I covered Far Cry 3 at the tail-end of last year, though you could be forgiven for not remembering, tucked away as it was in that year’s leftovers article. There was a lot to say about how that game managed to house nigh-perfect open world gameplay and then mar it with vaguely racist plot-points that would have felt more at home in a boy’s imperialist adventure story from a hundred and fifty years ago. And talk everyone did, which is why I didn’t really bother engaging in the discussion except to affirm that, yeah, it kind of felt racist.

So I’ll also be brief with Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, a sort of do-over that fixes its race relations by omitting them. Does that fix the game? Find out below.

Stalking enemy soldiers with my neon laser bow thingy.

I’m going to say it right up front: the eighties, as in the ’80s, 1980s, eighteez, easy-eights, or however else you might pronounce it based on social strata or personal preference, are Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon‘s racism.

Which is good, for the most part. For one thing, the ’80s aren’t about to get offended at somebody’s caricaturing them. In fact, the ’80s love it when you do. They thrive on it. They’d be dead without it. They were engaged in self-parody long before it was cool. I mean, have you seen their hair?

But let’s come back to that in a minute. First, let’s turn this pony around and head back to the last, um, pony-station.

The first interesting detail about Blood Dragon is that it has absolutely nothing to do with Far Cry 3. Gone are the irritating socialites and the coming-of-age transformation of one of their number from spineless weenie to psychopathic mass murderer. Gone is the racism (and the very concept of race, unless you count cyborgs vs non-cyborgs as socially relevant). Gone even is the pretense of a real-world tropics setting.

Instead, we’ve got a story set in the distant future (so distant that the apocalypse has had an apocalypse) about a super-cyborg general gone rogue, and the team of super-cyborgs who are the only ones who can stop him.

Some of its attempts at humor aren’t all that bad.

The gameplay is indistinguishable from Far Cry 3′s, which is good, as that was some mighty smooth gameplay. You’ll still be stalking across an open world, hiding in the foliage with a bow or machinegun, highjacking trucks or evading helicopters, freeing bases so that a beleaguered resistance can occupy them in the place of evil pirates cyborgs. It has the same control scheme, the same weapon types, the same climbing animation (except this time you have a cyborg claw where your left hand ostensibly once rested). If it feels similar, smells similar, and tastes similar, it’s probably the same cake.

And that part of the game is great! As with the game’s namesake, there’s plenty to do and collect, and although it’s shorter (thankfully, as FC3 began to overstay its welcome the instant I discovered the presence of an entire second island to invade). Even better, playing as a cyborg in a 1980s version of post-apocalyptic 2007 has its perks: for one, you can upgrade your machinegun to fire laser bursts instead of bullets, and I heartily recommend you do, as the cyborg heads of your enemies will then squelch with gusto as they spray neon goo across the landscape. You can also run as fast as a patrol rover and wrench the cyborg hearts of your enemies out of their chests to feed to the titular blood dragons.

Ah yes, there are dragons. And not the trad winged things you’d recognize from your Thursday evening “guys nights” either, but glorious laser-beam-eyed monstrosities that can’t see all that well but can sense movement real good, leading to plenty of tense creeping moments as you try to evade a pair’s notice. These and other apocalypse-ified wildlife add a dash of salt to an already-tasty dish.

You begin the game OP. By the end, you’re laughably invincible.

So how are the eighties this game’s racism? I’m glad you asked.

In Far Cry 3, those pesky racist undertones gave the entire experience a bit of a sour aftertaste. After a couple hours of torching dudes with a flamethrower and then stealing their truck and expertly piloting it into a gulch, you’d finally forget that you were playing White Messiah, and BAM naked native chick thankin’ you for being rad and white and tatau powah and blood sacrifice and stuff.

Similarly, in Blood Dragon you’ll be happily chucking cyborg hearts to trick dragons into lasering an enemy base for you, and blasting robo-helicopters out of the sky with your flame-bomb shotgun, and BAM overwrought cutscene with sloooow narration telling “eighties” jokes and pausing in between each and every line as though waiting for you to erupt into bowel-rupturing laughter.

Ha ha.

Unfortunately, few of its jokes are particularly funny, and those that are soon wear out their welcome.

Its very-serious take on the drama of ancient cartoons is chuckle-worthy, until you realize that every single cutscene is doing the exact same thing, and tossing in a lot of dissonant F-bombs that would have had your parents sprinting to shut off the TV and enact a house-wide ban on animated animals until you went off to college.

Text pop-ups that demean you and offer (fake) DLC to actually play the game might elicit a smirk for their uncanny honesty, until the twentieth time they appear to block the action, gradually becoming guilty of the exact transgression of game design they’re condemning.

A montage sequence defies the sacred purpose of montages by going on for a painfully long time, a 1980s action movie sex scene feels less liberated and more embarrassing than even the most enthusiastic cringes produced by that decade, and many a reference crosses the line from cheesy-funny to merely lame.

At best, it’s amusing. At worst, it infects the game, making each story encounter into another slog of references for references’ sake, uninspired one-liners, and some of the worst cutscenes I’ve seen this decade. And since Blood Dragon hasn’t mastered the art of recognizing when it’s time to shut up, you’ll be hearing “IN THE EIGHTIES…” jokes at a steady clip from the very first action set-piece to the end credits.

He picked a good spot.

Which isn’t to say Blood Dragon is bad — rather, as with Far Cry 3, I liked it quite a bit; it’s just that my enjoyment was at times put off by the game’s insistence on being “funny.” It’s like having a good friend over for dinner, and it’s an excellent meal and mostly good conversation, except your pal can’t help himself but drop the same tired Anchorman quotes for three hours.

All in all, Blood Dragon is the joy of the original game compressed into five hours of gleeful insanity, minus a few painfully tedious cutscenes and a plot that thinks it’s cleverer than it really is. Which makes it sound a lot like most first-person shooters now that I’ve laid it out like that.

My final score is that Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon goes in for the high-five, but it’s one of those awkward three-fingered slaps that leaves you both standing there for a moment, wondering if you should give it another try. Nah, you decide, it was fine.

As you may have noticed, our regular programming here at Space-Biff! has slowed from a hopeful cool trickle to a dry faucet in the middle of the harshest windswept desert. Also, you may have deduced from this note’s title that we’re taking some time for ourselves — in part to contemplate whether there’s a meaning behind our short and possibly pointless lives, but mostly just to see some pretty places in Europe. And my original plan to continue updating the site with shorter articles hasn’t panned out — after all, Venice is one hell of a place. Vienna makes two.

If you’re wondering how to while away the hours in our absence… well, I was close to recommending a spate of excellent blogs you could read instead of this one, then figured if you’re missing this site all that much, why go and ruin that for you?

And by the way, the view is fantastic. Five space pennies to whomever can identify the spot I took that picture from.

There’s a special place in my heart for deck-building games — it’s just that it’s a twisty, confusing place.

On the one hand, the basic concept behind deck-building is nothing less than an absolute stroke of genius. On the other, I’m one of those theme guys that can’t help but need a reason for all the sheep-shuffling, card-conscripting, and goblin-ganking that board games regularly task me with. And while it’s a hoot to listen to my Dominion-loving buddy Stephen try to explain away that game’s thematic failures by insisting on a historically plausible kingdom composed of two witches, three markets, and a half-dozen duchies, I remain unconvinced. Although there are exceptions (like Mage Knight, upon which you could read a three-part series and never guess is running on deck-built steam), this is a genre I admire more from a mechanical standpoint than because I’m actually smitten.

Until Core Worlds, that is. Because I’m in love with Core Worlds, and I don’t care who sees us making out in public.

Difficult choices…

A (Bad) Shakespearean Sonnet Upon the Topicke of “Ye Olde Core Worlds”

When I have fears that I may never play
The deck-builder of theme, layered and burled,
I recall the details I hope to convey
Of the beauty and glisten of distant Core Worlds;
There be no markets to peruse for to buy
Curse-flinging witch nor Lauket adventurer
Nor silver nor gold nor laborat’ay;
Rather, sail the stars by Nexus Explorer—
O! Lay me down by the fires of Flame Troopers
Who burn through spare cards for extra ground attack!
Pay for your tactics with genetic supers
And fight the stars with starfighter flak!
__Draw and again until you can draw no more
__Then riffle the refuse to draw once more.

