Does It Never End?

I wasn't planning on making another post on Blue Prince, but I've gotten another fun month or so of gaming out of it, and wanted to capture a few odds and ends of thoughts that didn't make it into the first post.

 

Before diving into spoilers: it really is amazing just how deep this game goes. Now that I'm poking into more online community things, I'm seeing that fans describe the game as having various "layers". Your initial goal of finding Room 46 and seeing the end-game credits is really just the first "layer". That's a perfectly fine and reasonable place to stop, you've solved a ton of puzzles by that point and had a really satisfying story. But you can keep playing and find a deeper layer of story and secrets. And keep playing after that and find a still-deeper layer of more esoteric story and more obscure secrets. There are periodic beats where you get to watch a cool cut-scene, which seems to be designed as a graceful off-ramp to say "This was fun, I think I'll stop playing now, thanks," but you can also choose to continue on to the next layer.

 

 

But one thing about those deeper layers is that they are more obscure. In my initial post I mentioned that I never felt "stuck" - there were always multiple things I was trying to make progress on, and there are multiple channels of hints that can guide you towards what you should be doing next. That's less true in the deeper layers. Which isn't inherently bad, just different. The deeper parts of the game start to feel more like an ARG, where it's more about the community as a whole pooling their knowledge and sharing discoveries to collectively advance. There are still some aspects where things are fairly sign-posted, and I'd never want to just follow a walkthrough, but I've also gotten to a point where if I'm feeling just stuck-stuck I'll feel good about looking things up online. 90% of the time I'll think "Oh, yeah, there's no way I would have figured that out." And as I mentioned before, the online communities are really good about managing spoilers, with individual spoiler sections and gradually expanding levels of hints and nudges rather than just "Here is the combination to open this safe."

 

 

For communities, I've found Reddit and Steam to be best; the actual articles from proper games websites are more like standard walkthroughs which is less fun. For the wiki, I strongly prefer blueprince.wiki.gg over the Fandom wiki, mostly because I hate Fandom in general.

 

 

I've also learned via a friend who plays this game that the creator was inspired by an old book called "Maze: Solve the World's Most Challenging Puzzle." Now I want to read that book! It's been out of print for a long time and it looks like used copies are selling for $100-$200. I'm hoping that the success of Blue Prince helps bring that back into print. In a very cool tribute, the developers commissioned Christopher Manson, the author/artist/creator of that book, to create new artwork that appears within this game. It looks like Maze has a community of its own online, and I'd be interested to dip my toe into that world as well.

MINI SPOILERS

I have a few thoughts on mechanical tips and things for playing but game, but also want to note that a surprisingly large number of these tips can be found within the game itself.

 

 

It's best to prioritize drafting "tight" floorplans with few or no unused room slots. So if you're drafting past an area, try to get a doorway in to any spaces that don't already have incoming doorways. Conversely, if a slot already has a doorway coming in, it's slightly wasteful to "spend" another doorway getting into that same space. You'd be better off spending that doorway further north, avoiding getting trapped in a dead end. So ultimately, if I am choosing between a room I really want but that has "bad" doors (blocking off my last chance at a slot or drafting a door into a wall or something) versus a mediocre room with "good" doors, I'll almost always take the mediocre room. I'll still be able to draft the "good" room later, will get the "mediocre" room out of my deck, and have more options for doors in the future.

 

 

I'm a big fan of the Ornate Compass, a fairly expensive item from the Showroom (I think 30 gold) that lets you rotate the first set of cards you draw each time you draft from a given door. Mostly because this helps with the above paragraph - you can optimize the use of a room. For example, Dining Room is always useful; it might initially present with one wasted door going into a wall, but you may be able to flip it around so the other two doors open into unexplored space. These days I usually keep the Ornate Compass in my Coat Check so I can use it from early on. It isn't usually usable on the edge rooms since you can never draft doors out of the manor, but it can be super-handy in the middle.

