Antiantidisestablishmentarianism
This might shock you, but I don’t actually love big words. Rather than elbowing pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis into a conversation, I prefer short, evocative slashes to anything my readers might need to sound out. Let’s be real for a second: Did you actually say the word in the previous sentence, or did you blip over it like one more nickname for Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment? Exactly.
Five-Dollar Words, then, is a game that I am unexpectedly terrible at. Designed by Amabel and Mary Holland as the freebie for this year’s Hollandays Sale, it peddles itself as a game for sesquipedalianists and pedants. Better yet, it has a rule that prevents anybody from dragging out antidisestablishmentarianism as their word of choice.
Look Up
Xoe Allred’s Velocirapture is hard to describe, one suspects by design. There’s a shortcut in games criticism that’s tempting to invoke, wherein anything perplexing gets labeled a “tone poem.” Velocirapture, however, is not a tone poem so much as it is a garbled signal about the all-too-human tendency to talk around a difficult topic.
Here’s the box pitch: A meteor streaks across the Cretaceous sky. Extinction looms. But nobody wants to talk about that. Instead, these dinosaurs intend to play human games until the very end. As pitches go, it’s a knee-slapper. Largely in part because it’s so very recognizable. Just ask every single person who’s suffered from unusual bleeding or a misplaced lump and didn’t schedule a doctor’s visit right away. We are such odd creatures. Apparently, so were the dinosaurs.
You End Up Becoming Yourself
Kaiju Table Battles is one of the most intensely personal games I have ever played. It’s like stumbling across a friend’s open diary and reading a few fervid paragraphs before recognizing the artifact for what it is. The impulse in that moment, in our culture, is to clasp the diary shut, and likewise clasp shut the memory. We shy away from earnestness so readily. How, then, do we respond when the earnestness stands on a stool and demands to be seen?
Amabel Holland has always been a designer who stretches and strains the medium to its absolute boundaries. Kaiju Table Battles takes both to their limit. Maybe beyond the limit. This is a legacy game, envelopes and all, which peels itself apart layer by layer, revealing new diary lines and rubber-suited monsters alike. Along the way, it questions the very foundations of play.
Fossil Industries
It would be a lie to say I love cube rails, but there is a handful I’ve enjoyed more or less, and it’s no coincidence that three of them were designed by Amabel Holland. Dinosaur Gauge, co-designed between Amabel and Mary Holland, is, I hate to break it to you, the least historical of the set. Despite some messiness, that might also mark it as my favorite of the bunch.
Werner Placement
Despite its shared parentage, General Orders: World War II comes across as the antithesis of Undaunted: Stalingrad. Where Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson’s magnum opus of the Undaunted line was sprawling and personal, General Orders is a trifle, two heavily abstracted battles that say little about their subject matter, but really doesn’t care to in the first place.
It’s rather good, a few complaints aside.
Dudes on a Board
Match of the Century is the second game in recent memory to figure chess as its topic without simply being chess. The first was The Queen’s Gambit: The Board Game, a title I didn’t play but which seemed to draw mostly groans. Match of the Century was designed by Paolo Mori, and because Mori is one of the most assured designers working today, it is decidedly not groan-worthy.
That doesn’t mean it fits Mori’s register. This is his most overtly historical game, tackling the 1972 World Chess Championship match between Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky and challenger Bobby Fischer. But while it’s a compelling ditty in its own right, it didn’t leave me any surer of the dynamics of that landmark tournament.
Winds of Change, Part Two: Malaya
In the West, it’s all too easy to blind oneself to the long-term consequences of colonialism. As we examined last time, the reverberations of British Imperial promises in the Middle East continue to be felt a full century after they were made. Today we’re looking at a conflict — euphemistically called an “emergency” — that was far bloodier and more pressing to the Crown than the logistical colony of Mandatory Palestine: the communist uprising and subsequent imperial deployment on the Malay Peninsula.
The Malayan Emergency is the second of four insurgencies included in Stephen Rangazas’s The British Way, and it’s by far the most robust of the multipack. Were players to pursue these scenarios in order of complexity, this would likely constitute the final installment. Unfortunately, history doesn’t gently ramp up its level of complexity for our ease of play. Cinch up that rucksack, because this one is going to require some explanation.
Maybe Check Under the Mountain?
The old king has disappeared. Inconvenient. We were barely holding the place together as it was. Now four claimants are scrambling to seat their bums on the royal pillow. The pillow is on the throne, you understand. But it’s a sublime pillow. Too bad it’s no good for sharing.
Longtime readers will be well aware that one of my favorite types of game is the lane battler, whether we’re talking about classic Battle Line and Schotten Totten or something newer like Omen: A Reign of War, Haven, RiftForce, or Air, Land, & Sea. Even Marvel Snap qualifies.
The Old King’s Crown is a lavish addition to the genre. Designed and illustrated by Pablo Clark, this forthcoming title is certainly one of the handsomest games I’ve played in a long time. I mean, just look at the thing. Mwah.
In Case You Didn’t Get Enough Zoom
It’s the future. Plague and government neglect have caused humanity to retreat into the virtual world. No, I’m not talking about the COVID lockdowns of 2020. Fate dictates that we’re going to do it all over again in 2047 — although apparently this time the Metaverse won’t turn out to be such a deflated whoopee cushion.
Based on a film I haven’t seen but redolent of well-worn cyberpunk tropes, Virtual Revolution is the brainchild of Guy-Roger Duvert, who both wrote and directed the movie, penned a prequel novel, and has now designed the board game. I’m wary whenever an author adapts their fictive world to cardboard; a talent in one medium doesn’t often translate into another. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that Virtual Revolution is a worthy non-virtual plaything.
Our House Is a Very Very Very Molly House
I often joke that I’m a class-four prude. Like many jokes, this one hides a kernel of truthfulness. For reasons that are far beyond the purposes of today’s discussion, sexuality is not something I discuss easily or often. When I do, it’s often behind a veil of playfulness. In laughter and mirth, the untouchable is momentarily set free.
Although the comparison is an imperfect one, that also seems true of molly houses, gathering places such as coffee houses or taverns where homosexual men in 18th-century England could socialize freely, veiled from the gaze of polite society. In some ways, their idea of queerness was different from ours. Indeed, they lacked terms like “queerness” at all. The laws of the time lumped homosexuality and bestiality together, and those who were arrested could be pilloried or even hanged.
Despite these penalties, men risked shame and death to create places where they could become more fully themselves. That’s the topic of Molly House by Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle. Molly House was one of the finalists of the first Zenobia Award. Now it’s nearly here, and I can safely say there’s nothing quite like it.
SPACE-BIFF! 