Blog Archives
Drop the Big One and See What Happens
When 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis arrived in the mail, I headed over to my Dad’s house and asked what he remembered about those two weeks in October of 1962. He was just a kid at the time, only six years old. His parents had sheltered him and his siblings from the full brunt of what was going on, but they still had a number of specific instructions, right down to the portion of the basement they would retreat to in the event that an air raid siren sounded. Mostly, he remembers being afraid. His older brother would act out at times. “Why should I be good?” he would ask. “We’re just going to get blown up anyway.”
It’s sobering to dwell on just how close we came to annihilating ourselves. And if nothing else, 13 Days absolutely captures the sense that the warning lights are on, the lid has been flipped back, and that red button is staring you in the eye, waiting to unleash the end of the world.
Mr. Cabbagehead’s Pleasant Garden
I know a thing or two about pesky neighbors. So when Mr. Cabbagehead goes on holiday and Horace Savoy-Brassica from down the lane swipes an armful of prize-winning radishes right out of his garden, I can empathize. In fact, I empathize so fully that I may have even uttered some of the same phrases that saw use in my house when my neighbor petitioned to have speed bumps installed on our street. Phrases that include such words as “tarnation” and “sasquatch.” Apologies for the foul language.
Pony (and Stagecoach) Express
I’ve always been a fan of Colt Express. For a game featuring programmed movement — a system where your moves are planned three or four steps in advance before being carried out — it was generous enough to provide some wiggle room rather than dooming you to rigidly follow an ill-conceived plan, and always embraced a unique sort of physical comedy. You’d punch an opponent, sending them reeling into the adjacent train car; the marshal would drive you onto the roof in a flurry of gunsmoke; outlaws would tussle over a lockbox filled with one thousand Union dollars. It was good stuff.
My one complaint was that it could end up being too straightforward, with the same beats arising every game. That’s where Horses & Stagecoach comes in. Colt Express has never been wilder.
Cruisers, in Space, Battling
I’ve tried meditation. I’ve tried yoga. I’ve tried herbal tea. And to this day, the only thing that helps me sleep at night is the thrill of spaceships blowing each other to smithereens.
All Aboard the Raft of the Medusa
Being trapped for a week on a lifeboat sounds pretty awful, but what about being trapped for a week on a lifeboat stuffed with sociopathic murderers who alternate between claiming they love you and tossing buckets of chum into the water whenever you fall overboard?
Welcome aboard. You’re in for one heck of a ride.
Usher in the New Millennium
I’ve always wanted to play a collectible card game in a competitive environment. There’s something about watching a deck take shape over weeks and months, toying with ideas and builds whenever new cards are released, and then testing the mettle of your creation in the crucible of a tournament. And when that’s done, you do it all over again, learning from your mistakes and capitalizing on your successes. Unfortunately, I simply lack the time that I’d need to invest in such an endeavor. I’d say, “Maybe if I were younger,” but I didn’t have all that much free time when I was a kid either. Maybe when I’m older.
Good thing Millennium Blades is finally here, because it satisfies my hunger with one of the most rollicking fun games I’ve ever played.
The V-Pandemic
Riding high on the tremendous success of Pandemic Legacy, Rob Daviau has now crafted an entirely new game about a deadly infection, the globetrotting team bent on curing it, and vampires. It’s called V-Wars, and it features a map of the planet (complete with cities located one galling inch away from their real-world positions), a disease that pops up according to the whims of an uncaring event deck, and vampires. If it sounds a lot like Pandemic plus vampires, well, you aren’t wrong. In a way, it feels like Daviau had a few great ideas left over that he couldn’t quite squeeze into Pandemic Legacy, so he made V-Wars. And now it exists.
Exploitation Cardboard
Watching something you aren’t supposed to is almost a rite of passage for a young person. Whatever the film, there’s an adolescent thrill in viewing the forbidden. For my schoolyard friends, it was Alien and Predator, which they recounted scene by scene for my jealous ears. For me, it was Timecop, an old VHS cassette pulled down from the shelf because my dad had talked up this one scene where Jean-Claude Van Damme did the splits over a pool of electrified water. Instead, I got an eyeful of him doing the splits over Ferris Bueller’s old girlfriend. So that’s how it is in their family.
And that’s what Ferox is all about. Mimicking the Italian cannibal exploitation genre that was so bizarrely prominent in the ’70s and ’80s, it arrives in a shoddy cardboard box, sports a “Be Kind, Please Rewind” sticker, and overfloweth with gory images of grisly massacres, angry twentysomethings embracing the horrors of desperate survival, and lots and lots of skulls and blood spatters. Just opening it, a part of me reflexively checked over my shoulder to make sure my parents hadn’t come home early from the symphony.
A Thousand Pages, Give or Take a Few
I’m going to tell you something I’ve never confessed to anybody: I was raised from vat-birth to be a Scrabble-playing genius. Yes, it’s true. Unlike some of the gene-factory’s other assigned Mothers, mine spared not an iota of self-esteem when it came to her favorite pastime. She would scrub the floor with me, assembling words like SYZYGY for hundreds of points while I scrabbled in the dirt with SCOOP. I finally thought to put an S on the end. “SCOOPS,” I announced with no small note of triumph in my voice, picking up 10 points, my first double- digit accomplishment. “QUETZALS,” she countered, using my own S, my pride and joy, as the key to my undoing. From beneath the table, she produced a calculator and starting tallying her triple word score.
When I saw that Tim Fowers — who also designed the delightfully surprising Burgle Bros. — had put out a game that was simultaneously about deck-building and word-building, I knew my chance had arrived. I would finally defeat Mother.
Sho Sho Shogunate
Japanese history isn’t really my specialty. As far as I can tell, it basically consists of four thousand years of fighting over who gets to be shogun for a little bit, then the new shogun gets poisoned by a ninja and the whole things starts all over again, at least until Tom Cruise shows up and wows everyone with his beard into accepting modernity — but sensible modernity rather than mean modernity.
Thankfully, the tiny card game Shogunate doesn’t do anything to challenge my assumptions. Just last night, we propped up five new shoguns, then promptly murdered all of them. There were vendettas, assassinations, and… well, that’s mostly what happened. Vendettas and assassinations.
SPACE-BIFF! 