Game designer Soren Johnson (Civ IV) has put together a mega-list of board games, some of which I’ve actually played! Mostly, I must admit, on iPhone, which has become a fantastic platform for board game conversions. Something of a follow-on to my thing about games for parties, here’s my take on what I’ve played on his list.

Dominion

Really big in gaming circles, Dominion (pictured above) is simple enough to appeal much wider, too. The aim is to amass a hand of cards, with the hand with the greatest value at the end winning, but you’ll need to balance your collecting, from buying value cards to earning the coin cards that allow you to buy them, as well as choosing cards that give you special abilities each turn.

I’m not quite sure about what Johnson means about the game only requiring you to take a single strategy – in fact you’ll need to switch strategies as a game progresses, from building up coin cards in the early phase to rushing to gather value cards at the end, while deciding whether to take an aggressive or defensive stance. That said, maybe Johnson’s right in that it’s hard to switch strategies once you’ve committed to a general stance.

› read more

Here’s a thing, courtesy the excellent Now I Know newsletter. Corning’s sale of Pyrex to World Kitchen in 1998 had profound effects on crack cocaine production.

That’s because Pyrex used to be made using borosilicate glass, which does not shatter when being subjected to the sudden changes of temperature you get when you splash water on a jug you’ve just taken out of the oven. When World Kitchen took over it started to make Pyrex products for the US market out of tempered soda-lime glass, which is more susceptible to, essentially, exploding in such circumstances.

› read more

Around 10 years ago I went on holiday to Morocco with a friend called Dave. We stayed in Marrakesh and went up into the Atlas mountains, where I’ve never been so cold and so hot in a single day. Towards the end of the holiday we visited Essaouira, a coastal holiday town. It was October – the sun was hot, but the wind, coming off the sea, was strong and sharply cold. Looking for something to do one afternoon we found ourselves taking shelter at a cafe in a sunny square.

› read more

An update to last week’s ding-dong over Apple’s EULA for iBooks Author, which suggested that it would not allow you to publish elsewhere the content of a book you’d published through the software - Apple’s updated the EULA to say that it only extends to the file iBooks Author generates, not the content itself, over which you retain all rights. Hooray.

› read more

Having watched the documentary Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times, I am now totally in awe of the newspaper’s media and culture columnist, David Carr.

There’s an incredible scene where Carr is interviewing the heads of Vice magazine for an article on how Vice is diversifying its output in the face of the rising power of the internet. The team has recently made The Vice Guide to Liberia, a video that presents fighters claiming that they kill children and drink their blood before battle and a beach littered with human crap.

› read more

Ethics in videogames is a big, scary topic. Ethics? I mean the ways designers are using compulsion to entertain players and also to extract time and money from them.

It’s a pity, then, that the level of discussion around videogame ethics is so poor. Like this article, for instance. Written by iOS developer Benjamin Jackson for The Atlantic, which really should know better, it’s a very compromised piece.

I should note that it’s an excerpt from a longer article that’s to be published elsewhere, but this is a standalone piece that will probably more widely read.

› read more

I really need to have another crack at reading Infinite Jest. But until then, Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace’s essay on the Maine Lobster Festival will have to do.

It’s pretty much amazing, effortlessly crossing from travelogue to treatise on the science and ethics of causing pain to animals to food writing to grumbles about tourism. Written for Gourmet magazine, it’s colloquial, personal, expansive, humble (maybe falsely, but hey, who’s judging?), but it conceals a the powerful payload of trying to get gourmands to think about what their food really is.

› read more

It’s one hell of a brouhaha. Apple released iBooks Author last week, a free eBook maker that publishes direct on to Apple’s iBooks store. Nice! It’s free! And beautifully designed!

The sting in the tail is its EULA (emboldened for emphasis):

Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:

(i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;

› read more

“A man or woman on the street in any year in the 20th century groomed and dressed in the manner of someone from 27 years earlier would look like a time traveler, an actor in costume, a freak.”

Vanity Fair recently published an article by Kurt Anderson about American culture slowing its rate of innovation, pointing out that in many ways there’s far less difference between the fashion style of today and that of 1992 than the difference between, say, 1992 and 1972, or 1972 and 1952.

› read more

“Do you enjoy upsetting this family?” [Two knocks.] “You do. Well, now will you please go away? Because I think you’ve had enough of your jokes.” [Two knocks.] “You won’t go away. I would like you to go away, and go away because I think you’ve been upsetting this family long enough."

A ‘psychical’ investigator on BBC Nationwide in 1977 attempting to get rid of a poltergeist haunting the above room of a house in Enfield.

› read more