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alaricmacconnal and Kathy hosted a day of
gaming. I got to play two new-to-me games (along with others),
Through the Ages (board game) and Innovation (card game).
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filkerdave.
Ooh, pretty: when Planet Earth
looks like art. Link from browngirl.
Overheard at work: "Every time a developer cries, a tester gets his horns".
Neat visualization #2, from a coworker: 200 counteries, 200 years, 4 minutes.
I had sometimes wondered what the point of bots was -- what does somebody
get out of creating bogus LJ accounts just to add and remove friends?
(At least when they post nonsense comments they might be testing security
for when the spam comes later.) Bots on Livejournal explored
helps answer that question. Link from alienor.
Graph paper on
demand (other types too). Thanks, loosecanon; I can
never find the right size graph paper lying around when I need it.
A handy tool: bandwidth meter, because the router reports theoretical, not actual, connection speed.
And a request for links (or other input): does anybody have midrash or torah commentary on the light of creation (meaning the light of that first day)? I have the couple passasges from B'reishit Rabbah quoted in Sefer Ha-Aggadah and I have the Rashi; any other biggies? I was asked to teach a segment of a class in a few days.
This is a cooperative game where the players are trying to prevent the spread of four strains of monsters before they overwhelm the map. The map consists of a bunch of interconnected sites, each color-coded to one of the four types of monster. On each turn new monsters appear in designated locations (dictated by cards), and if you get more than three monsters in a particular location that spot becomes tainted. Each type of monster also has a general; the generals might move during the "darkness spreads" stage (also when new monsters come out), and if any of them reach the capital you lose. Other ways to lose are to run out of taint markers and to run out of monsters of any given color. You attack monsters by going to their locations and rolling combat dice; you attack generals by accumulating cards of the right colors, which you draw each turn. Each player has a unique role with associated special abilities. You win by killing all four generals.
But wait; this isn't at all like Pandemic. Why, this is non-deterministic! You have to roll dice to attack infections, er, monsters. And the infection, err, darkness-spreads, cards don't get reshuffled and put back on top. And taint is completely different from outbreaks. Um, yeah.
But all that said, it's an enjoyable game; while it blatantly rips off most of the Pandemic mechanics, it doesn't feel like a complete knock-off. This is its own game, though I do wonder how the publisher has stayed out of trouble.
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The description from BoardGameGeek starts:
In Agricola, you're a farmer in a wooden shack with your spouse and little else. On a turn, you get to take only two actions, one for you and one for the spouse, from all the possibilities you'll find on a farm: collecting clay, wood, or stone; building fences; and so on. You might think about having kids in order to get more work accomplished, but first you need to expand your house. And what are you going to feed all the little rugrats?In each turn you can take one action per person in your family. Each action can only be taken once per turn, so there is competition for certain spaces (not always the same ones). A new action becomes available each turn. Some actions provide resources, some allow you to plow and sow fields, some let you build things (which consume resources), and some let you acquire skills, and, later, some let you expand your house and then grow your family. You start the game with a hand of two types of cards, minor improvements (these are things you can build) and occupations (skills). Both give you some sort of advantage and there's a great variety. For example, the fishing pole (cost one wood) lets you take extra food from the "fish pond" action. The woodworker (occupation) lowers the cost of building wood improvements. The oven (costs three clay and a stone) lets you bake bread (one grain becomes five food).
At set points during the game there are harvests: you take grain or vegetables from your sown fields, must feed your family (if you have a fireplace you can cook animals or vegetables for this), and then can increase your flocks/herds (if you have enough fenced pastures to hold them). As you increase your family you need more food and as the game goes on the harvests get closer together.
Scoring is based on how well you did in several factors, and, like all optimization games, you have to choose which ones to pursue and which ones to accept lower scores for. You lose points if you didn't touch a category at all (for example if you had no plowed fields or no grain). Points are given for plowed fields, fenced pastures, three different types of livestock, two different crops, upgrades to your house, and number of family members, and some improvements also give points. So you'll find yourself facing quandries like "if I don't get a vegetable to sow I'll lose points for that, but if I blow that off I could build this improvement that'll be worth points, but it requires materials I might not be able to get in time".
