Author Archives: Dan Thurot
Observe, Feyd-Rautha
Arrakis. Dune. Desert planet. Warner Bros. property.
It’s not every day that a game I genuinely love hits it big in this hobby. I’ve been pleased to watch Paul Dennen’s Dune: Imperium thrive, earning two expansions in Rise of Ix and Immortality. That said, I’ve been as perplexed as anybody at the latest offering. Dune: Imperium — Uprising has a surfeit of subtitles and a questionable provenance, functioning neither as an expansion nor as a totally fresh start for the series. At a glance, it’s not all that far removed from the original game.
Colors of Abstraction
As a youngster one of my prize possessions was The Book of Classic Board Games from Klutz Press. I didn’t know at the time that I was in good hands, the book being authored by none other than Sid Sackson. While Sackson seemed intent on imparting how much could be accomplished with a single set of Go stones, mostly I was enamored with the more “thematic” games in the collection, such as the clay-molded landscape of Dalmatian Pirates and Volga Bulgars or the plump wrestling moves of Hasami Shogi. Thus began my lifelong appreciation for abstract games. (Although please note that “appreciation” and “skill for” are very different traits.)
Over the past few months, I’ve been enjoying three modern abstracts at a leisurely pace. Their common thread is that they were all designed and self-published by Khanat Sadomwattana. Not that you’d know they were self-published by looking at them. These are lavish productions, each visually arresting on their own, with striking aesthetics that aid in making their gameplay as smooth as possible.
Shiny and Chroma
One of this hobby’s great pleasures is coming across a designer whose creations adhere to a logic that’s unlike anything else. Jorge Zhang is one such designer. I’ve been obsessively playing and replaying his latest release, Chroma Mix, scouring it for new gems and cracks alike. It’s been a rewarding process, unfurling a game that touches on highlights from other titles — Cieslik and Chudyk’s Red7 springs to mind — without, it turns out, being very much like them at all.
MORE RHUBARB
All I play anymore is trick-taking games.
Pies, a remake of Matthias Cramer’s 2015 Plums, does not happen to be a trick-taker. Oh, I’m aware there’s some debate over the matter. Couldn’t this be considered a trick-taking game with but one suit and a slew of ranks? I guess so. That would transmogrify a whole lot of games into trick-takers, but sure. And a hot dog is a sandwich.
Semantic athletics aside, my concern has less to do with trick-taking essentialism and more with this pastry’s sogginess. Cramer has produced some excellent games over the years, from hefty fare like Weimar to more accessible titles like Watergate and The Hunt. Compared to those, Pies doesn’t rate.
Federation Kitbash
Yesterday we took a look at Age of Civilization, Jeffrey CCH’s take on the thirty-minute civgame, which was loaded with clever ideas that got short shrift thanks to the game’s clipped duration and misplaced priorities.
Fortunately for us, CCH revisited the concept a few years later. Age of Galaxy swaps the first game’s historical civilizations for alien societies, tasking players with cobbling together their very own Federation of Planets — or a merciless Dominion. Or a Culture. Or maybe an Imperial Radch if they play their cards poorly. The bones of that first game remain very much intact, but everything else has been overhauled. And this is one hull upgrade that proves rather appreciated indeed.
Age of Three Civilizations
Before Inheritors, before Eila and Something Shiny, Jeffrey CCH designed a civilization game. The white rabbit of “civ but in half an hour” has humbled many a talented creator. Does Age of Civilization bend the long arc of history away from failure?
Nope. But it’s an interesting failure. That’s more than I can say for many of its peers.
The Banalities of Yesterday
Growing up Mormon, disdainful opinions about smoking were in plentiful supply. I recall a mother proudly recounting her answer to her daughter’s question about why people smoked. “Some people are on Satan’s side,” she declared.
She was half right. But the wicked were not the smokers — the victims, to use Amabel Holland’s parlance in Doubt Is Our Product. They were the profiteers who killed hundreds of millions for market share. Who peddled tobacco to children and obfuscated the deadliness of cigarettes. Who flooded the zone with bullshit so that ordinary people couldn’t make informed decisions. Who continue to do so, to the tune of eight million dead per year, one million of whom die from secondhand smoke. Textual critics have long held that hell and the devil were invented as a form of cognitive easing, a way to reassure ordinary people who couldn’t square why some of their peers, leaders, and oppressors were so predatory. Surely they were being influenced by a malevolent, otherworldly agent; surely they would receive a fiery judgement at the end of time.
If there’s anybody who makes hell and the devil seem necessary, it’s tobacco executives.
Antiantidisestablishmentarianism
This might shock you, but I don’t actually love big words. Rather than elbowing pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis into a conversation, I prefer short, evocative slashes to anything my readers might need to sound out. Let’s be real for a second: Did you actually say the word in the previous sentence, or did you blip over it like one more nickname for Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment? Exactly.
Five-Dollar Words, then, is a game that I am unexpectedly terrible at. Designed by Amabel and Mary Holland as the freebie for this year’s Hollandays Sale, it peddles itself as a game for sesquipedalianists and pedants. Better yet, it has a rule that prevents anybody from dragging out antidisestablishmentarianism as their word of choice.
Look Up
Xoe Allred’s Velocirapture is hard to describe, one suspects by design. There’s a shortcut in games criticism that’s tempting to invoke, wherein anything perplexing gets labeled a “tone poem.” Velocirapture, however, is not a tone poem so much as it is a garbled signal about the all-too-human tendency to talk around a difficult topic.
Here’s the box pitch: A meteor streaks across the Cretaceous sky. Extinction looms. But nobody wants to talk about that. Instead, these dinosaurs intend to play human games until the very end. As pitches go, it’s a knee-slapper. Largely in part because it’s so very recognizable. Just ask every single person who’s suffered from unusual bleeding or a misplaced lump and didn’t schedule a doctor’s visit right away. We are such odd creatures. Apparently, so were the dinosaurs.
You End Up Becoming Yourself
Kaiju Table Battles is one of the most intensely personal games I have ever played. It’s like stumbling across a friend’s open diary and reading a few fervid paragraphs before recognizing the artifact for what it is. The impulse in that moment, in our culture, is to clasp the diary shut, and likewise clasp shut the memory. We shy away from earnestness so readily. How, then, do we respond when the earnestness stands on a stool and demands to be seen?
Amabel Holland has always been a designer who stretches and strains the medium to its absolute boundaries. Kaiju Table Battles takes both to their limit. Maybe beyond the limit. This is a legacy game, envelopes and all, which peels itself apart layer by layer, revealing new diary lines and rubber-suited monsters alike. Along the way, it questions the very foundations of play.
SPACE-BIFF! 