Revisiting the travel chess computer

Computers are interesting things. When we think of computers, we tend to think of general-purpose computers – our laptops, smartphones, servers and mainframes, things that run a vast array of programs composed of hundreds of thousands of instructions spanning a multitude of chips. When I was younger, general-purpose computers were more-or-less hobbyist items for home users. Single-purpose computers still exist everywhere, but there was certainly a time when having a relatively cheap, often relatively small computing device for a specific task was either preferable to doing that task on a general-purpose computer, or perhaps the only way to do it. Something like a simple four-function calculator was a far more commonplace device before our phones became more than just phones.

Chess poses an interesting problem here. By modern standards, it doesn’t take much to make a decently-performing chess computer. The computer I’ll be discussing later in this post, the Saitek Kasparov Travel Champion 21001 runs on a 10MHz processor with 1KB of RAM and 32KB of program ROM (including a large opening library). It plays at a respectable ~2000 ELO2. This was released in 1994, a time when the general-purpose computer was becoming more of a household item. The Pentium had just been released; a Micron desktop PC with a 90MHz Pentium and 8MB of RAM was selling for $2,499 (the equivalent of $4,988 in 2022, adjusting for inflation)3. 486s were still available; a less-capable but still well-kitted-out 33MHz 486 with 4MB of RAM went for $1,399 ($2,797 in 2020 dollars). Chessmaster 4000 Turbo would run on one of these 486s, albeit without making the recommended specs. It cost $59.95 ($119.85 in 2020 dollars)4, and while it’s hard to get a sense of the ELO it performed at, players today still seem to find value in all of the old Chessmaster games; they may not play at an advanced club level, but they were decent engines considering they were marketed to the general public. A more enthusiast-level software package, Fritz 3, was selling for 149 DEM5, which I can’t really translate to 2020 USD, but suffice it to say… it wasn’t cheap. Fritz 3 advertised a 2800 ELO6; a tester at the time estimated it around 2440 ELO. Interestingly, when that tester turned Turbo off, reducing their machine from a 50MHz 486 to 4.77MHz, ELO only dropped by about 100 points.

All of this is to say that capable chess engines don’t need a ton of processing power. At a time when general-purpose computers weren’t ubiquitous in the home, a low-spec dedicated chess computer made a lot of sense. The earliest dedicated home chess computers resembled calculators, lacking boards and only giving moves via an LED display, accepting them via button presses. Following this were sensory boards, accepting moves via pressure sensors under the spaces. These were available in full-sized boards as well as travel boards, the latter of which used small pegged pieces on proportionally small boards with (typically clamshell) lids for travel.

In 2022, we all have incredibly powerful computers on our desks, in our laps, and in our purses. Stockfish 15, one of the most powerful engines available, is free open source software. Chess.com is an incredible resource even at the free level, powered by the commercially-available Komodo engine. Full-size electronic boards still exist, which can interface with PCs or dedicated chess computers. Some of these products are pretty neat – DGT makes boards that recognize every piece and Raspberry Pi-based computers built into chess clocks. There is an undying joy in being able to play an AI (or an online opponent) on a real, physical, full-sized board.

The market for portable chess computers has pretty much dried up, however. Pegboard travel sets eventually gave way to LCD handhelds with resistive touchscreens and rather janky segment-based piece indicators. These were more compact than the pegboards, and they required less fiddling7 and setup. The advent of the smartphone, however, really made these into relics; a good engine on even the lowest-end modern phone is just a better experience in every single way. On iOS, tChess powered by the Stobor engine is a great app at the free level, and its pro features are well-worth the $8 asking price. The aforementioned chess.com app is excellent as well.

When I was quite young, I improved my chess skills by playing on a 1985 Novag Piccolo that my parents got me at a local flea market. I loved this pegboard-based computer – the sensory board which indicated moves via rank-and-file LEDs, the minimalist set of button inputs, even the company’s logo. It was just a cool device. It is, of course, a pretty weak machine. Miniaturization and low-power chips just weren’t at the state that they are now, and travel boards suffered significantly compared to their full-sized contemporaries. The Piccolo has been user rated around 900 ELO, it doesn’t know things like threefold repetition, and lacks opening books.

I’ve been trying to get back into chess, and I decided that I wanted a pegboard chess computer. Even though the feeling pales in comparison to a full-sized board, I don’t have a ton of space, I tend to operate out of my bed, and I have that nostalgic itch for something resembling my childhood Novag. Unfortunately, things didn’t improve much beyond the capabilities of said Novag during the pegboard era. I would still love to find one of the few decent pegboard Novags – the Amber or Amigo would be nice finds. But I ended up getting a good deal on a computer I had done some research on, the aforementioned Saitek Kasparov Travel Champion 2100 (from hereon simply referred to as the 2100).

I knew the 2100 was a decent little computer with a near-2000 ELO8 and a 6000 half-move opening library. I liked that it offered both a rank-and-file LED readout and a coordinate readout on its seven-segment LCD. Knowing that these pegboard computers struggled to achieve parity with their full-sized counterparts, I was pretty surprised to find some above-and-beyond features that I was familiar with from PC chess engines. The LCD can show a wealth of information, including a continuous readout of what the computer thinks the best move is. A coaching mode is present, where the computer will warn you when pieces are under attack and notify you if it believes you’ve made a blunder. A random mode is present, choosing the computer’s moves randomly from its top handful of best options instead of always choosing what it believes is the best of the best. You can select from themed opening books or disable the opening library entirely. These are all neat features that I really wasn’t expecting from a pegboard computer9.

I can see why the 2100 tends to command a high price on the secondary market – if you want a traditional pegboard chess computer, it seems like a hard one to beat. I’m certainly intrigued by some of the modern solutions – the roll-up Square Off PRO looks incredibly clever10. But for a compact yet tactile solution that I can tune down to my current skill level or allow to absolutely blast me, the 2100 checks a lot of unexpected boxes. As I mentioned, these travel units died out for good reason; I can play a quick game on chess.com against Komodo and get an incredibly detailed, plain-language analysis afterword that highlights key moments and lets me play out various ‘what if?’ scenarios. I do this nearly every day as of late. Purchasing a nearly-three-decade-old chess computer may have been a silly move. But it’s a different experience compared to poking at at an app on my phone. It’s tactile, it’s uncluttered. It’s scaled down, but there’s still something about just staring at a board and moving pieces around. I still use my phone more, but the 2100 offers something different, and it offers that alongside a decent engine with a flexible interface11. Maybe one of these days someone will come out with a travel eboard, but I doubt it. Solutions like the Square Off PRO are likely the direction portable chess computers are headed. This is fine, it’s a niche market. I’m just glad a handful of decent models were produced during the pegboard era, and I’m happy to have acquired the Saitek Kasparov Travel Champion 2100.


On Wordle and Fragmentation

So, the New York Times bought the word game phenomenon Wordle1 for ‘low seven figures,’ or expressed in more human terms, ‘upward of a million dollars.’ I’m happy that Josh Wardle got his bag, though I despise the NYT for things like rampant copaganda, warmongering, transphobic editorial practices, and puzzlingly enough, boot-licking anti-labor covid jokes. It seems logical that Wordle will eventually get wrapped in with the other games that they NYT bundles alongside its crossword section, itself mired in controversy.

Experiencing Tetris Effect

In 1984, Alexei Pajitnov wrote Tetris for the Elektronika 60 computer. This was not a home computer by any stretch of the imagination; it was a Soviet interpretation of a DEC LSI-11, itself a shrunk-down version of the PDP-11. It had no display capabilities of its own, and this initial release of Tetris had to be played on a text-mode terminal that communicated with the computer. Pajitnov, working at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, was tasked with demonstrating the limits and capabilities of the equipment being developed.

Artwork of the Channel F (external)

Just a fun little link post. Title link goes to a lengthy and well-illustrated post by Kate Willaert highlighting the design of Fairchild Channel F game cartridges, manuals, and boxes. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately discussing the specific aesthetics of various consoles, and why they gravitated toward those aesthetics. The Channel F is one of those systems that I know all about the history of, but have somehow never actually experienced in person. So, I never really had it in my mind to mull over its aesthetic, but it is a trip. Of course, much like the later VCS, this was a time when video game graphics were… y’know, dots. So box and cartridge art tended to just go buck-wild.

Anyway, the Channel F had a colorful and cohesive aesthetic to its game art, and Willaert does a bang-up job of walking us through it. Apparently this is the third in a series she’s doing, with the Magnavox Odyssey and those games you’d type in from magazines and such being the first and second entries, respectively. Good stuff.


Super Mario Bros. 35

I go on a tangent toward the end of this post about my fear regarding preservation when Switch Online inevitably shutters. However, since posting this, I have learned that SMB35 was planned to be shut down at the end of March 2021. This is absurd, and likely warrants its own post, but it’s worth mentioning that my fears are not only warranted but grossly underestimated.
Super Mario World was likely the first smooth-scrolling platformer that I ever played, albeit briefly at a family friend’s house. Later, PC games like Jill of the Jungle and Jazz Jackrabbit were the first of the genre that I owned and played heavily. It wasn’t until a bit later in life that I got an NES and fell in love with… well, a ton of games for the system, but most relevantly the first and third Super Mario Bros.

Don't turn off the lights

Sigh, so, I feel like every post from the past few months has contained some version of this statement, but… I’ve started writing a number of things lately, and just haven’t had the motivation or whatever to finish them. Some are daunting longer-format pieces that require research and/or illustration, others are smaller filler bits that just don’t ultimately seem worth following through with. I’m handling things pretty well during this pandemic, but… being creative and seeing even the smallest projects through to completion… it’s tough right now.

I bought another four-function calculator

Something I find rather amusing is that despite my owning… a lot of classic HP calculators1, this here blog only has posts about one old Sinclair calculator (which is, at least, a postfix machine) and one modern four-function, single-step Casio calculator (that somehow costs $300). And, as of today… yet another modern Casio calculator. I actually do want to write something about the HPs at some point, but… they’re well-known and well-loved. I’m excited about this Casio because it’s a weird throwback (that, like the S100, I had to import), and because it intersects two of my collector focuses: calculators and retro video games.

The mid-1970s brought mass production of several LCD technologies, which meant that pocket LCD calculators (and even early handheld video game consoles were a readily obtainable thing by the early 1980s. Handheld video games were in their infancy, and seeking inspiration from calculators seemed to be a running theme. Mattel’s Auto Race came to fruition out of a desire to reuse readily-available calculator-sized LED technology in the 1970s; Gunpei Yokoi was supposedly inspired to merge games with watches (in, of course, the Game & Watch series) after watching someone fiddle idly with a calculator. Casio took a pretty direct approach with this, releasing a series of calculators with games built in. Later games had screens with both normal calculator readouts and custom-shaped electrodes to present primitive graphics (like the Game & Watch units, or all those old terrible Tiger handhelds), some of which were rather large for renditions of games like Pachinko. The first, however, was essentially a bog-standard calculator as far as hardware was concerned2: regular 8-digit 7-segment display, regular keypad. I suspect this was largely to test the reception of the format before committing to anything larger; aside from the keypad graphics, the addition of the speaker, and the ROM mask… it looks like everything could’ve been lifted off of the production line for any number of their calculators: the LC-310 and LC-827 have identical layouts.

This was the MG-880, and it was clearly enough of a hit to demonstrate the viability of pocket calculators with dedicated game modes. The game itself is simple. Numbers come in from the right side of the screen in a line. The player is also represented by a number, which they increment by pressing the decimal separator/aim key. When the player presses the plus/fire key, the closest matching digit is destroyed. These enemy numbers come in ever-faster waves, and once they collide with you, it’s game over. Liquid Crystal has more information on the MG-880 here.

So that’s all very interesting (if you’re the same type of nerd I am), but I mentioned I was going to be talking about a modern Casio calculator in this post. About three years ago, Casio decided to essentially rerelease (remaster?) the MG-880 in a modern case; this is the SL-880. I haven’t owned an MG-880 before, so I can’t say that the game is perfectly recreated down to timing and randomization and what-have-you, but based on what I’ve read/seen of the original, it’s as faithful a recreation as one needs. In fact, while the calculator has been upgraded to ten digits, the game remains confined to the MG-880’s classic eight. Other upgrades to the calculator side of things include dual-power, backspace, negation, memory clear, tax rate functions (common on modern Japanese calculators) and square root3. You can also turn off the in-game beeping, which was not possible on the MG-880. The SL-880 is missing one thing from its predecessor, however: the melody mode. In addition to game mode, the speaker allowed for a melody mode where different keys simply mapped to different notes. The only disappointing thing about this omission is how charming it is seeing the solfège printed above the keys.

So was the SL-880 worth importing? Honestly, yes. The calculator itself feels impossibly light and a bit cheap, but it is… a calculator that isn’t the S100 in the year 2020. The game holds up better than I expected. It is, of course, still a game where you furiously mash two keys as numbers appear on a screen, but given the limitations? Casio made a pretty decent calculator game in 1980. More important to me, however, is where it sits in video game history. One might say I should just seek out an original MG-880 for that purpose, and… perhaps I will, some day4. But I think there’s something special about Casio deciding to release a throwback edition of such an interesting moment in video game history. And while the MG-880 was a success, it certainly isn’t as much of a pop culture icon as, say, the NES. This relative obscurity is likely why I find this much more charming than rereleases like the NES Classic Edition. It feels like Casio largely made it not to appeal to collectors, but to commemorate their own history.


