→ September 9, 2024
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Evergreen.

I loved the game Photosynthesis when it first came out in 2017, as it brought something quite new in its sunlight mechanic and also was striking on the table with its three-dimensional trees of varying sizes. I didn’t think it held up as well on repeated plays, and the cardboard trees took a beating rather quickly.

Designer Hjalmar Hach apparently thought he could improve on the original as well, reimagining the game as Evergreen, which doesn’t have quite the visual impact of Photosynthesis but which makes the game play itself simpler while it makes the strategic aspect more complex. And there’s something clean about the new board and the cards that make the game easier to look at, even if you lose the coolness of the 3-D part.

In Evergreen, players will plant sprouts in six biomes on their own boards and then grow them to small and then large trees, all of which is done by drafting cards in each round. Players choose their sprout locations to build the longest possible chain of trees while also maximizing the sunlight they’ll take in from each of the four directions as the sun rotates around the board. Trees cast shadows behind them, though, so they block trees directly behind them from collecting sunlight (and points).

In each round, players will draft cards that dictate where and what they’ll be able to play. Each card shows a specific biome (or a white background that can stand in for any biome) and an action, the two of which are unrelated. For the biome, you can plant three sprouts, grow two plants to the next level, plant one sprout and grow one plant, or ignore the biome on the card and just do one of those two things in a biome of your choice. For the action on the card, it gets a little more interesting, because actions become more powerful the more often you take them. These include planting more sprouts, growing plants from sprout to small tree or small tree to large, adding a lake that immediately grows two adjacent plants, adding a bush that extends your chain of contiguous trees but won’t collect light, or taking immediate points from the rose action while adding nothing to the board.

The card that isn’t selected by any player goes to the fertility area of its matching biome, which matters significantly for end-game scoring. Each card can have one to three fertility symbol at its top, or a skull showing aridity, or no symbol at all. You discard the cards with no symbols on top, and you place cards with fertility symbols face-up on the matching pile. Aridity cards cancel out the last fertility card played to that biome – when an aridity card is left over after the draft for that round, you flip over the face-up card on that biome’s pile and play the aridity card on top.

The number of rounds in each season varies, decreasing by one for each season, from five rounds in season one (spring) to just two in season four (winter). At the end of each season, you score points for sunlight hitting your trees, getting 1 point for each small tree and 2 for each large one, but a tree only gets sunlight if it isn’t in the shadow of another tree between it and the sun. Small trees cast a shadow of one space and can block a small tree behind them; large trees cast shadows of two spaces and can block small or large trees behind them. This gets tricky as a large tree that receives no light because it’s blocked by a large tree in front of it can still cast a shadow and block large trees behind it, so, for example, four large trees all in a line would score just two points for the first tree and nothing for the next three. (The rule book depicts this way more clearly than I can explain without diagrams.) Then you count every tree in your biggest Forest (chain) of connected trees and bushes, taking 1 point for each in the cluster.

After you do the end of season scoring for winter, each player scores points for every biome by multiplying the number of large trees they have in that biome by the number of visible fertility symbols in the card pile for that biome. This can get pretty large, since that’s how multiplication tends to work, and can inform your strategy throughout the game both in what cards to try to push to the fertility zone and where to focus your construction of large trees. That’s the only additional scoring at the end of the game.

For whatever reason, Evergreen hasn’t quite caught on like Photosynthesis did, and I think that’s part of why it is now available in digital form on Board Game Arena and now as a standalone app for $4.99 on iOS, Android, and Steam. I think it’s a great game and have now played it on the table, on BGA, and on the iOS app (the last one vs AI), so I can vouch for all platforms. It deserves a wider audience than it’s gotten, and I would definitely choose to play it over Photosynthesis thanks to the greater player interaction and simpler components so I’m not always knocking over trees. It came out in 2022, so it won’t be on my best-of-2024 list, but it would have made my top 10 for its actual release year.

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→ September 7, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 9/7/24.

Two new posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week – one just on Red Sox prospects I saw recently, including their top 3 prospects plus 18-year-old Franklin Arias; and another on prospects from several other orgs, including Jarlin Susana (Nats), Vance Honeycutt (O’s), and Parker Messick/C.J. Kayfus (Guardians). This past week’s schedule really did me no favors, unfortunately, and nearly all of the teams close to me missed the playoffs.

