Dragons Greater and Lesser
It’s an odd thing to say, given that Connie Vogelmann’s spinoff of Elizabeth Hargrave’s Wingspan is about fictional creatures rather than real-world birds, but Wyrmspan benefits from its sense of grounding.
Yeah, yeah, I know. But it’s true. Wingspan, which I’ve always had a fondness for, requires some degree of acceptance. You’re arranging its avian wildlife into three rows that represent… sanctuaries? Bird-watches? Meals? I couldn’t tell you. By contrast, Wyrmspan settles into a fiction of carving dragon nests into a primeval mountain. You feed the beasts, fill their hoards, raise their hatchlings. It’s every bit as pleasant and appealing as Wingspan, but heftier and more established.
Also, it sends my ten-year-old into paroxysms of joy. So there’s that.
Baconator
Where last year jump-started my appreciation for trick-taking games, perhaps 2024 is the year I’ll bumble into an adjacent genre: the shedding game. I’ve played a handful over the past few weeks, dominated by designer Sean Ross. My launching point for this introduction has been Bacon, one of his more recent shedders.
Canceling the Apocalypse
If every airplane flight is as prone to failure as Luc Rémond’s Sky Team makes out, a third of passengers will never make it to their destination. That makes modern transportation the equivalent of buckling yourself into a faster Hindenburg.
Awesome.
I Prefer Henotheist, Actually
When the Witch Hunter bangs on my door to accuse me of paganism, I hope he won’t mind listening to some internal debate over whether that’s a suitable designation. I prefer to think of myself as a monolatrist, you see. Maybe a henotheist. I’m torn, really, over how to identify my relationship to these heathen deities that adorn my home. We don’t insist on labels like your mainstream god.
Pagan: Fate of Roanoke is positioned to ask such questions. Designed by Kasper Kjær Christiansen and Kåre Storgaard, Pagan places itself not only on the physical frontier, but also along the raggedy edge of our theological understanding. Only rather than debating the finer points of ecclesiastical law, two players are caught up in an existential debate over whether the colony should be forcibly stripped from the landscape via magic. That’s right, it’s a New World religious debate. No knowledge of Latin required!
No Franks!
I can’t tell whether Empire’s End, the latest game by John Clair, is trying to invoke the end of the Roman Empire, the Bronze Age Collapse, or a theoretical crumbling of the fleet from Space Base. Given the skinny cards, perhaps it’s the latter. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that this game’s genesis arose from the former.
Which isn’t to say they’re especially alike. Space Base was an engine-builder with dice. Empire’s End is an engine-builder that occasionally explodes in your face due to No Thanks!-style auctions.
Little Gerties All the Way Down
It seems the Crossroads Series has settled into a groove. It’s certainly been a journey. From the selfish besieged colonists of Dead of Winter to the, uh, whatever they were in Gen7, to the lovable pirates of Forgotten Waters, these games have never sat still for long.
Freelancers, designed by Donald Shults but drawing upon Plaid Hat’s wide-ranging stable of talent, is the first time the series has felt like a repeat. Set in an Adventure Time-styled landscape that doesn’t seem to know the apocalypse has already happened, players embody a team of do-gooders who don’t seem capable of doing much good. And it’s such a riotous good time that it gets away with being a very bad game indeed.
The Better Part of Valor
The Battle of Hegra Fortress saw 250 Norwegian volunteers holding off a Wehrmacht battalion for the better part of a month. It was a comparatively minor engagement in the grand scheme of the Second World War, but the unexpected success of the defenders against overwhelming numbers, artillery and air bombardments, and the weather itself became a symbolic victory for Norway.
Petter Schanke Olsen’s version of the battle, Halls of Hegra, turns to modern mechanisms and systems to immortalize the battle. The result is exceptional craftsmanship, a depictin of warfare that goes far beyond the customary in its portrayal of courage under fire.
Skipping School
Not many board games make me tired. Sankoré is the rare exception. As a follow-up to Merv: Heart of the Silk Road, it has certainly shed the reservation I felt at the time, that it was a boilerplate nu-Euro with a wonderful action selection system.
This time, Fabio Lopiano, working alongside Mandela Fernandez-Grandon, has crafted a nu-Euro that does everything at once. Too many things at once. After I prepped for its requisite second and third plays, a setup I clocked at twenty-two minutes, everybody filed in and groaned. It’s not a good sign when people are weary before a session has even started.
The Ministry for the Here and Now
Before we can create a better future, we must imagine a better future.
That was my mantra as I discovered Daybreak, the recent board game co-designed by Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace. I first played it only days after finishing Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. Both of these artifacts, board game and novel, are about confronting climate change through some combination of hard work, human ingenuity, and international cooperation. Early reports on the board game were mixed. It seemed Daybreak didn’t capture the same highs as Leacock’s previous cooperative titles — a tall order given his authorship of Pandemic. More importantly, it seemed that Daybreak may have tipped the scale from hopeful to sanguine. One critic went so far as to declare it “blindly optimistic.”
I’m of multiple minds on all counts. Daybreak isn’t Leacock’s finest plaything; with apologies to his many Pandemic and Forbidden Island/Desert/Sky/Jungle fans, that would be Era: Medieval Age. What it is, rather, is his most conceptual and most clear-headed design, a board game with a thesis, a tone, an intended takeaway. As prognostics go, I suspect it may well prove too optimistic — but for a different reason than some others have concluded. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Best Week 2023! The Index!
I suspect we enjoy end-of-year lists because they ease our underlying certainty that everything will eventually be swept away by time and the sea. Anyway! 2023 was a much better year for board games than some will admit. Or perhaps my affection arises from this being the first year that my nine-year-old pretty much earned her own category. Regardless of the reason, below you will find links to every day of Best Week 2023, and from there to reviews of the year’s finest board games, puzzles, and diversions.
Here’s to another. And another. And countless more beyond.
SPACE-BIFF! 