→ November 15, 2010
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Jambo (board game).

My series of articles for mental_floss on the history of board games begins today, with a look back at games from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. We’ll end up with some contemporary games at the end of the series, but not before going through the histories of some important games from East Asia, India, and Africa, and medieval Europe.

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Note: I revised this article about a week after it was first posted to reflect the fact that we were playing the game wrong at first. The review below reflects the correct rules. I think.

I picked up Jambo in September on the recommendation of dish reader Joe Huber, designer of the game Burger Joint, who declared Jambo his “personal favorite two-player game” in response to my lament (in the Lost Cities post) about great German-style games’ tendency to play best as 3- to 5-player games. Jambo is, indeed, an excellent two-player game, even though there are certain mechanics I don’t love. It’s a higher order of complexity than Lost Cities, but much of what’s added is random chance rather than deeper strategy.

In Jambo, each player is a trader in precolonial east Africa, with a market capable of storing six “wares,” of which there are six types available (silk, jewelry, salt, hides, fruit, and tea, although the drawing for that last one keeps reminding me of the cover of The Chronic). The goal of the game is to finish with the most money; end game is triggered when either player passes 60 coins, after which he completes his turn and the other player gets one more full turn before the game officially ends. Players earn money by buying and selling wares, most often through ware cards that allow for the purchase or sale of a specific combination of wares – usually three, but a few cards allow the purchase of six – for fixed prices. However, the deck of cards is full of “utility” cards that allow for exchanges of cards and wares, for direct purchases of wares, or for attacks against your opponent such as swiping a single ware from his market or discarding one of his active utility cards, making the game more interactive and opening up some other avenues for strategy.

The core mechanic, however, is buying and selling wares. Each three-ware card has three specific wares on it; they may all be identical, there may be two of one kind and one of a third, or it may contain three different wares. The gap between purchase price and sale price shown on the card is always 7 coins for a three-card combination. That is, if you draw two copies of the same three-ware card, you can buy them and immediately sell them for a profit of seven coins. And since on each turn a player receives five “actions” – the first is usually used to draw a card, so in practical terms we’re talking four actions – it seems to me that the ideal turn is one that starts with a purchase and ends with a sale, where in between you might use utility cards to ensure you have what you need to complete the sale. (You can’t use a ware card to sell unless you have those three or six exact wares in your market.)

The non-ware cards are where the game gets interesting, or at least gets interactive. There are two types of cards – utility cards, which are played once and used repeatedly; and people/animal cards, which are played once and discarded. (I misread the rules, and we played people cards as utility cards for a while, which really wreaked havoc with the game.) Each player may have up to three utility cards face-up in front of him – playing a card counts as one action – and may use them once per turn, with each use counting as an action. Most involve the exchange of something for something – cards, gold, and wares, sometimes allowing you to exchange like for like, sometimes allowing you to use one thing to buy another.

People cards are a wildly mixed bag, with the best of them allowing you to increase your profits on a sale or buy missing wares cheaply so you can complete another sale, but many of them are close to useless and just clog up the deck. Animal cards are all for attack purposes; the parrot lets you steal one ware from your opponent, while the crocodile (the most abundant animal card) lets you take one of your opponent’s utility cards, use it once yourself, and then discard it. You can fight off an animal attack with a Guard card, although I don’t think the deck has enough of them and acquiring one is a function of luck rather than skill or planning.

And that’s the only thing keeping me from raving unabashedly about Jambo: There’s a lot of luck in this game, more than I tend to like. You have no outright control over which cards you draw, of course, and only a few utility cards give you any improvement over that. The solution is simply to draw more cards, and there are utility cards that allow you to draw an extra card, swap a ware for a card, buy a card for gold, grab a ware card your opponent just used, or even rifle through the discard pile for a specific card you’d like to have.

But, unlike in a game like Dominion where you build your own deck, acquiring good cards in Jambo requires luck, and I didn’t feel like the deck was flush enough with good utility/people cards to allow me to set a couple of strategies up and then just pursue whichever one the cards offered me. We’ve played ten times, and each of us has had at least one game where the cards just killed us, including one where I spent five turns needing just about any ware card to win the game, never got it, and lost.

Bear in mind that I prefer games with lower luck levels than most people do – if you view a game as just a game, you’ll probably love Jambo even more than we do. I enjoy games for the thinking and strategizing as much as I enjoy them for their social aspect, and Jambo fell a little short in that regard for me. It is still an excellent two-player option that I think we will continue to play often even as the collection grows.

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→ October 31, 2010
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Bridge of Sighs.

I started Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs ready to joke in my writeup that, in book reviews, “ambitious” is merely a euphemism for “long.” I’ve read the five novels that precede this one on Russo’s bibliography, including the amazing, Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls, and while I think his books are smart, funny, and deep, I did not consider them “ambitious.” Bridge of Sighs, as you have probably guessed by now, is a work of great ambition, a sprawling modern epic with multiple foci, exploring themes of love, betrayal, mortality, meaning, and hate across more than fifty years in a small, dying town in upstate New York.

That town, Thomaston, is the birthplace of the two men at the center of the book, narrator Lou C. (“Lucy,” a nickname he never wanted or liked) Lynch and his on-and-off childhood friend Bobby Marconi. Shifting among three narratives, Russo tells their stories, weaving them together and tearing them apart, using Lucy’s own memoir-in-progress for the history of Lucy, Bobby, and their incredibly different families; jumping to the third person for the present-day perspective on Lucy’s strained marriage to his high school sweetheart, the almost too-perfect Sara; and Bobby, now a world-renowned painter living in Europe and contemplating the nearing end of his career and his life while he fights an undetermined health issue.

