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Month: October 2024

Two More Board Games from the Top 10 List

Two More Board Games from the Top 10 List

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Here are two more games for my GeekList about the top 10 games on my BGG user profile. They are both “old school” games that younger generations might not recognize, but that gamers my age would possibly remember from their youth.

Why am I making this list? Simply put, because I want to dig up my gamer past and put it on the Internet. I have all these artifacts that are like a record of my gaming life: beat-up old copies of games with customized rules and components, and piles of notes and ideas.

Obviously I’m not going to scan and digitize all of that, but I can at least put together some online content that captures that information – frankly, for posterity. Then, when I’m gone, you can still go to my profiles and get an idea of what it was like to be a game enthusiast in the late 1900s and early 2000s, should that interest you.

So, without further ado, two more games from my top 10:

#8 Illuminati

In my teen years, I was one of a certain breed of nerd who obsessively read The Illuminatus! Trilogy, the conspiracy theory novels by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. You could spot us carrying our dog-eared copies of the big red omnibus edition in the hallways of my high school. We all fancied ourselves fringe intellectuals with a keen understanding of the world denied to our mundane peers. We were resonating with the countercultural vibe of that time period.

How far down the conspiracy rabbit hole I really fell I could not say. Probably I enjoyed the genre with tongue firmly in cheek. But one part of Illuminatus! fandom was playing a card game called Illuminati, published by Steve Jackson Games. I know I played it in high school, because I have a fond memory of playing at one of the old GenCons, where I actually won a copy of the game in a tournament. I wrote about it in this sesson report, where you can see a picture of the copy I won, which I still own: The Gnomes of Zurich Take Over the World Sometime in the Early 1980s.

This was also a popular game at the WarGamers Club in college. The game came with blank cards so you could make up your own, and I still have those in my old copy. Here’s a couple of examples (I have others but they are not in great shape):

In the late 80s one of my friends ran a really cool play by mail (PBM) version of the game. He printed out a set of rules (which I still have) on perforated computer paper, written up as a roleplaying game he called “The Secret Wars.” The way it worked was your PC was the head of a conspiracy (which you could make up and could be anything you wanted) and acted as an agent. You could recruit more agents as NPCs, and build up a conspiracy power structure using rules like in the Illuminati card game.

Each turn, each agent and each group would get an action. All of this was submitted by mail, and after a bit you’d get back the results. What was so great about it was, since it was all done by mail, you actually had no idea how many players were in the game and what the big picture was. You had to slowly figure it out based on your correspondence with the gamemaster.

I don’t think the game ever officially ended, just sort of faded out. I ran my own game in the early 90s with new friends I had made in college, and still have all those notes and papers. It too faded out after a while. It’s hard keeping up with a play by mail game. With permission from my friend who gave me the rules back in the 80s, I’m planning to transcribe them into a digital document and upload them to BoardGameGeek and to my personal web site (it’s a medium term project of mine).

I’m not sure I would want to run another PBM Illuminati game in today’s political climate, with conspiracy thinking actually being an existential threat instead of a mere countercultural affectation. But it sure was fun when I did it before.

In the late 90s/early 00s collectible card games were the rage (I guess they still are), and an Illuminati-themed version was made called Illuminati: New World Order. I briefly got into it, but I never had enough cards to make a really competitive deck. I remember liking it though.

Although it’s been 20 years since I’ve played any version of Illuminati, this game will always have a special place in my heart for all the zany, subversive fun it has provided.

#6 Cosmic Encounter

This is a game that was hugely popular in my college years. It is very chaotic and luck based, unlike the kinds of games that are popular today. It also has a storied history, with many different editions published as the rights passed from game company to game company.

Back in those days, we would have considered this game, and games like Illuminati and Nuclear War, to be “medium weight,” or games to play when you only had a couple of hours, not a whole day. They were all random and chaotic, too, but that was how we liked our games back then.

I first played the original Eon edition with a group of college friends. The game has a goofy space conquest theme, and each player has one or two Alien powers. Each power comes with a matching card called a Flare. In this edition, you didn’t discard the Flares when you played them, which made them more powerful (and also made sense given the name). Later editions made it so that the Flares were one time use.

I know I’ve played the West End version, but the one that I’ve played the most is the Mayfair edition. I own a copy, with all the expansions stuffed into the main box, well worn from many, many plays. Even after I graduated from college, I was able to find players throughout the 1990s.

