Category: Featured Content

It’s a ’gram jam

Hampton haven for tacos, tunes and selfies

Walking into Instabar, one is greeted by a riot of color, light and kitsch: wild graphics, a wall of speakers offered for art, not sound, a hollowed out Winnebago remade as a conversation pit, and positive vibes like “Make today Magic” drawn in funky fonts on the floor. Every night, live music flows from a corner stage.

The festival of senses is about more than a fun night out, though Tex-Mex tacos, local craft beer and margaritas do provide that. Instabar is a place that exists in equal measure for pleasure and posting, dedicated to the Instagram generation. Each tableau — there are more than 20, and they change regularly — is a potential scene for selfies, a nod to the notion that an experience is more awesome when shared online.

It’s the brainchild of Scott Millette, a former competitive snowboarder and fight promoter turned filmmaker. His work in branding and marketing led Millette to Austin, Texas, last year, where he discovered Rainey Street, an old neighborhood turned nightlife hub brimming with food trailers, bars made of freight containers and other oddities. He found the scene ideal for iPhone snapping and uploading.

Dawn Kingston, a photographer who works extensively with influencers and artists like Shawn Mendes, Machine Gun Kelly and Cameron Dallas, told him about an emerging business model focused on the selfie crowd.

“Pop-up museums like Happy Place and Ice Cream Museum, the one made famous on the Kardashians,” Millette said by phone recently. “They all had individual rooms that were basically built just to take Instagram photos of yourself. I was like, ‘Wow, this is a whole other market.’ These places had tickets that were selling out in minutes.”

Millette hatched a plan to combine it with a focus on his favorite food and bring it home to New Hampshire.

“I thought those two things coming together would be a really cool experience,” he said.

His old friend Shane Pine liked the idea of using the back of his Hampton restaurant, Shane’s Texas Pit, and he liked the food focus, which Millette hoped would draw the surfer crowd and be true to the Lone Star State.

“One thing you can get that’s amazing all the time in Texas is a taco, whether you go to a big restaurant or get it out of a truck at 3 in the morning,” Millette said.

Losing 87 pounds on an all-Mexican food diet a couple of years ago gave Millette the experience to build a menu. He then recruited artists to create the space.

“Carmen Fernandez, a friend of mine from Portsmouth, Christian Hardy, a filmmaker, musician and an artist I’ve worked on other projects, Kendall Vocca and Alyssa Pine,” he said. “We all worked together; I just essentially would curate it, but sometimes I would just guide them in a certain area.”

Kingston helmed the crucial Instagram rollout. To her surprise, Millette insisted the location would be a mystery right up to opening night.

“Social media is all about engagement,” he said. “The first question is, where is it? We tell them it’s a secret and they can’t know without an invite. That made our Instagram quite explode, to like 700 views per story.”

Live entertainment is integral to Instabar’s mission.

“What is art without music?” Millette asked. “Nothing without a good soundtrack. It’s so important to me … and this restaurant is based on being authentically Austin, which claims to be the live music capital of the world.”

April Renzella, David Corson, Rob Pagnano, Brad Bosse, Sam Robbins and Amanda McCarthy have all appeared there since Instabar opened in late May. Comedy happens June 24 at 6:30 p.m., when Manchester standup Mike Koutrobis performs ($10/ticket).

Millette has other ideas brewing as well, like help sessions with professional photographers for people looking to take more flattering shots.

“We have this whole environment of great backdrops,” he said. “We could do an Eight Steps to Up Your Bumble Game type of night that includes live music after, where people come out and take awesome selfies, and get to meet other singles.”

Instabar @ Shane’s Authentically Austin
Where: 61 High St., Hampton
Reserve: instabarnh2020.eventbrite.com
Thursday, June 18 – TBA
Friday, June 19 – Dave Corson
Saturday, June 20 – Rob Pagnano
Sunday, June 21 – Alex Potenza
Monday, June 22 – TBA
Tuesday, June 23 – Dave Corson
Wednesday, June 24 – Amanda McCarthy
Thursday, June 25 – Dave Corson
Friday, June 26 – King Kyote
Saturday, June 27 – Dave Corson
Sunday, June 28 – Brad Bosse

Film Reviews by Amy 6/18/2020

Da 5 Bloods (R)

Spike Lee blends a Vietnam war movie with a quest-for-treasure movie with Da 5 Bloods, a new Netflix release.

