My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Someone recently asked me, vis-a-vis my previous comments on Kickstarting board games, if there were any Kickstarters I would recommend. And there is definitely one: the Pandasaurus Games reprint of Tammany Hall. For those who are unaware – which is most of you – Tammany Hall was an extremely-small-print-run board game which has become legendary among hardcore boardgamers because it’s A) supposed to be really good and B) extremely hard to find and thus very expensive.

Well, I happen to have a copy already! So let me confirm: it’s very good. It’s a sort of area-control game wherein each player is a major political player in 18th-century New York (it is, in some ways, Gangs of New York: The Board Game). Each turn you can either plunk down “ward bosses”, or a combination of ward bosses and immigrants (Irish, English, German or Italian). When you place immigrants on the board, you get political favour chips of the appropriate nationality.

Then, at the end of every four years, you have elections in each of the city wards, which are won by the player with the most votes. Votes are your ward bosses plus all of the political favour chips you choose to expend – but chips are expended in a sealed bid, which effectively turns each vote at least partially into a bluffing contest (“so, is he going to pull in his Irish favours here, or save them for ward 17?”).

That, plus some other clever mechanics (slandering opponents, the fact that the big winner of each election gets more VPs but then has to assign the special powers of the game to other players) make for a boardgame that is both extremely engaging and not too complex from a rules standpoint, but what I really love about Tammany Hall is that it captures the feel of political horse-trading almost perfectly, and the bluffing aspect of the game really seals that for me. (Also, you can make lots of jokes about English and Italians, if you are so inclined. Playing the game with friends of the appropriate ethnicities gets hilarious and lowbrow very quickly.)

Right now it’s a few hundred bucks short of making its Kickstarter goal for the base game, so it’s guaranteed to succeed. I highly recommend it – it’s a fantastic game.

(Also, other people should Kickstart Ogre so it gets to 700K and Steve Jackson promises to thus Kickstart Car Wars. I don’t care about Ogre, but I want me some Car Wars. With the long-awaited official rules for scaling gameplay up to Hot Wheels.)

Free Comics Day has changed a lot for me since my daughter came into my life. It used to be something I almost casually ignored; after all, I was already shopping at my local comics store. I didn’t need a neat holiday to get me through the doors, and whenever the folks at Mind’s Eye Comics (in Eagan, on Thomas Center Drive, just for the benefit of those looking for a good comics store in the Twin Cities–I promise they didn’t pay me for the plug) tried to foist free comics onto me, I told them no. I advised them to save the freebies for someone just walking through the door for the first time who might need an enticement to come back.

I feel very much different now. For one thing, a six-year old is a wonderful cure for feeling jaded, and let’s face it: Even if I didn’t know that I was feeling jaded, that’s what I was feeling. To her, it’s a big day. We get to go to the comics store (which is not an everyday thing; another thing that changes when you have a kid is that you find better things to spend the money on than comics) and she gets to pick out her very own comics to take home for free! There’s a party atmosphere at the store, which contributes to the feeling that it’s a special day; this year, she asked if she could bring her Thor hammer along (the Thor hammer being the only present that she directly requested for her sixth birthday) and everyone at the store got a huge kick of her carrying it around…and she got a huge kick out of everyone getting a huge kick out of seeing her carry it around.

I really can’t stress that enough, actually; for a six-year old girl, being told that her geekery is a positive thing and that it’s not just okay, but actually awesome to be into Thor and Green Lantern (she already knows the Oath by heart) is something that she’ll be able to carry with her through the times that I know will happen, despite my best efforts, where she’s told that it is not okay for a girl to be into these things. The man who jokingly tried to lift her hammer and pretended he couldn’t, the guy behind the counter who gave her a “Free Comics Day” sticker for being the “most awesome kid in kindergarten”…those gestures were important to me. And to her. (If you happen to be reading, thank you!)

