The Actual Table

[OhBollox]

We had a banger of a game, even for our usual enjoyment. Blue cast about desperately for a victory condition and failed, including spending his last Favour and Secret. This was only reversed by me taking pity on him, and making him a Citizen and arranging a trade of Favour to help him out of the hole. Red became a citizen via Long-Lost Heir, hoovered up Relics, including stealing them from Blue, and making tiny tiny advances towards keeping the empire together. I made big strides in sustaining and expanding the empire, reaching five sites at one point, but the Yellow Exile destroyed the economy with the Alchemist, he reconfigured the entire Favour system to pour into his pockets, and systematically deprived everyone of funds. The Black Exile caused possibly the most trouble, and a truce with Yellow ended in upsetting most of the territorial gains of the empire.

The game looked decided very early on, but Blue somehow swung a self-Exile, scooped up the Vision of Faith, and recovered the Darkest Secret. Red stayed out of the way, kept quiet, and contributed little, and as I, Black, and Yellow all furiously tussled for the Oathkeeper tile, with Yellow’s sheer weight of Favour beginning to tell, and the game end die roll cancelled as a result, I put together a huge turn, using the Old Oak to churn out Secrets and recover the Darkest Secret, and my dwindling Supply to Campaign one last time, conquering a site, recovering the last remaining Relic, which turned out to be the Map. With the added Supply from the Map, I moved once more and Campaigned once more, and crushed another site, pushing Yellow out of the running. Yellow’s revenge was foiled by one result, as they assaulted my last bastion, the Keep, manned by a few loyal troops, and the game finished after going the full distance. Red’s Successor victory was quietly and sensibly won. The game went from three of the five players being somewhat lost and falling behind, to all five competing for the win and everyone having a good chance. If one battle had been different, Black or Yellow could have won. Blue ended up fulfilling his vision and would have won, but Empire victories take precedence, so I won, but Red’s victory piggybacked mine.

An amazing game.

[kennfusion]

I have decided to go to PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia next month. Anyone else from the US planning on stopping by there?

[whovian223]

Mission #6 of my Storm Above the Reich campaign.

The end of the first season. Will I get enough points to “not lose” and be able to continue?

[OhBollox]

We actually managed to hit everything I brought on holiday, from Oath to Fury of Dracula, and one of my old favourites, Dune. Only 4P, but with three new players, we still had an absolutely ace time, and I made three new converts. Atreides was Not Happy with their role of information broker, but was loving their role by the end, helping their Harkonnen ally in battle with prescience, and sliding the Emperor and my poor Fremen multiple useless or redundant cards in the bidding phase. The Emperor player had no trouble being the Bank of Daddy for me, and I had no trouble being his footsoldiers, but in true Dune fashion, I won every battle and yet lost the war, as I sliced up every Harkonnen animal that came my way, used my knowledge of the weather patterns to avoid the storms (and decoy enemies into them), and even fed my ally spice from time to time. The Emperor played a blinder, but unfortunately thanks to Atreides meddling, never saw a single defence card, and the Harkonnen deploying a traitor at a critical time ensured the Emperor never won a battle and lost a stronghold. They can’t wait to get to it with more players, which is great news.

[whovian223]

I reviewed a great, and quick, push your luck card game.

TEN by Alderac Entertainment Group is quite good.

[Natus]

@OhBollox we are Arrakis brothers in spirit. Or Herbertian brothers? Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter, you get the idea.

I also got my Dune on this weekend with the full six, including my own Kwiz–I mean my son, who played the Spacing Guild. I used the GF9 components but a homebrew board a friend made for me ages ago. I tweaked it to mirror the info on the GF9 version, and it works pretty well. I love Dune like I love HIS/VQ, and I have spilled entirely too much ink on the various rules wrinkles over the years. That said, there were very few rules issues this time, only the length of the game bothered me, as the game session threatened to break past six hours, but ended with a sudden Atreides-BG victory, more of a bang than a whimper if I’m honest. That’s a really annoying alliance to play against, although there was one magical victory when Alia of the Knife betrayed her sisters to my benefit. Sadly, my Fremen were allied with the Guild, which is just not a potent alliance. I’m still getting used to paying spice for units in battle after decades of not doing so, which meant that I let a few close victories slip away.

