→ March 25, 2011
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Reiner Knizia’s Medici app.

Chat today at 3 pm EDT. New draft blog post on Dylan Bundy is up. I’m back on the Baseball Today podcast today; we just finished recording slightly before noon Eastern, so I expect it’ll be posted at that link shortly.

—

The iOS game Medici is just 99 cents until April 4th and since it’s another Reiner Knizia game there was a zero percent chance I would let that sale go by. It’s worth far more than that, a clever auction game that in typical Knizia fashion uses simple game play to create complex results. The scoring is a little trickier than other great Knizia games like Lost Cities or Battle Line, but after botching my first game I was able to grasp the concept.

Each player represents a trader in Renaissance Italy, bidding on lots of goods to fill up the five spots on his ship in each of three rounds of scoring. There are six goods available; on a player’s turn, he selects a box from the right side of the screen, after which it’s opened, revealing one to three goods in any combination, with each good carrying a value of 0 to 5 (or, for gold, a fixed value of 10). Players bid on the set of goods in a single-round auction, with the player who selected the box getting the final bid. Bidding can be fierce early, but as players’ ships fill up, players can score bargains later in a round … or they could be stuck with goods that don’t help as much in the scoring.

That scoring is the one slightly difficult part of the game to understand, at least from the in-game rules (I’ve never played the physical board game), but it’s also what makes the game brilliant. You earn points in three ways:

* The ship with the most value in each round earns 30 points, with declining bonuses after that depending on the number of players; the player with the least valuable ship receives no bonus at all, but all other players receive at least 5 points. A ship’s value is merely the sum of the values of each of its five goods, but those values are only applicable to this type of scoring. They lose all meaning when it comes to shipping goods.

* After ship values are scored, players ship their goods other than gold, which is only counted towards the total ship values. The player who has shipped the most of any specific type of good up to that point in the game receives 10 points; the player who ships the second-most of that good receives 5 points; everyone else gets zero. That is, the scoring for the quantity of, say, dye shipped is cumulative. Players tied in goods shipped split the available points, rounded down.

* Players who have shipped at least five goods of a specific type get a five-point bonus in each scoring round. Six goods shipped yields a ten-point bonus, and seven goods shipped yields twenty points. These bonuses are not split in case of a tie.

The ideal strategy, of course, is to ship lots of goods that no one else is trying to ship, which is harder to do the more players you involve in the game. (Medici requires three players with a maximum of six.) There’s also an inherent strategic conflict between acquiring goods with high values to grab that 30-point ship bonus and acquiring goods to ship to try to rack up points and bonuses for shipping one or two specific types of goods. Balancing those two goals when you can’t control what goods come up for auction while competing against other players who might want the same goods makes the game interesting and highly replayable.

The implementation on iOS looks good and works reasonably well with a few small hitches. The scoring pyramids where numbers of goods shipped are displayed is quite small on an iPod touch, and selecting boxes from the right side of the screen doesn’t always work on the first try. The app comes with nine AI players with different strategies and difficulty levels; I’ve found the top three or four to be challenging but the ones below that are best left behind once you’ve learned the game. There’s no online play option at the moment.

The mechanics make this game well worth the purchase, and it’s a solid implementation that has proven very stable for me across multiple plays and interrupted games. It also plays very quickly given how many players it can have and how much is going on behind the scenes, and I find the more I play the more I’m getting used to the tiny scoreboard for goods shipped.

I’m still testing out another Knizia app, Through the Desert, that recently came on the market; my initial impression is that it’s a great game but one best suited to the iPad (and there is indeed an HD version) rather than a smaller device.

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→ March 24, 2011
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Pickin’ Up the Pieces.

I first heard Fitz and the Tantrums’ “Moneygrabber” maybe two months ago on XM, but in the interim it seems to have exploded into the mainstream – in the past week alone I’ve heard it in Whole Foods and in a restaurant in Chandler (neither of which was playing an XM feed). It’s the best song on their debut? album Pickin’ Up The Pieces (iTunes) but also a good indication of the sound you’ll get on the rest of this short, tight, ten-song disc.

“Moneygrabber” is an energetic Motown-tinged three-minute burst of vitriol directed at a gold-digging former lover, driven by a rousing chorus that bookends two brief verses that are subdued in comparison. The contrast works because the verses are short and because the song opens with the chorus, putting that energy into your head and creating a calm-before-the-storm feel to each verse before the singer launches into the angry “this is your payback/moneygrabber” chorus. (It’s a bit lowbrow, but I laughed once I realized the second verse concluded with the singer’s statement that he doesn’t “think twice for the price of a cheap dime whore.” Don’t hold back, man.)

Where “Moneygrabber” is primarily a rock song with Motown fringes, the rest of the album presents more of a balance between the two elements (with hints of New Wave), with a few songs that wouldn’t be out of place on an oldies station. The first half of the album is mostly upbeat even when the lyrics aren’t – the soulful organ-heavy opener features the line “ooh what a lovely day/for breaking the chains of love” – and the songs are punchier, with nothing over 3:10 until track five. The very poppy “L.O.V.” features multiple tempo changes and some outstanding hooks in the vocal lines, particularly the melody of “all these words are the sweetest embrace,” one of many riffs on the album that reminded me not of a specific song from the 1980s but of the general feel of pop music from that era.

