Blood in the Felt
The original Fallout — the original original, the video game, the one from so long ago that they refused to sell it to me at the media section of my local grocery store because it was rated M for mature and as a twelve-year-old they suspected I didn’t qualify — it had a time limit. After a certain number of in-game weeks, the quest failed. Sayonara, Vault 13. Sorry about the terminal dehydration.
You know what else has a time limit? My life. Your life. All of our lives. I was once advertised a wall calendar that would count down the weeks in the average lifespan. It was perhaps the grimmest thing I’ve ever seen, one’s life scratched off week by week. Fallout: Power Play is that ghoulish product in board game form. It is a waste, the subtraction of every minute in its presence keenly felt. If the function of art, as Tarkovsky noted, is to harrow the soul and prepare it for death, then Fallout: Power Play is anti-art. It is a game that makes me unready for the beyond, incurious to receive the answer to the great mystery that awaits us all. It makes me resentful and crabby. It makes me want to claw those minutes back from the felt and stuff them red-nailed into the craw of whichever anonymous designer retched forth this slouching antichrist.
I do not recommend it. Not ironically, not for a sake of a lookie, not to release its carbon back into the atmosphere through combustion. Stay away. The radioactive skeleton has been thus mounted atop the dump, its meaning undeniable. If you enter here, you will leave poorer.
All Things Go, All Things Go
Quinn Brander’s Rebuilding Chicago is one of the best polyomino-placement games I’ve ever played. That’s the lede, and I will not bury it. Even moreso than its predecessor, Rebuilding Seattle — not to be confused with Raising Chicago, which I do pretty much every time I say the game’s title aloud — this is a tight, smart, and addictive approach to city-building and competitive brinkmanship. The more I play it, the more I want to keep coming back.
Better Citizens than Netizens
Citizens of the Spark feels like it was custom-made with me in mind. It’s a tableau-builder (yes) designed by Philip duBarry and illustrated by Diego Sá (yes) seeded with a small selection from a huge pool of cards (yeeesss) that happens to be populated with anthropomorphic animals (eh, fine). Those animals, it turns out, are not your usual medieval-ish fare, but scientists, scholars, performers, and everything else, jumbled together to form a polis of intersecting interests and vocations.
Which is to say, it brought me around in the end.
Dive Tables
Here’s something you probably didn’t know about old Dan Thurot: I’m a scuba diver rated for search and recovery. There aren’t many of us here in the desert, which is probably why I receive unexpected calls to dredge the ponds of local golf courses whenever there’s a Silver Alert. Thus far, I have declined these requests. Those waters are, like, four feet deep. That’s a job for snorklers. Or a tall guy with hip waders.
Instead, I mostly use this as qualification to comment on scuba stuff. That cave rescue in Thailand? Legitimate. The roll-and-write shenanigans of Aquamarine? Um. Okay, look, Aquamarine isn’t the most robust scuba simulation. But as another print-and-play title from Postmark Games, it’s a worthy followup to Voyages.
Coprodexterity
Wombats are herbivorous solitary nocturnal mammals native to Australia, and — here’s the part you knew was coming; nay, hoped was coming — they poop in cubes. And stack them. Why? I dunno. Darwin was pulling a goof that day.
Now Wombat Poo is a stacking board game by Phil Walker-Harding. Why? We know why. Because poop is funny, that’s why. But is Wombat Poo funnier than its opening joke? I think so. A little bit.
Not Your Daddy’s Blackbeard
I no longer think of Volko Ruhnke as a man, but as a machine purpose-built for stamping out novel conflict simulations. COIN, Levy & Campaign, that older one where the terrorists have the efficacy of ’90s movie baddies, and now Hunt for Blackbeard, an unexpected romp that’s as much about setting the record straight as it is about blasting pirates with grapeshot. I now know more about Blackbeard than at any point in my life. Which is to say, I know a lot less, given the man’s outsized legend.
It’s Always the Ides of March Somewhere
I would describe my feelings toward Regicide as “appreciation,” despite it finding dedicated fans all around me. For years it was in regular rotation on my wife’s phone; my sister-in-law bought the fancy custom deck rather than just using a generic deck of playing cards. My own interest had more to do with the game as an act of repurposement: the clever casting of face cards as mad royals who needed to be put down, the suits transformed into character classes for blocking attacks or repairing injuries.
Regicide Legacy, designed by the same trio as the original — Paul Abrahams, Luke Badger, and Andy Richdale — is very nearly the exact opposite of the original game, at least in terms of form factor. Where the previous Regicide could be played with any old deck scrounged from a vacation bag, this edition is something of a throwback. It’s a genuine legacy title, for one thing: torn cards, stickers, micro-expansions, all of it. Its cooperative/solitaire campaign is generous. Moreover, it’s hard, significantly harder than is the norm in our current obliging hobby. It isn’t uncommon for a chapter to take two, three, half a dozen tries before your band of mercenaries is permitted to move on to their next target.
Now that I’ve wrapped it up, I can squarely say that the ordeal was thrilling, brilliant, and exhausting.
High O’er the Billows We Are Wafted Along
Let it not be said that I don’t take requests. A number of readers have pointed out that it’s been a long time since I’ve covered any print-and-play games. Too true. But there’s a reason for that. Voyages, the six-map design by Rory Muldoon and Matthew Dunstan and the launchpad title from Postmark Games, is both an illustration of my reticence and a roundhouse kick to that same reticence’s noggin.
Riot in Cell Block Arkham
Considering how often the supervillains incarcerated at Arkham Asylum mount successful escapes, we’d do better to confine them inside a Chuck E. Cheese. At least that way they’d have to contend with food poisoning and sticky benches.
Still, the idea behind DC Breakout: Arkham Asylum is a strong one. Designed by Geoff, Sydney, and Brian Engelstein, this is another entry in the “wacky race” genre, marking it as the fourth such title in the past year. How does its coterie stack up against bun bangers, slippery bananas, and underdog brontos? I’ll put it this way: in any other race, it might have won a medal.
Battlefields of the Kitchen Table
Under normal circumstances, it might seem a bitter irony that Paolo Mori and Alessandro Zucchini’s partnership will be lauded for Toy Battle over the supernal Battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars. But these are no normal circumstances. Not when Toy Battle is currently up for a Golden Geek alongside its crunchier sibling, which I’m sure has infuriated a certain class of grognard, but strikes me as maybe the perfect encapsulation of that silly award. (If you needed further proof that the Golden Geeks aren’t especially rigorous, my podcast is also up for one. “LOL,” as the kids say.)
It helps, too, that Toy Battle is a tremendous little plaything. I’d even say it’s good in much the same way that Old Boney’s Battlefields is good, threading an uncommon needle between strategy and chance, heft and approachability. Or maybe I’m just saying that because it’s colorful, feels great on the fingertips, and my twelve-year-old can give as good as she gets.
SPACE-BIFF! 