This review is a cross-post from Playtest. Love Letter is available from Amazon and Funagain Games.

Love Letter falls into two unusual categories, the first of which is Games That You Are Convinced Won’t Work Until You Play Them. Often these are games that are so complicated that you can’t visualize how all the disparate systems could possibly come together into an organic whole, but sometimes you come across a game so simple that you can’t imagine how playing it would be any more intriguing than flipping a coin.

The second unusual class into which Love Letter falls is what I call Two-Minute Games — not because they can be played in two minutes, but because they feature such an economy of rules that they can be taught to others in that limited time frame. Love Letter is so simple, in fact, that I bet I can explain the core rules in 25 words or less. “Draw a card on your turn, then discard one from your hand. The discarded card takes effect. Have the highest ranked card at round’s end.” Done.

Were I actually teaching you the game, of course, I would open with the premise. Each of the 16 cards in the deck depicts a member of the royal household, which is composed of the Princess, the Countess, the King, two princes, two handmaidens, two barons, two priests, and five guards. In an attempt to woo the Princess, you have entrusted a love letter to one of these people, who has agreed to pass the missive along. Ideally your letter will be in the hands of the Princess herself by the end of the round; barring that, you just want your letter to be as “close” to the object of your affection as possible. Each member of the household has a rank from 8 (the Princess) to 1 (the guards), and you win by holding the highest ranked card at the end of the round.

Everyone receives a single, random card before play begins. On a turn, a player draws a second card and then discards one of the two from his hand. The discarded card has an effect, depending on the person shown. A Guard, for instance, allows you to name a player and a card; if the target holds the card you specified, he is out of the round. The Priest allows you to look at the held card of an opponent. And the Princess, the optimal card to own when a round ends, comes with a liability: you are eliminated if you discard her for any reason.

There are only eight abilities, one per role, and yet the interaction between them make for a tense game of bluff and deduction. Take the three roles described in the paragraph above, for instance. Discarding the Priest, a player could look at the hand of an opponent, and perhaps discover the Princess; if he holds (or draws) a Guard on his next turn, he could then single out the same player, “guess” the Princess, and force him to discard it (thus knocking him out of the round). But the other player will first have a turn to react, and may discard the Handmaid, thereby becoming immune to all attacks until his next turn, or the King, which would allow him to trade his hand with any other player, handing them the Princess (and possibly the victory) whilst weaseling out of the crosshairs.

Love Letter does not contain an abundance of game; play a round or two and you’ve pretty much seen the gamut. But that won’t prevent you playing compulsively, and enjoying every game. The design strikes a deft balance between subtlety and brainlessness, allowing you to play even while mentally fatigued from earlier, weightier games, or a bit hazy after that second margarita. Indeed, with its simple rules, compact size, and quick playing time, Love Letter is a near perfect bar game, so long as you don’t mind the stares of the other patrons as you howl with laughter at the reversals of fortune, and rage against the perfidy of your erstwhile “friends”.

Like a hapless suitor, pouring his heart into a billet doux, you will likely become quite enchanted with Love Letter. The infatuation may not endure, but you’ll be hopelessly smitten while it lasts.

Wil Wheaton and the fine folks at Geek and Sundry have declared March 30 to be Tabletop Day.

The Tabletop website has a map of events, including many in Seattle, but I’m going to list them here as well for convenience. I’ll keep this post updated as a receive new information.

• Blue Highway Games (Queen Anne): No specifics yet, but “Board Game Challenge” events are being created for 03/30. [Event link]
• Cafe Mox (Ballard): The International TableTop Extravaganza! It will be going ALL DAY and will have some pretty great Guests, including Mike Selinker (Loneshark Games), Paul Peterson (Smash-Up, Guillotine, etc.), James Ernest (Cheapass Games), Chris Dupois (Wizards of the Coast), NPC Aaron & NPC Chris (NPCCast), Flying Frog Games (Last Night On Earth, Fortune and Glory, etc.), Passport Games (Trajan, Tokaido, Kalua), Privateer Press, and more. [Event link]

• Dawgsled Events (Downtown): “From 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM, we will have the run of the entire 76th floor (that’s the top!) of the Columbia Tower. There will be games, games and more games! We’ll also have live streaming of the main Table Top Day event in Los Angeles. General admission tickets currently cost $15; your admission gets you into the event and gets you a catered lunch. The price of drinks is not included, but drinks are available for purchase. Because there will be alcoholic beverages available, this event is for gamers 21 and older.” [Event Link]
• Gamma Ray Games (Capitol Hill):
  

  Just randomly stopped by Gamma Ray Games in Seattle to harass them into doing a #TabletopDay event! They already had one on the books!

