For today’s Space-Cast!, we’re revisiting some jerk’s nasty review from five years ago, investigating some excellent indie games, and discussing the ups and downs (but mostly ups) of self-publishing. Our guide for this journey is none other than Connor Wake, creator of Umbra Via, Out of Sorts, That’s the Spirit!, and many others.

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

TIMESTAMPS

1:05 — a reckoning with Umbra Via
28:49 — persisting through Hedged In and Hedge Mage
37:09 — Out of Sorts
58:16 — That’s the Spirit!
1:10:20 — self-publishing

 

(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.)

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Every so often — although not as often as I’d like — a publisher will release a more affordable version of a beloved game, and it’s always interesting to see where they’re able to shave a buck off the original production. Cardboard becomes cardstock. Plastic miniatures lose detail or transform into standees. In the absolute worst cases, the game is streamlined. “Streamlined.” The doubt-quotes are important. Pared down, more like. Cut short. Decapitated.

Thunder Road: Ignition trails the lavish Thunder Road: Vendetta. In some ways, this is what you would expect from a product that’s more of the same but costs a third as much as the original box. Cardstock and single-injection molds. The usual.

What’s surprising about Ignition, though, is where it departs from the save-a-buck formula. It isn’t that I expected the folks at Restoration Games to churn out garbage. Far from it. But Ignition isn’t just Thunder Road Done Cheap. After only a handful of plays, my daughters, who had previously declared Vendetta one of their all-time faves, insisted Ignition was superior. To my own surprise, in many ways I agree with them.

Not that you’d know it right away. Thunder Road was a maximalist design. You could see it in every detail, even if you didn’t have access to the multi-tiered Maximum Chrome edition. The cars were assembled from multiple pieces. The helicopters had a spinning rotor. The boards and dice were chunky. And that’s before the expansions added trucks and motorcycles and super-weapons and a deathmatch arena.

By contrast, Ignition is smaller. Suitably so, but still smaller. As before, players command three vehicles as they race across the wasteland, dodging potholes and taking potshots at one another. The accoutrements are gone, none more fundamental than the original game’s whirlybirds, the toy helicopters that served to pursue anyone who broke away from the pack.

Honestly… I don’t miss all that stuff. At least not as much as I thought I would. Ignition is a return to basics. Which might present a problem if those basics weren’t superheated and accelerated to 2400 feet per second.

First, the dice. The foundations are the same as before. Each round, everyone rolls four dice, then takes turns placing them one at a time on those various rigs to hurtle them down the highway. That last die could be used once per round to activate a special bonus, like weaving through traffic or sending your helicopter to bomb someone.

Very little has changed. For the most part, the dice-play is identical. Roll four. Spend three on movement. The last one goes toward a bonus action. It’s every bit as smooth and chancy as ever.

The first little differences only rear their heads once you look closer at those bonus actions. The helicopters are gone, replaced by an action that serves more or less the same purpose. This time it’s a missile, presumably launched from one of your cars, and capable of targeting anyone on the road. The only difference is that the missile doesn’t take up space on the road the way Vendetta’s helicopters did.

Or there’s the way nitro no longer moves a car by the value of the die placed on it. Instead, you get to roll the trick die and move that far. It’s a subtle but smart alteration, reducing the effect of a strong opening roll and making breakaway vehicles less likely to speed across a dozen spaces in a turn.

Or there’s the absence of the repair action. Now, if you know Thunder Road, that might sound as cracked as a wasteland warrior’s sense of self after their warlord has imparted some considerable brainwashing. No repairs? How will you keep your cars from being wrecked?

About that…

In Ignition, cars don’t get wrecked.

Oh, they can still crash. Or get machine-gunned to bits. Or have a missile turn them into a crater. Or speed across too much gravel after their transmission has been shredded by a landmine. Two hits and a car is out of commission.

But only for a while. Only until the next time you activate it with a die.

The answer is checkpoints. When a car is destroyed, it goes to the most recent checkpoint. From there, it reenters the race, albeit probably a little farther back then before. Also, it will be slower. It takes the car’s entire turn just to reappear on the road.

That is, unless you spend your bonus action on the option that stands in for the old repair action. Now, when you roll your car back onto the road, the jump-start action will allow it to make its full move. In most cases, this is enough to get back into the thick of things. And if not… well, maybe in those cases it’s smarter to save your bonus dice on heat-seeking missiles.

The ramifications of this change from permanent destruction to temporary setback are far-reaching. First, I won’t pretend there aren’t any negatives. There are no more car wrecks. These were one of the original game’s coolest sights, the burnt-out husks of defeated racers turned into serious obstacles for the drivers behind them.

That said, this completely removes one of the system’s larger problems: that the back half of Vendetta’s races were considerably less interesting than their opening moments. As players lost their vehicles, turns grew shorter and more perfunctory. Fewer decisions were present. Usually the last third of the track felt like a foregone conclusion.

Now the victory condition has changed. This is a race, pure and simple, and whomever crosses the finish line with two cars is declared the winner. There’s no longer a situation — and a common situation at that — where you’ve lost so any cars that you no longer have anything to do with those remaining dice. Now you just wheel them back onto the track and keep going.

This eases some of the game’s chancier elements. Thunder Road has never been a serious game, but dulling the consequences helps to emphasize its better portions. Namely, that this is also a rather funny game. Smashing a tank into a dune buggy, only for the tank to get thrown into a wall of trash, is now wholly amusing rather than frustrating. By the same token, getting slapped with a missile right before you reach the next checkpoint offers a shadow of the finish-line blues, but its easier recovery means you haven’t lost the race. If anything, this adds some strategy to the game. Rather than investing every one of your best rolls into your fastest car, it’s often worthwhile to spread them around to ensure a damaged vehicle reaches the next checkpoint rather than getting booted back to the start of the track.

Which is all very clever. Because Ignition is definitely the smaller of these siblings, but it doesn’t feel short so much as lean and muscular. Its matches are focused and mean and hilarious. An improbable emotional blend, but one that works thanks to some ruthless development work.

Everything else survives intact, at least if we’re starting from the baseline rather than the expansion stuff. The special dice, which oversee ramming and damage and shooting, are still a joy to contemplate and handle. The cars still feel distinct without needing any additional rules. The race… well, it’s still Thunder Road. Just better, in most ways.

As my seven-year-old put it, “It was so crazy when my car hit your car into the garbage!” Like the best of the recent resplendence of comedy racing games — Hot Streak, Magical Athlete, and Dino Racer — Thunder Road: Ignition feels like it was custom-built to appeal to everyone in my family, adult and child alike. Vroom vroom, sucka.

 

A complimentary copy of Thunder Road: Ignition was provided by the designer. It will be available at Pax West next week.

(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.)

Hench is a strange, lovely beast. It’s as far as it gets from Edward Damon’s previous title, Rex Regnat, and not only because its Saturday morning cartoon vibe is a sharp contrast with that game’s public domain portraiture. They operate in distinct modes. Where Rex Regnat functioned best when everybody was attentive, Hench is a little sloppier. It’s raucous. It doesn’t mind getting grease on its shirt. It wants to throw stuff against the wall.

Players are, rather obviously, a supervillain’s henchmen. Henchpeople, according to union guidelines. It’s a role that rewards those who steal recognition for the most basic of tasks.

When you get down to it, Hench is about a single question. Really, it’s the same question that undergirds much of modern society. On the one side, there are tangled and mutually beneficial incentives that allow us to have raspberries in winter and mass transit and airplanes that don’t fall immediately out of the sky. On the other, there’s the need to “get that bag,” as the kids say. To benefit yourself. To stay afloat at everybody else’s expense.

Perhaps Lord Nefarious, your supervillain overboss, is the stand-in for capitalism in this particular arrangement. Because in Hench, it’s necessary to work as a team to succeed. But in order to succeed succeed, you also need to stab that team in the back as often as possible.

Picture this: multiple missions, ranging from the banal (dry-clean the boss’s outfit, bully a child) to the labyrinthine (build a volcano lair, file the evil org’s taxes). Even the most trivial of these tasks requires investment from multiple henchpeople. Especially because those do-gooder heroes are always out foiling your plans, requiring regular confrontations that may well end with your face purpled and swollen, but at least you’ve kept Dr. Hero away from Evilcon East for the week.

But then, the problem. The real problem, because heroes are but the first hurdle on this particular marathon. (Marathons have hurdles now??) Everyone who contributes to a mission will earn Lord Nefarious’s esteem. But whomever contributes last to the task, the mook who’s putting the finishing touches on the job when the overboss slouches around — well, they get more credit than everybody else.

This social conundrum informs everything. Whether you bother to help a fellow henchperson fix the deathray. Whether you intercept a hero on the verge of tanking an objective. How obnoxious — how loud — you become at the table.

For the most part, Damon leaves the answer to this question — really the answers, plural, because there’s no singular way to respond — up to the players. Hench is a restrained design in that regard. Turns, which are simultaneous, consist of picking cards and then, according to their initiative number, playing them to those various jobs. Within that rubric, there’s room to collaborate or to be as snide as possible. Even to sabotage a rival’s mission on the brink of its success. Hench isn’t proscriptive about it.

I will say, the center of this cake is a little doughy, and not only because we baked a saw into its midsection. Whether we’re talking about the missions, the heroes, or the limited henchperson powers, the tuning never feels entirely right. Hench feels like a game that would have benefited from wackier occurrences, the occasional landmine or salt-water taffy, to keep events lively.

The biggest example is the minions. Each character receives a passive ability and a couple of cards with special abilities. For a game with so much potential, it’s a limited approach. Not even the game’s cooldown system, which prevents any henchperson from playing the same one or two cards over and over again, can break its hold. Instead, players tend to play their best three cards over and over again. Some additional tinkering wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Still, I appreciate a design that keeps the focus where it’s due. Hench might not be the best imaginable version of itself, but there’s no denying that its attention never strays. The whole thing takes maybe half an hour, just long enough to let a few interoffice rivalries develop, but not so long that they grow stale. It’s a thought experiment written… not large, but big enough to illustrate its point. There’s no such thing as ethical collaboration under a dark lord. That’s my takeaway.

Or maybe I just like hanging out with these weirdos. To be sure, the cast is colorful, and while their abilities are limited, they each gesture toward a more robust personality. There’s the Worm, who thrives on punishment and thus seeks out minor failures. The Brain, always out-thinking everybody around him. (Or at least imagining he is.) The Brute is a gigantic hippo. I don’t remember its abilities. But being a giant hippo’s got to count for something.

All in all, Hench is a minor but still appealing second act from an exciting up-and-comer. It isn’t as dense or piercing as Damon’s previous title, but still offers a tight half-hour experience that understands the virtue of getting out of its own way. Very much unlike a dark lord, come to think of it.

 

A complimentary copy of Hench was provided by the designer. It will be available at Pax West next week.

(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.)

Say it with me: The wheel has turned once more.

2023 feels like a zillion years ago. That’s what I get for having the brain of an old-growth redwood. According to tradition, New Year, Old Year is how I revisit the titles that I declared to be the “best” in any given year. Best Week 2023 featured thirty titles over five days. Let’s see how they stack up today.

Day One! Family Stuff!

Aw. The first day of Best Week 2023 is a snapshot of a slightly younger family. These are all games I played with my kids, then aged four and nine, and it’s interesting to see which have survived the intervening two years and change.

In terms of family play, the big losers of the bunch are Fugitive and Race to the Raft, although not so much because the games aren’t good as because they’re too heady. I’d still be happy to play either of them, but their absence from my daily life is rather pronounced.

Somewhere in the middle, I would put Beacon Patrol and Lacuna. I’m actually pretty regretful that I passed along the former. Given how smitten with Blorp! my children are, despite being grossed out by its overabundance of orifices, I think they would appreciate Beacon Patrol’s gentler setting and more interesting placement puzzle. Lacuna, on the other hand, is still sitting on Cate’s shelf. She always gives it a place of priority when she rearranges her games, and insists she isn’t too old for it. I think it might be time to pull it down to see how it fares between her and her little sister. For whatever reason, though, it’s been cemented in her head as a game that’s worthwhile, something to be treasured, even if we haven’t played it in a good long while.

That leaves two titles. Fit to Print is such a banger. I wouldn’t say it’s appeared much at family time, but I tabled it again earlier this year to show some friends what could be accomplished with that Galaxy Trucker formula, and it was a hit all over again. This is another good candidate for reintroduction. (How’s that for a phrase that makes me sound like a mad scientist?) I think even the younger kiddo could now grasp the basics.

The undisputed leader of the pack is none other than Spots. Honestly, I’m not sure why I didn’t give it the number one position. Contrarianism, most likely. Cate recently introduced it to a group of friends at one of the game days she’s been hosting, and it warmed my heart to see yet another pack of children giggling over the cow that thinks it’s a dog. What a perfect game.

Next up, some slightly more serious titles.

Two years might not seem like enough of an interval to warrant a second edition, but Connor Wake’s Out of Sorts is not your average board game. Actually, it’s become something of a counterpoint for me. While Wilmot’s Warehouse has become the proof of concept for what a modern memory game can accomplish, to such a degree that I have played it something like fifty times, Out of Sorts is that but bizarre, that but frightening, that but even more unwilling to guide its players by the hand. Because it is weird, my appreciation is even more boundless.

How weird is it? Here’s the premise: You’ve been abducted by an alien and put to work categorizing their spacefaring library. Presumably the delay of lightspeed means they’ve only recently learned of Melvil Dewey’s book classification system. “There are less racist alternatives!” one might protest. Yes. We have more pressing problems at the moment, but too true. Unfortunately, the alien doesn’t know about those Dewey-free alternatives. All it knows is that humans are good at sorting books. And it owns a lot of books.

So you sort. And sort. And sort.

