If digital writing required the same ink as print, we'd have blown through all the dye, murdered every octopus and squid, and started in on the crayons just to cover everyone's gun-related opinions over the last few days. There's no argument that can sway anybody who lives in this country anymore, not on its merits. Opinions shift when headline events occur, and if outside opinions sway a person, it's from being surrounded by a bunch of people shouting in unison. The gap between 'we will die with all these guns' and 'we will die without all these guns' is too massive for someone to leap on the strength of a single person's eloquence.
Some people keep fighting anyway. Some walk away, unwilling to lose (more) friends and relatives to a firestorm that only ever has fuel added. I watch numbers. Less open to interpretation, as a wise man (read: greedy fictional banker) once said.
One of my Facebook friends posted a takedown of Everytown for Gun Safety's statistic that there have been eighteen school shootings in the first month and a half of 2018. The takedown focused pretty hard on the fact 'only' six or seven had injuries or fatalities, which seems like a pretty fucked way to look at the situation. Within the lifetime of anyone coherent enough to understand what we're talking about, the idea of guns on a campus would still have been cause for a freakout. Setting aside incidents where bullets flew in or around a school in a separate category because someone's aim was shitty is missing the point pretty hard.
That said, there were also instances like a third-grader pulling the trigger on a cop's gun, which is a situation that sounds idiotic as shit but is very much an accident. Whether the list looked like the 'correct' number would be eight or ten or twelve or fifteen, eighteen was clearly not right. Pointing that out is fair. It's arguably necessary given how many media and political sources took that number and ran with it, because if a statistic gun control advocates start relying on can get shot down as easily as this one, it's doing zero good for the cause.
But there's a flip side to making corrections: letting go of the point once it's made. The Gun Violence Archive has just about every data point you could want at a glance about shooting incidents (some of which don't have any casualties). The New York Times used the archive's data in a recent piece on shootings since Sandy Hook, and as of February 15th found eleven school shootings listed in 2018. Both logic and a dig through well-collated data shows the eighteen number was too high. The people who complained about that can enjoy that they were correct, and let it fucking go.
Eleven in a month and a half is still one every four days. If your message is, hey, this statistic is too high, but this is still really fucking bad and we need to find some answers, great. That is a reasonable perspective. If the main thing you're bitching about is that the gun control people overshot their argument, and you can't stop harping on it because they're dishonest or it's clear you can't get a straight answer out of liberals or whatever the fuck else, shut the goddamned fuck up.
Go hug your guns. I truly don't give a shit. I've stopped believing that we're going to fix this problem before the whole country burns. But if you'd rather watch the country burn before you give up your weapons, own it. Own the fact that, no matter how much you argue there will be just as many dead people without guns, we can't possibly know that without changing anything and your guns are more important than trying. I will respect people more for throwing themselves on top of their arsenals screaming, "MY GUNS! YOU NO TAKE!" than anybody scrabbling for the tiniest handholds so they can cling to the notion one erroneous statistic discounts every other argument on the side of those who made the mistake, including entirely valid arguments presented by the corrected statistic.
Just be sure—for your own sake, be really, really sure—that you are all-in with whatever you believe. Because if what you support is or becomes the rule, and it leaves you in a position of having to help someone else grieve the loss of a child or parent or whoever that might not be gone if you hadn't gotten your way, your belief isn't going to do shit for them. You're going to have to look at them and know, in your deepest heart, that even if you had known this would happen you still couldn't have supported anything else. If you can't do that, you need to seriously ask yourself why you feel the way you feel when it comes to guns, and pester yourself about it until you figure out something that makes sense, that you can live with.
Because not everyone is going to.
Sunday, February 18, 2018
Saturday, February 10, 2018
Dave Reviews: The Game of KYOOOOOT
Stuffed Fables
The description of Stuffed Fables at the above link calls it "an unusual adventure game".
Yeeeeeah. That's accurate.
Stuffed Fables is called an 'AdventureBook Game'. This is the first of its type from Plaid Hat Games. When you open the box and see a big spiral book full of stories taking up more space than anything else, it might immediately bring to mind Above & Below or Near & Far. The box cover alone, however, makes it clear we're dealing with kid-style stories, and likewise the game follows a simpler (read: more linear) path than either of those two.
The directions are easy: Read the book. Passages in italics are story for the current bookkeeper to read to the group. Regular text involves gameplay. Don't move forward from the section you're on until something in the game tells you to do so. As long as you know a few core rules, that's all you need to run the whole thing.
Let's split this between the gameplay and the storytelling.
—Gameplay. Every character has its own set of abilities, although each starts with the same amount of stuffing (health) and hearts to power their abilities. Characters usually have at least one ability that nudge them towards using certain types of items, though they can use anything they want.
You start a turn by drawing five dice from a bag. White dice potentially give you extra stuffing. Black dice are threat dice, which can trigger enemy minion turns or other negative effects. Other dice can be used for actions specific to that die's color, or for a few general abilities not connected to a color (mainly movement or storing dice for a later turn). Non-boss enemies have one hit point; beat their defense with a roll and you KO them, earning a button that can serve various purposes later. Bosses have hit points equal to the number of players in the game, but you hit them the same way, by rolling higher than their defense. Other icons on the board can give you other stuffed animals to talk to, merchants to deal with, or push the story forward.
