When she isn’t pretending to be a dragon, my seven-year-old pretends to be a cat. “Mrrrowrrr,” she says when she pounces on me in bed in the morning. “Raawwwrrr,” she purrs when it’s time for her to line up for second grade. “Grrrrrr,” she rumbles at bedtime, her bones suddenly transforming to jelly. If certain “news” articles were to be believed, we’d have a litter box in the bathroom.

So, as a surprise, I picked up Cats Knocking Things Off Ledges. Designed by Sen-Foong Lim and David Killing, it’s as descriptive a game as they come. My seven-year-old treats it as a tornado simulator.

On the surface, Cats Knocking Things Off Ledges isn’t meant to be a tornado simulator. Instead, it plays like a parallel version to Rhino Hero. Turns consist of three steps. First you expand your kitties’ playspace, adding one or two pillars and a single card, whether rectangular or circular, to create a new climbing platform. Second, your kitty leaps to a new space, managed by a pair of tweezers. Third, your kitty bats a toy from their perch. If it happens to land on another platform, you score points. The greater the fall, the more the score.

It’s adorable. And not in any pejorative sense. The tweezers, for example, have little kitten paws on the inside edges. The toys are wooden versions of squeaky mice and pizza slices. The platforms show fuzzy carpet for kitties to test their claws against, but it’s really their reverse side, which reveals fabric stapled to wooden bases, that feels like something you might actually stack into a climbing tree.

That adorableness extends to the rules. They’re simple, which suits the game’s format and age target. But more importantly, they capture feline caprice. Cats, according to this game, are agents of mischief. Why do they knock things off ledges? One expects the things had it coming. If the things didn’t have it coming, the cats wouldn’t have batted them from their ledges. Simple. Circular. Incontestable.

Which does make it a shame that the components are so darn light. I think back on the original Rhino Hero, before its blown-up version or Rhino Hero Super Battle made it easier to handle, or that popsicle-stick stacking simulator Tokyo Highway that collapsed as though the slightest hand tremor was a seismic event. For little fingers to make a stacking game work — and seven isn’t especially little — the components need a certain heft.

Sure, the box rates the game for ages 10+. Fair enough. But let’s be real: those are there to cover the publisher’s backside if a kid chokes on a meeple. No matter the specific digit on the box, Cats Knocking Things Off Ledges is what a seven-year-old who wants to be a kitten and only breaks character to insist she wants chicken nuggets for dinner wants to play. Who else would it be for? It isn’t for my twelve-year-old. She regards it coolly. She doesn’t complain. She’ll humor her younger sister. But this isn’t the sort of thing she’ll directly seek out. Who else is there? Me? My wife? Sure, we have a fine time with it. But the one who jumped up and down at the sight of the box was three years below the stated age limit.

In practice, then, Cats Knocking Things Off Ledges becomes a tornado simulator. The platforms in particular are so light that their surface warps ever so slightly, closer to cardstock than proper cardboard. Not even that heavy of cardstock either. Without proper architectural planning — and, again, let’s be real here — it isn’t long before the tower teeters and shudders. At times, that’s part of the fun. Look at our tower, barely held together with thumbtacks! But when the tower keeps collapsing, especially when it collapses from even slight errors, and doubly especially when it always collapses on the youngest kiddo’s turn, well…

Well, it becomes a tornado simulator. Because the kiddo starts knocking things over on purpose. “Mrrrowwwrrr,” she says, jabbing a pillar with the kitten-stick. Everything tumbles.

Which is fine, as these things go. I’m not about to insist she play the cats-making-a-mess game properly. But it puts the game in a strange place. She adores it. But her adoration has been tempered by the fragility of this plaything. It’s so delicate that she can’t help but break it, and so the breaking has become the game. For the rest of us, Cats Knocking Things Off Ledges becomes a game about rebuilding a similar edifice over and over again, eking out one or two points at a time, and then restarting the process.

To be honest, I’m surprised. Lim was half of the design team behind Junk Art, one of the chunkiest stacking games on the market. If only this title had received similar care. Instead, it winds up overstaying its welcome and growing repetitive within the span of a single session.

Here’s the good news: my kiddo has repurposed the pieces for building a cat tower beyond the confines of the rules. Good initiative, kitten.

 

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, my third-quarter newsletter is open to all.)

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.

Rune Rite

At a glance, Rune Rite doesn’t look all that dissimilar from any number of other flip-and-writes. Fortunately, designer Jason Katzwinkel makes one alteration that has major implications not only for this game, but for the entire format.

Short version: you craft the card in advance.

Longer version. Like every other instance of the genre, you begin your turn by flipping over a card. This shows some combination of runes — spirals, stars, tildes, triangles, and plusses, with the occasional wild that counts as anything and everything. Then everybody at the table gets to mark a cluster of those symbols onto a personal paper grid. The larger the cluster — say, a polyomino L of stars — the more you mark, all the way down to a single symbol.

The wrinkle is that drawing a card isn’t as simple as drawing a card. You draw the card, yes, right, you’re following I’m sure, but then you choose how to lay that card over the top of any previous cards, all framed within a cardboard holder to establish the selection’s outer boundaries. In more mathematical terms, every card offers a 2×3 selection, but you’re really drawing from a 3×3 grid. So the current card matters, but so do any previous cards that might still be peeking out from previous turns.

The implications are far-reaching. At the first and most obvious level, you’re given some control over which symbols — and furthermore, which shapes of symbols — you’re allowed to draw on your pad. By rotating your card, it’s possible to arrive at unusual shapes indeed.

But more than that, with some attention you can also sabotage everybody else at the table. Whatever shape the card-puller draws, nobody else is allowed to use. Sometimes this only provides access to smaller leftovers, but there’s room for devious plays. Such as noting that a rival wants a size-two combination of spirals, so instead you hand them a huge cluster of spirals instead. Go for it, bud. Overcommit.

In some ways, Rune Rite feels like a proof of concept. It’s a small game, I mean, with very little variance between sessions apart from the actual shape-crafting that occurs on each and every turn. Unlike something like Cartographers, which changes its victory conditions between sessions, the goal is always the same.

But for a proof of concept, there’s a lot to like here. There’s real tension between specialization and diversification. Points principally come from drawing boxes of similar symbols and filling other boxes with as many different symbols as possible, encouraging you to build across the pad’s boundaries. Which is to say, there’s a definite “best approach” here, but it isn’t one easily or flippantly pursued.

I’d like to see more of this. Crafting the “flip” of the flip-and-write is a stroke of brilliance, and here it’s given perhaps its purest possible expression. The result is little more than a snack, but it’s a snack that might prove transformative if everybody catches the vision. Like a Triscuit.

Rune Rite is on Kickstarter for nine more days.

Bucket List

According to internet lore, the term “bucket list” was coined by the 2007 comedy film The Bucket List. This is a myth. My proof is a journal entry dated 14 March 2006 which reads: “Bucket List. Item #1. Prove that I, Dan Thurot, came up with the term ‘bucket list,’ not that stupid movie coming out next year.”

Many of the action items in Micah Heiselt’s Bucket List represent similar uphill battles. Spend a night in Dracula’s Castle? Sure, but bring the gauze. Buy a farm for orphaned alpacas? Nothing was ever stopping you but the fear of success. Fill the Louvre with only your art? Kid. Come on. You can’t even finish one board game preview on a site without the slightest quality control.

Then again, that’s much of the charm of this one. You and your friends wrote a bucket list in high school. (Presumably you graduated after 2007.) Now, with death swiftly approaching, you must tick off as many boxes as possible.

What would otherwise be a cutesy gimmick game is elevated by two factors. The first is that the gameplay is a combination of long-term planning, thinking on your toes, and careful risk management. There are only two main resources, time and money, which must be invested into a goal before it can be accomplished. That’s simple enough, but resources come from multiple sources, some more reliable than others, such as action cards versus a turn-initiating roll of the dice. You’ll get something, but whether you can put it to good use is another question. Oh, and any leftovers will anger the Grim Reaper.

The Grim Reaper is the other shakeup to the formula. Various triggers will see old boney chasing everyone around the score track. If he catches up to the trailing player, a headstone will be placed to end the game upon the completion of the round. There are ways to cheat death, nudging the Grim Reaper back on the track and returning the headstone to its resting place… except you might not want to delay the end of the game if you’re sitting pretty at the top of the score track, leading to little tussles to delay or hasten your mortality.

It’s a bit grim. But then, so is anything associated with bucket lists. The good news is that it’s also an amusing little plaything, with more to consider than first meets the eye, and lots of goofball moments where death seems around the corner only to be delayed yet again. It’s ultimately a game about picking your battles. There isn’t time or money enough to do everything, so you’re encouraged to pad out your days with goals that can absorb whatever resources happen to come your way.

In that sense, there’s something comforting about it, almost nihilistic in its dedication to self-determination. Maybe it will even inspire me to fulfill the other entries in my bucket list. “Item #2. Change it back to Berenstein Bears before anyone notices.”

Bucket List is on Kickstarter for fifteen more days.

Pact

Pact is what you get when you blend the asymmetry of Root with the hard tradeoffs of a classic card-driven wargame like Twilight Struggle.

First, the Root. Four bug factions occupy the tree kingdom of Branchbourne, each with its own advantages. There’s Jenna Ermine VI, her authority thoroughly entrenched across the branches and boughs of the kingdom, but spread so thin that the slightest tension might crack her carapace. Her closest rival is the Duchesse Orich, incredibly well resourced but also over-leveraged. Somewhat farther underfoot is the revolutionary Matuk Inkclaw, capable of unleashing labor strikes that cripple the kingdom, and the heretic Weaver Neith. Mostly I remember Weaver Neith mind-controlling everybody.

All right, asymmetry is hot right now. But the second half of the game, the card-driven wargame half, controls how things get done. Everything relies on event cards. At any given time, a handful of these are on offer in the market. Taking a turn isn’t as simple as moving pieces. Instead, you select an event. If it’s your own, you either use the card for its action points — adding tokens, moving stuff between locales, that sort of thing — or take its historical outcome, which is always weirder and often more potent, but less directed. On the other hand, if it belongs to someone else, you take the actions while they trigger the event. Pretty normal, as card-driven wargames go, but rather novel when it comes to bug-based fantasy games.

Making matters more complicated, society in Branchbourne is dominated by four “pillars,” each of which demands some measure of attention lest the kingdom fall into disrepair. These are handled by moving treasures, a nearly zero-sum economy, between their four domains. The Merchants, for instance, are how cash gets infused into the economy. By investing treasures into their domain, additional treasures wink into existence ex nihilo. Invest too much, however, and the Merchants will crash the whole dang thing, reducing the number of treasures in circulation.

Okay, so you want the Merchants to have a lot of treasures, but not so many that they wreck the economy. Except the other pillars also have their own requirements. The Nobility mostly function as parasites, destroying treasures outright, but if not placated they’ll steal treasures from the other pillars. The Church is similar; they like to gather treasures as tithes, but they can manipulate the standings of the other pillars outright. The Military, meanwhile, needs treasure. Lots of treasure. Only their threat is no paper tiger-beetle; if they don’t have enough loot in their vault when the round ends, the centipedes chewing at Branchbourne’s roots will overrun the kingdom and eat everybody.

This prompts a delicate balancing act. Your faction doesn’t only want to survive; they also make pacts (the title! oh ho!) with those pillars to see them succeed in exchange for influence at court. So, depending on how you’ve positioned your faction, you might want the bank to fail this round, since its collapse will humiliate your rival who’s aligned with them, while feeding heaps of glittery to the Church in exchange for their imprimatur on your ascending the throne.

Which brings us full circle to that event system, because this is where you can manipulate every little corner of Branchbourne to your advantage. The Duchesse Orich, for example, can use her hives to bestow additional treasures on various pillars of society. But when an event raises the opportunity to do so, will it align with her current goals? The same goes for the firebrand and his labor strikes, the Empress and her loyalty counters, and everything else. Pact is a game of hard tradeoffs. Direct action or powerful but perhaps misaligned events? That’s the question, baby.

All told, the result is a fable about the ever-shifting halls of power that I find mighty intriguing. Like a lot of the best games, designer Zach Hoekstra has keyed into the fact that smart design is often about limitation as much as it is about player agency. Often, turns force a choice between which goals you’ll fail at the least. It’s a lot like tacking into the wind; moving at increments that seem to go nowhere, only that bit by bit move you closer to your objective.

The result is one heady political game indeed. Of the titles on this list, Pact is the heftiest, but it’s also the one I’m most eager to see reach completion. It’s ambitious, it’s weird, it’s full of bugs.

Pact is on Gamefound for nineteen more days.

 

Prototype copies of Rune Rite, Bucket List, and Pact: The Future of Branchbourne were temporarily provided by their designers and publishers.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, my third-quarter newsletter is open to all.)

I’ve never been to Machu Picchu, but it was the site that demonstrated to me at an uncomfortably young age that history wasn’t just one thing but many, and that those many things were subject to a wide range of interpretations. Even, possibly, that they might end friendships.

Which is appropriate, because that’s exactly what Wiñay Kawsay, designed by Alison Collins, is all about.

At a sky-high level, Wiñay Kawsay is set at Machu Picchu. You can see it right there. The map is even helpfully labeled with the various temples and complexes that were constructed by the Inca Empire sometime in the 15th century.

But the game is also set elsewhere: in universities and magazine offices, at dig sites and museum storerooms, and in the minds and imaginations of historians, archaeologists, students, and countless readers and viewers. For such a complicated tale, not to mention one told by a freshman designer, Wiñay Kawsay is deftly told. Collins weaves an entire warehouse of threads together with real deftness. The resultant tapestry — perhaps more appropriate, the cumbi — appears simple. In reality, it’s anything but.

Most board games would have their players build Machu Picchu. In Wiñay Kawsay you’re here to deconstruct it. To deconstruct and dig and brush away sediment, to catalogue, to publish, to argue. In its earlier incarnation, the game’s full title was “Wiñay Kawsay: Publish or Perish,” a mouthful that was nonetheless instructive. You are historians, practitioners of a 20th-century discipline rather than artisans of the 15th-century, and the mountaintop ruins have yet to yield their secrets.

