The Arrow's Path

Like many Americans (apparently 135+ million of us), I watched the NFL's championship Superbowl on Sunday night. Let me be clear from the outset that I like American football in general. I played football (not on the professional level of course). It has become the one sport that I follow closely on a regular basis, both on the collegiate and professional levels.  I used to follow baseball like that when I was younger, as it was the first sports love of my youth, but Major League Baseball has done everything in its power to alienate old school baseball fans like myself. I watched the Cubbies and a bit of the Braves last season for the first time in years, but baseball is just not a joy to watch anymore. It's largely just run by computers and sabermetrics now with the added nonsense of incoherent rules changes to try and speed up the games. There are ways to speed up baseball naturally without dumbing it down or becoming dependent on computers, but that's a discu...

Continuing my thoughts on board gaming, I used to do short term crisis counseling, and I found board games to be amazing tools in certain instances. This was years ago, and there was virtually no academic studies or any empirical data on this subject as far as I could tell at the time. I think there is more now. I was largely shooting in the dark with this method. Most of my fellow counselors and therapists thought I was nuts (as they themselves clung to their weird Schools of Psychology like neo-Freudianism and whatever but that's a discussion for another day). I found though that games that were not high stress/high stakes games could do wonders at getting people out of a crisis mode. Games that had some strategy with rules that could easily be explained, particularly if it was spatial in some way. The earlier versions of games like Sagrada or Lanterns or Azul...that kind of thing. There was an old print and play game that I think became Patchwork that I could use, w...

Continuing my series on lesser known religious orders in the Catholic Church, I thought I would do one closer to my heart: the Glenmary Home Missioners . If you have never lived in either the American South or in rural areas in the US in general, you have probably never heard of this group. To be honest, I had never heard of them until they started a mission in the county seat of my home county in rural East Tennessee many years ago.  By the time the Glenmarians, as they are called, started a little Catholic mission near my home town, I had already moved away from home. In fact, I may have been out in Nebraska and in the Episcopal church by the time this particular mission started. But, after becoming Catholic, when I would go down to visit my parents in Tennessee, I would need somewhere to go to church on Sunday. Turns out the nearest one to my parents' home was in Maynardville, Tennessee. Maynardville was on the other side of the mountain from the home I grew up in. Imagine my su...

I have been asked over the years what I thought about the practice of yoga. While I do not believe I have ever attempted yoga in any meaningful sense because I am about as physically flexible as a rock (and largely always have been, even as a youngster), I only know of yoga by what I have seen other people engaging in such practices. Usually that is what I see on TV because that's often either a trope on many TV sitcoms of some (usually female) character(s) going to yoga class, or the occasional trope of a man (usually a single and/or middle aged Dad) attempting a yoga class to some hilarious effect. On rare occasion, I also happen to occasionally walk by some yoga class in progress at the local YMCA.  That is about the only experience I have with yoga personally. From those seemingly innocuous interactions of my personal experience, I, for many years, simply told people that I thought yoga was just some harmless form of exercise like Jazzercise or what have you. I never put a whol...

 And I just don't know what to do with that. I still have my Christmas LPs sitting out on my record player. :) 

 

The game I am going to review today is not necessarily a lost classic. It's a relatively recent manufactured boardgame. The original incarnation came out in 2020, entitled Dune: Imperium. It was riding the wave of the coming two-part big screen depiction of Frank Herbert's classic science fiction masterpiece novel, Dune. I suppose for full disclosure, I do have a minor theme bias on this game. I do love the original Dune novels. I discovered them in college. The first four are phenomenal. Frank Herbert for the last two, unfortunately, began cranking them out for the money. The last two are mediocre, and not nearly the philosophical masterpieces that the first four are. God Emperor of Dune is truly one of the great politically mind bending science fiction masterpieces of all time. Frank Herbert died before finishing the 7th novel, which was supposed to end the series.   As a side note, his son, along with Kevin J. Anderson, took up the Dune mantle, and wrote several prequel ...