Destroy the World, новое видео KING SATAN, доступно для просмотра ниже.
#King_Satan #KingSatan
Видео: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh6XhDdb78I

How has Doctor Sleep fared 5 years since its release?

#54-Enlightenment - Waking Up from Our Dreamed Life

The post #54-Enlightenment – Waking Up from Our Dreamed Life appeared first on Enlightenment Podcast.

More experimentation with image to video… now with AI audio experimentation too!

The post Unlocking The Sphinx appeared first on Stuck in Customs.

Hey gang, it’s David. It’s been a while!

In 2021, I archived Strobist as a completed project. I can’t honestly say that I’ve missed the breakneck pace of running a solo site. But I’ve definitely missed interacting with so many cool people all of the time.

That said, I am still teaching. X-Peditions gives me the twin advantages much smaller class sizes, plus being in Hanoi every fall. And that’s been wonderful.

Better yet, my new schedule has given me the breathing room to be able build my current project. Like Strobist, this project is designed for photographers. But unlike this website, it has nothing at all to do with flash.



Today I’m introducing my new book, The Traveling Photographer’s Manifesto. It aspires to be for traveling photographers what Strobist always tried to be for lighting photographers.

The premise of the book is that your camera can, and should, be much more than just a pricey recording device when you travel. It can also serve as a passport, opening up new connections and possibilities that otherwise might not have happened.

Using a photo trip to Southeast Asia as a framework, the book walks through many things that you can do to help this to happen.

I have uploaded three documents to help you to know if TTPM might be suited for you:


1. A 5-minute summary: This will quickly give you a feel for the book.

2. A 27-page supplement: Only a small portion of the book, which is unillustrated, is about camera operation. This visual supplement is available for readers who are more visual learners. And it will give you a quick skim of parts 4 and 5.

3. A sample chapter: How to become more comfortable meeting and engaging with people as a photographer.


As you'll see from the summary, most of the book is not about camera operation at all. It’s more about the countless little things that working photojournalists do while on assignment that an enthusiast might not think of.

These little habits, taken together, can start to form the impression of a photographer being consistently, conspicuously lucky. When in reality, luck had very little to do with it.

So, if this is the sort of thing that interests you, I hope you’ll give the book a spin. It is available now, on Amazon.com worldwide.

Just as with Strobist, I welcome your feedback from this project as well. My email is listed on the copyright page and elsewhere. And of course, I will read and take to heart every Amazon review. Because my goal is for the project to continue to evolve and improve over time, just as the material on this website did.

Thanks for your interest, and for your readership of Strobist. As always, please say hi at any time on Twitter at @Strobist.


Cheers,
David


The Traveling Photographer’s Manifesto (Amazon.com)

REVIEW – 3D printing is fun and challenging. You can download countless free files from sites like Thingiverse and Printables, Cults 3D, and Thangs, or create your own using Fusion 360 TinkerCAD. It takes time, patience, and a love of tinkering, but it can be great fun. Many 3D printing enthusiasts will agree that incessant […]

Six months ago I didn’t even know what a tower defense game was and now I’ve played two of them several times and have some strong opinions on each one. In this post, I want to talk to you about one of them - Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time. The good folks over at Lucky Duck Games sent me a review copy of the game, designed by Helana Hope, Sen-Foong Lim, and Jessey Wright.

Now I mentioned that this is a tower defense game, but what exactly does that mean? In games using this type of mechanic, one of the primary objectives is to continually defend your assigned sector of the board (i.e. your home base) against incoming threats. This is managed through the use of armed towers, which reign down violence and death on any malicious parties approaching. This mechanism got its start in 1980's video games (source: Wikipedia) and is one of the most popular mechanisms in modern game apps on cell phones and tablets. More recently, it's crossed over into the tabletop board game industry, with the earliest tower defense games appearing in 2013.

Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time was funded on Kickstarter in 2019 to the tune of over a million dollars. It's derived from an app (Kingdom Rush) originally published for the browser and iOS by Ironhide Game Studio back in 2011. There are 58+ million users who have downloaded and reviewed the app on Metacritic so the built-in audience for the board game from the existing app users alone could potentially keep the publisher churning out boxes indefinitely (how long does it take to produce millions of copies of a board game?!). With a retail price approaching $60, even with licensing fee expenses, I imagine it's a lucrative project for Lucky Duck. But is it a good purchase decision for board game enthusiasts who've decided they want to add a tower defense game to their collection?

