I don't know how it works for anyone outsidenthe province of Quebec, but if there is one thointhe governement here has done right it hjas to be governement sponsored parental leave. For those of you who don't know, Quebec is the most highly taxed place in North America: 15 percent sales tax when you factor in both provincial and federal sales taxes, and some crazy steep income taxes.

 On the plus side , I get the next five weeks off at 70% of my salary, while my wife gets 50 weeks off-- the first half of which she gets 75% of her salary, and 55% for the remaining half. There is another option which allows one paretnt to have 3 weeks off at 75%, and the other 9 months off at 75%.

 Personally I think this is fucking brilliant, since it allowed me to not only help my wife with her post c-section recovery ( which is no joke, really), but, more importantly, allowed me to get to know my oldest daughter-- and threw that I actually got to learn to be a" hands on parent" as opposed to  the "walking ATM/breadwinner" model of parenting every man in my familly has alwyas been.

 I guess a bit of context is needed here: I'm the first generation Canadian born son of Greek immigrants. Traditionally Greek men do fuck all when it comes to child rearing -- except for putting food on the table and making  asses who get too big for their breeches blush. I can honestly say that until ,like,  now my father has nevre held a baby in his hands,and that he has never changed a diaper, prepared supper for the kids without mom's assitance (keep in mind that the man was a restauranteur...), put the kids to bed , or kept the kids while mommy went out and had a good time with her friends. nither did any of my uncles or any of their Greek friends.

 The point here is that I honestly credit my wife's dogged determination ( she is and will remaion then only person that can ever get  me to do something I don't want to), and the provincial governments parental programs, gave me the inclination and the financial security needed to become a better parent.

I asked my dad the other day why he was not more of a hands on kind of dad.  Answer: " I worked 120 hours a week when you where born, most of that undeclared.  it just wasn't an option."

It  got me thinking about other countries /places that don't, much like ol' dad, don't  have that option-- for whatever reason-- and was wondering what that's like.

Anyone?

P.S: my fatherly pride won't allow me to not at least show you guys one pic of the little one.

Actually there is none. My dad sent me game money, but everything I want hasn't been released yet. I pre-ordered Battlestar Galactica and Red November. Amazon says these will ship October 31, but I'm not going to hold my breath since I hear that BSG pre-order has sold out. I'm waiting for Touch of Evil and Tales of the Arabian Nightsto be released. So it looks like I may not be celebrating my birthday, new game wise, until December or later.
Just to rub it in, my Dad called to wish me a happy birthday, and told me that he had played an "outer space" game last night, where he was a robot. I asked him if perhaps he might have been something called a Cylon. Yes, he remembered that was what he was. He told me it was very complicated, but that he won. He didn't say whether he liked it or not, so I don't know if he will play with me when he visits sometime after my copy finally arrives. So my dad got to play BSG before I did. Go figure.
My man took me out shopping, but I couldn't find anything I wanted, not even shoes. Well, that's not entirely true. There was a pair of kitten heel thongs at White & Black, but they didn't have them in my size.

In other news, I played Jamaicaat game club on Thursday. Meh. I wouldn't veto it if someone suggested it, but I wouldn't jump at the chance to play again either.

Yesterday was our traditional Black Friday game day where we have friends over all day to play board games and avoid all the rampant consumerism that the rest of the country was partaking in.  Or did we really avoid it?  Fresh from BGG.con, our friends came through our door carting big boxes full of new games, many still in shrink and unpunched and some completely unknown to me.  In fact, our friend Jeff came straight from the local game store with a shiny new copy of Eldritch Horror, a game that has been out less than a week.  When I saw it, I immediately dropped my resolution to play some beloved oldies and our newish unplayed games.  Since rumor has it that Eldritch Horror is supposed to replace my very favorite game ever, Arkham Horror, by being more streamlined yet retaining all the theme-y goodness, I wanted needed to find out if I had to get this game or not.  Well, I accomplished that mission.  I do NOT need to get this game.  It came nowhere near replacing my beloved Arkham Horror. 

So, I'll start right in with the negative.  These are some of my gripes with the game:

• First off, I'm going to raise my hand and solemnly swear that I will never, EVER try to play a hot-off-the-press Fantasy Flight game.  I will wait until it has been out a few weeks, giving all the hardcore gamers time to thrash out the rules online and make beautiful, helpful player aids for me. An included Reference Guide is nice, but it really needs to actually be shorter than the Rulebook.

