It might seem weird to talk about an expansion from 2008 that’s been woefully out of print for longer than I’ve even been into board games, and has a revamped and updated second edition currently available for sale. But I don’t have that second edition, I have the first edition, and I want an excuse to talk about Galaxy Trucker some more
For those uninitiated, Galaxy Trucker, designed by Vlaada Chvatil and published by Czech Games Edition in 2007 is a game in which players are tasked with building a ship in real time. Frantically flipping tiles from the centre of the board and choosing to weld them into a cohesive spaceship, then running that ramshackle boat through a gauntlet of peril, illicits so much joy in my heart. I’ve covered the base game in depth here, and it currently sits as my second favourite game of all time.
The Big Expansion is one of the few expansions that I would call necessary for anyone who’s played a fair amount of Galaxy Trucker. A lot of its additions make the game a bit more punishing, which, after you’ve played the base game half a dozen or more times, feels necessary.
Not to brag, but I have 19 plays of Galaxy Trucker under my belt, making me a veritable veteran. I’ve also played the campaign mode in the app a few times through, meaning my grasp of ship building is not to be underestimated.
My challenge, when playing with new players, is that I have a pretty good idea how to build a ship without any major deficiencies. While I haven’t memorized every tile and card in the game and know exactly how many guns a level 2 ship should have, I’m pretty good at not placing redundant components on my ship. My size lasers are two spaces apart to cover 6 squares, my shields don’t cover the same sides, I don’t have two of the same life support modules on my ship. I can intuit what parts I need for my ship fairly well, and that experience puts me two large steps ahead of my friends, who only have half a dozen plays under their belt.
And, here’s the major problem. When you play it well, Galaxy Trucker is kind of boring. If you make it through all 3 runs unscathed, well… that’s just not very exciting. I suspect the Vlaada Chvatil had similar feelings, because everything in this expansion adds complexity and difficulty. It’s like a saw-blade. In the hands of an experienced person, an excellent tool. In the hands of a child? Well, someone’s going to be upset my this metaphor…
What Does This Expansion Add?
Galaxy Trucker: The Big Expansion adds several modules.
Pieces to allow for a 5th player
New ship blueprints for the first and second adventures
A Rough Roads module, which introduces a new rule for all players
Promo adventure cards, changing up the adventures
Evil Machinations, all players get to insert a potentially devastating card into the adventure deck
New ship classes
Cyan Aliens, who offer unique benefits depending on the specialist you’ve chosen
10 new ship components, all of which add-in some major benefits, but can also have devastating drawbacks.
The new ships are brilliant for those who are experienced with the base game. The level 1 ship can be rotated in any direction, but engines still must fire backwards. These ships can also be hit on every dice roll, no longer can you rely on rolling an 11 and having that large asteroid narrowly miss your crew quarters.
The level 2 ship is actually 2 smaller ships that you need to fly in tandem. They offer many challenges, such as needing to staff and power the two halves of your ship separately, and your flight speed is set to the lower of the two ships. They have a few benefits however, like adding the firepower from both ships together, and more outside edge pieces to place guns.
Neither of these two new ships are ‘insurable’, meaning if you choose to partake in these new designs, you’re putting your wallet at stake. There is no limit to the amount of losses you need to play should your ship crumble under the weight of the galaxy. Luckily for me, playing Galaxy Trucker is never about the money.
Returning to my sentiment about surviving unscathed and how boring it is, the Rough Roads module seeks to ruin your day. A number of the Rough Roads cards are revealed before building your ship, so you can, hopefully, plan around these new rules. They can include things like, explosive batteries, if you lose a battery component, the 8 surrounding components are also lost, or, space junk, in which every piece that falls off a ship becomes a large meteor for every player behind them.
