board games — Page 6

→ June 25, 2019
→ By keith

Downforce.

Restoration Games has brought back a half-dozen old board games since the company was founded a few years ago, including one of my childhood favorites, Stop Thief!, which was kind of a precursor to modern games that ask you to download an app to help you play. (The original Stop Thief! came with a battery-operated “phone” that would give you clues in the form of sounds to tell you if you’d found something or even located the thief – and, if he escapes, sounds of him running or breaking glass so you can guess where he went.)

One of their first redesigns was the game now known as Downforce, which has existed under multiple names going back to 1974, when designer Wolfgang Kramer released his first game, an abstract game called Tempo. He repurposed the basic mechanics of that game for a series of car-racing games, including 1996’s Top Race, which seems to be the last iteration of this game until Restoration brought it back in 2017. This new version has slick graphics and very simple to learn game play that still has the same core mechanic where players play cards to move six cars around the track, but where the card you play likely moves some of your opponents’ cars forward too, and you can win the race but still lose the game depending on how every player bets.

Players begin the game with a hand of cards that varies with the number of players – you deal out the entire deck of 42 cards, ditching any remainder if you have 4 or 5 players – and then use those cards to bid for the six cars in the ‘auction’ that ends with all cars assigned to players. When you win a car in the bidding, you get two additional cards: one that lets you move that car 8 spaces (and doesn’t require you to move any other cars), and a card with a special power unique to you for that game, with some more useful than others. (My favorite is the one called Tricky, where you have the option to execute the moves on any card you play from the bottom up, rather than from the top down, so you can choose which is most advantageous and may be able to use the card to create or clear a bottleneck.)

Each player then plays one of their cards on each turn. The cards have from one to six rows, each row showing a number and a car color; the player moves all of those cars the displayed number of spaces, going from top to bottom, if possible. (Cars can be blocked when the track narrows in the three turns; you can and should use that to your advantage.) Some cards have spaces marked ‘wild,’ which you can assign to any car not already shown on the card. Players go around the table playing these cards until all six cars have crossed the finish line or the remaining players with cars on the track have run out of cars.

The track has three yellow lines across it, roughly at the quarter marks, and when the lead car crosses each line, every player bets on which of the six cars will win the race by marking it on their scoresheets (in secret). This can give you an incentive to help a rival player win if you realize your car isn’t likely to do so, and creates a way for a player hopelessly behind in the race to at least have a chance to win the whole game. Your final score is your winnings from your car(s), ranging from $12 million for first place to $2 million for fifth, plus your winnings from the betting (you can get money if the car you bet on at each point finishes in the top three), minus the cost you paid at the auction. A perfect bet, where you bet on the eventual winner in all three betting periods, would get you $18 million, enough to win some games even if you get nothing from your car.

Games take about 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the number of players and how quickly everyone takes their turns. My seven-year-old niece had no problem keeping up with the game after she sat and watched the adults play once, just needing a little guidance on using the cards to her best advantage. (I think it took a little longer for her to grasp the way the cards worked when certain cars would be blocked partway through a move.) And who doesn’t love a race car game … especially one that doesn’t suck?

→ June 24, 2019
→ By keith

Lanterns Dice.

The 2015 game Lanterns has been one of my favorite titles to play on my iPad for since the app version came out in 2016, which in turn led me to trade for the physical game as well. It’s a quick-moving game that appears light but has more depth to the long-term strategy than it seems, especially because players all place tiles into the same space and have to plan for the potential for someone else to screw up your little plan.

Renegade Games is about to release Lanterns Dice: Lights in the Sky, a spinoff, roll-and-write game that incorporates similar themes to the original but gets rid of most of the directly competitive elements of the original, asking players to fill out spaces on their individual sheets to match set patterns and create contiguous areas for more scoring. That lack of interaction on the table itself makes this a very different experience than that of playing Lanterns, which makes this more of a competitive solo game – what you do almost barely affects anyone else’s game or score. That said, it’s still a solid roll-and-write game because of the variability in game setup and because of some new quirks on the sheets that can let you chain together certain moves.

Lanterns Dice comes with four six-sided dice, each side showing a distinct color, and gives each player a sheet with a 9×6 grid of “pools,” each of which contains two triangles of different colors. When it’s your turn to roll the dice, you roll them into the tray and shake it until the four dice sit in the center, and then you orient it so one die faces you. You get to fill in one triangle of that color on your sheet; every other player has a die facing them at the same time, and they fill in triangles of those colors. On your roll, you also get a free fill from a color specific to that round, shown on the right of your scoresheet.

The primary goal in Lanterns Dice is to fill in complete pools (both triangles) to match any of the four patterns that you’ve chosen for scoring in that particular game. The box comes with eight patterns, two of which cover three squares, four of which cover four squares, and two of which cover five squares; you pick which four to use, using one small, two medium, and one large. The point value for each pattern declines the more it’s used over the course of the game, so being the first to score a pattern has a modest baked-in bonus of an extra point or two. You will also score at game-end for the second-largest contiguous block of completed pools on your sheet, so you need to create two disconnected chains and try to keep them close in size to maximize these points. There’s a third way to score by surrounding pools with boat symbols on them, filling in the four orthogonally adjacent pools but leaving the boat’s pool untouched.