She got a “Yo Gabba Gabba” comic and a “Tinkerbell/Smurfs” comic, and I added the “Donald Duck”, “Peanuts/Adventure Time”, and “Superman Family/Young Justice” sampler to the mix for her. I read all five (because what kind of parent would I be if I didn’t read stuff my kid was reading) and was relatively happy with all of them. The “Superman/Young Justice” issue was fairly inconsequential, really more a taster than an actual comic, but was cute; the “Donald Duck” and “Peanuts” were timeless classics but anyone who didn’t already know this probably isnt reading this blog (the “Adventure Time” backup wasn’t to my taste, though); the “Yo Gabba Gabba” comic was cute and captured the feel of the show, which really means different things to different people depending on what they think of “Yo Gabba Gabba”; and the “Tinkerbell/Smurfs” thing…well, let’s face it, my daughter’s going to like it a lot better than I do. Because she likes Tinkerbell just as much as she likes Thor, and that’s pretty awesome too.

For myself, I got the “New 52” sampler…which, I’ll be honest, did nothing to convince me that the new DC Universe is anything other than a terrible vortex of suck that somehow escaped the 1990s and hungers for the future of the comics industry; I got the “Age of Ultron” prelude, which was significantly less terrible than the DC comic but tried a little too hard to convince me that Ultron’s return was a terrible, unbearable, unprecedented threat to the Marvel Universe instead of, you know, Thursday; I got the perfectly good Spider-Man origin recap, which I will toss on the pile with all the other perfectly good Spider-Man origin recaps; I got the various Dark Horse media tie-ins, which were decent (although the final exchange between Mal and Jayne is one of the best in all of “Firefly” in any of its incarnations); and I got the Bongo comics special, which as in previous years delivered a perfectly workmanlike piece of entertainment product. (And a straightforwardly beautiful and touching little bio-piece from Sergio Aragones that feels like it got snuck in by accident, but was absolutely perfect.)

Perhaps, judging by my reaction to the comics I grabbed for myself, I’m still a little jaded. But my little girl isn’t.

Okay, so before the nerd hordes charge with their bat’leths held high (or Mjolnir replicas, or whatever), I’m not going to say I didn’t enjoy watching The Avengers. Indeed, I came out of it feeling truly entertained1. On that score, let us be clear: The Avengers is quite successful. I would particularly mention that the final third of the movie, wherein the Avengers fight the baddies in New York City in a top-notch extended battle, is probably the best super-extended action sequence since the final third of Hard Boiled when Chow Yun-Fat and Tony Leung fight the army of gangsters in the hospital. There are plenty of amusing quips, as one would expect from a Joss Whedon movie (and one hopes this elevates Joss Whedon, finally, to the directorial A-list, because there are many people who are there who deserve it less, and that is even given all my issues with Whedon’s oeuvre), although only three of them really made me laugh out loud and two of those involved the Hulk. The performances are good, although there are levels of excellence – RDJ and Mark Ruffalo top the list, of course, but nobody is bad.2

But here’s the thing. When I came out of Captain America and Iron Man and even Thor, I came out and said to myself, “well, that was a great movie.” Because all of those were great movies.3 I did not say that after coming out of The Avengers, because, well, it’s not a great movie. It’s not even a really good one. It’s an okay movie. At this point someone usually says “but it’s a great thrill ride!” and… well, no. At the end you might think it’s a great thrill ride, but again – that’s after the superb third act. The first two thirds of the movie are not a great thrill ride – there are thrilling moments interspersed with a lot of waiting for the awesome moments. There is, let us be honest, barely a plot to this movie: it is a bunch of Awesome Character Moments (well, mostly) and big fights, but the Awesome Character Moments aren’t really earned like they are in the previous and better Marvel films because no character gets enough time to really build a coherent storyline, and some of the plot twists in this movie are really amazingly stupid.4 Also, the movie unfortunately points out multiple times how stupid it is for anybody in a superhero universe to use a bow and arrow, which is a shame because Jeremy Renner is great, but nobody put a gun to his head and said “hey, be Hawkeye.”

So it’s not a great film. It is about as good, though, as I think an Avengers movie can be in the modern era of film: it is entertaining, competent on most levels, and if you’ve seen all the other Marvel films you can appreciate it as Adventure of The Guys From Those Other Movies well enough, and I have and did. It could be so much worse than it is, and it’s not really “worse” in any way. It’s just not great, and it’s not because it’s a team movie because The Incredibles was a team movie and it was splendid – it’s because it’s product, and product has to hit the expected beats, and in a movie like The Avengers there’s so much less room to hit them well. Which it does, right down to the end-credits reveal of Guess Who to make the fanboys come in their pants.