The Rough Roads’ module turns up the difficulty and chaos to its maximum value. I’ve found these cards combined with the new ships are a great way to handicap experienced players. Not all players need to adhere to these new rules, but you can decide as a group. Generally, Bigfoot and I take on the massive challenges, while Otter opts for the safe and easy routes. Again, for me, score doesn’t matter, I don’t care about balance in Galaxy Trucker. I’m here to chew bubble gum and watch ships get blow’d up. And I’m all out of bubble gum.
Who is this Expansion For?
I can definitively say that this expansion is for those who absolutely love the chaos of Galaxy Trucker, and just want more. They want harder missions, tougher ships, and unforgiving twists around every space bend. The Big Expansion (and by extension, the Keep on Trucking expansion for the second edition) breathes life and flavour into a fun and fantastic system.
That said, it also adds complexity. It turns Galaxy Trucker from a game that I can teach to anyone quickly, into a game with well over a dozen different components. The back of the expansion rule book includes a summary of all the new pieces, which I always make a point of putting near the new players, so they can quickly reference what these pieces actually do. Inevitably, they just ignore the new pieces, casting them aside because they’re too complex. It’s a lot of computations their brain can’t handle during the stress of a real time phase.
The tiles are a pain to separate out, meaning this expansion will probably live forever folded into your base game. It’s great for experienced truckers, but fresh meat need not apply.
I love the modularity of the difficulty. I enjoy the trade-offs a lot of the new pieces introduce. The new ships are wild and frenetic, and I absolutely adore everything The Big Expansion adds to Galaxy Trucker. I recognize that the base game was incredibly divisive, people either love it or hate it. If you hate Galaxy Trucker because it’s random, too chaotic, has a ‘pummel the loser’ problem, and feel dispirited when your ship falls apart, this expansion does absolutely nothing to ease those qualms. But if you’re on the ‘love it’ side of that dichotomy, The Big Expansion just gives you more to love. It’s a must-have for Galaxy Trucker fans, and I’m so glad they brought it back for Galaxy Trucker’s second edition.
What is a point worth? This is a question that comes up frequently when I’m learning new games. After the rules are done and the scoring conditions are being discussed, I have to ask what the average score tends to be. Unfortunately, I am frequently playing new games where no one at the table has any anecdotal evidence of what’s average final score, can be.
If you’ve played a lot of games, you may have run into this problem. Say you’ve just finished off a game of Castles of Burgundy. You managed a pretty good score, just squeaking over that 200 point mark. Feeling pretty good about that score, your friend pulls out Agricola. During the rules teach they mention that if you can’t feed your family during a harvest, you’ll have to take a beggar card for every food you’re short, and those are worth -3 points. “No problem” you think to yourself. 3 points is basically nothing. Flash forward to the end of the game and the winning player earned 30 points. You look down at those three beggar cards you took right off the bat and realize that 9 points is ~30% of a winning score.
In some games, it’s fairly easy to get a feel for how valuable a single point is. In Dune: Imperium, the first player to get to 10 points triggers the end of the game, and probably wins. In that case, it’s easy to see how valuable a single point is. In Food Chain Magnate, your money is your score, and the game ends when the bank is depleted. You know the total sum of ‘points’ available from the moment the bank breaks the first time.
Players all choose how much money the bank will have at the start of Food Chain Magnate
Other games have their scoring a bit more nebulous. Wingspan for instance, the final score will be highly dependent on which scoring objectives come out, which birds are available, and how many scoring cards each player managed to take into their hand. The scores in Isle of Skye can swing wildly, depending on just the order in which the objectives get scored!
Another thing to consider is some games have a fairly set amount of points, no matter the player count. Vikings and Raiders of the North Sea are two games that don’t scale with player counts. The competition for each point becomes fiercer the more players you add to the game. This is especially frustrating when someone offers anecdotal evidence, “Oh yeah, Otter and I played Raiders of the North Sea a few months ago. Our scores were in the 80 point range”, not realizing that in a 3 player game, 60 points a more average score.
