Posts Archives | Ludobits

At Your Marks

05/06/2019 | Paul Dussault

Floor marks. Actors are quite familiar with those discrete crosses made with gaffer tape on the stage floor. They tell them where they have to stand, at precise moments of their scene.

But they also tell them less obvious things. That the whole scene has been designed, is predetermined; that the lighting has been painstakingly measured, and the projectors or the softboxes carefully aligned. They tell them that most of the work has already been done, and that as for the actors, well, all they have left to do is to complete the picture, by standing exactly there. Right on the tape. Not an inch off their mark, or the arrangement no longer works, and the effect is ruined.

Mandatory objectives marking a board game leave me with the same impressions as floor marks. No need to question anything; everything has been calculated. Just relax and enjoy the ride. The game, its story arch, its solution are all set and ready; all you have to do, you, the player, is follow these prescribed steps, reach such location or such level at such moment.

Just stand there, and everything will work.

A finish line is fine—without it there is no game. But I rarely enjoy having to run towards a finish line within the confines of a predefined lane. Because constantly planning, tracking and correcting my position, my course, is the most pleasurable aspect of any game for me.

By giving me a precise trajectory to follow, you take the game away from me.

Understandably, story-driven games, as well as some tactical wargames, are often made out of objectives. In most of those games, players are visitors; they’re characters used by the predefined plot(s), to various degrees. Sometimes even only cogs. The story, the all-powerful script, sits above them, and they’re there to serve it.

Such games make me feel as if I’m less of a player, of a driver, and more of a passenger.

An extra.

What I find the most absorbing in a game is the challenge of evaluating, of correctly reading the situations it presents me with. Or the patterns hidden in its rules. I like to be confronted with seemingly obscure, opaque situations, and to have to try and make my way through them, by placing my own floor marks. By defining my own objectives.

Then I get to make mistakes. And I start over. But then I’m learning. I can get better.

Indeed I realize that I am getting quite fond of games that let the players set their own victory conditions during the course of the game. Now those are the best. They close the loop.

No narrow story line to obey, no arbitrary timing to meet. No staging. Just a raw game put in front of us with no other clue than its rules.

Just the inexhaustible pleasure of formulating hypotheses, and of spending the rest of the game testing them.

This is where the whole game lies for me.

My best chance at immersion, as they say.

Being told what my objectives are, what is supposed to matter to me during a game or a scenario I’m about to play, simply sucks all substance out of the game. Leaving behind a mere exercise, a puzzle.

At best, a chess problem.

At worst, a point-to-point drawing. Painting by numbers.

How to better enjoy your games thanks to Inoreader — Organizing

01/03/2017 | Paul Dussault

Informed gaming is better gaming. Such is the premise of the current series of articles (see Introduction, Part 1, Part 2) which aims at showing how to better discover and organize online gaming content..

I don’t know about you, but registering my subscriptions in Inoreader has mostly resulted in the number of unread items climbing like the national debt counter. Something needed to be done. In the latter part of this series, we explore a few tricks that can help you keep all this content under control and, of course, manage to read it.

Making Use of the Folders

Inoreader’s folders are quite flexible. They can even become unwieldy if we’re not careful.

Only you can devise the organization method that best suits you. But understanding the features offered by the folders will no doubt help you choose.

Subscription Status

First the folders let you know which of their content is being read, and when.

The number of unread articles. This is the number that will be displayed to the right of each folder name (and each subscription), if you so choose. That counter will keep you informed of how many new articles have arrived in each folder. And it can also be very useful for fine-tuning your filters and rules. And clicking on it can mark all the items in the folder as read at once.

Your reading statistics. Right-clicking on a folder will offer you to View Folder Information, that is a graph comparing the articles read to those received, over the last month, on weekdays or time of day.

Actions and Settings

Some of Inoreader’s actions and settings can be applied on a per-folder basis. Which is another good criterion to use for building a solid folder structure.

Views. Every display setting selected for a particular folder will remain associated to it. So each folder can use one of the five views available in Inoreader.

The benefits of these display modes vary depending on the type of content. For example, the featured image makes the Map or Magazine views more suited to lists of articles about games, allowing them to be identified more quickly. On the other hand, forums or subreddits discussion threads are easier to scan using the Compact view. Also note that the way articles are marked as read can vary depending on the view, which offers even more flexibility in reader behavior.

Sort order. It is handy to be able to have different folders sorted differently. Your Kickstarter news or updates folder will show the latest articles first. But you will most likely want to follow forum discussion threads in chronological order.

Rules. Rules might be the greatest feature of Inoreader for me. I’ll come back to them in a bit. For now just know that they can be applied separately to each folder.

Sharing. Inoreader doesn’t stop at collecting content — it also offers many ways of sharing it. Each folder can become a bundle that can be made accessible to other Inoreader users, to your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ followers as well as your blog’s readers (the wargame bundle is here). It is also possible to export the content of each folder in a file readable by other aggregators and, of course, to publish it using its own RSS feed (since Inoreader will generate as many RSS feeds as you’ll need).

