The Intricate Dance of Photosynthesis

Tragically, I have not decided to write about the biological process by which carbon dioxide becomes oxygen and water becomes sugar. Rather, I’m here to talk about Photosynthesis the game – a forest-building strategy system with rotating advantages. I’m of the opinion that introducing this to chess players specifically would be highly entertaining – like chess, it’s all strategy, and unlike chess, there’s trees!

The basic principle of Photosynthesis is this: you’re trying to score points by facilitating a complete life cycle for your trees, and to do that, they need sunlight. The sun rotates around the board, however, so which trees shadow each other changes from turn to turn!

Light Points are earned by trees left in sunlight, more points the taller they are, and spent to grow, plant, and purchase. The latter was the mechanic that took the most adjusting to, at least for me. Not so much buying the trees before using them, as a limited pool of next-size-up certainly focused our options a bit, but that when you replace those – when a large replaces a medium, and the medium goes back in the pool – it goes back to the to-purchase section, rather than what’s available for use. I wasn’t particularly fond of this choice, but to each their own.

Something I did like about the mechanics, however, was the incentivization of competition. Players start around the edges of the board, you see, and for the most part we kept to our own, out where we could keep from blocking our own light. However! Trees are worth more the closer to the center they are. And since cashing in large trees is the only way to score points – other than a leftover Light Points exchange, which is not favorable – it got us spreading out.

Each player represents a different type of tree, which the seeds show. As a botany nerd, this of course made me very happy. My favorite part of this game, though, is the art on the backs of the player boards. Isn’t it pretty?!

Four artfully rendered forests opening into grasslands, a soft fade to the colors that makes it feel surreal. All but the yellow forest have birds overhead; red also has a squirrel and a fox, while blue has a bear and green has a rabbit and perching bird. On yellow's, and somehow I missed it the first time, a deer peers out between trunks. Blue is visibly a pine forest, while the others are varying types of deciduous.
Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Staying Grounded In The Face of Magic

If you’re a fan of the fantasy genre and enjoy comedic trope deconstruction, I highly recommend The Dad Who Lived’s “If I Was the Dad in a YA Fantasy” series! It’s an expanding canon of its own, told in a series of TikToks, and calling on elements of Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Twilight to implicitly ask The Big Question: Where are the responsible adults? And how different would the story be if there were some?

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Christkindlmarket!

Yes, yes, it’s a little early for the Christmas season – as an American, I generally assume it starts after Thanksgiving. But the Christkindlmarket is open, and the weather was good, and I had a great time!

For those who don’t know, the Christkindlmarket is a “German-style outdoor market” that pops up in the holiday season, with locations in both Chicago and Aurora. It’s largely Christmas themed, though not exclusively, with vendors selling everything from ornaments to elaborate wooden puzzles to cakes. They represent locations around the world, also – my lunch was Dutch, my new gloves hail from Ecuador, and there were handmade journals from Nepal! There’s always a combination of well-made staples and novelty items, and a food selection for everybody. The poffertjes pictured below, for instance. Or the vegan empanadas at Fons! Regardless, it’s a great way to spend an afternoon.

Poffertjes - aka Dutch mini pancakes - cook in a specialized pan, which has divots for up to a hundred of them at a time. Behind the pan is an apron with the words "Puffy Houzz" on it. A Santa gnome smiles benevolently at something beyond the camera.

My examples are all from the Aurora location, I should note, which also has glassblowing lessons this year.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Wikipedia Is… Actually Well-Organized!

“Don’t use Wikipedia as a source,” the teachers said, which may well have been my first introduction to the platform’s existence. Since then, it’s become a sort of shadow monolith – a baseline for perusing matters on which I know nothing or need very specific details formatted coherently, without extending much thought beyond the individual pages or the search function. It’s served me well! And, rather abruptly, I’ve realized how impressive that is.

In the last couple months, I’ve been doodling plants from different countries, coupling geography practice with gorgeous flowers and some really fascinating ecology – like the fact that there’s a parasitic, ant-pollinated plant growing around the Mediterranean. I’d never have found that out otherwise! It’s a funky lookin’ thing, too. This is the point in my life when I discovered the Categories feature.

Categories have saved this art-science pursuit so many times over, my friends. “Flora of Tunisia” on a search engine? Informational roulette. “Flora of Tunisia” on Wikipedia? An organized list of both species that qualify and adjacent topics, to do with the Mediterranean in general. Some countries have a subset for endemic plants specifically! More importantly, the superset “Flora By Country” guarantees this same lack of headache in the future.

What this is is an exceptionally niche use of a much broader application, I know. And isn’t that what Wikipedia is for?

