I’m currently in the late stages of a post about Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine, which I finally finished reading last week. But I thought I’d throw up a quick episode today with a couple of quick hits in the meantime.
Apiary
Back in the pre-pandemic days, summer used to be the season where several of my friends and I would try out a bunch of board games. I don’t think of myself as an expert, but it got to the point where I became a superbacker on Kickstarter, checked in every so often at Board Game Geek (the Hotness!), and acquired enough games and experience with them that I actually may qualify. Unfortunately, as that group of people has diffused, so too has the motivation for that expertise. I still pick up the occasional game here and there (and back a few on KS), but my collection is becoming something of an anti-library more than anything else.
This week, though, a couple of friends came over and we played Apiary, a game I picked up a couple of years ago1, and had been itching to try ever since. And the good news is that I got to play.
I grabbed a photo of the completed game, because it also shows off the game mat that I bought during the pandemic and have only had a couple of chances to roll out. Also, since we were learning the game and playing it for the first time, it ended up taking nearly three hours, and that long of a session deserved a little memorialization.
With a couple of caveats, Apiary is a fun game. In a nutshell, humans have gone instinct and honeybees have evolved to the point where they are engaged in interstellar travel. We play as different “hives,” competing against the other player/hives to acquire resources, spend them on farms, specialists, and developments (the different hex tiles in the upper right of the board), building out our hives, and accumulating points before the game ends.
Apiary is a worker placement game2, so the primary mechanic is placing worker bees in the different sectors of the board (Explore, Advance, Convert, Carve, Research, & Grow). One interesting part of the game is that the bees themselves have a Strength rating from 1 to 4, and as they are bumped off spaces, they return to the hive and increase in strength (higher strength bees accomplish more when they’re placed). But if a 4-strength worker is bumped, it goes into hibernation (and enters the Hibernation Comb at the bottom of the board above). Once 12 workers have hibernated (for a 3p game), the game is over. So the workers themselves also serve as the “clock” for the game.
Stonemaier games in particular tend to focus on intuitive user experience, and while the rulebook may be substantial, a lot of the gameplay is built into the materials. We checked the rulebook only a couple of times, to confirm small details. Otherwise, we were able to start playing fairly quickly, even though it took a while to hit our stride (it was our first game, after all). At the same time, though, as you may be able to tell, there’s a lot of fiddly stuff3, a lot of set-up, and the scoring is complex and challenging. The three of us are experienced board gamers, and even so, it took a while to set up, learn the game, and get to the point where we were able to think about strategy. There are five different kinds of resources, four different categories of hex tiles, and each sector of the board has slightly different mechanics to learn and integrate. I’ve played (and own) games that are more complicated, but Apiary is probably nearing the upper limit on complexity4 for a first-time game that I’d play without asking folks to watch playthrough videos first. Now that I’ve played it though, I’d be happy to play it again.
Writing About Games
While I’ve gotten pretty deep into board games over the past however-many, I’ve largely lost touch with videogames. I was never especially attuned to them—partly that was a function of age, and partly it was the fact that those of us who committed to Macs faced very limited options. I spent some time with Sims and Civs, to be sure, and I did have a pretty dedicated World of Warcraft era for several years, but otherwise? I never got into first person shooters, and didn’t have the time or resources to invest in consoles. All that said, part of my interest in game studies more generally meant that I tried at times to pay attention to the discourse. So while I was never a regular visitor to Rock Paper Shotgun, I spent some time there.
Last week, one of their (now-former) Editorial Directors, Graham Smith, penned a “farewell” column about games journalism and what he’s learned in 20 years of working in the field. He “present[s] here just some of the values - and the personal taste, clearly - that I've tried to express through the site during my time here,” and the results are really interesting.
Smith’s ethos jumps off the page. His gratitude for the site and his colleagues, his clear enthusiasm for what he’s been able to, and the combination of expertise and humility are really appealing. This sort of column is incredibly tricky to pull off well, and even though Smith eventually turns to bullet points (which he jokingly describes as “the columnist's crutch”), the individual items are entertaining to read.
Some of those items are very specific to videogames, but enough of them were not, which got me thinking about how they would transpose pretty well to any number of other versions of culture journalism. In other words, I found myself really intrigued by Smith’s earned wisdom and how it might apply to the kind of writing I do when I talk about board games, movies, books, etc.
I don’t want to tell you how to read this piece, but here are a couple of examples that I found relevant. For instance,
You owe it to the reader to be honest about your feelings, not to hedge based on how you think the reader will feel. This sounds obvious, but I still see writers do it all the time. If you're playing a game that seems great or that you think other people will like, but you are finding it a boring dirge, write about why you're finding it a boring dirge, even if the answer lies in you and not the game. Trust readers to find the writers that align with their tastes, rather than sacrificing your own taste in favour of the imagined reader's or a false objectivity. Trust that clear expression of your honest feelings is the most valuable thing you have to offer as a critic.
