Janurary recap: silly but it's fun

by Sean Franco

The new year has begun, and with it the hopes and dreams of those like me who want to see the world return to normal. I'm really itching for public meetups again, which requires a safer situation. I've signed up to be put on a list for a vaccine, which is very different from actually being in line for one. My wife is actually in line for one, but it's unclear when her number will come up. But still, at least there's progress on those lines. That doesn't mean that I'm guaranteed to any conventions this year. Even my usual annual, Geekway to the West, won't be quite normal, opting for three days in the middle of an October Week rather than four days during a May weekend. Their reasoning makes complete sense, but it's hard to see a situation where I'll attend this year. Hopefully, I'll be back there in 2022. But enough about what isn't happening; let's do the numbers.

New-to-me Games


Legacy of Dragonholt
I got this a few months ago, but have finally have had a chance to play it. My wife was interested in the idea of the game (in the past, she's been fond of Tales of the Arabian Nights), so we decided to do it together. I have a bit of a background in RPGs, but her experience starts and ends with a couple of sessions of Fiasco. This led to the character creation being a bit goofy. Her preferences don't lean towards writing up backstories and personality profiles, which I fully understand. Myself, I prefer for things to evolve naturally from gameplay and role-playing rather than front-loading the creativity. But we got our characters made, an orc for me and a gnome for her.

We've gotten two actual encounters done: the mandatory first one ("To New Roads") and one of the encounters in the village. Overall, I'm a big fan of the system. It's clean, with usually interesting choices that sometimes check some character skills. I also like how time and story points are used to track what has been going on, making different encounters or events behave differently depending on the actual circumstances. I've written before about how I like games that feel like they have a functional ecosystem, like Magic Realm or Urban Sprawl, games that keep running and doing things even without player input. Legacy of Dragonholt feels like that kind of game already, which is doubly impressive considering how the nature of the game is to be highly scripted.

I've played games with similar mechanics in the past, like the Lone Wolf series or Barbarian Prince/Doctor Who: Solitaire Story Game, but this includes more tactile elements as well, like an escape room almost. We've already failed to decode something from the first prop we got, but when we got an NPC's journal, we stopped playing to pour over its pages and try to figure out if there were clues and details that we needed to follow up on. ("Too much about horses," my wife said.) The village map itself is really nice, easy to use and an attractive prop in its own right. I'm waiting to see how the other quest books tie in, but I'm sure that will just take more exploring of the village to trigger one of those. Expect more reporting on this game.
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Haiclue
It had been a few months since I had gone to an online meetup with my old STL group, largely due to weekend scheduling being hectic around the holidays and my old job. But I made a return this past weekend for a couple hours, only enough time to knock out a few light games, starting with this word/party game. It was very much like a more competitive Dixit, where you want a group of people to guess from a selection based on an arcane clue, but you both lack the freedom and building the clue and want as many people as possible to get it right. You are randomly assigned one of four randomly chosen words, then given fifteen different random words. With these fifteen, you need to use at least two to build one or more phrases to indicate your given word. You are given the ability to arrange the words spatially to help point to things, if you think that helps. Being limited in what words you can use is a bit tricky. I was given the word "capture," for which I built the clue "start defeat." I thought it was a great clue, but only a third of the other players chose "capture" for my clue, the rest choosing "sport." I guess "sport" and "defeat" are inseparable to some. Still, a nice light filler that I would play again. BGA has a nice implementation.
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Dinosaur Tea Party
Deduction games have always been something I'm willing to look at, so I suggested this title. The art and presentation are great, and the deduction is quite good. I especially like the three problematic dinosaurs, like the one who always lies or the one who always says "no." Definitely down to play again. I'd like to see this game in person, as I imagine the production would set the formal silliness off even more. The BGA implementation was functionally fine, although it was difficult to read the board on my laptop screen.
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Online Games


Coloretto
With my time limited, I rounded off my meetup with a quick game of Coloretto. This is a game that continues to rise in my estimation. I really think it should replace Uno or Phase 10 as the card game that people who don't play games keep around the house. It's simple, attractive, and clever. More to the point, it's accessible in ways that we often claim certain board games are but still aren't. I think the graphics on BGA are a bit goofy and small, but it's still very playable there.
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Acquisitions


Cosmic Frog
We got some Christmas mad money, so I decided to pick up a couple games. The first was Jim Felli's trippy inter-dimensional brawler. The production is stunning, from the rolled board to the brilliant card art to even the font on the dice. I'm incredibly excited to play this; it will definitely be in my bag for the first public meetup I attend when things open.