Former Army squad-mates Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis) and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) arrive in 21st-century Vietnam to retrieve the body of their squad leader, Norman (Chadwick Boseman), who died during the war. They have also returned in search of gold. As we see in flashbacks to the war, they were sent to retrieve a case of gold bars (CIA money meant to pay local allies) from a plane that crashed in the jungle. After an ambush left only these five men alive, Norman, who had held the squad together through their anguish over the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the ongoing inequality faced by African American troops, argued that they should keep the gold for themselves and their community.

Now a mudslide has revealed a bit of the plane, which, along with the burial site for Norman and the gold, had been lost in the fog of war. But even before the men find the gold, they are weighed down by the past. Paul seems to be the man most aggressively suffering from post-traumatic stress, which has spilled over into his relationship with his adult son David (Jonathan Majors), who shows up, uninvited, on the trip. Otis reaches out to an old girlfriend (Lê Y Lan) and learns that their relationship was more complicated than he knew. The ghosts of the past haunt all of the men, with greater intensity as they set out to hike to the crash site.

I reread my review of Miracle at St. Anna, Lee’s 2008 World War II film, and my feelings about that movie are very similar to my reaction to Da 5 Bloods. This movie, like that one, plays with Hollywood war movie conventions, is packed full of rich moments, pulls in fascinating elements of history, has very Spike Lee visual arrangements, has a very Spike Lee movie score (by Terence Blanchard, who has scored most of Lee’s movies) and has character beats that make you want to know more. It’s a lot for one movie and it doesn’t all always come together. Even though this movie is two hours and 35 minutes, it felt like it needed more time to develop all of the elements it throws into the mix (or needed to edit out a few that didn’t get as much development).

Da 5 Bloods is actually the first of these cinema-at-home movies that I wished I had seen in a theater. I feel like the bigness of what Lee is doing would have worked better on a big screen. At times, the “in search of gold” half of the movie feels like it is fighting with the “fuller look at history” half with its sharp commentary on African American military history and the wider context of racism and injustice in American society. There are a lot of moving parts here (including a whole subplot about a French woman and a landmine clearing nonprofit that I feel like is thematically relevant but a drag on the narrative) but there are also strong performances (from Lindo in particular) and eloquently delivered Spike Lee statements that stick with you.

Here’s how I’m going to recommend Da 5 Bloods — and I do recommend this movie, especially to movie nerds and Spike Lee fans: Make your viewing experience as cinema-like as you can. Dim the lights, put away the phone and watch it all the way through. B

“Rated R for strong violence, grisly images and pervasive language,” according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Spike Lee and written by Danny Bilson & Paul De Meo and Kevin Willmott & Spike Lee, Da 5 Bloods is two hours and 35 minutes long and available on Netflix.

Shirley (R)

A young couple comes to live with author Shirley Jackson and her husband in Shirley, a not-quite biopic based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell.

The movie seems set in the late 1940s and early 1950s at the still all-women Bennington College in Vermont. Rose (Odessa Young) and Fred (Logan Lerman) are a newly married couple who come to Bennington so Fred can work as an assistant for professor Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), husband of famous but reclusive writer Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss).

Stuhlbarg really goes the extra mile to make Stanley unlikeable. I have no idea what real-life Stanley Hyman was like but here he is a blowhard who has affairs and makes little speeches about the horrors of mediocrity when he himself seems pretty mediocre, particularly in comparison to his wife. The picture of Shirley here is a woman suffering from mental illness but also from some degree of gaslighting by her husband, who seems to exaggerate her difficulties and seems to have her convinced that she desperately needs him.

