→ December 15, 2010
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The Little Sister.

I’m back at mental_floss today with an article about the designing of the game Dominion, based on an email exchange I had with designer Donald X. Vaccarino.

—

“Do you drink, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Well, now that you mention it–”
“I don’t think I’d care to employ a detective that uses liquor in any form. I don’t even approve of tobacco.”
“Would it be all right if I peeled an orange?”

Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe isn’t just hard-boiled – he’s dry, sarcastic, self-effacing, and mercurial, making him one of the most compelling protagonists I’ve found in any novel in any genre. Consigning Chander’s novels to the detective-fiction bin does him a great disservice, as his greatness is in his mastery of the language; not only is the prose itself readable and rich with metaphor, but it becomes the tool by which Chandler creates well-rounded characters through a handful of seemingly effortless lines.

I understand that The Big Sleep is considered Chandler’s best work, and it is phenomenal … but there’s little to no difference between that and Farewell, My Lovely, or the work I just finished over the weekend, The Little Sister. They’re all superb, all following the basic Chandler template of putting Marlowe in a situation where the line between solving the case and saving his life is blurry.

In The Little Sister the titular character – quoted above – shows up in Marlowe’s office, asking the gumshoe to help find her older brother, who has disappeared in Bay City not long after leaving his family in Manhattan, Kansas. Marlowe takes the case against his better judgment (S.O.P. for him), even though he believes the girl is holding back information. With a modest amount of investigating, Marlowe ends up in the middle of a blackmail scheme, a dope ring, and a lot of questionable identities – something Chandler creates in his usual economical way, with just a handful of new characters outside of a few corpses.

I picked the wrong time to read The Little Sister by starting it on day one of the winter meetings, which left me very little time to actually read the book until the meetings ended on Thursday – frustrating when it’s a book you never want to put down in the first place. I found it moved more quickly than The Big Sleep, but the plot was a little less complex – it was relatively easy to figure out what most of the characters were up to, and I say that as someone who almost never figures things out in books – so the question of which is the better book is one of personal taste. (It’s possible that The Big Sleep enjoys its status at the top of Chandler’s canon because of its film adaptation, directed by Howard Hawks with Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe.) No matter where you start, though, if you haven’t given Chandler at least one shot, I can’t recommend his work highly enough.

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→ December 14, 2010
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The U.S.A. Trilogy.

My Cliff Lee analysis from last night is up for Insiders, as is a piece from earlier on Monday on Scott Downs, Brendan Ryan, and Ryan Theriot, featuring a TOOTBLAN reference.

–

John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy – The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money – is considered a landmark in American fiction, ranking 68th on the Novel 100, 23rd on the Modern Library 100, and 55th on the Brit-lit-skewed Guardian 100. Leading literary lights from Jean-Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer have praised Dos Passos’ writing in U.S.A. and the influence the work had in bringing modernism to the American novel. Taken in sum, this series of interconnected stories presents a panoramic view of the United States from the start of the Great War to the end of the Roaring 20s, where the main character is the scene and setting rather than any individual in the book. It’s not an easy read – more on that in a moment – but it is an important read if you read as a student rather than just for pleasure. (Not that there’s anything wrong with reading just for pleasure, of course.)

(Aside: The Novel 100 is back in print after several years out of it. The book, by literature professor Daniel Burt, ranks the 100 greatest novels ever written with an essay on each, and features a bonus, unranked list of the “second 100” after those. It’s been a great reading list for me, and I enjoy Burt’s analyses and comments on each book’s influence, even if I don’t always agree with his selections.)

Each book in the trilogy includes lengthy chapters following a dozen or so characters whose lives intertwine and whose paths cross with major historical figures, such as the young idealist who ends up working publicity on the campaign to save Sacco and Vanzetti. These chapters, heavy on descriptive prose, are bookended by two types of mini-chapters, the Newsreel and “The Camera Eye.” The former is a list of clipped fragments from newspaper and magazine articles of the time, anchoring you to a specific year or month while also setting up some of the emotional framework for the chapter to follow; the latter is a somewhat indecipherable stream-of-consciousness, worm’s-eye view of society that I found myself skimming because it gave me bad memories of struggling through Ulysses last winter. Dos Passos also inserts short, stylized biographies of important Americans of the time period, from Henry Ford to Woodrow Wilson to Frederick Taylor to now-forgotten names like dancer Isadora Duncan and labor activist Joe Hill, written with an opinionated voice that also seeks to inform.

Dos Passos also based large chunks of the books on his own experiences in World War I as part of the volunteer ambulance corps in Paris – a role that seems to have required a lot more drinking and carousing than actual ambulance-driving, but one that also seems to have fueled the book’s derogatory portraits of upper-class American twits in Europe, chasing money or skirts or good times while there was a war going on around them.

What I didn’t like about U.S.A. was the lack of a central story, or even set of stories. The existential nature of the trilogy means characters wink in and out of the book and Dos Passos gives a lot of time to mundane matters without investing the reader at all in anyone’s fate or happiness – because, I presume, that wasn’t his point. Dos Passos set out to provide a slice of life, and I’m not sure any American writer has done it better – but it makes for a more academic read than a leisurely one, a trilogy you might pick up to help you better follow the transition in American literature from the 1920s to the 1940s, but not something you’re going to grab to get you through your next long plane ride.

My other regret about U.S.A. is that Dos Passos didn’t use more dialogue, because he was pretty sharp with it and could have given more depth to his characters just by having them speak more often, such as in this banter from 1919 regarding the League of Nations:

“It’s not the name you give things, it’s who’s getting theirs underneath that counts,” said Robbins.
“That’s a very cynical remark,” said the California woman. “This isn’t any time to be cynical.”
“This is a time,” said Robbins, “when if we weren’t cynical we’d shoot ourselves.”

Baseball does come up a few times in the book, as one character is a serious fan (right around the time of the Black Sox scandal, after which baseball earns scant mention – you’d think Babe Ruth would show up in some Newsreels, right?) while the section in The Big Money on Frederick Taylor claims that

At Exeter he was head of his class and captain of the ballteam, the first man to pitch overhand. (When umpires complained that overhand pitching wasn’t in the rules of the game, he answered that it got results.)

