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Sister Cities and Such

When my world — surely not yours — turns to a roiling bucket of vomit, I write. Doesn’t matter what. The topic could be a current project, say, the William Halsey Wood manuscript. Could be bad poetry — though I shall never post it here. And then there is Agincourt, my own personal rabbit hole of avoidance.

Quite by accident this evening, the word “worpswede” crossed my path. Was that a misspelled reference to Star Trek? Or a criticism of liberal agendas in Scandinavia? No, Worpswede turns out to have been an artists’ colony in Lower Saxony, about 100k from Hamburg, a city which I would like to know far better. Worpswede is an old community but in the late 1880s it accidentally acquired the seed for becoming a colony of fine artists, printmakers, sculptors, but primarily painters of the vernacular landscape.

My knee-jerk reaction is predictable: fascinate, investigate, appropriate. Agincourt already has a similar phenomenon — a summer colony at Sturm und Drang — so why not an exchange program of sorts between the two. The world has witnessed far stranger things. Consider the last seventy-two hours following the Supreme Court’s recent finding. I find my efforts far less damaging.

Agincourt, the board game 1.3

“Opportunity” cards are a feature of nearly every board game. They add both risk and reward. How they might function in A:TBG is still a mystery for me to resolve. But they can also introduce irresolution and ambiguity, both of which rank pretty high with me.

Monopoly provides two classic categories:

CHANCE COMMUNITY CHEST
  • 7 direct you to either a property, railroad, or utility (44% chance)
  • 3 make you pay money to the bank or other players (19% chance)
  • 2 reward you with cash (13% chance)
  • 1 Advance to Go (6% chance)
  • 1 Go to Jail (6% chance)
  • 1 Get Out of Jail Free (6% chance)
  • 1 makes you move back three spaces (to either Income Tax, New York Avenue, or Community Chest, depending on which Chance space you land on) (6% chance)
  • 9 reward you with cash (56% chance)
  • 4 make you pay money to the bank or other players (26% chance)
  • 1 Advance to Go (6% chance)
  • 1 Go to Jail (6% chance)
  • 1 Get Out of Jail Free (6% chance)

So, in light of this borrowed analysis, here is the place to experiment, to explore how A:TBG might evolve.