→ August 5, 2018
→ By

Stick to baseball, 8/4/18.

For Insiders this week, I had a slew of trade writeups:

I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday before I headed off to Gen Con 2018. You can see some of the photos I took there, the country’s biggest board gaming convention, on my Instagram. The writeup will come later this week.

I’ve been better about sending out my free email newsletter lately after slacking a bit during the spring (in large part because I can’t use the site’s editing function on an iPad), so, you know, do that signup.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The hard-to-believe true story of how an ex-cop led a conspiracy to rig the McDonald’s Monopoly game.
  • The Guardian rank a lengthy excerpt from a new book on denial and denialism, Keith Kahn-Harris’ Denial: The Unspeakable Truth. The excerpt covers a lot of ground, describing why denialism is more than just the denial of truth, why facts tend not to stop or change denialists’ minds, and the dangerous new phase of denialism before us.
  • The Verge has a longread on the gaming of Amazon’s listings and sales system by self-published romance authors. It’s just a bizarre subculture, and has led to a lawsuit over two authors’ use of the word “cocky” in their books titles. The journalist who wrote this piece, Sarah Jeong, just joined the New York Times editorial board; Vox, which owns the Verge, has a great piece on the non-troversy that alt-right trolls used to try to get her fired.
  • The Rumpus’ editor Lyz Lenz writes that writing still matters in the age of despair. Write like a motherfucker, as Cheryl Strayed (Wild) once wrote.
  • Why would the University of Michigan allow the presentation of “research” on homeopathy? Homeopathy is woo. After you dilute the substance in question that many times, all that remains is bullshit.
  • The Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial board called on the state to crack down on doctors who spread anti-vaccine lies, as California is trying to do.
  • There’s a huge Dunning-Kruger epidemic in the anti-vaccine community, which has also managed to diverted time and funds away from more important vaccine research towards needless studies debunking claims like the nonexistent vaccine/autism link.
  • Spike Lee accused the President of giving the green light to the KKK and other hate groups during a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian about his upcoming film Black Klansman.
  • Gizmodo details how two strangers tried to wreck an Alabama realtor’s life by spreading a false story about the realtor sleeping with someone else’s husband.
  • The Washington Post looks at the board game Twilight Struggle’s new relevance in this political environment. I happen to find the game wildly overrated; it’s long, hard to set up, and requires intimate knowledge of the two player decks to play it well.
  • This Psychology Today essay assailing the ‘lack of resiliency’ of today’s college students seems to me to paint with an excessively broad brush, and contradicts the message we give our kids today to reach out when they need help. I’m also a little skeptical of the veracity of some of the stories – they sound like they were crafted for viral tweets – but even if they’re true, I’d rather too many kids ask for help than too few.
  • The anti-LGBT group Alliance Defending Freedom has been working to undermine basic protections for LGBT citizens, especially trans youth, using disingenuous and even dangerous language.
  • Former big leaguer Adam Greenberg, whose MLB career consisted of two PA, one in 2005 and one in 2012, is now running for Congress in Connecticut as a Republican. The fact that he’s turning to politics is interesting in itself, but the NY Times author here, John Altavilla, spends almost no time on Greenberg’s policy positions.
  • Would-be populist – and clear Islamophobe and race troll – Ben Shapiro is backed by a wide network of billionaire conservatives, many of whom also support more reviled figures like Ann Coulter and the Breitbart site.
  • Turning Point USA, the hard-right conservative group founding by diaper-clad college students, has been courting and praising anti-Semitic troll Bryan Sharpe, who has denied the Holocaust occurred and uses the triple-parentheses notation favored by white supremacists to identify or out Jewish people.
  • These QAnon people are batshit insane.
  • The Pennsylvania gun rights lobby watered down a bill aimed at keeping domestic abusers from obtaining guns.
  • The Washington Post profiled New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, although the piece doesn’t question him enough about their opinion pages.
  • An Astros fan wrote an open letter to the team’s GM, criticizing the decision to acquire Roberto Osuna.
  • There’s a new shape in town – really, totally new to mathematicians and physicists, but something that appears in nature: the scutoid.
  • An “Instagram star” – seriously, how the fuck is this a thing – is in hot water after her cookbook included ‘recipes’ likely to sicken or kill people who try to eat those dishes. One example that would be obvious to anyone who knows food is the advice to forage for and eat raw morels. A good editor is important; a bad one can lead to a PR disaster. Also, maybe don’t give someone who just takes nice pictures a cookbook deal.
  • Jack White (ex-White Stripes) is now the co-owner of a baseball bat manufacturer.
  • And finally, a video, as comedian Aamer Rahman explains why there isn’t any such thing as “reverse racism:”
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    → July 19, 2018
    → By