And if you’re into food, U.S.A. introduced me to “smearcase,” which can refer to a sort of farmer’s or cottage cheese among the Pennsylvania Dutch, but which in the Baltimore area refers to something more akin to cheesecake. (The name comes from the German Schmierkäse, meaning smear-cheese.)

Next up: I’ve finished Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister and am most of the way through Dawn Powell’s Turn, Magic Wheel. Both authors are among my favorite American writers, Chandler for his phenomenal prose, Powell for her sardonic wit.

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→ December 13, 2010
→ By

Cookbook recommendations (plus Top Chef thoughts).

Before I get to the books (and magazine), a thought or two on last week’s Top Chef: All-Stars.

First, I found it interesting that no chef stood up for Jamie and even indicated that they understood, let alone approved of, her decision to leave for stitches on her thumb. If that’s the ethic of the kitchen, I feel like I should defer to that. And Tony Bourdain had no sympathy either. (Hat tip to Dave Cameron for pointing me to Bourdain’s blog.) Plus the stakes are even higher in this competition than they are in a restaurant kitchen.

But more importantly, how did no one ding her on bad cutting technique? Where the hell was her thumb that she ran her knife directly into it? I hate the parallel-to-the-board cut anyway because it’s dangerous, but when I must do it, my main priority is ensuring that if the knife moves forward faster than I expect, it will do nothing but slice the food I’m cutting. Fingers up. Thumbs up. Wrist angled up and sharply away from the food. If you don’t want to send Jamie home for malingering, send her home for poor knife skills.

Also, I tweeted a link earlier to the Chicago Tribune‘s interview with week 1’s unconditionally-released chef, Elia, in which she completely loses her mind and goes after Tom Colicchio. Tom’s response, while clearly dripping with disrespect, stays on point in an impressive manner – he answers the charges while keeping the deprecation subtle. It’s a model of angry writing. And as he and Bourdain and others have said, raw fish is raw fish. If it’s not meant to be raw, and it’s raw, you can’t pin that on the judges.

–

I was asked on Twitter today to suggest some cookbooks or magazines, and I haven’t updated my old list of recommendations in a while so I figured I’d throw a new post together. I tend toward more specialized cookbooks now because I’m more interested in ideas than in techniques, but I’ll start with the staples to which I keep returning even though I’ve owned some of them for years.

Joy of Cooking. The gray lady of the kitchen – still reliable if somewhat staid, with a level of completeness that few rivals can approach. If you need a recipe for a basic or common dish, it’s probably here, with clear instructions and lots of information on ingredients. I learned to cook from two sources above all others: Alton Brown and Joy. I’m partial to the 1997 edition myself, as I understand the last revision (for the book’s 75th anniversary) introduced some best-forgotten sections on semi-homemade meals while removing some of the professionally-written material that makes the ’97 version so indispensable. The new revision does include cocktail recipes, but I have The Official Harvard Student Agencies Bartending Course for that.

Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. You cook, and you don’t own Ratio? I don’t think I’ve added any cookbook to my collection that changed my thinking on food as much as Michael Ruhlman did in his concise, almost engineering-like book that reduces recipes to their master formulas. From biscuits to pâte à choux to stocks to custards, Ruhlman gives you the framework and lets you build up from there. If you’re like me and cook better when you understand what’s happening in the bowl or pot, you must own Ratio. And it’s just $10 on amazon.

Baking Illustrated. The one book that I can say has truly supplanted Joy, at least in its niche; if you can get past the cloying prose and descriptions of the strange substitutions they tried (“then we replaced the sour cream with motor oil … but that killed four of the testers”), the recipes are extremely reliable, and the lengthy prose does give you the insight you’ll need to know where you can tweak. Their pumpkin pie recipe remains the best pumpkin pie I’ve ever tried, and it worked perfectly the first time I made it.

Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, Whole Grain Breads, and Artisan Breads Every Day. I love bread, real bread, just baked, best eaten in a day or two after which you bake some more. Reinhart helped me crack the code of good bread, and his books are tremendous references that cover many of the directions in which you might go as a baker. Artisan Breads Everyday is the beginner’s book of the collection, if you’re just getting started with the joys of autolysis and the overnight soak, while the other two books are still accessible but presume a little more skill – and they include the best pizza dough recipe I’ve ever used.

How To Cook Everything. I do not own this book, but the reviews from those of you who do have been uniformly positive, and it seems like a good companion to or – perish the thought – substitute for Joy. The author, Mark Bittman, is a longtime food writer for the New York Times who is often credited with bringing no-knead bread to the attention of the masses. (I still knead my bread, though. Even a minute of kneading makes a huge difference.)

Good Eats: The Early Years. The first of three books – I do not own the second one yet – has Alton going back through every episode of his seminal TV series and reworking recipes to address problems or user concerns, all while providing a lot of background information on each episode or the food it covers.

Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom. I do own a copy of the first part of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking … but it feels dated to me, and I’m never likely to do much classical French cooking at home. That’s just not how we eat on a day to day basis. Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom distills the core techniques and ideas from her experience in the kitchen into a slim, bright volume that I have always found far more relevant to what I might cook on a Wednesday evening. The book contains many recipes, but as with Brown, Reinhart, and Ruhlman, Child is pushing comprehension, not repetition. This was the book that pushed me to make more vinaigrettes.

For magazines, I’m partial to Fine Cooking, which takes that scientific approach of Good Eats and packs every issue full of recipes, with reference information on ingredients and tools, a card with nutrition data for every dish in that issue, and an emphasis on extensibility (such as the “nine cookies from three doughs” article from several years ago that was a staple of my Christmas cookie regimen). Of course, my subscription keeps lapsing because I’m disorganized, but this is the only cooking magazine to which I’ve subscribed since my daughter was born; I gave up on Bon Appetit because they repeated recipes and ideas, and I can’t deal with the writing in Cook’s Illustrated, which is even sillier than the writing in Baking Illustrated.

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→ December 7, 2010
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Edward Trencom’s Nose.

I’ll be writing up every significant trade or signing over on ESPN.com, including Adrian Gonzalez, Jayson Werth,, Marcum/Lawrie, Mark Reynolds, and
J.J. Putz.

