Mechanics: Deck Building, Narrative Adventure, Pick up and Deliver, Legacy
Introduction
It’s kind of amazing how Legacy games rose and fall over the last decade. What started back in 2011 with Risk Legacy, and rose to provenance in 2015 with Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, there was a time when Legacy games were all the rage, when board game hobbyists were clamouring for more campaigns. Original games like Seafall and Charterstone promised a unique game experience instead of using a ‘tried and true’ existing game as their foundation. Ultimate Werewolf, Machi Koro, and Betrayal at House on the Hill all produced Legacy versions of their popular games.
If you were anything like me, we went from a dearth to a glut of half-finished campaigns. It turns out, committing to play the same game 12 – 24 times is actually quite a tall order. With 4 players, all of whom have different tastes, and new games always on the way, choosing to return to a Legacy game means not playing whatever new, exciting game for another week. And then one of your friends decides to start a board game blog, and is always pushing to play something new, so he can produce new content, and you’re left with boxes of half finished games on your shelf. What scum.
How to Play
Clank! is a deck building game, in which players are delving into a dangerous mine to steal the most valuable artifact they can get their hands on, then escape with their loot. Each player starts the game with a deck of 10 cards, containing some boots for movement, some burgle, that grants some skill, which allows you to buy new cards, and a two stumble cards, which simply produce the titular resource, clank.
As players play cards, acquire new cards, and move deeper into the dungeon, they will inevitably produce clank, which represents the noise you make. After buying cards from the market row to augment and power up your abilities, the new cards that come out may have a symbol that triggers the dragon to attack. When this happens, all the clank that has been produced gets swept up into a bag, then, some cubes are drawn. If your colour comes out, OUCH! It gets placed on your health bar, and should you ever reach 10 damage, you’re out of the game. As you and your fellow thieves manage to ransack the dungeon, the dragon will get angrier, and draw more cubes each time an attack happens. If you die while in the underground, you’re the dragon’s dinner. You don’t get the opportunity to score your points, and no one remembers your name. If you die while in the above ground, hurrah! The local villagers haul your maimed body to the inn, where you can recount your tale of danger. Even better, if you manage to return to the starting spot with an artifact in hand, you earn a bonus 20 points.
Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated takes this gameplay, and adds in some story beats. A narrative set in the Penny Arcade universe, with extra goals and bonus objectives that can help or hinder your party should you manage to complete, or fail to satisfy before the end of each game. As each game progresses, you’ll be tearing up contract cards, placing new location stickers on the board, augmenting cards, and adding bonuses to specific spots on the board. Each game will end with a winner, the player who earned the most points, and a Associate Spotlight, the player who managed to accomplish the objective set by the story at the start of the game.
Review
My experience playing Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated was a bit odd. We bought the game as a group and broke it out during our first Cabin-con. We played 4 games back to back, and I was utterly in love. There was so much discovery, so many things to sticker, branching paths in the narrative, I was deliriously enjoying the experience. The last game of that weekend saw my character at the bottom of the map while everyone else was nearly out, spelling an almost certain doom for me. I choose to accept my fate and push further to get the last story beat, which just so happened to reveal a genie, granting me a massive 20 point relic, and teleporting me out of the danger zone. That was one of the few games I won.
My goal while playing Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated was never to get the highest score. Instead, I always chased down what thought the associate spotlight award was going to be. I would beeline to the spots on the map that would have us reading from the book, I would eschew ‘good’ cards if they didn’t help me fulfill the available contracts. More than once, I sacrificed my game to satisfy my need for discovery.
Each play of Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated took between 2 and 3 hours. Every few turns there’s a new paragraph to be read, stickers to apply, and conditions to update. I loved it, but constantly having to stop, and read, and sticker utterly broke the flow of the game. In the latter half of the campaign, the discovery slowed down. A lot fewer stickers were being placed, only a handful of contracts were available, and the deck of cards left to unlock was gradually getting thinner. Even with the discovery elements waning, each game still managed to introduce new mechanics that would keep the game from getting stale.
After that first day where we played 4 games in a row, it took us a further year and half to finish the next 8 games. Every couple of months we’d break it out, need to re-learn the nuance of the legacy elements. None of us were major fans of the base game of Clank, which Acquisitions Incorporated was based off of, but we knew the gist. We’d often forget how some of the elements that were unlocked in our previous game worked, and we’d often forget the bonuses that we unlocked at our pub, because that board would be way off at the end of the table. Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated is a table hog, spanning the entire breadth of my average sized dining table, and still needing spare chairs for the boxes, books, and sticker sheets. Furthermore, we’d forget the nuance of how the shrines worked, or that we had to draw vault cards at the start of each mission. I suspect this wouldn’t have been a problem if we had less time between each games, but, when your game group priortizes new games over old ones as ours does, there’s only so much you can do. It weirdly felt like learning a new game, every time we sat down to play.
