05/16/21: Innovation & Rummage sale
TLDR
Update: Rummage sale, weird brains
Playing: Innovation on BGA
Reading: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
End Notes: You can contact me at jadettman@gmail.com
THE UPDATE
We participated in a rummage sale this week. The sale, and getting ready, took up a fair amount of time so I’m behind in my writing schedule. Y’all are the lucky ones, I didn’t even get a games newsletter out on Friday.
Fun fact: one of the games I play with myself when writing newsletters is telling myself that no one is reading them. This is not meant as a prompt for you to write me and say otherwise; it is a means to reduce my self-consciousness that you might not like or enjoy what I’m writing. Which is funny and ironic because part of the whole point of this is to keep me writing more frequently by making it more of an obligation to you, my readers.
Brains are weird, folks.
PLAYING
I have been playing Innovation more lately on Boardgames Arena, which is a civ-building card game in which 2-4 players try to score “achievements” before their opponents to win the game. The most interesting thing to me about the game, which I have not seen other games do, is to allow the players to manipulate stacks of cards to gain benefits.
You see, each card has five symbols on it and at least four of those symbols relate to an ability on the cards itself or another card. (The symbols: crown, leaf, lightbulb, castle, factory clock.) So, whenever you use a card ability it references how many symbols of a specific type you have. (For example: Castle: Draw two cards.) The trick is that if your opponent has an equal number, or higher, number of symbols then they get to share the ability. AND there are also abilities that force your opponent to do something they don’t want to do but only if you have more symbols than they do.
It can be kind of A LOT.
And it can feel very random at times. You get stuck with a combination of cards that don’t seem to do you any good but, sometimes, if you’re paying attention, you can come up with something that works. Which it why it’s an interesting game, I suppose.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/63888/innovation
READING
I finished A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine last week and I’ve been thinking about it, off and on. It won a Hugo award last year and, before I even knew about the award, it came highly recommended by various folks.
I did not have a strong response to the book. I’m trying to figure out why.
First I will say, the book is good and well written. Also, it’s been highly recommended by lots of folks that aren’t me, so maybe check it out for yourself.
Now, about how I’m feeling about it: It felt like a YA book to me, which is not a negative. I read a fair amount of YA books (because, you know, they’re books and often good). The main character reads as a young person and, as with many YA, is thrown into a difficult situation and has to deal with it. In this case, it’s a tough political situation and it turns out that the help she was supposed to get in navigating a new culture and said situation is itself a problem.
(Talking about books without spoilers is fun!)
I think the new culture is the most interesting part of A Memory Called Empire, honestly. It’s kind of like an interesting, but troubling, future space-Rome. Except that it’s actually, probably, more like Byzantium (because that is the author’s scholarly area).
This is not a glowing endorsement, nor is it a suggestion of avoidance. so I think I’m going to just reiterate: Other folks say this book is great! I read the whole thing and I thought it was okay! Maybe read it for yourself and let me know what you think?
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250186430
END NOTES
If you’d like to send me some feedback or discuss one of the topics I’ve talked about here (or even a different topic), email me at jadettman@gmail.com
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