Well, it depends on what kind of board gamer you are.

Let's dig in a little deeper.

Regular readers know theme is very important to me. Is there a good narrative explaining our roles in the game and a plausible backstory to illuminate how we got into the position we are in and why we are doing what we're being asked to do in the game? For Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time, the answer is yes to both. There's a time mage who has opened up a rift in the fabric of time, hell bent on taking down our kingdom and our job is to stop the mage before they can do so. It's simple yet compelling call to heroism.

The artwork, by Mateusz Komada and Katarzyna Kosobucka, is cartoonish and playful. It definitely has that cell phone app flavour to it.

The components are average for the price point or for a mass market game. And here's where we begin to tie things to what kind of board gamer you are. If you've been playing higher end games lately (those typically with a retail price over $100), the components might feel a bit flimsy and look a bit cheap. They're comprised of colorful cardboard tokens and boards, plastic figures, plastic trays, a handful of wooden meeples, and many (thin) cardstock cards.

If your tastes or budget gravitate toward games at a similar price as Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time, I don't think you'll find anything problematic about the components here and on that criteria, this is a good tower defense game for you. Happy bonus: among the components is a campaign progress map and stickers that allow players to mark their accomplishments as they play through the campaign. As a person who likes to check off boxes, I adore this feature. Kudos to the designers for the thoughtful addition.

I also really appreciated the player aides provided - the summary of steps in a round printed on the hero boards, and the helper cards that detail the various enemies.

  The gameplay is simple enough that it doesn't take long to set up or learn the rules. In each round of this cooperative game, players spawn new hordes of enemies marching on the kingdom, play tower and hero cards to attack the hordes, check to see whether any hordes have been destroyed (and remove them if so, reaping the crystal rewards), move the surviving hordes closer to the kingdom, pick up the surviving tower and hero cards played, and spend crystals to buy more tower cards. Rinse, repeat for every round. The individual monsters within a horde have different rules for engagement (for example, some cannot be attacked by heroes and others are self healing) so players will need to vary their tactics when playing tower and hero cards. Also, instead of playing all your tower cards during a round, you can upgrade one or more of them and pass them to a fellow player to use next round. And instead of activating your hero's attack against a horde during a round, you can restore your hero's health if needed. Mixed in among the hordes are portals that the time mage wants to use to reach and breach the kingdom. If one of these portals crosses into the kingdom, the game is lost immediately. Conversely, for most scenarios included with the game (there are 10 in the base game and several expansions already available and each can be played on varying levels of difficulty, providing plenty of replay) all of the portals must be destroyed in order to win the game. You can also lose the game if enough of the regular hordes breech your kingdom, causing you to run out of kingdom hearts (health).

The rulebook, which is well written and illustrated, suggests playing the game on difficulty level 3, while Tom Vasel (respected reviewer) has recommended playing on difficulty level 1. So we took the middle road during all of our games and played on level 2. Even though we lost our first game because we didn't do enough upgrading of towers (the second portal that came out could only be attacked with towers we didn't own), we didn't feel there were any overly complicated nuances to the game that would take several plays just to learn. You can play this game with your teens and tweens and they'll do just fine. The puzzle aspect of figuring out the best place to establish each tower on the board to maximize the damage to the hordes is an excellent logic puzzle for young and old alike. So we return to our discussion of what kind of board gamer you are. Do you want a family friendly game you can play with your kids? If so, then this is a good tower defense game for you. Do you enjoy board games that don't require a steep learning curve when it comes to strategy? If so, then this is a good tower defense game for you.

To recap, Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time  is an accessible, affordable, family friendly tower defense game and board gamers who value those qualities would do well to pick up a copy for themselves. And of course, with the holiday season upon us, it's a smart choice for gifting as well. I'm glad we own a copy, and I plan to pick up the expansions to play with my kids.

For my friends who exclusively prefer complex gameplay that will take you many games to even begin to master and expensive components with a luxury look and feel, stay tuned for my review of Cloudspire, because that's the tower defense game for your cohort.

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Publisher: Lucky Duck Games Players: 1-4

Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): approx an hour per game

Game type: cooperative, tower defense, tile placement

Rating:

Rating scale:

OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.

OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.

OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.

NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.             

During the early reign of King Charles III (Charles the Simple) in West Francia, the area was besieged by Viking invasions, while the memory of the previous and frequent Saracen incursions was still fresh in the minds of the general populace. The Saracens were Muslim - mostly Berbers from Africa – and had only let up on the Franks because they’d been pushed back by the Vikings. The local nobles were left largely to fend the Vikings off on their own.