At Paste, right at the end of August I had a review of the game Rock Hard 1977, designed by former Runaways bassist Jackie Fuchs (Fox); and a related ranking of the five best thematic games I’ve played.

And now, the links…

  • After the 2020 election and the January 6th insurrection, several big tech firms kicked Trump off their platforms and major media outlets appeared at least to push back on his constant falsehoods, but those guardrails are largely gone as those for-profit entities see dollars in a competitive race.
  • Vaccine opt-outs continue to climb in Florida schools, including life-saving vaccines like MMR and TDaP. The inevitable outcome of this is kids hospitalized or killed by ignorance, made possible by the state’s governor and surgeon general coming out strongly against vaccinations.
  • A Minnesota police officer with a long history of driving misconduct, including causing four crashes while on duty and driving 135 mph in a 55 mph zone without using his siren or lights, hit another car while driving 83 mph, killing an 18-year-old passenger. Shane Roper had been suspended twice for his driving but was still on the force and allowed to drive a police car.
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→ September 5, 2024
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Music update, August 2024.

August brought a bunch of contenders for my year-end albums list, with LPs from Jack White, Fontaines D.C., Zeal & Ardor, Tank and the Bangas, and others, plus a surprise return from Opeth, a welcome single from Olympic stars Gojira, a farewell track from one of the most influential American punk bands, and a return from a band I was afraid had called it quits. As always, you can access the playlist here if you can’t see the widget below.

Gojira feat. Marina Viotti and Victor Le Masne – Mea Culpa (Ah! Ça ira!). You know this song already, as it was the highlight of the stunning Opening Ceremonies to the Paris Olympics; now we get a studio version that packs the same punch, albeit without the visual impact of Gojira playing on the balconies of an old castle along the Seine.

Jack White – Old Scratch Blues. White’s new album No Name is his best solo LP to date, a return to his roots in classic rock and blues sounds from the 1940s through the 1970s, highlighted by this track, “Bless Yourself,” and “It’s Rough on Rats (If You’re Asking).”

Fontaines D.C. – Here’s the Thing. Fontaines’ new album, Romance, is one of the big surprises of the year; the Dublin-based rockers have largely abandoned their punk sound in favor of a more ambitious array of influences that have them dancing around the edges of pop-rock without fully giving in to the sound. You can hear the punk roots in the background of songs like this one, but they’re in their post-punk/new wave phase now, and it’s fascinating. I still think “Favourite” is my … uh, favorite track on the record, but this and “Starburster” are also highlights.

Goat – Ouroboros. These Swedish psychedelic/fusion rockers return with their third album in three years, titled Goat, on October 11th; this is the radio edit of the album’s lengthy closing track, with a guitar riff that Nile Rodgers would approve.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard – Hog Calling Contest. The Aussie band’s 26th (!) album, Flight b741, came out in August, with an unusually long gap of ten months between records, and it’s more in the vein of their bluesy jam-band stuff than some of their heavier (and, to my ears, better) works.

Nice Biscuit – Fade Away. Not quite as good as “The Rain,” but we still get another strong guitar riff from this Australian indie-rock band, which marries some psychedelia with the pulsing beats of post-punk. Their new album SOS comes out on October 4th.

The Killers – Bright Lights. This one-off (for now) single dropped just a few weeks before the Killers started their residency in Vegas to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Hot Fuss, with all four original members playing the entire album start to finish as part of the shows. The track bridges the gap between their earliest synth-pop leanings and the more country-tinged sound of 2021’s Pressure Machine.

Chime School – The End. The Boy Who Ran the Paisley Hotel, the second album from Andy Pastalaniec (also of Seablite), continues with the project’s 1980s jangle-pop sound, which in itself derives from 1960s pop bands like the Byrds.

Sunflower Bean – Teach Me to Be Bad. Another heavier song from Sunflower Bean, and I’m into it. “Moment in the Sun” was a huge hit, and deservedly so, but the last thing I wanted from the band was an album full of attempts to re-create it.

X – Ruby Church. X announced that Smoke & Fiction will be their farewell album, accompanied by a final tour, four years after their comeback LP Alphabetland marked their return from 27 years away from the studio. I’ve never been a huge fan of X’s music, and am certainly not a fan of Exene Cervenka’s conspiracy theory-mongering, but I acknowledge the band’s huge influence on American music from the 1980s and 1990s.

