Cards on the table: despite my affection for Sami Laakso’s Peacemakers: Horrors of War and Dale of Merchants, I still can’t get into Lands of Galzyr, the open-world adventure game he co-designed with Jesús Delgado. Not for a lack of trying. To date, I’ve played this thing one dozen times, mostly with my ten-year-old daughter, who, by the way, recently declared it her favorite board game of all time.

So believe me when I tell you, I’ve tried to like Lands of Galzyr. And tried. And tried.

A bird in summer.

To be clear, there are plenty of small things that I appreciate about Lands of Galzyr.

For example, the overall format. Set on a sprawling map, these lands are one distant corner of Laakso’s Daimyria, the shared setting for all of his games. Dozens of species rub elbows (and wings, frills, shoulders, and every other anatomical feature), each harboring their own preferences, tics, and cultures. It’s a more developed Hundred Acre Wood. These animals extract coal from hillsides and tinker with hot air balloons. In Dale of Merchants they engage in commerce. In Peacemakers, they wage war.

And in Lands of Galzyr, they do pretty much everything. There are stations where rangers tend to the roads, and merchants who travel between markets, and theaters where thespians put on performances. There are invading armies, but also doctors and teachers and curious inventors.

You, the player, have the privilege of intersecting with any number of these professions. That’s because you are an adventurer, an actual title that some creatures use to identify their choice of career, traveling between Galzyr’s city-states and outposts to solve problems, meet colorful individuals, and get up to mischief. Your goals are… well, they’re somewhat nebulous, if we’re being honest. Lands of Galzyr can be played competitively or cooperatively, but in either case your objective is to carve out a reputation for yourself.

My character’s skills, items, quests, and companions.

That seems clear enough! But it’s also where Lands of Galzyr starts to peel away from my preferences.

There is no overarching narrative direction to the game, or at least it’s gentle enough that discerning its shape is about as effective as doing a dart toss in heavy fog. Instead, the entire thing is a series of side quests, some with more import or multiple chapters, others closer to bottle episodes in duration and consequence. It’s an intriguing approach. Rather than being bound together by a singular All-Important Quest, Lands of Galzyr is about occupying a place. You’re an inhabitant of Galzyr. An interloper, sure, but also one more denizen of this sprawling territory.

Turns, then, stick to a reliable format. You move your adventurer along the map’s roads — usually arriving somewhere consequential every other go — and then resolve an encounter using the game’s browser-based app. There’s more reading than these games usually require, and the writing is, ahem, serviceable if not especially exciting. Encounters generally require one or two dice checks to determine how well an adventurer fares at some challenge or another. Depending on one’s performance, reputation, gold, ongoing effects, and so forth are doled out.

Things change. Seasons come and go, including the rather nice touch that the board flips to reveal a snow-shrouded Galzyr on its winter side. Your character’s skills might change, but that means change, not develop. You will always have four skill pips, never more and never fewer. Items can be swapped out, but, again, you always carry three at most. Your adventurer might gain a retinue, little side characters who travel with you for a week or so. But they’ll soon go their own way, leaving you alone once more.

Now, at a certain foundational level, there’s nothing wrong with any of this. I want to be clear about that. This approach to storytelling is pleasant, in a drowsy sort of way. One reader compared it to a bedtime story. Since I generally play Lands of Galzyr as a pre-bedtime activity for my ten-year-old, that’s apt. It’s also appropriate in the sense that these narrative strings don’t seem intended to excite. We sit down for an hour, read a half-dozen snippets of narrative, roll some dice, and compare our reputations. That’s Lands of Galzyr in a cowrie shell.

The passage of time matters, but not as much as you might think.

Playing the game, however, I keep thinking back on that old truism about how becoming is more interesting than being. And, look, I’m wary of truisms. There isn’t one right way to create art, no single best way to tell a story, no one mode that suits every play experience. And it isn’t as though Lands of Galzyr isn’t working as intended. My kid loves this thing! She asks to play it all the time!

But I keep wishing my story felt more like becoming. When a quest offers me the chance to swap out one of those (adorable) plastic skill pips for another, I balk. I don’t want to swap out a skill. I want to gain a skill. I want to “level up.” The same goes for everything else in the game. I want to make friends who stick around for more than a week. I want items that are better than the previous trinkets I was hauling around. I want to gain influence with one of the factions instead of trashing their influence card the instant I persuade them to do something. I want my gold to be worth something. Most of the time, I earn the maximum twenty gold pieces and then blow it all on an end-of-session tavern party. Why? I’m not sure. Mostly so I can earn more gold next time.

I’m wholly aware that these responses say more about me than about Lands of Galzyr. I’ve always been accomplishment-driven. I keep daily checklists of tasks. I feel guilty if I go an hour without ticking off a box. When I’m sick or recovering from surgery, I devolve into an anxious wreck. In some ways, these are useful traits. I cram a lot of stuff into my weeks!

But they don’t help when it comes to a sedate undertaking like this. Playing Lands of Galzyr makes me twitchy. Sojourning between one city and another, swapping out items and skills, I start to wonder why I’m not getting anything done.

A bird in winter.

That’s why I’m not the right person for Lands of Galzyr. In a way, its relaxing pace is instructive. I’m such an omnigamer that I’m sometimes surprised when somebody declares they don’t like something, that they prefer cooperative games to competitive affairs, or that they find timed games too stressful, or that they can’t stomach anything too abstract. What’s the hang-up?

Except I have my hang-ups too. In this case, it’s a pleasant fantasy countryside filled with anthropomorphic animals who are way too cozy for my high-anxiety self. Hopefully I can help my kiddo learn to be comfortable in such a place. That’s the goal, anyway. Maybe I’m ticking off a box every time I play after all.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

A complimentary copy was provided.