The Cardboard Republic has rolled out the annual Laurels of the Republic awards, celebrating the best new games released in 2021 for each of the gamer archetypes. What follows are the finalists for one of those groups.
Always the consummate gamblers, Daredevils like living on the edge. This group adheres to the idea of high risk and high reward, never letting a silly thing like failure get in their way of possible victory – or a good time. That said, this group doesn’t avoid or dislike strategy either. Rather, they’re just far more willing to take chances for a better payoff, be it on the battlefield or in the board room. Essentially, Daredevils like to win, but they want to do it on their terms. They adore games giving them a wide variety of options to cross the finish line, and if they have to embrace a bit of luck to accomplish that, then so be it!
And with that, here are The 2021 Laurel Finalists for Daredevils:
Honorable Mention: Super-Skill Pinball: Ramp it Up!
Publisher: WizKids | Players: 1-4 | Play Time: 20 Minutes
Last year we remarked just how difficult it was for this particular archetype in 2020. Daredevils, by nature, are those who run towards unpredictability and the unknown, preferring to take chances for the prospect of a greater reward. By and large the mood in 2020 wasn’t super conducive to that sort of environment, even in the gaming world. The hobby still released a fair share of Daredevil-friendly games, but the percentage of those specifically aimed at this group was unquestionably down as publishers faced delays or opted to push them to 2021.
One 2020 title that did come out but just missed mention here was Super-Skill Pinball: 4-Cade, a fast-paced pinball themed roll-and-write solo game and brainchild of the veritable Geoff Engelstein. It caught the attention and adulation of many not just because it was a spirited solo game at a time when such things were quite useful but also because of how much the game encapsulated the feel of classic pinball – without the frenetic button mashing anyway. It’s the pen-and-paper equivalent of dropping the quarter in the slot and seeing how far your efforts would go.
Well, the pinball wizard was back again with the standspansion Ramp it Up!, further pushing the boundaries of what this 2D escapade is capable of offering. And this time it’s getting its due recognition.
Like its predecessor, technically Super-Skill Pinball isn’t a single game as it is a quartet of possible pinball tables. Each lively setting brings with it its own flavor, scoring opportunities, and hardships. As a baseline, every challenge works the same way: rolling a pair of dice, selecting the result you prefer, and then watching it bounce, tumble, cascade, and drop from one section to the next based on a series of successive moment-by-moment choices. Whether panning for gold or performing a crime caper, every table is chock full of potential scoring bonuses, multipliers, and more as you speedily work towards the goal of an ever-higher score. One map even includes a speed component, bringing this analog implementation that much closer to the wonderfully frenzied antics of a real world machine at a fraction of the required living space.
While it can be played in groups, this game is primarily a solo challenge of you wrestling with the capricious whims of the dice. This lightweight and approachable exercise offers a charming (and surprisingly) thematic roll-and-write romp with unpredictable outcomes, fast playthroughs, and rapid-fire decisions that directly impact your next move. For Daredevils, who take as much interest in victory as the path taken to get there, Super-Skill Pinball is one setting this group is more than willing to go full tilt on.
The Nominees
Number Five: Sheepy Time
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group | Players: 1-4 | Play Time: 30-45 Minutes
It seems like a tale as old as time: if you find yourself laying awake and unable to sleep, simply imagine yourself counting sheep jumping over a fence, one after another, until the monotony of the process lulls you into much desired slumber. “Counting sheep” has been propagated so much through perpetual repetition and depictions as to become a deeply engrained, if harmless, pop culture idiom about trying to get to sleep. The great irony being that, as an exercise, it rarely works.
Sheepy Time is the pleasant exception to that statement.
Step through the waking world into the realm of Sheepy Time, home of the very flock of sheep you’re counting when attempting to nod off. Your singular mission as the fluffy slumber brigade is to jump over that empyreal fencepost as often as you can. However, your benevolent activities are not without risk. For it has its own force in opposition: the Nightmare, whose only desire to scare people awake and undo all of your work.
