In the second page of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton, she talks about how Cape Breton used to export fish, coal, and steel; but in 2005, its main export is people. Empty chairs around tables, fathers, siblings, cousins gone to Ontario or Alberta. “The only message we got about a better future was that we had to leave home to have one. We did not question it, because this is the have-not region of a have-not province, and it has not boomed here in generations” and then a few pages later “I learn that I can have opportunity or I have a home. I cannot have both”.
The introduction hit me hard. I grew up in northern Manitoba, in an ex-mining community, population ~700. The mine shut down a few years before I was born, and the 17 years I lived there were marked with a slow exodus of people. What separates my experience from Kate Beaton’s, is that she has a love for her home, her community. She is an East Coaster, an Islander. It’s a part of her identity, and she’s proud of it, it’s her safe place. I don’t have that same reverence for northern Manitoba. I didn’t have a large family or cousins nearby, or really a tight community. I suspect part of that has to do with isolation, there was no other town around us for 100 Kms, and the next town over was another ex-mining town also in decline. The closest “boom” town was Thompson, 300Kms away.
I suspect another part of why Kate has a heritage while I do not is that Cape Breton has history. The first settlers arrived in 1605, and setting hamlets all over the island. While Kate’s hometown of Mabou is only slightly more populous than my hometown, there are hundreds of years of history in Cape Breton. People being proud of their homestead. My hometown was founded in 1950, with most of the homes in the town having been moved across over the frozen lake after a nearby mine ran dry. We didn’t have generations of history to establish ourselves, we had a single generation of transplants.
I’m getting away from the point here. What I’m trying to say is Kate’s words hit me hard. As an adult that feels without a real hometown, I get the melancholy she’s expressing here. Mine is a bit more bitter, but I can relate.
Kate chooses to move to Alberta to work in the oil sands until she can pay off her crippling student debt. She graduated from a University with an arts degree, paid for entirely by student loans. She feels like a boot has been pressed against her neck, and she’ll never be able to pay them off if she chooses to stay on Cape Breton Island, because of the lack of jobs, let alone anything well paying. With protests from her parents, she packed her bags and headed west. What follows is a deeply personal accounting of her experience working in the oil sands as a woman. Being a woman, living at camps, in a workforce that is 95% male is an experience I cannot relate to, but I can absolutely emphasize with. So many of the stories Kate tells are the derogatory comments made to and around her while she’s just trying to do her job. The constant advances, propositions, and misogyny wearing down her mental health, and that’s not even to mention how crappy working a tool shed job in -30 weather can be. The one time Kate tries to talk to a supervisor about the misogyny, she gets shut down, hard. “We’re a team here”, and “What did you expect when you came to work here?” essentially telling Kate to put up and shut up, or leave. Kate spends the next two years enduring casual toxicity, threats, invasions of privacy, gendered violence, and sexual assault.
Kate often touches upon the juxtapositions of being surrounded by people, but also being isolated. The shadow population living out two lives. Their real life back home, often with spouses and children, and the camp life, where you never really know what each other gets up two on their weekends. Drugs, sex, and relationships are all a shadowy undercurrent amongst a population of people who are in a place to do a job. The men she’s surrounded by are blue collar, apparently devoid of empathy, compassion, or respect.
After a year, she tries to leave. She gets a museum job in Victoria, B.C, but doesn’t get enough hours, so picks up a part-time job as a maid. She goes on dates, but doesn’t know how to relate to ‘normal’ people. After a year of working in Victoria, she gets the bad news that her student loans are due, and she’s not earning enough money to pay them off in Victoria. Without any better options, she makes her way back to the oil sands.
