- Tabletop
Earlier this year I fell in love with an unassuming little solo board game called Black Sonata. You can read all about it right over here. Just a spectacular solo game that combines tight decision-making with mechanisms that obfuscate the underlying math, ensuring you never feel like you’re simply solving a puzzle.
Yesterday, publisher Side Room Games decided to go at it again. Leaving the Elizabethan era behind, their latest focuses on World War II espionage in a little title called Maquis.
If you’re scratching your head thinking you may have heard of Maquis before, you’re right. First of all, it’s an award winning print-and-play that’s been around since 2013. Secondly, there’s an app for the game that’s been around since 2016 and is still available for iOS Universal and Android. So, you may have already played Maquis. If so, you know it’s a great game.
This Kickstarter will do to Maquis what the Kickstarter for Black Sonata did for that game: take a print-and-play classic and give it some published game polish. The components for Sonata were fantastic, so I expect nothing less for the upcoming Maquis.
What’s it all about? Blurb:
Maquis is a solitaire worker-placement game with variable goals and a play time of approximately twenty minutes. The player places his resistance agents on spaces around town to achieve his goals – blowing up trains, publishing underground newspapers – but at the same time Milice collaborators and Wehrmacht soldiers patrol the area. Agents who can’t make it back to the safe house at the end of the day are arrested, and never seen again.
If you’re into solo gaming at all, this is a no-brainer. You can get the game and all stretch goals for $24 in the US. The game is already killing its funding and Side Room did a great job fulfilling their last KS, so there’s really no risk here. Head on over to the Kickstarter and pledge for your next solo game addiction.
Good Lord this would make for an excellent semi-co-op board game. The Resistance did plenty of infighting and were of several political groupings. The scope for ambushes and betrayals amidst fighting the Germans is enormous.
Very much dig Maquis on Android.