We Built These Cities

Titles are hard. I make board games for a living. I blog here almost every weekday. I am keenly aware that finding the right title to represent your creative work is a massive challenge. What's the perfect name that reflects what you've done, might break through the noise, intrigue the skeptical, ensure the faithful, make people crack a smile? There are countless considerations that go into a few words. And I know that plenty of times, you never quite land on the perfect ones. Still, I think there's no excusing the professional malpractice that went into naming the 2024 board game Cities.

Cities is a team-up of designers Steve Finn and Phil Walker-Harding. Together, they've created a clever little drafting game that lately is one of the most enduring and beloved types of games in my group: one that plays lightning fast (about 30 minutes, in this case) while packing more meaningful decisions than you'd expect in that amount of time.

The game is played over 8 rounds. In every round, players go around the table drafting one item at a time. By the time the round is over, they must have drafted exactly four different things, in the order of your choice:

1) A land card representing 4 squares in a cityscape. The cards place alongside one starting card you're given, forming a 3x3 arrangement of cards by the end of the game. How you place those cards as you draft them is up to you, though your later choices will soon be constrained by that 3x3 limit and the directions of your earliest choices.

2) A group of two or three building pieces. The pieces come in four colors, and must be stacked on a square of matching color on one of your land cards. You can stack pieces up to four high, creating skyscrapers in blue, red, yellow, and green.

3) Tiles that fill other squares on your cards. They might be decorations for parks, or activities in the water. For either of these, a diversity of features scores better at the end of the game. They might also convert a color-locked building site to "wild," allowing you to later construct a building of any color there.

4) A card with an endgame scoring condition. It might give you points for every square in your largest single park area, points for every yellow skyscraper exactly 3 pieces tall, points for every complete set of the four colors of buildings... or a variety of other things.

Each of these four things relates closely to the others. Once you have a particular endgame scoring card, you might be driven to want buildings of a particular color. The land cards you've chosen might leave you flush with empty park spaces, making you seek tiles with features to fill them. The game is not so complex (for the savvy gamer, at least) that these connections are unmanageable. But even if you know exactly what you want, that's where the drafting mechanism kicks in to make you think harder.

You must take exactly one of each of the four things every round. Maybe there are two endgame cards that both suit your developing city perfectly? You must choose. What if none of the city cards seems critical to your plans this round? Can you find one that might give you better options in the future?

More challenging still is when there's something you know you want in more than one of the categories. If you take that group of building pieces (that are all the perfect color) now, will that endgame scoring card (that's also perfect) still be there when the draft comes back around to you? Say you glance over at your opponents' cities, and see that two of them already have that park decoration you desperately want. Is it worth risking that your last opponent won't draft it this time around, so that you can instead grab the perfect land card now?

In a handful of plays of Cities, I have found every time that the game presents me with a steady stream of choices. Perhaps none offer the tremendous depth of a more advanced, hour-plus game... but neither do they cause the paralyzing indecision those games sometimes invite. And there's nice replayability to Cities as well; the game comes with what essentially are "scenarios" representing different major cities of the world. Each one lays out three different conditions where players race to be the first, second, or third to reach them to score bonus points (each condition evocative of a real-world feature of the city).

That name, though. Cities. It's hard to think of a less memorable, less internet-searchable, less compelling title. I've played the game perhaps half a dozen times now, yet still, when I suggest "want to play Cities?", I get blank stares and have to show people the picture of the pieces on the back of the box before they go "oh, that game!" Any time I've talked with a fellow gamer about what I've been playing lately, if I mention Cities, they answer "I've never heard of it." I'm not necessarily holding Cities up as a top game of all time, but it's a game that deserves a better title, for sure.

If you're looking for a speedy game to kick off a game night -- or perhaps a good "one more game" when you're tired but not yet ready to completely turn off your brain? Cities might fill that niche. That is, ssuming you can remember the name of it after you've finished reading this. I give it a B+.

Enterprise Flashback: The Crossing

Star Trek has a long history of "possessed by an alien" stories. Enterprise served up its own take in "The Crossing."

Enterprise encounters a race of non-corporeal "wisps" that seek to inhabit the bodies of Enterprise crewmembers and experience physical reality. But when it appears these aliens might be looking for more than a temporary exchange, the crew finds themselves fighting an invasion.

I find this to be a bit of an awkward episode for Star Trek. Our crew is exploring space to seek out new life and new civilizations... yet when the encounter a truly different one here, Archer immediately doesn't trust it and doesn't want to explore. And while his caution and skepticism is arguably more realistic than most Star Trek, the fact he turns out to be right -- and that these aliens turn out to be hostile -- kind of undermines the core values of a best Star Trek stories.