—

Before moving on to the last two thirds of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, I read the first novel by Giles Milton, whose nonfiction works include one of my favorite books in that genre, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg. The novel, Edward Trencom’s Nose:, looked right up my alley, promising in its subtitle a tale “of history, dark intrigue, and cheese.” A historical mystery/detective story revolving around food, by an author I’ve read and liked? Sign me up.

You might infer from the introduction that I did not care for Edward Trencom’s Nose. That is an incomplete inference. It might be the worst novel I’ve read in the last five years. Milton’s sins are many. The book has zero suspense – you don’t find out what’s going on until the final few pages, and the way Milton unfurls the story yields no dramatic tension. The relevance of the food to the plot is minimal, and it seems more like a chance for Milton to flex some cheese knowledge than anything else. The protagonist is an aloof, self-centered idiot, and there is no three-dimensional character to be found in the book’s pages. And while the book’s jacket and reviews promised a funny book – the marketing copy on the back calls it a “mouth-watering blend of Tom Sharpe and P.G. Wodehouse,” for which the Wodehouse estate should sue – the book is terribly unfunny, crowded with obvious, futile attempts at humor and some of the worst descriptions of sex I have ever seen in any book. (Sex in Milton’s world appears to be a foul, violent act; he actually uses the word “pummeled” to describe one particular bout of coitus.)

So, since that book sucked, let me use this space to talk a little about Milton’s Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: Or the True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History, a book I can actually recommend to you without hesitation. The book is the history of that titular spice, one that was once the most expensive foodstuff in the world (an honor that I believe now falls to saffron, at least on a per gram basis) and that played a heavy role in European colonization of the western hemisphere and southeast Asia. When doctors in seventeenth-century England claimed that nutmeg was the only reliable cure for the plague, the spice – itself the dried seed of trees of genus Myristica – became more valuable by weight than gold, spurring a rush to obtain and trade in it … if only anyone could figure out where it came from.

Nutmeg at the time was found only in the Banda Islands (in the Maluku archipelago) of present-day Indonesia, and its best source was a tiny island called Pulorin (or Puloron) by its natives but just called “Run” by Europeans of the time. It was hard to reach, hit twice yearly by powerful monsoons, and populated by unfriendly locals. The Portuguese visited the Spice Islands nearly a century before the English reached Run, but had no luck with the natives and could do little more than trade with middlemen. Beginning around the year 1600, the English and Dutch – who came to Indonesia loaded for bear, and stand accused in this book of some unspeakable acts of violence in the name of securing their nutmeg supply – began a decades-long dispute over Run Island, one that wasn’t settled until the 1660s.

Nathaniel Courthope was a factor in Borneo who led an expedition in 1616 to Run to try to break the Dutch monopoly on nutmeg. The islanders warmed to Courthope and the English, only to find themselves subjected to a brutal siege by the Dutch that lasted nearly four years, a feat Milton credits largely to Courthope’s cunning and bravery. The Dutch won the battle eventually – I won’t spoil how – but lost the larger war, eventually securing their hold on Run and all of the Banda Islands in an agreement with the English that ceded New Amsterdam to the occupying English forces. That is, we speak English today in large part because the Dutch wanted a 3 km long island in Indonesia that was the world’s main supply of nutmeg. And, in a bit of a last laugh on the Dutch, to recapture Run after the British briefly held it in 1664, the Dutch pulled a General Sherman on the island, nearly killing their own golden-egg-laying goose.

Courthope makes an ideal hero for a nonfiction book, right up to his hero’s demise, and the story of Dutch brutality against Englishman and native alike should not be lost to history just because now they’re nice people and cheer really loud for their long track speed skaters. Milton sprinkles the story with the history of nutmeg itself (and a little on its poor sibling, mace, the dried aril that covers the nutmeg seed, lacking the potent flavor of the nutmeg proper) and the prior history of the Banda Islands, but the star of the show is Courthope, giving the book some of the narrative greed that I particularly like in my nonfiction reads.

So start with Nathaniel’s Nutmeg and skip the cheese course entirely.

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→ December 2, 2010
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Tangled.

Chat today at 1 pm EST/11 am Arizona time.

—

We took our daughter to the movies for the first time the other day to see a movie she’d been asking about for weeks: Tangled. It was a big deal for us beyond the movie, since it was a family outing, and the first time my wife and I had been in a theater together since before our daughter was born. The day planned around the child turned out to be a bigger hit for the adults, as we thoroughly loved Tangled but our daughter’s feelings were more mixed.

The story is only loosely based on the Rapunzel myth, but is updated in a way that gives the film’s two central characters (Rapunzel and her accidental savior, the thief Flynn Rider) much more to do while also increasing the opportunities for merchandising. Rapunzel is now a princess, stolen from her royal crib shortly after birth because her hair has healing powers that the film’s villain, Mother Gothel, wants to use to continue to keep herself eternally young. So, of course, she keeps Rapunzel in an inaccessible tower in a hidden part of the forest, convincing her that to leave the tower and enter the cruel, dangerous world would be sheer lunacy. (I imagine a psychologist would have a field day here.) Flynn Rider, himself on the lam after stealing the crown Rapunzel’s grief-stricken parents have set aside for her hoped-for return, stumbles upon the tower and eventually sets off with Rapunzel … at which point the real movie starts.

And it’s some movie – not a princess movie by any stretch, but a Disney adventure flick, with thugs, fights, chases, trickery, and, in the best trick of all, some actual plot tension even though you know more or less how the story is going to end. It took about a third of the movie to get to the point where Rapunzel leaves the tower, but after that, the movie flies, with three different parties chasing Flynn and Rapunzel, leaving (thankfully) less time to dwell on the budding romance between the two characters. I feel like Disney gave the Pixar gang minimal directions – “make a movie about Rapunzel, and put her in a purple dress*” – and Pixar did what they do best: They turned it on its head and wrote a fantastic, fun, energetic story.

*So my daughter is completely caught up in the princess stuff, which means my wallet is caught up in the princess stuff as well. We were last at Disneyworld in November of 2009, right as they introduced the Tiana character from The Princess and the Frog. Her dress was green, which, I noticed as we walked through that massive store at Downtown Disney, left only purple as the likely color for the next dress, since we already have pink, blue, turquoise (twice), yellow, and green, not including the fairies. I’m wondering what color is next – orange? Magenta? Some other blue? This stuff matters when you know it’ll be on the Christmas wish list a year from now.

