A Drive Through Escherland 
I like to watch good comercials. In this Audi clip the car drives through a modern M. C. Escher landscape.
Via Milk and Cookies.
The Bell Curve
Andrew Sullivan talked about The Bell Curve today. I was surprised when he said that the book had "held up" as I thought that the controversial assertions about race and IQ had been debunked. He linked to a recent article by one of the authors and he does talk a good game. Atrios has been going off with a lot of name calling but Mathew Yglesias delivers a good overview of what is wrong with The Bell Curve.
Update: Now Atrios links to some good analysis.
Hecatomb
I played my second game of Hecatomb yesterday and I can give some impressions. Hecatomb is a new Collectable Card Game from Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Magic: the Gathering. The game has many notable features the most striking of which is the cards themselves. A Hecatomb card is five-sided and made of partially transparent plastic. Very different. Also noticeable immediately is the extremely dark nature of the card art. While there are four colors in the game it more like these are four aspects of the color Black from Magic. The age range on the box is 15+. This is a very interesting move from Wizards. Where most other CCGs are focused on getting simpler and kid friendlier Hecatomb has gone the other way. This is not a game that will be straigforward to figure out if you have not played any CCGs in the past and they actively don't want little kids to play, although I guess this could be reverse psychology marketing.
The game Hecatomb is most similar to is, in fact, Magic. But, it's Magic streamlined and with my personal most requested feature included. Magic is a great game with one big problem. There are dedicated cards you must include in your deck that are used to genearate mana, the "money" used to pay for playing cards. The problem is that, in a game where there is already luck of the draw, if you get to many or to few of these mana cards at the top of your deck it's almost impossible to win. Hecatomb does away with mana cards by allowing you to play any card upside down and count it as mana. You lost the opertunity to play it as a real card but there is almost no possibility of "mana screw." This also presents intersting early game decisions as you have a great but expensive card in your hand but you can't play it until later - do you play it for mana. This is not a new mechanic but it's nice to see it in this game.
Back to the similarities to Magic. There are creature cards, called minions. There are sorcery cards, called fates. And really that it. The other two card types are Gods and Relics but there are very few of them in the game and they play similarly to global enchantments. Not the lack of local enchantments, a hugely complex and confusing part of Magic. Also not the lack of instants. Indeed, you normally cannot play cards during an opponents turn. Now this is the simplifying move that most games make since it avoids the very confusing timing issues involved with playing during other's turns. Unfortunately this move usually results in a game that is to simple and just not interesting. Hecatomb takes in in-between stance with variants of the other cards called Combat Minions and Combat Fates. This plays like it sounds, they are cards that you can play during your opponents turn but only during the Combat phase of a turn and in a very organized fashion. This seems to work well for having enough interesting options.
Now some differences. Why five-sided plastic cards? This enables the principle game mechanic, stacks of creatures. When you play your first minion card it forms what is called an abomination, the game word for a stack of minion. An abomination with one minion cannot attack or block other creatures. When you play your next minion you have a choice. You can play it on the table forming another single minion abomination, or you can play it on top of the first minion. The transparent parts of the card allow the game text and strength of the first minion to show through. The new, two minion abomination, has the total strength of all it's minions and all of the minion's game texts apply. With two minions the abomination has a size of two and can now attack and block.
The size of minions is important to another feature of the game, it's version of life points, called souls. Each player begins the game with five souls and at the start of every turn you gain a soul. It when you gain this soul you have 20 or more, you win. If you attack your opponent with an abomination and it is not blocked you steal a number of souls equal to the abominations size, or number of minions it has.
They have also thrown a surprising number of game mechanics into the first set especially considering there are only 144 cards in the set, half the size of a large Magic set. Some are familiar from Magic but some relate to the unique nature of abominations.
My first game was with my sister-in-law who loves games but does not play CCGs. The game took over three hours mostly due to a lot of looking up rules and playing untuned decks right out of the starter boxes. The second game with with Brian a friend from my long time Magic group. In both cases we enjoyed the game. Of course these games are kind of expensive to collect but this is a good game that's worth a look if you've played and liked other CCGs and if you like really dark artwork.
Looking back on this it's clear to me that I've been talking to my old Magic buddies and trying to get them to play. Sorry if you didn't follow along.
Tranquility
Collin recomends Tranquility which you can play for free on Mac or PC. It looks really cool and is very hard to describe. I just started the tutorial and it's time for bed. More tomorrow.
A Night for the New House
We closed on our new house yesterday! It's very exciting for us. We've been in our current house for seven years, by far the longest we've ever lived in the same place. Tonight we went out to celebrate by shopping for appliances. I didn't think washers and dryers could interest me but things have sure changed since the last time we shopped for them. So many buttons and displays!
Tomorrow the packing starts.
