It’s good to be king. In theory. Leder Games poses the question of just what it means to win a crown and what comes after in their semi-legacy strategy game Oath. Longtime readers will know that one of my favorite games of the last decade is King’s Dilemma which falls more in line with traditional legacy games where you put down stickers, open hidden envelopes, and rip up cards to create a one-time long form experience. Oath is a gentler legacy game where it’s easier to revert back to the default without peeling or gluing anything. Instead, the game offers you a chance to see it shift subtly over time and rewards repeat plays with familiarity and unique stories born at the table.
The base game of Oath involves an asymmetric struggle between an Empire with its Chancellor and Citizens and various Exiles. One player will be the Chancellor and the others will be Citizens and Exiles. The Chancellor wins if they successfully keep the Oath established either at the start of the game or at the end of the previous game. This Oath can be to rule over the most Sites, possess the most Relics and Banners, possess just one of two specific Banners, or run out the clock. Exiles win by fulfilling the Oath better than the Chancellor or by snagging and fulfilling various Vision cards whose requirements mirror the Oaths – ruling Sites, possessing Banners and Relics, etc. The last type of victory belongs to Citizens who work alongside the Chancellor but can snake victory by fulfilling specific requirements on the Oath cards. If playing with a consistent group, the previous winner plays the Chancellor and how they won determines what the current Oath is and thus the general thrust of the game.
All players have a player board that tracks how many actions they can take on their turn, their personal bodyguards, and their treasury of Secrets and Favors which are the two currencies the game uses to Muster troops, Recover Relics, activate powers, or vie for control of the Banners. Actions are tracked through a Supply counter which goes down as they Move, Muster, Trade, Search, Recover, and Campaign (battle other players.) As they play, they’ll also add Advisers to their board who will grant special abilities and also potentially impact the legacy portion of the game.
The map is divided into three Regions – the Cradle, Provinces, and Hinterland. At the start of the game, only one Site is revealed in each Region and the Empire rules over all of them. As players explore, they’ll reveal more of the map and can attempt to Campaign to lay claim to the Sites either from non-playing Bandits or from one another. Along with fighting, players can Search in the shared World Deck or the Region-specific Discard piles for Denizens. Denizens can either join the player as an Adviser or be played to the Site which earns the player Favor and makes them available to help players Muster troops or Trade for more Favors or Secrets. They also have their own powers which can be used either by the player on their Site or the one who Rules their Site. All Denizens belong to specific Suits which act as a sort of faction and impact many of the actions players can take. Hidden in the World Deck with the Denizens are also the Vision cards which are one of the paths the Exiles have toward victory.
As the map fills up, players will spot opportunities to meet the various victory requirements and the game becomes a sort of king of the hill as players try to battle and build up resources to meet all the various requirements and then hope they can defend their position long enough to win. Many of the victories trigger at the start of a player’s turn so there is a lot of tension between trying to chase your own victory vs trying to keep your rivals from winning. There’s a tasty bit of prisoner’s dilemma in trying to decide how much to focus on yourself and trust your other players to do the work of stopping each other from winning.
Combat in Oath is a tricky bit of business. Called Campaigning, when you go to fight someone, you have to decide just what your goal is: claiming their territory, stealing their Banners and Relics, or attacking them in the pocketbook. When you go to fight, you can choose any or all of these targets, increasing the difficulty as every target gives the Defender more dice with which to fend off your attack. The more troops you throw at the fight, the better your odds and the game tantalizingly allows you to see how the dice turn out and then kill off your own soldiers to add to your score and see if it’s enough to win. This gives combat real stakes and makes them dangerous affairs especially as burning all your resources to defeat one enemy leaves you vulnerable to the others at the table.
The asymmetry of the game takes on an extra edge as the Chancellor player can try to seduce the Exiles into joining the Empire and becoming Citizens, pooling their strength to crush the remaining rebels. This is a real devil’s bargain moment for all involved as the Chancellor hopes they gain a vassal and not a future liege and the potential Citizen eyes the new victory requirements to see if they’re in close enough reach to make up for having to bend the knee. Even if they do take the deal, there is still a chance they could wind up Exiled again so there are no secure alliances, only temporary truces on the path to snatching victory for one’s self.
Once a victor manages to win either through clever timing and resource management or by sheer attrition and exhaustion, the game is not over. It’s now time for the Chronicling portion which acts as both clean up and the set up for the next game. First the Oath for the next game is chosen and then the Sites ruled by the winner move to the Cradle region where they’ll form the heart of the next Empire along with the Denizens and Relics there. Based on the Suit the winner’s Advisers belong to, new cards from the same Suit will be added to the World Deck while cards belonging to the losing players or discard piles risk getting removed from the game, possibly never to be seen again. As you play the game over and over, this process repeats, filtering cards in and out until you have a Deck that is truly your own and reflects all the decisions made in previous games.
Along with this ever evolving Deck, seeing Sites and Denizens that proved vital in the previous game as the core of the new Empire creates a clever sense of continuity and history. Coming into the middle of this legacy game is less daunting than some of the other legacy games that depend on everyone having been there when a box was opened or a sticker laid down to get the full impact. In Oath, you can imagine the history of this world and as you play, you can sense how your actions could impact not just this game but future games as well. It’s a neat magician’s trick pulled off with gorgeous art and an evocative system that lets you tell organic stories with your friends.
Space. A lot of games use it as their setting to inspire players and make them feel like heroes, explorers, or conquerors. Many tap into existing movies and books but a few try to create their own lore and history to entice and intrigue and give players a sense of being part of a grand narrative. Leder Games’ ARCS does something different. It eschews specificity and lore for abstraction and ambiguity. When you pick a player color and board, you are not picking a species with reams of backstory. When you draw cards to enhance your galactic empire, you’re invited not to be part of an established story but instead to imagine and invent on the spot. What does it mean to you that you secured the loyalty of the Mining Guild or that your fleet arrived at a planet full of weapons? This is not Star Wars where you have preconceived notions of what it means to go gallivanting off to Tattooine. Planets don’t have names. Nothing does. And in thar blank space, you are free to imagine and invent or just focus on the game.
Leder above all else understands that what they make are games. As someone who is a sucker for themes and experiences, it can be quite a splash of cold water to be presented with something like ARCS that focuses so much on the Games-iness of their games and trusts players to bring their own imagination to fill in the blanks. Part of their confidence can come down to how well they design games and also how skilled and evocative their art is. There’s just enough sci-fi on the cards and board to make the sandbox you’re playing in feel alive and vibrant without overpowering the experience.
ARCS has you chasing down victory points by fulfilling Ambitions that change throughout the game and is determined by the players. At the start, everyone might be trying to hoard fuel or hunt down relics but soon it might be more valuable to blow up ships or conquer your neighbors. The uncertainty of what will earn you points at any given time means that players need to be flexible enough to jump on opportunities but also know that at any time they can grab the reigns and determine the fate of the galaxy. Initiative is a huge part of this game and you can sacrifice a great deal to take it.
