Category Archives: Board Game
A Fistful of Ghost Rock
Today my Personal Journey for a tournament-style card game continues with Doomtown: Reloaded, which immediately delivers a swift kick to the head by being based on that most sunset-tinged of genres, the Western.
Ah, the Western.
Spoils Alert
Over the past year or so, I’ve become slowly more interested in embarking on a Personal Journey to try my hand at a tournament-style card game. I was too late to be competitive in Netrunner, and Summoner Wars, although a game I’ve always enjoyed, doesn’t have a big enough tournament scene for my tastes. To that end, at GenCon 2014 I picked up three collectible-style card games: The Spoils, Doomtown: Reloaded, and Warhammer 40,000: Conquest, with the idea that I’d play the hell out of each of them and then pick the best one as my tourney game, and review all three in order from worst to best.
The Spoils is the first one I’m covering. If you’re a smart cookie, you can guess what that means.
Tiny Epic Something-or-Other
Maybe because of the unspoken nerd prestige that accompanies 4X games (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate, for the uninitiated), or perhaps because the previous two titles from Gamelyn Games, Dungeon Heroes and Fantasy Frontier, both ranked alright-to-okay on Space-Biff!’s Universal Objective Scale of Personal Preference, Tiny Epic Kingdoms really wants you to think of it as a 4X game.
But that’s somewhat misleading, because Tiny Epic Kingdoms isn’t really a 4X game. It’s more of a 3X game, which is just a 4X game minus an X — in this case, exploration, because there is absolutely no exploration in TEK. Unless laying a map tile on the table at the start of the game counts as “exploration,” in which case nearly every game is about exploration.
Not that it matters one dang bit, because Tiny Epic Kingdoms is easily the best title we’ve seen so far from Gamelyn Games.
Come Sail Away (to India)
You know what we take for granted? Nutmeg. We’re eating a bowl of spaghetti, it’s kind of bland, and we just shake a bunch of nutmeg over that sucker like it’s nothing.
To the Portuguese explorers of the 15th century, we eat like kings. Better than kings, because those kings could hardly get their royal mitts on any nutmeg at all. See, they were cut off from their lucrative nutmeg trade after the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, and suddenly there’s no nutmeg for anyone.
Nutmeg. Nutmeg nutmeg. It’s a nonsense word.
Over-Groomed But No Less Vicious
Dogs of War is a weird looking game, and not only because there isn’t a single dog in it. It comes with a nice enough board, your usual dinky cardboard tokens, and some of the most fabulous, over-produced miniatures you’ve ever seen, complete with detailed feathers sprouting from their floppy hats. They’re colorful, shiny, and utterly lovely to look at — and seem particularly incongruous when you realize they’re pretty much worker placement tokens.
The Secret History of Quilts
You know how people are always comparing time and history to a tapestry? Me neither, it just seemed like something someone might have said at some point. Who’s to say they didn’t? In the event that someone did compare history to a tapestry, Patchistory is probably the game of their dreams, provided that tapestries are anything like patchwork quilts.
Allow me to put it another way: Patchistory is a game about quilting. Also history. Together for the first time.
I trust everything is clear now.
Drafting Deep Space Nine
Among the Stars seems to have been designed to push nearly every one of my nerd buttons. An alliance of aliens working together? Egalitarian Future Button! Assembling a unique space station? Deep Space Nine Button! Card drafting? Drafting Button! Designed by a dude whose name is so unpronounceable to my thick English tongue that it might as well belong to an alien? Alien Board Game Designers Button!
Zombie Fifteen Apostrophe
Real-time games hold a special place in my heart, mostly because many of my best gaming memories revolve around the absolutely bonkers Space Alert. My family played through the campaign mode from the expansion, and even bought my dad a captain’s shirt one Christmas. “Listen up,” he’d say at the beginning of each run. “Emilie, you’re taking care of energy? Son, you’re going right? Somerset, left? Who’s going to jiggle the computer mouse? Remember to say if you need cards.” Then we’d press play on the CD player and proceed to panic like a chicken with its head, legs, and wings chopped off and rearranged at random.
Suffice it to say, Zombie 15′, which pits a pack of fifteen-year-old kids against a zombie horde, with only fifteen minutes to escape each of its fifteen scenarios, sounded exactly like my sort of thing.
Get Ready to Make an Impulse Purchase
“Impulse” doesn’t feel like a very good title for Impulse, the newest game by Carl Chudyk, whose previous games I didn’t play but probably will now that I’ve played Impulse. While I realize they’re going for the “driving force” definition, especially since the game’s impulse track is what enables all of your potential actions, “Impulse” makes it sound like a game about making snap decisions. And that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“So if you’re such a title genius,” you’re probably thinking, “what’s your title?” Well, yeah, I’ve got one. It’s perfect.
Space Deliberation.
Boom.
Beep. Beep. BEEPBEEPBEEP!
There are a few reasons why I’m not the ideal person to review Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game. For one thing, I didn’t play Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game (because I don’t really read comics), so I can’t talk about how this version compares. Second, I don’t like most deck-building games all that much. And third… Alien³ is totally the best Alien movie, right after the utter perfection that is Alien: Resurrection.
Okay, go ahead and scrub that last sentence from your memory.
SPACE-BIFF! 