 

 

Speaking of gold - I think I mentioned this before, but you do eventually get to a point where you don't really need to worry about it. I'm now on Day 80 and I start each day with 90 (and counting) gold. There's another black-floorplan room that is now giving me another 50+ gold. All that to say, when you get Upgrade options, the ones that boost Gold are the least useful since it ends up being a very abundant resource.

 

 

There's a point in the game where you can use something called The Axe to completely remove the Gem cost from a room. This isn't communicated in-game, but you can only get The Axe a total of three times on a given playthrough, so do be very thoughtful about what you spend it on. In my case, I spent it on the Trophy Room (so it now just straight-up gives 8 gems, which is usually plenty to see me through a whole day), the Attic (which gives a large and random variety of items, including resources and usable items), and the Throne Room (an unlockable floorplan that includes a lever and is an important part of some later-game puzzles). 

 

 

I very rarely worry about Gems these days - I start the day with 2, usually have another 2 from the previous day's Morning Room, and that's usually enough for me to find additional sources like the Trophy Room, a Sledgehammer'd trunk, some Digging Spots, the Courtyard, the Morning Room, etc. Keys are usually fine too - I often don't start with any, but since I methodically try to fill out my southern rooms before progressing north I'm usually able to pick up keys through chests, trunks,  Metal Detector drops, Garage, etc. I've also made the Foyer common, which unlocks all hallways doors (including the Great Hall, which in turn usually has some keys behind a locked door); I've also made the Kennel common, which unlocks doors when you dig in a room. So it's a mix of finding keys and pre-emptively unlocking doors without keys.

 

 

I rarely get stuck these days, but when I do, it's usually because of running out of steps, or rarely keycard issues. Both can happen when I start the day with a Trading Post, as I'll typically spend a lot of steps up front gathering and trading in some starting items. I usually don't care about food much until I'm further north, but every once in a while I get stuck (often having passed up a Kitchen or Dining Room earlier) and without enough steps to retrace to another drafting area. Between the Break Room, Security Room and Utility Closet I usually don't need to worry about security doors, but sometimes I'll do something boneheaded like cut security door power when I have a keycard but haven't drafted Security yet, or trade in my Keycard and not get it or the Security room back before hitting security doors.

 

 

Oh, and just straight-up drafting myself into a corner can happen sometimes, though as I noted above I usually avoid this by making "tight" floorplans. Redraws help a ton too. I've gotten some upgrades that help with getting Dice; once you get over 50 Stars you can redraw more or less at will; and the Study will let you spend Gems to redraw (and I'm often swimming in gems by the middle of the manor). But I will sometimes get greedy and take too many dead-ends early, then be forced into final dead-ends before I have rerolls available.

 

 

At one point you can start adjusting the rarities of rooms. This is a very gradual process, you might get the chance to change up to three randomly-selected rooms on a given day, but it can be very powerful. I'm following a strategy I'd read about online which has been working well for me. Make rooms "Common" if you specifically want to draw them early in a run, usually because they cheaply give you resources or help you set up the rest of your run. For me this includes rooms like Security, the Coat Check, my axed Trophy Room and Attic, the Kennel, the Foyer, etc. Other rooms that you like but don't need early in the run should be "Standard". This includes most multi-exit rooms (hallways, courtyards, boiler room, etc.), rooms that you want to get later in the run (Great Hall to follow the Foyer), or good rooms that aren't run-defining (like a maxed Planetarium, the Mail Room, etc.). "Unusual" is for rooms that you want to get late in a run like the Freezer, or rooms that are expensive or mediocre, like the Pantry and Laundry Room. And "Rare" is for bad rooms that you almost never want to draw, like the Maid's Chamber, many Bedrooms, the Furnace, the Closet, etc. The main thing I still want to adjust is the Showroom - now that I have such a generous Allowance, I'd love to draft it early in my runs so I can use the Silver Spoon from early on, and maybe also try to get the Compass from there and save the Coat Check for an advanced item like the Jack Hammer.

 

 

ANYWAYS - All of that is a lot of strategy thoughts. But what I meant to say was, one tricky thing especially as you get further into the game is that there are some specific situations where you then need to unlearn things that have almost become muscle memory. There's one particular puzzle where you need to have zero gold, zero gems and zero keys - so don't automatically collect that Allowance, and figure out how to spend exactly 2 gems to get rid of your daily start!