Monster Care Squad

Monster Care Squad funded! Late pledges can still be made on the Kickstarter page.

I started writing this post late May. Well before the Kickstarter started. I wrote a lot; I hated it all, it all felt like I was parroting some bullshit press releases. I wouldn’t care, except… I read an extremely early copy of the rules, and I was so excited to write about it. But, I mean, the world… sucks right now. I’m horribly depressed and unmotivated. I’m floating between highs and lows, but… nothing is great. I’m doing lots of retail therapy; collecting films I meant to watch, filling up gaps in my manga collection, I bought the dang perfect scale replica of the Ohmu from Nausicaä. Shit is hard. And I’m glad in these times, folks are creating… happy things.

See, Monster Care Squad is a TTRPG from my pals at Sandy Pug Games that… is exceedingly gentle. My initial take in May was that it was fantasy James Herriot; I know I’m not alone in making this connection. You roam its world, Ald-Amura, fixing up monsters who have been afflicted by a poison: the False Gold. Somewhat uniquely, monsters in this world are… well, they coexist with humans, they’re… not villified. And accordingly, you play a roaming monster veterinarian who never encounters combat. That’s not the sort of game this is. You heal; healing is the end goal, the level-up trigger, the apex of the narrative arc. You may need to slap a monster around to get it to accept your anaesthetic, but… fighting is ancillary here. It is a gentle game, a healing game.

I think part of why I struggled to finish this post was that… there’s a lot of rules to dive into, and again… I fall into some trash PR writing very easily. I will say that a core dice mechanic is that of control, which shifts what dice you use based on how much you’ve succeeded or failed up until that point. It’s a neat system that makes my maths-brain dance. But honestly… all these bits are great, but they mean nothing without realizing how much heart is in the game. And, I have known this from the beginning, I know these people and I know that they care; I’ve read the initial text, and I know that it cares. But…

…here’s the thing. The Kickstarter is going very well. Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t back it; you should! But… the team is doing something amazing. They’ve set up a grants system for what amounts to fanfiction. They’re not claiming ownership over anything that comes of it; they’re essentially not setting any rules at all. They’re asking people to apply, submit community works, and potentially get paid under a patronage sort of system1. Creators potentially get paid to develop whatever the hell they want, and then… they keep the ownership. This is the sort of shit I’ve always been pushing for. This is the sort of shit that we all need to be doing when we get a wee bit of power, yet are still stuck in this capitalist hellscape. Fixing stuff on a large scale is… kind of hard to even fathom. But on a medium scale… Sandy Pug Games is doing something that feels unprecedented to me for a small games company. This is a big fucking deal.

I don’t know how to wrap this up. Monster Care Squad is… so exciting to me. I imagine it would be exciting to anyone who happens across this blog. More importantly, the creators are finding new ways to… be genuinely good. Which is… what you’re to be doing in the game, in Ald-Amura, you’re a selfless professional. It’s some full-circle shit, and I’m here for it. I hope you are too. Redundant link, just in case, y’all.


Open Mic Aid (external)

Hello, my tiny audience. I’ve been teleworking for… three weeks now? I think? I don’t know, I’m not trying to keep track. The reality is that we are all cooped up, likely for months, for good reason. Maybe some of us will find time to do things, maybe some of us will lose time. It’s… new. And hard. Really, really hard. For the time being, I’m financially secure. But a lot of people aren’t.

Caltrops

I love four-sided dice (which I will refer to from here on as d4s, in keeping with standard notation). I also love clean, simple dice mechanics in TTRPGs. Many of these use d6s, Fate uses d3s in the shape of d6s, some use only a percentile set or a single d20. I’m certainly not about to say that there aren’t any d4-based systems out there. But I have not encountered one on my own time, and my love of these pointy little bits has had me thinking about potential workings for a while now. And while I don’t have anything resembling a system here, I had some interesting thoughts and had my computer roll a few tens of millions of digital dice for me, and I’d like to lay out a few initial thoughts that may, some day, turn into something.

The TL;DR is this: players can, for any resolution1, roll two, three, or four d4s. If every die has the same value, regardless of what this value is, that counts as a special. Otherwise, the values are summed with 1s and 2s treated as negative (so, -1, -2, +3, +4). And that’s it, roll complete! What is a special, exactly? Well, I don’t really know. My initial thought was that the all-of-a-kind roll would be a critical success. After seeing the maths, and thinking about what I would opt to do in any given situation. Which led me to believe that the all-of-a-kind roll should certainly be special in some way, but likely a more interesting and dynamic way than just ‘you score very big’. This could be a trigger for something special on your character sheet related to whatever thing you are rolling for, or it could be a cue for the GM to pause the action and shift course. It should certainly always be something positive, but I don’t think the traditional crit mentality quite fits.

I’ll get into the numbers in more detail in a minute, but the key takeaways are:

Ignoring specials for a minute, we see a clear advantage to rolling more dice. Generally speaking, we will trend toward getting higher values, and the likeliest values for us to get on a given roll are better. When we factor in specials, rolling two dice becomes a lot more attractive; specials come up 25% of the time! Which is a very cool way to shift the balance, in my mind, but it’s also why it needs to be something other than just ‘BIG SMASH’. Make it too strong, and it basically becomes the universal choice. Making it more dynamic or narrative seems like a likely way to make the decision meaningful for players. Another possibility is a potential cooldown mechanic where rolling two specials in an encounter would force that character to cut out; that would likely leave the 3d4 option unused, however, as players would roll 2d4 until hitting a special, and then switch directly to 4d4.

I wrote a quick and dirty Lua3 script to let me roll a few tens of millions of virtual dice and run the numbers. The resultant percentage table is below. My initial script only returned the number of specials, positives, negatives, and zeroes. Upon seeing the steep declination toward 0% specials on rolls of more than 4 dice, I decided I was only going to do further testing on 2, 3, and 4. I’ve included the percentages of specials for 5, 6, 7, and 8 dice just to show the trend.

Result percentages in the Caltrops concept
# d4s 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Special 25 6.3 1.6 0.4 0.1 0.025 0.006
-7 0 0 1.6
-6 0 0 2.3
-5 0 4.7 1.6
-4 0 4.7 0
-3 12.5 0 1.6
-2 0 0 6.3
-1 0 4.7 9.4
0 0 14.1 6.3
1 12.5 14.1 1.6
2 25 4.7 2.3
3 12.5 0 9.4
4 0 4.7 14.1
5 0 14.1 9.4
6 0 14.1 2.3
7 12.5 4.7 1.6
8 0 0 6.3
9 0 0 9.4
10 0 4.7 6.3
11 0 4.7 1.6
12 0 0 0
13 0 0 1.6
14 0 0 2.3
15 0 0 1.6

One final (for now) takeaway after having stared at these numbers in multiple forms. I mentioned the use of special instead of critical because of a traditional critical making a roll of 2d4s too powerful; you’ll get that hit 25% of the time. There’s another truth to 2d4 rolls, however, and that is that the chance of negative rolls is the lowest: 12.5% of 2d4 rolls are negative, 14.1% of 3d4 rolls are negative, and 22.8% of 4d4 rolls are negative. Every negative 2d4 roll is -3, however, and the chance of getting -3 or lower for 3d4 is 9.4% and for 4d4 is 7.1%. This raises a question as to what is a better motivator. You’re more likely to get a negative with more dice, and it’s possible to get a worse negative, but the trend is toward a better negative (the above numbers didn’t reflect zero; the likeliest non-positive result for 3d4 is, in fact, zero). It’s worth running through how this plays out and deciding whether negative values matter, or simply the fact that a negative was, in fact, rolled. My instinct says stay with values, but that doesn’t take into account the feeling of how the dice are treating you.

Clearly there are a lot of ‘what ifs’ to work through, and there’s a lot more involved in practical testing than just rolling millions and millions of dice. But I do think I’m on to something interesting here, something simple, but with slightly-less-than-simple decision determinations.


The new mobile Tetris is a travesty

A few more technical notes as I’ve unfortunately put more time into N3TWORK’s Tetris: it does use guideline scoring, which I assumed but… the awkward placement of the score made it hard to confirm (and it gives no notification for any moves other than Tetris); leveling is fixed-goal (which makes sense: you lose faster and get to watch another ad!) and tops out at level 15 (EA’s Tetris used variable-goal leveling and didn’t max out); it never reaches nor approaches 20G (I’m pretty sure EA’s Tetris did; if it didn’t, it got far closer).

It’s probably pretty obvious by now that I love Tetris. Enough so that I was able to write a 1200-word post detailing my favorite Tetrises. It is, then, incredibly disheartening that I feel forced to write two posts in one month (back-to-back, even) about modern Tetris implementations that are just absolutely terrible. Unfortunately, this also renders part of the aforementioned list of favorite Tetrises outdated1. Until recently, Electronic Arts (EA) was the developer for Tetris on mobile. As of last year, the ridiculously-named N3TWORK is the exclusive rights-holder to mobile Tetris. Once upon a time, this would simply mean that EA could no longer make or sell a new Tetris game on the respective platform, but it’s 2020 and all technology is hell. So, as of April 21, 2020, EA’s mobile Tetris will simply… stop working. I’m sure EA was forced into some phone-home scheme that would allow such a thing to happen, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that the ability for such a thing to happen should be 100% illegal.

Capitalist technohell aside, there’s a new mobile Tetris in town! In my 2019 video game retrospective, I pointed out that “[a]pparently there’s a battle royale Tetris game coming to mobile as well, which is exciting.” This game (Tetris Royale) will, of course, also be made by N3TWORK, and I have to say… I am no longer excited. While EA’s mobile Tetris was essentially a perfect implementation, N3TWORK’s is an unplayable steaming shit. The controls are utterly broken – one’s finger must be lifted in between swiping sideways for lateral movement and swiping down for a hard drop. Bonuses aren’t acknowledged (I’m unsure if they’re scored properly or not at the moment) for T-spins, back-to-backs, or combos – only Tetrises. And visually, the game is a nightmare.

Compare these screenshots (EA on the left, N3TWORK on the right). EA’s app has a bunch of black space at the top and bottom, as it was never updated for X-sized iPhones. N3TWORK’s has been made for modern phones, but it… does nothing useful with that space. In fact, it is objectively worse because the score is floating so far away from the field. One of the big reasons that EA’s made my list of favorite Tetrises is the boxes for the next piece and hold. The backgrounds of these boxes are the same color as the piece, which means that if you know your Guideline colors, even the slightest hint of these out of the corner of your eye tells you the necessary information. N3TWORK’s does not do this. To be fair, this is also something I miss from all of the other implementations I enjoy. However, N3TWORK goes far beyond the normal level of disappointment by making their next and hold pieces nearly invisible to an eye focused on the grid. There is absolutely no reason for them to be so small, it’s just a foolish design decision that makes the game objectively less playable. On top of that, the colors in these boxes are absurdly pale, making color-based recognition difficult as well. It’s worth noting that there are five different skins. Of these, the one in the screenshot is the only one that bothers to color the hold/next boxes at all. It’s absurd. The bizarre pseudo-3D effect and half-baked ‘90s-hacker-film aesthetic are distracting (though fitting for a company called N3TWORK) and ugly, but that’s a personal opinion. You’d be hard-pressed to make an argument about the other aforementioned visual issues not making the game objectively worse to play at a high level.

EA’s Tetris also had excellent stats tracking, both per-game and over time. It would graph out scores over the course of a week or a month. It had some silly additional modes beyond Marathon, but for someone who primarily plays Endless Marathon at a relatively high level, it was the perfect companion. My stats didn’t carry over from my last phone, but I’m glad I cleared over 35,000 lines with EA’s Tetris on my current phone. I will keep an eye on updates to N3TWORK’s Tetris, but a lot would have to change for me to pay for it or even continue to play it for free. It is utterly, devastatingly disappointing.


Tetris Microcard vs. Tetris Micro Arcade

This is going to be an attempt to review two ostensibly similar products, one discontinued that paved the way for the other. Both are pocket-sized Tetris games, officially licensed and generally adherent to the Guideline. They follow the same basic physical format, and comparing them should be pretty straightforward (it is, actually; one is good and the other is bad). I think that properly comparing them, however, requires examining the technical decisions that were made, and for this we need to back up and establish a couple of other things. This is because the first product, the discontinued one from 2017, is based on the Arduboy platform.

Arduboy is a tiny open gaming console that vaguely resembles a Game Boy, based on the Arduino ‘open-source electronics platform’. Arduino kits are typically used to ease the embedded microcontroller portion of hardware products. It’s a dinky 20MHz ATmega processor, with enough flash memory to hold (in the case of Arduboy) one game at a time. Tetris Microcard, released in 2017, took this overall platform, rotated the physical format so it was more like a Game Boy Micro (and in the process, orienting the display portrait, perfect for Tetris) and matched it with a custom port in ROM. Both the Arduboy and Tetris Microcard were manufactured by Seeed Studio, a fabrication shop that also sells a number of premanufactured devices based around these sorts of microcontrollers. I doubt these were manufactured in massive quantities. All of this together led the release price of the Microcard to be a whopping $60.

