→ November 25, 2024
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Dracula vs. Van Helsing.

Dracula vs. Van Helsing is a new, asymmetrical two-player game (first out in 2023 in Europe) from the co-designers of The LOOP, one of whom also co-designed Sea Salt & Paper, Draftosaurus, and Rauha. This particular game offers a new twist on the capture-the-flag style of two-player games, with a couple of mechanics that make the game extremely tense, where one player can end the round without warning and you often won’t know the results until all of the cards are revealed. I have found it really hard to play well, more so from the Dracula side, which has made it a fun challenge to try. (It’s also at Target if Noble Knight is sold out.)

There’s a little board between the two players with five district and four spaces for humans in each of them. Dracula wins if he infects all four humans in any single area, or if he’s still alive after five rounds; Van Helsing wins if he brings Dracula’s health points from 11 to 0 before that happens. In each round, each player will play one card to each of five regions, moving and swapping cards over the course of the round to try to get the best alignment of cards for the reveal, at which point the cards are compared, with Dracula biting a human if their card wins, and Dracula losing a health point if Van Helsing’s card wins.

The deck has cards from 1 through 8 in four colors, and in each round one color starts out as the trump. At the reveal, a card in the trump color defeats any other color, with the higher trump card winning if they’re both in that color. If neither card is the trump color, the higher number wins, and if they have the same number, there’s an order to the colors that is also variable and then determines the winner.

Each number has a specific action associated with it, and when you discard a card, you take that action. On a turn, you draw the next card from the deck and decide whether you want to discard it or to play it to one of your five spaces, discarding the card that was already there and taking that card’s action. Actions include (in order from 1 to 7) revealing one of your own cards, revealing the next card in the deck, revealing one of your opponent’s card, swapping two of your own cards, taking another turn, swapping one card with your opponent’s card in the same district, and changing the trump suit to one of your choice. The 8 card’s action is to end the round immediately, but you can only do so once there are at least six cards in the discard pile, giving each player a fair chance to compete. Either player can call to end the round without discarding an 8, but that gives the other player one last turn, and that’s a huge risk to take.

At the end of the round, you evaluate each district from left to right, and if either player meets their victory condition, the game ends immediately without evaluating any further districts. If you haven’t played five rounds yet and neither player has won, you reshuffle all cards but leave the trump suit and suit order as they were at the end of the previous round.

I’ve played this a bunch on BGA, and it took me forever to win my first game – for some reason I kept getting the Dracula side – because I wasn’t aggressive enough at protecting my health points. There’s a lot of randomness in any game where you draw one card (tile, whatever) and then must play it immediately, but there’s also a ton of skill in this game around what cards to hang on to and when to ditch certain ones. Swapping the trump color (7) and then ending the round immediately (8) on consecutive turns can be a death blow to your opponent, and the swap cards with your opponent (6) and then ending the round immediately can be almost as good. There are times when it’s okay to reveal one of your own cards, and if your opponent reveals one of yours, maybe you want to ditch that card sooner. There are little strategies with each number and then the broader strategy of protecting yourself while trying to strike surgically (if you’re Dracula) or more broadly (if you’re Van Helsing), and if you play it well you can even overcome some bad card draws. It’s a strong two-player game in the vein of Jaipur or Battle Line, where the competition against your opponent is very intense, but with the added twist of asymmetrical goals even though you play from the same deck.

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→ November 24, 2024
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Courtisans.

Courtisans is a very simple, cunning small-box game where players fight to shift the balance across six different ‘families’ (card colors) to determine which cards will be worth positive points at the end of the game and which ones will be worth negative points. The game plays well with three to five players, although in my experience it’s better when players are willing to be spiteful – this is the wrong game for your group if everyone is nice about it.

