Somebody posted something recently in one of my feeds about the new Avengers movie, and I guess they must have been posting from a phone, because they referred to “age of lutein.” It turns out lutein is a real thing (which I guess is why someone’s autocorrect would use it); it’s a yellow pigment found in plant leaves and egg yolks. THIS IS HOW TRIVIA HAPPENS, PEOPLE.
And of course, lutein is sold as a dietary supplement because plants.The lutein centipede. OH HO!
Anyway, I am going to see Avengers: Age of Lutein tomorrow evening with the Boy, the Girl, and one of the Boy’s friends. Mrs. Someone can’t make it, so that means some subset of us will undoubtedly be seeing it again sometime fairly soon. I’m looking forward to it. The Boy and I watch Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and we enjoy seeing how the movies are tied into the TV show (or is it vice versa)?
In Dead Tree news, I just finished reading The Three Musketeers (Gutenberg Project link). I’ve seen the movie–and as far as I’m concerned, there is only one “The Movie” when it comes to this work: the 1973 Richard Lester version, starring Michael York, Oliver Reed, Charlton Heston, Faye Dunaway, and Raquel Welch–but I had never before read the book. The movie tells only the first half of the story; I never saw the sequel (The Four Musketeers), which tells the second half.
The book is a great deal of fun. The language is pretty florid, but it’s hard to tell if that’s the result of mid-19th century literary sensibilities or Alexandre Dumas’s tribute to earlier times (with a wink to the reader). Overall, the book is quite funny (though fairly gruesome in parts). The religious and political setting is one with which I am entirely unfamiliar, so it has spurred me to further reading. I would like to read Dumas’s follow-ups, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later.
But that will have to wait, as I am now on to Ancillary Sword, the sequel to Acillary Justice (about which I wrote last week). I just started, so I have little to say about it, other than that I really like the way Ann Leckie evokes the cultural and religious background in which the story is set.
Hey! This will be a week since I rebooted this thing. Go me! Anyway, last night was, as most Tuesdays are, game night. Herewith, a brief after-action report.
Dramatis Personae
Your humble narrator
Jim, An Instructor of Impressionable Youth
JR, A Seminarian
Jessie, Another Seminarian
Julie, A Former Seminarian
Jason, A Terminally Cheerful Person
Ocean, A Late Arrival
(Astute observers will note a preponderance of people whose names begin with J. We are still working on finding a cause for this clustering effect.) Initially having six people, we split into two groups of three. Ocean’s arrival filled one group to four just as the first game began. Excelsior!
The Games I Didn’t Play
We didn’t name the two groups, so I will make up names for them. Team Not-Me consisted of Jim, Jason, and Julie. Their first game was Harbour, a short, relatively light game of resource collection, building, and market manipulation.
Harbour. You can tell it’s a sophisticated game by the “u” in the name.
Once that was done (I don’t know who won, but I am fairly certain the winner’s name begins with J), the group moved on to Viticulturewith the Tuscany expansion. The expansion provides a legacy structure that allows the winner to “uncork” a new feature, making the next game very different. This is the second time it’s been played in my group, so it has been enhanced by the previous winner and last night’s winner (Jason).
Viticulture. Wine wine wine spodie-odie.
The Games I DID Play
Meanwhile, back at stately Wayne Manor… you know what I mean. Team The Other Team consisted of me, JR, and Jessie, with Ocean joining us shortly after we had set up the first game. Which was Lords of Xidit, brought to you by the people who make Seasons, and set loosely in the same world.
Lords of Xidit. No, I don’t know how to pronounce “Xidit” either.
In this game, the players travel around the map from city to city, recruiting units from five different classes (Farmer, Bowman, Infantry, Cleric, Mage) and using those units in various combinations to defeat threats. A game turn consists of six actions, performed one at a time clockwise from the current starting player. In a single action, a player can move along a road to a new city, recruit units or defeat a threat in a city (depending on which is available), or just wait and twiddle their thumbs. The tricky part is that all six of a player’s actions must be planned in advance, which means the players have to consider the timing of their actions – someone might get to their destination first, leaving them twisting in the wind and unable to do what they had planned.
In addition to the advance planning mechanism, the game has a couple of other interesting features. Empty recruitment markers cycle to become future threats, and defeated threats cycle to become future recruitment markers, and the players can see what is coming down the pike. This also feeds into the planning.
The endgame scoring process is interesting as well. Defeating a threat entitles the player to take two of three possible rewards: Reputation, Gold, or Sorcerer Towers. After 12 turns, the game ends and each player is ranked according to their accumulation of each of these three rewards, in an order determined at the beginning of the game. (In our game, the order was, in fact, Reputation, Gold, Towers.) The last player in rank in each reward is eliminated and cannot win, but their score in the other rewards counts toward determining everybody’s rank in the other rewards. In our game, Ocean was last in Reputation, so he was out of contention; but his rank in Gold was higher than everybody else’s pushing the rest of us down in rank. I got eliminated in the Gold ranking, and then Jessie defeated JR on Towers to win the game.
The game is designed for four, but also plays with three players (using a dummy player to work out the rankings at the end) and with five (in which case the lowest two players are eliminated in the first ranking). It took us about two hours, including learning the rules.
