Minecraft Legos

From the Department of Redundancy Department. Lego is producing an official Minescape Lego product, which will be completely different from regular Lego because it will say "Minecraft" on the box. And maybe come with a Creeper face decal.

Lego CUUSOO is a site that allows people to post ideas for Lego projects, and if they get enough votes (and pass review), Lego will produce that product. Minecraft passed the 10,000 vote mark and the review process, and "we are now developing a concept that celebrates the best aspects of building with the LEGO system and in Minecraft and we can’t wait to show it to you—but we aren’t ready just yet. These things take time, so we appreciate your patience. More details are to come."

h/t Penny Arcade

Do We Already Have a Skyrim Killer?

It's called Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and it looks amazing.

Gibraltar Chess Festival Gets a Stamp

The Gibraltar Chess Festival has become one of the premiere events on the chess calender, drawing some of the top talent to the Rock for 10 days, from 24th January to 2nd February, 2012. For the tenth anniversary, they're issuing a set of stamps depicting classic games from past years:

The games featured on the stamps have been specially chosen as representing the best of the many thousands contested in Gibraltar over the past decade. All the players shown are grandmasters. Two are women. Pia Cramling (Sweden) has played in all ten Gibraltar festivals, while Natalia Zhukova (Ukraine) won the top female award in 2010. Michael Adams, Nigel Short (both England) and Vassily Ivanchuk (Ukraine) are all former Gibraltar champions. Viktor Bologan (Moldova) and Fabiano Caruana (Italy) are elite players with aggressive styles popular with the public. Chess legend Viktor Korchnoi (Switzerland) fought two World Championship matches with arch-rival Anatoly Karpov.

My children were puzzled when they first learned about stamp collecting. I explained that it was something we had to do before fun was invented.

You can follow the Gibraltar games live if you like.

h/t: Wayne Schmittberger

Star Wars: The Exquisite Corpse Version

This is about to go very viral, very fast. Star Wars Uncut divided the entire original movie into 15-second intervals. Fans from around the world claimed each of those intervals and made their own versions of those 15 seconds. These were then stitched back together into an entire film.

Why post it on a game site? Because it is, essentially, a high tech variation on the parlor game called exquisite corpse, in which someone makes a drawing, folds the paper so only the edge of the drawing can be seen, and then others continue the drawing without reference to the entire picture. The result looks like this:

Drawing by Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Max Morise, Joan Miró, c. 1926.

Star Wars has such profound cultural capital that everyone can understand these moments no matter how crudely recreated, and they flow together into a surreal, ever-shifting, experience. It's almost impossible to watch all at once, but there are real moments of genius here and there. It is Star Wars re-imagined by the hive-mind of the internet fan community.

January 18th: Stop SOPA Day

Minecraft has become the latest site pledging to go dark for 24 hours on January 18th in protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) & Protect IP Act (PIPA) currently making their way through the US legislature. Notch tweeted the following message a few hours ago:

Decided. We'll silently take down http://minecraft.net and http://mojang.com on the 18th in protest of SOPA.

A number of sites are planning to shut down in order to protest the new law, which is supposedly designed to thwart copyright violations and pirating. Similar hairbrained schemes crop up now and then and need to be smacked back down with great force, Whack-a-Mole-style.

I have little confidence in our government's ability to do almost anything right that doesn't involve really cool weapons, and the idea of opening the technological infrastructure of the entire internet to their meddling is sheer madness. Standford Law Review has a good summary of the problems with the law, and the Wiki entry also fills in some details. SOPA/PIPA is yet another bone thrown to the toxic mix of trial lawyers, lobbyists, and media conglomerates, and will only serve to cripple the continued growth of the internet and stifle free speech. 

 

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Xbox Workers Threaten Suicide in China

It doesn't seem like the most effective way to keep your job, but the subtleties of Chinese labor negotiations are lost on my Western Imperialist mind.

Dozens of workers assembling Xbox video game consoles climbed to a factory dormitory roof, and some threatened to jump to their deaths, in a dispute over job transfers that was defused but highlights growing labor unrest as China's economy slows.

