Kingkiller

Saturday Morning Musing

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I really don’t like the hype train. I’m very patient when it comes to people and obligations. When it comes to things I get excited about or that don’t have a specific wait time, I absolutely suck at waiting. Which means I hate watching trailers for movies and video games because they get me super excited for something cool and then I have to wait four months or a year or, in Breath of the Wild’s case, three years. Last week, Nintendo announced the latest Super Smash Bros. game would come out on the Switch this year and all I can do now is wait and think about it. It probably won’t come out until the holiday shopping season, but a soft release date is not very helpful to me.

I’ve never really enjoyed the anticipation portion of anything. I like knowing when stuff is going to happen and then mostly ignoring it until it is time to do something about it. This can sometimes backfire on me, as it did with the Switch, because I missed my 12-hour window to pre-order one. I managed to get on by waiting in line for 12 hours and freezing my butt off, but my life would have been better if I’d just pre-ordered it. For the most part, though, I don’t actually lose anything by avoiding stuff until right before it comes out. I got movie tickets to see Star Wars just fine. I can just go into most book stores to grab books I want. Game stores never actually run out of games these days. Steam makes pretty much every game easily available since I don’t know if it is even possible to run out of digital copies… Heck, most “physical” games are just download codes concealed inside plastic rectangles these days.

There’s only so much planning you can do for stuff like that before it starts feeding into anxiety. I already have enough trouble properly allocating my mental energy without marketing companies doing everything they can to convince me to uselessly spend mental energy on substanceless hype. I really don’t need the encouragement since I’m already to get overly invest in pretty much anything. This means I can be susceptible to marketing because it feeds into behavior I’m already prone to, so I spend a good deal of effort to stay away from marketing geared toward my interests. Which unfortunately means I miss out on a lot of things I might enjoy until long after they’re out.

Thankfully, I’ve got plenty of friends who all advocates of the hype train, so I can ask them what is coming up and get all my gaming news without any of the hype beyond their excitement. Books are a little bit easier to follow on my own because there isn’t as much energy put into marketing them via excitement like there is for video games and movies. Most of the time, we just get news from conventions or author blogs, such as Patrick Rothfuss confirming that The Kingkiller Chronicles trilogy is actually just the beginning of the story. Which I am super excited about, because it means I was right to suspect that there was too much left unanswered at the end of Wise Man’s Fears to wrap up in one book. I love the series, so I am excited to hear there will be more books, but there is no urgency behind this. We don’t even have a release date for the book that was for-sure happening, Stone Doors, so information like this is close to news than marketing.

Honestly, even if I do miss out on things sometimes, I feel a lot better when my life isn’t full of a constant stream of advertisements, marketing promotions, and pitches for things that I probably want. It is a lot easier to focus on what I am doing and what I already have to enjoy when I’m not being bombarded by what I don’t have. Inner peace, and all that.

Tabletop Highlight: Tak

Chris Leave a comment

I love strategy games. I was in the Chess Club during high school and enjoyed learning to play Go in college. I ran out of people willing to play with me before I ran out of willingness to play either of these timeless classics. I’ve always been on the lookout for new games like those, but most of them wind up being fun but lacking in complexity. I’d wind up with one or two winning strategies I could pretty much rely on and I would soon start to miss the variety of play that Go and Chess afforded.

One the other loves of my life is books by Patrick Rothfuss (Primarily the Kingkiller Chronicles, since I feel his “children’s” books lack the narrative complexity I prefer). In one of his books, Wise Man’s Fear, the protagonist (Kvothe) is introduced to a popular strategy game and taught at least a little bit of the larger strategy of it by repeatedly getting his ass handed to him. His tutor, a noble who has been kind enough to also teach him some of the rules of the particular high society Kvothe has found himself in, wants to play a “beautiful game” rather than simply win and highlights the differences for Kvothe. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t actually go into enough detail to learn to play the game. Fortunately, Patrick Rothfuss teamed up with an excellent game creator so that we could all learn to play it and buy really cool board/piece sets.

Tak, as the game is called, is conceptually simple. Build a road of your tiles from one edge of your game board to the opposite. The board can be any size beyond 4×4, and the number of pieces available to each player changes accordingly. The larger the board you’re using, the more complex the game you can play. In addition to the horizon “road” tiles, you can place them vertically for “standing stone” pillars that prevent the other player from moving or building their road through that square. On your turn, you can choose to move any tile or pillar you’ve placed to an adjacent square, placing it on top of anything but standing stone pillars. Once you’ve made a stack, whoever controls the piece on the top of the stack controls the stack. Once you get beyond 4×4 boards, you get a piece called a “capstone” that is like a super pillar capable of flattening standing stones into road tiles.

The strategy required to build your road grows in complexity and potential cleverness as the size of the board increase. While I can see how some brutal math and efficient use of tiles and pillars could easily net anyone a win, I can also see what Patrick Rothfuss’ characters spoke about in his book. I want to play a beautiful game, with clever tricks and a victory that snatches a win from the jaws of defeat. I have already played a few games that saw me win by unforeseen means, completely shocking my opponent as I unfold my route to victory. I’ve also played the brutal, fast matches. If either player starts playing like that and is halfway decent, there’s no way you can win other than to play just as brutally. A beautiful game requires two participants and I’ll admit I’m lacking in a good foe.

Not because I’m better than everyone else–I’ve got about a 60% win rate, so I’m hardly undefeated–but because I’ve yet to find someone who is willing to put in the time and effort to learn the game to the degree one would need to in order to start using some of the more clever strategies. I’ve yet again run into the issue of not having enough willing opponents to enjoy an excellent strategy game.

Which Tak certainly is. I don’t know if it will remain as timeless as Chess and Go are, but I can definitely see myself enjoying this game for years to come. You can play it with pretty much whatever pieces you want and an imaginary board once you know the rules. Or you can buy yourself one of a variety of very nice Tak sets here.