psocoptera

The Ghost and the Golem, Benjamin Rosenbaum, interactive "choose your own adventure" style text game. On the Nebula ballot for Game Writing and I have high hopes of seeing it on the Hugo ballot as well.

Rosenbaum wrote my favorite book of 2021 so of course I was excited about this, but then I put off playing it for a long time because of anxiety. Some technological anxiety (was I going to need some special software to obtain or play it? no, it turned out to be a thing I could buy for my phone from the Google Play apps store) and some anxiety that I have only recently managed to name *as* anxiety around interacting with what I am tentatively thinking of as "anisotropic media" or "directional media", encompassing both dramatized forms like TV and movies and games like this one with a one-way flow forward through the game and no way to flip back a few pages to check something or refresh my memory of something. This is an anxiety both around not having attention/emotional control (what if there's a boring part but I can't speed up? what if something is unpleasantly tense but I can't look ahead to check in on what to expect?) and attention/memory (what if my mind keeps wandering and it's hard to follow? what if I lose track of key stuff? my memory is not what it used to be, and in fact I did make one choice in one of my plays of the game that I definitely would not have made if I had recalled who that name referred to, although in fact there is a character list (and a glossary for the Yiddish) that I could have gone and checked and I just didn't for whatever reason), and no doubt seems absurd to most people in our very drama-normative culture (my mom, at least, finds it baffling that one of the reasons I don't watch much TV is that I find watching TV "hard"), but it is anxiety I actually have, and I have decided I get to, you know, name and look at those, if I want to. And it became easier to actually sit down and play once I had figured out what I was nervous about.

In the end my worries turned out to be pretty much unfounded - it did not feel at all unmanageable to play, and was in fact extremely fun and engaging, especially once I got to the end of my first playthrough and was like "oh, okay, now I've seen one way things can go, and I can just do this again as many times as I want to see what other outcomes I can get". There is a list of possible achievements, which hint at possible outcomes, and if you go online you can also find a list that includes all the "hidden" achievements where some of the most interesting stuff is. :) I really like having an idea of the range of potential outcomes - in two and a half playthroughs I have unlocked 21 out of 68, or 410 out of a possible 1000 points, and I have ideas in mind for two more approaches I'd like to try after this one. A lot of the choices you get to make have to do with your feelings about things or your approach to solving problems, affecting a list of stats about your talents and your nature, which I think then affect what options you see later in the game or whether you succeed or fail in some of your later plot attempts. So in my three playthroughs so far I've tried to be somewhat different people with different priorities - pushing a little further away, each time, from my own natural impulses, playing characters who are less and less "like me". Like, the first playthrough, I think I was thinking "what is the best thing to do in this situation", and on subsequent playthroughs I've been more able to get into the mindset of "but what would this character do in this situation that might make for a good story (or get me more of those various achievements/outcomes)" even if it feels like a "bad idea" that "I"/my proxy in this world "shouldn't" do. (This is a tension I find interesting in narrative games, the space between player and character - there's a Lovecraftian text adventure I played with my friend D that forced an action I found abhorrent that was both upsetting to play at the time and remains by far the most memorable moment of any text adventure we ever played - which honestly seems like something that Rosenbaum might well have found interesting about the medium as well, and something that I hope awards voters find interesting about this game.) Subsequent playthroughs have definitely been a lot faster than the first one, because some of the events repeat verbatim (so I can, like, skim through that meal description) and some Rosenbaum is probably altering in subtle ways but I can't remember the exact wording from before enough to catch, so might as well skim until I get to something really different. (I have caught some of the differences though and they are neat!)

Anyways if you are interested in what it's actually about, it's set in the Pale of Settlement in 1881 (so if you loved Forbidden Book and would like to spend more time running around that world, this is perfect for you) and there is maybe going to be a pogrom and there is the question of an arranged marriage (so far I've been playing female-presenting nonbinary characters, because there are a whole bunch of neat options about ways the character can be trans and/or nonbinary and/or intersex, although for one of those two other playthroughs I have in mind I want to try Being A Dude which I think might be really different) and as you might guess from the title there is possibly a dybbuk and/or a golem. I might make another post sometime in the future about some of my different outcomes (and which I was or wasn't ever able to achieve) but I'll keep this one spoiler-free. Highly recommended if any of this sounds interesting to you at all.

