→ October 1, 2024
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Red Side Story.

Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey came out in 2009, his first novel separate from his various Thursday Next/Nursery Crime books, and ended on a cliffhanger. The resolution had to wait for fifteen years, until the release earlier this year of Red Side Story, which picks up right after the end of the previous novel and thrusts our two heroes directly into jeopardy. It’s Fforde’s longest novel to date, and his darkest, as he finally reveals the story behind the alternate universe of both books.

The novels take place in the future, at a date unknown (but revealed within the second book), in a place called Chromatacia, which exists on the island of Britain. Our civilization appears to be long gone, as residents of Chromatacia refer to the Something That Happened before they existed. Their civilization revolves around color: Most humans can see just a single color, and their status in society depends on what color that is and how much they can see it. Purples have the highest status; Greys have the lowest. Our hero, Eddie Russett, is a Red, while he falls in love with the pugnacious Jane Grey, who has a habit of punching people in the nose when they displease her. In Shades of Grey, they discover that all is not right in Chromatacia or with the authorities that run it, National Colour, who profess to abide by the rules of a prophet named Munsell, who wrote the rules that govern the nation. The events that close the first book put Eddie and Jane in immediate danger of a death sentence, giving the sequel a real-time feel, as they must both solve the greater mystery of what exactly Chromatacia is and finagle a way out of execution via the Green Room.

Fforde has always at least dabbled in dystopias. The Thursday Next series takes place in an alternate universe as well, and while it’s mostly a comic and satirical world, he colors it (no pun intended) with numerous negative or simply unpleasant twists. Both of his standalone novels, Early Riser and The Constant Rabbit, depict worlds distinctly worse than ours, the former full of great suffering, the latter a not-thinly-veiled analogue for our own racism and xenophobia, just with bunnies. The truth of Chromatacia does not emerge until near the end of Red Side Story, but once it begins to come out over the last hundred pages or so, it is monstrous at both a micro level and a macro one.

That long, detailed conclusion and the sheer number of characters we met in Shades of Grey make Red Side Story the first Fforde book I’ve ever read that I found slow to start. It didn’t help that I read the first book fifteen years ago, so I didn’t exactly hit the ground running, but there is a lot of exposition here, and a ton of plot for Fforde to set up for his usual denouement to work. He’s a master of this particular form, laying hints and details early that will come back to matter later in a way that makes you laugh or simply slap your forehead for your failure to see it coming, but here he’s also busy building out more color (pun intended) to the world even as he’s placing stones for the conclusion. It’s not a mark against the book that he does so – this universe has so many details and quirks that it requires more work to set it up and keep it running. It does mean that some of the character development that boosted Shades of Grey doesn’t appear until you’re maybe a fourth of the way into Red Side Story.

That development goes far more to Eddie than to Jane, as she becomes more of a supporting player here, with Eddie clearly the star and far more in control of the action (to the extent that anyone is in control in Chromatacia). Jane was the more interesting and fun character in the first book, not least because she would punch anyone who commented on her rather retroussé nose (Eddie describes people’s noses any time he meets someone), but here she has somewhat less to do and ends up off screen more. Some of that is plot-driven, as Eddie is betrothed to the officious climber Violet deMauve, who is also carrying his baby, so she ends up a more significant character this time around, while Fforde also delves into the underworld of Chromatacia more than in the first book, much of which is necessary for the big finish.

Fforde had a long stretch of writers’ block when he was working on Early Riser, but since that book came out in 2018-19, he’s been on something of a roll, not just in productivity but in creativity, as his last few novels before the hiatus began had started to lose a little something, especially the Thursday Next ones. He’s promised the eighth and perhaps final book in that series next, and in February of this year he announced that there will be a third book in this series as well, which is especially interesting given how Red Side Story concludes. I’m already in the tank for Fforde anyway, but Red Side Story is even more ambitious than his typical novel, and seeing him succeed when stretching himself makes me even more eager to read whatever he publishes next.

Next up: Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.

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→ September 28, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 9/28/24.

I had three new posts this week for subscribers to the Athletic – my hypothetical ballots for the six major postseason awards, my annual look at some players I was wrong about, and a look at the future of the White Sox based on what’s in their system and their recent development successes and failures.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Let’s Go to Japan, a fantastic game that is about … exactly what it sounds like: planning a trip to Japan, based on the designer’s own yearslong plans to visit the country only to have it postponed for several years by the pandemic.

