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Syphilitics
Moving to Paris to embrace my inner bum/artist has always been one of my life goals, so Jasper de Lange’s Bohemians was a safe bet. Set in the drowsy days and smoky nights of Paris-That-Was, this is a love letter to the wanderers who set out to thumb their noses at society and create timeless works of art, and sometimes even did, but spent more of their time sleeping in, strolling the streets, and spreading syphilis.
Did I mention that Bohemians is also a deeply funny game? Top comedy, this.
The Little Crunch
Ah, the “small civgame,” the brass ring of tabletop design. If Age of Galaxy sounds familiar, that’s because this is the second edition of the tinier-than-you’d expect title from a couple years back. Now, in a somewhat ironic turn, it’s been blown outward.
Some dead space in the box notwithstanding, it’s a suitable alteration. The cards are full-sized! The map and action board feel less like gimmicks! The discs can actually stack on top of each other! This is the very same Age of Galaxy I reviewed positively two years ago, transformed so that it’s much easier to read across the table, with all the upsides and downsides vacuum-sealed for a fresh audience.
Some Rando Viking
Cards on the table, I have no idea who this Thorgal fellow is. Child of the stars? Some rando Viking? In need of a shave? Apparently he’s the main character of a Franco-Belgian comic book. Until I played Joanna Kijanka, Jan Maurycy Święcicki, and Rafał Szyma’s board game, I wasn’t even aware that there were Franco-Belgian comic books.
But that’s the impressive thing about Thorgal: The Board Game. Its alt-history world is so vibrant, its rough-handed characters so vividly drawn, its gameplay conundrums so compelling, that it hardly requires any introduction at all.
Where a Million Diamonds Shine
If Imperial Miners used one of those home DNA kits, it would swiftly find itself on the front page of Reddit as yet another story about one’s parentage being thrown into dispute. Despite being named to capitalize on the success of Imperial Settlers, itself a descendant of 51st State — but also a parent to the other 51st State — Tim Armstrong’s design doesn’t actually display all that many of its predecessors’ hereditary traits. Why do I look so much like your college sweetheart, MOM?
But maybe this is a good thing. Freshly doubtful of its pedigree, perhaps Imperial Miners can forge its identity anew, free of the family’s medical history of clutter, obsessive hoarding, and frustrating expansions that require players to sort through multiple decks of cards.
Well. At least Imperial Miners escapes the first two fates.
Who Killed Detective?
It’s no secret that I was mixed on Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game. Here’s my alibi. Sure, you could pin some slight motive for revenge on me. It was wordy in a way I found personally offensive. The interconnected cases were thick like a ball of old cheese. And sure, not every function of its app was what you’d call obvious. But kill? Who, me? C’mon, officer. It was a fling. I haven’t even thought about Detective in two years. I’m back together with the wife and everything.
You wanna know who I think killed Detective? I’ll tell you.
“Modern Crime”
I sat down to write this review. Then I realized that last night’s dinner was unsettling my stomach. During my trip to the gentleman’s closet, I began playing a game on my phone to pass the time. Then, digestions completed silently and rightly, I went to the couch to finish up, because those gems aren’t about to match themselves. Now with an empty belly, I consumed an entire spoonful of peanut butter, scraping the jar clean. Time for a walk through the neighborhood to clear my head. On the way back, I concluded to finally sit down and finish this review.
And therein lies the main problem with Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game. Come on down and I’ll explain.
Deep Space 51
Portal Games has a thing for tableau building games that occupy three rows. See 51st State, Imperial Settlers, and the other 51st State, all of which were largely defined by how much your economic engine snowballed. If the last round wasn’t ten times longer and slower than the first one, you probably hadn’t adequately snowballed.
At this point, Portal delivering another three-row tableau-builder might feel a smidgen like those games that reappear after a Cthulhu retheme. Slap tentacles on the cards, change some keywords — the draw pile is now Miskatonic University or whatever — and there you have it. No need to come up with new ideas when people will gratefully snap up the latest mind-numbing coat of paint, fumes and all. 51st State in space.
But in spite of appearances, Alien Artifacts isn’t just another three-row tableau-builder. Sure, cards are aligned across three rows, and sure, it’s about assembling a tableau. While it wasn’t designed by Ignacy Trzewiczek, co-designers Marcin Ropka and Viola Kijowska could have fooled me, right down to the factions with ever-so-slightly different advantages. But that’s where the similarities stop and Alien Artifacts steps out from under the shadow of its predecessors. And the most radical aspect of its reinvention? It melts snowballs.
Let Slip the Trogs of War
Cry Havoc, a triple-header by Grant Rodiek, Michał Oracz, and Michał Walczak, wants to be one of the coolest things you’ve ever heard about. Hell, it’d like your ears to bleed when you hear just how cool it is. Soldiers dropping from orbit, rampaging machines who’ve never heard of the Turing Test and couldn’t care less, four-armed knockoffs of either the Eldar or Protoss — depending on which you think is a better representation of the ancient grumpy alien trope — and muscle-bound idiots who care for nothing so much as pumping their arms in the air to the catchy beat of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Cry Havoc has all that and more.
But instead of dripping honey into your ears, there are precisely two things I want to say about Cry Havoc. Just two. Not three, not one. Two.
Neuroshima Forever
Interrupt me if this is a spoiler, but it’s the factions that do it. Can a review be spoiled? If so, I just spoiled myself.
Neuroshima Hex has been a thing for a while now. Ten years, in fact. When it first appeared on the scene, Portal Games was much smaller than it is now, and Michał Oracz was just beginning to show his prodigy-levels of cleverness at creating distinct factions. In essence, Neuroshima Hex was the broadside that started the war. After all, this was before his wonderful Theseus: The Dark Orbit and the brand-new Cry Havoc, both of which are all about the way their various factions intersect, clash, and resolve their differences. Usually by shooting or eating each other. Sometimes both.
Now it’s ten years later and Neuroshima Hex is still going strong. And I’m going to tell you why it’s the raddest abstract tile-laying game on the market.
We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes
Eighteen cards. Four tokens. One pad for keeping score. A single golf pencil.
That’s how I introduced last year’s Tides of Time, Kristian Čurla’s then-unique microgame about the dawn of civilization as glimpsed through the world’s tiniest lens. It was a bijou of a game, as clever and elegant as it was petite.
Now we’ve got Tides of Madness, which at first glance appears like little more than the inevitable Lovecraftifying that has gripped so much of this hobby. But let’s take a closer look.
SPACE-BIFF! 