Space-Cast! #35. But Then She Spilled Tea
For this month’s episode, we’re unexpectedly joined by Amabel Holland to discuss board games — except this time, we cover three titles in total, ranging from Kaiju Table Battles to Doubt Is Our Product and But Then She Came Back. Along the way, we dive into the advantages of board games over other artistic mediums, that New Yorker article, and Amabel’s birthday orgy. Be warned: there’s a chance that this episode should not be played at work, in the presence of impressionable children, or at church. That is, unless your church is the fun kind.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Kinfire. Not That One.
Every time I mention I’m playing Kevin Wilson’s Kinfire, somebody asks if it’s really as big and intimidating as they’ve heard. This sparks a clarification: the Kinfire in question is Kinfire Delve, which is considerably smaller than Kinfire Chronicles, the latter of which is so sprawling and so expensive that it would probably be compromising for me to even glance at the thing.
No, Kinfire Delve — specifically Vainglory’s Grotto, the first of three proposed releases in the Delve line — is neither big nor intimidating. To the contrary, it’s compact and easy. Both solitaire and with two players, it’s as smooth as they come. Maybe too smooth. But only by a scooch.
Snoozing Gods
It’s been a while since I’ve visited, but I think back on my three campaigns in the world of Sleeping Gods with nothing but fondness. I could probably sketch a rough map of the Wandering Sea: that ivory hive on the map’s edge, the ancient spires stacked like dominoes rising from the seabed, the far-flung deserts. Ryan Laukat’s vibrant brushstrokes establish an adventurous tone, giving the world a sense of scale that hasn’t often been replicated. What will you find around the bend of the next island? You’re practically itching to find out.
Sleeping Gods: Primeval Peril swaps the colorful palette of the original for muddy rivers and tangled jungle, not to mention a more claustrophobic perspective. This was originally a free print-and-play for those who backed the crowdfunding campaign, now given fuller development and a shelf-ready production. I hate to say it, but its status as a rejiggered freebie is all too evident.
Winds of Change, Part Four: Cyprus
This is how The British Way ends: not with a bang but a whimper. Of the four scenarios in Stephen Rangazas’s vivisection of 20th-century British colonialism, Cyprus is the briefest and least rules-heavy inclusion, a suitable outcome for a conflict that was comparatively minor when contrasted with the counterinsurgencies of Palestine, Malaya, and Kenya. Exhausted by colonial occupations across the globe, the British Empire was spread too thinly to enact a full response. Instead, it elected to utilize the lessons of occupations past to sway international opinion and brutalize the insurgents into surrender.
As we will see, the outcome proved unsatisfactory to everybody.
Choose Your Own Cardventure
I spend a weird amount of time thinking about narrative in board games. So maybe it isn’t a surprise that I was drawn to Hildegard, the second entry in Greg Favro’s Spire’s End series, in which the obvious touchstone is choose-your-own-adventure books. You know, those things everybody cheated through as a kid.
The Plum Island Park Stroll
One of the finest solitaire games of all time is Dawn of the Zeds, Hermann Luttmann’s masterful riff on the States of Siege model. Not that it should be taken lightly. It presents a vicious struggle for survival that might end in calamity faster than the game can actually be set up. It doesn’t help that further editions and expansions cluttered the table with so many optional modules that even veterans of the zed wars might pause before breaking it out. At least this veteran has.
So it was with no small measure of excitement that I approached The Plum Island Horror, a spiritual successor to Dawn of the Zeds, and a perfectly schlocky reimagining of the small town under siege by reanimated horrors.
Talking About Games: Against Repeatability
There’s a recurring series I write on Space-Biff! called New Year, Old Year, which looks back on the games highlighted in Best Weeks past and evaluates them from a more updated vantage. When I began writing it back in 2017, there were two purposes behind the series. The immediate function was prophylactic. I’m often asked whether this or that game has held up since its release. New Year, Old Year could function as a repository for keeping my readers updated. Also, sure, so I had something to link to instead of answering those questions over and over again.
On a more personal level, New Year, Old Year also functioned as a form of accountability. A gut-check on my own tastes and attitudes. It was valuable to look back on the lists I’d written years before. With the benefit of hindsight, it was easier to see where I’d steered wrong, the gaps in my recommendations, or where my initial enthusiasm had been misplaced. The series was a corrective. It helped me not only reevaluate previous titles, but approach the games I was playing and reviewing right now with some additional perspective.
But something happened last year. When the appointed time came around to write about Best Week 2021, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Something I’d left sitting on the windowsill for far too long had finally curdled.
I Sacrificed My Blood to NAWALLI
The first time I opened NAWALLI, the Aztec-themed card game from Gonzalo Alvarez and Will Rogers, I cut my finger. An occupational hazard, one might suppose, but this was no paper cut. No, the ruby scratch that marked my index finger had come from reaching too eagerly into the game’s baggie of tracker gems and obsidian stones. I soon found the offending piece, a miniature knife with jagged teeth and an unexpected bite.
I can’t think of a better stand-in for NAWALLI as a whole. Like that shard of volcanic glass, this game is jagged around the edges. It’s small and might nip at your fingertips. But it’s also so dang cool that I wouldn’t have it any other way.
More Like Hadrian’s Pathetic Ditch
It isn’t that I dislike the entire roll-and-write/flip-and-write genre. It’s that the genre never grew past its infancy. There are exceptions. To give one example, I recently enjoyed Steven Aramini’s Fliptown enough to name it one of my favorite titles of 2023. For the most part, though, these games feel more like proofs of concept than something I’d elect to drag off the shelf.
That is, until I played Bobby Hill’s Hadrian’s Wall, a tangle of possessives if ever there was one. I’ll do one better: This is Dan Thurot’s Bobby Hill’s Hadrian’s Wall review.
Annie Christmas vs. Motthew
I have such a soft spot for Rob Daviau and Justin Jacobson’s Unmatched series. That goes double when they’re producing sets like Cobble & Fog, adaptations that faithfully translate works of literature to the gaming table and let the Invisible Man slug Sherlock Holmes in his upturned snoot.
Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze takes the series in a new direction. Designed by Jason Hager and Darren Reckner, this set is transformative in the literal sense, reworking those staple clashes into cooperative boss battles. In comic book terms, it’s the crossover event that sees all those ruffians and louts teaming up to topple an even nastier baddie. It’s such a shift of perspective that it would be a minor wonder if it worked at all. Instead, it comes off so perfectly that I’m tempted to drag my older sets out of storage.
SPACE-BIFF! 