Most of the gameplay of ARCS is a deceptively simple suits-based card game where whoever has initiative plays a card that allows certain actions like taxing, moving, building, or attacking and everyone else has to decide whether to follow suit and do the same sort of actions or play cards to do something else but usually not as well. In addition, you’ll be taxing or stealing resources and claiming cards that give you options for ways to enhance your power and strategy but almost always at a cost. Every decision has a sense of weight. Do you burn a card to seize initiative so you can decide which Ambition will earn points or do you let your rivals exhaust themselves? Do you go all in on smashing your fleets into their points-scoring planets or hold back and let your rivals duke it out so you can sneak around the edges and outscore them while they’re rebuilding? Even combat has you decide whether to roll safe but ineffective dice or dangerous but exciting ones.
It can be a very brutal game and players can see their hard earned fleets turned to so much debris or see cards and resources they schemed to acquire purloined by rivals but luckily it moves fast and there are always opportunities for revenge. Despite space being so large, players can very quickly find themselves bumping into one another and getting into all sorts of scrapes. Going after planets is a great way to take your neighbor’s stuff but if things get out of hand and you blow up one of their cities, you provoke Outrage and have to deal with the fallout of being a brutal warlord both mechanically and emotionally.
Despite having a simple structure, every game of ARCS is a novel experience due to just how much weight it puts on player decisions with just enough randomness to keep things largely unpredictable. The base game comes with a handful of optional cards that give your faction some powers and limitations but they are just as evocatively non-specific as the rest of the game. Leder also offers a campaign game to play which I’ve yet to explore but it apparently takes the base game and launches it even further into the cosmic aether.
If you’ve spent more than 5 minutes talking with me about board games, there’s a non-zero chance I’ve talked about Terraforming Mars from FryxGames. Released in 2016 with numerous expansions doled out like clockwork, my friend Jack got me hooked on this game and I’ve subsequently gone all in on it, purchasing almost every expansion and various Etsy game enhancements to feed more yearning desire to make Mars wetter, hotter, and greener.
The base game largely revolves around a map of hexes that represent various geologic features and potential resources on and off the red planet. Every round roughly represents a human generation as players acting as corporations compete for government funding to make Mars livable. Various trackers on the board mark just how progress has been made and when Mars can’t get any more hot, wet, and green, the game is over and everyone counts up their score.
The simplest way to terraform Mars is to throw money at the planet but this makes a slow and tedious process even moreso which is why the game gives you the opportunity to research and implement projects in the form of a massive stack of cards that boost your economy, add alternative scoring options, or throw sand in your rivals’ engines.
Most of the cards boost your player board which both acts as storage for the resources you’ll produce and collect as well as your production reminder so you can see just how much income, metals, biomass, energy, and heat you’ll produce at the end of every round.
Sidenote: this particular set of player boards was purchased from etsy and may be the most game enhancing purchase I made. Because you have to keep your various production levels very clear, the two layered slotted board keeps the cubes from sliding about when the table gets bumped or you sneeze.
Some cards will give you bonus actions, others will create triggering effects, and yet more will let you crash asteroids into your friends or unleash ants into their labs to eat their precious microbes. One particular bit of weirdness this game has is making you pay twice for most of your cards. At the start of the game and then every round you’ll draw a hand of cards and then pay for which ones you want to keep. Then on your turn you have the option to pay the printed card cost to put them into play. This creates tension between trying to prioritize your resources with wanting to fill your hands with exciting projects and sets Terraforming Mars apart from most games.
Another sidenote: the game has rules for drafting cards every round and passing them back and forth between players but I have never enjoyed playing that way and routinely skip that.
Along with dotting Mars with forests and oceans, you also can erect cities which grants some economic boosts but largely is a way to score points at the end of the game as well as claim real estate to block your rivals. Because forests can only be planted next to other tiles, cities let you seed the perchlorate-heavy soil for future growth and development. The board also has unlockable milestones and awards which players can race to unlock for a heavy dollop of points.
As generations pass, Mars will get busier and more filled up and so the game becomes partially a race to terraform faster and better and gobble up the limited planetary resources but because there are so many pathways to victory you can have games where Mars is a lush garden by the end or still a dusty smog-choked hellscape dotted with factories and mines. Some players may be fully invested in planting cities and trees and others may realize controlling the orbit and space lanes with asteroid colonies, space stations, and questionable security forces is worth more victory points at the end of the game. There are lots of fiddly cards and strategies but you can choose to interact with or ignore any of all of them and both are viable strategies.
This flexibility is part of what makes the expansions work as well as they do. The four shown here clockwise from the upper right are Venus Next, Turmoil, Prelude, and Colonies. Venus and Colonies introduce whole new worlds with a bunch of cards, new terraforming goals, and a trade mechanic but you can discard every V card you run across and never set foot on Venus or Pluto and be no worse off. Prelude gives your starting game an initial economic boost so it goes a little faster and gives you a starting direction to explore and of all of these is the one I recommend the most. Turmoil adds about an hour to the game as you do Politics and while I find it a charming mess, don’t recommend it unless you have a very idiosyncratic group. There are also new maps you can play on and my most ridiculous purchase – the 3d pieces. I love both but leave their necessity to your conscience and budget.
(The more recent expansions (Prelude 2 and Automa incorporate a lot more generative AI art and content and as such I opted not to get them.)
So why do I love Terraforming Mars so much? A lot of it has to do with the way the setting and theme click with the gameplay and mechanics. There is something so stirring about starting a game off with a blank, barren canvass and watching it come to life over the course of a few hours. The cards also create a fantastic and organic narrative and their juxtaposition can be hilarious, heartbreaking, or both. In one game, I set up refugee camps only to immediately deploy conscript labor to build a commercial center. In another game, a friend built a meat industry suspiciously soon after starting Mars’ only zoo. The expansions only supercharge this process, giving your imagination ample opportunity to picture colonists on Ganymede watching the skies for hungry trade convoys or Martian separatists storming the administrative domes.
This is a brick of a game with an intimidating teach and a lot of seeming complexity but as you play it starts to zoom along and I have found few games as rewarding and rich for inherent storytelling. But you don’t have to take my word for it. My 7 year old asked if we could play it instead of watch TV which is about the highest praise I can think of.
A slightly smaller game than my previous Star Trek simulator, Buffer Time is a cooperative push your luck game of trying to have fun shenanigans while doing the work the bridge crew has assigned you. You earn Leisure (victory) points by playing Side Project cards to finish along with your Assigned Duties. Both cards require time so the more you collectively mess around, the longer it takes to get everything done. The way you get all this done is by drawing from a Shift deck mostly full of numbered cards that subtract from your time requirement. Finish your tasks and score your cards before moving on to the next.
