Day Two! Save Yourself!

In the interests of picking up the pace, how’s this for a grand opening statement: Rocky Mountain Man should have been this category’s winner.

Sure enough, this is one of the titles that got me rethinking this feature’s overemphasis on replayability. Even though I’ll never touch Rocky Mountain Man again, it still stands out as a landmark gaming experience. It came along at exactly the right time in my life, when the simple act of getting outdoors and bravely charting the unknown was an embrocation for the stir-craziness of the pandemic. Retreading its environs would dispel that magic. Already a full play requires multiple sittings, which is long enough to reveal the seams: the too-random terrain, the hectic events, the crumbly crayons. Facing the wild is worthwhile all the same.

The other entries on this list hew to the day’s theme of panicked survival in the face of chaos to various degrees. Cryo has disappeared from the cardboard annals, one more mid-weight Eurogame among a thousand others. It deserved better. Unsettled, too, went the way of the snowman, enjoying an all-too-brief moment in the sun before melting away. I would have liked to play its second set of boxes, but as a multi-set system it hasn’t stuck around the way, say, Final Girl has, despite its initial selection of planets being more creative and far-ranging than the serial killers and destinations of the latter. One could probably write a comparative piece examining their various approaches to “core box plus expansions,” but I think I’ll leave that to somebody else.

I mostly remember Judean Hammer as the game where somebody got mad at me for beginning my review with Alexander the Great rather than the besieged Jews, even though that’s where the account begins in Maccabees. It’s an odd little game, a little too prim for the insurgency it’s trying to portray, but I appreciate these peculiar slices of history making their way to my gaming table. Sometimes it’s tough reviewing the game that’s in front of me instead of the game I wish had materialized. So it goes.

The last two, Bullet and Paleo, are both good games that I haven’t bothered to revisit. That says something even if it isn’t the sole purpose of this retrospective, especially since both practically beg to be played again and again. My reluctance to revisit Bullet is more about me than anything. Level 99 has this tendency to create these superb games only to beat them over the head with expansions until I can hardly see straight. Where would I even start at this point? Even the prospect of breaking in again feels exhausting. Paleo, on the other hand, was more self-contained at the time. There have been a whole range of expansions, but I haven’t heard boo about a single one of them. Maybe I’ll see about dipping in a toe sometime.

On the next page, listen to more hemming and hawing!