FOR RENT

2 & 4 Bedroom Apartments
$1400‑$2800 plus utilities.
Tenants pay electric to DTE
Showings scheduled M‑F 10‑3
w/ 24 hour notice required
1015 Packard
734‑996‑1991

5 & 6 Bedroom Apartments
1014 Vaughn
$3000 ‑ $3600 plus utilities
Showings scheduled M‑F 10‑3
w/ 24 hour notice required
734‑996‑1991

 ARBOR PROPERTIES 
Award‑Winning Rentals in 
Kerrytown 
Central Campus, Old West 
Side, Burns Park. Now Renting for 
2018. 
734‑649‑8637 | www.arborprops.com 

FALL 2018 HOUSES
# Beds Location Rent
 5 1016 S. Forest $3600
 4 827 Brookwood $2900
 4 852 Brookwood $2900
 4 1210 Cambridge $2900
Tenants pay all utilities.
Showings scheduled M‑F 10‑3 
w/ 24 hr notice required
734‑996‑1991

LARGE 3 BDRM. at 119 E 
Liberty. All three rooms have sky 
light. Washer and dryer, central air. 
Heart of Ann Arbor, 7 min. walk to 
UM. One year lease. Avail 
able NOW. 
$2400 per month, $800 per person 
(room for three people). No park 
ing. 
Please call 734‑769‑8555.

TWO BDRM APT. 325 E Liberty 
good location for two people. Apt 
above Per 
sian House 5 min. walk to 
UM. Free heat, washer/dryer, shared 
internet. Available NOW. One year 
lease. $1600 per month. 734‑769‑8555 
or 734—662‑0805.

SERVICES

STUDENT SUMMER STORAGE 
Specials‑ Indoor, Clean, Safe and 
closest to Campus. Reserve online 
at annar 
borstorage.com or call 
734‑663‑0690 to 
day as spaces are 
filling fast!

ACROSS
1 Film director’s
honor
6 Rich, dusty soil
11 Greeting at a dog
park
14 100 kopecks
15 Common film
festival film
16 Loving murmur
17 Phoenix-based
hotel chain (and
see circles)
19 Mac platform
20 Crankcase
reservoir
21 Small bouquet
23 “Help!” at sea
26 Filing tool
27 Threadbare
28 Place for prayer
30 Collars
33 __ the hills
34 Web unit
36 Here, in 
Spanish
37 Agrees quietly
38 Skater Sasha or
comic Sacha
Baron
39 Short
40 Indianapolis
NFLer
41 Veggie burger
veggies
42 Accra is its
capital
43 Struggled to
achieve
45 Yellowstone
attraction
46 Brewski
47 With 31-Down,
“Proud Mary”
singer
49 Nine and five, in
nine-to-five:
Abbr.
50 Cast a ballot
52 Sources of
fragrant wood
54 Make a mistake
55 Old family recipe
(and see circles)
60 Salty body
61 “Carmen,” e.g.
62 Not yet realized
63 Peak
64 Ten-time 
French Open
winner
65 Sounds from a
belfry

DOWN
1 Mercury or Mars
2 Alphabet Series
novelist Grafton
3 “Young Sheldon”
network
4 Kind of clarinet
5 Does some
electrical work
6 Speech
therapist’s
concerns
7 Ready to pour
8 Genesis garden
9 Ringo Starr’s title
10 Motion detector,
e.g.
11 Produce served
in the fall (and
see circles)
12 Civil rights hero
Parks
13 Sly
18 Airline to Tel Aviv
22 Tediously
moralistic
23 One carrying a
torch?
24 “Hey, check it
out!”
25 Feature of some
penny loafers
(and see circles)
27 Small, chirpy bird

29 Incurring late fees
30 Forever
31 See 47-Across
32 Indian lutes
34 “Always be a __,
even in prose”:
Baudelaire
35 Finder’s cry
38 Computer
“brains,” briefly
42 Gets ready (for)
44 Heavily favored
45 Pesky flier

47 __ cotta
48 Exemplary
50 Garment for brisk
days
51 Two-toned snack
52 Sent a dupe to
53 Reasonable
56 Org. that monitors
wetlands
57 Actress Thurman
58 Cartoon sheet
59 Purported UFO
crew

By John Guzzetta
©2018 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
04/11/18

04/11/18

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

RELEASE DATE– Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

Classifieds

Call: #734-418-4115
Email: dailydisplay@gmail.com

P/T COMPUTER PROGRAMMER 
with strong math background and 
familiar 
ity with MATLAB required. 
Experience with C++ desirable.
Individual will need to gain 
knowledge of immunology. Salary 
commensurate w/ exp. Contact: 
Dr Stephanie Evans: 
vansst@umich.edu

HELP WANTED

HEY.

YOU'RE 
DOING GREAT 
AND WE 
know you 
can do it. 

Don't give up!