The interesting aspect of Lanterns Dice comes from two other symbols that appear on certain pools on your sheet. When you complete a pool with a square platform, you get to fill in one triangle on any adjacent pool. When you fill in either triangle on a pool with a circle on it, you get one “gift,” tracked at the bottom of the scoresheet, and you can redeem those for valuable prizes. You can spend one gift to reroll your four dice one time. Each game also has three bonus moves you can buy with one to three gifts, such as letting you fill in a second triangle of the same color you rolled, or letting you fill in one or both triangles on a separate pool somewhere on your sheet. These can be very powerful if you plan them out a little, because you can set yourself up to get a chain of free moves, especially later in the game.

Games take about a half an hour, and setup is really very quick – you just have to sort and choose the fireworks tiles showing the patterns you can match and score in that game. It’s a nice filler game, but I think it loses the facet of the original Lanterns that I liked most: the interaction among players on the main board, where you’re competing to place tiles in the most valuable places, and your placement can interfere with someone else’s plans. The dice game also isn’t as visually appealing as the base version, if that’s your thing. It’s a solid addition if you love the original or enjoy roll-and-writes, but I don’t think it’s going to be a regular play around my house.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, dice games, family games

→ June 9, 2019
→ By keith

Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra.

Azul was my #1 game of 2017 and remains a huge favorite in my house for so many reasons – simple mechanics, high interaction, appealing components, solid play for two players and for four, and the most important fact: it’s a lot of fun. The game was such a huge hit that the designer and Next Move games have released a spinoff game, Azul: Stained Glass Of Sintra, that borrows about half of the mechanics of the original but asks players to achieve different goals, creating a slightly longer game but one I find just as entertaining.

The basics of Azul: Stained Glass Of Sintra are identical to the original. Tiles in five colors are placed on platforms in the center of the table, four per platform, and on a turn, each player takes all of the tiles of one color from a platform. Remaining tiles go to the center, from which players may also take tiles. As the round progresses, players then have to weigh the potential of getting stuck with tiles they can’t place, which also carries a penalty – this time, one that increases as the game goes on, rather than resetting every round.

Here, players have unique boards of eight columns of five spaces in different combinations of those colors. The player places as many of the tiles they’ve taken in a single column, moving their personal glazier token to that column. Once a column is filled, the player places one of the tiles on his board below the columns, discards the rest, and scores: 1 to 4 points for that column, plus points for every column to the right of that one for which the player has scored at least once previously in the game, plus one point per tile matching the special tile color for that round.

When a player fills a column, they flip it to the other side, which contains a different pattern; once that side is filled, the column is removed entirely. The bottom board thus has two spaces under every column, and there are bonuses at game-end tied to how many of those spaces you fill and in where – two different sets of bonuses, depending on which side of the boards the players use. My preference is side A, which gives you bonuses of 3, 6, or 10 points per 2×2 square.

The original game is a good bit simpler and more streamlined than this game, which takes slightly longer to play, but also gives you more options than the first game did. In the first game, it was easier to get stuck with tiles you couldn’t place. Here, you have more spaces to fill and more options, plus a way to pass your turn by moving your glazier back to the first position (you can only places tiles under him or to his right), which factors into the calculus at the end of the round battle to avoid getting the shaft.

There’s an elegance to the original that’s missing in this game, but the play in this game is also more open-ended, so you will usually feel like you have more choices. I don’t know that this is really a distinct game from the original; it’s more like a new flavor of the same thing. Some folks like original recipe and some like extra crispy. If you loved the first Azul as I did, though, you’ll at least like this version. (You can also buy the original game here.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, family games, family strategy games

→ April 20, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/20/19.

Nothing new for ESPN+ subscribers this week, although I’ll have another draft blog post next week, followed by a draft top 50 the week after (I got bumped by some other draft). My last ESPN+ post covered likely first rounders Alek Manoah and Josh Jung, with Manoah looking like a top ten pick when I saw him.

I reviewed the app version of Castles of Burgundy, one of my favorite high strategy games, for Ars Technica. MENSA also gave its Select tag to five games from 2019 and I’ve reviewed two already, Gizmos and Architects of the West Kingdom.

I rarely appear on podcasts due to time constraints, but when Kyle Bandujo asked if I’d come on his show, Trouble with the Script, to review the worst baseball movie I’ve ever seen, I couldn’t possibly decline. I think we properly eviscerated Trouble with the Curve.

