Category Archives: Board Game
Encyclopedia Brown vs. The Telephone
Have you ever enjoyed the company of an Encyclopedia Brown mystery book, solving its riddles right alongside those plucky kids? Or perhaps engaged in a game of Telephone, also known as Chinese Whispers by those insensitive to the soft-spoken natures of our eastern brethren?
If so, then Witness might be the game for you. Buckle up, Encyclopedia.
Seven Polish Samurai
After spending my best years waiting for a board game adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, like a hero of old comes 7 Ronin in from the billowing dust, sword in hand, to the rescue. His weathered eyes flash, crinkle, and the corners of his mouth twitch upwards as he points to the hills behind my village.
“Ninja!” he hisses.
“Huh?” I reply.
Chaosmos in the Old Universe
Like an animal dead at the side of the road, the universe has begun to decompose. Too hot, too bloated, collapsing beneath its own weight. Making this metaphor even flimsier, as a member of one of the organism’s last surviving races — all of them charmingly weird, no jack-of-all-trades humans in sight — your only hope rests on the shoulders, boggles, or tentacles of the agent sent to find the all-important Ovoid. Without it, your extinction is guaranteed; with it, your people will be reborn in the universe to come.
Unfortunately, somebody went and told all the other species about it too. The race is on.
Finity Dungeon
Dungeon diving doesn’t have to be an ordeal. In fact, Welcome to the Dungeon pitches the act of spelunking ancient tombs as almost whimsical, heroes marching into the murky depths at the slightest fit of pique, their lives spent with hardly a care other than for your amusement.
And somehow, it works. Hoo boy, does it ever.
Welcome to Bright Sunny Indines
In a lot of ways, Indines seems like the ideal tourist destination. It’s bright. Sunny. The people are exotic and vibrant, and have sexy, unfamiliar names like Kallistar Flarechild and Zaamassal Kett. The general populace has long ago gotten used to inter-planar travelers popping into existence left and right, so there’s nary a grouse to be heard about bloody foreigners or damn tourists or anything ugly like that.
It’s so nice, it’s almost easy to forget that there are apparently only two careers in Indines: university professor and punching bag. More often than not, they’re the same job.
Rock the Cradle of Civilization
Sometime in the 23rd or 24th century BCE, things weren’t looking great for the Sumerians. Over hundreds of years they’d built multiple city-states along the alluvial plains of the violently unpredictable Tigris and Euphrates rivers, formed a powerful religion with priest-kings and mudbrick temples as their bases of authority, and even had time left over to develop writing somewhere along the way. Then an usurper came along, conquered most of the city-states, took a name that literally translates as, “No guys, really, I’m a totally legitimate king, I promise,” and set up the Akkad Dynasty. It would last for about a century and a half before more usurpers, more invaders, more uprisings continued to transform the face of Mesopotamia.
It makes for gripping history, and it’s exactly what you’ll be doing in Reiner Knizia’s Tigris & Euphrates.
Elsewhere: Colt Express
Our more astute readers will likely note that I already reviewed Colt Express back in January. But — bonus! — I’ve now reviewed it all over again down at The Review Corner, so if you somehow missed my first try at explaining precisely why I keep robbing the same old train, just mosey on over and I’ll do my best to explain.
Eighty-Minute Empire
When I asked Ryan Laukat at SaltCon why his latest expansion wasn’t entitled Eight-Minute Empire: Legends: Lost Lands — a fair question in my estimation, seeing as how it’s only compatible with Legends and not the original Eight-Minute Empire — he responded that when he considered it, his wife shot it down as too long. Too wordy.
Fair enough. You don’t want people taking longer to say the title than it takes to play the game, after all.
Welcome to the Redux
Despite taking place a good handful of centuries earlier, the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history somehow managed to give violent conflicts like the Mongol invasions and the First World War a solid spanking when it came to human death toll. The decline of the 400-year-old Han Dynasty had paved the way for the rise of three belligerent kingdoms, Shu, Wu, and Wei, and the next half-century was marked by their struggle to unite the country.
It’s the perfect setting for a board game, packed with court intrigue and military adventures, leaps and bounds of technology and contests of economy. And Three Kingdoms Redux understands this multifaceted approach to warfare perfectly.
Still Better than Camp Mill Hollow
Where do you wanna go?
Hey Mom, I wanna go,
Gee Mom, I wanna go,
to Mill Hollow.
With a hundred other kids crammed into a semicircle on our elementary school stage, I belted out that song. I blasted my lungs out, eyes damp and smile earnest but hopeful. It was basically a fundraiser dressed up as a play, the weight of parental guilt over their children’s dreams pinned on paying the fee that would let their kids spend three days and two nights at a camp in the High Uintas Wilderness.
Many of us boarded that bus to Camp Mill Hollow. And I’m living proof that at least some of us returned.
SPACE-BIFF! 