1. Although I wish I had not spent the money to see it in 3D. The 3D is ass. See it in 2D, folks. [↩]
2. Although Samuel L. Jackson just phones in a paycheck Samuel L. Jackson performance, which is not terrible but let’s be honest, he’s basically the black Christopher Walken at this point. [↩]
3. Okay, Thor less so than the other two by a fair bit, but even so, Thor is at least a decent movie with some really great moments. [↩]
4. Loki’s mind-control can be beaten by punching them in the head, which is basically the shittiest mind-control ever. [↩]

So apparently this mashup of the Hey Girl meme with Paul Ryan is the new hot thing, and I am nothing if not a slave to trends, so I am participating!

…is this.

Not the article. The pictures. It really does seem, based on not just this but all the publicity pictures I’ve seen, that everyone in the Nu52 has only one expression, and it’s “perpetual grimace”. Seriously, you could make an animated gif of nothing but DC characters making inadvertently hilarious facial expression, and it would probably take about five minutes to loop around. Nobody ever smiles in the new DC universe. Nobody laughs, or jokes. Everyone is Serious and Angry, all the time.

Or in the case of the Superman pictured there, has accidentally stepped on a pile of Legos in the dark. Or possibly whanged his shin on the corner of a desk. Either one.

EDIT: And Wonder Woman has clearly just gotten the end of ‘Serenity’ spoiled for her. “I just discovered the series, you bastards! I’m only up through ‘Out of Gas’! And you just drop ‘Oh, man, it killed me when Wash died’ in the middle of conversation like that?!”

Batman? It’s January in Gotham. Swirling winds around the bus stop. And the bus is officially now twenty-seven fucking minutes late.

Twenty-eight now.

I will admit, though, that Jay and Alan’s expressions make sense. Presumably, the missing word balloons are, “FALLING! FALLING INTO RATS!!!!” and “OH MY GOD MY HAND IS ON FIRE!!!!!”

Okay, that’s an attention-grabber of a post title, I will admit. After all, what I want to talk about might not exactly be a problem with Kickstarter exactly, but it’s definitely an issue. Bear with me.

So I was talking with a friend of mine who is a retailer of boardgames, and we were discussing the distribution side of the industry. If you did not know: the distribution side of the boardgame industry is remarkably fuckety. Basically every boardgame publisher is signing exclusive distribution deals, which in turn places retailers at the mercy of the distributors, and the distributors are not always brilliant. My retailer friend complained that he was at present completely unable to purchase Filosofia/Z-Man boardgames because the Canadian exclusive distributor was, in essence, not doing its damn job.

Anyway, this conversation eventually led its way to Kickstarter, and said friend dislikes Kickstarter even more than he does distributors because the entire sales paradigm, for him, gets screwed with. He has to constantly explain to people when he carries a formerly-Kickstarted product that, no, he doesn’t have the Kickstarter promo bonuses because those don’t come with the mass-market release. Each Kickstarter has its own, shall we say, eclectic release schedule. Reprints are never guaranteed and usually are not expected: Kickstarter products are one-shots. And this last element is especially problematic because good retailers depend on shelf stock to grow the business. After all, retailers – even those who smartly use the internet to promote their business wisely – need to compete with the Amazons and eBays of the world and the only way they can still do it is by having deep stock so that if you want X, they will most likely have X.

But the Kickstarter problem for boardgames goes beyond just retailers – it’s about boardgaming as a whole. Every new product depends on word of mouth. These are not products intended to create new gamers; they’re intended for an existing audience. Steve Jackson Games right now is Kickstarting a new super-deluxe edition of OGRE, their classic “one giant mega-tank versus an army” game – but how is this going to create new OGRE players? Shouldn’t the point of any new product launch be to both satisfy the target audience and expand the existing base? (I note that SJG has offered, as a benchmark goal that is still approximately $50,000 away, a “mini edition” of OGRE – AKA “the entry-level edition that new players might actually buy sight unseen.) Is anybody ever going to see super-deluxe OGRE on a shelf and think “let’s try that?”

Kickstarter is targeted-marketing that depends heavily on word of mouth. That’s fine for many things. But it worries me that it’s becoming a primary business model for game publishers, because I doubt that such a model is sustainable in the long run.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Black Mage: Does Thomas Mulcair have a good shot of winning the next Canadian election? Is it a better/worse shot than any of the other NDP contenders?