The gameplay is about as good as it needs to be for a game like this. The best mechanic is the ability to choose how many dice you roll to attempt specific tasks. In most cases you'll want to roll as many dice as you can, or (if for some reason you have a pile of dice you can use) at least enough to just about guarantee success, but having the option not to do that and instead take multiple shots at a task with worse odds is good and I'm glad they offered it. Needing specific colors of dice for certain tasks, but having to pull dice from a bag each turn, is a recipe for annoyance, but the ability to save dice for later, or give friends dice to use on their turn, does a fair bit to alleviate issues created by randomness. Skill tests and group tasks can be failed, but you should usually have a much better than 50/50 chance to succeed.
Perhaps the highest praise for the gameplay is that it's good enough while also not overshadowing the story that is the selling point. Speaking of which...
—The story. When we opened the book, the first thing that came up was, do we actually have to read this kiddie shit to each other? Once the gameplay aspects came in, though, we got over that, and everyone read without feeling weird about it by the end. It's also a little darker than someone might expect—not original Grimm Brothers level, but not shiny happy Disney stuff either, no matter how the first page of the story book might read. The first story revolves around the animals retrieving the blanket of 'their' child from little spider monsters with doll heads. If you look at the little spider monsters with doll heads and don't buy into the creepiness that exists here, you're probably not going to buy into the whole theme. And those are the lowest-level threats.
More generally, if you can buy into stuffed animals coming to life and running around (which is a relatively common idea), you can perceive the threats to their well-being. Yet stuffed animals don't die; they can give stuffing to each other, including if one of them hits zero. Having all the animals flatten out (literally) is a loss; we didn't get anywhere near that point, but the idea of it feels pretty sad.
It can feel odd to be an adult, reading these stories to other adults, but they've written and paced it all in a way that lets you get into it. It helps that the art and miniatures are really nice, so you know exactly what characters are running around the maps.
—The overall. Pretty good gameplay, solid story. Sounds like winner!
Eh....
Playing through a story is enjoyable. You go through the process, have a good time, and think, man, this is fun, I'd like to do this more. Then you get to the end and... nothing. There are different endings available depending on how the story plays out, one better than the other, but once you hit the ending, that's it. There are eight stories available; like a legacy game, there's not much point to playing them multiple times unless you're trying to introduce someone new to it, but there's no legacy aspect. Nothing moves from game to game. I mean, you could house rule it so your characters keep their items, but they'd become incredibly broken.
It feels a little odd to criticize the game for only having eight stories to play when Time Stories starts out with only the one, and that's quite popular. The difference I would draw between them is that Time Stories is a mystery to be solved, so once that happens you naturally wouldn't have a reason to play it again. Stuffed Fables is a game that makes you want to keep seeing new stories, just like you would want more work from an author you like, with sufficient gameplay but not enough to make you want to re-run anything. Some people may get through all eight and decide they got their money's worth; others will think there should have been more. I have no good advice for how to decide which side of that line you'll fall on. It helps if you enjoy crisp art and excellent miniatures. That's all I've got.
Score: Six crawly doll heads out of eight.
The description of Stuffed Fables at the above link calls it "an unusual adventure game".
Yeeeeeah. That's accurate.
Stuffed Fables is called an 'AdventureBook Game'. This is the first of its type from Plaid Hat Games. When you open the box and see a big spiral book full of stories taking up more space than anything else, it might immediately bring to mind Above & Below or Near & Far. The box cover alone, however, makes it clear we're dealing with kid-style stories, and likewise the game follows a simpler (read: more linear) path than either of those two.
The directions are easy: Read the book. Passages in italics are story for the current bookkeeper to read to the group. Regular text involves gameplay. Don't move forward from the section you're on until something in the game tells you to do so. As long as you know a few core rules, that's all you need to run the whole thing.
Let's split this between the gameplay and the storytelling.
—Gameplay. Every character has its own set of abilities, although each starts with the same amount of stuffing (health) and hearts to power their abilities. Characters usually have at least one ability that nudge them towards using certain types of items, though they can use anything they want.
You start a turn by drawing five dice from a bag. White dice potentially give you extra stuffing. Black dice are threat dice, which can trigger enemy minion turns or other negative effects. Other dice can be used for actions specific to that die's color, or for a few general abilities not connected to a color (mainly movement or storing dice for a later turn). Non-boss enemies have one hit point; beat their defense with a roll and you KO them, earning a button that can serve various purposes later. Bosses have hit points equal to the number of players in the game, but you hit them the same way, by rolling higher than their defense. Other icons on the board can give you other stuffed animals to talk to, merchants to deal with, or push the story forward.
The gameplay is about as good as it needs to be for a game like this. The best mechanic is the ability to choose how many dice you roll to attempt specific tasks. In most cases you'll want to roll as many dice as you can, or (if for some reason you have a pile of dice you can use) at least enough to just about guarantee success, but having the option not to do that and instead take multiple shots at a task with worse odds is good and I'm glad they offered it. Needing specific colors of dice for certain tasks, but having to pull dice from a bag each turn, is a recipe for annoyance, but the ability to save dice for later, or give friends dice to use on their turn, does a fair bit to alleviate issues created by randomness. Skill tests and group tasks can be failed, but you should usually have a much better than 50/50 chance to succeed.
Perhaps the highest praise for the gameplay is that it's good enough while also not overshadowing the story that is the selling point. Speaking of which...
