Blog Archives
Our Quiet Year: Autumn
Spring. Summer. Twenty-four weeks have passed in our telling of The Quiet Year, a story-weaving and map-drawing game from Buried Without Ceremony, and our year has been anything but quiet. Our community has shattered into far-flung splinters, tiny communities that were once part of a greater family, all of them grieving past losses, all of them seeking redress — well, except for the goatherds. They just watch their goats get it on all day. But everyone other than them is having a pretty rough time.
And this season looks like it might prove to be the roughest time of all. There’s a reason the folks of the Former World used to call it “The Fall,” after all.
Play Coin Age for Only $1.56!
Hold on, I know what you’re thinking: A buck fifty-six? Dan, you hyperbolic hipster! Surely, no game worth playing could be so affordable! Alright then, I have a pair of rebuttals for you. First, you’re using the word “hipster” far too haphazardly, and it makes you sound like a YouTube commenter; and second, if you think cost is the best indicator of a game’s quality, then surely you haven’t heard of Adam P. McIver, Project Game, or the freshly-minted Coin Age.
Oh, and the best part? Since you can print and play it right now (proof!), you can even use some of that $1.56 for dollar menu food once you wrap up your game.
Tower Defense, Sans Towers
You’d think the tower defense genre would be low hanging fruit for board and card games, what with the board-style setup and the dumb “AI” behaviors that could easily be handled by the flipping of a card; but while there are a few contenders out there — Castle Panic pops into my head most readily — Mage Tower from Super Mega Games is probably the first I’ve seen to actually bill itself as a “Tower Defense” game. Even so, it’s going to take more than a genre-baiting tagline to convince me your game is worth its weight. How hefty is Mage Tower, you ask? Not to discourage you from reading the review, but this one is light.
Our Quiet Year: Summer
Welcome to part two of our series about The Quiet Year, a storytelling and map-drawing game from one-man outfit Buried Without Ceremony! After the upheaval and social tensions that marked the end of spring and caused our community to worry that perhaps our new home wasn’t quite the fresh start we were hoping for, the summer season has fallen across the landscape like a warm blanket, and our small family of nomads is looking forward to mending divisions, securing borders, and working towards a brighter future — or a quiet year, if you prefer.
If you haven’t already, it would be a good idea to read about what happened to our family back in spring before continuing on with this season, because there’s far too much to relate to spend time catching up.
Omen: The Value of Olympus
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote a review about a nifty little title from Small Box Games called Omen: A Reign of War. I don’t recommend you read it, as it’s a relic from back when I believed good boardgame reviews were 85% rules regurgitation and 15% quality, but in my defense, I was young. At any rate, I gave Omen a glowing review. Unfortunately, it could be a huge pain to get a hold of thanks to John Clowdus’s small business model, which sounds like a great setup for an independent game designer, but meant SBG could only handle lighter print runs.
Flash forward to now. Small Box Games is taking preorders of the upcoming Omen: A Reign of War: Olympus Edition, a new printing run of the beloved but hard-to-acquire original — except that it isn’t quite exactly the same as the original. A few people have voiced some concerns about the changes that will be made for the Olympus Edition, and I’m here to talk about that.
Alone Time: Robin Crusoe
Ahoy there! I’m filling in for Dan today. He told me that this “Alone Time” thing is a series about boardgames you can play by yourself, and there’s none better qualified to tell you about the solitary life than I, Robin Crusoe, of York, mariner, who lived one and ten days, all alone on an uninhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; having been cast on shore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perished (ha!), with an account how I was at last strangely delivered by pirates. It’s pretty damn gripping, really.
Before we begin my amazing tale, Dan left me some notes to share with you. Let’s see here… something about an Ignacy Trzewiczek, who made a game about a convoy that Dan liked… best cooperative and solo game of the year… something like that. Sorry, the ink got damp on my last adventure. Sounds like it was boring anyway.
With that dull stuff out of the way, let’s talk about my adventure!
Our Quiet Year: Spring
Today marks the beginning of a short series about storytelling card game The Quiet Year from Joe Mcdaldno’s Buried Without Ceremony. This designer is so indie, you can pay for his games by doing good deeds. Awesome.
This is going to be a little different than most of the stuff I write here at Space-Biff! As The Quiet Year is a storytelling game, I’m only going to talk about the rules a little each week. The rest is about the story four people crafted about our community; its hopes, fears, and struggles; and, eventually, its end.
There’s Always a Board: Bioshock Infinite
I would have loved to begin this review with some snark about how there’s never been a good boardgame based off a videogame, but that’s not even remotely close to true. In fact, videogame licenses generally seem to fare better than their television and movie counterparts. There are all sorts of examples: Civilization, Doom, Starcraft, Warcraft, Age of Empires III: Age of Discovery, Gears of War, the Resident Evil deckbuilder — crud, there’s even an okay version of Risk with a pasted-on Halo theme. And that’s only counting direct licenses, not the hundreds of titles that draw inspiration from the digital; take Christian Marcussen, for example, whose Clash of Cultures and Merchants & Marauders elevate Sid Meier imitation to an art form.
But it’s time for all of those games to step aside, because videogame-licensed boardgames have found their One True King. His name is Bioshock Infinite: The Siege of Columbia, and if we really follow this metaphor to its uncomfortable conclusion, then Plaid Hat Games is his mom.
Tactile/Dexterity/Component Quest
One of my favorite things about boardgaming is the innate tactility of the hobby. It’s much the same reason I prefer bound books to digital copies — I love the weight of pushing a threatening piece across a board, the rattle of dice at a critical moment, the delightful textures of cardboard and plastic. I even love those crappy cards every successful Kickstarter project seems to be using these days, the cheap ones that feel like they’re flaking at a molecular level and make your hands feel weird until you wash them. And I love the way designers come up with clever ways of making this hobby even more touchable, from hiding bonus cards beneath your battle cards in Kemet to the information-concealing shields of BSG Express and Archipelago to real-space games like Master Plan.
And if I’m nerding out about those mechanics, you know I’m having a straight-up aneurism over the sheer sensory overload of dexterity games. Because, hey, if there’s one genre that gets the importance of “feel” in boardgames, it’s games like Catacombs, Ascending Empires, and Cube Quest.
Vanguards vs. Fallen Kingdom, Round II
Summoner Wars is so full of bitter rivalries that it could be about pro wrestling, but all of them pale in comparison to the conflict between the sickeningly rotten Fallen Kingdom and the sickeningly noble Vanguards. Now, with the appearance of an additional summoner on each side, these two factions are once again squaring off on the battlefield — which means Somerset and I are squaring off again too.
SPACE-BIFF! 