In Paladins of the West Kingdom, players assume the role of these unnamed nobles (most likely Dukes), working to keep the region safe and spread their faith (historically: Christianity).  I really enjoy this theme, and in fact, playing the game nurtured my interest in the historical kingdom of West Francia.  That’s why I can tell you that while the rulebook notes that the King lends his Paladins to the nobles to aid them in their quest, I’m giving all the credit for the loan to the designers, Shem Phillips and S J MacDonald.  Paladins are a fictional group of knights in French lore (think of them as similar to the Knights of the Round Table in British lore),  or alternatively, a translation of the Frankish royal title of Palatine Count, which was a noble that focused mostly on judicial and governing matters and was not known as a knight.

I’ve won a few and lost a few games of Paladins. It’s a worker placement game that incorporates card drafting.  At the beginning of every round, players draw the next three Paladin cards in their deck and choose one to play for the round, one to put back on top of their Paladin deck to draw during the next round, and one to put at the bottom of their Paladin deck. Each Paladin boosts faith, influence, or strength (usually more than one of these), and also provides a special benefit. If you’ve got players prone to analysis paralysis, this is where they may get stalled, especially in the first few rounds. After Paladins are selected and put into play, workers for the round are selected by each player and put into their personal resource supply. You have many stations on your player board to place your workers during the round,  and when you do so, your moves are independent and walled off from your opponents (they cannot tamper with your player board or placement of your workers on it). However, there is one area on the general board (the King’s Favour card area) where you can also place your workers and those spots are competitive. Also contributing to player interaction – some of the stations on your player board where you place workers allow you to move resources (monks and outposts) from your player board to the main board, consuming a competitive spot that provides a placement reward. And all the resource cards on display around the main board – the townsfolk you can hire, the walls you can build, the outsiders you can attack or convert, the tavern cards you draw workers from, and the suspicion cards you gain $$$ from, are all lucrative items for which players must compete. So we’ve got a good mix of independent action and player interaction in Paladins.  There are not a lot of opportunities for  “take that” behavior in this game, other than perhaps timing your draw of suspicion cards to trigger an inquisition when you know your opponents will suffer a penalty and be forced to take on more debt.

Strategy Tips: [1] Don’t be afraid to take on debt. It’s not too hard to flip debt cards for additional victory points and the income generated from the suspicion cards + the usefulness of the criminal workers are worth the increase in debt. [2] As with all worker placement games, look for opportunities to get more workers. For example, try to recruit any townsfolk that provide workers as a reward for other actions. [3] Attacking outsiders is a reliable way to get provisions and build influence, which are prerequisites for building the wall, which in turn give more strength and allow you to attack more outsiders. When paired with the townsfolk card that provide a bonus worker for every attack action, it’s a powerful combination.

Giving the game more intellectual weight, worker placement on your board and the actions workers trigger often have additional requirements beyond number and types (i.e., colors) of workers. The actions triggered by worker placement may be constrained by your strength, faith, or influence level. And some spots or actions triggered by placing workers in those spots require money or provisions. All of these prerequisites can be gained as rewards from prior actions triggered by various worker placement, so much of the game is finding the most efficient ways to obtain prerequisites associated with the series of actions you’d like to take as the game progresses. I worried this decision making would be a weak point for analysis paralysis (I’m a pretty good candidate for testing potential AP, as I’m prone to it) and while there can be a bit of that during the game, nothing excessive was logged during our plays.  

The artists (Shem Phillips on graphic design and Mihajlo Dimitrievski on illustrations) have printed helpful indicators next to each placement location on boards and cards to identify any prerequisites as well as rewards. It’s an example of how the designers have worked with the artists to layer meaningful game information into the layers of artwork. In fact, all of the symbols implemented across the game components are really quite helpful. Bonus: once you familiarize yourself with them in one of the West Kingdom games, you’ll have learned them for the entire series as the artists reuse the same symbols in all three titles.

Beyond the iconography, the illustrations and other artwork are lovely. As with the iconography, the same style of artwork is implemented across the entire series and it carries the theme well. There was a good mix of cisgender representation, but not a lot of racial diversity, especially as would be suggested by the historical setting of the game (for example, Berbers in the area had skin tones ranging from light to to dark brown).

The components for Paladins of the West Kingdom are well made.

