→ December 7, 2019
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Knives Out.

Knives Out might as well have been made explicitly for me. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie that fit so many things I like in movies or even literature. It’s a mystery, and a fairly clever one. It’s witty on multiple levels. It’s very fast-paced, with a sort of hyper-reality to the dialogue. It left me wanting more of the same, and never felt overstuffed. It’s an homage to my favorite genre of films and novels, but never descends to parody. It’s not quite perfect, but my god did I enjoy every minute of it.

Rian Johnson wrote and directed the film, and did a similar homage to noir mysteries with his first feature film, Brick, but without the humor of this film, which is very much a British mystery in the style of Agatha Christie’s novels. He’s assembled an incredible cast, with Daniel Craig chewing scenery all over the country manor house as the pompous ‘gentleman detective’ Benoit Blanc – so we’re not even going to be subtle about the Christie allusions – who is Hercule Poirot with an exaggerated southern drawl that another character compares accurately to Foghorn Leghorn. It’s a bit of overkill, because he wrote the film like every Poirot or Miss Marple novel where there’s a bunch of eccentric characters who get very little depth or development, but given how much these actors appear to be enjoying the ride, it’s hard not to enjoy watching them do so.

Blanc, like Poirot in most of his novels, isn’t introduced until some time has already elapsed in the story. Instead we are introduced to Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer, a delight as ever), bestselling mystery writer and, as of the opening scene in the film, recently deceased. A week later, two police officers (LaKeith Stanfield, woefully underused, and Noah Segan) arrive to question all of the family members, with Blanc sitting in the background and only interjecting after the formal questioning is over. The family members are all simply aghast at the implication that the patriarch was murdered – well, all except for his mother – and get worked up when Blanc starts probing. Enter Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s private nurse, a Peruvian woman whose mother is an undocumented immigrant and who can’t lie without throwing up. Blanc uses the latter feature to his advantage, while others try to exploit the former for their own ends. Marta was the last person to see Harlan alive, and knows more about the circumstances of his death than anyone else, so Blanc appoints her his deputy (in a way) and sets about solving the crime.

Knives Out is all story and dialogue, and I’m good with that. I especially love the Poirot stories because I enjoy his character – the pompous, brilliant little Belgian man with the “face fungus” and silly hat and ability to solve crimes by the “psychology” of the suspects – and Blanc offers a lot of that too, similarly enamored of his own abilities, perhaps less perceptive when it comes to the suspects’ psychological motives but more entertaining with his turns of phrase. If you’re looking for complex characters or character growth, though, it’s not here: this is an old-school whodunit that lives and dies – pun intended – by the murder and its solution, buoyed by rapid-fire dialogue that would do His Girl Friday‘s writers proud. It is frequently funny, never riotously so, but consistently amusing, and Johnson did imbue several of the characters with varying degrees of wit, with Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis, who really inhabits her role and could carry a movie in that character) dashing off some of the best lines. So you’ll get to see a stupendous collection of actors – Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Chris Evans, Chris Evans’ sweater, even M. Emmet Walsh – get not quite enough to do, but do a lot with what they get.

The story itself is good, but I think it’s a bit too easy to solve. I suspect I know what Johnson was trying to do, but it doesn’t quite work. I wasn’t sure I knew it until the end, and even then I realized I missed one really big clue, but it’s a bit too clear from the midpoint of the film who the most likely culprit is. Johnson does dial up the resolution to eleven, though, and perhaps the greatest strength of the script is how often little lines or events from earlier in the film pay off at the end. It rewards you for paying attention, and my attention was rapt from the beginning.

Johnson has already said he’d like to do a sequel with Blanc as the lead detective solving another murder, and I’m here for it – but I acknowledge I am at the absolute center of the circle encompassing the target audience for such a film. I love an old-timey murder mystery, and Johnson gave me the best new one I’ve seen or read in a very long time. It has flaws I wouldn’t forgive in a non-genre film, but great genre fiction often adheres to the genre’s intrinsic rules. I wish I could have seen Curtis fire off a few more quips or to know how Evans character became such a spoiled disaster, or gotten more mileage from the gag about the grandson who’s an alt-right troll (and looks like someone hit Mark Gatiss with a Benjamin Button ray), but this isn’t that kind of movie. Your mileage may vary.

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→ December 6, 2019
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Pandemic Rapid Response.

Pandemic Rapid Response is the latest brand extension to the Pandemic cooperative game franchise, which now includes the two Legacy seasons and multiple spinoffs in specific geographies, but all of which adhere more or less to the original game’s mechanics. This one, however, is a completely new game with the Pandemic theme pasted on to it, adding a real-time element and a lot of dice rolling, removing all of the path-finding aspects of the original and creating a more tenuous connection between the game play and the theme itself. It’s available exclusively at Target.

In Rapid Response, two to four players play crew members on a plane that brings emergency supplies to the worst-affected cities in a global outbreak. There are five types of supplies, represented by four cubes each of five colors in separate rooms on the plane, and a track of cities around the outside of the board with a plane token to move around it. In the most basic version of the game, you start with two cities already asking for help, which means they need four or occasionally five supply cubes in a specific combination, and you must gather those supplies from around the ship in a convoluted fashion so you can deliver them from the cargo bay. You start with three ‘time tokens,’ and lose one each time the hourglass runs out, at which point you also unveil another city card that is requesting assistance – three more, in total, in the starter version. The hourglass runs long enough for multiple player turns, but you have to move quickly and make split-second decisions. When you deliver to a city, you remove that card and gain one more time token; if you run out of time tokens at any point, however, you lose the game.

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Each player has six dice that show various symbols on the six sides – the five supply types as well as an airplane symbol. You start your turn by rolling all of your dice, and then you may reroll any or all dice up to two more times at any time during your turn. You can spend any die, regardless of face value, to move to an adjacent room on the plane. You can spend a die with a plane symbol to move the plane one city in either direction. If you’re in a room and have dice with the matching supply symbol, you can place those dice on the room’s track; once you get at least four dice (it varies by room), you can ‘activate’ the room, take the displayed number of cubes, and then roll all of those dice to see how much ‘waste’ you generated, based on how many circled symbols you get on the roll. You then move up the waste track in the recycling room, which goes from 0 to 10; if it exceeds 10, you lose the game as well. You take your cubes and move them to the cargo bay, which holds up to ten cubes until you deliver some.

You can deliver goods by moving to the cargo bay and using one die with a plane symbol to activate it, after which you return those goods to their original supply rooms. You can also deal with the excess waste by going to the recycling room and placing up to five dice on that room’s track, losing them for the rest of the turn but moving the track marker back up to four spaces.