    Istanbul app.

    Istanbul won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2014 and was one of my favorite new games of that year, ranking only behind Splendor on my personal list. Although the basic mechanics of individual turns revolve mostly around set collection, gathering items you can trade for rubies (required to win the game) or for money you can use to buy rubies, the real heart of Istanbul strategy is critical path modeling: figuring out the best way to move around the variable board to ensure you’re being as efficient as possible with your turns. Because the board itself is built each game, with a basic ‘short paths’ setup but millions of potential arrangements of the 16 tiles, you can master the concept but can’t go into a game with a set plan.

    Acram Digital has now introduced a port of Istanbul for iOS and Android, and it’s excellent right out of the chute, with just minor flaws even at its first release. The app particularly helps the novice player by making it hard to forget options you might have to enhance your turns; if you have earned a special ability or have the right to play a card that might help, the app reminds you of this, sometimes with a dialog asking if you’re sure you don’t want to use that ability, sometimes just with an icon right on the screen that puts the option in front of you. That makes game play much easier against the AI and more fair if you’re playing online against more advanced players.

    In Istanbul, each player is trying to be the first to collect five rubies, anywhere on the board. You can buy them with combinations of goods, with gold coins, by upgrading your ‘wheelbarrow’ three times (a total cost of 21 coins), or by buying both upgrades at the small mosque or the great mosque. The catch with all of those tiles, other than the wheelbarrow upgrade, is that the cost increases each time someone uses the tile, so getting there early can be beneficial … but it costs you the change to acquire upgrades that might make it easier to collect rubies later in the game. You move around the 4×4 board of tiles with your merchant and a stack of ‘assistant’ tokens; when you land on a tile and want to use it, you must leave one assistant there, or, if you’ve been there before and left an assistant already, pick that one back up. Once your stack is out of assistants, you can move but can’t take an action unless you pick an assistant back up or return to the Fountain tile and bring ’em all home. I reviewed the game in full for Paste back in 2015.

    The app is pretty much spot on; I had just one little glitch, found some spelling errors in the tutorial, and would like harder AI opponents, but that’s a modest list of criticisms for a brand new release – and it has yet to crash on me through dozens of plays. The app offers four board setups, including the semi-random setup described in the physical game’s rulebook, and lets you play one to four human or AI opponents, with three difficulty settings for the latter. The game’s icons are simple, but sometimes the function of a card or a mosque upgrade isn’t immediately clear; you can click on any of those and hit the (i) in the upper left corner to get a full description of what it does. There’s a tiny lag sometimes when you complete an action before the app gives you the icons to move to the next screen, not a serious problem but something that threw me off the first few times I played.

    The app also includes the ‘neutral assistants’ variant, where each player starts the game with one assistant in his/her stack that doesn’t belong to any single player, so if you go to a tile with a neutral assistant on it, you can pick it up and take the action even if you didn’t leave the token there in the first place. It’s definitely worth the $7 as is, although again, I think the hard AI players need to be stronger; I’m no expert at the game but can beat them more than half the time even on the harder boards.

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    → June 13, 2018
    → By

    Compounded.

    The board game Compounded takes its theme from the world of chemistry, asking players to gather five elements to assemble any of the sixteen compounds available at any given time on the table, while boosting players’ abilities to form and fill compounds as the game progresses. The core game play is pretty simple, although the rules are more detailed than they probably need to be, and there’s one rule I could probably have done completely without.

