Let Me Die Surrounded By Machines
Moon Colony Bloodbath is a board game out of time, and not entirely in the good sense. It owes its evocative title to the Mountain Goats / John Vanderslice collaborative EP of the same name, but the comparisons end there. Donald X. Vaccarino liked the name, liked the idea of a moon colony going extinct, and, well, that’s what prospective moon colonists are going to get. It’s not quite a joke — there is some gameplay here — but its punchline is right there on the cover.
Space-Cast! #44. Enlightened
The Illuminati! Aside from being a cabal of lizard-people who rule the world through the United Nations, they are now also the topic of a board game, Pax Illuminaten. On today’s Space-Cast!, we’re joined by designer Oliver Kiley to discuss three very different histories of this secret society.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Adolescent Archipelago
Over the past few months, we’ve taken a look at a number of small-batch games that were designed for sale at indie markets. One forthcoming example is Juven Isle, a tile-placement and terrain-blocking game by Gary Kacmarcik, which should be available at this weekend’s Game Market Vegas.
Mostly, it’s an excuse to pore over maps and puns at the same time. Two of my favorite things!
Magenta Three: Figment
Another week, another Magenta! After Fives and Duos, I thought I had a handle on CMYK’s approach. These are fresh spins on familiar card games, simple enough to appeal to the masses, but dimpled enough that you, a time-tested veteran, won’t grumble when it hits the table.
Until Figment. Figment is the weird one of the bunch.
Climbing Three Ladders
Is ladder-climbing and deck-shedding the next phase of our hobby’s obsession with trick-taking? It may well be. I’ve covered plenty of trick-takers from New Mill Industries over the past year or so. Now the small-box publisher has released a trio of shedder-climbers. Let’s take a look at each in turn, shall we?
RETXXIIIRN
Remember how last year all those RETVRN bros couldn’t stop talking about how they meditate on the fate of Ancient Rome every single day, but when pressed it turned out they just had a big squishy for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator? Well, here’s a part of our distant heritage I think about daily: that holiday in the middle of March when we all get together and stab our nation’s self-proclaimed dictator.
23 Knives, designed by Tyler J. Brown, whisks us to that fateful day in 44 BCE when a senatorial conspiracy resulted in Julius Caesar lying dead at the feet of a statue of Pompey the Great, his onetime ally, son-in-law, and eventual rival in the preceding civil war. Those Romans sure loved their little ironies.
A Visual Tour of ProtoCon
The Wasatch Front hosts an unusual density of board game designers. I don’t know if it’s the culture, the thin air, the altitude, or the arsenic billowing from the withering lakebed of the Great Salt Lake, but there you have it. Beginning in 2019 just in time for ‘rona, a handful of local publishers started an annual convention for board game prototypes. They named their baby ProtoCon, which I believe is short for “Protolithic Confluence.”
Last month, I spent an afternoon at ProtoCon. Hosted in the conference rooms of the architectural marvel that is the West Valley Megaplex, this was an opportunity for dozens of designers and playtesters to show off their games, get feedback, and polish their playthings. Wait, don’t cite that last part.
As ever, I would love to share some of the best sights, sounds, and scents of the convention. Take my hand as I lead you on a visual tour. No, the other hand.
Magenta Two: Duos
Last week, I called Fives, the first entry in CMYK’s Magenta, the least intriguing of these four releases. Duos, on the other hand, is probably the best in terms of raw gameplay. Designed by Johannes Schmidauer-König, this is a remake of his 2015 title Team Play. And let me tell you, for a thirty-minute partner game, it’s as tight as they come.
Conclave: The Board Game
It’s wild that Conclave, the award-nominated movie about papal electioneering, Vatican secrets, and Ralph Fiennes’ preference of regnal epithets has only been out for a few months and already it’s getting a board-game tie-in.
Okay, okay. I swear I won’t turn this into a review of Conclave.
Habemus Papam is the work of Pako Gradaille, whose forthcoming Onoda fascinated me with its solitary gameplay and ethically sticky protagonist. Unlike that game’s antisocial tendencies, Habemus Papam is strictly communal, casting players as members of the Roman Curia tasked with selecting the next pope. It’s an intriguing, if sometimes wobbly, little thing.
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.
SPACE-BIFF! 