Then comes the sexual assault. In one camp, she talks about how often her door would open, someone would poke their head in and see that she was with people, mutter “wrong room”, then leave, or how often someone tries to open her door during the night, rattling the handle to see if it’s locked or not. The boys of the group mention that never happened to them. When Kate attends a party that migrates from room to room, she gets drunk, realizes she forgot her drink a few rooms back, and when she goes back to retrieve it, the man she’s with closes the door behind them and advances on her. She depicts the moment like an out-of-body experience. The scene goes dark, she floats home, then the scene changes. Later in the book she says to her friend “It felt like I had a second to decide and an eternity to live with it” This scene reminds me of Bear Town, but unlike in that fiction, Kate doesn’t get any justice. In her afterword, Kate writes, “I was nothing in his life but a short release from the boredom and loneliness endemic in camp life, but he was a major trauma in mine.” As a man, the constant awfulness that Kate endured made my skin crawl. I can only imagine that any woman reading this will be reduced to a ball of seething rage and misery.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands touches on the environmental impact of the oil sands, but the focus of the book is Kate’s story. It’s not a tragedy, but it is an unhappy tale. Rife with melancholy and bitterness. Complex feelings of being exploited, while also being party to a larger evil. Kate feels alone and weird when she’s in ‘normal’ situations, friends come and go as jobs ebb and flow. I can’t relate to the experience of being a woman in a male dominated workplace, but I absolutely have empathy for this poor woman who just wants to do her job but is constantly leered at. Even worse when she invites friends into her workplace, and they catch men ducking under the tables trying to catch a glimpse up a skirt.
Kate never invites the comments, but she’s constantly subjected to them. Her mental health takes some brutal hits. Near the end of the book, Kate comments on that while the comments and misogyny has been constant, she recognizes that there have been hundreds of men who have just been in the background. On one hand, not all men have made comments, but they do have a role in being complicit when a guy makes a shitty comment and doing nothing.
I really enjoyed this graphic novel in the same way that I enjoyed Bear Town. I sit here, angry at men. I have a deep sadness for Kate, and the world that created the situation that made Kate feel like she had to endure that, and the world that let men feel like they can behave in these ways. The author’s afterword bring a lot of context to this deeply personal story. I would not hesitate to recommend Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, but that recommendation comes with the caveat that this book can be deeply painful to anyone who has a history of sexual assault or gendered violence.
I tell myself every holiday that I need to create a content calendar so that it’s not October 28th and I’m suddenly looking for a Halloween game to review. One day I’ll get my ducks in a row, but it’s not this day. It also doesn’t help that I’m not a big fan of the entirety of the horror genre. I don’t like scary movies, I don’t read spooky books, despite my birthday being on Halloween, it’s just not my vibe. For me, the holiday is represented by pillow cases full of candy and fun, friendly witches.
While horror is not my vibe, flicking games, certainly are. Flick ’em Up! Dead of Winter is the board game marriage between the disc flicking western, Flick ’em Up! and the narrative crossroads game, Dead of Winter. Flick ’em Up!: Dead of Winter is a cooperative game where players are striving to survive and explore a city of cardboard buildings in 10 different scenarios. The players take on the roles of survivors, each of which is named, has a default weapon, and their plastic figure has a backpack that helps you remember if they’ve been activated this round or not.
A game begins with setup, and I find Flick ’em Up!: Dead of Winter to be tedious to set up. Cardboard buildings are scattered around the table in a specific orientation, various obstacles are placed, then zombies, and survivors also litter the table, all dictated by the scenario you’ve chosen to play. Also, before the very first game, all those components need to be snickered, and buildings need to be assembled, which is not an insignificant time commitment.
The gameplay mostly consists of moving, which is achieved by choosing a survivor and flicking a movement disk. You’re often trying to get into a building, which requires flicking that disc between the two supports of the building, but more often involves crashing into a wall or ricocheting directly into a zombie’s grasp.
Flick ’em Up! Dead of Winter uses the 10 scenarios to scaffold the players into more interesting and complex items. When you first start playing, you’ll only have a basic handgun, which is just a single disc that you flick at zombies. And sometimes, you can shoot with TWO guns. Crazy, I know. There’s also the shotgun and sniper rifles. The shotgun is a cardboard stencil that you press 4 mini discs into, and flick them all out in one mighty motion. The sniper is another stencil with straight sides, which should assist in long range shots. In addition to guns, there are silent melee weapons to offer some tactical considerations for your turn.
