Good Taste

Every so often, a board game tries to capture some of the flavor of a different kind of game. Years ago, I wrote about Potion Explosion, which was a kinda-sorta take on Candy Crush. Now I've come upon Tasty Humans, by designer Ryan Langewisch -- a game that's kinda-sorta Tetris.

Each player takes on the role of a ravenous monster marauding through a medieval village. With each turn, you eat one of the townsfolk, placing them in your gradually-filling stomach. Each villager arrives at your mouth as a pattern of body part tokens, which you must then "drop" into a column of your grid-ordered stomach. They settle to the bottom -- in a way that, if you've done your planning right, maximizes points for your particular set of scoring conditions.

There are plenty of "polyomino" games about arranging interestingly-shaped pieces on a game board; it's not the shapes alone that make a game feel like Tetris. But having them "fall into place" as they do here definitely evokes that feeling. There's a lot more to it, to be sure. The shape of the villager doesn't land "intact" -- it's an arrangement of single squares that will collapse at the bottom of your stomach into the most compact form possible. You're also not simply trying to fill up horizontal lines.

In fact, scoring is the most complicated aspect of the game. In each round, players draft multiple villagers for their stomach. They then draft one of an array of scoring tiles, each with their own scoring condition. One might look for "hands" in an unbroken orthogonal line connecting to the scoring tile itself. Another might look to score for any "leg" anywhere in your stomach that's touching another leg. Drafting for compatible goals is a big part of the strategy... but the players who need help most get to draft first. If you're already doing well, you're likely to get saddled with a difficult new scoring condition to try to work toward next round.

There is, however, a wrinkle to placing these scoring tokens that I think the game could do without. When you choose one, you don't place it in your stomach immediately. Instead, it waits off to the side and gets put in at the end of the next round, just before you select your next goal. Basically, you spend one round preparing for the scoring goal you have "on deck," then drop it in. Perhaps this would grow to seem more natural with repeated plays, but it caused a lot of friction within my group -- with almost everyone, at least once, confused about when a goal would be added to the stomach.

The drafting system for the villagers you eat, however, is a lot more smooth, and quite fun. Nine villager cards are arranged in a 3 x 3 grid. Some are helpless snacks for you to devour. Other are armed warriors that protect the villagers orthogonally adjacent to them in the grid -- if you select a protected villager, each of the protectors deals 1 damage to you: you must take a damage token and toss it into your stomach along with the villager you're eating. Archers in the grid protect villagers that are 2 cards away, also inflicting damage. These damage tokens take up space you'd rather fill with body parts, and each one costs you points at the end of the game if it's touching any other damage in your stomach. Eating turns out to be a tricky balance of whether to choose the most useful villagers (accepting the damage that may come with them), or to select less valuable villagers that cause you less damage.

Tasty Humans might be a touch more complex than it needs to be. On the other hand, it might be that very complexity that we would grow into and appreciate if we play it more. There's enough going on there that I could see doing that. I give it a B+.

Limited Thinking

A while back, I wrote about One Word Kill, a novel from Mark Lawrence that began a trilogy in which a teenager in the 1980s gets caught up in an unusual science fiction adventure. I was cagey in that review about the true nature of the story, but now that I've arrived at the follow-up book, it would be impossible to say much of anything while keeping completely spoiler-free. So if I grabbed your attention with that earlier review, yet you haven't gotten around to the book and you don't want to know anymore, then here's the short version of this review:

Book two, Limited Wish, wasn't quite as good as One Word Kill. But it still very much held my interest, and I will be completing the series at some point.

If you're still here now, I'm assuming you're okay with some necessary spoilers about book one to give context to my reaction to book two. All good then?

This is a time travel series, in which the main character, Nick, meets his own doppelganger from the future. But unlike most time travel stories, which are all about changing some aspect of the past in order to alter the future, this series is all about fate and paradox. Nick's future self travels back to the past not to affect change there, but because that's what he remembers happening to him when he was a teenager. Neither version of Nick wants to change a thing -- the younger because keeping time intact guarantees he'll beat his cancer diagnosis and have a future, the older because he hopes to use the past to bring about change in his present.

You wouldn't think a time travel story with a fixed outcome could manage to generate much interest. But then, it seems neither did Mark Lawrence. After a book one that effectively played with that idea, book two introduces new complications to the mix: the concept of paradox and overlapping realities, the idea of time as an aggressive force looking to reconcile inconsistencies, and new characters from Nick's future coming back to disrupt his 1980s life.

Some of the characters from One Word Kill get benched to an extent here in the sequel, and that is a bit of a shame. To lean on the "it's like Stranger Things" analysis of that first book, imagine if subsequent seasons of Stranger Things had stayed focused on Mike and Eleven, but sidelined Dustin, Will, and Lucas. Still, better that this story grow in new directions rather than stagnate and repeat the same thing. So I was open to the new aspects of Limited Wish, and ultimately left in a place where I want to complete the trilogy and see how it's all wrapped up.

I give Limited Wish a B. Like I said earlier, it doesn't quite measure up to One Word Kill, but it's still a fun ride.

An Okay Review

If you saw the newest adaptation of Stephen King's It, one big takeaway may have been "those kids are all really good, and I bet they're going to go on to do more things." What you might not have expected was for some of them to go on to do things together. That's exactly what has happened with the Netflix series I Am Not Okay With This.

Based on a comic book series of the same name, this series stars Sophia Lillis as frustrated teenager Syd, struggling with the challenges of high school, a single mother she doesn't get along with, a younger brother she's helping to raise, and a father whose death just one year earlier has left her shaken. Oh, and also that she may be developing telekinetic superpowers. Her only ally when it comes to that last part is "weird kid" Stan (played by Wyatt Oleff)... if she can bring herself to open up to him.

I Am Not Okay With This is an odd blend of genres you won't find anywhere else. It feels like some sort of 80s John Hughes movie throwback, where high school kids you wouldn't expect to meet in real life are nevertheless thrown together. You get stoic malaise from the protagonist, a nerdy-but-still-cool supporting character. A relationship between that character and the weirdo that defies a simple label. Put Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, and The Breakfast Club in a blender (with maybe a shot of Ferris Bueller's Day Off), and the resulting smoothie might look a lot like this show.

Except of course that it's also a superhero origin story. And this element actually mixes with the whole better than you might expect. The show is actually slower to dole out this aspect than you might expect, given how little show there is. It's just 7 episodes, each one around 25 minutes long. This does help the whole season go down fast and easy, but it also means the whole thing is almost just a prologue to some other story you'd really like to see. It's entertaining along the way, and yet it also sort of feels like it's just gotten where it's going right when it's all over. (Will there be a season 2? No word yet.)

The show has two big selling points in its favor, as I see it. One is its effective blend of lightness and poignancy. Any given episode has a few moments to make you laugh out loud, and a few moments to tug at your heartstrings. And it negotiates the two without the whiplash you might expect in a compact 20-25 minutes. Two is the performances from those two young actors from It. Sophia Lillis is a great anchor for the whole thing, and her steadiness gives Wyatt Oleff space to play around and have goofy fun.

To be perfectly honest, this show probably isn't better than whatever thing someone has assured you is The Best Thing You're Not Watching. But it's so compact that it's easy to make time for, and it's also scratching an itch that I think isn't quite reached by anything else. I'd call it a B overall. For some, that's maybe not enough to cut through the immense pile of excellent things to watch. For others, considering the quirkiness and the low time commitment here, it just might be ticket.

DS9 Flashback: Honor Among Thieves

It was essentially an edict among the writers at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine -- "O'Brien must suffer." As the most accessible "Everyman" character on the show, putting him through emotional turmoil (even actual torture) would almost always yield moving results. The sixth season's "Honor Among Thieves" isn't quite an "O'Brien must suffer" story. And perhaps that's why it's not quite as good as those other episodes.

Starfleet Intelligence has a security leak, and their operatives within the Orion Syndicate are being exposed and executed. To identify the mole, they've tapped Miles O'Brien to go in undercover as a tinker/repairman to work his way up in the criminal organization. But when O'Brien begins to sympathize with Bilby, an oddly likeable family man amid this den of thieves, he worries what will happen when the mission is over.

"Honor Among Thieves" didn't actually start out as an O'Brien story. Outside writer Philip Kim pitched a story in which Jake Sisko happens to save the life of a girl whose father ranked high in the Orion Syndicate. This soon earns him special "friends" and privileges, which soon turns threatening as he tries to extricate himself. Meanwhile, Quark is trying to buddy up to Jake because he wants in. Kim said in an interview that when he got the call that his story was being bought, he thought they might have had the wrong person, so unrecognizable was what the staff pitched back relative to his original idea. But show runner Ira Steven Behr explained that they'd never even considered doing a story about the Orion Syndicate, and that germ from Kim's story is what inspired them.

