Yawpz
This might sound funny, but the game that kept springing to mind while playing Gruntz, the tiny-as-it-gets wargame by Carter Scott, was none other than Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ. Like that ancient (but now resuscitated) title, Gruntz is about a pair of World War-era armies bashing it out on the field. They’re both highly attritional, encouraging a tit-for-tat gameplay that’s either enthralling or exhausting depending on your tolerance for swapping one piece for another.
More than that, they’re both games about both movement and reinforcement. It isn’t enough to position your troops smartly. You also need to know when — and what — to call up from the rear. In the case of Gruntz, that sometimes means snapping a range of equipment onto a chassis to create a custom-built war machine.
This is never not cool. Because magnets, baby. I’m always in a mood for magnets.
Afterlife for Auction
I find Realm of Reckoning, the latest title by Max Anderson, Zac Dixon, and Austin Harrison, to be fascinating. There’s the cosmological angle: an afterlife fallen into disrepair, now pieced back into working order through the clashing imperatives of feuding factions. Personally, I’d be a fanatical member of the Eat As Much Cake As You Like Without Getting Tummy Sick sect.
But more even than that, it carves out a new space in the whole “dudes on a map” genre. (Are we still saying that?) There are fingerprints of the greats all over the design. A splash of Blood Rage, some Inis, even a little bit of Arcs. It’s something of a mashup, and not every part works as smoothly as the others, but the result is a gripping struggle over an ashen landscape.
Joker’s on You
Say one thing for Carl Chudyk, he’s always swinging for the fences. His latest, Chess Joker, is full of wonderful ideas. At its most basic: what if we took the game-altering jokers from Balatro, say half a thousand of them, and transformed Chess, that ancient game of strategy and discipline, into a cast-iron bathtub filled with jelly beans and marmalade and one or two razor blades just for fun.
At its best, Chess Joker lives up to that promise. The problem is that it isn’t often at its best.
Delver’s Dilemma
Brumble Quest is a peculiar inclusion in Plaid Hat’s catalog. Unlike their other touchstones, whether expandable duelers like Ashes and Summoner Wars or comedy adventures in the vein of Forgotten Waters, it’s a diminutive thing with minimal components, a ten-minute playtime, and — oh yeah — it only sells in sync with big conventions. Fortunately, that means during conventions, not at them; online ordering is still a possibility for those of us unable or unwilling to make the annual pilgrimage to Indianapolis.
For such an odd duck, though, it’s… kinda great? Designed by J. Arthur Ellis, Brumble Quest is a prisoner’s dilemma game for pretty much any number of players. Minimum three. But as many as fifty out of the box. With a projector and laser pointers, theoretically it could go even higher.
Blorpassonne
In my quest to find activities that will hold the interest of children with a five-year age gap, I routinely find myself playing board games that normally wouldn’t register more than a fraction of my attention. Blorp!, for example.
What is Blorp!, you ask? Apart from being a noise my offspring produce when they don’t want to empty the dishwasher or hang up their towels, a blorp is apparently the answer to what Dr. Seuss would animate for a David Cronenberg flick. These are queasy creatures in three colors that communicate by, uh, farting confetti at one another. Garth Kaufmann, who both designed and did the illustrating, sure has a knack for tongues, eyeballs, and tendrils, I’ll tell you that much.
Buried
Ruins, the card-building, card-shedding game by John D. Clair, served to answer a question that’s been niggling at the back of my skull since I first played Mystic Vale almost a decade ago. Namely, why don’t I like these things?
Not John D. Clair games, to be clear. I like plenty of his games. Rather, these of his games, the ones about sliding inserts into sleeves to build custom cards. At a notional level, it’s a solid concept. Plenty of digital card games let you modify your cards. By using inserts and sleeves, these titles circle some of that bespoke nature back to its origin point. Yet none of Clair’s experiments with the form, whether Mystic Vale, Dead Reckoning, Unstoppable, or now Ruins — which is based on an earlier title, Custom Heroes — has really landed with me.
I now know why. It isn’t the sleeving that’s the problem. It’s that Clair doesn’t exhibit much trust in his own sleeves.
Clatter and Write
When the Portuguese charted the island of Taiwan, they named it Ilha Formosa, “beautiful island.” That’s the background behind the board game Formosa Formosa, which — and I’m not sure designer Kirk Beiser is aware of this — translates to “beautiful beautiful.” Kind of like when somebody calls a monster a were-person, which just means man-person, except “beautiful beautiful” is even more duplicative.
Appropriately, Formosa Formosa doubles down on its namesake. Designed by someone who has lived in Taiwan for fifteen years, printed in Taiwan, and ultimately about Taiwan, this is a drop-and-write game that’s as charming as it is combo-heavy.
Liberation Ludology, Part Two: Peru
When last we visited Stephen Rangazas’s The Guerrilla Generation, we looked at a localized urban insurgency in Uruguay, one that failed to bring about a socialist revolution, but eventually, after a period of military rule, saw former revolutionaries elevated to government positions, including the presidency itself.
Today’s scenario casts a wider net, not to mention a more tangled one. When the scenario opens in 1980, Peru has only recently emerged from its own period of ideologically complicated military dictatorship. Riven by debt and poverty, Peru now has a freshly elected civilian government that’s reluctant to give the military too much latitude, while a philosophy professor named Abimael Guzmán has just launched one of the most vicious insurgencies in Latin American history: the Shining Path.
Wingspan for Mandy
“Wingspan but smaller, simpler, and shorter” isn’t half-bad as pitches go. That’s precisely the niche Wingspan Pocket carves out for itself. In every way that matters, this is Wingspan, Elizabeth Hargrave’s 2.6 million bestseller, all birds and combos and speckled eggs, but slimmed down to a blue-footed booby’s webbed footprint.
I’m convinced that it might even be better than the original. For the doubters, it’s certainly shorter.
Media Masters
I’m not the biggest fan of trivia games. Especially those that require players to know a specific answer, and a hundred times those that sporadically stuff me into a locker with an unexpected sports question. “Who soiled his pants while stealing two consecutive homers during the 1914 Cinnamon Bakeaway summer camp?” the question will ask. “Nobody could possibly know that,” I begin, only for my father to scream “Mickey ‘The Dugout Dog’ O’Queefe!” for ten thousand points.
Book Club and Movie Night are teensy-tiny trivia games by Peter Hayward. Each session lasts five minutes, sometimes a run of cards will produce an impossible question, and they’re titles that will prompt the most obnoxious person in your gaming group to insist they’re activities rather than games. For all that, they’re the rarest of beasts: trivia games that put creativity and lateral thinking on the same footing as raw factoid retrieval.
SPACE-BIFF! 