Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles was another one of those games that I had some fond childhood memories of. I’ve played a smattering of the game here and there throughout my teenage years, and one time I even got to play it multiplayer, which I’ll go into depth on that later. I’ve always remembered really enjoying Crystal Chronicles, but I’ve never owned it, so I’ve never beaten it before. That changes today, let’s dive into one of the first multiplayer, non-turn based Final Fantasy games, originally published for the Nintendo Gamecube in 2003.
Story
The world is covered by a toxic substance called Miasma. Settlements are able to survive only in the shadow of a crystal, which provides a purifying presence. But these crystals lose their purifying power over time, so each village sends a caravan out into the world. The caravanners are able to travel around the world thanks to a crystal chalice, that has a small shard of crystal embedded in the top. The crystal shard provides a small sphere of safety from the Miasma. The caravan’s goal is to find myrrh trees to collect myrrh drops that can be used to recharge the town’s crystal. The world is gated by these intense Miasma streams, which require your crystal chalice to possess a specific element to pass, which can usually be acquired in a nearby dungeon.
As you adventure out into the world, you’re fed little vignettes as you encounter other caravanners and characters. Every encounter is then recorded in your journal. Similarly, when you enter a dungeon, you’re given a small narration that sounds like the entry from someone else’s journal. And once you beat the boss of the level and collect a Myrrh drop, you record your adventure in your own journal.
It only takes 3 drops of myrrh to recharge the crystal, after which you are forced to return home and your hometown of Tipa throws the yearly celebration to celebrate your return and the charging of the crystal. Then, after the town mayor tells you a little tale of a past caravan’s actions, you set out again to collect more myrrh drops.
Throughout your adventures you’ll hear of, and eventually run into a character called The Black Knight, who screams about a light stealing his memories and he can’t remember who he is anymore. You’ll also run into a group of inept thieves, a clan of armoured Lilties, and various other minor characters, each encounter making the world feel more fleshed out and lived in.
Eventually, you’ll make your way to the Lynari Desert, where if you’ve been paying attention to the poems shared by the charlatan Gurdy, you can solve a puzzle to unlock a 5th element for your chalice. This 5th element allows you to pass through all the Miasma streams, including the one gating off Mag Mell, a village of Carbuncles at the foot of Mount Vellenge. At the end of Mount Vellenge, you encounter the Meteor Parasite, which is a 3 phase boss battle. As you prepare to deliver the final blow, you’re interrupted by a disembodied voice, and you suddenly find yourself on an ethereal plain with a figure made entirely of light.
The figure of light reveals herself to be Dio, Dio, together with Ream, eat memories. While Ream prefers to gorge himself of the negative memories, Dio just nibbles on little memories from time to time, which explains the Black Knight’s madness. Ream won’t allow you to destroy the Meteor Parasite, as it’s the source of the Miasma, and the Miasma causes so many negative memories that he just loves to devour.
Once you defeat Ream, he absorbs Dio into himself, and again attacks, refusing to allow himself to fade away. Once you defeat Ream a second time, you find yourself back at the Meteor Parasite, which appears to be withered and dying. You strike it once more, it dies, and the land is free from the scourge of Miasma.
The story of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is fairly non-linear and is light on exposition. Dio and Ream being the unseen final bosses of the game were a complete surprise to me. But I suppose at this point it’s almost more expected for a random and sudden deity to appear as the final final boss in this series.
Gameplay
Unlike past Final Fantasy games, Crystal Chronicles is a 3D real time action RPG. As you crawl through the dungeons you’ll acquire items and magicite, which you can add to your command list. Attack and Defend are always available in your command list, and you cycle through your commands with the shoulder buttons before pressing A to activate the command.
You can chain up to 3 attacks together with some careful timing, and most of the game is just you, wailing on the enemies with your sword until they fall. In fact, most of the combat in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is just you rushing in, hitting the monster 3 times, then moving slightly to dodge its attacks, before delivering 3 more hits. Rinse and repeat until everything is dead. Another aspect of the combat is the Focus attacks. All magic requires a few seconds of focus (holding the command button) before they’re ready to cast. Then a spell reticle appears on the ground, allowing you to target areas far away from your avatar.