Back to Modern English

If you didn’t get all that, I have two things to say to you.

First, I’m bummed, because I worked on that for like an hour and a half.

Second, Core Worlds isn’t like other deck-building games. You know, the ones with a theme half-heartedly hot-glued over the top of the mechanics, like a grade schooler realizing her finger-paint project was supposed to be a Mother’s Day present and labeling her picture of a bear in the woods with a glittering and hopeful “I LOVE MY MOM!” Like that ungrateful kid, these games aren’t fooling anyone — you might appreciate it, but you’re never under the illusion it’s something more than appears at face value.

Enter Core Worlds.

Not a Core World.

It’s About Conquering — Get This — The Core Worlds

Whatever power has heretofore governed the farthest reaches of the galaxy is beginning to collapse, leaving a dynasty-sized power vacuum that’s just begging to be filled. Each player takes on the role of a barbarian empire with their sights set on gaining all the prestige and power of the previous rulers. You do this by making your way towards the Core Worlds themselves, gradually passing from distant frontiers to wealthier and better-defended industrial and luxury worlds, gaining strength by retrofitting broken-down cruisers and starbases, convincing heroes and traitors to join your cause, and recruiting the vilest mercenaries, strangest mutants, and toughest soldiers to fight for a better tomorrow — so long as we take “better” to mean “ruled by you.”

And the coolest thing about Core Worlds is that it’s a near-seamless integration of deck-building and theme. Instead of building the most unbalanced kingdom in the history of all monarchies everywhere, you’re filling up your deck with the best tech, military doctrines, and fighters you can get your hands on, and then using them to conquer the ever-loving shit out of various planets. For instance, up above you can see that the world of Osiris, a “barbaric” planet beyond the defensive purview of the empire, is getting royally messed up by a squadron of Snub Fighters and a Heavy Machine Unit that spends energy to blast everything into microscopic (and mildly radioactive) refuse. This is a good early-game get for our empire, as Osiris not only produces a bit of energy (represented by the yellow number at the top left) that we can use to draft more cards into our deck or recruit those cards into our Warzone, but it’s also strategically valuable (note the red victory point in the top right).

Decisions, decisions: draft, invade, or deploy more troops?

Also, the sheer variety on display is staggering. Not only are there puny infantrymen and fragile starfighters, there are also Flame Troopers who use extra cards from your hand as fuel to deal more damage, Hubris Missile Crawlers that blast enemy ships from the ground, terrible robots that are as adept at ground combat as they are in the sky, massive capital ships capable of dealing with a planet on their own, Stealth Hawks that don’t reveal their position until the last minute, and strange prototypes like the Supreme Brain that lets you draw piles of extra cards or the Genetic Super Soldier that pays for your tactics. You can make alliances with native tribes in exchange for help overthrowing their world’s rulers, make use of drones that can draft cards out from under your opponents’ noses, rile up your population’s pioneer spirit for combat bonuses, or employ smugglers to steal energy from your enemies.

In addition to all shapes, sizes, and dispositions of units, there are loads of worlds to conquer, many of which hold value beyond their energy and victory points, such as manufactories that decrease the cost of certain types of troops or the ability to draw an extra card at the beginning of each round. And since the price of units and difficulty of planets gradually increases depending on which of five sectors you’re currently invading, there’s never a problem of those prices or defenses being disproportionate to your level.

Unless you screw up, that is. There are lots of ways to go about doing exactly that. Like most deck-building games, Core Worlds doesn’t contain much direct conflict. Your empire can’t declare war on your spouse’s empire, for instance — these are distinctly passive-aggressive barbarians when it comes to inter-barbarian diplomacy. Even so, there are plenty of actions you can take to get ahead — the problem is in deciding which one to do right now.

A late-game military prepped for the Core Worlds.

For Example…

The round has just started, and over the previous round you deployed a healthy contingent of troops into your Warzone. Your opponent is still building up his military, though there is one weaker world he could manage to conquer right now. Something tricky occurs to you: Do you invade that less-valuable planet to keep it from falling into your enemy’s hands, even though you could go after something a little better, and hope you can build up to take the better planet too? The danger of this plan is that anything you use to conquer a planet is cycled back into your discard pile, meaning you’ll have to draw and deploy it again later. If the plan works, your opponent might not be able to acquire a world at all this round, setting him back and giving you a considerable long-term advantage. However, this plan could also dramatically backfire: maybe he’s holding some powerful troops that he can deploy to snatch the more powerful planet while you’re busy occupying weenie world, thus reversing the situation entirely.

That’s not all. Are there any cards worth drafting into your military, and should you gobble those up first, or hope he ignores them so that they’ll become cheaper in the next round? Or should you forgo conquering and drafting entirely and build up your strength because you’ve come to the border of a wealthier sector? And if you‘re going to draft a card, which one should you take — do you need another ultra-powerful star cruiser, or are your ground forces beginning to lag behind?

In Core Worlds, there’s always more to do than you have the resources to accomplish.

Events can be beneficial or horrific.

Now, as good as Core Worlds is, I really have to recommend the expansion, Galactic Orders. Now that I’ve gotten used to all its additions, I can’t imagine playing Core Worlds without it.

See, the original game had a couple minor problems. For one, things could become a little more predictable and deterministic than you’d expect of a massive invasion of a galactic empire, which gave you a fairly reliable idea of who was in the lead at any given time. The other problem was that most players didn’t bother conquering anything in the first sector, preferring instead to build up their fleets for the much juicier Frontier Worlds. This meant that even with the pre-game draft that lets you customize your deck a little bit, players had largely homogenous and boring decks for a significant portion of the early game, and all the interesting cards from the first sector went largely unused.

Galactic Orders solves all that.

The first problem is fixed by the addition of events. These are generally helpful early on: extra enthusiastic troops as they begin conquering the galaxy, barbaric allies who let you play your starting tactics cards more easily, ancient ruins filled with spare energy, imperial defectors who help you gain more actions — those kinds of things. Later on though, even the best laid plans can be disrupted as the galactic empire fights back with Republic Patrol Units that force you to discard troops from your Warzone, Convoy Raids that make drafting new cards even more expensive, and Industrial Disruption to slow down your military growth; not to mention the meddling of space pirates, mercenaries, robot revolts, nebula flares, and more. As a result, you’re forced to be more flexible as you react to a constantly fluid situation.

The second issue, that everyone ignored the first sector, is aided by the fact that you really want to start drafting and deploying cards as soon as possible, because the titular Galactic Orders, organizations like the Mining Coalition and the Science Guild, have decided that their best bet for survival is to ally with the encroaching barbarian empires. When you deploy a unit or employ a tactic, you get to place a faction token on the Order that corresponds with the little symbol on that card — and now you’ve curried influence with that particular guild, which you can trade away in exchange for favors. The Merchant Alliance helps you pay for some troops, for instance, while the Order of Knighthood is happy to lend a hand towards conquering a planet, the Science Guild loves helping you learn new tech, and the Mining Coalition will send some energy supplies your direction. Even the Galactic Senate itself can be finagled into helping you out.

Furthermore, since Core Worlds is all about making tough choices, cashing in these favors isn’t necessarily a good idea, since dominating an Order will grab you extra victory points at the end of the game.

Currying favor with the Galactic Orders.

Hijacking the world-cracking Goliath before your opponent can and then using it and a Mech Annihilator to wipe out all resistance on the core world of Indra for the win is a unique delight, and it means my final score is that Core Worlds is easily my favorite deck-building game, representing exactly the foundation I hope future deck-builders will strive to build upon. Not only is it thematic, which so many games in this genre completely fail at, but it’s a solid and exciting experience in its own right.

