I don’t often delve into the world of book reviews, but when something leaves me in a heightened state of emotion, I find the best resolution for myself is to blog about it.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver is the story of the titular character, Demon, as he takes the blows delivered by life. A modern retelling of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (which I haven’t read), Demon Copperhead is set in a rural community in the Appalachian mountains and examines the deep-rooted problems of poverty and addiction.
Trying to decide between reading fiction and non-fiction. As usual, fiction won.
Where does the road to ruin begin?
With his father dying six months before he was born, Demon was raised in a single-wide trailer by his mother next door to his best friend, Maggot (Matt Peggot). The book begins in earnest in the late 90s when the boys are 10 years old, and the Peggot’s take Demon on two-week trip to the city. Upon their return, Demon’s mother has married her short-term boyfriend, Stoner, and he’s moved in with them.
I have my own complex feelings when it comes to being a 12-year-old boy and having a bald, tattoo-ed step-father suddenly in the picture that I don’t particularly like revisiting. Within the first 100 pages of Demon Copperhead, I was mad. I had such rage and fury inside my soul at Stoner, and how he showed up and upended Demon’s entire life. His bullshit alpha-dog, macho, ‘my way or the highway’ stance, his proclivity to teach with his fists, his verbal and emotional abuse, I was furious. When he for no real reason banned Demon from seeing Maggot, to standing over the boy and forcing him to scrub the floors several times over while inhaling cleaning fumes for mindlessly tracking in mud, I wanted pain to come to Stoner.
Further to the abuse of a man to a child, Demon Copperhead tells the story of Maggot’s mother, and why she’s in jail. Another horrific, awful tale of cold-blooded abuse and trauma. This was not a good tale to read while I was holding my 3-month-old son.
Demon’s mother was characterised as being an on-the-wagon, off-the-wagon type of person. She’d be sober for months to years until something slipped, and she ended up back in the throes of addiction. One day, Stoner busts into Demon’s room and says “Your mom wants to show you how much she loves you”, then has Demon help his overdosing mother. Fighting tooth and nail against calling 911, until they show up, then he’s the dutiful husband. Scum.
This event lands Demon in foster care, working the tobacco fields for a crusty old farmer. Demon’s mom goes into rehab and things seem to be going well until, on Demon’s birthday, his caseworker informs him that his mother has OD’d on Oxy. Stoner ghosts, and Demon, is left to the state.
At this point, my rage had boiled up into a fire, I wanted divine retribution against Stoner. I didn’t want Demon to get his hands dirty, nothing short of the divine hand of God, personally smiting Stoner from His green Earth would satisfy me. Alas, that’s not how life works. Stoner gets a fresh start, and Demon bounces between foster houses.
The rest of the book is life happening to Demon. He’s a naïve child, but has a strong sense of what is right and wrong. A foster family moves out of state, leaving him behind, he chooses to track down a long-lost relative who finds him a place to live. He takes up Football, ends up being a rising star for the team, he’s pegged as a gifted person, albeit behind due to his foster care’s lack of care. He’s popular, but never loses the sense of inferiority that comes from sleeping behind dumpsters. He’s keenly aware that at any moment, life can get rattled and everything can get snatched away from you, and he’s insular. He refuses to rely on others and knows that he can only stand on his own two feet.
Then a football injury destroys his knee. The whole back half of the book is Demon, falling into the rabbit hole of pain medication and the addiction therein. It seems like everyone in the county is on something, whether it’s Percocets, Oxy, blow, or something else. Demon flunks out of high school, moves in with his girlfriend, Dori, after she loses her father, and the two teen addicts take a stab at playing house. Demon, for all his worth, tries to keep it together, despite the addiction. Unfortunately, and predictably, Dori OD’s and passes away herself. Several characters turn up broken by addiction, other characters die, not necessarily due to someone’s malice, but more thanks to the cruel twists of fate, and Demon eventually finds his way into rehab and gets clean.
In the final chapters, Demon returns to the county and touches all the places that were home to him. He’s duller now, damaged goods. But he’s alive, and that’s something. He revisits several locations and reminisces about how he sheltered in a barn overnight here, and how he was robbed by a hooker over there. These places are quiet now. These places that were so influential and formative are now just, sad, empty, derelict buildings.
The images along the cover are a lot more poignant after you’ve read the book
As I alluded to above, the first 100 pages made me angry. The next 450 pages just made me sad. I sit here with the novel concluded, feeling like a pile of ash. Everything has been burned up, and for a glorious moment, we were alive and bright. Now, it’s destroyed. Gone.