I’ve always found it beautiful, our human tendency to see shapes in foliage and gods in static. We are thing-ordering machines, if you want to go that way, with such a talent for hearing music and witnessing divine geometries that we sometimes drive ourselves mad. When we look at the cards Wake has illustrated, we don’t see nonsensical scribbles. We see — so many things. Little projections of our selves. Examinations of our private pareidolia. Here is a hand-tied fly, ready to be cast into the river. There is a tadpole bopping along to a song. Which song? “Barbara Ann” by the Beach Boys. It could be none other.

When the game begins, we receive three categories. These, like everything else in Out of Sorts, have been retouched from the original edition. Perhaps we have been tasked by our alien overlord to organize their xenic scrawl into Death, Math, and Art History. Or perhaps Royalty, Life, and Rituals. Some combinations are easier than others. Some seem impossible. What’s the crucial visual distinction between Reptiles and Monsters? How about Thermodynamics versus Cosmos? Best of luck. We’re gonna need it.

There are two roles. One player is the Sorter, responsible for shelving these cards. In game terms, assembling them into a hand. Everyone else is a Finder. They find the cards, both at the beginning of each round and then when the alien decides to check our homework.

This latter portion is the game’s version of a pop quiz. One by one, the Finders reveal cards from the deck and put them into an order that matches the hand built by the Sorter. It’s analogous to diving into a card catalog for some random book, then immediately identifying where in your personal ordering system you’ve decided to place it. Structural Dynamics of Flow, easy, that’s in the middle. Noblesse Oblige & Other Obsoletions, that goes after the first one. Wheels: The Denunciation. Uh oh, that’s in the same category as the previous title. Fortunately, we created a sub-category that lands it squarely before that one.

Except here we’re faced with alien squiggles rather than readily-identifiable classics of the Western Canon. Sometimes the symbols collapse into a mental mishmash. Other times we spark the magic that is our capacity to organize even the most nebulous of concepts. Within a century, pedants will grouse at one another over which category is truer than the other. Mostly, we’re spinning these categories on the fly, terrified of being fed out the airlock.

Where this latter edition departs from the original is in its open-ended nature and overall fluidity. The original, if you haven’t played it, was a march to a finish line that probably never arrived. Victory required passing through every one of the game’s checks. Nine in total. I’ve never managed it. Frankly, I’m not actually sure it was possible for normies to accomplish.

This time around, Wake has grown more playful. As before, the game begins with a twenty-minute timer, followed by escalating requests from the alien. Only this time, rather than hoping you’ll make it through all nine rounds, the game assumes you’ll falter. Maybe we’ll deplete our limited supply of minutes. Or maybe the alien will notice the errors in our categorization system. (Adorably, it peeks suspiciously from behind its alien magazine. What we cannot know is that its reading material is smut.)

Either way, we’re given one last chance to sort the deck we’ve created, ordering the entire thing in a panic. The more checks we passed previously, the more we have to sort, but also the longer the alien gives us to accomplish our task. Our performance awards us a final score, tallied for every card we put into its correct place. As conclusions go, it’s far smoother than what Out of Sorts provided before, more of a crescendo than an abrupt termination.

But that’s not all. While our score matters, Wake also rips a page from Jon Perry’s Hot Streak by assigning our rank a post-script to this whole debacle, a one-sentence note right out of a ’90s sports flick. “Bobby went on to play in the Majors. Tom married Queenie. Jerry died of lung cancer at 34 from smoking eight packs a day.” That sort of thing. Only more likely to involve airlocks.

These changes make the new edition gentler in some ways, more approachable, but this isn’t to say it’s been defanged. If anything, the game has been given a rounder shape, one that suits its gameplay so perfectly that it’s hard to imagine it ever occupied a different vessel. In fact, I’d half-convinced myself that it was always this way. I had to go back to the original rulebook to make sure I wasn’t imagining a slightly worse version of the same game.

There are other little additions. The biggest is a variant that sees the alien librarian occasionally interjecting its own recommendations. Sometimes these are helpful, like having the Sorter flip a card around so everybody can see it. More often, they’re petty annoyances, like tossing a book onto the front of the stack or having the Finders assign a title in the Sorter’s place. It’s a small alteration, but worthwhile in how it forces your squad of unwilling astro-librarians to adapt to further impositions.

All told, Out of Sorts is every bit as good as I remember. Partly that’s because it’s such an improvement that it retroactively persuaded me that this is how the game was always played, a suitable trick for a game about both the fuzziness and indefatigability of creative memory.

But the real reason is because it’s still that same weird memory game, only improved in nearly every way from Wake’s earlier effort. For a game about alien libraries, Out of Sorts is defiantly human. Its illustrations are hand-drawn, its design is iterative, and its central spark is the same promethean fire that is our human capability to organize and imagine. I love its squiggles and crotchety alien kidnapper. I love even more what it reveals about our human capacity to index a shelf of shame.

 

A complimentary copy of the new version of Out of Sorts 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.)

One of my favorite games ever designed is getting a new edition. Apart from some component upgrades and better availability, nothing has changed. Which is precisely what this title needed.

So come on in. The tea’s hot and the fire is crackling. HA HA. You just scalded your tongue. That means I’m the winner. It also means today’s game is Schadenfreude, the most joyously nasty trick-taker out there.

I’m convinced that Schadenfreude is the best “pure” trick-taker ever crafted. Designed by the mysterious ctr, historically this one has been hard to nab. Not so any longer, because the new edition is coming via Office Dog, the same studio that brought us the Lord of the Rings trick-takers, Fellowship and Two Towers, both of which are lovely.

As I noted in my original review, Schadenfreude unfurls like a joke that keeps on giving. It’s comparatively bare of ornamentation, nothing like some of my personal favorites of the genre. The tricks are must-follow. The triumphs are nonexistent. There are two special cards, a zero and a ten that can match with any suit, but I suspect they’re mostly there to round out the card count.

The gimmick, such as it is, is that the player in second place wins the trick. At the level of sheer utility, this does a lot for the usual reliability of high-value cards. You’re holding a nine? Too bad. You’ll never get it into your scoring pile. At best, it’s a way to push an eight into somebody else’s score pile. Unless somebody is holding that wild ten, anyway. Then the nine might be your undoing. But now I’m getting ahead of myself.

Schadenfreude’s shenanigans extend to the entire scoring rubric. Whenever you win a trick, you claim the winning card plus anything played off-suit. These cards then sit in your score pile, where they’re worth points at the end of the hand. Unless you later win a duplicate. Then any duplicated cards obliterate one another like those two guys in Time Cop.

Avoid duplicates, check. Easy, right?

Except you don’t necessarily want to score, at least not too much or too often. The game only ends once somebody breaks past forty points. But this isn’t a threshold for victory. Oh no. It’s a threshold for losing like a chump. Anybody over forty is ineligible to win. Whoever’s sitting at the highest score after that game-concluding bust becomes the winner in their place. Provided not everybody busted on the same round. Which, yes, can absolutely happen. It’s never not hilarious.

Between this rubric and the game’s restraint — only four suits, no special powers or rules exceptions — Schadenfreude provides tremendous range to strategize. It’s the sort of game where every play might force-feed a poison pill to a rival. Maybe even three poison pills at once. Early on, it’s common for somebody to gobble up as many cards as possible, only to realize their comfortable lead puts them in very real danger of busting. Suddenly their play grows conservative. Only now everybody else wants them to choke on as many cards as possible.

Above all else, it’s funny. Lots of trick-takers are funny, but I don’t think any one of them has made me laugh as hard as this one. Some have called the game “themeless,” except it’s a perfect expression of an emotive theme rather than a physical setting. Schadenfreude is about schadenfreude, about the joy that comes from watching somebody topple from their high horse. Which is probably why the cover art is now a knight taking a head-dive from his noble steed. I hope he dents his helmet and spends the whole evening scrubbing grass stains from his coat. Git.

Ahem. Anyway, this is more of an announcement than a proper review, and for that I’m sorry. But Schadenfreude is a wonderful little artifact, the rare sort of game that’s not only a joy to play but also to explain. I’ve yet to see it flub at the table.

 

A complimentary copy of the new version of Schadenfreude was provided by the publisher. Which was very kind of them, considering I’d bought the damn thing three times previously, twice at great expense because it was impossible to actually find anywhere reasonable.

(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. Fortunately, it’s an uncommonly smart genre. Today I’m covering three titles that highlight both the format’s breadth and what makes trick-taking one of tabletop’s most enduring pastimes — and one of its meanest.

In other words, these are trick-takers for jerkwads. Compliment intended.

Shortstack

Marceline Leiman has been busy. After the success of High Tide, it seems like her designs are popping up everywhere. (Pro tip: Dino Racer has the juice.) Most recently, Shortstack has been making the rounds.

To begin, your hand is massive. Nine cards, then a “napkin” (also a card), then nine more cards. The reason for this division becomes clear right away. Rather than playing a single card, every trick is built from two separate components, one from the left side of the napkin and the other from the right. The first card’s number becomes the “suit” while the second becomes the “rank.”

Simple enough, and a wrinkle that constitutes the entire sub-genre of domino trick-takers. But two things set Shortstack apart from the pack. The first is that “perfect pancakes” — those where the rank and suit are identical — are outright winners. You’re still required to follow suit if possible, but your dichotomous hand makes it easier than usual to claim tricks at unexpected moments. This produces quite a bit of flexibility, important for claiming high-value tricks that will likely award a point at the end of the round.

The other thing that’s different about Shortstack is even more impactful: if you eat too many pancakes, you’re gonna hurl. Leiman is too polite to actually state this outright, but we’re professional translators of subtext round these parts. If you take too many tricks, all your pancakes are “thrown out” (read: barfed), you score nothing, and everyone else at the table earns a point. Presumably because they’re laughing at your misfortune.

This alters Shortstack from straightforward into a nasty affair indeed. Your flexible hand makes it easier to claim tricks, but also offers little opportunities to nudge an opponent into chowing down on too many pancakes. It always seems like there are two or three rounds too many. While it’s technically possible, in the three-player game at least, to get through a hand without ejecting all that batter across the table, it isn’t likely.

The result isn’t my favorite short-form trick-taker; personally, I would rate this one alongside Nebular Colors, which I appreciated without wanting to come back to. But it’s still a simultaneously charming and vicious little thing. Like Marceline Leiman herself, perhaps? I couldn’t tell you. I’ve never met her. But when she keeps producing such digestible razor blades, one starts to wonder.

The Magic Shop

More games should come in DVD cases with soundtracks on compact disc. Even better, those discs should double as game boards. Even bettah, those games should be adaptations of short stories from the turn of the century. And not this century. The one before that.

The Magic Shop, designed by Reader on Jupiter, calls to mind their previous title The Man Who Was Thursday not only for its packaging and soundtrack, but also its fascinating approach to adaptation. In this case, the work being reimagined is H.G. Wells’ 1903 short story “The Magic Shop,” and much like the story’s father and son, we’ve stumbled into a shop, found ourselves trapped, and must now accomplish increasingly bizarre feats of endurance and navigation in order to leave. Basically, it’s a 19th-century IKEA.

While it’s tempting to spend this entire time discussing the game as an adaptation, which is utterly delightful in its impressionism, capturing the whimsy and some measure of the story’s menace without recreating even a single narrative beat, we’re here to talk shop. For the most part, The Magic Shop’s trick-taking is relatively straightforward. You want to win tricks, but only as many as you’ve contracted. Your bid matches the rank of whatever card you devote at the start of the hand, but in a gesture of goodwill every card also allows a bid of either three or zero on its reverse side. In practice, this usually means shooting for either three tricks or none at all.

Here’s where it gets wacky. Whenever a trick is taken, the winner also gets to perform a magic trick. These are tied to the suits, which limits what the winner is permitted to cast. Furthermore, while the winner is always free to use the suit of their own card, they also have the option of using any of the cards played into the trick — but only if they take a “thirst token” that awards additional points to any rival who meets their bid for the round.

As for the actual magic tricks, these give The Magic Shop much of its flair. One of them changes the trump suit; another flips an eye token so that low ranks now outclass high ranks. Perhaps the meanest is the one that forces everybody at the table to pass a card clockwise, perfect for ruining bids. This can be ameliorated by the suit that lets you swap out your bid for another card from your hand (phew!), although this can be summarily wrecked by the one that forces the current trick to “accumulate.” This means that rather than awarding the trick, it instead sits off to the side to be claimed by whomever takes the next one. And yes, multiple accumulations can be strung together. Ever wanted to win four tricks at once? Probably not when your bid is set at three and you’ve already taken two.

You can probably already tell that The Magic Shop is a highly tactical trick-taker; its merger of exacting contracts and ongoing flux makes for quite the ride. I’m convinced it’s possible to play well, but I’ll be damned if I know how. Once again, I love what Reader on Jupiter is doing, but there’s really no separating my affection from the game’s aesthetic, approach to adaptation, and general mischief. Those who fear chaos really should avoid this one at all costs. Personally, I dig it.

Torchlit

Speaking of chaos, David Spalinski’s Torchlit is one of those games that first appears entirely uncontrolled. Don’t be deceived. This is a highly strategic trick-taker. It’s just that there’s room for some truly cruel plays, usually as a result of some jerk deciding you need to be taken down a peg.

Here, those jerks are adventurers. Dungeon delvers. Ruin ransackers. Your goal is to march into the current dungeon, earn some gold, and march out again. Gold mostly comes from looted corpses; at the end of the hand, every monster on your space is worth a coin. Two coins, if we’re talking about dragon cards.

Wait, there’s more. At the start of the hand, you flip one of your cards face-down. This is your torch. Yes, it’s a — say it with me — contract bid! If you wind up on your chosen room, you earn some extra money. If not, your torch is added to its designated room, where it awards any other adventurers the gold instead.

Making matters significantly harder is the way you move through the dungeon. The winner of each trick moves forward… and so does anybody whose card rank matches theirs. So while it’s possible to piggyback on a hero’s success, it’s also possible to get piggybacked. As in, hauled up on a rival adventurer’s and dragged kicking and screaming past the room you bid on. Like you’re some kinda hobbit being taken to Isengard.