I find that the cards add a lot of variety to the game without adding a lot of complexity. When I play Puerto Rico I'll probably settle into one of the established strategies (corn king, builder, variety, etc), depending on what the other players are doing. In Caylus (which I have not played as much) there also seem to be some basic strategies that players fall into, again depending on what others are doing. All of that is true of Agricola too, but the occupations and improvements in your hand can play a big role in this, so, at least so far, it feels like there are more strategies available. Or maybe it's just that the tactics are more varied. Either way, I'd like to play more.
( SCA afternoon )
( cookout )
And tonight, to celebrate Dani's birthday, we went out to Casbah for dinner, where we learned that sitting on their (enclosed) patio during a thunderstorm still poses challenges, primarily acoustic. (But also some dampness because it's not completely enclosed; we ended up asking to move to another table partway through the meal.)
One of Casbah's standard appetizers is a cheese plate. The specific cheeses vary, but you can always get an assortment. Tonight all three of the cheeses we got were clear winners. Dani wrote the names down, though we've tried in the past to find cheeses we've eaten there and it's never worked out so far. Maybe this time will be different, but I'm not holding my breath.
The game is played on a map covering the middle east, Europe, northern Africa, and Asia through the Indian subcontinent. Cities, towns, and spots in the seas are marked and connected via lines; these indicate legal movement. Players (who are assigned character names like Ali Baba) move around this board fulfilling quests and seeking adventure, which can alter your scores on two tracks (destiny and story), bring new skills, bring treasure, and cause status changes like "wounded" or "blessed" or "married" or "grief-stricken". Ultimately the winner is determined by the destiny and story points; the rest serves to affect your adventures along the way.
After you move you draw a card from the encounter deck, which typically has a noun like "sorceror" and a number. This number is looked up on a table against which you roll a die, which results in an adjective like "angry" or "friendly" or "foolish". You can choose one of about 8-10 actions from a list (there are several different lists; the table tells you which to use), like "aid" or "question" or "hide" or "attack". The table cell where the adjective and the action meet produces a cross-reference into the big book of stories. (There's another die roll that can tweak this cross-reference a bit, so it's not completely predictable.) Someone else then reads the corresponding entry, which provides a usually-entertaining narrative of what happens. Sometimes this is affected by the skills your character has or further decisions you get to make. This entry also gives you a resolution such as "story +1 and wounded" (you got a good story to tell but it hurt along the way).
For the most part characters do not interact, though they can under some circumstances. What keeps this from being parallel solitaire, though, is that at least three people are involved in each turn: the player, the person to his right (who does the table lookups), and the player to his left (who reads from the book of stories). This sounds tedious (and cries out for a software adaptation), but it really wasn't bad once we got the hang of it. Players not engaged in any of this were helping to pull out the right status cards or skill chits as needed, manage treasures and quests, and so on.
The game rules seem to assume that you'll run through the deck of encounter cards two or three times, but even with six players we only barely started the second time. (I think we drew three cards after reshuffling the discard pile.) I don't know if we were supposed to be having more encounters, but there didn't seem to be a lot of ways to call down additional ones. Maybe players are supposed to try to interfere with each other more, but again, there aren't a lot of opportunities for that. Though I note that an unfortunate encounter with a disgruntled wizard cost me the win by giving control of my movements to another player for two turns. I had already satisfied the victory condition in points, but you have to end the game in Baghdad. When I wrested control back I was somewhere in India, IIRC. Oops.
I forgot to time it, but I think our game was around four or five hours, including teaching. That's a lot longer than the two hours advertised on the box, but four of us were completely new to the game and the other two had played a few times. I think our next game would be a lot faster, but with six players who've played once or twice I'd plan on three hours, not two. I would definitely play this again.
Tangentially-related: a short discussion of overly-pediatric seders.