Metadata

But the first utility of folders is obviously to help organize your subscriptions into broad categories.

Sources. Keeping an eye on all your BoardGameGeek subscriptions, Kickstarter projects, discussion threads, Reddit, Medium or Twitter content will be easier if you keep each of those sources in its own folder.

Content type. Likewise, subscriptions to videos, podcasts, or images will be easier to browse and manage when grouped together.

Content category. A kind of thematic grouping can also be a good idea. A folder for game reviews, another for news or publishers feeds will help you stay on top of things.

Such basic organization will be helpful. But it may fall short with helping you read all these articles on a daily basis. To avoid missing too many articles, or turning daily reading into a drudgery, you might need a little more forethought.

Organizing by Frequency

I’m always experimenting with different ways Inoreader can help me read more easily. And folders can play a big role here. Since the same subscription can belong to any number of folders, you can try all kinds of methods without messing with your core folder structure.

The system I’m using now has been holding its own over the last several months. It is based on frequency. Frequency of publication, frequency of reading. It is the simplest and the surest method I’ve found so far to guarantee that I read everything that I find of interest, without missing major news, but also without wasting time over poor or redundant content.

The method relies on a simple procedure, and 5 special folders.

First I roughly group subscriptions according to their publication frequency and the priority I give them. The most active — and the more relevant — subscriptions go together, down to the least active that I will only want to check occasionally.

Then I make sure to browse each of these folders at a set frequency. Scanning a folder looks a bit like this:

I scroll down the list of unread articles (they get marked as read automatically).
I open in a new tab articles I want to read, and read most of them right away.
I mark the ones I will read later as favorites (using the star).
If one of those articles really stands out and deserves to be kept, I archive it with one click in Evernote (yes, Inoreader gets along very well with Evernote, among others).

Here are the 5 folders I use; they have been working pretty well so far.

Daily. This folder contains the more active feeds (publishing at least once a day), and of higher priority (I don’t want to miss a single article). I manage to scan this folder, well, daily.

Weekly. Here go feeds of interest, a bit less active, and that I don’t need to read right away. I empty this folder in one week, often over the week-end.

Monthly. Some feeds in this folder can still be substantial, but publishing even less frequently. But most of the articles come from minor or secondary sources and can be less interesting. Even if they can accumulate in large numbers, they’re shorter to scan and emptying this folder in a month is not difficult.

Rarely. Welcomes the feeds that don’t fit in the other folders, but that I still want to follow, for some reason. There can be blogs that have been inactive for quite a while, and subscriptions that I keep just in case. I clear this folder periodically.

Of course, since I organize subscriptions by publishing frequency, I first need to know what their frequency is. Therefore I use a 5th folder:

Probation. This is kind of my inbox for feeds. When I stumble upon a new blog or a new YouTube channel, the subscription usually goes into Probation, where I keep it under observation until I know what to do with it and which folder is best suited for it.

Anyway, by now you get the idea. Like the basins of a fountain, when I’m done reading one level, I go to the next one. It works well.

But what happens when, having taken the time to build a sound folder structure, you still get too many articles to manage? Time to think about filtering.

Filters

The safest method to limit the proliferation of unwanted content is filtering at the source. Inoreader offers you two ways to filter the content of your subscriptions.

Global Filtering

In the Behavior section of the Preferences, you can activate a global filter, which will attempt to eliminate as many duplicates as possible based on your criteria. For example, articles with the same URL and title can be filtered out.

Subscription Filtering

But the best way to limit incoming content is to filter subscriptions individually. You just define the criteria using some of the many options available.

Let’s say that you want to follow the news coming from BoardGameGeek, but are not interested in miniatures or party games. Just set a filter that will discard any article whose content or title contains those terms, like so:

(Inoreader can inform you each time an article is removed that way.)

Cast a Wide Net

A good trick to find interesting, unusual board gaming content using filters: subscribe to all kinds of big, popular sites that are not board game related. Sites like Mashable, Listverse, Mental Floss, Slate, Huffington Post, Ignant or Business Insider — why not! And add a filter to each of them only allowing in articles containing terms like “board game”, “wargame”, etc. Such a filter can have criteria like “Title or content doesn’t match regular expression” followed by a regular expression such as:

/ board game / ig

The beauty of it all is that you only have to create such a filter once. Inoreader will then allow you to apply it to all the subscriptions you want to filter.

Those filtered subscriptions will return very few articles, but they are almost guaranteed to be surprising and informative.

Making Use of the Tags

Tags are mostly like folders, but applied to articles instead of entire subscriptions.

Note

Note that Inoreader uses a star as a special tag to mark articles as favorites. The Favorites are always available in the vertical menu, as well as within the filter options.

You can think of folders as the table of contents of your collection, and tags as its index. Just as folders, they are very useful to organize content by topic, and to execute tasks on specific groups of articles.

Since they are a lot like folders, let’s focus on three tags specific features:

Every tag has its own email address;
Tags get exported along with articles;
Tags can be managed using rules.

