→ November 10, 2012
→ By

Saturday five, 11/10/12.

Five plus one this week, although the last one probably only matters if you have ties to Long Island.

* From The Atlantic, a look at from where post-election racist tweets emanated. There’s been a fair amount of debate over the practice of outing people, often kids, who say awful things on Twitter, but on this topic I subscribe to the thinking of Shakti Gawain, who said, “Evil is like a shadow – it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light… In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.” And maybe we could make the morons who compound their ignorance by crying “freedom of speech!” after they’re exposed take a civics class to learn what the First Amendment actually means.

* Also from The Atlantic, a piece on the problem with “rape exceptions” in anti-abortion laws. The author makes a pretty compelling case that they’re worthless.

* Brandon Heipp’s piece at BP on the history of “replacement level” in baseball analysis was a great and timely read, given confusion over the term in the religious wars around the AL MVP contest.

* mental_floss delves into the secret lives of six spices. It quotes Giles Milton, whose book Nathaniel’s Nutmeg is one of my favorite non-fiction books on any subject.

* Bookmarked but unread, a short story recommended by Michael Ruhlman called “The End of Baseball.” It’s only accessible if you have Flash, as far as I can tell.

* I concede this is of interest to maybe a handful of people besides me, but this New York Times review of Kushi, a new sushi restaurant in Nesconset, caught my eye because it’s about a mile and a half from the house where I grew up, and which my parents just sold earlier this year. If anyone’s tried it, I’d love to hear how it is.

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→ November 9, 2012
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Phoenix eats, fall 2012.

Today’s installment of the offseason buyer’s guides, covering the catching market, is the end of the series. I’ll do award posts starting on Monday with Rookies of the Year.

Barrio Queen, in Old Town Scottsdale, is a spinoff of Phoenix’s Barrio Cafe, sharing some menu items but focusing more on street tacos, roughly four-inch tortillas generously filled with about 20 different options diners can choose from a sushi-style paper menu that covers beef, chicken, pork, seafood, and vegetarian fillings, all ranging from $2.50 to $5 or so. The restaurant’s signature cochinita pibil (slow-roasted pork shoulder) appears in taco form, as do carnitas, grilled flank steak, mushrooms and huitlacoche (corn fungus), and smoked salmon. The carnitas taco was the best of the four I tried, with the meat shredded and slightly crispy on the edges, although the smoked salmon with roasted cactus paddle (nopal) was a close second. The mixed grilled peppers taco blew my mouth off, although that doesn’t make it a bad thing. We also tried the chili verde fries, which are just what they sound like, with pork and cheese, a little too over the top for me although the chili verde itself was delicious. The food itself destroys any other tacos I’ve had in the Valley save downtown’s Gallo Blanco, and the prices are comparable to and even below some well-reviewed places like the overrated La Condesa.

Distrito, in the Saguaro hotel just up Drinkwater from Scottsdale Stadium (where the Giants train), also goes for a Mexican street food vibe, but the dishes are more complex and upscale, with price points to match. The mahi-mahi tacos ($14) come three to an order, with large pieces of fried fish on top of chipotle remoulade and a red cabbage slaw on top. Their cochinita pibil ($12) comes already sliced, which is a little odd, but the meat was tender and was served with a slow-cooked pineapple achiote sauce that was actually even better the next day. Their huarache de hongos ($10) flatbread includes mixed wild mushrooms as well as huitlacoche and a topping of melted mild white cheeses. The guacamole ($10) with cotija cheese was silently spicy but also had some of the creamiest avocadoes I have ever tried, giving them a faintly sweet taste as well. We tried one of the vegetable sides, the esquites ($6), sweet corn served off the cob, tossed with lime and queso fresco, served on a bed of chiptole aioli (probably the same that’s under the mahi mahi), a fork-friendly equivalent to the charred corn with cotija and paprika dish that’s become very trendy across the U.S. over the last few years. The one dish that fell a little short for me was the queso fundido ($12), duck barbacoa with roasted chilies served under a sheet of melted cheeses; the flavor of the duck itself completely disappeared under the cumin, red peppers, and poblanos.

While I’m still covering Scottsdale, I’ll throw in yet another endorsement of Baratin Cafe, which might be the single best value in the Valley because you’re getting very high-end ingredients and preparations for roughly $10 per salad or sandwich. The catch is that the menu changes daily and it is small – one salad, one sandwich, one “potted” (forcemeat or pate) or pickled dish, a snack, a starter, a vegetarian plate, and a dessert. I’ve been four times, always showing up with no idea what would be on the menu, ordered the sandwich each time, and have been thrilled with everything, even the day the sandwich was vegetarian and built around eggplant, probably my least favorite vegetable (technically a berry) of all. Baratin piggybacks on the purchasing power and prowess of FnB, which is just around the corner on Craftsman, but you can get in and out of Baratin at about half the cost of its more sophisticated sibling. If you’re staying in Old Town and are an open-minded eater, this is the one place I’d encourage you to hit above all others.

Moving over to Phoenix, Chris Bianco’s newest place, bearing the Google-unfriendly moniker Italian Restaurant, opened earlier this year in the Town and Country shopping center just off route 51 between Highland and Camelback. The focus here is on house-made fresh pastas produced from Arizona-grown wheat and served with simple, mostly traditional sauces that rely on fresh ingredients, with the menu changing frequently to reflect seasonal items. We started with the farinata, a traditional Italian crepe made from chickpea flour and cooked in a very hot cast-iron skillet until crispy. Italian Restaurant’s version includes red onions, black olives, and sage leaves, balancing the sweetness and tang of the onions with the brininess of the olives and the earthiness of the chickpea flour and sage, bringing a very satisfying crunch from the high heat to which it’s exposed during cooking. (You can try this very similar recipe if you want to make it at home as I’ve done.)

