Charmed!
Taiki Shinzawa has designed no fewer than three of my favorite trick-takers: American Bookshop, 9 Lives, and Ghosts of Christmas. Now two more of his designs are getting wider distribution thanks to New Mill Industries. There’s Inflation!, formerly known as Zimbabwe Trick, and Charms, née Dois. Both titles very much want to punish you for making grave counting errors.
Sounds Swedish
I’m one of those nerds who insists that board games “get Star Trek right.” Just ask my reviews of Star Trek: Ascendancy, which offers a longue durée telling of the series’ civilizations, or even Star Trek: Super-Skill Pinball, with its emphasis on weird situations and problem-solving.
But it matters. Star Trek was the formative science fiction of my childhood. It was never as polished as Star Wars. Maybe more importantly, its collectible card game wasn’t nearly as interesting. But it was a series that celebrated doubt and skepticism rather than positing that its in-universe religion was the font of truth. In Star Wars, success was a question of believing hard enough. In Star Trek, it was a question of breaking down the problem into its constituent pieces and then working through them. For a kid grappling with existential questions in a culture that offered too many glib answers, Star Trek was a promise.
So when three sets of Star Trek: Away Missions appeared unbidden on my doorstep, I was skeptical. Hey, that’s the Star Trek way. Maybe I shouldn’t have been. Although Away Missions has plenty of problems, getting Star Trek right isn’t one of them.
Rage Against the Artificial Machine
There are two cautionary tales in City of the Great Machine, the recent board game by German Tikhomirov. The first and more intentional of these tales is one we’ve read and watched and played many times. Decades ago, the citizens of this steampunk setting decided to automate the humdrum chores and maintenance tasks that were necessary for the operation of their floating city. Thanks to some serious feature creep, the great machine gradually took over more and more of the city’s labor. First it was factory work. Then sanitation. Next, security. Eventually, art. Tomorrow, perhaps, it will automate thinking altogether.
A resistance has formed. These brave men and women, armed only with stovepipe hats, corsets, and the occasional geared implement of war, intend to smash the great machine. Their one problem? Whenever they talk about the dang thing, everybody is too busy tinkering with its latest Midjourney ChatGPT steampunk app to pay attention.
The People Person’s People Power
Between its eleven volumes, two spinoffs, and a handful of spiritual successors, the COIN Series has covered a lot of ground over the past decade. It’s a series I’ve always appreciated for how it dusts the underappreciated corners of history for conflicts that are otherwise too unconventional for easy gamification. That said, it’s also a challenging series, both thematically and as player experiences, not least because of its unswerving dedication to force asymmetry. Perhaps that’s inevitable. It is, after all, dedicated to showing how small irregular forces can paralyze military juggernauts with their unpredictability and tendency to disappear into the countryside rather than trade blows with tanks and helicopters.
Somewhere along the way, the series morphed into a depiction of not only governments and insurgencies, but also popular movements. Kenneth Tee’s People Power: Insurgency in the Philippines, 1981-1986 leans into this more recent characterization. It’s also the simplest and most approachable the series has been since its second volume.
Space-Cast! #31. An Undaunting Conversation
As befits as large and ambitious a game as Undaunted: Stalingrad, today on the Space-Cast! we’re joined by Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson to discuss WWII, inclusions and omissions in historical games, and whether board games are art — or at least what it means for them to have authorial intent.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Emergence
It’s an easy thing to draw comparisons between one game and another when they share mechanical underpinnings, but I often prefer to dwell on those parallels that aren’t immediately clear. Take, for example, Adam DeYoung’s Emerge, the recent release from Pandasaurus that, for all intents and purposes, is another generic points-chaser. It’s a dice game at heart, and feels bland for precisely the same reason it feels rewarding in the moment, thanks to a core gameplay loop in which nearly every action awards roughly one point. It doesn’t immediately stand out from the pack.
But while playing Emerge, the strangest comparison kept springing to mind. That title was Jon Sudbury’s Ortus Regni.
In the Pale Blood Moon Light
Ryan Courtney is mostly known for games about pipes, but it seems I will forever prefer his less squiggly work. Bear Raid leaps to mind.
From now on, I expect it will be Spectral that leaves the strongest impression. Once every million years, give or take a thousand, the blood moon bathes a haunted house in its crimson light. On that night alone, spectral treasures can be found within. Also curses. Maybe look out for those.
Eila and Something Disconcerting
I’ve never taken a firm stance on age ratings, in part because I’m not sure what they’re trying to impart. Most of the time, I take them as an evaluation of a game’s complexity, and a wishy-washy evaluation at that. A rating of 12+ won’t prove much of a deterrent to my nine-year-old because she plays more board games than her peers. That’s only the first limitation. I also can’t be certain that the designer invested much thought into it. Before I had children of my own, I couldn’t have told you the cognitive difference between ten and twelve years. And it isn’t as though the other numbers on a box bear much resemblance to reality. How often has a game’s estimated playtime proven to be hopelessly optimistic? These days, the only digits that really catch my eye are player counts.
I didn’t play Eila and Something Shiny with my daughter. Jeffrey CCH’s narrative experiment is a solitaire game, and for once I took that suggestion to heart rather than offering to loop in my kid. What a relief. Given the game’s friendly exterior, she might have accepted.
I Cherish Peace with All My Heart
I have a soft spot for Sami Laakso’s Daimyria, the shared setting for Dale of Merchants, Lands of Galzyr, and Peacemakers. It’s the specificity that does it. Other games about anthropomorphic animals feature, I dunno, turtles. Daimyria doesn’t settle for such broadness. Instead, it’s populated with fennec foxes and short-beaked echidnas and giant pangolins. Each species is an entire identity unto itself. Medieval courtiers in fursuits need not apply.
The forthcoming Peacemakers: Horrors of War is a reimagining of Laakso’s Dawn of Peacemakers. The early version of the game only includes two scenarios, but those were enough to get me excited for more.
These Animals Need an Estate Tax
The king is dead. Long live the king’s many successors, claimants, and pretenders. Designed by Hong Kong-based creators Jeffrey CCH and Kenneth YWN, Inheritors is the latest in a long string of titles that demonstrate why hereditary monarchy is a terrible way to run a burrito cart, let alone a country. Maybe it should come as a surprise, then, that this transition is so smooth.
SPACE-BIFF! 