COIN Volume II: Clash of Cubans
As you may remember, I’ve been working my way through Volko Ruhnke’s COIN Series (COIN for “counterinsurgency,” though my little group goes by the “Coin Collector Club” to sound barely less nerdy), beginning with the first volume, Andean Abyss. I liked it quite a lot, but felt it was a tricky entry point to a series that’s known for its complex asymmetrical conflicts.
As though on cue, the second volume of the series bursts through the door, dressed in an army jumpsuit, drab olive field cap, and underwear over the top of the pants. It’s Cuba Libre, here to save the day!
Blue Moon, You Saw Me Standing Alone
It’s become more popular to bag on Reiner Knizia over the last couple years, to the point that it’s increasingly easy to forget that he has some pretty amazing designs floating around. Case in point: Blue Moon, Knizia’s take on the collectible card game that turned out completely unlike any CCG before or since. It wasn’t even a real CCG! Psych!
Now Fantasy Flight Games has taken Blue Moon and all its expansions — just shy of a whopping 350 unique cards — and released the entire thing in a single box. It’s a lot to take in. So much, in fact, that I went through four major emotional stages as I tried to get a handle on why so many people have fond memories of Blue Moon.
Build a Better Star Realm
Star Realms is a purebred deck-building game, descended from deck-building stock and distilled from deck-building ingredients, and completely unburdened (or perhaps “unadvantaged,” depending on your point of view) by the frills that round out most modern deck-builders. There’s no board to explore. No bidding. No hybridization with other genres. Just a bunch of cards, the compulsion to buy them into your deck, and a whole bunch of shuffling. It is, in short, what we would surely call a deck-building game, through and through, nothing more and nothing less.
Or is it?
History and Bluffing: Condottiere
HISTORY TIME! If there are two figures that stand out as the most condottiero-ish of the condottieri, the first is Francesco I Sforza, the captain who leveraged his mercenary band to install himself as the Duke of Milan in 1447. The dude made it into Machiavelli’s The Prince as an example of bad employment decisions, which seems like pretty high praise to me. The second is Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, the great-grandson of Francesco, who became the last of the great condottieri when a cannon killed him in 1526, proving just how obsolete armored condottiero knights had become.
History, man. It’s cool stuff.
Anyway, Condottiere is about all of that: romantic and duplicitous mercenary captains doing what they do, conquering Italian city-states and strutting around like it’s nobody’s business but the Pope. And bluffing all the while, desperately hoping their rivals never figure out exactly how vulnerable they are.
How to Raise a Board Game Baby
Now that Baby Cate has somehow survived to the age of four months, I get a lot of questions from fans, mostly while shopping at the supermarket. One of the most common queries is “How did you raise your child to appreciate board games?”
Well, wonder no longer! The stellar folks here at Space-Biff! have assembled a helpful how-to. Within hours, your own child will be begging to play board games with you!
D B S A B-Z B
Say one thing about Todd Sanders, say he’s prolific. Not only have we seen him tackle airship combat, fantasy sieges, space exploration, warring mages, the Silk Road, and more, now he’s gone and made a game about… um… letters and puns and… bees and… stuff.
Well. I don’t know exactly how to classify LMNOP. Let’s find out together.
It’s Never Too Late to Launch a Coup
Hoo boy, I’m late on this one. Sorry about that. Thanks to some buried childhood trauma, now and then I’ll intentionally not engage with something I know I’ll like — a highly-anticipated movie or book or slice of pie — just to save the thrill of the experience for later. I know it’s dumb, and I also know that every single board game reviewer has already talked about why this is such a great game.
Still, Coup is like good chunky peanut butter. So smooth. Yet so nutty. And so simple, yet so compelling. Multitextured. Rich. Rewarding. Sexy.
Okay, that comparison doesn’t hold up very well, because Coup certainly isn’t oily — scratch that, it totally is! But okay, I’ll try to explain why I’m crushing so hard on Coup, and I swear I’ll stop talking about the world’s number one food paste.
Get Flicked
Everyone with a soul loves dexterity games. Maybe it’s their inherent lightness, the way they push the most diehard rule-memorizing gamers off their pedestal and onto a level playing field with the rest of us. Or maybe it’s just the fact that everyone likes flicking things around a table and trying to cause as much damage as possible, from smacking quarters into other kids’ knuckles in the cafeteria to games like Catacombs, Ascending Empires, Rampage, and Disc Duelers letting us vent a little of our carefully suppressed anger.
Well, today we’re looking at another dexterity game, and like the best of them, it’s going to let you smack the hell out of anyone who stands in your way.
In the Past Tense, Splendid
While I fully recognize it’s a sign of my curmudgeonly age to keep making use of stock “You know what I don’t like?” intros here on Space-Biff!, I still can’t help but say that I really don’t like Eurogames where you have to appease some local medieval or Renaissance lord. Probably because my current landlord demands rent be paid in chickens and/or clay but not roasted on a spit or baked into bricks but yes if I deliver glazed pots full of steamed casserole.
So here’s a game that by all rights I shouldn’t like. It’s called Splendor, and it’s about appeasing medieval-ish lords. It also has a theme so pasted on that it could be about pretty much anything, from importing booze for Prohibition gangsters to selling datachips to shady megacorps. Which raises the question: why is it that I want to be playing Splendor right now?
Rogue Ausloos
Just for the sake of being a grump, I’m not convinced “Rogue Agent” is a very good title for Rogue Agent. Maybe it’s because it conjures up images of the worst of the schlocky spy movies from my dad’s generation or because there aren’t any actual rogue agents in the game, just normal agents going about their normal day jobs, but hey — in either case, I think it’s fair to say my expectations were far removed from what Rogue Agent is actually trying to be.
And since this is the third game I’ve played from designer David Ausloos, the first two being Panic Station, which was so bad that I couldn’t bring myself to review it, and Dark Darker Darkest, which I thought was pretty good but sort of uneven, it’s also safe to say that my expectations were quite low. Bad schlocky spy movie low.
SPACE-BIFF! 