The animation in Tangled is absolutely absurd, the most impressive I’ve seen so far, even exceeding the normally high expectations I take into any Pixar-made film. You would expect that, in a film about Rapunzel, the main character’s hair would be superbly animated, but it’s not just her hair – Flynn Rider’s rakish hairdo and Mother Gothel’s curls* look rich and textured, more real than real, if that makes sense. But there’s a scene where a torrent of water breaks loose and heads towards the camera (I assume for the 3-D version) where I couldn’t get over how un-animated the water looked – clear, glassy, almost like I could see the drops of water making up the flood. And my wife and I both noticed that the Rapunzel has realistic-looking feet, something you almost never see on an animated character (and important since she’s barefoot through the whole movie).

*Figures that they give the film’s main villain curly hair.

The Wikipedia entry on the film explains that the animation style was inspired by a rococo painting called The Swing, although I can’t say I would have noticed the difference if I hadn’t read that beforehand. I know nothing about art, though, which is probably the reason.

Tangled was scary for my four-year-old, who particularly disliked “the bad woman” (Mother Gothel), I think in part because that character separates Rapunzel from her parents and then is increasingly wicked as the film goes on. I was more disturbed by the extent of comic violence, especially that involving blows to the head. Some of the physical comedy is brilliant, such as Rapunzel’s trouble stuffing the unconscious Flynn into a closet, but one of the best running gags in the movie involves whacking people in the head or face with a cast-iron skillet. I use one of those almost every night I cook, and a blow to the dome from one of those won’t just knock you out – it would probably fracture your skull. And in Tangled it happens over … and over … and over, to the point where I couldn’t sustain my suspension of disbelief. It lost its humor for me, until Flynn’s one great line about it near the end of the film. There’s other violence in the film, including a stabbing and an implied death by defenestration, that probably makes this inappropriate for younger viewers. It is an action flick, Disney-style, and while I’m glad they didn’t just make a dull princess movie, I don’t think we’d have taken our daughter to see it if we knew just how much of a grown-up kids’ movie Tangled was.

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→ November 29, 2010
→ By

Rivals for Catan.

Amazon is still running several $1.99 album download deals, including Roots’ How I Got Over, The Walkmen’s Lisbon, and Spoon’s Transference. I bought the first two but have only listened to each part way so far. Reviews to come at some point in the indefinite future.

—

Settlers of Catan may be my #1-ranked boardgame, both for the game itself and its importance in board game history, but it has one glaring flaw: It requires 3 players. Since my primary gaming partner is my wife and my daughter is too young for Settlers (and in bed by game time anyway), we use the 2-player games we own much more often. Klaus Teuber, the designer of Settlers, sought to remedy that several years ago with a two-player card game simply called Catan, but it got mixed reviews for longer game play and some frustrating rules that made it harder to develop any sort of strategy.

Mayfair Games just released the update to that two-player game, now called Rivals for Catan, that streamlines the play, making games shorter and reducing the possibility of massively negative in-game events. The artwork is noticeably improved and the cards are (mostly) easier to follow. What has not improved, however, is the luck/strategy ratio, which means that it remains hard to play this game with any sort of plan or design in mind unless you tweak the rules yourself or re-use the “tournament” rules from the original card game.

The basic structure of the game is the same as it was in the original edition. Each player starts with a set of cards representing his principality: Two settlements connected by a road, with six regions, each representing a specific resource (the five from Settlers, plus gold) and bearing a unique number from one to six. On each turn, the player rolls a single die to determine which resource(s) each player receives. Players can expand their principalities by using resources to build roads or more settlements, or to upgrade a settlement to a city. There is a small deck of event cards that are used when either player rolls the event die and gets a question mark (on just one of the six sides, rather than two as before), and forty-odd expansion cards that include buildings to add to your principality, military units that give you strength or skill points, and action cards for single use that allow you to do things like fix the die roll or choose which regions you’ll get when you buy a new settlement. The expansion cards are in several face-down decks, and each player holds three to five cards in his hand, drawing at random from the stacks (unless he pays two resources to look through a stack for a specific card).

There’s a new “basic” game that uses just those cards and features described above and has a victory condition of seven points. It’s a complete waste of time unless you need to play once to learn the game’s mechanics. It’s over extremely quickly and is almost entirely based on luck, since players can’t pay to sift through a stack when choosing a card. The game comes with three “theme” decks that add several simple rules as well as a few new event cards and twenty-four expansion cards (buildings, units, action cards) to allow for a little more strategy, but you’re still dependent on the cards you draw unless you want to pay two resources every turn to exchange one of your hand cards for one of your choice from any deck.

One thing I’ve learned from playing and researching board games and discussing them with all of you is that each player has his or her own ideal luck/strategy balance, and there are games all along the luck/strategy spectrum to suit you no matter your tastes. The current rules structure of Rivals for Catan has too much luck for me, but with one of the theme decks there is certainly some strategy (garnering resources, pursuing certain points bonuses) and I think that underneath this game somewhere is a better strategy/luck balance.

The rules indicate that an expansion pack is coming in 2011, restoring the “Tournament rules” (where you build your own deck, choosing cards from the original set and one theme set) from the expansion pack to the original Catan card game, which gives the game more of a Dominion-like feel and shifts control back to the players. Those rules are still available on the Catan site and are easily adapted to work with this game, but without them, you’re relying too much on dice rolls and card draws for this to approach the degree of strategy involved in the core Settlers game, let alone that in little-or-no-luck games like Puerto Rico.

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→ November 22, 2010
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Top 21 boardgames.

UPDATE: I’ve set up an aStore link on amazon.com where you can find all of these games plus others I’ve since recommended in one place.

This is the third iteration of my own personal boardgame rankings, expanded from the original ten as our own collection has increased over the past year. It’s not intended to be a critic’s list or an analytical take on the games; it’s about 80% based on how much we enjoy the games, with everything else – packaging and design, simplicity of rules, and in one case, the game’s importance within its niche – making up the rest. We are not hardcore gamers; I don’t mind a complex game, but I prefer games that offer more with less – there is an elegance in simple rules or mechanics that lead to a fun, competitive game. Don’t expect this to line up with the rankings at BoardGameGeek.

