In Virginia, in an effort to maintain equity, students have not been given *new* instructional material and 4th quarter is going to consist solely of review. While I understand the need here – there are many students who don’t have access to internet, devices and the infrastructure to school virtually – it has been a difficult transition for my kids. After a few weeks of redundancy, my 10 and 12 year old sat me down and told me that they feel like they are being punished because “we already did this work.”

So…we ditched the school curriculum and dove into our own. The girls started a literature study of Esperanza Rising. It’s a bit below their reading level, I was able to get my hands on a study guide for it, which means I don’t have to make it all up myself and the content of 1920s America/Mexico is interesting. The social studies component includes North, Central and South America.

Using Boardgames to reinforce topics

The 10-year-old got stuck one day on an Economics lesson in social studies. She read the material and when she started on a planning worksheet to divvy up natural, capital and human resources – she froze.

The task: Make a list of the natural, capital, and human resources of Mexico or Canada using Geography of the World as a resource. Then think about a business or industry that might benefit from the availability of those resources and write a short letter to potential investors explaining why your idea for a business will be a good fit with the country’s resources.

So we started a conversation about the different resources. I was grasping at ideas to explain the differences with enough examples that she would be able to always sort the resources…and suddenly it came to me..

Puerto Rico, The boardgame

“In Puerto Rico players assume the roles of colonial governors on the island of Puerto Rico. The aim of the game is to amass victory points by shipping goods to Europe or by constructing buildings. Each player uses a separate small board with spaces for city buildings, plantations, and resources.”(According to Boardgame Geek)

Aha!
1) Natural Resources – In order to ship goods to Europe, players first have to collect the natural resources from the island – corn, indigo, sugar, tobacco, and coffee are the natural resources available in the game.
2) Capital Resources – Those resources can’t come straight out of the ground and go to Europe. Players have to turn their natural resources into goods they can actually ship.
3) Human Resources – People are a key component in this game – without occupying the plantations and buildings with people, you can’t collect the resources or turn them into shippable goods.

We’ve owned this game for a long time, but the youngest kids were too little to play it back when it made it onto the table regularly. It had been years since we’d played it, but in that moment I knew it was going to explain everything she wanted to know about natural, capital and human resources. We looked up images of the different natural resources and talked about how each good is transformed before being useful (except for corn – the game accounts for the fact that it doesn’t have to be processed like the other goods).

It was the action of *doing it* it that really stuck with her. She had to pull colonists off the boat and send them to factories, processing plants, and plantations in order to gather and process her natural resources. She owned indigo, coffee and tobacco plantations. She built tobacco storage sheds, indigo plants and coffee roasters. As she was building her “engine” she realized that without all of the components in place, she couldn’t turn her resources into viable goods. But once she made it through several turns, she started to make more money and gain victory points for shipping. In the end, she fully understood all of the components required to play the game AND do her assignment.

Boardgamegeek (the authority on boardgame geekery) gives it a complexity rating of 3.28 / 5 (medium weight) and recommends it for 12+. The relevance to our studies made it interesting for the kids and it wasn’t too complex for the 10-year-old. Plus, it has a simultaneous action function (essentially, everyone gets to play on every turn) which is the 10-year-old’s favorite game mechanic. She gets bored with strict Euros that require a lot of downtime between turns.

In the end, she devised a business called “Jewelry Girl” using the natural resources of silver and copper, the capital resources of a factory, a truck and a building, and human resources of a truck driver, a jeweler and a miner.

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I take play testing seriously and I love the idea of “breaking” a new game. What’s to love? What’s got room for improvement?

First Impression

Upon punching the game, I noticed a couple of things: The box is nice and the storage compartments are perfect. The player boards are rather flimsy though and aren’t going to hold up well through a lot of plays. I wish they’d been made of sturdier cardboard instead of more of a standard cardstock. In addition, the player name is on one side of the board and the reminder text for winning hands is on the opposite side. So you either get to “be” the character or you get to see the reminder of what-beats-what on the player aide. It would have been nice to see the player names on both sides. As it stands, we ended up making up new names for our characters as we used the player aides. Shotgun Granny was a family favorite and comes with a song.

