Imagine me in a real pickle sandwich. The middle of preview season (ho ho ho), and suddenly I come down with not one illness, but two. Something chronic, something acute. And me with a whole stack of board games to write about. Some of them time-sensitive, counting down the minutes on crowdfunding platforms as we speak.

What’s an old man to do? Write about all three in a single splash, naturally.

In other words, here are three very different tabletop titles, each worth a wink of your time. Come on in. Let me tell you about them. Briskly, before I’m back to bed.

Runes, crafted, so thus they may be written.

Rune Rite

At a glance, Rune Rite doesn’t look all that dissimilar from any number of other flip-and-writes. Fortunately, designer Jason Katzwinkel makes one alteration that has major implications not only for this game, but for the entire format.

Short version: you craft the card in advance.

Longer version. Like every other instance of the genre, you begin your turn by flipping over a card. This shows some combination of runes — spirals, stars, tildes, triangles, and plusses, with the occasional wild that counts as anything and everything. Then everybody at the table gets to mark a cluster of those symbols onto a personal paper grid. The larger the cluster — say, a polyomino L of stars — the more you mark, all the way down to a single symbol.

The wrinkle is that drawing a card isn’t as simple as drawing a card. You draw the card, yes, right, you’re following I’m sure, but then you choose how to lay that card over the top of any previous cards, all framed within a cardboard holder to establish the selection’s outer boundaries. In more mathematical terms, every card offers a 2×3 selection, but you’re really drawing from a 3×3 grid. So the current card matters, but so do any previous cards that might still be peeking out from previous turns.

The implications are far-reaching. At the first and most obvious level, you’re given some control over which symbols — and furthermore, which shapes of symbols — you’re allowed to draw on your pad. By rotating your card, it’s possible to arrive at unusual shapes indeed.

Looks suspiciously like a flip-and-write to me.

But more than that, with some attention you can also sabotage everybody else at the table. Whatever shape the card-puller draws, nobody else is allowed to use. Sometimes this only provides access to smaller leftovers, but there’s room for devious plays. Such as noting that a rival wants a size-two combination of spirals, so instead you hand them a huge cluster of spirals instead. Go for it, bud. Overcommit.

In some ways, Rune Rite feels like a proof of concept. It’s a small game, I mean, with very little variance between sessions apart from the actual shape-crafting that occurs on each and every turn. Unlike something like Cartographers, which changes its victory conditions between sessions, the goal is always the same.

But for a proof of concept, there’s a lot to like here. There’s real tension between specialization and diversification. Points principally come from drawing boxes of similar symbols and filling other boxes with as many different symbols as possible, encouraging you to build across the pad’s boundaries. Which is to say, there’s a definite “best approach” here, but it isn’t one easily or flippantly pursued.

I’d like to see more of this. Crafting the “flip” of the flip-and-write is a stroke of brilliance, and here it’s given perhaps its purest possible expression. The result is little more than a snack, but it’s a snack that might prove transformative if everybody catches the vision. Like a Triscuit.

Rune Rite is on Kickstarter for nine more days.

Some of the things I wish I’d done.

Bucket List

According to internet lore, the term “bucket list” was coined by the 2007 comedy film The Bucket List. This is a myth. My proof is a journal entry dated 14 March 2006 which reads: “Bucket List. Item #1. Prove that I, Dan Thurot, came up with the term ‘bucket list,’ not that stupid movie coming out next year.”

Many of the action items in Micah Heiselt’s Bucket List represent similar uphill battles. Spend a night in Dracula’s Castle? Sure, but bring the gauze. Buy a farm for orphaned alpacas? Nothing was ever stopping you but the fear of success. Fill the Louvre with only your art? Kid. Come on. You can’t even finish one board game preview on a site without the slightest quality control.

Then again, that’s much of the charm of this one. You and your friends wrote a bucket list in high school. (Presumably you graduated after 2007.) Now, with death swiftly approaching, you must tick off as many boxes as possible.

What would otherwise be a cutesy gimmick game is elevated by two factors. The first is that the gameplay is a combination of long-term planning, thinking on your toes, and careful risk management. There are only two main resources, time and money, which must be invested into a goal before it can be accomplished. That’s simple enough, but resources come from multiple sources, some more reliable than others, such as action cards versus a turn-initiating roll of the dice. You’ll get something, but whether you can put it to good use is another question. Oh, and any leftovers will anger the Grim Reaper.

Death comes for us all.

The Grim Reaper is the other shakeup to the formula. Various triggers will see old boney chasing everyone around the score track. If he catches up to the trailing player, a headstone will be placed to end the game upon the completion of the round. There are ways to cheat death, nudging the Grim Reaper back on the track and returning the headstone to its resting place… except you might not want to delay the end of the game if you’re sitting pretty at the top of the score track, leading to little tussles to delay or hasten your mortality.