You retain items like food and crafting materials from level to level, but you need to recollect your magicite every level. The most important one being Cure. There is no MP or mana system here, so once you get a Cure spell, you’re able to easily keep your health at full. Sometimes it requires some careful timing so you don’t get smacked in the face as you charge your spell, but in general, once I found a Cure, I felt pretty safe for the rest of the dungeon. You can also fuse magicite together to create stronger spells. 2 Fire spells will give you a Fira, while two different elemental magicite will let you cast Gravity. Sometimes you can get Mog to help you out a bit, too.
Oh yeah, Mog. Remember in the story section where I said caravans have a crystal chalice to keep the Miasma at bay while they adventure throughout the land? Yeah, Mog is a Moogle that carries your chalice. You can have him drop it, and he’ll sometimes provide a bit of support if you charge a spell. He’ll charge a spell of the same type, and move his spell reticle on top of yours, combining your spells, as if you had multiple magicite fused together. The problem with this system is 2 fold. 1, Mog is entirely unreliable to actually cast a spell. And 2, if he’s not holding the chalice, you can’t move around freely without dipping into the Miasma, which saps your health.
Throughout each level, you can find 4 artifacts that will boost your stats, provide extra command slots, or extra hearts. At the end of each level, you’re given a chance to keep one artifact permanently. The level always provides 4, no matter how many you find, so finding them all just gives you a choice of 8 in the end.
As I touched on above, every dungeon holds a Myrrh tree for you to harvest a drop from. Each tree only produces one drop of myrrh every 3 years, meaning you’ll need to travel further and further to find myrrh drops until 3 years have passed. When you do revisit an area, you’ll often find that it’s changed. The monsters are stronger, maybe a drought cleared a river path that didn’t exist before, and the level boss will have acquired new abilities for an added challenge, too.
Thoughts
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is a game that is short on plot but strong on vibes. There’s a real sense of loneliness and melancholy as you adventure through this tortured world. Everyone is struggling to survive, the Miasma is ever-present on your doorstep, but no one seems to mind. They go through their days, seemingly fairly carefree, secure in the thought that the caravan will return by the end of the year to recharge their crystal. There is one dungeon, Tida Village, that is an abandoned town where the caravan never returned. The narration introducing the location is haunting:
The sun once smiled on this village more than any other. But one day, their crystal’s blessing faded. The villagers eagerly awaited their caravan’s return; but for them, the crystal would never shine again. It is said that not a single one of them tried to escape. All stood fast waiting for the caravan, hoping to the very end. After hearing that tale, I felt the weight of my burden like never before.
There is a sense of sadness that is pervasive throughout the game, but you won’t know it by the music. Beautiful woodwinds and simple, jaunty tunes make this soundtrack absolutely wonderful. I can’t help but bob my head to the gorgeous, provincial tunes. All the music is made using classic or ‘ancient’ instruments. No heavy metal guitar riffs like the final boss music of Final Fantasy X over here. Composer Kumi Takano knocked it out of the park with beautiful, simple music that imbues the game with an incredible amount of charm. Easily one of the best OSTs in the series.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is a surprisingly short game. My in-game timer reads only 12 hours after beating the final boss, but I suspect that timer is somewhat truncated, considering how often I died and had to reset in a level. If you do fall, you have the option to continue the dungeon you’re currently working on, or reload your last save. If you choose to continue the dungeon, you’ll be dropped at the start of the room you’re in, all the items and magicite you’ve collected will remain in your inventory, the monsters you defeated stay gone, but any items you consumed are also gone. This was mostly a problem during boss fights where I used one or two phoenix downs, only to die anyway, and have to retry the boss from the start, but with less phoenix downs.
The final dungeon represents a significant difficulty spike that is worth mentioning. The Final boss in particular was a horrid 5 stage affair. I quickly burned through my phoenix downs and had to take down the last two forms one at a time. If only I had a friend around to revive me when I fall.
The Multiplayer Elephant in the Room
Back in 2003 when Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles was released, it had a novel mechanism to allow for multiplayer play. Because a player has to go into their menus a fair number of times, having all players play from the same screen just wouldn’t make sense, it would destroy the flow. So instead, each player needs to have their own Gameboy Advance and a GameCube link cable. This gives every player their own screen to manage their inventory from and access their won information without disrupting the flow of the game. The downside for me, however, was that I grew up in a small town and never had access to the GameCube link cables. I was never willing to spend my few coins back then on a peripheral over a new game. But I did get to try multiplayer once when I was traveling to a cousins house, so I’m not totally ignorant of the multiplayer experience.