I sent another issue of my free email newsletter out on Monday. That’s two weeks in a row, so clearly I have the hot hand.

And now, the links…

  • The French cement company Lafarge paid millions to ISIS to keep its plant operating in Syrian territory held by the terror group. The Guardian has the full story, including the $778 million judgment against Lafarge in the U.S., lawsuits from people victimized by ISIS, and now a criminal trial in French accusing Lafarge executives of abetting crimes against humanity.
  • Josh Kraushaar is the editor-in-chief of Jewish Insider, and this past week, he started a false rumor that Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D) accused Michigan AG Dana Nessel of filing charges against pro-Palestinian campus protestors because Nessel is Jewish. Steve Neavling, the Metro Times writer whose interview with Rep. Tlaib was the supposed source of the quote, says the claim is false and she never referred to Nessel’s religion. Kraushaar’s tweet and story are still up, and it’s been picked up by Nessel, by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, and others. The New Republic weighed in as well.
  • Seeing a lot of AI spam on Facebook? It’s the “zombie internet,” says 404 Media’s Jason Koebler, with bots interacting with bots in a facsimile of the old web.
  • The Delaware Drug Overdose Fatality Review Commission released a new report with suggested policies to try to reduce drug overdoses in the state, especially among those recently released from prison.
  • Kurt Vonnegut designed a board game in the 1950s, before his literary career took off. It’s about to get its first commercial release, and the board game blog Space-Biff got to play a pre-release copy.
  • North Star Games, publishers of Evolution, has a Kickstarter live for Nature, a new, standalone, modular game in the Evolution series that streamlines a lot of the rules of the original.
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→ September 27, 2024
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Undergrove.

Elizabeth Hargrave has already cemented her place in board game history thanks to her design of Wingspan and her choice to devote much of her time and energy to promoting diverse voices in the space, notably women designers. She followed it up with The Fox Experiment, a completely different sort of game other than the two games’ shared basis in real science, and now is back with another science-themed game, Undergrove.

Hargrave’s name on any game box is going to get reactions, pro and con; the board gaming space has its share of incels and other misogynists who seem to rush to savage her games on Boardgamegeek and elsewhere, while I think she also has the benefit of being one of the few designers who even some casual gamers might know by name. I know I’m predisposed to like anything Hargrave does, certainly, because of her past designs and because I’ve had many positive interactions with her over the last five years.

So when it comes to her newest game, Undergrove, I have had a very hard time deciding what I really think of the design. There’s no question the game itself works well – it looks great, feels thoroughly playtested, isn’t too hard to learn, and seems balanced. If someone breaks it out, I’m going to be happy to play it. I’m just not sold that it’s fun enough for me to want to play it regularly.

Undergrove is built around the symbiotic relationship between trees and the fungi that live in the ground around them. Players have a collection of tokens to represent seedlings, trees, and roots, and will play them to the vertices on the shared board they’ll build, where the tiles are fungi that belong to the forest as a whole. You’re managing five basic resources in water, carbon, nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, with the last four represented by their atomic symbols on the board, and will use the carbon cycle to continually trade up through those resources to allow you to take the game’s main actions – placing mushroom tiles, planting seedlings, growing roots, and soaking up carbon through those roots to grow your trees.

There are five primary actions in the game, one of which you can always take while the others tend to require you to have something first. There are also four major mushroom types, represented by tokens on each player board; when you take the first action, Activate, you pick a mushroom tile where you have at least one root, then flip the matching token to its used side, which means you can’t activate a mushroom of that type again until you do something to refresh the token. To Activate a mushroom, you pay the carbon cost shown on the tile, then pay whatever other resources are shown to activate its ability. These can include getting different resources in exchange, soaking carbon up into your trees (as in the Absorb action), or copying the ability of another mushroom. Some mushrooms can’t be activated but give you ongoing powers for the rest of the game once you have a single root on them. All mushrooms have victory points you get at game-end for each root you have on them, with a few mushrooms showing a variable victory point value that’s tied to how often it was activated.