Each player has a unique role, as in the original Pandemic, that gives you some small but useful benefit, such as getting to move the plane 1 or 2 spaces per die, or letting you roll one fewer die for waste when you activate a room. One role lets you reroll up to two more times, for a total of five, which I think is the most useful of all, although I am not quite sure of that after just a few plays.

You can increase the game’s difficulty by using more city cards both at the start and in the mini-deck you’ll use during the game each time the hourglass is emptied; or by using the Crisis cards, which just throw more obstacles in your path, like the ones that sit atop already-played city cards and require you to deliver one specific cube to satisfy the crisis card first before you can make a second delivery to complete the city card. I don’t think they’re necessary, but they do add another wrinkle to the game.

The challenge is already pretty difficult, and I think you should be prepared to bark a lot of orders or “suggestions” at each other while you play because your time is so limited. You start the time, the first player rolls, does a few things, rolls the remaining dice, tries to do something else, maybe rolls a third time, stops, and the second player has to jump in immediately to start their turn. It’s a frenetic experience, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s a big switch from Pandemic, which is also very tense but draws it from the game itself rather than a timer. Pandemic Rapid Response plays two to four players but is definitely better with more; you need the advantage of more pawns moving around the ship to be more efficient with your deliveries. It’s also the shortest Pandemic game by playing time; the box promises 20 minutes and I think that’s accurate once you get the rhythm down, although before that, the games might be shorter because you lose so quickly.

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→ December 5, 2019
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Early Riser.

Jasper Fforde was one of my favorite authors in the first decade of the 2000s, from his Thursday Next series (starting with The Eyre Affair) to the two Nursery Crimes stories to his Shades of Grey, a brilliant, dystopian novel that ended on a still unresolved cliffhanger. I even got my daughter hooked on his young adult trilogy that began with The Last Dragonslayer, also still hanging as he decided to make it a tetralogy. All of his output screeched to a six-year halt, however, due to what he termed a “creative hiatus,” that ended with the long-awaited release in early 2019 of a new, standalone, self-contained novel, Early Riser.

Fforde started talking about this novel in the early 2010s, although I think it has undergone many changes since that point. It’s also a dystopian story, unrelated to Shades, this one in an alternate universe where the planet is exceptionally cold and humans must hibernate during winters. Set in Wales, where Fforde lives, the book follows Charlie Worthing as he’s brought into the equivalent of the night police in this world and uncovers a plot around “nightwalkers,” people whose cognitive functions have been severely impaired by interruptions to their winter sleep cycles. Such people, who kind of resemble docile zombies, take on menial labor tasks for the conglomerate HiberTech, which also produces the drug (Morphenox) that allows people to hibernate in dreamless sleep that doesn’t require the kind of calorie-loading other species must undertake before several months of slumber.

Fforde’s genius in all of his books prior to Early Riser was his humor, which played out in multiple ways, from slapstick to wordplay to more ornate situational gags. It’s almost completely absent in Early Riser, and there are a few points where it seems like he’s trying to be funny and failing – none more obviously so in his character names, which has turned from an amusing sideline from earlier books (e.g., just about all characters in the Thursday Next series have absurd names, from the title character to Braxton Hicks to Brikk Schitt-Hawse) into a tired bit here. Just one character has a clever name in this book, and I can’t mention it here because of the spoiler involved, but it’s not even a bad pun – just a smart, slightly esoteric reference that made me think, “yeah, actually, that is a pretty good name.”

The rest of the story, however, just isn’t funny in any way. So many reviews cite how hilarious the book is, but it’s not – the story itself feels serious, and most of the plot itself tends towards the serious side. I can see places where Fforde tried to add some levity, such as the occasional, bold-and-italic “Whump” lines that indicate somebody got hit by surprise, but his light touch with dialogue and story are absent here. It makes sense on some level that Fforde is trying to tell a more serious tale here, with both an unsubtle climate-change allegory and a more directly anti-corporate take than the parodic Goliath of the Thursday Next series, but it’s distracting to read Fforde’s voice as if its affect has gone flat.

As for the story itself … it’s fine, nothing more. I never felt all that invested in Charlie’s story, or the person he ultimately tries to save, in part because I knew the former was going to work out (and had a rough idea of how) and because the latter character isn’t well developed enough before she ends up in jeopardy. It seems like Fforde might have wanted to go to a darker, creepier place than in his other books, but pulled up a little short rather than committing fully to creating something so contrary to his prior work. The dark of the novel – there are multiple scenes set outside in blizzard conditions, so Charlie can’t see what’s happening – doesn’t quite lend itself to the sense of foreboding that Fforde seemed to want. The result undermines a bit of the allegory within the book as well: I could understand the goal of the climate-change metaphor, but it felt distant from the plot itself.

The good news, I suppose, is that the creative hiatus is over, and Fforde’s next book, The Constant Rabbit, is due out in the UK in July of 2020, to be followed by the fourth and final Dragonslayer book within twelve months. He still owes us the Shades of Grey sequel and I suppose one more (final?) Thursday Next novel, but at least now he’s back to writing regularly.

Next up: I’m almost through Manjit Kumar’s Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality as well as Alan Alda’s If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?

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→ December 4, 2019
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Music update, November 2019.

I’ve kept this playlist and post a bit short since I’m about a week-plus from doing my year-end top 100, after which I’ll do my top 100 songs of the entire decade, on top of all of the other stuff I’m planning to do between now and the holidays. Stay tuned. As always, if you can’t see the widget below you can access the playlist here.

FKA twigs – sad day. FKA twigs’ second album, MAGDALENA, is definitely more mature and polished, and a better showcase for her incredible voice. While there are some ups and downs there are multiple memorable tracks here, including this, “cellophane,” and “mirrored heart.”

Jake Bugg – Kiss Like the Sun. I loved Bugg’s first album and the lead single from his second record, “What Doesn’t Kill You,” but he kind of lost his sense of melody after that; this is his best track since then.

White Reaper – Raw. White Reaper’s brand of punk-pop is nothing novel, but it is really right in my wheelhouse.

The Mysterines – Who’s Ur Girl. I don’t really do breakout columns for music, especially since it’s often unclear when any specific artist is going to release a full-length album, but if I did such a thing for 2020 I’d have this Liverpool trio on it. Their output to date has such a promising combination of raw energy, seething vocals, and dark melodies under the hard-rock surface that I feel like they should be everywhere a year from now.

Rina Sawayama – STFU! The song itself is good, although there are indeed a lot of F-bombs within it, but it’s the cringey-funny video that takes the song to the next level.

