Simps All the Way Down
Gastby. You know Gatsby, right? Throws fancy parties. In love with a woman who couldn’t care less whether he lives or dies. Always staring at that green light.
When it was announced that Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc were doing a board game version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the response was mostly derisive. I get it. We’re tired of this multiverse crap. And who are these new characters anyway? Everybody knows you can’t go disrupting fans’ headcanon by adding characters to a century-old book.
In this case, though, it works. What’s a better homage to Jay Gatsby than inventing two new characters who were presumably hovering in the wings the entire time, only he never noticed? Unsuccessfully simping for somebody’s attention is as Gatsby as it gets.
Too bad about the rest of the game, though.
Kinfire Homeowners Association
Kinfire Council is full of jolting moments where I can’t tell whether Kevin Wilson wants to Say Something or I’m just suffering from a momentary case of pareidolia. As councilmembers of the once-great city of Din’Lux, we’re treading water while the world goes to hell. Magical climate change has led to sweeping food insecurity. Cultists are tearing down the very safeguards that have seen them prosper. Our politicians are feckless cowards who will swap sides the instant it seems expedient. Oh no. Is this the United States of Din’Lux?
More like the Homeowners Association of Din’Lux. After the events of Kinfire Chronicles and Kinfire Delve (all three of them), we’re patching the city back together one brick at a time. Most of our activities are suitable to such a task: gathering taxes, delivering food, deploying seekers with magical lanterns to kill the monsters in the sewers. Others make less sense. Can we censure the councilwoman who regularly visits the pub to court the evil cult’s loyalties? No? Hmph. Semi-cooperative once again proves the shakiest mode for any designer, even one as experienced as Wilson.
Calimala Olives
Sometimes I assume that everybody around me knows the same things that I know. To wit: when I began teaching the second edition of Calimala — the first edition of which was published in 2017 and launched Fabio Lopiano’s career as a game designer — everyone at the table started talking about Kalamata olives, and not, you know, the Arte di Calimala, the cloth finishers guild that was the economic backbone of Florence for two centuries.
Why would I assume that everybody knows about the Arte di Calimala? Don’t ask me. I’m in the assumptions business, not the understanding my assumptions business. At any rate, Calimala isn’t a game that requires much historical knowledge. Sure, Lopiano includes a number of nods to Florentine business practices and even city governance, but it’s too razor-toothed to matter. This one is sharp. But it may, perhaps, contain the seeds that would lead Lopiano to clutter his later designs with interlocking systems.
Distant Rumble Train
Despite all outward appearances, Lightning Train doesn’t include any magic. Which is something of a double statement. I went in expecting locomotives propelled by atmospheric violence; instead, we got a rare Paul Dennen miss. It isn’t that I wanted another Empyreal: Spells & Steam, exactly. Just something with spark. Even a little zap from the light switch after walking on the rug with my socks would have done.
PHANTO
So you’ve died. Only, rather than disappearing into the inky black, the way any sensible modern atheist would anticipate, you have been relegated to an eternity as a ghost trying to communicate nouns to lexically obsessed mediums. Dang it. Your mother was right all along.
That’s kinda-sorta the premise behind Phantom Ink, the word game by Mary Flanagan and Max Seidman. Phantom Ink has been kicking around for a few years now, one of those sturdy team games one can count on to make an appearance at gatherings once everyone is too tired for anything more taxing. It’s an unassuming plaything, redolent of any number of parlor games. That’s its greatest strength. Despite its simplicity, even despite its sleepy-eyed coziness, it’s the sort of game you can rely on.
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I’ve never hated a game the exact same way I hate 21X, which I suppose is a compliment of sorts. Growing up, math class was for three things. (1) Hanging raggedly onto a good grade so I could get into medical school. (2) Inventing those math jokes where you hold the calculator upside-down to see the answer. (3) Programming text adventure games into my TI-83+.
Everything but the math.
Chalice of Bananas
I promise this won’t become a food review. Although if you could see the embarrassingly touristy pictures of what I spent the past weekend eating in New Orleans, you would understand the impulse. The story of how I came to be trapped in a not-as-haunted-as-advertised hotel with sixteen game designers and wargaming wonks isn’t as exciting as it could have been. Short version: I had a flight voucher two months shy of expiration.
But the games — oh, the games.
There’s no need to cover all of them. You already know how to play Two Truths And A Lie — the key is in the title — and my brisk review of Matt Calkins’ Charioteer is that it’s too arithmetical for its own good. Instead, here are the weekend’s two standouts.
Space-Cast! #49. A Vantage on Vantage
By now you’ve likely heard of Vantage, the ambition first-person exploration game about surviving and thriving on an alien planet. For today’s Space-Cast!, we’re joined by Jamey Stegmaier to discuss the eight-year inception, development, and eventual appearance of this wonderful and strange artifact. Along the way, we discuss Vantage’s inspirations, how design constraints can engender greater freedom, and games within games.
Listen over here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Brass: New Delhi
Is there an aphorism about how satire is often indistinguishable from reality? If not, there ought to be. Tycoon: India 1981 takes notes from Martin Wallace’s Brass, not only in terms of its interlocking economy and rich-get-richer gameplay, but also by turning choking smog into a whole aesthetic. It’s the inverse of colorful Lakshadweep, the last title we covered by Sidhant Chand, swapping the sustainable fisheries for sky-blotting smokestacks.
In spite of that shift — in spite of a few problems, really, nearly all of them inherited from the Eurogame tradition Tycoon is imitating — I can’t help but be compelled. Can you taste the carbon? That’s the flavor of money.
How Was the Gameplay, Mrs. Lincoln?
I know it’s far removed from today, but the assassination of Abraham Lincoln makes me sad in a way that most historical events do not. Thanks to my father’s interest in the topic, the Civil War was my first real foray into both history and wargames, and the Gettysburg Address was the first speech I ever memorized. Not original for an American schoolkid, I know, but still.
There is some small upside: playing Wes Crawford and Ryan Heilman’s The Pursuit of John Wilkes Booth, I had that extra motivation to nail the bastard. Some part of me approaches the subject reluctantly. It’s a game about the early history of American policing more than anything, staffed with military detectives and Pinkerton agents and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton pulling strings to put more federal cavalry under my command. Like the Civil War that had ended only five days before the traitor’s bullet found its mark, this is America’s Old Testament period, its belly fired with vengeance and fury. I know the problems. I have my hangups. And yet there is nothing I want more than to catch the assassin before he crosses some remote frontier.
SPACE-BIFF! 