Ever since first playing Battlestar Galactica years ago, the cry of “Cylon!” can often be heard ringing through the burgundy corridors of Château de Thurot. Usually during game night because one of our besties is preparing some horrible machination or another, but it’s not an uncommon shout at other times either. “Will you empty the dishwasher?” Somerset asks me. “Cylon!” I scream back.

The only problem is that we can’t seem to find the time to play Battlestar Galactica anymore. Fantasy Flight’s two-hour playtime estimate doesn’t help, as it’s so conservative it makes the Tea Party look Left. For whatever reason, BSG is just one of those games that always takes a few too many hours to play — so thank goodness for BSG Express from some fine gentleman who goes by the obvious pseudonym of “Evan Derrick.” This version really takes less than an hour to wrap up, and, best of all, you can put it together all by yourself.

All the homemade (but not by me) components.

Not that I did — put it together, I mean. I’ve got eleven thumbs (don’t ask) and I’m about as talented at crafts as I am at communicating with gorillas. Oh, I know the basics: no eye contact, don’t bare your teeth, all that. Still, I’d much rather have someone else do the gorilla-communicating on my behalf, which is why I got my copy of BSG Express from Andrew Tullsen of Print & Play Productions, which specializes in helping talentless mopes like myself get their hands on custom-assembled print ‘n play games. Alternatively, you could save some cash by going over here to check out the “files” section a little over halfway down the page and make it yourself. Either way, you’re going to want to give this a try at some point.

For anyone unfamiliar with Battlestar Galactica (and we’re talking about the 2004 re-imagining, not the 1979 wine and cheese sampler), imagine post-9/11 paranoia colliding with sentient robot apocalypse fiction. Years after a robot uprising (though that’s “Cylon” to you), the toasters decided to finish the job by nuking all twelve human colonies. A few thousand refugees escaped to space in search of a new home and found themselves relentlessly pursued and exterminated. Worse, the Cylons have inserted a bunch of spy-bots into the human fleet, and these traitors walk, talk, and copulate convincingly enough that nobody can tell the difference. Cue lots of debates about the morality of torture and biological warfare, vague prophetical mumblings that are anagrams of Mormon words, tons of space battles between the humans’ last Battlestar (some of you have likely surmised it’s the “Galactica”) and the massive Cylon fleet, and, best of all, the terror of never knowing who’s a friend and who’s a machine in disguise who wants to murder you.

About halfway to defeat in all three areas.

All the other mechanics work well enough, but that constant nagging sense of uncertainty is the trembling maybe-human heart of Battlestar Galactica.

See, everything in BSG Express revolves around continually second-guessing the loyalty of your compatriots. Everyone is ostensibly working together to ensure the survival of the Galactica and the rest of the human fleet as you try to find a new planet to call home, and even if you could count on everyone being a loyal human being, that’s no easy feat, because there’s only one path to victory (by traveling quite a long distance) and three ways to lose.

For one, if enough enemy Raiders appear on the DRADIS display (space-radar), then your defenses are overwhelmed and the robots win. Or maybe everyone gets demoralized at the same time, which prompts the mass-despair and the suicide of the entire human race. Robots win. Or, lastly, the Galactica could succumb to its wounds, leaving the rest of the fleet defenseless. Robots — you got it — win.

To stave off these different types of defeat, you’ll be rolling dice in secret and then assigning them as successes or failures for all sorts of actions. You could spend time commanding the fleet to clear out Cylon Raiders or saving colonial ships, or giving rousing speeches to raise morale, or laboring in the belly of the Galactica to keep it in good repair. You could give other players executive orders to unlock their spent dice, or work on calculating the ship’s FTL jumps to get to your destination faster. And on every turn, some sort of crisis will arise — maybe unrest in the fleet, or more Cylon attacks — and you’ll keep on spending those dice because you’re hoping to hold out for just one more round.

The rub: while everyone’s rolling their dice and contributing happy positive numbers, someone, or maybe two players if you’re playing a five-person game, is a traitor. And when it comes time to count up the dice to see if you’ve avoided taking massive damage from a Cylon Basestar, a couple of your friends reveal a die with a negative number — and now you’re looking at them more closely than you ever have in all your long relationship, and trying to recall exactly how many times this sort of behavior has manifested itself. Of course, they’re both apologizing profusely, and saying they donated the least-damaging number possible. But it’s no use, because now your friends are entirely different creatures from the doting husband or grade-school chum or church-friend that you feel you know so well.

Oh, no. No. Now there’s something lurking beneath that usually-cuddly exterior. Something rotten.

Something rotten indeed.

So, terrified you’re accusing your wife of being a Cylon when she really is nothing more threatening than a really bad dice-roller, you call a vote to toss her into the brig to keep everyone safe from her predations and lies.

Of course, on the next turn your oldest friend reveals himself as a Cylon and screws up your long-term plans, all because you locked up the wrong person and left him free to wander the ship and poison the water supplies.

And, again of course, your spouse’s glare lets you know just how wrong you were.

Theme: BSG Original vs. BSG Express.

I’d recommend experiencing that exquisitely shameful moment at least once in your life, and either the original BSG or the Express version will do it for you. Both will also provide the even more delicious moment when you pull off a perfect Cylon sabotage and leave the humans floundering in space.

Deciding which version is better for you, however, is a bit tougher.

The real perks of BSG Express are that you can make it yourself, it takes much less than three hours to get through a full game, and the simplicity of the rules makes it significantly less fiddly. These are hardly negligible upsides — after playing both games, I personally prefer the Express edition. Even so, there are a few ways the original outdoes it.

First, the original game is definitely heavier on theme. Drawing a card that explains precisely what crisis the crew of the Galactica is facing is far more involving than rolling a die that tells you that you’re facing “Unrest.” Furthermore, the theme has been expanded on by multiple expansions, some of which I hear are great (others not as much). So if you’re new to Battlestar Galactica or aren’t confident in your ability to flesh out the theme on your own, the Express edition isn’t going to slow down to explain things.

Second, if you suspect some of your friends are prone to cheating, be aware that in BSG Express you spend a lot of time rolling dice behind a screen and then selecting which to reveal to the rest of the players. Which is to say, it’s really easy to cheat. Not that I have. Ahem.

Third, and this is more of a personal complaint, but I miss the civilian vs military subtext that was so strong in the TV series and hinted at in the original game by allowing players to conflict over whether they supported the special role of the Admiral or the President. In BSG Express, there’s only an Admiral, and it’s a much-simplified role. Then again, it takes less than an hour to finish a game, and this was a logical mechanic to get snipped.

“Sorry fellas, nothin’ but negatives — I swear!”

I’ve been meaning to review the original Battlestar Galactica for a long time, and was only hindered by the game’s length, and thus the difficulty of convincing anyone to play it. The BSG Express edition has changed all that, at the expense of some of the original’s complexity and variety. Fair enough, to my way of thinking. Regardless, I’m giving both versions a definite recommendation.

It’s easy to read about the ladies and gentlemen of previous times — say, the Regency or Victorian eras — and cluck at just how silly and simple those people were, to care only as far into the future as next Friday’s ball or Jane Warmporridge’s upcoming wedding. To fret so intently over appearances and the ministrations of their servants. To live with such a vast gulf between husbands and wives. It’s so easy to read about those people in those different times and let out a sort of superior chuckle. The easiest thing in the world, really.

So although a few folks have voiced concerns that Ladies & Gentlemen sounds a bit, ahem, sexist, in reality it’s a marvelous tool. For, you see, by the end of the game you’ll understand precisely how much a well-matched dress and hat can matter. Most importantly, this is one of the first board games that has stood out to me as having actually taught me something. And I’m not talking about trivia, because I’ll be damned if I’m going to say Trivial Pursuit is an important game.

The type of Lady anyone can aspire to be.

It’s Serious Time

Okay, now that we’re into this article proper, it’s time to get serious. You might be reading this sentence out of a sense of curiosity, or out of completionism, or maybe because you like my writing style (hi mom!). But seriously, we’re getting serious now.

