Fellowship has a time limited demo until March 3rd 2025. If anything in this article sounds interesting, I highly encourage you to try it out.
I’m not good at, nor do I like MMO’s. They’ve always been too pricey for me, and while I’ve tried both WoW and FF XIV, neither made me want to play it long term. Somewhere, my character sits forgotten, having only gathered eight of the fourteen nut screws needed to advance to the next set of screw gathering.
Of course, then my friends who like such games will tell me that “I haven’t gotten to the raids or dungeons,” and that those are the good parts. I privately wonder in the back of my mind why, if those are the good parts, I have to spend my time gathering blinker fluid and elbow grease for twenty hours before I get to those parts.
Ultimately, I find myself wondering why someone doesn’t just make a game that’s just the “good” parts of the experience.
Well, someone has, and the game is called Fellowship. It has a demo right now, and it’s open until the end of the coming weekend.
I find Fellowship fascinating because I haven’t done classic MMO-style raids before. As such I don’t really have much to compare it to, and don’t really have too much to say on the subject that hasn’t been said before by others. There’s the classic tank/heal/DPS, extra mechanics are added at higher difficulties, and gear is rewarded on completion.
So why do I care about this game if it’s not really my thing?
Fellowship is interesting to me because it’s a chance to experience a set of mechanics that I’ve previously been locked off from. As an obsessive control freak who hates not being in charge, I chose to tank, and as a result, I now have a quiet seething hatred for all DPS players.
Okay, I joke, but I do find it really interesting how quickly I feel into some of the emotional responses I’ve seen folks make fun of for years, like getting upset when someone doesn’t know the boss, or fails a mechanic. Even if, y’know, I failed that mechanic and didn’t know the boss TWENTY MINUTES AGO. It’s fascinating, and I’m learning a lot about myself. Mostly that I’m an asshole when handed even the smallest ounce of authority.
There is some stuff here my friends complained about that didn’t bother me much, the big one being that there’s no character customization. But as an opportunity to experience the best part of MMO’s without 60 hours of mushroom bullshit? Sign me up.
Occasionally I see a take on the internet, and get real twitchy about it for a moment. This morning, it was a post about if puzzles are board games. Thus the twitching began.
The first thing I want to ask is, “Why are we asking this question?” That’s not superfluous, or being rude, it’s an important distinction.
The first response to the original question on Bluesky links to the Board Game Geek game criteria page. It is a very nice page, and I especially enjoy how it puts puzzles out of scope in one moment, and then puts escape rooms, a collection of puzzles, back in scope paragraphs later.
But the BGG page has a specific purpose. They want to limit and filter what sorts of products end up on their website, because they do not want to just have a list of everything. It’s a valid reason to define what a board game is, and to decide that a puzzle is not a board game for their purposes.
Let’s look at two others real quick. A friend asks you to bring something for board game night. You bring a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle. Are folks going to be happy?
Probably depends on the friend group. But I’m leaning towards, “No.”
What about sorting things for a store? Do puzzles go with the board games? In my experience, often the answer is, “Yes,” though that might have more to do with packaging and distributor than content. But the last few times I’ve been in a store, the puzzles sit right next to the copies of Cards Against Humanity.
So going back to the original question, what I want to ask is: Why does it matter if a puzzle is a board game? Are you stocking a store? Giving a gift? Setting up a web page? Because that context is going to change the answer.
Why am I being twitchy about this?
I don’t like it when people define words around art and art adjacent spaces in such a way as to exclude certain things from being in that category. To do that, there needs to be a good reason for it.
The usual reason for folks doing that is to exclude a category of other people from being in their in-group. The prime example of this is “gamers” claiming that The Sims and Animal Crossing aren’t “real games,” but I’m sure their are plenty others. That’s not a good reason, it’s just being a gatekeeping asshole. Now, I don’t think the original question on Bluesky was posted to gatekeep. But gatekeeping is why my brain decided to do the record scratch noise, and spend 40 minutes on this garbage writeup.
This year at PAX East, I got a chance to meet some of the folks doing Speed Puzzling. Presumably the speed part is what elevates it to the level of board game, but it was something fun and neat that I’d never heard of before. It’s also something that would never show up on BGG.
I’d rather that board game enthusiasts had space for weird stuff that does not in fact conform to neat tables of rules, or perfect definitions. I’d rather we had more In Memory Of sorts of things.
Okay, but are puzzles board games?
A sandwich is a piece of meat between two slices of bread.
Is this a sandwich?
Which is to say: it doesn’t matter without additional context!
Someone who’s very hungry might be happy to have a hot dog after asking for a sandwich. Someone who catered a sandwich tray for a work event might be slightly less enthusiastic to receive sixty Costco hot dogs.
Sky Team is incredibly elegant. I would have preferred that it was interesting.
I have played a lot of Sky Team over the last few weeks. Games of Sky Team mostly happen when my co-pilot (and actual game owner) asks me if I want to play, and I respond with a half-hearted “Sure.”
Outside of our first flight, I have never deliberately visited my friend in order to play Sky Team. We find our way into the cockpit every time we run out of things to do or talk about, and don’t particularly feel like playing a competitive game.
The game’s general simplicity and short playtime mean that despite my general lack of enthusiasm for taking to the air, I’m never really opposed to it.
Let’s start with that simplicity. Every round, you and your teammate each roll 4 dice, and then you take turns placing them onto a semi-split board. EYour dice pool is secret, and you cannot talk to your partner during the round.
Slots are color coded, specific to each player. Speed and axis must be filled each round by each player, leaving your other two dice to be used for a variety of other problems, such as other planes in your path, flipping the variety of switches that will allow the plane to land, and dealing with an untrained intern.