Since Team Edward was ensconced in Viticulture when we finished, we opened up Stefan Feld’s Bruges(with the City on the Zwin expansion). We are a Feld-friendly crew, but I had forgotten how enjoyable this game is.
Bruges. Not even close to color-blind friendly.
As with most Feld games, there are multiple paths to victory and a half dozen fiddly ways to score points, and players must make hard choices. Each turn, players draw up to a hand of five cards, from two decks containing cards of five different colors (red, yellow, blue, purple, brown). For each draw, a player has two choices – usually two different colors, but sometimes both the same). Then the current starting player rolls five dice – one in each color; the pips on each die establish certain costs and values and may result in the players’ receiving threat tokens.
The players then take turns playing a card from their hand, one at a time clockwise from the starting player. Each card may be played in one of six ways: to gain workers of the corresponding color (for future use); to gain money equal to the number of pips on the corresponding die; to eliminate a threat of the corresponding color; to build a section of canal by paying money; to build a house by expending a worker of the appropriate color; or, once a house is available, to put a person into a house by paying money. A person in a house in a player’s display will have a special ability that may happen just once when played, or may be activated by spending a worker of a particular color, or if a certain condition is met. The expansion adds (optionally) more cards; boats each turn that allow a player who builds a canal to get an extra benefit; and a market that grants a player a bonus of some sort when they take a particular action during that turn.
Each player plays (usually) four cards per round, then the starting player rotates clockwise, and the cycle begins again. The game’s final round is triggered when the last card in either of the two decks is taken. (There is a deck of additional cards that can be used to fill out the rest of the round as needed.) When the player’s have taken their last actions, the scores are totaled up and – mirabile dictu! – the player with the most points wins. As noted, there are multiple ways points are scored, and since most of the scoring is left to the end of the game, it can be difficult to gauge how well one is doing. Last night, I thought I was doing miserably, but I wound up in second place, two or three points behind Jessie and ahead of JR by about the same margin.
Epilogue
A good time was had by all. Having won two games in a row, and every game he played last night, Jessie was placed on probationary status, and swore never to do it again. Also, I need to take better pictures.
Finally, not weird, but just because it is so freakin’ cool, here’s the picture (and a video) released by NASA to celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope’s 25th Anniversary last Friday, featuring the Westerlund 2 cluster, where so many stars are being spectacularly born.
Actually, this week has been a bear–literally, a large Alaskan grizzly, or perhaps a Kodiak bear*–so I have not had time to engage in any of the music discovery that I would normally report on here. So for this week, I will just put up this video of some little English band of yesteryear singing a little ditty I have been learning on bass. (For such a simple song, it’s a pretty complex bass line. Not difficult, necessarily, but deeper than you might expect.)
Next week, maybe something new and previously unheard…
*Please don’t write in to complain. The management is aware that a Kodiak bear is the same as an Alaskan grizzly.
I recently read Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie, and enjoyed it quite a bit.
The story takes place in a universe dominated by a religious empire (the Radch) that has expanded aggressively, using (among other things) sentient starships which interact with their human commanders through human bodies called ancillaries. The narrator, Breq, is a former ancillary from a particular echelon of ancillaries of the warship Justice ofToren,platoon of its ancillaries, but is now a single individual. Breq’s sole goal now is to exact revenge against the person who effectively destroyed her as a ship and left only the one ancillary.
The story itself is a little slow to get rolling, but ultimately becomes a compelling space opera, weaving together Breq’s current journey with the slow reveal of what happened to the Justice of Toren. What I (and many reviewers) find so fascinating about the book, though, is that the Radch empire uses a language (which presumably reflects a culture) that does not mark gender. Breq and the other Radchaai characters refer to everybody using feminine pronouns–“she,” “her”–even while describing or otherwise indicating that particular individuals are male. Thus, on a planet outside the empire, whose native language does recognize gender differences, Breq will listen for cues from natives as to whether a particular person is male or female, while Breq’s internal narration consistently uses only feminine pronouns.
At first, this was a little odd. In the beginning, the use of “her” and “she” in conjunction with a description of a character as “probably male” (Breq’s not very certain all the time) jars one out of the story a bit. About 50 pages in, though, it struck me that gender didn’t matter. Whether a given character had male or female genitalia, or whether they identified as one gender or another, was entirely irrelevant to the story, because (a) most of the action didn’t have anything to do with sex, romance, love, or anything that might implicate gender or gender roles; and (b) even in those few instances where relationships were relevant, the gender(s) of the participants were not.
I think that when we read a book, we look for cues in the text to help us develop an internal image of the characters, and that’s why the use of non-gender in this book was a bit jarring. But when it finally clicked for me, I realized that my internal visual image of the characters was irrelevant to the story and to my enjoyment thereof. The use of feminine pronouns dispelled the “default” maleness for characters whose sex is not specified (because–again–it doesn’t matter).
