Thurn and Taxis

Played something new at GC today: Thurn and Taxis, a game about building mail-delivery routes in 17th century Europe. There are territories of various sizes and colors, and cities with roads connecting them, and you build routes by playing cards. When you score a route you place houses of your color in the cities you connected — either all the cities of one color, or one in each color. You can score bonus points by having houses in all the cities of a color region, but also by having at least one in almost all the regions. Building long routes also scores you bonuses. One clever touch is that the bonus chips are stacked with the highest bonus points on top — first player to get all the purples scores 3 points, the next only gets 2, etc.

Having read The Crying of Lot 49 didn’t really help me any. I did start out strong, grabbing a 7-spot route and the 3-point purple territory chip, then the 5-point gray chip, early on, but having specialized in colors left me with fewer options late in the game, and two other players caught up. The scores wound up 19, 18, 18, 13, with me as one of the 18s.

Also played a two-player game of TransAmerica, which turns out to be better with more people. And I pulled out my DS and played a couple games of Meteos, which I picked up last night instead of buying a Wii.

I also picked up Brain Boost: Gamma Wave last night, hoping I’d like it more than Brain Age. The Brain Boost line of games is supposed to train your mental abilities, but each game develops a particular skill. Beta Wave trains concentration, but I figured I can already concentrate pretty well when I’m interested in something. My memory is slipping as I get older, and that’s what Gamma Wave is supposed to help. And eventually it should turn me into this guy.

I grind through dozens of web pages so you don't have to

• “We’re here! We’re American! Get used to it!” (via solarbird)
• Tom Disch vents his spleen at Dick and Delany (via Kip Manley)
• Sketchfighter 4000 is a 2-D spaceship shooter game (for MacOS X, $19) with pen-drawn graphics on a graph paper background — the sort of thing many of us doodled instead of paying attention in class. The pen shown on the website, also used to create the art, is the Pilot Precise, also featured in Scott McCloud’s Making Comics. (via Ceejbot)
• Dan Froomkin: On Calling Bullshit — “Calling bullshit, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. The relentless spinning is enough to make anyone dizzy, and some of our most important political battles are about competing views of reality more than they are about policy choices. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy.” (via Daring Fireball)