The Absorb action lets you bring carbon from connected mushrooms into your seedlings, which is how they grow; once a seedling has taken in 3 carbon, it becomes a tree, and then can’t grow any more. A tree scores for all four of its roots at game end, whereas a seedling only scores for one root per carbon token. The Reproduce action lets you place a seedling and one root at any unoccupied vertex, and optionally to place a mushroom tile. The Partner action lets you place two roots from your supply from one or two of your seedlings/trees on to adjacent mushrooms; you may also choose to play a mushroom tile from your hand to the table. The fifth action, Photosynthesize, allows you to refresh all of your mushroom tokens, and to take two carbon cubes, plus optionally to trade nitrogen for carbon.

If all this sounds a bit … well, educational, it feels that way too. The problem I keep facing with Undergrove is that the actions feel pretty rote, and as a result, the game is lacking the joy of a really great design – never mind Wingspan, since that’s a totally different sort of game to me, but even to other resource management games where you’re gathering resources and trading them up either to build things or to get more of other resource types. I suspect that there was a tradeoff between lighter or freer gameplay and authenticity to the underlying science, which is something I’ve noticed in games explicitly designed to teach a science topic, like Cytosis and Cellulose (both very solid games, but a bit dry to play).

You can definitely get a little engine going in Undergrove, as the game rewards you for cycling through the various actions as efficiently as possible. There are some end-game objectives, and there’s a carbon track that you move up every time you absorb carbon through any means, giving you rewards while also serving as the game’s internal clock. Once any player reaches the top, they get to choose a bonus (probably the two point token) and the game enters its final round. That gives you more things to shoot for as you play so there’s something a bit more than just, well, breathe in (nitrogen), breathe out (carbon).

I’m afraid this game just missed the mark for me on some hard to define criterion. I think in the end I felt too constrained in my choices, though; the next turn’s action was always obvious, and often it was the only viable option. Maybe that was ultimately what made Undergrove fall a little short, despite the tight design, the balance, the fantastic artwork, and clever flourishes like the little boxes to hold your seedlings and roots and trees: I’d rather have more latitude in my actions, even if it means I might take some bad ones, than to have fewer options, or even just one.

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→ September 25, 2024
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The Unstoppable trilogy.

Charlie Jane Anders won the Nebula Award for her first novel, All the Birds in the Sky, which revolved around two teenaged protagonists who grew up together, saw their lives diverge, and then came back together in a soaring conclusion. Over the past few years, she published a young adult trilogy, Unstoppable, that was also largely built around two teenaged protagonists, although here the story is more madcap, the threats much larger, and the relationships between characters more front and center. I won’t pretend to be objective here, as I’ve met Anders and I read these books because she sent me an autographed set of the trilogy, but I thought the books were a blast.

The first book of the series, Victories Greater than Death, starts out pretty normally, both playing into and gently satirizing some of the tropes of the form, with its main character, Tina, a teenager who happens to be the Chosen One to save the galaxy and lead its Royal Fleet against its enemies, although in this case she knows the first part because her mom told her. She’s just waiting for the call, literally, as she has a beacon in her torso that will light up at some point when the aliens come to take her home. Of course, even that doesn’t go off without a hitch, as her best friend Rachael, who is a talented artist and was bullied badly enough that she’s now home schooled, ends up along for the ride into space. Unfortunately for, well, everyone, the forces attacking the Royal Fleet are very determined to make sure Tina doesn’t get back to space, and they don’t seem to care if they blow up Earth in the process. Tina does get to her ship, and not long after – with a brush with death included – she ends up part of a motley crew of teenaged humans on board who help avert the catastrophe, after which they head off into the heavens to fight crime, or, well, the bad guys, of which there turn out to be more than one. By the time we get to the second book, the stakes are much higher than they first appeared, as this is no longer just one tyrant’s power play, but an unseen and unknown force threatening to put out every sun in the universe.

Because this is a young adult series, and the main characters are all teenagers, there’s a lot of interpersonal drama amidst the intergalactic drama, both the romantic and friend varieties. Tina becomes involved with Ella, a trans girl from Brazil who ends up in the pipeline to become one of the Princesses atop the sprawling intergalactic monarchy, although the job is a lot less glamorous than the name implies. Rachael falls for another crew member, Damiani ends up with a non-human partner, and so on. Life on board a spaceship, or multiple spaceships, gets complicated.