Manic Street Preachers – Decline & Fall. The Welsh trio has said this track was inspired by several artists, including the War on Drugs, and that couldn’t be any clearer. I’m also stunned that James Dean Bradfield still sounds this good at age 55. The BBC has a story on some recently unearthed photographs of the band taken shortly before lyricist/guitarist Richey Edwards disappeared.

Hayden Thorpe – They. The former lead singer of Wild Beasts will drop his third solo album, Ness, on September 27th; it’s just a different sound than that of his former band, and I’m still kind of getting used to his individual style, which has some of the art rock leanings of Wild Beasts but in a quieter mode. He released two singles in August, this one and “He.”

Katie Gavin – Casual Drug Use. The second single from the MUNA singer’s upcoming debut solo album, What a Relief, due out on October 25th, is another smooth indie-pop track that borrows as much from alternative country singers like Kacey Musgraves and Brandi Carlile as it does from MUNA’s college-rock influences.

Bananagun – Free Energy. I dug this Australian experimental psych-rock band’s 2020 debut album The True Story of Bananagun – seriously, why is Oz so rife with psychedelic rock music? – but we haven’t had a peep out of the band since. They’re back with this frenetic track, which feels like it’s almost all drum-and-bass with a little vocals sprinkled on top, ahead of their sophomore album, Why is the Colour of the Sky?, due out November 8th.

Spirit of the Beehive – I’ve Been Evil. I hear a lot of Pinback and even Polvo in this track from Spirit’s newest album, You’ll Have to Lose Something, which, like most of their albums, is interesting but all over the place.

Jamie xx feat. The Avalanches – All You Children. Jamie xx’s second solo album, In Waves, finally comes out on September 20th, nine years after his debut In Colour, which had two of my favorite tracks of the decade in “See Saw” and “Loud Places.” I haven’t heard anything quite to that level from the five singles already released from the new album, with this one perhaps the best for its more accessible EDM sound.

Tangent feat. Rakim – Get Right, Keep Tight. Rakim put out a short comeback album in July that didn’t feature anywhere enough of him; his verse here as a guest on an otherwise unremarkable track from Tangent might be the best thing Rakim has done this year.

Maxïmo Park – Quiz Show Clue. There are too many bands, part 837: I’d never heard of Maxïmo Park before this spring, only to discover they’ve been around for 20 years and are about to release their eighth album, Stream of Life, on September 27th. They’re a post-punk revival band often lumped into the “landfill indie” pile, which, to be entirely honest, kind of fits; I actually first heard of them when I went down that rabbit hole (after the Libertines’ new album came out) and found VICE’s list of the 50 greatest landfill indie songs of all time, which has two Maxïmo Park tracks on it.

Ten Fé – Space Invader. I’m thrilled that Ten Fé is back, as they hadn’t released any music since 2019’s Future Perfect, Present Tense, although this song reminds me a little too much of Keane and doesn’t quite have the hook of some of Ten Fé’s best singles to date.

Sports Team – I’m in Love (Subaru). I loved Sports Team’s 2022 album Gulp!, so I’m not sure how I feel about them suddenly deciding they’re going to channel the band ABC.

Geordie Greep – Holy, Holy. So this is a rare case where I’m including a song I don’t particularly like. Greep was the lead singer/guitarist for black midi, which announced its breakup in August (or maybe an indefinite hiatus), with Greep then releasing this single a few days later. It’s kind of a mess, although I wouldn’t expect anything other than that from a black midi member, but the problem here is more in the lyrics, which might have worked for an older singer but just come off as snotty and ridiculous here. His solo album A New Sound comes out on October 4th.

Satan – Turn the Tide. I can’t believe these guys are still together, with both founding guitarists (Steve Ramsey and Russ Tippins) still in the band 45 years on, along with Blitzkrieg vocalist Brian Ross, who sang on their first full-length LP, 1983’s Court in the Act, before leaving the band until their 2011 re-formation.

Zeal & Ardor – Kilònova. Zeal & Ardor, a Swiss/American band that fuses black metal with African-American spiritual music, just released their fourth LP, Greif, in August; from the three singles I’ve heard, they seem to be drifting more towards a mainstream metal sound, with fewer of the more ridiculous trappings of extreme metal like death growls (there’s a little on “Clawing Out”) or blast beats.

