Risk: Black Ops - Why Mine Won't Hit eBay

On a (thankfully) lighter note, I mentioned a while back that I'd scored a copy of Risk: Black Ops, a game that just oozes cool out of every one of its tiny cardboard pores. I had a chance to play it a few weeks ago, and I was suitably impressed. This game is engaging, fast, light, and fun. It still maintains the general mechanics of Risk that will be familiar to anyone who's ever turtled in Australia, but it puts some significant spins on those mechanics and adds a few new tweaks. The result is - well, frankly, it's excellent. What I've found interesting, though, is the small number of copies that have started to hit eBay. I've been following the auctions, mostly out of a sense of curiosity but perhaps with an eye towards persuasion - what price would copies of this command, given that there are a mere 1,000 in existence? And would it be enough to convincer me to part with mine? Well, I wasn't disappointed - the first round of auctions closed over the weekend, with each one ending over $500. Two months ago, if you'd have told me that I'd be holding in my hands a copy of Risk valued at over $500, I'd have probably laughed at you, but here we are.

Still, mine won't hit the auction block, at least not yet. I'm enough of a collector to know that if I dump this copy, then I can forget about ever getting my hands on one again. And I do think it's worth keeping, even if Risk has been long surpassed by others on my list of favorite games. This version is simply stunning visually - it has an ultra-modern, minimalist approach that just works.

Ok, so it looks fantastic - how does it play? As I've already mentioned, it's an overwhelming improvement over original recipe Risk. If you've ever played the game, you're probably familiar with some of Risk's characteristic problems - it's too random, it's too dependent on dropping cards for a big army, it's too easy to get eliminated, and overall, it's just too long. I'm happy to report that the new version fixes many of these flaws. The big changes:

• Objectives: Objectives are probably the biggest change. There are eight objectives available for each game, ranging from things like "Conquer North America" to "Control two of your opponent's capitals" to "Capture at least ten territories in one turn". Completing an objective will award you with a bonus, such as an extra die for attack or defense or a free movement during your turn. Also, completing three objectives wins the game.
• Capitals and Cities: Cities are placed randomly at the start of the game. When determining the number of troops that are drafted at the beginning of a turn, each city counts towards the total territories controlled (in other words, it's now territories plus cities instead of just territories). This essentially doubles the strategic value of territories with a city. Also, each capital adds one to your total (in other words, capitals count as three territories for determining number of troops). This means that every game will be different because the map changes by virtue of city and capital placement.
• Cards: Cards now show either one or two stars. No more collecting sets - you can trade cards in at any time, receiving an amount of troops proportional to the number of stars on the cards. This means that there's no longer a strategic advantage to being the last player to turn in cards.

The net effect of these changes is to make the game much more aggressive. Players will have to attack and take territories, and the rewards for doing so are significant. More aggressive play, plus the addition of the objectives, results in a much tighter, fast-paced game that can realistically be played in 60-90 minutes.

A new retail version will be published this summer using these same rules. If you're at all a fan of Risk, and especially if you've played and enjoyed any of the variants (2210, Star Wars, etc), then I recommend giving this one a try - even if you can't get your hands on the uber-cool Black Ops version. For my buddies and I, it's transformed Risk from a game that would always get preempted by something more meaty to something that can serve as a quite satisfying warmup to, say, War of the Ring. Risk is finally back in my rotation.

Technorati Tags: games, risk black ops

I'm back - what an insane couple of weeks. Thanks to everyone who shared thoughts and prayers - it was appreciated, even if I haven't been in the frame of mind to say so. We're starting to get back to normal, or at least a semblance thereof. I don't think that we'll ever quite be the same after this. Two weeks ago I had one of the worst experiences of my life, and I suppose that what's starting to happen is that I'm adapting my perception of normal.

Well, anyway - enough about that. We still have questions that need to be answered; we don't even know the baby's gender yet. Hopefully we'll have those in the next few weeks and gain at least some sense of closure around this whole mess. It's been utterly surreal - two weeks ago we were still trying to decide on names.