The back half of the album includes one outright power ballad, “Tighter,” which I could see crossing over and creating the kind of pop success that ends or derails a band’s career because they become associated with love songs (or, in this case, a lost-love song). But side two* is generally slower without becoming understated or subtle, and the album ends with a down-tempo song, “Rich Girls,” that manages to work in some black humor around whether it’s better to date rich girls (who’ll break your heart) or poor girls (who’ll take your money).

*Raise your glass if you’re old enough to understand what “side two” of an album means.

The weakness here, by far, is the quality of the lyrics on some of the lesser songs. “Dear Mr. President” is embarrassing, the one skippable song more for how dated and inane the words are (I think it’s supposed to be some kind of protest about the lack of funding for social services, but the preachiness over a stereotyped picture of American poverty makes me cringe), and the disc as a whole is full of the kind of empty lines that populate most pop records, with very little you haven’t heard before.

I can get over bad lyrics when the music is both catchy and different, and I can’t think of the last time I heard a group meld rock and old-school soul this well. (Little Caesar doesn’t cut it.) The production is clean and I liked how easily I could pick out individual instruments or the two voices when they’re singing in tandem. “Moneygrabber” is the Fitz song I’ll still be listening to for years, but the rest of the disc is wearing well even after a dozen times through it, a solid first effort that will likely prompt a host of imitators once the public catches on to it.

–

Incidentally, I see the Roots’ classic Things Fall Apart album is a $5 download this month on amazon. Doesn’t have the standout single but it’s one of the most important hip hop albums of the last twenty years, in my opinion.

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→ March 14, 2011
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An American Tragedy.

Been busy on the draft blog, with updates on Gerrit Cole, Trevor Bauer, Kyle Gaedele.

—

Clyde Griffiths is dead, and it’s about freaking time already. It took Theodore Dreiser over eight hundred pages to tell a story that could have been told in under half that. An American Tragedy is an acknowledged classic, present on four of the top 100 lists I use as reading guides*, but I found it dull, thin, internally implausible (even though it’s based heavily on a true story), and populated by characters who were lucky to receive a second dimension.

*It’s #16 on the Modern Library 100, #88 on the Radcliffe 100, and on the unranked TIME 100, all of which are limited to English-language novels of the 20th century. It’s also #46 on The Novel 100, which covers all novels and is now back in print.

The story, in brief: Clyde Griffiths is raised in poverty by a pair of non-denominational missionary parents, and rejects their lifestyle and religion to strike out on his own. At every turn, his attempts to move himself forward socially and economically are stymied by his attraction to and obsession with the fairer sex. Eventually, he’s taken in by his wealthy uncle and given work in that man’s collar factory, where he meets and seduces a simple country girl, Roberta Allen. When Clyde finds that society girl Sondra Finchley is interested in him, he ditches Roberta to pursue Sondra, only to find out that Roberta is pregnant with his child and (after failed attempts to abort the baby) insists that he marry her. So he hatches a plan to kill Roberta, and Roberta ends up dead even though Clyde may have had a change of heart at the last second. He’s quickly caught, tried at great literary length, and executed. Fin.

It could easily have been a story of great drama, but it’s not. For one thing, most readers of the book know the ending, which was true when it came out because the case on which Dreiser based the novel was a national sensation, the O.J. Simpson trial of its day (except that the defendant was found guilty and executed).

It could also have been a brilliant character study, but poor Clyde is as narrow as Doug Fieger’s tie and has so little nderstanding of his own actions that it’s hard for me to make any convincing case as to his motives. The closest I could come is to label him a narcissist, since he tends to think of everything bad as happening “to him,” notably Roberta’s pregnancy which was most certainly not happening to Clyde in any physical sense.

It doesn’t even work as a polemic. At first it looks like an indictment of religion, or of Puritanism, but that falls by the wayside when Clyde leaves his parents. It could be a criticism of misspent youth, of alcohol, or of venal behavior by “loose” women, but none of those themes sticks around long either. The longest single theme is that of the caste system found in the upstate New York town where Clyde’s uncle and family live, a system that finds Clyde caught in between as the part-owner of a surname associated with success, status, and wealth but himself poor, uneducated, and socially awkward. But then Clyde kills Roberta, gets arrested, and the rich/poor issue is mostly forgotten.

If there’s anything worth pondering in An American Tragedy, it’s whether Clyde was legally guilty of the murder. Clyde sets up the entire crime, then at the last second has some sort of mental apoplexy and doesn’t quite go through with it … but Roberta falls out of the boat, Clyde probably knocks her in the head, and he definitely doesn’t bother to save her as she drowns. Is it murder if he meant it but he didn’t mean it but he meant it anyway? I sure as hell thought so, which made the trial – on which Dreiser spends the better part of 300 pages – as dull as pitcher fielding practice.

And as for the prose, well, Dryser might have been a more appropriate moniker, for the author was no magician with our language, a view to which my friends at TIME also subscribe. The prose wasn’t leaden; it was eka-leaden. To wit:

But in the interim, in connection with his relations with Roberta no least reference to Sondra, although, even when near her in the factory or her room, he could not keep his thoughts from wandering away to where Sondra in her imaginary high social world might be. The while Roberta, at moments only sensing a drift and remoteness in his thought and attitude which had nothing to do with her, was wondering what it was that of late was beginning to occupy him so completely. And he, in his turn, when she was not looking was thinking – supposing? – supposing – (since she had troubled to recall herself to him), that he could interest a girl like Sondra in him?

