rakkauden ja epätoivon laulu

LJ was down just as I wanted to post this late last night, but here's the pdf scans of the "diary" pages I wrote during my practicum : Sorry, kinda large file (27.4 MB) | Better image of the sketches on the first page

I sort of still want to have the pages transcribed, but it's hard to look at them. It's because, mentally, I've pretty much moved on and would rather not think about it. But I can't completely keep it out of mind; I know that it will be asked "so but why? You had already done so much".

I had my medication adjusted last week and I started on the new prescription on the weekend. It's a very subtle difference, but I feel it: for one thing, I'm again not freaky-moody.


And now, something to think about:

Five Reasons Why USPS >> Canada Post
1. US$1 lets you mail a regular sized letter to practically anywhere in the world with USPS. CA$1 gets you, at most, a regular sized letter to the US with CP.
2. USPS got rid of international surface mail. So it's a bit expensive to ship stuff overseas, but at least it isn't literally on a ship.
3. USPS delivers mail on Saturdays.
4. USPS has flat-rate shipping boxes.
5. USPS has those self-serve postage vending machines at the post office, so you can buy postage after-hours.

When my order gets delivered in three separate packages, I get triple the fun!
(From Helsinki, from Turku, and the one CD is on backorder so it will ship later)

I am also almost out of FAILmoney (i.e. money I earned from working on EPIC FAIL) now. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not.




Edit [4.1.2011]: The last CD shipped yesterday. Yeeeeeeaaaaaaah! :D
_________
*But also triple the processing fees, if the postal service decides to levy tax on them.

I <3 the Finnish postal service.

That is all.

On BoardGameGeek, I accidentally (accidents happen a lot) came across the card games Inquisitio, Modern Society, and Soul Hunters, for which there seemed to actually be a little bit of buzz about their public release at the Essen Spieltage (which is next week). The publisher had a pre-Essen deal on: the games for 18€ each, or 45€ for the three, shipping included.

(Click pictures for enlargement opportunities.)



What a great deal! I jumped right on it.

1. I have a feeling that games with slightly darker/cynical themes like these could be appealing to my Scandinavian Club friends, who seem inclined toward that kind of thing rather than perhaps mercilessly making fun of fantasy or colonial themes like they seem to like to do.
   
2. Also, it's difficult to get a substantial card game for less than $20 around here. Citadels is something like $21 online, plus taxes and shipping. To buy the same game in-store bumps it up to the $27 range plus tax. With this deal, these are ~$25 each, including shipping all the way from Finland, so I'm not complaining.
   
3. The designers seem to have a presence on BoardGameGeek and managed to generate good publicity buzz over the years as they've been working on them, so hey, they deserve something for their efforts (as opposed to... um... *cough*).
   
4. I still have a little bit of money left over from the payment for my work on Zanziar, and using the money to support a rival game publisher gives me a warm fuzzy feeling... like the one that some people get from boycotting Wal-Mart.

They said that they'd ship the games as separate packages and sent them out at the beginning of last week. I picked them up from the post office today. Finnish economy post has been very quick lately. That's interesting.




Each envelope was lovingly packed and addressed by hand (forgive the romanticism). Despite the games just being wrapped in a loop of bubble wrap and stuffed into a regular envelope, they arrived relatively unharmed. The envelopes were a little ripped but only a couple of box corners got dinged, and only very slighly. Actually, one of the envelopes was so torn that it's a wonder the game didn't fall out of the bubble wrap and through the hole! (You can see this envelope in the upper corner of the second photo above.)

Some BGG users would complain like crazy about this. They like their games to come in stuffed shipping boxes or real padded envelopes. I'm not so picky. They got to me in good shape. That's enough.

The boxes were designed to be a set, with the fake book effect.


There was a small puncture wound on the Modern Society box, so I carefully pulled back the paper label, filled the hole with glue, and replaced the label. I'm obsessive-compulsive like that:


But let's crack them open and see what's inside.


All three games have similar components: rulesheets in Finnish, Swedish, and English, 144 cards (of which some are advertisement cards), and some wooden chips.

Each game also has a card that's got a brief comment from the designer on it in both Finnish and English (in Modern Society it's printed on the back of the player scoretrack cards). I think that this is a really nice touch. Along with the advertisement cards, it's a good use for blank spots on the card sheet and saves up valuable space in the rulebook (where such comments are traditionally placed, if at all).

The cards themselves are of average quality; the cuts weren't completely clean and I had to colour in a small rip on one of the cards with my Finnish-permanent-marker-of-Japanese-manufacture. Because of the rough edges, I imagine that they would wear very readily. But they are the Euro-sized cards like in Agricola, requiring sleeves that I can only buy online, and once sleeved, they won't fit back in the box anyway. I'll consider making tuckboxes for them a little bit wider than Euro-sized cards. I made new trays for the boxes, with more slots, so that the cards can be separated by type.

