Games That Don't Suck: Pandemic

(For a list of games in this series, click here and scroll down.)

Pandemic holds a secure place on most lists of “gateway games,” simple but thought-provoking board games that can introduce and attract neophytes to the hobby. It does so, I think, partly because it is easy to learn and quick (45-60 minutes) to play, partly because its accelerating threat schedule and narrow victory conditions make it a very tense game, and mainly because it helps introduce newcomers to a new kind of simulation, the cooperative game. The other titles I've reviewed here so far, like Dominion and Guillotine, are competitive games, where one player wins at the end. In Pandemic, however, either all the players win or everybody dies. I'm pretty sure that “everybody,” incidentally, means everyone in the world. Why play for low stakes?

The game board shows a map of the world, with 48 circles representing large cities. These are the spaces the players' pieces will occupy, move through, or meet in during the game. They are connected by red lines, representing rail and sea and air links, that both players and diseases can move along. To move, players employ colored pawns, each representing a different specialist trying to find a cure for the four epidemic diseases ravaging the world. Each specialist has a complementary ability letting them bend the rules in a different way: the Medic can treat diseases more effectively, the Scientist can discover cures more efficiently, and so on.

The diseases, which are the game's antagonists, are signified by four different colors of cubes. Infected cities have 1-3 cubes of the appropriate disease (sometimes multiple diseases), indicating the virulence or saturation level of the illness. Nine cities start out with varying levels of infection, and at the end of each player's turn s/he draws 2-4 infection cards and places additional cubes in the cities they display. If a city acquires more than three cubes of one color it has an “outbreak,” spilling cubes to all adjacent cities and raising the game's Outbreak Indicator by 1.

On his/her turn each player also takes four actions and draws two player cards. These cards are the game's core play element: most depict cities, and one can use them to travel immediately to or from the city they depict, or to build there a research station (a prerequisite for curing diseases). A player can use five player cards of a particular color to cure that color of disease. One of the more important cooperative strategies in Pandemic involves transferring cards from one player to another to form sets of five, which normally requires both players in the transfer to meet in the city depicted on the transferred card. This, needless to say, requires careful planning.

So does determining when and where to treat diseases – that is, to remove cubes from afflicted cities. Treatment uses actions one might prefer to use accumulating and transferring cards, but it becomes necessary as individual cities, particularly adjacent cities, accumulate three cubes. Outbreaks can turn into chain reactions if one occurs in a city adjacent to another metropolis with three cubes of the same color disease. Since the game ends on the eighth outbreak, these chain-reaction eruptions can prove dangerous.

Just to make things harder, the player-card deck contains epidemic cards that saturate one city with disease cubes (possibly triggering another outbreak), then reset the infection card deck, so that previously infected cities will be the first to acquire more disease cubes. Epidemics also increase the rate at which players draw new infection cards each turn. A few of the player cards give players temporary special resources instead, but none gives advantages that tilt the game much in the players' favor.

It is very easy to lose Pandemic: if the eighth outbreak occurs, or the “timer” expires (when the players run through all 59 player cards), or when all 24 cubes of any one particular disease are on the board. There is only one way to win: by curing all four diseases. And the game dangles a huge distraction in front of the players: a disease can keep appearing even after it's cured, but if players remove all cubes of a cured disease from the board, it is eradicated and will never appear again. This is very helpful, but since time is short and eradication only affects one disease, it is almost certainly a mistake to waste player actions on it.

Part of the appeal of Pandemic is that the game starts off slowly, with only a few cities infected, but quickly increases its tension and pace, as epidemic cards reset the infection-card deck, as outbreaks occur, and as players see one of the defeat conditions approaching. The rules give players many reasons to cooperate - individuals have limited actions, each specialist has a complementary ability, the card-transfer rule gives players an added incentive to share resources - but so does their growing awareness of how fast the clock is ticking. The game's rules may seem slightly complicated at first (the rulebook explains them well), but all of Pandemic's rules work together to build that sense of tension and encourage inter-player cooperation. Some gamers complain that one player tends to tell everyone else what to do, but I've played this title with a couple of dozen people and have yet to encounter such narcissism. Perhaps the threat of global catastrophe, even in a simulation, does promote humility and cooperation. Reason enough to learn Pandemic, and to keep taking it down from the shelf on game days.