I’m very interested in the new 4-player version. I’d like to see if it works and how it works.

[whovian223]

For fans of Roll Player (which I totally am), I reviewed the Fiends & Familiars expansion.

It’s good! But not the best of the two expansions.

[Tamsk]

Currently at a hotel in Devon for GridCon, in the middle of my first games convention since early 2020. Arrived Tuesday evening, leaving Sunday afternoon, as much boardgaming as I can manage in the time between. It’s good to be getting back into the “people! Games! Games with people!” mindset again after so long, even if there’s still an odd undercurrent of tense wariness: daily lateral flow tests, wearing masks while moving between tables, windows open for ventilation, no hugs even when meeting friends for the first time in two years. Peculiar atmosphere all round, but I’ll take it for what it is.

(Played so far: Just One, 6 Nimmt, Azul Summer Pavilion, Merv, TRAILS, Miyabi, Furnace, Kokopelli, CuBirds, A Gentle Rain, Pulsar 2849, Sherlock: The Tomb of the Archeologist. Up next in half an hour or so: Ark Nova. A nicely balanced mix of crunchiness and fluff, I think.)

[kennfusion]

That’s awesome! I am going to Pax Unplugged in Philly in a few weeks which I am looking forward to. Wise Wizards is running a Star Realms Legends Tournament for that also.

[Mirefox]

Are there any board games that really give the feel of a classic PC RTS like StarCraft or Age of Empires? I think such a game may be a bit with my friends. Availability would be a plus - I’ve been recommended Nexus Ops in the past but it is out of print.

[OhBollox]

That depends on what aspects of it you’re looking at. I love Quartermaster General, for instance, and you can probably find a game in the series that fits your player count.

Other options would be Runewars, Forbidden Stars (also OOP), and Ares Project. There’s a bunch of games ‘inspired’ by RTS games (Company of Heroes, Heroes of Air, Land and Sea, etc) that don’t seem to be very good even if they are ‘closer’ to PC games.

[Natus]

The only design I can recommend is Age of Empires III, designed by Glenn Drover, which was one of the few good video game adaptations. However, the game’s topic of colonialism and subjugation of natives has aged badly. As much as I love the game, I don’t know if I’ll ever get it back on the table.

[Baelnor]

See, I don’t really get why “Colonialism” gets such a terrible wrap. Human beings have been awful to human beings forever. Egypt with their slaves, the Vikings with their raping and pillaging, the tribes in Africa, Australia and other indigenous peoples killed and enslaved each other on the regular.

I understand the propaganda that white = bad in the current zeitgeist; they have the money and the power and essentially “won” through technology and culture. Even the anti-China sentiment about whatever’s it is they are doing just demonstrates how people fear their power and progress.

In traditional power structures, the most powerful don’t answer to anyone. They do what they like, there is no umpire. Even now, the only umpire is the US (when they can / want to through the financial system), but that’s it.

Mini rant over, and if you feel uncomfortable about colonial themes, then that’s okay.

I just don’t really get it

[OhBollox]

The current rejection of colonialism in games isn’t about colonialism per se, it’s about the most popular depictions of colonialism only showing it as a (at worst) morally neutral activity, and often showing things like grinning natives bringing you, their benign overlords, goods and riches, ignoring the vast amounts of warfare, subjugation, and slavery that went on. I’m actually all for games with colonialism, as long as they don’t whitewash it, with the resulting issue that one’s harmless antics shipping goods from Africa is now shown in a rather harsher light. Dropping hundreds of people overboard in the middle of the Atlantic because you’re overloaded, and promptly claiming on the insurance when you get to port, has a rather different feel than “I ship my goods from Africa to America. I get five money.”

Egypt with their slaves, the Vikings with their raping and pillaging, the tribes in Africa, Australia and other indigenous peoples killed and enslaved each other on the regular.

I believe the difference there is, Egypt didn’t enslave the entirety of Africa and insist it was actually to the benefit of Africans. The Vikings raped and pillaged (it’s an overblown reputation, quite honestly), but they didn’t then insist those raped and pillaged should be grateful. African, Australian and American tribespeople didn’t do their level best to conquer an entire landmass, and then make board games hundreds of years later pointing out “But we built the railroads!”

