Igenlode Wordsmith

A thing went past on Tumblr that was like "List your 25 favourite board games", and I don't think I can manage 25, but I can probably do ten. In no particular order:

• Once Upon a Time: Semi-cooperative storytelling. Everybody gets a hand of cards with story elements like "frog" and "crown" and "witch", and the aim is to play them in an order that creates a reasonably coherent fairy story. Each player also gets one ending card, and wins if they can bend the story into a shape that lets them cap it with their ending. I have fond memories of the time we were approaching what felt like the end of the story and realised that nobody had an ending that fit, so we had to pull a "meanwhile, the princess's brother" and tack on another entire story before we could finish.
• Half Truth: A trivia quiz game specifically designed to avoid the common problems of trivia quiz games, such as players feeling like they know the answers to everyone's questions except their own. One of the few games I've backed on Kickstarter and been entirely happy with. My only regret is that everybody knows better than to challenge me to trivia games now.
• Cockroach Poker: A bluffing game that involves handing people creepy-crawlies and lying about what they are. The game ends as soon as one player is eliminated, so there's no pressure to be The Winner, and as long as I'm not dangerously close to elimination I can relax and enjoy trolling people.
• Ingenious: Abstract tile-placement game. Has an interesting scoring mechanic where each player has separate scores for each tile type, and only their lowest score counts at the end of the game, so it's a bad strategy to try and rack up one score and neglect the others.
• Betrayal at House on the Hill: Starts as a cooperative game about a group of people exploring an old abandoned house with a spooky reputation, then halfway through one player (chosen according to criteria that change each game depending on how the exploration went) is transformed into or revealed as a villain whom the others must defeat. Has several fun variants, including a licensed Scooby-Doo edition. The first edition had a famous misprint that sometimes resulted in finding a subterranean lake in the attic.
• Star Realms: My favourite deck-building game. Acquire a fleet of space ships and space stations to defeat your enemies.
• Dixit: Everybody puts down a card, and the active player gives a hint about which card is theirs. They get no points if nobody correctly identifies their card, but also no points if everybody correctly identifies their card. The cards have strange and interesting artwork on them.
• Fury of Dracula: Hidden movement. One player is Dracula, attempting to make a comeback and secure dominion over Europe, while the other players control a team of vampire hunters (Professor Van Helsing, Mrs Harker, Dr Seward, and Lord Godalming) trying to track him down and put a stop to him.
• Star Fluxx: My favourite version of Fluxx. The creeper mechanics are interesting, and I enjoy the way that it includes allusions to many different science fiction franchises and tropes, and in particular the way that many of the cards change meaning with context (for instance, "The Doctor", which means one thing if it's paired with "The Time Machine" and something else if it's played with "The Captain" and "The Expendable Crewman").
• Flamme Rouge: Racing game. Each player controls two cyclists, racing around a track with terrain features like hills and rough ground that affect how fast you travel, and you get an aerodynamic drafting advantage if you position yourself well relative to other cyclists (which is one reason you get two cyclists, so that one can try to give the other a boost). You have a certain number of cards that let your cyclist put in extra effort for a turn, but once you use them they're gone, so it's important to use them at the moments where they'll do the most good.

And five games that I think might become favourites if I get to play them more than once:

• RoboRally: Each player is trying to control a robot around an obstacle course. You determine your robot's movement for each round at the start of the round, and then all the robots move at once. Knowing left from right and clockwise from counterclockwise are very important. There's a significant chance that another robot will bump into yours and send you off in entirely the wrong direction.
• Unmatched: Fighting game where every player has a unique character or duo with their own special abilities. There are a whole bunch of expansions that add extra characters, such as Cobbles and Fog (heroes and villains from Victorian literature) and Battle of Legends (heroes and monsters from classical mythology).
• Winter Tales: Storytelling game set in a world of twisted fairy tales.
• Bomb Busters: Cooperative logic game where the players are a team trying to deactivate a bomb by cutting the right wires in the right order.
• King of Monster Island: From the same series as King of Tokyo, a game about giant monsters fighting for control of territory. It's been long enough since I played it that I don't remember the details clearly, but my notes are emphatic about how much I enjoyed it.

Morning's impending
It is still dark now
I'm just pretending
Day has begun

Sleep is elusive
There's no distraction
Should I get up and
Get some things done?

(after Eleanor Farjeon)

#22: Read a book that has a different setting (e.g. city, farm, boat, etc.) than the previous book.
(also the July random book selection)

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Quite a short book: this edition is around 100 pages, well-spaced, on pages small enough to fit in a pocket. There's some scene setting, but most of it is a collection of brief sayings on various topics, such as "Love", "Crime and Punishment", "Pleasure", "Buying and Selling", "Good and Evil", and so on.

It's written in a style that might be described as poetic but I found off-putting; I feel that a book written in New York City in the 1910s doesn't have a natural right to contain so much "verily" and "unto".

The blurb on the back would have it that it's been translated into many languages and sold millions of copies and changed many lives; I didn't find it life-changing, though I grant that reading it out of idle curiosity wouldn't have put me in the most receptive frame of mind. The bits that resonated with me most were things I already believed, although some of them could stand to be said more often (I particularly liked the section on "Children", the theme of which is that children are not possessions and that the role of a parent is not to mold a child into the parent's chosen image but to help the child find its own path).

#23: Read a book with a page count within 20 pages of the previous book's.
(also the August random book selection)

The Practical Princess, and other liberating fairy tales by Jay Williams. A collection of fairy tales featuring proactive princesses and unconventional heroes. Short and entertaining. I'd been worried that it might be mean-spirited, but I think I had it mixed up with a different book with a similar title.

My favourite story was "Stupid Marco", despite the title (which isn't even accurate; the story itself starts out by immediately stating that Prince Marco isn't actually stupid, just inattentive, poor at following directions, and incapable of remembering left from right). I also felt some kinship with the hero of "Philbert the Fearful", a knight who would rather stay at home and read a book than go on dangerous quests.

#24: Read a book that shares a word in the title (exactly or as a synonym) with the previous book.
(alternate pick for the August random book selection)

A Princess of the Chameln by Cherry Wilder. I've enjoyed a couple of other series by Cherry Wilder, but this one felt like it was lacking something that they had. It's (for the most part - one or two scenes are devastatingly effective exceptions) a slow, solemn book where the characters feel like they're at a remove from the reader.

One of the reviews on StoryGraph compares it to Tolkien, which prompts the thought that what it's missing is hobbits - not literally, of course, but in the sense that everybody is always very serious and one struggles to picture any of them having a silly conversation about taters, or an argument about the best way to translate a pun (something which, incidentally, does happen in my favourite of Wilder's novels). Seriousness is not inappropriate to the situation the characters are in, but when they're always serious the whole thing ends up feeling kind of flat; the novel covers ten years of in-story time, and that's a long time to go without finding anything to laugh about. I was reasonably satisfied by the end, but I'm not motivated to read any of the sequels.