Hiero's Journey, Chapter by Chapter

From November 2012 to November 2014, your Humble Narrator devoted much of this blog to a chapter-by-chapter takedown of Sterling Lanier's campy, under-appreciated science-fantasy classic, Hiero's Journey. For those just discovering this timeless treasure of online criticism, and for those wanting to re-read the whole series (and the voices in my head tell me you're out there), I offer herewith a hyper-linked* table of contents:

Chapter One: Welcome to the seventy-fifth century. Also, Gorm the Bear bites evil S'nerg in the jahooblies.

Chapter Two: Flashback, with water weasels.

Chapter Three: Hiero's mutant foes have evil toys.

Chapter Three, Cont.: The Dweller in the Mist offers Hiero Unspeakable Sexytime

Chapter Four: A damsel-in-distress turns out to be an early draft of Foxy Brown.

Chapter Five: Luchare tells her story. Plus, the EUMs return, this time with a lightning gun.

Chapter Six: We spare a little pity for Chee-Chowk, the Hairy Howler Red Shirt.

Chapter Seven: There will be ruins, and giant lampreys.

Chapter Eight: In which we learn that the Catholic priesthood has changed a bit by the 75th century.

Chapter Eight, Cont.: Enter Aldo and his giant fish.

Chapter Nine: Brother Aldo brings out Captain Gimp. Lanier piles on the action scenes.

Chapter Nine, Cont.: Hiero and the Gimp trade insults with some pirates.

Chapter Ten: Ohio has become some sort of giant mutant nature preserve.

Chapter Ten, Cont.: Of necessity, there are dryads.

Chapter Eleven: The House has a good leer in Hiero's brain. 

Chapter Eleven, Cont.: The Going Rate is one golden torc. Also, our gang finds a mysterious bunker.

Chapter Twelve: Your humble narrator has an Infocom flashback. Will he be eaten by a grue?

Chapter Twelve, Concluded: Hiero plays Last Man Standing.

Afterword: Is HJ the first draft of D&D?

----------


* Boy, there's a term I never see anymore. Yr. Hbl. Narr. is getting old.

The Problem of Freedom in John Christopher's Tripods Trilogy

The Tripods series, which I reviewed in my previous post, owes much of its appeal to a compelling central message: Freedom is Hard. Staying free of the alien Tripods' rule brings protagonist Will Parker and his friends neither honor nor comfort. Instead, the Capped, mind-controlled humans view them with suspicion, the Tripods try to capture or destroy them, and even if they elude enslavement they are excluded from such benefits as human civilization can offer. In The White Mountains, John Christopher uses Eloise to symbolize these benefits and their allure: Eloise, though Capped, is pretty and charming and offers Will a place among the landed gentry of post-invasion France. At least, she does until she decides to become a sacrifice to the Tripods. (In the television series, Eloise is played by Charlotte Long, who with rather unpleasant irony died in a car accident a few weeks after the BBC shot her scenes.) Will and Jean Paul and their fellow free men trade the comforts of home and hearth for a Spartan, fugitive life in the mountains, under military discipline and with little expectation of beating the invaders. This kind of dystopian realism appeals, I think, to bright and disaffected adolescents, but it raises an important question: does freedom carry any benefits that justify its huge costs?
  
In the trilogy, Will and his friends are too busy fighting the alien menace to ask this question, and Christopher himself only proposes a few answers to it. Free men control what Orwell called the few inches inside one's own skull. They don't have to share their most intimate space with an alien intelligence. Free men feel no desire to offer their children to the Masters as slaves or trophies, though Christopher's free men do have to steal children (or near-children) from the settlements of the Capped: they can apparently only increase their numbers by recruiting 13-year-old runaways.* The free men can also express an emotion, curiosity, that the aliens have denied to the Capped, which in turn allows them to ask hard questions about their social environment and to conduct scientific research. As in our own world, however, only a few actually do so: John Paul becomes a scientist, and Henry, in The Pool of Fire, travels to North America and learns there to regard humans as a single race rather than separate nations. (The Masters have preserved pre-invasion languages and nationalities to keep their human subjects divided.) Apart from Henry, though, the free men mainly value science as a source of more powerful weapons and vehicles, both necessary to fight the Tripods but dangerous once the Earth is free and human aggressiveness towards other humans reasserts itself.

