Blog Archives
Christ and His Saints Were Asleep
Hot take: any time period dubbed “THE ANARCHY” was probably a bummer. The specific Anarchy referred to in The Anarchy, the latest flip-and-write game by Bobby Hill, was a fifteen-year war of succession fought between the Empress Matilda and King Stephen across Normandy and southern England during the twelfth century. Which, in case you missed the memo on the merits of every century, was itself something of a bummer.
Here’s the good news. While The Anarchy might have been a big ole stink-pickle for everyone involved, Hill’s version offers the exact opposite. Building on the systems he established in Hadrian’s Wall, this is a complex but thrilling portrayal of Medieval warfare, tower defense, and brewing, with a heady dose of modern combo-building for good effect.
Stuck in the Midden with You
The oldest known evidence of human habitation on the Orkney Islands, the archipelago off the northern coast of Scotland, is a charred hazelnut shell and some thousands of flint fragments, variously dated to either the seventh or eighth millennium BCE. That’s a long time ago. A dang long time. Later evidence is more impressive, standing henges and stone farmsteads, but those simple tools confirm that humans first came to Orkney not long after the glaciers receded to hunt, forage, and eventually heap together so much garbage (mostly shells) that later generations would repurpose the refuse into the foundations for their settlements.
Skara Brae, named for the largest of those settlements, is another historical title by Shem Phillips. I’ll confess I went into Phillips’ latest with some reluctance after Ezra and Nehemiah showed such a lack of care for its history. To my relief, Skara Brae is on surer footing, opening a limited but compelling window onto the daily lives of its characters.
The Gone Samaritan
It’s a rare board game that leaves me as conflicted as Ezra and Nehemiah, the latest creation from design duo Shem Phillips and Sam Macdonald.
Set during the resettlement of Jerusalem following the Babylonian Captivity, it sees players rebuilding the destroyed temple and walls of the city, strengthening the priestly classes, and translating and preaching the torah. As much a work of Biblical exegesis as it is a plaything, it calls to mind the golden darics mentioned by its sources: where one side of these coins features an expressive slice of history, the other is little more than an empty divot.
More Like Hadrian’s Pathetic Ditch
It isn’t that I dislike the entire roll-and-write/flip-and-write genre. It’s that the genre never grew past its infancy. There are exceptions. To give one example, I recently enjoyed Steven Aramini’s Fliptown enough to name it one of my favorite titles of 2023. For the most part, though, these games feel more like proofs of concept than something I’d elect to drag off the shelf.
That is, until I played Bobby Hill’s Hadrian’s Wall, a tangle of possessives if ever there was one. I’ll do one better: This is Dan Thurot’s Bobby Hill’s Hadrian’s Wall review.
Chaos. Order. Back Together.
I’ll confess I have no idea what’s going on in Circadians: Chaos Order, the handsome but oh-so-drab title by Sam Macdonald and Zach Smith. Six factions, their skin tones and general aesthetic helpfully color-coded, have gone to war. What are they warring over? What are these strange artifacts? Is this what it would be like to dip into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Avengers: Endgame? Am I ignorant because I didn’t play the previous title, Circadians: First Light? Must board games have cinematic universes too?
Never mind all that. Klaxons are sounding. Missiles are incoming. We dive into battle — by setting some prices. Booyah.
SPACE-BIFF! 