Chicago’s west suburbs have the privilege of several good zoos, and one of them is Cosley! We went recently to see their coyote, Wiley, who’s in full winter poof. Consequently, photos! Not just of Wiley.
A lot of Cosley’s critters are native to right here in Illinois, which has characterized it for me as the most domestic of our local zoos. There’s something to be said for bigger zoos like Brookfield, certainly, with species from all over the world, and something to be said for ones like Cosley, which taught me a lot about the animals right here. I love that we have both! (Also Phillips Park, which falls somewhere between the two… but that’s a post for another time.)
And I don’t mean ergonomically, or keeping it low-distraction, though I’m not discounting either. I mean that I wrote my first book with a turkey hat on my head. It was a little thing, and it brought me joy, so I kept that turkey hat at my desk and I wore it diligently.
As it turns out, you never outgrow that: that joy of small absurdities. I keep a Writer’s Block at my desk, now, in case we need to have words. A toy crab, too, for my own spin on the Rubber Duck Method. Four different sound systems, which certainly feels gratuitous at times, and also makes it incredibly convenient to switch from wired headphones to wireless to speakers to the Box of Sounds. Whatever will best serve me, already where it will serve me best.
Invest in your workspace. That is to say, the space you do things in, whatever those things may be. Make it convenient. Make it comfortable. Make it fun! It makes a world of difference.
…with a purring cat in my lap. Thank you, Diane! I’m thinking cat photos. (You may notice the TARDIS comforter shows up a lot – that’s because it’s Diane’s favorite. She’ll file a complaint if I don’t have it spread out enough. She makes good use of it when I do.)
Meeple Party is, in fact, a game in which Meeple throw a party. Who knew? Better yet, it’s cooperative, so you’re all throwing a party together! As parties generally should be.
There are, by default, five Roommates throwing the party. Players each pick one to play and the rest are NPCs. All players can move all Roommates, just like they can move all guests, but certain Surprises will give or take Stress from specific Roommates, which is the only time your specific character matters. The backs of the character tiles double as rooms – those rooms specifically are optional, but there are a certain set required in the house, namely a Kitchen, Living Room, Dining Room, Bathroom, Bedroom, Door, and Outside. Rooms are arranged however the players want.
Each Roommate’s turn starts by welcoming a new Meeple to the party. This means drawing one out of a bag, and then placing them in a room of your choice and activating their effect – each color of Meeple is a different personality type, with can draw Meeple toward them or push them away. The exception is the white Meeple, which cause a Surprise and then disappear back into the bag, to cause more later! In the photo below, we drew The Conga Line as our Surprise – it moves all Meeple in the room with the most to the room with the least, which is how we wound up with five in the Bathroom. You then move a Meeple of your choice to an adjacent room and activate their effect. The goal is meet your Photo criteria!
We’ll get to Photos, but first – Disasters. The difficulty level you chose at the beginning of the game will determine whether you get individual or communal Disasters, or both! Disasters list criteria you must not meet, lest you gain Stress. If all players get three Stress, the party ends prematurely because you blew up and kicked everyone out. If you have individual Disasters, they only trigger on your turn.
After that, you get to check for Photo opportunities! Everyone has two Photos in hand that they’re trying to take, with either a minimum or exact requirement. Sometimes these clash painfully with Disasters, like when I needed exactly one Flirt and one Jerk in a Bathroom, and also couldn’t have Jerks and Flirts in the same room without incurring Stress.
The good news is, 3, 6, 9, and 12 o’clock on the Clock refresh Disasters! The Clock activates after you check for Photos, and after you move it up one space per Photo you completed this turn. There are a few different effects, some more inconvenient than others. (*cough* laying down Meeple *cough*) (Laying down Meeple can’t be moved until you’ve taken a turn to stand them back up. They’re napping, sick, etc.) You then replace any Photos or Disasters you triggered this turn.
The length of the party is also determined at the beginning of the game; in the (out-of-game) photos, we were playing Casual, or a 12-Photo goal. The objective is to reach the end of the party without completely stressing out!
This one has a colorful and entertaining realism (which is not a word I thought I’d assign to Meeple) and the mix of cards, chosen room arrangements, chosen difficulties (in multiple ways), and optional items and pets (each with their own mechanics) all combine to give Meeple Party a whole lot of replay value! We haven’t played the alternate game modes yet, but I look forward to trying the Hot Tub Party, where you aim to get as many Meeple into the Hot Tub before stressing out.
There’s a kids game with exactly that premise: Penguin! Yep, just Penguin. And it’s easy to learn, as evidenced by the single double-sided sheet of rules.
The even shorter version? Players blindly draw penguins and hide them behind their screen, so only they can see. Everyone takes turns placing a single penguin in play, either next to one that’s already there, or balanced between two, matching the color of at least one of them. Usually the bottom row has a max of eight penguins, but we were playing two-player, so it was seven. A player is out when they can’t play another figure. The round is over when everyone is out.
Now, you’ve heard of highest score, you’ve heard of lowest score, but get ready for: least negative score! That’s right, players score penalties for each penguin they couldn’t place. They also incur a hefty penalty if they knock over the iceberg, but since we were making full use of the wings (slots for the base of penguins above, holding them steady) we didn’t exactly have that problem.
