Transcendence Express by Jetse De Vries

“The greatest job is the one where you make yourself superfluous.”

-- Transcendence Express

After the nightmarish human-eating of The Bird Catcher, we move on to more straight up science-related concepts. Transcendence Express, as you might guess, deals with human transcendence. In this case, via biologically-grown quantum machines. I could get into that.

Apex Book of World SF, edited by Lavie Tidhar

Let’s All Talk About the Biological Computers

Technology is the focus and the folks in this story are an afterthought.

The best way for me to describe De Vries’s character development is comparing it, for good or ill, to the work of Isaac Asimov. Think back to any of Asimov’s Robot stories, where one engineer is having a conversation to another engineer about recent robot developments. What do the engineers look like? Who cares! Tell us more about the robots!

Instead the human beings serve as a framework to show the scientific revolution taking place. There’s no changes in personality or evolution of character, both are pretty static when they aren’t having weirdly awkward personal moments.

Your Childhood is Obsolete

Transcendence Express imagines a discovery allowing complex quantum computing devices to be grown out of common easily-available chemicals.

The action happens in a third world village, with a couple of Dutch teachers showing the kids how to make their own wooden cases for receiving the developing computational goo. 

Is this a disruptive revolution? It must be, but the reader is left to imagine most of it.

Other than one kid getting upset because his father won't alter the traditional planting schedule, we are left to wonder where the world will be after a year or two of biological enhancement. 

Will the AI's be running the show? Certainly this is the most efficient outcome, even the most friendly to the humans if they get a better yield out of the deal.

Looking to the Future Of World Speculative Fiction

Transcendence Express is forcing a disruptive revolution on a personal level: I'm wondering if I picked the wrong book off the shelf to start my review series. Perhaps I should pick a story I've already read before committing to writing a review of it?

I think the only way to determine an insurmountable failure is to do it one last time.

If the next story strikes out, I'll try to switch to something else. Because that's how they do it in baseball, so it must be right.

See everyone next time when we explore:

The Levantine Experiments

by Guy Hasson

Down the Rathole with Gamewright's Slamwich

The wind was howling. The heavy rain was splattering against the windows. In the darkness, I huddled at my desk, wrapped in a threadbare shawl. I swore in the darkness...I would have Slamwich’s secret!

In sunnier times, one bright Easter morning, my daughter opened a strange present in her basket. It was Slamwich!

The Slamwich game, complete with Lunch Box
for easy transport and storage

This game had always existed in my periphery. I knew of it, but never about it. From the instructions it sounded like a commercialized form of Slapjack. Everyone’s played Slapjack, the kids love Slapjack. No childhood is complete without looking for those lovable jacks to slap.

The entire deck is dealt out as equally as possible, with the remaining sandwich cards (if they exist) going face-up into the middle the start the pile. Everyone has their own little deck, and cards are played by flipping them off the top and putting them in the pile, going around in the circle of players.

There’s no choice in which card you play, it’s always the top card.

Suddenly! The Slappening

You might think the game sounds pretty boring to start with. Well, you are right. The flipping the cards off the top of the deck action is only the framework of the game. The beating heart, and where the real fun lives, is in the slapping.

There are 2 combinations. Double Stacks and Slamwiches. 

Double Stack

A delicious meatball and sardine Slamwich

Spy either of these combinations of cards and any player, no matter whose turn it is, can bring their hand down in an almighty slap of power over the top of the pile. First hand on the pile takes the pile.

Then, whoever took the pile starts a new one by playing the top card of their deck. The won cards go to the bottom of their pile without shuffling, essentially becoming more ammunition for continuing play.

Slamwich Thief cards

Thick as Thieves

If you see a Thief card, this is also grounds for a slapping. Preferably shouting “THIEF!” as loud as possible. Everyone loves the thief cards, because they are easy.

The Muncher Conundrum

Here’s the source of my confusion regarding Slamwich. In the game there are a bunch of these “Muncher” cards with numbers from 1 to 3 on them.

All the Muncher cards

When you play a muncher, it’s like a whole new thing. The next player has to play (one at a time) the number of cards on the muncher, hoping to play yet another muncher and pass the challenge to the next person like the curse off a magic monkey paw. Otherwise the person who played the muncher wins the pile automatically.

And as I mentioned before, a lot of the muncher cards have a number 1, meaning you get only a single try to beat the muncher. This didn’t seem very fun, it felt overly complex, and it didn’t look like any version of Slapjack I’ve ever played.

