by Walter Kunkle, 23 June 2025
PRELUDE
A flickering candle cast its light over my living room as I began to write. I wanted to sit nearer to the candle, actually, but the fuckass hinges on my laptop were both broken. This meant the machine needed to be cocked in a very specific corner of the couch so that my screen would stay upright and not slam down on my fingers. The prospect of aura-farming directly next to the dramatic light of the candle lay, tantalizingly, out of reach. I was bent out of shape. I didn’t have the vacation time to attend Origins this year (though this turned out to be somewhat fortuitous as it placed me on a very interesting work project that my attendance at the fair would have made impossible). Still, it was June 15th, three days before the show officially began, and it was dawning on me that I was going to miss something I was quickly becoming used to.
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It wasn’t the Columbus Convention Center, nor the playful mascot Crit (the sight of whom still induces an instinctive distaste)–no; as trite as this was to say: it really was the people that I had come to know there. But I had developed a plan. As past readers of my articles will know, Origins is a place of personal discovery for me. I have a deep emotional connection to the event. And so it made sense to plumb this emotional connection. You see, while it was impossible for me to physically attend the fair—that did not rule out the tantalizing possibility of psychic attendance to Origins 2025. And so, some weeks before the fair, I asked a couple of friends if they could recommend a shaman to take part in an interesting project: helping me astrally travel to a board game fair that I could not physically attend.
My friend Sam put me in touch with a shaman he knew named Chevalier. Sam was guarded about doing this, suspecting that I was perhaps “doing a bit” so that I could make fun of this man or his livelihood. Nothing could be further from the truth—I reassured him. After an initial screening, Chevalier contacted me. He wanted our entire phone call recorded, which I thought was very Nixonian—but perhaps this served some higher spiritual purpose.
Chevalier had a tight clientele and did not advertise. He explained politely that what I wanted to do technically was possible through what he called “grid travel,” but that, realistically, as a beginning spiritual practitioner, he would be surprised if I saw any results. He explained mushrooms would aid in this, though I told him I could not take any as I didn’t want to lose my job. He offered to guide me to Origins. With respect to Chevalier, his proposed price for this was more expensive than my plane ticket, lodging, and meals for Origins last year. I turned down his offer tactfully (I hope).
I would be proceeding without a guide.
Towards the end of my call with Chevalier, he recommended I watch a movie called Fantastic Fungi; he annunciated both “F’s” very crisply. Without paying for any of his services, this was the only tip I had to go on. I did watch it—or at least, part of it.
The film was a very slick production, filled with sumptuous time-lapse shots of fungi in vivid color. A woman with greying hair and a knowing look was sautéing mushrooms in a frying pan “Mushrooms love to be roasted,” she said. I wrote this down. An expert explained that, while there were plenty of mushrooms that could kill you, there were also berries that could kill you, too. The people giving the testimonials all lamented that mushrooms were so misunderstood. I didn’t understand why mushrooms were getting this dazzling PR blitz. Watching the film, one might think that mushrooms had been accused of a bunch of sex crimes and that this was some sort of industry attempt to rehabilitate them. After about an hour, I turned the movie off and went to bed.
Day 1
With only this B-rate documentary as preparation, I closed my eyes on Wednesday morning, June 18th, and focused my breathing. In my hand I had a totem: the Eddie Rickenbacker Spad plane I had won at Origins last year. I zeroed my mind’s eye on the most solid focal point I could think of that could bring me to Origins: the Arnold Schwarzenegger statue outside the Columbus Convention Center, which I had disparaged before. Please let this work, I thought. And then I wasn’t thinking anything. I was just breathing.
This next part took a bit of time for me to be able to put to words.
I felt a large presence overshadowing me as I kept breathing. My cheek brushed against the chill of Arnold’s metal breast. I opened my eyes. I was ensconced in his muscled arms—and Arnold carried my spirit westward. In awe, I looked up into his emotionless iron face and saw the Milky Way unfold in the sky above. It was daytime when I closed my eyes, but I was being borne now through a dappled twilight of the spirit. His steps were quick; light. How could I have ever called this statue grotesque? What a fool I was! My heart was singing, and strange as all this is, I felt a song coming from within the statue, too, though its mouth never opened. The joyful hymn of a task well-performed—not prideful or boastful—but sincere. It wasn’t alive, but by sculpting it, we humans had imbued dead metal with enough will and vitality to break the veil between spaces.
