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A streak of bad birthdays finally broke yesterday, despite the best efforts of the MBTA and an underwhelming food truck festival in the South End. The Red Line wasn’t running between Kendall and Park, but nobody bothered to tell MK and me as we climbed aboard the train parked at the inbound platform. There are few things more disconcerting than having the T suddenly lurch in the wrong direction, leaving you wondering whether or not something has gone horribly awry and you are at that very moment in the path of another train hurtling along the same track.

So our friends came and rescued us, but by the time we got to the festival, the bare handful of food trucks were running low on everything you might want. There was nearly a riot when people who had been waiting for an hour for ribs were told that there was nothing left but cornbread.

Still, things can only be so bad when it’s a beautiful summer’s day and you’re out with friends. And they’re bound to get better when you all come home for an evening of drinks, cake, and games. Jason taught us mahjong, a game at which I am complete crap but enjoy very much, before we rounded out the evening playing one of my favorite games: Agricola.

I have argued before that Agricola is an RTS in turn-based strategy’s clothing. Each round, you can only perform as many actions as your farm has family members, and you can only perform an action if its space on the board is currently unoccupied. So even though you play sequentially, you still have to anticipate how the other players will change the board during their turn, while sparing a thought for the harvest round, during which you must ensure your family has enough food.

I eked out an extremely narrow victory over MK, who for once went a Polyface Farms direction rather than playing like Monsanto. I ran a more aggressive, higher-risk game than usual, probably because I’ve been playing so much Starcrat. I basically took a big risk on being able to feed my family in exchange for expanding early. Having an extra action each turn so early in the game meant that I could rapidly expand and diversify the farm.

Anyway, it was a vastly improved birthday over last year’s food-poisoning and the previous year’s heatwave-induced depression and drunkenness at the apartment on Linnaean.

Beyond that, there is the undeniable fact that life is simply better now than it was a year ago, or two years ago. Previous birthdays here in Cambridge have been lonely affairs, because everyone in my life besides MK was a thousand miles away. But in my 27th year, I finally started living my life here rather than passing time. I became friends with Troy, who then brought me aboard Three Moves Ahead and busted me out of the Freelance Isolation Chamber. PAX East came to town, and I finally started meeting colleagues and kindred spirits. Drew, Bryan, and Jason became invaluable local comrades. Julian brought me into the Gamers With Jobs circle, where it turns out I had a bunch of friends I simply had not met. This year, I feel confident that I’m finally figuring out how to work this.

Having a review assignment go spectacularly wrong feels a bit like being John Dortmunder. Dortmunder was the protagonist of Donald Westlake’s comic novels, a brilliant but hopelessly unlucky professional thief who always had the best plans for pulling down a huge score, but who always watched it all go wrong in slow-motion tragi-comedy. While the general arc of the stories was formulaic, the adventures themselves were not, and it was always a joy to watch the new and horrific ways it could all go wrong. But of course, to Dortmunder it was all deadly serious.

I went through a similar thing with this last review. I thought I’d identified a good job, something that would be quick and rewarding, and I sold a a few people on the idea. Then, once I got to work on the assignment, it started to turn on me. In the meantime, other work was sliding away from me because I was furiously trying to extricate myself from the debacle. Now I’ve managed to pull off my daring escape, and the review will go up sometime in the near future, but in the meantime it’s left me in some deep trouble with other assignments.

Still, there is a part of me that feels suffused with virtue. I knew, within an hour of starting my first game, that this game was in trouble. Not too much longer, I knew it was nothing I could ever enjoy or recommend. But I didn’t entirely understand why, which meant I hadn’t yet completed the review process. Anyone can tell you what he likes or doesn’t, but that reaction won’t help anyone unless the reviewer can explain where he’s coming from and why he had the reactions he did. So I continued my grim death-march toward understanding.

I suspect it’s probably a good thing to, every once in awhile, find yourself locked in a room with a bad game. Not because it helps us keep other games in perspective, but because it underlines the bromides and truisms that critics and designers like to throw around. Meier’s “series of interesting decisions” description of a game means a hell of a lot more once you’ve played a game that’s a series of pointless, illusory decisions. It’s easy to wonder why a game doesn’t have certain features that might make it more historically accurate or interesting, until you see how verisimilitude unbound from design discipline can send an entire game cartwheeling into an abyss of incoherence.

Still, it came at a cost. It’s Wednesday morning and I still feel like I’m shaking off a bender. There are sources that must be harassed, editors that must be appeased, stories that must be written, and games that must be played. And there’s not enough time for any of it.