Daughters.

Daughters is a documentary about a single father-daughter dance, remarkable because the fathers are all incarcerated, some for many years to come, and the dance is part of a program that began in Richmond, Virginia, called Date with Dad.

The film follows several daughters and an entire circle of fathers at a prison in Washington, D.C., from when the men start their required fatherhood coaching sessions about ten weeks before the dance through the event itself and its immediate aftermath. There is no narration, as the subjects do all of the necessary talking to the camera or in groups. We hear from the girls and some of their mothers about how hard it is for them to grow up without their fathers around, sometimes going months or years without touching their dads and maybe talking to them once a week for 15 minutes – for which the mothers are charged outrageous fees. The fathers open up quite a bit about their feelings about being absent fathers, sometimes as children of absent fathers themselves, and the film wisely avoids telling us anything about why they’re incarcerated. Some of the strongest scenes are the smallest ones, like the one where the men, who are provided with suits and haircuts before the dance, are tying their ties, with one man showing a group of the others how to tie a Windsor knot; or the one of Aubrey, the youngest of the daughters we meet, as she rattles off her multiplication tables but who is too young to fully grasp how long her father will be gone. The daughters we see range in ages from 5 to about 15, and their feelings range from sorrow to confusion to outright anger at their dads for their life choices.

When we finally get to the day of the dance, and those girls start walking down the hall towards their fathers, who are sitting in a row of plastic chairs in their suits and polished shoes, I dare you not to cry. I just dare you. Those reactions, both of the daughters and the fathers, are as pure a distillation of what it means to be human as you will see in years of movies. There is far more to the movie than that – the conversations the fathers and daughters have in the dance itself are illuminating and direct and often heartbreaking – but that one moment is the perfect unscripted scene.

I can’t relate to these men completely, because I have never been in that situation, where I couldn’t see my daughter, or hold her, or even talk to her whenever I wanted. That scene where the dads see their daughters for the first time the night of the dance did remind me of one thing, though: the fear that gripped me for almost all of my daughter’s childhood that I would die before she was an adult. I just imagined the grief, the hole in her life, all the things I didn’t get to do or say. When they tell you that being a parent means living with your heart outside of your body, they aren’t even scratching the surface. Being a parent meant living for her more than I was even living for myself.

Daughters follows the dance with brief looks at the aftermath for both sides, with one man, whose daughter couldn’t make it but who is there in suit and tie (and perhaps thought she was coming?), giving a speech to the other dads that is so open and vulnerable that it underscores again their humanity and the cruelty of our prison system. The film ends with two-sentence updates on a few of the incarcerated dads and their daughters, one of whom is now in a facility that doesn’t allow visitation rights. I don’t think I knew that was possible outside of people held in solitary confinement (which is, itself, cruel and unusual punishment), but what Daughters underscores is that such a policy harms more than just the inmates: Regardless of what the father did, depriving his children of the right to even see him – not for a dance, or even a “touch visit,” but literally just to see him to talk to him – harms the kids, and I can’t imagine what the benefit or justification is for the policy other than spite. Our national addiction to incarceration is bad enough, but this film makes it clear how the carceral state also harms succeeding generations. The damage done when we are deprived of a parent, regardless of the reason, is immense. The Date with Dads program boasts a 5% recidivism rate, meaning 95% of fathers who go through the program and are subsequently released from prison do not reoffend. That such a simple program has such powerful results should be reason enough to expand its reach.

Avoiding mention of the fathers’ crimes, alleged or otherwise, is a choice, of course. If we found out that one of these men was responsible for someone’s death – which I don’t think is true given what we hear about the lengths of their sentences – it would alter our view of him whether we want it to or not. That choice by the directors, documentarian Natalie Rae and activist Angela Patton, keeps the focus where it belongs, on the people themselves and the essential relationship between fathers and daughters that will resonate with most of the viewing audience. There are some outtakes from the dance that play alongside the closing credits, and they are definitely worth hanging around to watch, as they show more joy from the night itself than is immediately evident from the main footage, which doesn’t show a whole lot of actual dancing, a choice I understand (this is about their relationships, not the Harlem Shuffle) but that they could have balanced differently.

Daughters won two Audience Awards at the Sundance Film Festival this year, U.S. Documentary and Festival Favorite, after which Netflix picked it up; it’s already showing up on top of predictions for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, along with another Netflix documentary, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, that premieres today. I imagine the powerful social justice angle here will help Daughters in awards season, and I hope that encourages more people to watch it and to consider doing something to help fight the incarceration cycle.

Dune: Imperium.

Dune: Imperium is one of the top-rated games of all time on Boardgamegeek, currently ranked 6th with an overall rating of 8.4 out of 10 despite having nearly 50,000 ratings, a really unusual degree of agreement on a site where, in my experience, people give in to some of their most pedantic tendencies. The game came out in 2020, in advance of the first Dune film from Denis Villeneuve, from the publisher Dire Wolf, who have also now put out a digital version of the game that is just as superb as the tabletop game itself. (It’s available on Steam, iOS, and Android.)

