Hello all and welcome to the latest edition of Retrograde Online. In this post I detail how I am once again pushing back against the feelings of boredom and restlessness and trying to reverse some of the entropy of the universe.

I recently bought Cuba Libre and was immediately into the complexity of it. I have never played a COIN¹ game before, and Cuba Libre was apparently the best one to get started with learning the rules.

I was immediately overwhelmed with running the AI Bots on my solo playthrough, even after walked through the two tutorials that come with the game’s playbook.

The AI’s movement choices are determined by a pretty intimidating flow-chart, with lots of little things to keep track of. Move markers there, increase resources here, flip tokens here, remove pieces here etc.

Naturally I thought how great it would be if I could just be told what pieces to move about on the board for the bots, rather than painstakingly trawling through a flowchart multiple times a round. I would spend more time reading the sheets than I would playing the actual game.

But that doesn’t exist, as far as I am aware, and so what is a person to do.? That’s right, make your own one!²

And so, once again, I am attempting to make an app thing for myself and others to use. I am writing it in Blazor after burning myself with React last year³, where I spent more time trying to learn the library than I did making progress on the game, and getting super bored.

So here’s the thing: Cuba Libre Automata.

It looks extremely lame right now as I am absolutely not a front-end developer. It is also going to be designed for mobiles, as I imagine most people will have access to their phones while playing, and maybe less so a laptop.⁴

Well anyway, that’s it for now. I’ll be trying to make this automata app over the next few weeks until I’m either done, bored, or failed.

I am also planning on doing some more film reviews as I was fairly happy with my Romulus one so I’ve acquired the X-Men films from the last 25 years and will make a start on those.

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12th Feb 2025