I would say yes and I don’t know, respectively. I think Mulcair is perhaps better positioned to leech votes from the centre than any other of the NDP candidates were and he’ll protect the new Quebec base, but the fact that he is from Quebec will be at least a slight negative in the West because they get incredibly pissy about that. I think on balance he was the best choice, not because he of geography or politics, but because he’s a political gut-punch fighter, and that’s what going to be necessary until the next election. But the NDP bench was really deep this time around (due in large part to Jack Layton making sure that it would be), so Mulcair is just the best of a strong lot.

supergp: If you were going to write a big comic crossover event, what would your premise be?

Old DC: Probably something involving most of the major heroes being mind-controlled with Starro or whatever and a few stragglers left to save the day. Probably including Empress, Major Disaster, and Geist the Twilight Man as some of the rebel fringe. (Yes, I know both MD and Geist were supposedly killed in Infinite Crisis. My answer to that is simple: “nuh-uh.”)

New DC: Something that brings back the old DC.

Marvel: Victor Von Doom. Infinity Gauntlet. *drops mic*

JDR: Can you compare Canada to some country(ies) that aren’t the USA?

Well, we’re colder than Botswana, freer than Yemen, less blonde than Sweden, better at parking than Italy, have less Japanese people than Japan, have better McDonald’s than Australia, less jiggly at most times than Brazil, less shaky than Djibouti, less class-riddled than England, have more Tamils working as line cooks than Sri Lanka (seriously, in Toronto Tamils fill the same role that the various Central American immigrants do in American kitchens; one of my former roommates, a sous chef and thoroughly white dude, spoke decent Tamil), easier to pronounce than Kyrgyzstan, less desert-y than the Western Sahara, and our French bears only a slight resemblance to France’s French. How’s that?

Greg Morrow: What is the most important difference between the constitutional laws of Canada and the United States? Not the procedural stuff about how the legislature is constituted, but the substantive stuff about civil rights and limited government power.

Probably the existence of s.1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the limitations clause. (Which, for the uninitiated, allows the government to pass laws which limit individual rights, so long as those laws are relatively specific and enumerated and that the limitation is justifiable in a free and democratic society.) It prevents a lot of “this absolute principle is clashing with that other absolute principle” confusion that arises whenever rights collide with other rights, which actually happens just about all the time. Of course, I know more than a few Constititional scholars who absolutely loathe the existence of s.1, so who knows.

Der Whelk: Is there an old series or property out there you think deserves and would be a perfect for a big budget re-make?

It’s not so much a remake as it is a continuation or sequel or even logical endpoint: Quantum Leap.

You would still have Scott Bakula as Sam Beckett, clearly having aged in real time from the end of the show, leaping from life to life, his memories continually fogged, and you would still have Al traveling alongside him, guiding him in his tasks, and that would be the first quarter of the movie or so – maybe one or two quick leaps – and then Sam jumps into a timeframe he shouldn’t be able to jump into normally, a time well after his death would have occurred. Something has gone wrong in the quantum stream. Somebody is interfering. Al is completely panicked and Sam is at a loss.

And that’s when he meets a second Leaper – one Al recognizes, not that he can tell Sam this – and although Sam doesn’t quite understand it, suddenly they’re working together to do something he can’t quite understand. The three of them are now leaping together, and every time she reminds him of what’s been happening so he doesn’t lose track. She’s working with slightly more advanced technology than Sam is, but even her advances aren’t enough for her to do what she needs to do, so she has enlisted Sam’s help. Two Leapers, working in tandem across multiple times, can pull it off. There’s no other way.

What has happened? Thanks to the interference of the second Leaper (who is much younger than Sam), Sam has traveled into her timeline. This leaper dies much, much later than Sam will – a century or more later – and this means she and Sam, together, can effect the events necessary for a future Leaper to leap backwards and give her the technology she so desperately needs to return Sam home. And so the present changes the future changes the past changes the present…

…because Sam Beckett’s daughter wants her father back.

(previously, slightly less previously)

supergp: What game would you use to introduce a young kid to boardgames, and at what age?

