Blog Archives
Imperium: Kobayashi Maru
More than most fictional settings, Star Trek lends itself to what-ifs. Mirror universes, alternate dimensions, and time travel play a big role in making the final frontier ever more expansive, but we don’t even need to breach the time-space continuum to find uncomfortable alliances and enemies-turned-friends. In its messiness, Star Trek has always been playful. Ever wondered what would happen if a dilithium leak briefly tricked an intoxicated Commander Sisko into courting Lursa Duras? Me neither! But there’s a non-zero chance that someone in the writer’s room drafted an entire Deep Space Nine episode about that very scenario.
Star Trek: Captain’s Chair swims in those possibilities. Designed by Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi, and built around the deck-building system they unveiled in Imperium: Classics, Legends, and Horizons, this isn’t the first board game to bottle the spirit of Star Trek, but it is perhaps the one that most exemplifies its endless possibilities.
Bloodsucking Techbros
It’s been a while since we’ve seen such a thorough explication of why setting matters than J.B. Howell’s SiliconVania. Set in a future Transylvania where vampires have gone public and decided to transform their ancestral homeland into the next Silicon Valley, Howell has crafted a game that riffs on blood-boy slurping techbros and venture capital excess, all without necessarily cluing its players in on the satire. It surprises with some devious bidding and tile-laying. If only the setting weren’t such a damp spitball to the ear.
Growing Up Free and Wild
Back when cities regularly burned down, Seattle burned down too. That’s the starting point for Rebuilding Seattle, an optimistic title by Quinn Brander that does exactly what it says on the tin. Like so many modern games chasing mass appeal, it plays like a pastiche of a best hits album: there are polyominoes and a wide-open card drafting market, limited currencies and special powers. On their own, these elements are baggy and ill-defined. In tying them together, however, Brander manages to elevate Rebuilding Seattle to more than the sum of its parts.
Spreadsheets of Gaia
In my corner of the world, the Great Salt Lake is drying up. Because its bed contains deposits of heavy metalloids, the winds that sweep that portion of the valley have begun to billow arsenic-laced dust. Local politicians have proposed a wide range of solutions, from “Let’s cut down all those water-hogging trees” to “Did you know Victorian women consumed daily arsenic wafers to bleach their skin lighter and show they didn’t work in the fields? It’s time to embrace the wisdom of our foremothers!”
I prefer my apocalyptic wastelands with a splash of eco-optimism. Crud, I’d take a wasteland that wasn’t in thrall to the alfalfa lobby. Until then, Ian Cooper and Jan Gonzalez’s Shapers of Gaia is about reseeding the desert after everybody’s arsenic consumption made them too pale to keep on living.
Then again, does it count as eco-optimism if it requires mega-robots and efficacious cloning?
Move Along Home: The Board Game
I think it’s fair to say that Star Trek never really understood games or why people play them. Watching Starfleet officers spit nonsense rhymes while playing hopscotch wasn’t exactly the high point of Deep Space Nine. Another time, The Next Generation introduced a free-to-play app game to the crew of the Enterprise. After the adults displayed all the willpower of a kid with a Fortnite addiction and unfettered access to his mom’s credit card, Wesley Crusher saved the day. Probably because he was the only youngster. Desensitized little goblin.
Fortunately, Geoff Engelstein didn’t adapt either of those episodes for his third outing of Super-Skill Pinball.
Space-Cast! #18. Game Design Wizard
For the first time ever,* game designer, instructor, writer, and overall wizard Geoff Engelstein appears on a podcast to discuss a trio of his games, along with some insider baseball. Join us as we discuss getting an author’s permission to treat a protagonist like a doofus, what it’s like to gamify a peace conference, and why “gravity” is one of the greatest gaming metaphors of the decade.
(*Not the first time ever.)
Listen over here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
Checking the Rules: The Board Game
In Nathan Woll’s Free Radicals, the free radicals are not the sexy cyberpunk characters frolicking on the cover. A free radical is apparently what we’ve decided to name the hovering alien spacecraft that have settled over the surface of our planet. These artifacts are fonts of limitless knowledge. But where Denis Villeneuve’s film Arrival, based on Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life,” posited that first contact was an exercise in linguistics, these free radicals are more interested in helping us do capitalism better.
In game terms, that translates to ten different factions each playing their own game. Keep those rules sheets handy. You’re going to need them.
Roshamdon’t
Only a big damn nerd would know that the Kardashev Scale is a hypothetical measurement of a spacegoing civilization’s energy potential. Theorized by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, it posits that a civilization might fall into one of three levels, either harnessing the energy output of their entire planet (type-I), planetary system (type-II), or host galaxy (type-III). The concept plays a minor but pivotal role in Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem. If you don’t remember that part, it’s when Ye Wenjie figures out she can bounce a signal off the sun, effectively granting our sub-type-I species the communications potential of a type-II civilization. Spoiler alert.
Like I said: big damn nerds.
Stephen Avery and Eugene Bryant’s Kardashev Scale might also appeal to big damn nerds. But probably more because they’re hopping up and down at the sight of a board game entitled Kardashev Scale than because it’s any good.
Dungeons Crawlers
I think we’re all mature enough to share a secret. Here it is: I don’t like dungeon crawlers. Not in their purest form. Between the discarded bones and mats of moss, the ground is far too dirty for these old knees. I’d prefer a dungeon stroll.
Revenge of the Pinball Nerds
Last year’s Super-Skill Pinball: 4-Cade by math nerd Geoff Engelstein was a probabilities superstructure. What first seemed simple — picking which of two random numbers your pinball would hit next — was in fact a long con of ever-deepening regrets. But in a good way. It was a take-backer’s nightmare, a niggling reminder that the human brain has proved inferior to a rodent’s at assessing basic likelihoods. It also felt weirdly like real pinball.
Engelstein’s second stab at the system, Ramp It Up!, is better than the original in every regard. So instead of describing Super-Skill Pinball at its most elemental, let’s take a look at those four new tables.
SPACE-BIFF! 