BONES UK – Pretty Waste. I don’t pay much attention to the Grammy nominations – they’re for someone else’s taste in music, just not mine – but I did notice that one of the five nominees for Best Rock Performance was this song, by an artist I’d never heard of before. BONES UK comprise two women and a drummer (known simply as “Heavy”) who produce harsh noise-rock with dance elements and lyrics about feminism and toxic masculinity. Speaking of the Grammys, Candlemass and Tony Iommi are going to win the Metal award (for “Astorolus”) because Iommi’s the same age as the voters, right?

Grimes – So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth. I want to reserve judgment on some of the Grimes tracks until the entire album is out, since she’s pitching as a concept record, but on their own they’ve been pretty uneven and generally lacked the accessibility of Art Angels, with a lot of the little-girl voice she used on Visions.

Wye Oak – Fortune. I assume this is the lead single from a forthcoming album from the indie-rock duo, whose 2018 album The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs had some incredible high points and was a promising return to form after the previous record Tween.

James BKS, Q-Tip, Idris Elba, & Little Simz – New Breed. They had me at Q-Tip, and kept me at Idris Elba, but this second track from James BKS, signed to Elba’s new label 7Wallace, is a solid enough song even if you don’t grant bonus points for the name value of the guest stars … and it led me back to James BKS’s 2018 single “Kwele,” which is even better.

Beck – See Through. I prefer Beck’s more innovative, layered, uptempo stuff, including his last album Colors, to the more subdued and restrained style he shows on his newest record, Hyperspace. This and “Stratosphere” are probably my favorite tracks from the new album.

Inhaler – My Honest Face. Inhaler has a bit of a leg up as they start their careers, since their frontman is Elijah Hewson, whose father you may know as Bono. This track seems like it could have appeared on War or October, but they’ve earned some plaudits from Noel Gallagher and opened for his High Flying Birds this fall.

Greg Dulli – Pantomima. Dulli, the lead singer of the Afghan Whigs, is about to release a solo album, the first original material to appear under his own name since 2005’s Amber Headlights (a Twilight Singers project he abandoned and then finished on his own). I enjoyed the Whigs’ 2017 comeback album In Spades and find this driving track a promising look at Dulli’s new album.

…And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead – Don’t Look Down. This almost seems a bit mellow for the post-hardcore pioneers, who will release their tenth album, their first in six years, in January.

Alcest – Le Miroir. Yeah, this is my favorite metal album of the year, and I don’t think it’s close. This is atmospheric, ambitious metal that I could listen to for hours.

Kvelertak – Bråtebrann. I’d never heard of this Norwegian band before finding them on a Spotify playlist, but this feels like vintage Entombed with vocals that are just yelled rather than growled – death’n’roll for the masses. Well, except for the lyrics, which are all in Norwegian, but that doesn’t bother me.

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→ December 3, 2019
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Santorini app.

As a very chess-like game with an obvious mathematical underpinning, Santorini, which I reviewed in 2017, was an obvious candidate for a port to digital platforms. Roxley Games did so earlier this year and the adaptation is very successful, so much so, however, that it reminded me of why I stopped playing the tabletop version and dropped it from my top 100.

Santorini is played on a 5×5 grid, and each player gets two workers to move around the board and build towers of up to three levels. On a typical turn, you pick one of your workers, move it to any adjacent space (orthogonally or diagonally), and then build on a space adjacent to the new one. Workers can move up one level at a time, or down any number of levels. You win the game if you get either of your workers to the third level of a tower. You don’t own the towers you build, so you can climb or build further on a tower your opponent started. You can also put a dome on top of the third level of a tower, which makes it impossible for any worker to move there for the rest of the game. In my limited experience, you want to set up a trap of sorts where you have a worker on a two-level tower who is standing between two three-level towers, or who is next to a three-level tower to which your opponent can’t get a worker adjacent to put a dome on it.

That’s the base game, and I think it works quite well in the vein of chess-like two-player games, with zero luck, a fair amount of thinking ahead and envisioning what your opponent will do and how the board will change. However, game and the app both come with a set of “gods” that give players unique powers, creating a huge number of possible combinations to give the game plenty of replay value. The app seems to come with 34 gods up front, which would mean you have 561 combinations in the base game, with 25 more available through in-app purchases of 5 gods apiece for $1 or $2, or all 25 in a pack for $8, giving you 1711 combinations. (Combinations and permutations always gave me fits in school.)

This is about where Santorini loses me: these gods are just not well-balanced, and some feel too close to unbeatable. The fact that the game is so mathematical means the AI players always seem to make the optimal moves, and I’ve had numerous experiences where I quit a game against the AI because I could see that I was 3-5 moves from a guaranteed loss with no way out. And there are god combinations that skew heavily towards one or the other. Pan is the most annoying one I’ve encountered, as he’s one of the gods with a second win condition – in Pan’s case, the player wins if one of its workers can move down two levels, which means you have to prevent their workers from ever getting to the second or third level of any tower, ever.

The app implementation is really strong, though – the variety of gods and the skill levels even of the easier AIs are indicative of the quality of the app itself. The fact that it reminded me that I don’t like the game is probably a sign that the developers did their job. The graphics are bright and mostly clear, while the animations work well and all user moves are intuitive. The board itself relies on the three-dimensional perspective; in the app, you can spin the board around and view it from the top, but I still often find it hard to discern whether there’s one level or two on buildings that I can’t see from the front, and it’s definitely too easy to click the wrong space unless you move from the isometric view to the bird’s-eye one. You can undo a move if you click the undo button within about two seconds, before the AI makes a move, but of course that may be before you realize you erred.

The app comes with local and online options as well as a campaign mode called Odyssey, which is useful for letting you experiment with several of the gods, although the options for working through it are rather limited and that’s where I ran into some of the god matchups I thought were unbalanced. Given how many combinations there are in the game, though, it’s probably a better way to get introduced to some of them than going with trial and error in the local mode.

I’d compare this to Race for the Galaxy, another game I don’t love but that was implemented incredibly well in its app, although I’d take that one over Santorini because I think the game lends itself to more open-ended strategies. I’d recommend this if you like the original Santorini, or enjoy games like chess or Tak or Go that involve very little luck and reward long-term thinking. It’s $4.99 for iOS or Android.

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→ December 2, 2019
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Gift guide for cooks, 2019 edition.

As usual, this is a repost of the previous year’s list, with new items I’ve added clearly marked, and some minor edits to the rest. I’ve added a new paragraph at the time rattling off a few things I’ve gotten in the last year, or that I had already but never thought to include in this post. Enjoy and feel free to ask questions in the comments.