We had a game group at one my old jobs where we played at lunch time every Wednesday. This was actually at the dawn of the Eurogame era, and we played games like Settlers of Catan as well, but since we were older generation, we were comfortable with a game in the older style. When we played Cosmic, in order to expedite game play we would pick our Alien powers ahead of time. One of the guys in our group created a Unix program that generated random powers. Once we each picked our powers, then he would set the game up, including the Flares, so it would all be ready to go when our lunch break began.

In the 2000s, I haven’t had as much luck getting this game to the table. I played the Fantasy Flight version once but wasn’t thrilled, probably because I only played the base game. The few times that I’ve brought Cosmic to the table in recent years, it hasn’t caught on. I think it is too chaotic for today’s gamers, who are used to games which accomodate sure-footed strategizing. In Cosmic Encounter, the luck of the draw can overwhelmingly favor one player over the others. Some combos are insanely powerful, and others weak and ineffective. But I’ve always loved how frenzied and chaotic this game is, and would gladly play it, with all expansions, any time anyone asked.

I Can’t See Good and It Makes Me Cranky!

I Can’t See Good and It Makes Me Cranky!

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My vision started deteriorating when I turned 50 years old. Before that, I had never needed any kind of visual correction. But, almost as if a switch got flipped on my 50th birthday, and the warranty on my eyes expired, my eyesight got progressively worse as I aged into my fifties. It got to the point that I needed corrective lenses to drive safely. I also needed reading glasses to read, including reading small text like preparation instructions on food packaging. I’m sure you other oldsters are familiar with this experience.

Now I constantly juggle among three sets of glasses: a prescription pair for getting about in the space of life, and essential for both driving and watching TV; another prescription pair for the computer (with the blue light filter); and then generic reading glasses for books and sometimes the cell phone. I should probably use the computer glasses with the cell phone, but some apps have such small fonts that I need better magnification to clearly read the text. It seems the only time I’m not wearing glasses is when I’m showering, or when I’m sleeping.

The worst part of it is that I have terrible double vision at medium and long distances. My prescription actually doesn’t do much for the focus of my eyes, but it has a feature called prism which bends the light going into one eye, fixing the double vision. Without it, I see double, which is incredibly annoying, and also makes it impossible to drive a car. So I’d better not lose those glasses.

It’s so bad, and so frustrating, that I’ve started seeing a visual therapist. My diagnosis is a turned eye – technically ‘esotropia,’ meaning the eye turns inward. My therapy consists of exercises to train my eyes on convergence and divergence (turning in and turning out), and also to work on my hand-eye and foot-eye coordination. My therapist wants to build new neural paths in my eye-brain system, and believes that working on my overall physical coordination is an important part of that.

So now our house has eye charts and patterns of shapes taped to the walls, and the family gets to watch me do fun, goofy exercises, and hear me reciting letters to the beat of a metronome. So far, I have noticed only a slight improvement; I seem to be able to fix my double vision at some distances, so long as I strain my eyes. But that’s still annoying, and my eyes are tired all the time, which I know is because I spend so much time looking at a computer screen, but that’s my work and my life, so what am I supposed to do?

I wake up with tired eyes, and can’t see straight, and stumble through my morning routine. When I need to find things, I have to strain my eyes, and turn my head, in an attempt to correct my double vision. It can make me quite cranky sometimes.

I’ve thought about how my double vision might relate to chakra health. Vision is connected to Ajna, the third-eye chakra, which is the seat of the intellect (the mind’s eye, as they say).

Maybe I see double because I can’t discern the future well. Two possible realities float in my visual field, but which one is the accurate image? What does it look like when it comes together? My vision reflects my mind’s confusion and uncertainty over the state of the world, in these uncertain times.

That could just be me overthinking things. Also not good for the third-eye chakra, I’m sure.

Apologies for the whiny post, but I am here to chronicle the changing times, which includes chronicling my own deterioration with age, as I already began to do years ago.

Why Did You Give Up, America?

Why Did You Give Up, America?

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aka: Barnett is back!

Twenty years ago (was it really that long ago?) a geostrategist named Thomas P. M. Barnett pubished a book titled The Pentagon’s New Map. He introduced a new way of thinking about geostrategy in the post-Cold War era. Instead of seeing the world as divided between East and West – the old Soviet bloc vs. U.S. bloc – it made sense to see the world divided between the “Core” of functioning globalized states and the “Gap” of disconnected, poorly governed (or ungoverned) states that weren’t (yet) integrated with the global economy.