11 points is a big difference in a 4 player game of Raiders of the North Sea
So, naturally, when playing so many different games, it can be hard to value a point. Knowing when to throw away a card that offers you two points in favour of something else can be key. I’m not going to take one of the 4 point buildings as my first pick in Castles of Burgundy, but in some other game, getting an easy 2 points is a worthy trade-off. And Bigfoot finally got sick of my whining, so he created Goodat.games to solve my whining.
Goodat.games queries BoardGameGeek’s user submitted scores and plots out the average score on a handy graph to answer the question, “What is a point worth?” It includes filters to sort by the number of players, narrow down the subset of data based on a year or month, and can even tell you what the average score is for each placement in a game (e.g. the average winning score in a 4 player game of 7 Wonders)
What’s the average winning score of a 4 player game of 7 Wonders? Around 58
Goodat.games is a work in progress, but it has become such a handy tool in my board game life, that I feel compelled to share it with the world. There are limitations, like it doesn’t have every game available, and adding new games requires a 10-minute buffer as to not make too many API requests and get itself blocked by BGG. Games that have the same name as others, or trying to specify which edition or expansions, are all extremely tricky things to try and solve for. But for my purposes, it has become a site that I pull out anytime I’m learning a new game. Now I never need to guess at what the value of a point is. In Gizmos, the difference between a 1 point card and 3 point card is the difference of 3% of your final score, and 10% of your final score. Meanwhile, in Whistle Mountain, the average score is 134, so the difference between a 1 and a 3 point tile is .7% and 2% of your final score.
I don’t play many video games to completion any more, or rather, the games I tend to play don’t have a proper ending. Slay the Spire, Enter the Gungeon, Rocket League, and Shotgun King are all examples of the games that I default to playing when I’m tired, or don’t feel like I can commit the time to really get into a video game. Generally I’m procrastinating writing a board game review, or I’m waiting for my toddler to wake up, so she can destroy the house I just spent the last hour cleaning. Situations where I don’t want to spend the time and effort to launch into a campaign, only to be forced to shut it down in a hurry.
The Fire Emblem series has always been broken into manageable chunks, with a chapter encompassing a bit of story, a single battle, some more story, and then some army management before repeating for the next chapger. It was easy to budget my time accordingly. Knowing what to expect in terms of session length encouraged me to launch the game more frequently than some of the other games that are still sitting half finished in my queue. Borderlands 3, Dragon Quest XI, and Ni No Kuni 2 are all games that I started that I don’t play because I feel like I don’t have enough time to really sit down and enjoy them.
What is a Fire Emblem?
Fire Emblem is a tactical RPG franchise developed by Intelligent Systems. The Franchise is known for it’s grid based tactical combat, hosting a large cast of colourful and varied characters, and featuring perma-death of said characters. Generally being set in a magical, medieval world, complete with kings, knights, mages, and dragons, the story usually revolves around a certain blue haired lord fighting back against an invading army.
The Titular object, the Fire Emblem, is different in each game. In the Sacred Stones, it was a magical gem, in Path of Radiance, it was a medallion, in Fates, it was a chainsaw sword. It fills whatever role the plot requires it to be.
Fire Emblem: Engage tells the story of Alear, the Divine Dragon, who has awoken from their 1,000 year slumber, only to be thrust into a conflict that could result in the destruction of not only Elyos, but of all worlds in the universe. To combat this ancient evil she embarks on a quest to collect all the Emblem Rings, because only with their power united, does our heroes stand a chance against the darkness.
My History with the Series
I’ve been a fan of the Fire Emblem series since I was 15 years old, when Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones made its way into my Game Boy Advance. It kicked off a decades long love for the tactical RPG genre of games, and taught me what a ROM was, and how to patch fan translations simply to access the 6 games that never made it over to North America. The turn based combat of units moving around a grid, all of their stats boiled down to a damage value and a hit chance. I’ve had my bacon saved more than once with a 5% critical hit chance pulling through, and I’ve had whole battles thrown down the drain at the very end becuase I got a hit when there was a 70% chance to miss. Luck swings both ways I suppose.
