Blog Archives
Sun Besties!
At the risk of sounding like a backwater bumpkin, I’ll admit I don’t know much about Inca mythology. After playing Ayar: Children of the Sun, the latest collaboration between Fabio Lopiano and Mandela Fernández-Grandon after last year’s overstuffed Sankoré… well, I still couldn’t tell you much. As near as I can tell, we’re following in the footsteps of a creator god’s grandchildren, founding civilization in our wake. Planting corn, thatching islands, that sort of thing.
For a nu-euro, that’s par for the course, I suppose.
Not a Blackthorne in Sight
Hard to believe it’s been two years since General Orders: World War II. The brainchild of Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson — and distinct from Undaunted, their other shared WWII series — the inaugural General Orders was an ultralight wargame blended with worker placement. I liked that opening salvo well enough, and despite some hangups there wasn’t any reason to not take a gander at the system’s second outing.
I’m glad I did. General Orders: Sengoku Jidai turns back the calendar to the warring states of 15th century Japan, swapping airplanes and artillery for ashigaru and… well, still artillery, but it’s somewhat less efficacious. More importantly, every detail of Sengoku Jidai, from the game’s more coherent visual direction to its fluctuating battle lines, is punchier and more confident than before. The result is a near-perfect small-box title that packs thunderous drama into a slender half hour.
Oh Friend Ah
Everything I know about ofrendas I either learned from Coco or Spectre. Okay, it isn’t as bad as all that — twenty-five years ago, I also played Grim Fandango.
Regardless, it’s fair to say that I was eager to learn more from Orlando Sá and André Santos’s Ofrenda, the board game version of the practice. I came away surprised by the depth of the gameplay, but no more informed about the particulars.
Sockeye Salmon Slayers
With their bright red scales and barbed mouths, sockeye salmon have always looked to me like an invasive species from some alien moon. That Alaskan brown bears love to eat the things by the hundreds only endears me to them further. Go bears. Get those fish heads.
Peter Ridgeway’s Katmai: The Bears of Brooks River puts these heroes front and center. Two sleuths of twelve bears have staked out a stretch of river and are determined to catch the most fish, jostling for position in the churning waters. Here’s the good part: I learned a little bit about brown bears. Here’s everything else: Katmai doesn’t stack up against its peers.
All Welrod and Good
Every so often I have the opportunity to play what I call an enhanced choose-your-own-adventure game. Not unlike Edward Packer’s beloved children’s series, these are games about making narrative decisions and seeing how they play out, usually with a lot of “turn to page 101” and “turn to entry 344.” The “enhanced” part comes in when these choose-your-own-adventures include tabletop elements from outside the book itself, such as dice rolling, action points, or a story sheet to keep track of narrative consequences — the most recognizable example being, naturally, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy series.
Right up front, here’s my declaration: Dave Neale and David Thompson’s War Story: Occupied France is easily the best of these titles I’ve played. Full stop.
Another Imperium
With a few years behind us, returning to Imperium is like catching up with an old friend. A messy friend, one who hasn’t ever gotten their life together, but a good friend who’s never given me reason to regret their acquaintance. When Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi first unveiled their hybrid deck-builder / civilization game, there was so much material that it had to be split across two separate boxes, Classics and Legends. Horizons adds half as much again to the collection, and shows these designers once again at their most creative.
Daunted: Battle of Britain
Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson’s Undaunted has grown storied over the past half-decade, crossing the beaches of Normandy, the sands of North Africa, and most recently the besieged city of Stalingrad. That last installment proved one of my favorite light wargame experiences of all time, a grueling and personal perspective on the Second World War’s turning point.
Now the series’ fourth major installment is taking us to the skies. I’m trying to decide whether the letdown it fills me with is thanks to the furious pitch and ambitious quality of Stalingrad or because this system is ill-suited to what Battle of Britain is trying to accomplish.
Skipping School
Not many board games make me tired. Sankoré is the rare exception. As a follow-up to Merv: Heart of the Silk Road, it has certainly shed the reservation I felt at the time, that it was a boilerplate nu-Euro with a wonderful action selection system.
This time, Fabio Lopiano, working alongside Mandela Fernandez-Grandon, has crafted a nu-Euro that does everything at once. Too many things at once. After I prepped for its requisite second and third plays, a setup I clocked at twenty-two minutes, everybody filed in and groaned. It’s not a good sign when people are weary before a session has even started.
Werner Placement
Despite its shared parentage, General Orders: World War II comes across as the antithesis of Undaunted: Stalingrad. Where Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson’s magnum opus of the Undaunted line was sprawling and personal, General Orders is a trifle, two heavily abstracted battles that say little about their subject matter, but really doesn’t care to in the first place.
It’s rather good, a few complaints aside.
Space-Cast! #31. An Undaunting Conversation
As befits as large and ambitious a game as Undaunted: Stalingrad, today on the Space-Cast! we’re joined by Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson to discuss WWII, inclusions and omissions in historical games, and whether board games are art — or at least what it means for them to have authorial intent.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
SPACE-BIFF! 