Blog Archives
Networkcrawler
Everything I know about running a broadcast television network I pretty much learned from broadcast television. Which is great! Who better to learn from than the creators of content themselves, after all. Thus, I went into The Networks expecting to totally 30 Rock it.
We’ll All Float On Okay
If I were forced to identify the unifying “aesthetic” of a Ryan Laukat game — and avoided using actual, you know, aesthetics, the bold colors and whimsical fantasy creations that populate his worlds — it would be that the creator of Red Raven Games has carved a niche out for himself by making games that seem a lot like other games, but look and play almost nothing like anything else. City of Iron announces itself as a cube-pusher and deck-builder, then merges those systems in a way that’s reminiscent of precisely nothing. Eight-Minute Empire is a study in minimalism that avoids feeling restrictive. Even Laukat’s forays into worker placement, The Ancient World and Above and Below — which itself echoes older storytelling games like Tales of the Arabian Nights — step to the beat of their own drummer. It’s almost as though Laukat knows these systems exist, but has only read about them in old newspaper articles or printed-out scraps of blog posts that happened to wash up on his desert island.
And to be clear, that’s a good thing. It’s what makes something like Islebound work so well.
Man-Made Climate
Evolution has always been a game of counting calories, though in a different sense than most of us are accustomed to. It’s anything goes all the time, with everyone consuming every last leaf, berry, and scrap of meat they can clamp their jaws around. I’ve both written and spoken about my love for Evolution in the past, but now it’s time to explain why Climate is the pinnacle of the series thus far.
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.
(Steam) Engine Builder
What do luminaries George Washington Carver, Alexander Graham Bell, Marie Curie, and Guglielmo Marconi have in common? Their love of contraption racing, naturally.
If nothing else, Steampunk Rally, which comes with sixteen characters to select from, makes for a serviceable who’s who of inventors. Slap down Sakichi Toyoda, ask what he invented, then shake your head in resignation when everyone guesses Toyota. That’s the man’s company, not one of his inventions. Depending on the way you say it, you either sound doubly smart or doubly pedantic.
Rome Didn’t Dominate You in a Day
What do Julius Caesar, Hannibal Barca, Hammurabi, Cleopatra, and Pericles all have in common? If you guessed “they were contemporaries,” um, no, that’s really very incorrect. Caesar and Cleopatra knew each other (double meaning!), but other than that, these people had about as much chance of rubbing shoulders at the corner pita shop as Ronald Reagan and Charlemagne.
So Mare Nostrum: Empires, which pits these pivotal ancient statesmen against one another in a sort of fantasy grudge match, isn’t too keen on getting its dates straight. No problem. When you’re a game about bullying trade in the Mediterranean — and when “bullying” means you spend a lot of your time being an honest-to-goodness bully — you can bend history into as many pretzels as you like.
Five Minutes to Impact
Much like Space Alert, XCOM, Space Cadets (whether the original or the head-to-head Dice Duel), or the deck-assembling portion of Millennium Blades, Meteor is a real-time game, meaning you’ve got a limited span of time to complete whatever objective has been set before you. With only a scant handful of minutes on the clock, tasks like navigating around an asteroid field, counting off how many turns until that stealth fighter drifts into range of your cannons, cobbling together a tournament deck, or calculating the odds of a squad of soldiers beating back an alien invasion — all simple assignments on their own, given enough time to actually evaluate your options — the stress ratchets up to, dare I say it, meteoric heights.
And yet, though I’ve played many real-time games, I’ve never seen anyone react with quite the same level of incredulity as when I start explaining Meteor.
Oldlithic
Size matters. In board games too. The appeal of Small Box Games isn’t just that John Clowdus makes small things, it’s that he makes things you can carry around without much trouble, that can fit ten to a shelf where a single regular-sized game might sit, that provide some of the best ounce-for-ounce gameplay out there.
Take Neolithic, for example. Crammed into a box the size of a deck of playing cards, this is the sort of thing that would be easy to overlook on a game store shelf. But to discount it for its size would be doing it a disservice, because this is one of the cleverest little games I’ve played in a long while.
Cheerful Woodland Marshmallows
Occasionally, being adorable is exactly what a game needs.
By way of example, consider Kodama: The Tree Spirits from Action Phase Games. Here’s a game that, if it weren’t so darn precious, might have everyone slamming their heads against the table. Not in the sense that the rules are complicated or the game is especially frustrating. Rather, because the goals lend themselves so fully to a tightly-controlled competition of wits where a single misstep can see you plummeting in the rankings. Transforming it into a zen-like game about growing a tree so you can house some cute-as-buttons forest spirits? Magnificent.
Forging Your Own American Legend
Settle in, because I’ve got one whopper of a tale to tell. I recently played the latest game from hit-or-miss-or-miss-or-miss designer Richard Launius, a doozy that goes by the name of Legends of the American Frontier. How was it? That’s not the important part. We’ll get to that when the time’s right. For now, I’d rather tell you about cheerful Jedediah, the whistlin’ preacher-man who wasn’t ever much good at anything other than stumblin’ right along, no matter how rocky the trail.
SPACE-BIFF! 