Blog Archives
Something Familiar This Way Comes
Madrid-based publisher Salt & Pepper Games has been on a roll lately. I hesitate to say that the secret sauce behind both Resist! and The Hunt was the visual work of Albert Monteys, not least because both would have been impressive even had they been illustrated by crayon. Honestly, though, it’s the art that catches the eye. There’s a humanity to Monteys’ work that breathes life into his subjects, whether they be dueling captains or ragged insurgents.
Or a coven of witches in Salem-adjacent New England warding off evil while placating the local judges. Designed by David Thompson, Trevor Benjamin, and Roger Tankersley, Witchcraft! is the follow-up to Resist! In many ways, it’s a familiar outing. In others, it’s an improvement.
If Books Could Kill
It’s hard to go even one minute in the presence of Paperback Adventures, the latest word game by Skye Larsen and Tim Fowers, without drawing comparisons to Slay the Spire — specifically, the original digital game by Anthony Giovannetti and Casey Yano, not the forthcoming cardboard adaptation by Gary Dworetsky. At this point, a Mormon genealogy project would struggle to detangle its heritage. Slay the Spire spawned entire crowds of imitators, but it was also a successor in its own right, drawing on both roguelikes and the tabletop deck-building craze. It’s been almost a decade since Fowers’ original Paperback, itself a deck-builder. Now it’s back after some liberal cribbing from Slay the Spire. Trace that lineage and you get a time paradox.
Here’s the crazy part: Paperback Adventures is possibly the finest title Fowers has produced. It might even be superior to Slay the Spire. Hear me out.
Strangling on Bootstraps
There’s this adage our mission mom used to tell us. This was prior to 2019, when a mission president’s wife finally became an official calling rather than one inequality among countless others. She didn’t have an official role despite fulfilling numberless functions, among them an ambiguous blend of cheerleader, guilt tripper, and motivational speaker. Every couple of months, dozens of nineteen-year-old Mormon missionaries would crowd into a tiny room to be scolded and encouraged, sometimes in the same breath.
“According to scientists,” she would say, in a voice that made one suspicious she hadn’t conferred with a scientist on the matter, “the bumblebee is so heavy and un-aerodynamic that it’s incapable of flight. But nobody ever told the bumblebee that. Whether you’re a bumblebee, a person out of a job, or a missionary hoping to bring others to Christ, all you need to do is pull yourself up by the bootstraps.”
Steve Dee’s The Rent is an autobiographical microgame about pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. It has a somewhat dimmer outlook on letting the ignorance of bumblebees stand in for economic theory.
Scry Guys
I know an uncanny amount about divination. Not because I believe in the stuff, mind you. It comes up a lot in my work, both as a practice in ancient religion and as a prominent branch in the history of board games.
So when Chris Chan’s Portents first hit my table, I was fascinated to learn which type of cleromancy it would use. Drawing Roman sortes? The knucklebones and dice oracles of astragalomancy? The fateful archery competitions of belomancy? We haven’t even touched upon the really cool ones. Maybe Portents would let us manipulate shards of coconut, or pour molten metal into water and examine the resultant shape’s shadow, or undertake bean magic. Yes, bean magic. Favomancy. It’s shocking how many forms of geomancy used beans. The possibilities for gamification are endless.
Turns out, Portents is about haruspicy via bird parts. And while any self-respecting haruspex would immediately note that it uses the wrong organs, never fear: this one is about fraudsters trying to out-divine one another.
All Is Bomb Is Bomb
Here’s a scenario for you. The Princess slumbers in her bed. Soon she will awake. What will she want for breakfast? Since she’s a bit of a, well, princess, she will neither wait to be served nor accept anything other than what her rumbly tummy desires most. You summon the breakfast prophets to foretell the proper meal. Except they’ve gone missing. A dozen other matters also consume your attention.
Also, everything is a bomb.
Triggered Effects
I suffer from panic attacks and poor health.
How’s that for an opener? I’m normally reserved about sharing personal details like that. But there it is: I’ve suffered from health complications my entire life, a handful of which have necessitated serious corrective surgeries and lengthy periods of recovery. Heading Forward, the solitaire game designed by John du Bois, makes sharing those details easier, or at least less frightening. Maybe those are the same thing. Empathy isn’t the first emotion I would expect to feel when playing a board game, but this demonstrates exactly how to express something deeply personal via a handful of cards and some punchboard spoons.
“Republic, Socialism, Humanism”
The story of the Spanish Maquis is a long one, laden with setbacks, betrayals, and defeats. First formed as a guerrilla force in the waning years of the Spanish Second Republic’s fight against the junta that propelled Francisco Franco to power, the resistance was soon displaced to France. There they spent time in Vichy concentration camps, fought alongside the French Resistance, and eventually returned to their homeland only to be abandoned yet again when the Allies declined to finish the job of rooting out fascism. The Maquis continued to wage a losing war for years to come, buoyed only, as cartoonist and onetime soldier Josep Bartolí i Guiu put it, the possibility of “Republic, socialism, humanism.”
Resist!, co-designed by David Thompson, Trevor Benjamin, and Roger Tankersley, is a solitaire game about the brave men and women who strove to retake Spain. I’m tempted to declare it the best portrayal of a resistance movement ever put to cardboard. Here’s why.
States of Ziege
For a while there, Darin Leviloff’s States of Siege system was a big deal for solitaire gaming. The concept was brilliantly simple: what if, rather than sprawling hex maps and proviso-laden movement priorities, conflicts were portrayed as tug-of-wars along lanes? The inaugural title in the series, Israeli Independence, was more a proof of concept than a full-fledged game, but it quickly drew imitators and iterators. Before long, the series stepped into many of history’s overlooked corners. Zulus on the Ramparts. Ottoman Sunset. Hapsburg Eclipse. Mound Builders.
The best entry in the series, however, gamified the under-publicized zombie invasion of Farmingdale. I’m speaking, of course, about Hermann Luttmann’s Dawn of the Zeds.
Alone Among Nobles
Nobles is a snack. Like John Clowdus’s Pocket Galapagos, it’s a bite-sized solo game preoccupied with the movement of cards from one place to another. Unlike that game, Nobles also taps into the joy of putting things into their proper arrangement, even when — perhaps especially when — it doesn’t feel much like a game at all.
Cartocide
Like everyone else, I’ve been playing a buttload of Regicide, designers Paul Abrahams, Luke Badger, and Andy Richdale’s game of royal assassination that can be played with any old deck of 52 playing cards.
Also like everybody else, I’m slightly smitten.
Slightly.
SPACE-BIFF! 