So I went to the Internet and did my due diligence. And what I found blew my mind.

A Dark Discovery

Slamwich had only the most rudimentary connection to Slapjack. And what was with all of these Munchers?

Well, the Munchers made a lot more sense when I finally found Slamwich’s true roots. Slamwich is definitely a commercialized version of a traditional 52-card game. But that game wasn’t Slapjack.

It was Egyptian Ratscrew.

Cryptic Considerations

The shock! Every hand of Slamwich I had so far played with my kids, I had inadvertently been culture-jamming their little brains to understand and successfully play Ratscrew.

And here’s the deal with the muncher cards. In Ratscrew these are the face cards, which is why there are so many of them. And these face cards are actually part of the normal, boring game you play while you look for slapping opportunities.

When a player uses a muncher card, this represents a “challenge” to the player on the left. And yeah, it might not be terribly fair. But that’s because the real winner of Slamwich, or Ratscrew, is the one with the fastest, meatiest hand who can take advantage of the sudden slapping opportunities when they unexpectedly show up.

Conclusion

Is Slamwich better than just playing Ratscrew with normal cards? I think the answer is yes. The game reduces the number of face cards and adds the thieves to reduce challenges and increase slapping. Children crave the slapping.

Unfortunately, the cards are bread-shaped, and they are as weird and obnoxious as you might think for dealing and forming a deck. Luckily in Slamwich there is almost no shuffling otherwise play would be practically impossible.

The sandwich ingredients are thoroughly disgusting, which is immensely appealing to kids. No one wants a gummy bear and sardine sandwich, unless of course you are playing Slamwich!

If you want to get the flavor of Slamwich, just deal out a deck of cards and use your favorite Egyptian Ratscrew rules. Just go easy on the slapping, and prepare to be defeated by any 10 year old with a decent set of eyes in their head.

The Bird Catcher by S.P. Somtow

As an exercise in increasing my posting regularity, I’ve decided to initiate a delve into the world of contemporary fiction. Previously, my examinations have remained relegated to 70’s science fiction dystopias. But I’m going to try something completely different:

(drum roll)

The Apex Book of World SF!

Edited by literary great Lavie Tidhar. Published in 2009. Packed full of who knows what.

A Note on Speculative Fiction

The first thing you may notice from this book is that it’s not science fiction. The hard capital S and Fs indicate this is instead a collection of Speculative Fiction. Which is what scifi calls itself when it wants to escape from the grim science/fantasy genre shelves at the local bookseller. Hard SF is normally scared s-less by normal sci-fi tropes. I’m not expecting to run into any spaceships or aliens with weird bumps on their heads. But maybe I’ll be surprised.

A Note on World Authors

If you are from a non-English-speaking country and you are writing in English, it is going to take extra work. Each word is going to be that much more valuable. You’re going to try to get to the point without a lot of digressions. At least that’s my thinking when I read distinctly international fiction like this.

Plus, in the same way that Settlers of Catan had to be really good to make the jump from Germany, I feel like these stories had to work extra hard to get to where they are today. But I might be wrong there, too.

Without further ado, the first story in this collection:

The Bird Catcher by S.P. Somtow

If I had to “pigeonhole” The Bird Catcher into a genre, it would probably be horror. There’s not really any ghosts or monsters, but there is a serial killer. In fact there may be a couple of them.

The Bird Catcher starts off in modern day Bangkok and then flashes back to post WWII Bangkok and then the tiny fishing village of Thapsake. The main character (never named), his mother and finally a shadowy companion are all fleeing survivors of a Japanese internment camp in China, who settle as foreigners in Thailand.

Cages within Cages

The feeling of being trapped in a cage is the ongoing motif for The Bird Catcher.

The narrator has escaped a gruesome fate, but the prison has followed him. The Buddist practice of “making merit” by releasing birds is examined critically, the narrator notes the birds’ wings are clipped, and often return quite soon to captivity ready for another customer.

The narrator feels trapped by his circumstances and as a foreigner in a different culture. He feels trapped by the horrible dreams he has from the camp.

But on the other hand, Thailand seems like a pretty nice place in many respects. The narrator has friends. The weather is beautiful. Play is unstructured and offered in generous amounts. There's plenty to like.

Humans are on the Menu

No matter how wonderful the rest of the country is, the narrator can’t help but feel drawn to the brooding half-witted mentally-scarred man Si Ui.

Si Ui only has a few lines in the story, 90% of which are “Hungry!” and “Si Ui Hungry!”

