Brevity soul’d or no, wit can also be the enemy of honesty; a fundamentally performative pin brooch with an artificial sheen. When I go back over my notes after playing a game, at least two-thirds of them will routinely be useless and powerfully crap jokes I’ve written in lieu of practical points because – even in a document no-one but me will ever read – I cannot bear to cease reminding myself that I’m an implausibly clever sausage.
Occasionally I do remember to just jot down an unadorned factoid. “Cards wot do two things (Gloomhaven)” says my notes on this puzzle game. I’ve had my eye on it for a while, mainly because making your game star a ghost with an axe and calling it Axe Ghost is some premium Nic Reuben bait, especially if the ghost also has normal human arms for some reason.
How’s the demo? It’s good! Falls into the “It’s either quite hard or I’m quite bad at it, yet I still want to keep playing” category. A tricky one to get right because, as we’ve already established, I do like to be reminded that I’m very good at everything by all things, at all times.
Watch on YouTube
It does indeed feature cards that do two things, or rather offer two options, or rather actually offer four options because the arrows on the cards can be reverse-toggled. Those arrows are used for shunting around monsters or grouping them together so you can wipe out the entire shoal with your axe, which is where that Tetris comparison comes in.
They’re also useful for pushing monsters away. If a single one reaches you it’s farewell to normal human arms: you’re now entirely dead.
My Sokoban comparison is more spurious, but what I mean here is that you spend time working out which shunts to chain together to create paths without blocking off others, lest your future shunting plans be interrupted. The most basic arrow will target and move an entire group of monster types as long as they’re all touching, but it won’t work if any of those monsters would end up getting blocked by the move. For those situations, you need a different type of arrow that tracks collision on each monster individually, letting others complete their move even if some of the group get blocked. You get cards that move entire rows one space, cards that move whole columns one space, cards that freeze monsters in place, and so on.
An additional wrinkle here is that the actual axe you need to actually get rid of the monsters is itself a card, although one that shows up regularly. An Axe Ghost without permanent access to his own axe? Communism did this.
It took me a while to wrap my head around all the rules and counter rules but it ends up flowing nicely after a little investment. What I like most about Axe Ghost is how it takes some game things that feel quite ancient and primitive and turns them into a random conundrum generator, offering meaty, puzzly turns that sometimes had me stumped for good stretches.
Also, as far as I could tell, it’s made by a single guy. I realise that’s not quite as impressive as it used to be, since with 2025 inflation that’s more like one and a quarter guys. Still impressive though. No release date on this one just yet.
