Author Archives: Dan Thurot
Space-Cast! #19. Attacking the Bloc
In the midst of a time of social unrest, one game dares to investigate the polarities of popular protest. That game is Bloc by Bloc by T.L. Simons and Greg Loring-Albright. For today’s episode, join Dan, T.L., and Greg as we discuss how their game offers both contradiction and clarity in politics, violent and nonviolent disobedience, popular expropriation, and the danger of having an uprising stolen from under your feet. Bloc by Bloc: Uprising is currently funding on Gamefound.
Listen over here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Runnin’ Through the Forest
The first Advent calendars were crafted by German Lutherans to count down the days to Christmas and had Bible verses behind their windows. Two centuries later, Michael Menzel, best known for designing Legends of Andor, came to the conclusion that it would be much cooler to hide board game stuff back there.
For unto us The Adventures of Robin Hood is born.
We Call Them Cylons
There was never a chance that Unfathomable would sweep me off my feet. From its very announcement, when news broke that Tony Fanchi would be recasting Cory Konieczka’s Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game as yet another volume in Fantasy Flight’s loosely connected Arkham Horror Files, a single unexpected, uncharacteristic thought barged into my head:
How distasteful.
Am I Happy or in Misery?
Bernard Grzybowski’s Purple Haze, currently funding on Gamefound for the next day or so, claims to be “an immersive story-creation campaign game for 1 to 4 players that drops you into the heart of darkness: Vietnam, 1967.”
As buzzwordy an introduction as that is, it’s all true on a technical level. It’s a game. It’s immersive. It openly asks its players to take its icon-laden framework and breathe the life of a personal story into its vacant lungs. Yes, smart-ass, it plays with 1 to 4 players.
More than that, though, as I’ve been playing it over the past couple of weeks, I can’t help but think there’s a better descriptor. Purple Haze is all of those things. It is also a neon-lit warning sign about how difficult it can be to make a game about serious subject matter.
Space-Cast! #18. Game Design Wizard
For the first time ever,* game designer, instructor, writer, and overall wizard Geoff Engelstein appears on a podcast to discuss a trio of his games, along with some insider baseball. Join us as we discuss getting an author’s permission to treat a protagonist like a doofus, what it’s like to gamify a peace conference, and why “gravity” is one of the greatest gaming metaphors of the decade.
(*Not the first time ever.)
Listen over here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Checking the Rules: The Board Game
In Nathan Woll’s Free Radicals, the free radicals are not the sexy cyberpunk characters frolicking on the cover. A free radical is apparently what we’ve decided to name the hovering alien spacecraft that have settled over the surface of our planet. These artifacts are fonts of limitless knowledge. But where Denis Villeneuve’s film Arrival, based on Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life,” posited that first contact was an exercise in linguistics, these free radicals are more interested in helping us do capitalism better.
In game terms, that translates to ten different factions each playing their own game. Keep those rules sheets handy. You’re going to need them.
The Little Bang
Sometimes when I’m feeling anxious, I’ll wander over to the NASA page to look at the most recent images coming in from the Hubble Space Telescope. There’s something about two galaxies colliding that makes my problems seem small by comparison. I’m not joking. The sheer enormity of the cosmos is utterly calming.
With Cosmogenesis, Yves Tourigny sets out to present only a small slice of the cataclysm of creation that is our universe. As with my Hubble pics, I’m enchanted despite its shortcomings. Even more so because, somewhere behind the colliding debris, Cosmogenesis is about the interrelationship of all things.
Sopophoria
Multiplayer solitaire gets a bad rap. Some folks use the phrase as an insult. But the truth is that sometimes I want to interact with my friends directly and other times I want to sit alongside them, maybe chatting, maybe sharing snacks, while playing in parallel without the pressures of competition.
Cascadia, designed by Randy Flynn and beautifully illustrated by Beth Sobel, is multiplayer solitaire to its core. So much so that its best descriptor is “sleepy.” And not necessarily in a bad way.
McDune
Dune. That inscrutable novel. As a youngster it seemed to me to be about purpose and awakening, puberty maybe, definitely victimhood, all trammeled by the reality that every life touches everything else, sometimes for the better but often for the worse. Its game adaptations, both cardboard and digital, were disappointingly narrow, preoccupied with the competing factions that served as the backdrop to its larger questions. Of those many attempts, however, the closest anything came to approximating the feel of Frank Herbert’s magnum opus was Bill Eberle, Jack Kittredge, and Peter Olotka’s 1979 board game, the very same that received a supernal remake only a few years back.
Dune — the 1979 board game — was also longer than Shai-Hulud. In an attempt to bring it under control for modern audiences, Gale Force Nine tapped Greg Olotka and Jack Reda to help create something more digestible. An abridgement, if you will.
The resultant Dune: A Game of Conquest and Diplomacy is certainly more playable. But it’s more playable the way bowdlerized Shakespeare is more watchable. Most of the individual beats have survived intact. All the same, the cutting has not been kind to the overall intention of the piece.
Roshamdon’t
Only a big damn nerd would know that the Kardashev Scale is a hypothetical measurement of a spacegoing civilization’s energy potential. Theorized by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, it posits that a civilization might fall into one of three levels, either harnessing the energy output of their entire planet (type-I), planetary system (type-II), or host galaxy (type-III). The concept plays a minor but pivotal role in Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem. If you don’t remember that part, it’s when Ye Wenjie figures out she can bounce a signal off the sun, effectively granting our sub-type-I species the communications potential of a type-II civilization. Spoiler alert.
Like I said: big damn nerds.
Stephen Avery and Eugene Bryant’s Kardashev Scale might also appeal to big damn nerds. But probably more because they’re hopping up and down at the sight of a board game entitled Kardashev Scale than because it’s any good.
SPACE-BIFF! 