Bazaar is a 1968 3M bookcase game (3M would later sell their game line to Avalon Hill). Totally abstract set-optimization game a little like Splendor or Century Golem Edition; you can either roll for a token in one of five colors, or use one of ten exchange rates (different from game to game) to trade some number of tokens in certain colors for some other number of tokens in other colors. Sets of five tokens in the right colors can then be used to buy cards, with the cards worth more the fewer leftover tokens you have. We thought it was fun - moved along nicely, with occasional longer pauses when someone needed to strategize, final scores seemed reasonably balanced, the available cards changed often enough to never feel too stuck. Biggest problem was that this was, once again, before the invention of shapes, and of the five colors, green vs blue and white vs yellow were tricky to tell apart in some of their appearances (on the die, tokens, exchange rates, or cards). I don't think my dad could have distinguished them at all pre-cataract surgery. Is the idea of using different shapes or symbols as an adjunct to colors an innovation that only happened once? Like did some specific game designer come up with that, in a certain game, and then everyone started copying it? Or did multiple people come up with it independently at various points? (Or, for that matter, how many games are still not doing it, but I don't notice because I'm a trichromat and they've picked different enough colors that I never think about it?)

Last year I seem not to have reviewed Quest, but as I recall we weren't wild about it but thought it was better than the Aristoplay games.

This year we've been working our way through some of the other Ravensburger games we didn't play over and over (in contrast to the ones we did, Enchanted Forest, Labyrinth, and Scotland Yard).

Flying Carpet lets you lay out your own board of obstacles and then race around them with a hand of movement cards that give you various movement options, including into moving into zones with more default movement, vaguely Niagara-esque. The board art is really gorgeous; I think we mostly thought the gameplay was a bit fiddly and random, and Q found it frustrating, but I would play it again.

Hare & Tortoise is a racing game in which you have to balance spending movement points to get further ahead with moving strategically or even falling back to get more movement points (very vaguely like Cartagena). Neat mechanic, my parents especially got a kick out of it, may favor people who can grind more math in their head (or might have enough random element to counteract that). I would also play this again.

Wildlife Adventure is a route-building game of trying to get three shared paths to go through the nodes in one's hand (sort of like TransAmerica). The board was a little challenging - my parents couldn't tell some of the color choices apart (different shapes apparently hadn't been invented yet in 1986) and some of the connecting lines were nigh-invisible from the ends of the table. Some of us thought it might play better with fewer than 6 players. Junie really disliked this one. I would play again.

I think all three were better than Quest. I would probably rank them Hare & Tortoise, then Wildlife Adventure, then Flying Carpet, in order of my interest in playing again.

I'm visiting my parents and playing old board games from our shelves in hopes of identifying games we all agree we never want to play again, so that we can get rid of them.

Aristoplay made educational board games in the 1980s, and we had like six of them.

By Jove is a roll and move on a Monopoly board layout where you can acquire heroes from classical mythology and use them to fight various perils; there are also a couple of side-tracks for special quests. It suggested setting a time limit and playing to that time limit and calculating points, which was arbitrary but a useful way to know how much of the By Jove experience we were going to have, and to get to stop having more of it.

Star Hop has you rolling to move on an open grid, certain points of which let you travel to various astronomical destinations. I immediately house-ruled this one by a) removing the penalty for needing to look up which destinations corresponded with which facts - I am not penalizing my 10yo for knowing less astronomy than my dad - b) reducing the number of points needed to win, and c) giving a roll bonus to certain "get out of somewhere" rolls based on points cards held by the leader, which made the game playable, but still kind of tedious. Also the board and art are tragically ugly for an astronomy game (although obviously astronomy wasn't as pretty yet in the 1980s as today).

Made for Trade. A pleasantly charming board with a winding path for roll and move, but fiddly object-acquisition and swapping rules. The 10yo thought this was the worst of the three, but did like the warm-up game, which was basically Spoons, and would like to play more Spoons.

Overall review: there is a reason my family played the same Ravensburger games over and over again instead of any of these. :/

As yet unplayed: Dinosaurs and Things, which my sister knows she wants to keep and so is not a candidate for disposal, Music Maestro, which I believe needs a cassette player for the "identifying instruments by audio" mode but may also have a "categorizing instruments by section" mode, and Pyramids and Mummies.

I usually forget to review games - failed to write about a whole batch back in August (Century: Golems, Santorini, something neat I don't remember the name of now, Sushi Go), or a couple more recently (Kingdom Builder, Trias), but here's a bunch from this weekend.

Wingspan - I loved this, a good balance of public goals and secret goals, and also you are building your engine by playing different birds and I really love birds. And there are cute little eggs.

Shadows in the Forest - Awesome concept (you play in a dark room, and one player is the seeker, moving a little lantern around the board, and the rest are hiders, 3D figures hiding behind stand-up trees, trying to stay out of the light) but I didn't think the game play was actually great; it was hard to even see what we were doing in the dark, and it didn't feel like there were a lot of options for the hiders. Q loved it, though - he was the seeker and found us pretty quickly, so, very successful as kid entertainment.