I don’t know if Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated is strictly better than the base game of Clank!. Now that we’re done, none of us feel compelled to keep the giant box that held everything. There’s literally a 0% chance one of us will want to play a ‘normal’ game of Clank! on that legacy board. At least with the base game (or one of the sequels that offer a spin on the main layout) I’d feel compelled to play with people who are new to the deck building genre of board games. Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated is a behemoth on the shelf, taking up too much space, and now that we’ve finished the story, there’s a dozen little rules that’d I’d have to teach that when introduced over time, aren’t too onerous, but when thrown in all at once, can be a bit overwhelming.
Luck and balance aren’t things that I want to harp on, as with every deck builder, there is some element of luck. Pulling enough boots at a critical moment, or getting just the right amount of skill points, allowing you to get a powerful card at the perfect time, isn’t something that can really be balanced for. The deck of cards that makes up the offer is thick. There are few duplicates in the deck, making the offer feel different every time. That said, it really sucks when someone manages to score an excellent combo of cards, letting them pull off amazing turns, whilst your turn is “move two spaces, get 3 skill points, produce one clank. Oh look, all the cards cost 4 or more, so I guess I’ll take another explore card.”
The narrative of Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated is funny. My friend, Bear did a fantastic job as the role of the narrator. Perfectly assuming the accents of various rogues and rapscallions. Even with humourous writing and a great narrator, the story didn’t really grip us. One disconnect I had, was that we were all members of the same crew, the titular Acquisitions Incorporated, but at no point is this a cooperative game. Several times the story nudged us in the direction of collaboration, such as not letting the opposing crew, the Dran Enterprises steal our clients, but there wasn’t any real push to collaborate, other than for the joy of the story. As a group of mechanically driven people, it wasn’t enough for us. For each of us, our goal was to win the game, and/or, get the highest score possible. Collaborating would generally be in direct conflict of that goal. More than once I was fusturated by the fact that the next story objective was way at the bottom of the map, so I had to choose between going after that story, or, escaping from the depths before the dragon took a chunk out of my hide. And, as soon as I commit to delving deep, someone would snag a relic, and players would start cycling the offer row, trying to trigger the dragon more and more, punishing me for my choice. It’s a great mechanic in the base game, but when Clank! Leagcy is trying to tell a story, it feels like it’s trying to play two tunes at the same time.
I’ve heard of a few people report that playing Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated was one of their absolute best board game experiences. And some who report that they basically played the game cooperatively, The whole table would work together so they could discover the absolute most that the game had to offer. Honestly, before embarking on this legacy game, I wasn’t a very big fan of Clank! in general. And as far as legacy games go, Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated had everything I want in a legacy game experience; a doublesided map to explore, tonnes of story, stickers, destroying cards, bringing new cards into the system, surprise twists, you name it. But the biggest detractor I felt is that we had to play Clank! 13 times, and had no clear indication what we were supposed to be doing. How you actually win the campaign wasn’t revealed until the entire campaign was over. I was always chasing the Associate Spotlight award, but, that was a self imposed goal. I had no idea what reward that would net me in the end. And honestly, that’s something that’s always really irked me and my game group. We like to know all the rules before we start playing, so, when we open a rulebook and see huge blank spaces to be filled in with new rules as we progress, it’s not something we actually enjoy.
One of our players admitted they weren’t having fun and bowed out halfway through the campaign, so Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated became the game that we played when that player wasn’t available for our regular game night. It took a year and half, but we actually finished it, which is more than I can say for almost every other Legacy game I’ve attempted. I’m happy that we completed the campaign, the experience was good, but I can’t say that it left me particularily satisfied. It’s not something that I would recommend to everyone. If you enjoy Clank!, this is a no brainer. It’s more of what you like, and an obligation to play it more frequently. But if you don’t have any strong feelings for Clank!, or, if you actively dislike it, Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated is not going to change your mind.
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.
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.
Disclaimer: A copy of Trekking Through History was provided by Underdog Games for review purposes
Introduction
I have a trick when it comes to introducing people to hobby board games. I find the easiest, most colourful, aesthetically pleasing game with a theme that they already enjoy, and use it to ease them into the hobby. Underdog Games has been producing some very bright and vibrant games with absolutely no expense spared on the production. Neoprene mats, tarot sized cards featuring full sized art, and chunky components make for excellent introductions into board gaming. Add in an educational twist, and suddenly you’ve got a game for both parents and kids to enjoy!
How to Play
In Trekking Through History, you’re playing as time travelling tourists tearing the fabric of the space-time continuum in an effort to curate the most enriching three day vacation through mankind’s past.