Dune: Imperium is a worker placement and hand management game with a dash of deckbuilding, and it has a ton in common with Clank!, which is also published by Dire Wolf and comes from the same designer, Paul Dennen. Where Dune: Imperium differs from Clank! is in its higher degree of player interaction; you don’t compete directly with opponents in combat, but you compete to send the most forces to the conflict in each round and are fighting for valuable spaces on the board. There are also asymmetrical player powers and some resource management involving spice and water, giving the game a strong mix of mechanics that blend into one outstanding whole.

In Dune: Imperium, you play as one of several leaders, such as Paul Atreides, and you will play two cards from your hand to place your two agents on the board, activating the spaces to gain resources or another reward, and then use your remaining cards to either buy new cards or to supplement your troops in the conflict in the Reveal phase. Each round has a unique conflict with its own rewards for the player who contributes the most, second-most, or third-most strength to fighting it, with strength coming from troops and cards.

The various spaces on the board allow you to gain water, spice, coins, or troops; to gain influence with one of four Houses, such as the Fremen and the Bene Gesserit, for rewards and victory points; and, in one-time use spaces, to gain a third agent (so you can place three per round, rather than two) and to gain a seat at the Council to boost your purchasing power by 2 in every round. Placing an agent requires playing a card with the correct symbol on its left side, after which you also gain the reward shown on the top row of the card’s lower half.

Once all players have placed their agents, you move to the Reveal phase, where players reveal their remaining cards and use the values on the bottom row for purchasing power or for more strength in the conflict. You might only buy eight to ten new cards over the course of the game, typically one per turn but occasionally two, with the powerful The Spice Must Flow cards worth one victory point apiece. You may also dedicate any attack strength on these cards to the current conflict. The game ends when any player has reached ten victory points, or when the ten-card conflict deck is empty.

As in many such games, like Clank! and the Lost Ruins of Arnak, the cards in your starter deck are not terribly useful, although there’s nothing as useless as the Stumble cards in Clank! are. Upgrading your deck as you play is important, but I would argue that how you use the cards in your hand each turn is at least as important as what you add to your deck, especially later in the game, since you might not even see a card you buy in the last round or two. You do want to build a deck that will maximize your turns – two and then three to play agents, and the remainder for the Reveal. There are a few cards that have the draw power, and there are a few opportunities to trash cards, and those are extremely powerful in a game with just ten rounds at most.

The digital implementation is outstanding – not a surprise, as Dire Wolf is probably the best digital board game publisher out there, and this is one of their own tabletop designs. There’s a great if long tutorial to introduce the game, and during the game it is always clear what moves you may or may not make, along with when you have no choice but to pass to the next phase. It frees you up to focus on the game itself, and, in my case, to trying to finish anywhere other than fourth. The app comes with three levels of AI difficulty, two AI modes, and challenges where some basic rules of the game are altered, just in case you manage to beat the AI on its basic mode. (I was so close to beating the first challenge mode in my first game, and lost 11-10 on the final move. I won the second time.) I actually owned a physical copy of Dune: Imperium, but sold it for charity away after playing the app – I have too many games as it is, and that one wasn’t getting to the table any time soon anyway, while the app is more than enough to scratch that itch.

Will & Harper.

Will & Harper (streaming on Netflix) telegraphs its main problem in the title, which is too bad for a film that has its heart in the right place and mostly gets the emphasis right. Will is Will Ferrell, without whose involvement this documentary likely never happens, but it is his friend Harper Steele, a trans woman who only came out about a year before the film was made when she was around 60 years old, who is the real star and the focus of the story.

Steele was a writer on Saturday Night Live when Ferrell first joined the cast, and she saw his comedic potential when other writers didn’t, leading to a longtime partnership and friendship between the two that went beyond the show into movies (including Eurovision Song Contest).

Harper emailed Will to announce her transition a year or so before the events of this documentary, and Will suggested the idea of a cross-country road trip, something Steele liked to do before she transitioned, but that obviously brings some new challenges she hadn’t faced before.

For the first half of the film, Harper is the real main character, as it should be. This is very much her story, and she needs to be at the heart of the movie. Ferrell is supportive and cracks the occasional joke, but he cedes center stage to Harper at every turn where there are other people around until we’re past the one-hour mark. His personality is so big, and he is so recognizable, that of course it is hard for him to fade entirely into the background, but he does manage to step back enough to allow Harper space to speak and even to have conversations with other people where he is just an observer.

