Blog Archives
Finity Dungeon
Dungeon diving doesn’t have to be an ordeal. In fact, Welcome to the Dungeon pitches the act of spelunking ancient tombs as almost whimsical, heroes marching into the murky depths at the slightest fit of pique, their lives spent with hardly a care other than for your amusement.
And somehow, it works. Hoo boy, does it ever.
Welcome to Bright Sunny Indines
In a lot of ways, Indines seems like the ideal tourist destination. It’s bright. Sunny. The people are exotic and vibrant, and have sexy, unfamiliar names like Kallistar Flarechild and Zaamassal Kett. The general populace has long ago gotten used to inter-planar travelers popping into existence left and right, so there’s nary a grouse to be heard about bloody foreigners or damn tourists or anything ugly like that.
It’s so nice, it’s almost easy to forget that there are apparently only two careers in Indines: university professor and punching bag. More often than not, they’re the same job.
Rock the Cradle of Civilization
Sometime in the 23rd or 24th century BCE, things weren’t looking great for the Sumerians. Over hundreds of years they’d built multiple city-states along the alluvial plains of the violently unpredictable Tigris and Euphrates rivers, formed a powerful religion with priest-kings and mudbrick temples as their bases of authority, and even had time left over to develop writing somewhere along the way. Then an usurper came along, conquered most of the city-states, took a name that literally translates as, “No guys, really, I’m a totally legitimate king, I promise,” and set up the Akkad Dynasty. It would last for about a century and a half before more usurpers, more invaders, more uprisings continued to transform the face of Mesopotamia.
It makes for gripping history, and it’s exactly what you’ll be doing in Reiner Knizia’s Tigris & Euphrates.
Elsewhere: Colt Express
Our more astute readers will likely note that I already reviewed Colt Express back in January. But — bonus! — I’ve now reviewed it all over again down at The Review Corner, so if you somehow missed my first try at explaining precisely why I keep robbing the same old train, just mosey on over and I’ll do my best to explain.
Welcome to the Redux
Despite taking place a good handful of centuries earlier, the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history somehow managed to give violent conflicts like the Mongol invasions and the First World War a solid spanking when it came to human death toll. The decline of the 400-year-old Han Dynasty had paved the way for the rise of three belligerent kingdoms, Shu, Wu, and Wei, and the next half-century was marked by their struggle to unite the country.
It’s the perfect setting for a board game, packed with court intrigue and military adventures, leaps and bounds of technology and contests of economy. And Three Kingdoms Redux understands this multifaceted approach to warfare perfectly.
Still Better than Camp Mill Hollow
Where do you wanna go?
Hey Mom, I wanna go,
Gee Mom, I wanna go,
to Mill Hollow.
With a hundred other kids crammed into a semicircle on our elementary school stage, I belted out that song. I blasted my lungs out, eyes damp and smile earnest but hopeful. It was basically a fundraiser dressed up as a play, the weight of parental guilt over their children’s dreams pinned on paying the fee that would let their kids spend three days and two nights at a camp in the High Uintas Wilderness.
Many of us boarded that bus to Camp Mill Hollow. And I’m living proof that at least some of us returned.
Cthulhu Wars Fhtagn!
Since the dawn of time, when we yet believed the stars were fireflies caught in the thatched ceiling of the nighttime sky and fire was a newfangled contraption not quite trusted by the older generation, a single question has nagged at the back of Man’s mind:
Who would win in a fight between Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, and Hastur?
The Big Crunch of Little Microcosm
You’ve probably heard of the Big Crunch, the theory that the universe will eventually realize that continual expansion is so last eon, and will instead reverse its direction and collapse into a single gravitational singularity.
Eminent Domain: Microcosm is sort of like that, but for card games. And it probably hurts less.
Game of Shadow Thrones
When you play the game of Shadow Thrones, you win or you die. Or you come in second place but you’ve recruited so many agents on the victorious side that you kind of win anyway.
Come along, I’ll explain.
Elsewhere: A Fistful of Dinero
Another month, another writeup over at the Review Corner! This time it’s Charlie Theel’s A Fistful of Dinero, a genre mashup about shooting the fluff out of a dusty saloon. You can read about it right here, though I recommend tabbing between the review and the pictures I’ve stashed below.
SPACE-BIFF! 