• What attracts me to an ameritrash game is the theme.  Not conflict, not a handful of dice (although I do love dice) but THEME.  I want to be immersed in the world and I want a story playing out in my head that will keep me up later when I'm trying to go to sleep.  Arkham Horror has all these colorful locations.  You can recruit allies at Ma's Boarding House, look for unique items at the Curiositie Shoppe, try to gain access to the Inner Sanctum of the Silver Twilight, etc.  I love the flavor.  LOVE it.  Eldritch takes it from a micro-setting and blows it up into the entire world map that has too many generic locations.  About half of the places are named, but poking around in London is not nearly as exciting as braving the Unvisited Isle or the Witch House. Someone at the table described the game as Arkham Horror meets Fortune and Glory.  Having never played the latter, I can't say if that's a good description or not.

• This brings me to traveling in Eldritch.  A lot of the routes between locations are either rail or sea.  You need to have the appropriate ticket and you can hold a maximum of two tickets.  You take two actions on your turn and they can't be the same one.  Way too many of my turns were buying a ticket and using it to travel to an adjacent location (my two actions).  It took forever to travel that way.  I guess that all fits - it takes a much shorter time to travel around a city than the world.  But it was boring.

• The monsters.  In Arkham, they wouldn't just sit at their spawning location and taunt you.  They would wander the streets hoping to find you.  They could seriously mess up your travel plans.  In Eldritch, they don't move.  Sure, if you don't go and take care of them, the gate that released them stays there open, possibly causing the doom track to move every so often.  But you can just let the monsters pile up.  In our game, we declared Tokyo to be dead to us as it had three nasty monsters stacked on it.  One of us eventually got a double barreled shotgun and went in and cleared it out, but it wasn't really that much of a problem to just leave it a while.

• In Arkham, the crush of advancing doom weighs on you the entire game. It always feels like the Doom Track is marching toward the end, you can never seem to keep back the monsters overrunning the town and the Great Old One will soon awaken and devour you. In Eldritch, I did not feel nearly enough tension. The Doom Track advanced so slowly.  We finally lost by it getting to zero, but we were also only three cards away from losing by going through the entire Mythos deck.  Which meant it was a very long game - at least 3 hours not including rules explanation which is too long for a game that is supposed to streamline the bloated Arkham Horror.

It wasn't at all a *bad* game.  The flavor text on the cards was pretty good.  There were a few decent thematic events such as when Antarctica was hit by an earthquake, destroying it and shutting down all expeditions there as well as causing injury to anyone in neighboring locations. The other players all seemed to like it.  The main comments were along the line of "this has a lot more chance of hitting the table than Arkham Horror."  Me, I'd MUCH rather just be playing Arkham Horror a few times a year.  I don't need a sort of similar but shorter game in my collection competing for table time.

Big caveat to all of this - our game was taught by someone who saw a demo at BGG.con and I haven't read the rules thoroughly myself.  It is entirely possible we missed something that would have sped up the game and/or made it more challenging.  It still wouldn't change the lack of flavor for me though.

A small confession

When, last month, I wrote thanking “John and David of Black Hearted Press for the small gesture of faith they showed in an unknown blogger” I was talking about the free review copies they’d given me of comics published by their Glasgow-based independent comics publisher, Black Hearted Press. There I was just sitting quietly in the Scotia when Jim Stewart- of The Astounding Ganjaman fame, pointed this guy in my direction, telling John (for John Farman it was) that I was someone he should talk to. The next thing I knew I had 3 free comics and an article to write. My introduction to David Braysher soon followed, and a fourth comic had been added to the pile of what was my first officially commissioned review.

Blackbeard (published by GMT) is a game where players control different pirates, trying to get notoriety and gold and retiring them before they die on the high seas.

More thoughts on failure, Blades in the Dark, and the reasons we're dumber alone than we are together.

Why our dumb, beautiful stories matter.

In my four-odd years of gaming, I don't think any event in the hobby was quite as big as the 2009 reprint of Space Hulk. It was out of print for some 15 years, and used copies were fetching a pretty penny on eBay. And what a reprint it was. The minis and tiles were some of the best ever produced. For perhaps the only time ever, a game totally looked like it was worth $100. 