  — Felicia Day (@feliciaday) February 28, 2013

  They do indeed. Mandy McGee and Jason “Kantrip” Calhoun of Extollere will host the festivities. [Event link]

• Wayward Coffeehouse (Roosevelt): “We have reserved blocks of time for gaming groups, and several are already set to play at Wayward on Tabletop Day. We have tables that can accommodate parties from 2-10, and we encourage groups can reserve a table in advance. We especially are hoping for more groups who want to play in the morning as the afternoon is quickly filling up! Individuals who don’t have a group to play with can show up and join something in progress. We have live music that night, 8-10 pm, but its a geeky filk music performer (Hello, The Future) to fit in with the day! To request a table reservation please email wayward@waywardcoffee.com with the date (March 30th), number of people, start and end time, and name of the gaming group.”
• Burlesque Board Games (First Hill): “Are you a burlesque performer, producer or fan? Do you like board games? Do you want to get all sparkly and play board games with other burlesque performers, producers and fans? Then come to Burlesque Board Games on International TableTop Day! Presented by Unnatural Redhead Productions, Smooches and Science Presents, and GeekGirlCon.” [Event link]
• Uncle Games (Eastside): “Board Game party featuring local gaming celebrities and publishers! 3:00pm until 11:45pm.” [Event link Bellevue] [Event link Redmond]
• Norwescon 36 (Sea-Tac): Norwescon is the Pacific Northwest’s Premiere Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention and one of the largest regional Science Fiction and Fantasy conventions in the United States. Norwescon 36 will offer tons of opportunities to get your game on, and is proud to be an official event site for International TableTopDay on Saturday, March 30th![Event link]
• Games at Top Pot Doughnuts (Renton): “We are a small gaming group, and the cafe we normally play at every couple of weeks, Top Pot Doughnuts at the Renton Landing, has given us the go-ahead to have the event there. It’s a decent-sized cafe that can host 30 or so people inside, and probably 10 more outside. They’re always great to us when we’re there, so please make sure to purchase drinks and doughnuts and sandwiches from them while you’re there playing games.” [Event link]
• Fantasium Comics & Games (Federal Way): “We will be hosting a variety of game demos as well as providing a library of games for you to play.” [Event link]

More events as I learn of them.

I will be out and about that day, though I don’t yet know where. If you are interested in gaming with me — and perhaps receiving a tutorial on one of the games you’ve purchased through my Good Gift Game Guides — let me know in the comments, by email, or via Twitter, and I’ll keep you in the loop.

“Oh my God, our approval rating is below 15%! We have to fix this sequestration mess before Friday!”

“Or — hear me out — or we could spend the week making the biggest and best Harlem Shake video yet!”

You totally know this conversation took place.

Earlier this week I reviewed The Castles of Burgundy, a recent design from Stefan Feld that I quite enjoy. Now let’s turn our attention to Trajan, a second 2011 release from Feld with which Castles shares many similarities.

Trajan is really a collection of mini-games, bolted together by a central mechanism called the action circle. The action circle dominates the right side of each player mat, and is composed of a six cups numbered I-VI. Two tokens are placed into each cup at the start of the game. On a turn a player selects a cup with at least one token in it, takes into hand all of the tokens from the chosen cup, and then places one token into each cup that follow the selected one in clockwise order, until he has none left to distribute. If cup II contains three tokens, for example, a player might take these three and place one each into the III, IV, and V cups, leaving the initial II cup empty as a result. The target cup — that is, the cup into which the last token is placed — determines which of the six possible actions the player can perform.

A player mat, with the action circle on the right

This form of action selection has, to the best of my knowledge, never before been used in strategy game of this caliber. But you may also recognize it as mancala, a game that predates recorded history. In other words, Trajan has a central mechanic that feels both familiar and strikingly original.

The six possible actions allow players to further their influence in ancient Rome, the milieu in which the game is set. The senate action gives the player political influence and a handful of victory points; the Military action allows a player to march his soldiers around a map of Italy, appropriating resources and scoring points; a player can draw cards after selecting the Seaport action, or redeem sets of these cards for points; and so forth.