I’ve always liked board games. 
For as long as I can remember I’ve 
played Monopoly with my dad and 
Scrabble with my grandpa. My 
brother and I used to play round 
after round of Battleship, Sorry! 
and Stratego. Chess had a strong 
place in my life for a while, until 
I cost my middle school Chess 
team the state championship and 
Chess and I more or less parted 
ways. High school introduced 
me to my first true board game 
love, Settlers of Catan, which still 
plays 
a 
prominent 
role in game nights 
all these years later. 
College has brought 
about a renaissance 
in my board game 
playing, with party 
games and Catan itself 
seemingly becoming 
more prevalent across 
campus by the day. 
Over the course of 
the past two years 
I 
have 
surrounded 
myself with equally 
competitive 
mad 
men who take no 
greater pleasure than watching 
the terrible misery of a poor soul 
who loses at a game made out 
of cardboard and plastic. But in 
our endless quest to achieve total 
domination over each other in 
games of skill and chance, one 
question has slowly emerged, 
“What value is there in winning a 
game of luck?”
On first glance the value would 
seem obvious. It’s clear that in any 
contest, regardless of the amount 
of skill involved, one would 
always prefer to win than to lose. 
Certainly that is the case, but 
when your win is judged against 
the wins of others, do you not 
want your win to stand above the 
rest, in the eternal glory of having 
been truly earned? If you win a 
coin flip, did you really “win” if 
you had no control over the events 
that led to your “victory?” Would 
it really be worth bragging about a 
game of rock, paper, scissors? The 
answer is no, and therein lies the 
board game conundrum.
Take, for example, the card 
game known as Coup. It’s a simple 
game of bluffing, in which players 
hold two of a possible six cards 
at any given time, granting them 
access to two of a possible six 
abilities. The twist is that there 
is no penalty for using an ability 
you don’t actually have, unless of 
course an opponent calls you out 
on your bluff and you lose one of 
your two cards (or the game if you 
only have one card left). At first my 
friend group believed this game 
was mostly skill-less, and it was 
just random chance if you called 
someone else out on their bluffing. 
Soon however we began to develop 
strategies, as we noticed patterns 
in each others games and realized 
some cards were better to end up 
with at the end of the game than 
others. Over time these strategies 
grew even deeper as we began to 
bluff, double bluff and triple bluff 
our way into victory. Is that other 
guy doing the thing I think he’s 
doing? Does he know I think he’s 
doing it? Does that mean he’s not 
going to do it because he thinks I 
think he will do it? What does that 
mean? Does it mean anything? 
Coup eventually became a battle 
of the wits, like the famous poison 
scene in “The Princess Bride.” 
Once you’ve gone down the rabbit 
hole of bluffing strategy and come 
out the other side you arrive back 
at the same place you began. If 
every move ever made is being 
made in an attempt to throw the 
other players off the scent, then 
no strategy can truly be formed 
because every strategy is based 
upon players playing rationally, 
which they wouldn’t be inclined 
to do for fear of giving away what 
cards they have. And so the game 
is one of chance. And therefore it 
involves no skill. So whoever wins 
has no ability to use their victory 
as proof that they are better than 
everyone else, which is one of the 
main reasons people like to win. 
Winning in essence becomes 
meaningless.
We faced a similar predicament 
with Catan. What at first appeared 

to be a mostly skill-based game of 
trading and building, with some 
luck involved (the roll of the 
dice), eventually became mired 
in arguments over whether or not 
the inherent luck of dice-rolling 
superseded any level of social 
interaction that would otherwise 
seem to be the crux of the game. 
Winners again found themselves 
besieged by the notion that they 
only won because they rolled four 
threes in a row, which everyone 
knows is less than probable. It 
seemed we had sucked 
the fun out of board 
games. 
Winning 
had been rendered 
utterly 
pointless. 
No longer could one 
find any satisfaction 
in 
defeating 
one’s 
friends.
It seemed there was 
only one solution. Two 
weeks ago one of my 
friends and I entered 
Vault of Midnight, the 
game and comic store 
located on Main St., 
and asked an employee 
to direct us to the game that 
involved “the most skill, the least 
luck.” She sold us a game called 
“Century: Spice Road.” At first, 
we thought we had found our holy 
grail at last. The game was devoid 
of dice and although it featured the 
drawing of cards, it was unclear 
if there was much of a difference 
between the cards that could be 
drawn. The game consisted of 
exchanging various colored cubes 
until one had the right number of 
cubes to unlock “points” cards, 
which gave one a certain number 
of points. Certainly, the game was 
mostly strategy. Getting your cube 
exchange rates correctly required 
thinking many turns ahead and 
there was almost no chance of 

someone messing up your game 
by torpedoing you or ganging up 
on you with other players. At last 
we had found a game without 
any luck. In doing so, we had also 
found a game without any fun. 
It turns out that luck is actually 
pretty synonymous with thrill. 
It’s the thrill of rolling the dice, 
the thrill of the QB throwing up 
a deep pass, of letting the hands 
of fate guide the ball, the roll, 
the flip of the river. Take that 
away, and take away the need 
to interact with other players 
during a game, and you no longer 
have a game, but a math problem 
that four people are attempting 
to solve simultaneously. As my 
brother so succinctly declared 
upon playing Century for fewer 
than five minutes, “It’s like four 
people playing solitaire at once.” 
The day after this proclamation 
we returned to Catan. We played 
a few rounds of Coup. That old 
thrill has returned, regardless of 
whether or not any one of us is 
truly more skilled at the games 
than another. In the end, so long 
as you are enjoying yourself, it 
doesn’t really matter if you win. 
At least, that’s what I like to tell 
myself when I lose. Don’t get me 
started on Euchre.

