→ October 23, 2017
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Entropy: Worlds Collide.

Entropy: Worlds Collide is a very quick-playing card game of simple set-collection and not-so-simple actions, because you can’t do the same thing another player wants to do on the same turn. These “clashes” can result in players repeatedly unable to do anything – unless one of them takes the card that resolves clashes in their favor, which can spur a whole new set of fighting over who gets that card.

Entropy has players take one of six potential character cards, each with a unique ability, and asks players to collect the four cards (called “shards”) representing that player’s “reality.” The players are supposed to be characters from parallel universes whose realities have become jumbled, and thus must fight to be the first to reassemble one’s reality – placing all four shards face up – to win the game. The four shards from each player’s reality are shuffled into a central deck (the “nexus”) along with four cards from another, unused reality, plus one wild shard, and each player starts the game with one such card, face down, in his/her “hold.”

Each player has the same set of six action cards, numbered 1 through 6. Once you play an action card, you discard it to the table in front of you, and can’t reuse it until you have used all your actions or played your Reset (card 5) action. Card 1 allows you to use your character’s ability. Card 2 allows you to flip over one face-down card anywhere on the board – including in another player’s hold. Card 3 lets you take the top two cards from the nexus and place one in your hold (discarding what’s already there if you have one). Card 4 lets you take a shard from anywhere on the table – the nexus, the discard pile, or an opponent – except from an opponent’s reality. Once a card is played to someone’s reality, it’s there for the rest of the game. Card 5 is the aforementioned reset, and Card 6 lets you take the Anchor card.

Players all play their actions simultaneously, but if two or more try to play the same action, they clash and no one gets to play that round – unless one of those clashing players has the Anchor card. If you have the Anchor, you win any clash and can take the action in question, while everyone else in the clash has to sit the round out. So the game truly hinges on the Anchor, which starts the game in the middle of the table but should change hands frequently (unless you want one player to run away with things).

Because the deck of shards is so small and you can go through the discard pile, there isn’t much deduction involved in collecting your cards, other than perhaps trying to guess what’s in other players’ holds. The deduction in this game is around the action selections – you need to figure out what other players need to play, and then try to play something different, unless you have the Anchor.

Entropy is a light, diversionary game, although I think it aspires to a bit more. The clashes would seem to invite negotiation (and lying), but there’s no direct mechanism for this in the game, and no currency to use to try to ensure compliance or convince someone else to do what you want. There are certain character/action combinations that seem overly strong, such as the character who can play an action and force all other players to discard that action card … which, if you do it with Reset, kind of blows the other players out of the game.

Entropy: Worlds Collide also has a separate expansion called Echo of Time that introduces a second storyline, some new roles, a one-versus-many option, a way to play with five players (although the rules warn you there will be many clashes), and a second, stronger Anchor card for players to fight over. We found Entropy enjoyable, but a filler game, and probably not one we’ll go back to a ton because there seem to be little imbalances in the game play. The game was available at Rule & Make’s booth at GenCon but won’t ship to buyers until December 2017. The publishers do have another game out, Skyward, that we like a lot more, and that will be the subject of my next review for Paste in early November.

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→ October 21, 2017
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Stick to baseball, 10/21/17.

I wrote two scouting posts for Insiders from my week in the Arizona Fall League, which you can read here and here. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I reviewed the card/dice game Valeria and its new expansion here on Friday; my next boardgame review for Paste will go up in early November. I also posted about a big boardgame app sale going on right now from Asmodee Digital.

The schedule for PAX Unplugged, a new boardgaming con to be held in Philadelphia in November, is now up. I’ll be signing copies of Smart Baseball there on November 18th and plan to attend the entire event.

And now, the links…

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→ October 20, 2017
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Valeria: Card Kingdoms.

Valeria: Card Kingdoms came out in 2015 from Daily Magic Games and has been steadily expanded ever since, including the latest release, this summer’s Flames & Frost, which is also the largest Valeria expansion to date. The game combines some great elements of other games, including the extensibility of Dominion, but more than anything else it takes the core mechanic of Machi Koro and improves on it dramatically. The theme is different, and there are other major variations, but this really is Better Machi Koro, to the point that I can’t imagine pulling MK out again now that we have Valeria on the shelves.