There are wooden meeples, an assortment of foldable boards constructed from cardboard, and various plastic coated card decks. We found the rulebook to be clear and direct, and there weren’t any items we had to look up online. It would have been nice if the designers included a player aid in the components, but I was able to compensate for the oversight by downloading a detailed player aid another user uploaded to the forums on BoardGameGeek.com.

Paladins of the West Kingdom is my favorite game of the West Kingdom series. All of the worker types and available actions make sense within the context of the theme, the mechanisms (worker placement, card drafting) integrate tightly with the scoring system to provide opportunities for building a victory point engine, and the game is complex and interesting yet still accessible for new players. The game is also a great value at its price point (approx $50) given you’ll get dozens of multiplayer games in before even a hint of same-o same-o creeps in. Many games with comparable replayability and complexity are double the price of Paladins. There’s also a solo play mode, which provides an additional way to explore the game.

-------------------------------------------------

Publisher: Renegade Game Studios
Players: 1-4 (We played with 2)
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 2 hours per game
Game type: card drafting, worker placement
Retail Price: $50

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Years ago, on a snowy winter excursion to Bavaria, I took a tour of King Ludwig (Mad King Ludwig) II's  castles. I really feel for the poor chap Ludwig II. He was very excited to be king and wanted to be a *real* king of the old order with power and dominion. Alas, he was born much to late in Germany’s evolution for such things and was reduced constitutionally to being a mere figurehead (such as Queen Elizabeth II is in England today). So he consoled himself by building castles throughout the countryside where he would escape and  fully immerse himself in his pretend kingdom where all subjects worshipped him and did as they were told.  Linderhof was one of the first castles he built and it was pretty modest so the taxpayers didn’t really bat an eye. This was the first stop on our tour.

The same could not be said for his next building project: Castle Neuschwanstein. This grand and glorious castle (just up the hill from his parents’ country castle) was the castle to end all castles. He fancied he’d build himself a castle in medieval style (probably because that was a time when subjects dutifully respected their king or perhaps because it appealed to his alpha-male decorating sense) and he spent his way through a good portion of the national treasury before the impoverished taxpayers had enough and called shenanigans. The castle was never finished, King Ludwig II came to a premature end and within a year the political leadership had turned the castle into a tourist attraction. It was *this* castle, by the way, that Walt Disney held in his mind’s eye when designing the Disney Princess Castles. With the snow falling softly around it, it was truly an amazing site to behold. So beautiful!

With the happy memories of the castle tour, I was drawn to Castles of Mad King Ludwig  when it was released by Bezier Games a few years later.

Another Bezier release – Suburbia – is in my top 10 list, so the positive track record with the publisher was another indicator that I’d probably enjoy Castles. After a bit of research, I found the general consensus in the board game community is that Castles  plays so similar to Suburbia that it feels like a reskin of the game with a castle theme. Players purchase tiles from a market to build a great infrastructure, with various points awarded based on which tiles are used and how they are arranged. After this discovery, I actually didn’t follow through with the purchase, as I’ve never been one who is keen to get every iteration of a game. For example, I rarely keep both the card game and board game version of a given game in my collection – I force myself to pick one and let go of the other. Since Surburbia was so close to my heart, I let go of any ideas to purchase Castles.

A year after Bezier released Castles, Stonemaier Games released Between Two Cities. In BTC, players draft tiles and then use them to build cities collaboratively with other players.  We build one city with the player to our left and a separate city with the player to our right; each of our partners also contributes tiles to our respective cities in common. At the end of the game, all cities are scored and the lower scoring city of the two we helped build is assigned to us as our final score. The player with the highest score at the table wins. It’s a pretty unique approach to scoring and forces you to give both of your cities equal attention throughout the game. I don’t own a copy of this game either, mostly because I only began collecting Stonemaier games after I fell in love with Scythe in 2016, and have focused heavily on acquiring new releases (vs picking up their earlier games). 

