The nerds over at American Mensa have come out with their 2014 list of new tabletop games that they find fun, challenging, and a good value. It’s their Mensa Select list of games.
Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension (Cryptozoic Entertainment, cryptozoic.com) – Your starship has been sucked through a wormhole, you’re being sucked toward a black hole, and you’re out of fuel. With some quick mining of nearby astroids you’re able to get some kind of fuel, but it doesn’t work the way you’d expect it to… Gravwell is a race game, so it’s all about getting to the finish line first. The unique part is how ships move. Your movement is based on proximity to other ships on the board where you either want to move toward or away from the closest ship, but since moves are reveled simultaneously, and cards have a set priority, ships may not be where you expect them to be when you start moving.
Qwixx (Gamewright, gamewright.com) – Do you like Yatzee? If so, then this may be another dice game for you. It’s stupidly simple, roll some dice and cross some numbers off on your score pad. The trick is picking which numbers to cross off and how your dice luck will favor you in crossing more off.
Since it’s a wooden tile, you can assume this is your duke if you want.Pyramix (Gamewright, gamewright.com) – There’s a pyramid of cubes (like dice, but with Egyptian symbols on the sides) and the goal is to get points by collecting these cubes from the pyramid. The cool mechanic is the way cubes slide as ones below it are pulled out. The strategic element is for the big score, you want to have the most of a certain color and that’s worth what’s left of that color on the base. So focus too much on the color, and there won’t be much left, or focus too little and someone else will take those points.
The Duke (Catalyst Game Labs, catalystgamelabs.com) – Think of chess, but each piece is a tile. Then realize you only start with the king (The Duke) and 2 pawns (Footmen). Each turn you can move (or activate with some special pieces) these tiles or you can pull a new random tile from your reserves and add it to your team next to The Duke. To add to the interesting strategy, each tile is labeled with how it moves, and that’s because after you move, the tile is flipped and it shows some slightly different movement. It’s only a 2-player game (like chess) but seems to be a good abstract strategy game for when that’s what you’re looking for. Also, if you want to try it out, Catalyst Game Labs has a free print and play version of the game on their website.
Who doesn’t like a good dystopia (if you’re not tired of them yet)?Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia (Stonemaier Games, stonemaiergames.com) – “You find yourself in a dystopian cityscape with a few workers at your disposal to make your mark on the world. Like most people in dystopian fiction, your workers are oblivious to their situation. This world is all they’ve ever known. You may use them at your whim.” This is a pretty heavy worker-placement game. The like most games of this type is to use your workers to get what you need done to take over. Some of the interesting things that Euphoria does, is that workers are dice and every time you pull them off of the board, you roll them. Add up the values of the dice, and if it’s too high (their intelligence), one of them leaves (she figured you out and doesn’t want part of your schemes). Also each player gets specific people cards who can slightly help them with certain factions that control parts of the board.
Qwixx seems pretty stupid for this list, I guess I need to give it a go, and see why it’s on the list.
Today’s STATurday is about looking for a job. ??????? ?????? This is from a survey of over 1200 people about their plans for looking for a new job. The biggest surprise is how often people keep their résumé up to date. ????? ??? ???? If you haven’t switched jobs in a few years, do you really need to make updates every week? ????? ?????
I found a whole site of charts showing some crazy correlations on data. ???? ????? Check it out:
If Nicolas cage is in less movies, fewer people will die. At least that’s what I’m seeing here.
Or perhaps this one:
“Why are you eating all that cheese?” “I’m doing my part to better educate America!”
I think by now you should be realizing the point of this site. If you want to see more, or even hook it into your RSS reader, check out Spurious Correlations.
I’d like to start a weekly feature for boardgames up in this nerdy and sporty place. It’s not like anyone is reading this blog, so I can pretty much shout into the dark voids of the internet whatever I want. Let’s start this new feature this week with a game that almost everyone has played: Monopoly.
Monopoly is a weird game, since almost everyone has played it, we all have differing memories and opinions on the game. Now, before you go about giving me your opinion of the game, you should read the rules and realize that you played the game wrong (Was there money on free parking, or no auctions, or maybe you traded for future rent immunity – All wrong). How would you like someone judging your favorite game if they didn’t play by the rules — Football is stupid & boring, we just passed the ball back and forth until we got to the endzone untouched.
