Blog Archives
Carceral Draftsman
The ‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
That’s the most oft-quoted line from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, probably because it’s such an apt summation from an author who, let’s face it, preferred discursive barrel-rolls to punchy thesis statements. Liberty and discipline are the topics of Dan Bullock’s latest board game, a term I’m employing loosely but not unfavorably. The game in question is called Penitent, it’s about constructing and managing a prison in the early 19th century in the United States, and it’s either the second or fifth of Bullock’s provocations on the issue of justice, depending on how liberally we stretch the concept.
The Goose Will Have Blood
I can’t speak to whether The Gods Will Have Blood, the latest game by Dan Bullock, is a faithful adaptation of Anatole France’s Les Dieux ont soif, but it evokes sensations that only rarely creep into our hobby from literature. Perhaps it would be better to call it an abridgement. At only twenty minutes in length (if that), it packs terrible questions into a pressure cooker that threatens to pop with every flipped card and drawn cube.
SPACE-BIFF! 