Hiya Hiya Hiya: I'm back; quarterly media review

I’m back from a long trip, and have taken a week to dig myself out from under my piles of correspondence, tv, and dirty laundry.  I wanted to swing back into action with something a little more meaty, but, well, wishes and fishes.  Instead, as I so enjoyed my year-end review of media back in December, I thought I would inaugurate the practice as a quarterly thing.  Writing this has left me plenty of time to finish my laundry for real (but I still haven’t).

Rest assured that I have plenty of topics in mind for the coming weeks--Snowden and the NSA!  “Information scientists”!  Being civil in the course of criticism!  What’s a guy gotta write to go viral around here?  If none of that works I’ll have to pretend I’m an adorable moppet doing a social media experiment, and nobody wants that.

Books

Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson--book 2 of “The Stormlight Archive”

I feel about Brandon Sanderson as I do about Patrick Rothfuss, but with less venom.  I think both are weak writers who get way more acclaim from the fandom than they deserve, and I don’t always understand why, except that they offer certain surface-level satisfactions to fantasy fans. In Sanderson’s case, it’s uber-clever magic paired with eye-bleeding action.  In this, the second volume, of his great epic, the self-indulgence afforded by all that acclaim continues on into bloat.   

What’s more, Sanderson gives the impression of never having really lived.  As a result, he replaces any human sensibility in his work with an approximation of the adrenaline rush you get from the last level of your favorite video game.  He’s often praised for his cinematic writing, and I would agree, with the caveat that he fulfills only the most shallow definition of the term: he provides motion and spectacle with none of the visualized heart that good filmmakers perfected in the nineteen-aughts.  Plus, he continues to double down on humor in his writing that just...needs to stop.

So that’s more of my review of Sanderson than of this book, but I think it fits.

Dune by Frank Herbert

I hesitated to read this sci-fi classic for years; the genre is not my favorite, for one, but I also feared its space opera themes would fly over my head.  (Ah, pride!)  Well, it’s definitely a challenging read, but it’s also an extremely rewarding one, as well as just being beautifully written and thrilling to experience.  You’ll wonder why modern Americans can’t think about the ecological future of the planet as cogently as the Fremen do about Arrakis.  Now, I’m pleased to have finally rounded out my exploratory tastes of sci-fi classics--the others being Foundation and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy--and look forward to continuing with the Dune series and beyond.

One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson

A rollicking, romping, compulsively readable look at a particular moment in American history, one that aptly reminds us how interrelated seemingly distant happenings can be--in this case, flight, baseball, natural disasters, and more.  It makes me wish Bryson would similarly treat every season of every year in world history, to tease out the fascinating connections between events.  What a project that would be.  For now, it’s enough to soak up this volume, and enjoy the sketches provided of Lindbergh, Ruth, Hoover and others--by turns hilarious, enlightening, and disturbing.  (Try not to get choked up at Calvin Coolidge’s account of his early loss.)

TV

True Detective

Most everything I watch is still in the thick of things right now, but this HBO series provided a compact, muscular character study of two broken men.  Now, I wasn’t too dense to notice the meta-narrative going on here, with the detectives’ exploits framed by their own sometimes guarded (to say the least) reminiscences in a contemporary police interview.  But, to be honest, I was too enthralled by Harrelson and McConaughey's bravura performances to worry too much about that, as well too busy keeping my eyes peeled for Lovecrafty references.  But the show rewards deep thinking and subsequent rewatches, which I intend to undertake soon.  And that opening credits scene is worth the price of admission all on its own.

Movies

I haven’t seen a one yet this year!  That’ll change with the next installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe next week, though--Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  I’ll report back at some point.

Games

Dune

Here’s a weird fluke: I played the board game version of a famous novel before reading it.  Only barely, in this case, but still.  My lack of skill with this 70s cult classic (and rather early example of the high-concept board game trend) ensured a speedy defeat in only three or so rounds, but from what I saw of the game--its network of competing factions, its sandstorm and sandworm mechanics, and its built-in capacity for betrayal--whet my appetite for more playing and more reading.

Puerto Rico

Classic.  Just ignore the optics of importing little brown meeple to work your estates.  (Hey, points for historical accuracy, I guess?)  This game was interesting in that players don’t seem to be competing with each other within the framework of the same representation of the island colony, but rather across separate versions of Puerto Rico, each little ‘god’ vying to make his or her version the most optimized.  But then you work with the same shipping mechanic, so maybe not.  It’s a little garbled that way, but it’s a lot of fun.