Si Ui has seen some stuff from his internment camp days, and the narrator bonds with him over this. They wordlessly appreciate each other’s company and shared experience. Si Ui introduces the narrator into the world of bird catching, which he is remarkably good at.

They kill some birds. They eat some birds cooked. And they eat some birds raw.

And some of those birds, they might not be birds, but little girls from the neighborhood.

Fractured Minds and Hungry Bellies

Much connection is made between the empty hunger of surviving horrific events, the simple hunger when you want to eat, and the compulsive mental hunger a serial killer feels that draws him to his next victim.

Only problem is, I’m not convinced this is a real thing. History is full of people who have survived the worst human experience can offer, and they don’t turn into some kind of liver-eating monster.

If you are a kid, and your parents are murdered by Santa Claus, you aren’t going to dress up as Santa Claus and start punishing people. That’s an overused trope from the very bottom of the horror barrel. Yet the narrator constantly refers to the hunger inside him born from the camps and how the killing of birds suddenly grants him this relief he has never had before.

Serial killers apparently do often have tragic events in their past. But I can't help feeling there's plenty of people who are just born that way.

If this was a real thing, liquor companies would be out of business and human overpopulation would no longer be an issue.

Explaining Something to a Child

One of the most authentic feelings I got from this story was in the framing. The narrator’s flashback to his bird-chomping days is told from his perspective in the modern day. Walking to a decrepit freak show museum to show his grandson the mummified remains of Si Ui the Liver Eater, he attempts to explain the significance of his own memories to a boy who really could not care less.

This is parenthood at its most real.

When your son or daughter is a baby, you think about all the things you want to tell them. Perhaps not necessarily about your dabblings with cannibalism, but important life lessons or learning opportunities.

But here’s the real truth: there is not a single fact or figure in my head, not a single fragment of information, that holds any interest beyond the strictly short term to my son. 

Anything I tell him, I can see Minecraft continuing uninterrupted somewhere behind his glassy eyes, waiting for me to finish so he can go do something interesting.

At the end of the story, the narrator tucks his grandson into bed and hops a flight back to New York. After which he’s probably going to eat some people, I guess.

Rating?

I’m not sure I should be rating these. What would I even give them? Stars? Thumbs? Dead birds?

I’m not going to grab a zip-line and fly down to the local library to hunt up more fiction from S.P. Somtow. But I also feel like I got something out of it.

Will I like the next story in the collection? The only way to find out is to read my next blog post.

Coming Soon: “Transcendence Express” by Jetse de Vries. See you then!

Out for Bloodborne: The Card Game

“Go out, kill monsters, and take their blood...it’s a family game.” -- Eric M. Lang, game designer

You want blood and the monsters are practically bursting at the seams with the stuff. Only problem is, you’re not the only one on the trail. Other players are trying to grab what’s rightfully yours and the only by successfully navigating their help/interference will you come out on top when it comes time to collect the spoils.

A week before now, the video game Bloodborne was barely in the realm of my awareness at a all. That all changed during the GAMA trade show, when I found out Eric M. Lang was developing a short, fast card game using the official license.

Lang spilling the beans

Racing for Blood

One of the first “deckbuilding” games to arise out of the bacterial soup left behind by the impossible success of Dominion was Thunderstone. After years of successful expansions and a new edition, Thunderstone is still at its heart adventurers awkwardly buying gear and fighting monsters.
The monsters don’t feel like monsters. And the gear doesn’t feel too much like gear in many cases.
The same basic play is available in a faster framework now with all the different versions of the DC Comics Deckbuilding Game. Players take turns buying smaller stuff until they have enough gear to make the jump into the big bad guy deck, earn the big-boy victory points, and move the game closer to its conclusion.
One of the problems I see with both of these games is plodding inevitability. Each player’s turn is completely separate, with little you can do to affect your opponents. Except for a couple of really crushing cards (I’m looking at you Power Drain), you can plan out your turn pretty nicely no matter what your opponent does. You lay your cards down, something happens, you go on to the next turn.
According to Lang, in Bloodborne all the turns are going to happen simultaneously. Actions will be resolved in a changing turn order, and everything you do will possibly have an unintended effect on both you and your opponents. And during the turn, you will have to play by the seat of your pants much like one of my other favorite games.