He carried me for miles until the terrain, gradually, became more mundane—more familiar. I could recognize the sights of downtown Columbus and the eyesore that was the Convention Center. And that, readers, is how I remote projected psychically into Origins 2025 from my uptown DC apartment. The CIA couldn’t do it in the 1980s with Project Gateway, but I am willing to chalk that up to the CIA not knowing ball. Frankly, the process wasn’t even that hard. It took like twenty minutes. I’ll probably do it again next year to save money.
Arnold brought me down in front of the Convention Center at what must have been 11:00 AM on opening day. To the lidless and spiritually dead eyes of the conventiongoers, Arnold was just a statue flexing out front once again, though I knew better. Honestly taken aback by the staggering success of my astral travel, I did a few laps around the whole convention center to get my bearings: starting from Arnold and then going up the escalators, past the coffee shop and ballrooms, and looping at the food court. Even on the astral plane, this shit was way too far apart.
I realized very quickly that while I was at Origins, no one there could see me or interact with me. This was great: I wouldn’t have to talk to a lot of vendors, and I was pretty sure my invisibility would also mean I wouldn’t have to cover the Origins Awards this year. I saw Brant in his green Hawaiian shirt walking around with his brow furrowed, his mind doubtlessly preoccupied with my absence. Little did he know that I was right then compiling notes for my opus—a kind spirit zipping around for his benefit.
I quickly became used to my invisibility. I had always kind of stuck out in a crowd before, and envied people who could blend in, and this offered me that opportunity. But just as I was writing this thought down in my little journal, I noticed someone waving at me on a patch of grass outside the convention center. It was a furry. A man, or perhaps a woman, in an elaborate brown and white fursuit that must have cost a fortune. The suit had pointy ears and a noble face, its mouth upturned in a mysterious expression. Its head cocked a little as I snapped a picture of it.
A coyote, I realized. A guide through the spirit realm.
The flame under the crucible of my higher consciousness had been lit. It seemed that, even without retaining the services of Chevalier, the universe did not want me to embark on this enterprise alone. I took a cautious step closer, but the coyote got up and rapidly scampered away. I attempted to follow, but the furry was fast, and I soon lost sight of it. I searched—a futile exercise. It would be found when it wanted to be found.
There was a big downside to my peculiar mode of attendance. It wasn’t the flying, which as a journalist I am obligated to inform you about. Nor was it the ability to look at each attendee’s soul and see who would go to heaven. No—all of that stuff ruled. The downside was that all this woo-woo stuff would obviously get in the way of my board game coverage, which I viewed as an essential part of Origins. After all, how could a ghost without a body play a board game—much less engage in the tableside trash talk and toxic behavior which I love so dearly? Luckily for me, I quickly hit on a solution. I would be able to call up my friends and play some games on Tabletop Simulator via my computer in DC, and in that way provide Brant’s readership with the Game Journalism they so richly deserved. As it turns out, my phone worked on the astral plane (I have T-Mobile), and I quickly set up a schedule of games with some buds of mine.
The first of these games, I am excited to convey to you, was the horror RPG Kult. I had tried to get a spot in a Kult game last year at Origins because it seemed exciting and violent, but fate conspired against me. So when I heard my homie Trent was interested in running Kult, I scheduled a session with him and another friend of mine right away. I popped away from Columbus that evening (the statue very graciously carried me back to DC) and set up at my computer to delve into the system.
Trent is a rarity in my social circle, in that he’s one of maybe three people I regularly interact with whom I have never met in real life. Trent is based out of Arizona, which evinces an enormous amount of pity from me. I’d like to re-pot him and see him bloom in an environment less hostile to life. The rulebook for Kult insisted that what we know as “the world” is just a tattered cloth cast over a much darker playground of the subconscious. I now had experience with this as a Real-Life Planar Traveler, and so I gave the system points for realism.
The system itself was pretty standard fare. The subject matter of the setting is noticeably more mature than other RPGs, but there’s no reason you couldn’t inject these mature horror concepts in, say, a DnD campaign or some other system. What I had expected, perhaps naively, was that the violence or tension the setting wanted to invoke would somehow be reflected the game system itself. This would admittedly be hard to do, but something like the horror RPG Dread –which has you pull Jenga blocks for skill checks, is proof of concept that horror RPGs can be inventive in tying mechanics to themes in this way. Ironically, for all its risqué subject matter, Kult plays its hand pretty safe as far as what you’re used to from other RPGs. Nothing, mechanically, is going to throw you if you’ve played a game like this before.
