Month: November 2020

Weed (Cooperation Games I)

It’s time for change.

Weed is a cooperative card game for 1-4 players. There are three different types of cards, in four colors:

Types 01

They can be laid out to grow weeds, like so:

Weed 1 01

When placing the cards, there are a couple of things we shouldn’t do. We won’t:

Nonos 01

Below is a full set of cards, and here a printable pdf.

Cards 01

Now for the game: The players first agree on a board size, like a 6×6 square. As many cards as there are players are placed face down onto the board so that they don’t share an edge, not share an edge with the boundary of the board, and then turned over. The remaining cards are dealt to the players. They take turns to grow weeds, only placing cards that match previously placed cards. For every completed weed the players get one point. For each square of the board that can’t be tiled one point is being subtracted. The goal is to come out positive, of course.

Below is a perfectly completed 6×6 board. Sample 01

 

Enjoy, and go in peace.

Revelation 7:3 (North VI)

Right next to the Black Rock Barrens Nature Preserve is my third stop on the excursion north, the Weiler-Leopold Nature Preserve.

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It is dramatically different, with a leisurely loop first through tall prairie grass and then through woodland.

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Views are scarce, but colorful in late fall.

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Most impressive are several very tall and old oak trees. 

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Neither time nor space are ours.

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Light and Dark (North V)

Let’s return once more to my fifth stop on the way north, the Portland Arch Nature Preserve.

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The quality of darkness and light changes with contrast and  sharpness. When many shades of gray are present, we perceive them as a guide for depth, assuming that darker colors prefer the background.

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In images with strong contrast, however, the black becomes the substance, and the white the ether, the insubstantial. For some reason, our understanding of an image flips from the rational to the symbolic. We give up on perceiving reality, but instead accept that a more mystical interpretation of what we see is possible.

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This relapse into dualistic-mythological thinking is reinforced when the contours become blurry. We prefer to reject doubt, and are therefore happy to accept our first impression as truth.

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It is difficult to navigate a reality that is perceived like this, as the substance, the dark, to which we could hold on to as real, is at the same time more ominous and frightening, while the light that attracts us will not hold us.

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Black Rock Barrens (North IV)

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While the world waits, let’s continue to the second stop on my excursion North, the Black Rock Barrens Nature Preserve.

DSC 5501In contrast to the nearby Black Rock Preserve, this one features a decent long loop through the preserve, but no rock formations. 

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It does offer the opportunity to get lost in the tall grass. Doing so in the summer will probably result in dangerous blood loss due to insect bites.

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With a bit of effort and luck one can access the Wabash from here, too. It’s just behind the trees up there.

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Lamentate (North III)

 And I was moved to ask myself just what I could still manage to accomplish in the time left to me.

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Thus Arvo Pärt about his composition Lamentate, a piano concerto of sorts, inspired by Marsyas, the enormous sculpture by Anish Kapoor.

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Pärt’s Lamentate is, as the name suggest, not merely a lament but a call to arms, in order create a counterweight to the state of the world. Marsyas does this in its own way, too, in the form of a musical instrument filling all of space.

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The short canyon in Shades State park that leads from Devil’s Punch Bowl to Silver Cascades Falls is such an oversized instrument in its own right, to be played by walking it.

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The beginning is total silence.

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But, even during the worst drought, there is a trickle of water, feeding the fall with bits of sound and hope.

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Four years ago I attempted a prayer.

Lamentate. 

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Recursion – Solution (Solitaire XXVI)

To keep this week’s frustration to the necessary minimum, here is a discussion of last week’s recursion puzzle:

 

I first asked to assemble any of the 30 squares whose sides are colored in four distinct colors out of five from four smaller squares so that edge colors match, and we don’t use the square we start with, like so:

 

Rec2 1 01

As we can see, there are seven different solutions. It doesn’t matter which square you start with, permuting the colors will reduce everything to this example. Next we need to pick one of these seven solutions, and assemble each of the four sub-squares using 16 of the the remaining squares. It turns out that

  1. this is only possible for the fifth solution above;
  2. each subsquare can be assembled in two distinct ways:

Rec2 2 01

But only two of the 16 possible choices satisfies the condition that we are not allowed to reuse squares, namely these two:

Rec2 3 01

Pretty? Now the remaining squares 9 can be, in each case, assembled into a 3×3 square in exactly one way:

Rec2 4 01

Here are a few hints about this: First note that the dark green color has to occur an even number of times, the other colors an odd number each. This forces the other colors to constitute the boundary, so dark green is confined to the interior. A bit trial and error shows that the only green-free square has to be at the center, and the green edges assemble in a pattern as above.