On the subject of noise, most of the actions in the game can trigger a zombie reaction. Any loud action, or a quiet action when the next closest zombie is standing, triggers a zombie rush. A zombie tower is placed behind the closest zombie, and that zombie is placed upon the trap door on the top of the tower, If it was a loud action, the next two closest zombies join in the rush as well and are placed on the trap door. Then, the support is pulled away, and the zombies fall toward you, damaging anyone they hit.
Flick ’em Up! is a dexterity game. No amount of planning or strategy is going to change the fact that you can’t nail a shot that’s 6 inches away. The physicality of the game is simultaneously what makes it a joy to play, and utterly frustrating at times. The little shotgun pellets that seem incapable of knocking over a zombie, or playing on a different table surface, making all of your shots either way too strong, or pathetically weak.
You’ll need to commit to your shots. A gentle tap to a zombie’s leg won’t cause any damage, you need your bullet to barrel that monster down. But also, playing on a table or surface that doesn’t have walls does mean you’ll spend a fair amount of time looking for that stray bullet that flew off the table and bounced off the wall. Not a game I recommend playing when you have a curious 10-month-old roaming the floors.
The artwork is cartoony, colourful, and goofy, despite the zombie theme. All the characters and zombies are bulky plastic pieces, and are lacking in heft. It’s a bit unsatisfying to hold, but I suspect at least part of that is taking into consideration that these zombies need to be relatively easy to knock down, which is aided by their abnormally large flailing limbs raising their centre of gravity. All this goofyness brings a light-heartedness to the game, which is welcome, as the vibe isn’t so much of “we’re being hunted”, it’s more of a “let’s kill these zombies”. A rip-roaring hack and blast adventure of slaying monsters while sometimes, optionally, chasing an objective. In the same breath, the zombies can be quite terrifying. A missed shot means 3 zombies barreling down on you, and trying to provide backup has the potential for friendly fire in the back.
I love dexterity games. I really do. And I want to love Flick ’em Up! Dead of Winter. But it’s just so damn fiddly. So many rules on who is standing and who has fallen, being too close to zombies, what’s silent and what’s loud, constantly needing to stand terrain back up because of a knock on effect, and the absolute tedium of setup make this game such a pain that I rarely ever play it anymore. On my first play, I spent so much time flipping back and forth in the rule book trying to remember how everything worked together, that I pined for a rule summary on the back of the book. Just something to help my game along, even a little bit.
At higher player counts, the game feels like it drags. The number of survivors doesn’t change depending on player count, so 5 survivors in a 4 player game means you’ll probably only be taking one activation per round. And if you miss, it’s a long wait until your next chance to act. Really, I wouldn’t recommend this game at 4 players, and would even hesitate at 3 players.
Flick ’em Up!: Dead of Winter can be a blast if you’re a dexterity game fan with patience for setup and a penchant for precision flicking, However, the game’s fiddly components, annoying rules, and long setup can easily overshadow its charm. If you’re up for the challenge, set it up on a bordered table and keep the player count low to maximize your enjoyment.
I have a tenuous relationship with the games designed by Alexander Pfister. On one hand, I generally dislike Great Western Trail, Blackout Hong Kong, and Maracaibo. On the other hand, two of his co-designs, Broom Service, and Isle of Skye are some of my favourite games ever. While I’ve learned to steer clear from his bigger euro games, I hold out hope that I’ll continue to find joy in his smaller games.
Port Royal is a card game for 2 to 5 players originally published in 2014, although I played the big box edition with art by Fantasmagoria Creative and published by Pegasus Spiele in 2022. In Port Royal, players are trying to extract as much value out of a series of Caribbean mariners as possible to hopefully win the award of most prestigious company.
I’m actually not sure what the players are supposed to be, the theme does no service to the gameplay. The gameplay is a straightforward push your luck game, where the active player flips over cards one at a time until they either choose to stop, or they reveal two ships of the same colour. If the active player chooses to stop, they can take 1/2/3 cards (if they revealed 0-3/4/5 different colour ships), then every other player gets a chance to buy one of the revealed cards, but must pay the active player a coin for the privilege of doing so.