This run of Kult, Trent had told us, would be True Detective-inspired. I decided my character, Det. Thomas Early, would be sort of a Cali guy who was reassigned to a beat in Nevada. The Kult rulebook instructed me to play my character with a Dark Secret, so my headcanon was that Detective Early had a comatose wife in a home hospital setup who he cared for, but whose condition obviously wore on his emotional state. I told this to Trent—and I also decided not to talk to anyone on the force about this, or my partner, because it was more narratively interesting.
Said partner, the other player in the scenario, was Det. Roy Durand, a local guy, a bit older and less polished. The investigation took place in 1995, which meant the O.J. trial was dominating the news every time we turned it on. Trent gave us both curios to start the game with, I picked a guitar that I kept in the back seat of my car, which my character was semi-confident had been owned by Steely Dan legend Walter Becker.
We were on the tail of a child predator we called “The Sandman,” who had some means of rendering his victims comatose—if he left them alive at all. As my wife in this scenario was comatose, this struck a particular resonance with me. Fortunately, we had a suspect in mind for Sandman. Unfortunately, that suspect was Sam Rourke, the son of Nevada Senator Eddie Rourke, and the powers that be began to weigh heavily on the procedures of the investigation.
Unlike True Detective, there wasn’t much of a mystery to this particular case. We bumped into our suspect while tailing him, and it became clear immediately that this was our guy. We uncovered this through some pretty elaborate dream sequences, as well as a third eye that manifested in my palm. But the logistical problem of “How do you deal with a pedophile who’s also the son of a Senator and has magical powers?” really put us on the back foot, especially because this guy was smart and we had lost the element of surprise against him.
As to how we did it—well, I don’t know. We ran short on time and had to pencil in a part two to the story. I liked Kult a lot. It was group storytelling in its purest form. Much of this may have been down to Trent, who is a very good DM, but the system felt very light-touch, and there were very few moments where we were interfacing directly with it. It really felt like me, my partner, and the DM were all shaping the story together on equal footing—a wonderful feeling unique to small RPG groups. I had to work really hard to not undermine a serious game with my innate desire to riff, but I enjoyed myself immensely.
As I settled into bed that night, I made preparations to project my consciousness back to the showfloor for the following day. As the fog of sleep began to overtake me, I was reminded of something Chevalier had said during my talk with him: “Walter is the name your parents gave you—your spirit does not have a name.” The shaman’s wisdom, or perhaps, his warning, sounded in my head like a sonorous bell, and I slipped into a dreamless sleep.
This is part of our comprehensive coverage of The 2025 Origins Game Fair from GAMA; you can find the links to all published articles at the end of each one
Day 2
I had breakfast at my joint in DC and readied myself for the day’s journey. The flower of Origins opened itself up to me again. There was a tattoo parlor this year, a special booth off the periphery with a sign that read “Ink-U-bus.” I’m too indecisive to ever get a tattoo, and there seemed to be a special indignity in getting my first one right next to a convention-hall Subway. But I was getting ahead of myself—it’s not like I had a physical body at the moment to tattoo anyway.
I took to flying above the showfloor and letting the immensity and color of everything bombard me. I searched in vain for the coyote I saw the first day. The occasional object of interest could bring me down, however. I saw a familiar face: James Sterrett, who was running a game of Major’s Gambit. Major’s Gambit is a 2v2 tactical wargame that emerged from Sebastian Bae’s wargaming class at Georgetown. James is the husband of Corinne: the photographer who I had made friends with last year, but who I hadn’t seen so far this year. As I floated down from the rafters, I noticed that James’s son, Ian, was one of the players in the game.
It seemed to be a game of youth versus experience—Ian and his teammate, a young woman, were up against a pair of older dudes, one of whom I recognized as Tim Densham from Catastrophe Games. The kids were good. In what was perhaps a violation of show ethics, I used magic powers a couple of times to make the younger team’s dice rolls a bit better. The stress of the game seemed to be weighing on Tim a bit. I stopped fudging the rolls and floated off, hoping I had put my thumb on the scale long enough to bring about a decisive result.
