Boardgames have this much in common with books- you shouldn't judge them by their covers. With boardgames you can go one step further and also add that you shouldn't judge them by their boards. Some games have the ugliest boards ever but are super fun to play, and certainly the reverse is true all too often. Even so I was drawn by the absolutely striking cover image and board art of the upcoming ThunderGryph Kickstarter, Darwin's Journey. Just look at that box! Beautiful. The board is even more so. I got to give it a try last night on TabletopSimulator with some local friends and an Instagram friend from Malaysia- one nice thing about the pandemic is it's taught us how our game groups can be worldwide!

I didn't even realize it was designed by Simone Luciani, a beloved game designer who has made, among others, Grand Austria Hotel and Lorenzo il Magnifico, and co-designed The Voyages of Marco Polo (a game I just received from one of the above game group friends!!! Heart emoji heart emoji how do you make emojis on a computer keyboard <3 ) Grand Austria Hotel is this lovely game where you attract customers to your hotel, hopefully enticing them with your yum food and drinks so that they will stay in your establishment and help you win the game. And you also have to make sure the emperor (of the Austro-Hungarian Empire? Probably) is happy with you... All this is done with dice and cards. but manages to make you feel like, yes, you could star in a Wes Anderson movie too!

A quick but necessary digression- I'm fairly new to the online tabletop gaming platforms. I'm also fairly new to being a computer guy at all after four years of not even having a computer and not really noticing. So these platforms are a little tricky to learn and navigate. But the pandemic so you deal, right? A few weeks ago we tried another game on a slightly different platform, and as much as I wanted to love that experience, it was a bust. I won't say the game, since I don't know if it was the game's fault, but I will say it had a similar main mechanic to Grand Austria, but coupled with me learning the digital platform, and it being late (the puppy takes so much out of me) and so forth, I think I would now demand a considerable sum of money before I play that particular game ever again.

But I was willing to give online gaming another try. Just to have social connection with my friends, I was wiling to suffer through the computeriness hassle of learning another game. Whatever game! Just not that last one we tried... and when they suggested Darwin's Journey, which I'd seen in facebook ads and instagram posts, I was hopeful but not too hopeful. And again, there were hiccups but tl;dr, the game was so enjoyable that the friction was easily overcome, whereas with the previous game, it just kicked dirt on the grave, so to speak. Here's a screenshot of the board:

The game is worker placement, my favourite game mechanic, which just means you choose where to go and what to do, but your opponents also have the same freedom so you just sort of do your best. This is already a wordy post so I won't go into too much more detail about that, but Darwin's Journey takes this very common mechanic and does some interesting new things with it. You have to kind of customize your worker, unlocking abilities for each, which determines what they can do. That part is fun and requires some good decision-making. But what wax-seals the deal for me is all the things you do in-game. I love games where you feel like you are doing what the game pretends you are doing. There's always abstraction, but I want to feel like I really am making coffee for this beloved Austrian author at my hotel. And in this game, I want to feel like I really am  Charles Darwin exploring the Galapagos Islands, slowly uncovering evidence for the origin of the species. 

And you do- I think in real life where you're not trying to remember which keys move and which zoom, it will feel much more so, but even on TS, you get the feeling that your boat is following the Beagle, and your little Charles is exploring that island, and studying this species, and mailing reports off to a museum... it kind of makes you wonder if life doesn't change, one might say evolve, incrementally over eons, in response to natural selection! By jove I believe so! 

I'll be honest, even with my science degree and great love for the evolutionary history of this amazing planet, I've never actually read On The Origin of the Species. Maybe if it had a cover with art by Paolo Voto I would! 

The Darwin's Journey Kickstarter goes live tomorrow, go here for more details!