Pressing your Luck

The “Whammies” in Bloodborne look like they can come at any time. You won’t know what attacks your fellow players are using until they do it. You also won’t know how much damage the monster you are fighting will deal until it does it. Combined, players will be uncertain they will survive each round and the temptation to leave the encounter and save your remaining resources for the next encounter will be fierce.
The example Lang brings up in the video is the Blunderbuss. You can use both melee and ranged weapons in Bloodborne. But when you use the Blunderbuss, you also do damage to anyone trying to execute a melee attack that round. You might accidentally get caught in the crossfire, which is of immense benefit to the Blunderbuss firer if you don’t survive to collect your share of the blood.

The video game: monsters are tough!

Licensed to Die

An official license to use the intellectual property from some other media empire can be the kiss of death. Lang notes the card game is designed to appeal to the digital players of the video game first, and carries some simplification versus the type of game a board gamer would expect.
This can be good or bad, and no one will know until Bloodborne gets played.
If you need a current example of a official license cash grab, look no further than the Ghostbusters board game, already moving forward on a sequel that makes yet another iteration of a very derivative concept.
On the other hand, it might be awesome.
I appreciate "simpler" games as much as anybody. Often board game mechanisms find ways to be more elegant the smaller the surrounding apparatus becomes. And whenever the turn order in a game is all mushed together, with no safe time to plan strategy, I find I get extra excitement in the process.
So Bloodborne might make a good card game. But like the video game, you’ll have to keep vigilant and not rush into anything until you know exactly what you’re dealing with.
Because once you’ve plunked down your hard-earned blood to the shopkeep, there’s no do-overs.

Asmodee's Specialty Retail Policy: Paving the Board Game Utopia

The big news this weekend (not counting Star Wars) is the reorganization of Asmodee, Fantasy Flight Games and Days of Wonder into a globular amalgamation of board gaming intellectual property. And the biggest news from within that amalgamation is the new sales agreement Asmodee has announced they will try to use to save their retail margins and rescue everyone’s favorite local gaming store from the brink of extinction.

At least, that’s why I assume they are doing it. Ultimately, behind the corporate speak, only the executives at this new Asmodee North America truly know all the reasoning.

What we have is a agreement all retailers will be expected to sign, that severely limits their rights to resell their own property purchased from one of only 5 approved Asmodee North America distributors.

Advice is Cheap, But the Games Won’t Be

I don’t own a game store. But what I do see is a world full of game stores, both online and brick-and-mortar. And I have trouble envisioning why any type of trade agreement like this would ever turn out as a good thing for anyone involved. It’s not like its a new thing, small publishers of niche products have tried to control their retail channels ever since Games Workshop began slowly strangling itself to death doing the same thing back in the early 90’s. You have to buy at certain percentages. You have to sell at certain prices. You can’t sell online.

One of the few benefits to running your own game store is being your own boss. At least, I have to imagine it is. Any report from any “specialty retailer” has first and foremost reiterated it is not about the money. There are far easier ways in this world to slowly spiral into bankruptcy.

Why do We Even Have Favorite Local Gaming Stores?

This agreement, along with opening your eyes and looking at the world around you, both seem to indicate there are plenty of ways to buy cheap board games. Even the most hard-to-find game, if its in print, you can no doubt buy it somewhere at a discount.

In the cold, uncaring marketplace the Asmodee Specialty Retail Policy is fighting the good fight. To keep those faithful retailers making the profit they deserve. But what have retailers been doing in the meantime?

I’ve personally seen the typical gaming store evolve to cope with these challenges. The competent retailer has not stood by and watched people showroom their aisles and load up on their Game of Thrones, Star Wars and Cthulhu-based board games online. Heck, one of the biggest examples of the NEW board game store is the flagship retail establishment run by the former Fantasy Flight Games itself.

There’s places to play your games. Spaces to hang out with people. Food to eat. Drinks to drink. Demo copies of new titles for you to try out.

No online store can offer any of these amenities. They can only compete on price.

Getting Them in the Door

Ask anyone in sales, and they’ll tell you the biggest challenge is just getting people to show up. Once someone has walked into your establishment, they’re already halfway made up in their mind they’re going to buy something. Heck, when I go in a game store it take incredible, almost impossible force of will to leave without buying something.

So even if the prices are higher, if you bring people into your store you will no doubt get sales. And all of the previous reasons are exactly why people go in there. Buying the board games is almost secondary. Anybody can buy board games, any time. You see the ads on Board Game Geek. They’re all over the place.

Retailers don’t need the help. So maybe this agreement will really help Asmodee turn into a super-profitable game company, a board game Google, ready to take the entire board game industry to the next level.

