Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.
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.
"I don't regret one decision," said Gerald Bostock, the lead plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court ruling banning workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual identity.
