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Four more capsule board game reviews

I’m starting to run out of space in my board-game bookcase. And I’ve just ordered a new game to boot. I think I’ll have to bite the bullet and get rid of the ones that aren’t getting any play, and aren’t going to get any in the future either…

This week, a bunch of games that come in small boxes and all by the famous Reiner Knizia:

Loot

A filler that sees players manipulate hands of merchant and pirate ships. The pirate ships can be deployed to attack merchants that others may have played. If one’s attacking ships can last a full round in top position against a ship, they win the merchant ship (each is worth a different amount). There are two incentives to play merchants out of one’s hand: if everyone else is distracted by other battles and the merchant is not attacked for a round, it makes it back, and is points for the player who started it out. Additionally, unplayed merchants count against you at the end of the game. This is a fantastic mechanic, and the game plays well, particularly in the teams variant.

Lost Cities

A two player “competitive solitaire”, where play consists of discards and or playing cards to attending sequences of five different suits. Again, a great mechanic, and one with some real heft to it. Chris Farrell discussed it nicely in his Illuminating Games blog.

Medici vs. Strozzi

This is another two-player game. I’ve only played it once, and had to agree with my counter-party that it was very dry. It’s probably a candidate for the “making space” project. The game requires constant valuation of loads of goods that have to be put onto ships, and the setup which ensures that different loads will be worth different amounts to different players is clever. If you want a calculation-heavy game, and have an opponent who wants the same, this is probably the game for you both.

Modern Art

I suppose this is the heaviest of the four games this week. I think it’s fair to say that it’s widely acknowledged as a classic. The theme is appealing: each player is attempting to convince the others that particular artists (and thus their paintings) are a great investment, and then selling them off in auctions. Sometimes, it will even be the case that the paintings will be worth good money. And so, there are two routes to wealth (and thus victory): by buying paintings that do turn out to be valuable, or simply by selling paintings at the right moment.

This is not economic like Container, but it’s definitely about accurate valuation. The thing that lifts it so definitely above Medici vs Strozzi is that there are more people involved, the values are not so certain, and there’s an obvious development to the game across its three phases. This is definitely a great game.

This and That

iTerm2: Having had a number of spinning beach-balls of death occurrences on my macbook lately, I started to worry that I had a dying disk, and that the machine (or at least the disk) was going to need replacing.

But now I'm beginning to suspect that the terminal program iTerm2 is the cause. If this was running when the laptop went to sleep, I’d often find that I had a seriously unresponsive, beach-ball filled machine on waking it up.

I’m going to try running without it for a while, and see if the hangs go away. (I’d earlier suspected Firefox of being the culprit, and its Master Password+ add-on in particular, but I’ll soon try reenabling the latter.)

Upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04: This version of Ubuntu still has a particularly ancient (=2009) version of its TeX distribution. If I replace it with a more recent version manually, then I have to then install my own copy of the emacs AucTeX mode because Ubuntu’s package management sees its own TeX package as a prerequisite for AucTeX. Grrr.

Another minor problem is that the cursor mask used in my xpause program doesn’t seem to work properly anymore: when I get the big “Stop” appearing as my cursor, the containing rectangle’s background is all messed up. Given that I’m supposed to be stopped at this point, not doing anything with the mouse, and generally having an RSI-preventing break, I don’t suppose this is such a big deal.

Still, perhaps I can find a replacement for xpause. It’s a TCL/Tk program written by Jules Anderson in 1993 or 1994. I may well be the only person on the planet still using it. I’m sure others will have tried to scratch this itch before.

I will soon upgrade to 11.10 I think, but before doing that, I may get a new desktop machine entirely. The current one has too little memory, and a disk that is getting a bit close to full (across all its various partitions).

Firefox: Oh yeah, I also have to look into Firefox synchronisation options. My current solution is SyncPlaces + Dropbox, but this seems to break browser restart.

Shows for girls

Having had my daughter recently become a fan of Octonauts, I’m a bit depressed at the terrible low profile the female characters get. In the episode we just watched earlier, a female briefly gets to start everything off, only to be swallowed by a whale shark and then need rescuing by the active male characters. Another of the female characters seems to have responsibility for the engineering, but is very much a bit part.

My daughter is also keen on the program Busytown Mysteries, with two male principals (Huckle and Lowly Worm) and one relegated female (sister Sally). Gack.

There’s an obvious contender show, that being Dora the Explorer, but this hasn’t been as successful, and really rubs the parents the wrong way too. The whole program seems to consist of the voice for Dora yelling in an extremely unappealing way. The character is not yelling, but her voicing is, and this is really grating.

Given how gender-identity seems to be a big part of being a three-almost-four year old, I don’t want her diet to so relentlessly treat females as marginal. While I can definitely recommend Olivia and Charlie and Lola, these are also totally domestic shows. If she is to see drama and adventure, the options seem to be yelling Dora, or shows where the girls are after-thoughts.

Scala is Wonderful, But

Despite being another of those worrying single-implementation languages (see also: Perl, OCaml and Haskell), Scala may just be a language I could use instead of SML. It certainly has a number of advantages compared to SML. Firstly, and most importantly, it still seems to be under development, and has thereby managed to attract a community of keen users. (In the SML world, only Poly/ML seems to get any development love.)

It also supposedly gets to leverage the big wide world of Java code, which is pretty appealing. I haven’t confirmed that this is actually possible without undue pain, but being able to link against arbitrary other bits of Java would be pretty awesome. After all, there’s a heck of a lot of Java out there (some of which is presumably useful).

Of course, compiling to the JVM means that you get reasonable portability “for free”, but I think it’s more important that it also gives you consistent access to proper concurrency on multi-processor systems.

(I don’t want to suggest other options might not be awesome too. In particular, Haskell is clearly pretty amazing and my limited experience of writing xmonad configuration files has helped me remain impressed by it.)

Scala’s biggest disadvantage seems to be the build system. That whole Java eco-system is a mysterious world to me, but it seems to have thrown away the simplicity of make and replaced it with the horror of sbt (itself built on top of something called maven apparently). I can build stuff with sbt: I type sbt compile and errors get reported, but I dislike having the system be such a black box. I know how make works, and knowing how it works means I can build a good mental model of what is happening when I invoke it. With sbt I might as well be praying to an inscrutable deity.

Perhaps I just have to invest the time in learning its intricacies.