Devin Townsend – Power Nerd. Townsend is a virtuoso metal guitarist whose first band, Strapping Young Lad, earned him a following but was way too harsh for my tastes. His post-SYL output, which has basically all been solo material but sometimes under monikers like the Devin Townsend Project, is a mixed bag, but this speed-metal track has a fantastic hook in the chorus.

Opeth – §1. Opeth hasn’t used death growls on any album since 2008’s Watershed, but they did on this track, the opener of their album The Last Will and Testament, a concept album due out on October 11th.  

Tribulation – Tainted Skies. Tribulation’s music wouldn’t be out of place on a mid-80s episode of Headbanger’s Ball, but they mix in some death growls and wear silly corpse paint. The music is almost comically melodic for the genre – this is metal, but it ain’t heavy other than the vocals, and it hits an almost nostalgic note for me because I listened to so much (admittedly mediocre) metal in the 1980s.

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→ September 2, 2024
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Faraway.

Faraway is a very quick game with very few rules, but it’s a real brain-twister in the way that you score your eight Region cards – after eight rounds, you turn all those cards face-down, then reveal and score them one by one in reverse order. Because most cards score based on what else is face up at the time they’re scored, the cards you played last are usually worth the least, and the ones you play first may not be worth anything if you don’t get and play the right cards later.

Faraway comes from designer Johannes Goupy, who has burst on the scene with a flurry of new games in the last two years, including the lovely small-box game Pixies (due out in September in the U.S.), Rauha, Orichalcum, the brand-new heavy game From the Moon, and others; of his games, the only one I haven’t cared for was Nautilus Island, which seemed a bit underbaked, which is definitely not the case with his other titles. His forte seems to be coming up with simple games that pack a lot of strategy into them for their size and weight, at least based on the small sample so far.

In Faraway, all players work from a deck of numbered Region cards, 1 through 68, each of which has at least one of these three elements: fixed or variable point scoring, element symbols, and/or required elements. The point-scoring may be unconditional, but for the most part they only score if you have the required elements on cards that are already face-up when the card is revealed. There are three elements in the game – animal, mineral, and plant – and cards may require two or more of these symbols, the same ones or any combination. Many cards also show one or two symbols in the upper right that are then available to fulfill requirements for cards that appear later. Some Region cards are also “night” cards, with their card number surrounded by a white circle, which can also factor into scoring for some cards. Some Region cards show a map symbol next to the card number, which I’ll get to in a moment.

You start the game with three Region cards, and you will play one of them face-down. All players reveal their played Region cards at the same time. The player with the lowest played Region card gets first draft from the market, which has one more card than the player count and is visible before you choose what to play in the current round, so you can factor that into your decision of what to play. This process continues for eight rounds, although in the final round you skip the market phase.

You play your cards left to right in a line in front of you, and the order matters in two ways. The first is that if you play a card with a higher number than the one you played right before it, you get one or more Sanctuary cards. These can either offer additional points, provide additional elements, add another night symbol, or even have a different card color to qualify for certain Region cards that score based on the colors of cards you have. If you have any cards in your row with map symbols, when you get Sanctuary cards, you get one extra one for every map symbol you have showing, and then you choose one Sanctuary card to keep.

When the eighth round is complete, players all turn all eight of their Region cards face down, but keep their Sanctuary cards face up. You then begin scoring by turning over your rightmost (last played) Region card, scoring it if possible; then you move to the left and turn over the next card, scoring that if possible, and so on. That last played/first scored card will only meet its requirements if you have those elements showing on Sanctuary cards. When you get to your first played/last scored card, however, all eight of your Region cards will be face up, and you will have everything available. That means that one fairly basic strategy is to play a high-point card with a lot of required elements in the first or second round, and then playing the rest of your cards to try to fill those requirements. I won a two-player game on BGA against a much higher-rated opponent where I only scored three of my Region cards, including zero of the last four I played. Those cards were worth 24, 13, and 12 (3*4) points, and I tacked on 17 more from Sanctuary cards to dance to victory.

There is a good bit of luck involved here in the card draws, and you can end up behind the eight-ball if you’re getting cards that don’t fit your plans but are also high-numbered enough to keep you from drafting first in subsequent rounds. I think that’s just baked into the game; you have to cope with some randomness and just plan around it as best you can.