The story itself absolutely flies, with a pace that’s almost manic at times, with very short chapters and rarely more than two or three pages without some sort of action, whether it’s a battle between starships or between people. The initial villain has an origin story that involves Tina’s alter ego, and it’s quite intricate and plausible at the same time, with Anders integrating it well into the main story through flashbacks and through the residue it leaves in the contemporary plot. Tina and Rachael share the lead roles by book two, and both are well developed, showing growth over the trilogy, with Tina reckoning with a past she didn’t know she had and Rachael learning to find her voice in multiple ways as the situations demand more of her.

The most notable part of the prose is Anders’ decision to have all characters introduce themselves with their pronouns, which is only notable the first few times before you become habituated to it and stop noticing – which, as someone who uses he/him pronouns and lists them in his bios and on name tags, is kind of how it should be. The only time it threw me was the character whose pronouns were fire/fire; I know about neopronouns but I just can’t get my brain to read them as such, so every single time Anders referred to that character by pronouns I’d have to stop and re-read the sentence. I’m guessing my kids would have less of an issue with this, but my brain isn’t as plastic as it used to be.

Dr. Katherine Mack, better known by her social media handle of @astrokatie, advised Anders on the mysterious forces threatening to end all life in the universe, and I won’t pretend I really followed it. I did sort of feel like it was the Marvel movie problem, where the stakes are just always so high that you can’t really adjust your thinking – I ended up way more invested in the individuals’ storylines than any part about saving planets or the universe as a whole. That, of course, may have been Anders’s entire intent; science fiction that leans too much on the science and doesn’t give enough time to its characters is pretty dreadful. I was good just spending more time with Tina and Rachael, and to a lesser extent their other friends, although some of the alien characters on the ship still felt, well, a bit alien to me. (The Grattna race, by the way, are my favorite creation of Anders’s here, as she gets to delve into philosophy and linguistic relativity in a wholly organic way that ends up affecting how Tina and her friends interact with them.) My only reservation about the books is that there’s a lot of death, not out of violence but out of spaceships blowing things up, even the occasional inhabited planet, and that’s at least out of the ordinary for YA fiction in my experience, so I might recommend this for slightly older readers, but Anders does have Tina et al grapple with the consequences of their actions as they become increasingly pacifistic over the course of the last two books; even the death of a dangerous nemesis has moral repercussions. It’s just a joy to read, even in its most morbid parts, and even as Anders tackles broader themes like discrimination, gender theory, utilitarianism, cultural sensitivity, and much more. And I hope I would say the same even if I had come by the books some other way.

Next up: I’m about to finish Dr. Cassie Holmes’s Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most.

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→ September 23, 2024
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Águeda: City of Umbrellas.

Águeda: City of Umbrellas is a great-looking game with high-quality components. I just wish there was more game in here.

Águeda is a town in Portugal that hosts the Umbrella Sky Project, a permanent art installation that began as a temporary one in 2012 but that has expanded and become a major attraction for the city. Several pedestrian streets in Águeda have umbrellas of many colors sitting above them, forming artificial canopies that produce different visual effects depending on the time of day and the weather conditions.

The game Águeda has players collect umbrella tokens from the market and place them in three rows along their personal board, which represents one street. You also have a mural with six tiles on it, all of which begin the game face down; each tile has a different umbrella color on its back. And you have six tourist meeples, three of which are available to you at the start and three of which you can unlock by flipping the two mural tiles in their row.

On your turn, you take a complete row of umbrellas from the market, comprising one to three tokens. If you take a row of three tokens, you must pay one coin to the bank; if you take a row of just a single token, you receive one coin. (I’ll leave it to you to figure out what happens if you take a row of two tokens.) You then put all umbrellas into a single row on your street, in any order you like. Each row has two spaces marked with paintbrushes, and if you place an umbrella on one, you then flip the mural tile with that color of umbrella on its back.

You then may place one or two available tourist meeples on the tourist space next to any row on your board as long as it does not already have any meeples on it. Each of these spaces has two colors on it. If you place two meeples, you get one point per umbrella of either color in that row. If you place one meeple, you must choose one color to score. If you can’t place a meeple, or simply wish to get your meeples back, you may rest instead, returning all placed meeples to their spaces on the top of your board, marked with little suitcases.