What I’m saying is that perhaps you need to look at the good parts of Monopoly. The wheeling and dealing of properties and cash between players. The game is almost completely about making the right trades and having the dice luck pay out for those trades. Hell, there’s math and statistics on the optimal strategies of the game. The thing with that being the good part of the game is that it’s also what makes the game terrible. If you’re lucky with dice, your trading skill can kill the game for you and vice versa.
For this week’s STATurday entry, here are a few posts by nerd Matt Daniels that breakdown some lyrical accomplishments of hip hop artists. ???? ??????? ?? ????????
First up is his study on The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop, which breaks down the number of different words used by rappers in their songs. The East Coast wins:
Next we jump in to just one word, Shorty, and how it came to mean “a fine ass woman, or your girl,” when it started very differently.
And finally, a dive into Outkast and how these southernplayas have affected some commonly used slang.
Last week, Businessweek published a fun tool for calculating what they call an “efficiency index.” This is what there using to figure out how much a team spends per win and how that compares to the league average. ??? 365 They are taking into account playoff and championship wins as a multiplier value compared to regular season wins. ??????? ??? ????? ????? That multiplier is what you can adjust. ???? ???? ????? ??? ???? You can set it to only show a single league, say MLB, and start increasing the value of post-season wins. Watch as the Marlins plummet from the top as the Yankees begin their climb.
I recently came across a “book” by one of my favorite Shark Tank sharks, Mr. Mark Cuban. This collection of previously written blog posts entitled How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It. As the now owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Cuban is definitely able to mix his sports metaphors and business knowledge in this mostly autobiographical selection of stories.
This book is not very long and it’s probably not going to tell you anything new, but it was enjoyable nonetheless. If you want to learn more about the early failures and successes of Cuban, this will give you good insight to that. But if you want to learn how to start your own business or how to become the next owner of your favorite sports team, all you’re going to get out of this book is a “you need to try very hard, and probably fail a couple of times.” Also, you’re going to realize that it takes a giant dose of luck to actually hit it big.
Yes, you can probably get all this stuff for free on the internet as he has just compiled some blog posts. But, the quality posts have been selected and they have been edited – Something us bloggers often fail to do. And it’s less than $3, so he’s not asking for much.
So this baseball season the fine folks over at CBSSports.com have released their app development platform, or as they call it “CBSSports.com Development Center” to the masses this year. I’m a bit of a sucker when it comes to these kinds of things as I enjoy figuring out how technological things work. I’ve got some half-baked iPhone apps around here somewhere; as well as pile of barely used API keys for just about every service you can think of. Perhaps I should combine them all and make: a Google map with pins of your Fantasy baseball players and pictures of that day’s weather forecast that checks you in to foursquare while tweeting about it. I’m sure everyone will be shelling out the big bucks for that app. Right?
If all my APIs had a physical form, this would be what my office looked like
Actually, the reason I’m posting this is that I’ve actually completed the process of creating a little app for fantasy baseball. Introducing the Nerds on Sports Nickname App for CBSSports.com. Yup, I made an app that will display players nicknames. Some of the names are real, many are completely made up. For example the most recently added nickname is for Mark “Mayonnaise” Buehrle: That’s not a name that anyone (other than myself so far) is calling him, but I think it works well for a couple of reasons:
2) As a pitcher, he can be told to “put some Mayonnaise on it” instead of the usual slang of mustard.
See what interesting name/news tidbits you can learn from just a silly name? This is why I decided to create the app. Of course the list of players in the CBS Sports database is over 4500 players long, so if I really want to have tons of names, I need everyone’s help. That is why I created a suggestion box for new names. Please give me some new names — If you do, you’ll get to see your name in the app! Or perhaps, go spend the $1 to buy the app (You can sign up for a free league and buy just the app if you want to donate a (portion of a) dollar to me, if you do, please give me a good review ).
The nerds over at American Mensa have come out with their 2014 list of new tabletop games that they find fun, challenging, and a good value. It’s their Mensa Select list of games.
).