I Need an Adult
The first time I played The Game of Life — yes, the one from the 1960s with the spinner that went up to ten and the gender-coded pegs in the cars — I loved it. No kidding. I was pretty young, maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven (okay, I was twelve), and it was one of the first non-abstract board games I’d ever tried. I immediately asked for a copy for my thirteenth birthday.
And then I played it again. To this day, I’ve played The Game of Life exactly twice. To use a word I normally don’t like very much, that second play was just so boring. The spinner had lost its novelty, my little car beep-beeped through the exact same story beats, and one player sped to the end and had to sit around for half an hour while everybody else caught up.
Johnny O’Neal’s Adulthood reminds me a bit of The Game of Life. Don’t get me wrong, it’s the better game of the two by at least a dozen country miles. There’s no spinner, but what the game loses in toy factor it makes up for in almost every other regard. Still, though, playing Adulthood raises some of the same thoughts dredged out of twelve-year-old Dan. Namely: Is this really what adulthood is like?
Float or Flounder
Tinned fish! Potted pulpo! I know so little about conservas that I can’t tell whether it’s a staple or a delicacy. In Scott Almes’ hands, it’s more of a double-edged pun, both a commercial enterprise and a matter of survival. In this solitaire game, you take on the role of a tinning factory. Your goal is to land and sell conservas — but not so much that you overfish the sea and leave yourself unable to operate next season. As such, there’s a delicate balance to be struck between your needs right now and the promise that tomorrow can be just as rich as today.
Breaking Mythwind
I like an ambitious game. Maybe it’s my abiding soft spot for Teddy Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena, despite some of the worst people you’ve ever met quoting the thing to deflect criticism, or maybe it’s my never-ending hunger for novelty. Either way, a board game that tries something different is bound to attract my attention. Even when that board game decides to get dressed by looping its underpants around its shoulders.
Mythwind, designed by Nathan Lige and Brendan McCaskell, certainly fulfills in the ambition department. To various degrees, it also does the underpants-as-pauldrons thing.
Non Eventu
Prophecy is tricky. In critical theory, huge quantities of recorded prophecy fall under the category of vaticinium ex eventu, “prophecy after the event,” which is a fancy way of saying somebody jotted down some historical events in a book but pretended it was written before those events occurred. Uncovering ex eventu prophecy is a useful method for dating a document. The trick is to look for the watershed moment when the prophecy switches from accurate to nonsensical. Voila: you’ve uncovered the instant the author stopped relating history and started penning revenge fiction. For two stellar examples, see the Christopher Columbus stuff from the Book of Mormon or the politicking diadochi of the Book of Daniel.
Arcana Prophetia is all about prophecy. The supposedly real stuff, not the ex eventu kind. Designed by the same team that gave us the imperfect but gentle Kawa, this is a gorgeous production that takes cues from tarot decks and splays to weave a story about old and new gods clashing over competing visions of destiny. Metal.
Understanding the Obsession
The first and only time I had played Dan Hallagan’s Obsession was shortly after its release in 2018. At the time, I regarded it warily. The Eurogame model has produced a net positive for board games as a whole, but like all genres it comes with its own inbuilt limitations, and Obsession struck me as overly shackled by the model’s conventions. Specifically, that Eurogame tendency to flatten everything to a grocery list of scoring categories and an airiness in what we label “theme,” a quirk of wording unfortunately particular to our medium that betrays a suspicion that board games are closer to amusement parks than novels. Like many Eurogames, Obsession seemed to excel at setting while missing what would constitute thematic import in any other medium. Full of “theme,” low on theme.
But Obsession endured. Oh, how it endured. On BoardGameGeek, it’s currently rated as the sixtieth best board game of all time. Thirteen thousand people have rated it. A steady schedule of expansions have rounded out the experience, including a few that have taken direct stabs at some of my original nitpicks with the design.
