Book-Space! #24. Babel
Ever wondered what a translator’s life is like? R.F. Kuang’s Babel lends readers an accurate impression of higher education, British colonialism, and the magical powers of silversmithing. Join Brock, Summer, and Dan as we discuss this wonderfully dense and evocative book. Listen here or download here.
Next time, spider aliens! Courtesy of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time.
Rome in a Quarter Hour
Despite being familiar to anybody who’s divided a last piece of cake, “I cut, you choose” doesn’t tend to attract much attention. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Evgeny Petrov’s Rome in a Day is looking to change that. This is a quiet little game, such an embodiment of the filler category that it takes literally fifteen minutes to play. In spite of that, it’s an unexpectedly solid title that transforms its players into shrewd speculators of hexes and laser-cut structures.
The Gryphon Has Fallen
Very few games are as cacophonous as Guards of Atlantis II — or as elegant. Are those antonyms? Before playing Artyom Nichipurov’s masterpiece, I might have thought so. We’ve tried our hand at plenty of titles that have aspired to bring the skill and chaos of multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs) to the tabletop, a tall order for a genre that takes full advantage of its processing power and leans on reflex for good play. Despite the limitations of the medium, a handful of attempts have been noteworthy. Even excellent.
Compared to the best of them, Guards of Atlantis II is on a whole ‘nother level.
If Books Could Kill
It’s hard to go even one minute in the presence of Paperback Adventures, the latest word game by Skye Larsen and Tim Fowers, without drawing comparisons to Slay the Spire — specifically, the original digital game by Anthony Giovannetti and Casey Yano, not the forthcoming cardboard adaptation by Gary Dworetsky. At this point, a Mormon genealogy project would struggle to detangle its heritage. Slay the Spire spawned entire crowds of imitators, but it was also a successor in its own right, drawing on both roguelikes and the tabletop deck-building craze. It’s been almost a decade since Fowers’ original Paperback, itself a deck-builder. Now it’s back after some liberal cribbing from Slay the Spire. Trace that lineage and you get a time paradox.
Here’s the crazy part: Paperback Adventures is possibly the finest title Fowers has produced. It might even be superior to Slay the Spire. Hear me out.
Space-Cast! #28. Land and Conversation
The politics of the Spanish Civil War are complicated — which only makes it all the more impressive that Alex Knight’s Land and Freedom distills them so elegantly into a three-player scrum for control of the Second Republic. Today, Alex joins us to discuss the genesis of his game, including how he solved the semi-cooperative problem with a silk bag, evolving the card-driven formula so popular in wargames, and the factional politics behind the gameplay.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
The Jaunty Mattanza
La Famiglia: The Great Mafia War, the latest design by Maximilian Maria Thiel, has caused a minor stir thanks to its subject matter, the Sicilian mafia wars of the 1980s. Sometimes called the Mattanza — the slaughter — this conflict claimed thousands of victims, including bystanders, police officers, and civil servants, and included acts of violence that crossed borders and oceans.
When it comes to board games, it’s hard to find a setting that will unsettle me. I’m less interested in a game’s proposition than its execution. Playing La Famiglia, however, it’s hard to escape the niggling feeling that this isn’t the most canny handling of a sensitive topic.
13xx
My favorite thing about Nick Case’s Pilgrim is how it seems to be winking at you. That’s saying a lot, given how many things it does well, but there it is: this is a game about a topic that could have been unbearably dry, yet it carries itself with a sparkle of irreverence that calls to mind the games of Alf Seegert.
The topic in question is a ring of abbeys in 14th-century England. Students of history will immediately recognize the period. Set anything in the 14th century and there’s a good chance the tone will hover somewhere between dismal and outright mortal crisis. There’s a plague on, and a war, and indulgences, and ecclesiastical abuses, and all the other things you were probably taught about in school as being symptoms of the wider Middle Ages.
Spinning Stories
At this level of saturation, I can’t help but wonder if trick-taking games aren’t a little bit like pursuing a graduate degree — to prove your bona fides, you’ve got to make an original contribution to the field. It’s a good thing, then, that the genre sources from an inexhaustible wellspring of creativity. I’ve played well over twenty new trick-takers over the past few months, all of them visibly kin, and it’s a sublime joy to sit down for a session, the basics already sketched out in your mind thanks to a hundred previous titles, and still have no idea what a treat you’re in for.
That’s certainly the case with Tall Tales, an unassuming little trick-taker that joins a long tradition of upending the status quo in exactly the right ways.
Klaus Teuber Saved My Life
By now you’ve likely heard of the passing of Klaus Teuber at 70 from a “brief and severe illness.” Even though his Google return defaults to identifying him as a “German former dental technician,” it isn’t an overstatement to say he may be the figure who’s had the single greatest impact on modern board gaming. His 1995 Spiel des Jahres game of the year win for Settlers of Catan was his fourth and final time bringing home that award.
I never had the pleasure of meeting Teuber, but his designs are written into my gaming DNA. Maybe that’s why the news of his passing has hit me so hard. I can’t recall feeling this saddened by any other celebrity death. Then again, no other creator gave me a relationship with my father or helped me survive the bleakest two years of my life.
How Space-Biff! Will Be Using A.I.
As the world’s premier board game critic, the question I receive most is “So, are your parents, like, verbally disappointed, or are they more of silent letdown people?” Number two is “Do you intend to use A.I. generated text and images so you can focus on the important stuff, such as getting your family back to work at the steel mill?”
A luddite at heart, I’ve spent my fair share of time kicking against the future. No more. Today, I’m ready to unveil the steps I’m taking to embrace artificial intelligence art.
SPACE-BIFF! 