And just like that, the game was gone. Speculators bought up tons of copies to resell them on eBay, and soon $100 looked like a bargain compared to what some people were asking. Those who didn't make the impulse buy were left to the vultures. Fantasy Flight clearly saw an opportunity here. Having previously done some very well-received work in the Warhammer and 40K universes (with Warhammer: Invasion and Chaos in the Old World), they put the gifted Corey Konieczka to an interesting task. Turn the tense, claustrophobic atmosphere of Space Hulk into a game that might fill the gap left by the blink-and-you'll-miss-it reprint. In a rare show of restraint, FFG chose to make a small card game, and they chose to make it cooperative. Death Angel: Space Hulk - The Card Game was the result. 

That they actually were quite successful is no mean feat. Death Angel is very good indeed, and I'd venture to say that it's one of the best purely cooperative games on the market. The setting for the game is identical to that of its big brother. The players take the role of Space Marines charged with clearing out a derelict spacecraft (the titular space hulk). Standing in their way are the vicious Genestealers, who come crawling out of the walls to attack the players. Instead of miniatures and tiles, however, this is represented in a vertical row of cards. Other items along this line are represented by cards on either side, as are the swarms of Genestealers. The Marines move from floor to floor, slaying attacking swarms and accomplishing other objectives. If you clear all the floors, the Marines win. 

The most amazing thing about Death Angel is that the game takes this setting, recreates it very faithfully, and does so in an entirely different way from its predecessor. The formation of Space Marines is definitely abstracted, but it does an amazing job of bringing that sense of claustrophobia. There's a definite pressure to line up just perfectly, and that's not completely easy. Another sharp abstraction is the action system. Each player is given three actions, and picks one each turn. That action cannot be selected in the next round, so each player essentially gets a binary decision each time. Each player has a unique squadron consisting of two marines, so they can contribute special powers to the attack. The action selection is very straightforward, but it's also agonizing. It's not particularly thematic, but it's excellent from a design perspective. 

The soul of the action is a single six-sided die, which is used for attacking, defending, and several event cards. Trust me when I say that this die is merciless. Like the original game, it only takes one hit to finish someone. If you lose that defending roll, your marine is gone for good. And there are times when you need to successfully hit a Genestealer, and the die is deaf to your pleas. There are ways to get support tokens, which allow for rerolls, but they don't tone down the harshness of the die rolls much. This may sound a little brutal, but it's actually a very good thing. Even when groups get good at coordinating between each other, there's a good chance the die will screw them anyway. It really keeps you on your toes. Every roll feels important, because they almost always are. 

 In another stroke of brilliance, FFG included a very well-done solo variant. Essentially, the player takes charge of three different squadrons, and runs the game the same otherwise. I am normally not the type to solo much, although fatherhood has forced it upon me. Normally I find solitaire variants to have too much in the way of housekeeping, and not enough in the way of fun. But this one is light enough that you can set it up and run it without too much effort. I've played way more solo than with others, probably over 20 games. It makes this game a total no-brainer for people who worry about finding other players. I'd say that it's a little easier than it is with others, just because it's easier to coordinate actions without other people to argue with. 

If there is any complaint, it's that Death Angel suffers from the common problem of cooperative games: familiarity. You figure the game out, and it doesn't really surprise anymore. Death Angel does better than most, because the die keeps things tense. But it really could use some more variety. When there are 3 or 6 players, all marines are used, and that makes things a little more predictable. Fortunately, FFG has produced two small print-on-demand expansions, one with extra locations and another with extra Space Marines. These are terrific, and if you plan on buying Death Angel, you can just pick these up with it. They give just enough variety to make the game stick around. Each expansion also has a little "1" attached to it, so I hope we can see some more like them. 

Is Death Angel better than the original? Not many games are, so I wouldn't say this one is. It isn't quite as direct or visceral. And of course, you can never underestimate the physical aspect, which is as much a part of Space Hulk as anything else. But Death Angel looks really good too, and if you want to play Space Hulk with any more or less than two people, this is definitely the way to go. It's a lean $25, which is one quarter the price for three quarters the awesome. That's a very good ratio, and this one is still available in stores. It's a great balance between terrific theme and solid mechanics, and it will appeal to Ameritrashers and cube-pushers alike.