In the central exhibit hall, something grabbed my attention. Truthfully, it had grabbed my attention the first day when I did my little walkaround, but I waited to write about it until now. There was a vast space in the middle of the showfloor across from the Enterprise Games booth. This would have been prime vendor real estate, but it was left entirely empty, flanked only by small tables where you could meet celebrities (the guy from Torchwood). A spiritual novice might write this off as your sort of classic harebrained executive decision made by the showrunners, who you might assume would have a better idea of why people actually come to this thing. But as I was the only attendee on the astral plane, I could see that this empty space held within it a glowing portal, and that the arrangement of the desks along its periphery were potent magical wards to supply this entryway with energy. And I knew, instinctively, that I was going to be venturing through it to see what lay on the other side.
I pondered calling Chevalier and asking for his read on the portal situation, but truthfully, I was a bit embarrassed how easy it had actually been to astral travel after he had been hyping it up this whole time. I didn’t feel ready to enter the portal before I had located my furry spirit guide. The weird thing was, I had a lot of free time. If I had been physically here, Brant no doubt would have me running around writing about all the vendors in the show hall. Without these homework assignments, the festival felt more open to me than it ever had in prior years, though this was accompanied by a sense of weightlessness.
Just as I was setting about my day and flying around, a man, annoyingly, noticed me. This caught me off guard. This guy wore a flatbrim, and was one of a few standing in a swagged-out purple booth belonging to “XP Network.” I told him that it was literally impossible for him to be talking to me right now. He told me that there were a bunch of quests I could do in their app to earn rewards. I did not want to download their app. The flatbrim guy did not seem to pick up on this. Finally, bewildered, I simply flew off. Looking back down at them, they seemed to make a habit of bothering other passersby, too. I took some small solace in the knowledge that none of them would be going to heaven, and resumed my hunt for the coyote, but to no avail.
After a fruitless day of searching for my spirit guide, I made my way back to DC. I had an appointment with my friend Michelle to play a game I had long wanted to crack open: GMT Games’ The U.S. Civil War. This was a hex and counter game of impressive magnitude—covering the entire war at the strategic level. We played on Tabletop Simulator, but the board was still eye-wateringly dense. Michelle was confident she was the first woman to ever play this game, and as such, I let her have her pick of side. She picked the Union, leaving me in the driver’s seat of the proverbial General Lee.
This game was very absorbing, and I did not take detailed notes. Nonetheless, I remember our campaign pretty vividly. After a hellaciously-long read-through of the rules (neither of us had played before), we began play in the summer of 1861. The game very smartly didn’t let you chain actions together in the same theater too many times, as this could result in unstoppable momentum on one front. You were really reliant on your generals to keep your forces flowing, and mispositioning them would spell trouble.
I had a plan that involved fortifying and holding Charleston, West Virginia for as long as possible, giving my cavalry generals a base of operations with which to terrorize the north. Unfortunately, Michelle ordered McClellan out of Grafton and towards Charleston as rapidly as possible, looking to strip control of the state from Confederate hands. In the first turn of the game, I suffered a pretty significant defeat in the Shenandoah Valley, and soon McClellan had wrested Charleston from me. But, in an operational blunder, he had left no men behind to defend Grafton, which I recaptured. I made a feint for DC, which Michelle fortified, slowing down her momentum by denying her more men in West Virginia.
I had less men, shittier railroads, and a much flimsier economy than the Union. But my generals were far more capable. Michelle had to grapple with rules that made her commanders too cautious, but my hillbilly commanders had no such misgivings about popping the trunk on random Yankees up in the holler. Toward the end of the first turn we hit the first big hurdle of the game: Confederate reinforcements.
Each turn, the Union reinforcements arrived as reliably as a pensioner’s bowel movements. The Confederacy, by contrast, had to play its own separate minigame with its reinforcements, and this exercise was stupefyingly dull and almost embarrassing to stumble through in front of the befuddled Union player. After counting up a bunch of random bullshit, accounting for inflation (c’mon man), and doing some long division, I would usually end up with 11-12 “Strength Points” every turn as reinforcements, with each of these representing about 5,000 men. To further complicate this, I was only ever allowed to place a maximum of two strength points in any one Confederate state each turn, and these had to be split between the East and West as evenly as possible. It was almost as though I was placing little, racist gumdrops atop a shitty cake. I prioritized West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina whenever I could.