The dispute was set off after contract manufacturer Foxconn Technology Group announced it would close the assembly line for Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 models at its plant in the central city of Wuhan and transfer the workers to other jobs, workers and Foxconn said Thursday.

Also of note: the writing at Associated Press (and, frankly, all mainstream journalism) just keeps getting worse and worse. I wrote better than this for my high-school newspaper: "The site previously had a couple of suicides or attempted ones a couple years back, prompting the government to take over the operations of the dormitories, said Wang, the equipment engineer."

ToneMatrix: Your Amazing Time-Waster of the Day

The developer describes ToneMatrix as a "simple sinewave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer. Each triggered step causes a force on the underlaying wave-map, which makes it more cute." It's the work of Andre Michelle, and it's flat-out amazing in its addictive simplicity. If he converts this to a mobile app, he'll make a pot of money.

I found this one courtesy of my National Catholic Register colleague Simcha Fisher, the irritant who helps little grains of sand become wondrous pearls, whether we want to or not.

Strange Stories of an Accused Spy

Amir Hekmati

On Monday, January 9th, Iran's Revolutionary Court found 29-year-old Amir Hekmati "Corrupt on Earth and Mohareb,” and sentenced him to death as a US spy. (“Mohareb” is legal term identifying a defendant as someone who is waging war against God, or God and the State.) The verdict against Hekmati, a US citizen, is creating an international incident, but the story Hekmati tells in his “confession” is a strange tale of the CIA using games to influence popular opinion.

Amir Hekmati was born in Arizona to Iranian parents, and graduated from high school in Michigan. In his confession, he claims to have entered the US military in 2001, where he was trained and deployed as an interpreter because of his familiarity with the Farsi language. The US military regularly uses Iranian-Americans as translators in Afghanistan because Farsi is spoken in both countries.

After serving in Iraq for several months (the confession claims), Hekmati went to work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is a super-secret group that is described, on their publicly-available website, as being established in 1958 “to prevent strategic surprise from negatively impacting U.S. national security and create strategic surprise for U.S. adversaries by maintaining the technological superiority of the U.S. military.” DARPA is, essentially, a high-tech R&D contractor for the US Department of Defense.

Now, here’s where things get weird. In the interest of just reporting the facts as stated, this is what Hekmati said in a confession broadcast on Iranian state television and obtained, we are certain, without any coercion, threats, or use physical force:

“After DARPA, I was recruited by Kuma Games Company, a computer games company which received money from CIA to design and make special films and computer games to change the public opinion’s mindset in the Middle East and distribute them among Middle East residents free of charge. The goal of Kuma Games was to convince the people of the world and Iraq that what the US does in Iraq and other countries is good and acceptable. The head of Kuma called me and said I have received your resume from DARPA, and we have a program in which you can help us. It [Kuma] was also a cover for the CIA and only the chief of company knows that you're working with the agency.”

Hekmati’s father, Ali, a professor of microbiology at Mitt College in Flint, Michigan, contradicts this version of events. He told the UK Telegraph that his son was in Iran visiting his grandparents. "He is not a spy. It's a whole bunch of lies on my good son. They have lied about any American ... captured in Iran for visiting or tourism, or for any other reason. The first two weeks went without incident. The third week in Tehran, some people visited him and took him away. Nobody heard from him in the next three months."

Kuma Reality Games was founded in 2004, and is based in New York. They are best known for a series of poorly-regarded downloadable military first-person shooters, often with a “ripped from the headlines” premise. Users can download new episodes containing missions such as the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. They’re also responsible for Dinohunters, a game of almost sublime awfulness. One of their few innovations is the use of sponsored advertising in free games.

Some of Kuma’s shooters may well be intended for the military, which often uses software for recruitment and training purposes. In 2006, Keith Halper, the head of Kuma, admitted to Kotaku.com that Kuma created training simulations for the US Army.

Dionohunters (Kuma Games) was created by the CIA
to convince Iranians that the US has an elite force of
dinosaurs on flying scooters equipped with machine guns.