Falling into the
deep board game 
rabbit hole

ENTERTAINMENT COLUMN

IAN 
HARRIS

FILM REVIEW
‘A Quiet Place’ is acutely terrifying

John Krasinski’s (“The Hollars”) 
“A Quiet Place” explores a world 
where noise is the most dangerous 
element of all, where even a small 
cough can invite the deadly wrath 
of sound-seeking creatures, and 
where humans must completely 
adapt their way of life in order to stay 
hidden in plain sight. Krasinski’s 
film, which he co-wrote, directed 
and starred in, is an extremely 
inventive and acutely terrifying 
foray into the tensions between 
silence and sound, survival and 
sacrifice. “A Quiet Place” is intensely 
stressful and wholly engrossing; 
Krasinski’s manipulation of the 
rules and the stakes of his quakingly 
silent world makes for something 
overwhelming and nerve-jangling 
and brilliant.
“A Quiet Place” is a fascinating 
cross between a survival narrative 
and a horror film. The movie 
centers around the Abbott family, 
led by Lee (Krasinski) and Evelyn 
(Emily Blunt, “The Girl on the 
Train”), who have completely 
adapted every aspect of their 
way of life to survive. The most 
impressive parts of the film are 
these adaptations — Krasinski 
employs a clever understanding 
of light, textures and materials to 
make daily life and communication 
possible. From feeling Monopoly 
game pieces to pathways lined with 
cornmeal, Krasinski shows a firm 
grasp on the details and nuances 
of a world where every sound must 
be muffled. Watching this family 
go about their daily routine is just 
as engrossing as the moments of 
bloody horror, because every detail 
is so meticulously thought out and 
creative. 
Along with its moments of 
paralyzing fear, “A Quiet Place” 
weaves a moving emotional arc 
about family, love and sacrifice. 
With almost no dialogue, the film 
relies heavily on close-up shots 
to express emotion and illustrate 
the ways in which this family is 

strained and bonded. The film is 
anchored by the genuine chemistry 
between Krasinski and Blunt, 
a married couple off-screen as 
well, who believably will give 
anything to protect their children. 
Their daughter Regan (Millicent 
Simmonds, 
“Wonderstruck”), 
more vulnerable to the monsters 

because of her deafness, struggles 
against the coddling of her parents 
while trying to prove her ability 
to take care of herself. She also 
holds herself responsible for the 
accidental tragedy that happened 
on a scavenging trip the year 
before. 
Simmonds 
delivers 
a 
great performance rooted in her 
actual disability that works as the 
emotional fulcrum of the film. “A 
Quiet Place” is successful for its 
portrayal of a loving family despite 
impossible odds and bone-chilling 
horrors. 
Communication is a central 
theme in the film. Because of Regan’s 
deafness, the family already speaks 

fluent sign language. “A Quite 
Place” reverses the stereotypical 
marginalization of deafness by 
showcasing sign language as a 
vital tool for communication and 
survival in a silent world. In this 
way, the film works as a piece of 
speculative fiction that reimagines 
an impairment as an enhancement.
Above all, Emily Blunt is the 
sensational focal point of this film. 
Her character is intricately layered 
and expertly performed — she is 
the capable matriarch, tenacious 
in survival, but committed to 
the impossible task of bringing 
new life into this anarchic world. 
Blunt shoulders the weight of her 
character with grace and strength, 
proving once again her place in the 
Hollywood elite as a true movie 
star. She endures an endless series 
of horrors in this movie, always 
managing to center the story on 
family and perseverance over 
superficial jump-scares.
“A Quiet Place” is a horror movie 
unlike any other, an imaginative 
and thrilling deep-dive into the 
limitless ways humans can adapt 
and exist in severely limiting 
conditions. The film is unconcerned 
with 
the 
complications 
of 
a 
monster-ridden world at large, and 

instead focuses successfully on 
the dynamics of a single family’s 
struggle to connect and understand 

one another. It is a must-see that 
adds a new dimension to the genre 
of horror.

SYDNEY COHEN
Daily Arts Writer

PARAMOUNT

“A Quiet Place”

Paramount Pictures

Rave and Quality 16

Krasinski’s 

manipulation 

of the rules and 

the stakes of his 

quakingly silent 

world makes 

for something 

overwhelming 

and nerve-

jangling and 

brilliant

 In our endless 

quest to achieve 

total domination 

over each other 

in games of skill 

and chance, one 

question has 

slowly emerged, 

“What value is 

there in winning a 

game of luck?”

6A — Wednesday, April 11, 2018
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

