It’s not exactly a secret that I love languages, generically and in specifics. So I’ve been consistently delighted by K Klein, a YouTube channel all about linguistics!
Sort of like Tasting History, this is somewhere I go for specificity. Give me this very zoomed-in little niche of your science, whether the focus is on a specific language, specific feature, or specific event! K Klein covers a little bit of everything, from French’s spelling system to temporal pronouns to spelling reforms, which has given me both a deeper understanding of languages I speak, and a sort of starter platter as to the fascinating phenomena other languages offer!
One of my favorite blogs on Tumblr is @herpsandbirds, which, as the name implies, features a variety of animals. They share pictures of the species, of course, along with some of the scientific information and fun facts! They’ll also ID photos for people. And they take requests, like this one for birds with long tails! It sits at that intersection of wholesome, educational, and aesthetic – see again the birds.
I was perusing the game library at a convention recently and happened to stumble upon Seikatsu, a gorgeous gardening game that makes excellent use of perspective!
All players share the same garden, enhancing the view from their color-coded pagodas by populating it with bird/flower combos, scoring points for matching adjacent birds as they do. Once the garden is full, they score again, this time for flowers! Flowers are scored in rows instead of clusters, still by type, and the rows are determined by the perspective of each player’s pagoda. I adore this mechanic – the use of shared space combined with directional scoring parameters? The dance of scoring points now and later for yourself, without also helping your opponents? Absolutely fascinating. And the koi of course can pair with anything.
Art reflects life, and so the living can learn through art. As a storyteller, I’m always delighted to see this premise explored! Enter Cinema Therapy, a YouTube channel featuring a therapist and a filmmaker as they analyze movies, both for moments of exceptional craft and for the real life lessons you can take away from them.
There’s a reason Pixar movies make people cry, so I’m especially fond of that series; it has a lot to say about family dynamics, as well as grief and, well… Inside Out, in all its emotional-awareness glory. They also focus episodes on heroes, villains, relationships… they even interview actors, like Karen Gillan! And though television demands a lot more viewing hours to research, they occasionally cover that, too! Specifically such icons as Firefly, and Avatar: The Last Airbender.
I always finish one of their videos with a deeper appreciation of the work, no matter how many times I’ve seen it, and of course I’ve learned a thing or seven about people, too! I’m perpetually delighted by how much knowledge I can gain just by loving stories.
It occurred to me abruptly that while I have referenced Mancala on this blog, I’ve never properly posted about it! And that seemed like a shame.
Like chess, Mancala is a long-time-played, all-strategy, two-player board game that comes in many forms. The set we were playing with used stones as the pieces, and had a wooden board with two rows of six circular indents, with an oval at each end. This version of mancala is fairly straightforward – each circle starts with the same amount of stones, and players take stones from their own side of the board, trying ultimately to score them in that side’s oval.
When a player takes stones from one of their circles, they’ll move counter-clockwise, dropping a stone in the next pit, then the next, and so forth, until they’ve placed them all. This includes their own oval, but skips over their opponent’s; all other opponents’ spaces are counted. If the last stone they place is in their scoring space, they take another turn; if not, their opponent goes. There’s also a special “capturing” mechanic, which I’ve seen two sets of rules for. In both, ending your turn in an empty circle lets you score all stones in the pit across from it, a space your opponent controls. What the rules disagree on is whether you also score the stone you just placed! This is a consequence of Mancala dating back to at least the 3rd century, gaining variance as it aged and spread geographically. This also means there are much more complicated variants I hope to someday try!
I suspect, however, that we’ll have the same problem with all forms of Mancala as we had with this one: Zuko was trying to help… by stealing the stones.
This is one of those games that’s very simple – good for younglings or intense multitaskers. Feed the Kitty involves dice, mice, and a bowl. And that’s it!
Players take turns rolling dice, which will make them put mice in the bowl, take mice from the bowl, or give mice to another player. You only get to roll if you have mice in front of you, and you’re still in even if you don’t – there’s always the chance someone has to pass you some! Unless it’s a two-player game, in which case the end-of-game condition – when all but one player are out – is immediate. Sorry. The player who still has mice is the winner.
There is, of course, a fourth option on the dice: take a cat nap! Perhaps my favorite “no action” gimmick to date.
For my Midwest folks, because I didn’t know about it – Lizzadro Museum is in Oak Brook, Illinois, and dedicated to carved and polished stones and gems. There’s a gorgeous collection of jade pieces, mosaics, and information on both the cultural contexts and the materials themselves.