Ferrell ends up taking center stage in a weird sequence where the pair go to a Texas steakhouse that offers a 72 ounce steak that’s free if you eat it within an hour – and he goes into the restaurant as Sherlock Holmes. The whole thing feels like a stunt, or something to help market the film, and it doesn’t go over well, for which he does offer a sincere apology afterward – one of many points in the film where it becomes clear that he’s trying to be supportive but that one of his usual mechanisms for that, his over-the-top comic style, doesn’t work here. Later in the film, Harper suggests that the two go out for a nice dinner, and Will goes into a costume store to look for something to disguise him enough that he won’t be recognized … and then buys the most ridiculous wig, glasses, and mustache so that it’s even more clear that he’s Will Ferrell. It’s like he can’t help himself – in a potentially stressful situation, and one where he is trying to be a good friend, he resorts to his favorite trick of playing the clown. In so many environments, that might work wonders by diverting attention from Harper when she’s extremely self-conscious or simply doesn’t want that kind of attention, but in these two scenes it backfires. 

That said, the two do meet some wonderful, accepting people in unlikely or unexpected places. Hate is not inherent to humanity. Fear is, and we have plenty of people who will weaponize that fear to advance their own agendas, and the two stop at one point and read some vile tweets directed at Harper from people who saw the two together at one of their more public appearances on the road trip. That’s one of several moments in the film where Harper is the entire focus and her emotional struggles are laid bare for everyone to see – and where Ferrell acts “normally,” just being a supportive friend who listens to Harper and validates her feelings as best he can.

Documentaries like Will & Harper do suffer from the observer’s paradox: people will behave differently when they know they’re being observed, and in this case, recorded. There are certainly points in the film where you can see the joists holding it together; the two meet up with Molly Shannon near the end of the movie, and she asks a question that is so obviously scripted it took me out of the movie for a moment. Yet there is still a lot that is real, or feels real, from the interactions in an Oklahoma dive bar to the retired therapist they meet in Arizona, things that couldn’t have been scripted but that also read as far more honest and authentic, along with several of Harper’s spontaneous soliloquies – the one near the house she bought is particularly powerful – that give this film its emotional heft.

I’m sure the film wouldn’t have sold as well had it been called Harper & Will, but that’s what this movie is about. Ferrell’s occasional missteps don’t overshadow Steele entirely, just for some segments, and even with those choices it is very clear that Ferrell is trying to be a good friend and a good ally, and in moments where he doesn’t know exactly what to say or do, he doesn’t just resort to cheap laughs, but says very little and just listens, making it clear he’s there to listen – and giving Harper the floor to share some very vulnerable and painful thoughts. It’s uneven and sometimes uncertain, but at the end of their trip, Will and Harper get us, and the film, where we needed to go.

Floriferous.

Floriferous is a delightful game from 2021, with some light set collection and public/private objectives, playing out over three quick rounds before the final scoring. There’s nothing new here, just some familiar mechanics put together really well for a fast, family-friendly sort of game.

In Floriferous, players are all at a flower show and will compete to create the most valuable collection of flowers after three days (rounds). They do this by selecting flower and ‘desire’ cards from a public tableau that has five columns and three to five rows, based on player count, with the last row always desire cards and all other rows flower cards. Two of the cards in the top row are always face-down, for reasons that will become clear in a second.

The start player places their token on any card in the first (left-most) column to claim it, replacing the card with their token, after which the other players do the same. Then the player whose token was in the topmost row out of all tokens goes first in the next turn, selecting a card in the second column, and so forth. After all players have taken a card from the fifth column, the day ends, and you check the three public objectives to see if anyone has met their criteria; their value decreases by the day from 5 points to 3 to 2. Day two works the same way, but goes from right to left, after which day three goes left to right and the game ends. (The rules offer a slightly more competitive mode, where you score public objectives as they’re achieved, with the player who does it first taking the 5-point space, blocking it for other players.)

Flowers come in five types and five colors, and may have one of the five insect types on them as well. Some cards in the flower deck are actually arrangement cards and give you points for getting the matching symbols within the cards you’ve collected. Desire cards come in three varieties: two points per specific bug/flower/color, increasing points for up to 5 of the same bug/flower/color, increasing points for up to 5 different bugs/flowers/colors. At the start of each day, you’ll place some tokens (called stones, but made of cardboard) on specific cards in the tableau, which are worth 1 point per 2 stones at game-end, with a 2-point bonus to whoever collects the most.

That’s the entire game, other than the included solo mode. The original Floriferous is in a smallish box, but there’s an even smaller one coming, a “pocket edition” you can pre-order here; it’s the same game, just in a tinier box. I’m a big fan regardless of the box size – it’s so simple, and works so well, that it’s a practically perfect little family game.

To End All Wars.

I read Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost back in January of 2013. In hindsight, I’d have to say now it’s one of the most influential books I’ve read in my life, which I think is saying something. It is an incredible, detailed, horrifying work of historical writing, telling the story of how Belgium’s King Leopold destroyed the region of Africa that is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, exploiting its people and resources for personal gain while setting the stage for what has been sixty-plus years of bloody civil wars. It’s the most damning work I’ve read on colonialism. It provides a new and somehow even more excoriating view of western racism towards Africans. It changed how I think about the world.