Your commanders would level up, get promoted, demoted, or disappear on set turns of the game. Promoted generals can carry more men with them and boost your results on offense or defense a bit more. I had a bit of a problem with this from a sandbox perspective. Yes, it reflects the real contours of how the war advanced—but it allows limited deviation from actual events. Stonewall Jackson will always die in the summer of ’63, Grant will always be a monster by the end game, and McClellan will always lose his nerve shortly after the start of the war and never really get back on the horse. But the alternate history nerd in me felt the game would have been more interesting if, in addition to the historical schedule, the game offered an alternative, Friedrich-style system of semi-random retirements and promotions that could turn history on its head. It felt weird to have a general win a key battle and see him get demoted the next turn.
The campaign heated up once Confederate cavalry commander J.E.B. Stuart came into play. From Grafton, he recaptured Wheeling, West Virginia and pushed further north along with Longstreet—temporarily occupying Pittsburgh in a big blow to the Union. In the West, the Confederates seized the tactically vital fort of Cairo, Illinois at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. I was being pushed slowly out of Kentucky and Missouri, but this wasn’t enough to secure a northern victory as we were playing a short scenario. Michelle really felt hamstrung by her gun-shy generals, and I felt like I was driving a car that was going to run out of gas at any second, and I had to hold on where I could. In the end, we called it for the South—their incursions into the North had cost the Union a lot of VPs, and by this point, three Union armies were chasing after Stuart in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, with no easy path back to Virginia and its rail network. Even once Wheeling was recaptured and my rebels up north were cut off from their supply lines, they proved quite troublesome for the Union to catch.
Confederate reinforcement bullshit aside, I greatly enjoyed this game, and so did Michelle. We skipped the advanced naval rules as we actually wanted to dive in and play, but I think they might have hemmed me in even more. The Union player could put a lot of pressure on my economy through capturing my coastal forts—though we didn’t play long enough to see the repercussions of this. If you are willing to learn a lot about rail ferrying, please give this particular GMT title your money.
I headed to bed—it was quite late. The game had made me emotional for some reason. I grew up in the marshland of Charleston, South Carolina—a place steeped in Civil War history, where the evil of slavery was literally worked into the mortar. Yet, for all this history, the Charleston I inhabited was a metropole very much of itself—separate from the rest of the South. But occasionally you would see something weird or fucked up that reminded you where you were. And sometimes when you were out on the road you would find yourself in a country that you had never seen before, and there the South would be waiting for you. It was a big thing you could never catch a full glimpse of—lurking in the trees behind the gas station parking lot—staring at you with hungry yellow eyes like a tomcat. I don’t know if the South claimed me or if I ever really claimed it. But all this is to say, this was an important game for me to play.
Day 3
I didn’t see any of the usually-recognizable Ottowa Redshirts on the showfloor. I wondered if, like Corinne, they were skipping this year. Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon seemed to be bigger presences on the floor this time around. It was the last day of the show, and I knew where to look for the coyote. Like I suspected—it was waiting for me outside the throbbing portal in the center of the showfloor. It disappeared inside—an acknowledgement that it was time for me to take this next step in my understanding.
I steeled myself and flew through the portal at a great speed. My soul was taken apart and put back together again. I was in a place that looked startlingly like the Columbus Convention Center, except there were no windows.
A rather plain-looking sign outside the room read “EXTRAPUB.” The UNPUB room at Origins is a place for as-of-yet unpublished games. EXTRAPUB, as I soon learned, was a hall filled with games that had been published, but didn’t exist in our reality. A nine-foot tall, jackal-headed archon in an orange Origins t-shirt weighed my soul on a scale against a copy of Pandemic Legacy. Since I had never played that game, I was allowed in.
The room was a Mos Eisley of interdimensional beings, angels, reptilians, wisps from World of Warcraft, and souls denied entry into Mormon heaven. If my coyote were to be found anywhere, it would be here. But my search was soon interrupted by the novel and strange games that could be found here, and I sat down to a table where a two-headed pharaoh was unboxing a bevy of fantastic, unpainted miniatures. He introduced himself as Pas. He hadn’t had time to paint all of the miniatures, he told me, almost apologetically—he had been busy with work. I asked what game this was. “You’ve never heard of Rondo of the Spheres?” Pas asked, and his voice carried a tone of genuine disbelief.
Rondo of the Spheres is a fantasy dungeon-crawler with bespoke miniatures. The game is a cooperation between designer Abacus Cornwall and the enigmatic miniaturist Jacques Klesmer, who went mad before completing it. The box cover showed the battlements of a fantastic, ivy-covered castle, over which thousands of metallic spheres hovered in a yellow sky. It evoked a feeling of profound unease, as though it were a photograph taken minutes before a terrible event. “None May Defy the Spheres,” the tagline on the box read. Speaking of the box, it measured five feet by five feet, and it was at least two feet tall.