The list includes 21 titles rather than 20 because I filled out most of the list, realized I never slotted in Power Grid, and didn’t feel like junking Zooloretto once I’d written it up. I own every game on this list except Diplomacy, and with one exception (Agricola) have played every game on here many times. As always, clicking on the game title takes you to amazon.com; if I have a full review posted on the site, the link to that will follow immediately.

21. Zooloretto: Full review. A fun game, but a bit of a trifle compared to the others further up this list. You’re a zookeeper trying to fill his zoo’s three enclosures (expandable to four) with animals that arrive each turn on trucks available to all players, but each enclosure can only hold one type of animal at a time. There’s a cost to switching animals around, and there’s a penalty for picking up animals you can’t house, with points coming for filling an enclosure or filling all spots but one. I’m a little surprised this won the Spiel des Jahres, as it lacks the elegance of most winners of that award, and the two-player variant rules included in the game don’t work at all. I have played a simplified version of the game with my daughter, who loves the animal tokens and the well-drawn zoo boards. It’s a good starter game in the German-style genre, but not the best.

20. Babel. One of the first games we purchased – on a trip to Vienna in 2003 – its star has dimmed over time as we’ve found better games in the genre. It’s a two-person game where each player is trying to build towers with cards representing five different civilizations, but each civilization has a special skill or power, including the power to knock down an opponent’s tower or make one of his groups of cards “wander off.” Those powerful attacks make the game much longer, and you can go a while without making much progress, which ultimately made the game a little frustrating for us.

19. Catan (card game): We had this before we got the board game, and while it’s a lot more complex than the original Settlers, the basic goal is the same: Build up your principality to reach twelve victory points. But there’s a lot more up and down in the game, with disaster cards to supplement the robber by destroying resources or decommissioning your knight cards. We found it would often take longer to play this with two people than it would to play Settlers with three, especially once we picked up the card game’s expansion set. This game has been superseded by the new Rivals for Catan, a copy of which is en route to me as I write. EDIT: Rivals of Catan review is now up.

18. Metro. Almost comically simple, but highly replayable. Players compete to build the longest subway lines on a grid that represents the city of Paris. There are different types of tiles, some of which include straight tracks, while others include all manner of twists. You can extend your own tracks on your turn, or you can use a tile to screw someone else. The game ends when all tiles are played; the player with the longest total track lengths across all of his lines wins. The ability to play on (and prematurely end) someone else’s line is a major criticism of the game, although you can kind of do the same thing in Carcassonne and nobody complains about that. If it’s an issue for you, just play with a house rule that you must play on your own lines unless such a move is impossible.

17. Wise and Otherwise. I thought I should have one party game on the list, and this would beat out Taboo for me. Wise and Otherwise is one of the family of games where one player holds the “right” answer and every other player tries to make up a fake answer good enough to fool someone else; instead of dictionary definitions, Wise and Otherwise gives you the first half of a proverb and asks you to complete the second half. It plays up when you’re with friends and can start working inside jokes into your fake answers.

16. Acquire. Monopoly for grown-ups. Build hotel chains up from scratch, gain a majority of the shares, merge them, and try to outearn all your opponents. The game hinges heavily on its one random element – the draw of tiles from the pool each turn – but the decisions on buying stock in existing chains and how to sell them after a merger give the player far more control over his fate than he’d have in Monopoly. There’s a two-player variant that works OK, but it’s best with at least three people. The game looks a lot nicer now; I have a copy from the mid-1980s that still has the 1960s artwork and color scheme.

15. Jambo. Full review. A two-player card game where the deck is virtually everything, meaning that there’s a high element of chance based on what cards you draw; if you don’t draw enough of the cards that allow you to sell and purchase wares, it’ll be hard for you to win. Each player is an African merchant dealing in six goods and must try to buy and sell them enough times to go from 20 gold at the game’s start to 60 or more at the end. We played this wrong a few times, then played it the right way and found it a little slow, as the deck includes a lot of cards of dubious value.

14. Diplomacy. Risk for grown-ups, with absolutely zero random chance – it’s all about negotiating. I wrote about the history of Diplomacy (and seven other games) for mental_floss last week, concluding with: “One of a handful of games (with Risk) in both the GAMES Magazine and Origin Awards Halls of Fame, Diplomacy is an excellent choice if you enjoy knife fights with your friends and holding grudges that last well beyond the final move.” I think that sums it up perfectly.

13. San Juan: Full review. The card game version of Puerto Rico, but far, far simpler, and very portable. I like this as a light game that lets you play a half-dozen times in an evening, but all it really shares with Puerto Rico is a theme and the concept of players taking different roles in each turn. It plays well with two players but also works with three or four.

12. Agricola: The most complex game we’ve tried, with the steepest learning curve. Very well made aside from the square animal pegs, which we replaced (at the suggestion of one of you) with actual animal-shaped pieces I bought via amazon. You’re a farmer trying to raise enough food to feed your family, but also trying to grow your family so you have more help on the farm. The core game play isn’t that complex, but huge decks of cards offering bonuses, shortcuts, or special skills make the game much more involved. It was out of print this summer but appears to be back. (Credit to my wife for finding one of the few remaining new copies out there for my birthday, ordering it from a site based in England.)

11. Power Grid: Full review. This might be the Acquire for the German-style set, as the best business- or economics-oriented game I’ve found. Each player tries to build a power grid on the board, bidding on plants at auction, placing stations in cities, and buying resources to fire them. Those resources become scarce and the game’s structure puts limits on expansion in the first two “phases.” It’s not a simple game to learn and a few rules are less than intuitive, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a game that does a better job of turning resource constraints into something fun. Disclaimer: My wife doesn’t like this game because she says the board and cards look “depressing.”

10. Puerto Rico: Full review. It’s grown on me, especially since I got to try it out a few times online via Tropic Euro, although I’ve had friends and readers tell me it can become monotonous after a lot of games. You’re attempting to populate and build your own island, bringing in colonists, raising plantations, developing your town, and shipping goods back to the mother country. Very low luck factor, and just the right amount of screw-your-neighbor (while helping yourself, the ultimate defense).