Courtisans comes with a little mat that shows the six families trying to curry favor with the queen, and players will play cards above and below the mat over the course of the game to increase or decrease their favor, as well as playing cards to the areas in front of them. On each player’s turn, they’ll get three cards to play: one to their own play area, one to the mat (above or below it), and one to another player’s area. The game continues until the deck is exhausted, which takes about a half an hour if everyone’s focused. (I’ve played this with my stepdaughters, and it took longer because they got a little bored between turns.) There are four special card types in the deck, but the vast majority have no function beyond their color. When the game ends, you look at the cards above and below each family on the mat; if there are more cards above, that family is in the good graces of the queen, and every card you have in front of you of that color is worth +1 point. If there are more cards below, the family has fallen from grace and each card you have of that color is worth -1 point. If there are as many cards above as below, the cards aren’t worth any points.

The four special card types do add some extra intrigue to the game, although the heart is still in that ‘take-that’ mechanic where you should be actively trying to screw with your opponents. Noble cards count as double (two cards), whether they’re above or below the mat or in a player’s area. Spy cards are played face-down, wherever they’re played, and are only revealed at game end; if they go to the mat, they’re played at the queen’s spot. No one can look at a played spy card until the game is over, not even the player who played it. Assassin cards let the player eliminate one card from that area – if you play an assassin card to the mat, you get to trash one card from there, and if you play it to any play area, even your own, you may trash a card from there, although this is optional. Assassin cards, like all special cards, do have a family/color, so they count towards the final scoring like any other card. Guard cards are the only cards immune to the assassin. There aren’t very many of these special cards, and none of them is so powerful that they throw off the balance of the game; if anything, they made me suspect there might be more cards coming in an expansion that might be more potent or otherwise upend the rules.

Each player also gets two random private objective cards at the start of the game that are worth 3 points each if they’re achieved, one of which is about your play area and one of which is about the central play area; that’s a small shift compared to the total point values in the game, so in my experience they’re nice to get but not enough to totally shift your strategy.

Ultimately the game works best if you’re trying to screw with each other, boosting a couple of families where you have a bunch of cards by playing above the mat while hurting players who have cards in other families by playing below the mat. That said, if a family goes too far into the negative, all players will avoid it for themselves and try to stick each other with cards from that family, and because you can’t hold cards from turn to turn, you can’t plan to flip a family from positive to negative (or vice versa) on your last turn – you just hope the cards go your way. That makes it a light strategy game with a big luck component, one you play more for the fun of messing with your opponents than for the pleasure of a well-executed plan.

Note: I’m shifting board game affiliate links to NobleKnight.com and away from you-know-who.

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→ November 23, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 11/23/24.

Nothing new from me beyond the dish this week. I’ll write up big transactions when they happen, and I should have a board game review up next week, although the game I’m targeting I have yet to play, so we’ll see. EDIT: Hey, we got a trade last night, after I’d scheduled this post, so here’s my writeup of the Jonathan India-Brady Singer trade.

If you’re looking for me on social media, you’re most likely to find me on Bluesky and Threads. I’m winding things down on Twitter, just posting links there, and I locked the account due to the change in the blocking policy. You can also subscribe to my free email newsletter.

And now, the links…

  • And in a related story, Harvard magazine looks at the causes of our housing crisis, led by the lack of affordable housing (and of any will to build it) along with draconian zoning laws that pull the ladder up behind existing homeowners.
  • Florida State Rep. Rick Roth (R) is a farmer turned politician who long fought attempts to crack down on immigration, but turned into an anti-immigrant hawk in 2023 – hurting his constituents but not him. Funny how that works!
  • Roxane Gay writes, “Enough.”
  • ProPublica reported on two maternal deaths that resulted from Georgia’s draconian abortion ban, using documents obtained from a state committee on maternal mortality. The state then fired the entire committee.
  • Ken White, aka Popehat, wrote about one of his own cases, defeating what he called “the most purely evil and abusive SLAPP suit” he has ever seen. A 21-year-old Stanford student named King Vanga was charged with gross vehicular manslaughter for a car accident that killed two people. He then sued the family members of the deceased for defamation because they contacted the school with the details of the criminal case. Really.
  • Board game designer Kory Heath, whose games include Zendo, Blockers, and this year’s hit game The Gang, took his own life this week at age 54. Boardgamegeek has a memoriam to Heath and links to other tributes.
  • I’ve mentioned the death of board game evangelist Amber Cook a few times now. She left behind a 6-year-old son, and there are several fundraising efforts to try to help provide for his future, including a huge bundle of RPGs available for just $25, over 90% of their aggregate list prices.