Play continues until one player fills all 21 umbrella spaces on their board, after which they get the bicycle token, which has no function other than to mark that someone finished the game, and all other players get one last turn. You then score for your mural, getting 2/4/6 points for flipping 4/5/6 tiles; and you score for the three shops, two of which vary in every game, while the third ostensibly is permanent since it’s printed on the board, although you could just choose a third shop from the deck to cover it. The permanent shop gives you ½ point for each umbrella on your street that matches any of the special wooden umbrella tokens randomly placed on the shop at the start of the game. In the beginner setup, you use two other specific shops, one of which gets two random wooden umbrellas and gives you a point for every column on your street with at least one of those colors, while the other gets one color and gives you 1 point for each umbrella of that color but only if you have an even number of them on your street.

I’m not the first person to compare this game to Azul, but I find it unavoidable, and it is not to Águeda’s benefit. Azul is tighter and has a high degree of player interaction, to the point of spitefulness if you choose to play it that way (I think that strategy has diminishing returns – a little spite goes a long way). You also have a lot to think about on almost every turn. My 7-year-old stepdaughter said the morning after we played Águeda that she thought “the turns got a little boring because you’re just doing the same thing over and over,” and she’s right. You don’t have that many choices, so your decisions on any one turn are limited, and there’s zero player interaction to spice things up.

The game does look amazing, and we all agreed (including my older stepdaughter as well) that the murals are the best part of the game – there are five unique ones and they’re all fun to reveal. It pops on the table, with solid plastic umbrella pieces that feel very sturdy and bright colors all over the place. It’s a pretty heavy box for a light game, with a promised play time of 20-40 minutes that I think leans closer to to 40. There just isn’t enough substance here; it feels like a game that could have been an hour in length with more spaces to fill and a better selection mechanic, maybe even some kind of drafting, or just a different format to the market. I just don’t see any way I’d pick this over the basic Azul game now that everyone in the house is old enough to handle it.

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→ September 22, 2024
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Parks Roll & Hike.

The game Parks has become a huge hit and a franchise of sorts for publisher Keymaster Games, with two expansions, a lighter spinoff game called Trails, and now a roll-and-write version called Parks Roll & Hike. It carries forward the theme of the original Parks game, but it’s a completely different game – it’s a lighter roll-and-write game that has some superficial similarities to Parks/Trails but almost nothing in common in the play experience.

Parks Roll and Hike takes place over three days, each lasting 4-5 turns, where players will draft dice on each turn between an orange Leader die and several white dice. The dice show symbols that allow you to mark off certain spaces on your scoresheets, which come in cute little notebooks that represent hikers’ journals, definitely the best part of the game’s compact design. You’ll fill raindrops in your canteen to score based on how many columns you’ve filled at the end of each day. You’ll draw sights on mini journal pages and then write three lines in each to gain bonuses. You’ll mark off spaces in four wildlife rows, earning bonus actions for each and then earning points for certain pairs of wildlife sightings. You’ll fill in sun circles that allow you to choose the Leader die on later turns. And you can fill in binocular circles to earn a bonus for every two, starting with free wildlife sightings. At the end of each day, you get some additional bonuses from the Sunset bonuses above the mini journals, and you can spend extra suns to buy some bonus specific to the trail you’re hiking. (The game comes with six trails, each with some unique scoring options.)

The game itself couldn’t be much easier – you pick a die and mark off one or two spaces, then maybe mark off something else because you unlock a bonus. The scoresheets are easy to read and understand, and it’s not the sort of roll-and-write where you get long chains of bonuses like Three Sisters or the Clever series, so turns are pretty quick. You could probably teach this to anyone even if they’ve never played anything more complicated than Yahtzee or Qwixx.

As with most roll-and-writes, there’s a solo mode where you’re mostly just trying to rack up the highest score possible. I haven’t gotten over 42 points, which the game says is a good score but not close to the best, because I clearly haven’t figured out any of the best ways to chain bonuses. In the solo game, you get one die for free on each turn, including the Leader die, but if you spend two suns you can choose the Leader die plus another – and then you get to sketch whatever landmark is showing at the next stop on the trail. It’s a pretty significant benefit and there’s a timing element to it, since you can’t do it on every turn, and there will be landmarks you want to sketch more than others.

