I went to Dice Tower West last week to hang out with friends (mostly from Southern California) and play board games. I had a great time! Vegas is super weird, though. Kind of wish the con had been somewhere else.

Some games I played:

Planet Unknown

Competitive solitaire game.  A little bit tetris, a little bit worker placement.  The placement part is on your own board; I like my games to be less solitaire.

I’d play it again, but I would not reach for it.  

Foundations of Rome

Crazy overproduced map placement game.  Beautiful 3d pieces.  Very straight forward to learn, harder to figure out how to score well.  

I’d play it again.

Cthulhu: Death May Die

This was my favorite game of the con.  It’s a pretty standard Cthulhu co-op adventure game – you play one of about a dozen characters trying to stop the bad guys from doing the bad thing and battling cthuloid minions and monsters along the way.  You lose sanity while doing so – which makes you more powerful right up until it kills you.  I think there were 2 boss options and about 10 scenarios to choose from and you shuffle the cards for each along with the base set.  The writing is fabulous, it’s easy to dive in – trivial if one person has played before.  A really solid game.  From what folks said, winning is pretty rare, but we won our first game; got smashed our second game.  Part of it came down to character and [random] insanity pick for the characters – which happened to work well for the first game and against us for the second.

I’d buy a copy, except: seems out of print and Ellyn has a real aversion to co-op games where screwing up screws the team – and this is an ‘often lose’ game.

Heat: Pedal to the Metal

Deck based racing game.  Fairly simple mechanics – including some solid last place catch up.  Easy game to learn.  There is just a little bit of random in the draw of cards – but the deck is pretty small so it feels pretty strategic.

I would totally play this again – which is a little odd because I don’t generally go for racing games.  

The Guild of Merchant Explorers

Competitive solitaire map exploration game.  A little bit of deck builder mechanic.  I just didn’t find it at all compelling.

I’d play it again.  Meh.

Century: Golem Edition

This is Century: Spice Road re-themed. And it feels way cleaner and less grey. Collect cards, build your engine and create Golems. Spice Road always seemed totally bland. This game has jelly bean gems! There is something to flavor.

I would totally play this again.

Cat in the Box

An interesting trick taking card game.  There is a board where each played card played (color & number) is tracked – but the cards are all black.  You declare what color the card is when you play it, and each player declares when they are out of a suit – either so they can play trump (red) or because all the numbers left in their hand have already been played in the led color.  It’s a simple game that I suspect has a whole lot of depth.  Quick game; easy to learn.  Probably really hard to master.

I would totally play this again – but I don’t think I’ll pick it up.

Wonderland’s War

This is a bag building area control battle game.  It’s very colorful and thematic and I just don’t care.  Every freaking piece has at least one modifier when placed/used.  We didn’t play the whole game – but we played enough to know that I did not care for it.

Won’t play that again.

Return to Dark Tower

Co-op adventure game (with competitive option) with a mechanical tower that’s linked to a phone/tablet app via bluetooth.  There are 3ish types of actions you can take to help defeat the big baddie in the tower.  This is a game that you’re not going to win the first time through because you have no idea what you’re going to be facing.  I tried to take on one of the beasties and got crushed because it did about 5 times the damage any of us were expecting.  

I would absolutely play this again – but ideally with someone who had played it before so that we would not get totally blindsided.

Pipeline

Worker placement competitive solitaire.  The goal?  Make as much money as you can by buying crude oil, processing it into something more useful, and selling it.  In this day and age, who makes a game like that!?  We just played enough of this to get some feel for the mechanics – then off to lunch.  We didn’t get deep into the mechanics, so I’m not super certain how good they are.

Yeah, I’d play it again.  But I really wish the mechanics were built on a game about another subject.

Earth

Competitive solitaire engine builder.  Often compared to Wingspan – and for pretty clear reasons.  You draw cards that you place to build of an engine; they have various powers.  Bottom line – I prefer Wingspan.  Earth felt too complicated.  Ain’t that the truth!

Meh.  I’d play it again.

Dwellings of Eldervale

Area control/unit placement/battle game.  Pretty crunchy euro game.  Played a much shortened version of this at a demo booth.  Not super complicated – though the guy explaining it kinda made it feel like it was.  I think it probably takes 1-2 full play throughs to really get the hang of the details.  I’m just not sure there’s enough fun to justify it.

Yeah, I’d probably play it again – ideally with at least one person who’d already played.

Scout

This is like a combination of Gin Rummy and The Great Dalmuti.  Quick game, easy to teach, fun to play.

I wish we’d played this before the last day because I’d totally play this again.  In fact, I may pick up a copy.

I play Dungeons & Dragons with friends on the internet. I know you’re shocked at how geeky I am. For those that are interested, we use Roll20 and we like it OK. We get together once or twice a week and have a silly fun time. I’ve been doing this off an on for about 4 years, now. Back in 2020 it was really great to have these regular social events.

Toward the middle of 2020 we formed a new group. And at the start of every single session we had audio problems. Someone was too quiet, someone was echoing; everyone knows how that is, now.