More than that, a fellow scholar insisted that it deserved another look. In both of our fields — him as a literature guy, me as a historian — there’s a concept called reception theory, a method for investigating a work of art on the basis of its interaction with audiences over time, as opposed to focusing on authorial intent or critical reading. So I took a step back. Why was this game so popular? How was it speaking to people? I agreed to try to understand the obsession with Obsession.
Biomoseying Along
Gricha German’s Biomos is a game with an important point on its mind. Could have fooled me. Let me propose a rule: if you intend for your game to make an important point, consider leveraging the medium’s unique strengths rather than squirreling that point away in the back of the rulebook. To be sure, the point is a sobering one that deserves widespread attention: over the past half-century, our planet has witnessed a 70% decline in monitored wild animal populations. That’s hard to fathom. If only somebody had modeled it in, say, a board game so we could visualize such a catastrophe.
Instead, Biomos moves in almost the exact opposite direction. You are a planet attempting to gather disparate biomes in order to sustain life. Even as a plaything with nothing on its mind but the accumulation of victory points, it fumbles the essentials.
Anthropic Rock Collector
Sea glass is the second coolest anthropic rock, ranked right behind fordite and waaaay above concrete. River Valley Glassworks, Adam Hill, Ben Pinchback, and Matt Riddle’s hot game of the moment, is about cute river creatures collecting fragments of discarded glass that have been tumbled smooth by the river. As befits the man-made artifacts you’re collecting, it’s wonderful to look at and feels incredible to manipulate. It’s also a little too superficial for my tastes.
Talking About Games: One Billion Biases
Bias. It’s a scary word, huh? We all have biases, but never as many as other people. Or is that also a bias?
Surprising nobody, reviewing a hundred-something board games a year leads to regular accusations of bias. “Oh, you only liked this game because you’re so handsome,” they’ll say. “Oh, you only liked this game because all the ladies write romance novels in which you’re plainly the author-insert character’s love interest. But you’re so coy. You play with your food. Not because you’re emotionally neglectful, oh no. Because of your dark past. Because you were mistreated and thus mistreat others. She can fix you. She will fix you. Anticipation shudders down the novel’s spine.”
Yes, it’s a difficult life I lead. But I bear the burden gladly. So let’s talk frankly about bias. What it is, why it is, and how it impacts every review, mine included.
The Whole World Is Watching
It’s a rare board game that asks you to locate yourself in history. To do more than merely visit some remote decade but to recognize your place within it, the ways it has accompanied your country, your family, your self all the way through to today.
Yoni Goldstein’s Chicago ’68 is, as the title indicates, about the Democratic National Convention of 1968 — fifty-six years ago this very week — when protests against the escalating Vietnam War flared into a riot between demonstrators and police. Its anxieties are our anxieties. War or peace, one nominee or another, racial tensions that remain with us still. We’ve played protest games before, but Chicago ’68 is the crispest example yet, neither abstracted like Bloc by Bloc nor given the bird’s eye view of Votes for Women.
Most of all, it has a profound, sickening familiarity that both of those titles lacked. This is play not only as history, but as a mirror.
Arabian Hammer
Periodization is a funny thing. Sorting history into discrete blocks is useful for the sake of memory and study, but often proves misleading the instant somebody takes those blocks as gospel rather than as a loose mental framework.
Take the unification of the Arabian Peninsula. From the European perspective, the ascent of the House of Saud was paved by the evaporation of the Ottoman Empire. On the Peninsula itself, however, the conflict had deeper roots, bound up in feuding tribal dynasties, the distant interests of multiple imperial overlords, and the passage of many decades.
Arabian Struggle, co-designed by Nick Porter and Tim Uren, and drawing on the Conflict of Wills system initially expressed in Robin David’s fascinating Judean Hammer, emphasizes the long view. A dozen wars, countless battles and raids and negotiations, and even the Great War itself are mere beats in its epochal narrative. At ten thousand feet, the details get fuzzy. It’s to Porter and Uren’s credit that the overall thrust of the conflict never goes missing.
SPACE-BIFF! 