Valeria will at least start out as familiar to Machi Koro players: Each player starts with two cards, a Peasant (with the number 5 on it) and a Knight (number 6), and on every turn, the active player rolls the two dice to ‘activate’ certain cards. In Valeria, three cards are typically activated with each dice roll – the number on each individual die and the total of the two. (If they’re equal, some cards will thus be activated twice.) If you are the active player and you have any cards with those numbers on them, you get a specific reward in gold, magic, or strength tokens; if you’re not the active player, you also get a reward, but it’s usually smaller than what the active player gets.

On each turn, you get two actions, and can do one of four things. One is to just take a single gold, magic, or strength token, which is especially useful at the beginning of the game, but isn’t exactly why you’re here. The second action is to buy a Citizen card from the table. Citizens are numbered from 1 through 8, plus a 9/10 card and an 11/12 card. Citizens with higher-probability dice rolls on their cards cost more to buy, and, unlike in Machi Koro, you pay more to buy multiple copies of the same card – face value plus one more gold coin for each copy of the card you already have.

The third action is to buy a Domain card, which range from 5 coins to at least 12 coins, and give you end-game victory points as well as some recurring extra abilities or bonuses during the remainder of the game, such as reducing some card costs or allowing you to steal tokens from other players every turn. The fourth is to ‘defeat’ a Monster card on the table; there are five stacks of Monsters, sorted by type (a symbol in the upper left), and they get increasingly difficult to defeat as you move down the stack. You defeat Monsters with strength tokens and sometimes with magic tokens as well, earning an immediate reward (usually gold and/or other tokens, sometimes a free Citizen card instead) and end-game victory points.

There’s one other avenue to points that is unique to each player. At the start of the game, you’re dealt two Duke cards that detail specific game-end bonuses that are tied to the symbols found in the upper right of all cards (Domains, Monsters, and Citizens, especially the first two), or just to the number of Domains you bought or Monsters you defeated, and something for the leftover tokens you have. Add the points from your Duke to the points on your Domains and Monsters and any extra points you picked up during the game (some Citizens let you take a victory point rather than, say, two gold) and you get your total. The game begins with twenty card stacks in total, and when the number of Exhausted (depleted) stacks reaches twice the number of players, the game ends.

Here Be Monsters.
Here be Monsters.

The expansions mostly add twists with new Citizens, Monsters, Domains, and Dukes, varying the possible ways to score and altering how you might combine cards, while also giving the game the Dominion-like aspect of allowing you to mix and match cards so the game has functionally infinite replayability. The Flames and Frost expansion is larger than the previous ones, large enough that you can play a complete game using only cards from the new box other than the starter Knight and Peasant cards and the Exhausted cards from the base game. Several expansions introduce Event cards as well, which are shuffled into the Exhaustion deck; if you draw an Event card when a pile is exhausted, something happens to all players, usually something not good.

Game play takes about 30 minutes for 2 to 4 players – we haven’t tried it with five – not including setup time, which can get longer if you want to craft your own custom set of Citizens for that particular game. My daughter and her friend, both 11, had no trouble understanding the rules, and my daughter even tied me in our first two-player match. The iconography within the game, which limits its reliance on English (for the global market), can be a little confusing at first, but we kept the rules handy as a reference to walk us through it. If you liked the main idea of Machi Koro but found the game somewhat broken, especially given the way players could monopolize certain dice rolls, then I give Valeria my very strong recommendation.

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→ October 20, 2017
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Asmodee Digital app sale.

A bunch of the best boardgame apps out there are on sale right now courtesy of publisher Asmodee Digital, and since there are too many to squeeze into a tweet or FB post, I’m going to list my favorites among them (they have over 20 titles on sale) here with links to my reviews and to the iOS/Android stores.

Ticket to Ride ($1.99): Review, iTunes Store, Android version

Splendor ($1.99): Review, iTunes store, Android version

Pandemic ($1.99): Review, iTunes store, Android version

Small World 2 ($1.99): Review, iTunes Store, Android version

Jaipur ($0.99): Review, iTunes store, Android version

Ticket to Ride First Journey ($1.99): Review, iTunes store, Android version

Also, I have only played Twilight Struggle ($1.99) on Steam and haven’t reviewed it, but it’s also on sale for iPads and Android tablets. It’s a two-player game that I think requires a lot of playing experience to play it well because you must be familiar with the cards in your deck.

