Blog Archives
Over and Under
If there’s any one thing that sets the designs of Ryan Laukat apart, it’s the fact that nothing ever really “goes to hell.” Even when you’re fighting world-crushing titans in The Ancient World, they never quite get around to crushing the world. There are no Nazis to pilfer your 1930s loot or kidnap your significant other in Artifacts, Inc. Even warfare in Eight-Minute Empire represents minor setbacks rather than crushing routs. By and large, Laukat’s games are set in a bizzaro universe where optimism and progress rule the day.
Now, that might sound dull. I couldn’t blame you if it did. Because, sure, it’s conflict that drives our games, and a game without conflict hardly feels like a game at all. Which is why it’s such a relief that Laukat’s designs are brimming with conflict — it’s just that it’s the sort where nobody ever gets seriously hurt, where you’re racing to be the most optimistic and most industrious, where the goal is to have the most good things happen to you rather than avoiding the bad. It’s childlike, almost, if that didn’t feel like an underhanded insult. Innocent. Pure.
Above and Below might be the greatest exemplar of Laukat’s spirit of optimism thus far.
Seeing Red
Mission: Red Planet feels like the sort of game that would have been an absolute classic ten years ago — which is fitting, considering it first released in 2005 and only recently got a fresh splash of red paint from Fantasy Flight Games. The question, then, is how well does it hold up today?
Choo Choo Island
Bad little boys are laid on the tracks,
— lashed in place with rusted old chains —
locomotives splitting clean as an axe,
when sent by grandma to the isle of trains.
That’s what old gran used to sing to me as a young child. Ever since, I’ve had a peculiar paranoia of islands packed with trains. Who put these evil trains on an island? Why are they so mean to lost children? Were these the little engines that couldn’t? I used to stay up nights pondering the answers to these questions. So when the card game version of Isle of Trains fell into my hands, it was a good four months before I got up the courage to play it. Turns out, it’s a perfectly pleasant hand-management game. Huh!
Pandemic: Spoiled Plans
If you’re into board games, you’ve probably heard about Pandemic Legacy, the persistent game of disease control from Rob Daviau and Matt Leacock, which alters in unexpected ways every time you play it. There’s no shortage of people who will gladly fill your ears with honey about the greatness of this game; problem is, they want to tell you about it without spoiling anything. Which is altogether too antiseptic for my tastes.
Which is why I’m spoiling, for your benefit, the runthrough of Pandemic Legacy that I’ve undertaken with my wife, my sister, and my sister’s husband. I will spoil everything I can remember to spoil.
IN THE EVENT YOU DO NOT YET COMPREHEND, I AM THE MAD BOMBER OF SPOILERS, AND I PLAN TO SPOIL EVERYTHING, EVERY SINGLE THING, SO DO NOT SEND ME HATE MAIL WHEN EVERYTHING GETS SPOILED AND YOU WERE TOO OBTUSE TO REALIZE IT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. WARNING DELIVERED.
I’m Being So Sincere Right Now
If I’m being entirely honest, my suspicion of Portal: The Uncooperative Cake Acquisition Game had very little to do with Cryptozoic Entertainment’s mostly-bad reputation. Nor did it revolve around my discovery, upon opening the box, that the pieces aren’t all that great, especially the hexagonal room tiles that don’t fit together nearly as well as they ought. Or the lopsided turret. Or the way the bendy-man test subjects are jet-black but for a narrow band of color, making them frustratingly slow to sort unless they’re already standing up.
No, it wasn’t any of those things. It was the license. As in, Valve’s ultra-popular duo of games of the digital persuasion, Portal itself.
You’ve Got Me Couping Like a Baby
Way back last year, I highlighted a title that was pretty much my ideal filler game: Coup. Confrontation, deception, and bullying, all crammed into one fifteen-minute package. Glorious.
Well, now I’ve been given the opportunity to review it all over again, because Coup just got a mouthful of a sequel. Coup: Rebellion G54 they’re calling it, for some reason. And it’s totally blowing me away.
Doctor Congo, I Presume?
As a medium, board games tend to revolve around tried-and-true topics, uncontroversial subject matter like surviving a zombie apocalypse or building a medieval town. This is hardly surprising; with their focus on social interaction and optimal move-making, there isn’t often much room left over for heady discussion — say, of the obstacles facing a developing African nation. At best, the game will be scrutinized for casting its controversial setting as “play,” or perhaps even more damningly, for not focusing enough on the play. At worst, it could come across as downright ignorant or offensive.
DRCongo, the latest title from Ragnar Brothers, embraces the controversy. Not only is it set within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, casting its players as industrialists who collect diamonds, deploy peacekeepers to suppress insurgents, buy political offices, and get filthy rich extracting oil and minerals from the Congolese countryside, it also posits that its magnates are forces of benevolence, employing their wealth to bring about an era of stability. In essence, you will take part in some extremely spurious activities, but the end goal is surprisingly admirable.
If nothing else, DRCongo is hopelessly optimistic.
Ashes: The Gathering
A specter is haunting card games — the specter of Magic: The Gathering. It’s an inescapable, all-consuming glutton, and it leaves hardly any room at your friendly local game shop, just a few leftover tables at the rear. But perhaps, just perhaps, Magic will one day be vanquished. Maybe somebody will come along and beat it at its own game, and we will cheer and celebrate and share candied yams and forever be as one, for all men are brothers. And then, years later, we will complain about how beloved this usurper is, and how universally available, and how it only leaves us the tables with the most pronounced corn dog stains, and we will look back on the days of Magic as those of a golden age.
Sadly, Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn is probably not the title that will unseat the king. Though that has nothing to do with how awesome it is.
Kid Gamez
Dear Matagot, publisher of Ultimate Warriorz:
Did you see what I did with the title of this article? How I — sans talent or creativity — transformed “games” into “gamez”? Did you feel a shudder of professional contempt when you saw that? Was the breath sucked from your lungs in a paroxysm of disdain? Did you seriously contemplate depositing some hate mailz into my inbox?
Now you know how I feel whenever I play Ultimate Warriorz. No matter how great the game itself is, I will never ever be able to unsee that inverted S. Please use the correct spelling of words from now on. Misspelling is not cute. It is not fun. It is not whimsical. On the contrary, it’s worse than genocide.
The Court of Xiang Todd
It’s been far too long since I’ve highlighted anything from my favorite print-and-play designer, Todd Sanders, whose games are consistently interesting, easy on the eyes, and completely free, provided your local library doesn’t charge for printing. The trick is to bring your own card stock and perform the ol’ Thurot eyebrows dance. I’ve yet to meet an octogenarian whose heart won’t go sticky as molasses once my eyebrows have had their way. Mmhm.
Back on topic! Todd’s latest solo game is a ditty called The Court of Xiang Chi, about managing three different clans, navigating the intrigue of the court, and scoring as many points as possible. Oh, and also living in constant fear that those damnable Daemon Princes will show up and whisk away your ministers to serve the Daemon Court. Exactly like it happened in Real History.
SPACE-BIFF! 