→ February 24, 2010
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Why I cook.

Returning to the subject of Michael Ruhlman, the passionate and blunt food writer behind Ratio, he posted a mini-essay on his blog last week titled “Why I Cook,” giving his reasons and urging his readers to do the same. (This comment from one of his readers is alone worth the click, although it’s quite sad.) Here, therefore, is my answer to the question of why I cook.

I cook, first and foremost, to eat. When I was in graduate school, my wife was working 40 hours a week as a preschool teacher, which, some of you probably know, is exhausting work. I, meanwhile, was done every day by 3 pm, sometimes sooner, and generally didn’t have much homework to do, so I thought it was the least I could do to take over the cooking duties. And, in hindsight, I was pretty bad at it. But we ate, and we ate cheaply. That still holds today, even though I can splurge on more expensive ingredients – although I now understand the value of those ingredients, and when and where it’s worth the splurge and which corners one can safely cut for home cooking.

My life has changed dramatically in the eleven years since I’ve graduated, as I now have a demanding job but a commensurate income and at least have the excuse to slack on cooking. I continue to do so because…

* I want the control over what goes into our bodies, especially since the first-person plural now includes my three-year-old daughter. I know what we’re eating, and I know that we’re limiting her intake of pesticides, high fructose corn syrup, preservatives, or needless quantities of salt. I know the bread we eat is 100% whole wheat, because I made it. I know the beef we eat was grass- or grain-fed, and that the sea bass I purchase (rarely) came from a sustainable fishery, because I bought it and cooked it myself.

* All three of us have to monitor our diets to limit our intake of one or more ingredients or nutrients. For me, it’s lactose, and a handful of other foods that my stomach doesn’t like. For my wife, it’s sugar and a few minor food allergies. For my daughter, it’s protein, so we’re raising her as a vegetarian, and are glad that she hasn’t quite made the bacon/pig connection yet. (I did suggest we name the stuffed-animal pig we bought her “Smokey,” but my wife called that “twisted.”)

* It lets me spend my calories where I want to. I’m not on a diet, nor am I a rabid calorie-counter, but I will put on weight if I completely ignore what I’m eating, something that happens to many people in my line of work because we’re on the road so much. When I cook, I can stick with lean meals and use those extra calories on dessert, or on a big mess of waffles and sausage on a Sunday morning.

* I can vote with my mouth. Organic food isn’t for everyone because it’s expensive, and while I wish organic farms could feed everyone today, we’re not there yet. I also know that the more that people like me who are not rabid environmentalists but care enough about food safety, the environment, and the rights of farmers and laborers in the food supply chain choose to buy organic or sustainable or fair-trade products, the more that that section of the industry can grow.

* You can’t beat the flavors of fresh food. I can buy and cook the same day, and if I time it right, I might get a locally-grown vegetable or fruit from ground to table in a day or two. We pick strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries every summer and I put them up in jams so that I can still get that unbeatable taste of summer in the middle of January. I grow herbs in my backyard because pesto Genovese is sweeter and more potent when you picked the basil 20 minutes before putting it in the food processor.

* And, most of all, I cook because I love it. There is something magical about taking ingredients, applying heat and a little know-how, and producing a dinner to feed your family. There’s a tremendous reward in bringing a dessert or a basket of bread to a party and seeing people enjoy the food you crafted with your hands – regardless of whether you ever receive a “thanks” or a “wow.” And, to me, food just tastes better when I earned it in the kitchen.

Any one or two of these reasons would be sufficient for me to continue cooking, but all of them together have made it a part of my routine that borders on obsession, to the point where I miss it after too many days on the road – the sight of bright-green basil or deep red roasted peppers, smell of onions caramelizing in the pan, the feel of bread dough that just needs a few seconds of kneading, the sound of meat hitting the surface of a hot pan, and the taste of all of the above.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 23, 2010
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Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio + whole wheat pancakes.

Ratios liberate you – when you know the ratio and some basic techniques, then you can really start to cook.