Little by little, your search scratches the surface. Gray blocks are removed from the map along with evidence cards, their backs color-coded with hints about their nature. This portion of the game is operated via worker placement, with researcher meeples deployed to recover blocks and artifacts. As the rulebook indicates, there’s an element of destruction to this process. Stones must be removed — carefully, with intention to be replaced, but removed all the same — to uncover what lies beneath. Artifacts will be removed for study and, often, displayed in far-off countries or private collections. In game terms, this translates to “impact.” For every block displaced and card recovered, you move along a track, leaving a trail of displacement in your wake.

Everything recovered reveals a function. Ornate pottery speaks to wealth. Sudden abandonment hints that the site may be one of the continent’s mythical lost cities. Guardhouses and moats and narrow bridges indicate military use. The astronomical alignment of windows and dwellings prompts thoughts of the heavens.

Very quickly, however, one thing becomes clear. There is no singular “truth.” At least there isn’t one hidden in the deck of evidence cards. There are tendencies, certainly. In the aleatory shuffle that begins each round, sometimes a corner of Machu Picchu develops in one way or another. A cluster of pink cards speaks to the site’s religious importance; a scattering of reds lends credence to the idea that this was a military citadel.

But it’s what you do with these fragments of evidence that makes Wiñay Kawsay so compelling.

First, evidence must be published. This is presented via an atypical auction system. One player approaches a publication — a journal of military history, say, or a compendium of ancient history. They arrange their evidence cards and at least one of the gray blocks they took from the dig site. This is their bid.

At this point, competing players are allowed to get in on the action with their own cards and blocks. When everything is revealed, this might result in competing interpretations. In fact, it’s downright common. Icons are tallied to reveal which interpretation is most favored at the moment. Then the player who submitted the bulk of the evidence in that interpretation becomes the publication’s author, adding a color-coded book or two to the professorial desk that serves as their resource shield.

In its abstraction, this auction system captures something of the discourse that is historical authorship. Ideas matter, but only in the turbulence of publication and counter-publication. Along the way, things fall through the cracks. One interpretation that seemed solid might slip out of favor, only to resurface later when its evidence card is dredged from the archives. Meanwhile, material artifacts — a broken spine, misgendered bones, grave goods — become tally marks in ideological tug-of-wars, disappear into a crate somewhere, and then are found later to be returned to Peru, usually with some gravity of ceremony to ensure your institution doesn’t get in too much trouble for pillaging somebody’s heritage.

Which is to say it’s all so very earthy. This is history as tangible product, something dug out of the earth and then fiercely argued over. History, even, as personal prejudice and petty squabbles. It’s history as the ongoing conflict between fieldwork and archive work. And the game hasn’t even unveiled its centerpiece yet.

When the game opens, you haven’t yet established a favored interpretation. That occurs naturally as you publish your first papers. But then, maybe twenty minutes in, the game shifts gears. You have your interpretation. Now you’re asked how you’ll defend it.

There are three options. The first one, the one most of us would recognize as history as an ideal practice, is Empiricism. Over time, your approach to the evidence changes. This requires you to put forward and defend multiple theories — sometimes contradictory theories. By publishing books in multiple colors, your ultimate reward is a well-rounded score derived from a whole range sources.

In some ways, Empiricism is a safe bet. Any and all evidence might become valuable. But as you’ll soon discover, it’s also a precarious approach. On the opposite end of the ideological spectrum is Determinism. This approach puts forward a single theory at all costs, seeding only a single color across the map of Machu Picchu, but scoring those blocks over and over again. As a Determinist, you have the answer already in mind. The evidence is down there. All that remains is to find it. And to ignore, bury, or overwhelm any evidence to the contrary.

The third route sits somewhere in the middle: the Popularizer. Rather than having an interpretation at all, the Popularizer is here to talk about how cool history is. Basically, you’re the 20th-century history version of those I Fucking Love Science social media pages that share unsourced listicles about how neutron stars prove the universe is one big brain, maaan. In some ways, this is the safest route. As soon as you declare yourself a Popularizer, you ditch the burden of having an interpretation at all. Instead, you gain a documentary crew. This you place on one of Machu Picchu’s sites, where it earns points for every colored block. Not only some, like the Empiricist. Not only one, like the Determinist. All. As your popularity expands, you unlock additional film crews to cover further sites. Maybe you’ll even talk about aliens on some podcasts.

(Note: There are no aliens in Wiñay Kawsay. Thank goodness.)

What’s so fascinating about the model Collins has presented here is that it demonstrates not only the process of uncovering and writing history, but also its dangers and drawbacks.

Here’s my favorite example. In one session, I was playing as an Empiricist. That meant I favored nearly all evidence, right? Well… sorta. As the game progressed, one of my rivals outed himself as a Determinist. Specifically, a Determinist for the military theory, the idea that Machu Picchu was a citadel that projected force onto the surrounding agricultural communities.

And he was doing a bang-up job of finding evidence. Red cards, the ones that support the military interpretation, were appearing all over the place. When a lull in mace-heads and splintered bones finally presented itself, our resident Determinist had already unlocked the special action that let him plunge into the archive — the discard pile, which is very much in-play throughout the entire game — to pull out cards that matched his ideological slant. The board was redder than the binding of Chairman Mao’s Quotations. Or the cover of a Dan Bullock board game. Very red indeed, is what I’m saying.

Which meant that I, the Good Guy, the One Who Accepted All Evidence, started burying red blocks every chance I got. I still earned them, of course. In the course of publishing articles about The Militant Traditions Evident in the Soil Layers of Machu Picchu, I gave the military theory its due. Still, while I was oh so impartial on paper, beneath my player shield I was hoarding red blocks rather than adding them to the map. I even scoured each round’s opportunity cards for new ways to swap one color for another. A lecture series became a chance to discuss how, yes, there were some military artifacts here and there, but they really bore religious significance. Adios red blocks, hello pink blocks. I capitalized on popular beliefs to add more yellow blocks to the Temple of the Sun. I abused radiocarbon dating to swap reds for blues in the Residential District.

And I won. By the slenderest possible margin, I took it. I’d become the very thing I supposedly despised, a vandal of the archaeological and written record. But I’d beaten my foe, and done so while remaining the very model of a modern history-writer. To the outside world, anyway.

I wish I could say that these abuses of history are the exception, but that hasn’t been my experience. I grew up in a culture that enthusiastically encouraged higher education for everyone… provided everyone then used that education to prove the right things.

Machu Picchu was one more bystander of that culture war. In middle school, a close friend bragged to our group about how his father was taking people on tours that proved the Book of Mormon had really happened: it had been a Nephite stronghold, a satellite kingdom of Zarahemla that was wiped out in the war against the Lamanites a few hundred years after Jesus Christ had visited the Americas. In reply, I pointed out that the latest radiocarbon dating placed its origins no earlier than 1420, and furthermore argued that it was problematic to rob an indigenous group of their history to service a white Christian millenarian narrative.

LOL. I didn’t say any of that. I didn’t know the first thing about the Inca, and I probably would have told you that “cultural appropriation” was when you really liked bratwurst. But those ruins were a long way from where my seminary teacher said Zarahemla was really located, so I bounced back with something like “That’s bonkers.” Eloquent seventh-grader fare.

Anyway, my friend got very upset. “Are you calling my dad a liar?” upset. Not-talking-for-three-days upset. So upset that he stopped eating lunch with me.

Because even when history is very badly done, it matters. That’s one of the things Collins seems to be saying in Wiñay Kawsay. These ruins are real. The artifacts we draw from them are real. But the stories we tell about them are only perceptions of reality. Better or worse, accurate or inaccurate, studious or half-baked, they were written by people who had their own versions of the Inca, or what certain items must have been used for, or how this story could be told.

This situates Wiñay Kawsay in rare company. Plenty of games use historical settings, but not many of them are about history. Wiñay Kawsay is about history. It’s about how history is the study of primary sources and artifacts, but about how it’s also about relating a story that makes sense. The result is a warning as much as it is a love letter, a game that believes in the process of making good history — in looking at the past, the entirety of it — but which is never unaware that bad history is always close at hand, one error, oversight, or unexamined bias away. Hopefully there are correctives, found in peer review and publishing and debate. Hopefully.

At any rate, Collins has crafted something impressive, a heady blend of sharp gameplay and shaper insight that’s far simpler and more playable than anyone could rightly expect.

 

A complimentary copy of Wiñay Kawsay was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, my third-quarter newsletter is open to all.)

On not-so-rare occasions, I get to play board games before they’re fully polished. There’s something about seeing a game struggle through its growing pains, watching its knobbly limbs grow lithe and athletic, its protrusions smooth and frictionless, that recalls editing a novel for publication or appraising frames for the final cut. Most of the time, this process is a hard one. “Murder your darlings,” Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch said of an author’s finest phrases. Cut them down to size. That’s what it takes to make something great.

Only I’m not convinced we don’t sometimes murder a little too liberally. Sometimes I’ll play a finished game only to discover that the essential soul that made its earlier incarnation worth experiencing has been killed along with the wobbly iconography and degenerative action states. Somewhere in the process, development has sanded down the knobs and protrusions — and left little more than a burnished stick. Good for a walk, perhaps, but not especially notable.

Which brings us to Braided Skies, created by Dan Germain and Stonemaier Games.

Ever played a board game about operating a tour company that whisks hard-earned customers to exotic locales aboard custom pleasure craft? That’s Braided Skies. Or, well, Braided Skies is the other one. The one that isn’t Galactic Cruise. It’s a gentle game. Strait-laced. Customary.

Literally. In an era when worker placement has the air of either a past fad or something that complements other systems rather than standing on its own, Braided Skies puts the concept front and center. Turns consist of taking an airship, of which you own three, and sending it to a destination. Most of the time, these placements are completed without restriction. Only on occasion do you need to pay attention to the vessel’s little flags, whether one, two, or three, to determine whether it can safely navigate to a particular port.

There are variables on the formula, as you might expect. The mainstay is the game’s approach to topography. When Braided Skies opens, a thick cloud layer covers most of the board. Technically it’s two layers of additional cardboard, buckled against one another with the help of hidden magnets, but you get the gist. These layers conceal additional ports that are only gradually uncovered as you visit the spots on top of them. The clouds part to reveal some bonus — an extra card, one of the multi-colored “tapstones” that function as airship fuel, maybe a few seeded points at a location to incentivize a visit — and then, underneath, a new location brimming with resources to exploit.

Similarly, ships and ports alike exist to be upgraded. Since they function as your workers, the former are the real highlight, permitting both a sailor and a little factory to come along for the ride. (A little loosely, it must be said. It would have been preferable for them to snap into place rather than wobbling over the side at the slightest nudge. Crewing an airship is no joke.) These upgrades goose the value of the ports you visit. Similarly, many ports can be staffed with outposts for another helping.

Which is all to say, where your early airships feel a little underwhelming, it isn’t long before you’re fielding — floating? — absolute resource-guzzlers. Every time you descend into port, your hold swells with tapstones and tourists. This in turn initiates a little… I wouldn’t call it a minigame. It’s far too light for that. But a mini-minigame, one where your newfound cargo must be loaded into the proper slots or get left behind. It’s always free to load cargo into the ship that did the hauling, provided there’s room. Loading stuff onto other ships costs grit, a more abstract resource, and might be worthwhile if you’ve added the right outfitting cards to a ship.

Look, this is all a mouthful, but in practice it’s silky smooth. Ships go out and pick up resources. Resources go into your ships. The more outfittings a ship has, the more it can hold. The real highlight, though, is what those outfittings do when you bring a ship back home.

Recall turns have long been the bane of worker-placement games, and if there’s any one thing that Stonemaier Games has set out to solve, it’s the recall turn. Germain has done as good a job as any, and likely better. The idea is that returning ships trigger all their outfittings, but only if they’re full of resources. This is how you… well, everything. Speed along the tracks that act as game timers and make your card icons more valuable in the endgame. Earn points. Gain passive trickles of resources. Add extra outposts to the map. More often than not, it’s the return trip that’s the more exciting of Braided Skies’ tidal phases. Going out, you get resources. Coming back, you put those resources to work.

Naturally, resources don’t only serve that one purpose. The real spills of points are found on the map, mostly in the form of wonders. Basically, these are the destinations you’re delivering passengers to, provided you haven’t forgotten about them in your distraction with other shiny possibilities, which I’m somewhat pleased to report has happened to me on more than one occasion.

This in turn produces a certain tension. Should you spend all those resources to secure access to another wonder? Or ensure your recall turn will be as stocked as possible? As generous as Braided Skies is, it isn’t uncommon to find oneself just short of having enough resources to have it both ways.

Which isn’t the same as saying there’s any stress to these decisions. Like much of Stonemaier’s output these days, Braided Skies is as buffed of friction as possible. There’s a certain arc to the game that rarely deviates from its appointed path. Early on, everybody stocks their ships with factories and crew. Later, they onboard huge amounts of resources and churn them into points. Every so often — but not often enough to make it really matter — someone will require a specific ship to visit a particular port.

But this doesn’t extend to wonders, nor to any of the actual points-scoring locales. The result is an endgame gold rush for points, one with hardly any consideration for, say, sweeping something out from under a rival. There’s no sacrifice to anything. No dangerous headwinds to navigate; no spots that sacrifice a shipboard factory for a heap of points. If anything, the board seems to develop from one side to the other. Halfway through the game, the spaces along the bottom are all but obsolete. Why visit them? You’ll never need to crew up again. The time for new outfittings has passed. Now is the time to gather and spend resources.

Really what I’m trying to say is that Braided Skies is rewarding but hollow. Every move gives you something, but it isn’t often that something will be demanded in return. I have no idea if there was a more rough-and-tumble version of this game at some point. One where blocking mattered. One where a keen move could upend an opponent’s plans with purpose rather than incidentally. But I hope so. If only because Braided Skies truly is impressive, in its way, full of systems that feel good to manage and some smart ideas about how to evolve a map and make recall turns exciting. Those parts of the game deserved extra kindling. Something they could spark against.

