Stratego, Plugged

This week, I was at the local thrift store when I discovered an old friend: a functional copy of Electronic Stratego! (He was on sale for a buck.) In case you have forgotten how this lovely contraption looks, or if you've never met one, here's a brief sample: (Warning! 80's nostalgia ahead!)

Some of you may be asking, "What is that?!", to which I reply, "It's like Stratego! By Milton Bradley! A classic game of strategy and... um... 'go'? Look it up!"

So, now some of you are probably asking, "Right... so... how's it different than normal Stratego?" Well. Let me tell you how it's different from the vanilla edition.

To start off, the scale is a little different. It's got an 8x10 grid (instead of 10x10), and only 24 pieces (instead of the usual 40).

More importantly, the electronic aspect opens up a lot more functionality. There are three major variations in gameplay that result from having Electronic Stratego instead of "plain-ol'" Stratego:

One: Hidden bombs. The little compartments on either player's side of the board let players place bombs under their pieces, and they activate only when stepped on by enemy players. (Unless your board's malfunctioning, in which case your men might be fair game as well.) One wrong step, and KABLAAM!

Two: Piece identities remain secret. To engage in combat with an enemy piece, you merely push down on the attacking piece and then on the defending piece, and the computer informs you whether you won or not. And that's all it tells you. Did you kill a scout? A marshal? Who knows? It adds a lot of uncertainty to the game. (You don't have to play this way, but it is awesome; and to do this using a normal board, you'd need a third party just to compare pieces during attacks. Good luck finding anyone to volunteer for that.)

Three: Awesome sound effects. From the moment you turn it on, the thing emits a soundtrack worthy of an early Atari game. The interminable "drum roll"-esque sound (audible in the above snippet) accompanies your every move, and snippets of notable songs pepper the play. (The manual falls all over itself calling out each song; when attacking, you'll hear "a few bars of The William Tell Overture" instead of "heart-pumping attack music". Maybe it helped them corner the market of the culturally elite?)

Anyway, if you're in my General neck of the woods soon, Flag me down; I'll Scout out four AA batteries and we can Marshal our forces to engage in Major two-player electronic melee! (It'll be the Bomb!)

"Inky, binky, bottle of ink..."

I like writing by hand sometimes. Yes, a good keyboard is still about the fastest way for me to write, but sometimes a good pen in hand is just what the doctor ordered. Six months ago, I decided to try something a little different in my writing toolbox: a fountain pen.

I believe in starting small when pursuing a new interest, so I worked to find the cheapest way into the fountain pen world. I settled on Pilot's Varsity pens (amazon), finding a three-pack at my local Staples for seven dollars.

Well, it turned out to be a lot of fun; I like the smooth feel of the writing and the fun of having an old-school fountain pen. But going on buying disposable fountain pens to feed the addiction? I'm not so keen on that idea. And my new fountain pens were running out of ink fast!

So I started looking at buying a more permanent fountain pen. But then I found something that made my (web-browsing) ears perk up: some folks had successfully refilled the "disposable" Varsity with new ink.

I bought a 3-ounce bottle of Noodler's black ink (amazon) and tried it out. It worked! And with the new ink, my writing was smoother than before!

So that's a win. But the money side of things is pretty sweet, too: Each refill of the pen takes about 2 cc's of ink. In my $12, 3 oz bottle of ink, there are 88 cc's, giving a price per refill of 44 cents! (Far cheaper than the $2/pen price of new ones.) Refilling takes only two minutes, including setup and teardown time, and I've refilled only once in the six months I've had the pen.

Plus, having a bottle of ink hanging around is pretty awesome.

Another example of how it makes good financial sense to "go reusable", even if the product is touted as disposable.