There is a whole lore behind the game’s theme and artwork that didn’t do a whole lot for me, other than that I appreciated the bold color choices on the cards (with patterns on a horizontal line in each color’s design to allow color-blind players to distinguish them). I didn’t expect to like it because of the silly art, but it’s more of an abstract game with a theme that’s sort of pasted on. I’ve learned not to judge a board game by its cover, at least, and the art here doesn’t get in the way of the game at all. Pandasaurus has brought this one over to the U.S., along with Goupy’s game Pixies; another great small-box game, Knarr; and another in my review queue, Courtisans. Faraway is my favorite of the batch so far.

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→ August 31, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 8/31/24.

I’m back to work this week, having gone to Delmarva on Wednesday night to catch Boston’s latest teenaged phenom, Franklin Arias, and will have a long scouting notebook up in a day or two covering that and three other games I haven’t written up yet. I’m a little at odds and ends for next week, as it looks like the schedules of the local teams are pretty unfavorable, and I may have to wait and see on the playoffs.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Rock Hard 1977, designed by Jackie Fuchs, a four-time Jeopardy! champion who happened to be the bassist for the influential rock band the Runaways under the name Jackie Fox. It’s fantastic, and spurred me to rank my five favorite thematic board games (meaning games where the theme is great and well-integrated with game play).

I’ve been holding off on a newsletter until that review went up, so I’ll try to get one out this weekend. You can sign up for free in eager anticipation.

And now, the links…

  • “The truth is that Staten Island kind of sucks.” I’d argue that’s half-right; Staten Island just sucks. It’s the worst of the five boroughs, lacking the culture or diversity of the other four – and it doesn’t have the subway. New York should just hand it to New Jersey. The two states should build a bridge from Jersey City straight to Brooklyn. But this Baffler longread argues that it sucks because it’s Trumpy and xenophobic, and that there are other “little Staten Islands” around the rest of the city, too. And now they’re talking about seceding from the rest of the city on which they depend for their financial existence.
  • The City of Philadelphia released a farcical economic “study” that purports to show that building a new sports arena in Chinatown will benefit the city even though the 76ers already play in a perfectly usable facility that doesn’t require destroying a historic neighborhood and displacing residents.
  • Once upon a time, Chipotle was the “good” fast-food outlet, trying to use better quality ingredients and cultivate relationships with farmers, but ultimately, the profit motive has won out – they’ve been accused of denying raises to unionized workers at a Michigan location in violation of federal law.
  • Lionsgate put out a trailer for the new Francis Ford Coppola film Megalopolis that included a bunch of fake quotes from movie critics blasting some of the director’s older and more acclaimed movies. Megalopolis looks like it’s going to be a giant disaster, after mostly bad reviews at Cannes and multiple stumbles already from the studio and the director.
  • Ohio Republicans, who have repeatedly shown themselves to be some of the worst enemies of democracy, have approved language for an anti-gerrymandering ballot question that is designed to confuse voters into voting their way. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who voted seven times to use district maps that were ruled unconstitutional by courts, drafted the confusing language.
  • A cop in Massachusetts raped a girl he met through the state’s program for kids interested in law enforcement careers and then murdered her when she became pregnant, according to charges filed last week. The article I linked refers to “sex acts” before the victim, Sandra Birchmore, was 16 years old, but doesn’t use the correct word for it: rape. This is statutory rape and we need to stop normalizing it by avoiding the term.
  • Mainstream news outlets complaining about the DNC’s credentialing of over 200 content creators are authoring their own extinction, according to Mark Jacob, whose newsletter covers the way right-wing propagandists have run rings around the MSM. Jacob argues that journalists need to refocus on real journalism, like investigative pieces, now that the subjects can often go around them to talk directly to their audiences/customers.
  • A conservative alumni group at the University of Virginia has pressured the school into suspending campus tours given by a student-run service because they talked about how Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and raped them. Really.
  • The denialist group Biosafety Now, which continues to push the debunked lab-leak theory and includes a wide number of prominent anti-vaxxers, has added economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, whose advice to then-President Trump on the pandemic was disastrous, to its board. This same group has worked closely with Republicans in Congress to push false claims that China is responsible for creating SARS-CoV-2 and should be held responsible for damages.
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→ August 28, 2024
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Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs.

