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Because it’s a FAQ: 2-Player Tabletop Games

A few times a week, I am asked by couples to recommend some two player Tabletop games for them to play. This is a very short, totally non-exhaustive list of (mostly lighter) games that I love to play with Anne, as well as some other games that aren’t her jam, but are still pretty great.

Travel Blokus

The idea is to take pieces that are basically Tetris shaped, and lay them down on a board, following some simple placement rules. The objective is to use up all of your pieces, or have fewer pieces left than anyone else when you run out of places to put them. It’s super simple to teach and learn, and way more difficult to master than you would expect. There’s a regular Blokus that’s for up to four players, and a version that uses triangles. This travel version is perfect for, well, traveling, and also is specifically designed for two players.

Jaipur

Jaipur is a very simple set collecting card game for two players. It’s portable, and has great replay value because it allows a lot of different strategies to be explored and utilized.

Small World

You may have seen us play Small World on Tabletop in the first season. It’s sort of like Risk, but more fun. It’s an area control game, and each player has a fantasy race + special ability combo that changes every game, or multiple times during the game, if they choose. One of the great things about Small World is that it comes with multiple maps in the box, and each map is designed for a different number of players, including a two-player map.

Pandemic

Pretty much any cooperative game will work for two players, or even as a solo game, but I think Pandemic is the best one for couples because it’s so freaking intense. You feel like you’re losing from the first turn, and that’s half the fun of the game. I’m not saying that it lends itself to strip variants, but I’m not not saying that. I should also mention that Pandemic Legacy is fantastic for two players, especially if you want to have the experience of watching a season of a TV show together, only you’re playing it and everyone on Earth is going to die if you fail.

Sorry!

Yes, Sorry! from Milton Bradley. This is the go-to game for Anne and me, because I hate Scrabble. This game is almost entirely random, but there is some strategy if you really want to go that route. It’s great for two players, especially if you want to have a drink or eleven while you play.

Ticket To Ride: Switzerland

Ticket To Ride is a great infection vector for making new gamers, and this expansion is specifically designed for 2 or 3 players. You can technically play any of the TTR games with 2 players, but you run into the problems a large map presents, which (in my opinion) just make the game longer and less fun. So this particular map works well for 2 players, and works with either the original Ticket To Ride or Europe base sets.

Set and Iota

Both are little card games that feature pattern matching and team work. Iota is more competitive, and plays like Set in reverse.

Takenoko

One of my favorite Tabletop games of all time, Takenoko is high variance when you play it with 4 players, but intensely strategic when you play it heads up.

Finally, there is also Magic: The Gathering (duh) and my friend Chris Kluwe’s upcoming Twilight of the Gods LCG. If you want something that’s intense and takes hours and hours to play, Twilight Struggle gets high marks from my friends who play it.

I’m sure there are a lot of other games (tell me in a comment, if you want) that work well for two players, but this is what I can come up with quickly off the top of my head, and I have 23 pages of dialog to prepare for a voice session tomorrow so I kinda have to get back to work.

Play more (two-player) games!!

Edit to add: HIVE! This was mentioned in comments (with a lot of other games that look really fun, but haven’t been played by me) and I need to add it. Hive is amazing. It’s everything you love about Chess and Othello and Go, with none of the things that make those games so difficult for new players. Rich Sommer introduced me to this game one night at a little coffee and pie place in North Hollywood, and what we thought would be a quick cup of coffee turned into like four hours of us playing Hive over and over and over. It’s really awesome. Get the pocket edition, because it’s portable and you lose nothing in the translation.

 

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all we have to do is keep talking

Back in the Before Times, we’d go to a blog, read the post, read the comments, add a comment, and (usually) encounter interesting people who engaged us in interesting conversation. That probably feels like a fairytale to a lot of you, but it still happens here, because I think I’ve used a combination of no-fuck-giving and the banhammer to push away most of the idiots who would waste our time being dicks and just trying to disrupt our ability to communicate with each other.

 

Still, I imagine that a substantial percentage of you don’t have the time or interest to read what other people have to say, so it is for all of you that I am sharing this conversation I had over the weekend. I think you’ll dig it as much as I did.

In the comments to my post nebulat ergo cogito, Stephanie said

This is really beautifully written and I sincerely enjoyed reading it.
Nitpick/ question : If your title is “Fog therefore I think” then there’s a typo in your latin. There shouldn’t be a “t” on the end of “nebulat” because nouns in the in the nominative singular don’t change their endings. If you wanted it to be “I fog therefore I think” as a play on cogito (I think) ergo (therefore) sum (I am) I’d recommend adding an “ego” which is latin for “I” because nebula won’t function as a verb. Or for “fog is therefore I think” I might try “nebula est ergo cogito” Unless your title is meant to be something else and I missed it?

Latin grammar nazi 😀

I replied

So I love that, of all the kinds of grammar Nazis you can be, you’re a Latin one, because that’s really freaking cool! I had a friend who could read and write Latin, and it was always fun to make him do it at parties.