In 2018, Stonemaier (in collaboration with Bezier) released Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig. This game is designed by Ben Rosset and Matthew O’Malley and it takes the best of Between Two Cities and Castles of Mad King Ludwig and marries it all together. Now we find ourselves at the game table, working to build two castles at once, simultaneously but separately collaborating with our left and right neighbors. At the beginning of each round, each player draws nine tiles, comprised of various indoor and outdoor room types. Each turn, we select 2 tiles to keep (one destined for the castle we are building with the player to our left and the other for the castle we are building with the player to our right).  We pass the rest of the tiles to our neighbor (to the left in round 1 and to the right in round 2). Once everyone has selected their tiles and passed the leftovers, we begin collaborative discussions with each of our neighbors regarding the tiles we selected and where they should be placed within our castles. There are a few straightforward rules governing placement (for example, downstairs rooms can only be placed below the ground level) but generally the selection and placement decisions should be guided by maximizing victory point scoring. Also of note, when the third or fifth regular room tile of the same type is placed, a placement bonus is earned and redeemed immediately. These bonuses provide either additional tiles (including specialty room types) or bonus cards that award conditional victory points at the end of the game. After tile placement, the turns repeat in the same fashion three more times, except that on the last run, there is only 1 tile left after selecting two for placement and that tile is discarded out of the game. Round two begins, and follows the same process as the first round, with the only change being the direction the unselected tiles are passed around the table.

In anticipation of the upcoming Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig  expansion release (Secrets and Soirees), I received a review copy of the base game from Stonemaier.

Opening the eye-catching box (with artwork by Agnieszka Dqbrowiecka, Laura Bevon, and Bartlomiej Kordowski), we inventoried the components (cardboard tiles, wooden tokens, plastic coated cards, and score sheets) and set up our first game. The rulebook was easy to follow (as it always is with Stonemaier) and the handy player aids included proved valuable as we worked our way through the game. There were five of us playing that first time, including two teenagers, and I was surprised to see just how varied each team’s castle was from the others.

I worked really hard to give my all to both castles I was constructing, knowing that I would only score for the one that brought in the lower victory point total. I had to to correct my efforts a few times as it started to feel like one castle was building to a much higher score than the other. With both my neighbor on my left and right, I focused on bonus cards and tiles to increase point totals, whereas the competing castle builds leaned more heavily on amassing points directly through the regular room tiles. My strategy worked, and both of the castles I helped build were higher scoring than everyone else’s, giving me the victory even when taking the lower score of the two. In later games, my husband Chris and I played against each other, using the special 2 player rules in which a dummy player (“Ludwig” of course) is controlled by one of the players during the first round and by the other player during the second round. I focused on the same things in these two player games that I had previously at higher player counts. Meanwhile Chris focused almost exclusively on standard room tiles to accumulate points. Every time we played, the castle that Chris and I built together was by far the highest scoring one in the game (scoring highly on regular room tiles thanks to Chris and on bonus tiles and cards thanks to me), and my castle with Ludwig was runner up, giving me the victory again. 

I really really love this game. Much more than I thought I might, given its straightforward and simplistic mechanisms (I usually prefer complex strategy games).  Pick two tiles and arrange, rinse repeat. Sounds like it should get boring fast, but it never does.  I think the real draw of Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig,  that keeps engagement and enthusiasm high even among experienced gamers, is the puzzle of having to work both castles at once. Dividing your time between two equally important projects simultaneously that will be scored against each other is a personal challenge, regardless of your skill level, because you’re competing against yourself. That’s genius, and I can’t think of another game I own that implements this kind of scoring. The only drawback to this scoring mechanism is that players who are significantly weaker in strategy or skill than the rest of the group will drag down the scores of their partners, giving a clear advantage to the remaining players who weren’t yoked to the underperformer. Tactfully, since the game scores average in the direction of the weaker player on each team, this is a game to play with a group of your intellectual peers, unless you want to stew in resentment over how irrelevant all of your hard work turned out to be when it came to scoring.

In addition to the puzzle aspect of the game, the quick gameplay (less than an hour), family friendliness, and low level of analysis paralysis all help to make it an excellent go-to game, even on weeknights. 

I’m glad I gave Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig  a chance on our game table, and our friends who played with us have already asked when they can come over to play again. I’m quite excited to see what the upcoming Secrets and Soirees expansion adds to the game.

-------------------------------------------------

Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Players: 2-7
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 45 minutes per game
Game type: card drafting, tile placement, set collection

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig is one of our board game library essentials. There’s a great puzzle aspect to the game, it plays in under an hour, it’s family friendly, and it keeps analysis paralysis to a minimum. It also plays up to seven players, filling that niche when so many other games are capped at 4 or 5. For all of these reasons, when the Secrets and Soirees expansion debuted, we knew we had to have it.

The expansion offers additional room types for your castle, extra bonus cards, two new solo modes, higher player count (up to 8), and a new variant of head to head castle building where each player builds their own exclusive castle.