Masquerade

I so enjoyed Citadels, the previous game by this designer, and Masquerade did not disappoint as a follow-up. This game has the remarkable mechanic of hidden identities--even from yourself.  Each turn consists of three basic actions--you can either peek at your own face-down character card to ascertain your own identity, declare yourself to be a certain character to claim that character’s special ability, or--fun!--blind-swap your card with another player’s, ensuring that you can rarely be sure who you or your opponents are.  If you opt for choice 2, though--”I am the bishop!” for example--one or more of your opponents can chime in to challenge you--”No, I’m the bishop!”  Then you check, and whoever was right (if anyone) gets to use the power, and whoever was wrong has to give up some coin.  I wouldn’t delve so deeply into the minutiae of these simple-enough rules, except that I think they’re delicious.  It was a great fun time, and it’s the kind of game that stays competitive throughout.

Bang

Another hidden-identity game (only this time you get to know who you are, at least).  I liked this one, especially because it takes a genre I don’t usually care about--wild west--and got me invested.  Before playing, I fell into the trap of thinking that mechanics for a rusty, old-timey genre would be equally dated-feeling, but Bang straddles the line between feeling thematically appropriate and happily universal.  The sheriff is the only players whose identity begins open, and the first few rounds are concerned with ferreting out who his deputies are and who the outlaws are (and don’t forget about that pesky renegade!), with each side pursuing its own victory conditions.  The scads of cards that modify your weaponry and range, heal your wounds and dodge fire lead to action-packed rounds.  Friends take hits and justice hangs in the the balance.  It also comes in a giant bullet-shaped container, so it’s really more fun that you can shake a cactus at.

The Learning Curve: Adventures in Self-Directed Education

Back when I started this blog, I promised several recurring features that I haven’t always delivered on.  (I like to think that if you take the long view, all of my promises will be kept...it’s all a work in progress!)

One of those features was discussion of self-directed continuing education, with my own experiences with setting up curricula for myself as the model.  Of course, the main reason you haven’t seen much of that is because I haven’t done a great job creating and sticking to my own curricula.  Well, January started a new semester, and I’ve been much more successful so far.  Various web-based options are making it easier to keep up one’s education outside of the traditional bounds of the classroom, and I’m interested to hear from my readers about their own experiences or with commentary on my choices.

First off, I decided that continuing library/info studies education doesn’t necessarily have to include the stuff you might expect to find in your official program--on the contrary, there are lots of subjects that are of immediate benefit to the librarian but which don’t fit into our 2-ish years of training.  For me, top on that list is Spanish.

I’m interested in working in large urban public libraries, and nearly every job posting I’ve responded to has listed proficiency in Spanish as a preferred qualification, if not an outright requirement.  Well, this guy made the very positive, yet not so demographically savvy, decision to study French starting in middle school, going on to major in the language in college.  While I very much enjoyed learning to read and discuss Hugo and Sartre in their original tongue, it hasn’t lended itself to employers snapping me up.

Spanish, I recognize, is extremely valuable to know in the American workforce today.  It’s the most-spoken non-English language in American homes, and overall there are 69 million hispanophones in the US.  While a great many of them also speak English fluently or very well, there’s a sizable number who do not--and besides, sometimes it’s more comfortable for people to conduct business in their native language, no matter how well they speak another.  

In the little community public library where I volunteer, a good proportion of the patrons I encounter every day are Spanish-speakers.  I decided it was time I had the ability to at least offer the option of communicating in these folks’ first language.  While it will be many years before I’m able to do so in a way that won’t make them cringe at my vocabulary and accent, I can at least get the process started with increasingly useful, rigorous and affordable online language-learning options.  

For this effort I’ve chosen Duolingo, with which I previously had a positive experience practicing Portuguese just for fun.  It’s a colorful site that offers an intuitive scaffold of each language to climb toward proficiency, breaking it down into digestible, thematic chunks--sometimes grammatically like pronouns, sometimes by subject matter like food.

The experience is nicely gamified to grab and hold attention: you earn points for successful lessons completed and which you can compare with those of your friends, and you earn bonuses for streaks of days practiced.  During lessons, you have three hearts--make too many mistakes and lose all your hearts, and you have to restart in that area.  But success also earns you some web-currency, ‘lingots,’ which you can use to purchase bonuses and upgrades, like extra hearts.

