EPHEMERSON

I’ve been trying my hand at some low-poly 3D art and tried recreating a little toad thing that I made out of polymer clay last year. I’m pretty thrilled with the results.

Just get a load of this guy.

Back in August of 2022 I took a chance, made myself a little vulnerable, and started a board game club on Meetup for my area. There really wasn’t an organized group or anything for the hobby where I lived, but I knew people around me played board games - I just didn’t know them! It ended up being a wonderful social gathering that led to friendships being formed outside of playing games and me finally being amongst people who actually wanted to play, rather than me either tricking or otherwise begging my less-interested friends in giving it a try. It was occasionally awkward, sometimes disappointing, but largely very gratifying. Unfortunately, Meetup exchanged hands and, as it goes in tech acquisitions, it’s heart went black and the monthly cost of being an organizer skyrocketed last year to a price beyond anything I could reasonably sustain on my own. We relocated over to Heylo, but the damage was done - the group was effectively dead.

Outside of playing with a few friends made from the group as well as independently of the group, my engagement with the hobby was once again something I only sporadically got to enjoy. This didn’t prevent me from buying games, as anyone who plays will tell you that the infrequency in which you play really doesn’t factor into whether or not you feel justified in buying a new game. After all, you could _maybe _one day play it with someone! Eventually.

Last week I was able to meet up with three other locals for the first time in a while in what might be the start of a new dedicated group, which is tremendously exciting for me. We played three different games within a span of three hours at a local coffee shop, and I’ll provide some general details about both the people I played with as well as the games we played, as it may help anyone out there with where to look and what to play should you find yourself in a similar position.

The Players:

One thing that works to my advantage is that I live in a college town, which means there’s a fair quantity of people in their 20s that live around here, but most of all there are professors who live around here, and professors are historically pretty nerdy. Two of the players work at the local university, two of them are professors at a university. One of them is me. One of the players I met through my old group and have played games with probably the most. They are playfully competitive and have a good threshold for the initial confusion inherent to board games. Another player is someone I’d only spoken to a couple times but learned in conversation that they liked board games so I invited them to join one night. They seemed mildly overwhelmed by a couple of the games we played, but learned at a faster rate than most and had a good attitude towards not knowing how to play at first. The other player was someone my friend invited from work whom they did not know themselves other than that they knew they liked board games and took a chance on inviting them. They were a very fast learner and had a great attitude overall.

This sort of thing is important to call out to anyone who might struggle with getting a group together, because a major and often unspoken ingredient to having fun with board games is player chemistry. Absolutely nobody wants to play games with someone who either revels in wiping the floor with everyone or mirthlessly goes through the motions. It’s challenging to play with someone who, in the face of what they do not know or struggles to understand at first, responds with white-knuckled anxiety and frustration. Woe betide the group that has one person who makes frequent attempts at being funny and succeeds only in making everyone uncomfortable. The hobby does not always bring it’s best representatives, so the landscape can be, well, dicey (I’m sorry).

The best way to avoid this is by simply not falling under any of the aforementioned categories. Are you really good at board games? Good for you, but here’s the bad news: it’s lonely at the top. If you struggle to have fun with board games, but you want to have fun with board games, try figuring out what you actually like before bringing people on for the ride. If you’re the joker of the group and suddenly you find yourself not being invited to play board games, accept that you’re the punchline for a group that now meets without you. Enjoy the solitaire game of self-discovery and social reinvention!

Everyone was very laid-back, quick to learn, and gracious with themselves and others when mistakes were made or not doing there best. In short, everyone was there to have fun above winning, and so everybody won.

A quick aside: A while back, I watched the below video by Actualol, a great YouTube channel focused on the board gaming hobby, and the first mistake he calls out is one that I have burned into my brain ever since watching: DO NOT INVITE PEOPLE TO PLAY A GAME YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO PLAY. In his words, “If you’ve invited non-gamers to play a board game, you are now an ambassador of the hobby”.

