Month: September 2025

Yi Xian: Cultivator Card Game

This game is pretty. That was the first thing I noticed, once a friend convinced me to play. The art is colorful and softly lit, the music is light and often ‘peppy meditative’… and there’s a friendly metalbending tiger.

Okay, to be clear – my characterization of Mu Hu as friendly is based on the artwork. If you have the misfortune of opposing the tiger, it might not hold. Also to be fair, as a member of the Five Elements Alliance, Mu Hu can technically make use of any of them – metal and earth are just in line with his character bonus.

The way it works is this: each character belongs to a Sect, which has a base card pool they’re working with, and throughout the game the player will also unlock the character’s unique special options. A little bit like Hearthstone Battlegrounds, Yi Xian is a game of eight players, each prepping their own build, cycling through one-on-one fights until they run out of health. (Or rather, Destiny.) Also like Hearthstone Battlegrounds, your build is determined before you enter combat.

There are, in total, eight card slots in your deck. The game starts with three unlocked and progresses, so as not to overwhelm, and you’ll draw cards to work with each turn, which you can add to your build, hold on to, exchange (discard, draw a new one to replace it) or absorb (I call this “eating” it – it’s one way to level up). You can also stack two Level One versions of the same card to make a Level Two, and two Two’s to make a Three, with improving bonuses.

And then, build in place and timer running down, you fight! And hope that your build scales faster than your opponent’s. You can check in on what they’re working with, if you have time to spare, but you only ever get to see what they had in play last turn – not what they’re changing about it now.

Basics in place, there’s the matter of Sect and character complications: the Cloud Spirit Sword Sect are very stabby, and generally straightforward to use, while the Heptastar Pavilion – reliant on probability manipulation and building around fixed spaces in the deck – are a little bit harder. Mu Hu is consistently well-paired with earth and metal cards, while one of his Five Elements comrades, Du Lingyuan, starts with a randomized preferred element each game and benefits from jumping between multiples, which need be carefully sequenced. My favorite card in the game by name and by artwork is “Giant Whale Spirit Sword.” I have no idea how to explain why this makes sense, except that it… does.

And then the characters have Side Jobs, a whole ‘nother card pool which can give you magic flowers or poison music depending on what you choose. And then, if you’re of a high enough experience level (or playing with a friend who is) there’s also the Season event chaos. And yet somehow it’s all cohesive and well-balanced! And, again, so beautiful. I might go play Mu Hu again.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Hard Boundaries To Soft Problems

What is it like to live at the border of time zones? Where “six o’clock” means something different where you live than it does ten minutes away?

As someone who lives pretty solidly in Central Time (US), I haven’t had to reckon with that, and it comes to mind because of something more personally relevant – USDA hardiness zones.

For the unitiated, USDA hardiness zones are a map of average coldest temperatures across the United States, which are grouped into zones to indicate which plants your winters (probably) won’t kill. A zone 7 minimum, like some pomegranates, won’t handle the negatives Fahrenheit well. This makes them viable in Portland, Oregon – likely because of the Pacific – but not so much in northern Illinois. Which makes sense! The finer problem is this: because of Lake Michigan, much like with the Pacific, the Chicago suburbs closer to the lake are a zone warmer than the ones further away. We cross this divide regularly. The Morton Arboretum, which I’ve written about before, might actually straddle it. So if a fig tree’s minimum zone is 6… can it survive one or two suburbs over?

The answer, realistically, is it depends on the specific conditions where you specifically plant it, and the zones are more guideline than rule. But it is an interesting thought experiment, is it not? Because at some point, “just another suburb over”… is one too many. Which is why northern Illinois can’t grow pomegranates.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Tiny Epic Dinosaurs

These are the itty-bittiest dinosaurs you’ve ever held in hand. Lying them down and standing them up again on the boards is a minor dexterity exercise. And they’re so cute. You’ve got stegosaurus, brachiosaurus… allosaurus, velociraptors… the purple ones… I’m getting ahead of myself.

Inside of this very compact box is a sprawling board of actions, Ranches, player mats, research and contract centers, and the desperately important Medical Leave, whose board also houses the round tracker, a phase guide, and end-game scoring on the back. Each player’s Ranch is unique in arrangement and therefore where Barriers need to go to stop dinos from escaping, where your freebie enclosure starts, and which resources are where! Resources become more difficult to acquire the more dinos you need to provide for with them, as you use land to house stegos instead of to grow food. Luckily, you can also gain resources during the Assign Ranchers phase, which is also where you get Barriers, Research benefits, Contract fulfillment, and dinos.

