Mrs.Bairdy

Yes, strong words in the title, but Race for the Galaxy is a strong candidate. It’s a 2-4 player card game, often described as San Juan in space, that focuses on role selection while building a tableau of development cards & production worlds. It’s short, sharp & incredibly good fun, which combined with a very short playtime make it an excellent lunch time game. We’ve clocked up over 100 games in a couple of months, often getting 4 games in one day. And it’s still fun.

Short but deep with just enough randomness through the card draws that no one person always dominates, though our system designer is definitely the best player of our group. We’ve definitely suffered some group-think at times with regards to strategies & better starting positions, but we’re getting past that. We’re well past the ‘multiplayer solitare’ mud that gets slung at the game on BoardGameGeek – play this game ignoring the competition & you will lose regularly & by a large margin. You need to know who is going to produce, when a trade is likely to happen etc.

It’s such a darn elegant system of costs & bonuses, with strong obvious strategies but some nice not so obvious card combos that lead to races & furious deck searches in some games.

I  adore this game.

Turing’s Delirium by Paz Soldán.
A novel about hacking, cybercrime, the nature of cryptography, revolution & personal responsibility, set in a Bolivia caught in the middle of changing from 20th century third world dictatorship to 21st century modern economy. This is a novel of Big Important Concepts, however it’s really well written & well researched. I wasn’t desperately keen on the electric ant concept, but I understood where he was going with it. I’m a sucker for books relating to Turing, albeit slight in this case. The setting of South America is a nice change to the usual cyberpunk metropolis sprawls.

Yes Man by Danny Wallace.
What happens if you say yes to every question? That’s the basic premise of this book charting the journey taken by Wallace as he pledges to say yes more often for a year. Adapted from his diary of the year, Wallace is funny, down to earth, in the same style as Nick Hornsby etc. Wallace was stuck in a rut, when a chance encounter on a late night London bus makes him evaluate where he is in life & take a pledge to say yes. What happens if you say yes to every proposition you get? The book sags a little in the middle, but it packs a nice emotional punch towards the end. I likes.

Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction by Sue Townsend
I adored the Adrian Mole books as a teenager – funny, down to earth but over the top (and a fantastic adventure game by Level 9). This is the latest one, set during the Blair years, with Mole now an utterly boorish character. Absolutely hated this. All the fun of the characters have been sucked out & the political satire is dull & obvious.

Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art by Ira Greenberg.
A handbook for the programming language/environment Processing, teaching the basics of programming/maths for artists/designers, and going into a number of techniques for generative art. Not everyone’s cup of tea or directly related to anything I’m working on in my dayjob, but I enjoy mucking about in Processing. Some nice examples & ideas in this, even if the ‘learn to code’ stuff is for beginners

Creating Fractals by Roger Stevens
Pretty mathematical pictures & the maths to generate them. Not the greatest book about fractals, and it’s a little simplistic at times unfortunately.

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