Blog Archives
Mad Libs from the Stars
One of my favorite subgenres of speculative fiction is the first contact story. Whether it’s the (hideously misguided) Prime Directive of Star Trek, the mimicked conversations in Blindsight, or the failed Christian witness of The Sparrow, the notion of alien minds coming into sharp collision has always fired my imagination.
It’s safe to say, then, that A Message from the Stars sounds like exactly the sort of board game I would love. Designed by Clarence Simpson, this one is all about an alien ship, human scientists, and the half-understood snippets passed between them.
Strip Poker
Peter Hayward is on a roll. This year alone he’s released Converge and Things in Rings, and now he’s enabling my lifelong dream of cheating at cards in Las Vegas (and getting away with it, obv). Vegas Strip offers all the glitz and false glamour of its titular location, plus the satisfaction of thieving from the biggest and most legalized thieves of them all. It’s a real hoot.
Red Fish, Blue Fish, Fish What’s Ticklish
Comedy is hard, and that goes double in a medium with no clear speaker and a tendency toward the pedantic. Who’s on first? That guy. The guy who just batted a single. Obviously.
Fortunately, Things in Rings has what we call pedigree. Peter Hayward is a funny fellow, especially when he’s designing games like That Time You Killed Me or Fiction. Even this year’s Converge hits the right beats gameplay-wise to nearly qualify.
Anthropic Rock Collector
Sea glass is the second coolest anthropic rock, ranked right behind fordite and waaaay above concrete. River Valley Glassworks, Adam Hill, Ben Pinchback, and Matt Riddle’s hot game of the moment, is about cute river creatures collecting fragments of discarded glass that have been tumbled smooth by the river. As befits the man-made artifacts you’re collecting, it’s wonderful to look at and feels incredible to manipulate. It’s also a little too superficial for my tastes.
Snack Packs
AAAHHH! Too many games! I didn’t ask for this. Literally, I did not ask for this. I requested A Message from the Stars, and Allplay sent me these four tiny boxes. That’s one way to manage your warehouse overfill.
Fortunately, I wouldn’t call them half-bad. One or two might even be quite good. But since they’re all tiny, it seemed appropriate to write about them all at once. I’ll tackle them in alphabetical order so as to avoid the appearance of favoritism.
Baconator
Where last year jump-started my appreciation for trick-taking games, perhaps 2024 is the year I’ll bumble into an adjacent genre: the shedding game. I’ve played a handful over the past few weeks, dominated by designer Sean Ross. My launching point for this introduction has been Bacon, one of his more recent shedders.
MORE RHUBARB
All I play anymore is trick-taking games.
Pies, a remake of Matthias Cramer’s 2015 Plums, does not happen to be a trick-taker. Oh, I’m aware there’s some debate over the matter. Couldn’t this be considered a trick-taking game with but one suit and a slew of ranks? I guess so. That would transmogrify a whole lot of games into trick-takers, but sure. And a hot dog is a sandwich.
Semantic athletics aside, my concern has less to do with trick-taking essentialism and more with this pastry’s sogginess. Cramer has produced some excellent games over the years, from hefty fare like Weimar to more accessible titles like Watergate and The Hunt. Compared to those, Pies doesn’t rate.
Roll-and-Aright
The roll-and-write craze kinda fizzled, huh? Apart from one or two exceptions, the genre never developed much past the bijou phase. Maybe it’s for the best. Even though it hasn’t been all that long since we were playing dozens of the things, Nao Shimamura’s Mind Space carries itself with the air of a throwback. It’s crisp and elegant and even, dare I say it, thematic.
Larger than Life with Just a Hint of Lace
Everything I know about fashion came from either Zoolander or my friend Geoff, so it’s a safe bet to say I don’t know the first thing about fashion. Yasuke Sato’s Couture portrays fashion models as globe-trotting influencers, assembling a portfolio of dresses, poses, and glam squads. As auction games go, it shows glimmers of brilliance behind its workmanlike façade.
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.
SPACE-BIFF! 