For the entree, I went with the papardelle bolognese, which is among my favorite sauces but one I rarely eat because it’s so often done poorly – overcooked, made with too much cream, made only with beef, made with cheap tomatoes, whatever. Bianco’s place does it right, starting with giant sheets of pasta closer in dimensions to lasagna, cooked just barely to al dente, served with a vibrant red sauce without the heaviness of most bolognese attempts (including a few of my own at home). My parents were visiting that week, and my mother chose the cavatelli with Schreiner’s sausage, roasted cauliflower, and spring onions; the sausage and pasta combination was a perfect marriage, with the al dente cavatelli bringing a bready texture to the meat, although the cauliflower was overrun by other flavors in the dish. Portions are generous but not unfinishable and prices are reasonable for the quality you’re getting, with each pasta dish running $15.

I also tried Chris Bianco’s legendary sandwich shop, Pane Bianco, and was a little disappointed, at least compared to the high expectations I’d gotten from friends who’ve tried it. The bread was what let me down, which is shocking since Bianco is known for his pizza doughs and uses a similar formula for the focaccia at Pane Bianco. Mine was dry and lacked the soft sponginess of good focaccia, so while it absorbed some of the olive oil from the mayo-less tuna salad, it was too chewy and made the whole sandwich feel heavy. All five of these places appeared in Phoenix magazine’s list of the 20-odd best new restaurants of 2012.

To the east valley … if you’re going to a Cubs or Mesa Solar Sox day game, my new recommendation for a pregame meal is Urban Picnic on Main Street, less than ten minutes’ drive from the ballpark, offering a modest menu of hot (pressed, but not smashed) and cold sandwiches, made on these amazing baguettes, soft on the inside with a crust that shatters upon impact. I’ve tried two sandwiches, the mozzarella caprese and the roast beef with horseradish, both of which are outstanding, although I wish the mozzarella was fresher – it’s not quite the hard moisture-reduced stuff you get at your generic megamart, but it’s not as soft as even a good-quality cow’s-milk mozzarella is. The fruit cup you can get on the side is tiny but the fruit within has always been sweet and was obviously cut that morning. The only item I didn’t like was the fresh lavender lemonade, which was like sucking on a flower.

Pitta Souvli, located at Germann and Alma School just south of the 202’s Santan portion in Chandler, wins the prize for best Greek/Mediterranean place we’ve found so far, with everything solid but the small plates really shining. Their baba ghanoush is a powerful mixture of smoky, tart, and garlicky flavors that will have you radiating allyl methyl sulfide from your pores for days. The avgolemono – a soup made from chicken stock, lemon juice, rice, and eggs that are beaten into the hot stock to make a thick, cloudy end product – has bright lemon flavors and the thick, slightly uneven texture that the soup should have if the rice is fully cooked and the eggs are added slowly enough. Their souvlaki is a slightly mixed bag, with the meats a little overcooked for my tastes, more of a problem with the chicken (white meat, so it dries out) than with the pork. They also get points for using thick, better-quality pitas that can stand up to heat and to thick dips like the baba ghanoush and the hummus, which is topped with a bright peppery olive oil.

And finally, to Surprise, where there’s finally a good, fairly quick, non-chain option near the ballpark: Saigon Kitchen, the best Vietnamese restaurant I’ve found out here and another restaurant in Phoenix magazine’s list. I’m a little boring when it comes to Vietnamese food because I nearly always order the bun, steamed vermicelli topped with some sort of grilled, highly marinated meat, served with a sweet/savory sauce based on nam pla (a salty Asian fish sauce that’s very high in umami) along with bean sprouts, shredded vegetables, mint leaves, and sometimes peanuts. What Saigon Kitchen does differently from most places is create blocks of a highly spiced (but not spicy) pork meatloaf, as opposed to fatty slices of pork, baking the meat at a low temperature before finishing it on the flat-top to give it some color. It’s tricky to eat with chopsticks because the blocks are so large, but the added flavor and improved texture make it completely worth it. It’s busy at lunch but I haven’t seen it packed, probably because of all the competition from crappy chains next door to it on Bell Road, and the food comes pretty quickly.

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→ November 8, 2012
→ By

Top Chef, S10E1.

My buyer’s guide to the relief market is up for Insiders, and I’ll be chatting today at 1 pm EST.

This year’s opening-episode twist had the chefs broken into four groups, each visiting one of the four chef-judges at one of his restaurants, and competing in a challenge of that judge’s design. The producers also broke the show up by using Tom’s group as the main story arc of the episode, returning to them three times while presenting each of the other three groups in single chunks from start to finish. I thought it was a clever twist and didn’t involve sending home as many chefs as last year’s opener did.

* Group Tom features John Tesar, the “most hated chef in Dallas,” who gets off to a roaring start of arrogance; South African Lizzie Binder, who has a mad crush on Tom; and Jorel Pierce, wearing Rollie Fingers’ mustache.

* Tom’s challenge puts the contestants in his Craft LA kitchen for part of a shift, with each chef getting one specific task to tackle, like stuffing and shaping fresh tortellini (Lizzie, who seems to nail it), breaking down whole birds (Anthony and Jorel), or fileting fish (John and Micah).

* Micah makes a statement against self-interest by telling Tom he went from line cook to executive chef but never worked as a sous. Tom contemplates eliminating Micah on the spot by using a boning knife but thinks better of it.

* Rollie Fingers’ restaurant is “butchery focused,” then he screws up butchering the chickens. We can see where that’s going. By the way, friend of the dish Dave Cameron (also of Fangraphs) says that Rollie’s Denver restaurant, Euclid Hall, is excellent.

* Moving along to group two, we have another insane mustache, which must be some more Movember nonsense. (Seriously, you’re going to ask people to sponsor you for doing nothing? Growing a mustache is not effort. If you’re not dead, your facial hair will grow. This isn’t like asking people to sponsor you for running a 5K. It’s like asking people to sponsor you for going to the bathroom.)

* Anyway, group two’s judge is Emeril, who asks the contestants to make soup in one hour. What isn’t clear is whether they get any stock as an input, although from the results I assume they didn’t. I find it really hard to imagine a soup with the proper body if there’s no stock involved.

* Two of the chefs, Stephanie and Kristen, work together, live in the same building, and got the same tattoo. Then Stephanie clarifies that they’re not actually a couple, which the editing leading up to that point implied pretty strongly, right? Kristen has the look of a breakout candidate/fan favorite – she was born in Korea, modeled as recently as five years ago, is chef de cuisine at a Barbara Lynch restaurant (Stir) in Boston, and, judging by her performance in this challenge, is ready to kick ass. (Aren’t models usually pretty tall? I always assumed that would be a handicap in the kitchen because you’re constantly leaning over a low table.)

