→ October 17, 2024
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Floriferous.

Floriferous is a delightful game from 2021, with some light set collection and public/private objectives, playing out over three quick rounds before the final scoring. There’s nothing new here, just some familiar mechanics put together really well for a fast, family-friendly sort of game.

In Floriferous, players are all at a flower show and will compete to create the most valuable collection of flowers after three days (rounds). They do this by selecting flower and ‘desire’ cards from a public tableau that has five columns and three to five rows, based on player count, with the last row always desire cards and all other rows flower cards. Two of the cards in the top row are always face-down, for reasons that will become clear in a second.

The start player places their token on any card in the first (left-most) column to claim it, replacing the card with their token, after which the other players do the same. Then the player whose token was in the topmost row out of all tokens goes first in the next turn, selecting a card in the second column, and so forth. After all players have taken a card from the fifth column, the day ends, and you check the three public objectives to see if anyone has met their criteria; their value decreases by the day from 5 points to 3 to 2. Day two works the same way, but goes from right to left, after which day three goes left to right and the game ends. (The rules offer a slightly more competitive mode, where you score public objectives as they’re achieved, with the player who does it first taking the 5-point space, blocking it for other players.)

Flowers come in five types and five colors, and may have one of the five insect types on them as well. Some cards in the flower deck are actually arrangement cards and give you points for getting the matching symbols within the cards you’ve collected. Desire cards come in three varieties: two points per specific bug/flower/color, increasing points for up to 5 of the same bug/flower/color, increasing points for up to 5 different bugs/flowers/colors. At the start of each day, you’ll place some tokens (called stones, but made of cardboard) on specific cards in the tableau, which are worth 1 point per 2 stones at game-end, with a 2-point bonus to whoever collects the most.

That’s the entire game, other than the included solo mode. The original Floriferous is in a smallish box, but there’s an even smaller one coming, a “pocket edition” you can pre-order here; it’s the same game, just in a tinier box. I’m a big fan regardless of the box size – it’s so simple, and works so well, that it’s a practically perfect little family game.

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→ October 16, 2024
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Circus Flohcati.

Circus Flohcati is a 1998 game from the prolific designer Reiner Knizia, whose name you can’t mention without calling him a Prolific Designer; he’s published over 600 games, and has a number of all-time classics to his name, including Samurai, Tigris & Euphrates, Through the Desert, Battle Line, Lost Cities, Medici, Ra, High Society, and The Quest for El Dorado. I own seven of those, plus at least four more games by him, just at a glance at his BGG page. He’s good.

Circus Flohcati is actually one of his oldest games, but it’s out in a brand-new printing from 25th Century Games, which brought Ra back from purgatory, and uses art from the 2013 Korean edition. It’s a light push-your-luck game, listed for ages 6+, that is kind of perfect in its simplicity: there are just a handful of rules and the game works fine, with a high luck/randomness factor that should keep younger players in the game – as long as they grasp the main scoring mechanic.

The entire game is a massive deck of cards, 80 circus cards and 9 action cards. The circus cards come in ten colors, with cards numbered 0 through 7 in each. The action cards have three varieties, with three of each in the deck. The goal is to build the most valuable circus through collecting high cards in each color; through playing trios with three cards of the same numerical value; and possibly by causing the end of the game by collecting one card of each color in your hand.

On your turn, you may select one card from the face-up cards in the market, or, if you don’t want one, you may flip over cards from the top of the deck until you find one you like. If you flip a card with a color that’s already in the market, you discard that new card and your turn ends immediately. If you flip an action card, you take that action: take a random card from an opponent, choose an opponent to give you a card of their choice, or reveal cards from the deck until you get to a duplicate color and then choose any card from the market that you want.

If at any point you have three cards of the same value, you may play them to the table as a free action, forming a trio that is worth 10 points at game end. If you get all ten colors in your hand, you may call a “gala” and end the game, taking 10 points as your bonus. Once the game ends, each player scores the face value of the highest card they have in each color. Any lower-valued cards in those colors don’t score at all, so getting them out in trios if possible is the only way to get any points for them at all. You add those points to the trio points and the gala points and that’s the whole shebang. There’s no penalty for having lower-valued cards, or having too many cards – there’s nothing punitive in this game at all. You’re just drawing until you get high cards and/or trios.