That’s the final line of Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, a cookbook that’s also part anti-cookbook in the way it attempts to separate you from your 1/8-tsp-this-and-1/2-cup-that recipes by addressing the underlying relationships between ingredients that make the recipes work. It’s worth buying even if you never get out of the Doughs and Batters section that opens the book, including master formulas for bread, pasta, pie crust, biscuits (his are rolled, but unrolled they are as tender as can be), cookies, pâte à choux, pancakes, muffins, fritters, crepes, and more. I’ve adapted his master pancake recipe to use 100% whole wheat flour* below, but if you do decide to buy the book, I suppose you might want to delve into later sections on stocks, roux, brines, vinaigrettes, hollandaise, and custards. I’m just saying the first section is the part I’m wearing out.

*I love white-flour pancakes, but let’s face it – you feel like crap after eating a whole stack of them. Pancakes have a high glycemic load, and good ones contain a fair amount of fat, so to me, they function more like dessert than breakfast. If I’m making pancakes for the family for breakfast, it needs to be a kind that won’t put us all in a food coma for the rest of the day. It reminds me of a line in the very silly too-good-to-be-true travel memoir Pasquale’s Nose, where a crazy old man has just one sentence to say: “Nobody ever feels good after eating pancakes.”

Whole wheat pancakes

Ruhlman’s recipe is identical to this one save an extra half-ounce of flour, since he’s using white all-purpose flour instead of whole wheat. These freeze and reheat well – cool completely on a rack, freeze in a flat layer (if you stack them in a bag before they freeze, you’ll need a jackhammer to separate them), then reheat in the microwave for about 40 seconds, or reheat for 30 seconds, top with cold syrup, and give it another 10 seconds to heat it through.

Wet ingredients:
8 ounces milk (anything but skim)
2 large eggs
2 ounces (1/2 stick) butter, melted
1 tsp vanilla extract

Dry ingredients

7.5 ounces (by weight) whole wheat flour
2 Tbsp sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

1. Preheat your griddle. It has to be completely hot or the first batch of pancakes won’t brown.
2. Whisk the wet ingredients together in a bowl, making sure the egg is thoroughly broken up.
3. Whisk the dry ingredients together in a second bowl.
4. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and stir briefly to fully hydrate the flour and eliminate any huge lumps. Small lumps are okay.
5. Lightly grease the griddle and immediately begin pouring the batter on to the griddle once any sizzling (of butter or bacon fat) has stopped.
6. When the bubbling on the top becomes firm and the bottom is nicely browned, flip and cook for roughly half the time it took for the first side to cook.

These pancakes are strong enough to handle anything you’d fold into ordinary pancake batter, but I haven’t found a better partner for the nutty, grainy, slightly cardboardy taste of whole wheat than sweet blueberries.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ February 22, 2010
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Las Vegas eats, 2010 edition.

Latest draft blog post is on Kyle Blair, Sammy Solis, and Cory Vaughn. I’ll be on Baseball Tonight on ESPN Radio tonight in the 10 pm EST hour, and on Mike & Mike on Wednesday morning at 8:10 am EST. I recorded 45-second previews for M&M on the four AL West teams, which will air some time over the next two weeks.

You’ve asked about this week’s chat (maybe Friday, definitely not the usual time on Thursday) and a podcast (still working on it, so Jason and I will probably bootstrap one in the short term). Thanks for bearing with me.

—

I spent under 48 hours in Vegas last week and mostly went to places I’ve already talked about here (in December 2008) or in chats. I only have one truly new place to recommend an inexpensive breakfast spot in a strip mall a mile or two west of the Strip, called The Maple Tree. The concept is to serve the food you’d find in a New England diner or bed-and-breakfast, although I think it’s fair to say it’s more straight-up American breakfast. The one distinctive item I had was the maple muffin, a very light, airy pastry like an angel food cake with a pronounced maple flavor and none of the heaviness of a typical muffin. For the meal, I did a sampler so I could at least taste the pancake (fluffy, but a little bland without the syrup) while also getting the usual eggs, meat (a kielbasa sausage that was seared on the outside and therefore cold at the center), and country potatoes. Everything is cooked to order – in fact, I heard the waitress ask the cook why he only does one plate at a time, which is inefficient but meant I knew what I was getting was freshly prepared – and all that food ran only about $13 including tea.

