I’m addicted to connections—board game design and criticism give me that special hit because games are dialectical. Their form relies on stringing together familiar operations, abstractions, metaphors. It’s why every time you see a game where people are moving little soldiers around a map you assume that some kind of slugfest is taking place.

Games talk about other games through their mechanics, they are connective tissue between people. Good game design is healthy tissue, linking ideas that have potential and might have otherwise been forgotten.

Feya’s Swamp (or if you have the Spanish version like me, El Pantano de Feya) is a fascinating example of old ideas resurfaced, and I sincerely hope that it makes its way to a larger audience.

If you’re a game genealogy nerd like myself, Feya’s Swamp is a reimagining of Anselm Ostertag and Helge Ostertag’s (the latter is the co-designer of Terra Mystica) game Kaivai, but it is not just their previous game with a new coat of paint. Every system has been optimized and tweaked, though the overall structure stuck around. It remains, like its predecessor, a very punishing game.

Monoswampism

Feya’s Swamp is a fishing game that’s not really about fishing. It’s about building fishing villages. Each player has four tracks…

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