Check out this review and others at my game blog,The Rumpus Room. Subscribe and start an argument.

With our awesome online WALLENSTEIN game coming to a close over at spiel-by-web, I was looking to start up round 2. I noted that they also host REEF ENCOUNTER and thought, what a fun way to motivate people to play WALLENSTEIN well--the 4 losers of that game have to play REEF ENCOUNTER. I assumed I was losing so I set up the game and started reading the rules.

The site provides online HTML rules, but the paginatuion makes me crazy, and I like to have something physical to hold when reading rules, usually. So I did my normal thing and went to BGG's entry for REEF ENCOUNTER, hit the "Hot" button in the Files section, and sure enough, the rules floated to the top. Check this thing out:

Yes. Comic sans throughout!  This rules PDF is: "posted with permission of Zev Schlasinger." Zev, I beg you, revoke this permission.

Friday night, kids are asleep, I plop on the couch to read me some rules. The author helpfully indicates I can ignore the blue italicized comic sans, as that's just background, notes, and hints like you get when playing any Euro with neckbearded assholes, "well, you shee, it's, ahh, unwizhe to do THAT on your first turn " Ignoring for the moment that blue italicized comic sans is preternaturally un-ignorable, I get to the meat of the rules. I am up to about page 2 ("Contents!) when I fall asleep. I think it was around, "Spaces for players to place the first of their shrimps to be eaten by their parrotfZzzzzz.z.z.z.zzzzzz"

Oops, OK, shake it off. I come to and try again. I am getting confused as the rules go right to turn order without really explaining how scoring works (I need to know how scoring works so I can know why I would take an action, right?) I jump over to the scoring section and see this: "Each polyp tile consumed scores one point plus one point for for each card tile which shows that color of coral duplicated at the top of the card tile." What the fu-shnickens? I gather that I can eat polyp tiles by dropping them in my parrotfish box, and those score me points at the end. But when picking the eat a coral action, you don't eat all the coral, just the coral polyps OVER 4 coral polyps. Well, you eat them all--they all go, but you only keep the ones 5+ in your parrotfish box. And you need a shrimp on there. Unless it's your first shZzzzzz.z.zzz.zzzzz.z

I fell asleep TWICE while reading these rules. Mercy.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

A new Neal Stephenson book being released is a moment both relished and feared--will it be a new Snow Crash? Do I have the time to commit to a new "System of the World" cycle (about 2000 pages)? I'm going to blog this one as I read it; dodging big spoiler. If you just mustknow how something turns out, or want to comment on the book as I read it; please keep spoilers to PM.

I really enjoy Stephenson's work, and I don't find myself plagued by the problems others have with him: that he doesn't know how to end a novel, that he's juvenile, and that he's pedantic. These are all valid criticisms, but the vast majority of speculative fiction is so downright shitty, I easily look past any of these supposed issues.

I will come right out and say the books this parallels best (about 150 pages in) are The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco and Dune by Frank Herbert.  The story centers on the inner workings of a cloistered monastery (a la The Name of the Rose) and features the same kind of millennial thinking and new vocabulary so prominent in Dune. 

Like Dune, a glossary is provided, but unlike, Dune, it's not -as- necessary. Most of the words have roots in English or Latin that allow the reader to follow along without constant referral. The mynster (monastery) that serves as the only setting of the first section of Anathem is home to various Fraas (Brothers) and Suurs (Sisters) dedicated to teasing out new theoric upsights (therorums). Nothing like gom jabbars nipping at the Kwisatz Haderach, amirite? Even the title is a neologism: a combination of anthem and anathema--it's a sung rite used to expel an "avout" from the mynster for some heresy or whatever. 

The central conceit of the novel is that this world's "Abraham"experienced his revelation, and it was then interpreted by his daughters into two opposed philosophies--one religious, akin to the monotheism that exists in our world; and with equal weight, a vision of Platonic forms, leading to a monastic order based on math. The book is set about 7,000 years after this original vision.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

The hero protagonist (har) of Anathema is Erasmas. A late-teen tenner at Saunt* Edhar's. Stephenson spends some time establishing the world Erasmas lives in--a cloistered academy for math and physics (largely cosmological) research. As a decenarian "tenner" he has promised to remove himself from all contact with the outside world for ten years at a time. Other "maths" found at Saunt Edhar's (and other mynster) are unarians ("one-off's"), centarians ("hundreders"), and millenarians ("thousanders"). Little time is spent discussing unarians--that amounts to college/university in our world. Folks spend say, four or five years locked away until the annual 10-day Apert festival, when they may opt to leave. When inside, each math is not only separated from the outside, but also from each other. Only during rituals are they aware of each others presence, and then only from behind high-contrast screens.