Etie has a 100% chance to do 64 damage, with a 5% chance to land a critical, which triples the damage of that attack
One of my favourite features of the Fire Emblem series has always been the relationships the characters can develop with each other. As characters fight alongside each other, they gain ‘support’ and can have support conversations with each other, developing each character’s backstory. I remember laying on my living room floor, pairing sets of characters, and just grinding out skirmish after skirmish, trying to unlock each of the character’s support conversations. It was a long process, but in the end I was successful. Then I discovered the internet, and I no longer had the need to grind out support conversations for myself.
I’ve played the majority of the Fire Emblem games that have been released in English, but I am by no means an expert, I generally play on the normal difficulty with the perma-death turned on, I loved Blazing Blade, Sacred Stones, Path of Radiance, and Awakening. I liked Shadow Dragon, was luke-warm on Fates and Three Houses (too much army management downtime, the dating-sim aspect was too prevelent for my liking), and was actually angry at Radiant Dawn, just due to how bad the support conversations felt.
In Fire Emblem: Engage, the support conversations themselves aren’t that engaging, no one is going to pull these quotes and create inspirational wallpapers with them. But they’re great little vignettes that give colour and personality to the characters that you bond with. It’s kind of amazing how attached you can get to a character, after they’ve pulled through impossible situations for you, and bared their heart to the other characters. It’s that level of attachment that makes the perma-death mechanic so impactful. It physically hurts me when I make a mistake, and Jill, my wyvern knight, takes an arrow to the heart and falls. I restart my game every time, determined to make it to the end without losing a single character.
Weaponized Nostalgia
The gameplay keeps to traditions by including the tried and true weapon triangle, but turns it on it’s ear by including a ‘break’ mecahnic. If you smash into a sword user with a lance, you’ll ‘break’ them, rendering them unable to counter attack. This tweak really helps get the weaker, or less defensively capable units into the battle, as they can slip in, deal some damage without getting one-shotted by the opponent.
The new gameplay hook in Fire Emblem: Engage comes in the form of Emblem Rings. Artifacts that allow the wearer to engage with a spirit in the form of heroes from prior Fire Emblem games, such as Ike from Path of Radiance, or Byleth from Three Houses. Doing so can grant a myriad of benefits, such as new special attacks, enhanced stats, special legendary weapons, and more. Spending more time engaged also grants the unit special skills, and new weapon proficiencies, which in turn allows the unit to change into more classes.
By including a main character from every main line Fire Emblem game, I found myself with an overwhelming affinity towards some of the spirits. I was eagerly anticipating the arrival of some of my favourite characters, such and Lyn and Ike. Further to just their presence in the game, each emblem has their own paralogue, which recreates a pivotal moment from their game. For Lucina, it recreates the battle in Arena Ferox, where she first fought her father, Chrome. For Ike, you relive the chapter from Path of Radiance where Ike is cornered in a fortress with enemies flowing in from all sides. Each time I approached a paralogue, I felt a surge of nostalgia, and a strong urge to replay those older games. Having these nostalgic hooks in me kept me engaged, thirsting to play more. I couldn’t wait to find the next emblem, or tackle the next chapter, which is good, because one thing that didn’t keep be engaged, was the story.
Scantily Clad Children
Look, I’m not expecting artistic prose, or dialogue that makes me weep from a Fire Emblem game, but I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the overly dramatic, anime-esqe, trope filled plot line. From multiple characters striken with convenient amnesia, characters being raised from the dead multiple times, and a dash of time travel left me rolling my eyes more than once. Some of the support conversations, which used to be my favourite part of a Fire Emblem game, left be sighing. I got annoyed when Etie’s entire personality was just “Work out, get buff”, and that same sentiment was repeated with every support partner she had.
