Blog Archives
Femkort in the Woodland
A solitaire trick-taking game sounds like a contradiction in terms. Then again, I used to say the same about two-player trick-taking, until a few superb examples showed me the error of my thinking.
It’s still too early to tell whether For Northwood!, the solitaire trick-taker by Wil Su, is an outlier or an originator, but it makes for a dang good time either way. More than that, it functions as a primer for a handful of trick-taking concepts that can prove intimidating to tackle in a multiplayer environment.
Eila and Something Disconcerting
I’ve never taken a firm stance on age ratings, in part because I’m not sure what they’re trying to impart. Most of the time, I take them as an evaluation of a game’s complexity, and a wishy-washy evaluation at that. A rating of 12+ won’t prove much of a deterrent to my nine-year-old because she plays more board games than her peers. That’s only the first limitation. I also can’t be certain that the designer invested much thought into it. Before I had children of my own, I couldn’t have told you the cognitive difference between ten and twelve years. And it isn’t as though the other numbers on a box bear much resemblance to reality. How often has a game’s estimated playtime proven to be hopelessly optimistic? These days, the only digits that really catch my eye are player counts.
I didn’t play Eila and Something Shiny with my daughter. Jeffrey CCH’s narrative experiment is a solitaire game, and for once I took that suggestion to heart rather than offering to loop in my kid. What a relief. Given the game’s friendly exterior, she might have accepted.
Antiquity in Your Pocket
So we were talking about wallet games. Yesterday we took a look at River Wild, a microgame by Steven Aramini that didn’t quite live up to the (compact) heights of his previous efforts Circle the Wagons and Sprawlopolis. As I wrote way back then, it’s exciting to see how a genre can be pressed into its purest form by the strict limitation of having to fit onto eighteen cards. The only hitch is that the resulting microgame ought to be, you know, good.
Ancient Realm, also by Aramini, is good. Maybe better than good. Maybe even better than Sprawlopolis.
River Riled
When it comes to his work with Button Shy, purveyor of 18-card wallet games, Steven Aramini has a mode. Between Circle the Wagons and Sprawlopolis — not to mention spinoffs Agropolis and Naturopolis — his output has been a fixture of microgames for years. His latest diminutive title is River Wild, about selectively channeling a river through a fantasy kingdom to preserve its wildlife. It is exceptionally pink and purple. That might be the one kind thing I can say for it.
The Unlucky Eighth
Even though he has only the sole credit to his name on BoardGameGeek, it wouldn’t be fair to call Zach Barth a newcomer to card game design. While his studio, Zachtronics, was perhaps best known for its high-concept engineering and programming titles like SpaceChem and Infinifactory, I was more preoccupied with his solitaire offerings. When it comes to a simple deck of cards, Barth displays an ear for riffing on established designs, producing new and more interesting versions of FreeCell, cribbage, and one of the most devious solitaire games I’ve ever had the pleasure of suffering through, a ditty by the name of Fortune’s Foundation that wields a tarot deck like a rusty knife.
So it’s safe to say that Barth knows solitaire card games. Now that Zachtronics has been shuttered, it seems he’s shifting his attention from digital to tabletop. The first project of his design collective is now out. It’s a solitaire card game. Bet you didn’t see that one coming. Here’s one better: unlike his previous solitaires, this one isn’t quite like anything else. It’s sharp. It’s punchy. It plays in about ten minutes. It even opens with a bona fide gag.
Carcassonne-by-the-Sea
It would be easy to label Beacon Patrol, the tile-layer designed and illustrated by Torben Ratzlaff, as a toothless Carcassonne-by-the-Sea. Like Klaus-Jürgen Wrede’s masterpiece, it’s preoccupied with the matching of corners and edges, the apprehension of gaps yet to be filled, and landmasses that come together at jutting intersections. Despite those similarities, Beacon Patrol is unhurried, a wholly cooperative or solitaire game that proceeds at leisurely pace and doesn’t conclude so much as it goes to sleep.
That’s exactly what it’s meant to do. It may lack bite, but the better descriptor would be to say it never breaks skin.
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.