Russo eschews the easy plot device of having everything look perfect on the surface, only to shock the reader by showing how imperfect everything is; he makes it clear from the start that Lucy and Bobby are both damaged people, and lets the gradual revelations of major events from their childhoods provide the surprises, tossing in a little narrative greed as he goes. You don’t actually find out what happened between Bobby and his father until roughly 90% of the way through the book, but you can start to create and fill in an outline just by watching the evolution of their relationship. Lucy presents himself at the start as a married father and successful local businessman, but how successful and how happy are questions that open up as the story develops. Complicating his history and tying the two estranged friends together is Sara, who came from a broken home of her own, adopted the Lynches as a surrogate family as she dated Lucy, but found herself drawn to the raw, emotional Bobby when he reappears for their senior year of high school.

The contrast between the safe, steady affection between Sara and Lucy and the seething rage that emanates from Bobby is a central theme for Russo, who never seems to favor the measured (or bottled up) Lynch style over the open, dangerous emotions of Bobby:

It was amazing, when you thought about it, how effortlessly hate slipped into the space reserved for love and vice versa, as if these two things, identical in size and shape, had been made compatible by design. How satisfying a substitute each was for the other.

But rather than mire the story in a love triangle, or a tragic romance, Russo folds that into the comfortable ground of the yearnings of kids in a small, failing industrial town – Thomaston’s main industry, a tannery, slowly heads for extinction all while polluting the river and raising the town’s cancer rates – for something more than the hamlet can offer them. In Bridge, however, Russo moves those sentiments around; sometimes it’s the kids racing to get out of Dodge, but as often it’s their parents hoping their children leave for something better, all while they try to figure out a way to survive financially in a local economy that keeps shrinking. Lucy’s father, a hopeless optimist, loses his milkman job to modernization, only to buy a corner market as A&P locates the town’s first supermarket out by the highway. That corner market becomes the central hub of action as the kids go through junior high and high school – taking the place of the diner that lies at the heart of most Russo novels – but the work the Lynches put into it, and the role it ends up playing in their lives, symbolizes the work required to keep a marriage of two seemingly incompatible people together, even in unfavorable circumstances.

Another theme, perhaps coming from Russo’s own advancing age, is one of regret even for a life lived well – a “road not taken” question that Bobby and Sara in particular end up facing, although Lucy has his own questions about what might have been and even his mother and uncle (the roguish Dec, a classic Russo character) end up in the act. Sara’s parents seemed very two-dimensional, but I thought they might represent Russo’s unflattering takes on two extreme life paths – her angry, faithless, emotionally distant father on one side, and her unsatisfiable, self-serving, emotionally stunted mother on the other – that, I suppose, help explain why Sara is so grounded, so clear, and so able (mostly) to be happy with where she is and what she has.

If I have a criticism of Bridge of Sighs, it’s that Russo’s trademark humor is so much less in evidence. If Straight Man is his funniest work, this is probably his most serious. The gags are often little verbal jabs, rather than the slapstick and broad farce that characterizes his earlier novels:

After all, it wasn’t just people in big cities who had big dreams. Wasn’t her father himself a perfect example? Though he considered himself an urbanite, he’d grown up, as her mother had delighted in reminding him back when they were still living as husband and wife, on Staten Fucking Island.

I laughed, but hey, if you haven’t been caught in traffic on the Staten Island Expressway, that might not be quite so funny.

I’m barely doing the serious side of this book justice, however; it’s deeper and more literary than even Empire Falls, even if it’s not quite as exhilarating a read. The prose is classic Russo, as are the many full-fleshed characters, the setting, and the very realistic dramas that drive the book. If it’s a little less witty than normal, he has at least made up for it through his ambition.

Next up: I finished Dave Jamieson’s Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession, which I would certainly recommend to those of you who collected cards in your youths or are simply interested in baseball history; and have just barely begun Abdelrahman (or Abdul Rahman or Abd el-Rahman) Munif’s Cities of Salt­, which appears on the Novel 100 list at #71.

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→ August 31, 2010
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Puerto Rico (game).

Hat tip to Matthew Leach, who covers the Cardinals for mlb.com, for pointing out that The Roots’ new album, How I Got Over, is just $5 as an mp3 download on amazon.com (through that link). No idea how long it will last – the Arcade Fire sale was supposed to last one day but amazon extended it at least through the end of that week.

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I’ve been promising a writeup of the game Puerto Rico for about six months now, but up until a few days ago didn’t feel like I’d played it enough to offer an informed take. The significance of the last few days is that I discovered the site Tropic Euro (two points to anyone who gets the reason for that name), a very slick Java-based application that allows you to play Puerto Rico against bots or live opponents. With a three-person game involving two bots running about 11-12 minutes for me, it’s been a nice way to take a quick break from packing as well as a way to get more familiar with why BoardGameGeek users rate Puerto Rico as the #1 board game of all time.

The goal in Puerto Rico is to amass Victory Points* by producing and shipping goods from your “island” back the mother country and/or by constructing buildings, especially one of the five large buildings that provide bonus points at the end of the game based on what else you’ve accomplished. Your island is a board with spaces for twelve plantations and twelve buildings; the plantations, which are free, can grow one of five crop or house a quarry that reduces the cost of any building by one doubloon. Corn is the least valuable crop, with a trade value of zero, but doesn’t require a processing building; coffee is the most valuable crop for trading but you can’t produce more than two units per turn.

*One thing you have to get used to when playing German-Style board games is that even a fairly concrete game concept, the goal is nearly always the abstract victory points. Completing certain tasks, building specific buildings, or shipping goods earns you points, but the assignment of points to deeds can feel a little arbitrary. I’ve just learned to accept it for each game and move on.

Buildings come in three types: Production buildings, for processing any of the four crops beyond corn; small buildings, each of which grants you a few victory points and some special privilege on every turn; and large buildings, which offer no in-game benefits but can provide significant bonuses after the game ends. Every building and plantation must be manned by a colonist, but their supply is limited, especially early in the game.