Onward to the 2019 release of Tetris Micro Arcade. It retains the basic physical format of the Microcard, but is no longer based on the Arduboy platform or manufactured by Seeed Studio. Mass-produced by Super Impulse alongside (currently) five other games in the same format, Micro Arcade sells for a more consumer-friendly $15-20. Some have speculated that these run Arduinos as well, but I suspect this is simply because of the obvious evolutionary path from the Microcard. My suspicion all along has been that these run on a Famicom-on-a-chip. Opening the case up, the processor has (of course) been epoxied over, but it certainly doesn’t look like the format of an Arduino’s ATmega. Regardless, even if it is the same platform, it is a wildly different ROM, and one that fits its role as a cheap, mass-produced device, devoid of love.

That is to say, the Micro Arcade ROM is… bad. Really, really bad. It plays through the background music (“Korobeiniki”) once, and then just… stops. At some point after that, the screen just blanked white on mine, even though the game was still technically playing in the background. There are no lines to delineate between minos in a tetrimino, which always feels like a Programming 101 port to me. There’s no ghost piece. It doesn’t save high scores1 (Microcard has a ten-spot leaderboard). Despite largely adhering to the guideline (pieces are colored correctly, at least, and rotation is SRS2) it feels terribly unofficial.

Which isn’t to say that the Microcard was a perfect port either. Its pieces were not the correct colors, because the screen was monochrome3. It showed one ‘next’ piece compared to Micro Arcade’s three. But aside from the price difference… that’s all Micro Arcade has going for it. The screen blanking may be a glitch on mine, or something that will be patched in a future revision, but I’m not the only one reporting this issue. Even if that wasn’t an issue, and even if the music didn’t randomly cut out, I would still play Microcard over Micro Arcade in a heartbeat. It feels like Tetris to me, vs. a knockoff.

I may put more effort in to figuring out what’s under the hood. Delidding the epoxied ASIC isn’t entirely in my wheelhouse, but I also don’t care about destroying this thing. I may also try to dump the ROM at some point, which could theoretically provide some insight.


2019, a personal video game retrospective

Last year, I did a sort of year in review post which began with an explanation of the difficulty in creating such a post. I don’t tend to consume a lot of media as it comes out, and… 2019 was even worse in that regard. I think my escapism was fairly concentrated this year in two media: video games and comics. Hopefully I’ll do a second post on the latter after sorting out what all actually came out this last year. But for now: VIDEO GAMES.


(Finally) playing Pokémon

Despite growing up firmly in the Pokémon era, I had only played Pokémon Snap, Pokémon: Magikarp Jump, Pokémon Go, and a handful of games on the Pokémon Mini console. That is to say, I have never played a main-series Pokémon game until now, with Shield. I know I’ve been writing about video games a lot lately, and I really should do some maths or something instead. But, I’m an exhausted person in an exhausting world, and video games are giving me a lot of joy. I also know that I’m not particularly qualified to write a review on a game which I have nearly no background with; this isn’t intended to be a review. It’s just been a very interesting experience breaking into a well-known, well-loved franchise 23 years and eight generations late.

To get the end of the story out of the way, I am really enjoying Pokémon Shield, and I intend to go back and play through previous generations of Pokémon games. I can tell that I am nearing the end of Shield, and my sole complain would really be the length of the game. Not in an ‘I paid $60 for this!!!’ sort of way, just… I’m having a good time, I want more. Part of why I’m having a good time is that there’s an obvious formula that works here; the franchise is successful for a reason. The narrative is present but not so deep that it demands undivided attention.The collection element is engaging, and even without the ‘gotta catch ‘em all’ mindset, it means there’s always something new to find. The RPG system itself is interesting to me as well, with every possible move having a cost, that cost system not replenishing over time, and no ability to skip a turn. On the surface it feels like it should be unforgiving, but it works and forces decision-making over just brute-forcing every battle with one well-designed monster.

My appreciation goes beyond the gameplay, however, since Pokémon is such a cultural powerhouse. Simply due to the sort of cultural world I inhabit, Pokémon fan art1 crosses my path a lot. And I’ve always enjoyed it! The little monsters are cute, and folks who want to reinterpret them generally gravitate toward the cutest of the cute. But now it feels personal: I can go out and find this creature, or if I already have, I know how it operates. I realize this is not a novel concept; obviously one will have a greater appreciation for art that they relate to beyond its surface level. But it’s interesting to me how much that appreciation has shifted for me, despite already having absorbed a fair amount of franchise knowledge simply by its cultural saturation.

Part of the reason, I suppose, that I never got into the franchise is because it has always been centered around Nintendo’s mobile consoles. I never owned mobile consoles2 until much later in life – my first was a DS Lite. What I didn’t realize was that this meant that from the beginning of the series, this focus on mobile meant there was a multiplayer aspect. If you truly wanted to ‘catch ‘em all’, you had to link up and trade with a friend who had the other version. A dear friend of mine (who has been very helpful in getting me up to speed on the basics) has Sword, and while we haven’t traded monsters, we have been sharing our finds with one another. It’s cute, and it’s clear that this culture of sharing has been baked in to the series from the beginning. I had no concept of this before; I deeply appreciate it now.

I guess that’s about all I have to say. I firmly believe that Pokémon Shield is a good game. It could be the worst game in the series, for all I know; that wouldn’t really matter. It has been a thing to share with friends, a thing to connect me to a community, and it has me convinced that I should go back and play the older games. To me, that’s good enough.


Garfield Kart: Furious Racing is out, but whatever

Well, Garfield Kart: Furious Racing officially lands in the U.S. today, which means a review is in order. Not of that game, of course, but of Garfield GO – Paws, Inc.’s 2017 response to the similarly-named and certainly better-known creation by The Pokémon Company. Much like Pokémon Go, you play on a map, based on your actual location, tapping things to interact with them. Also like Pokémon Go, you can play in an AR-style mode where the objects you interact with are superimposed on camera footage of the real world around you, or you can disable this to play on static backgrounds. In AR mode, you have to rotate yourself around to find things and aim very carefully, it’s a frustrating experience just for the sake of seeing a Garf floating above your sad desk. I never enjoyed playing Pokémon Go this way either, personally.

Like so many Garf games, Garfield GO feels like a shell of a game with a half-hearted Garf theme slapped on. Even with my limited knowledge of Pokémon lore1, I knew that Pokémon Go made sense: you found cute monsters out in the wild and trapped them in tiny balls. While there’s a battle element to it and all, a core part of the Pokémon Go experience was just finding all of these different creatures and watching them evolve. The Garf imitation, on the other hand… involves you throwing food into Garf’s bowl. One of four types of food (lasagna, pizza, donut, cake); one of one type of Garf.

So if you’re not collecting different bizarro Garfs (which would have been 100% more rad in every way, tbh), what exactly is the point? Well, after you catch feed a Garf, he disappears in a cloud of smoke before appearing next to a treasure chest, fidgeting and pointing at it as though it contains the directions for defusing a bomb that’s strapped to his chest. It does not, of course; it contains coins, hats, comics, and trinkets. Which I guess I have to dive into now.


Objects

I had a plan to submit something into the 200 Word RPG Challenge this year. I wrote a thing, meant to polish it up a bit, didn’t, figured I’d just submit it anyway, and forgot. I don’t think the thing is particularly good, and given that my first task was to bind myself to a word limit, it is not particularly well-written either. And, maybe I’ll edit it so it reads like a human wrote it at some point, or maybe I’ll build it into something bigger and with more purpose. But unless/until that happens: here are 195 words describing a little roleplaying concept about the objects around you. Do with it what you will.


Objects is a light filler game (aim for 45-60 min) for 1 GM and at least 2 players about examining your surroundings with a macro lens and bringing life to the inanimate. Each player should look around the room and choose an object to roleplay. They inform the GM, but not one another. They should briefly consult with the GM what free actions are available to them – a soda bottle can likely roll freely, but bouncing to a height will be a challenge. The GM announces their goal: a rendezvous point, and potentially another object from the room that must be brought to said point. Challenge actions are resolved via 1d4, with the GM deciding whether success is a 2+, 3+, or 4 depending on difficulty. Failures should still move the player(s) forward, just not quite as they’d hoped. When player characters manage to run into each other, those players can reveal to one another what they are, and they can work together. Aside from the basic challenges of movement, finding one another, and rendezvousing, the GM should bring other objects in the room to life as challenges (the ottoman is trapped!) and NPCs.


I am writing about the goose game

I did not intend to write about Untitled Goose Game. It has been written about exhaustively, the core bits of it reviewed and dissected from Kotaku to Entertainment Weekly, from Polygon to Time. The best piece about it, or possibly anything, has already been written. Folks talking about and posting fan art of the game has dramatically brightened up what has been a fairly bleak time in internet discourse. I have nothing to add, because everything has already been said about this game multiple times by myriad people. And yet.

Initially I was a bit frustrated by the game, as its controls are… not great. But even when I was trapped in a weird rotational loop with the farmer, annoyed that it felt like I was playing a hastily-coded shareware title from the late ‘90s, I didn’t want to stop. All was forgiven, I just wanted more goose. I beat the game, which prompts you with a handful of additional tasks. I thought, I’ll do these here and there amid other games. The next day, I wanted more goose, and promptly powered through these tasks. I watched some streamers do these additional tasks despite just having done them, because, more goose. Which, I suppose is why I’m writing this. It’s just another avenue to more goose.

The game is silly and low-stakes, and I feel like saying ‘spoilers ahead’ is kind of ridiculous. But I also think a big part of the game’s charm is figuring things out for yourself, finding weird little details, experiencing the whole thing fresh. So, with that in mind… Spoilers ahead, here are the goosey little details that brought me the most joy:


Hey go check out Disposable Heroes on Kickstarter (external)

This thing funded and I am so, so happy. I dearly love the folks behind it and… ahhhhhh!

Disposable Heroes is a card-driven tabletop RPG making use of the Powered by the Apocalypse system, live on Kickstarter now. Its main hook is that none of your characters effectively have HP – if they take damage, they die. You don’t roll your own character sheets, you use the aforementioned cards in their stead. Character dies, you draw a new one. It’s a very neat idea, it has a wonderful street-tag aesthetic, and it’s a complete dig at the capitalist hell of the gig economy.

I wasn’t originally going to post about this, because I haven’t actually played it, and I don’t generally feel like I can write meaningful things without having felt my way through an experience. But I have seen it played, I have flipped through the prototype cards, I know it’s going to be good. And I know that it’s important to support independent queer creators. I want this thing to come to life, and I think anyone who comes to my blog voluntarily likely would as well.


Solo: Islands of the Heart

Solo: Islands of the Heart is, in the words of the developers, “A contemplative puzzler set on a gorgeous and surreal archipelago” wherein the player “Reflect[s] on love’s place in [their] life with a personal and introspective branching narrative.” This sounds like peak me: I love puzzles, surreal landscapes, love, and introspection! To top it off, the game offers some flexibility regarding gender representation; you’re not automatically forced into a binary heteronormative default. I snatched it up pretty quickly after learning about it (and confirming that it at least attempted to be queer-friendly) and completed a run after a few days of casual pick-up-and-put-down play. While I’m not sure that it was quite what I’d hoped it would be, it made enough of an impression on me that I feel the need to write about it. Be warned, there may be some things that resemble spoilers ahead, but the game is very much dependent upon what you put into it, so I’m not even sure spoiling is… a thing.

The basics…

The basic gist of the game is that you hop around from island to island trying to activate totems. There are two pieces to each; you activate a small one, which shines a light at a large one which you can then talk to. Talking to the large totems asks you a question related to love, after which a new island opens up. There are some other minor puzzles along the way, like helping smitten dogs reach one another or watering gardens; these are all optional and don’t move anything forward in the game. Puzzles involve moving five different types of boxes around, generally so you can move upward to a place you can’t reach, or float via parachute to a far away bit of land. They are, for the most part, pretty simple and somewhat flexible in terms of solving. They can be frustrating in terms of guiding just how high up or far out you need to be to land on that island – suddenly you’re in the water again swimming back to your pile of boxes.

In my experience, there was a considerable disconnect between the ‘do a box puzzle’ and the ‘talk about your love life’ elements. I suspect that part of the idea here is to allow the introspective side of your brain some time to relax by running the lateral thinking bits instead. And, as a whole, I didn’t really mind that disconnect – but it stacked up with other things. I mentioned that it was fairly easy to misjudge just how high or far out you’d need to coax the boxes, lest you plunge into the sea. This happened to me quite a lot, often multiple times on the same puzzle in later stages. Swimming is slow, and faster swimming is achieved by hitting a certain rhythm with the swim button. This decision, too, I can easily justify as an exercise in mindfulness instead of impatiently button-mashing. But these things compound – things start feeling like busy work keeping you at bay while the totems think of something to ask.