Of particular interest is the Trajan action, which allows a player to claim a special tile and place it next to one of the six cups in the action circle. The tokens in the action circle come in six colors, and each Trajan tile shows the two colors necessary to trigger its effect. When the target cup has a Trajan tile next to it and contains tokens of the same color as those shown on the tile, the special effect occurs, granting an immediate advantage in one of the minigames and instantly awarding the player points.

The goods, which are acquired and sold using the Seaport action

If you noticed a preponderance of the word “points” in the preceding paragraphs, that’s because Trajan awards them for nearly everything a player does. I raised this as a concern with Burgundy —  that a player could concentrate on a few elements of the game and largely ignore others — and it’s even more pronounced here, where there is even less bleed-over between the mini-games. Burgundy at least provides cohesion in the form of a player’s estate, where all of the various tiles must coexist, and which forces a player to switch focus when regions on his board are full. In Trajan, on the other hand, a player could (for instance) pursue a Senate and Building strategy, and never once select the Military or Seaport actions. Some players might find this freedom liberating; I, however, prefer a framework for play, even something as abstract as “fill up your estate”. 

Trajan is also similar to Burgundy in that players are given both a menu of possible actions and constraints on their choices. Burgundy does this through dice, the values of which dictate what a player can do; a player of Trajan, meanwhile, can only take an action that he can reach via the action circle. The constraints in Burgundy tend to reduce over-analysis, as players do the best with the values they roll. But unlike dice, the action circle in Trajan is not random. A player can work out his moves several turns in advance, and usually attempts to do so.

Put another way, Trajan is considerably more strategic than Burgundy. That’s not a bad thing, obviously. In fact, many (and perhaps most) gamers will prefer Trajan to Burgundy for this very reason. But in my experience, the action cup mechanism does not facilitate the game so much as become the game. I become so intent of figuring out how to work the action circle to my advantage that everything else — the building, the buying and selling of goods, the politicking — falls away. I eventually feel like I am just playing mancala, something I could have done without Stefan Feld’s help.

I like Trajan. Honestly, I think it’s one of the best games I’ve played in recent years. And although Castles of Burgundy is currently the higher ranked of the two on Boardgame Geek, I won’t be surprised if that changes in the coming years as Trajan reveals itself as the more durable design. But there is a line at where a game becomes too abstract for my tastes, and Trajan falls a few inches on the wrong side.

Until recently, designer Stefan Felt was primarily known for In the Year of the Dragon, Notre Dame, and Macao, three games that were well-regarded at the time of their release, but that have been fading from memory ever since. In 2011, however, Feld released two new games that may outlast their predecessors. One of them, Trajan, has received ample buzz, was crowned “Game of the Year” by GAMES Magazine, and received the 2012 International Gamer General Strategy Award. But after extensive play of both, it’s Castles of Burgundy that I’ve come to prefer.

Burgundy is in many respects an old-school Euro, a set-collection and tile-laying game with lots of routes to victory and low player interaction. Each person owns an estate, printed on a player mat and composed of 37 hexagonal spaces of six different terrains. The mats also have three hexagonal spaces in the lower-left corner, known as the player’s reserve.

The central game board has depots numbered 1-6, into which hexagonal tiles are semi-randomly distributed before each phase. The depots also hold the six varieties of goods that come into play as the game progresses.

The central board, the players mats, and many of the components

Six types of terrain, six types of goods, six central depots — what’s with all of the 6s? The answer, and something that sets Burgundy apart from many heavier-weight euros, is dice. Each player has two, rolls them before each round of the game, and then uses them to perform actions. Though the player is free to choose from any of the four available actions, the value of the die used constrains how the action is performed.

The four actions are:

• Gain a tile: Take a hexagonal tile from the central board and place it into reserve. The depot from which the tile is taken must have a number equal to the value of the die used.
• Place a tile: Take a hexagonal tile from reserve and place it onto an estate. Each space in an estate bears a number from 1-6; the tile must be placed into a space with a number equal to the value of the die used.
• Sell goods: Players will accumulate goods over the course of the game, with each of the six types having a different number. Only the goods with the number matching the used die can be sold.
• Gain worker tiles: Before using a die for any of the other three actions, a player may modify the value up or down one for each worker tile spent. A player gains more worker tiles by selecting this action, which grants him two. 