The logic governing these aliens feels very conveniently particular. They once had corporeal bodies, which is meant to explain why they have a physical spaceship. But they've been "wisps" for so long that they've forgotten most of what physical existence feels like. So how is it that their spaceship is only now critically breaking down? It seems to take no effort for them to displace a human consciousness (only Phlox is immune)... and yet they don't simply take what they want; no reason is ever given for their initial ruse. Or for them only ever taking control of part of the crew. Or for them not possessing Archer when he poses the biggest threat to their plans.

In particular, one "rule" we're given about the alien possessions is hard to overlook when its broken later. Travis learns by accident that the wisps can't go into the engine nacelle (allowing the production to reuse that expensive catwalk set). Except then Trip becomes possessed without ever leaving the catwalk, and remains possessed while inside it.

Whenever a human is possessed by one of the aliens, they act wildly out of character. On the good side, that allows most of the cast a chance to give a distinctly different performance. On the bad side, it makes you wonder why our heroes ever bother building an "alien possession detector" when it's immediately obvious who isn't acting normal. And on the worse side, a plot element involving a possessed Reed threatening sexual violence against T'Pol is utterly unnecessary. (The alien's big "pickup" line, that he wonders what it's like to be female, is patently stupid; it could just go possess a woman.)

There are moments that play better -- most of them (as usual) involving John Billingsley as Phlox. He's the first to realize that the aliens might commander a host against their will, and is clever enough not to be fooled by a possessed Hoshi. He even gets an action sequence in the end, where he has to don a spacesuit, be talked through an engineering modification, and physically wrestle with an alien to save Enterprise. The horror movie vibes of the episode generally work too, from the distant and haunted cadence the aliens use when speaking of their non-corporeal realm to the "body snatcher" vibes of Possessed Trip stalking Phlox.

Other observations:

• Non-corporeal entities in scifi stories always want to eat food. This episode honors this tradition by putting a veritable buffet in front of Trip.

• When Travis Mayweather is running from a wisp, he darts up a classic, vertical Jefferies tube just as the original series presented.

• Possessed humans have to die for the aliens to be driven from them, which forms the basis of the plan to free them all. But Phlox sure doesn't seem to be in a hurry to get around the ship and revive everyone.

Not every Star Trek episode has to have a moral. But if you're going to just do a "cool scifi ghost story" like this, I think you have to respect the "rules" you set out for your story. The rules of "The Crossing" are rickety to begin with, and then not respected at all. With only fun performances to balance that out, I give the episode a C+.

A Familiar Ring

On several occasions, I've written about (or mentioned) The Crew -- a pair of cooperative trick-taking games. Those two games (especially Mission Deep Sea) have probably given my play group more hours of fun than any other new games of the past several years. Which is why we're open to other games in a similar space, and how we came to try out the ponderously titled The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game.

The game follows the plot of the first volume of J.R.R. Tolkien's famous fantasy trilogy. Each chapter of the book becomes a scenario in a cooperative trick-taking game. Each player chooses by draft to take on the role of particular character, each one with a specific goal to fulfill during one deal of the cards. Characters change depending on the chapter, and so certain goals persist from hand to hand, while others swing in for just a chapter or two before going away again. That, along with a number of other setup changes to accentuate story, results in a series of 20-ish scenarios for you and your friends to work through.

Any cooperative game based on taking tricks is going to have to contend with the existence of The Crew. But one of the more intriguing aspects of The Fellowship of the Ring is how it demonstrates that even small tweaks to a game system can have a major impact on the strategy of playing it. Designer Bryan Bornmueller has chosen just the right tweaks for maximum effect.

The deck of The Fellowship of the Ring is quite similar to that of The Crew: there are five suits in all -- though one has fewer cards in it than the other four. (That one being Rings, compared to Hills, Mountains, Forests, and Shadow.) But unlike The Crew, where that short suit is also the "trump suit" that beats all others, The Fellowship of the Rings has no trump suit -- just a single card, the One Ring (literally, the 1 of Rings) that can optionally win any trick into which it's played. Enthusiasts of Bridge, who have played their share of "No Trump" hands over the years, will understand the implications of this. But if you've been brought up on Hearts, Spades, Euchre, and their like, you'll quickly find that the absence of a trump suit radically changes the strategic landscape of the game.