Meanwhile, the rooms are populated by monsters according to the cards that were played into the current trick, but they’re doled out by whomever deployed the lowest rank. This means there are two games going on: the death march through the dungeon as decided by the winner, but also the local cash piñatas as seeded by the loser. Unless those two happen to be the same player. Then that punk gets to decide everything. Which is entirely possible, especially if somebody sweeps a trick by winning with a low dragon card.

All told, these contrasting imperatives give Torchlit its venom-tipped fangs. When I wrote about its self-published version a while back, I argued that it was very nearly a hybrid trick-taker, as much about your position on the board as about the tricks themselves. The intervening years have only deepened that impression. Torchlit is something like a push-your-luck game, except it’s less about luck and more about dodging and/or taking advantage of your fellow dungeon divers. The new edition by Allplay is incredibly handsome, making it more widely available to those who aren’t able to gobble up the latest indie darling.

Of today’s titles, this is the strongest. Honestly, it might be one of my favorite trick-takers of the past few years. But make no mistake, it’s every bit as nasty as the others. It may not include regurgitated flapjacks or unexpected magic tricks, but there are plenty of little barbs to dig into your rivals’ plans. Between this and the similarly jerkwaddy Chasing Shadows, Spalinski is on a roll.

 

Complimentary copies of Shortstack, The Magic Shop, and Torchlit were provided by their designers/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, 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.)

According to one of my uncles, the terms “right” and “left” derive from the fact that conservatism is correct while liberalism is wrong. You know, because we say “that’s right” to mean “that’s correct” and “that’s left” when we’ve suffered a serious brain hemorrhage and don’t remember how words work.

In actuality, the right/left divide comes to us from the French Revolution of 1789, when the members of the National Assembly who supported the Ancien Régime would sit to the king’s right, while those in favor of the revolution sat to the left. Presto blammo: a rubric that would confuse dumb uncles for the next 240 years.

Still, it’s a helpful formulation for the rest of us, if often an overly simplistic one. When I introduce the five factions from Laurent Rix’s exceptional Revolutions: France 1820-1880, I lay them out from right to left. All the easier to explain their objectives. Often, players appreciate this gesture, especially for the factions in the middle, whose aims might seem alien to our modern minds. And some people say you can’t learn history from a board game.

The second thing I usually explain when teaching Revolutions is the timing of the whole thing. There are certain dates that stand out in the memory — the existence of the 1812 Overture is a good reminder that the game begins after Napoleon’s removal from power, but not everybody has internalized that particular mnemonic. And it makes sense that not everybody in my very American group would recognize this particular string of dates. 1820 to 1880? What even happened in there?

Why, these are the middle decades of the Long Nineteenth Century! Which is to say a whole lot happened, but it isn’t the sort of stuff that’s often taught in history classes in the United States, where Manifest Destiny and the Civil War loom large over everything else.

In our case, Revolutions casts us as five major factions, all of whom seized and held some measure of power over those six decades. Even if, for one of them, the furthest expression of that power was limited to two months in Paris.

Thus, our dramatis personae, from right to left:

First we have the Ultras, who are, as their name suggests, rather extreme in their dedication to a reconstituted monarchy and suppression of everything the previous revolution and eventual empire stood for.

A few centimeters to their left stand the Orleanists, willing to fly the Tricolor and speak the revolutionary tongue, but still invested in tradition and moral order.

The cult-of-personality Bonapartists make up the middle children of this family squabble; they appreciate a good monarch, but only when it’s their own guy on the throne, and will allow a few concessions to modern liberalism while also brutally suppressing it.

The Republicans are next, with their lofty ideals about freedoms and voting, not to mention a willingness to engage with urban populations and newspapers.

But even they pale next to the more extreme Socialists, who are about as far away from our starting point as it’s possible to get without earning a thinkpiece from the Atlantic about how they and the Ultras are really the same at heart.

Now that the cast has been listed, it’s time to… well, to debate, mostly.

What makes Revolutions special is the way Rix covers six decades of history, both legislative and revolutionary, without missing a beat. As board games go, this is a longue durée history that teases out the unlikely alliances, concessions, and sometimes bloodbaths that marked those years.

Most of the time, your faction wants to secure votes. Let’s say you’re a brash young Republican in the middle of a reconstituted monarchy enforced by a foreign Coalition. What exactly is your recourse? Early on, your goal will probably be to secure some measure of legislative power. So you curry favor, both on the table by bidding influence cards to various sectors of French society, and above it by trying to persuade your natural allies — the Socialists for now, but also the Bonapartists and maybe Orleanists, especially if the Ultras have spent too long on the throne — that it would be prudent to make a few adjustments to how votes are cast, who receives representation, or which privileges will be granted to citizens. Together you create a voting bloc, earn some political influence, and then squabble over whether to flex your limited power to enforce a plebiscitary or representative government.

But then, disaster. After all that effort, perhaps the Ultras will veto your motion. They’re quite happy with the vote going to the richest landholders, thank you very much. But this veto sets the streets of Paris into a flurry. Now, with social tensions on the rise, you begin to agitate.

Over time, the political landscape undergoes seismic transformation. Rural populations become reachable. Newspapers begin to carry the public voice even more resoundingly than song. The working class begins to wake up to the fact that it’s a whole deal. Did I mention that Rix has folded the century’s gradual urbanization into his game? It’s quite the thing to behold. When Revolutions opens, the only people who can really be influenced are the notables and the clergy, and you can bet they aren’t taking calls from anyone grumbling about freedom of religion. But over the course of ensuing decades, new sectors open up, throwing the old order into a disarray from which it will never recover.

To be clear, Revolutions is never whiggish. Progress isn’t the straight line some would have us believe. When the peasantry enters the game, they’re hot for more Bonapartism, for the glory of the old days, not for equal representation. Newspapers, like tavern songs, can be written by gray-haired reactionaries as well as by sexy young revolutionaries.

Still, it becomes increasingly difficult for monarchism to keep its cold fingers wrapped around the national throat. There’s an arc here, even if it doesn’t have a foreordained slant.

So you agitate. Eventually, the frustration of the population boils over into a full-blown conflict. Now factions are forced to pick sides, either sidling up to the established order in hopes of earning a concession or two, or joining the revolutionary bandwagon in an attempt to reshape society more dramatically. Like everything else in Revolutions, these are handled slickly. Tallying votes is as easy as checking everybody’s position on the game’s six tracks; counting manpower is much the same, with a few extra steps for those who are willing to erode their popular support to throw additional bodies at the problem. Revolutions are tense, but they’re never complicated.

Playing Revolutions is an illuminating experience. It calls to mind a few other titles, exemplars like Geoff Engelstein and Mark Herman’s Versailles 1919, with its uncomfortable alliances and shifting priorities, and Alex Knight’s Land & Freedom, about partners whose petty squabbles are so urgent that they argue themselves to death rather than combining to face a superior threat.

Like those games, Revolutions takes place in subtle theaters. One might even call them abstract. There are no battlefields here. Your successes and failures are measured on tracks, both those that measure your appeals to France’s social spheres and those that gauge the current status of national sovereignty and which rights are held by the people. Wars are a question of numerical superiority. Whichever side has the bigger number wins. Simple. Functional.

For all that, it’s gripping from start to finish. Rix imbues his social model with little eurekas. In our last session, we saw uncomfortable coalitions form, especially when factions who wouldn’t normally deign to spit on their rival’s flaming culottes were suddenly brought together to oppose a runaway tyrant. We also saw the peasantry undergo a shift in attitude after dear leader sacrificed them so casually to quell the next uprising. We watched as newspapers shifted from suspicious new media, the tool of republican rabble-rousers, to another appendage of the moneyed class. We observed how the erosion of rights could be accomplished in steps so that the populace only grumbled a little at a time.

Meanwhile, these occurrences required very little overhead. Like many new-wave historical titles, Revolutions prides itself not only on its model of culture in transition, but also on ease of play. For the most part, gameplay consists of bidding cards, tallying votes, and then spending influence to enact changes. Or, when that doesn’t work, mustering your forces for a bash in the streets of Paris. There are subtleties to these processes, but they never tip the scales into unnecessary chrome. Instead, the rules get out of the way, letting you focus on which side of the latest political headwind you want to tack into.

All told, Revolutions: France 1820-1880 is one of the finest examinations I’ve ever seen of a new society struggling to be born. In many ways it’s a game about not only history, but the way history is formed, the way people begin to see themselves as agents of history and authors of history, the way ideas are transmitted or obscured, the way change is enacted or smothered. It’s about the many birth pangs and postpartum twinges that accompany any transformation. Hopefully, it’s a reminder that the world can be recast into a new shape yet again.

 

A complimentary copy of Revolutions: France 1820-1880 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 never played Spyrium, William Attia’s 2013 game of steampunk factories, but I heard good things about its worker placement/removal system. Greylune, as near as I can tell, recaptures that title’s core appeal, while swapping the geared top hats for a more generic — but maybe more blandly appealing? — fantasy universe.

As expected, the best part has everything to do with the workers. The core system here is genuinely brilliant, a series of placements and eventual withdrawals that feel like direct assaults on one’s fellows at the table without ever laying a cross finger upon anyone’s shoulder.

The idea is that workers are placed into a marketplace to secure various goods. There are a few types of said goods: items and companions, both of which require purchasing, and amenities, which can be visited more than once. Their main commonality is that buying something from the market has two big restrictions. First, you can only purchase something by removing a worker — thus shifting yourself into the game’s second phase, which prevents you from placing any more workers until the next year — and second, the more workers there are surrounding something, the higher its cost.

The inverse is also true. Rather than pulling off a worker (teehee) to buy a card, their withdrawal can earn a pocketful of gold instead. This works by the same formula: you remove a worker, count how many other workers are next to the card in question, and then earn that many coins. They’re probably engaging in commerce or something. I preferred to pretend they were pickpockets.

As systems go, there’s no doubting its cleverness. Everything is wholly player-driven. It’s pretty rare that I’ll pay attention to how many coins a rival is holding, but here it’s common to tally someone’s holdings. Often, the placement of a single worker can drive up a price just beyond their reach, prompting them to first place another worker to earn the necessary cash, and thus providing a window to swoop in and nab whatever sword, horse, or buddy they were eyeing.

It’s a rather snitty game like that. Also a razor-taut one, every coin and card counted to its precise change.

The reason for all those fairly-gotten gains is to outfit your knight for adventure. Everything has its place: companions provide reactive abilities that make it easier to travel and survive encounters, while items generally serve to improve your skills or move your knight deeper into the wild. There are also two flavors of strength, cherry and blueberry, to represent swords and sorcery.

So you head out into the unknown to beat up a troll, help a hermit, or take part in a joust. You know. Hero stuff. But in my favorite twist, it isn’t enough to accomplish an objective. These encounters are tucked under your player board, where they then sit, doing nothing, until you get around to sending one of your followers to boast of your achievements in one of the local taverns. This requires more worker placement and removal, whether the following spring or because you’ve planned ahead.

It’s rather impressive to see in motion. Despite the removal of anything resembling steampunk, the game moves according to clockwork logic, everything feeding back into itself: workers outfit knights who bring back deeds for workers to boast about or resources for them to spend at the market, around and around, until you’ve exhausted everyone and it’s time to tuck in for the winter.

At the same time, it’s a game laden with regrets. It isn’t uncommon to move onto the next phase only to immediately see the gap in your plans. Or, more often, for another player to come along and do something that forces you to think more reactively. Encounters exist to be stolen; quests to be one-upped; jeweled idols to be purchased out from under another prospective client.

It feels good, though. Really good. Which makes me wish the game didn’t feel like it was left at eighty percent completion. There’s a big difference between replayability and variety, with lots of modern games leaning toward the latter. I would guess that Attia was designing for tightness of experience.

But also… Greylune needs some variety. Every session reveals nearly every card, both in the marketplace and the wild. There’s such a lovely sense of discovery to those first sessions that I found myself wishing I could go back and experience it again. Here, knowing what’s coming is much of the battle. On my second play, I knew I would buy the horse if it showed up. Then I knew I would try for a potion strategy. In the last round, which features no variance from play to play, it’s inevitable that a powerful tavern will appear, one that awards rather large quantities of points. So I planned from the very beginning to save most of my quests for the last moment and forego adventuring altogether. There were little hiccups, but the strategy worked well enough to lap most of my opponents. It felt good, to be sure. But it also felt sterile and mechanical.

Ultimately, Greylune both impressed me and left me chilly. Its core system is downright smart, and the set dressing around it feels good to handle. But it’s like handling a machine; a fidget toy, perhaps, or an orrery, spinning along its foreordained orbit. Pleasant but cold; beautiful but delicate. These days, I like my games to apply some force when they’re ramming their shield into my teeth, and Greylune’s touch is simply too dainty to cause so much as a wiggle.

 

A complimentary copy of Greylune 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.)

There was a run there, between the aughts and the teens of the current century, when Victory Point Games published multiple of the best solitaire board games ever. Banger after banger. Then it was sold and chopped up for parts.

Perhaps the best title to emerge from that golden age was Hermann Luttmann’s Dawn of the Zeds. This baby merged the strategic considerations of the States of Siege line with some cinematic flair. So much cinematic flair that its overstuffed third edition aped not only the dramatic beats of cinema but also the notion that it was a movie being directed by the player. A tonal mismatch if ever there was one.

Here’s the good news: Hermann Luttmann is back with a new version of Dawn of the Zeds. Dubbed the Designer Edition, and divorced from the vultures who gobbled up Victory Point, it’s a revamp of the system from top to bottom. It isn’t as good as I remember. It’s better.