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→ November 22, 2024
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It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over.

Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and then It’s Over is the third winner of the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, continuing the award’s tradition of sticking to shorter works (I’d call this a novella at 125 pages) as well as keeping the prize exclusive to women authors. It’s the strangest winner so far, both in concept and in theme, as it’s a strange and, to me, almost inscrutable meditation on death and grief. I still don’t know if I liked it.

The narrator and protagonist of It Lasts Forever has no name, and doesn’t even remember her name, because she’s dead, or more specifically she’s undead, a zombie moving through a post-apocalyptic world where there are some living people left, just not many, and the undead retain some of their pre-zombification consciousness. The narrator is grieving the loss of her life, as well as her partner, whose name she also doesn’t remember, and whose absence is like a hole in her existence, not to be confused the literal holes in her existence like the one that happens at the beginning when her arm falls off. She also later takes a dead crow and binds it into a lacuna in her chest, talking to the crow and believing it is answering her with trios of seemingly unrelated words. The novella follows her on a journey of sorts, through a sort of zombie encampment, with at least one murder along the way and a long introspection on whether she’s actually hungry (no “BRAINSSSS” here, fortunately) and what it means for her undeath if the hunger is gone. Where she’s going isn’t clear even when she gets there.

De Marcken writes with an ambiguity that drives me a bit mad, because there is so little on which my brain can anchor to get a hold of the scene. She describes almost no one, and does little more to describe any of the environs. The protagonist has no name. The entire novella is an inner monologue by our host zombie as she tries to remember some of the things she’s forgotten and wonders what it means to be undead and how to navigate this in-between sort of grief she’s experiencing.

That last bit is, I think, the key to It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, although I’m far from certain on this one. The narrator’s status in zombie purgatory is a metaphor for the fog of grief, when despair and loss and the finality of it all cloud your judgment and your memory, tingeing every day with enough gray to disorient you and make you forget where you were going or why you got out of bed in the morning. She – I believe she’s a she, but I actually am not 100% sure any more – drifts from place to place without a clear sense of purpose, or even a clear sense of place. The whole story kicks off with her arm falling off, which I suppose happens when you’re unalive, and her response even to that is a big meh. If this is the brochure for being undead, I’ll pass, thanks.

I’ve read three of the finalists for this year’s Le Guin Prize, including this one, Some Desperate Glory, and the book I read right after this one, Orbital, winner of this year’s Booker Prize for fiction (after I’d put in a hold at the library for it, you have to take the small victories as they come). I think I’d rank this third, as it is just so slight, and I think its best attribute is the one I tend to value least, the quality of its prose. It is poetical, not exactly poetic; it reminds me of a professor I heard in college for a single lecture, who played Jethro Tull’s “Bouree” and pointed out that it is jazzy, but it is not jazz. It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over left me quite unsated. I wanted more, and I finished wondering what exactly I had just consumed.

Next up: I’m a few books behind, but I read Orbital after this one, and am now reading Cédric Villani’s Birth of a Theorem.

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→ November 21, 2024
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Anora

Writer/director Sean Baker has carved out a niche for himself with stories about sex workers that rely on a small number of well-developed characters and a strong element of time and place. Anora is his biggest film to date, showing that his eye for character and mood translate well even when the stakes of the story are much higher.

Anora is the given name of Ani (Mikey Madison), an exotic dancer at the club HQ in New York whose life is turned upside down when Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch, shows up in the club, asking for a girl who speaks Russian and throwing around $100 bills. Vanya is 21, seldom sober, and living the high life, often literally, on his father’s ruble. He buys a week of Ani’s time, flies to Las Vegas with her and several friends, and then marries her at a Vegas chapel, complete with a 3-carat ring. The fun and games end when one of Vanya’s handlers tells him that Vanya’s parents are flying to the U.S. for force an annulment and bring the prodigal son back to Russia to join his father’s business, taking the film in a darkly comic direction that only further underscores how little agency Ani has in her own life.