For some reason, I had never sought out Hochschild’s other books until last year, when my daughter had to read his To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. His approach here is to provide a history of World War I through a modest number of individual Britons, many of whom were connected by family, marriage/liaison, class, or cause, while telling the larger story of this bloody, pointless war through brief descriptions of military maneuvers and deadly battles. The result is a book that is quite readable despite the grim subject matter and that also sheds light on a number of historical figures, some famous and some who probably should be, while also delving into the war’s effects on women’s suffrage, the labor movement, and the Russian Revolution.

The choice to focus on British subjects allows Hochschild, who is American, to make many of the stories far more personal. Many of the people he follows, including Rudyard Kipling, end up losing a son on the battlefields, yet only in some cases does it change their perception of the war – Kipling was an ardent hawk whose racism on the page translated well into similar sentiments against the Germans. The women of the Pankhurst family were all ardent suffragettes, but they split when the war began, in part due to a disagreement over whether becoming war supporters might win them more support in Parliament, but primarily due to a fundamental disagreement over human rights. The cast also includes military leaders John French and Douglas Haig, Prime Minister Lloyd George, pacifist Charlotte Despard, Labour Party founder Keir Hardie, and philosopher Bertrand Russell, most of whose lives would intersect in myriad ways through their positions on the war, both official and unofficial.

Hochschild’s decision to follow all of these people also spares us some of the grisliest aspects of the war, although he doesn’t eschew them entirely, particularly in describing trench warfare and the various new ways in which it allowed soldiers to die. That makes for a book that’s just far more readable, and also means that when someone connected to one of his main characters does die, it sits larger on the page – one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic, just in literary form.

In an ironic contrast to the callous way in which its various leaders and commanders sent millions of young men to their deaths or to life-altering wounds, World War I also brought out the largest antiwar effort we had seen, itself an outgrowth of a movement that began during the Boer War against Dutch colonizers in what is now South Africa. (In that war, white fought white, and the losers, as always, were the natives.) Hochschild steps back to tell that war’s history, both how it began and how antiwar sentiment crystallized and grew before and during its progression, tying it into the voices who spoke out against war in Europe even before it began, and to the conscientious objectors who rose in number during World War I and often faced harsh prison terms or even forced conscription.

What To End All Wars is not, and does not try to be, is a comprehensive history of the war. A few battles get the full treatment, while others receive little to no mention. Hochschild’s digressions on the Boer War, the pacifist movement, the fall of the Tsar and the Russian Revolution, British politics, and more mean that the look at the Great War itself is selective, albeit not superficial. He also doesn’t dedicate much time to exploring the causes of the war, a welcome decision given how much literature there is on that subject (I feel like that is all I ever learned about WWI in school, even if the whole topic remains open to debate). This is very much a story of one country’s role in the war viewed through maybe eight to ten people, with tendrils reaching out to cover some related topics – but only as they connect back to Britain.

Instead, we get some small character studies, several of them around people who aren’t well remembered (at least not in the U.S.) but have extremely interesting back stories. I was less caught up in the stories of the various military men, including French and Haig, who were terrible people happy to condemn thousands of soldiers to certain death and somehow even worse than that at military strategy; the civilians Hochschild discusses are all more compelling and three-dimensional on the page. The royalist Viscountess Violet Cecil saw the brutality of the Boer War, then lost her only son, George, in the first year of the Great War, yet remained a vocal hawk until its end, only to become an advocate of appeasement when she became the editor of her family’s conservative periodical The National Review (unrelated to the American publication). Emmeline Pankhurst cut off two of her own daughters over their political disagreements, as she became a jingoistic supporter of Britain’s war efforts, while daughters Sylvia and Adela remained true to their cause and became socialists and labor agitators, although Adela eventually flipped and became a right-wing nationalist during World War II. Charlotte Despard was also a suffragist and went to prison four times for her cause, later also fighting for Irish independence, yet also spent a large part of her time advocating for the poor and even lived in a small flat above one of her ‘shops’ to provide services for poor residents of one disadvantaged area of London. Bertrand Russell, quite a famous figure for his non-fiction writings in philosophy and math, is more human on the pages here too, with only mentions of his written opposition to the war but not his other work.

To End All Wars didn’t radicalize me the way that King Leopold’s Ghost did, but it is also an infuriating work in many ways because there is such broad, blind disregard for the value of human life, and in this case it comes from so many people. It’s a deeply humanist work at its core, even with all its depictions of callousness and suffering, and also a highly accessible work with a strong narrative that had me hooked despite my previously low degree of interest in its subject.

Next up: Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley.

Seers Catalog.

Seers Catalog is yet another trick-taking game, this time a game where you’re trying to get rid of most of your cards, but not all of them. It has a lot in common with SCOUT until you get to the scoring, where it has a novel way of awarding points – or taking them away – that makes this game so fun and so very hard to play well.