* Word of advice to all the male chefs in the audience: Do not go on Top Chef and risk missing the birth of your daughter. Not only does that disqualify you from all future Father of the Year awards, your wife will bust that out in every argument you ever have with her, forever. And no, I didn’t miss my daughter’s birth, before anyone asks. I just know these things.

* Jeffrey trying to quick-chill a gazpacho was one of the few moments of cooking drama in the show, but they sort of dropped the subject until service – the same with Josh plating his soup a good five minutes too early.

* Judging: Jeffrey’s gazpacho is cold and he gets the Top Chef jacket immediately. Kristen makes an English pea broth with scallops, crème fraiche, and lemon peel she poached three times to remove the bitterness, something that makes a pretty clear impression on Emeril (and was, perhaps, done to make just such an impression, a pretty slick move). She advances, as does Josh, whose soup was still warm enough and who gets points for sutble use of chili pepper to balance the sweetness of his coconut broth. Kristen’s colleague/tattoo-mate Stephanie goes home, as does one other contestant.

* Group Tom resumes, with John saying that because he’s in Tom’s kitchen, he needs to do stuff Tom’s way. That’s maturity speaking, and doesn’t quite fit with the arrogant front he showed in the comments at the top of the episode. He nails the halibut he’s preparing and advances on the spot, although the other four chefs in the group don’t know if he passed or was sent home. Incidentally, John reveals that he came up through the ranks with several chefs who’ve gone on to greater heights but saw his career derailed by “casual drug use that became self-medication.” So he’s an ass, but one we might root for anyway. I think.

* Group Wolfgang is the motley crew, featuring the foul-mouthed (even by Top Chef standards) ex-wife of the owner of Rao’s in New York, a Japanese woman whose parents don’t respect her career choice, and a guy bragging about being ranked #1 on Yelp. That’s like a baseball prospect bragging about being on the most fantasy rosters.

* The challenge: Make an omelette in 45 minutes with presentation counting very heavily. Puck says, “I’m such an easy guy as long as they do it exactly the way I want it.” Having seen him on several other shows, I’m actually concerned he’s too soft for judging on this show, and he ends up being (I think) the easiest judge to please in this episode, passing several chefs who screwed up royally.

* Chef Yelp uses bacon fat and produces a messy, greasy omelette. Carla ex-Rao shreds her omelette when it sticks to the pan, Tyler’s omelette is overcooked and brown all over. Eliza burns her first omelette and has to salvage her other ingredients from that dish to make a fresh one. They probably all should have gone home.

* Kuniko infused chamomile in the milk in her omelette, the one bit of innovation I saw in all six dishes. It’s like everyone panicked and forgot that you don’t win Top Chef if you’re not pushing the envelope somewhere.

* All but Chef Yelp advance, after which Puck shows how to make a proper omelette, the French way … in a technique I learned from a $10 Julia Child cookbook. How is it possible that none of the six chefs in this group knew how to do that?

(EDIT: I forgot to mention how Chef Yelp referred to Kuniko as “Origami,” which was both incredibly racist and unwarranted since she actually made the dish correctly. He could have been a great punching bag for me for a few more weeks if he didn’t suck.)

* Let’s face it – we’re watching primarily for Group Hugh, and the editors show it to us last because they know we’re not changing the channel until we see the Unibrow. His challenge to the chefs: Make a beautiful salad in 45 minutes. I like that it’s possible to pass this challenge without actually cooking any ingredients, although if you take that route you had better be precise with your flavors.

* Chef Bart is a knight in Belgium, and really, Hugh is going to mock him endlessly for this, as am I.

* Gina says she’s a ferocious tiger. She is also annoying. But she founded a community food program, so she’s noble, but still annoying. She also says that Danyele is dumb for flaming her tomatoes and that is cooking school 101 and it’s pretty clear that this point that the editors are telling us Gina will not be with us for much longer.

* Sheldon has spent nearly his whole life in Hawaii and worked his way up from dishwasher to executive chef, making him another early leader for fan favorite. Hugh asks for Spam in his salad, of course.

* Put the lid on the fucking blender, Bart.

* Judging highlights. Brooke does a kale salad with Brussels sprouts leaves, lemon vinaigrette, and fried kale on top, trendy across the board, so she advances on the spot. Sheldon does fried Brussels sprouts and gets dinged slightly for using an out-of-season ingredient and for using too little acid in his dressing. Bart’s salad is overcomplicated. Danyele’s charred tomato vinaigrette is a little overpowering. Gina is blatantly trying to manipulate Hugh in judging, and she ends up the only chef in this group to get the axe.

* Group Tom, finale. Rollie Fingers’ beurre monté is too salty. Anthony did too much damage to the duck and was too timid in the kitchen. Both chefs go home, with Micah (who recovered from revealing too much of his resume) and Lizzie advancing.
* Way too early top three prediction: Micah, Kristen, and John. I also considered Brooke, Jeffrey, Josh (who can cook with more focus when his pregnant wife dumps him), and even Kuniko for that one burst of creativity. I don’t think we got a great look at Tyler or Eliza – if they were players I’d need to scout them again before even forming a preliminary opinion.

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→ November 6, 2012
→ By

Umamicatessen & Intelligentsia Coffee.

The offseason buyer’s guides continue with today’s post on the outfield market and yesterday’s on middle infielders. Wednesday’s will cover starting pitchers.

Umamicatessen is the latest creation of Adam Fleischman, the man behind Umami Burger (which I reviewed in February 2010), folding a burger joint into a restaurant with a larger menu that also includes salads, starters, Jewish deli sandwiches (mostly featuring pastrami), artisan hams (including prosciuttos and two types of jamon serrano), various cooked pig dishes created by Top Chef Master Chris Cosentino, and doughnuts made to order. It’s over the top by design, and while some of the more decadent items were too rich for more than a few bites, every item we tried – I went with D-backs beat writer Nick Piecoro – was outstanding.

