GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Notes

  • On First Taste

    This was a forum exchange on Boardgamegeek, that was worth reblogging because it touches on our gut instinct when encountering new things in a familiar field.

    Yep. And I’ve spent decades developing my palate for games. I think I know what I will like on first taste.

    the comment I was responding to.

    I completely disagree with this sentiment. I had been a heavy gamer for a while before being completely underwhelmed by Glory to Rome (5 player) and Innovation (2 vs 2 team game) when I first played them. I had a similar experience with Taluva (4 player).

    One of my gaming buddies who knew my preferences guessed (correctly) that I must have had bad experiences. He sat me down for a gaming session with two player Glory to Rome and Taluva. In both cases my eyes were opened and they now are among my favorites. My revelation on Innovation came later after I moved to Vegas, after all the folks on the forum continued to talk about the greatness of this game.

    Part of the problem was the initial play setup that introduced me to these games. I couldn’t imagine playing a team game of Innovation even now, but I’d be totally down for a 5 player game of Glory to Rome now that I grok the game (even though it wasn’t an ideal introduction to the game). The initial dislike of Taluva was just a complete whiff on my part.

    I mean, I wouldn’t give just any game a second chance “just cause”, but these three games were clearly misread by me even though I was already an established gamer.

    Mottainai could count as a fourth example. By the time I tried the game as a print-and-play version, I was already calling Carl Chudyk (designer of Glory to Rome and Innovation) a minor deity. After trying it a couples times with my wife, I regarded it as just a pale imitation of Glory to Rome. Last year, I decided to buy a copy as a performative marketplace gesture to signal that I love Carl Chudyk via a direct purchase from the publisher.

    Now that I had a new copy, I decided to give it another shot. Even so, it took about five plays to wipe Glory to Rome out of my head and grok the game on its own terms…and the rest is history.

    Most of the time, I will know if I enjoy a game after the first play – hell, I usually know to avoid a game after reading the rules! But those rare exceptions makes me believe that having total confidence in one’s own palate a dangerous overreach.

    I wonder if my deeply religious upbringing is why I remain so tentative when making opinions. Prideful self assuredness was one quality that was not well received by my deity of that time. This constant self-questioning has enhanced aspects of my career, especially when it comes to critiquing designs (especially floorplans) and tweaking work processes. However, I also think it set me up to be a weak designer – creativity often requires one to go out on a limb and jump on it … and I’m just not up for that sort of exercise.

  • Magic Treehouse, Mary Pope Osborne

    Unfortunately, my daughter got my genes for nearsightedness. In her teenage years, my wife managed to avoid getting glasses by doing a regular exercise of staring into a pitch black room.

    Try getting a seven year old to do that regularly!

    Now that I’ve broken forty and my eyesight seems to be on a second round of degeneration, I’ve been assigned this task, to sit in a dark room with the girl for twenty minutes a night.

    Fortunately, technology.

    We have been listening to audiobooks, courtesy of the library, and she has been plowing through the Magic Treehouse series. Having listened to several of these books, I have two notes.

    First, it seems quite negligent for Merlin and Morgan le Fay to send the two children to gratuitously dangerous quests. For example, Jack and Annie were sent to Pompeii the morning before the volcano erupts. If Morgan was going to ship them back in time, couldn’t she have set the dial back a couple days?

    Second, it is awfully convenient that the kids are able to communicate with whoever they come across. Obviously, such a conceit is necessary for the stories to work, but I wonder if an immigrant would have written these books. It requires a certain centeredness (or lack of otherness) from being part of the majority culture to have the imagination to ignore such a plot hole. At least the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had the Babelfish.

    I should add a third note since these books aren’t for me. My daughter loves these books. She’d (visually) read them all in an afternoon, if we let her, but the whole point is to go through them in these night time sessions. Plus there are plenty of other books for her to read – including the non-fiction “Magic Treehouse Fact Checkers” which accompany many of these books.

    I should add a fourth note several months later, having completed the series. These books truly aren’t for adults. The plotlines were so cringeworthy that I had to start listening to my own podcasts during these sessions. That said, my daughter still loved the books and they exposed her to plenty of moments in history that she wouldn’t have known otherwise.

    She’ll still occasionally revisit the ebooks on her reader, so I think that ultimately remains an endorsement for the series. Fortunately, we’ve now moved on to Newbery Award books and that is much more palatable for me.

  • The Voyage of Dr. Dolittle, Hugh Lofting, 1922

    After finishing The Magic Treehouse series, I borrowing several Newbery Award winners for our audiobook listening sessions. My daughter read the synopses of these books and was intrigued with the idea of someone who could talk to animals. I was a little surprised by her choice, since she strongly prefers girls as her main characters. Then again, the other books with female protagonists were too scary for her preference (she doesn’t care for tense plots), and she sure does love animals.