Decrypto - Sort of like Codenames, except instead of having to clue multiple words from one word, you have to clue four words repeatedly with different words that are different enough from turn to turn that the other team can't match up which new set of clues goes with which previous set. My team won and really should not have because everything we thought we knew was wrong, but we got lucky; meanwhile the other team was much more onto us but still lost, which didn't quite seem fair. But on the other hand, more of a time constraint than in Codenames to think of clues quickly, and a little less putting one person on the spot as the cluer (since you take turns coming up with the new sets of clues), which might be improvements over Codenames?

Letter Jam - Hanabi meets Scrabble. A cooperative game in which everyone has a letter they can't see; players take turns making words out of everyone else's letters, by indicating with number tokens which letters of the word they are, giving you information about what letters you might have, to make the word make sense. (Like if I knew I had the blank spot in "MIG_T", I could conclude it was an H.) I liked this a lot, although figuring out who was going to take the turn to clue involved a certain amount of asserting that our words were going to be useful that I found a little nervewracking (what if I was missing something and they weren't going to be that useful?). But it was neat; I like constrained-information games a lot. Also the number tokens were really satisfying objects with pretty pictures of fruit slices.

Spyfall - An improv game in which most of the players are assigned a particular location and one player, the spy, doesn't know what it is but is trying to figure it out without their ignorance being discovered, as everyone asks each other questions about the scenario. Seemed broken, as implemented - insufficient incentive for the players to give useful clues to the spy - but I kind of like the concept and have been trying to think of ways you could fix it. (My current idea: in addition to the spy, there is a beloved amnesiac, whose identity is known. The amnesiac gets to ask questions, but doesn't have to answer questions (because nobody wants to make them feel bad that they don't remember!) and is racing the spy to figure out the location. So the other players are trying to help the amnesiac without tipping off the spy. Maybe the amnesiac needs to have a slightly easier job than the spy - like they need to figure out something slightly less specific?)

Anyways I also got to terraform Mars, so, much gaming happiness.

I've had "write about our further adventures with No Thank You Evil" on my to-do list since August, and my to-do list needs... well, I almost wrote "to die", but what it really needs is some aggressive cycling off of old lingering items so that I don't feel overwhelmed adding a bunch of new items. So!

We've now played three more times, after the first time... I wrote a continuation of the first boxed adventure, which we played out over two sessions, and we also played the second boxed adventure. I definitely felt like I was improving as a DM for my specific kids with practice... still sometimes underestimating their risk-aversion! "No, *really*, I *really* think you're likely to be able to sneak by the owls, *please* go the rest of the way down this tunnel and find your plot coupon for the next part." I mean, obviously, grown-up parties don't always do what you want them to either, but I feel like grownups are more likely to get actively hung up on the wrong thing than just be like "there is only one interesting thing here but we're scared of it." I guess *as* a grown-up gamer, I have this trust that the DM has chosen reasonable challenges for the party so that whatever happens will be interesting to play (and has maybe even done some math on how dangerous this encounter is), and as newbie gamers the kids haven't formed that yet, especially when they learned in the first session that I was willing to let them take damage, which for them feels too much like "getting hurt" to be fun. So, I mean, I guess we established a basic level of *dis*trust there. Even though the system tries to make it really clear that when you take damage it's more like getting tired than getting injured, that sense of losing something/having something taken away was too upsetting for them. Which is a neat challenge, in a way, to try to *really* shake up my "damage and danger" mindset for how I think about what happens in a game - maybe those aren't important aspects at all! - and also try to think beyond damage to an entirely positive or additive system where things can be gained or not gained but not lost. (Which is... not really the No Thank You Evil system, but I like to think of it more as a launchpad than a blueprint.)

Anyways, things the kids like, an incomplete list: funny voices for NPCs, non-being threats to fight like grappling roots (non-being is awkward but I mean things that aren't either persons or animals), pictures of what places look like as well as maps, win-win scenarios where success is figuring out what you and the NPCs want and how to help each other, simple puzzles like using the size-changing mushroom to shrink to fit into the tiny tunnel. Possibly my very clever "to find the dragon's heart, remember the dragon's scale" wordplay, or at least I think Junie appreciated that, I'm not sure Quentin did. (They had been picturing the heart as a handheld object, but the dragon was like hill-sized, so the heart was like room-sized... unfortunately I think both of them jumped mentally to like a weighing scale rather than either skin-covering scales or size-proportion, which muddled things.)

For their next quest, Junie has expressed a wish to go shopping, having acquired a number of coins, so I need to come up with some kind of plot that kicks off from there. Presumably either Find A Thing or Deal With Someone Causing Trouble, the two basic D&D plots. I haven't been feeling inspired but I think I need to remember they'll care more about me drawing a nice picture of the setting and doing funny voices than the plot being interesting. :)

Well, I have written my kids an extension/next installment of their No Thank You Evil adventure, so I guess I'm ready for the weekend.