Saturday 11 April 2009
Friday 3 April 2009
Uwe Rosenberg
What do Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Stephen Hawking and Isaac Newton have in common.
That's right, they are all morons, idiots, airheads. That is, compared to a certain Uwe Rosenberg.
Who is this Uwe Rosenberg? you ask. Who indeed and what has he done so that he does not so much stand on the shoulders of giants as much as leap from their shoulders and peer down on them from an unassailable height. Well, imagine this scene - Apollo 13 is has just reported 'Houston, we have a problem' and Nasa (organisation with the most geniuses of any company) has just scrambled its finest brains to get them out of the soup using incredibly brilliant Heath Robinson type solutions and saved the astronauts. Now imagine that the very same brilliant minds have just opened the board game Agricola (by Uwe Rosenberg) with an intent to kick back and have a bit of fun. I guarantee you that in a couple of hours there will be more stress and panic than in mission control room for the Apollo 13 rescue. Some will be rendered permanently autistic or even catatonic within a matter of minutes by the mind bending complexity of the rules, others will be staring at a single paragraph in the rulebook for hours, repeating the words over and over in a futile attempt to find a whisper of logic within. Some will have given up and gone off to do something simpler like predict new particles or find alternate proofs to Fermat's theorem of cubed numbers. Some will lock themselves in the toilet and refuse to come out while others will begin eating some of the pieces (of which there are enough to build a full sized space station I might add). One or two will try to break down the rules into a series of smaller and easier to understand chunks but end up needing to invent new words and mathematical symbols which they then forget the meaning of as they try to balance the whole of the rule set in their minds. Honestly if the rules began 'Firstly memorize PI to 20,000 places, then square it and substitute colours for even numbers and sounds for odd numbers (except where the coefficient of adjacent products is a Mercene prime) such that a pattern of major key hypercubes spiralling along a moebius strip wrapped around a tuple of buckminsterfullerene particles is formed' it couldn't be any worse. Even the contents of the game read like the stock take of a department store - 17,340 Occupation Cards, 98,620 Turn Cards, 700,000 Minor improvement cards, 2,000 major improvement cards and so on for what seems like forever. Its the only board game I know that comes in two shipping containers.
So there you have it, Uwe Rosenberg inventor of the most complex process known to man.
The picture below is when we'd got about 3 paragraphs (and 2 bottles of wine) into the rules.
And we were playing the simple version for families - one can only imagine!
That's right, they are all morons, idiots, airheads. That is, compared to a certain Uwe Rosenberg.
Who is this Uwe Rosenberg? you ask. Who indeed and what has he done so that he does not so much stand on the shoulders of giants as much as leap from their shoulders and peer down on them from an unassailable height. Well, imagine this scene - Apollo 13 is has just reported 'Houston, we have a problem' and Nasa (organisation with the most geniuses of any company) has just scrambled its finest brains to get them out of the soup using incredibly brilliant Heath Robinson type solutions and saved the astronauts. Now imagine that the very same brilliant minds have just opened the board game Agricola (by Uwe Rosenberg) with an intent to kick back and have a bit of fun. I guarantee you that in a couple of hours there will be more stress and panic than in mission control room for the Apollo 13 rescue. Some will be rendered permanently autistic or even catatonic within a matter of minutes by the mind bending complexity of the rules, others will be staring at a single paragraph in the rulebook for hours, repeating the words over and over in a futile attempt to find a whisper of logic within. Some will have given up and gone off to do something simpler like predict new particles or find alternate proofs to Fermat's theorem of cubed numbers. Some will lock themselves in the toilet and refuse to come out while others will begin eating some of the pieces (of which there are enough to build a full sized space station I might add). One or two will try to break down the rules into a series of smaller and easier to understand chunks but end up needing to invent new words and mathematical symbols which they then forget the meaning of as they try to balance the whole of the rule set in their minds. Honestly if the rules began 'Firstly memorize PI to 20,000 places, then square it and substitute colours for even numbers and sounds for odd numbers (except where the coefficient of adjacent products is a Mercene prime) such that a pattern of major key hypercubes spiralling along a moebius strip wrapped around a tuple of buckminsterfullerene particles is formed' it couldn't be any worse. Even the contents of the game read like the stock take of a department store - 17,340 Occupation Cards, 98,620 Turn Cards, 700,000 Minor improvement cards, 2,000 major improvement cards and so on for what seems like forever. Its the only board game I know that comes in two shipping containers.
So there you have it, Uwe Rosenberg inventor of the most complex process known to man.
The picture below is when we'd got about 3 paragraphs (and 2 bottles of wine) into the rules.
And we were playing the simple version for families - one can only imagine!
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