I’ve reported the situation to DAW—a note from an alert reader—and they’ll handle it. I’m not sure how many books are mis-described. If you spot that, comment here and we’ll all know.
Meanwhile it’s snow turned to rain here. I’ve got a re-exam at the eye doc’s this morning: my prescription seems to have shifted a bit and I’m straining to see clearly.
Want a REAL timesync? Check out the cnn.com game site. Mahjongg Solitaire is absolutely wicked. The Games site has a few buggy games: getting the Crossword to take the first letter is an annoying one—but it will if you start and then erase. But Mahjongg? I can see how fashionable Chinese ladies got seriously addicted to this game. Board play is only for 3 or more; but the electronic version is dimensional solitaire.
Fear not. I’m writing like mad.
I play Mahjong with a group of ladies once a month. Love the real game, but play the solitare Mahjong at home too. Try looking up Mahjong Titans by Oberon Games. Best one I have found and can be really difficult to win. Fun!
Do atevi play something like Mahjongg, I wonder? The four-sided board seems infelicitous, but then again, they don’t seem to have changed the 8×8 chessboard….
Why not a six-sided board, ordinarily three players, triangular or hexagonal arrangement of spaces? Sort of like crossing tiles/dominoes with Chinese Checkers? I’d think card games might be arranged with three players also, possibly three or five suits instead of four.
What about dice, though? Dice need to be a regular polygonal solid. The triangular pyramidal four-sided dice seem iffy to me, but are used in RPG (D&D style) gaming, along with several others. Personally, only about three or four of those specialty dice make sense to me. But surely atevi would have a solution using one of those shapes, and perhaps, like the 20-sided percentile dice, they might have a set of numbers that occur twice, equally, on the sides of the die, only an odd number. Thus, perhaps they’d have a cube with three and three, instead of our six? Or zero through five, instead of one through six?
Atevi seem interested in baji-naji, fortune and chance, but not particularly in gods. But do they ascribe events to supernatural or divine forces or natural forces? The wind, the rain, the waves, sun, moon, “elemental” forces, etc.? What I’m getting at is, what about atevi fortune tellers or atevi cards a bit like Tarot? Or would that not fit atevi thinking? Note, I’m not saying palm readers and fortune tellers and so on are the way to go. I’m saying, atevi seem very occupied with fortune, chance, numerology, and auspiciousness. It seems like it would be likely in past times and among some in the present. Nand’ CJ uses the “number-counters” in a couple of ways as satire of our own world, so perhaps the atevi are prone to some things like that too.