    The elements that players will use to form their compounds are drawn at random from a bag, and no two elements appear with the same frequency – hydrogen is the most common, sulfur is the rarest. Compounds can be as simple as three elements, and can require up to eight. You can ‘claim’ one compound at a time, before you finish it, and can then place two elements anywhere on the tableau on a turn. Once you do finish a compound, you take the card, return the elements to the bag, earn three to seven points, and get to move up one of your four tracking tokens that affect how many elements you draw at the start of each turn (default is two), how many compounds you can claim at any given time, how many elements you can place on a turn, and how many elements you can store on your board (default is four). Some compounds also give you a bonus token or ongoing ability; for example, if you have three elements of any color, you can return them to the bag to take one element of your choice, but with the Pipette that ratio becomes 2:1 instead.

    The game progresses until one player has scored at least 50 points – the scoring track is a separate board showing the periodic table, so you have to at least get to tin – or one player has reached the top of three of his four tracks, or the deck of compounds is exhausted. That can take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half in our experience, playing with three to five players. (It plays two with some rules variations.)

    The one rule that I would gladly ditch is the lab fire, which doesn’t do much but add some randomness and a little ability to screw your opponents to the game. Some compounds have one or two tiny fire icons at the bottom of their cards, indicating that the compounds are flammable. The deck of compound cards has five Lab Fire cards in it, and when one appears, players must add one very tiny fire token to every compound on the table that has the icon on it. Once all flame icons on a compound have been filled, the compound explodes and is removed from the board, and all elements on it are scattered to adjacent compounds (at the discretion of the player who had claimed but not finished it). There are also a few volatile compounds in the deck that explode when they’re completed and have a similar effect on the tableau. Players can complete their fire extinguishers – two oxygen, one carbon and use them to remove one flame token from any compound, although I think it’s better to save it until the end of the game for 4 extra points. And you may earn a one-time use Bunsen burner token that you can use to light someone else’s compound on fire, which is just mean.

    There’s more strategy required in Compounded that just figuring out which compounds you can easily finish; gaining the abilities to draw or place more elements each round is huge, and whichever player moves up the fastest on those tracks is going to have an advantage that will be hard for other players to catch. Getting those abilities does require some luck, however, as you have to draw the right elements to be able to complete the right compounds; we had one five-player game where one player never managed to finish a compound that would have allowed her to draw more than two elements at a time. There is a slight workaround – if you finish a compound with a graduated cylinder on it, you can then bump one track down a peg and another track up a peg, once per turn for the rest of the game – but it can lead to a serious imbalance if one player just gets the wrong draws from the bag.

    I’m all for more science-themed games, and chemistry games seem to be especially scarce, so Compounded is a welcome entry to the field. I did find some of the rules a little fiddly, and the Lab Fire mechanic didn’t really work for me other than to add more maintenance and move through the compound deck a little faster. The core game play itself, trying to figure out how best to deploy the elements you’ve drawn, is the best part of Compounded, and you can certainly tweak the other rules to work with just that basic mechanic for a cleaner experience.

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    → April 8, 2018
    → By

    Stick to baseball, 4/7/18.

    Three new pieces for Insiders this week – looking at the most prospect-laden rosters in the minors, and draft blog posts on the top prospects at the NHSI tournament and on Kentucky’s 6’11” RHP Sean Hjelle. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

    Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! You can buy it through HarperCollins directly or at any bookseller.