In each round, each player chooses a role, with options including the mayor (obtaining colonists), the settler (choosing plantations), the builder (obvious), the craftsman (producing goods), the trader (each player can put one good on the trading ship, as long as another good of that type isn’t already there), the captain (shipping goods for points), and, in larger games, the prospector (take a doubloon). Every player gets to utilize the roles chosen by other players, but the player who chooses a specific role gets an extra privilege, such as producing one additional good of his choice. Roles that go unselected are worth an extra doubloon in the next round.

The complex and slightly crazy part of Puerto Rico is that shipping round. There are five goods that players can produce, but there are only three ships available to take goods to the mainland, and a ship can only hold goods of one type. When a player chooses the shipper, all players must ship all of their goods; if there’s no room, most of their goods spoil and are lost with no compensation. (There are large and small warehouses that a player can buy and man to protect some of his goods.) The ships empty at the end of a round and only when they’re full.

Every good shipped is worth a victory point, and in the later rounds a player could easily ship five goods or more in a single shipping phase, especially if he’s the shipper and can place his goods first. Since points from shipping can easily be around 40% of a winning score, possibly more, there are a host of considerations behind the set of decisions of what goods to produce, how much to produce, and when to ship them, and those decisions also include considering what your opponents plan to produce and what they have on hand. A well-timed decision to choose the shipper role can grab you six points while spoiling goods for several of your opponents.

That’s what makes Puerto Rico a great game, and I’m going to assume it’s why the geeks over at BoardGameGeek have it at the top of their rankings: The decisions each player has to make are rich and complex and depend on potential future moves from both the player and his opponents. Just choosing a role means weighing four or five variables – money, colonist supply, the shipping situation, production potential, and what your opponents will do with this role if you choose it … or what someone else will do with the role if you don’t. Given the game’s complexity, it’s surprising that it works as smoothly as it does, and I think the only truly difficult part of Puerto Rico is setting the game up and putting it away.

It is, however, the most complex game I’ve reviewed on the dish so far, so I can’t just tell you that, say, if you love Settlers of Catan or Stone Age, you should try Puerto Rico. It would be more fair to say that if you’re looking for a more involved game than those two – both among our favorites – you should try Puerto Rico, not just because I recommend it but because the consensus of the boardgaming world is that it’s the best game out there.

Back to Tropic Euro, I’ve found that the software works very well; I’ve had occasional trouble logging on, where the main window was blacked out, but closing and restarting the app solved it. It offers PR expansions, swaps the prices of the Factory and University buildings (per the original boardgame’s designer’s suggestion), and the AI moves quickly and pretty logically, enough to punish me for making rookie mistakes. The app’s author, Chris Gibbs, says on the site that there will be a “hard” AI option available in the next week or so.

I’ve previously reviewed San Juan, the card game variant of Puerto Rico; while it’s consistent with the theme, it is a massively simplified game. I enjoy San Juan in its own right, but it’s just a different experience.

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Posting here will be sporadic over at least the next seven days as we pack and await the moving vans. I should have at least one ESPN chat either this week or next, and both ESPN and dish blogging will become more frequent by the week of September 20th. If you’ve emailed me or asked me a question in any forum without receiving a response, I apologize, and I hope you understand.

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→ August 24, 2010
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Unaccustomed Earth.

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London, and her writing revolves around Bengali families in the United States who retain at least some of their non-American identity, but her writing is more American than most fiction by contemporary authors born in this country. Lahiri’s stories are richly textured, written in intelligent yet easy prose, showcasing her incredible skill at encapsulating human emotions through plot events large and small, and her overarching theme of Bengalis feeling adrift in a foreign country and culture seems central to the American experience regardless of the characters’ nation of origin. Her first published work, the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and if anything, her second story collection, 2008’s Unaccustomed Earth is even better, more assured with stronger characterization.

The title story, which leads off the collection, is one of the most subtle stories in the book, dealing with Ruma, an Indian mother married to a non-Indian man, whose widowed father comes to visit her in her new home in Seattle. She is still grieving from the sudden loss of her mother, and now must deal with the question of whether to invite her father to stay with her, per Indian (or perhaps Bengali) custom, even though she has never had a close relationship with him and believes her husband is less than thrilled with the idea of having his father-in-law living in their spacious house. Ruma’s father, meanwhile, has begun a quiet affair – so quiet it barely merits the term – with another Bengali woman, also widowed, and does not wish to reveal it to his daughter or to give up his peripatetic new lifestyle. Lahiri allows both characters to narrate the story, creating two distinct voices, moving the story along by magnifying tiny events in their lives during the father’s visit and establishment of a new relationship with his grandson, surpassing anything he ever developed with Ruma. The story’s conclusion is extremely un-Hollywood, yet more effective for its realism.

Unaccustomed Earth closes with a three-part novella titled “Hema and Kaushik,” which returns to the twin perspectives of the collection’s title story by tracking two young Bengalis through three stages of their lives – a brief period in their teen years when Hema’s family housed Kaushik’s on the latter’s return from India to Massachusetts; Kaushik’s difficulty in adjusting to a major change in his family situation while he’s in college; and an unlikely reunion between the two in Rome with the two in their late 30s. The novella is more about Kaushik (the boy) than Hema, with the latter serving more as a lens to examine Kaushik’s character, and how a few major events in his life shape his choices in adulthood, including his inability to grieve and his difficulties in forming lasting relationships with women.