There are a couple of downsides to this approach, however. Because all players need to remain within the range of the crystal chalice, when one player dives into their menu, the whole party has to wait for them anyway. Secondly, the moment you have at least 2 players, Mog is no longer a part of the team. Someone always has to carry the chalice, which cuts their movement speed by at least half. It’s not exactly fun being the chalice holder while your teammates run up and kill the monsters before you even have a chance to drop the chalice and pull your weapon.
Now, the loss of Mog is regrettable, but it is still fun to play this game with your friends. The bosses are an interesting challenge, and syncing up and casting your spells on the same spot offer a really exciting moment of collaboration. The character you played was saved in the village, letting you power them up as you and your friends moved through the dungeons together.
Without other players though, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles feels like a lonely affair. Your avatar walks alone into battle, sits alone at camp sites, meets up with other caravans on the road, totally alone. The loneliness does play into the overall sense of melancholy that Crystal Chronicles presents, and I would largely be fine with it. There were some particularity frustrating moments where the puzzles of a dungeon obviously wanted 2 or more players to do something at the same time. Or one player is supposed to stand on a pad and another player is supposed to grab a key that reveals itself. Never mind the existence of the Life spell to resurrect your fallen comrades, which is largely wasted in the solo experience.
My in-game timer tells me that it took a mere 12 hours to beat Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, but it feels much longer than that. Perhaps it’s because the pace of the game is slower, or the timer for a level restarts after you die. Either way, I came away from my Crystal Chronicles play though less keen on the game than my nostalgic memories had me feeling before. I still enjoyed the experience, especially the music. But I won’t lie and say that I’m likely to replay this game sometime in the future. The story is drip-fed to players, the villain comes out of nowhere, and there’s never a sense of over arcing progression or building tension. You just keep adventuring until you happen to take down the cause of all the Miasma. The combat is repetitive and without multiplayer, the slow pace made it harder for me to want to come back to this game at the end of each day. I don’t think it’s a bad game by any means, it’s certainly charming and nostalgic. But it sure does show its age and technical limitations in 2026.
Disclaimer: A copy of Pioneers in Peril was provided by the designer for review
I don’t normally begin reviews by talking about the production, but in the case of Pioneers in Peril, the production is the star of the show. A fully wooden, hand made game by designer Matt Terry in his solar and wind powered garage. This game isn’t just another product, it’s obviously a passion project, marrying a love of board games, wood working, and western story telling.
Pioneers in Peril stands out on your shelf because of it’s all wood production. When you lift the lid and start riffling through the hundreds of wooden chits, you’ll smell the cut wood, you’ll feel a splinter here and there, and you’ll see the imperfections that make every copy of this game unique. A whole big game made my one guy in his garage is the kind of artistry that I want to see more of in the board game scene, and I applaud Matt Terry in taking this approach. Instead of shipping files off to China for a quick print, he’s built himself a tiny production facility and his labour of love truly shines through. And this has to be a labour of love, because there are a lot of wooden pieces in the box, all laser cut and assembled by hand. It’s rustic and handmade, it feels purpose built rather than cheaply produced.
I’ll be the first to say that I don’t want every single one of my games to get this all wood treatment, but for Pioneers in Peril, it fits the theme. The handmade wooden aesthetic fits the old west pioneer setting so very well. The game starts with the centre tile, showing the bank, store, blacksmith, school, church, and saloon, and nothing more. Beyond the edges of town is wilderness, yet to be explored. On your turn, should you choose to, you’ll press yourself against the boundaries of the map and reveal what lies beyond.
A 4x game at its heart, Pioneers in Peril wants you to Explore, Expand, exploit and exterminate. Moving has you rolling a D6 (and doubling the number if you have a horse), then exploring has you revealing tiles as you walk your pieces into empty space. Forests, mountains, pastures, fields, rivers, deserts, all these land types also represent a resource that can be extracted and exploited. You’ll stake a claim, build buildings, and then you’ll need to defend your buildings from your competitors. You’ve staked this land, so you need to defend it from interlopers.
Also there’s a bandit that needs shooting every now and then, lest he causes havoc, but I’ll touch on him later.
