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Choo Choo Choom
The concept behind Stephen Kerr’s Metrorunner seems like a misbegotten effort to put a finger on a pulse of what’s hot in board games. What are folks into these days? Trains. Netrunner. Oh my gosh. What if we made a game about trains and netrunning.
But it isn’t like some of my favorite board games aren’t about wackadoo topics. For all I know, some combination of turnstile-jumping and encryption-cracking is poised to become my favorite mashup of all time.
Still could be. Won’t be Metrorunner, though.
Dungeon Accountant
Remember Dungeon Keeper? I was only a kid when I played it off of a PC Gamer demo disc, just a little older than my daughter is now. At that age, playing as the baddie was transgressive, a dark secret I never could have shared with my parents. Looking back, they probably would have laughed. Or asked whether it was satanic. It’s hard to know which phase we were in at the time.
Jordy Adan’s Stonespine Architects is set in the same shared universe as Roll Player, Dawn of Ulos, and his own Cartographers. It’s about building a dungeon, carved in stone and filled with deadly traps and monsters. Like the other titles in the Roll Player line — and very much unlike Dungeon Keeper to an eleven-year-old — it’s a safe and colorful place, inoffensive, and certainly absent any form-fitting black leather. As drafting and tile-laying games go, it’s pretty good.
Ulos & Euphrates
Dawn of Ulos is seriously smart. Designed by Jason Lentz, and ostensibly set in the same universe as Roll Player and Cartographers, its intelligence is less a question of innovation than one of tactical inspiration. By drawing from classics such as Sid Sackson’s Acquire and Reiner Knizia’s Tigris & Euphrates, but still applying his own modern spin, Lentz has created one of the sharpest stock-profiling games I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing.
When You’re Not Stalin, You’re Russian
Don’t make the mistake of calling Dual Powers: Revolution 1917 a wargame. I learned that lesson the hard way. Like 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis and Fort Sumter, Dual Powers is about what happens before the war — in effect, a pre-wargame. This is the jockeying, the shakeout, the period when everybody decides who they’ll sidle up to when the shooting starts. Even better that Brett Myers has selected a topic I’ve yet to see explored. With the February Revolution out of the way and Tsar Nicholas II off the throne, Petrograd has settled into an uneasy truce between the Provisional Government and the Bolshevik Party. Surely such an arrangement will last more than a few months.
SPACE-BIFF! 