Ages ago, when I was a kid growing up in New Hampshire and Maryland, summer stretched out to Labor Day. It wasn’t until September that I’d wearily trudge back to the bus stop with a backpack full of fresh notebooks and pencils.
Not so for my son in Texas, who starts his school year in the sweltering Texas heat today, in mid-August. He, his mom, and I had a lot of fun this summer. Minor health issues kept us close to home this year, but we played a bunch of games and watched a lot of cheesy horror movies together.
As an adult, with whatever free time I have, summer is when I cycle through hobbies most rapidly – hopping back and forth from board games to video games, with a dash of reading on the side. If you’re a regular reader of the blog, you’re a witness to the consequences of my short attention span; I usually write about whatever I’m playing at the moment, whether it’s old or new.
So as we near the end of another Texas summer and my son assembles his overstuffed backpack for the coming year, I thought I’d take this week to highlight two of the best free-time distractions I’ve experienced in the last couple of months.
Everdell: Dangerously Adorable
When I was very young, my mom – a writer and photographer by trade – spent almost every evening reading to me. One of our favorites was Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame’s lyrical children’s novel about a group of woodland creatures who go on an unexpected adventure.
The cardboard tree is a little clunky, but
it’s part of the game’s charm.
So it’s no surprise that the art and style of Everdell, a board game from Starling Games, immediately drew me in. Unlike a lot of Euro-style games, Everdell is dripping with style. Every component from the squishy berries to the fantastic card art reinforces the game’s theme, where anthropomorphized critters prepare for an upcoming winter by building a tiny village.
Everdell is easy to pick up and teach, with fairly standard worker placement and tableau-building mechanics. You pick where to place your critters, sometimes blocking other players from the juiciest spots, and use the resources they collect to play cards representing your city and its adorable inhabitants. After a few turns, advance to the next season, collect your workers from the board and do it all over again.
The game is not new. I picked it up quite a while ago, but it sat on my shelf unopened for nearly a year. I finally cracked it this summer, on a weekend when my son was particularly bored. It’s hard to get him to play competitive board games; like me, he prefers cooperative titles. But the cheerful, oddly-shaped board with its cardboard Evertree and the rest of the excellent components drew him in.
Turns out that a game of Everdell is a brutally competitive city-building riff on Watership Down rather than the lyrical, leisurely wanderings of Wind in the Willows. My son showed no mercy, applying his keen mathematical mind to the engine-building of his bustling woodland village, putting together a string of combinations of critters and buildings that had him performing three actions to my one by the end of the game.
I consider myself reasonably experienced in worker placement games. I’ve tackled beastly and complex titles like A Feast for Odin. I’ve won more than my share of cutthroat Settlers of Cataan matches. So the loss – my field mice’s pastoral farms and shops crushed by the industrial might of my son’s sprawling squirrel metropolis – was humiliating.
The berries are a little squishy, and
the river rocks are nicely smooth.
Everything is just top-notch.
Not only that, I can’t get my son back to the table for a rematch; he’d rather rest on his laurels. I hoped I could get my wife into the mix for a three-player game. “Look!” I said, showing her the art on the cards. “Cute woodland animals! Look how adorable this is!”
She frowned. After so many years, she’s wise to my tricks. “This game sounds super competitive. Like Settlers of Cataan. Which you know I hate.”
“Um…no, it’s nothing like that! Look, squishy pink berries and chunky bits of tree resin!” She wasn’t buying it.
If I badger (no pun intended) my family enough, I’ll eventually get Everdell back to the table. In the meantime, there’s an elegant and easy-to-manage solo mode, and apparently a ton of expansions for the game that I haven’t touched. Everdell easily lands a coveted permanent spot in my board game collection.
War in the Pacific: Logistical Tinkering
Two weeks ago, I wrote about three different wargaming takes on the Pacific theater of World War 2. In the article, I sang the praises of the excellent WarPlan: Pacific – the best compromise between complexity and playability. I’d still stand by that recommendation for most players.