This game had a fifty-page hardcover book just explaining the setting, and you were required to read it all cover-to-cover before you could play. I did this, and I still don’t know what the hell the story is about. The whims of the Spheres are inscrutable—their origins, unknowable. And yet by their designs, kings and gods prostrate and humiliate themselves, and great wars swallow up heaven and earth. The narrative and the characters in it shift back and forth across time, as though the firmaments of reality are sinking into a swamp. Some the Spheres favor, and some they disfavor, and those who work against them take the black snake of fate into their own hands.
Rondo of the Spheres is a masterpiece.
This game is fluid, reactive, and invites you to throw yourself into a vast mystery. It is a time-hopping miniatures game that is both tactical and dynastic in scope—your entire bloodline of heroes can be wiped out by a bad stratagem. It plays perhaps most similarly to a cross between Warhammer Quest: The Silver Tower and Kingdom Death: Monster. Before each session, you and all the players drink wine out of a ceremonial golden bowl. I am pretty sure this wine comes with the game.
Combat is tense and snappy, and flows seamlessly from player to player. I played an Orbwright—one of several entirely new class archetypes invented just for this game. Line of sight rules make sense and are intuitive, and, miraculously, the procedurally-generated dungeons are astoundingly engaging—augmenting the DM’s (Spheremaster’s) vision without overruling it.
The miniatures are awe-inspiring. They are, without a doubt, some of the best high-impact plastic sculpts I have ever seen. For as long as we played, we did not even see one hundredth of the miniatures that the box contained. I almost forgot to mention that the game comes with its own orchestral score, including the titular rondo, the tune of which I will spend my life trying to remember. The dice used in the game were entirely spherical, and I couldn’t find the trick of getting them to land on any number.
The base game is available on Kickstarter for $900, but that version does not come with the golden bowl that is, to my mind, essential for play. You can get the bowl and a custom-built table to play and store the game for $5500. If the backers meet their $25 million dollar stretch goal (current funding sits around the 18 million dollar mark), these custom-built tables will come with legs as well. No price is too high to pay for this game.
I needed to adjust to something lower-key. Looking to wipe the siren song of the Spheres from my mind, I bid Pas and his playgroup farewell and sat down to play a game called Cube Incel. The large chudjak on the front of the box amused me. Cube Incel is a spatial reasoning game where you have to rotate and match certain shapes and blocks to prevent your character from committing some sort of undefined mass crime. You can play it in just 30 minutes, but there is a decent amount of depth to it. While I lost at Cube Incel and didn’t think much of the ruleset (I am terrible at these kinds of games) I was inspired by the noble effort to use games to tackle real-world societal problems. This was probably the best way to cure the Male Loneliness Epidemic (which I capitalize out of respect for males everywhere) that is currently stumping our nation’s best podcasters. The guy demoing it told me that they are already using the game in those Scandinavian reformist prisons as a replacement for family visits.
Time seemed to flow differently here. I had free reign to play all sorts of games. My eyes widened when I saw that they had Hanseatic Wheat Orgy here. I had to play it, if only for the bit. Hanseatic Wheat Orgy is the Euro farming game. Doug Miller had designed it, leaning heavily as he did so on the storied Euro title The Burgomaster’s Repast developed by Gerd Stroopwafel in the late 90s. Hanseatic Wheat Orgy, or “HWO,” has an almost memetic reputation among its monastically devoted online fanbase, who refer to themselves as “HWOmanizers.” They relish the minutiae of their insane game, the explicit design goal of which seems to be making you, the player, as miserable as possible. As a game, HWO is so European that it is routinely used as a test by the IMF to determine loan interest rates to various agricultural banks.
My rivals were ruthless. Their prominent hunches and visible mouth breathing alerted me that, where board games were concerned, these were men to be feared and respected. Yes, these had to be elite board game janissaries—or so I imagined from what I could observe of them. I watched as they moved things around on their playmats, not interacting with me or each other at all—siloed off inside the soundproof vacuum chambers necessary to enjoy this Eurogame as it was truly meant to be experienced. At a midway point in the game, a cup of espresso and a little anise-flavored cookie were brought in for me.