Tags and Email

I have explained elsewhere how I subscribe to various newsletters using the email address that Inoreader assigns to every tag.

By using well-chosen tags, and having Inoreader subscribe to itself, you can also transform any email exchange, or your contributions to discussion forums, into a feed that you can read at your own pace.

In addition to having its own email address, in Inoreader every tag can have its own RSS feed.

So let’s say that I use the email address of a given tag to subscribe to newsletters — “Inbox”:

What I can do next is to go in Preferences and turn on the Export option for this tag. Inoreader will provide an URL for the feed, that I copy and paste in the subscription box. I then place the resulting subscription in my “Daily” folder:

All the newsletters I receive will, instead of crowding my email inbox, end up neatly organized and easily readable, among the regular feeds. I don’t miss a thing.

Tags and Exports

I have also mentioned how Inoreader is quite apt at receiving content from several platforms and services. Integrations allow this tool to get input from Facebook, Twitter, etc. But the same goes for output: Inoreader can export or archive your articles in many different apps, like Evernote, Dropbox, Pocket, OneNote or Instapaper.

I have been using Evernote for a few years now. And I regularly export content to it from Inoreader.

And I was happy to find that tags created in Inoreader are exported with the articles I send to Evernote. It allows me to reliably use the exact same tag structure in both applications.

Tags and Rules

As useful as tags can be, applying them over and over by hand will get fastidious. Their real strength in Inoreader is that they can get applied automatically, by rules you create to suit your needs.

The Rules of the Game

I consider the rule engine a top feature of Inoreader. Just like your email application, it offers this simple and efficient way of automatically dealing with incoming articles. Many actions are available, which can be combined with many different criteria.

You just define a few criteria, some actions to perform, and every incoming article will trigger the appropriate behavior, even other rules.

Automatic Tagging

It becomes quite easy to apply a tag like, say Vital Lacerda to every article either written by him, or whose title or text contains his name or one of his game’s title, and then find them all neatly tucked in one place. Or still apply a tag called News to all articles coming from the News sections of BoardGameGeek and many other sites. Inoreader is also smart enough to identify articles containing videos, attachments, etc.

Automatically tagging articles coming from BGG forums is especially simple. Because somebody, somewhere, thought it through and used a strict pattern to name the forum feeds. The title, content type, topic and forum name are clearly separated using colons, so your rules can easily pick them up and use them for tagging and filing.

It is for example very easy to create a rule that will identify a forum post, about the rules of the game Pax Renaissance, and to tag it appropriately.

Find the Game You’re After

It is all very nice, but I am not always sitting in front of Inoreader, waiting for the next update of my subscriptions.

The following scenario happened too often. Browsing a feed in Inoreader, I learn that somebody is selling a game that is on my wishlist. Excellent condition, right price, and the seller is in my neighborhood… But the post dates from the previous day, and some other buyer got the deal.

Well, a simple rule got me rid of this problem.

It is triggered every time an article coming from the forum of a local group contains terms like “Sale” or “$”. This feed is monitored in real time. What happens next is that Inoreader sends the post to my personal email address, and I get notified right away. I owe a few nice acquisitions to that system.

What will appear obvious to anyone working with the Inoreader rule engine is that it has been carefully designed and is not an afterthought. It offers all the features of a robust, professional tool, such as:

combining various criteria and operators;
using regular expressions;
copying one rule to another;
enabling a rule to trigger another rule;
deactivating rules without deleting them;
executing any rule on existing articles.

End of Round

I am stopping here, but there would be a lot more to say about the goodies Inoreader offers to gamers:

Contextual menus
Search criteria
Active searches
Customizable feed update intervals
Highlights
Channels
Subscription to OPML lists
Contacts
Comments
Teams

Just look them up, it is worth it.

I only hope that these few examples will convince you that Web feeds are not only alive and kicking, but an excellent way of staying current with what’s going on in the board game world. And that Inoreader is the tool of choice to get maximum value from this technology.

Do you already use a feed reader, or Inoreader? Care to share some tips with us?

Glitches, Geese and Ghosts. Three Points of View on Games’ Points of View

02/02/2017 | Paul Dussault

Glitches, Geese and Ghosts. Three Points of View on Historical Games’ Points of View — The Noble Game of the Swan, linen-backed etching, London, 1821.

I recently stumbled upon the three following articles. And it was only once I had read them almost back to back that I realized they were somehow related. Let’s see if I can summarize how. I enjoyed reading them — maybe you will, too.

A Glitch?

I think that every wargame can and should have some kind of point of view.Tom Russell

I am still yet to try Agricola, Master of Britain. This solitary game intrigues me now that I have read the brief clarification that its designer, Tom Russell, posted in reaction to episode 114 of the 1 Player Podcast.

Toward the end of a thorough discussion, the game gets almost criticized for presenting only the Roman conqueror’s point of view (which, in this case, is the only one we have, Tacitus’ biography of his father-in-law being the only available source).