One feature I didn’t grasp at first, but which is actually really helpful, is aimed at combating recall decay.  When you complete a lesson, you have four full bars in the skill it covers--a happy little fully-charged feeling.  But as time goes by, you lose bars, and you have to go back and practice that skill to build bars back up.  It’s a great visual cue to remind you to go back and really lock down that content, rather than washing your hands of it.

The goal of Duolingo is to crowdsource translations of web-based content.  The thought is that there are too many millions of gigabytes of content building up through such outlets as  BuzzFeed for it ever to be translated in-house for global access.  By teaching people some of the top world languages, Duolingo hopes to harness their new skill to fill that gap.  Every now and then a dialog box pops up saying “You can now translate x% of all listicles!  Why don’t you give it a try!”

Frankly, I’m dubious.  It’s a noble aim and I will certainly do my part if I feel like I know enough to contribute competently, but even after months of practicing Portuguese, I wasn’t confident tackling BuzzFeed translations.  Especially not given the slang-heavy nature of most Web writing--Duolingo focuses on official language, so I’m really not sure how successful I’ll ever be in this part of the operation.  But I applaud those who make it work.

If you’re in the mood to pick up a new language, need a crash-course for a new life situation, or want to brush up on an old favorite, Duolingo is a great option.  And did I mention it’s free?  Money talks (several languages).  And if you already have a background in a given language, you can test out of the basic lessons and dig right into the  pollo y manzanas (chicken and apples--as close as I can get to ‘meat and potatoes’ so far!).  Eventually I will branch out from Duolingo and enlist some Hispanophone friends to converse with me and share more advanced, library-specific vocabulary...but for now I have to get my conjugations down.

So that’s my first self-directed course of study in my own private spring semester.  Tune in soon when I let you in on my efforts exploring coding and gamification, and chime in with your thoughts and feelings in the comments!

Media Binges: The Good, the Bad, and the Library

We live in an era of a new media consumption model--the binge.  

We stream whole seasons in a day and knock off DVD box sets in a week.  DVRs and On-Demand services allow us to enjoy marathons of our current programming without (as many) ads or those pesky week-long waits between plot points.  Spotify and iTunes playlists deliver our music to us in a neverending cycle.  

And librarians are particularly responsible for making even books into objects of mass consumption--what else would you call our insistence that we cram as much reading as physically possible into each year? It’s bingeing at a slightly slower frame rate.

So what to make of this burgeoning trend?  Is this a positive development, a negative one, or in between?  And what role should libraries play in supporting or combating it?

I, for one, am excited about libraries’ ability to promote media-gulping.  For one thing, since it’s what people are doing anyway, it’s great that libraries are already equipped to mesh with their behavior; many of us have got respectable runs of popular TV shows on DVD, ready for plowing through, and we already do a brisk business in DVD lending.  Why pay for Netflix?  (And if you want Netflix too, maybe your local library can help fill some of its frustrating online gaps.)

Beyond that, though, I think that media bingeing is actually a positive development, and librarians are in place to mainstream it and its benefits.  My experience with reading, in particular, shows me that the longer a process is strung out, the more comprehension and command of detail suffers.

In an environment where even the most accessible of TV dramas operates on a serialized basis, and where your TV sitcom favorites undergo actual character growth and change across a season, watching TV is more like reading a novel than ever.  That’s a good thing, but it doesn’t really work with the traditional broadcast television model.

It’s been opined that Game of Thrones functions better as a season-by-season unit while some individual episodes suffer in isolation. I’ll go out on a limb and suggest the same applies for Breaking Bad, Homeland, Downton Abbey...heck, schlocky Revenge and Scandal are often difficult to keep track of from week to week.

So maybe for some people, it’s optimal to wait for the end of the season or for the DVD release, either for the sake of aesthetic appreciation or for personal viewer comprehension.  And again, who has those DVDs ready for free (and who is hot on the trail of various streaming access options)?  Don’t make me spell it out for you!

So, bingeing is good and libraries promote it--but sensible consumption is a desirable outcome as well.

Sitting in your basement watching all of Breaking Bad is a closed circuit activity unless you internalize lessons learned, share opinions, and rejoin the community with new things to say and new perspectives to offer.  Happily, the Internet provides opportunities for this kind of interaction in droves, and many consumers avail themselves of such things.  But a lot do not.