In addition to writing about board games, I sometimes cover computer games as well. Now and then I tag a PC game article with “Why Games Matter,” which indicates the game in question does a little bit more than most games bother with. In some instances, this means the game comments on human nature, or complains about something broken in our society. Sometimes it means the game sprays lots of vague philosophy against a wall to see what sticks, and at other times that it’s critiquing the world of gaming itself.

This is the first time I’m putting a “Why Games Matter” tag on a board game article.

It’s not that I didn’t think it could happen. Not in the slightest. And anyway, there’s always been something that’s “mattered” about board games; probably because they’re so inherently social that they promote similarly social behavior. The wide difference in warmth and civility between the video game and board game communities is one of the major reasons I’ve shifted the focus of this site over to board games this year, after all. I’m certainly not saying this is true of everyone, but I think it’s much easier to be a decent dude or righteous lady in a hobby that has to be shared, including all the face-time and positive demeanor necessary to make that sharing happen.

Even so, Ladies & Gentlemen stands out as doubly “mattering.” To me, anyway.

“Fine, fine, but can we actually talk about it now?” you’re probably thinking, or saying aloud if you’re the solitary sort. Fair enough, let’s do that.

The shopping at Spencer’s is divine.

The Game Itself

Ladies & Gentlemen is published by Libellud, the company you might recognize as the force behind the excellent party game Dixit and the tremendously unique drafting game Seasons; and designed by Loïc Lamy, who also designed Deadwood (which I know literally nothing about except that I have a friend who seems to like it). And it’s very, very easy to see why some people have called its theme into question.

Anyone with the capacity to sense the presence of that elusive creature satire really shouldn’t have any problem, though. In fact, if you’re one of those gifted individuals, Ladies & Gentlemen ought to suddenly transform from being that one game with the weird theme to being one of the most fascinating game premises you’ve heard in years.

For one, it’s about shallow Victorian couples going about the egotistical business of appearing more elegant and prestigious than any other couple at the upcoming ball. To this end, each team of two (one a lady and the other a gentleman, as though there were any other sort of arrangement proper before God and Nature) works to deck out their lady with the finest clothing, wildest accessories, and most resplendent jewels. Additionally, one of the most powerful tools at any lady’s disposal is the ineffable gift of gab, which they can use to insult their nemeses into a self-defeating fluster. The most peacock’d lady is pronounced the belle of the ball, while the others shuffle back to their manors to plot fabulous revenge at the next party.

Second, the disparity between classes is severe. Not only are servants bought and sold as easily and offhandedly as a handbag, they’re also purchased for a fraction of the price. A gentleman may earn over a thousand quid in one day of frantic stock-acquiring and contract-fulfilling, and come home to purchase his wife two maids and a hat that costs twice as much as those servants’ annual pay. Combined. And don’t expect any Downton Abbey-esque characterization of the people downstairs; these servants are appropriately invisible until called upon.

Third, there’s no breaching the gulf that separates a husband and wife. Although you’re on the same team and working towards the same goal, gentlemen will be going about the manly business of pairing commodities with contracts in a simple matching game, while women oversee the stocking of their favorite stores and then shop ’til they drop. Only during each day’s third phase (“evening”) will ladies and gentlemen come together to needle each other about the most appropriate, affordable, and wonderful items of clothing. Even then, the gentleman has absolute authority over his estate, and can purchase or toss (or place on layaway) any item he sees fit.

The incomprehensible things Gentlemen do.

Playing Roles

Finally, not only are you tasked with playing as painfully self-centered batteries of ladies and quagglestomps of gentlemen (proper period terminology is fun!), but you’re ordered to act it out. As in, the gentlemen are instructed to be the most arrogant, pretentious gentlemen possible, and the ladies are to slot into their roles by being as vacuous, flirty, and fashion-obsessed as they can manage. This can lead to some hilariously sexist and classist statements. Especially when talking about buying servants with your spare change. Especially when deploying hideous insults to make use of the gossip cards. And especially when your table is full of men playing ladies and women playing gentlemen and everyone’s really throwing their backs into it. It’s sort of like a train game asking you to chortle about all the natives you’re displacing when you lay those rail lines.

Which is to say, it’s a riot.

As I implied above with all the tact of a brick falling on your head, Ladies & Gentlemen is clearly satire. Even the fashion designer brands are examples of this, as you take pains to collect items from Jean-Paul Gantiez, Lolo LaBanne, and Mélanie Canel. And it’s the sort of satire that will have you acting out these insipid lives in the most bloated manner possible. My performance as a lady, for instance, is primarily informed by the behavior of the infamous Miss Piggy — which is to say, I’m possibly the most insulting, self-important, underhanded bitch who ever lived. “My, we’re hardly cousins of the Georges, my dear,” I say to the poorest player as I hand over a gossip card. Later I’ll be implying inbreeding in someone’s family line, or wondering whether someone’s mirror will crack under the strain. I’ve played tons of games that have let me be a bad man, but this is the first game I’ve ever played that has made me want to be a horrid woman.

My wife Somerset, incidentally, is an utter jackass as a gentleman, taking the most exquisite pleasure in denying her wife the finer things in life.

Even though it’s a laugh, the game portion isn’t quite as exquisite. It’s basically two minigames played in tandem, and the gentlemen’s in particular is so simplistic that it’s common for them to finish up their tasks long before the ladies wrap up all their shop-arranging and -emptying. It’s a delicious irony that the female portion of the game requires so much more actual forethought, planning, and undermining of opposing plans than the gentlemanly game at the stock exchange.

The primary downside is that you’ll need to assemble the right group in order to enjoy it. Players should be willing to talk, and to directly insult each other’s parentage and looks. People who are easily offended shouldn’t be included, and you might be well advised to drop them from your circle of associates anyway. You’ll also need the right quantity of players — too few and there won’t be enough exchanging of gossip and shop-visits, too many and the stock market gets rather crowded with grabbing hands.

When it comes together, though — it’s brilliant.

Couples flirt while waiting for others to conclude their business. We cut out the eyes to avoid a scandal.

Why Ladies & Gentlemen is “Important”

Ladies & Gentlemen has taught me two life lessons. I mean, they’re not life lessons. Minor epiphanies, more like. Still, I’m glad to receive them.

1. This is the first time I feel like I’ve understood the importance of the little nagging insults and the importance of looking good for the upcoming dance that you read about in books like Emma. I hesitated to play L&G because I didn’t think I’d care enough for the theme — only to realize halfway through that I was getting really worked up about the fact that Adam had just insulted me because he had a pair of gorgeous earrings and I did not. It stung. And it was a testament to the way L&G‘s theme gets under your skin that after our first game, my friends Geoff and Elliott were arguing about their final elegance points and someone pointed out, “You’re like actual bickering Victorian ladies,” and both of them got all sheepish about it. When it comes down to it, we’re no better than those ancient ladies and gentlemen; I’m every bit as petty and competitive, and just as liable to snap when I feel like I’ve been pushed into a corner by injuries to my pride.

2. It made me feel more appreciation for the relationship I have with Somerset. In L&G, the roles of husband and wife are so irreparably separate that I soon found I had more in common with my fellow ladies — my opponents — than with my teammate/husband. He worked at the bank all day with his fellows, more in common with them than with me. Our alliance was one of necessity, not of any actual comfort or similarity. Of course, not all Victorian marriages were analogues to the system the game portrays, but it still made me happy that my relationship wasn’t anything like that lonely partnership.

Together, these two points gave me just a little bit of extra empathy for the strange, distant characters I’ve read about in fiction and from history. I can see how a lady and a gentleman might care deeply about those silly things when it’s their sole shared vocabulary. It makes them much more human, two people reaching out to each other in the only way they know how.

Not a winning lady, but certainly not a shabby one either.

That’s what I got out of it, anyway. Your mileage may vary.

Either way, it’s a heap of fun. It takes less than an hour to play, it’s quick to teach, and it’ll have everyone calling each other names faster than any other game on the market.

Once upon a time there was a cowboy by the name of Mark Klassen, though everybody called him Dr. Handsome. Nobody is sure what Mark did for a living — whether he erected hospitals with his bare hands, or just watched way too much Grey’s Anatomy and ER in between modeling gigs. Really, it’s a hell of a mystery. Whatever the case, Mark decided to design the board game equivalent of those fine television programs, though minus all the chiseled doctors and ravishing nurses hooking up. The result is Quarantine from Mercury Games, and it’s unlike anything you’ve played before.

