Author Archives: Dan Thurot
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.
Almost Me
It could happen to anyone. Your band of adventurers hit the tavern too hard last night. When you woke up, every member of your party was accused of a different heinous crime. For some reason we’re presuming you didn’t commit the deeds in question. Before the queen tosses your sodden bones in the clank, you’ll need to clear your good (eh) name. It’s detectin’ time.
That’s the premise behind Almost Innocent, Philippe Attali’s cooperative deduction game, which is best described as aggressively fine.
Pax Partying
It hasn’t been all that long since Matilda Simonsson wowed me with Turncoats, her handmade game of hidden influence and third-party warfare. Now she’s back with a more ambitious — not to mention riskier — follow-up in the form of Pax Penning. As its title suggests, this is a riff on the venerable (and thorny) Pax Series, importing crucial details and framing, right down to the clarifying footnotes in the rulebook.
But it’s something more than that. While Pax Penning is identifiably Pax, it’s also a more intricate take on the ideas Simonsson explored in Turncoats. This is a game of tenuous alliances, unexpected turns, and riding the changing winds of politics. And that’s before we excavate how it reveals uncommon depths of history via the language of play.
AMBLE
I own a pocket watch from Stratford-upon-Avon, a trinket I picked up to commemorate viewing Macbeth at the Royal Shakespeare Theater. It’s a gorgeous little thing, clasped in silver, its open face and back revealing the clockwork precision within. Everything has a purpose: the hairspring that stores tension, the jagged teeth of the escapement wheel that tick out the seconds, the gems that cap the gears to minimize friction. Sometimes I wind it up just to set all those pieces in motion.
RUN, a hidden movement game by Moritz Dressler, reminds me of that pocket watch. As an object of mechanical fascination, there’s nothing quite like it. Everything has its proper place. It ticks smoothly.
But it’s also pointless. An artifact, a curiosity, rather than something I’m going to actually carry around.
Space-Cast! #35. But Then She Spilled Tea
For this month’s episode, we’re unexpectedly joined by Amabel Holland to discuss board games — except this time, we cover three titles in total, ranging from Kaiju Table Battles to Doubt Is Our Product and But Then She Came Back. Along the way, we dive into the advantages of board games over other artistic mediums, that New Yorker article, and Amabel’s birthday orgy. Be warned: there’s a chance that this episode should not be played at work, in the presence of impressionable children, or at church. That is, unless your church is the fun kind.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Kinfire. Not That One.
Every time I mention I’m playing Kevin Wilson’s Kinfire, somebody asks if it’s really as big and intimidating as they’ve heard. This sparks a clarification: the Kinfire in question is Kinfire Delve, which is considerably smaller than Kinfire Chronicles, the latter of which is so sprawling and so expensive that it would probably be compromising for me to even glance at the thing.
No, Kinfire Delve — specifically Vainglory’s Grotto, the first of three proposed releases in the Delve line — is neither big nor intimidating. To the contrary, it’s compact and easy. Both solitaire and with two players, it’s as smooth as they come. Maybe too smooth. But only by a scooch.
Snoozing Gods
It’s been a while since I’ve visited, but I think back on my three campaigns in the world of Sleeping Gods with nothing but fondness. I could probably sketch a rough map of the Wandering Sea: that ivory hive on the map’s edge, the ancient spires stacked like dominoes rising from the seabed, the far-flung deserts. Ryan Laukat’s vibrant brushstrokes establish an adventurous tone, giving the world a sense of scale that hasn’t often been replicated. What will you find around the bend of the next island? You’re practically itching to find out.
Sleeping Gods: Primeval Peril swaps the colorful palette of the original for muddy rivers and tangled jungle, not to mention a more claustrophobic perspective. This was originally a free print-and-play for those who backed the crowdfunding campaign, now given fuller development and a shelf-ready production. I hate to say it, but its status as a rejiggered freebie is all too evident.
Winds of Change, Part Four: Cyprus
This is how The British Way ends: not with a bang but a whimper. Of the four scenarios in Stephen Rangazas’s vivisection of 20th-century British colonialism, Cyprus is the briefest and least rules-heavy inclusion, a suitable outcome for a conflict that was comparatively minor when contrasted with the counterinsurgencies of Palestine, Malaya, and Kenya. Exhausted by colonial occupations across the globe, the British Empire was spread too thinly to enact a full response. Instead, it elected to utilize the lessons of occupations past to sway international opinion and brutalize the insurgents into surrender.
As we will see, the outcome proved unsatisfactory to everybody.
Choose Your Own Cardventure
I spend a weird amount of time thinking about narrative in board games. So maybe it isn’t a surprise that I was drawn to Hildegard, the second entry in Greg Favro’s Spire’s End series, in which the obvious touchstone is choose-your-own-adventure books. You know, those things everybody cheated through as a kid.
The Plum Island Park Stroll
One of the finest solitaire games of all time is Dawn of the Zeds, Hermann Luttmann’s masterful riff on the States of Siege model. Not that it should be taken lightly. It presents a vicious struggle for survival that might end in calamity faster than the game can actually be set up. It doesn’t help that further editions and expansions cluttered the table with so many optional modules that even veterans of the zed wars might pause before breaking it out. At least this veteran has.
So it was with no small measure of excitement that I approached The Plum Island Horror, a spiritual successor to Dawn of the Zeds, and a perfectly schlocky reimagining of the small town under siege by reanimated horrors.
SPACE-BIFF! 