Regarding the questions…

The questions the totems ask are not trivial, they run a fairly wide gamut and certainly lend themselves to introspection. Early on, one basically asked if I was polyamorous which… is honestly a very important sort of acknowledgement in a game like this. You’re asked how important things like sex and shared values are; you’re asked if you would abandon your family for a lover. You’re also asked questions that relate more directly to the path you choose at the beginning – that is, are you in love, have you loved and lost, or have you never loved at all. It’s easy, when answering this at the beginning of the game, to fall into the trap of your character being you. And, to be fair, I think that it would be a waste of energy to not align your choices in the game with your personal life and feelings. But, it’s important to keep a bit of distance, as the game will occasionally contradict your answers or dive into things that quite possibly aren’t at all applicable to your situation.

For example, having chosen in earnest the ‘in love once, but not now’ option, I was asked a lot of questions as to why I thought the relationship failed. One was about time, did I think time played a role. After answering ‘no’, the next question basically opened with ‘okay, but time basically had to play into it’, directly contradicting my honest response. This was the first moment where I got annoyed and began to realize I needed to distance myself from the little tiny on-screen version of me that I was shaping. Some of the responses were, to me, absurd to the point of throwing me right out of the game’s depth, such as “You can’t fully hate what you don’t fully love”. But again, the key was to answer honestly while consciously separating myself from my avatar.

About those gender options…

I’d be remiss to not touch on the matter of gender. You can independently choose one of three body styles for your character, and one of three ‘genders’. While the game refers to it as gender and gives you the option of male, female, and non-binary, what it actually means is pronouns. To be clear, I’m glad that they put an effort into making this game inclusive, I’m glad that you can use they/them pronouns. But that’s not gender, and there’s no reason not to call it what it is. Both you and your partner1 get the three options; you can change yours at any time. It’s a root-level option in the pause menu, right with ‘Back to the main menu’ and ‘Settings’. This is absolutely the right way to handle a thing, and should be seen as an example for all developers to follow. Your partner is static upon initial choosing, which… is honestly a little weird, given the player’s flexibility. I would like to see this reconsidered.

In closing…

I’m glad that I played this game. I’d have to be very cautious in recommending it, however: it’s very short, it’s not great as a puzzle game, and the disconnects mentioned (between puzzle and introspection, between player and avatar) are a little tricky to reckon with. I doubt there’s much in the way of replay value – even writing this, I’d like to go through the beginning again to pull some direct quotations but at the same time… I really don’t want to. I might play through a different path if I find myself in love again, but even that feels like a toss-up. Still, there aren’t a lot of games doing this sort of emotional introspective adventure, and I think there’s a lot of value in it. And even though the matter of gender may be a bit flawed, enough of an attempt was made such that the game feels fairly inclusive (or, at least, not intentionally exclusive).


The poetics of TTRPGs

I have often expressed, in a pseudo-jest of oversimplification, that I prefer novellas to novels, short stories to novellas, and poems to short stories. I have always been more drawn to the meditative experience of an impossibly-concise framework than the contemplative experience that length and breadth brings. That isn’t to argue that either experience is objectively better, more difficult to create, nor more serious or worthy of being canonized as art – I, myself, personally just find something extremely satisfying in art that I can hold in a single breath. That oxygenates my blood and travels throughout me.

At Gen Con this year1, I had the opportunity to play Alex Robert’s For the Queen, a short, card-based, no-dice-no-masters TTRPG. The basic gist is that all of the players are on a journey in wartime with their queen, and characters and narratives unfold as players answer questions prompted by the deck of cards. You don’t really need a table, you don’t need to write anything. It’s an incredibly distilled essence of roleplaying. The experience soaked into me, stuck in my mind. A week later, I was trying to figure out why, and how, and it occurred to me that the game is a poem.

My mind repeatedly wandered to another game that I love, that similarly demands I pore over its delicacy: The Quiet Year by Avery Alder. The Quiet Year is also free of masters, and also deck-based2. Cards lay out events that happen during a given season, and players use these events to draw a map that tells the story of a community. Two common themes between these games are cards and lack of a master, but I don’t think either of those elements specifically makes a game a poem. Cards prompting events are randomized, but it’s not the chaotic, make-or-break randomness of chucking a D20 at your GM. An egalitarian system free of masters adds an odd aura of intimacy within the group. They’re poetic elements, certainly, but that’s kind of like saying that in literature, everything that rhymes or
looks like
this
is apoem(period)

And certainly, there are a bunch of formalized rules that we can scrutinize and calculate and determine that aha! A given piece of written or spoken word simply must be a poem! But that’s clearly not what I mean, and I don’t know that it’s productive to try to break down countless elements and rule sets to establish an encyclopedic guide as to whether or not a given TTRPG will give me this lingering satiety. To me, it’s simply about feeling, much of which I believe comes from crossing boundaries, challenging expectations, and doing it all with the crash of shocking brevity.

Let’s talk about a game I haven’t actually played, Orc Stabr by Liam Ginty and Gabriel Komisar3. Fitting on a single sheet, it is a simple game (though a game made more traditional by way of both dice and masters). I suspect it is a fairly quick game, but again… I have not played it. Aside from the game itself, however, there was an additional experience layered onto it, a bit of a metagame if you will. It was launched on Kickstarter, and all of the materials for it were written from the perspective of its orc designer, Limm Ghomizar. Backers could get a full sheet of paper, or a hand-torn half-sheet of paper, encouraging them to find other backers to form a full, playable sheet with. Every sheet had something custom done to it – crayon doodles, recipes, custom rules, handprints, all manner of weird things that simply served to make each copy human, personal, and unique. Seeing folks post about their copies when they received them and just knowing that everyone was getting some different bit of weird was an act of art in itself. And that had that lingering feeling of something once, seemingly rigid, being shattered in the medium.

Clever means of introducing interactivity to narratives have always existed outside what we understand and refer to as gaming. Things like Fluxus’ event scores, the Theatre of the Oppressed, Choose Your Own Adventure novels. Community storytelling has always been a thing, and presumably ‘interactive storytelling, but with rules’ is not a particularly novel concept either. It’s almost certainly unfair, then, to presume that there’s really anything new about what feels like a Gygaxian mold being broken. But I do feel like I’m seeing more and more of this sort of thing being done very intentionally in a space dominated by long-campaign, dice-laden, hack’n’slash systems. There’s a vibrancy to the sense of art and emotion that is being put into games, and that I think seethes through the players of these games.

And that, to me, is poetry.


The unsettling meows of a Garf

This post is about the 2007 Nintendo DS game, Garfield’s Nightmare. While it would not be terribly off-brand for me to review a 12 year old video game based on a syndicated comic strip, I don’t really plan to do that. Because honestly, there isn’t much to review. It’s a serviceable platformer with very little in the way of challenge. There are some hidden things can find, some very lightweight box-moving challenges, some enemies to stomp on. It’s a simple game, and, you know… it’s fine.

Gameplay is actually extremely similar to the developer’s earlier GBA games based on the Maya the Bee franchise: Maya the Bee: The Great Adventure and Maya the Bee: Sweet Gold. The developer in question is Shin’en Multimedia, a studio made up of – I shit you not – a bunch of current and former demosceners. This makes more sense when you look at, say, their first GBA game, Iridion 3D which is incredibly impressive from a technical standpoint, or even their recent F-Zero-esque Wii U/Switch title, Fast Racing Neo/Fast RMX. Aside from demos, the Abyss1 group dabbled in games early on with Rise of the Rabbits and Rise of the Rabbits 2 – both, of course, for the Amiga. They developed Rinkapink for the GBC. While it doesn’t appear to have ever been published2, it seems they used bits of it for Ravensburger’s Käpt’n Blaubärs verrückte Schatzsuche. A promotional brochure for Rinkapink seems to be selling their demoscene experience as a company that can avoid “bad programming, flickering graphics, and awful music”, which… makes a lot of sense! You don’t win at demo parties without knowing how to make the most of a given system. Abyss was and is particularly known for its music, at the time largely done by Manfred Linzner, the lead programmer on Iridion 3D, Maya the Bee: Sweet Gold, and, yes, Garfield’s Nightmare. They developed trackers and audio toolchains for the Amiga (AHX) and Gameboy (GHX). They’re still releasing audio demos.

What does any of this really have to do with Garfield’s Nightmare? Likely not much, but it sure is fascinating. If anything I think it explains how technically competent this game is while also being a pretty sub-par Garfield experience. Which brings me to something that I highly doubt was intentional and can only imagine was a byproduct of a team of highly-skilled demosceners having agreed to take on a licensed title about a syndicated comic strip cat: Garfield’s Nightmare is actually fairly nightmarish. Not in a blatantly scary, horrorish way, but rather in its completely disquieting approach to what Garfield’s world is. The basic premise is that Garfield ate too much (shocker) before going to bed, and is now stuck in his own nightmare. But throughout the game, he really doesn’t seem concerned himself. Either he has good enough lucid dream control abilities to will himself into perfect calmness, or else he’s just oddly resigned to being in this nightmare world that he is, of course, ostensibly trying to escape. It doesn’t make any sense, and the disconnect that it presents as perfectly normal is more and more discomforting the more one thinks about it.

This isn’t the only weird disconnect. Aside from spiders (which Garfield does canonically hate)3, none of the enemies are things that bother canon Garfield, or even things that exist in his world as we know it. They seem like entirely generic platformer enemies (for instance, turtle thing with a cannon built into its back) yet they’re in a very specific licensed setting. I’m sure the studio just didn’t want to cough up the handful of dollars to license a sound bite or two of Lorenzo Music’s voice, but Garfield meows when he gets injured in this game. It shouldn’t be unsettling to hear a cat meow, but I assure you it is extremely so to hear what sounds like a sample of a real live cat coming out of Garfield. There’s no lasagna in sight; pizza stands in for health points and donuts are akin to coins. There are hidden doors that lead to brief minigame reprieves in the real world, but this version of the real world is cold and empty, it feels like the Garfield who is in the nightmare has himself fallen asleep and is experiencing a nightmare version of the real world. Even the box-moving puzzles feel planned and placed, which… Obviously they were, by Peter Weiss of Shin’en, but it makes the nightmare feel like an escape room situation that someone has built for the sole purpose of torturing Garfield. On the surface it’s almost certainly just a bunch of half-hearted design decisions, but it adds up and makes for an unnerving, uncanny experience.

So, should you play the game? I don’t know. I mean you can grab one on eBay for like six bucks, and if you let your mind really take in the nightmare world, it’s… weird. It’s fascinating to think about how the developers, active demosceners, got into the DS development program and got shit on for making a Santa Claus demo that they couldn’t link to because of licensing violations months before releasing this oddity. Everything about Garfield’s Nightmare is just weird, and that in itself is worth quite a few donuts to me.


The avocado with legs

Avo is the first bit of media from British company Playdeo, whose lofty introduction describes the things they’re creating as ‘television you can touch’. A lot of the general buzz around Avo has described it as augmented reality with prerecorded video, which seems apt. Told over eight short episodes, Avo is a lightweight mystery that befalls the quirky scientist Billie and her sentient ambulatory avocado, Avo. The player controls Avo, walking the stubby-legged fruit around and picking things up while Billie explains the situation and tells you what she needs. At its core, it’s a typical adventure game mechanically – walk around, pick things up, bring them to a place. But it’s all done seamlessly in this fully video-based real setting.

“Seamless” is kind of a strong word, I suppose. While exploring, the video is simply short loops of, say, Billie working at her desk in the background. There are still cutscenes, but because you’re already in the world and bound to preset camera angles, they just kind of… happen in place. So despite there still being two distinct modes, they do blend together in a fairly seamless way. The story is cute and simple, there are fun nerdy jokes scattered throughout (I had a good chuckle at Billie’s large cardboard box labelled ‘Klein bottles with moebius strips inside’), and the core mechanic works well. Avo is enjoyable and potentially worthy of recommendation, albeit with some caveats.

For starters, the game requires you to agree to a privacy policy like… pretty much immediately. I definitely have issues with content (especially paid content) tracking me for marketing purposes, but unfortunately I am used to it. Actually having to accept a privacy policy before entering the game just (and this may be unwarranted) feels more ominous than usual. Perhaps requirements are tighter being based in the UK, but it feels extreme for such an airy game. I was going to play it regardless because I was curious about what Playdeo was doing with the format, but I would encourage folks to actually read through the thing and weigh the pros and cons.

The other weird thing to me is the matter of the beans. Beans are scattered throughout the game. They serve three purposes: they give you an idea of paths you’re supposed to explore, they make Avo move slightly faster for some reason, and they are also the in-game currency to buy the episodes. While I suppose you could simply replay each episode a ton of times and collect enough beans to get the next one, doing so would be wildly impractical. Episodes cost 1,000 beans, and there aren’t hundreds (much less a thousand) of beans scattered throughout any given level. Which makes sense, Playdeo wants you to actually spend money on the game. For this, I do not blame them, and I do not think the game is overpriced (the bean bundle at $6 will get you through the whole thing). I do think that forcing it into this free-to-play framework is just weird. Awkward.