—The story. When we opened the book, the first thing that came up was, do we actually have to read this kiddie shit to each other? Once the gameplay aspects came in, though, we got over that, and everyone read without feeling weird about it by the end. It's also a little darker than someone might expect—not original Grimm Brothers level, but not shiny happy Disney stuff either, no matter how the first page of the story book might read. The first story revolves around the animals retrieving the blanket of 'their' child from little spider monsters with doll heads. If you look at the little spider monsters with doll heads and don't buy into the creepiness that exists here, you're probably not going to buy into the whole theme. And those are the lowest-level threats.
More generally, if you can buy into stuffed animals coming to life and running around (which is a relatively common idea), you can perceive the threats to their well-being. Yet stuffed animals don't die; they can give stuffing to each other, including if one of them hits zero. Having all the animals flatten out (literally) is a loss; we didn't get anywhere near that point, but the idea of it feels pretty sad.
It can feel odd to be an adult, reading these stories to other adults, but they've written and paced it all in a way that lets you get into it. It helps that the art and miniatures are really nice, so you know exactly what characters are running around the maps.
—The overall. Pretty good gameplay, solid story. Sounds like winner!
Eh....
Playing through a story is enjoyable. You go through the process, have a good time, and think, man, this is fun, I'd like to do this more. Then you get to the end and... nothing. There are different endings available depending on how the story plays out, one better than the other, but once you hit the ending, that's it. There are eight stories available; like a legacy game, there's not much point to playing them multiple times unless you're trying to introduce someone new to it, but there's no legacy aspect. Nothing moves from game to game. I mean, you could house rule it so your characters keep their items, but they'd become incredibly broken.
It feels a little odd to criticize the game for only having eight stories to play when Time Stories starts out with only the one, and that's quite popular. The difference I would draw between them is that Time Stories is a mystery to be solved, so once that happens you naturally wouldn't have a reason to play it again. Stuffed Fables is a game that makes you want to keep seeing new stories, just like you would want more work from an author you like, with sufficient gameplay but not enough to make you want to re-run anything. Some people may get through all eight and decide they got their money's worth; others will think there should have been more. I have no good advice for how to decide which side of that line you'll fall on. It helps if you enjoy crisp art and excellent miniatures. That's all I've got.
Score: Six crawly doll heads out of eight.
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
League Math; or, I Done Learned Something
The League of Legends season has been running for about three weeks. I finished my placements within the first week to take advantage of the quest reward (quests are the tastiest candy), but I've only played a half-dozen ranked games since then. I'm 3-3.
I have 35 LP.
If, by some miracle, anyone reads this who also doesn't know how the League ranking system works, it's based on the Elo rating system that dominates competitive games where people or teams need to be ranked who may never get a chance to play one another. This is common when the competitive pool is not structured in small leagues, but rather allows anyone interested to jump in. Elo ratings use a formula to determine the win rate any player should have against any other player. The more someone plays, the more accurate their Elo rating will be. In a perfect mathematical situation, where a person performs at the exact same level every time against players of the exact same calculated ability and has an exact 50% win rate (such as 3-3!), that person should not see a change in their rating.
LoL doesn't show anyone's rating, or MMR (match making rating). Your only shift comes in LP, and if you lose at 0 LP or win a promotional series at 100 LP, a change in division. However, in the aforementioned perfectly balanced scenario, a 3-3 record starting at 0 LP would also finish at 0 LP. Considering someone playing what the system considers to be a completely equal team will gain or lose 20 LP—which is to say, winning three games without losing any would put you at 60—being at 35 LP at 3-3 feels incredibly strange.
What particularly confused me was this: I'm Bronze 3 at the moment, and it's not like there are only a few players down at this level. Even if we were placed with players possessing a wide variety of MMRs, why would the game always put the highest ones on the other team?
Time for research!
It turns out, if op.gg is correct, that the game higher MMR players on the other team at all. Rather, everybody has a higher MMR than I do. Mine is only 935, which is fresh HOT garbage (although kadeem is only at 810, so at least I'm not a total statistical dumpster fire). Apparently—again, assuming op.gg is correct, though I can't imagine they'd start posting match MMRs unless they were pretty damn sure those numbers mattered—it's just my MMR versus the match MMR. It can't be the other team's MMR, because opposing teams have had pretty serious fluctuations while the game MMRs have been pretty steadily near 1100.
I have to assume going 2-8 in placements is the main reason my MMR is so bad. Still, if I'm 3-3 in ranked, it should have gone up... which means it was lower? Holy shit. Well, I'm not going to complain. If it gets me out of Bronze faster, I don't care if they put my garbage MMR over my name in neon.
I have 35 LP.
If, by some miracle, anyone reads this who also doesn't know how the League ranking system works, it's based on the Elo rating system that dominates competitive games where people or teams need to be ranked who may never get a chance to play one another. This is common when the competitive pool is not structured in small leagues, but rather allows anyone interested to jump in. Elo ratings use a formula to determine the win rate any player should have against any other player. The more someone plays, the more accurate their Elo rating will be. In a perfect mathematical situation, where a person performs at the exact same level every time against players of the exact same calculated ability and has an exact 50% win rate (such as 3-3!), that person should not see a change in their rating.
