Bean Farming and Ice Cream
Lots of whimsy this week
Extended Thoughts on Bean Farming - (link)
I finally put together some ideas on Bohnanza: The Duel, in a new format. It’s a pretty mediocre implementation of a good board game that I ended up playing to the tune of 50+ hours. I spent some time thinking about why this was and how it felt pretty similar to other (much more well-published) games like Hearthstone or Legends of Runeterra.
3 Links For Your Week
The Art of Leadership: Small Things Done Well by Michael Lopp - (link)
I’ve been meaning to read this for a while and I finally crossed it off my list last week. So much of leadership talks about vision management and big picture thinking. There’s an entire trope in the genre dedicated to differentiating “leadership” from mere “management”. I appreciated this book because it pays more attention to all of the small things that you need to do over and over. It makes explicit all of the ways they compound and combine into a vision of competent leadership.
Adding is Favored Over Subtracting - (link)
This is a quick article from Nature about how people default their thinking when it comes to problem solving. I wished there were more suggestions for how to overcome this (that was obviously not the point here). One of the concepts in software engineering is the idea that we shouldn’t be tracking features, but often we still end up measuring value correlated to the features we ship.
They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machine - (link)
The concept of right to repair is a contentious one. It’s interesting to see that one company has such a corner on the market (who would think that ice cream management wouldn’t be commoditized?). I don’t want to spoil more; if you haven’t read it yet, go now.
Project Update
I’ve made a bunch of progress on my “Tic-Tac-Toe” game (innovative I know). I’ve been messing around with trying to allow players to be able to share their current location in the game so other players can play along and try it out. I started with Tic Tac Toe because I wanted to prototype the concept on a game that had pretty simple states to start. Hopefully if this goes well I’ll port it over to other games like the “Cypher” game I build a couple of years ago.
You can find a link to the very very rough draft game here.
Have a great week!