A remake of a self-published game called Of What’s Left, Seers Catalog has a deck of cards numbered 2 through 13 in five suits, although you’ll cut that down based on player count so that each player will start with a hand of twelve of those cards plus one wild and two ‘artifact’ cards. Those artifact cards have various special powers but nearly all of them have values of 0 for scoring at the end of the round, so you want to use them rather than holding on to them. Some work in tandem with another card you play, such as changing its suit or adding or subtracting 1 (or ½!) to its value, while others you play on their own, like a card that automatically is the highest one on the table, or the Go First card that, as you might infer, means that player goes first (but doesn’t have to play that card immediately).

The player who starts a trick must play a ‘meld’ from their hand: a set of cards of the same value with different suits, a run of cards of the same suit with consecutive values, or a single card. All players may follow by playing the same type and size of meld – so if I play a run of 3-4-5, you must play a run of exactly three cards – but must have a higher card value than the last trick played, so in that example, you would have to play at least a 4-5-6. Players may pass; whoever wins the trick opens the next one. When any player has fewer than six cards in their hand, they go in the Bonus, flipping the indicator token in front of them. From that point on, they may not pass: if they have a legal play, they must make it.

A round ends when any player is out of cards. They will score zero points for the round, as will any players not yet in the Bonus. All other players in the Bonus score as follows: Take a number of points equal to the value of the lowest card in your hand, then subtract the number of cards in your hand. So if you have two cards remaining, a 6 and an 8, you would get 4 points (6 for the card minus 2 for your two cards in hand). Wild and artifact cards are (mostly) value 0, so if you have one, you get 0 points minus the number of cards in your hand.

It should be obvious that the goal is to end up with one high-value card at the end of a round, or at worst just a couple of high-value cards. Because you’re required to play once you’re in the bonus, however, that’s really hard to do. Later in the round, players are more likely to make smaller plays – a single card or a run/set of two – and it’s similarly likely that you’ll have a legal play. And if you have the misfortune to win a late trick like that, you may end up having to lead the next trick and end up playing your last card.

I haven’t mentioned the theme here, because beyond the wonderful title – which, I’ve discovered, you probably have to be at least 45 or so to get – the theme is irrelevant. There’s flavor text on the cards, but I never read them; I played this once without my glasses, so I couldn’t have read it if I’d wanted to, and it didn’t affect my ability to play the game at all. I can say that the game plays well with two players, which is unusual for a trick-taking game. It’s different, since it’s easier to guess what the other player might or might not have, but it still works really well. I prefer SCOUT, but if you love SCOUT and want something in a similar vein that’s offers a few new twists, you should put Seers Catalog on your order form.

Red Side Story.

Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey came out in 2009, his first novel separate from his various Thursday Next/Nursery Crime books, and ended on a cliffhanger. The resolution had to wait for fifteen years, until the release earlier this year of Red Side Story, which picks up right after the end of the previous novel and thrusts our two heroes directly into jeopardy. It’s Fforde’s longest novel to date, and his darkest, as he finally reveals the story behind the alternate universe of both books.

The novels take place in the future, at a date unknown (but revealed within the second book), in a place called Chromatacia, which exists on the island of Britain. Our civilization appears to be long gone, as residents of Chromatacia refer to the Something That Happened before they existed. Their civilization revolves around color: Most humans can see just a single color, and their status in society depends on what color that is and how much they can see it. Purples have the highest status; Greys have the lowest. Our hero, Eddie Russett, is a Red, while he falls in love with the pugnacious Jane Grey, who has a habit of punching people in the nose when they displease her. In Shades of Grey, they discover that all is not right in Chromatacia or with the authorities that run it, National Colour, who profess to abide by the rules of a prophet named Munsell, who wrote the rules that govern the nation. The events that close the first book put Eddie and Jane in immediate danger of a death sentence, giving the sequel a real-time feel, as they must both solve the greater mystery of what exactly Chromatacia is and finagle a way out of execution via the Green Room.

Fforde has always at least dabbled in dystopias. The Thursday Next series takes place in an alternate universe as well, and while it’s mostly a comic and satirical world, he colors it (no pun intended) with numerous negative or simply unpleasant twists. Both of his standalone novels, Early Riser and The Constant Rabbit, depict worlds distinctly worse than ours, the former full of great suffering, the latter a not-thinly-veiled analogue for our own racism and xenophobia, just with bunnies. The truth of Chromatacia does not emerge until near the end of Red Side Story, but once it begins to come out over the last hundred pages or so, it is monstrous at both a micro level and a macro one.

That long, detailed conclusion and the sheer number of characters we met in Shades of Grey make Red Side Story the first Fforde book I’ve ever read that I found slow to start. It didn’t help that I read the first book fifteen years ago, so I didn’t exactly hit the ground running, but there is a lot of exposition here, and a ton of plot for Fforde to set up for his usual denouement to work. He’s a master of this particular form, laying hints and details early that will come back to matter later in a way that makes you laugh or simply slap your forehead for your failure to see it coming, but here he’s also busy building out more color (pun intended) to the world even as he’s placing stones for the conclusion. It’s not a mark against the book that he does so – this universe has so many details and quirks that it requires more work to set it up and keep it running. It does mean that some of the character development that boosted Shades of Grey doesn’t appear until you’re maybe a fourth of the way into Red Side Story.

