In review: Yspahan

Josh and I played a handful of games the other night (3 in 2 hours!). By far, the star that night was Yspahan. In subsequent days, I became quite enamored with the game, and got to play it again at a games night over at Chris and George's (friends we met through Josh and Megan). Then, I was able to borrow it and bring it home to play with the missus. Jill said, "I like it. Let's get it." Magic words, those. I haven't picked it up yet, but soon it will be mine...

Yspahan has a thin theme of merchants in a city (Yspahan) during the heyday of the Persian empire. You can place goods in shops around town, in an attempt to control blocks of shops, or you can try to get your goods onto the caravan that is bringing goods to Yspahan. The game has 21 turns (days), divided into three weeks

Yspahan is divided into 4 neighborhoods (see image below). Within each neighborhood, there are groups of shops (each group is called a souk) organized by color. If you place a good into any souk, no one else may place in any other shop in that souk. But you may not place in any other shop in that neighborhood until you have claimed the entire souk. The little white pawn is called the supervisor, and you may move it on your turn. If it lands in front of a shop with a good in it, that good is moved onto the caravan.

The setup, with the action board to the left and the caravan to the right.


If you move one of your own goods out to the caravan, it immediately scores. The entire caravan scores when it is full, or at the end of the week. Thus, you can count on your goods in the caravan scoring at least twice. The entire city scores at the end of the week, as well, and is then cleared of goods. Only souks that have been completed are scored, so one tactic is to use the supervisor to kick out an opponent's good from a lucrative souk to the caravan.

That is the basic plot and execution of actions in the game. The real fun is in the die rolling/action selection mechanism. Each turn, the start player will roll 9 dice, and then place them on the action board from lowest to highest. In the above image, I rolled 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 5, 6, 6, 6. So, the 1 goes in the lowest position, then the 2's, and so on. Since I didn't roll any 4's, the 5's occupy the fourth highest spot. The rule is that the highest number rolled always goes in the top spot, so there will always be at least one die there and in the lowest space (unless all numbers are identical). The result of this is that the 4th and 5th positions are less likely to have any dice.

Beginning with the start player, everyone chooses a row of dice and executes an action. If you want to place goods, you select one of the four middle rows and place as many goods as there are dice in that space. These rows have icons that refer to the four neighborhoods, so you can see that some of the neighborhoods are less likely to have any dice. If you want to move the supervisor, you choose any row of dice and move the supervisor exactly the number of spaces as the number rolled. If you want to take a card (very powerful, often), you choose a row of dice and take one card. The highest and lowest rows on the action board, respectively, give you gold or camels, which are used as currency in the game. After everyone has taken an action, the start player changes and a new day begins.

This game moves very quickly, and it's a lot of fun. I like the seven days between scoring rounds, as it gives you a chance to position yourself to execute multiple scoring strategies. This game is all about scoring points as you go (and taking them away from your competition). In that, it reminds me of El Grande. Ystari, the same small company/development group that produced Caylus, has seriously impressed me with this one. I hope that it holds its charm after several plays, since the cards are really the only variable element to the game.

I give it an 8 right out of the gate as a fast-playing game with decent depth of decisions and a dash of random fun thrown in with the dice mechanism. I bumped it to a 9 because it's easy to teach and seems to have pretty wide appeal, making it way more likely to get played at my house.

Fear

With Halloween fast approaching, it's time for a gimmick post.

These are some fears that I thought of right after I typed this sentence, but before I posted the entry:

1)The Boogeyman (duh)
2)Drowning was my first big fear (besides the Boogeyman)
3)That final scene in The Blair Witch Project still gives me the freakies if I dwell on it too long.
4)Spiders on the ceiling
5)President Sarah Palin
6)The Yellowstone Caldera
7)Dying abruptly without being able to say any last words to someone
8)Clowns
9)Homeland Security/FEMA (tie)
10)Losing Jill
11)Everything that could ever happen to Elaine
12)Failure
13)Crows
14)Showing up for a seminar completely unprepared, in only my underwear
15)Cauliflower...ok, I guess I'm kinda stretching at this point. I do dislike cauliflower a great deal, but I'm reasonably certain that I can outrun it if the need arises.

