Four years of playing Wordle

The first wordle I did was on Jan 5, 2021, which I got in 1 guess because a friend came on Facebook and asked, "Has everyone done today's wordle?"  Then I went to find out what wordle was, thought about why they might be asking, and guessed right.

Since then, I've used that word as my first guess every day (with the exception of Apr 23, 2022, when a coworker started asking, "Has everyone done today's wordle?") and disabled Hard Mode because tiger is a terrible first word to use for Hard Mode (so many words end in "er").  After 4 years, starting tomorrow I'm going to start using a different first 

How have my four years of Wordle gone?  Well, recording that accurately was a bit of a challenge.  At first I used the original Wordle website, and then the Worde app, and finally the NYT app when the Worde app was no longer synced with the official Wordle of the day.  So my stats from the NYT app aren't right: 

Fortunately, I had taken screenshots of nearly all of my games, and eventually put them all into a spreadsheet, so that I have a more complete accounting:

Even cooler, I have a chart that shows the progression of my guesses over time, so you can quickly see when 3's started to outpace 4's and now 2's have started to outpace 5's.

The obvious question is: am I getting better at Wordle?!  Well, no, there are simply fewer words to choose from.  There are only 686 words left from the original Wordle list.  NYT sprinkled in 22 "new" words in 2025; unless that rate increases dramatically in 2026 and 2027, we realistically have roughly 2 years of OG Wordle left.

Solving wordle in 3 guesses or less

I've recorded 1216 attempted wordles, and finished 608 (or exactly half) in 3 guesses or less. This happened a little earlier than expected**, mostly due to a 14-day run of 2's and 3's.

Wordle games by number of guesses needed

Of course, the reason why I'm starting to get many more in 2 or 3 is because there are only 713 words left from the original wordle list. So far, NYT has peppered in 30 words that weren't in the original list, but it's unclear to me how many more they can add without getting obscure or including 's' plurals.

** I thought it would be around the 4th anniversary of my first wordle, on Jan 5.

EOY 2023 wordle update

There's one more day in 2023, but gonna post this as the EOY wordle status update.  It took a little while for me to use the NYT app instead of the site, and keep missing days here and there.  But a good year. 

(note: published here Jan 4, 2026; backdated to Dec 30, 2023 when I originally shared with friends on FB) 

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. 

Seafall: A Legacy Game

Seafall is a game that straddles the line between traditional board games and role-playing games, with a "storyline" that carries over from session to session through a campaign of multiple games.

On the strength of this Slate article, we acquired a copy for Christmas and finished the campaign this past weekend.  We played a total of 14 sessions, including the "Prologue" game, and had a great time, especially in the earlier sessions.  That's 40-50+ hours of entertainment for 4 people for $40, and no fights for several weeks over what we're playing for game night.  Can't ask for a better deal than that.  However, I can't wholeheartedly recommend the game without mentioning some caveats.

This is a good-looking game with solid pieces that would hold up for many, many more sessions.  However, as a Legacy game, the campaign is now over, and the driving interest in playing the game (the ongoing storyline) is gone and the mechanics of the post-campaign "game" aren't exciting, so we're disposing of it.  Fortunately most of the game is paper and cardboard, so it's nearly all recyclable.  I'm totally down with idea of an "experiential" game that doesn't clutter up the shelves when we're done with it, but if the idea of throwing away a game gives you the willies, this one may not be for you.

You get to make permanent alterations to the board, cards, and other elements of the game. This is transgressive, and can either feel exhilarating or horrifying.  Again, if drawing in permanent marker "ruins" a board game, this may not be for you.

You need to be a group that is okay with uncertainty, because as noted in pretty much every review of the game, the rules are not always clear.  There were many times we felt having someone familiar with the game to act as a gamemaster would have been helpful.

Each session simultaneously takes too long and not long enough.  As with most strategy games, the estimated playing time of 90-120 minutes is a gross underestimate.  With setup, cleanup, keeping abreast of changes to the basic rules, and two kids at the table, we needed to set aside about 4 hours for each session.  However, very few sessions saw a third in-game year.  Each year is broken up into 6 turns; one of us usually won by turn 10-12, often by triggering something that gave an unexpectedly large amount of glory (victory points). I suspect this is because we made more progress on the main storyline than expected per session, partly because we tend to play games fairly cooperatively (see below). Unfortunately, this meant that long-term strategies were not worth pursuing, and even medium-term plans were ruined by unanticipated events.  If your group is into making up house rules, I would be strongly tempted to time box the game so that you play a certain number of in-game years per session, possibly varying the number of years from session to session, rather than to a certain amount of glory.  

