Tag: Review

Maquis Review

In case you haven’t heard this verbalized in the past couple months, allow me to say what everyone’s thinking: we live in straaange times.

As of writing and publishing this, the world is in the grips of a pandemic and it’s forced us to stay home, away from family and friends for an indefinite amount of time. It really sucks but when the alternative is literally dying it makes the sacrifice a little more worth it.

In the process of these stay at home orders across the globe, people in board gaming are starting to realize the wonders of solo gaming. Yes, games that can be played by yourself. Once the punchline of many a joke, solo games are now becoming salvation in these trying times.

I have been a self-proclaimed solo gamer for the past year or so. While I obviously much prefer playing games with actual people, I do enjoy pulling out solo games a couple times a week to help satisfy my cardboard cravings.

To celebrate the wonders of solo gaming, especially in this dark period in history, I am in the process of writing a Top 10 Solo Games for this site. Sadly, it’s taking me waaay longer than anticipated, mainly because I have so much trouble choosing between just 10. As I’ve written it, games have entered and left the list like Defense Against the Dark Arts professors and it’s resulted in a patchwork writing style in which half the entries are written and the other half are still in flux as I play and replay various games to decide if they earn top billing.

Maquis is a game that was on the list, and I even wrote a decent sized chunk about it, BUT it unfortunately got booted off by another game at the buzzer. I didn’t feel right doing Maquis dirty like that, so I decided to flesh out what I wrote and turn it into its own full-fledged review because that’s what this game deserves, dammit.

Maquis is designed by Jake Staines and published by Side Room Games. Side Room Games is interesting because they’re a small indie publisher that seems to primarily focus on solo games. They’ve had a handful of successful Kickstarters, perhaps their most famous and popular being the solo hidden movement game (yes, you read that right) Black Sonata. Unfortunately, I missed the boat on Black Sonata but I made sure to not make the same mistake with Maquis.

Maquis is interesting in that it’s a solitaire only worker placement game. Despite the fact that worker placement games lend themselves well to solo modes, it’s tough to think of any worker placement games that are SOLELY designed for one player. Well, besides Maquis, of course.

In Maquis, you are a member of the French Resistance in World War II, pushing back against your Nazi oppressors in occupied France. I really love this game’s theme not because its World War II but because of it’s take on World War II. So many WWII games are about combat and battling it out with a boots on the ground approach. Which makes sense; it’s a war after all. But it’s refreshing to see a game focus on the more human element of it, about average people completing clandestine tasks to win back their homeland from horrific oppressors.

As an American, I have no shortage of “Americans punching Nazis” pop cultural materials to enjoy, so I love when another country or culture is spotlighted. Being able to immerse myself in the French Resistance chapter of WWII’s vast textbook of events is interesting and enlightening. The game’s stark art style also helps add to the theme, as well as just making the game fantastic to look at.

Okay, so the theme and art are great. How does the game actually play?

Every game you’re given two random objectives and in order to win you need to complete them both before time runs out. These objectives vary wildly, involving tasks like blowing up a train or assassinating some officers or being a mischievous backstreet hooligan by placing graffiti tags around the city.

Seeing as Maquis is a worker placement game, it’s no surprise that the way in which you complete these objectives is by placing workers. On your turn, you’ll place a worker in one of the many spots around the city, gathering resources that will allow you to satisfy the different objectives. As you place workers, however, the enemy A.I. deck is placing patrols at certain locations as well.

These guys are assholes for a couple reasons, besides the obvious ‘they work for the Nazis’ ones. One: they block a spot that you might have needed. Two: they can potentially remove your workers from the game if all their targeted destinations are already occupied. Three (and this is the big one): they block the route back to your safehouse, endangering your workers from ever getting back into your possession.

That last one is a doozie and is what forms the crux of Maquis’ puzzle. Unlike most worker placement games, solo or otherwise, Maquis doesn’t allow you to immediately take the action or resource from a spot till the end of the round. The only way that occurs is if you’re able to find a route back to the safehouse from where your worker currently is. If all possible routes back home are blocked by enemy patrols, that worker doesn’t make it back and is removed from the game. To add insult to capture, many of the spots on the board don’t allow you to take its associated action/resource if this happens. While frustrating to deal with, this makes thematic sense. How could that gun make it back to the safehouse if the worker is captured?