Which would be baa-d.
Its appreciably esoteric theme aside, Sheepy Time is a soundly lightweight and straightforward push-your-luck game. Through a variable handful of rounds, Sheepy Time’s simplicity belies an engaging and entertaining but low-stakes game of taking chances – and being rewarded for doing so.
In it, players take turns playing cards from their hands, moving around the game’s circular floating cloud. Each time you complete a cycle, literally leaping over a white fence, you accumulate points for the round. You’re also then presented with a choice: stop there and cash out or keep going. The first sheep to bank enough points over several rounds proves they are the dreamiest.
However, over time two elements complicate your calculus. On the one hand, as the game progresses, locations gain abilities where you can activate them to alter movement, gain points, and more.
On the other hand, there exists the Nightmare, a creature haunting the board and working against all dream-sheep. Whenever a Nightmare card is revealed, it moves – possibly onto spaces to scare sheepies. If you’re scared twice, you bust. If it leaps the fence, everyone remaining busts.
While its gameplay is concise, brisk, and inviting, where this imaginative game works best, especially with Daredevils, is paradoxically how animated its simple decisions can be. There’s a commendable quality to an engaging game with just a handful of choices, but to this group Sheepy Time is particularly appealing because it doesn’t just let you push yourself as close to the limit in outlasting the competition – it encourages it.
And the thrill when that pays off is downright dreamy.
Number Four: Cubitos
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group | Players: 2-4 | Play Time: 30-60 Minutes
There are hundreds upon hundreds of games released every year coming from publishers far and wide and catering to the entire spectrum of gamer preferences. To narrow so many meritorious games down to a few dozen is a long and arduous process full of tough calls, close votes, and painful cuts. Celebrating any finalist is therefore a commendable testament to all the work that went into making it, from designers and developers to artists and publishers. Yet while some publishers do end up with multiple nominees, rarer still is a publisher winding up with multiple titles in the same category.
But it’s happened before, and now with AEG, it’s happened again. Given this particular roster, one could say AEG was on a roll last year.
Cubitos drops players into an annual racing game set in a world where its contestants are cube people, a sort of cross between Minecraft’s Steve and anthropomorphic dice. Here, you square off against other players for the title. Your goal is simple: move around the racetrack and be the first to cross the finish line. To do this you are aided by a team of supporters each round, represented by the dice you roll.
Broken into two basic phases, each of which can be played simultaneously, players first roll a variable number of dice in classic push-your-luck fashion to collect as many face-up symbols as possible. Re-rolling blanks offers the temptation for more results and more explosive turns but, naturally, brings with it the risk of busting. Then those results are resolved, with the primary effects being to either move your runner or purchasing new dice from an octet of colorful, specialized supporter dice. These supporters bring with them their own effects and benefits, as defined by a slate of modularly selected cards each game.
As a result, between these cards and four different racetracks, Cubitos effortlessly packs a dizzying degree of gameplay variety into such a light affair. With all of its setup and in-game variability, Cubitos guarantees it won’t ever box you in with the same predictable outcome over and over.
Cubitos raced its way onto the scene in early 2021 and quickly became one of the more talked about casual titles from the first half of the year. Thanks to a combination of interactive gameplay, unpredictable outcomes, and a congenial ambiance of lightweight competition, it endeared itself to many (and rightfully so) as one of the more exemplary family-style games of 2021. It also quickly gained the attention of Daredevils, mostly because the lure of a dice-driven racing game that rewards both strategic planning and embracement of luck – rather than solely one or the other – is kind of their perfect mousetrap.
Number Three: SHASN
Publisher: Memesys Culture Lab | Players: 3-5 | Play Time: 90-120 Minutes
To many, a game’s theme is the first thing they notice and one of the last things they remember. Theme provides a layer of purpose to the mechanical system you’re using, and with the litany of games out there these days, it can be a major determinative factor not only with which game you play but whether it appeals at all. Game themes are myriad, from flying ships in outer space, to running museums, to reenacting historical battles both famous and forgotten. Every game theme has its fans and detractors.