There are many, many times when you're presented with an old-school "choose your own adventure" type of decision, where you might take a "cautious" path or a "bold" path, one choice will have a potentially bad effect, and it's impossible to tell which is the "right" choice from the information you have available.  I'd rather the results be roughly equal, but different; for example, the "cautious" choice might result in no ill effects and give a moderate reward, while "adventurous" might cause some pain but also greater rewards.  Knowing this in advance, your group might come to an agreement on how to change the risk/reward system.

It's extremely difficult to play "friendly".  We like cooperative games and competitive games that don't require you to attack other players.  Part of the assumption in the balancing of Seafall is that players will gang up on the player who is in the lead.

Still and all, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, loved the concept of the game, and hope to see others like it that learn from the experience of Seafall.

EDIT: a second post with images of the game is finally up.

The Dungeon of Dread

At the moment, we're playing with the Pathfinder system.  We needed something after the short module in the Starter Kit, so I cobbled together a module from the Dungeon of Dread Endless Quest book and put it here.  The PNG is a flowchart map of the dungeon and the document describes the dungeon.

The party consisted of four female elves; one cleric, one mage, two rogues.  Favorite moments: 

• This party is highly dexterous, so they tended to creep up upon encounters.  When they met the bugbear, their plan was to throw a flask of oil at it and fire flaming arrows into it to ignite the oil.  One rogue successfully hit the bugbear with the oil, but the other rogue and the cleric missed with the arrows.  In the next round, both rogues and the cleric missed with the arrows, at which point, the bugbear ran.
  
  The all-elven party missing moving targets with their missile attacks became a running theme throughout the dungeon crawl.
• They encountered Black Fang, chained up, before Kalman, debated whether to set Black Fang free, and eventually decided to come back later.  After killing Kalman, they used the slightly defective wand of polymorph to turn Black Fang into a black kitten... which has extra-long canine teeth and bat-like wings

We now have the Rise of the Runelords adventure path to work with, but this was fun, so I might have a go at the other Endless Quest books.

Update: this is the map the players drew of the dungeon as they experienced it.

Clash of Clans

Reporting three weeks in to my own village: Town Hall is still level 5 (same as last week); most of this week has been a matter of upgrading buildings and participating in my first Clan War.
 
Perhaps this has been done in other games and I'm just ignorant, but I like how SuperCell has created a social game with a PvP element that seems to elegantly avoid the possibility of bullying via ganging up to repeatedly destroy a particular village, all through the simple tactic of not allowing you to search for a specific opponent when you go on a raid. 

There are lots of nits to pick in gameplay, so I'll just focus on the most serious I've seen: it appears to be a valid, possibly even preferable, strategy to purposefully lose trophies so that you can amass enough resources to make a major upgrade in peace.  For example, when upgrading your town hall to level 8, rather than leaving yourself open to loot raids from other members of the Gold league, you can easily make several attacks where you send in a single barbarian in order to get knocked down to the Silver or Bronze league, where no one can effectively steal resources from you.  This is perverse, and staying in your "proper" league needs to be properly incentivized, possibly through sizable loot bonuses for membership, or by not allowing you to drop down a league once you've attained a particular level (though this latter might have its own problems if someone rises too fast through the ranks).

Okay, one more because it's related and I've just been through a Clan War: I don't think there's enough incentive to stretch yourself to go after the best-defended war villages.  Because getting stars is what matters most, too many of our high level clan members are going after weaker villages.  Theoretically, this should backfire against a well-organized clan that right-sizes their attacks, but the reality is that most clans have enough members that aren't participating that this is a valid, even preferable, strategy.  The problem is that it shuts out the weaker members of our clan who are slow to attack the villages that they have a chance of winning against.  A simple solution might be to only give you a maximum of 2 stars if you win against someone weaker than the village that CoC automatically "matches" you against (CoC seems to choose a village that's much weaker than what you can actually beat).