    And now, the links…

    • Longread: Novelist Rana Dasgupta, writing in the Guardian, looks at the ongoing decline of the nation-state system and the lack of a promising structure to replace it.
    • The Useless Department of Agriculture ruled this week that organic food producers can use the bogeyman emulsifier carrageenan, derived from seaweed and blamed (without evidence) for lots of health ills. The real problem here is that the USDA shouldn’t be ruling on what organic means; it’s not clear any more that that term has any use, and one major reason is that the federal government has watered it down.
    • ICE is trying to deport a U.S. Army veteran, contrary to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ directive that they should not do that. I feel safer already!
    • The Thai government has had a long-running endeavor to open more Thai restaurants abroad, reasoning that it would help drive tourism to the southeast Asian country (which has a not entirely undeserved reputation for unsavory tourist business). It’s been successful enough, at least, that other countries are mimicking their strategy.
    • This week’s NPR Hidden Brain podcast, a repeat of an episode from about two years ago, covered the scarcity trap, or how a lack of something leads us to focus inordinately on getting it. Among other things, it helps explain why people who live paycheck to paycheck (or with less) have a hard time spreading out the funds they do have until their next deposit.
    • The Outline looks at why Wilmington, Delaware’s ongoing problem with gun violence hasn’t abated even as the national homicide rate has declined. Three major reasons: Urban poverty, the effects of trauma, and bureaucratic infighting.
    • JAMA ran an anti-glyphosate editorial recently without disclosing the authors’ substantial conflict of interest. The authors are running what sounds like a scam site offering to test customers’ urine for the presence of glyphosate for a significant fee.
    • The Athletic has a subscriber-only piece that includes a Q&A with Rob Manfred on MLB’s end run around the courts to suppress minor league salaries, and why Manfred’s answers don’t add up.
    • The Good Phight’s Paul Boyé looks at Nick Pivetta’s new, sharper curveball. Pivetta was a sinker/slider guy in the Nats’ system, and had no real weapon for left-handed batters back when I first saw him in 2015, when he had a wide platoon split. He had virtually no split in 2016, then had a huge reverse split in the majors in 2017. With two effective breaking pitches now, though, I’d absolutely expect him to show substantial improvement against right-handed batters.
    • Tim Grierson discussed the new film You Were Never Really Here with director Lynne Ramsey and star Joaquin Phoenix, who won Best Actor at Cannes for this performance.
    • A pair of stories around my alma mater: I saw folks claiming on Twitter that Harvard had somehow suspended its largest evangelical students’ group; the truth is that the Undergraduate Council suspended funding for an evangelical group that violated the Council’s rules on non-discrimination by expelling an officer who came out as LGBT. The UC is a student-run organization, not the university proper.
    • There’s also a stalking-horse lawsuit against Harvard alleging that the university discriminates against Asian-American applicants; the truth is that the lawsuit is arranged and funded by a white conservative who opposes affirmative action.
    • The headline here is terribly misleading, but there was a flurry of stories this week like this one, about a new study arguing that diet affects mental health, particularly depression. The quick-and-dirty: eat more fiber in your diet from vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. As a whole, the prescription doesn’t sound that different from the so-called Mediterranean diet.
    • James Beard award-winning chef Sean Brock went public with his alcoholism last year, and in a new piece for Bon Appetit he describes his new diet and self-care regime, a combination of good nutrition, mindfulness, and pseudoscience.
    • Serious Eats has a guide to Italian amari, potable bitters that include Campari and Montenegro. The guide includes comments from Sother Teague, owner of tiny Manhattan bar Amor y Amargo, profiled this week on Liquor.com. I’ve been to Amor y Amargo and it’s superb; Teague uses only bitters, no sodas or fruit juices, in his drinks, creating clever flavor combinations with some serious alcohol kick.
    • George Will writes that there’s no good reason to prevent felons from voting; there’s a reason states like Florida do it, of course, but it’s not a good one.
    • Board game news: The Fireball Island Kickstarter was fully funded in an hour and crossed the $1 million funding mark inside of a week.
    • Z-Man Games announced Taj Mahal, the upcoming game from Reiner Knizia, due out later this year.
    • Asmodee Digital announced the imminent release of the Terraforming Mars app, with Steam coming first and iOS/Android soon after.
    • In what appears to be an April Fools’ Day tradition, Berkeley Breathed released a new “Calvin County” crossover comic, bringing Calvin back to the meadow of Bloom County.
    Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
    → February 27, 2018
    → By

    Abalone.