Thoughts on Agricola

As reported earlier, I received the gift of this game a few months ago. I've played a few 2 person games against Jill, a 3 person affair that included our friend Josh, and 3 solo ventures. Yes, the game comes with a solo variant. I make sure to keep the blinds down.

Agricola is Latin for farmer, so the game is about managing a farm. The image below shows your farm mat, which includes a two-room wooden house, a few plowed fields, and some fenced pastures, one of which contains sheep.



Shown below is the setup for a solo game



On each turn, you can take as many actions as you have family members. You start with a husband and wife, and you use their tokens to claim actions on the action board. No one else may claim the same action on a turn. If you build another room on your home, you can have a kid, which is obviously a great plan if you want to get more done on your farm. At the end of the game, your farm is scored for its completeness (all spaces used), upgrades (bonus points for family members and for upgrading your Wood house to Clay and then to Stone) and variety (good representation of the various crops and animals).

At several points in the game there is a harvest. At this point, you must be able to feed your family 2 Food per family member. Failure to do this is bad. You can get Food directly off the Action board, or you can build improvements to make Food more easily. The Fireplace allows you to cook meat, so you can convert your animals to Food. The more baroque method is to bake bread. This is how you do this, in terms of the number of actions you must take to accomplish it: 1) Take Grain, 2)Take Clay, 3) Take Stone, 4) Major Improvement (build an Oven), 5)Bake Bread. This is tough to get off the ground in the early going, but you do get to convert one Grain to 5 Food by baking Bread. If you also 1)Take (another) Grain, 2)Plow a Field and 3)Sow, then you can collect Grain for the next three Harvests, which will allow you to Bake Bread at any point during your turn. Got it? Much easier to slaughter the sheep and go to the fishing hole (ain't that always the way?).

There are many more wrinkles to the game, but I think that the above gives you the basic flavor. The thing that makes this game different from many of the other resource management/economic development games is the cards. Everyone gets 7 Occupation cards and 7 Minor Development cards at the start of the game. You have to use an action to play a card (plus many of them have resource costs as well). Cards can combine in obvious or subtle ways to provide you with a unique path to victory. In addition, there are 4 decks of cards that come with the game, one of which consists of very helpful, obvious-use cards, and two of which are relatively more interdependent upon other cards to be valuable.

There's a lot of game here, in terms of replay value and material components. It's way less complicated than it looks. A 3 player game shouldn't take more than 60-90 minutes, and there's plenty to think about when it's not your turn. The game moves along nicely, and every game is quite different.

A critical upgrade of Agricola, if you have it in your collection, is an organizer. The one shown here costs $3.49 at Home Depot, and saves roughly 20 minutes of setup and breakdown, not to mention table space.


My final analysis? A pretty good game that is a cut above most. Jill is definitely a fan. I give it a rating of 8 (out of 10), and it could well go up after more plays. Thanks again to Mustafa, Kathy, Jon, and Em!

Egads, I'm tired

We've been having some recent difficulties with Our Darling Princess' sleeping routine. She still goes down between 8-8:30pm, but has taken to rising at 5:30. Her rising is accompanied by shouting--not angry shouting or even urgent shouting. Just long, sustained yelling, punctuated by shorter bursts of varying pitch. Like this: "Ahhhhhmaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamamamamamaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa..aaah...maamaammaaa...bababamama...AAAHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."
It is patient and implacable. It says, "I don't have anywhere to be, and I can do this for a very long time. Good luck sleeping through it, or waiting me out." So, I've had a week's worth of going to bed at 11 or 12 and getting up to a very frisky girl around 5:30-6 AM. Then she has the gall to pass out around 8 AM for an hour of catch-up sleep, after I'm finally wide awake.

That's all I have today. Just some complaining about being a parent. Classy, huh?

