Blog Archives
Risk Legacy: Earth #00016592
People who like Risk fall into one of three categories:
(A) Those who flavor their poison with a heaping dose of nostalgia. It’s okay, I’ve done it too.
(B) Those who are wrong and/or new to the world of board games.
(C) Those who like Risk Legacy.
Risk Legacy has been out for a while, and I’ve avoided talking about it because to talk about it is to, well, ruin it. Still, it’s been out for almost two years, and its creator, Rob Daviau, has recently announced SeaFall, a spiritual successor that will have the benefit of being born apart from the series-mishandling clutches of Hasbro. Which is to say, it now feels like time. Time to talk about Risk Legacy, about why it’s possibly the single most innovative board game to come along these last couple decades.
Though be warned: while this first installment won’t spoil anything important, future accounts will chart my group’s course through Risk Legacy’s fifteen successive battles, and may very well become more illuminating than someone looking to experience Risk Legacy for themselves might like. This is a game best experienced firsthand; this series is for everyone else, who knows they won’t get that chance. You’ve been warned.
Alone Time: Aether Captain Todd
By a show of hands, is anyone getting tired of me highlighting the work of Todd Sanders?
If you raised your hand, too bad! If you didn’t, good, because we’re not done yet! Seeing as how all of Todd’s games are free in spite of being surprisingly good, you’re crazy to not want more. And more we’ll get — although we’ve already looked at most of the games in the Shadows Upon Lassadar series, Todd’s got an entire second universe under his belt. It’s the steam-driven floaty world of “Aether Captains,” and while I won’t be going over every single title (after all, there’s a whole bunch of them: Aether Captains, Capek Golems, Clockwork Cabal, Dread Supremacy, Pirates and Traders, The Search, Triad, Triad 2, and Compass and Empire) (those games entitled “Triad”? Those are three games apiece), today we’ll be taking a look at three of them.
Buckle your steam-seatbelts, because on page two, we’re talking about the original Aether Captains, one of Todd’s earliest designs.
String Doomworms
Disclaimer: I know nothing about trains. I also know nothing about train games. Oh, I’ve played Ticket to Ride, because everybody has played Ticket to Ride, and when I was nine my dad tried to introduce me to the 1977 title Rail Baron, which is a bit confusing because I don’t think they’d even invented trains back then, so it must have been a science fiction game, and either way it fried my brain and left me the perplexed mess you see before you now.
Here’s the thing: I don’t like trains. I think they’re smelly, and over-warm, and I get motion sick riding them even though they travel in mostly straight lines. I get nauseated just thinking about them. This means I’m uniquely unqualified to talk about String Railway. So instead, today I’m going to tell you about a nifty little game called String Doomworms.
Not Just a Rerun: Space Cadets: Dice Duel
You know what we love here at Château de Thurot? The unadulterated thrill of real-time board games. You know what we didn’t love? Space Cadets. In fairness, we only played it once, and had a really grand time for the first hour or so. Then Real-Time Exhaustion Syndrome set in (it’s a real thing, I’ll wait right here while you look it up) and we spent the concluding two hours wondering where the fun and excitement had eloped to. That’s why everyone was suspicious when I plopped Space Cadets: Dice Duel down on the table. “Wasn’t suffering through this once enough?” someone muttered, to a tidal wave of grumbled assent.
But here’s the thing: forty minutes later, after insisting that Dice Duel was an entirely different game, blitzing haphazardly through the rules, and stumbling half-blind through our first game, there wasn’t a person at the table who wasn’t itching to give it another spin. When a game starts out a victim of prejudice and still wins over your heart, you know you’ve got a winner.
Discs of Indines
I don’t “get” Level 99 Games’ World of Indines setting. One minute its characters are brawling in the streets, the next they’re brawling in bars — I think I follow so far — and five minutes later they’re laughing over a friendly game of volleyball or soccer or speed-racer or something, and suddenly I’m not sure I grasp the nuances of this relationship. Weren’t they just barely angry with each other? Why are they now pals with that demon-faced dude? Are they just getting along so the artist won’t have to come up with a new set of fifty cutesy characters and the writer won’t have to invent fifty new names? Or is there really some sort of acid-trip story arc going on over here?