Many negative reviews on the App Store are from folks who don’t want to pay and actually are going the bean-collection route. The alternative that they would prefer is lowering the cost of the episodes. I mentioned that I don’t think the game is overpriced. I do think that the complete undervaluation of mobile apps means that a great number of people will think it’s overpriced. Especially since it’s much more of a story than it is a game. I think these are challenges that Playdeo is going to need to overcome. First, either ditch free-to-play or come up with a far less clumsy approach to it. Second, make the content more of a game and less of a poking-the-television. Avo largely feels like a proof-of-concept. As proof-of-concepts go, however, it is an incredibly charming one. And I would still recommend it as an experience for folks who are comfortable with the data collection.


On Twine (and my first Twine project)

Twine is, by its own definition, “an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories”. I, personally, would call it a templating language for HTML-based interactive fiction. I have finally gotten around to experimenting with it, and… I find it to be missing the mark in the way that many templating systems tend to, and the way that many ‘friendly’ languages tend to.

Before I dive into my struggles with Twine, I’d just like to drop a link to the result of this experiment: yum yum you are a bread, which I guess I’ll just call a bread simulator? I don’t know. It’s silly, it’s fun, it’s bread. Also, minor spoilers in the rest of the post.


Tetris 99

I rather enjoy Tetris. Tetris has changed a lot from the pre-Guideline games I grew up with. I’m glad the Guideline exists and has made for a largely consistent experience among recent Tetris titles. But I still haven’t adapted perfectly to, say, a world with T-spins after no such moves existing in my formative Tetris years. Over the years, more and more multiplayer Tetris games have been released as well, the strategies of which are completely antithetical to the way I play solo. To put it lightly, I have never been good at multiplayer Tetris – some of the stronger AIs in Puyo Puyo Tetris’s story mode even frustrate me.

So when Nintendo announced Tetris 99, a battle royale match between (guess how many) players, I was skeptical. Not that I thought the game would be bad1, but I definitely thought I’d be bad at it, which would simply make it… not super fun for me. But, due to there simply being so many players and a large degree of randomness in how much you’ll be targeted for attacks (additional bricks), simply being decent can keep you alive for a considerable portion of the round. I’ve only played a handful of games, maxing out at 9th place (and dropping out nearly immediately at 74th once!), but I’m really enjoying it so far. Something about seeing 49 other players’ teeny tiny Tetris screens on either side of the screen is quite engaging (and honestly a bit humorous).

You can, either manually or according to four rule sets, choose who of those 98 others you are targeting. The mechanisms for this are not made entirely clear – in fact, they aren’t really explained at all, you just kind of have to stumble across them and suss out how they work by name. Likewise, because the rounds are short (and, to an extent, shorter the worse you are at the game) it’s hard to get into a groove, and there isn’t really a mechanism for practicing. If one didn’t already have other Guideline-era Tetris games, and particularly games with a multiplayer experience, I feel like they’d be a bit sunk here. Those minor quibbles are the closest things that I have to real complaints about the game. I’m curious how they’ll monetize it. The mobile Tetris games from EA have additional soundtracks that can be unlocked w/ coins won in-game (or purchased). Perhaps Tetris 99 will end up with a bit of this, or additional skins. Perhaps it’s just an incentive for Switch Online. For now, save for needing a Switch Online account, it is completely free… and it is a blast.


RIP, Wii Shop Channel

A sad loss – Nintendo shuttered the Wii Shop Channel today. This was advertised well ahead of time; hopefully most people who care were able to retrieve and backup everything they wanted to. I haven’t powered my Wii up in quite some time, so likewise… hopefully I don’t have any gaps in my downloads. People are (rightfully) disappointed with Nintendo (I guess this is the first major console download marketplace to disappear?), but I don’t really think it’s sensible to focus our ire on Nintendo specifically – this is the nature of the download beast1.

Assuming one can readily dump downloads, then I suppose from an archive perspective the data can be passed around eternally. Beyond that, however, I fail to believe that any of these markets will outlive the silicon in a cartridge. It would surprise me if they outlived properly-stored optical media. I’m glad that a lot of Switch games are being released in both download and cartridge form – even indie titles via small-batch entities like Limited Run Games. Cartridges are still patched via downloads, and these patches are stored on the device (not the cartridge), so that could become its own issue, but the base game should stay functional for a very, very long time.

Anyway, nothing I’ve said here is particularly groundbreaking. It’s sad that the Wii Shop is no more, but… it was inevitable. One thing that has, fortunately, been archived: that lovely, lovely theme music.


Be gone, 2018

I don’t really consume a lot of current media1, and have accordingly joked that if I made a best-media-I-consumed-in-2018 list, it would just be re-reading Sailor Moon and a bunch of video games from the early 2000s. But, digging a bit deeper, 2018 was one of the rare years that I did consume slightly more current cultural artifacts. So, why the fuck not: let’s list off the best of the best that 2018 had to offer me.

I’m not going into movies, because I watched very few 2018 movies (and in general, I am disappointed by movies). I would have included Mary and the Witch’s Flower, but that was 2017 somehow. Holy heck, this year was a horrifying blur. I did just see The Favourite, which I thought was very good, but it just seems a bit… inappropriate to make any sort of judgment call when I’ve focused so little of my time on film. Also, graphic novels/manga aside, I definitely did not read any 2018 books in 2018, so… there’s that. Okay!


Portal, Commodore 64 style

I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy and emotion in video games lately, and this has really given me the itch to play through Portal again. This weekend, I did just that… sort of. Jamie Fuller1 has released a 2D adaptation of the classic for the Commodore 64 (C64), and it is pure joy. It’s quick – 20 levels with brief introductions from GLaDOS, completable in around a half hour. The C64 had a two-button mouse peripheral (the 13512) but it was uncommon enough that even graphical environments like GEOS supported moving the cursor around with a joystick. Very few games had compatibility with the mouse, and here we are in 2018 adding one more – using WAD to move and the mouse to aim/fire is a perfect translation of Portal’s modern PC controls. If you’re not playing on a real C64 with a real 1351, VICE emulates the mouse, and it works great on archive.org’s browser-based implementation as well.


The VCSthetic

The Atari VCS, better known as the 2600, was an important part of my formative years with technology. It remains a system that I enjoy via emulation, and while recently playing through some games for a future set of posts, I started to think about what exactly made so many of the (particularly lesser-quality) games have such a unique aesthetic to them. The first third-party video game company, Activision, was famously started by ex-Atari employees who wanted credit and believed the system was better suited to original titles than hacked-together arcade ports. They were correct on this point, as pretty much any given Activision game looks better than any given Atari game for the VCS. Imagic, too, was made up of ex-Atari employees, and their games were pretty visually impressive as well. Atari had some better titles toward the end of their run, but for the most part their games and those of most third-parties are visually uninspiring. Yet the things that make them uninspiring are all rather unique to the system:


A few of my favorite: Tetrises (Tetrii? Tetrodes?)

I spent a couple of weeks writing this, and of course remembered More Thoughts basically as soon as I uploaded it. For starters, I had somehow completely forgotten about Minna no Soft Series: Tetris Advance for the GBA, which is a somewhat difficult to find Japanese release superior to Tetris Worlds in every imaginable way. Second, I neglected to mention leveling details and have updated the Puyo Puyo Tetris and mobile sections accordingly (as of 10-28).

Tetris, the ‘killer app’ of the Game Boy and proven-timeless time-sink has a pretty bizarre history. Alexey Pajitnov originally wrote it as a proof-of-concept for a Soviet computer that lacked graphics capability. Pajitnov’s coworkers ported the game to the IBM PC, and its availability on consumer hardware meant that unofficial ports popped up across the globe, and licensing deals were struck without Pajitnov’s involvement. Facing some difficult decisions regarding licensing, Pajitnov gave the Soviet Union the rights to the game. Licensing was then handled through a state-sponsored company known as Elorg (the famous Game Boy pack-in deal was during the Elorg era). During this period, brick colors and rules were inconsistent from this Tetris to that Tetris. Some games branded Tetris during this era bore next-to-no resemblance to the game we all know and love.

The Elorg deal was temporary by design, and some years later Pajitnov got the rights back and formed The Tetris Company. The Tetris Company has proven to be an absurdly aggressive intellectual property monster, which is hardly surprising given the game’s licensing history1. The Tetris Company has done one positive thing, though: standardized the rules and the colors of blocks into something known as the Tetris Guideline. This means that any Tetris from the late ‘90s and newer is largely interchangeable2 – and if you can make out the color of the next piece from the corner of your eye, you know what shape it is. The consistency is valuable, and even though years of NES Tetris have left me rather untalented at T-spins, all of my favorite Tetris games are of the modern sort. This also largely means that the distinction really boils down to hardware, but that’s kind of important when some form of the game has been released for pretty much any given system. So on that note, the four I most often reach for are:


Americana

Americana was successfully funded on Kickstarter! Be sure to check out the Kickstarter campaign or the quick start rules.

A while back, I wrote lovingly of a sweet little tabletop RPG (TTRPG) called Mirror. Currently, I am in the middle of a campaign of an upcoming (to Kickstarter, October 1) TTRPG by the same author (a personal friend, it’s worth noting1), entitled Americana. I have no real desire to discuss the nitty-gritty mechanics of, say, where the dice go and how to use them, but as far as my experience is concerned this all works well. I don’t mean to be dismissive of the gears that make the clock tick – all the little details are incredibly important and difficult to make work. I just don’t think that writing about them is particularly expressive, and Americana has a lot of implementation facets that really make for a compelling experience. These experiential details are what I’d prefer to discuss.


Solo play: Cardventures: Stowaway 52

When I first wrote the ‘Solo play’ series, they were basically the top five solo board/card games that I was playing at the time, in order of preference. Adding to this series at this point is just adding more solo games that I love, the order isn’t particularly meaningful anymore.

Beyond nostalgia, I’ve enjoyed a lot of the modern takes on the Choose Your Own… errm… Narrative style of book. Recently, my fellow commuters and I have been laughing and stumbling our way through Ryan North’s 400-page Romeo and/or Juliet, which I highly recommend. There are great independent works up at chooseyourstory.com. It’s an art form that’s alive and well, and has grown beyond the exclusive realm of children. Does a book that you read out of order, and often fail to bring to a happy conclusion count as a game? Does it warrant a post in my ‘Solo play’ series?

Cardventures: Stowaway 52 by Gamewright is a card-based version of the choosable narrative. The premise is something along the lines of being stuck on an alien ship set to destroy Earth. The assumption is that you like Earth, and would therefore like to keep this plan from happening. My initial suspicion was that the thing should’ve just been a book, and that the card-based system was a cost-cutting measure or a gimmick. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was quite wrong about this.


Sea Duel

HOW TO PLAY THE GAME:

  1. Slide ON/OFF switch to “ON” position. Listen to a few bars of the song “Anchors Away [sic]” and see a computer graphic of the American flag appear on the screen.

Such begins the instruction booklet for the Microvision game, Sea Duel. A few days back, I wrote about the Microvision, and reviewed the handful of games I had at the time. I figured I’d acquire the handful of remaining games, and in several months or whenever, I’d sum them all up in one more post. But then Sea Duel came in the mail. This game is such a prime example of depth in a limited system, that I feel compelled to discuss it on its own. Putting aside the hilarity of describing listening to a song and looking at a flag as one of the steps you must take to start playing, it highlights one of the immediate standout features of this game – despite having 256 pixels, a piezo buzzer, and ridiculously limited processing power and storage space, the game actually has an intro screen that shows something resembling an American flag and plays something that resembles “Anchors Aweigh”.


256 pixels

I’ve been restoring a Milton Bradley Microvision and am now happily at the point where I have a fully functional unit. Introduced in 1979, it’s known as the first portable game console with interchangeable cartridges. Anyone who has scoured eBay and yard sales for Game Boys knows that the monochrome LCDs of yore were fairly sensitive to heat and even just age. For a system ten years older than the Game Boy (and one that sold far fewer numbers), functional units are fairly hard to come by. But for a while, I’ve been invested in patching one together, and I plan to enjoy it until it, too, gives up the ghost1.


Another World

Is there a word for nostalgia, but bad? Kind of like how you can have a nightmare that is on one hand an objectively terrible experience, but on the other… fascinating, compelling even. When I was quite young, the household computer situation was a bit of a decentralized mess. I guess the Commodore 64 was the family computer, but it was essentially mine to learn 6510 ML and play Jumpman on. My sister had a Macintosh Quadra which I guess was largely for schoolwork, but it had a number of games on it that were positively unbelievable to my 8-bit trained eyes. Among these was the bane of my wee existence, Another World1.

I guess I’m about to give away a few spoilers, but they’re all from the first minute or so of punishment play. Another World begins with a cutscene where we learn that our protagonist is a physics professor named Lester who drives a Ferrari2. At this point, we realize we are dealing with a science fiction title. Lester starts doing some very professorly things on his computer, and then some lightning strikes his ARPANET wires or whatever and suddenly our protagonist is deep underwater! Some kind of sea monster grabs him, and… game over?! The cutscenes are rendered with the same beautifully polygonal rotoscoping as the rest of the game, so it’s entirely possible that you die several times watching this scene before grasping that you’re actually supposed to press buttons now.