The whole book is like this, all 353,014 words of it. Another typical Dreiser move is the extended double negative:

Nevertheless she was not at all convinced that a girl of Roberta’s looks and practicality would not be able to negotiate an association of the sort without harm to herself.

You parse that sucker, and get back to me in a week when you’re done.

So … why did I stick it out? For one thing, because it’s on four of those book lists, and while I may not reach 100 on any of them, it pushed me one closer. But it also stood as the last unread novel from my years in school: It was originally assigned to me in my senior year of high school, in the fall of 1989. I got to page 25, hated it, bought the Cliffs Notes, and wrote the paper off that. That’s the same class for which I didn’t read Tess of the d’Urbervilles, a book I went back and read in 2005 and loved. I simply can’t say the same for this paperweight.

Next up: Dr. Michael Guillen’s Five Equations That Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics.

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→ March 12, 2011
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Alhambra.

Somehow the board game Alhambra has slipped through the cracks here on the dish, which I’ll blame on our move into the new house in the middle of last month. I’m hoping that now that we’re in (albeit far from unpacked) I’ll get back to more frequent posting here.

Alhambra won the Spiel des Jahres award in 2003 and looks like it should be a great game – players purchase castle tiles from a central “market” and try to earn points while building their own Alhambra-style castle. But the randomness factor is way too high for my tastes, particularly in the way it can leave one player in the dust from the outset if the cards/tiles don’t line up for him.

That central market has four tiles in it, drawn randomly from a bag as needed. Tiles come in six colors representing different types of rooms or building structures (like Towers or Gardens), each carrying a different potential point value, and with walls on anywhere from zero to four sides. You may place a tile only in a way that would allow a person to “walk” into that tile from your existing castle without having to hop a wall. There are three scoring rounds, coming roughly at the one-third and two-thirds marks as well as at game-end; each time, points are awarded to the player with the most tiles of each particular type, with smaller point gains available in the later scoring rounds for players with the second- or third-most tiles of each type.

The hitch, and it’s a big one, is how players acquire money to buy the tiles. The conceit is very clever: The masons you hire to build your Alhambra come from different countries and insist that you pay them in their own currency. The central market has four squares of different colors, and the currency required to buy a tile from the market is determined by the color on which that tile happens to sit. But you acquire currency from a separate currency market: Four cards, randomly drawn, that sit out for players to take in lieu of buying a tile. A player may take any single card from the currency market, or take any number of cards whose values add up to five or less. So the tiles you’re able to buy over the course of the game will depend on what color and value of currency cards are available to you when your turns come up.

On his turn, a player may buy a tile, take currency, or make a very small modification to his castle. The currency takes on added weight because of the rule that allows a player to take an extra turn if he buys a tile with exact change. (If you overpay, you’re out of luck – you don’t get the difference back.) The result is that there’s very little strategizing possible around tile purchase and placement; it’s all about your currency options, and while there is some turn-to-turn strategy there, in a four-player game the central market changes so much each time around that the value of good currency decision-making is severely curtailed.

My wife disagrees with me on Alhambra; she’s not bothered by a high randomness factor and places more value on visuals and production value. We have played the two-player variant, where you assign some tiles to a hypothetical third player, “Dirk,” and the game actually works a little better than it does with four people because the central market changes less between turns. But on the whole, I can’t see buying this game over other tile-based games like Carcassonne, which folds its randomness more seamlessly into gameplay in a way that actually enhances the value of good decision-making.

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Again, I’m hoping that’s the last long layoff on this blog for a while, and I apologize for neglecting it. I’m almost through with An American Tragedy and am planning a long music post for some time in early April, as well as reviews of some of the Dominion expansions we’ve acquired over the last few months. In the meantime, check out my post on UCLA star Gerrit Cole and listen for me on the Baseball Today podcast three times this week starting on Tuesday.

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→ February 28, 2011
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Battle Line game and app.

Battle Line is another two-player card game from the prolific Reiner Knizia, the man behind Lost Cities, Samurai, and Ingenious, one that brings a little more randomness to the table than Lost Cities offers but with plenty of opportunities for strategy – the type of randomness that forces you to rethink your approach to the game, rather than the kind that makes you throw up your hands in frustration. There’s also a very good Battle Line app available for iOS, with good graphics and a solid AI but as yet no online play option.

The main deck in Battle Line includes 60 cards, 10 cards numbered 1 through 10 in each of six different colors. Players begin with seven cards in their hands and on each turn play one card and draw one replacement. In between the two players sits a line of nine flags, and at each flag players place cards to try to create a winning formation, one that ranks higher than the opponent’s formation at the same flag. A completed formation contains three cards. The first player to either win five of the nine flags or to win three adjacent flags wins the game.