On the whole, then, Braided Skies is a feel-good game that struggles to elicit grander emotions than the muted pleasure of adding more tokens to your stockpile, ticking along a scoring track, or ticking along a different scoring track. It’s lighter than the titles that usually get pegged as too light for “serious” play, the Wingspans and Wyrmspans and Finspans. If not in terms of rules — a caveat I add entirely for the sake of Wingspan Pocket — then in terms of consequence.

Still, I’ve enjoyed my time soaring across this particular cloud-banked continent. Enjoyed and forgotten. But enjoyed all the same.

 

A complimentary copy of Braided Skies was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, my third-quarter newsletter is open to all.)

It’s almost too obvious to state aloud, but there’s a lot to be said for the games we actually play. Case in point, Enchanted Ivy, the solitaire game by Sarah Joshua. When I sat down this morning to begin writing this review, I went through the usual steps. Picking and editing the images. Uploading the template and arranging everything into logical order. Glancing through a few notes.

But then I thought to myself, maybe I don’t understand this game yet. Even though I’ve played it well over thirty times. One more session. In endless mode with randomized guests. Just one extra play to make sure I know what I’m talking about.

And then, with such inevitability that I’m not sure why I ever thought differently, I played it twice. That’s Enchanted Ivy for you.

Enchanted Ivy is about building an inn. It’s a magical inn, always shifting, and covered with ivy and blossoms. The arrangement of that ivy is the first layer of the game’s challenge. The more interconnected the ivy — the fewer gaps in its protective foliage — the more points you score.

But Enchanted Ivy isn’t only about the structure. It’s also about the guests who will inhabit it. Every card can be flipped over. One side shows the ivy growing along the plaster and brickwork. The other shows the same, but with the addition of a balcony. These are the spaces for your guests to inhabit.

Turns are simple. You draw two cards and two guests. Both cards will be placed: one on its bare side, the other for its balcony. Onto the balcony you’ll place a single guest. Then you draw back to two cards and two guests. Simple.

Except the only simple thing about Enchanted Ivy is its turn structure. Your guests are the real challenge. To a one, they’re fussy. Fussy and wonderful. And since most sessions require you to balance the needs of ten or so guests, whether you’re tackling one of the game’s ten scenarios or tinkering with the randomized endless mode, their needs clash almost immediately.

For example, today I was faced with some tough conflicting imperatives. Some of my guests were all about proximity. Such as the Dog, who wants to keep his three heads affixed to as many guests as possible, and the Gift Giver, a Santa knockoff who can only be bothered to walk in two straight lines through the inn, but scores quite a few points for every room he leaves a present at. Others, though, wanted room to spread out. Like the Adventurer with his grappling hook, ready to swing across gaps to say hello, or the Washer, needing another window somewhere across the way to suspend her clothesline from — the farther all the better for hanging additional wet underthings — or the Firebreather, determined to regurgitate flames against empty diagonals.

At times, the sheer bulk of these needs — having to house an Astrologer who wants an unobstructed view of the night sky next to a Cat that intends to wander from sill to sill — can seem overwhelming. Especially when you first reveal all those guests. Ten! Ten! How am I going to keep ten people straight?

To its credit, this is where Enchanted Ivy really shines. The scenarios, which present a lovely little tale about coming to accept one’s changing identity (I smell a metaphor!) introduces guests steadily but not so quickly that they become overwhelming. And really, the whole thing is brief enough that it usually demands a second session to see how many extra points can be wrung from a set now that you know your guests’ peccadilloes.

Very quickly, I developed favorites. The Fighters, paired guests who must be kept apart at all costs. The Raven Keeper, observing the comings and goings from above. The Architect and his invisible lines across the way. Of course, there were also those guests for whom my welcoming smile was more of a rictus. The Fool and his juggling. The Mystery Knight insisting that his bath demands privacy. The Justice’s demand for absolute symmetry of guest placements. That hag.

No matter the combination, though, there’s a fairness to the process. Sure, it’s possible for a bad draw to smash your plans. I’m speaking in a more holistic sense. Before Enchanted Ivy jumbles the pieces together, it shows you the parameters. The guests who must be housed. The shape your inn will take today. Who’s going to be a problem. If you’re playing a scenario, which optional challenges you can tackle. And then you take those pieces and make something beautiful.

Lots of board games are about making something beautiful, whether visually or mathematically. Enchanted Ivy lets you do both. But more than that, it asks you to linger. To spend an extra minute. To observe the flaws in your creation and appreciate them.

Which is to say that even after all those sessions, even after learning how to manage the game’s thirty-odd guests, after checking off every scoring goal and special objective in the campaign, I keep coming back for one more visit. This is one of the finest solitaire games I’ve played in… well, in ever.

 

A complimentary copy of Enchanted Ivy was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, my third-quarter newsletter is open to all.)

Of the handful of things I appreciate about Pax Playground, the most significant is the way it reminds me of recess. Its very existence is playful — this is, after all, a Pax game that lasts twenty minutes and bucks tradition by refusing to touch history with a ten-foot pole, let alone compose loopy footnotes about it.

More importantly, David Masnato, who previously did the art for Matilda Simonsson’s Turncoats and Pax Penning, uses Pax Playground to reproduce the anxieties of childhood. Like a child, you step into the game buoyed by possibility — and weighted down by it. As a game about play, it’s playful; as a game about becoming yourself, it’s as fretful as a kid trying to decide which sweet to pick out at the store.

When Pax Playground opens, you’re presented with the titular playground. There are five locations in all, four of which, the slide, swings, teeter-totter, and rocking horse, are also considered structures. These locations begin with some number of toys. There are three types: blue for cars, yellow for yo-yos, and red for dolls. The schools I attended as a youngster never permitted toys, forcing us to manage our own black-market trade in Pogs and Matchbox cars and eventually Magic: The Gathering cards. Swap out a few nouns and the whole thing becomes achingly familiar.

Your objective is twofold. First, you want to make friends. Second, you want to stay true to yourself. Or maybe those should be the other way around. First, stay true to yourself. Second, make friends. Perhaps it’s a question of priorities.

As any kid can tell you, making friends isn’t as easy as you think it is, MOM. At any given time, the playground has a favorite toy, determined by which of those three colors wields the most majorities across those five locations. You also have a favorite toy. This one is tallied based on the cubes in your possession and the cards you’ve banked face-down. When the game concludes, if your favorite toy and the playground’s favorite toy are in alignment, you’ve struck up some friendships based on shared interests. Otherwise, you’re the weird kid performing yo-yo tricks while everyone else is playing with dolls.

Meanwhile, staying true to yourself is a question of fulfilling the objective card that was dealt to you in secret during setup. These offer a variety of goals, all tied in some way to the state of the playground. A picky child, for example, might want to ensure there’s only one type of toy at their favored location, while a determined child stacks a whole pile of toys together in one place.

Easier said than done. Thanks to a truly devious card system redolent of the stones from Turncoats, every action spends something from your possession and beckons you slowly but surely toward the game’s conclusion. Your hand opens with five cards. You’ll never draw or draft a replacement. Furthermore, a card only triggers its action if it matches either the toy or the location in the discard pile. For such a short game, expect to spend a lot of time studying your cards for worthwhile plays.

The only way around this limitation is to throw a tantrum. This sends you to the sandbox, the playground’s fifth and normally inaccessible location, where a selection of market cards can break the usual symbol-matching problem. The hitch is that throwing a tantrum spends a toy from your backpack. However, this also presents an opportunity. Because the sandbox can only be adjusted by children having a meltdown, a tactical tantrum can tweak the playground’s favorite toy to your liking without having to play nice with the other children. Future business majors, here’s your life lesson: sometimes it pays to be bad.

In all cases, these limitations are the beating heart of Pax Playground’s gameplay. It’s hard to play cards, and even harder to make them do what you want. It’s even possible that you’ll be forced to play on your own for a while, daydreaming about your favorite toy even if it undermines your long-term strategy. For a game that appears so lighthearted, the mechanical principles are uncompromising.

Then again, I suspect that’s the point. Adults often look back on childhood as a period without cares or responsibilities. This is only true if one considers their principal responsibilities to be economical: rent, bills, employment. Everything else — and I mean everything, from one’s moral behavior to their social obligations to the frightening burden of who you’re becoming minute by minute — is not only every bit as large and intimidating to a child as to an adult, but significantly larger.

In one respect, Masnato softens the blow. While Pax Playground asks its players to think through the ramifications of every move, it takes a loose hand when it comes to victory conditions. Like a few recent titles, there’s no definite win-state, only the lingering question mark around whether you made friends and/or stayed true to yourself.

Here’s the old man in me speaking: at times, victorless games strike me as a brand of ludic malpractice. As fun as it can be to sit around and engage in directionless play, the medium that we call board games generally requires some guiding principle. That direction, more often than not, is most clearly expressed through victory conditions.

Now, I’m sprinkling qualifiers around for a reason. There are some perfectly wonderful victorless games out there. I’ve even recommended some of them. What’s more, I’m not sure the objection applies to Pax Playground. For one thing, it does feature objectives, and they result in fairly natural rankings at the table. While there might be some quibbling over one player making friends but betraying their values while another stays true to themselves but remains lonesome, it’s reasonably easy to say that meeting one objective is better than none and accomplishing both is pretty dang great.

Even setting that aside, Pax Playground succeeds because it raises one of the most pressing concerns of human life, whether on the playground, in the workplace, or really anywhere else: the tension between conformity and individualism. What’s more, it asks the question in a way that doesn’t result in a cliché “conformity bad, individualism good.” As a social creature, it’s healthy to foster friendships, even if we sometimes have to feign interest in a friend’s new hobby. On the flipside, the personal values listed on the cards aren’t things like honesty or generosity. They’re attributes like pickiness, indecision, or the pressing need to erect a fort around the seesaw.

Which isn’t to say those traits can’t be worthwhile! I’ve built more forts as a parent than I ever did as a kid. It’s just that Pax Playground declines to put down stakes. Instead, Masnato has crafted a system that’s challenging to operate but allows any errors to fall on soft ground. As a feat of design, it’s quite the thing to behold, simultaneously painstaking and without immediate consequence.

In that sense, Pax Playground is a game about childhood. About the pressure to become yourself, about the wide-open frontier that is your future, so vast and uncharted as to be terrifying. But it’s also about having the liberty to mess up now and then. It is, in both senses of the word, a sandbox. And every so often, it’s worth the time-out to throw a hissy fit.

 

A complimentary copy of Pax Playground was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

When Cole Wehrle first unveiled An Infamous Traffic way back in 2016, it was a scrappy little devil. Not only was it Wehrle’s second design, it was also among the earliest releases from Hollandspiele. As such, its constraints were stark: a handful of counters and dice, a paper map, and one of the worst rulebooks ever written. (That last one was included in the contract: “The designer will include a horrible rulebook that doesn’t explain the game in the slightest.”)

Now a second edition is on the way. Much like Wehrle’s second stabs at both Pax Pamir and John Company, this is the work of a designer who knows what he wants to say. More importantly, it’s the work of a designer who’s spent the intervening decade learning how to use the curious medium of tabletop board games, simultaneously one of our ancientest and most recent arts, to paint a compelling and damning landscape of 19th-century business.

An Infamous Traffic functions as a prologue. To the single most profitable good of the British Empire across the entire 19th century. To two state-backed drug wars, the establishment of Hong Kong, and the Chinese Century of Humiliation. To the association of opium with Chinese immigrants, from Sherlock Holmes to the first anti-drug law in United States history, passed in San Francisco in 1875 to curb the rising popularity of smoking dens.

And it all begins with supply and demand.

When the game opens, Christian missionaries and a handful of smugglers have brought opium into Canton. From your perspective as a well-to-do mercantile family, the immiseration of those hooked on the drug represents an opportunity.

As in the original game, this largely means filling supply chains with tokens that fulfill the demand for opium. The raw bales, produced in India; the vessels used to transport them across the sea; the merchants who sell them locally. In this last case, that can be your own agents, smugglers, or corrupt diplomats happy to look the other way for a cut of the profits.

Of course, this process isn’t as easily done as said. There are complications. The right opportunity needs to present itself, abstracted by dice that must be matched between a special pool and the region where you’re peddling your product. There must be sufficient demand to pay the prices you’re asking, sometimes resulting in little bidding wars — an example of Adam Smith’s invisible hand driving down prices to favor the consumer, if you want to be cynical about it. Eventually, the danger of enforcement rears its heads. But that’s a way out.

At this level, An Infamous Traffic functions much as the original edition did. It’s a game about the early decades of capitalism as not only a theory but as a practice. As a natural right, as the Crown would argue when its gunboats later forced the Qing to open their ports to an addictive poison.

But there were problems with the first edition. Quite a few, some of them apparent more in hindsight than at the time of the game’s authoring. This new edition rectifies these problems, both mechanically and narratively, to craft a better-rounded experience, not to mention one that’s shorn of the madcap silliness that sometimes marked the original.

The most visible transformation is one of scope. An Infamous Traffic was always cosmopolitan in scale. Your objective wasn’t really to sell opium. Rather, it was to take the profits from slinging dope to improve your standing in polite society back in London. At the end of each round, players would send their family scions back home to compete for various rewards. The latest fashions, highborn marriages, or in some cases terrible hunting accidents, all served to tweak your family’s fortunes. The more profits you’d clawed out of China, the better your reward.

The second edition keeps most of that intact, and does so by adjusting the lens to show not only China, but India and London as well. Your current position is shown by a moveable pawn. Just as a 19th-century merchant was likely to expend a third of their lives at sea, your pawn spends a not-insignificant portion of its time shifting between locales. To India you sail to secure poppy contracts. Over to China to manage your supply lines. Then back to London in time to throw a fancy party. There are questions of timing to consider, such as whether you’ll dally too long in one port and therefore miss out on an opportunity elsewhere. Sometimes seniority matters, as when one firm reaches China before the others and can therefore pounce on an opening.

Along the way, Wehrle ameliorates, or at least numbs, some of the issues that harangued the first edition. It’s still possible to undersell a rival, but the original game’s race to the bottom has been dulled by the need to actually take on debt to recreate an opponent’s network. Gone, too, are the “industry leader” positions that previously protected one from these little predations.

But that’s all granular stuff that won’t matter to newcomers. The point is that An Infamous Traffic now operates sans the bechromed rules that were necessary in the original game, and does so in such a way that makes both its gameplay and its core arguments cleaner and more impactful.