Sudoku data

I was given the 2012 and 2013 "Original Sudoku Calendars" as presents prior to the starts of those years, so naturally I recorded the time it took me to complete each puzzle and the date on which I completed it.  A quick perusal of the data shows:

1. I'm not particularly good at Sudoku; I even started keeping track of when I screwed up and had to erase completely and start over.
2. There are some missing times; either because I forgot to record it, or because I was unable to finish the puzzle, or (in the case of a few at the beginning of 2012) I hadn't started keeping the dataset yet.
3. 2013 saw the introduction of "visual" sudoku, in which they used various symbols other than Arabic numbers.  For a variety of reasons, I'm even worse at these than "regular" sudoku.
4. I tended to work on the puzzles in clumps, finishing several each evening for a few days (or airplane flight), and then not doing them for a week to a month (or more)

While working on the puzzles in 2012, I suspected that the "Medium" difficulty puzzles weren't any easier than the "Hard" difficulty puzzles; also, after spending so many hours doing sudoku puzzles, I wondered whether I'd gotten any better at solving them.  Well, after some painstaking record keeping, we can answer that with data science!  So, first a quick look at some descriptive statistics of the time it took to complete each puzzle by puzzle difficulty:

Well, hell.  The Puzzle Difficulty is sorted in alpha order, so because I used text in the Excel spreadsheet instead of a numeric encoding with 1 = Very Easy, 2 = Easy, and so on, the table's out of order.  So, after a little recoding:

Better!  And I even remembered to save the image as a hard-G GIF, rather than a JPG, this time so there's no moiré pattern.  What jumps out at me from this is that:

1. The mean time to complete for each category is about 4 minutes more than the previous category.  That's eerie.  Also, not great evidence to start out for my theory about Medium vs. Hard. 
2. There are many more missing "Hard" puzzles.  
3. The median values are all lower than the mean values, suggesting that the distribution of time to complete is skew for each difficulty level.  That's kind of a "duh" observations, because it was to be expected, but I should check to see just how skew the distribution is.
4. The maximum values for the "Easy" puzzles is higher than the "Medium" puzzles.  This is, I think, due to the "Visual" puzzles.

Breaking the information down further by year, and putting it in a graph so that we can better see the distribution of values, suggests that:

1. I shouldn't be worried about skewness when going to perform statistical tests; yes, there are some outlying values, especially on Easy, but I think these are all the "Visual" puzzles.
2. It looks like I may have gotten better at the Easy and Medium puzzles from 2012 to 2013, but was no better at the Hard puzzles.  
3. My theory that I was no better at the Medium puzzles than the Hard puzzles (in 2012) is alive!

A quick look at boxplots, paneled by whether I messed up and whether the puzzle was "visual", confirms for me that I should go ahead and start building models.

So let's do a general linear model of the time to complete based on difficulty, whether the puzzle was visual, whether I messed up, and the year, with all first level interactions.

Lots of good stuff here.

1. The puzzle difficulty contributes the most to the model (duh, but good to have the confirmation)
2. Whether the puzzle was visual and whether I messed up and had to start over had roughly equal effects on the model.  
3. year did not have a significant effect on the model, which suggests that I did not, overall, get better from 2012 to 2013; however, the interaction of puzzle difficulty and year is significant, which means that the differences between 2012 and 2013 that we saw in the Easy and Medium puzzles may be real effects, and not just noise
4. The interaction of PuzzleDifficulty and Visual is a redundant effect, because the visual puzzles were all of Easy difficulty.  Likewise, the visual puzzles all appeared in 2013, so Visual*year is redundant.
5. PuzzleDifficulty*Messedup is statistically significant.  This means that messing up on a Hard puzzle will have a different, and almost certainly greater, effect on the time to complete the puzzle than messing up on an Easy puzzle (duh, but good to have the reminder)
6. Visual*Messedup is also statistically significant. This means that messing up on a Visual puzzle (which we have seen take longer than regular Easy puzzles) will have a different, and almost certainly greater, effect on the time to complete than messing up on a regular Easy puzzle.  This is really the same type of effect as PuzzleDifficulty*Messedup
7. Messedup*year is not significant.  Screwing up in 2013 was no better or worse than screwing up in 2012.

We could, at this point, look at the parameter estimates table, but it's big and messy and won't tell us anything important that we can't get from the tests of effects table above and the estimated marginal means table below.