Dino-wrangling is, to nobody’s surprise, incredibly dangerous, and often results in injury. You can shill out Supplies for someone to do that for you, of course, but that gets expensive, so your other option is to pick a dino and roll the Wrangler die. Most of the time, nothing happens. You net the critter without incident, move it to your Holding Area and move on. Sometimes, there’s an incident, and both your Ranger and the dino are wounded and sent to Medical Leave – you still get to keep ’em, but any plans that depended on them being where you’d expected are shot. And sometimes, very occasionally, there’s a different kind of incident, and you wind up with a second dino. This sounds fantastic and I was absolutely delighted when it happened to me… until I realized I had neither the Barriers nor the food for it. Extra dinos are not always a good thing. And being wounded isn’t always so bad! I had for myself a plenty functional build in which being wounded got me a bonus action and wound up rather disappointed when wrangling went without fanfare.

All your ranger actions handled and all your stuff now being yours, you now move on to arranging your Ranch, dealing with runaway dinos, feeding your dinos, dealing with more runaway dinos, and breeding your dinos, at which point there are – you guessed it – more runaway dinos. Now, to be fair, you will not necessarily be dealing with them three separate times, so much as the possibility of them three separate times, depending on what you don’t have enclosures for before breeding them, what you don’t have enclosures for after breeding them, and what you can’t afford to feed. Even the gentlest of herbivores will crash through your Barriers rather than starve to death, which is what the escaping ones do, and jailbreaking carnivores will eat your other dinos instead. (They can, however, eat your other escaping dinos, if that tidies up some problems.) So there is a strong incentive to be sure you can maintain what you’re acquiring, certainly.

There are two other problems, if problems they are, to do with opportunities and the challenges thereof. The first is Contracts, which are both a primary way of earning points and the most difficult one. Seven spare dinos, anybody? A Public Contract only takes three, but your Private Contract needs four, and can only be fulfilled when a Public Contract is also. Talk about steep terms. Especially because, unless you spend a Supply and an action, there’s no way to acquire a dino and sell it in the same round! And, as previously established, feeding them gets expensive. The ones worth more points in both Contracts and on their own are, naturally, the ones that need to eat more. And then there are the purple ones.

“The purple ones,” for which every little figure is unique, are products of the Research division and each come with their own special effects, food requirements, and more lenient habitation rules. They’re hand-raised and unlikely to run off on you, more or less. An excellent example is Gallimimus, an omnivore requiring either one Plant or one Meat, which lets you pick an adjacent dino that does not need to be fed. If that dinosaur is, say, Tyrannosaurus Rex, which needs three Meat in a round (or even just Allosaurus, which needs two), you definitely see returns. Also, Gallimimus is worth two victory points at game’s end, so there’s that too. The non-animal Research cards, like the Mobile Barriers (allowed to be rearranged), also have point values attached.

All in all, this one is very mechanics-crunchy, needs a lot of space for gameplay and very little for storage, and, again, has tiny little dinosaurs you get to profile-match to their pictures and zookeep in a format where they don’t bite. And then you get to sell them to the Jurassic Parks of the world, and they’re no longer your problem! Flawless. Replayable ad infinitum. Have at least one player with steady hands and decent eyesight.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Old Traditions, New Traditions, and Somewhere In Between

For as long as I can remember, our household has had a rule: when a doctor’s appointment involves needles, we get milkshakes. It was a successful distraction/treat/hydration technique, and made me probably the only kid who was ever vaguely disappointed when I wasn’t due for shots. By middle school I had a regular shake (coconut chocolate almond) that I had fairly consistently and knew to look forward to.

In more recent years, we’ve found out I’m lactose intolerant.

Naturally, that’s not the end of the world (thank you, modern medicine, even if your solution has the texture of chalk) but I still went looking for other options, and we’ve had other treats accordingly. I was looking for A Perfect Replacement, you know? Something that would live up to the well-tread hype of a childhood favorite. On the other hand… variety! I love trying new things.

Ultimately, a compromise: the new treats are varied and subject to whim; I got a tetanus booster and we got onion rings and chocolate cake. (We did not, I feel the need to note, consume them at the same time.) And when Mom got blood drawn, we went and got ice cream, armed with Lactaid and a healthy dose of nostalgia. There’s a s’mores soft serve with chocolate and marshmallow chunks at Oberweis right now – very tasty, absolutely massive (“if I put the rest in the fridge it’s a milkshake later”), and that faint jumble of ice cream smells made me inordinately happy, even just walking in the door.

There’s a quote in Amphibia – vague spoilers for a single-episode side plot, I guess – “Turns out if you embrace change instead of clinging to the past, you get a say in what the future looks like! Heck, you can even bring some of the past along with you.” And this is absolutely not what they meant by that, but man am I feeling it. And sugar happy! Happy Sunday.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail