Tiwanaku is a puzzle-style competitive deduction game that recently funded on Kickstarter. It is played on a grid of square tiles, either the small 5 by 5 or the large 5 by 9. I will not explain all the rules here, since you can find them yourself if you’re interested, but it is important that when you play Tiwananku, you are given a hidden answer key that tells you the correct answer when you attempt to deduce a tile. Above is my implementation of that answer key.
So let me explain how the grid is laid out. There are four types of square terrain tile, represented by four colors (and edge shapes on the tile): yellow deserts, green forests, blue mountains, and red valleys. These tiles are grouped into regions on the grid. A region is a group of 1-5 terrain tiles of the same type, orthogonally adjacent to each other. A region will never be larger than 5 tiles, nor will it touch, orthogonally or diagonally, another region of the same color.
There are crops to be planted in each region, represented by the circular tiles of different sizes on top of the terrain tiles. Each region will have a different crop on each tile, from 1 up to the size of the region - so a size 4 region will have a 1, 2, 3, and 4 crop on it, in a random arrangement. Furthermore, no two of the same crop will ever be adjacent orthogonally or diagonally.
Lastly, how to use the answer key. The board is laid out with a number of pre-filled “hints”, where both the terrain and the crop are revealed. There are also stacks of tiles below the board, showing how many of each type will be used when the board is full. You can click on any grid space to reveal what terrain tile should be there, and click on any placed terrain tile to reveal what crop should be there. The grid is set up in such a way that there will only be one possible layout of crops once all of them are planted.
Tobago is one of my all-time favorite board games. It has 3 board sections which fit together in multiple ways as well as palm trees and huts placed randomly to make a different island map every time.
It’s the “placed randomly” where things get interesting. As humans, it’s hard to do things truly at random - our brains aren’t built for it. I was delighted, therefore, when I came across this little doodad by @TodayIsOkay on BGG. It’s a quite clever JavaScript applet that generates and displays a random Tobago setup. I’ve used it for every game since.
Well, this year the first expansion for Tobago came out, 9 years after the game’s debut. The expansion adds a volcano(!) and lava that covers up parts of the island. The volcano is also placed on the board randomly. So as a challenge to myself, I copied the original code, then modified it to optionally place a volcano. The volcano can either be placed anywhere on the board or in the middle. The keyword here is “copied”: I did not come up with this idea and I would not have known how to implement it. I do, however, know enough to understand it (more or less), and even to expand on it slightly with a little help from a search engine.
Speak friend and enter, but beware:
This zoo is not logical. Nothing
Is on display for your amusement.
(for indeed, Nothing is very amusing)
Here there be dragons to discover,
Joy and other mythical creatures
Truly dangerous. You might not survive.
If you flounder in seas of symbols
You may find the Salmon of All Knowledge.
Watch out for red herrings.
When you leave, take something with you,
Spiky and uncomfortable. Take, take, fill
Your hands, your head, your hollow chest;
Your belly laughs await their food.
My third collection of poetry, Joy and Other Mythical Creatures, is available now in paperback on Amazon! Ebook version coming soon(TM).
This is the first of a series of essays about my favorite musicians and what makes their work engaging to me.
Adam Young has one of those stories that all artists crave - plucked seemingly at random from obscurity by the internet, thereby earning enough money to become a full-time music creator, under the name Owl City. Of course, the whole story is more complex, and includes many nights in his parents’ basement, hard at work. Young channeled his insomnia into synthesizing and mixing whimsical flights of fancy with sharp hooks and bell-toned riffs that are difficult to forget.
I think the title Owl City is an apt one, at once meaningless and evocative, like many of the tracks Young produces. When I say ‘meaningless’ I don’t mean ‘gibberish,’ but ‘nonsensical;’ the words connect thoughts that aren’t used to being connected. For example, the first verse of Owl City’s biggest hit, Fireflies:
You would not believe your eyes
If ten million fireflies
Lit up the world as I fell asleep
‘Cause they fill the open air
And leave teardrops everywhere
You’d think me rude, but I would just stand and stare
There’s a story here, a flow, but it has a dreamlike quality, intensely metaphorical. How is the singer standing and staring after they fall asleep? Whence the ten million fireflies? These are not the right questions. The lyrics’ goal is to evoke a mood, and when I’m biking downtown on a summer evening, seeing lights in all the windows, and think of this song, my sensations get tied into the tapestry in my head that I see every time I hear Fireflies.
That is the genius of this kind of lyricism - it is vague enough to apply to many situations and people, who then become attached to it because of their investment in it. Of course, most if not all music does this, but Owl City’s best songs seem made to tap into those roots, at least to me.
Young’s more recent albums contain some less abstract tracks like This Isn’t the End, which while still sounding good, don’t quite live up to his original style in my opinion. It must also be said, and has been before, that his vocals are nothing special, and attempts to spruce them up with or without computer assistance don’t really help. But those are quibbles that do not touch the core of what makes Owl City good music. (And if you can’t stand the vocals, Young released one well-produced soundtrack every month for a year.)
