Hero Worship

Board Game: Axis and Allies

/ Shane / 1 Comment

It wouldn’t be fair to talk about Acquire without mentioning the OTHER best board game ever, Axis and Allies.

Axis and Allies is like Risk on steroids. In fact, after you’ve played Axis and Allies, Risk seems so un-strategic and pointless, it is hard to ever play it again.

Like Risk, you have a certain number of units that “fight” against an opponents units by rolling dice. That’s about where the similarities end though, because in Axis and Allies there are many different types of units, and each need to roll a different number for a “kill”. For example, if I am attacking you with my infantry men and my fighter jets, my infantry needs to roll a 1 to kill one of your guys, but my jets need to roll a 3 or lower (obviously a jet is a lot more powerful than an infantry men).

So why wouldn’t you just have only jets then? Well, much like Risk, you gain “points” during your turn based on how much territory you control. In Axis and Allies, these points are money, and you can spend them on units. This is where some of the strategy comes in: do I buy a ton of cheap infantry to throw into the breach and eat up bullets, or do I buy something more expensive, like tanks or bombers? Do I spend money on a navy, and patrol the Atlantic with wolf-packs of subs, or do I blitzkrieg my panzer divisions across Africa? Or maybe I should be going  Luftwaffe all the way?

As you’ve probably picked up, this game is centered on World War II, and is eerily accurate, historically. In fact, the initial setup of the board is to replicate the troop placements of a specific year of the war. I’ve seen alternate setups online where you can replicate the troop placements of other years of the war. And if you make the same historical decisions (good or bad) made by the countries in those wars, you tend to have the same results those countries had. I am always amazed at how accurate the whole thing plays out (like the way Russia is almost forced to sacrifice ridiculous numbers of infantry men to buy time against the German army, or the way the U.S. has very little effect on the war until the end, when they become a powerhouse. The “sleeping giant” indeed!) History classes should be forced to play this game; I think they would learn a lot about why certain decisions were made.

However, the game gets interesting when you DON’T follow the precedent of history. Russia captured by Japanese invaders from the East. Britain fighting Pacific naval battles from a base in Australia. A powerful Russian navy (strategy-wise, this is about as bad as it sounds). D-Day taking place, but in Africa, or Scandinavia, or some other strange location. Now we’re talking!

The downside to this game is that it takes a long time to set up and an eternity to play. If you have people who don’t know all the troop placements off the top of their heads, it can literally take 45 minutes to an hour to set up. An hour before you can even begin playing! But that’s nothing compared to the game itself. I’d say 6 hours is not unreasonable.

This is crazy talk, you’re probably saying. 6 hours or more to play one game? Well, sometimes a long game can be immensely more satisfying than a short one. These are games that you’ll be recounting years later (no joke!). It is also technically possible to play a game over a couple sessions, unless you have kids or a cat. Seriously, I swear Nala just *has* to lay in the middle of the board! In high school we used to keep a game going in the back of Mrs. Jones’ class, and she would keep curious kids from messing up the board. Then we would run in and take a turn in between classes. Games would last for weeks! And don’t even get me started about the ill-will we generated playing a game entirely through the night on Christmas eve.

Anyway, I don’t know that I’ve ever enjoyed a gaming session as much as I’ve enjoyed a session of Axis and Allies, but it’s pretty intense, and the length of the game makes it difficult to play very often. If you have a chance though, it’s well worth it!

Board Game: Acquire

/ Shane / 7 Comments

I grew up playing a little-known game called Acquire. I don’t run across many people outside of my family who are familiar with this game, but once people play it, they are hooked. It’s sort of like Monopoly meets Pit (except a lot more complicated than either).

Acquire is about buying stocks. You have a “hand” of tiles which allow you to start companies (hotels in the old school version, but I have the newer set, pictured below)(picture not taken by me), increase the size of companies, and merge companies into other companies. You buy stocks in these companies, and, depending on how the tiles fall, you can sell these stocks for money (hopefully for more than you paid), parlay stocks from a smaller company into stocks in a larger (and thus more expensive) company, or hold onto them until the end of the game, when they could be very valuable.

I know what you’re thinking: that doesn’t sound fun at all. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to convey the fun of the game in this simple blog post. However, if you’re really interested, you’re all invited to my house for a giant Acquire tournament! It is deceptively simple, as you soon find out when you’re forced to purchase a stock which might have implications 3 or 4 turns from now and you have to count your stocks, your opponents stocks, your money, your opponents money, and the number of stocks left for that company 5 or 6 times each, trying to predict how it will all end out.

