Just finished The Day of the Muses, which is the fourth SPRQ book by John Roberts.

It was a very nice change-of-pace book because it took place in Alexandria (Egypt) rather than Rome. Decius still had his typical problems of facing disbelief or indifference from his Romans peers, but at least the Egyptian King was somewhat more interested (while not drunk). Mind you, the main villain got away, as ever, because of political influence--but this time Decius assures us that in 12 years' time he's going to get his (because Decius writes from the future, sometime after the fall of the Republic).

It was also neat to see this series move entirely into the time of Rome (the TV series) as we hear that the Triumvirate is sectioning up the world over on the other side of the Mediterranean.

Another fun little read.

Edit: Figured I was done with SPQR for the year, but I see that the next chronological story is a short story, so I've ordered Classical Whodunnits through LINK+ before I forget. I'll have to read about the other authors within, when I get it, and see if any are worth reading ...

Today the odometer on my bike hit 1000 miles. Well, it hit 999.73, and I did honestly consider riding an additional block or two and back to get it to the magic 1000 (or, as I expect 000). But I figured it was close enough. I think the actual number is up to 10% higher, given a combination of forgetting to attach my odometer at various times, having the sensor occasionally get knocked out of whack, and the being pretty sure it undercounts by a bit.

I think got it just after Thanksgiving last year, as I believe I didn't have it for my first ride of the Iron Horse Trail. So, that's a 50-week count, or about 20 miles a week. Not bad. I suspect the next 1000 miles will take a little less, as I'm now riding 20 miles most weeks just to EndGame and back (though I've also been doing fewer bike adventures).

Here's some of the highlights of my last 50 weeks:

• The Iron Horse Trail. This is a 25 mile rails-to-trails multiuse path that runs from Dublin to Concord. That's over in Contra Costa County, and I find the landscape there to be entirely beautiful (well, except maybe for San Ramon). It's also nice having such a long and protected trail.
  
• The Lafayette-Moraga Trail. Also over the hills in CCC, this one runs south from the Lafayette BART station up into gradually ascending hills. Highlights include the fact that: I've ridden this trail with Kimberly; it's got a waterfall off to one side (in the rainy season); and it climbs gradually up into the hills. I've also never seen the end of the trail, because the hills have made K. call a halt each of our two trips out, so it's a mystery that's not yet entirely explored.
  
• The Bay Trail. I've ridden this from Fremont in the South to Point Pinole in the North, pretty much the entirety of the East Bay portion of the Trail. The actual trail isn't nearly as nice as either of those Contra Costa Trails because it rarely has more than a few continuous miles at a time. There are still chunks which are totally unavailable as well as chunks that are dirt for several miles. But riding next to the Bay is gorgeous. I think the best section is from Point Isabel to the Richmond Inner Harbor which is several continuous miles, all paved, and includes paths through beautiful wetlands.
  

As I said, I've been bike adventuring less and that's because I've gotten to everywhere easy. Almost anything else takes BART. However, here's some things I'd like to do within the next 1000 miles:

• The Lafayette-Moraga Trail. And finish it.
  
• The Contra-Costa Canal Trail. (Or something like that.) This is a trail that runs northwest and northeast, bisected by the Iron Horse Trail. I've ridden the northeastern leg, but not the northwestern one.
  
• Over the Bridge. There's a bridge north of Concord that was just opened up to bicyclists. I'd like to ride over it and into the lands beyond.
  
• East from Point Pinole. This is the natural extension of my current Bay Trail journeys, but it includes both lots of unfinished trail and lots of hilly terrain, so it'll be a real test.
  
• Around the South of the Bay. From Fremont south and around, maybe ending at some random Caltrain station. If I take it early, I can head north up the peninsula until I'm tuckered out.
  
• To Mom's House. I've heard several times that there are some nice creek-adjacent trails heading down into south San Jose.
  

We'll see when I get up the Umph to get to some of these. Something at Thanksgiving, I'm certain.