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→ October 14, 2017
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Stick to baseball, 10/13/17.

For Insiders this week, I posted my first batch of scouting notes from the Arizona Fall League, covering prospects from the Cardinals, Yankees, Brewers, Orioles, Padres, Cubs, Rockies, and Twins. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

Later today (Saturday) I will be at Changing Hands in Phoenix, at 2 pm, to talk about and sign copies of Smart Baseball. I’ll also be signing books at PAX Unplugged, a new boardgaming convention that takes place in Philadelphia the weekend before Thanksgiving.

And now, the links…

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→ October 4, 2017
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Alhambra app.

The boardgame Alhambra is a modern Euro classic, winner of the 2003 Spiel des Jahres award and a host of other prizes, and still rated fairly highly on Boardgamegeek even thought it’s a bit light for that crowd. It’s also one of my least favorite Spiel winners, and one of my biggest disconnects between what I think of a game and what the gaming community thinks. I reviewed the original game back in 2011, and while I’ve softened on it just a little bit, it’s still not something I’m eager to pull off the shelf.

But there is now an Alhambra app (for iOS devices and Android), and because I take my responsibility to all of you seriously, I have played it for the purposes of reviewing it. And … I still don’t like the game that much, and I find the app a little clunky to use; after I’ve been spoiled by a run of Asmodee Digital apps and a few other super-clean ports, this one fell short of the mark for me. The AI players are solid, though, so it’s a good challenge for solo play, so if you enjoy the tabletop game, you may find value in the app that I didn’t.

Alhambra is a tile-laying game where players use money cards selected from a rolling display of four cards and use them to buy one or more of the four tiles currently in the market. You get one action per turn and can use it to buy a tile, take money cards (one card, or several if they add up to five or less), or move a tile already in your palace to storage/move one from storage to the palace. If you buy a tile and pay the exact amount, you get a bonus action, so in theory you could get five actions in one turn: you buy each of the four tiles for the exact amount, and then get a bonus action to take money or renovate. There are six tile types, and you score for having the most or second-most of each type, with three scoring stages during the game and points increasing at each scoring. Tiles also have wall segments on zero to three edges; at every scoring, you score one point for each edge on your longest contiguous wall.

The app version of Alhambra has two different views – a standard top-down look and an isometric view with graphics on the tiles to give them 3D textures, with the isometric one much more comfortable to look at in my experience. You can also tailor the app speed if you want to see AI or opposing players make their moves, or if you’d rather speed things up and have cards just disappear from the display as they’re taken.

Making moves in the app is not intuitive in the least. First, you must select your action from a box at the top of the screen – buy, take money, renovate. If you’re buying, then you must select the money cards you intend to spend to buy the tile, and selecting the cards is a pain because of the way they’re laid out, overlapping each other, forcing you to click on the edge of a card to select it. Then you pick the tile you’re buying. If you pay the exact price, the app automatically gives you a bonus action by asking you to select a new action type. If you don’t have enough money to buy any tiles, that action is greyed out.

Any tiles you buy go into a temporary storage bin on the screen until your turn is done, after which you place all of the tiles at once. You drag the tile you wish to place over towards your board, and the legal spaces for it light up in green, then go back to retrieve the next tile if there are more in your tray. Once you place a tile, I don’t think there’s a way to undo it. The isometric view only fails in this one spot – it’s hard to distinguish walls on the ‘far’ side of tiles.

The game ends when the supply of tiles is exhausted, at which point there’s a quirk in the rules – the remaining tiles are assigned to players based on who has the most money of each color, whether or not those players have enough to buy the tiles. That can also mean you acquire a tile you can’t place, and the app wants you to place that tile in one of your renovation slots … which I only figured out from trial and error. If you don’t know this, you’re stuck.

The app is stable now after some early bugginess, and some expansions are available as in-app purchases, but I find the UI here too frustrating – and, again, I’m not wild about the game underneath it. If you love the base game, go for it. Otherwise, I’d give this one a miss.

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→ September 27, 2017
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Ticket to Ride First Journey app.

