When the Odds Are Ever Not in Your Favor, Wordscapes Edition

I was introduced to Wordscapes in late 2019, and still lightly compete for crowns on the weekends while getting steps.  During the week, there is a daily puzzle, but it otherwise feels like it's turned into a Tamagotchi game to give you rewards in the form of jeweled hearts (to get you more pets -- you can have one pet "active" at a time), cocoons (to hatch butterflies for a variety of settings), and binoculars (to find pieces of portraits that you can use).

For the month of October, there is a set of 12 portraits you can collect, and in order to get a portrait, you need to find 3 "pieces" of that portrait.  At this stage, where I'd collected 8 out of the 12 portraits, if the probability of finding each piece is roughly equal, I'd expect to get a new piece about 1/3 of the time.  Instead, I found 111 duplicate pieces before getting another pumpkin piece.  The probability of that happening is on the order of 10^-20, so that strongly suggests the probability of getting each piece is not equal.  Unfortunately, there's no indication of this in the interface.

Charterstone

After Risk Legacy, we tried Charterstone.

The legacy story of Charterstone is that the players have been given a charter by the Forever King to "build me a village worthy of Greengully" ... or something like that.  Players assign their meeples to buildings in order to gather resources, construct buildings, and complete various tasks.  Conceptually, it's not that radically different from Lords of Waterdeep, I guess, which is well-liked by the family, so looking good?

The pieces are nice and the boxes for keeping your pieces from one game to the next are well-designed.

The board is charming and well-organized:

Zooming in on the upper left of the map, there's the Cloud Port, which is a shared spot for all players.  Shipping goods out via the Cloud Port scores you points.  There's also my territory.  Since I won the first game, the rest of my family got to name it.  Hence, I am the proud leader of "Noobland".  

Noobland focuses on clay as a resource, so my personas' names are all about clay.  You choose a persona to play at the start of each game, and it gives you a special ability.  You eventually get a companion who stays with you across all the games, and because mine once tried to kill the Forever King, she naturally had to be named Celaena Sardothien...  Guests can also visit your territory, and while you can keep some of them from one game to the next, they are more temporary.  

Zooming in on the upper right of the map, there's the reputation track, which is another way to score points.  I really like it when there are multiple ways to win, and you work with what chance brings you.  The upper right is also the home of "Sylvania".

Sylvania is all about harvesting wood from the forests (hence Lilah's "the Destroyer" moniker???). Lilah's companion is Lulu, and they're so adorable with their similar names that they're now a couple.

Zooming in on the lower left of the map, there's the progress track that marks when the game ends.  It's also the home of "Totally Poland", a territory that was not actively run by someone in our family of 4 (you can have up to 6 players in Charterstone).

The lower right of the map has "Champs", another territory not actively run by a player.  It's been long enough that I forget how we began to be able to develop these territories.  It's possible that we misunderstood something in the rules (a common issue we've had in legacy games; it's a challenge because the rules change as the game evolves).

The bottom center of the map has the "Soviet Cat Union".

They're all coal miner's daughters here, and suspicious of outsiders like Comrade Jeb and his outlandish stories. Back to the mines with you, Jeb!

The top center of the map has "The Empire". It's all about farming. You can also see the top part of "The Commons", which has a number of spaces for scoring victory points.

The leader of The Empire truly is an evil mastermind who can't trust anyone, especially not a companion who has been spying on them.

It turned out that while I like a cozy, resource-gathering, town-building game, the rest of my family does not; or at least they didn't enjoy this variant on that style of game.  We got through 8 games before The Empire broke the campaign with some economy gremlining and we quit. 

Disruptive Flyovers in the NNE

The outgoing mayor wants to extend VTANG's lease at the Burlington International airport for another 25 years.  The current lease is set to expire in just under 25 years; however, the DoD apparently will not release funding for construction projects at the base unless there are more than 25 years left on the lease.  Capital expenditures are only planned out 5 years in advance,but $50M is on the line.  That said, it might be nice to renegotiate VTANG's mission.  

A sore spot for some residents over the last few years has been the introduction of the F-35 planes at the base.  I've been a resident of the NNE, and worked remotely from my home, for 22 years.  For the first 18 years, a few times a year the F-16s would fly overhead and I'd think, "Wow!  That's loud," and go on about my day.  With the arrival of the F-35s, this changed, and in April of 2020, I started to keep track of the number of flyovers that disrupted normal life -- not "I can hear them in the distance", but "I have difficulty having a normal conversation inside my home because the planes are so loud."  The table and chart below are summaries of that dataset.  What is striking is not only the number of minutes of disruption, but that 2023 is showing a significant increase over previous years. 

Below are charts showing:

• Flyovers by day of the week; they are mostly in the middle of the week.
• Flyovers by time of day; they are typically during the first two hours of the workday and then again after a noon lunch 
• Flyovers by time of day and date; this shows the consistency of when the disruptions typically occur over time

In my dataset, I record the date and time of the disruption; if the disruptive noise continues for several minutes, I record each minute, which helps to differentiate between a relatively brief flyover versus an extended one.  An important caveat is that I don't run outside to check whether the aircraft causing the disruption is an F-35; I simply record the timestamp.  July 2022, for example, stands out because VTANG's F-35s were deployed overseas at that time.  I don't know what other aircraft might have been flying during that month; again, I simply record the timestamp and try to get back to work.

Obviously, this is my personal experience and not everyone is adversely affected by the noise.

I don't know whether the issue is that the F-35s are significantly louder than the F-16s, or whether they've changed the flight patterns so they fly over my neighborhood more often.  What I do know is that this is a drastic change from my experience with the F-16s; if they had been this disruptive when I arrived in 2001, I likely would have relocated.