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A Prickle of Trickers
Say it with me now: All I play anymore is trick-taking games.
Every so often, one comes along that makes me perk up and take note. Which is an exciting (if unfair) way of setting these three Indie Games Night Market games against one another. Three trickers enter. All three leave. But one of them leaves with its head held a little higher than the others.
This Is Not a Review of a Pipe
All I play anymore is trick-takers. And while some of them are challenging, others risk disappearing down their own pipe-hole in a semantic puff of tobacco smoke.
That isn’t a bad thing. This Is Not a Game About a Pipe, designed by Mac McAnally, may have started as a riff on René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, but it’s a respectable little ditty in its own right, in no small part thanks to the way it forces players to construct studiously sensical statements about their cards.
Nebulae, Medusae… Crownae?
Yesterday on BlueSky, Marceline Leiman asked a great question. Using only one or two extremely vague words, how would I describe the titles on offer at this year’s Indie Games Night Market?
Now that I’ve given it some thought, I think I have an answer, although perhaps it’s more concrete than she was looking for. More even than last year, these games seem like they’re pushing boundaries. They capture the spirit of what it means to be “indie.” Not only in the sense that they don’t have publishers. Rather, that they see the hobby from a perspective apart. They know board games; they love board games; they’re in conversation with board games. But more than that, they’re board games as lenses through which one might behold the entirety of the hobby. Its past. Its present. Its future.
How’s that for a wanky answer? Oh well. What follows are three games I love for different reasons, but perhaps love even better for the same reason — because they’re outsiders paying homage to their hobby, but doing so in a way that’s so defiantly indie.
Paper Planes, Coupons, Stencils
We’re only a few days away from the Indie Games Night Market at Pax Unplugged. Funny how time gets away from us. Don’t worry, that’s less a plaintive cry about my fading youth than a statement on my incapability to properly schedule these things.
Fortunately, three of these titles fall into roughly the same category. The same two categories, even! These are tactile games that play best with family. Let’s take a look.
Joy in the Burnout
Eric Dittmore’s Adulting is not Johnny O’Neal’s Adulthood, although it’s inevitable I’ll mix up the two titles somewhere in the text of this review. In fact, I already have! Twice! Once in the permalink and again in the tags! It happened about ten seconds apart, and after the first time I even reminded myself to never do it again.
In a way, though, that’s about as strong a metaphor for Adulthood — dammit, Adulting — as one could hope for. This is another forthcoming Indie Games Night Market title, and it might be the strongest of the year’s batch, in no small part for how well it represents the challenges of daily adult life.
Putting on a Row
Rowin is… not about rowing. Sorry, rowing enthusiasts. You’ve come to the wrong place. Again.
Instead, Rowin is about getting five stones in a row. I suppose that’s how rowing works, if you squint real hard and treat your brain to a few slaps. Designed by Matt Ward and debuting later this month at Pax Unplugged’s Indie Games Night Market, this one’s a standout if only for one reason: it’s not a trick-taker.
Tricker Taker Soldier Spy
It’s that time of year again. The days are getting shorter. The air is starting to nip. And the Indie Games Night Market at PAX Unplugged is only a month away.
After the success of last year’s Indie Market, a greater number of contenders are stepping out of their comfort zone to offer small-batch titles to the public. One of those previous successes, Torchlit, now has a younger brother. And here’s the buried lede: David Spalinski’s followup trick-taker is probably the best example of the genre I’ve played all year.
SPACE-BIFF! 