Ani is a flawed heroine, looking out for herself at every turn because it’s clear no one else would; she’s 23 and effectively on her own, living with her older sister, with a mother in Florida who appears to be absent from her life and no mention of any other family. Ani squabbles with her boss and some of the other dancers over mostly petty matters, but when she’s cornered, she’s vicious – often appropriately so – because she has so little to call her own. She lives a precarious existence, both in finances and in safety, as most sex workers do, a fact that is only underscored when Vanya’s handlers, including the amoral Orthodox priest Toros, show up and force her to help them find the fugitive Vanya in a mad and often funny chase across the city. When the resolution comes, Ani takes control in the only way left available to her, although in the end it becomes clear to her (and the audience) just how little she has.

Each of Baker’s prior two films revolved around a strongly written character played extremely well, with a plot good enough to move the pieces along and get the character to the right conclusion. Ani is just as well-written as The Florida Project’s Mooney or Red Rocket’s Mikey, and Madison gives the best performance of the trio, but the story does suffer a little under the strain of the second half. The plot strains credulity at a few points to either increase Ani’s helplessness or to amp up the comedic aspects, although the courtroom scene – one of those less believable moments – did deliver some big laughs.

Baker’s The Florida Project was my favorite film of 2017, and his follow-up Red Rocket made my top ten in 2021, but neither received the plaudits that Anora has so far. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year and is atop most of the Oscar prediction lists right now (although it’s still early days), while Madison appears to be a strong favorite to win Best Actress. I’ve seen just four of the Best Picture contenders, and this is easily the best, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if I see something better. It isn’t up to the level of The Florida Project, and is more ambitious than Red Rocket without the latter’s taut story. Madison, though, is a revelation – I’ve never seen her before, but other than her overdone Noo Yawk accent, she’s delivers the kind of performance that deserves all of the awards. The contrast between Madison’s tiny stature and Ani’s big, smart-assed, and foul-mouthed personality perfectly encapsulates the struggle the character faces as a woman in a misogynistic world, working in an even more misogynistic industry, trying to make a living in what may be the only way available to her.

Anora lacks some of the stronger secondary characters who popped up in Baker’s previous two films as well, making this even more of a character study than either of them was. Mark Eydelshteyn plays Vanya as a Russian cosplaying as a louche Timothée Chalamet, and the character turns out to be disappointingly one-note and is usurped in the second half by the film’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Garnick and Igor. Vanya’s parents, especially his mother, are caricatures. Even Toros, who contributes some humorous moments because of his desperation to get the marriage annulled before Vanya’s parents walk off the plane, literally leaving in the middle of a baptism to go find him, turns out to be just craven, nothing more.

Which ultimately adds up to Anora being merely very, very good, when Baker has been transcendent before. Mikey Madison takes a great character and plays it to the hilt, keeping you on her side even when you don’t like or understand what she’s doing, in a performance that will probably see me actively rooting for her to win everything this winter. I wish the characters around her were more interesting and less idiotic.

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→ November 20, 2024
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Emilia Pérez.

Emilia Pérez has so much going for it that it seemed like a can’t miss – it’s a musical, it’s a redemption story, it’s about a trans person coming out and finding themselves, it’s a comedy. Unfortunately in trying to be all of those things, it ends up almost nothing at all. It’s an incoherent babblefest, salvaged only a little by its three main performances, notably that of Zoe Saldaña. (It’s streaming on Netflix.)