It is not fair to have people take precious time out of their evening so they can watch you read the rules, then explain them poorly because you’ve barely had time yourself to understand them. I’ve known people who’ve done this, and it only serves the pretense that board games are impenetrably obtuse and boring to all but the most bizarre of humans. It has become a major pet peeve rivaled only by the continued existence of Monopoly (a rant on this game is now forthcoming).

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s get into the games we played.

The Games:

As mentioned, we played three different games in three hours. There are great board games that would either fit snugly in that timeframe or blow right past it. I’ve generally erred on the side of caution with the games I bring to nights like this, which does mean that I’m often playing the same sorts of games, but they really hold up. While we played three games, I had several others that I brought as options, and because I try to practice what I preach, I either knew each game like the back of my hand or I spent time reading the rules and watching videos explaining how it’s played before I considered bringing it. I’ll go into details on what we played and then briefly cover the ones we passed on, because they are worth sharing.

Game 1: The Gang

This was a new addition to my collection and one that I’ve been eager to play. The easiest way to explain is that it’s cooperative Texas Hold ‘Em. Everyone has to work together to figure out who has the best hand, and assign a rank from lowest to highest with the only method of communicating what you have being numbered chips that you grab from a stack to signal to players the level of confidence you have that your hand is the best (or worst) of the group. This ranking changes as cards are revealed in the community pile, and if you end the round with any cards incorrectly ranked, you lose the round. You have to win three times before losing three times. At first it seems like it’s going to come down strictly to guesswork and luck, and some of that is in play, but what comes to the fore is this sort of budding telepathy that is genuinely thrilling when it works, and it’s surprisingly easy to conjure. So much so that the game has higher levels of difficulty to account for when players find that the base game is actually very easy.

We played the standard difficulty, and at first I suspected that people were wondering how this game was going to be compelling, but after we won the first round, I could tell it clicked for all of us. Soon, we were able to just talk while wordlessly ranking our hands, and only pausing to discuss when it truly felt ambiguous or dire. The Gang is a game where you die in the margins, and you die as a group, so collaboration under the constraints is key to avoid total failure. We ended up getting two rounds wrong, so it came down to the last one and we cheered when we got it right. We’d definitely return to this one, and at the higher difficulty.

Game 2: Illimat

I included this game in my offerings largely because the person I invited was wearing a Decemberists hoodie when I met them, which prompted the conversation around board games to begin with, as Illimat is a board game made in collaboration with the band. I’d seen some mixed reviews about the game after I bought it, which at first I was in agreement with. It’s a beautiful, but initially confounding game that seems to revel more in its esotericism than being an actually fun game. At least, that was how I felt at first. I’d take another stab at it years after buying it with some more seasoned gamers, and that night we fell under its occult spell. I now carry the banner for Illimat - it’s a wacky and fantastic game.

Rather than explain how the game is played, which is actually pretty challenging, I’ll settle for hitting the major notes. It’s a game that uses it’s own unique set of playing cards (5 suits, four of which correspond to seasons, and a Fool which is worth either 1 or 14), rule-changing tarot cards called Luminaries, creepy little tokens called okuses, and a cloth board with mysterious runes. If nothing else, the game has an unbelievable aesthetic and presence on the table (or grassy field).

This game was definitely more of a challenge for our newcomers, but soon they were enthralled with it as they began to come up with strategies. It’s also the game that ate the most of our time, so I was glad that it wasn’t a dull time for everyone.

Game 3: Scout

Scout is a game that, since buying it, is my tabletop version of an everyday carry. If games are going to be played somewhere, I’m bringing Scout. It’s a brilliant game and one of my all-time favorites, albeit with the weakest theme I’ve ever known a game to attempt.

The premise of Scout is fairly simple: play cards from your hand in either of-a-kind matches or sequential runs to beat whatever the active “show” of cards is to earn points equal to the number of cards that show is. However, there are a few wrinkles that makes this game really special. For one, cards in your hand cannot in any way be rearranged. That means if you have 3 in-between one and a pair of 9s, you have to get rid of the 3 before you can play all three of those 9s. Cards also have different values on the top and bottom, and when you get your hand, you have to decide which end your cards are going to be played from. Lastly, you either have the option, or the last resort, of “scouting” a card from the active show, to be placed anywhere in your hand and with either number on top. Any card scouted nets the person who played it a point, but it may lead you to playing a huge run of cards later in the round. It’s a game that guarantees surprises no matter how many times you’ve played. There’s a variety of strategies at your disposal and everyone plays differently. For the cost, and overall size of the box, it’s one of the best values in games as far as I’m concerned.