My free email newsletter is becoming dangerously close to a weekly thing now. I must be mellowing in my old age.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This is from February but I hadn’t seen it until a friend sent it along this week – best-selling novelist Dan Mallory is a serial liar who has made false claims of cancer and bipolar disorder to try to further his career. None of the claims has anything to do with his book, The Woman in the Window, however; it’s just that much of what he says about his life to date is untrue.
Mariners pitcher Rob Whalen recently retired due in large part to anxiety disorder, and he says the Mariners handled his case extremely poorly.
WIRED has a long, in-depth look at the chaos inside Facebook in 2018 as the company was called to account for its role in influencing the 2016 election, the way it promulgates hate speech and fake news, and poor data privacy standards.
Audio link: KQED looks at the Coachella concert-goers and those of us at home don’t see, a community far less affluent than the attendees are, and that is dealing with environmental problems from the warming desert.
The Writers’ Guild of America has demanded that its members cut ties with their agents to protest conflicts of interest by agencies that also produce shows via “packaging” deals. This past week, the first writer came out to say he wasn’t going to do so, in a letter that is pompous, self-serving, and in at least one instance untrue.
Fair Harvard, doing me proud: The university’s health services rejected a student proposal to make naxolone, the treatment capable of reversing opioid overdoses, available on campus. The money quote: “They had some skepticism about whether the research actually suggested that naloxone would be effective at Harvard.” If Harvard students have different biology from other humans, I’d love to know about it sooner rather than later.
The FDA may start cracking down on the use of the Non-GMO Project label.
A Bangladeshi student who reported sexual harassment by one of her teachers to the police was burned to death by members of her community, sparking large protests in the Muslim nation in south Asia.
A pair of adults wore Nazi armbands and MAGA shirts in Providence, Rhode Island, and then stood atop the city’s Holocaust memorial where they gave the Nazi salute.
The Washington Post looks at one possible fix to the “nightmare” job market for academics.
Brewers reliever Jeremy Jeffress started a food truck with someone from his hometown to re-create a favorite childhood experience of fried seafood. I need reports from those of you in Milwaukee when it starts up on May 5th.
Apparently there’s a controversy brewing over a Canadian stamp with an inaccurate depiction of something called a Nanaimo Bar, which I’d never heard of it until this happened.
Board game news: Another Terraforming Mars expansion, Turmoil, is over $600,000 on Kickstarter already.
The unrelated game On Mars has also cleared the half-million mark on Kickstarter. The BGG listing for the game says playing time is 90-150 minutes, so I may end up giving this one a miss.
Not a board game, but after reading this review of Falcon Age at Paste, I’m suddenly interested in it despite my general avoidance of video games (because they suck up so much time).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anxiety, bangladesh, board games, gmo, links, rhode island, social media

→ March 25, 2019
→ By keith

Comanauts.

Comanauts builds on the mechanical foundation of the 2018 title Stuffed Fables, using a similar framework with a more involved and more adult-oriented story, with spectacular artwork and a high-quality ‘adventure book’ that guides players through the story. It’s a shame that gameplay is so convoluted and the rules so poorly written; I am not sure I’ve ever had a more frustrating experience trying to decipher how to play a game, especially when it came to looking for named components or getting answers to specific game situations.

Comanauts players work together to try to solve the game’s core mystery of what happened to Martin, a scientist who may have been about to prevent the end of the world when a lab accident (perhaps not an accident) left him in a coma. The players will explore his psyche and go through events from his past, real or imagined, to try to figure out what happened to him and how to prevent the approaching cataclysm. Each player gets an avatar with a few unique skills and items, and can play up to three over the course of the game before the players lose with the death of the third one. Gameplay unfolds like a Choose Your Own Adventure game* as players move to a new area, explore a small map, uncovering clues, facing challenges, and usually fighting enemies before they achieve some exit condition and leave for the next place.

* There is an actual Choose Your Own Adventure Game, and I have had it for months, but we’ve never played it because it isn’t quick and requires multiple sessions to play a story to completion. I’ll get to it eventually … I think.

It is unfortunate that the Comanauts designers married some good writing and narrative game structure with some truly dismal mechanics decisions. On each turn, a player draws five dice from the game’s common dice bag; dice come in eight colors, and specific colors apply to specific tasks. Black dice power hostile characters when they appear. White dice give you light bulb tokens you can use to reroll dice or to use your character’s unique power. The other dice may apply to certain skill tests … but if you happen to run into a clue that requires you to roll a yellow die to see if you succeed or fail, and you didn’t draw a yellow die in that round, tough luck. It’s just dumb – it’s pointlessly random and will do nothing but frustrate players. Arkham Horror handles these tests in a much smarter fashion, giving players a fair chance to pass such tests without making it too easy.

The game’s combat system is also a failure pretty much from start to finish. Enemies generate either when you hit a certain space on the map and fail a test or when you’ve drawn too many black dice during your turns on that page, after which, you will probably get your asses handed to you, because there isn’t a great way to defend yourself beforehand, and defeating enemies outright is difficult. You have to draw the right colors of dice (purple dice are wild, which helps a little), and then usually roll two of them for a high enough total to vanquish one hostile character – and those enemies come in threes. You can store one die on your card for defensive purposes, but if you roll against an attack and fail, not only do you take damage but you lose that die, so if you get attacked by all three enemies in a round, and you fail the first test, you’ll lose all three of your health tokens and die. It’s just not a well thought-out system, and while the game does give you the backup of two additional avatars to churn through in a game, discarding a character and setting up a new one is not play, it’s administration.

I lost count of the number of times I had to go back to the rulebook for the explanation of something, which absolutely kills my enjoyment of a game. Some of this was as simple as the adventure book saying we should take a specific avatar from the supply and put it on the board, without telling us what the avatar looked like (none of them have names on the cutouts). Some questions were more involved – when we escaped from the Noir scene with a new avatar we’d rescued, does that avatar come with us, since she came in the base game with a card of her own and special skills? Does she join our gang, so to speak? Even simple questions like when dice are ‘discarded’ and when they’re returned to the bag aren’t adequately answered in the rulebook. I can only think the designers assumed Comanauts players would already be familiar with the mechanics because they’d played Stuffed Fables, but I have only seen the earlier game without ever actually playing it, so I was at a loss from start to finish here – and finish is pushing it, as we gave up after over an hour that probably had us just 60% of the way through the scenario.