LoL doesn't show anyone's rating, or MMR (match making rating). Your only shift comes in LP, and if you lose at 0 LP or win a promotional series at 100 LP, a change in division. However, in the aforementioned perfectly balanced scenario, a 3-3 record starting at 0 LP would also finish at 0 LP. Considering someone playing what the system considers to be a completely equal team will gain or lose 20 LP—which is to say, winning three games without losing any would put you at 60—being at 35 LP at 3-3 feels incredibly strange.
What particularly confused me was this: I'm Bronze 3 at the moment, and it's not like there are only a few players down at this level. Even if we were placed with players possessing a wide variety of MMRs, why would the game always put the highest ones on the other team?
Time for research!
It turns out, if op.gg is correct, that the game higher MMR players on the other team at all. Rather, everybody has a higher MMR than I do. Mine is only 935, which is fresh HOT garbage (although kadeem is only at 810, so at least I'm not a total statistical dumpster fire). Apparently—again, assuming op.gg is correct, though I can't imagine they'd start posting match MMRs unless they were pretty damn sure those numbers mattered—it's just my MMR versus the match MMR. It can't be the other team's MMR, because opposing teams have had pretty serious fluctuations while the game MMRs have been pretty steadily near 1100.
I have to assume going 2-8 in placements is the main reason my MMR is so bad. Still, if I'm 3-3 in ranked, it should have gone up... which means it was lower? Holy shit. Well, I'm not going to complain. If it gets me out of Bronze faster, I don't care if they put my garbage MMR over my name in neon.
Saturday, February 3, 2018
Dave Reviews: A Very Meh Comic
Tokyo Ghost
I wanted to like this. For a while, I did.
Led Dent and Debbie Decay are constables in future Los Angeles, a world where everyone is plugged in all the time and can't see the world around them for all the screens in their faces (Debbie being the lone apparent exception). In the course of their work, they're sent to Tokyo, the last tech-free land on the planet. I'm curious if Tokyo was chosen because the creators liked the idea of a low-tech Japanese aesthetic, wanted to flip the script on Japan often having the most cutting-edge technology on Earth, if they just liked the sound of "Tokyo Ghost", or if it was something else entirely.
In any case, Debbie uses the opportunity to unplug Led and bring him back to his senses. They'd grown up together and fallen in love before he succumbed to the screens, and she sees this as their chance to be the happy couple. It all happens a bit quickly; the problem isn't so much that the process needs to take X number of pages for it to matter, but rather that because it happens so fast, and we don't see Led struggle very much with reintegrating himself into the real world, it's a given some other conflict has to come and fuck everything up for them.
That's the end of spoiler territory. I only went in that far because that's the best part of the story and is worth reading even if you already know the above information. The way the world is built, both with the art and the storytelling, is very good. Ending spoilers here means that I can only say this: they get to the end of book one (if you're reading it as two trade paperbacks), take everything they were doing well, and flush it.
The advertising in the link calls Tokyo Ghost a "smash hit". I don't know what the sales numbers are, but this isn't a situation where I didn't like something and can't fathom how anyone did. I understand that the end of the first book, and all my complaints about it, are something I think most people will grasp but not that many will think is as important as I do. I know that it's easy to bag on any sort of writing because it's not to one's taste, or forgive writing some sins because we like a particular thing about it. Copperhead is my example of the latter; it started pretty strong, but the writing has weakened noticeably over time. I still enjoy it, though, because I like the outer space lady sheriff and the characters that surround her. Others, perhaps many others, will forgive Tokyo Ghost its faults in a way that I can't.
All that said, my criticism of the story is largely based on as objective a factor as I can find. Even if you don't mind the exact things that happen from the end of book one into the beginning of book two, those events leave the writers pinned in a very serious corner. They have room to be creative about how to make the necessary future plot points happen, but there are necessary future plot points, and that's a problem. For a story to really succeed, the readers need to have some question about what's going to happen, the fate of someone in a questionable situation, the likelihood that the heroes will triumph, etc. If you're in a position where thing X has to happen for everything you've done before to make sense, and if thing X doesn't happen then you wasted everyone's time, you have fucked up. That's the situation with Tokyo Ghost.
It's a cool world. I like Debbie. Led's ok, but he's meant to be the meathead, so it's not like he's a bad character. I'm sure lots of people read the first few issues and were sold on the whole concept. But it doesn't hold up all the way through.
Score: Six absurdly sized motorbikes out of nine.
I wanted to like this. For a while, I did.
Led Dent and Debbie Decay are constables in future Los Angeles, a world where everyone is plugged in all the time and can't see the world around them for all the screens in their faces (Debbie being the lone apparent exception). In the course of their work, they're sent to Tokyo, the last tech-free land on the planet. I'm curious if Tokyo was chosen because the creators liked the idea of a low-tech Japanese aesthetic, wanted to flip the script on Japan often having the most cutting-edge technology on Earth, if they just liked the sound of "Tokyo Ghost", or if it was something else entirely.
In any case, Debbie uses the opportunity to unplug Led and bring him back to his senses. They'd grown up together and fallen in love before he succumbed to the screens, and she sees this as their chance to be the happy couple. It all happens a bit quickly; the problem isn't so much that the process needs to take X number of pages for it to matter, but rather that because it happens so fast, and we don't see Led struggle very much with reintegrating himself into the real world, it's a given some other conflict has to come and fuck everything up for them.