For the most part, Wehrle accomplishes this by altering the nature of An Infamous Traffic altogether. Where the original limited its components to a counter-sheet and a handful of dice, the production has expanded to include four decks of cards. Each setting — London, India, and China — now feature decks where players can make and take advantage of business connections, turning the game into a minor tableau-builder.

It works like this. While located in one of these spots, you might choose to delve into the deck. You draw three cards from the corresponding deck, select one to keep, and place the other two back on top. It’s surprisingly similar to the system Wehrle used in Oath, keeping certain cards in circulation. You’re not only getting a glimpse at the business opportunities your firm can take advantage of, but those your rivals are likely to capitalize upon at any moment. The alternative is to forego a selection altogether, instead burying the draw at the bottom of the deck.

Once secured, cards become the activities you can take at their location. London tends to produce sturdy ships and enterprising individuals. India, of course, is packed with sources of opium. (Production was enforced by the East India Company and later the British Raj, lest anybody get the idea that opium was a uniquely Indian vice. Let’s not shift our blame only halfway to where it belongs.)

Over time, these cards generate a tableau of business connections. Sometimes, you’ll establish a leapfrog network from London to Shanghai, requiring your attention in dribs and drabs at each locale. At other times, it pays to specialize. If you hold the monopoly on cheap poppy production, while your rivals can only secure expensive secondhand products back in Britain, you could turn India into a one-stop shop before setting sail once again for China.

There are other possibilities in each deck. In London, you might gain the prime minister’s ear, letting you noodle with parliament’s view of China or take direct command over any ensuing opium wars. The investment of an Indian prince could allow you to warehouse a few extra tiles in between decades, while a plantation of your own makes it harder for opponents to undersell your product. The deck in China, meanwhile, is special abilities all the way down: local bodyguards for scaring off rivals, pirates for protecting your vessels, bandits willing to strangle a rival’s activities. An Infamous Traffic no longer requires the former edition’s persnickety rules because every exception has been offloaded to a card. It’s a blunt-force approach, but it’s one that gives each player their own bespoke selection of advantages, not to mention makes the rules considerably easier to keep straight.

This system also adds little moments where player agency is suddenly, sharply undermined. For instance, mixed in among the China deck is Lin Zexu, the imperial commissioner who cracked down on the opium trade. His appearance is never welcome, ruining the current player’s turn and tossing an extra chit into the event bag.

Speaking of which, the entire event system has been overhauled. In the first edition, the players’ opium firms wielded outsized, even comical command over the course of events in China. Now these events are drawn from a bag, which makes Lin Zexu’s intervention all the more untimely. Events might not matter in the slightest. Or they could throw the entire course of the game into disarray. An ill-timed crackdown can unravel an entire supply chain. Rebellions can plunge regions into chaos. Even the whims of parliament might rear their head, bringing about an opium war, your chance to fling open a free port where your cartels can freely sling their product, or keeping parliament at a simmer that never quite boils over.

All the while, your objective remains consistent. The fourth and final deck merges this game’s first edition with the second edition of John Company. These are the rewards your merchants hope to secure back home. Beautiful estates, sturdy marriages, fat children. Sometimes these rewards are conditional. In one session, I was an insufferable Christian accelerationist whose money went toward assisting the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom gain a toehold in China. In another, a friend desperately sought a marriage card so he could realize a bevy of ambitions that wouldn’t trigger until he achieved holy matrimony. Naturally, the rest of us conspired to prevent any eligible ladies from falling into his orbit.

In all cases, these elements are as sobering as they are compelling. When you realize an ambition card — say, by siring a son with an interest in joining the clergy, or penning a self-aggrandizing memoir, or even retiring to Grosvenor Square — the cost of these luxuries becomes apparent. These are nice things, to be sure. Comfortable arrangements. Desirable ornaments. And they only cost another few thousand addicts. Another back-alley knifing. Another cannon-shot war. Another starving orphanage. Another century of humiliation. You didn’t force the milk down anybody’s throat. You didn’t light the fuse. You didn’t withhold the bread. All you did was conduct business.

In every way that counts, the second edition of An Infamous Traffic is superior to the original. It produces a more robust history, plays more smoothly, and argues more clearly.

That argument, as presented here, is an asymmetry of comfort and misery that never lingers far from mind. Far from being limited to a bygone century, it’s as relevant today as it was when Lin Zexu wrote to Queen Victoria. Here is your drug. Here is your fruit company. Here is your gambling app. Here is your plagiarism machine. Here is your extraction from the many for the sake of the few. Here is your war fought to preserve the right of the rich to grow richer. Again. Again. Again.

 

A prototype of An Infamous Traffic was provided by the designer/publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

There’s undoubted utility to a bag of holding, but I always imagine everything jumbling together like loose chicken parts. Magical tomes next to tavern dinners next to razor implements, sloshing around to produce a pulpy slurry.

Designed by Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, and Shawn Stankewich — best known for Point Salad and Verdant, although my course of choice would be the excellent TEN — Satchel Quest might be the first game to really understand the problem. This is a bag-builder only slightly in the vein of The Quacks of Quedlinburg, featuring hints of that title’s press-your-luck gameplay, but really emphasizing the disorderly nature of a magical burlap sack where one’s potatoes are stored beside mana crystals and radioactive artifacts. For example, you’ve decided to hold not only an entire arsenal in your satchel, but also a whole bunch of monsters.

If that sounds like a bad packing decision — and I’m saying this as someone who grew up schlepping a half-dozen hardbacks on any given weekend trip — then rest assured there’s a reason for all those odds and ends.

The centerpiece of Satchel Quest is an extended puzzle. Provided a dungeon mat, complete with a few enforced spaces like stairwells and maybe a monster or artifact, you draw chips from a bag and place them somewhere on your current floor. Often, these chips give you opportunities. Gold! Gems! Artifacts! Weapons! Whole suits of armor!

However, chips often present dangers as well. Or, if we’re in a sunny mood, opportunities. Chests double as traps, while monsters whittle away as much of your health as possible. It behooves any adventurer to tread carefully. While death doesn’t end the game outright, the penalties for bottoming out your health track are severe. This is excellent design, by the way. While there’s some rubber-banding in Satchel Quest to prevent errant players from falling too far behind, it’s hard to recover from a botched dungeon.

What soon becomes apparent is that Satchel Quest is as much about placement and foresight as stretching your luck to its absolute limit. Every type of chip presents its own conundrum. Gems only unlock their potential when placed next to as much gold as possible. Artifacts like to be clumped together for maximum returns. Chests are a whole mini-puzzle. When bordered by exactly the right chips, you crack them open without harm. Too few and you take damage; too many and you break them open through sheer brute force… but still take injuries from their protective trap.

Of course, the most impactful type of chip is the monster. You can dull their attacks by positioning shields and armor nearby, while slaying them requires careful arrangement of your own swords, bows, and staves. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Swords only hit adjacent monsters. Bows and staves smack entire lanes, but only along diagonal or orthogonal lines respectively. In general, this requires you to produce little defensive clusters around shields, while weapons produce fields of damage.

But this is where your satchel comes into play. Only rarely will things go according to plan. It isn’t uncommon to place a shield exactly where it needs to go, ready to block damage from three monsters at once, alongside an empowered staff for blasting the beasties. Only then you’ll draw a bunch of gold tokens, a sword that isn’t needed at the moment, and a gem that would pair nicely with the gold, if only that’s what you were trying to do right now.

It pays to pivot. It also pays to learn the tools of your trade. There are items, tools like keys for breaking past a sticky chest or torches that serve as extra draws from your satchel. Each hero also gets their own set of abilities, like the Dodo Alchemist’s taste for potions or the Pangolin Fighter’s layers of armor. It helps, too, that chips are double-sided. If you can’t possibly tackle that monster right now, there’s usually something helpful, or at least benign, on its reverse face.

This puzzle phase is Satchel Quest at its best and brightest. Everybody plays simultaneously, a barbed blessing if one player happens to be slower than everyone else, but considerably pacier than taking turns. And while most players will usually use every last chip in each dungeon, somewhat undercutting the game’s press-your-luck ethos, this puzzle is always engrossing. That goes double when things are going wrong. Johnson and company have done a solid job of ensuring that their game is at its most interesting when nothing is quite going your way, forcing you to use every tool at your disposal to come out of the dungeon alive.

If you detect a Ginormous But lurking around the corner, you’re only half-right. For the most part, the remainder of Satchel Quest is similarly polished.

Consider the shopping phase, which uses the game’s double-sided chips to its advantage. Letting everybody check the reverse face of each chip would have been a horrible time-sink. Instead, everybody is allowed to “browse” one chip per turn, peeking at its reverse side before buying something — and that purchase might be a different chip entirely. This ensures there’s still an element of surprise, but also lets players wield some control over their destiny. No endless token-checking required.

Or there’s the way new adventure cards vary the puzzle from round to round. One dungeon might be rotated ninety degrees, requiring you to venture down a shaft with little room to maneuver, while the next is filled with placeholder gold that makes gems more valuable but combat unusually claustrophobic.

If anything, the Lesser But is that Satchel Quest overstays its welcome. Five dungeons is a lot to tackle, especially when you’re only adding one to three chips per round. This isn’t enough to mix up your bag’s composition, at least not quickly. While your bag will hold a different mishmash of weapons and monsters between the first and fifth dungeon, its changes are incremental, and therefore the puzzle feels samey from one delve to the next. This gives the game a fatiguing sensation, especially with additional players necessitating pauses while adventuring or shopping. Unsurprisingly, the solitaire mode sees the problem evaporating.

On the whole, then, Satchel Quest is an admirable effort. It isn’t as varied or as punchy as it could have been, but its central puzzle is well crafted, with plenty of smart touches that ensure every draw presents its own attack of anxiety. I would file this under the “play a few times and pass it along” category — much like this bag of holding. Curse my stars for thinking I could store my good adventuring boots next to these vials of beholder pollen.

 

A complimentary copy of Satchel Quest was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

CMYK is on a hot streak. Get it? Hot streak? Fine, I’ll just tell you about this other board game. Grabble is a remake of Naoki Fukuda’s Nuts a GoGo!, which probably doesn’t tell you much. Imagine a bunch of people scrambling around a box for mismatched components. Shortly thereafter, they wage a sudden-death competition with their foraged traffic cones, dice, and metal pigs. In and out, five minutes.

That’s Grabble. It’s fast, it’s silly, and then it’s over. Unless you play more than once, which is more or less mandatory. Unlike a few other recent CMYK releases, I suspect this one will prove too trifling for some. I think I’ve played it something like forty times in the past month alone.

As noted, the rules for Grabble are compact. So compact that they fit inside the box lid. How’s that for a throwback? It’s the sort of game that can be taught inside of thirty seconds. Which isn’t to say there aren’t… not subtleties, exactly. Not even nuances. But there’s more than one might expect to Grabble.

Take, for example, the pieces. In the original Nuts a GoGo!, the pieces were all wood. They had different shapes: pegs, rings, pyramids, cubes. But they all had that lacquered brown shade, which made them hard to select in a lineup, let alone when five hands were groping around in the box. Here, the shapes are more distinct. Dice, both large and small. Traffic cones, also in two sizes. Wooden meeples, colored green so my seven-year-old calls them leprechauns. Metal pigs and bananas. A lower-case g. Not for Grabble, actually. For gumption.

The distinctiveness of these pieces is part of the game. When Grabble starts, everybody reaches into the box and starts grabbing stuff. The usual restrictions apply: one piece at a time, only one hand. Everybody deposits these pieces into their very own metal cup. If they fall out, they must be replaced before you can continue grubbing around in the box.

Already, there’s something here. Strategy. Tactics. Maybe not. But dexterity, at least. You’re targeting specific pieces. Don’t have a traffic cone? You’d better find one. Somebody seems to be moving too quickly? Shove your fingers under theirs, play a little defense. Thinking too hard? Don’t do that.

As soon as your cup overfloweth, you’re allowed to halt the festivities. You grab the big pawn — it’s huge, you can’t miss it — and shout stop. Everybody slaps the table. The last person to slap owes you a present from their cup.

This is where Grabble switches gears. Everybody pours out their cup, making sure to keep everything hidden. Then, starting with whomever ended the grabbling phase, you go around the table. On your turn, you declare a piece to throw back into the box. Pig! Everybody complies. Then the next person throws something back. Leprechaun! Then the next. Letter!

Here’s the rub. When somebody can’t throw something back, they’re out. It doesn’t matter how much they’re holding. The goal, naturally, is to be the last person standing. So you play… again, not quite strategically. But there is some sense in which you’re making informed decisions. The colorful and shapely nature of the components matters. Because, yeah, you noticed when such-and-such seemed to keep grabbing endless orange cones, or that somebody was taking pieces too quickly and maybe overlooked the tiny bananas that accrue beneath everything else.

The funny thing about Grabble is that it doesn’t need these words. I’ve spent double or triple the wordcount describing Grabble than Grabble spends on itself. Any subtleties arise organically during play. All at once, it’s a dexterity game and a guessing game and a deduction game. It’s a player elimination game, too. But it doesn’t need descriptors. It’s Grabble. It’s itself.

It’s so wholly itself that it resembles some ideal form given shape and volume. When a half-dozen players are glazed over from some overwrought nu-euro, Grabble is there to shake off the mental cobwebs. When my seven-year-old wants to play something before school but she’s taken too long picking out an outfit, we can get in a session of Grabble, no problem. When my twelve-year-old wants to host a game night for her friends but isn’t confident she can teach something complicated, Grabble breaks the ice.

Even compared to some of CMYK’s recent catalog, it’s short, giddy, and not especially long on player agency. Then again, there’s a thinkpiece about what “player agency” actually means in there. Everything passes at lightning speed in Grabble. But it never really feels like it’s out of control. Only that its control is always at risk of slipping away, a finger’s length from being firmly grasped.

Or maybe control doesn’t matter. Not always. Not all the time. Maybe player agency is overrated, at least in some cases. I worry that some people will think themselves too mature to appreciate what it gets right.

