07/05/21: So! Many! Fireworks!
TLDR
Update: So! Many! Firework!
Playing: Terraforming Mars: Aries Expedition
Reading: Penric and Desdemona novellas by Lois McMaster Bujold
Watching: Looking for recommendations
End Notes: You can contact me at jadettman@gmail.com
THE UPDATE
I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but for the last six weeks we’ve had fireworks going off every night. For the last week, it’s just been more and louder, culminating, as I write this, with even more and more often. Is the point of fireworks during the day just the loud bang? Is there even anything to see during the day? As an anti-explosion enthusiast, I do not get the appeal.
Otherwise, this week has been nice. I appear to be in a weird liminal state in which I am both burned out on designing the game that I’m working and my brain is fizzing with new ideas for said game and won’t shut up about it. Woohoo.
PLAYING
Britt and I played our inaugural game of Terraforming Mars: Aries Expedition this week. It was interesting and fun in ways both traditionally TM but also not. Aries Expedition is a card game version of Terraforming Mars that seems to be intended to provide a faster game play with many of the enjoyments of the original. In two-player form, with very experienced players, it wasn’t that, at least not yet. It’s hard to remember back to our early days of playing TM to compare.
The way Aries Expedition works is that player start with a player board that tracks various incomes (money, cards, heat, plants) and discounts (steal, titanium) for each individual. You also start with a Corporation card (the conceit of both games is that the future of space is corporate exploitation) and eight random cards from the deck (which represent Actions, Developments, and Events). And you have a set of five cards which correspond with the phases of the game. It verges on A Lot.
Each turn, a player chooses one of their phase cards and then every player takes the actions associated with that phase (Development = play green cards, Construction = play blue/red cards, Action = do actions, Research = draw more cards, Produce = gain resources). If you are the player who played the card for that phase, you get a bonus (Race for the Galaxy fans will find this familiar).
At first blush, Britt and I both had some feels both positive and negative about the visual design of the game. Some of it is unnecessarily reproducing visual elements from the original game which makes tracking some things more difficult and, though the cards feel clean and clear text-wise, the design makes tracking tags and special abilities a little harder than it feels like it should be. (I will, at this point, completely admit that graphic and usability design are both hard and I’m not saying I would have done a better job.)
Our first game took us about two hours and Aries Expedition felt mostly like playing Terraforming Mars even with some of the abstractions, so I’m definitely not unhappy with the purchase. Especially since I got it on Kickstarter and part of the benefit for doing so was better production values on the player boards. Locals, hit us up if you want to play.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/strongholdgames/ares-expedition-the-terraforming-mars-card-game
READING
Lois McMaster Bujold may legitimately be in my top five favorite authors and I have read everything that she has ever written, often multiple times. I would recommend everything that she’s ever written.
Recently, I’ve been catching up with her Penric and Desdemona novellas which are set in her World of the Five Gods originally featured in The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and The Hallowed Hunt. Is it possible that these novellas are cozy fantasy fiction? I think that they might be (I’m not 100% sure of the necessary criteria).
The basic conceit of the novella series is that Penric, as a young man, stops to help an old woman who is having a health crisis on the side of the road and, when she dies, the demon that she was carrying is passed on to him. He is suddenly gifted with twelve lifetimes of experience (every being that has ever possessed the demon, including a mare and lioness), a willful demon (the agglomeration personality separate from the others) and is required to become a temple divine.
Despite all those complications, each novella is rather sedate. Typically, there is a problem to solve, sometimes straightforward but not always, and it’s Penric’s job to do the solving. Which he usually does with some interesting character building and fun along the way.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Penrics-Progress/Lois-McMaster-Bujold/9781982125202
WATCHING
We’re in the processing of finishing up several of our regular shows and I’m not ready to talk about Mare of Easttown quite yet, so if you have any recommendations send them my way.
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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