None of these fascinating question have anything to do with Disc Duelers, the latest title in the World of Indines. Flicking, on the other hand? Flicking has a lot to do with it.
Boremachine: High Command
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a publisher in possession of an intellectual property must be in want of a deck-building game. At least, that was probably the thought on the minds of the bigwigs at Privateer Press when they decided to slap together a deck-building game of their very own. Then, in a sign of things to come, they named their new baby Warmachine: High Command, just in case you were expecting something fresh and exciting.
See, unless their goal was to become the proud owners of the most boring and least inspired deck-building game of the year, their investment didn’t quite pan out.
The World’s First Real-Time Bar Fight Sim
The good ole saloon fight was basically the Old West equivalent of boardgaming. Feel free to fill in the blanks of this metaphor on your own.
Enter 7-Card Slugfest. This isn’t the first game to tackle the “bar fight” as its subject matter, though it’s definitely the first real-time bar fighting game. Y’know, short of actually punching someone in the face in a bar, because that gets pretty real-time too. 7-Card Slugfest is much less likely to end with a hospital visit, though anything’s possible when it’s set in the Level 99 Games World of Indines, which as far as I can tell is a colorful fantasy universe where everyone is perpetually pummeling everyone else in the face, whether Street Fighter-style in the BattleCON: War/Devastation of Indines games, as 8-bit phalanxes in Pixel Tactics, flicked discs in Disc Duelers, or, in this case, as a hot mess of raging testosterone in a poorly-lit tavern.
Alone Time: Three Sieges
The ever-prolific Todd Sanders is something of a patron saint for us solo-flying boardgamers, which is why I’ve minted a series of collectible totems you can carry in your pocket. Just incant Todd’s name three times (in the dark, looking into a mirror, gnawing a sprig of Conium maculatum between your molars) (please don’t swallow) and rub the totem betwixt pinkie and the back of your thumb to have one of Todd’s solo games teleported directly to your location — okay, okay, I didn’t get around to finishing them. Turns out black magic is harder than the manuals made out.
Instead, I’ve previously covered a couple titles from his Shadows Upon Lassadar series here on Alone Time, and I recently finished playing the entire second Lassadar trilogy. So you’re in luck, because I’m ready to tell you about not one, not two, but three solo games (because trilogy apparently means three. Huh!).
Buckle up! On page two, we’re talking about the Siege At Dalnish.
Our Quiet Year: The Index
I recently finished a four-session play of the fantastic story-telling and map-drawing game The Quiet Year from Buried Without Ceremony, easily one of the indie-est board/card game designers I’ve had the pleasure of hearing about these last few years. The Quiet Year also happens to be one of the few boardgames I’ll gladly file under my “Why Games Matter” tag — it’s nothing short of compelling the way it assembles totally unique stories by a process of creative collision. It isn’t always an easy game to play, but it’s definitely a worthwhile one, if only because it will give you a window into your friends’ weird imaginations. I guarantee you’ll be surprised by what they come up with.
“But what is The Quiet Year, really?” you ask. Sorry, but one cannot be told what The Quiet Year is. I mean, you totally can be told what it is, but not here in the introduction. That’s an unreasonable expectation. The only solution is to read on.
Scoundrels of Skullport/Undermountain
Besides lauding its phenomenal box, I never really got around to talking about Lords of Waterdeep, the labor administration simulator set in D&D’s City of Splendors. For what it’s worth, it was probably my favorite worker-placement game — scratch that, it was the one that bored me least. Even with its ever-evolving city, myriad quests, and cutthroat intrigue, it remained a solid “pretty good” with me. That’s probably why I never wrote about it. You folks don’t pay me read Space-Biff! for chatter about how a game is perfectly decent and it’ll appeal to a certain type of person; you want the latest gossip about my recent engagement to Archipelago or why I plan to bury Mage Tower in the backyard guarded by the corpse of my reanimated pit bull.
So it was a pleasant surprise to discover that Scoundrels of Skullport, the recent expansion for Lords of Waterdeep, takes a game I wasn’t particularly excited about and transforms it into something that’s really rather good.
SPACE-BIFF! 