If I sound a little conflicted on Parks Roll & Hike, well, I am. I like it and have played it quite a few times since I got my review copy at Gen Con. I like most roll-and-writes anyway, and this is an above-average one for me. I also am not sure if it brings anything new at all to the genre, and I don’t think the theme totally comes through in the game – which is very tough to do with most roll-and-writes, for what it’s worth; Three Sisters is the best example of a game of this style that integrates its theme, but it’s a rarity. Most roll-and-writes or flip-and-writes are just about checking boxes and chaining bonuses, and Parks Roll & Hike does that well enough for me to recommend it, even though I feel like it’s missing a little something in the style department.

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→ September 21, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 9/21/24.

One new post at the Athletic this week, naming Boston’s Kristian Campbell as the Minor League Player of the Year for 2024, along with a bunch of honorable mentions and other honorees as usual. And, as usual, people got very mad that I didn’t mention some prospect from their favorite team. I’ve got a piece coming up Monday on the future of the White Sox given what’s in their farm system and what they’ve shown they can and can’t develop.

You can and should sign up for my free email newsletter, because think of all the worthless crap that’s in your inbox. I promise you my emails are better than the latest email blast from Lands’ End, and they’re much less frequent.

If you missed me on Codenames Live! this week, you can watch the replay here on Twitch. My teammate was the great Daryl Andrews, designer of Sagrada and the brand-new game Mistwind.

And now, the links…

  • Northwestern has suspended Professor of Journalism Steven Thrasher due to his participation in the anti-Gaza War encampments in the spring and pro-Palestine statements he has made elsewhere. Over 1900 journalists, academics, and health professionals signed a letter to the school, saying he has been targeted for his views and what should be protected speech. I’m presenting the story here but acknowledge it may be more complicated than it first seems, as this only presents Thrasher’s side and that of his supporters.
  • The Q-Collar claims it can protect athletes’ brains from concussions and that research “proves” its efficacy. The data may not be real. I don’t see any way this thing could possibly work as claimed.
  • Prof. Deborah Kelly at Penn State has had two papers retracted and a third may be on the way, but she’s lawyered up and is fighting it even though other researchers have found fabricated data or images in 21 of her publications.
  • Paste’s Jim Vorel wrote a defense of the Aviation, a drink that had a brief renaissance about 15 years ago but seems to have lost some of its luster. I’m a fan – it is the only drink I’ve ever seen that uses crème de violette, but those floral notes are a great complement to the juniper flavors of a quality gin. And it’s a good drink to order out in the world because you’re never going to buy crème de violette to make it at home.
  • A Kickstarter for Railroad Tiles, a new game inspired by the roll & write series Railroad Ink, is already over $250,000 in funding. I actually don’t like Railroad Ink, but this looks more up my alley.
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→ September 19, 2024
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Kronologic Paris 1920.

Kronologic is a new series of deduction/mystery games that distills the process to something very simple yet kind of addictive. Each box has 15 mysteries to solve, in three sets of five, with increasing difficulty as you work through each set, but they all sit on the same framework and are perfect for fans of deductive reasoning – although I worry that it might just prove too easy for advanced/older players.

I played through the Kronologic Paris 1920 set, since that’s the review copy I received, and I love the theme (anything 1920s is pretty much in my wheelhouse, especially fiction), although ultimately this schema translates to any setting. You have six characters, six rooms, and six time periods, and in each mystery, you’re looking for one combination of the three – one suspect, in what room, and (usually) when, although in set 3 the third part is a little more complicated.

Each character and time period has a thick card with two cutouts in it, while each room has a regular card that has a set of symbols on it in a grid. You lay the thicker card over the back of the room card to reveal two symbols, one of which you share with everyone and one that is private information just for you. (In a solo game, you just get both bits of info.) If you use a time period, you find out how many characters were in that room at that time period, and if it’s not zero, you alone get the identity of one of those characters. If you use a character, you find out in how many time periods they were in that room, and if it’s not never, then the private info tells you one specific time period of those. Characters never stay in the same room in two consecutive time periods, so the maximum number is three. If you happen to get a zero/never answer, you get the “take another turn” symbol and you go again.