Well, here’s the problem. Even with the acquisition of a couple other HUGE publishing juggernauts, there’s one inescapable fact:

Plenty of Board Game Fish in the Sea

Anyone can publish a board game. There are more small board game publishers than there are stars in the sky. Go ahead and try to count them sometime.

How will this affect the board game industry?

It won’t. No matter how hard they try, I don’t anticipate any time of agreement forced on retailers to do anything whatsoever. Except destroy Asmodee’s relevance in this changing niche economy. And even then, there are so many other companies ready to fill in the gap should even the mightiest oak fall I don’t see that as a problem.

While I’m sure board gamers are already jumping out the second floors of their townhouses in anticipation of some big board game collapse, there’s just no way for it to happen. Buy the games you want to buy, however you want to buy them. And visit the establishments you want to patronize. And if you’re a retailer, enjoy your independence and feel free to shun any board game company forcing you to sign overly complex agreements. Because your clientele aren’t coming to you for the board games. They’re coming to you because you’re you.

Some famous cartoon character once said it best: "Screw those guys."

The Best Theme is a Boring Theme: Xenon Profiteer and Uwe Rosenburg's Patchwork

The Compelling Truth, as told by T.C. Petty III

Recently the  designer of  just-released Xenon Profiteer offered up an in-depth Designer Diary on the nature of his creative process. What struck a chord with me was his analysis of the role of theme in games, and how many of the most interesting games actually had pretty dull themes.

T.C. Petty III wrote:

There's something deeply humorous (absurdist? dadaist?) about creating a game that transforms an activity that sounds absolutely un-fun into a deeply rewarding experience, and it's apparent that I'm not the only one that agrees. Some of the most popular games on this site have the most boring titles, cover art, and themes that the world has ever known, but against all odds, and with intense focus on the fundamentals that make gameplay truly engaging, they pull even the most skeptical board gamer deep into their worlds of abstract grids and crop farming and transitioning from canals to railroads. Seriously, Brass is a game about the transition from canal systems to railroads. Riveting. How is this not considered ridiculous? How is it not considered art?

This insight struck me hard, and I saw the incredible truth. I have felt this way myself, instinctively, for plenty of time during my gaming life. But it took Petty’s words to put all those theme yearnings together under one umbrella that made sense:

The most rewarding games often have the most boring titles, cover art and themes. 

Yet I want to play them, and then I enjoy them, and then I want to get more. Badly.

Time to Lay Some Pipe

And its not just me. One of the most popular games in my household...with the wife, with the kids, with my friends, is Galaxy Trucker. You might initially argue at the boring theme:

“What do you mean, boring? This game is about space, and spaceships. You fly around in space and get hit by asteroids and fight space pirates.

But, I would argue, the flying in space of Galaxy Trucker is actually the uninteresting part of the game. It’s essentially a super-long scoring phase, when the construction of your ship is “judged” against a revolving menagerie of variables. From cargo delivery, to exploration, to combat to the aforementioned asteroid collisions.

Where does all the fun come from in Galaxy Trucker?

The fun part is welding pieces of pipe together. The quick thinking involved in locating just the right piece. The rush of finding a spot it connects with. The balancing of different types of components to ensure your ship can reach the destination. The delight when your opponent fails to find a legal position for his chosen tile. It doesn’t really look or feel like a spaceship. I’m really pretty sure this is not how anyone actually builds spaceships. It could be anything. A bridge or a skyscraper or a sewer line. The fun would be the same.

It’s Time to Talk about my NEW second-favorite Uwe Rosenberg game

If you want to talk about how a boring theme allows you to build up elegant unconstrained mechanics, the best example I’ve seen yet is Patchwork, by famed board game sadist Uwe Rosenberg. Unlike most of his games, there’s no starving children or tortured mutant farmers. Instead each person is weaving together a delightful patchwork quilt.

Of course, its competitive patchwork weaving, so each player is drawing patches from a shared pool, paying some nefarious entity for the patches in the form of bright, blue buttons. Actually, now that I think about it more, this game might be about mutants, too. That makes a lot of sense. The theme, however, is definitely boring quilting.

Much like Galaxy Trucker, no one is going to look at Patchwork and say “oh, this is a perfect simulation of craft quilting.” No, instead the theme is used to surround some exciting mechanics, namely weighing the “value” of different pieces based on their shape, cost and ability to generate more buttons when another income phase comes around.

See I think these are mutants or goblins of some sort. Probably living in someone’s attic, I’m guessing. Play the game yourself and give me your theories.

I want to know where the buttons come from.

