→ December 10, 2024
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The Gang.

I admit I was pretty skeptical when I heard about The Gang, a new small-box game that was described to me as “cooperative poker.” It is that, but it works far better than I expected it to.

The Gang is based specifically on Texas Hold ‘Em, where players begin with two cards in their hand (pocket cards) that other players can’t see, and then five cards are revealed in three stages, first three (the flop), then one more (the turn), and then the last one (the river). In actual poker, players bet after each of these stages, but nothing is resolved until after all five cards are out and the betting has concluded. In the Gang, the players try to determine the ranking of all players’ best hands, best to worst, after the river card is flipped, but must not communicate at all about what’s in their hands. The only communication comes by taking the ranking tokens after each step – so, for example, if after the flop, your best hand is nine-high (which is terrible), you would probably grab the one-star token for that round, which is the lowest one. Someone else might try to take it as well, so you have to decide whether to let them have it or whether to swipe it from them as a way of signalling that, hey, your hand really sucks. You can never have more than one of those ranking tokens in front of you, and you can’t put a token in front of someone else – only in front of yourself or back to the middle of the table.

There are four sets of those tokens, one set for each stage, but you only ‘score’ the set for after the river. If all players have the correct ranking tokens based on their best possible hand, your team has completed the challenge and gets to flip a heist card; if any player is out of ranking order, you have triggered the alarm and flip one of those cards instead. You all play a best-of-five, so if you get three heist cards before you trigger three alarms, you win the game.

The game also comes with various cards to increase the difficulty or change some of the rules, like giving each player a specific power or requiring you to win in four rather than five. I understand why these exist, since otherwise the entire game is a regular deck of playing cards and the 16 tokens, but I don’t think it needs them. It just overcomplicates things without making the game any more interesting. I might feel better if I played this a few dozen times and maybe got tired of it, but there are just so many possible combinations from a deck of 52 cards that I think it’s got a lot of legs.

The one caveat I would offer is one the tutorial app acknowledges – the game plays 3 to 6, but with only 3 players, it’s just not that challenging. There are only six possible configurations of tokens/rankings with three players, so you could accidentally get it right now and then, and that takes a good bit of the fun away. I played with 4 and 5 and it was appropriately difficult, winnable but not easily so, and that meant that when we nailed it, everyone got that positive feeling from a job well done. We had one people where we had three people whose hands were separated by just four cards – something like queen high, jack high, nine high – and we got it right. That was incredibly satisfying. The group had a 12-year-old and an 8-year-old, and both were able to grasp the concept and the scoring with the help of the reference cards (which just shows the hierarchy of the values of possible hands), although the 8-year-old struggled a little bit with the nuance of being, say, second-highest – if he saw he had a good hand, he wanted the top token. I imagine that will smooth out with more plays.

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→ December 3, 2024
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A Real Pain.

Jesse Eisenberg has come into plenty of acclaim as an actor, but A Real Pain, his second turn as a director and writer might herald an even brighter future on that side of the camera. He co-stars in this taut, funny, thoughtful film with Kieran Culkin, who gets the better character here and plays the absolute hell out of it, relegating Eisenberg to straight-man status for large stretches of the story, as Culkin seizes the film by the throat and refuses to let go.

The two men play cousins, David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin), who meet up at an airport at the start of the film as they embark on a weeklong tour of Poland that is focused on the history of Polish Jews, including a visit to a concentration camp, after which the two will peel off on their own and visit the house where their recently deceased grandmother grew up. Both were close to her, but Benji was especially so, and he has struggled to cope with her death. The two form a classic odd couple, as David is successful, straitlaced, anxious, and extremely worried about Benjy; while Benjy is outspoken, charming, unbounded, and seems to lack a purpose in life.

The two are joined on a tour by the recently divorced Marsha (Jennifer Grey), a man who fled the Rwandan genocide as a boy and later converted to Judaism (Kurt Egyiawan), and a somewhat older Jewish couple with an ancestor from Poland who came to the U.S. well before World War II (Daniel Oreskes & Liza Sadovy). The tour guide, James (Will Sharpe), isn’t Jewish, for which he seems to apologize in every other sentence, and he takes his job as guide extremely seriously.