The result feels almost like an episode from a completely different show. Aside from two short scenes set on the station (right after the credits, and at the end of the show), it really isn't. For one, the story takes place in a completely new setting -- and the show's budget doesn't quite reach far enough to fill it out, with the same establishing shot being used multiple times, and the sets being a bit more threadbare than run-down. For another thing, the only character we know is O'Brien, who is masquerading as someone else; meanwhile, some of the new characters don't get enough time to become truly distinct from one another. There's a reference to the often-sabotaged weather systems on Risa, a reappearance of computer hacking neck implants, and a plot thread that ropes in the Dominion. Otherwise, this show could be an installment of a sci-fi anthology series.

There are a lot of mob tropes in here, and your usual reaction to those probably governs how you respond to them here. There are familiar scenes like "testing the new guy to see if he'll lie to you" and "having another traitor in the mix so that you worry, for just a moment, that our guy has been found out." There's all the expected talk of family and loyalty -- including threatening the former to secure the latter. This story hits pretty much every beat of one of these tales, and gets the job done in a tight little 40-minute package.

On the other hand, it might have been nice to have more. There isn't really a two-part episode worth of story in here, but more time with these characters might have helped in giving the story more stakes. We might have actually met Bilby's family in person, or seen more menace from him. There is, after all, a delicate tightrope to walk here: Bilby has to be a dangerous enough character to seem like a threat to O'Brien, but has to be likeable enough for O'Brien to care what happens to him by the end. The episode has to rush through scenes at these extremes to get everything in. Bilby is nothing but nice to O'Brien for the first third of the episode. When he finally kills a guy, O'Brien does seem rightly horrified and aware of how deep he's fallen in... but then there's not quite enough time to explain a shift back before the end, when O'Brien is punching his "handler" to run to Bilby's aid.

Of course, it's also a heavy lift to believe O'Brien ever being put in this situation to begin with. The episode establishes that real Starfleet Intelligence agents were compromised and an outsider had to be brought in. Why O'Brien, out of every possible Starfleet officer? That isn't really explained. He is the right choice from a "who are the characters on our show" perspective, though -- the right combination of savvy but human, duty-bound but open-hearted. Bashir could almost have worked (and indeed, the series would thrust him into an espionage tale soon enough), but "family" is a key theme here, making O'Brien the right fit for the narrative; he can bond with Bilby over that.

The acting does fill in many of the gaps, though. Colm Meaney and guest star Nick Tate do have a good rapport together. They feel similar in all the right ways, as though O'Brien and Bilby might naturally have become friends in some other life. It helps the important emotional beats play better: Bilby taking interest in O'Brien's semi-fictional "girlfriend" Kumiko, O'Brien's hidden guilt when Bilby goes on about how well he can read people, and O'Brien promising to look after Bilby's cat. Interestingly, though, Tate was the second choice to play the role. The show had cast Charles Hallahan (perhaps best known to genre fans from the movie The Thing), hoping to bring a father/son dynamic to the Bilby/O'Brien relationship; Hallahan died of a heart attack just days before filming was to begin, and Tate (knowing he'd lost the role the first time around) was brought in.

Other observations.

• The one early Deep Space Nine scene establishes how quickly the station falls apart without O'Brien around to fix things. All the more reason you'd imagine Starfleet would want to tap "anyone else" for a mission like this.

• The Vorta here, Gelnon, is the same one from the previous episode. But he and a shrunken O'Brien never met. There's talk of similarity between the Dominion and the Orion Syndicate, and how loyalty means everything in both organizations. That said, Gelnon seems quite surprised by the "vouch"-based system of trusting one's co-workers.

• In a moment that feels subtly quite racy for 1990s Star Trek, O'Brien actually does pay the prostitute Bilby procured for him.

• Script writer René Echevarria wanted to name Bilby's cat Sweet Pea. Show runner Ira Steven Behr says this was another "Kukalaka," giving a too-serious thing a too-dumb name. He put his foot down, and the cat became Chester.

• I know this is the farthest thing from being a story about O'Brien's handler Chadwick, but I think it would have injected a little more Star Trek into the episode if that character had been a Vulcan. Seeing a Vulcan deal with the world of espionage, and justifying lies like the one told to keep O'Brien on mission (that Bilby will be arrested, not abandoned to execution by the Syndicate) would have been a neat texture.

Though I have pointed out some shortcomings here, it's because by this point in the run of Deep Space Nine, the audience can expect more. In truth, it's a decent episode -- thanks largely to the acting. I give "Honor Among Thieves" a B.

Plunder Rated

I'm always interested to see what different game designers are doing with deck building, and recently got to try a newer entry in the genre called Plunderbund, by Woody Hutsell and Adam Chunn. It's quite the mashup; the flavor is part fantasy and part mafia racketeering, while the mechanics are part deck building and part area control.

A board represents a town divided into four sections, each with four or five specific locations. In every round, tokens are randomly pulled from a bag and placed at their corresponding locations on the board. You have a few rounds to jockey for position before those tokens are collected for scoring, using workers of two types. Having an agent in a space will let you collect tokens... provided that you're further up on that color's influence track than any opponents also at the location. Ah, but before the agents claim tokens, one racketeer at the location gets to act first, regardless of influence, claiming one token of its owner's choice. So the game sees a lot of churn in players replacing each other's racketeers, climbing on one influence track or another, and keeping close watch on which opponent is in the lead.

Deck building is the mechanism used to go up in influence and to place workers... but it's deck building with an unconventional costing system. Each card you play gives you the option to take a game action. But most actions are paid for in "favors" you'll have to pay back later. Each favor is a dead card, giving you no action when you shuffle later and re-draw it. But once drawn, you immediately get to "trash" the card and get it back out of your deck. So unlike a typical deck builder, where your deck grows ever bigger and stronger, Plunderbund is about an ebb and flow, choosing which actions are worth diluting your deck for, and knowing when it's gotten thin enough again that you can push a bit harder and temporarily flood it with more favor cards.

As for the actual deck building? You only actually ever add 6 new non-favor cards to your deck over the course of the entire game; at regular intervals, you get a pair of new cards via serpentine draft -- selecting either to lean into your emerging strategy, or to shore up vulnerabilities you've found along the way. Otherwise, it's all about managing "throughput" of as many cards as possible, and keeping tabs on how many favors you have at the moment.

It is different... but it's also pretty easy for one player to run away with it. It's one thing to limit actions in a game and force players to choose what to do. It's another to allow them to do as much as they want, even when that's the wrong thing, challenging them to self-police. Players who let too many favor cards into their deck at the wrong time are going to pay for that bad decision over the course of several subsequent rounds, allowing players who manage more thoughtfully (or who just get lucky) to get a real leg up on the competition. If this happens on, say, two consecutive shuffles of one player's deck, that player is likely going to be effectively out of the competition, perhaps without even knowing it.

The game does obscure scoring to some degree by having it occur only at four regular intervals -- but in the back half of the game, one player's lead can seem insurmountable. No, it's not a bad thing for a strategy game to present new skills for a player to master... a skill such as managing this odd new deck building system. But there's an unfortunate Catch-22 here. If players don't all grasp the nuances at the same time, the end score will not be close. And if the game doesn't seem close, it will be hard to convince anyone to play it again in the hopes of improving at it.

I liked Plunderbund's attempt to do something different, and I'm open to playing it again. But overall, the game didn't seem like a hit in my group, and I'd be surprised to see it return to the table much more. On limited experience, I'd give it perhaps a B-. Serious fans of deck building thirsty for something different might want to give it a look. I doubt it would win over anyone skeptical of the genre.

Lifeless

I've been listening to the podcast Filmspotting for some time now, enjoying their interesting angle into conversations about movies, and generally benefiting from their recommendations. I can think of cases where a movie I would never have heard of without Filmspotting turned out to be a personal favorite. But oh man, did they ever steer me wrong with High Life.

What if David Lynch had made Interstellar? That's probably not a truly accurate description of High Life, but it encapsulates the way I felt punked after the two hours I spent on this odd science fiction film starring Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche. Here's a better description: someone made an especially arty web series consisting of 5-minute episodes, then decided to release them in a random order.

This is the story of the one man left after a deep space mission to harness energy from a black hole. But he's not alone -- he's caring for his daughter, a toddler. Flashbacks tell us how this situation came to be, how the crew of the mission dwindled away, what they were all really doing there. It also reveals the strange experiments they were taking part in. It's a sequence of events that does finally all cohere, even if the non-linear narrative makes it harder than it needs to be to suss everything out. Yet none of what we learn really illuminates any character's motivation or explains their behavior to us.

