Kevin Bales: $10.8 billion to end all slavery, forever

In time for Pesach, here's Kevin Bales from freetheslaves.net.

Pesach Cleaning

It takes a good amount of time to thoroughly clean a kitchen for Pesach, even a simple one like ours.

Today I'm off to work, while Rachel will shop, drop our remaining chametz products off with our non-Jewish friends, do the final touches on cleaning, and possibly do some cooking. Tonight we'll do bedikat chametz, or ritually search the house to see if we missed any chametz. Tomorrow we'll burn whatever is left and finish the cooking.

I usually prepare some interesting activity, project, or questions for seder night, but I'm currently blank so far. Any ideas?

Have a happy and kosher Pesach.
Yehuda

Two-Player Age of Empires III

It's been about five years since my step-son last played a game with me. He is into computer games (and was into Warhammer). He never liked Euros (except Settlers when he was little), CCGs, or anything that didn't involve visceral killing and complex war strategies.

Upon recommendations, I picked up Age of Empires III on my last visit to the US. While I understood that it is a Euro, I also hoped it might tempt my step-son, who had played the computer game, and who had, at least, looked curiously at some of my other recent Euros that sported pictures of generals and armies (though typically had no combat). So I was thrilled that he was willing to try it.

AoE3 (at least, for two players) is not really a war game, less of one than either Antike or what I remember of Wallenstein (played once about four years ago). But the combat is in there, and we did use it; actually I used it first and more viciously than he did. I'm a big fan of "remove one for one" combat in comparison to dice rolling; my step-son prefers the dice rolling.

Actually, AoE3 is a game of worker-placement, resource-management, and area control. The object is to earn the most victory points, which you get from a) buildings (ala Puerto Rico and Caylus), b) areas discovered, c) your end-of-the-game income (excepting any bonuses from buildings), and d) three times during the game from areas controlled.

Each round you have five guys to allocate between a) turn order, b) moving to the areas, c) adding guys to your contingent ready to discover an area/discovering an area, d) buying a building, e) getting an additional special guy to use next round, f) taking an income source, or g) declaring your intention to battle.

The income sources are various commodities, which you can also get from discovering one of the areas on the board, as well as one "wild" commodity. Three of any commodity gives you $1 income, three of a kind gives $3, and four of a kind gives $6. Money is good for buying buildings, declaring a total war on another player (rare), or (useful only in a game with multiple players) one space that lets you buy a special guy for use on the next round.

The special guys are worth double value, or give you income once, or can be used to shoot the other player's guys in an area during a battle.

Each area has an initially-secret strength you have to overcome during discovery (essentially, how many Indians you have to slaughter :-( ). When you run out of areas, you can still discover areas off the board for more victory points, but you don't actually move guys to them. Control of an area is worth 6 points, second place is 2 points; this is counted three times during the game.

In our game, we both scored about equal for this over the three scorings.

At the end of the game, you also score your income levels. I scored a bit higher for that. You also score your discovered territories. Again I scored a bit higher for that.

Lastly you score your buildings. The big point-scoring buildings only appear in the last two round of the game, so it is essential to be first or second to claim these in one of these rounds. My step-son miscalculated the importance of these, and his buildings only amounted to some 17 points total, while mine totaled some 35 or 40. Earlier buildings give you bonus cash, bonus guys each round, bonus income, etc...

Oh yes, combat. If you declared combat, you can pick one player in one region and have each of your soldiers in that region remove one of the other player's guys. If you pay $10, you may instead declare total war against a player and have this occur in every region of the board. I killed a few of his guys first, and then he loaded the board up with more soldiers. The object, of course, is to be the one with the most in an area during scoring turns.

The game is a scant 8 turns long. The entire game took us about 45 minutes on our first play, which was impressive, maybe even a little too short. We could both tell that the game becomes richer and more competitive with multiple players, so probably 4 or 5 players is ideal.

I quite enjoyed it, and my step-son thought it was a good game, though he would have liked more dice and more combat. I'm looking forward to trying it out with the game group.

---

This week has been overwhelming: I'm essentially working two jobs (I missed a lot of work in the US), keeping up my blogging, fixing a whole lot of things, dealing with various money issues, and cleaning for Pesach while the wife is away (coming on Friday). And I started the week with a bad stomach virus of some kind.

I had to cancel both game night this week and games day I usually host over Pesach. Luckily, one of my gamers is hosting a smaller version of games day at her house, which I will try to attend after work next week.

A video review of It's Alive.

Shabbat Gaming

Played Apples to Apples Friday night at the behest of the hostess at whose house I ate, together with 3 others. I called it a game after she had 7 green cards and none of us had more than 2.

This morning I play-tested DD Mau, which was sent to me by the publisher in response to my having called it "UNO+" in a Purple Pawn post after reading the ad copy. He took offense at that description. So now I can post an actual review after having played it.