This stressful memory came back hard upon recently purchasing a Switch and inexplicably making this year’s port of Another World my first purchase. Well, I guess it is explicable: ‘nostalgia, but bad.’ The frustrations of a game that will let you die if you simply do nothing within the first five seconds had not changed much from my childhood. This is a fundamental part of the experience; Another World is a game that wants you to die. It demands that you die. A lot. It’s a lovely game, and one that I’m sure a lot of folks remember (fondly or otherwise) from their Amigas and Macs, but I couldn’t help but think that this sort of trial-and-error experience really wouldn’t fly today if not for nostalgia3. Though I have to ask myself, how does this differ from, say, Limbo, another game that tricks you into death at every turn?

The next death in Another World is when little polygonal slug-looking things slip a claw into Lester’s leg, collapsing him. You have to kind of squish them just right, and it’s the first of many deadly puzzles that rely more on a very finicky sort of perfection rather than just a clever solution. Slightly further into the game, Lester faces a challenge that neatly sums up the whole problem: perfect positioning and perfect timing are required to dodge two screens worth of oddly-timed falling boulders. These moments are very reminiscent of the frustratingly exacting challenges in Dragon’s Lair, a point of inspiration for designer Éric Chahi4. I think this is where a modern take like Limbo feels less annoying in its murderous tendencies – you rarely die because you didn’t time something out to the nanosecond or position yourself on just the right pixel; you die because something crafty in the evil, evil environment outsmarted you.

This sort of thing seems to be a point of maturity for gaming in general. The aforementioned Jumpman was one of my favorite games back in the day, but it was painstakingly picky down to the pixel. Collision detection has eased up in modern times, and additional system resources give designers a lot more room to make challenges diverse and clever instead of simply difficult-by-any-means-necessary. Another World’s spiritual successor, Flashback5 definitely still had these moments, but by the time its 3D sequel, Fade to Black came out, things were much less picky.

I’m certain I beat both Flashback and Fade to Black, but I don’t think I ever had it in me to get through Another World. I guess this was part of why I jumped right on the Switch port. The game has won many battles, but I do intend to win the war. And the fact of the matter is, that for all my griping, it is still an incredibly enjoyable game. ‘Nostalgia, but bad’ certainly doesn’t mean that the game is bad, it means that the game forced all of my respective memories to be bad. The graphics have a unique quality about them6, and the sparse atmosphere feels very modern. The challenges are often interesting, even when they’re more technical than cerebral. It’s a game that I think is best experienced in short spurts, so as not to be consumed by the seemingly infinite tedium of frustrating deaths. It’s a product of its time, and must be treated as such. And while its demands certainly reveal its age, little else about it feels out of place on a portable console in 2018.


Part Time UFO

Somehow, I missed that HAL Laboratory (creators of the Kirby franchise) had broken into the mobile market earlier this year with the game Part Time UFO1. I tend to be oblivious to even these big mobile releases because I’m just generally not that into the mobile game scene2. Touch controls are limiting at best, and the market is saturated with free-to-play snares. If anybody is going to release a mobile gem, though, HAL is bound to, so I snatched this thing up as soon as I heard about it.

In Part Time UFO, you control a flying saucer (oddly reminiscent of UFO Kirby) with a claw-game-esque grabber attached to it. Every level has a bunch of objects, and a place to put them. Some of the objects are mandatory, others might net you extra points or help you meet a bonus goal. The primary goal is usually straightforward – put all of the important objects on the target, get five objects on the target, get the objects to fit a particular shape on the target, etc. Each stage additionally has three bonus goals. One is usually a timer, and the other two either involve stacking things perfectly, not dropping things, stacking more things than required, etc. The real trick comes from the fact that the target area is small, so you pretty much have to stack things. The physics of swinging something four times your size from a flaccid claw make this stacking less than simple.

The levels are adorably-themed, and the themes tend to influence the overall challenge. For instance, my least favorite are the ‘Lab’ levels, which require you to fit Tetris-like blocks into a precise shape – which feels like a bit much going on all at once. But this adds a nice bit of variety, I think there will be some themes that a given person really looks forward to unlocking more of, and some that are less captivating (though still enjoyable).

Points equate to money, and money can be used to buy new outfits for the UFO. Aside from being cute (and occasionally referential to other HAL properties – Kirby’s parasol comes to mind), these affect the control of the UFO in various ways. Certain challenges benefit more from some outfits than others, but generally it seems like you can pop one on that gives you a boost in control that makes you more comfortable, and just leave it. I made the mistake of buying a speedy outfit first, and became very quickly frustrated with the game.

Make no mistake, the game can be frustrating. But never to the point where it feels insurmountable or stops being fun. Part of it is probably just how charming and sweet the whole thing is. The challenges are goofy (stacking cheerleaders, balancing hamsters on a circus elephant, and of course placing cows onto a truck), and even when successfully completed, the end result is often uproarious. This is one thing I wish they had included – some kind of gallery feature of all your wacky stacks.

I haven’t completed the game yet, so I’m not sure how many levels there are. I definitely think it’s worth $43 – it’s just so joyful, well-polished, and fun – everything I expect from HAL. I do think the default controls – a fake analog stick and button type deal – are awful. That control scheme is bad enough for games in landscape orientation, but even with my tiny hands and Plus-sized phone, I could not figure out how to hold my phone so it would work. Fortunately there’s a one-handed control that’s a little bit awkward, but still streets ahead of the faux stick.


Solo play: Coffee Roaster

When I first wrote the ‘Solo play’ series, they were basically the top five solo board/card games that I was playing at the time, in order of preference. Adding to this series at this point is just adding more solo games that I love, the order isn’t particularly meaningful anymore.

Solo board games don’t seem to get a lot of distribution. Deep Space D-6 is still rather tricky to come by, SOS Titanic sells in the triple-digits on eBay, and it’s only recently that I managed to acquire a copy of Saashi and Saashi’s highly-regarded single-player bag-builder, Coffee Roaster. The game is accurately described by its title: you are roasting a batch of coffee beans over the course of however many turns you think you need, and then tasting the result to see how closely your roast matched the target.

Coffee Roaster is essentially played by pulling a handful of tokens out of a bag, potentially using some of them for some immediate and/or future benefits, increasing the roast level of any of the bean tokens that were pulled out, and then returning them to the bag. This is wonderfully thematic – the longer you take, the darker the overall roast becomes. Adding to this thematic element, useless moisture tokens evaporate (are pulled from the game) over time, before first and second crack phases occur yielding a more significant increase in roast level as well as adding harmful smoke tokens to the bag. The game is definitely on a timer, and while the effect-yielding flavor tokens allow you to play with time a bit by adjusting the roast, ultimately you need to be mindful of how dark your beans have gotten before you stop the roast and move on to the tasting (scoring) phase.

Scoring involves pulling tokens from the bag and placing them in a cup (which holds ten tokens) or on a tray (which holds either three or five, depending on whether or not you picked up the extra tray). You can stop at any time, but a major penalty is incurred for failing to fill the cup up to ten tokens. Whatever roast you’ve chosen has a target roast level, as well as flavor profile requirements. Again, all thematic to the point where my coffee-loving self was giddy over the little details.

The game has quite a few rules to get through; you absolutely want to read the rules start-to-finish before diving in. It can be a little bit easy to forget to do this or that, but for the most part the theme and artwork help guide you once you’re comfortable with the rules. There is one serious omission to this, however, and that relates to the aforementioned flavor profile tokens. Aside from leaving them in the bag to be used for scoring, these can be pulled out and played in order to achieve certain effects. As an example, I mentioned the extra tray, which you gain by sacrificing two flavor effect tokens while roasting. However, any time you give up a token in this way, there is an additional effect that controls the roast and must immediately be performed. One of the tokens turns (say) a single level two bean into two level one beans, one of them preserves the level of two beans, and the third turns (say) two level two beans into a single level four bean. The problem is that there’s no indication of this on the board, or the player aid. No indication that the effect must be performed, nor which effect goes with which token. It is really easy to forget to do this, and even if you remember, you probably need that page of the rulebook open to remind you which does what. This is my biggest complaint about the game, and I’ll be making myself an improved player aid to remedy it.

I really do love Coffee Roaster; though I haven’t gotten particularly good at it yet. Fortunately, once I do, there are a ton of ways to control the difficulty. Several levels of difficulty in beans, a three-round vs. single-round variant, there’s an on-board mechanism for tracking the roast that can be eschewed. There’s a lot of room to grow into this game, and I fully intend to do that.


Mirror

You should immediately follow this link to the single-page tabletop RPG system, Mirror. There you will find my review, which is likely a more cohesive version of this post. You will also find a couple of other reviews from friends who playtested the game alongside me, and you will find the official description, and you will find the words ‘Pay what you want,’ to which I say… it’s worth a decent wad of cash.

Mirror does two things very well. First, it exists as a single-page ‘accelerated’ tabletop RPG system. Second, it breaks the tabletop mold in a meaningful way. It does the latter by basing character generation on real-world friendship. The former is aided by this, but is additionally accomplished by a simple dice-pool mechanic that drives interactions and health.

The dice pool mechanic is straightforward and covered by the rules, and not entirely worth expounding upon. CharGen is far more interesting, and is based upon the real human physically sitting across from you. I entered this rather nervous, and ended up playing across from people who I trust1 implicitly, but honestly have a hard time distilling to their core essence. You see, you play as an abstracted version of the person you sit across from, and during CharGen, you isolate four of that person’s strong suits, and two of their weaknesses. Without being an utter piece of shit, of course. I opted to play my weaknesses as counterpoints to my strengths — where my friend was absurdly creative, that creativity made her ideas occasionally impractical.

My best friend in the whole world games with me, and I am very grateful that in playtesting Mirror, I was not sat opposite her. Not for fear of insulting her during CharGen, but simply because I actually think I had to soak in what I love about other players in said group. A lack of closeness (let’s call it) made me feel a lot closer to the friends I played as. I guess Mirror has a way of doing that — it’s like a forced empathy, but since these are people you want to empathize with, it just makes you love them more.

And, this is important in the game, and brings me back to the first point — this is a single-pager. There are expectations for these things — quick, and simple to broach. I, personally, love Fate Accelerated Edition (FAE) as a quick, accessible tabletop system. But even FAE has barriers to entry… CharGen can theoretically be as long as a campaign, and for a new player, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be invested. Something about playing as one of your fellow gamers has a strange way of making you invested. And CharGen is quick and straightforward as you are simply… describing your buddy.

In my review on the DriveThruRPG page, I describe the friendship element and the one-page/one-off element as being intimately intertwined, and that’s really the magic of Mirror, I think. To non-gamers, even a quick system like FAE can be intimidating. But Mirror allows you to build a world, build a scenario and give your players an inherent motivation and set of character attributes — these are both dependent upon someone they care about IRL.

Mirror terrified me at first. Because I’m timid, and I’m bad at breaking even the people I know the most intimately into their prime components. But there’s enough of a balance between abstraction and familiarity that the whole thing is just… really comfortable. This is probably a first: I’m going to smash a redundant link here: go check out Mirror, it’s… special.


The death of Miitomo

Well, damn. Come May 9, Nintendo is shuttering Miitomo. I don’t know that it was ever terribly popular – it was Nintendo’s earliest venture onto mobile, but it wasn’t really a game. There were some game-like elements, primarily throwing your body into a pachinko machine to win clothes, but ultimately it was a dollhouse. A game of dress-up.

Entertainment, in all forms and across all media, is often a tool for escape. Some wish to lose themselves in a setting, others as a passive bystander in a plot, still others seeing pieces of themselves in fictional characters. A dollhouse experience is largely concentrated on this third aspect – expressing yourself, consequence-free, as this blank canvas of a person. While certainly a valid means of escape for anyone, this seems especially valuable to trans folks and people questioning their gender identity. The answers and comments on in-game questions revealed a staggering number of trans Miitomo users. I don’t really know of another game of dress-up that will serve as a viable replacement to Miitomo, and this is heartbreaking.

The May 9 date will put Miitomo’s lifespan at just over two years. Unfortunately, the app is entirely dependent upon the service, and assets users have acquired will not be retained locally, etc. While it seems plausible that local copies could be downloaded so that users could still fire up the app and change into any number of outfits they had previously purchased1, this will not be the case2. This is not a matter of ‘no more updates’, this is ‘no more app’. And that’s… a fairly short lifespan, even for a niche non-game. This absolute dependence on hosted assets makes me wonder about some of Nintendo’s other mobile forays. When Super Mario Run stops being worth the upkeep, will there be no more updates, or will the game cease to function altogether? Nintendo is in a weird spot where a lot of their casual gaming market has been overtaken by mobile. Obviously they want to get in on that and reclaim some market, but they just haven’t proven that they quite ‘get it’ yet. Or perhaps rendering a game entirely ephemeral is meant to prove to us the value of a cartridge. I… doubt it.

On January 24, Nintendo stopped selling in-game coins and tickets3 for real-world money. Daily bonuses, which used to be a handful of coins or a single ticket, are now 2,000 coins and 5 tickets every day. That’s a lot of in-game purchasing power for the next few months, and I’m glad that Nintendo is saying ‘here, just go nuts and have fun while it lasts’. Better than making this announcement on May 1, and operating as usual (including in-app purchases) until then.