One commenter on BGG gave this game a 7.5 out of 10 and said “It’s stupid and lucky but I love it!” and that’s pretty apt. I don’t know if I’d say it’s stupid, but it is simple. It plays very quickly, and it works with 2 to 5 players. BGG ratings are pretty heavily skewed towards longer, heavier, less luck-driven games, and this is kind of the anti-BGG game in that way: it’s super simple, quick, very random, and very fun. It reminds me a little of Splito, another small-box card game from 25th Century that was one of my favorite new games of 2023. I think I like Splito a little more, and it has the benefit of playing up to 8 people, but they’re in the same vein – you can bring these games to a family gathering where you have players of all ages and experience levels and you’ll have a good time.

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→ October 15, 2024
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Clash of Magic Schools.

Clash of Magic Schools is a brand-new version of the 2000 game Babel, with a fresh theme but as far as I can tell no real changes to the rules. It’s a two-player game co-designed by Uwe Rosenberg, back when he was only known for Bohnanza, before he became the king of heavy worker-placement games and more than a decade before he put out the two-player game Patchwork. It’s pretty clearly an early design, and it needed an update to more than just the theme and art to make it better.

In Clash of Magic Schools, players represent two different magic academies fighting some kind of tournament across five different ‘arenas,’ playing cards of students to their sides of those arenas and casting spells when they’re able to try to improve their standing and attack the other side. As you add cards to your side of an arena, you can pass trials in sequential order, from 1 through 6, once you have at least that many cards there, but only if the trial number you need is available. Although it looks like a capture-the-flag sort of game (Battle Line, Riftforce), there’s no control aspect here; the arenas exist just as places to attack your opponent.

On a turn, you can take as many actions as you want. You can move your token to any arena by discarding one card from your hand. You can play as many cards from your hand to your token’s current location (your side of that arena). You can pass a trial, as described above, taking the top trial card from your side OR from your opponent’s. You can summon students, moving exactly three cards from one arena to another. And you can cast a spell, for which you must have three student cards of the same color at one location. Spells allow you to trash cards from your opponent’s side, or steal a trial card, or pass a trial while skipping a level, and more. Play continues until all of the top trial cards on one player’s side totals 15 or more while their opponent’s total is 9 or less; if tied, you continue until one player reaches a total of 20, or one player drops down to 9 or less. If you exhaust the trial deck, the game ends regardless of scoring.

I have a soft spot for Babel because it’s the first Eurogame I ever owned. I was on vacation in Austria in 2003 and stumbled into a board game store, and I had never seen anything like it in my life. I was overwhelmed and wanted to buy all the things, but I barely speak enough German to order a coffee, and certainly didn’t have the vocabulary to ask an employee for advice – nor did I know what I’d ask even in English. So after some time, I ended up with Babel, as it was a two-player game and not too expensive, and it had a seal on it that I now know means it made the shortlist for the Spiel des Jahres award (won in its particular year by Carcassonne).

That said, I played Babel quite a few times with my ex-wife before our daughter was born, and after a while we both realized it’s just not that good of a game. The back-and-forth of it isn’t very fun; I’d compare it to trench warfare, where you make a few feet of progress one day only to have your enemy claw it back the next. It is easier to damage your opponent than to build up anything yourself, because passing trials requires a ton of luck – the right trial cards have to be visible when you’re ready for them. That is by far the aspect of Babel that most needed revising in a new version, and they didn’t touch it. You can have sabotage as a core mechanic – I think the base game of Riftforce does this really well – without making it the core mechanic. Five of the game’s six spells allow for some form of sabotage, and all that does is make the game a frustrating slog that takes twice as long as it should.

