a wolf angel is not a good angel

Hey, other bloggers. Come play Funny Farm. Essentially, you’re guessing words that are related to the word in the big centre box.

Most fun: you can work cooperatively, so after you’ve played for a bit, you can merge my saved game and we can play together. I haven’t gotten very far, and it seems like more fun to do with people, anyhow.

Update: got a few more answers. This game is annoyingly frustrating.
Update 2: even more. Someone, help. Please.

Hurray! I got the Monkey Island games (as well as other LucasArts games that I’ve not played before), so I can fill my piratical ambitions. Unfortunately, I cannot figure out how to play Loom *with* the sound/music. It is a totally utterly 100% pointless game without music. But with the music, it was, as I recall, a phenomenal game. I’d like the chance to try it again. Sigh.

Just saw Wordplay. Much fun! Probably not so much fun for non-crossword players, but I do play them, so it works out fine. (And I do pretty much only the NYT ones. I can usually do most of Thursday unaided, sometimes a Friday. I need help on Saturday. I can always do most of a Sunday, and often all of it. I am getting better.)

Of course, I’m totally not obsessive enough to be one of the real solvers. 2 minutes for a Monday? 10 for a Saturday? Please. I can do maybe 10 minutes for a Monday. (Well, probably less, but not that much. Anyways, I already read too damn fast, I might as well be slow on crosswords.)

I tried the puzzles on their website, but one keeps rejecting my obviously correct answers,[1] and another makes you search round on other websites for the clues. Then I gave up, because the interface also sucks.

I found I can only solve very short clues in my head.

Before you see this movie (or read the book Crossworld), solve this puzzle after downloading this software. You will regret it if you don’t and the solution is ruined for you. (People who remember a weird/contentious puzzle in 1996 can ignore this.) Seriously really, solve the puzzle. It’s, I think, a Tuesday, so it’s really easy. Plus, it’s totally worth solving. It is worth downloading software for.

Anyways, back to the movie. I liked it. I was disappointed in who won the tournament, though. And it was — of necessity — a bit light on some information (which I got through the book, though there’s supposed to be a companion book to this movie and what? I am so sane), which was a little disappointing. But at the same time, it *showed* in a way a book couldn’t. And I wasn’t sure how you could show a crossword puzzle being solved, it seems like the epitome of boring (you can’t even see the clues yourself), but it managed.

I was, I admit, sort of irritated by the pen(cil) thing they did. people, get a grip. Unless you never ever make a mistake with your pen, you’re just being an obnoxious snob.

Upshot: deserves all its praise. Go see the movie if you are any sort of nerd.

[1] Joshua’s conquest: JE_ICHO; Peak perfomances? ONEAC_PLAYS and, crossing those those, Short Havana misses, S__AS. I mean, seriously. There was no battle at Jepicho. I’ll make my mother try it.

So my mother and I, in an awesomely exciting Friday night plan, decided to do some of the Lewis Carroll puzzles[1] from Linguist, because they’re fun. (We have, in the past, done them on long car rides. Sometimes you think “oh, if I could only get from drape to gnats I would have the solution”, then you finally figure out that path and can’t remember why you thought it would be helpful, which is why paper is useful.

But in any case, we did some of the easy ones which are, indeed, very easy and also boring, then we did the challenger one:

Looking Glass Puzzle 8

FOR EXPERIENCED PUZZLERS! The shortest solution we could find for this puzzle required 15 steps, or 20 by the old rules! [wolfa: old rules means just exchanging letters, no adding or removing]

Transform ONSET to LEARN

After a lot of work, and a fair bit of randomly putting pseudo-maybe-words into the online Scrabble dictionary until we found one that was useful we got through in *10* steps! We have absolutely no idea how to do it with the old rules — anyone who can show me will have my utmost respect. (I am assuming that the answers will show up on LL eventually.)

[1] Rules: go from one word to another through a chain of other English words. You may, at each step, do one of the following: add one letter, remove one letter, change one letter for another. An English word is defined as a word in the Scrabble dictionary, not a proper name.

Yes! I have finally convinced other people of the wonders of Fresh Fish! This is a boardgame I love, though I’m not sure why, because I find it’s impossible to predict the endgame until we are actually at the endgame. I think I will try again with two players, too; earlier games I found didn’t work well with two, but I have ideas that might make it more worthwhile — hard to say. It might be best for each player to play two people.

Board game geeky people: play this game!

In responding to Profgrrrrl’s post about Leisure Suit Larry, I started thinking about the games I played in high school (that I can think of offhand). I played all the King’s Quest games — the last one I played was 6, but I don’t know what number they’re up to now. Those were my favourites of the “games where you can fuck yourself into an unwinnable situation several hours of game play later” genre. Perhaps because I knew enough of fairy tales and mythology that the puzzles made sense. I believe King’s Quest 4 — the one about the daughter, Rosella — was the first I played, but eventually I played them all in some order or another.