Same season, different religion: researchers have found that portion sizes in depictions of the last supper have been rising for a millennium, though I note the absence of an art historian on the research team.
Same season, no religion: I won't repeat most of the links that were circulating on April 1, but I haven't seen these new Java annotations around much. Probably only amusing to programmers, but very amusing to this one.
Not an April-fool's prank: xiphias is planning a response to
the Tea Party rally on Boston Common on April 14: he's holding a tea party.
You know, with fine china and actual tea and people wearing their Sunday
(well, Wednesday) best. It sounds like fun.
Edit (almost forgot!): things I learned from British folk songs.
From nancylebov:
Harry Potter and the
Methods of Rationality looks like it'll be a good read. Or, as
siderea put it, Richard Feynman goes to Hogwarts.
Real Live Preacher's account of a Quaker meeting.
Thanks to jducoeur for a pointer to
this meta community over
on Dreamwidth.
I remember reading a blog post somewhere about someone who rigged up a camera to find out what his cat did all day. Now someone is selling that. Tempting!
In case you're being too productive, let me help with this cute flash game (link from Dani).
( Imperial, Settlers (and what's with these weird pieces?), Puerto Rico, Pandemic )
( Incan Gold, Pandemic expansion, Merchant of Venus, Rum and Pirates, San Juan, Trans America )
This is a cooperative game for up to four players (all of our games had four so I can't speak to the experience with fewer players). Each player has a specialization; more about those in a bit. The team is trying to find cures for four diseases before they spread out of control. You win by finding the cures; you lose by having too many outbreaks, by having any disease run so rampant that you run out of its markers, or by exhausting the deck of cards without winning. The game starts with several infected cities; at the end of each player's turn two more cities will be drawn from the "infections" deck and infected as well. Every now and then an epidemic breaks out; a new city (from the bottom of the deck) gets a disease and then all the discarded infection cards get shuffled and put on top. That means that cities that have been infected once are more likely to be infected again, which has the right feel to it.
Players can spend actions (four per turn) to move, cure a single disease token (in the city they're in), build research centers (help with travel and required for finding a cure), or work on finding a cure. Finding a cure requires accumulating sets of cards, which are drawn each turn; there is a limited mechanism for passing cards, and one of the player roles (the researcher) can pass cards more freely (that's its special ability). The other roles are the scientist (requires fewer cards to cure), the dispatcher (can move other people on his turn and can bring people together without the normal constraints), the operations expert (can build research centers for free), and the medic (can heal cities more effectively). I played three games, playing researcher, the medic, and the dispatcher. I enjoyed all the games, and while it had appeared in the first two games that playing the dispatcher would be boring, it was not.
The calibration of the game (we played at the first two levels of difficulty) felt pretty good, neither too easy nor too hard. In the last game we were prepared to win on the very last turn, until the single card that would have caused us to lose came up in the infections deck. Oops.
Other games I played, all of which I think I've written about before, were Trans America (filler), Rum & Pirates, Puerto Rico (three players, four-point spread among scores), and Carcassonne. Other games that were played (this might not be a complete list) were Imperial, Dominion, El Grande, and Hermagore. Pandemic and Dominion got played multiple times by different groups. Belatedly I realized I could have given up a Pandemic slot to let a new person play; I jumped into Pandemic when the choices were that and Arkham Horror (decent game but too visually-challenging for me late in the day), but then the other group decided to play something else instead and I didn't think to move. Oh well; didn't mean to be greedy with the new game.
We had some cancellations and were down five people (from planned) for dinner. Non-sandwich suggestions for leftover lunch meats would be welcome. (No combining with cheese or milk, though, so pizza, lasagna, etc are out.) We'll eat sandwiches too, but I'd like some variety. I think scrambling the pastrami in eggs would be good; I don't have good instincts for the roast beef (would stir-frying it with veggies work?) and turkey breast.
