Author Archives: Dan Thurot
Shadow of the Proboscis
Justin Kemppainen’s Leviathan Wilds wears its influences on its sleeve. One influence in particular: Shadow of the Colossus, the 2005 PlayStation 2 title that influenced a generation of up-and-coming designers. Like that game, Leviathan Wilds is about scaling behemothic creatures in order to punch them in their color-coded weak spots.
But Leviathan Wilds is a kinder giant-puncher. Gone are the melancholic grays, swapped out for a fuller palette and a conservationist ethic. These leviathans have been corrupted by nasty crystals, you see. Cured of the brobdingnagian gout, they will return to their gentle ways. Time to climb.
Four Hands and a Spare Finger
We play a lot of board games as a family. Short games, long games, campaign games. Everything. Over the past couple of months, however, we’ve fallen into the event horizon of a single book. It’s a slim thing, just the right size to sit against the window by the dinner table. Every evening, we’ve barely started eating before my daughters ask the question. “Daddy? Can we play a hand game?”
Internet, if you turn this cherished memory into something weird, it’s straight to jail for you.
Space-Cast! #37. Pax Relationships
In her second-ever appearance on the Space-Cast!, today we’re joined by Matilda Simonsson, designer of hand-crafted games Turncoats and Pax Penning! As we discuss her second hit, we also delve into why she decided to create an entry in the Pax Series, the difficulty of writing history, and how every single historical board game except hers is wrong to use coins as their primary form of currency.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Arbor Daze
After a disaster left much of the land uninhabitable, eco-pilgrims journey to faraway territories to restore both their village’s habitats and the creatures that once dwelled there. Dani Garcia’s Arborea joins the recent run of ecologically conscious board games; this time, its fantasy setting provides a colorful, almost trippy backdrop to the action. It’s conservation on acid, the Half-Earth Project on mushrooms.
If only it had embraced the trip.
Smothering Gods
There’s nothing out there quite like Ryan Laukat’s Sleeping Gods. Even after a mediocre sidequel, the repackaged freebie Primeval Peril, this is one of the few fantasy universes I’m eager to dive into, a testament to Laukat’s writing, illustrations, and imagination. Where most board games of its ilk would make me groan at the prospect of another flipped page, another half-baked snippet of dialogue, another skill check (brrrr), Laukat produces worlds that drive me compulsively forward.
Which is why I’m so very happy to report that Distant Skies, the first full-length followup to the 2021 original, is everything the first game was and more.
Galactic Relapse
When it comes to board games, it isn’t always easy to tell the difference between a development and a regression. Take Galactic Renaissance, Christian Martinez’s followup to his supernal war-and-politics game Inis. On the surface, it covers much the same ground as that previous title, full of aggressive peacetimes, ill-advised conflicts that leave one poorer even in victory, and intersecting interests that are too testy to call alliances. Even the game’s geography, those far-flung planets only connected via warpgates, the way their abilities are contested and claimed, calls to mind the island terrain of its predecessor.
But this is no Inis. Despite riffing on many of the same ideas, Galactic Renaissance is a pockmarked experience, uneven in its best moments and frustrating and over-long the rest of the time. At its worst, it feels like a half-completed prototype for its predecessor.
Hot Rook on Rook Action
Taiki Shinzawa is a well-known figure in the realm of Japanese trick-takers. He’s responsible for a thick catalog of formidable offerings, including American Bookshop, Inflation! and Charms, Maskmen, 9 Lives, and one of my absolute favorites, Ghosts of Christmas.
Tower Chess is not a trick-taking game. It’s a varietal of chess — bet you couldn’t see that one coming — and it’s eminently agreeable.
Chewing the Scenery
There’s no hiding it: Earthborne Rangers feels like a gigantic leap forward for a particular niche of card game, a quiet revolution of contextualization and setting that effectively relegates its predecessors to the nursing home. Those predecessors, adventure card titles defined by the release model of Fantasy Flight Games — The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game and Arkham Horror: The Card Game, to name the most durable examples — have been defrocked, shown to possess creaking knees and prosthetic hips.
But while it would be possible to write a thousand words bemoaning the business model that trickled out those games one expansion pack at a time, it’s far more interesting to highlight what Earthborne Rangers gets right.
Doohickey Archaeology
ArcheOlogic, in addition to having the most offensive capitalized letter in the history of board games — seriously, how do you pronounce this thing? aar-kee-OH!-laa-juhk is as close as I can get — is what I mentally categorize as a “doohickey deduction game.” As in, it’s got a doohickey, and the entire game is more or less about using that doohickey to feed you information.
Which makes sense, given the game’s provenance. Yoann Levet was also half of the design team behind Turing Machine, itself a doohickey deduction game. As with that title, ArcheOlogic is a clockwork engine whose engineering is perhaps more interesting than the gameplay it spits out.
The Death of Dyson
The current locus for per-ounce innovation in tabletop is trick-taking, and I’m not sure there’s a finer example of how far the genre punches above its weight than Power Vacuum. Designed by Kaleb Wentzel-Fisher and published and illustrated by Malachi Ray Rempen — who gave us the imperfect but charming Roll Camera! — this one provides suited cards by way of The Death of Stalin. It’s viciously good.
SPACE-BIFF! 