Rose and Fred, shakily on their own after an elopement that Fred’s family frowned on and expecting a baby, are no match for this couple and their drama. Fred seems to quickly give in to the temptations of Bennington while Rose is saddled with becoming the designated housewife for both families — cooking and cleaning for Stanley and Shirley as well as her husband. Shirley, who is mulling over a novel based on the disappearance of a local girl, is sick, Stanley tells Rose, but also we suspect that Stanley is clearing the decks so Shirley can write — the movie (and Wikipedia) leaves us with the impression that not only is Shirley’s fame greater than Stanley’s but so is her paycheck.

Moss’s Shirley is fascinating. She crafts a character who is clearly suffering but isn’t a victim. She seems to resent Stanley, love him deeply, need him and see him for his flaws, all at the same time. She is, as with other recent Moss characters (in The Invisible Man and Her Smell for example), full of big emotions but Moss is able to convey those big emotions and big moments and even elements of madness (another thing Moss excels at) without tipping into cartoonishness.

Shirley feels like she’s running twice as fast as Shirley. About halfway through the movie, I realized I was still waiting for it to start. As Shirley pulls Rose in — to the source-material story of the missing girl, to Shirley’s creative process, to Shirley herself — we see Rose getting lost in all of it. It’s interesting, but it’s all slow to develop and it’s almost as if the movie is so focused on everything Moss is doing that it has to remind itself to pay attention to Rose.

As not-quite-tight as the movie overall is, it’s worth a look, especially for Moss’s performance. B

“Rated R for sexual content, nudity, language and brief disturbing images,” according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Josephine Decker with a screenplay by Sarah Gubbins (from a novel by the same name from Susan Scarf Merrell), Shirley is an hour and 47 minutes long and distributed by Neon. It’s available for rent or purchase.

The King of Staten Island (R)

Pete Davidson plays a young man adrift and suffering in The King of Staten Island, a somewhat-autobiographical (about Davidson) movie directed by Judd Apatow.

The “Apatow” part of that sentence might have you thinking this movie is a comedy, even if you know about Davidson’s mental health struggles and his family history (his firefighter father died at the World Trade Center site on Sept. 11). It would be more accurate to say that there are funny moments in this drama.

Stuck in his life, Scott (Davidson), age 24, dabbles in self-destructive behavior (shutting his eyes while driving on the highway) and in tattooing and is generally aimless, hanging out with his buddies, unwilling to take his relationship with Kelsey (Bel Powley) seriously and half-heartedly working a part-time job while still living with his mom, Margie (Marisa Tomei), even as his younger sister (Maude Apatow) heads to college.

As the movie tells us early on, Scott hasn’t really been able to move forward after the loss of his firefighter father (who died fighting a fire when Scott was a kid). Just how much becomes clear when Margie starts dating Ray (Bill Burr), also a firefighter and the first serious relationship she’s had since her husband died. Ray’s presence spurs her to nudge Scott to think about moving out, which sends him into a tailspin of anxiety.

I feel like both Davidson and Apatow have a very solid and complete idea of who this character is and what his struggles are — not surprising since everything I’ve read and seen about this movie (including videos on the movie’s official website) so heavily underlines how much of Pete is in Scott. And Davidson plays this character version of himself with genuine, to-the-bone emotion — he brought similar layers to a performance in Big Time Adolescence, a movie released on Hulu earlier this year, and here brings even more vulnerability.

But I didn’t get the sense that this movie always knew what to do with this character. At about the 50-minute point I felt like this movie was spinning its wheels still setting up who Scott is. The movie is also uneven in how it uses a subplot involving Scott’s friends, and Scott and Ray’s relationship seems to take an unnecessary amount of time to get to where it’s pretty clear that it’s going. Everything in the middle of this movie — from the initial 30 or so minutes and until it hits its final 30 to 40 minutes — seems to suffer from a lack of a heartless editor, someone who could slice out all the moments that are probably viewed fondly by Davidson (and maybe also Apatow, whose movies seem to have become progressively looser and filled with scenes that probably should have remained outtakes) but get in the way of both Scott’s arc and where the movie heads in its final act.

It’s hard to completely discount a movie as deeply felt as The King of Staten Island clearly is and with such a clear and specific character at its core. And I didn’t hate it. But I did wish I didn’t have to slog through all the messy extra bits.B-

“Rated R for language and drug use throughout, sexual content and some bloody violence/bloody images,” according to the MPA on filmratings.com.