Yet few in the hobby get passed over faster than mere utterance of a single word: politics.
Games about administration of an organized institution are not what people have an aversion to. Those are part and parcel. Rather, it’s the intrigue and strategy around having to obtain, exercise, or retain the power that comes with governance. Politics takes many forms based on the country, society, and time period in which it’s occurring, be it Machiavellian power struggles in medieval courts or the sometimes brilliant, sometimes inept partisan wrangling of the modern day nation-state. Many view politics as a dirty word writ large these days (and you would not be entirely wrong), but one thing it isn’t is boring.
SHASN challenges this assumption that games of simulated political elections are only appealing to the most niche of niche audiences, offering up a dynamic, engaging, and even thought-provoking modular campaign simulator. In it, each player is a politician attempting to amass the most support among the voters of various zones and use their backing to secure an election.
Throughout the game Candidate You is routinely presented with a political issue card and must make a choice. Your policy decisions garner resources that help build trust among supporters, raise funds, and gather political clout – all to keep your voters happy.
SHASN’s extensive replay ticket is punched in part to its fluctuating board state and in part to the fact that you can choose different campaign backdrops, such as Brexit, the rise of Caesar, and yes, the Indian or American 2020 elections. Each setting brings its own flavor, rules, and criteria for what success even means. Effectively navigating its mercurial democratic landscapes rely on the right blend of short-term opportunism, long-term ambitions, and the temperament to adapt to an ever-shifting environment – sometimes by your own hand. It’s a position tailor-made for Daredevils.
Using a mix of area control, coercive negotiation, and strategic maneuvering, SHASN distills the elements of political campaigns down to its basic elements, all while conveying a slightly humorous undercurrent of irreverence about the whole thing.
In other words, SHASN accomplishes something many but few succeed at: making non-satirical politics entertaining.
Number Two: Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile
Publisher: Leder Games | Players: 1-6 | Play Time: 45-150 Minutes
There is an endless push nowadays for games to be jam-packed with more, more, more. Flashy upgrades. Fancy extras. The insatiable cry for All The Things and an extra Thneed to boot. Now in a new edition.
Yet any skilled game designer will emphatically tell you that more doesn’t automatically mean better. Even in the most expansive board games, lobbing in the kitchen sink for the sake of it can undermine its strengths and dilute its purpose. Sandbox games must be particularly mindful because much of their draw is about having a broad slate for players to tinker with. Such titles must carefully provide enough material to incite wanderlust but not so much that it devolves into a listless hodgepodge of disjointed ideas.
Luckily for Oath, and for us in general, threading this sort of needle is something estimable designer Cole Wehrle is keenly adept at. Here, Cole masterfully puts forth an abject lesson in the intoxicating but transitory nature of being a ruler within a visually stimulating game of deceptively typical objective-driven opportunism. Yet it’s a sandbox where the dunes continuously shift beneath your feet, where stability is not an option, and victory relies in equal parts on using timing, guile, and luck to your advantage not just across a single game but an entire quasi-legacy campaign.
Or in other words, the perfect destination for Daredevils with royal aspirations.
In this ancient realm, one player rules the land as Chancellor. Your goal is to maintain being the ruler by game’s end based on adherence to your established goal and disrupting your opponents via both carrot and stick.
The remaining players are individual factions out to ensure ascension for themselves. Doing so takes several forms, and much of the game’s adroit gameplay centers around finding and then achieving said goals. Controlling the landscape involves extensively moving about the board over several rounds through a host of interconnected actions. This includes a mix of marshalling troops to attack and hold territory, exploring new locations, recovering lost relics, and recruiting denizens to aid you.
However, a linear game Oath is not. With to multiple paths to victory and a board continually in flux due everyone’s continual machinations, there is no singular strategic guidepost to follow and no “correct” way to win, proffering instead a game with an extensive and brilliantly layered sense of plasticity over how to cross the finish line but few guarantees your knavery will pan out. It’s a land of ample uncertainly and ample reward – if you’re willing to embrace its beautiful melee. All of which, naturally, plays into this group’s most ardent gaming preferences.