In the same Shift deck lurk the bridge crew, however, and if you draw too many of them, they reprimand you for slacking and you fail the assignment and lose some precious Leisure points. If you run out of assignments before you hit a set number of points you lose but if you successfully dodge your superiors and bank enough points, you win!
Finally to give you some tools to aid in your chicanery are Ability cards that let you maximize your goofing around and help you buy some time or get away from meddling officers. Every turn you choose between chipping away at the tasks at hand, adding more to your plate, or seeing if you can pull a fast one and rig the game in your favor.
Like a lot of cooperative games it is prone to headstrong players trying to dominate the strategy and telling everyone what to do to maximize efficiency so I recommend calling that person a Boimler and focus on having fun. The game is fast and silly and the Lower Decks art and quotes are a delight. Getting caught by officers definitely makes you feel like a naughty ensign and there are few problems the game throws at you that can’t be solved by throwing Romulan Whiskey right back. Fun and sweet but you don’t have to just take my word for it. My 7 year old insisted we play it instead of reading stories at bedtime so take that for what it’s worth.
PS: I went to college with Mike McMahan who created Lower Decks and it’s been a blast watching the show blow up. Garashir forever!
I took this morning to do a test drive of Gale Force Nine’s 2016 4X space opera generator Star Trek Ascendancy and I have some initial thoughts. This playthrough made use of my Cardassian expansion which I set against the Klingons and Romulans. I’ll try again with the Federation on my next away mission but I got a decent feel with these three.
The core mechanic of the game is building and sending out ships to discover planets and either colonize them, charm them, or blast them into submission in order to harvest the three core resources of Production (abstracted money, material, labor) Research, and Culture. Production is used to churn out ships as well as develop planets so they can produce more resources. Research helps you improve your ships or unlock cards with hopefully useful powers. Culture is spent colonizing or diplomatically adding planets your collection as well as buying the Ascendance tokens that are one of the two main paths to victory as well as essentially leveling up your faction.
At the start of the game there are only the starting planets of each player with a lot of blank space between them. As ships are sent out blindly to explore they’ll build the space lanes and map out the quadrant by plonking down the paths and planets, occasionally connecting them up with other newly discovered worlds until by the end of the game you wind up with the galactic molecule pictured above. Every time you head out into the black you have no idea whether you’re going to find a pristine world, deadly nebulae, valuable artifacts, well armed inhabitants, Crystalline Entities or some charming combination. You also don’t know just how far away anything will be as the dice determine the length of the lanes and whether they might intersect with previously placed planets. There’s room for creative cartography and just how these lines and circles are placed can have huge strategic and logistical implications for the rest of the game.
Before First Contact with other players there will be plenty of dangers facing early star pioneers as various stellar phenomena and deadly planets take pot shots at poorly shielded vessels that dare blunder into them. The rewards for doing so are often quite generous although you can find yourself in my frequent position as well where your plucky craft dodges one initial crisis only to smash immediately into the next. As in life the real dangers are your friends and once you create a pathway that connects your home worlds you are now vulnerable to the other path to victory: galactic conquest. Players can also win by controlling three home worlds including their own and you can’t win at all if your people’s historic lands are occupied by alien invaders so it pays to keep your home well guarded.
In the game I played the Klingons took an early lead by running around gobbling up defenseless planets while the Romulans kept running into cosmic hurdles and occasional Qs and the Cardassians prowled for easy conquests to little avail. Over the rounds, luck changed and an initial trade agreement between Klingons and Cardassians that filled their coffers led to unexpected land swaps and inevitable betrayals while the Romulans quietly used the stellar phenomena in their region to fuel a scientific Renaissance. At the very end the Cardassians’ almost secured victory was snatched away by a coordinated offensive first by the Klingons smashing most of the defenses out of Cardassia Prime followed by the arrogant arrival of Romulan fleets that annihilated the once proud planet to rubble.
This game feels like a helpful second option after your friends turn down your excitable suggestion to play Twilight Imperium. It hits a lot of the same beats but faster and in a familiar setting that can make for an easier sell. It’s still quite the time sink and there are a number of fiddly rules that are not always clear and instinctive. Movement is particularly funky as the game allows you to both move around slowly via impulse engines or warp around the board with stunning speed. Combat can be clunky as you compare the effect of upgraded weapons and shields and try to juggle your various tech upgrades to see if they are applicable. The various environmental dangers give the exploration angle edge but also blow up your small selection of ships with frustrating regularity that it makes one question the survivability of the Enterprise and turns what should be a regular fun bout of discovery into a constant game of Russian roulette or its Gorn equivalent.
The real moments when this game shines is when its theme manages to break through. Playing as the Romulans involves scheming and lurking, Klingons spoil for a fight just because, and Cardassians reward your every worst instinct to subjugate and tyrannize. Every faction has a printed advantage and disadvantage and in some ways the disadvantages are more fun as they give you a real sense of character and purpose as you make your way across the galaxy.
All in all I’d like to get it back on my table and in front of friends but imagine that if they have the willingness for Twilight Imperium I’d rather get that out and if they ask for streamlined space opera business I’ll more likely recommend ARCS. Still, for the folks who want their blood wine not too hot and not too cold, I am glad I have something to offer.
It’s another year and another attempt to bring blogs back! Rachel and I are in South Carolina for the new year as usual although we hit a rough spot this particular visit when my kidney decided to craft and expel a stone into my ureter for what would be one of the longest 42 hours of my life. Such encounters really make you examine your priorities which brings us back to blogs!
This site has always been a delightful place to talk about the various geeky pastimes and musings my priest and have enjoyed over the years and I’m hoping to bring it back to some semblance of activity, marking some of the goings-on in our respective lives. I’d love to find the get up and go to revive the podcast fully but for now I’m happy to write up some of what we we’ve got going on this year.
Board games still dominate my hobbying self image and I continue to collect them even if I don’t always bring them to table although I feel I’ve curated a tolerant circle of friends who are willing to try their hands at a variety of games of chance and skill. I started running a community games afternoon with the local library which felt very civic and community building and I’m looking forward to continuing that this year. One of favorite gaming moments was introducing my daughter to Balderdash and watching her go all in on what was a seminal game of my youth and young adulthood. My son’s gaming prowess continues at a staggering pace and I had best enjoy my victories while they remain.
Rachel has fallen deeply into the Dreamlight Valley cult on our new family Switch and it’s been a delight watching her pal up with Merlin and Mirabelle as she tends her gardens or delves mysterious portals. Her reading list has exploded this last year as she ninjas between physical books, Kindle selections, and audiobooks at chipmunk speeds.
Last year was quite the adventure and we have no doubt this one will be as well as we watch national and global events unfold with hope and fear. We’re grateful for all of y’all and hope to be in better touch as we navigate the months ahead. For more immediate updates, you can follow us over on bluesky here and here. While tiktok persists we’re also making noise here and here.
