Assorted Highly Positive Reviews
Sep. 9th, 2018 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackAzul
Liv knew she wanted this game for ages, and I wasn't sure but immediately fell in love with it. It's based on Portuguese Islamic-derived ceramic tilings. All the parts are absolutely gorgeous, the tiles are fairly simple design on simple plastic, but they feel sooo tactile and are sooo beautiful.
The gameplay is collecting tiles to fill out a grid, and blocking the opponent from doing so, but the rules are really quite simple, and the strategy really quite complicated.
Trail of Lightning
By an urban fantasy by Rebecca Roanhorse, who won the Campbell Award and Best Short Story Hugo this year. Set after global warming causes catastrophic ocean rises and political cohesion in America dissolves, in the newly evolving and ironically-drought-ridden Diné nation from what had been the Diné (Navajo) reservation.
The protagonist is a monster hunter. It's interesting to read a story with some of the immortal figures like Coyote who've shown up in other fantasy novels I've read, but by an author who presumably knows the original stories better.
City of Brass
By S. A. Chakraboty. An early 19th century Egyptian con-woman discovers she has Djinn heritage and is immediately sucked into complicated multi-sided supernatural politics between factions of Djinn, and other more powerful immortals, and not-exactly-Djinn, etc.
If, like me, you like supernatural politics, history of Djinn through Islamic dominance, to before to their capture by Solomon, all the way back to the early world, this might be the book you've been waiting for.
I can't vouch for the accuracy of the real-world cultures depicted and drawn from, but it felt very much like characters actually being there, a wide variety of people.
Liv knew she wanted this game for ages, and I wasn't sure but immediately fell in love with it. It's based on Portuguese Islamic-derived ceramic tilings. All the parts are absolutely gorgeous, the tiles are fairly simple design on simple plastic, but they feel sooo tactile and are sooo beautiful.
The gameplay is collecting tiles to fill out a grid, and blocking the opponent from doing so, but the rules are really quite simple, and the strategy really quite complicated.
Trail of Lightning
By an urban fantasy by Rebecca Roanhorse, who won the Campbell Award and Best Short Story Hugo this year. Set after global warming causes catastrophic ocean rises and political cohesion in America dissolves, in the newly evolving and ironically-drought-ridden Diné nation from what had been the Diné (Navajo) reservation.
The protagonist is a monster hunter. It's interesting to read a story with some of the immortal figures like Coyote who've shown up in other fantasy novels I've read, but by an author who presumably knows the original stories better.
City of Brass
By S. A. Chakraboty. An early 19th century Egyptian con-woman discovers she has Djinn heritage and is immediately sucked into complicated multi-sided supernatural politics between factions of Djinn, and other more powerful immortals, and not-exactly-Djinn, etc.
If, like me, you like supernatural politics, history of Djinn through Islamic dominance, to before to their capture by Solomon, all the way back to the early world, this might be the book you've been waiting for.
I can't vouch for the accuracy of the real-world cultures depicted and drawn from, but it felt very much like characters actually being there, a wide variety of people.