A player may also, once per turn, spent two coins to purchase a hexagonal tile from the central board. The game continues in this manner for five phases of five rounds apiece. After each person has had 25 turns, the player with the most victory points wins.

Many points are scored when tiles are placed into estates. The hexagonal tiles come in six different colors, and can only be placed in spaces of the same hue. Each color of tile also does something different upon placement. Beige tiles are buildings, and have an immediate, one-time effect, such as allowing a player to take a tile from the central board and place it in his reserve, or place a second tile from his reserve into his estate for free. Yellow tiles represent knowledge, and confer onto a player either a new ability (e.g., collect four worker tiles instead of two when selecting the “gain worker tile” action), or an end-game bonus (if certain conditions are met). Grey mines produce money; blue ships allow a player to gain goods; light green pastures instantly award points;, and the dark green castles permit a player to take an additional free action, as if he had a die of any chosen value.

When a player fills all of the spaces in a contiguous group of like-colored hexes, he immediately scores points based on the size of the region and phase of the game. He will also score bonus points if he is the first or second player to fill every space on his board of a single color, regardless of whether they are connected.

A player board, with many hexagonal tiles placed

Castles of Burgundy is one of those games that sounds way more complicated when explained than it feels during play. It is a testament to Feld’s skills as a designer that the seemingly disparate systems described above are so well integrated that everything seems intuitive once you internalize the fundamentals.

The method of providing lots of options, and then limiting those options through the use of dice, is generally effective at preventing “analysis paralysis”, in which a player locks up while thinking through all the possible permutations of their turn. The randomness of die rolls skews the play more toward the tactical than the strategic (although this is in turn tempered by the worker tiles), and makes for the kind of brisk, medium-weight game that I prefer. That said, the four-player and three-players games can feel overlong — there is so little interaction that additional players beyond two increase the playing time while leaving the dynamics of play essentially unchanged. The game is listed as “best with two players on Boardgame Geek entry, and I agree with that assessment.

My nagging concern with Burgundy is that is sometimes feels like one of those do-whatever-you-want-and-score-points-for-everything kind of games. A player can focus on maximizing their score through pastures, or through yellow knowledge tiles, or by completing regions, or by accumulating and selling goods, and ignore (at least temporarily) the areas of the game that don’t interest him. This is not necessarily a bad thing — multiple routes to victory is often the hallmark of a rich and replayable system. But the only significant form of interaction between players the the taking of tiles before others can claim them, and a player denied something he wants is as likely to shrug his shoulders and switch his focus to something else as he is to gnash his teeth and curse. The end-gaming scoring even awards points for unspent money, goods not sold, and worker tiles not used. I recognize that these incentives allow for meaningful decisions in the last few turns of the game, but it adds to the perception that the game just doles out points for everything, even failure.

Still, Castles of Burgundy is my favorite Euro of the last few years. I’m sucker for tile-laying games to begin with, and I find the filling up of one’s estate to be an oddly satisfying experience. It’s even something that can be introduced to and enjoyed by non-gamers, though they will likely be terrified by the time you make it through the rules. Simply assure them that they will understand everything after the first few turns, and will be eager to play again after their inaugural game is over.

Trajan review to follow.  Stay tuned …

The 2012 Make-Yer-Own Oscar Pool Page is live. Per tradition there has been exactly zero user testing, so let me know if you encounter bugs, typos, or miscellaneous weirdness.

Over at Que Sera Sera, Sarah Brown has a post about the misconceptions that people (including myself) had as children. Be sure to read through the comments, which include such gems as, “My husband believed (still believes?) that limes are unripened lemons”.

Also in the comments are a few instances of readers coming to shocking realizations, such as the woman who discovers that her long-held belief that Alaska is an island (because of its placement on US maps) is erroneous.

That reminded me of an incident in my late 20s. I had lived in Washington State nearly all of my life, and driven its roads innumerable times. One afternoon I was driving home from the airport, having picked up a friend who was making her first visit to the state.

“I love your State Highway signs,” my friend remarked as we passed one. I thought this was an odd thing to find charming, and asked her to clarify. “I like how the number is printed on a silhouette of George Washington,” she replied.