Busy day. Went down to San Jose and back in celebration of my mom's birthday. Most of the day was spent just hanging around her backyard, talking to Jason, Lisa, Rob, my Mom, Bob, and Mike T. (and his family). It made me remember how nice it is just to have a backyard--if someone else is taking care of it that is--and of course the conversation was all good too.

Even got to play a game of ping pong with Mike. I used to love that game when I was young, but I haven't played since I moved out of the dorms, after my first year of Berkeley. Mike, also out of practice, beat me, but we were both getting the feeling that we were rediscovering the ping-pong muscles as we played.

Not a lot beyond that. We heard that Jason and Lisa quite liked the Ticket to Ride that we got them for their wedding, which is great. We'd known that they'd played a lot of Monopoly and such, so I wanted to introduce them to a Euro. I also expect that I'm going to join Mike T. for a bike ride before November is out, if we can make our schedules coincide. We'll see. It's been a busy couple of weeks, so next weekend is officially off (other than regular gaming, of course).

We got home earlier than I'd guessed, and I was considering sitting down to work on a review (Traveller Book 3: Scout) or my next Signs & Portents article ("Gods of the Goblins"), but I'm just too burned. Will sit down to read instead.

Had a game of Arkham Horror scheduled as our saturday gaming today, in honor of the holiday. We also played with the (newish) expansion, Innsmouth Horror.

After about 5.5 hours of failing to get sufficient gates closed down (in large part due to an inability to seal gates for a couple of hours), we finally had Rhan-Tegoth awaken, with us needing 17*6 = 102 combat successes to kill him. Much to our surprise, we did, primarily because he could only wound one investigator each turn. I think 3 of the 6 investigators got killed before he was taken down. I'm never quite sure whether a battle with an Ancient One is a climax or an anti-climax in a game of Arkham Horror.

Still, nice color and fun wanderings about the town, as always.

Though we had the Innsmouth Horror expansion out, we never went to Innsmouth, because not a single gate or monster appeared there the entire time. That's a problem I've had with the other city expansions in the past. Ah well. We still used new investigators, new Arkham encounters, a new GOO, and probably some other assorted stuff from the set.

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On my way home from EndGame, I swung into our neighborhood back at Ashby, and I was amazed how many kids there were trick or treating. We've had years where we kept the lights blazing and not a single trick-or-treater showed up. Today, while she was waiting for me to get home, Kimberly said she had two groups knock (but we had no candy, alas, due to those kidless years).

It made me wonder if there's a change in the atmosphere of the country generally. For years Bush and his corrupt cronies tried to bury us in FEAR, telling us that everything was bad and everyone wanted to kill us (no surprise, with that jackass as our leader). Now we instead have a new President pushing hope.

Could that be the change that has parents willing to escort their kids around the neighborhood again?

Or it could just be a fluke or the fact that it was a Saturday this year. I dunno.

Had a lost weekend, in which I pretty much sat at home and read. Since I've been a'home for about a week now, everything feels foggy and lazy.

One of the benefitors of that was The Shape of Dread (1989), the next book in the Sharon McCone series, which I picked up from the library on Saturday and had largely finished by Sunday night.

Muller continues to be an excellent mystery writer. This one was a no-body murder case where she got to have a lot of fun exploring whether everyone even was correct about who had been murdered. Some of McCone's early bad-girl stylings are gone, since she actually keeps in touch with the authorities and ask for permission to stay on the case in this work. It seems like Muller & hubby had their individual sleuths triangulating, with McCone getting more law-abiding and Nameless less law-abiding, as time went on.

In any case, another good read. Muller is probably at the top of the list of the older series I'm reading right now--the perfect author if I'm down, sick, or need something quiet and simple to read.

Been more than a week since I wrote last ...

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Sick. I've been sick the last several days. Fortunately I dosed myself with a good amount of zinc on the first two days when I thought I was getting sick, and it seems to have helped. Monday I wasn't sure, Tuesday just my throat was raw (but very raw), Wednesday I could barely breathe & had troubles thinking, and today I'm feeling relatively good other than a persistent cough that has me ready to rip my throat out. Hopefully it'll keep trending upward (though I'm also continuing to feel too warm today).

