• In late November 2022, The New Yorker profiled designer Isaac Childres in an article by Sean Michaels titled “A Board-Game Auteur Makes His Next Move”, an article that exudes fabulous New Yorker-isms such as these:
— “Childres, who has a slight and somewhat owlish figure, and the squint of a medieval illuminator…”
— “In September of that year, he unveiled Gloomhaven, a Brobdingnagian fantasy game that fit inside a twenty-two-pound box the size of a microwave.”
— “In December of 2019, Childres announced Gloomhaven’s official sequel: Frosthaven. It is roughly the weight and height of an Icelandic sheepdog — around fifty per cent longer and fifty per cent heavier than its predecessor, and requiring about three hundred hours to complete.”
— “Serious board-game players are a culture unto themselves. They favor novelty over tradition, mechanics over aesthetics, the ingeniousness of a puzzle over immediate ease of play. Enthusiasts open their own cafés, stage their own conventions, and invariably log into a Web site regrettably (but fairly) named BoardGameGeek.”
Fair indeed, although The New Yorker’s abbreviation choice of “B.G.G.” is odd.
This detail is nice to know: “During the past seven years, Childres’s company, Cephalofair Games, has sold more than half a million copies of Gloomhaven and grown to have four full-time employees.” BGG users have logged 85,903 copies as owned, which is one-sixth of that total. Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion has sold “nearly as well as the original”, with 55,081 copies owned by BGGers.
I really appreciate the compact worldbuilding in the article’s final paragraph:
• Deadline reports that Terraforming Mars has been optioned for a screen adaptation. Here’s an excerpt from Peter White’s article:
The company is leaning towards a series but is also open for a feature take on the strategy game, which sees players compete to use resources and innovative technology to make the red planet inhabitable…
It hopes that the Terraforming Mars narrative can highlights the game’s themes including existential tropes like class struggle, colonialism, and ecological collapse.
BGG lists 115,641 copies of Terraforming Mars as being owned by BGGers, which is roughly 8% of total sales.
• On the German program Wetten, dass…? (roughly “You bet that…”), Holger Siebenich is challenged to defend his claim that he can identify Spiel des Jahres winners solely by listening to the components being poured out. Can he identify four of the five games correctly? Watch here.
Screenshot from the video
Maybe someone can arrange a similar challenge for future conventions…
• Researchers have created an AI agent that excels at playing Diplomacy. Here’s the abstract from an article that the researchers posted on Science:
For anyone who lives by the credo of longtermism, this paragraph (with italics added) might give you the willies:
Must remain human compatible at all times! Then no one will suspect a thing…although the paper does include this comment:
I also burnt my toast yesterday morning! Ha ha, what a human thing to do!
One kicker in the study’s closing notes: “All funding was provided by Meta.”