Play until you’ve had as many rounds as you have players, and then award whomever has the least penalties “Monarch of Penguin Stacking”! (That’s not an official part of the game, but you could.)
This one’s really simple, so it may be under-stimulating for an all-adult group, but I imagine it’s good for little ones, and especially for encouraging them to be gentle with piece placement. That, and there is a little strategy in the form of cutting off different color paths, or trying not to.
Sometimes you’re going through the game cabinet, and you realize only one member of the household actually remembers a game (that came out before the other one was born). So, naturally, you have to play it again! For us, (this time,) that game was Greed Quest.
Greed Quest is a competitive dungeon crawl put out by Steve Jackson Games way back in 2004. The overarching mechanics are fairly simple: everyone starts in the first room, going the same way, with their own deck of cards, of which they’ll each play one simultaneously every round. Easy. And somehow still so much chaos.
First off, each of the 12 rooms has a special effect, ranging from the relatively benign (“You may choose whether to keep or discard the first card you draw each turn,” or the one room without an effect) to the challenging – like the room where you can’t draw to refill your hand, and if you can’t get out before your hand empties, you move forward anyways but lose your next turn. Secondly, the cards themselves. Even simple movement is… less simple. Go! cards are a competition, with only the highest value played actually granting movement. Unless someone else played The Meek Shall Inherit, in which case whoever played the lowest value Go! card moves. Note that cards like this don’t directly benefit you, since you’re only playing one card per turn. They just mess with everyone else. I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that this game comes from the same company as Munchkin.
Third, once you reach The Horde! at the end of the path, you then have to turn around and make it back to the beginning! Which means those cards that grant movement based on where other players are get nice and tricky. Like the Odd Reversal in the photo – “If the winning Go! card is odd, trade rooms with that player after he moves.” The friend who ultimately won this game won because they – previously in room nine, when we were all on the return – swapped places with someone in room three! And as they made it back to room one, the person they’d booted to room nine swapped with someone else in room three. Oh, and room nine is the one where the deck picks your card for you! In short, it’s very much one of those “no lead guarantees victory” games. Chaotic from start to finish!
Arboretum is a gorgeous tree-based strategy game that I tried at a friend’s house this week… and completely forgot to take pictures of. Whoops. The basis of the game is that you’re building an arboretum and, eventually, scoring your trees. Or rather… some of them.
Each player starts with seven cards in hand, which will be a constant. On your turn, you’ll draw two cards, play one, and discard another. Each player has their own face-up discard pile, which is important because cards can be drawn from the top of the deck, but also the top of any discard!
Except for your first card, everything played has to be orthogonally adjacent to a tree already in your arboretum. Everyone has their own, so your played cards don’t directly affect each other, but may affect what cards you choose to pick up. More on that later. The goal, ultimately, is to make paths. A path is any set of trees of ascending value that start and end with the same species. (So long as you can draw a line between them, it can be as twisty as you want.) The trees in the middle can be something else, and they can skip numbers, but you get a bonus point for paths that start with a 1, and two for paths that end with an 8! You also get extra points if your path is at least 4 trees long and all the same species.
Your strategy, then, may be informed by what other players are playing, to block advantageous moves. However. There’s another element to scoring. Only one player has the right to score each species! Who is determined by the cards in your hand when the deck runs out. Whoever has the highest sum value of that species in their hand gets to score it – ties are friendly, and if nobody has it then everyone can score. This means you might pick up other players’ favored trees, to prevent them from scoring, but you also need enough of your best types in hand to actually reap the benefits of your work.
Between the spatial logic, planning ahead, ever-shifting discard selection, and scoring intricacies, Arboretum is a deceptively challenging mental exercise hidden behind calming, beautiful art.
Happy holidays! Let’s talk about learning. OmniSets is a free digital study platform. There are a few of these, and I actually started on a different one, but when I came back to that in recent years I found it had paywalled its services, so I went looking for an alternative. What I found was OmniSets, and it’s been serving me well ever since.
The main tool is the digital flashcards. You can search the library for StudySets other people have made, or make your own! It’s really easy, and if you already made the set on another platform you can import it! (I thought I’d have to transcribe my 100+ flashcards individually, so this in particular was a delightful surprise.)
From there, you have several practice options. You can just use them as flashcards, plain and simple; you can Study, which provides a mix of true/false, multiple choice, and written response questions until you’re consistently correct; Quiz functions as a practice test; Match is, of course, a matching game; and Spell is purely written response. You can also pick and choose which types of questions you get in Study, and Favorite cards to if you want to just study those! The only caveat is that Match works much better with smaller StudySets; it uses your whole set, so when that’s 370 cards like mine, it’s kind of clunky. That’s on me for not splitting it out at all, though.
The rest of the site really centers around making the sets as helpful as possible: you can customize how your sets are sorted, decide whether they’re public or private, decide whether they can be copied by other users (“forked”), and set StudyPlans that account for factors like when your test is to best help you memorize everything! I can’t speak to the efficacy of StudyPlans, because my flashcards aren’t for a class, but I do think it’s awesome that they’re an option.
