Blatherberg

Original publication on boardgamegeek.

Waters of Nereus has a little of everything: worker placement, engine building, resource management, multiple paths to victory, and Beth Sobel’s artwork and Steve Finn’s design. It’s also the first game (I think) from Dr. Finn’s Games with a 60-90 minute playtime. Given that he’s known more for shorter, filler games, that’s an ambitious change. It pays off nicely. It’s not just that there’s a lot to like in Waters of Nereus, it’s that it catches my imagination.

Before going any further: I’m fairly biased in that I enjoy almost everything I’ve played from Steve Finn, but this is the first time I’ve even considered writing a few hundred words about it.

The look: Two things stand out to me here: the artwork, which includes 7 distinct character cards for each of the four players, and the boards. Each are well designed. The other components don’t stand out, but they’re perfectly fine. The coins are well sized, the cards and boards have a good finish. I’m enjoying seeing how Dr. Finn’s ongoing success has allowed him to provide higher quality components. Compare the coins in this game to the wooden crates from Gunrunners, where it’s hard to tell the sizes apart.

Big kudos to Dr. Finn for focusing on accessibility for this game, providing a complete extra set of tokens for people with color blindness, and also using the back side of the player board to use letters to distinguish colors. Kudos, I’m sure, also go to the graphic designer, Sebastian Koziner, who I’m sure had a part in that.

So it will seem pedantic to nit about that, but the player markers and ships aren’t distinguished by color. I’m not expecting Scythe-like individuality, I’m only noticing the absence.

The gameplay: As I said, it’s got a bit of everything I like.

It has worker placement, by choosing from a variety of actions to take on a turn. The longer you wait to claim an action, the worse your options become. Every action has a value and cost that comes from lost opportunity.

It has engine building: by focusing on paying off members of your crew, they’ll do more for you.

It has multiple paths to victory: one game I focused on the treasure chest for big rewards, and another game I focused on acquiring vital crew bonuses by day two, and then executing those cards as much as I could.

The crewmember variety is one of this game’s best strengths, and gives you room to combine their options into attractive combinations. Of all the crew, the Boatswain is probably the least used – it’s not often you just want to shuffle your treasures, so it’s made more attractive with the point bonuses. (incidentally, it’s pronounced bo’son, or, /ˈbōs(ə)n/. Thank you, Wifeberg.)

A two-player variant uses neutral third-player with peculiar movement rules, where you roll a six-sided die to determine the ship’s direction. But since ships can travel in eight directions, it means the ship can never move -45 degrees. I’ll probably use an eight-sided die, or maybe I’m looking for a reason to use the seven-sided die I just happened to get.

https://www.amazon.com/gamescience-opaque-white-dice-7-sided…

What was this about it captures your imagination?

This game doesn’t need any changes. It’s complete and good. But the board options the game presents makes me want to try a number of things, and also, pimp my set a bit.

I want pirate coins for this game. It’s not cheap, but options are out there https://www.ebay.com/p/Metal-Pirate-Treasure-Coins-Set-of-30… – maybe even the Scythe coins, https://www.thebrokentoken.com/scythe-metal-coins-80?utm_sou… though they’re a bit pricey.

The set-up for each round comes with drawing four of a set of six cards describing where treasures will be placed each day. While it’s more than sufficient for the game, I just want more.

I want stickers: four markers with the number ‘50’ on it, giving you a way to flip your scoring marker over once you’ve lapped the score board. It’s not critical — Carcassonne doesn’t have one and it’s one of the most successful games in the world. But Sagrada has it, and now I just want.

In the meantime such a sticker sheet could have small color letters to place on the player markers to address the minor accessibility issue I mention above, for color blindness.

The game does not allow you to attack your opponents, and that’s probably the right thing to do. And I’ve continued thinking about how to bolt on rules allowing you to take on a meaningful risk to try to steal treasures from your opponent’s hold. That idea seems to be waning, but that it’s been in my mind this long is a testament to how much I enjoy it.

More than anything I’ve been thinking about solo play. Steve published his rules for solo play warning people he didn’t think it was up to the quality he hoped for. It’s more of a puzzle than I’d like. Inspired by Patchwork Automa and some fan-made solo rules for Istanbul: The Dice Game, I’ve drawn and written a few card prototypes, and hope to focus on it this weekend.

What the game is not, and why it frustrates me, and why it doesn’t matter.

The game has some strategy, but hobbles its strategic depth. Most of this is manifested in the random nature of daily treasure placement. You have no idea where treasures will appear the next day, and even if you did, you wouldn’t know which treasures they were. This limits your daily choices toward maximizing your flexibility on further days.

Azul is pretty similar, you pull tiles from a bag, but in that case, the quantity and broad availability can still play in to an overall strategy.

And while the movement options are much improved over Sunset Over Water (still an excellent tight little game) and appropriate for a game of this size, I can’t help but feel it loses itself in the strategy. Why can a Captain only move one or two spaces? Why can’t a Pilot move diagonally? That’s a weird boat you got there, Cap’n.

So yes, this game isn’t Scythe. But it’s not trying to be Scythe, and even if it was Scythe, Wifeberg wouldn’t play it. And that’s why I didn’t consider mentioning this to begin with: if you want to play Scythe, go play it. But if you want to satisfy your lust for worker placement and engine building, I would be hard pressed to pick something else right now.

Century: Spice Road. A new Wifeberg favorite.

Century: Spice Road is just a stellar game. Most important, Wifeberg just loves it. As much as I’ve had years of fun with Splendor, now I see why everyone says this replaces it. (Part of why is because I played Splendor for so many years.) Recently I have learned the joy of playing games solo. Scythe comes to mind, it has a first-rate Automa opponent that lays clear just how little I know about the game.

One thing about Scythe: when you play around the table, you really play around the table.

But I also have a soft spot for fan-made expansions. Ticket to Ride: Emerald City being my hands-down favorite. I’ve been enjoying a simple-to-play, yet fairly challenging fan-made solo mode for Instabul: The Dice Game, so when I saw someone made a solo mode for Century: Spice Road, I resolved to play it.

Look at this. A fan made this. As a labor of love. Because he loves Seattle. It’s gorgeous. And best of all, it plays wonderfully.

While the next paragraph talks about some positives, let’s get this out of the way: these rules aren’t very good. The opponent hobbles itself by constantly using its cube supply to buy market cards, all game. Its next turn is always obvious. In our one and only bout I creamed it by an outrageous margin. It would have been a total blowout had it not  managed to grab a single point card simply because of the good luck of the card turning up just as it had the cubes to purchase it. I’ll never play those rules again.

This AI opponent is so dumb it’s going to spend the next turn tossing a green cube to take a market card rather than get one more brown cube for the 14-point card above.

So what do I like about it? Well, go back to the post on BoardGameGeek. There’s a community of users there, that are providing their own feedback on how they might adjust the AI, trying to make it better. Even I gave my own thoughts on the matter, with a derivative I haven’t actually played despite my promises. But people are trying. So what’s good? The framework was interesting enough to generate discussion. And so now I keep thinking about how to tune the AI so it doesn’t just grab market cards, it grabs good market cards. And just like a human player, it should be part of the early competition to grab decent market cards (or rather, take them from other players) but during the late game not even waste its time on them, and focus on growing their little cube-shaped empire. And the next step should not be predetermined. One thing I learned from the AI opponents in Scythe and Istanbul: The Dice Game: the AI opponent doesn’t even have to play the same rules. It just needs to be tough competition.

These things are surmountable. I’m not about to draw up an Automa deck with a Phase I side and a Phase II side. Or am I? Such an interesting idea.

Our good dog and best friend, Maggie, was put to sleep yesterday after her fourth bout with pancreatitis. We hoped she would rally like she had in the past. And for a while she did. And then she did not.

The house feels empty. We see reminders of her everywhere. The pill sheet. The box of toys. The piles of blankets we stacked everywhere on every floor, and all the water bowls, so she could sleep and drink wherever she chose. The kid-gate we bought just last week to prevent her from climbing the stairs unaccompanied.

Maggie’s pill reminder sheet. We stopped trying to give her pills Sunday night. Five days later we put an end to her suffering.

With Wifeberg in NYC last weekend, through Monday morning, Maggie and I visited friends in South Jersey. Maggie was healthy. Happy to walk, just … slowly. On one of her last walks she nabbed some random food or poop thing. Could that have been what got her sick? It doesn’t matter.

A big Maggie fan, who wanted to be part of every walk.

And we had a nice long walk Sunday morning. I’m not giving details, but we had a scary incident which only later did we realize was an early warning sign.

