Black Angel reminds me of a pocket watch I once had. (This isn’t the setup to a bad joke.) You see, the watch was broken. A memento from my time in Germany, the watch broke during shipping and never kept good time, made a weird grinding noise when I wound it, and had an unsightly crack across its face. I still keep it around, though. With its open face and back, you can see the inner workings—gears, flywheels, jeweled pivots. The craftsmanship is breathtaking, even if it loses a minute every half hour.
Let’s back up. The board game Black Angel, designed by Sébastien Dujardin, Xavier Georges, and Alain Orban, is something of a spiritual successor to their previous collaboration, a well-known game by the name of Troyes. Like Troyes, Black Angel is a dice game in the loosest sense, tasking players with utilizing pools of dice in ways that are almost entirely novel. It also resembles a busted clockwork—lots of ideas working in sync—just not quite in sync enough to keep regular time.
Its first hurdle is the setting. Where Troyes was set in its namesake city and saw you overseeing the tried and tested (if overdone) theme of medieval tradespeople doing medieval things, Black Angel sets its sights somewhat higher. Literally. You’re located aboard a generation ship, see, on a 3,000-year voyage, right, and you’re one of a handful of competing artificial intelligences, OK, trying to be the best steward of the ship so you can become the only AI of the colony mankind will eventually settle, got it?
Huh. Cool, but huh.
Before you think that overseeing a generation ship for three millennia sounds tedious—all hydroponics metering and nitrogen adjustments—it turns out that space is crammed full of aliens who can relieve the tedium. Some of them want to trade with you. The ones that look like evil bugs want to attack you. And everyone has something you can use to secure the success of your mission.
