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I submit Cathedral. Cathedral is a puzzle game for two players, who take turns placing their pieces representing buildings onto a gridded board within a city wall. The first player places the neutral eponymous cathedral piece, which is also the largest. Players capture territory by walling off part of the city with a contiguous wall, which can be (almost always is) extended off of the external walls of the city; if a single enemy or the neutral cathedral piece is trapped within a captured territory, it is removed and returned to the player that owns it. In this way players attempt to get as many of their pieces as they can fit onto the board. The match ends when neither player can place any more pieces, and the winner is the player with the fewest total "squares" worth of pieces left in their supply. Like chess, who plays first matters, but a match between experienced players can be played out in ten or fifteen minutes. A common way to play is to play many matches; you can keep an accumulating score across multiple matches and end when one player exceeds some pre-decided total, or you can score by matches, playing until one player has won a predetermined number of matches. Play is simple enough that children can learn and play; there is a surprising depth to play, so that two experienced players will still find significant challenge, as players learn to prioritize certain pieces, bluff, use cathedral placement to create a more open or more closed game, and even intentionally sacrifice a small piece in order to sneakily capture a larger territory as the opponent takes the bait. My copy is a Mattel version from 1986 with detailed plastic pieces. A criterion collection entry might be one of the several editions that had wooden pieces: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/7/cathedral/versions Although some of these have a disadvantage of the pieces looking very "samey" from above, which can make the board blend together visually. The Monumental Moves version might be the criterion collection version to own, since it comes with beautiful pieces depicting monuments from all over the world, but I have never seen it in person and I'm not certain if it has identical piece shapes and rules. There are also magnetized travel editions, and due to size and speed of play this is an excellent travel game. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 20:36
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 01:30 |
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I think being a game (or a film) that defined a genre, in its time, is a quality in and of itself. Some works are important enough to be emulated, and ultimately improved-on, but the existence of the more recent improved works doesn't erase the value of the original. I bet a lot of the designers of modern dungeon crawl games played Talisman when they were teenagers.
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Mar 29, 2023 04:54
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