That development goes far more to Eddie than to Jane, as she becomes more of a supporting player here, with Eddie clearly the star and far more in control of the action (to the extent that anyone is in control in Chromatacia). Jane was the more interesting and fun character in the first book, not least because she would punch anyone who commented on her rather retroussé nose (Eddie describes people’s noses any time he meets someone), but here she has somewhat less to do and ends up off screen more. Some of that is plot-driven, as Eddie is betrothed to the officious climber Violet deMauve, who is also carrying his baby, so she ends up a more significant character this time around, while Fforde also delves into the underworld of Chromatacia more than in the first book, much of which is necessary for the big finish.

Fforde had a long stretch of writers’ block when he was working on Early Riser, but since that book came out in 2018-19, he’s been on something of a roll, not just in productivity but in creativity, as his last few novels before the hiatus began had started to lose a little something, especially the Thursday Next ones. He’s promised the eighth and perhaps final book in that series next, and in February of this year he announced that there will be a third book in this series as well, which is especially interesting given how Red Side Story concludes. I’m already in the tank for Fforde anyway, but Red Side Story is even more ambitious than his typical novel, and seeing him succeed when stretching himself makes me even more eager to read whatever he publishes next.

Next up: Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.

The Unstoppable trilogy.

Charlie Jane Anders won the Nebula Award for her first novel, All the Birds in the Sky, which revolved around two teenaged protagonists who grew up together, saw their lives diverge, and then came back together in a soaring conclusion. Over the past few years, she published a young adult trilogy, Unstoppable, that was also largely built around two teenaged protagonists, although here the story is more madcap, the threats much larger, and the relationships between characters more front and center. I won’t pretend to be objective here, as I’ve met Anders and I read these books because she sent me an autographed set of the trilogy, but I thought the books were a blast.

The first book of the series, Victories Greater than Death, starts out pretty normally, both playing into and gently satirizing some of the tropes of the form, with its main character, Tina, a teenager who happens to be the Chosen One to save the galaxy and lead its Royal Fleet against its enemies, although in this case she knows the first part because her mom told her. She’s just waiting for the call, literally, as she has a beacon in her torso that will light up at some point when the aliens come to take her home. Of course, even that doesn’t go off without a hitch, as her best friend Rachael, who is a talented artist and was bullied badly enough that she’s now home schooled, ends up along for the ride into space. Unfortunately for, well, everyone, the forces attacking the Royal Fleet are very determined to make sure Tina doesn’t get back to space, and they don’t seem to care if they blow up Earth in the process. Tina does get to her ship, and not long after – with a brush with death included – she ends up part of a motley crew of teenaged humans on board who help avert the catastrophe, after which they head off into the heavens to fight crime, or, well, the bad guys, of which there turn out to be more than one. By the time we get to the second book, the stakes are much higher than they first appeared, as this is no longer just one tyrant’s power play, but an unseen and unknown force threatening to put out every sun in the universe.

Because this is a young adult series, and the main characters are all teenagers, there’s a lot of interpersonal drama amidst the intergalactic drama, both the romantic and friend varieties. Tina becomes involved with Ella, a trans girl from Brazil who ends up in the pipeline to become one of the Princesses atop the sprawling intergalactic monarchy, although the job is a lot less glamorous than the name implies. Rachael falls for another crew member, Damiani ends up with a non-human partner, and so on. Life on board a spaceship, or multiple spaceships, gets complicated.

The story itself absolutely flies, with a pace that’s almost manic at times, with very short chapters and rarely more than two or three pages without some sort of action, whether it’s a battle between starships or between people. The initial villain has an origin story that involves Tina’s alter ego, and it’s quite intricate and plausible at the same time, with Anders integrating it well into the main story through flashbacks and through the residue it leaves in the contemporary plot. Tina and Rachael share the lead roles by book two, and both are well developed, showing growth over the trilogy, with Tina reckoning with a past she didn’t know she had and Rachael learning to find her voice in multiple ways as the situations demand more of her.

The most notable part of the prose is Anders’ decision to have all characters introduce themselves with their pronouns, which is only notable the first few times before you become habituated to it and stop noticing – which, as someone who uses he/him pronouns and lists them in his bios and on name tags, is kind of how it should be. The only time it threw me was the character whose pronouns were fire/fire; I know about neopronouns but I just can’t get my brain to read them as such, so every single time Anders referred to that character by pronouns I’d have to stop and re-read the sentence. I’m guessing my kids would have less of an issue with this, but my brain isn’t as plastic as it used to be.