The Other Ones:

To be clear, these games are by no means lesser for not having been chosen. They’re just other games that I brought with this group in mind, and we could have easily played one of these and had as much or more fun. Some of these are part of my standard roster and I enjoy playing them each and every time.

Pandemic: Hot Zone - North America

Pandemic: Hot Zone is every bit as tense and exciting as the original but in half the size (and time). I hazard to say I prefer this version for those reasons. Victory or defeat is far swifter, and so going again in the same sitting is actually feasible.

Burgle Bros.

Arguably my favorite cooperative game. A dungeon crawler without the combat, in an Ocean’s 11 heist theme. No two games are the same, and no victory is without cheering.

Startups

From the same company that makes Scout, Startups is my least played of the group, but its form factor makes it easy to include. A great bluffing game of knowing when to hold and when to fold your shares in a company. Super fun aesthetic and easy for anyone to play.

Fiction

Fiction is a clever spin on Wordle, made into an asymmetric deduction game where one player (the Lie-brarian) picks a 5-letter word from a deck of cards containing passages from classic literature, while another team has to try and successfully guess it either within 20 minutes or 10 guesses. Like Wordle, each guess will net you some letter-by-letter insights of whether you’re on the right track or not, either that a letter isn’t in the word, isn’t in the right place, or is exactly where it’s supposed to be. However, the Lie-brarian can, well, lie about one of those answers in an attempt to throw off the people guessing. It leads to this tug-of-war where the Lie-brarian has to choose what ground to concede as the guessers pick out the truth from the lies, while the guessers are racing against the clock and fighting against the doubt created by the Lie-brarian. It’s the kind of game where everyone wants a turn at either side, and it goes quick enough that a loss never stings hard enough to feel too punishing. In fact, I usually find myself really proud of the people I’m playing against when they can rally at the end to beat me.

So I wrote most of this the following night, but ended up getting sick and fell off of my goal of posting daily, but in the interim I’ve got some posts planned because it’s been a pretty busy month so far!

My first foray into having some kind of presence on the Internet was around the turn of the millennium, in the 5th grade. I somehow found out about Expage aka The Express Page, and the ease with which I was able to put things together lit my little brain on fire with potential.

I remember making at least two pages (both sadly lost to the ravages of time) - one for my two best friends at the time, Brendan and Chelsea called “ZBC”, and another one that I used to create a very shortlived newsletter that I remember going so far as to print on-demand for anyone who wanted a copy before a teacher rightfully stopped me. I was absolutely enchanted at the idea of making something that anyone could find, and like a lot of people back then, it didn’t really matter how many people stopped by. It was just cool that they could at all!

My presence online has since waxed, waned, and waned some more in the current era of social media. Before the Internet went lame, my time in cyberspace has been marked by what I would consider some awkward albeit earnest attempts at creative expression.

There was the “Post my poetry to DeviantArt” phase of early high school, which as thrilled as I would have been to provide evidence of, I’m sad to say there’s just no way for me to track examples down to share. Absolutely impossible!

I do however have screengrabs of a few early efforts to become “YouTube famous” in the late 2000s, as one-half of the dynamic comedy duo “Fail Drive”. We actually did, due to our registering the channel as being Australian, become the 20th most viewed Australian channel in the Comedians category on August 20th, 2009, which was a high that we rode for several days following despite being largely undeserved.

This was followed by a fledgling effort to make a game in Flash (cutting-edge) that I published to Newgrounds called “Punch the Bear” to, dare I say, mixed reviews.

No matter what I get wrong in life, there was at least one person in the world that seemed to love Punch the Bear.