The persistence of characters and their goals from one "chapter" to the next also makes for an interesting change from The Crew. Even when characters recur, this "up to four player" game can have more than four characters to choose from. Newly appearing characters are always required to be taken in the draft. That in turn causes repeating characters to take on new strategic ramifications. (For example: Legolas' goal to win a Forest card of a particular rank plays differently when more Elves with other Forest interactions appear on the scene.)

This game also foregoes the big innovation that made The Crew's premise of cooperative trick-taking really work in the first place: the concept of "communication." In The Crew, players had a method to signal to everyone else key information about a single card in their hand. To take the place of that concept in The Fellowship of the Ring -- thus greasing the gears for cooperation -- players are allowed to "exchange" cards before each hand. Loosely, this is bringing in the concept of passing cards (from Hearts), that was never part of The Crew. But in practice, it's a story-motivated way of helping players tailor their hands for the challenges they've drafted. Gimli always gets to exchange one card with Legolas before each hand (and vice versa). Boromir can exchange a card with any player other than Frodo. And so on.

Together, these changes -- along with some inspired ways of capturing narrative elements from Tolkien's book -- make for an experience that felt quite new and distinct to my group, which has played hundreds (if not thousands) of hands of The Crew. But is it a "Crew killer," as the gamers would say -- a game that makes you never want to play The Crew again? I'd say no. We dutifully worked our way through a chapter or two of The Fellowship of the Ring at the end of every single game night we gathered for over the course of a few months, until we finished. But now that we have? I feel we're not super likely -- at least right away -- to go back and play through the whole game again. (Whereas we've played both The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine and Mission Deep Sea each multiple times through all scenarios.)

But... would we be there immediately for the seemingly telegraphed release of a The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Trick-Taking Game? (And later, The Return of the King?) You'd better believe it. Not many games give you as much bang for your buck as this one, and I'd certainly recommend it to fans of card games or cooperative games. (Or both.) I think it's a solid B+.

Enterprise Flashback: Canamar

By halfway through the second season of Enterprise, it was clear that the series regarded Archer, T'Pol, and Trip as their core trio -- their Kirk, Spock, and McCoy -- and that they weren't terribly interested in doing much with the other characters. Some episodes feel especially lacking because of this focus. One of these is "Canamar."

When Archer and Trip are mistakenly loaded onto an alien prison transfer ship, the question is whether anyone can set things right -- and set them free -- before the vessel reaches its destination. But the situation becomes more harrowing when other prisoners aboard the transfer ship stage a breakout, and Archer and Trip must play along.

Not long ago, I was commenting that the writers of Enterprise seem to enjoy putting Trip in danger more than any other character. And if someone else is going to be with him sharing the jeopardy? Odds seem to be that'll be Archer. So right out the gate, "Canamar" is saddled with a lot of "been there, done that" weight. A lot of the episode turns on Archer playing up his piloting skills to string the fugitives along... a story that could just as easily have been given to Mayweather. Trip's role in the story is mostly to navigate delicate situations with other prisoners... a story that might have played just as well with Reed, or even Hoshi Sato (if the writers had consider the option of a co-ed prison ship).

But no, we see two of the series' most familiar characters in what feel like too-familiar situations -- chained to benches as though being put to work on oars, suffering torture at the hands of indifferent guards, playing hero in a hostage situation, lying about their identities, and more. It's not exactly that Star Trek has done this stuff to death. It's that there's no particular Star Trek spin being put on this parade of tropes. The script brushes against being Star Trek at the very end, as Archer moralizes against this alien justice system, noting that there might be many more innocent people being wrongly incarcerated. But the episode barely engaged with that notion before this climax, with just one guest character noting that they were once innocent, before actually turning to a life of crime.

We don't get much satisfaction in the B plot either, which follows Enterprise on its search for the prison transport. The characters involved never really have to do anything. There's no need to convince an alien judge of Archer and Trip's innocence, since an alien leader immediately concedes the fact. They never really have to do anything clever to stay on the trail of the prison ship; they basically just follow it without diversion from point A to point B.

What's left to enjoy are a few fun action beats, delivered with the usual panache Enterprise brings to such sequences. (Even if it does seem hokey that a blow from a pair of rigid handcuffs could knock someone out.) The episode also does well with an unlikable weasel of a character, an archetype who always appears in a prison break story. Here that comes in the form of the alien Zoumas, played by guest star Sean Whalen to distasteful, annoying perfection.

Other observations:

• In the opening scene, set inside an empty shuttlepod, CG of the time isn't quite up to believably rendering the objects floating around in zero gravity.

• After seeing the electro-shock handcuffs throughout the episode, it's satisfying to see Archer use that feature as a weapon in his final confrontation.