Unlike any number of internet specialists, I have no idea what a “real” zombie apocalypse would look like. But the scenario presented by Dawn of the Zeds feels real enough, at least in the moment. It begins on the periphery, slowly, Farmingdale’s outlying communities stubbornly refusing to listen to reason. Then the levy breaks and the tidal wave comes all at once. Defenders panicking over the radio. Refugees crowded on the interstate. Infections concealed among the survivors, ready to bloom into a fresh horde of killers. It isn’t long before the bodies are piling against the barricades.

Drawing on its lineage from the States of Siege system, Dawn of the Zeds offers a bird’s eye perspective that lends it a certain credence. At a tangible level, you play as a specific group of survivors. There’s some wiggle room there, including a multiplayer mode, but the classic setup is four heroes selected at random from a generous pool. These heroes, to put it bluntly, are not created equal. One session might provide Professor Agee, already on the cusp of inventing an antidote, and Captain Piazza, the sniper whose ranged attacks and booby traps make her a force of nature at any range. Then the next will give you Pickles the dog. Poor dumb Pickles. He’s the best boy. Just not, you know, the best at zombie invasions.

But these inequalities — some might call them “imbalances” — are not only to be expected from Dawn of the Zeds; they’re the whole reason it works. Better get used to it, in any case. Every round begins with an event card that dictates not one but four phases. One of them, the RRRR phase, is really four phases folded into one, letting you usher refugees to safety, shove raiders across the countryside, and invite any passing Army Rangers to help your community. There’s a fourth R in there, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what it stands for. Compared to that, the actual action phase, which usually sees your characters taking a measly one action each, is often brisk. Certainly you’ll wish you had more time. What do you mean Emily Orozco, golf pro, can drive balls into an oncoming horde or shuttle defenders around in her golf cart, but not both?

The sense that you’re drowning in a rickety submarine, four new leaks springing each turn while you only have enough hands to patch three, has been the default state of solitaire and cooperative gameplay ever since Matt Leacock standardized it in Pandemic. But where Dawn of the Zeds excels is at making that formula feel more natural than elsewhere. Flipping an event card doesn’t merely present a problem; it hits you with a full-spectrum crisis. Whether refugees can retreat. The threshold for yet another outbreak that will bring new zombies onto the board. How far you can stretch your tins of beans. Whether your heroes can muster some extra oomph today, that little bit of extra effort to earn a more generous action allotment.

Not least of all, which lanes will come under assault today. This being a glorified States of Siege game, the entire map is divided into four lanes that spiral around and eventually terminate at Farmingdale. If any zeds reach the town, it’s game over.

So you play football. Or tug of war. Some calorie-burning metaphor is appropriate. Each lane has its own tendencies, not to mention spaces that are crucial to your survival but which will very quickly succumb to the horde. The suburbs are defensible but populated with noncombatants who must be protected lest they turn into zombie chow. The interstate is mostly open but for the town’s nuclear plant. The mountains and farmlands both feature zones where food and ammunition can be harvested more readily, if only you can hold them. It doesn’t help that zombie territory must be painstakingly reclaimed lest any future zeds spawn that much closer to your town center.

For the most part, this turns Dawn of the Zeds into a game of fire response. One of your outlying settlements’ defenders falls too soon, so you send loony old Mister Johnson and his shotgun to help bushwhack the zeds back a few steps. Supplies are dwindling, so it’s time for Big Wheels Carter to plow through the crowd with his big rig to bring a few crates back home. Injuries are piling up, so Agent Carter retreats from the front lines to help out in the hospital. Too many zombies are at the gates, so Pickles runs out and ignores the zombies, but also doesn’t really help behind the lines either. Good job, Pickles. Who’s the best boy?

Fortunately, there are plenty of tools to aid in these efforts. Barricades can be erected. Refugees can be rearmed and turned into zed-killing professionals. Antidotes and super-weapons can be manufactured. Indeed, it’s now pretty rare to not leave at least one hero back in town, at least for the first half of the session, just to keep a handle on the hospital and laboratory.

In the meantime, the underlying logic has changed somewhat from the game’s previous incarnations. Since its earliest days, Dawn of the Zeds betrayed its wargaming roots by employing old-school combat results tables. The dreaded CRTs. Anytime zeds entered a space with humans, you would compare their relative values, then check those values against a table that would tell you the outcome. It was a question of sums. My defenders have two strength, plus one for defending a named location, plus another for that supporting unit, plus two for Colonel Kingman’s enhanced barricade… against the combined zed strength of three plus four… now check the table… and that means we inflict two hits and the zeds retreat one space, but we take two hits in return. Wait, since Deputy Schmidt is on the scene, we get a positive shift on the table. Even better. Except, wait, we were looking at the ranged table when we were in hand-to-hand combat.

In other words, the combat system was functional, but not always very exciting.

It seems Luttmann has learned a few tricks in the years since the third edition, perhaps courtesy of experiments like The Plum Island Horror. The CRTs are out. And I mean all the way out. Nowhere to be seen. Instead, zeds now deal a static attack value — usually two to five — that can be blocked with shields, while human forces roll dice to inflict injuries or trigger special abilities.

The consequences are far-reaching. First of all, hero abilities are more manageable. In the third edition, heroes had half a dozen abilities each, all written in long-form text, all necessary for using them to their fullest capacity. Now heroes have two passive abilities plus perks that trigger when they get the right results on their dice. It’s tidy by comparison, preventing those obnoxious “oh shoot, I forgot to do this one thing” moments that were so common in previous editions, but also ensuring everybody feels like their own member of the team.

More importantly, combat is no longer something that can be summed out in advance. No longer can you park the right cluster of heroes and town defenders on a space and trust the CRT to provide. Sometimes you’ll roll five dice and flub the whole set. Other times Pickles will pounce on a pair of chits and somehow obliterate the entire stack with his lone yellow die. This can be frustrating, and there’s a whole optional reroll system in there for those who are, like me, little brats about bad tumbles. But this also pushes the game in a direction that’s more organic, more freewheeling, with unexpected twists and turns. It feels more like a series of triumphs and catastrophes and less like we’re pausing every thirty seconds to look at another dang chart.

It helps, too, that combat now includes little moments of player agency, especially where retreats are concerned. Previously, the CRT was everything. Injuries, retreats, the CRT might as well be God handing down tablets from Mount Sinai. Now it’s up to you whether to retreat from a space to ignore an injury or suck it up and hold your ground. This still won’t save a squad from a total overrun, but it’s a nice decision to leave in the player’s hands. Will you absorb a few extra losses to hold onto that important district, or cut your losses and hopefully outrun the zeds? It’s a toughie.

To be clear, Dawn of the Zeds is still a cluttered design in some ways. There are still tables, just not combat results tables. You check separate rubrics to see if your hero succeeded at foraging, healing, or researching the zombie virus. Chits still show little letter codes that designate their special abilities. Above all, there are still absolute heaps of special modifiers that might be applied to units. What’s the difference between flaming zeds, smelly zeds, and beta zeds? That isn’t the start of a joke. Those are actual traits that might be added to a chit to modify the threat it poses to Farmingdale’s defenders.

For the most part, though, the beauty of the Designer Edition is that it hits the sweet spot between complexity and ease of entry. It’s a little easier than before, both complexity- and difficulty-wise. But for all its streamlining, there’s still texture here. Flaming zeds are incredibly dangerous, but they’re also self-damaging. Smelly zeds repel your defenders if they share a space after combat. Beta zeds move faster and hit harder. Now that you know those ones, what about infected vermin, dirty zeds, smart zeds? Most of these traits won’t appear in a single session. But the beauty of this system is that they might. This is still a kitchen sink design, but it’s a kitchen sink design by a kitchen sink designer who’s come to really know his kitchen sinks.

And what a kitchen sink it is. After all these years, I had some trepidation going back into Dawn of the Zeds. Like its comrades in the old Victory Point Games catalog, it was a product of its time. That second edition, arguably the high-water mark for the old versions, shipped in a folio-sized ziplock. Its cutouts smelled of wood smoke from the workshop laser cutter. The rules were scattered and frenetic, a little homebrew. Opening the box for this edition, I wasn’t exactly thrilled to discover that that’s apparently how Luttmann’s brain functions.

But even after all this time, Dawn of the Zeds feels fresh. Fresher, actually, now that the States of Siege titles are a thing of the past rather than regular attendees of the alternative wargaming scene. The closest comparison from the past few years is The Plum Island Horror, but while that game has left a few visible fingerprints on this one, the two are more like cousins than siblings. All in all, this has the hallmarks of the same game Luttmann designed fifteen years ago. It’s still weathered and wild-eyed, the buttons of its overcoat still loose, but it’s every bit as indomitable as ever.

At least I hope it is. Some part of me wonders if Dawn of the Zeds has grown too far out of step with the modern hobby scene. It’s challenging and woolly and random. Even more random thanks to the dice combat.

But it’s also one of the most exciting and interesting solitaire games of its age. Once a week over the past month or so, I’ve sat with it in the evening, watching my defenders fail or rally, my heroes dart from one peril to the next. And it was perhaps the most relaxed I’d been in as much time. It felt like coming home. Not to the janky and over-stuffed version that I’d grappled with when I reopened the third edition last year. Instead, a version that was still expansive in what could happen, but more manageable and vivid in the moment. The past as I remember it rather than the past as it was.

Even when Pickles showed up only to promptly hurl himself into an unwinnable fight. Especially then. Good boy, Pickles. Good game, Dawn of the Zeds.

 

A complimentary copy of Dawn of the Zeds: Designer Edition 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.)

As a natural melancholic, the idea of being drawn to the sea — to drown one’s regrets, whether figuratively or bodily — makes me glad there isn’t a significant body of water within six hundred miles. It isn’t that suicide holds appeal for its own sake. Rather, it’s a fire door in the back, rigged with an alarm but duly located in case of an emergency. Sometimes, when an elderly person goes missing in the mountains, I wonder if they disappeared because of forgetfulness, as the silver alerts would have us believe, or because they could no longer stop remembering.

Deep Regrets, like Judson Cowan’s forthcoming Personal Demons, wears its metaphor on its sleeve only to collar it in gameplay. Perhaps we went to the sea to forget, to scrape our hull free of the barnacles that have accreted there, only to find ourselves fouled with a fresh catch. To mount an escape is to be caught.

Okay, now I’m being melancholic. At least it’s a good fit for Cowan’s intended topic.

“On the surface” is a loaded term for Deep Regrets. That’s because Deep Regrets is about surfaces and what lies beneath them. In terms of character, the surface reading is that you’re a fisherman. Not the catch-and-release kind, but rather the my-livelihood-is-disappearing-with-the-depleting-abyss kind.

Which is what drives your bayman to trawl ever deeper. As the shoals close to the surface grow thin, you seek more benthic prey. It’s a solitary practice, both thematically and at the table. Turns don’t exist in complete isolation from those of your peers; this isn’t a total multiplayer solitaire experience. But as we will see, there’s a lidless membrane between you and your peers that’s never quite breached.

For the most part — on the surface — Cowan plays it straight. The entire game could be described in that hobbyist shorthand that sounds alien to outsiders. Fishing is a press-your-luck minigame that expends dice and other resources to land the best fish. Every turn is framed around either a day at sea or one in harbor, trading your catch for equipment. There are subsystems aplenty: permanent and temporary dice, rods and reels with variable benefits, fish both great and small.

What’s interesting about these systems, though, is what they communicate about both the gameplay and your character.

Starting with gameplay, Deep Regrets is — on the surface — an incredibly chancy plaything. Early on, there are clues one can follow: the shadow beneath the water reveals whether a catch is small, middling, or large, and various depths translate to creatures that are increasingly dangerous to land-based mammals. Your bayman also has access to a few starting tools, such as a can of worms for peeking at a shoal’s face-down card and a lifeboat for beating a hasty retreat to port if your odds at sea turn south.

It isn’t long before it becomes apparent that Deep Regrets isn’t as aleatory as all that. Oh, there’s always a sense of risk. It isn’t uncommon for a cocksure hand to take one risk too many and invite the wrath of something truly monstrous. There are cards in the deck, whether the base deck or one of its multiple expansions, that can very much ruin your day.

Still, there’s so much mitigation at play that it’s hard to regard Deep Regrets as quite as chancy as some have made it out to be. Failing to catch a fish results in grabbing a “dink” — fishing slang, not lifestyle slang — which offers some benefit of its own, whether better fishing or some cash value, to offset the sting of failure. Even a cursory glance at the equipment shop reveals tools that will offset any number of flubs or miscasts. It isn’t enough to strip the game of its uncertainty altogether, but these are hardly uninformed decisions.

This is all good stuff, and would provide plenty to mull over. But, once again, this only brushes the surface.

It’s appropriate that where Deep Regrets expands its horizons is via the regret deck, a thick stack piled with all sorts of misgivings and heartbreaks. At regular intervals, your hapless fishers will land something special. A mermaid, perhaps, so shimmering with glory that it breaks your heart to haul her ashore. A leviathan, its mind linking to yours in its lashing final moments. Or maybe you’ll just sell something nasty at the fish market and feel bad about it. Regardless of the cause, these junctures see you drawing a regret.

Regrets matter in two senses. First, the number you hold in your hand determines your character’s current madness. The madder you become, the greater the risks you’ll take at sea and the weirder the creatures you’re willing to sell at market. Second, the sum of those cards determines which player is bitterest upon the game’s completion. This means tossing out your highest-scoring trophy.

What’s curious about regrets, though, is that they aren’t wholly undesirable. True enough, you would rather not have such terrible regrets that you fling your prize charybdis angrily into the sea. But a handful of regrets is… good, in fact. After a few days at sea, it won’t escape your notice that the deadlier deep shoals are packed with strange creatures. It also won’t escape your notice that these can be sold at higher prices and earn greater scores. But only if you’ve gone a little mad. Maybe even very mad. Not so mad that you ruin yourself. But mad enough to take the right risks and mount the right trophies.

Which is to say, Deep Regrets isn’t really about said regrets being bad, at least not always. In much the same way that Personal Demons doesn’t present fears as bad so much as things that need to be confronted, here one is invited to court regret, to dance with it, to dispel its worst excesses through clean living or self-medication or simple caution. Whatever works. But either way, a life without regrets hoists a lower ceiling, victory-wise.

Laid out like this, Deep Regrets’ messaging might come across as trite. Adolescent. As a species, we’ve told countless stories about how our regrets and failures are crucial stepping stones on the path to adulthood, from Picard being transformed into a timid science officer because he didn’t get shanked as a cocky ensign to the memory-erasing shenanigans of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

But Deep Regrets doesn’t come across as an adolescent musing. Its passage to success isn’t as straight as “regrets good.” Plenty of its regrets are well worth casting off. There’s a certain temporal wiggliness to the process; if you regret losing your arm or sacrificing your sister, I’m not wholly sure what it means when those regrets are discarded. Did we… forget? Get over it? Prevent its having happened through some demersal bargain? No idea. But the effect is one of curated regret, cautious regret, not wholesale acceptance or dismissal.

This makes Deep Regrets interesting rather than perfect. I wish the game had been pacier, but in some spots Cowan’s eagerness seems to have gotten the better of him. After the first few rounds, turns begin to bloat with extra dice, fish, equipment, and dinks. In the end, it isn’t the chanciness that’s the problem; it’s the replete tools for extending a turn and making outcomes more certain. As the game grows longer, its charms wear thin. Eventually, they rupture like aquatic flesh that’s gone too long without refrigeration.

Still, Deep Regrets is smarter than it looks. It’s a game that rewards peering beneath the surface, both in terms of gameplay and as a ludic examination of a life lived without too many guardrails. I can say this with complete certainty: I don’t regret the time I’ve spent with it. Not in the slightest.

 

Complimentary copies of Deep Regrets and its expansions were 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.)

The first thing one notices about the third scenario in Stephen Rangazas’s The Guerrilla Generation is that the script has been flipped. Unlike both the Uruguay and Peru scenarios, which presented the COIN Series’s customary red insurgents facing off against government blues, here the entire color scheme has been inverted. Now the insurgent cylinders are the blue ones, while the government’s troops and police are red and pink. The effect is jarring. More than once, I found myself staring at the wrong side of the faction aid, trying in vain to make sense of the information before me. What do you mean the red side needs to deploy sweep-and-clear operations? Wait, the pinkos have air superiority? When has that ever been the case?

This is Nicaragua, baby. One short year after the socialist Sandinistas ended the Somoza family’s four-decade reign, inheriting an indebted and war-wracked country, the U.S.-backed Contras are pouring over the border from Honduras and Costa Rica. What follows is the most harrowing of the multipack’s scenarios thus far.

As always, the first few turns in a new COIN scenario are testy. Both sides take longer turns than usual, acquainting themselves with the operations that will be their guiding star over the next few hours. (Or, in the case of Rangazas’s scenarios, the next hour to ninety minutes.) Everything is new. The contours of the geography, with its many tropical hiding places and mountainous hard points. The location of any urban centers and their lifelines through the countryside. Any neighboring countries to act as hiding places for roving insurgent forces.

And, in this case, the sudden realization that the Sandinistas are going to have to find a way to afford all this stuff, while the Contras are perpetually flush.

This isn’t the first time in the COIN Series a faction has wielded unlimited spending potential. That distinction traces all the way back to the bottomless pockets of the Coalition in Brian Train’s A Distant Plain. Even this multipack has already showcased a scenario that dispensed with funding altogether.

But what makes Nicaragua so dizzying is that here it’s the insurgents who can act with impunity, not the government. In the background, the Sandinistas are hurrying to repair the damage from the last bad decade of Somozan rule, including the earthquake that leveled much of Managua only for relief funds to quietly route into el presidente’s personal bank account. Now they’re making good on their promises: literacy campaigns, schools, hospitals. Also no small measure of native repression, in case you’re thinking everything is rosy. So when it comes to the CIA shenanigans in Honduras, the Contras with their limitless materiel, the commandos laying nautical mines in the harbors, the U.S. embargo squeezing the entire economy, there simply isn’t enough cash to go around.

It wouldn’t matter so much if everything weren’t so damned expensive. When the scenario opens, the Sandinistas are desperately undermanned. This makes sense in context. All those bright-red troops and hot-pink police have been hastily retrained from the previous conflict’s insurgent cylinders. This leaves much of the country unprotected, especially around the fringes. The only solution, especially early on, is to spend, spend, spend. Spend to train more police. Spend to garrison them in the countryside. Spend to sweep into insurgent hotbeds. Spend to send in the soldiers with the big guns. Even with the multipack’s briefer campaigns, hovering around only eight cards per propaganda round, it isn’t uncommon for a government player to find themselves skint with a good few turns before the next infusion of income.

The only reprieve comes from the Contras themselves. Once again, Rangazas uses the limited tools of Volko Ruhnke’s COIN System to carve out some impressive evocations of insurgent warfare. Unlike the other insurgents we’ve seen thus far, the Contras are not locals. Or, well, they’re locals, former members of Somoza’s national guard or disillusioned revolutionaries, but they aren’t locals the way the Tupamaros were locals to Montevideo or the Shining Path were locals to Ayacucho. The Contras are roving death squads. Their targets aren’t only military, but also the schools and hospitals and agricultural collectives currently being set up by the Sandinistas. Their targets are economic. And therefore civilian.

Which means the Contras don’t have roots in local communities. They can establish bases in Nicaragua, but these are closer to waystations than actual recruitment centers. All their actual recruitment occurs in neighboring countries, in the safe harbors of Honduras and Costa Rica. They aren’t wholly untouchable across these borders; the Sandinistas can lob artillery strikes into foreign territory, risking erosions to their legitimacy, and depending on the whims of the event deck might mount small incursions. But their foreign-backed status informs everything about how the Contras behave. They deploy in foreign territory, then infiltrate into Nicaragua via mountain passages and jungle paths. Once there, they mount attacks and sabotage infrastructure — the customary insurgent tactics — only to melt back across the border at regular intervals.

This produces a starkly different type of gameplay from the usual COIN fare. The Contras work according to their own circadian rhythm, there and back again, in offensives and dispersions, rather than claiming territory long-term. When a campaign ends, they can maintain a certain number of toeholds in-country, but not so many that they won’t have to yield something hard-fought.

More importantly, this gives the Sandinistas some breathing room. Border security is a priority, and not an impossible one. Urban centers have always been tough nuts to crack, but Managua’s central position makes it uniquely secure among COIN capitals. It isn’t unthinkable, for example, that the Sandinista player might opt to empty it of protection altogether. A risky proposition, but one that might put its manpower to better use in more vulnerable sectors.

Meanwhile, the geography takes on real significance. Given its operational focus, the COIN Series has always taken a satellite perspective of territory, more about regional tendencies than individual strongpoints. Here, one immediately grasps the various inroads the Contras might take toward destabilizing the socialist regime. Harbors on the coast are vulnerable, but are more readily policed. The mountains are good hiding spots for entrenched death squads, but access can be blocked with some well-placed army divisions. Perhaps the tenderest pressure point is the harbor on the country’s Atlantic coast, far from Managua and surrounded by jungle. But the Contras also struggle to project that far. It’s a pickle all around.

Of all its pickles, however, none are more vinegary than the looming gaze of the continental hegemon. The United States is never absent from either side’s thoughts. While the Contras don’t have to worry about actual resources, they are subject to American pocketbooks. Depending on the current status of U.S. aid, their operations can target between two to four regions at a time. This encourages the Contras to spend at least a portion of their attention attending to their paymasters, whether through the event deck or by occasionally passing to beg for more attention.

The Sandinistas, for their part, must also keep an eye on the Yankees. There’s no avenue for directly tanking funding to the Contras; the inner workings of a corrupt American presidency are far above the Sandinistas’ ability to influence. But there are ample cards in the deck for applying international pressure. This makes the Sandinista player somewhat reliant on the sequencing of the event deck, but it also prevents their operations from becoming rote. More than most of Rangazas’s scenarios across both The Guerrilla Generation and The British Way, and indeed more than most of the main COIN volumes, Government players must consider every possible avenue for undermining their opponent. Where these titles usually present their government factions as clear frontrunners in terms of wealth and manpower, here they feel fragile and outmanned. They’re the region’s big dog, but their hookworms are funded by the most powerful empire in human history.

Which makes the Iran–Contra Affair such a big deal. Whenever the Contras require extra help, they can pass to bump up the aid track. The price is an extra evidence token in the Iran–Contra box. This isn’t guaranteed to trigger; in fact, it’s even less likely than the People’s Prison being uncovered in Uruguay or Abimael Guzmán being captured in Peru. But if Reagan does happen to get caught funding a violent insurgency that wantonly targets civilians, the ramifications are considerable. With no further ability to increase their funding, there’s a very real chance the Contras will wither on the vine.

Where the previous two scenarios existed in isolation, this draws greater attention to the specter of American involvement in Latin American politics. There’s the wider situation to consider. For The British Way, Rangazas connected all four scenarios via a meta-campaign that traced the larger anti-colonial movement against the British Empire. The Guerrilla Generation includes a similar option, one that’s both more focused and more ambitious. This campaign, called Resisting Reagan, allows players to tackle both this scenario and the next one side by side. It’s a massive undertaking, requiring familiarity with both scenarios and an additional set of campaign rules.

Which is why it will have to wait for its own chapter in this series. Hey, I can only do so much at a time. Look at the bright side: bonus fifth part! Yay!

(Right? Yay?)

All told, Nicaragua is not only the strongest of the three scenarios we’ve played in this multipack, and not only one of Rangazas’s best uses of this long-running system about counterinsurgencies, but one of the best expressions of the wider COIN Series, period. It draws clear delineations between its besieged (and increasingly problematic) revolutionary government and the foreign-backed commandos raising hell in the countryside, presents a novel gameplay scheme in the constant ebb and flow of its insurgents, and, perhaps most importantly, draws the player’s attention outward to the wider problems of American imperialism besetting the titular guerrilla generation on all sides. As my play partner put it, this might be the first COIN scenario that he would request we play again.

But another session in Nicaragua will have to wait for Resisting Reagan. First, we need to examine the multipack’s fourth and final scenario, and the one most personal to me: El Salvador.

 

A complimentary copy of The Guerrilla Generation 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.)

Nutgoo.Lee’s Blancat made my seven-year-old cry. I know. That’s a movable bar. She was tired from a long day of playing in the sun, but she wanted to try the “kittie quilting game” anyway. It ended in tears. That’s on me, not Blancat, and certainly it isn’t on Nutgoo.Lee.

But here’s the thing: she practices at Blancat. She sits on her own at the table and studies the little templates and does her best to craft the quilts. She’s played plenty of other board games. She even has her favorites. Right now, that means Barbecubes and A Gentle Rain. Tactile stuff, not all that far removed from Blancat, but simpler, with lighter stakes. This is the first game I’ve seen that’s made her studious. The first game that’s meant to be challenging. Her intensity makes me wonder if there’s something here that I didn’t see right away. They say children let you see the world through new eyes. It seems the same goes for board games.

Blancat is about making blankets for cats. It’s a simple concept. You draw a card that shows a pattern. Everybody races to make the pattern, folding strips of stiff paper over and under one another. Upon completing your blanket, you grab a kitten. Last one out is a rotten egg. Then you play again. Nominally, there’s a scoring system. Honestly, we’ve never bothered. It’s the sort of game you play until the little ones want to do something else.

I’m not opposed to simplicity. Indeed, simplicity is often a synonym for elegance. But there’s a tendency in this hobby to hoist a ceiling over certain games. Too simple and the game is for kids. Too small and we’ll cap its rating at 7/10 on BGG. It doesn’t matter whether this is our most-played game of all time. It’s still not a serious game. Because it’s small. Because it’s simple.

Blancat is both small and simple. But watching my seven-year-old play it, I can tell you it’s the most serious exercise ever devised.

There are two types of patterns, separate decks that offer vastly different degrees of challenge. The easy deck fits the description. As long as you have the gross motor skills of a toddler, you’ll get there.

But the hard deck is nasty. It isn’t enough to just fold down those strands willy-nilly. A successful pattern takes forethought. Blue over yellow. Red tucked between two strands, then folded upward. Blue back through the yellow and the red… wait. How exactly is this supposed to work? For twelve cardboard flaps, there’s surprising tactility at play. A strand that seemed like it went here might suddenly need to go there. A ribbon that was previously buried might become crucial, necessitating a last-second excavation. I’ve had easier times sewing actual quilts, and that’s no boast.

There’s an element of muscle memory to these challenges. It’s like playing with a Rubik’s Cube. At first, you’re just fiddling. Only later do you develop the sense for how to move things around. Eventually, it becomes second nature. To such a degree, in fact, that the whole thing stops being impressive and becomes an exercise in rote execution. When’s the last time you were impressed with somebody solving a Rubik’s Cube? I had a friend who could solve one while bouncing on a trampoline. Ten or fewer bounces, I think.

Of course, it’s all relative. Put that Rubik’s Cube in the hands of a child. Now we’re cooking. Because Blancat isn’t rote for my seven-year-old. Not yet.

For adults, Blancat is about speed. Such speed that I worry those little paper flaps will tear. Such speed that it’s like watching my high school friend take the highest, laziest bounces on the trampoline, so high and lazy he could spin that Rubik’s Cube a dozen times before his feet returned to the mesh. It was fun trick to watch, the once.

But with her? With my youngest kiddo? For her, it isn’t about speed. It’s about deliberation. It’s about thinking through this new logic. It’s also about kittens, because she loves kittens. But when she’s in that zone, the strands worked in her little fingers, even the kittens become secondary. She stops grabbing them for a hug. Instead, she’s all focus, weaving one flap over the other, pausing in confusion when something doesn’t line up, reversing her decisions, reassessing.

Watching her play Blancat is like watching her grow up in time-lapse. Her brain making new connections in real-time. Her fingers growing more limber. Her sense of self forming a new confidence. It makes my sternum watery. To see her. To feel such awe at her. To wonder at the span of us, our human family, striking flint into tinder, the spark igniting liftoff for a rocket ship. We grow up so fast.

Blancat. That’s what we’re talking about.

Is it a good game? I have no idea. I think it is. For what it is. For a game that’s simple and small, but also surprisingly large. For a game that’s one thing to adults and another thing entirely to children. For a game about folding strips of paper ribbon over and under one another. For a game with wide-eyed kittens on its cover.

Honestly, I don’t really care about all that. What I care about is the way my child studies its ribbons, folding and folding, and then, when the pattern is done, reaches out and plucks a wooden cat from the table, and places it atop the quilt, and then, in a voice so quiet I can tell it’s reserved for herself alone, whispers in triumph, “Meow.”

 

A complimentary copy of Blancat 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 won’t pretend to know what’s happening in Duel of Meloch. When we first got a glimpse of this world via Scythe, it was an alt-history Great War mechs-n’-boiled-barley affair. Then Expeditions rolled around and the whole thing took on a determinedly Strugatsky Brothers flair, all strange zones and alien meteors and zombified hussars. Now there’s a foreign entity named Meloch who’s thrown the previous games’ heroes into a time warp, resulting in one last excursion that just so happens to be a grudge match between two of Jamey Stegmaier’s most iconic gameplay systems.

Do these disparate threads make a lick of sense? Not to this philistine. But even as the gameplay mostly gets me shrugging, I can’t help but find the result compelling. It’s a pickle.

At a sky-high level, Duel of Meloch does precisely as its subtitle proposes. This is Scythe vs. Expeditions, and so snugly fitted that while a few minor alterations are necessary to make its hand-me-down trousers and blouses cohere into a single uniform, for the most part these changes dissolve into the aether after all of two minutes. This isn’t a different, third game that just so happens to use the components from Scythe and Expeditions. It’s Scythe and Expeditions, side by side, and sometimes right in each other’s faces, both humming along as Stegmaier intended.

How does it work? Well, again, it’s Scythe and Expeditions, so they work like Scythe and Expeditions. The former, called the Scythian, is playing an economic game. They escort workers across the landscape, have them harvest wheat and oil and so forth, and then spend those resources to build mills and armories and additional mechs. The latter, the Explorer, is more solitary. Occupying a single mech, they trawl across the map in search of cool artifacts and various helpers, then use those assets to manage a hand of cards and attack corruption tokens. Visually, the Scythian puts themself out there. You see their workers and factories and mechs spread across the land. The Explorer, on the other hand, tends to keep their resources closer to the vest. More tangibly, this means glancing at their board to see how many quests and upgrades they’ve completed.

What’s most impressive is how smoothly these systems merge. Some fun has been poked at Stegmaier for his games’ shared iconography. Even as recently as two months ago, the new edition of Euphoria once again used those objective stars as their centerpiece, giving the game the appearance of a spreadsheet, one at odds with its more vivid original incarnation. But those duplicated icons have never seemed more forward-thinking than here. In fact, the one discernible place where the icons differ — combat strength — is so jarring that it comes across as an intrusion into the game’s visual language.

It’s funny, in other words, to pine for even more generic visual language, but there we have it. Take that, doubters. Myself included. Without those duplicates, Duel of Meloch would have been a true ocular nightmare. Instead, it’s as crisp as can be expected from such an experiment. Especially if it’s true, as Stegmaier asserts, that these systems were never planned to be combined.

The gameplay itself is conducted at two levels: the micro, consisting of your own turn — which, for the last time, is either Scythe or Expeditions, depending on which side of the equation you’re commanding today — and the larger macro perspective that sees those sides coming into collision.

This being Duel of Meloch, it’s that latter collision that’s the real draw. And it’s… fine. The Explorer moves faster in terms of kilometers per turn, while the Scythian draws borders and eventually outnumbers their rival in terms of sheer mechpower. This mostly matters for combat. The Explorer punches harder máquina a máquina thank to its dual brands of combat strength; the Scythian brings numerical superiority to bear. To help these tussles along, combat is imported more or less intact from Scythe. Both sides bid via private dials, then modify their strength with combat cards. These cards have received some adjustment in the form of a new deck, but not so much that returning players will require explanation.

The inherent limitation of these bouts is similar to those of Scythe: namely, there really isn’t much reason for the Explorer and the Scythian to jostle. Duel of Meloch isn’t a duel so much as a race. There’s a shared objective board, and both sides are hustling to tick off its various boxes. This also acts as a showcase for the games’ shared iconography, even when those icons translate to slightly different things. For example, the Scythian might be asked to raise their popularity to ten, while the Explorer tries to accomplish three quests. Both of these goals use the heart icon, and both represent an outward-facing perspective, making them a natural leg of this particular relay. The same goes for other criteria: loot some number of coins, defeat corruption tokens or expand across a certain number of hexes, strap upgrades to your mech or roll out all your reinforcements.

Or win in combat.

Depending on which side of the objective bar you’re using, you’re encouraged to win either one or two battles. Like every other objective, however, this locks off access to that objective for your rival. The result is usually at least one big battle. Beyond that, it’s usually a better use of your time to sprint toward the next objective. Sure, there’s some possibility of disruption, since defeating a rival sends them back to their home base. But the Explorer moves so quickly, and the Scythian eventually fields so many units, that these setbacks are fairly minor in the scheme of things. Depending on the current state of the board, they might even delay the victor more than the vanquished.

In other words, these aren’t exactly the fine-tuned interactions of Root or Vast. Or, crud, even the more Euro-tinted interactions of something like Crescent Moon. Players are mostly left to noodle in their respective corners, gathering the workers, resources, and cards they need to succeed. Then, either once or twice per session, they’re invited to poke their rival, only to retreat back to their personal workshop for the remainder of the duration.

This isn’t bad so much as uninteresting. In a vacuum, there’s nothing wrong with multiplayer solitaire. The problem, rather, is that everything about Duel of Meloch, from its setting to that promissory tagline, scream out for greater friction. The game itself is a collision. Of systems. Of outlooks. Of occupants trapped in an alien entity’s playpen. But for a collision, there’s very little in the way of combustion or shattered glass. It feels like something is missing, an undelivered invitation to actually look up from your private tableau to see what your opponent is up to. Flashpoints on the map. King of the hill. A reason to drive the Scythian away from the upgrade-bestowing city or prevent the Explorer’s access to those corruption tokens. Anything.

Instead, what Duel of Meloch offers is a buttery smooth merger that doesn’t seem to know what to do with itself. It’s bad practice for a reviewer to theorize about what could have been, but some part of me yearns to see Duel of Meloch as a more ambitious experience. Why limit ourselves to two players? Why not two per side, one Scythian and one Explorer, the first for building and defending our base, while the other roves into contested territory and sabotages rival efforts? Such a game would be different than this one… but not as different as it would have sounded before I actually played Duel of Meloch. Such is the expert craftsmanship behind these systems and their combination.

As it stands, Duel of Meloch is a fine piece of engineering. But it’s like a windup car without a racetrack to hurtle itself along. The parts are there. The motor winds with such a satisfying tick and whines so beautifully when the knob is released. It hurtles forward with such enthusiasm. But this is one mech that could have been soaring loops instead of walking in circles.

So, for now, it remains a curiosity. Perhaps there’s some value to the game as an expansion, especially for the Scythe/Expeditions devout. For the rest of us, Duel of Meloch stands more as a monument to its designer’s cleverness than as a plaything worth exploring on its own merits.

 

A complimentary copy of Duel of Meloch 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.)

For over five years (but fewer than seven), Postmark Games has published high-quality, low-cost print-and-play games. Oh, you need examples? How about roll-and-move titles like Voyages, Aquamarine, and Waypoints? Or ditties like Battle Card, Scribbly Gum and Koala Rescue Club? Or even 52 Realms: Adventures? Now the company is working on their first coin-flip title, Master of Coin. For today’s Space-Cast!, we’re joined by Rory Muldoon, half of the Postmark team, to discuss the beginnings, current status, and future of the company. How does one build a business on games that players print for themselves? Maybe we’ll find out!

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

TIMESTAMPS

2:06 — the origins of Postmark Games: when Rory met Matthew
11:33 — the first game
15:20 — roll-and-moves: Voyages, Aquamarine, and Waypoints
24:52 — licensed games: Battle Card, Scribbly Gum, and Koala Rescue Club
31:55 — Postmark’s compact form factor
40:19 — playing card games: 52 Realms: Adventures and 52 Duels
51:48 — from the customer’s perspective
58:28 — the current title: Master of Coin

 

(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.)

💾

Not that long ago, my twelve-year-old daughter listed Tag Team as her favorite title of 2025. When I asked her whether that was still the case, she replied, “I like other games more, but I still like Tag Team.” There we have it, I guess.

Except now there’s a second set, Arthur’s Legacy, that can be played standalone with its own six fighters or merge with the original ten to create infinite possibilities. Or 120, which might as well be infinite. How does it stack up? Honestly, I think it might be the stronger of the pair.

For those coming in late, Arthur’s Legacy keeps the Tag Team formula fully intact. Both players pick two fighters and shuffle their decks together. Then you take those fighters’ two starting cards, one apiece, and order them as you like. When battle kicks off, these cards resolve simultaneously: my first card and yours, then our second cards together.

What happens next is where the game shines. We both take a trio of cards from our larger decks, pick one, and slide it into our battle decks. The order of our previous cards must be preserved, but our new attack (or block or heal or defense or whatever else) can be added before, after, or in the middle of our previous cards. Now we have a battle deck that’s three cards deep. We resolve another clash. Then we add a fourth card. Another battle. Now a fifth card.

We continue adding cards to our battle deck and duking it out until a fighter is KO’d, at which point the game is over. Along the way, our decks grow outward, but only in manageable increments. It’s so simple that one designer friend, in the midst of theory-crafting his own auto-battler, was shocked at its lack of adornment. Which isn’t to say the game is shallow. It’s just that it’s subtle, capable of being played sloppily or carefully, and reliant more on memory and yomi than on flashy stratagems.

My worry, when it came to expansions, was that the design team would clutter what was otherwise such an elegant piece of work. Even in the original set, a few of the fighters were decidedly more complicated than the others. In some cases, this could distract from the actual battle, adding an unnecessary cognitive load over the top of the cards and their all-important ordering.

Here’s the good news: while Arthur’s Legacy is somewhat slimmer than the initial Tag Team, with only six fighters rather than the original ten, this is probably the stronger ingress for newcomers. Instead of bumping up the complexity, Corentin Lebrat, Gricha German, and their added co-designers have kept the powers meaningful and punchy. If anything, the new characters are easier to handle than many of the previous set’s fighters.

Naturally, each fighter has its own gimmick. The Dragon sprouts scales that act as makeshift armor, reducing opposing attacks but shedding them in the process. Percival grows more powerful with added cards, performing lots of little n-value attacks that encourage you to focus on his combos, but at the risk of neglecting his partner. Basically he’s self-obsessed, but for good reason. Morgan’s whole thing is dead simple: her gift of foresight lets her see which card her opponent is drafting before she makes her own selection. And the Green Knight offers a miniature game of press-your-luck. He heals fully every round, but many of his abilities lower the ceiling on his actual life pool. This makes him difficult to whittle down, but also prone to killing blows. Prolonged bouts are not his friend.

The last two fighters are a little more complicated, but, again, not by much. My personal favorite is Merlin. He comes with a little sideboard that’s kin to a skill tree. Certain cards let him upgrade his skills, gaining blocks or attacks or heals. These then trigger thanks to other cards, resulting in attack/heal/block combos that are incredibly powerful. Then again, because they only trigger on rare cards, they become fragile and easy to preempt. Arthur’s Legacy continues Tag Team’s tradition of including occasional cards that cancel their foe’s ability outright, meaning a well-timed counter can leave Merlin with his smock down. Or blown up. Whichever way an awkward smock goes.

Lastly, there’s Excalibur. This one is tricky. The gist is that it’s a low-health, high-finesse fighter, almost guaranteed to shatter midway into the match. But rather than ending with a KO, the duel continues with an invulnerable Excalibur. The downside is that Excalibur’s cards now add a “broken” trigger. In nearly every case, these injure Excalibur’s partner. But there are a couple that are even more potent when shattered, like one that damages everyone at the table, or another that lets Excalibur’s partner make an unblockable attack. Perhaps more importantly, this upsets the previous status quo. The order of cards is thrown into disarray, with attacks that previously targeted Excalibur suddenly rendered ineffective. It’s tough to play, but incredibly rewarding at the same time.

In nearly every regard, Arthur’s Legacy is an excellent follow-up to one of last year’s strongest two-player titles. It’s a little slimmer than I would have preferred, but it hits the right spot in terms of rules load and complexity. Most importantly, it preserves the system’s elegance. Indeed, it doubles down in that regard. These characters have a clear identity, feel distinct without risking obvious power gaps, and make strong additions to any duo, whether paired with the original or on their own.

 

A complimentary copy of Tag Team: Arthur’s Legacy 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.)

Houdini’s Last Act feels like a magic trick. And not only because designers Chris Zinsli and Suzanne Zinsli (no relation) (okay, maybe there’s some relation, but it’s rude to assume) provide an actual card-shuffling trick as an intermission.

Set during the final years of the escapist’s life, the game’s apprentices — of which there must always be precisely four — are here to assist Houdini in exposing various spirit mediums as frauds and hucksters. It’s a noble objective, protecting the bereaved from those who would take advantage of them. But it’s also a testy proposition, one liable to end in disaster. Thus the game’s core tension: Will you work toward the show’s success? Or look after your own self-interest?

