Blog Archives
My Little Sickle
Kid games don’t need to be awful.
That’s the design ethos behind My Little Scythe, the father/daughter collaboration of Hoby and Vienna Chou, and a streamlining of Jamey Stegmaier’s Scythe. It’s cute, but there’s still some tension to be found. Lighthearted, but you can still end up with pie on your face. Simple, but not dumb simple. It’s a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Scythe, for one thing.
Playing Forever with Charterstone
Even though it remains a fledgling subgenre, I think I can safely anoint myself a legacy game veteran. I’ve played ’em all. Like, all of them. Basically, I’m sick of legacy mechanisms at this point. The sole upside is that my time in the trenches has endowed me with Opinions.
The first commandment of legacy games is simple. No, I mean that literally: the first commandment is simple. Be thou simple. If possible, build on something that was already there. Which is why Risk Legacy and Pandemic Legacy were so breezy to learn, while SeaFall was one learning game after another until you gave up and played its hidden game, which was opening all the boxes early and laughing with wild abandon while you sorted the pieces into recyclables and garbage.
Charterstone is the simplest of them all. And when you get right down to it, it’s the legacy game that I’ve enjoyed the most.
Sickle of the Hype
If there are two things I’m wary of, it’s hype and Eurogames. Scratch that, three things: also moths. I hate those dusty-winged buggers.
Those first two reasons are why, in spite of my love for Jamey Stegmaier’s earlier Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia, I was so wary of his newest title, Scythe. The early previews received it with such breathless ecstasy, as though this game of mechs-and-agriculture were some rapturous merger of religion and boardgamery. Not only would Scythe cure world hunger through mechanization and make cube-pushing fun again, it would also look good at the same time. It was all a bit much, honestly.
So imagine my surprise that Scythe is actually one rattlesnake of a game, tightly coiled and packing enough bite to back up all that noise.
Euphoria: Build a Better Worker Placement
It might surprise you to learn that I’m a huge fan of dystopian fiction. Or it might not, who knows. Maybe it’s such a critical component of my being that it bleeds into the open, and upon our first meeting, a stranger will instantly feel the tug of intuition whispering, “This guy likes dystopian fiction.”
Regardless, it was the subtitle of Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia that first drew my attention, because I would love very much to do that. Yes indeed. For pretend, of course. Ahem.
SPACE-BIFF! 