I am struggling to imagine how one could see as a glitch, or even a flaw, for a historical game, to have a point of view. I can’t help but ask myself what would be left of any historical game from which every point of view had been removed, or cancelled by the addition of its opposite?

The scope. The sources, the facts and the mechanics modeling them. Their presumed effects. Objectives and victory conditions. The thousands of decisions punctuating a historical design do form a narrative. Far from being a glitch, an emerging point of view is unavoidable.

Tom Russell states that any one of his designs may even end up having a point of view different from his own. Historical games, being based on their own set of facts, are likely to develop their own internal logic.

A game cannot avoid having a point of view, but can it have too many? Card driven games might offer various perspectives, but still rely on predefined framework and event selection.

Instead of expecting a game to present different points of view, I try to play different games.

Redundant gaming is an expression I’ve come across lately. Redundant games are games that provide such a similar experience that once you’ve played one of them, you do not need to play the others.

Some gamers feel that historical games covering the same period or events are redundant.

Nothing is more alien to my conception of both historical games and redundancy. In fact, the motivation to explore the same periods or topics using different simulations largely explains how I select my games and schedule my plays, and why I enjoy historical gaming.

Geese

[…] a game that advertises Coke as a healthy drink, […] in which landing on a square of green apples will send you backwards.Claire Voon

Some historical games have nothing to do with history, but have become historical themselves.

Their simplicity made them extremely popular, and extremely adaptable. Which explains why they have produced such a wide array of variants, across different eras and cultures.

Of course there is our infamous Monopoly, with its thousand editions. I think that more resources have been allocated to making this game seem still alive and relevant than Lenin’s body — for almost as long and, unfortunately, with comparable results. But what Monopoly has been for, say, the last five decades, the Game of the Goose has been for the last five centuries.

Professor Adrian Seville is a British researcher who studies the history of printed board games, their international diffusion and their rich cultural background. He is a specialist of the Game of the Goose and its many variants throughout Europe from the sixteenth century to the present day.

In its standard form the Game of the Goose is a race game in which players roll the dice to move their token along a single spiral track of 63 spaces. Some spaces give them bonuses, some others, penalties. It can hardly be simpler. No strategy, no decision. Given the popularity and longevity of the game, its main lasting interest lies in the amazing variety of its themes and layouts; the history of its skins.

Claire Voon sums it up perfectly: “what really persists is the game’s format, which yields a rich and captivating array of elaborately embellished boards that at first glance all seem like different games.”

Scientific discoveries, historical events, industrial processes, moral prescriptions, naughty stories, advertising, fashion, magic, sport, religion, politics, health, fairy tales, romantic epics. Every possible aspect of European culture seems to have been goosified at one point or another over the last five hundred years.

That’s a lot of points of view.

The exhibition The Royal Game of the Goose: Four Hundred Years of Printed Board Games, presented at the Grolier Club in New York last year, included only a small portion of Adrian Seville’s private collection. But it is enough to make us appreciate what a formidable vector such games have been and what can be read into them. You can watch Prof. Seville presenting two interesting boards here, at 46:00, right after a gorgeous game table from the nineteenth century.

Together with his colleague Luigi Ciompi, they maintain an online illustrated database of the 2,396 board adaptations of the Game of the Goose that they have recorded so far. Well worth a look.

Just as several games can tell a lot about the same era, the same base game can tell a lot about many different eras.

Ghosts

The Ghost of Churchill; or, How to Make a Wargame — Winston Churchill, aged seven, in 1881

I had mentored a group of Afghan women writers, many of whom were based in Kabul, and I always wondered, if they had been taught wargame design, how might their deck have differed?Muira McCammon

Of course, games can tell a lot — in many ways.

So what about what they don’t tell?

This agile text by Muira McCammon dances among ghosts, jumps lightly from disparitions to absences, alludes to various kinds of silence — and yet achieves profound resonances.

What if the crucial parts of a historical narrative were the ones it doesn’t include?

She hints in rather clever ways that omissions and suppressions, intentional or not, are the active ingredient in the construction of any narrative. And that perhaps it is desperately easy — and dangerously tempting — to create points of view from a few fragments. Just as easy as to create characters from a few quotations.

I have always been interested in fragments. Photographs. Aphorisms. Quotations. And a few years ago, event cards, which drew me to historical games. I like the rich flavor of these particles of history. Their ability to produce a different narrative for every game played. To deliver a multitude of points of view.

Perhaps because of what lies in their interstices. Those other stories, those other decks, those ghost cards.

The Ghost of Churchill leaves me with the event card deck as a vivid — and somewhat cruel — analogy for everything I think I know.

Which includes my “inner Churchill” — who, across the war memoirs, the quips and quotes, the letters to Clementine or the impressionist paintings, is nothing but a deck. Of several Churchills. Always different, always plausible, always elusive.

I, too, often ask myself “What would Churchill do?” — only to follow with “But which Churchill”?

How to enjoy your games better thanks to Inoreader — Subscribing

17/01/2017 | Paul Dussault

Informed gaming is better gaming. Such is the premise of the current series of articles (see Introduction, Part 1) which aims at showing how to better discover and organize online gaming content.