I focused on the Pigg menu, by Cosentino, ordering pork cracklins ($5) with smoked paprika, sage, and cayenne, as well as the Texas Toast, topped with an obscene quantity of barbecued pig’s tail and a small amount of vinegary cole slaw. The cracklins, one of three lard-fried items on the menu along with crispy pig ears and French fries topped with ham and “brainaise,” were highly addictive, with the crunchy, airy texture of puffed rice but the unmistakable tangy-salty flavor of pork skin. If they had a flaw, it’s that it would be too easy to eat the entire cardboard cone full of them without realizing just how much you were eating (including the sheer quantity of fat).

The Texas Toast ($11) is an enormous plate of food, giant chunks of pig tail that looked a lot like an oversized short rib, fattier on the inside than that cut of cow, and with a slightly tough skin that needed knifework where a short rib can be eaten with a fork (teeth optional). The flavor of the sauce itself was the star item on the plate, elevating the smokiness of the tail with red pepper, cumin, brown sugar, and dark flavors that reminded me of coffee or aged whiskey. Every part of the dish worked together, but the pig’s tail itself was a fair amount of work to eat and I’m sure I left some bits of meat in the middle because I was trying to perform liposuction with a steak knife.

The roasted baby carrots ($4) were a huge bargain considering the quality of the carrots – actual baby carrots, not giant factory-farmed carrots cut and tumbled to look like baby carrots – and the care in their preparation, leaving them ready to eat right up to the half-inch of green extending from the carrot-tops, as well as the smoky red harissa sauce beneath them. The beet salad featured yellow beets (I presume roasted and peeled) with truffled ricotta, wild arugula, and smoked almonds rested primarily on the flavor of the cheese, which was thicker than most ricotta, more like a soft goat cheese, with enough tang to balance the earthy truffle flavor and the pepper notes of the arugula – but the beet was a little lost in the mix, even though overall the salad was excellent.

We ordered two donuts, the tres leches cake donut ($4) and the yeast-raised beignets (two small ones for $4), with the tres leches the clear winner for both of us. The donut itself probably stood on its own, but the combination of milks, caramel, and cinnamon-topped whipped cream turned it into the best coffee cake you’ve ever had in your life. The beignets were a little dry throughout, although the burnt sugar-coffee-chicory dipping sauce was a clever nod to New Orleans-style coffee (and, to be honest, had a lot more flavor).

The draft beer selection included about eight or nine options, running the gamut from IPAs to the Deschutes porter I chose. Nick went with the Bourbon Pig, bacon-washed bourbon with sugar and bitters, topped with a few thin slices of crispy pig’s ear. He described it as “smoky but not too strong. Basically it was wildly dangerous and amazing.”

Speaking of LA, I owe a shout-out to Intelligentsia Coffee, where I had an espresso back in September and got a little free coffee as a gift from a reader. I do love coffee but find most espressos are too harsh to drink without either milk or sugar – and sometimes both. Intelligentsia is one of the very few that uses beans fresh enough and high enough quality that I can drink the resulting espresso straight, with their Black Cat producing a beautiful, viscous shot with bright fruity notes (stop laughing) and a little oak, but none of the bitterness from older beans or much darker roasts. They started in Chicago, with four locations there and now three more in greater L.A., along with roasting operations in both places, and an emphasis on a personalized coffee experience in the store, where you get a barista with his/her own station who takes your order (and offers guidance) and makes your drink. It’s expensive relative to the big chain espresso spots, but you are paying for quality of inputs and the expertise of your barista. I’d rather pay more for that than spend 30% less on battery acid in a demi-tasse.

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→ November 3, 2012
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Navegador.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this offseason is up – you can go right to the top ten, to 11 through 30, or to 31 through 50. The buyers’ guides are also back, starting today with corner infielders, where I discuss (among other things) A-Rod as a trade target.

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Navegador is a beautifully-designed game with a great theme that’s strongly integrated into gameplay, combining exploration, production, and construction all into a single, easy-to-understand game that balances the three areas enough to allow players to win in several different ways. With three or more players, there’s enough competition for resources that players are forced to make tough choices and focus on single strategies before the game gets too far along. Unfortunately, the breadth of options for players makes it unsuited for two players because it’s far too easy for both players to get and do everything they want to.

In Navegador, players represent fleets of explorers – think Dutch East India Company – who start in Portugal and travel to Latin America, Africa, and south and eventually east Asia, exploring those areas, developing colonies, and acquiring trade goods to sell on the open market. Players begin with two ships apiece, but lose one ship if they’re the first to explore a new area of the ocean, although that player receives a token worth more points at the end of the game plus an immediate cash bonus.

Any player can purchase a colony once the adjacent sea area has been opened up, with sugar colonies from Latin America, gold from Africa, and spice from across Asia. (My wife insists the gold bars look like butter, which would at least make the food theme consistent even if it raises unpleasant questions about storage.) Colonies produce goods that can be sold on the market, but the price goes down the more a good is sold, after which the advantage shifts to players who build factories to process those goods – no colony required – which then drives the price for the raw materials back up. This creates the first of several “do what your opponents aren’t doing” dynamics that work much better when the game has more players.

Construction is the third leg of the game. There are five building types, including a factory for each good, plus shipyards, allowing players to build ships more cheaply, and churches, allowing players to recruit workers more cheaply. Each player begins with one shipyard and one church, so s/he can build one ship for 50 cruzados or recruit one worker for the same cost during that kind of turn. Each additional shipyard/church allows the player to build/recruit one more whatever for 50 cruzados; otherwise the cost for extras can run from 100 cruzados in phase one to 300 in phase three. Ships are required for exploration, while workers are required to build factories (three workers), shipyards (four), and churches (five). However, each building type becomes more expensive as the supply of available buildings declines, so building early can be a major advantage even thought it may box you into a specific strategy for the rest of the game.

You can’t do whatever you want on a turn, however; there’s a rondel on the board that lists different turn types – Sailing, Shipbuilding, Worker recruiting, Market, Building, Colonization, and Privileges. Players move around it counterclockwise, advancing one to three spaces at no cost (destroying one ship for each additional space, a very high price), so sequencing your moves properly becomes a fundamental part of gameplay.

