Day Four! Reject Orthodoxy!

You have no idea how much I would love it if there had been enough games in 2021 to fill a whole list of religious games. Someone on r/boardgames complained that I write too much about obscure theological debates from two thousand years ago. I accept the compliment.

If we’re going by sheer number of plays over the ensuing years, Regicide wins hands down. My wife plays it on her phone and has eked out the ultimate victory on multiple occasions, an honor that, were I to achieve it, would collapse the probability waveform of the entire universe due to its impossibility. I don’t know if Regicide is responsible for the resurgence of games that can be played with a regular deck, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Still, it’s the odd duck out on this list, the only title that doesn’t aspire to say something about history. That it fits so neatly in a list about throwing off the shackles of orthodoxy is a testament to its quality. That or my own case of parallelomania.

I’ll cop to two big disappointments here, but for opposite reasons. At the time, I called All Bridges Burning an exciting step forward for the COIN Series. Looking back, that’s a silly thing to say about a game I haven’t felt the slightest desire to return to, and thankfully the series has pulled the other direction, toward ease of entry and open-ended conclusions via People Power and The British Way. It’s too constrained, I think, by a topic that doesn’t quite suit the COIN model, not to mention a faction (those Moderates!) who are boring in their efficacy. This is a conclusion I’ve only picked up since the review, which speaks to a flaw in the entire concept of “telling you what I think.” Do I wish I had a time machine? Yes. But I probably wouldn’t use it to write more accurate board game reviews.

Nah. I would use it to make Alf Seegert’s games more popular. Illumination is another issue, but for very different reasons than All Bridges Burning. It’s still a charming game with a devil’s sense of wit. Seegert achieved some popularity very early on in the board game renaissance only to gradually lose the limelight. The idiosyncrasy of his designs probably has something to do with that; he makes games that are flush with irony, an uncommon trait in this hobby. This is one of those rare games I expect to hold onto forever; if only more people saw it that way.

Only a handful remain, including the most openly religious titles. Nicaea is as good as ever, straddling the line between Amabel Holland’s “woollier” and more accessible historical games. Its rather… abasing approach is counterpointed by Martyr: Bloody Theater 1528, a game that was always fated to fade from memory, and not undeservedly. Hardy readers will recognize my obsession with games-as-devotionals, and Martyr certainly fits the bill there. Somehow it fails to produce the yearning feeling of something like Nicaea, even though it’s more directly invested in the divine than Holland’s take-down of ecclesiastical councils.

The one that’s stuck around best of all, though, is Pax Viking. ION released an alternate win condition, cheekily named the “Danish Variant,” which was created by yours truly. I foolishly declined the design credit at the time, assuming someone would slap my visage onto a corpulent medieval king. How would that be for immortality? That misplaced anecdote aside, Pax Viking still remains one of the better representations of Norse colonization, casting its protagonists as curious and mercantile in addition to bloodthirsty and boaty. It’s still a strange entry in the wider Pax Series, but that’s no bad thing.

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