A formation’s value is determined by the numbers and colors of the cards it contains. The game has its own lingo, but you’ll notice a correlation to poker hands as well. The top formation is the game’s royal flush – three consecutive cards in one color, with a tie going to the formation with the highest sum on his cards, leaving 10-9-8 as the best possible formation in the game. (If a player completes a 10-9-8 formation at a flag, he wins the flag even if his opponent has yet to finish his own.) Next highest is three of a (numerical) kind, followed by a flush, a straight containing more than one color, and last just any assortment of three cards. When both players have identical formation types at a flag, the above tiebreaker applies. It’s also possible to claim a flag before the other player has completed his formation if it is no longer possible for the second player to create a formation to top the one that’s already on the board.

The twist in the game is the existence of a second deck of ten Tactics cards, each unique, which may be drawn instead of cards from the main deck. These cards run from the lifeline (Hero and Champion, two wild cards that can stand in for any card you want, although each player is limited to playing one of these per game) to the attack card (Traitor, stealing a card your opponent has played and using it yourself; or Deserter, trashing a card your opponent has played). The number of Tactics cards you can play is restricted by how many your opponent has played – the delta must not exceed one, so once you’ve played your first Tactics card you can’t play a second until your opponent has played one.

Battle Line strategy breaks down into two major areas. One is deciding how to fill out formations – if you have the green 9 and the green 8, do you play those together and hope you get the 7 or 10, or do you break up the 9 and 8 to try to build the easier three-of-a-kind formations? But the more interesting part is deciding when to fill out formations. Holding back the second or third cards in a strong formation might entice your opponent to waste a valuable card there – but playing that second card might open the door for him to waste your cards by dropping a stronger formation there. And do you challenge his formations early or try to play at empty flags and create large obstacles in the center of the board? It’s one of those “simple rules but different every time” games, like Lost Cities, that work very well for a quick two-player match.

The game’s card constraints are more confining than those in Lost Cities, which makes it a little more random because of how much you’re at the mercy of the deck. In Lost Cities, you’re just waiting for a larger card in any color you’re using, preferably not too much larger. In Battle Line, you have more formations in play but are often looking for a specific card or one of two in a specific color, and can’t discard a card without using it as you can in Lost Cities. If you want a change from Lost Cities, however, Battle Line is the most comparable two-player game I’ve found.

The Battle Line app (a.k.a. “Reiner Knizia’s Battleline”), from Gourmet Gaming, features two AI opponents, allows you to play two-player against someone sitting next to you, and offers a basic game that involves six cards in your hand and no Tactics cards if you want a tutorial. The strong AI player uses Tactics cards well, doesn’t do anything stupid, and will seize on player mistakes nearly every time. Flags are claimed automatically regardless of the winner, and the graphics involved are very clear. The app had problems with crashing and with incorrect values on two Tactics cards, but both glitches appear to be gone since an update about three weeks ago. It’s been my go-to app of late when I don’t want to get sucked into a long game of Carcassonne since you can knock out a game quickly and there’s enough random variation to keep it fresh.

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→ February 27, 2011
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Texas eats.

I’ll start with the bad experience of the trip since it’s the most interesting – one of the worst and weirdest meals I’ve had on the road over the last five years.

Riva Mediterranean Grill in Arlington (not far from UTA) is a fairly new restaurant in the space formerly occupied by an Italian restaurant in a strip mall on Park Row. I found a few positive reviews and comments about Riva, promising good eastern Mediterranean food, but the food was awful across the board – nothing is fresh and I have reason to believe they’re not handling their food properly. The hummus appetizer had only a harsh lemon flavor and a bland texture, both of which I’d associate with prefab hummus from the supermarket, but when I asked my server if it was made in-house I was told “yes” – possibly true, but doubtful. The chicken shish kebab eliminated any questions I had about the restaurant, however, as the meat had the unmistakeable look and texture of chicken that wasn’t thawed fully before its exposure to heat. Of the nine or ten pieces on the two skewers, I cut into seven and found the same problem in each one. I know that texture because I’ve encountered it before – and because I’ve made that same mistake myself, about ten or eleven years ago when I was first learning to cook. (The rice that came with it was straight from a box, too.)

When the head server (possibly a manager – he never identified himself by his role) came to ask if I wanted a box for the chicken, I told him I didn’t need one because the chicken was inedible. His response was to ask if I’d ever had “shish” before – I half-expected him to follow up by asking if I’d ever had chicken before – and to claim that the meat was never frozen and that this was the first complaint they’d ever had. I’m no Gordon Ramsay but I know badly handled meat when I taste it, and the fact that front of house doesn’t know what’s going on in the back (or lied about it) just made it worse. I may have left skid marks in the parking lot.

I needed a quick meal before the Friday night game at TCU and an Urbanspoon query on nearby Q joints sent me to Red Hot & Blue, which was a 35, terrible chain barbecue masked under kitschy Memphis-blues décor.

As for the one decent meal of the trip, I did try Ethiopian food for the first time, going to A Taste of Ethiopia in Pflugerville just north of Austin. (Google Maps has their location wrong, if you try to go – they’re a mile or so further south on Grand, on the west side of the road.) I knew very little about Ethiopian food before the meal, nothing beyond their berbere spice mix and injera flat bread (made with teff, an ancient grain now making a comeback with the current whole-grains craze), so I can’t judge whether this was good or authentic for the cuisine. The service at Taste of Ethiopia was off the charts, especially once I said I was new to the cuisine, and the server strongly encouraged me to try the lamb tibbs, marinated and slow cooked with berbere, onions, and peppers. I lost my taste for lamb about two years ago, with no explanation; I just can’t stomach the smell of it, so I went with siga tibbs, the same item made with beef.