One of the first things that struck me about Pioneers in Peril is just how much stuff there is. Both in the box and in the game. On your turn, each of your pioneers can do 2 actions, and there are, and I kid you not, 16 actions in this game. Most are fairly simple, like praying where pay $2 and draw a card (unless you have less than $5, then praying is free). And that rule example of “Do a thing, except for in this circumstance”, is fairly indicative of the entire rulebook. There are different win conditions and consequences for shootouts, depending on the participants. Player vs. Player, Player vs. Bandit, Sheriff vs. player, and Sheriff vs. Bandit, all of these scenarios exist, and requires the person holding the rulebook to remember what to do in each of those scenarios.
What I’m getting at here is that this game, production and rules both, are not Svelte, elegant productions. They don’t achieve a great deal with minimal components or rules overhead. Instead, they’re bulky, cumbersome at times, but if this is the kind of game you have a craving for, it’ll satisfy that craving like few other games will.
A game of Pioneers in Peril ends when someone achieves 20 points, and you earn points by having pioneers, buildings, homesteads, and diplomas. Each round you activate your workers and explore the land, adding hex tiles to the board. The hex tiles can be useful, developable land, like mountains, forests, and pastures, each land type will support a specific industry. But it can also be unforgiving and tough terrain, such as Deserts and Canyons. Should you so desire, as an action, you can pay some cash to stake a claim on a tile. Then in a future action, you can pay some more cash to build a building on that tile. If you happen to build a Ranch, Farm, Mine, or Sawmill, you’ll roll a dice and place that many resources onto that building. As yet another future action, you can choose to process that resource, provided you own the corresponding tool, like an ax for processing timber from a sawmill or a pickaxe for pulling coal from a mine.
In case you were wondering, if someone develops a coal mine and then wanders off, yes, you can sneak in behind them and pull coal from their building. Doing so is likely to get you shot, however.
So all these actions serve to earn you resources, which you can then use to sell or trade with. Because at the end of the day, all the things that earn you points cost money. Expanding your homestead costs a lot of money, but doing so allows you to have more pioneers in Peril. Of course that means you have more mouths to feed, and failing to feed those mouths will result in your pioneers perishing. Cash also works for tuition, earning your pioneers a diploma, giving you a special ability for the rest of the game. Again, 20 point of buildings, pioneers, and diplomas is how you win the game.
The last thing the players do on their turn is move the bandit. He starts off the board, but slowly crawls down a track before entering Peril. The bandit has a bunch of rules dictating where he wants to go (largely the saloon to buy a drink), but he can and will hold players up. Players can choose to have a shootout, or just succumb to the holdup, in which they roll the dice and lose that amount of money from their supply to the bandit.
At this point, I’ve mentioned the shootout a couple of times, so lets dig into that. Unlike the rest of Pioneers in Peril, which is a economic game about buying and selling goods to build a wild west empire, the shootout is more reminiscent of Dutch Blitz. Both players take their decks, ante up the number of bullets they want to spend on this encounter, then SPRAY AND PRAY BABY!!!!
*ahem*, I mean, both players count down, Three, Two, One, Draw! then both players flip over cards one at a time as fast as they can until one player pulls a HIT card and that player shouts HIT. The attacker deck has a single hit card out of the 10 in the deck while the defender has 2 hit cards. You only get to flip as many cards as bullets you put up for ante, and if you chose to put up less than 10 bullets, well, you might just never hit anything.
This shootout mechanic is quite a change of pace from the rest of the game, it’s fast and frenetic. I won’t lie and say my heart didn’t beat a little faster when I stared into the eyes of my enemy, wondering which one of us was going to walk away from this encounter alive. The player who looses the shootout, loses their pioneer, and the winner has the chance to loot the body, adding insult to injury.
Pioneers in Peril is an interesting game. It’s economic focus on building and accruing wealth, and using that wealth efficiently to earn the points required to win make it feel like a euro game. But the randomness from the 6 sided die and the shootout mechanics keep one boot firmly planted into the amerithrash zone (although that’s not a term I’ve used for a long time). I think players who really prefer economic games will feel frustrated by this experience in more than one turn. The events can bestow random blessings and just as quickly take them away each round, the D6 might mean the mine you spent so much time and effort building only spits out a single nugget of coal. Sometimes life is unfair, and Pioneers in Peril leans into that cosmic irony.
