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.
Here Lies Every Other Detective Game
Dear reader, I think I’m falling in love… with the design collective Jasper Beatrix. Typeset offered our first furtive glance. Signal jumped us to second base. Yop. We move fast. Now that I’ve played Here Lies, we’re already booking venues for the wedding breakfast.
At a glance, Here Lies swims in the same waters as Signal. It’s also a deduction game, a one-plus-many cooperative affair where a lone player works as the “lead investigator,” more or less the silent alien from Signal, here to assist everybody else as they deduce the answers to a secret message. Despite its modal similarities, though, Here Lies carves out its own identity. More than that, it embraces an entirely fresh approach to deduction. There’s nothing quite like it.
Gingham Takes a Roadside Picnic
Yesterday I previewed Gazebo, a forthcoming remake of Reiner Knizia’s Qin. In the usual Bitewing tradition, Gazebo has been partnered with another game, one it broadly shares a setting and aesthetic with. That game is Gingham. Created by Robert Hovakimyan, whose titles Bebop and Shuffle and Swing I covered around this time last year, Gingham also takes us to the park. In a few ways, though, it’s less of a spiritual partner to Gazebo than its spiritual opposite.
Gazebo Takes It on the Qin
Right when I’d sworn off writing about any more Bitewing Knizias, they went and got the rights to Qin.
Long out of print, Qin — pronounced “chin,” for those among us who keep stumbling over that Q — is another Reiner Knizia tile-layer, one that effortlessly showcases the Good Doctor’s ability to generate hard stares over a handful of non-matching colors. Now redubbed Gazebo, the original game was about unifying the warring polities of pre-imperial China. In my mind it’s still about that, because merging garden plots doesn’t quite communicate just how ruthless this thing can be.
Flying Too Close to the Ruff
Trick-taking alert! This week’s instance of the genre is Trickarus, which scores an extra point for its pun of a title. Designed by Bajir Cannon, this one takes cues from Greek myth. You are an adorable pajama-wearing child with a set of homemade wings, flapping through the sky while performing sick dives and kicks. Surely you will not soar too close to the sun and be dashed on the rocks below.
No, your goal is to inflict the dashing on somebody else.
SPACE-BIFF! 