There’s a campaign mode here as well that would let you follow the storyline through multiple scenarios, but that’s for folks who grasp the core gameplay here far better than my daughter and I did. Unfortunately this one’s not a keeper, a shame given Asmodee and Plaid Hat’s history of strong titles.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, cooperative games

→ March 16, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/16/19.

New ESPN+ content this week included a Grapefruit League scouting notebook and a draft blog post on Carter Stewart and Matt Allan. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

At Paste, I reviewed Tiny Towns, a new, light strategy game from AEG that has players placing resources on their boards to try to match set patterns, but where you have to take whatever resources your opponents take as well, which means you can easily get screwed by someone else’s choices, especially with more players (it handles up to 6).

My email newsletter is alive and well, and also free, with more of my writings whenever the spirits move me.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Gizmodo’s Earther looks at Apple’s complicated efforts to reduce its reliance on mining for heavy metals, an environmentally hazardous process that doesn’t have easy replacements via recycling programs for reasons the author details here.
Lifehacker interviewed Stella Parks, author of Brave Tart (and @bravetart on Twitter and Instagram), as part of their This is How I Eat series, although it includes lots of insights from Parks on baking as well. I learned she and I have identical coffee preferences.
The New York Times interviewed Elizabeth Hargrave, designer of the new board game Wingspan, which incorporates real information about various bird species to inform game play. I’ve played Wingspan and it is excellent; it’s also one of the only games I’ve ever seen designed by a woman and with all art by women as well.
Jane Coaston looks at some of the highlights from the college admissions fraud investigation.
The Boston Globe has a story on local indie bookstores thriving by creating communities of readers or holding events you might consider unorthodox for bookstores. Silver Unicorn Books owner Paul Swydan, ex-Fangraphs and Hardball Times writer, is interviewed here; I visited his shop in Acton, Massachusetts, last summer for a talk and signing.
The New Zealand mosque shooter told viewers of his massacre livestream to subscribe to Pewdiepie, the youtube star with a long history of embracing racist tropes and videos but then denying that he did so. Was this a serious line, or just part of a pattern of shitposting that you’d only catch if you’re extremely online?
That Oregon boy who nearly died of tetanus because his irresponsible dipshit parents didn’t get him vaccinated required the care of over 100 medical professionals during his 57-day, nearly $1 million hospital stay. The kicker: His parents still refused to vaccinate him after his ordeal.
New York says unvaccinated kids six and under must stay home if their schools are at high risk of a measles outbreak, so a bunch of denier parents are suing. If that happened here, I’d go to the courthouse and look for parents I knew.
The NY Times editorial board argues that lawmakers and social media sites need to do more to fight anti-vaccine trolls and raise immunization rates. I imagine science-denier Bret Stephens sat this one out.
Scientists in Congress used Pi Day as a platform to urge greater use of science in public policy discussions, as seen when Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-SC) blasted an air horn at an ignorant NOAA official during a hearing earlier this month.
A new report from the UN Environment assembly says Arctic temperatures will rise by over 3 C even if humanity meets the Paris accord goals. You should be scared, especially since our current Administration denies climate change even exists.
The OED’s blog has a post on the history of the singular ‘they’, including this gem: Tennessee Republicans passed a law in 2016 banning the use of state funds to “promote the use of gender-neutral pronouns.”
Tennessee ain’t done trying to convince us of their atavistic tendencies: Legislators there have already introduced a dozen anti-LGTBQ bills in 2019, including yet another bill targeting trans people in bathrooms or locker rooms as well as a bill that tries to roll back marriage equality.
Not to be outdone, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin just signed a bill allowing concealed carry without a permit, over objections by state police groups. I’m glad I don’t have any travel to Kentucky this year.
Republican legislators across the country, even in blue states like Connecticut, have been introducing bills that would stop schools from teaching kids about climate change or minimize man’s role in it, despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that we’re warming the planet. Making our kids dumber to own the libs, right?
On the bright side, Georgia state rep Dar’shun Kendrick (D) introduced a “testicular bill of rights” package (heh) that, for example, would require men to obtain permission from their partners before getting a prescription for erectile dysfunction medications.
Did you catch the “Jexodus” joke going around online this week? The idea that Jews will leave the Democrats en masse is a delusion, according to Talia Levin, in part because the GOP has zero intention of pursuing policy goals that might matter to Jewish voters. How’s Blexit going, anyway?
A strange study published in the Royal Society journal Open Science claimed that listening to gore-themed death metal didn’t inspire or trigger violent thoughts in test subjects. I never believed this was true, but not because of anything in the lyrics. It’s because you can’t understand anything death metal singers are saying.
Ken Jennings wrote a lovely tribute to Alex Trebek in the wake of the longtime Jeopardy! host’s announcement that he has stage IV pancreatic cancer.
Board game news: Glen More II, an expanded update/sequel of the top 100 game Glen More, is up on Kickstarter now and of course blew past its goal in about two days.
Paladins of the West Kingdom, the second game in the West Kingdom series after Architects of the West Kingdom (which I liked a lot and will be reviewing shortly for Paste), is also on Kickstarter for a few more days. It’s the same designer who made the Kennerspiel-nominated Raiders of the North Sea back in 2015.
Dire Wolf Games announced Game of Thrones: Oathbreaker, a new social deduction game due out later this spring.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, board games, environment, links

→ March 9, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/9/19.