There are a lot of ideas thrown into the mix here, but none have satisfying origins or conclusions. The idea of raising a child alone in deep space is compelling, but we barely get to see anything meaningful of that process. There are weird experiments being run, but we're never made to understand why these experiments. There are emotional touchstones skipped across the pond of this movie -- time spent in a lush garden, a sad episode involving dogs -- but they don't play out in a way that extracts any poignancy from the ideas. And one of the "episodes" in this story is borderline pornography, without (I felt) any clear narrative reason for it to be so explicit.

You could argue that there are a lot of beautiful visuals in this movie -- and for some, the visuals make a movie, as much as (or more than) the narrative. But even this aspect of the movie felt compromised to me. High Life is filmed (mostly, but not entirely) in an odd aspect ratio that doesn't fill the screen, leaving thin black vertical bars on the edges of the picture. It's not like a TV show from former 4:3 days; it's something all its own, both conspicuous and distracting for being so unusual.

Worst of all, the movie really doesn't all add up to much. I was pulled in just enough to want to see where this train wreck all wound up, but if I was expecting a satisfying ending, I was seriously disappointed. Indeed, I didn't even know that the ending was coming. I watched this movie (before the quaran-times) on an evening where my husband was gone for a few hours, and he returned before I had finished. I told him that I needed maybe 10 more minutes to get to the end... and then, when I hit "play" again, there turned out to be literally 20 seconds until the end credits. No closure, no nothing.

For someone reading this, High Life might well hit the sweet spot. But I wouldn't risk trying to describe that person when the cost of me being wrong, of that kind of person having a bad experience like mine, feels so very high. This is the worst movie I've seen in quite some time. I give it a D-.

Dino Developments

I've written before about short audiobooks, a few hours in length, that perfectly fill the time on a short road trip. On one such road trip (from back in the before-time, when people went places), I listened to the Audible original book A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs, by Ben Garrod. It's a non-fiction presentation of just under three hours, premised on the notion that while so many of us are fascinated with dinosaurs as a child, most age out of that phase at some point. Why this is significant is: in roughly the last 30 years or so, so many discoveries have been made about dinosaurs that a great deal of what you think you remember from your childhood is quite probably wrong.

This is a great little book about the scientific method in action. You wouldn't necessarily think that a couple of decades would make all that much of a difference in the study of creatures that have been extinct for tens of millions of years. But technology has been growing at an astonishing rate, allowing for the refuting, positing, and testing of all kinds of hypotheses about dinosaurs. It's still very much a developing field, and those developments are really quite fascinating.

Some of the revelations in here may not be entirely new to you. Perhaps you've heard that scientists have managed to pinpoint exactly where on Earth the meteor struck that ended the dinosaurs? But perhaps you haven't heard the latest evidence for exactly why certain species survived when others didn't. Perhaps you've heard the theory that dinosaurs, the immediate evolutionary predecessor to birds, actually had feathers instead of lizard scales? But perhaps you haven't heard the abundant evidence confirming this, rendering every Jurassic Park style dinosaur you conjure in your mind's eye an inaccurate fiction.

A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs manages to stuff quite a bit of knowledge into a tight little package. And if you don't happen to have a three-hour road trip on your schedule in which to give it a listen, that's alright. It's divided into distinct chapters on different topics, and consequently plays out more like a podcast mini-series than a typical audiobook. You can work your way through it in 20-30 minute chunks, letting the author-host take you on a series of interviews with the ground-breaking scientists advancing our knowledge of the creatures that capture so many of our imaginations at some point in our lives.

If anything, this leaves me wanting to do an even deeper dive on some of the revelations this book touches on. It's detailed enough to be compelling, but it's actually far from what I'd call "detailed." I give A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs a B+. If the topic holds (or ever held) any interest to you, you should check it out.

DS9 Flashback: One Little Ship

The short-lived animated Star Trek series of the 1970s often used the cost-effectiveness of animation and the shortened half-hour format to tell stories that for the original live-action series might have been too... well... goofy. But decades later, visual effects technology would improve, and the need for literally hundreds of stories for the various Star Trek series would push writers to attempt things they might have dismissed before. Turning crew members into children? The animated series did that... and then so did The Next Generation. Shrinking crew members for an adventure? The animated series did that... and then so did Deep Space Nine, with "One Little Ship."

The Defiant is conducting scientific research on a subspace compression anomaly. A runabout carrying Dax, O'Brien, and Bashir is temporarily shrunk down to mere inches... and then inadvertently left that way when the Defiant is commandeered in a Jem'Hadar attack. Sisko is stalling by exploiting internal strife among the invaders -- a mix of new Jem'Hadar bred in the Alpha Quadrant and aging veterans of the Gamma Quadrant. But ultimately he needs the help of the tiny runabout and its tinier crew to retake the Defiant.

This episode is by no means a reboot of the animated series. Staff writer René Echevarria had actually written a spec script about a shrunken shuttlecraft even before selling his first script to The Next Generation. Once he was brought on staff, he tried to persuade show runner Jeri Taylor to make it, only to be all but laughed out of the office. After moving to Deep Space Nine, he pitched show runner Ira Steven Behr to similar results. But Behr eventually softened, until one day, the idea didn't seem so crazy. (For whatever reason, though, it was writing duo Bradley Thompson and David Weddle who wrote the script, not Echevarria.)

Against the odds, the episode does work. It's smart to come at the premise initially with as much skepticism as the audience. In the first scene, reportedly written by Ronald Moore, Kira can't keep herself from laughing hysterically at the idea of shrinking people down for science. Julian is cracking jokes throughout (while also fusing his new super-genius personality with some old-fashioned first-season naivete when it comes to areas outside his knowledge). Yes, this is a silly idea, the episode admits... just go with us.

Thankfully, it doesn't let things get that silly. Even though behind the scenes, it was nicknamed "Honey, I Shrunk the Runabout," it's not a parade of hijinks about being tiny in a full-sized world. There's no concern of being stepped on, no running around in the carpet fibers of the Defiant (as we're specifically told our tiny heroes couldn't breathe outside the ship), and the main concern is not about trying to be noticed and rescued -- it's about trying to not to be noticed and being the rescuers.

But yes, of course we get some tiny hijinks. There's a Star Wars-like "into the superstructure" flight as the runabout enters the Defiant. In the final clash, the Rubicon zips around like a modern day drone, blasting Jem'Hadar with tiny torpedoes (inflicting burning explosions that look to have been done practically on set). And Bashir and O'Brien's trip inside a computer panel is a real showpiece sequence with a great set and props -- towering computer chips and giant flashing widgets.

The humorously tiny heroes do get to save the ship from a real jeopardy, a takeover by the Jem'Hadar. There's an interesting idea introduced here that, unfortunately, the series never revisits: a new crop of Jem'Hadar bred in the Alpha Quadrant. They're portrayed as young punks, disrespectful of old traditions, dismissive of the wisdom of the more experienced, and overly confident in their own abilities. The first, Kudak'Etan, is an especially familiar type: he's certain that being the leader means he's also the smartest, and he thinks that because he's in charge that he's also in control. But the veteran Ixtana'Rax is also flawed. He may be rightly suspicious, and may know exactly what Sisko and his crew are plotting at every turn, but he's too loyal to disobey for the greater good. His final words punctuate his failings, as he dies before finishing the Jem'Hadar credo: "Obedience brings victory. And victory is... [life]."

Other observations:

• There are a lot of small (heh) nods to continuity here, with Jem'Hadar removing seats from the bridge as they do on their own ships, a mention of our heroes struggling to pilot the Jem'Hadar ship they once captured, and talk of how the Dominion fleet from the Gamma Quadrant was taken out.

• A few NPC Jem'Hadar definitely fail their perception rolls, not noticing the tiny runabout buzzing about right by their heads.

• The regular characters are all so well-established now that their personalities show even in moments that aren't fundamentally about character -- Nog's nerves are fraying under the pressure of trying to retake the ship, while Kira is cool as they come even after she's specifically threatened with execution.

• Odo's absence from the Defiant avoids some problems in plotting: his status as a "Founder" might have made it too easy to overcome the Jem'Hadar, while his shifting abilities might have been a boon even at a tiny size. Still, he pops in at the very end of the episode to joke with Bashir and O'Brien about them looking shorter than usual -- leading to a rare team-up when Quark immediately picks up on the joke and joins in.

• Just before this, we get a rare taste of Worf's humor too, when he extracts a promise from Dax not to be ridiculed for his attempt at poetry, only to then recite a child-like, sing-songy rhyme.

• While this episode has some superficial similarities with The Next Generation's "Rascals" -- the ship is conquered, the characters in the seemingly silly crisis have to save the day -- one aspect of "Rascals" is not repeated here. Where the Ferengi captured the Enterprise (and might plausibly be beaten by children), the enemies here are Jem'Hadar. Both René Echevarria and Ira Steven Behr later said they'd wished they'd opted for a less serious opponent here; Echevarria felt they should have used Pakleds, while Behr mused that they should have somehow brought back Harry Mudd from the original series.