Dr. Katherine Mack, better known by her social media handle of @astrokatie, advised Anders on the mysterious forces threatening to end all life in the universe, and I won’t pretend I really followed it. I did sort of feel like it was the Marvel movie problem, where the stakes are just always so high that you can’t really adjust your thinking – I ended up way more invested in the individuals’ storylines than any part about saving planets or the universe as a whole. That, of course, may have been Anders’s entire intent; science fiction that leans too much on the science and doesn’t give enough time to its characters is pretty dreadful. I was good just spending more time with Tina and Rachael, and to a lesser extent their other friends, although some of the alien characters on the ship still felt, well, a bit alien to me. (The Grattna race, by the way, are my favorite creation of Anders’s here, as she gets to delve into philosophy and linguistic relativity in a wholly organic way that ends up affecting how Tina and her friends interact with them.) My only reservation about the books is that there’s a lot of death, not out of violence but out of spaceships blowing things up, even the occasional inhabited planet, and that’s at least out of the ordinary for YA fiction in my experience, so I might recommend this for slightly older readers, but Anders does have Tina et al grapple with the consequences of their actions as they become increasingly pacifistic over the course of the last two books; even the death of a dangerous nemesis has moral repercussions. It’s just a joy to read, even in its most morbid parts, and even as Anders tackles broader themes like discrimination, gender theory, utilitarianism, cultural sensitivity, and much more. And I hope I would say the same even if I had come by the books some other way.

Next up: I’m about to finish Dr. Cassie Holmes’s Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most.

Evergreen.

I loved the game Photosynthesis when it first came out in 2017, as it brought something quite new in its sunlight mechanic and also was striking on the table with its three-dimensional trees of varying sizes. I didn’t think it held up as well on repeated plays, and the cardboard trees took a beating rather quickly.

Designer Hjalmar Hach apparently thought he could improve on the original as well, reimagining the game as Evergreen, which doesn’t have quite the visual impact of Photosynthesis but which makes the game play itself simpler while it makes the strategic aspect more complex. And there’s something clean about the new board and the cards that make the game easier to look at, even if you lose the coolness of the 3-D part.

In Evergreen, players will plant sprouts in six biomes on their own boards and then grow them to small and then large trees, all of which is done by drafting cards in each round. Players choose their sprout locations to build the longest possible chain of trees while also maximizing the sunlight they’ll take in from each of the four directions as the sun rotates around the board. Trees cast shadows behind them, though, so they block trees directly behind them from collecting sunlight (and points).

In each round, players will draft cards that dictate where and what they’ll be able to play. Each card shows a specific biome (or a white background that can stand in for any biome) and an action, the two of which are unrelated. For the biome, you can plant three sprouts, grow two plants to the next level, plant one sprout and grow one plant, or ignore the biome on the card and just do one of those two things in a biome of your choice. For the action on the card, it gets a little more interesting, because actions become more powerful the more often you take them. These include planting more sprouts, growing plants from sprout to small tree or small tree to large, adding a lake that immediately grows two adjacent plants, adding a bush that extends your chain of contiguous trees but won’t collect light, or taking immediate points from the rose action while adding nothing to the board.

The card that isn’t selected by any player goes to the fertility area of its matching biome, which matters significantly for end-game scoring. Each card can have one to three fertility symbol at its top, or a skull showing aridity, or no symbol at all. You discard the cards with no symbols on top, and you place cards with fertility symbols face-up on the matching pile. Aridity cards cancel out the last fertility card played to that biome – when an aridity card is left over after the draft for that round, you flip over the face-up card on that biome’s pile and play the aridity card on top.

The number of rounds in each season varies, decreasing by one for each season, from five rounds in season one (spring) to just two in season four (winter). At the end of each season, you score points for sunlight hitting your trees, getting 1 point for each small tree and 2 for each large one, but a tree only gets sunlight if it isn’t in the shadow of another tree between it and the sun. Small trees cast a shadow of one space and can block a small tree behind them; large trees cast shadows of two spaces and can block small or large trees behind them. This gets tricky as a large tree that receives no light because it’s blocked by a large tree in front of it can still cast a shadow and block large trees behind it, so, for example, four large trees all in a line would score just two points for the first tree and nothing for the next three. (The rule book depicts this way more clearly than I can explain without diagrams.) Then you count every tree in your biggest Forest (chain) of connected trees and bushes, taking 1 point for each in the cluster.

After you do the end of season scoring for winter, each player scores points for every biome by multiplying the number of large trees they have in that biome by the number of visible fertility symbols in the card pile for that biome. This can get pretty large, since that’s how multiplication tends to work, and can inform your strategy throughout the game both in what cards to try to push to the fertility zone and where to focus your construction of large trees. That’s the only additional scoring at the end of the game.

For whatever reason, Evergreen hasn’t quite caught on like Photosynthesis did, and I think that’s part of why it is now available in digital form on Board Game Arena and now as a standalone app for $4.99 on iOS, Android, and Steam. I think it’s a great game and have now played it on the table, on BGA, and on the iOS app (the last one vs AI), so I can vouch for all platforms. It deserves a wider audience than it’s gotten, and I would definitely choose to play it over Photosynthesis thanks to the greater player interaction and simpler components so I’m not always knocking over trees. It came out in 2022, so it won’t be on my best-of-2024 list, but it would have made my top 10 for its actual release year.