As much as I may praise “Hema and Kaushik,” it wasn’t the star of this particular show. I don’t read many short stories because I often find it hard to get emotionally invested in a character or a plot in ten or twenty thousand words, but “Only Goodness” was easily the most affecting short story I’ve ever read, for personal reasons. The story opens by telling us that “It was Sudha who’d introduced Rahul to alcohol,” a clue to the guilt the sister would later carry for her brother’s alcoholism, even though the addiction and downward spiral was almost certainly inevitable. An uncle with whom I always felt close was a lifelong alcoholic, something I didn’t know until late in my teens, and his periods of recovery never lasted and were punctuated by disappointment and frustration on the part of the rest of his immediate family. I remember too well the phone calls I’d get from him at odd hours in the late 1990s, about some get-rich-quick scheme he’d found or a penny stock on which he wanted my opinion, and the fact that I was not equipped to handle him in those states, or even fully aware of what the calls truly signified. Eventually, I drifted out of contact with him, talking maybe once or twice a year, hearing of him through my parents, until the day in spring training of 2005 when I got another call that he had taken his own life the night before. Rahul lives to see the end of “Only Goodness,” but Lahiri paints an accurate portrait of the devastation a grown child’s alcohol problem can cause and the false hopes and crushing disappointments it can cause, while still giving the reader enough insight into Rahul to feel some empathy, until the climactic event that caps the story.

“A Choice of Accommodation” chronicles the gradual decline of a “mixed” marriage (between an Indian man and a non-Indian woman) by watching the couple over the course of a single day and night at someone else’s wedding; I’ve criticized many writers here for badly-written sex scenes that feel like they were written by teenaged boys, but Lahiri wrote one of the few I’ve ever read that didn’t make me cringe – perhaps it simply needed a woman’s pen – although as the conclusion to this story the device felt a little hackneyed. “Nobody’s Business” is actually told from the perspective of the shy American roommate of an Indian woman on whom he probably has a small crush; he finds out her mysterious boyfriend is having an affair and is left trying to decide whether and how to tell her about it. The story itself works, with a technologically quaint solution, but the constant parade of suitors that the girl, Sang, faces – all men seeking an arranged marriage through her parents – provided a level of exasperating comic relief. The weakest story for me – still above-average if you’re looking for grades – was “Heaven-Hell,” told by an Indian girl about her mother who, trapped in a loveless arranged marriage, develops a crush on a Bengali graduate student who rooms with the family for several months, and even thatt story features a classic Lahiri oh-by-the-way twist at its end.

Interpreter of Maladies was brilliant and worthy of the recognition it received, but I can’t say I was as moved or involved in its stories as I was in those of Unaccustomed Earth, and her ability to create tension in short stories that revolve around emotions rather than action is astounding, reminiscent of the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the novels of Marilynne Robinson, two of the best American writers of the last hundred years. And I think it’s fitting that someone of a non-traditional background should emerge as one of the brightest voices in 21st century American literature, one who speaks to the experiences of an entirely new wave of immigrants who spend much of their lives living in one country while trying to maintain the cultures and traditions of others.

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Before Unaccustomed Earth, I read John Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel, the first part of his U.S.A. trilogy. However, it’s not a complete, standalone novel; it weaves together the stories of five people in the U.S. in the late 1910s, but their paths just start to cross near the book’s end and nothing is resolved enough to merit a real review. I’ll write them up when I finish all three parts, which appear as a single entry on a few of the greatest-books lists I follow.

Next up: Dawn Powell’s final novel, The Golden Spur.

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→ August 16, 2010
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Prime Obsession.

I admit it: I am not afraid of math.

And if you’re not afraid of math either – in this case, some fairly heavy math – you might enjoy Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics as much as I did. It’s a book about an obscure question in the field of number theory, one that remains unsolved after 150 years and probably has little to no practical application, but John Derbyshire manages to give the subject some real personality while doing his best to make it accessible to readers who haven’t taken a lot of advanced math classes or who, like me, are a good 13 years removed from their last one.

The subject of Prime Obsession is the Riemann Hypothesis, which states that the non-trivial zeros of Riemann’s zeta function are half part real. “Non-trivial zeros,” in this case at least, are complex numbers (a + bi, where i is the imaginary number defined as the square root of negative 1 and b is nonzero) that give the result of 0 when plugged into the zeta function. “Half part real” means that a in that complex number is equal to ½.

The zeta function is the crux of the matter, the sum of the following infinite series:

That is:

Riemann posed his hypothesis when studying the Prime Number Theorem, which states that for any random number N, the probability of N being prime (and thus the frequency of primes around N) is roughly equal to the reciprocal of the natural logarithm of N, that is, 1/ln(N). In his one paper on the subject, he hypothesized that the frequency of primes and the differences between the actual frequency and the predicted frequency in the Prime Number Theorem was connected to the zeros of this zeta function. He couldn’t prove it at the time, and even though David Hilbert declared it one of the great mathematical problems of the 20th century in 1900, one of a list that has seen all but two of its number* solved, and in 2000 the Riemann Hypothesis was named one of the Millennium Prize Problems by the Clay Mathematics Institute, it remains unsolved. Prove or disprove it and you’ll get a cool million bucks for your trouble.

As you might imagine, solving the problem isn’t easy; indeed, it stands unsolved more than a decade after Sir Andrew Wiles’ solution of the equally perplexing problem of Fermat’s Last Theorem, one that required the development of an entire new field of mathematics (topology) unknown to Fermat at the time that he wrote that he had a “truly marvelous proof” to the problem. (Current thought is that whatever proof he had was incomplete.) The difficulty of proving or disproving the Riemann Hypothesis has led many of the major figures in mathematics, particularly in number theory, to attempt to tackle all or part of the problem or to work on further theorems and conjectures that build on the assumption that the “RH” is true. (And it has at least held true so far for very large numbers, which is not a proof but is weak evidence in its favor.)

