Author Archives: Dan Thurot
Summer Ludens
Yesterday, my car thermometer clocked 104°. Granted, our car is black, which means it regularly measures temperatures about ten degrees too warm, but still, that’s too damn hot.
Like everybody else descended from pioneers who decided to settle in the desert, we’re always on the lookout for ways to beat the heat. Our answer, like our answer to every other apprehension, has been board games. What follows are the ten titles that are helping my family cope with the Great American Bake-Off.
Life in First-Person
There’s an exercise I sometimes use in class to help my students break out of their modern mindset. Everyone gets a sheet of paper and swears to avoid looking at anyone else’s work until we’re finished. Then I ask them to draw a picture of where they are in the world. To place themselves within their surroundings.
For most modern people, the reflex is to draw a map. The layout of the lecture hall, the nearby buildings, maybe our city or state or country. This isn’t universal; those with aphantasia might create rudimentary images, while my more artistically minded students sketch the nearby mountains. (Or me, sitting at the front of the class, looking more pouchy and tired than I’d prefer.) But in most cases, maybe seventy to eighty percent of the time, they draw a map. Bird’s eye view, top-down, like something you’d see on a navigation tool.
And then we talk. Because for most humans in most places and most times, a map was an impossibility. Perhaps surveyors and astronomers had created one, a painstaking process that still resulted in an unreliable thing with uncharted gaps and “here be dragons” scrawled in the margins. More often, the best one could hope for was a series of landmarks. A settlement here, a strange rock over there, a mountain or lake on the horizon. Your world was a series of visual cues, a vast maw that threatened to swallow you up the instant you strayed from its stepping stones.
This modern tendency to locate ourselves on a map creeps into our thinking about… well, everything. The identity of our kinsmen, neighbors, and rivals. The spaces that can be considered safe or dangerous. The distance between points. Our place within a country, continent, time zone, planet, ecology. Who we are.
Way more important than any of that identity junk, of course, is that maps also make their way into board games. Whether we’re talking about hex grids or squiggly provinces, nearly every board game about kingdom-building or exploration stands its players on firm footing, located safely within the confines of a perfectly scaled representation of reality.
Except for Vantage.
Christ and His Saints Were Asleep
Hot take: any time period dubbed “THE ANARCHY” was probably a bummer. The specific Anarchy referred to in The Anarchy, the latest flip-and-write game by Bobby Hill, was a fifteen-year war of succession fought between the Empress Matilda and King Stephen across Normandy and southern England during the twelfth century. Which, in case you missed the memo on the merits of every century, was itself something of a bummer.
Here’s the good news. While The Anarchy might have been a big ole stink-pickle for everyone involved, Hill’s version offers the exact opposite. Building on the systems he established in Hadrian’s Wall, this is a complex but thrilling portrayal of Medieval warfare, tower defense, and brewing, with a heady dose of modern combo-building for good effect.
Space-Cast! #47. Bun Bangers
Hot Streak! Off-brand mascots and gambling degeneracy have never been more in fashion. For today’s Space-Cast!, we’re joined by Jon Perry to discuss his mascot-racing board game, its connections to the digital collection UFO 50, and the particulars of adaptation and artistic medium. Now that’s a mouthful!
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Skyblivionrockmarsh
Way back in 2011, Todd Howard let it slip that Skyrim would have “unlimited dragons,” dragging surprised reactions from the internet. Don’t believe me? Here’s pre-People Make Games, pre-Shut Up & Sit Down Quintin Smith’s press release on the matter. It’s pleasingly sarcastic. Because, you know, “unlimited nouns” has always been the Elder Scrolls’ whole thing. This is the fantasy series that made volume its defining metric. Depth? Nah. Enjoyment? Get outta here. Kelvins? Only if you’re talking about Lord Kelvyn, the Redguard Knight of the True Horn. No, really. Like I said, unlimited nouns.