Life in the mynster is governed by The Clock. A massive stone structure that controls the gates and serves as the focal point of most rituals. Once a year, the clock engages the Apert gate(s) and opens them; usually just for the one-off's, but this book is set in 3689, a few days shy of a decenarian Apert, Erasmas' first since entering at age 8. He'll spend ten days chatting up what he recalls as his parents and relatives, and then head back for another decade inside.

This idea of long-term thinking is the real inspiration for the book, and Stephenson has mentioned this in his acknowledgments . I'll spend some time in another blog post on this to be sure.

You may be wondering, how does a Millenarian math work? How does anyone get locked up for a thousand years? The mynsters are the "safe haven" baby drop-off locations for this world--everyone knows that if they have kids they don't want/can't care for, they can be deposited at the Day Gate of the mynster and be taken in. If the child is so young that the umbilical is still attached, then they are taken in by the Millenarians--any older and there's risk that the outside world has influenced her too much. She is raised by the Millenarians, only ever knowing their language and experiences, and carries on their traditions and learning until the next 1000-year Apert. There are a few administraive officials ("hierarchs") that interact with all of the maths outside of rituals, but they are specially trained in the millenarian (and hundreder) dialects of what-amounts-to-Latin and make extreme efforts to never introduce information from the other maths or outside world.

*("saunt" is linguistically derived from "savant", a title bestowed upon great thinkers of yore. A fine example of the efforts the author went to to make his neologisms internally consistant and externally easy-to-recognize.)

Anathem by Neal Stephenson .

I finished it. And, in essence, he blows it. Neal starts out great, develops nicely, and then, BAM.The "big thing" happens and the book turns from an epic-in-scope tale of amazing imagination to a kung-fu riddled sci-fi romp with lasers and what-not.

No kidding. This is about half-way through the book, mind you. He fails to maintain the alien nature of Arbre (the world this occurs on) and its unique "religious" life and the book suffers immensely for it. I read it, but was more and more disappointed as I went along--this is his weakest effort since Zodiac--if not even worse because it starts so well.

The most interesting character (a Millenarian) is almost totally underdeveloped. The little bots we get of him are gems and give us a glimpse into the serious weirdness of a people that only get outside news every thousand years. Erasmas, the main character, becomes a real boy! Like Pinocchio, except shittier, because I wasn't reading Pinocchio. He falls in love, bonds with his family, starts digging pop music; Jesus, its bad. Are You There Euclid? It's Me, Erasmus.

Given the overwhelming terribleness that is most speculative fiction, I still need to recommend this to fans of the genre. It's well-written, and well-appointed. It even ends better than most of Neal Stephenson's other books (in that it has an end rather than a truncation).  The lenghty asides that irritate so many readers are tucked in the back of the book, and the ideas the book generates are worthwhile, I just wish he'd taken them in a more interesting direction.

I'm up to p 759 of 1862 now. The book is a tough read, because it makes you work. Not one sentence comes easy, but they are so worth it. In a TrashTalk thread, Dair Grant accuses the author of "showing off," which would be true if he wasn't one of the best writers I have ever read. This really is a tour de force.

The book's topic is addiction. It sounds horrible, and at times, the writing is gruesome. But it's about addiction psychologically, not just the drugs/alcohol kind. Addiction is something which sure starts out nice, and then becomes something menacing, but by then you you can't stop. Drugs and alcohol get a lot of coverage. Hard stuff and lighter fare--the psychology is the same. But he also writes about high-caliber tennis as an addiction. A lot of the book takes place at an elite tennis academy, and much time is spent talking about the grueling awfulness of trying to make it to The Show. Or the addiction to media--the title refers to a movie that is so entertaining, once you start watching it, you won't stop, until you stinkily die of thirst.

