Author Archives: Dan Thurot
Best Week 2024! Adapted!
Adaptation, the process by which a work is transferred from one medium to another, is a delicate and skill-intensive art, prone to going wrong at either end of its metamorphosis. Licensed games often get a bad rap. Maybe because they’re often bad. But that only makes good adaptations all the more important to celebrate. That’s what we’re doing today. These are 2024’s best adapted board games.
Best Week 2024! Snacked!
2024 has been another incredible year of board games. For the first day of Best Week, Dan Thurot brought to me… the best snacks of the year! These are the titles that pack the most gameplay into each cubic millimeter, the ones that can be carried in a backpack or even a back pocket, the stuff that makes for a perfect day trip.
Pink Mars
Volko Ruhnke’s COIN System sure has come a long way since Andean Abyss. It’s sobering to realize that it’s been twelve years since we stalked the mountains of Colombia for drug cartels and Communist insurgents. The system has always prioritized certain assumptions about adversarial state-building, but now, in its twelfth volume, with multiple spin-offs and grandchildren padding its family tree — not the least of which is Cole Wehrle’s Root — the main series has taken a hard left turn into the speculative. We’re a long way from those history classrooms and CIA factbooks now, grandpa.
Red Dust Rebellion is the first game by Jarrod Carmichael, although we took an early look at his forthcoming Shadow Moon Syndicates a couple months back. For the most part, this project is a surprisingly cozy fit for the COIN Series. Set two hundred years in the future, give or take, the usual geopolitical boundaries have been redrawn thanks to the game’s remote setting, the red planet itself. What’s that phrase about how history doesn’t repeat itself, but often rhymes? Yeah. That. Even thought it takes place 140 million miles away, Red Dust Rebellion is so familiar that it might as well be a roadmap.
The Worms Have Turned
People often ask if I ever get tired of board games. Ninety-nine percent of the time, my response is no, because board games are a bottomless wellspring of joy and creativity.
Then something like Worms: The Board Game comes along to make me reevaluate that answer.
Mad Libs from the Stars
One of my favorite subgenres of speculative fiction is the first contact story. Whether it’s the (hideously misguided) Prime Directive of Star Trek, the mimicked conversations in Blindsight, or the failed Christian witness of The Sparrow, the notion of alien minds coming into sharp collision has always fired my imagination.
It’s safe to say, then, that A Message from the Stars sounds like exactly the sort of board game I would love. Designed by Clarence Simpson, this one is all about an alien ship, human scientists, and the half-understood snippets passed between them.
Galzyr? Gals Where?
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.
Finally, a Game for Turophiles
It’s hard to imagine talking about Fromage without a few cheesy puns or some choice selections from my personal cheese journey. Fortunately for you, I’m professional enough to know when nobody needs what I’m peddling.
Fromage is a hot item right now. That might seem silly, but there’s something appreciable about cheese being the topic of the moment rather than zombies or pirates. Designed by Matthew O’Malley and Ben Rosset, it carries undertones of one of their previous games, The Search for Planet X, thanks to its rounded board and considered timing. Despite its creamy appearance, it offers some truly formidable decisions to chew over.
That’s Not Two Minds!
Brock: The long anticipated return of a feature that’s maybe mostly forgotten… We are simply giddy with delight to bring you yet another installment of Two Minds About! How have you spent the two years since last we sparred, Dan?
Dan: Drugs. Also… no, it’s mostly drugs.
Brock: Me? I’ve been bench pressing bloated Kickstarter games and eating bowl after bowl of meeples. I knew this day would come, and I knew I would have to be ready. This time around, we’re looking at a tiny box that gives me some very big feelings: That’s Not a Hat!, designed by Kasper Lapp.
Journeys in the Dark
All I play anymore is trick-taking games. Now and then, fortunately, one of them catches my fancy.
This month’s example is David Spalinski’s Torchlit. A self-published production, and so far only sold at this past weekend’s Indie Games Night Market alongside titles such as High Tide and Out of Sorts — which I wasn’t able to attend, but by all accounts was a resounding success — this is as close to a hybrid trick-taker as one gets without actually tipping over the line.
All Welrod and Good
Every so often I have the opportunity to play what I call an enhanced choose-your-own-adventure game. Not unlike Edward Packer’s beloved children’s series, these are games about making narrative decisions and seeing how they play out, usually with a lot of “turn to page 101” and “turn to entry 344.” The “enhanced” part comes in when these choose-your-own-adventures include tabletop elements from outside the book itself, such as dice rolling, action points, or a story sheet to keep track of narrative consequences — the most recognizable example being, naturally, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy series.
Right up front, here’s my declaration: Dave Neale and David Thompson’s War Story: Occupied France is easily the best of these titles I’ve played. Full stop.
SPACE-BIFF! 