Blog Archives
Alone Beneath the Sea
It’s rare enough that a game gets a second chance, let alone when it’s a niche solo title. Based on Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Nemo’s War held a formidable reputation for its brutal difficulty, constant barrage of dice rolls, and tangible sense of setting. It’s Nemo and his Nautilus against an entire world of colonial powers. And, tipping my hand right now, its polished second edition is easily one of the slickest solo games ever crafted.
The Anti-Catan
At first blush, Spirit Island looks achingly familiar. A tropical island lush with multiple colorful regions, ranging across jungles and mountains and wetlands and deserts. Why, that’s nearly as many as in The Settlers of Catan! What’s more, here are some lily-white explorers, a few towns, even the occasional city. Every so often a crude grass hut interrupts the landscape. The only things missing are some roads and sheep cards. Throw in an economic engine and some bleating about chivalry and, baby, you’ve got a Euro going.
That’s where Spirit Island turns a hard left. Turns out you aren’t the settlers at all. Rather, you’re the indigenous spirits trying to shake off their white-man burden before you can say “smallpox.” Whether that means scaring them silly or burning all those cities to the ground, whatever gets the job done.
But that’s the window dressing. Spirit Island is more than some mildly socially-aware theming. It’s also el banana grande.
Fully Epic, Too Tiny
Wow. Can we just take a moment to marvel at the fact that Tiny Epic Quest is the fifth entry in this series of small-yet-usually-pretty-good games? From warring kingdoms to defending kingdoms, from outer space to the Wild West. All in a little more than three years. Scott Almes is nothing if not prolific.
Behold.
Anyway, this is probably the best the Tiny Epic series has ever been. Though that might be because it’s just so dang photogenic.
Pretty Chancy
Very few notions have done as much harm to our hobby as the chestnut that “Luck is Bad.” No, silly. Luck is good. Luck is great and generous. Also benevolent, if you accept it into your heart.
Sorry. I got carried away there.
But as I was saying, luck is awesome. It’s just also very hard to do right. Anybody can invent a luck-based dice game. How about this: first one to roll a 4 wins. There. That’s a dice game. An awful one, but a dice game with lots of luck nonetheless.
Unearth has attracted some (very) minor controversy. As far as I can tell, the problem is that it’s a dice game that happens to look good, thus stymieing those who like their games pretty but haven’t yet braced for the possibility of failing thanks to the clatter of the dice. So let’s talk about that.
The Octopus
What do you get when you stuff Rikki Tahta, designer of the ever-lovely Coup, into one end of a particle accelerator, and Spyfall — or better yet, A Fake Artist Goes to New York, which I still contend is the better of the two — into the opposite side, then flip the power switch?
Nothing, you goof. That’s not how particle accelerators work.
If this were a television program featured on the CW, however, the unholy merging of these two substances would result in The Chameleon. It would also very likely be improbably attractive and infuriatingly dramatic, but let’s set that aside for now.
Lazer Pooperz
Now that Stranger Things and Ready Player One are all the rage, it seems the ’80s are finally having their heyday. Take Lazer Ryderz, for example. Here’s a game that’s basically the light cycles from Tron.
That’s it. Were you expecting me to say more about it?
Alone in the Jungle
There’s an undeniable romance to the notion of finding a long-lost city in the middle of an inhospitable landscape. It’s the sort of thing that caused men like Percy Fawcett to wager — and ultimately lose — his life in pursuit of Z in the deepest reaches of the Brazilian Amazon. To brave dangers, starvation, the uncertain meetings with the indigenous, and to arrive battered and thinned yet alive at the foot of a monumental geographic discovery; it almost sounds worth the risk. And I’m the sort who avoids taking my daughter to the park.
The Lost Expedition is only loosely based on Fawcett’s doomed expedition, instead opting to capture the broad strokes of perilous exploration. And unlike its source material, it’s a success.
Words With Frenemies
I was born and bred for word games. Which has led me to regard them fondly, but also sometimes with a simmering resentment you could whip up a stir fry in. What if I don’t want to spell QANATS for the thousandth time?
But Jeff Beck’s Word Domination is a clever one. And it largely has to do with the fact that it doesn’t focus too much on prioritizing the tougher letters.
Some Theses About Indulgence
A game about the selling and buying of Renaissance indulgences would be fascinating. You could try to guess which sins would need forgiving that weekend, pay the priest, and waltz right off to your fancy sexy parties. But! If you didn’t anticipate your transgressions properly, Martin Luther would lodge a complaint and Teresa of Ávila would slap you hard across the cheek.
Indulgence, one of the three titles in the opening salvo from Restoration Games, isn’t quite that. It’s a remake of Jerry D’Arcey’s Dragon Master, which was a remake of his own Coup d’Etat, which was a remake of Barbu. That’s a type of history too. Fewer assassinations and peasant revolts, one hopes.
The Crimes They Are a-Changin’
My Grandpa owned the original Stop Thief, the one from way back in 1979 before exclamation marks were considered proper for board games. The ’80s overcompensated by adding the buggers to everything, but for that brief moment in time you could utter that phrase with a gruff flatness. Stop. Thief. No yelling. You’re hardly even speaking aloud at that point. Growling it, maybe.
Sadly, the chunky plastic “police scanner” that revealed the location of the fleeing thieves was hopelessly broken. We mostly just pushed the investigators around and pretended they were blasting each other in broad daylight and on public streets with their magnum revolvers. So, in a way, a big stretch of a way, Restoration Games giving Stop Thief! new life — with a shiny new exclamation mark — feels almost predestined, as though I was never meant to escape its gravitational pull.
SPACE-BIFF! 