The artwork in the new game is fantastic – I love the art on the student cards, where each card color uses the same basic outline for a student, but each card itself has different hair, skin color, clothes, makeup, and so on. That said, this is about as blatant an attempt to draw on Harry Potter as those Russian books from the early aughts that barely bothered to disguise the main character. The spell names, the school symbols, the cover art, all of this makes it look like a Harry Potter-themed game that didn’t want to pay the royalties. (To be fair, I wouldn’t want to line that transphobe’s pockets, either.) I’m good with the update from ancient nomadic tribes to modern magic schools, but I did expect something more imaginative than this.

I still have my copy of Babel because it started my collection – it’s not the oldest game, and it isn’t valuable at all, but it was game #1 and I think my interest in the hobby truly started from there. I don’t see any need to keep my (review) copy of Clash of Magic Schools, though, as it’s the same game with a fresh coat of paint.

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→ October 14, 2024
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Midaq Alley.

Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, making him the first and still the only Arab writer to win that honor, the same year he published his last novel, The Coffeehouse. The Nobel committee’s speech cited several of his works, including his Cairo Trilogy, which the Zimbabwe International Book Fair named as one of the 12 best works of African literature in the 20th century; and Midaq Alley, which my daughter had to read for her IB English class last year.

Midaq Alley is a slice-of-life work set on one street in Cairo in the 1940s, near the close of World War II, and follows a broad array of characters as they live, work, fall in and out of love, and more. The closest we get to a protagonist is Hamida, the young foster daughter of Umm Hamida, who spends most of the novel trying to find a suitable husband – with finances high on her list of criteria, and her story intersects with those of two other residents of the Alley as well as a well-heeled visitor who sets his sights on her as soon as he arrives. The entire novel is a moment, an attempt to capture Egyptian city life as it sits on the precipice of modernity, with western influences creeping in, technology threatening some traditional jobs, and secular sentiments battling with traditional beliefs. The myriad people living on this street and on these pages are likely a stand-in for Egyptian society as a whole during the last years of the monarchy and the final years of British presence on Egyptian soil.

The alley itself is so small and life there so provincial that everyone knows everyone else’s business, which is part of how Mahfouz can pull off the constant changes in narrative and perspective – although it also seems like there are few real connections among the residents. There’s plenty of gossip, but there isn’t much love lost between them; not once does Mahfouz present us with a true friendship between any two characters, even with the large number of people who cross the page. This aspect of the book lies in the background, even when tragedy strikes at the very end of the novel, where one character makes a choice that will upend several lives yet he has nobody willing to stop him or who might have dissuaded him from his actions.

There’s clearly a lot of cultural context I missed when reading Midaq Alley, and I’m sure I would have benefited from reading it as part of a class, since I know very little of both Egyptian culture and its history outside of what we typically learn in school (ancient Egypt) or what has happened in my lifetime. I was better able to pick up some of the satirical elements, like Zaita, the “cripple-maker,” who gives beggars false deformities or disabilities so they may take in more money while panhandling, or Dr. Booshy, who isn’t a real doctor but provides medical-adjacent services at cut-rate prices and no one wants to know how. Those character archetypes are at least somewhat universal, even if the specifics are unique to Mahfouz’s world, and I could get a handle on them and what they might represent. I was also aware from the very first chapter, where a Quran-quoting poet finds himself out of a ‘job’ because the radio has effectively replaced him, that my lack of knowledge of Arab and Islamic culture would probably wall off some aspects of the novel from me. That’s on me, not the author, but the result was that I didn’t get as much out of Midaq Alley as I might have hoped.

Next up: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, another of my daughter’s books from her last year of high school, and I think her favorite.

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→ October 12, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 10/11/24.

Nothing from me this week at the Athletic, although I should have at least two pieces going up in the next seven days.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Little Alchemists, a streamlined version of the heavy game Alchemists that also works as a light legacy game, building you up over seven modules to a full midweight deduction game that you could play with the family.

I’ve been much more regular with my free email newsletter since taking some PTO in August, which I don’t think is a coincidence as it gave me some mental downtime after the crush of the draft and the trade deadline.

And now, the links…

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→ October 9, 2024
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Applejack.

Applejack comes from Uwe Rosenberg, known for his heavy worker placement games and his light tile-laying games, although I think it’s been a few years since he had a real ‘hit’ – probably 2020’s tile-layer New York Zoo. Applejack came out in 2023 and it’s a perfectly fine game that suffers from an overwrought final scoring mechanic, so while I think it’s good enough to recommend, it’s not one I’ll come back to very often.