It’s a bit grim. But then, so is anything associated with bucket lists. The good news is that it’s also an amusing little plaything, with more to consider than first meets the eye, and lots of goofball moments where death seems around the corner only to be delayed yet again. It’s ultimately a game about picking your battles. There isn’t time or money enough to do everything, so you’re encouraged to pad out your days with goals that can absorb whatever resources happen to come your way.

In that sense, there’s something comforting about it, almost nihilistic in its dedication to self-determination. Maybe it will even inspire me to fulfill the other entries in my bucket list. “Item #2. Change it back to Berenstein Bears before anyone notices.”

Bucket List is on Kickstarter for fifteen more days.

This tree is especially bug-infested.

Pact

Pact is what you get when you blend the asymmetry of Root with the hard tradeoffs of a classic card-driven wargame like Twilight Struggle.

First, the Root. Four bug factions occupy the tree kingdom of Branchbourne, each with its own advantages. There’s Jenna Ermine VI, her authority thoroughly entrenched across the branches and boughs of the kingdom, but spread so thin that the slightest tension might crack her carapace. Her closest rival is the Duchesse Orich, incredibly well resourced but also over-leveraged. Somewhat farther underfoot is the revolutionary Matuk Inkclaw, capable of unleashing labor strikes that cripple the kingdom, and the heretic Weaver Neith. Mostly I remember Weaver Neith mind-controlling everybody.

All right, asymmetry is hot right now. But the second half of the game, the card-driven wargame half, controls how things get done. Everything relies on event cards. At any given time, a handful of these are on offer in the market. Taking a turn isn’t as simple as moving pieces. Instead, you select an event. If it’s your own, you either use the card for its action points — adding tokens, moving stuff between locales, that sort of thing — or take its historical outcome, which is always weirder and often more potent, but less directed. On the other hand, if it belongs to someone else, you take the actions while they trigger the event. Pretty normal, as card-driven wargames go, but rather novel when it comes to bug-based fantasy games.

Events are the heart of Pact.

Making matters more complicated, society in Branchbourne is dominated by four “pillars,” each of which demands some measure of attention lest the kingdom fall into disrepair. These are handled by moving treasures, a nearly zero-sum economy, between their four domains. The Merchants, for instance, are how cash gets infused into the economy. By investing treasures into their domain, additional treasures wink into existence ex nihilo. Invest too much, however, and the Merchants will crash the whole dang thing, reducing the number of treasures in circulation.

Okay, so you want the Merchants to have a lot of treasures, but not so many that they wreck the economy. Except the other pillars also have their own requirements. The Nobility mostly function as parasites, destroying treasures outright, but if not placated they’ll steal treasures from the other pillars. The Church is similar; they like to gather treasures as tithes, but they can manipulate the standings of the other pillars outright. The Military, meanwhile, needs treasure. Lots of treasure. Only their threat is no paper tiger-beetle; if they don’t have enough loot in their vault when the round ends, the centipedes chewing at Branchbourne’s roots will overrun the kingdom and eat everybody.

This prompts a delicate balancing act. Your faction doesn’t only want to survive; they also make pacts (the title! oh ho!) with those pillars to see them succeed in exchange for influence at court. So, depending on how you’ve positioned your faction, you might want the bank to fail this round, since its collapse will humiliate your rival who’s aligned with them, while feeding heaps of glittery to the Church in exchange for their imprimatur on your ascending the throne.

Keep forty eye-facets on those centipedes.

Which brings us full circle to that event system, because this is where you can manipulate every little corner of Branchbourne to your advantage. The Duchesse Orich, for example, can use her hives to bestow additional treasures on various pillars of society. But when an event raises the opportunity to do so, will it align with her current goals? The same goes for the firebrand and his labor strikes, the Empress and her loyalty counters, and everything else. Pact is a game of hard tradeoffs. Direct action or powerful but perhaps misaligned events? That’s the question, baby.

All told, the result is a fable about the ever-shifting halls of power that I find mighty intriguing. Like a lot of the best games, designer Zach Hoekstra has keyed into the fact that smart design is often about limitation as much as it is about player agency. Often, turns force a choice between which goals you’ll fail at the least. It’s a lot like tacking into the wind; moving at increments that seem to go nowhere, only that bit by bit move you closer to your objective.

The result is one heady political game indeed. Of the titles on this list, Pact is the heftiest, but it’s also the one I’m most eager to see reach completion. It’s ambitious, it’s weird, it’s full of bugs.

Pact is on Gamefound for nineteen more days.

Prototype copies of Rune Rite, Bucket List, and Pact: The Future of Branchbourne were temporarily provided by their designers and publishers.

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