I’m not a Gloomhaven guy, for a variety of reasons, but foremost among them is that I just don’t care for modern role-playing games. I did play a little pen-and-paper D&D in the 1980s, and got into several CRPGs, including the Bard’s Tale, before going all out on the Baldur’s Gate series. Those experiences cemented a style of RPG in my brain that’s hard to dislodge; if a modern RPG isn’t built on the same framework, it feels counterintuitive and slow to me.

Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs gives me that same feeling, although I do respect the cleverness of the design and the way it packs a lot of game into a tiny box. Based on a fan expansion for the massive, $120, 20-pound Gloomhaven tabletop RPG, Buttons & Bugs is a strictly solo endeavor that has 20 scenarios to play through where your character gains levels, skills, and items … but the combat system at the heart of the game is so clunky that it drove me kind of nuts. (It’s between printings, but you can pre-order the second printing here, with shipping expected in September.)

In Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs, your intrepid hero has been debiggified (my word, not theirs) to a miniature size and must fight through a series of adventures to get back to some kind of final boss that will reverse the curse and make you full-sized again. The battles will increase in difficulty, and your character will gain some new skill cards, better items, and a very modest number of hit points as the game progresses.

The combat system revolves around cards, and I don’t care what Gloomhaven fans say – this is the clunkiest combat system I’ve ever seen. You start out with four cards in your hand, with two actions on each side. You’ll pick a top action from one card and a bottom action from another on each turn. If those are the A sides of the cards, you’ll pick them back up and flip them to the B sides, which have different actions. Once you’ve used all of the B sides, you have to rest to pick them back up, but you will lose one card from your hand each time you do this. If you ever have just one card left in your hand, you lose the scenario. (You also lose if you run out of hit points.) Top actions usually involve attacks; bottom actions usually involve movement. That means if you’re hemmed in by a monster and just want to attack with both your actions, well, tough luck – you’re going to waste some of your turn with movement points you can’t use. I played several scenarios as the thief, and there’s a lot of movement on the thief’s initial action cards that is close to useless on the early maps because there’s no place to run, literally.

There’s also a single die with three values on it that works as a sort of attack modifier for you and determines the monsters’ initiative and exact actions (skewing towards more movement or more offense) on each turn. It’s fine for the monsters, as it mixes things up a little bit, but for you it’s just a nuisance – it adds a tiny bit of randomness in most cases, adding or subtracting one from your attack value, except very rarely it can either double your attack or void it entirely. Remembering to use it and then move the peg down the board to track the current modifiers was more trouble than it was worth.

I think the design here also presupposes some familiarity with Gloomhaven’s combat system, icons, and terminology. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what one symbol meant, since it’s not explained on the one reference card with the game itself, so I had to read the online rules (accessible with a QR code) and then go re-read them to find the symbol, which was just off to the right of my phone’s screen. It’s a dark element, and while it appears on one of the thief’s starter cards, there’s no explanation anywhere in the box of what elements are, and I don’t think you can even use that bonus action (+2 to your attack if you have consumed a dark element) with that initial card set.

I absolutely love the idea of this game – a solitaire dungeon-crawl with a solid story that’s a little bit funny and that has some great components to keep the game truly compact, like the hit point dials you use for yourself and for your adversaries. A whole campaign in a box the size of a new set of business cards is awesome. If the game had a more user-friendly combat and item system, I probably would have played it all the way through. It’s just too fiddly for me, and that may be just a function of my own experiences playing RPGs with other ways of handling combat.

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→ August 27, 2024
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Outer Banks eats.

We spent last week in the small town of Corolla, North Carolina, at the northern tip of the Outer Banks – beyond Corolla, there are houses, but the roads aren’t paved, and you may wake up to find a wild horse hanging out in your yard. It’s very quiet, which was wonderful, but also has enough amenities that we could get whatever we needed, which also meant we could cook in the house we rented or head out to eat. So while this is probably the most obscure place for which I’ve ever written up restaurants, here’s the rundown of everything we ate on the trip.

