As all the faithful readers of my weblog will know (all two of you), I am a big fan of german or german style strategy board games - the ones with the designer's name on the cover. I recently bought Carcassonne at Brettspill.no. It's a great game that is a new favourite of my wife (I still think I must place Puerto Rico first, but it's apples and oranges anyway).
I then discovered that the new fancy computer game store in town, EB games, actually stocks it in their tiny selection of german-style games. Doh! I wasted some shipping money there. Ah well, I suppose Nils Håkon is happy. (Perhaps that's why he suggested I buy Tigris & Euphrates next time? A good suggestion it is anyway)
I found this article in an online game magazine. It's really sensible. I'm glad to see I'm not the only gamer that gets irked by "closed holdings", semi-secret game information that can be tracked if you're really rabid about winning. In my opinion, the semi-secret victory points is the only weakness in Puerto Rico (of we keep them open anyway). Not that tracking information in this way isn't an interesting challenge, but if it's there, it should be a main part of the game. Adding it on as an afterthought to a game that already has 99% public information is a design fault in my eyes.
When googling for a link I found out that there are other strategy gamers in Langevåg. They're even computer scientists as well! :-)
I'll almost have to contact them somehow.
Actually, I don't know if it's an applet or some type of script or other app (I'll find out when I try the site in linux I suppose), but music-map is really, really interesting. Instead of saying, "People who like U2 are almost certain to like R.E.M. , and some of them also have an affinity for Nine Inch Nails, it shows you.
(That particular connection would probably disturb both Bono and Trent Reznor, by the way.)
I wonder where they get their data from. Hmmm.
Wow. It's some kind of AI engine working on the basis of user input. gnod it's called, for "global network of dreams". Huh, cool, but I wonder what should be done with the typos in the author names.
I was going to post a comment at left2right, but their buggy blog software prevented me from entering my name and email adress, and thus from posting. I was sufficiently annoyed that I paste in my would-be comment here instead.
"the language abilities of women are generally superior to those of men"
If that is really true, I wonder why it seems there are so many male linguists? Perhaps there are different strategies for learning language (or maths, or chess, or anything), and some are more useful for one gender?
Ahmad al Qloushi, a seventeen year old republican activist, has apparently accused his professor of misconduct some time ago. Just a snippet I found out about on left2right. It was some time ago, but when googling, it seems to me noone else has noticed this about his account:
"Most of all we remember our one-week-old baby cousin who died while the Iraqi invaders were stealing incubators from hospitals to sell them for profit"
This is strange, because the incubators story has been discredited many times.
Snopes, anyone?
Does this hurt Ahmad's reliability? It is conceivable that he lost a cousin, that he didn't know the story was fake, even that he and possibly his family genuinely believed that it happened this way.
But I've seen enough teacher/student conflicts in my life (who hasn't?) to know that it's worth the time to wait and observe a bit before choosing sides. I don't think they tell everything on either side.
(Actually, Professor John Woolcock has said very little, and nothing to the media, as I can find.)
I'm back to school, and back to blogging. Hopefully grades will get a little better this year...
In the holiday I've been playing "Tyskerspill" (German's games) with my wife and my siblings. You know, those really well designed strategy board games like Settlers of Catan. We played that, and a game called Puerto Rico. I really can't praise the design of that game enough. It's complex and fascinating, but you still don't have to study the modest rulebook very much beforehand.
The rulebook was obviously translated from german, though. Even when perfectly correct, german people's english has a certain odd quality, even to (norwegian) me. Not that it mattered that much for Puerto Rico, though. We could probably have played the german version itself with little trouble.
Settlers of Catan, though, was another matter. It was the norwegian translation, but it was obviously translated from danish, and with very little skill. I can't say for sure if the translator was norwegian or danish, but he apparently didn't know that the innocious word "må" means two quite different things: "must" in norwegian, "may" in danish (Shame on you, Dan-spil!). We had some trouble figuring out which actions were mandatory and which were optional, and we probably ended up doing it wrong in some ways, but it didn't seem to affect gameplay much. It was a very balanced game.
So consider me hooked on tyskerspill. My brother and sisters are back where they live, of course, but I'm pretty certain my friend Rune will like Puerto Rico.
Yet another cool thing that I first read about in the saturday edition of Dagens Næringsliv, after geocaching and all that. Slashdot could take a cue from DN's feature journalists!
Hmm, the game-addicted family DN wrote about played Carcassonne, and that seems really cool. It's from the same people who published Puerto Rico, too. They may have good taste :-) I'll look into it if I get the chance.
Unfortunately I forgot to give the paranoid koala a call when he was home. I'm sorry!