 Yes, "One Little Ship" is silly at times. But the light touch works. I give the episode a B+.

Ever After

One of the newest games to break into the Top 100 at BoardGameGeek is Everdell, a strategic worker placement game with a cute theme (the society you're building is one of cuddly forest animals) and a flashy prop (a large 3D cardboard tree with levels, on which some of the cards and pieces are placed).

Everdell has many of the staples of worker placement games. You gather resources (of four different kinds) and spend them to bring cards into play. The cards represent people and buildings in your village that give you special powers for the rest of the game. The game isn't necessarily a radical departure from other games in the genre, but it does have a unique synthesis of familiar ideas that make the experience distinct and satisfying.

And this one twist, an element I don't recall seeing before Everdell: you can get out of placing a worker on your turn by playing a card instead. You can do this by paying resources, or by working through a "tech tree" in which one card allows you to play the next card in a chain for free. Deferring the placement of your workers has a fun strategic ramification: as long as your workers remain out in play, no player can use the spot they occupy. That, of course, is pretty common in worker placement games, but the ability to draw out the pain for everyone, turn after turn, is an intriguingly cutthroat element in a game that's dressed up in such a cute theme.

Everdell does a great job of making you feel like you're ramping up into a powerful engine. You have just 15 slots in your village to play cards, and at the beginning of the game, you definitely have a feeling that you'll never possibly be able to fill all those slots. But as resource accumulation accelerates, the cards you've already built start to kick in, and you unlock new workers (as new "seasons" in the year arrive), you ultimately reach the point where you think, "wow, 15 slots might not be enough!" It's all on solid mechanical ground.

I don't know that I like the theme all that much, though. The mechanics are quite crunchy and sophisticated for the playful atmosphere of forest animals building in harmony. And that big tree prop is way more trouble than it's worth. It's so large that it can easily obstruct the view of some players... but set it out of the way and then important components are too far out of reach. Also, reserve workers are meant to be kept on the uppermost platform of the tree. Bump the tree (as you inevitably will, several times a game), and worker rain down on the play area and have to be cleaned up. It's a prop that looks cool but makes the game more difficult to play.

There can also be a lot of down time between turns. The overall system isn't too difficult to pick up, but there are a couple of cards in the deck -- particular buildings and characters -- that are quite complicated and/or have complex strategic ramifications. It's a large deck overall, so it doesn't feel to me like the game would have suffered much by, say, excluding the 10% of the cards that cause this extreme brain burn. But of course, it's up to the designer where to spend the complexity chips, and James A. Wilson's choices here have landed him a top 100 game. I'd have preferred a bit of streamlining, but it's hard to say he was wrong.

I'd give Everdell a B+. That is to say that personally, I like it roughly as much as another worker placement game that recently entered the mix with my play group, Coloma. But I feel like more of my group likes Coloma better, enough that I expect Everdell might be crowded out fairly quickly. But if you're a fan of worker placement games, Everdell definitely deserves a look.

DS9 Flashback: Far Beyond the Stars

Star Trek is famously about voyages in space in the future. Yet some of the most widely-praised and best-known episodes of the series have little to do with that: the original series' "The City on the Edge of Forever," The Next Generation's "The Inner Light" ... or Deep Space Nine's "Far Beyond the Stars."

Captain Sisko's spirits are fading; the Dominion war continues, claiming the lives of more friends. He confesses to his visiting father than he's thinking about stepping down. Then he slips into a vivid alternate reality, an extended vision seemingly sent by the Prophets. He is Benny Russell, a science fiction writer in 1950s New York, struggling against systemic racism to publish his short story about the black captain of a space station in the distant future. Bits of his fantasy begin to intrude on his reality -- which is filled with familiar faces.

The concept of this episode first came from outside writer Marc Scott Zicree, who suggested that Jake Sisko travel back in time to meet a group of struggling 1950s writers (only to learn in the end that it was an alien simulation to extract information from him). Show runner Ira Steven Behr rejected the idea, but the 1950s sci-fi writers stayed with him, until it occurred to him to make Benjamin Sisko the protagonist, and introduce racism as a major theme. Behr found himself in the odd position of going back to Zicree, him now being the one to pitch a story idea.

After a first draft script reportedly closer to the final shooting version than any other episode in series history, next came production concerns. The writers and producers recognized their privilege (as we would understand it today), and knew this episode needed the guiding influence of someone who had experienced racism and prejudice. They were certain Avery Brooks would be an ideal choice to direct... but they were also concerned, as typically whenever a main cast member directed an episode, it was one in which their own character was lightly featured. This script would call for Brooks to be in every scene. They asked him if he'd be willing to take on the challenge, and he agreed for what he would later call "the most important moment for me in the entire seven years."

If anything, the message here resonates more clearly now than it did in 1998, when the episode first aired. Today, people have a wider understanding that "representation matters," and can better appreciate what the aspirational portrayal of a black captain in a sci-fi future means. Today, (most) people are more aware that racism is not a "solved" problem of the past, and more fully understand some of the moments portrayed in this episode: from the casual racism of allowing a black man his success (as long as he's not "in your face" about it by wanting to appear in a photo), to the more overt racism of the execution of a black man and a vicious beating of another by the police. Avery Brooks, of course, knew exactly what story he was telling in 1998, saying in one interview: "If we had changed the people's clothes, this story could be about right now." He could say the same of 2020.

The episode is at times shocking in how unflinching it is, perhaps never more so than when Jimmy actually says the n-word (which one probably would never have imagined hearing in a Star Trek episode). It's all part of making this setting feel as real as possible, and allowing all the black characters a moment to voice where they see the limitations imposed upon them. Real life black authors are named too.

You can feel Brooks' directorial hand all over the episode, and see the work of an enthusiastic production team excited to do something so different from the norm. Sets like the diner are actually built on the studio back lot rather than on a stage, allowing us to see vintage cars outside the window. Shots of the street are loaded with those cars, and dozens of period-costumed extras. Benny Russell's apartment is filled with artifacts of African culture, and he wears a kufi hat. The score slips into a film noir style, with punctuations of jazz and doo-wop, plus room for a line or two of a song by Avery Brooks. About the only moments that doesn't look or sound perfect are the stock footage bits of the New York skyline, far grainier and worn than the newly filmed material.

But Brooks' work behind the camera pales in comparison to his performance in front of it. There are great moments throughout, but the memorable centerpiece, the moment that would have won him an Emmy in a world where awards respected science fiction, is Benny's complete breakdown and literal collapse. It starts small, with Benny challenging his boss to actually give voice to the racist thoughts he's stepping gingerly around. He then explodes with a lifetime's pent-up fury. It would be over the top if it didn't also feel completely honest and lived in. It's delivered in a single, unbroken take, with the camera mere inches from his face. Everyone on set for this performance tells the same story: that it took a while for the assistant director to finally call "cut," and even once he did, Avery Brooks didn't "come out of it" for a very long time. You may find moments in Star Trek that move you more personally, but none where the actor was more dedicated to the performance.

Though this episode provides an unflinching look at a serious issue, it's not without its pleasures. The entire main cast (and many recurring guest stars) are used as a sort of repertory theater company to slip into other roles. For the audience, this is a chance to see many of them out of their usual alien makeup. For the actors, it's a chance to portray a character that may or may not have much in common with their usual character -- and showing by contrast just how much performance goes into what they normally do on the show.

Take Rene Auberjonois as editor Douglas Pabst; his voice is in a higher register (his usual one), his posture is different from Odo's, and he's the biggest villain among the main cast members. He's bickering with Armin Shimerman as usual, but the roles are reversed: Herbert Rossoff is the most enthusiastic supporter of Benny, the closest thing to a knight at his side. (Pointedly, though, he'll only go so far.) Instead of "everyman" Miles O'Brien, Colm Meaney is playing Albert Macklin (an homage to Isaac Asimov) who is so unlike the common man that he can't even order his thoughts to communicate without the intermediary of a typewriter.

Enjoy Alexander Siddig and Nana Visitor getting one episode to play a couple as they were in real life. (And note an homage in Visitor's character, "K.C. Hunter," to original Star Trek writer D.C. Fontana, a real-life woman who had to write using initials so the audience would assume she was a man.) Watch Terry Farrell ditz it up as secretary Darlene Kursky, Michael Dorn as baseball star Willie Hawkins -- smarmily hitting on a man's girlfriend right in front of him -- or Cirroc Lofton as always hustling Jimmy. Savor Aron Eisenberg as a newsie, Marc Alaimo and Jeffrey Combs as villainous cops, Brock Peters affecting the musical speech of a preacher, and J.G. Hertzler as an artist. And after a year away making The Larry Sanders Show, it's a thrill to see Penny Johnson back as Kasidy Yates and her alter ego Cassie.