As the youngest of three geek brothers, I was aware of role-playing games before I was literate. I can fondly remember my pleas to be allowed to play Dungeons & Dragons falling on deaf, adolescent ears and so I would try to figure out manuals based on their pictures. Even once I could read, trying to parse just how the different Star Frontiers species were mechanically distinct or how to use the point buy system in Toon to accurately reflect my current animated favourites proved a daunting challenge. Friends would run rudimentary games or dungeons for me and and I for them but it wasn’t until I was in late middle-school and my middle brother returned from several years working in Kyrghizstan that I finally had a patient tutor to sit with me and truly work out how to play a game and that game was Star Wars.
Specifically, it was the original 1980s West End Games version of Star Wars before the license would be swapped around like so much unrefined Coaxium between Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro and Fantasy Flight/Asmodee/Embracer Group AB. West End Games also provided young Leeman with both Torg and Paranoia which prompted a lot of curiosity but Star Wars was a known quantity and so the one I was most willing to puzzle out and bring to the table. The original Star Wars had a simple dice pool mechanic with target numbers so there wasn’t too much to struggle with and soon I was running games for friends at sleepovers or between classes. My friend Jackson had a long-running Quixotic Jedi Boink LaVache who was a frequent hero of these adventures but character creation was very simple, particularly with the easily photocopiable pages of pre-generated heroes from which to choose so more often than not, we just ran one-offs.
I made a ton of mistakes and picked up no shortage of bad GMing habits that no doubt I haven’t completely rid myself of but it was a joyous apprenticeship and I’m grateful to my brother for patiently explaining the problems of rail-roading and to all my friends who put up with me crashing their ships into anything I could think of menacing them with unlimited waves of stormtroopers.
I got to college right as West End was starting to fall apart and Wizards was on the ascendancy and the 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons would hoover up much of my limited spare change that previously I would have spent on floppy Star Wars books. It was then with great excitement and perhaps limited foresight that I rejoiced at Star Wars being smashed together with D&D to produce the d20 system that I would play over the next decade. Gone were my simple handfuls of d6s and in their place were pages of rules, too many skills, feats for days, and the opportunity to purchase more and more sourcebooks.
Once I got to grad school, I quickly found a critical mass of gamers and soon introduced the idea of running a pre-clone wars game using the d20 system. This would prove to be the only campaign I would GM start to finish. It was a hot mess that saw me burgling from Silent Hill, Eternal Darkness, and even raiding my brothers’ old Star Frontiers books. It was a wild and raucous time and I miss having the free-time and communal living situation to facilitate such an expedition.
I would continue to play d20 Star Wars off and on but eventually editions began to shift and Saga came out. I poked at it but by then I was working in retail and trying to make more conscientious spending choices and it didn’t quite sit well with me so I stuck it out with my old game. When Fantasy Flight came out with their own system I hadn’t picked up my books in a good long while having fallen back into the D&D gravity well where I would orbit for many years.
As a quick aside, a few years ago I had the opportunity to interview Bill Slavicsek for my Ask Lovecraft After Dark interview series. He worked for West End Games and Wizards of the Coast and worked on both of their iterations of the Star Wars RPG plus more and it was an absolute dream come true to get to talk with him about his work. If nothing else, I hope you’ll give it a listen.
Fast forward to earlier this year and my local forever GM reminding me of my offer to run a Star Wars game so he would have a chance to play amid GMing multiple campaigns. This was an on and off-again discussion and a few years back I had made baby steps towards running something by purchasing a pdf of the Scum and Villainy game. It looked fun but inertia won out and I never moved forward with the idea until this year. Lugging out all my various editions, I slammed them down in front of prospective players and we debated what we wanted to do. D20 was the closest to Dungeons and Dragons but the prospect of navigating the rules gave pause. West End offered the simplest gaming experience but ultimately folks were tempted by funkiness of Scum and Villainy so here we are.
We’re only a few sessions in and navigating some of the unfamiliar bumps and peculiarities of the system but it’s so far been a blast and reskinning it for Star Wars has been fairly straightforward given how much of Star Wars was in the game’s DNA. I have no idea how long we’ll stick it out but I’m glad to be back in the captain’s chair, flying my players through all sorts of ridiculous adventure. We’ll see where the Force leads us.
In November of 2020, frustrated by COVID isolation and inspired by the siren song of Shut Up and Sit Down, I purchased King’s Dilemma as an aspirational motivator and in July of 2021 after vaccines were distributed, I got together with two other dads from my pod and we started to play. We finished our game in January of 2024 and it was one of the greatest gaming experiences of my life.
Since this is a legacy game, I’m going to break this article up into two different sections. The first will be a general one about the game with my vague thoughts and opinions so as not to spoil any of the mysteries and surprises. The second part will be my deeper dive into what happened in our specific game so please, if you think for even a moment that you might one day want to play and have a completely untrammeled experience, stop before the break.
King’s Dilemma essentially allows players to step into the roles of a king’s privy council or Landsraad if you’re feeling Dune-y. The king is not played but instead referred to by the various cards that determine what happens in any given game. At the end of each game, the king has either died or abdicated in favor of a worthy successor who is chosen from the family of the winning player so dynastic control of the realm bounces around but the decisions are made by these noble houses with the king largely ornamental.
The setting for King’s Dilemma is a brand-new low-fantasy realm with a decent amount of history and specificity for the various countries as well as the regions and domains within the main kingdom – . The tone and aesthetic is generic medieval going into Renaissance European with powers split between church, merchants, military, scholars, and the nobles themselves. Each noble house has a very unique history which gives them long-term goals for the players to try to achieve and story-based goals that can be unlocked as the games go on.
In any individual game, the players will be making decisions about the kingdom which will impact five aspects – Defense/Military Strength, Wealth, Morale/Faith, Health, and Knowledge. They have their noble house which (traditionally) they stick with for the entire campaign which has certain goals printed on it. Perhaps they want to make sure that the army does exceedingly well in this game or that the economy is tanked. Achieving these goals can unlock unique special abilities as well as end-game points to determine the winner of the overall legacy game. In addition to these consistent goals, every player will choose how their particular noble wants the kingdom to be run this game and those are determined by cards such as Extremist, Opulent, Moderate, etc. These goals are achieved by moving the various aspects up and down a slider that makes up most of the board. If the army is doing well, you move the tower token up. If wealth is doing poorly, you move the gem token down, etc. At the end of each game, players look where the tokens have ended up and earn points based on what their goals were. They can also get points from amassing personal wealth and power. Whoever has the most points (usually) wins and their dynasty picks the king who will reign in the next game.