The current explosion in popularity of European-style boardgames has tended towards older players, adults or teenagers, without as much emphasis on the youngest players who, at least historically, were a prime target for boardgame publishers. A few companies have produced stripped-down, introductory versions of their Eurogames for kids aged 8 and under, but until now none of them had appeared in app form. Asmodee Digital changed that with today’s release of their Ticket to Ride: First Journey app for iOS devices, Android, and Steam, and as you’d expect from an Asmodee product, it looks incredible, plays smoothly, and is extremely stable and reliable. At $4.99, it’s a steal for folks who want to introduce their younger kids to the glories of tabletop gaming.

Ticket to Ride: First Journey is a simplified version of the boardgame Ticket To Ride, which is itself among my top five games all time for its own simplicity and universal appeal, with First Journey – sold exclusively at Target – aimed at kids six and up (and probably fine for kids as young as four, as long as they can match colors). The board itself is smaller, with fewer cities on it and fewer trains required to connect cities that remain – there are no five-train connections between cities, for example.

If you’re already familiar with the rules and mechanics of the full versions of Ticket to Ride, here are the main differences between that game and the First Journey version:

  • You draw two train cards from the deck rather than choosing from five visible options.
  • You start the game with two route tickets (and have no choice).
  • When you finish one ticket, you get another ticket.
  • Everyone knows when you’ve finished a route.
  • Each ticket is worth one point; first to six points wins.
  • You get a point for building a continuous route from coast to coast.
  • There is no penalty for failing to complete a route.
  • Even in the two-player game, players can use both routes between two cities, and you can’t occupy both routes to block another player.
  • Each player has 20 train cars; as in the regular game, if a player places all his/her cars, that also triggers game-end.

The board is streamlined, and the cities on your route cards are animated in the app until you complete them. Each city has a unique icon, like a beaver in Montreal, a totem pole in Seattle, or a movie camera in Los Angeles. The pictures are bright and the text is very clean – not quite Comic Sans, but in that vein. You can drag your train cards to a route to place them; it’s a little fussy about your placement, but the app zooms in on the two cities to help you direct the arrow to the correct route. When you have two colors of tracks between cities, the one you can use is evident and the one you can’t use shows up with lock symbols on it. Some of the routes are extremely short – one track of three trains, two tracks of one or two trains each – so it doesn’t take long to complete your tickets.

On a turn, you have just three options: take two train cards, place trains on the map, or trash your two current route tickets and draw two new ones. That keeps turns quicker than in the base game, since no one is hemming and hawing over which train cards to select, and gives you an out when other players have done something to prevent you from completing a route card.

The route-planning aspects of the main game are still here but much simpler. There’s no longest route bonus, just the “coast to coast” bonus, so building a more efficient route that encompasses your two initial tickets is more about hoping you’ve already completed tickets you’ll draw later in the game or will at least be closer to finishing them. That means less need for the long-term planning of the original game, which makes it easier for younger players to keep up with the adults.

For the youngest players, First Journey might still present the frustration that comes from getting boxed out of a route, especially with three or four players. You can use your turn to trash your two current route cards, however, and draw two new ones, which at least gives you a chance to draw something you’ve already completed or at least will be able to complete. It also means that showing other players your route cards isn’t a negative, so if parents want to help their kids it doesn’t hurt the parents’ ability to play their own hands. The game still has a fair amount of luck involved in card draws of both types, and it’s possible to just have an unlucky game, which cuts both ways with younger players since they can be helped by randomness as well as irritated by it. There are three levels of AI difficulty; I only played against the Hard AI, which I think would be hard for a young player new to the game but isn’t challenging for someone who’s played the full Ticket to Ride.

The game appears to end immediately when one player reaches six points, rather than allowing all players a final turn as in the base game, which seems to give the first player an advantage. It’s possible, therefore, to have a player complete his/her fifth route and then draw a ticket for a route s/he has already completed, ending the game on the spot.

The game comes with a U.S. map and players can unlock a Europe map with a free Asmodee online account. The Europe map will be a standalone game in physical form (due out to U.S. retail in January) and includes a coast-to-coast style bonus, which is more of a west-to-east bonus with players connecting Dublin, Brest, or Madrid to Moscow, Rostov, or Ankara (represented by a samovar rather than an iron fist). There are also collectible stamps within the app for players to earn with each victory.

The First Journey app is ideal for players too young for the full game, with the inflection point probably somewhere around age 7 or 8 depending on your kids’ experiences with better boardgames. For older kids and adults, I recommend the Ticket to Ride app itself, which is among the best boardgame apps available and allows you to buy different maps as in-app purchases to give you different experiences and new rules tweaks.