My personal favorite bit of the expansion is the puppy room!!! Adorable little corgis, just like we have at home.

We have played the expansion dozens of times. The first few months we had the game, we stuck to standard play, with everyone building two castles, and just focused on the fun of the new room types. These are activity rooms, secret rooms, and ballrooms. The activity rooms are thematically just that – clever little rooms themed around activities that give you points for each other room adjacent or penalize you if the listed prohibited room type is within the radius. The secret rooms are quite innovative. Each one has a little arrow printed on the tile pointing up, down, left, or right and takes on the same identity as the room indicated by the arrow, giving players a lot of flexibility based on placement in the castle. The ballrooms score points for specific room types in your neighbors’ castles. I really enjoyed these plays with the expanded room types and have not ever wanted to go back to playing with just the base game tiles again.

More recently, we’ve explored the new variants provided by the expansion. The Mad King’s Demand variant has players each build a single castle instead of managing two castle builds at once. It solves the problem of weaker players bringing a section of the entire table down in scoring and it plays so much more quickly than the regular game, so it can be a good choice for player counts larger than two. While it’s also easier and smoother in a two player game to play this way versus playing with the 3rd NPC player normally required in a two player game, I’m much less fond of using this variant with two players. I like the extra tiles to choose from when a third castle is in the mix; it helps make it a bit more challenging and feels more interactive.

The Automa solo mode is very easy to learn and it’s the most enjoyable solo game I’ve ever played because it feels like you’re actually playing against other players.  I played on level 3 – normal difficulty – and won 58 to 55/55. I actually found myself wishing for longer rounds. The other solo mode (which is dubbed the Introvert variant and noted by the rulebook as technically not an Automa mode) feels less like a game against peers and more like a game of solitaire puzzling. It’s faster than the Automa solo mode and has the quirky hack of allowing you to force the NPC opponent to take a specific tile you don’t mind it having when there’s only one that meets the selection filter used to draft a tile for them. This is because, in this mode, the NPC follows an algorithm to pick between a tile you’ve marked as favored and desired for yourself and all the other tiles in demand under its selection filter that round. If there’s only one tile that meets the filter and you mark another tile you actually want, there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll lose your coveted tile to the NPC. However, if you mark the tile that meets the filter as if you wanted it for yourself, it’s forced to select it. Then you can choose whatever tile you actually prefer for yourself instead. The introverted solo mode is pretty great if you like that sort of thing, but I prefer the feeling of playing against others, so I’ll stick with the Automa solo mode, or competitive play against real life opponents.

With a retail price of just $15 on the Stonemaier website, and having so much quality content in the box, the Secrets and Soirees expansion is a must-have.

-------------------------------------------------

Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Players: 1-8
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 45 minutes per game
Game type: card drafting, tile placement, set collection

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

In the latest episode of their easily spotted podcast, Ken and Robin talk Invisible Men, coarse vs granular ability lists, and Ken's last book raid for the duration.

1. New prime time kings as AFL’s 2025 Thurs night blockbusters revealed  Fox Sports
2. Three Thursday night fixtures revealed  Collingwood
3. What we know about the 2025 fixture: Thursday nights back with a bang, Smith to face Dogs in blockbuster  The Age

When asking for a pledge, the fundraiser has many informational advantages over the donor. Simply asking for the proper amount ensures that a donor will consider giving at the level you request. Starting out with a sufficiently high donation request amount allows you to find your donors preferred level of giving as rather than targeting the amount which is the lowest possible amount that a donor can possibly give to your campaign.


If a donor could give more to their charity, they probably would. When donors who maintain a strict charitable budget and give a fixed amount annually hear requests for support that are above the amount which they are willing to give, they let fundraisers know just how much they are willing to give and when they intend to give it. In the rare event that a donor is offended by large or additional requests, a skilled fundraiser can apologize for the offense and leave the donor feeling good about the level of support which they do give.


There is no downside to “asking high”.




Becoming a better fundraiser is a continuing process. There is always more to learn and more skills to master.

The conclusion to this article will be posted here in the coming days.

Perseverance faces a hard climb, but New Horizons proves it’s worth going the distance.

A Dwarf king and his elite guard take to the field.

 Amongst the Eagle helms of the shield wall is the kings champion himself. Nothing must get to the king and the champions blue axe, will see that nothing does.

