Board games I like

Me and Luisa found a few new hits in boardgaming during our vacation.

## Lost Cities
Lost Cities

Lost Cities is a two-player card game of exploring lost cities. A German design, without the use of language on the cards. Came with Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish translations of the short rules.

Learning the game was a 10-minute affair in a coffee shop.

Mastering the moves? After two or three full games I am a capable player, I think. But I still take chances that I have not calculated.

## Acquire

Acquire is: A plastic board. Plastic pieces with numbers that fit on it. Cards for stocks. Paper money.

Buy stocks, wait, play some pieces, buy more, play some pieces, buy… and you are out of money. The game actually has the venture capitalists run out of money. And they wait… and wait… and like an explosion, money is freed when a large corporation eats a smaller one. And the investment cycle begins again.

I found some smart rules for the 2-player game, where the stock market acts as a stock-holder as well. When counting the number of stocks to see who has the majority, the stock market randomizes a 1-12 number (by drawing a tile). Makes for different play.

Designed in the 1960s by Sid Sackson. Follow that link, and you can read more on Acquire: its history and development. They also have the best shots of its board in play as well.

## Bohnanza

Card game of simple German design (Uwe Rosenberg). Worked very well with only three players.

Stay away from additions to the game, they remove the focus on the trading of resources, which is a social affair at the heart of the game.

Review with some cover-art pictures.

D-Link DWL-122 + Tiger = Trouble

D-Link DWL-122 is a little dongle for wireless internet. With Mac OS X, it makes trouble.

D-Link dongle

When removed from the USB slot on OS X Tiger it freezes the computer with a nice OS warning that the computer must be shut down or restarted.

Now I am digging up info on as to why it makes trouble.

Update: this thread gives a link to an updated version of the drivers… that are not linked to from D-Link’s support page. We’ll see after these are installed.

Django: Python web framework of the minute

More frameworks that map relational databases to rich object-oriented models! Today’s news is a Python framework. It’s been developed during two years for use at a newspaper in Kansas.

Read more in the real description: Django at a glance tells the short of it, and Simon Willison says more at his weblog.

You create a data description (kind of like an SQL table schema but with additional information about validation rules and interface widgets) and load it in to Django. Django then creates the database tables, model classes and a comprehensive web-based administration interface for your site’s staff. All that’s left for you to do manually is the code for the public site, which is generally a case of writing a few lines of controller code, configuring some URLs and knocking out some templates.

A bit like Paul M Jones’ PEAR class DB_Table where you describe the data structure in your program, and have the database knit together after that.

Serious role-playing: Rest in peace

My friend with the great singing voice Tobias takes a historical drive down LARP’s memory lane: Drama exercises is the new costume-making.

He chronicles the descent of Swedish LARP “seriousness” (and also defines what that term meant, at the time).

(I now see that I need to tag my posts more specifically. LARP could be a tag. RPG Theory could be one, too. Feed the metadata-monsters!)

Blog platform update

I can not believe I waited this long to do this upgrade. What could go wrong? Everything, I thought. And yet, it went flawlessly.

As you can see, I have taken only one step away from the default theme, and installed another theme. Steps will be taken in the future.

What this move to a higher plane of bloggishness means is that I can begin recording and podcasting easier.

Come the time.

**Update**: OK, I could not stand the illegible standard typeface that this theme shipped with, so “Verdana”, as a magician could say.

Thanks to [Peter Rukavina](http://ruk.ca) for the term in the title of this post.

Flow: Ecological restaurant

Restaurant Flow

Gyldenløvesgade 10

1369 Copenhagen K

Tel.: (+45) 33 14 43 43

Olle’s comment: Have not visited this place yet. I’d like to, but every time something comes up. Please chip in with commentary on this place.

> A cozy, tranquil atmosphere; non-smoking, no caffinated or alcoholic beverages. Food is prepared according to the ancient Indian nutritional system known as Ayurveda (science of life). The meal of the day (89 DKK) consists of a plate with three dishes made from grains, vegetables, beans/lentils, salad and spelt bread. Desserts and beverages are extra. Simple, good-tasting, healthy and filling. Open Mon-Sun 17:30-21:00.

Quoth HappyCow

Holding thoughts

Briton and computer geek Matt Webb and his blog Interconnected continues to amaze me.

The guy reads continental philosophy (Deleuze, no less), and discusses it like it was comic books. The way it should be discussed, at any rate. That goes for comic books, too, but the other conceptual way around. “A Thousand Plateaus was my Gödel, Escher, Bach” he states. But with humour. I freely quote the man, his command of his mother tongue is far superior.

I caught the last part of his magnificent presentation at reboot7 on the computer user interfaces of the future (as seen in films, or rather in the film adaptation of Minority Report). They use huge screens, and move items with gestures in the air in front of them. Video sequences represent objects, and throwing items aside tags them as interesting or uninteresting. If you know if/where Matt has put his presentation online, please comment here. It was good stuff, but I guess his presence made the show into a show, not just statements.

I take pleasure in the fact that Mr Webb is a great presenter. His powerfully positive attitude about dynamic languages is never made into dull yes-man-speak. He is also a great writer.