So for Christmas I decided to get everyone a headphone/mic combo. Because that solve the problems – if you have headphones, you can hear everything and the mic mostly picks up just what you’re saying. Certainly it doesn’t loop what other folks are saying. And I decided to give them out secretly. Each pair was addressed to the character in game, so folks had some idea. I had most everyone’s address – except one person – whose address I got from another player.

Everyone got theirs except that one person. Then I received a delivery confirmation message *with a picture* of the box on the porch. Still nothing. So I asked the player if that was his address and if those shoes (that were on the porch in the picture) were his. Nope – he had not lived there for nearly a decade. He now lived about 2-3 miles away.

Who had the headphones? All I had was a delivery address in Texas. I tried a few reverse address lookups and they mostly agreed who the home belonged to – a woman with an unusual name. That’s lucky – unique/unusual names are usually pretty easy to look up on the internet. For example, there are about 3 “Kurt Werle”s on the internet.

This woman had an extremely low internet profile, however. The only reference to her that I could find was nearly a decade old – from a newspaper – and it was associated with a gym. I looked up the gym and it seemed to have changed hands. But I decided to give it a shot – so I sent email to the gym’s contact email address and asked if I could get in touch with this lady about a package I’d accidentally sent her.

The email was forwarded to her and she responded and asked what was in the box. Headphones. So I explained the whole thing and told her that if her household had any used for the headphones then they should go ahead and keep them as an early Christmas present – otherwise if they could get it to my friend, that’d be great.

It turns out her younger son was now using them for remote schooling and they were a big hit. So I bought another pair for the player that had moved.

And that’s how I bought a pair of headphones for some kid in Texas.

This past week I finished three things: the netflixable Stargate series, the Watchmen series (on disk), and listening to George Orwell’s 1984.

Stargate is almost entirely fluff. They throw in a slightly more interesting episode or arc every once in a while, and they will bump into some of the bigger questions, but not much. Mostly it’s save the team/world/child in 30-60 minutes. But there are almost guaranteed explosions, so it’s mildly entertaining. It’s also amusing to see how CGI/special effects improve from season to season.

Watchmen is something altogether different. At some point I learned the Greek myths. I guess that probably started in elementary school; gods, heroes and monsters. I certainly gained a deeper appreciation for them in college, reading some of the classic plays (thank you, Dr. Barker). Regular and supernatural people, visions of the future, events political, natural, and supernatural, and how the characters choose to deal with them; heroically, horribly, successes and failures. For me, Watchmen evoked those themes and characters. Ellyn was frustrated by a foretelling of future events that was not avoided. To me, it was a retelling of a story with the Fates and Furies.

Great acting, some really great shooting, and some amazing music/audio (thanks to Trent Reznor). I highly recommend it.

I read 1984 in high school. It might have actually been 1984. Recently, I was part of a class action suit against audible.com because of a jerky thing they did. We won, and as a result I was granted one audio book from a very large limited selection of things that I had absolutely no interest in. But I’ve been meaning to re-read 1984, and that happened to be on the list.

Several things struck me about the book: it’s amazing how anti-Soviet Union it feels. Not so much the USSR of 1948 as that of the 70’s and 80’s. He is really hung up on people’s physical appearance in the book. And I didn’t find it particularly good. But maybe that’s just me conflating good with enjoyable – ’cause enjoyable it ain’t.

It’s certainly an interesting book in what it gets right and what it gets wrong, though. There is so much thought and energy put into controlling the media – all media past and present. Eradicating any scrap of evidence that the party in power was ever wrong. That still seems like a ridiculous idea to me; there is print, there is uncontrolled media, there is memory. So it still feels like he got that wrong. More important than getting it wrong is that it seems to be so totally unnecessary.

What he got right is the terrifying idea: doublethink. That people will willingly believe what they are told and forget what they were told 15 minutes ago. That you can hold up four fingers and declare that they are 5, and people will believe you. There is some terrifyingly large portion of the population that doesn’t care what the record shows, what reality shows. The message is reality.

So, no, 1984 is not an enjoyable read. But if you have not read it, you really probably ought to.

Last night (Friday the 17th), we went out to see the comet. We decided to go ‘up the hill’ since it was foggy at the beach and it seemed likely the murk was going to flow into town. We chose a spot west of Santa Margarita Lake (a bit southeast from the marker on the map) because it is away from anything, pretty flat, and not many trees. We got there about 8:30 – about 15 minutes after sunset. We brought Ellyn’s binoculars and were able to spot the comet by around 9:10. It was about mid way between the big dipper and the horizon. By about 9:30 it was clearly visible to the naked eye – including the big tail. Continued to become more visible as the sky got darker. Great view of the milky way, and Jupiter happened to be at its brightest in the opposite direction. With the binoculars we could see several of Jupiter’s moons. If you can get to a dark sky place in the next few days/week, you should definitely go for it!

Other things:

Cupcakes for my birthday.

Carrots from the garden.

Ridiculously cute cats.