(Unless, maybe, they launched it into the air towards the safehouse like a Doug Flutie Hail Mary, which certainly gives me ideas for the expansion.)

This important rule not only adds heaps of tension but also a spicy pinch of route building and push your luck to Maquis’ otherwise standard worker placement recipe. The first game of Maquis I ever played, I was treating it like any other run of the mill worker placement game. I put my workers on spots that had the resources I needed, assuming I’d be safe in getting them back to the safehouse. It’s only World War II, it can’t be THAT hard, right?

I lost by round 3.

All of my workers were arrested and I quickly realized that I was going to have reprogram some of my old habits with worker placement games. Dotting your workers across the board like you’re sprinkling sugar on a Christmas cookie leaves them vulnerable. What Maquis trains you to do is to create chains of workers, like a line of ants snaking towards a picnic blanket. This makes it MUCH more likely that your workers will have a safe route home, safeguarding the resources you hope to acquire.

Maquis board — Nothing says “Vive la France!” like a conga line.

The problem, of course, is that linking your workers together is not always efficient. There are a couple of spots that don’t offer any action or maybe give a resource you have no need for. Placing workers there for the sake of building your chain can often seem like a waste, even if it is for the greater good. Time is short in Maquis, though, and there will be points where you must break a worker off on their own to get something you desperately need. Deciding when to take that calculated risk is when Maquis is at its most intense.

And intense is the word I’d choose to describe Maquis. From round 1 you can feel the threats of capture and running out of time breathing down your neck. I saw someone on Twitter mention that when they play Maquis, they find themselves flipping the cards faster, as if doing so buys their Resistance members more time to escape safely. I wholeheartedly agree with this and I have noticed myself doing the same thing.

This intensity is a double-edged sword, however, and one of the big reasons why Maquis ended up just missing out on a spot in my forthcoming top 10 solo games list. As I’ve played more and more solo games, I’ve realized that I gravitate towards games that are a little more relaxing and offer a difficulty that challenges me but is winnable more than half the time. I think it’s because if I’m solo gaming, I’m using it as a chance to settle down and relieve stress. Maquis does quite the opposite. A game of Maquis is 20 minutes of fist clenching, teeth gnashing intensity and it’s something I have to be in the mood for.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that and it’s purely a personal preference. And honestly, it’s good that this game is so tough and harrowing. If a game about trying to overthrow Nazis with nothing but grit and determination was easy and laid-back, that would be a huge thematic disconnect. This SHOULD be tough and it SHOULD tie my stomach into a Gordian Knot. It kind of reminds me of what I said in my last blog post when I briefly discussed the game Freedom: The Underground Railroad. That is also a game that handles a sensitive theme with grace and respect and involves a brutal difficulty that makes you appreciate just how difficult it was for good to eventually triumph over evil.

In the end, even if Maquis it is a little more nerve-wracking than my usual solo fare, I really do love this game. Its unique take on worker placement, by adding elements of route building and push your luck to the genre, combined with its cool theme and art, results in a game than any solo gamer should have in their collection.

Rising 5: Runes of Asteros Review

The two games I credit with getting me into the hobby are Forbidden Island and Pandemic. Both are largely considered gateway games in the hobby and they certainly were for me. Forbidden Island kindly showed me to the gateway, gesturing to the land of board games beyond, but it was Pandemic that brought me back to the gateway a few months later, carrying dozens of pounds of semtex to blow it wide open. It then cackled wildly, throwing me through the smoking, ragged threshold and I haven’t been seen by my family since.

The biggest similarity between these two games, besides the fact that they’re designed by the same guy and that they share some basic mechanics, is that they are both cooperative games. Because it was two cooperative games that brought me into the hobby, I have a certain fondness for them. Plus, the idea of working with your friends rather than viciously being at each others throats is also appealing to me (surprising, considering that I’m a socially anxious grump that likes alone time). As such, when a new cooperative game takes the hobby by storm, I tend to pay attention to it, aiming to try it as soon as possible.

Rising 5: Runes of Asteros (which I will simply call Rising 5 for the rest of the review, for the sake of my fingers and your eyes) is such a cooperative game. While ‘taking the hobby by storm’ is probably too strong a statement, this is certainly a game that has gotten a good deal of attention over the past year, thanks in large part to its app integration and unique concept of cooperative deduction. Is it worth the buzz? For the most part, yes, though Rising 5 is far from a perfect game (gasp!).