Let’s Start with the Basic Toolset

Not getting submerged by all the features available in Inoreader requires some effort. So let’s just take a look at subscribing. Basic notions. How we subscribe, and to what.

Folders

As mentioned in a previous article, in Inoreader you manage both your subscriptions — the sites or sections of sites to which you subscribe — and your articles — the contents published on these sites.

Folders are categories that you assign to your subscriptions. A single subscription can belong to several folders.

In addition to bringing some order to your collection, folders allow you to manipulate the subscriptions they contain in bulk.

How to Subscribe

Subscribing to a Web feed with Inoreader involves providing the application with the address at which the feed is located. There are several ways to do so, and they are all simple. Once it gets the address, Inoreader takes care of the rest: saving it, labeling it, fetching the most recent articles, formatting it, and scheduling its next visit to the feed.

The Subscription Area

The most complete method to subscribe is not always the most practical: using the subscription area in the main screen of the application. This text box can also serve as a search area. So you just copy the address of a Web feed, and paste it here:

Once done, Inoreader will go and check the address. If a valid feed is found, it will then confirm the new subscription and allow you to start customizing it.

You can replace its default name with a name that better suits you, assign it to one or more folders, as well as filter its contents, as we will see later. Finally the new subscription is added to the main list on the left.

You don’t enjoy a data entry session interrupting your reading? There are other methods to add subscriptions.

Inoreader Companion

The Inoreader browser extension offers fewer options than manual input, but is by far the easiest way to add a subscription. Once installed in your browser (see how to install a browser extension), it allows you to have Inoreader retrieve the feed address for the site you are currently browsing (or to save a shortcut of the current page). Just a few clicks. Completely pain-free.

Inoreader Bookmarklet

By using this bookmarklet you will also be able to save the current page and have the option of assigning a keyword right away. Simply drag the link from the Inoreader Preferences page and drop it anywhere on your browser’s Favorites Bar:

And it will be easy to save content on the fly.

RSS Extension

There is also an alternative method, in case your browser already has an extension to manage RSS feeds. Then you simply declare Inoreader as your default feed reader, and you will be able to add subscriptions directly by clicking on any RSS link.

That’s about it, you should now have enough to get started. Let’s put these methods to work on a few well-known sites to board gamers.

Subscribe to What?

Web feeds are a well-established standard. But the way they are displayed on a Web page can vary widely from one site to another. A little care and practice will ensure that you always find the information you are after.

BoardGameGeek

Ever heard of a site called BoardGameGeek? I will assume you have, if you’re not new to boardgaming. If you are, go and have a look, create your BGG account, and don’t be fooled by appearances — BGG is indeed the Web’s most important source of board game related content.

Such large sites, with many sections, typically offer multiple Web feeds. This is the case with BoardGameGeek. A few simple tricks will allow you to find whatever content you want without getting bogged down.

Piecemeal Subscription

I have written elsewhere that RSS is everywhere on BGG. Each section and subsection has its own feed, just like every game, every user, every forum thread. There is also a feed on just about every search results page. The huge amount of information added each day on this site is why I recommend that you subscribe to BGG piecemeal, targeting specific content.

Let’s say you are interested in Great Western Trail, the game by Alexander Pfister published in 2016. The game page on BoardGameGeek has a series of buttons on the top right, including one with the RSS logo (click to enlarge):

Clicking on this button takes you to the Web feed for Great Western Trail. If your browser has not been configured to recognize Web feeds, you will only see one page of XML gibberish:

It doesn’t matter — what you are looking for is the address displayed in the address bar, so that you can copy it (even simpler, right-click on the RSS icon and select Copy link address).

Now you can just paste the address into Inoreader’s subscription area to save the feed. The new subscription will bring to you every content regarding Great Western Trail that gets published on BGG: reviews, discussions, photos, files, videos, sales, etc.

Too much of a good thing? Well, let’s further slim it down. You are mostly interested in rule clarifications, not in photos or reviews? In this case, always from the game page, click on the the Forum menu, then on Rules. At the bottom of the screen, you will see another RSS button. Same principle. Copy. Paste.

And you will only receive new posts about the game’s rules.

Note

The feeds typically return content published within the last 30 days. If the forum you are subscribing to is not very active, the feed may be empty. But you will receive any new message posted on that forum.

Pretty neat, isn’t it? No? You mean, there is more than one game in your collection? Really?

Custom Subscription

In that case, you should create a custom feed based on the games in your collection (you need a BGG account to do that — go ahead, it’s free). This is done easily, from the Feeds page, where all articles published on BGG in the last week or so are listed. You can access this page by clicking on the Feeds link displayed at the bottom of every page of the site.