Kuma also releases a steady stream of machinima, which are short films created using game engines. Some of these are just silly or promotional, while others depict military operations. The tone of the military shooters is sober and undeniably pro-American, with coalition soldiers shown taking down terrorist targets or conducting important military operations. It’s not particularly hard to see it as a coordinated propaganda effort, but it’s also not hard to see it as yet another military shooter with a Western/American point of view. Aside from its use of contemporary missions, nothing about Kuma’s work stands out one way or another.

The uniquely peculiar part about the “trial” of Hekmati is that the main charge against him was not for his work—real or not—with Kuma, but for working in Iran as a CIA spy. He was allegedly ordered to give Iranian Intelligence good information in order to get their trust, and then to start providing them with misinformation. He was allegedly captured before he could begin this alleged mission.

Of course, this version of events would ask us to believe that Hekmati’s employment at a company producing widely-available pro-American propaganda was merely cover for his role as a CIA agent, which would be a rather curious way of approaching a covert operation.

Although Iranian death sentences are usually carried out quickly and brutally, it’s more likely than Hekmati will be kept alive and used as a pawn in the ongoing geopolitical struggle between Iran and the West. 

Written for Games Magazine

Wizards of the Coast to Revamp D&D Yet Again

An interesting email just popped into my box, and I was thinking about headlining it "Wizards of the Coast Prepairing to Break D&D and Blame You."  All I have to say to WotC is this: D&D 4.0 is just fine, Encounters is a great initiative, the boardgames are good, and Pathfinder is out there for anyone who still wants the 3.5 experience. For the love of God, please STOP!

I mean, how many people would really prefer to go back to 3.5 via Pathfinder? Let's just toddle over to Amazon and take a look at the sales charts to see what people are buying  ...

... well ...

... that was awkward.

The release Wizards sent to the press today is after this-here jump:

Yeaaaah! Skyrim Gets a Little Macho Magic

I was going to title this one, "Snap Into a Skyrim," but Kotaku beat me to it. A Skyrim mod in which dragons are replaced with the late, great pro wrestler Macho Man Randy Savage? Yeah, that's awesome.

REVIEW: Skyrim

I've reviewed Skyrim twice and written two editorials about it, and still keep on playing, logging something like 90 hours or so in total. That may seem like a ridiculous commitment for a game, but remember that a long-running TV show (like Lost, the last thing I followed with any enthusiasm) runs about 100 hours, and Skyrim is every bit as rich and varied as Lost. 

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is vast. It is epic. It achieves moments of grandeur unlike anything I have encountered in three decades of roleplaying, both conventional and electronic. Yes, it is flawed in places, but these are the flaws of a system that occasionally breaks down under the immense strain created by pushing current technology to its very limits.

Players familiar with its immediate predecessors from Bethesda Softworks—The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3—will see much that is familiar, on the surface. This is a still an open-world, action-oriented RPG, heavy on dialog and filled with quests, places to go and things to kill.

But everything is simply better this time around. The potential hinted at in Oblivion and developed further in Fallout 3 is now fully manifested in Skyrim. Bethesda has created a dynamic, highly-developed fantasy world populated with an immensely diverse selection of characters and spread across the most fully realized landscape ever seen in an electronic game.

There is much to love in Skyrim, but the biggest star of the show isn’t the graphics, the story, the character, or even the gameplay, but Skyrim itself. This world just cries out for exploration, from its sunlit valleys to its frozen mountain peeks, from the depths of monster-haunted dungeons to the frozen plains where peaceful giants (deadly if provoked) act as shepherds for wooly mammoths. Farms, homesteads, fortresses, and ancient ruins dot the landscape, beckoning travelers. The different cities each have a unique character and even a socioeconomic profile, from grand imperial seats to squalid, poverty-blighted areas where thieves and cutthroats lurk in shadows. Never has a fantasy world been so thoroughly and appealingly realized in a video or computer game, not even World of Warcraft.