That's the end of spoiler territory. I only went in that far because that's the best part of the story and is worth reading even if you already know the above information. The way the world is built, both with the art and the storytelling, is very good. Ending spoilers here means that I can only say this: they get to the end of book one (if you're reading it as two trade paperbacks), take everything they were doing well, and flush it.
The advertising in the link calls Tokyo Ghost a "smash hit". I don't know what the sales numbers are, but this isn't a situation where I didn't like something and can't fathom how anyone did. I understand that the end of the first book, and all my complaints about it, are something I think most people will grasp but not that many will think is as important as I do. I know that it's easy to bag on any sort of writing because it's not to one's taste, or forgive writing some sins because we like a particular thing about it. Copperhead is my example of the latter; it started pretty strong, but the writing has weakened noticeably over time. I still enjoy it, though, because I like the outer space lady sheriff and the characters that surround her. Others, perhaps many others, will forgive Tokyo Ghost its faults in a way that I can't.
All that said, my criticism of the story is largely based on as objective a factor as I can find. Even if you don't mind the exact things that happen from the end of book one into the beginning of book two, those events leave the writers pinned in a very serious corner. They have room to be creative about how to make the necessary future plot points happen, but there are necessary future plot points, and that's a problem. For a story to really succeed, the readers need to have some question about what's going to happen, the fate of someone in a questionable situation, the likelihood that the heroes will triumph, etc. If you're in a position where thing X has to happen for everything you've done before to make sense, and if thing X doesn't happen then you wasted everyone's time, you have fucked up. That's the situation with Tokyo Ghost.
It's a cool world. I like Debbie. Led's ok, but he's meant to be the meathead, so it's not like he's a bad character. I'm sure lots of people read the first few issues and were sold on the whole concept. But it doesn't hold up all the way through.
Score: Six absurdly sized motorbikes out of nine.
Friday, February 2, 2018
Dave Reviews: Photographers Who Can't Beat A Goddamned Smartphone Camera
ShutterBug
I wonder if Mike Elliot is proud of his name being so firmly attached to this.
ShutterBug has a clip-art looking cover, and (spoiler alert) it's the clip-art version of a game. Your goal is to travel the U.S. looking for extraordinary creatures so you can snap photos of them for different magazines, and possible to fill a portfolio of specific pictures for side jobs. You move up to three hexes in a turn, collecting Tip cards when you move through or finish a turn in a city. Those tip cards let you take photos of creatures when you land in spaces where they are. Whatever the photo quality on the card, you discard that many Tip cards (assuming they're relevant to the creature and/or terrain) and get the photo tile.
Your main goal is to fulfill the requests of one of the two tabloids on your secret assignment card. If you get at least as many points of a given creature as the tabloid wants, you score all the points you have for that creature. You can only score requests for one of the tabloids, no matter how many you meet between the two of them. Side jobs are another way to score, although whether or not you can get them is mostly a matter of chance; stay aware of what the side jobs are and recognize if you have the possibility of fulfilling one.
Here's the main problem: the game ends after eight rounds. If you average one Tip card per round—which means moving through a city on most turns and ending on a city once or twice to offset the times you run off into the wilderness for a picture—you end up with ten or eleven, adding in the three you start with. You need one tip card per point that you score, and tabloids have ten points worth of requests. Therefore, if you want to nail everything on one of your special assignments, you have to almost perfectly maneuver your photographer towards both the cities with the Tips and the creatures you need as photo subjects. If you place more of a focus on Tips—using the fact Chicago and New Orleans are somehow adjacent to each other, for example—you can end up with more room to play with in scoring points but less ability to chase the specific pictures you need.
What about the side jobs? Given how tight you're probably running with Tip cards, the most likely way you'll finish side jobs is if you happen to finish most of one as part of your secret assignment and the last part of the job is easy to reach. Maybe that's done on purpose because the side jobs never change and the designer (hi Mike!) wanted to make it feel special each time you finish one. Then again, the side jobs range from two to five points, and you get two bonus points just for finishing the game in a city space, so maybe they're not that special after all.
In a two player game, each player controls two photographers, and you get a little more to work with in terms of resources. Even then, it's not a given you'll finish the whole secret assignment, because you need your Tip cards to match the photos you're taking well enough to play them, and you need the potential photos you need to go on the board in the first place. It would be one thing if two players were swimming in photos and points, and the normal game just played tighter, but even with the extra character it's still not that easy to get all the pictures you want.
It's true that the scoring is relatively flexible. You don't need to finish all three parts of the secret assignment for the parts you do finish to be valuable. That, however, leads to a game that doesn't feel very rewarding for whatever effort you put into it. If you get an assignment with X, Y, and Z requirements, especially when you get two such assignments and have the option of which one you do, not being able to finish the whole thing feels like you're not succeeding even if you win. It would be one thing if there was a reasonable choice to be made between finishing the secret assignment and piling up side jobs, but it's more likely that if you aim for more side jobs it's because the assignment is too hard to complete.
This is more a proof-of-concept than a finished game. It runs too tight on Tip cards for a system where you don't know what photos will be available. The side jobs never change, despite the nature of how they work being such that a deck of side jobs you draw from each game would fit much better. There's a lot to be said for efficient thinking, and efficiency is something I like in board games, but this thing isn't worth the effort.
Score: Five garbage yeti pictures out of nine (entire rolls of film).
I wonder if Mike Elliot is proud of his name being so firmly attached to this.