1. Messing up roughly doubles the amount of time spent on a puzzle.  This makes sense; often, it's not until I'd near the end that I'd realize that two 7's were in the same row, column, or square (or the like).
2. Visual puzzles took about twice as long to finish as regular Easy puzzles, and messing up a visual puzzle compounded the error.
3. I did, in fact, get better at Easy and Medium puzzles from 2012 and 2013.
4. (*) I appear to have not gotten better at Hard puzzles from 2012 to 2013, and I appear to have been no better at Medium puzzles than Hard puzzles in 2012

I'm putting an asterisk next to this last conclusion for the important reason that most of the missing Hard puzzles are from 2012.  It's extremely likely that these are puzzles that I failed to solve at the time, and would have taken me a long time to solve if I'd kept at them.  I would hazard a guess that I did, in fact, improve on Hard puzzles from 2012 to 2013, and that I took less time to finish the Medium puzzles than Hard puzzles in 2012; my belief that the Hard puzzles in 2012 were no more difficult than the Medium puzzles was predicated upon a lack of completion times for the hardest of the Hard puzzles.

Now, I could make certain assumptions about how long it would have taken me to complete the missing puzzles and re-run the model to do some "What if?" analysis, but I want to stop here for now.  There are also some other methods for modeling whether I got better at solving these puzzles over time; maybe I'll look at them later.


I should also note that I didn't receive the 2014 calender, and so will continue the dataset using puzzles from http://www.websudoku.com/ (though I haven't attempted any this year, so the future of this dataset is actually not very clear).  The biggest benefit to using puzzles from the sudoku.com site is that I can link to the exact puzzle, so that my own dataset could be merged with other datasets kept by other people recording their times.

This rabbit hole leads to Triple Town data analysis

Well, how did I get here?

1. Commenting on a previous post, a friend suggested a new game to try.  
2. The Wikipedia page for Gone Home notes it uses the Unity Engine.
3. The Unity Engine page lists Triple Town as a client app.
4. The Triple Town page notes some research done on the distribution of tiles
5. This Triple Town Tribune post by Andrew Brown mentions that the data was collected by David de Kloet.
6. The data was originally shared in the comments of this post, which I found by searching on "David de Kloet triple town" in G+. (NOTE: I also asked Andrew if he had a copy of the data, which he was kind enough to share)

Now, the distributions are a good start, but my first question is: does the probability of getting a particular tile on your next tile depend upon the tile you've just been given?  For example, if you've just been given a bear, are you more or less likely than the overall estimated probability of 0.15 to get another bear with your next tile?

A quick way to start examining this is to look at a crosstabulation of the tile you've just been given by the next tile.  In this table, the rows show the current tile, and the columns show the next tile.  Looking at the first row, what this means is that of the 1043 total times that a Bear appeared, it was followed by another Bear 157 times, by a Bush 157 times by Grass 637 times, and so on.  

The raw counts are useful, but it can be hard to compare rows to see if they're different.  So now let's look at the row proportions.  Again, the rows show the current tile, and the columns show the next tile.  Looking at the first row, what this means is that of all the times that a Bear appeared, it was followed by another Bear 15.1% of the time, by a Bush 15.1% of the time, by Grass 61.1% of the time, and so on.  Bears appear pretty consistently around the overall average of 15.1% of the time, though they seem to appear less often after a Hut (11.4%) and more often after a Tree (18.4%).  However, Huts and Trees don't appear very often, so these differences could be due to chance.
 

So let's look at the chi-square test.  SPSS Statistics produces both Pearson and Likelihood Ratio chis-square tests.  Since the significance values of the tests are each under 0.05, this suggests that there is, in fact, a relationship between what tile you have now and the next tile you'll get, but I'm a little worried about the large number of cells with low expected cell counts.  That can throw the results of the test off.

So another set of tests to look at are pairwise comparisons of the column proportions.  (NOTE: I really want to compare the row proportions, but that's not an option, so I've reorganized the table so that the current tile is in the columns and the next tile is in the rows)  At any rate, the tests suggests that when your current tile is a Tree, the distribution of your next tile is different from when you current tile is a Bear, Bush, or Grass.  

Looking back at the table of proportions, what's not clear from the test is whether the detected statistically significant differences come from the relatively higher rate of Bears and lower rate of Bushes when the current tile is a Tree, or whether it comes from the relatively higher rate of Huts and lower rates of Bots and Trees.  The latter sets of relative differences arises from very rare events, and I wouldn't trust results based on that.  We could re-run the test while ignoring those columns, but for now I'm pretty comfortable saying that there is no practically significant relationship between the current tile and the probability distribution of the next tile.

These tables were produced using this SPSS Statistics syntax on this text file.

A character sheet for the old D&D Coloring Book

If you are a fan of the Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Book, not just for the coloring, but for the game included as part of the book, then you might find this sheet for keeping track of your adventure useful.  (Heck, for simplicity we ignore the map of the dungeon in the middle of the book and assume you can choose any order in which to battle the monsters)

Then the question is: what's the best order in which to fight the monsters?