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One of our guests was temporarily in a wheelchair due to a broken leg (sounded like a bad break from her description), which I didn't know in advance. (I knew about the disability, but thought she was on crutches.) Most of our first floor did not pose problems, and it's good to know that a wheelchair does fit through one doorway I thought questionable. I'm not sure how she managed the powder room; that might have required using structural features (like the sink) as supports (lean on this and hop over). I guess it's an improvement over my previous house, which had no first-floor restroom at all, but it reminded me that we still have accessibility barriers even setting aside the steps one must use to get into the house in the first place.
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( Fury of Dracula )
( Descent )
This weekend Dani and I joined some friends for a last-minute gaming get-together. We played La Cita (my third time, I think), which split interestingly: the winner had 35 points (would have been 40 if he hadn't starved his people in the last round), another player and I had 32 and 33, and the other two were in the high teens. It didn't look like that in play. (I thought I was doing worse and those last two better.) Then we played Rum and Pirates and all clumped within a few points of each other (something like 62-70). I like both of these games and will happily play more.
A few weeks ago I ordered a used DVD set via Amazon Marketplace. (I decided to see what all the Heroes fuss is about.) I chose a seller who had only a handful of ratings, all positive, figuring that someone like that is motivated to give good service. (Also, I noticed that the DVD would ship from PA.) A few weeks passed with no DVDs, so I sent email a couple days ago. This morning the seller wrote back with profuse apologies; he (she?) had accidentally sent my order to someone else who'd ordered on the same day, but now had the set back in hand -- "so I'll drive it over this afternoon". It turns out the seller is in the greater-Pittsburgh area. As promised, the DVDs were waiting for me when I got home from work, so everything worked out just fine. (I never order anything from third-party sellers that I actually need in a hurry.)
Speaking of TV,
the BBC
might bring back Blake's 7 (link from caryabend).
Woo hoo! I trust that this will eventually find its way to DVD and,
thence, my TV. Since it's been more than a quarter-century, I do
wonder what they'll do for casting. Of course, they could well do a
"25 years later..." story, even though the final season left things
on a cliffhanger.
(Anonymous) quote of the day, after interviewing a job candidate: "He has a lot of learning to do, and I don't want to pay the tuition".
This sign in a shop made me laugh.
Reusable printer paper looks like an interesting idea; I wonder if it can be developed economically. I'm surprised by the claims about what it costs to (1) manufacture and (2) recycle a piece of paper.
Quote of the
day #2 brings some much-needed context to the flap over Obama's
ex-minister. Excerpt (compiled by dglenn):
"No one likes to hear someone, especially a preacher, criticize our
good country. But Donna Potis [...] and so many others who decry
presidential candidate Barack Obama for having attended the
Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church while he preached prophetically
have very selective memories." The whole thing is worth a read;
it's not long.
Somewhat relatedly, osewalrus pointed me to
this
post pointing out that all the candidates and the voters
have a bigger religious-leader problem than this. Excerpt:
"[I]f I wake up and find that I'm in an America where certain pastors
and certain churches are openly denounced from the White House's
presidential podium, I will suddenly get even more nervous about
freedom of religion in America than I already am." Yes.
I found this
speculative, alternate timeline of the last ten years
by rjlippincott interesting.
Question for my Jewish (and Jewish-aware) readers: Thursday is Yom HaShoah (Holocaust rememberance day), so instead of my usual "daf bit" in the morning service, I'd like to do something on-theme. It has to be a teaching, something that would qualify as torah study, which rules out most of the readings that tend to show up in special services for the day. Any suggestions? I could probably find something in Lamentations, if that's not cliche, but I'm not really sure. And naturally, I do not wish to offend with a bad choice people who are old enough to remember.
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Within the last few years I've been introduced to two games where you play multiple empires over the course of the game. You would expect this to lead to less player attachment; if one empire tanks, well, you've got the means to start another. In practice, I've found this to be true in one and not in the other.