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→ September 19, 2017
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Through the Ages.

Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization is currently the #2-rated game on Boardgamegeek – a ranking that tends to skew towards longer, more complex games – even higher than the original version, which is ranked #18, so it was perfect fodder for an app version, especially since the game requires a fair amount of accounting work to keep track of all of the resources and options. The app dropped last week for $9.99 for iOS devices and Android, and it is really stunning – great graphics, smooth gameplay, no glitches, and decent AI players – although I have to admit I’m not sure I love the game underneath it.

Through the Ages is essentially Sid Meier’s Civilization in card form, with a few tweaks. Players are competing to build tableaux of cards that represent growing civilizations from the stone age to the present day, playing cards that generate food, stone, knowledge, and happiness; making new workers by growing the population; adding new technologies; developing new military units and growing armies; raiding or declaring war on opponents; constructing Wonders, because every game of this theme has to have that; upgrading their government types; and probably six other things I’ve already forgotten.

On each turn, players get a fixed number of civil actions and military actions that allow them to take cards, grow the population, research technologies, or build buildings. The number of each is tied to the government type, with more advanced governments giving players more actions per turn. Everything in the game is dictated by the cards available on the rolling display; the first few cards cost one civil action to take, then the next group costs two, and the last three, with some penalties for certain card types. You’re really building a giant engine that will produce enough of the different resource types to allow you to rack up points in the end-game without creating unrest or running short of what you need to keep up with your opponents’ armies or feed your workers or lose resources to ‘corruption.’ There are substantial bonuses for finishing Wonders and in the Politics cards that will appear later in the game or at the end.

Through the Ages is incredibly layered, and requires more oversight, active management, and long-term planning than most games I’ve ever played. It has reached the point in some games where I thought, “Maybe I should write down what I’m doing so I remember what to do on my next turn,” which I think is a clear sign that a game has become work. I also had to monitor the AI players’ moves in the game log just to figure out why I was getting so thoroughly trounced (by the medium level, no less), and eventually pieced together a sort of rough strategy that involved getting Knights, Iron, Irrigation, and a couple of key military and science cards; it doesn’t work every time but I did finally beat the S.O.B. by doing that and ensuring I was never at a military strength disadvantage for the entire game.

The biggest bottleneck in the game is the need for an ‘idle worker’ to build or create anything new, whether it’s a building (farms, mines, labs, temples, and later versions of the same) or a military unit. You need a certain amount of food to grow your population, an amount that increases as the game goes on, and then those people need to eat, so you have to keep producing food to grow your population and build more things, or to destroy some of your weakest buildings to put those workers on more productive jobs. (Of course, they don’t actually earn any more for being more productive, as all benefits flow to you, which is one way in which Through the Ages reflects our modern economy.) There are yellow resource cards in the carousel that give you immediate, one-time bonuses of food, stone, or science, but taking one burns an action that you might need for something else.

And those actions are a second major bottleneck. Every player starts the game under Despotism, and can take a unique government card to upgrade to more modern systems that grant more actions – some give more civil actions but fewer military ones, some more military ones but not many more civil ones – and then burn either a whole turn or several rounds’ worth of science points for a “revolution” that changes your government type. You have to do this once to win, I think; I don’t know if doing it twice would pay off. But late in the game you’ll need more than the four civil actions per turn you get from Despotism.

Whereas in Civilization and other 4X (video) games, you can pretty much build whatever you want if you have the resources, Through the Ages dramatically limits your options because it’s card-based. There’s a ton of luck involved in the card draws, because the rolling market turns over quickly, with the leftmost three cards moving after every player if not selected; it’s easy to miss a card you need, especially those with just one or two copies in the deck. (All leader and wonder cards are unique, and you can’t take a wonder card if you have one currently in production.) The political cards aren’t quite a function of luck, but if you end up behind in military strength, your opponents can hammer you every turn, deepening your deficit by robbing you of population, resources, points, or buildings. Players play these cards into a LIFO queue, so playing one into it pushes the oldest one out, and many of those cards really stick it to whoever has the weakest army, more so as the game progresses.