Life doesn’t conclude in neat little bows, and not every storyline gets the ending it deserves. And in this, I feel Demon Copperhead does a pretty good job of emulating that structure. I’m used to fiction having a dramatic climax and resolution, but Demon’s story didn’t really have that. It was like a boot in a tumble dryer, a constant hum accompanied by random bangs, as the shoe hits the walls. The hits of life keep coming, then they ebb for a season, then another tragedy befalls our hero. At the very end of the book, he rides off into the sunset, leaving his county behind. The ending didn’t make me feel good, or resolve any feelings that I had in my soul, some of the characters that I wanted to see more of didn’t return, but it didn’t end in a tragedy. Demon keeps living, when so many others don’t.
Demon Copperhead was a very good read. Emotional, personal, and brilliantly written. I’m amazed that Barbara Kingsolver can write from a perspective that seems entirely outside of her own. It’s intimate, dark, and beautiful. If you can stomach the tragedy that is the opioid crisis, the failures of the foster care system, and the pain that humans inflict upon each other, I highly recommend Demon Copperhead. It’s only March, but I’m almost sure this is going to be my favourite book of this year.
We’ve arrived at the cream of the crop. My top 10 games of all time. Serendipitously, this is also my 200th post on this blog! Nothing more to say, other than thanks for reading!
10 – Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization
My favourite thing about Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization:
How deep and satisfying the puzzle is. I really cannot overstate how much I enjoy wrestling with the systems in Through the Ages. Now, it’s a game I’ve only played offline once, and it was tedious and took hours, but, I’ve played dozens of games online and on the app, and in those venues, the brilliance of this game shines through.
My favourite thing about Glen More II: Chronicles:
The tile roundel and being able to leap as far forward as you want allows for so much freedom in how you want to grow your village. Leaping ahead to get the best tile ensures you’ll get what you want but it allows your opponents to take everything that was left behind. Sometimes it’s worth it to claim that castle, but other times, slow and steady produces fistfuls of goods.
Yeah, that’s right. I have the OG Agricola where animals are cubs and resources are disks. My favourite thing about Agricola is easily the occupation and minor improvement cards that you get, and how drastically they impact every game. These cards are by far the reason why I prefer Agricola over Caverna.
The way they took the word building of Paperback and meshed it into a roguelike Slay the Spire-esque tabletop game is really fascinating. The mechanic of splaying your word left or right to get different icons, and choosing which card you want on top to trigger its ability, feels so satisfying. So many decisions to make on each turn, I am utterly in love with Paperback Adventures
The positive player interaction that I mentioned in Brass: Birmingham is here in full force. Weasling your way into the same province as the other players to benefit from their Prefect action. I love this peaceful economic game, and there are so many maps to explore, I never get tired to playing it.
It might be kinda silly, but I really love the fact that there are 3 ways to win. While achieving a science victory or military victory when playing against equally skilled players is incredibly rare, I love that they exist. And when one player makes a move towards one of the victory conditions, the other player is forced to respond. Commit too far and not achieve it, and you’ll have wasted a ton of precious actions, but still, the threat is palpable and exciting.
It’s fast, it’s variable, and it’s satisfying to build a functioning engine and goose it for fistfuls of points. So many other tableau building games wish they could achieve the level of satisfaction that Race for the Galaxy nails in just 30 minutes. Race for the Galaxy is my most played game on Board Game Arena, but that doesn’t mean I won’t play the physical version any chance I get!
The boss battle mode is just the perfect solo puzzle for me. It’s fast to set up, it’s wildly variable as each boss and each heroine have drastically different skill sets, and it takes less than 15 minutes to play. The puzzle is endlessly satisfying, and the push your luck element always has me on the edge of my seat. The expansions, Bullet⭐, Bullet🍊, Bullet 🐾, and Bullet🎨 all add more characters, and characters from any expansion can be mixed together, giving this excellent game almost endless variability.
No game has made me belly laugh more than Galaxy Trucker. From the moment I finish building my first ship until the final card in the game has been resolved, I have a stupid grin on my face, and when any ship gets cleved in two, my own included, I just feel giddy inside. A childlike sense of joy that comes from senseless and slapstick destruction makes me love Galaxy Trucker more than almost every other game I’ve ever played.
Everything. Okay, I know it’s a cop-out to say ‘everything’ to my favourite game of all time, but honestly, yeah, I love everything about Food Chain Magnate. The no luck strategy, the interaction that comes from all the players competing over the same customers, the way the economy seems dead for 5 rounds then BAM money starts flying all over the place. I love Food Chain Magnate with all my heart. My heart rate literally accelerates when I get to play it, and just thinking about playing it makes me salivate. I have a physical reaction to this game, and while my game group doesn’t share my level of enthusiasm, it does not deter my love for this masterpiece.
Almost to the end of the list now! These games are ones that I would play anytime, anywhere. These would always get a resounding “YES” from me, if ever asked to play
It’s one of the most satisfying dexterity games I’ve ever played. There’s a high skill ceiling, but also great potential for laugh out loud funny moments. From bouncing off two of your opponents disks to land in the centre, to fully missing the most basic of shots.
The translucent colourful dice are simply beautiful, and when beautiful components are paired with a simple yet satisfying puzzle, you get a perfect introductory game. I cannot tell you how many people I’ve convinced to start playing board games regularly when I see them doing a Sudoku, and I give them a nudge into the hobby with Sagrada.
The positive player interaction. One player builds a coal or iron mine, another player consumes it to build something else, both players benefit. That on top of some really interesting dynamics make Brass: Birmingham a top tier game.
Oh man, it’s a shorter list to say what I don’t love about Scythe. To pick one thing that really draws me into this game, I love that it’s a ‘cold-war’ game. The threat of combat is so much more present than the actual combat. I’ve had games where I was the loser of the only combat encounter of the whole game, but I ended up as the overall winner. It sounds counterintuitive, I know, but it’s endlessly satisfying.
My favourite Stefan Feld game by far. I love how simple each turn is, just use your two dice, but how efficently you use your actions determines how well you do in the game. There’s a push to fill your small provinces early to get the bonus points for doing so, but those large provinces offer huge rewards, if you can complete them. One day, I want to complete the whole board. I don’t know if it’s possible, but it’s what I want to do.
Oh gosh, Calico is a puzzle game with teeth, and I love it for it. Every hex you place feels impactful, and deciding to put a purple dots tile in one spot means you’re choosing to not pursue three other objectives with that spot. I have my head in my hands the entire time I’m playing Calico, which doesn’t sound like a good thing, but I love the burn this game gives my brain
Leaving a trail of workers behind and then doubling back to pick them up again is a genius mechanic. You want to be efficient with your actions, and spending time going back to a space you don’t need is painful, but running out of workers means you can’t do anything. I also love how fast Istanbul is to play, with most games taking around ~25 actions, you can fly through games, assuming no one is stalling at the market for too long.
The auction/bidding mechanic that makes money flow around the table, and the game constantly pouring more and more money into the economy letting the bids grow bigger and more ludicrous makes for exciting rounds. I love pricing one tile just a bit too high and watching my opponents agonize over spending that much cash on a single tile. I don’t even care if I win, I just want my friends to be uncomfortable for a bit!
Board Game Hot Takes recently did a poll discussing if the unthinkable happened, and you lost your entire board game collection, how many of your games would you re-acquire. I think every game in my top 30 would be strong candidates for re-acquisition!
It’s an easy, relaxing polyomino tile placement game. What sets Bärenpark above Patchwork in my mind is the fact that someone actually get to complete their park. Beyond that, BEARS!
Dexterity games hold a special place in my heart, as I really love the tension they deliver. I love seeing the highways rise up amongst the grey spires, and they duck and weave over and under each other. Then in an instant, it all comes crashing down.
The shared tunnel system creates a fascinating leapfrog effect. You’ll strike out in one direction, nabbing some juicy gems, but that gives your opponents a springboard to leap even further, collecting even better resources, which in turn sets you up on your turn.
Panda camel. Just kidding. I love the push and pull as you and your opponent pick at the shared market, swapping cards from your hand and trying to decide if you want to sell early to get the most valuable token, or if you should hoard cards to net that amazing 5 card bonus tile.
I like building up my deck in Paperback with a wide variety of powers, and the natural growth of the amount of money you’re able to generate. At the start of the game, earning 5 cents feels like an achievement. Then by the end of the game, dropping a casual 21 cent hand feels super satisfying.
A classic from 2006 about picking up cards and building mail routes. There’s enough short term benefits to distract you from your long term goals to create some very interesting decisions. Honestly, it’s hard to poinpoint what exactly I love about Thurn and Taxis, as it’s just a very fun and satisfying game to play. It’s light, it’s easy, I feel engaged. It’s lovely, and it’s moving up in my rankings!
