Author Archives: Dan Thurot
Eighty-Minute Empire
When I asked Ryan Laukat at SaltCon why his latest expansion wasn’t entitled Eight-Minute Empire: Legends: Lost Lands — a fair question in my estimation, seeing as how it’s only compatible with Legends and not the original Eight-Minute Empire — he responded that when he considered it, his wife shot it down as too long. Too wordy.
Fair enough. You don’t want people taking longer to say the title than it takes to play the game, after all.
Welcome to the Redux
Despite taking place a good handful of centuries earlier, the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history somehow managed to give violent conflicts like the Mongol invasions and the First World War a solid spanking when it came to human death toll. The decline of the 400-year-old Han Dynasty had paved the way for the rise of three belligerent kingdoms, Shu, Wu, and Wei, and the next half-century was marked by their struggle to unite the country.
It’s the perfect setting for a board game, packed with court intrigue and military adventures, leaps and bounds of technology and contests of economy. And Three Kingdoms Redux understands this multifaceted approach to warfare perfectly.
Still Better than Camp Mill Hollow
Where do you wanna go?
Hey Mom, I wanna go,
Gee Mom, I wanna go,
to Mill Hollow.
With a hundred other kids crammed into a semicircle on our elementary school stage, I belted out that song. I blasted my lungs out, eyes damp and smile earnest but hopeful. It was basically a fundraiser dressed up as a play, the weight of parental guilt over their children’s dreams pinned on paying the fee that would let their kids spend three days and two nights at a camp in the High Uintas Wilderness.
Many of us boarded that bus to Camp Mill Hollow. And I’m living proof that at least some of us returned.
Cthulhu Wars Fhtagn!
Since the dawn of time, when we yet believed the stars were fireflies caught in the thatched ceiling of the nighttime sky and fire was a newfangled contraption not quite trusted by the older generation, a single question has nagged at the back of Man’s mind:
Who would win in a fight between Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, and Hastur?
The Big Crunch of Little Microcosm
You’ve probably heard of the Big Crunch, the theory that the universe will eventually realize that continual expansion is so last eon, and will instead reverse its direction and collapse into a single gravitational singularity.
Eminent Domain: Microcosm is sort of like that, but for card games. And it probably hurts less.
Game of Shadow Thrones
When you play the game of Shadow Thrones, you win or you die. Or you come in second place but you’ve recruited so many agents on the victorious side that you kind of win anyway.
Come along, I’ll explain.
Elsewhere: A Fistful of Dinero
Another month, another writeup over at the Review Corner! This time it’s Charlie Theel’s A Fistful of Dinero, a genre mashup about shooting the fluff out of a dusty saloon. You can read about it right here, though I recommend tabbing between the review and the pictures I’ve stashed below.
Out of the Dimly-Lit Past
While there’s a part of me that marvels at how it’s been two years since I reviewed Noir as part of the Minigame Library, and ponders at how much I have changed and grown and aged over the past 24 months, mostly I think of that part of me as an unoriginal nitwit. We’re reminiscing now? Thinking about how I was once a fresh-faced 26 year-old? No time for that — there are murders to solve. Poor Irma is too busy being dead to pine over her lost youth, so why should I mope over mine?
Sometimes “Tiny” Ain’t a Compliment
“Tiny” and “Epic” very rarely go together — usually only during my annual checkup. However, Gamelyn Games has been carving out a niche for themselves with the diminutive and monumental, and their previous game, Tiny Epic Kingdoms, was a pleasant little experience perfectly suited for casual fare between the main courses of a game night. Its spiritual sequel, either a solo or cooperative game this time, is better suited for a lonely night on the tundra. If you’ve brought a match, at least you’ll have a way to keep warm.
Here He Comes to Save the Day
A couple years back, a pair of game designers got bonkers drunk and were determined to make famous author Dan Brown’s rabid anti-Catholic dreams a reality. Under cover of darkness, they broke into CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, loaded it up with two of their favorite games — Jenga and Uno (also one of my favorites) — and cranked it up to God Particle Mode. They expected the result would be something like Uno Stacko, but thanks to a rhino horn that had inexplicably become jammed in the flubby-dub flam shaft, the result was…
RHINO HERO.
SPACE-BIFF! 