Tag: prehistory

SubscribeStar Saturday: Prehistoric Exploration: Catan: Dawn of Humankind

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Last night yours portly had his raucous bachelor party, which consisted of eating pizza and play board games with my friends at my younger brother’s house.  The board gaming highlight of the evening was playing Catan: Dawn of Humankind (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you), which my best man purchased as an early wedding gift.

The game can best be described as a blend of the early turns of any Civilization game and Settlers of Catan (more affiliate links), the classic Klaus Teuber game.  The map takes place on Earth, with all players starting with camps and explorers (imagine a blend of the scout and settler in Civ) in Africa.  Players are encouraged via various game mechanics to migrate out of Africa and to explore and populate the rest of the world.

Like classic Catan, the goal is to reach ten victory points.  These points achieved through various means—cultural and scientific development; exploration; and settlement outside of Africa.  Like Catan, players gather four different resources, re-themed to fit the prehistoric setting, by rolling two six-sided dice.  Players may trade these resources or cash triplicates into the bank in exchange for a single resource of another type.

There are some key differences, however:  while Dawn of Humankind is built on the Catan system, it is geared towards exploration and research.  Settlement is a key component of the game, but it’s done by sending out explorers.  Some areas of the map are blocked off by certain research requirements; for example, reaching Australia requires substantial investments into construction (for boats, presumably) and clothing.  Going towards the Arctic requires high clothing investments.  Investing in exploration lets explorers move more quickly, and investing in hunting allows players to move the Neanderthal in Eurasia and the Smilodon (saber-toothed tiger) in the Americas and Australia (these tokens act as the equivalent to the thief in classic Catan.

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Phone it in Friday LXVII: YouTube Roundup XXIII: Sleeper Disappointments

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Yours portly uploads a bunch of content to YouTube.  Most of those videos only get a handful of views.

A couple of weeks ago, I looked at “sleeper hits,” the videos that did better than I thought they would (which, to be honest, is every video).  Today, I’m looking at videos that did as poorly as expected.  In doing so, I’m hoping you, dear reader, can help give these little compositions the love they deserve.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Composing “Ötzi”

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Yours portly is teaching World History this year, and it has been so fun talking about prehistoric humans.  Particularly, I find Ötzi, a Chalcolithic Age European who died roughly 5000 years ago in the Austro-Italian Alps, fascinating.  Two German hikers discovered his mummified remains in the ice in 1991, providing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn about the lifestyle and diet of people in prehistoric Europe.

Ötzi has captured my imagination so much, I composed a lengthy piece depicting his icy trudge through the Alps, and his tragic last hours (an arrow pierced his back, likely killing him).  Upon his death, snow began to fall, preserving Ötzi’s remains in ice for millennia.

I began composing a slow, morose tuba piece, which is only twenty-five measures long on paper and in my composition software:

Handwritten Manuscript for "Ötzi"

The slow 6/8 section captures a gloomy-but-whimsical feeling, as one might feel on a frosty trudge through the high mountains.  The 5/8 section speeds up considerably, depicting what may have been Ötzi’s hasty, violent retreat from his attackers.

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