Book Review 20/6/18

Somebody’s Gotta Do It, by Adrienne Martini (Henry Holt & Co., 240 pages)

On one hand, Adrienne Martini suffered from terrible timing, her new book coming out amid a global pandemic.

On the other, it’s a book about running for public office, and it’s out amid the most social unrest since the 1960s. Hillary Clinton tweeted about it. By these measures, it should be on everyone’s best-seller lists.

Somebody’s Gotta Do It is Martini’s account of running for — and winning — a decidedly unsexy office: district representative for Otsego County in rural New York. It’s also a call for you to stop the doomsday scrolling and do the same, wherever you live. This is not just because the world seems to be imploding before our eyes, but because of what Martini calls “a ripe, juicy opportunity ready to be plucked,” the redistricting that will happen next year, establishing electoral maps for the next decade.

Before your eyes glaze over at the prospect of being lectured to by the District 12 representative from Otsego County (home to Cooperstown, if you’re trying to place it), know that Martini is genuinely funny, despite being a middle-aged woman who knits. A marathon runner who writes a biweekly column called Dry Martini on a running website (anothermotherunner.com), she is a reliable source of a laugh. That said, if you disagree with her political views and can’t take jokes aimed at your team, steer clear; you will only get angry. A previous memoir, 2010’s Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously, may have the distinction of being the only knitting memoir savaged by Amazon reviewers for being too political. “If you want to tell the world of your political views, then WRITE A POLITICAL BOOK,” one said.

Regardless of your political leanings, Somebody’s Gotta Do It is a fine manual for the aspiring politician (or public servant, if you’re less cynical than me). It begins with Martini’s meltdown after the election of President Donald Trump. (The president’s supporters would call this the onset of Trump Derangement Syndrome.) Suffice it to say, Martini was not pleased, and after the inauguration, she decided it was high time she got involved in the political process.

The campaign itself was revelatory. But so was plunging into the work. At the first budget session for new members, during which she realized that the salt-and-sand budget for her county “could pay for my house three times over,” she concluded that running for office was kind of like pregnancy, in that she had spent nine months being “obsessed with the wrong things.”

“I owned every book on pregnancy and delivery, but had no skills or knowledge about, you know, infants.” Similarly, she said, “I’d approached running for office armed with research and numbers and opinions about how to win, rather than collecting information about what happens once you’re sworn in.”

While much of the book is about her own experiences, Martini delves a little into history, including the violence done to women’s suffragists, and also research on the gender divide in elected office. Although more women than men go to college, fewer hold public office, because fewer of them run. Martini suggests that this is as much about a lack of confidence as it is lack of role models. “Give every woman the confidence of a middle-class white guy, and we’ll run the world,” she writes. However, when women do run, they’re as likely as men to win. It’s just getting them to agree to be on the ballot that’s the problem, she said. That looks to be changing, at least among pro-choice Democrats. The political action committee Emily’s List reported that 920 women asked for information on running for office in 2016; in 2018 the number was 26,000.

Martini shines when applying her “Dry Martini” wit to the indignities of seeking office, as in her list of things she learned while doing that quintessential politician task: knocking on doors. One person, she reports, told her they couldn’t open the door because everyone in the house had tuberculosis, “which can’t possibly be true, but whatever.” The humor, however, comes and goes amid instruction on how to ask people for donations, design mailings, and answer seemingly impossible questions such as, “What would you do to combat the opioid epidemic in the county?” If we get a little impatient between jokes, it’s because we’ve been conditioned for them and expect them at the end of every paragraph, a la Sedaris.

In addition to learning how to run for public office, readers of Someone’s Gotta Do It will emerge with fresh revulsion for the typical coroner system, in which people of any background can be elected to determine how someone died, so long as they’re 18 or older and live in the county.

Martini’s revulsion for that system, however, is surpassed by her revulsion to Trump, whose election, she writes, left her literally shaking.

