Categorize My Thing Thing
You can tell that a designer is crushing it when I start mentally checking other games against theirs. Case in point, Jasper Beatrix — a design collective, not a singular person — has now crafted one of my favorite word games in Typeset, one of my favorite tableau-builders via Scream Park, and a pair of deduction titles, Signal and Here Lies, which have more or less ruined other detective games for me. Also, there’s Corvids. There aren’t enough games like Corvids for me to name-check it against.
Thing Thing is Jasper Beatrix’s attempt at a party game. As these things go, it displays the collective’s trademark good humor and cleverness. But it’s also the first of their titles that doesn’t fill me with a desperate need to share it with as many people as possible.
Oh Friend Ah
Everything I know about ofrendas I either learned from Coco or Spectre. Okay, it isn’t as bad as all that — twenty-five years ago, I also played Grim Fandango.
Regardless, it’s fair to say that I was eager to learn more from Orlando Sá and André Santos’s Ofrenda, the board game version of the practice. I came away surprised by the depth of the gameplay, but no more informed about the particulars.
Whispers-in-Leaves
It isn’t often that we can say that a board game has great sound design. When it comes to Corvids, another small-box offering from the creative collective Jasper Beatrix, that’s possibly my favorite thing about the entire game. This one is about birds digging through a trash heap to find the shiniest bits and bobs to decorate their nests. It’s an affecting, gentle exercise occasionally rent by theft and spite.
Ready Set Brat
How has it come to this? You’ve lost your house. Your family. The bank has issued a repo order on your car. Credit cards? Forget about it. You’re the first person in your state to hold a credit score below 300. Thank goodness you still have a few bucks in your pocket. The bounce is coming, you can feel it. Sure, every casino ejects you on sight, but there’s one last hope for salvation:
Off-brand mascot racing.
This is Hot Streak, a game with a premise so weird and wild that I’d be drawn into its orbit even if it hadn’t been designed by Jon Perry. But like Time Barons, Scape Goat, Air, Land, & Sea, Spots, and a good number of titles in the faux-retro collection UFO 50, it was indeed designed by Jon Perry — and I can safely say it’s the only game in existence where a man in a hot dog suit might trample a foam angler fish to death by running backwards on a racetrack.
Casus Ludi
I know this isn’t a functional rubric for anyone whose output has been as prolific as Martin Wallace’s, but I mentally sort his games into two broad categories. There’s the tight, elegant stuff, full of careful point-generating races between players, logistic considerations, and probably a loan system, and then there’s the big messy sandbox stuff.
Casus Belli inhabits the latter category. More than inhabits; it embraces the role whole-heartedly. It isn’t even a little bit ashamed to be rolling around in the sandbox. What’s that sand-encrusted lump over there? Oh, don’t mind that. It’s just another potential building block. Stick it in the back of the dump truck and call it a pun.
New Year, Old Year: 2022 Revisited
The wheel has turned once more. Continuing with our sporadic tradition of revisiting previous Best Weeks in order to assess my ever-changing feelings about the year’s best board games, not to mention the mutable nature of artistic taste, today we are plumbing the dark ages of 2022. Wow, what a throwback. What did I like back then? Has any of it held up? Did they even make board games that long ago? Let’s find out together.
Space-Cast! #46. Screaming Sherlock
Is Jono Naito-Tetro a designer? A collective? A publisher? ALL OF THE ABOVE? On today’s Space-Cast!, we sit down with Jono to chat about a wide range of exciting titles. From the creative crime-sleuthing of Here Lies to the garbled transmissions of Signal and the unexpected antagonists of Scream Park, join us as we dig into what makes DVC Games one of the most exciting independent publishers operating today.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Boss Cells
I don’t envy the creative team tasked with adapting Dead Cells to cardboard. The video game is all twitch reflexes and light-speed assaults — a state I’ve heard called “submission,” more about submerging oneself within a game’s flow than about responding to any specific stimulus — which isn’t exactly the most conducive mode for taking turns or planning ahead. How does a designer transpose a video game that’s about subordinating one’s consciousness to sheer reactivity into a medium that generally works the other way around?
For the most part, the answer is that Dead Cells: The Board Game doesn’t bother.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a living spring of talent behind this adaptation, a wundersquad that consists of Antoine Bauza (7 Wonders, Ghost Stories, Oltréé), Corentin Lebrat (Faraway, Draftosaurus), Ludovic Maublanc (Cyclades, Ca$n ‘n Gun$), and Théo Rivière (Sea Salt & Paper, The LOOP). For this collaboration, the squad approaches the original design like a fold-up snowflake, snipping around the edges of the video game for the stuff that’s easily ported to the game table and leaving the rest scattered on the carpet.
Sockeye Salmon Slayers
With their bright red scales and barbed mouths, sockeye salmon have always looked to me like an invasive species from some alien moon. That Alaskan brown bears love to eat the things by the hundreds only endears me to them further. Go bears. Get those fish heads.
Peter Ridgeway’s Katmai: The Bears of Brooks River puts these heroes front and center. Two sleuths of twelve bears have staked out a stretch of river and are determined to catch the most fish, jostling for position in the churning waters. Here’s the good part: I learned a little bit about brown bears. Here’s everything else: Katmai doesn’t stack up against its peers.
Fear Factory
Haunted houses aren’t my thing. But games by design collective Jasper Beatrix are very much my thing. When it comes to Scream Park, a drafting game about assembling a seasonal haunted house, I’m glad I took the risk. Not only are there no jump scares for those of us operating above the table, but like the rest of JB’s oeuvre — Typeset, Signal, and Here Lies — Scream Park pulls more weight than first meets the eye.
SPACE-BIFF! 