February | 2016 | Tales of software craftsmanship

Tales of software craftsmanship

Calamares 2.0 is out

Feb 24, 2016 Posted by Teo Blog, KDE 6 comments

The Calamares team is proud to announce the immediate availability of Calamares 2.0, a major release that brings countless new features and improvements over the 1.1 series. Calamares is a distribution-independent system installer. After almost five months of intense development since the last maintenance release, Calamares 2.0 is a user ready product.

Highlights of this release include:

thoroughly rewritten partitioning feature, now based on KPMcore (the same library used by KDE Partition Manager);
overhauled modules system, allowing for much more flexibility in configuring and arranging views and jobs;
support for post-install mode, which turns Calamares into a first run configuration tool;
improvements in many modules, including locale, bootloader and displaymanager.

Get it from our release announcement or find it soon as the system installer in one of our downstreams.

Collapsible D: The Final Minutes of the Titanic is a thematic board game in which the players (3-6 of them) try to save the lives of passengers on the infamous sinking ship. Each saved passenger grants victory points, but reaching the lifeboats on the top deck isn't easy, especially for a third class passenger who starts deep inside the ship.
The game takes its name after the RMS Titanic Collapsible Boat D, the last lifeboat to be successfully launched from the ship with about 25 passengers on board. At that time, there were still 1500 people on the Titanic.
The events of Collapsible D unfold over 16 turns, which accurately model the final hours of the Titanic. The game is impressively well researched, and the passenger cards come with actual names and photographs of survivors (we got to rescue Frederick Maxfield Hoyt and Jane Anne Hoyt, husband and wife).
In-game lifeboats are launched at the same times as they were on the real Titanic, so the player has to get their passengers to the right boat at the right time to even have a shot at boarding.
The way to the top deck is hindered by panicked mobs and the rising water level, gradually spilling over the bulkheads, and even if a passenger manages to reach the top deck, boarding a lifeboat is a difficult endeavor, especially if he happens to be a third class male.
A variety of bonuses can be found throughout the ship to increase a passenger's chances of boarding a lifeboat, including cash, a gun and an infant.
Collapsible D is a very suspenseful and engaging game, it is one of those board games one plays in order to experience a story rather than for strategic depth. With a simple mechanic, outstanding historical accuracy and an incredibly deep theme (no pun intended), this is one of my all-time favorites, and is sure to be enjoyed even by players without specific interest in history. -- 1 year ago
In Cyclades, players compete against each other for the favor of the gods. The Cyclades (Κυκλάδες) are a Greek island group in the Aegean sea, named that way because they surround the sacred island of Delos, birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, meeting place of the Delian League and once a busy nexus of culture and commerce.
The Cyclades board game comes with a pantheon of five major gods. At the start of each turn all players bid for their favor in an auction, and each god bestows his or her own unique bonuses. Players can also hire mythical beasts, such as Polyphemus, Medusa or Pegasus to unleash against their foes.
The goal of the game is to be the first to build two cities on your islands, while preventing your opponents from doing the same through warfare and resource domination.
Cyclades is a fairly quick game. I've found the bidding wars for the gods somewhat limiting, because the gods are effectively the main resource, and their scarcity is what creates tension. In order to win, a player should ideally win the auction for every god at least once if not twice, and this is not easy when everybody else is trying to do the same thing. Cyclades is beautifully designed and easy to learn, and while there are games I like more, it's not hard to see why this one is a sure crowd pleaser. -- 1 year ago
Genji is a card game of Japanese Tanka poetry. Players take the role of gentlemen trying to impress the ladies of the Japanese imperial court with their poems.
A poem is constructed by laying down two cards, a beginning and an ending. Each half-poem has a topic and is related to a season, and each lady has her own preferences. The game is played for 4 seasons (4 trips around the 12 ladies), and for every season there's a new topic in fashion.
By comparing a poem with a given lady's preferences and the current season and fashion, each poem can be rated as more or less beautiful. A player can also destroy another player's poem, this is achieved by wooing the lady with a more beautiful beginning or ending.
Genji can be played from 2 to 6 players, and it seems to work well with groups of all sizes. It's a fun and engaging game without being excessively demanding as far as time or table space is concerned. With its unique mechanic and gorgeous theme, this one is sure to get a lot of play time. -- 2 years ago