Blog Archives
No County for Young Men
Harrow County, the second title from Off the Page Games, lends itself to a parable. Like its predecessor, Mind MGMT, there’s an act of evocation going on here, a summoning ritual meant to call to mind the comic book by Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook. But somewhere along the way, the mixture grew too saturated. Whatever ingredients were put into this moonshine, they swelled up and eventually burst the mason jars that contained them. It’s a reminder that good game design is often about subtracting everything that doesn’t fit.
What would have comfortably fit into Harrow County hovers at roughly seventy percent of what the game gives us.
No County for Old Men
After I declared Mind MGMT my favorite game of 2021, the pressure must have been unbearable for Off the Page Games. All right, all right, I doubt they noticed. Still, Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim’s adaptation of Matt Kindt’s comic series was such a zinger that any follow-up would be swimming upriver.
Case in point, Harrow County: The Game of Gothic Conflict, co-designed by Cormier and Shad Miller as an adaptation of the comic series by Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook, which is on Kickstarter for the next two days — yes, I’m running behind — carries itself with an exerted air. It does so many things in a short span of time. Maybe it should have doubled down on two or three.
SPACE-BIFF! 