Author Archives: Dan Thurot
Nightmare Jass
Lurching across the table like some horror-flick slasher, Kazuma Suzuki’s Somnia wears the skin of an older trick-taker. In this case, that victim is Mittlere Jass, a peculiar three-player Swiss trick-taker that’s all about trying to avoid the middle score. Like the other titles in this season’s New Mill Industries releases, especially last week’s Man-Eating House, this is a fiddly trickster that’s somehow all the more compelling for its jagged edges.
There Can Only Be 0001
My favorite thing about artificial intelligence is that it’s always eating itself. I’m serious — called model autophagy disorder, it’s what happens when AIs gobble up what other AIs have produced, resulting in an incomprehensible grayscale. Enjoy the buffet, robots!
Swap out the plagiarism engines for actual artificial intelligence and that’s the basis of Compile, Michael Yang’s lane battler and derivation of Jon Perry’s exemplar of the genre, Air, Land, & Sea. Two general intelligences are waking up. Because there can only be one, Highlander style, they have immediately set to the task of compiling their protocols and deleting the other out of existence. Nice. Now if only ChatGPT and Midjourney would hurry up with that.
Philatelist Fatalist
The history behind the word for stamp collectors, “philatelist,” is rather charming. Derived from the Greek words for love (philos) and tax exemption (ateleia), it’s bound to the early history of postage stamps, which placed the burden of payment for a letter or package on the sender rather than the recipient. Where receiving mail had once been a hassle, often representing an unexpected payout to the carrier lest they hold your letter hostage, it now became a source of childlike joy. Here’s a gift; you owe nothing for it.
That might be the most interesting thing you learn today. Paul Salomon’s Stamp Swap sure won’t beat it.
Wrex. Shepard.
What is there even to say about Mass Effect? It’s old. The final installment came out twelve years ago. Not counting Andromeda. Which we don’t around these parts.
But, sure, I’m a sucker for Commander Shepard, the Normandy, the whole goofball crew. I have a pile of opinions nobody cares to hear, fond memories of blasting through human supremacists and robot supremacists alike, even some suppressed affection for the Mako, that tumble car I rolled sideways down every mountain in the Armstrong Nebula.
Now Mass Effect is back as a board game. Why now, you ask, a dozen years after all the cosplayers were airbrushing themselves blue? Pffft, who cares. Designed by Eric Lang and Calvin Wong Tze Loon, Mass Effect: The Board Game — Priority: Hagalaz is one heck of a mouthful that I intend to never repeat. It’s effectively a generous side quest set during the third game’s galaxy-spanning war against the Reapers. And, some hiccups aside, it’s a nostalgic treat to see the gang back together for one more bash.
Man-Eating Review
Man-Eating House is a bit of a cryptid. Designed in 2016 by Kunihiko Tsuchiya, it did that thing where it appeared at Tokyo Game Market, generated some buzz, and then fled into hiding. Fortunately, it’s now getting a new edition courtesy of New Mill Industries. The remaining question is whether it’s a cool cryptid or one of those lanky goofball monsters that hides out of shame.
Pariahs Non Grata
It’s been a hot minute since we covered a title from John Clowdus, creator of Omen: A Reign of War, An Empty Throne, that historical trilogy from a couple years back, and so many others that listing them all would quickly make this sentence tiresome. Here’s the short version: almost nobody has been creating small-format games for as long or with such consistently impressive results as Clowdus.
His most recent game, Pariahs, is a perfect example. Set in an evocative pocket universe where future humans live in capsules and only occasionally grant permission for select members to carve their own path, Pariahs riffs on familiar ideas while being entirely unlike anything else out there. It’s small, it’s weird, it’s fantastic.
We Are All on Drugs
Everything I know about rock and roll, I learned from biopics. Now look, I’m a boring straight-edge, a real square, but watching Ray, Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Elvis, and Back to Black within the span of a year doesn’t give the, ah, healthiest impression of the career. So many young talents teetering on the brink of annihilation. Hopefully I’ve just missed all the wholesome ones.
Or maybe it’s that perpetual teetering that ignites our admiration. If nothing else, Rock Hard: 1977 feels primed to make such a statement. Playing this game is like riding a rocket ship on a gravity-breaking trajectory, albeit with an awareness that some seal or bolt has been improperly fitted and will vaporize upon contact with the upper atmosphere. As a worker-placement game, it’s merely okay. But as an accelerant-soaked wick leading not to a candle but to a firecracker, it hits many of the right notes.
I Need an Adult
The first time I played The Game of Life — yes, the one from the 1960s with the spinner that went up to ten and the gender-coded pegs in the cars — I loved it. No kidding. I was pretty young, maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven (okay, I was twelve), and it was one of the first non-abstract board games I’d ever tried. I immediately asked for a copy for my thirteenth birthday.
And then I played it again. To this day, I’ve played The Game of Life exactly twice. To use a word I normally don’t like very much, that second play was just so boring. The spinner had lost its novelty, my little car beep-beeped through the exact same story beats, and one player sped to the end and had to sit around for half an hour while everybody else caught up.
Johnny O’Neal’s Adulthood reminds me a bit of The Game of Life. Don’t get me wrong, it’s the better game of the two by at least a dozen country miles. There’s no spinner, but what the game loses in toy factor it makes up for in almost every other regard. Still, though, playing Adulthood raises some of the same thoughts dredged out of twelve-year-old Dan. Namely: Is this really what adulthood is like?
Float or Flounder
Tinned fish! Potted pulpo! I know so little about conservas that I can’t tell whether it’s a staple or a delicacy. In Scott Almes’ hands, it’s more of a double-edged pun, both a commercial enterprise and a matter of survival. In this solitaire game, you take on the role of a tinning factory. Your goal is to land and sell conservas — but not so much that you overfish the sea and leave yourself unable to operate next season. As such, there’s a delicate balance to be struck between your needs right now and the promise that tomorrow can be just as rich as today.
Breaking Mythwind
I like an ambitious game. Maybe it’s my abiding soft spot for Teddy Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena, despite some of the worst people you’ve ever met quoting the thing to deflect criticism, or maybe it’s my never-ending hunger for novelty. Either way, a board game that tries something different is bound to attract my attention. Even when that board game decides to get dressed by looping its underpants around its shoulders.
Mythwind, designed by Nathan Lige and Brendan McCaskell, certainly fulfills in the ambition department. To various degrees, it also does the underpants-as-pauldrons thing.
SPACE-BIFF! 