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Galzyr? Gals Where?
Cards on the table: despite my affection for Sami Laakso’s Peacemakers: Horrors of War and Dale of Merchants, I still can’t get into Lands of Galzyr, the open-world adventure game he co-designed with Jesús Delgado. Not for a lack of trying. To date, I’ve played this thing one dozen times, mostly with my ten-year-old daughter, who, by the way, recently declared it her favorite board game of all time.
So believe me when I tell you, I’ve tried to like Lands of Galzyr. And tried. And tried.
Walk the (Slack) Line
Peacemakers: Horrors of War fascinates me. This is my third visit to Sami Laakso’s Daimyria, a world not dissimilar to ours but populated by countless species of fur and scale and feather. Like humans, as we saw in Dale of Merchants, these creatures engage in mercantile exchange. In Lands of Galzyr, they wander off on continent-spanning adventures. And in Peacemakers: Horrors of War, they expend a great deal of energy on killing one another.
But not all of them. Horrors of War is a second stab at the system Laakso introduced in Dawn of Peacemakers, which cast characters not only as negotiators and mediators determined to cease hostilities between neighboring belligerents, but also sometimes as manipulators and poisoners. The art of peace, Peacemakers argues, is as fraught as battle itself. As a result, it walks multiple fine lines, both ludically and morally.
I Cherish Peace with All My Heart
I have a soft spot for Sami Laakso’s Daimyria, the shared setting for Dale of Merchants, Lands of Galzyr, and Peacemakers. It’s the specificity that does it. Other games about anthropomorphic animals feature, I dunno, turtles. Daimyria doesn’t settle for such broadness. Instead, it’s populated with fennec foxes and short-beaked echidnas and giant pangolins. Each species is an entire identity unto itself. Medieval courtiers in fursuits need not apply.
The forthcoming Peacemakers: Horrors of War is a reimagining of Laakso’s Dawn of Peacemakers. The early version of the game only includes two scenarios, but those were enough to get me excited for more.
Dale of Deck-Builders
Perspective is a funny thing. When Sami Laakso reached out to inquire whether I’d like to take a look at Dale of Merchants — more specifically, Dale of Merchants 1, 2, and Collection — I hesitated. Not because of Laakso’s talents as a designer, but because the game in question was a deck-builder. And not a hybrid deck-builder; a straight-up, pure, honest-to-goodness cards-and-tokens deck-builder.
Why such hesitation? Because for a moment that felt like a decade, you couldn’t enter a game shop without tripping over that month’s shipment of DBGs, barely-themed stacks of wallpaper with a license slapped over the top. How many decks have I built? How many settings have gone underutilized? The answer is not flattering, either for me or the industry.
But it had been a while since I last built a deck. Doubly so a “pure” deck, sans larger strategic considerations like a map or a lootable dungeon. So I said, sure, why not. And, after a half-dozen plays, I couldn’t be happier.
SPACE-BIFF! 