As a plaything, Houdini’s Last Act is tightly wound. There are two discrete acts, divided by the aforementioned magic trick, and it’s necessary to see them in motion to really understand what sleight of hand the Zinslis are getting up to. In other words, this is one magic act it pays to see twice. Which is no big thing, considering the entire game takes maybe half an hour to complete.

First come the preparations. Going around the table, everybody spends cards to get ready for the big show. There’s more to do than can all be handled at once, ranging from overseeing the show’s security and promoting it via pamphlets and airwaves to preparing yourself by mastering various magical techniques.

What’s interesting about the game is that each of these preparations is spring-loaded in its own way. Promoting the show, for instance, sees you claiming a private token that reveals whether the local public is on your side or feeling antagonistic. Positive numbers mean your show is more likely to succeed, while negative digits might mean… well, the other thing.

From there, the cards are (magically) shuffled and dealt back to the apprentices. Now it’s showtime. There’s still time for a few last-minute preparations, but for the most part this phase of the game is an icon-matching affair where you attempt to demonstrate the techniques the local mediums are using to defraud the public. It’s useful to cooperative tightly with your fellow apprentices. As with a death-defying escape act, any number of details might go wrong and spell disaster for the entire act.

It isn’t really until the final tally that the game’s legerdemain becomes apparent. Which is, incidentally, why I recommend any prospective players give it two tries back to back.

The first question is whether the show succeeds or fails. This is a mathematical question, the one portion of the game that feels more like bookkeeping than a careful balancing act. Provided all the mediums have been defrocked, there’s still the question of the event’s security — which sets the baseline score your team is required to beat — versus the product of those defeated mediums times the show’s publicity.

Look, the details don’t matter. The point is that you multiply one number against another, then check that result against a third number. If the show was a success, everybody wins. Otherwise, everyone reveals a personal goal card. And now the real chicanery is afoot.

At heart, Houdini’s Last Act is a game about confidence. The confidence of its masters and apprentices and mediums, but also the confidence of its players, in themselves and one another. Because all those actions, the earlier ones in the preparation phase as well as those taken during the show itself, are slow-motion bets that your work will pay off. And depending on what you saw earlier, if you happened to publicize the event and saw which way the winds were blowing, or even if you just don’t think your crew can handle quite so much debunking in one sitting, your confidence might not be overflowing.

That’s where your personal objectives come in. If the show fails, the game switches tracks and checks the goals you’ve been tending this whole time. Maybe you want to expose a particularly skilled medium personally, ensuring your own legacy on the stage. Or maybe you’re more cynical, angling for the show to fail spectacularly. Either way, apprentices who aren’t feeling especially good about the tour’s odds can claim additional goal cards. But this is a dangerous proposition, threatening to sow discord. Wait, why did you draw another goal? Do you know something I don’t? Are we a team or what?

Even small doubts can have a corrosive effect. All it takes is one draw at the wrong time and suddenly everyone is thinking twice about overseeing security or learning stage techniques. Instead, they’re checking their little green objective cards and making weird decisions. Like insisting that we debunk more mediums than we can strictly handle, or getting flustered when somebody else claims the wire-work mastery token, or drawing two new goals in a row.

To be clear, Houdini’s Last Act never becomes more than a bite-sized experience. Even played twice in a row, it probably won’t consume a full hour. There are certain limitations to what can be accomplished in such a short span of time. Sometimes a longer duration is a boon. When it comes to ambiguous behaviors on the part of fellow players, a game this short doesn’t provide much room to observe whether people are acting squirrelly.

But the magic trick is that it doesn’t matter, at least not as much as it might have otherwise. Houdini’s Last Act works because it’s charming in all the right places. The way the sleeves are designed to let the cards slide one way or the other to reveal hidden information. The cardplay, which is simple but never shows even the slightest pound of extra weight. Putting on a successful show is genuinely challenging, enough so that pursuing a side hustle or two seems wise. Even the little magic trick in between acts is amusing, a ritual that takes so little time that you might as well go through the motions rather than dealing out the cards normally.

The result is a game that punches well above its weight. Not unlike the little escapist himself, come to think of it. For such a small thing, there’s some real verve here, a commentary on magic as showmanship and mystery versus hucksterism and superstition, about personal goals versus collaborative efforts, about we silly humans who love to be tricked so badly that we grow addicted to it.

Which is, perhaps, the final flourish of this particular offering. Like all figures from history, Harry Houdini had his textures. But he also stuck by his principles, especially where it came to debunking those who took advantage of the bereaved. He sacrificed friendships over it — most famously with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that faerie-believing dork. As an offbeat and enjoyable expression of history, Houdini’s Last Act is a suitable tribute indeed, a brief foray into a world where magic and reason brushed shoulders and left audiences entertained.

 

A complimentary copy of Houdini’s Last Act was provided by the designers.

(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 a tagline on the box of The Witches of Willowspur, the latest game by Jenna Felli, that I appreciate deeply. “Doing their best,” it reads. It’s a reference to the titular witches, the daughters of wicked witches who, as a clique of misbehaving teens, have decided to get up to some good by releasing Prince Murray — the very same Murray the A**hole Frog who troubled the waters of his own title — from his shapeshifted form as… well, as a frog. Presumably not as an a**hole. There’s no counterspell for that malady.

“Doing their best.” It’s such a warm and reassuring phrase. This is a cooperative game about teenage rebellion and about teenagerhood more broadly, about finding one’s own goodness despite a world that would rather hammer you into a very different shape. Presumably Felli also did her best in crafting the game. I so very much wish it had resulted in something more playable.

Before we get into all that, I want to whisk us to a more distant vantage. The Witches of Willowspur is the first of Felli’s games that fully inhabits a shared world, at least without some measure of insider knowledge. Where her previous title made us despise the appearance of that blasted frog, this rulebook implores us to appreciate the Prince’s plight. To show some measure of understanding for someone who, let’s face it, is a bit of an asshole.

Enter the witches. There are ten in all, and it’s hard not to feel warmly toward them. There’s a lot to be said about their portrayal here; their diversity, their inclusivity of gender, the way each of them is introduced in company to produce glimpses of iron-bound friendship. Zara wears a headscarf that also houses her familiar. Abigehl holds herself with a rigidity that speaks to someone still learning to command her body. Sydnie has a stillness that’s always contrasted with the perpetual motion of her besties. Kate seems like the normie of the pack, which also marks her as the group mom. In them, I see people I knew in my own youth. People I still know, in some cases.

Which also speaks to the way even something like a board game, a narratively fluid medium very much unlike more set forms such as television or film or novels, can speak truth about the way we behave and commune and interact. One gets the sense that these teenage witches are good not in spite of their rebellion, but because of it. That’s the case with most teenage rebellion, or at least that’s how I’ve come to see it. I remember when my grandfather told me that he thought of my dad as having been a cold boy in his teenage years, distant, annoyed by family dinners and adult wisdom. And then, how, in a moment of sudden clarity and unexpected defensiveness for a father I was in my own period of rebellion against, I discovered myself coming to dad’s defense. He wasn’t cold; he was studious and dedicated and wanted to make the best of himself and, yes, sometimes getting together for dinner was an intrusion into those processes. I surprised grandpa, and surprised myself, and never bothered to tell dad about it, because such direct support is not something the men of our culture are permitted to share with one another.

Which brings us to the young Witches of Willowspur. Murray may be an asshole, but even an asshole probably shouldn’t be doomed to a lifetime as an amphibian. So these girls have decided to prove themselves through rebellion. They are not saving the world. They’re saving an entitled jerk, but that’s probably as far as their cantrips and familiars will permit at the moment. It’s practice, in other words, for the greater task of building communities and families, for the necessary rebellions that will come later.

Felli imbues this struggle with deft touches. It’s hard not to see the fingerprints of someone who cares deeply for this particular tale. Most of the game is concerned with questions of process: where our kids will focus their efforts today, whether they’ll work as a gang or labor apart, how to swap a crystal for some nightshade. All the while, however, the presence of the coven’s mothers looms large over the proceedings. It is the shadow of parenthood, the very same our protagonists are hoping to evade.

For example: when foraging for ingredients in the wild, the girls’ mothers have instructed ravens to watch for misbehavior. Normally the girls go out, roll some dice, and hopefully uncover the right ingredients for their brews and elixirs, or at least bottle some enchanted water. But when one of those raven cards is revealed, or even when the dice roll amiss, these carefree activities are intruded upon. Your mother’s suspicion ticks upward, perhaps resulting in a guardian raven of your own or a sentence of confinement in your room.

But here’s the part that’s so relatable: your mother’s suspicion is tiered. There’s no difference between two and three suspicion, or four and five, or six and seven. The only thing that matters is when you pass one of those thresholds. Which means that, in being caught misbehaving, you’re encouraged to misbehave a little more. To press your luck, in game terms. But also in terms of teenage psychology. Because when you’re getting lectured, maybe that’s as bad as it’s going to get. You can make amends later, beg forgiveness, do chores around the house. In the moment, the mere reality of the punishment is enough to egg you into greater misdeeds.

Other touches are similarly adept. There’s the sheer potency of the game’s magic system, with its potions that can alter your luck outright and spells that ought to be cast as often as possible. Of course, these are paired with limitations of their own, but these once again open the umbrella of your mothers’ oppressive sheltering. Chugging an unnecessary potion in order to bypass the spirit ward that’s blocking the spell you’re hoping to cast is the perfect analogy for teenagers passing physical notes because their parents can read the text messages on their phone watches. The Witches of Willowspur is about slipping through the fractures that manifest in every parental monitoring system, given enough time and correspondence between dedicated teens.

Which only makes it all the harder to talk about the ways the game slips through fractures of its own. It’s a little heartbreaking, to be honest.

The earliest offender is the rulebook. Felli has always produced dense tomes of rules, and her games are nontraditional enough that they must be seen in motion to comprehend. Here, though, the instructions are a vertiginous mixture of thematic notes, roundabout instructions, and variable-stuffed formulae.

It doesn’t help that the resultant actions are similarly jumbled. Most actions require rolls, but not all, and those rolls will sometimes demand little adjustments according to your witch’s skill level in one of three traits. Those traits begin at zero rather than one, but then a formula will ask you to add one to the results, raising one’s eyebrows over why the bottom-level trait wasn’t listed as one to begin with to save on the extra operator in the formula.

As for the rolls, these are fraught things, nearly as likely to raise your coven’s mothers’ suspicions as produce successes. Except some actions require successes where others might benefit more from teamwork, while others still are performed without any sense of risk at all. The results are certainly textured, but to such a degree that we were forced to constantly refer to both the reference chart and the rulebook when the former neglected to include a crucial piece of information.

And then there’s the disconnected nature of the whole thing. Each witch has their own tracker for the day and the phases of the moon, but these would have been better served as a shared track in the center of the table. As it stands, a minor oversight on one player’s part results in a temporal mismatch that leaves everybody confused. The same goes for the whole location-visiting nature of the gameplay. It’s basically worker placement, except everyone uses their own set of cards to designate whether they’ll spend the day at home, in town, or exploring the wilds, necessitating constant updates where a quick glance at a shared board would have saved time and headache.

As for the actual objective of this whole shindig, The Witches of Willowspur presents a board where your mothers’ ongoing ritual against Prince Murray is tracked… except this bears little direct import on your own progress. There are a few methods for altering what’s happening over there, but there’s never really a case where, say, some adjustment to the ritual forces your witches to alter their plans. Ultimately, it’s a way to generate a score that you must beat through brewing potions, casting spells, and leveling up your skills, all of which produce their own numeric value, the opposite of violating a hex or brushing through a circle of salt. The game trundles on and on, then ends with dueling mathematical formulae rather than a confrontation. It’s as damp a conclusion as I’ve seen.

There are diagnoses I could offer. How a game this ambitious needed wider development, an outsider’s hand to pare away the dead branches, a stronger sense of internal consistency.

Really, though, the whole thing strikes me as tragic not because it’s a failure of design, but because it clutters such a keen portrait of adolescence on the cusp of adulthood. Playing The Witches of Willowspur, I find myself recalling my own youthful rebellions that were also my earliest attempts at goodness. Through illustrations and certain in-game activities, Felli captures those efforts in all their complexity, then fumbles at giving them the conclusive outcome they deserve.

Our witches, after all, are not rejecting their mothers’ lessons; they’re still practitioners of the dark arts. But in seeking to use those lessons for a more robust purpose than mere troublemaking, they embrace the renewed necessity that is youthful activism. We’re often told that age brings wisdom, but it also brings complacency, and often when an adult calls a particular cause “childish,” they fail to realize that they have identified the real nut of the problem. Some things are so obviously wrong that even a child can see it. So wrong that only an adult can persuade themselves to shroud its wrongness in nuance.

In the end, The Witches of Willowspur is remarkable in its ability to capture some sliver of that hopeful adolescence. Win or lose, the witches are doing their best. I imagine Felli did her best, too, just as I’m doing my best to write about it, and you’re doing your best to understand it. Have we succeeded? Not as a board game, not all the way. Maybe not as a review, either.

Still, we come back to the reassurance of that line. Those of us who want to do good are doing our best. It’ll have to be enough. If it isn’t, nothing will be.

 

A complimentary copy of The Witches of Willowspur 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.)

Paper! Despite the meddling of the internet, it’s still everywhere. There’s a good chance you have some in your very own home. In fact, it’s probably within arm’s reach right now. Coming for you. Fluttering closer. Ready to give you a stingy cut on the fingertip.

But for all its sins, paper is good for a few things. Making board games happens to be one of them. And today, I’m going to talk about three paper games I’ve been playing this week.

Rock Paper Crane

Rock Paper Crane bills itself as the world’s first-ever origami card game. True to its word, its construction requires you to craft the first couple of steps for making an origami crane.

