ara ara ara?

When I was in grad school, some of my classmates introduced me to modern board games like "The Resistance." This led me to playing social deduction games on internet forums, and both of these communities have been formative for me. I don't do a lot of blogging about it under this pseudonym, but for bingo this year, one of the squares is "not a book." Some of my online werewolf friends put together a mini-convention where we rent a cabin or vacation home together over a long weekend, and I figured that would be a good opportunity to learn some new games and write about the ones that would fit this challenge!

These are more "first impressions" than detailed reviews. In general a lot of them are like "meh, fine," but there's a selection bias here--if it's something that's really up my alley, I might have heard about it and played it already, the newer ones are more likely to be things I could take or leave. In terms of "what counts as fantasy/science fiction/speculative fiction" it's very arbitrary, in many of these the themes are extremely light so it's kind of like...whatever.

FaeKin: This is a brief, symmetrical, social deduction game (symmetrical in the sense that there isn't an informed minority/uninformed majority, the two teams are comparable) with players trying to deduce the highest-ranked player on both teams. You get peeks at information but there isn't a lot of public communication, and the endgame is just one mechanical action taken by one player, so it's not as engaging as something more substantial like Resistance or Werewolf (Mafia).

The card ranks are like a traditional deck of cards, except there's both an Ace (high) and a 1 (low), which felt needlessly confusing. The way cards are displayed when revealed, you point your face-up card toward the player who showed you a card higher than it. So if I play my 5 face up, pointing at Mike, we know one of Mike's cards ranks higher than a 5. And my card has a 5 printed in two colors at opposite ends, so depending on which one is pointing outwards, we know "Mike has a high white card" or "Mike has a high blue card." This was a nice thought. Unfortunately, in practice, the color distinctions seem very difficult to tell, and when you have a lot of people sitting around a rectangular table, it can be difficult to tell "is this pointing at Mike or Brian who's next to him."

In one of the games I had both the white Jack and the King so I showed people the Jack and kept the King hidden, so there would be some doubt over where the highest card was. One of my opponents tried to bluff by being like "I have the white Jack" and I was able to go "nope, that's a lie" and it was like "dang, good one." (We successfully won that round because he didn't know where the King versus the Queen was.)

It's a pun because "Fae Kin" sounds like "Faking," get it???

A book you could read alongside this: "War for the Oaks" (Seelie Court vs. Unseelie Court).

Alibis: This is a Codenames-type cooperative game where you have to give a clue that links two words, and your teammates have to guess which two words your clue refers to. Then you work together to narrow down the one word that wasn't clued by anyone, so you can be amusingly right for the wrong reasons. The art is based around supervillains, so we could say it's fantasy, but the theme has nothing whatsoever to do with the game and you could probably play this with Codenames cards and some other generic number cards. I don't think this adds anything that Codenames, Decrypto, etc. don't do better.

Valiant Wars: This is a light push-your-luck game with deckbuilder aspects, and the cards are various warriors and treasures from ye olde fantasy land. One of my friends commented later that the funniest part was one of our friends asking for a game that wasn't too "take that," and then immediately going for all the cards that forced other people to draw cards and risk misadventure.

My opinion about deckbuilders is that I strongly prefer games with a variable trade row (like Star Realms) to games with a static market (like Dominion, which invented the genre). I am happy to report that Valiant Wars is of the former type. But there isn't as much deeply synergistic deckbuilding as Star Realms, it's not something where you're going to go through your entire deck and then reshuffle. Push-your-luck games, like Diamant, often have a "everyone simultaneously decides whether they want to keep going or stop" mechanic, so the way that was implemented here created a few issues with turn order, who goes when? Might be more annoying for heavy/more serious gamers.

Like Dominion, you win by purchasing point-scoring cards, but those take up space in your deck and come with downsides, so it slows down people who get off to an early lead and allows others to catch up. I rushed out to an early lead with the good cards, and then slowed down and other people caught up to overtake me, so...working as intended.

Rebirth: This is by the highly prolific and well-regarded Reiner Knizia, and it's set in a post-apocalyptic Scotland. Mechanically, it's a little like Kingdom Builder (which is great); at the end of your turn, you draw a new tile, which will tell you which type of hex you're allowed to play on next turn. You have your opponents' turns to think about it, and then when your turn comes around again, you play a tile, and there are various point-scoring mechanisms.

Every time you build next to a different cathedral, you draw a secret objective card. Some of them are just "score three points at the end of the game," and others are like "if you achieve ___, score five points." I like having these kinds of goal mechanisms to give me something to build towards (one of my friends, who owns the games, likes this even more than I do), so thumbs-up. The little tokens you stack on top of the cathedrals make very cute little stacks, which is satisfying.