    Abalone is an abstract two-player game from 1987 that looks a bit like Chinese checkers but plays with much more complexity thanks to a short list of very narrowly defined potential moves. It got a digital release late in 2017 from Asmodee Digital that offers a variety of starting boards and has a mostly superb interface, although they might need a harder AI player for a future update. It’s available on iTunes and Google Play for $2.99.

    Abalone is played on the central, shared area of a Chinese checkers board, a hexagon with nine rows ranging from five spaces on the exterior to nine spaces in the center row. Each player begins with 14 marbles, black or white, and must try to push six of the opposing player’s marbles off the board to win. The potential moves are:

    1. You can move one marble one space in any direction, as long as the space is empty.
    2. You can move two or three marbles in a line forward, as a unit, one space. If the next space has an opposing marble in it, but your group has more marbles than there are opposing marbles in the same row, then you can push them one space backwards. So you can move two marbles, one behind the other, to push a solitary opposing marble into an empty space beyond it, and you can move three marbles in a line to push two opposing marbles.
    3. You can move two or three adjacent marbles on the perpendicular, rather than moving them in a line (moving them like you’re sweeping them with your hand), but can’t push any opposing marbles that way.

    The game requires players to consider offense and defense; setting traps is a huge part of Abalone, and avoiding them by setting up lines of three marbles when you can is just as important, but with 14 marbles (a number that will decline as the game progresses), that’s not easy to do. You have to watch the edges to make sure you don’t lose sight of a marble that’s in danger of being pushed off the board on the next turn.

    The easy AI player is really just a tutorial/newbie opponent, while the hard player is good but I think a bit too beatable. The hardest AI will take advantage of pieces on the edge, but its trap-setting capabilities are a little weak, and I have seen it fail to take the occasional risk-free ejection. (Sometimes you can eject an opponent’s marble, but doing so always puts your marble in the vacated space, and thus you might be giving your opponent an easy push.) I’ve lost to the hard AI player, but I beat it more often than I lose, needing as few as 63 moves to win and as many as 199.


    The nicest starting arrangement in Abalone.

    The app comes with more than 30 starting boards; some players think the official, classic board is “solved,” or at least confers too much of an advantage to the start player, although given the sheer number of moves required, the game being “solved” would still require you to memorize a ridiculous number of steps. There’s also a chance of a stalemate, especially with the AI players, where both players end up repeating a loop of steps indefinitely, until one player chooses to make a more aggressive move instead. I do think the various “Daisy” boards – the app includes four – present a better challenge, reducing the chances of a temporary stalemate, and as I quickly learned, they also give the start player a great opportunity to do something very stupid at the beginning.

    I’ve never been a huge fan of chess, because the game requires more study and more forward planning than I like in a game – it’s a serious intellectual challenge, but begins to feel more like work, and mapping out the potential scenarios creates a fairly large decision tree in my head. (I’m also not great at discarding moves – I think the best chess players can prune those trees because they know their opponents will make a specific move in response to each of their own moves.) Abalone has that chess-lite feel that I love in games – yes, there are lots of potential moves, but the tree is limited because you only have one piece type, and it’s definitely easier to figure out your opponent’s likely next move.


    I won this game rather nicely.

    The app is very easy to play even on the small screen, and lets you undo any move before confirming it. You can also see the last move with a rewind feature that’s very useful, and at game end it tells you how many moves the game took and replays the entire thing from the beginning. One minor quibble is that when you leave the app for a while, resuming a game requires you to enter the menu to start a new game and then hit the Pause button in the upper right, the only thing in the app that felt non-intuitive. The tutorial is also excellent.

    Abalone was briefly on sale for 99 cents, and I imagine it will be again at some point; I’ve found it quite addictive even as I’ve gotten to be good enough to beat the AI more than half the time (which I interpret as a weak AI, not that I’m some skilled player). It offers a pass and play mode as well as networked play, which might be the better option if you’re looking for a more serious challenge instead of a minor brain teaser. I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth from it already.

