Blog Archives
Party Up, Party Down
UFO 50 was one of the coolest gaming artifacts of the past few years, a collection of fifty unique video games by Derek Yu, Jon Perry, and a handful of other developers that pitched itself as a digital excavation of a long-lost 8-bit console. The collection was special for many reasons, but my favorite trick was the way its creators employed modern design principles that contrasted the system’s hardware and input limitations.
For example, Party House. Designed by Jon Perry, this was a full-fledged solitaire deck-building game that fictively predated Dominion by over two decades. Now, in a design ouroboros, Perry is shifting Party House to tabletop.
Baba Is Boss
If you haven’t heard of Baba Is You, grab hold of the nearest guardrail, because you’re about to be hit by a wrecking ball of descriptors. Here goes: released in 2019, Baba Is You was a mind-bending box-pushing syntax-making meta-puzzle video game by Arvi Teikari. It was hard. Famously so. Especially if you’re anything like me and not really into Sokoban-style box-pushers.
Baba Is You is now also a board game, albeit one whose pedigree doesn’t only belong to Teikari. The analog adaptation was done by Peter C. Hayward, and in many ways it feels like a riff on his abstract comedy game That Time You Killed Me. Although somehow, improbably, it’s even better — provided you have the right mind for it.
Biffing Balatro
Ready for a confession? I didn’t love Balatro, the roguelike poker deck-building game from a couple years back. Don’t get me wrong, the number-go-up part of my brain adored Balatro. But the rest, the foam of consciousness so certain it’s in control of the mammalian beast, the me suspicious of anything hypnotic, found the whole process incredibly off-putting. Which, of course, is why I played it for (oh no) 76.9 hours, about which I cannot tell you a single anecdote. Which, incidentally, is also why I hate it.
Rolling Deep is the forthcoming solitaire board game by Peter C. Hayward. Given his explicit efforts to emulate Balatro, which he’s detailed at length in a series of design diaries, one might suppose that Rolling Deep is not my jam. The Anti-Dan, as it were. But having played it a handful of times, I’ve come away with the opposite impression. Yes, this is more or less Balatro: The Board Game. But it’s so much more than that.
It’s better than Balatro, for one thing.
All Gold Country
Another day, another cube-rails-adjacent title — although Gold Country, being designed by Reiner Knizia, is decidedly crisper and more rules-light than yesterday’s Stellar Ventures. This one is based on Spectaculum, a game about traveling circuses. I’ve never played Spectaculum, so I can’t comment on how the game may or may not have changed; but in this format, Gold Country offers a slick presentation and some crystal-clear speculation. It’s far from my favorite Knizia, but it’s such a buttery smooth experience that it’s hard to imagine turning a session down.
Real Moytura, Guys
I’ll confess it was a little surprising to unfurl Moytura’s board and see such a literal depiction of Ireland. After the suffocating hoplite melee of Iliad, the checkerboard Mount Olympus of Ichor, and the abstract leylines of Azure, here the membrane between the real and the mythological seems especially thin. Designed by one of the busiest partnerships in the industry, David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin, and fiercely illustrated by A. Giroux and Harry Conway, Moytura loosely retells the Maighe Tuireadh’s ancient clash between men and monsters to decide the fate of pre-Christian Ireland. As an installment in this particular series, it’s something of an odd duck. I’d even go as far as to play loose with some definitions and label it a light wargame.
A light wargame with heaps of monsters, that is. Right from the get-go, Moytura portrays its conflict as a desperate struggle for survival. And let me tell you, the main attraction is all those baddies.
I’m Not Azure About This One
Hot on the heels of Reiner Knizia’s Iliad and Ichor, Bitewing is crowdfunding another pair of titles for their Mythos Collection. As seems to be the pattern with these things, one of them stands head and shoulders above the other — although whether that’s the things’ fault or because we’re doomed to hold everything in comparison to every other thing is harder to tell.
Azure is the one I’m shakier on. Designed by Trevor Benjamin and Brett J. Gilbert, this is an abstract game about controlling four intersecting leylines and the auspicious beasts who inhabit them.
Tick Tick Toe
If there’s anything that tickles the pleasure center of my brain, it’s seeing a designer put their own spin on a classic. Even better when that classic is soggier than bread that’s been tossed into a duck pond. Robert Hovakimyan isn’t the first person to tackle Tic Tac Toe this year. But compared to Brett J. Gilbert and Trevor Benjamin’s Tic Tac Trek, Bombastic is the straighter adaptation, right down to the nine-square grid and make-three gameplay. The big distinction is that everything has already been played to the board. Face-down.
Oh. And there’s a bomb.
She’s a Grisly Monster, I Assure You
You know the story. Buncha monsters storm Mount Olympus. The pantheon is in a scramble. Who’s this coming to save the day — Hercules? More like Hunk-ules.
Reiner Knizia’s Ichor isn’t Disney’s Hercules, and thank the gods for that, although Tyler Miles Lockett’s illustrations do somewhat resemble the Gerald Scarfe amphorae look of the animated feature. When I previewed the thing a year back, I liked it somewhat less than its sibling title Iliad. Now that they’re both finished and on my table, though, I’ve been giving Ichor a second look. And while it’s still the zanier and less measured of the pair, there’s so much to appreciate about Knizia’s portrayal of this divine brawl that I can’t help but be charmed.
Let Me Not Then Die Ingloriously
You know that moment in every ancient battle scene, whether in film or video games, where the lines have collapsed and now the burly infantry boys are fighting one on one, everybody mixed together and slashing wildly? Bonus points when two rival heroes spot each other in the fray and start murdering their way toward one another, hellbent on a personal duel where nobody will happen to spear them through the backside.
Sorry to disappoint, but those scenes are pure invention. There simply weren’t enough suicidal soldiers in the ancient world for such an engagement. Still, it looks hella cool, and it’s significantly easier to stage than an actual line of infantry trying to scare their opposite number into freaking out and running away.
One of my favorite things about Reiner Knizia’s Iliad, which I previewed last year, is the way it evokes those haphazard murder-thons, Greek boys in blue and red squaring off in a checkers-grid melee. Sure, the game is smart and all that, providing a thinky two-player match of wits that emphasizes clever investments over brute strength. But I’m really here for the chaos.
Gingham Takes a Roadside Picnic
Yesterday I previewed Gazebo, a forthcoming remake of Reiner Knizia’s Qin. In the usual Bitewing tradition, Gazebo has been partnered with another game, one it broadly shares a setting and aesthetic with. That game is Gingham. Created by Robert Hovakimyan, whose titles Bebop and Shuffle and Swing I covered around this time last year, Gingham also takes us to the park. In a few ways, though, it’s less of a spiritual partner to Gazebo than its spiritual opposite.
SPACE-BIFF! 