The Privileges tie into the end-game bonuses that determine nearly all of the scoring in the game. Each player automatically gets points for exploration, colonization, and buildings at the end of the game: One point per colony, two per factory (all types), four per new region explored, three per shipyard, and three per church. Players can increase those bonuses by gaining Privileges, sacrificing one worker to take a token that increases the per-unit bonus in one of those five areas by one or two, while also earning an immediate cash bonus for doing so. For example, a player may sacrifice one worker to take a one-point Colony privilege, earning two points per colony at the end of the game rather than just one, while also taking 30 cruzados per existing colony at the time s/he grabs the privilege.

The game is fantastic with three or more players (I haven’t tried with five, so I’m extrapolating from other experiences), because you’re going to be tripping all over each other on the board and will have to straddle the line between executing the ideal strategy and staying flexible because someone will inevitably try the same thing. With just two players, each person can achieve in all three major areas without much competition, splitting the new exploration roughly in half, grabbing plenty of colonies, working the market (you sell, I process), and building enough of all building types to do pretty much whatever you want. The game remains fun because the theme and mechanics are so well integrated, but there’s not much of a competitive sense to it, nor is there the tension you’d get with more players, where you spend time between your turns hoping your opponent doesn’t do the thing you were going to do. That means that, for us, as great as the game looks and as easy as it plays, we’re not going to get as much mileage out of it as most of the other games in our collection.

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→ November 2, 2012
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Castles of Burgundy.

Just a reminder that my top 50 free agents ranking goes live on ESPN.com at midnight ET tonight. In the meantime, you can check out yesterday’s Klawchat and my appearance on Joe Posnanski’s Poscast.

The Castles Of Burgundy looks like Stone Age, plays a little like Glen More, but in terms of getting into it, it reminds me of 7 Wonders: The rules are complex and not that well-written, but gameplay is quick and strategy manages to be deep without becoming too much like work. It’s also one of the best uses of dice I’ve seen in a strategy game, utilizing them in a way that introduces a small element of randomness without throwing the game off balance or becoming a game of too much luck. The game plays two to four, with two-player games taking 30-45 minutes, and at just under $30 it’s one of the best values in German-style games.

So here’s a warning – I’m going to walk through all of the rules, which will make this game seem more complicated than it actually is. If you want the review stuff, skip down to the break.

In Castles of Burgundy, each player has a game board of hexagonal spaces that s/he will try to fill over the course of the game by acquiring various tiles from six different depots on the central board. On a turn, each player rolls two dice in his own color, with each one representing a potential action associated with the number rolled. (Therefore, you get two actions on each turn.) Possible actions include:

* Taking a hexagonal tile from the depot bearing the same number that the player rolled.
* Placing a previously-acquired hexagonal tile on a space on the player’s own game board that bears the number of the die and has the same color as the tile.
* Selling goods of the type indicated by the number on that die.
* Acquiring two worker tiles. Playing a worker tile allows the player to add or subtract one from any rolled die, including going from 6 to 1 or 1 to 6.

On each turn, a player may also spend two Silverings (coins) to buy one of the tiles in the black market, a central depot of four to eight tiles of all colors, not tied to any die rolls. This is critical to completing regions or maximizing point values, so getting Silverlings along the way is also critical; most of your silverlings will come from selling trade goods, adding mine hex tiles, and adding bank building tiles.

The purpose of the game is to earn the most victory points, and the variety of possible strategies in Castles of Burgundy comes from the myriad ways in which to earn points. There’s no single, ideal strategy, at least not that I’ve found, but the best approach is to build whatever you can early and then go for hex tiles later that add the most value to what you’ve already placed. In other words, what you play in the first round or two should determine what you do in rounds three through five. (The game comprises five rounds of five turns each.) The main ways to earn points, either during the game or at its end, are:

* Filling a contiguous region of one color on your board. This earns you a bonus tied to the number of hexes in that region, equal to (x2+x)/2 if you’re math-inclined, as well as a bonus tied to the round in which you fill the region, with the latter bonus declining as the game goes on. So filling a five-hex region in round two gets you 15 points for the region, plus 8 points for filling it in the second round.
* Filling every hex of a specific color on your board before your opponents. There’s a bonus of 5-7 points for doing it first, and 2-4 points for doing it second, depending on how many players there are.
* Placing pasture tiles with animals on them. These bonuses repeat themselves if you place more tiles with an animal type you’ve already placed. So if you place a tile with four cows on it, you get four points; if, in the same region, you later place a tile with three cows, you earn seven points.
* Selling goods. When you sell a stack of goods, you get two points per good sold, plus one silverling coin.
* Placing watchtower buildings, which are worth four points apiece. One beige region, used for buildings, may not contain two buildings of the same type, so there’s a cap on this bonus, unless you place the yellow tile that waives this restriction.
* Placing yellow “knowledge” tiles that provide additional bonuses at the end of the game, such as four points per bank placed, or four points per different animal type on your board.

—

If that feels a little dry, it looked that way when I first cracked the rule book, but the actual game play is far quicker and smoother than you’d think. Your set of possible decisions is broad, but not overwhelming, and once you’ve played the game a little bit, you will find it easier to zero in on the set of sensible moves. The fundamental pair of actions in the game is taking a tile and placing it on your board, and since you only have three spaces to store a tile you’ve acquired but not placed, you have to balance those two actions – often just by using your two allotted actions to take a tile and then place it. There are numerous ways to get bonus actions as well, such as placing castle tiles or placing certain building tiles, allowing you to extend your turn, but the main conceit is the same: You want to fill up most of that hex board, and do it in a way that’s internally consistent to max out your points. With two players, you won’t find yourself competing much with your partner for tiles or goods you want, but with three or four the competition for specific moves will be more severe.

