I feel like recommending PnP games again

 I’ve written about essential PnP libraries and PnP games that I feel would be good for budget gaming more than once. Unfortunately, I still think there is a real, possibly growing, need for that, although the very concept of PnP games comes with the assumption that people have access to printers, which feels like an arrogant assumption. Still, PnP games is one of my hobbies so that’s what I am working with.

Few disclaimers:

- If you this blog on the regular, there will be no surprises. 

- I’m focusing on games that just require printing. There’s a lot of good PnP games that involve cards and tiles and boards and such but I’m focusing on accessible games. If you’re already making cards and chits and tiles, you don’t need my advice.

I have said more than once that, if you are completely new to Print and Play, a good place to start is to go to Postmark Games and buy their whole catalog. Which I think is currently eight games so it’s not unreasonable. And if that’s as far as you go, you will still do well.

With that said, I want to highlight their first three games: Voyages, Aquamarine and Waypoints. Lots of content, solid mechanics and aimed at the general gamer audience. Accessible but full of interesting choices. Great examples of what you can do with Roll and Write.

All three of those games are multi-player solitaires, which is pretty common in the print-and-go niche of PnP. My next recommendation, on the other hand, is totally in your face.

Beards and Booty from Shiny Pigeon Games  is possibly the best Beer and Pretzels PnP game I’ve found. Pirates with special abilities beating the tar out of each other. Plenty of room for smack talk and other good fun. I do recommend always playing with sea monsters. They mix things up and make sure things keep happening.

Around the World in 10-15 Minutes also from Shiny Pigeon Games gets an honorable mention. It has a strong Ticket to Ride and a Roll and Write vibe and I really enjoy it but I also think it is very forgiving. When I play, it’s less of a question of will I do well, but how will I do well this time? That keeps me from giving it a wholehearted recommendation.

My last recommendation (at least for now) is Chateau from Rolling Rhino Games. It’s also the game that made me decide that I should post yet another blog like this. It’s a fill-in-the-grid Roll and Write, which is a ridiculously common mechanic. However, it has a bunch of different maps, each with their own special power. And it has interaction, letting you actively mess up other players’s plans. That’s when I said. ‘People can use this in their libraries’ 

This is far, far from a full list of PnP games that are out there that are worth your time playing. I will also admit that every last game on the list is definitely on the light side. And there are heavier PnP games out there, including ones that don’t require any construction. And I keep meaning to find the time to look at them :)

Still, like I said at the top, I think there is a real need for budget gaming. And this is my way of trying to help people find a way to do that. At the very least, I think I’ve put together enough for a few good family game nights here.

I just keep binging Chateau

 I’d been looking at Chateau for a couple years but I didn’t actually pull the trigger until PnP Arcade announced it was was shutting down business. (I bought a lot of files when that happened)

I had initially assumed it was a resource management game but quickly found out that it was a fill-in-the-grid game. Which is a game genre I enjoy but, particularly at this point, a game has to do more than fill in boxes.

In case you don’t want to read the rest of the blog, Chateau has several design choices that made it a really bingeable game for me. I have really been enjoying it and it has been hitting the table a lot.

I am not going to go through the rules and play in detail because it’s roll dice, consult a chart and draw the matching shape on the grid. Instead, I am going to go though the design elements that I think really make the game rock. 

First and foremost, the game has twenty different maps, all based on real castles. And each one comes has a different special power that, in some way, lets you break the rules. More than that, the game is set up for  asymmetrical play. In a multi-player game, everyone can have a different castle.

This is the single biggest reason I binge Chateau. Each castle is a different enough experience that each one is worth playing. A solitaire session for me is multiple maps. And it also adds a lot of value to multi-player game.

Second, interaction. Now, almost all of games of these types are multi-player solitaires. Part of the setup is drawing a five-square shape on the player-to-the-left’s map. When one’s are rolled, you fill in a square on the player-to-the-left’s map. For this genre, that’s war game level interaction.

(For solitaire play, there are rules to make those actions as inconvenient as possible lol)

Another element I appreciated is that for the four-and-five-sized shapes, you can only use each one once. And, while you do, you get the full assortment of four sided Tetris shapes, you only get five pentominoes. And you don’t get many of the more useful ones either lol Definitely adds a scarcity element to the game.

One thing I’m meh about is that your score is how many turns it takes to fill your castle. Lower score is better. It’s not terrible, but it doesn’t really make me sing. Quite frankly, it speaks well of the rest of the game that I don’t really mind this.

The same week I learned Chateau, I also learned Junk Drawer online. Now, if (or when) I had a physical copy of Junk Drawer, I’d pick it over Chateau to play with the kiddo. On the other hand, I’d pick Chateau for a more ‘gamer’ audience. 