Still, some broken corner of my brain was drawn back to the insanity of War in the Pacific: Admiral’s Edition. As I mentioned in my previous article, it’s a ludicrously massive game with one-day turns that tracks every ship, plane, and pilot of the conflict separately. I’ve never finished a full game of the campaign, and I probably never will. But something about the title keeps calling me back.
War in the Pacific. Singapore
won’t hold out forever, but we
can slow down the onslaught.
If you visit the still-busy Matrix Games forums for the title, you’ll find a plethora of guides, videos, and tutorials that will (with a major time investment) teach you to play this monster. You’ll also find comprehensive starting checklists for the first turn – massive Excel spreadsheets that serve as a way to track which units need to move where, which bases need supply convoys sent, and so forth.
For those hardcore enough to complete a War in the Pacific game, that’s the “right” way to learn to play. And the producer part of my brain almost wants to tackle it that way too. Yet somehow I can’t bring myself to do it. I tried to follow a guide the last time I picked the title up, maybe two years ago, but it felt too much like work.
So this time, I approached the game with a fresh outlook. I wasn’t going to attempt to do everything. I wasn’t going to take twelve hours on the first turn and check every single unit.
Instead, I’d just tinker with the game’s engine without any intention of finishing – playing as the Allies against a Japanese AI on the default difficulty level, each turn adjusting only the bits that interested me. Moving a few destroyers here, or a carrier there. Shipping fuel to this port or that port while flat-out ignoring giant swaths of the map.
In parallel, I re-read The Pacific War 1941-1945 by John Costello. It’s a one-volume history of the conflict written in the 1980s, dated but providing a reasonable overview of the high points.
Reading the book became an excellent companion activity to the game. I’d play a few turns of War in the Pacific, then knock out a few pages of The Pacific War – seeing where and how my tinkering differed from the historical events.
Once again, I have no intention of completing a full campaign. Even with my slipshod, unmethodical approach, it takes me a solid hour to complete a couple of turns. It’s unlikely I’ll get too deep into 1942 before something else distracts me.
Still, a monster wargame with a logistical focus can be soothing. And yeah, I know sending a fuel convoy across the Pacific to Australia and seeing it arrive dozens of turns later is not for everyone.
But in my game, I’ve already had moments of high drama: squeaking out a desperate defense of Singapore for an extra week to delay the Japanese timetable elsewhere, and saving the British warships Prince of Wales and Repulse by evacuating them to Australia.
When logistical choices pay off – when the fresh regiment you shipped from India arrives in Rangoon just in time to defend it – War in the Pacific: Admiral’s Edition shines. I’ll take a few of those moments, even if I only end up playing out the early-war battles.
Costello’s book. It’s what convinced
me to send the Prince of Wales and
Repulse to Australia on Turn 1.
Summer’s End
For school-aged kids, summer’s end is always bittersweet at best. It’s an odd mix of excitement about seeing your friends again and sadness that summer is over. New routines, earlier wake-up times, and all the difficulties of navigating the high school years await my teenage son.
For adults, the rhythms of summer aren’t that different from the rest of the year. We still have to work, take care of our household, and pay the bills.
Yet sometimes, on a weekend or a day off, we get to join our kids for a lazy afternoon free from distractions and responsibilities. We’ll curl up with a good game or a good book. We’ll take an hour – or three, or four – and enjoy one of our favorite hobbies. And we’ll forget (for a little while) that our to-do list isn’t getting any shorter.
If you’re not living in my corner of Texas with its unfathomably early back-to-school date, you’ve still got some summer left. If you’re stressed out, burned out, and at your wits’ end, take an afternoon and pick up your favorite hobby.
That to-do list will be there when summer’s last days are gone.
The Scree Games blog will be taking a brief pause next week. We’ll return with fresh content on Tuesday, August 27.