The theme is light but leads to some delightfully whimsical tiebreakers. Whoever has the most tiles next to a castle controls a castle. But in case of a tie, food and energy tiles count more than housing tiles, in post-collapse solarpunk world we appreciate the laborers rather than the rich consumers. If there's a tie for most points the end of the game, whichever of the tied players controls Edinburgh Castle wins. If none of the players involved in the tie control Edinburgh Castle, then whoever controls Stirling Castle wins, even if they weren't involved in the tie. I have no idea what was the playtesting conversation that led them to make that choice, but sure, I'm here for it.

IDK, it's fun, I'm just not sure if I'd choose it over Kingdom Builder.

A book you could read alongside this: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I haven't finished it yet, but the narrator wants you to know that "Edinburgh is certainly one of the most civilized cities in the world and the inhabitants are full as clever and as fond of pleasure as those of London."

The Gilded Realms: This is one of those games that takes forever to set up and explain, every round is divided into "Phases" and "Steps" and so forth. Then the game itself takes a couple of hours, even if you're not playing on "epic" mode.

Players are leading vaguely tropey fantasy land kingdoms, with heraldry that displays on the side of the enormous box. You play cards into your build queue. Every round, the queue advances, and cards move closer to completion. Once they pop out, they either go into your army (people), or contribute symbols to the kingdom (buildings). If you get the right combination of matching symbols over time, then you can upgrade your provinces. The army is used to fight the NPCs who may or may not attack at the end of the round. You can also use them to attack other players and steal their cards or their caravans (caravans require a multi-round investment of resources, and then you can establish trade routes, which pay off every time a new caravan returns). There's a cute little spinny component that everyone has and they simultaneously twist it around to indicate "are we doing attack, defense, or resource production this round."

At the beginning, each player gets a Quest, with rewards for completing it by the end of the sixth round out of nine. I like this kind of thing (see above), and this required me to upgrade my Agriculture. Additionally, each kingdom has asymmetric player powers; I had the chance to have special units in my army (but it was a little unclear how those cards worked), while other players had extra "shroud cards" and "market deck." How did those work? No idea, it was complicated enough keeping track of my own stuff.

At the end of the game, it's like, "finish building everything in your queue even if it would normally have taken more turns. Now every leftover resource gets converted into a silver. Two silvers make a gold. Five golds make a gem. Two gems make one point." Fortunately the upgraded provinces are a pretty substantial source of points, so at least the quest gives you something to work towards.

There are rules like "you can trade coins and resources with other players as much as you want," which we kind of ignored for the first half of the game and then had one really good trade round. Then when it clicked how to use resources to "expedite" cards through the queue, being able to convert coins into resources from the bank made sense. But there's just so much to absorb it feels difficult comprehending it all at first. Maybe it would be different if I knew I would be playing it multiple times, with opponents on a similar learning curve, but games this complex to explain usually leave me cold.

The theme has nothing whatsoever to do with "Dune," but it reminded me of the meme: "Can we have Sarduakar?" "No, we have Sarduakar at home." "The Sarduakar we have at home: Sarrukar" (the NPC enemies).

Ankh: Gods of Egypt: You're ancient Egyptian gods, battling to earn devotion and be remembered by history. But religious syncretism might cause the cults of multiple gods to merge together. It's possible that no deity will be worthy of immortality, the game can end with an "everyone loses" condition. And some of you may just be lost to the sands of time.

In reverse order. I don't have a problem at all with player elimination. In modern games, there's often a tendency for designers to be like "player elimination is a problem, it's not fun to sit around and watch while having nothing to do yourself," so some games are designed to avoid that. But if someone is far enough behind that sitting around and continuing to play is not going to be fun, maybe elimination will streamline things. Just funny to see people patting themselves on the back for reinventing the wheel.

Likewise, I don't really have a problem with the way the "everyone loses" condition was implemented here. (It didn't come up in our game, and the people who own this copy of the game have yet to see it.) There are some loud internet posters who are like, "if you're in fifth place, a situation where everybody loses is a better result for you than the one where the first-place person wins and you're still losing in fifth. So given those alternatives, everyone needs to optimize for the former type of strategy." But in practice, for a game like Ankh, I don't think this is a thing--I think the player in fifth is busy trying to accumulate as many points as possible for themselves that they're not worried about "oh, will this potentially prevent the leaders from escaping the everyone-loses outcome or not." 

But the "merge" mechanic...well, thematically it's great. The idea of "in the ancient times some people used to worship Amun and others used to worship Ra but now they've kind of blurred together into one Amun-Ra" fits perfectly with the theme (and yes, that was the pair that merged in our game, theological accuracy ftw). But. Sometimes I get insecure when I hear those loud internet guys being like "I MUST PROVE MY SUPERIORITY BY MINIMIZING THE NUMBER OF PLAYERS WHO CAN WIN WITH ME, A SHARED VICTORY IS INHERENTLY WORSE THAN A SOLO WIN."

