On Children's Day, my wife went to a college reunion and came home with a few gifts. One of them was a children's board game called Millennium Silk Road.
Before this, my board-game experience was mostly the old airplane chess thing. As a kid I played it once and never wanted a second round. Monopoly was the same—since it came out, I don't think I've played three full games. Later I watched videos by people who really know board games and thought, fine, maybe it's not bad. But when it comes to rolling dice myself, I still can't work up any enthusiasm. It probably reminds me of strategy games: Ba Wang Da Lu, Fire Emblem, Langrisser, and Civilization VI. The repeated moves and watching numbers change get old fast. It's like counting banknotes. Even if the money is yours, counting can make you sleepy. You already know roughly how much is there. It isn't loot from a bank job that you can spend without a care, so counting it doesn't get more exciting as you go.
I've seen pictures of an adult version of a dice game before. Too bad there was no one to play it with me. And honestly, if someone insisted, I'm not sure I'd dare play.
Millennium Silk Road has a nice little travel mechanism. When the route reaches water, you switch to a boat; when it reaches land, you switch to a camel. The die has five numbers plus an event symbol—no six. Your boat can carry only four kinds of goods. Founding a new city earns you 2 silver. You start with 45 to 50 silver and set up resource cards; there are four kinds of supplies you can buy according to what you need. Usually you pick the best value, and ideally you want a mix of goods so it's easier to make money. If you notice spices selling high in a distant city, you still have to draw a card when you arrive and replace the price. Sometimes the spice price drops, and it looks like even after waiting a few more rounds there won't be a good price. Once a city's goods price cards run out, you can just find two cities with the shortest route and a price gap and farm money back and forth. Event cards can be reshuffled and reused after they're exhausted. The city cards didn't seem to have any instructions.
Last Sunday night I played a round with my kid. The second child started out playing with the first, but the first got bored and asked me to take over. I didn't want to play at first, but the second child did, so that's how the notes above happened.
This Tuesday, the second child asked me to play Millennium Silk Road again. I said, let's play an old game instead—Sanguosha. It's also a board game and pretty fun. No dice, you just play. The rules are simple. The official Sanguosha site has two options; pick the one ending in .com. I registered and logged in again, went into beginner mode, and played 2v2. After winning a few rounds in a row, I asked the second child what he thought. He said he needed to take notes. I laughed. Fine, take notes. Actually, it's a good thing—he really wanted to write things down. It reminded me of 1998, when I was in an internet cafe playing StarCraft and writing down hotkeys. People mocked me for it. I asked a classmate what the hotkeys were, and he said he'd figured them out one by one. I actually believed him. I wrote down the hotkeys for the Terran barracks and tank building. For buildings, B for build—I asked about that directly, so I put it in my notebook. The real discovery didn't come from the notes. After pressing all 26 letters, I found the secret: the bright yellow letter was the hotkey.