I fumbled a bit toward the end of my HWO game because I confused my barley cubes (tan) for millet cubes (khaki). This one mistake undid several hours of meticulous budget analysis on my part, and I had to rework three load-bearing spreadsheets I had been relying upon. When the Burgomaster piece was moved to my village, the inefficiency of my crop rotation schedule made me the laughingstock of Groningen. When it was all over, a panel of suit-clad judges looked over my materials and adjusted my credit score. It was unclear, exactly, who won. I left the game feeling like the Marshall Plan was a mistake—we should have let the Soviets have the entire continent.
I still could not spot the coyote that I had been chasing. At a table nearby, a bunch of people were playing a miniatures game of some kind. My love for miniatures drew me closer. The sign at the demo table read Marvel: Slop Nexus. From what I could observe, this was a game designed by MIT behavioral scientists to surgically remove the last vestiges of nobility remaining in the soul of Man. HWO had been a kind of worldly, banal, evil. But as a comparative feat of design, Marvel: Slop Nexus was awe-inspiring—a sleek black monolith of depravity. Ancient civilizations would have worshipped it.
It’s a skirmish miniatures game in the vein of Heroclix where you play as various characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Your characters can throw terrain around or even bring in new terrain from other games. The game itself cannot be played without an app on the Apple Store that costs five dollars and is guaranteed to be abandonware by the end of this year. All dice-rolling and adjudication in the game occurs through this battery-intensive app, which also means that you are basically on your phone the entire time. App-integrated microtransactions let you boost your digital dice rolls against other players, and thanks to changes in state laws, you can place live in-game wagers on the outcome of your matches to win real money. If you go into debt this way, the game allows you to pay it off by writing positive reviews of it on BoardGameGeek for eight dollars a day.
Marvel: Slop Nexus is perhaps most unique for its ability to “conquer” other game rulesets and absorb them into its own. I intuited that it was currently doing this to Magic: The Gathering, based on how important trample and vigilance ended up being the game I observed. As a high point of its design, it plays very quickly. This is because if a match ever exceeds forty minutes, the phone app emits a radio signal that kills both players. Kill Team could learn something from this.
In a low-ceilinged and cobwebbed corner of the ballroom, a group of grognards were playing what seemed to be a very involved wargame of some kind. I saw a map laid out of a brown coast meeting the waves of the Atlantic. This game was Operation Torch: 8 November, 1942: 0600-0800 Hours, which I will refer to as just Torch for brevity.
The men playing Torch were older than time itself. The overhead lights of the ballroom were slowly turning their skin into a fine, powdery dust. Their baseball caps indicated that they were veterans of wars I had never heard of, and they were all wearing t-shirts from 90s bands. The old soldiers were cheery, and their leader, a man called Phryges, seemed overjoyed that a young person would be interested in what he called “serious gaming.” Torch is baffling. The game is based on the WW2 Allied landings in North Africa: Operation Torch, though you only play through the first two hours of the undertaking: 6:00 AM – 8:00 AM on November 8, 1942.
Over the entirety of the game, only one piece was moved: a troop transport, but the old men later moved it back after much debate because they were unsure they had read the rules correctly. The men enthusiastically explained to me that you could get an expansion for the game that added an additional two hours and, according to the rumor mill, included the minute possibility that the opposing teams would be able to exchange gunfire. They probably wouldn’t start shooting even with the expansion, one mustachioed man said, and his companions all solemnly nodded and agreed this would be anachronistic. Phryges told me that once he and his companions had finished perfectly replaying the entirety of Operation Torch in two-hour increments, they would finally be able to die.
But just then, across the ballroom. I spotted the coyote. “By the Spheres!” I exclaimed, and I noticed it had locked eyes with me. The furry hesitated for a moment before Naruto-running straight towards the exit. I jumped from my seat—abandoning Phryges and his band to their purgatory. “Come back,” one of them called out to me. “We can talk about Ben Folds!” I screamed back that I didn’t know who that was.
I jostled out of EXTRAPUB and chased the furry through the rest of the hallways down here. I raced by a sign that read: One Piece Powerscaling Live Panel. I was pretty sure my natural prejudices were starting to bleed into the spirit realm. The jokes were certainly getting lazier—more grievance-driven. This is all Twitter is now! I angrily thought. I was right, of course, but maybe this was my cue that I had best not stay here very long.
Rounding a bend, I cornered the furry at a dead end. It seemed composed, like it had stopped running a while ago, even though I had seen it round the corner just a second before. “Why did you lead me here?” I asked it, my voice strained. “What is the lesson you’re trying to teach me?”