What makes modern colonialist attitudes so bad isn’t man’s inhumanity to man, it’s the lying, hypocrisy, and denial that anything bad happened that can be attributed to colonialism, and even if it can, we built a bunch of infrastructure, so you should be happy we accidentally genocided millions.

[Baelnor]

Thanks! That makes a bit more sense. I guess that’s the challenge when the dominant evil doer is still in a dominant position of power and justifies the efforts.

The scale doesn’t bother me so much in comparison to the other worlds. Technology enabled it globally but local devastation still existed.

Okay, thanks for the additional context. I don’t think I saw the grinning natives and the “it’s for your own good” / “the is the best for everyone” propaganda that went with it.

Humans can be awful

[Natus]

I’d be hyper-aware of issues of colonization anyway even if I wasn’t married to a woman from Lebanon, which was a former colony of France. There’s also a difference between “not getting something”, which is where education comes in, and being dismissive of it. And if you live in the UK or the USA, it’s very much an ongoing issue.

In AoE3, you send conquistador expeditions to conquer lands from the natives. It’s pretty blatant, a lot more so than the “slaves” in Puerto Rico.

[OhBollox]

Colonialism

Is one of my favourite titles for this, and it tends to stun people a little because it is an honest look at what was actually done.

Compare and contrast with Mombasa, which even has a bit in the rulebook from the designer going “Don’t talk to me about colonialism, mate.”

[Snotty128]

They changed the discovery mechanic slightly in the version I played. I played empires: age of discovery which is the reimplementation of age of empires 3.

Whereas your version has tokens with the number of natives you need to defeat (depicted by a graphic showing half dressed native warriors). In empires the same mechanic is abstracted to a resistance number. It had honestly never occurred to me that I was out there killing natives, as it’s captains that give the biggest boost to success. I figured it was just the difficulty of finding the place I was exploring.

There’s barely any mention of indigenous people elsewhere in the game (conquest of aztecs, Incas excepted). I can see Ohbolloxs point about colonialism being abstracted would apply to this game too

[rinelk]

I think I’d nuance what @OhBollox said somewhat—I think the hypocritical demands for worship probably also have a long history, and were also present among the other bad peoples of the past. And I get that the colonizers might well look not so much worse as more effective than the peoples they were colonizing, usually. I do think some of the suppressed cultures had some very cool, humane features and it’s a great loss to humanity that they’ve been largely destroyed, but certainly it wasn’t just Europeans who were dicks.

But what bugs me about this stuff is that it reinforces a view of history which encourages in me a worldview which makes more likely my support of policies I oppose. I don’t really care about 17th-century colonialism; sure, it was bad, but it’s beyond anyone’s capacity to do anything about it now, so that’s not where making moral judgments makes the world better. I also think that, back when I used to play games with colonialist themes and thought about the problems with colonialism not at all, playing them didn’t make that any worse.

The problem for me comes from that fact that I’m inclined to think about modern-day colonialist policies a little, and I don’t want to stop. That’s really what I’m trying to avoid by being cognizant of this in my gaming: they often inculcate the skill of thinking about the benefits but not the costs of policies from which I might benefit.

So, I don’t really care about the hypocrisy of colonizers from 17-whatever. I care about my hypocrisy today. I’m not ready to give it up entirely, but I don’t want to make it worse. What colonialism seems to have been so good at wasn’t just being hypocritical, but encouraging much of society to get so good at the doublethink that they were able to commit to genuinely impressive moral precepts at home despite supporting horrific policies abroad. And now, I basically bought into those moral precepts, and I’m trying to get a little better about universalizing them. Games with unproblematic colonialism work like propaganda, just as the organization of the British Empire’s economy allowed the English to develop the habit of seeing their dominion as just and good. So I feel like playing such a game is a lot like choosing to view propaganda: so long as I’m careful to counteract its effects, it’s fine. But there are games which aren’t going to subtly (even unintentionally) propagandize me, and I generally prefer for my mind to be engaged by the game and the players, not antidotes to the messages of the game.

[Baelnor]

Hmm… so how do we feel about spirit island?