In fact, Pioneers in Peril leans into a lot of that difficult homesteader lifestyle. From the production, to the aesthetic, to the boons and banes doled out seemingly at random. It captures that feeling that life and the world is always against you. You constantly need to worry about your food supplies, if your industries are producing, and worry if some ne’er-do-well is going to try to steal what you’ve worked so hard to achieve. Maybe you’ll be that person, because you desperately need just a little more food to feed your growing family, and someone left their field unattended. Maybe you’re just 2 dollars short of your next milestone, and a shootout is the fastest way to get that cash. Maybe you’ll do it, just because its fun to be an agent of chaos and your opponent is only one turn away from winning the game.
Pioneers in Peril is a rules dense game, but the rules almost always make sense thematically, making it a bit easier to digest. The whole game feels like the theme was in mind from the first moments of conception, rather than a window dressing pasted on after the fact. Maybe it’s the fresh cut wood smell in my nose, but playing this game certainly made me feel like we were toiling away in the western frontiers.
It’s a very sandbox-y game, one where you aren’t going to follow a scripted opening every time you play. Pioneers in Peril isn’t going to end in 90 minutes, every time you play. The game will ebb and flow as players expand and constrict. Having more stuff means more points, but it also means having more stuff to protect. I can’t deny the feel-bad moments when someone is making progress on their goals, only for the rug to be pulled out from under them by a devastating event or a shootout gone wrong. There are rules where players can lower the point threshold for victory, and even rules for players to leave and/or join mid game and what to do with all of that players stuff. Players can be eliminated from the Wild West. I think a lot of players will chafe at that idea, but I also think Pioneers in Peril is doing something a little special here.
In an era of companies off-shoring productions to cheaper regions, and AI slop showcasing the lazy producers urge to do things the cheapest, easiest way possible, I can’t help but admire Matt Terry and Deadwood Games. This is a game he built himself in his garage. This isn’t just another SKU to have on store shelves, but it’s a labour of love. And I think some of the rules sprawl I mentioned earlier is indicative of this; this is a game that he loves. It hasn’t been honed down to a fine edge, developed away all the potential pain points with blind play testers, and turned the game into a bland, samey experience. While the take-that aspects and potential to lose some of what I built are not things that I enjoy in my games, I feel like this game is exactly what Matt loves, and I can’t help by applaud his ambition as he toiled away in his garage, making the game of his dreams. I admire and cheer on this intensely independent creation, and encourage you to do the same.
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice is a post-apocalyptic story set in a reserve in Northern Ontario. One day, the cell phones and satellite TV stop working. No big deal, that happens sometimes. They’ll probably come back in a day or two. The next day, the internet is down. That’s odd, but again, not really abnormal in this remote village. The next day, the power goes out. It used to go out all the time, but that hasn’t really happened in the last three years, not since the big hydro project connected them to the main grid. Then when a week goes by and the power still hasn’t returned, and winter is looming, the town has to figure out how to survive.
I’ll be honest about my bias here: I grew up in a village in northern Manitoba, and no book has made me feel more at home than this one. The community relationships, the way the characters talked to each other, even referencing “The Northern Store” as the only grocery store in town, is super reminiscent of my hometown. Rice absolutely nailed the feeling of what a remote northern community feels like.
The writing in the book made me feel right at home. On the Rez, in this community of Anishinaabe in northern Ontario, away from the cities, the locals manage to live their lives, feed their families, and some try to keep their heritage alive. some of the language, the rituals surrounding hunting, and looking out for the elderly. Things aren’t always perfect, some people are more content to play video games all day rather than going hunting to fill their freezer for the upcoming winter. And they’ve had their share of tragedies, but life goes on here, even after the lights go dark. The band tries to keep people calm as a low sense of panic sets in. The store shelves are pretty much empty the next day, but no worries. A delivery of food is scheduled for next week, everyone has enough food to keep them until then.
A dump of snow blankets the community in white, then two college students return home from the city of Gibson via ski-doo, and tell the community that power is out everywhere, and society is crumbling. There will not be any help from the outside world any time soon. Thankfully, the band has an emergency generator, a byproduct of the time before electricity was reliable in this area. But there is only so much gas to keep them going as winter is upon them. They tell everyone to ration their energy use, and most do. Some don’t, and that’s their choice. The band also has an emergency reserve of rations, and they begin sharing the food with anyone who needs it on a weekly basis. Evan, the main character is a bit dismayed at how few people managed to hunt before the winter. The community comes together to make it through this crisis.