Setting up the game tasks players with laying out the neoprene mat that serves as the market row and score tracker, then separate the three decks of cards based on the number in the upper right corner. Each card depicts an event in history, and prominently displays the date the event happened in the top left corner. In the bottom right corner, cards may show several symbols that you’ll earn if you choose to that the card into your Trek, while the bottom left corner tells you just how much time you’ll have to spend for that card.
On your turn, you simply take one of the cards from the row, and collect tokens matching the symbols on the card, as well as a token matching the space the card was on. The tokens fall onto your itinerary and may score you points or earn you time crystals. You move your token on the time track, and place your card into your Trek. A trek is a line of cards with an ascending date, which means if you take a historical event that happens further in the past than top card of your current trek, you’ll need to start a whole new trek (It’s also worth mentioning that you can only have one active trek at a time). Then, the player whose token is furthest back on the time track, gets to take the next turn.
The rounds ends when all players time tracker tokens reach the 12 o’clock spot. The cards in the market are wiped out, and the round 2 cards come in, which span from the earliest records of BCE, all the way to almost modern day events. After the third round, the scores are counted. Your final score is based on the points you earned during play, and each of your treks are scored based on how long they are. There’s a helpful reminder on the right side of the score track. The player with most points wins!
Review
Starting off with the physical production of Trekking Through History, the components are fantastic. All the tokens you’re collecting to fill your itinerary are made of moulded plastic, and are stored in a firm, plastic case. The player markers are large, chunky plastic stopwatches that move around the circular time board, and the main play area that contains the card river and score track is a stitched edge neoprene mat. Each of the large cards feature unique and vibrant artwork. All of this to say, the components of Trekking Through History make the game feel like a premium product!
The gameplay itself is very straightforward, pick a card, pay it’s time cost, and place it into your current trek. You’ll be compelled to wait for a card to slide along the card river, so it matches up with the bonus token that you really want, so you can earn bonuses from your itinerary. This is risky, however, as you really need to hope that other players won’t snap up your card. Treks can only move forward through time, meaning if the token you really want is associated with a card late in the timeline, you may find yourself making several shorter treks, and hoping you make up the difference in points. It’s quite satisfying when everything works out, however. There are great moments during the game where the perfect card slides into the right position, and claiming that event just so happens to trigger extra bonuses on your itinerary, rocketing your marker up the score track. When the combos hit, the game sings.
I love the time mechanic, I’ve loved the mechanic in every game I’ve played that featured it (Glen More, Patchwork, and Thebes are the games that come to mind). The cards that offer you a variety of resources, and sit further back in time require more opportunity cost to acquire, which offers an excellent trade-off. It can be frustrating when you have to take a card that launches you several spaces into the lead, then you sit there, watching the other players take turn after turn, letting the card you want slip right past the resource you needed, but the flip side is quite satisfying. If you happen to have them, the time crystals allow you to reduce the time cost when acquiring a card by 1 space per crystal you spend. We found ourselves using these to get multiple turns in a row more often than perhaps we should have, but it gave us greater control over that card market. Which in a game with narrow margins, every extra point counts!
Every card represents an event in history, and the back of the card shares some details about that event. Just like in HerStory, also by UnderDog Games, this feature educated us during our downtime of the game. Events or objects I’ve never really considered, like “Breaking the Sound Barrier with Chuck Yeager”, or “Race in the Paris-Rouen” were suddenly interesting. While waiting for my turn to come back around, I felt compelled to flip over the card. Even better were the conversations some of the cards inspired amongst my friends, like watching Freddy Mercury during the 1985 Live Aid concert. I love when a game helps pull the stories from our past, or encourages us to talk about hobbies other than the game we’re currently engaged it. It’s an easy way to introduce someone to stories from other cultures they may never have encountered otherwise.
With only 36 time to spend each game, and most cards costing between 2 – 4 time, Trekking Through History moves along quickly. Before you know it, you’ve picked up 13 cards between your three treks, and the end of the game is bearing down on you. There’s a lot of luck in the cards, considering only 6 cards are available to you when it is your turn. It can be entirely possible that there just aren’t any cards that will generate the resource you need! I don’t think Trekking Through History is the absolute best drafting or set collection game out there, but it’s one that would absolutely excel in a family setting. I wouldn’t hesitate to plop this down on a week night to encourage curiosity from the younger people in my life.
The deck of cards is thick, meaning players will always be seeing new events. The game flow is easy to follow, and it feels good when the luck just happens to fall the right way. It’s a fun and smooth game, and with the dates on the cards making each card valuable or worthless depending on the state of your current trek, it’s hard to inflict bad feelings via hate drafting. With short and long term goals pulling you in multiple directions, I felt engaged through my plays of Trekking Through History, and I really enjoyed the snippets of knowledge I acquired in between my turns. It’s attractive, fun, and quick to play. It’s probably not one that I’ll be pulling out with my regular game group often, but it’s the kind of game that I would put in front of my sister and her kids when they ask “What’s the board gaming thing you’re always going on about?”