The goal of the game is to reach 12 or more points the quickest, and points mostly come from the crew you hire. Most of the crew members will give you special abilities while they’re in your tableau, such as earning extra money for specific colours of ships, or offering you more card picks, or giving you bonus income if the card market has 5 or more cards when you start your turn. The ships on the other hand, just give you money and are discarded. There are also tax cards, which make players with 12 or more coins lose half their money, and expedition cards that sit off to the side until someone trades in the prerequisite crew members to claim the expedition. Around and around players play until someone hits that 12 point threshold, and after all players had the same number of turns, the player with the most points is the winner.
The fact that Port Royal is naught, but a single deck of 120 cards is really clever. Every card has a coin on the back, and when you take coins, you just draw them face down from the top of the deck, ensuring no one can really be counting cards. This also means when the deck runs dry, and you shuffle the discard to form a new deck, you’ll be likely be seeing new cards that were drawn face down the first time around.
That said, I did not find the game itself to be particularly engaging. More than once someone flipped two ships of the same colour after just 2 or 3 card draws, busting their turn. Money felt fairly hard to come by if your turn busted, as the active player was most likely to take the highest value ship, and taking the lower value ships on their turn means you’re just feeding them more money. Managing how much money you hold is a delicate balance, as having 12 or more puts you at risk of just losing half of it, which is the equivalent of at least 2 turns of taking ship cards. The crew cards themselves cost as low as 3 coins, but as high as 9, meaning if you want to hire a crew on someone else’s turn, you need to have 10 or 11 coins, lest you find yourself at risk.
I see small trappings of engine building in Port Royal, but they didn’t come to fruition during our play. Yes, you can hire multiple traders to get extra value out of those ships, if they come up and are available on your turn. Also, having traders of a colour is a sure-fire way to ensure that the other players don’t let ships of that colour make it to you on their turns.
Luck is a major factor in Port Royal. Having the right cards come out at the right time is key to your victory. It doesn’t even need to be the right cards, it can just be cards that you can afford, or a ship to earn you money. As I said in the paragraph above, if you have a merchant to earn you bonus money if the right colour ship comes out, hopefully you’re lucky enough to draw that ship before you draw two of the same colour and lose your whole turn. I get that this is a push your luck game, but I never really felt excited drawing cards and seeing crew members that I couldn’t afford and ships of the wrong colour flip up.
Port Royal is a clever deck of cards with good flow. It’s easy to teach and understand how to play, but my issue lies in the fact that there are so many more push your luck games that I’d rather play. Incan Gold, Can’t Stop, and The Quacks of Quedlinburg all come to mind. Port Royal failed to create any stand up moments. Every time someone busted it was just a shrug, an “oh well”, and pass the deck to the next player. At no point did I feel tension or excitement. There were no real stakes, nothing exciting to be gained or lost. A ho-hum yawn of an experience.
Lost Ruins of Arnak is a resource management game with a touch of worker placement and deck building for 1 to 4 players, designed by Min and Elwyn, and published by CGE. In Lost Ruins of Arnak, players have two workers, a small deck of cards, and a huge board with various locations for their workers to explore and earn resources, which get spent on the temple track to move your two tokens up to earn more resources and victory points.
It’s a bit awkward because while Lost Ruins of Arnak has worker placement and deck building as mechanics, neither of those mechanics feels like the core of the game. The main board is broken into 3 main sections, the base camp, the level 1 locations in the middle of the board, and the level 2 locations at the top. As an action, players can send their workers to any of the locations to earn resources, but at the start of the game, the central and upper locations are entirely empty, they must be ‘explored’, which means 3 or 6 compasses must be spent before a worker can be put onto that spot, which generally yields more resources than the base camp, but also comes with a guardian to contend with. Guardians are essentially a recipe of various goods that needs to be spent to ‘overcome’ it, at which point it offers the player a small benefit, as well as an idol (which can either be traded in for more resources, or kept for points) If players don’t overcome the guardian before the end of the round, they simply flee, take a fear card (which clogs your deck and is worth negative points at the end of the game), and the guardian remains for whomever wants to adventure there in the future.
