m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

I came up with a new pyramid game variant while searching for the origin of a cool square Tarot deck I spotted in the Gnostica image gallery at BGG. At closer examination, it wasn’t ideal for use in Gnostica or Zarcana because too many of the major arcana were renamed—and who would want to mark up such a pretty deck? There aren’t many other square decks; I found only the Insecta Obscura tarot and the AI-assisted Caticorn tarot. But along the way, I stumbled across some less problematic round decks, and a dreadful idea was born: Hexcana.

Ideally Hexcana would be played with a hexagonal tarot deck, but these range from expensive to vaporware; many apparent hex tarot are merely tarot-adjacent and inadequate for playing Zarcana-style games. Fortunately, circles will do to make a hex board instead of the usual Zarcana-style grid.

At first I conceived of Hexcana as a Gnostica variant, but adding two new directions seemed too likely to tip the perfect balance of the game. Whereas tossing new cray-cray into Zarcana seemed more in the spirit of the game. Thus, Hexcana is Zarcana played on a hex grid. All rules are the same, except that there are six orthogonal directions, and the opening layout should consist of seven round Tarot cards in a hex formation.

Playtesting will have to wait for the acquisition of a round Tarot deck and a live Zarcana victim partner.

Since my last gaming post, but still a few months ago, I also added Jacynth City (yet another Zark City variant) to my Decktet and pyramid games lists. Today I am also posting the draft rules of Darcana, a reimplementation of Dectana with more Gnostica, less Zarcana, and a solo/automata mode.

Maintaining a little G. K. Chesterton page is supremely uneventful, so I was pleasantly surprised to spot a new review of his work at Scott Alexander’s blog, Slate Star Codex. Note that this review is most likely not by Scott Alexander; it’s an entry in his ongoing anonymous “book” review contest.

[T]he Ballad is Chesterton’s love song to conservatism as he understands it. In it Chesterton weaves the ideas that he has been writing about all his life and creates a cohesive narrative theme. The Ballad is like a melody that all his other works, fiction and nonfiction, dance to. Chesterton wrote many books, yet none seemed to stand higher than the others in terms of quality or popularity. Because of this he has been called “the master without a masterpiece” (though, appropriately, the quote itself seems legendary: I have found it referenced everywhere but I cannot find the source). I disagree: the Ballad of the White Horse is his masterpiece. It is Chesterton boiled down to his essence. Within it we find two core themes of Chesterton’s body of work: hope in defiance of fate, and the eternal revolution.

The whole review is worth reading, as is (as always) the unexpectedly long comment thread, which touches on the origin of the masterpiece quote, JRR Tolkien’s critique of the poem, the confusing variety of Danes, and other points of interest.

Happy Pi Day!

I’ve collected enough pyramid content here and elsewhere to devote a page to it.

I expanded the pyramid randomization in the Zoning Out Randomizer to a general Pyramid Randomizer. I was thinking about saving your selected colors, but that hasn’t happened yet. I should also move it somewhere more appropriate than a github fork of someone else’s project, but that hasn’t happened yet either. Enjoy!

I’ve added pyramid randomization to the Zoning Out Randomizer, because it turns out it’s pretty annoying to draw pyramids by size from only one bag, and I was jealous of the Solomids randomizer. I also relaxed the restrictions on game size (previously to just the regular game and the small city variant) so it’s easier to set up Samantha’s toddler games with only one special rule.

I thought about adding a random seed to share challenges like the Solomids people do, but it seemed unlikely to get much use.