There were two restaurants I’d recommend regardless of where they were – they weren’t just Corolla good, but legitimately good. Mama Easley’s is a fried seafood place with a solid beer selection, and the seafood was superb across the board. We were down there with another family of four, so I got to try a little of everything – the fried shrimp were the best item, but everything was fried perfectly, with no excess oil anywhere. The French fries were too spicy for the kids, with something Old Bay-like but without that odd stale flavor of actual Old Bay (sorry, Marylanders, I just think it’s overrated), while the hush puppies were a hit. My wife got the grilled bay scallops, the one non-fried item we had, and they were cooked just the way I like them, which is just the hotter side of rare – I know scallops are usually just seared so that the center is still slightly translucent, but I like it pushed a touch farther than that so they’re hot through but still tender. I ate way too much fried stuff that night, and drank a local beer (I don’t remember what sort), so I didn’t exactly feel great the next morning, but I have no regrets.

Agave Roja was the other big hit, a Mexican restaurant in a strip mall (across from the Food Lion) that goes upscale from typical Mexican restaurants in that area. We ordered take-out, so we probably missed out on a little of the experience, getting four different types of tacos – fried shrimp, fried fish, carne asada, and pollo asado. I skipped the steak, but the other three were all excellent and the shrimp was not spicy despite what was supposedly a mango-habanero salsa and chipotle aioli. The fish and shrimp came on flour tortillas, while the other two came on corn; the latter should have been doubled as they fell apart almost immediately. There was a ton of flavor on all of the tacos, both in the protein and the various toppings, although I’m not sure what was listed on the menu was exactly what we got on top of each taco.

I grabbed lunch one day at Sooey’s, a barbecue spot in the same strip mall as Agave Roja, and it was perfectly average BBQ. I got a half-rack of ribs, which the host said was her favorite item on the menu, and some collard greens and fried okra, because I was in the south and I love both of those things. The ribs were smoked properly, with a visible ring and the meat coming free from the bone, and had enough flavor on their own that they didn’t need the sauce (which was not that interesting anyway). The collards were the best item of the three, while the okra needed more salt.

We tried two pizza places in Corolla, with Corolla Pizza (located at the northern edge of town) the better of the two; it’s pretty close to New York City pizza but the crust needed to be cooked just a little more, as it had zero color on the under side. Giant Slice’s pizza was cooked more, but the toppings were nowhere near the same quality and the sauce was too sweet.

For coffee, I would suggest seeking out The Kind Cup, which is in Corolla Village, the closest thing there is to a town center here, and a short walk from the lighthouse and museum. The Kind Cup roasts their own coffee to a variety of levels, with a medium-roast for their espresso; I was a little bummed that they didn’t have any light roast on drip or for sale as whole bean that particular day, as they do roast and sell some single origins. The building is also a small art gallery and craft shop, and it’s across the street from a modest, well-curated bookshop called The Island Bookstore. I also tried the coffee and gelato at Doppio, with the gelato very good (I had the dark chocolate) and the coffee darker than I like it. Our friends got a bunch of pastries from Northern Lights Bakery & Coffee; I don’t even usually like sticky buns, but theirs was outstanding. Apparently there’s a line out the door most mornings within an hour of them opening, according to the locals.

Beyond food, Flying Smiles Kites is in the same shopping center as Northern Lights, and they sell an impressive selection of board games – they had Trio, Castles of Burgundy, Scout, Carcassonne, and more beyond the games you’d find at Target. We ended up buying a kite … and, most fittingly, they also had the real-time game Kites in stock. They do ship games, too, so if you wanted to pick up Trio from a friendly local game shop, it’s here.

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→ August 17, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 8/17/24.

I’m on PTO from the Athletic this week and next, so there won’t be any new content from me over there until the week of August 26th. I had some plans to hit a Blue Rocks game last week, before my PTO, but 2+ inches of rain in our area scotched that (although they did play on one of those days, which flabbergasted me because that field doesn’t drain well). I was on the road a ton this week – something like 23 hours in the car in the last five days – so I don’t have as many links as usual, either.

I’ve got a review filed to Paste for Rock Hard 1977, the board game designed by Runaways bassist Jackie Fox (Fuchs) that was also my #1 new game from Gen Con this year.

I do have a newsletter half-written, so feel free to run over and sign up (it’s free) before I finish the damn thing already.

