Category Archives: Board Game
Assemble This
My second-favorite thing about Janice and Stu Turner’s Assembly is that the killer AI is probably right. After a micrometeorite storm introduces a deadly virus to the game’s ship assembly platform, the AI does exactly what every responsible citizen should do when they suspect they’ve been contaminated — it washes its hands. Sure, that involves flushing the station’s oxygen and quarantining the two survivors so they can’t reach Earth, but… when we lose the game, isn’t humanity winning?
Food for thought. At least it made me feel better when I lost over and over again. As for my favorite thing about Assembly, let’s take a closer look.
Alone in Nubia
Each Monday, I share a list of the past week’s played titles on social media, along with a few short details and a picture of each. When it came to sharing a snapshot of Wes Erni and Ben Madison’s solo wargame Nubia: Egypt’s Black Heirs, I suffered from a rare moment of hesitation. Like the last of Madison’s games I covered here, The White Tribe: Rhodesia’s War 1966-1980, Nubia is frank about the racial dynamics of its topic. Unlike The White Tribe, Nubia might not be sturdy enough to shoulder that weight, at least not quite as levelly. To examine why, we need to talk about slaves — both the broad history and the in-game tile.
Elsewhere: Cardboard for Conservation
Two articles by yours truly appeared on Ars Technica over the weekend. The first is a list of thirty games to play while surviving a global pandemic. Since I wrote only six of the thirty entries, it’s a good thing we’re not currently stuck at home with nothing but the list’s flimsier offerings. Which six did I write about, you ask? Good question. I’ll give you an easy clue: the best six.
The more substantive piece focuses on a handful of titles that are good picks for Earth Day. These are my favorite games for learning about this little blue marble we all happen to share, the interconnectedness of its climate and inhabitants, and our responsibility for its well-being. The first few titles are familiar family fare, but props to my editor for letting me include the last third, which consists of games you usually don’t see discussed on more mainstream sites. I hope someone picks up the Bios trilogy and goes cross-eyed at the lexical carpet bombing that is Phil Eklund’s principal mode of communication.
The Patron Saint of Empty Spaces
In one sense, Santa Monica isn’t anything new. Apart from its sun-bleached palette and laid-back setting, this hobby is full of perfectly serviceable tableau-builders. Bonus points if those tableaux are tiered; I’m thinking of offerings like 51st State, Imperial Settlers, or even Wingspan. Three rows of cards, each with different but complementary functions. Santa Monica only has two rows of cards. Two is fewer than three. Isn’t that a step in the wrong direction?
Nope. If anything, Santa Monica has produced some of the freshest tableaux I’ve ever laid on my table. And it has everything to do with how it goes about the process of establishing its setting.
Talking About Games: Critique Criteria
Words are weird. I still remember in the second grade when my father insisted I refer to a particular bodily function as “urination,” while my friends called it “going pee.” When I inverted those terms, both groups became upset at me for being gross. The meaning was unaltered. Neither word was particularly crass. But there I stood, excoriated for my choice of vocabulary. My lifelong terror with linguistic solipsism had begun.
Following up on our previous conversations about the meanings and importance of negativity and criticism, today we’re looking at three more concepts. This time, however, these are the broadest possible traits that should be found in any critique — the bare minimums, you could say. Although as you’d expect, we’re peddling in ambiguities.
Mezo Hungry
Somewhere underneath the dudes-on-a-map genre lurks an even more specific subgenre, the dudes-on-a-map-beseech-the-gods-for-aid genre. For short, the “god-botherer.” You know the type. Cyclades, Kemet, Blood Rage, Rising Sun. They’re an excuse for ordinary plastic molds to genuflect and summon something far greater. Those little dudes are going about their business when — blammo — here comes a table-trembling hulk of sculpted muscle and claw. The elder plastic.
At first glance, John Clowdus’s Mezo is another god-botherer. It has dudes. It has gods. It has the appropriate gap of scale between said dudes and said gods. But because Mezo was designed by John Clowdus, his first-ever title that isn’t a Small Box Game, it’s anything but a ripoff or an homage or just another god-botherer. If anything, it’s probably best described as “three or four bidding games at the same time.”
Monumentally Elongated
There’s something infinitely enticing about the prospect of a short civilization game. Centuries, even millennia of technologies, policies, wars and wonders, played out in a couple of hours rather than an entire afternoon. You might even call it one of the holy grails of game design.
For a moment, Matthew Dunstan’s Monumental looks like it might reach out and choose wisely. The turns clip along nicely. It has decisions with room enough to stumble, but not so badly that you’ll slip onto your face. And of course there’s all that plastic. What could possibly go wrong?
After the jump, let’s talk about what went wrong.
When Two Bears Love Each Other Very Much…
Even though I’ll joke about it, I don’t hate UNO. In fact, I’ll prove it by saying something positive about UNO right now. UNO is good because hhhhhnnnnnnngggggggrrrrrrr uuuuuuuuggggggghhhhhhh eeeeeehhhhhhhhhhggggggg winning by getting rid of all your cards is pretty smooth. Jeffrey Beck’s The Bears and the Bees takes that model and shapes it into something much better — UNO with hexes.
Yes, I’m being fantastically reductive with that description.
Clue Too: Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost tricked me into playing Clue. Not that that’s a bad thing. If anything, I admire Tom Butler’s deftness in pulling out the rug. One moment I was expecting a bland fantasy excursion, so generic as to be staffed with public domain heroes like Hercules and Alice — not the first time I’ve been surprised to see her show up — and a few minutes later, we were asking questions about the Water Witch’s henchmen. “Was it the Big Bad Wolf with the Vorpal Blade?” There’s no third part: “…in the Eternal Cedar Forest?” There’s a reason for that.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.
Dale of Deck-Builders
Perspective is a funny thing. When Sami Laakso reached out to inquire whether I’d like to take a look at Dale of Merchants — more specifically, Dale of Merchants 1, 2, and Collection — I hesitated. Not because of Laakso’s talents as a designer, but because the game in question was a deck-builder. And not a hybrid deck-builder; a straight-up, pure, honest-to-goodness cards-and-tokens deck-builder.
Why such hesitation? Because for a moment that felt like a decade, you couldn’t enter a game shop without tripping over that month’s shipment of DBGs, barely-themed stacks of wallpaper with a license slapped over the top. How many decks have I built? How many settings have gone underutilized? The answer is not flattering, either for me or the industry.
But it had been a while since I last built a deck. Doubly so a “pure” deck, sans larger strategic considerations like a map or a lootable dungeon. So I said, sure, why not. And, after a half-dozen plays, I couldn’t be happier.
SPACE-BIFF! 