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Scry Guys
I know an uncanny amount about divination. Not because I believe in the stuff, mind you. It comes up a lot in my work, both as a practice in ancient religion and as a prominent branch in the history of board games.
So when Chris Chan’s Portents first hit my table, I was fascinated to learn which type of cleromancy it would use. Drawing Roman sortes? The knucklebones and dice oracles of astragalomancy? The fateful archery competitions of belomancy? We haven’t even touched upon the really cool ones. Maybe Portents would let us manipulate shards of coconut, or pour molten metal into water and examine the resultant shape’s shadow, or undertake bean magic. Yes, bean magic. Favomancy. It’s shocking how many forms of geomancy used beans. The possibilities for gamification are endless.
Turns out, Portents is about haruspicy via bird parts. And while any self-respecting haruspex would immediately note that it uses the wrong organs, never fear: this one is about fraudsters trying to out-divine one another.
Ophthalmology Is Not an Option
T.C. Petty III’s My Father’s Work is the sort of game that gets called “thematic.” Shiny with chrome, bursting with colorful verbs and adjectives, and narrated via an app, it’s the latest title to blur the distinction between storybook and plaything.
But it’s also thematic in the more universal sense: that it contains themes. Actual honest-to-goodness themes of obsession, selfishness, generational trauma, and the bewildering hilarity that tends to accompany the macabre. It’s a rare game that strives for commentary; this one could constitute an entire shelf’s worth of literary references.
Gentlemen of Fortune
Pirates are all the rage. Something must be in the water. Brine. Rum. Scurvy.
Dead Reckoning is John D. Clair’s attempt to leach the lemon juice from our water supply. Don’t take that as an insult. It’s a scurvy joke. Because scurvy is caused by vitamin-C deficiency. To keep their gums from becoming bleeding pits, sailors would drink lemon juice. It’s also where we get “limey,” because the British Navy forced its sailors to drink lime juice, except lime juice doesn’t have enough vitamin-C to offset scurvy, so ha ha, the British Navy was drinking lime juice for nothing.
What were we talking about? Oh, right. Dead Reckoning.
Chaos. Order. Back Together.
I’ll confess I have no idea what’s going on in Circadians: Chaos Order, the handsome but oh-so-drab title by Sam Macdonald and Zach Smith. Six factions, their skin tones and general aesthetic helpfully color-coded, have gone to war. What are they warring over? What are these strange artifacts? Is this what it would be like to dip into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Avengers: Endgame? Am I ignorant because I didn’t play the previous title, Circadians: First Light? Must board games have cinematic universes too?
Never mind all that. Klaxons are sounding. Missiles are incoming. We dive into battle — by setting some prices. Booyah.
An Empty Omen
Look, you already know that John Clowdus’s Omen: A Reign of War is one of my favorite games ever designed. I’d still be lying if I called it a perfect game. It’s very phasey, full of insistent procedures and favored approaches, not to mention being reliant on learning that pool of cards and winning in the pregame draft. If Clowdus announced he was going to redesign Omen from scratch, I’d be over the moon.
To some extent, that’s exactly what An Empty Throne purports to be. Like Omen, this is a Battle Line-alike game about fielding units, comboing powers, and trickling more points into your pool than your opponent. That’s where the similarities end. Foremost because, at fifty-five cards, this thing is lean.
Oh, and there are no phases. An Empty Throne is nothing but action.
Spacium: The Enspacening
Gary Dworetsky’s Imperium: The Contention just might be one of the most unfortunate titles ever to appear on my table. By which I mean its title is atrocious. First of all, there is now a moratorium on using “imperium” in any more game titles. Sorry. I declared it. No more imperia. Second, there has never in the history of contentions been a contention that deserved the definite article. And don’t tell me I need to read the fluff at the beginning of the rulebook to understand the meaning behind The Contention. It’s a space game. Space empires, space bugs, space mafia, space humans. Can we fast-forward through the exposition already?
Color me surprised, because Imperium: The Contention is entirely happy to fast-forward through not only the exposition, but also through the extra hours that distend most games about space empires. Pare away the fat, leave nothing but muscle and spiked appendages and laser cannons. If that were the only thing going for it, it might be enough. Instead, Imperium has become one of my favorite rapid-fire space games in a very short amount of time.
But Who’s Fate?
You may have heard the story about the fertility doctor who donated his own, ah, material to his patients, thereby fathering a host of children. A surprising amount of ancient mythology falls back on pretty much the same concept. So does Veiled Fate, the game of questionable divine parentage by Austin Harrison, Max Anderson, and Zac Dixon. Everybody at the table is a god. The nine heroes roaming the board are their demigod offspring. Nobody’s sure who belongs to whom. When will we get the daytime talk show version?
I Have Three Sisters
Pitch me the words “three sisters” and my mind reacts in this precise order.
- My actual three sisters.
- The play “Three Sisters” by Anton Chekhov.
- Three Sisters Peak on the north end of Salt Lake Valley.
- The “three sisters” standing stones down in Goblin Valley.
- The “three sisters” even farther south in Monument Valley.
- The Three Sisters method of companion planting, in which Native Americans planted maize, winter squash, and climbing beans together for their mutual benefits.
- Now also a roll-and-write game by Ben Pinchback and Matt Riddle.
- There’s a tomato plant called Three Sisters that grows one of three different sizes of fruit.
- Seems a lot of people had three sisters.
Razing Wonderland
It’s madness that Wonderland’s War works as well as it does. Codesigned by Tim Eisner, Ben Eisner, and Ian Moss, the description is a mishmash of play verbs and unnecessary plastic minis. An area-control bag-building press-your-luck rondel-drafting wagering game? Leave the sequence adjectives to the professionals, honey.
The avalanche works in part because of the game’s setting. Lewis Carroll’s madhouse world is as zany and starkly drawn as ever, and only made slightly more madcap by the world war currently scouring its environs. The other part is more to the credit of its design team: it’s rare to be treated to a game quite this funny.
Talking About Games: Excavating Memory
There’s a phrase we use in English, one meant to strike upon its hearer the importance of a topic or the need to keep an atrocity close at heart for fear of its repetition. You’ve heard it before, cast in somber and memorializing tones: “Lest we forget.” The irony, of course, is that we’re a fastidiously forgetful species. We forget things all the time. As a defense mechanism, forgetfulness is unrivaled. In the rare occasion that we don’t forget, we do our damnedest to afflict ourselves with collective amnesia. Lest we recall.
John Clowdus’s history trilogy plays like variations on a theme. Its three titles, Neolithic, Bronze Age, and The Middle Ages, are mechanically similar. They’re all about excavating cards from a deck and then using those cards to build toward a brighter future.
They also express something deeper: cultural memory, in all its complexity and simplicity.
SPACE-BIFF! 