David Foster Wallace, resquiescat in pace. A genius? A misanthrope? A lost soul (how he would hate this descriptive)? Yes. I will be reading his magnum opus and blogging here and there along the way. I am on page 27 of 1862 (sic) of the iBook's edition of INFINITE JEST.  Dave Egger's forward has set the stage: 

The book is 1,079 pages long and there is not one lazy sentence. The book is drum-tight and relentlessly smart, and though it does not wear its heart on its sleeve, it's deeply felt and incredibly moving. That it was written in three years by a writer under thirty-five is very painful to think about.
...while it uses a familiar enough vocabulary, make no mistake that INFINITE JEST is something other. That is, it bears little resemblance to anything before it, and comparisons to anything since are desperate and hollow. It appeared in 1996, sui generis, very different from virtual everything before it. 

He of the Wiz-War avatar, Not Sure, has set up a fantasy group for the English Premier League that I'm joining. I haven't played an actively managed fantasy league for years, and that was NBA. I'll cough up info to other players if they bother to read these posts, but I think it's a cool payoff for folks that might be intimidated to see how I am thinking my through what will likely be horrid decisions. 

Here's the group details from Not Sure's post in TT:

Group ID: 1365

Password: excitedman

The Yahoo URL is: http://uk.premiership.fantasysports.yahoo.com/football

First, a name! I want one that shows my sense of humor  and at the same time conveys deep insights on the game to intimidate the players that have actual knowledge of the game. The EPL is famed for its shitty mascots: Lilywhites, Wanderers, Rovers, Pensioners, &c. I didn't want anything too obvious like Agoura Hotspur or Thousand Oaks F.C., so I looked up the mascot for the gone-but-not-forgotten Nottingham Forest team that had such success for a podunk town that I can say with confidence it will never be repeated. Hence, the Agoura Tricky Trees.

So now folks think I know what the hell I am talking about. Next up is to try and figure out what I am going to do to maintain this charade. The vast majority of my EPL information is filtered through the Red Devil tinted glasses of my father-in-law and his MUFC worship. Anyone that plays for United is great, everyone else is shit. Exception made for Gary Neville whom he despises with the heat of a million suns. On that team I like van der Sar, Hérnandez, and Park. Rooney and Berbatov are going to be overpriced. This is where my direct knowledge runs out. Now I am winging it.

In fantasy, I wing statistically. I found a site that has nice team and individual stats, and I'll use these to make initial lists and then verify those against injury reports. In terms of rosters I'll look at for a good ratio of offense per GBP, I like West Ham United. Finished low in the standings but scored more goals on average than teams that finished above them--tells me they had solid offense but gave up too much defensively. Similar logic points me to Liverpool for defensive bang-for-the-buck. A deeper dive makes me value Carlton Cole and Sotirios Kyrgiakos from their respective teams as potentially cheap values. 

I'm not sure how stats are tracked yet, though, so looking at defense might not be necessary--I'll talk that up in a follow-up. 

The scoring system for Yahoo Fantasy EPL is pretty robust. Players get points for individual achievements and mistakes on offense and defense. For example, scoring a goal is good for 7 points, winning a corner gets you 1, committing a foul is -0.5, a goalkeeper loses 3 points for conceding a goal. There are also more "team" oriented points, in that a defenseman can get 6 points for a clean sheet and the goalie gets points or loses them for the outcome of their match.

Each week a manager selects the formation he'll use (4-4-2, 3-4-3, &c. in the order of defense - midfield - forward) and fills the roster with players who fit under his salary cap of 100M uh, units I guess--they are intentionally vague on the currency. So, it's to my advantage to figure out which position yields the most points on average per unit spent. Thus, I can maximize that position in my formation. It also will tell me whether or not it's worth it to spend big bucks on a keeper if they return more points on average than other positions.

A player's worth is determined by demand for that player in the game overall, so for week 1 it's going to depend very much on historical performance. Last year's stars are going to be pricy, as indicated by Didier Drogba at almost 21M, Frank Lampard at 20M, &c. 20M is one-fifth of the budget for the whole squad--you need to get 10 more players for not more than 8M each on average after taking one of those two. 

I looked at the average points per week and the average cost for the top 10 players at each position and found forwards and defensemen to be almost perfectly matched. Midfielders were slightly more points on average per unit spent and keepers were much less. So, don't overspend on keeper, and maximize midfielders. 3-5-2 it is. 