Like the nonplussed knitters upset by Martini’s political leaning in her previous memoir, some people won’t be able to get past the Trump hate to find anything useful or inspirational here. But for those who can, or those who share her views, Somebody’s Gotta Do It is a breezy, informative look at the grassy roots of politics, with the cheerleading of an overweight marathon runner who knows what it’s like to persevere while in pain. “Running very slowly while crying is still moving forward,” she writes. “So is walking while muttering [expletive, expletive, expletive].” B+

Covers for two books. Salvage the Bones, handwritten font tangled in the black silhouette of a tree, a swirly blue sky and yellow ground. The cover for Difficult Women, a black background with thin light pink font, and a heart made from pink color splashes.

BOOK NOTES
The most interesting thing in publishing last week was not in book stores but on Twitter through the hashtag #publishingpaidme.

The hashtag started as a means to expose disparity between advances paid to black and white authors, but wound up also showing differences between genres, and also the courage of authors who chose to participate.

Roxane Gay, a black writer of fiction and nonfiction, said she was paid $15,000 for her 2014 essay collection Bad Feminist, $100,000 for 2017’s Hunger: A Memoir of My Body, and $150,000 for The Year I Learned Everything, expected next year.

Those numbers horrified Mandy Len Catron, an American writer and professor currently living in British Columbia, who revealed that she received a $400,000 advance for her 2017 memoir How to Fall in Love With Anyone.

For perspective, Catron confesses that she was “a totally unknown white woman with one viral article” — which was “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This,” published in The New York Times in 2015. Without revealing sales numbers, Catron also said that three years later she is “laughably far from earning out that advance.”

I wish I could recommend we all buy a copy of How to Fall in Love With Anyone just to support Catron for her honesty. But I just found my review from three years ago, and all I could muster was a “B.” Better to buy something written by Gay (I gave her 2017 short-story collection Difficult Women an A) or anything by novelist Jesmyn Ward.

Ward revealed on Twitter that her advance for 2011’s Salvage the Bones, which won a National Book Award, was $20,000 — about $13,000 less than the average car loan taken out this month.

Album Reviews 20/6/18

Sara Serpa, Recognition: Music for a Silent Film (Biophilia Records)

Serpa, a jazz singer from Portugal, has been a fixture for years, applying her elite-level voice to music that’s always just palatable (and dada) enough to keep influencers on their toes; she even won the No. 1 spot on Downbeat’s 2019 Rising Star Female Vocalist poll, which is, to me, amusing. Her shtick involves “wordless singing,” that is to say there are no recognizable words, just her voice uttering random vowel/consonant sounds. She does this gently and without electronic assistance, instantly captivating anyone in earshot who doesn’t have somewhere else to be. Her sparse but powerful 10th album, probably her most out-there work, is meant to backdrop a documentary she also put together, consisting of Super 8 footage of various scenes of life in 1960s Angola while under Portuguese colonial rule. An odd but ultimately fascinating work offered in memory of the victims of a long-forgotten injustice. A

Used Cassettes, Used Cassettes (Loose Union Records)

This is the purported final album from the surf-garage quartet, which finally disbanded for the same reason that they got together: they’re not from South Korea. You see, the members are from randomly different places — Detroit, South Africa and Canada — and met near Gangnam, where they were probably as surprised as their parents to find massive fame in the country, one highlight of which was starring in their own comic book, which was read by millions. The breakup weighed on their minds while recording this; finality is everywhere in these none-too-upbeat songs, all of which feature their trademark sound (think Coldplay with Raveonettes guitars), downtempo-ed to mark the occasion. It’s not like America didn’t have an opportunity to clue in to these guys; there were pieces in Spin and plenty of other places, but regardless, their legacy does live on as they go about their new lives, once again scattered to the winds (the bassist went off to build a beach hut in Sri Lanka – not shabby, friends). A

Retro Playlist

Eric W. Saeger recommends a couple of albums worth a second look.

In a local music scene almost solely composed of fedora-hat bar-bands that happily and unironically play “Brown Eyed Girl” for fun during rehearsals, my never-ending quest to find a halfway decent techno artist/band has come up bupkis, save for Otto Kinzel’s yeoman efforts to put some industrial-metal-tinged tuneage up on the board. In February I talked about his new single “I Bleed for You” here, a dark but very listenable song with addictive acoustic piano lines and a boss guitar solo.

