Blog Archives
Legend Became Tabletop
Countless players and critics have already pointed out that Matt Leacock’s Fate of the Fellowship is magnificent, and there will be no hot takes here. I’d call it the finest Lord of the Rings board game ever made, but I still have War of the Ring sitting unplayed on a shelf somewhere, and anyway there are so many wonderful tabletop adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy that any quibbles would be matters of taste more than quality.
What impresses me the most is the granular stuff. The sheer amount of love poured into the adaptation, of course, but also the way Leacock has refined his original Pandemic formula until it’s all but unrecognizable. The crucial elements are present, but Fate is so far removed from that disease-inoculating 2008 original that it’s like observing evolution in freeze-frame.
This Is Not a Review of a Pipe
All I play anymore is trick-takers. And while some of them are challenging, others risk disappearing down their own pipe-hole in a semantic puff of tobacco smoke.
That isn’t a bad thing. This Is Not a Game About a Pipe, designed by Mac McAnally, may have started as a riff on René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, but it’s a respectable little ditty in its own right, in no small part thanks to the way it forces players to construct studiously sensical statements about their cards.
Unnameable
After the first day of SDHistCon, where I played three games about opium peddling, I figured the second would be easier on my stomach. I could not have been more wrong.
It has no name. Its designer doesn’t want to be credited. Of all the many board games I’ve played, it’s the one that left me the most shaken.
“You are four senior Nazi officials,” our Teacher tells us. His hands are trembling. His mouth quirks between solemnity and something like an apologetic smile. “And you are conducting the Final Solution.”
EXTREME CONTENT AND SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT FROM THIS POINT. PROCEED ONLY AT YOUR OWN RISK.
Trick-Taking’s Back on the Menu, Boys!
The problem with sequels, especially in board games where sequels are mechanical artifacts first and narrative artifacts a distant second if at all, is that there isn’t necessarily more to say about them. Last year, Bryan Bornmueller’s The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game was one of my favorites. Now, as was foretold by some lady peering into a bowl of water, The Two Towers: Trick-Taking Game is here.
It’s more of the same.
That’s precisely what I wanted it to be. But it doesn’t necessarily make for interesting breakfast reading.
Nebulae, Medusae… Crownae?
Yesterday on BlueSky, Marceline Leiman asked a great question. Using only one or two extremely vague words, how would I describe the titles on offer at this year’s Indie Games Night Market?
Now that I’ve given it some thought, I think I have an answer, although perhaps it’s more concrete than she was looking for. More even than last year, these games seem like they’re pushing boundaries. They capture the spirit of what it means to be “indie.” Not only in the sense that they don’t have publishers. Rather, that they see the hobby from a perspective apart. They know board games; they love board games; they’re in conversation with board games. But more than that, they’re board games as lenses through which one might behold the entirety of the hobby. Its past. Its present. Its future.
How’s that for a wanky answer? Oh well. What follows are three games I love for different reasons, but perhaps love even better for the same reason — because they’re outsiders paying homage to their hobby, but doing so in a way that’s so defiantly indie.
Paper Planes, Coupons, Stencils
We’re only a few days away from the Indie Games Night Market at Pax Unplugged. Funny how time gets away from us. Don’t worry, that’s less a plaintive cry about my fading youth than a statement on my incapability to properly schedule these things.
Fortunately, three of these titles fall into roughly the same category. The same two categories, even! These are tactile games that play best with family. Let’s take a look.
SDHist 2025: Day of Copium
This past weekend, I attended SDHistCon in San Diego, the most interesting board gaming convention currently running. Here are the official snapshots: the Summit Award went to War Story: Occupied France, the Bobby Nunes Memorial Award went to Amabel Holland’s video on the preservation of Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ — thankfully beating out some doofus piece by yours truly — and I spent Saturday dealing drugs to unsuspecting victims.
In board games, mother. In board games.
Joy in the Burnout
Eric Dittmore’s Adulting is not Johnny O’Neal’s Adulthood, although it’s inevitable I’ll mix up the two titles somewhere in the text of this review. In fact, I already have! Twice! Once in the permalink and again in the tags! It happened about ten seconds apart, and after the first time I even reminded myself to never do it again.
In a way, though, that’s about as strong a metaphor for Adulthood — dammit, Adulting — as one could hope for. This is another forthcoming Indie Games Night Market title, and it might be the strongest of the year’s batch, in no small part for how well it represents the challenges of daily adult life.
Atlas Boogied
Something I’ve always appreciated about John Clowdus’s games is the way they evoke larger worlds with two sentences and a half-dozen illustrations. In the Shadow of Atlas, for instance, speaks to the way extra-solar colonization will necessarily change us, physically and socially both. Some of those changes look pretty good from where I’m sitting. I wouldn’t mind being a member of the Laverna Order and sashaying around with a fur-trimmed coat and saber. Others are more mixed, like becoming one of the clone-slugs of the Janus Order. These dudes can step into any other role. Which might seem nifty until you realize they’d be the underpaid substitute teachers of the twenty-ninth century.
Or maybe In the Shadow of Atlas is just another lane battler. Not that that’d be a bad thing. Clowdus has long established himself as one of the form’s most studied hands, and this title demonstrates that he’s still shaking up the genre.
Robots Punching Robots
space-biff: noun (informal) A sudden, sharp blow or punch or lasering, as delivered from a robot or spaceship to another robot or spaceship
I believe it goes without saying that any game about gigantic mechs will receive default coverage here on the site that is their namesake. CogDrive Neon isn’t John Clowdus’s first game about gigantic mechs slugging other gigantic mechs. But is it his… most recent? Yep. It’s definitely that.
SPACE-BIFF! 