My spiral notebook was the envy of all...

The subject is TPK.  Today's lecture will discuss appropriate armor choices when adventuring in flooded ruins inhabited by monstrous reptilians.  On the one hand, not wearing plate armor greatly reduces the chance of accidental drowning.  On the other hand, it greatly increases the chance of becoming lunch.

Crackers, part II

I previously reported our children's attempts to crack our home computer password in order to play video games at 6am on weekdays.  Since then, on the weekends I've set the password to be the answer to a math problem in the hint text.  This doesn't really stop them from getting up at 5am to play, but while there are good controls on Vista and beyond, our desktop runs XP, where the parental controls are a little more crude.

But then I got tired of changing the password back and forth on the main account, and decided they didn't really need access to the account that has admin privileges (not that they know what to do with that, yet), so we finally created a second account on the box.  The problem: Steam won't run unless you have write privileges to the directory.  I read several unhelpful forum threads that indicated either no workaround or a complicated one, before stumbling across a link to Moving a Steam Installation and Games.  Perfect!  It can go somewhere under the "All users" directory or, better yet, to the external hard drive (which is 1TB, vs. 145GB on the main computer) -- and 30GB suddenly freed up.  w00t.  Now we'll just have to see if the gaming experience running across the USB connection is acceptable.

Fight, Fight, Fight, Parry, Parry, Parry

Because the kids are less than thrilled with the graphics in Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord -- even I'm a little taken aback because the graphics are different from those on the Apple IIe -- they're not interested, and I'm free to do whatever I want with those characters, though I do plan on showing them the battle against Werdna. 

It's also even more brutal than I remember, possibly because we used the identify cheats back in the day.  The "evil" group died on the stairwell between the 4th and 5th levels, and then the "good" group, while getting strong enough to go after the evil group, died on the third level**, so a third group needed to level up to the point where they could recover the good group.  Finally, Gandalf (our original "good" mage) has learned Malor and we can start retrieving the evil group (because Gandalf will always try to save Saruman).

So let me back up a moment.  In some ways, Proving Grounds makes modern CRPGs look like they were designed for sissies, because nowadays you can always revert to a previous save.  OTOH, in modern CRPGs, you also only get one party/storyline, and if you make bad choices in character development early on, you can hose yourself down the road (Wizardry 8 and Dragon Age: Origins are especially guilty here), and starting over means a couple dozen hours of mind-numbing repetition of the quests you just completed with the first character.  By contrast, in Proving Grounds, you build up a stable of characters and can easily mix and match your party as you determine the "optimal" group, and leveling up a new batch of characters to where they're useful is only a few hours of mind-numbing dungeon crawling.

** the Samurai with 18 Luck keeps getting decapitated; after one battle in which he was beheaded, we ran for the stairs to the second level and were surprised by Rotting Corpses and Grave Mists.  Two characters paralyzed in round 1; the other three in round two; TPK.  Good times.

I love that huttlet!

For every product, there is a Star Wars version, and this includes the Top Trumps card game.  Connor was given a copy of the Clone Wars Top Trumps.  


The premise is simple: it's War with a twist. Each character is scored on Bravery, Cunning, Leadership, Fighting Skill, Battle Tech, and Jedi Power.  On each turn, the "starting" player draws their topmost card, looks at it, and decides which attribute will be used that round.  The other players draw their topmost cards, and the one with the highest value on that attribute wins.  


The problems are that:

1. each attribute is scored on a wildly different scale; Jedi Power seems to range from 0-10, a Fighting Skill of 41 is very low and 130 is very high, and a Bravery of 24 is very high.  Maybe this is supposed to be a "feature" so that it's harder for players to remember a particular card's relative rank on each attribute, but instead it comes across as arbitrary. 
2. and this is a much greater problem, many of the rankings don't make any sense.  The Jungle Rancor has the highest fighting in the game at 140; General Grievous has greater Bravery than Anakin; the typical Clone Trooper has Fighting Skill equal to Kit Fisto and greater cunning than Jabba the Hutt...

