[Comp00] Lucian's Dissolutions (intro)

[Lucian Paul Smith]

What follows are not really reviews, per se. They're what I wrote down
about the games right after I finished playing them (I was good this
year!) I didn't play as many games as I might have liked, but my son
was born on November 10th, and that kind of put a halt to any last
minute game-playing. Still, I got through 21 games, and I'm pretty
happy with that. I plan to play the rest, too, keeping this up and
posting in groups of, say 5 at a time. I haven't decided if I'll
include ratings; guess you'll find out in time ;-)

One should expect spoilers for all of these reviews, though in cases I
never got around to revealing anything egregious. It's just that I
never let spoiler fear color any of what I had to say. I'm calling
these 'dissolutions' because it rhymes and because it implies 'breaking
down into parts'. At my best, that's what I've done: taken some of the
pieces of the games and discussed them.

I rated the games this year as I rate them every year: after playing
them all (or as many as I can get through in time), I ranked them in
rough order of how much I liked them and enjoyed playing them, then
assigned numbers. So for any given score in this set, you can only
safely compare it to one of the other 20 games in the group. I have in
the past given out scores in a roughly linear fashion (equal amounts of
each number); this year, the games bunched up in the middle for me,
giving a high number of fives and sixes, and less extremes. You might
be surprised to compare a particular rating with my discussion about it;
this is largely because, again, I'm not necessarily writing about my
enjoyment of the game; I'm writing about something I wanted to talk
about the game.

I've kept the games in the order that I played them, generally straight
out of Comp00. I greatly enjoyed playing the games this year; as others
have mentioned, this seemed to be a *very* strong year for comp entries.
Go team!

-Lucian