Taming the Medicean Stars
It’s been 413 years since Galileo Galilei gazed into the heavens with his telescope, a homemade object fitted with lenses he’d ground himself and that could only achieve twenty-power magnification, and noted three points of light lingering near Jupiter. Contrary to the stars behind them, these points of light, which were soon joined by a fourth, seemed to be moving in the wrong direction, clustered in a straight line about the planet. Within three months, Galileo published The Starry Messenger. Among a few choice insults flung at the moon (“mountainous,” he called it), the treatise described how other celestial objects possessed satellites of their own. The universe was suddenly a lot bigger and scarier.
In the four centuries since, we’ve dreamed of ways to conquer Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Fortunately, Adrian Hesling’s Galileo Project is all about taking the Galilean satellites down a peg. About time.
Necrarium
Sometimes when playing a board game, I simply have no idea what’s happening. Not necessarily because the game is complicated — although sure, that happens too — but because the game doesn’t bother to string together its bones with connective tissue.
Take Vivarium by Frédéric Vuagnat, for example. Vivarium is about exploring a hitherto undiscovered continent brimming with amazing creatures, uncategorized plants and minerals, and zero complications from colonialism. In exploring this new land, explorers select their discoveries from a grid by matching dominoes. Why dominoes? I couldn’t tell you. Presumably the publisher had a few extra pallets of dominoes hanging around at the warehouse.
Stranger than Documentary
Wordle. If you haven’t played it, you’ve definitely been irritated by its scoring rubrics cluttering up your social media pages. Josh Wardle sold his original game to the New York Times for about a billion dollars, but not before it spawned even more imitators. There was even a board game adaptation. It was garbage.
Peter C. Hayward’s version is not garbage. When last we saw Hayward, he was helping us kill our alternate selves via That Time You Killed Me. Now he’s back with Fiction, a version of Wordle that captures the spirit of the original. Rather than slavishly reproducing the thing, he’s transformed it into a game of panicked guesswork, dueling wordsmiths, and some well-placed lies.
Something Familiar This Way Comes
Madrid-based publisher Salt & Pepper Games has been on a roll lately. I hesitate to say that the secret sauce behind both Resist! and The Hunt was the visual work of Albert Monteys, not least because both would have been impressive even had they been illustrated by crayon. Honestly, though, it’s the art that catches the eye. There’s a humanity to Monteys’ work that breathes life into his subjects, whether they be dueling captains or ragged insurgents.
Or a coven of witches in Salem-adjacent New England warding off evil while placating the local judges. Designed by David Thompson, Trevor Benjamin, and Roger Tankersley, Witchcraft! is the follow-up to Resist! In many ways, it’s a familiar outing. In others, it’s an improvement.
Not the Archean Supercontinent Vaalbara
Did you know there was a supercontinent named Vaalbara? It’s true. There’s also a board game named Vaalbara. Presumably the board game Vaalbara, designed by Olivier Cipière, is not about the supercontinent Vaalbara, since it existed something like three billion years ago. The supercontinent. Not the board game. That exists right now.
Growing Up Free and Wild
Back when cities regularly burned down, Seattle burned down too. That’s the starting point for Rebuilding Seattle, an optimistic title by Quinn Brander that does exactly what it says on the tin. Like so many modern games chasing mass appeal, it plays like a pastiche of a best hits album: there are polyominoes and a wide-open card drafting market, limited currencies and special powers. On their own, these elements are baggy and ill-defined. In tying them together, however, Brander manages to elevate Rebuilding Seattle to more than the sum of its parts.
This Trick-Taking Life: The Suits
“I never understood the appeal of trick-taking. Isn’t it just, we all put a card down and someone gets all the cards?”
Thus spake someone on social media this past week. I’m keeping their identity anonymous. Not so much because it’s a wrong opinion. Because it’s an opinion I shared not all that long ago. Growing up in a family where playing cards were an endowment from the devil, there wasn’t much room for anything more complicated than UNO. When I married into a trick-taking family, the appeal was lost on me. The processes seemed random. Yet the same people won no matter how poor their hand. Maybe, just maybe, there was something more to these games than first met the eye.
This series is written for my past self. One layer at a time, I want to talk about what makes trick-taking special. Today, we’re starting with the barest of basics: the suits.
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.
SPACE-BIFF! 