This is one of those things that I think many of us, anyone who does any sort of review writing, struggle with. The flattened noisescape that is social media actually disincentivizes us to trust in our taste, in part because there’s clout to be harvested by sacrificing it for likes and clicks, and in part because the gap between critic and object has been so thoroughly collapsed. Do I prefer to grant my attention to commentators with integrity? Absolutely. Do we live in a system where integrity is rewarded? [sad trombone]
There are several other bullets that I could highlight, but this one felt especially relevant to me, for a couple of reasons:
The people who play a particular videogame are not a "community". Games have players, who are individuals, and if those players congregate, it's typically in small groups. Attempts to define a playerbase as a single coherent community is normally either a function of the marketing department or of a tiny minority of players claiming they speak on behalf of the whole. Be wary of stories about what eg. "the Apex Legends community" thinks, therefore.
This may seem a bit esoteric, but I thought it was timely, given the infiltration of “fandoms” into culture discourse, and the lazy tribalism of political discourse in the past few years. The hullabaloo over the recent American Eagle ad campaign feels like a perfect example of the fallacy that Smith refutes here. Charlie Warzel provides an excellent analysis of this weird episode in “The Discourse is Broken:”
Our information ecosystem collects these statements, stripping them of their original context while adding on the context of everything else that is happening in the world: political anxieties, cultural frustrations, fandoms, niche beefs between different posters, current events, celebrity gossip, beauty standards, rampant conspiracism.
One of the key steps in this process is the tendency that Smith critiques, the mistake of overgeneralizing a single opinion or a couple of tweets and representing it as the position of a “community.” (You might recognize this rhetorical operation as (bad) synecdoche, btw.) It’s how a few objections made on a 3rd rate social media platform turned a trashy 30-second ad spot for jeans into an item that rated hours of coverage on our news outlets.
“Community” is the media critic’s version of the phrase “research shows” in student writing. Rather than doing the work to track and trace sources and place an opinion in its proper context and perspective, commentators will attribute remarks to a “community” to which they assume the person belongs. A handful of random tweets becomes “Democrats are losing their minds and trying to censor Sydney Sweeney!!” And the majority of folks who lack the original context are fooled or scammed into engaging with the mountain that’s been constructed in bad faith from the molehill.
I should stop myself here before I launch into another critique of social media. But that’s where my mind went as I was reading this. Give Smith’s column a read if you have a chance—it reminded me of how much better the discourse might be if we took the time to learn from those who’ve done it well.
I know that this is short and loose, but I wanted to post something this week while I’m working on my Mood Machine review. I’ll have to finish it as orientation activities around the university start picking up, but I should have it in front of you soon. Have a good weekend.
In the same way that I have favorite writers, there are certain designers and game publishers that I root for. Apiary comes from Stonemaier Games, a company that puts out some of the best games I’ve ever played, both conceptually and materially, so I’ll buy their stuff even if I don’t have a regular group to play them with. Jamey Stegmaier, the owner, also has (imo) the best board game channel on YouTube. He’s one of those people who’s both been really successful and puts a lot of that success back into the industry itself.
A worker placement game is one where the primary mechanic involves placing your meeples on sectors of the game board to accomplish goals. So, games like Agricola, Everdell, Viticulture, Lords of Waterdeep, Flamecraft, or Dune: Imperium. These games tend to be fairly complicated, and part of the strategy is learning to synergize game mechanics and win conditions.
I’ll also say this, about Stonemaier games in particular. They put a lot of intention into designing the box insert, so that the game is easier to set up because things are separated. They also “overdesign” the materials, building redundancy into the game board through text, iconography, and color, and that makes their games highly accessible. Both of these things are big “quality of play” elements for their games.
If you ask me, one of the best things about Board Game Geek is that it rates games both in terms of quality (Apiary is 7.7 on a 10 pt scale) but also “weight,” that is, how complicated the game is to learn and play. Apiary is weighted 3 on a 5 pt scale, which feels about right. Two other Stonemaier faves, Wingspan (2.5) and Scythe (3.45), are respectively a little less and a little more complex. In my opinion, Apiary’s weight is closer to Scythe than Wingspan, but that may also just be me.
"...mountain that’s been constructed in bad faith from the molehill." Whew. That observation landed smack on target for me. Molehills delivered at tech-scale, shoved upon us at D-9 Cat levels, with Zuck-droid look-alikes at the controls. Where's the escape hatch?