Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
D.V.C., as wonderful and consistent and quirky a publisher as you’ll find, largely does its own design work. With the exception of 2020’s Rosetta: The Forgotten Language, all of D.V.C.’s games up till now have been credited to house designer Jasper Beatrix. In a just world, Jasper would be unable to walk down the street without being mobbed by fans, but there are two barriers to that: we certainly don’t live in a just world, and Jasper Beatrix doesn’t exist.
Not corporeally, anyway. Good ol’ J.B. is a pseudonym for a loose collective, a merry anarchic band of creatives who work together to make these wonderful games. They’re so prolific, and release games of such high quality, that the announcement of Pacts and the realization that it was not designed by Jasper Beatrix, was quite the surprise. This area-control game for two is the work of Ben Brin, a single corporeal designer.
Well. I assume.
I Pick I Pick You Choose
Pacts is an exemplar of I Split, You Choose, a mechanism whose promise is often let down by the execution. I’m a big fan of games with decisions that are just murky enough that no one choice seems Correct, and the best I Split, You Choose games have that quality about them. The general idea, if you’re unfamiliar, is to take a cluster of goods and divide them into two piles before the other player decides which pile is theirs and which pile is yours.
There’s an agony to it, a beautiful misery, wretchedly trying to parse how to get what you really want but knowing that if you make what you want too good without giving them enough of what they want, they’ll just take what you want, and all the while you’re trying not to give them too much of what they want, because then they won’t mind giving you the too little of what you want that you wanted. When I Pick, You Choose works? Delicious.
For reasons that are obvious now that I think about it, I Split, You Choose games tend to fall into two categories: set collection (Agent Avenue and Honeypot) and area control (Marabunta). The prior king of the genre, Hanamikoji, is a little bit of both. Set collection works because it cuts out the middle man. The things you’re splitting and choosing are the goal in and of themselves. Area control, meanwhile, is the most dramatic possible means of displaying the results of all this fussing. It’s more interesting than adding up scores.
The area control in Pacts is impacted by two, count ‘em, two actions: Place, and Move. Each of the game’s breezy six rounds starts with one player drawing a set number of cards that mostly contain some combination of those two actions, splitting them into two piles, then letting the other player choose. The board is divided into six areas, grouped into pairs by color. A red Place card lets me put x number of units down in either red area. A blue Move card means I can move cubes from a blue area to an adjacent one.
The third kind of card activates your faction’s special ability. There are a number of factions in this little box, each drawn from Irish folklore and each meaningfully distinct. Pacts perfectly implements the increasingly wearisome idea of asymmetrical factions—look, I love ‘em, but there’s been a lot of that going around the last few years. Differences here are superficially mild, but they significantly impact play. The choice of Cu Sidhe or Changelings has a surprising amount of impact for how quickly this game plays.
In less than 20 minutes, Pacts offers complex, satisfying decisions. Mid-game scoring is quick, and the value of each region changes, which keeps players from turtling. The question of dividing up actions is enriched both by the faction abilities, which impact what types of cards are of what degree of interest to each player, and by this game’s Great Leap Forward: in addition to the action cards, the splitting player assigns a 2nd Player Token to one pile or the other. It’s such a fabulous idea. The ability to respond in a game like this is significant, and Brin has chosen to make it a part of the calculation. Do you want this incredibly powerful card, or do you want to see what I do first? It’s up to you.
Pacts is not as unconventional as other D.V.C. releases. It doesn’t have the same sense of rugged individualism. Unlike Here Lies or Karnak, I have in some sense definitely played Pacts before. The publisher seems aware of this too. The Pacts rulebook is clear, and doesn’t leave anything up to interpretation. That’s atypical for D.V.C., who often seem to leave things vague on purpose. The edge cases and specifics are not crucial to the experience their games seek to foster, and in fact coming to a group decision about those things is often a crucial part of said experience.
I keep talking about the publisher because Pacts feels like a statement. This small, beautiful box is D.V.C. slamming their glass down on the table and affirming, “We could do this all the time if we wanted to. We could just crank out perfect jewels.” It was already hard to argue with their design sensibilities. Turns out it’s also hard to argue with their sense of taste.