The engine building of trying to get the right vikings to earn money and points is quite satisfying. You want all the vikings possible, but obviously you can’t take them all, plus, they might be paired with an island tile that you really can’t use! Also, the way the market dynamically adjusts based on the vikings that are getting purchased is unique and awesome. It’s a great game over-all.
The push-your-luck aspect of putting down the handshakes and just HOPING that you’ll pick up more cards of that colour is amazing. I love getting 3 handshakes down, knowing that every card I pull could be the one that launches me into the stratosphere of points. More often, my hubris leaves me in a hole that I can’t dig out of, but I have fun none-the-less.
I like that throughout the race you’re shedding cards from your deck, so in the final stretch you might be running right out of cards. It feels thematic in that sometimes at the end of the race you just don’t have the juice to make it over the finish line.
The cutthroat nature of the scoring, being able to deny others the ability to score their best lines just by holding one card in your hand is amazing. That said, every card you hold on to, to deny your opponent is one card that isn’t helping further your own goals. Every time I have to discard in Arboretum, I’m in anguish, and all the cards are ones I want to keep. And I really love that feeling!
Games games games. I still find it kind of amazing that I can list off 100 games that I love, and it’s less than 20% of the games I’ve played. There’s still so many games that I want to play, and new games coming out every year. I love this hobby!!
The auction for player order is so great. As the game goes on, the most valuable possible moves become more and more rare, and therefore, more sought after. Being able to control going first, making your opponents pay dearly for the privilege, or deny them access to the action they need as a punishment for their cheapness makes every turn in Five Tribes feel exciting
Many word games can end up suffering from a similar problem. You get a selection of letters, and you spend 15 minutes staring at them, trying to figure out a word, any word that you can make out of that mess. Hardback allows you to flip any card in your hand over, voiding any abilities or benefits it may offer, but turning it into a wild card. I love this mechanic as it keeps the game rolling and saves players from a truly awful draw.
I love the population track in Suburbia. The goal of the game is to earn population, as ultimately, the player with the most population is the winner. But on that population track are a bunch of red lines, and every line you cross, your reputation and incomes are knocked down a peg. I’ve seen players stumble into the perfect tile, slot it into their city, earning themselves insane amounts of population on a single turn, only to kneecap their own game, throwing their income into a deficit and making the next few turns a desperate struggle to buy an income generating tile.
That may sound needlessly harsh, but it’s a mechanic I adore in a game that I love.
My favourite thing about Castles of Mad King Ludwig
I’m torn between building wild looking castles, and the player controlled auction as my favourite aspect of Castles of Mad King Ludwig. Both aspects are awesome, and make the game feel fresh every time I play it.
The decision to make the vertical act as a score multiplier is so satisfying. I’ve had games where I manage to get several tiles of the same colour to the 4th level, which gets multiplied by all the stars of that colour makes for a really satisfying puzzle!
To this day, Pandemic is a go-to option for introducing anyone to the world of cooperative games. Pandemic has all kinds of tension, short term problems that need to be solved that are at odds with the long term goal of the game, plenty of opportunities for players to communicate and figure out an optimal plan. It’s a classic, and even though I’ve picked up a few of the spin-offs, the original remains in my collection.
It’s a shame about the actual pandemic creating all kinds of negative connotations, though.
The double resource cost of all the tiles needing money (buttons) and time makes for some fascinating decisions. At the beginning of the game, you don’t have many buttons to spend, so you’ll pick the high time cost pieces. Come the end of the game, you’ll be throwing fistfuls of cash at the board, but your new limiter is time. A pretty good allegory for life, if you think about it.
33 – Chess
My Favourite thing about Chess:
There isn’t much I can say about Chess that hasn’t been said already, by people who have devoted significantly more time than I have into playing and studying this game. With an endlessly high skill ceiling and dozens of books breaking down even just the opening moves of Chess, I love this game as it’s a pure strategy game. Any mistake is your own fault, and while it sucks to get crushed by someone more skilled than you are, I like that any victory or loss is earned by your actions and choices alone.
What I left unsaid about Patchwork applies here. Polyomino tile laying games are just simple fun. And I love My City for constantly evolving, even if I find the over-arching victory condition of the legacy campaign to be less than satisfying, I still enjoyed seeing the game change over time.
I love real time games, I love Tim Fowers games, and I love cooperative games, Now Boarding was an easy hit for us. What I love most about Now Boarding is that the game only gives you half the information you really need for the round, and obscures the rest of it. You can your teammates can plan out what you want to do, but when the real time phase starts, more information is thrown into the mix and it might drastically change your plans!