Jason Churchill and I went to craftsteak on Friday night – and no, per diem didn’t quite cover it – which was my first time there since 2004. It was as spectacular as I remembered it, especially the 24-hour braised short rib, which is one of their signature dishes. (Granted, I’m not sure that 24 hours of braising, if that’s what they’re really saying, is necessary, but the dish is amazingly tender). For sides, we went with the mushroom risotto – a lot creamier than a typical risotto, and a little more al dente than a truly authentic one, but still plus courtesy of the mix of perfectly-sauteed wild mushrooms – and the asparagus, which was probably over a half-pound before cooking and flavored with fresh thyme. With two entrees and two sides, no booze, no dessert, the pre-tip bill was over $100, so I could easily see two people with big appetites and strong livers racking up a $200-250 bill no problem.

Churchill and I also hit two places where I’d eaten on that last trip, with both matching their previous reports. We went to Firefly with a crowd – there were six of us – so we ended up with a few items I hadn’t tried before. The tuna tartare was fair, good-quality fish but not all that flavorful outside of the mango/avocado accompaniment, but the merguez (spicy lamb sausage) was outstanding, and while I skipped the lamb chops the sauteed lentils that came with it were good enough to be a menu item in their own right. We also did lunch at Lotus of Siam, which is currently expanding but still open for business; the khao soi was somewhere between a noodle dish and a tom kha gai (soup), with sweet and spicy flavors brought to life by the assortment of pickled vegetables served alongside it.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 19, 2010
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Draft blog is live.

Incredibly premature ranking of the top 50 prospects for this year’s MLB draft is up now, for Insiders, as is my piece on Bryce Harper, Levon Washington, and a few JC arms. Jason Churchill’s first piece on the draft blog, previewing the first weekend in the Division 1 season, is also live.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With:
→ February 17, 2010
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The Known World.

Edward Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World combines techniques or themes from some seriously great novels of the last fifty years, including Beloved, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and a faux-historical writing style I’ve seen before but whose origin I can’t place. Unfortunately, it ended up less satisfying than the great novels it emulates, so while a solid novel in its own right, it suffers from the inevitable comparisons the reader will make while moving through the book.

The center of the book is the estate of the slaveowner Henry Townsend, a black man who became free around age 20 but who chose to purchase slaves for himself and build his fortune on the backs of members of his own race. Townsend dies at the beginning of the novel, although we see large chunks of his life through flashbacks, and the bulk of the plot revolves around the gradual decaying of the tight order of things – the business operations and the formal and informal hierarchies – of the tiny empire he’s built on that estate. The wide cast of characters includes slaves, freed blacks, and whites whose lives intersected with the Townsends, often with disastrous results.

While whites are largely depicted as forces of evil in the book, whether directly bringing evil on the black characters or simply by opening the door for ill fortunate, Jones targets black slaveowners and even highlights black slaves who exercised formal or informal authority over others for their moral culpability in the suffering of slaves. Using a black slaveowner and his family at the story’s center allows him to remove the facile white-bad-black-good dichotomy that could obscure the greater themes of morality he’s trying to explore, and the resulting moral ambiguity suffuses the novel, such as the question of whether a “fair” slaveowner is any better than a cruel one, or what the value of a law is when men charged with enforcing it fail to do so or even openly flout it. Jones mentions other outrages of the time like anti-miscegenation laws, but brushes past them because they’re not worth his time – his interest, beyond just telling a story, seems to lie in exploring situations that lack right or obvious answers, and thus he ignores those where modern sensibilities will lead all readers to the same horror or repulsion.

Where The Known World fell a little short for me was in narrative greed – it’s obvious from the start that the plantation will crumble without Henry Townsend, and it was evident to me early in the book that Caldonia, his widow, wasn’t up to the task of managing it, which presaged, at a high level, what was going to happen with the slaves and the estate. The interest of the plot, for me, was largely in finding out the fates of the various central characters, particularly the slaves, although Henry’s parents do figure into the last major plot strand, one that I thought had a strong symbolic significance and was the only area where Jones took square aim at whites, even non-slaveowners, for their role in the great cultural tragedy of slavery. And Jones remains true to life – some characters find positive, if not actually happy, endings, while others meet tragic ends and some just end up in the great grey middle.