Power Grid: The Stock Companies
The second game I picked up was this Power Grid expansion. This fills a couple roles for me. First, my storage solution for all of my expansion maps was getting out of control, so the second box was a boon. Second, I'm just always intrigued by what Friedemann Friese does with his games, with both new designs and wacky expansions. Just look at Power Grid: Fabled Expansion, which created a campaign out of Power Grid; this was a huge hit for us. I'm highly interested in how turning one of my favorite Euros into an 18XX stock game will work out.

Movies

Not many movies this month, since I picked up the full series of The Good Life from the library. This is a show I grew up with and wanted to share with my wife. She loved it, from the premise of self-sufficiency to wonderful relationship between Tom and Barbara. I'm personally finding Paul Eddington to be the funniest part of the show this time through. I also understand some of the modern critiques of the show, with some minor politically incorrect bits that were more accepted in the seventies. It's also hard to escape the critique offered by The Young Ones: "They're nothing but a couple of reactionary stereotypes, confirming the myth that everyone in Britain is a lovable middle-class eccentric." I still can't help by love the show. I also think it has one of the best Christmas episodes in television.

A Place in the Sun(new-to-me): I mostly enjoyed this. I think this is the only film I've seen with Montgomery Clift, but he was very good. I don't know why, but I'm fond of movies that start as character pieces but end up as brutal crime stories. That's what made the ending slightly disappointing to me. Maybe in 1951, it would still have been uncouth to allow a criminal to have a successful getaway and coverup. In contrast, I was thinking about a movie with many similarities, Match Point. It's the same story about climbing social classes leading to murdering the more plebeian girlfriend, but the ending it much more thought out. I liked Elizabeth Taylor in this; I was especially impressed with how she stuck with George all the way through the end.

Books

I'm continuing The Expanse. Babylon’s Ashes was a weird book, for several reasons. First, it carried on directly from Nemesis Games rather than standing alone to the same extent that previous volumes had. This meant that the antagonist set up last book to last out the series came back with a bang... but was also far less impressive this time around, and also won’t actually be around for the rest of the series anymore.

Second, Babylon’s Ashes discarded the effective practice of the previous books of limiting the number of POV characters. Book 1 had two such characters, and books 2 through 5 had four. Book 6 overwhelms with a solid dozen, several only getting only one dedicated chapter. I’m not sure what was gained by this creative pivot, and I hope it doesn’t stick; a glut of POV characters is what helped kill any enjoyment of Wheel of Time for me.

Finally (but minorly), it was strange to see so many scenes of dialogue written out in the patois of the asteroid belt with no accompanying translation or explanations. There had been a smattering of this pidgin in all the previous books, but mostly used only incidentally. Not a terrible read, despite my critiques, but still some bizarre choices in the writing.

I also read all of The Boys from Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, the first I knew from Preacher and the second from Transmetropolitan. This was broadly a good series. It was obviously a send-up of established comics; hero and team counterparts are easily identifiable in basically every super character and individual storyline. There was a lot of sex and violence, which I expect from Ennis, but also a lot more of each than in most comics I've read. There was also regular and substantial rape and assault, which seemed excessive pretty quickly. These elements aside, the story was pretty satisfying. It's essentially the story of superheroes versus bad guys, except the superheroes are terrible people and the bad guys have a slight moral high ground. These bad guys are the Boys, and very specifically Billy Butcher. The Homelander is a tremendously evil character, whose despicableness is heightened by the twist circumstances concerning his background and actions; I thought that bit was both surprising and worth the build-up. The ending of the series seems inevitable now that I've had a few days to digest it, but not as clean and original as Preacher. Pretty happy to be able to enter the conversation about it.

Podcasts

I listened to a ton of pods this month. Lots to get into here; here's the best of what I heard.

First, the 2020 Game of the Year episode of Shut Up & Sit Down was great, partially because they had so many problems picking 2020 games (or even board games), but mostly because Matt Lees's speech about why 2020 was such a problematic time for playing and reviewing games struck an incredibly close chord with me.

True Anon did a couple of great pods. First up is a leftover from last year (I was kinda behind on my queue at the start of the month) where they dive into the truth behind Christmas myths like elves and yeti. Next is a great interview they did with scholar Norman Finkelstein; his discussions of Maoism and ideology are enlightening.

Bad Faith had three standouts. First was a look at Star Trek and whether or not it is an entry point into leftism, a conversation heightened by one of the hosts having basically no experience with the show. Second was a discussion of populism and its history as a leftist movement, a conversation heightened by the fact that as this episode was being recorded, the events at the US Capitol on 6 January were occurring. Finally, they had a great interview with Richard D. Wolff, professor and economist, starting with feudalism, slavery, and capitalism, then examining where we've gone from there.

Finally, America Interrupted from the PBS Newshour did an episode talking to their reporters who were on location during the events at the US Capitol on 6 January. This was the coverage that my wife and I were watching live, so hearing their reflections on the events and their reporting was fascinating.

See you space cowboy...