Compasses and coins can also be spent to acquire cards from a market row. At the start of the game, there will be plenty of tools and few artifacts available, and as the game progresses the staff slides along, offering more artifacts at a time. The last action you can do is to gain a temple tile. If your temple track marker reached the top, you can trade in a bunch of resources to get tiles that are worth more points.
From that description, you may have noticed that Lost Ruins of Arnak has a lot of ways to gain and spend resources, and that’s all that I feel that this game really is. Get stuff, sell it for more stuff, to get more stuff. I know skilled players find ways to squeeze blood from a stone. They eke out every last resource the game has to offer and manage to just barely pay the costs to gain more and more benefits.
I know my unenthusiastic stance on Lost Ruins of Arnak puts me into the minority of players. It’s rated #28 on the BGG ranking, and it routinely shows up on many top games of all time lists. I can see the joy in the game, it’s a satisfying experience to have the perfect amount of resources and can manage to take another half dozen turns after all the other players passed for the round, running up the temple track head and shoulders above the rest. But for all the other players who are just watching, or if you could have been that player but were missing just a single compass, it can be a painful experience.
I love the artwork, it’s bright, colourful, and vibrant. The guardians look terrifying, and all the cards feature artwork that looks like it’s straight out of an Indiana Jones movie. I can see the joy that other players talk about in Lost Ruins of Arnak, but I don’t really feel it when I’m playing it. I had picked up the expedition Leaders expansion, which adds a very nice layer of asymmetry to each of the players, but even still, it just feels like 2 hours of swapping items, and I need more excitement in my life than that.
I enjoy that there’s variety in the temple tracks, and even more so with the expansion mixed in. But at the end of the day, the whole game just feels like resource swapping. If you can get an action chain going, it’s quite exciting for that player, but for everyone else, they’re just sitting around watching you trade in a compass for an arrowhead, then trade in an arrowhead and a tablet for a movement up the temple track, which earns you a compass and lets you draw another card, that you can then spend for another compass, which lets you buy a card from the market that triggers immediately, and you get the picture.
Lost Ruins of Arnak does a lot, but it doesn’t do anything particularly well in my opinion. Which is a bit of a shame, it’s so popular and gorgeous that I so desperately want to like it and be a part of the club of people clamouring for every expansion. Alas, I sold my copy and will be looking for my next big adventure somewhere else.
Disclaimer: A copy of Wizards & Co was provided by Sinister Fish for review
Designers Flaminia Brasini, Virginio Gigli, Stefano Luperto, and Antonio Tinto have brought us some wonderful games, such as Lorenzo Il Magnifico,First Rat, and Coimbra, as well as some not so great games, like Grand Austria Hotel, and Egizia (This is a joke. These are two of Otter‘s favourite games and I really like harassing him. Egizia is a very fine game). It was this pedigree of designers that I agreed to receive a review copy of their latest game, Wizards & Co, published by Sinister Fish Games.
In Wizards & Co, players take on the role of wizards, seeking the treasure of the recently deceased high necromancer, packed away in unguarded dungeons. You head to the local big box store Henchpersons & Minions and pick their deal of the day to acquire a preassembled crew of creatures that will help you haul the treasure out. Unfortunately, that preassembled crew was such a good deal, your rival wizards picked the same team, and now you’re all vying for the treasure with the same henchmen.
Wizards & Co kicks player asymmetry to the curb and gives everyone the exact same abilities. The game is out-thinking your opponents to get the most loot and win the game. A game of Wizards & Co. has a number of dungeons in the centre of the table, each one with a number of empty slots. On a player’s turn they can play one or two cards to one or two dungeons, one of those cards can be face down. Then, depending on the number and orientation of those cards, they may draw 0, 1, or 2 cards. When a dungeon runs out of open slots, then a ‘battle’ happens. First, starting from the statue and moving clockwise, each monster activates in turn. Some monsters will stun or destroy other monsters, and if they do that to another minion before it had the chance to activate, they don’t activate at all.