I read the rules in about ten minutes and it took only a minute or two to explain them to the family. Everyone was ready to go rob some stagecoaches and trains and become Most Wanted.

Game 1: 5 players (2 adults, 3 kids: 15, 11 & 9)

This is a family game, so having a big family was helpful for playtesting. We also had a visiting friend this summer who helped us play test it. I forgot to set the timer for game one, so I don’t know how long it lasted.

On your turn, players choose one of 6 actions: 3 robbery actions (with 3 levels of difficulty), a hand refill option, a money from the bank option, or a one-on-one duel.

The hands are then played out as a trump-style game where the better hand beats a lesser hands (4 of a kind, 3 of a kind, 2 pairs, 1 pair, etc). It has an interesting mechanism called the 6-shooter which allows a hand of ALL 6s to beat a hand of ALL Aces. The Six-shooter made it interesting but at the same time, it only applies for the entire hand (so not in the case of 2 pairs, etc).

On the first turn, the youngest player went for the Pony Express (the lowest difficulty robbery option), but since no one was on the board, there was no consequence for losing, everyone went in, even if just to rotate their cards out. In Most Wanted, the winning hand moves forward on the board, while the losing hand must then pay “bail” to avoid jail. The bail is equivalent to your character’s position on the game track.

One of the first stumbling blocks of the game – how do we pay bail when we don’t have any money? The starting hand does not include any money from the bank. It’s a Western-themed game about being an outlaw – centered around robbing stagecoaches and trains, and yet when you “win” the robbery, there’s no payout. You move up on the point track, but you DON’T receive money from the bank. Winning means you win points and not cash. It took a couple of players a few rounds to figure out priories and how to manage them. I can see how it could be confusing to some younger players who don’t understand their objective. It took the 9-year-old three turns to realize how to get money and then she wanted to collect money instead of points.

By the time the draw deck needed to be replenished – we still had two players NOT yet on the point track.

The first game ended just as the draw deck replenished for the second time, still with one player not on the game board. The 15-year-old won.

Game 2: (Same 5 players, this time I set the timer: 22 minutes of game play)

This game moved faster and everyone understood that going to an Honest Day’s Work was the only way to get money, so everyone did that with their first turn before venturing out to try to gain points.

Then immediately someone went for the Train action, because with all players off the board there was no consequence for losing, so some players jumped in just to enable them to rotate out their hands. It would have been nice to have a minimum bail to pay so that there are consequences for joining in the robbery.

Everyone also decided to go to Church a lot more in the second game because the higher hand count enabled more options when it came time to battle it out with cards.

We never used the Duel action during the first game, so I tried it during this game, just to see how it played.

The second game played a bit more evenly but there was still a player not on the board until the second Draw deck refill happened. That’s a long time for not participating too much in the game.

Overall Impressions:

• One person is constantly handing out card refills (in a 5 player game at an oval table, it didn’t make sense for everyone to try to reach the deck, especially with characters in the center of the board to be potentially knocked over).
• One person is constantly reminding the other players of their Bail charges when they lose a hand (while the card refills are happening)
• There’s not a lot of action for 22 minutes of gameplay and quite a bit of downtime if you aren’t participating during another person’s turn (or if they are choosing solo actions).
• Money is not accessible and the action to get money is kind of boring. There is no money reward for pressing your luck.
• There are times when you need new cards and you go into a Robbery action just to rotate your hand out.
• It’s disappointing to see that there are players who are not even on the board near (or at) the end of the game. It’s not much fun to feel like you aren’t participating.
• The youngest player could not wrap her head around how to use the Six-Shooter to her advantage.
• The theme was fun and everyone enjoyed the art and character names (and making up their own names and backstories)
• It’s a quick filler-game that is ideal for families or kids.
• Playtime works well for younger players and non-gamers or families that love gaming and don’t have the time for a big long game.
• I wish the player boards had been more reinforced and less flimsy.

