a bit of this, a bit of that

[jazzfish]

Rick Boucher, my Congresscritter, is guestblogging for Larry Lessig. This is about the coolest thing I've seen a politician do, but then I don't pay much attention to politicians.

Koko the sign-language gorilla seeks medical help. Quite cool, but my pull quote has to be "The woman handed [the gorilla] a business card, which Koko promptly ate."

Some people are just too lucky for words. Man. Twenty-five dollars.

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Some get sucked into MMORPGs and never see the light of day. Others sit up all night playing Counter-strike [or whatever cool FPS the kids are playing this year] or Starcraft.

Me, I just got started on BrettspielWelt. Online boardgaming.

The interface is less than good [comes of being a graphical client on top of what appears to have started life as something like a MU*], and English is far from being the primary language spoken, making navigation even trickier, but . . . wow. I sat down with some munchies and a drink and figured "what the hey, I'll give it a whirl" and suddenly I look up and it's an hour and a half later and I've just played three games of TransAmerica and how did that happen? Tied in one and won another, too, so that probably contributes to the buzz. Felt quite shaky at first [and the client briefly freezing up on me didn't help any], but I suspect that in a few days it'll be just like breathing. And for jedibfa, they've got Puerto Rico without all the painful setup time. :)

It's certainly no replacement for playing games face-to-face with people I know and like. But it gives me access to games I don't currently have, pretty much any time I'm at home.

Update: User id on BSW is, of course, JazzFish.

Comments

[mneme]

The Settlers interface is ugly (the bitmaps are drawn in a far too low resolution), but functional -- it does the job, especially in allowing people to trade when they don't have a common language. And it has very little text, so once you have some idea what the icons mean, it was usable even before they changed the Abruch (or whatever it is) text to a very stretched out "No".

The -Furstien- (Princes of Florence, by any other name) interface is -dire-, however. It's full of counter-intuitive controls, and on top of that, every action is irrevocable. (Frex, at times, you'll draw 5 cards, pick one of them to keep, and put the rest on the bottom of the deck in any order you choose. They -could- have done this by having you click on the thing you wanted to keep, and then click on the others to decide in what order to throw them away. Even better would to have you select exactly one to keep, and then drag them around to order them before clicking "ok". What you actually do is click on them in turn to -discard- them in order; the one you fail to click on is the one you keep. Meaning that if you accidentally click on the one you want most...oops).

But I frequently play San Juan, Puerto Rico, St Petersburg and Lost Cities there, and somewhat less frequiently play Settlers, Trans America, and Funkenschlag there (and I've played/will play a bunch of other games there; check my profile; the only experience I'm unlikely to repeat is Princes of Florence).