I could use this base for King Balin when he tries to retake Moria. A future project of mine.
The King points out floors in the enemies formation to the chief engineer.
The Dragon standard flies over head echoing the Kings mighty dragon helm.
This base has been created for the upcoming Hobbit battle, replacing Dain's base in the ranks. This allows Dain to roam freely as a character on the field.

 The figures are beautiful old sculpts from Asgard and Citadel. There has been a bit of tweaking on a couple of them, like the axe and the standard.

I'm a sucker for sage advice much as anyone else, and Kernighan is certainly right on money in the epigraph. Alas there comes a time in programmer's career when you just end up there despite the warning. It could be that you were indeed too clever for your own good, or maybe the code isn't quite yours anymore after each of your colleague's take on it over the years. Or just sometimes, the problem is indeed so hard that it strains your capacity as a coder.

It would usually start with a reasonable idea made into first iteration code. The solution looks fundamentally sound but then as you explore the problem space further it begins to seep nuance, either as manifestation of some real world complexity or your lack of foresight. When I run into this my first instinct is to instrument the code. If the problem is formidable you got to respect it: flailing around blindly modifying things or ugh, doing a rewrite at this stage is almost guaranteed to be a waste of time. It helps to find a promising spot, chisel it, gain a foothold in the problem, and repeat until you crack it. Comfortable debugging tools here can really help to erode the original Kernighan coefficient from 2 to maybe 1.6 or 1.4 where you can still have a chance.

Lisp users are fortunate with the options of interactive debugging, and one facility I reach often for is the plain BREAK. It's easy enough to wrap it into a conditional for particular matches you want to debug. However sometimes you want it to trigger after a particular sequence of events across different positions in code has taken place. While still doable it quickly becomes cumbersome and this state machine starts to occupy too much mental space which is already scarce. So one day, partly as a displacement activity from being intimidated by a Really Hard Problem I wrote down my debugging patterns as a handful of macros.

Enter BRAKE. Its features reflect my personal preferences so are not necessarily your cup of tea but it could be a starting point to explore in this direction. Things it can do:

• act as a simple BREAK with no arguments (duh)
• wrap an s-expression, passing through its values upon continuing
• trigger sequentially based on the specified position for a common tag
• allow for marks that don't trigger the break but mark the position as reached
• provide conditional versions for the expressions above
• print traces of tagged breakpoints/marks

If you compile functions with debug on you hopefully should be able to see the wrapped sexpr's result values.

(use-package '(brake))

(defun fizzbuzz ()
  (loop for n from 100 downto 0
	for fizz = (zerop (mod n 3))
	for buzz = (zerop (mod n 5)) do
	(format t "~a "
		(if (not (or fizz buzz))
		    (format nil "~d" n)
		  (brake-when (= n 0)
			      (concatenate 'string
					   (if fizz "Fizz" "")
					   (if buzz "Buzz" "")))))))

These macros try to detect common cases for tagged sequences being either aborted via break or completed to the last step, resetting them after to the initial state. However it is possible for a sequence to end up "abandoned", which can be cleaned up by a manual command.

Say in the example below we want to break when the two first branches were triggered in a specific order. The sequence of 1, 3, 4 will reinitialize once the state 4 is reached, allowing to trigger continuously. At the same time if we blow our stack it should reset to initial when aborting.

(defun ack (m n)
  (cond ((zerop m) (mark :ack 3 (1+ n)))
        ((zerop n) (mark :ack 1 (ack (1- m) 1)))
        (t (brake :ack 4 (ack (1- m) (ack m (1- n)))))))

In addition there are a few utility functions to report on the state of brakepoints, enable or disable brakes based on tags and turn tracing on or off. Tracing isn't meant to replace the semantics of TRACE but to provide a souped up version of debug by print statements everyone loves.

CL-USER> (report-brakes)
Tag :M is DISABLED, traced, with 3 defined steps, current state is initial
Tag :F is DISABLED with 2 defined steps, current state is 0
Tag :ACK is ENABLED with 3 defined steps, current state is initial

Disabling breakpoints without recompilation is really handy and something I find using all the time. The ability to wrap a sexpr was often sorely missed when using BREAK in constructs without implicit body.

Sequencing across threads is sketchy as the code isn't guarded but in many cases it can work, and the appeal of it in debugging races is clear. One of those days I hope to make it more robust while avoiding potential deadlocks but it isn't there yet. Where it already shines tho is in debugging complex iterations, mutually recursive functions and state machines.

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