9. Orient Express: An outstanding game that’s long out of print; I’m lucky enough to still have the copy my father bought for me in the 1980s. It takes those logic puzzles where you try to figure out which of five people held which job and lived on which street and had what for breakfast and turns them into a murder mystery board game with a fixed time limit. When the Orient Express reaches its destination, the game ends, so you need to move fast and follow the clues.

8. Stone Age: Full review. Really a tremendous game, with lots of real-time decision-making but simple mechanics and goals that first-time players always seem to pick up quickly. It’s also very hard to hide your strategy, so newbies can learn through mimicry – thus forcing veteran players to change it up on the fly. Each player is trying to build a small stone-age civilization by expanding his population and gathering resources to construct buildings worth varying amounts of points, but must always ensure that he feeds all his people on each turn.

7. Small World: Full review. I think the D&D-style theme does this game a disservice – that’s all just artwork and titles, but the game itself requires some tough real-time decisions. Each player uses his chosen race to take over as many game spaces as possible, but the board is small and your supply of units runs short quickly, forcing you to consider putting your race into “decline” and choosing a new one. But when you choose a new one is affected by what you stand to lose by doing so, how well-defended your current civilization’s position is, and when your opponents are likely to go into decline.

6. Thurn and Taxis: Full review. I admit to a particularly soft spot for this game, as I love games with very simple rules that require quick thinking with a moderate amount of foresight. (I don’t care for chess, which I know is considered the intellectual’s game, because I look three or four moves ahead and see nothing but chaos.) Thurn und Taxis players try to construct routes across a map of Germany, using them to place mail stations and to try to occupy entire regions, earning points for doing so, and for constructing longer and longer routes. Just don’t do what I did and play it against an operations consultant, lest you get your clock cleaned. At $24 this is one of the best values on the list, along with Carcassonne and Lost Cities.

5. Lost Cities: Full review. The best two-person game we’ve found, from the prolific designer Reiner Knizia, and the most portable game as well, since it can be played with nothing but the game cards. The deck comprises 12 cards in each of five colors, including cards numbered 2 through 10 and three “investment” cards to double, triple, or quadruple the profit or loss the player earns in that color. Players take turns drawing from the deck but may only place cards in increasing order, so if you draw a green 5 after you played the 6, tough luck. Games are short but we can play many times in a sitting without a hint of boredom.

4. Dominion: Full review. The definitive deck-building game, with no actual board. Dominion’s base set – there are four major expansions out there, including the potential standalone Dominion: Intrigue game – includes money cards, action cards, and victory points cards. Each player begins with seven money cards and three victory cards and, shuffling and drawing five cards from his own deck each turn, must add cards to his deck to allow him to have the most victory points when the last six-point victory card is purchased. I don’t think we have a multi-player game with a smaller learning curve, and the fact that the original set alone comes with 25 action cards but each game only includes 10 means it offers unparalleled replayability even before you add an expansion set. I did play this with some hardcore boardgamers – the host owned Caylus, which should say it all to those of you familiar with that behemoth – who found it a little lightweight, but they were probably just bitter that I won. (I kid.) (Somewhat.)

3. Ticket to Ride. Full review. Actually a series of games, all working on the same theme: You receive certain routes across the map on the game board – U.S. or Europe, mostly – and have to collect enough train cards in the correct colors to complete those routes. But other players may have overlapping routes and the tracks can only accommodate so many trains. Like Dominion, it’s very simple to pick up, so while it’s not my favorite game to play, it’s my favorite game to bring or bring out when we’re with people who want to try a new game but either haven’t tried anything in the genre or aren’t up for a late night. I do recommend the 1910 expansion to anyone who gets the base Ticket to Ride game, as it has larger, easier-to-shuffle cards and offers more routes for greater replayability.

2. Carcassonne. Full review. This game keeps growing on me, from the ease of learning to the tremendous replayability (I know I use that word a lot here, but it does matter) to the portability (you can put all the tiles and meeples in a small bag and stuff it in a suitcase) to the great iPod app. You build the board as you go: Each player draws a tile at random and must place it adjacent to at least one tile already laid in a way that lines up any roads or cities on the new tile with the edges of the existing ones. You get points for starting cities, completing cities, extending roads, or by claiming farmlands adjacent to completing cities. It’s great with two players, and it’s great with four players. You can play independently, or you can play a little offense and try to stymie an opponent. The theme makes sense. The tiles are well-done in a vaguely amateurish way – appealing for their lack of polish. And there’s a host of expansions if you want to add a twist or two. We own the Traders and Builders expansion, which I like mostly for the Builder, an extra token that allows you to take an extra turn when you add on to whatever the Builder is working on, meaning you never have to waste a turn when you draw a plain road tile if you sit your Builder on a road.

1. The Settlers of Catan: The grand-daddy of German-style games, not so much in age but in impact. I’m not saying it’s my favorite game, but it is among my favorites for its simple, easy-to-grasp rules and a good balance of luck and strategy that keeps it accessible for novice players or players who just don’t want heavy strategy in their gaming. I am saying, however, that the game’s influence means some other game is going to have to blow me away before I take this out of the #1 spot. We own the Seafarers expansion, which solves one problem – wool is by far the least valuable resource in the base game, but it’s needed to build boats in Seafarers – and creates another: the game becomes much, much longer. But the base game was a revelation when it hit the market and when we first played it, one that continues to reshape the game market a few players at a time. If some play it and move past it to more complex games like Puerto Rico or even more elegant ones like Dominion, then Settlers still deserves credit as the ultimate gateway game, one that can still be played and enjoyed even by people who, like me, had to buy a new bookshelf just to accommodate their growing collection.

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→ November 18, 2010
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Hillside Spot & Barrio Cantina.

Busy day today. I’ll be chatting at 1 pm EST, on the Scott Van Pelt Show on ESPN Radio at 2:05 pm EST, and on Outside the Lines on ESPN shortly after 3 pm.

My latest post at mental_floss covers the histories of eight classic board games, with another post on the history of Settlers of Catan coming later today. And my last two posts over on ESPN.com broke down the Joaquin Benoit signing and the Uggla trade and John Buck signing.