Don’t panic — I know, you get a list of several hundred pages containing several dozen articles each. But there also are two sets of criteria you can use to filter the list: by the games of your collection, and / or by type of content. It’s right there above the list:

Let’s say you are mostly interested in reviews, blog posts, forums, the marketplace, video explanations and player aids relating to the games in your collection. It may then seem a good idea to select the following values:

But if you are like me, your collection includes dead weight, games that you do not want to find anywhere in your feeds: games you got tired of, mediocre games given to you by well-meaning non-gamers, or even some of the children’s games. The best approach is perhaps not to keep these games in your collection… Otherwise, at least, identify them clearly. By making sure they get no rating, for example. That will allow you to further refine your filter. Here I want to limit the list to the games in my collection to which I gave a rating:

That’s all. All you have to do is copy the address for the feed, by clicking this icon above the list:

and paste it in Inoreader.

Subscription to your Subscriptions

BGG regulars know that they can, inside the site, subscribe to any item, and, somewhat like with a feed reader, get all these subscriptions on the same page — the Subscriptions page. If you’ve been to BGG for any amount of time, you’re likely to be following quite a lot of items, not just games, but also threads, geeklists, or guilds. From your MyGeek menu:

you can access the Subscriptions page containing all your subscriptions, here grouped by type:

This is an important page, since it lists your favorite BGG content. But its organization leaves a lot to be desired. Fortunately, every section of this page (Forums, GeekLists, Pictures, Videos, Files, Blog Posts, Marketplace and Auctions, Media) has its own feed. Look for the RSS icon, on the right-hand side of every section’s title:

So you just get the relevant feed addresses, and build yourself a custom BGG subscription page in Inoreader.

Being able to access and customize BGG content while discarding items that don’t interest you, and avoiding an often frustrating user experience makes it even more valuable. And Inoreader will soon make you realize that all this important content is but a small portion of the information on board games that you can access daily online.

No RSS?

You are on an interesting site, you have looked everywhere, but could not find any link, any RSS icon?

It does not mean that the feed does not exist. Most platforms and Web authoring tools offer Web feeds natively. So much so that it often takes some effort not to implement them. So if no sign of RSS shows up on a site, the first place to look to find a feed is the site’s address. Try appending one of the standard suffixes to it, like /rss or /feed.

An example of that is Club Fantasci website, at http://www.clubfantasci.com/. There is no visible RSS icon or link anywhere on the site. However if you enter the address http://www.clubfantasci.com/feed in Inoreader, it will find a valid RSS feed. So will the Inoreader Companion extension. Isn’t that always the case?

No. That’s why knowing that the Web feed usually hides behind a suffix appended to a site’s address is useful.

The gigantic (nearly 1 million topics) website Reddit harbors a few interesting, fast-growing boardgame-related communities that are much worth your time. But it might prove difficult to subscribe to a subreddit using its address, or the standard /feed and /rss suffixes. Even Inoreader will not find a feed under https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/. It’s because Reddit, as do many large sites, uses its own suffix. But since you know that Web feeds generally hide behind URL suffixes, you do a quick Google search and find that the suffix to access any subreddit RSS feed is /.rss. And sure enough, entering https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/.rss will allow you to subscribe to a very active and engaging forum.

YouTube

We’ve seen that Google is not that fond of Web feeds. So obviously you will not find any visible reference to RSS on a YouTube channel home page. And no uniform suffix is used for feeds either. But they exist and lay behind special calls that applications like Inoreader can do. So just copy any channel’s address in Inoreader and it will create a subscription.

Are you a big YouTube fan? Last time I went on YouTube I was surprised to see that I had subscribed to over fifty board game related channels.

So if, like me, you have accumulated a large number of channel subscriptions in your YouTube account, know that it is ridiculously easy to import them, in one swoop, into Inoreader, and follow them all from there.

Go to the Manage Subscriptions page of your YouTube account.
At the end of the list of all your current subscriptions, you will find a button allowing you to Export to RSS readers. Clicking this button will package all your subscription data into a single file and download it.
To import the file in Inoreader, go to Preferences, under Import/Export. Once you have selected the file, you can also tell Inoreader where to put the newly imported subscriptions. This is especially useful if you have many YouTube subscriptions and want to avoid that they end up scattered all around your Inoreader folder structure.

No Web Feed? No Problem

Lastly, the uncooperative sites. The larger among them, like Facebook or Twitter, have their own subscription system, and simply don’t include Web feeds. Inoreader offers a few solutions to remedy the situation.

Integrations

Quite a trendy word these days, an integration means a way by which two distinct, independant applications can still talk to each other.

Inoreader is especially rich in integrations. It can namely receive input directly from your Twitter, Facebook or Google+ account, follow and manage everything happening there.

For instance, let’s say you are trying to enter in the regular Inoreader subscription box an address coming from Twitter. Inoreader will recognize it and will suggest the following:

You only have to authorize both sites to talk to each other and you will receive in real time, in your Inoreader feed, all the tweets coming from your account. Then you can manage, filter, sort them just like the articles of any RSS subscription.

You can do the same with Google+ and Facebook pages.

Subscription by Email

You are interested by a site, but it offers neither a Web feed nor a direct integration. Rare, but still possible. Then look around to see if the site offers some form of email subscription — to a newsletter, regular updates, etc. Most do. But you don’t want to reveal your email address for fear of getting spammed, right? Inoreader has a solution for you.