Inquisitio is the only one of these games whose components are fully bilingual (the others only have English card texts). The cards in Inqusitio that don't require a back face are Finnish on one side and English on the other.

The English writing isn't perfect and some explanations could be more clear, but it seems to have been done in-house (there's only a translator credit on the Swedish rulesheets) and is very good. Only Soul Hunters has significant game text on the cards and they are straightforward rules texts presented in a consistent style. The other games use symbols.

===

I'm going to organize a "Heart of Winter EPIC FAIL Tea Party", which will happen between the end of final exams and Christmas, I think. For maximum "Heart of Winter" effect. Naturally we can't get Finnish-winter darkness here. It'll be a tea party to celebrate all kinds of EPIC FAIL with the playing of non-EPIC FAIL board/card games like these. Hopefully by then I'll be done with and have been paid for my EPIC FAIL work, and have more money to buy non-EPIC FAIL things.

Hmm. What else was I going to say? My pictures are showing off my new Kashmiri shawl/blanket. I got it for $5!

I received this direct from Finnish Lapland last week. It's a very, um, complex board game reminiscent of Dungeons & Dragons and a bit of Warrior Knights. It's based on a fantasy RPG setting, so the resemblance is intentional and appropriate. In fact, it felt a little weird to be reminded of fantasy RPGs, given the role that D&D played (no pun intended) in my personal history.

It is a brand new copy given to me by the designer, Timo Multamäki, in exchange for a small used game from my collection, which I can't even send to him until Easter. Makes little sense, since he sells these for 39€ - that's almost as much as I paid for my Finnish Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries game. He seemed, perhaps, just a little desperate to find playtesters outside of Finland. I had, after all, only made a silly comment about the game on BoardGameGeek, saying "it's Finnish :o".

There were so many little pieces in the box that the first thing I did was to sleeve the cards (they're pretty good-quality, and glossy) and spend 6 hours measuring and making foamboard trays for all of the parts. I totally lost track of time there and worked until approx. 4AM. I originally had the trays all along the entire interior of the box, but then I realized that almost all of the wells were far too deep for the number of pieces in them. So I salvaged what I had made and transformed most of the trays to half-height, which meant that I could have two layers of trays in the box. And that I wouldn't have to push and shove the trays out of shape just to get them in there.

There were also some random "Finnish materials" placed in the box for me (a donation tax form and a pizza/kebab menu flyer from some business in Sodankylä - do they deliver across the Arctic Ocean?), but they officially line the bottom of the box now, since I have otherwise no official place for random Finnish papers.

Figure 1. Itty-bitty tokens	Figure 2. Foamboard trays

There are some more of my photos of the contents and trays here

Being manufactured in China, the game has the distinctive smell of a box made in China - in fact, the same smell as my Pandemic box, also made in China. Some people complain about smells, and then complain about Chinese manufacturing in general. I don't. It's a very unique smell.

This is not to say that there shouldn't be any complaints. Especially for independent designers and self-publishers like Mr. Multamäki, printing in China is usually the only affordable option, and resulting manufacturing quality (or lack thereof) is just a consequence that one just has to work with. (Although I should mention that after a disastrous shipment like this, one has no shortage of replacement parts for people emailing in about missing or damaged pieces.)

Unfortunately it could be an indefinite amount of time before I find a group of nerdy fantasy RPG-type people and a few hours to try out the game with - and I have discovered that, as it stands right now, one thing that could be a huge barrier to a wider market for the game is not its target audience, but that the rulebook definitely can use some improvement. I believe the rules were written in English first, but a Finnish translation exists and I reckon that it probably reads more smoothly.

I feel that the game has been gifted to me, and in light of my unlikelihood of being able to play and provide feedback on gameplay, I have taken it upon myself (with permission) to, in my "spare" time, make revisions to the rulebook to make it easier to read. I don't know how long it will take, nor exactly how much my time is worth, but that's inconsequential. I just want to help make the game as accessible as it can be, so that he can see a better return on his investment. Anything to help my people.

At first I thought that I could just rewrite any problematic sentences into fluent English, but then studying the problem deeper, I realized that changes may also need to be made in the order that the material is presented. Right now I can make sense of the rulebook in its separate sections, but there are places where I have to flip back and forth between pages in order to make sense of how the game is put together from those sections.

So I'm not sure how to proceed. He wants to print a revision of the rules in a few weeks. Do I prioritize revising sentences for grammar now, and then try to work with him on the organization after that (which may entail further sentence revision)?