GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Notes

  • MaNiKi (Crazy Car variant), Dominique Ehrhard, 2002

    This morning I slammed together a DIY set of MaNiKi (also called Jungle Smart and Crazy Circus) using Duplo Blocks.

    I made three different colored cars (green, blue, and yellow) and put them on red and orange Duplo Houses. I wrote up a cheat sheet using the MaNiKi commands.

    So the only thing that didn’t match the published game was determining the goal for the round. Instead of having the 24 cards as in the published game, I took 5 pieces and put them in a bag, green, blue, yellow for each car with red and orange for each of the houses.

    To set the goal, I draw one piece at a time. All of the car color tiles are stacked in order and then placed on the first house tile that came up. After the second house tile comes up, any further car tiles (if any) are placed on that second house.

    This system worked well enough, though the cards in the published game make for better gameplay, since the goal is immediately revealed and the game can proceed without the drawing process.

    That said, this makeshift set worked quite well in teaching my five year old the game. She’s not ready to play competitively since she can’t work out the order of operations in her head, but she caught on surprisingly fast.

    It’s definitely a sharp little game, one worth trying, and possibly buying as well!

    One last note. In the photo, you will see a little tower to the right. I used that tower to keep track of the starting setup for a round. If there were any mistakes we could easily go back to the beginning to work out the correct answer. It’s not necessary for the rules as written, but a nice accessory for beginner games.

  • Kingdomino, Bruno Cathala, 2016

    With the two little ones, I haven’t been gaming much. In this time away, I’ve allowed theories kind of harden into preferences, and one of my favorite things to hate is multi-player solitaire.

    So let’s say you make a game of four people building their own little board with zero interaction outside of drafting tiles.

    Yeah f’ that…and the committee who gave this game THE award.

    But Kingdomino is an SDJ and it was being sold at half off at Target.

    So I picked it up.

    And damn, it’s a nifty little game.

    I still doubt I would enjoy its more complicated sibling Queendomino, but the committee still knows what it’s doing.

  • Visit from the sister (games!)

    My sister and brother-in-law visited Vegas this week so it gave me a chance to play some games between chasing the kids around.

    Innovation (twice)
    Circus Flohcati
    Aton
    No Thanks (twice)
    Times Square

    When you have a limited time budget, it’s interesting what came out to be played.

    I’ve always acclaimed Carl Chudyk, the designer of Innovation, as a “minor deity”. And this assessment hasn’t changed. His ability to have a completely chaotic game result in a memorable gameplay experience, is really something to behold.

    As for the other games, Aton and Times Square are both excellent, albeit slightly 2 player fussy games.  Aron is a gridded area control game and Times Square is a linear tug of war, but both games have multiple levers to push and pull constrained by the card draw making for great 2 player experiences.

    It was also a lot of fun to introduce No Thanks and Circus Flohcati to my sister and brother in law. Just fun light fillers, easy to teach but with meaningful decisions.  Both well designed games, also by Thorsten Gimmler and Reiner Knizia respectively. My daughter even joined in for No Thanks and enjoyed it well enough.

    Interestingly, all of them were card games, as were almost all the other games I would have thought to pull out. Amongst the board-dice-cards categorizations, I definitely lean towards cards.

    But honestly, my daughter had the most fun of all when we played hide and seek in the house.

  • Trapped in paradise

    My in-laws have a peach tree in their back yards, and to keep the birds from eating all the peaches, they wrap it in a net.

    The net got compromised and three birds ended up dying in the summer heat before we realized what was happening.

    There are many colloquialisms for what just happened.

    But mainly it’s sad.

    And a warning to the rest of us about life in general.

  • A short list of Books

    I was rereading Damn Good Advice by George Lois and I realized it is most likely one of my favorite self help books along with Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande.

    Then there are the two Jocko Willink and Leif Babin leadership books, Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership. The first is clear and concise, the second is a necessary counterbalance to the literally extreme title.

    And then Seth Godin’s most recent book This is Marketing, as well as his older classic The Dip. The first book is about selling, or as he defines it, making change in the world. The second is about quitting fast versus having grit and trying to navigate both great options.

    And I need to re-read the massive tome Design for Ecological Democracy by my first architecture professor, Randy Hester.

    Honorable mentions:
    The One Thing
    Essentialism
    Dale Carnegie
    Do it Tomorrow
    The Leadership Pipeline

    Throw in some “impractical” books like Invisible Cities and Labyrinths and that’s not a bad reading list at all.

  • Mirai, Mamoru Hosoda, 2018

    Over the long weekend, we watched Mirai, winner of the Japanese Academy Prize for Animation in 2018.

    Of his films that I’ve seen, this was his tightest story and I really enjoyed it. I am fond of slice of life family stories, but I felt that he did not do a good job wrapping up the end to Wolf Children so acclaim is not guaranteed. However I can happily say he stuck the landing on this one.

    It also helped that the family included an architect, so the house in the film is pretty cool (albeit questionable IRL). As easter eggs, it was also fun to see the Ikea products in the house, presumably to signify a modern sense of style on a middle class budget.

    And of course, it helped to have two kids spread apart almost exactly the same difference as the protagonists on screen. It was fun to watch the kids, but also of exchanges between the mom and dad.

    This is a family film and the kids will dig it, but it is parents who will really grok what just happened.

  • Weiqi (Go)

    No that I taught my girl Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) I’m getting greedy and I want to teach her Weiqi (Go).

    I guess I need to be careful that I’m not transmorgifying my general acquisitiveness for games into forcing her to play different new games all the time.

    That said, I think she did enjoy playing Xiangqi. She didn’t really enjoy the initial teaching part, but she did like moving pieces around and eating my pieces that I offered up to her by purposely bad plays.

    Even though I’m naturally quite bad at Xiangqi, at least I’ve played it quite a bit and know how it works. But Weiqi is not a game I’ve played much, so I guess I need to play a bit online and then once I’ve at least gotten the rules worked out, then I’ll drag out a chess board (9×9 vertexes) and we’ll see where it goes.

  • Topsy Turvy

    We recently picked up a rotating compost bin and I’ve been depositing the goods every morning.

    Our local ants have discovered this new treasure trove in the backyard.

    I wonder what they are thinking when everything goes spinning around for ninety seconds before settling back into normal until the next morning.

  • Bread, 24 August 2019

    I went back to my standard 75 hydration for this fellow after the train wreck of last week.

    400g all purpose flour (King Arthur)
    300g water
    40g starter
    4g salt

    I started it around 6am, I thought I had put it in the fridge when we went out for a few hours in the afternoon, but the dough was sitting on the kitchen island when I came home.

    Fortunately, given the small amount of starter, it was not over proofed and it came out quite poofy and pretty.

  • Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, Bob Persichetti, 2018

    I’ve read about psychological studies which show that people actually get more enjoyment out of a movie or book that has been spoiled.

    I’m not really sure I buy into that theory. I certainly avoid spoilers for any movies I intend to watch.

    But I just watched Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and I suspect I will definitely enjoy the movie more the next time I watch it.

    It was certainly an enjoyable watch the first time. But let’s be frank, the plot is pretty much as you expect from a superhero flick.

    So getting rid of the minimal uncertainty about the plot details will just let me concentrate on the insane graphics.

    Then again, would I have prefered to have this first viewing pre-spoiled?

    Nah.