The thing that makes Acquire the best board game ever, is that every game is different. For such a small board, you’d be amazed at all the combinations you can have. The board shapes up depending on how many people you have and how the tiles come up, and there are even multiple different ways for the game to end. Sometimes you have one big company that eats up all the others. Sometimes you have 2 or 3 even sized companies. Sometimes the guy with all the cash wins. Sometimes the girl with all the stocks wins.

The tricky part is that you can only buy 3 stocks per turn, but you have many different things going on at the same time. So the hard part is deciding what to buy. Do you get majority stockholder in this company, or do you get second place in these two? If you buy one stock is that going to be enough to hold on until the company merges, or do you need to buy two? But if you buy two, what else can’t you buy? Who seems to be doing better at the moment? Can I sabotage them somehow by giving majority to someone else who’s not doing as well?

It’s exhilarating, and it’s hard. When you get done you feel like you’ve really given your brain a workout. And if you can do that while having fun, what’s not to love?

Some people complain that the game takes too long. Honestly though, I think our average is around an hour and a half per game. To me, that’s not really much longer than any other board game you’re going to play. And it’s a lot more fun than any of those other games anyway.

Trust me on this one: Best. Board game. Ever.

A Dance with Dragons

/ Shane / 1 Comment

After a long, long hiatus, the latest book in the greatest series of books ever written, the Song of Fire and Ice, was finally published. (Note: no spoilers!)

I read it about as fast as I could, but 1,000 pages takes a minute or two. Now that I’ve had a chance to sit back and think on it for a second, all I can say is, “Wow.”

I’m on record with my appreciation for George R. R. Martin, but the quality of his writing is simply amazing. I’m not exaggerating when I say this series is the best series of books I have ever read, by far. Better than Harry Potter, better than Twilight, better than Lord of the Rings, better than Dune, better than the Sword of Truth, and about a million times better than the Wheel of Time (don’t get me started on that one). The world building is amazing. The characters are a study in character development. The plot twists are unprecedented in their twistiness. Do you get the impression I like the books?

The only knock on the books whatsoever is the *looooong* wait in between installments. I think it was something like 6 years between this book and the last one. That’s a pretty long time, and it puts you in a compromising position, since you can’t always remember what happened in the previous books, but you don’t have the time to re-read the monsters. And by the way, that’s 6 years of anticipation for the next book, which you would think would almost doom it to fail, since it couldn’t live up to the hype.

Well, it did. It’s as good as any of the books in the series, and probably better than the last book.

I’ve always maintained that Mr. Martin can take as long as he wants to write them, as long as the quality is good. I don’t know what kind of writing process he has, but it’s obviously working, so I’d rather have him stick with it. However, as time wore on, and promises about deadlines began to pile up, I began to worry that perhaps success had gotten to him and he was knuckling under all the pressure, unable to finish or even proceed for fear of letting everybody down. Imagine my relief at finding out I was worrying for nothing.

Furthermore, writer John Scalzi makes some very good points I hadn’t considered concerning my expectations about how long it *aught* to take to write a book the size of a Dance with Dragons:

Add all those up, and I’ve written roughly 440,000 words worth of novels since 2005. A Dance With Dragons, so I am told, clocks in at 416,000 words. So, in terms of total novel words written for publication since 2005 (and omitting excised material), there’s a 5.5% difference between the amount that I have written for novels and what Martin has. If we’re talking about the actual words published, written since 2005, there’s a 13.5% difference — in Martin’s favor, because my 2012 novel won’t be published until, well, 2012.

In other words, maybe it just takes 6 years to write 416,000 publishable words.

I promised no spoilers, and I won’t include them since I know several people who are dying to read the book but haven’t yet. But let me just say that there is a cliff-hanger at the end of the book that is going to kill you. Especially since it is entirely likely it will be 6 years before we get to find out what happens!

I am also aware that HBO has turned the series into a tv show, Game of Thrones, and it’s killing me not to watch. From what I’ve seen online in terms of clips and reviews, it seems like it does as good of a job at living up to the books as could be done. Thanks, in no small part I’m sure, to HBO’s history of making some fantastic television, and Mr. Martin’s heavy involvement in the project (and he knows a thing or two about writing for a television series). Alas, I am waiting for the DVDs, since we don’t have HBO.

Get the book. Pick up the series. You might not like it as much as me, but if you like high fantasy even a little bit, I can’t imagine you wouldn’t like it.

Joss Whedon

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Nobody on the Internet needs less hero worship than Joss Whedon. He has plenty. However, I have always been a day late and a dollar short to the Joss Whedon party, so there’s no reason to stop now.