I’ve seen a few “Christmas gift guides for the cooks in your life!” over the last couple of years, but most of them are like this 2014 gem from Grub Street, with recommendations for things that no one could possibly need – a “rosemary stripper” (I have two of those; I call them “hands”); a “banana slicer” (use your paring knife, genius); a $140 toaster (makes toast); and a $1600 set of Thomas Keller-branded pans, which, unless he forged them personally out of pure adamantium, are a colossal fucking waste of money. These are not gifts to by the cook in your life; these are gifts to buy the person in your life who pretends to cook but really just likes playing with toys. Toys don’t make you a better chef; they just make you a less socially responsible one.

I do have a few pricier toys in my kitchen, but aside from one, they’re all highly functional, at the middle to low end of the price range for their jobs, and built to last a long time. I’ve had my chef’s knife for over a decade, my food processor for 17 years (my next upgrade – looking at this Cuisinart model), my Dutch oven for about eight years, and just replaced my 18-year-old stand mixer when I moved in 2013. You are free to call me cheap, but I think I’m just prudent. I’ll spend money in the kitchen if it gets me something I need. I will not spend money to get a famous name, a fancy design, or a paperweight to live at the back of a gadget drawer until I move again. If I can make do with something I already have in the house – binder clips, a (clean) putty knife, a (clean) paintbrush – I’ll gladly do that instead.

Therefore, what I recommend here – for your cheffy friends or for yourself – is largely what I own and use. If what I own isn’t available, or isn’t good value for the price, I recommend something else. I am also willing to answer any and all questions about these or other suggestions; if I include it here, that’s an endorsement that it’ll be money well spent. You can see my list of my recommended cookbooks here.

New stuff in 2019: I finally caved and bought myself a larger stand mixer for bread doughs this year – the 5-quart version I had previously would “walk” across the counter while kneading a full patch of pizza dough, and I would worry about the motor overheating. I bought a renewed model from amazon although the new version of the 6-quart, 600-watt mixer is $329 now unless you get a custom color. It’s more powerful and also easier to use since the motor head doesn’t tilt back – you turn a crank to move the bowl up and down instead. The one downside of the larger model is that you can’t use it for very small jobs, like whipping two egg whites to a foam for a meringue, because the attachment doesn’t quite reach. If you have the quantity, it’s still great for cookie dough, brownie batter, quick breads, whipped cream, and Italian meringues (for macarons). The pasta-maker attachment is overpriced, but it does the job, and the grinder attachment has been good for me in a handful of uses, especially for turning stale bread into bread crumbs.

I’ve had an iSi whipper for years now but my last one broke, and I bought a new 1-pint model last winter; it’s overpriced at $82 right now, but if it goes on sale or you find a better price elsewhere, I’d say it’s worth about $50 for the time and mess it saves when making whipped cream for a party. You can use it to aerate other things but I’ve only used it for cream.

The basics

The most important tool for any cook is a good chef’s knife, and I love my Henckels 8″ chef’s knife, although I have a discontinued model with a different handle. It’s a workhorse, has only needed professional sharpening once, and is a comfortable grip and weight for my rather small hands. Henckels seems to have cut its list prices, so that knife lists at $52 and is on sale now for $42, so while in past years I’ve steered readers towards the $43 Victorinox 8″ chef’s knife, which America’s Test Kitchen has long recommended, there’s no good reason to skip the Henckels when it’s a buck cheaper.

The basic knives any home cook must have are a chef’s knife, a paring knife, and a bread (serrated) knife. The bread knife is good for more than just slicing bread – serrated blades are safer for slicing tomatoes, and they’re excellent for chopping chocolate and other hard foods. I have another Henckels four-star model, also eight inches, but the same blade is available with a different handle for just $13. You might look at a 10” blade if you get a lot of large, artisanal loaves. Any strong paring knife will do, such as this Victornix 3.5″ paring knife at just over $7. With a modicum of knife skills, you can tweak and hull strawberries with one of these without any risk to your fingers or waste of fruit. It’s also good for cutting citrus supremes, slicing apples and pears, pitting olives and cherries, and other fine-motor-skills work.

I do have two other knives I use frequently, but they’re not essential for most cooks. One is the santoku, a very sharp knife with a thin edge but wide body that’s ideal for slicing vegetables and hard fruits; I recommend a 7” blade, which you can get in this two-santoku Henckels set for $22 and just … I don’t know, regift the 5” version or something, because I can’t see any use for it. The boning knife I own, from Henckels, appears to be discontinued, but there’s another Henckels 5.5″ boning knife for $26 that looks like it has the same blade. A boning knife is ideal for breaking down a whole chicken – it’s substantially cheaper to buy a whole chicken (sometimes called a broiler-fryer, usually 3-5 pounds total weight) and cut it into parts, and you get the bones to make stock – or for deboning other cuts of meat like short ribs. Some folks recommend a flexible blade instead, but I have never used that kind so I can’t give an opinion.

I finally caved and bought a home knife sharpener in 2015, buying this Chef’s Choice Diamond Hone 3 Stage Sharpener, a manual sharpener that turned out to be both easy to use and very effective; I sharpened every knife I own and even a few pairs of scissors, including the kitchen shears some of you’ve seen me using to spatchcock my Thanksgiving turkeys.

My pots and pans aren’t a single set any more; I have some remnants from an All-Clad anodized aluminum set I got with rewards points in 2001, but have swapped out certain pieces to get better nonstick (coated) skillets. What you really should get for your loved one (you may include yourself in that category) is a a 12″ Lodge cast-iron skillet, an absolute workhorse that can handle about 90% of what I need from a skillet or a saute pan. I still use a nonstick skillet for egg dishes, and a saucier (sadly one that’s no longer made) for sauces or custards, but the Lodge skillet is past a decade old and just keeps getting better. The work of seasoning them is nowhere near as arduous as you’ve heard.

I got a Lodge 10″ carbon steel skillet for Christmas in 2015, and I love it. It’s not as nonstick as the cast-iron one, which I’ve had for years and thus has built up more of a coating, but for getting a pan rocket-hot quickly and working fast on something small, it’s great. I’ve found that the more I use it, the more resistant the surface becomes to sticking – even eggs – and it is the ideal skillet for making the dramatic, puffy pancake known as a Dutch baby.

If you want to splurge on something, get an enameled cast-iron Dutch oven, great for soups, stews, braises, deep-frying, jam-making, and caramelizing huge batches of onions. Cast-iron doesn’t distribute heat well, but it holds heat for a long time. These pots are heavy, but I use mine for every saucepan duty that doesn’t involve boiling water or cooking grains on their own. They go stove to oven (as do the skillets) and can take the hours of low heating required for a proper braise. I own a Le Creuset that I got on sale at an outlet store because the color was discontinued; if you’re not quite that fortunate, try the 7.5 quart Lodge model for $80.

