Tof Eklund's 2021 Games of the Year: Magic, Boyfriend Dungeons, Pretend, and More!
Tof Eklund, Contributing Editor
Game of the year? Gods, I don't know. What is a game? Hell, what is a year? I've spent almost four months in lockdown this year as Auckland broke into the top 10 most locked-down cities. Is Montero a game? How about a coffee I didn't have to make for myself? Hugs are good, maybe hugs are my GotY.
I haven't even gotten around to playing some of the games I'd been most looking forward to, like Christine Love's Get in the Car, Loser! It's honestly been difficult for me to pick up and play anything new. No, that's misleading. It's been easy for me to pick up (buy) new games, especially bundles, but actually opening them and playing them? Much of the time, I just haven't had the focus.
If we're going by hours played, I would be forced to crown Magic: the Gathering: Arena my GotY. I started playing Magic when it was new: my first deck of cards was from the "Beta" edition. No, I don't still have them. I stopped playing Magic in the late 90s, and all-but forgot about it for over twenty years. I was enticed back in by Niko Aris' amazing queercut (Aris is a nonbinary Planeswalker) and the blending of Norse mythology with shape-shifting Changeling creatures. Magic is oatmeal with fresh blueberries and razor blades: blandly comfortable with moments of tart surprise and an absolutely ruthless player base who exploit the swiss cheese of the rules for all it's worth. The best thing about the "Arena" version of the game is naming your decks. Back in the day, I just referred to my decks by their contents: my Camarid deck, my Summon Legend deck, etc. Now my decks include "I Walk the Leyline," "We Have Gingerbread," "Runcible Spoon," "Secret of the Ooze," "Satan's Reindeer," and "Feets too Big."
Kitfox Games' Boyfriend Dungeon and Daniel Mullin Games' Inscryption both deserve slots on my GotY list, but I already said my piece about Boyfriend Dungeon and Patrick did an excellent job of summing up Inscryption, so there's no need for me to dwell on either here, wu wei.
The most fun metagame experience I had in 2021 was playing Square Enix's Actraiser: Renaissance with my 11-year-old and comparing notes. A joint review of the game never materialized (maybe next time), so I'll share the highlights with you now. We both enjoyed this reboot of a 16-bit classic, but the side-scrolling action levels that were the heart of the original game now feel the most dated ("least fun" to my kiddo), whereas the new tower-defense mechanics sit really well with the light city-building/Populous-like game segments. Gaining new divine powers as you develop human cities and renew your cult among them, and getting to use those powers in all three game modes, is "cool." And for a side-scroller / city builder / tower defense game, the story and character development are pretty good: my sprog particularly liked the story of the "not Indiana Jones" character. The surprise release of Actraiser: Renaissance was a spring rain on a dry field (a miracle you can perform, in-game), but neither of us actually finished the game, tarnishing it's credentials as GotY material.
Time to fess up. For me, the real GotY was: playing pretend. I include a handful of live and remote D&D sessions with my kids and their friends, whose madness included a monstrous half-dragon cow, color-coded gnomes trying to complete their tasks as something picks them off one by one, and privileged half-elf hooligans in orcface raiding farms. I also include rules-free pretend play with my 7-year-old, where I have regularly been challenged to add to the history and lore of a world where a dragon hatchling was found by ducks and/or a human, explaining the great duck-dragon war, rolling with it as my little dragon started to breathe out billows of cotton candy, explaining the virtues of modestly magic-enhanced traditional cave homes, finding myself using a magic-eating disease as a metaphor, and taking my dragon to monster school at a time when our local primary school was indefinitely closed. Pretend play was definitely the most difficult and demanding game(s) I played all year, and also the most rewarding.
Honorable mention goes to Keith Burgen Games' Gem Wizards Tactics, which has been out on PC for most of the year, but whose December release on mobile made it an eleventh-hour contender, with it's mobility-focused turn-based strategy and cartoony sense of humor (units include firehose-wielding Potatoes, oil-drilling Business Demons, and a fried-dough-serving food truck). Expect a review of this one.
