Cerberus 2(10)
The long, drawn-out hangover
Preamble
Pardon the bit of radio silence. I think the recent weeks called for it. But here we are and nothing is going to stand in our … what? Oh, yeah, maybe it’s time to pivot.
Volume 2, Issue 10 is here in your inbox. And as always, I appreciate you taking the time to read. Hopefully it’s a brief but welcome respite from what is looking like a long winter of social distancing because … well, we don’t have to get into that either.
From the glow of your device to your face, this is me giving you a bit of warmth in a socially distanced, not at all creepy, way. Much love for you and yours and I plan to keep cranking out these newsletters as frequently as possible. All thanks to all 4 of my loyal readers.
Reviews
Pumice — Table
The horizon of experimental musics which dabble in pop and folk have no bones to pick with New Zealand. As the Aotearoa island imagined what pop sounded like from other regions, along with the late pressings they received of bands from Europe and the Americas, the retelling that occurred in the artistic beds of Dunedin, Wellington, and beyond became a touchstone. New Zealand became a place musicians from across Europe and America turned to for renewed inspiration.
Stefan Neville and Jade Farley are no different, becoming a part of this cultural fabric. With Table, Pumice exist as a means of understanding the elongated landscape of modern New Zealand and not just its storied history. One can pick up a book such as Bruce Russell’s Erewhon Calling and feel the textual sensation of a place and time. Pumice has often made music that is timeless, separate from the influential rabble of its ancestors and yet totally indebted to its originality and repetition.
More than anything, Table is conversational. This is a communal experience of people gathering around the titular item. Much of our lived-in experiences happen around tables. It’s where we eat, play games, conduct work, chart activities, make lists … by being a utilitarian piece of furniture, it folds neatly into our existences. Tables are versatile, being able to be forged out of any surface area able to accommodate our instinctual need for a reliable place to conduct these activities.
So it’s no coincidence that Pumice’s Table serves these purposes neatly. It’s a place where the variable New Zealand sounds of old and new are laid bare in a bath of folkish melodies and pastoral drones: Farley’s forlorn violin pining deeply in “Marie”; the happy dirge of guitar and organ sang round the pint room throughout “Hankerchief”; the dark underbelly of our own souls splayed across the table through the murky harmonization of “Our Schedule to Explore the Large Area, the Heart.”
Table, much like the land of its birth, houses both influences and the influenced. Its versatility to be both a place to gather and a place to depart cannot go unnoticed. Sometimes we come together to celebrate a life or to remind ourselves what we’re thankful for, sometimes we come to this flattened obelisk to argue or say goodbye to our familiars. It’s the spirit of Table as both an artistic statement put into music, as well as the physical form where we put so much of ourselves in front of others to be seen and heard.
Rob Mazurek Exploding Star Orchestra — Dimensional Stardust
International Anthem/LP, Digital
I just want to get this out of the way: Hot damn! What a phenomenal, uplifting album!
Biased pleasantries brushed aside, hot damn, what a phenomenal, uplifting album!
Mazurek has been exploring all forms of jazz and jazz-like music for 30 years, but his recent output via International Anthem has been transformative in reintroducing the wide-scoped genre for modern audiences. Sometimes contemplative, sometimes minimal, Mazurek’s work always inhabits a space that is timely yet timeless.
With his 14-piece Exploding Star Orchestra (ESO) in tow, Dimensional Stardust takes us on a trip-hop, funk, and electro-rock journey that harkens back to turn-of-the-century jam-jazz (Medeski, Martin, and Wood’s The Dropper or Soulive’s Doin’ Something quickly come to mind). It’s a feel-good blast that isn’t beholden to genre, or the limitations of stuffing other genres into it like a turducken.
In fact, Dimensional Stardust is rudimentary when all things are considered. Despite the cacophony of instruments and styles clashing in any of the album’s compositions, there’s still a measured presence in sound design. It’s an album that cries out for an interdimensional turntable to properly play it, so that we can be set adrift within the “careening prisms” of this opus.
If you have any love for even the metaphysical idea of jazz, this is your jam. Don’t hesitate. You need to feel these rhythms, noises, and ideas coursing through you. This is an album of exuberance and vitality. Go capture that feeling in song before you forget what it’s like when the real world comes crashing down (and it hurts inside).
Bonus Materials
(Note: From time-to-time, I will add some bonus materials from other work I’ve done. This is from a recently published review I wrote for an Australian-based board gaming magazine called The Campaigner. This is for you, those diehard newsletter subscribers, to either ignore or print out and use as birdcage lining.)
Expedition to Newdale
Designer: Alexander Pfister
Publisher: Lookout Games
Return to Alexander Pfister’s Oh My Goods universe in a quest to reach Newdale via an eight chapter epic.
Expedition to Newdale is a 90 minute affair for 1–4 players wherein everyone is trying to create the best synchronized engine to advance the story and win the game. Though the game provides eight chapters, which introduces new cards, game boards, and other mechanics to progress the story of the titular expedition, the game’s core mechanics remain unchanged through seven of the eight chapters. Eschewing legacy games, there is nothing to destroy or discard, only additions (to be used or excluded depending on the group of gamers) to enhance the options and advance the underlying story.
At its heart, Expedition to Newdale is a simple worker placement game where players are working to generate goods for building, exploring, and end-game scoring conditions. However, being the design of Alexander Pfister, the paths to making these actions harmonize vary, causing players to crunch the odds, sacrifice goods and/or cards, and decide what is the best play over the course of seven tightly-wound rounds.