I am truly sad about this; Miitomo has been oddly important to me. There is a lot of sadness and anger in the answers to the public in-game question running until May 9, ‘What was your favorite outfit in Miitomo? Show it off when you answer!’ Users are elaborately staging Miifotos with dead-looking Miis stamped ‘DELETED’, Miis crying on their knees, demonic-looking Miis labeled ‘Nintendo’ standing over innocent-looking Miis labeled ‘Miitomo’ with table knives sticking out of them. Ouch. We have #savemiitomo, #longlivemiitomo, #justice4miitomo (bit extreme, that) hashtags popping up. Suffice it to say, there is a frustrated community. I’ll be the first to admit that it never would have had the prominence of a Super Mario Bros. or Animal Crossing game, but Miitomo has been very meaningful to a lot of people.


As Queen, I keep dying

This post might contain spoilers for the games Reigns and/or Reigns: Her Majesty.

Reigns was a game that really kind of blew my mind when it came out. I guess the idea was to sort of frame a narrative around Tinder-esque interactions, which I didn’t really grasp (Tinder seems like the polar opposite of how I wish to find a mate). To me it was just this story, played over a whole bunch of games (some of which you had to fail), each game potentially affecting future games, and all handled via this incredibly simple decision tree mechanic. For the most part, you have two decisions at any given time (swipe left or right, that’s the Tinder-y bit). It was an oddly engaging game.

Now, in Reigns, you played as a king. So if they were to make a sequel, it would only be fitting that you would play as a queen. This is Reigns: Her Majesty. I don’t really make a habit of reviewing mobile games1 on this blog, but Her Majesty is fucking phenomenal. I don’t know if Leigh Alexander was involved in the first game, but she definitely has a writing credit on this one, and it shows. Reigns was clever, but Her Majesty is ridiculously tight, smart, and progressive.

Part of my draw to the game is likely bias — you play as a woman, a woman who I deeply respect wrote the thing, and the entire game just oozes with femininity and feminism. This has always been a sticking point for me, I will become far more invested in a game where I can play as a woman vs. one where I’m stuck as a man. That’s not necessarily a knock on any given game (or unwarranted praise on any other given game), it’s just my bias. But, trying to look past that bias, this Queen’s world undeniably gives Her Majesty far more depth than its predecessor.

If you never played the first game, it’s worth briefly describing what swiping left or right accomplishes. For any given scenario, swiping either direction may raise or lower one or more of your piety, popular favor, might, or financial2 stats. If any given stat maxes out or reaches zero, you die. This is the same in Her Majesty, but there’s a much bigger struggle (at least, how I’ve played it) with the church. Part of this is that a major aspect of the plot involves astrology and the occult, and diving into that essentially requires you to defy the church. Part of it is that you’re constantly given the opportunity to flirt with all the other women in the game and I mean, how could you not!? Oh, and occasionally the Cardinal asks you to conceal your pendulous melons (or something), which… no, I dress how I want.

And this is why I think the feminine aspect really gives the game depth. Personally, I find it hard to play in a way that defies my feminist sensibilities (and, in fact, a random owl occasionally pops up to tell you how feminist you are or situate you in various fandoms3), but this is often detrimental to my score – you are, after all, ‘just’ the Queen, and in a sense must maintain your place. But beyond my personal hangups, this still adds a great depth to the game. Choices aren’t as clear-cut, and your level of control isn’t always what it seems. Layer the whole astrological woman magic icing on top, and it’s an even more impossibly complex swipe-left-or-right game than Reigns.

This complexity and my desire to be an empowered Queen means that I have been losing very quickly, very often. Which might be grating in a lesser game, but somehow losing Her Majesty usually feels pretty damned virtuous.


Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp has been available stateside for about a week now, and it is… strange. This post on ‘Every Game I’ve Finished’ (written by Mathew Kumar) mirrors a lot of my thoughts – I would recommend reading it before reading this. I haven’t really played a lot of Animal Crossing games before, and I tend to avoid free-to-play1 games. The aforementioned post is largely predicated on the fact that Pocket Camp doesn’t fully deliver on either experience. Which, I guess I wouldn’t really know, but something definitely feels odd about the game to me.

Early in his post, Kumar states that ‘[Pocket Camp] makes every single aspect of it an obvious transaction’, which is comically true. My socialist mind has a hard time seeing the game as anything but a vicious parody of capitalism. My rational mind, of course, knows this is not true because the sort of exploitative mundaneness that coats every aspect of the game is the norm in real life.

This becomes even more entertaining when you observe how players set prices in their Markets. For the uninitiated, when your character has a surplus of a thing, they can offer that thing for sale to other players. The default price is its base value, but you can adjust the sale price down a small amount or up a large amount. Eventually you’ll likely just max out your inventory and be forced to put things up for sale in this Market. More eventually, you’ll max out the Market and be forced to just throw stuff away without getting money for it. But in the meantime, people (strangers and friends) will see what you have to offer and be given the opportunity to buy it.

For the most part, if you need an item (I use the term ‘need’ loosely), it is common, and either hopping around or waiting a couple of hours will get you that item. So there should be no reason to charge a 1000% markup on a couple of apples. But (in my experience thus far) that is far more common than to see items being sold for the minimum (or even their nominal value). I don’t know if it’s just players latching on to the predatory nature of free-to-play games or what, and I’m really curious to know if it works. I’ve been listing things in small quantities (akin to what an animal requests) for the minimum price, and while I’ve sold quite a few items, most still go to waste – I can’t imagine anything selling at ridiculous markups.

So far this description of a capitalist hellscape has probably come off as though I feel negatively toward the game, which I really don’t. To return to Kumar, he leaves his post stating that he hasn’t given up on the game yet, but ‘like Miitomo, the first time I miss a day it’s all over.’ This comparison to Miitomo is apt, and a perfect segue into why I’m invested in this minor dystopia.

Miitomo (another Nintendo mobile thing) is really just a game where you… decorate a room and try on clothes. You answer questions and play some pachinko-esque minigames in order to win decorations and clothes, but it’s basically glorified dress-up. It seems like mostly young people playing it, but it’s also just a wonderful outlet for baby trans folks, people questioning gender, and any number of people seeking a little escape. I find Miitomo to be very valuable and underrated, and a lot of the joy Miitomo brings me is echoed by Pocket Camp.

While the underlying concept behind Pocket Camp is that you’re a black market butterfly dealer or whatever, there’s also a major ‘dollhouse’ component to it. You buy and receive cute clothes and change your outfits, which has no bearing on the game. You buy things to decorate your campsite which (effectively2) has no bearing on the game. You can drop 10,000 dollars bells on a purse that does nothing but sit in the dirt looking pretty. I guess it’s hypocritical to praise this meaningless materialism, but it’s a nice escape. A little world to mess around in and make your own.

I don’t know how long I’ll obsessively island-hop the world of Pocket Camp, but I think that (like Miitomo) once the novelty wears off, I’ll still pop in to play around with my little world when it occurs to me to do so. And the whole time, in my mind, it will remain a perfectly barbed satire on capitalism.


SVG d6

I’ve posted a few games-in-posts and other toys that involve rolls of dice, and my strategy is to use Unicode die-face symbols. I think, for the foreseeable future, this is how I will continue to handle such matters – it’s clean, compact, and rather portable. For whatever reason, I was wondering how best to achieve this in an SVG containing all of the pips, with the face selected via class and modified via CSS. So, below is an SVG die that contains seven pips, with its class set to .die1. But if we set it to .die2, it hides the (0-indexed, left to right, top to bottom) pips 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. If we set it to .die4, it hides pips 2, 3, and 4. This works, of course, for .die3, .die5, and .die6 too, of course. Since pips 0 and 6 and pips 1 and 5 will always be (in)visible together, we can combine either set into a single class, .pip06, and .pip15 to simplify the .die classes that hide them.

Pros include the ability to customize dice (regular D6s and fudge dice, say, or simply multicolored pips), the potential to mix in other-sided dice, and likely superior accessibility. Cons are complexity and file-size (SVGs must be embedded into posts as SVG elements). The latter can be mitigated by generation of the SVGs from whatever JS would be running the show, but it’s still a bit clumsy. An interesting experiment, regardless of whether or not I ever use it.


Discoveries

‘Timeline’ is a game that I’ve been pushing to non-gamers lately. The premise is very simple – everyone has a (public) hand of several historical events, inventions, artistic creations, discoveries, etc.; anything notable and dated. The flip-side of every card has the corresponding date. One event starts the timeline date-side up. Players must then choose one of their cards and make an educated (or not, I suppose) guess as to where it goes in the timeline relative to the other events. Place it, flip it, leave it in place if correct or pull a new card if not. Gameplay is simple, fast, and almost educational. There are a whole bunch of sets, and they can be freely mixed-and-matched.

One of these sets is ‘Science and Discoveries’. Something always felt a little off about this set, and the last time I played it, I think I figured it out. There are 110 cards in a given set, and I have (to the best of my ability) narrowed this one down to a handful of categories:

I had to make a few executive decisions so that I could neatly categorize things, and if I did this categorical exercise again right now, everything would likely be give or take a couple cards. But the heart of the matter is that the creators (rightfully) marked 22% of the cards as having been discovered (by Europeans). If my categorization is even remotely accurate, that’s 40% of the physical/corporeal ‘discovery’ cards.

Now, that ‘rightfully’ up there is important – I am glad that Asmodee opted to point out that these peoples and places were only ‘discovered’ in a very surface manner – the pygmies already knew that the pygmies existed. And this isn’t a very deep thought, hopefully it’s immediately obvious to any given American or European that their history textbooks are written with a bias and to a purpose. But I guess what fascinated me were those percentages.

This is by no means representative of a history textbook, nor the average person’s understanding of history. But I can’t imagine it’s terribly far off, either. Coming from a colonialist sort of viewpoint, a lot of our ‘big moments in history’ come from finding this or that ‘savage’ population and treating them not as humankind, but as a scientific subject. And here we have a truly trivial history game telling us that >20% of the notable achievements the creators could come up with are, in fact, just stuff we’ve decided we can claim as having discovered. Despite either it (for lack of a better phrasing) having discovered itself, or other (‘lesser’) civilizations having beaten us to the punch. I suppose there is far more important stuff to worry about right now, even in the context of colonialism, but I still find it to be an intriguing glimpse into our historical ownership.


Game-in-a-post: Rolling Market

Here it is! Game-in-a-post of ‘Rolling Market’, which I’m still pretty happy with, truth be told. Rules are here. This JS implementation has one bug I’m still aware of which lets you cheat during the endgame, so just… don’t do that until I fix it.

A few additional tips/thoughts on the game:


Rolling Market introduction & rules

I did end up implementing this as a game-in-a-post.

I’ve been testing out a little solo game design lately that’s somewhat inspired by Sackson’s Solitaire Dice. Inspired in the sense that I was looking to come up with something that has that same lack of Yahtzee-esque luck mitigation, instead relying on intuition, probabilities, and risk management. Much like Sackson’s game, this can backfire, and the dice can utterly screw you. But even when that happens, there’s enough going on to where the game is still enjoyable (in my humble opinion).

Full rules are listed after the jump, and will repeat some of this brief overview, but here’s the idea: players have four companies they can buy and sell stock shares from. On every turn, the player rolls dice which influence the current value of a given company’s shares. Buying and selling also affects values. On some turns, the market is closed, but when it is open the player can buy shares of one company and/or sell shares of a different company. The player goes through 12 of these buying/selling turns, and scores based on their final pile of cash.

I have a JS game-in-a-post implementation nearly ready to go, so that will appear shortly, along with a PDF of these rules, and potentially a few more strategic thoughts. Until then…


Game-in-a-post: Sid Sackson's Solitaire dice

Sid Sackson, in his book A Gamut of Games1, describes a solitaire dice game that I have grown very fond of. Fond enough that I decided to whip up a little js version of it, found below. I won’t go into the rules here, others have done that well enough. I will just put a couple of thoughts out there on why I find the game so compelling. Dice are obviously the epitome of randomness; roll-and-move mechanics are universally bemoaned for this. Games that try not to be awful while still using dice generally do so with some sort of randomness mitigation technique. Yahtzee is an easy example – a player gets three rolls to a turn to mitigate luck. Sackson’s Solitaire Dice does not offer any mitigation, and in fact it can be brutal. You could theoretically lose 400 points on your last turn. And while this sounds objectively terrible, it really isn’t. Occasionally you will have a game where the dice just torture you, but for the most part the game forces you to think about probabilities, and attempt to control pacing. If the game is going really well, you may want to try to blow one of your scratch piles up toward the game-ending 8 marks. Similarly, if things aren’t going great, it would probably be in your best interest to take poorly-scoring pairs in order to scratch dice evenly. In my plays thus far, I’d say that a meh game is in the -100-100 point range, a successful game being 350+.