Start them early (and this isn’t just me espousing the hobby, incidentally – any childhood dev expert can tell you that the problem-solving and analytical skills kids can pick up by playing boardgames will go a long way in their lives). You can start playing boardgames with kids as early as two thanks to games like Go Away Monster! (among others). Animal Upon Animal is a dexterity game first and foremost but there’s strategy to be found there (enough that I have played it with adults and had fun, albeit using variant rules); Geistesblitz never, ever stops being fun either, whether you are four or sixty-four. As kids get older you can introduce them to slightly harder stuff: Liar’s Dice, Blockers! or Zooloretto or even Ticket To Ride. And then you can get them into the big-name stuff like Settlers or Carcassonne.

Evil Midnight Lurker: Have you ever killed a man in Reno just to watch him die?

Seems like a waste of a perfectly good murder to do such a thing.

A2H: Will there ever be any more Who’s Who columns? And if not, would going over the Official Guide to the Marvel Universe be a possibility?

Yes to both. I was actually working on a fairly lengthy Who’s Who entry (one of the more think-piecey ones, although I do especially want to do another Crime Tailor segment at some point and have a couple of villains in mind for that) last week and didn’t have time to finish it for that Thursday. Maybe this Thursday if everything goes smoothly. Or not. It depends.

As for the OHOTMU, probably, yes. Rex the Wonder Dog’s awesomeness is not constrained to one universe.

Mitchell Hundred: Does Armond White actually believe all the crazy shit he writes, or is he just trying to garner publicity? I’m really not sure about this.

I think Armond White is a born contrarian, and contrarians are extremely skilled at making themselves believe that the contrary opinions they hold for the sake of being contrary are also correct. Seriously, if Armond White is trying to get publicity, there are much easier ways to do it than by arguing that latter-day Michael Bay films are unrecognized works of genius.

Nicodemus: If you were a flavor of soup, what flavor would it be?

Presumably “mangled flesh” flavour.

Jonathan: Do you have any opinions/insights into the current Alberta election? Does it even have any meaning to you as an Ontarian?

Yes. I said on MetaFilter a couple weeks ago that I thought Danielle Smith – not Wildrose, Smith – represented the future of Canadian small-c conservatism because she was what it needed to be to survive (or at least pretending to be so): fiscally radical-conservative and socially liberal/libertarian. Youth polling in Canada – even in Alberta – makes it quite clear that social conservative positions are wildly unpopular with young voters and that is only trending downwards. Libertarian-conservatism is really the only way for conservatism to truly survive in Canada over the next fifty years, and Danielle Smith was trying to sell Wildrose as being that.

The problem, of course, is that Wildrose was actually chock-full of the usual old white Reform Party psychotics who have always been the backbone of Canada’s far right and once it became obvious that this was the case, the moderates and youth that might have considered voting Wildrose suddenly found they weren’t so interested in voting for Canada’s religious right and went for the Progressive Conservatives, who have moved to a decidely centrist position over the past few years. So generally, I’m quite happy with the results, as Alberta politics seem to have shifted from all-right-wing-all-the-time to a centrist/conservative fight, and that’s a leftward shift in the most conservative province in Canada.

KD: Nearly a year in, what are your thoughts on the DcNU?

I’m reading I, Vampire and that is pretty much it (and I don’t know how long I’ll hang on to reading it). The Nu52 basically killed DC for me – the emotional attachment that I always had to the DCU is still there, but it’s strictly to the old DCU and not this shitty new EXTREEEEEEME version. Really, most of the Nu52 comics are just appallingly bad, and the ones that aren’t are crossing over with the bad ones far too often. But at the end of the day, it’s not about quality but about the fact that my DC comics, the ones I grew up with, have been mostly discarded for something else. Even if they were good comics, I still wouldn’t want to read them, because without the emotional tie they lose all resonance for me. I mean, I’m not even reading Legion of Super-Heroes! This is the first time basically ever that I am not bothering to read Legion. It just feels weird for me to type that, but it’s true.

And look – DC has greatly increased their sales, so good for them, I suppose. But it’s not for me any more. I used to dream of writing for DC; I don’t any more, because it’s quite clear that even if I could get past their abominable treatment of creators (and I don’t think I could), it’s just not a place I’d want to work now.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.