Streets Behind
When I contemplate Haakon Gaarder’s Villagers, its defining characteristic is its “light touch,” a careful avoidance of going too far with its complexity or authorial intrusion. Instead, it employs sparing strokes: a few abilities, sparse rules, a shared social space that made immediate sense to everyone involved.
Streets is a follow-up to Villagers in more ways than one. And it could have used a heavier touch.
“Republic, Socialism, Humanism”
The story of the Spanish Maquis is a long one, laden with setbacks, betrayals, and defeats. First formed as a guerrilla force in the waning years of the Spanish Second Republic’s fight against the junta that propelled Francisco Franco to power, the resistance was soon displaced to France. There they spent time in Vichy concentration camps, fought alongside the French Resistance, and eventually returned to their homeland only to be abandoned yet again when the Allies declined to finish the job of rooting out fascism. The Maquis continued to wage a losing war for years to come, buoyed only, as cartoonist and onetime soldier Josep Bartolí i Guiu put it, the possibility of “Republic, socialism, humanism.”
Resist!, co-designed by David Thompson, Trevor Benjamin, and Roger Tankersley, is a solitaire game about the brave men and women who strove to retake Spain. I’m tempted to declare it the best portrayal of a resistance movement ever put to cardboard. Here’s why.
It Takes a Village(rs)
One of the joys of board games is watching how the same system can be used in radically different ways, and in the process produce entirely different moods. Take Haakon Gaarder’s Villagers as a prime example. I’ve played more drafting and tableau-building games than I’d dare guess at, but none of them felt quite like this.
Foucault in the Woodland, Part Four: DTR or DTF?
May I never repeat the awkwardness of my first DTR.
DTR. “Define the Relationship.” My friends, most of whom were older and more experienced, spoke the acronym in ominous tones. It was an essential step of middle school dating, as serious as your first hand-holding or first footsies or first furtive kiss. To a ninth-grader, it was the equivalent of proposing marriage without knowing the answer beforehand. We’d gone on a few dates. School dances. Group hikes. Now we crouched together in a treehouse (oh no), as good a time as any to pop the question: “Are you my girlfriend?”
Over the past three parts of this series, we’ve examined how Root reflects a Foucauldian understanding of power and politics. Today, we’re looking at how that extends into the realm of sex and relationships — and how governments transform sexuality into an extended DTR that will not end no matter how vigorously we try to flee the treehouse.
That Time I Spoiled That Time You Killed Me
Time travel is like paprika. There’s a huge difference between a little and a lot. And I say that as a time travel apologist.
Peter C. Hayward’s That Time You Killed Me is all about time travel. If we stretch our metaphor to the breaking point, it’s an entire mountain range of paprika. Fortunately, Hayward has the good sense to dole it out in pinches and scoops rather than shovelfuls. And there’s really no way to talk about it without some minor spoilers.
Book-Space! #22. Mind MGMT
Everybody knows psychics aren’t real. What Mind MGMT presupposes is… what if they are? Join Brock, Summer, and Dan as we discuss Matt Kindt‘s graphic novel, including professional conspiracy theories, non-professional relationship advice, and our mutual bewilderment when people say they don’t like the art. Listen here or download here.
Next time, we’ll be reading about dragons via Uprooted by Naomi Novik.
Touch the Cloth!
As any would-be casino thief can tell you, there are ideas and then there are executions. Hit the Silk!, from the same publisher that brought us Stop the Train!, opens with a sterling idea. Desperate to pay off a major debt, you and a few friends have decided to rob a MONEY PLANE. The heist goes about as well as any MONEY PLANE heist can go, which is to say the engines have been shot out, the pilot is dead, there are bags of money bouncing through the air like startled chickens, and there aren’t enough parachutes for everybody.
And then there’s the execution.
Of Aglets and Eyelets
I’ve always been jealous of people who could transform knotted shoelaces into elaborate cat’s cradles. Or, frankly, people who could tie their shoes without them coming undone five minutes later. There’s a reason I’m a socks-in-Birkenstocks kind of guy.
Amabel Holland’s Eyelet is a game for those folks. For me, it’s closer to therapy.
Le Temps des Cerises
Mark Herman’s Fort Sumter was a lean, rangy filament of a game. After initially falling for its charms, I soon found its leanness and ranginess a little too emaciated, with not nearly enough muscle and fat beneath the skin. One of the reasons I play historical games, after all, is to see how the history is modeled, not to merely see it sketched out as the titles of locations and cards.
Enter Red Flag Over Paris. Designed by Frédéric Serval, it uses the system and leanness of Fort Sumter while still piling on, well, everything else. Its topic is the Paris Commune, the brief but fierce revolutionary outpouring that would prove so influential on Karl Marx — and become a stain on the early days of the French Third Republic.
Love Is a Ghost Train Howling
There is something initially morbid about London Necropolis Railway, and not only because Daniel Newman’s latest offering is set during a cholera epidemic and will release in the third calendar year of our own century’s mismanaged public health crisis. The historical Necropolis Railway was the solution to the bodies piling up in the streets, a line only twenty miles long but devoted entirely to the business of death and mourning. In Newman’s care, the whole thing takes on the pallor of a funeral celebrant both jaunty and jaundiced. More than that, it’s imbued with an uncommon dignity.
SPACE-BIFF! 