Solo play: One Deck Dungeon

On to my number one solo game at the moment: Chris Cieslik’s One Deck Dungeon, released by Asmadi Games. This game takes all the uncertainty and the brutality of a roguelike, and packs it into a small deck of cards and a pile of dice. One’s character has attributes which indicate the number and color of dice that can be rolled in resolving a conflict. A section of dungeon, so to speak, is entered by spending time (discarding cards). This fills the player up to four face-down dungeon cards, which can then be encountered on a turn by flipping them up. One can either attempt to defeat the card or leave it for later, wasting time and available space to fill with new dungeon cards. Defeating these cards involves rolling the dice allowed by the player’s character attributes and placing them to beat numbers on the card. These can be color-specific or not, and spaces can either require the placement of one die or allow multiple dice. Unfilled slots are what ultimately cause damage – to either health, time, or both. Assuming the player lives, resolving a conflict allows them three choices – the card can be taken as an item (additional dice and/or health), a skill or potion, or experience.


Solo play: Deep Space D-6

My (probably, maybe) second most-played solo game currently is one of dice, cards, and worker placement. Designed by Tony Go and released by Tau Leader (in very small print runs, it seems, though one can print-and-play), Deep Space D-6 packs a lot of game into a very small package. One of several tiny boards with illustrated ships, explanations of their features, countdown tracks for hull and shield health, and placement areas for worker dice sits in front of the player. To the right of the players ship, tiny threat cards are added every turn, and positioned to indicate their health. The player rolls their crew dice for the turn and assigns them to various attack and defense roles. Worker actions are taken, then a die is rolled to see which, if any, enemies activate and attack on that turn.


Solo play: Friday

Friday is third up in my list of top solo games, and routinely comes up whenever solo board/card games are being discussed. Designed by Friedemann Friese and released by Rio Grande, Friday is a card game in which the player takes on the role of the titular character, helping Robinson Crusoe survive his time on the island. The theme is not one that has been beaten to the ground, and while the game by no means drips with theme, it makes sense and the art supporting it is goofy fun. Even if the theme does nothing for you, the gameplay shines so much that it’s easy to get lost in it.

For as small as the game is, as few card as there are, Friday is just loaded with decisions. Essentially, every turn involves pulling a hazard from the hazard deck (actually, decision number one: you pull two and choose one to take on), then pulling a series of counterattacks from your fighting deck. You get so many fighting cards for free, and then pay life points to keep drawing. Additionally, if you opt to simply lose the fight instead, you will lose life points. While the primary goal here is to obviously not run out of life, you’re also essentially building your deck for the future – defeated hazards become fighting cards, and a lost fight gives you the opportunity to get rid of poor fighting cards that you may have drawn that round. When your fighting deck runs out, you get to shuffle it anew, including the new cards you’ve gotten from defeating hazards, but you also end up throwing one aging card in with negative effects every time this happens.


Solo play: Onirim

Beyond Dungeon Roll, this list is a real struggle to rank. Do I push games with creative mechanics higher, or games that ultimately speak to me more? I’m inclined to go with the former, in this case, only because the things that make my no. 3 work as a solo game make for such a tight, decision-addled game. But Onirim (Shadi Torbey, Z-Man Games), my no. 4 may very well get more play for its relative lightness, small footprint, and fascinating artwork/theming.


Solo play: Intro and Dungeon Roll

As someone who is far more into board (and card) than video games, as someone who spends a lot of time alone, and as someone who has immense insomnia (compounded by the ridiculous anxiety brought on by recent politics), the volume and quality modern board/card games continues to impress me. While I know I’m not alone in seeking these out, I do think they get pushed to the side a bit, and I’ve been meaning to get a few write-ups out there about the games I’ve been enjoying as of late. Initially, I’m going to present this series as my current top five, but in the future I’ll be tacking others on in no particular order. With that…

First up is Dungeon Roll from Tasty Minstrel Games and designer Chris Darden. Its appeal is pretty clear: it’s cheap, has fun dice, and comes in a tiny cardboard chest that you pull treasure from during the game. They bill it as playing 1-4, but multiplayer is essentially just every individual playing a solo game while others watch. All of the encounters are based on dice, with no automatic rerolls (some character abilities grant rerolls), so it is very much a game of randomness and of pushing one’s luck. There are a handful of expansions out there (all bundled together in a cheap package at CoolStuff Inc., conveniently), which are largely just new player characters, though the winter one also adds some interesting new treasure.


Brains: Japanese Garden

Brains: Japanischer Garten (Japanese Garden) is a single-player game brain-teaser, if we’re being honest, from Reiner Knizia. With Knizia’s name on it, it’d be easy to assume that it’s actually some sort of solo game, but really it’s a simple set of puzzles based on this theme of a Japanese garden. If anything, it reminds me of those ThinkFun puzzles with the chunky plastic pieces, except this uses seven cardboard tiles and a stack of paper containing the puzzles. Alternatively, there is a mobile app, which I think I would recommend over the physical edition as a simple value proposition. I’m assuming since ‘Brains’ is so much more prominent than the ‘Japanese Garden’ title that perhaps more of these puzzlers are coming down the line from Knizia.

Ruleswise, the puzzle itself is quite simple. The theme is utterly unimportant (though it means we get the lovely art, so that’s something). It’s a well-designed puzzle despite not being particularly unique or groundbreaking. What fascinates me is the whole tile-laying with placement rules as a solo puzzle is actually rather clever, and opens up some thought processes on how one could make puzzles of, say, Carcassonne. I mull from time to time over ways to implement solo Carcassonne play, particularly using the limited tile set of the Demo-spiel. One way that I’ve played has been to use one meeple, and allow her to move a tile per turn in lieu of placement. Moving off of a feature scores it as is, and a meeple is placed on the feature on her side to indicate that the feature has been scored and cannot be scored again. This may or may not warrant its own post (likely not, as I think I just covered everything), but my point is that I’m always looking for a way to throw down tiles by myself. This puzzle-like concept in Brains: Japanese Garden certainly has potential with other tilesets.


The Lazy He

While searching through the rule book for ‘Raptor’ (an admittedly great game by everyone’s favorite Brunos) for a bit of errata this weekend, I came across a grossly irritating footnote early on:

Note: throughout this document male pronouns are used for the sake of simplicity and readability. It should be clearly understood that in each instance, we mean to include female players as well.

This is bullshit on so many levels. The most inclusive choice would, of course, be to use the singular they. The most sorry-gaming-is-horribly-patriarchal choice would be to use female pronouns throughout1. And while I hate enforcing the gender binary, the most ‘readable’ choice would be to use male pronouns for Player A and female for Player B or vice versa. ‘Raptor’ is exclusively a two-player game, so all of the included examples rightfully include two players. Switching between two people with a shared set of pronouns is far less readable than unique pronouns for either. Ambiguity is always a potential pitfall of pronoun usage, easily avoidable when you’re dealing with two purely hypothetical humans.

Failing all of the above, however, I’d almost prefer they just used male pronouns throughout and cut out the nonsensical and condescending footnote. The footnote reads as though ‘some woman complained that we did this once and rather than adapt we’re just going to make up a bunch of excuses.’ Whose ‘simplicity’ is this for the sake of? The reader’s? Are we to assume that they are so caught up in the masculine gamer trope that a single female pronoun would cause their brains to shut down, eternally paralyzing them, rulebook still in hand? Or is it for the sake of simplicity on the part of the writers and editors, so lazy and consumed by male hegemony that they can’t even bother to do a find-and-replace on their masculine-as-default pronouns? The message put forward by the footnote is a brutally honest display of privilege: ‘we know we should be more inclusive, but we think it’s simpler not to.’ The footnote does not read as a statement of inclusiveness, rather an outright denial of it and a mockery of the very idea.


Yamzod

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about new game concepts and designs using existing bits – dice, playing cards, checkers, &c. One such recurring thought is expanding on the Yahtzee sort of theme – solitaire dice-chucking games with poker-like scoring. It’s easy to pan Yahtzee as a garbage game, but as a quick solo activity it isn’t terrible. It isn’t great, but nor is it terrible. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been playing around with an idea for a dice game that offers a tiny bit extra in the decision-making category. I call it Yamzod, which is a name I came up with while on the brink of sleep, and have stuck with because it makes me laugh.


Super Mario Run

So, Super Mario Run has been out for half a day or so now, and I’m sure more meaningful opinions than mine are bouncing around all over the internet. It’s just too juicy to not set my own uninspired thoughts in pink internet stone, however. I’ve always been a Nintendo fan. These days I really don’t game much at all. The occasional weird indie, a nostalgic retro re-release here and there, but mostly if I’m gaming on a screen it’s either a roguelike on the computer or a board game adaptation or point-and-click (point-and-tap?) adventure on the phone. The last consoles I’ve owned were the original Wii and DS Lite. All this to say, having a Nintendo side-scroller on my phone is ridiculously exciting. The game is a ton of fun, well worth the cost of entry, and generally feels very much like a Super Mario Bros. game. A few thoughts:


Karuba: Solo

Karuba is, essentially, a solo game that two to four players play simultaneously. One player could theoretically play for a high score, but the randomness of the draw makes that a little problematic – and playing to beat a high score outside of the arcade isn’t terribly fun anyway. But as I was playing with the pieces and the tiles and thinking of a simple notation for my aforementioned hypothetical correspondence game1, I accidentally came up with what seems to be a decent solo variant for this game.


Karuba

I recently received a copy of the 2016 Spiel des Jahres nominee, ‘Karuba’. It’s a tile-laying game of sorts, albeit less free-form and less interactive than Carcassonne. It’s really about solving a puzzle more efficiently than everyone else at the table. I don’t really aim to explain or review the game, however, as plenty such explanations and reviews are already out there. There is one interesting angle that I would like to touch on, however.

I have always been a fan of correspondence chess1, the idea that the game is open, all information is public, and moves are simple enough to easily notate, pass back and forth, and replicate. It was immediately obvious to me that Karuba has a great potential as a correspondence game. Due to the lack of interaction, it will certainly be nothing like chess. But as a casual puzzler, all the pieces are there for correspondence. All information in the game is public. All players start with the same board configuration. All players place the same tile on a given turn. Because of the way this mechanic works, tiles have unique numbers and would just as easily be described in correspondence. To ease in initial setup, rows and columns of the board already have labels. The four explorers every player controls are all unique colors, and can therefore easily be described in notation.

I don’t expect a huge community to explode around correspondence Karuba, but this possible means of play immediately struck me as such a perfect fit. Kind of the icing on an already rather impressive cake.


Game-in-a-post: Yz (or, on post-specific JS/CSS requirements in Hugo)


Finding the greatest Yahtzee score

A little over a year after writing this post, I decided to make a code golf challenge of it. Not too many people submitted answers, but there was a wild one in MS-DOS Batch, as well as some interesting tricks I hadn’t thought of.

I’ve been meaning to implement a way to incorporate style or script requirements into my posts using Hugo frontmatter. I’m not there yet, and before I get there, I need a test post that requires one or the other. I thought a little toy that lets one play a turn (three rolls) of Yahtzee, and then returns the highest possible score of the roll would be a fun and simple demonstration. Aside from small straights wigging me out a little (and I still have a nagging feeling this can be optimized), it was indeed simple1 to come up with an optimal score search. Fortunately, for a single-turn score, we don’t need to worry about a few scoring rules: bonus (joker) Yahtzees, the upper row bonus, nor chance. We could implement chance easily, but it really doesn’t make sense for single-turn scoring.


A night of Pokémon Go

Tonight marked my first night spent actively hunting Pokémon; it was, in fact, the first time I’d ever bothered to catch one outside. Finding new critters in new places, seeking out pokéstops with lures attached, comparing notes with a friend… this was all fun but predictable. I guess I just also haven’t been on an evening walk in a while1, because the whole meatspace community aspect of the thing was new, and very unlike what I expected.

Walking through our main town park, which was technically closed since it was after dark, was fascinating. Where there were pokéstops, there were just masses of people huddled together… enough where it seemed rather unlikely to me that all these people actually knew each other… little social gatherings were forming in the middle of the night just out of the desire to catch virtual monsters. And while the basic idea here wasn’t surprising, the sheer scale of the groups, the sheer number of people glued to their phones and alerting others to the presence of a Goldeen really wasn’t something I had anticipated.


SCorCh, Part Two

This is an old post from an old blog; assets may be missing, links may be broken, and my opinions may differ considerably by this point… Notably, this became FENipulator.



Couple of minor developments on the scorch front. First, I have a rough flowchart whipped up. There are likely flaws in this chart, but I wanted to quickly get my thoughts diagrammed out. PDF, or Graphviz/DOT.


SCorCh - Simple Correspondence Chess

This is an old post from an old blog; assets may be missing, links may be broken, and my opinions may differ considerably by this point… Notably, this became FENipulator.

I've thought a lot in the past about correspondence chess, and the current state of such. There are a number of online solutions, most of them not so great. Twitter-based ChessTweets is my current favorite solution (anyone who wants a fight, @brhfl) although the constant barrage of DMs from the system does get somewhat irritating. I use the somewhat clumsy XBoard with a variety of engines for the sake of analysis, but using it for correspondence is far from ideal. This task seems the perfect opportunity to demonstrate that less is more, and create a CLI interface which acts as a somewhat dumb client for displaying a board and interpreting moves. While I will probably never actually code this, I hope that perhaps I will some day, and I will call it scorch for Simple Correspondence Chess.