Kinda creepy coincidence

I was reading this mediocre essay by Jonathan Chait on Robert Bork, and I was struck with an impulse to read up on the Watergate scandal. What’s the link? Bork had been Solicitor General at the time Nixon tried to quash the investigation, and had wound up in charge of the Justice Department after the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General had both resigned rather than fire the investigator. Bork did the firing.

This led to the creation of the Office of the Independent Council, a check on the growing power of the executive. I’d known that the office had since expired, but I hadn’t known when: At midnight on the 11th of September, 2001.

akawil tells me that this isn’t quite as eerie a coincidence as it might seem: The reason it expired then was because that was the first day Congress was back in session after summer recess; since Al Qaeda was aiming to hit Congress with United Airlines Flight 93, they’d chosen this day. But it looks to me like the recess ended the previous Tuesday, Sep 4th.

Games Club

I’ve been skipping out on games reviews, haven’t I? Actually, I’ve been kinda lame about playing games for a while. But here are a few new ones:

Ticket to Ride: Europe
Not just a sequel to Ticket to Ride, this version improves on the original with a better balance of routes, station pieces that let you use another player’s lines to fill your tickets, and special routes that require wildcards or can take a random number of extra cards to build.

Santiago
Yet another German game about colonization. What’s up with that? Now that I think about it, I’ve got a really nasty idea for a German rail game.... Anyway, Santiago is a tight, challenging game of limited resources with clever auctioning rules. Each round starts with an auction; high bidder gets first choice of farm tiles to place and control, low bidder gets to be canal boss for the round. Then there’s the canal placement phase, where players bribe the canal boss to irrigate their farm tiles. Unirrigated farm tiles wither and die, living farms are worth points at the end.

Carcassonne: The City
Lots of wooden bits in this stand-alone addition to the thriving Carcassonne line of games, and a much faster endgame. In this version, players get to place wall pieces around the edge of the developing city to close off further expansion (and complete features). They can also place guards on the walls; each guard scores points for special buildings in his straight line of sight. This makes paying attention to the overall board and what other players will be able to do much more important than in original Carcassonne.

Speaking of original Carcassonne, anyone played with the Princess & Dragon expansion?