...annnnd, speaking of Jabba, his son, Rotta the Huttlet, has a Jedi Power of 5.  This is less than any Jedi or Sith, but greater than any other character.  Hunh?  Is Rotta supposed to be Force-sensitive?  What gives?  But... thinking a little more along those lines, that would actually have made the plot of the animated Clone Wars movie actually make sense.  If Rotta were Force-sensitive, the premise could be that the Jedi Order asked Jabba if they could take him for training.  Jabba refused, but when Rotta is then kidnapped and Dooku comes with "information" that the Jedi have done this in order to train Rotta in the ways of the Jedi, Jabba actually has a good reason to believe Dooku.  We could even have a discussion between Anakin, Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan as to whether it's right for Jabba to refuse his son the chance to learn more about his special gifts, and whether it would be just for the Jedi to actually take Rotta and train him.

Sigh.  Can we retcon this ASAP?

Bike lanes are slow in Latona

Steam has been downloading updates to Audiosurf lately; yesterday's is part of an ARG promo for Portal 2.  If you manage a "gold medal" ride, you get a transmission that says "Bike lanes are slow in Latona."  (though I thought it said "Biplanes are slow in Latona.")


Some people on that wiki page linked to above are griping about the difficulty of getting gold.  I agree it's non-trivial, but did it on my third try (after scoring 488k and 486k the first two times -- note that I'm just showing the VT scores b/c the worldwide scores are much higher than mine):
  

Then again, I've been playing Audiosurf for a while now.  Annnnnd, that's probably as much I'll participate in the ARG.  (I only did this bit because it involved a game I already enjoy playing and the song is pretty cool.)

Accidentally waking a sleeping giant

Audiosurf is a great, cheap game that has maintained its interest for me for 2 years now.  The other day I was playing some R.E.M. songs and hit the top score on "The Wrong Child".  The problem is that artma3bk is a truly elite player who must have simply had a bad game. 

artma3bk quickly rectified the situation, and then went on to play some other R.E.M. songs that they hadn't played before...

Flowing Data posted about the NYT Rock, Paper, Scissors article, and while I work for the company that works hard to crush the humans in competitive games, there is no way a machine is going to be me at RPS**, even with a significant amount of training, because I'm learning about it while it's learning about me.  Results after 11 shakes against the expert machine below:

After snookering it rounds 4 and 5, I was impressed that it learned enough to go for paper instead of rock, and then to go for paper again, and then for scissors, and then to actually have the gall to get me in round 9.  I'm fairly confident I could stay slightly ahead of the machine (until mental exhaustion hit, which of course wouldn't be a problem for the machine), but I don't think it would be by much.

Lego SW vs. KotOR

Connor got to a video game prize the other day, and while setting him up on the computer, Sarahmac accidentally clicked on the shortcut to start Knights the Old Republic instead of the Star Wars Lego game, and then left the room during the boot sequence.  At first he complained that the splash screen wasn't right, but he did it in such a whiny tone that Sarahmac declined to respond from the other room.  I came in from shoveling a few minutes later, just after Sarahmac had figured out what had happened and was starting to shut down KotOR and start up Lego SW.  It was clear that something was "weird" on the screen, but Connor wasn't complaining anymore.  Later that night at bedtime, Connor wanted to know when he'd be old enough to play KotOR, and opined that he had "been doing really well" against the sandpeople (which was where the last saved game happened to be).


The interface is considerably more complex in KotOR than SW Lego, but (as long as your character tends to choose "good" actions and build up light side force powers) it's actually harder to do "evil" things than in SW Lego (where you can easily choose to be Dooku, Vader, or the Emperor and force choke/lightning people), so we might be doing KotOR sooner rather than later, depending on how much of it he can run himself...

All Good Things

One of my all-time favorite games, Little Green Guys with Guns, is going down at the end of the week, as Wolff explains here and here.  This is very sad, and I'll miss it.

Fantasy Coloring Albums

Connor recently discovered my old copy of the Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Book, and we've read it every day since.  We even played the "game" inside the coloring book, which I had never played before, since we also had Dungeon! (so why play some crappy pseudo-game inside the coloring book?).  Even though he's not entirely interested in coloring, I went to see whether you could find it at Amazon, and the answer is "yes, but you won't want to buy it at those prices".  Searching wider, it turns out there are other people with fond memories of this book, and the Monster Brains blog had several pretty good scans of uncolored pages, but was incomplete, so I was happy to eventually find a complete book in PDF format -- the real pages are larger than 8.5"x11" (actually the PDF's are 11 2/3" tall?!), so some of the pictures are a little cropped, but good enough for printing out and letting a 6.5-year-old (or 39-year-old) color away if he gets interested.  The backgrounds are a little gray.


Searching more generally for fantasy coloring books turned up nothing I was particularly interested in giving to Connor.  I'll bet there's something good out there, but don't have the time to wade through it all at the moment.