It’s not as bad as Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, but it’s nowhere near almost any other game since 2004, where the characters felt more real and fleshed out, less one dimensional. They formed different relationships with different characters that made reading all the different support conversations fun. In Fire Emblem: Engage, it feels like each character has one trait, and they just repeat that same trait in every support conversation. It wasn’t enough to drive me away from the game, but I wasn’t compelled to seek out more support conversations than what happened organically.
A much harsher criticism that I have has to do with the character costumes that I simply found problematic. Never have I ever been more aware of the scantily clad children, running into battle with midriffs and cleavage bare. Heaven forbid characters protect their organs or eschew constant fan service. I know this isn’t new, I’m sure I could find a busty, nearly bare chested character in every game, and my distaste for problematic costumes likely stems from the fact that since becoming a father, I’m much more aware of how women are portrayed in media. But man did it feel front and centre in Fire Emblem: Engage. Between Ivy and Zelestia’s chests, and the bare tummy and spandex shors of the Sage class, I felt awkward playing this in front of my wife and kid.
Lady, there is a war going on! Put on some pants!
Final Thoughts
What Fire Emblem: Engage does well, is gameplay. I had FUN playing this game! There’s freedom to grow your army however you want it. Jade comes to you as a knight, but with just a couple skirmishes with the right emblem attached, you can turn her into an archer. Or a Pegasus knight. You can mix and match emblem skills with class skills, and unique character powers to customize exactly how you want to fight each battle. Do you want defensive Framme to one-shot the boss? Have at it! Feel like turning the heavily armoured Diamont into a mage? Not recommended, but fill your boots! I never felt stuck or like my team was missing something, because I could so easily use any character I wanted to fill any role that needed filling. Turning the Thief Yunaka into a nimble Wolf Knight that no one could hit felt way better than I expected it to.
There’s a lot in Fire Emblem: Engage that I didn’t explore. I barely crafted weapons, I hardly cooked, or donated resources. I didn’t battle in a single skirmish, and I have over a dozen relay tickets that I didn’t touch. There’s a lot more game to explore here if you’re so inclined, and if you don’t want to engage with those systems, you don’t have to, which I love. One of my biggest problems in Fire Emblem: Three Houses was the full hour it took between every combat to run around and collect all the little items, talk to every character, play all the mini-games, over and over and over again. I like they dialed back the dating-sim elements here, and made it, so I could be competitive in a normal game while not sinking excess time in army management simulation.
There’s a very good chance that I’m going to replay Fire Emblem: Engage, which is probably the highest praise I could give it, given how limited my video game time is these days. I want to use another 12 characters that I immediately benched in my previous playthrough to see how different the game feels. Considering how popular Alcrest and Hortensia are, I should probably let them play at least a few battles.
Spoilers for the book ahead. You have been warned.
I’ve always identified as ‘a reader’. Reading books is a core part of my identity. From the Scholastic book fairs as a child to wandering through giant book stores as an adult, I’ve always loved books. My tastes have drifted from fantasy, to autobiographies, and back to fantasy, but I’ve always been rooted in fiction.
A couple summers ago, my wife took an audiobook out from the library on a lark. She had a bunch of commutes coming up and needed something to fill the time when she was driving in a straight line (thanks Saskatchewan). She saw a book by the author of A Man Called Ove called Beartown was available, and figured she’d give it a shot. She had quite enjoyed A Man Called Ove, and hopefully, this would be another hit.
And it was. But not in the way that we thought it would be.
Beartown is a tiny community in northern Sweden, stuck in the far side of a forest. The factory is dwindling, the economy is sagging, and people are moving away. Any community faced with this hardship has to rally behind something, and Beartown, is a hockey town. The junior hockey team has a chance to compete in the national semi-finals, and actually have a shot at winning! If they do, it would breathe new life into the community. A hockey academy would be built in Beartown, pouring much needed capital into the community. The hockey team represents hope, a light in the cold, dark winter night that Beartown is going though. At the head of that hope is Kevin, the star player. He’s the one who scores the goals, he’s got the skills and drive that could lead him to the NHL, and he’s the one that’s going to lead the Beartown junior hockey team to national victory.
