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Burned Notice
There’s a problem with most hidden movement games, and I say that as the mechanism’s greatest devotee. Namely, they’re slow. So slow. Maybe it would be kinder to call them “deliberate,” but even that doesn’t quite transform the ding into a compliment. Stealth, in theory, can be deliberate. Stick insects are deliberate. But it can also be harried, adrenal, instinctual. Like a panther. Like an owl. Like me ducking out of a Super Bowl party before the uncles start complaining about the halftime show.
Burned occupies the untapped middle ground between those two poles. Designed by Jon Moffat, who gave us last year’s top game about poop carts, Burned is neither Mind MGMT nor Captain Sonar. Instead, it’s the closest a board game has ever gotten to making me feel like a highly-trained secret agent picking off mooks in broad daylight. Usually right before they tackle me to the ground and stomp me to death.
Battle for MOBAness
Adapting a video game to cardboard isn’t easy. As I’ve written in the past, the difficulty isn’t limited to replicating the game’s visuals, its characters and events, or even its systems. The hard part is capturing its feel. Its flow. How it operates when you’re at the controls and everything is running smoothly. That’s why making a game about pushing buttons misses the point. That’s like adapting a board game into the digital sphere and carefully modeling the jitter of your fingers and your posture at the table. Those things matter, but only as inputs, not the essence of the game being played.
So it goes with cardboard versions of the MOBA. As a genre, Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas seem like the perfect fit for adaptation. You have a bounded space, clear goals, characters doing cool combo-driven things, and things like cooldown timers that practically beg to be codified as turns. The top-down perspective even mimics the way we view a board and its many counters. So why is Battle for Biternia the first one I’ve played that’s gotten it right?
SPACE-BIFF! 