In Applejack, players will draft hexagonal tiles to fill out their meadow to attract the most bees and grow the most apples of seven different varieties. Each tile has up to four apples on it, possibly some flowers, and honey pots with numbers from 2 to 10 on at least one of the six edges. There’s a central board with a spiral track, and as the round-marker die moves, it will offer you your choices of the tiles in the bucket ahead of it and the bucket behind it (located around the outside of the board). You can place the tile anywhere on your personal board; if you line up an edge with a honey pot next to another edge with a honey pot, either on another tile or on the outer frame of your board, you get coins (honey) equal to the lower of those two values. That matters because you have to pay coins for the tile you draft, with the cost equal to the value of its honey pot(s). If you can’t pay, you must flip the tile over and place it face-down, with no apples, flowers, or honey pots showing.

The general goal is to place tiles to create chains of apple varieties; as the round marker moves, it will score the different varieties one or two at a time, giving each player coins equal to the number of tiles in the longest chain of that variety minus the current round number. Flowers score one coin apiece at the end of the first round, two apiece at the end of the second.

About halfway through round three, all players will have filled their boards and the game ends. You then score each apple variety again, subtracting three for the current round number, and double that number – effectively scoring them twice. Then there’s a bonus for the number of apple varieties you scored in that last harvest, starting with 4 coins for 4 varieties up to 35 points if you scored all 7. And flowers score again, but this time it’s back to just one coin per flower. Whoever has the most coins wins.

The actual game play, meaning the tile selection and placement, is good. I’d even argue that it’s all good until the final scoring, and then it gets annoying. It’s a lot of arithmetic, and it takes a while, but that also means that it’s hard to do the mental math during the game to fully anticipate how it’ll play out. Building the chains is fun, as is the challenge near the end of the game when you only have a couple of spaces left for tiles and have to choose which varieties’ chains to sacrifice and which to expand. I understand the philosophical decision to double the chains’ scoring at the end, because otherwise you’d end with players potentially gaining fewer points in the end game than they did in the second scoring, but it makes the process clunkier than it needs to be. Maybe Rosenberg tried it without subtracting the round number and it didn’t work; that seems like a more obvious way to score, at least. And I think the flowers are just kind of there – the points are nice but they’re so small in relation to the rest of the scoring that you’re not likely to pay much attention to them.

That’s a lot of words on what’s wrong with Applejack, but I’m being a little harsh – it’s really a solid game other than the scoring, and it’s possible that 1) the scoring won’t bug you like it did me or 2) you’ll just house-rule it and score it differently. I will say that among Rosenberg’s tile-laying games, though, this is below Patchwork, Sagani (also known as Nova Luna and Framework), and New York Zoo for me, so if you’re interested in this mechanic you might want to check those out first.

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→ October 8, 2024
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To End All Wars.

I read Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost back in January of 2013. In hindsight, I’d have to say now it’s one of the most influential books I’ve read in my life, which I think is saying something. It is an incredible, detailed, horrifying work of historical writing, telling the story of how Belgium’s King Leopold destroyed the region of Africa that is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, exploiting its people and resources for personal gain while setting the stage for what has been sixty-plus years of bloody civil wars. It’s the most damning work I’ve read on colonialism. It provides a new and somehow even more excoriating view of western racism towards Africans. It changed how I think about the world.

For some reason, I had never sought out Hochschild’s other books until last year, when my daughter had to read his To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. His approach here is to provide a history of World War I through a modest number of individual Britons, many of whom were connected by family, marriage/liaison, class, or cause, while telling the larger story of this bloody, pointless war through brief descriptions of military maneuvers and deadly battles. The result is a book that is quite readable despite the grim subject matter and that also sheds light on a number of historical figures, some famous and some who probably should be, while also delving into the war’s effects on women’s suffrage, the labor movement, and the Russian Revolution.

