I live in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains. Have for nearly my whole life. Out-of-towners sometimes voice their apprehension when they first visit our cordillera, when they see the way our cities and suburbs are hemmed in by walls. The mountains, they say, seem precarious, like they could topple onto our heads at any moment, burying us under a thousand tons of limestone and quartz monzonite. Jokingly, I inform them that the real danger of the coming tectonic collapse — not the little shakes we sometimes get, but the Big One, the one we’re a millennium overdue for — is that it will kill us from below. The ground will liquefy and carry us downward, the ancient tidal basin finally sweeping us out to an inland sea that died with the mammoths.

Cysmic, the board game by Jason Blake, gives me that feeling. When I hefted it onto the review stack next to my computer desk, my wife wondered aloud if it would topple and crush me. It isn’t the largest board game I’ve ever owned; that would be the 22-pound Ogre, the one with the team lift warning printed prominently on its side. But it’s the one that feels most like an Ozymandian temple to excess. Its map is sprawling. The frame that holds the hexes comes with hidden magnets to lock everything into place. The plastic constructs are so phallic that they make me uncomfortable. Among its many dice, there’s one for gauging your character’s crisis of conscience. It’s so gargantuan that it’s become a game-night joke. Nothing could justify this sprawl.

I kinda dig it.

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