I canceled my usual Wednesday & Thursday gaming nights due to the sickness. I'm a strong believer in not heading out to spread your illness and wish to hell that more people felt the same. It's so damned irresponsible to be the plague carrier. After canceling those events, I was amazed by how the week really opened up before me. I'll have to remember that I don't need to do my board game nights every Wednesday & Thursday.

I haven't made a decision on Saturday gaming yet. I'll make that call tomorrow when I decide if (1) I still feel like I might be infectious -and- (2) I think I'm going to have enough voice to talk for four or five hours. Right now the answer to those questions would be "yes" and "no", but we'll see what a difference a day makes.

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Cats. Cobweb is still about the house. Kimberly and I both think that she looks gaunter than ever, and that certainly can't keep up for much longer. However for the last few weeks she has continued to act very happy and intelligent and active.

Her sickness has of course been a big wrench in our normal pattern of life. Seeing her around every day, and knowing that she won't be here much longer, is bittersweet. Sometimes I feel sad for her for obvious reasons and sometimes I feel happy that we've had her for so long (and three or four weeks feels very long) after we knew that she was terminally ill, that we've really be able to lavish attention and love on her in that time period. By my calculations, we've given her about two and a half years' worth of wet food, which we used to give to her about once a week as a special treat, in the last three or four weeks.

That wet food is the other wrench in our schedule, because Kimberly takes some time out every afternoon to give her wet food away from the other cats, and I do the same every night. The other cats get the scraps when she's done.

Of course this all means that the other cats are wise to the fact that she's getting wet food and they're not and they're always swarming about as a result. So, rather than making this into an obligation, I've made it into a fun game. I try and get up to my office (where I usually feed Cobweb), with Cobweb right behind me, and with the other cats nowhere in sight. It's very challenging.

Fortunately, Cobweb is much smarter than the other cats (as this has certainly proven). She has no doubt that wet food is coming, while the other cats get distracted. It often takes a little bit of slight of hand and a little bit of patience to trick them. Sometimes I just have to outrun the other cats, but Cobweb also stays well ahead when I take that route.

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Cards. My Money iPhone card game is coming well. I think I should be able to play a full game against dumb AIs in an interface that needs some polishing tomorrow. Which is very exciting. That'll give me another week to complete polishing. It's less than I'd like, but I'm happy to have a deadline really pushing me.

(I'll do some more polishing after I send the first release draft out to Knizia.)

Part of the reason that the program has taken a while is that I'm working very hard to create a clean, abstract structure for card games. I'm really proud of the results. There are almost no corners that I've cut*. I'm pretty sure that I'll be able to use my core structure for both the cards *and* the display table for my next game and cut at least half the time off the development.

Which is very exciting, as it's what I've been planning for.

(Though I guarantee that I'll also discover areas where I didn't think I'd cut corners, but where the other game is different enough that my level of abstraction fails. But those points should get fewer as I develop more games with the engine.)

---

* I'm aware of one, but I plan to clean it up tomorrow, as I figured out a better abstraction this afternoon when I walked out to Skotos' mailbox and back.

Well, we got our first real storm through today. It was pouring when I woke up this morning, and kept on through the end of the work day, which is a relative rarity for Bay Area storms.

I decided to have lunch out, in part to appreciate the storm a bit, since it's been so long since we got any rain. I got a bit more than I ... uh ... appreciated ... today. I ended up soaked, even with my umbrella and my rain coat. It was quite wet.

Looking at the rainfall totals, it's obvious why. Most of the Bay Area got 10-15% of its annual rainfall in about 12 hours. Yowza!

I also had another reason for taking the walk out to lunch, which is that I wanted to collect and correlate the thoughts on the coding I'm doing. Too often we just have things coming at us all the time. It's been worse for me since I got my iPhone, because now whenever I'm walking alone I'm listening to that. Which is a pity because when I walk and my mind goes quiet (or used to go quiet) is one of the times I can really solve problems.