Although I was a very early supporter of the (now generally reviled) Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, I didn’t start watching the most excellent tv show until season 4 or so, and I had to catch all the back episodes on reruns, as well as catching up on Angel. I even managed to be late to the Firefly party, despite watching the first couple of episodes as they aired. I thought the show was terrible and stopped watching. Later, people told me, “You have to watch this show Firefly, it’s awesome!” and I said, “Ha, nice try! I watched it on tv and it was awful.” Well, it turns out that there were some issues with the show when it was on tv, specifically that the episodes were aired out of order. When I was eventually convinced to watch the show in the correct order (way after everybody else), it was indeed a pretty good show. And I’ve never even seen Dollhouse.

So, compared to most of the rabid Whedon fans, I hardly even register on the meter. Therefore, how do I find myself writing a fanboy blog post?

There are two big reasons: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and the musical episode of Buffy, Once More with Feeling. Here’s a guy who is a television writer/producer/what-have-you, and he’s written two distinct “musicals” that I would put up there with many of my favorite musicals. If you haven’t checked out the music from these, I would highly recommend it. Yes, you can tell they are a little more amature than a big budget production (especially in the case of Buffy, when the actors and actresses are not normally singers), but that makes them a little more endearing. And it also makes it all the more amazing that the songs are so catchy. (Heck, I started out hating the Serenity theme song, and even that eventually grew on me! Burn the land and boil the sea, but you can’t take the sky from me)

So lets give it up for a guy who has consistently provided smart, funny, quality entertainment since before I was out of high school, and who somehow managed to write a couple of pretty fantastic musicals along the way, with less to work with than a lot of people.

Lonely Avenue

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Ben Folds just released a new album, Lonely Avenue.

The thing that makes this album interesting, is that all of the lyrics were written by British novelist Nick Hornby. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to write music for someone else’s words. I mean, obviously people do it all the time, and I can’t even imagine how difficult it must be to write music at all, even to your own words. But Ben Folds has always written his own lyrics, so it must have been a challenge.

So the lyrics are very story oriented, but Ben’s own style is very much storytelling anyway. So it probably wasn’t too much of a switch for him. That being said, having a literary writer definitely gives the songs a little something different. All in all, I thoroughly enjoy the album (thanks Anna for lending it to me!), and I like it better than the previous one (Way to Normal).

So, here are my 5 favorite songs on the CD, in reverse order:

5) Levi Johnston’s Blues – I’m willing to bet this is the #1 song in America about Levi Johnston (of Bristol Palin’s baby-daddy fame). Basically it’s just about how he was a regular 18 year old dude one minute, and the next minute was the focus of an entire presidential campaign (at least for a little while).

The lyric: I’m a f—–‘ redneck, I live to hang out with the boys / Play some hockey, do some fishin’ and kill some moose / I like to shoot the shit and do some chillin’ I guess / You f— with me and I’ll kick your ass*

*This entire chorus was taken wholesale from Levi’s MySpace page before it was sanitized by the political machine.

4) Claire’s Ninth – All Claire wants for her 9th birthday is for her divorced parents to get together and take her out for dinner. This song is flat out amazing. It somehow manages to capture both the sarcasm and embarrassment of being a pre-teen, and also the feelings of the parents: sort of a strange mix of regret over what happened and how it affects their daughter, but at the same time sort of oblivious to how they’re hurting her.

The lyric: Or what we were, you’re all that’s left / It used to be our birthday too

3) Belinda – This is a song about a singer who wrote a love song which became his biggest hit, the song he will be forever known for. The problem is, 40 years later, he’s not with the girl anymore and he’s forced to sing the song over and over, night after night. I wonder if this one rung especially true for Ben Folds, who’s written a love song or two over the course of his 4 marriages.

The lyric: There’s a lot of 40-somethings wouldn’t be in the world without it

2) Saskia Hamilton – The entire song is based on falling in love with the name of poet Saskia Hamilton. Seriously. The entire song is just about her name. Aside from being very catchy, the video is pretty awesome too. From what I understand, Ben Folds just contacted some dude who made cool youtube videos and asked him to make a video for the song. It turned out fantastic. The entire thing is filmed in the guy’s bedroom. This had me screaming, “Saskia Hamilton!” at odd times for at least a week.

The lyric: She’s got more assonance than she knows what to do with

1) From Above – The premise is that soul mates do exist, and we walk by ours every day without ever noticing. The song follows two such people through their lives. I liked this song immediately, but it wasn’t my favorite at first. However, after hearing a few times, the lyrics are so poignant, and the music fits them perfectly. How sad to think that each person has a perfect second half, and the vast majority of everyone will never even meet them.

The lyric: Maybe that’s how books get written / Maybe that’s why songs get sung / Maybe we owe the unlucky ones