But I hope not. Maybe with titles like Magical Athlete and Hot Streak and Dino Racer in favor again, people will see Grabble for what it is: the purest, most perfect way to laugh for five minutes while out-slapping, out-grabbing, and out-guessing one’s family members.

 

A complimentary copy of Grabble was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

All I play anymore is trick-taking games.

At times, that feels like an invitation to make me regret what little time I have left on this Earth.

Shards of Creation is the latest unfortunate example. Designed by Hayden Dillard, it fails to utilize the past decade of sound tabletop design principles, let alone the trick-taking revolution that has produced so many wonderful trifles. It is the anti-trick-taker, the title I would place before someone I was hoping to dissuade from getting into the hobby.

Before we discuss Shards of Creation, there’s something I need to get out of the way. This thing is nominally based on Brandon Sanderson’s fantasy novels. Now, I’ve read a few Sandersons in my time, and even enjoyed one or two, although I wouldn’t label myself a fan. When it comes to the Cosmere, the shared setting for most of his novels, I know very little. Perhaps the Shattering of the Adonalsium is meant to be represented as a capricious slog, a lanced blister in the form of a creation myth. If that’s the case, then Shards of Creation is an accurate and lore-appropriate depiction.

I have my doubts.

As a trick-taker, Shards of Creation is relatively boilerplate. Somebody plays a card. Everybody else follows that card’s suit. The high card wins.

Of course, there’s a trump suit. Depending on player count, each session uses either four or five suits from a selection of eight. Three of these, drawn at random, will function as trump suits over the game’s three rounds.

Except right away, there are some big problems. The first is the rulebook, which doesn’t bother to state who leads most tricks, at least not in the actual rules. Without diving into the examples of play, it’s impossible to discern the designer’s intentions without making some big assumptions that may or may not be true.

That’s a nitpick, albeit one that demonstrates a lack of care that extends to everything else in Shards of Creation. The bigger issue dwarfs the first: everything depends on the luck of the draw. And I mean everything.

The first time I tried a trick-taker, as an adult who’d been kept safely away from playing cards for all of my nineteen years, the pursuit struck me as pointless. Wouldn’t the contest naturally be won by whomever had drawn the most hearts? Modern trick-taking design goes to great lengths to ensure this isn’t the case. Heck, ancient trick-taking design did the same. It isn’t often that trick-takers, whether new or old, are won by sheer quantity of tricks won.

Shards of Creation goes the other direction. Winning tricks is everything. That’s because the winner of each trick gets to select a card to add to their scoring pile. This pile produces the points that will matter when the game concludes after three rounds. The more cards you’ve claimed, the more scoring opportunities you have, whether by collecting as many cards within a suit as possible or collecting sets.

Of course, this is already obnoxious. Drawing a bunch of trumps means you’ll take significantly more cards. And since there aren’t many opportunities to poison the well — only one suit subtracts points — this is almost always an unvarnished positive.

At the same time, a whole bunch of card effects ask players to draw new cards during the round. On the one hand, this churns the hand a little bit, perhaps dulling the sting of a bad draw. (Provided your bad draw included cards that would let you churn your hand, hardly a guarantee.) Except this also turns Shards of Creation into a slog, players regularly pausing mid-trick to draw and discard, steal and draw and discard, draw and sum ranks… basically, Shards of Creation pulls out every method for slowing itself to a crawl.

Put together, this makes Shards of Creation straightforwardly dull but chancy but slow. It’s a trifecta of bad trick-taking.

Again, I know next to nothing about the Cosmere. I don’t know why Honor is so ineffectual. I don’t know who shaved the evil runic lettering into the evil Dominion guy’s haircut. I don’t know why Ruin is presided over by an angry Irishman.

But I do know that this is one of the worst trick-takers I’ve ever played. Take it from someone who only plays trick-takers anymore: there are countless better options out there.

 

A complimentary copy of Shards of Creation was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

Upland & Prairie is troublesome. Designed by the peerless Peer Sylvester, gorgeously illustrated and produced, and conceptually adjacent to certain Knizian disc- and tile-laying games, it has the makings of something wonderful.

The problem is that it doesn’t work. With some squinting, I believe I can see what Sylvester was going for. But it’s like looking directly at the sun: uncomfortable, fumbling, all its majesty blinded by sheer directness. I have worked to appreciate what is here. But the more I try, the more irritated I become.

At a soil level, Upland & Prairie is about placing discs in three colors to link together either two or three objective spaces. When this happens — if it happens — the color of that space-linking chain determines which type of token becomes the game’s victory condition. Thus, linking rodents means rodent tokens become the game’s means of success. If the chain is composed of owls, you’re hopefully holding the most brown tokens. Predatory cats… you get the idea.

The game’s sole action is dead simple. On your turn, you draw three tokens from the bag. One of these gets placed on the map. Another gets hidden behind your player shield. The third gets tossed back into the bag. Even at its slowest, it’s snappy.

In theory, this exiles players to donkeyspace. If you’re holding the most red tokens, you want the final chain to be red. But placing red tokens means you’re not hoarding red tokens; hoarding red tokens means you’re not placing red tokens. Meanwhile, if an opponent sees you moving to complete the red chain, there’s nothing preventing them from hoarding their own red tokens. It’s a pickle.

Conversely, the game might end with the bag running dry. When that happens, now players are looking to build sets of red, green, and brown tokens. In such on occurrence, hoarding was exactly the wrong thing to do. Now it’s variety you’re after. Choices, choices.

And there certainly are choices. Constrained choices, to be sure. Choices dictated largely by the draw. That’s no problem. They’re still informed choices, and theoretically interesting choices at that. Every little tidbit, every placement, becomes a trickle of water on an arid prairie. When an opponent tucks a ferret (?) into a corner, is that because they’re trying to run out the bag? Or are they just trying to deplete those green tokens because they aren’t holding enough of them? Could this be an opening? Or is it so much static, not a coherent signal?

The foremost issue with Upland & Prairie is one of limitation. Not in the sense that it’s too limited. Rather, that it isn’t limited enough.

There are only three colors. Most of the time, this makes blocking a real problem. Now, in the game’s early stages, blocking is simple enough. If owls are threatening to end the session prematurely — a real possibility, given the tiny size of the map — then I might cut off your parliamentary incursion by placing a mountain lion. Easy enough.

But as the game progresses, other tokens might appear from the bag. These push up a tracker that increases how many tokens a space can hold. Where the game begins with each hex limited to a single disc, eventually it becomes possible to hold a second disc, and then a third. These moments, regulated as they are only by the draw-bag, are significantly harder to manage than ordinary token draws. It’s possible, as in a few of our sessions, that the game will open up its geography very early, in which case you might as well beeline toward the finish line with the color you’re holding the most of. If instead the game lingers a while, then the sudden appearance of a population-expanding token tends to favor the player upon whose turn it appeared. Now any bottlenecks can be pried open, and usually with ease.

Meanwhile, because the map is so small, these swings arrive with such suddenness that there isn’t much one can do to preempt them. Even if I’ve successfully walled off a particular species, a shift on my opponent’s turn — whether that’s one opponent or two, or perhaps two opponents and a partner, all depending on play count — can spell a very swift crumbling to that bulwark.

And then, when the game ends, there’s the very real possibility that it will end in a tie. There are tiebreakers, of course, and as in some of Sylvester’s better titles, The King Is Dead foremost among them, knowledge of the tiebreaker might be all-important.

Here, though, the tiebreakers feel more like concessions than objectives that can be shrewdly managed. In the case of a chain, tied players break their stalemate by who would go next in turn order. For an empty bag, it’s all about who holds the most animals of a single type. That might sound functional enough, but I’ve also seen that tally result in a tie. And the rulebook declines to address this possibility with either a second tiebreaker or a desultory “in this case, players share the win.”

This relates to my earlier issue. Upland & Prairie tends to end in a tie for the same reason that blocking is hard: the whole thing is simply too small. The map, the duration, the limits on placement, all of it. Sessions tend to end either swiftly or slightly less swiftly. There just isn’t enough time to build up a sizeable lead in any particular category. Nor is there room to suss out what an opponent is likely holding. The result is a game that presents pleasantly bite-sized decisions, but never enough of them to amount to a meal.

It’s a shame, because I understand the desire to build a shorter tile-laying game. The famous Knizias — Tigris & Euphrates, Samurai, Qin, Babylonia — weren’t horrible time-hogs. But, sure, they could take a while to develop their board states.

Unfortunately, Upland & Prairie goes too far in the other direction. It prunes down not just the scope, but also the ability to stretch out, to take an opponent’s measure, to switch gears. Instead of coming across as a compact tile-layer, it feels like a novelty, like a mint-tin version of something more robust. And one that doesn’t succeed at compressing its subject matter, at that. This is no highland, no prairie. It’s a strip of lawn in a cookie-cutter suburb.

 

A complimentary copy of Upland & Prairie was provided by the designer/publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

BABA IS YOU is one of the most mind-bending puzzle video games of recent memory. Now, thanks to Peter C. Hayward, it’s also a board game. On today’s Space-Cast!, we discuss the peculiar adaptation of Arvi Teikari’s video game, from its inception in That Time You Killed Me and sickbed time-wasting to its gradual development and Hayward’s long-term plans to become a screenwriter.

Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.

TIMESTAMPS

00:15 — obligatory compliments
17:11 — Peter’s artistic journey
40:40 — from That Time You Killed Me to Baba Is You
45:54 — Baba Is You (the video game)
54:00 — making the board game
1:04:50 — the shape of Baba Is You (the board game)

 

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

💾

For its size, I would classify Brute Fort as maximalist. Which perhaps sounds contradictory, given it’s a microgame that runs on only 18 cards and comes in a plastic cassette case. But each of those details unfurls into something more. The cassette case is double-wide, necessary for holding the synth soundtrack alongside the cards. And the included dice, concealed under the tuckbox, can be used to generate the rooms of a haunted fort in a TTRPG.

What’s more, the microgame within is hand-drawn in garish inkstrokes that wouldn’t be out of place in a game like Cave Evil or The Restless. This is my first attempt at a game by Alfred Vale, but it’s solid enough to make me sit at attention and consider the other entries in his catalog. Maybe, for instance, the solitaire zine that requires you to spin a coin while you complete drawing minigames.

But for now, I’m contenting myself with Brute Fort. This thing doesn’t quite fit the Button Shy model. It’s way too metal.

Brute Fort is about sacrifice.

When the game begins, you have three heroes: the Wanderer, the Champion, and the Sage. Each hero is arranged so that it partially covers the one next to it. A fourth card, drawn at random from the main deck, covers the last hero, and in the process also imposes some penalty on your session. The Gloomswiller destroys artifacts the instant they’re played. The Demon Imp threatens to flip more cards against you. The Warlux Revenant transforms any dead cards in the crypt into your enemies.

But it’s the heroes who are the important part, at least right at first. Each hero begins fresh with four points ready to be spent. You draw a trio of cards from the deck. Each one costs some amount of those points. You might, for example, be holding a Poison Salve (poisons enemies — not quite a salve, but fine), a Harbinger’s Mask (grows stronger near specific other items), and a Cursed Banner (also makes you stronger when placed near certain items). All useful in their own way.

Except most of these items don’t cost four points. In fact, only one of them does. The Poison Salve, in case you were wondering. But the Harbinger’s Mask costs two and the Cursed Banner costs one.

Now, normally this wouldn’t be a problem. But in Brute Fort, your heroes don’t give change. If you spend any of the Sage’s four points, the remainder is gone. All that effort, spent to place a single card. What’s an adventuring party to do?

In this case, you divide your attention. By adding one of the cards from your hand to the fort, but doing so in the fort’s favor — flipping it over to its evil side — you’re allowed to divide a hero’s resources in half. Now instead of your Sage having four points, he has two bundles of two points. Only, uh oh, the Harbinger’s Mask has transformed into an Infernal Seer. Now it will be even harder to overcome the fort.

Later, you might make another sacrifice. More time, another baddie, to divide your points yet again. Now your Sage’s two and two becomes two and one and one, the latter half halved again. Now you can play that Cursed Banner without losing out on any points. The only problem is that between the Infernal Seer and the Iron Talon Raptor you just added, the fort is starting to look rather tough indeed.

Brute Fort continues like this. One sacrifice after another. Cards transforming into monsters. Resources rationed and dwindling. At the right moments, your own cards — items and allies and artifacts, all that stuff — coming into play to slowly raise your own score to hopefully trounce that of the fort. In the end, it’s a simple tally. Your strength versus the fort’s strength. Only nine cards in the fort itself, plus some tucked cards maybe for a bonus here or there.

It’s all very microgame-like, although it doesn’t feel anything like the fare you’d get from Button Shy. I don’t mean that as an insult. It’s just that Brute Fort is a little darker than the titles in that catalog. There’s the art, obviously, which is a far cry from the cartoonier style that usually fills those wallets. But also in the sense that Brute Fort feels a little wilder, a little less ultra-tuned. Some cards offer obvious combos. Others require more massaging. There are some I’m not sure can be made to work, not for any shortage of trying.

As for the feel of the game, it’s tradeoffs all the way down. Every card feels like a tangible sacrifice to the dark gods that inhabit this place. Even the ones you actually purchase might wind up in the wrong spot, with each one offering slightly different abilities depending on where in the fort they get placed. This is the remedy to the danger of Brute Fort growing rote: since cards are more powerful lower in the fort, you’re encouraged to make at least one or two purchases at suboptimal exchange rates, sacrificing a hero’s strength before parceling it all the way down to its constituent fragments.

And then there’s that soundtrack. I even had my mother scrounge a cassette player from some undusted corner of her castle so I could listen while I played. I’ll confess I don’t understand the return to tape, despite being a fervent advocate for physical media in this age of rented art. But as the deck scraped to life, some part of me was taken back to an earlier time. To listening to books on tape on long car trips, only to abscond with the rest of the set when our time on the road didn’t quite conclude the latest Tony Hillerman or Michael Crichton novel. Listening to them in my bedroom, in the dark, on the boom box I owned mostly for Green Day CDs, but which included a tape deck because there were still a fair few cassettes floating around in those days. The scratch and whine complemented the narrator’s voice the way the rotating spindles complemented John Darnielle’s early albums, and I’ll be damned if the crackle didn’t evoke a sputtering torch here.