"Canamar" isn't so much bad as utterly forgettable. I'll give it a middle-of-the-road C.

The Devolution Will Be Televised

The Last of Us is back and currently airing its second season. But I'm here to talk about a different post-apocalyptic video game-turned-television series, Fallout.

Hundreds of years after nuclear annihilation has befallen a retro-future society, a group of survivors is sheltered in every sense of the word inside one of a series of bunkers. When raiders invade and abduct their leader, his daughter -- the resourceful but naive Lucy MacLean -- sets out to rescue him. Meanwhile, a young "squire" named Maximus tries to better his standing in the harsh, caste-driven society of the surface dwellers. An ageless, mutated "Ghoul" wanders the wastelands as an outlaw gunslinger. And the destiny of all three is intertwined.

I never played the Fallout games (I was more a fan of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series), but it seems the writers of the television series have chosen to adapt the setting of the games more than any particular main storyline. It's a sensible approach to adapting an open-world RPG for a narrative-driven format that would not tolerate "side questing." And by creating in essence three main characters, the television series isn't forced to focus on just one aspect of the setting -- it can follow several.

But of course, this approach means the average viewer is going to find some storylines more compelling than others. I was not super into the early episodes of the show, centered mostly on vault dweller Lucy, played by Ella Purnell. The show spends a lot of time reveling in her "fish out of water" qualities, challenging her politeness, forcing her into uncomfortable or outright gross situations, and generally beating her down as she learns the ways of the outside world. It's the only way for her to experience a good character arc... and yet it starts to feel repetitive awfully fast.

I was more pulled in by the story of Maximus, played by Aaron Moten -- a put-upon grunt in a military-like organization, serving as squire to an ungrateful and unworthy "knight." Like Lucy, he begins the stories with an idealized view of the world -- but his blinders come off much more quickly, before a similar sense of repetition set in for me. His storyline loses some steam later in the season, though by that point Lucy has developed in more interesting ways that allow her to take up the narrative slack.

But most of all, I was pulled in by the story of the Ghoul. At first, this was about performer more than anything else; the character is played by Walton Goggins -- who was pretty much everywhere in my TV viewing diet at the time I was finally catching up with Fallout. (He was also in season 3 of The White Lotus, the final season of The Righteous Gemstones, and voicing a character on Invincible.) Goggins had been cast as an imposing baddie with a charming wit -- basically his character from Justified, with makeup and visual effects. And if that was all his role ever was, I probably would have enjoyed it. Late in the season, however, we get more deeply into the backstory of the Ghoul, and suddenly Goggins was asked to do more than twirl his figurative mustache.

And that's pretty much how the arc of watching the series went for me. Early on, I kept watching more because my husband was enjoying it quite a bit, and I didn't dislike it enough to say "you can keep watching without me." In particular, some oddly recognizable faces in the smaller roles hinted to me that the show might be building to something better -- or at least, might be saying that a lot of video game fans wanted to be part of this; either might explain the appearances by Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Emerson, Matt Berry, Michael Rapaport, Chris Parnell, and others.

By the time the eight-episode season concluded, however, I was liking the series myself, and found myself disappointed that I couldn't forge right ahead to see what happens next. I'll need to get used to that disappointment; filming on the new season just wrapped, and lengthy post-production likely means we won't get more episodes until 2026. But that also means if you were late to Fallout like I was, you have plenty of time to check it out and see if it's for you. As I said, I thought it was a bit slow at first, but as a whole, I'd give the first season a B.

Twice the Horror

While not every horror movie is seeded with deeper meaning, the genre has a long history of social commentary. That subset of horror movie films is either being made more these days, or getting more attention; I'd heard about the recent movie Blink Twice, and wanted to check it out.

Frida is a nail artist and cocktail waitress who, along with her friend Jess, sneaks into an exclusive party being thrown by eccentric billionaire Slater King. When Frida has a chance encounter with him, and they hit it off, the two women are invited to his secluded island retreat. But once there, a darkness sets in. Strange flashes of... fear? memory? premonition?... seem to warn that terrible things are happening on the island, and that Frida may soon be fighting for her life.

This movie is the directorial debut of Zoë Kravitz, who also co-wrote the script. She definitely set out to make a message movie, and the message is one very current in the zeitgeist: basically, that if a woman in a vulnerable situation were to choose between being with a random man or a bear, she should choose the bear. Billionaire Slater King is a perfectly charming "prince" for that message, with a perfectly just-hidden sinister undercurrent.