And now, the links…

  • The plastics industry is pushing to change the rules on what they can label “recyclable” – in short, if something could, hypothetically, be recycled, they want to label it as such, regardless of whether such recycling is readily available or feasible. I see this crap already with things labeled “compostable” that require access to industrial composting, so you can’t just throw it in your home compost bin or pile.
  • The chief of police in Millersville, Tennessee, is under investigation by the state for all kinds of malfeasance, and when Channel 5’s Phil Williams spoke to him, the chief called Williams a pedophile.
  • These weirdos’ attacks on Vice-President Harris for not having kids will only backfire on them, writes Jess Grose of the NY Times. I think it already has, to some extent.
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→ August 10, 2024
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Age of Wonders: Planetfall.

Age of Wonders: Planetfall is a 4X video game from Paradox Interactive that came out in 2019 and, from my reading, had all of the trappings of that genre, from resource management to economic and military development to a tech tree. Hobby World published a board game adaptation from a first-time designer that borrows the art from the video game but has nothing more to do with it, slapping the IP on a bad Splendor clone that might be more fun to play if it didn’t try so hard to get the sci-fi art and theme involved in game play.

Age of Wonders: Planetfall has seven decks of cards representing the seven planets players will “explore” over the course of the game, with cards in each successive deck increasing in cost and value. Cards can require you spend either strength or energy, and they may have a minimum experience level before you’re allowed to purchase it. For each round, you shuffle one planet deck and deal either all of the cards (4-5 players) or all but three cards (2-3 players) to the center of the table in three rows, next to the operations board that shows levels I, II, and III; each card shows three levels of costs and they become slightly less expensive at higher levels.

Players will go twice per round, moving their ship to a card or a space on the operations board, resolving those, then repeating the cycle before all remaining cards are removed from the game to make room for the next planet. The turn order depends on what cards players chose in the last turn; you resolve cards left to right, starting with level I, and then move each player counter to the topmost empty spot on the ops board to show turn order for the next round. You can choose any card on any level as long as you have the resources and/or experience required to buy it; every deck has several “power-up” cards that just give you energy and maybe a victory point or two, and you can also choose one of the three spots on the operations board to get 5-7 free resources or victory points or experience, so you can’t end up without a legal play.

Each player has an individual player board with four tracks, three in the middle and a victory point track around the outside. Strength and energy are expendable resources; you spend them to gain cards, and each has a maximum you can get at one point. Experience and victory points never go down, with experience maxing out at 10 while VPs have no limit. You have to gain experience as the game progresses or you won’t be able to acquire valuable cards from later planets.

Most points in the game come from the VPs you get as you go from cards, but each game also begins with three goals (public objectives) players can shoot for, some of which are competitive (points for having the most of something) while some are open to everyone (e.g., one point for every strength you still have left at game end). A few cards also provide game-end bonuses, although those only appear in the last 2-3 decks so you can’t plan ahead too much for those.

It’s a light engine-builder along the lines of Splendor but with the sliding resource scales seen in dozens of other games, such as The White Castle and Kh­ora. The art and card names are kind of a distraction here, and I didn’t feel the theme at all – the rulebook even talks about combat against a neutral opponent but that just means you can buy some cards with strength instead of energy. Instead, it’s Splendor in Space, except that game already exists in Space Explorers, which I think does a better job of grafting Splendor’s engine-building framework on to a space theme, and gets a little better with some of the expansions. I haven’t played the actual video game here, but from reading about it I don’t see where the connection is – this seems like an IP extension to cash in, without a lot of meat to the game behind it.

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→ August 10, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 8/10/24.

I’ve been tied up the last few Saturdays with other things, so here’s a quick rundown of what you might have missed.

I wrote 14 different trade-deadline reaction pieces at the Athletic but there isn’t a single link to all of them beyond my author page, so if you missed anything that’s the place to start.

You can see my annual Gen Con recap post, which covers every game I saw at the convention plus my top ten games from the show and which this year ran over 10,000 words, over at Paste. I also reviewed the light family game Biomos, which I kind of liked when I first played it but eventually decided had too much randomness for me.

Stadium has changed its programming schedule and I’ll no longer be going to Chicago, but instead will be doing remote video work for them that will appear before their broadcasts of minor-league games (it’s all AAA games this month) or will show up on Amazon Echo devices and MSN. Unfortunately, I know several people lost their jobs in the changeover there, with some resources moving to the new Chicago Sports Network.

And now, the links – just some of the ones I saved over the last three weeks:

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