Similarly, the fact that the merge point is known and predetermined, and scores can be very close going into it (the shared team rounds down to the score of the lowest-place god, and keeps the board position/monuments/troops of the second-to-last one) means there's a lot of room for kingmaking/trying to negotiate who you'll merge with to be in the best position. For someone like me, this is pretty stressful, because I don't want to be accused or suspected of forming alliances for out-of-game reasons, I'd rather it be as anonymous and this-game-only as possible.

There were people at this event who I've been gaming with (online or in person) for over a decade. We're all more chill, organized, nutritious-eating adults than we were ten years ago. But when my first impressions of someone are them going "I AM VERY SMART, ALL MUST BOW DOWN TO MY GREAT INTELLIGENCE, NONE OF YOU CAN BE AS STRATEGIC AND BRILLIANT AS ME..." that's a gut impression that's very hard to shake no matter how much evidence my rational brain has to rebut it. The thought of being like "oh no, I can only compete for a shared win, that'll never be as brilliant or competent as an outright win" is not appealing in that sense.

Something something there's a joke to be made about "behold, the whole army of the Pharoah, all his chariots and chariot drivers, have been thrown into the sea." It's me, I'm the one who got wiped from the map.

Battlestar Galactica: Before Resistance or many of the other contemporary social deduction games, there was this, a much heavier, crunchier, co-op but maybe there are traitors, game, based on the TV show. And I'd never played it. (I watched four episodes of the TV show early in the pandemic when everything shut down and was like "this is SF for people who don't like SF, no thank you.")

I had never played the game. And it's kind of like...it takes two-three hours even among experienced players, if I'm just a n00b, I'll never be able to break in and catch up with everyone else. (There were also some other misunderstandings on my part giving it the mystique of a "this is what we do at the cool kids' club and you're not invited" thing at times, and I think I understand better that it's not that great.) But at this event, there were a couple other people in the same boat of "I'd love to learn but it seems overwhelming if I'm the only n00b/almost-n00b," so we used that as an excuse to try.

Well, the game is very complicated. One of the experienced players wound up sitting out and mostly GMing, but we kept her busy just resolving all of the "Cylon ships" symbols on Crisis cards. (We played with some elements of the Exodus expansion, but I could not tell you what they were.) I could not teach this game to a group of new players because I would be entirely at a loss for "and then...the bad guy ships...IDK, pew pew pew. Look, this blank corner means the humans are no closer to making an FTL jump, though!"

When it comes to succeeding/failing the Crisis skill checks, everyone can put some number of cards from their hand into the pot, then two random cards are added so there's plausible deniability. Some colors are good, some colors are bad. The problem is, if everyone is able to exactly claim what cards they played, that would narrow down the bad guys pretty quickly. So the rules say you're allowed to say only stuff like "my two cards helped a little" or "my one card helped a lot" (with the understanding that, of course, you could be lying). It wasn't a big deal for our group, but it could be an issue for some of the Loud Internet Guys, and I think "semantic restrictions" like this are somewhat of a flaw in principle.

Unlike most Resistance/werewolf games, there's a "sleeper agent" mechanic that doesn't trigger until about halfway through the game, so your loyalty could change at that point. I had been playing as a human for the first half (and nobody seemed suspicious, although it turned out the player next to me was actually a cylon from the start), but switched at halfway. I don't think it's a damning flaw that "you could be playing half the game as a human and then shift," like, you could compare it to something like "Betrayal at House on the Hill" where you spend the first half just running around opening doors but the win conditions/loyalties haven't been established yet. But it's hard to recommend this over something like Resistance that's much more streamlined.

So once I flipped, I started subtly failing crisis checks. The player next to me tried to go outed, but there were rules issues about what counts as an action and what doesn't, so she technically hadn't revealed "yet." The human players were using their powers effectively, launching nukes and stuff (because nothing proves your human bona fides like...wanton use of weapons of mass destruction! It's thematic), so there was suspicion on me, but nothing decisive. But then we had to break for dinner. At that point, they decided to call the game for purposes of moving on, giving other people a chance to play before their bedtime, etc. The way in which this was handled left a bad taste in my mouth because it kind of felt like they'd just declared me a Cylon in absentia and flipped my card to see my power (I had the "use this as an action to push the FTL jump tracker back two spaces," which I could have done the next turn to powerful effect), and because one of the other players had been part of an abortive/not-really-complete game before, I didn't want him to feel like he was missing out or being screwed over again. But it worked out okay and I think all of us felt like we'd actually gotten a chance to see what the game was about, enough to say that I could try it again some other time but I wouldn't feel like I was missing out on something amazing if I didn't.

There's still a lot more that we didn't see, though--like, there's another region of the board with special actions for outed Cylons to take, we never got to that. I had a once-per-game power that could take place on any crisis check, not just my turn, without an action, so that kind of thing felt like an intriguing balance to "when you're in the brig there's a bunch of stuff you can't do."

tl;dr if I had to pick one of these to play again, assuming no time/player count restrictions, I think Rebirth would be my first choice and BSG my second. But mostly I know what I like, and I'm mostly grateful to have these friends to explore many more games with. <3