ShutterBug has a clip-art looking cover, and (spoiler alert) it's the clip-art version of a game. Your goal is to travel the U.S. looking for extraordinary creatures so you can snap photos of them for different magazines, and possible to fill a portfolio of specific pictures for side jobs. You move up to three hexes in a turn, collecting Tip cards when you move through or finish a turn in a city. Those tip cards let you take photos of creatures when you land in spaces where they are. Whatever the photo quality on the card, you discard that many Tip cards (assuming they're relevant to the creature and/or terrain) and get the photo tile.
Your main goal is to fulfill the requests of one of the two tabloids on your secret assignment card. If you get at least as many points of a given creature as the tabloid wants, you score all the points you have for that creature. You can only score requests for one of the tabloids, no matter how many you meet between the two of them. Side jobs are another way to score, although whether or not you can get them is mostly a matter of chance; stay aware of what the side jobs are and recognize if you have the possibility of fulfilling one.
Here's the main problem: the game ends after eight rounds. If you average one Tip card per round—which means moving through a city on most turns and ending on a city once or twice to offset the times you run off into the wilderness for a picture—you end up with ten or eleven, adding in the three you start with. You need one tip card per point that you score, and tabloids have ten points worth of requests. Therefore, if you want to nail everything on one of your special assignments, you have to almost perfectly maneuver your photographer towards both the cities with the Tips and the creatures you need as photo subjects. If you place more of a focus on Tips—using the fact Chicago and New Orleans are somehow adjacent to each other, for example—you can end up with more room to play with in scoring points but less ability to chase the specific pictures you need.
What about the side jobs? Given how tight you're probably running with Tip cards, the most likely way you'll finish side jobs is if you happen to finish most of one as part of your secret assignment and the last part of the job is easy to reach. Maybe that's done on purpose because the side jobs never change and the designer (hi Mike!) wanted to make it feel special each time you finish one. Then again, the side jobs range from two to five points, and you get two bonus points just for finishing the game in a city space, so maybe they're not that special after all.
In a two player game, each player controls two photographers, and you get a little more to work with in terms of resources. Even then, it's not a given you'll finish the whole secret assignment, because you need your Tip cards to match the photos you're taking well enough to play them, and you need the potential photos you need to go on the board in the first place. It would be one thing if two players were swimming in photos and points, and the normal game just played tighter, but even with the extra character it's still not that easy to get all the pictures you want.
It's true that the scoring is relatively flexible. You don't need to finish all three parts of the secret assignment for the parts you do finish to be valuable. That, however, leads to a game that doesn't feel very rewarding for whatever effort you put into it. If you get an assignment with X, Y, and Z requirements, especially when you get two such assignments and have the option of which one you do, not being able to finish the whole thing feels like you're not succeeding even if you win. It would be one thing if there was a reasonable choice to be made between finishing the secret assignment and piling up side jobs, but it's more likely that if you aim for more side jobs it's because the assignment is too hard to complete.
This is more a proof-of-concept than a finished game. It runs too tight on Tip cards for a system where you don't know what photos will be available. The side jobs never change, despite the nature of how they work being such that a deck of side jobs you draw from each game would fit much better. There's a lot to be said for efficient thinking, and efficiency is something I like in board games, but this thing isn't worth the effort.
Score: Five garbage yeti pictures out of nine (entire rolls of film).
Thursday, February 1, 2018
Dave Reviews: Garden Sculptures of Hate
Topiary
Nothing says peace and relaxation like a sculpture garden. Except... not this sculpture garden.
Topiary is a game for two to four players based on a simple presence: take your people and put them on the edge of a sculpture garden so they can see as many sculptures as possible. The trick, because there's always a trick, is that you don't know what's in the garden at the start of the game except for the middle sculpture in a 5x5 grid.
At the start you get a hand of three tiles and a pile of little meeple folk. Each turn you place a meeple next to one of the tiles, either orthogonally so it looks straight down a row, or at a corner so that it can see in a diagonal path. Then you take a face-down tile into your hand and place a tile in the open spot (it can be the one you just picked up). Whatever line a meeple looks down, they can see the sculpture directly in front of them and others going back as long as the ones behind are taller than the ones in front. Thus a meeple could see everything in a 2-3-4-5 line, but only the first two in a 2-5-3-4 line.
At the end of the game, your score consists of three things: the sum of all the sculptures your meeples can see in their lines of sight; bonuses based on multiple sculptures of the same type in any single meeple's line of sight; and tiles in hand that are worth as much or less than a sculpture of that type that at least one of your meeples can see. Most points come from the first total, and all scoring requires you to get as many sculptures in front of your meeples as possible.
It sounds relaxing until you realize the flip side of this is that you can also make sure as few sculptures as possible are in front of your opponents' meeples.
The theme of this game does not match the play at all, because this game is a total fuck-you hate fest. If you have a 5-height sculpture in hand and an opponent is setting up a long visible line, drop that thing in front of all the other sculptures and that meeple's only getting five points. You can frequently screw people out of more than five points that way, and sometimes create a line for yourself where that five is at the back, making tactics of screwing over your opposition usually more effective than playing peacefully and just trying to help yourself. Unless, of course, everyone knows how to fuck each other over and so everyone plays carefully so as to minimize the ability of others to screw them.