Saldaña plays Rita, a lawyer in Mexico who is disgusted by her work as a defense attorney, as she’s helping defend a man who killed his wife by arguing that she killed herself – and she doesn’t even get the ‘glory’ of arguing the case, as she writes the words and her dim-witted boss gives the big speech. She’s then contacted by the cartel boss Las Manitas, who reveals that he wants to come out as a trans woman, including undergoing gender confirmation surgery, and wants Rita to make all of the arrangements – including faking his death so she can begin a new life as Emilia Pérez. (She’s played in both incarnations by Karla Sofia Gascón, a trans actress from Spain.) Las Manitas was married, however, to Jessi (Selena Gomez), with two kids, and after transitioning, Emilia decides she can’t live without her children, so she poses as a wealthy cousin of Las Manitas and invites the them and their mother to come live with her, which goes off the rails when Jessi takes up again with her old lover Gustavo. Meanwhile, Emilia decides to make amends for her past by helping relatives of people presumed killed by drug cartels find out their loved ones’ fates, using her money and her connections to the underworld, becoming a popular hero for her efforts and her criticism of the authorities.

That would be enough plot to fill a ten-part TV series, but not only does Emilia Pérez try to pack it all into two hours, it does so in song. There are sixteen songs in the film, some of which are actually quite good (“El Mal,” sung by Saldaña during the gala dinner, is a real standout, and she nails it), although I’m not sure if “Vaginoplasty” ever really needed to see the light of day. The result is that a plot already stretched to translucency ends up so shallow that the film never actually says anything – even though it seems to think it has a lot to say.

The kernel at the heart of the story is fantastic: A drug lord fakes his death, comes out (privately) as transgender, establishes an entire new identity as a woman, and becomes a crusader against the violence of the drug trade and the government’s war on the cartels. That’s all this film needed to be an epic satire of the current state of Mexico, and Gascón would have been up to the task, as she’s perfectly menacing as Las Manitas, then entirely credible as a remorseful Emilia who uses the same determination that made her a successful criminal to become a serious reformer – even though the violent resolve is still there in reserve.

This isn’t that film, starting with the decision to make Rita the main character rather than Emilia, even though Emilia is in the title. Rita’s just nowhere near as interesting as Emilia is, not through any fault of Saldaña’s, but because she’s written so austerely, while Emilia is the one truly three-dimensional character in the film. Her trans status is more of a detail; it makes the plot work, but it’s not a part of why her character is so interesting. Emilia has the emotional depth and range that the other characters lack, and she should have been the central character, but the script has no interest in, say, exploring her emotional growth, or just her change of heart, or perhaps questioning whether she really understands the wrongs she committed. There’s a faint implication that she was just so deeply unhappy that it drove her to bad acts, but that’s pretty facile (if that’s even what writer-director Jacques Audiard intended) and I think could even lean into the whole “queer as mental illness” myth.

Saldaña is as good as she can be with a poorly written character, and when she sings and dances – she’s a trained dancer, which I admit I didn’t know until after I watched the movie – she owns the scene. Her songs look like scenes from a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, in the best way: she grabs the camera with both hands and won’t let go until the song is done. And she gets just about all of the best songs, which is ironic with a pop singer elsewhere in the cast. It’s fun to see Gomez playing a vixen, even if the film doesn’t give her much time to vamp it up, and she barely gets to sing at all. She and Gascón are wasted by roles that don’t really make enough use of their talents.

The result is a film that is oddly boring for one that has some comic elements, a lot of song and dance, and eventually a big action scene. That last bit isn’t even that well earned, and leads to an ending that is an inexcusable copout where Emilia is no longer even in control of her own fate. That conclusion also underscores just how superficial Emilia Pérez ultimately is as a film: It has so little to say that it was completely fine resolving its plot with a figurative lightning bolt from the sky to wrap things up. What a waste of an opportunity.

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→ November 19, 2024
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Runemasters.

Runemasters is a cooperative tower defense board game for up to four players, with a solo mode, that is really, really hard to beat. I’m pretty impressed by the design, even though I honestly have no idea what a winning strategy would be. (I only played this one solo, and no, I haven’t beaten it.)