The choice to focus on British subjects allows Hochschild, who is American, to make many of the stories far more personal. Many of the people he follows, including Rudyard Kipling, end up losing a son on the battlefields, yet only in some cases does it change their perception of the war – Kipling was an ardent hawk whose racism on the page translated well into similar sentiments against the Germans. The women of the Pankhurst family were all ardent suffragettes, but they split when the war began, in part due to a disagreement over whether becoming war supporters might win them more support in Parliament, but primarily due to a fundamental disagreement over human rights. The cast also includes military leaders John French and Douglas Haig, Prime Minister Lloyd George, pacifist Charlotte Despard, Labour Party founder Keir Hardie, and philosopher Bertrand Russell, most of whose lives would intersect in myriad ways through their positions on the war, both official and unofficial.

Hochschild’s decision to follow all of these people also spares us some of the grisliest aspects of the war, although he doesn’t eschew them entirely, particularly in describing trench warfare and the various new ways in which it allowed soldiers to die. That makes for a book that’s just far more readable, and also means that when someone connected to one of his main characters does die, it sits larger on the page – one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic, just in literary form.

In an ironic contrast to the callous way in which its various leaders and commanders sent millions of young men to their deaths or to life-altering wounds, World War I also brought out the largest antiwar effort we had seen, itself an outgrowth of a movement that began during the Boer War against Dutch colonizers in what is now South Africa. (In that war, white fought white, and the losers, as always, were the natives.) Hochschild steps back to tell that war’s history, both how it began and how antiwar sentiment crystallized and grew before and during its progression, tying it into the voices who spoke out against war in Europe even before it began, and to the conscientious objectors who rose in number during World War I and often faced harsh prison terms or even forced conscription.

What To End All Wars is not, and does not try to be, is a comprehensive history of the war. A few battles get the full treatment, while others receive little to no mention. Hochschild’s digressions on the Boer War, the pacifist movement, the fall of the Tsar and the Russian Revolution, British politics, and more mean that the look at the Great War itself is selective, albeit not superficial. He also doesn’t dedicate much time to exploring the causes of the war, a welcome decision given how much literature there is on that subject (I feel like that is all I ever learned about WWI in school, even if the whole topic remains open to debate). This is very much a story of one country’s role in the war viewed through maybe eight to ten people, with tendrils reaching out to cover some related topics – but only as they connect back to Britain.

Instead, we get some small character studies, several of them around people who aren’t well remembered (at least not in the U.S.) but have extremely interesting back stories. I was less caught up in the stories of the various military men, including French and Haig, who were terrible people happy to condemn thousands of soldiers to certain death and somehow even worse than that at military strategy; the civilians Hochschild discusses are all more compelling and three-dimensional on the page. The royalist Viscountess Violet Cecil saw the brutality of the Boer War, then lost her only son, George, in the first year of the Great War, yet remained a vocal hawk until its end, only to become an advocate of appeasement when she became the editor of her family’s conservative periodical The National Review (unrelated to the American publication). Emmeline Pankhurst cut off two of her own daughters over their political disagreements, as she became a jingoistic supporter of Britain’s war efforts, while daughters Sylvia and Adela remained true to their cause and became socialists and labor agitators, although Adela eventually flipped and became a right-wing nationalist during World War II. Charlotte Despard was also a suffragist and went to prison four times for her cause, later also fighting for Irish independence, yet also spent a large part of her time advocating for the poor and even lived in a small flat above one of her ‘shops’ to provide services for poor residents of one disadvantaged area of London. Bertrand Russell, quite a famous figure for his non-fiction writings in philosophy and math, is more human on the pages here too, with only mentions of his written opposition to the war but not his other work.

To End All Wars didn’t radicalize me the way that King Leopold’s Ghost did, but it is also an infuriating work in many ways because there is such broad, blind disregard for the value of human life, and in this case it comes from so many people. It’s a deeply humanist work at its core, even with all its depictions of callousness and suffering, and also a highly accessible work with a strong narrative that had me hooked despite my previously low degree of interest in its subject.

Next up: Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley.

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→ October 7, 2024
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Seers Catalog.