It isn’t often that I play a game that feels quite this complete. Brute Fort works, and it works because it has such a zine sensibility, merging art and media and even disparate types of play without seeming like it’s even thinking about how it’s crossing boundaries. I have a little corner of my collection for microgames. Most of them inhabit plastic wallets. I’m delighted to now have a double-wide cassette case misfitted among them.

Brute Fort is available over on Alfred Valley’s itch page.

 

A complimentary copy of Brute Fort was provided by the designer/publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

Board games aren’t always very good at themes. Actual themes, as in underlying messages, not “themes,” the settings that appear in a game’s artwork. One of the hobby’s essential exceptions was Sol: Last Days of a Star. Set in some distant future, players were asked to harvest their dying star’s last embers to propel an ark into the great beyond, only to realize that their efforts were hastening the same solar death they were striving to outrun. Part climate change parable, part meditation on thermodynamics, Sol was not only playable, it was a genuine effort at using gameplay to tell a worthwhile story.

Now Ryan Spangler, one of Sol’s three creators, is back with Organism. Where Sol propelled itself outward, Organism utilizes the smallest possible lens to zoom all the way down. In a way, its diminutive subject matter is even more meaningful than Sol’s space opera. I’m speaking, of course, about the building blocks of life.

What are the smallest components that are necessary for something to constitute “life”? When I interviewed Spangler for Senet Magazine, that’s the question that led to Organism. Here players become… not even cells, really. Cells and their constituent components. Organelles. Nuclei and ribosomes and flagella. Grasping, uh, mouth-parts. Can you tell I was never very good at biology?

Fortunately, Organism drills down onto some simple terminology. To constitute an organism, there are three parts. These are your cellular building blocks. Without any one of them, the organism will die. With many of them, it becomes a lurching thing capable of doing more work. Maybe more importantly, it might split into two separate bodies altogether.

Those three building blocks are as follows. There’s the Eater, which is how your organism takes in nutrients; the Grower, which allows your organism to sprout new components; and the Mover, which allows it to shuffle around the petri dish or hydrothermal vent that is the game’s playground. At the game’s beginning, everybody begins with one of each. That’s your organism: Eater, Grower, Mover.

Turns consist of selecting a single action for your organism. (Actually, you could select a different action for each organism, but now I’m putting the flagellum before the pili.) Those actions correspond with your organelles, with the crucial detail that you get to take as many actions as you have cellular bits. Want to absorb food? Choose Eat. Now every Eater in your organism gets to chow down on ambient soup, pulling food discs into your body. Want to expand your cell? Growers spend food to add new structures in adjacent spaces. Move? Look, you know what Move does.

Except you probably don’t! Organism, it turns out, is about grappling with your own lumbering body as much as it is about the smallest possible components of life. It isn’t all elegance and skater-like gliding down there. Sometimes your body is a malformed, asymmetrical blob, only capable of pushing around its parts on one side, or maybe wedged into a corner because your limbs are tucked against the edge of the board rather than putting their best foot forward. As someone who recently had both legs fall dead asleep because I was sitting too hard on my bum — normal sitting posture, just sorta wedged into a cushion — I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.

What I’m trying to say is that turns are two things at once. There’s raw potential here. Provided you have a solid handful of Movers in your body, you can rearrange yourself quite quickly, scooting your little organs all over the place. But when those Movers are in the wrong spot or few in number, movement becomes a chore. The same goes for Eating and Growing. With enough mouths and, ahem, reproducing bits, your organism gains the advantage of scale. Without them, you might soon find yourself dead in the water.

Literally dead, in fact. Organism is cutthroat. When two rival organisms move into contact with another, there’s a quick-and-dirty rock-paper-scissors check where Eaters destroy Growers, Growers smoosh Movers, and Movers circle around to strangle Eaters. This destroys the organelle on the receiving end of the circle of life and deposits an extra morsel of food in its wake. What’s more, if the recipient of this microscopic violence no longer has all the necessary components to sustain life, the whole thing is reduced to a pile of mushy calories.

And this is tied directly to how victory functions. There are two ways to win. Either you rack up five points by occupying the nutrient-dense space at the center of the board and destroying body parts — which can be done surprisingly swiftly if a surgical strike eliminates an entire hostile organism — or you outrun your rivals by dividing into three separate bodies.

These are roughly analogous to aggressive versus turtle playstyles, although the game’s open-ended nature means it’s an imperfect comparison. More often, Organism allows both approaches simultaneously. Having two bodies is better than one in terms of diversification, since now you can take two separate actions per turn. But mitosis is not a decision to undertake lightly, leaving your newly separated organisms open to attack and liable to grouse at each other for lack of sleep. [Note: Insert parenting joke.]

What this really does for Organism is make every decision matter, both in the micro sense and the larger conflict. It isn’t uncommon to look at your bloated cell and realize you optimized it poorly a half-dozen turns ago and the bill is only coming due now that you can’t figure out how to move it into battle with a rival organism without sacrificing two appendages.

Speaking purely mechanically, Organism is an abstract game — obviously — but one with its own internal coherence. After that awkward learning phase, which has as much to do with the game’s novelty as anything else, one can look at the board and read the slow-motion topography of its microcosmic battleground, like skilled eyes reading tectonic plates or a football match.

And as an abstract game, it’s entirely distinct from anything else out there. Like Chess, it’s sometimes elegant and sometimes ungainly; like Go, it’s possible to read the state many turns into the future only to find oneself blindsided by a clever turn. But it’s also wholly unlike either of those benchmarks.

One of its biggest departures is that it’s also only a starting point. I’ve been exploring a handful of the game’s mutations, discs that introduce special rules. It’s a similar approach to what Spangler did with Sol, letting these little powers alter the progression of the game without undermining the rules wholesale. Except, well, sometimes the rules do get undermined wholesale. Such as when a mutation introduces “fields,” little discs that function as sub-systems within a cell. Some foster aggression, others lean into the optimization puzzle, and still more transform the game into something else entirely.

No matter how it transforms, though, Organism remains truly exciting. There have been some excellent games about evolution over the years, in particular the North Star titles Evolution, Oceans, and Nature. Organism takes an entirely different tack from those games’ recombinant traits. In a sense, it recalls those games but with only three cards and a whole lot of careful positioning. But there’s a certain thematic overlap, an arms race that never lets up. That it works not only with two players, but as many as six, is nothing short of astonishing. I’ve played with four, and while the session took longer than lower counts, it was a wonderful experience, full of little feints and flankings.

Anyway. That’s Organism. As a parable, its ambitions are narrower than Sol, but also given the focus of an electron microscope. I can’t wait to push around its tendrils, mouth-parts, and weird jiggling udders for years to come. It’s on Kickstarter right now.

 

A prototype of Organism was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

All I play anymore is trick-takers. And climber/shedders. Are those the same thing? Some say so. Others disagree. I don’t take a strong stance on it. Which is why I’m lumping these three titles together. For this quarter’s roundup, we’ve got friendly oni, unfriendly gangsters, and some super cute monsters that might be friendly or unfriendly depending on whether you correctly guess their identity.

Welcome Demons

If I were a Japanese demon, I’d be like the oni from Welcome Demons — a menacing li’l guy with a sword, but really just here to make sure you get home safe. Designed by Daniel Newman, this is a shedder about using the cards from your hand to guide lost hikers out of the mountains.

It’s also as atypical as it gets, seating exactly three players and, rather than building melds in the usual fashion, having you match your cards to your hikers. Each hiker has their own needs, whether odd/even ranks or various suits of oni. What’s more, players are required to format these melds using at least one card from the previous player’s set. This forces everyone to pay some attention to what their rivals are putting on the table. More than some attention, really. Because your meld must contain the same number of hikers (one, two, or three) but a higher sum of ranks, or more hikers but a lower overall rank. Which makes things tricky indeed, especially if you’re holding a bunch of mid-rank cards.

And then, if it becomes impossible to follow, everyone passes and the last demon to shepherd their lost hikers begins the process all over again with one lonely hiker. This continues until somebody most definitely can’t save any more hikers, at which point they lose and the other two players are crowned… I don’t know, the most helpful oni of the month.

It’s a clever little thing, emphasis on both “clever” and “little.” Newman pulls a trick we’ve seen before, where you aren’t playing to win so much as playing to avoid losing. Oni are spiteful that way. Especially near the end of the hand — and the hand is the game, this isn’t some multi-round affair — it isn’t uncommon for players to struggle to build the right melds, sometimes resulting in an early quit for the session. Like many shedders, this makes the game’s back half less interesting than its opening salvo.

Fortunately for Welcome Demons, its approach to meld-building is novel enough that it’s worth witnessing, even if only as a filler. I would put this one in the midnight nugget box: a tasty snack with a crunchy exterior, but not the most filling meal out there.

Sumidagawa Red Town

Like our previous entry, Sumidagawa Red Town is a shedding game about sinking slowest. Players, of which there are between two and five, step into the rain-slicked trenchcoats of small-town gangsters who need to subtract a column from the organization’s payroll. By which I mean they need to murder one of their companions. With the oni doing emergency response, it raises the question of who the real monsters are. Sobering, etc.

The main twist is that players aren’t one-upping each other’s melds, at least not in the traditional sense. Instead, the titular red town is presented as eight sections, each of which holds its own unique meld. There’s a space for a sequence of three brown cards, another for a triplet of red cards, two for singles of either suit, and so forth. Into these spaces you play a meld. This must start at a higher rank than whatever the previous player deployed, but otherwise you’re free to choose whether to play one card or four.

Assuming the proper space remains open, that is. And that’s the rub. After even one round, it becomes very tricky indeed to find a good fit. This marks Sumidagawa Red Town as one of those titles absolutely riddled with tactical passes. While dropping four cards on the town’s biggest space is certainly a power move, it might be better to pass and let the town clear out for the next round. Especially if you’re likely to go second.

It’s thrilling to follow a four-card bomb with a single, and for that reason alone Sumidagawa Red Town establishes itself as one of my favorite shedders.

But Mashikamaru doesn’t stop there. In between rounds, players get to decide if they want to summon hitmen — in game terms, suit-coded wild cards — to beef up their hand. If only one player elects to do so, they receive broad latitude to add as many hitmen from their private pool as they like. But if multiple players choose this option, they only add one hitman, then swap hands with everyone else who made the same decision. It’s a brilliant piece of brinkmanship, potentially making or breaking your entire hand, plus offering the chance to drop a real stinker of a hand onto somebody else.

And really, that’s what this one is all about. Choosing your battles, knowing when to go all-in, and then slipping your rival a mickey rather than facing them directly. The main downside is that it’s hard to find outside of Japan and requires a translated rules sheet. Personally, I’ve found it well worth the effort. Forget it, Jake. It’s Sumidagawa Red Town.

Suppose

On the more traditional end of things — although only marginally — is another New Mill import in the form of Hagizou’s Suppose. This is a trick-taker, and for once there’s an actual winner, but the game’s may-follow nature marks it as rather distinct from most of its peers.

Scratch that, everything is distinct. There’s the way your hand is arranged: sorted by your neighbor and splayed so that ranks increase within suits, but with only a few cards facing you while the others peek outward to show everyone else at the table what you’re holding. In fact, much of the game revolves around your hand’s concealment. Whenever you play a card you can’t see, you’re permitted to guess its identity. There’s no penalty for guessing wrong, while a correct guess awards a “suppose” token. These translate into points at the end of the hand. Which is a good thing, given the relative scarcity of points elsewhere.

How, then, does one score? Tricks, first of all, although at one point per, these aren’t much to write home about. Your larger tally comes from another guess. When the round begins and you sort your neighbor’s hand, you wager how many tricks you think they’ll take. Contract bids are always testy, but here they’re especially tough. Since you’re never forced to follow suit, sabotaging a neighbor’s bid is especially easy. It’s possible to split your bid for fewer points, but, well, that only makes it marginally easier to hypothesize what your opponent is going to do during the round.

The outcome, then, is an extended guessing game, but one that strikes out along multiple avenues of conjecture. What you’re holding, what everybody else is holding, how your target neighbor is faring, whether this is a good time to nab another trick or yield it to someone else… it’s a lot to take in.

That said, Suppose is something special. It might even be my favorite New Mill release all year. The deck is tight enough that correct guesses are possible, but the inclusion of two copies of each card makes card-counting, while not impossible, at least not such an advantage that it changes the nature of the game entirely. The result is a game that’s as much about sabotage and the careful sniping of unexpected tricks as it is about reading everyone’s hand. Truly, this one is a gem.

You know. I suppose.

 

A complimentary of Suppose and Welcome Demons was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

UFO 50 was one of the coolest gaming artifacts of the past few years, a collection of fifty unique video games by Derek Yu, Jon Perry, and a handful of other developers that pitched itself as a digital excavation of a long-lost 8-bit console. The collection was special for many reasons, but my favorite trick was the way its creators employed modern design principles that contrasted the system’s hardware and input limitations.

For example, Party House. Designed by Jon Perry, this was a full-fledged solitaire deck-building game that fictively predated Dominion by over two decades. Now, in a design ouroboros, Perry is shifting Party House to tabletop.

If nothing else, Party House is more relatable than most gamified topics. You want to throw a party. A big party. But you also don’t want the cops and/or the fire marshal to bust up the festivities. In the UFO 50 original, that meant building out your Rolodex, expanding your apartment to accommodate more bodies, and then randomly drawing guests until you decided you’d had enough. Or until the door got kicked in.

Basically, the whole thing was a merger of Dominion-style deck-building and press-your-luck gameplay. Good guests awarded popularity and cash, while rowdy guests egged your neighbors into taking matters into their own hands. Others served as utilities: bouncers for tossing out troublemakers, private investigators who could drag the right people to the party, college mascots for nostalgic gatherings of old friends. Special guests like aliens and mermaids, meanwhile, served as objectives, awarding the stars that proved you had mastered a particular set.

That’s the gist of the physical version as well, although Perry has made a number of changes, some delicate and others structural.

