Blog Archives
The Mythotopia Mallet
Martin Wallace has already earned the distinction of being one of my favorite game designers this year thanks to his wonderful and anarchic A Study in Emerald, which casts its players as saboteurs, detectives, and political agitators fighting against (or secretly supporting) their alien overlords during the dawn of the 20th century. It’s basically the unholy spawn of H.P. Lovecraft and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and as far as genre mashups go, that’s the one that pushes all my buttons with squamous webbed toes. Which is why, upon hearing that Wallace was making another deck-building-on-a-map hybrid, I did a little happy-dance.
Sadly, Mythotopia is more of a spiritual successor to Wallace’s earlier title A Few Acres of Snow, a game I only played once and wasn’t particularly taken with — a relief, as it later turned out that a single strategy (ominously deemed the Halifax Hammer) was so potent that all other strategies soon crumbled before it.
The question, then, is whether Mythotopia transcends that earlier game’s shortcomings, or if there’s a Mythotopia Mallet waiting to fall.
A Study in Hodgepodge
By the year 1882, the Old Ones have already ruled the planet for seven hundred years. They sit upon the thrones that may have otherwise held human occupants, and their whims and appetites are law. All of humanity is a plaything, a subject, the victim of powers beyond their comprehension. For the foreseeable future, as with the known past, there is no hope that mankind might cast off the shackles of eldritch oppression, might seize what is theirs and awaken to a new dawn.
That is, until the invention of dynamite.
This is the bleak world of A Study in Emerald by Martin Wallace, an inverted — or rather, a perverted — take on the era of Sherlock Holmes, full of all the real-world romance of anarchism, but without all the unnecessary guilt over exploding royalty. Since they’re, y’know, aliens.
SPACE-BIFF! 