MEGA SPOILERS

I've been spending a good part of the last month going through more time-consuming, or maybe just slower, parts of the game. Like trying to draft all of the Blue Rooms into Rank 8 and then looking for their Blue Tents notes. In many cases those will reference puzzles I've previously solved, other ones appear inscrutable and/or for future puzzle. I've been working through the Treasure Room notes; I did find the True Treasure of the Trove (after an online hint), but am still learning more about the Memo System, which may or may not be useful for future puzzles. And after an online hint for bringing the Satellite Dish online I've been gradually removing crates from the Tunnel. While slow, those have been pretty satisfying tasks, as I can usually make at least some progress on at least one of those each day.

 

 

The most recent milestone I hit was Reclaiming the Throne, which was very cool. I had seen an online reference to that some weeks ago, but have been naturally playing through the game and managed to figure out a lot of the prerequisites by myself without more detailed hints. I got to a point where I had separately gotten to the Blue Door at the end of the tunnel, then realized I was a bit behind where I should be for the Throne Room. I hadn't been able to open the Cursed Coffer, having tried several different keys in it for a while, and had assumed that a key in the tunnel would open it. So I finally looked that up, and had a head-smacking moment: there is no key to open the coffer, you have to smash it open with a sledgehammer. Just like what happened in the book! Sigh.

 

 

But anyways, it did feel really satisfying to finally get that, and I was able to Reclaim the Throne on that same day. I've gotten pretty good at maximizing movement and minimizing steps, such as quickly figuring out when to enter or exit through the Entryway versus the Basement Foundation. In this particular case, I had the Garage open so I had that option as well.

 

 

Where I'm at now: I still need to open the Blue Door, I think I should be able to do that soon as the Throne Room is Common and I still have the Royal Scepter with me. I'm not sure what lies beyond that, but I suspect it has something to do with the Numeric Cores - I think I've solved the MCCXXIII one (it's 8, because of course it is), but it seems like there should be something more there. I also just reached 100 Stars, which ties in to Her Ladyship's writings, and I'm very curious about that message. But it sounds like whatever comes next will be even slower than this most recent layer, so there's a very good chance I'll pick this as my personal cue to gracefully duck out and move on to the next game.

 

 

END SPOILERS

And, that's that! I think that will probably be my last post on this topic, but Blue Prince is surprisingly good at fostering obsessions, so I may be wrong about that! 

History of Money

Continuing my eternal exploration of financial books, I recently finished reading "The History of Money: A Story of Humanity." I think a few people had recommended it to me. I enjoyed the book, but it also served as an indication of just how thoroughly I've been reading in this area. Some years ago every financial fact was new to me; now I find myself increasingly saying "Yes, I know that already... oh, that's another way of looking at it, I suppose... Hm, this seems a lot like this other thing..."

 

In contrast to some of the wonkier and more tightly focused books I've been reading lately, The History of Money is definitely aimed at popular audiences and doesn't presume any prior knowledge. It's a little bit like Investing In US Financial History in that it takes a chronological look through the history and evolution of economic topics, but this book spans roughly 5000 years in time and most of the globe in space, as opposed to just 250 years and one country. It doesn't go into huge depth on any particular incident, but I think its most valuable characteristic is for putting things in context. As one random example, I'd previously read William Bernstein's description of the importance of grain imports to the Athenian economy, so that wasn't a new topic for me; but in THoM you can see how that evolution fit in with the Lydian invention of metallic currency and Roman taxation of the provinces, as one stepping stone on a centuries-long process of evolving money.

