A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Another exciting Memoir 44 game, playing scenario 40: Breakout at Klin, part of the Eastern Front expansion that classicaljunkie got me for Xmas.

M44 has kind of become "our game" - we have a reputation among some friends for liking it a maybe a little too much - but we hadn't played it in months after I got kind of burned out on it over the winter. Early summer rain combined with a good work-day put me back in the mood.

Anyway, you'll be pleased to know that even though I boasted on Twitter about how I expected to make short work of Amy's russians, she turned it around. I think I made a mistake my throwing units at Golyadi right at the start of the game, figuring I'd be able to hold them for the duration. Amy correctly focused on knocking them out for an early lead, and that kept me off-balance for the whole game. Duh: occupying territory is an endgame move in Memoir, not an opening gambit. I deserved what I got.

And, as always with Memoir 44, it really helps to remember to roll the dice well. I kept forgetting to do this, clearly. It feels like I kept rolling flags, allowing Amy's units to flounce away from all my attacks, and meanwhile she kept rolling tanks, neatly taking apart all my Panzer units.

It came down to one of those ridiculous situations where it's mutual game-point and there's two adjacent units chipping away at each other until one of them finally rolls the right symbols. But that's war for you.

Last night's random game thing was a nice success. Lots more people showed up than we expected (not complaining)! We may start doing this more often...

Finally played Goa, with classicaljunkie teaching it to three of us newbies. I loved it, feeling completely engaged for the entire two hours or so that we played. Managed to squeak out a win (pulling a tiebreaker over ahkond), which was extra-nice for me since it kills my idea that I can never do well at auction games. I wanna play this game again soon.

dougo stuck around for a bit at the end, and the three of us played Figaro (which we concluded doesn't work well with three) and then a fascinatingly mechanical game of Race for the Galaxy. It was the first time I had the Blue strategy fall into my lap, and it was a little ridiculous. My first few moves had me lay out a string of blue-producing planets and then the Consumer Markets development, which gives you lots of bonuses for having blue producers. The last six rounds had me alternating between my Produce and Consume(2xVP) action cards, hoovering up ten VPs each time, and shutting down the game quickly. There was no reason to do much of anything else! It was the first time a pattern like that emerged from this game for me.

Is it wrong to feel vaguely disenfranchised that Settlers is now officially known as just "Catan", according it its publishers (and, more to the point, the publishers of its sundry electronic editions)?

In their position, I would probably have done the same thing. But now I anticipate a future where I unconsciously judge myself as superior to anyone who calls the game "Catan" versus "Settlers", and I'm like, wow, I'm going to be very slightly more of a jerk as a result. Awesome, thanks.

OK I have heard enough about the nu-wave tabletop rolly-hitty RPGs of the last coupla years to wanna play one.

I would love to try either Descent or D&D4 sometime. Any action around here I can get in on? Anything else I should be playing?

I am in a very Memoir '44 mood. If you would like to challenge me to a game this weekend I would likely be all over it. I have the basic set and the Pacific Theater expansion, the latter of which I haven't explored nearly enough of.

I have been playing it again via classicaljunkie. After much bugging I finally got her to play BattleLore with me. She didn't like it, but it moved her to counterpropose Memoir, which neither of us have played in a long time. So a little later I blew the dust off the box and opened it and my friends it looks positively empty compared to BattleLore's monster box. It's like there's nothing inside.

And yet the game is so much fun! The rules are much simpler, and it moves a lot faster than BL, since there are fewer factors to keep in mind and check against every turn. I'm not ready to say that I like it more, but... let me say that Memoir has definitely earned its place in my Top Five, and BL hasn't gotten there yet.

It reminds me of the difference between vanilla Settlers and Cities and Knights, and the reasons folks have for preferring one over the other. It's not a perfect analogy becuase BL isn't Memoir '44 With More Stuff; the tactical strategies for moving units around is entirely different, which is part of the coolness (BL forces you to keep units clumped together or else their morale shatters, while Memoir units are better off hanging loose until it's time to gang up on an enemy). But, yes.

I am pleased to announce a new homepage for The Gameshelf, at the same location it's always had (gameshelf.jmac.org). I started to build it last week as a way to learn Movable Type 4 (which, gord willing, I may soon use to help a potential client) and finished it yesterday. This is the first time I've felt confident that I have a site for the show that people are going to want to visit more than once. This also completely obviates the blip.tv site, which I'll draw down presently.

Why, yes, there are Google ads on it now. No, I don't expect to make a significant amount of money from them today. But I've started to become quite curious about the magical world of passive income, and wish to begin some experimentation. This page is the most appropriate (or least inappropriate) one I have to spray ads onto. I like how they fit on the current layout: visible, but polite and unassuming.