So when they win that semi-final game on their home turf, it’s cause for celebration. A raucous house party where the players are celebrities. Copious amounts of booze consumed by lightweight teenagers leads Kevin to comit a violent act against Maya, the General Manager’s daughter, that tears the town asunder.
Beartown was a difficult read for me on a number of levels. First, I come from a small town in northern Canada. I’m intimately aware of the types of people who are drawn to, and remain in, those communities. I keenly aware in how stupid ‘hometown pride’ is, and how important it is to ‘fit in’, to ‘be a team player’, because get on one persons bad side, and suddenly you’re isolated. There aren’t any new friends to make, new jobs to seek out. Everyone knows, or thinks they know, whatever drama has befallen you.
I left my small town the moment I graduated from high school. At 17 I left it behind and moved to the big city of Winnipeg, only returning to visit once a few years later. My mother now lives in a different small town, where I end up visiting once a year or so, and every time I do, I’ve filled with such disdain. I despise the small communities and the people who choose to live away from the urban centres. I’m fully aware that it’s my own bias, but, it’s the feelings that fill my heart.
So that’s tough point number 1. I think hometown pride is stupid, so reading about a group of people who scream “We are the bears from Beartown!”, people to stay in a dying town because they’re ‘tough’, just makes me shake my head. I don’t have respect for that kind of hardheadedness, but, that’s coming from someone who couldn’t wait to leave their hometown. a hometown where there aren’t a lot of good memories left behind.
Beartown doubles down on the team mentality by putting the hockey team front and centre. Everything is for the team, the individual doesn’t matter, the team comes first. Coaches who’ve poured entire lifetimes into the club are thrown aside by the sponsers who think they know better. The players are idols, getting away with calling their teacher ‘sweet-cheeks’ in class, skipping school, proudly proclaiming that they could fuck any girl at the party. There are no concequences for their actions, because they’re the hockey team.
I’m no longer an outcast, but I sure felt like one when I lived in my hometown. I didn’t fit in, and those who don’t fit in are made keenly aware of it. If the collective turns their back on you, there’s nothing in a small town to seek out. I can’t tell you how much happier I was when I moved to the city and found a group of like-minded individuals. Hell, I wasn’t even that odd, I liked books, anime, video games. I’m a cis-gendered straight man, I can’t imagine the torture that someone who didn’t fit that mould would have felt. In a city, even if a fraction of a percent are of the same mind, it’s still a significant number of people. If there’s drama or a rift within a hobby, there’s other people that you can turn to. It isn’t so insular and suffocating, there’s freedom in being able to piss someone off, without being completely ostracized from your community.
Back to Beartown, and, here’s where the spoilers really set in. Maya, the GM’s 15-year-old daughter, is raped by Kevin, the 17-year-old star hockey player. When I first read the premise of the book, I was really worried that the main conflict of the story was going to be characters trying to cover up the crime so Kevin could play in the final. Instead, as soon as Maya comes forward with her accusations, Kevin is plucked from the bus literally on the way to the final game. Beartown loses the championship, and a rift sets in. Maya is hated by everyone, they cost her everything. “Why couldn’t she just wait until after the game?” “The police shouldn’t be involved, we could have dealt with this internally!” are phrases thrown around by the men in the hockey club.
Fredrick Backman has some really amazing quotes in this book. So many feelings and emotions that I’ve felt in my heart and soul, but never had the words to put them to.
“For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.”
“Culture is as much about what we encourage as about what we permit … That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with”
“Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.”