The biggest alteration is Party House’s format. Because the UFO 50 version was a solitaire game, it presented a series of challenges, each offering a pre-built selection of guests and objectives. Tackling these levels required some luck, but the game’s core concern was more with finding the right build order for your Rolodex than responding to dynamic problems. The result wasn’t quite a puzzle with a set solution, but it was closer to that side of things than one might expect.

For the physical edition, Perry has tossed all the digital game’s goodies into a single box. Gone is the set marketplace. Instead, players are presented with three rows of guests that are constantly refreshing as they’re befriended with popularity and cash. Gone are the puzzle-style levels. In their stead is a race to earn a certain number of stars before anybody else at the table. Gone is the apartment limit. Now your place can hold as many guests as possible. Provided the party doesn’t end prematurely, that is.

On the topic of premature ejection, troublemakers have received a significant facelift. Previously, the police would crash the party as soon as three troublemakers were clomping around the living room. Now every guest — or nearly all of them — produces some amount of noise. As soon as you hit eight points of ruckus, the party’s over. Worse, you skip the Rolodex phase entirely. And unlike in the original game, popularity fades each round. Only money can be hoarded. Fortunately, these twin currencies are interchangeable. What one lacks in charisma they can make up for with Benjamins.

As a side note, there’s a nice balancing mechanism where a crashed party puts an accessory card in your deck. Accessories are always positive, just not as positive as a good guest. Still, a charcuterie board or karaoke machine is handy in a pinch. It’s a nice concession for the occasional stroke of rotten luck. Failing players stay in the game, but with less control over how they assemble their guest list.

Perhaps most importantly, the whole thing is fast. You hold your deck in your hand the entire round. A turn takes maybe twenty seconds at most. And cards flip at a rate comparable to the typewriter clatter of FlipToons, but with the occasional mid-turn decision to prevent it from feeling quite so rote. Actually, the comparisons don’t end there. Party House feels like FlipToons with considerably more direct control. Whether it’s the ability to peek at cards mid-party via spies and superheroes, cover your loudest offenders with cute dogs and counselors, or deploy occasional cards that directly confront your opponents, your Rolodex is a bespoke assemblage that can be bent to your will.

The other big point of inter-player friction arrives in the form of party cards. Each game puts two of these on display, then asks players to jostle for control by fulfilling their stated objectives. This allows for some distinction between sessions. Hosting a Class Reunion feels different from a Legendary Rager, with the former favoring gatherings of old friends while the latter requires you to ride the line with plenty of troublemakers. Importantly, these cards can be stolen, encouraging players to one-up each other over the course of the game.

On the whole, Party House does an admirable job of translating the version that existed in UFO 50. It captures the spirit of the original, incorporates more players, and expands the decision space, while also keeping the play punchy and pacey. There are even little touches that speak to Perry’s deep mastery of how a hand of cards can and should be handled, such as the single guest that must be peeled from your deck to become the “door” (read: discard pile) of your apartment, a trick he pulled in Hot Streak to prevent players from developing too robust of a predictive mental model of their deck.

I’d also be remiss to forget Daniel Profiri’s illustrations, which resemble felt board cutouts and are a perfect way to depict the guests’ retro appearance without defaulting to pixels.

At the same time — and keeping in mind that I’ve only played the prototype — Party House comes across as a minor title in Perry’s ludography. It isn’t as subversive as some of his other hits, lacking the emotional range of Scape Goat, the genre-redefining nature of Air, Land, & Sea, or the family breadth of Spots. To be sure, this isn’t to say that Party House has to be revolutionary, and there’s a tyranny to expectations that can prevent us from appreciating what’s right in front of us. But by and large, my experience with Party House has been a gentle one, a pleasurable process of revealing and shifting cards that still feels largely automatic. Where the version found in UFO 50 fit that collection’s 8-bit limitations, here it lands somewhat more thinly.

Then again, there’s a lot to be said for pleasurable physical processes, and that’s where Party House succeeds best. With the right group, it’s the sort of game that gets people chanting “Hit, hit, hit!” And the game upsets genre formulas in subtler ways. For instance, this is one of the few deck-builders to shrug off the absolutism of the five-card hand. Here a party might consist of three guests or ten, all depending on chance and how well you’ve assembled your Rolodex. It’s a smart little thing. Just be aware that it’s littler than you might expect.

Where does that leave Party House? On the threshold, I suppose. Playing prototypes is always a risk. Sometimes you get Baba Is You, which feels poised to become an instant cult classic. Other times you get a game that’s still finding its identity. That’s where I would put Party House. Class Reunion or Legendary Rager — we’ll see next year which party this shindig shapes up to be.

 

A prototype copy of Party House was temporarily provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

If you haven’t heard of Baba Is You, grab hold of the nearest guardrail, because you’re about to be hit by a wrecking ball of descriptors. Here goes: released in 2019, Baba Is You was a mind-bending box-pushing syntax-making meta-puzzle video game by Arvi Teikari. It was hard. Famously so. Especially if you’re anything like me and not really into Sokoban-style box-pushers.

Baba Is You is now also a board game, albeit one whose pedigree doesn’t only belong to Teikari. The analog adaptation was done by Peter C. Hayward, and in many ways it feels like a riff on his abstract comedy game That Time You Killed Me. Although somehow, improbably, it’s even better — provided you have the right mind for it.

You are Baba. Baba is a dog… sheep… cat thing. Baba likes to push boxes around a ten-by-ten grid. Baba can also pull boxes, one of the board game’s main concessions to its non-digital format. Mostly, this is to prevent everything from piling up on the edges and corners until the board has screwed inward like an ingrown toenail. Boxes can also be placed next to Baba, brought from off-map to alter the game’s progress.

You are also Keke. Or, well, your opponent is Keke. Because unlike the video game, Baba Is You: The Board Game is not a solitaire affair. This is a duel, alternating players and pairs of actions. I take two actions, split as I choose between moving Baba and placing boxes. Then you take two actions, moving Keke this time and maybe also placing boxes.

What sets this apart from any number of other games is that there is no win condition. Not right away. Your goal is “to win.” I mean, obviously. That’s why we’re playing games, isn’t it? To win? But in order to win, you must construct a way for that win to occur. For example, by placing and pushing boxes. “Rock.” That’s one such box you can place on the map. “Is Win.” That’s another. Put them next to one another and you spell out the phrase “Rock Is Win.” Now if somebody steps onto a rock, they win.

It doesn’t take long for this rubric to turn pretzels and loop-de-loops and barrel rolls on itself.

For one thing, there’s a lot you can do with a few basic phrases. Put “Rock” next to “Is You” and suddenly “Rock Is You.” Now instead of only moving Keke, you can also move any rock as though you were the rock. Spell out “Rock Is You” and “Rock Is Win” at the same time and you might be able to win by stepping one rock onto another rock — because you’re a rock and also rock is win. Or you could do things more simply by just spelling “Rock Is Win” and having Keke, who is you, step onto the rock. Fewer steps that way.

At the same time, fewer steps isn’t always better, because both you and your opponent are messing with the integrity of these phrases. Usually by pushing and pulling, but other tricks eventually reveal themselves as well. As a rock, maybe you push apart the phrase “Flag Is Win.” Now the flag isn’t win, so your opponent, Baba, who was one turn away from stepping on the flag, cannot win. At least not without somehow putting that phrase back together or creating another. Or by layering the game’s syntax and box-pushing puzzles over the top of each other so that your rival is checkmated into permitting your win.

Also, there are heaps of these phrases, all capable of jumbling together to create dynamic new rulesets. For example, maybe something on the board becomes “Curious.” This means that anything that moves into its row or column will cause that thing to come wandering over to see what’s snuffling about. Or perhaps Baba becomes “Thirsty,” inclined to scoot over to the river spaces at the end of each turn. Or the river decides to begin to flow downhill, potentially whisking items off the board altogether.

Sometimes these rules can have unintended consequences. Such as when a “Hot” item comes in contact with a “Melt” item, which destroys the latter. It’s possible that you will even be destroyed. You as in Baba, or you as in Keke, depending on which side you’re playing as right now. If you are something else on the board — a rock, a flag, an errant piece of syntax uplifted to temporary sentience — then you can continue to function, maybe even calling your destroyed body back onto the board, until such time as the rule is broken into pieces.

There are three main things I would impress upon you about Baba Is You: The Board Game.

The first is that it’s incredibly funny. I mentioned that Baba recalls Hayward’s earlier effort, That Time You Killed Me, another notably funny game. Their commonalities are many. Both are short abstract games with ever-shifting rules. Both are tight two-player duels on claustrophobic boards. Both allow precisely two actions per turn, which is just enough to get something done but not enough to accomplish everything you need. Also, if played in an obnoxious manner, both can result in little I-step, you-step conundrums that aren’t especially interesting to resolve.

But where Baba Is You differs from That Time You Killed Me is crucial. These are dramatically different games in scope and process. Moves are harder to undo than those in That Time You Killed Me, with boxes usually sticking around for the duration of the match. Also, the comedy doesn’t arise from the prose. There’s none to speak of anyway. Here, Baba and Keke’s misadventures are pure slapstick. It’s the joy of assembling a mousetrap only to trigger it in your own face.

Which is also to say, the game is hard. At least it’s hard for me and the people I’ve played it with. I came into the game forearmed, having played Teikari’s original video game. But when introduced to newcomers, I found it often perplexed them. Four different opponents bounced off its systems. The combination of box-arranging and word-making is no easy thing to get a handle on.

Then my seven-year-old requested a try. She’d watched me try it with her older sister and Summer. I figured there was no harm. She plays all sorts of games that are beyond her level, so she’s a good sport whenever something doesn’t match her expectations.

Except she took to it immediately. To her, the syntax puzzles were a joy, a constant wellspring of experimentation. The box-pushing was tougher, especially when she developed some creative interpretations of which boxes could be pulled. But making innovative new phrases became her favorite thing. She began to request it every day before school, insisting on new chapters with their punch-boards of nouns and adjectives. When we would walk to class afterward, she would bounce along, singing about the different combinations of words she had made. “Daddy, I’m floating, like Baba! Daddy, watch out, I’m gonna melt you! Daddy, the hole in the grass over there is win!” Sharing the various ways she had discovered to upset reality.

Which is another way of saying that Baba Is You doesn’t fit every brain. But when it fits, it fits with a satisfying click.

To the designer’s credit, there’s some secret sauce in the recipe… and it’s basically mayonnaise. As in, not the most exciting to talk about, but an essential splash of flavor nevertheless. The way it works is that you play a match with only a couple of keywords. Then, when that’s over, you add a new keyword and the loser gets to decide which older word is removed. This keeps the game lively and defangs the threat of losing. Rather than wagering everything on a single session, Baba Is You is played as a flight of five, seven, or possibly more matches, each building on what came before. Little metagames develop, instances where both parties want to see a keyword used to greater effect, or perhaps someone gets fed up with a Fast Baba zipping around the board and deletes the “Fast” keyword from existence altogether. It’s a dang smart way to approach the game as a whole, encouraging experimentation and risk-taking instead of putting all that weight on a single bundle of moves.

Put together, Baba Is You: The Board Game becomes more than the sum of its parts. It’s a comedy game that’s genuinely thinky, a thinky game that bounces off some brains but burrows into others, and a technical achievement that always feels one step ahead of both players. When it works — and for some, that won’t happen — it’s one of the funniest, most generous titles of the year, a constant reinvention of what it means to be Baba.

 

A prototype copy of Baba Is You was temporarily provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

I owe Abroad an apology. When it first landed on my doorstep, I set it aside for a solid month. My assumption was that it was another ultra-light globe-trotter, absent serious tension and disconnected from the locales it was asking me to explore. A game about travel, but not really about travel, if you take my meaning. Not to throw any specific shade here, but I figured it for a Trekking the World clone.

Designed by Rodrigo Rego and Danilo Valente, Abroad is anything but a clone, and it certainly doesn’t feel disconnected from its geography. If anything, it hews closer to the Let’s Go! series by Josh Wood, which invited us on vacations to Japan and France. Those titles drew us in with both tourist traps and local color, the unique contours of their cities, even the way these places’ infrastructure might require transit, downtime, or some extra effort to uncover something off the beaten path. The main distinction, of course, is that Abroad covers a continent rather than a single country. The remarkable thing is that it still manages to feel like a real place — and a highly competitive one at that.

Unlike the abstractions found in some titles, Abroad opens with quite the hook: you’re in the running for a position as a travel journalist. It’s a dream job for people who don’t mind trains, planes, and automobiles — that’s me precluded — and as such you have one month to visit as many regions of Europe as possible, cultivate local connections, write articles, and sometimes pass out from exhaustion.

Also, engage in a cutthroat area control minigame. But that comes later.

In a near mirror image of something like Trekking the World, it begins with a selection of cards that represent a whole range of possible destinations. Here those cards begin in your hand, subdivided by region rather than individual country. You might, for instance, consider swinging by the Alhambra Palace in Spain, the Isola Bella on Lake Maggiore in Northern Italy, and the Tsarevets Fortress in Bulgaria. Broadly speaking, your objective is to visit these destinations, necessitating some logistics as you balance flights against available funds and train rides against a steadily declining supply of physical energy.

So it’s a movement game! True. Getting around is one of Abroad’s central questions, especially when you get stranded in Greece because you hopped one too many trains. But it very quickly reveals other dimensions as well.

The calendar, for instance. When you visit a location, you don’t just play the card and earn a bonus. Sure, you do both of those things. Playing cards and earning bonuses are both major components of the game. But the card is also added to an ongoing schedule that shows your four-week tour of Europe.

What’s more, the duration of that card matters. A small attraction, like an ancient amphitheater in Greece, might only require one day to visit, while something grander, such as the Fjords of Norway, takes four. To place such a card into your schedule, then, you must count that many spaces forward on your calendar. One, two, three, four. That’s most of a week. Maybe it would be better to see a bunch of smaller locales?

Except it isn’t that simple. First, there’s an entire resource system under the hood. You can spend motivation — which for those who are counting is a fourth resource to manage, in addition to cards, money, and energy — to subtract from a destination’s time requirement. Want to see the Fjords in two days? You can do that. It will cost you, but it’s possible.