The movie has a very interesting way of playing with narrative. Strange flashes are inserted between scenes, or even in the middle of them. It takes time for you to recognize just what's happening, and longer still to realize exactly how they fit into the story. Without getting too specific, I'll just say that they're well-considered clues to a larger mystery -- and when the "solution" arrives, it does so with the satisfying feeling of a reveal that was fairly telegraphed at every step of the way.

However, the decision to keep things close to the vest permeates all aspects of the film. There's actually a rather large cast of characters here, as many whodunnit mysteries have. But the characters don't pop in the way a whodunnit requires -- they aren't eccentric, and often seem interchangeable. The movie is relying on performance more than anything else to make you not only care about anyone, but to even keep track of them.

So casting is key. The movie trades on the fact that you'll know the actors in the secondary roles from somewhere else: Alia Shawkat, Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment, Genna Davis, Kyle McLachlan, and Adria Arjona. But it is anchored by two strong performances -- Naomi Ackie, walking a delicate line as Frida; and Channing Tatum, calibrating a balance of charm and menace, as Slater.

Blink Twice didn't blow me away -- perhaps because there have been a lot of good "message horror films" in the last decade. But it's a fun little suspense film that I'd say ranks a solid B.

Enterprise Flashback: Future Tense

Having just visited its ongoing Andorian story arc, Enterprise decided to check in on the Temporal Cold War arc with the next episode, "Future Tense."

Enterprise brings aboard a derelict one-person spacecraft, only to find a host of mysteries inside. It's larger on the inside than the outside. Its dead pilot has genetic markers of an unusual mix of alien species. And ultimately they learn: the ship comes from the future. Soon, Enterprise is pursued by several factions who want to claim the ship for themselves.

This episode is moderately entertaining, but it highlights a few things that I think are problems with the Temporal Cold War story arc as a whole. This doesn't really progress the story; by the end of the episode, everything has vanished and we're basically right back where we started. Temporal Cold War episodes seem to be a "puzzle box" only to be opened and then closed again -- not fiddled with while they're open.

All the characters tend to look extra dumb during a Temporal Cold War episode. T'Pol continues to insist that time travel is impossible, even in the face of her many experiences that demonstrate it isn't; her denial is taking on conspiracy-theorist proportions. When Trip and Reed go exploring inside the impossible alien ship, they almost specifically don't radio their progress up to Archer, so he won't find out the value of the ship for another couple of scenes. And when our heroes head to Daniels' quarters for intel from the future on their current situation, no explanation is offered as to why we aren't in there all the time for answers to our problems -- not even a flimsy moralistic explanation.

Mostly, though, my problem with Temporal Cold War episodes is that (because they don't ever advance their own story), they're pretty much just fan service, a way to get around the restrictions of this being a prequel series and have the characters all but wink straight at the audience. They speculate on whether a Vulcan/human child would have pointed ears. Archer wonders whether they've found the body of Zefram Cochrane, a tiny subplot that's there basically just to elbow fans of the original Star Trek series who know the episode "Metamorphosis."

But if you can just accept this as a roller coaster ride -- right down to the part where you'll end exactly where you began -- then there are a few thrills to take from it. Bringing the Tholians in is a bit of fan service that pays off fairly well; it's nice to use filmmaking techniques of some 35 years later on something the original series attempted. And the idea of temporal radiation causing little time loops is a fun one, and plays well in the climactic showdown (and also, satisfyingly different than The Next Generation's memorable time loop episode).

There are also a few nice character moments too. I like Reed and Trip's discussion of how they might use the ability to time travel. And I really enjoyed Phlox's scene with T'Pol, in which he points out that Denobulans believed they were the only life in the galaxy before they made first contact with aliens.

Other observations:

• When Archer first enters the mysterious ship, it's kind of ridiculous how long it takes him to notice the dead pilot sitting in the command chair -- the only object in the entire empty space.

• Doctor Who fans can feel smug knowing that show got to the idea of a ship that's bigger on the inside way before this.

• I have the memory that once the Xindi story arc began in season three of this series, they began to write Archer more and more like a George W. Bush type of leader. (They were really hitting their allegorical 9/11 nail on the head.) I feel like we get a glimpse of that here, as T'Pol offers valid reasons not to get involved in a (hypothetical) Temporal Cold War, and Archer basically just says "nope, we're doing it." He doesn't have reasons, but he's going to be the "decider." (Rewatching this series today, I long for the days when George W. Bush was the biggest imaginable dipshit in politics.)

"Future Tense" isn't exactly a bad episode, but it doesn't amount to much either. I give it a B-.