“The love a parent feels for a child is strange. There is a starting point to our love for everyone else, but not this person. This one we have always loved, we loved them before they even existed. No matter how well prepared they are, all moms and dads experience a moment of total shock, when the tidal wave of feelings first washed through them, knocking them off their feet. It’s incomprehensible because there’s nothing to compare it to. It’s like trying to describe sand between your toes or snowflakes on your tongue to someone who’s lived their whole life in a dark room. It sends the soul flying”
“It doesn’t take a lot to be able to let go of your child. It takes everything”
Seriously. If I had been reading this on my ebook, I would have been highlighting so many passages. I loved reading this book and coming across passages that just lit up lights inside my head. Giving words to feelings that I’ve been searching for so long. Backman also leans heavily into foreshadowing, sometimes too much for my liking. Every now and then I would feel a passage was written clumsily, but, as you can tell from my entire blog, this is just the pot calling the kettle black.
Beartown has a deep melancholy feeling to it. The weight of the struggle is almost too much to bear. Between friendship, loyalty, honour, and just plain right and wrong, Backman handles the extremely serious and sensitive subject matter with aplomb. One character I particularly loved was Ramona, the old bar owner who’s been drinking her breakfast for a decade, ever since her husband died. There’s a scene where someone is trying to proclaim that “Hockey makes people do crazy things” and she fires right back “Religion doesn’t start wars, guns don’t keep people. It’s fucking MEN” which, honestly, makes me stand up and applaud. So often we pass off responsibility for actions, make excuses for the horrific things that occur, but at the end of the day. Humans are choosing to hurt humans.
The character who I hated the most was the head coach, David. He was supposed to be this shining example, his strategy for building up the best junior team was to pour love into these boys for the last 10 years. Then, when this happens, he’s quick to say “Don’t want to get into politics, I just want to coach hockey”, as if these boys aren’t humans with lives outside the game. David is a soon-to-be parent, but offers no remorse for Peter, whose daughter was attacked. He only bemoans that they didn’t wait to present the crime until after the game. David buries his head in the sand, and, when it becomes clear that Maya and her family aren’t going to run away from town, he turns tail and takes up the head coach position for the rival town’s team. The cowardice this character displays infuriates me. As a parent, I hated his lack of empathy. As a man, I despised his adherence to the status quo.
Beartown explores a lot of themes, as there are a lot of characters, all with their own lives and struggles. Even if the book is spoiled now that you’ve read this blog post, I still highly recommend reading this book. Fredrick Backman made me feel raw feelings that I didn’t really know were there. I know I’ll be continuing onto the sequel, Them Against Us very soon, which, my wife assures me doesn’t let up on the emotional turmoil.
At the end of the weekend, I was left laying on the couch eating ice cream, feeling utterly destroyed. I had somewhat forgotten, in the age of easy to consume content, that art, real art, makes you feel things. It forces you to look at situations and events that are so far removed from our day to day lives. A Pogrom in Romaina is utterly incomprehensible to me, as is sexual violence, but they’re very real things that happen. When we forget that real people go through these traumas, we’re in danger of becoming complacient. Heaven forbid we ever fall so deeply into our own safe little bubbles and think “These things don’t really happen”. As a parent, I’m plauged with intrusive thoughts of harm befalling my children, and it’s something I have to deal with. I can’t protect my children forever, nor will I rob them from the fullness that comes from adventure and exploration. I’ll equip them the best I can, sit back, chew my fingernails and worry, and kiss their wounds that inevitably come from life. But what I can do, is champion that we as people always need to be better. We cannot protect and glorify those who seek to do harm to others. We need to protect the vulnerable around us, and hold those who live in positions of power accountable for their actions. We need to continue to tell the stories that make us uncomfortable. We need to teach everyone around us that we won’t be complacent when evil befalls our loved ones.
I hope this divergnce from board game reviews has been intresting for you. It’s certianly a very different skill, and while I don’t really feel eqipped to offer substitive critics of the art I engaged with this weekend, these blog posts are an accurate represntations of my thoughts and feelings. My heart has been hurting this weekend, and writing about my feelings is a pretty good band-aid.