The dish, like a thin stew, wasn’t spicy but had a bright chili flavor like you’d get from ancho chili powder, but the beef was surprisingly tough for something marinated and slow-cooked. The meal is served without utensils, as you are supposed to tear off some injera and grab some of the meat and vegetables which are spread out on a large plate lined with a single piece of injera – a little awkward, but eventually effective enough, and nobody seemed to care if I made a mess of things. They’ll serve their dishes with rice instead of injera and will bring utensils on request, but I didn’t think it made sense to act like a tourist when trying a new cuisine.

The bread itself was like a mild, spongy crepe, but I was surprised to see zero evidence of browning anywhere on it – that may be traditional but I’m hard-pressed to think of another bread product (other than steamed breads) that is deliberately removed from the pan or oven before it browns, and whole grains benefit from the way browning brings out nutty flavors. It was clearly just made, and one of the servers was on the prowl with fresh injera in case anyone was running low. The meal also came with a spicy cooked green bean and carrot dish and a tart cooked cabbage and potato mixture (not your mum’s bubble and squeak). It’s a ton of food and including their house-brewed spiced iced tea, which includes cardamom, cinnamon, and cloves, ran about $15 before tip.

Incidentally, thanks to all of you who suggested Ethiopian dishes I might try, as well as those of you who pushed Austin-area recs. I was only in the metro area for about six hours and never south of Pflugerville, so I’ll store those away for another visit.

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→ February 25, 2011
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Catching up on recent eats…

‘Pomo Pizzeria*, located just north of Old Town Scottsdale in the pretentious Borgata shopping center, has been certified by the Neapolitan authority that travels the world and gives its imprimatur to pizzerias serving authentic Naples-style pizza. It lacks the cachet of Pizzeria Bianco, but has the benefit of being easier to patronize, since they’re open for lunch and take reservations, with a product that’s nearly as good as their more famous rival.

*Yes, there’s an apostrophe before the word ‘Pomo, something I have yet to decipher. The Italian word for tomatoes is pomodoro, but if the restaurant’s name derives from that word the apostrophe is on the wrong end. Perhaps the Borgata’s owners insisted on the apostrophe to ratchet up the restaurant’s elitist factor.

‘Pomo’s menu is straightforward – a few antipasti, salads, and many pizza options with an extensive list of ingredients, several of which are imported from Italy, including mozzarella di bufala and proscuitto di Parma. The oven runs up to 950 degrees, on the low end of acceptable for this kind of product, and the crust had the requisite slight char with plenty of lift to it. Neapolitan pizza doughs are very thin in the center and should still be wet when they reach the table, although they’ll tend to firm up as the pizza cools; don’t be alarmed by reviews that call it “soggy,” as that’s an application of an American standard for pizza to a completely different product. The texture is fine, while the dough’s taste is a little quiet compared to the toppings.

I went with two other writers, Nick Piecoro and Molly Knight, and somehow we all ended up with pizzas that boasted at least one pork product. I went with a bianca pizza, one of maybe a half-dozen tomato-less options on the menu, featuring mozzarella, prosciutto, and Parmiggiano-Reggiano, a combination that would be too salty and acidic if you layered any sort of cooked tomatoes underneath them. Nick and Molly both went for tomato-based pizzas featuring more charcuterie, including the diavolo, featuring a spicy salame that ‘Pomo uses in lieu of pepperoni (which is fine by me, as I find most pepperoni to be harsh).

There’s a definite focus here on fresh and authentic ingredients; the mixed greens in the salad were immaculate, the Parmiggiano-Reggiano was the real deal (not some American or Argentine knockoff), and the tomatoes come from San Marzano (although I admit I probably wouldn’t know the difference on that score). They also offer a handful of Moretti beers for about $5 apiece, including La Rossa, a red beer that’s about 8% alcohol that is outstanding but requires that I surrender my keys before ordering. Total damage for three pizzas (which run $11-16 each), a salad, a beer, and four glasses of wine was about $105 with tax but before tip, and we had probably 2/3 of a pizza left over. It wasn’t quite the transformative experience that my one meal at Pizzeria Bianco was, but it is among the best pizza experiences I’ve ever had in the United States, one I strongly recommend.

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Speaking of authentic pizza in America, in December my family and I went to Via Napoli, the new restaurant in Walt Disney World at Epcot’s Italy pavilion; we were lucky to get two reservations in our week in Orlando but I understand it’s become a tough ticket as word has spread. Via Napoli’s menu is somewhat limited, with fewer toppings available and not much in the way of salads, but more antipasto options including some expertly fried verdure fritte (fried vegetables) and prosciutto e mela (prosciutto and fresh cantaloupe). The restaurant boasts three giant wood-fired ovens and the dough is superb, with thicker crusts (perhaps to suit American palates?) but less of the trademarked char on the exterior. As with ‘Pomo, Via Napoli imports many of its key ingredients and I felt the mozzarella they used was more flavorful, perhaps because it contained a little more salt. (Cheese without salt is like water without oxygen.) The dessert menu includes real gelato and a new take on zeppole, the Italian version of fried dough; Via Napoli’s includes ricotta cheese in the mix, which you’d expect would make the end product heavier but instead creates these soft, slightly sweet pillows of dough that don’t actually need any accompaniments but oh hey you brought some dark chocolate sauce so I feel obliged to use it. Via Napoli is where I discovered La Rossa and where I discovered that a large serving of it will keep me inebriated for at least six solid hours.