First, let’s hear what this game is about. The planet of Asteros is in peril, with some sort of eclipse that’s about to occur that will open a gate, thus allowing an apocalyptic wave of monsters to burst forth. The solar system calls upon a team dubbed Rising 5 to go to Asteros and figure out a way to seal the gate for good, saving Asteros from certain destruction. Believe it or not, this was the least nerdy way to summarize the game’s premise. The introduction in the rule book laying out the game’s lore reads like it was written by someone playing some sort of sci fi Mad Libs. Despite this, I enjoy when a game attempts world building (one of the many reasons why Scythe is, at the moment, my favorite board game) so I’ll stop making fun of it. In fact, the game actually does a great job of imbuing a sense of atmosphere and a tangible sense that Asteros is a real place. This is mostly because of the phenomenal art of Vincent Dutrait.

Over the past few months, Vincent Dutrait has gone from a board game artist who I thought was perfectly fine, to one of my favorites in the business and Rising 5 is a HUGE reason why. This game easily has some of the best art I’ve seen in a board game. The characters, whose portraits adorn the bottom of the board, ooze personality and the different regions of the planet are all distinct yet cohesive. The enemies that come out to attack your heroes are masterfully painted, causing a burst of revulsion in my gut every time I flip them over and see their strikingly detailed and ugly mugs. There is a picture on the back of the rule book that I purposefully left face up on the table as we played so that I could glance over at it and admire its beauty, like it was a shiny new car I bought and left out on the front lawn for the neighborhood to see and get annoyed with. I really can’t say enough good things about the art in this game, so I’ll stop with a simple bravo, Mr. Dutrait, bravo.

rising 5 rulebook — I will admit, though, my gaming group got kind of weirded out when I took this into the bathroom and didn’t come out for ten minutes.

Enough about the art. Your mother always told you to never judge a book by its cover, so we shouldn’t judge Rising 5 by its salivation inducing look and presentation. Granted, my mom also told me that gum would take like twenty years to digest in my stomach if I swallowed it, so maybe we shouldn’t listen to everything they say, but let’s humor them just this once. How does the game play?

Rising 5‘s elevator pitch is that it’s basically cooperative Mastermind. Mastermind is an old mass market game where one player set up a combination of colored pegs and the other person had to figure out said combo. They did so by placing different combinations of the pegs and the Mastermind would let them know which colors were correct but in the wrong place, which were correct and in the right place and which were flat out not in the code. It was decent fun, providing a nice logic puzzle for one player to chew on for ten to fifteen minutes, but that was the problem. It was just ONE player playing the game. The Mastermind/game master had one job at the beginning that took fifteen seconds, and then the rest of the game they were a glorified exam proctor. Rising 5 fixes this by making it cooperative, completely doing away with the game master. Instead of that annoying neighbor kid (you know, the one that invited you over to play Sega Genesis, said ‘Here let me try’ during the first level and then proceeded to beat the whole game), the game master is an app you can download for free on your phone.

You see, a major part of the game is taking the titular runes, represented by hexagonal tokens, and placing them in a specific order on the board. With the app, you are able to take pictures of these runes throughout the game and it spits back images correlating to mysterious astrological signs. Those astrological signs are secretly tied to one of the colored runes and it reveals similar information as in Mastermind: the rune is either 100% correct, correct but not placed correctly or not in the code at all. Not only do you and your team need to figure out which runes go with which signs, but also where the damn runes need to go. It’s a puzzling conundrum which requires deduction, logic and teeny bit of luck. It’s incredibly satisfying to crunch the combinations together as a group, trying to work out what runes need to stay and where they need to go. When you activate the app one last time and see that you indeed cracked the code, winning the game, it’s a triumphant moment of victory (at least until the app hilariously and abruptly cuts to a black screen, asking you to input some information so it can give you a grade for your performance).

Luckily, this logic puzzle is not the only thing that Rising 5 has to offer. There is an actual game built around the puzzle as well, involving some hand management and an action point system that you come to expect from a cooperative game.

This aspect of Rising 5‘s gameplay is very simple. Everyone has a hand of cards, with the cards representing one of the five main characters in the game. On your turn, you play a card/multiple cards of one character, taking as many actions with that character as cards played. So if you play two cards with the wizened sage Orakl, you get two basic actions with him. Those actions are equally as simple: you can move to a location, interact with a card at a location or attempt to solve the puzzle. Interacting with cards gives you free goodies or allows you to enter combat with a beastie, which is resolved by rolling a die and occasionally adding some buffs. Figuring out the most efficient way to use your cards is a fun dilemma, adding just enough meat to the bones of Rising 5‘s logic puzzle.