I’m keenly aware that this is a board game review blog, and that I’m ill-equipped to offer a proper review on something so outside my wheelhouse, but sometimes you need to step outside your comfort zone. This weekend, I engaged with art that left me emotionally raw, and I feel compelled to share them here. I hope you enjoy this divergence from the regular, cardboard content that normally appears here.
My partner and I love live theatre. One of our first dates, I was trying to impress her and bought tickets to a local production of Pride & Prejudice, and it ignited a love for plays in both our hearts. We’ve been to dozens of plays over the years, but unfortunately, a lot less so since Covid happened and we brought a baby in our household.
This week, my wife organized childcare, procured tickets, and picked me up from my office for dinner and a date. The dinner was a delicious sweet and sour pork belly from Foo, one of the few restaurants that we go back to specifically for that dish. Then we meandered down to the playhouse, and sat down, unaware of the emotion damage we were about to receive.
Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story written by Hanna Moscovitch, directed by Christian Barry, with songs by Ben Caplan & Christian Barry is a dark folktale story about two Romanian refugees, Chaim (played by Eric Da Costa) and Chaya (played by Shaina Silver-Baird), finding each other at the docks of Halifax, waiting in line to get cleared medically. They part ways, but come back together when they meet in Montreal. He’s a plucky 19-year-old, she’s a 24-year-old widow. He remembers her, asks to marry, and she reluctantly consents “If it’s her father’s wishes”.
Much of the story is told through the rough but powerful voice of the narrator, ‘The Wanderer’ (preformed by Ben Caplan). He skips merrily from side to side of the stage, singing of the cold, the joy of matrimony, and the bleakness of fleeing your home. His bushy beard matches his strong baritone, and while his jubilant high notes get the audience clapping in beat, while in the solemn moments you could hear a pin drop. The score mixes folk, rock, and lullaby, utilizing woodwinds, violin, saxophone, and even a megaphone at one point. Chaim and Chaya perform double duty in playing various instruments while The Wanderer narrates.
Living in Montreal where everything is cold, Chaim and Chaya eventually have a baby. Chaim has been working on the railways, good work at $8 a week! One night, he tries to join his friends in watching a film at the theatre, but gets stopped by an anti-Semitic message. Suddenly, a crack forms, and he remembers the pogrom that killed his entire family. He goes home, and his child has a fever. Chaya’s sure it typhus, the ailment that claimed her husband’s life, but the doctor refuses to see her, and she doesn’t know why!
It’s at this turning point that The Wonderer, with a cloth draped over his head, sings a hauntingly beautiful Yiddish melody. My heart was in my throat, not knowing if the child lives or dies. Spoiler, he lives. And the cast goes on to live a full life. Chaya dies at 77, Chaim at 92. They have 4 kids, and 16 great-grandchildren, who all achieve so much.
The story of Old Stock is the true story of playwright Hanna Moscovitch’s great-grandparents. While creative license was taken, the story remains true. It left me contemplating humanity, and how could anyone fathom to hurt other humans! How can people have such hate in their heart that they tear through a community. I reflect on how blessed and lucky I am that I live in a place where me and my child don’t have those worries. We have safety, stability, and freedom.
Old Stock is dark and thought-provoking. I found The Wanderer’s wild energy utterly charming, and encourage everyone to seek out this play. Some parts are crass, and being confronted with the very real suffering that feels so far removed from my daily life left me uncomfortable, the raw emotions I felt are a good reminder of why art is important in the first place. In the age of media, that seems made solely to entertain, it’s a good reminder that art evokes deep and complex emotions. It lets you see a snippet of someone else’s life and story, and sometimes that reminds you that while so easy to just divide humans into Us and Them, we’re all still humans, and the pain we inflict on others is real.