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I’ve mentioned Hillside Spot before, but let me recommend it again: If you live anywhere near the Ahwatukee region of Phoenix, or pass through it on I-10, you need to try this place, because the food is outstanding.

I’ve been for breakfast and lunch and can vouch for both meals. The “El Gallo” torta with eggs, chorizo, and avocado was tremendous, with the eggs cooked to order (they’re not that quick – that would be my only warning, but I will wait for food like this); bright, fresh avocado; just the right amount of mayo; and a fresh, soft, square roll from La Sonorense Tortilla Factory in downtown Phoenix. It’s a steal at $6. Their pancakes have earned some acclaim around here, for good reason – they’re eggy and buttery, like a thick, soft crepe, with one order more than my wife could finish even with some serious help from me. It looks like they rotate their coffees but try to offer something from a local roaster, such as one from Tempe’s Cartel Coffee Labs the day I was there.

I went back for lunch because I’d seen a pulled pork sandwich on their menu, with the pork first braised then finished over mesquite on their rotisserie grill. The pork was perfect, falling apart but with good browning on the outside, with a good background smoke flavor. It comes with a spicy cole slaw and, oddly enough, sliced fresh pear, which was a new combination for me but worked well, giving the sandwich a little bite and providing a small amount of natural sweetness to balance the acidity in the slaw. It comes on the same bread as the torta (telera bread), and the French fries, one of four side options, were hand-cut and just-fried.

Hillside Spot uses a lot of local vendors (including all of their eggs) and has that great funky cafe vibe I love to find in a local restaurant – like the Mission in San Diego or Blue Moon Cafe in Baltimore. Other than the Angel Sweet gelateria, I haven’t found anything as exciting as this place since we moved. It’s located on Warner and 48th, behind the McDonald’s, in the same strip mall where the Sunday farmer’s market is held.

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We found Hillside Spot because it was mentioned in Phoenix magazine as one of the best new restaurants of 2010. We also tried another one, Barrio Cantina, in Scottsdale on Cactus right by the Tatum mall. The food was good, but on the heavy side, not just in fat content (that doesn’t usually bother me) but in the chef’s hand, adding sauces and flavors that end up detracting from the dish. But the core ingredients were all very strong, particularly their meats.

They offer a strong selection of taco plates, all available with corn or flour tortillas or as a torta. I went with the torta – that’s a new dish for me since we moved out here, so I’m indulging – made with machaca short ribs, braised to the point of collapse, with a full, satisfying, beefy flavor. It comes with shredded, slightly wilted cabbage and a crema that was probably unnecessary with the fattiness of the short rib. The dish came with a scoop of a strange, earthy rice and corn mixture that was slightly overcooked but tasted good, a solid neutral note to give me a break from the strong flavors of the machaca.

My wife went with a carnitas enchilada that came in a small cast-iron skillet and was served with the tortillas open, so the sauce and cheese (browned slightly under a salamander) were directly on the meat. She enjoyed it, although the presentation within the skillet was a mess.

We tried one appetizer, the “mini chimis” – small chimichangas where the ratio from dough to meat is way too high. I peeled a few of them open and ate the carnitas and machaca inside, to reduce the doughiness and get away from the tangy crema sticking to the outside like wallpaper paste. Someone there really knows how to slow-cook meat; they just need to work on how they serve it.

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→ November 16, 2010
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Cities of Salt.

Reminder that part one of my history of board games series is up on mentalfloss.com, with part two going up this afternoon. UPDATE: Part two is up, covering go, mancala, and pachisi.

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‘Abd al-Rahman Munif’s novel Cities of Salt has, according to a few critical reviews I’ve read, legitimate claim to the title of the great Arab novel, at least of the last century. The first in a five-book novel sequence (where only the first three have been translated into English), Cities of Salt tells the story of the discovery of oil near a small, isolated wadi in an unnamed Persian Gulf kingdom, and follows the migration of that village’s people as their traditional home is destroyed and their way of life is thrown into disarray by the arrival of Americans, modern technology, cultural gaps, and a whole new kind of local economy.

Munif uses an unconventional structure in Cities by forgoing a clear protagonist or even set of them; the central characters in the book’s first dozen chapters are gone by the final third of the book. Instead, the central characters are settings: The wadi that is destroyed in the first movement, and later the town of Harran, which goes from a backwater to a booming oil town, with a walled-off American district and an Arab shantytown, and in which all of the book’s action takes place after the pipeline is laid from the wadi to the Harran coastline.

That lack of a main character combined with Munif’s habit of using multiple honorifics to refer to the same character (often “Ibn,” meaning “son of,” and “Abu,” meaning “father of,” although the latter may also be used symbolically) left me frequently confused about exactly who was involved in any particular scene. Instead, I eventually settled on reading the book as a series of connected stories about the people affected by the arrival of Big Oil – Munif delivered his satire or presented sympathetic locals through winding anecdotes, such as the folk doctor who becomes a target of the foreign medical doctor, who brings science to his practice but also uses his connections to attempt to eliminate the folk doctor’s competition.

No one comes off well in the book, but Munif’s primary targets seem not to be the Americans, whom he largely depicts as aloof, money-minded bumblers, but the Arab powers-that-be who throw away their own heritage, ignore the needs of their people, and become addicted to the needle of American money. Later in the book, the emir who rules over Harran becomes childlike when presented with American toys like a radio or a telescope, making it that much easier for the Americans to do as they wish in creating a segregated Harran and flouting local Islamic laws and mores.

The strength of Cities of Salt was his sharp satirical edge, as nothing Munif depicted in the Americans or the installed Arab kleptocracy seemed remotely unrealistic. This isn’t parody – satire through ridicule or exaggeration – but satire through exposure: Here’s the sort of thing that happened, and viewed from above the situation, it looks awful. I found those portions more compelling than the often sad depictions of the Arab peasants whose lives were uprooted because, whether we like it or not, economic and scientific progress nearly always leaves some victims – the buggy makers who were run over, figuratively, by the automobile, for example. The issue is not how progress treats those victims, but how those in power use progress to enrich or protect their own interests and create more victims or worsen their plight along the way. I thought Munif’s greater contribution, at least in terms of the human element of his story, was shining some light on the migrant workers who move to work in the oil industry but who are treated in this novel as disposable resources by the oil company. Without cultural, linguistic, or social grounding in their community, treating them as such is a recipe for disaster, and in fact leads to the only real open conflict in the entire book.

