Blog Archives
Ogre Really Is an Ogre
Something came in the mail yesterday. Something strange and a little crazy and a whole lotta wonderful, and also over twenty-five pounds, set up against the screen door so I had to go around out the back and into the cold so I could retrieve it without knocking it off the porch.
I’d heard the stories, of course. Who with their finger on the pulse of the seedy underbelly of the world of board games hasn’t? Even so, I didn’t expect this. I didn’t expect Ogre to be such an… ogre.
Triumph of Indines
I don’t have much of a history with fighting games. Oh, there was that time up at Rocky Mountain Pizza Company when a pack of older kids kicked me off the Street Fighter machine, and I owned both Power Stone games on Dreamcast (though they were 3D, so they don’t “count”), and I occasionally got roped into enduring a match of Super Smash Bros with my cousin — but other than those isolated instances, fighting games always stood out as a particularly silly genre, and anyway, I was too busy playing games like Baldur’s Gate II and Planescape: Torment. *raises pinkie ever so superiorly*
So when BattleCON: Devastation of Indines appeared on Kickstarter, I wasn’t exactly out of my mind with anticipation. Still, it was by Level 99 Games, and after gems like Pixel Tactics and the Minigame Library, I figured I’d take a chance. That was nearly a year ago, and now that I’ve played through a couple dozen matches, I can tell you exactly how disappointed I am…
Tomorrow Usually Dies
There’s a board game called Tomorrow. It’s one of the best things I’ve played this year, and to understand what it’s all about, you only need to see two pictures. You’ll find them below.
Horror Horrorer Horrorest
You know that part of some of my reviews where I say something like, “This new game is from designer X and he designed games Y and Z”? It’s meant to give you a sense of why you should be interested in that person’s new game, because he’s produced something awesome and recognizable in the past. Sadly, this isn’t the case for the creator of Dark Darker Darkest, whose main distinction is that he designed a game so bad that I didn’t bother to review it, because my mother taught me to always insert something positive into my criticism and I just couldn’t manage it that time. And since you’re already switching tabs to ask Goog-El, patron goddess of all knowledge, what I’m talking about, the designer is David Ausloos and the offending game was Panic Station.
But here’s the good news: Dark Darker Darkest is a hell of a lot better than Panic Station, and the foremost proof is that I’m reviewing it at all! It’s actually rather brilliant in a number of ways, though I fear it might be brilliant the way unpolished diamonds are brilliant, because some of its luster is hidden beneath blackened slag. What follows is a list of three things I really like and three things that could have been improved about David Ausloos’s latest efforts to scare you silly.
Eight-to-Twenty-Minute Legend
When people say they’re sick of Kickstarter, you know who they aren’t talking about? Ryan Laukat. In addition to successfully funding multiple titles through Kickstarter, this time he’s shipped his latest game, Eight-Minute Empire: Legends, sequel to plain old Eight-Minute Empire from earlier this year, and done so two months ahead of schedule. A whole mess of delayed projects are suddenly seeming that much more tardy.
Exciting as that is, the question I keep hearing everyone ask is whether Legends is really necessary, riding as it is on the heels of the previous game. Is it worth picking up Legends if you already have the original? The short answer is yes, but I suspect you’ll want the long answer. You can find it below.
Chess Checkmated: The Duke
Today I’m going to introduce you to a game that’s so good, it basically reviews itself, and one of the few games I’d ever recommend to every human being regardless of their taste in other games. As a lifelong amateur of modern Chaturanga (or Chess, if you insist on being vulgar), it’s also the first abstract game I’ve played that’s both reminiscent of that ancient classic and wildly fresh in its own right. Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce: The Duke.
Looks Like Regular Paradise To Me
Sometime halfway through playing Paradise Fallen, the most recent release from Crash Games, I mentioned the game’s post-apocalyptic theme. Probably as an explanation to why we were paddling outrigger canoes around a misshapen Hawaii for no apparent reason other than to check out a bunch of grumpy tribes, evil coral reefs, clouds of green mist, and freak whirlpools.
“What. This game isn’t post-apocalyptic,” one of our players interrupted.
I insisted it was. If it wasn’t post-apocalyptic, I argued, why is it called Paradise Fallen? And why do the ration cards show tins of spam and emergency water baggies? I had to show him the game box, complete with its smouldering, beat-up Honolulu skyline, to persuade him.
“Huh,” he shrugged, and looked back down at his cards. “Looks like regular paradise to me.”
Roll under 40 to Spot: Tanks of War
Rich Nelson, founder of Giant Goblin Games, is in the process of shipping his baby to nearly a thousand Kickstarter backers at the very same moment I sit here writing this. Storm the Castle! is his first foray into the intimidating world of boardgame publishing, and he’s determined it won’t be his last.
Since we live in the same city, I got to sit down with him for a look at his second project, the aptly-named Tanks of War: Third Reich Rising (because it’s about tanks, and war), and after talking for a while about what he’s doing to differentiate this from all the other WW2 games out there, I got a chance to play it. Quite a few times, in fact. What follows are my impressions of this WW2 tank-battle deck-building game, which should show up on Kickstarter sometime in the next week or so.
Shadowrun Mostly Returns
If you don’t know anything about the world of Shadowrun, it’s a prime example of the cyberpunk genre we all know and love, full of heartless megacorporations, hackers with glowing avatars, the word “runner” indicating someone working a spurious career path, and thousands upon thousands of square kilometers of crotch-scented slums. However, it’s got one major twist that transmogrifies it into something distinct from all its would-be twins: thanks to a mysterious “awakening” about fifty years before the setting’s present day, this particular universe houses elves and dwarves, orcs and ogres, demons and magic. These exist alongside the humdrum day-to-day of glaring neon and hand-to-mouth desperation. And here, recent Kickstarter success Shadowrun Returns is all about your deeply flawed character’s noir-flavored quest to solve the murder of an old friend — though in a world where everyone lives in the shadow of unreachable highrises, even your motives are shady.
It’s About Building an Island Fortress
Island Fortress strikes me as a deeply silly title for a boardgame. So matter-of-fact. No mystery to it. It’s kind of like naming Archipelago, I dunno, “Unethical Caribbean Colony” or something. Or calling Netrunner “Corporate Hacking.” I’m not sure why it strikes me as so unusually stolid when there are plenty of poorly-named games games out there, but whenever I look at the box, I hear an accountant telling me, in the flattest voice possible, “We are now going to begin constructing an island fortress.” Then he starts eating all the crackers and talking about his favorite equity funds.
Thank goodness I don’t judge books by their covers unless they’re romance novels, because otherwise I would have never learned that Island Fortress is the best time you’ll ever have sending dozens of people to their deaths so that you can play Tetris.
SPACE-BIFF! 