Remember the above-mentioned tags? Just go have a look at your tag list in Inoreader’s Preferences screen. You will see that every one of your tags has been given a unique email address:

What this address does is transform your tag into a inbox. For instance, I have created a tag called Inbox, and I use its email address to subscribe to various newsletters. It is very simple and risk-free. Every email sent to that address will be received in Inoreader, automatically tagged with the associated keyword, and I am able to manage them like any other article.

I do think it’s neat. It works flawlessly. Just make sure that, right after subscribing to a newsletter, you go in Inoreader, find the confirmation email and confirm your subscription.

Nothing filling up your email inbox, everything sorted and managed in one place, and very spam-proof. Now you can subscribe to dozens of newsletters. You can unsubcribe the usual way, by clicking on their Unsubscribe link, or in bulk, by simply deleting the tag in Inoreader.

Saved Pages

We could see this feature as a last resort. But it has proven very handy in many circumstances. It goes without saying that Inoreader can save any individual Web page. At any time, while you are browsing the Web, you can click the Inoreader Companion, or the Inoreader Bookmarklet icon — or indeed copy its address in the Inoreader subscription box— to save the page you are on.

In addition to being tagged with your Inoreader keywords, these pages are automatically grouped under Inoreader’s Saved Web Pages menu item. No need to save bookmarks in your browser anymore.

Ok, now that you are accumulating all that gaming content in your Inoreader, you will soon need to bring some order to it.

That is what we will talk about next time. Until then, happy reading!

5 Things I’ve Learned around 1960: The Making of the President

10/01/2017 | Paul Dussault

I learned that The Making of the President – 1960 is a book

The book’s author is Theodore White.

The game’s title comes from a bestseller, Pulitzer prize. The first of a series of detailed accounts he wrote, with strong literary overtones, about four American presidential campaigns. The book was turned into an award-winning documentary.

It became a game in 2007, thanks to designers Jason Matthews and Christian Leonhard. Matthews is specialized in political board games, as his impressive ludography clearly shows.

Why did the designers choose that particular election? Its obvious landmarks are well-known: the election of one of the youngest American presidents ever, the first and only Catholic, who would be assassinated in office three years later. But there are many exceptional features lying just a little deeper, that make the 1960 presidential campaign deserve, more than so many others, to become the subject of a historical game.

It is impossible not to learn a lot from such a game.

I learned that the 1960 campaign results were the closest in the 20th century

And among the closest of American history. (Indeed Grover Cleveland defeated James Blaine, winning the popular vote by only 24,000 votes in 1884, but it was in a context far too different to even be comparable.)

Kennedy received only 113,000 votes more than Nixon of the 68 million total votes cast, a nano-majority of 0.17%. A popular vote gap nearly three times narrower than the one between Bush and Gore in the tragicomedy of 2000. The margin of victory ended up being under 1% in six states, under 5% in fifteen others (and as always in such close cases, electoral fraud was alleged on both sides).

Obviously, as game designer, those are the first features you are looking for. Two eventful campaigns, two popular candidates with equal chances at victory, but for diametrically opposed reasons. And all the tension of an unpredictable yet historical outcome.

I Learned That This Photo Existed…

It is such a delight. I can’t help smiling every time I look at it. So perfectly comical that it could have been staged. Perfect attitudes. The blissful smile of the onlooker who manages to contort enough to reach Nixon. The hasty step of a frowning Nixon, obsessed with his watch, who could not conceivably show less interest toward a supporter. It has everything.

A cropped version can be seen on the card “Fatigue Sets In”. Incidently, the development team and Canadian graphic designer Joshua Cappel have to be credited for the excellent iconographic research done on this game.

This photo is quite a judicious choice, to illustrate the card’s subject, but also to demonstrate how photographs can be deceitful…

It was taken nearly 15 years after the 1960 campaign, during a visit to Belgium made by the then President Nixon.

The photographer, Charles Tasnadi (1925-2008), was from Hungary and went through barbed wire and a mine field to defect in 1951. He ended up as a photographer for Associated Press and worked in Washington for over 30 years, covering numerous political subjects, but mostly 7 U.S. Presidents.

His hilarious shot of Nixon is not a one-off. He definitely had a knack for capturing Presidents in quite un-presidential moments.

Gerald Ford guffawing after a ski fall, in Colorado in 1975:

Lyndon Johnson proudly showing the Press his gall bladder surgery scar:

A scar which the sharp pen of cartoonist David Levine drew in the shape of Vietnam:

As much as I enjoy Tasnadi’s witty photo, I try to resist the temptation of holding it against Nixon, who was certainly not as rude as it suggests. Photographs are moments blown out of proportion, that can easily lie, as we are about to see yet again.

… And That This One, As It Were, Did Not

The two leaders are in an American model house, in what was, back in 1959, an ultra-modern kitchen. The photographer knew how to “place himself on the trajectory of chance”, as Cartier-Bresson put it, and could capture several moments of a lively discussion.