No new ESPN+ content this week, but that will change now that I’m in Florida to see a little spring training and at least two potential first-rounders while I’m here. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday and a Periscope video chat on Friday.

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday, this time discussing a hypothesis I have on how some teams handle low-ceiling teenaged prospects; you can sign up here and maybe I’ll send you something too.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: I have four pieces in this week’s roundup from the New Yorker, including two longreads. I subscribe to their site – I signed up right after I cancelled my New York Times subscription – and, if you have the disposable income, I recommend it. The first is Jane Mayer’s incredible, horrifying piece on the transformation of Fox News into a Trump propaganda network, the closest thing we’ve ever had to state TV in this country.
The second longread profiles kaiseki chef Niki Nakayama, a pioneer here in a niche cuisine dominated by men.
Ben Lindbergh and Rob Arthur received a large file of thousands of scouting reports from the Cincinnati Reds from 1991 to 2003 and wrote up some of what they found from global analysis and looking at specific players in a three-part series. I’m quoted several times in the first piece, but I will mention again that I’m a little uncomfortable with this information, which is outdated but would still be classified as trade secrets, getting out to the public.
The Verge looks at popular Twitter user & activist Dr. Eugene Gu, who has been accused of sexual assault and of misrepresenting portions of his resume.
There’s been a lot of very bad writing in the last week over Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and her comments on Israel and AIPAC. I thought this Politico piece contrasting Omar’s place on the policy continuum with that of fellow Rep. Dean Phillips, who represents a district that borders on Omar’s, was one of the few good pieces. Omar ended up in the news again for her candid comments on President Obama’s tenure, including his decision to continue the drone strike program started by his predecessor, and for her comments that questioned whether some people have “allegiance” to Israel, the latter being taken completely out of context and used as more evidence of anti-Semitism. It’s not, as you can see from this transcript of her remarks. AIPAC is a powerful lobbying group, and AIPAC is not Israel is not Judaism.
A Florida massage parlor owner has been selling access to President Trump at Mar-a-Lago. I’m not sure how this isn’t a bigger story.
The framing here isn’t great but this New Yorker piece on the risk that we become so overwhelmed by climate change’s dangers that we give up is still worth a read. I haven’t run into this sentiment anywhere online or in the real world, at least not yet.
The New Yorker‘s Masha Green looks at why measles is “a quintessential political issue” of 2019, drawing parallels to Michael Cohen’s testimony while excoriating our public-health system.
Dorit Reiss writes in the San Francisco Chronicle that non-vaccinating parents should be liable for damages when their kids start outbreaks. This would put a stop to some vaccine refusals – plenty of wealthy or high-income parents are vaccine deniers, too – but even marginal increases in vaccination rates will boost herd immunity.
For example, many of you already saw the story of an Oregon boy, aged 6, who nearly died of tetanus and racked up about $1 million in hospital bills. One, the parents should lose custody; they subjected their son to an entirely preventable, prolonged period of physical suffering. (It’s described in detail in the article. Imagine putting your kid through that.) Two, those costs, which don’t include the opportunity costs of that helicopter or the associated doctors being unable to take care of other patients, are the result of the parents’ active decision not to vaccinate. They should be liable for all of it.
A Chicago man who wasn’t vaccinated as a kid, then caught measles at age 30 and nearly died from it says parents have “no excuse” for deciding not to vaccinate.
UK Health Minister Simon Harris has warned social media companies over anti-vaccine ads ($).
The Sackler family’s role in fueling the opioid epidemic to further enrich themselves represents a significant policy failure, according to the Washington Post‘s Charles Lane.
It looks like Big Tobacco and now its partners in the vaping world may have helped push FDA head Scott Gottlieb out of his job. He was a rarity in this Administration, an official who took a tough stance on regulating harmful products in the name of the public interest.
The era of easy recycling is over as China is no longer interested in our recyclables. Add this to your Green New Deal proposals: we need more reduction and reuse, and easier access to composting. I have had a working compost pile for five years now, and it makes a noticeable difference in reducing my trash, but even that isn’t enough to take all of my compostable plant-based items, and I can’t compost meat or dairy scraps or even most paper materials in there because it’s not big enough. (I have composted a few cotton shirts, though.)
Writer/producer Amy Berg posted a Twitter thread explaining the Writers Guild of America’s conflict-of-interest complaint that the major talent agencies representing them, which could lead to some pretty drastic action as soon as the end of this month. (Full disclosure: I am represented by WME.)
Steven Spielberg wants to ruin the Oscars out of spite. Well, the Oscars aren’t so hot anyway, but he wants to make them worse by ensuring that Netflix titles and, as a secondary consequence, other indie films have a harder time qualifying for the awards. Spielberg went on to yell at several clouds that he said looked too much like the amazon logo.
Drew Magary – back from the brink – goes goes General Sherman on Barstool Sports in the wake of the latter’s aggressive legal tactics to try to get away with copyright infringement.
Jane Coaston explains right-wing grifter Jacob Wohl, recently banned from Twitter for admitting he’s made and continues to make fake accounts to try to influence elections and/or get gullible conservatives to send him money.
Parker Molloy shows how conservative outlets and commentators use “Mister Gotcha”-like claims of hypocrisy against Democratic politicians or candidates to derail actual debate over policies.
An Alabama court ruled that an aborted fetus’s biological father had some say in whether the pregnancy was terminated while ruling the fetus had legal standing to sue, a huge step backwards for women’s rights and for secularism.
This video clip from INSIDER explains why white savior movies are bad for Hollywood and for viewers.
A new, deluxe edition of the Martin Wallace classic Age of Steam is now up on Kickstarter. The new version includes brand-new artwork and a better color scheme.
A roll-and-write version of the great tile-laying game Lanterns called Lanterns: Dice in the Sky is available for pre-order, with May delivery expected.
Game designer Rich Gain, who worked as an operations manager at Japanime Games until just a few months ago, lost his fiancée and infant son in a car accident last week; there’s a GoFundMe running on his behalf in the wake of the tragedy.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board games, japanese cuisine, links, oscars, social media, the swamp, vaccines