Round by round, one player will be the Leader and another (or sometimes the same player) will be Moderator. The Leader draws from the deck of cards that determines what is the current issue facing the kingdom. Perhaps there is demand for an expensive joust, or a merchant wants to be able to import slaves, or scholars request funding an expedition into mysterious desert ruins. The card indicates how the decision might impact the various aspects of the kingdom but it doesn’t say everything so players have to debate, threaten, bribe, and decide how they want to vote. You vote by choosing either Aye, Nay, or Pass. If you vote Aye or Nay you have to back up your vote with power tokens representing your sway and political capital. Voting goes around until with opportunities to keep adding power until finally the vote is called and whichever has the most power behind it wins with the Moderator breaking ties. The spent power all gets dumped into a pool on the board. In addition, whoever invested the most power behind a winning decision becomes the new Leader for the next round. If a player chooses to Pass, they get a little money and then they can either Pass and become Moderator or Pass and scoop up the spent power on the board. Multiple people can pass and split the pool.
However the vote went, the card is flipped over and the Leader reads what impact the decision made on the kingdom which will usually be to slide the aspects up and/or down but can also unlock some of the legacy aspects of the game, namely stickers and envelopes. Stickers represent lasting issues that impact various aspects – a lingering plague harming health, a new academy boosting knowledge, etc and they also are a way that players can earn and lose points. Every sticker gets signed by the Leader who was in charge when it was unlocked and gets credit for either the benefit it imparts or the blame for unleashing the horrors on the kingdom. Stickers accrue over time and can eventually be replaced by newer stickers as the kingdom moves on and changes over time.
Envelopes are where new cards come from and also determine the course of the game. If the council decides to go to war rather than seek peace, then you open the war envelope and the peace one sits unused for the rest of the campaign. In addition to unlocking new decisions for the council to vote on, they can also unlock story and event cards which have unique impacts on the game, sometimes in absolutely astonishing ways that upend the entire balance of things. Some of those will be discussed in the spoilers section.
Once all the impacts of the vote has been determined, players check to see if the king’s death or abdication has been triggered and if not, play continues with the Leader drawing the next card. If either enough cards have been drawn that the king dies or if the balance of the kingdom gets pulled in too high or low a direction and the king abdicates then the game is over, players score their points, and determine the winner. Based on who won and how the game ended, end-game points are also scored and various noble house goals can be checked to show legacy progress.
King’s Dilemma is a truly fantastic game for a number of reasons that I want to get into before going into some of the specifics of our game. First off, it blends strategy, storytelling, and roleplaying in a deft way. You can feel yourself being torn in certain decisions because the mechanics of the game pull you in one direction but the desire to see what happens if you vote a certain way can pull you in another. Every decision feels weighty and important and knowing that what you decide could still be impacting you for the rest of the campaign gives those decisions a real heft. The setting, the play-styles of the different noble houses, and the goal cards also lend themselves to roleplaying. Perhaps in the last game you were a goody-two shoes trying to keep the kingdom from falling apart but this game you’re a sinister Mordred who wants to watch it all burn. The arguments and debates can lead to quick alliances or grudges as you bring up terrible decisions made by the player four games ago. That leads to the amazing way this game plays with memory. Because every individual game is a new generation, the haziness of why things were decided makes sense in-fiction because it wasn’t your current noble who made those decisions, it was their grandfather or great-grandmother. That slight distancing is so freeing as far as being able to just play in this world and feel the richness as the story unfolds.
I absolutely recommend this game. We played with just three of us which was about all our schedule allowed but if I hadn’t already pre-ordered the sequel Queen’s Dilemma, I’d seriously consider buying a fresh copy to try to play with four or more players and try out different noble houses because to see what all else this game has to offer. 10/10 game. Finishing the campaign was as satisfying as ending a long-running RPG campaign. I hope you’ll look it up and consider trying it with your crew.
SERIOUS SPOILERS
Seriously, walk away right now if you think you might ever want to play this game with a black and open mind.
Okay, for the rest of you all let me start by saying that I am not good at this game and lost it about as hard as you can lose. If you look at the scoring sheet above, you will see I consistently came in last or in the middle and by the end of the campaign I was so thoroughly defeated that not only was my current noble killed but my family was hunted down and wiped out. It was brutal and unforgiving and I loved it.
I did not know what to expect from the tone of King’s Dilemma and was unprepared for just how dark it got early on and how things got worse from there. Now, in fairness to me, we actually had a somewhat cheerful start to our game with a decision made to unite two kingdoms in marriage and so things were pretty chipper and lovey-dovey although that was plagued by all sorts of decisions about how religiously tolerant our kingdom would be or rather, wouldn’t be. Already I was starting to see dynamics form among the three of us playing that would be present right until the very end.
I was playing a house obsessed with knowledge and pushing the boundaries of understanding, Jack was a belligerent house that got rewarded for going against the majority decision, and Jon was house moneybags. As we played, while we might have made decisions based on the goal cards we drew, that underlying dynamic was always at work. Jack would vote for aggression, I would try to bankrupt the country to fund bizarre expeditions and research, and Jon… Jon discovered the power of passing to the point that his seeming inactivity became a running gag but in truth, it was a powerful tactic and Jon won the game handily a number of times.
After the blissful early game of love and tolerance, we soon got slammed with plague, wars, more plague, and eventually were living in fear from a cabal of psychic terrorists. We discovered a love of jousting and exploring islands but we also didn’t understand the central bank minigame which possibly contributed to our kingdom’s financial woes. Right towards the end, we got lamentably drunk and couldn’t navigate our way out of labyrinth which cursed the royal bloodline but actually that was what Jack wanted all along so maybe I should have watched more carefully who was pouring the drinks.
In the endgame, we were all faced with the decision to either try and protect the king and the status quo or let it all burn to the ground. I stood by the king, Jack joined the traitors, and Jon… Jon raided the treasury and gleefully watched us destroy ourselves. Well, more accurately, he watched Jack destroy me and my bloodline. It was pitch perfect. We went out of the game the same way we had gone into it. I cannot recommend it enough and I cannot wait until Queen’s Dilemma arrives and we get to jump back into this bonkers, delightful game series.
This year has seen plumbing woes, illness, emergency pet surgery, and the like but! in the words of Mrs. Peacock, I have been determined to enjoy myself and in that spirit I documented all the different board games I played this year and will now bring you the end result. Most of these are ones my son Martin and I played and you’ll read both of our opinions plus those of various other players as they pop up. This list is in order of when I first played it with another person this year and to give you a sense of how much we play, by the end of January we had played the first 22 games on this list at least once (although not always to completion) and some many many many times. This list also does not include solo plays or tinkering to learn the mechanics or just setting it up to look at it or it would be much much longer. Maybe next year.
Let me know your thoughts!
1:Space Marine Adventures – Labyrinth of the Necrons
A Christmas gift for Martin from his uncle Van. Players work cooperatively to maneuver The Emperor’s Finest through cramped hallways while Necrons keep beaming aboard and generally being in their way. Short and simple with lots of replay potential as you mix and match the different marines with their different abilities and special cards.
Martin’s opinion: “it’s fine. I hate the monsters.”