Derbyshire’s main difficulty, beyond the lack of a clear resolution to the story, is making the solution of a potentially useless mathematical conundrum interesting; Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem was momentous and newsworthy, but the practical applications have been nil – it’s merely interesting to people who like numbers. Proving the Riemann Hypothesis would likely have a similar lack of real-world effects, and the hypothesis itself is a lot harder to grasp than Fermat’s Last Theorem was; the latter problem had an incredibly complex solution, but the question itself was easy for anyone who’d taken algebra to understand. Derbyshire does a masterful job of walking through the history of the Riemann Hypothesis, from earlier work on prime numbers, including the PNT, through Riemann’s brief life and career in mathematics to the major developments in the 151 years since his seminal paper appeared.

The book alternates between chapters walking through the math and chapters on the history and personalities involved in the hypothesis’ history. Carl Friedrich Gauss has a starring role early, while G.H. Hardy, Leonhard Euler, J.E. Littlewood, Jacques Hadamard, and Hilbert appear at some length later on. Derbyshire sprinkles stories of their peculiarities, senses of humor, and non-mathematical interests to keep the text lighter while also highlighting the chance occurrences that made some of the progress on the proof possible and regularly pointing out the remarkable longevity of most of the major mathematicians he mentions.

His math writing, while clearly geared to a lay audience, still got fuzzy for me when he got deeper into the zeta function as he tried to map it to the complex plane. Derbyshire relies on these “visual” interpretations that don’t correspond to any sort of plane or graphs that I’ve seen elsewhere, and I felt it was the one time he presupposed some familiarity with higher math on the part of the reader. But to his credit, he relies largely on algebra and gives a brief (re-)introduction to differentiation and integration for the short periods where calculus is necessary to move the math story forward. He also hits many major touchstones that will unlock memories for those of you who took and enjoyed lots of math classes, from the Sieve of Eratosthenes to the amazing Euler’s Identity, the latter of which states that

And if you look at that formula and are amused, fascinated, or just generally intrigued, Prime Obsession is a book for you.

I also recommend a book about one of the mathematicians who makes a cameo appearance in Derbyshire’s book, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erd?s and the Search for Mathematical Truth. Erd?s was a Hungarian-born savant who lived most of his life out of a suitcase, traveling the world, arriving at the doors of mathematicians he knew and announcing that “my brain is open,” after which he’d settle in for a few days or weeks and embark with his host on a streak of problem-solving and paper-writing. He had his own peculiar vocabulary, consumed large quantities of caffeine and later amphetamines, and combined brilliance and prolificacy (that’s peak and longevity for you Hall of Fame watchers) to the point where other mathematicians are referred to by their “Erd?s number,” where a person who co-authored a paper with Erd?s has an Erd?s number of one, while others are marked by how many papers you must go through to create the shortest possible chain back to Erd?s.

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→ August 12, 2010
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Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs.

I wouldn’t have characterized myself as a huge Arcade Fire fan before last week – I’d heard several singles, liked most of them, but never ran out to download one of their albums or thought of them as one of my favorite artists. When Amazon.com ran a $3.99 promotion on mp3 downloads of their new album, The Suburbs (now $7.99), I bought it just on the assumption that there would be four or five songs worth having, more than justifying the cost. As it turns out, the album blew away my modest expectations, even with some unevenness, a 64-minute story of regret and frustrated hopes set to a pastiche of references and nods to new wave, post-punk, and alternative music from the 1980s.

After an introductory track that sent me for the fast-forward button, “Ready to Start” showed the Arcade Fire I know from their best prior singles, such as “Keep the Car Running” or “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out),” a foot-stomper with a driving bass line behind an understated vocal that mixes the yearning for an independent artistic life in a culture that seems (in Win Butler’s eyes) to reward the corporate life instead. “Empty Room” starts with a crazy violin intro – which continues behind the wave of guitars, creating an effect that reminded me of My Bloody Valentine, but without the latter’s excessive distortion; both that song and “Month of May” give the album its highest-energy moments to sustain the listener through the more subtle (and occasionally soporific) songs that dig more deeply into the decline of culture in the suburban sprawl.

The slower-tempo tricks are more of a mixed bag, but offer the album’s best overall songwriting. “Half Light II (No Celebration)” calls to mind New Order, or even Joy Division, with an anthemic lament with a lush arrangement behind dark, defeated vocals about the loss of nature and open space, while “Modern Man” channels Roxy Music, although the latter’s cliched moaning about the people in line behind him “can’t understand” typifies the song’s lack of concrete imagery.

“Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” is the final full track (there’s a 90-second reprise of the opening song after it), and one of the most devastatingly complete songs on the record, building to a crescendo that never quite arrives while growing into a sprawling (pun intended) homage to the classic new wave/synth-pop songs of the mid-1980s. I don’t care for Regine Chassagne’s voice, but her delivery of the song’s critique of the sprawl of the song’s title, that uniquely American creation of suburbs that go on forever, with “dead shopping malls” that “rise like mountains beyond mountains,” bringing excesses of light (I keep picturing car dealerships at night, sucking down energy to light up football fields of metal boxes) but lacking the edginess or openness of urban culture.

But the song I keep coming back to again and again is the spare, slightly uptempo yet haunting “City with No Children,” the title line itself (“Feel like I’ve been living in/a city with no children in it”) evoking images of deathly quiet, or even destruction – it brought to my mind the scene from The Road where they see “the little boy” in the window of a building in an otherwise abandoned city. The hand-claps stand in place of almost all typical percussion, while the predominant guitar riff is dampened, as if it was played through a pillow, creating a stunning contrast between the song’s pace and its melancholy production.

