Author Archives: Dan Thurot
Glimmer, Lantern, Glimmer
When I looked at Kinfire Delve: Vainglory’s Grotto last month, my conclusion was optimistic. Kevin Wilson’s sidequest in his Kinfire universe was rather good, with colorfully realized characters and a solid deck-delving system. If it also happened to be too easy, its titular villain wadding up like a spent hankie, well, at least our heroes were relieved to not require a potion to recoil their intestines.
The second set, Scorn’s Stockade, continues the spin-off’s tradition of pairing a negative trait with a generic destination. Mechanically it’s the same game, but what a difference the new cards make.
From Grave to Cradle
If I keep saying the same thing it risks becoming a running joke, but even compared to People Power and The British Way, Vijayanagara offers an easy entry point to the formidable COIN Series. Designed by a quartet of designers — Cory Graham, Mathieu Johnson, Aman Matthews, and Saverio Spagnolie — this is the first in GMT Games’ Irregular Conflicts Series. The pitch is that this is not your ordinary COIN, with all the procedure and chrome the title implies. These are experiments, salvaging the system’s baseline concepts and taking them in a new direction.
I’m not so sure about that. Vijayanagara is about as COIN as they come. That doesn’t stop it from being a perfect gateway drug for an unsuspecting playmate. This one goes down smooth.
Three Little Kittens Awaiting Ignition
Apparently “mlem” is a meme designating the noise a cat makes when it licks its own nose… and that’s just about enough internet for today, thank you.
Fortunately, Reiner Knizia’s MLEM: Space Agency, despite making my face feel moist every time I hear it, is one of the good doctor’s better dice games.
I Want to Go to There
Josh Wood is the designer behind what I consider the finest tableau-building game of all time: Santa Monica. What sets it apart from its peers is a willingness to let players not only create a scenic space, but also explore that space, moving tourists and townies along its beaches and storefronts. The effect is profound, elevating cards from mere stockpiles of victory points to textured terrain that must be traversed.
Wood’s next stab at the genre is Let’s Go! To Japan, a curiously titled game that feels like it’s trying to launch a brand. Like Santa Monica, Wood invests his players in scenic locales and tangible geographies. I’m going to do my darnedest not to draw too many comparisons between them.
Upscale Court Officiants
Let’s get this out of the way up front: yes, Courtisans is a funny title for a card game. Designed by Romaric Galonnier and Anthony Perone, one presumes the title’s French meaning hasn’t gone the way of the English word “courtesans” to imply upscale prostitutes. Or maybe it has. I really couldn’t tell you.
Look, it doesn’t matter. Whether it’s about upscale prostitutes, upscale courtiers, or upscale court officiants, Courtisans is a shockingly good game with almost zero rules overhead.
New Year, Old Year: 2021 Revisited
The wheel has turned again. And again. Although this installment of New Year, Old Year is a full year late, I’ve already explained my growing reservations with this recurring retrospective, so there’s no reason to belabor the point. Instead, here we are, on the precipice of revisiting the titles I considered the best of 2021. What did I get right? What did I get wrong? The answers may surprise you.
Or they may not. Who can tell. Not me. Either way, we’re doing things a little differently now. Rather than dividing everything into binary right/wrong categories, it seems more helpful to look back on each title in turn. Because sometimes I got things right and wrong at the same time. Nuance, y’all.
Space-Cast! #36. How to Invest in Solar
The climate crisis! That’s a dour topic, isn’t it? Today we’re joined by Matteo Menapace and Matt Leacock to discuss Daybreak, their board game about world governments coming together to combat climate change. Along the way we discuss cardboard incentives, producing board games without plastic, and why optimism is necessary when thinking about big problems.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Heliotropes
Three and a half hours into our most recent play of Bloodstones, I turned to the five other players sitting at my living room table. “I just wanted to say,” I began, in the tone of a hard-bitten battlefield commander trapped in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. “There is nobody I would rather share this ordeal with than all of you.” And then we laughed the laugh of soldiers who had spent too many weeks cowering at the bottom of foxholes.
Bloodstones is the latest title by Martin Wallace, a designer who has produced some of my favorite games of all time. It’s an impressive production, with multiple cloth maps, six unique factions, and oh so many bags filled with wonderfully clacky tiles. Between pedigree and production, it’s an easy sell.
I can’t stand it.
Island in the Sun
Spirit Island. What a game. R. Eric Reuss’s masterpiece has been around long enough that it’s become a staple of the discourse, a counterpoint to all those colonial settings that dominate game store shelves. Seven years ago I called it the anti-Catan. It’s still that and more besides. Nowadays I think of it less as a subaltern revenge fantasy (although it qualifies) or a deified avatar of conservationism (it’s that too) and more as a lament. If only there were gods, it cries. Even if they were gods that didn’t think much of us and might trample over us in their enthusiasm to preserve their creation, there would be comfort in knowing that some power, any power, cared enough about the trees and the beaches to keep them around a little longer.
Reuss’s latest iteration of the game, Horizons of Spirit Island, is a downscaled version that swaps plastic for cardboard and lowers both the player count and the complexity. It’s Spirit Island for book stores and Target, in other words. Even in a reduced format, it’s fantastic.
Everything Minus the Zamboni
I had no idea what to expect going into the second edition of Trick Shot. Not only because I don’t know the first thing about hockey, but also because I was operating under the assumption that it was a dexterity game.
Here’s the good news: Trick Shot may not let me hurl around a puck by flicking it with a tiny hockey stick, but it doesn’t need to. Designed by Artyom Nichipurov, creator of the stellar Guards of Atlantis, this is even better than my assumptions led me to expect.
SPACE-BIFF! 