Trismegoogah
One of my main complaints with modern Eurogames is that they too often mistake complication for depth. This isn’t surprising. It’s an easy mistake to make. After all, many deep games come across as complicated, with strategies and levels of mastery that may seem counterintuitive and elusive.
But complication can also prove distracting, especially when it’s wrapped within a serpentine vocabulary, iconography, or scoring conditions. In those situations, victory is often less about effectively manipulating the board state, and more about who’s superior at deciphering the game’s foreign tongue. In other words, it’s play as transliteration rather than strategy.
Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula is both an example of how to do a modern Eurogame right — and horribly, utterly wrong.
Arrakis. Dune. Desert Planet.
It’s hard to imagine what our geekish DNA would look like if Frank Herbert had never written Dune. It touches so much, and says so much, but never seems to follow any one thread to its conclusion. Maybe because it’s as varied as the thoughts rattling around Herbert’s head in the early ’60s. Poverty grasses and climate patterns. Resource monopolies and shortages. Religion as opiate; opiate as religion. Charismatic heroes unleashing murderous jihads. Carl Jung’s collective unconscious and cellular memory, spurring hosts to destruction and rebirth alike. Great houses entangled in destinies both inevitable and mutable, like plunging headfirst into a sandstorm with just enough will to select the ground where your flesh will be scoured from your bones.
And the beauty of Bill Eberle, Jack Kittredge, and Peter Olotka’s 1979 design of the board game version is that it got it right. As right as could be got, anyway.
Housing Crash: A Look at Magnate
It’s both accurate and misleading to say that James Naylor’s Magnate: The First City is a good version of Monopoly. Accurate because it’s a satirical take on unbridled capitalism that would do Lizzie Magie proud. Misleading because the two really don’t have much in common, aside from paper money, city development, plastic houses, and dice. Okay, saying that out loud makes them sound really quite similar. They’re not.
Seriously, they aren’t alike at all. You should keep reading. I promise.
Inspiration Plus Knowledge Is Wisdom
![A computer would read this as "VINDICATI[onevictorypoint]N"](https://spacebiff.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/1.-vindiheadercation.jpg?w=604&h=117 "A computer would read this as \"VINDICATI[onevictorypoint]N\"")
Sometimes — not often, but sometimes — it can feel as though I’ve seen all this hobby has to offer. The cause of such ennui is usually related to a deck-builder set in a licensed property. Event Horizon: The Card Game. Play the gravity drive card to trash your eyes cards. Yawn. Been there, winnowed that.
Every so often, however, something comes along that I haven’t heard before. Marc Neidlinger’s Vindication, for example. Its pitch starts out slow. “It’s an adventure game,” Vindication begins. Already my jaw is unhinging for the father of all yawns. Then Vindication finishes. “By way of resource conversion.”
By all rights, that shouldn’t be enough. I’ve been converting resources since my kids were in diapers, including the one that’s graduated to undies. But somehow, Vindication manages to not only make this idea work, but soar. It’s a strange world where tired plus tired equals really damn good.
Lonesome Alcibiades
Know how you can tell I’m a phony wargamer? I don’t play against myself. Sure, I’ll play solo, but that’s a different thing entirely. I’m talking about playing both sides. Working against my own interests. White knight takes black bishop. Simply can’t do it. What if I need that black bishop’s services next turn? As sure as rain makes pavement smell better, I’m picking a favorite and leading them to victory.
That is, until Mark Herman’s Peloponnesian War. First published way back in 1991 and only recently given a fresh printing, it’s possible that this is the finest play-against-yourself solo system ever crafted.
BrittleLands
When I heard somebody mention that Andrea Mezzotero and Jerry Hawthorne’s BattleLands would be reminiscent of Condottiere, I was both thrilled (because Condottiere is a classic) and a bit apprehensive (because Condottiere is a classic). After all, the first rule of looking good is to stand alongside someone more vertically challenged than you. Which is why I tell everyone that the closest parallel to my forthcoming dice game is basically Bunco.
The good news is that there was no need to be worried. BattleLands may not be an instant classic, but it’s hardly a slouch.
Talking About Games: Feedback Error
The circle has turned yet again. Here we stand, ready to talk about what we talk about when we talk about board games. Hold on… (counts on fingers.) Yes. My count was completely correct. Well done, me.
To recap what brought us to this point, we began by talking about the inexpressiveness of the usual mechanics/theme dichotomy found in board game criticism. I then proposed the five categories I use in my own thinking and writing about games. Thirdly, we talked about chess to flesh out the concept of “feedback,” the spooky glue that integrates a board game’s other elements. And today, we’re going to do the opposite, by taking a game — and, far more importantly, a good game — to talk about its failures of feedback.
The game is none other than…
Clodspire
Right up front, Cloudspire wasn’t made for me. Even with gobs of ways to play, ranging from a solo mode to cooperative scenarios, plus the regular competitive slugfest that goes all the way up to four factions, I can’t see the appeal. Maybe it’s because I have no history with the MOBA genre. Maybe it’s because I have a thing (a buried, unconscious thing) against poker chips.
Or maybe it’s because I like games that aren’t the board game equivalent of a chocolate syrup truck tipping over in slow motion. You know, a plodding mess.
Book-Space! #13: The Calculating Stars
We’re going to the moon! Maybe! Join Brock, Summer, and Dan as we discuss Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars, a futuristic take on the sexism, racism, and other -isms of the 1950s space program. Expect high stakes, bad takes, and more rocket euphemisms than you can shake your Atlas launch vehicle at. Listen here or download here.
Next month, join in as we read All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders!
The North Goes South
It’s been two years since we saw a proper Small Box Games release from John Clowdus. Unless we’re counting Kolossal’s printing of Omen: A Reign of War. Which I’m not, in case you were wondering. A professional printing may be glossy, but there’s nothing quite like the home-packaged feel of Clowdus’s limited runs, right down to its too-tight box and ribbon for prying the cards loose.
Thankfully, Clowdus hasn’t lost a step. The North is, at the absolute least, one stylish set of cards, with Aaron Nakahara’s chilly artwork raising the occasional goosebump. It also happens to be a deck-builder. Of course, Clowdus being Clowdus, that doesn’t make it like any deck-builder you’ve ever played before.
SPACE-BIFF! 