Books, board games, and whatever else is on the desk this week.
Jocelyn's Nerd Notes
Welcome!
I edit for a living, which either explains or was caused by how much I care whether a rulebook actually teaches you the game or just lists it at you. Most nights I've got a book going, most Thursdays I've got a game on the table, and some weeks it's both. I write these up because I kept losing my own notes on why something worked or didn't, and a page beats the backs of receipts.
Latest posts
How Asymmetric Champions Create Matchups Worth Mastering The reason asymmetrical board games hold up over years is not variety for its own sake. It is that asymmetry creates matchups, and a matchup is a much richer object than a strategy. A strategy is something you learn once. A matchup is a relationship between two sets of tools, and there are as many of them as there are pairings. A South Asian Science-Fiction Epic With Global Ambition South Asian science fiction does not need to choose between cultural specificity and global scale. That choice has often been imposed by markets rather than by imagination. 
Light Made Me Feel Genuinely Unmoored, Which Is a Compliment Three timelines, a serial killer physicist, and a space empire built on tech nobody understands, braided together in a way that refuses to explain itself and is better for it. Why I Still Keep a Paper Reading Log Everyone in my life who tracks their reading uses an app, and I'm still working through the same water-stained notebook I started nine years ago, on purpose. 
Ventus Is What Happens When Terraforming Gods Forget They're Gods Terraforming nanotech gods gone half-feral, a teenage protagonist who can hear them, and a scope that keeps widening past where you think the book will stop. 
Faraway Packs a Surprising Amount of Game Into a Deck of Cards A small-box card game about writing your own legend through overlapping card text, and it's smarter about scoring interactions than a game this size has any right to be. I Evangelized Gormenghast to Marcus and He Bounced Hard I pushed a slow, strange book on a friend who reads almost nothing but fast-moving epic fantasy, and it went about as badly as it probably should have. 
Tomasello's Case for Why Chimps Never Got a Civilization A tightly argued case that the one thing separating us from other great apes isn't raw intelligence, it's the ratchet effect of culture accumulating on itself.
More posts » Light Made Me Feel Genuinely Unmoored, Which Is a Compliment Three timelines, a serial killer physicist, and a space empire built on tech nobody understands, braided together in a way that refuses to explain itself and is better for it. Why I Still Keep a Paper Reading Log Everyone in my life who tracks their reading uses an app, and I'm still working through the same water-stained notebook I started nine years ago, on purpose. Ventus Is What Happens When Terraforming Gods Forget They're Gods Terraforming nanotech gods gone half-feral, a teenage protagonist who can hear them, and a scope that keeps widening past where you think the book will stop. Faraway Packs a Surprising Amount of Game Into a Deck of Cards A small-box card game about writing your own legend through overlapping card text, and it's smarter about scoring interactions than a game this size has any right to be. I Evangelized Gormenghast to Marcus and He Bounced Hard I pushed a slow, strange book on a friend who reads almost nothing but fast-moving epic fantasy, and it went about as badly as it probably should have. Tomasello's Case for Why Chimps Never Got a Civilization A tightly argued case that the one thing separating us from other great apes isn't raw intelligence, it's the ratchet effect of culture accumulating on itself.