Christopher makes this point in The City of Gold and Lead, when Will's Master tells him that pre-invasion humans could build bombs powerful enough to destroy entire cities. Will, focused on his spy mission, can't think far enough ahead to realize that such bombs could endanger more than the Tripods. Christopher returns to this point after the final defeat of the invaders, when the Council of Humanity collapses in nationalist bickering. But Christopher more or less ends his story there. What I wish he had done is explore Henry's discovery: that freedom means emancipation from more than one kind of mental slavery. If freedom is symbolized only by the raised fist, the flung grenade, or the ruins of an enemy city, how can it become compatible with the kind of peaceful and civilized life most of us want to lead? Does freedom mean more than merely smacking one's enemies about? If we were to ask Henry, he might say that freedom means the freedom to travel, to learn about other cultures and their ways of living, to realize that one's own ethnic group does not hold a monopoly on wisdom, and to recognize that people can choose nonviolence. John Paul would probably say freedom means the freedom to research subjects that are not immediately useful, to discover new facts and create new things beyond the ken of a docile, pre-industrial culture. Will, I think, would say that freedom means the freedom to be alone – to have privacy and solitude. His final decision to join Fritz and John Paul in creating a new league-of-nations movement represents a greater sacrifice than Christopher was able to articulate. 

In fairness, I don't see how the author could have written a compelling, action-packed YA novel about cultural exchange and diplomacy in the aftermath of a defeated alien invasion. I think this would make an intriguing storyline, but not for young people. Peace-making is primarily work for adults. As Faisal said at the end of Lawrence of Arabia, "The virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage and hope for the future," while "the vices of peace" - and its benefits - come from the labors of the old.


* This sounds creepier out of context than on the page; it is difficult to find even faint sexual allusions in Christopher's early YA novels.

Aliens Enslave Earth, but English Teens Will Save Us

When John Christopher (ne Samuel Youd), who wrote over seventy books in his lifetime, died in 2012, obituarists principally identified him as the author of the acclaimed young-adult series The Tripods. This trilogy certainly gave Christopher his widest exposure: the constituent novels have been translated into seven languages and adapted into a comic strip (in Boys' Life) and a BBC series. Written in clear, spare prose, and maintaining a healthy balance between plot, dialogue, and exposition, the Tripods novels gave adolescent readers an accessible entree into a dystopian future, long before dystopia became the default setting of young-adult fiction. At the same time, Christopher refused to talk down to his readers. He allowed them to deduce on their own, from clues left by the main characters – letters on decaying old signs, mysterious objects found in ruined cities, fragmentary stories told by half-mad travelers – how the world of The White Mountains (1966) and its sequels had come into being.

What they discovered was alarming: the slightly mysterious pre-industrial world of protagonist Will Parker was the creation of alien invaders. A race called the Masters (identified as the Tripods' builders and pilots in The City of Gold and Lead [1967]), had conquered our own world and enslaved its inhabitants with mind-control implants. These implants, which Will and his contemporaries called Caps, curtailed humans' curiosity, free will, and technological ambition. Only a handful of men learned the truth about their world before they reached the age of fourteen, when the Masters implanted their Caps; if they wanted to resist their fate, they had to go on the run, becoming outcasts from settled human society. Will and his friends Henry and Jean Paul decide to join the ranks of these free men (it would have been a short series if they had chosen otherwise!), and the trilogy follows their exploits as they flee to the rebels' mountain fastness in Switzerland, help infiltrate one of the Masters' cities, and try to find a way to defeat humanity's conquerers. By the start of the third novel, The Pool of Fire (1968), readers have learned that the free men face a very difficult struggle. A tiny, fugitive minority fighting a hugely powerful alien foe, they are also weakened by their own personal flaws, like protagonist Will Parker's short temper and inferiority complex. Humans must not only defeat the Masters; they must also, as Christopher observes by the end of the series, overcome their own failings if they hope to survive. If this sounds trite, it was nonetheless a message young people needed to hear, and Christopher delivered it far more gracefully than I have done.