    At first, it was quite a bit of a shock to go from Mary Pope Osborne’s clear voice to the sounds of a deep, gravelly British man. However our ears caught on quickly and we both enjoyed the story. It was a wide ranging adventure, both in town and out in the world. Given its age, I was worried it would dabble with unsavory stereotypes, but Hugh Lofting managed to avoid such traps. In all, a good time.

    My daughter certainly thought so, she borrowed all the Dolittle books from the library (there are quite a few) and plowed through them, even ones that without the illustrations. This book was a wholesome, delightful romp and I see why the Voyages of Dr. Dolittle continues to hold sway a century after its initial publication. The Magic Treehouse introduced our girl to chapter books, but this was her first true excursion into the deeper world of books. Not a bad way to start.

    Any child who is not given the opportunity to [meet Doctor Dolittle] and all of his animal friends will miss out on something important.

    Jane Goodall

  • Mary Engelbreit Loonacy, Andrew Looney, 2018

    The Looney’s have good ideas.

    They’re also great at franchising those good ideas.

    But holy god, they are exceedingly mediocre at turning good ideas into good games.

    Usually their development process is just good enough if you embrace the game on its terms (Aquarius, Nanofictionary). It’s telling that Zendo is the only great game to go with their brilliant concept of the Icehouse pyramids (and you could argue that Zendo barely a game).

    When you make a habit of inhabiting the “good enough” zone, you’re bound to drop a deuce and this was a stinker. I have no idea what is the appeal of Loonacy, much less how it has managed to be published in its multitude of iterations.

    I don’t regret the purchase, the game was on sale at steep discount and the pictures are pretty enough. I’ll keep the game around so maybe I’ll find out what I’m missing one day.

    We haven’t played this game since the initial plays a couple months ago. I should get my wife and mother in law to play a four player game with my daughter to find out what I might be overlooking. Or maybe not. Odds are pretty high that this will be yet another inhabitant in my big box of small un-played card games.

  • I Ching, King Wen, Thomas Cleary, 1992

    A few weeks ago, I borrowed the audiobook of the John Minford translation of the I Ching, which was a good way to go through all the introductory material, but really quite lousy once it started to go through each hexagram.

    I’m not a believer in the divine per se, but I do believe in the unconscious. This translation by Thomas Cleary seemed to be the most straightforward, least western new age woo woo physical copy that was available at the library.

    It is a lovely pocket paperback. Just the straight text with a short introduction and minimal notes at the end. It was good to first meet the I Ching by walking (often confusedly) through the text without any commentary to clog the flow.

    The simplicity of this format helped me wrap my head around the framework of the book. It let my mind start to feel the contours of this world, the hexagrams flowing one after another, flipping back and forth.

    Even so, I must be admit that the damn book (the original, not the translation) is a word salad. This isn’t a bad thing (I suspect that’s why it continues to speak effectively to querents), but there is no denying that the text can feel like bunch of images that don’t make much coherent sense.

    Then again, it’s been making sense for millennia, so there must be something there. Does the emperor have no clothes? Maybe not this time. I sense that there is something here, even though the pieces are not logically tied together.

    Ultimately, I’ve purchased a copy of the several translations for long term reference. This small book was a good introduction to the I Ching and will stay on my shelves until someone puts it on hold at the library, but I don’t feel a need to purchase my own copy.

    Since writing the first draft of this post, I have gotten really into the I Ching. I appreciate this translation as in my personal history since it introduced me to the book. However, I don’t ever reference this translation when I conduct a reading. I’ve stopped pulling it off the shelf, preferring my Minford, Wilhem/Baynes, Lynn, Richter, and Richmond versions. There is something to be said for being available at the right time, but I fear that may be the best one can say about it.

  • Death by Meeting, Patrick Lencioni, 2004

    I’ve been a fan of reforming meetings but have had difficulty thinking about how to do it.

    I enjoyed the book Read this Before the Next Meeting, a short book by Al Pitampalli, which emphasized decision making and preparation before a meeting. This was a good start because the advice fits nicely with my preference to solve problems one-on-one, but it was a myopic in its proposed solution.

    Death by Meeting takes a different tack by emphasizing the need for meetings is to unearth and expose conflict. This allows all players to put their views on the table for an open resolution. It is an appealing approach, though it will take some thinking in how to implement this, especially as a lower level employee within the organization.