Since you asked, what would get me really jacked is receiving a message from a local musician or soundsystem who’s released an album or EP that sounds even the remotest bit like something a respectable artist would put out, mindfully rendered both vocally and beat-wise. Maybe I’m missing an act that’s done stuff on one of the Facebook “NH Musicians” or whatnot groups, but to date, I remain unaware of any. You must come unto me, lambs, or I can’t help you get famous.

That reminds me, I totally spaced Tricky’s new EP, 20,20, when it came out on March 6. These three new tunes from the trip-hop pioneer were about as slow as you can go without flatlining, bare bones and morose but nevertheless brimming with, I don’t know, comfort? Opener “Hate This Pain” is an instant classic, driven by a lazy, Jelly Roll Morton-ish piano doodle and a string of expletive-riddled existential mumblings lovingly delivered by Tricky and his backup singer Marta.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Email [email protected] for fastest response.

PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• June 19 is a Friday, meaning brand new music releases, for your brain! Any self-respecting curator of such a weekly announcement list would naturally start this week’s proceedings with Rough and Rowdy Way, the new album from wizened folkie mummy Bob Dylan, so we’ll do that, just to be normal for once. If you don’t know what Dylan sounds like — hey, I once had a girlfriend who couldn’t name one Beatles song, so you just hush — think of Tom Petty with no vocal range whatsoever. If you start there, you must move on to his renown as a poet, and take that on face. A lot of critics have put this album’s advance tunes under a microscope, mostly the 17 interminable minutes of Murder Most Foul, a 17-minute ballad about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which actually comes off more as a cultural reference name-checking exercise, wherein he mentions Shakespeare, Stevie Nicks, Charlie Chaplin, Jelly Roll Morton and A Nightmare on Elm Street, among others. I couldn’t care less about anachronistic laissez-faire folkies preaching to politically unaware comfortably settled boomer choirs about the ever-mounting perils of this era, but if someone derives a little fleeting comfort from mildly imaginative hot takes lifted from mainstream-media-pundits, like “The age of the antichrist has just begun / it’s 36 hours past judgment day,” I shan’t grumble but simply continue stocking up on Angel Soft and bottled water. I mean, Dylan did stop the Vietnam war, or was it that President Johnson’s enthusiasm ran out after the Tet Offensive? So confusing!

• Whew, I’m sure glad we’re done with that bit, because if we had to revisit some more ’60s flower-power music, I swear I’d … GAHHH, barf, looky there, fam, it’s a new album from shaky-voiced great-great-grandparent Neil Young, called Homegrown (get it?), and this one isn’t even about hot new takes on the current apocalypse, it’s about old hot takes from the old apocalypse, because this was recorded in 1974! I mean, I thought “Ohio” and “Southern Man” were cool songs when I was young enough to ignore his dreadful guitar solos, but I just don’t know if I can take this. Oh well, I suppose it’ll be cool to see what he was doing after he sold out completely in 1972 and released the wussy cowboy-rock single “Heart of Gold,” even while there were all sorts of other apocalypses that were apocalypsin’, and plus, Richard Nixon. Ha ha, the video for the single “Try” starts out with this dude in a yellow shirt and a giant bird in sunglasses — oh wait, that’s a “Limu Emu” car insurance commercial. So this tune is super slow and boring, really heavy on the dobro guitar, like I have this weird urge to chew tobacco, but I’ll bet I wouldn’t really like it.

• Thank goodness, finally a band this week that wasn’t making records during the Abraham Lincoln administration, Protest the Hero, with their new LP, Palimpsest! All progressive-metal heads know that their last album, 2013’s Volition, was a big deal, reaching No. 1 on the U.S. charts, but will this new song, “From the Sky,” be awesome? Huh, I like the drums. It sounds like Pendulum played at double speed. The singer’s too loud in the mix. I like Gogol Bordello a million times more than this, but whatever.

