Blog Archives
Don’t Play with Matches
I want to state this first, for the record: the container for Matches, the trick-taking-ish game by Daniel McKinley, is maybe my favorite board game box in recent memory. It slides open like an actual box of matches! Its color palette is dingy and slightly burned! The sides are embossed to look and feel like striker strips! Ten out of ten. Yeoman’s work.
If only the game within the box had been better.
Return to Return to Dark Tower
I’m wary of expansions. Doubly so when it comes to expansions for adventure games. Back in its heyday, Fantasy Flight Games couldn’t resist the temptation to overload any successful title with additional cruft. New decks, new characters, new sideboards. Shudder. So many sideboards. After a couple expansions, setup became so daunting that it was easier to leave it all in the closet.
So when Alliances and Covenant, the first two expansions for Return to Dark Tower, showed up on my doorstep, I was both excited and apprehensive. No small measure of the original remake’s appeal was its dedication to a streamlined experience. Would the addition of new stuff be the accidental conclusion of my love affair with Return to Dark Tower?
I shouldn’t have worried. As usual, the crew at Restoration Games has a preternatural understanding of what makes games tick. What follows are three ways that these expansions, in particular Covenant, get it right.
Dungeon Accountant
Remember Dungeon Keeper? I was only a kid when I played it off of a PC Gamer demo disc, just a little older than my daughter is now. At that age, playing as the baddie was transgressive, a dark secret I never could have shared with my parents. Looking back, they probably would have laughed. Or asked whether it was satanic. It’s hard to know which phase we were in at the time.
Jordy Adan’s Stonespine Architects is set in the same shared universe as Roll Player, Dawn of Ulos, and his own Cartographers. It’s about building a dungeon, carved in stone and filled with deadly traps and monsters. Like the other titles in the Roll Player line — and very much unlike Dungeon Keeper to an eleven-year-old — it’s a safe and colorful place, inoffensive, and certainly absent any form-fitting black leather. As drafting and tile-laying games go, it’s pretty good.
The Galaxy Is on Orion’s Belt
Orion Duel is the sort of game fifth-dimensional beings play while waiting for the next Big Crunch to reset the universe. Designed by Alberto Branciari and Andrea Mainini, this is an abstract that nominally resembles John Nash’s classic game Hex, but with a few major wrinkles thrown in for good measure. I am very bad at it.
Glimmer, Lantern, Glimmer
When I looked at Kinfire Delve: Vainglory’s Grotto last month, my conclusion was optimistic. Kevin Wilson’s sidequest in his Kinfire universe was rather good, with colorfully realized characters and a solid deck-delving system. If it also happened to be too easy, its titular villain wadding up like a spent hankie, well, at least our heroes were relieved to not require a potion to recoil their intestines.
The second set, Scorn’s Stockade, continues the spin-off’s tradition of pairing a negative trait with a generic destination. Mechanically it’s the same game, but what a difference the new cards make.
From Grave to Cradle
If I keep saying the same thing it risks becoming a running joke, but even compared to People Power and The British Way, Vijayanagara offers an easy entry point to the formidable COIN Series. Designed by a quartet of designers — Cory Graham, Mathieu Johnson, Aman Matthews, and Saverio Spagnolie — this is the first in GMT Games’ Irregular Conflicts Series. The pitch is that this is not your ordinary COIN, with all the procedure and chrome the title implies. These are experiments, salvaging the system’s baseline concepts and taking them in a new direction.
I’m not so sure about that. Vijayanagara is about as COIN as they come. That doesn’t stop it from being a perfect gateway drug for an unsuspecting playmate. This one goes down smooth.
Three Little Kittens Awaiting Ignition
Apparently “mlem” is a meme designating the noise a cat makes when it licks its own nose… and that’s just about enough internet for today, thank you.
Fortunately, Reiner Knizia’s MLEM: Space Agency, despite making my face feel moist every time I hear it, is one of the good doctor’s better dice games.
I Want to Go to There
Josh Wood is the designer behind what I consider the finest tableau-building game of all time: Santa Monica. What sets it apart from its peers is a willingness to let players not only create a scenic space, but also explore that space, moving tourists and townies along its beaches and storefronts. The effect is profound, elevating cards from mere stockpiles of victory points to textured terrain that must be traversed.
Wood’s next stab at the genre is Let’s Go! To Japan, a curiously titled game that feels like it’s trying to launch a brand. Like Santa Monica, Wood invests his players in scenic locales and tangible geographies. I’m going to do my darnedest not to draw too many comparisons between them.
Upscale Court Officiants
Let’s get this out of the way up front: yes, Courtisans is a funny title for a card game. Designed by Romaric Galonnier and Anthony Perone, one presumes the title’s French meaning hasn’t gone the way of the English word “courtesans” to imply upscale prostitutes. Or maybe it has. I really couldn’t tell you.
Look, it doesn’t matter. Whether it’s about upscale prostitutes, upscale courtiers, or upscale court officiants, Courtisans is a shockingly good game with almost zero rules overhead.
New Year, Old Year: 2021 Revisited
The wheel has turned again. And again. Although this installment of New Year, Old Year is a full year late, I’ve already explained my growing reservations with this recurring retrospective, so there’s no reason to belabor the point. Instead, here we are, on the precipice of revisiting the titles I considered the best of 2021. What did I get right? What did I get wrong? The answers may surprise you.
Or they may not. Who can tell. Not me. Either way, we’re doing things a little differently now. Rather than dividing everything into binary right/wrong categories, it seems more helpful to look back on each title in turn. Because sometimes I got things right and wrong at the same time. Nuance, y’all.
SPACE-BIFF! 