The World’s First Real-Time Bar Fight Sim
The good ole saloon fight was basically the Old West equivalent of boardgaming. Feel free to fill in the blanks of this metaphor on your own.
Enter 7-Card Slugfest. This isn’t the first game to tackle the “bar fight” as its subject matter, though it’s definitely the first real-time bar fighting game. Y’know, short of actually punching someone in the face in a bar, because that gets pretty real-time too. 7-Card Slugfest is much less likely to end with a hospital visit, though anything’s possible when it’s set in the Level 99 Games World of Indines, which as far as I can tell is a colorful fantasy universe where everyone is perpetually pummeling everyone else in the face, whether Street Fighter-style in the BattleCON: War/Devastation of Indines games, as 8-bit phalanxes in Pixel Tactics, flicked discs in Disc Duelers, or, in this case, as a hot mess of raging testosterone in a poorly-lit tavern.
Alone Time: Three Sieges
The ever-prolific Todd Sanders is something of a patron saint for us solo-flying boardgamers, which is why I’ve minted a series of collectible totems you can carry in your pocket. Just incant Todd’s name three times (in the dark, looking into a mirror, gnawing a sprig of Conium maculatum between your molars) (please don’t swallow) and rub the totem betwixt pinkie and the back of your thumb to have one of Todd’s solo games teleported directly to your location — okay, okay, I didn’t get around to finishing them. Turns out black magic is harder than the manuals made out.
Instead, I’ve previously covered a couple titles from his Shadows Upon Lassadar series here on Alone Time, and I recently finished playing the entire second Lassadar trilogy. So you’re in luck, because I’m ready to tell you about not one, not two, but three solo games (because trilogy apparently means three. Huh!).
Buckle up! On page two, we’re talking about the Siege At Dalnish.
Our Quiet Year: The Index
I recently finished a four-session play of the fantastic story-telling and map-drawing game The Quiet Year from Buried Without Ceremony, easily one of the indie-est board/card game designers I’ve had the pleasure of hearing about these last few years. The Quiet Year also happens to be one of the few boardgames I’ll gladly file under my “Why Games Matter” tag — it’s nothing short of compelling the way it assembles totally unique stories by a process of creative collision. It isn’t always an easy game to play, but it’s definitely a worthwhile one, if only because it will give you a window into your friends’ weird imaginations. I guarantee you’ll be surprised by what they come up with.
“But what is The Quiet Year, really?” you ask. Sorry, but one cannot be told what The Quiet Year is. I mean, you totally can be told what it is, but not here in the introduction. That’s an unreasonable expectation. The only solution is to read on.
Our Quiet Year: Winter
For such a “quiet year,” our people have endured a whole lot of clamor across the last three seasons. The mounting tensions (and Bazongas!) of spring. The fracturing of our family over the summer. And more recently, the reappearance of our greatest enemy during the autumn. When last we played The Quiet Year from Buried Without Ceremony, the few remaining members of our community had decided to migrate south for the winter, both to make a new home in a bunker we’d discovered and to hide from the pitiless leeching of The Jackals.
There are a lot of questions on everyone’s minds. Will our enemy overlook us? Will Short Red prove a better leader than his father? What happened to our brothers and sisters who fled Grandfather Tall Red’s reign of terror? The only thing that’s absolutely certain is that, at some point during the coming harsh months, the Frost Shepherds will appear and spell the end of our family as we know it.
Scoundrels of Skullport/Undermountain
Besides lauding its phenomenal box, I never really got around to talking about Lords of Waterdeep, the labor administration simulator set in D&D’s City of Splendors. For what it’s worth, it was probably my favorite worker-placement game — scratch that, it was the one that bored me least. Even with its ever-evolving city, myriad quests, and cutthroat intrigue, it remained a solid “pretty good” with me. That’s probably why I never wrote about it. You folks don’t pay me read Space-Biff! for chatter about how a game is perfectly decent and it’ll appeal to a certain type of person; you want the latest gossip about my recent engagement to Archipelago or why I plan to bury Mage Tower in the backyard guarded by the corpse of my reanimated pit bull.
So it was a pleasant surprise to discover that Scoundrels of Skullport, the recent expansion for Lords of Waterdeep, takes a game I wasn’t particularly excited about and transforms it into something that’s really rather good.
Our Quiet Year: Autumn
Spring. Summer. Twenty-four weeks have passed in our telling of The Quiet Year, a story-weaving and map-drawing game from Buried Without Ceremony, and our year has been anything but quiet. Our community has shattered into far-flung splinters, tiny communities that were once part of a greater family, all of them grieving past losses, all of them seeking redress — well, except for the goatherds. They just watch their goats get it on all day. But everyone other than them is having a pretty rough time.
And this season looks like it might prove to be the roughest time of all. There’s a reason the folks of the Former World used to call it “The Fall,” after all.
Play Coin Age for Only $1.56!
Hold on, I know what you’re thinking: A buck fifty-six? Dan, you hyperbolic hipster! Surely, no game worth playing could be so affordable! Alright then, I have a pair of rebuttals for you. First, you’re using the word “hipster” far too haphazardly, and it makes you sound like a YouTube commenter; and second, if you think cost is the best indicator of a game’s quality, then surely you haven’t heard of Adam P. McIver, Project Game, or the freshly-minted Coin Age.
Oh, and the best part? Since you can print and play it right now (proof!), you can even use some of that $1.56 for dollar menu food once you wrap up your game.
Tower Defense, Sans Towers
You’d think the tower defense genre would be low hanging fruit for board and card games, what with the board-style setup and the dumb “AI” behaviors that could easily be handled by the flipping of a card; but while there are a few contenders out there — Castle Panic pops into my head most readily — Mage Tower from Super Mega Games is probably the first I’ve seen to actually bill itself as a “Tower Defense” game. Even so, it’s going to take more than a genre-baiting tagline to convince me your game is worth its weight. How hefty is Mage Tower, you ask? Not to discourage you from reading the review, but this one is light.
Our Quiet Year: Summer
Welcome to part two of our series about The Quiet Year, a storytelling and map-drawing game from one-man outfit Buried Without Ceremony! After the upheaval and social tensions that marked the end of spring and caused our community to worry that perhaps our new home wasn’t quite the fresh start we were hoping for, the summer season has fallen across the landscape like a warm blanket, and our small family of nomads is looking forward to mending divisions, securing borders, and working towards a brighter future — or a quiet year, if you prefer.
If you haven’t already, it would be a good idea to read about what happened to our family back in spring before continuing on with this season, because there’s far too much to relate to spend time catching up.
Omen: The Value of Olympus
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote a review about a nifty little title from Small Box Games called Omen: A Reign of War. I don’t recommend you read it, as it’s a relic from back when I believed good boardgame reviews were 85% rules regurgitation and 15% quality, but in my defense, I was young. At any rate, I gave Omen a glowing review. Unfortunately, it could be a huge pain to get a hold of thanks to John Clowdus’s small business model, which sounds like a great setup for an independent game designer, but meant SBG could only handle lighter print runs.
Flash forward to now. Small Box Games is taking preorders of the upcoming Omen: A Reign of War: Olympus Edition, a new printing run of the beloved but hard-to-acquire original — except that it isn’t quite exactly the same as the original. A few people have voiced some concerns about the changes that will be made for the Olympus Edition, and I’m here to talk about that.
SPACE-BIFF! 