Blog Archives
Yer All Sheeps
For my money — or, all right, for my attention — Blaž Gracar is one of the finest puzzle-makers of this generation. Between All Is Bomb and LOK, I’ve spent countless hours fiddling my way through some conundrum or another, thinking the madman must have left a typo on the page, only to let out an exasperated sigh as, of course, the solution was there all along. Even his lesser efforts, Abdec and Workworkwork, have proved worthwhile.
Herd is his latest project, and its adorable stacking domes bridge the gap between puzzle book and board game. In some ways it’s his most “straightforward” offering. Of course, that still means it’s twisted and full of secrets.
DoS That LLM Till It’s 404
There’s history to Deckers. Pedigree. Richard Wilkins — better known by the epithet Ricky Royal, the name under which he’s created a bunch of incredible solitaire modes for games that wouldn’t otherwise suit solo play in the slightest — designed a ditty called Renegade back in 2018. Before the plague years. Before the world’s billionaires started cramming robo-slop down our throats and calling it nourishment.
Before, in other words, cyberpunk felt quite so urgent. Back when the genre was a throwback to ’80s techno acceleration and not ’20s techno throttling.
Deckers is Renegade. That’s the short version. The slightly longer version is that Deckers is Renegade, but decoupled from the vulture who acquired it along with the rest of the Victory Point Games catalog, and with the expansion packs folded in, some additional clarity and development, and a new coat of paint. It won’t persuade anybody who didn’t get along with the original, but it’s just as fresh as ever. And as infuriating.
Scratch & Sniffle
Now here’s something I haven’t seen before: a collection of six scratch-off board games designed by puzzle master Zach Barth. That’s a sentence that keeps getting more intriguing as it goes, especially after The Lucky Seven proved one of the most reliable single-deck solitaire games on my shelf.
What I didn’t expect was the smell. I don’t know how scratch-offs are made, especially scratch-offs as nice as the ones in this pack. These are hardly the state fair scratch-offs from my childhood. They still produce a royal mess — I’ve had to play with a little rubbish can next to the table — but that metallic scent has proven strangely addictive. Is this why people gamble away their life savings? Maybe I’d be tempted to do so as well, were the minigames in the state lottery this compelling. Let’s run through all six.
Queen of Lies
I’ve said before that Salt & Pepper Games is doing some of the finest work in the industry, especially when it comes to historical titles that draw in newer and veteran players alike. Queen of Spies pairs Liz Davidson with David Thompson, who produce a handsome, if uneven, solitaire perspective on resistance and spycraft in the Great War.
Syphilitics
Moving to Paris to embrace my inner bum/artist has always been one of my life goals, so Jasper de Lange’s Bohemians was a safe bet. Set in the drowsy days and smoky nights of Paris-That-Was, this is a love letter to the wanderers who set out to thumb their noses at society and create timeless works of art, and sometimes even did, but spent more of their time sleeping in, strolling the streets, and spreading syphilis.
Did I mention that Bohemians is also a deeply funny game? Top comedy, this.
Neither Board Nor Counters
I remember the first time I felt doubt. It was the night my little sister was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes. Mom figured it out at the grocery store — we’d been through this once before — and was sharp with us, but she let me buy a treat and for a while on the ride home everything seemed okay.
Then she said it. “I think Em has diabetes.”
There’s that pang even now. That lurch. Em was three. At home, we already had the equipment from my other sister’s diagnosis. The glucose monitor. The ketone strips. Mom was crying. Em was crying. I couldn’t tell which was worse, my mother’s grief or my baby sister’s wails. I went upstairs to my room and shut the door and prayed so hard it felt like my stomach would roll into a ball and fall out. Please, I said. Please, Heavenly Father, give it to me instead.
Nothing. No miracle. I didn’t really expect one, even as a ten-year-old. But no comfort, either. I cried, then went into the bathroom and nearly vomited, then crawled into bed and cried some more. When I looked out from the cocoon I’d built around myself, there was the treat from the store. Sugar. Something my sister would have to avoid from now on. I threw it in the trash and fled back to my blankets and that’s where the memory stops.
The Great Commission, designed by Simon Amadeus Pillardo and Paul Snuggs, is sometimes about doubt. Not often, but sometimes, and not always in a way the game seems to understand. Set during the early years of the Christian Church — strictly speaking before there were Christians or churches as we conceptualize them today — it is preoccupied with the evangelizing mission that Jesus commanded after his resurrection. Or rather, a particular interpretation and portrayal of that mission.
The New Dog-Ears
Storyfold: Wildwoods isn’t the game I was expecting. It isn’t the story I was expecting. If we want to be a little more crass, it isn’t the product I was expecting, either.
Fetch-Building
To quote the Holy Bible, John D. Clair keeps trying to make fetch happen. That isn’t an insult. If anything, I admire the guy’s persistence. Unstoppable is his latest attempt to master the “deck-building but also you’re building the cards by sticking other cards into increasingly overstuffed sleeves” system that he kinda-sorted invented (provided we ignore Keith Baker’s Gloom), following up on Mystic Vale, Edge of Darkness, and Dead Reckoning. This one is a solitaire outing, and it’s the most expansive expression of Clair’s approach to card-layering yet.
Which isn’t to say it doesn’t have some pretty big hangups, unfortunately.
All Workworkwork and No Play
By the time my brain was being compressed like fine pasta out through my ears, my self-confidence had taken more than one impact and, although this may reveal too much about the ailing functions of my inner ear, I had suffered a few vertiginous moments that bordered on nausea.
This is Workworkwork, the latest effort from Blaž Gracar, the madman who gave us LOK and Abdec and All Is Bomb. Like the first pair of those titles, Workworkwork is a puzzle book, comb-bound and packaged with a transparent plastic sheet for doodling on with a dry-erase marker. Unlike your average sudoku or crossword, this is a necessity. There is no solving these puzzles on your first go. Instead, it takes practice, experimentation, and failure. So much failure.
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! 