I’m not thrilled with the physical design of the game or its box, which doesn’t allow for easy storage. (Small World remains the champion there). The theme is mostly irrelevant here and not that well integrated to gameplay; you’re supposed to be a medieval land baron filling out cities or regions on an estate, but there’s very little sense to what buildings or tiles go on certain regions, and no sense that you’re building a cohesive unit on your board. There are a lot of small hexagonal tiles, some of which need to be shuffled for each game, and shuffling small cardboard tiles is like herding cats. I also found the rules to be a bit unclear, especially with the various building and knowledge tiles that have special functions that required us to keep the rulebook handy throughout the game.

The best aspect of the game is the tension between what you know you want or need to do to increase your points and what the dice and the random supply of tiles will allow you to do. That tension will be increased with more players; the supply of tiles scales to the number of people playing, but also increases the chances that one of your competitors will take the tile you want, forcing you to spend more time considering the timing element of your moves, which isn’t as present when playing with two players. Replay value here is fairly high, thanks to the dice element and to the inclusion of several different player boards – everyone can play on the basic board, or you can use one of the four alternative boards included in the base game, meaning each player would have a different estate to fill. It’s more complex than Stone Age, less so than Le Havre, on par with Glen More, and like the latter game it’s much easier to play once you’ve stumbled through a game or two. I’d also compare it in complexity to Puerto Rico, but without the one semi-dominant strategy (shipping) of that particular title, and a little more fun to play because it moves faster once you’ve got everyone on board.

Just a heads-up – I’m hoping to review three more games before doing this year’s rankings: Navegador, Yspahan, and Oregon. If time doesn’t permit that, I’ll post the rankings the week before Thanksgiving no matter what.

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→ October 31, 2012
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A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (and the incumbent title-holder, since the Board decided that every book published in 2012 sucked and declined to give the award to anyone), is a hybrid novel/short story collection, weaving long vignettes involving a small group of interconnected characters together across time to track, backwards and forwards, their rises, falls, and sometimes rises again. The results are often funny and occasionally tragic, but the writing and characterization are so compelling that when Egan punts the entire thing in the final two sections it is an enormous disappointment.

The book doesn’t have a single protagonist, but we do see several of the core characters in multiple stories, including Sasha, the charismatic, troubled young woman with an unexplained penchant for stealing, one that doesn’t even fully abate when she’s confronted with the consequences of one of her thefts. She works for the unctuous Benny Salazar, a record executive whose fortunes ebb and flow with popular tastes, and whose own history includes a stint in a punk band where many of the novel’s central relationships began. He’s a bit of a wacko magnet, like the former bandmate of his who shows up at Benny’s office one day bearing a freshly-caught fish, or the snobby neighbors in the suburb where he moves with his young, self-conscious wife, looking down on the nouveau-riche Hispanic guy in the neighborhood – who might be a terrorist, because, well, you know. The spectre of 9/11 hangs over many of the stories set in the few years after its aftermath, with the majority of the novel happening in spitting distance of New York City.

The novel’s unconventional structure, with a nonlinear narrative and changing perspectives, gives Egan some room to stretch out and show off her writing skills, which she does well for most of the book. One section comprises a magazine feature, presumably unpublished, written by the brother of one of the major characters, an account of a celebrity puff piece gone so wrong that he ends up in jail (with cause) and the celebrity’s career ends up so derailed that she eventually finds herself paid to be the consort of a murderous third-world dictator, one of the funniest sections of the book, even more timely with the Arab Spring occurring after the novel’s publciation. Sasha runs away from home as a teenager, and one section has her feckless uncle trying to find her in Naples to coax her to come home. The changing styles shift our views of characters, peeling back layers while also turning the onion to show us as much as possible in such a short space.

The last two sections destroyed the book for me, unfortunately. The first of the two is a ninety-page slideshow – excuse me, slidshow – written the daughter of one of those recurring characters, describing their family dynamic and the slightly depressing future in which they live. It’s gimmicky and superficial, losing the depth and most of the wit of the previous sections. The final story is set in a dystopian future a few decades from now, with Egan embarrassing herself trying to craft her own texting vernacular, and where interpersonal skills have broken down the point that people standing next to each other communicate via their devices. It wasn’t funny enough to be a parody and it was a lousy way to send off some great characters.

Next up: I’m past the one-quarter mark in William Gaddis’ mammoth novel The Recognitions. I’m hoping to finish before Thanksgiving week.

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→ October 30, 2012
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Babel and An Awesome Wave.

Mumford and Sons’ second album, Babel, is a little better than more-of-the-same – not that that would be the worst thing in the world, since their debut, Sigh No More, was both good and commercially successful – but it doesn’t break much new ground, at least not musically. It’s not exactly predictable, but it feels very expected, evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and likely, given its huge initial sales, to continue to spawn more bands attempting to mimic their fusion of country, bluegrass, and folk traditions with modern-rock production values.

Babel does vary from its predecessor in one specific way – the album’s music is more upbeat, feeling more like what you’d expect from a live concert experience, without as many of the funereal tracks that populated the first album. Sigh No More‘s high points were largely found in songs that picked up the pace, in whole or in part, with “White Blank Page” the main exception. Babel starts out with the title-track, a slightly formulaic barn-raiser that at least announces that this album will be more energetic than their previous disc, although it also lacks the strong hook that made singles like “Little Lion Man” and “Cave” into big radio hits.

It’s the third track and lead single, “I Will Wait,” that gets Babel going in earnest, an exemplar of what Mr. Carey Mulligan and company can do when they hit all their strengths – tempo changes, heavy bluegrass influences, strong harmonies, and concrete imagery (including the album’s first mention of eyes, which becomes a recurring metaphor through the rest of the disc). The song is as radio-ready as it gets on the disc, without sounding excessively commercial beyond the upgraded production quality. The song begins a five-track run of highlights, including “Ghosts in the Dark,” which veers about as close to straight American country as Mumford & Sons get due to the heavy use of finger-picking; and “Lover of the Light,” which combines several memorable hooks with an off-beat lyrical melody over a repeated piano riff that leaves the listener slightly askew before shifting to more conventional structure in the second half, in by far their longest track yet as well as one of their most layered. Even the later track “Hopeless Wanderer” manages to transcend the slow-fast-slow cliché from their first disc with more abrupt transitions between sections and the tempo contrast between the lyrics and the horse-race feel of the fast guitar riff behind the chorus.