Librarians have a responsibility to perform, model and instill the habits of conscientious media consumption.  We need to write and post reviews, in our public and private lives both.  We need to call out positive and negative examples of media citizenship--applaud diversity and inclusivity; decry stigma and exclusion.  We must encourage our patrons to be canny consumers--introduce them to Goodreads and Getglue and IMDB message boards.  Inspire them to become critics in their own lives.  

If you want to get really crazy, promote the idea of tracking amounts and types of media consumption--with the goal of demonstrating growth in terms of amounts digested, the complexity of ideas encountered, and the types of genres and media in which fluency has been achieved.  

Why promote all of this?  Because watching TV and movies, reading books, and listening to music doesn’t have to be a totally solipsistic, zero-sum endeavor.  Exposure to ideas and events should change us, and we should be able to recognize how it’s changing us--the better to place ourselves in relation to the world around us.

(Slightly off my desired track, but important to note: the library is a good place to be a media consumer without resorting to thievery  Librarians need to make sure potential patrons know about the damage pirating material does, and not just in a self-interested “Don’t sue me, brah!” way.  Pump up the library as a legit conduit in the media consumption pipeline, much safer and happier for everyone than torrents or Russian link aggregators.)

And at the end of the day, even if we can’t be THE player in binge media consumption, libraries can act as the great leveler--as we so often have.  We can be the solid option for all those who can’t choose to own seven seasons of Lost.  As always, it comes down to social justice, and equal access to entertainment is no less important an issue as access to research materials.

(Truly, say otherwise and I’ll fight you.  Art is the way we know ourselves.)

I’m genuinely amped about librarians’ role in promoting this paradigm, and I hope I’ve been somewhat convincing on the matter.  My fear is that some self-important members of the new crop of information professionals will decide that access to binge-worthy materials isn’t “critical” enough to dedicate resources to.  I hope many will join me in talking up the import of this stuff as librarianship continues to evolve.

Midwinter Postmortem

Just wanted to do a little post mortem on the rest of my experience at the Midwinter conference in Philadelphia, which I rather criticized in my last post.  Overall, the experience was very positive and helpful, and again, I don’t blame ALA for the problems I pointed out last time.  LGBTQ literature, while important, is still very niche, and it is up to those of us with a stake in the benefits its existence provides to see that our organizations and publications reflect our need.  Onward!

My experience in Philadelphia was very food oriented and very game oriented.  The food part had little to do with actual conference happenings--it was most thanks to the Reading Terminal Market and the very good taste of my local friend Brendan--but I did attend one of those “What’s Cooking at ALA?” sessions on the exhibit hall floor, goofy as such things are, and had a great time.  The one I hit was pizza-based, hosted by pizza expert, tour guide and box art specialist/record holder Scott Wiener, who was very engaging on the subject for ten o’clock in the morning.  He coached the small but enthusiastic crowd on proper pizza technique (I now know how to avoid tip sag) and cooked us up a pie to sample while waiting for him to sign free copies of his book on pizza boxes for us.  I liked his signature line style--he had a ready stream of questions for each of us that ensured non-awkward interaction and gave the impression  of complete personalization.  Mine was “What’s your least favorite pizza topping?” to which I quickly answered “black olives,” so he drew me a black olive with a no-smoking sign through it.  What  a sweetheart.

A more unfortunate floor experience came when I accidentally got a book signed by Cal Thomas before I realized he was an archaeoconservative homophobe.  I would have felt bad snubbing him, though.  (I have to snicker at “the Queen Latifa” and “Ellen Degenerous” though, but seriously, stop shouting in all-caps, Cal!  We can hear you.)

But games!  You know I love games, dear readers, and their potential for library use and enrichment.  I attended two sessions hosted by the GameRT (Game Round Table--there’s a group for every interest at ALA!) in general, one by the Game-Making Interest Group in particular.  Got some great ideas on how to host a board game program at a library, particularly one focused on introducing seniors to “modern” board games.  There’s research to be done here, folks!  Also a great description of a really fun-sounding murder mystery event out near Seattle.  I would love to hold such a thing.  It all goes to show that there’s a world of possibility for the incorporation of existing games and game-like behavior in libraries, and there’s an audience and a purpose for it.