The actual game is a fine dance of probability and signaling. Can my teammate deal with the plane we are about to crash into? Can I slot a six into our axis freeing up my 3 to signal traffic out of the way? Or will doing so throw us directly into a tailspin?
All of this stands against the ever ticking clock: you have a limited amount of fuel, and must reach your destination before the final turn with all flaps down, and at a slow enough speed that we don’t run ourselves directly into the airport Cinnabon.
As the difficulty levels crank up, additional challenges have been thrust upon us. We must dodge mountains must by manipulating the axis meter within a specific range. A greedy kerosene gauge loses fuel if it isn’t plugged with a dice to minimize the loss. There is an intern. I’m not sure why we’re letting them fly the plane, or why failing to train them is as catastrophic to our success as doing a 360 no-scope directly into Kathmandu, but I don’t make the rules here.
Despite all of the additions and add-ons, I’ve never found myself excited by Skyteam with the level of either enthusiasm I had for Clank: Acquisitions Incorporated, or in retrospect, the curiosity I had for Lost Ruins of Arnak.
Instead, Skyteam is just kind of there.
It feels odd to be so ambivalent about a game that I’ve played so much of, and also is the winner of the Spiel, but here I am. I’ll play it. I’ll do my best to enjoy it. I’ll be impressed by its thoughtful mechanics, and absolutely brilliant box and component design. But I’ll never feel inspired or enthused by it.
Post Script: It’s not entirely true that Sky Team elicits zero emotional reaction from me, but the sole example of a time when it did is neither flattering to me or the game.
During one session, I came up with the idea of a 9/11 themed expansion for Sky Team. Obviously, this hard to justify for a variety of reasons.
But the one that made me laugh, and laugh and laugh, was the thought that it would be a very easy expansion, as landing would no longer be required.
I enjoy co-op campaign games. As a result, after finishing up Arkham Horror, I was looking for something new. It was then that I saw a writeup from Dan Thurot on War Story: Occupied France. Sure, a World War Two choose your own adventure sort of thing is a bit out of the usual wheelhouse, but it seemed like it would be worth giving a shot.
On the whole, I have quite mixed feelings on War Story. I think I can explain them (and the rest of the game) best by first pulling the box quote from BGG.
Through three replayable story missions, you must exploit the specialties of your chosen agents to uncover information, enlist allies, and obtain weaponry. Engage occupying forces on tactical encounter maps where careless positioning could cost your agents’ lives. Remember, no plan survives contact with the enemy…and time is running out.
Let’s start with those “three replayable story missions.” Yes, there are three of them. Yes, they are missions. Are they replayable?
I would not call them that. As the box also says, much of what we spent our time doing was simply gathering information. Playing again while knowing what and where the Nazi forces are up to feels like it would somewhat defeat the point. After all, it is a choose your own adventure booklet.
Perhaps the game has an elaborate branching path system, but by the time we finished mission 3, we had a pretty good sense of all three ways we COULD have finished our objective, even if we did only focus on one of them.
That said, the general missions and choices they present are fun, tense and exciting.
I would not say the same about the tactical encounter maps.
I’m going to be honest: the gunfights feel like a crapshoot, and there were at least two instances where we got absolutely screwed by the system. That’s not to say there aren’t choices, but often the choices boil down to trying to read the game text about the tactical maps for clues.
And many times, it just feels like those clues aren’t there. A choice with no information is the same as a random selection, and random selection isn’t agency. To the quote the box for a final time “no plan survives contact with the enemy,” and no, our plans did not. Instead, the gunfights feel like a matter of asking “Are you willing to spend gun tokens to avoid the worst case outcome on this check?” twelve or so times in a row.
Either way, I don’t think it’s something that would have annoyed me if it wasn’t for a larger problem I have with tone.
Now this might just be a me problem. My friend didn’t have it, and I believe Dan Thurot had a sort of opposite experience to mine. But it’s my writeup, so I’m going to talk about it here.
To me it feels like there are two very different types of story trying to co-exist in War Story. The first is a sort of grim, intense insurgency narrative, with all the things associated with said narrative.
Life is cheap, the enemy is endless, and while your actions are impactful in the grand scheme of things, they will also lead to death and torture for others around you. There are morally grey choices, and whether you are a terrorist or freedom fighter is ultimately going to be decided by if your side wins.
The way bulk choices are handled with cards, all available or not available as the mission demands is clever, but really only feels used to its full potential in mission 3.
This attempts to sit side by side with a sort of heroic myth thing. The primary enemy is a literal cigar smoking Kriminalkommissar Nazi, who the first two acts spend significant time building up. There is extended narrative time spent on a few “Face” characters who show up, but don’t actually spend much time as part of the story, like the albino toymaker.
Perhaps this is just the result of it being a choose your adventure story. Dan was darkly delighted at a moment when he was confronted with a treacherous informant, and given the choice of killing this person, lying to them, or trying to buy them off. I was equally frustrated when upon encountering a child of a German soldier or potentially SS Officer, I was not given the option to shoot the child.
This was not a choice I was enthusiastic about, but it did feel like a key moment where I would be confronted with the fact that in order to reach my objectives, I would have to make some heinous choices. Instead, we just distracted him and he ran off.
It was an oddly dissonant feeling, and one that has stuck with me since then.
It’s an interesting experience, but playing it by the book it felt frustrating at times, and frankly I don’t see how it could possibly be replayable. Would I play another game in the series? Maybe, but only if someone else was footing the bill.
I don’t really recommend or not recommend War Story. If someone told me they were thinking about playing it, I think the first thing I would say is that I’d love to hear their thoughts after they finish.
The second would be to ask if they wanted to buy my copy.
And here sit the 7 out of 8 agents that I got killed by the end of the campaign.