Barnett’s book emerged out of a famous (in some circles) presentation on C-Span in 2004. The new map in question was based on a look at all the places where the U.S. military had intervened since the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s. They were all places in the Gap, essentially the part of the world that was most in need of security. The U.S., as the sole superpower to survive the Cold War, was the planet’s premier provider of security.

Logically, the strategic mission of the United States should be to “shrink the Gap” by working to economically integrate these failed states with the rest of the world. This would mean fewer military interventions in the long run. It would fulfill the post-World War II promise of the U.S. using its formidable military power to protect free markets around the globe.

You can see how this line of thinking might have dovetailed with Bush’s Iraq War, ostensibly an effort to replace a dictatorship in the Gap with a democratic state. Barnett was a rising star in the Bush era, and I followed him closely, including reading all of his books. I reviewed The Pentagon’s New Map here on this blog back in 2018, noting at the same time that with the failure of the nation-building efforts in SW Asia (mission not accomplished), his whole line of thinking kind of fell to the wayside. He didn’t post as much on his blog any more, and I lost track of him.

Then I discovered that he is on Substack now, and is promoting a new book. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to have found him there – Substack seems to be where all the intellectual Gen Xers and Boomers have gone to publish and promote their work, now that the other platforms have devolved into A.I.-generated troll farms. Barnett is in fact an Xer, born in 1962.

Here is the post I encountered: The case for Chinese global leadership.

From what I can tell, he is arguing that while the U.S. has withdrawn from the world since the Crisis Era began, China continues the process of integrating with the economies of the Gap (now called the Global South). The Global South welcomes, indeed depends upon, this integration, and so China is emerging as a new global leader, now that America has given up. Barnett, of course, doesn’t refer to the Crisis Era of turnings theory as I just did, but he does mark the 2008 Global Financial Crisis as the turning point, so he is essentially in agreement with the timeline of the generational theory, if not the underlying model.

Here’s a quote from his post:

As I have noted here in the past: America was the market-maker in the system from 1945 to 2008’s Great Recession. Since then we have elected nation-building-at-home presidents (Obama, Trump, Biden) and have largely eschewed any role in promoting global trade integration — just the opposite. Instead of re-injecting just enough market-playing, I’m-in-this-for-myself vibes to rebalance our global posture between looking out for the world and looking out for ourselves, we Americans naturally go overboard in our reaction. We cannot merely adjust; we must pull a 180 and denounce all that came before (Globalization was a lie!). It’s just how we be.

So why did we go overboard (as Barnett puts it) in this country, becoming so obsessed with our Culture Wars divisions that we can’t even form a stable government or coherent national strategy? Overreacting to trends and overcorrecting, I think, comes with the generational cycle, and we might be more vulnerable to this cycle because we are a young settler nation that emerged from radical ideas of freedom and equality, and not bound by any long tradition.

We are also saddled with a Constitutional system that doesn’t work with an even two-party split. The checks and balances lead to paralysis when there is no majority party to assert its agenda. How we got to a 50-50 split, rather than a more workable 60-40 split, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s some natural law of partisanship, a strange attractor in the chaotic system that is modern society. Worst case scenario, a shadowy group is orchestrating it – but that’s just conspiracy thinking.

It also occurs to me that the U.S., being the wealthiest and most secure nation on Earth, can afford to brush off the rest of the world if it wants to. We can take our toys and go home, unlike nations that are caught in conflict regions or heavily dependent on trade. We can obsess on our internal problems, since we don’t realistically face much pressure from the external world. That we choose to do so is us exercising a kind of privilege.

As for our little internal thing that we’re struggling with, well, I think Barnett nails it with this post: The radical-acceptance election – A very uncomfortable truth is that this race is all about race.

He just puts it bluntly: the MAGA movement, with its Hitlerian leader promising a violent cleansing of American society, is the last bastion of white Christian supremacy, trying to stop the tide of non-whites and non-Christians from rising up and claiming their share of freedom and equality and their part in the American dream. He gets the generational aspect of it, recognizing that with Boomers and Xers at the top, the internal struggle will continue. And he gets the high stakes of it – neither side is going to back down.

I’m just glad Barnett ends up on the same side as me, because if he had turned out to be a Trump supporter, I probably wouldn’t have subscribed to his substack.

Oh, who am I kidding: of course I would have subscribed, just to get this brilliant man’s take on current events from that perspective. He’s got a head full of ideas that go against the grain of conventional thinking, and his arguments are always eye-opening for me. I’ve ordered a copy of his new book, and look forward to reading more of his substack posts in the future.

