Blog Archives
Bewitchments, Buckets, Bugs
Imagine me in a real pickle sandwich. The middle of preview season (ho ho ho), and suddenly I come down with not one illness, but two. Something chronic, something acute. And me with a whole stack of board games to write about. Some of them time-sensitive, counting down the minutes on crowdfunding platforms as we speak.
What’s an old man to do? Write about all three in a single splash, naturally.
In other words, here are three very different tabletop titles, each worth a wink of your time. Come on in. Let me tell you about them. Briskly, before I’m back to bed.
D’ough
L’oaf is that rarest of gifts: a board game that makes me laugh, and not because it includes any actual jokes. Designed by Bart de Jong, it opens with perhaps the most relatable conceit ever put to cardboard, a dead-end job players are working in order to make ends meet, but one they’re not overly interested in completing beyond the bare minimum. Not quite by accident, it’s about many things — the false enthusiasm of managers, the vast gulf between owners and employees, the oppression of tedium. As if by magic, none of those headier topics break the spell.
