Author: Cassandra

Mancala

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.

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Feed the Kitty

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.

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Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art

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!

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Welcome to the Monster Factory!

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?

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Oh cool, a bird! What’s its Wingspan?

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…

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Pride Week at the Zoo

“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!

A brown snake is curled up to form two loops on either side of a stem, easy to mistake for part of the plant amidst the large leaves radiating out from it.
“I am one with the plant and the plant is with me.”
A Pallas's cat is curled up in a crevice so small it has zero free space, about halfway up the rock wall of its enclosure. It is not a small enclosure, nor a short wall.
“I fits, I sits. Even if nobody is sure how I got up here.”
A whole cadre of flamingoes following the wooden path with railings, usually used by humans. They're escorted by a zoo employee in a pink visibility vest as they do a loop of the building before returning to their enclosure.
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.

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Dino Days

The third and final game in the series! Unlike Cat Days and Woof Days, I can only speculate on the behavioral accuracy of this one. Still, Dino Days features a fun variety of the creatures in question with, like the others, a mix of new and familiar mechanics. (As this is a comparison post, I would highly recommend reading the other posts first! At minimum, the one on Cat Days, where I explained the overall mechanics of the game.)

The most immediately obvious difference is in your starting hand. Like in Cat Days, there’s a fixed card all players start with, and unlike in Cat Days, this card is an animal worth points all on its own. Quite a lot of them, in fact! The catch? Giganotosaurus’s superpower is scaring away all other dinos on the board you’ve played it on, so you need to decide quickly whether you’re using it to garner points or holding it to wield against your opponent.

There are other dinos with similar, though less all-encompassing, predator abilities, and of course some non-dino cards as well. Another major difference with this deck is the Diplodocus: a dino that’s split across Diplodocus Front and Diplodocus Rear cards, which you must have both of to play – spanning two adjacent days of the week, counting as one action, and, if it’s still around at the end of the game, scoring its player twelve points. A tricky set of conditions, sweetened by another factor: many of the dino-removing or -stealing effects can’t touch it. Which in turn makes the Meteor a coveted prize, as one of the few exceptions!

And of course, there are your staples like the Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and Ankylosaurus, with much chiller day-of-the-week effects. Triceratops being Sunday-only, for example. True to form, the dinosaur game is one of carnivores and herbivores, functionally distinct from those of Cat Trees and Muddy Paws. Which is what excited me most about this as a set, I think – not only do you pick the flavor text, you get to pick the tone!

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Woof Days

I suppose “Dog Days” was disqualified for connotations. That’s alright – I think “Woof Days” is cuter! From the same people who made Cat Days, Woof Days is… well, the dog version. Admittedly, I know far less about dog behavior, so I can only hope it’s as spot-on as the cat game. I’d expect that it is. The contrast between the games is especially interesting! (That’s mostly what I’ll be discussing here, so reading the Cat Days post first would be beneficial.)

Instead of starting with four random cards and a Cat Tree or equivalent, players start this game with five random cards, making your opponent’s opening moves even more unpredictable. Whereas Cat Days cards tend to affect the top card of a pile, many movement effects in Woof Days move the whole stack as a unit, which in retrospect highlighted for me the mix ‘n match behavior of cats and who they choose to hang out with. Some of the animal cards correlate pretty directly – the Rescued Cat and the Mixed Breed have the same effect – while others are distinct. The Chihuahua, for instance, must be played on a day that’s not adjacent to a Great Dane, German Shepherd, or St. Bernard.

Overall, it’s sort of like Fluxx variants: you expect the overall mechanics to be the same, in new flavors. And there’s one more flavor to discuss, so I expect I’ll be posting about that next week!

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These Glorious Cat Days

The advantage to a cat game produced by an animal rescue is that they clearly, viscerally understand cat behavior. In Cat Days, your board is the seven days of the week… and the cats are all picky about where they’re willing to sit.

Some cats are easier to place than others. The Rescued Cat can go on any day, on any board. The Fluffy Cat can only be played on Sunday on any board. More difficultly, the Playful Cat can be played anywhere from Tuesday to Saturday on your own board, but only if both adjacent days are already occupied. All the cats have their quirks, and they’re drawn or played one at a time – be judicious which action you take, because once any player has filled all seven days, the game ends immediately!

At that point, scoring happens, generally counting only the top cat for each day. However, each player starts the game with a Cat Tree, which they can play on a day to let it score up to three! There are other items in the deck too, like the Cardboard Box – play it on your own board to lure an opponent’s cat to it.

As a cat person, I adore this on principle. It’s also simple enough to play while holding a conversation! So long as you keep track of whose turn it is. (We used the box for that.) And it’s part of a series of games, so expect my thoughts on the others soon!

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Humankind: A Hopeful History

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman is a book about how humans are inherently good and kind.

Too often, I’ve seen this notion brushed aside as naive, and part of what I love about this book is… it isn’t. At all. Bregman doesn’t shy away from humanity’s dark side – quite the contrary! He actively tackles it, presenting everything from the supposed savageness of our prehistoric ancestors, to Lord of the Flies, to the Stanford Prison Experiment, along with the more cynical perspectives on how or why they occurred – before systematically dismantling those arguments with dissenting evidence from other studies. A shocking amount of the former have turned out to be blatantly untrue, whether thanks to misconceptions or deliberately dishonest results. They only continue to circulate because they’ve already been taken as truth! Bregman also addresses events that definitely did happen, and disputes our assumptions about why, or how.

Beyond that, he goes on to offer examples of real-world institutions, be they schools, companies, or governments, that have based practices on the “optimistic” psychology to great success! I put “optimistic” in quotes because as he stresses over the course of the book, this mindset is realism. That is, what science has shown reflects reality. In a nutshell? Our evolutionary superpower is that we’re a social species, and so friendliness is a baked-in survival mechanism. One that we have to choose to honor, and one that we’re predisposed to.

These later sections especially are dear to me, because while it’s heartening to know that people are generally good, that part alone can leave you feeling a bit like my namesake – you know the truth, yes, but who’s listening? Knowing the ways this psychology has been applied – and in the process, revealed – makes the knowledge actionable. And as much as I admire the opposition-first formatting, it’s this part that I appreciate most. Because, to quote Ratatouille, “Change is nature… The part that we can influence.” And we hold the keys to influencing our perception of ourselves.

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