In Runemasters, players are “guardians” trying to defend a tower against incoming hordes of monsters. The players win if at least one guardian is still alive and the tower is still standing when the monster deck reaches the Dawn card, which is randomly shuffled into the bottom three cards during setup. The monsters attack via four paths, each with its own color, and only one guardian can guard each pathway. Each monster has two to four spaces on it representing “weak points,” and once players have filled those via attacks, the monster is vanquished. Don’t worry, more are coming behind it. The game goes back and forth between player turns and monster attacks until either the players win or they all die.

On a turn, the active player rolls four dice and then uses each one for an action of their choice. Red, green, yellow, or blue symbols allow the player to move to the matching pathway, or to put an injury token on the matching weak point of a monster in the path they’re guarding. Purple symbols let the player move to any pathway, or to deal an injury to a purple weak point. When a player moves their guardian to an occupied pathway entrance, they swap places with that guardian, which is a good way to get another player out of trouble. The white symbol lets a player use their special ability, which can include healing any guardian of one hit point, moving a monster to another pathway, or putting a shield on any guardian to protect them from attacks for one round. Discarding two matching dice allows a player to place a blockade on their pathway for one round, as it’s destroyed by the next monster attack. A player may discard any die entirely to charge up their superpower, which is active when fully charged (level 4) and then may be recharged and used one more time before it is done for the entire game.

Players start the game with 4 health points and 4 mana points. The health points are the things you need to not die. Dying is very easy, as it turns out; livin’s the hard part. Mana is more useful, and easier to get, as it’s the reward for beating every monster type except dragons. You can spend one mana to reroll as many dice as you like one time. If a monster is at the nearest space in a pathway (space 1 – pathways have 5 spaces and new monsters spawn in space 3) and your mana is full, you can spend all 4 mana points to destroy the monster immediately.

After each player’s turn, all monsters move one space towards the tower, if able – only one monster can occupy a space. A monster in space 1 then attacks the guardian guarding that pathway, dealing 1 damage. If there’s no guardian, the damage hits the tower, which has 4 or 6 health points depending on the player count. To spare you a little math, I’ll spell this out: In a four-player game, monsters will attack four times between your actual turns. This is a very efficient way to kill a guardian, since you only have four health points, so if there’s a monster in space 1 and someone doesn’t move you out of the way, you’re dead before your turn will come back around again – and that’s even assuming you have 4 health points left, which, let’s face it, you don’t.

There are different monster types with some different attributes to contribute a little more chaos to the game. Archers can attack from any space as long as there isn’t a monster in front of them. Warriors can’t be killed by rerolled dice. Wizards can’t be killed by the four-mana trick. Dragons’ weak points don’t have colored icons on them; you kill a dragon with three matching dice, or with the four-mana trick, after which you get 1 mana and 1 health point. There’s also a small Event deck that combines some good and bad rules tweaks to each round, and that allows you to calibrate the difficulty a little bit.

Since I soloed this game and recently did the same with Gloomhaven: Buttons and Bugs, I couldn’t avoid a comparison, and this game is far superior. It’s so much less fiddly to learn or play, even with some issues in the rule book (possibly a translation issue, although I found at least two errors around icons that were reversed in the rules). It’s also harder to beat, which I suppose will ultimately have a ceiling, but I was happy to keep banging my head against the tower wall for a while. It’s not my favorite genre or theme, but if you like tower-defense games, or want a good small-box cooperative experience, Runemasters is pretty solid.

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→ November 18, 2024
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The Remarkable Life of Ibelin.

Mats Steen was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a degenerative disease that would eventually kill him at age 25. When he died, his parents logged into his blog and posted a note saying that he’d passed away, including Mats’s father’s email at the bottom. Messages poured in from people the Steens had never heard of; they’d thought that Mats was isolated, spending most of his waking hours playing World of Warcraft – over 20,000 hours, by their estimates. It turned out that he’d lived an entire life online, building deep and real connections to people around the world while showing those people aspects of his personality that his own family rarely got to see.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (streaming on Netflix) is a biography of Mats, whose character’s name was Ibelin, but also a window into the digital world, where things become possible for people with disabilities that are shut off to them in the ‘real’ world. Even for able-bodied users, these online communities can become meaningful parts of their lives, going beyond the shared experiences of trying to advance within the game to the point where players open up about themselves and develop real attachments, platonic or romantic, to others they meet in cyberspace. It’s an emotional ride, even though you know from the start that Mats is going to die young, because the film follows his parents through their discovery that their son lived a much richer life than they knew – and that he helped many, many people he’d never physically met.