Add it all up, and you have an episode regarded by fans as not just among the best of Deep Space Nine, but of the Star Trek franchise. That's an opinion shared by many who worked on the show, from writers (Ronald Moore: "I wish I was the one who wrote it!") to actors (Armin Shimerman: "It is perfect science fiction.")... to people who would join the franchise decades later (writers Michael Chabon of Star Trek: Picard and Kirsten Beyer of Star Trek: Discovery both cited it as a favorite).

The one moment I don't much care for is the final one, in which Sisko almost deliriously opines that perhaps real life is really just the dream of Benny Russell -- and his father doesn't promptly march him back down to the Infirmary for examination. This "maybe the dream is real life" ending would go on to be a trope that kept popping up in other genre TV series over the years... and even almost returned in the series finale of this one. The writers reportedly gave serious consideration to having the final moments of the Deep Space Nine be with Benny Russell -- an idea only shot down because the series was not truly stand-alone, and no one wanted to say that all of Star Trek in fact sprang from his mind. Perhaps the writers needed the character of Herbert Rossoff in the room with them to argue as he does in this episode: "Making it a dream guts the story."

Other observations:

• Casey Biggs (Damar) was meant to have been a part of this episode, but was unavailable the week it shot. The only other recurring actor that truly feels "missing" to me here is Andrew Robinson, though to be fair, the "not quite friend, not quite villain" nature of Garak would make it challenging to place him in the world of Benny Russell.

• The audience may enjoy seeing the actors without their alien makeup, but Armin Shimerman found it "slightly off-putting. I've grown accustomed to the Quark mask being a mechanism for support. That face describes who I am as an alien character. And also, while many actors worry about how they look on camera, I don't, because my face isn't on camera. So it was bizarre to be bare-faced on a Star Trek show. I never had been before."

• While the magazine the characters work for is fictitious, the rival publication mentioned, Galaxy Science Fiction, was quite real, and published work from many legends in the genre including Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Theodore Sturgeon.

• I love the moment where a science fiction writer is dazzled by the technology of instant tea.

• Another Star Trek rarity in this episode is a quote from the Bible. When Joseph Sisko recites a verse, Benjamin notes how unusual this is.

"Far Beyond the Stars" is not my personal favorite episode of Deep Space Nine as it is for some, but it's still a clear grade A installment of the show. It's among the very best of Star Trek.

One For All? Certainly One For Me!

If they were to engineer a television series in a lab that was targeted at me specifically, it's hard to imagine they could come up with something more precise than For All Mankind. It's 1) a narrative steeped in history (an alternative one), 2) about the Apollo moon program, and 3) co-created by Ronald Moore, creator of the Battlestar Galactica revival series and writer of many great episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

The jumping off point of For All Mankind is: "what if the Soviet Union landed the first human on the moon?" What if the space race never ended? What ripples in history, small and large, would result?

In its early episodes, the series is really all about these questions -- to a point where it's slow to get going with its characters and narrative. If you're a manned space flight geek (or, say, have recently watched the exceptional mini-series From the Earth to the Moon) and a lot of the details about how things actually happened in the Apollo program, then you'll enjoy all of this. The way the show weaves real-life figures in with its fictional characters is a lot of fun, and the writers really seem to go the extra mile in making their alternative history feel plausible: given X, then it really does feel like Y could happen.

But I was deliberate when I said that "Russians on the moon" was the jumping off point for the show. Once it sets the stage with its first few episodes, the series really pivots into character drama -- as you'd expect from a show run by Ronald Moore. The show delves deeply into the minds of the astronauts and the people who work at NASA, but also into the lives of their families. Episodes spend just as much time with the spouses of astronauts, and the season even dedicates a running slow burn subplot to a janitor in Houston who illegally came from Mexico in the hopes of providing a better life for his bright daughter.

For All Mankind is also a bittersweet show -- another characteristic you'll expect if you know the writing of Ronald Moore. Interestingly, the backdrop of this alternate history is largely positive. It quite frankly suggests that if Americans had lost the race to be first on the moon, our world would actually be a better one. But for the characters we follow, life is not always good. There's a lot of adversity and tragedy, and trying to rise above and carry on.

Among the listed main cast, there aren't many names and faces you're likely to know from other places. Joel Kinnaman is the most established among them, but he's hardly the show's "lead" despite being listed first in the credits. The series really does share the load evenly among half a dozen "main" characters. Plenty of recurring guest stars figure just as prominently too -- Chris Bauer (from True Blood) brings his trademark irascibility to the role of real-life figure Deke Slayton, recognizable "that guy" Wallace Langham gives good adversary as a more political operative in NASA, Nate Corddry is solid as an engineer with an important running subplot, and Sonya Walger (Penny from Lost) is great as uncompromisingly tough pilot Molly Cobb.

The one wrinkle here: this series is released on Apple TV+, a service not many I know have jumped onto. There are some shortcuts there, though; a year's subscription comes with an Apple TV device, and they've also made some of their programming (including this) available for free (temporarily?) in the age of Coronavirus. Any hurdles to watching the show, though, I recommend you jump... but, as I said, this show could scarcely be more "for me."

I give the first season of For All Mankind an A- overall. (The minus is acknowledgement that it is slow to get going at first.) I'm eagerly awaiting the second season.

DS9 Flashback: Who Mourns for Morn?

On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Quark's Bar was always populated with background characters of all sorts. But one stood out from all the others, picking up over time a name, a reputation, a history... and finally his own episode: "Who Mourn for Morn?"

Morn has died in an accident with his ship, leaving his entire estate to Quark. When it appears that inheritance will amount to a staggering 1,000 bricks of gold-pressed latinum, all sorts of characters start coming out of the woodwork: Morn's flirtatious ex-wife Larell (who thinks she deserves a cut), tough guy loan sharks Krit and Nahsk (who say Morn owed the money in debt to them), and lawman Hain (who says it belongs to a royal family and must be returned). Quark is soon caught up in a heap of trouble.

The series writers had always been open to the idea of a Morn episode, but there was a major hurdle that none of the pitches they'd received over the years could clear: Morn could never speak. To hear the writers tell it, this was a precious joke they never wanted to let go of; Morn was to Deep Space Nine as Maris was to Frasier (an often-talked-about-but-never-seen character), who would never, ever, ever speak on the show.

Actor Armin Shimerman had a less-charitable take on the matter. Background actor Mark Allen Sheperd had played Morn for years on end, enduring horrendous makeup, garnering fans, even getting an action figure that earned Paramount profit... but the powers-that-be weren't inclined to reciprocate with a speaking role. (In that light, it's perhaps an even greater indignity that in this episode, the person Quark pulls out of the crowd to first take a "shift" sitting in Morn's chair is Mark Allen Sheperd, out of alien makeup.)

Regardless of the background and one's view of it, freelance writer Mark Gehred-O'Connell, who had successfully sold three previous episodes to the show, finally cracked the "Morn episode" with this idea: don't actually make it a Morn episode at all. He pitched an episode where Morn disappears and all our heroes band together to find him -- realizing in the process how little they know about him. The staff writers massaged that into a Quark-centric story, adding the colorful criminal characters Quark comes up against.

There's a classic improv game that goes by a few names, but it plays like this: multiple performers begin a scene by describing an off-stage character in the craziest ways they can think of, freighting him with a laundry list of wild traits that another performer must then enter the scene and embody. Morn in general, and this episode in particular, is like that game. We've always known that Morn will talk your ear off (though we never see this). In this episode, we learn he sparred weekly with Worf (and was excellent), has a second stomach, used to have a full head of hair, runs a shipping business, and sleeps in mud.

He also took part in a bank heist in which he and four partners stole a fortune. And amid that backdrop of increasingly wild details, the lies those partners weave slip right in. Maybe Morn did have an ex-wife and is a lottery winner. Maybe he was massively in debt to criminals. Maybe he was a prince who abdicated his title. One wonders why these associates would tell lies that you'd think could be researched and verified easily enough. (Clearly, Morn was the brains of the operation.) Still, it's fun that each takes a different approach with Quark -- flirtation, a mob shakedown, and an outright con.

It is all fairly fun, though it does depend on a sort of regression to a version of the show and the characters that feels more first season than sixth season. Quark is back to full greed, lacking signs of the nuances he's picked up (particularly in season five). Odo is all over him, not so much to bust him as to just be there to watch him fall, even at times building up Quark's hopes just for the schadenfreude. ("Maybe his fortune is in business assets." "Maybe he's hiding it in his quarters." "Maybe it's in this tiny little box I'm about to open for you.")