Seers Catalog is yet another trick-taking game, this time a game where you’re trying to get rid of most of your cards, but not all of them. It has a lot in common with SCOUT until you get to the scoring, where it has a novel way of awarding points – or taking them away – that makes this game so fun and so very hard to play well.

A remake of a self-published game called Of What’s Left, Seers Catalog has a deck of cards numbered 2 through 13 in five suits, although you’ll cut that down based on player count so that each player will start with a hand of twelve of those cards plus one wild and two ‘artifact’ cards. Those artifact cards have various special powers but nearly all of them have values of 0 for scoring at the end of the round, so you want to use them rather than holding on to them. Some work in tandem with another card you play, such as changing its suit or adding or subtracting 1 (or ½!) to its value, while others you play on their own, like a card that automatically is the highest one on the table, or the Go First card that, as you might infer, means that player goes first (but doesn’t have to play that card immediately).

The player who starts a trick must play a ‘meld’ from their hand: a set of cards of the same value with different suits, a run of cards of the same suit with consecutive values, or a single card. All players may follow by playing the same type and size of meld – so if I play a run of 3-4-5, you must play a run of exactly three cards – but must have a higher card value than the last trick played, so in that example, you would have to play at least a 4-5-6. Players may pass; whoever wins the trick opens the next one. When any player has fewer than six cards in their hand, they go in the Bonus, flipping the indicator token in front of them. From that point on, they may not pass: if they have a legal play, they must make it.

A round ends when any player is out of cards. They will score zero points for the round, as will any players not yet in the Bonus. All other players in the Bonus score as follows: Take a number of points equal to the value of the lowest card in your hand, then subtract the number of cards in your hand. So if you have two cards remaining, a 6 and an 8, you would get 4 points (6 for the card minus 2 for your two cards in hand). Wild and artifact cards are (mostly) value 0, so if you have one, you get 0 points minus the number of cards in your hand.

It should be obvious that the goal is to end up with one high-value card at the end of a round, or at worst just a couple of high-value cards. Because you’re required to play once you’re in the bonus, however, that’s really hard to do. Later in the round, players are more likely to make smaller plays – a single card or a run/set of two – and it’s similarly likely that you’ll have a legal play. And if you have the misfortune to win a late trick like that, you may end up having to lead the next trick and end up playing your last card.

I haven’t mentioned the theme here, because beyond the wonderful title – which, I’ve discovered, you probably have to be at least 45 or so to get – the theme is irrelevant. There’s flavor text on the cards, but I never read them; I played this once without my glasses, so I couldn’t have read it if I’d wanted to, and it didn’t affect my ability to play the game at all. I can say that the game plays well with two players, which is unusual for a trick-taking game. It’s different, since it’s easier to guess what the other player might or might not have, but it still works really well. I prefer SCOUT, but if you love SCOUT and want something in a similar vein that’s offers a few new twists, you should put Seers Catalog on your order form.

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→ October 5, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 10/5/24.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top rookies on postseason rosters, based on their likely impact; my top pick looks pretty good so far. I also held a Q&A on the Athletic’s site on Friday, which was almost entirely baseball questions (unlike the typical Klawchat over here).

We’ve got two family birthdays this weekend, so it’s birthdaypalooza around here, but I’m hoping to do another issue of my free email newsletter once we get through Sunday.

And now, the links…

  • The Washington Post covered a rambling, incoherent Trump speech accurately, without “sanewashing” it. There have been a lot of clips this week of Trump appearing to forget where he was or what he was talking about. Too many media outlets continue to dance around this.
  • A new study of Scottish women found that those who received the HPV vaccine before age 14 had zero cases of cervical cancer. Yes, there is a vaccine your kids can get that may completely prevent several types of cancer, including cervical and anal cancers. There is so much misinformation about this vaccine online, and the cost of this will be human lives.
  • Board game news: To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the release of the first Dungeons & Dragons set, NPR asked readers to contribute their memories of playing the game. Here are five of their stories.
  • Rock Manor Games has a Gamefound campaign up for StarDriven: Gateway, a pickup-and-delivery game on a modular board. I’m friends with the publisher and got to try a prototype last week; we played the shortest version, and I think it needs the extra rounds, but I like the fact that there’s no conflict and that the economic aspects are easy to keep straight in your head.
  • Shem Phillips’s Garphill Games has a Kickstarter up for two new titles, Skara Brae and The Anarchy. Phillips is best known for his series of worker-placement games that started with Raiders of the North Sea. I don’t think Skara Brae has anything to do with The Bard’s Tale, though.
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→ October 3, 2024
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Happier Hour.