Modern critics of the novels have noted that John Christopher had his own failings as an author, with which he did not in this case successfully grapple: his sexist indifference to women and his middle-class English ethnocentrism. As I have noted elsewhere on this blog, Christopher had written earlier dystopian novels for adults, in which female characters mainly figured as victims. I don't think he was a misogynist – women in his novels are real people, and usually fairly intelligent ones – but he doubted they could flourish in a devolved, post-collapse society that placed a premium on physical strength and viciousness. In the Tripods trilogy, women are almost non-existent, and Christopher's one important female character, Eloise, serves mainly as an object lesson for Will Parker, warning him about the dangers of civilized life under the heel of the Tripods. The author's ethnocentrism is less obnoxious, but when non-European characters appear in the Tripods novels they do so as cliches and stage props. Middle Easterners are religious fanatics who worship the Tripods, East Asians (whom Will once calls “little yellow men”) are soft-spoken and mysterious, Americans are “taciturn” and sunburned. Christopher, to his credit, addressed both of these defects in his later YA novels. Strong, if not always sympathetic, female characters play prominent roles in Wild Jack (1974), Empty World (1977), and the Sword trilogy, while Christopher included a Japanese main character, Sunyo, in Wild Jack and a fairly sophisticated treatment of the Aztec culture in New Found Land (1983). I agree with Jo Walton, though, that rather than make excuses for a mid-century author's prejudices and limitations, one should only recommend Christopher's YA novels to adults, who can make allowances for the author's chauvinism. Certainly I enjoyed them more as a young adult than as an adolescent, though with age and time I have found additional, thematic problems with the Tripods trilogy that wouldn't have occurred to my earlier sci-fi geek self. Those, however, can wait for a later entry.

Hiero's Journey Afterword: Sources and Influences

We have finished our read-through of Sterling Lanier’s minor SF classic, Hiero’s Journey, but in assessing the book’s impact on the larger field of Geek-dom I have found the following sites helpful: 

Reading Science Fiction:

The author, EarthKnight, provides some background detail on Sterling Lanier himself, who had a wide range of eccentric interests. Lanier trained as an anthropologist, which probably explains his decision to make his protagonist Native American and his female romantic lead African-American, though it doesn’t seem to have made him very inquisitive about the cultures and motivations of his humanoid antagonists. Lanier was in his spare time a “fan of cryptozoology” and a sculptor of “Ice Age animals,” which explains the giant mutant beasties that tromp or swim or slither through almost every chapter of Hiero’s Journey. 

Advanced Readings in Dungeons & Dragons:

Tim Callahan praises HJ for the intensifying pace of its plot, and observes that Lanier intended it as the first volume of a trilogy, though he only completed one sequel, The Unforsaken Hiero, before calling it quits. Hiero’s Journey itself had a significant and largely unacknowledged impact on the early role-playing games of the 1970s. It was an obvious source for the 1978 game Gamma World, which was full of vicious humanoids, mutant animals, and “cities with names like primitive spellings of our own.” It also, however, seems to have influenced Dungeons and Dragons, which includes psychic powers – something not found in Tolkien or Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories or many of the other main influences on D&D – and whose early adventures were often set in ruins and tombs belonging to lost empires. D&D, Callahan concludes, was “a more ambitious genre mashup than just Gandalf meets Conan."

Reading Appendix N: 

Raven Crowking, who read Hiero’s Journey specifically because of its appearance in the bibliography of the first D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, observes that Dungeons and Dragons’s love of “weird creatures that defy natural explanation,” fungus and slime monsters, intelligent giant lynxes (inspired by Klootz and Gorm), evil humanoids, powerful artifacts (some of them bearing curses), “clerics in leading roles [and] psionics” almost certainly come from HJ. The novel, Mssr. Crowking notes, takes an “episodic” form like a series of D&D adventures, and it even includes an actual, interior-voice depiction of a character “leveling up:” “The two battles Hiero had won…had given the hidden forces of his already strong mind a dimension and power he would not himself have believed possible. And the oddest thing was, he knew it.” Because of the giant “LEVEL 5” icon hovering above his head, no doubt.