So I walked and let my mind go quiet and solved problems today, amidst the torrential downpour.

The new structures I was looking for are now dropping into place in my program and will hopefully get finished up tomorrow ...

I'll again say that I don't understand how Stefan Feld has controlled the Alea large box line since Rum & Pirates. However, Notre Dame is definitely one of my favorites in the line, so I can't complain. And perhaps the secret is in the fact that Feld continues to design games which feel very different from one another.

Notre Dame is a card and resource management game. Each player has a number of buildings which allow him to do various things, such as earn gold, victory points, cubes, keep the rat population down, etc. A player preps for each round of play by drafting three cards which let him utilize the various buildings, then uses two of them. When a card is played, a cube is added to the building and the player then takes its effect. Most buildings have powers that increase triangularly, e.g.: 1 gold, 2 gold, 3 gold, etc.

I'll also argue that Notre Dame is a worker placement game with some twists, namely:

1. Where you can place workers is determined by cards acquired through a card draft.
   
2. Workers remain placed on buildings, and the more you add, the more utility you get out of each building.
   

The other big innovation of Notre Dame is, of course, the rats. Notre Dame was one of the earlier games that was heavily based upon tight, negative economics, where you were always just one step ahead of total failure. (Perhaps following on the heels of Age of Steam.) I think that In the Year of the Dragon, Feld's next game, continues the trend. (And we've since seen it in Agricola, La Havre, and others as well, of course.)

Since its release, Notre Dame has been one of my favorite Alea games. It plays quickly and simultaneously gives you a lot of actions over the course of the game. In addition, it not only supports a lot of paths to victory but in fact encourages specialization thanks to its triangular power rankings. (I do offer have suspicions that some paths are better than others; I, for example, usually try and hit the VP generator hard, while getting just enough from other buildings to scrape by.)

I also find Notre Dame to do quite well in how it manages luck. There is definite luck in which cards you draw and thus which actions you can take. However, Notre Dame offsets it in two ways. First, you're drafting cards, so you can always try and work toward what you actually want. Second, you're guaranteed to see all 9 of your cards every 3 turns. You don't get to use them all, because of the draft, but you do get to choose whether each one is important to you.

L1: Ra. A+. (Plays: 15) [ Read my Review ]
L2: Chinatown. B-. (Plays: 1)
L3: Taj Mahal. A+. (Plays: 7)
L4: Princes of Florence. A. (Plays: 4+) [ Read my Review ]
L5: Adel Verpflichtet. B. (Plays: 2) [ Read my Review ]
L6: Traders of Genoa. A+. (Plays: 3+) [ Read my Review ]
S1: Wyatt Earp. B+ (Plays: 2)
S2: Royal Turf. A- (Plays: 6)
L7: Puerto Rico. A+ (Plays: 11) [ Read my Review ]
S3: Die Sieben Weisen. C (Plays: 1)
S4: Edel, Stein & Reich. B- (Plays: 1) [ Read my Basari Review ]
L8: Mammoth Hunters. B+ (Plays: 5) [ Read my Review. ]
S5: San Juan. A+ (Plays: 32) [ Read my Review; plus Glory to Rome review. ]
L9: Fifth Avenue. C- (Plays: 3+)
M1: Louis XIV. B+ (Plays: 7) [ Read my Review ]
M2: Palazzo. B- (Plays: 6)
L10: Rum & Pirates. B (Plays: 3)
M3: Augsburg 1520. B+ (Plays: 2)
L11: Notre Dame. A (Plays: 6)

Quickly upon the heels of Chasing the Bear, I got the brand-new Spenser book, The Professional (from the library, as ever).

In short: not one of my favorites.

Oh, sure it had the great Parker dialogue and the great characters of Spenser, Hawk, and Susan, which are always are a joy to read. I read it in just a few days. But, it was even more pointless and meandering than most Spenser books.