I upgraded my stockpot last year with this $36 Excelsteel 16 Quart Stainless Steel Stockpot. I make stock constantly throughout the year; I buy whole chickens, break them down myself, and freeze the carcasses and necks for future stocks. I also made a turkey stock after Thanksgiving with the backbone, neck, and the picked-clean roasted carcass, and the result was so full of gelatin that it was solid at room temperature. (It made an unbelievably rich turkey and soba noodle soup.) I needed a good stockpot since my previous one’s pseudo-nonstick finish had started to fade; this pot is also taller and heavier so it holds the heat in more effectively and I can do a double batch with two chicken carcasses and plenty of aromatics. I usually have to get at the interior bottom with a little Bon Ami, though. It’s also been my go-to pot for sous-vide cooking, since it’s deep enough to hold my circulator.

I don’t own a proper mandolin slicer, but I do pretty well with a handheld mandolin for under $20 that works great for things like root-vegetable chips or thinly slicing onions. I use my digital instant-read thermometer almost every night, and I’ve run through at least three of them over the last ten years. Amazon tells me that I bought my Microplane classic grater in November of 2003, and I’ve had their coarse grater for almost that long. The former is great for zesting citrus fruits or grating nutmeg; the latter is ideal for creating a snowfall of hard cheese over a pasta dish. I now own four silicone baking mats, two of which are amazon brand, now listed at two for $14 but which I got cheaper on Prime Day a few years ago – but I find I’m using them less and parchment paper more, especially for cookies, where the silicone seems to retard browning.

I own two scales – a chef I’m friends with on Twitter made fun of me for this – one, this AWS Digital Pocket Scale for weights up to about 2 kg, which is ideal for precise measurements like grams of coffee (more on that in a moment), and a larger scale that’s long discontinued. I picked up this $13 Ozeri scale for weighing larger quantities, measuring up to 12 kg; I rarely need to measure more than about two pounds of anything, maybe a little more for some large-batch baking but that’s about it. You need at least one good scale if you’re serious about baking, though; the best bread and pastry recipes all use grams, not cups or liters. I finally killed my digital candy/frying thermometer this year, replacing it with an old-fashioned, $7.50 analog frying thermometer. I use it for jam, macarons, and my various deep-frying experiments (see the sous-vide discussion below). You absolutely must have one of these to make caramel, any kind of jam or preserves, or true buttercream frosting.

I haven’t included this on past lists, but I do use my OXO potato ricer for mashed potatoes – it’s much better than a so-called “masher,” which is otherwise useful for guacamole or for crushing fruits while making jam but makes lumpy mashed potatoes.

Other things I always appreciate getting or often end up buying for myself: Wooden spatulas (not spoons), silicone spatulas, good (not decorative) metal measuring spoons, Pyrex or similar measuring cups for liquids (never measure liquids in a plastic cup designed for measuring solids).

I don’t have this exact brand/model, but I love having a few silicone ingredient cups in the kitchen. I use one for measuring and pouring out coffee grounds, and I often have another one next to the stove with salt or freshly ground pepper or toasted sesame seeds to add to something right before serving.

About two years ago, I picked up this $18 bamboo cutting board and have used pretty much nothing else since then. It’s safe for any knife, easy to clean, and just requires occasional oiling (use mineral oil) to keep it smooth. Wood is better than plastic for several reasons, one of which is that bacteria like the grooves that knives put into plastic boards … I’ve actually owned a Rabbit corkscrew for years, but never thought to put it on this list. It’s the easiest way to open a bottle of wine short of sabrage, using leverage rather than requiring you to twist while applying downward force. … I own this OXO stainless steel bench scraper/pastry cutter and use it all the time, both for cutting doughs and for cleaning countertops of anything fine or that might have stuck to the surface – such as flour left on the counter after you kneaded dough or shaped cookies. … I use this amazon basics electric kettle several times a day, boiling water for tea, coffee, and often for cooking… And finally, I received one heck of a gift for my birthday in 2018 from a longtime friend: A santoku by Yu Kurosaki, made in Echizen, Japan. It is by far the sharpest thing I’ve ever owned, which means I have to cut more carefully than before, but can also make smaller cuts (mincing, julienning) and can use less force when cutting. I’ve seen his knives on specialty sites for varying prices.

The expensive stuff

* In 2017, I finally caved and upgraded my food processor to this 14-cup Cuisinart model, although mine is black and has a slightly different model number (which I can’t find on amazon). You can get a 7-cup model for $100, and it will probably be fine for most home cooks. I have a few recipes I make regularly that require the larger capacity. But you kind of need a food processor for things like pesto, hummus, mayonnaise, pie or biscuit doughs (if you don’t want to or can’t do them by hand), and my favorite pumpkin pie recipe. The blade on this is extremely thin and sharp, so wash it very carefully; the manual recommends putting it on the top rack of the dishwasher so you don’t risk your fingers.

* I’ve gone full geek, getting an Anova sous-vide immersion circulator (pot not included) and using it frequently for cooking chicken legs, chicken breasts, steak, and pork. Serious Eats has many recipes for it, and I’ve used their chicken thighs recipe many times, often cooking entire chicken legs that way. (I’ve discovered that, if you can handle some spattering, you can take the drumsticks, pat them dry, then bread and deep-fry them for some of the juiciest fried chicken you’ll ever taste.) I’ve cooked skirt steak, which can be tough even when cooked medium-rare, sous-vide and it melted in our mouths. Sous-vide cooking takes time, and some up-front investment – I caved and bought a FoodSaver vacuum-sealer, although you can do it with zip-top bags too – but once you use it you’ll find it indispensable.

* I have this Vitamix 1782 TurboBlend “food preparing machine” (it’s a blender, stupid), and it’s amazing. I can make smooth vegetable soups with it, no cream required; don’t toss those broccoli stalks, just peel, quarter, and roast them, then blend them with some vegetable stock and season to taste, maybe with some basil oil and toasted pumpkin seeds on top. I used it at Thanksgiving 2015 to make the carrot soup in Hugh Acheson’s The Broad Fork. The blender is down to $328 (from four bills), but that’s too much if you’re just making milkshakes and smoothies (and there is nothing wrong with just making milkshakes and smoothies). You’ll probably be fine with just a basic blender and the food processor.

