Chu-se Wisely
The time has come for Tom Lehmann to design a trick-taker. Okay, that’s not wholly accurate. Chu Han, set during the Chu-Han Contention, is strictly a ladder-climber and card-shedder, but the genres overlap to such a degree that most laymen couldn’t tell the difference. More importantly, as befits the creator of Race for the Galaxy, Res Arcana, and Dice Realms, Chu Han has a few cool ideas up its sleeve.
Unwitched
As much as I would prefer to cast off all longing and become immune to nostalgia, I will confess a squishy soft spot for The Witcher. No joke, my adventures with Geralt of Rivia helped me come to terms with becoming a father to a tiny screamy baby. And while parenthood hasn’t contained quite as much monster-slaying as promised, I still sometimes find myself asking how the White Wolf would handle daily indignities like PTA meetings and where this grocery store has hidden the chicken stock. (It’s a fetch quest, I tell myself. Just a fetch quest.)
Which is why, even though I had determined to pass on any additional sets until the next Unmatched Adventures showed up, I discovered that I was still helpless in the face of this tie-in. Please note that these two sets, Steel & Silver and Realms Fall, are not parenting guides.
The River Mild
So you’ve gone on a group river rafting trip without making a plan. It happens to everyone. Now everybody has their own idea how this trip ought to go.
Even me! Last week, I reviewed Roaring River, the latest design by Joeri Hessels and Wouter Moons, except it turns out I’d made a huge mistake that turned the game on its head. My apologies to the designers, who I’m grateful set me straight. Because while Roaring River still isn’t my favorite small card game, it’s significantly better than I assumed the first few times down the canyon.
Meet the Faceless Cusk
We all know that one of the juvenile pleasures of Wingspan is calling out the birds that sound like human anatomical features. Abbott’s Boobie! American Woodcock! Truly, I will never age past thirteen.
Finspan is the second spinoff of Elizabeth Hargrave’s unexpected smash hit, following last year’s Wyrmspan by Connie Vogelmann. Designed by David Gordon and Michael O’Connell, Finspan drops us into the sea. It also changes the nature of the game. Now, instead of calling out funny body parts, it’s all about announcing which fish resemble the people at the table. Me? I’m a Porkfish.
Wrinkles in Space-Time
I don’t know if time is a flat circle, but it does have a way of bringing us back around to where we started. Ascending Empires, Ian Cooper’s mashup of space exploration, empire building, and dexterity-based gameplay, was one of my first modern tabletop flings. I even reviewed it, way back. I got a rule wrong, and the embarrassment was bad enough that I considered not writing anymore.
Now, fourteen years after the original game’s release, Cooper has produced the Zenith Edition. The original game can be found in the box, but let’s be real: fourteen years is like three full generations in board game time. Let’s see how the new edition fares in the cold depths of space. Or worse, an over-saturated tabletop market.
Photograph of a Battlefield
Persistent readers will be well aware that I’ve been writing about some of the titles to come out of the recent Indie Games Night Market. Three of them, High Tide, Out of Sorts, and Torchlit, were among my favorite tabletop experiences of 2024.
Chris Lawrence’s Propaganda represents a different manner of showing from the Night Market, both tonally and in terms of polish. Where that previous trio had been fashioned to a high sheen, functioning almost like an audition — and indeed, two of them have since been picked up by publishers — Propaganda is an act of unsettlement. It is the most starkly “indie” of these indie games, confronting players with difficult questions about the media we regularly consume.
Rebel Yowl
As much as I appreciated the spatial puzzle of Race to the Raft, Frank West’s follow-up to The Isle of Cats, I still have yet to try the original feline-placer. Instead, I’ve jumped straight to The Isle of Cats Duel, which is, I gather, a somewhat improved version of the same game, but in duel format. Two ships enter. Both leave laden with some variable quantity of cats. Also heaps of treasure, but who cares about gold and gems when you have all these cats prowling around?
Vandalizing the Barbenheimer
Let’s get this out of the way right now: Christophe Lebrun’s Barbarian Kingdoms isn’t going to teach you anything about the migrations, settlements, and wars that transformed European power across the fourth through ninth centuries. It’s one thing to fudge the timeline so that Attila and Theodoric are contemporaries, but Ælle? The centuries, they pass like falling leaves.
Bottle Princess
Since all I play anymore is trick-taking games, it seems fitting that I should inaugurate the New Year by writing about two titles that have been occupying my winter break: Bottle Imp, the reissue of Günter Cornett’s 1995 classic, and Rebel Princess by Daniel Byrne, Gerardo Guerrero, Kevin Peláez, and Tirso Virgós.
What’s their unifying thread? Mostly that trick-takers are often accused of being “themeless.” Probably because they often are. But these are two examples of how to imbue a trick-taker with a tangible setting, and in the process aid players in remembering the import of all those individual plays.
Best Week 2024! The Index!
Another year, another Best Week. Below, you will find my favorite thirty tabletop titles of the year, ranked according to obscure criteria I found sensible at the time. Click any of the images to be whisked to the proper article. Happy New Year!
SPACE-BIFF! 