Author Archives: Dan Thurot
Back to the Burgle
Have these bros had enough burgling? Apparently not. After two full Burgle Bros, not to mention at least three other wacky stealth games, I think it’s fair to confess to some fatigue. Burgle Bros 3: Future Flip moves the action into the not-too-distant future, where soulless megacorps run the world, intrusive surveillance is ubiquitous, and onesies are the height of fashion.
Apart from the onesies, that could be right now.
God Games
Between the old-world deities, satirical tone, and bean-sized mortals begging to be smited (or blessed), the forthcoming game Almighty feels like it was tailor-made with me in mind. This is the third title we’ve seen from Malachi Ray Rempen, following Roll Camera! and Power Vacuum. In more ways than one, this feels like the culmination of Rempen’s efforts to date; it’s smarter, more assured, and more inventive than its predecessors.
Or maybe I just like the theological implications of having my storm god honk his nose at the god of the underworld.
Broken Clocks
The consensus on Take Time, the abstract teamwork game by Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière, seems to be that it’s Wolfgang Warsch’s The Mind but Even More, which means, mercifully, that it’s marginally less likely to spur tedious arguments over the difference between an activity and a game.
As an enjoyer of The Mind, at least in moderation, I figured I should take a look. Here’s my professional diagnosis: It’s The Mind but Even More. Even the hivemind’s broken clock is right twice a day.
Hot Cross4 Buns
Back when I was in the dating pool — the late Pleistocene, oh ho ho — I would sometimes tell women that my only qualification for a life partner was somebody I could “play boggle in bed” with. This was, of course, a euphemism for playing Bill Cooke and Allan Turoff’s 1972 word-making board game Boggle. While atop a bed. Because beds are cozy. And let me tell you, that joke goes so much harder among people who don’t play so many board games that they immediately assume that’s what I meant by “Boggle” in the first place.
Amabel Holland’s cross4 falls into the category of retro word games. Like Boggle, I suppose. Frankly, I would rather play Boggle. Which perhaps isn’t a ding against cross4 so much as it is a statement about how great Boggle is.
Space-Cast! #53. Scratch & Listen
Most people know Zach Barth as the founder of Zachtronics, purveyor of digital playthings such as SpaceChem, Opus Magnum, and EXAPUNKS. But we are not most people. Instead, we’re here to speak with Zach about his analog games: The Lucky Seven (with the Depot expansion), Chemistry Set, and the scratch-off puzzle pack Zach Attack! That’s right. We’ve got the good stuff.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
DoS That LLM Till It’s 404
There’s history to Deckers. Pedigree. Richard Wilkins — better known by the epithet Ricky Royal, the name under which he’s created a bunch of incredible solitaire modes for games that wouldn’t otherwise suit solo play in the slightest — designed a ditty called Renegade back in 2018. Before the plague years. Before the world’s billionaires started cramming robo-slop down our throats and calling it nourishment.
Before, in other words, cyberpunk felt quite so urgent. Back when the genre was a throwback to ’80s techno acceleration and not ’20s techno throttling.
Deckers is Renegade. That’s the short version. The slightly longer version is that Deckers is Renegade, but decoupled from the vulture who acquired it along with the rest of the Victory Point Games catalog, and with the expansion packs folded in, some additional clarity and development, and a new coat of paint. It won’t persuade anybody who didn’t get along with the original, but it’s just as fresh as ever. And as infuriating.
One-Hit Wonder
Whether in video games or board games, there’s a certain zen — is it okay to call it zen? — that washes over you when you only have one hit-point left. Now it’s just you and your skills. How smartly you can dodge. How precisely you can block. You become an agent of grace, dancing across the screen or tabletop. The playing field has been leveled. Every mistake is now the same as every other mistake. Just you and your abilities and those key-mappings and—
And now you’re dead.
One-Hit Heroes by AC Atienza and Connor Reid starts from the idea that, well, look, it’s right there in the title. One hit and you’re dead. It’s a fantastic idea. One they fudge a little bit, which is to be expected, and one where the execution sometimes feels a little thinner than it might have. But the idea never stops being fantastic.
All Gold Country
Another day, another cube-rails-adjacent title — although Gold Country, being designed by Reiner Knizia, is decidedly crisper and more rules-light than yesterday’s Stellar Ventures. This one is based on Spectaculum, a game about traveling circuses. I’ve never played Spectaculum, so I can’t comment on how the game may or may not have changed; but in this format, Gold Country offers a slick presentation and some crystal-clear speculation. It’s far from my favorite Knizia, but it’s such a buttery smooth experience that it’s hard to imagine turning a session down.
Cube Shuttles
The forthcoming Stellar Ventures is nothing if not wildly ambitious. Its creator, Pontus Nilsson, has designed both cube rails and 18xx titles, and is now mashing those systems together — along with the faintest whiff of 4X space opera — into a game that sees joint-stock firms crisscrossing entire star systems with logistical networks.
Also, the space shuttles sometimes rust. Just in case you were wondering what you were getting into.
Cinema Skins
On an intellectual level, I understand it would be terrifying to attend a cinema where all the projections have pushed through the big screen to consume the moviegoers. But as an intellectual there’s some appeal to the prospect, because in preparation for such an occurrence I now only attend exhibitions of Brian De Palma’s erotic thrillers. Rawr.
Sadly, the mortals of Spooktacular were in attendance at a B-movie horror festival on Halloween night. Now they’ve been reduced to cheap theater snacks. And not the sexy kind of snacks.
SPACE-BIFF! 