But this all is generally funnier than attempts at comedy in season one Deep Space Nine ever managed. Quark using a hologram to keep business up is quite on-brand. His interplay with each of the Morn's different crime partners is clever. The parade of them all breaking into his quarters is funny. Quark's high-pitched scream at the prospect of having his thumb cut off is both hilarious and probably just how I would react. Him standing up in the middle of a gun standoff is a great visual. There are even a couple of fun moments that don't involve Quark, the most successful being Bashir and O'Brien both praising each other ("good man") for keeping Morn's seat warm.

The signposts in the story are also very deftly woven in: Dax references that people used to "make change with an eye dropper," setting up the final revelation on where Morn's "liquid assets" are really hidden; Hain fails to pick up Quark's signals that people are hiding in his quarters, making it more satisfying when Odo is quicker on the uptake; and some of the wild details about Morn pay off in the end when it's revealed he faked his own death.

Other observations:

• I think Quark's eulogy at Morn's memorial is meant to be taken as genuine. Kira and Odo are certainly impressed. But given what we see of quintessentially greedy Quark in this episode, it reads to me like Quark has calculated a way to replace his most valuable patron: by guilting others into keeping his seat full.

• This episode was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Makeup. I believe the award category is based on new makeup designs, and thus the nomination was based on the look of Krit and Nahsk. But it's also quite a trick when the painting is busted over Quark's head without destroying the Ferengi makeup.

• Hain is played by one of television's most omnipresent actors, Gregory Itzin. He's arguably most known for role as Logan on 24, but he's been a regular or guest star on countless shows, and this is only one of his five Star Trek appearances.

• Why can Quark crumble gold bars to powder with his bare hands? I suppose latinum must be unstable in some way that compromises the gold if extracted?

This episode isn't truly laugh-out-loud hilarious, but I find it pretty good for a lighter Star Trek episode. I give "Who Mourns for Morn?" a B.

Stranger(s) Than Fiction

A few years back, I sang the praises of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, Revisionist History. It continues to this day, and I continue to be enthralled with every new episode. But Gladwell, of course, is an author too. And I'd never read one of his books. I decided to address this with his latest effort, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know.

Talking to Strangers is a book about miscommunication, generally organized around this thesis. We all know how complicated our own thoughts are. We know we can have bad days, or be distracted, or have people take us out of context or misunderstand us or ascribe wrong motives to our behavior. We know we are complicated individuals. Yet when we look to others, we routinely imagine ourselves to be excellent judges of character and motive. We're all armchair psychologists. Yet clearly we cannot be as good at it as we imagine ourselves to be.

Predictably -- almost inevitably, given the subject -- this book got Gladwell into a bit of hot water in the Twittersphere when it was first released a few months back. Talking to Strangers devotes different chapters to different anecdotes that effectively poke around at his thesis from all sides. Two in particular awakened the ire of critics: the death of Sandra Bland, and the Brock Turner rape case. In both cases, some people construed Gladwell's contextualization of these two events as forgiveness of wrongdoing. I would say it most emphatically was not -- nor does his examination in this same book of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed endorse terrorism or waterboarding, or his examination of Jerry Sandusky support child molestation. The criticisms, I feel, came largely from people who did not in fact read the whole book and take Gladwell's larger point.

I for one found reading the entire book a breeze. Gladwell has an incredibly natural, conversational writing style. It's possible that I've just become very familiar with his voice after listening to his podcast, but I found myself hearing him read the book in my head as I read along. It's not an especially long book, but it feels shorter still as the prose briskly pulls you along.

That said, I would say that if this reminded me of his podcast, it would be would of the "quite good, but not great" episodes. Each of the anecdotes he recounts is intriguing, but I wasn't entirely convinced that they assembled together in the strongest unified case. It may well be that Malcolm Gladwell's work in a more episodic format has led him to write a more episodic book. It did make me quite curious, though, to go back to one of his earlier, breakout books at some point and see how that hits me.

I'd give Talking to Strangers a B+. If you're already a fan of Malcolm Gladwell's writing, it feels like a no-brainer to me.

DS9 Flashback: Waltz

Season six of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had opened with plenty of expensive, bombastic episodes. But the switch was thrown far in the opposite direction with "Waltz."

Sisko and Dukat are marooned together on a planet, awaiting rescue from the Defiant. The search has a ticking clock, a time limit at which point the ship must leave for another mission. But there's more of a time bomb in the mix too: Dukat is mentally unstable, having full conversations with hallucinatory figures, and lying to Sisko about their true situation.

"Waltz" is almost a one-act play; were it not for the cutaways to the Defiant, it would be a story that takes place primarily on a single set, and primarily between two actors. There are even long stretches without any music underscoring it. Who better then to direct this "play" than actor Rene Auberjonois? His earliest episodes of Deep Space Nine were almost too theatrical in their staging, but he always had a knack for getting great performances from his castmates. By this, his eighth episode, his skills behind the camera had caught up. He's able to do a lot to make this simple scenario more visually dynamic, with very dark lighting you must sometimes strain to see, creative staging of the imaginary characters, and extreme closeups to emphasize the unraveling of Dukat.

Still, I'm of two minds about this episode. Deep Space Nine is the Star Trek most interested in shades of gray, and until this point had given even Dukat some redeeming character qualities. This episode abandons what the show is good at, casting him in the Kathy Bates role of Stephen King's "Misery," to lie to and lord over a wounded Sisko from whom he seeks to extract something he desperately needs.

On the other hand, one could argue that Dukat really shouldn't be very sympathetic. The writers did. Show runner Ira Steven Behr complained of actually reading fans defending Dukat with arguments like "only five million Bajorans were killed during the Occupation," and felt that attitudes had to change. In Ronald Moore's final script, what might have been subtext is explicitly made text: Sisko says that there is such a thing as true evil, and Dukat is it. While the show still had more than a season to go at this point, it clearly wanted a real villain for the long term, and Dukat really was the best choice for that.

One imagines many of the production choices here were made to save money -- we don't see the destruction of the Honshu, or Dukat's rescue of Sisko -- but the limitations actually serve this story. As soon as we see Dukat strike up a conversation with a Weyoun we know isn't really there, everything he has said becomes suspect. How did they really get to this planet? Is it really as desolate as Dukat claims? Does Dukat even know that he's lying to Sisko, or does his break from reality extend beyond imagined people?

Still, Dukat's psychosis isn't as crisply delineated as it might have been. His vision of Damar is there to stroke his ego and provide the adoration he craves. But his visions of Weyoun and Kira are fairly interchangeable, taunting and belligerent figures who take joy in Dukat's failures. All three are fun to watch, as Casey Biggs, Jeffrey Combs, and Nana Visitor all shade their real characters with a streak of venom, but it feels like the opportunity to really get inside Dukat's head is lost. Much of the episode is just playing the character's authoritarian hits: he never got enough credit for trying to be a nice guy, but he doesn't deserve any of the blame for the dark pages of his past.

Things do shift in the final act, though. After Sisko spends much of the episode bottling up his true feelings, he first deploys sarcasm, then acts as devil's advocate, to goad Dukat into revealing his true self. And what Dukat reveals is ugly. He quite literally regards Cardassians as a superior race. For the Bajorans' crime of not accepting their subservience, of not loving him enough, Dukat wants to kill all of them.

Though it's Dukat's episode, and a showcase for Marc Alaimo, Avery Brooks does get a lot to play here: feigning greater weakness to relax his foe, providing just enough pushback to Dukat to avoid suspicion without triggering him, and ultimately serving up a full meal of Sisko's trademark righteous anger. There's a physical struggle between them in the end, and plenty of verbal sparring matches along the way.

I could do without the scenes on the Defiant, though. There's an attempt to subvert a Star Trek trope here that I do appreciate -- for once, the starship captain is not going to blow past a deadline to continue a search and rescue. But I feel this subplot lies to us too much. The Defiant does hang around a few moments extra in the end. There's also a Silence of the Lambs-style bait-and-switch where we're made to think our heroes are about to arrive on the scene, only to discover they're at a different scene. With lies and distortions of reality being such a key part of the Dukat story, I could have done without these deceptions in the objective reality of the B-plot.

Other observations:

• No prison outfit for Dukat? Does he just wear that Cardassian military uniform day in, day out? He must smell pretty ripe by now.

• Dukat calls Sisko "Benjamin" a lot in this episode. As I remember it, anyway, he's hardly ever (never?) done this before. It's definitely part of his revisionist effort to paint the two as "old friends."

• It seems that in the end, Dukat sends out a distress signal that leads the Defiant to Sisko. Why does he do that? He's already committed to killing all Bajorans, and seeing to it that their Emissary won't save them. So... I don't get it.