The faux-historical trick I mentioned in the intro merits a mention. Jones intersperses fake historical facts, written in the dry manner of a history text or even a census register, throughout the book, whether to tell us the fate of a minor character or to give shape or color to a place or a county or a period of time. I found it very effective, and it gave the book the feel of a longer one because of its level of detail, without requiring the time an 800-page book demands.

Next up: Since finishing this, I read Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder, the last published Christie novel, a solid but unspectacular Miss Marple novel that, as always, had me second-guessing my instincts (which turned out to be right, although I can hardly take credit after doubting myself so heavily) after I thought I’d picked out the culprit. After finishing that this morning, I’ve started Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the year before Jones won with The Known World.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 15, 2010
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Hollywood eats.

My first draft column of 2010 is up today, a breakdown of Saturday’s showcase at the MLB Urban Youth Academy in LA, featuring just about every top senior in SoCal this year. (One guy was missing, and I’m working on finding out why.) There’s also a clip of my ESPNEWS hit today, talking Victor Martinez (my most boring answer of the day, of course). And I’ll be on ESPN Radio’s Baseball Tonight in the 10 pm EST hour tonight.

To the eats:

First meal was at Umami Burger in Hollywood, which turned out to be within walking distance of my hotel, which made me feel rather stupid for driving there and rocking the GPS to go a whopping 0.4 miles or so. Anyway, it’s a good burger, made from the relatively unknown cut of cow called flap meat, which has a strong beefy flavor and responds well to quick searing (so I don’t think you want to go past medium on your burger here). Where they shine is in the toppings, a mix of grilled and roasted vegetables designed, in theory, to hit that “fifth taste” of umami; I know I spotted caramelized onions, some kind of roasted tomato, and a little cracker made from grated, griddled Parmiggiano cheese, served on a Portuguese (and therefore slightly sweet) roll. I strongly recommend the burger, but skip the fries and try the thick-battered onion rings, with a crunchy crust that shatters on impact.

Sticking with Hollywood, I went to Ike Sushi at Hollywood and Gower, buried in a corner strip mall, which turned out to be a great find. The fish was fresh – I’m not sure how a sushi place in LA would stay open if they didn’t use the freshest fish – and other than the salmon, just barely laced with a little ponzu and some finely minced scallion, it was all served straight-up, including some of the best yellowtail I’ve ever had (Ike also had yellowtail belly, or toro, a good find although it was a little tougher than what I get at Koi in Seal Beach) and very strong maguro. Six or seven orders of fish, including tip, was under $40. They’re apparently known for their rolls and combinations, if that’s more to your tastes, but when I’m in California I want the real deal.

Breakfast the next morning was at Square One Dining, a recommendation from dak of FireJoeMorgan fame. They specialize in local & organic ingredients, and the menu incorporates a lot of fresh vegetables in their omelettes and baked egg dishes. The basil and asparagus omelette with goat cheese and squash was fresh all over, but a little light on flavor – it needed salt, but also could have used some oomph from a spice or a bitter vegetable. The thyme-roasted potatoes were golden and crispy and tasted a little more fried than roasted, not that there’s anything wrong with that, and they had an excellent tea selection, with large bags of either whole leaves or something close to it.

I also went back to the Culver City location of Versailles, a small local chain of Cuban restaurants, which I hit last year as well. I mention it here to recommend it again (the lechon asado is excellent, and the service is fast – I was in and out inside of 20 minutes after sitting at the counter) and to torment Joe Sheehan, who recommended it to me in the first place.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ February 10, 2010
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NCIS: LA.

My wife enjoys both flavors of NCIS on CBS, and I find the original one pretty solid for a network TV program, so I watch along with her; if she wasn’t a fan, I doubt I’d give either a second thought. We’ve been watching NCIS: LA this season, and “watchable” is about its ceiling right now – but I think that, if the writers have any stones, they have an opportunity to turn it into something much better.

