Kurt Pankau Dot Com

💍 "I told you he was tricksy..." Asmodee and Office Dog are in the process of releasing a complete trilogy of trick-taking games based on the book  The Lord of the Rings  by J.R.R. Tolkien. The first installment,  The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game , was released early this year to much acclaim, and a sequel based on The Two Towers  is scheduled to release in January—although there will be pre-launch release events this month—and you can bet your sweet bippy that I will be acquiring a copy as soon as possible. I adore the first game, and not just because it combines one of my favorite gameplay mechanics with one of my favorite IPs. It is, in fact, an excellent adaptation of the source material as well as being a very refined and inventive game engine that is heavily thematic. And if there's one thing that I love as much as trick-taking games and The Lord of the Rings , it's thematic storytelling! In fact, I would go so far as to say that this specific game...

🗺️ I Can See For Miles and Miles... A message from an entity known as "The Traveler" has lured you to an uncharted planet. While orbiting, your spaceship suddenly malfunctions. The crew jump into their individual escape pods and are sent scattering down to the corners of the planet's surface. While you're unlikely to find each other, you have radio contact and can share information and skills in order to help each other out. Gather items, vehicles, quests, and what-have-you in order to complete your mission and/or fulfill your destiny. Vantage  is a cooperative exploration game for 1-6 players from Stonemeier, creators of Wingspan  and Scythe . It just released and I happened to get a copy very quickly after orders went live, so while many people are waiting on theirs, I've managed to get a few plays in, and I wanted to share my thoughts. I want to be clear that this is not  a review. I've played it twice at two players and only feel like I've scratched t...

⛈️ Are You Telling This Story or Am I... [SPOILER ALERT] Over the holiday weekend we took the kids to see Thunderbolts*  at the theater. It was my second time seeing it, and I have to say that it really resonated with me. I'm still enjoying the MCU, even if the bloom has come off the rose in the public perception. And I freely admit that a lot of the recent content has been not great ( Eternals ) and occasionally quite bad ( Secret Invasion ). At the end of the day, I'm fine with sitting through a so-so movie if I get to spend it hanging out with characters I like. But Thunderbolts*  is actually pretty good, and it manages to tell a compelling story about something that you don't see represented well in mainstream blockbuster action flicks. Thunderbolts*  is a movie about depression. Which is something I've struggled with off-and-on for my entire life. Let's take a step back, shall we? One of the things that I love about speculative fiction is the way it externalize...

🤓 Players Gonna Play, Play, Play, Play, Play... This last weekend was another annual installment of Geekway to the West, the convention where I spend four days playing board games. The draw every year is the Play-and-Win contest, in which you play games from a library of over a hundred recently published games (multiple copies of each, so it netted out to roughly 800 games in all). Every play gives you a chance to win one of those copies. Here's what I played! Tower Up Started strong out of the gate. This was easily my favorite of the con. It's a light, puzzly eurogame that plays fast, scales cleanly, has a great tactile component, and looks gorgeous on the table. You can either gather pieces or start a new tower. When you start a tower, you must also build on anything that's adjacent to it as well. You then put a roof on one of the towers you built. Playing a roof does not keep others from playing over it, though. Once someone plays their last roof, the game ends. Score p...

🤺 And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger... Two blog posts in a week. What madness is this!? Anyhoo... Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith  was back in theaters this week to celebrate its 20th anniversary. My kids are big Star Wars  fans and never got to see this one in the cinema, so we went. They had a lot of fun. The prequels are pretty popular with kids as well as the Zoomers who were kids when they came out. As for me? It... uh... has not gotten any better with age. But it is interesting to revisit it as an older filmgoer, free from the intoxicating hype of people still thinking the prequels were any good. And as someone who now spends a fair amount of time thinking about story structure and narrative, I have a better understanding of what doesn't work about it. But first! A little history! I saw Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith  at the Arclight in Hollywood, because it came out during the long weekend I spent living...