It's a little weird to rate how good this game is, because the expectation of what you're going to get looking at the box is entirely undercut by the gameplay. I can't think of an aesthetic off-hand that would have worked particularly well, but almost anything would have been better than this. That said, the game itself is reasonably good, but its casual setup doesn't really fit the strategy required to win. It does not appear to be the intent of the creator to make a game where someone is almost guaranteed to be called a son of a bitch at some point. That's what we have, though.
Topiary is a light game with some clever ideas; a casual design with a rage-inducing best strategy. It's a game worth playing, but at the same time I don't know what type of player I would recommend this to. Maybe one who's willing to draw angry faces in sharpie on the tiles.
Score: Seven growly-looking T-Rex trees out of eleven.
Nothing says peace and relaxation like a sculpture garden. Except... not this sculpture garden.
Topiary is a game for two to four players based on a simple presence: take your people and put them on the edge of a sculpture garden so they can see as many sculptures as possible. The trick, because there's always a trick, is that you don't know what's in the garden at the start of the game except for the middle sculpture in a 5x5 grid.
At the start you get a hand of three tiles and a pile of little meeple folk. Each turn you place a meeple next to one of the tiles, either orthogonally so it looks straight down a row, or at a corner so that it can see in a diagonal path. Then you take a face-down tile into your hand and place a tile in the open spot (it can be the one you just picked up). Whatever line a meeple looks down, they can see the sculpture directly in front of them and others going back as long as the ones behind are taller than the ones in front. Thus a meeple could see everything in a 2-3-4-5 line, but only the first two in a 2-5-3-4 line.
At the end of the game, your score consists of three things: the sum of all the sculptures your meeples can see in their lines of sight; bonuses based on multiple sculptures of the same type in any single meeple's line of sight; and tiles in hand that are worth as much or less than a sculpture of that type that at least one of your meeples can see. Most points come from the first total, and all scoring requires you to get as many sculptures in front of your meeples as possible.
It sounds relaxing until you realize the flip side of this is that you can also make sure as few sculptures as possible are in front of your opponents' meeples.
The theme of this game does not match the play at all, because this game is a total fuck-you hate fest. If you have a 5-height sculpture in hand and an opponent is setting up a long visible line, drop that thing in front of all the other sculptures and that meeple's only getting five points. You can frequently screw people out of more than five points that way, and sometimes create a line for yourself where that five is at the back, making tactics of screwing over your opposition usually more effective than playing peacefully and just trying to help yourself. Unless, of course, everyone knows how to fuck each other over and so everyone plays carefully so as to minimize the ability of others to screw them.
It's a little weird to rate how good this game is, because the expectation of what you're going to get looking at the box is entirely undercut by the gameplay. I can't think of an aesthetic off-hand that would have worked particularly well, but almost anything would have been better than this. That said, the game itself is reasonably good, but its casual setup doesn't really fit the strategy required to win. It does not appear to be the intent of the creator to make a game where someone is almost guaranteed to be called a son of a bitch at some point. That's what we have, though.
Topiary is a light game with some clever ideas; a casual design with a rage-inducing best strategy. It's a game worth playing, but at the same time I don't know what type of player I would recommend this to. Maybe one who's willing to draw angry faces in sharpie on the tiles.
Score: Seven growly-looking T-Rex trees out of eleven.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Dave Reviews: Lazy Spirit Gods Who Need To Pay A Little More Fucking Attention
Spirit Island
The great vengeful spirits of the Dahan people are so lazy I want to become a spirit god myself just to smite them.
Spirit Island is a co-op game heaped with praise since it first appeared as a twinkle in the gaming scene's eye. You play one of four nature-based spirits on an unnamed island in the Pacific (presumably) who take it upon themselves to wipe an invading nation off the island and protect it so the Dahan can live there in peace. You start with a small deck of cards, using both the abilities on those cards and your personal spirit powers based on the symbols on the cards you played that turn to push the invaders and their towns around and, eventually, off the island.
Each turn you choose one of three possible actions. These actions are balanced between bringing more cards into your hand, refreshing your hand by picking up previous discards, gaining extra energy to spend on cards, and adding more of your presence to the board. Adding presence takes presence tokens off your player mat, which also increases the amount of energy you automatically gain and number of cards you can play each turn. Thus, as the game goes on you will naturally increase in your capabilities, and can rush the ability to play more cards or gain more energy if you wish (though this can come at the cost of playing stronger early moves and letting the invaders get a better foothold on the island). Once you achieve the ability to use your most powerful ability, especially if you find a way to do it every turn or almost every turn, you can begin to rout the invaders--but you need to survive that long.
The invaders themselves cause two problems. One is that they'll destroy the native villages on the map. Each Dahan hut does two damage to the invaders, but unless a special ability changes things, the invaders attack first. Thus, unless there's only a single explorer in a territory (explorers do one damage and Dahan huts can take two), even if you have enough people in place to win a battle, you're going to suffer losses. Second, if invaders ravage a territory and do two or more damage to it (which only requires a single town or a pair of explorers), blight is added, which wipes out the presence of any spirit in that territory. Worse, if the area is already blighted, the blight is pushed into an adjacent territory, and further still if all adjacent territories are blighted.
As the spirits, you fight back through foreknowledge of the invaders' moves and planning ahead. You find out each turn where the invaders will next build, which means adding towns or cities where they already have tokens, and wherever invaders build, the turn after that they'll ravage. Thus your primary goal is to move or eliminate invaders from areas that will be ravaged, and then to limit how much can be built. Early on this is is difficult due to a relative dearth of abilities, but as mentioned, over time you gain access to abilities that can do substantial harm to the invading forces.
