Blog Archives
The Year of Living Boringly
Ever wanted to make a year seem as long and tedious as possible? Boy, have I got the game for you! Meet 365 Adventures: Cthulhu 1926: 2026, a title filled with too many damn numbers. Designed by Lee Ju-Hwa, this is the sequel to this year’s 365 Adventures: The Dungeon. Some have called the idea of letting you play a microgame every day “innovative.” That’s a heck of a thing to say when daily peel-off crossword and sudoku calendars have existed since Ancient Roman times. But, sure, let’s go with it. 365 Adventures is innovative for anyone who wants to make their year seem as long and tedious as possible.
Oops. I already wrote that. My bad. Forced repetition is more of this game’s shtick.
That Wizard Came from the Moon
Fabio! Lopiano! Truly, he has the most pronounceable name in the entire hobby. I’m something of a provisional fan, after being impressed with Merv but mixed on Autobahn and Sankoré, both of which proved too overwrought for their own good. Shackleton Base, which Lopiano co-designed with Nestore Mangone, finds the pair back in stride. It’s complex but not too tangled, indulges in the occasional digression but never loses focus, and above all takes us to a semi-plausible moon colony that feels absolutely great to bang into working shape.
Gosu Gosu Gosu! Ecks!
Gosu, it’s good to see you.
I wrote about Kim Satô’s goblin-filled GOSU a literal decade ago. I was a relative newcomer to the hobby then, and enjoyed its antics thoroughly, though time and the luck of the draw saw it falling out of favor. Gosu somehow managed to go on without me. This new edition, Gosu X, is less a game designed than a game developed. Its publisher, Sorry We Are French, has put it through the wringer with multiple years of playtests. The result strongly resembles the original, but with a few alterations that leave it feeling like an entirely new beast.
For one thing, it’s no longer about warring goblins.
Taming the Medicean Stars
It’s been 413 years since Galileo Galilei gazed into the heavens with his telescope, a homemade object fitted with lenses he’d ground himself and that could only achieve twenty-power magnification, and noted three points of light lingering near Jupiter. Contrary to the stars behind them, these points of light, which were soon joined by a fourth, seemed to be moving in the wrong direction, clustered in a straight line about the planet. Within three months, Galileo published The Starry Messenger. Among a few choice insults flung at the moon (“mountainous,” he called it), the treatise described how other celestial objects possessed satellites of their own. The universe was suddenly a lot bigger and scarier.
In the four centuries since, we’ve dreamed of ways to conquer Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Fortunately, Adrian Hesling’s Galileo Project is all about taking the Galilean satellites down a peg. About time.
SPACE-BIFF! 