| Title | If you stare into the Andean Abyss |
| Author | Bruce Geryk |
| Posted in | Games |
| When | October 4, 2012 |
The argument about whether or not games are art is often just a plea for games not to be ridiculed, and instead to be treated as serious endeavors..
Read the full articleBravo. A simple, sincere whispered. "Bravo" in the auditorium in the heartbeat before the crash of applause.
Nice article, I obtained an interesting response from a reviewer on BGG ("Hello Gregor"), he contrasted Volko's latests games:
"Most, if not all of the events, can be interpreted at least two ways, either by offering two options or by having an option be interpretable. This works better, in my view, than say, Volko Ruhnke's last game Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-? to capture the specifics of the subject. Both games cover recent subjects which means both there are strong opinions on them and that those opinions greatly influence the "facts".
Ruhnke, in both games, attempts to give all interpretations their due. Labyrinth was handled more as a myth, it incorporated many of the beliefs about the war on terror and made them reality in terms of the game. Which is actually a brilliant way to cover a conflict that is so perception based and muddied with so much propaganda and emotion, still. Andean Abyss allows you to take each element of the conflict and interpret it in different ways in the reality of the game based on which faction's playing it, thus allowing you to explore alternate histories (if somewhat abstractly) rather than a conglomeration of opinions as a whole".
Another great article from Bruce. This was as always a good read and broadening my horizons as well.
Thanks all. Raul, that's a great description of the difference in treatment of events between Labyrinth and Andean Abyss. I am very curious as to how this will play out in his next game, which is about Cuba.
The glossy cardboard that boardgames are made of is *excellent* for chopping lines of coke, too!
I heard. Somewhere. From an anonymous source.
Thank you Bruce for your excellent article on our new game "Andean Abyss".
I have shared your comments with our fans on my C3i Magazine website – www.c3iopscenter.com/
Rodger
So you're saying Andean Abyss is the Citizen Kane of board games... Gotcha.
Corrections:
"Partly this is the fault [of] non-gamers..."
"That may sound like simply taking not taking [sic] a position on history."
Leave it to Bruce to bring out a luminary of the hobby. Nice website Rodger, especially love the shirt with what looks like the old PanzerBlitz box cover artwork.
Andean Abyss was recently implemented on rally-the-troops.com. This has had the effect of letting me play more games of Andean Abyss in the last couple months than in all the previous years combined. I also had the chance to experiment with a two player game. I was the FARC+Cartel player and found the game to work really well in that format. It was a closely contested game and balancing the victory conditions of both factions was taxing, but in the right way. Face to face I never played a COIN game with less than the full count of players, so I don’t know how the others in the series stack up but based on this great experience I can wholeheartedly recommend Andean Abyss as a two player game.