Which brings us to The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era, Chip Theory’s adaptation of not only Skyrim, not only Oblivion, not only Morrowind, not only those other ones nobody talks about anymore, but the whole dang universe with its boundless recreations, provided your recreational interests are limited to hoofing across fantasy landscapes and murdering fantasy gobbos. It comes with a bazillion components, weighs so much that it should have a team lift warning on the box, and costs as much as twenty-five burritos from my favorite local burrito place.
You heard that right. Despite my policy on the matter, this thing is so pricey that I think it warrants some discussion. First, though, I want to walk you through the shape of an average TES:BOTSE campaign.
She’s a Grisly Monster, I Assure You
You know the story. Buncha monsters storm Mount Olympus. The pantheon is in a scramble. Who’s this coming to save the day — Hercules? More like Hunk-ules.
Reiner Knizia’s Ichor isn’t Disney’s Hercules, and thank the gods for that, although Tyler Miles Lockett’s illustrations do somewhat resemble the Gerald Scarfe amphorae look of the animated feature. When I previewed the thing a year back, I liked it somewhat less than its sibling title Iliad. Now that they’re both finished and on my table, though, I’ve been giving Ichor a second look. And while it’s still the zanier and less measured of the pair, there’s so much to appreciate about Knizia’s portrayal of this divine brawl that I can’t help but be charmed.
Let Me Not Then Die Ingloriously
You know that moment in every ancient battle scene, whether in film or video games, where the lines have collapsed and now the burly infantry boys are fighting one on one, everybody mixed together and slashing wildly? Bonus points when two rival heroes spot each other in the fray and start murdering their way toward one another, hellbent on a personal duel where nobody will happen to spear them through the backside.
Sorry to disappoint, but those scenes are pure invention. There simply weren’t enough suicidal soldiers in the ancient world for such an engagement. Still, it looks hella cool, and it’s significantly easier to stage than an actual line of infantry trying to scare their opposite number into freaking out and running away.
One of my favorite things about Reiner Knizia’s Iliad, which I previewed last year, is the way it evokes those haphazard murder-thons, Greek boys in blue and red squaring off in a checkers-grid melee. Sure, the game is smart and all that, providing a thinky two-player match of wits that emphasizes clever investments over brute strength. But I’m really here for the chaos.
Syke!
In 1916, at the height of WWI, two diplomats met in secret to outline the future partitioning of the Ottoman Empire. Those diplomats, the United Kingdom’s Mark Sykes and France’s François Georges-Picot, approached this undertaking with all due gravity and diligence.
Jokes! Nah, they more or less scribbled on a map with crayons, dividing the region between the U.K., France, Russia, and Italy. Their proposed boundaries split local polities — in some cases, they seem to have used the letters on their map as landmarks — and showed no intention of honoring their agreements with their Arab allies. Shrouded in secrecy, the agreement only came to light when post-revolution Bolsheviks published the whole thing, proving to the world that the Triple Entente had returned to their bad habit of cutting backroom deals.
This ignominious treaty is the topic of Sykes-Picot, the trick-taking, dry-erase, area control game by Brooks Barber and Hollandspiele. This one is angry, polemical, slapdash, and wholly on-point.
Gazing Up into Heaven
Last year, two designs by Tomáš Holek marveled at the stars. One of those games, SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has enraptured audiences with its thoughtful quest to discover life beyond our planet. The other title is Galileo Galilei, a boilerplate Euro with a few good ideas in its head and some profoundly spurious history in its belly.
This review is for the weaker of the two. Get ready to squint into the eyepiece.
Wet Behind the Gills
Over the past year or so, my eleven-year-old daughter Cate and I have tried a handful of campaign adventure games. By far her favorite — our favorite — has been Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders by Tim and Ben Eisner.
Not that Tidal Blades 2 is without its peculiarities. It’s an odd duck, a sprawling cooperative campaign that’s also a sequel to a game that was not, apparently, itself a sprawling cooperative campaign, set in a far-future world where fish and crocodiles are sentient bipeds, axolotls live in hive-mind communion with trans-dimensional beings, and a big old time warp called the Fold sits over the flash-frozen husk of a nearby civilization. The Fold, by the way, is what your heroes will be unfolding. Not, say, their little sister’s origami.
SPACE-BIFF! 