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Goop vs. Goop
Board games aren’t always very good at themes. Actual themes, as in underlying messages, not “themes,” the settings that appear in a game’s artwork. One of the hobby’s essential exceptions was Sol: Last Days of a Star. Set in some distant future, players were asked to harvest their dying star’s last embers to propel an ark into the great beyond, only to realize that their efforts were hastening the same solar death they were striving to outrun. Part climate change parable, part meditation on thermodynamics, Sol was not only playable, it was a genuine effort at using gameplay to tell a worthwhile story.
Now Ryan Spangler, one of Sol’s three creators, is back with Organism. Where Sol propelled itself outward, Organism utilizes the smallest possible lens to zoom all the way down. In a way, its diminutive subject matter is even more meaningful than Sol’s space opera. I’m speaking, of course, about the building blocks of life.
Solar Flair
A dying star. A utopian civilization becoming less utopian as it grows more desperate. A cohesive union splintering into factions. A bitter race to escape the coming supernova. The lingering suspicion that all of this was your fault.
It’s rare that I’ll read the fluff for a board game — if there’s one thing designing a board game doesn’t qualify you for, it’s writing compelling fiction — but Sol: Last Days of a Star almost convinced me to go all the way. Almost. The included mythos book, with its short stories about characters the game never reveals and motivations that are distant from what you’ll actually be doing, was a step too far. All it earned was a quick skim. What does Sol think it is? The Canterbury Tales?
Not quite, but it is something rare: an actual honest-to-goodness science fiction game. With something to say. And systems that actually support its message.