The game comes in low art (which is what I’ve printed out) and much prettier full color art. If (or when) I had a regular group, I’d think about making a laminated full color set. At that point, it would have the same production values as a published Roll and Write. And sometimes, that’s what it takes to get it on the table.

I think the need for budget gaming just keeps getting greater. Chateau, between having low construction requirements and offering solid (if short) gameplay, I think fits the bill very well. (Maybe I should revisit that topic yet again) I enjoy Chateau and I think it has a role in many collections.

Where I babble too much about DC The New Frontier

 For years, I read and heard references to DC The New Frontier. I finally decided that I should actually read it. And, when I did that, I also realized I had no idea what it was actually about lol

And New Frontier turned out to be a wild ride indeed.

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DC the New Frontier is a examination of DC’s transition from the Golden Age to the Silver Age. Oh, it’s also an Elseworlds story, which means it’s out of continuity so anything can happen. (It’s an imaginary story but aren’t they all, to paraphrase Alan Moore)

It also deals with McCarthyism, racism and misogyny. None of these are new topics for revisiting DC in the 50s but New Frontier deals with them in a striking fashion. Possibly because it’s about as subtle as a baseball bat to the teeth.

The actual plot centers around the new generation, as well as the United States in general, having to come together to deal with an eldritch, Lovecraftian horror. Said horror is actually a revision of an element of DC comics that’s been around since 1960, which was a nifty touch. 

And the art by Darwyn Cooke is really cool. Very stylized and very emotive, the art conveys the overall tone and the characters’ emotions very well.

However, instead of the discussing the plot or the overall work, I wanted to comment on some specific characters that I found really interesting. Bullet points.

John Henry - A brand new character, a black man who fights back against the KKK in a clearly handmade costume. And who ends up being lynched but not before making a profound impact. The character and what he represents is as subtle as a hand grenade but things shouldn’t be subtle.

Hal Jordan - Hal is the closest thing New Frontier has to a main character and is journey to becoming the Green Lantern is a definite underpinning structure to the story. Portraying him as a pacifist who has to struggle with violence doesn’t really jibe with any other version of Hal but this is a stand alone story and makes him one of the most interesting Hal Jordans I’ve read.

J’ohn J’onzz the Martian Manhunter - Oh, J’ohn J’onzz is fun. Which he frequently is in any version. Insanely powerful, incredibly altruistic and always a stranger in a strange land. This version binge watches TV (which is one of the funniest part of a book that doesn’t have many laughs) to learn about the human race and becomes a pure hearted cop in corrupt Gotham. Hal Jordan may be the protagonist but J’ohnn is the MVP.

Challengers of the Unknown - the Challengers were a stepping stone between the adventure stories after superheroes went out of vogue in the late forties/early fifties and the silver age return of super heroes. Adventurers and science heroes who wear matching jump suits, they are regarded as Kirby’s dry run for the Fantastic Four over at Marvel. And their basic motivation is a suicide pact. They are heavily used in the New Frontier and that made me go and look up the original Kirby stories. Now that’s been own flavor of crazy.

New Frontier is a fascinatingly meta work because so much of it only works in the context of the reader being familiar with the source material. At the same time, it tells a fantastic story with underlining meaning.

‘There’s the door, spaceman’ isn’t just a badass line. It means something.

Junk Drawer hits the any audience mark

 I make it a point to try and learn at least one new game a month. It was getting to the middle of April and life had been too crazy for me to feel like learning anything. So I used one of my ‘break-glass-in-case-of-emergency’ methods and went to Board Game Arena to find a game to learn.

And, as it happens, Junk Drawer turned out to be a dandy little game.

Junk Drawer is a fill-in-the-grid-with-polygons game. Which is a genre that has no end of examples. Mind you, Blokus was a big deal for me when I first got into gaming and I still think Blokus Trigon is one of the best three-player abstracts that I’ve ever played.

So, I’m prepared to be sold but you got to give me a reason to buy in. (Did that sentence even make sense?)

The theme of Junk Drawer is organizing junk drawers. While not as exciting as World War IV or trading in the Mediterranean, it’s a theme that everyone can relate to. 

Everyone gets a set of twenty-one tiles, all the Blokus shapes except they have images of different types of bric a brac printed on them. There’s a set of cards of the tiles. Cards get shuffled and flipped and you place the matching tile. Boom, you know how to play.

So what’s the hook? What’s the clever bit? 

You don’t have one board. You have four five-by-five boards. And each one is going to have a different scoring condition, drawn from twenty-four possible scoring conditions. And each round of the game is four moves, placing a tile in each different grid.

That kicks things up a notch. Heck, maybe two notches.

