Links: Sweet Game Imbalance, Exclusives = Higher Costs & Behind the Scenes of the 2012 Pulitzer No-Prize

Imbalance may feel like part of the charm of Cosmic Encounter. It does for me. While mutual dependency may be the basis for negotiation to be meaningful (I will give you the wood you need in exchange for the brick I need is meaningful in terms of the outcome of a game), imbalance is the basis for negotiation to be interesting...

[T]he alien powers in Cosmic Encounter mean unequal encounters, which require invention to tackle – convincing other players to ally with you when you're up against a tricksy alien like the sorcerer (who can chose to switch his played encounter card with the one you played) is tough. It might require promises of future cooperation, or a commitment to make a favourable exchange the next time the chance arises. Either could be an outright lie, of course. But whether promises made are sincere or not, they come about because an imbalance in power means they must.

I think Milestones is the most ambitious game from Ralf and me. The rules are very simple, but there are many different ways to win this game. The players build houses, streets and marketplaces on the game board and they get points for these buildings. But if you want to build a house or a street, you have to produce sand and stone. This happens on a player board. Every player has an individual board with different spaces. On the 8 upper spaces you can hire some workers, who produce stones, wood, sand, grain or coins. On the four building spaces, you can take actions, such as hiring new workers, building on the main game board or delivering grain. These 12 spaces form a circle. You can move your playing piece slowly or fast around this circle. If you go slowly, you will earn more coins or wood. If you go fast, you can build a house first.

The game distribution system, at least for the big guys, works off a discount model. When you start with a distributor, your discount is pretty weak, usually 47% or so. As you buy from a distributor, your volume increases your discount level, usually capped at 50%. So generally, if you work towards that discount level, you'll have a 49-50% with your primary and something in the basement with your secondary. I've got a 50% with most of mine and until recently, I only had a 47% with my secondary (Alliance). So what does this mean?

It means if you don't have Alliance as your primary distributor, you're losing money on these exclusives, which for me is 22% of my board games. It's a different amount for each game store, but I figure I would lose about $1,000 a year in added "cost of goods" costs. I don't know about you, but when my bills go up $83/month, I tend to howl a bit.

So the obvious answer, the one I'm sure Alliance is not unaware of, is to change your primary distributor to Alliance. Or, if you've got enough volume, add Alliance as your strong secondary distributor to boost your discount level. That's what I've done this year, at the expense of many of the smaller distributors.

As we jurors continued to find books we loved but failed to find the One, the Great Invincible, I confess (I can't indict Maureen or Susan [the two other jury members] along with me) that I wanted not only to recognize genius but also to escape going down in history as one of the people who failed to recognize it. Someone who missed the Northern Lights because they were fussing with a lapdog; who proved unable to see beyond their readerly peccadillos and prejudices or their flat-out limitations.

This ongoing state of agitation was not helped by the knowledge that a great new book, more or less by definition, doesn't much resemble the great books of the past. Nor was it helped by my suspicion that many of the long-forgotten critics and prize-givers who decimated Moby-Dick or ignored The Sound and the Fury failed to understand that the future wouldn't mind Melville's insistence on all those longish chapters devoted to whaling arcana, or Faulkner's devotion to a lexicon that could seem simultaneously oracular and impenetrable, that sometimes barely resembled the English most of us had spoken, with relative confidence, since childhood...

Finally, there was the question of shifting sensibilities. When Maureen, Susan, and I talked Big Book, we were thinking almost literally – a book that was, if not over five hundred pages long, vast in its scope, enormous in its concerns.

But as I scanned the cartons for Big Ones, I found myself thinking more and more of the Impressionists. I wondered over the fact that, in the course of several centuries, "serious" painting ceased to favor great historical or religious subjects, which tended to incorporate at least two dozen figures, facial and bodily expressions that ranged from despair to ecstasy, a landscape, a horse or two, symbolic vestments, symbolic gestures, and (optional, but recommended) various saints and angels, approving or angered, up among the roil and brilliance of the clouds.

And then, a mere minute later in historical time, a "serious" painting could be a Monet haystack. It could be a Cezanne portrait of a local farmer in overalls. It could be an empty Van Gogh field under an empty sky.

The Impressionists don't strike us (don't strike me, anyway) as lesser artists simply because they worked on an outwardly more modest scale. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, do I hurry past the paintings by Monet and Cezanne and Van Gogh to get to those by Tintoretto and the Delacoix? I do not. I'm happy to see all of them, but the Monets and Cezannes and Van Goghs don't look small compared to the Tintorettos and Delacroixes. They're just big in different ways.