About five years ago, and true to the stereotype of straight white guys, I tried starting a podcast based around Pop-Tarts (“A conversational popcast from tart to finish” was the tagline). A friend of mine made a pretty kickass logo for it.

Then there was the Tumblr thing for a brief minute and the Blogspot thing for, like, an afternoon, and that’s sort of how a lot of the whole writing thing went for me online. Plagued by imposter syndrome and harried by fleeting interests, I could never seem to stick with blogging even though it probably would have done me a lot of good to write for the sake of it. It’s silly to think back on how much I cared about whether or not someone would read what I wrote, much less like it or think it was “good”.

These days, I’m just glad there are spaces to write in that feel a little bit like when I tried making a newspaper for my 5th grade class. Stay tuned for the guest book and page counter, I’m off to find a choice GIF of a 3D construction worker to stop you from proceeding any further, to remain posted till someone unplugs the big computer all this runs on.

I read more books this past year than probably any year since childhood. That said, this list would more accurately be titled The 5 Books I Read, as they’re the only ones I read and finished (one somewhat begrudgingly). I’m hoping to read at least as much this year.

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Count Zero - William Gibson

I had read Neuromancer the year before and was blown away by how intricately and coherently William Gibson laid out what would essentially become the foundation of the cyberpunk genre, so I was excited to jump in Count Zero. It’s a lot of the same, but takes more narrative risks in telling three intertwining stories that span the globe. It ends up being a little less focused than its predecessor, but still very enjoyable by the end.

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Chain-Gang All-Stars - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

I’d seen this book recommended from various sources and decided to give it a try. Arguably my favorite book of the year - written beautifully and at the pace of a bingeable miniseries. The premise and characters are complicated and well-conceived, and the real-world issues the book addresses are recontextualized in a way that had me feeling genuine rage at the American prison industrial complex. I hope a day comes when this book is required reading in classrooms, but these days it seems like that’s a pipe dream.

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Ambergris - Jeff VanderMeer

I started this book a couple of years prior and only last year finished it because it’s utterly massive. A complete volume of all short stories and books written by Jeff VanderMeer based in his fictional world of Ambergris. The stories take place across the strange, often violent history of Ambergris, from it’s colonization and genocide of the indigenous mushroom people that live there, through the political unrest of its anarchic industrial period, up to the days in which the tables get turned. Jeff had fun with this one. Some of the stories are written in a tongue-in-cheek academic prose, one is a detective noir. I enjoyed them all to varying degrees. It was impossible for me to not be inspired by the scale of vision that VanderMeer had for this place.

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Days Between Stations - Steve Erickson

Recommended to me after I finished House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, and I was largely unimpressed despite the praise I’d seen elsewhere. The strange and dream-like quality of the world that is ours but not quite was intriguing, but felt largely wasted on a deeply uninteresting love triangle between three unlikeable people, punctuated by “love” scenes that often excluded any notion of mutual consent that made me question if the author had ever had sex before. Finished it so I could tell the person who recommended it to me that I gave it a fair chance, but would have just as easily abandoned it a third of the way in.

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Absolution - Jeff VanderMeer

Another Jeff joint! I think everyone who is a fan of the Southern Reach Trilogy was pleasantly surprised (i.e. stoked) when a surprise prequel for the trilogy was announced. I preordered a book for the first time since when my mom did the same for me with the Harry Potter books in the 90s and early 2000s. It wasn’t what I expected, which in hindsight I’m glad for. It was challenging, but made for a greater sense of mystery that answers some questions while leaving others tantalizingly in the periphery. Jeff could write three more books and still keep this nightmare world of his fresh and terrifying.

I experienced a lot of personal development over the last year, fortunately due to taking chances on creative endeavors and being more vulnerable. It’s led to me knowing more people and being more truly known by the people I care about. In many of those cases, I had songs like the ones I’ll share below to inspire me in one sense or another.