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    → February 19, 2018
    → By

    Otys.

    Otys is a new-ish midweight strategy board game from Asmodee’s Libellud imprint, released here right around the holidays, and the first title from designer Claude Lucchini. It’s a sort of futuristic deep sea-diving themed game, where players try to gather resources to complete contracts, and must manipulate two sets of tiles to be able to make moves. There might be a better game in here somewhere, but I found it rather overdesigned, and the mechanics aren’t well-connected to the theme.

    In Otys, two to four players each work with a player board that has six tokens, numbered one through five plus a neutral “X” token, and eight diver tiles, each of which has a different ability. The board has slots for the numbered tokens, and then a column where you randomly stack the diver tiles in a way that has five of them adjacent to the five numbered slots. On a turn, you will pick one of the numbered tiles, slide it to the right, use one of the five “sponsor” tiles from the central board to get something (a credit, a battery, the right to use your diver’s skill twice, etc.), and then use the ability of the adjacent diver. Four of the divers get you specific resources. The others let you add abilities like gaining a new contract card only you can complete or trading credits for resources.

    The contracts come in two forms. The game has four resources – white, green, blue, and black, which I think mean actual things like plants and water, but it really doesn’t matter to the mechanics – and some contracts simply require you gather two to four specific resources to fulfill them, gaining points and sometimes a credit or battery token. The other contracts tell you to acquire specific combinations of any resources – so, two of one type, two of another, and one of a third – where you get to pick the colors, and then have similar rewards.


    The Otys board; diver tiles are in the center column.

    The big catch in Otys, and the only mechanic here that I thought was novel, is that each token/diver row on your player board has a storage space for resources, and to fill a contract, you must have all the right resources in one specific storage space. The spaces can hold three to six resources, but in practical terms, you’re going to use maybe two of them heavily, because gaining resources in all of your storage areas will leave you unable to ever fill contracts. You can also add tokens via one diver (the ‘explorer’) that let you pay two credits, take one resource or victory point or battery now, and then place that token on its other face next to a storage area, providing you with a permanent bonus whenever you fill a contract from that area. The divers are also double-sided, with each bringing an ‘upgraded’ side that lets you invoke its power for one fewer credit or that gives you something else in addition to the single resource.

    The numbered ‘key’ tokens must be placed in the ‘hacker’ track below your board after they’re used; you can only bring them back up when the track is filled, which at the start of the game would mean using all of your tokens at least once before using them again. You get one X token to place in any row where you’ve already used the key, and there’s a way – very poorly described in the English rules – to acquire more X tokens from the central supply. This mechanic felt trite, reminiscent of games from Puerto Rico and San Juan to last year’s Entropy, where you have to use all or most of your roles and then ‘reset’ your hand, and the combination of this mechanic and the diver one – when you use a diver, s/he has to ‘resurface’ by going to the top of the queue, with everyone above him/her moving down a spot – just made the game overly complex.

    The game ends when anyone gets to 18 points, after which you finish the round so everyone can try to complete one more contract. In practice, that means 3-4 contracts plus the random point or two you’ll add along the way, and it does play in about an hour. The theme has almost nothing to do with the game, and there are way too many restrictions and twists here for me to enjoy the experience. I wish more effort had gone into streamlining the rules, even if it came at the cost of some of the artwork or component design.

    Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
    → February 16, 2018
    → By

    Seikatsu.

    Seikatsu was one of my honorable mentions on my list of the top ten games of 2017, maybe the best-looking game I played last year with gorgeous artwork and solid, heavy tokens. It’s listed as a game for 1 to 4 players, but really works best with 3 and fairly well with 2, not with the other counts.

    Seikatsu calls itself “a game of perspective,” which is true for the final scoring, which accounts for the bulk of the points in the game. You score two ways in Seikatsu: once when you place a token on each turn, and then once for each row on the hexagonal board at the end of the game – but the rows you score depend on where you sit, so each player scores those rows (or columns, if you want to get all pedantic about it) differently. The result is a fast-moving game that asks you to balance two different scoring methods with every turn, but that keeps those turns short because your options are finite and it’s not that hard to figure out an optimal move.