    The other key point of the book is to categorize the meetings: five-minute huddles, weekly “tactical” check-ins, monthly strategy sessions, and quarterly off-sites. These categorizations don’t match my professional experience as a bit player outside of the C suite, however I like the idea of categorizing one’s meetings, so that each type can be fine tuned for fit.

    When I was in production architecture, I would always push back against management’s assumption that a draftsman could just cut-and-paste old details. No one should start from scratch, but fact one needs to draw another detail means that this is a unique condition. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions for such problems. Even so, details should be categorized and sorted, careful organization is the art of putting together a set.

    Similarly, I think my role is to find a proper categorization for the multitude of meetings that I encounter in my position. From there, I need to envision how each of those meetings could be made more effective. Then I will need to consider my position (as low man internally, or main client on projects) to figure how to encourage change.

    Along with streamlining asynchronous communications, I think this will be a pretty interesting exercise for the next few years.

    In the half year since I wrote the first draft, I’ve written an extended blog post about weekly check-ins for projects and started a weekly check-in with my supervisor as well as a bi-weekly check-in for my digital signature side project at the office. I have not made any revisions to the weekly Owner Architect Contractor meetings, though I have been holding them as video conferences (with job walks on a separate day) which I think that works fairly well.

    It looks like I will be deep in design for the next year, so it will be interesting to see how that process might be managed differently in a post-pandemic videoconference centric world.

  • Innovation on Board Game Arena

    I went on a binge, playing Innovation on BoardGameArena.com. This was the first week since finishing graduate school where I stayed up past 1am every night.

    The implementation of Innovation on BGA is quite good and it is really convenient to have a community of players around the world. This is especially true when you join the “Arena League” where you are always just a few minutes from having an available opponent.

    I think that a proper league ranking system would just give you a number, maybe some sort of ELO score, but that would be a bit too dry. Instead BGA created six levels to gamify the journey itself. Once you’re in the system, there’s always yet another rung on the ladder, culminating in the “elite” level with the final goal to reach number one.

    It didn’t help that I lucked into a couple easy wins over “elite” players in my first few games. Like a good casino, this beginner’s luck sucked me in hard. Subsequent games put me back in my place, being properly crushed in most of my games against top ranked opponents. There were a few games where I was “just one turn away” from victory, but that is the point of competition at the upper levels. One wasted turn is what separates the elite from us mere mortals.

    In the end, I made it to “gold” in that week, It was quite gratifying to know that my obsessive gameplaying against myself during the quarantine of early 2020 turned out to be decent training. Still, I must quit this Arena. It’s too easy to click play again, and again, and again.

    This was a fun one week fling, but it would have made a bad marriage. I slept only a few hours every night and was on the verge of being chronically sleep deprived. The effort to become truly great would have been monumental. It’s one thing to use your actions wisely; a whole other level of to never waste an action. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

    A few days after stopping BGA, I’ve started to feel a deep sense of relief. I had been in the grips of a addiction and didn’t realized it. Just like quitting Facebook last summer, I hadn’t realized how deeply this thing had dug its tendrils into my subconscious until after I stopped.

    It’s a little embarrassing to go on a run bragging about kicking digital addictions, and then admit how easy it is to fall right back into it. Even so, I am happy to report that I’ve stayed off this drug for the two months after that week of gluttony. I’ll log onto BGA on Friday nights to play with my friends, but that’s it. To be clear, this isn’t a feat of will power, but a consequence of getting really into the I Ching. It’s a good reminder that it is a whole lot easier to quit for something better.

  • Mottainai (again, again), Carl Chudyk, 2015

    After another gushing post about Mottainai late last year, a friend on boardgamegeek responded.

    I wasn’t really impressed by the couple of plays I had way back when but you make me think I ought to try it again.

    Martin

    This was my response:

    To be fair, I wasn’t particularly impressed after my first couple plays of Mottainai. I remember trying the original print and play version and thinking this was a pale version of Chudyk’s earlier classic, Glory to Rome (GtR).

    My recent infatuation with Mottanai has a bit to do with timing. I bought a copy of this game halfway into my season of exile between March and June of 2020. During that time I was playing quite a bit of of Innovation against myself, so I added Mottainai add some variety.

    In this enforced solitude, it took several plays of Mottainai to banish GtR out of my head and grok this game on its own terms. At the same time, work got insanely busy so I went from primarily playing Innovation to focusing on Mottainai, because of the freshness of the new game and its ease of setup.

    After work slowed down and I stopped traveling, I moved back in with the family. Now that I was with the kids again, I no longer had big blocks of free time. With little people running amok, I could only sneak in a hand when circumstances permitted. Thus, the simple single deck shuffle went from being a convenient amenity to a killer app feature.