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Pride Knights

Friends, if you’d like pride dragons, pride swords, or pride playing cards, I highly recommend you check out Pride Knights. Their dragon and sword pins currently feature eleven different flags, and they’re working on another! And their playing cards are gorgeous. Each suit has a different theme, and if you lay out cards 2-9 you’ll make a castle – hearts’ theme is animals, clubs’ is flowers, diamonds’ is gemstones, and spades’ is space!

Continuing with those themes, their 10’s are swords, their Aces are shields, and the face cards are the Pride Knights themselves, with dragons for the Jokers. And if you don’t want a deck of cards? You can buy the uncut sheets as wall art, or a large print of a specific knight!

There’s so much thought and care in every piece of their work that it genuinely lowers my stress levels just to look at it. The world is messy – and groups like Pride Knights give me hope.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Faun

Once I’ve been studying a language for a while, I make a mission of finding music in that language that I really, really like – the kind you can happily listen to over and over again until you have all the lyrics memorized. For German especially, I hit the jackpot! The first song I listened to was one of Faun’s.

First off, the vibes are impeccable. I could not understand a word of this and be having a good time. On top of that, it’s like listening to a fairytale! In fact, sometimes it is. Rosenrot, for example, tells the story of Snow-White and Rose-Red. Non-fairytale story-songs, meanwhile, include Gold Und Seide, Feuer, and Federkleid! These three especially have some of my favorite uses of language as a craft, and Faun’s work collectively has become a crucial memory device for the particulars of German grammar. Vocab, too – there’s nothing like humming your way to the word you were looking for!

Alongside all of that, they also delve into Pagan traditions, like the Celtic festival Lugnasadh!

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Munchkin Loot Letter

With only 16 cards and some loot cubes, Munchkin Loot Letter is quick and compact, featuring familiar cards from Munchkin and mechanics reminiscent of Knuckle Sammich. It’s a simple “draw one, play one,” with a hand size of one, leaving you choosing between two cards each turn. Each card has a value and an effect – the goal is to be either the last player standing, or the one with the highest value card when the deck runs out!

Effects come in a few different flavors, mostly ways to eliminate other players depending on what’s in their hand. By far the most common card is the Potted Plant, a 1-value card that lets you make a guess at what someone else is holding. If you’re right, they’re out! (You cannot, however, guess Potted Plant.) The higher value cards are deliberately inconvenient, meanwhile, like the Turbonium Dragon which must be discarded if you ever have the Net Troll or Dread Gazebo in hand. For a tiny, tiny deck, it’s impressively well-balanced! You’re meant to play multiple rounds, best-of fashion, with the loot cubes to keep track of who’s winning.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

The Wide, Wild World of RPGs

I’ve spoken previously about Overly Sarcastic Productions and their gloriously chaotic educational material, and today I want to specifically recommend Detail Diatribe: TTRPGs That Aren’t D&D (And Why They Slap) The Detail Diatribe series are long-form presentations digging into the real meat of a subject, and in this case it’s nearly two hours of RPG systems, their stories and mechanics! It’s a fascinating variety and you may hear about some of the particulars from me later, once I’ve had a chance to try them.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Thud!

I would loosely describe Thud as asymmetric chess – an all-strategy game for two players, but in which each player is operating off of different rules. It’s based on a battle in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld featuring a smaller force of larger opponents, and a larger force of smaller ones.

Due to sheer size, the Trolls (the larger characters) both move more slowly and need only land adjacent to a Dwarf to capture it. Dwarves, on the other hand, zip about the map much like chess’s queens – but they can only capture if enough of them have lined up to fling the front Dwarf into the nearest opponent. Who must be directly in line with them. It’s rather challenging.

To the rules’ credit, they warn you that the Trolls are much easier to play, and the Dwarves take some getting used to. Also to their credit, the game is played in two rounds, so each player gets to play both sides – overall victory is scored not so much by who won, but by who lost less. If you fielded the Trolls’ jump-‘n-thump and their shove propulsion – their version of flinging a friend – enough to actually capture any of them, you’re doing pretty well. Presumably, it’s possible with enough practice for the Dwarves to present a serious challenge.

Ultimately, we decided this game wasn’t for us, and I hope our copy finds someone who cherishes it and enjoys the puzzle it presents.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Welcome to Gallery 200!

Gallery 200 is an art gallery in West Chicago that’s run by artists, for artists, featuring the work of local creators in all sorts of mediums! Paint, markers, felt, jewelry, dishware… to paraphrase, “you can walk through three times and always find something new.”

My experience so far has specifically been at the exhibit openings, an evening reception with snack food, several of the artists, and, this month, live music! The gallery is usually open on afternoons, Wednesday through Sunday, and I’ve just learned they offer workshops as well! It’s such a magical little corner of the world, truly, full of pretty things and lovely people.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail