King Gizzard concert
To start off the month, my wife and I attended Merriweather Post Pavillion to see King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard on their Phantom Island orchestral tour, supported by Sarah Hicks and the National Symphony Orchestra. There was no opener, but KGLW played two sets: first, the entirety of their new orchestral album Phantom Island; and second, a set of older songs reworked to include the orchestra.
This was my second time seeing them perform live, and while I had a good time, I think I preferred them playing a more traditional set like they did in DC, back in 2022. I am admittedly not a huge fan of their newest album, but the second set made up of mostly longer, jammier bangers really saved the show for me. My wife also snagged us some sweet t-shirts from the ridiculous merch line.
Movies
Together - As a result of supernatural forces, a couple in a faltering relationship begin to get closer than they ever expected. I really dug this one. It has some really gnarly body horror as well as some really effective but not overblown world-building and lore-crafting. The only thing that kept me from truly loving it was literally the last shot of the movie.
Weapons - After the mysterious disappearance of nearly an entire class of elementary-schoolers, a small town reckons with the fallout of the tragedy. This will probably end up being my favorite movie of the year. I loved how it balanced an actually gripping mystery with pitch-perfect dark humor.
Drop - A woman’s first date becomes a nightmare when she is air-dropped messages from an unknown stalker asking her to murder her date. This was a mostly inoffensive but bland thriller that would’ve benefited from a lot more humor, which is what I would expect from Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day, Freaky) anyway.
Final Destination: Bloodlines - A new installment in the horror franchise that bends the mythology in a new wider-scoped direction. I was hoping to like this one more than I did. The deaths are mostly really great, but I felt like this one takes too long to get going and starts nodding off when it has to stop to consider the plot. So, basically the same as most of the other FD movies.
Tornado - A Japanese immigrant in 1790s Scotland takes revenge on the bandits that upended her life. Setting aside the unique setting, this was one of the most paint-by-numbers revenge thrillers I have ever seen. Everything builds up to a last act confrontation that failed to do anything for me at all.
Games
Wandering Towers - In this memory game, players race to move all of their wizards into Ravenskeep tower first. This game is played on a circular ring board with 3-dimensional towers that can be moved and stacked. Players play cards to move both their wizards and these towers clockwise around the board, potentially landing towers on top of other wizards, imprisoning them beneath.
This game seems very family-oriented at first glance, and for the most part it is, but it also quickly becomes very cutthroat as wizards quickly get stuck between tower levels and you struggle to keep track of where everyone is. This also frequently makes the game absolutely hilarious as sometimes peoples’ memory isn’t as good as they think it is.
My only qualm comes from a bit of a breakdown towards the end of the game. A secondary goal for victory is to fill up potions that you have (and can also spend on extra actions) by imprisoning wizards under towers. The problem is, once you have all of your wizards in Ravenskeep, if you don’t have all of your potions filled it becomes very tedious to spend your time trying to capture wizards. The cards in your hand that can only move wizards become useless, and the only consolation is in the ability to discard you whole hand to only move a single tower one space for your entire turn! This extra goal feels very tacked on and I would’ve preferred it if just getting your wizards to the end was the only aim of the game.
The game plays pretty quickly in only 30-45 minutes and seems to benefit from higher player counts. This will probably stay in my collection for a while as it kind of carves out a niche that none of my other games do.
SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - This GIGANTIC euro-style game tasks players with launching space probes and analyzing deep-space signals in an effort to find signs of alien life. Over the course of 2+ hours you will try to optimize your game-play to spend your resources efficiently and out-play your opponents to find traces of alien life first.
The game primarily concerns itself with finding “traces” which can be done in three ways: launching probes and landing them on planets in the solar system, scanning deep-space signals and collecting the majority of data from given sector, and analyzing said data. You can also purchase technologies that make your actions more powerful and/or efficient. These techs very satisfyingly socket into your player board in way that makes me say “ooh yeah that’s nice”.
Because of the breadth of ways to score points in this game, it kind of feels like a mishmash of other types of games thrown into one. It’s certainly an engine-building game where you’re trying to line up combos and synergies, but it’s also an area control game in the segment where you’re vying for majority stake in scanned signals. And this is before I even mention anything about the aliens!
Every game has two randomly selected (and hidden) alien lifeforms out of a possible five that reveal themselves after enough traces are collected. These aliens are additionally “mini-games” of their own that alter the rules of the game and introduce more end-game ways to rack up points. In the game that I played, we had a race of bug-like aliens that added a pick-up-and-deliver-style mechanic to the game and another race with an asteroid that essentially becomes a new planet to land on and scan.
Overall, I really enjoyed this game and look forward to playing it again. It looks very daunting from all of the options of things you can do on a given turn, but it quickly becomes very clear what you can and can’t do, and paths to get points are laid out reasonably clearly. There are also multi-purpose cards that on their own are pretty powerful, but can also be discarded for a nudge in resources to get you out of a bind.