Heroes

We've been really enjoying Netflix recently. After burning through season 3 of LOST over the course of a few weeks, we rented season 1 of Heroes. I had seen the pilot when it first came out, and immediately filed it away as a future rental/purchase. I hate watching shows like that over the course of a season. I hate waiting for the next show, and I can't stand commercial interruptions. Of course, I wasn't expecting a show that would be nearly as addicting as LOST has been, but it looked like a cool concept.

So, the spoiler-free review. The premise: people are "evolving" all the time. Individuals are born with unique abilities at a certain rate, some of which manifest at a young age, and some that appear later. The cool part is how the writers demonstrate a believable reaction from the characters as they realize what they can do. Some of them embrace their gifts (like the guy who can bend time and space), some focus on the impending social stigma (like the cheerleader who heals instantly from any injury), and some are mildly embarrassed (this one's my favorite: the guy who can fly -- who hasn't ever wanted to fly??!-- he basically says, "Big deal, so I can fly!) Then there's the "what the heck is his ability anyway?" characters that help to drive the plot.

Anyway, so there has to be a plot, and enough villiany to justify some heroism. Once I realized what the major event of the season was going to be (IT'S A BOMB THAT EXPLODES NEW YORK!!!), it became a rather fun game of figuring out which characters fit where in my constantly evolving model of the final events of the season. Although it was ultimately predictable on many fronts, it was nonetheless enjoyable to watch it all unfold.

The primary villain, who cannibalizes other "special" people to gain their powers, is presented as alternately crafty and stupidly power hungry. I find this sort of dissonance annoying, and I thought that that character was written with a total lack of craft. He was quite scary, though. Secondarily, there is an agency of some sort that searches out people with abilities and either exploits them or destroys them. Thirdly, there's some mobster who seems to connect all of the main characters. And finally, (and most compellingly) there's the people who you KNOW have some ability, but you haven't seen it yet. It is these characters that make you want to watch season 2.

The show ostensibly revolved around Claire, the cheerleader, in season 1, but I think that the main character of the show was (duh) Hiro, the Japanese 20-something who loves comic books and who can bend time and space. I came to like many of the protagonists by the end of the season. I think that, in general, the writers did a decent job of developing the characters and creating a sense of mystery. I'd also say that the show was really well-cast. I believed all of these actors as their characters. I thought that Hiro, Claire, and Nathan Petrelli were especially great throughout the season (forgive me for not bothering to learn the actors' names).

I seriously doubt that any subsequent season will be as good, since the plot of season 1 had so many great dramatic elements. Still, we've got the next season in our Netflix queue, and I'm a fairly loyal viewer. It's gotta be pretty foul for me to just give up. I'm looking at you, "24".

Weather's turning

Summer was a bit shorter here in the higher latitudes. I'm sure that our Edinburgh friends can relate. Of course, it's been officially Fall for over 3 weeks now, so there should be a change in the weather. Perhaps the temperature hasn't fallen much where you live, but I'm sure that the leaves are changing colors and winding up on the ground. Fall in Seattle means more rain and cloudiness. We've also had a drop in temperatures for the past month, to the point where 60 degrees F is a warm day. Fortunately, I can count on a relatively temperate winter, so I'm not in the near state of dread that I always had in Michigan this time of year.

And now, Elaine Pictures With a Vague Fall Theme!

First walk in the rain



Elaine adopts a worm



A leash makes things a bit easier on me

In which I interview for a position

So I had an interview today. It's a cruel thing that the last thing you do as a grad student is to sort of anonymously hand in this tome that represents your efforts of several years, and the first thing that you do in a job search is to give a stinking talk. Anyways, so I gave a stinking talk today. It was basically my thesis defense, which was probably the best talk that I ever gave. However, 12 months later, trying to remember exactly what I said, trying to recall all of those obscure details, trying to make all of those old arguments, trying to solidify all of those papers that I had read in my mind--it was like trying to raise a corpse.

Fortunately, the talk went well. Good questions were asked -- far more than at my thesis defense. The interviews with the lab members went well, as well. Hopefully, I'll hear back by mid-next week to know whether I'll be offered a job.

One of the post docs had this poster next to his desk...



Go ahead and marinate on that awhile.

UPDATE: I got hired today, so I get to see Man O' War every day!

