Best Week 2023! Family Stuff!
You know what Space-Biff! has always been about? Family. Okay, it’s more often about board games. So consider today a synthesis. These are the past year’s best board games that I played with my extended family or nine-year-old. They’re light, they’re fluffy, and there’s a good chance they contain anthropomorphic animals in some degree of peril.
Flippin’ Heck
Round these parts, we mostly know Steven Aramini for his 18-card wallet microgames, fare like Circle the Wagons, Sprawlopolis, and Ancient Realm. Now he’s set up his own imprint, Write Stuff Games. While its inaugural title is rather compact, it’s downright massive compared to a wallet game. It’s also one of the best flip-and-write games I’ve played. Ever.
Once More Unto the Omen
Omen is an old friend. I first wrote about John Clowdus’s masterpiece eleven years ago, and swore off repeating that review more than once. We’ve been through good times (the Olympus Edition) and shaky times (the eventual glut of Kolossal spinoffs). I once alienated my brother-in-law by trouncing him a little too thoroughly. When my daughter’s appendix ruptured, I grabbed the first thing off the shelf on my way out the door. Dusty and well-worn, it was Omen I spent the night shuffling, drafting deck after deck, doing anything to keep my mind occupied.
Clowdus recently bought back the rights to Omen. Now he’s rebuilt the game from the ground up. New art, new style, tighter focus. It’s a different experience, in some ways. That’s no surprise for a game that’s always shifted with the times and Clowdus’s evolving design sensibilities. I can’t wholly assess whether it’s the best incarnation of the series; we’ve grown old middle-aged together. But I think it’s great, the work of a designer who can’t quite leave his masterpiece behind.
Age of Blunders
In 2019, a video game named Age of Wonders: Planetfall came out. It was the fifth entry in the Age of Wonders series, a crossbreed of Civilization and Heroes of Might and Magic, and the only non-magical entry thus far. It has since been supplanted by Age of Wonders 4, the sixth entry in this increasingly inaccurately-numbered series.
Now there’s a board game adaptation of this four-year-old video game.
Why? Why is there a board game? I couldn’t tell you. Nor could I tell you why Stepan Opalev, the game’s designer, chose to adapt a series famous for its 4X openness by designing a tableau-builder. Apart from the in-game models that have been ported over as illustrations, Age of Wonders: Planetfall doesn’t capture the first thing about Age of Wonders: Planetfall.
Wingnut Spanner
Brett Sobol and Seth Van Orden seem to have enjoyed Wingspan. Or maybe they didn’t, and that’s how Raising Robots came to resemble Wingspan with the action selection system from Race for the Galaxy. So it goes. Board games are more often about recombination and iteration than they are about innovation. Raising Robots iterates by adding as many icons as possible.
That’s unfair. It also innovates by making me worry about free will.
Space-Cast! #33. Gab on the Clocktower
How much work goes into a successful social deduction game? If Blood on the Clocktower is anything to go by, a whole lot. Today we’re joined by Steven Medway, designer of this long-awaited game about the improper use of timekeeping apparatuses, to discuss unreliable identities, player elimination, and how chaos fosters memorable stories.
What’s All This About a Chair, Anyway?
You might have heard that a fairly large board game publisher recently crowdfunded an entry in a well-loved series using AI-generative illustrations. Now, here at Space-Biff!, it’s my policy to pass on any titles that use generative AI in place of human craftsmanship. There’s some nuance there; I’m talking about image and text generation, not assistive tools, although plenty of people talk about those two things like they’re identical.
But I get that many people may not understand such a stance. So let’s talk. What follows is an explanation of why I’m not interested in covering games that use generated images and text.
Gazette Trucker
It will surprise nobody to learn that I was one of the layout editors of my high school newspaper. There’s an art to fitting everything on the page — just don’t ask me to demonstrate that art or what any good examples are. Mostly I remember working late after school to meet deadlines.
In that regard, Peter McPherson has transcribed the topic accurately. This is the third of McPherson’s published titles, after Tiny Towns and Wormholes, and it’s the strongest of the three in no small part due to a frenetic nature inspired by Vlaada Chvátil’s Galaxy Trucker. The secret to Galaxy Trucker’s success is that it, like its sister title Space Alert, grows funnier as its players fail. It’s the hobby’s equivalent of slapstick. Fit to Print follows that tradition. It’s at its best when everything is falling apart.
Beads?
There’s an obvious appeal to Connie Vogelmann’s Apiary, if only because “space bees” is such an evocative pair of words as to bend light waves. Also, bee puns are really, really easy. “Bee” sounds exactly like the letter B. Come on.
But I want to set that aside, because Apiary excels at making difficult things look easy. This is a fine-tuned example of optimization gameplay and speculative fiction. I suspect there was nothing easy about designing it.
Observe, Feyd-Rautha
Arrakis. Dune. Desert planet. Warner Bros. property.
It’s not every day that a game I genuinely love hits it big in this hobby. I’ve been pleased to watch Paul Dennen’s Dune: Imperium thrive, earning two expansions in Rise of Ix and Immortality. That said, I’ve been as perplexed as anybody at the latest offering. Dune: Imperium — Uprising has a surfeit of subtitles and a questionable provenance, functioning neither as an expansion nor as a totally fresh start for the series. At a glance, it’s not all that far removed from the original game.
SPACE-BIFF! 