I heard Dr. Cassie Holmes talk about her book Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most and her approach to time management, making sure we get the most out of the limited free time most of us have, on the Hidden Brain podcast a month or so ago. She was an excellent guest, telling some great anecdotes and offering a superficial look at her recommendations for people to reorganize their time around the activities that give them the most joy or pleasure. The book, however, goes no deeper than that, and really could have been a pamphlet for all the insight it offers.

Happier Hour’s main advice is simple to understand and plan, albeit perhaps not to implement. Holmes asks readers to spend about two weeks tracking their time in small increments, writing down what they’re doing and how they felt while doing it. The goal is to identify the activities that give you the most happiness, however you may define that. That’s often social activities with family, friends, etc., but it will vary by person – you might enjoy solving a puzzle by yourself more than playing a game with friends, and if so, then you should enter that in your little journal.

Once you’ve gathered that information, you should then create a schedule of your week, filling in the activities that you must do before you get to anything else. Holmes distinguishes between types of required activities, however; for many people, there will be aspects of work that you enjoy, and aspects that you don’t enjoy but have to do anyway. (One recurring problem with Happier Hour, though, is that this is very much a book for privileged people. Here, you have to have a job that gives you some flexibility in when you perform required tasks, at the very least.) Her advice is to isolate the best parts of work – the ones that give you some positive feeling, however you wish to define that – and dedicate time to them at the time(s) of day when you feel best. She’s a morning person, and she likes the deep work parts of her job, so she sets aside a few hours each morning for it, delaying the lesser parts of the job, like answering emails, to the afternoon when she’s not at her best anyway.

She counsels the same approach to your leisure hours – some of which will, again, involve required tasks, like making dinner, chauffeuring children or other family members, or performing certain chores. As I write this, I just emptied the garbage and recycling bins in the kitchen, dealt with the cats’ litter, and took the trash bins to the curb, a required task I perform every Wednesday. That would be on my calendar, each Wednesday night, taking up maybe 15 minutes at most. Once those fixed tasks are in place, I would then fill I the remaining time with activities that give me the most joy and with required tasks that can be performed at any time, again prioritizing the good stuff for times when I feel my best. (This also would require that I know when I feel my best. It depends on the day.)

That’s all there is to the Happier Hour system, aside from some minor details. Beyond that, the book is fluff – a little research here and there on how social activities tend to make us happiest, how experiences beat acquisitions (no kidding), or how social media sucks, plus some mostly cute stories from Holmes’ own life (along with one pretty lousy one). I don’t mind hearing about the author’s experiences when they relate to the book; her decision to leave a prestigious but intense job that was cutting into her time with her young children is understandable, and there’s a straight line from that to the research she does now at UCLA. However, they also underscore how this book is only for a small sliver of the population: It is way, way easier to execute the program in Happier Hour if you’re either rich, or in a flexible job (like mine, come to think of it), or both. So many of her stories just scream wealth and privilege: oh, you have a weekly coffee-and-hot-cocoa date on Thursday mornings with your preschool-aged daughter? How nice for you, but most of your readers with kids that young will take them to day care or similar arrangements so they can go to their not flexible jobs.

I say this with full awareness that my job is flexible – I’m a writer, and as long as I hit my deadlines, I could write at any time of the day I wanted. I could do it from 2 to 4 in the morning if I wanted to. (I do not.) And I could write from anywhere; in the offseason, I don’t even need to be in this hemisphere, as long as I have a phone and an internet connection. I am in the target audience for this book. I just didn’t feel very moved by it, and by the time I was about 2/3 of the way through, I was just annoyed by how much extra verbiage there was around something that could be described in under ten pages. This book could have been a podcast, and in fact, it was.

Next up: Still reading Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars.

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