Later that night things took their turn for the worse.

Monday through Thursday were the same: visits to the vet, hydration, carrying her outside, offering her food, and looking for signs of improvement. Wifeberg closed in the living room with the plastic gate, and someone was with her all the time. Someone slept downstairs with her every night, some nights both of us, up every two hours to carry her outside to make her peeps.

This was Thursday. I thought that was the day we were going to do it, so I asked Wifeberg to take this photo. The vet suggested we try one more day. Friday we rushed to the vet and neither of us had our phones. Not that I wanted more photos.

Wednesday night started to see some bad signs: she threw up water all night. (She had long passed wanting to eat.) The vet suggested one more round of treatment, along with a nausea suppression. We expected some improvement by Friday.

The improvement didn’t come.

On Friday morning we knew it was time. At 9AM Wifeberg dropped me at the front door to the vet’s office. I carried Maggie inside while she parked the car. We sat by her side the whole time, giving her pets, telling her stories, and saying thank you. By 9:45 she was gone.

“Are you a hugger,” I asked the vet? “Because I’m a hugger.” I learned my vet’s office has a lot of huggers.

Many of you understand the kind of love we shared. We were a family of best friends.

It’s sad. We’re sad. But we know how lucky we were. How lucky we are.

I don’t have a graceful ending here. And I’m tired of editing this post. And if you’re sad, please don’t be. Because we had the greatest dog there ever was. And they were the best 11 years of my life.

“It came to me that every time I lose a dog they take a piece of my heart with them.

And every new dog who comes into my life gifts me with a piece of their heart.

If I live long enough, all the components of my heart will be dog, and I will become as generous and loving as they are.” (source)

Like I said in my prior post, I’ve been getting into print-and-play. My second project was to be a print-and-play copy of Secret Hitler, a lovely social deduction game I played last year. Even though it’s available for purchase, the manufacturers provide a free version.

I didn’t even really want my own copy, but I wanted to make it and give it away two weeks later at my framily holiday party and gift exchange.

This was an ambitious project, with a lot of pieces:

• Playing cards
• Playing board
• Placards
• Legislation cards
• Card envelopes

Even though the manufacturer gives away a black-and-white PDF, that didn’t stop the gaming community from colorizing it.

The original lacked some card backs, and I found someone who added their own.

Each of the five components were made with different materials:

• The playing cards were glued onto standard playing card blanks, and sleeved.
• The playing board was glued onto foam posterboard, with some painter’s tape to allow them to bend.
• The placards were glued onto very standard thin cardboard.
• The legislation cards were glued onto double-thick cardboard. (This gives them a great feeling in your hands.)
• And the envelopes, well, that’s below.

Of everything, the path to envelopes needed the most work, and was also the most satisfying to do. I had no template to go on, but found a fabulous and highly recommended blog post about the game’s original graphic design. It came with this good quality image of an example envelope.

Well, it was almost perfect, except for that shadow. That took me about an hour in GIMP to replace, and then I loaded it up in Google Docs to size and test. Once in Google Docs I actually replaced the original YOUR ONLY with text written in Twentieth Century typeface to give it a cleaner look when printed.

My original test envelope folded lightly on the sides, but I preferred that the sides have more strength.

For the final envelope I printed on both sides, with a large block of the envelope color on the back. This gives the envelope an authentic feel. When people look at it they can’t believe it came out of a laser printer.

All in all I had a complete set!

That’s when I made the big mistake of trying to preserve them with a Rust-Oleum spray-on matte. See, the spray caused all the colors to bleed. All of them.

I wound up having to reprint and recreate the legislation and placards. I forget whether the envelopes came out okay, or I just got lucky, or I ignored those. I ignored the damage to the foam boards, because it wasn’t going to materially change anything. And if the recipient cares, I’ll be happy to do it. besides, I expect the foam player boards will loosen up. Because, something else I’ve learned is that it’s really hard to get something to stick to that foam. Every glue I’ve thrown at it fails, terribly. For a future project, I’ve moved to double-sided tape, and that seems to be working.

I’m proud of the outcome. I’m particularly proud of the variety of material types, and the envelopes in particular.

Total time: 13 hours, over two weekends and several evenings. But that’s 13 hours off the computer. Which was the whole point. So while I’d love to edit this, and write some more about it. Off I go.