The humble beginnings of Gingras Medical.

The Pitch

In a nutshell, Quarantine sets you to the task of building and running your very own hospital. Beginning with only a lobby and a handful of treatment rooms that correspond with the four colors of sickly folks who line up at your doors, you admit patients, cure them, and use their money (all their money; medicine doesn’t come cheap) to add new treatment and special rooms, hopefully transforming your building from a plodding and disorganized country hospital into a humming engine of illness-curing efficiency.

That’s the pitch. And if it doesn’t make you want to sign off right this instant to buy the game, you’re hardly alone, because I wasn’t all that jazzed by the basic description either. “Where are all the hot nurses?” I complained to Somerset. She had no answer, and was similarly upset by their absence (I assume). Perhaps worse, it looked like one of those non-interactive games where each of the players might as well be playing a solo game, laying out tiles and shuffling around colorful eurocubes without having much of an impact on the course of the game for anyone else.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Osler General is humming along.

Competitive Aspect #1: Adding New Patients

There are two things you have to do on your turn. The trickier one is that you get four actions, but we’ll get to that in a minute. For now, I want to talk about adding new patients, and how it’s a brilliantly simple mechanic that makes everyone permanently invested in what’s going on during other players’ turns.

While you’re puzzling over how to spend your actions, the player to your left pulls four cubes out of the game’s draw bag and holds them (without peeking!) in their closed fist. At any point on your turn, you shout “New Patient!” with your throatiest, most cigarette- and liquor-braised voice, exactly the way you imagine a surgeon would; and in response, the player holding the cubes chucks one at you.

This cube could be one of five colors. If it’s blue, green, yellow, or red, then it’s a patient, and you get to add it to the end of a waiting line — any waiting line. Which means you could take all these new patients for yourself in the hopes of curing their various diseases and, in the process, squeezing their wallets until cartoon moths fly out. Or you could look over at the hospitals your loved ones are building and notice your wife’s line is gummed up with blue patients. Now you have a decision to make: do you refer more blue patients to her, further mucking up her line and probably making a Hospital Nemesis for life; or do you forge a Hospital Alliance by offering to trade useful patients?

Now, perhaps the cube isn’t one of the primary colors (and I realize green isn’t a primary color, but run with it) — perhaps it comes out gray. In which case, it represents infection, a case of the Graysles (really, that’s Quarantine’s pun, not mine). You’ll almost definitely want to avoid infecting your own precious institution, meaning this decision is even harder than referring patients. Now you need to decide which hospital tile to infect — and infection means a tile is quarantined, and quarantined tiles can’t admit or cure patients, so you’ve just royally screwed over somebody’s ability to make money.

Either way, your chosen methods of referring the ill can earn you fast friends and faster enemies, and keeps everyone riveted on whoever’s hand is busy delivering a stream of new cubes that turn.

Penfield Health Center is overrun by disease.

Fighting the Infection

I mentioned above that you have four actions each turn. What I didn’t tell you is that they’re represented by four tactilely-pleasing discs. When you spend an action, you chuck one of these discs at the player to your left in an act of revenge for all the eurocubes he’s been flicking off the edge of the table when he was supposed to be handing them to you. In addition to the simple caveman pleasure of throwing things around, these discs also solve the age-old board game problem of players “forgetting” to track their actions — and in Quarantine, there are plenty of actions to pick from.

For instance, it gets back to your turn, and your dick roommate has infected a couple of your tiles. It isn’t absolutely essential to eradicate all traces of the Graysles disease, so you decide to let your quarantined yellow patient sit around for a while longer, and instead you spend an action to decontaminate your blue room. Easy as that, the disease is gone.

Actions do all sorts of other things too. You can admit a whole stretch of patients with a single disc, conga-line style, until they’re blocked thanks to too few treatment rooms, or the proper rooms already being occupied, or quarantines halting admission — so spending actions to shuffle the order of your waiting line can often be a great way to make sure you aren’t wasting those discs. You can cure patients, though one action only grants a cure for one color at a time, so working to specialize your hospital so you can cure 2 or 3 green cubes in one go is definitely something to look into. You can also renovate your hospital for maximum efficiency, points, or disease-containment; and even take bonus action markers to store up for bigger turns in the future.

And those are just the simple options. I haven’t even mentioned one of the game’s best mechanics yet.

Rooms for sale!

Competitive Aspect #2: Opening Tile Contracts

One could argue that Quarantine is a subtle metaphor for the grand expense of a medical-industrial complex, because when you cure a patient, you claim his body and soul as currency — meaning cured patients are added to your supply, where they wait to be spent or counted towards your victory point total at the end of the game. Alternately, you might argue, probably a bit more sanely, that this is a tidy little abstraction that presents players with an agonizing choice over whether to trade in their victory points to improve their institution with new rooms.

The simpler option is to just spend two cubes for one colored treatment room. These are limited, so players hoping to energize their efforts to cure certain types of patients will have to act quickly before they’re all claimed.

More interestingly, there are also special tiles. The game comes with two each of 14 varieties of these (with 2 more types if you can get your hands on the First Aid micro-expansion), and in each game you only use eight types — meaning in one game you might have access to Graysles-curing Pathology departments, un-infectable Containment zones, Triage centers that let you rearrange your entire wait line in a mad bout of musical chairs, and Pharmacies that let you cure patients without even bothering to admit them at all; while in another game you’ll have Purchasing departments to help you buy more tiles, On Call Rooms that let you cure patients at hilarious rates, Maintenance offices that let you renovate your hospital with the speed of a YouTube Rubik’s Cube solution, and Gift Shops to squeeze cash out of your patients’ relatives for get-well cards and coloring books. Because these are randomly chosen, every game has a different dynamic: Labs turn Graysles into a moneymaking opportunity, Cafeterias transform extra action markers from vaguely pointless into a mighty action-multiplying strategy, and any hospital can be transformed into a slapdash comedy maze if you have a Helipad to life-flight your patients all over the place.

These rooms are cool, that goes without saying. Acquiring them, though — that can be a real pain.

See, you don’t just buy them. Oh no — you have to spend an action just to open a contract. When you do that, you put at least two of your cubes on it (there’s no maximum to how much you can spend) and hope nobody matches your price in cubes and colors on their turn. If they do, they take the room; if there are no rooms of that type left, you get your money back and a pity-prize bonus action marker, and you’re deprived of the tile itself. If, on the other hand, it gets back to your turn and the contract is still open, then you get to add the tile to your hospital.

What this does is creates a system where the players are setting the prices of the various available rooms and banking on how well they’ve read the intentions of their fellow players. Spend too little and your friends will gobble up that tile type before it comes back around to your turn. Spend too much… well, in that case you just wasted a pile of victory points. Or perhaps you’ve noticed that you’re the only person who’s cured any yellow patients at all, in which case maybe you can open a contract for two yellow cubes and nobody will be able to pony up the proper match.

Adam agonizes over how to expand his hospital.

Just Like In a Real Hospital, There’s a Lot of Risk vs. Reward

I’ve already talked about a couple examples of this. Any game that allows players to shaft each other comes with a bit of inbuilt risk-vs-reward. Hurting your opponents is a reward in and of itself as it pushes them farther from victory, though of course, the risk is that you just might be awakening a sleeping giant who’s going to infect the hell out of your hospital when they draw four gray cubes on their next turn. And opening tile contracts brings a whole slew of risks and potential rewards depending on how well you’ve managed to gauge all sorts of factors, like how much you’re willing to spend to improve your hospital in this certain way, how much your opponents are willing (or are able) to spend at this time, if anyone wants to nab your contract just to mess with your plans, et cetera.

But the really cool thing about Quarantine is that every single opportunity for victory points reflects some sort of risk-vs-reward mechanism.