Some creatures offer persistent effects, others trigger when they’re placed, but most activate during the battle phase. After every minion has activated and the dust settles, whoever filled up the dungeon gets to take the enchantment, and whichever player has the most minion power in the dungeon gets to take one of the two treasures. Second place gets the remaining treasure, then, any minions that are sitting at an entrance that has a gem icon, takes one of those gems, and all the minions go to the bottom of their respective players decks.
The deck system is fairly clean in Wizards & Co. There are no discard piles, all discards just go to the bottom of the deck. On one hand, no need to shuffle. But more than once I accidentally picked up my deck of cards instead of my hand, which is probably more of a scathing indictment of my terrible big hand small deck strategy than anything else. It is somewhat unintuitive to remember, “if you played one card face up, draw two cards. If you played one card face down, or two cards face up, draw one card. If you played two cards to the same dungeon, draw no cards”. Thankfully, there is a player aid, but we did have to keep referencing that aid as we played. A potential sticking point for some people.
I have some complaints about the rule book, and how some of the information is laid out, but once you start playing, all the pieces start to fit together. What appears as a light and silly game can actually turn into a cold, calculating puzzle. Because everyone has the same creatures as everyone else, it can turn into a standoff. At first, placing a monster in a tower early seems like a good idea. Lock down the gem you need. However, placing monsters in lucrative spots invites their specific foils, and that damned ogre that bumps a creature from an occupied slot turns what was going to complete your gem set into forcing you to take yet another void gem.
The Cavern of Wonders – I love that the dungeon name changes depending on the combination of the dungeon tile and enchantment
The base game comes with 16 creatures, of which you’ll only use 10 per game, plus another 6 special monsters that only get unlocked for the player who acquires their specific artifact. The replayability of Wizards & Co doesn’t lie in its variability, but in the depth of strategy. Learning how and when to play your monsters is vital, as is a good memory. Counting which foils have come and gone, and understanding when to rush a dungeon versus spreading your forces out.
I’ve done terribly in this game. My memory is so awful, that I laid a face down giant killing hobb in an empty tower, then placed a giant there in my next round, completely forgetting what I had done the turn before. I got bounced out of lucrative spots several times, kicking my units into the void gem spots, decimating my gem horde in the end game. But I still had fun! The reveal of the face down monsters when the tower fills up is exciting, as is when you correctly place a monster in a way that it either kills, or avoids being killed.
As I said above, the rule book isn’t very clear on the details, and there isn’t a comprehensive glossary of icons. This had me flipping back and forth in the book a few times on game night, which could leave some gamers feeling frustrated, but really, that’s my biggest complaint about Wizards & Co. The components are nice, the gems are all shaped differently with screen printed accents, the cardboard is sufficiently thick, the cards feel good in the hand, no complaints on the physical production. The artwork by Miguel Coimbra is colourful and fantastical. Each of the imps, hobbs, giants, and monsters felt unique and dynamic.
woof, that’s a lot of void gems
I also don’t think Wizards & Co. plays particularly well at 2 players. With only two dungeons, it turns into a waiting game. Of course, on your turn if you have cards, you must play at least one, it almost feels like a game of chicken. Slowly adding one face down card to each dungeon until someone is able to fill it on their turn, hoping that the specific foil isn’t present. With more players, you need to take more risks to stake your claims, as the dungeons fill up fast. You don’t always have time to slow roll your creature deployment. Somewhat unintuitively, while a large part of the game is about taking gems, I don’t think they’re the best return on investment. It takes 6 different gems to get 12 points, but a single A treasure is worth 7. But don’t take strategy advice from me, I’ve lost every game I played.
As I said before, the joy in Wizards & Co doesn’t lie in its variability, but in its mastery. Developing a meta strategy among your friends, and finding ways to surprise and counter each other, is a fun experience, and it only gets better as you and your friends become more familiar with the potential that each monster holds. I do hope that Sinister Fish Games has some expansions in the pipeline, as I would love to see more creatures become available to shake up the gameplay. If you have a group that likes to replay the same game multiple times, Wizards & Co. will reward you for that proclivity.