The Suburbs is far from a perfect album – there are too many “skip” tracks for me to slap an 80 on it, including the dirge-like “Wasted Hours,” “The Suburbs,” and “Sprawl I (Flatland),” and the slow rocker “Rococo,” with a staccato vocal line I just found irritating – but it’s far more than the standard three-singles-and-some-filler album template, a style that should be long dead in an era where the album is finally unbundled for consumers to purchase individual tracks. It’s the kind of album that would earn Grammy nominations if the Grammy Awards weren’t still based on wins, saves, and RBI.

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Amazon.com has another 1000 albums available for $5 apiece as mp3 downloads through the end of the month. Two I’ll recommend: Mumford and Sons’ Sigh No More, which I reviewed (glowingly) back in April; and Radiohead’s OK Computer, one of the five or ten best albums in the history of rock.

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→ July 19, 2010
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Small World.

A few readers have recommended the game Small World, which won GAMES Magazine’s Game of the Year award in 2010. It’s from Days of Wonder, the manufacturer of the Ticket to Ride series (which I often recommend), and the game itself is a remake of an earlier game (that I’ve never played) called Vinci. Small World has been a big hit so far, as it’s a short game once you know the rules, pretty easy to pick up, and offers slightly different game play each time.

I’ve seen and heard Small World described as similar to or influenced by Dungeons & Dragons because Small World involves selecting various races, including orcs, halflings, and elves, familiar to anyone who’s played fantasy role-playing games. It’s incorrect for two reasons. One is that anyone who’s seen Lord of the Rings knows about orcs and elves. But more importantly, the fantasy aspect to the races is almost completely irrelevant to gameplay – you’re not pretending to be any of these things, but are instead using these races to try to capture spaces on the map.

The game comes with two double-sided boards, giving maps for two, three, four, and five player games, and as the name implies, there’s not a whole lot of room on any of these maps. There’s a stack of twelve races and sixteen skills which are combined into random pairs at the start of each game, after which each player selects one race-skill combination and uses it to start to take over territories on the board. Each race-skill combo brings a fixed number of race tokens, which are then used to take and hold those territories. At the end of a player’s turn, he earns one victory point for every map space he occupies, as well as various bonus points depending on his race and skill at that time.

The big twist in Small World is that you aren’t going to have enough tokens to take over many spaces, and while you need to expand to keep accumulating points, at some point you’ll become overstretched and will need to push that race-skill set into “decline”, giving up one turn of potential moves and gains for the right on the following turn to pick a new race-skill combo, acquire a stack of new tokens, and wreak havoc somewhere else on the map while still grabbing a few points for the civilization you just put into decline before those spaces are captured by others.

Each race has a special benefit attached to it, some simple (Ratmen start with two more tokens than any other race; Humans get an extra point for every farmland territory occupied) and some complex (Trolls get to place “lairs” on their spaces, making them harder to capture, and the lairs last even when the civilization is in decline). The skills* work similarly, such as awarding bonus points for occupying certain spaces, allowing moves that might otherwise be prohibited, or allowing a player to go into decline on a turn where he’s already made moves, thus saving a turn that would otherwise be lost.

*We played this as a three-player game, but haven’t tried it with just two players yet. There’s one skill that looks to me like it’ll cause trouble in a two-player game: the Diplomatic skill, where a player can declare that an opponent whom he hasn’t attacked this turn may not attack him on the next turn. With two players, that means one can force peace as long as he doesn’t attack the other one. I’m not sure if that makes him invincible, but it would seem to create a substantial imbalance.

The fact that players receive points for occupying territories temporarily rather than receiving points at game’s end makes the game play different from most of the other games we’ve tried in that there’s a clear benefit to doing something that you know is likely to be undone quickly by your opponents. For example, in one game we played, I had Pillaging (skill) Orcs (race), giving me two bonus points every time I conquered an opponents’ region, so my ideal strategy was to abandon regions I already had, taking those tokens to take over new ones, gaining 3 points for each new region instead of 1 point for a region I already held.

Each race/skill combination brings its own strategic implications, and some are going to be more desirable than others (there’s a payment system similar to that in other games, where passed-over combinations start to accumulate victory points to make them more attractive). There’s also a lot of interaction between previous moves and your choices going forward, because a civilization you’ve already put into decline is removed from the board if you put a second one into decline (with one or two exceptions), leaving you with a quick cost/benefit analysis to estimate when you’re considering whether you can wring one more turn out of the race-skill combo you’re using.

After our first game, where we screwed up several rules (almost inevitable when we play a game for the first time), we found we could get through a three-player game, which lasts ten rounds, in 20-30 minutes. Setup only takes five minutes or so, as you shuffle the races and skills and place a handful of tokens on the map, then placing about 20 other items on the side of the board for when certain races are drawn. The game is brightly colored and the drawings of races have a slightly silly bent, although one flaw we found was that when tokens are flipped over to show that that civilization is in decline, the grayed-out images of races all tended to look alike, making tallying points after each turn a little trickier.

I hesitated on Small World because I saw and heard the Dungeons & Dragons references and, since I never got into D&D or other role-playing games, didn’t think it would appeal to me. However, with no real significance to the use of dwarves or sorcerors or ghouls, there’s no fantasy aspect to Small World – just think of each race as a set of tokens conferring some specific benefit to you and you won’t have to spend the game worrying about your street cred. It’s one of the best “family strategy” games I’ve seen – below the hardcore strategy level of Puerto Rico and Agricola, smarter than Thurn und Taxis, comparable to one of our all-time favorites, Stone Age – without feeling dumb or luck-driven, and the ability to rip through a few games in an evening makes it better for a casual game night than the two-hour commitment of those complex strategy titles.

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→ July 6, 2010
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Lost Cities.

As much as I love the new wave of German-style boardgames, the category lacks viable two-player options. Many games, like Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico, require a minimum of three players, while others, like Zooloretto and Power Grid, include two-player variants that don’t work as well as the three-plus rules do. We’ve found a couple that work well for two players – Carcassonne, San Juan, and Dominion are probably the best – but the list is relatively short.

