Blog Archives
RETXXIIIRN
Remember how last year all those RETVRN bros couldn’t stop talking about how they meditate on the fate of Ancient Rome every single day, but when pressed it turned out they just had a big squishy for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator? Well, here’s a part of our distant heritage I think about daily: that holiday in the middle of March when we all get together and stab our nation’s self-proclaimed dictator.
23 Knives, designed by Tyler J. Brown, whisks us to that fateful day in 44 BCE when a senatorial conspiracy resulted in Julius Caesar lying dead at the feet of a statue of Pompey the Great, his onetime ally, son-in-law, and eventual rival in the preceding civil war. Those Romans sure loved their little ironies.
Wrinkles in Space-Time
I don’t know if time is a flat circle, but it does have a way of bringing us back around to where we started. Ascending Empires, Ian Cooper’s mashup of space exploration, empire building, and dexterity-based gameplay, was one of my first modern tabletop flings. I even reviewed it, way back. I got a rule wrong, and the embarrassment was bad enough that I considered not writing anymore.
Now, fourteen years after the original game’s release, Cooper has produced the Zenith Edition. The original game can be found in the box, but let’s be real: fourteen years is like three full generations in board game time. Let’s see how the new edition fares in the cold depths of space. Or worse, an over-saturated tabletop market.
SPACE-BIFF! 