SolForge: The Canonical Early Review

I have played more games of the SolForge iPad beta than any non-developer on the planet right now, thanks to being stuck in an airplane for ten hours and then driving for five.  The good news is – obviously – it’s an entertaining game, even in beta format.
SolForge is the latest collectible card game to rival Magic: the Gathering, with a twist – it can only be played on computers, which means the game can keep track of niggling bits that a human player could not.  This is most evident by the levelling system: play a card once, and when it dies, it “Levels up” and the next time you draw it, it’s stronger. If it dies again, it comes back as a Level III card, as strong as it gets.
This immediately makes for an interesting set of tactics.  In Magic, if there’s a creature that’s hurting you, you kill it.  In SolForge, it might be better to leave that creature on the board, because the next time it comes back it’ll be even more of a pain in the ass.  The cards we’ve seen in the beta – about 15% of the card pool – have fascinating level components.  Some cards are vicious in the early game as a Level I threat, requiring two cards to take out, but don’t increase that much as they level up.
So let’s say you go all-in on these early-but-potent guys, forcing your opponent into a corner to use all of his good cards to hold them back.  Well, that means all of his cards come back considerably increased in power at their Level II, but your guys’ Level II increases are negligible.
On the other hand, you have cards that are near-useless in a Level I state, but become behemoths if you can survive long enough to get them to Level III.  So there’s a nice balance between a quick rush and slow control.
The game is fascinating because on many levels, it’s about knowing who to kill and when.  I’ve often found that the best strategy is to make quote-unquote substandard trades: yes, I could put this guy on the board and have him survive.  But I will instead put this substandard mook out to die, planning on him coming back, like Obi-Wan Kenobi, stronger than ever.  You’re constantly balancing board position against future development.
One problem is that the game is so deep I’m honestly not sure what the best strategies are.  Sometimes I lost and had no idea why – was it luck, or just my bad plays?  I’m getting a handle on what factors define a game, but there are so many options I’m often struggling to figure out what the correct move is.  Which is both a glory (I can play this game for a long time!) and a hindrance (what the fuck was I supposed to do?).
(What I do know is that effects that reduce a creature’s power are a lot stronger than they look in Magic.  Since toughness doesn’t regenerate at the end of the round, a -5 to power can clog your opponent’s lane and save your creatures from a lot of damage.)
There are some irritations: you start at 100 life, and while it’s possible to come back when you’re at 30 and your opponent’s full up, it’s unlikely.  There’s not a lot of swinginess, in that often if your opponent (well, at least the opponent AI) takes an early lead, it’s hard to come back.  And like Magic, there are certain overpowered cards that seem ridiculously unfair; two-for-ones are thin on the ground, which makes it hard to lose a game when you get the Wisp-guys out in the early game.
Most annoyingly, there’s no concede button.  Are you dying?  Don’t want to go through the next four turns to the inevitable?  Well, you need to actually quit the game, then answer “Cancel” when it asks you to take up where you left off.  Even for a beta, that’s just bad design.
I’m also not quite sure of the logic of why or when cards level.  There’s a green bar on the right side of the screen, and something happens when it fills, but how it fills or what happens when it does are not intuitive.  I’ve made guesses, but I’m not sure I’m correct.  (EDIT: Apparently, I’m not.  But man, it’s not intuitive when you get your cards back, and in what state.)
Still, it’s free for the iPad, and it’s entertaining.  I’d advise you to check it out asap, particularly if you liked Ascension, which was also made by the same guys.

The Annual Gift O'Cow

Every year, for Christmas, we make a donation to Heifer International.  I give to various charities over the year, of course, but Heifer gets the big Christmas donation in part because it feels like an actual gift: you don’t just donate money, but you buy a llama for a small village, or a flock of geese, or you send a girl to school.
(I’m reasonably sure the money’s just wadded up and doled out as Heifer sees fit, but it’s a clever way of making your donation seem more tangible.  And Heifer’s efficiency rating in terms of how much money it actually passes on to the people in question is reasonably high.)
This year’s gift, in honor of my new heart-healthier living, was a full gardener’s gift basket.  (Appropriately enough, this included a hive of bees.)  But if you’re lucky enough to have some spare dosh hanging about this year and feel like giving to those in need, I’d recommend you take a look at their gift catalog, which has donations for all price ranges.
And if it’s not to them, give to someone.  In the welter of expensive gifts, it’s easy to forget just how much a little gift means to those who are truly bereft.  It doesn’t take much for you, but it means so much to them.

Would You Like To Help Me Make Money From Professional Masturbation?