The coyote said nothing. There was a pneumatic hiss–I saw its body slowly begin to inflate. A grunting could be heard within the fursuit—more human than I expected—and this made me very uncomfortable. Eventually, after an agonizing minute and a half, my spirit guide was too round to move or stand up. It began to slowly float up to the rafters like a balloon. I furrowed my brow. What did this symbolize?
The Spheres—I realized. Had I forgotten the Rondo’s lesson? Who was I to defy the fate that the Spheres had traced for me? I laughed, and I thanked the creature. Still working out what all of this meant—I went back to EXTRAPUB and wiled away the last hours of the show.
I saw and played many exciting games there that do not exist in our plane of reality. These were too numerous to elaborate upon, but a couple of titles stuck out to me:
- Littoral Commander: Hyperborea
- Terraforming Narnia
- Oars of Glory
- Frasier
- Steve Jackson’s Blood Meridian
- Trench Crusade but We Fixed the Morale Rules
- Combat Command Combatant Commander: Combat in the Command Age
- Puerto Rico
I didn’t visit them, but apparently the Origins Awards happened on the astral plane too. Pokémon had swept, winning even categories I had never thought possible—like “best map graphics.” I heard this info secondhand from a giant black cat named Behemoth that beat me at Puerto Rico, so take it with a grain of salt. Still, I hoped the real awards proceeded in a more dignified fashion.
Eventually, it was time to go home. It was the last day of the show, and I needed to start compiling my notes. I left through the portal, casting my eyes up toward the spherical furry in the rafters as I did so. “Thank you,” I said to it. The wise creature let out a gurgle of pleasure. I decided not to overanalyze everything the coyote did, nor to assume that its behavior was connected to anything going on with me, spiritually. Maybe it was just like that.
It was nighttime when I exited the portal and arrived once again in the more familiar part of the Columbus Convention Center. The showfloor was mostly broken down. I floated out toward the windowed area in the hall next to the now-closed Homegrown Market. Out the window, the line was still winding around the block to collect those stupid pint glasses from Barley’s. I caught the reflection of my spirit in the windowpane. I saw a faint outline of a writer who generally sticks to writing only the absolute truth of what actually happened, but who I think should probably be given the pass just this one time because it would be funny. The stars in the night sky outside were dim, but they were there.
I saw a spirit without a name—a spirit who is deathly afraid of being taken seriously, and who probably has trouble communicating with people. I wonder how much I’ll ever understand about those I’m dearest to, and I wonder how close anybody: my family, my friends–is to knowing my “true” self. But whenever I’m playing a game, I feel like the people I’m playing with see the closest thing possible to my true nature. I see more of other people through play, too—it’s not a one-way street. You could call it the “naming of the spirit”—or coming close. I live a life that’s truly privileged: to have gotten to play enough games with people to really realize this about myself. The knowledge that I’ll get to play many more makes me quite happy.
I am a high-strung person, and a lot of this anxiety comes with how my life will go, and how I am perceived by others. But the coyote was trying to tell me (I think) that it was foolish to defy the hidden movements of the Spheres that controlled my fate. I should throw myself into uncertainty and follow my natural inclinations. And if I write something dumb, or do something strange, I can at least set myself in the knowledge that it’s my own nature that’s directing me. Because ultimately, even I can’t truly understand myself, and that means no one can truly understand me—not really.
So if you were at Origins this year and you felt a loving presence behind you, know that I was with you. If you dice rolls were hot, know that I might have been helping you out, though perhaps I shouldn’t have. And if you heard a peal of laughter carry across the rafters, or felt a spring in your step as you topped that escalator—that was some part of me, too: a spirit without a name.
I wanted to see my wife again. I walked out to the statue—still waiting there faithfully for me. I brushed my fingers across that cool and beautiful face. “It’s time to go home, Arnold,” I said. At the edges of those eyes, I thought I could detect the telltale crinkle of a smile.
Origins 2025 Coverage
Wargame HQ Events ~ War College Previews ~ Wargame HQ Previews ~ Exhibitor Spotlight ~ All The Wargaming Events ~ The Final Countdown ~ Setup & First Games ~ The Charles S Roberts Awards ~ The View From Above ~ AAR for A&A Arnhem ~ The Kind Spirit ~ The AAR ~ Exhibit Hall
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