It's been a long week. We learned Tuesday that we lost the baby. We're in complete shock - there was no indication that anything was wrong. I'll be away from the blog for a bit - please pray for us in this difficult time.

Entertainment and the Suburban Condition

Finally (!) delving back into Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, I want to dig into a phenomenon that Putnam argues is the most significant shaping influence in terms of social capital in modern American life - namely, electronic forms of entertainment and, specifically, television. This particular chapter of the book is both enlightening and depressing, if not entirely surprising. Putnam offers devastating analysis and commentary that relentlessly links television with civic disengagement in measure after measure. In conclusion, he writes:

Americans at the end of the twentieth century were watching more TV, watching it more habitually, more pervasively, and more often alone, and watching more programs that were associated specifically with civic disengagement (entertainment, as distinct from news). The onset of these trends coincided exactly with the national decline in social connectedness, and the trends are most marked among the younger generations that are...distinctively disengaged. Moreover, it is precisely those Americans most marked by this dependence on televised entertainment who were most likely to have dropped out of civic and social life - who spent less time with friends, were less involved in community organizations, and were less likely to participate in public affairs. (p. 246)

I suppose I should be clear that what Putnam is discussing here -and in the book generally speaking - is not in any way isolated to suburbanites. Obviously the influence of electronic media pervades all demographics and communities in our society. Putnam, in fact, relates a story from a town in northern Canada where, due to a topological anomaly, television signals were unavailable until the mid-1970's. This community was studied alongside two neighboring communities that had ready access to television signals. Once television became available, this community demonstrated an immediate, measurable decline in residents' participation in community activities. The other two communities were used as a control to demonstrate that the only variable in play was, in fact, television.

But my concern is specifically with the way in which electronic media interact with suburban culture. I'm convinced that there is a reciprocal relationship between the isolating effects of suburban geography, the counter-competent effects of chronic outsourcing, and the demotivating effects of electronic entertainment. Put simply - these three elements of suburban life reduce the ability, desire, and personal connections needed to make meaningful change in ourselves and our communities. An example perhaps will help to clarify what I mean - take sports, basketball for instance, something that I used to play regularly with friends in high school and college. I haven't played basketball in years, and if I thought of starting again, I'd face three hurdles: it's easier to get my basketball "fix" by flipping over to ESPN, lack of play has atrophied my skills (such as they were), and I don't know anyone else in my neighborhood who would like to get together for a few hoops. There it is - isolation, outsourcing, and entertainment all combine to keep me off the courts. And if I wanted to translate this into the area of Christian faith - well, I don't think I'd have much difficulty, would I?

But here's what I'm currently starting to wonder - would a change in one of these categories be enough to overcome the inertia that keeps me in a rut (in any particular area of my life, but faith in particular) and push me forward towards action? That's the question that I want to take up next.

Technorati Tags: Bowling Alone, suburbs, entertainment

News Update

What a crazy couple of weeks! As you can no doubt guess from my news last week, we're scrambling to get things in order. We've put our house on the market, so most of my spare time has been spent either preparing our home for prospective buyers or searching for a new home with my wife. It's not the best time to sell, but it's a good time to buy, so we're feeling perhaps less nervous than we were a few months ago. Also, most of the work is done on our place, so we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. As is probably obvious, our home search has taken on a new sense of urgency - our little two bedroom townhouse is tight with three boys; I can't imagine packing a fourth child into the mix.

More updates of course as we get them - we do want to find out the gender, since at this point its less a novelty for us and more a question of how much stuff we'll need to buy. A girl would be completely new territory for us. Please, if you would, pray that our house search goes well, that our current place sells in a timely manner, and that the pregnancy continues to be smooth.