The winner is chosen based on:
* 1 point for each special room tile in your hospital.
* 1 for each complete Nurses’ Station.
* 1 for every 2 cubes in your supply.
* 1 if you have no patients in your wait line.

Leaving aside all the stuff about spending patients for improvements, consider the Nurses’ Stations. These are created whenever four tiles meet at the corner. Simple enough, so you’ll want to build a boxy hospital rather than one with lots of long, narrow corridors.

The problem is, if you have Nurses’ Stations, then infections spread much faster. When someone places a gray cube on a tile that contains a complete Nurses’ Station, they get to place another gray cube on another tile that connects to that Station — so you just got two infections for the low, low price of one.

This transforms Quarantine’s hospital-building from a breezy minigame into a tightrope-walk across razor-wire. And the other mechanics do it too — you’re constantly trading one opportunity for another, or cashing in your victory points in the hopes that the sacrifice means you’ll be able to generate more in the future.

All the room tiles (the last two are from the First Aid expansion for those who preordered).

Final Score: It may not have all the genius female doctors and sexually-liberated male nurses you’ve come to expect from a hospital, but Quarantine has plenty of component-chucking and personal conflict. It’s simply staggering that this is Mark Klassen’s first game — it’s so tight, unique, and fun, that I would have expected a much more experienced designer at the helm. I had my doubts when I first heard its premise, and I’m nothing but happy to say I was wrong in my assumptions, and that this is an excellent game. I cannot recommend Quarantine enough.

Meet Anna, a sniper with the Rangers.

Meet Anna. She’s the first female character in the Metro series to have a name — other than Nikki the prostitute from the first game. Which means, if you couldn’t guess, today I’m writing about the sexist undertones in Metro: Last Light.

If you thought you’d never see the word “sexist” here on Space-Biff!, you’re not the only one. Since this is a site about the things I like, I don’t often talk much about the things I don’t like. Even my few negative reviews only exist because I really enjoy panning bad games. The thing is though, I really like both games in the Metro series. For the most part, they encourage thoughtful, even considerate, behavior. That’s a rarity in any genre of videogame, let alone in the first-person shooter genre, which one could argue makes its bucks by being the exact opposite of “thoughtful.” In fact, I’d go so far as to label Metro 2033 as one of the most moral games I’ve ever played — which is precisely why the sexism in Last Light bothers me so deeply.

Putting on the Ritz.

Before we get into it, if you aren’t familiar with the Metro series, you might consider getting up to speed by reading the synopsis I wrote last year, which explains most of the game’s themes when it comes to morality. Also, I’d like to quickly clarify two things.

First, I haven’t written much about sexism in games because the topic brings out the worst in some people, and I’ve been content to keep on writing about the things I like, and having my non-asshole readers keep on contributing non-asshole comments to the discussion. If you’re the sort of person who doesn’t like to hear about all this “sexism” and “misogyny” and “rape culture” stuff, the door’s right there.

Second, there’s a major difference between setting and sexism. True, they can intersect — but it’s a vast oversimplification to label any work of fiction that depicts women being taken advantage of as sexist.

For instance, Metro 2033 didn’t strike me (personally) as sexist even though its only named female character was a prostitute. For one thing, indulging in her services was a big no-no (the game penalized you by robbing you of all your hard-earned military-grade bullets, the currency of the Metro series; Nikki, as it turns out, wasn’t your average post-apocalyptic sex worker), and for another, the lack of women soldiers made plenty of sense according to the fiction of the world. After all, it’s pretty easy to imagine that a post-disaster society would both revert to the Rule of the Physically Strong and/or treat females as a valuable commodity to be protected at all costs in the interests of preserving the species, thus relegating most women to support functions like mothering and food handling. Not enlightened, but certainly not surprising of the society the game depicted, and it fits the general attitude that living in a haunted metro is probably pretty shitty. And it’s not as though the standard of living is particularly superior for the menfolk. Everyone suffers alike in the Moscow Metro.

They’re their OWN bosses, see.

This means there are two different aspects to Last Light’s treatment of women.

The first is the game’s setting. I find it neither surprising nor worrisome that, within the fiction, a metro station run by criminal gangs should house a booming sex industry (though the insistence of certain of these prostitutes that they answer to no bosses of any kind, when said station is owned by said criminals, feels a bit like the designers were trying their best to eat the cake they were having), or that the metro’s sole bastion of “high culture” revels in high-breasted can-can lines as much as they do in shlocky pet tricks and bad accordion performances. These all fit into the game-world well enough, and in fact highlight just how grimy this life is when a whorehouse is situated mere feet from regular residential shanties.

The problem arises when the game herds you past grinning showgirls in various states of undress — including past the fogged glass of their showers, any concept of privacy or self-respect stripped away for the player’s puerile observances. And again when your character forcefully hushes a prostitute, holding a hand over her mouth to keep her voice and struggling to a minimum. Now, it’s true your character is muffling her cries because you were in the process of eavesdropping on an important conversation between enemies, but the real issue is what comes afterwards, upon her release: rather than being enraged at your imposed physicality, or even just annoyed, or afraid, or hopeful for an explanation — any of the things you’d expect a real human being to expect after being shoved into a booth and held immobile and silent — she basically says, “That’s how you like it?” and offers you a topless lap dance.

Unlike the first game, which had themes dealing with the value of life between enemies, challenging your expectations about others, and treating people in a generous manner, Last Light reduces its women to — pardon the word — a pair of tits.

She isn’t too bothered by this.

Matters only get worse when you realize the game’s sole named female character, the brash ranger sniper Anna, is around for the sole reason of providing a love interest. She appears for a scant few minutes in the game’s intro, then disappears until it’s time for her to get captured hours later. Upon her rescue, she talks to you for all of one minute and then begs you to sex her.

Great.

To reiterate, the one time we’re shown a woman fighter in any capacity in this universe — and remember, the only other roles we’ve seen are food handlers, mothers, and prostitutes — and she turns out to be just another princess in another castle, held captive by another monster, waiting for her knight to come and fill her belly with child. Which is exactly what happens, by the way: in the game’s bad/regular ending, it turns out she’s now raising your child on tales of your bravery.

Yep, we did it.

There are other irritating details, such as why women are the only ones in constant states of undress despite how undoubtedly cold it must become underground, but I’ll let those slide for now. After all, the point has been made: Last Light encourages its players to view all life as valuable and to feel empathy and generosity for all beings — at one point you even receive moral points for showing empathy for a hulking monster by letting it escape right after conducting a massive battle against it. And those are great themes for a game to have. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t seem to agree with its own message.

And that’s a damn shame.

What a beautiful world we managed to destroy.

It’s more than a little flattering that my most-received request for Space-Biff! is for my thoughts on Metro: Last Light from 4A Games and Deep Silver (and formerly THQ, rest in peace). This is probably owing to the synopsis I wrote last year, which you should totally read, if only because it makes me feel beautiful on the inside.

My one hangup in delivering an actual review is that, while I’d love to fall back on a tried-and-true critique like “it’s two steps forward and one step back,” the reality is more that Metro: Last Light is dancing the Charleston, with so many steps, leaps, and bounds in every direction, that in the end I can’t be sure which direction it’s moved at all. Which isn’t to say I don’t have thoughts on the proceedings — I’ve got plenty. And you can read them below, in a format that includes only a few minor spoilers.

Shooty bit. (sidenote: you can, and should, click to embiggen these pics).

1. It’s Smoother. That’s Not Entirely a Good Thing.

In the original Metro 2033, there was a level entitled “Frontline.” In it, our hero, a stranded and lonely Artyom, had to pick his way through a rotten and creaking metro line that happened to be the entrenched position of two hostile forces. It was pitch-black, lit only by the occasional lightning-flash of rifles, the cook-fires of terrified soldiery, and glaring searchlights that brought machinegun death to every dark corner they happened to peer into.

There were two ways through. The first was the obvious method, especially for a game about shooting: load your guns and shoot, murdering your way past fascists and socialists alike. It was a hard method. Your ammunition was filled with diluted powder, so targeted enemies were more likely to lose a chunk of armor or receive a slow death than be killed outright; and while you could load better bullets into your weapons, doing so was a defeat in and of itself, because those high-powered rounds were the very currency of the desperate societies that lined the metro’s gut, and wasting them on combat meant you might not be able to afford vital supplies later on.