In addition, each character you use also has a special ability which you can trigger at the beginning of the turn. These abilities do even more to create a sense of personality for these characters. The aforementioned Orakl is the only character who can actually swap the runes and change their positions, making him a mysterious and mystical force that perfectly fits his character’s wrinkled, world weary look. If there was ever a Rising 5 movie (please don’t Hollywood execs reading this, it’s just a hypothetical), Orakl definitely looks and feels like the character whose death would definitely end the second act. There’s also the fierce Nova, whose ability to get a free combat perfectly captures her fighting spirit; the hulking robot HAL who can copy the ability of anyone at his location, thematically presenting him as a calculating machine programmed to learn and assimilate; Eli, whose magical ability to postpone Judgment Day by pushing back the tracker that triggers the game’s loss state hints at something deeper beneath her somewhat unassuming look; and finally Ekho, whose cocky yet charismatic expression perfectly matches his ability to lead the team and boss them around by sending them to different locations outside of their turn.

ekho — He definitely mansplained at least a couple things on the long flight to Asteros.

These thematic powers combined with the, again, stupendous art from Vincent Dutrait makes this team feel like an actual rag tag band of characters who truly need to work together to prevent a cataclysm from occurring. I couldn’t believe how attached I felt to them, considering the fact the game only runs around 30 minutes long and there’s not even any flavor text or anything on the cards. It’s maybe the most surprising thing about this game and something I definitely felt the need to mention.

Okay, so the art is good enough to be in a museum, the game’s central puzzle is rewarding to deduce, and the hand management is simple but fun. What do I NOT like about Rising 5? Well nothing is perfect (except Breaking Bad and pizza), and there are two big flaws with this game that prevent this game from being considered among the greats of the genre, like Pandemic or Ghost Stories. The first is the difficulty of the game, or lack thereof. This game is quite easy and that’s usually not a great thing for a co-op game. While I am not a cooperative game sadist, wanting every co-op game to kick my ass and make me call it mommy (did I just make this weird? I just made it weird, didn’t I), I do prefer my co-ops to be on the tougher side. That creates a sense of constant tension and, more importantly, hooks you back into trying it again so that you can finally beat it. That probably isn’t going to happen with Rising 5. You’ll likely beat it on your first or second try and there is rarely a feeling of having your back against the wall like other great co-op games produce. Again, this isn’t a huge deal breaker for me, but I know that it definitely is for a couple of my gaming friends. It is a little disappointing though, so keep it in mind.

The game’s second flaw is a bit more damaging for me, and that’s that the game feels quite same-y. Distilling the game into just three actions is great for introducing people and teaching it, but as you play the game it becomes quite clear that the mileage for those three actions is limited. Most of your turns devolve into either ‘move’ or ‘move and roll a die, hoping for good things’. It feels like if this game offered just one more plate to spin, maybe another sub objective for your team to contend with, it would not only have helped prevent some of this mundane repetition but also perhaps solve the difficulty problem too. If any game deserves and needs an expansion, it’s Rising 5.

With all that said, if you aren’t bothered by a somewhat easy experience that can feel a tad repetitive, you can do a whole lot worse than Rising 5. It’s a cool co-op experience that manages to feel different and unique from so many of the Pandemic clones that have flooded the market which, not to anger the cooperative God of Matt Leacock, is a good thing. If that sounds interesting to you, check Rising 5 out.

Biblios Review

Board games, like any great medium, provide a form of escapism. The best board games can create an immersive experience on par with a great book or movie. Take for example, a game such as Captain Sonar, which casts you and up to seven friends as crew members on competing submarines. It’s 45 minutes of heart pounding excitement as you and the rival team fire torpedoes, lay mines and do lots and lots of shouting.

Or how about The Resistance, the ostensible grandfather of social deduction. You and your friends find yourself in the shoes of a resistance group in a dystopian future. BUT there are spies among your ranks, trying to undercut you at every corner, and you need to weed them out. The good guys need to complete a certain amount of missions while the spies want to make sure most of those missions fail. It creates agonizingly suspenseful moments as your friends ruthlessly accuse one another, desperately try to exonerate themselves, and do lots and lots of shouting.