• Finally, fedora-rocker Jason Mraz’s new “slab” Look for the Good is also on the way; let’s see if my Tums has kicked in enough to handle the title track. So in the video he’s chilling in the forest, watching a magic laptop showing guys working at horrible jobs, but in slow-motion so it’s OK, and the lyrics are Brady Bunch platitudes about nice people. The song has a one-drop beat that makes me think of Raffi, not Bob Marley. I think Tums may be the answer here, guys. — Eric W. Saeger

On board

Manchester tabletop game developers working on third game

Bobby Fowler and Brenda Noiseux, best friends and founders of the Manchester-based tabletop game company Almost a Game, say they’re looking forward to reuniting and continuing their work on their third game, which has been put on hold because of Covid-19.

The duo released their first game, Wicked Apples, in 2016. It won the Tabletop Audience Choice Award at that year’s Boston Festival of Indie Games.

Wicked Apples is designed for two to five players ages 12 and up, and takes about 15 to 20 minutes to play. The gameplay is player-versus-player and involves memory, bluffing and luck.

“It’s a very cutthroat, ‘Take that!’ kind of game, where you’re actively trying to knock out your opponents,” Fowler said. “There’s a lot of player interaction.”

Each player starts with a set of four cards representing apples — three good, and one wicked — which they can look at only once. Then, the cards are placed face-down, and the players take turns sliding their cards around to their opponents. At the end of a round, each player must choose one of the “apples” in front of them to eat. Any player who eats a wicked apple is out of the game. Additionally, the good apple cards all have special actions the players must do, which result in the cards being randomly shuffled around.

“As the game goes on, the apples get more and more mixed up, and you have to really try to keep track of where everyone is pushing the different apples in each round,” Fowler said.

The game may end with one winner — the last player standing after all other players have eaten wicked apples and been eliminated — or it may end with no winner, should the last two players both eat a wicked apple in the same round.

“It’s fun that way because then, if you get the sense that you aren’t going to win, you can still say, ‘OK, so how can I take my opponent down with me so that no one will win?’” Noiseux said.

Last December, Almost a Game released its second game, Space Chase. It’s designed for one to six players ages 12 and up, and takes about 30 to 45 minutes to play. Unlike Wicked Apples, Space Chase is a cooperative game, meaning all players work together as one alliance and will collectively win or lose. The gameplay is tile-based and involves using strategy and teamwork.

The players act as a crew aboard a spaceship. Their objective is to outrun an enemy hunter who is tracking their ship. To do that, the players must lay down tiles to create a path to the escape gate. If they reach the escape gate before the hunter reaches them, they win.

“We thought space as a theme would be a good fit for the mechanics of the game,” Fowler said. “There are tiles that are wormholes, which allow you to go from one side of the board to the other; and there are suns on the board, which you have to fly by really fast; so being in space allows players to interact with the tiles and use them in many different ways.”

Fowler and Noiseux met through work and developed a friendship, bonding especially over their mutual interest in tabletop games.

“Neither of our significant others liked to play games and we did, so it became this fun thing that we could do together,” Noiseux said.

Fowler has a passion for art and studied graphic design in college. He does both the design and the artwork for his games, which he said is unusual among game developers.

“Pretty much all game designers design the game, then hire an artist to do the art,” he said. “I get a fun, unique perspective, because as I’m designing a game I’m also thinking about the art. I can make sure that the artwork is reinforcing the design, and that the design is reinforcing the artwork, and that they really come together.”

Noiseux handles the marketing, play-testing and project management, but has been taking a more active role in the creative process for the company’s third game, False Queen, which is still in the early stages of development.

“I’m excited for us to start working together more closely and collaboratively on the designs,” she said.

Almost a Game
Order Wicked Apples ($15) or Space Chase ($45) at almostagame.com.

A little Election Day practice

Making the year ahead in this most unusual coming sports year even more unusual is it’s coming as the presidential election and the Black Lives Matter protest appear to be on a collision course. That took a major step forward last week when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and USA Soccer broke ranks from their previous stance to back their players’ right to protest. The president immediately and stridently assailed those new stances as unpatriotic and said he won’t be watching. Thus with detractors and proponents on each side it’ll be happening every Sunday and with the election growing closer and closer it will likely be a hot campaign topic all through every following week. That means sports may have a greater direct impact on how people vote for president than it ever has before.