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On to Los Angeles from mid-February, where I’ll start with the last meal I had, Bludso’s BBQ in Compton on Long Beach Boulevard, a real hole in the wall that focuses on takeout with an emphasis on brisket and beef ribs. The service was definitely more Texas than downtown LA, and when I asked what the specialty was the woman behind the counter insisted that I sample the brisket before ordering; it was smoky and tender and didn’t need sauce to provide flavor or moisture, although the salty-sweet-earthy sauce they use is a good complement. For takeout they package their meats in foil with a healthy dose of sauce, enough that it started to drown out the meat’s flavors, but that’s easily fixed by asking for less sauce or for the sauce on the side. The ribs were smaller than I expected but had good tooth and pulled away from the bone pretty easily. The collard greens were deep-South style, cooked low and slow with plenty of liquor included; the baked beans had become soft and mushy but had strong flavors from the meat included in them. For about $11 you can get two meats, two sides, a piece of northern-style (that is, very sweet) cornbread, and some of that white bread that people in Texas always serve with Q but that just confuses everyone else. Yes, it’s a bad area, but it’s worth seeking out.

I met my friend Jay Berger at his local favorite sushi place, Yoshi’s Sushi on Santa Monica in West Hollywood. We had nothing but nigiri, which has become my style anyway after reading The Story of Sushi last summer. About half came with a ponzu sauce, including the yellowtail and the halibut; everything was fresh and only the salmon was disappointing, although I should know by now that salmon nigiri is not very authentic – I just love salmon in any preparation. The albacore, which I usually find kind of boring, and red snapper were both among the best I’ve had of each kind of fish. However, I tried octopus for the first time and am still chewing it three weeks later. Next time I’ll stick with the raw stuff.

And I should throw another mention at Square One Dining in Hollywood, which is becoming my breakfast ritual when I’m in town for the Compton workout. Square One focuses on natural, local ingredients, and their breakfasts include some real throwback elements, like bacon rashers cut about three times as thick as you’d get at a typical diner or fresh eggs cooked to order. My only criticism is that despite using good tea, somehow it’s already overbrewed and bitter when it reaches the table, which makes me think they have pots of tea ready to go for breakfast service – thoughtful, but counterproductive.

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→ February 22, 2011
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Scorecasting.

I apologize for the long delay between posts; we moved into our house last week and are finally settled, although far from unpacked.

I tweeted earlier today that I’ll be joining ESPN’s Baseball Today podcast as a co-host three days a week starting in mid-March. And, if you missed it, my preseason ranking of the top 50 prospects for this year’s Rule 4 draft went up last Thursday.

—

Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim’s Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won aims to be the Freakonomics of sports, a marketing angle made quite clear from the cover quote from Steven Levitt that calls Scorecasting the best book of its kind since Freakonomics, which is funny, since Levitt co-wrote that book. (And one wonders if the authors share an agent or an editor or something else.) My cynicism over the quotes aside, Scorecasting is a fun read, one that does a better job of challenging conventional wisdom than providing hard answers to hard questions, the sort of book that could make an old-school sports fan rethink some of his positions without requiring a background in behavioral economics. If you’re here, however, the odds are good that your mind is already open, in which case Scorecasting is more of an enjoyable lark but might leave you looking for more serious analysis than what the authors offer in a book aimed at the mainstream audience.

Wertheim and Moskowitz attack a number of questions over the course of the book, with the only unifying theme that these are questions that can be examined (if not actually answered) through some very rudimentary statistical analysis. For example, they examine the potential causes of home-field advantage, which is fairly persistent within sports but doesn’t seem to tie to attendance; whether icing the kicker is an effective strategy (I won’t reveal their answer, but have always found the practice unsportsmanlike); or whether momentum exists. The template for each essay – some just two or three pages, others thirty or forty – is standard: Explain the question and the conventional wisdom on the subject, discuss how they operationalized the variables, then present the results in text and graphical format, usually just showing some evidence telling us whether there’s a correlation between the independent and dependent variable. For example, in the momentum chapter (“The Myth of the Hot Hand”), they look at basketball, defining what a “hot” period of time constitutes (one, two, five, and ten-minute samples), then look at point differentials over the one, two, five, and ten minute periods immediately following a “hot” period. It’s not rigorous, but it will likely sway some of your opinions even if it doesn’t convince you.

The best essays in the book combine the Freakonomics-style analysis with interesting stories, like the chapter on the history of trades in the NFL draft (“Off the Chart”), which discusses the famous Mike McCoy chart on how to value draft picks in trade talks. The authors describe the chart’s genesis, early successes, propagation, and loss of usefulness once everyone had it, along with some potential explanations for the psychology behind incorrect valuations of draft picks. (Yet another reason why I’d like to see MLB allow teams to trade draft picks: It’s another way for smart front offices to create value.) Another essay (“Rounding First”) asks why we see more round numbers in seasonal statistics than you’d expect if the results were normally distributed, pointing to psychological and perhaps financial incentives that drive behavior in situations where the leverage (to the player, not the team) is increased.