Lost Cities is a real rarity among great German-style games in that it’s strictly a two-player game, only the second (along with the card game Catan, a two-player offshoot of Settlers) in our collection, and it has the twin virtues of being quick to learn and quick to play, so that you can run through several games in an evening rather than devoting the entire night just to setting up Puerto Rico. Lost Cities – which went in the less common direction by spawning a multi-player game, Keltis, which ended up winning the Spiel des Jahres – is simple, portable (just a deck of cards and a small board that isn’t fully necessary once you know how to play), and has an excellent blend of strategy and chance that prevents the game from becoming repetitive yet gives the player some control over his fate.

Each player in Lost Cities may begin, over the course of the game, up to five “expeditions” using cards; each expedition costs 20 points once initiated, but there’s no cost associated with an expedition that’s never started. The deck of cards contains twelve cards in each of five colors, representing the five expeditions: One card each from numbers 2 through 10, and three “investment” cards that allow the player to double, triple (if he plays two), or quadruple (if he plays all three) his profit or loss from that particular expedition. On each turn, a player plays one card to an expedition or discards one to the board and draws a single replacement from the deck or the discard piles. When the deck is exhausted, you add the values of the cards in each expedition, subtract 20, and then multiply the result by 2, 3, or 4 depending on the number of investment cards that expedition, gaining another 20 point bonus for any expedition that contains at least eight cards.

The catch is that cards must be played in order – investment cards come before card 2 – but the deck is fully shuffled and players only hold eight cards in their hand at any given time. Thus, players face decisions like holding on to high-numbered cards while hoping to get lower numbers or investment cards to fill out the expedition, or risking beginning an expedition where he isn’t close to the 20 card points required to turn it profitable. If you discard a valuable card, your opponent may pick it up, unless his expedition has already gone past the number of the card you’ve given up. When the game is nearly over, a player may choose to pick up discards rather than draw from the deck to try to delay the end and allow him to play more cards – but the other player can just keep drawing from the deck to try to end it sooner.

Once we got the hang of it, we found that games only lasted ten minutes or so, meaning that one of us can try avenge his/her losses in the same night, breaking up one of our major frustrations with the Catan card game or massive multi-player games like Puerto Rico and Agricola*. There’s no particular skill required beyond arithmetic, so even the most ardent RBI-lover could handle the math, and the basic strategies are straightforward and shouldn’t take long for new players to figure out. I’d boil down those strategies to two archetypes that the players can blend as needed: You can try to hit home runs on one or two long expeditions with investment cards, or go for 5-10 points on four or all five expeditions. Your optimal strategy or mix of those two depends on the cards you draw, but since you only see eight at the start the game, you have to make some educated guesses – you could argue that there’s a little probability involved here but I’m not saying anyone needs to bust our their old permutations formula – and at some point will end up at the mercy of the deck and your opponent.

*Yes, I now own Agricola, a birthday present from a determined wife who bought one of the last copies from the game’s last print run – it’s out of stock just about everywhere until at least August – and we’ve played it twice. When I get through a few more games, I’ll write it up.

The simplicity of Lost Cities meant that I could even play with my four-year-old daughter, who wanted to play as soon as she saw the cards in my bag while we were in St. Kitts. We never keep score, but to make it interesting for her, I told her she just had to make sure each card she put down was bigger than the one before it, she had to match the colors, and her goal was to make each column add up to more than twenty (she’s not adding to twenty yet, but it turned into a whole conversation about how you add numbers together). We’d play the game and she’d be excited that, say, three of her five expeditions reached the magic number of 20. Those of you with children probably understand this more than those of you who haven’t crossed that chasm yet, but it was fun for both of us to play like that, and she enjoys playing games she sees mommy and daddy playing.

One final advantage to Lost Cities: It’s cheap for a German-style game, and so in many ways this could serve as a gateway game to the bigger, more complex entries that tend to dominate the rankings at BoardGameGeek.

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→ July 3, 2010
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The Story of Sushi.

My most recent piece on ESPN.com went up yesterday – a preview of the major amateur free agents available in Latin America this summer.

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I recommend a lot of books around here, but I’m not sure the last time I said that any you must read a particular book. If you like sushi, or just seafood in general, however, you need to get yourself a copy of Trevor Corson’s The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice (published in hardcover as The Zen of Fish), a tremendous read that blends the history of what we now refer to as sushi in the U.S. with a surprisingly interesting subplot around a class going through a sushi-chef academy near Los Angeles. Corson’s integration of the two threads is remarkable, but for me, the value was in hearing him subtly say to American diners: “SUSHI: UR DOIN IT WRONG.”

Corson boils sushi down to its core components – the rice, the vinegar in the rice, the seaweed – and even dabbles in some food chemistry by explaining why we particularly like those ingredients as well as raw fish, discussing umami and the chemicals that deliver it (glutamic acid and inosine monophosphate in particular) and why we like the flesh of sea creatures raw but generally don’t like uncooked meat from land creatures. He discusses why certain types of fish make better or worse sushi, and of course discusses wild fish versus farm-raised (wild is better, but farm-raised does have some advantages) as well as the dangers overfishing present to natural fish populations. There’s even a chapter on uni, a paste comprising the gonads of sea urchins, which I recently learned is also consumed raw in various Caribbean cuisines as well.