The protagonists are of course the Soviet Union Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and the American Vice President Richard Nixon.

The kitchen and the model house were part of the American National Exhibition, held in Moscow in July 1959. The event was an effort to improve relations between the USSR and the United States (the Soviets had held a similar exhibition a few months earlier in New York).

The photographer is Elliott Erwitt, whose brilliance no longer needs to be expanded upon.

Of the fifty-some shots he took in those few minutes, one only would make history. Angering the Soviets, galvanizing the Americans, it did become a symbol of the Cold War. It is no wonder that, in addition to being included in 1960: The Making of a President (“Stature Gap”), it is also found in the Twilight Struggle deck.

A fiery Nixon poking a determined finger at an unsettled Khrushchev: appearances have turned this shot into an icon.

The thing is, while there were some political discussions during the visit, what Erwitt heard once he was close enough had nothing to do with Nixon standing up to the Soviets with “authority” or “courage”. The two men were rather joking about the merits of cabbage soup.

If there’s one thing photographers must never, ever do, it is to show their contacts sheets or to display them in public. […] Because they might prove too revealing. Because wrong conclusions could be made, and perhaps even worse, correct ones.
– Elliott Erwitt

The contact sheet of the whole sequence, which can be seen here, would tend to prove that. And we can also see Khrushchev poking his finger at Nixon.

Erwitt told the story many times, including in a episode of the outstanding 3-volume series Contacts.

I Learned that 1960 was the first campaign in which television played a significant role

The Strength of the Image

In 1960, what is regarded as the golden age of television, from the smashing success of Milton Berle in 1948 to the scandal of Quiz Show in 1959, had already passed. By then almost 90 per cent of American households had a television, and watched it an average of five hours a day.

Yet if the 1960 campaign revealed anything about TV, it is its immense power. A force that could no longer be ignored: appearances.

The four Kennedy-Nixon “Great Debates” were the first political debates to be televised. The first one, held on September 26, 1960, was the most decisive — and the most watched. Nixon and his advisers learned the hard way how unforgiving black and white could be, and were given a harsh lesson on image management.

The anecdote is known: Nixon was just out of the hospital where he had been fighting an infection. He had refused to wear make-up, relying on cheap Lazy Shave powder. His light suit and tie were in the same tones as the backdrop of the set. And the heat from the spotlights made him sweat.

The result? What 70 million viewers saw on their TV was that one of the candidates had fleeing eyes, a shadow beard and was sweating profusely, struggling to impose himself. In comparison, the other candidate looked relaxed, confident, almost tanned, looking straight at the camera.

The whole impact of TV on public perception is summed up in the results of a survey conducted after this first debate. A majority of the voters who had watched the debate on television declared Kennedy the winner, while most of those who had listened to it on the radio gave the victory to Nixon.

The Strength of the News Clip

From a press conference held in July 1960, that had lasted over 30 minutes, television retained, transformed and spread a single sentence. The rather exasperated answer that President Eisenhower ended up serving to Charles H. Mohr, a reporter with Time Magazine, after a long barrage of questions about Nixon’s experience. He had asked Eisenhower to name one major contribution that his Vice President had made to his administration.

If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.

Was this snappy remark targeting Nixon, or even Mohr? Was it a mere attempt at humor, as both Eisenhower and Nixon later said? The thing is, it just did not matter anymore. The clip was out there. And with the help of new techniques that had been inaccessible to the print media, it was effectively weaponized by the Kennedy team into a quite damaging campaign ad. With replay, we hear, but also see Eisenhower say it, not once, but twice. With editing, the clip is removed from its original context, and mixed with other carefully chosen clips, and put into a narrative, driven home by an overall, not-so-subtle, but very efficient, voice-over commentary.

Not surprisingly, in the game, the card “Give me a week”, could make the Nixon player loose momentum and get weaker on all debate issues.

Back to the Game

Those are just a few reasons why the significant role given to the debates and the media in the design of 1960: The Making of the President, makes it such a rich historical game.

An entire phase of the game is dedicated to the debate. A mini-game in itself, for which both players should begin preparing early on. It can be a turning point before Election Day. And the balance can very easily be tipped against the Nixon player.

The mechanics surrounding the presence of the media are also extremely thematic and well done. Players can gain media support in each region by investing valuable political capital points. Media support allows a player to gain more state support, by weakening his opponent’s grasp on states that he is carrying. The player having the most media support can also prioritize the issues for the upcoming debate.But those are rarely decisive advantages. Rather, the genius of the game is to make sure that, as the Nixon campaign learned in 1960, media support becomes an important factor to the extent it is ignored by one of the players.

I started writing with the intent of listing the many reasons why this particular election became the subject of a game. But I realize that these few seem to already amply justify the choice.

They are enough, in any case, to make 1960 a game intelligently designed, satisfying to explore and delightful to play.

1960: The Making of the President will soon be available again, in a new edition by GMT Games (it was previously published by Z-Man Games). Its release is scheduled for April, 2017.