I had no idea what she was talking about. It wasn’t until we approached another of the black and white signs that I could validate her observation.

“You never knew that?” she asked. “What did you think the white thing was?”

I shrugged. “It’s always been the State Highway Background Shape to me.”

The 2012 Good Gift Games guide appears in The Morning News today. Here are the ten games featured:

Also: the Good Gift Games Greatest Hits.

My Other favorite Games of the Year

The Good Gift Games guide focuses on games that are “easy to learn and teach, fun and engrossing to play, and that can be completed in 90 minutes or less”. I like games that meet these criteria, of course, but also enjoy the meatier stuff. Here are five of my favorite mid- to advanced-strategy games of last year or so.

Mage Knight Board Game (Wizkids, 1-4 players, 2-4 hours): I’m a huge fan of Vlaada Chvátil, and Mage Knight Board Game checks in at #11 on the Boardgame Geek top 50, so this was a no-brainer, I thought. Wrong! Figuring out the game requires like three or four brains, minimum. Like Through The Ages (also by Chvátil, and my current favorite game), Mage Knight is of Byzantine complexity, and yet everything fits together astonishingly well. And because each turn of the game feels like a tactical puzzle (not unlike the combat aspect of Dungeon Lords), the game work very well as solitaire. (In fact, many contend that it is the best solitaire game ever, an assessment I currently agree with). [Boardgame Geek | Amazon | Funagain ]

Photo by Eric Kouris.

Eminent Domain (Tasty Minstrel Games, 2-4 players, 45 minutes): I really wanted to put this on the main G4 list, but it fails the “must be fun on the first play” criterion, at least for non-gamers. But anyone who can make sense of the description “Dominion meets Race for the Galaxy” is in the target audience for this one. Yes it’s another deck-builder, but one that plays quickly and cleanly, and offers an experience similar to many more complicated card games without all of the overhead. This, along with Kingdom Builder, was one of the surprise hits of PAX 2012, for me. [Boardgame Geek | Amazon | Funagain ]

Eclipse (Asmodee, 2-6 players, 2-3 hours minutes): I’ve only played this once, and it was of the most boring experiences of my life. But! But I was bored because, not knowing what to do, I adopted the most conservative strategy possible, and the game punished me for my timidity. That’s a feature, not a bug, in a game such as Eclipse; as in other 4X games, such as Civilization, the goal is to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate … not hide away in your corner of the galaxy and hope to go unnoticed, as was my plan. Eclipse presses a lot of my buttons — technology tracks, diplomacy, and light wargame elements — and so, even with only one play under my belt, I can already predict with confidence that it will become on of my favorites of 2012. [Boardgame Geek | Amazon | Funagain ]

The starships in both Eminent Domain and Eclipse (they use the same ones, for some reason). Photo by Mikko Saari.

The Castles of Burgundy (Ravensburger, 2-4 players, 60 minutes): I first played this at a friend’s house and, midway through the game, I pulled out my phone to order a copy for myself via Amazon. The game is similar to Troyes in that it uses dice, but has many, many systems to mitigate the effect of fluky rolls. The Castles of Burgundy looks more daunting than it really is; the core system is fairly simple, and the game is well suitable for mid-weight gamers. [Boardgame Geek | Amazon | Funagain ]

Ora & Labora (Z-Man games, 1-4 players, 2 hours): The latest from Uwe Rosenberg, and my favorite of his “worker placement trilogy” (which also includes Agricola and Le Havre). Ora & Labora struck me as more thematic than the others, almost to the point of feeling like a light civilization game rather than the straight resource-management, number-crunching, please-don’t-let-my-family-starve affairs for which Rosenberg has become known. [Boardgame Geek | Amazon | Funagain ]

Other Opinions

Don’t trust the yeti? Here are the highlights of some other “2012 best game of the year” lists.

German Game of the Year:

• Winner, Overall: Kingdom Builder
• Winner, Advanced Strategy: Village
• Winner, Children’s Game: Schnappt Hubi!

Deutscher Spiele Preis (the “other” German Game of the Year award):

• First Place: Village
• Second Place: Trajan
• Third Place: Hawaii

International Gamers Awards:

• General: Trajan
• Two-Players: Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small

GAMES Magazine Awards:

• Game of the Year: Trajan (I guess I gotta play this game …)
• Family Game: Takenoko
• Strategy Game: Zong Shi
• Advanced Strategy Game: Village
• Abstract Strategy Game: Matter
• Card Game: Decket
• Party Game: Pluckin’ Pairs
• Word Game: Kerflip!