• In early outlining of the episodes, the writers planned to do "inside Dukat's head" in somewhat the same way "Distant Voices" had gone "inside Bashir's head." Sisko would come see Dukat in prison, but then we'd push into Dukat's mind, where he was running the station with Kira as his wife. The fantasy life would slowly unravel, intercut with conversations with Sisko in the real world. But when the writers felt that the Sisko material was where the more compelling material could be mined, they reconfigured the story into its final form.

• Another revision came late, when the writers cut a final threat Dukat was to have made to Sisko: "You too will learn what it's like to lose a child." This might have better explained Dukat's decision to let Sisko live, but it certainly would have locked them into too restrictive a story. The writers wisely chose not to have this hanging over any future Jake/Ben interactions in the future.

I do enjoy the way this episode puts two strong actors in a toe-to-toe match-up with one another. I also enjoy watching the hallucinatory characters cut loose and have fun. But there are parts of "Waltz" that don't totally hang together for me. I give the episode a B-.

Avast! A Real Leviathan of a Game!

One of the more buzzed about deep strategy board games of was Maracaibo, from designer Alexander Pfister, about the exploration of the Caribbean in the 17th century. I had a chance to try it out, and I can see what so many players are liking about it. Yet I also felt that is was not a game ideal for my group.

There are a lot of mechanisms at play in Maracaibo. A lot. Too many to coherently summarize here. Suffice it to say players take turns sailing their ship meeple around various Caribbean islands, stopping at the location that corresponds to the actions they want to trigger. Pathways on the board mandate travel in one direction, with a few spurs here and there to break off on. You're also playing cards from hand in a soft-touch set collection system, paying to hire cards (people, ships, etc.) that provide you permanent powers for the rest of the game, and even occasionally advancing a team of explorers through a jungle track along the bottom of the board. One player arriving at the end of the ship path will trigger the end of the round; players each get one more action before that round ends and ships are reset at the start of the track to make the voyage again. After four trips around the board, the game ends.

Let's get right to the heart of why I don't think this game will have staying power in my group: it took us over four hours to play a 4-player game. Now, of course, we were all learning it for the first time. And first time players of any game aren't going to be as fast with their decision making. So I was expecting longer than the declared "30 minutes per player" on the box. I was not prepared to run more than double that time. None of us were.

The thing is, I really don't think any of us were playing especially slow. Maracaibo has a broad and complex decision tree -- too broad, in my view, and it's the reason the game takes so long. Each turn, you must advance your ship from 1 to 7 spaces. Some of those spaces will have tiles that were randomly placed at the start of the game to define the action(s) you can take there. Other spaces will have actions that you and only you can take, if you've set them up in a previous trip around the board. (Or you can bypass them on purpose for points.) Still other spaces lead you to a choice of 3 different possible actions -- 1, 2, or 3 picks, depending on how far your ship moved that turn. Essentially, every turn you take, you face a 3-layer decision tree with a total of at least a dozen possible end points on it. Figuring out what is best is not easy.

For the people who love this game, I suspect this is a key part of the appeal. There's so much to consider! Should you move farther, faster to push an early end to this voyage around the Caribbean? Or should you try to stop at as many places as you can along the way and hope the other players will follow suit? Should you focus on playing cards to build an engine? Battling for status points with the three European nations that figure in endgame scoring? Exploring the jungle? I see the compelling pressures at work in the game. I also wish that just every once in a while, you'd feel like the choice presented to you was easy to make.

Oh, I should also mention that there's a system for upgrading your ship. As you deliver goods to locations around the map, you remove tokens from specific upgrade options on your personal ship board. Remove both of the two tokens for a given upgrade, and it's yours for the rest of the game -- a permanent power to enhance your game. But there are far more choices for upgrades than feel really necessary (about a dozen in all). It's another decision tree with more branches than I think it truly needed to be plenty interesting. And the tracking is precarious; a gentle table nudge can knock it all askew quite easily.

When we finally reached the end of our night-long experience, the score was quite a blowout. Endgame scoring really swings things wildly. It's made up of multiple parts, and it's all fairly opaque -- good for keeping everyone feeling they have a chance all the way through to the end, but pretty rough when you realize too late that you didn't focus on the right things.

Then there's the complexity we didn't even attempt in our first playthrough! The game has a campaign option, with story cards that are used to change the Caribbean over the course of multiple plays. If you can actually wrap your head around everything that Maracaibo has to offer normally, I'll bet there's some compelling material in there.

I would be open to playing Maracaibo again. It did feel good to slowly grasp the elaborate system. It was a rush to have an especially effective turn. But honestly, playing it again feels like a very heavy lift for my group. It would probably still take three hours the next time around, and that's simply more than we're in the market for most of the time. The game would need to be exceptional, and not just good, to be worth the time and effort.

I give Maracaibo a B-. If your group is into more elaborate and time-consuming games with complex strategic choices, then you should consider giving it a try -- I'd wager you'll like it more than we did. If you like your Euro games short and sweet, steer well clear, lest your ship founder on the rocks.

Post: Modern

Anthology TV shows are so often the province of science fiction. From Black Mirror to The Twilight Zone to The Outer Limits to Amazing Stories (and the revivals of most of them), there are plenty of ways to get a compact tale of the bizarre -- especially if you like it bleak. But bleak isn't for everyone, especially now. Which made a different kind of anthology series particularly welcome.

Modern Love is an Amazon Prime series created by John Carney. Odds are you haven't heard of him. In fact, odds are you've never seen any of his movies -- though I have praised his most recent, Sing Street, here on my blog. If you have seen Sing Street, though, you might imagine (like I did) that Carney might be just the person to bring audiences this type of show. Modern Love is a series of stand-alone romantic tales inspired by columns published in The New York Times. The opening credits make clear that the series is going to cast a wide net in the stories it tells: featuring young people and old, many ethnicities, straight couples and gay, tales of romantic love and others of profound friendship, people finding each other or drifting apart, stories happy and sad and bittersweet. Each episode is, simply, half an hour about love.

Each of season one's eight episodes (and the series has been renewed for another season) features different actors. As a whole, it's an impressive lineup, and often the romantic pairings are well cast. Episodes feature Catherine Keener, Dev Patel, Gary Carr, Tina Fey, John Slattery, John Gallagher Jr., Andrew Scott, Olivia Cooke, and Jane Alexander, among many others. I wouldn't have thought John Carney the sort of person with a huge contact list to just open up, but one way or another, some great performers turned out for this show.

Though I found something to like about every episode, I did have some personal favorites. The first episode, "When the Doorman Is Your Main Man" is a great way to begin the series; it stars Cristin Milioti (of How I Met Your Mother) in a sweet tale that shows right out of the gate that the relationships this show examines won't always be purely romantic ones. The third episode, "Take Me as I Am, Whoever I Am" features Anne Hathaway in a bold performance as a woman dealing with intense bipolar disorder; the episode captures the high highs and low lows in a powerful way.

The episodes don't trend as "com" as standard "rom-com," which I think made me like them more. Still, I'd say they're not so heavy to put off any fan of the genre. Imagine the separate story lines of Love Actually, each pulled apart into their own 30-minute episode -- that's Modern Love. It's certainly easy enough to try one and see whether you like it or not -- there's no grand commitment as with so many shows worth watching these days. And it being on Amazon Prime, odds are sampling Modern Love won't mean convincing you to try some new upstart's streaming service with not-enough-content-yet-to-be-worthwhile.

I give Modern Love a B+ overall (with both stronger and weaker episodes than that, individually). The series certainly isn't as buzzed about as other streaming phenoms these days -- or even other shows on Amazon Prime -- but I think it's worth checking out.

DS9 Flashback: The Magnificent Ferengi

Part of the formula of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was not to have a strict formula. Any given season contained serious episodes, comedic episodes, and everything on the spectrum between. When it came to the comedy, the writers would often look to the Ferengi. "The Magnificent Ferengi" was no exception.

Quark's mother has been captured by the Dominion, and he's out to rescue her using an all-Ferengi team: his brother Rom, his nephew Nog, his cousin Gaila, the eliminator Leck, and ex-liquidator Brunt. After realizing they'll never succeed with a commando approach, they cook up a prisoner exchange. But either way, they'll have to outwit a no-nonsense Vorta named Yelgrun and his huge group of Jem'Hadar.

This episode's title may be inspired by the movie The Magnificent Seven, but its plot is not. (The actors did work in their own homage, though, counting off the Ferengi on their fingers as they're added to the team.) If anything, this episode is more like "Ocean's Six" starring Quark, with impulsiveness and shenanigans replacing the slick planning. And if you're wondering why Grand Nagus Zek farms out Quark's rescue, it might make a little more sense to know that Zek was the prisoner in the original concept for the story; actor Wallace Shawn was unavailable, and the switch to Quark's mother was made.