    The tokens in Seikatsu each show a bird and a ring of flowers, which correspond to the two scoring methods. You can place a token anywhere adjacent to another token or the neutral center space, and you score 1 point for that token plus another point for each adjacent token with the same bird image on it. In theory, you could score a maximum of 7 points, but in practice you’ll get 1 to 3 each turn and maybe luck into a 4 once every other game or so. There are four koi pond tokens that function as wild cards; you can place one and name any bird type to score it, after which the tile no longer scores as any bird type for tokens placed adjacent to it.

    The flowers come into play at the end of the game. There are pagodas on three vertices of the board, each of which corresponds to one player’s perspective for scoring, splitting the board into seven columns unique to that player. In each column (or row … I’ll stop that now), the player identifies the flower type that appears on the most tokens, and scores points based on that number – 1 point for a single token, then 3, 6, 10, 15, and 21 points for the maximum possible number of six tokens with the same flower type. Koi pond tiles are wild again in this stage, and each player can assign whatever flower type s/he wants to those tiles.

    Seikatsu is ideal with three players; with two, it’s a little easier to work the board independently until the last few moves, whereas with three you can’t plan ahead as easily. You only get two tokens in your hand each turn, so long-range planning is just not part of the game, but with two players you can set up your rows of flowers with less interference from other players. We’ve found that with two players, the scores are extremely close – we’ve tied once and never had a margin of victory over 5 points. That makes it a great game for a parent to play with a child, because it’s hard for the parent to run away with the game and thus doesn’t require playing ‘down’ to the younger player’s level. With four players, it’s “team” play, which I don’t think works very well; there’s a solitaire mode I haven’t tried. Seikatsu lists for $40, which I think reflects the high quality of the components but is a bit dear for this type of game; now that it’s been on the market for six months, though, I’m seeing it for under $30 (e.g., $28 on amazon) which is just right.

    Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
    → February 10, 2018
    → By

    Stick to baseball, 2/10/18.

    My one new piece for Insiders this week covers the Cubs signing Yu Darvish to a six-year deal. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

    I reviewed the new, light strategy board game Majesty: For the Realm for Paste this week.

    I’ve been sending out my free email newsletter a bit more regularly now that the prospect work is over. Also, Smart Baseball will be out in paperback on March 13th; you can pre-order it on amazon or elsewhere, although at the moment the hardcover version is about $1 cheaper.

    And now, the links…

    Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,
    → February 3, 2018
    → By

    Stick to baseball, 2/3/18.

    My org reports and top ten prospect lists for all 30 teams are now up for Insiders, which concludes this year’s prospect rankings package:

    • NL East
    • NL Central
    • NL West
    • AL East
    • AL Central
    • AL West

    I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday.
    I’ve been selling some of my board game collection and donating the proceeds to charity, including the Food Bank of Delaware and hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

    With the prospects project done, I resumed my free email newsletter this past week. Also, the paperback edition of Smart Baseball comes out on March 13th; you can buy any of the editions through HarperCollins’ site.

    And now, the links…

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    → January 10, 2018
    → By

    Exit: The Game.

    I have a new board game review up at Paste today as well, covering Pandemic: Rising Tide, a standalone spinoff of the best cooperative game on the market.

    Exit: The Game won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2017 in a bit of an upset over the heavily favored and much better-reviewed Terraforming Mars, which I thought was the best complex game (or “expert game,” which is the literal translation of Kennerspiel) of its year. (It also beat Raiders of the North Sea, which I have played just once but enjoyed.) I’m guessing Exit won because it’s novel – it’s a series of cooperative puzzle games that are supposed to mimic the escape-room experience in a tabletop setting. There are other new games in this vein, like Unlock!, but Exit does this really well, with puzzles that you can reasonably solve in the allotted time and, more importantly, a very strong system for helping you if you’re stuck.

