Rich Mintz  

My video game of choice for the summer, as you know, has been Civilization IV. But with Civilization V due in less than a month, I’m giving it a rest, and resurrecting two other favorite diversions for the waning days of summer: Scrabble, and Sim City 4.

First, Scrabble. I have to blame the Boon Companion for this; he got me addicted to iPad Scrabble, which we’re still playing at home. But most of my playing is via Lexulous, which is the Facebook game once known as Scrabulous, given a new name and a slightly different board configuration after an encounter with Hasbro’s lawyers. It’s still on Facebook, where you can play both in real time and via the correspondence method (“You have a move to make on Lexulous, Rich”); but I prefer to play on lexulous.com, where there are literally hundreds of Scrabble fanatics sitting in chat rooms 24 hours a day waiting to play with you immediately.

It turns out I’m a moderately good Scrabble player — but I’m an even better timed Lexulous player, and most of the fanatics on the site want to play timed. Timed games fit well with my satisficer personality, which races to find the best move available that can be thought up in the first 30 seconds, i.e., roughly the 85% move on average, and then gets bored and anxious trying to come up with something that’s 5 points better. Typically I play 8 minute games with a 10-second Fischer delay, but as I get better I’m going to inch the time limit down little by little.

(Side note: I saw Bobby Fischer in an elevator when I was going to the pediatrician’s, in Century City in L.A., when I was about eight or nine. This would put it in about 1974 or 1975. I was with my mom, who recognized him; she explained who he was, and I remembered hearing about him on the news — I was kind of a chess kid. I think that was both the most famous and the craziest person I met up to that point, at least until we saw Farrah Fawcett in the grocery store a few years later. Or I think it was Farrah. Anyway, I digress.)

The other game is SimCity 4, with the Rush Hour expansion pack, which I played for months before I started playing Civ IV. I figure it’s time to give it another shot, playing a bit more strategically. I’ll have more to say when I get a city to a more interesting point in development, but here’s the one I’m working now:

I actually didn’t wake up that late, but I got up, went out into the steambath of a day to get the Times, came back in, made coffee and read the whole thing, then decided I’d play a few turns of Civilization IV. Four hours later (!), here I am, sitting on the couch being licked by a cat, eating toast made from yesterday’s bread, catching up on a little blogging as I listen to Kathy Griffin talking about her vaginal makeover.

I don’t know why I shouldn’t have days like this — and weather like today’s, nasty and oppressive and miserable, is the perfect day to stay indoors in the A/C and have one — but I feel vaguely guilty about it, as though there’s something More Important I should be doing. But there isn’t; it’s Sunday, so why not? Besides, this is life, as much as the stuff we do weekdays from 9 to 6 is. Right?

Bonus photos: current game of Civ IV. I’m playing green.

I’ve come to the end of a long, involved game of Civilization IV, and it’s time to take stock.

This game, which I played as Gandhi (whose color on the board is that lilac purple) was by far the longest, most involved, and most interesting game I’ve played so far. I did win a time victory (when the clock ran out, I was at around 3500 points, more than 1000 ahead of my next rival, and almost triple the score of my sworn enemy Montezuma. Great game, with several active civilizations and a dozen zones of triple or quadruple cultural influence.

I concentrated this time first on territorial advance and consolidation, second on cultural dominance, and only after that on research and on militarization, which may explain why I ended up in a hundred-year war of attrition with Montezuma. It didn’t affect my lead, but it sure did consume a lot of resources. Lesson learned: arm earlier, arm everywhere, and think carefully about how remote colonies will be supplied and protected.

Speaking of which, it was the first game in which I ended up with three or four completely separate and significant areas of influence, including most of the northern icecap, due to two things: an early bid to range as far as possible and plant colonies early, as soon as I got oceangoing transport; and the success of my long campaign against Montezuma (who, it must be said, declared war on me and not the other way around), who lost two large cities on his home continent of Montezumaland, and would have lost more if the clock hadn’t run out. Montezuma harried my polar cities, but only took two of the remotest ones (razing one and keeping the other); I’m not sure why, but I’m assuming he was just overextended.

It was my first game with such a heavy sea component, and because the icecaps effectively divided the world into a western sea and an eastern sea (with my continent at the middle, of course), I had to run two completely separate sea supply and defense operations, which I didn’t get figured out for a while. That cost me. In the early days, I depended on an alliance with Mao for an outlet to the eastern sea, and after he closed his borders I briefly had to go to war with him (with the help of Peter, who took Chengdu and opened the sea lanes again), but we made peace right after that. I tend to play the way I live, which is to say relatively amicably with almost everyone — that may explain why at the end of the game, despite my victory, I was rated with the strategic prowess of Ethelred the Unready (worst of all save Dan Quayle), but I think it makes the game interesting.

To my amazement, I held Darjeeling throughout the hundred years’ war, despite light defenses, a century of bombardment, and a land border with Montezuma (at a city he’d taken from me). This was for the same reason that it had originally been hard to settle: the city itself was cut off by a mountain from the adjacent lands, so it would have had to have been attacked by sea, and he must have not had marines or the capacity to use them. (See the bottom photo below.)

Here are a couple of photos. Click through to see larger images, or to see the whole set, which is also here.

Thanks, Apple Store, for turning the repair around so quickly. But did you have to accidentally slash on purpose forget to put the Civilization IV disc back in the drive?

Are you in league with another of the Great Powers to overcome our civilization, take over our cities, and win the space race?