Second, the slots on your calendar don’t only serve to mark time. They also demonstrate how much you’ve mastered the region you’re currently exploring. Visiting that day-trip amphitheater means you’ll only move one token from your calendar to the map. You now know something about Greece. Well done! But spending four days in Norway means placing four tokens. Sure, you could use motivation to shorten the trip. But that also decreases the number of tokens you’re placing on the map.

And tokens matter. Oh, how they matter. At the end of each week, there’s some quick upkeep. You earn income, which is nice. You discard and draw cards, which is even better. But the real headliner is that each region awards points to the journo who’s mastered it best.

Even then, this isn’t as simple as “most tokens wins.” Sometimes tokens can be flipped to their more powerful heart side. Then they function as trump cards, winning against any number of ordinary tokens. The result is a series of little bids across the map. My knowledge of the German-speaking countries gets one-upped by your heart token, so I counter by writing a great piece about hot spring destinations in Britain, eroding your base by way of revenge. It’s smart, emphasizing both time and mastery over our subject matter.

It’s also super, super mean. Just downright jerky. Snitty all the way through. Supernal area control, with all the little bid-sweeps and point-swipes one has come to expect from the mechanism.

Which is also, naturally, the best thing about Abroad. Generally, these travel games serve as comfort fantasies. If you could go anywhere, could take the time off work and afford any destination, what would you do? We play it out, and then we tally our scores to see who had the best trip. Which can be a great deal of fun, but isn’t exactly doing any heavy lifting with inter-player dynamics.

Abroad, on the other hand, never lets you sleep on its audition. Took a nap in France to recoup your energy? That’s a defeat. Paused to write a few articles for pocket money? That’s a chance for your peers to step ahead of you. Spent two whole weeks in Central Europe because you were holding a dozen purple cards? Sorry, you’ve overspecialized. You think Rick Steves only knows Poland? Baby, there isn’t a roadhouse or castle or war memorial between Portugal and Moscow that he hasn’t photographed or humped.

Along the way, you get to know these spaces. Not as intimately as the spaces in some games, it’s true. These are big attractions, not the gachapon shops and hidden gardens of the Let’s Go! titles. But one still develops a sense for Europe, its many sights, the festivals, the benefit of local knowledge. It’s only an impression, and barely an impression at that. But it’s more of an impression than most games of this stripe bother to make. It feels like it loves these places, wants them to be more widely appreciated, understands why people keep returning to them. They’re destinations, not points on a checklist. You’re only visiting, but you’re visiting something.

This marks Abroad as a success in myriad ways. Its sense of place, of course, but also its willingness to let players knock heads, to steal scoops from one another, to become the Prime Understander of Spain when nobody expects it. The result is wonderful to handle, from its calendar to its board, raising questions of timing and control and resource management and comprehension and more besides. I went in expecting a staycation; what I found is one of the finer travel games out there.

 

A complimentary copy of Abroad was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

I don’t know what to make of Pond. Not as a board game — it isn’t that hard to get a handle on — but rather as an artifact of hyperreality, a signifier that has sprung into Pinocchio-like boyhood, a cardboard link to another game entirely.

Which, yeah, is to say that it calls to mind Root. It isn’t even that close, gameplay-wise. But when you put something on the table and three people blurt out “Is this that new Root expansion?” / “Wait, those aren’t the Root frogs” / “Huh, it even has four letters in the title,” just one part shy of a Barbershop quartet, reality begins to feel negotiable.

Picture this. Up to four factions of adorable wetland creatures have decided to duke it out for control of their local pond network. Each faction is asymmetric, with its own adorable superpower to attend to its adorable visual motif. For the most part, they are staffed with frogs. Just frogs: the infantry for this final war, the grist for this cuisses de grenouille.

There are also long frogs. Pardon me. Long fwooogs. That should tell you something about Pond’s sense of humor. If “long fwooog” strikes you as substantially cuter than “long frog,” this might be the game for you. At any rate, long fwooogs are the battlefield commanders who send their fellow frog-kind hopping into battle. They can be injured, in the sense that sustaining damage will result in points for your rivals, but never killed the way a lesser frog might be removed from the board. One imagines them the gentlemen officers of this particular campaign. Stiff upper lips when asked to call upon others to make the final sacrifice, quavering backs and sickbed sweats when it’s time to charge over the top. Which is perhaps why long fwooogs do not take part in battle directly.

As for the map, it’s arranged as concentric ponds that radiate from the center. Each pond is identical, but lily pads may be built to increase one’s scoring value. Movement tends to be rapid. In part because the map is rather compact, but also because factions can accomplish quite a bit on a turn. The art, as you might expect, is downright adorable. I don’t mean that in a belittling sense; some of the cards made me laugh out loud, in particular the “Biblically Accurate Frog,” with its seraph’s spokes of eyes and wings.

As for cards, there are heaps of the things. In a thankful departure from Root, Pond presents itself as a deck-building game. Everyone begins with a deck of ten cards, built from a combination of generic offerings (“Frog with a Knife” and “Frog with a Net”) and faction-specific troops that give each player their own dose of asymmetry without front-loading too many rules. Banana Frogs are slippery — they generate movement but also return to the top of your deck — while Wizard Frogs teleport around, Pumpkin Frogs produce lots of food, and Cowboy Frogs like to wrassle.

This is probably where Pond shines the brightest, not least because its card effects are all over the place. You might draft Jimmy the Bee into your deck to draw a card for every single lily pad under your control — potentially doubling the total action economy of your turn but also planting a target on all those lily pads. Or the Anarchy Frog, perfect for dumping all your stagnant frogs into a single pond and then lighting them on fire for a bunch of points. Swole Frog turns self-damaging battle results into offense-only attacks; Sneaky Frog deploys into any pond, even those you can’t normally reach; Cactus Frog pops a couple of attackers at the instant of their aggression. The whole thing feels wild and untamed. One might even say it doesn’t feel properly developed. All the better.

Of course, there aren’t infinite effects to tinker with. Indeed, one of the main limitations of the underlying system is that everything seems to revolve around four or five verbs — deploy, move, attack, build, hibernate — but within that rubric, there’s an impressive range of expression here. Some cards feel like outright showstoppers. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a great way to get the table to actually pay attention to the card market.

It helps, too, that card-winnowing is built right into the foundation. Whenever you shuffle your deck, you’re required to “hibernate” a frog, removing it from circulation while still preserving its point value. There are other ways to hibernate cards, too. They’re almost always desirable thanks to hero frogs.

What are hero frogs? Glad you asked. These are permanent upgrades that sit atop one, two, or three hibernated cards. That’s where the Biblically Accurate Frog comes in. Also the Unicorn Frog, the Leprechaun Frog, the Investor Frog, and so many more. To a one, these guys are valuable. First of all, you don’t need to shuffle them into your deck. Their ability is always there, ready to teleport a dead frog into your opponent’s swamp cooler.

At a more fundamental level, hibernation and heroes are a wonderful method for further defining all that factional asymmetry. Once again, almost no overhead required. This is probably where Pond deposits itself furthest from Root’s woodland. Where that game put all its chips on front-end asymmetry, requiring a tremendous initial investment before anybody could play — or at least play well — here the asymmetry is gentle at first, then slightly less gentle. It never becomes not gentle. Just more differentiated, with little perks that spring from the cards you’ve chosen to hibernate, draft, and deputize to hero status.

Which brings us, inadvertently, back to Root.

I’ve seen some people call Pond a starter Root. My Little Root. Root for Babies. (Okay, not that one.) That isn’t too far off in the sense that its adorable artwork belies a confrontational race to score a certain number of points. But the games are surprisingly distinct in their underlying approach. They’re both volume-measuring tools with froggy eyes sharpied onto the side. But one is a funnel that runs from wide to narrow while the other is a bit more of a graduated cylinder. Despite some superficial resemblance, they move their liquids toward different purposes. A gulp versus a sip.

Those purposes, meanwhile, reach different conclusions. Root has been around for eight years. That’s a long time in this hyper-speed hobby of ours. Long enough to spawn imitators, some more flattering than others. Pond, in some senses, feels like a game that can only exist because Root existed first. But it carves out an identity that feels… still similar to Root, but not overly so. Not so close that it starts to feel like a ripoff. Just another perspective on similar themes. Root but easier to learn. Root with a first teach that doesn’t feel like reading a syllabus. Root that ends with a bang rather than a last little trickle of crafting points. Root without the near-infinite imaginary space.

(Root without Foucault? Yes. But Root as Baudrillard, as the signifier and signified getting mixed together until we can’t tell the difference. Root as the meme that has escaped containment. If it could ever be contained to begin with.)

This leaves Pond in an interesting place. There’s a spot for a lighter adorable woodland creature kingmaking asymmetrical game. Maybe not the biggest spot or the most lasting one. But it would be false to pretend that Pond hasn’t exerted some charm. I’ve enjoyed spending a few sessions with its Biblically Accurate Frogs and Frogs with Two Knives and, sure, even the Long Fwooogs, cloying as they seem. I don’t imagine I’ll keep coming back, but my romps through these wetlands have been enjoyable all the same.

 

A complimentary copy of Pond was provided by the designer/publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

Circle of Conflict is a really bad title. Just terrible. You know what would have been better? Anything. Ring of Conflict, maybe, seeing as how this is a Lord of the Rings shindig. Crud, just call it Circlet. That has an elegant chime, doesn’t it? Circlet.

I imagine the thinking behind the title, which was designed by Geoff Engelstein and Stephen Buonocore, was that it’s descriptive. Because the game actually plops you right into the middle of a circle, you see, and that circle happens to be not a circle of harmony, but a circle of conflict. You’re reenacting the War of the Third Age from both perspectives, commanding the Free Peoples against the player to your left and Sauron & Friends against the player to your right. Thus the Circle. The Circle of Conflict.

The other rancid thing about the title is that… oh, what’s that? You want to hear about the game? Very well. It’s quite good. Not perfect, but good.

As gimmicks go, one could do a lot worse than Circle of Conflict. It’s like the inverse of its title: just a great idea from top to bottom. As the Free Peoples, you’re trying to safeguard the One Ring on its trip to Mount Doom, muster armies to defend Rohan and Gondor, and generally vouchsafe the hearts of men so they don’t falter. As the Shadow, you’re doing all that but exactly the opposite. Find the Ring, burn Rohan, burn Gondor, indulge every impulse.

And it works. Works well, in fact. Works too well, perhaps, in the sense that the system very quickly scurries out of the way and opens up the holistic design to any number of nitpicks.

The baseline mechanism is roll-and-write, landing this in the long and not-often-successful lineage of titles that have tried to fashion a roll-and-write-but-bigger game. Every round — which is a mess of phases, just be warned — opens with a big handful of chunky dice getting rolled onto the table. When the game begins, only two of these dice are actually usable, and you’re required to divide them between the halves of your demesne. One for the Free Peoples, one for the Shadow.

It’s a simple enough decision, although of course there’s more to it than first meets the eye. It isn’t long before players begin to hear rumors from their neighbors. Perhaps the player to your left announces that they’ve rallied Isengard. This means they also gain the icons from the gray die, and may soon begin deploying troops to assault your version of Rohan. Meanwhile your Nazgul are hunting for the Ring somewhere around Weathertop; this initiates a call-and-response phase where you check your investigation against the player to your right, who reveals whether you’ve managed to corrupt their Ringbearer.

Point is, while you aren’t given total control over whether to go all-in on one side or the other, you’re afforded just enough authority to lather up some nice apprehension. At times, it can feel like both sides are pressing in on you while ignoring their neighbors on the opposite side. It’s a smart way of divvying up the action on Engelstein and Buonocore’s part. Some activities are concealed, others reveal essential breadcrumbs of military intelligence. Along the way, you hope you aren’t playing with cheaters. Or people who don’t really understand the rules and might interpret them in their favor.

At all times, this puts you in twin headspaces: hunter and hunted, army on the march and defenders under siege, Gollum and Sméagol. Actually, you’re only ever Gollum or Sméagol. There’s a special phase for that. Everyone chooses whether they’re the li’l guy’s good side or bad side, then reveals their decision and handles the fallout. If anything, Gollum’s madness seems like the one thing to collapse the game’s cosmological superposition. But that’s neither here nor there.

If anything, there are a few points where Circle of Conflict (ugh) seems to throw up its hands, as though Engelstein and Buonocore knew they were onto something great and realized they had to bring it back down lest they invent something too mind-expanding. There are a lot of the customary roll-and-write combos, for example, where you’ll be filling in one bubble that then awards another icon that lets you mark another bubble, and then that bubble lets you mark something else, and on and on until an ordinary turn has transformed into two or three turns’ worth of dry-erase daubs. In a game this distinct, these moments always feel like a throwback to the format’s puzzle-going past, more of a conundrum to solve than a dynamic contest between players.

And, yes, at times Circle of Conflict (hurk) feels like too much of a puzzle. After one or two sessions, you get a good sense for which combos will really let you whip along its tracks. Some early Boromir and Galadriel to secure the loyalty of Rohan toot suite, Wormtongue to tank the loyalty of whichever nation your right-ward neighbor embraces first, just enough Legolas Gimli to max out your battle value but no more. I don’t want to say it can be “solved”… but one of my opponents in our most recent session sure believed so.

Which isn’t to say this ruins the game. Not by a long shot. It’s just that Circle of Conflict (uruk-hai) is at its best when it leans into the suspense between neighboring players, but not every portion of the design is pitched toward maximizing that. The slow buildup of armies, with both sides growing stronger, closer, and more likely to win a bunch of points from the coming battle: incredible. The gradual chase and evasion of the Ring on both sides: wonderful. The occasional game-disturbing abilities from the heroes: appropriately enraging. Waiting around while somebody completes their tenth mark on a turn when you earned two or three: a bit of a downer.

On the whole, I dig it. It calls to mind other experimental titles like Captain Sonar and The Anarchy in its willingness to tinker with the usual formula, even as it doesn’t quite reach their heights. Even so, there are little touches that make it especially considerable, like how the hobbits are tiny until suddenly they matter quite a lot, the occasional ability to move or hunt with greater efficacy, or, my favorite detail, the fact that the whole thing is presented as a single folder so you can lean back in your chair while you jot down your moves. One could do a lot worse.

 

A complimentary copy of The Lord of the Rings: Circle of Conflict was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)