Project L
Rick: Hey Pete, what do you say I take the lead on the lead-in this time?
Pete: It sounds like you’ve already started. Don’t trip on your own flow.
Rick: Good point. What do you know about Tetris?
Pete: I know that the programmer and designer of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov, also invented Texas Hold 'em Poker.
Rick: Oh, wow. That’s–that can’t possibly be true. Is it?
Pete: You gonna look it up and let me take over, or are you gonna go with it?
Rick: Wow. It seems like you’re trying to make me fail.
Pete: Dude, you need to understand that 50% of this game is talking past the other person. You have much to learn.
Rick: Uh, yes. Okay. Right. So, Tetris. What else do you know about Tetris?
Pete: I know that as a young kid I was constantly trying to beat my sister’s high score.
Rick: Cool. Okay, so there is this new game called Project L that—
Pete: And because I was three years younger than her, I was not nearly as good at the game. I had to constantly sneak down onto the computer to get some extra time to play to try and get on the high scoreboard.
Rick: Right, so Project L. It’s a puzzle game that uses colored plastic Tetris-shaped pieces to—
Pete: The high scoreboard only had 10 slots, and my sister was always playing the game and had a later bedtime than me, so she could stay up after I was in bed to practice, practice, practice, and she had a stupid avatar name: “Cinnamon.”
Rick: So what you’re gonna do in Project L, is you’re gonna take your pieces, and—
Pete: What the hell kind of name is that? “Cinnamon.” That’s all I would see. When I woke up every morning. A new wiped scoreboard of “Cinnamon,” “Cinnamon,” “Cinnamon,” “Cinnamon,” “Cinnamon,” “Cinnamon,” “Cinnamon,” “Cinnamon,” “Cinnamon,” “Cinnamon.” And all of my “GameMasters” completely wiped off the board. I felt like a game loser, not a game master.
Rick: Your avatar was “GameMaster?” No wonder you were a loser.
Pete: You’re losing focus.
Rick: Right, so you can actually play Project L solo or with other people, and there’s no scoreboard. Uh, except for the fact that the game is based on victory points.
Pete: All I could do was uninstall and then reinstall the entire program to wipe the scoreboard. But that was difficult because that was in the back in the day of 3.5 inch floppies, and after I pulled that off a couple times, our parents hid disks from me.
Rick: So you put out all the pieces and try and create puzzles to get points—
Pete: Finally, I tried a different hack out of spite: I hid the trashcan application and replaced it with a folder disguised to look like the trashcan icon. But I got in trouble for that hack even though my parents were hackers in the 70s.
Rick: So there are a number of ways to play—
Pete: I mean, talk about hypocrisy, righ—
Rick: DUDE!!! I’m trying to talk about our unboxing of Project L (2020) designed by Michal Mikeš, Jan Soukal, and Adam Spanel and published by Boardcubator, which we’ve already written a full review for.
Pete: Oh. Well that’s true. Carry on.
Rick: Just do the unboxing yourself. Honestly, I can’t work under these conditions. You do the lead-in from now on.
Pete: Well, if you insist. Thanks!