Benjy is the smoke bomb thrown in the middle of the group, as he swears constantly, asks uncomfortable questions, and generally speaks his mind even in situations where decorum might call for him to say less. He’s the conscience of the story, though, saying what needs to be said, even if his delivery could use some work. David, of course, is appalled by much of his cousin’s behavior – including Benjy smuggling cannabis into Poland – but also envies Benjy’s apparently carefree attitude and the way that other people gravitate so much more strongly to his cousin, something that’s especially apparent as the two men say goodbye to the tour group to go to their grandmother’s hometown.

The visit to the Majdanek concentration camp, which fleeing Nazi forces failed to destroy as Soviet troops approached, also provides Eisenberg with one of his strongest scenes as director. The imagery is so potent that it requires very little dialogue, and you would expect these people to be nearly silent in their discomfort, horror, grief, and so on. The shots of the tourists walking by the gas chamber are brief, but so strong, and when it’s followed by James’s explanation that the blue stains on the walls are the residues of the hydrogen cyanide gas used to murder Jews and other inmates at the camp, it ties back somberly to something Benjy said earlier to the group that at the time might have seemed histrionic. The script ends up validating Benjy many times over, without exactly excusing some of his more boorish actions.

Culkin is on another level here, way beyond the solid performances he gave on Succession; Benjy is far more interesting and nuanced than Roman, who was an entitled and often gross little prat, and didn’t have a lot of redeeming qualities or even a good reason for why he was the way he was. Benjy is such a rich, intelligently written character, and Culkin plays him perfectly, making it clear why he is the life of the party while also showing that that’s something of a façade. He’s much better than Eisenberg, who plays that character he nearly always plays, the nebbish, fast-talking guy who doesn’t seem to have feelings; there is one scene, at a restaurant, where Eisenberg gets the floor, and we finally see inside David, and the film could probably have used a little more of that. Sharpe, who was so good in Giri/Haji and very good in The White Lotus, is excellent in a smaller role, nailing his interactions with Benjy so that you feel his discomfort and understand the evolution of his reactions over the course of the tour.

The only film I’ve seen in this cycle that was better than this is Anora, and that’s largely because that film is more ambitious; A Real Pain is tight and trim at 90 minutes and wastes none of it, doing what it set out to do and dropping you back at the airport before you know what hit you. Culkin seems like a lock to get a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and I really hope this ends up with a Best Picture nod or, at worst, a Best Original Screenplay nomination for Eisenberg. It’s better than Conclave and so much better than Emilia Pérez, just to name two movies that have better current odds for a Best Picture nod. I can not imagine I’ll see ten better films from 2024 than this.

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→ 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 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 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 14, 2024
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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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→ October 23, 2024
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Daughters.

Daughters is a documentary about a single father-daughter dance, remarkable because the fathers are all incarcerated, some for many years to come, and the dance is part of a program that began in Richmond, Virginia, called Date with Dad.

The film follows several daughters and an entire circle of fathers at a prison in Washington, D.C., from when the men start their required fatherhood coaching sessions about ten weeks before the dance through the event itself and its immediate aftermath. There is no narration, as the subjects do all of the necessary talking to the camera or in groups. We hear from the girls and some of their mothers about how hard it is for them to grow up without their fathers around, sometimes going months or years without touching their dads and maybe talking to them once a week for 15 minutes – for which the mothers are charged outrageous fees. The fathers open up quite a bit about their feelings about being absent fathers, sometimes as children of absent fathers themselves, and the film wisely avoids telling us anything about why they’re incarcerated. Some of the strongest scenes are the smallest ones, like the one where the men, who are provided with suits and haircuts before the dance, are tying their ties, with one man showing a group of the others how to tie a Windsor knot; or the one of Aubrey, the youngest of the daughters we meet, as she rattles off her multiplication tables but who is too young to fully grasp how long her father will be gone. The daughters we see range in ages from 5 to about 15, and their feelings range from sorrow to confusion to outright anger at their dads for their life choices.

When we finally get to the day of the dance, and those girls start walking down the hall towards their fathers, who are sitting in a row of plastic chairs in their suits and polished shoes, I dare you not to cry. I just dare you. Those reactions, both of the daughters and the fathers, are as pure a distillation of what it means to be human as you will see in years of movies. There is far more to the movie than that – the conversations the fathers and daughters have in the dance itself are illuminating and direct and often heartbreaking – but that one moment is the perfect unscripted scene.