→ March 3, 2019
→ By keith

The River.

The River, the most recent release from the imprint Days of Wonder, tries to be Stone Age Lite, but only succeeds about halfway, as it strips down game time and makes building things a bit easier, while also recomplicating things with a strange and not very successful new scoring mechanism that adds little to nothing to game play.

Stone Age is both one of my favorite games ever, and one of the best examples of a straight worker-placement game: You get a finite number of meeples and you put one or more of them on the board in each turn to either gather resources (wood, brick, stone, gold, or food) or spend them to get stuff (build buildings for big points or buying cards for points and/or more goodies). Stone Age starts each player with five meeples, and you can run that up to ten by sending two meeples to what is colloquially known as “the love shack” on a specific turn to, um, make another meeple. Games can run 90 minutes or more, but you’re constantly in motion, and there are a lot of constraints that force players to compete for the same spaces and rewards on the board.

The River’s intent is clear: Streamline (pun intended) the Stone Age concept for a half-hour game. There are three main resources, wood, brick, and stone, plus a wild-card resource of food (little turkey meeples, a nice touch). You gather resources to build building cards worth two to nine points, and early buildings gain bonus tokens starting at six points and gradually decreasing to zero. The number of resources you get when you visit a resource space is equal to number of symbols showing that resource on the twelve spaces on your personal river board, and you also have a number of warehouse symbols that limits what you can store.

Within each round, you can also take up to two new tiles to place on your river, in order. Tiles show resource and/or warehouse symbols, or they confer one-time or game-end bonuses. So you can expand your storage and set yourself up for bigger resource hauls with the right tiles, making your meeple usage more efficient. You start with four meeples, and placing your fourth tile (out of twelve) unlocks your fifth meeple. After that, however, you can lose meeples, staring with your fifth tile, as your workers choose to settle down on the new terrain you’ve developed, so rounds can get shorter as players keep placing tiles.

The game ends when a player has placed twelve tiles, filling their river board, or built five buildings, filling all five bonus token spaces (even if one or more tokens are worth zero points). The game-end scoring adds an additional wrinkle: Tiles come in five different terrain types, and if you’ve managed to get the same terrain in two or all three of the tile spaces in one column, you get additional points – six if you got all three to match, two if you got two of the three. There are a few ways to switch tiles around once you’ve already placed them … but my God, this feels like a totally extraneous, tacked-on scoring method. It has no tie to game play, and it has no tie to the theme. With winning scores in the 30s for us, a player could mostly skip the building cards, get a little luck with river tiles, and rack up enough points to win just by color-matching.

The two-player game uses a smaller main board that restricts meeple placement further, and the game ends if either player builds four buildings (reduced from five). That latter threshold might be too low; my daughter, who didn’t care for this game, decided she was going to try to end it as quickly as she could, and raced through to build four building cards, two of which were worth two points each, the lowest value. It turned out to be a smart plan, because she ended the game before I could build my third building, since I was trying to get some higher point cards. It’s also possible that my daughter is just smarter than I am.

I don’t think The River makes the cut in my house to stay in our rotation; it’s too familiar – really, yet another game where we’re gathering wood, brick, and stone? really? – and offers nothing new in the mechanics or theme. It is, however, a simplified version of Stone Age and similar games, and probably far more friendly to play with younger kids – especially if you just dispense with the game-end tile-matching bonus. That eliminates one spot on the board, and you’d take out some tiles that give you a free tile swap power, but then the game would be like a starter version of Stone Age … except that such a game already exists, My First Stone Age, with a listed playing time of 15 minutes. I haven’t played the latter, but I keep coming back to how The River just feels like a blurry copy of Stone Age, and that feels very unsatisfying to me as a critic or just a player.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, family strategy games

→ March 2, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/2/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers this week, I wrote three pieces, breaking down the Bryce Harper deal, ranking the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and offering scouting notes on players I saw in Texas, including Bobby Witt, Jr. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

On the gaming front, I reviewed the Kennerspiel des Jahres-winning game The Quacks of Quedlinburg for Paste, and also reviewed the digital port of the game Evolution for Ars Technica.

I went on the Mighty 1090 in San Diego with Darren Smith to talk Manny Machado, Olive Garden, and the Oscars, and on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about Ross Atkins’ strange comments on Vlad Jr.. I also spoke to True Blue LA about Dodgers prospects, and joined the Sox Machine podcast to talk White Sox prospects.