Spring is Coming With a Strawberry in the Mouth - Roger Doyle/Operating Theatre

I had to double-check to make sure that I discovered this song last year, because at this point it feels like I've known it forever. Likely of the first crop of songs that I listened to in 2024, and now forever the song that will usher in the thaw of spring for me, "Spring is Coming..." is absolutely entrancing. When I heard it come on, it immediately pulled me from whatever I was doing. Very 80s, and yet composed in such a way that feels very modern, and a sparse mix of spoken word and ethereal vocals from Elena Lopez. The cover by Caroline Polachek is also worth calling out, as it's great in it's own way.

Dancer - IDLES

Saw the thumbnail for this song's music video pop up for me, and when I saw LCD Soundsystem was featured, I couldn't ignore it. Listened to it and like most IDLES songs, I wasn't sure how I felt about it. I couldn't shake it afterwards, and I kept thinking about it, and when I played it for my girlfriend later in the day, she had the same reaction as I was coming to the realization that I really, really dug it. It just crackles with energy and a sort of euphoric abandon. This year is bound to have some deeply challenging, draining moments, and it's important to remember that you can still dance in the midst of chaos. You have to have joy to fuel resistance.

Times - Wu-Lu

Man, this song hits hard. No matter how much is going on in it, it all works together. It's both noisy and melodic, messy and composed. Brings me back to the late 90s in some way. I don't know what else to say about it, it just rules. Recommended pairings: Sunset drive through the city; walking to get coffee; mowing your lawn.

Choke Throat - GOON

If the metric for song of the year was the number of times I listened to it, Choke Throat wins by a mile. When it first played, it was at a lower volume in the background and I made a note to listen to it later with headphones because it sounded interesting. When I did, I was immediately swept away. There's this unplaceable wistfulness, or haunting nostalgia to it that I found myself wanting to live in for a time, not just listen to. Try to imagine what it felt like as a kid waking up from a dream that you couldn't understand. Not a nightmare, just where things aren't right and you aren't sure where your mind went to find those things.

Easy to Be Around - Diane Cluck

This one entered my orbit late into the year, otherwise it would have probably been in stiff competition with Choke Throat for song most listened to. I guess I'm a sucker for songs that have a haunting quality to it, but where Choke Throat conjured something dreamlike, Easy to Be Around conjured being with someone you're madly in love with as you sit by a fire or walk through a forest at night. It's both a rebuke of the material world and a celebration of being with someone that permits you to be yourself, and it's so utterly beautiful and appropriately strange.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to really appreciate a game that gets to its point at a tight clip of ten hours or less. Oftentimes, games like this can take big swings, greater risks, despite their short length, and so the experience can oftentimes be as memorable, or more so, than games well outside its weight class.

I picked up the aptly-named Arctic Eggs as the cold was starting to set in. For whatever reason I find comfort in playing games depicting winter even as the real-life chill starts to effect my overall mood. Maybe it’s because it always seems _way _ colder in whatever I’m playing (see also: “The Long Dark").

You could probably take a stab at what the game is related to in some sense by the title - it takes place in a remote human settlement in the frozen wastes of Antarctica, in a vague, dystopian future. As nothing grows here, food comes from what can be brought in or cultivated indoors - specifically, chickens. Thus, the primary diet of everyone is eggs (as well as beer, cigarettes and tins of sardines). You play as someone who recently attempted to escape this place, and as punishment you are made the resident egg cooker.

The game itself picks up here, as you go from person-to-person to cook their eggs (and whatever else they throw in the skillet) to satisfy their hunger. You have to do this for enough people to eventually be granted an audience by someone known as the Saint of Six Stomachs, who may grant you the ability to leave.

It’s all very absurd and surreal, but like any good narrative as eclectic as this, beneath the goofy appearances is very real humanity. As you are fulfilling your quota of fed residents, they talk to you about their life and what they’ve got going on. It offers a deeper glimpse into an otherwise opaque world, and more often than not is a jolt of humor in an environment that’s made of blizzards and concrete.

Admittedly, I haven’t finished the game yet. I was afraid I’d finish it too soon as I played, which led to me falling off of it a quarter of the way through. Hopefully writing about Arctic Eggs compels me to pick back up on it so I can conclude my thoughts on it.