In The Professional, Spenser gets a job to stop a guy from blackmailing some women that the guy had had affairs with. Spenser can't do the job, because the guy doesn't give in, but Spenser stays obsessed with the psychology of the guy and his victims and continues watching over them long after the case ends ... and eventually some other things start to happen, but in them Spenser is more of a witness than an active participant.

Over the years Parker has gotten more and more interested in psychology and what makes people tick. I mentioned that the ongoing psychological discussions of Chasing the Bear was its main weakness. Similarly here Parker tried to put out a whole book centered around some psychological sketches, and it became obvious that it was less a mystery and more a ... whatever this is that Parker is writing.

Hopefully the next Spenser role will have him taking a more active role, and maybe actually doing something he's getting paid for, rather than acting as a detective dilettante.

I'm somewhat surprised that Augsburg 1520 didn't get more attention. It's a tough, strategic game, perhaps the heaviest in the whole Medium Box series, and yet it was just a blip on the gaming RADAR. I know I didn't bring it to gaming much because it was a bit too tough for me personally, but I don't know why no one else ever brought it around.

The game is one of economics. You're managing money in order to buy favors from several different nobles. You then use those favors (which are effectively four different currencies) to win auctions and in turn use those victories to increase your ability to earn money, victory points, and new favors.

The most original aspect of the game is the auction. You bid for how many cards you're going to play and then everyone who "calls", saying they're going to play the highest value of cards bid, secretly puts down a set of cards. The player with the single highest valued card in his bid wins. So, you have to balance both your highest valued cards and the breadth of cards you have in a suit. You can win either by out-valuing your opponents or by out-counting them. Usually it's a balance between the two extremes.

The second really original aspect of the game is that there are two victory-point barriers, at 25 VP and at 45 VP. You have to build a certain structure (a church or a cathedral) to be able to go past those barriers. Building them takes great sacrifices in money (though you get the cost down if you can manage to build after other people) and also takes winning a specific type of auction (unless you've "saved up" a build by hiring a master builder earlier in the game).

Overall, I think there are a lot of interesting elements that go together quite well, and though I'll admit that the theming is a bit paper-thin (as has really been the case in all of the medium-box games up to this point, which is to say Palazzo and Louis XIV), that's my only real complaint (other than the fact that the game is a bit mathy and/or non-forgiving for me personally much of the time).

I'm not convinced there's a huge amount of depth to Augsburg 1520. The little economic machine that you're building is pretty simple, with just a few different levers, and so there are limits to how many different paths you can take. Nonetheless, I think it's got as much depth as any of the other medium-box games to date.

As with some of the other games around this period in Alea, I thus think that Augsburg 1520 has ended up somewhat underappreciated.


L1: Ra. A+. (Plays: 15) [ Read my Review ]
L2: Chinatown. B-. (Plays: 1)
L3: Taj Mahal. A+. (Plays: 7)
L4: Princes of Florence. A. (Plays: 4+) [ Read my Review ]
L5: Adel Verpflichtet. B. (Plays: 2) [ Read my Review ]
L6: Traders of Genoa. A+. (Plays: 3+) [ Read my Review ]
S1: Wyatt Earp. B+ (Plays: 2)
S2: Royal Turf. A- (Plays: 6)
L7: Puerto Rico. A+ (Plays: 11) [ Read my Review ]
S3: Die Sieben Weisen C (Plays: 1)
S4: Edel, Stein & Reich B- (Plays: 1) [ Read my Basari Review ]
L8: Mammoth Hunters B+ (Plays: 5) [ Read my Review. ]
S5: San Juan A+ (Plays: 32) [ Read my Review; plus Glory to Rome review. ]
L9: Fifth Avenue C- (Plays: 3+)
M1: Louis XIV B+ (Plays: 7) [ Read my Review ]
M2: Palazzo B- (Plays: 6)
L10: Rum & Pirates B (Plays: 3)
M3: Augsburg 1520 B+ (Plays: 2)

Fortunately next up we have some games that I think have been well appreciated, and which represent an overall return to strength in the Alea line.