Madness at the Mall

I yust go nuts at Christmoose

Feeding the Beast

Queen of the Mall

See You Next Year

Another year.......GONE!!!

LET THE HOLIDAYS BEGIN!!!

Necrophilia

Cats dig the wax

Glossing the Games

NAME OF THE GAME

With thousands of board games out there, and more being invented every day, dedicated board-gamers need a glossary to describe the various types and genres. Here's a few of our favorites:

Euro or Eurogame: Also described as German-style, these games eschew direct conflict. Randomness is limited and players aren't eliminated by bankruptcy or annihilation on the battlefield. The Catan games are the best known Euros.

Ameritrash: Emphasizing drama and direct conflict, these often include an element of luck, where

fates can tum on the roll of the dice. Think Risk.

Take that: Games, often card games, that give players an opportunity to target a particular opponent.

Press your luck: A mechanism that tempts the greedy with rewards to take yet another turn even as the odds mount for lose it-all disaster. Seen in TV game shows and Russian roulette.

Co-op or Cooperative: All the players work together to beat the game itself. See Pandemic, in which everyone is trying to defeat global outbreaks of virulent diseases.

Dungeon crawl: You and the other players are stuck in a scary, underground labyrinth, battling monsters and scooping up loot. Gloomhaven, currently the top-rated game on the BoardGameGeek website, is a dungeon crawler.

Filler: A game that's easy to learn and takes 15 to 20 minutes to play. What you pull out to kill time while you're waiting for other players to show up to play a heavier game.

Dexterity: A game that could involve flicking something at a target, balancing blocks in a tower or using chopsticks to snatch sushi pieces floating from midair.

Engine builder: A mechanism where your aim is to build a machine, empire, company or system that becomes more powerful as the game progresses.

Hidden traitor: Players work together to accomplish a common goal, except for one player who is

secretly trying to foil the group.

Asymmetric: A game that assigns players widely varying roles and goals. Imagine Monopoly recast

with one player as a real estate developer, another as a tenants rights activist and a third as the

jail.

From an article by RICHARD CHIN

Chicks dig the wax ... uh, while they listen to the radio? That's OK, rock on young miss.

Immutable Laws

On last Sunday’s The Circus (Showtime) Steve Bannon said something that hadn’t occurred to me until then. He predicted with certainty that the Democrats would impeach Trump (that had occurred to me) but also that Mitch McConnell would, at that point, offer him what Bannon called “an acquittal deal”. Mr. Bannon is, as he is accustomed to be, interesting and wrong.

His mistake is to ignore two immutable laws of American politics. First: Trump can never be trusted to uphold his end of any deal and everyone, even McConnell, knows that. Second: only Republicans impeach, they only impeach Democrats, and they always fall short of the votes to remove.

But what about Nixon? you say. Nixon demonstrates how the process works when the shoe is on the other foot, as in the present case. In this situation the Democrats deliberate impeachment and produce articles which are voted out of committee and the Republicans response is to shove their president out the door. 

I can’t say I’ve examined even the outlines of Republican thinking on the matter. Who can really know such mysteries? Even Bannon, I’ll admit, likely has a better grasp than I. But I am holding to the immutable laws above. Sure, times change, political parties evolve, even flip polarities. In my bones, however, I feel it is late in history for the creation of entirely new patterns in the constitutional landscape.