Author Archives: Dan Thurot
Monkey See, Monkey Doze
After Us is a tranquilizer. And not the gentle soporific kind that lets you slip little by little into drowsiness. It’s a knockout drug in a pressurized dart that’s been fired straight into your artery and dragged you kicking into a coma. I suspect that wasn’t what Florian Sirieix was designing for, but here we are.
This Trick-Taking Life: The Future
My wife introduced me to modern board games. Oh, not totally — I’d played The Settlers of Catan to exhaustion, and eventually I discovered Philippe Kevaerts’ Small World on my own. But meeting Somerset introduced me to an entire world of tabletop games, one that was wide and wonderful and only in its infancy. The trick-takers, though, those I didn’t get. Wasn’t it just, we all put a card down and someone gets all the cards?
This is the last part of this letter to my younger self. We’ve already discussed the history and appeal of the genre, from its inherent simplicity to the innovation of the triumph suit to the important hurdle of contract bidding. Today, there’s only one last piece of history to explore. It’s the year 2021, and a handful of trick-taking games are about to change the format forever.
First Place Goes to Second Place
All I play anymore is trick-taking games.
When it comes to Schadenfreude, the supernal title by the Japanese designer known as ctr, that seems like a good thing to me.
Slaying Probus
Ah, the third century. When men were men, women knew their place, and the Roman Empire was so tattered that the lifespan of its leaders was measured in months rather than years. Who wouldn’t want to be transported to those halcyon days?
If their previous design catalog is anything to go by, Wray Ferrell and Brad Johnson might volunteer. Time of Crisis and its expansion tackled the military anarchy of the third century with ease, highlighting the plagues, inflation, invasions, and civil war that were the hallmarks of the era. Their newest title, The Barracks Emperors, covers such similar ground that one might mistake it for another expansion.
With Friends Like These…
All I play anymore is trick-taking games.
As a genre, they’ve ensnared me with their neurotoxins and begun the process of digestion. Not unlike a sea anemone, come to think of it. That’s the topic of Daniel Newman’s Enemy Anemone, which one suspects was created solely because it’s so fun to pronounce. Fortunately, that’s not all it has going for it. Not unlike yesterday’s Aurum, it has some devious surprises in store.
All That Glitters Is Not Aurum
All I play anymore is trick-taking games.
I’m not being all the way serious. But it is a rare game night that doesn’t see at least a few tricks being taken. As I wrote in the first part of my open letter to my younger self about the value of trick-takers, these things are just so dang easy to learn that they offer the perfect digestif to a full-course gaming session. Only yesterday, Shreesh Bhat’s Aurum provided a literal digestif, enabling a pleasant half-hour after dinner with the in-laws. It helps that Aurum is mostly a team game. That way, my mother-and-law and I can tear up the table.
The Goose Will Have Blood
I can’t speak to whether The Gods Will Have Blood, the latest game by Dan Bullock, is a faithful adaptation of Anatole France’s Les Dieux ont soif, but it evokes sensations that only rarely creep into our hobby from literature. Perhaps it would be better to call it an abridgement. At only twenty minutes in length (if that), it packs terrible questions into a pressure cooker that threatens to pop with every flipped card and drawn cube.
Gosu Gosu Gosu! Ecks!
Gosu, it’s good to see you.
I wrote about Kim Satô’s goblin-filled GOSU a literal decade ago. I was a relative newcomer to the hobby then, and enjoyed its antics thoroughly, though time and the luck of the draw saw it falling out of favor. Gosu somehow managed to go on without me. This new edition, Gosu X, is less a game designed than a game developed. Its publisher, Sorry We Are French, has put it through the wringer with multiple years of playtests. The result strongly resembles the original, but with a few alterations that leave it feeling like an entirely new beast.
For one thing, it’s no longer about warring goblins.
The Unlucky Eighth
Even though he has only the sole credit to his name on BoardGameGeek, it wouldn’t be fair to call Zach Barth a newcomer to card game design. While his studio, Zachtronics, was perhaps best known for its high-concept engineering and programming titles like SpaceChem and Infinifactory, I was more preoccupied with his solitaire offerings. When it comes to a simple deck of cards, Barth displays an ear for riffing on established designs, producing new and more interesting versions of FreeCell, cribbage, and one of the most devious solitaire games I’ve ever had the pleasure of suffering through, a ditty by the name of Fortune’s Foundation that wields a tarot deck like a rusty knife.
So it’s safe to say that Barth knows solitaire card games. Now that Zachtronics has been shuttered, it seems he’s shifting his attention from digital to tabletop. The first project of his design collective is now out. It’s a solitaire card game. Bet you didn’t see that one coming. Here’s one better: unlike his previous solitaires, this one isn’t quite like anything else. It’s sharp. It’s punchy. It plays in about ten minutes. It even opens with a bona fide gag.
Sustainable Archipelago
In 2017, an island vanished. Parali I, one of thirty-six islands in the Lakshadweep archipelago off the western coast of India, disappeared thanks to rising sea levels and coastal erosion. It was a small island, uninhabited, a quiet calamity. But it’s a calamity that will be repeated. Four more of the archipelago’s islands are expected to disappear in coming years. Experts anticipate that it won’t be long before more populous islands and coastal communities are affected.
Sidhant Chand’s Lakshadweep is about the titular archipelago. Its tone is optimistic. Rather than dropping islands beneath the waves, it’s about developing sustainable industries that will allow the local population to prosper without demolishing the natural world around them.
SPACE-BIFF! 