The story here does not lionize Mats, which would be an understandable impulse for a film whose subject is dead and who was disabled most of his life, but that honesty gives the story much greater resonance (and keeps it from turning saccharine). Mats was kind, mostly, but he had a temper and a bit of a mean streak, and he could be jealous, or heedless of others’ emotions. He did hurt others’ feelings, and we hear about that, and ‘see’ it through recreations the filmmakers commissioned using WoW graphics and the actual characters’ avatars. There’s an eccentric romantic story arc that might seem very weird to people who haven’t spent much time in online communities, but it tells us a ton about who Mats was, for better and worse, and if you consider it outside of the digital context, it maps pretty well to romantic relationships in the real world.

Ibelin really gets at a question I’ve discussed with many people over the last twenty-odd years: Are digital friendships real? I have always maintained that the answer is … they can be. (This, of course, was in conversations with people who think they can’t.) The friendships Mats/Ibelin had were certainly real, real enough that some of those friends he made in the game came to his funeral. The broader view, however, would say that these friendships were real because of their nature, not because of their medium. Mats and his friends discussed their lives and their emotions the way that people do in meatspace, and experienced many of the same feelings we do when talking to people in reality – or, say, on the phone. Their relationships were real because they made them real through their actions, so that when some of the players decided to hold a meetup – Mats didn’t tell them why he couldn’t come – those friendships and the feelings behind them carried over. The connections we make with other people are real, regardless of the medium, as long as we make them real. Ibelin’s life was remarkable not because he was disabled, or died young, but because he did so much with the life he had, validating, listening, caring, and being there for his friends, even though he never met a single one of them. It’s a simple film at its core, but illuminates such a universal theme that it works – and it’s punctuated by a scene from the game that is as life-affirming as anything they could have done in the real world.

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→ November 15, 2024
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Inori.

Inori is the latest title from Space Cowboys, publishers of Splendor, Jaipur, and the underrated Botanik, along with last year’s Spellbook, a Phil Walker-Harding game that really missed the mark for me. Inori looks fantastic on the table – I saw it at Gen Con, and received a review copy from the publishers as well – but it was also disappointing in the actual play, in large part because of the worker-placement mechanic.

In Inori, players make offerings to spirits by placing their markers on the offering cards available in that round, starting with three in the first round and increasing by one in each round, while players also gain another worker in each round as the game progresses. Placing a token gives you some immediate reward, usually tokens of a certain color, and if all spaces on a card are filled at the end of a round, the card is scored, with points going to each player who placed workers on it. If it’s not filled, players receive no points and the card is flipped to its reverse side. There are also spaces on the big tree that can take workers, which the first player to use can then tag with a specific color for the remainder of the game. After four rounds, the game ends, with the player with the most points winning.

I’ll be up front: the mechanic where cards don’t score unless all spaces are filled sucks. It’s one of the worst mechanics I’ve seen in a game in a while, and I don’t say such things lightly. I love board games, period. A bad day at the tabletop is better than a day without the tabletop at all. I rarely say that something is outright bad, but I have played Inori many times and I think this mechanic is bad. As it works, you can place multiple meeples on the card to fill it to make sure it scores, but you only score once regardless of how many meeples you have on the card. That’s a design failure.

There is some randomness to the game as well, as some spaces allow the player to take a rune that gives you a random reward that can range from extra tokens to the power to move already-placed meeples on the board. The problem with that aspect of the game is that it is quite easy to get a rune that’s utterly useless. There’s just too wide of a variance between the high end of what a rune can be worth and the low (which is zero).