Within this world, the NPCs (non-player characters) go about their lives in a more dynamic way that we’ve ever seen, farming, trading, crafting, stealing, drinking, brawling, flirting, and just living out their lives. It’s hard to tell just how dynamic the economic model really is, but there’s no question that the fortunes of people and locations fluctuate with time and the actions of the player. Driving off a threat helps a town or city return to normal, and people’s actions and moods change accordingly.

Skyrim is not a true sequel to Oblivion, but a new series set in the same world. The action picks up 200 years after the end of Oblivion. The Empire has begun to recede, and with the assassination of the High King of the Skyrim region, the area is slowly descending into chaos and civil war. The natives of Skyrim, known as the Nords, are divided into various camps: those who want to remain in the Empire, those who want out, those who want to manipulate either side for power, and those who just want to keep their heads down and avoid trouble.

You begin the game by choosing a race and appearance for your character. This doesn’t effect the plotline of the game, but it does effect interactions with individual characters. The world of Skyrim is highly race-conscious, with xenophobia leading to inevitable conflict. Whatever race you choose, you start the game as a prisoner on his way to execution, suspected of being a member of the rebel group known as the Stormcloaks. The execution is interrupted by the shocking reappearance of dragons, which had long since vanished from the land.

From there, you learn that you are yourself “Dragonborn,” meaning you are able to speak the “language” of dragons. Known as “shouts,” this dragon language enables you to harness incredible power, but also marks you as someone destined to play a major role in the fate of Skyrim. Soon, you find yourself meeting a wide array of people and factions, each with their own needs and agendas. People appear offering opportunities for adventure, treasure, and a chance to uncover the mystery of the return of the dragons. Some are just folks who need your help, and you can assist them or not depending upon your desires.

Factions are groups that provide certain benefits and potentially align you with certain forces. You can join the Empire or rebellion, become an assassin or thief, rise to be Archmage of the magical college, or follow any number of other paths to carve out a unique career in the world of Skyrim. Impress the local leader, and you can even buy a home and decorate it.

The Dragonborn mystery is really the central plotline of Skyrim, but you can pick it up or drop as you please. The difficulty level scales along with your skill level, so no matter what order you tackle missions, the strength of the enemies will match your character’s abilities. No matter how you approach the Dragonborn plot, dragons will appear throughout the world. These dragon battles are large and somewhat challenging, but not so difficult as to become frustrating. Plus, at the end of each battle, you absorb the soul of the defeated dragon, thus adding more opportunities to expand your selection of shouts.

The combat mechanics are quite simple but provide for ample flexibility. Each of your character’s hands is bound to a button and can be assigned a weapon, shield, or spell. Favorite spells and gear can be called up while the game pauses, allowing you to cast a spell, switch to weapon and shield, and then switch back to a spell, with each hand acting independently. The spells themselves come in a wide array of categories, such as healing, summoning, attacks, traps, and more. The game also features an incredibly robust crafting element that allows you to make, improve, and sell all manner of items from armor to potions.

A character earns points towards his next level as he performs tasks and defeats foes, and with each new level comes one “perk” point. These perks are a complex matrix of enhancements to various skills, adding bonuses and new abilities in order to gradually customize your character around your style of play. Thus, you can spend points to enhance anything from haggling and lockpicking to shield bashing, sword skills, and spell power. As these points are spent, each character develops a unique set of abilities.

The flaws in Skyrim are intermittent and mostly technical. The game crashes occasionally on all platforms, and there are graphical glitches aplenty. Frankly, for a game of this size and complexity, I expected far more of these problems than I found, and the ones I did encounter rarely had a huge impact on the overall experience. I’ve seen far worse in far less ambitious games.

And this is an ambitious game, perhaps moreso than any other open world game yet created. It is a masterpiece of worldbuilding and epic storytelling, rich in content and featuring an immense amount of gameplay. It’s impossible to say how long it would take to see and do everything in the game, but Bethesda has claimed 300 hours of potential gameplay. It’s easy to believe. This is a monster of a game, and a masterpiece of interactive art.