Each player begins with their own player board, a number of wooden homes, a Coal Mine card (placed in the starting area of their player board) with five starting gaming pieces on top of the card, two numbered workers, and eight cards drawn from the massive building deck. Players will choose five of these building cards to begin with, trying to synergize the goods they produce as well as determining buildings that will help them achieve the end goal of Final Scoring Overview card associated with the current chapter. Players will then receive a secret scoring objective for potential victory points at the end of the game.
Play begins with the first player turning over the first card in the event deck. The event deck is seeded according to the rule book and also dependent on which chapter is being played. The event deck can provide special cards that enter into a communal market on the table, but their main purpose is to reveal the number of guaranteed assistants to help players produce goods during the round. Each card in hand or acquired throughout the game will require a certain number of works to produce, so these assistants are vital to helping players reach necessary thresholds to produce.
Four more assistants will be drawn from random from a bag during the round as well. Assistants come in one of four colours (yellow, blue, orange, and green). However, this is just one part of producing goods from one of the cards in a player’s tableau. For players to produce goods during the course of the game, they must place a worker in one of the three action spots under that building on their player board. Each spot may produce less or more goods depending on the spot workers are placed. For example, the Coal Mine has spots to produce two goods, where one less assistant than listed on the card is needed. Its second spot will produce three goods but requires one more assistant from either of the listed colours to meet the conditions of production. Finally, the third spot can yield four goods but requires two additional assistants of the same on top of the needed requirements to produce at this level.
As players build buildings, they can place up to seven more of these anywhere on their player boards. The action spots under each building may yield different numbers of goods and change the requirements for those yields, so players must be strategic in what they produce and the quantities, not to mention trying to build a tableau with similar colours so that they can optimize production. Goods may also be produced via chaining, which allows players to discard cards from their hands with pictured goods that match one of the buildings on which they tried to produce. Players may also take cruder goods and place them on a card that needs those goods to produce more valuable goods. When chaining occurs, players also produce an additional good to the number they chain. Chaining can occur on buildings that unsuccessfully produce when assistants are drawn.
To build, players will place one of their workers on the building action in the shared worker board. When doing this, they can then choose to place one of their wooden homes onto a map one or two spaces away from any current homes they have on the map (all players have one home on the board at the start of each game). Choosing to build in an adjacent city may give players the opportunity to claim a bonus tile from the board that was randomly seeded during set up. These bonus tiles allow players to trade in building cards for goods, earn bonuses if a number of the same colour of assistants are drawn during the round, or even to subtract the cost of an assistant from any production.
Building two spaces away does not allow players to claim a bonus tile (unless they perform an action using a worker on the shared board that allows them to move two spaces to build and claim a tile). Other buildings provide non-production benefits as well, such as fortresses that give players military strength (based on the number of fists on the card), post offices (which provide permanent boosts to the number of assistant of a specific colour), and other production buildings that only trigger goods production at the end of the round without workers needed.
There are shared board actions, which not only aids people to increase the distance in which they can build on the game board, but includes other options for varying gameplay. These actions include freeing additional workers. This comes at a cost of resources (discarding the equivalent of 7 for the first worker, 13 for the second). These workers can prove valuable in future rounds, allowing players to carry out more actions. Players may also place a worker on the shared board to discard cards from their hands to draw new cards, or to gain black market goods that are placed on the coal mine and one other building of choice.
The game unfolds over 7 rounds as players try to build a symbiotic engine, place workers and chain their actions by the number on the worker pawns (so Worker 1 will go first, then Worker 2, and so on), and try to maximize chaining goods and building where they can. All of this is in service to meeting the scoring goals of the game. If players choose to play the campaign, these scoring conditions will change and may include gaining specific resources and meeting a military strength threshold. In solo games, the goals are far more specific and provide a deeper challenge.
And make no mistake, Expedition to Newdale is challenging but not due to the myriad actions players take across its seven rounds. All it takes is one round for players of any skill level to acclimate to the actions and what is and could be available to them. However, an overflowing deck of building cards can make getting the right buildings to meet the scoring conditions a game of luck rather than skill. As the campaign advances and more cards are shuffled into the deck, the probability of getting the buildings you need to produce the necessary goods shrinks. It’s one of the biggest weaknesses of Expedition to Newdale, where a lot of options actually hinders progress. It’s even more crushing in the solo variant, where by round three a player will know whether they have any chance of pulling off a win.
More seasoned players of Pfister games will also begin to settle into a routine in their first few turns just out of habit. Again, by creating a varied engine of actions, in the end Expedition to Newdale boils down just a few rudimentary actions at the beginning of each game so players can optimize their engines even before they get them going. That the game only goes seven rounds means every action is valuable, so experimentation with the available variability goes away in the chase to meet end game requirements.
However, Expedition to Newdale — even with these limitations and circumstances — is a lot of fun. Once all players are familiar with the game and the parameters of a specific chapter, the game moves quickly but still provides excitement and intrigue. Waiting for the right building card(s) to come up can be excruciating but also fun. Building an engine where you can maximize chaining production is a delight, allowing a lot of flexibility. Finding the sweet spot of what you have built and how to leverage it in seven short rounds is the best part. You get the chance to run your engine every round and to improve it, but the game’s swiftness means it’ll never get overwhelming.
Pfister is a master at presenting players with a lot of options but ultimately having them seize on just a few of them. Expedition to Newdale is no different, and though it isn’t the strongest game in his expanding oeuvre, it may be one of the most accessible for gamers interested in Euro games but afraid of hours-long games. It’s more than a toe in the deep end, but players won’t find themselves completely underwater or out of the game at the end of the first round.
ORIGINAL REVIEW LINK: https://thecampaignermagazine.com/2020/10/expedition-to-newdale/