Scorecasting is a text for the mass market, which means fewer numbers and more broad brush strokes in the book. I’m not the first to raise this objection, but the way the authors treat results that are merely indicative as if they’re conclusive is offputting if you realize what they’re doing and misleading if you don’t. For one thing, their analytical methods, while valid, are on the superficial side. For another, they often confuse correlation with causation, and even though I often agreed with their arguments on the causes of the effects they discovered, they meld those opinions with statements of statistical facts in a way that just isn’t warranted. It’s a marketing issue – the book wouldn’t sell if they just presented data paired with a lot of “draw your own conclusions” quotes – but it takes what could have been a serious work and makes it a popular one.

And some of their conclusions just aren’t supported by the analysis, at least when it comes to baseball. They offer throwaway comments on how a salary cap would increase parity in baseball without an ounce of evidence to justify the statements. They claim that PEDs improve baseball performance by showing that players who had been suspended for PED usage were more likely to be promoted to the next level, a lousy proxy for multiple reasons and one that makes their conclusion, “In addition to the science, the data support the claim that steroids work,” ignorant on both sides of its comma. I imagine that the authors glossed over similar controversies in other sports, enough that no matter your game of choice you’ll find something in the book to annoy you.

You should read Scorecasting, though, in spite of its shortcomings. Moneyball was equally flawed, perhaps more so, and yet it launched a quiet revolution not just within the industry but within the fan base, an inflection point that I believe saw a major increase in the number of students of the game who began pursuing and publishing their own analyses, with some even finding themselves entering the industry as a result. I could see Scorecasting as a similar spur to innovation in the analysis of sports, and in the way sports are covered. One thing that Scorecasting does confront, without ever explicitly saying so, is ignorance. If you say “X causes Y,” others will look for a way to verify it, so don’t make the statement without trying to verify it yourself.

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→ February 5, 2011
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Vikings & Ascension board games.

I purchased Vikings on a whim, since I had a Barnes & Noble gift card and wanted to add one board game to the pile of books I ordered through their site: Vikings was one of the only German-style games they offered that I didn’t already own. It turned out to be a great purchase and a new favorite for us, and a rare game that plays well with two players and with more than two.

Vikings’ concept is that each player represents a tribe of Vikings sailing west to settle new islands, but rather than a game of exploration it’s a game of placement and resource management. Players must construct islands using left, middle, and right island tiles; place boats worth points or coins; and gather and place six kinds of viking meeples, each serving a different purpose in the game. Some viking types earn you points, some prevent you from losing points, and one kind (boatmen) allow you to ferry meeples from your main island to your tiles.

The game comprises six rounds, and on each rounds, eleven random tiles are placed around the game board’s wheel on spaces numbered 0 through 10, each tile paired with a viking drawn at random from the supply. Ship tiles go to the highest numbered spaces, while island tiles start at 0. The vikings are also placed in a specific order – first fisherman (used to feed your people at game end), then goldsmiths, scouts (score points for goldsmiths and fishermen in the same column), nobles (two points apiece), and warriors. Goldsmiths are worth 3 gold coins at the end of every round. Warriors allow you to score points for ships placed directly above them, and an “unprotected” ship prevents you from scoring for some tiles in its column. Unprotected ships will also cost you points or gold at game end. Warriors are important, if you didn’t catch on.

The number of the space a tile/viking pair occupies represents its cost, but the 0-cost tile is unavailable unless its viking is the only one left of its color, or the player whose turn it is to choose has no coins remaining. When a player takes the 0-cost tile, the wheel turns until the 0 is next to the lowest remaining tile/viking combination, so tiles become cheaper as each round goes on. But players can always choose to spend big to acquire a choice tile or a needed viking (e.g., a warrior to protect a five-point ship), so there’s no guarantee the tile will still be there when the wheel turns.

I generally don’t like games with a lot of random elements, but Vikings’ randomness is much more controlled: All 72 island tiles are used, and with only a few types, you rarely have to wait long or spend too much for a tile type you might need. There are 78 meeples, so only a few are left out of any single game, and again you’re rarely left up a creek. It’s variation without huge swings in luck, and you can build a coherent strategy around it once you have a sense of how the game flows.

We’ve played Vikings with two players and with three (it plays up to four) and found no significant difference in game play. Your strategy shifts slightly with three players from two to consider where you’ll make a sacrifice; the competition for warriors, boatsmen, and fishermen becomes more intense, and you’ll probably have to accept a point loss somewhere. Minimizing those and/or maximizing point gains elsewhere is key.

It’s the wheel that sets Vikings apart in my mind; it’s an elegant compromise between the egalitarian but time-consuming auction method (think Power Grid) and the straight assignment method where players can be helped or hurt by fortunate tile draws. Since the start player rotates from round to round, every player will have his or her chance to get the tile or Viking s/he needs, given the willingness to pay for it.

Typical game time was under an hour for us once we got the hang of it, and the rules are well-written. There’s a more complex variation/expansion included that we haven’t tried yet, in part because we like the simplicity of the core game so much. I’m certainly puzzled to see it ranked outside the top 100 on Boardgamegeek; it’s worth checking out, especially if you’re a fan of not-too-complex strategy games as I am.