I can’t relate to these men completely, because I have never been in that situation, where I couldn’t see my daughter, or hold her, or even talk to her whenever I wanted. That scene where the dads see their daughters for the first time the night of the dance did remind me of one thing, though: the fear that gripped me for almost all of my daughter’s childhood that I would die before she was an adult. I just imagined the grief, the hole in her life, all the things I didn’t get to do or say. When they tell you that being a parent means living with your heart outside of your body, they aren’t even scratching the surface. Being a parent meant living for her more than I was even living for myself.

Daughters follows the dance with brief looks at the aftermath for both sides, with one man, whose daughter couldn’t make it but who is there in suit and tie (and perhaps thought she was coming?), giving a speech to the other dads that is so open and vulnerable that it underscores again their humanity and the cruelty of our prison system. The film ends with two-sentence updates on a few of the incarcerated dads and their daughters, one of whom is now in a facility that doesn’t allow visitation rights. I don’t think I knew that was possible outside of people held in solitary confinement (which is, itself, cruel and unusual punishment), but what Daughters underscores is that such a policy harms more than just the inmates: Regardless of what the father did, depriving his children of the right to even see him – not for a dance, or even a “touch visit,” but literally just to see him to talk to him – harms the kids, and I can’t imagine what the benefit or justification is for the policy other than spite. Our national addiction to incarceration is bad enough, but this film makes it clear how the carceral state also harms succeeding generations. The damage done when we are deprived of a parent, regardless of the reason, is immense. The Date with Dads program boasts a 5% recidivism rate, meaning 95% of fathers who go through the program and are subsequently released from prison do not reoffend. That such a simple program has such powerful results should be reason enough to expand its reach.

Avoiding mention of the fathers’ crimes, alleged or otherwise, is a choice, of course. If we found out that one of these men was responsible for someone’s death – which I don’t think is true given what we hear about the lengths of their sentences – it would alter our view of him whether we want it to or not. That choice by the directors, documentarian Natalie Rae and activist Angela Patton, keeps the focus where it belongs, on the people themselves and the essential relationship between fathers and daughters that will resonate with most of the viewing audience. There are some outtakes from the dance that play alongside the closing credits, and they are definitely worth hanging around to watch, as they show more joy from the night itself than is immediately evident from the main footage, which doesn’t show a whole lot of actual dancing, a choice I understand (this is about their relationships, not the Harlem Shuffle) but that they could have balanced differently.

Daughters won two Audience Awards at the Sundance Film Festival this year, U.S. Documentary and Festival Favorite, after which Netflix picked it up; it’s already showing up on top of predictions for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, along with another Netflix documentary, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, that premieres today. I imagine the powerful social justice angle here will help Daughters in awards season, and I hope that encourages more people to watch it and to consider doing something to help fight the incarceration cycle.

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→ October 22, 2024
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Dune: Imperium.

Dune: Imperium is one of the top-rated games of all time on Boardgamegeek, currently ranked 6th with an overall rating of 8.4 out of 10 despite having nearly 50,000 ratings, a really unusual degree of agreement on a site where, in my experience, people give in to some of their most pedantic tendencies. The game came out in 2020, in advance of the first Dune film from Denis Villeneuve, from the publisher Dire Wolf, who have also now put out a digital version of the game that is just as superb as the tabletop game itself. (It’s available on Steam, iOS, and Android.)

Dune: Imperium is a worker placement and hand management game with a dash of deckbuilding, and it has a ton in common with Clank!, which is also published by Dire Wolf and comes from the same designer, Paul Dennen. Where Dune: Imperium differs from Clank! is in its higher degree of player interaction; you don’t compete directly with opponents in combat, but you compete to send the most forces to the conflict in each round and are fighting for valuable spaces on the board. There are also asymmetrical player powers and some resource management involving spice and water, giving the game a strong mix of mechanics that blend into one outstanding whole.

In Dune: Imperium, you play as one of several leaders, such as Paul Atreides, and you will play two cards from your hand to place your two agents on the board, activating the spaces to gain resources or another reward, and then use your remaining cards to either buy new cards or to supplement your troops in the conflict in the Reveal phase. Each round has a unique conflict with its own rewards for the player who contributes the most, second-most, or third-most strength to fighting it, with strength coming from troops and cards.