I played Police Quest 3 (I think? His wife died, or — something). I played most or all of the Space Quest games, in random orders. I wasn’t very good at them and didn’t like them as much. In other Sierra games, I played two of the Dr Brain games (love! nerd!), The Incredible Machine, and Jones in the Fast Lane. And yes, I can still do the tune for it.

And then there was the incredibly difficult (to get perfect — I could never win the archery contest) Conquest of the Longbow and, later, the far-too-easy Conquest of Camelot.

In grade — 9? 10? — when we first learned programming (other than Logo), some of us already knew how to program (in BASIC. Ahh, line numbering when you didn’t leave enough numbers), so we got to do whatever we wanted to in class. I played KQ5 a great deal in school that year. That was weird.

I preferred Lucasarts games. The Monkey Island series were just brilliant — though there were the occasional puzzles that were a little too ridiculous — and I keep intending to buy the pack of them all. Plus, you COULDN’T die. (Well, you could, if you stayed underwater for 10 or 20 minutes, but it was a pretty deliberate choice.) And you couldn’t get yourself into an unwinnable position.

I adored Loom, another game I want to get access to again (only with the music — the deluxe version), but they don’t seem to sell that one anymore. Also I’m unsure it would work on XP, so I’m leery of ebaying it.

And Tetris. There’s always Tetris.

Whatever they claim happens when I’m *not* there, when I *am* there, the same person wins Settlers of Catan. Every. Single. Time. (Knights and cities, this time. I need to find a group in Montreal. )

I even got to 12 points. One freaking point away. I was almost certainly going to win the next time, either by building a settlement or another McDonald’s.

Played Settlers and Fresh Fish with the local gay strategy gaming group. I came in *second* at Settlers: my best ever! (I had 8 points, and would have hit 9 at my next turn. It was exciting.) I won Fresh Fish, but only one other person there had ever played before, so that’s far less impressive.

It was nice to get to do that. It’s good to meet people who aren’t linguistics graduate students.

I then saw The Triplets of Belleville, which was odd. I’m not sure if I liked it or not. This was 8 hours off from work, which was good, except not so much, because now I’m sitting here looking at odd legal terms and wishing I were asleep instead.

Or, more discussion of Fresh Fish.

I played it again Friday night, with my cousin and then a second game with my cousin and my uncle. My cousin won the first game and I won the second (or maybe the other way around? I can’t even remember) which just shows how much prior experience helps. It is one of those learn-as-you-go games. I have some ideas on how to better lay out my stores, but I’m but not entirely sure how much they will work.

I am much better at road placement now. It’s getting somewhere towards natural. It’s really crucial, though: if you build somewhere you can’t, it looks like the game would be ruined. (Note: we play the “if we missed an expropriation and noticed it after you bid so you can no longer place it where you intended, the turn gets restarted” version.) It’s best, though, to officially look for expropriations after every turn.

It’s still a lot of fun. I’m entirely taken with it. You need serious spatial reasoning skills, though. The games are remarkably short, mostly because there’s no point in taking 5 minutes for a turn because the endgame is, as far as I can tell, totally unpredictable at the beginning.

Oh, I liked this game. A lot. (More, I think, than the other people.)

It’s very cognitive; there’s no trading-type interaction. There are auctions, but it’s just an auction, not a trade.

The point of the game is to minimise your road lengths. I have no clue how to make the roads do what I want, though. I can sometimes figure out how to screw other people, but not ensure I’m safe.The real problem is the beginning of the game. I can work the end game out well, but by then most of the pieces are set. And I can’t, from the beginning, tell what will be a good placement and what won’t. None of us could figure it out.

The games are very fast — less than an hour.

The first game we took the suggestion of hiding all the factories in the corner. This made placements more obvious and roads much easier — it was difficult to see why road placement would be a problem. (I tied for second place with 6 points. Leftover money was crucial in both games.) The second game we put the 3 factories away from corners. It is almost impossible to predict where the road will come out of something that’s in the middle of the board. Which means that even if you’re on the corner of one, you can be 8 road tiles away.

The odd thing about this game is that the road tiles go in the weirdest places sometimes. You need to put one floating around in the middle of the board because otherwise you’d split the board, or . . . we were actually quite good about that — we didn’t always catch them immediately, but before we ever built on one.

The first factory goes for a lot, the next bunch go for around 3, and the last are free. I had *8* points freed up from extra money — this is important. (It brought me from 14 to a winning 6 in the second game.)

It’s quite a different kind of game. It’s much more strategy and less luck. It also requires some kind of puzzle skills, so you can figure out what places to expropriate adn turn into roads. It’s a logic puzzle kind of thing, I think — you must enjoy that for the game to be even a little worthwhile. But I was totally taken with it. Part of it is just figuring out *what* the strategy for it is. (No clue. None of us can even imagine.)

I really enjoyed the game — more than Settlers of Catan. I am, however, a minority there. Everyone liked it.

It’s not an expensive game, though, and you can play it with 2 people (I don’t know how well that would work), which is a big plus. I would suggest it, just for something that will be nothing like what you’ve seen before.