The post Game Review: Most Wanted appeared first on Sita Romero.

Last year, when I was living in Mexico, I didn’t have access to any in-person writing workshops or cons. In an effort to continuously improve my craft, I found some wonderful writing workshops online.  I attended The Brainery’s Science Fiction Fairy Tales class, in which I wrote the first draft of the story THREE LITTLE VISITS, which will be out later this year in the After the Happily Ever After Anthology.

The goal of the workshop was to create a science fiction re-boot of classic fairy tales. Every week we would read a new fairy tale, then we would find alternatives to the classic tale across different cultures and time periods. After that we would focus in on a science theme and do some research (starting with some great curated material from the instructor). Finally, we would come up with our own new short story. Sometimes it was just an element taken from the original. Sometimes it was the structure or the theme or a certain type of character. Sometimes the story came out so far off that you couldn’t tell that it had any inkling of a relationship to the original fairy tale.  The class was fantastic and I highly recommend it. I wrote 9 new short stories in a 12 week period.

THREE LITTLE VISITS began as a retelling of the Three Little Pigs. This is probably one of the most recognizable of the fairy tales. The many retellings of this story often stick fairly close to the original circa 1886. I loved the rule of three in this tale but I knew I didn’t want to anthropomorphize animals. I focused in on the wolf character and the science. The science topic for this fairy tale was animal testing. That’s a topic that could’ve led me back to my old vegetarian lifestyle.

The science that interested me the most is xenotransplantation: the process of grafting or transplanting organs or tissues between members of different species. I’ve been fascinated by this for years because of the potential in transplantation. And of course, the species has to be a pig to throwback to the original.

This is a story that doesn’t look much like The Three Little Pigs, but it’s a wild, fun ride and I am thrilled that it will be published and available later this year.

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It was much longer than I expected it to be. It was a scary dry spell of no writing. It came after a plateau. And a problem with my first writing group.

I decided to start taking chapters to writing group from my current work in progress. I left writing group after each chapter with a handful of notes and revisions planned. The problem…I wasn’t finished with the story. So in one hand, I had a half-written story and I required momentum to plow through to the end. And in the other hand, I had a stack of revisions on the beginning of the story. I edited the first chapter (not the right choice, by the way) and went back to writing group with the next chapter. I left the group again with a stack of changes in one hand and no momentum to move forward.

I froze. Should I move forward? Should I go back and make changes? I can assure you the answer (for me) is not “go back and make changes.” But how do you move forward with a stack of problems from the beginning? So I did neither. Since I was mid-project, I didn’t feel that I could abandon it for something else. I wrote nothing. Not a word for months.

That dry spell taught me something very valuable about my process as a writer. I can’t interrupt the flow of a story and start the feedback process until its DONE. Completely done with the final words on the last page DONE. It ruined my momentum to learn about changes that were inevitably coming. Do I know all first drafts are going to need changes? Yes. Do I think it’s okay to bring a first draft to writing group? Yes. But, for me, bringing the first draft of an incomplete project spelled disaster.

I’m back at writing again and back in full swing. But that valuable lesson is going to stay with me and to ensure I don’t interrupt the flow of my creativity.

I have a new writing group and I set strict guidelines for myself now. Nothing that is incomplete goes across my desk to the group. Nothing. Maybe others can balance doing both at the same time. Maybe the strict and heavy outliner would be unaffected by feedback on their beginnings. But I know that I can’t put myself in the position to have to split my brain that way. I know what I need to make my process work. An uninterrupted first draft is a must.

Sometimes a tough spot is just a valuable lesson waiting to expose itself. I actually accomplished something with that hiatus. Because being keenly aware of my process and the guidelines I need for myself are a must.

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