D.V.C., as wonderful and consistent and quirky a publisher as you’ll find, largely does its own design work. With the exception of 2020’s Rosetta: The Forgotten Language, all of D.V.C.’s games up till now have been credited to house designer Jasper Beatrix. In a just world, Jasper would be unable to walk down the street without being mobbed by fans, but there are two barriers to that: we certainly don’t live in a just world, and Jasper Beatrix doesn’t exist.

Not corporeally, anyway. Good ol’ J.B. is a pseudonym for a loose collective, a merry anarchic band of creatives who work together to make these wonderful games. They’re so prolific, and release games of such high quality, that the announcement of Pacts and the realization that it was not designed by Jasper Beatrix, was quite the surprise. This area-control game for two is the work of Ben Brin, a single corporeal designer.

Well. I assume.

I Pick I Pick You Choose

Pacts is an exemplar of I Split, You Choose, a mechanism whose promise is often let down by…

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The Fox in the Forest predates the contemporary trick-taking craze by a few years. It was an early harbinger of what was to come, of the deluge with which we have subsequently been blessed, and it proved successful. Successful enough that now, almost a decade after its initial release, Joshua Buergel’s two-player trick-taking game is getting the Deluxe treatment.

For those who’ve never played, The Fox in the Forest distinguishes itself from the bulk of trick-takers in two ways. Way the first: all of the odd-numbered cards in this non-traditional deck have special powers that trigger when played. Normally, I try not to get bogged down in the weeds when reviewing a game, but I do think the powers here are illustrative: The 1 in each suit lets you lead the next trick even if you lose, the 3 lets you change the trump suit, the 5 lets you draw one of the cards that weren’t dealt that round before discarding any card from your hand, the 7 is worth a point for whoever wins it, the 9 is always considered a trump card, and the 11 forces your opponent’s highest card in the same suit.

If you are at all familiar with the ebb and flow of trick-taking games, you can imagine well the sorts of shenanigans…

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Cross Bronx Expressway, GMT’s third release in the Irregular Conflicts series, is not for the weak. It is exceptionally complicated, even by the elevated standards of a COIN title. A frequent refrain amongst the GMT faithful, and an accurate refrain at that, is that the rules aren’t all that complicated once you get over the hump of learning them. Not so here. For my first game, I gathered three of the finest gaming minds in New York City, all of whom had read the rules in advance, and it still took an hour or two to get things started. This is no doubt in part a function of the theme, the civic management of The Bronx across the latter half of the 20th century. It’s easier to keep rules in your head when they don’t use words like “coalition,” “partner organization,” and “Census Round Audit.” You may find yourself scratching your head and wondering why you didn’t go back to school to get an MB(oard game)A.

Work your way past the daunting exterior and you’ll find a game that is a fascinating mix of the exceptionally confrontational and the utterly inscrutable. Cross Bronx Expressway is a hard game to talk about as a game, in part because the gamic elements are relatively slight in view of the whole. Designer…

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