If you’ve seen the original NCIS, you know the formula: well-developed characters, lots of witty banter, incredibly simple plots where the perpetrator is always one of the first three non-regular characters you meet, and some serious fast/loose play with technology. If you’re looking for riveting stories, this isn’t it. It’s entertaining, and the writers have done a good job with the characters, but if they get CBS in the afterlife Agatha Christie scoffs for an hour every Tuesday night.

NCIS: LA follows the pattern of the clones in the Michael Keaton movie Multiplicity – it’s a copy, but the quality is below that of the original. The plots are even sillier, with higher stakes and more ridiculous resolutions, and even the show’s very premise – a secret NCIS unit in Los Angeles that, if you’re a stickler for things like accuracy, is WAY out of its jurisdiction in almost every episode – is absurd. The writers are pushing hard to flesh out the various characters, but only one (G. Callen, played by Chris O’Donnell) is at all compelling, and, amazingly enough, LL Cool J carries most of the episodes. He’s the best actor on the show after Oscar winner Linda Hunt, who is outstanding as the eccentric unit manager in a fundamentally supporting role, and the writers have wisely put his Sam with G. Callen in a “bromance” at the center of the show. The rest of the cast is bloated even after the recent elimination of Dominic, the biggest cipher. Kensey, played by Brazilian actress Daniela Ruah, serves primarily as a pair of legs and as the token female agent, while Eric, the techie, has the same cliched TV-geek’s inability to stop himself from going into excessive detail on technical subjects, something that was already hackneyed when NCIS started using it for McGee.

Despite its many flaws, NCIS: LA is the highest-rated new show of the 2009-10 season and one of the top-rated shows on network television because it has an incredible lead-in audience from NCIS and serves as an extension of the prior show. The writers and producers could, of course, rest on those laurels, let the money roll in for a few years until either it or the original NCIS runs out of gas, and move on to something else, older and perhaps a bit wealthier. But I see this as opportunity: If audiences will tune in by the millions to watch a mediocre show, why not experiment with something edgier that might not have found the same audience if it hadn’t been handed enormous ratings from the start?

The episode where Dominic was removed from the cast of characters reminded me of one of my favorite British shows, MI-5 (known as Spooks in the UK), which easily beats any network crime drama I’ve ever seen in the U.S*. MI-5 is the British equivalent of the CIA on matters of “internal” security (meaning on British soil), and the show puts the agency and its operations at the heart of the series, rather than the characters. That focus and the serious subject matter give the writers substantial latitude to break with the audience’s normal expectations for a crime drama, where main characters may be killed or otherwise eliminated with little or no notice. Even though things do usually work out in the end, they don’t always work out, and successful operations on MI-5 often come with sacrifices, costs, or casualties. As a result, the show brings a tension unlike any I’ve seen on network TV here.

*I’ve never watched Fox’s 24, because I have little or no interest in a show with a storyline that demands that I watch every week, given my travel schedule and irregular work hours, but I get the sense that that’s one show that matches MI-5 for anything-goes tension. I’m open to other suggestions, as always.

NCIS:LA almost nodded to MI-5 in the episode where Dominic departs the show, but it proved an outlier with the following episode, which brought the series to new depths of ridiculousness when Callen saves an entire mall from botulinum toxin exposure by diving to catch a bottle of the bad stuff that was thrown from two levels up … right near where he happened to be standing. And he made a shoestring catch, of course. That’s fake tension – there was no way in hell CBS was showing a mall full of people dying from botulinum toxin poisoning – whereas MI-5‘s history of less-than-happy endings provides real tension, not to mention twice the freedom for the writers to craft compelling and at least moderately realistic stories, where characters burn out, quit, get hurt, and die, and you never quite know what’s going to happen next. If NCIS: LA took that risk, which would be reasonable given the subject matter of the show, not only would it help them turn over a fringy cast of characters beyond Sam, Callen, and Linda Hunt’s Hetty, it could turn a merely watchable program into a can’t-miss one.

Filed Under: Media Tagged With: , ,
→ February 9, 2010
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Mrs. Dalloway.

