Cold Days: Comprehensive Review

Finally finished up Cold Days. And I loved it. This most recent addition to the series was definitely a little different. It seems like the scope of the conflict is always escalating to the point where I wonder how Butcher is going to step it up a notch. Turns out he seems to always manage it. Of course, I seriously doubt the scale of the conflict will manage to be grander in the next book. Kind of harder to get biggere than the stake of the universe. It might be a nice pace to have things ramped down to a more personal level in the next installation.

So my specific yet general impressions of the book...

First off, the writing style maintained that fresh Butcher inner monologue that I'm always looking forward to when I crack open one of these books. I kept laughing out loud at the references the characters would make. Which was a nice contrast to the gravity of the situations the characters were in. The other freshness came from the introduction of new villains and a completely new perspective on some classic "villains".

I didn't particularly care for the ramped up sexual components of the book although I understood the use and context. It's actually kind of nice to have a character that recognizes the strength of sexual... temptations, for lack of a better word, and the power that can come from standing strong and maintaining focus and dedication.

Spoilers ahead!!!!!

The most heart wrenching moment of the entire series was at the conclusion of this book. It was hard enough when Dresden had to kill the mother of his daughter in the heat of the moment. It was so much harder when he had to watch the life and even existence of his apprentice and daughter of one of his best friends ripped away. I actually cried. And for the first time, I'm a little apprehensive about how this new development is going to affect his interpersonal relationships in the upcoming Skin Game.

Overall, I really enjoyed this novel and am both excited and nervous to continue reading the Dresden Files.

Tales of the Arabian Nights

We spent this last weekend camping with some family that we adore and took advantage of the evenings after the kids all went to bed to try and play some board games.  Unfortunately, it turns out most board games require really good lighting for all players most of the time. Who would have thought? On our last evening together, we discovered that Tales of the Arabian Nights is a great camping game because everyone is interacting, but you don't all need great lighting all the time. Now if only we had discovered this on an earlier night...

So here follow my general thoughts on Tales of the Arabian Nights.

Components
To begin with, it's published by Z-Man Games of which I am definitely a fan.  They also published Pandemic, which was our first serious foray into hobby board gaming as well as exposure to a cooperative game. Both Arabian Nights and Pandemic have solid components with appropriate artwork. Arabian Nights has much more thematic and gorgeous artwork with a feel that even seems authentic to the source material.  There is a board with a world map (okay both games happen to have this but I'm only talking about Arabian Nights from here on out) drawn in an old world style complete with mythical as well as real world locations. There are also several decks of cards including statuses, encounters, quests, and treasure cards. My in-laws, who own the game, bought baseball card sheet protectors (at least I think that's what they're called) to organize all of the status cards since there are a lot of them, and you never know which ones you're going to need. In addition to the cards, there are also player reference sheets, player tokens on stands depicting individuals from the Arabian Nights, dice, skill tokens, a matrix sheet for making choices, and THE BIGGEST RULEBOOK EVER!! To be fair the rule book is really a large scale Choose Your Own Adventure playbook that everyone uses. But it can be pretty intimidating to first time players to see that big honkin' thing on the table. Of course the number of different components in general can be a little intimidating. In a very creative approach to organizing the skill tokens, my in-laws also purchased on of those daily pill organizers as it turns out they fit in there perfectly. Overall reaction? The components are high quality but a little complex for ease of organization during play itself.

Gameplay
At first glance, this game appears to be an RPG following the theme of the Arabian Nights. As it turns out, this game is in fact more of a party game with almost no strategy involved and highly dependent on the people playing the game. (Sidenote: my in laws make this game awesome!) Each person plays a character from the Arabian Nights and embarks on quests and seeks encounters that will provide treasures, statuses, skills, and (most importantly) destiny and story points. The latter two things are the victory points of the game. After acquiring a number of both destiny and story points set secretly by each player at the beginning of the game, players attempt to return to Baghdad and declare victory first. What makes this more of a party game is the fact that the choices you make at each encounter (Choose Your Own Adventure Style as previously stated) have almost no predictable outcomes. You might choose to pray to wild Efreet thinking that your piety skill will get you someone when in fact you need either courtly graces or wilderness lore. Or you might choose to rob a destitute beggar just to be mean and realize he's some evil dude that you can defeat using your luck skill. Seriously, no strategy. Instead everyone has lots of fun guessing and telling stories and stringing together the most ridiculous plots that each character is living out during the course of the game. And if you have the right people willing to do voices, use emotion while reading, and throw in their own flavor of improvisation every now and then, it can be totally awesome!


I would recommend this game for a group of people looking for a casual board game experience that love telling stories.

Overall Rating: 8/10

Starting Up Cold Days

Even though I know that I will get more hours of enjoyment out of a book than a movie, I seriously have a hard time paying more than $8 for a book. College textbooks? No exception. Which means that time of the semester was always pretty emotionally challenging for me. Anyway, I finally got my copy of the new Dresden Files book, Cold Days, in the mail from Books-A-Million as it has hit paperback. Yay!

So I'm only four chapters into reading this book. Why am I already writing a blogpost? Because Jim Butcher is amazing with this series. Fourteen books into the series and four chapters into the book itself, I'm still laughing out loud and also getting really intense. How does he do that? I'm sur a big part of it is the fact that I seriously love the character. I mean Harry Dresden rocks! He tries to always do the right thing but knows when he's crossing a line even if its for the right reasons. And he is both humble and arrogant at the same time. Harry can be brutally honest with himself and paint uncomfortably accurate pictures of situations most people would shy away from. And of course his sense of humor is totally my style.

Sadly I can't really say a whole lot more about Cold Days right now since I'm only at the beginning of the fourth chapter. But I promise (myself since I know from the stats attached to this blog that no one else looks at this) that I will give a detailed and (let's be honest) raving review of this book once I've finished reading it.