The great beer adventure tour

Sometimes, I fall in love with a brewery. I've tried all of their more widely available offerings, but I know that there are special reserve brews that are only available in the bosom of the affiliated brewpub or gift shop. I'm looking at you, Unibroue, perched along the Chamblay near Montreal. And, of course, the Huyghe brewery in Ghent, Belgium would be a must-see. I might spend a week there. This type of fascination starts with a satisfying beverage, which leads me to try others, which eventually leads me to a website to find out more. There, I usually salivate over all of the seasonal, small batch, and commemorative brews that I will likely never get to try.

Having lived in Michigan for the past 7 years, I consider it a complete oversight to have never visited Bell's in Kalamazoo. Nearly every offering that I've had from Bell's has been pretty good to great, and they're constantly trying new things. They currently have 19 regular beers in their annual rotation, not counting the special brews that often appear on the shelf unannounced.

More recently, I've become enamored with the offerings of Allagash Brewing Company in Portland, ME. They've got a promising line of Belgian-style ales that I'm just beginning to work my way through. Way over on this coast, I've gotten a crush on the Russian River Brewing Company. Now, I've only tried one beer from them, but it was a Double IPA. I don't like American-style IPAs, as a rule, but this one blew me away. I have another of their line downstairs right now, an artisanal Golden ale. I think that the fact that I can't get my hands on another of their Pliny the Elders is driving my current infatuation, but I don't care. I just don't care.

Incidentally, I'm currently sipping on the brown ale that we made a few weeks ago. It hasn't fully carbonated yet, but it tastes very nice. Sweet and full bodied, very little hoppiness (but you can really smell the burnt chocolate malt), and dark as ink. They should call this a black.

UPDATE I tried the Damnation golden ale from Russian River. They're the real deal, folks. It had the body, sweetness, and spicy-ness of a good Belgian Trippel, but with only 7.5% ABV. Still, I have a bit of a headache today, likely as a result of not enough food base prior to consumption.

Getting my brew on

After a 7 month hiatus, I pulled my trusty brew pot out and got busy. Jill requested the dubbel from the "Complete Joy..." book, and I wanted to get a brown going. I made them over a few days when Jill was feeling OK. Everything seemed fine with the dubbel, but it stopped bubbling after only four days. You have to understand that the dubbel has about 12 tons of malt sugar in it, so I expected quite a lengthy fermentation. Nonetheless, I took a gravity reading at 10 days and found that it was pretty close to the target figure. I bottled it last night, and it tasted pretty amazing, even uncarbonated. This one is going to be special in a month or two.

The brown was more of an adventure. It failed to bubble at all, meaning that the yeast was no good. I discovered this on a Sunday, three days after brewing. Something should have happened. Our local homebrew supply is closed on Monday and Tuesday, and I didn't want to risk contamination by some wild fungus or bacteria, so I went across the street to the co-op and got a 750mL Trois Pistoles (my tasting notes here). It's bottle conditioned, so there's live yeast in the bottle. I sterilized the bottle and poured the whole thing into the wort. Four days later--bubbles! I bottled it a week ago, and I'm putting one in the fridge today. It smelled very nice when I bottled, and I'm hoping that it got a lot of character from the Unibroue yeast.

I've also bought the ingredients for the next batch, a dark wheat beer (Phat Fired Weizenbock, p.195 of "Complete Joy..."), so I hope to have three funky styles at the ready in time for the holidays.

Hi there

OK, so this is me basically pledging my regular support of this site by enacting a posting guarantee. I'm sure that you realize that this is more for me than for you. So, beginning here, I will post an entry at least five times per week. At least three of them will be good, so no more than two will be weak-ass posts like this one, which counts toward next week's quota. Clear? Good. This is the last you'll hear of it.

I'm getting Jill's sister and her family a board game for Christmas, but I haven't yet figured out which one. They like Ticket to Ride - Europe, Ra, Blokus, and Lost Cities, and Gwen has played Power Grid and Puerto Rico and liked them, too. I'd like to get them something that their kids can eventually play with them (they're 11 and 6, I think). Suggestions?