Welcome to a New Year of Gaming

Good Lord, has it been a month already? These festive seasons sure do take their toll. Between finishing a semester in graduate school, work, and fending off an evil, soul-sucking mortgage company, it's been all I can do to get from dawn to dusk with my usual 3 hour nap and 2 hour martini break in between.

Seriously, though, I've been going through almost stratospheric levels of stress lately, and it's taken a toll on my writing, my health, and my sanity (which some would claim was already pretty fragile)(and by "some" I mean mostly my mother). It's also cut deeply into the extra gaming time, which is what (in theory) makes State of Play more than just a repository for my print writing. Board and card game play has fallen off a cliff, and it's all I can do to write for work while still leaving time to live a full and happy life as a High Elf Werewolf Companion Archmage Thief Legionnaire with two houses, a wife, a couple of housecarls, some daedra, and a horse with a unquenchable desire to charge into every dragon encounter and promptly get either barbecued, frozen, or eaten.

(I've been through 6 horses, and my daughter is running out of chocolate-themed names to give them. We've had Chocolate, Hershey, Snickers, Musketeer (he lasted about an hour--tried to stomp a bear to death--failed), Reeses, and M&M, and I'm afraid I'm about to wind up with M&M With Peanuts, which is just all kinds of wrong.  Why the chocolate names? Because Bethesda, which has populated Skyrim with hundreds of unique creatures, seems incapable of making a horse in any color but "brown", and I sold naming rights to my horses to a 10-year-old girl in exchange for leftover Halloween candy.)

So am I abandoning State of Play? Nope. I'm still here. Just slowing down while life kind of reforms around me. I'm increasing my school schedule and my non-game writing, and still working my way through the insanely ill-conceived and horribly implemented HAMP process. That means posting will be intermittent, but I've put down a fairly solid footprint here and don't intend to abandon it. 

And I'm looking forward to a new year of gaming. I have a stack of good stuff waiting for the table, and the electronic platforms have been an absurdly rich banquet of high-quality titles. I'm about to post my review of the most high-qualityist of them all right after this, so stay tuned.

INTERVIEW: Alf Seegert Takes the Road to Canterbury

Alf Seegert and friend playing Road to Canterbury

I don't recall when I first heard about The Road to Canterbury, but I knew I had to have it. I'm a huge fans of Middle English literature in general and Chaucer in particular, and was a member of the New Chaucer Society for a time. There's something in the strange beauty of the language, at once alien and familiar, that makes Middle English remarkably appealing. The Canterbury Tales in particular pulse with life and meaning, capturing a huge range of styles and emotions from highly cultivated to utterly base. (If the language is a real obstacle for you, just pick up a decent translation, such as David Wright's from Oxford World Classics rather than the newer one from Burton Raffel. It's worth taking the time to learn the original language, but if it's between a translation and nothing, then read a translation.)

Regular readers of SOP will know that I've covered the game several times since I first learned about it, but I like to have a number of plays before I commit to a final review. Short version: it's very good! A longer version will have to wait until it gets to the table at least one or two more times.

Recently, I got a chance to sit down with designer Alf Seegert (and by "sit down" I mean that we were both sitting at our computers at opposite ends of the country doing an email interview) to talk about his career and his latest game.

Alf's first two games, Bridge Troll (Z-Man games, $25) and Trollhalla (Z-Man Games, $50), each made the Games 100, and his newest game, The Road to Canterbury (Eagle Games, $60) is heading for the list as well., Seegert, a professor of English at the University of Utah, started designing game 10 years ago, and five of his early designs were finalists at the annual Hippodice board game design competition in Bochum, Germany: The Vapors of Delphi (2nd place, 2004), Bridge Troll (end-round finalist, 2005 -- later published by Z-Man Games), Ziggurat (end-round finalist, 2005), Mont-Saint Michel (end-round "Recommended Title," 2007), and TEMBO (3rd place, 2008 -- later published by Z-Man Games as Trollhalla). With Road to Canterbury, Seegert finally gets to merge his love of literature with his love of gaming, offering a unique take on Chaucer’s famous tales of garrulous pilgrims on their way to Canterbury.