The game-making event was more generally informational, which was great in its own way.  To my pleasant surprise, the best practices that the facilitator mentioned were provided by Mary Broussard, librarian at my alma mater!  She bases her pointers off the success of her anti-plagiarism game.  Very cool to hear about Lycoming College in a non-alumni setting.  The Game-Making IG is in need of more active members; I don’t know, should I volunteer?  (If you’re interested in the best practices, other game making resources, and coding self-help that was mentioned at this session, dear readers, please let a blogger know; otherwise I shan’t trouble you.)

http://www.lycoming.edu/library/instruction/tutorials/plagiarismGame.aspx

The president’s program was also a great time, and got me on to a new-ish organization that I hope to involve myself with at some point.  The Harry Potter Alliance aims to use the power of fiction, and the enthusiasm fiction inspires, to tackle real-world problems.  I’m overjoyed, because I’ve long felt that fandom generates a lot of energy that is--well, I won’t say ‘misdirected,’  because a lot of creative stuff comes out of it, and we don’t have to judge people for simply enjoying anything and never taking it further.  But I will say that with all that energy in the world, it’s good to have an alternate outlet for it towards issues of social justice and need.  The organization’s founder gave a very inspirational speech, if annoyingly read directly from paper (he had been sick and had probably not had enough time to prepare; still, the parts where he went off script, either for humorous or passionate effect, were the most worthwhile parts of his two-hour talk).  I encourage all of you involved in fandom of one ilk or another to check out HPA’s website and think about getting involved, especially as their very grassroots campaigns have begun to branch out from strictly Potterverse flavors.  (What kind of social problems could the Game of Thrones fandom address?  Several funny answers spring to mind, but war refugee relief would be a good, serious one.)

There were a few other bits and pieces, but those were the highlights for me.  All in all this was a lonelier experience for me than ALA Annual was, lacking my buddies Esther, Natalie and Bryan (missed you guys!).  But special thanks to the aforementioned Brendan, as well as Natasha and Alicia, for being stalwart dinner companions and makeshift innkeepers, and to librarians Matt and Cheng, friends who I met up with along the way (sometimes unexpectedly) to make the between-session time pass more pleasantly.

Now, on to Vegas!

ALA Midwinter Update

24 January 2014
Frigid Tundra (Philadelphia)

After an arduous journey by amtrak-coach during which all possible indignities were thoroughly experienced (a seat partner in the last third of the trip!  A power outage-caused hour-plus delay!  Old jerk bonhomie train conversation!  Blatant hat-head!), I made it to New-York City and thence, this morning, to Old Philadelphia, where ALA is holding its midwinter hibernation stretch.  A much-needed Indian supper was had at Reading Terminal Market before I plunged into the conference...

...where the session I was aiming for was canceled, the exhibit floor doesn't open 'til 5:30, and these young librarians playing Librarians Against Humanity don't seem open to outsiders inviting themselves in.

So I made my way down to the ALA store, where, after a few glimpses through some indexes to determine the quality of the publications (thanks, Dr. Nesset!), I noticed something distressing.

Very few of the books published by ALA and available right now have anything to say about the experiences of LGBT patrons and employees.  Indeed, by my best estimate, not a single book available at the ALA store is focused primarily on this demographic.

Now, did I look through the index of every book in the room?  No.  Nor, I'm sure, did I see the title, spine or cover of every available publication.  I very well could have missed something.

And there were a couple of signs of LGBT presence in our professional thought processes.  Two books on kids and young adult services, admirably, possessed some glancing mention of LGBT needs.  So there's that.

But all these things serve to underscore several points that are rather unfortunate:

1.  ALA (and by extension, librarians) are still thinking primarily in terms of LGBT youth when they think about LGBT people at all, ignoring millions of people with critical needs and wants.

2. If there are more books on this subject currently available, the ALA store at this conference did not do a good job featuring them; none of the out-facing books had anything to do with writings on the LGBT experience.

3.  As a publisher, ALA displays a lack of consistency in classifying and indexing LGBT-focused passages, which may have led to my missing any more such passages than I found; in the books that did feature some indexing on the subject, they were indexed under different terms, with less than exhaustive cross referencing in all cases.

4.  Assuming I didn't miss anything due to (2) and (3), few ALA writers are interested in addressing this demographic's service needs in a long-form format.

I point no fingers; a publishing concern can't control the topics submitted by its writers in more than a rudimentary way, and convention staff can't feature products that aren't there.  There could be more control exerted in indexing standards (how hard would it be to adopt a consistent form across ALA publications?), but if there isn't huge interest among the professional body to address these topics in book form, there won't be any published products.

Which means those of us librarians so concerned need to address this lack.