Virginia Woolf ripped James Joyce’s Ulysses when it was first published, but liked the idea of a single-day novel enough to use it in a novel of her own, one that hews more closely to the conventional novel form and appears to be something of a rejoinder to Joyce’s genre-busting efforts: Mrs. Dalloway. Unfortunately, a straightforward novel about quotidian life is about as interesting as you’d expect a novel about the mundane thoughts of ordinary people to be; that is, it’s boring as hell.

Woolf’s gambit is to spend most of the novel inside the heads of her characters, with jarring, unannounced transitions from head to head, sometimes within a room (almost as if you had a sudden camera change, from behind one character’s eyes to behind another’s), sometimes to a separate time and place through the slimmest of segues. Only one of her characters might qualify as interesting, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith, who today would be diagnosed with post-tramautic stress disorder and possibly treated, thus making him relatively uninteresting for the novelist’s purposes. The contrast between his futile attempts to make sense of a world gone mad – he’s a World War I veteran who hears voices and suffers paranoid delusions – and the utterly insignificant thoughts of the vapid upper-class characters in the rest of the book is shocking, but Woolf spends too much time with the well-heeled and not enough with Septimus.

The one wisp of intrigue in the book comes from the hints at romantic tension between Clarissa Dalloway and her former flame, Peter Walsh, once a boy of some promise but now a man whose progress has been hindered by his own poor choices. The sight of Clarissa still stirs old passions in Peter, reducing him to tears or boiling him in rage … but nothing much comes of it and Clarissa’s party, the goal of her day, goes off as planned. Her own existential crises – mostly a fear of death or simply regret that all this must one day end – seem so much less serious given how she chooses to spend her time or emotions.

Peter does have one small episode that stood out, for me, for its sheer darkness, as he stalks – there’s no better word for it – a young woman in the streets of London for several blocks before giving up:

Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms – his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought – making oneself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one could never share – it smashed to atoms.

Up next: I’ve taken a few days off from reading, but I’ll start Edward P. Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World later this week.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ February 8, 2010
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Thurn and Taxis.

We finally played the boardgame Thurn & Taxis with more than two people last night – we had a Game Night on Game Night with a couple of friends – so I’m confident enough to review and recommend the game. It’s fun, it’s quite simple to pick up, and it moves quickly; it’s probably most comparable to Ticket to Ride among games I’ve reviewed before, but with a little more complexity in scoring, allowing for more ways to win the game without the rigidity of fixed routes.

T&T, which won the Spiel des Jahres in 2006, is played on a map of southern Germany and the borders of a few nearby countries, with 24 cities marked on the map across nine different regions. The object of the game is to amass points by building, turn by turn, postal routes (the House of Thurn und Taxis* ran a postal company in north-central Europe for over two centuries) that connect these cities based on cards drawn from the main deck of 72 cards (3 of each city), with six cards visible at any time. Routes must run at least 3 cities, and you must add to your route each turn or “close” it, placing houses on the cities in the route and collecting any point bonuses; if you can’t add to an open route on your turn, you must discard it and start over, an often fatal error. But your ability to place houses on cities in a route you close is limited by a rule that says you may only place one house per region in a closed route, or place houses in only one region of the route, meaning that a route of seven cities across three regions is inherently inefficient, as is a route that includes many cities in which you’ve already placed houses.

*Yes, I’ve read Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and no, I neither liked nor fully understood it, two things that are most likely connected.

The bonuses are the key to winning the game, of course, as you earn points by placing houses on all cities in a region (or pair of regions in the case of smaller regions with one or two cities each), by placing at least one house in all nine regions, or by building routes of five or more cities. Each bonus declines by a point when each player achieves it. There’s also a sequential series of bonuses, where you receive a carriage card for building routes of at least 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 cities, in order, without skipping any of the cards, with the points ranging from two points for the three-city route to ten points for the seven-city route. When a player gets the 7-city carriage card, or places the last of his 22 houses, the game ends, with each player taking one more turn.

Those are almost all of the rules of the game, summarized in under 400 words, but those rules allow enough different strategies to keep the game interesting. You have enough houses for all but two of the cities, so you can try to win by placing all your houses first (there’s a penalty of one point per house left in your pool at game end), but have to sacrifice one or two of the regional bonuses to do so. You can try to race to the seven-carriage card, but may be short in region bonuses, or be late for the long-route bonuses. And you’re always at the mercy of the cards in the pool and the deck.