The title is taken from a quote by Umberto Eco, and because I don’t speak Latin, or read it, or even understand it, I just copied it from him. 🙂

She said

I love Umberto Eco! My favourite is the Island of the Day Before, although I’ve never read something he wrote that I disliked. I deeply wish my Italian was strong enough to read him in his original language, because I think it must be beautiful, but I can barely order coffee. Anyway, excellent choice in source material 🙂
Umberto Eco was also a poet and medievalist, whereas my Latin language training was classical (think medieval English versus modern), so there could be some difference there. He was also far more skilled a Latinist than I will ever be.

Basically, latin grammar uses different endings on the end of words in place of things like pronouns and prepositions, or to indicate if the verb is subject or object, plural or singular, etc. And Latin nouns never take a “t” ending so far as I know.

Given that I know the source is a poet, I’d say he added the ending to make nebula function as a verb in the 3rd person singular (he/she/it).

If that’s the case then the translation is roughly:

It fogs, therefore I think.

However, “ergo” may be static in meaning as “therefore” but “cogito” can mean: think; consider, reflect on, ponder; imagine, picture; intend, or look forward to; and “nebula” can mean: mist, fog; cloud (dust/smoke/confusion/error); thin film, veneer; or obscurity.

So there’s a lot of play with the translation, and we’ll never be able to say with 100% certainty what that translation should have been. As a writer and lifelong teacher, I’m sure Umberto Eco wouldn’t mind if you played with his words.

If you ever come across any more latin phrases and want a rough idea of their meaning this stuff might help you a little bit:

http://archives.nd.edu/words.html

http://www.dummies.com/languages/latin/declining-a-latin-noun/

Oh! that reminds me. Did you know that there’s a rule in English grammar that says it’s incorrect to split the infinitive? This is because in Latin the infinitive is a single word, so it’s physically impossible to split it and a long time ago, the original grammar Nazis decided that English grammar should adhere to the same rules as Latin. Of course that makes no sense at all, you can split the infinitive in English quite easily and its meaning is perfectly clear. The most famous example of the split infinitive? “To boldly go.”

Thus ends Latin to English translation 101.

I said

This is fascinating, Stephanie! Thank you for taking the time to share all of this stuff with me!

And she said

You’re more than welcome.

Latin is basically a math puzzle for the literary minded, so you’d probably really enjoy studying it since you enjoying programming and such. Have you ever thought about going back to school? A lot of people study things like languages and history and come away feeling like it’s just a bunch of names and dates and words to memorize, but if you have the right kind of mind for it, you’ll see that what it really is, is the study of the framework of our world. Once you learn to see the scaffolding that holds everything up, you get good at working with the shell that’s built up around it, and you realize that the anthropological idea that all history is fiction is literally true. If you spend enough time with languages then you start to see that writing is only a series of symbols which function as a kind of telepathy allowing you to read the thoughts of other people, whether it’s been hours or millennia since those thoughts were given form. Although It’s kind of weird when time loses its scope and the tragedies of 200 CE become just as immediate as something that happened yesterday.
I know you think of yourself as a creative type, but academia is creative, that’s why it produces so many people like Tolkien and CS Lewis and Umberto Eco. It also gives you a lot of free time to spend on other pursuits. Plus your performance ability would have made you an amazing professor, like really fantastic.
Things to think about in case you get bored.

Anne and I watched ARRIVAL this weekend, and that film deserves an entire post of its own, but something Stephanie said harmonically resonated with some dialog from the film. Amy Adams plays a linguistics professor, who is teaching her class about the origin of Portuguese:

So I was already thinking about how language and art are ways to express thoughts and emotions and all of those things that make us individuals. When I read Stephanie’s most recent comment this morning, it landed on me in a profound and meaningful way. Part of me wants to tell you precisely what that is, right now, but a different part of me, who I guess is in charge right now, would rather leave that thread out there for you to pull on in the hopes that you’ll share what, if anything, is makes you feel and think about … because I think that one of the biggest reasons we are staring into the Abyss right now is that we’ve started talking at each other, instead of talking to each other.

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this soylent green is not people

Every day last week, I had a light night followed by an early morning. I averaged 6 hours of sleep, so when the alarm went off earlier today so I could wake up in time to go to the hockey game, I smashed it with Thor’s Hammer and went back to sleep. I’ve only been awake for an hour, which disappoints the part of me that wants to wring every second out of every day, but satisfies the part of me that is like “shut up with that Type A shit for a minute and accept that you can sleep as long as you need to on the goddamn weekend every now and then.”

So I recalibrated my day. When I finish this coffee, I’ll have another coffee. I’ll probably make some oatmeal pancakes because that’s been on my mind all week long, and then I’ll clean up and organize my office, then my game room, and finally my kitchen. It will eventually be a busy, productive day in Castle Wheaton.

But at the moment, I’m having this coffee and listening to the classic Ambient album Earth to Infinity, by Deep Space Network, while I get my day slowly started.

As I do from time to time, I’m going to evangelize about this album, which is perfect for background music and active listening, depending on how much of a journey you want to take. So as I say from time to time, if you want some ambient in your life (you need it already, whether you know it or not), here’s one of the greatest tracks off this album, Soylent Green:

This album is nearly impossible to find, because it went out of print within minutes of its release. If you can track it down, though, it’s worth the effort.