I Want to Go to There
Josh Wood is the designer behind what I consider the finest tableau-building game of all time: Santa Monica. What sets it apart from its peers is a willingness to let players not only create a scenic space, but also explore that space, moving tourists and townies along its beaches and storefronts. The effect is profound, elevating cards from mere stockpiles of victory points to textured terrain that must be traversed.
Wood’s next stab at the genre is Let’s Go! To Japan, a curiously titled game that feels like it’s trying to launch a brand. Like Santa Monica, Wood invests his players in scenic locales and tangible geographies. I’m going to do my darnedest not to draw too many comparisons between them.
Upscale Court Officiants
Let’s get this out of the way up front: yes, Courtisans is a funny title for a card game. Designed by Romaric Galonnier and Anthony Perone, one presumes the title’s French meaning hasn’t gone the way of the English word “courtesans” to imply upscale prostitutes. Or maybe it has. I really couldn’t tell you.
Look, it doesn’t matter. Whether it’s about upscale prostitutes, upscale courtiers, or upscale court officiants, Courtisans is a shockingly good game with almost zero rules overhead.
New Year, Old Year: 2021 Revisited
The wheel has turned again. And again. Although this installment of New Year, Old Year is a full year late, I’ve already explained my growing reservations with this recurring retrospective, so there’s no reason to belabor the point. Instead, here we are, on the precipice of revisiting the titles I considered the best of 2021. What did I get right? What did I get wrong? The answers may surprise you.
Or they may not. Who can tell. Not me. Either way, we’re doing things a little differently now. Rather than dividing everything into binary right/wrong categories, it seems more helpful to look back on each title in turn. Because sometimes I got things right and wrong at the same time. Nuance, y’all.
Space-Cast! #36. How to Invest in Solar
The climate crisis! That’s a dour topic, isn’t it? Today we’re joined by Matteo Menapace and Matt Leacock to discuss Daybreak, their board game about world governments coming together to combat climate change. Along the way we discuss cardboard incentives, producing board games without plastic, and why optimism is necessary when thinking about big problems.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Heliotropes
Three and a half hours into our most recent play of Bloodstones, I turned to the five other players sitting at my living room table. “I just wanted to say,” I began, in the tone of a hard-bitten battlefield commander trapped in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. “There is nobody I would rather share this ordeal with than all of you.” And then we laughed the laugh of soldiers who had spent too many weeks cowering at the bottom of foxholes.
Bloodstones is the latest title by Martin Wallace, a designer who has produced some of my favorite games of all time. It’s an impressive production, with multiple cloth maps, six unique factions, and oh so many bags filled with wonderfully clacky tiles. Between pedigree and production, it’s an easy sell.
I can’t stand it.
Island in the Sun
Spirit Island. What a game. R. Eric Reuss’s masterpiece has been around long enough that it’s become a staple of the discourse, a counterpoint to all those colonial settings that dominate game store shelves. Seven years ago I called it the anti-Catan. It’s still that and more besides. Nowadays I think of it less as a subaltern revenge fantasy (although it qualifies) or a deified avatar of conservationism (it’s that too) and more as a lament. If only there were gods, it cries. Even if they were gods that didn’t think much of us and might trample over us in their enthusiasm to preserve their creation, there would be comfort in knowing that some power, any power, cared enough about the trees and the beaches to keep them around a little longer.
Reuss’s latest iteration of the game, Horizons of Spirit Island, is a downscaled version that swaps plastic for cardboard and lowers both the player count and the complexity. It’s Spirit Island for book stores and Target, in other words. Even in a reduced format, it’s fantastic.
Everything Minus the Zamboni
I had no idea what to expect going into the second edition of Trick Shot. Not only because I don’t know the first thing about hockey, but also because I was operating under the assumption that it was a dexterity game.
Here’s the good news: Trick Shot may not let me hurl around a puck by flicking it with a tiny hockey stick, but it doesn’t need to. Designed by Artyom Nichipurov, creator of the stellar Guards of Atlantis, this is even better than my assumptions led me to expect.
Almost Me
It could happen to anyone. Your band of adventurers hit the tavern too hard last night. When you woke up, every member of your party was accused of a different heinous crime. For some reason we’re presuming you didn’t commit the deeds in question. Before the queen tosses your sodden bones in the clank, you’ll need to clear your good (eh) name. It’s detectin’ time.
That’s the premise behind Almost Innocent, Philippe Attali’s cooperative deduction game, which is best described as aggressively fine.
Pax Partying
It hasn’t been all that long since Matilda Simonsson wowed me with Turncoats, her handmade game of hidden influence and third-party warfare. Now she’s back with a more ambitious — not to mention riskier — follow-up in the form of Pax Penning. As its title suggests, this is a riff on the venerable (and thorny) Pax Series, importing crucial details and framing, right down to the clarifying footnotes in the rulebook.
But it’s something more than that. While Pax Penning is identifiably Pax, it’s also a more intricate take on the ideas Simonsson explored in Turncoats. This is a game of tenuous alliances, unexpected turns, and riding the changing winds of politics. And that’s before we excavate how it reveals uncommon depths of history via the language of play.
AMBLE
I own a pocket watch from Stratford-upon-Avon, a trinket I picked up to commemorate viewing Macbeth at the Royal Shakespeare Theater. It’s a gorgeous little thing, clasped in silver, its open face and back revealing the clockwork precision within. Everything has a purpose: the hairspring that stores tension, the jagged teeth of the escapement wheel that tick out the seconds, the gems that cap the gears to minimize friction. Sometimes I wind it up just to set all those pieces in motion.
RUN, a hidden movement game by Moritz Dressler, reminds me of that pocket watch. As an object of mechanical fascination, there’s nothing quite like it. Everything has its proper place. It ticks smoothly.
But it’s also pointless. An artifact, a curiosity, rather than something I’m going to actually carry around.
SPACE-BIFF! 