This book is mostly a collection of stories, early on stories about nations, later on stories about individuals. I was most familiar with the content earlier in the book and just sort of glided over a lot of it. But as it gets into the 1700s or so I started learning a lot more. In particular, I don't think I've ever read about Talleyrand's role in the creation of French livres and the assignat system. It's very germane to this book, and the author David McWilliams talks through how the confiscation of church property gave the state a solid basis of value for the livre initially (a land-backed as opposed to metal-backed system), but after the revolution the radical government excessively printed paper money which led to hyperinflation. Again linking back to Bernstein, from "The Birth of Plenty" I was familiar with France's lack of faith in banking and how that caused a competitive disadvantage in their conflict with England, but THoM gives a gripping story about particular people and the sequence of events that may make this period more memorable for future recall, as well as directly illustrate the related financial ideas.

The book also kind of normalizes and contextualizes random things I've read or heard over the years. For example, I was already familiar with John Law, but I think that was from some on-off podcast or NPR program I had listened to, while other stories are from economic books I've read. So now I have a better understanding of how John Law fits in with Talleyrand and others.

When picking up this book, I had assumed that it was going to be focused on money in particular: what it is, how it's used, how it's valued, etc. It turned out to be a lot broader, and a lot of the book is about more general economic growth and development. To be fair you can't really write just about money unless you're purely talking about numismatics. Money exists for a reason, it is influenced by the economy and it influences the economy, so you can't easily separate the two. I think the book ends up being roughly half about money-as-money, and half about the economic (and political and social) world growing in a symbiotic relationship with money.

McWilliams mentions that similar developments were occurring simultaneously and independently in the Fertile Crescent, China and central America, but he focused on Western culture like I remember from World History class, with the story beginning in the Middle East and gradually migrating into the Levant, the Mediterranean, and eventually western Europe.

Like I said before, this book is aimed at a popular audience: the language tends to be pretty casual, and overall this doesn't feel as rigorous as other economic books I've read, for better and for worse. He seems to often note correlations and imply causation without demonstrating it. For example, with the decline of the Roman Empire in northwest Europe, metal coinage became very scarce and was replaced with a more primitive bartering and tithe system. He notes that small-denomination currency is required to support city living, and thinks that the decline in the physical supply of money contributed to the de-urbanization of this area. But I think you could just as easily argue the opposite: with the decline of great cities, there wasn't as much demand for small coinage, so people would be more likely to repurpose them for trinkets or jewelry or just reclaim the copper or silver metal from the coins and put them to practical use. Or the decline of cities and the decline of coinage could both be side-effects of other forces (raiders, plagues, etc.). It's interesting to note the correlation, but I wish he would more explicitly question the cause and effect instead of just generally implying that money was responsible for changes and not the result of those changes.

On page 191 he writes "Could Law, with his alleged accomplice Spencer, have encouraged not one but two revolutions?" His theory is that John Law helped inflate the South Sea Bubble, Charles Spencer and other highly placed British nobles corruptly benefited from the bubble, and outrage from the fallout was one of the precipitating factors of the American Revolution. But this is the kind of vague circumstantial suggestion that irritates me, implying something without proving it or thoroughly arguing it.

Or on page 204: "It could be said that suspect money - rather than suspect politics - greased the guillotine, in an environment of food shortages, denunciations and worthless currency." "It could be said that" is one of the classic weasel-word phrases. Is McWilliams saying that the Terror was primarily caused by an unstable currency? No, he's implying it without really standing behind it.

Overall this feels like a book designed for chatter at a dinner party. There are lots of interesting little anecdotes and factoids sprinkled throughout the book. He really loves giving the etymology behind various common words, which were almost all new to me and made me say "Huh!", but they also aren't really important. The stories tend to be sensational whenever possible, focusing on the wilder aspects of peoples' sexual scandals or rivalries or duels: he'd rather repeat some salacious hearsay than a boring fact. Sometimes these stories' connection to money feels extremely tenuous, but the stories do tend to be very entertaining.

The author is Irish and loves featuring Irishmen. I really liked that, it adds good color and personality to the book: I feel like I'm being told an entertaining story by a particular person with their own passions, not a dry account assembled by some committee.