Later.

Right now I'm suffering from a debilitating bug or food poisoning, or something. Ugh.

Session Report, in which I win 3-Player Steam

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: Hunting Party, Saikoro, Steam.

First play for Hunting Party, second for Steam.


Overwhelmed with Pesach cleaning ...

What Happens If You Show Up to Confront Your Past, But It's Gone?

I've always known that you must not let all the opportunities pass to show appreciation to your loved ones. I never knew that you must act just as quickly to confront your demons. Turns out that both kinds of opportunities are ephemeral.

I went to my 25th high school reunion. No one I knew from high school was there. I met only adults, forty year old doppelgangers, descendants of the loved ones and demons that I remembered from high school. I went expecting to confront the past, but the past wasn't there. It was too late to confront people from the past. The only past I could confront was within me.

I met a more or less familiar group of strangers swapping news and memories. Some memories I shared, some obliquely intersected my own, many were new to me. Lord help me, I liked all of these people (at least, all the ones with whom I spoke).

A girl who, as far as I remember, never spoke to me in high school, was now a woman who greeted me like a friend and was genuinely warm and happy to see me. I truly liked her, too. A boy I remember as rude, obnoxious, annoying, and awkward was a man, and not at all rude, obnoxious, or annoying (ok, still a little awkward). Another girl who was indifferent to me in high school was a woman who laughed when I told her that no one from high school was actually present. "Good thing," she said, "I didn't like a lot of them. Even myself."

It was, perhaps, the most surreal experience of my life.

We had not held any other reunions; this one, the 25th year, was the first. If we had met every five years, maybe it would have been different. More of the same cliques. More comparisons of progress and more jealousy.

I didn't recognize half of the people, even at close range, until they told me their names. After the first such incidence, I didn't let it bother me any more. Some of them looked radically difference from how I remembered them. Others looked exactly the same, or nearly the same, with some broadening of faces and bodies.

I was surprised at how beautiful the women were. And the men so handsome and sharp. They all seemed to be more or less happy (only half of the class attended, so perhaps some of the ones that did not attend were less beautiful and less happy).

The fact that so many of them came, and the fact that so many of them are still connected to a daily Jewish life, was a pleasant surprise.

Nothing can change the fact that I suffered through my school years, and that I experienced reverberations of this suffering in the years following. I came to the reunion hoping to confront this past as a self-assured adult. But the past had died. With no one left to confront, there was, is, a certain lack of closure. But also now an acknowledgement that I can finally let it go.

When you walk into a bar mitzvah or wedding, there are generally a handful of people with whom you want to catch up. This was like speed dating: you got three minutes to connect and then you had to move on. Still, there were a few people with whom I really wanted to reconnect; a few of these few (or rather, the doppelganger descendants of them) came. And I had the privilege of spending a few precious minutes with them. It was amazing. They were not exactly the people I knew in high school, but they were the closest I was going to get. They were those people and 25 years added on.

What a night. Pictures later.

Can You Judge a Game By Reading The Rules?

For a movie, or a book, or a dance, or a song, you never really know what's coming. You can infer based on what you know of the skill of the author, the genre and culture in which the work is set and made, and so on. But you never know for certain. It could change in a moment; the book may suddenly pick up, the dance change direction, the song change rhythm. The author may, at any moment, take the work in a new direction.

For a board game, with the rules laid out in front of you, the author can explicitly take you in a new direction only if the game requires you to bring heretofore unrevealed external media - a movie, a piece of music, a paragraph of text - into the game play during the game. For the typical abstract, roll-and-move, or trivia game, you've seen everything the author put into the work the moment you've read the rules, and sometimes the moment you've read the back of the box.

Barring the author having you consult external media during the game, if you have imagination and experience with similar games, you can do a fair job of envisioning what the experience with the board game will be like. The dice may be screwy and you may pick all the wrong cards, but a trivia game is a trivia game, an economic game is an economic game. The other players will be the main unexpected factors in the game.

However, there are exceptions to this. Games like Go or Chess looks and initially play like simple abstract games. However, there are depths in these games that reveal themselves after several plays, depths that you could not have expected or understood from simply reading the rules.

Discoveries like these can occur in other games. Many of these will be bad, when you come to realize that the game is not really balanced or enjoyable for certain reasons. Some of these will be good, when you come to realize that there are hidden, novel, pleasurable experiences in the way the game mechanics interact.

Sometimes this is the voice of the author, whose twists remain unrevealed until the game is experienced. Often, it was a happy accident to the author as well, who discovered these twists the same way that you did.

For games, as well as for any well crafted media, even after these twists are revealed, and even after you know when to expect them, you should be able to enjoy experiencing them repeatedly.