    Each Exit box gives you a single play, because you’ll be changing destroying components, including tearing or cutting cards, marking up pages, and maybe even disassembling the box. I played four of the games: The Abandoned Cabin (the first in the series), The Forgotten Island, The Polar Station, and The Forbidden Castle, which vary from two to four on the game’s 1-5 difficulty scale, and there was a noticeable difference in the challenges – although I’m not sure the difficult boxes are better, just harder.

    One Exit game box comes with three card decks – riddles, solutions, and help cards with hints – plus a booklet specific to that game, a disk of three concentric dials used to decipher codes, and sometimes some “special objects” that may be stencils or windows for finding clues on other cards or pages. You’ll start the game with one of the riddle cards plus the text on the first page of the booklet, and then must find a series of three-digit codes to progress through the game. Each game has roughly ten codes to find, represented by different shapes on the disk, which also help you figure out which cards and pages might work together. The puzzles come in lots of forms, and we found it was better to think a little like a kid to solve many of them. Some of the puzzles are visual – you have to trace things, connect dots, color in cards, fold pages into different shapes, cut pages into strips, all things you’d never expect to do with a board game. Some puzzles are self-contained, while others require you to solve three smaller ones to get each of the digits for the code.

    Once you think you have the code for a specific puzzle, you locate that puzzle’s symbol on the outer rim of the disk and then rotate the three inner dials to match the code. (Some games use colors or other glyphs instead of numbers, but there will then be a reference card to help you translate them into numbers so it doesn’t become a drag on the game time.) A card number from 1 to 30 will show up in the center of the disk, which sends you to the Solutions deck. Some cards in that deck will tell you you’re wrong right away; others will ask where you saw that symbol – on a piece of furniture, a briefcase, a trunk, a door – in one of the images you’ve seen in the booklet or on a new card. You’ll then be directed to yet another Solution card, and if you were right, that new card will give you further instructions that will include at least one new Riddle card and perhaps give you a special object. This multi-step process makes it difficult to accidentally see an answer to a Riddle, and cheating via the Solutions deck would be nearly impossible.

    Components from Exit The Abandoned Cabin
    Components from Exit: The Abandoned Cabin.

    The Hints deck is the cleverest aspect of Exit’s mechanics by far, and I think it’s what makes this game so playable even if you run into a puzzle you can’t solve. Every puzzle gets three Hint cards with its symbol on it, with the first card telling you what cards, pages, and/or objects you need to solve the puzzle (and maybe one small hint), the second card telling you most of the information on how to solve it, and the third giving the actual solution with an explanation. There were puzzles we solved without any Hints, and a few where we needed all three hint cards to move along. (The game has a timer app you can use, but there really isn’t any need for it except to let you know how long you’ve been playing and nudge you into looking at Hint card.) Having the first Hint card tell you which cards you must have to solve that puzzle is particularly useful if you have pieces of a few puzzles and aren’t sure which one to attack next.

    Everything is fair game for solving these puzzles, including things like the game box itself, outside or inside, and each game we played had at least one puzzle that required us to use something that you might assume wasn’t part of the task. (The image on the inside of the top of the box in one game was quite faint, though, which I think is a mistake and makes the game less accessible.) We did find one glitch in The Forgotten Island, as the final riddle’s solution didn’t work; I haven’t heard back from the designer about this, but I’d pass on that particular module for now. The other three were all quite good and my daughter and I were able to solve them in about an hour using a few hints here and there; each had at least one eye-roller solution, but I think that’s the price of entry given that the designers have to come up with ten or eleven puzzles for each box, meaning some are going to be a little weird or ridiculous, especially when the designers, Markus & Inka Brand, try to make the riddles more difficult. The games list for $15-18 and, even as single-play games, they seemed like a good value to us, enough that we bought one after we finished the review copies I’d received (and my daughter will get some more for her birthday). If you’re intrigued, start with The Abandoned Cabin, since it’s first and I think the most straightforward of the four I’ve played.

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