Category Archives: Board Game
You Stay in That Television!
All I play anymore is trick-takers.
I don’t play as many trick-takers as I used to.
For the most part, that’s fine by me. Sometimes, too much of a good thing makes for a real tummy ache, and while it’s a rare week that doesn’t see me tackling at least one of the hobby’s elder statesmen, nothing makes a board game quite like a board. I will admit, though, there’s always the siren call of the latest pure tricker. “Come back to the table,” it sings, except in, I dunno, Greek. Calling me. Haunting me.
Dead Channels, for example. This is the latest title by Daniel Newman, whose designs we’ve tussled with once or twice.
Colossissippi
Despite being the creation of John Rudolph Drexler, Colossi reminds me of an early John Clowdus design. At really every point, come to think of it. There’s the shape of the thing: a lane-battler packed with powerful abilities that constantly reform its contests into new shapes. Or its illustrations, here produced by Sean Thurlow, but not all that distant from the brushstrokes that fill Omen: A Reign of War. The form factor is also approximate; the box isn’t tiny, but it isn’t much larger than Omen’s second edition. Even the game’s willingness to surprise feels redolent of one of our hobby’s under-celebrated innovators.
If I wasn’t sufficiently clear, this should be taken as an enormous compliment. Colossi has a few shortcomings — another parallel with certain Clowdus titles — but it’s such a gust of fresh air that I dearly hope Drexler has a few more in the chamber.
Scribbly Koalas
My odyssey through Postmark’s catalog of single-sheet print-and-play games continues. This week’s titles are none other than Scribbly Gum and Koala Rescue Club, both designed and illustrated by Phil and Meredith Walker-Harding.
You can tell we’ve reached the really good games when I’m covering them two at a time. Although this makes for a good twist, because one of them is pretty dang solid. For babies. I mean that in a good way.
A Crack in the World
I wouldn’t wish to inflict board game drama on anybody who wasn’t already saturated in the stuff, so I’ll keep the details sparse, but the past couple of weeks saw a minor authority figure on BoardGameGeek sharing his views on demonic possession with a potential customer. I try to stay away from such dust-ups, but I found myself compelled to weigh in. My resultant post discussed the textual development of an adversarial spirit in Judaism and Christianity and made an impassioned plea to anyone basing their decisions on the existence of otherworldly beings.
Over the coming days, I heard from a number of people. Some had been touched by what I’d written. Others were just glad to have encountered something informative on the internet. One or two were offended.
But what stood out to me the most were those who had, like me, encountered “demonic possession” in the wild. Not the real thing. Not actual demons clawing their way through the cracks in the world. I’m talking about the excuses, usually offered by pastors, who couldn’t explain some phenomenon, but who needed to be the authority figure on everything. The undiagnosed illnesses. The non-mainstream gender orientations. The people who wanted nothing to do with the good news.
Playing Martha McGill’s Witch Hunt 1649, it was impossible to not mull over those thoughts all over again. It was impossible not to think back on the time I met a witch.
Forget the Flippers
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call Steven Aramini one of our hobby’s finest designers of small-format board games. Whether we’re talking about microgames like Sprawlopolis and Ancient Realm, or Fliptown, still perhaps the finest flip-and-write game ever designed, Aramini has a keen talent for compressing big ideas into small packages.
Flip Voyage, then, is his followup to Fliptown by way of Nemo’s War — although in a rare Aramini miss, this one surfaced too quickly and contracted the bends.
Class Reunion: Euphoria
It’s been thirteen years since the original release of Jamey Stegmaier’s Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia. I would say it doesn’t feel like thirteen years, but I’d be lying. Between the pandemic and five or six successive generations of board game iteration, it’s been an eternity. Long enough for a retrospective, certainly.
Speak of the devil. Euphoria: Essential Edition is a remake of the original game, plus some of the stuff from the expansions, minus a few love handles and splotchy moles. Let’s see how the old dystopia has held up after all these years.
Combat Results Postcard
Battle Card is as apt as descriptions get. Designed by David Thompson and Nils Johansson, this is the fourth project in the Postmark Games lineup. Like its earlier peers — Voyages, Aquamarine, and Waypoints — this is a print-and-play title that can be produced with functionally zero budget. Unlike those projects, however, Battle Card is billed as a wargame on a single postcard-sized sheet.
That’s true enough. With a few dice and a smidgen of experience to help interpret the rules, Battle Card covers six engagements from the Second World War. And their format is indeed very small, highlighting some real resourcefulness on their designers’ part in compressing battles and even campaigns into ten-minute experiences.
But unlike those other titles, Battle Card is a mixed bag. I’ll give an example.
Space-Cast! #56. Keep Your Shirt Tucked In
Ever wanted to play a game that would make you feel strange feelings about your childhood religion? Heyo, Greg Loring-Albright’s Keep the Faith is the title for you! In this conversation, Greg joins us to discuss whether board games or role-playing games are better, our respective religious traumas and hopes, and how a board game might prove illuminating of historical forces. You know, light chit-chat!
Bite the Big One
I live in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains. Have for nearly my whole life. Out-of-towners sometimes voice their apprehension when they first visit our cordillera, when they see the way our cities and suburbs are hemmed in by walls. The mountains, they say, seem precarious, like they could topple onto our heads at any moment, burying us under a thousand tons of limestone and quartz monzonite. Jokingly, I inform them that the real danger of the coming tectonic collapse — not the little shakes we sometimes get, but the Big One, the one we’re a millennium overdue for — is that it will kill us from below. The ground will liquefy and carry us downward, the ancient tidal basin finally sweeping us out to an inland sea that died with the mammoths.
Cysmic, the board game by Jason Blake, gives me that feeling. When I hefted it onto the review stack next to my computer desk, my wife wondered aloud if it would topple and crush me. It isn’t the largest board game I’ve ever owned; that would be the 22-pound Ogre, the one with the team lift warning printed prominently on its side. But it’s the one that feels most like an Ozymandian temple to excess. Its map is sprawling. The frame that holds the hexes comes with hidden magnets to lock everything into place. The plastic constructs are so phallic that they make me uncomfortable. Among its many dice, there’s one for gauging your character’s crisis of conscience. It’s so gargantuan that it’s become a game-night joke. Nothing could justify this sprawl.
I kinda dig it.
Touch Grass (Metaphorical)
Voyages, the first of Matthew Dunstan and Rory Muldoon’s single-sheet print-and-play roll-and-write games, used three dice. Aquamarine used two. Waypoints continues the trend by using a single die.
That’s cool in its own right. But that isn’t what makes Waypoints special. What makes Waypoints special is the way it handles the movements generated by its rolls. Where those other titles — and let’s face it, most board games — featured straight movements, point to point, A to B, nearly every move in Waypoints is the sort of move you might actually make while traversing an open space.
Here, I’ll show you.
SPACE-BIFF! 