Through the Ages never eliminates anyone, but deficits can grow exponentially, and it can be clear halfway through the game that you’re just not coming back. It also has one of my least favorite game features – players can have actions available without any way of using them. No one likes the frustration of having the right to make a move but not having the ability; some of this is a function of insufficient planning, but you can also just get stuck even if you did the right things earlier.

The app version is extremely well-done, with a tutorial that should be a model for other developers looking to port (or just create) complex boardgames to tablets. (There’s even a clever joke within it.) And the app has built-in reminders to cover numerous situations where you might forget a free action, fail to use all your actions, lose resources to corruption, or lose all production on your next turn due to an Uprising (in essence, if you don’t have enough happiness points to cover your population). There are so many cards with special functions that it’s easy to forget what you can do, and the attempt to render some depth to your civilization means wonders are in the way back, at least one of which, the Ocean Liner, gives you a new benefit each turn, fall out of sight and out of mind.

There's a lot going on here.

I found the light AI to be more of a training module, but the medium AI throttled me repeatedly before my first win. That doesn’t mean the medium AI is good, just better than I am as someone new to the game. It was instructive to watch the AI’s actions, and the game log, available by tapping a button on the upper left, is clear and useful. The game also has an easy undo function that lets you go back as far as your last irreversible move – such as something that involved revealing cards or a battle against an opponent. There’s a lot on the screen, but everything is brightly colored and clear, and once you get the hang of some of the images they’re using – like having a light on in a building to show that it’s occupied by a worker – they’re straightforward.

Through the Ages is above the level of game difficulty I prefer; it’s long and involved, requiring too much thought and planning to make it truly fun for me. I understand why players would love the game’s intellectual challenge and the reward of building something successful, but I prefer games that move a little faster and let me act more spontaneously. If playing a game with a beer in hand would make you demonstrably worse at it, it might not qualify as fun in my book. But if you like Through the Ages, or just generally like intricate games with long cycles, this app is just what you want.

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→ September 16, 2017
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Stick to baseball, 9/16/17.

For Insiders this week, I wrote two pieces, one on eight top 100 prospects who had disappointing years in 2017, and my last minor-league scouting notebook of the season, covering Yankees, Pirates, Nationals, and Cardinals prospects. I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday. My next column for ESPN will be my annual “players I got wrong” piece; if you have suggestions, throw them in the comments. I try to stick to players who’ve beaten expectations for more than just one season, although sometimes I waive that if there’s a particular story I want to tell.

Over at Paste I reviewed Yamataï, the new boardgame from Days of Wonder, which hasn’t fared that well critically or commercially but which all three members of my family really liked. It’s also a gorgeous game, which never hurts around here.

My book, Smart Baseball, is out and still selling well (or so I’m told); thanks to all of you who’ve already picked up a copy. And please sign up for my free email newsletter, which is back to more or less weekly at this point now that I’m not traveling for a bit.

I have a ton of links from the NY Times this week, which requires a subscription above a certain number of free articles. I normally try to spread my links out across many sources, but the NYT had so much great content this week that I stuck with it. I’ve tagged a few of them as such for those of you who don’t subscribe (I do, obviously). And now, the links…

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→ September 2, 2017
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Stick to baseball, 9/2/17.

For Insiders this week, I wrote four pieces. I broke down the Astros’ trade for Justin Verlander and the Angels’ trade for Justin Upton. I put up scouting notes on prospects from the Yankees, Phillies, Jays, and Rangers. And I looked at five potential prospect callups for September. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

At Vulture this week, I looked at five major Game of Thrones-themed boardgames, not just reskinned games but several original titles like the excellent GoT Card Game. For Paste, I reviewed the Tour de France-themed boardgame La Flamme Rouge, which is light and good for family play. And here on the dish I reviewed the strong app version of the two-player game Jaipur, a steal at $5.

I’m trying something new this week, and if you find it useful I’d appreciate your feedback. I get a lot of press releases on boardgames from publishers, so I’m including the best of those at the end of this run of links along with boardgame-related news items. These will include Kickstarter announcements that look interesting to me, and if I’ve seen a game at all I’ll indicate it in the blurb.

This is your regular reminder that my book Smart Baseball is available everywhere now in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook formats. Also, please sign up for my free email newsletter, as my subscriber count is down one after I removed that one guy who complained about the most recent edition and called me a “tool.”

And now, the links…

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