(no subject)

Yipes. Modulo a three-hour-ish game break with the usual Tuesday crowd, spent the whole day on business correspondence and bookkeeping. I am getting nervous about my pledge to get the store online before Origins; only seven days left. I can do it, but after yesterday's meeting, and the subsequent staff meeting, there is so much else I want to do, all at once.

The store is important, and part of all this. I will finish the store.

Other Volity people are working on other fun things you will like. You will know when they're up.

---

Games: Don, again, and again dead last but at least tied with ahkond. I don't get bidding games like this, and it still fascinates me more than it annoys me. Especially if the games are short.

That one German game about the tug-of-war garden gnomes. Very light, cute and silly. The components are quite clever, and the mechanics remind me a little of Currents.

Flowerpower, finally, after hearing so much about it. It's not really my cup of tea but I can see the appeal. And yes, it's very pretty, if you're into that sort of thing (as cthulhia is).

Ker-slam

VC dood just emailed me a rejection despite his earlier invitation to meet again. To be fair, I believe that he (incorrectly) thought he'd have time to meet again with us before his screening group's Monday meeting. But they did end up meeting first, and drummed us out, so I suppose it's more efficient this way. Blat.

So we're back down to one interested potential post-seed investor, angel #2. This one is unlike the others in that he overtly wants us to succeed, which is very good, but guarantees nothing, and having only one degree of potential is too few for comfort.

I will this week pursue the homework assignment that angel #2 gave me, and which we refined on our Monday staff meeting - I get to write Perl scripts to mull jabber access logs and database tables and generate reports by god and I'm looking forward to it. This will lead to our having a real funding schedule. Right now, this is what it looks like:

[✓] Collect seed funding
[✓] Launch public beta
[ ] Collect all the other funding we'll ever need and then some
[ ] ???
[ ] Exit!

It has been pointed out to us that it starts out nice, and it ends nice, but that bit in the middle could use some refinement. So we're going to take out those middle two steps and replace them with several couplets of this template:

1. Collect $FUNDING to meet $MILESTONE
2. Meet $MILESTONE before $DATE

Where $FUNDING, in every case, is a figure significantly less than the bignum we've been tossing around lately.

(no subject)

I've written before about my observation that Japanese-produced video games seem to care far less about portraying or even acknowledging ethnic diversity than American-made games do. I've started to notice that this can also be said about European tabletop games.

I was introducing a friend to the German-originating Citadels this morning, and while going over the role cards she made a disgusted face at the Merchant. This started a conversation about an unfortunate aspect of one of my favorite games: this particular card depicts - let's be quite frank - an obvious charicature of a conniving Jew, right down to the period-appropriate red cap. I guess because it has the neutral label "Merchant" I've been able to mentally ignore the artwork, but now that I've talked about it I really can't any more. Really, would it have been so hard to draw the Merchant as, I don't know, anything else? I mean, let him keep his hat if you must, but we could have done without the full-bore Shylock posture.

In the Italian-produced Bang!, on the other hand, I have always cringed whenever the "Indians" card comes out, with its depiction of a screaming horde of warpainted braves who immediately engage in a shootout with all the active players. These are the only Native Americans who show up in the game. Now, you could argue that they are actually no more violent than every other character in the game (which after all has the goal of being the first to gun down all your friends), but if an American repackaged this game for mainstream distribution you can bet that card would turn into, I dunno, "Bandit Gang" or something, and I would have no problem at all with that.

Again, I can only theorize that these things are so because America is so much more of a polyculture than not just Japan with its video games but individual European countries with their card games, enough that what seems like a perfectly good thematic twist yonder seems over here like hair-raising insensitivity at worst and plain tackiness at best. Interesting, is all.

(no subject)

Since rikchik can't do it (without working through a translator, anyway), what are some American-themed games to play on July 4th?

Some that come to mind:
• Empire Builder
• Ticket to Ride
• TransAmerica
• Bang!
• Memoir '44 (more or less)
• Baseball (the poker variant, that is)

Maybe I should start a GeekList about this over on the Geek, eh?

(And how would you refer to America in Rikchik, anyway?)