Or how about Biblios, the featured game of this review where you and up to three players are rival monks, trying to complete…the best library? Like, just a library? With just scrolls and those big books that you see in movies where the main character slams them on a table and a bunch of dust flies up in the air? I mean, they’re monks, so surely the libraries have booze, right?

(checks the rules, components and double checks with the designer)

No? Huh.

Okay, maybe all board games aren’t exactly prime examples of escapism and palpable themes that create cinematic moments with your friends that you’ll never forget. I mean, this is a hobby where a quarter of the games are about buying stocks in trains and another quarter of the games are about farming. When Uwe Rosenberg comes out with a new game, it’s rarely a question of whether it will be about farming, but about what type of farming it will be (“Hey, did you hear about Uwe Rosenberg’s new game? It’s about pumpkin farming in Minnesota! Instant buy for me.”)

But you know what? That’s okay. Games don’t need themes that can also double as a Wikipedia synopsis for a Steven Segal movie. And Biblios is the poster child for this. Because even though its theme is as dry as the century old scrolls the game shows in its artwork, Biblios manages to be one of the most ass clenchingly tense twenty minutes you can find in the hobby. And I am aware clenchingly is not a word, but that’s how good Biblios is. It demands new words to describe it.

Designed by Steven Finn, who has a reputation for making great filler games, and published by Iello, Biblios is a card game that, as mentioned, has you taking the role of a Middle Ages monk trying to make their monastery’s library the talk of the town. During a time period when the most fun activities were ‘don’t die of the plague’ and ‘don’t die, kind of in general’, you can argue that Biblios is actually trying to capture the more lighthearted aspects of its source material.

The deck of cards that comprises Biblios has different types of scrolls and books, all of which are associated with a color. These essentially make up the five ‘suits’ in the game. In addition to these cards are five colored dice, one for each of those suits. These dice control the points awarded at the end of the game. At game’s end, however many pips are on the die are the amount of points given to the person who holds the majority in that die’s color. So if the blue die is showing four, whoever holds the highest combined value in blue cards gets four points.

So at its core, Biblios is basically just a set collection game. Try to get the most cards in the sets worth the most, right? This game’s easy.

Weeellllll, it’s actually not quite as simple as that.

What separates Biblios from your normal run of the mill set collection game is its two round structure. The first round is called the gifting round, where players take cards from the deck and evenly distribute them between themselves, their opponent(s) and a new deck called the auction deck. Which leads me to the next round, the auction round. In this round, players, unsurprisingly, arm wrestle to gain control of new cards as they’re revealed.

Just kidding, it’s an auction, duh. Though never rule out arm wrestling for an expansion, Dr. Steve Finn, if you’re reading this.

First, let’s begin with the gifting round. Thematically speaking, people from town are coming to your monastery to bestow you with gifts. Mechanically speaking, you’re basically drafting cards from the deck. On your turn, you draw a number of cards equal to the number of players plus one. So in a two player game, you draw three cards from the deck and you must do these three things: give one to yourself, give one to your opponent and put one face down in the auction pile to be auctioned (or arm wrestled, with the inevitable expansion variant) off in the next round. These cards include the aforementioned different suits/colors, but there are also cards with gold (which give you buying power in the auction round) and church cards, where (thematically) you get to gain favor of the head priest allowing you to manipulate the pips on the dice. Which the inclusion of this during this round makes me chuckle, as if the townsfolk are coming to your monastery and just dropping off priests, like they’re parents dropping off their kids at daycare.

“Hi, this is Timmy, he has a peanut allergy and don’t let him have more than three hours of screen time, okay, I’ll be back at four.”

But here’s the catch. Those cards are being drawn one at a time, and you must decide at that instant what to do with it. If it’s a good card, do you keep it for yourself and hope nothing better comes along? Or do you give it to the auction and gamble that you’ll draw something better? And then there is the eternally annoying fact that you have to give something to your opponent. This usually means that the moment you get a low valued card in an any suit, you immediately hand it over to them, making it seem like you are the world’s most passive aggressive monk, giving things because you’re expected to not because you want to. You’re the Middle Ages equivalent of that uncle on Christmas who gives you scratch off lottery tickets as a gift and snidely tells you to not ‘spend it all in one place’.

