Blog Archives
The Guild of Guilt-Free Explorers
Despite containing no pencils, dry-erase pens, pads of paper or laminated cards, Matthew Dunstan and Brett Gilbert’s The Guild of Merchant Explorers is as much a flip-and-write game as any other. It’s the feel that counts. A single card is flipped. Everybody uses that card to fill in spaces on their personal map. Everybody suffers or profits together. At least initially. After a few cards, whether any given flip helps or hinders your expansion is a function of planning and foresight rather than mere chance.
What sets this title apart from its peers, though, is the way it resets between eras.
Move Along Home: The Board Game
I think it’s fair to say that Star Trek never really understood games or why people play them. Watching Starfleet officers spit nonsense rhymes while playing hopscotch wasn’t exactly the high point of Deep Space Nine. Another time, The Next Generation introduced a free-to-play app game to the crew of the Enterprise. After the adults displayed all the willpower of a kid with a Fortnite addiction and unfettered access to his mom’s credit card, Wesley Crusher saved the day. Probably because he was the only youngster. Desensitized little goblin.
Fortunately, Geoff Engelstein didn’t adapt either of those episodes for his third outing of Super-Skill Pinball.
Arcs Avec Arc
Where last week’s examination of Arcs, the upcoming title from Cole Wehrle and Leder Games, focused on Arcs as an experience meant to be completed within a single session, today we’re delving into the “arcs” of Arcs. That’s right: I’ve completed two full campaigns. That’s six plays, a few branching narratives, and two galaxies brought under the reign of a single power.
I have some thoughts.
They See Me Rollin’
When I’m bored, I add more hours to Spelunky. When Jamey Stegmaier is bored, he designs roll-and-write games. That’s the origin story for Rolling Realms, born of COVID downtime and one of the genre’s greatest strengths: the ability to be played by large groups, even when they don’t occupy the same room.
To my surprise, it’s rather charming.
Arcs Sans Arc
Whenever I mention Arcs, the upcoming four-letter title from Cole Wehrle and Leder Games, everybody wants to know about the campaign, the three-session “arc” that will chart the ascent of four players amid the decline of a stellar empire. It’s a fascinating premise, and not only because it formalizes the playful and open-ended concept of a non-legacy board game that rolls over from one session to the next that Wehrle introduced in Oath.
This preview is not about that. At some point in development, Arcs was split in two. To mitigate costs and the danger of tossing a gaming group out the airlock before they’ve had a chance to suit up, the campaign is now a day-one expansion. Arcs, the core game anyway, is now a single-session board game. Which up until very recently was just called “a board game.”
How is Arcs sans arc? Let’s take a look.
One Through Nine
Every so often a publisher will send me a game out of the blue. I try to take a look at every title I’m sent, but when I’m working through a backlog twenty boxes deep, I’ll confess it isn’t beyond me to judge a game by its lid. Eternal shame, I know. But look at this thing. TEN? That’s the name of your game? TEN? With that epileptic seizure of colors passing for box art? I only knew Shawn Stankewich, Robert Melvin, and Molly Johnson from Point Salad, but, uh, I’m not especially fond of Point Salad. Onto the pile of giveaways it went.
And then something funny happened. TEN got nominated for a Golden Geek. My curiosity was piqued. It was sitting right there, after all. How much opportunity cost could it represent? At worst, it would take fifteen minutes to learn and play. Fifteen lousy minutes. It’s a rare game night if we don’t chat about Geoff’s fashion sense for at least twenty. Might as well give it a try.
Since then, we’ve hardly hosted a game night without playing a round or two of TEN. It’s phenomenal.
Cryptidcurrency
Hal Duncan and Ruth Veevers’ Cryptid had a lovely idea at its core. What if the world’s undusted corners are the habitat of the Loch Nessies and Bigfeet and every other unseen (but much reported) creature? While the game itself didn’t do much to sell the idea that you were documenting actual cryptids, it had cleverness in spades.
Cryptid: Urban Legends doubles down on the idea that you’re chasing a yet-to-be-catalogued creature. Unfortunately, that’s about all it does.
But Who’s Fate?
You may have heard the story about the fertility doctor who donated his own, ah, material to his patients, thereby fathering a host of children. A surprising amount of ancient mythology falls back on pretty much the same concept. So does Veiled Fate, the game of questionable divine parentage by Austin Harrison, Max Anderson, and Zac Dixon. Everybody at the table is a god. The nine heroes roaming the board are their demigod offspring. Nobody’s sure who belongs to whom. When will we get the daytime talk show version?
I Have Three Sisters
Pitch me the words “three sisters” and my mind reacts in this precise order.
- My actual three sisters.
- The play “Three Sisters” by Anton Chekhov.
- Three Sisters Peak on the north end of Salt Lake Valley.
- The “three sisters” standing stones down in Goblin Valley.
- The “three sisters” even farther south in Monument Valley.
- The Three Sisters method of companion planting, in which Native Americans planted maize, winter squash, and climbing beans together for their mutual benefits.
- Now also a roll-and-write game by Ben Pinchback and Matt Riddle.
- There’s a tomato plant called Three Sisters that grows one of three different sizes of fruit.
- Seems a lot of people had three sisters.
Razing Wonderland
It’s madness that Wonderland’s War works as well as it does. Codesigned by Tim Eisner, Ben Eisner, and Ian Moss, the description is a mishmash of play verbs and unnecessary plastic minis. An area-control bag-building press-your-luck rondel-drafting wagering game? Leave the sequence adjectives to the professionals, honey.
The avalanche works in part because of the game’s setting. Lewis Carroll’s madhouse world is as zany and starkly drawn as ever, and only made slightly more madcap by the world war currently scouring its environs. The other part is more to the credit of its design team: it’s rare to be treated to a game quite this funny.
SPACE-BIFF! 