…well, if that’s not a zinger of a headline, I don’t know what is.
In any case, I wrote a humor tale for Alex Shvartsman’s “Unidentified Funny Objects” science fiction humor anthology, which is now available on Amazon in e-book and paper format.  I’ve read some of the tales there, and they’re funny – he’s got some damn good authors, from Mike Resnick to Ken Liu to Jake Kerr to Lavie Tidhar… and yet somehow, among all this talent, he made a mistake and included me!
Fortunately, my tale is suitably bizarre.  If you’ve enjoyed some of my crazy sex stories in the past, this one’s the looniest.  It’s called “One-Hand Tantra”  – and like all porn, first I have to give you a sample:

“The path of most wizards is solitary,” Loefwyn’s father had told him when his power had first manifested itself.  “Your path, my dearest and only child, is more solitary still.”
To this day, Loefwyn wished he had never become a masturbatician.
As his father had promised, Loefwyn’s singular sex magic had given him a decent living.  He’d just scraped up enough cash to build the obligatory wizard’s tower, a ribbed rock column jutting up to advertise his unique talents.  Masturbaticians were rare, effective ones even more so… and both Loefwyn and his spells were potent indeed.  Intrigued merchants dropped by to witness the town’s newest oddity — even as they hesitated to shake his hand.
Now, royalty — minor, vicious royalty, but royalty still — had hired him.  Enspell Griselda the One-Eyed, and Loefwyn’s success was all but guaranteed….

If you’d like a fair amount of funny for your holiday season, I’d recommend this book even if I wasn’t in it.  As I said, it’s available at Amazon for a mere $5.99, or you can cut the middleman and buy it directly from their site.  Either way, I don’t think you’ll regret it.
 

Who Should Play Picard?

So it’s inevitable: in the next ten to fifteen years, there will be another reboot of Star Trek, and there will be someone’s take on Picard.
Our question: who should play Picard?
The criteria are that:
a)  This will be roughly ten years from now, yet somehow they’ll pick a current actor.  Just go with that.
b)  Said actor will have to be in his mid-forties, older, about the same age Picard was when he started.  (They could reboot with a young brash Picard learning his stuff at Starfleet Academy, but that’s too close to the recent reboot and too samey-same.  They’re gonna want to distinguish.)
So.  Which actor should we go with?
I personally would prefer Viggo Mortensen, dragged screaming out of actor’s retirement, because he’s got that reluctant gravitas you need to pull off the Picard.  Yet Gini – a huge Viggo fan, it must be said – says that Viggo’s voice is too nasal to pull off the resonance of a Picard.  Erin says she’d like Daniel Day-Lewis to do it, as would I, if only to see what kind of crazed preparations he’d make to live as a starship captain.
Daniel Craig was suggested, but there’s no way I could buy this guy as a man who negotiates first.
The one really interesting idea was race-swapping it to get Idris Elba to play the role, which I think is pretty good; he’s got the deep voice, he’s got that gravitas, and he’d be about the right age when the time comes.  But I also worry it’d be seen more as a riff on Captain Sisko, who’s also got a rumbly voice and a quasi-Shakespearean delivery (though no patch on Patrick Stewart), so there’d have to be a lot of careful character writing.
But who do you think?  All nerd battles are heartily encouraged.

Ten Days Gone By, And How Fruity Am I?

Last week, I got the news that my cholesterol levels were off the charts.  And so, in an effort to change my eating habits, I have been choking down a healthy helping of fruit every morning.
Let me reiterate: I fucking hate fruit.
…Or at least I did.  My goal is to get me used to eating fruit so that I no longer perceive it as vile.  Because I have a Very Clever Brain that operates better on unconscious levels.  As long as I really hate fruit, my brain will short-circuit any attempts to disguise fruit.  Is my fruit in a smoothie?  Well, says my brain, it’s far too late in the day for a smoothie!  You’ll be full all evening!  Better have some nachos instead.  And, you may note, my slacker brain told me that it was too much trouble to make a smoothie early in the morning, thus cleverly pushing me off until I had a better excuse.
No, this is like exercise.  People kept telling me, “When you find the right exercise, things will be a joy!”  And it never was, so I kept bombing out of exercise.  The solution that worked for me was to acknowledge that exercise would never be fun, and yet I had to do it anyway.  And that worked.
So after ten days of chowing down berries, how’s this working?
The answer is, “Better.”  I can now eat berries while I am doing other things, like programming.  I do not enjoy them, but at least putting a fruit in my mouth doesn’t cause the full-stop panic usually associated with feeling a cockroach crunch between your teeth.  So I managed a little better.
I also tried oranges, Clementines, which were actually not bad.  The pulp still makes me gag, but when I was sick yesterday I ate four of them.  I also tried pomegranates, which made me gag, but that could be because of the strong taste and the seeds combined.
I am not yet in favor of fruits, but at least for some of my long-time nemeses, I am not as diametrically opposed.  This is greater progress than I anticipated in ten days.  We’ll see how it goes.
As for fish, well, we won’t talk about fish.  I’ve had salmon twice, and it was a meal.  The tuna steak is slightly better, but all this fish is fucking expensive.  God forbid you have heart problems and you’re poor, man.