Space-Cast! #43. Unstuck in Time
In 1956, not-yet-famous author Kurt Vonnegut unsuccessfully attempted to publish a board game. That game, GHQ, was then stored in a box for decades until designer Geoff Engelstein read about it in a biography and began the long process of restoring this historical artifact. On today’s Space-Cast!, we sit down with Geoff to discuss how GHQ traveled across time, its surprising innovations, and what it might say about Vonnegut’s efforts to contextualize his wartime experiences.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Witness My Exhaust Pipe, Sucka
There’s something refreshing about Thunder Road: Vendetta. In a bygone era we would have called it Ameritrash, although there’s an elegance under the hood that belies its spots of rust. Designed by a whole committee at Restoration Games, it’s a reimagining of the 1986 Milton Bradley Thunder Road, albeit with all the advantages of nearly four decades of intervening design and component upgrades.
Super Glue on Cotton
Super glue, when applied to cotton, can cause sudden and significant increases in temperature. The internet would have you believe this can spark fires. I’m not so sure about that, but wisps of smoke aren’t uncommon, and my daughter has a burn mark on her arm from when she accidentally set her sleeve against wet super glue.
This is one of my favorite random factoids. I plan to deploy it as soon as somebody hands me a “favorite random factoids” category in My Favourite Things, a blend of trick-taker and party deduction game by Japanese designers Daiki Aoyama and Pepe_R.
Magenta One: Fives
After the unbroken killstreak of Spots, Lacuna, Daybreak, and Wilmot’s Warehouse, I was as surprised as anyone by CMYK’s announcement that their next big release would be Magenta, a series of four garish reissues of older card games. Although in the case of the first entry, “older” only hearkens back to 2022.
That first title, Fives, is a remake of trick-taking wunderkind Taiki Shinzawa’s The Green Fivura. We’ve looked at a number of Shinzawa’s trick-takers in the past, including (deep breath) American Bookshop, 9 Lives and Ghosts of Christmas, and Inflation! and Charms. Also in the non-card category, Tower Chess.
Compared to some of those offerings, Fives plays things relatively straight. You know. Relatively.
Love and Heartbreak in Georgian London
As a second-grader, I despised recess. Not because I enjoyed class — it was boring and tedious, hemmed in by schedules and busywork — but rather because I was lonely. Some people don’t understand loneliness. They can’t. It wears the soul to a grainy powder. I had recently changed schools, bidding farewell to my friends and those familiar halls. Now I spent those interminable minutes wandering the lawns, balancing on the rocks, avoiding the bullies I half-knew from church.
And then, like the sun warming my face after a chill, there they were. Two friends. Adam and Adam. They invited me to play make-believe with them. We soared across the grass, scraped our knees together, became soldiers and explorers, scared ourselves silly at sleepovers, told our first dirty jokes. Once, afraid that I had done something that would make them abandon me, I burst into tears, only for both Adams to enfold me in a gangly, childlike hug, reassuring me that all was okay.
Everything was bright. For a time.
I Love Night
Isle of Night isn’t here to blow your hair back. It also isn’t here to reinvent the wheel, make your day, or even dress to impress. Designed by Dustin Dowdle and illustrated by Ryan Laukat — right, that’s why it looks so familiar — this is a set collection game with a few good ideas rattling around its head. Unfortunately, they largely aren’t capitalized on.
Majestic Fifty-Seven
The Pax Series has long been free of Phil Eklund’s original authorship, but Pax Illuminaten, designed by Oliver Kiley, feels like the final broken link in a long chain — or perhaps the final thumb in the old man’s nose. This is simultaneously the most Pax of all Paxes, directly engaging with the Enlightenment thinkers Eklund has always been (selectively) enamored with, and the least Pax, directly descended from P.D. Magnus’s Decktet and eschewing the customary market manipulations for a session of musical chairs in the Bavarian court. It is uneven, sometimes baffling, and, contrary to all expectations, wholly engaged with what made the series so venerable in the first place.
Climb Ev’ry (Other) Mountain
Sigh.
Solstis is a puzzle. Not in the game sense, where you’re trying to figure something out. More like it’s an actual puzzle that somebody handed to a pair of designers, Bruno Cathala and Corentin Lebrat, and said, “Please make a game around this puzzle.” To which they replied, “Sure, haha,” and then spent the rest of the afternoon talking philosophy before remembering their assignment and slapping the whole thing together in twenty minutes.
Speaking of puzzles, Solstis has me seriously reevaluating my policy of playing every game three times before I review it. Solstis barely supports a quarter play, let alone a complete trio.
Eternal Sunshine of the Trick-Taking Mind
Once, in high school, I embarrassed myself in front of a crush. Emerging from the school play’s pit orchestra, I was accosted by a friend with a cup of hot cocoa. He grabbed me by the front of my shirt, snagging my then-new chest hairs in the process. In agony, I smacked him on the back of the head, only for his cocoa to splash onto the dress of the school police officer. “What the hell is wrong with you?” the officer shouted. I turned to find a crack to wither into. But there she stood, the girl I just wanted to play footsie with, gaping in horror at my behavior.
We all have bad memories. Sometimes, though, those memories are dangerous to touch, like prodding a canker sore. Brendon Fong’s We Need to Talk is a dual trick-taker and card-shedder about overcoming the painful memories of a failed relationship in order to move on to something new. And it’s about as close to therapy as the format gets.
Imperium: Kobayashi Maru
More than most fictional settings, Star Trek lends itself to what-ifs. Mirror universes, alternate dimensions, and time travel play a big role in making the final frontier ever more expansive, but we don’t even need to breach the time-space continuum to find uncomfortable alliances and enemies-turned-friends. In its messiness, Star Trek has always been playful. Ever wondered what would happen if a dilithium leak briefly tricked an intoxicated Commander Sisko into courting Lursa Duras? Me neither! But there’s a non-zero chance that someone in the writer’s room drafted an entire Deep Space Nine episode about that very scenario.
Star Trek: Captain’s Chair swims in those possibilities. Designed by Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi, and built around the deck-building system they unveiled in Imperium: Classics, Legends, and Horizons, this isn’t the first board game to bottle the spirit of Star Trek, but it is perhaps the one that most exemplifies its endless possibilities.
SPACE-BIFF! 