Remember When

Lurking at the edges of Autumn

12sep2008: It's my birthday again, which has come to mean less as I've gotten older. This is not something to get wistful about, since it's really just mathematics. My 11th birthday marked having accrued 10% more time on the planet. My 21st birthday only marked 5% more time on the planet. Today, only about 3%.

Mathematically, the significance of birthdays asymptotically approaches zero. Practically, it diminishes until the mortal discontinuity reduces it to exactly zero. After that, more years don't accrue you any more time on the planet at all.

So, I am not scoffing at the extra 3%. Yay for another year of not being dead. In the long run, there are too few of those.

In a ludographic vein: I have been toying with additions to the Decktet for a while. The Pawns are a new rank of card, with three suits each instead of two. I thought about holding onto them as something proprietary that I could add if the game were published, but I have decided to release them under the same open license as the rest of the Decktet. They are an optional extra, adding to what I now call the extended deck.

I am not sure how many copies of the Decktet are in existence. In addition to those given to or made by friends of mine, a number of people at BoardGameGeek have made their own copies. There is even a group of Spaniards who have translated the rules for some of the games. That is the kind of thing that is only possible because of the internet, and it makes me glad to be living in the 21st century.

(The card above left is the Harvest, one of the Pawns. The picture on the right is from last month at Spielbany, a quarterly meet up of regional game designers. Carl and Dean are playing my game Jacynth.)