This drip feed card draft is one of my favorite things about Biblios. It takes the idea of card drafting and turns it into a harrowing game of press your luck. Press your luck is maybe my favorite mechanism in games, so any game that incorporates it is instantly elevated in my eyes. And here, the press your luck is exquisite, a game of chicken where your opponent stares across from you with an expectant grin, just waiting for you to mess up, leaving you no choice but to hand over a high value card into their hand. It creates huge moments of tension, akin to other card game classics such as Lost Cities and Schotten Totten. And after that first ten minutes, you wipe the sweat off your brow, and breathe a sigh of relief as you unclench your buttocks. Then a feeling of terror will envelop you as realize that there’s still a second round to play.

And I mean that in the best possible way. Because as scary as that first round is, the second round-the auction round- is perhaps even more horrifying. Your hand is crafted and you have an idea of what colors you should probably look for, but that doesn’t make what is about to happen any easier. In this round, you shuffle the auction deck that you and your opponents had made and then begin flipping them over, auctioning them off one at a time. The auction then proceeds in turn order, with each player either raising the bid or opting out of the auction. To pay for the cards, you’re bidding the gold you squirreled away in the first round. Umm, you did make sure to keep some gold? Right?

biblios gold — Uhh, I sure hope there is a dollar store in this Medieval village.

The auction creeps along and you are constantly over analyzing and regretting every purchase, meaning Biblios may as well have been called “Buyer’s Remorse: The Game”. By the time you buy two or three cards, you realize your gold is almost depleted and you’re wondering how you are going to stretch out what you have for the rest of the auction. Luckily, there are gold cards in the deck (well, providing you and your opponents were prudent enough to put them in there), which are bought by discarding your other cards, in a clever twist. So that means if you’re short on gold and a 3 value gold (the highest value) pops up in the auction, you can trash cards of colors that you’re fairly certain you’re not going to win. But even that is a risk, because you’re making assumptions on the sets your opponents have built. Educated assumptions, yes, but not perfect. There have been a few games where I trashed cards of a certain color, only to discover I would have won that color if I kept them.

While the gifting round is a white knuckle push your luck drafting system, the auction round is an impossibly tight game of money management. Pay too much for a card, and you lose all leverage for the rest of the round, allowing your opponents to get things for cheap. Don’t be aggressive, though, and you may find yourself waiting for the perfect price for a card that just won’t ever come, especially if you’re playing against savvy bidders that prey on your Scrooge-like skinflint tendencies. I have lost games falling into both traps, and I’ve won games against opponents who have done the same. It’s all about balancing your gold supply with getting the cards you really need. And don’t get me started on the church cards during this round. Those things become so valuable at this stage of the game you and your friends will be clawing each other apart for them like they’re the last Furby on the Toys ‘R Us shelf and not some old white dude in a funny hat.

Furby is still a thing, right? I dunno what Toys ‘R Us sells these days, I haven’t been outside in a while.

By game’s end, after the bidding bloodbath subsides and the dust clears over everyone’s monasteries, you reveal your hands and show who truly has the most of what color. Naturally, this creates lots of groans and cheers, as you see that your opponent managed to get just one more blue than you did even though you wasted all that gold on blue and oh look blue is worth six points and oh hey, they also managed to win red with a measly two cards which I would have beat if I hadn’t discarded them to grab that one gold that I didn’t even spend and ahhhh

Of course, there’s plenty of times where you’ll be the one wearing a smug grin as your opponents regret every decision they’ve ever made in their lives and it’s times like this that reveal just what a devilishly brilliant game Biblios is. Using two very distinct rounds and threading them together in a cohesive and nerve-wracking package, Biblios manages to pack more thoughtful decisions in its lean twenty minute length than some hour long games I’ve played. The fact that it’s done with just a deck of cards and colored dice makes it all the more impressive. Since I’ve entered the hobby a couple years ago, Biblios remains one of my all time favorite card games and almost definitely my favorite set collection game. If you’re looking for a filler with a pair of monk shaped fangs, Biblios is just the game for you.

(Also, I know I’ve been taking the piss (I’m not British, but I love that term, I’m sorry) out of the theme, but I actually like it a lot. For whatever reason, I’ve always liked the imagery of monks in monasteries and the atmosphere that evokes. Combine that with listening to Gregorian chant (yes, really) while my friends and I play this and it really is a theme that I love engrossing myself in).