Category Archives: Board Game
Usher in the New Millennium
I’ve always wanted to play a collectible card game in a competitive environment. There’s something about watching a deck take shape over weeks and months, toying with ideas and builds whenever new cards are released, and then testing the mettle of your creation in the crucible of a tournament. And when that’s done, you do it all over again, learning from your mistakes and capitalizing on your successes. Unfortunately, I simply lack the time that I’d need to invest in such an endeavor. I’d say, “Maybe if I were younger,” but I didn’t have all that much free time when I was a kid either. Maybe when I’m older.
Good thing Millennium Blades is finally here, because it satisfies my hunger with one of the most rollicking fun games I’ve ever played.
The V-Pandemic
Riding high on the tremendous success of Pandemic Legacy, Rob Daviau has now crafted an entirely new game about a deadly infection, the globetrotting team bent on curing it, and vampires. It’s called V-Wars, and it features a map of the planet (complete with cities located one galling inch away from their real-world positions), a disease that pops up according to the whims of an uncaring event deck, and vampires. If it sounds a lot like Pandemic plus vampires, well, you aren’t wrong. In a way, it feels like Daviau had a few great ideas left over that he couldn’t quite squeeze into Pandemic Legacy, so he made V-Wars. And now it exists.
Exploitation Cardboard
Watching something you aren’t supposed to is almost a rite of passage for a young person. Whatever the film, there’s an adolescent thrill in viewing the forbidden. For my schoolyard friends, it was Alien and Predator, which they recounted scene by scene for my jealous ears. For me, it was Timecop, an old VHS cassette pulled down from the shelf because my dad had talked up this one scene where Jean-Claude Van Damme did the splits over a pool of electrified water. Instead, I got an eyeful of him doing the splits over Ferris Bueller’s old girlfriend. So that’s how it is in their family.
And that’s what Ferox is all about. Mimicking the Italian cannibal exploitation genre that was so bizarrely prominent in the ’70s and ’80s, it arrives in a shoddy cardboard box, sports a “Be Kind, Please Rewind” sticker, and overfloweth with gory images of grisly massacres, angry twentysomethings embracing the horrors of desperate survival, and lots and lots of skulls and blood spatters. Just opening it, a part of me reflexively checked over my shoulder to make sure my parents hadn’t come home early from the symphony.
A Thousand Pages, Give or Take a Few
I’m going to tell you something I’ve never confessed to anybody: I was raised from vat-birth to be a Scrabble-playing genius. Yes, it’s true. Unlike some of the gene-factory’s other assigned Mothers, mine spared not an iota of self-esteem when it came to her favorite pastime. She would scrub the floor with me, assembling words like SYZYGY for hundreds of points while I scrabbled in the dirt with SCOOP. I finally thought to put an S on the end. “SCOOPS,” I announced with no small note of triumph in my voice, picking up 10 points, my first double- digit accomplishment. “QUETZALS,” she countered, using my own S, my pride and joy, as the key to my undoing. From beneath the table, she produced a calculator and starting tallying her triple word score.
When I saw that Tim Fowers — who also designed the delightfully surprising Burgle Bros. — had put out a game that was simultaneously about deck-building and word-building, I knew my chance had arrived. I would finally defeat Mother.
Sho Sho Shogunate
Japanese history isn’t really my specialty. As far as I can tell, it basically consists of four thousand years of fighting over who gets to be shogun for a little bit, then the new shogun gets poisoned by a ninja and the whole things starts all over again, at least until Tom Cruise shows up and wows everyone with his beard into accepting modernity — but sensible modernity rather than mean modernity.
Thankfully, the tiny card game Shogunate doesn’t do anything to challenge my assumptions. Just last night, we propped up five new shoguns, then promptly murdered all of them. There were vendettas, assassinations, and… well, that’s mostly what happened. Vendettas and assassinations.
Pandemic: Spoiled Legacy
What a journey we have undertaken together. A full year’s worth of uncertainty, close calls, and other things I might have been able to talk about if this weren’t the pre-spoiler-warning header. Whatever else happens today, we’ll always have the adventures we lived in parts one, two, and three. Beyond that? Who knows.
AS ALWAYS, BE WARNED. HERE DWELL THE MOST ALL-ENCOMPASSSING, EVERYTHING-RUINING, SECRET-DEVOURING SPOILERS.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrel Society
Think of board games like a heist. You’ve got a target (winning the game), a plan both staffed with clever people (the other players) and enabled by innovative mechanical apparatuses (the rules), and any number of ways for things to go wrong. It’s the sort of analogy that feels so right because it can be applied to pretty much anything. A movie is a heist. A book is a heist. Stealing a bucketful of Fabergé eggs is a heist.
Scoundrel Society, which is about a gentlemen society of thieves seeking to fleece a mark of all their worldly possessions, single-handedly proves the point. Because when it comes to a heist, you can have all the right ideas, people, and tools, and still fall flat on your face right as you’re moseying out the door with a Rembrandt tucked under your coat.
Nary a Geared Top Hat in Sight
Clockwork Wars is the sort of game that might not survive the first glance. “Looks like a pared-down version of Archipelago,” one of my friends said when he first walked into the room, which is a longtime cardboard enthusiast’s version of “Looks like Settlers of Catan,” the proper reaction to any game featuring colorful hexes. And while Clockwork Wars holds nothing in common with Archipelago (or Catan), my friend wasn’t wrong. Colorful hexes and counters aren’t enough to set you apart in today’s golden age of colorful hexes and counters.
That’s where the second glance and the third glance come in, because Clockwork Wars absolutely survives those.
Who Would Want to Rule an Ice Garden?
Playing a game that boasts all your favorite elements but still doesn’t click is sort of like picking up a mouth-watering chili dog, taking a deep breath of its spiced perfection, then digging into a bite of jello and mushrooms. Or leaning in for a kiss and instead getting a faceful of echidna. Or looking forward to your favorite sibling’s birthday party only to arrive and discover they’re now engaged to your worst enemy.
I could go on. The point is, that’s The Lord of the Ice Garden in a nutshell.
A Bingo Ate Your Baby
Back in the winter of 2005, I spent one morning of every week volunteering in a retirement home. It was a rewarding time in its own way, but also rather ho-hum, especially because my job was to play bingo or bunco with the residents. For four hours straight. Not kidding, I’m occasionally bored awake by dreams of that ceaselessly shaking bunco cup. Night terrors would at least be interesting.
So when I cracked open the rulebook for Dingo’s Dreams only to discover a riff on bingo, the fact that it had been designed by Alf Seegert and illustrated by the prime target of my affection, Ryan Laukat, didn’t do as much for me as it might have otherwise. A pair of fantastic designers and artists making a ritzy version of bingo?
Oh.
SPACE-BIFF! 