The various spaces on the board allow you to gain water, spice, coins, or troops; to gain influence with one of four Houses, such as the Fremen and the Bene Gesserit, for rewards and victory points; and, in one-time use spaces, to gain a third agent (so you can place three per round, rather than two) and to gain a seat at the Council to boost your purchasing power by 2 in every round. Placing an agent requires playing a card with the correct symbol on its left side, after which you also gain the reward shown on the top row of the card’s lower half.

Once all players have placed their agents, you move to the Reveal phase, where players reveal their remaining cards and use the values on the bottom row for purchasing power or for more strength in the conflict. You might only buy eight to ten new cards over the course of the game, typically one per turn but occasionally two, with the powerful The Spice Must Flow cards worth one victory point apiece. You may also dedicate any attack strength on these cards to the current conflict. The game ends when any player has reached ten victory points, or when the ten-card conflict deck is empty.

As in many such games, like Clank! and the Lost Ruins of Arnak, the cards in your starter deck are not terribly useful, although there’s nothing as useless as the Stumble cards in Clank! are. Upgrading your deck as you play is important, but I would argue that how you use the cards in your hand each turn is at least as important as what you add to your deck, especially later in the game, since you might not even see a card you buy in the last round or two. You do want to build a deck that will maximize your turns – two and then three to play agents, and the remainder for the Reveal. There are a few cards that have the draw power, and there are a few opportunities to trash cards, and those are extremely powerful in a game with just ten rounds at most.

The digital implementation is outstanding – not a surprise, as Dire Wolf is probably the best digital board game publisher out there, and this is one of their own tabletop designs. There’s a great if long tutorial to introduce the game, and during the game it is always clear what moves you may or may not make, along with when you have no choice but to pass to the next phase. It frees you up to focus on the game itself, and, in my case, to trying to finish anywhere other than fourth. The app comes with three levels of AI difficulty, two AI modes, and challenges where some basic rules of the game are altered, just in case you manage to beat the AI on its basic mode. (I was so close to beating the first challenge mode in my first game, and lost 11-10 on the final move. I won the second time.) I actually owned a physical copy of Dune: Imperium, but sold it for charity away after playing the app – I have too many games as it is, and that one wasn’t getting to the table any time soon anyway, while the app is more than enough to scratch that itch.

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→ October 18, 2024
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Will & Harper.

Will & Harper (streaming on Netflix) telegraphs its main problem in the title, which is too bad for a film that has its heart in the right place and mostly gets the emphasis right. Will is Will Ferrell, without whose involvement this documentary likely never happens, but it is his friend Harper Steele, a trans woman who only came out about a year before the film was made when she was around 60 years old, who is the real star and the focus of the story.

Steele was a writer on Saturday Night Live when Ferrell first joined the cast, and she saw his comedic potential when other writers didn’t, leading to a longtime partnership and friendship between the two that went beyond the show into movies (including Eurovision Song Contest).

Harper emailed Will to announce her transition a year or so before the events of this documentary, and Will suggested the idea of a cross-country road trip, something Steele liked to do before she transitioned, but that obviously brings some new challenges she hadn’t faced before.

For the first half of the film, Harper is the real main character, as it should be. This is very much her story, and she needs to be at the heart of the movie. Ferrell is supportive and cracks the occasional joke, but he cedes center stage to Harper at every turn where there are other people around until we’re past the one-hour mark. His personality is so big, and he is so recognizable, that of course it is hard for him to fade entirely into the background, but he does manage to step back enough to allow Harper space to speak and even to have conversations with other people where he is just an observer.

Ferrell ends up taking center stage in a weird sequence where the pair go to a Texas steakhouse that offers a 72 ounce steak that’s free if you eat it within an hour – and he goes into the restaurant as Sherlock Holmes. The whole thing feels like a stunt, or something to help market the film, and it doesn’t go over well, for which he does offer a sincere apology afterward – one of many points in the film where it becomes clear that he’s trying to be supportive but that one of his usual mechanisms for that, his over-the-top comic style, doesn’t work here. Later in the film, Harper suggests that the two go out for a nice dinner, and Will goes into a costume store to look for something to disguise him enough that he won’t be recognized … and then buys the most ridiculous wig, glasses, and mustache so that it’s even more clear that he’s Will Ferrell. It’s like he can’t help himself – in a potentially stressful situation, and one where he is trying to be a good friend, he resorts to his favorite trick of playing the clown. In so many environments, that might work wonders by diverting attention from Harper when she’s extremely self-conscious or simply doesn’t want that kind of attention, but in these two scenes it backfires. 