News

Cocoa and Compassion

I wanted to post this for Valentine's Day but didn't get an opportunity. Fortune recently ran a fantastic article on the economics of chocolate - fantastic, not in the sense of a good-news story, but rather as a multifaceted look at the complexities of improving the lives of those in the developing world that provide us with many of our resources, in this case, the farmers in the Ivory Coast who produce cocoa. It's a sobering look into the realities that govern how hard it is to actually affect real change. Some excerpts:

Outside Sinikosson, El Hadj Madi Sankara cultivates 27 acres of cocoa, from which he usually harvests ten tons of beans, earning about $9,000 a year but remaining deeply in debt. Sankara and his 11-year-old son, Ibrahim, are preparing a large mound of cocoa pods for processing. "I want to help my father," says Ibrahim, standing on a pile of pods, toying with his machete. "I need to learn how to be a farmer." His sentiment captures the complexity of the child-labor issue here: Typically it is poverty that compels child labor, not greedy overseers.

Soon a group of young men and boys join the work. Among them are 8-year-old twins Hassan and Hussein. The boys, the children of a neighbor, are helping Sankara make his harvest on time. Their payment won't be in cash, but in reciprocal help from Sankara's family to their father. Not one of the kids goes to school. "We're all doing a hard job," says Sankara, "but we do not get a just price."

The farmers in Sinikosson do not know that Cargill buys their beans, but other farmers in the area are on painfully intimate terms with the Minnesota company. In the town of Thoui, members of a local farmers' cooperative say that borrowing money from Cargill has trapped them in debt and forced some of them to take their kids out of school and put them to work. "There is no other way we can buy fertilizer or feed our families throughout the year," says N'guessan Norbert Walle, a former president of the cooperative.

If farmers can't pay back their debts, they risk arrest. When Walle ran the co-op, his manager was jailed, he says, on orders from Cargill. The arrested manager, Lucien Adje, a former accounting student, says he was taken to the port city of San Pedro and put in a small cell. "You had to do everything in one place - you know, urinate, defecate. I couldn't eat much, it was so filthy."

Farmers describe these efforts [to eliminate child labor] as more akin to intimidation than to education. "People are worried that America will not buy our cocoa anymore," says Julien Kra Yau, director of a farmers' cooperative in Thoui. "That would be very bad." Adds the co-op's treasurer, Raymond Kouasse Kouadio: "It would be a total catastrophe!"

There is fair-trade chocolate on the market, but it accounts for no more than 1 percent of global supply - and the movement has little traction in Ivory Coast. A more effective way to combat child labor would be for the government of Ivory Coast to invest some of the revenue it gets from high taxes on cocoa exporters in education and social services to help poor farmers. But the government of Ivory Coast is ranked among the most corrupt in the world by Transparency International, a nongovernmental watchdog group. And it seems happier making excuses than changes.

I don't have much in the way of commentary on this. I think it's a view that perhaps those of us who are interested in economic justice need to hear. There simply isn't an easy solution - I was particularly struck by the worry that we will stop purchasing their products. Do we at times do more damage than good by refusing to purchase certain products? I simply don't know. The bottom line is that the farmers need a fair price, but the corruption between them and the end market makes such an arrangement difficult at best.

I like the way forward offered by such businesses as One Village Coffee. Here's a quote from their website:

Not only do we strive to create an exceptional cup of coffee in every roast, but we also believe our coffee is only as good as the communities we support. And so as a growing coffee company, we’re committed to helping communities both locally and internationally.

And it begins with raising our standard for coffee beyond just taste. It means supporting and partnering with organizations doing unique community development projects around the world.

I'm also a big fan of Kiva. In case you've been living under a rock, Kiva is a microfinance organization that connects lenders in the developed world with entrepreneurs in the developing world. The theory is that small loans, often $25 or so, spread out among many people can change the environment for business owners who just need a little help. It's a great way of connecting people who can afford to spare a bit of cash with those who need it in a way that offers dignity to both. That kind of creative imagination, pairing a business opportunity with compassion and integrity, is what is needed to move past our current, often destructive, models.

Technorati Tags: economics, justice, chocolate