I liked the book more the closer I got to the end, mostly because I learned more stuff that I hadn't known before. McWilliams is a professional economist with experience in both central banks and commercial banks and does know his stuff. This passage from page 266-267 may have been my favorite:

Gold has a fixed supply; if the economy grows, meaning the economy produces more things, the price of those things must fall in gold terms, because the supply of gold doesn't rise in response to the rise in the economy's output. Tethering a currency to gold is inherently deflationary. Falling prices sounds good, doesn't it? We are conditioned to think about prices in this way. It is good if the price of things you buy falls. But this cuts both ways. What if the things you sell, like your labor, also fall against gold? In a period of deflation, whose standard of living rises? The people with gold, of course. That means people in finance, people trading money or speculating on other commodities, those with access to money - the already wealthy. Currencies linked to gold will reward people with savings. Who in the late nineteenth century had savings? The same people who have always had savings: rich people, of course.

I really like the detail and cogent explanation there of how metal-based currency is inherently deflationary. I also really love the connection to the real-world class system. We aren't just discussing some abstract mathematical model, but a reality that has a social impact on our lives. He spends some productive time in this area, including describing how nations have realized after centuries of experience that it is much easier to recover from inflationary periods caused by fiat currencies than from deflationary recessions caused by gold-based or silver-based money.

While less wonky, I also really loved this passage from page 290:

Artists and entrepreneurs are blessed with similar outlooks; the type of minds that make art are also the type that create businesses. Sometimes artists don't see this similarity, schooled in an erroneous worldview that money is bad and poverty is noble, the artist expressive and free but the businessperson boring and conservative. In fact, both artist and entrepreneur see possibilities where others see limitations, bringing the previously unimagined into being. Both artist and entrepreneur have skin the the game, performing on the public stage of jeopardy. The creative - businessperson or artist - has strong opinions and is courageous enough to risk the ridicule of the crowd for their opinion to be heard. Success can only come after the effort has been made, making their entire existence inherently unstable. For both entrepreneur and artist, failure can be brutal and success is often a prelude to future disappointment. But they are driven by self-expression; it's in the DNA of these independent, sometimes unreasonable, often difficult sorts. Both the artist and the entrepreneur can suffocate when shackled by a boss, a wage, or an insurance premium. From a macroeconomy perspective, artists and entrepreneurs both create demand where no demand existed previously. The new products they offer create their own demand - and this is the key to all economic evolution.

The context for this passage is McWilliams' description of James Joyce's time living in Trieste, and how Joyce started a business to open Dublin's very first movie theater; we think of business and art as opposites, and I love how this passage draws them together. I think it's overstated: he uses "entrepreneur" and "businessperson" interchangeably, I think the argument applies to the former but not the latter. But the idea that "creation" is the main thing really resonates with me, as opposed to expanding or reproducing some existing thing.

This kind of reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's observation that entrepreneurs in particular and successful people in general tend to be more optimistic than the general population, and that optimism is not founded on a rational basis but can influence events towards a good outcome. Passion and a reckless risk-taking attitude can be ingredients for success in starting businesses and creating new art.

And, one last random quibble: on page 358 he writes: "When you buy the shares of a company, the understanding is that your money goes to the company and might be used to buy equipment or finance the expansion into a new market, from which you hope to profit." I don't think that's true. When you buy shares in, say, Microsoft, none of that money goes to Microsoft or can be used by it for anything. Your money just goes to the previous owner of those shares. What you are buying is the right to a portion of the future earnings of that company. (The one case where your money would actually go to the company is in an IPO event, but when is the last time you or anybody you knew bought shares in an IPO?) McWilliams' description here is closer to purchasing a bond issued by the company, in which case your money is going to the company and can be used for expansion; you aren't participating in the share of that additional profit, though, you are only collecting the interest due to you for the loan. 

The book ends with a "further reading" section, I haven't read any of those books before and a lot of them sound really interesting. I get the impressions at least some of those are more rigorous scholarly books, so they may be less readable but more satisfying to me.

So, yeah! I had slightly mixed feelings about this book. I think that for general education and entertaining economic stories it is excellent; for people like me who have already spent way too much time reading about financial topics it has value as a high-level contextualization of the broad sweep of economic and monetary development on planet Earth, which necessarily involved retreading some familiar ground but doing so in a pretty breezable and readable, though sometimes overly light, way.