On Boardgames: Hive

I've been playing the game Hive (designed by John Yianni and published in 2001) for ages, and I still love it.

With average play time lasting around 20 minutes, it's a fun game to play while you're waiting for the rest of your boardgame buddies to show up. It's also simple enough to play whilst intoxicated, and the heavy, colorful tiles seem designed around this. Or, you know, Yianni designed the game for children (although I'd like to argue that the two groups react to losing this game in similar fashions).

This is a game for two players, composed of 22 bug tiles in black and white. Each player gets three soldier ants, three grasshoppers, two beetles, two spiders, and one queen bee tile, and each type of bug tile has different rules that govern its movement. Players place tiles one at a time, with the main rules being that you cannot place your tile adjacent to your opponents' tiles, you cannot break apart the "hive," and the tiles need to be able to slide in and out of the spaces they are moving to, with a few exceptions based on the move actions available to each tile.

The goal of the game is to completely surround your opponent's queen bee. Once that happens, the game immediately ends and you may commence swearing at that punk kid who just smugly beat you at the game you've been playing for ages.

I like to think of this game as a combination of checkers and chess. Once you get the hang of it, it's easy to start planning two, three, even four moves ahead, and you have to carefully balance both the defense of your queen and the harassment of your punk kid opponent's. The pieces move almost like chess pieces, such as the queen moving one space in any direction and the grasshopper moving directly over pieces in a straight line, but the options for movement can get pretty limited since all pieces must stay connected. With that in mind, it's important to plan how you'll control the board, or "hive", early in the game. The rules may be simple, but the strategies get more complex the more you play.

If you get bored with the base game, there are expansions available that add additional bug tiles to the mix, such as the ladybug, mosquito, and pill bug. Or, if you don't want to purchase or heft around the actual tiles, that stupid punk kid can stomp you at the Android or iOS version of the game.

On Books: Lexicon by Max Barry

I am a shameless lover of action novels.

There. I said it.

Now that we have that out of the way, Lexicon definitely satisfied my love of things-that-go-boom, but it also managed to tickle my inner language nerd and my mild obsession with science fiction. Not as much as I'd hoped, but also not enough to stop me from recommending it to my sci-fi loving friends.

Max Barry immediately drops the reader into an airport bathroom where Wil is having a very bad day. His very bad day involves being savagely ambushed at a urinal and having a needle rammed into his eye while fielding really random questions.

From there the book doesn't let you down for a second. It moves along two narrative arcs, one providing the background to the main "antagonist" (Emily) and the other following a seemingly random buffoon (Wil) that is thrown violently into a world he knows nothing about.

The basis for this book is that there are certain people, called Poets, who have been trained by an enigmatic secret organization to effectively hypnotize people through the neurological effects of the spoken word. The mumbo-jumbo used to explain this is a bit vague, but the premise is logical enough for sufficient suspension of disbelief. Barry also throws in a lot of catch phrases that lend his story a teeny, tiny bit of credence, such as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and some basic concepts behind the Lexical Approach. But like all science fiction, don't pick at it too much or it all starts sounding ridiculous.

The two characters the book focuses on, Wil and Emily, both have intertwining stories and the way the two narratives play off of each other gives each character additional depth. They're both highly sympathetic and I was left in tears more than once as Emily's story unfolds.

Then there are car chases, subterfuge, conspiracy theories... All classic elements to an action thriller novel with a smidgen of sci-fi thrown in. If you're looking for a fast summer read, this is your book. I can't say it's a classic, despite having some masterfully crafted characters and a unique premise, which was a bit disappointing. The setting seemed to leave lots of room for speculation over the power of the spoken and written word, but the extent of it seemed to function simply as a plot device.

So yeah. Go read it.

Also I'm back blogging, so expect more regular updates.