All the Ferengi actors -- main, recurring, and one-offs suddenly recurring -- really do shine here at the comedy, in large part because each actor and character is good for a different kind of humor. Armin Shimerman plays Quark as "The Mouth," able to talk his way out of anything. Max Grodénchik has Rom's idiot savant act down cold. His reaction to learning of the Nagus' relationship with his mother is a hilarious display of the comedic "rule of three." Aron Eisenberg taps into the dictatorial order-barking that Nog has only previously directed at Jake. Watching him drunk with power as "strategic operations officer" is funny; watching that utterly fail to work with Ferengi is funnier.

Hamilton Camp is fun as Leck. His psychopathic personality is quite unusual for a Ferengi, though the fact that his ambition outstrips his abilities is very on-brand. Josh Pais returns as Gaila, and we learn that without his arms-dealing associate around, he's perhaps more cowardly than any Ferengi we've ever seen. Then of course, there's Jeffrey Combs once again chewing the scenery as Brunt. Though the character has been brought low, losing his job, he still can use coercion to get what he wants. His withering insults cut through the tension whenever the episode starts to get too serious.

But these six Ferengi actors aren't just good individually, they're funny as a comic troupe. The holographic rescue simulation makes for fun hijinks, their shared looks to their prisoner (or the camera) put a smile on your face, and their run through the empty halls of Empok Nor is so cartoonish that it's practically a Scooby Doo episode.

It's not just the rescuers providing the comedy, though. Christopher Shea, who so powerfully delivered drama as the Vorta Keevan earlier in the season, now proves just as skillful at bone-dry comedy. Keevan's resigned ennui and contempt for his captors run neck and neck for generating dark laughs. But Shea really shines after Keevan's death, when he's "reanimated" by technology to lurch and stumble around like a poorly manipulated puppet work; the specificity of the physical work is exceptional.

Returning as "Moogie," Cecily Adams is nowhere near a damsel-in-distress. She gets good moments too, beating on Nog when he tests to see if she's a changeling, and sharing financial advice with her captor. That captor is a new Vorta, Yelgrun, played by rock star Iggy Pop. Show runner Ira Steven Behr was a huge fan and had tried to cast him before; Iggy Pop was finally available here because he was recuperating from dislocating his shoulder while giving a concert. This role may not seem the most natural fit for his dynamic stage presence (which he couldn't have brought under the circumstances anyway), but he really is marvelous at capturing the droll disdain and growing impatience of this character.

Other observations:

• "Syrup of squill" and "hypecat" are shout-outs to a classic W.C. Fields movie, thrown in here because Ira Steven Behr thought they sounded funny. He was right.

• Odo has a scathing analysis of why Ferengi stories don't do well with a crowd: there's nothing heroic about earning profit. This is more than a cutdown, though -- the line frames the episode, a look at how Ferengi characters can rise to the occasion.

• The Jeffries Tubes are usually home to scenes of urgency and technobabble. Here, Quark and Rom take a long expository trip laced with jokes, and capped with a great sight gag of popping out in Sisko's office.

• Kira may not like Quark, but she returns favors, here helping Quark as payback for his rescue during the war arc

• The amount of makeup in this episode is extraordinary: seven Ferengi (one "old"), two Vortas, and dozens of Jem'Hadar extras. It's amazing they pulled this off. If saving money on sets by placing this story on Empok Nor is how they managed it, I'm totally here for it.

You have to get over the premise of this episode fast. Why would the Nagus send Quark to negotiate with the Dominion, rather than any of those Ferengi ships we used to see on The Next Generation? But if you can get at ease with the comedic aims of this episode, it's a hoot. I give "The Magnificent Ferengi" a B+.

A Legacy of Pain

I've played a lot of legacy board games over the past year. When I most recently wrote about one, Machi Koro Legacy, I noted that one lesson I learned there is that when an existing game you don't exactly love is adapted, the legacy experience isn't likely to be any more appealing. But at the same time I was learning that lesson with Machi Koro Legacy, it was really being driven home with another game.

Betrayal Legacy is based on Betrayal at House on the Hill, a game from 2004 with many ardent supporters. Players wander into a spooky old house, gather a handful of creepy items, and are suddenly hit with a story-driven scenario inspired by the great horror tropes. One player turns against the others, who must band together to slay the vampire, defeat the mad scientist, stop the preparations for an evil ritual... whatever the story chosen at random for this particular playthrough throws at the group. The one betrayer is given a set of rules to define how they will win; the rest of the players read a different set of rules spelling out their conditions for victory.

I was never a big fan of Betrayal at House on the Hill. There are those who love it -- I mean really love it -- but I always found it too chaotic and too time-consuming to be as lightweight as it is. But this new incarnation, Betrayal Legacy, was so widely praised among board game enthusiasts that I was willing to give it a try. (Well... that, and it had been more than a decade since I'd played the original game -- long enough to forget exactly what it was I didn't like about it.) But I haven't really buried the lead here: I found Betrayal Legacy to be no better than the original game. If anything, in "forcing" me to play 14 games of it (the campaign's 13 prescribed scenarios, plus an introductory game), it was worse.

I've hinted at the flaws I felt about Betrayal at House on the Hill, but it's worth saying that they remain present in the Legacy version. For the first 1/4 to 1/3 of any game, you actually have no direction to follow. Players simply wander around at random on their turn, discovering new rooms in the mansion in the form of tiles that are laid out on the table. They might find baubles to carry, or have strange encounters that affect one of their game stats (usually for the worse), but there's no actual goal to pursue. For that, you have to wait until "the Haunt" is triggered, the moment at which a traitor is revealed and players are given the scenario that defines what's actually must be done to win the game.

The separation of scenario rules into one book for the Traitor and a different book for the other players is meant to inject mystery, but it always winds up causing more confusion than drama. Players have to be cagey around each other to preserve things that are ostensibly meant to surprise, but there's enough overlap between the two rules sets to deflate the mystery, and enough lack of clarity that still no one really knows what they're doing for a few turns.

As with the original Betrayal at House on the Hill, Betrayal Legacy includes several dozen scenarios -- enough to cover branching possibilities during the campaign, and also to support post-campaign play. Like the original, few of these scenarios seem sufficiently playtested and balanced. The vast majority of scenarios heavily favor one side or the other, with very few offering an experience that actually feels tense and capable of going either way. But then... it's possible that the feeling of imbalance is sometimes there for failure to understand the rules properly -- because many scenarios aren't sufficiently explicit. BoardGameGeek is loaded with questions covering nearly every scenario in the book, clarifying oversights and squishy language, acknowledging ways in which players "broke" certain games that later had to be revised, and generally "patching" the game as originally released.

The Legacy elements don't add nearly enough to the underlying Betrayal experience. There is a "meta-story" of sorts that unfolds over centuries as descendants of the same families return to the same creepy house. But the contours of that story aren't really revealed until more than half of the 13 games have been completed, and there's really not much more to it than "there's one big evil here responsible for it all."

The Legacy gameplay mechanics use a similarly soft touch. You sticker tiles where players die, with those deaths sometimes impacting a handful of cards in subsequent games. Players can mark certain items as family "heirlooms," which in theory imparts a bonus when the same player acquires them again in a subsequent game. In practice, however, the item deck is so large, and acquiring any one particular card so random an occurrence, that you almost never get the payoff. One or two other elements come into play later in the campaign, and with just a bit more frequency over multiple games. Still, the overall impact of the game's Legacy elements are that you wind up doing a great deal of bookkeeping for effects both infrequent and negligible.

I was ready to abandon the Betrayal Legacy campaign quite early on, but enough players in my group were still into it enough (at first) to get us past the halfway point. By then, we all sort of felt pot committed. In a virtual gaming suicide pact, we saw the whole campaign through to the end... and then promptly tossed the game in the trash, even though it supports post-campaign play. I can say with certainty that I'll never like a campaign game less and still actually finish that campaign.

In the end, Betrayal Legacy is as chaotic and disjointed an experience as playing Betrayal at House on the Hill 14 times. And yet, there are people out there who would gladly sign up for that. I truly don't understand what they're seeing in the game. For stronger gameplay mechanics that change over time -- from the same game designer, even -- look to Pandemic Legacy. For a more satisfying story that really does build throughout a Legacy campaign, I'll not-at-all-humbly suggest Clank! Legac: Acquisitions Incorporated.

Betrayal Legacy is, at best, a D in my book. (And only that high because, in something this random, you're bound to randomly find fun on occasion too. We did, in perhaps 2 of the 14 scenarios we played.) If your gaming tastes tend to align with mine, I strongly suggest you look elsewhere for your next Legacy game. But if you loved the original Betrayal at House on the Hill, or already own Betrayal Legacy and love it, don't let me harsh on your fun.