That said, the two do meet some wonderful, accepting people in unlikely or unexpected places. Hate is not inherent to humanity. Fear is, and we have plenty of people who will weaponize that fear to advance their own agendas, and the two stop at one point and read some vile tweets directed at Harper from people who saw the two together at one of their more public appearances on the road trip. That’s one of several moments in the film where Harper is the entire focus and her emotional struggles are laid bare for everyone to see – and where Ferrell acts “normally,” just being a supportive friend who listens to Harper and validates her feelings as best he can.

Documentaries like Will & Harper do suffer from the observer’s paradox: people will behave differently when they know they’re being observed, and in this case, recorded. There are certainly points in the film where you can see the joists holding it together; the two meet up with Molly Shannon near the end of the movie, and she asks a question that is so obviously scripted it took me out of the movie for a moment. Yet there is still a lot that is real, or feels real, from the interactions in an Oklahoma dive bar to the retired therapist they meet in Arizona, things that couldn’t have been scripted but that also read as far more honest and authentic, along with several of Harper’s spontaneous soliloquies – the one near the house she bought is particularly powerful – that give this film its emotional heft.

I’m sure the film wouldn’t have sold as well had it been called Harper & Will, but that’s what this movie is about. Ferrell’s occasional missteps don’t overshadow Steele entirely, just for some segments, and even with those choices it is very clear that Ferrell is trying to be a good friend and a good ally, and in moments where he doesn’t know exactly what to say or do, he doesn’t just resort to cheap laughs, but says very little and just listens, making it clear he’s there to listen – and giving Harper the floor to share some very vulnerable and painful thoughts. It’s uneven and sometimes uncertain, but at the end of their trip, Will and Harper get us, and the film, where we needed to go.

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→ October 17, 2024
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Floriferous.

Floriferous is a delightful game from 2021, with some light set collection and public/private objectives, playing out over three quick rounds before the final scoring. There’s nothing new here, just some familiar mechanics put together really well for a fast, family-friendly sort of game.

In Floriferous, players are all at a flower show and will compete to create the most valuable collection of flowers after three days (rounds). They do this by selecting flower and ‘desire’ cards from a public tableau that has five columns and three to five rows, based on player count, with the last row always desire cards and all other rows flower cards. Two of the cards in the top row are always face-down, for reasons that will become clear in a second.

The start player places their token on any card in the first (left-most) column to claim it, replacing the card with their token, after which the other players do the same. Then the player whose token was in the topmost row out of all tokens goes first in the next turn, selecting a card in the second column, and so forth. After all players have taken a card from the fifth column, the day ends, and you check the three public objectives to see if anyone has met their criteria; their value decreases by the day from 5 points to 3 to 2. Day two works the same way, but goes from right to left, after which day three goes left to right and the game ends. (The rules offer a slightly more competitive mode, where you score public objectives as they’re achieved, with the player who does it first taking the 5-point space, blocking it for other players.)

Flowers come in five types and five colors, and may have one of the five insect types on them as well. Some cards in the flower deck are actually arrangement cards and give you points for getting the matching symbols within the cards you’ve collected. Desire cards come in three varieties: two points per specific bug/flower/color, increasing points for up to 5 of the same bug/flower/color, increasing points for up to 5 different bugs/flowers/colors. At the start of each day, you’ll place some tokens (called stones, but made of cardboard) on specific cards in the tableau, which are worth 1 point per 2 stones at game-end, with a 2-point bonus to whoever collects the most.

That’s the entire game, other than the included solo mode. The original Floriferous is in a smallish box, but there’s an even smaller one coming, a “pocket edition” you can pre-order here; it’s the same game, just in a tinier box. I’m a big fan regardless of the box size – it’s so simple, and works so well, that it’s a practically perfect little family game.

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