I’ll back up for a moment and get back to the rules. On each turn, you place a meeple on an open space on a card or on the big tree, and you take the reward shown on the space – usually one or two tokens of a specific color. Each round ends when all players have placed all of their meeples, after which all cards that are full, meaning there is at least one meeple on every space, are scored. Each player with one or more meeples on a filled card scores one point per token of the card’s color that they have in their supply – the number of meeples is immaterial. Then the card is removed and replaced with a card of a different color. If a card is unfilled, players with meeples on it receive no points, and the card is flipped.

The scoring at game-end revolves around the great tree – you score each level of the tree, where each level has a color that’s been assigned to it over the course of the game, and then points are awarded based on which players have the most tokens of each color. It is likely that at least one color will remain unassigned, and thus won’t have any value at game-end. Your final score will comprise the tree scoring from game end, the points from cards in each round, and any points you might have gained from placing meeples on cards during the game.

I played a half game at Gen Con at the demo table in the Asmodee booth and saw a ton of potential in Inori, but having played the full game, I was disappointed. It just doesn’t work – the card-scoring mechanism is all wrong, and it makes the game something of a random walk. I wanted to like Inori, given its publisher’s history and the way it looks on the table, but it’s a miss for me.

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Time’s Arrow.

Martin Amis’s 2014 novel The Zone of Interest, which was the basis for last year’s Oscar-winning film adaptation, wasn’t his first foray into Holocaust fiction; he explored the same subject in a very different fashion in 1991’s Time’s Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence, which is one of the most brilliant works of fiction I’ve ever encountered. The entire novel takes place in reverse, narrated by a second consciousness inside of a person who has just died – or un-died, and will go through life backwards through the eyes of our narrator.

Tod T. Friendly, as the newly alived person is known when the novel begins, is a doctor in the U.S. whose life will ravel across the pages, moving into his career, his carnal affairs, and eventually out of the country and back to his place of origin. While there is a big mystery that the nameless narrator is trying to figure out, he (I’m assuming a gender here) also discusses some of the most, uh, personal biological matters – but in reverse. Imagine defecation, but you sit on the toilet for the feces to go into your colon. You “eat,” but food exits your stomach and ends up on the plate intact. The narrator’s matter-of-fact descriptions of these and other mundane matters of life, such as any financial transactions, make the novel quite funny almost all of the way through … until, of course, we get to Tod T. Friendly’s younger days and our narrator has to make sense of the senseless.

Part of the genius of Time’s Arrow is in its construction; there has been plenty of fiction where time flows backwards in some fashion, with Memento (or maybe Irréversible) the best-known example. Philip K. Dick wrote something very similar in his novel Counter-Clock World, where time begins to flow backwards for everyone, so they live their lives in reverse. Amis’s conceit here is that the man we meet as Tod T. Friendly lived his life in normal, forward-flowing time; the narrator experiences it in the wrong direction, so he misunderstands causality and conceives wrong and often hilarious explanations for all sorts of events.

The other bit of genius is the same that Amis displayed in The Zone of Interest: he uses the Holocaust as a backdrop for a novel that simultaneously isn’t about the Holocaust … but it also is. It’s such a tightrope for any artist to walk, mining one of the worst episodes in human history for absurd comedy that also helps reveal things about the human condition. The Zone of Interest explored the banality of evil. Time’s Arrow shows how unthinkable the Nazis’ atrocities were: they make sense to our narrator, sort of, because he sees events in reverse. You have to turn history on its head to see any sense in it at all. Viewed normally, the actions of the Nazis, as a group or individually, are just inexplicable.

Time’s Arrow runs a scant 168 pages, which is probably about as far as you could take a gimmick like this, between the bathroom humor that populates the majority of the book and then the glimpses inside a concentration camp. There’s a limit to how far an author can go with either of those ideas – I certainly don’t want more scatological humor than this novel offers, and I don’t know how Amis could have spent any more time on the atrocities themselves without turning this into a very different sort of book. It is unique, and it works spectacularly well as a brisk, witty, often silly read that left me with deep unease and broader philosophical questions.

Next up: Anne de Marcken’s novella It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, the winner of the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.

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