Seven Games.

The title of Oliver Roeder’s book Seven Games: A Human History is a misnomer in two ways: It’s not really a book about games, and it’s far more a history of computers than of humans. It is, instead, a history of attempts to use what is now unfortunately referred to as “AI” to tackle the myriad problems posed by seven popular board and card games from human history, from chess to bridge. Each of these games presents the programmers with specific, novel issues, and while machine-learning techniques have succeeded in solving some games (like checkers), others have and may forever prove inscrutable (like bridge).

Roeder is a journalist for the Financial Times and clearly a gamer, and someone who loves the games for what they are beyond their competitive aspect (although it becomes clear he is a fierce competitor as well). He writes as an experienced player of all seven games in the book, even though he must have varying skill levels in each – I’d be shocked if he were much of a checkers player, because who on earth in the year of our lord 2024 is a great checkers player? His experience with the games helps infuse a book that could be a rather dry and grim affair with more than a touch of life, especially as he enters tournaments or otherwise competes against experts in games like poker, Scrabble, and backgammon.

What Roeder is really getting at here, however, is the symbiotic relationship between games and machine learning, which is what everyone now calls AI. (AI is itself a misnomer, and there are many philosophers who argue that there can be no intelligence, artificial or otherwise, without culture.) Games are perfect fodder for training AI modules because they tend to present short sets of rules and clear goals, thus giving the code and its coder targets for whatever optimization algorithm(s) they choose. In the case of checkers, this proved simple once the computing power was available; checkers is considered “weakly solved,” with a draw inevitable if both players play perfectly. (Connect 4 is strongly solved; the first player can always win with perfect play.) In the case of bridge, on the other hand, the game may never be solved, both because of its computational complexity and because of the substantial human element involved in its play.

In one of those later chapters, Roeder mentions P=NP in a footnote, which put an entirely different spin on the book for me. P=NP is one of the six unsolved Millennium Prize Problems* in mathematics, also called the P versus NP problem, which asks if a problem’s correct solution can be verified in polynomial time, does that also mean that the problem can be solved in polynomial time? The answer would have enormous ramifications for computational theory, and could indeed impact human life in substantial ways, but the odds seem to be that P does not equal NP – that the time required to solve these problems is orders of magnitude higher than the time required to verify their solutions. (For more on this subject, I recommend Lance Fortnow’s book The Golden Ticket, which I reviewed here in 2015.)

*A seventh, the Poincaré Conjecture, is the only one that has been solved to date.

You can see a thread through the seven chapters where the machine-learning techniques adjust and improve as the games become more complex. From there, it isn’t hard to see this as a narrow retelling of the ongoing history of machine learning itself. The early efforts to solve games like checkers employed brute-force methods – examining all possible outcomes and valuing them to guide optimal choices. More complex games that present larger decision trees and more possible outcomes would require more processing power and time than we have, often more time than remains in the expected life of the universe (and certainly more than remains in the expected life of our suicidal species), and thus required new approaches. Some of the attacks on games later in the book allow the algorithm to prune the tree itself and avoid less-promising branches to reduce processing time and power, thus leading to a less complete but more efficient search method.

Roeder does acknowledge in brief that these endeavors also have a hidden cost in energy. His anecdotes include Deep Blue versus Kasparov and similar matches in poker and go, some of which gained wide press coverage for their results … but not for the energy consumed by the computers that competed in these contests. We’re overdue for a reckoning on the actual costs of ChatGPT and OpenAI and their myriad brethren in silicon, because as far as I can tell, they’re just the new crypto when it comes to accelerating climate change. That’s nice that you can get a machine to write your English 102 final paper for you or lay off a bunch of actual humans to let AI do some things, but I’d like to see you pay the full cost of the electricity you’re using to do it.

I’ve focused primarily on one aspect of Seven Games because that’s what resonated with me, but I may have undersold the book a little in the process. It’s a fun read in many ways because Roeder tells good stories for just about all seven of the games in the book – I might have done without the checkers chapter, because that’s just a terrible game, but it is an important rung in the ladder he’s constructing – and puts himself in the action in several of them, notably in poker tournaments in Vegas. There’s also a warning within the book about the power of so-called AI, and I think inherent in that is a call for caution, although Roeder doesn’t make this explicit. It seemed a very timely read even though I picked it up on a friend’s recommendation because it’s about games. Games, as it turns out, explain quite a bit of life. We wouldn’t be human without them.

Next up: Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious, a book by Daniel Everett, a former evangelical Christian missionary who became an atheist and turned to linguistics after his time trying to convert the Amazonian Pirahã tribe. He appeared at length in last year’s outstanding documentary The Mission.