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A Great Game about The Great Game
In the second quarter of the 19th century, the crown jewel of the British Empire was unexpectedly placed under threat when the Russian Empire began a period of aggressive expansion into Central Asia. India had been the linchpin of the British Empire’s interests abroad for nearly a hundred and fifty years, so the prospect of a Russian frontier bypassing the khanates and the Afghan emirate that had previously stood as a buffer zone between the British Raj and the Russian Empire sparked a flurry of activity. Spies, armies, diplomats, and traders poured into the region. Just like that, the tribal leaders of Afghanistan found themselves squeezed between two desperate empires.
Welcome to what came to be known as The Great Game.
A Study in Emaciation
What made the original version of A Study in Emerald one of my favorite games of 2014 was the constant feeling that absolutely anything might happen. As a loyalist (or anarchist) trying to sustain (or smash) the regime of alien overlords that had settled in quite nicely by the time Sherlock Holmes appeared on the scene, you’d be going about your business when everything went suddenly and irreversibly off the rails. Perhaps a zombie horde began spreading across Europe, or some vampires seduced your best agent into their coven. Meanwhile, a mi-go concealed a crucial assassination target’s brain on Pluto, Cthulhu consumed London for brunch, and Otto von Bismarck marched the entire Prussian army into Madrid. And the game was only half finished.
Martin Wallace’s new take on A Study in Emerald is less interested in star-crossed anarchic madness and more in being easy to get along with. Gone are the original game’s excesses, flights of fancy, and more outlandish occurrences. In fact, all sorts of things have been stripped out, right down to basic concepts like the dangers of traveling across occupied Europe or the individual appearance of various historical figures. In their place is something that will undoubtedly strike fans of the original as somewhat withered.
Paradoxically, it’s also the better game in a lot of ways.
Steal My Heart
Your crew stands motionless, not daring to move, to breathe. The tumbler ticks beneath your fingertips, your heart pounding so loudly in your ears that you can hardly hear the dropping of the pins. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for. Your crew has circumvented the guards, crawled through service ducts, hacked the security system to bypass lasers and heat sensors. At long last, you deciphered the combination to the safe, pieced together from memos and computer logs throughout the bank offices.
The final pin slides into place. The door, a solid foot of clockwork steel and reinforced concrete suspended by hinges thicker than your demolition man’s biceps, swings outward with a whine. Your crew cranes their necks to get a peek inside.
Within, something begins to bark. Loudly and repeatedly. Down the hall, you can hear footsteps, coming fast.
“This is what the customer sent us to retrieve?” Rook says, bafflement evident in his voice. “A damn chihuahua?”
Going Golden
The entire span of human civilization is a lot to compress into three or four hours, let alone a trim 90 minutes. And yet that’s precisely what The Golden Ages aims to accomplish, cheerfully charting mankind’s ascent from mudbrick ziggurats to skyscrapers to star ladders. Better yet, in an age when a game’s briskness is often valued over its cleverness, all too often leaving the possibility of deep gameplay experiences stranded along the side of the road in its haste to arrive at its destination, The Golden Ages manages to be something even more valuable than fast: compelling.
Valley of Green Mystery Fury (2nd Ed.)
As those who know me can attest, I abhor repeating myself. Which is why I can’t even begin to fathom doing individual reviews of all the new editions, deluxe boxes, and standalone expansions appearing on shelves this time of year. Thus, rather than subject myself (and you) to a plodding second refrain of things I’ve already covered in the past, what follows is a breakdown of six excellent new versions of older games. Take a look.
Pandemic: Spoiled Meat
Today we’re continuing the adventures of everybody’s favorite gang of disease-fighting, globe-trotting pathologists, a journey that began when [redacted]. You can read all about it over here. In either case, what follows after the jump CONTAINS SO MANY SPOILERS THAT YOU WILL EXPERIENCE SYMPTOMS SIMILAR TO EBOLA IF YOU READ THEM UNPREPARED. IF I’VE WARNED YOU ONCE, I’VE WARNED YOU A HUNDRED TIMES. OPENING THIS CONTAINER CARRIES THE RISK OF PLOT-POINT INFECTION. BE CAUTIOUS, BE AWARE, BE SAFE.
C.O.O.L Story, Bro
As a kid, I was never any good at those Choose Your Own Adventure books. For one thing, I wanted to see every twist and ending the book had to offer, even the ones where my character died a grisly death or suddenly woke up and realized the whole thing had been an elaborate dream. Unless I read every single page, I didn’t feel like it had been worth it. The problem was that I wanted to accomplish this without having to reread anything. And so I dog-eared those books until there were more pages bent-down than in their original shape, and kept my fingers wedged at crucial junctures, and eventually resorted to drawing crazy-person diagrams with arrows pointing between important decisions. Anything to keep from reading even a single page over again.
Years later, T.I.M.E Stories has earned the distinction of being the first board game to prompt the resurgence of my childhood neurosis.
On the Origin of the Dice Game
By this point in their evolution, most dice games have become kindly creatures. Gentle, even. They want you to have a good time, to roll some bones and chuckle at your fortunes, to relax and have a straightforward and undemanding evening. They may have descended from wilder ancestors, but they’ve become tame, domesticated beasts along the way.
Neanderthal, the prequel to Greenland, is anything but that sort of dice game. It doesn’t care about staying late. Nor does it plan on playing fair. It embraces player elimination — or, perhaps worse, making the unlucky player sit around for rounds at a time with nothing to do. It’s complicated, rough, talks loudly about sex at inappropriate moments, changes the rules halfway through, and sometimes slaps you on the back so hard that you end up with Dr. Pepper charring your sinuses. In short, it has no interest in seeking mainstream appeal. And that’s precisely why I find it so fascinating.
The Space-Biff! Holiday Survival Guide
It’s that time of year again! The weather is getting nippy, radio stations are playing jollier music, and you’re honor-bound to spend multiple evenings with people you don’t necessarily know very well but who hold some sort of genetic or matrimonial connection to you. Sure, Uncle Deever is sort of a racist and your mother-in-law asks a lot of questions that feel like indictments of how badly you’re caring for her precious baby, but it could be worse. You might, for example, have nobody around who loves you.
But for those of us who do, what follows is an incredibly subjective and probably wrong-headed list of the ten games I’ll be hauling around in a big yellow duffel bag this holiday season.
Baby, It’s Cold Outside
Way back in 2008, the one thing that prevented me from getting along with good old Dominion — and disclaimer, I haven’t played it in a very, very long time — was the fact that my actions felt almost entirely divorced from the kingdom-building I was supposedly undertaking. Armed with gold and some estates, my fair land was soon filled with nothing but cellars and laboratories, while my only policy was the daily festival. Dominion deserved every ounce of heaped praise, but while it may have been the grandfather of an entire genre, it was also a classic example of the gulf all too often situated between theme and mechanics in deck-builders.
I might seem erroneous in besmirching my elders. After all, this was before, well, every other deck-building game. And certainly, they’ve come a long way over the last century seven years. Valley of the Kings and Core Worlds and Star Realms were mere twinkles in their designers’ eyes. Hybrid designs like A Study in Emerald, Baseball Highlights: 2045, and City of Remnants were radical heresies not yet uttered. There was one deck-building game, however, released the year after Dominion. To everyone’s surprise, it was every bit as smart and mechanically sound as its daddy, except it also had a dash of real personality. For all its pizzazz, it got locked up by Rio Grande Games to prevent it from competing with its father — possibly the most accurately medieval thing Dominion had ever done.
SPACE-BIFF! 