2:Disney Happiest Day – Magic Kingdom
Spinners, balloons, and a board that changes from day to night! Cute and simple searching game where you roam around the park trying to find various rides and locations that match the cards you draw before the clock runs out.
Martin’s opinion: “I like it!”
3:It’s a Small World!
Another simple search game where you’re moving your boat through the titular ride while trying to find figures that match your card. Game should be played with a lazy susan as you’ll often need to see different parts of the board at different times and there are literal walls in the way.
Martin’s opinion: “I just like it.”
4:Elf – Journey From the North Pole
A competitive path building game where players zig-zag Will Ferrell around trying to hit certain locations to earn points while avoiding the locations that will earn other players points. Cute and quick if deceptively cut throat.
Amanda’s opinion: “too messy.”
Martin’s opinion: “don’t skip my turn!”
5:EVO – The Last Gasp of the Dinosaurs
This cute game of moving dinosaurs around, making dino babies, and evolving them is deceptively warm and fuzzy but in reality is cruel and cutthroat. Every turn you roll to see how climate changes which impacts where your dinosaurs can safely live. There’s a mutation auction that lets you try to make your dinos more adaptable but you’ll still look on in horror as other players roll in and eat your dinos or you’re forced to lay an egg in a lethally cold space with no hope for survival.
Martin’s opinion: “it’s just fun”
6:Summer Camp
Part deck-builder, part race, all wholesomeness. Players cycle through their decks, move along three different tracks trying to earn merit badges and score points to have a better summer camp experience than your feckless peers. Pretty cute.
Martin’s opinion: “wait how do you win?”
7:Star Wars Talisman
It’s the Reese’s peanut butter cups of board games! If you like both ingredients, then it’s right up your ally! Outer Rim is still a better game that still keeps a lot of fun Talismanic qualities but this is much simpler and kid/spouse friendly.
Martin’s opinion: “it’s fine. I don’t know what’s fun about it.”
Amanda’s opinion: “there’s more than two girls!”
Rachel’s opinion: “I get to be Rey”
8:Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood Early Reading Game
Make simple words or match vowels with the cast of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and earn prizes! The box also comes with cards to play a matching game.
Martin’s opinion: “i wanna play!”
9:Space Station Phoenix
Holy poop this might have just blasted to the top of my very competitive fiddliest game ranking. players are intergalactic… real estate developers who burn through their dwindling reserve of space gems to operate a fleet of ships that gather resources, build space station components, shuttle aliens about, abduct….I mean hire humans, and dismantle their very ships to get more metal to build more real estate to house more aliens and humans all while greedily eyeing the ever shifting diplomacy track to see if you are owed kickbacks.
Martin’s opinion: “it’s good. Is it my turn?”
10:Empires of the North
Chibi Vikings, Celts, and Inuit scrabble for islands in this city builder and resource management game where players take turns building, harvesting, raiding, and setting sail in order to build the cutest and mightiest arctic empire.
Martin’s opinion: “I think it’s fine, Dad.”
11:Disney Villains Clue
It’s Clue with Disney villains! Ursula in the Cave of Wonders with the Magic Mirror! Benoit Blanc would still disapprove.
Amanda’s opinion: “it’s mine and it’s fun and it’s secretive!”
Martin’s opinion: “I just like the game.”
12:Ticket to Ride
Traaaaaaains! Filling up maps with happy train cars trying to complete routes and score points while blocking your friends and loved ones from doing so. Classic game. No complaints.
Eleanor’s opinion: “I just like playing games. It’s all about strategy.”
Robin’s opinion: “”I like it when the cards make sense.”
13:Concepts
It’s Pictionary with cubes and pictograms! Desperately search for the combination of images that will get your friends and neighbors to read your mind. We appreciate that while the rules as written call for a competitive game, the creators noted that people might just want to casually all play and guess cooperatively which is the only way I have ever played.
Martin’s opinion: “I’m trying to think, Dad!”
14:The Wizard of Oz Trivia Game
Dear lord I remember more of this movie than I thought.
Amanda’s opinion: “i like it because I get to answer questions!”
15:It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
It’s a race around the board to costume up, collect candy, and avoid rocks before returning to Linus to wrestle with theological disappointment and I guess win?
Martin’s opinion: “I just like games a lot.”
16:Labyrinth
These Jim Henson games are stressful as butt. This one is a cooperative game where you run around the titular labyrinth, drawing cards that all do terrible things to you while you desperately hunt for the one card you need to get into the Goblin City where your battered and bruised heroes have to face yet more harrowing challenges before going up against the Goblin King himself all while racing against the clock before Toby is lost forever.
Martin’s opinion: “I like turning the clock”
17:Tsuro
A simple tile laying game where you’re creating routes for your dragon (or uh Luigi happy meal toy) to fly around while avoiding colliding into one another or flying off the edge of the map. The last dragon standing is the winner! Very calm and serene game that plays quickly. Often pulled out as a warm up/cool down game.
Martin’s opinion: “if I do that, that would kill me.”
18:Operation
When your kid loves organs and surgery videos, this becomes inevitable.
Martin’s opinion: I like the buzz!
19:The Magic Labyrinth
While this game has a startling absence of Goblin Kings it makes up for it with magnets and hidden walls. Move your pokey apprentices around trying to avoid unseen collisions and collect the various tokens you pull from a mysterious cloth bag before your friends!
Martin’s opinion: “What I’m trapped!”
20:Fallout Shelter
For a board game based on an app game based on a video game, this worker placement game is pretty clever. Run around collecting resources to either attract more dwellers, hunt for items in the wasteland, build more rooms in your vault, or fight off the many monsters and raiders trying to take over your vault all while trying to earn more happiness so you can become the Overseer and win!
Martin’s opinion: “i like getting happinesses!”
21:Blokus
Clever tile laying game of trying to outmaneuver your friends and make pretty patterns of betrayal and deceit. Pretty good!
Martin’s opinion: “this game is called Blokus?”
22:Talisman (fantasy flight version)
Updated version of my childhood favourite with less racist art but significantly less ridiculousness. Not a good game by any stretch but maybe an amazing game. Essentially analog World of Warcraft.
Martin’s opinion: “l wanted to be the troll!”
23:Everdell
This cute game of forest critters scrambling around a giant tree collecting the cutest resources to build farms and post offices and attract other forest critters to build up your happy little village
Martin’s options: “i like getting all the berries and stuff to build stuff.”
24:Carcassonne
Classic, simple, brutal, meeples. Everything you need in a game.
Martin’s opinion: “I just like it. Where’s the die?”
25:Boss Monster
A game of 8 bit nostalgia as you build your murder house to attract and mangle meddling heroes. Not a brilliant game but the graphics are very cute and it goes quickly.