In related news I'm a little embarrassed the most recent episode talks up and links to the Icehouse Game Design Competition, as the winter 2007 IGDC might have just ended before it even began with a teh drama flameout on the Icehouse mailing list. I like the competition, and hope that someday it can find a dependable moderator with an emotional stability better than a 14-year-old cheerleader's. (IIRC this is the second one to fail after Zarf retired. To this person's credit, at least they managed to push out one competition cycle, unlike the first guy, who simply vanished from the internet after all the entries were submitted.)

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It's less the mere passage of time and more the active work on another project that makes the call to return to Volity get stronger. Regardless, and despite how close we are to an alpha release, I'm still feeling pretty burned out on the whole deal. The October collapse came after almost six months of obsessed-focus work, and it was a reaction of equal magnitude, compressed into one evening and aimed straight down. I'm not recovered yet.

That project isn't really something I can return to properly until I am once again truly excited about it. Perhaps it after I'm done setting up the shoots for the next Gameshelf episode, I can work up a good Volity froth again. We will see.

Here is a much less psychotic looking picture of me at the lakeside, though my head is still huge because it was taken at arm's length with the iBook's built-in camera.

( Someday I will re-assemble my camera-shaped camera. )

I proclaimed this to be a working vacation and I did work, to an extent. Put in all the time I could for the client - only about three hours, before my plate was clean - and kicked Volity around a little. Made palpable progress towards the demo but there are too many bugs to fix before that can happen, and this just isn't the environment for swatting bugs. Gotta be at my own desk for that.

Started a new Angband character (a Dunedain ranger) and am having maybe my best game yet. Controlling the urge to just play and play fairly well, this time, though I wonder if that will remain true when I'm back by myself in Somerville. There's novelty with this character - she's become deadlier with a bow than anyone I've run through the dungeon previously - and I am having honest fun with it, though there's still a distinct and unpleasant aftertaste of addiction after each play session. We'll see what happens. Anyway, I finally learned how to use the targeting command and my dude killed Wormtongue yesterday, which in my experience is the point where the game starts to get really interesting. (Whenever you manage to splat your first non-Farmer Maggot-related unique, anyway.)

Learned to play Tigris & Euphrates this weekend, and decided I really like it, though I'm quite far from figuring out any sense of good play. I've felt vaguely bad for years that I didn't know how to play this T&E, though, which is considered a high water-mark of modern board games. I did play it once before, and for whatever reason it didn't take and I found it confusing and frustrating.

General personal rule I've recognized for some time but need to enforce better: If my opponents point out a good move to make, and it is different from a good move I had been eyeing, I should not make that move even if it seems better. Since the people I usually play games with are my awesome friends, I do not accuse them of deceitfully metagaming me; rather, it's a personal fault to always see a new suggestion as better than one that I came up with myself. Their decision may be wise, but mine is based on the most intimate knowledge of my personal game state and sense of how I'm likely to follow through on the move. In yesterday's game, I ignored a tile-placement suggestion at first but took advantage of it a couple of turns later, and it scored big for me. But later I made a game-ending move right when it was pointed out to me, and ended up losing by one point. Was still a fun and rewarding game, but: yes, that's enough of that.

Zarf lent me Hofstadter's new I am a Strange Loop yesterday. Between him and the reviews I've read the consensus seems to be "Eh... it's worth reading." It covers the same ground as Gödel, Escher, Bach, examining how consciousness can emerge from unconscious material, but is both shorter and much more explicit about it - GEB is often seen and even loved by its readers as an almanac-style funhouse of art and logic not arranged around any particular topic, and though the book helped set him for life Hofstadter has always regretted its unintended ambiguousness. I read two chapters of the new book in bed last night and am already convinced that if nothing else it contains enough new angles to stay interesting throughout, so I'm cool with it.

The review I read suggests that I can expect him to spend a lot of ink alternately and mourning his dead wife and thrashing John Searle's anti-AI arguments, which I've already seen him do years ago in Le Ton Beau de Marot (highly recommended reading, by the way, if you haven't heard of that one). But this time he's doing it in a GEBby context and not a linguistic one (though these are certainly related to begin with) so we'll see. If I trust any author, I trust this one.

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I touched base with my client on Sunday evening, reminding them that they gave me zero hours of work last week but adding that this was OK given my webclient push, and I wouldn't complain if they chose to withhold for another week. The response has been uncharacteristic silence, such that I've been peeking in on their ticketing system just to make sure that I hadn't missed anything. Well, I'm getting what I asked for.