Those sections were interesting, but didn’t do too much to change the way I thought about sushi, since I already knew I liked the stuff. Corson also discusses the various traditions around sushi and the etiquette of eating it (use your fingers for nigiri; never rub your wooden chopsticks together; miso soup should be eaten after the meal), as well as the logic for eating certain pieces in certain ways. A good sushi chef will, if you allow him, consider the order in which you’re eating your fish, moving across a continuum from milder flavors to stronger ones, or from softer textures to firm ones. Stirring wasabi (which, you probably know, isn’t actually wasabi at most U.S. restaurants but American horseradish dyed green) into soy sauce reduces the flavor of the wasabi, because the heat is partly deactivated in liquid. The fish used in spicy tuna rolls – a thoroughly American creation – is generally refuse, scraped off the skin of the tuna after the best pieces have been removed and used for nigiri or other dishes that require better flavor and texture. In fact, most rolls are inauthentic and used to hide inferior-quality fish under ingredients that are strongly flavored, like chili oil, or that coat the tongue with fat, like mayonnaise or avocado.

I’ve never been a huge fan of complicated rolls, since they tend to layer lots of ingredients together and come with sticky-sweet sauces, and I’m not a fan of mayonnaise so I generally avoid spicy tuna anyway. Having a rich, fatty, sweet roll can burn your palate for the delicate flavors of the fish-and-rice nigiri. But Corson’s book, without ever explicitly saying, “don’t eat the fancy rolls,” presents three arguments – one based on authenticity, one on the quality of the ingredients, and the fact that sushi becomes rather unhealthy when you load it up with fats and sugars – for at least limiting your consumption of those rolls, if not eliminating them altogether. And the teachers and sushi chefs who appear in the book all share his disdain for the fancier rolls, even while they teach them at the academy because customers want them – and they’re very profitable. (Another good reason not to order them, actually – you usually get more bang for your buck with nigiri.)

A book that just discussed sushi’s history, traditions, and science would have been worth reading without an actual plot to carry it along, but Corson built his book around the story of a class at The California Sushi Academy, a school run by a longtime sushi chef named Toshi whose restaurant (adjacent to the school) is struggling and who is himself recovering from a fairly recent stroke that has sapped his energy. Corson focuses on a few specific students in the class, including Kate, the nominal star of the book, a young woman struggling to find a career while fighting depression who nearly quits the school a half-dozen times; Fie, the Danish model/actress who decided she’d rather be the bombshell behind the sushi bar; and Takumi Nishio, the former Japanese boy-band star who quit the music business to study first Italian cuisine and now authentic sushi; while also devoting some time to Zoran, the Yugoslavia-born/Australian-raised head instructor who is a True Believer in traditional sushi even as he teaches the students American-style rolls. Their stories are interesting, as are their struggles – except for Takumi, who, in the book at least, seems to be a complete natural at whatever cuisine he tries, so he’s fascinating but without much drama. Corson follows them on assignments outside the classroom, like feeding the cast and crew on a movie lot, or watches them work a shift in the back room of the restaurant, using each episode as a segue into some note on the history or components of sushi.

If you like sushi, The Story of Sushi is $10 well spent. You can simultaneously learn the history of the California roll – its inventor is actually known, and there’s a good reason why there’s an avocado in it – and why you shouldn’t really bother with it when you’re in a quality Japanese restaurant.

For more from Corson, check out his official site, which includes some notes on the people in The Story of Sushi and other links and articles about seafood.

Next review: Richard Russo’s The Whore’s Child and Other Stories.

Filed Under: Food, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
→ June 28, 2010
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Cary/Raleigh eats, part one.

I was in Cary, North Carolina, for a few days last week, and will be heading there again soon, so this is the first of likely two food posts on the area.

I’ll start with the one success, Coquette, a French brasserie in the North Hills mall complex in Raleigh, a recommendation of friend-of-the-dish Richard Dansky, who also met me there for dinner. Their duck confit crepes were outstanding all around, from the perfect duck leg to the three golden crepes to the just-right amount of mushroom-leek cream sauce; the only questionable inclusion were fava beans that brought color but a little bitterness and didn’t meld with the other flavors. For dessert, I tried their cashew toffee crunch profiteroles; the pastries, pate a choux with cocoa and cinnamon, were a little dry (hard to avoid), but I would order a half gallon of that ice cream, which was loaded with bits of nuts and toffee and had strong caramel notes in the ice cream itself. It’s served with a dark chocolate ganache sauce that I may have just eaten with a spoon. The only misstep was the salad recommended by our server, a frisee mix with a poached egg … but no other dressing beyond the runny yolk. Not really good eats, but they had plenty of other salad and starter options to try.

I tried two Q joints in the area, neither great. Danny’s, one of several in the area, is located in an industrial park right off Tryon Rd; the pulled pork was moist but had almost no smoke flavor and required saucing, but their sides were all very good, including outstanding fried okra and a small bean I’d never had before called “field peas” that had a little of the bright sweetness of English peas but with the firmness of black-eyed peas. Dixie Belle’s pork had slightly more flavor – I mean slightly – but was dried out, probably from being kept warm for too long. I know there’s better Q in Raleigh and Durham, but didn’t have time to head that far. The mom from one of the local host families recommended Clyde Cooper’s in downtown Raleigh, so I’ll try to hit that next time around.

I had a recommendation for a hole in the wall sushi place in Cary called Little Tokyo, which also seems to be held in high esteem by locals … and that doesn’t say good things about the state of sushi in Cary, because Little Tokyo is awful. I figured I was in trouble when I saw the menu was about 2/3 rolls, with nigiri and sashimi relegated to less than a full page without the same bells or whistles. I knew I was in trouble when I asked the chef behind the sushi bar what he recommended and he looked at me like I’d just said Yuniesky Betancourt should be the AL’s starter at shortstop in the All-Star Game. I ordered five different kinds of nigiri, none of which had a lick of taste. The nigiri fell apart when I picked them up with my hands, and the texture of the maguro was mushy. It’s clear they use the sauces and extras on rolls to cover up inferior quality fish. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

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