Month: March 2023

The Captain is Dead?!

The Captain is Dead is a cooperative board game reminiscent of Star Trek, in which characters of various color-coded skillsets work together to fend off an alien attack and repair the Jump Drive of their starship.

Characters start in the rooms of the ship that correspond to their skillsets. For example, the Teleporter Chief starts in Engineering. Each room (except the hallways) has Systems that provide useful bonuses while operational but can be damaged by Alerts. Alerts represent the damage done by the alien ship and are drawn after each player’s turn; if External Scanners are operational, you have the benefit of getting to see the next couple in advance before they hit! Some of the more inconvenient Alerts are Anomalies, which stay in play and have a continued effect until you research them away: Alien Ships, which join the one attacking you and amplify damages; and Hostile Aliens, which invade the ship and limit movement. And of course, many Alerts knock Systems offline.

Systems are repaired by a combination of Skill cards and actions. Each character has a set number of actions per turn, a rank to determine turn order, and a special ability – the first game, I played the Cyborg, who’s immune to Anomalies. Some of them also have Skill discounts. The Admiral, for example, has 2 Command discounts, so when that player would need to spend Command cards, they subtract 2 from the cost. This kind of spending also applies to Battle Plans and Upgrades. The former is a single-use advantage obtained in the War Room, while the latter are new Systems that can be researched and installed in the Science Lab. These especially are massive game changers! Our favorite was Epinephrine Ventilation, which gives everyone an extra action.

The victory condition is simple: repair the Jump Drive! Unfortunately, there are many ways to lose before you can. If you take damage that would lower your shields past 0%, have to add more Hostile Aliens to your ship than there are Hostile Aliens left, or have to draw an Alert when there are none left to play, the game is over and the crew has lost. In our first game, the one in the photo, we were so focused on fixing Systems we lost track of the Hostile Aliens and were overrun! The second game, though, we managed to get two Upgrades installed early, and rode that advantage to victory. It all depends on your characters and the cards!

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Archive of Our Own

Also known as AO3, the Archive of Our Own is host to a truly staggering amount of fanworks, mostly fanfiction, but also fanvids, fanzines, podfics, etc. For a concept of the scale, the Marvel Cinematic Universe fandom has over 511,000 visible works! (Though some are only visible if you have an account, so the number you see may be lower.) There are other sizable fanfic platforms, but I like AO3 best, because of how wonderfully navigable it is.

As I suggested before, you can browse works by fandom, but also by tags! Tags are one of the features I like best, because they give you more information about the actual contents of the story. These include the characters, major relationships, content warnings, and whatever else the author wants to add! The content warnings I’d especially like to see spread to the wider publishing industry, as they label heavier topics such as graphic depictions of violence, major character death, and rape, which many audiences would prefer either to avoid or to have advance warning for. Those are Archive Warnings, which means they’re expected to be labelled and appear in bold when they are, but most authors also list other possible triggers in their general tags, or else in the author’s notes for each chapter. I consider it an accessibility feature, and I think my future books may have something similar, so readers who want those warnings have easy access to them.

Because the Archive is well-organized and online, it also has an extensive filtering system. Within whatever tag you’re browsing (including fandoms) you can then choose to only see, or not see, any works with particular ratings, warnings, relationship categories, fandoms, characters, relationships, or particular tags. Furthermore, you can do the same for crossovers and completion status (I like reading stories that are already done, so that I can binge them), and set limits on word count or the date range in which works were last updated. If you want to read Marvel fics, but you don’t want Quantumania spoilers, you can filter to only see works that came out before the movie did! You can also do a more specified search, and sort by language.

The visual layout of the results is likewise convenient. Next to the title of each fic are four color-coded boxes, marking the maturity rating, romantic categories (gay, straight, lesbian, multi, gen, or other; gen is the circle with the dot, meaning any romance present isn’t the focus of the story), whether there are Archive Warnings (the lower left is red with an exclamation point when there are) and whether the work is complete. Like I said before, Archive Warnings are bolded, and relationship tags are highlighted grey, with a slash for romantic and an ampersand for platonic. Other relevant information is under the tags and summary, like the language, word count, and chapter count, all of which are nice and easy to find!

AO3 also has plenty of account features, like subscriptions, but the one I use most is bookmarks. Not only can you bookmark fics and then filter among them, but you can add your own Bookmarker’s Tags when you do! For example, one of my tags is “Spanish practice,” because I’ve found reading fanfic in Spanish is a great balance between education and entertainment. Plus, I learn a lot of really niche words I wouldn’t otherwise have cause to know!

All in all, I’m extremely impressed with this entertainment platform and how easy it is to use! Especially for a volunteer-staffed nonprofit. If you read fanfic, or want to read fanfic, and you haven’t checked out AO3 yet, I highly recommend it! They’ve got something for everyone. And it’s not that hard to find!

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Whirling Witchcraft

Whirling Witchcraft is one of those rare games where the mechanics felt new! You start by taking a board, a cauldron, and one of the two personality cards you draw. The one you pick will have your starting ingredients on the back, which are colored cubes you take from the supply and place on their matching track of your board. There are nine spaces for Mushrooms, Spiders, and Toads, four spaces for Mandrakes, and three for Hearts of Shadow. That’ll be important later.

Some personality cards have recipes, while others have abilities. You’ll also draw a hand of four recipes from the deck. These will let you convert specific ingredients into others, some of which are a one way reaction, and some of which can go either! The personality card in the picture is the Spider Summoner, whose recipe turns three Mandrakes into five Spiders.

All players will pick and reveal the card they’re playing simultaneously. Players will then use the ingredients they have on their workbench to fulfill as many of their recipes as they want. You keep your recipes between rounds, so the further you are into the game, the more options you’ll have! The spent ingredients are returned to the general supply, while those produced are taken from the supply and set in that player’s cauldron. This is important because they aren’t actually going to keep them! Once all the recipes are done those ingredients will be passed to the right, and the next player over will have to place them on their tracks. If they run out of room, the rest of that color goes back to the player it came from, into their scoring circle! The result is what I call “ingredient homeostasis,” where you’re trying to have enough of an ingredient to use in your recipes, but little enough that your workbench doesn’t overflow.

But there’s more! When the cauldrons of ingredients pass to the right, the rest of your cards pass to the left, so you have to balance playing the recipes that help you most with not giving your opponent the ones most likely to hurt you. Some cards also advance your three Arcana tokens on your Arcana card. When the token lands on or passes an even number, you get to trigger its effect! The Potion arcana lets you add one ingredient of any type from the supply into your cauldron, while the Raven lets you remove two cubes from your workbench and the Book lets you pick a type of ingredient, and take all of that ingredient from the supply instead of your board when filling recipes for the turn.

Altogether, it’s an intricate balancing act, done while your friends are trying to trip you and you’re reciprocating in turn. The first person to accrue five cubes in their scoring circle wins! This game goes quickly, so there should be plenty of time to play again and try another character. Plus the boards are pretty!

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