In the competitive game, you go around the table taking turns until someone things they’ve solved the mystery, at which point they check the solution in the booklet for that set. If they’re right, they win, and if not, they’re out and other players continue. In the solo game, you try to solve the mystery in the fewest turns possible, and if you get any bonus turns, they count against your total.

The first set in the Paris 1920 box is the most straightforward – you’re trying to find the killer, who was the last person alone with the victim, and identify when and where the murder took place. The third set requires more information, however, as you’re trying to figure out who has a set of jewels stolen from the dance hall, and you don’t know who first stole them or when, and then have to track them as they move; any character who has them transfers them to another character if they are alone as a pair in a room, but not if there’s a third person there. Thus you have to follow the jewels and figure out where they are in time period 6 to solve the case, which requires more turns.

The box suggests 30 minutes per case, and that’s probably true if you have 4 players, but I played this two-player inside of 15 minutes and soloed the entire third set in under ten minutes per case. (I got four of the five, all in the gold-medal category for number of turns, but missed one because my notes weren’t accurate.) My main concern is that people who’ve done a lot of deduction games and puzzles will find this too easy; I thought they were easy but fun, so that doesn’t meet my definition of “too easy,” at least. I wanted to keep playing, and I wished there were more cases that were a little harder. It does appear that there are some additional scenarios available in Europe, so they could appear in North America if this game sells well enough.

I also don’t love the sheets for note-taking – they’re thorough, but they don’t make great use of the space on the page for the kind of information the game gives you. I’d also love a line to keep track of turns for solo play.

Right now, Kronologic Paris 1920 is the only one available to purchase, with Babylon 2500 and Cuzco 1450 both listed as 2024 releases on BGG (which could mean just in Europe). I’m a fan, even with the concerns about the puzzles being too simple, and I’d be pretty happy paying $20-25 for another set, whether I intended to play with others as a sort of smarter party game or just to sit for an hour and change to solo it again.

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→ September 17, 2024
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Dorf Romantik.

I’ve played the solitaire video game Dorf Romantik, and found it kind of mindless – yes, there is some scoring to consider, but you always have a ton of options, it’s pretty easy to hit the basic objectives, and the game goes on way too long. I don’t really get the appeal, but I’m also not a video gamer of any stripe.

The board game adaptation of Dorf Romantik won the Spiel des Jahres in 2023, and man does that baffle me. The game isn’t bad; it’s just boring, even with the various additional rules you unlock as you play the campaign and get a handful of new tiles and tokens. I’m baffled by its victory, or the claims that either the board or video game is some sort of gentle or relaxing activity. It is aggravating in its dullness, in that while playing I thought of all of the other things I could do.

The board game is sort of a cooperative game, but the rules are the same as in the solo mode and I have no idea how or why you would play this with others. You draw a new hexagonal tile on each turn and place it on the board, making sure it is adjacent to at least one tile already on the map along a side (not a vertex). Tile edges only have to match if there’s a river or a railroad on the edges; otherwise, you can place tiles anywhere you’d like. Some tiles have a flag icon indicating that you must draw and place a scoring tile on them, which will display a number and show the color of one of the terrain types (including the river and railroad). To win the flag and its victory points, you must then create a continuous region of that terrain type, including the tile with the flag on it. Some require an exact number of tiles, while others have a minimum number that you can exceed. (Once a flag is removed, you can of course go beyond the number.) You can’t place a tile with a flag on it in such a way that its flag requirement will already be satisfied, of course. You must have at least three active points tokens on the board at all times; if you finish one, you draw a new tile from a separate stack that will give you a new flag.

At game end, you add up the values of the flags you completed and then score your longest river and longest railroad. That’s the first game, at least, as the box comes with a soft campaign where you mark off circles on a separate sheet to track your progress and then get to open additional boxes that add new rules and tiles once you reach certain milestones. The new stuff adds a little complexity and some additional ways to score, along with some different tiles that do things like combine a river/railroad with a terrain so the latter isn’t split in two, but none of it fundamentally changes the game.

The video game is actually worse, although I know it’s been a massive hit, probably aided by its low price (I got it on sale on Steam for under $10). That game gets longer as you complete its objectives, adding tiles to the stack every time you finish a flag, so you actually have to play worse to get it to end sooner. I suppose in that sense the board game is an improvement, because the tile stack is finite and thus so is the playing time. The video game version also sets objectives based on the number of trees or houses in a contiguous set of tiles, which becomes just the number of tiles showing these things in the board game, another big upgrade because in the video version you’re really just taking the app’s word for it.