Mumford himself shows some lyrical growth here, avoiding some of the stumbles of the first album and developing some consistent themes across the entire disc, without falling too badly into the sort of fake-profundity that characterizes far too much contemporary music. Several images are repeated across different songs in different context, especially eyes/vision and buildings/walls, while he also exhibits more of the spiritual yearning from the first album, such as a reference to the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich’s views of sin. He also gets five thousand bonus points for successfully using one of my favorite words in the language, sanguine, in a phrase on “Lover of the Light” that has two meanings, both of which work in context.

“Whisper in the Dark,” the second track on the album, feels like filler material to me, and breaks the flow between the title track and “I Will Wait.” “Broken Crown” might have been the second- or third-best song on the disc, seething with rage the way that “Dust Bowl Dance” did at the close of Sigh No More, but instead comes off as a calculated move to replicate the success of “Little Lion Man” through the unexpected use of the f-word – yet where “Little Lion Man” used it to maximum effect, here it’s awkward and even immature, turning a vicious attack into a teenager’s angry yearbook inscription. (Besides, that word alone didn’t make “Little Lion Man” great – it just made it greater.)

I’ll take this album as progress over the first disc, but I’d also like to see these four musicians push themselves further, maybe incorporating more genres, or perhaps continuing their experiments with song structures as they did with “Lover of the Light.” They’re going to sell plenty of albums no matter what at this point, and I have little doubt they can continue to produce memorable hooks, so they have the intellectual and commercial freedom to play around if they want to. I hope the next album goes more in those directions.

–

If you want experimental indie-pop, another British band, alt-J, might be on the verge of an xx-style breakout, perhaps after they win the Mercury Prize on Thursday, as they’re considered the odds-on favorites to do so. The product of five years of songwriting, and two years of recording, their debut album An Awesome Wave (just $5.99 to download) is a bizarre, textured, trippy perambulation across a broad swath of modern music styles. It might be genius.

alt-J, whose actual name, Δ, is produced on a Mac by pressing the Alt and J keys, draw on a wide tableau of influences that seems to span decades. Each listen to An Awesome Wave brought some other reference to mind, from Nine Inch Nails to Massive Attack to Television to Bollywood soundtracks, with hard swerves in style from track to track. Comparisons to the xx, who won the Mercury Prize two years ago, will be inevitable, since both albums tend toward quieter sounds and minimalist production, but alt-J is Faulkner to the xx’s Hemingway, rewarding multiple listens with greater complexity, crafting all-consuming soundscapes that suck you in with surprisingly catchy hooks.

The album contains three interludes and a short intro, but it’s track 3, “Tessellate,” that announces the band’s presence, with a haunting piano line quickly accompanied by a Tricky-like syncopated drum line, later joined by a disjointed base line that give a tremendous sense of movement and flow. “Something Good” begins with another off-beat drum pattern, joined by a sinister guitar and bass combination that belie the song’s title, only to have the whole thing stop for a Muse-like piano interpolation … and then we’re hearing Turin Brakes over the guitar before we return to the drumline of the opener. “Dissolve Me” fools you with a poppy synth intro that hints at the current new-wave revival, but the heavy, distorted bass line tramples over that sunny feeling like a drunken tuba player. And “Taro” follows its verse and chorus with a percussion and string (perhaps ukulele) line straight out of a Bollywood movie, yet one that fits perfectly in the song’s broader structure.

The biggest single from the album, “Breezeblocks,” remains among my least favorite tracks, with a J-Pop kind of lyrical repetition as well as a vocal delivery that sounds like a parent talking to a infant who’s just found her feet for the first time, although that’s the song that was stuck in my head when I woke up this morning. The lead singer’s style often makes the lyrics tough to decipher, but they are worth the effort, exposing a deeply intellectual and literary bent behind much of their songwriting. One song, “Matilda,” is about the film Léon (a.k.a The Professional), while another, “Fitzpleasure,” deals with one of the most brutal scenes from the scandalous book Last Exit to Brooklyn. The songs drip with clever imagery that will almost certainly leave you pondering hidden meanings and literary or film allusions.

Before this week, I would have tabbed Of Monsters and Men’s debut album, My Head Is An Animal, as the best new release of the year, but as amazing as that album is, it can’t rival An Awesome Wave‘s sheer ambition, packaged in shockingly tight songwriting and enough nods to melody to make this more than mere experimental music. It’s mind-expanding.

And, so I can justify reviewing these two albums together, here’s Mumford and Sons covering alt-J’s “Tessellate:”

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→ October 29, 2012
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Asara.

Asara is a family-strategy game that revolves primarily around building towers that will be taller or otherwise more valuable than the towers your opponents are building, a bit of light game theory that keeps a fairly simple game interesting. It incorporates some light worker-placement mechanics with a moderate amount of randomness to give it replay value, along the lines of Stone Age (if less elegant), while fans of more serious resource-based games like Puerto Rico or Caylus would probably find Asara too streamlined. If you consider the theme as well as the mechanics, it feels like a simpler version of Alhambra, a Spiel des Jahres winner with a money allocation system that detracted from the game for me.

In Asara, players compete to build towers in five different colors, each color bearing a different price and earning different numbers of points in the four scoring rounds. Players add tiles – spires, bases, and two types of middle tiles – by placing Buyer cards in the four market areas, but with a twist: The first player to place a Buyer in an area in each round determines what color worker must go there for that entire round. Other players must either place a Buyer of the same card, or must place two Buyers of any color in lieu of the correct one. After placing a Buyer, the player must buy one tile in that area, eventually placing a card on the center ring of builder spaces to allow him to build new towers or add to existing ones. The board also includes market areas for acquiring cash, stealing the start player tile, or paying a “bribe” to look through any stack of unused tiles to buy a specific one.

There are four rounds (years) in which players use Buyer cards, distributed randomly at the start of each turn. At the end of each year, a player receives a point for every tower he’s already completed, and a point for each section with a gold star (a minority of the available sections) that he’s built, while the end-game bonuses are much more substantial, awarding points to the player with the tallest tower in each color, smaller bonuses to the player with the second-tallest tower in each color, and bonuses to the players with the most completed towers and with the tallest tower of any color.