Munif was born on the day in 1933 when Saudi Arabia signed the first concession agreement of any Gulf state with an American oil exploration company, a neat coincidence given (or perhaps driver of) his eventual choice of subject matter. He was stripped of his Saudi citizenship for his political views; after receiving a law degree from the Sorbonne and a Ph.D. in oil economics from the University of Belgrade, he worked in Iraq’s oil ministry and became a member of the Ba’ath Party, then quit the job and party when he became disenchanted with the government policies. He chose to channel his frustration with the region’s political state into his novels, focusing on the rise of oil-backed autocracies and the way the United States props them up with money and technology. Whether this is the great Arab novel, I can not say, with almost no experience with the region’s literature. Daniel Burt chose it for his Novel 100 at #71, the only Arabic-language novel on the list, although it wasn’t clear to me whether he was including this novel or the entire pentalogy. It had to be there for its cultural import, as it breaks no new ground in literary technique or storycraft, with thematic similarities to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and the setting-as-star setup with multiple characters sharing center stage in the narrative seems descended from John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy (both also on Burt’s list). Its value to me, however, was its window into a part of the world of which I know little and understood less, and that is enough for me to eventually read the two remaining books of the pentalogy that have been published in English.

Next up: I’m already into Giles Milton’s first novel, Edward Trencom’s Nose: A Novel of History, Dark Intrigue, and Cheese, available new through that link for the bargain price of $1.35. Milton’s bestseller Nathaniel’s Nutmeg is one of my favorite nonfiction books on any subject.

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→ November 15, 2010
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Jambo (board game).

My series of articles for mental_floss on the history of board games begins today, with a look back at games from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. We’ll end up with some contemporary games at the end of the series, but not before going through the histories of some important games from East Asia, India, and Africa, and medieval Europe.

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Note: I revised this article about a week after it was first posted to reflect the fact that we were playing the game wrong at first. The review below reflects the correct rules. I think.

I picked up Jambo in September on the recommendation of dish reader Joe Huber, designer of the game Burger Joint, who declared Jambo his “personal favorite two-player game” in response to my lament (in the Lost Cities post) about great German-style games’ tendency to play best as 3- to 5-player games. Jambo is, indeed, an excellent two-player game, even though there are certain mechanics I don’t love. It’s a higher order of complexity than Lost Cities, but much of what’s added is random chance rather than deeper strategy.

In Jambo, each player is a trader in precolonial east Africa, with a market capable of storing six “wares,” of which there are six types available (silk, jewelry, salt, hides, fruit, and tea, although the drawing for that last one keeps reminding me of the cover of The Chronic). The goal of the game is to finish with the most money; end game is triggered when either player passes 60 coins, after which he completes his turn and the other player gets one more full turn before the game officially ends. Players earn money by buying and selling wares, most often through ware cards that allow for the purchase or sale of a specific combination of wares – usually three, but a few cards allow the purchase of six – for fixed prices. However, the deck of cards is full of “utility” cards that allow for exchanges of cards and wares, for direct purchases of wares, or for attacks against your opponent such as swiping a single ware from his market or discarding one of his active utility cards, making the game more interactive and opening up some other avenues for strategy.

The core mechanic, however, is buying and selling wares. Each three-ware card has three specific wares on it; they may all be identical, there may be two of one kind and one of a third, or it may contain three different wares. The gap between purchase price and sale price shown on the card is always 7 coins for a three-card combination. That is, if you draw two copies of the same three-ware card, you can buy them and immediately sell them for a profit of seven coins. And since on each turn a player receives five “actions” – the first is usually used to draw a card, so in practical terms we’re talking four actions – it seems to me that the ideal turn is one that starts with a purchase and ends with a sale, where in between you might use utility cards to ensure you have what you need to complete the sale. (You can’t use a ware card to sell unless you have those three or six exact wares in your market.)

The non-ware cards are where the game gets interesting, or at least gets interactive. There are two types of cards – utility cards, which are played once and used repeatedly; and people/animal cards, which are played once and discarded. (I misread the rules, and we played people cards as utility cards for a while, which really wreaked havoc with the game.) Each player may have up to three utility cards face-up in front of him – playing a card counts as one action – and may use them once per turn, with each use counting as an action. Most involve the exchange of something for something – cards, gold, and wares, sometimes allowing you to exchange like for like, sometimes allowing you to use one thing to buy another.

People cards are a wildly mixed bag, with the best of them allowing you to increase your profits on a sale or buy missing wares cheaply so you can complete another sale, but many of them are close to useless and just clog up the deck. Animal cards are all for attack purposes; the parrot lets you steal one ware from your opponent, while the crocodile (the most abundant animal card) lets you take one of your opponent’s utility cards, use it once yourself, and then discard it. You can fight off an animal attack with a Guard card, although I don’t think the deck has enough of them and acquiring one is a function of luck rather than skill or planning.

And that’s the only thing keeping me from raving unabashedly about Jambo: There’s a lot of luck in this game, more than I tend to like. You have no outright control over which cards you draw, of course, and only a few utility cards give you any improvement over that. The solution is simply to draw more cards, and there are utility cards that allow you to draw an extra card, swap a ware for a card, buy a card for gold, grab a ware card your opponent just used, or even rifle through the discard pile for a specific card you’d like to have.

But, unlike in a game like Dominion where you build your own deck, acquiring good cards in Jambo requires luck, and I didn’t feel like the deck was flush enough with good utility/people cards to allow me to set a couple of strategies up and then just pursue whichever one the cards offered me. We’ve played ten times, and each of us has had at least one game where the cards just killed us, including one where I spent five turns needing just about any ware card to win the game, never got it, and lost.

Bear in mind that I prefer games with lower luck levels than most people do – if you view a game as just a game, you’ll probably love Jambo even more than we do. I enjoy games for the thinking and strategizing as much as I enjoy them for their social aspect, and Jambo fell a little short in that regard for me. It is still an excellent two-player option that I think we will continue to play often even as the collection grows.

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