Blog Archives
Cutting the Cottage Pie
At this point, I don’t believe the fine folks at DVC Games have it in them to publish a bad game. Pacts, for example, is not only a fantastic divide-and-choose game, it’s probably the best example of its ilk.
Maybe that isn’t a tall order. Certainly it would sound more impressive if we were talking about deck-builders or trick-takers. Divide-and-choose is one of those mechanisms everybody understands at an instinctual level. We use it whenever we split a slice of pie. We contemplate it whenever the check comes due at a group dinner. But for all that, it’s never quite found its footing. Open a teach with, “Okay, this is one of those I-divide, you-choose things,” and my mind doesn’t exactly spark with excitement.
Until now. Because Ben Brin has cracked the code. Even though it isn’t quite as offbeat as other DVC titles, Pacts is one of their sharpest offerings yet.
Most Select of Board Games
The temple complex of Ipet-isut, “the most select of places,” today known as Karnak, is unique among Egyptian sites for the sheer duration of its construction. Nearly thirty pharaohs, from the Middle Kingdom to the Greek Ptolemies, added to the complex’s collection of statues, arches, obelisks, columns, hieroglyphs… pretty much anything we associate with “very old building.”
Now Karnak has one more addition: a board game by design collective Jasper Beatrix. Yep, the same folks whose designs I’ve been admiring all year. And like Karnak itself, this one necessitates some excavation.
Categorize My Thing Thing
You can tell that a designer is crushing it when I start mentally checking other games against theirs. Case in point, Jasper Beatrix — a design collective, not a singular person — has now crafted one of my favorite word games in Typeset, one of my favorite tableau-builders via Scream Park, and a pair of deduction titles, Signal and Here Lies, which have more or less ruined other detective games for me. Also, there’s Corvids. There aren’t enough games like Corvids for me to name-check it against.
Thing Thing is Jasper Beatrix’s attempt at a party game. As these things go, it displays the collective’s trademark good humor and cleverness. But it’s also the first of their titles that doesn’t fill me with a desperate need to share it with as many people as possible.
Whispers-in-Leaves
It isn’t often that we can say that a board game has great sound design. When it comes to Corvids, another small-box offering from the creative collective Jasper Beatrix, that’s possibly my favorite thing about the entire game. This one is about birds digging through a trash heap to find the shiniest bits and bobs to decorate their nests. It’s an affecting, gentle exercise occasionally rent by theft and spite.
Space-Cast! #46. Screaming Sherlock
Is Jono Naito-Tetro a designer? A collective? A publisher? ALL OF THE ABOVE? On today’s Space-Cast!, we sit down with Jono to chat about a wide range of exciting titles. From the creative crime-sleuthing of Here Lies to the garbled transmissions of Signal and the unexpected antagonists of Scream Park, join us as we dig into what makes DVC Games one of the most exciting independent publishers operating today.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Fear Factory
Haunted houses aren’t my thing. But games by design collective Jasper Beatrix are very much my thing. When it comes to Scream Park, a drafting game about assembling a seasonal haunted house, I’m glad I took the risk. Not only are there no jump scares for those of us operating above the table, but like the rest of JB’s oeuvre — Typeset, Signal, and Here Lies — Scream Park pulls more weight than first meets the eye.
Here Lies Every Other Detective Game
Dear reader, I think I’m falling in love… with the design collective Jasper Beatrix. Typeset offered our first furtive glance. Signal jumped us to second base. Yop. We move fast. Now that I’ve played Here Lies, we’re already booking venues for the wedding breakfast.
At a glance, Here Lies swims in the same waters as Signal. It’s also a deduction game, a one-plus-many cooperative affair where a lone player works as the “lead investigator,” more or less the silent alien from Signal, here to assist everybody else as they deduce the answers to a secret message. Despite its modal similarities, though, Here Lies carves out its own identity. More than that, it embraces an entirely fresh approach to deduction. There’s nothing quite like it.
A Desire for More Cows
Something is in the air. Unseen. Vibrating. Friscalating. Between A Message from the Stars, City of Six Moons, and Out of Sorts, it almost seems like we’re being prepared for some grand task, an entire species press-ganged into the labor of translating alien missives.
Or maybe I just really like first contact stories.
Signal, created by the design collective Jasper Beatrix, bears a singular honor. This is the best of the recent spate of games about communicating with aliens. But more than that, it’s a game I’ve delayed writing about so I could play it over and over again, reveling in its unparalleled sense of experimentation and discovery.
A Triphthong of Word Games
One of my favorite things about playing and critiquing board games is seeing the way designers can push the same mechanism in different directions. It’s not unlike a creative writing exercise in which everybody begins with a single prompt yet still produces their own individual perspective.
Here’s my latest example: I’ve been playing three word games that all revolve around pulling letters, chit-style, from a container. From that sliver of overlap, three distinct titles emerge, each with their own sensibilities and tics. Rather than spreading them across multiple reviews, I figured we might as well see how they fare in the grammar arena, my totally made-up word game deathmatch.
SPACE-BIFF! 