Space-Cast! #61. Perished & Published
Wiñay Kawsay isn’t your usual board game about history. For one thing, it’s actually about history — not just a historical topic, but the craft of history, from the biases and egos of historians to the damage done to archaeological sites whenever artifacts are removed from the soil. Today, we’re joined by Alison Collins to discuss the making of her game, what history can and should be, and what it’s like to explore Machu Picchu.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Abstracts Get Political: COINTELPRO
I don’t often receive boxes of bullets in the mail. Or even boxes of bullet casings. Because COINTELPRO: The Assassination of Fred Hampton doesn’t actually include bullets, only the spent brass that would normally hold the projectiles. When the game arrived, I hefted the entire handful. Ten casings, nine millimeter, five different manufacturers. Primers burnt. Cordite faint but noticeable.
Fred Hampton was shot four times. Twice in the initial barrage from outside the apartment where he slept, possibly drugged by his head of security and FBI informant William O’Neal; twice more at close range after officers realized he was still alive. He was the deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party of Illinois, but the crime that had drawn the FBI’s attention wasn’t any particular clash between the Black Panthers and the police, nor even the Rainbow Coalition he had formed with poor white Southerners and Puerto Ricans. No, it was the party’s Free Breakfast Program for neighborhood kids that had drawn J. Edgar Hoover’s ire.
Grin Evil? Grin Good!
Stop whatever you’re doing. Just stop. I need to tell you about one of the weirdest, wildest, and most interesting board games I’ve played all year. Scratch that. Ever. That’s right. Ever.
This is Grinivil. It was designed, illustrated, and published by Rudy Priecinsky. It’s tempting to lob a jab in there — “I can tell!” hardy har — especially once you get a look at the scattershot rulebook, the potato-headed character portraits, the mishmashed card layouts, the box itself… okay, as soon as you get a look at pretty much anything it has to offer.
But don’t make the easy joke. Set that aside. Because Grinivil is a gift from a parallel universe where Eurogames are never wrung dry through market testing and impersonal development, but instead allowed to blossom into bespoke artifacts that are equally uncanny and compelling and inventive. This is Grinivil. It’s breathtaking.
To Boldly Shuffle
Ah, Captain’s Chair. I’ve already logged my appreciation of Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi’s remapping of Imperium into the Star Trek universe. Like that series, now sadly defunct thanks to the shuttering of the board-gaming side of Osprey Games, this is an information-dense deck-builder that absolutely revels in its moreishness. Quite literally. It features more icons, more decks, and more chrome-laden rules per cubic micron than any other deck-builder I can recall.
Now there’s a second-wave box, To Boldly Go. If you’ve played the original, you know what to expect. Seriously, newcomers can just read my previous review.
Things Had It Coming
When she isn’t pretending to be a dragon, my seven-year-old pretends to be a cat. “Mrrrowrrr,” she says when she pounces on me in bed in the morning. “Raawwwrrr,” she purrs when it’s time for her to line up for second grade. “Grrrrrr,” she rumbles at bedtime, her bones suddenly transforming to jelly. If certain “news” articles were to be believed, we’d have a litter box in the bathroom.
So, as a surprise, I picked up Cats Knocking Things Off Ledges. Designed by Sen-Foong Lim and David Killing, it’s as descriptive a game as they come. My seven-year-old treats it as a tornado simulator.
Bewitchments, Buckets, Bugs
Imagine me in a real pickle sandwich. The middle of preview season (ho ho ho), and suddenly I come down with not one illness, but two. Something chronic, something acute. And me with a whole stack of board games to write about. Some of them time-sensitive, counting down the minutes on crowdfunding platforms as we speak.
What’s an old man to do? Write about all three in a single splash, naturally.
In other words, here are three very different tabletop titles, each worth a wink of your time. Come on in. Let me tell you about them. Briskly, before I’m back to bed.
Given the Land If They Lived Righteously
I’ve never been to Machu Picchu, but it was the site that demonstrated to me at an uncomfortably young age that history wasn’t just one thing but many, and that those many things were subject to a wide range of interpretations. Even, possibly, that they might end friendships.
Which is appropriate, because that’s exactly what Wiñay Kawsay, designed by Alison Collins, is all about.
Cumulostratic Cruise
On not-so-rare occasions, I get to play board games before they’re fully polished. There’s something about seeing a game struggle through its growing pains, watching its knobbly limbs grow lithe and athletic, its protrusions smooth and frictionless, that recalls editing a novel for publication or appraising frames for the final cut. Most of the time, this process is a hard one. “Murder your darlings,” Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch said of an author’s finest phrases. Cut them down to size. That’s what it takes to make something great.
Only I’m not convinced we don’t sometimes murder a little too liberally. Sometimes I’ll play a finished game only to discover that the essential soul that made its earlier incarnation worth experiencing has been killed along with the wobbly iconography and degenerative action states. Somewhere in the process, development has sanded down the knobs and protrusions — and left little more than a burnished stick. Good for a walk, perhaps, but not especially notable.
Which brings us to Braided Skies, created by Dan Germain and Stonemaier Games.
A Place for All My Fussy Guests
It’s almost too obvious to state aloud, but there’s a lot to be said for the games we actually play. Case in point, Enchanted Ivy, the solitaire game by Sarah Joshua. When I sat down this morning to begin writing this review, I went through the usual steps. Picking and editing the images. Uploading the template and arranging everything into logical order. Glancing through a few notes.
But then I thought to myself, maybe I don’t understand this game yet. Even though I’ve played it well over thirty times. One more session. In endless mode with randomized guests. Just one extra play to make sure I know what I’m talking about.
And then, with such inevitability that I’m not sure why I ever thought differently, I played it twice. That’s Enchanted Ivy for you.
Tantrums in the Sandbox
Of the handful of things I appreciate about Pax Playground, the most significant is the way it reminds me of recess. Its very existence is playful — this is, after all, a Pax game that lasts twenty minutes and bucks tradition by refusing to touch history with a ten-foot pole, let alone compose loopy footnotes about it.
More importantly, David Masnato, who previously did the art for Matilda Simonsson’s Turncoats and Pax Penning, uses Pax Playground to reproduce the anxieties of childhood. Like a child, you step into the game buoyed by possibility — and weighted down by it. As a game about play, it’s playful; as a game about becoming yourself, it’s as fretful as a kid trying to decide which sweet to pick out at the store.