* Coffee is my big kitchen weakness, at least when it comes to spending money; I’m fortunate to have a few friends in the industry (whom I met through social media) who work for direct-trade roasters and have tipped me off to good sources of coffee and helped me pay for the gear I own, which is wonderful but expensive. The Baratza Virtuoso burr grinder is the least expensive grinder of its kind and caliber; when my first one had an issue with the motor, I sent a quick video of it jamming to Baratza and had a new machine within two weeks. I do make pour-over coffee at home using this Hario V60 ceramic dripper, but my preference is espresso, for which I use a Rancilio Silvia machine that is a wonder. The boiler is huge, so it bounces back quickly between shots and you can heat up the steam wand before your shots go cold. (You can probably beat that price by $30-40 if you shop around.) If you get your ratios right – for me it’s 17.5 to 19 grams per double shot, depending on the bean and roast – you’ll get great crema, 30-32 grams of output in 25-30 seconds, with almost no bad pulls. I use it every morning and I miss it when I travel. I weigh the beans, grounds, and output on the AWS digital scale I mentioned above, which came recommended by a barista at Lord Windsor Roasters in Long Beach, California.

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→ November 30, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 11/30/19.

I had one ESPN+ post this week, covering the Luis Urias/Trent Grisham trade with a note on the Kyle Gibson signing. No Klawchat due to the holiday, but I did do my annual Periscope live chat where I spatchcocked the turkey.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, comes out on April 21st, and you can pre-order it now through that link or anywhere fine books are sold. Also, I’m trying to be more diligent about my free email newsletter now that we’re in the offseason.

I’ll be at PAX Unplugged here in Philadelphia next weekend, and if you’ll be there and are up for a game, just drop me a line. I have some publisher meetings, but my goal is to check out as many games in the First Look section as I can, and I may bring a game or two from my review queue as well.

And now, the links…

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→ November 29, 2019
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Cookbook recommendations, 2019.

I’ve streamlined this post a bit this year, as I’m using certain new books more and have set some older ones aside, and also I’d rather focus on the books I think you’re most likely to enjoy.

New for 2019

The new cookbook I’ve used the most this year is Yotam Ottolenghi’s Simple, which mostly lives up to its name. The majority of the recipes I’ve tried from the book can be executed start to finish in well under an hour, often closer to 30 minutes, as long as you ignore the utterly ridiculous quantities of chopped fresh herbs it calls for. The gigli pasta with chickpeas and spinach is a huge winner that I make at least once every two weeks. The mustard-marinated kale salad is a great platform for lots of dishes and as a side salad on its own even without the grilled asparagus it includes. The zucchini-feta fritters are excellent. The bulk of the recipes are vegetable-forward, like his other books, but not strictly vegetarian. It’s such a great go-to for weeknight dinners and many of them will provide you with leftovers if you’re cooking for fewer than four people.

I got an Ooni outdoor pizza oven last offseason and then got Marc Vetri’s Mastering Pizza to help me make better use of it; Vetri’s Neapolitan dough recipe is easily the best I’ve found, and it works every time. There are actually two versions: one that you ferment slowly over about 48 hours, and another you can start when you get up in the morning and use that night for dinner. His focaccia recipe is excellent as well, and I use his very basic tomato sauce for margherita pizzas. There are lots of other pizza dough styles in here, like the roman pizza al taglio, but I love the Neapolitan version so much I haven’t tried any of the alternatives.

I’ve just started to dive into two newish cookbooks, Yasmin Khan’s Zaitoun: Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen and Nik Sharma’s Season: Big Flavors, Beautiful Food. I’ve made a couple of recipes from each with success, including the za’atar crusted salmon from Zaitoun and the spicy sautéed Brussels sprouts from Season.

I introduced this book in last year’s post, but I can give a much stronger recommendation now to Brave Tart, from Stella Parks. Brave Tart‘s real emphasis is homemade recreations of popular American dessert items, especially branded ones – Parks’ versions of Oreos, Thin Mints and Trefoils from the Girl Scouts, Little Debbie Oatmeal Pies, and so on. Parks also writes for Serious Eats, and their ethos of testing the hell out of every recipe, using weight rather than volume, and offering concise explanations for anything that deviates from the norm carries over into the book. Her basic chocolate chip cookie recipe is the best I’ve ever made. Her shortbread cookies are excellent. I didn’t love the Oreos, but the filling recipe is excellent.

Essentials

There are two cookbooks that I insist any home cook have. One is the venerable Joy of Cooking, revised and altered through many editions (I own the 1997, now out of print), but still the go-to book for almost any common dish you’re likely to want to make. The recipes take a very easy-to-follow format, and the book assumes little to no experience or advanced technique. I still use it all the time, including their basic bread stuffing (dressing) recipe every Thanksgiving, altered just with the addition of a diced red bell pepper.

The other indisputable must-have cookbook is, of course, Ruhlman’s Twenty, by the best food writer going today, Michael Ruhlman. The book comprises twenty chapters, each on a technique or core ingredient, with a hundred recipes, lots of essays to explain key concepts or methods, and photographs to help you understand what you’re cooking. It’s my most-used cookbook, the first cookbook gift I give to anyone looking to start a collection, and an absolute pleasure to read and re-read. Favorite recipes include the seared pork tenderloin with butter and more butter; the cured salmon; the homemade mayonnaise (forget the stuff in the jar, it’s a pale imitation); the pulled pork; all three duck recipes; the scrambled eggs with goat cheese (using a modified double-boiler method, so you get something more like custard than rubber); and the homemade bacon. Many of these recipes appear again in his more recent book, Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World’s Most Versatile Ingredient, along with more egg basics and a lot of great dessert recipes; and Twenty itself builds on Ruhlman’s Ratio, which shows you master formulas for things like doughs and sauces so you can understand the fundamentals of each recipe and extend as you see fit.

I’ve long recommended Baking Illustrated as the perfect one-book kitchen reference for all things baked – cookies, cakes, pies, breads, and more. It’s full of standards, tested to ensure that they will work the first time. You’ll need a scale to get maximum use from the book. I use their pie crust recipe, their peach pie recipe, their snickerdoodles recipe (kids love it, but moms seem to love it even more…), and I use their pumpkin pie recipe every Thanksgiving. The prose can be a little cloying, but I skip most of that and go right to the recipes because I know they’ll succeed the first time. That link will get you the original book from the secondary market; it has been rewritten from scratch and titled The Cook’s Illustrated Baking Book, but I can’t vouch for it as I haven’t seen the new text.