My Sky-Watcher Life List Gets Two Checkmarks in One Week!

My Sky-Watcher Life List Gets Two Checkmarks in One Week!

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I just wanted to post about this on my blog, for the record. I’ve already shared these pictures on social media, on the nights in question.

And it’s not that I actually have a sky-watcher life list where I’m checking off the things I’ve seen in the sky, it’s just interesting that in the space of one week I’ve seen two different celestial phenomena (doot – doo – doo – doo – do) for the first time in my life.

#1 was the Aurora Borealis, which I always figured I would first see on some trip to a northern latitude, if I ever got around to visiting Alaska or Iceland or somewhere like that. I’ve long wanted to witness what I imagined would be a surreal experience of waves and bands of vibrant color in the night sky, and I was excited to learn that, because of solar flares and the resulting geomagentic storms, the northern lights would be visible in lower latitudes.

People all over the U.S. were already posting pictures of them on social media, but any time there was a heads up that it was a particularly good night for viewing them where I live, it would turn out to be overcast, or I might not get the info in time. Then, last Thursday, when Aileen and I were at an invited dress rehearsal, I overheard people in the audience mentioning the northern lights during intermission. At the end of the show, out in the parking lot, I looked up but didn’t see anything.

But then on the drive home, we did see them! Aileen kindly pulled over at a spot that had a good vantage point and I got some pictures. It was a very cold night, so it kind of felt like I had achieved going to a northern latitude to see the Aurora Borealis without actually travelling anywhere.

#2 was Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS. I was so happy to get a look at it, because I remember the excitement I felt at the prospect of spotting Comet Neowise in 2020. We had all that free time because of the pandemic! But it didn’t come to pass, though Aileen and I did go out for looking for it that summer. Possibly it was too faint and we needed to get to a spot with absolutely no light, or possibly we needed a telescope.

When I heard about this new comet, I put the mid-October dates that were best for viewing it on my calendar. It would be visible about 40 minutes after sunset, not too far off the western horizon. On October 15, unfortunately, the western sky was filled with clouds and I knew there was no chance. But on October 16, the sky was completely clear.

At Gavin’s suggestion, I drove out a ways into farm country, and pulled off at a side road where I had a nice view of the sky. It was 40 minutes after sunset, but I didn’t see anything. Based on an article I had saved, I figured out where the comet should be roughly, based on the position of Venus. While I was away from the light pollution in our town, there was also a full moon, which lit up the sky quite nicely, complicating the viewing for me.

As time passed, the sky darkened and stars began to appear. I noticed what looked like a faint streak in the sky at about the right place. When I examined the spot with my binoculars, it turned out to be the comet! Through the binoculars, I had a really nice view. It wasn’t terribly bright, but it was distinctly a comet, with a lovely, long tail. I relished looking at it for a long while, despite the cold.

Though it was only barely visible with the naked eye, my smartphone picked it up well enough with its night vision mode.

Well, there you have it. In the space of a week, I witnessed the northern lights and a comet, both for the first in my life.

Who knows what wonders lie ahead?

SNL 50, Featuring the Prophet Archetype in the Crisis Era

SNL 50, Featuring the Prophet Archetype in the Crisis Era

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Last weekend we watched the latest episode of Saturday Night Live, proudly in its 50th season. We didn’t watch it live, but on the Peacock streaming service, on Sunday evening. The host was the very talented Arianna Grande (b. 1993), of the Millennial generation, and the musical guest was Baby Boomer Stevie Nicks (b. 1948).

In her opening monologue, Grande joked about not wanting to upstage the musical guest, but then promptly burst into song. She is an amazing singer, as well as an amazing actor, and I was honestly worried she would be a hard act for the septuagenerian musical guest to follow.

Well, I shouldn’t have been worrying, because Nicks stepped up with a powerful performance of her song “The Lighthouse,” a political anthem and call-to-action, written after Roe v. Wade was overturned. Dressed all in black, on a barely lit stage, she embodied the dark and foreboding mood of her generation, which has always been at the forefront of angry political protest.

They’ll take your soul, they’ll take your power
Unless you stand up and take it back
Try to see the future and get mad

In the generational theory I often advocate on this blog, the Boomer generation, of which Nicks is a member, has the Prophet archetype – moralistic, values-obsessed, known more for words than for deeds. And with her long, flowing gray locks, Nicks sure looked like a Prophetess as she sang out her warning cry.

Now in elderhood, Boomers are facing their final chance to impress upon younger generations the importance of their message. You can feel the sense of urgency in Nicks’s lyrics.