    This game is definitely an acquired taste. There is no sugarcoating the convoluted flow for such a short game. Because of the speed of this game, there is no time for a memorable silly experience as could be found in GtR.

    The high randomness also masks the high skill in this game – it reminds me of my first couple plays of Innovation which were absolutely baffling and frustrating. That experience was such a turnoff that I avoided Innovation for a several years.

    After this many plays, I continue to be impressed with the tight design of Mottainai. I don’t think there are any wasted aspects in the game (such as Legionary actions in two or three player GtR). Every card in the deck can be perfect when used in the right context. As I become more familiar with the game, I find more and more contexts where a given card would be “perfect”.

    I can attest that the dominant strategy that I mentioned in my first review was indeed a product of personal groupthink. Even though I heavily relied upon that strategy in my first twenty plays, it has completely disappeared over the past eighty plays. It’s too slow if the opponent is actively pushing a fast game.

    I’ve gotten a good grasp over fast build approaches to end (and win) the game in the blink of an eye, especially now that I have gotten comfortable with craft-builds. However, I sense there is room for slower strategies to counteract this. I think this requires getting better at selling a few items early in the game. This of course causes a delicious quandary since early sales removes materials which could have been used for crafting multiple works. At the moment, this approach to keep the fast builder honest is rarely successful, but I think I could make it work about a third of the time if I deliberately practice this strategy.

    Hopefully Asmadi will get the Wutai Mountain expansion reprinted soon, cause I’m looking forward to exploring this last horizon in the Mottainai gameplay universe.

    Spoiler alert, I got my copy of Wutai Mountain, and it was glorious.

    All in all, Carl Chudyk is a minor diety. We are lucky to live in his world.

    Unfortunately for his games, I’ve taken to reading books lately. But at some point, I’ll be back, with a vengeance!

  • Mottainai: Wutai Mountain Expansion, Carl Chudyk, 2018

    A few months ago, I earned the the dubious honor of having the most recorded plays of Mottainai and its expansion Wutai Mountain. Maybe I will write a proper review of this expansion one day, but its been a while so I decided to publish the jumbled notes I sketched out after this great accomplishment.

    If Mottainai is a knife fight, then Wutai Mountain is a bruising boxing match. This expansion is a bit swingier. The OM cards drain your hand which takes time to refill. If you play (and fill up) a powerful OM card, the final beatdown could be foreshadowed several turns before the inevitable. Such advance signaling is not as common in the base game.

    The game with the expansion is considerably heavier than the original. Jumping from 3 to 4 (on the five point complexity scale on boardgamegeek) feels accurate. The expanded game is less heavy than Pax Porfiriana, but it now fits comfortably within the category of ridiculously heavy card game in a really small box.

    I have to admit that plays 10 thru 25 were a bit of a slog. The extra heaviness got wearying after the initial novelty of the OM cards faded out. I almost stopped playing the expansion, but I hit a second wind where everything clicked and I burst through a wild run of plays over a single weekend. The OM mechanism is still ponderous, but my mind now groks its intricacies. It helped that I realized that one can win a Wutai game without ever completing an OM work (maybe up to a third of such games).

    My personal boardgamegeek rating for this game has followed this trajectory, I started with an 8, dropped it to a 6, and have settled at a 7. I’m not sure if the expansion improves the base game, but it is a solid alternate game that uses Mottainai cards. This is not a must-have, and I would recommend playing the original fifty times before trying this out. Now that I’m standing on top of both play count lists at boardgamegeek, I’m not sure whether I would choose play the base game or the expansion more regularly.

    When I was shopping for a car after college, I decided to get an old Datsun sports car. I eventually settled on a 1981 280zx 2+2 with a back seat. Since I didn’t drink, the backseat got quite a bit of use since I was often the designated driver. Before I made that final purchase, I tried out an early model 240z, which felt like a completely different vehicle. I occasionally wonder if I made a mistake getting the Fat Elvis version, even though the back seat gave me the opportunity to transport four friends to Sacramento to watch Melt Banana.

    Unlike the 280zx, my experience with Wutai Mountain was unfortunately all by myself, playing against myself. Even if I don’t play it more, this expansion be inextricably tied to memories 2020, navigating the lonely vagaries of this drawn out pandemic.

    The night after, I played both versions, twice.

    It was relaxing to return to the base game. There are fewer unknowns to ponder in the base game without the OM deck. The patterns in a hand are much easier to analyze at a glance with the base game.

