Poirot, Cards on the Table

Poirot, Cards on the Table

ghoti found me an Agatha Christie in a second hand bookstall -- I'd never read any Christie before.

I enjoyed it a lot, it was a good detective story, and hung together well. She recommended this particular one because the murder occurred during a bridge game, and part of it is wondering which person slipped away when playing dummy.

It focusses on which character would have committed a murder, rather than could, and seems constructed to make that point, but is done very well -- the four suspects are consistent in their characters, and their actions do hang together psychologically. Who might do something out of panic? Who would take a bold chance? Etc etc. And the foreward admits up-front that it's a not a trick subverting one of the premises (as in, "this seems impossible -- how" mysteries), but it genuinely is one of the four suspects for the reason established in the first few pages, and the question is which.

However, I also felt that didn't take sufficient account for the possibility that someone might act in a way you don't expect because they knew something that made them more or less desperate, or made the risk seem greater or lesser, than you supposed -- I think that's more common than not.

I'm torn on Poirot himself. He's very vivid, the way he embraces the role of a pompous foreigner, but is really on the ball inside. But didn't seem to have much character himself, no fears or hopes, no loves or hates, (I don't know if there's more in other books).

Probabilistic reasoning

I touched on this above, but when I'm evaluating something, I try to think "how likely is this? how likely is it that my premises are flawed in some way?" Because at some point, the "most" likely explanation is less likely than "you missed something" or "something unlikely happened meaning people were acting at cross purposes somehow".

It's particularly evident in detective books, because it's usually the case you're supposed to take some things on trust, and distrust others, but exactly which is generally established by implication and convention, and if it's not what you expect you can feel cheated. And it's hard to avoid, because setting up a good mystery often involves some unlikely coincidences, which you're not supposed to quibble with too hard, but you're also supposed to evaluate the suspects with an eye to spotting deception.

I find it quite hard to think probabilistically, I can do "but it COULD be this...", but it's hard for me to go to "but probably it isn't", I tend to be too completionist. And sometimes that spots me interesting "out of the box" solutions which turn out to be right. But I can be quite bad at spotting normal "which of these suspects is actually guilty" mysteries, because I find it hard to say "well, it's not certain, but this is the best interpretation available"...

The nature of crime

Sometimes murder is specifically planned -- by someone desperate to silence the victim, by organised crime, etc. And often it's an extension of other violent crime -- a mugging, an argument, etc, where one or both parties kept escalating with no control. And the second is probably more common, but the first might be more common in mysteries.

But this book made me think about it, because the different types of motive for murder the suspects evinced, desperation, or hatred, or whatever. And also wonder -- how much is crime a product of selfishness, and how much a product of short-term thinking? I suspect, a lot of both.

Poirot, Cards on the table (with spoilers)

( Poirot, Cards on the table (with spoilers) )

Short reviews, games

Machi Koro

What do you call board games with cards instead of a board, like dominion? I, in defiance of etymology and bowing to convenience, call them "board games", but I know that can be misleading.

Anyway, ghoti got liv this as a present and the three of us played once and it was really cute. It's like dominion in that you collect increasingly costly cards, which help you get MORE cards costly cards, building a small Japanese (?) town until you reach a winning condition. But in this case, instead of shuffling your cards into a deck and doing "choose five", it's like Settlers -- you roll a die (or two), and cards generate money if they have have the number shown (divided into groups of "get money if anyone rolls that", "get money if you roll that", and "get money FROM someone else IF they roll that".)

I've yet to see what strategies work, if it's broken in any way, but the mechanics seem really good: like dominion it's self-balancing in the sense that if one card is far-and-away too good you could remove that one. For now, all the supply cards are available each game, but you could easily do what dominion did and print expansions and play with a subset of the cards you think make an interesting combination. It would be even easier to make your own, if you wanted to, as there's no need for them to mix with the others when shuffled in.

Cut the Rope, for android

I played this all the way through and it is Annoyingly Addictive. Both in the sense of having good puzzles, where each set of levels introduces a new element, and spends enough time to develop it, but also judiciously re-uses ones from earlier when they'd make sense. It does well in making a reasonable variation in possibility from a small number of elements, that you spend time wondering "I know how all these bits work, how do they work together" not just "i have no idea, what am I obviously supposed to do here?".

But also in the sense of being cluttered with free-to-play addictive intrusive thieving level-up type stuff which undermines the gameplay.

Soul Hunters

Agh, I love the idea of this, it's a mash-up of Magic the Gathering and World and Warcraft and a 2-d beat-em-up -- you level up heroes with a variety of abilities in multiple different ways, and defeat levels (and various arena combats etc which I've not looked at) by having your heroes run through the level defeating three waves of foes, ending with dark versions of heroes. The heroes mostly fight on automatic, making the strategy focus on levelling them up, not fighting well, but there is the interactive component of choosing when to use their ultimate abilities, which charge up at varying speeds. And then they collect stuff, which helps them level up.

It does everything to present the _idea_ of strategy, with zillions of knobs you have to tweak. But most of them are not really decisions, just "click X to get Y". And it's crammed to overflowing with freemium stuff. I don't know if there is or isn't strategy at the higher levels, but I need to get out fast before I find out.

But it's a shame, because lots of little details are really well done. There are zillions of characters to collect (and alas way too many are over-sexualised) but the idea of mixing and matching them is intriguing. And I liked imagining them chatting over a camp fire. The elf-knight with the six-foot sword -- everyone has ripped off tolkien, but more for "elves which are good at everything, but especially forests" and less for elves who ride to battle in bright array. Where does he come from? Is there a knightly order? The floating purple death who grows to twice their height and eviscerates enemies with a giant glowing scythe, do they enjoy chatting to the others over dinner? Do they enjoy feeling a touch of camaraderie?

And there's a plot, which is aggressively bland "fight dark version of heroes, now do that again in 20 different scenes, now do it while pursuing, now do it while fleeing, now do it in some other way which is mechanically exactly the same". It's like, someone mashed up every possible fantasy cliche and wrapped it around a scam, but they got people to polish all the bits of it enough really good ideas came squeezing out of the cracks...