Blog Archives
Boss Cells
I don’t envy the creative team tasked with adapting Dead Cells to cardboard. The video game is all twitch reflexes and light-speed assaults — a state I’ve heard called “submission,” more about submerging oneself within a game’s flow than about responding to any specific stimulus — which isn’t exactly the most conducive mode for taking turns or planning ahead. How does a designer transpose a video game that’s about subordinating one’s consciousness to sheer reactivity into a medium that generally works the other way around?
For the most part, the answer is that Dead Cells: The Board Game doesn’t bother.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a living spring of talent behind this adaptation, a wundersquad that consists of Antoine Bauza (7 Wonders, Ghost Stories, Oltréé), Corentin Lebrat (Faraway, Draftosaurus), Ludovic Maublanc (Cyclades, Ca$n ‘n Gun$), and Théo Rivière (Sea Salt & Paper, The LOOP). For this collaboration, the squad approaches the original design like a fold-up snowflake, snipping around the edges of the video game for the stuff that’s easily ported to the game table and leaving the rest scattered on the carpet.
Sockeye Salmon Slayers
With their bright red scales and barbed mouths, sockeye salmon have always looked to me like an invasive species from some alien moon. That Alaskan brown bears love to eat the things by the hundreds only endears me to them further. Go bears. Get those fish heads.
Peter Ridgeway’s Katmai: The Bears of Brooks River puts these heroes front and center. Two sleuths of twelve bears have staked out a stretch of river and are determined to catch the most fish, jostling for position in the churning waters. Here’s the good part: I learned a little bit about brown bears. Here’s everything else: Katmai doesn’t stack up against its peers.
Fear Factory
Haunted houses aren’t my thing. But games by design collective Jasper Beatrix are very much my thing. When it comes to Scream Park, a drafting game about assembling a seasonal haunted house, I’m glad I took the risk. Not only are there no jump scares for those of us operating above the table, but like the rest of JB’s oeuvre — Typeset, Signal, and Here Lies — Scream Park pulls more weight than first meets the eye.
Here Lies Every Other Detective Game
Dear reader, I think I’m falling in love… with the design collective Jasper Beatrix. Typeset offered our first furtive glance. Signal jumped us to second base. Yop. We move fast. Now that I’ve played Here Lies, we’re already booking venues for the wedding breakfast.
At a glance, Here Lies swims in the same waters as Signal. It’s also a deduction game, a one-plus-many cooperative affair where a lone player works as the “lead investigator,” more or less the silent alien from Signal, here to assist everybody else as they deduce the answers to a secret message. Despite its modal similarities, though, Here Lies carves out its own identity. More than that, it embraces an entirely fresh approach to deduction. There’s nothing quite like it.
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.
Gazebo Takes It on the Qin
Right when I’d sworn off writing about any more Bitewing Knizias, they went and got the rights to Qin.
Long out of print, Qin — pronounced “chin,” for those among us who keep stumbling over that Q — is another Reiner Knizia tile-layer, one that effortlessly showcases the Good Doctor’s ability to generate hard stares over a handful of non-matching colors. Now redubbed Gazebo, the original game was about unifying the warring polities of pre-imperial China. In my mind it’s still about that, because merging garden plots doesn’t quite communicate just how ruthless this thing can be.
Flying Too Close to the Ruff
Trick-taking alert! This week’s instance of the genre is Trickarus, which scores an extra point for its pun of a title. Designed by Bajir Cannon, this one takes cues from Greek myth. You are an adorable pajama-wearing child with a set of homemade wings, flapping through the sky while performing sick dives and kicks. Surely you will not soar too close to the sun and be dashed on the rocks below.
No, your goal is to inflict the dashing on somebody else.
Inhale & Exhale
My game group has an inside joke. Anytime Geoff comes over and sees hexes on the table, he’ll say, “Oh, we’re playing Archipelago?”
Rise & Fall is the first time I’ve been able to say, “No, but it was designed by the same guy.”
I’ll confess, though, that Christophe Boelinger’s latest effort has me befuddled. Part civilization game (but only a sliver), part area control game (a much bigger slice), there’s an undeniable elegance to the whole thing, almost a throwback quality in its absence of chance and willingness to turn players over to the mercy of its spikier edges. Which is maybe why I’m surprised to say that my favorite part of the endeavor is the setup.
Don’t Know If It’s Day or Night
A lot has changed with Bernard Grzybowski’s Purple Haze since I examined it three years ago. As wargames go, the final product is more assured and polished, as one would expect, but also less burdened by the prototype try-hard attitude. I might even go so far as to call it one of the finest narrative wargames ever produced.
To explain why, you need to meet my squad.
We’re the Messypotamians
I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game with so many tremendous ideas and so many disastrous executions as Sammu-ramat. Designed by Besime Uyanik and published through Ion Game Design, which Uyanik runs as CEO, it tells the tale of the titular Neo-Assyrian queen, Sammu-ramat, who succeeded her husband and seems to have co-ruled during the reign of her son, Adad-nirari III.
I say “seems” because the sources are thin on the ground — a few stelae here, some woman-queen legends there, all par for the course for an empire nearly three thousand years removed from our present circumstances — but historians largely agree that Sammu-ramat held an unusual position of prominence. This is a world I would love to see explored in detail, packed as it is with court intrigues, military campaigns, and early empire-making, not to mention the prospect of a queen bending that empire to her will. Unfortunately, this board game rendition of Sammu-ramat’s life leaves its most pressing questions unanswered.
SPACE-BIFF! 