None of these elements make the game add any real difficulty to learning or understanding the game. At the same time, it’s adds a lot to the decisions and replayability of the Junk Drawer. They add depth more than complexity.

Honestly, the closest thing the game has to a problematic element is that as soon as any player can’t make a legal move, the game ends for everyone. However, some of the scoring conditions do better with emptier drawers so forcing the end can be a strategic choice, as opposed to being a spoiler.

In short, Junk Drawer is a very intuitive game with a wide open decision tree that is easy to understand. Personally, I think it’s quite a bit of fun. It is a very solid family weight game.

I will keep on playing it online and, if I see a cheap copy, I would seriously think about picking it up. I think my whole family would have fun with it.

[Since then, I also learned Chateau, another polygon on grid games. Which I like even more, due to a number of little twists it throws at you. That said, everything I’ve written about Junk Drawer is true and I think it would work better for a family game night]

The Tinfoil Dosiers is a beautiful cosmic scream

 The Tinfoil Dossier series by Caitlin R. Kiernan is about government agents dealing with the Cthulhu mythos. (Which is well trod ground with works like Delta Green and the Laundry but there’s always room for more.) However, that description doesn’t do the series justice.

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The series consists of Agents of Dreamland, Black Helicopters and The Tindalos Asset. I understand that a shorter version of Black Helicopters predates Agents of Dreamland but every book is standalone. The Tindalos Asset makes references to the other books but works on its own.

The books are on the far end of the cosmic horror bell curve. They are bleak with each book including at least one chapter of a nightmarish future that has come to pass after the stars were right. Bad things happen. In Delta Green, humanity is trying to put off the end for just one more day. In the Tinfoil Dossier, humanity is hoping to mitigate the damage.

Each book is also written in nonlinear fashion, like Pulp Fiction. And, like Pulp Fiction, it’s not like the chapters are randomly shuffled. The stories build. I had to go back and check the dates at the start of each chapter.

And the books are very ensemble works. The Tindalos Asset is the one that has the closest thing to a protagonist. Each book is more about terrible events than following someone going through them.

The through line in the books (particularly because the awful futures don’t seem to be compatible) is an agent called the Signal Man who appears in every book. He is a broken old warhorse whose a barely functional alcoholic and completely burnt out. He is the very human element in an inhuman world

There are some nice touches. Agents of Dreamland connected the zombie-ant fungi with the fungi from Yuggoth, which I haven’t seen before. The omens that Cthulhu is waking in the Tindalos Asset are downright Biblical. And the climax of The Tindalos Asset was a surprising tonal shift while still feeling true to the work. 

I don’t know if Kiernan will write any more books for the Tinfoil Dossier series. There is always room for more ways to hideously end the world. However, the Tindalos Asset does mark a major change for the agency and could work as an end. And I am glad we got three of these books.

Just Desserts is no Fluxx

 My journey with Just Desserts is more interesting than It has any right to be.

You see, at some point, Looney Labs was selling or giving away beta copies of the game. I want to say 2008 but I’m honestly not sure about that. It came as uncut sheets of cards.

Now, if I were to get something like that today. I would get out a paper cutter, cut everything out and laminate the lot. But when I got those sheets, that was completely outside my wheelhouse. So I just hung onto the sheets. I might even still have them somewhere. 

So it’s a game that I’ve been aware of and been interested in for a while. But it took the solitary option on Board Game Arena for me to actually try the game out.

The game consists of two decks of cards. One deck is deserts that each have one to four symbols. There are ten different symbols and are things like chocolate and nuts and spices and so on. The other deck is customers who each have specific symbol requirements, including sometimes having restrictions. Some folks are allergic to peanuts after all.

It’s a game about delivering orders. While every customer has a favorite desert that fills all their requirements, you’re usually going to have to use multiple cards to serve one customer.

I’m not bothering to go into much details it’s honestly a game that you can figure out how it works just by looking at the cards. 

I’m honestly of two minds about Just Desserts.

On the one hand, I think it has some legitimate mechanical issues. Ten symbols are a lot to juggle, particularly in a game this light. Ten symbols makes hand management mostly guess work. Being able to serve a customer becomes very luck based.

Comparing Just Desserts to Looney Labs’ flagship game Fluxx, a game famously random, I feel Just Desserts is more random with meaningfully less strategy. (Admittedly, one of the major strategies of Fluxx is churn through the deck but that’s still a strategy)

On the other hand, I do enjoy the process of the game and I like how intuitive the game play is. And I also like the card art. The game just has a good feel.

I will go back to it on BGA but if I were buying a Looney Labs card game, I’d pick a flavor of Fluxx I don’t have. That would have more success at the table.