–

I received a review copy of a new deck-building game called Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, which seems like a cross between Dominion and the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering, based on what I know of the latter game (I’ve never played it). Ascension takes the core Dominion mechanic – shuffle your deck, deal yourself five cards, acquire new cards, place them all in the discard pile, shuffle again when your deck runs out – and marries it to the fantasy elements of Magic, with one substantial twist: You can use your cards to defeat monster cards and earn “honor” points. You also earn points for certain cards in your deck, and when the game ends, the player with the most such points wins.

The mechanics do vary from Dominion’s in a few ways. The most significant is that you can only purchase cards or fight monsters currently in the center row of five cards, as opposed to Dominion, where all ten Kingdom cards in use in the game are available until their supplies run out. Ascension also adds three cards – a basic money card, a basic warrior card, and a weak monster – that you can purchase/fight when you can’t do anything with the five cards in the center, thus largely eliminating the chance of a turn where you can’t do anything at all.

The limited choice in cards to buy or monsters to fight means that the game has a much higher randomness element and less strategic planning than Dominion; it’s hard to build a cohesive deck when you’re at the mercy of the cards in the market when your turn arrives. But we also found that the game ended so quickly that there was barely time for strategic deck-building. (By that, I mean acquiring cards that work well together, so that when you draw two or more into your hand you can increase your buying or fighting power.) We tested Ascension with three players and I was the only player who managed to pull off this trick (once!) before the game ended.

Other concerns not affecting gameplay are a very badly written rulebook, spawning several threads on Boardgamegeek that address these questions, such as whether the Cultist is available throughout the game for players to defeat (it is); and some horrible artwork on cards that looks like what you might find in the social studies notebook of a teenaged boy obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons.

I’ve never been a huge fan of fantasy literature or a player of Magic or D&D and can see why this might appeal more to those audiences. However, my wife and I agreed that we preferred Dominion and I can’t see us reaching for Ascension over that game.

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→ January 31, 2011
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The Gun Seller.

I’m off duty this week, since we close on our house today, but hope to post here a few times. As it turns out, today’s my wife’s birthday, so I tried to convince her that the house was her birthday gift from me, but so far it’s not working.

–

There are plenty of reasons to be jealous of Hugh Laurie. He plays the title character in one of the best television shows I’ve ever seen, and playing it well. Before that he played one of the leading characters in the definitive adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories (the full series is now $25.75, almost 60% off, on amazon, less than half what I paid for it years ago). And he started with a classic sketch comedy series with the inimitable Stephen Fry, many clips of which can be found online, such as this man on the street bit about wine.

Judging by his one published novel, the madcap spy novel The Gun Seller, he’s a damn good writer, too.

The Gun Seller almost reads like Wodehouse doing John Le Carré, although there’s a more modern feel to the prose than you’ll find in Wodehouse’s cheerfully patrician writing. But the wry observations, absurd analogies, and quick shifts of focus are present, as in the title character’s statement (after he’s been shot under his arm) that “I ordered a tonic water for myself and a large vodka for the pain in my armpit.” The plot is over-the-top, borderline farcical, but holds together surprisingly well and has plenty of tension and narrative greed to keep you turning pages.

The narrator and main character is Thomas Lang, a mercenary with an aversion to doing actual violence, who is approached by a man with a request to kill someone, only to find himself (at the book’s open) nearly killed by the target’s bodyguard, and then by his daughter. That one inquiry opens the door to a giant covert operation involving a next-generation attack helicopter and a disgustingly underhanded scheme to sell them to governments around the world, a scheme in which Lang plays a central role.

The book has two parts, the first of which leans more toward humor, the last (the book’s final third) works on resolving the intricate plot Laurie has assembled. That first part includes plenty of dry English wit to savor, much of it laugh-out-loud funny, some more smirk-inducing:

To follow somebody, without them knowing that you’re doing it, is not the doddle they makei t seem in films. I’ve had some experience of professional following, and a lot more experience of professional going back to the office and saying ‘we lost him.’ Unless your quarry is deaf, tunnel-sighted and lame, you need at least a dozen people and fifteen thousand quids-worth of short-wave radio to make a decent go of it.

The action picks up substantially in the second half as Lang finds himself inserted into a terrorist sleeper cell with plans that unfortunately foreshadowed later events in Lima, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam. There’s a bit less time for the humor of the first half, but Laurie manages to keep the tone light even when bodies are dropping.

When he got there, he sat down very slowly. Either because he was haemorrhoidal, or because there was a chance that I might do something dangerous. I smiled, to show him that he was haemorrhoidal.

Laurie also manages to strike just the right note of cynicism in the book, avoiding the out-and-out misanthropy that can infect any book that looks into the dark recesses of the human soul and finds a cash register there. There is a point, one that resonates more strongly today than it might have when the book was published in 1996, that seemingly “democratic” governments fall under the sway of money, particularly corporate money, and will do things that we would consider abominable if we knew they were up to them in the first place. Rather than beating you over the head with rhetoric, however, Laurie just incorporates it into the book and channels Lang’s anger into action rather than tedious monologues on the nature of republican government or the need for transparency or whatnot. Those would sink a book that, at heart, was written to be fun to read. And fun to read it is, a spy novel for people who like to laugh, or a comic novel for people who like a spot of bother in their books.

Next up: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

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