Games That Don't Suck: Citadels

(For a list of games in this series, click here and scroll down.)

Guillotine remains my beau-ideal of an introductory game: easy to learn, quick to play, and light-hearted in tone. As an evangelist of designer board and card games, I am aware, of course, of the importance of variety, and Guillotine can grow a bit stale if one plays it too many times. Strategy becomes less important than the luck of the draw as one adds more players, the jokes grow old, and the game's French Revolutionary “skin” loses its appeal. To players seeking an equally simple-but-challenging game, one with a different core mechanic (card-drafting, a la 7 Wonders), a different setting, and a different tone – and one which also improves with more players – I can, fortunately, offer an alternative: Citadels.

Published a few years after Guillotine, Citadels takes players to an imaginary (and slightly eldritch) kingdom where they compete to build the most vibrant and valuable medieval city. At the beginning of each round, players select a role from a deck of character cards, using a card-drafting protocol (discard, pick, and pass) that gives early selectors a look at the other roles still available to their rivals. Each role has a particular power: the Assassin can cancel another character's turn, the King gets to pick his/her character first on subsequent turns, the Architect can build more than one city district per turn, and so on.

Having chosen roles, the players take their turns in the numeric order of their role card, from 1 (Assassin) to 8 (Warlord). On his/her turn, a player may either collect three gold (used to buy districts) or draw two new district cards and keep one of them. S/he may also build one district card. These cost gold to build, are worth a variable number of victory points, and come in five colors: red (military), yellow (noble), green (mercantile), blue (clerical), and purple. Purple districts have special abilities the builder can use; the other colors give additional gold to particular roles (green gives money to the Merchant, for example). Some roles, like the Warlord (who can destroy other players' districts by spending gold), have special powers a player may use on his/her turn. These are all the actions a player may take.

Once a player builds his/her eighth district, the other players complete the round, and everyone counts victory points. Players receives a number of points equal to the total gold cost of their city districts, plus a bonus for building eight or more districts, and another bonus for having a set of all five colors. The player with the most points wins, though perhaps that's stating the obvious.

Citadel is a visually appealing game, whose cards feature excellent artwork: sharp lines, subdued but varied colors, deep shadows, and ample detail. The game places emphasis on building one's own city by playing one's role and hand well, but there are opportunities in the game to mess with other players, if one chooses the Thief or Assassin or Warlord roles. The game can be played, with a few modifications, with 2-3 players, but works best with 4-6. Like Guillotine, Citadels takes about 45 minutes to play, ideal for an evening session after dinner or for recovering from a long and exhausting game of Descent or Twilight Imperium.

Everything I Needed to Know I Learned from Robotech: The Macross Saga

    It's okay to drink to kill the pain, but poor form to throw whiskey bottles at your cousin.

    You can be a pacifist and still kill people with psychic head-butts (in movies, anyway).

    Expressing an accidental interest in women's underwear makes you a lecherous pervert.

    Long hair and combat aviation go together like Chips Ahoy cookies and milk.

    High rank is perfectly compatible with an inability to get out of the command chair.

    The best way to persuade a girl to marry you is to defeat her in a knife fight.

    There will be no cell phones in the future.

    Children are annoying but one mustn't let giant robots step on them.

    Nothing in the universe beats the destructive power of Japanese bubble-gum pop.

    Neither the reinforcements nor the ammunition ever runs out.

    When a Zentraedi warlord invites his male aide to help him discuss “aggression” in his “private quarters,” it's perfectly innocent.

    An appropriate farewell to the fiancee you're leaving forever is “Well, bye!”

    Men can mouth off to superior officers as long as they're female. (The officers, that is.)

    Bicycles are inherently ridiculous.

    It's okay for adults to obsess over action figures. Even if the adults are fifty feet tall.