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s mammoth The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, named for Kenji’s acclaimed and indispensable column over at Serious Eats, is a must for any advanced or aspiring home cook. Unlike many of the books here, The Food Lab is a better resource for its text than its recipes – I’ve made a bunch of dishes from the book, with a few that just didn’t work out (e.g., the pork shoulder ragout), but every page seems to have something to teach you. His marinated kale salad recipe changed my view on how to do those at home. The one caution I’ll offer is that it doesn’t include any sous-vide recipes, which is something Kenji does a lot on Serious Eats’ site, although he does have a section on replicating the sous-vide technique using cheaper materials like a portable cooler.

If I know someone already has Ruhlman’s Twenty, my next gift choice for them is Nigel Slater’s Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch, a book about vegetables but not strictly vegetarian. (There’s a lot of bacon here.) Each vegetable gets its own section, with explanations on how to grow it, how to choose it at the market, a half-dozen or more basic ways to cook it, and then a bunch of specific recipes, some of which are just a paragraph and some of which are a full page with glorious pictures accompanying them. The stuffed peppers with ground pork is a near-weekly occurrence in this house, and the warm pumpkin scone is the only good reason to buy and cook an actual pumpkin. I own but have barely cooked from his sequel on fruit, Ripe: A Cook in the Orchard, because it’s more focused on desserts than savory applications.

Another essential if you want to cook more vegetables is Hugh Acheson’s 2015 book The Broad Fork, which has become the first book I consult when I have a vegetable and am not sure what I want to do with it. Acheson conceived the book in response to a neighbor’s question about what the hell to do with the kohlrabi he got in a CSA box, and the whole book works like that: You have acquired some Vegetable and need to know where to start. Organized by season and then by plant, with plenty of fruits and a few nuts mixed in for good measure, the book gives you recipes and ideas by showing off each subject in various preparations – raw, in salads, in soups, roasted, grilled, pureed, whatever. There are main course ideas in here as well, some with meat or fish, others vegetarian or vegan, and many of the multi-part dishes are easy to deconstruct, like the charred-onion vinaigrette in the cantaloupe/prosciutto recipe that made a fantastic steak sauce. Most of us need to eat more plants anyway; Acheson’s book helps make that a tastier goal. It’s also witty, as you’d expect from the slightly sardonic Canadian if you’ve seen him on TV. He has a brand-new cookbook out called Sous Vide: Better Home Cooking, that I’ll pick up shortly. I also really like his podcast Hugh Acheson Stirs the Pot.

You know, a lot of people will tell you go get Julia Child’s classic books on French cuisine, but I find the one I have (Mastering the Art) to be dated and maddeningly unspecific. Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom is a slimmer, much more useful book that focuses on the basics – her explanation of vinaigrettes is still the gold standard, and her gift for distilling recipes and techniques into simple little explanations shines here without the fuss of three-day recipes for coq au vin. Oh, that’s in here too, but she does it in two and a half hours.

Experts

The The Flavor Bible isn’t actually a cookbook, but a giant cross-referencing guide where each ingredient comes with a list of complementary ingredients or flavors, as selected by a wide range of chefs the authors interviewed to assemble the book. It’s the book you want to pull out when your neighbor gives you a few handfuls of kale or your local grocery store puts zucchini on sale and you don’t know what to do with them. Or maybe you’re just tired of making salmon the same way and need some fresh ideas. The book doesn’t tell you how to cook anything, just what else to put on the plate. Spoiler: Bacon and butter go with just about everything.

Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty is an outstanding vegetable-focused cookbook that uses no meat ingredients (but does use dairy and eggs), although Ottolenghi’s restaurant uses meats and he offers a few suggestions on pairing his recipes with meat dishes. The recipes here are longer and require a higher skill level than those in Tender, but they’re restaurant-quality in flavor and presentation, including a mushroom ragout that I love as a main course over pappardelle with a poached egg (or two) on top and my favorite recipe for preparing Belgian endives (a pinch of sugar goes a long way).

Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery cookbook ($11 for Kindle right now) has long been my standby for high-end dessert recipes, but unlike Baking Illustrated, the recipes are written for people who are more skilled and incredibly serious about baking. Ingredients are measured to the gram, and the recipes assume a full range of techniques. It has the best macaron recipe I’ve ever found – close second is I Love Macarons – and the Bouchon book has also the homemade Oreo recipe I made for Halloween a few years ago (but you need black cocoa to do it right, and I use buttercream as the filling instead of their unstable white-chocolate ganache).

For the really hardcore, Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen is an essential kitchen reference, full of explanations of the chemistry of cooking that will make you a smarter cook and help you troubleshoot many problems at the stove. I haven’t read it straight through – it’s 700-plus pages – but I’ll go to the index and pull out some wisdom as needed. It also explains why some people (coughmecough) never acquired the taste for strongly-flavored cheeses.

I can sort of recommend Flour + Water: Pasta, a cookbook from the chef/owner of flour + water in San Francisco, although it’s not for everyone. The restaurant is nationally renowned for its fresh pasta dishes, and this cookbook is a grand tour of regional Italian cooking, with just about any style of pasta you can imagine, and the best directions on how to form, knead, and shape the pasta that I’ve come across. Every pasta dish I’ve made from this book has come out great the first time. There’s a catch, however: the non-pasta aspects of the recipes are poorly written and were clearly never tested by any non-professionals. One recipe calls for starting a sauce by cooking onions over high heat … for eight minutes, which is fine if you want to burn them (you don’t). Times and temperatures are off throughout, so if you’re a novice in the kitchen, this isn’t the book for you. If you’ve cooked a lot, especially Italian sauces, then you’ll spot the errant directions and make adjustments as you go. And the pasta is truly spectacular, enough that you might do as I did and spring for a garganelli board (used to shape a specific hand-rolled noodle).

Richard Blais’ Try This at Home has become a staple in my kitchen both for about a half-dozen specific recipes in here that we love (sweet potato gnocchi, lemon curd chicken, arroz con pollo, sous-vide chicken breast) and for the creativity it inspires. Blais has lots of asides on techniques and ingredients, and if you actually read the text instead of just blindly following the recipes, you’ll get a sense of the extensibility of the basic formulas within the book, even though he isn’t as explicit about it as Ruhlman is. His second book, So Good, came out in May 2017; I’ve tried four recipes so far, with the chicken thighs adobo and spicy green pozole both hits. I make that adobo recipe, which uses lots of ginger and garlic, a bit of brown sugar, and some vinegar (he recommends pineapple vinegar, but I haven’t found that in any stores yet) for a unique flavor profile.

Bread

I’ve owned and given away or sold a lot of bread-baking books, because nothing has been able to beat the two masterworks by baker/instructor Peter Reinhart, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice and Whole Grain Breads. Reinhart’s books teach you how to make artisan or old-world breads using various starters, from overnight bigas to wild-yeast starters you can grow and culture on your countertop. If that seems like a little much, his Artisan Breads Every Day takes it down a notch for the novice baker, with a lot of the same recipes presented in a simpler manner, without so much emphasis on baker’s formulas, and is a good value at $24.

