Blog Archives
Spot the Difference
I’ve never seen a tutorial quite as apt as the one that begins Perspectives. Designed by Matthew Dunstan and Dave Neale, Perspectives is a detective game. You know the drill: across three cases you will assemble evidence, match serial numbers, and answer a string of questions to determine whether you’re the next Encyclopedia Brown or a brown paper bag. The wrinkle is that you can only see a portion of the evidence. Mayhap a perspective of the evidence. See where we’re going with this? As wrinkles go, there aren’t many quite this redefining. It’s less of a wrinkle and more of an origami fold, a crease that transforms the entire structure into something new.
C.O.O.L Story, Bro
As a kid, I was never any good at those Choose Your Own Adventure books. For one thing, I wanted to see every twist and ending the book had to offer, even the ones where my character died a grisly death or suddenly woke up and realized the whole thing had been an elaborate dream. Unless I read every single page, I didn’t feel like it had been worth it. The problem was that I wanted to accomplish this without having to reread anything. And so I dog-eared those books until there were more pages bent-down than in their original shape, and kept my fingers wedged at crucial junctures, and eventually resorted to drawing crazy-person diagrams with arrows pointing between important decisions. Anything to keep from reading even a single page over again.
Years later, T.I.M.E Stories has earned the distinction of being the first board game to prompt the resurgence of my childhood neurosis.
In the Past Tense, Splendid
While I fully recognize it’s a sign of my curmudgeonly age to keep making use of stock “You know what I don’t like?” intros here on Space-Biff!, I still can’t help but say that I really don’t like Eurogames where you have to appease some local medieval or Renaissance lord. Probably because my current landlord demands rent be paid in chickens and/or clay but not roasted on a spit or baked into bricks but yes if I deliver glazed pots full of steamed casserole.
So here’s a game that by all rights I shouldn’t like. It’s called Splendor, and it’s about appeasing medieval-ish lords. It also has a theme so pasted on that it could be about pretty much anything, from importing booze for Prohibition gangsters to selling datachips to shady megacorps. Which raises the question: why is it that I want to be playing Splendor right now?
SPACE-BIFF! 