The Shape of Things to Come

Before playing Patchwork, I had heard it described as Tetris-like. I would agree on this. Certainly, you are paying buttons for specific pieces to fit better into your quilt design. Because you want your quilt to be complete, without any holes or ragged spots. Because here is the final “I Have No Mouth, But I must Scream” moment Uwe Rosenberg is known for:

At the end of the game, you have to pay this button freak back his buttons, 2 for every missing spot in your quilt. Which means if you don’t play this game right you might actually end up with less buttons than you started with, or even a negative number of buttons. And that’s how this guy gets more buttons, apparently by enslaving mutants in these predatory quilting expositions. No one’s going to buy a quilt with a ragged corner!

And ragged is how they all come out, guaranteed. The natural timer built into the game ensures it.

This Game Had Me in Stitches

The mutants, the button tax, everything is laid out in very abstract, bland terms. But in that vacuum, I was able to take the components I was given and tell an incredible story. How else would you use such an impressive Tetris tile-laying mechanic. You either use patches on a quilt, or you make a game literally about Tetris. Or maybe make it about snake stacking. Fun for you, but not so fun for the snakes!

Quantum: Eric Zimmerman's Work of Staggering Genius

Quantum gets very little appreciation, and I think it’s because people find it so hard to define. Like Spock flying into the heart of V’ger, there’s a lot going on. It might make sense internally, but there’s little common frame of reference. Today I’m going to try and as my assistants I will use 3 (decidedly inferior to Quantum) board games as examples.

Stage 1: King of Tokyo

Ships in Quantum are represented by dice. The face up number is the type of ship, 1 is essentially a Death Star, while 6 is a super-fast scout. The numbers in between are ships filling the spectrum of options between these 2 extremes. So the first thing you do in Quantum is randomly generate your ships by rolling dice, then rolling them again if you didn’t like what you got the first time.

The dice rolling is only barely similar to King of Tokyo. Once you’ve established your initial ships, they stay that way until they are destroyed or you spend effort to transform them.

Like in King of Tokyo, combat is encouraged but not completely necessary. Ships gain “infamy” points when they destroy other ships, but there is no penalty for losing in an attack. Your ship can only be destroyed when defending. These infamy points can eventually be used to buy a quantum cube (the victory points to win the game) and also to gain advance cards from the middle of the board (like the mutations in King of Tokyo).

Getting the advances can also be done via research, which a player is welcome to take as one of his or her actions during the turn. Research points accrue like infamy points, and when you’ve earned enough, you get to grab an advance card, this time with no quantum cube.

Stage 2: Catan

Building quantum cubes is how you win the game. The first player to deploy all 7 cubes on the board is the victor. Just like settlements in Catan, as you expand your empire you move closer and closer to winning the game. There are no victory points, and I really, really admire the thought that went into this.

You don’t gain any resources from quantum cubes, but you do get to build new ships in their proximity, meaning you really do get the feeling of an expanding empire. Building also does not require resources, instead you need a special numerical combination of ships (each planet is different) and getting these numbers together can generate the same sort of frustration as missing your wheat payout in Catan.

While quantum cubes can never be destroyed, the primary source of player conflict is in knocking opposing ships out of commission while their owner is sweating over getting just the right number combinations.

Stage 3: Space Chess

The movement of the dice is basically Chess in space. All the pieces have narrow, well-defined movement rules. Each has a special power you need to remember. And besides building quantum cubes, the primary use for ships is blocking opposing players from moving into new territory.

Also like Chess, the player needs to think a few steps ahead since accidentally leaving an opening for your opponent to build a final quantum cube is the eventual winning condition of every game.

Stage 4: The Game is Completely Original

After comparing Quantum to 3 incredibly diverse existing titles, I’m going to go ahead and negate everything I just typed by saying Quantum is like none of these games. You would never play it and say “This is just like Settlers of Catan” unless you were a weirdo committed to finding the parallels like I was. Instead, Quantum is an entirely original creation on both mechanics and style.

After playing over a thousand hands of Race for the Galaxy, I thought I had basically found my space game. But Quantum is most surprising of all to me because after spending way too much time searching for other games like RFTG, I love Quantum even though it has almost no similarities.

Designer Eric Zimmerman is a genius. I have absolutely no familiarity with his work before or after Quantum, but I’ll be doing my research. I found out about Quantum by playing on BGA, and now it's on my list to get. Do yourself a solid and check this game out. Then try to figure out why nobody seems to be talking about it anymore.