I don't think that I've overtly noted here yet that doing paid web work on the side of Volity has been good for my own project. Facing and overcoming challenges that don't originate from my own needs forces me to learn new web programming and styling techniques, broadening the arsenal I bring to Volity webwork. In June, for example, paid work encouraged me to get up to speed with CSS - all the books I own on the subject are from 2003 and therefore nearly useless - and for this reason the web client has a beautiful layout without a single <table> involved (except for the actual tables).

Yes, I still have to see how badly it fails on MSIE6. If it is full of fail I will be tempted to just lock that damn thing out and require MSIE7, or the non-shitty alternative browser of your choice. We'll burn that bridge when we come to it.

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Speaking of 2003, I've been thinking lately that as of this summer I've been working on Volity for the length of a typical American undergraduate education. All that time on a single project! It makes me feel a little panicky until I look at it sideways and figure: yeah, that's about right, actually.

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I can't wait to show y'all the webclient prototype. I can't until daerr builds a proxying solution that will let the webserver freely make AJAX calls to my Jabber connection broker daemon. For the time being, I have been having the daemon itself serve all the static HTML bits as well as the Jabber stuff, and just hit itself with the AJAX. This... does not scale. Heh, it might scale actually but it would be utterly unmaintainable and I don't even want to feint in that direction, not even for the sake of a demo.

My voice of experience speaks here. This is how paranoid I am of a "oh, we'll just do it this way for the time being" hack becoming the permanent solution. No, I'm not giving that an inch.

I have been threatening to just shoot a video of the alpha running, and I just might resort to this if I can't do anything else this week.

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Heh, the Diesel finally put up polite-but-firm little placards in its booths asking that they be used only by parties of three or more during "busier hours". It's 10am now and I see only couples and singles-with-laptops. Wonder how well this works when it's time. Oh, here comes a guy now... and he reads the card... and he keeps walking! Wow.

I used to stretch out in the booths by myself all the time, but at some point I lost the ability. The last time I did, earlier this year, I thought I could feel waves of resentment beating down on me from everyone else. I might have even picked up and moved to a table before I left!

Twice, attractive young women I do not know have asked to share the booth with me, and this always gives my day a little lift but it's probably a weak reason to seek to sit in the giant booths alone. I wonder whether mutual strangers might now recognize the look of argh-I-can't-sit-anywhere in each other as they wander around the cafe, and propose to become one-time Booth Buddies.

Picked out new glasses yesterday. My insurance gave me a good discount, so I opted for an expensive and tiny pair of jet-black titanium wire-frames. When we went last week dictator555 had me right on the verge of picking up a phat black geek-chic number, but a chorus of alternate fashion consultants I had since sought drowned her out. (This started when the dictator took a cellphone picture of me with the phat frames in the opt shop and sent it to classicaljunkie, who then called me from the airplane to ask if it was a joke.)

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On rikchik's advice I also visited the local Brooks' crafts aisle to buy 100 leetle zip-lock bags for a dollar and change, perfect for storing loose game bits. I immediately deployed a couple dozen to reorganize my BattleLore legions, storing between one and three complete multi-figure units in each baggie (one unit type per bag), and then dumping all of them back into the box. With those ridiculous plastic trays out of the way, the box now closes completely. Whee

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Almost definitely not going to Gen Con, since I just missed the pre-reg window, making securing hotel space much harder and more expensive. It's too bad, because it didn't occur to me until way late to ask gamer-fiend classicaljunkie if she might want to go, and when she said yes, my answer is like "Well... ya can't." Feh.

Still, my mumbling about weird timing WRT the web client is still all true. When it's in beta you better bloody well believe I'll be tromping all over the convention circuit, OK?

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Last night's HoRGN was fun, though the only game I played was Toppo (which I won once, woo). Delighted to meet jaq, who has just relocated from way out yonder to the Boston area.

Also got to play with an iPhone, and was excited to see that its version of Safari can run the DHTML Testbench demo just fine (I didn't think to check out the SVG version that daerr just posted, though). The iPhone will surely be my next phone, but I cannot say when that will be. Almost certainly not the device's first generation.

I am really tempted to buy a copy of Here I Stand, a three-to-seven-hour wargame about the Protestant Reformation. I half want it because it sounds like what you'd encounter being played by grognard caricatures in a skit about far-gone wargamers, and half because it actually sounds pretty damn fascinating.

Would anyone who goes to gamey things that I also go to ever want to play? It sounds like it'd work fine at foos or UGs or what have ye. Because of the game's length and level of involvement, I'm not really interested in playing with total strangers. According to BGG it's best with 6 players, good with 3 players, and crap otherwise.

Update I just ordered a copy, god help me.