In the few games of Seven Ages that I've played, I've noticed that players (at least in my group, and certainly this is true of me) still feel pretty attached to the empires they have in play. I might have three empires in play, each one bringing me points each turn, but if someone wipes one of them half off the board I feel unhappy, and thus I am more reluctant to do it to others. (I am more of a cooperative player than an aggressive one.) I say this knowing full well that (1) it's nothing personal, (2) I like this game, and (3) it's a game and you're supposed to do stuff like that.
In History of the World you also play several empires over the course of the game, and I realized this weekend while playing that the ebb and flow, rise and fall, conquest and obliteration is perfectly natural and not at all bothersome beyond the "hey, I was getting some points from those guys!" reaction. In this game if I need territory I take it, and I know others will do the same thing, and that's cool -- I've got more guys where those came from. So, what's the difference in this game? I think there are two key factors: predictability of new empires and timing of scoring.
In Seven Ages, you can only bring in a new empire when (1) you have pieces available and (2) you have an appropriate card. I've had games where I would have happily replaced a failing empire, but I did not have the means to do so for a few turns running. So I was stuck playing a losing position while waiting for the luck of the draw. Bummer. In History of the World, on the other hand, you play each empire for one turn, and then everyone gets another (not necessarily playing in the same order). Your residual empires help your score as long as they stick around, but there's this sense that everyone's moving on. You can't go back and modify those empires any more; they've been and gone. If I need to knock over your guys to build mine, well, those are the breaks. Sure, there's competition for resources, but it's more asynchronous. I also know that due to the variation in turn order, you might, or might not, go twice before I go again.
The other factor is the timing of the scoring. In Seven Ages, as in most games, everyone takes a turn and then you score everyone (or you score only at the end of the game, in some games). I can build my board position all I want, but it's only what survives after you're done that helps me ("all that work for nothing", possibly). In History of the World, each player plays and then scores before play passes to the next person. In this most recent game, in the last epoch every single player save one dominated northern Europe -- obviously not simultaneously. I went early that round, collected my points for it, and watched empire after empire squish my guys (and each other's, as the epoch went on) to build that position. It made it more natural for people to actually take the logical, historical conquest paths, and hey, I already got my points so it didn't take anything away from me directly -- there was just the general vying for getting the best overall score possible. In this sense, the scoring feels more like Euro Rails (make a delivery, get paid) than like Seven Ages. I'm finding that I like this model, though I don't necessarily dislike the other.
alaricmacconnal helped us out with this
weekend.
We had in play the purple reptiles and the other two sets that were not "dogface". (One of these days I'll learn all the names.) One of the other players was the best (potential) herbivore and the other was the best (potential) carnivore, leaving me in the middle. Each species has advantages and disadvantages; I just haven't learned them all yet.
I went into the water, which seemed like a good idea at first but then the others started crowding me out. After one turn in which I was down to two counters and no obvious growth path, I was ready to resign but agreed to keep playing. In the next turn (turn 8, I think) we got a disaster that ended the game. Oops.
That took about an hour and a half, so we decided to start again. I suggested we juggle creatures around; in the end Dani and Alaric kept what they had and I swapped the lizards for "dogface", a mammal. Dogface's special trait is that individual creatures, as opposed to whole species, can be declared herbivore or carnivore. This seems nicely flexible. In practice, it's kind of a bookkeeping hassle.
For all players, you can have your carnivores prey on your herbivores (so long as they're different species). This led to comments like "it's ok; I brought my own food to this biome". :-) A problem for carnivores is that not all herbivores are equally edible; some develop roadrunner DNA (speed, nocturnality, armor), and you have to adapt (speed, nocturnality, anti-armor) to eat. The carnivores end up moving around, following the prey, just like in real life.
The other thing that can make an herbivore inedible is size, and that was my biggest problem in this game. There are six sizes available in the game; a carnivore can eat prey of its size or up to two bigger. I had a gene that I really didn't want to give up that constrained my best carnivore to size 1, but Dani was going for size 5 and 6 creatures because there are places where herbivores compete on size. It's complicated but mostly good.
