We're snowed in for the second time this winter, a bit unusual in North Carolina but not as unusual as it is in Houston, where we used to live.

http://www.khou.com/weather/houston-winter-snow-weather-coverage-2018/508469415

I'm still not quite used to naming winter storms, though I think Inga is a good name for one.  One of my roommates in Rochester was an Inga, who liked to knit things.  She had a prized Ziplock bag full of musk ox hair that she had picked off some rocks in Greenland during a research experience, which she had ambitions of knitting something amazing out of.  She gave me some purple mittens that she had dyed with Kool-Aid.  I loved those mittens.

https://weather.com/storms/winter/news/2018-01-14-winter-storm-inga-midwest-northeast-south-snow-forecast-mid-january

Anyway, we're at home today, where one of my kid's friends is staying over, watching Venture Bros. and an anime called Black Clover.  I managed to peel them away from the TV and their phones for a tabletop game, one we hadn't played in a couple of years probably, but that used to be a favorite.

http://www.sjgames.com/starsareright/

The title refers to a quote from HP Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu."

When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die...

(Though I'm sure HPL would be delighted at his current level of literary influence, the fact that his mind-bending cosmic creating have been converted into cuddly plush and card-game cartoons would undoubtedly have sickened him.  But, as my kid likes to say, "Fuck Lovecraft.  He was a racist.")

The game itself is a pattern matcher.

 [image linked from Amazon]

The sky is a 5x5 grid of two-sided card tiles.

[]   []   []   []   []

[]   []   []   []   []

[]   []   []   []   []

[]   []   []   []   []

[]   []   []   []   []

For this next part to make sense, you need to open the game site and right-click on Sample Cards to get a new window, because I can't get a link to work.  Sorry.

Each creature card must be Summoned to capture its Victory Points.  To Summon a creature, you have to find the Constellations on the card in the sky.  For a really easy card like a Gug or a Tindaloo (a Hound of Tindalos in the stories), the four tiles can be anywhere in the sky.  For a harder one like a Formless, you need two pairs of tiles, which can be either vertically or horizontally adjacent.  For a Dagoon, three in a row.  For Great Old Ones like Hastur or Tsatso, you can see that the constellations become a bit more complex.

Fortunately, since this is magic, you as the cultist player can move the tiles by discarding, or "Invoking," cards.  There are three move types:

• Push allows you to shift an entire row or column, wrapping the tile that got pushed off the end back around.  On the lower row, Invoking a Gug gives you one push, a Dagoon two pushes, and Tsatso 3.  See the little green arrows on the upper left?
• Swap allows you to trade the places of two cards that are adjacent, but not diagonally.  To get a diagonal, you would have to use two swaps, one horizontal and one vertical.  Fortunately, some cards like Hastur give you 3.
• Flip.  I mentioned that the tiles were two-sided.  This means you can flip over the sun tile to get an eclipse, for instance.

First player to summon ten points' worth of creatures wins.

Our game today was the closest one I've ever played.  My kid won with ten, but me and the other kid both had nine by that point.  This was a little easier than it should have been because we had forgotten some nuances of the rules for Bonus Stars, which make summoning easier, and we were misapplying them.  It took us less than an hour, which was pretty quick since we hadn't played in a long time, and we were sacrificing a virgin.

My wife always asks why we like such complicated games.  I tell her that she just answered her own question.  Simple games get boring faster.  This one has a lot of replay value, because the sky (the board) is different every time.

If you're still fuzzy on the gameplay, here's a short video review that shows the game in action.  Tom gets some of the terminology wrong (he calls a full moon a sun, and a new moon an eclipse), but chill, it's just a game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYZuHg9ErUg

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By the way, I realized on logging in that today I just hit 350 followers.  

That's almost a doubling since I started back posting regularly this fall.

THANKS SO MUCH!