So, to get ready, I’m going to practice my voting technique today by voting on the following items that have been in the news of late.

News Items: Automated Balls and Strikes Good for Baseball?

One of baseball’s coming debates is when the not too far off technology is perfected, should baseball have balls and strikes called by technological automation? When replay first arrived I wasn’t a big fan because I thought it might take the human element out of the game. But with the growing regularity of brutal officiating errors happening all through sports that feeling is gone. Now the concern is just about getting an answer more quickly. I particularly like the idea of a computer calling balls and strikes because it will standardize what a ball and strike is according to what the rulebook says it is over the discretion of each ump on a given night. I vote yes on automated strike zones.

News Item: Do Baseball Players Deserve Leeway On Money Talks?

While I have been critical of baseball for its tone deaf fight over money, I will say comparisons to the other leagues is not quite fair. NBA and NHL players were paid through the end of March and missed just one paycheck. For NFL players it’s looking like they’ll play the entire schedule with some fans in the stands, so they won’t miss any checks and the financial hit won’t be as severe for their owners. Baseball players meanwhile haven’t been paid since last year and with no fans at their park and half the seasonal TV revenue gone they’re facing a vast reduction in pay. Plus with 100 years of documented history in the memory bank, their lack of trust in their owners is well-founded. Since it’s not apples and apples compared with the other sports the vote is to give them a little leeway in this battle. Though my advice is keep clueless nitwits like Blake Snell away from the mike.

News Item: Will Young Patriots Receivers Be Better Without Brady?

One of the stories of actual interest in the relentless Tom Brady or Jarrett Stidham news cycle is will the production of the Patriots’ maligned young receivers improve with a less demanding QB in Tom Brady’s place? It’s food for thought, though it’s more complicated than just that. For one thing, the offense will be dumbed down for Stidham, which will make decision-making on the fly less complex for them as well. That complexity probably contributed to Brady’s much discussed “trust issues” with newcomers. Though I’ve thought that it was more simply being set in his ways and pickiness the last few years when his “I know all the answers to the test mentality was a bit of a double-edged sword. It led to complete command of the offense, but his lack of patience for those who didn’t have that led him away from the young guys in ways he hadn’t earlier in his career when he jelled immediately with Deion Branch, David Givens, Gronk and Aaron Hernandez. So, while they won’t be as good as they were with vintage Brady, I’m a yes that they’ll get more from N’Keal Harry and company with a player closer to their learning curve under center.

News Item: Does Mike Bolsinger Have a Case?

You’ve got to love this one. Former Blue Jays reliever Mike Bolsinger filed suit in February against the Houston Astros for damages to his career. The claim is their sign stealing was behind him being lit up for four runs and four hits in 1/3 of an inning in 2017, which immediately got him sent to the minors for good. So here’s the question for a judge and jury to ponder: Did that one game alone get a guy with 1-7 record over two years when the ERA’s were 6.31 (2017) and 6.61 (2016) demoted to the minors? Sorry, those are journeyman numbers and the kind that get guys sent to the minors all the time. Vote to throw the bogus claim out of court.

News Item: Jeter a Lock for Yanks’ Mt. Rushmore

Saw this one on Facebook when a kid I grew up with posted a picture of Derek Jeter looking up at the Yankees’ Mt. Rushmore like Ruth, Gehrig and DiMaggio were waiting for him to join them as the fourth member. Hey, I like Jeter as much as the next guy and think his adulation in NYC is similar to the Tom Brady GOAT stuff around here. But, sorry, the gushing NYC media making him out to be a cross between Joan of Arc and Charles Lindbergh is way over the top. Even the Brady comparison doesn’t work since TB is (or may be) the greatest at his position while Jeter is not the greatest at his. Though teammate Mariano Rivera was and that’s why he’s higher in my Rushmore voting than Jeter. So with him just ninth on my all-time Yankees list behind Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, the Mick, Yogi, Rivera, Whitey Ford, Bill Dickey and Jeter with either Andy Pettitte or Red Ruffing rounding out the Top 10, it’s a no vote for Jeter.

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!