One of the more entertaining aspects of the game is the terror deck. Many co-op games, including old favorites like Pandemic, give you a certain suite of abilities and everything else is the game fucking with you. The terror deck in Spirit Island lets you fuck right back. As the terror level increases, your win condition becomes easier to meet (early you need to clear the entire board, but towards the end it's enough to simply eliminate the invaders' cities), and if you run through the whole deck, the invaders are so spooked that they all run away and you win regardless of how many pieces they have on the island. The terror effects are pretty fun as well, though I'd rather let you go play the game and enjoy seeing them all for the first time.
Aesthetically, there are going to be people who roll their eyes at the fact all the invaders--who are a colonizing force, not warbands from a neighboring island--are white. Those people can fuck off. It's taking a poke at world history without a single word being said about it, and that needs to happen more often. There's no 'kill all the white man' message, it's just a game that puts you on the other side of the situation and gives you tools to fight back that real-life colonized people didn't have. Adults can play a game that takes a semi-subtle shot at our predecessors without getting all butthurt about it. So can kids.
Spirit Island suffers from the lie of estimated game time on the front, at least at first. 90-120 minutes might happen if there are only two of you and you've played a few games, but four players can take four hours-plus learning the game and will probably take more than two until they know exactly what they want to do—at which point there are variants on the spirits to play and ways to make the game harder. But if you like the idea of a long, thinky co-op game, it's hard to go wrong here.
Score: Twenty-two vicious white devils driven into the sea out of twenty-four.
The great vengeful spirits of the Dahan people are so lazy I want to become a spirit god myself just to smite them.
Spirit Island is a co-op game heaped with praise since it first appeared as a twinkle in the gaming scene's eye. You play one of four nature-based spirits on an unnamed island in the Pacific (presumably) who take it upon themselves to wipe an invading nation off the island and protect it so the Dahan can live there in peace. You start with a small deck of cards, using both the abilities on those cards and your personal spirit powers based on the symbols on the cards you played that turn to push the invaders and their towns around and, eventually, off the island.
Each turn you choose one of three possible actions. These actions are balanced between bringing more cards into your hand, refreshing your hand by picking up previous discards, gaining extra energy to spend on cards, and adding more of your presence to the board. Adding presence takes presence tokens off your player mat, which also increases the amount of energy you automatically gain and number of cards you can play each turn. Thus, as the game goes on you will naturally increase in your capabilities, and can rush the ability to play more cards or gain more energy if you wish (though this can come at the cost of playing stronger early moves and letting the invaders get a better foothold on the island). Once you achieve the ability to use your most powerful ability, especially if you find a way to do it every turn or almost every turn, you can begin to rout the invaders--but you need to survive that long.
The invaders themselves cause two problems. One is that they'll destroy the native villages on the map. Each Dahan hut does two damage to the invaders, but unless a special ability changes things, the invaders attack first. Thus, unless there's only a single explorer in a territory (explorers do one damage and Dahan huts can take two), even if you have enough people in place to win a battle, you're going to suffer losses. Second, if invaders ravage a territory and do two or more damage to it (which only requires a single town or a pair of explorers), blight is added, which wipes out the presence of any spirit in that territory. Worse, if the area is already blighted, the blight is pushed into an adjacent territory, and further still if all adjacent territories are blighted.
As the spirits, you fight back through foreknowledge of the invaders' moves and planning ahead. You find out each turn where the invaders will next build, which means adding towns or cities where they already have tokens, and wherever invaders build, the turn after that they'll ravage. Thus your primary goal is to move or eliminate invaders from areas that will be ravaged, and then to limit how much can be built. Early on this is is difficult due to a relative dearth of abilities, but as mentioned, over time you gain access to abilities that can do substantial harm to the invading forces.
One of the more entertaining aspects of the game is the terror deck. Many co-op games, including old favorites like Pandemic, give you a certain suite of abilities and everything else is the game fucking with you. The terror deck in Spirit Island lets you fuck right back. As the terror level increases, your win condition becomes easier to meet (early you need to clear the entire board, but towards the end it's enough to simply eliminate the invaders' cities), and if you run through the whole deck, the invaders are so spooked that they all run away and you win regardless of how many pieces they have on the island. The terror effects are pretty fun as well, though I'd rather let you go play the game and enjoy seeing them all for the first time.
Aesthetically, there are going to be people who roll their eyes at the fact all the invaders--who are a colonizing force, not warbands from a neighboring island--are white. Those people can fuck off. It's taking a poke at world history without a single word being said about it, and that needs to happen more often. There's no 'kill all the white man' message, it's just a game that puts you on the other side of the situation and gives you tools to fight back that real-life colonized people didn't have. Adults can play a game that takes a semi-subtle shot at our predecessors without getting all butthurt about it. So can kids.
Spirit Island suffers from the lie of estimated game time on the front, at least at first. 90-120 minutes might happen if there are only two of you and you've played a few games, but four players can take four hours-plus learning the game and will probably take more than two until they know exactly what they want to do—at which point there are variants on the spirits to play and ways to make the game harder. But if you like the idea of a long, thinky co-op game, it's hard to go wrong here.
Score: Twenty-two vicious white devils driven into the sea out of twenty-four.
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