Things begin to get haunting as a handful of people arrive from the south. They grapple with their fear of intruders with the human desire to offer aid where they can. After all, the community has enough resources to make it through the winter, what’s adding one more person to the town? Justin Scott is a large white man with a sled full of supplies. He fancies himself a survivalist and offers his skills to help the town. He quickly inserts himself into the town meetings, and sets up his own home and begins exerting his influence on those around him, including shooting another outsider as they come up to the edge of town.
There was one moment in the book, as Evan is stoking the furnace for one of the elders in the community. They talk about how everything is different, how some people are using the world apocalypse. She delivers this emotional gut punch:
“The world isn’t ending,” she went on. “Our world isn’t ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that’s when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here… But then they followed us up here and started taking our children away from us! That’s when our world ended again. And that wasn’t the last time. We’ve seen what this . . . what’s the word again?” “Apocalypse.” “Yes, apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived. We’re still here. And we’ll still be here, even if the power and the radios don’t come back on and we never see any white people ever again.”
I really enjoy how the book doesn’t focus on the apocalyptic event itself. We never really get an explanation for what happened, or a answer about what’s going on in the rest of the world. Instead, it focuses on the reserve as they try to survive the winter. How the band starts to divvy out emergency rations. How the able-bodied men hunt and provide for those who are unable to do so. How they have to grapple with their fear when strangers, white men, show up at their borders asking for sanctuary. How these interlopers then cause trouble.
It’s a fascinating departure from most present-day apocalypse stories, which are usually about the crumbling of societal structures and social order. How the Lord of the Flies rules and “might makes right” quickly takes over. These stories always have us watching characters suddenly lose access to the systems they and their parents and grandparents have used their entire lives, like electricity and indoor plumbing, or a local grocer as a supply of food. We watch characters try to figure out how to survive without them, and defend themselves from those who want to take what they’ve built.
But Moon of the Crusted Snow has a different point of view. The ‘apocalypse’ comes on slowly and things only kind of fall apart, because the Anishinaabe community is already separated from traditional society, they’ve already survived multiple world shattering tragedies, this is just another world shifting event. Perhaps even less terrible than the ones that came before.
Losing power and phone service doesn’t immediately incite mass chaos and triggers everyone base survival modes, because they’re already used to going without those amenities. The culture of preparing your home for the cold winter still lives on in some people, so when the grocery stores go bare, the already have the skills and habits required to survive. The older generation just scoffs as the youngers panic, and remind them they didn’t have electricity for their entire childhood, and they turned out just fine.
While there is an ever-present looming sense of danger, I found the narrative of the community staying together and adjusting to this new way of life a much more interesting apocalypse story than simply watching civilization collapse. It made me think about my uncles in my home town who would deliver caribou meat to my house in the fall, and how that small town that I was so keen to leave is probably better off in the event of a disaster.
Moon of the Crusted Snow was just a great, haunting story. I really enjoyed it, and I’m really looking forward to reading the next book in the series. More than anything, though, I appreciated how familiar this book felt to me. Obviously, I don’t have the lived experience of the Anishinaabe characters in this story, but I do know what it feels like to live in a little northern community where the nearest city is hours away, where everyone knows everyone, where the only grocery store is the Northern Store, and where a power outage isn’t necessarily an emergency, it was probably just a racoon climbing into a transformer again. Hydro will be out in the morning to get it fixed. Probably.
If you want a little fictional glimpse into what life in a northern reserve kind of feels like, give Moon of the Crusted Snow a read.
I don’t actually have a lot of time to play party games. Maybe it’s not that I don’t have a lot of time, but I rarely have the right situation for them. My game group usually meets on a Wednesday, and it’s me and two other people. The same two people who have been meeting every Wednesday for almost a decade now. Every now and then there’s a bigger event where maybe up to five people show up, but regardless, party games are not part of my regular repertoire. So when people ask me what the best party games are, I actually come up blank. I don’t know what’s new and interesting and good in the party game scene these days. Which is why I was so excited to discover Poetry for Neanderthals and how much fun it can be.
In Poetry for Neanderthals, players break up into two teams. On one team’s turn, one player will be designated as the poet, and they will have a stack of cards with a bunch of objects or concepts that they need to get the rest of their team to say. The twist is that the Neanderthal poet can only speak in one-syllable words. A one-minute timer is set, and the goal is to get through as many cards as possible. The other team is tasked with watching and bopping the poet if they ever use a word that is more than one syllable.