Give us a bit of your gamer biography. What genres and styles have appealed to you throughout your life?

I didn’t become completely captivated by games until I was a teenager, when fantasy role-playing systems like Dungeons & Dragons and Tunnels & Trolls became a safe-haven for me. I loved Milton Bradley's electronic board game Dark Tower and in ninth grade I programmed a version of it into the high school mainframe computer (I used little monochrome ASCII characters to represent each player, the Tombs, the Bazaar, etc.). But except for an occasional session of the fantasy game Talisman, I didn't play many board games again until I hit thirty. I was spending a lot of time by myself playing computer games--and my girlfriend (now my wife) wanted me to play games with her instead. We did some research and stumbled on The Settlers of Catan, which proved a potent gateway drug into the brave new world (well, new to us) of Eurogames. Once we introduced Catan to our friends, Saturday nights quickly became a regular and much-anticipated “game night” event, which has continued now for over ten years.

What prompted you to make the leap from player to designer?

After encountering the brave new world of Eurogames, it wasn’t long before I felt compelled to take themes that interested me and make board games out of them. Sometimes it worked. Before long, I had several prototypes based on everything from geology to archaeoastronomy to ancient mythology to fairy tales. I sent some of my better designs to the Hippodice board game design competition in Bochum, Germany where several became finalists. With help from my fellow designers in the Board Game Designers Guild of Utah (www.bgdg.info), eventually I was able to interest major publishers in my designs and I’m on my way to my fourth published game as we speak.

Tell us a bit about your first published games, Bridge Troll and Trollhalla. How would characterize them, and what let to their development and publication? Also: what's with the troll thing?

I had encountered a sculpture in downtown Salt Lake City showing a Navajo woman leading sheep across a narrow bridge. I thought to myself how fun (and silly) it would be to put one of those wild-haired Scandinavian “Troll Dolls” beneath it, in homage to the fairy tale of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” Somehow the idea of actually playing one of these trolls became very appealing to me. In Bridge Troll you get to play as a troll who eats and extorts the travelers who try to cross your bridge. In Trollhalla I took these trolls out to sea where they became Viking-like marauders out to pillage and plunder islands full of pigs and peasants, nervous monks, and panicked princesses. Although these are both Eurostyle board games, they feel a bit like role-playing games to me because the players actually get to play the monsters. Part of my fascination with trolls was instilled in me during childhood by my Danish mother, who was convinced that scary trolls lived beneath the bridge in her hometown. Trolls are big in Scandinavia!

What elements of The Canterbury Tales made you think they might make a good theme for a game? Were you concerned that some might be bothered by the religious satire?

I grew up on British comedies like Monty Python and Black Adder, and I see both of them as inspired by Chaucer’s irreverence six hundred years on. In The Canterbury Tales, a company of medieval pilgrims journeys together from the Tabard Inn at the outskirts of London to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, entertaining each other with stories along the way. Some of these tales are incredibly bawdy (and very funny). Many challenge existing social hierarchies and expose the hypocrisy of those who supposedly represent God and the church. Satire is a useful tool for cultural critique, and Chaucer was a Christian genuinely disturbed by religious corruption—and he found humor a better (and safer) vehicle for critique than direct denunciation. I thought it would be fun to make a humorous and “Chaucerian” game inspired by Chaucer’s own work. In The Road to Canterbury you play a greedy pardoner, and to succeed in filling your coin purse, you need to pardon pilgrims’ sins for quick cash. But to keep yourself in business you also have to tempt pilgrims to commit these very sins in the first place! You will bring along a special supply of bogus relics like “The Miraculous Moustache of Saint Wilgefortis” (a female, I might add) to help the pilgrim drive away unwanted sins and the like. So far, it appears that the theme of my game is sufficiently absurd that it draws more laughter than ire, even from the religiously inclined.

How does the theme mesh with the mechanics of play?