So, alternatively, you could sneak past the fighting. This meant you didn’t have to kill anyone or waste any ammunition, but it was even harder than the violent method. You had to listen to the frantic conversations of unwilling soldiers that hinted about a place to which deserters could escape, and then you had to find and travel this rumored route while avoiding commissars’ booby-traps and searchlights. Chances were they’d catch sight of you and cut you down like so many other soldiers who had been found expendable already.

Metro: Last Light has no analogue to this level, and it’s largely in part because Last Light’s systems work so smoothly.

Sneaky bit.

Now, that’s mostly a good thing. Metro 2033 was clunky, from the shooting to the sneaking to the buggy game engine itself, and there were lots of people, myself included, who thought it would benefit from having some of its rougher edges sanded down.

But that clunkiness serviced the game in a couple ways. The predominant emotion evoked by much of Metro 2033′s gameplay, and Frontline exemplifies this, was a sense of nagging uncertainty. Violence was always a shaky proposal — even shooting a person in the head wasn’t a reliable way to take them down unless you were using the best weapons loaded with expensive money-ammunition. Stealth was even more uncertain, as you were never sure exactly how far a soldier’s headlamp cut into the inky darkness, and even if you had a solid guess, chances were you couldn’t take him down without alerting all his friends.

I’m not saying Last Light is made worse for being smoother, because it’s an absolute joy to sneak up behind an enemy and have the option to kill him or to knock him unconscious — and what’s more, to have that option work once you trigger it, unlike the original game’s failed knife-flails at a now-shouting watchman. Many of the game’s advancements, such as a watch that lets you know whether you’re visible to enemies or hidden in the shadows, weapons that can reliably extinguish life, and super-powered silent throwing knives, are also wonderful in practice.

Yet, somehow, the polish and ease-of-use subtracts something that was inherent to the original game. There’s less shattered glass underfoot to give away your ambushes, more myopic opponents who will walk two feet from your position without turning their heads the inch-and-a-half necessary to catch sight of you, and fewer instances of noise traveling through the air to give away that fact that you just rammed a set of spiked knuckles into a sentry’s dumbfounded face. It isn’t just that Last Light easier (though it is that too), it’s that in a world in which nothing is reliable, you are.

Still, it’s a hell of a lot better to play, which strikes me as a fair tradeoff, even if it makes me a little disappointed that there wasn’t the occasional weapons jam to drive home the point that life in the Moscow Metro isn’t always calculable.

Follow Pavel through a crowd of fascists!

2. The Two-Hour Tutorial Is Maddening (and Great).

The original game used two characters, Bourbon and Khan, to teach you the basics of gameplay. “Put on your gas mask or you’ll suffocate,” you learned from Bourbon. Keep your flashlight charged! Scrounge for better weapons and supplies! Use stealth to gain an advantage over those bandits who are hoping to ambush you! Here’s how you survive on the surface! Later, Khan taught you about ghosts and anomalies and spelled out the game’s theme and morality system if you bothered to listen.

Metro: Last Light does the exact same thing with Pavel, who Artyom follows around — don’t rush ahead! — for about two hours. And while I understand the need for someone to explain some of the game’s systems, as a Metro veteran it was absolutely galling at times.

Keep your flashlight charged or the light-sensitive enemies will attack!

Put on your gas mask when outside! And look for supply caches, Artyom!

Nice watch, Artyom! It tells you how much air you have left, and if enemies can see you!

Artyom! Here’s how you wipe grime and blood and rainwater off your mask! Artyom!

While Pavel’s survival tips are certainly helpful, his presence also means that for the first couple hours of your scenic tour of Last Light, this will be your most common sight:

Follow Pavel up some stairs!

Here he is again:

Watch Pavel watching guys kill mutants!

The reason I’m not willing to call Pavel’s segment bad is that he actually turns out to be the best character in the entire game — or, at the very least, the least plastic. Not only is he witty and charming, but the relationship between him and Artyom, a tale of soldiers from opposing sides who learn mutual respect and interdependence, is downright heartwarming. It’s gripping, human stuff, from tentative beginning to agonizing conclusion, and it’s just one of Last Light’s plethora of human moments. If he would have just let me be the one in charge, I might even like the idea of an entire Metro game that follows the buddy-cop formula of Last Light’s opening act.

Speaking of human moments…

One of many human moments.

3. This Metro Is More Human.

The bulk of Artyom’s interaction with the inhabitants of civilized metro stations has always been to stop and observe their conversations without contributing anything — bad! Or perhaps, merely dull. Why they decided to only give Artyom a voice during loading screens and journal entries, rather than giving him something to say to his comrades or the myriad civilians he encounters, is beyond me. The shadow of Half-Life 2 may be long, but a silent protagonist is certainly one of its weaker legacies.

However, at least in Last Light, these conversations are pretty good. Long preoccupied with mere survival, society seems to be at last rebuilding itself. Actors put on (miserable) shows. Soldiers comfort a widow, who reacts with outrage and accusations that they didn’t do enough to protect their brother-in-arms. A grandfather shows a group of children a shadow puppet of a bird, only for the youngsters to exclaim, “Is it a demon?” Then they mistake an elephant for a type of tunnel-mutant, then ask “are elephants dangerous?” — because, of course, they’ve heard of neither birds nor elephants.  Gangsters hustle merchants, who grumble in corners. Children cry over lost toys. Soldiers fret over rumors. Families worry together, or apart, as circumstances dictate.

You’re still walking forward a few meters and stopping to listen to a conversation, then repeating over and over until it’s time to move onto a new leg of your journey, but at least there’s more substance behind it.

Complete with boob physics.

4. This Metro Is Also, Unfortunately, A Lot More Sexist.

This is such a difficult issue that I’ll be devoting an entire article to it sometime in the next day or two. Seriously, I’ve ended up with an extra thousand words on the topic, and this article was never meant to be a long sequence of thoughts. Suffice it to say, whereas the original game’s women were nearly non-existent, Last Light’s are far more troublesome. While most of the points on this list are neither entirely positive nor negative, this one is a glaring black mark on Last Light’s soul.

(EDIT: You can now read those thoughts here.)

Leaden symbolism.

5. The Internal Morality Is Significantly Altered.

The theme of the original Metro 2033 wasn’t about black-and-white morality. Rather, it was a refreshingly mature take on ancient issues, arguing for tolerance and open-mindedness even after the world’s end. It asked you to offer your enemy an open hand, when all instinct and training demanded a fist instead. It was so difficult to accomplish, both with a game-player’s expectations and a human being’s assumptions, that very few people even realized that the game had a choice/consequence system at all. The result was that nearly everybody who played Metro 2033 got the bad ending, in which Artyom vaporized all the Dark Ones in a rush of nuclear fire.

Since it was about a general-purpose sort of enlightenment, it roughly equated killing enemy soldiers, who you could avoid if you went out of your way, with accepting a reward from a war widow, which you could do without and which would certainly leave her family impoverished. Likewise, you could go out of your way to accomplish a hidden objective to warn a metro station of an impending attack, though the game required you, the player, to remember that it was a goal at all. Time and time again, Metro 2033′s morality was more about self-sacrifice than about choosing an arbitrarily-designated “right” over “wrong.”

Last Light is a bit more flimsy on the whole “morality” thing. I was relieved to discover there’s still a morality meter, but it’s not as clear what it’s going for. Certainly a theme of redemption, given that the game begins after Artyom has earned the first game’s bad ending — and there are a few little nods to this new, more self-aware Artyom. For instance, you can earn some morality points by not killing a hulking mutant, which is certainly in line with what Artyom should be thinking about his assumptions after mucking up his first adventure so completely. But most of the game’s morality points come from much duller sources. Usually listening to conversations. And although the first game had some of that, nearly all its pertinent decisions were actions, or the calculated absence of an action.

