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With Friends Like These…
All I play anymore is trick-taking games.
As a genre, they’ve ensnared me with their neurotoxins and begun the process of digestion. Not unlike a sea anemone, come to think of it. That’s the topic of Daniel Newman’s Enemy Anemone, which one suspects was created solely because it’s so fun to pronounce. Fortunately, that’s not all it has going for it. Not unlike yesterday’s Aurum, it has some devious surprises in store.
Spinning Stories
At this level of saturation, I can’t help but wonder if trick-taking games aren’t a little bit like pursuing a graduate degree — to prove your bona fides, you’ve got to make an original contribution to the field. It’s a good thing, then, that the genre sources from an inexhaustible wellspring of creativity. I’ve played well over twenty new trick-takers over the past few months, all of them visibly kin, and it’s a sublime joy to sit down for a session, the basics already sketched out in your mind thanks to a hundred previous titles, and still have no idea what a treat you’re in for.
That’s certainly the case with Tall Tales, an unassuming little trick-taker that joins a long tradition of upending the status quo in exactly the right ways.
Scry Guys
I know an uncanny amount about divination. Not because I believe in the stuff, mind you. It comes up a lot in my work, both as a practice in ancient religion and as a prominent branch in the history of board games.
So when Chris Chan’s Portents first hit my table, I was fascinated to learn which type of cleromancy it would use. Drawing Roman sortes? The knucklebones and dice oracles of astragalomancy? The fateful archery competitions of belomancy? We haven’t even touched upon the really cool ones. Maybe Portents would let us manipulate shards of coconut, or pour molten metal into water and examine the resultant shape’s shadow, or undertake bean magic. Yes, bean magic. Favomancy. It’s shocking how many forms of geomancy used beans. The possibilities for gamification are endless.
Turns out, Portents is about haruspicy via bird parts. And while any self-respecting haruspex would immediately note that it uses the wrong organs, never fear: this one is about fraudsters trying to out-divine one another.
Love Is a Ghost Train Howling
There is something initially morbid about London Necropolis Railway, and not only because Daniel Newman’s latest offering is set during a cholera epidemic and will release in the third calendar year of our own century’s mismanaged public health crisis. The historical Necropolis Railway was the solution to the bodies piling up in the streets, a line only twenty miles long but devoted entirely to the business of death and mourning. In Newman’s care, the whole thing takes on the pallor of a funeral celebrant both jaunty and jaundiced. More than that, it’s imbued with an uncommon dignity.
SPACE-BIFF! 