I looked in detail at the highest average point scorer from last year--Didier Drogba at 16.88 points per week. He had MONSTER weeks of 40 points as well as ten weeks scoring 2 or less. For some reason Yahoo UK lists only 35 weeks and doesn't count three of his 0 score week games at that. Anyway, if you look at things the Yahoo way, his mean is 16.9 ± 12.3, his median is 15.75. Spending 20M for 16 points seems like a bad decision. Especially if 16% of the weeks will see him deliver less than 5 points.

Looking at the most costly defenseman, Gareth Bale, is also interesting. He had knee surgery and missed the first half of the season last year. If I look at the games he started, his mean is 14.2 ± 8.6 and median is 14.5, so more consistent in his ability to generate points than Drogba, and he costs 7M less. 

That points out another place to get easy points on the cheap--some players are new to the EPL and will be undervalued (hello Chicharito!). Some players were hurt for most of last year and didn't generate enough points to get buzz for week 1 (I hope this is the case for L. Boa Morte at West Ham).

So, finding a couple of these nuggets lets me field a team with a couple of overperformers, a potential defensive superstar, and a balance of guys that won't be awful. In the end I had about 17M left for two midfielders and looked at players that will start and play against teams that either just got promoted (Blackpool) or teams that finished in the bottom half (Sunderland), yielding me N'Zogbia and Larsson. A quick check to make sure my mid tier keeper isn't going against a powerhouse (West Ham opens against Aston Villa), and some injury checks and I have a squad. 

If a couple of big name players transfer in, I'll debate making some switches, but at least this set is in and I will score some points Week 1. 

So, the returns for Week 1 came in: 52.5 points. NOT GOOD. My keeper was thrashed (who would have thought Robert Green could disappoint an American?), my forwards clocked a total of 27 minutes of playtime for a collective 1 point, and my midfielders were fair to middling. My defense saved the day with 36.5 across the three of them, Gareth Bale my true star with 18.5. Here's the changes:

Green gots to go. I'm not paying for a good goalie, but that doesn't mean I want a bad one. Vermaelen wasn't anything special on a strong team like Arsenal. With most of his points from a shot on target--not something I want to count on, especially with the next fixture against Liverpool. Park did not play. Ferguson is pissing me off--that team is too deep. Same could be said for Silva, but I got him for a song and he'll get PT. Etherington actually did really well, but I think it was a fluke. A lot of offensive points--and ZERO defensive points. Not ideal at midfield. Adebayor played for 7 minutes and did fuck all. No thanks.

I'm bringing in Mignolet from Sunderland in goal. 4 saves against Birmingham, and his next fixture is against West Bromwich. I'll take my chances. I'm taking A. Faye from Stoke at Defender--he generated some offensive heat last week and still managed to win 6 tackles and  intercept passes with only 1 foul. At midfielder, I am upgrading to Downing at Aston Villa. he is offensively oriented, but he picks up tons of junk points on corners won and so forth. I am, uh, maintainingat midfielder with D. Jones from Wolves. He was 5M, so maybe I'll get something for nothing as they play Everton. I decided to at least have ONE forward this week by playing Berbatov alongside Hernandez. The Wayne Rooney Show continues at United, but I can perhaps scavenge his rebounds.

Downing was my upgrade--and he pulled in 1 pt. Jones, my 5M man, 3.5. Cripes. I did get 80.5 points, which is respectable, but only because Arteta decided to be worth the 16M I paid for him and Gareth Bale is superhuman.  Drogba and some other guy are the only ones averaging more than Bale--he's my team's anchor. Mignolet in goal for Sunderland had a fantastic game--he's a keeper. (OH IT IS TO LAUGH). 

More changes at midfield: Walcott. I need him. He's the other guy averaging more points than Bale, and for only 13M. Even if he doesn't turn in 20 pts per week like he has been, I'm happy with 10. I dumped Downing, and with heavy heart... Silva. I just couldn't keep him on, Ferguson seems to play him only in non-EPL matches or something. Sticking with Berbatov and Elmander up front--I couldn't trade them both in and afford Drogba. 

And Torres getting 21 points for that performance? Yuck.

A brief summary of my journey with my most played and explored game.

A follow-up entry to my Blood Bowl article where I report on the latest tournament I attended.