Martin’s opinion: “I like fighting the heroes”
26:Cosmic Encounters
Taking all the brutal galactic colonialism and diplomatic knife fighting of Twilight Imperium but distilling it down to a 20 minute game. Wacky. Unbalanced. Completely silly and yet not arbitrary. Compelling and fun. Yes Martin is having his rathtar toy be our third player.
Martin’s opinion: “i just like it.”
27:Hive
Quick and deadly puzzle of moving bugs and trying to trap your opponent’s queen bee. We’re missing a beetle but still making it work.
Martin’s opinion: “it’s good. Let’s play.”
28:Lords of Waterdeep
Shut Up And Sit Down described this game as “aggressively mediocre” which while apt, does not deter me from playing this game. There’s something so satisfying about treating fighters and clerics as disposable resources. Due to a certain someone’s lack of reading skills, we’re foregoing intrigue cards.”
Martin’s opinion: “it’s good. I like it.”
29:Battleship
Boom! Splash! A classic for a reason.
Martin’s opinion: “I don’t want to play anymore.”
30:Hogwart’s Battle
A cooperative deck-builder where players work together to blast the bad guys while acquiring new spells, allies, and helpful items to cycle through their decks to better blast bad guys before time runs out. Not a full campaign game, the game has seven separate boxes of cards to make the game more and more complex with every game. Pretty good.
Martin’s opinion: “it’s good”
Amanda’s opinion: “fun fun funny fun fun!”
Rachel’s opinion: “I am quite enjoying it”
31:Ticket to Ride Europe
I prefer it to the original although with Martin we ignore fiddly tunnel rules and destination cards and focus on the trains. The pieces are very fun to clack into place and the colours pop delightfully. All in all a fun classic.
Martin’s opinion: “I like it”
32:Star Wars Outer Rim with the Unfinished Business expansion
This game is way longer and busier than it needs to be but I have such a warm spot for it in my heart. It’s essentially Star Wars Talisman (not to be confused with the actual Star Wars Talisman) where you fly around, flipping cards, hunting bounties, delivering sketchy merchandise, collecting gear and crew and better ships, and generally being a galactic nuisance. It’s ridiculous and unnecessary but so much fun.
Martin’s opinion: “I like getting the money”
33:Ark Nova
Big Terraforming Mars energy only it’s a zoo! There’s a lot of upfront complexity with multiple scoring tracks and a wack-load of icons you have to decipher but actual turn by turn gameplay is quick and easy. Build your zoo, put animals in your zoo, send your meeples off on quests to secure partnerships with other zoos and universities, repeat! The end game scoring system might be breaking my brain a little but otherwise, I’m enjoying my initial pokes and playthroughs.
Martin’s opinion: “I like making animals”
34:Tales of the Arabian Nights
I haven’t played this game in far too long. It’s so ridiculous and so fun. A multiplayer choose your own adventure with just enough orientalism to be awkward but not completely unbearable.
Alison’s opinion: this is bananas and I’m loving it! Jonathan’s opinion: it’s so wonderfully story-centric it’s not gameifying which for me is freeing! Rachel’s opinion (not playing): oh I like this game!
35:Chutes and Ladders
Calvinism the board game.
Martin’s opinion: “ehhh it’s good.”
36:Qwirkle
Shapes! Colours! Brutal positioning and blocking! (Peppa pig not included)
Martin’s opinion: “meh, it’s good”
37:King’s Dilemma
So I unabashedly love this game and so when the Kenyon tableting club asked me to run a game for their one shot rpg night, i cheated and modified this legacy campaign board game to fit the bill and it was an absolute success. I essentially acted as a GM and guided the new players through two games and they seemed to really enjoy it. They banned slavery and abstract art! They weaponized wasps and approved novel medical techniques! They bribed each other shamelessly and regularly! Such a great game of voting and politicking. Cannot recommend enough.
38:Organ Attack
“I maked these!” A cute and brutal game of attacking your friends’ organs. Martin has given me cancer, tonsil stones, and love. Pretty good.
Martin’s opinion: “it’s good”
39:Star Wars The Deckbuilding Game
This game is much better than it has any right to be as an obvious IP cash grab and yet! Plays quickly and uses the theme remarkably well. Possibly one of my best recent game purchases.
Martin’s opinion: “it’s…. Good. I like blowing up Daddy’s planets”
40:Quest Kids
Fairly basic game of flipping over cards to either power up, fight enemies, or collect treasure. Not a whole lot of game but kids enjoy it enough.
Martin’s opinion: “I’m doing my Gravity Falls face”
41:Life
Classic game of bourgeois indoctrination and acquisitiveness with a janky spinner. Its greatest impact is that when anything mawkish or sentimental happens, my brothers and I will shout “Life!” at each other.
Amanda’s opinion: I really like how it’s about money
42:Monster Crunch!
Simple game of playing numbered cards in ascending order to represent eating cereal or drinking milk to combine cards. Different monsters have different powers.
Martin’s opinion: it’s good
Amanda’s opinion: I liked it because it’s silly. It’s monster Uno
43: Terraforming Mars
I love this game y’all. There’s just so much theme and fun packed into this bonkers maelstrom of cubes and cards. We used Prelude, Venus, and Colonies which added just little dollops of variety without being overwhelming. I fulfilled my standard goal of sending an interstellar colony ship out to the stars while Brian Cannon actually did most of the work of making Mars wetter, hotter, and greener while sneaking ants into my labs to eat my tardigrades.
Brian’s opinion: I came here to nuke Mars and eat tardigrades and I’m all out of nukes
44: Black Orchestra
This surprisingly tasteful game about killing Hitler is a fast game of lurking around Europe, catching trains, trying not to draw attention and eventually work up the nerve and wherewithal to take out the fuhrer. We were incredibly lucky and Sam managed to blow up his train en route to a Nuremberg rally and so we won with incredible speed
45: 7 Wonders
Man alive it’s been a minute since I’ve played this but it’s so much fun. I got pretty handedly trounced but enjoyed it nevertheless. This game introduced me to the idea of sharing a hand of cards with your neighbors and also only directly interacting with the folks on your immediate left and right which is such a great twist on normal gameplay. My standard plan of arranging my economy so I can build the Palace in the final round paid off and I got a full wonder so I won the completely worthless emotional victory.
46: Twilight Imperium
Pew pew! Kaboom! Meow! I finally get to play with humans! Thanks to my brother and nephew for indulging an old man’s dream
47: Joust For Fun
Playing cards to whack your friends and impress fans. Nice mind reading game with cute art and friendly violence!
48: Tranquility
Martin’s newest game is a tricky cooperative game of silently putting down cards in numeric order. Very pretty and meditative but has the potential to be hard af
Martin’s opinion: good.
49: Risk Junior
Very simple game of bouncing around a board and shooting dice out of your cannons. Does not accurately teach where Kamchatka is.
Martin’s opinion: it was brilliant! I won!
50: Cascadia
Quick and clever game of building ecosystems and populating them with fussy animals that poop out points based on their various whims and desires. A potentially meditative game with a very satisfying tableau at the end.