Where to Buy

I dunno about your hometown, but board game stores have recently been cropping up in Seattle like toadstools after a rain. Plug “games” into Google Maps and see what you get.

As for online, Amazon now carries just about everything I recommend. Funagain Games is one of the oldest board game retailers and remains one of the best. Others that I’d recommend include:

• Boards and Bits
• Fairplay Games
• Games Surplus
• Thought Hammer
• Time Well Spent

Need additional info, or want a more specific recommendation? Don’t hesitate to drop me a line.

This review is cross-posted to Playtest.

Before heading to PAX Prime 2012, I wrote down the games I wanted to seek out and try. At the top of the list was Story Realms, which I had the great fortune to play while attending the conference. Having crossed tat one off, I went in search of my #2 choice, but couldn’t find it anywhere. This was due in part to the fact that the designer and sole retailer of the game, Brent Povis, was not at PAX this year. But there was another reason why copies extant: Morels received such great buzz two weeks earlier at Gencon that every available copy had been snapped up, with none left over for me to try.

Oh, well. Based on the fantastic word-of-mouth I ordered my own copy soon thereafter, and have been greatly enjoying the game ever since.

Morels is a rummy-style card game — “card game” because, aside from a handful of “foraging stick” tokens, the 94 cards are the only components; “rummy-style” because gameplay revolves around the drawing and melding of said cards. These commonalities with the traditional game of rummy make Morels feel instantly familiar, even while you are still working out how the game is played.

Each card in the game depicts either a species of fungus (including Lawyer’s Wig, Porcini, Hen of the Woods, and the eponymous Morel), a basket, a frying pan, or something that pairs well with a meal of mushrooms (butter or cider). The deck is shuffled before play begins and a “forest path” is created by dealing eight cards face-up in a row across the center of the table.

A player may use their turn to take one of the cards from the path into their hand. Either of the two cards closest to the head of the trail are free, but each card deeper in the woods costs an additional Foraging Stick. Thus, the third card from the start of the path costs one token, the fourth costs two, and so forth.

After each turn the card closest to the head of the trail is added to a special pile called “The Decay”, cards are shifted down such that all gaps are filled, and the empty spots are filled from the deck. The Decay can hold a maximum of four cards, and a player may use her turn to take these cards instead of selecting one from the path.

Players are constrained by a hand limit, and must occasionally use a turn to play sets of cards, both to free up space and to reap the rewards of melding. Mushrooms may be sold (and discarded) to acquire more Foraging Sticks, or can be cooked (and kept) to provide victory points at the end of the game. A player needs a “Pan” card in order to cook, and can only fry up sets of at least three;  selling, on the other hand, requires no more than two mushrooms of the same species. It is therefore common for players to sell junk to acquire Foraging Sticks, which are then used to get the shrooms that provide the biggest payout when cooked.

There are some special cards in the deck — butter and cider increase the value of cooked mushrooms; baskets increase a player’s hand size — but the core game is simplicity at it’s finest. The only complicating factor is the presence of “Destroying Angel” mushrooms in the deck; when taken, a Destroying Angel forces a player to discard cards from their hand. Because taking The Decay often results in the accumulation of unwanted cards (that nonetheless count against their hand limit), a crafty player can use a Destroying Angel to her advantage. But if you don’t want to deal with the extra complexity that DAs introduce, you can simply resolve not to take them for the first few games, until you have a better idea of their function and utility.

For years my default two-player recommendation has been Lost Cities, as everyone introduced to the game likes or loves it. Morels changes enough of the rummy-esque draw-and-meld formula that Lost Cities employs so well to make it a different, and in many respects better, game. For one thing, there are no blind draws — players select the card (or, in the case of The Decay, cards) they want and are willing to pay for. For another, Lost Cities is essentially abstract, while Morels has just enough cohesion between gameplay and theme that you can actually envision the row of cards as a forest path, or the playing of pan, mushrooms, and butter cards as the frying up of fungi.

