Author: Cassandra

Recommendation Lists

Has a friend ever recommended something that you thought sounded cool and interesting… and then promptly forgot about? I used to have that problem, and eventually I found a solution: write it down! Whether that was a continuation of my Write It Down principle for story ideas, or inspired by Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in which “I’ll put it on the list” entails an actual list – or, more likely, both – it’s had a major impact on how I approach new content.

With comprehensive lists come a reduced sense of urgency, more (remembered) options at any given time, and, of course, more ways I can organize those options to best suit my needs. To begin with, I split my lists out by those books/shows/etc. that were directly recommended by friends or family, versus content I’d heard about indirectly that I decided might be interesting. That way, when I got around to something a friend recommended, I’d know who to thank and talk about it with.

After a couple years, I realized the lists – especially the indirect one – were getting inconveniently long, and adding items in the order I heard about them wasn’t making it any easier to navigate. So I subcategorized by medium: what to watch, what to read, what to play, etc. And again, it made life so much easier! If I want to look for new shows to watch, I know exactly where to find them. Some already have side notes about which streaming platforms they’re on, or whether they’re available through our library. I put a tiny bit of work in, each time I find something interesting, and it manifests as a massive convenience later. Cool, right?

I think the point, ultimately, is that how we manage life is a constantly evolving process. What worked before might be an obstacle now. The tools you overcame an obstacle with may need to be improved. But if you have the tools to improve your day-to-day, even a little bit… why not use them?

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Rummikub

I gather Rummikub has many variants, but I’m only going to comment on the version I’ve played, for obvious practical reasons. If any of you play by different rules, though, I’d love to hear about it!

The version I’ve played goes like this: everyone draws 14 tiles at random out of the bag, and lays them out on their tray, where only they can see. Your goal is to make sets of 3 or more tiles, in either a consecutive run of the same color, or multiple colors of the same number. The tile selection is effectively two decks of standard playing cards, so there’s two of 1-13, in each of the four colors. There are also two wild tiles, that can be used in place of anything! The goal is to be the first player to empty your tray of tiles.

For your first play, you need to have 30 points of tiles, determined by adding their face values. If you can’t play, you draw another tile from the bag instead; in this fashion, you may find yourself with 26 tiles before you can actually play anything, draw that higher value tile you needed and suddenly clear out half of them! Getting on the board late, then, is not the game-defining disadvantage that it is in so many other games.

Once you’ve made that first play, you no longer have to hit a certain point threshold to play your tiles. Furthermore, you can now use the tiles other people have played to complete your sets, so long as the set they played remains complete! For instance, in the picture, I could take the red 3 from the far right set (which, having 4, 5, and 6, is still a valid run), swap it for the wild tile in the middle, and use it to make a run with… my blue 9 and 10, my yellow 5 and 6, my black 3 and 4, or my black 11 and 13. Or my black and red 13’s… Wild tiles bring a whole host of opportunities! You don’t have to make a new set, either; if you have a stray tile or three that fit an existing line-up, you can just add them on!

All of which is to say, Rummikub requires a lot of strategy and split concentration, to follow the ever-shifting layout of the board, your own tiles, and how to use both to maximum advantage. For a game with such simple mechanics, it’s certainly a challenge!

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Quick, Get Them Out of Cryo!

In Cryo, your colony ship has crash-landed on a frozen world, and your only hope is to wake your crew from cryostasis and relocate underground… before the sun sets, and the surface temperature drops from “inhospitable” to “certain death.” Under those circumstances, I expected this to be a cooperative game, but the ship was felled by anonymous sabotage and the crew has split into factions, each only looking out for their own. Which seems massively inefficient when everyone has the same goal right now, that being “don’t die,” but fear makes people irrational enough that I suppose the story checks out.

As for the mechanics, I was definitely impressed! Each player has their own platform for their faction’s materials, which they get by deploying and recalling drones to and from the shared board. To deploy, they take one drone from their platform and place it on an unobstructed dock, which lets them take one of that dock’s adjacent actions. There are many of these, scattered between the four sections of the ship, but the most important are Stasis Control, Resource Space, and Launch. Stasis Control lets you trade up to three organic materials for an equal number of your crew pods, which move from the stasis chambers on the ship segment to the safety of your platform. Launch – the one dock that can hold any number of drones – is how you transport crew pods from your platform to the underground caves, and Resource Space gives you a resource tile to either redeem for that benefit or place in a slot on your platform.

Those slots on your platform are important because of your other choice of action, to recall. When you do this, all of your drones on the board return to open docks on your platform. Each dock has an associated action. These start the game incomplete, with costs and/or rewards undefined. That’s what the resource tiles are for! Once all of an action’s slots are filled, you can activate it whenever you land a drone there, provided you have the resources to pay the cost. Some tiles even have two benefits, or a choice between two benefits, both of which are especially useful to keep!

One of these benefits is the option of drawing or playing a card. The cards are one of my favorite aspects of this game, because they can each be used in not one, not two, but three different ways! Four, actually, if you count scrapping them for materials. Equipping the card as an upgrade acts as a permanent effect, like Automation in the picture, which lets you take an additional platform action when you recall without having to land a drone there. Upgrades are at the top of each card. On the left is a mission, which gives you additional means of scoring points, and the body of the card is a vehicle. Vehicles are necessary to use the Launch dock, and each have a maximum number of crew pods they can store/carry. Some also have special effects! I think it’s pretty ingenious how they laid out the cards to have several mechanics each, and how they line up with the slots of the platform!

The other effect of recalling is resolving incidents, which serve as the ticking clock towards sunset. Each ship section has one face-up incident token; the active player will choose one to resolve. For most of the game, there are only two options: looting and sabotage. Looting gives you an immediate benefit, whether that’s materials, energy, or card actions. Sabotage destroys all crew pods in the lowest-numbered stasis chamber that hasn’t yet been destroyed. In the picture above, all four tokens are sabotage, so the next person to recall had no choice. But because section one of Engineering was already vacated, the explosion went off safely and no crew members were harmed! The last token to refill an incident space is sunset, the resolution of which ends the game.

The other way to end the game is if all of a player’s crew pods are in caverns or destroyed. Either way, it’s time for scoring! Each player scores points for crew pods in caverns and on their platform, upgrades and vehicles, mission conditions, and who has the most crew pods in each cavern. The player with the most points wins!

Cryo has a lot of moving parts, but because the overarching turn mechanics are simple and the board is well laid out, it isn’t overwhelming or hard to keep track of actions. Keeping track of what you have left to do is harder, but it’s definitely worth it!

According to the website, there are also solo rules.

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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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