Smothering Gods
There’s nothing out there quite like Ryan Laukat’s Sleeping Gods. Even after a mediocre sidequel, the repackaged freebie Primeval Peril, this is one of the few fantasy universes I’m eager to dive into, a testament to Laukat’s writing, illustrations, and imagination. Where most board games of its ilk would make me groan at the prospect of another flipped page, another half-baked snippet of dialogue, another skill check (brrrr), Laukat produces worlds that drive me compulsively forward.
Which is why I’m so very happy to report that Distant Skies, the first full-length followup to the 2021 original, is everything the first game was and more.
Galactic Relapse
When it comes to board games, it isn’t always easy to tell the difference between a development and a regression. Take Galactic Renaissance, Christian Martinez’s followup to his supernal war-and-politics game Inis. On the surface, it covers much the same ground as that previous title, full of aggressive peacetimes, ill-advised conflicts that leave one poorer even in victory, and intersecting interests that are too testy to call alliances. Even the game’s geography, those far-flung planets only connected via warpgates, the way their abilities are contested and claimed, calls to mind the island terrain of its predecessor.
But this is no Inis. Despite riffing on many of the same ideas, Galactic Renaissance is a pockmarked experience, uneven in its best moments and frustrating and over-long the rest of the time. At its worst, it feels like a half-completed prototype for its predecessor.
Hot Rook on Rook Action
Taiki Shinzawa is a well-known figure in the realm of Japanese trick-takers. He’s responsible for a thick catalog of formidable offerings, including American Bookshop, Inflation! and Charms, Maskmen, 9 Lives, and one of my absolute favorites, Ghosts of Christmas.
Tower Chess is not a trick-taking game. It’s a varietal of chess — bet you couldn’t see that one coming — and it’s eminently agreeable.
Chewing the Scenery
There’s no hiding it: Earthborne Rangers feels like a gigantic leap forward for a particular niche of card game, a quiet revolution of contextualization and setting that effectively relegates its predecessors to the nursing home. Those predecessors, adventure card titles defined by the release model of Fantasy Flight Games — The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game and Arkham Horror: The Card Game, to name the most durable examples — have been defrocked, shown to possess creaking knees and prosthetic hips.
But while it would be possible to write a thousand words bemoaning the business model that trickled out those games one expansion pack at a time, it’s far more interesting to highlight what Earthborne Rangers gets right.
Doohickey Archaeology
ArcheOlogic, in addition to having the most offensive capitalized letter in the history of board games — seriously, how do you pronounce this thing? aar-kee-OH!-laa-juhk is as close as I can get — is what I mentally categorize as a “doohickey deduction game.” As in, it’s got a doohickey, and the entire game is more or less about using that doohickey to feed you information.
Which makes sense, given the game’s provenance. Yoann Levet was also half of the design team behind Turing Machine, itself a doohickey deduction game. As with that title, ArcheOlogic is a clockwork engine whose engineering is perhaps more interesting than the gameplay it spits out.
The Death of Dyson
The current locus for per-ounce innovation in tabletop is trick-taking, and I’m not sure there’s a finer example of how far the genre punches above its weight than Power Vacuum. Designed by Kaleb Wentzel-Fisher and published and illustrated by Malachi Ray Rempen — who gave us the imperfect but charming Roll Camera! — this one provides suited cards by way of The Death of Stalin. It’s viciously good.
Arcs Supra Arcs
Arcs is the most lucid title Cole Wehrle has created — and that’s speaking for someone whose ludography is packed with crisp thesis statements. It’s come such a long way in the two years since I previewed the prototype that there’s really no point drawing comparisons. The obvious lodestar is Oath; like that game, Arcs exhibits the long, ahem, arc of history, the way identities and meanings weather or buckle under the weight of time. But Arcs is the more resolute of the two, a game built as much on hindsight as with the benefit of additional years of experience.
It is sublime. It’s also a difficult game to pin down, arrayed like a blossom. Let’s start with the stem.
Corpse of Discovery
I don’t read comics, or at least that used to be the case. While I still don’t count myself an enthusiast, Mind MGMT, the inaugural title by Off the Page Games, introduced me to Matt Kindt’s series of the same name — and a wider world of comics than I had previously known existed. Harrow County, the imprint’s second effort, didn’t spark my affection quite so thoroughly, but that’s a tall bar to clear.
Now Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim are back at it. This time they’re tackling a brutal comic series by Chris Dingess and Matthew Roberts called Manifest Destiny. In a wise marketing move, Cormier and Lim have switched the title to Corps of Discovery — it’s pronounced “core,” lest the headline lead you astray — and mechanically, it’s one of the most enthralling cooperative games I’ve played in ages. I’m of two minds about it.
Vampire/Werewolf/Witch/Demon Village
Vampire Village is not about building a village for vampires — and thank goodness, after the blandness that was SiliconVania. Instead, it whisks us to exotic Central Europe, where the crossroads of the west have attracted a veritable convention of vampires, werewolves, witches, and demons to feast on the citizens of your hamlet. Not the best spot for a thriving community, but the schools were good. Designed by Maxime Rambourg, half of the team behind The Loop, it’s a hate-drafting game with surprising bite.
Daunted: Battle of Britain
Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson’s Undaunted has grown storied over the past half-decade, crossing the beaches of Normandy, the sands of North Africa, and most recently the besieged city of Stalingrad. That last installment proved one of my favorite light wargame experiences of all time, a grueling and personal perspective on the Second World War’s turning point.
Now the series’ fourth major installment is taking us to the skies. I’m trying to decide whether the letdown it fills me with is thanks to the furious pitch and ambitious quality of Stalingrad or because this system is ill-suited to what Battle of Britain is trying to accomplish.
SPACE-BIFF! 