The one aspect of Morels that bugs me is the need to move and deal cards after each and every turn. It’s not a lot of busy work, but significant given its frequency. To be fair, I should point out that I dislike the “shift cards and fill the row” mechanism in every game that uses it, up to and including my favorite, Through the Ages. And, honestly, a fun game that gives me some minor detail to grouse about during play is kind of win-win as far as I’m concerned.

As of now, Morels is only available for purchase through the Two Lanterns Games website. Here’s hoping that a major distributor picks this one up. You should consider picking it up as well.

I saw The Dark Knight Rises early, thanks to a corporate morale event. We even got free popcorn. I was excited to see the movie, but also to knock out a 800-word review that evening, sharing my enthusiasm for the franchise and gloating about having seen the film two days before you.

That review was not written, alas. My pervasive laziness shares 80% of the blame, as it doesn’t in all things. But I also didn’t want to be the killjoy. Nor did I particularly want to receive death threats. Because, honestly, I found the movie a little dull.

In the months since the release of TDKR it has become fashionable to grouse about the film — search Google for “dark knight rises” “plot holes” and you get somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 results. And so, now that I have ample cover, I will slink out of the shadows and explain my disappointment.

First, though, let me establish credentials. I am not only a huge fan of Batman (I was an avid reader of the comic books in my prime), and also of Christopher Nolan (Memento is in my top ten films of all time). Thus, Batman Begins seemed like a dream come true, a perfect marriage of these twin enthusiasm, and with The Scarecrow, my favorite Batman villain, as bridesmaid. And like everyone I thought The Dark Knight was off-the-charts great.

And let me state for the record that, despite everything I’m about to say, I think The Dark Knight Rises is good. It’s a good film. I liked it. Mostly.

But the film has a problem. And the problem ain’t plot holes. I mean, The Avengers has plot holes the size of Galactus and is still fantastic.

No, the problem with The Dark Knight Rises is that it doesn’t contain any goddamned Batman.

Here’s the thing. In the DC Universe, Batman holds his own against the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman. In fact, it is generally acknowledged that Batman could beat anyone in fight, given sufficient time to prepare, despite having no powers whatsoever.

He is able to do this because he possesses the following qualities, approximately zero of which are on display in The Dark Knight Rises:

• He is in peak physical condition: The difference between a contestant on The Biggest Loser and Michael Phelps is negligible when stacked up against, say, Superman, so this is the least of the attributes that make Batman Batman. But it’s worth mentioning. In TDKR, Batman starts out hobbled and later gets his back all busted, but, really, no big deal. I give it a pass.
• He is monomaniacal in his fight against crime: When TDKR opens, Batman has been retired for a long stretch of time. To be fair, (a) The Dark Knight Returns — Frank Miller’s seminal graphic novel — opened the same way, and (b) TDKR explained that Gotham had been relatively crime-free during Batman’s absence (another egregious variation from canon, but whatever). Even so, Bruce Wayne’s (clinical) obsession with fighting crime is central to the character.
• He is the World’s Greatest Detective (yes, all capitalized like that): Batman didn’t premiere in “Detective Comics” for nothing. TDKR pretty much only had one mystery — the identity of the person in the pit — and Batman not only failed to solve it, he didn’t even realize it existed.
• He is a master strategist: This ability, along with the aforementioned skill at detection, is what enables him to not only serve on the Justice League of America, but often lead it: while everyone else is running around punching things, he’s figuring shit out and issuing orders. Alas, there’s no evidence of this talent in TDKR where, even after having five months in a hole to plan, Batman spends his time in Gotham reacting to one crisis after another.
• He is a world-class inventor: In the comics, Bruce Wayne is essentially Tony Stark sans the drinking problem or ability to get laid. Which is to say, he makes his own gadgets. In the film (as I recall), all the hardware was made by either Lucius Fox or acquired by Wayne Industries; in fact, Batman doesn’t even know about the stuff until he gets a tour of the toybox. Worse, it wasn’t even as if Bruce Wayne alone could drive the stuff; he hands the Batcycle over to Catwoman, and she’s doing 180 turns in a matter of moments. When the main mode of fighting the bad guys is a bunch of technology that anyone can use, who needs the Caped Crusader at all?
• He is fabulously wealthy: Okay, he was still fabulously wealthy in TDKR. Ima give you that one.

I liked The Dark Knight Rises, I really did. It was a good Christopher Nolan film. I’d just kinda been hoping for some Batman.