The clear highlight of the week, and the obvious newsletter feature, is the fact that I’m right now out in a most peaceful vacation resort village on a long-weekend getaway, marinading slowly in bourgeoisie entertainments with a few friends, or people I thought were friends before we decided to go live together for the weekend.
The Dao of the Vacation Resort
Finland is very much “cabin country” culturally, the kind of outdoorsy cabin stuff everybody knows from American entertainment originates here in Northern Europe. In the 19th century the cabin was more of a working and living arrangement for rural migrant workers in various land-exploitation businesses ranging from hunting to forestry, but in the 20th century it established itself as the vacationing format of choice for all social classes both urban and rural: a summer hermitage in the back of beyond, away from home and work, whiling away the days in simple affairs like gardening, fishing and endlessly fixing the primitive cottage or cabin to keep it livable.
Our vacation weekend here in scenic Vuokatti has little to do with that kind of traditional cabinieering, except for the name: the Finnish language doesn’t really have a name for the concept of having a vacation home in a resort location, so this middle-class two-bedroom apartment in an over-prized tourist resort is called a “cabin” despite having in-door plumbing, electric lightning, the Internet connection I use to write this newsletter and so on. The back terrace opens to a golf course, and the left-hand neighbour is a tennis court. Not really my scene, but man proposes and conspicuous consumption disposes, I guess.
The weekend’s entertainment consists mostly of frisbee golfing (the novelty of courses away from home) and boardgames, with a dash of Gradius and similar retro video games. Might end up doing a movie sitting tonight as well, we’ll see.
The secret entertainment is, of course, cabin fever. A life hack goes here: if going cabinieering with a crew, maybe make it one night rather than three?
Cabin fever: commonly misunderstood as being caused by growing shit-bored at being stuck in a cabin, or alternatively a haunting by redrum spirits. Latest investigation suggests, however, that the disruption of ordinary life-styles involved in cabinieering causes unhealthy eating habits, lack of sleep, excessively having to look at your annoying friends, and other stress factors that ultimately result in cabin fever. Onset period can be as little as 24 hours.
Seriously, though, we’re doing fine despite the occasional attempt at homicide-by-thrown-boardgame-box. Letting people rest (as opposed to constantly running between organized entertainments) is key, as is allowing everybody to have their own private time, too. Time to write a newsletter, for instance.
Risk of Conan
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We played Age of Conan yesterday afternoon, and evening, and night — it’s not a short game exactly. I’d tried the game out about half a decade back and hadn’t been impressed then, but I’d forgotten the exact reason in the meantime. On paper the game seems pretty good for a cabin weekend: four players precis, strong theme, zero sum grand strategy wargame action. Fantasy Flight Games puts out a lot of modern Ameritrash, and often it’s a reasonable compromise between tastes.
For the future Eero, a short explanation for why the game is boring: it’s a Risk-variant (in the wide sense) armies-roll-dice-against-each-other exercise with many detached, abstract rules complications that require handling time without offering much excitement. The turn tracker is perhaps the most pronounced example of this clumsiness in design: a hundred game tokens, memory tracking of three different victory point categories through the game, constant exceptions cross-cutting across almost everything in the game, all to achieve an arbitrary game-length of ~30 rounds. A full half of the game’s mechanical structure is over-elaboration that serves to obscure the simplicity without offering depth in any sense except in increasing mental load. Usually the simplest things in the game are the most important, while the most complicated are the most irrelevant.
Age of Conan is also over-long, such that both times I’ve played it the game overstayed its welcome by a third or so. We managed to push through, but it was a grim slog, and the player’s counting error that served to pull the game short about 85% through came as a welcome respite (even besides that it led to my own victory). Perhaps the worst part is that a zero-sum Risk-variant like this gets most of its excitement from the brinkmanship and strategic commitments in the last part of the game; when Age of Conan finally gets to these decisive parts, you’re already so exhausted with running the game’s slow and pointless turn order that it’s difficult to muster the enthusiasm for the climax.
As mentioned above, I eked out a victory by relying on general precepts of strategy for this kind of game; conservative yet effective points-scoring combined with mitigating the inevitable attacks by other players. I took a fort from both of my worst competitors, while they couldn’t quite do the same to me, despite my having not really focused on the warcraft part of the game much.
All in all, there are much better games in the genre of themeful Ameritrash hybrid grand strategy wargames. The ones that come to mind are War of the Ring and Chaos in the Old World. And Twilight Imperium — really, pretty much anything except this.
Flying Saucer Galactic Pickup Foils
Disc golf’s been an affair here in Vuokatti. Time for another golf story:
Early in the summer there was a fateful confrontation on Mount Palois; two men and a caddie ascended, yet on the return trip were but two mortals accompanied by a divinity, a god of golf. Ever since then mortals have been scrambling to set their world in order, rightfully revolving around my floating driver, a disk powerful enough to turn the Earth. The jealous challengers have flocked, uttering grim portents in the stark shadows cast by my magnificence.