I don’t think I need to say much about this one, really. It’s not a large museum, and it covers a lot without ever feeling like the displays are crowding each other. If you like art, rocks, or the historical contexts in which either has existed, you’ll find something to enjoy here.
Beyond that, I’ll let the photos speak for themselves!
There are games that are rewardingly difficult, even educational (like Wingspan!), and there are games that are simple and hilarious. Monster Factory is one of the latter.
You’re building monsters. Like Dizios, you’re aligning like sides to like, only in this case it’s much more straightforward: there are purple/wide sides, and green/narrow ones. You draw one tile at a time and play it immediately on any player’s monster, provided it fits. It only gets discarded if there’s nowhere to put it! A completed monster is, of course, one with nowhere for new tiles to go. If all monsters are completed, the game ends; otherwise, the player immediately draws a tile as the base for a minion. When the game ends – which can also be caused by tiles running out – all completed monsters and minions are scored, monsters for total number of tiles and minions for tiles with eyes on them. What you want, then, is to build as large a monster as you can without running out of time.
And that’s it! That’s all the mechanics in one paragraph. Like I said: simple. The important part of this game is how fantastically ridiculous the pieces are, both on their own and compounded. One of our favorites is the green appendage holding a little screaming person! Which really sets the tone, don’t you think?
It’s always a delight when a game can multitask! Wingspan is one of those strategy games with lots of moving parts and several ways to earn points. We’ve played it four times now and I haven’t used the same strategy twice! It’s also an educational deep-dive into the birds of North America.
It’s essential that the core mechanics are simple – everything else is as complicated as you let it be, and as informational as you let it be, but the actual pattern all play follows is pretty straightforward! Each player has little colored cubes and a player board. Each turn, there are four actions available to them. The first is to play a bird in the leftmost open space in one of their three habitats, marking the column with a cube. After the first column, playing birds costs eggs.
The other three actions are specific to those habitats. In each case, your cube starts in the rightmost open space of the habitat, on the habitat’s ability itself, and then moves left, giving you the choice of activating each bird it passes over, provided they have a “When Activated” ability. (Also possible are “When Played” and “Once Between Turns.”) The habitats themselves are the forest, which lets you gain food – necessary to play most birds – from the birdfeeder; the grasslands, which let your birds lay eggs; and the wetlands, which let you draw more bird cards. A round is over when all cubes have been placed, and one is then used to mark end-of-round scoring. The result is that your number of actions each round goes down as the number of things each action does goes up. The game has four rounds. Scoring is a tally of the point values of your birds themselves, end-of-round goals, bonus cards (you pick one at the beginning of the game and can draw more later), eggs, food on cards (bird ability), and tucked cards (also a bird ability). Like I said – many ways to earn points!
And then, of course, there’s the technical aspects. The educational aspects. The part I’m nerding out over the most. Including the swift-start, the cards cover 180 North American bird species, including: their common names, Latin names, their habitats, what they eat, the continents they live on, nest type, wingspan, and how many eggs they lay in a year – that last one was brought down to scale. Some of these are just neat – continents, Latin names – and some are mechanically relevant! Various cards and end-of-round goals are dependent on nest type, or number of eggs in a particular nest type. (There’s a wild type that counts as everything, and in reality they have non-standard nesting habits. Like black terns, which apparently nest on water.) How many eggs the species naturally lays determines the limit for how many they can have in the game. Wingspan is relevant specifically when certain predatory birds are preying on the top card of the deck – if it’s below a certain wingspan, it’s edible. There is so much love and care and research permeating every inch of this game; it’s palpable and contagious. I expect the same is true of the expansions, too, which feature other continents! Someday…
“Why do you take so many cat photos?” I asked myself once. “Because they’re doing something cute.” “But they’re always doing something cute.” “That’s why I take so many cat photos.”
This, it turns out, is true for more than just cats, which is how I came out of Brookfield Zoo – somewhere I’ve been more times than I can count – with even more animal photos. In my defense… just look at them!
“I am one with the plant and the plant is with me.”“I fits, I sits. Even if nobody is sure how I got up here.”The flamingoes took full advantage of their parade around The Swamp. Not pictured: one walking right up to us and waiting impatiently for its photo to be taken.
We seem to have had really lucky timing this trip, from start to finish! Happy Pride indeed.