So much so that for much of 2021 we theorized Oath may ascend right to the top. And it likely would have, if not for an unexpected broadside…
The Winner
2021 Daredevil Laurel – Shiver Me Timbers
Publisher: Weltflucht Verlag | Players: 2-4 | Play Time: 90-180 Minutes
We’ll be honest that we didn’t fully see this one coming. But surprises are perfectly on brand for this group.
Pirate themed games can run a wide gamut in their approach, ranging from dark and gritty to more chaotic and whimsical. Many fans will gladly accept either style – or both – so long as the game conveys it well. To their adherents, no matter how it’s designed, pirate games ultimately need only one thing: a palpable sense of freedom to achieve your goals. Which is, usually, all about that sweet, sweet treasure.
The name alone reveals that this isn’t going to be a problem with Shiver Me Timbers.
Every facet of Shiver Me Timbers is crafted around a flavorful and engaging adventure on the high seas, and it approaches that task with a fervent zeal at every level. Even more notable is how it does – or in this case doesn’t – mandate how that adventure will unfold. Because here your pirate destiny rests in your own swashbuckling hands.
Setting sail in this extensive sandbox adventure game, players start as pirate captains of modest means and equally modest toyetic ships, each seeking to grow their status and renown. How you achieve that fame is largely determined by several randomized Life Goal achievements, which vary in focus and purpose. Rather than being a simple matter of pirate-based point salad, however, you secretly choose a pair of them to work towards. Having secret objectives keeps your opponents guessing and lessens the chance everyone is working on the same tasks. You may all inhabit the same region, but that doesn’t guarantee you’re after the same ends.
And if you are, well, that’s what cannons are for.
As the game progresses it slowly unfolds into a wide azure tapestry of possibility, where you’re encouraged to lean into taking risks and its narrative is emergent through the actions of its players rather than a storybook. It lets you explore, plunder, and upgrade as you see fit, all shrewdly without drifting into being overwhelming or overwrought. Up for slaying the Kraken, or laying siege to highly defended island fortresses? Hunt for buried treasure? Raid a bevy of merchant ships? All of these are viable and more – regardless of whether they’re towards a larger purpose or simply because you want to.
With extensive player flexibility, copious thematic interactions, and a barrage of variation from one game to the next, Shiver Me Timbers firmly anchors itself alongside many great sandbox titles. To Daredevils particularly, the allure of hoisting the Jolly Roger and seeing where the winds take you calls to their inner buccaneer like a perfectly plotted treasure map.
Thanks to ample latitude over how to navigate your ambitions, the helm is truly yours in this engaging and exciting watery playground. And it can fittingly add to its bounty this group’s Laurel.
Shiver Me Timbers Contest!
We thought about different ways to highlight the how worthwhile the winning title of the Daredevil Laurel is. We wanted to something We wanted to do something bold and unpredictable, as befitting the swashbuckling pirate ethos, but so, so so many of them turned out to be wildly expensive, time prohibitive, or as one state Attorney General put it, ‘a lawsuit bonanza waiting to happen’. (Which, fine. But he hates fun anyway.) We thought we had one solid lead at one point but eventually SeaWorld stopped taking our calls. Alas. Therefore, to avoid doling out too much of our own booty, to avoid accidentally setting off another 40 year treasure hunt à la “The Secret”, and likely to the dismay of Daredevils everywhere, in the end we opted for the most direct approach: providing one lucky winner with the opportunity to enjoy the award-winning game first hand. So let’s get to it!
That’s right! Enter below for your chance at your very own copy of Shiver Me Timbers!
Note: In honor of their award recognition, Weltflucht Verlag has kindly provided a copy of this game for giveaway purposes.
Be sure to check out the 2021 Laurel Award pages for the other archetypes once they go live!