    If someone wants an experience with wild variety, I see why they might prefer Wutai. After all, this is the point of the expansion. However, I’m not sure that’s what I want out of a cardgame.

    Fortunately both decks fit in the box, so they are both always available.

    A couple nights later, I had another opportunity to play the base game and the expansion in quick succession.

    I think my earlier analogy is correct. To take it to extremes, the base game is like getting on a Kawasaki to race around an oval track. Adding Wutai Mountain turns it into a meandering stroll through the woods.

    Wutai constipates your hand in two ways – you need to have cards in hand to fill up an OM card when you initially play that card. And then having emptied your hand to stock up the OM card, you need to fill your hand back up. It’s not a bad dynamic, but it is a fundamental change from the base game.

    A few days later.

    I’d say the appropriate aphorism is “more is more, but not necessarily better (or worse)”.

    After two hundred plays, maybe I’ll come to consider Wutai as mean and nasty as the base game. However, currently Wutai has a expansive meandering quality that is enjoyable in its own way.

    I hit 250 plays for Mottainai and 50 for Wutai.

    My final verdict is that is that Wutai does some cute things, but if I wanted to slow down Mottainai, I’d just play Innovation.

    Mottanai is fast and viscous. That’s the raison d’etre of this game. I’ll keep Wutai in the box for easy variety, but it generally isn’t worth the loss of quickness and lightness. (I should reread the Italo Calvino’s first two essays in Six Memos for the Next Millennium).

    The thrill of Mottanai is derived from the suddenness of the game end, which often comes as a thief in the night. One misstep can set up the sudden victory for your opponent. Delightful surprises reveal themselves. Swift game endings do not happen regularly in the expansion. Furthermore, the base game commonly scores as a tie, with the tiebreaker being whoever ended the game. This dynamic makes it important to be the person who ends the game, and it is often worth the risk the game prematurely even if you don’t have a guaranteed victory. Wutai’s final scores are generally lopsided which eliminates this delicious dynamic.

    In any case, I suspect Wutai will end up like Nefarious, a game with a ton of plays in one year and not many after. Mottanai will remain a classic.

    I haven’t played this game in the past few months. The I Ching and reading books in general has taken up all my free time when I’m not playing with the kids. Mottainai is great, but not as fun as plumbing the craggy depths of my brain.

  • Bed of Procrustes, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2010, 2015

    A few years ago, I borrowed this book from the library only to read a couple pages before returning it. Fortunately, the occasional recommendations of Taleb at rvltr reminded me to pick this book up again.

    This time around, I got the audio book and by the time I had reached the place where I had been previously dropped off, I realized this was an absolutely brilliant little book.

    What changed?

    It wasn’t the format. This book is best as a physical hardcopy, as an object lying around the house to be randomly accessed, to be pondered a couple lines at a time. An audio book is actually the perfectly wrong format for this book.

    So what changed? How did I see brilliance after missing it in its best light? Well, my brain is has changed. In the past year, I finally kicked my Facebook addiction and minimized my use of Boardgamegeek. I’ve always had good boundaries around Twitter and Linkedin, but I’ve strangled my use of those services as well. Thank god I never got sucked into Instagram or Tiktok.

    Getting control over these digital vices has not only freed up precious free time, it has made a big difference in how my mind processes the world around me.

    Can you imagine it? I wasn’t mentally concentrated enough to read a short book of pithy proverbs! We are going to look back at the early 21st century as a dark age of constant distraction from the computers in our pockets.

    My twenties had cigarettes, my thirties had social media. At the moment, I regret the latter more than the former. Let’s hope this decade doesn’t come with its own a regrettable addiction.

    The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free

    Taleb

    Back to the book for a moment. It’s fucking brilliant. Not every aphorism will be applicable to you, but when it hits, the punch packs a wallop. I read and listened (at 1.0x speed) to each copy separately, basically reading it twice in quick succession. I did not notice a major difference between the original audiobook and the expanded ebook. Both are fine but neither are ideal formats for full appreciation of this book. I suspect that I will eventually purchase a hardcopy, since it was designed for manual serendipity. However, it is also fair to note that I don’t love it enough to make a stand against my wife’s current campaign against new book physical purchases.

    Three months later. Even though I still haven’t purchased a copy, I suspect that this will be my most influential book of the year. It was nice that it spurred me to listen to Anti-Fragile, but more importantly it ignited my recent push towards reading ancient wisdom literature, such as the Havamal, I Ching, Bhagavad Gita, Analects, etc.

    One of Taleb’s aphorisms starts “Read no book less than 100 years old…”, It seems that I’ve multiplied that advice by ten or twenty. I wonder how long this personal trend will last.