I’m due for the next edition of my free email newsletter, so sign up now while the gettin’s good.

High Street on Market’s Sandwich Battles begin this Monday, with tickets available for $25. They’re my #1 restaurant in Philly, in large part because their breads are otherworldly.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: GQ has a length profile of the prolific and highly disturbed art thief Stéphane Breitwieser, who stole artworks valued at over $1 billion but never sold anything.
21st Century Fox was hit with a $179 million penalty by an arbitrator over a wide scheme to defraud the actors and producers of Bones of residuals from streaming on Hulu. Fox lied about the profits they were receiving from Hulu, of which Fox owns 30%, and at one point a Fox executive signed both sides of a deal between the two companies.
MLB.com’s Mike Petriello, who was a huge help to me when I was working on Smart Baseball, has a superb primer up on the Rapsodo and Edgetronic devices that are revolutionizing player development, especially in the area of ‘pitch design,’ where coaches and pitchers can work together to change or develop pitches by using real-time data that show how changes in grips or release points affect a pitch’s velocity and spin. Driveline Baseball, mentioned in Mike’s piece, has a blog post up on gaze research, or tracking how hitters see the ball. Technology has allowed teams and players to measure things that were either estimated by scouts/coaches in the past or that were simply brushed off as unmeasurable.
Little Falls, Minnesota, has found success in fighting opioid addiction by treating it as a disease, rather than as a crime or a personal failing. It’s an approach that has worked in other countries – Portugal is a paragon in this area – but goes against the Puritanical strain in American culture that sees addicts as degenerates.
What if climate change leads to enough cloud loss to further accelerate the warming of the planet? The odds of this are higher than we previously realized.
Why is California’s Attorney General refusing to release a list of cops convicted of crimes? Xavier Becerra, running for re-election this year, has even rejected public records requests from his own agency, which has led to lawsuits and would appear to violate open-records laws.
Marcela García writes in the Boston Globe how the should-have-won-Best Picture film Roma has exposed the deep racism within Mexican society.
A popular talking point among Republicans right now is that doctors are “killing babies” right after they’re born. The President said it in his State of the Union address, and it’s been repeated ad nauseam over the last month. Dr. Jen Gunter, an OBGYN who herself gave birth to a son so premature he could not survive, points out what a dangerous lie this line is.
Anti-vaxxer Forest Maready, who likes to depict people with autism as “tragedies,” has a new book coming out that resurfaces the debunked myth that vaccines cause autism. Amazon and Apple are planning to sell it, but I signed this petition asking them to pull the title from their stores. Meanwhile, an inquiry from Rep. Adam Schiff led amazon to pull six anti-vaccination “documentaries” from prime video.
Anti-vaxxer groups on Facebook are harassing pro-vaccine doctors by trashing their Yelp and Google ratings as well as flooding those doctors’ Facebook posts with comments. Facebook has done little to nothing to combat the problem. The Atlantic points out that the Facebook anti-vax community is quite small, just loud, and banning them would be easy for the platform.
WIRED argues that amazon’s anti-vaxxer problem is worse than Facebook’s.
A Nova Scotia chiropractor lost her license for spreading anti-vaccine information and making other unfounded claims. We should strive for the same kinds of laws around chiropractors, naturopaths, and even the rare medical doctor who embraces this sort of bullshit.
CNN also weighed in on tech outlets failing to police the anti-vaxx bullshit on their platforms.
The Washington Post looks at how anti-vaxxers are responding to the overdue public backlash against their efforts, as well as bills in various state legislatures to end religious and/or philosophical exemptions to mandatory vaccination requirements.
Scientific American presents public policies we can use to fight anti-vaxxer lunacy.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Kevin McDermott asks why so many Americans are rejecting science in the face of incontrovertible evidence.
Italian researchers used CRISPR to create a genetically modified version of a malaria-carrying mosquito; if released, it should lead to collapses of that specific species and thus reduce malaria transmissions.
Paste‘s Jacob Weindling noticed that CNN stacked its phony ‘town hall’ for Bernie Sanders with political operatives/lobbyists posing as regular folks.
LA Times movie critic Justin Chang wrote that Green Book is the worst Best Picture winner since Crash, calling the vapid white-savior film “an embarrassment,” “insultingly glib and hucksterish,” “a self-satisfied crock,” and a “palatable brand of godawful.”
Late Night with Seth Meyers rather perfectly sent up the film with their ‘trailer’ for White Savior.
And apparently Green Book producer sent critic Jenni Miller a condescending, tone-deaf email where he doesn’t even know the main character’s real name.
In a bit of things coming full circle, Pig Destroyer’s John Jarvis has formed a new baseball-themed grindcore band, Kolten Wong City, a name that alludes to Kowloon Walled City, whose bassist, Ian Miller, is part of baseball-themed grindcore band Puig Destroyer, whose name alludes to … well, you get it now.
Why are progressive artists still working with Morrissey despite his embrace of far-right causes and outright racist statements?
Talk Talk’s singer and main songwriter Mark Hollis died this week at age 64. His last release was a solo album in 1998, after which he retired from music to spend time with his family.
Splinter writer Samer Kalaf released an email exchange he had with conservative NY Times writer Bret Stephens, without Stephens’ permission, but I think Kalaf comes off far worse here than he realizes.
Roland’s Market, a collaboration between Chris Bianco and the couple behind Tacos Chiwas, closed without warning last month. The location will be converted into a larger outpost of Bianco’s Pane Bianco.
The former editor of the Rocky Mountain News writes of his fear that local journalism will continue to fade and die as newspapers are plundered by hedge-fund owners.
Charlotte Riley describes the game Patriarchy Chicken in a column subtitled “why I refuse to move out of the way for men.”
The FTC is finally cracking down on scammers who buy fake reviews on amazon, going after the seller of a bogus weight-loss ‘supplement.’
In board game news, Disney’s Villainous: Wicked to the Core hits Target tomorrow; it’s exclusive there for a month and will later roll out to other outlets. I’ve played it, and it’s as good as the original, but with rules that are much clearer for first-time players, enough that you might do better to start with this before going back to the first game. (This is a standalone expansion that you can combine with the original.)
Renegade Game Studios has Hex Roller, a new roll-and-write game that I haven’t seen yet, up for preorder.
Days of Wonder announced a few weeks ago that their next title will be Corinth, an update/retheme of the game Yspahan that alters some core rules and eliminates the caravan (which was a dominant strategy in Yspahan).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2018 movies, addiction, anti-science, art, baseball, board games, california, climate change, frauds, links, movies, oscars, pseudoscience, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 19, 2019
→ By keith