The main trick in Asara, especially with three or four players, is to stay ahead of your opponents in a couple of the available colors. That can mean building taller towers in those colors, but it can also mean blocking them from obtaining tower sections they might need. There are only six or seven pieces available in the market for each section type during each round; if the one you want isn’t available, you have to pay a “bribe” to look through the remainder of the stack and take the piece you want. Buyer cards also come in specific colors, and once a specific color of Buyer has been played in a market, all remaining Buyers played into that market in that year must be the same color; if a player is out of Buyers of that color, he must play two Buyers of any color to buy from that market. A little observation and a little deductive reasoning can go a long way if you want to play Asara to its full extent, although it works as a casual game if you just focus on building more or bigger towers.

Asara’s best attribute is its artwork, which isn’t a huge driver for me but is worth mentioning when it’s really bad or, as it is here, really strong. Aside from two tower section types that are too similar in shape, the pieces themselves are high-quality and easy to work with, with setup fairly quick and gameplay moving along easily. The randomness of Buyer cards and of available tower sections in each year give the game replay value, but more randomness generally limits strategizing and the decisions involved are usually pretty simple. I also found this a little too solitary as a two-player game, with so many spaces on the board that you’re never sufficiently restricted in your actions – both players will be able to construct complete towers in all colors if they want, and it’s almost impossible to run out of money. The game also includes a “professional” variant that doesn’t add much to the core game – it makes it more complex but not more clever or fun, in my opinion.

I’ll update the overall rankings in a week or so, but I would say Asara’s worth grabbing if you already have the better family-strategy games like Stone Age or Small World, or even the game from yesterday’s review, Tobago. Asara’s well made and plays very easily, but just doesn’t have the oomph to make me want to pull it off the shelf over other games of similar complexity.

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→ October 28, 2012
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Tobago.

I’ll be updating the annual boardgame rankings (that links to the 2011 list) in about two weeks, so as a prelude to that I’ll post reviews of the half-dozen or so new games I’ve gotten this year, some as far back as Christmas. First up is Bruce Allen’s Tobago, ranked #226 on Boardgamegeek’s master rankings and #27 on its “family game” rankings, which sounds about right – it’s a fun game, not that complex at heart, with two twists that make it a little more interesting to play, yet simple enough for younger players to learn without having to pore over the rules.

Tobago is set on an island containing several different terrain types across its hexed map, as well as three kinds of objects on certain hexes (palm trees, native huts, and statues). Players attempt to look for buried treasures on the island by narrowing down the treasures’ locations using clue cards tied to the terrain types. Clue cards may say a treasure is on a specific type of terrain, or next to a hex with a statue on it, or on the largest lake or mountain range – or they may say the treasure is not on a certain kind of hex. Once a treasure has been limited to no more than fifteen possible hexes, players place colored cubes on all possible locations for that treasure to know when its location has been identified.

There are four active treasures at any time, and each card added to the column under one treasure type narrows the number of hexes that might contain that treasure. Once enough cards are in a treasure’s column to guarantee that the treasure is on a specific hex, any player can move his vehicle to that spot to raise the treasure, after which coin cards are distributed to players depending on how many clue cards they added to that column. Coin cards show between two and six coins; the player with the most total coins at game’s end is the winner.

The distribution of the coin cards represents the game’s first significant twist. The deck of coin cards contains two curse cards, which, if revealed, can cost any player who was involved in that specific treasure hunt his/her highest remaining coin card. Coin cards for a raised treasure are distributed via a sort of draft format: The player who raised the treasure gets first crack at a coin card, followed, in order, by the players who placed each of the clue cards in that column, from the most recent card to the first one. One additional coin card is added to the stack to be distributed for a treasure.

For example, in a two-player game, if Player A placed the first clue card under a treasure, Player B placed the next two clue cards, narrowing the treasure to a specific hex, and Player A raised the treasure, Player A would get the first option to take a coin card (or pass), Player B would choose (technically with two chances), and Player A would get the final one. Once a player takes a coin card, he’s removed from the queue for that treasure, so if Player A took the first coin card to appear, then for the next coin card, Player B would choose first, followed by Player A. If a Curse card appears, that treasure hunt is terminated.

The second significant twist to the game involves the statues, which produce tokens called amulets every time a new treasure is raised. These amulets appear on the edges of the game board, depending on where the statues are located, and may be picked up by player vehicles in the course of their turns. A player may use an amulet to ward off a Curse card, or may use an amulet for any of these additional moves:

• Playing an extra clue card beyond the one allotted per turn;
• Moving his/her vehicle up to three hexes or terrain areas;
• Removing a single treasure cube from the hexes that might contain that treasure, possibly reducing a treasure’s possible locations to a single hex;
• Exchanging all of his/her clue cards for a new batch.

These amulets can be hugely valuable as the game goes on, especially due to their power to circumvent the clue-card process. For example, a player can put his/her vehicle on a location holding a treasure cube, then use amulet tokens to remove other cubes so that he’s occupying the hex that must hold the treasure, allowing him to raise it and get one more token in the coin-card queue.

The lone obstacle I could see to family play here would be the logic required for placement of clue cards. Some plays are illegal because they would eliminate all possible locations for a treasure; others are illegal because they don’t add any information and thus don’t reduce the possible locations at all. (One such move: adding an “on a lake” clue card to a column already containing the “on the largest lake” card.) The actual mechanics of Tobago are really straightforward – on each turn, you play a card or move your vehicle, perhaps supplementing your turn with an amulet – and the game involves no text on the board or cards, so even younger players can follow along with just the images. The game also plays well with two players; the BGG forums show some complaints from players who found they couldn’t make a legal card play in two-player games, but we’ve never run into that issue. Gameplay takes about 45 minutes for two players, an hour or a little over that for three; we haven’t tried it with four, which is the maximum. Tobago also offers added replay value because the board itself comprises three reversible pieces that may be connected in different fashions, allowing for 32 distinct game boards. It’s a good chance of pace if you’re a fan of Stone Age or Small World but want something with simpler mechanics and less strategizing.

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