Pallas and I have had a standing date on Sunday afternoons to play games. In the before times we loved to go as a family on weekends to any of the great local boardgame cafes, like Tabletop or BoardNBrew. But playing at home is always fun too. Yesterday was Roll For The Galaxy, a game I've had for a few years but only played once. So I had to relearn it.

Learning a game is like jumping a hurdle- and once you are on the other side you know how to play. You get it. But there's a barrier before you can get there, and getting over that barrier can be easy or hard. The best way, I find, is to get a hand from  a friend who is already over the barrier. But friends are a limited resource in this pandemic so, the second best way is to.... well, that depends on the kind of nerd you are ;)

 I'm the kind of nerd who will download rulebooks from boardgamegeek to read for fun. I like figuring out games this way! A well-written rulebook is, maybe not a joy, but at least... I actually don't know how to finish this simile. They are not for everyone, I get it. That's why they have How-To-Play videos on YouTube. I developed the reading-rulebooks-habit when I was working at the mine where I didn't have access to YouTube.

Anyway, I would give Roll for the Galaxy's rulebook a failing grade. The game is great! Simple and engaging and lots of room for figuring out strategy and such. You should play it! Just don't read the rules, watch one of those videos.

"But Nathan, I am stuck on some kind of boat in the Suez Canal and we don't have YouTube! But there's a whole container or ten of boardgames here so we decided to bust out this one."

OK well, the rules start out with too much information and also not enough. A good, concise "This is what we're doing" paragraph- using dice and tiles to build a galactic civilization. But then it's "setup like this and this is how you play starting with roll your dice and then choose what phases you want  to do."  I simplify, but just to show how it is. I think I would have started it like this:

Same introduction. But the player board could use a detailed explanation right here. Just say, "Although dice are your workers and how you will accomplish your goals, this player board is how you will manage everything. We have two spots for tiles- one is a tech that you can DEVELOP, denoted by this diamond which has a corresponding Dice-face and game-phase, and a world you can SETTLE, which is a circle, again with corresponding Dice-face and game-phase. The numbers inside the icons show how many dice with these icons you need to buy these tiles to place in your tableau. We will explain that part later."

And explain the Citizenry and money track, and now you can go through the Round Structure.

That's how I would have done it, anyway. We muddled through a few rounds and then it clicked. We got over that hurdle! I even won. You might think it unseemly to boast about beating my young daughter but she really skunked me the night before in Voyages of Marco Polo. I have yet to beat her at that game. Speaking of, that rulebook is...

 Shoot- I missed International Puppy Day yesterday. I was unaware there was such a day, as I was unaware of so much when it came to dogs. I'm learning though. Here is a live shot of our puppy right now, but even if you are reading this a year from now, it is probably a pretty reliable indicator of what she is doing:

Last night she was frightened of the coyotes. Something had riled them up and they were howling, not even that close to our house, but she could hear them. I let her out and she stood on the deck in high-alert mode, but then quickly turned around and ran inside. Poor little puppy! I wound up sleeping on the couch so she wouldn't have to go back in her crate. Well, I tried putting her in the crate but she was too agitated to settle and would have barked all night maybe. Urg.

We have her in Puppy School right now, and that's helping a lot.  Obedience training or whatever you call it. Last week she was so tuckered out from it that she slept all night, giving me three whole uninterrupted sleeps last week! The streak has not continued this week but maybe tonight will be ok.

I stopped walking her to and from school with the girls, and that's made a big difference in my relationship with my daughters. Our walks to and from school have been so good for connecting and we had lost that with also having to deal with Ahsoka. And we need a reset to teach Ahsoka how to walk to heel, which is coming along with dedicated training walks. We are all learning! 

It's ok to not be ok sometimes, right? I'm sure I've seen that somewhere during this pandemic. Even with all that is going on in the world I sometimes feel like my life is this idyllic perfect thing, but also at the very same time I also think everything is just terrible. A little cognitive dissonance never hurt anyone, right? At least for me a decent night's sleep is still enough (I think) to reset the levels to the "happy" side of the dial.

During my mornings where I try hard to be a writer, to mixed success, I have been rereading some of the classic writing books, trying to glean inspiration and better my technique. The current book is Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. One of the writing prompts she suggests is to steal a line from  a poem and write it down, continuing from there. And for me, the single line that has really resonated for me (other than all of Gojira's lyrics lol) is the line that, though written by Roethke, really belongs, in my mind, to local writer and photographer Shawna Lemay, from this post. The line is "you are required to make something beautiful". So I wrote that down and then just continued and this is what I wrote, with the plagiarized line omitted :

You must tend to your soul like a garden

Lovingly, with tenderness, be the guardian

Against all that would exploit, consume, destroy

And that is not enough: you must encourage

growth with water and all the sunlight you can find

No one blames the garden for weeds or pests

It is the gardener who is responsible for the garden

Ah, but this metaphor breaks down when one points

out to the poet:

The gardener and the garden are the same, here

But are they, though? As the poet in question, I’ll say plainly:

I don’t fucking know but I wish that I did 

The metaphor holds up in another way, though, I think:

You won’t know what you have until the end of the growing season

 Quick update for the anthology I will have a story in, the Kickstarter is humming along nicely with still a couple of weeks to go. I think this print run is limited to 250 copies, and as far as I know, no plans for a second printing. Maybe I will reprint the story in a far future edition of The Ursus Verses but it's such a specific story (the mashup of two fairy tales and a genre) that I'm not sure it will really work in a different context. In other words if you want to read it your best bet is to back the Kickstarter! Also you can order some of their back-catalogue, which has some really cool books. See the Air and Nothingness Press website for more on that.

And not for nothing, for there to be future volumes of The Ursus Verses, I need to make my money back on Volume 1 ;) Scroll down for how to purchase your own copy. I don't think I linked to a nice review Lyda Schoch gave me for the digital edition- I got a professionally designed logo for the print edition, which is the biggest difference.

Three Games

 My good friend lent me three games- brand new ones that were still shrinkwrapped- and we finally got around to playing all three. I don't want to review those games, but just talk about general impressions and insights I gleaned from playing them. I only played them once each, too, which is a pretty big caveat that if you want actual good reviews of these games you will not find them here!

Obsession has a pretty cool concept- think Pride and Prejudice or maybe Downton Abbey (neither of which i've read or watched lol). It's worker placement with deck building and tile laying, sort of,  I suppose. You have different coloured meeples who have specialized tasks they can do, and some colours can be substituted for others. You're trying to rebuild your estate and attract suitors and stuff. It's fine- I liked it. The rulebook was very thorough- including tons of info on Victorian society but I found it a little hard to parse as far as actually playing. Gameplay is simple enough once you figure it out, but each turn has many many steps, and those kinds of games are always harder to learn, I find.

Lost Ruins of Arnak got a lot of good buzz in the gaming community, and so I was very excited to try it. Very beautiful game, I really like the aesthetic. Nice components and art. Quite simple to play, and like Obsession it's a deck builder with worker placement- but no tile laying. I was surprised to find it was a family-weight game, I thought it might be a bit heavier. Having played Darwin's Journey first, maybe Arnak suffered a little in comparison. 

Beyond the Sun was a pleasant surprise- for Pallas and I both. Didn't know much about it, it was just the third game Kafir threw at me. Space theme, I like space. We decided to just watch a YouTubeo rather than wade through another rulebook. And once we got the flow of the game it was very easy to play. Super simple flow. Move your pawn, do the thing, then produce stuff, then check to see if you accomplished anything to help you win, now it's your turn! For that reason Pallas and I very quickly got immersed in the strategy and trying to plan moves when you don't have enough resources or people or argh! Wait! I can do this other thing but I need another turn to make it work...

I always say I like games where it feels like you're doing what you're doing, like it's a little microcosm. But to compare Arnak and Beyond the Sun, kind of puts the lie to that, or at least there's more to it than just that for me. Beyond the Sun has very little art- almost as though the designer (A very nice man named Dennis K. Chan) handed in his prototype and the publisher was like perfect, print it! (Usually game designers are discouraged from adding any art or anything as the publisher will do all that with their vast resources.) Don't get me wrong - the components are very nice, little dice and recessed player boards and all that. The theme of the game is all about unlocking new technologies to help you get out to the wider galaxy faster than anyone else. It's all done with iconography. And I found it didn't matter- we were having so much fun working out the puzzle of how to make the most out of our very quick turns. And we made our own terms that added some unintended immersion- you can trade in a "person" to make "ore" so we were very quickly saying "I squish this dude into coal" and that was pretty fun. Sorry Dennis!

Arnak, with all the great art and world-building, the turns never felt all that challenging. Like it was just a touch too easy to do whatever it is you wanted to do. Fight that monster? Here are the cards I need, yay! Now I will go up the research track, that was easy! Etc etc. I kind of wonder if maybe we were playing it wrong- always a possibility with me. 

So yeah, out of the three of these games, Beyond the Sun is the one I most want to play again.

Kickstarter Day

It's Tuesday and that means Kickstarter day- I don't really know why that is the case, but it is. Excited to actually be mentioned in a Kickstarter- as a featured writer in this anthology! I had a lot of fun writing the story that will appear in it. The call was to take two fairy tales and mash them together, using a genre of our choice. I'm not sure actually if I can say much more than that, yet. A little mystery is good, right?

Another one that went live today, from a Twitter mutual and all around great guy, Connor Alexander, is Coyote And Crow, an RPG set in a North America that was never colonized. Already funded!