Kero.

Kero is a pure two-player game that is absolutely perfect if you like games with lots of dice-rolling – not the Monopoly sort, where you roll once and are stuck with it, but more like King of Tokyo and other games where you get to re-roll repeatedly until you get a result you like or you bust. There’s a lot of luck involved, and I’m not sure all of the elements here are strictly necessary, but there’s something very appealing in how Kero works the dice.

Kero’s theme is postapocalyptic, and each player has a truck full of kerosene that must be refilled from time to time. Players roll the dice to collect various resources and use them to collect cards worth points at game-end and that also give one-time or permanent benefits, and can place ‘recruits’ on the four territories on display to claim those for more game-end points. Your truck contains an hourglass with sand in it, and on your turn you flip it and may continue rolling your dice as long as you have sand (kerosene) left in your tank, or until your dice all show fire icons, after which those dice have ‘burned up’ and can’t be re-rolled. The other sides of the five basic white dice show various resources – metal, food, recruits, fuel, or bricks – and you may pay fuel to add any of the three bonus dice, which have bigger rewards on them.

When your fuel runs low, you can spend one jerrycan token to refuel – and your opponent gets to roll the dice. You flip your truck the other way, so the sand fills the visible portion of the truck’s tank, and your opponent rolls all eight dice, and rerolls every die until all eight show fire tokens, at which point the refueling stops and you set your truck on its wheels again. (If you get seven fire tokens, then you roll the eighth die a maximum of five times before you just give up.) So there’s randomness all over the game, but the designers – Prospero Hall, the same group behind the Villainous games – have mitigated that with the ability to re-roll, and additional tokens you can use to allow even further rerolls or that let you ignore fire symbols for a particular turn.

Once you’ve decided to stop rolling dice on your turn (assuming you didn’t run out of fuel, which would end your turn immediately), you can use the resources shown on your non-burned dice to buy things from the board. The most common choice will be to buy cards from the market, with cards granting you points at the end of the game and most cards giving you either a one-time bonus or a permanent (unique) bonus for the rest of the game. The permanent bonuses mostly appear in the first round of the game – there are three rounds, separated by ‘claim cards’ shuffled randomly into the main deck – and grant you powerful benefits like a specific resource in every turn for the rest of the game, or the ability to convert something into fuel. Each player also starts the game with two Tuarek tokens, which grant one-time abilities like the power to ignore fire icons on dice for a turn or to move explorers to different territories.

Those territories, of which there are twelve, appearing four at a time across the three rounds, are the other source of points for game-end, either flat bonuses or bonuses tied to the cards you’ve collected. Each player has seven explorer tokens they may place in each round, usually by combining a recruit icon and a metal icon from dice. When a claim card appears to end a round, players compare who has the most explorers on each territory; whoever has the most gets that card for the rest of the game, taking any immediate bonuses on it. (There’s a power you can gain that helps you win ties, which happen frequently.) This is one of the few clumsy mechanics in the game, because the rounds are short enough that territories often go to a player who placed a single explorer on them, and it’s nearly always more efficient to go claim an empty territory than to compete with your opponent for one where they’ve already placed a token.

Kero games run about a half-hour, as the game’s length is determined by how quickly you move through the card deck; any time a player finishes their turn with at least two fire icons showing on the dice, you also ‘burn’ the rightmost card in the market to keep things rolling (pun intended), so there’s no way to stall progress through the game. The mixture of controlled randomness through the dice and the light engine-building aspect of the cards with permanent benefits makes Kero better than a pure dice-rolling game, so there is some strategy involved, but it’s definitely a game of luck – perhaps one of making your own luck, but still one where the randomness of dice rolls has a lot to say about who wins. That makes it a good game to play with your kids, since the dice will help smooth out any gaps in your skill levels, and one I think we’ll keep on the shelves here, but not something I’d pick over my favorite two-player titles like Jaipur or 7 Wonders Duel.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, dice games, family games, two-player games

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