Author Archives: Dan Thurot
Running Shoes Unlocked
You’ve heard the story. Boy meet girl. Girl chases boy. Boy leaps off building, evades federal marshals with the help of a nightclub’s smoke machine, wades through the sewer, and boards a plane to a non-extradition nation.
It’s been a hot minute since I wrote about Fugitive, Tim Fowers’ highwire hidden movement game. There’s now a second edition out. I wasn’t anticipating that I would play it, let alone write about it, but it’s stolen my heart all over again.
Space-Cast! #30. Remembering Stonewall
On this day in 1969, a police raid in Greenwich Village sparked three days of intense rioting by members of the gay community. This was the turning point in the fight for LGBT+ rights in the United States. Today we’re joined by Taylor Shuss, designer of Stonewall Uprising, to discuss how his game charts the beginnings of the Pride movement, wading into the muddy waters of gamifying the AIDS epidemic, and how playing as history’s baddies can give players a deeper perspective on civil rights.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Biting Off Too Many Bahnbahns
There’s something off about Autobahn, the heavy Eurogame by Fabio Lopiano and Nestore Mangone. The game wears its inspirations on its sleeve, both the historical, bound up in the division and eventual reunification of post-war Germany, and the mechanical, based on the interlocking incentives of other route-building games. It’s a game with a lot on its mind. Perhaps too much. Its gaze is larger than its stomach.
This Trick-Taking Life: The Contracts
I remember the first time I was asked to make a contract bid. You don’t forget a trauma like that. I’d played maybe two trick-takers — ever — and suddenly I was being asked a question for which there was no right answer. “Dan,” she said, “Now tell us how many tricks you’ll win.” I stared at her like she was nuts. She was nuts, right? What did she think I was, a precog? The only prediction I could make for my future was that I was about to lose yet another trick-taking game.
My personal journey with trick-takers has been fraught. In part one of this letter to my past self, we discussed the innate simplicity of the genre. In part two, things took a darker turn with triumph suits. Both of those experiences pale in comparison to today’s topic: contract bidding. Or, how trick-takers are secretly the toughest genre of card game in existence.
Skimping on Parchment
I’m a skeptic when it comes to roll-and-writes. For every one that hits, there are three or four others I’d rather never touch again. No, I won’t be giving examples. Whether that’s because I can’t remember any off the top of my head, I can neither confirm nor deny.
Paper Dungeons by Leandro Pires exemplifies the phenomenon. Per Space-Biff! policy, I’ve played it three times. In between each play, it managed to slip from my memory like fog through fingers.
Worldbreakers: The Gathering
Those of us who lived through the collectible card game boom of the 1990s approach our CCG derivatives with due suspicion.
Consider Worldbreakers: Advent of the Khanate, Elli Emir’s take on the genre. From one perspective, it’s the bastard child of Magic: The Gathering and Android: Netrunner, right down to the compulsive inclusion of a colon in its title. There’s nary a novel bone in the game’s body. Teaching it is as easy as confirming that your pupil also constructed decks in middle school. If anything, its slight differences from Magic — say, in the way attacks are resolved — are a sticking point for no other reason than because they’re so minor that they never wholly escape their daddy’s shadow.
On the other side of the coin, Worldbreakers is appealing for much the same reason. Amir has refined that august parentage into far more approachable offspring. It’s intuitive to teach, riffs on a few familiar chords, and crosses vivid new horizons. The result is that playing Worldbreakers is like exploring a hobby from adolescence for the first time.
Bloodsucking Techbros
It’s been a while since we’ve seen such a thorough explication of why setting matters than J.B. Howell’s SiliconVania. Set in a future Transylvania where vampires have gone public and decided to transform their ancestral homeland into the next Silicon Valley, Howell has crafted a game that riffs on blood-boy slurping techbros and venture capital excess, all without necessarily cluing its players in on the satire. It surprises with some devious bidding and tile-laying. If only the setting weren’t such a damp spitball to the ear.
Carcassonne-by-the-Sea
It would be easy to label Beacon Patrol, the tile-layer designed and illustrated by Torben Ratzlaff, as a toothless Carcassonne-by-the-Sea. Like Klaus-Jürgen Wrede’s masterpiece, it’s preoccupied with the matching of corners and edges, the apprehension of gaps yet to be filled, and landmasses that come together at jutting intersections. Despite those similarities, Beacon Patrol is unhurried, a wholly cooperative or solitaire game that proceeds at leisurely pace and doesn’t conclude so much as it goes to sleep.
That’s exactly what it’s meant to do. It may lack bite, but the better descriptor would be to say it never breaks skin.
When Fire Met Stone
From Troy to Stalingrad, there’s nothing quite as gripping as the stakes and drama of a good siege. Sieges seem like the perfect setting for a board game, with their limited parameters and clear-cut victory conditions. Yet we don’t often see them given their due. In many cases, board game sieges are little more than countdown timers while armies elsewhere rush to reinforce besieged allies or outmaneuver their foes.
In stark contrast with other efforts, Fire & Stone: Siege of Vienna is possibly the best siege game I’ve played. We’ve seen the work of Robert DeLeskie before, first with The Wars of Marcus Aurelius and later Stilicho: Last of the Romans. But where those were sweeping epics, covering decades of zoomed-out politics, Fire & Stone covers two months of intense fighting between the Ottoman and Holy Roman Empires.
Lacuna Matata
The older I get, the more I appreciate cozy games, those with simple rules and an intent to generate sensations of warmth and ease. Lacuna, designed by Mark Gerrits, is one such game. I came very close to overlooking it.
SPACE-BIFF! 