“Even a god can bleed”, they said, and bled I have. For some reason the Marquis hasn’t yet internalized my superior metaphysical stature, so he insists on beating me like a drum at every opportunity when it comes to disk golf. It is as if he thinks to move the heavens and shake the Earth by utterly domnating the local circuit. We’ve only had a few outings this summer, but Antti’s been consistently powerful: a fearsome drive has been accompanied by a fearfully precise approach throw such that I’ve been left entirely shut out almost regularly. It is fortunate that these have been but pokes on the mortal slopes of the cliffs of divinity. Cuts on my inflated divine ego, but merely superficial ones; surely defeat in training doesn’t count.
So anyway, we’ve been running around the Vuokatti disk golf courses over the weekend, matching disks and trying to stay out of the way of the actually competent throwers. Antti took the warm-up round in the practice 9-basket course yesterday with the same aplomb that he’s shown all summer, but then the magic started to happen when we moved on to the Vuokatti Mountain premium course for the actual championship encounter. I’d warmed up, as one does in the warm-up round, and proceeded to thoroughly dominate the first leg of the tournament. The Marquis fought well, but an early drive error coupled with near-flawless bogeys for both of us for the rest of the 9-basket course ended with a slim yet deliberate victory for the golf god.
Today we finished the Flying Saucer Galactic Pickup Foils with another warmup and the second leg of the championship run, this time in the ambitious forest course hidden behind a local chain hotel near Mount Vuokatti. Antti was visibly excited at the long courses presenting as wide cuts into the dense woods, making for prime grounds to utilize powerful driving shots, fatally so: whereas I proceeded deliberately with careful and precise drives, Antti made several unforced errors — several more than I, I should say; it was messy all around. The exciting 9-basket course ended with us both making a hash of the last course, with my 1-throw lead precariously preserved. No matter, for what occurs by the hand of god is but destiny by different name. The summer championship season was always to unfurl so, bookended by my head swelling ever rounder in the image of perfection.
As this was the Flying Saucer Galactic Pickup Foils, I’m expecting a galactic pickup any moment now. I’ll be a great flying saucer pilot, as proven by my ability to navigate the many treacherous forest courses dotting this fatherland.
Some related sports journalism
I interviewed my disc golf rival, the Marquis, after the first day of the Pickup Foils. This is the first interview feature for the newsletter, but surely well worth it:
Q: How did you come to join a game such as this, where a man occasionally has to face up even to the gods themselves?
M: It’s a pleasant hobby, the disc, to be taken as seriously as one likes. The attitudes of gods such as yourself particularly motivate a mortal man to greatness: such hubris is not to be forgiven, for there is — or should not be — any god but man himself!
Q: What are your greatest strengths and flaws as a disc-jockey?
M: The put still needs some work. My drive is, apparently, superior to the gods themselves, and my approaches are beyond critique. The put’s weak in comparison; I should concentrate more in the close-up situations. Stop and focus.
Q: Where do you see yourself a year from now?
M: If the training regimen holds, my drive will carry a 100 m by then. I will not fall to the trap of false hubris; still a mortal man then, and we shall see how far that takes me. A fighter fights and a golfer golfs; we shall see how far that suffices.
(NB: just some four hours later the Marquis would opt to attempt a risky full strength discus throw on the last basket of the Pickup Foils, fumbling the drive. We ended that basket at two mistakes each, which sufficed for my overall victory. The man without false pride might have won there.)
As I got a taste of sports reporting, I also interviewed our reigning High Society champion Sipi, who I am apparently unable to beat for some reason this weekend.
Q: Why are you so overwhelmingly successful in High Society, Sipi?
S: My intimate familiarity with the life of dissipation grants me an edge in a game that is all about conspicuous consumption.
Livin’ the Flea Life
I’ve been continuing my experiments in selling old geek trash (comics, DVDs, CDs, whatever) by taking a few hundred liters of stuff to a flea market in the regional capital of Iisalmi. A single shelf of sales space costs 17 e for the week. At this writing we know that the first week’s income was 162 € — well into the profits considering the amount of work and the fact that this trash is basically valueless to me personally. If this is at all representative of the eagerness of the locals for sustainability culture, I might end up holding onto that flea market shelf for the winter and seeing how much useless stuff I can offload to eager collectors over a few quarters. I have no idea what anybody needs a CD record for in this day and age, so I guess lucky me for nevertheless being able to sell them for a few rupees a piece.
Most of the effort in this mode of sales is involved in pricing all the items individually, but that’s actually handled in a pretty sleek way by a modern flea market: you can print up your own product labels with barcodes for the cash register alongside the human-readable pricing. I guess I could print these on stickers, too, but normal printer paper, scissors and some tape work well enough. The system naturally implies a degree of inventory control and real-time sales stats; I got the above sales profit number from a net interface used by the flea market — pretty modern for a scene not known for it!
So I guess that’s a positive review: it’s likely that there’s a flea market of some sort in your town as well, so get thee thence and konmari away the unnecessary stuff accumulated in the cup-boards.
Monday: Coup de Main #11
In the world of Dungeons & Dragons, namely Oerth, the Coup party had a fleeting brush with death in the last session, what with a carrion crawler, several giant spiders and unfortunate eagerness towards testing the flammability of three tons of cobweb (magical or not, who knows) by setting it on fire.
But that was then and this is the next session; reminded of their mortality, the party decided to cut out with some pretty appealing treasures they discovered in the cellars of the Yragrene mansion. The pride of place belonged to either the finest in junk silver the party released by breaking a priceless magic mirror, or the 60 feet of heavy velvet drapes that had inexplicably been left in the basement. Not bad for a single day’s work; the band of merry bandits the party’s attracted for henchmen were certainly happy, salivating for their share of the treasure. There were also some rarer curiousities, among them some scraps of the Mad Archmage’s personal historical wargaming miniatures collection — the handful of Swiss pikemen minis may or may not prove to be quest items of great import.
(This adventure is full of weird choices in which items are priced as treasure; every wash basin in the place seems to have an assigned treasure value, while things like crystal chandeliers, velvet drapes and hardwood furniture just sort of sit there. As we’re trying to play in a very logically clean fashion, the procedure doesn’t care what the module designer thinks; you tell us that there’s furniture, you better expect that we’ll seize it same as anything else.)
The rest of the session was spent in town; not that selling the found items necessarily took much time, but in the process of doing that the party sort of stumbled on a strand of sandbox events that turned into a quest: a bunch of travelling merchant halflings had been hanging out in Yggsburg for a couple of weeks, and, frustrated by their lack of progress and impressed by the now 2nd Level party Thief Rob Banks, they revealed their goals to Rob: the halflings had been hired by the Greyhawk Thieves’ Guild guildmaster Org Nenshen to investigate the guild Yggsburg rep Donmas Kaapu — apparently for signs of treachery, but ostensibly it’s just supposed to be routine org security (and Org security) performed by an external consultant.
So the hobbits have been doing some basic investigation and spying on this mid-level Thief, but the guy’s operation is shut up tight and they haven’t made any major progress, so Rob, who’s managed to impress himself as a level-headed Made Man in the eyes of Django Pipe, the halfling gangster, got an opportunity to help out. As a local he could already drop a bit of data on what Donmas has been up to, and he might have some angles for infiltration, and so on — it seems like we have an entire adventure in our hands here! I scored the quest as worth 8k xp, so well worth the time for a low-level party if they’d like to put the dungeoneering aside for a bit and work on an intrigue operation instead. It’s a particularly appealing adventure hook for Rob, of course, as he’s still thinking relatively locally as a thief; getting into the good graces of the guildmaster and thieves’ thief Org Nenshen would do him good.
Maneuvering around this new adventure, plus haggling with the hobbits about the treasure, took up enough of the sessionthat we decided to break it up and continue next week. The campaign’s in no hurry after all, and the online play format seems to encourage keeping the sessions reasonably short.
Session #12 is scheduled for tomorrow, Monday 24.8., starting around 15:00 UTC. Feel free to stop by if you’re interested in trying the game out or simply seeing what it’s like.
Thursday: Varangian Way
The RPG Club Hannilus has skipped a few weeks, but we finally got our shit together, and now we’re back to playtesting Varangian Way, the innovative GMless sandbox viking slice of life drama game. Imagine a combination of grand strategy simulator, medieval history lesson and a cast of thousands historical drama full of random twists of fate.
The game’s improving noticeably after every session of play as we learn to play it better and Petteri keeps honing the rules. This time around we tried our first “map phase”, the part of play where substantial time passes in-setting and great communal events change the shape of the map. The biggest thing that occurred in our first map phase was that the Swedish colonization of the Finnish coasts got kicked off. A “first crusade” if you will, going by the traditional Swedish historiography. I tried to establish an interesting protagonist there, but failed, so Tommi’s pre-existing viking teenager took up the task and traveled to Finland to be embroiled in adventures around the place.
The game’s still pretty slow, as we’re figuring things out as we go, but it’s more promising all the time, so it’s work that I don’t mind at all.
State of the Productive Facilities
Still stuck on stage 3 of Gradius. Luckily the Earth space forces don’t seem to be running out of Vic Viper star fighter frames any time soon.