Okay, so that’s the first problem. I dabbled in origami once. But I also happened to be six years old. Also, my little sister ruined my collection of nice origami papers, so I decided to spite her by never going back to the hobby or informing her or really imposing even the slightest imposition on her in any way. Which is to say, I finally fumbled together those first few steps. But the magic is in the fingers, not the voice, so as I labored to instruct my wife in how to shape her crane, I may have uttered the phrase, “You need to tuck in that piece, you’ve got it all popped out and flabby,” to which she replied, with a rather elevated voice, “You’re all popped out and flabby!”

So. Um. Be careful who you play Rock Paper Crane with.

Once assembled, Rock Paper Crane is Rock Paper Scissors with extra steps. For one thing, there’s an extra piece, the bomb. For another, winning a throw means you upgrade one of your sides. (Pause for origami.) Rock becomes wall. Paper becomes clay. Scissors become fire. That sort of thing.

Your objective, ultimately, is to win four throws, which will bring you one step closer to a finished crane. More importantly, you will have won the game. Or lost it, which is just as good, because, like I said, Rock Paper Crane is Rock Paper Scissors with extra steps.

Did I finish my crane? Nope. I couldn’t remember past those first two steps. Honestly, it’s pretty amazing that I got this far at all. Maybe I could have looked up the next instructions. But I swore an oath to never finish an origami ever again, and I’m true to my word. Take that, Mary.

Master of Coin

Master of Coin is the eighth title from Postmark Games that I’ve played, and this time Rory Muldoon and Matthew Dunstan are ditching the dice and the cards. Their replacement? Coins, of course. It’s right there the title.

As you might expect, Master of Coin makes good on its conceit by requiring you to flip so many coins that your fingers will start to smell rather pockety indeed. Covering a single year in the history of a small kingdom, you begin each month by picking up some number of coins — the exact quantity varies by season — and flipping them to determine how many heads and tails you have to work with.

Early on, your options are finite. A few basic buildings, some technologies, and any leftover orphans packed off to the army. But it isn’t long before the gameplay begins to accelerate. Once completed, you can clear a building of its coins to activate its ability, whether to unlock better structures, develop your nation’s economic infrastructure, obtain perks in war and peace, or maybe construct monuments that unlock better scoring benefits. Crucially, some abilities let you “lock” coins, sliding them a few millimeters upward on your sheet. From that point on, when you clear the corresponding structure, any locked coins stay in place.

As a concept, Master of Coin is solid. Consider the army. When it’s time to march on neighboring provinces, you pick up all the coins in your army and give them a flip. Heads become indicators of conquest, while tails are failures. But there are so many ways to massage the odds. Certain buildings, like the catapult, can be cleared to produce guaranteed successes in battle. Or there are techs, like gunpowder, that let you shift a coin from tails to heads, saving you in the nick of time. All this is to say that there are ample ways to get ahead. Even if you, as happened to our group, happen to play a session with novelty coins that always flip heads.

Of course, there’s more to be seen. As with previous Postmark titles, Master of Coin isn’t limited to a single map. The game is on Kickstarter right now, and according to the campaign there will be five scenarios in all, each adding a year to the story of this wealthy kingdom and its unfortunate neighbors.

Unlike those previous Postmark titles, however, I’ve only tried the first scenario, so I’m unable to furnish a full review at this time. The good news is that what I’ve played has been exemplary. Very quickly, I was surprised that my kingdom’s main limitation didn’t lie with having too little money, but rather in keeping too many coins tied up in other projects. The kingdom only has access to twenty coins, you see, and two of those are reserved for tracking the month and any possible events. It isn’t long before you’ll need to make some tough decisions, forsaking certain appendages of your financial project altogether to double down on whatever has become most important.

Anyway. After not being all that enthralled with Postmark’s playing card games, Master of Coin feels like a return to form, capturing some of the tight but expressive playspace of titles like Voyages and Waypoints. I’m excited to see how this one develops.

Color Jam

When’s the last time you colored by numbers? Being a parent to a recent kindergartner means it hasn’t been as long as it might have been otherwise, but this still isn’t a regular occurrence of my daily life.

Until Color Jam. Designed by Gene Koo and Joe Kell, and illustrated by Erin Laue, Color Jam is about coloring by numbers. And contrary to my expectations going in, it’s wonderful.

But first, a note. Color Jam is being published by Lunarpunk Games, the indie imprint operated by Xoe Allred and Matthew Hocker. If you’re elbows-deep in the indie scene, this might already tell you something about the game. Foremost, Color Jam doesn’t have the usual victory conditions. Nor does it really have goals, at least not goals of the foreordained variety. You’re here to make your own fun, set your own benchmarks, and, hopefully, come away charmed.

The basic idea is as simple as it gets. You take a picture and six crayons. Then you color in two of the spaces with stars in them. There are always four options, giving you some range to where you begin on the page.

From that humble beginning, you start to color in the entire thing. But there are limitations. Beautiful, expansive limitations. For one thing, you can only color a cell next to something you’ve already filled in. More importantly, those six crayons? You put them in order, numbered one to six. When you color a space, you use the corresponding crayon. Then — and this is where the game starts to breathe — you take that crayon and shift it to the last place.

Now, this might not sound like much. But it transforms Color Jam from an elementary school project into something unexpected. You might want consistency. The wings of a butterfly to align, perhaps. But the right crayon might not be available. Or, when the right crayon comes up again, maybe you’ll want it for something else.

What do you do? Well, you get creative. Maybe this butterfly is prismatic, like a jeweled brooch, its colors vibrant but mismatched. The colors can become revelatory, streaks of the unexpected in what might have otherwise been an ordinary picture. Or maybe you start to plan ahead, counting the crayons down until the right one is ready for another scribble, transforming the page into a low-stakes logic puzzle. Or perhaps you get artistic. You can do a lot with shading, with the strokes of a crayon, with the application of a smudge or a smear. Two spaces that both use orange don’t need to look the same. This isn’t the paint bucket in an image editor. You can do whatever you like.

More than that, Color Jam is flexible. It’s possible to play solitaire, one person making every decision. But it’s also possible to play as a group. I played with both of my daughters, and everybody got a say in the creation of our picture. Over which crayons we pulled from the bucket. Over the turn order. Eventually, over how to account for colors that wouldn’t quite fit where we wanted them.

The most unsurprising thing about Color Jam, but which bears repeating, is that it’s simply delightful. It’s soothing to play, but thinkier than one might expect from a distance. We played together, and then we all played apart. And then Summer came home and wanted to play as well, so we did that, too. In each case, we came away having crafted something wonderful, whether in collaboration or on our own, whether according to strict logic and long-term thinking or creative storytelling, and felt all the richer for it.

Color Jam will be on Kickstarter sometime in the next month or so.

 

Access to the files and/or complimentary copies of Rock Paper Crane, Master of Coin, and Paper Jam were provided by the designers.

(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.)

This might sound funny, but the game that kept springing to mind while playing Gruntz, the tiny-as-it-gets wargame by Carter Scott, was none other than Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ. Like that ancient (but now resuscitated) title, Gruntz is about a pair of World War-era armies bashing it out on the field. They’re both highly attritional, encouraging a tit-for-tat gameplay that’s either enthralling or exhausting depending on your tolerance for swapping one piece for another.

More than that, they’re both games about both movement and reinforcement. It isn’t enough to position your troops smartly. You also need to know when — and what — to call up from the rear. In the case of Gruntz, that sometimes means snapping a range of equipment onto a chassis to create a custom-built war machine.

This is never not cool. Because magnets, baby. I’m always in a mood for magnets.

The parallels don’t stop there, although I’m hell-bent on preventing this from becoming a comparison piece between two board games that are similarly under-known and probably wouldn’t appreciate the association anyway. Still, there’s something to be said about the way these titles portray their miniature battlefields. Where GHQ was a pale representation of Vonnegut’s WWII battlefields, dominated by artillery and armor, with infantry more or less serving as a screen for the good stuff, Gruntz is more timeless. Which is a polite way of saying that it isn’t quite as distinctive, history-wise, despite the visuals and hardware looking a little more Great War.

Perhaps the best place to start would be with the units. Infantry — the titular gruntz — represent a never-ending supply of bodies. Really, that’s their main trait: when killed, they bounce back into their general’s reserve rather than disappearing permanently from the table. They’re also useful for capturing control points, and can be moved en masse thanks to a captain who’s the spitting image of a gentleman officer in the midst of a war that’s very quickly eliminating the aristocracy at a pace that leaves every revolution red-faced with envy.

Those control points are the game’s biggest advantage over something like GHQ. Controlling two of the map’s three points at the end of a turn will award a star; controlling all three is worth two stars. Reaching three stars means victory, so there’s a strong incentive to usher your boys forward, even if it means they’ll get chewed up on the following turn.

To oblige said chewing, there are ample instruments. Both sides have access to quite the range of hardware. There are planes, both fighters and bombers, which tootle along wisps of contrail over the main battlefield, and are especially keen to obliterate anyone foolish enough to position their manpower in a straight line. These are matched on the ground by vehicles, which are built of two components, chassis and attachment. The chassis, whether armor or truck, either trundles or sprints across the battlefield, while providing more or less protection. The attachments, meanwhile, offer anti-air capabilities — more of an area denial strategy than an actual threat, it should be noted — a cannon for defeating anything in range, or a transport for depositing infantry closer to enemy lines.

By mixing and matching the best attachments, you can assemble the right tools for the current crisis. That’s the idea, anyway. Most of the time, armor gets the cannons and trucks become speedy transports. It’s a case of play mirroring life, a bit like how evolution tends to produce crabs because armor and pincers present obvious competitive benefits.

Very much unlike GHQ, which allowed its generals to divvy up their moves and reinforcements as they saw fit, Gruntz employs a stricter formula. Either you move twice and deploy once or move once and deploy twice. This ensures a steady stream of troops will enter the battlefield, and also that many of those troops will be demolished before the last clouds of smoke have blown clear.

Its most conspicuous absence is artillery. This is its biggest departure from something like GHQ, not to mention easy historical placement. Put simply, this is not simulationist fare. Units capture their peers in the manner of chess, by moving onto them, rather than pelting their targets from a quarter-mile out. The effect, then, is approximate to playing with little green army men, all bayonets and glory rather than ignoble death from afar.

To be clear, this isn’t a complaint so much as an errant thought. For all its symmetry, Vonnegut’s attempt reflected the unfairness of the war he took part in, the absence of rules, the capriciousness of the howitzer and the carpet bomb. Writing about the former war, Hemingway described modern combat as dying like a dog for no good reason.

In Gruntz, your gruntz die for good reason. The stakes are crystal clear. To defeat someone, you move into range of the counter-attack. This imbues the process with a necessary attrition. Of course, you try to avoid losing troops. A well-positioned flak cannon can stave off a bomber; a tank in the right spot can discourage an infantry push. But this isn’t a game about decapitating the serpent so much as trading bites with it, fang for fang and venom for venom, until one side is too exhausted to continue.

There are always back-of-mind benchmarks for combinatorial titles like this, and these exchanges make Gruntz feel more like Checkers than Chess, more about constant trades than graceful maneuvers. The one exception would be the aircraft, which glide over entire lanes and columns. A bomber is one of the few things that can ruin a tank’s day, which makes its appearance rather potent indeed. This can lead to interesting bottlenecks, anti-aircraft guns strangling any viable avenues of approach, only to grow obsolete the moment the threat has subsided.

The entire thing is full of misdemeanors like that. Obsolete units. A playmat that’s too creased to allow the gruntz to stay upright. The ease with which reinforcements appear, all but necessitating a protracted first act to clear out the chaff and force both sides to prioritize a few units. These are shortcomings, not outright game-breakers, but that only makes them more galling.

And then there’s the expansion. Allplay does this thing where they sell premium pieces separately from the main game. In most cases, it’s a positive practice. Those who want the metal bits can pay a few dollars more, while those of us who are fine with cardboard punch-outs can settle for the more affordable core box. It’s a smart middle ground.

Here, though, there’s an entire expansion that’s omitted from the main box despite only requiring a pair of reminder sheets and five cardboard tokens. Supplies, it’s called, and it adds — you guessed it — little supply markers. These can be spent to activate special abilities, like charging all your gruntz forward at once, making a crucial extra move with a vehicle, or swapping a now-obsolete AA gun for a big stonking cannon.

On its own, the Supplies expansion improves my opinion of the game considerably. It’s exactly what Gruntz needs to shine, adding a crucial but rules-light layer of resource management atop the game’s straightforward rules. Using a bomber to drop a bunch of paratroopers is incredibly cool, not to mention game-swinging; the limitation, naturally, is that your opponent also has access to their own cache of supplies. Without the expansion, Gruntz is handsome and interesting, but deeply flawed. With it, the flaws are still present, but dulled sufficiently that it becomes one of the more formidable precious-scale battlefield games out there.

All told, Gruntz is a strange offering, especially for Allplay’s small box line. Its direct conflict and zero-chance combat make it more confrontational than one might expect. This is no feel-good trick-taker or Peter Hayward deduction game. There will be blood. Or at least scrapings of green and blue crayon across the pavement.

Despite its shortcomings, however, I feel kindly toward Gruntz. It doesn’t have the pedigree of GHQ, and its diminutive scale may preclude it from broader adoption. But there’s something here, a certain sangfroid, some marginal strategy, that makes me want to get better at maneuvering its dweeby little guys and chonky tanks and turbulent aircraft. I want to stroll my captain into the enemy base for a more elegant win. I want to figure out how to keep its gun-trucks alive long enough to swing a battle. Is the depth there? I have my doubts. But it feels like something is lurking there, beneath the fabric.

Also… it has magnets. How do they even work? We may never know. Like I said, put magnets in your game and I’ll give it higher marks than otherwise. That’s a Space-Biff! promise.

 

A complimentary copy of Gruntz was provided by the publisher.

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