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→ November 27, 2019
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Bring Up the Bodies.

Hilary Mantel was the first author to win the Booker Prize for two novels in the same series, and the first woman to win the award twice, taking the 2009 honor for Wolf Hall, then winning again three years later for the sequel Bring Up the Bodies. (The third book in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, is due out in March.) While Wolf Hall was long and a bit arduous to read, it was full of plot and intrigue, and ultimately rewarded the effort required to get through it. Bring Up the Bodies, however, is just as tough to get through, without the plot rewards, with really just one thread through the book, and that one not a terribly compelling one.

Thomas Cromwell remains the protagonist, and Henry VIII is still the king, but now Anne Boleyn is the queen and Katherine, her predecessor, is in exile in the country. Henry still doesn’t have a male heir, however, and his patience grows thin just as his ardor grows for Jane Seymour, Medicine Woman. It falls to Cromwell, as always, to find a solution, but this one is far bloodier than the one he cooked up to help depose Katherine from the throne. Anne was eventually accused of adultery, including sleeping with her own brother, and beheaded, although the charges are poorly substantiated in historians’ view and in Mantel’s retelling, where it seems clear that she thinks it was all cooked up by Cromwell at the king’s behest.

The fundamental problem with Bring Up the Bodies is that that is the entire plot. There’s the same backbiting from the first novel, but the development of additional characters is gone. Cromwell’s son Gregory and ward Rafe Sadler are barely here. The members of the royal retinue are all replacement level, simpering and obsequious with one face, vindictive and Machiavellian with the other. Anne’s character is also not interesting enough to work as the primary antagonist; she’s very one-dimensional, less flirtatious than in Wolf Hall and more plotting and desperate as she realizes her place is slipping. She, too, fails to provide Henry with an heir – maybe his boys can’t swim? – and miscarries more than once in the course of this novel, which would explain the deterioration of her character but also makes her far less interesting in the retelling. Cromwell himself is also less three-dimensional here now that he’s widowed and his daughters are gone, all dead of the “sweating sickness” that affected London in the 1400s and 1500s.

Mantel’s habit of referring to Cromwell merely as “he,” only clarifying that she means him when it would be impossible to discern to whom “he” referred, grated on me in Wolf Hall and here it’s just exhausting. There are still lots of men running around, many of them with similar enough names and variable jobs, so that it’s not easy to keep them straight; I know Mantel didn’t make up the names, but a Cranmer and a Cromwell who is sometimes called “Cremuel” by the Francophone characters, plus a bunch of Henrys and Harrys and Thomases, is a mental burden not justified by the story around them all.

This won the Booker Prize because, in the words of the chairman of that year’s judging panel, Mantel “has rewritten the rules of historical fiction.” That may be true – it seems like Mantel works to stay within what we do know of the era and its personalities, creating a story with plausible details and a compromise in the dialogue that makes it readable – but it doesn’t make the story gripping, and I’m not clear on whether she rewrote those rules of historical fiction in this book or the first time she won the prize.

Next up: Jasper Fforde’s Early Riser, his first novel in six years.

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→ November 26, 2019
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7 Wonders Duel app.

7 Wonders Duel is my #2 pure two-player game, just behind Jaipur, and that makes it perfect for a port to the digital space – apps are great for pass-and-play or for playing against a single AI opponent. The 7 Wonders app, released about two years ago, turned out to be quite good, just a little tough to follow because of the size of the cards and the speed (which you could adjust) of the AI’s moves. The 7 Wonders Duel app has all of that, pro and con, although with just one opponent to track it’s much easier to follow, and some non-intuitive features that made it a bit harder for me to learn, but the AI seems fairly strong and outside of one crash the first time I used the app both on my phone and my iPad it’s been quite stable.

7 Wonders Duel is a real reimagining of the original game, which plays 3 to 7 and is best with at least 4, ditching the card-drafting mechanic for card tableaux where some cards are face-up and some face-down at the start of each round, with players alternating choosing cards. You may buy a card or, if available, take one for free because it has no cost or because you have a precursor card; you may take a card and discard it for 3 coins; or you may take a card, discard it, and build one of your four wonders. Once the seventh wonder has been built between the two players, the eighth one is destroyed. There are three rounds called eras, with cards becoming more expensive and more valuable as the game progresses, and there are purple guild cards worth variable bonuses in the third era just as in the original game. It’s a model for taking a multiplayer game and turning it into a two-player experience that forces direct interaction between the two players.

For straight play, the app is solid. There’s only one AI level, but it’s good enough for me; I’ve played the original game maybe a dozen times but wouldn’t say I’m particularly good at it. One of the most important strategies in 7 Wonders Duel is to choose cards that limit your opponent’s choices on their next turn, and it’s frequently possible to set up a move that forces your opponent to pick a specific card that makes two other cards available to you on the next turn. The AI player is programmed to do this, possibly above all else, and knowing that makes planning a counterstrategy a bit easier.

Using the app is much easier if you know how to play and what the icons on the tops of the cards mean; they’re clear enough to see even on the phone, although I find spotting the symbols on the side that tell you what precursor card might get you that card for free isn’t easy even on the larger screen. I found the way you choose to build a wonder so non-intuitive – you have to click on your wonders to pull up a separate box, then drag a card from the tableau over the wonder you wish to build. Since you play a card to your space by dragging it there, and discard one for coins by dragging it to your money pouch, dragging it to your wonders should give you the choice to build.

The tutorial in the app is really not very good, and there’s no way (that I can find) to directly access the rules within the app. Some of the card descriptions look unfinished; if you click on a science card, for example, it just says it counts for the symbol shown, without explaining how science cards score. There are three victory conditions in the game – more points at game-end, advancing to your opponent’s end of the military track, and collecting six different science icons (there are 7, two of each in the deck, although you omit three cards from each game) – and the app at least labels the first two differently as Defeat and Supremacy, but I lost to the AI once without any indication of why. It wasn’t military supremacy and the game wasn’t over; if it was the science icons, nothing told me so and I don’t think that was true from what I saw on screen. There’s also no undo function, although in this game it might not make sense, since so many card choices will reveal at least one face-down card.

I’m picking the app apart a little bit, but the underlying game is really great, and the app does work – it’s more that it’s rough around the edges, and maybe the AI could be a little smarter about its choices of cards. I’m still playing it a lot, though, and would recommend it at the $4.99 list price.

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