I am sure there are people who think the genderless approach is a gimmick, or who will bristle at not knowing exactly which equipment a particular character is sporting between their legs (or who will be offended at the idea that a male-sexed character–whose maleness might be cued in the text–would be referred to as “she”). Some might think it distracts and detracts from the storytelling. In a lesser story, maybe any of that distraction would have been a negative; but for me at least, the transition from catching myself constantly wondering and adjusting my internal image of the characters to realizing that I knew exactly what was going on and it didn’t matter whether a particular character was a man or a woman or something else added a cool dimension to the whole experience. I’m looking forward to reading the next two books. (Because isn’t everything at least a trilogy these days? Ancillary Sword is already out, and Ancillary Mercy is coming this year.)
We had a small group last night. Jim begged off, citing some nonsense about “my wife’s birthday.” (Whatevs.) Dave is on Impending Baby Watch, so he decided to stick close to home. Ken arrived first, and for a time, it looked like it might just be the two of us – and then, just as he was breaking out Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage for the two of us to play, JR and Jesse arrived. None of the other seminarians (whose names also begin with J, strangely) showed up, so it was just the four of us.
As is customary whenever Ken comes to Game Night, we did not play Titan. (This is also customary when Ken does not come to Game Night.)
Game 1: Rise to Power
JR brought a new game, Rise to Power, a card game of city building and expansion from an Australian two-man game company called Rule & Make. The game mechanics are simple: Everyone starts with a Power Plant and a couple of cards representing different values and colors of PRISM (energy), and builds a grid of city districts around it. At the end of he game, districts are worth a specified number of points, to which players add any “agenda” goals they managed to obtain during the course of play. Most points (shocking, I know) wins.
We played with the expansions that JR got with the game, including CEOs. Each player was given a CEO with two powers: a one-use power and a passive power that came into effect after the one-use power was triggered and stayed in effect for the remainder of the game. Ken’s CEO’s passive power gave him a lot of extra Action Points to work with, and as a result, for most of the game, he was running away with it. I managed a highly lucrative final turn, though, and managed to pull out a victory. [Victory Lap!] We all agreed that the CEOs are not properly balanced, and the game would play better without them.
All told, including rules reading, the game took us less than 90 minutes. The game can hold up to six people, but the consensus was there would be too much downtime with more than four. Nonetheless, we all enjoyed it and would play it again.
Game 2: Il Vecchio
Il Vecchio is an old favorite from Rudiger Dorn, published by Tasty Minstrel Games. (Their website is under construction, so the link goes to their BoardGameGeek page.)
In Il Vecchio, players send family members to towns around the Tuscan countryside to gather followers (Assassin, Monk, or Soldier tokens), favors (carriage and bishop tokens), money, and scroll tokens. With the proper combinations of followers and money, a player can place a family member in a position of influence in one of three provinces – but as the provinces fill up, the value of the next position declines while the cost to place there rises. The provinces also provide special single-use powers. Using scrolls (and possibly money), a player can place a family member on one of two tracks in Florence – the city track, which grants a favor the player can use for the rest of the game, or the nobility track, which grants end-game bonus points.
The game mechanics are interesting. The type of token obtained in a given town is determined by a “Middleman” marker; when used, the marker then moves clockwise to the next appropriate town on the board, meaning planning ahead is crucial. As each family member performs an action, it is laid on its side and cannot be used again until the player uses an action to “recover” – that is, to stand up all their family members. A bishop token allows the player to prevent the Middleman from moving and let the family member remain active.
At certain points along the province and Florence tracks, placing a family member results in the player taking a Medici token. Each Medici token has an immediate effect that usually screws up everybody’s planning, and counts as a victory point for the player who took it. The Medici tokens also act as the game clock – when the last one is taken, the players have final turns, and then count their scores.
The mechanics work in such a way that everybody feels frustrated at some point, usually because you have just missed an opportunity by one turn and someone has moved something out from under you. Money is hard to come by; it takes multiple turns to gather the tokens you need, and in the meantime, other players are likely to disrupt your careful planning. There are limited opportunities (using starting bonus powers and Florence city powers) to create an engine of sorts, but this is not really an engine-building game.
Once again, Ken appeared to be running away with the game, due to a starting bonus that kept him in carriage and bishop tokens and provided a stream of money. JR, Jesse, and I all felt stymied at multiple points. In the end, Ken did win, but by a margin of only four points. The rest of us were one point apart. I took third place, which frankly surprised me, because I had thought I was much farther behind.
All in all, a low-key game night, with one good and one great game.
I’m going to try something that I hope will pan out: regular blogging. I’m setting a schedule that ideally will make me more likely to write more often.
Sunday: Current Events – news, politics, issues of the day
Monday: Science and Technology – gee-whiz exciting stuff
Tuesday: (Off)
Wednesday: Tuesday Game Night Recap – who attended, what games were played, occasional victory laps
Thursday: Culture, Pop & Otherwise – movies, video games, comics, books, possible spoilers
Friday: Music Discovery – back to my “Friday Finds,” new bands or old favorites
Saturday: (Off)
I will be alternating Sunday one week with Monday the next; Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I hope to do weekly. I’m not going to make myself crazy trying to stay on schedule, but I’m hoping this approach will lead to a steady stream of my brain thinkings flowing into the Internets. Because who doesn’t want that?
Someone's Got To Say It 