Plains of Dust, Caravans of Silk
I’ve covered the work of Todd Sanders before — a whole buncha times, in fact — but Serica: Plains of Dust is still one of his more unusual designs. Yes, more unusual than haunted fantasy kingdoms or clockwork airships, Serica is about the famous 4,000 mile Silk Road strung from the Roman Empire to the distant Han Dynasty. It’s also a deck-building game, though being designed by Todd Sanders, you can bet it’s unlike any deck-building game you’ve ever played.
Risk Legacy: Envelopes
Here’s the drill: as started in the previous installment, my gang of puckish rogues has been playing through Risk Legacy and surviving to tell the tale. However, we’re telling everything, and Risk Legacy is one of the few board games in existence that actually suffers when spoiled — so take heed, because today we’re looking at how the game changed when we triggered the opening of a pair of the envelopes taped to the inside of the box, and once you know what’s inside, there’s no going back.
Tell ‘Em I Ain’t Comin’ Back
If I were to place myself on the Firefly/Serenity Bias Scale™, I’d be a firm 7 — a far cry from the “biased against” minority down at the bottom, a bit above the “no bias whatsoever” score of 5, and not quite the eerie devotion of those who rate a 10.
I’m telling you this because the new Firefly board game, from the same designers behind last year’s lauded Spartacus: A Game of Blood & Treachery, has been landing quite a few positive reviews (and a couple negative ones too) on the basis of its nostalgia factor. Does that seem right to you? I mean, I think it seems perfectly fine, since the game is about emulating the feel and spirit of the television show and movie, but if you’re at all like me — as in, you roll your eyes ever so slightly at that twangy intro theme and some of the more out-of-place western affectations, and really could not give a flying hump about someone’s Summer Glau themed DeviantArt account — then maybe this is the review for you.
Omen: Small Box Gaming Perfected
I have a theory that there’s a difference between our Favorite Games and our favorite games, if that makes any sense. No? Alright, I’ll keep trying. If you were to ask me about my favorite games of all time, I’ve got a whiz-bang top ten list ready, full of all sorts of great stuff, from the innovative to the epic. If you were to ask me which games I play all the time, well, that’s a completely different list, populated with games that are also my favorites, though for completely different reasons. And within the top couple spots of that second list is Omen: A Reign of War from Small Box Games.
Now, I’ve written about Omen before. Twice, in fact — once to review the 2nd Edition, and another to preview the then-unreleased Olympus Edition. There isn’t much more for me to add to what I’ve written there, but since it’s a slow day I’m going to take a shot at explaining exactly why I keep returning to Omen week after week.
Pathfinder! Adventure! Card! Game!
Everyone’s been talking about the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, which is little surprise considering it’s one of the year’s most heralded releases. As such, there are plenty of reviews out there, glowing or critical, and I really don’t have anything unique to add to the sentiments that have been voiced many times over. Even so, I’ve been paying close attention to my own reactions as I’ve played through the Rise of the Runelords base set. These impressions fall into three broad stages, and I think elucidating on those is probably the best way to express how I feel about Paizo’s latest release.
Unobtainium Wars
I almost passed over Titanium Wars just because its name is so doltish. Apparently, in the far reaches of the distant future, folks have discovered a powerful new source of nearly-limitless energy… and named it titanium, just for the sake of double-booking a fairly specific word. As though titanium’s day job as Atomic Number 22 just wasn’t making ends meet or something.
Notwithstanding the minor detail that pretty much anything would have made for a better title (my group kept reflexively calling it “Tiberium Wars,” which yes is already taken but shows how easy it would be to slot any old made-up sci-fi energy name in there and call it a day), it turns out Titanium Wars is a surprisingly good negotiation game. I’ll explain below.
Risk Legacy: Earth #00016592
People who like Risk fall into one of three categories:
(A) Those who flavor their poison with a heaping dose of nostalgia. It’s okay, I’ve done it too.
(B) Those who are wrong and/or new to the world of board games.
(C) Those who like Risk Legacy.
Risk Legacy has been out for a while, and I’ve avoided talking about it because to talk about it is to, well, ruin it. Still, it’s been out for almost two years, and its creator, Rob Daviau, has recently announced SeaFall, a spiritual successor that will have the benefit of being born apart from the series-mishandling clutches of Hasbro. Which is to say, it now feels like time. Time to talk about Risk Legacy, about why it’s possibly the single most innovative board game to come along these last couple decades.
Though be warned: while this first installment won’t spoil anything important, future accounts will chart my group’s course through Risk Legacy’s fifteen successive battles, and may very well become more illuminating than someone looking to experience Risk Legacy for themselves might like. This is a game best experienced firsthand; this series is for everyone else, who knows they won’t get that chance. You’ve been warned.
Alone Time: Aether Captain Todd
By a show of hands, is anyone getting tired of me highlighting the work of Todd Sanders?
If you raised your hand, too bad! If you didn’t, good, because we’re not done yet! Seeing as how all of Todd’s games are free in spite of being surprisingly good, you’re crazy to not want more. And more we’ll get — although we’ve already looked at most of the games in the Shadows Upon Lassadar series, Todd’s got an entire second universe under his belt. It’s the steam-driven floaty world of “Aether Captains,” and while I won’t be going over every single title (after all, there’s a whole bunch of them: Aether Captains, Capek Golems, Clockwork Cabal, Dread Supremacy, Pirates and Traders, The Search, Triad, Triad 2, and Compass and Empire) (those games entitled “Triad”? Those are three games apiece), today we’ll be taking a look at three of them.
Buckle your steam-seatbelts, because on page two, we’re talking about the original Aether Captains, one of Todd’s earliest designs.
String Doomworms
Disclaimer: I know nothing about trains. I also know nothing about train games. Oh, I’ve played Ticket to Ride, because everybody has played Ticket to Ride, and when I was nine my dad tried to introduce me to the 1977 title Rail Baron, which is a bit confusing because I don’t think they’d even invented trains back then, so it must have been a science fiction game, and either way it fried my brain and left me the perplexed mess you see before you now.
Here’s the thing: I don’t like trains. I think they’re smelly, and over-warm, and I get motion sick riding them even though they travel in mostly straight lines. I get nauseated just thinking about them. This means I’m uniquely unqualified to talk about String Railway. So instead, today I’m going to tell you about a nifty little game called String Doomworms.
Not Just a Rerun: Space Cadets: Dice Duel
You know what we love here at Château de Thurot? The unadulterated thrill of real-time board games. You know what we didn’t love? Space Cadets. In fairness, we only played it once, and had a really grand time for the first hour or so. Then Real-Time Exhaustion Syndrome set in (it’s a real thing, I’ll wait right here while you look it up) and we spent the concluding two hours wondering where the fun and excitement had eloped to. That’s why everyone was suspicious when I plopped Space Cadets: Dice Duel down on the table. “Wasn’t suffering through this once enough?” someone muttered, to a tidal wave of grumbled assent.
But here’s the thing: forty minutes later, after insisting that Dice Duel was an entirely different game, blitzing haphazardly through the rules, and stumbling half-blind through our first game, there wasn’t a person at the table who wasn’t itching to give it another spin. When a game starts out a victim of prejudice and still wins over your heart, you know you’ve got a winner.
SPACE-BIFF! 