It’s surprisingly fun trying to communicate with only one-syllable words. It’s hilarious when someone gets a word like “ankle” and they stammer and stutter before finally saying, “where foot meet leg.” And that moment when you get it, that moment when you sync up with the poet, it feels like you are mad geniuses decrypting a puzzle. Of course, the alternative is when you are just so out of sync and the poet is trying desperately to lead you to where you need to be. For example, drift ended up being a stone wall that wasted one teams entire turn. The poet was saying, “boat move wrong. Float far bad.”, which makes a crazy kind of sense when you understand the context. But when you don’t, you just sit there and stare at your teammate incredulously. And it’s in that moment when you learn that the person you’re talking to, the person you’re trying to lead to the word drift has never stepped foot on a boat before. They have no context for what a ‘bad float’ is. it turns out that they’re a car engineer and if you had gone with “car turn too fast, small spin” they would have shouted drift in milliseconds that makes you burst out with a belly full of laughter.
There are rules for keeping score and how to end the game and who wins and who loses, but I have always been of the opinion that those things, those rules, don’t make party games better. The point of party games is to engage your friends and to create laughter, and just playing *Poetry for Neanderthals* does that very well. It makes people laugh. It makes people exclaim when they get the right answer. It makes people debate on whether a permit should be along the same lines as a driver’s license as opposed to a construction permit. And honestly, those moments are the game.
Poetry for Neanderthals is very simple to play. Everyone knows what one-syllable words are, and yet it’s surprisingly hard to keep yourself from using a two-syllable word because a two-syllable word might be exactly the perfect thing you need to say. But you need to figure out a way around it, and then inevitably, when you slip up, you get a playful bop on the head with an inflatable club. At the end of the day, it’s exactly what I want my party game to be: light, fun, casual, and something that makes people laugh. All I should really say here is: game very good time.
I suppose re-theming an existing game can be a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, re-theming an existing game means that you have a built-in audience. Plenty of people have already played the game, Lots of reviews for the game already exist on BGG, it’s a known quantity. I would assume that means it’s easier to sell, just by the virtue of people having already played it, but you’ve given the game a new coat of paint and made it widely available. The downside is however, that no matter what you do, if you make any changes at all, suddenly the new edition will forever be compared to its predecessor. The discourse around your game will be consumed with debates over old vs new themes. I saw it happen with Stonemaier Games reimplementation of Libertalia, and I saw it happen again with For the King (and Me), designed by Steve Finn and published by IELLO in 2021.
For the King (and Me) is a re-theme of Steve Finn’s previous game Biblios. In Biblios, players are monks trying to gain majorities in different categories of books. It’s a small but attractive little game, albeit a little dark with its monastery aesthetic. For the King (and Me) has a much brighter colour palette, and the cover features a young, naive king surrounded by a bunch of cartoonishly scheming advisors. The theme of this game is that you’re trying to manipulate your position with the king to earn yourself a bevy of titles, which will earn player prestige, and the person with most prestige from their titles at the end of the game is the winner.
The game takes place over a series of turns. On your turn, you will take cards equal to the number of players plus one and look at them one at a time. When you look at a card, you choose to either put it in a face down auction pile, place it face up in a row for your fellow advisors to pick from, or put it face down for yourself to keep. Once you look at a card and put it into its spot, you can’t move it anymore, meaning if you choose to put the first card you draw into your pile to keep, none of the other cards that you’ll draw for the rest of this turn will be eligible to be put into your own pile. Once you’ve drawn all the cards and allocated them appropriately, the player to your left will pick the first one from the public market you just created, and then it goes around the table until all those cards are picked. Then the next player takes their turn, preforming the same ritual. And around and around the game goes until the deck runs out of cards, and players then proceed to the auction portion of the game.
Before I continue though, it’s important to know what the cards do. The cards that you’re picking from will either be colours, red, blue, purple, pink, orange, or green, and each of those coloured cards will have a number. At the very end of the game, you will compare your sum of each colour to each other player, and whoever has the most points wins the associated title. There’s a second-place award to win as well. Another card type in the deck will let players modify the prestige value of the titles, either pushing them up or down in value, and sometimes allowing a player to modify one or two titles at a time. I suppose it’s important to mention that when you do this, you’re really modifying the higher-value title, as the second-place title’s value is always half the value of the main title, rounded down.
