Space-Cast! #42. The Twilight Cardboard
On today’s Space-Cast!, we’re joined by Pako Gradaille to discuss his recent board game Onoda, about the Imperial Japanese officer who continued to wage the Second World War for nearly thirty years on the island of Lubang. Along the way we discuss why Gradaille was drawn to Hiroo Onoda, how board games can express alienation and discomfort, and both the necessity and perils of ambiguity in art.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
The Gooey Decimal System
Surprising absolutely nobody, this inveterate library-hopper actually knows and utilizes the Dewey Decimal System. Unfortunately for everybody else in the human race, especially those with a far more vibrant social life than myself, the existence of Melvil Dewey’s sorting method is the one thing our galaxy’s extraterrestrials have learned about us. Now a gang of disparate humans has been abducted to sort an alien library. Eep.
2024 has been an excellent year for memory games, if only thanks to the stupendous Wilmot’s Warehouse. Connor Wake’s Out of Sorts, which like Marceline Leiman’s High Tide will be available at next month’s Indie Games Market at PAX Unplugged, is proof that the genre still has a few unswept corners to explore.
Smurf-Hopping
I only recently got the memo that we’re now calling the entire shared-input genre, roll-and-writes and draw-and-writes alike, “smurf-and-writes.” Which… look, I’m not the king of taxonomy around here, but at a certain point we linguistic descriptivists really ought to consider putting our foot down.
Anyway. Rivages, designed by Joachim Thôme, is an island-hopping smurf-and-write (hurk) that isn’t nearly as smurfy as most of its peers. By which I mean it’s less about those shared inputs than you might gather from its laminated maps and dry-erase pens.
Where a Million Diamonds Shine
If Imperial Miners used one of those home DNA kits, it would swiftly find itself on the front page of Reddit as yet another story about one’s parentage being thrown into dispute. Despite being named to capitalize on the success of Imperial Settlers, itself a descendant of 51st State — but also a parent to the other 51st State — Tim Armstrong’s design doesn’t actually display all that many of its predecessors’ hereditary traits. Why do I look so much like your college sweetheart, MOM?
But maybe this is a good thing. Freshly doubtful of its pedigree, perhaps Imperial Miners can forge its identity anew, free of the family’s medical history of clutter, obsessive hoarding, and frustrating expansions that require players to sort through multiple decks of cards.
Well. At least Imperial Miners escapes the first two fates.
Girder Up
Tower Up is one of those titles that proves a board game doesn’t need to be complex to conceal untold depths. Designed by Frank Crittin, Grégoire Largey, and Sébastien Pauchon, this another game about real estate developers doing their thing and earning big bucks, with faint but clear brushstrokes from Sid Sackson’s Metropolis or Klaus Zoch’s The Estates. But in spite of its vertical development and intersecting player interests, perhaps its biggest departure from those predecessors is found in its dead simple internal arithmetic.
That’s No Shadow Moon
Shadow Moon Syndicates, the second design by Jarrod Carmichael, brings out my inner cynic. It might have something to do with the setting, all grungy piping and colorful gangs grappling over the guts of a husked-out asteroid. Or it might be the particular blend of chip-stacking, hand-building, and shifting objectives, which feels like somebody played Paolo Mori’s Ethnos and wondered why it wasn’t more complicated.
But then I come back to the star of this particular showdown: the cards. Oh, those cards! What marvelous little bastards!
Gouge Out Thine Own Eye
What if Magic: The Gathering were way nastier? That’s too clean a pitch for Personal Vendetta, the auteur project from designer-illustrator-publisher Nick Meccia, but it communicates the gist. It’s a rare game that sports such congruity between gameplay, artwork, and internal motifs; everything about Personal Vendetta both unsettles and services its central notion that to annihilate your clones, you must also annihilate a portion of yourself.
Be warned, this one isn’t for the faint of heart or stomach. One of my oldest friends got woozy just drawing from the deck.
Strip Poker
Peter Hayward is on a roll. This year alone he’s released Converge and Things in Rings, and now he’s enabling my lifelong dream of cheating at cards in Las Vegas (and getting away with it, obv). Vegas Strip offers all the glitz and false glamour of its titular location, plus the satisfaction of thieving from the biggest and most legalized thieves of them all. It’s a real hoot.
Three Phases of Six Moons
The past is not a foreign country but an act of imagination, one that can have greater or lesser fidelity to something that once happened, but one that also remains forever out of reach. The best we can do is stretch and maybe, just maybe, graze fingers with the unnameable.
Like true history or old starlight, City of Six Moons is an unrecoverable thing. Created by Amabel Holland, this is a radical design from a designer known for pushing boundaries. By now you may have heard of the game’s conceit: in a medium defined by its attempts to crystallize authorial intent as perfectly as possible, City of Six Moons is instead presented in a foreign language, offered to Holland by alien visitors and then transmitted to us as a signal garbled over the airwaves. Somewhere underneath the static is a playable game. On our plane, the designer refuses to clarify any rules or offer correction.
Over the past four months, I have grappled with City of Six Moons. I have studied its rulebook by lamplight and fallen asleep with its symbols dancing under my eyelids. This is the story of how I translated the game — or, perhaps, how I didn’t.
Intertidal Zone
High Tide is wonderful. Designed by Marceline Leiman and currently only slated to be sold in limited quantities at the forthcoming Indie Games Night Market in December, its petite format conceals surprising breadth, the way a seashell might contain a mollusk or hermit crab or the whole rounded cacophony of the ocean.
SPACE-BIFF! 