Boarding Pass: Game of Thrones: The Board Game: Feast for Crows Scenario; or, That's a Lot of Colons

A Game of Thrones: The Board Game: A Feast for Crows

Fantasy Flight Publishing

Expansion design: Jason Walden

Core game design: Christian T. Petersen

Longtime readers of my blog will no doubt remember my longtime overwritten post reviewing the Game of Thrones board game from Fantasy Flight.  As a bit of a coda to that post, I’d like to bring you a much more bite-sized review of the the “Feast for Crows” scenario now available to play with the core game.

What I so enjoy about contemporary board gaming is that it’s not a static pastime--so much of each game evolves.  That’s true of each experience of playing a particular game, since the depth of strategies available make for a different universe of possibility each time you grab your favorite cardboard treasure chest and let the bottom slowly de-vacuum suck from the top and plop with the utmost ceremony onto your playing table.

In the olden days, every game of Monopoly was essentially the same--everyone would try to get Boardwalk, somebody would be stuck with the purple ones, no one would buy the utilities, et cetera.  Not so with these ‘pro’ board games.  Nothing is set in stone with them.

But in addition to all that, the games themselves evolve--as in the constellation of components and rules that make up potential gameplay--through expansions, new editions, and what Fantasy Flight has termed, for this game at least, ‘scenarios.’  With these, you have new options to spice up your enjoyment of the core game, add a little variety to the proceedings.  And for a game based on a property as changing and alive as Game of Thrones is, that’s definitely a welcome opportunity!

FF has released two such scenarios so far, corresponding roughly to the events and circumstances of the most recent books in the series, A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons.  The former, as least, introduces new game concepts that make for an even more authentic Thrones experience of intrigue, back-stabbing and military conquest.

How so?  Well, unlike the basic GoT game, which was a basic territory control game (“first player past a certain threshold wins”), FfC bases its victory condition on the fulfillment of various objectives--each player (or “House”) has a basic objective that they can try to honor every round, plus a hand of randomly-drawn cards offering up additional goals that can be cashed in once and only once.

What’s neat about these cards is that they recognize that the objectives will be easier for some houses than for others, and score you appropriately.  If House Stark is asked to control a territory that’s more or less already in its sphere of influence, it might only get one victory point for that; but if faraway House Baratheon happened to have drawn that card, it might score two or three points for fulfilling its objective.

And since you can never be sure what objective each player has in hand, you can never be quite sure how close to victory anyone is.

This scenario also asks you to swap out the original game’s first “Westeros” deck of round-altering circumstance cards for a new one that plays with the objective mechanic.  Thanks to these new Westeros cards, you might have to swap objectives with another player, have the option of rejecting a too-tenuous objective, and more. The other nice revised rule is that the “supply” mechanic occurs once each round--a process that was subject to random “Westeros” draw in the original version, leading to oversized armies for some and choked-off resources for others.  Now things are much more dynamic, with new armies entering the field every round even as others are forcibly disbanded--but with another supply opportunity coming up every round, no one period is too damning or overpowering.

Perhaps most fun for those of us who love the books and TV show is that the FfC scenario introduces a new faction that was left off the original map: House Arryn.  That means new House cards modeled after the most prominent characters to help you out in combat; their art alone is worth the price of admission, but the way their various special skills shake up the game is not to be sneezed at. Sadly, there is no little Lord Robert making his porridge fly, but one can always hope for the next revision…

To make the game even more thematically appropriate, I did a little experiment and used the House Stark deck from the Dance with Dragons scenario during one FfC game.  It would be too spoilery to get into why the basic deck no longer really works thematically, or whom you can find in the DwD version--but if you’re all caught up with the books you’ll want to try this out.  I didn’t notice the balance to be off at all, and doing it this way will make you feel so much more canon-comfy.

The Feast for Crows scenario is a fun alternative to the basic Game of Thrones game.  It’s designed for four players, so gameplay is faster-paced--perfect if you want a Thrones night but don’t have 8 hours to set aside.  The presence of concrete objectives actually makes for authentic-feeling diplomacy sessions, if that’s the way you play--everyone’s gunning for something, sometimes conflictedly so, and you never know for quite what, so deals get made and broken with much more consequence.  And it’s just fun adding House Arryn to the mix.  If you already own the core board game, this is a must-add.

Excitingly, Fantasy Flight offers this scenario as a print-on-demand commodity, so go get yours now!