That proved to be the major wrinkle between two- and four-player games. In the two-player game, I found it easy to look ahead a few turns, because I knew what city cards were likely to be available to me the next time around. In the four-player game, not only is that impossible, but the player who chose cards right before me was executing a similar strategy and going after similar routes, so if a card I needed was in the pool, he’d have a chance to grab it, and I clearly wasn’t fast enough to make the mid-game adjustment. (Also, it is absolutely the wrong game to play with your friend the operations research consultant, even more so if he’s the player going right before you, doing critical-path modeling in his head while he steals the cards you need. But I’m not bitter.) Those adjustments aren’t required in a two-player game, so while the two-player game is fun, there’s a solitaire-ish element to it, while the four-player game has just enough randomness to throw a wrench in your strategy and force you to rethink plans on the fly. Like Stone Age, it seems to me to have a good balance of luck and strategy for this type of game. It’s definitely a good starter game for any of you looking to jump into German-style board games, with enough sophistication to satisfy someone who’s already into the genre.

—

Some of you have asked me questions, here, on Twitter, and in chat about games by skill or complexity level. Our collection of German-style games has grown to the point where I think I could categorize them roughly for you by my perception of their complexity, both in terms of learning the game for the first time and in terms of repeated play. Links are to reviews on this site or to the top ten rankings for three games (Babel, Metro, Settlers) that I only wrote up there.

Lowest complexity:

Moderately low complexity:

Moderate complexity:

  • San Juan (long, complex rules, but very simple to play after that)
  • Stone Age (moderately complex rules, a few simple strategies)
  • Babel
  • Carcassonne (simple game, complex scoring strategy)

Moderately high complexity

Highest complexity:

  • Puerto Rico (played twice, many rules, long setup, complex strategy)
Filed Under: Games Tagged With: , , ,
→ February 6, 2010
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Game Six.

I received a review copy of Mark Frost’s Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America’s Pastime in October, but just got to it now because my book queue at the time was running around 3-4 months. (Thanks to Ulysses and Christmas, it’s now closer to six.) I started it right after finishing Mrs. Dalloway (more on that book later) and put it down before I got to page 20, because it is garbage – florid prose with huge, unsourced, inaccurate statements on baseball would kill even a great story, which I’m not sure Game Six even offers. The phrase that killed me was in a fanboyish passage on Fred Lynn: “what was beyond dispute the most sensational rookie season of any player in the history of pro baseball…” If Frost wants to argue that Lynn had what was – to that point, I assume – the greatest rookie season in MLB history, I suppose there’s a case to be made, and he could probably weasel out of an argument behind his bizarre choice of “most sensational,” which now joins “most feared” in the pantheon of phrases the innumerate like to use to try to argue their way past the stats they don’t understand. But “beyond dispute” set off alarm bells – in a book with no stats or sources, it’s like saying “check my work” – and it didn’t take long to cook up a dispute:

Player Year Age OPS+ wRC+ wOBA
Ted Williams 1939 20 160 168 .464
Dick Allen 1964 22 162 167 .403
Fred Lynn 1975 23 161 163 .427

(OPS+ from Baseball-Reference; wRC+ and wOBA from Fangraphs.)

So Ted Williams – who, by the way, played for one of the two teams in Frost’s book – had 37 points of wOBA+ over Lynn despite being three years younger during his rookie season. But it is “beyond dispute” that Lynn’s season was the “most sensational” ever by a rookie? Okay, sparky. I’ll just put the book down now, because when I read a baseball book, I want it to at least get the baseball stuff right.

That quote wasn’t the only problem I found in the first fifteen pages; Frost is clearly out to lionize his subjects, including the reporters who covered the game, and he prints inner monologues from long-dead people that have to be his own interpretations or creations, which had me questioning every statement that wasn’t backed up by an actual quote from someone involved in or covering the game. If this was a book about a famous soccer match, perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed these inaccuracies or errors and just kept right on moving, but knowing a little about the game and even knowing some of the people mentioned in the book (or at worst being two degrees away), I found it unreadable.

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