Frank in the Woodland
In Frank West and James Tomblin’s latest title, fully clothed animals travel between forest clearings and initiate battle in order to restore their chosen power structures to the woodland. Hmm… where have I heard this before? Ah, I remember — it’s Defenders of the Wild!
I kid, I kid. To be fair, Emberleaf bears only the most superficial of resemblances to Root. I wouldn’t dare invoke Foucault to describe its depiction of biopower or sexuality, for one thing. On a somewhat less onanistic spectrum, Emberleaf is an optimizer’s board game, jam-packed with sequences of actions that spool into other actions, resources that must be spent in precisely the right order, and conflicting objectives that each award their own variable numbers of victory points. It’s an intriguing, persnickety, and sometimes gummy title, either a deeply flawed masterpiece or a mess with pretensions. I’m still trying to determine which.
Better to Live Under Robber Barons
Barony feels old. When we first played the new Royal Edition, my mind automatically sorted it into the early 2000s. It fits the period. The feudal setting. The perfect information. The simple rules. Even the emphasis on direct conflict. This is what Eurogames once resembled, before the endless recombination of systems into recursive engines and checklists of scoring criteria. Before everybody decided to chase that Vital Lacerda money.
But Barony is not old. Not that old. Marc André designed this thing a mere decade ago, in 2015. That’s a year after he gave us Splendor! The same year Trickerion: Legends of Illusion hit the scene!
As a not-quite-throwback, Barony is an interesting case study. In some ways it’s refreshing; in others, it’s mired in sensibilities the hobby has largely left behind.
Roamin’ Out of Memory
I don’t know how I missed Roam the first time around. Every so often Ryan Laukat releases something like this, a twenty-minute title that stands in contrast to his sprawling adventures like Sleeping Gods, its sequel Distant Skies, or even time-conscious fare like Creature Caravan. Minor artifacts, in other words, but artifacts that shoulder more weight than their diminutive frames would otherwise indicate. Like ants. Or dung beetles.
Roam is no exception to the dung beetle rule. I’m pretty sure I played it way back when, only to slip from my memory like so much sand. It isn’t that the game isn’t pleasant, or even quietly clever. It simply lacks the pizzazz that might have otherwise marked it as a staple filler.
Trick-Taking Tranche
All I play anymore is trick-taking games. Or at least that’s the case when I receive another tranche of the things from New Mill Industries. There are four this time around — five, actually, although I wasn’t sent the last one for some reason — and I’ve gotta say, there’s not a stinker in the bunch. Let’s figure out which is the best of the pack.
Summer Ludens
Yesterday, my car thermometer clocked 104°. Granted, our car is black, which means it regularly measures temperatures about ten degrees too warm, but still, that’s too damn hot.
Like everybody else descended from pioneers who decided to settle in the desert, we’re always on the lookout for ways to beat the heat. Our answer, like our answer to every other apprehension, has been board games. What follows are the ten titles that are helping my family cope with the Great American Bake-Off.
Life in First-Person
There’s an exercise I sometimes use in class to help my students break out of their modern mindset. Everyone gets a sheet of paper and swears to avoid looking at anyone else’s work until we’re finished. Then I ask them to draw a picture of where they are in the world. To place themselves within their surroundings.
For most modern people, the reflex is to draw a map. The layout of the lecture hall, the nearby buildings, maybe our city or state or country. This isn’t universal; those with aphantasia might create rudimentary images, while my more artistically minded students sketch the nearby mountains. (Or me, sitting at the front of the class, looking more pouchy and tired than I’d prefer.) But in most cases, maybe seventy to eighty percent of the time, they draw a map. Bird’s eye view, top-down, like something you’d see on a navigation tool.
And then we talk. Because for most humans in most places and most times, a map was an impossibility. Perhaps surveyors and astronomers had created one, a painstaking process that still resulted in an unreliable thing with uncharted gaps and “here be dragons” scrawled in the margins. More often, the best one could hope for was a series of landmarks. A settlement here, a strange rock over there, a mountain or lake on the horizon. Your world was a series of visual cues, a vast maw that threatened to swallow you up the instant you strayed from its stepping stones.
This modern tendency to locate ourselves on a map creeps into our thinking about… well, everything. The identity of our kinsmen, neighbors, and rivals. The spaces that can be considered safe or dangerous. The distance between points. Our place within a country, continent, time zone, planet, ecology. Who we are.
Way more important than any of that identity junk, of course, is that maps also make their way into board games. Whether we’re talking about hex grids or squiggly provinces, nearly every board game about kingdom-building or exploration stands its players on firm footing, located safely within the confines of a perfectly scaled representation of reality.
Except for Vantage.
Christ and His Saints Were Asleep
Hot take: any time period dubbed “THE ANARCHY” was probably a bummer. The specific Anarchy referred to in The Anarchy, the latest flip-and-write game by Bobby Hill, was a fifteen-year war of succession fought between the Empress Matilda and King Stephen across Normandy and southern England during the twelfth century. Which, in case you missed the memo on the merits of every century, was itself something of a bummer.
Here’s the good news. While The Anarchy might have been a big ole stink-pickle for everyone involved, Hill’s version offers the exact opposite. Building on the systems he established in Hadrian’s Wall, this is a complex but thrilling portrayal of Medieval warfare, tower defense, and brewing, with a heady dose of modern combo-building for good effect.
Space-Cast! #47. Bun Bangers
Hot Streak! Off-brand mascots and gambling degeneracy have never been more in fashion. For today’s Space-Cast!, we’re joined by Jon Perry to discuss his mascot-racing board game, its connections to the digital collection UFO 50, and the particulars of adaptation and artistic medium. Now that’s a mouthful!
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Skyblivionrockmarsh
Way back in 2011, Todd Howard let it slip that Skyrim would have “unlimited dragons,” dragging surprised reactions from the internet. Don’t believe me? Here’s pre-People Make Games, pre-Shut Up & Sit Down Quintin Smith’s press release on the matter. It’s pleasingly sarcastic. Because, you know, “unlimited nouns” has always been the Elder Scrolls’ whole thing. This is the fantasy series that made volume its defining metric. Depth? Nah. Enjoyment? Get outta here. Kelvins? Only if you’re talking about Lord Kelvyn, the Redguard Knight of the True Horn. No, really. Like I said, unlimited nouns.
Which brings us to The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era, Chip Theory’s adaptation of not only Skyrim, not only Oblivion, not only Morrowind, not only those other ones nobody talks about anymore, but the whole dang universe with its boundless recreations, provided your recreational interests are limited to hoofing across fantasy landscapes and murdering fantasy gobbos. It comes with a bazillion components, weighs so much that it should have a team lift warning on the box, and costs as much as twenty-five burritos from my favorite local burrito place.
You heard that right. Despite my policy on the matter, this thing is so pricey that I think it warrants some discussion. First, though, I want to walk you through the shape of an average TES:BOTSE campaign.
She’s a Grisly Monster, I Assure You
You know the story. Buncha monsters storm Mount Olympus. The pantheon is in a scramble. Who’s this coming to save the day — Hercules? More like Hunk-ules.
Reiner Knizia’s Ichor isn’t Disney’s Hercules, and thank the gods for that, although Tyler Miles Lockett’s illustrations do somewhat resemble the Gerald Scarfe amphorae look of the animated feature. When I previewed the thing a year back, I liked it somewhat less than its sibling title Iliad. Now that they’re both finished and on my table, though, I’ve been giving Ichor a second look. And while it’s still the zanier and less measured of the pair, there’s so much to appreciate about Knizia’s portrayal of this divine brawl that I can’t help but be charmed.
SPACE-BIFF! 