Martin’s opinion: I had all the birds
51: Splendor
Fast moving game of acquiring satisfyingly heavy and clacky gems and trading them for mines and caravans and real estate to attract constipated looking nobles to your establishment to hopefully poop out some points.
Martin’s opinion: it’s good. Can we play Waterdeep now?
52: Ex Libris
Build a library! Send minions on errands! Please the Mayor! Fiddly game but so satisfying to fill up your shelves and snag books from friends. I was a mummy this game!
53: Runebound
What if Talisman was excessively fiddlier? Not a question anyone was asking but the answer isn’t terrible. Fun and busy with some truly unnecessarily complicated combat and movement rules but it makes up for it by getting to dramatically read aloud cards like “sky full of wasps!” or “like animals before a storm!”
54: Disney Cookie Swap Game
Sweet little game of making matches and swapping cookies with a shared middle board. Requires some memory and strategizing.
Martin’s opinion: it’s good.
55: Dixit, Disney Edition
Dreamlike game of hints and misdirection, now with more Mouse o’clock! Teaches kids the importance of being vague.
Amanda’s opinion: it’s Disney and it’s fun!
56: Citadels
Devilishly cutthroat game of building civic infrastructure. So much murder. So much fun.
57. Dixit
This game really is a fantastic variation on the Balderdash & Apples to Apples family of casual psychology and sideways deception. Dixit’s genius of only granting points to the clue giver when they generate enough ambiguity that some get it right and some get it wrong is a masterful mechanic. Combined with the dreamlike art of the game, the whole game really does cast a spell on everyone while playing it.
58: Reiner Knizia’s Kingdoms
Quick and thoughtful game of plonking down mines and farms and monsters around your castles to secure the best view while snarling up the view of your friends. Classy fun.
59: Groo
A quick and easy city and army builder where you treat the titular Groo as a terrible hot potato, bouncing him back and forth between municipalities as he wrecks infrastructure and personnel with good intentions. Martin’s opinion: it’s good
60: Charlie Brown Trim the Tree Game
A decent cooperative game of adding ornaments to a spindly tree until it collapses under the weight of all the holiday cheer. A fitting metaphor for getting through the holiday season intact.
61: Grave Robbers From Outer Space
Dracula eats a robot! Teenage werewolves maul the creepy innkeeper! The bookish girl with glasses gets cleavage and a flamethrower! It’s been way too long since I’ve played this amazing game.
62: Clue
This game becomes much more difficult with kindergartners who struggle with reading and secrecy. Still pretty good.
63: Dice Throne
63rd board game of 20A fun back and forth dueling game of rolling dice and spending cards to try to whittle down your opponent’s hit points. Fast and furious!
64: Castle Panic
Work together with your friends to fend off wave after wave of monsters in a colorful anxiety generator. Pretty good.
65: Deadly Dowagers
Marry sensibly, manage your estates, avoid scandal, murder your spouse, collect the inheritance, repeat as needed until you attract the amorous attentions of the Duke and win! A fast and delightful game to play with family!
66: Welcome To
Draw cards! Build homes! Erect fences! Municipal planning! Mild kickbacks! I’ve been wanting to play this for a while and I’m glad I got the chance this trip!
67: Nightmare Before Christmas Merry Madness
Frenetic game of flinging presents at each other and into Sandy Claws’ bag. Fast and/or furious simultaneous dice tossing. Martin’s a fan
68: Earth
Fiddly but fun gardening game! Collect all the fungi! Summon a hurricane! Make a bison happy! Very pretty game with excellently tactile pieces.
69: War of Whispers
It’s a war game where the actual war is secondary to the secret machinations and behind the scenes schemes of the secret societies, cultists and other nefarious groups whose loyalties to the warring houses are flexible and up for grabs. Nice.
70: Disney Chronology
Stressing your Disney knowledge to pinpoint just when various movies and shows occurred in relation to each other.
Tim Powers’ 1987 novel of fantastical pirate adventure has had an outsized influence on me despite my only having read it this past month. This is largely to do with Secret of Monkey Island and other films, books, and games that were directly inspired by or shamelessly burgled from On Stranger Tides. The book is quite the ride and having blasted through it, I see why it took on such a legendary status. However I want to use my stage to talk very specifically about this book and that is its portrayal of women, particularly how for much of the book they are reduced to something consumable.
Readers coming to this book familiar with Anne Bonny, Elaine Marley, Elizabeth Swann, or Morgan Adams might be forgiven for expecting to see a similar heroine on display but Powers instead gives us women who are largely passive and while they may inspire the actions of the hero and villains, rarely make decisions for themselves. Beyond that and perhaps of more visceral discomfort is what they inspire, particularly in the villains.
Elizabeth Hurwood is the woman we spend most time with and who gets both more dialogue and agency albeit her most direct and consequential action is saved for the epilogue. Throughout the majority of the book she is unwillingly dragged across the Caribbean by her troubled father Benjamin Hurwood and his unctuous accomplice Leo Friend (who, by the way, if we’re gonna get a real movie adaptation of this book, needs to be played by Josh Gad because come on).
Hurwood, we discover, needs her for an unholy ritual to annihilate her mind and soul and cram the unwilling soul of her deceased mother into her body. Friend has the rather unsubtle plan to just ravage her although it’s not enough to violate her physically (which she is fortunately spared from) but instead wants to become so powerful a sorcerer that he can bend her will and reality to make her crave him of her own volition. Friend, we also come to learn is motivated by a disturbing Oedipal lust which we are forced to witness in various ways before he is, to our relief, blown up in a magic duel.
Elizabeth also comes to the attention of Blackbeard who, very late in the book, reveals that magic has a gendered component and to take full advantage of it, a practitioner needs to be married so as to access feminine magic. To this end, Blackbeard reveals that he’s had a series of marriages that have consumed many women and at the end, needs Elizabeth as his bride since she is the only woman whose blood mingled at the Fountain of Youth. This culminates in the aforementioned epilogue where finally Elizabeth takes direct action and marries Jack Shandy right then and there, amplifying his own magical prowess and denying Blackbeard his nuptial goal.
The trope of the “attractive lamp” is a useful one for thinking of stories that reduce women to objects that the more active male characters trade around, fight over, and obsess about but in On Stranger Tides, women and particularly Elizabeth are not merely desired as ornamentation but to be wholly consumed and used up except by our hero. It creates for a disturbing story and ups the stakes but should not go without pause or consideration about how these stories reduce women down not just to objects but dehumanizes them even further. We can contrast it with the Hannibal series which likewise is about the consumption of others but takes an equal opportunity approach and in a perversion of aesthetics, elevates the act of consumption to art and worship. We are not given such illusions of dignity in On Stranger Tides but instead invited to roll around in the muck and sit with there with our discomfort, like the frequently mentioned toy soldier unable to get back to the store window.