It’s slipping through your fingers, you don’t have what you had
You don’t have much time to get it back

A video of the performance follows, with full lyrics (the closed captions on YouTube are a bit off). This is really just so Boomer generation. EDIT: The SNL video is not available any more so I switched to the official music video.

I have my scars, you have yours
Don’t let them take your power
Don’t leave it alone in the final hours
They’ll take your soul, they’ll take your power
Don’t close your eyes and hope for the best
The dark is out there, the light is going fast
Until the final hours, your life’s forever changed
And all the rights that you had yesterday
Are taken away
And now you’re afraid
You should be afraid
Should be afraid
Because everything I fought for
Long ago in a dream is gone
Someone said the dream is not over
The dream has just begun, or
Is it a nightmare?
Is it a lasting scar?
It is unless you save it and that’s that
Unless you stand up and take it back
And take it back
I have my scars, you have yours
Don’t let them take your power
Don’t leave it alone in the final hours
They’ll take your soul, they’ll take your power
Unless you stand up and take it back
Try to see the future and get mad
It’s slipping through your fingers, you don’t have what you had
You don’t have much time to get it back
I wanna be the lighthouse
Bring all of you together
Bring it out in a song
Bring it out in stormy weather
Tell them the story

A Board Game that Takes All Day to Play: Yes, Please!

A Board Game that Takes All Day to Play: Yes, Please!

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As already noted, I am putting together a GeekList of the top 10 games on my BGG user profile. This next one, Civilization, is #7 on my list, and is the third one mentioned on this blog that comes from game company Avalon Hill (the other two are Titan and Diplomacy). I should note that being #7 on the list does not make this my 7th favorite game; the list is ordered from newest game to oldest game. So it just means it’s a game I’ve been playing for a long time.

I don’t remember if I played Civilization in high school, but I definitely did a lot in college. There was a group of us guys from our gaming club, called the Wargamers Club, that would play all day on Saturday in our dormitory. Yeah, we were a bunch of nerds alright. While our peers were out in the sunshine doing sports or whatever, we would spend 10+ hours focused on a board game. Because that is how long a game of Civilization takes to play. But it’s such a good game, that it is worth the time. At least, to me it is. I actually enjoy playing a game that takes a whole day to finish.

This game, as its title and box art suggest, simulates the rise of ancient civilizations in the old world. The board is a map of the lands around the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the fertile crescent in the modern Middle East. You play one of the well-known civil societies or empires of ancient times, such as Egypt or Assyria. You spread across the world, build cities, trade resources, and develop techonologies. Sometimes you have a little conflict with other civilizations, but there is not much war in this particular game. However, there are calamities like earthquakes and civil disorder that alter the board.

Unlike the other older games on this list, Civilization is one I’ve kept getting back to through my whole life, albeit much less frequently than in college. It seems like once every few years throughout the 2000s, someone would host a game, including me sometimes. I even wrote a helpful post with advice on what was needed for a succesful game, in the form of a review: So you want to play Civilization…

I think a big part of what keeps me coming back to this game is that it is fun to play even if you fall behind and are likely to lose in the end. You know you will lose, and the game has hours left to go, but it’s still enjoyable to do what you can to build up your own civilization. Plus there’s the fun of seeing the calamities come out and reshape the board every turn.

There have been expansions to the game, which extend the map and add resources, as well as reimplementations which slightly alter the rules. Personally, I only own the original, base game, though I have played other versions on occasion. Most recently, when I’ve played, it has been one of these new versions where the map is extended to pretty much cover all of Eurasia and North Africa, and the game can accomodate a huge number of players.

There was a game convention some time in the 2010s where I first learned about these reimplementations. I found out some folks were playing Mega Civilization, and I wanted in! We played on the last day of the convention, a Sunday, for over 12 hours. I did not mind at all using up one entire day of the convention for this purpose.

Mega Civilization can accomodate up to 18 players, but we had about 12 or so, which was still a huge number and just made the game that much more fun, to me. I played again at the same con some years later. Then, after I moved to Pennsylvania in 2018, I played again at a convention in this region.

The last time I played was in 2023, though it was yet another reimplementation, Mega Empires: The West. Played for an entire Saturday, just like in the good old days. I was in last place, but still had a great time.

They keep tweaking the original game, but these new versions remain the same in spirit. They evoke the same joy while playing them – as well as requiring the same stamina – that I recall from my gaming youth.

Setting up a game of Mega Civilization at a gaming convention.