Even worse than the shaky theme is the game’s rushed ending. Where the first game built to its conclusion at a glacial and expectation-defying pace, Last Light just sighs and gets on with it, teleporting you and the relevant characters to the final boss battle. Did I mention there are boss battles? Yeah, they’re bad, as all boss battles are wont to be. Anyway, back to morality: as I was saying, after being rushed to the conclusion, the game’s two endings are nearly-identical, and have scant little to do with the theme of redemption that runs through the game’s few pertinent moral choices.

After such a tremendous journey, the destination feels sort of piddly.

Outside the husk of the Dark Ones’ hive.

I realize this might sound overwhelmingly negative, but I can assure you that even with a disappointing ending, it’s a journey I wholeheartedly recommend. Last Light is a bit more unfocused than the original, but overall it’s also smoother and prettier and better-formed. I liked it, even if it didn’t leave me as breathless as it did the first time around.

But get it in a sale.

In last month’s installment of Alone Time, I mentioned that the Lord of the Rings Card Game from Fantasy Flight Games was very possibly the only solo game a fella would ever need. And perhaps you thought to yourself, “What if I don’t want to design decks and buy more quests? Also, I hate hobbits.” If that’s the case, today we’re going to talk about two different editions of another game from FFG. It’s Elder Sign, and it’s much more self-contained, has a lot more dice, and doesn’t have quite as high a barrier to entry. And anyway, what could be more anti-hobbit than H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos?

A solo game using four investigators (click to embiggen).

If you’ve ever seen Ben Stiller vehicle Night at the Museum, Elder Sign will be a familiar concept. Take Night at the Museum, subtract Stiller and the family-friendly overtones, add a whole pack of rapacious Elder Gods whose idea of relaxation is enslaving new dimensions to mount over the hearth, throw in a pinch of insanity and uncomfortable body horror, and— okay, it’s not a perfect metaphor. Basically, they’ve both got museums. And desperate leading characters too, I suppose, though in Ben Stiller’s case failure means continuing on as an aged and unhip version of a once-beloved household name, while the failure of Ashcan Pete & Co. means our entire existence gets fondled by tentacles.

Anyway, Elder Sign is about a museum where some ancient artifacts have gotten up to ancient artifact business, allowing terrible unpronounceable beings like Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, and Cthulhu into our dimension for a visit. The only thing opposing them is a plucky band of interlopers, assembled from period archetypes of hard-boiled private eyes, purple-suited mobsters, determined scientists, and confused dilettantes. If these unlikely allies can’t scrape together enough elder signs to lock these creatures out, then those monsters’ vacation is going to become more… permanent. Dun dun duun.

Your method of battling these extra-dimensional baddies? Dice, of course.

The haunted Koi Pond.

There are two things that stand out about Elder Sign.

The first is that, like many of the games based around H.P. Lovecraft’s terrifying fiction, it’s effortlessly thematic. Even though all you’re actually doing on your turn is deciding which adventure card you’ll try to resolve, rolling the dice and hoping that some of your item cards will help you get the right matches with whatever is printed on that adventure card, and then advancing the clock until whichever elder god you’re fighting strikes back in some way, that’s not what it feels like. Even the mundane, like that museum Koi Pond pictured above, are transmuted into fearful receptacles of goggle-eyed scale-fleshed beasts. And in this instance, that Koi Pond has also been adopted by a vampire, which turns a tough job into an absolute mess.

True, the dice mechanic will still usually have players announcing that they need more “scrolls” and “skulls” rather than roleplaying it out like true nerds — “I don’t have enough knowledge of the lore of the language printed on this tablet to solve the riddle of the Man in Yellow!” does take a lot of effort to get out in a game this brief, and you’re certainly not going to be saying stuff like that while playing it solo. I mean, you can. Go ahead. I don’t judge. Either way, beyond some of the mechanical stuff that feels a little disconnected from the shadowy mysteries you’re supposedly investigating, the way the cards tie their theme to tangible threatening circumstances is admirable. The museum curator may be charming and articulate, but the picture on his card shows the biggest shit-eating grin you’ve ever witnessed, so he’s definitely worth checking out. The card announcing “We need to find help!” also locks your powerful red die, meaning you really do need to find help, whether by using the weaker yellow die or doing everything in your power to resolve that card first. And many of the adventure cards do the same thing with the locations of the museum, such as a darkened loading dock scaring your investigators silly, a ransacked security office taking a whole bunch of time to sort through, the archives housing boxed-up spare artifacts, and, most frightening, the public lavatory being appropriately monster-infested. I mean, who isn’t afraid of what lurks in public restrooms?

And that’s not even taking into account the occasional portals to alternate dimensions that house some of the toughest puzzles and best rewards.

The slick iOS/Android Elder Sign: Omens version.

The second thing that stands out is that for a dice game it’s got a respectable array of player options. Which is a nice surprise, because dice games don’t always excel at providing players with meaningful decisions.

Here, not only do you continue locking or losing dice depending on how successful your roll was, but you also gather clues that give free re-rolls, allies who bestow additional abilities, all sorts of items that give you extra perks or more powerful dice, and magic spells to lock additional dice as you resolve multiple tasks. Completed adventures and slain monsters give you trophies that you can trade in at the museum gift shop for healing (mental or physical), rummaging through the lost and found, or buying souvenirs like elder signs (I’ll say this much: even at museum prices, they’re probably selling them way too cheap). You can even work with other investigators for additional benefits, or jump through that portal to R’lyeh without any hope of backup.

Whatever you decide to do, the dice are just one of many elements that contribute to your victory or defeat, and there are always plenty of extra details that, if you take the time to look them over, will give you an extra edge against the whims of chance. For instance, old professor Harvey Walters lets you change a terror die result to scroll result once per roll. Terror results are bad and often trigger negative effects, so you might consider sending Harvey to tackle adventures with painful terror effects, or adventures that need a bunch of scrolls to succeed — though you’ll need to be careful of risking him in physical confrontations because he’s frail. On the other hand, archaeologist Monterey Jack gets double unique items when he succeeds quests, so he’s probably your go-to guy when you see an adventure offering unique items as a reward. And those are just the simplest examples that I could come up with off the top of my head.

It looks simpler because all the bookkeeping is handled for you.

Now, I mentioned in the intro that there are two versions of Elder Sign. I’ve mostly covered the physical boxed copy, but there’s also a digital version called Elder Sign: Omens for iOS and Android devices. This version is also good, though it automates so much of the bookkeeping that it strips out some player choice (for instance, Ally cards are completely missing). I’ve also heard that the Android version is a bit buggy, and I can attest that the iPad version has occasional hiccups. I’m personally not a fan of pass-and-play with a tablet, but on the other hand, it’s hard to beat the portability of this compared to hauling the box around on a camping trip. And if you already own a tablet, it only costs a few dollars and has a couple of super-cheap expansions that completely overhaul the experience.

Why Cardboard Is Best:
- More initial variety, such as Ally cards, more ancient gods, and expanded player options
- Choose how to play, with 1-8 investigators
- The only bugs are the ants, and you only have those because you left food out
- No $200+ initial investment
- Tactility is one of the reasons you play board games anyway
- You can cheat, if that’s your thing

Why the Cardboard Age Is Coming to an End:
- If you can’t handle some mild bookkeeping, the app does it for you
- Super portable
- A couple extra bucks can more than double the scope of the adventure
- You don’t have to set it up
- You don’t have to put it away
- It won’t let you cheat, if that’s your thing

Either way, this is a great consideration for both solo and multiplayer gaming. It’s rich with theme, and loaded with a surprising amount of decisions for such a light dice game.

The Great Gatsby, 2013.

I finally saw Baz Luhrmann’s riotous take on Fitzgerald’s American classic The Great Gatsby last night, and I must say it was without a doubt the most vivid and energetic thing I’ve seen all year. For the entirety of its running time, I felt as though my eyes and ears were being boarded and pillaged by a raucous band of neon pirates.

However, I have one little suggestion for Baz Luhrmann and everyone involved with the production of this 2013 update on the original classic. You can find it below.

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