I don’t think this game needs to exist in the first place – it’s not so much that it’s bad, but there is nothing original here, and it seems like little more than a brand extension. It’s like solo Carcassonne, which isn’t a thing. Nobody gets in your way and if you don’t get the tile you need this time, you’ll get it soon, because nothing is scarce in the tiles, not even the railroads or rivers. It just … is. I need a whole lot more than that from a game.

(There is a two-player version called Dorf Romantik: The Duel that just came out this month. That might be a lot more interesting, as it has a module that involves some direct player interaction. Or maybe it’s just another cash grab.)

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→ September 16, 2024
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Life in Reterra.

The earth has been devastated by some sort of apocalypse – take your pick, there are just so many options to choose from. Now it’s up to you to try to rebuild your part of the planet, with enough diversity in your terrains to help all species grow, attracting inhabitants and even constructing some basic buildings to get civilization back on track.

Such is the backdrop for Life in Reterra, a new family-level game from designers Eric M. Lang (best known for heavier games like Blood Rage and Ankh) and Ken Gruhl (Cahoots, Happy Salmon, and the underrated Mystic Market) that draws heavily from Kingdomino but offers a ton of replayability because you can change the scoring. It’s a strong filler game, definitely one to play with the kids, that can move very quickly because turns are so simple and most of the complexity within the game is in the scoring at the end.

Players in Life in Reterra – by the way, I’m embarrassed at how long it took me to realize what “Reterra” meant – will build a 4×4 tableau of square tiles, each of which is divided itself into a 2×2 square of one to four terrain types. Some squares have relic symbols on them, which are worth a single point each if still visible at game end. Some squares have gears, which you can cover immediately with an inhabitant meeple for another point at game end, or you can leave open to try to create a pattern of two to four connected gears that you can cover with a building.

The turns are extremely short: on your turn, you either take a tile from the market or use one of the three tiles you were dealt at the start of the game, placing it on your tableau. You place inhabitants on any gears, if you want, or a building if you have the right configuration of gears. That’s it. Go around the table 15 times and the game’s over. I can see why BGG lists a play time of 35 minutes for it – if everyone’s engaged, you can rip through this game really quickly, and usually you can figure out your turn a player or two before it gets to you.

The buildings are the heart of the game, and the best aspect of Life in Reterra is that they’re flexible: The game comes with three sets of building tiles, with five buildings per set, and each building has a double-sided card with slightly different scoring. There’s a recommended beginning building set, but you can mix and match as you see fit, so if my math is correct there are 7776 combinations just in this base game. Some may not necessarily work that well, so the rulebook recommends a few combinations to get you started. Most buildings give you a few base victory points, but they have additional powers that range from sticking a junk token on another player’s relic space (turning it from +1 points to -1 at game end) to giving you one extra inhabitant per turn until all buildings on that terrain area are full to giving you one point per square in your largest contiguous area of one terrain type.

The game-end scoring is where it gets tricky enough that you’ll need an older player to take over. Inhabitants, relics, and buildings score as described above, with the buildings scoring their base value plus a variable bonus for some building types. For every contiguous area of a single terrain type that covers at least 7 squares, you get three more points. There are also special “energy source” tiles that score 8 points each, but only if they’re completely surrounded by other tiles – that is, they have to be in the 2×2 square in the middle of your 4×4 tableau. Counting squares and then moving building pieces aside to ensure they’re counted correctly is where this requires a little experience in dealing with board game scoring mechanics.

If the game only came with one set of buildings/scoring cards, I think I’d get tired of it quickly, just as I got tired of Kingdomino quickly. (Then again, Queendomino added a bunch of new scoring mechanisms, and that game sucked.) I’m more intrigued because there are so many ways to mix up the cards and get a game that’s more or less competitive, or that rewards more or less diversity in terrains, and so on. It’s a strong family-level game, probably not something I’d break out for a game night group but a good one for kids who have reached the point where they can play ‘adult’ games. (My guess is this will be on the bubble for my best-of-2024 list – it’s turning out to be a very strong year for new board games.)

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