Something I’ve always appreciated about John Clowdus’s games is the way they evoke larger worlds with two sentences and a half-dozen illustrations. In the Shadow of Atlas, for instance, speaks to the way extra-solar colonization will necessarily change us, physically and socially both. Some of those changes look pretty good from where I’m sitting. I wouldn’t mind being a member of the Laverna Order and sashaying around with a fur-trimmed coat and saber. Others are more mixed, like becoming one of the clone-slugs of the Janus Order. These dudes can step into any other role. Which might seem nifty until you realize they’d be the underpaid substitute teachers of the twenty-ninth century.

Or maybe In the Shadow of Atlas is just another lane battler. Not that that’d be a bad thing. Clowdus has long established himself as one of the form’s most studied hands, and this title demonstrates that he’s still shaking up the genre.

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