The game combines hand management, area control, and press-your luck mechanics: you must always make tough choices on whether to tempt a pilgrim to sin or to collect coins by pardoning sins in play. The catch is that the value of pardoned sins increases geometrically as the Sin cards accumulate, so you are “tempted” to let them really pile up—although doing so risks another player beating you to the punch! You can also cleverly play Relic cards to add some chaos to the game and deviously foil your opponents’ plans. I’ve put together a little Flash tutorial to help new players get a grip on how it all works at www.theroadtocanterbury.com

How did you choose the art and develop the aesthetic elements of the game?

A few years ago I stumbled upon Hieronymus Bosch’s tabletop painting The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things. Bosch’s deranged and demonic imagery and the rondel-style circle in the middle of the tabletop made me think that his painting might serve well as a game board, so I attempted a “posthumous collaboration.” It seems to have worked very well! Players say they love Bosch’s art on the board and on the Sin Cards, which give close-up images of Bosch’s representation of each individual “Deadly Sin.” I am a professor of English, so it was only natural to bring in seven pilgrims from The Canterbury Tales to create an unnatural Bosch-Chaucer hybrid. Each pilgrim has their own “favorite sin”: the Knight suffers from Pride, the Miller from Wrath, the Monk from Gluttony, etc., and for these illustrations Gryphon Games secured images from the early 15th Century Ellesmere Manuscript of The Canterbury Tales. The game’s “fine art” approach made it a suitable successor to Gryphon’s recent game Pastiche.

I understand you've achieved some measure of fame as a bad writer. What is the worst sentence you've ever written?

Well, my “claims to fame” in fiction writing are indeed all bad fiction entries in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, where the goal is to compose the worst opening sentence to a novel. I have scored several “Dishonorable Mentions” so far. My most efficient example is this one:

“The Zinfandel poured pinkly from the bottle, like a stream of urine seven hours after eating a bowl of borscht.”

And here is my best attempt to write an entire story in the self-enclosing style of Borges in a single sentence:

“Wet leaves stuck to the spinning wagon wheels like feathers to a freshly tarred heretic, reminding those who watched them of the endless movement of the leafy earth--or so they would have, if only those fifteenth-century onlookers had believed that the earth actually rotated, which they didn't, which is why it was heretical to say that it did--and which is the reason why the wagon held a freshly tarred heretic in the first place.”

The Lewis Chessmen in New York

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is hosting the Lewis Chessmen until April 22, 2012. Thirty of the 78 pieces will be on display in the Romanesque Hall at the Cloisters. It's rare for such a large chunk of the collection to appear outside of the UK.

The Lewis Chessmen are the most significant game pieces ever discovered. They almost certainly were made in Norway in the 12 century, and then shipped west for sale to the upper classes of the British Isles. Carved from walrus tusks, their beautiful craftsmanship and unusual designs have captivated people since their discovery in 1831 on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland. 

The figures were part of a hoard buried in the sand, and including pieces from at least 5 chess sets, pieces for the game of Tables, and a buckle. This Salon story plays up the "mystery" angle, but there really isn't anything mysterious about them. Beautiful? Impressive? Important? Yes. But there's no real need to turn it into a mystery story. The Baghdad Battery is mysterious. The Lewis Chessmen were cargo retrieved from a shipwreck, and perhaps buried with plans for later retrieval. All the other stories are purely for the tourists. 

My personal favorite has always been the berserker biting his shield (a Rook, shown above), his eyes wide with lunatic rage in the full fever of a battle frenzy. The pieces are the rarest kind of game art, mixing humor, pathos, stateliness, satire, and perhaps even political commentary. (This doesn't look like the image of a King which a king would endorse.)  

Then, of course, there's the Queen (shown at right). She's not sure why you just did what you did, but she's really disappointed with you.

We'll never know the name of their craftsman, now dead and forgotten nine centuries ago, but he was an artist of the first order. Get to the Met and see for yourself. It's a rare opportunity.

H/T: Thanks to the Accordeonaire extraordinaire Gary Chapin for the tip.