Lastly, there are gold cards you can acquire, which are used in the auction phase of this card drafting game. Once the deck runs out, the next player in turn order takes the top card of the face down pile and reveals it to the table. Starting with the player to their left, Each player calls out a sum of gold that they’re willing to spend to acquire that card. If the card revealed is a gold card, then players can bid a number of cards they want to discard to acquire that gold. Once that pile of cards is exhausted, everyone reveals the sums of each of the colours and claims their titles. The player with the most prestige points from their collected titles is the winner.
As a production, I like the art and colour a lot more than the more serious-themed Biblios. I like seeing caricatures of goofy advisors with high eyebrows, regal moustaches, and pompous grey wigs. I really enjoy the cartoony aspect of it. It leans into the goofiness of the whole scenario. I found the cardboard title tiles on the centre board to be more annoying than anything else. Every time someone modifies the value of one of those tiles, you are supposed to take the title tile off the board and put a new one with its new value in its place. And because the lower title value is always half rounded down of the higher value total, sometimes you’d be adjusting two tile titles at the same time. It’s just a lot of shuffling little cardboard bits around. And I probably wouldn’t even complain about this if the predecessor Biblios didn’t have a more elegant solution in dice. When modifying values, its just easier to rotate a die to represent a new value than it is to swap out two cardboard tokens. We were saying at the table that it would make a lot of sense to have a large die and a smaller die and just use that instead of all those titles. Now, that said, the titles do have a little bit of flair on them, saying what title you receive. As a small example, you could be the Royal Pillow Fluffer or the Poultry Plucker, and that’s kind of cute, and I appreciate that. But I still think dice would have been the way to go for this kind of game.
The gameplay is as simple as it gets, you’re literally just flipping cards and picking where to put them, but you do get some tense decisions. The moments when you reveal a mid-range colour card of a set you’ve been collecting, you have to ask yourself: “Is that worth keeping?” And then you choose to keep it, and the next reveal is the highest-value card of the colour you just took. ARGH! You just kind of shot yourself in the foot a little bit. The alternative is you put that one into the auction pile, and the rest of the cards you draw for the round are useless to you. Such consternation!
There’s a good mix of known and unknown information, and depending on how good you are at tracking what players take when drawing from the face up cards, you can get a good sense on what other players have. Sure, maybe you can let that one blue go away because you’re sure that player didn’t have any blue before this, and you a couple blue cards in your hand, so you feel pretty safe. But because players are taking cards face down, you never actually know what everyone has. The auction is equally tense. When a card comes up that you really want, you try to bid low and hope to get it for a discount, but then the players next to you bid as well, jumping the value to unreasonable heights. It can sting.
Just like in Biblios, I love in theory the mechanic of increasing and decreasing the value of the titles. It’s a really cool and interesting to have the value of what you’re working towards to be constantly in flux. In practice, I find that most of the values actually come out in the wash. Someone tries to pump up red, the next player just pushes it right back down. And because there’s an equal number of positives and negatives, most things end up being staying roughly the same. I don’t feel there’s very much room for clever plays. Especially when the luck of the draw is so prevalent. Maybe scoring one of those cards near the end of the auction can swing the game a bit, but I don’t think it ends up being particularly impactful in the end. Maybe at a lower player count, where each player has more control, more opportunities to pump a value, or if multiple players team up to really take down the value of a specific colour, but in my experience this rarely comes to fruition.
One big change from Biblios is the existence of second place. In Biblios, only the player who has the majority in each colour wins anything. Here, second place gets a half-value prize, rounded down, meaning two players might actually team up to increase the value of a colour, and it’s more likely that players will spread themselves more thin trying to get more second-place values. Hopefully this will encourage players to use the +/-1 cards for good and not evil. After all, more points is always more fun than less points.
At the end of the day, For the King (and Me) is a fun and light game. Biblios is the perfect game to begin or end game night because it plays in half an hour and encourages interaction between players. It’s fun to steal the majority from someone, or when you see someone really going hard on one colour, you tank the value of that title. You may not have as much control as I might prefer in a game, but it’s over in half an hour, and it’s a generally good time. If you have been sad that Biblios is unavailable, For the King (and Me) is a pretty great replacement.