That trait I didn't want to give up? I think this was a huge factor: I got a poisoned bite, which allowed me to ignore roadrunner DNA. (I don't understand, logically, why it would help with speed and nocturnality, though helping with armor makes sense.) In a previous game when I was playing a carnivore strategy the prey kept hiding or running away; since DNA comes out randomly and then you have to win the bidding, addressing this isn't always easy. But this time the luck ran in a different direction.
For a while Dani and Alaric were doing better on population than I was, but I managed to catch up and ended up winning by about five points (with top score around 150). Alaric would have instead won by one point if the disaster on the last turn hadn't made one of his species extinct. Ah, fickle fate.
The game seems to work best when players can fall into niches, but that's not always possible and a fair bit of conflict is inherent in the game. I think it works reasonably well, but the 3-player game came in at 5.5 hours, a little longer than I expected. Each player and each species adds complexity, so I think we need to come up with some player aids (visualization, mainly) before we try another 4-player game.
On one foot: you are playing one or more species (a phylum, loosely) 250 million years ago. The board consists of biomes with different characteristics; you acquire DNA that lets you adapt in compatable ways. For example, a biome might require water-tolerance (amphibian) and give extra points to insect-eaters. Or a biome might support anyone but give extra points to creatures that can reach the tall trees. Depending on what cards come into play, you can bid for DNA or for the chance to spin off new species. Random events can throw wrinkles into your plans, most frequently by altering biomes. Scoring is based on the number of counters you can keep alive on the board.
The game has five sets of counters -- not identical, so we chose two at random. I played lizards (purple), and Dani played "dog-face" (yellow, mammal). The game has a basic reptile/mammal split, so I suspect it worked well that we played one of each.
You start with one species and from that can spin off more, inheriting the base characteristics. My base lizard was almost immediately amphibian, so all my derivatives were too. One derivative was aquatic (required water to live in); the others were more flexible. Initially there weren't a lot of marine biomes on the board, which was a problem, but new biomes and climate change helped me out.
Dani, meanwhile, went in for carnivores, at least some of the time. Carnivores don't actually eat other players' counters; it's about balancing species, not individual chits. Carnivores have to be supported by herbivores, but that comes at no cost to the player of the herbivores. That said, most of the herbivores in our game ended up developing armor, making it unprofitable to be a carnivore. (Anti-armor -- you know, stuff like big sharp fangs -- was under-represented in our game.)
Mechanically, each species is represented on your playing mat by a card (about 2x2 inches) and a pile of little cardboard tents to represent acquired characteristics. You can have any characteristic more than once (this means a stronger presence). I don't know what's typical, but we had species in play with a dozen of these little tents, which is more than fits on the card. Because orientation of the card also matters (it indicates your size), this made it a little hard for me to see what was going on on Dani's mat and vice-versa. This was tractable for a two-player game, sitting next to each other; I don't know how well it would work for me across the dining-room table. I was keeping stuff in memory more than looking. If the markers were plastic rather than cardboard, some sort of stacking scheme might have helped with that.
Our events were not well-randomized, though we shuffled thoroughly. So I don't have a sense yet of what that should look like. We had one catastrophe, on the last turn, that caused five of the six species then in play to go extinct. I gather that lesser catastrophes exist.
Our game took about three hours, including teaching, which is a comfortable length. (It means it can play in an evening and not just on a weekend.) The plastic tray that Dani bought helps with chit management, but at the expense of things not fitting well in the box. Speaking of the box, it opens on an end rather than having a conventional lid -- bad choice IMO.
Dani played a draft of the third edition last year at Origins, but that edition has not yet been published. He bought the second edition and its expansion, and downloaded third-edition rules, that that more or less fits together. (That this is so suggests to me that the third edition won't be published as a packaged game.) The rules support a basic game and an advanced one; we played the basic.
Overall, it's a neat game with an unusual concept, and I'd like to play it more. I don't think I have a great feel for it yet, but I like what I've seen so far, aside from some of the physical aspects.
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