Nanty Narking Board Game Review

Year Published: 2019

Players: 2-4

Playing Time: 60 Minutes

The Victorian era and its many fictional inhabitants, ensconced as it is in the murky waters of public domain, has been mined vigorously for its intellectual property in gaming.

Nanty Narking is no exception, promising a “truly Victorian game of wit and podsnappery.” Whatever that’s supposed to mean.

But it’s aiming for a particular idiom and, wouldn’t you know it, manages to achieve it. The card art, character cards, production, and limited flavor text includes every Victorian personage and idea into a Looney Tunes-style mashup. The London setting might initially look serious, but it quickly gives way to a fair amount of nonsense, albeit within a tensely tactical structure. There’s not much that’s historically accurate here, and you sense that the game has its tongue planted firmly in its cheek as it reveals itself to you.

The irony is that, for all its merits, podsnappery – “smug self-satisfaction and a lack of interest in the affairs of others” – is a quality the game doesn’t possess. You’ll be intimately interested in the affairs of others during play, and this is a good thing.

The Game In Brief

I’d call it area majority via cardplay, but that’s not quite right. The goals that represent win conditions for various randomly-drawn characters at the game’s start aren’t all related to controlling the board. Some are, sure, but others are more circumspect.

So rather, I’d call it “intrigue via cardplay.”

You might actually just need to control, say, four of the games districts to win. Easy enough. But your neighbor might be trying to hit a certain quota of unrest in the city, which is caused mainly by the movements of various pawns.

Another player may simply want to accumulate money, unconcerned about their network of forces controlling anything.

And the last may simply wish to prevent everyone else from achieving their goal, treading water until the game’s alternate endgame condition, that of its central deck of action cards running out.

You can’t know these goals for certain (besides your own), but you can guess at them, and have to work to prevent them while trying to further your own ends.

And this all plays out via cards with sequential action options on them. There are light ways to chain cards together, but this isn’t a “card-chaining game” like Magic: The Gathering and its descendents. It’s small, tactical bursts of activity on the board, reacting to and/or dictating changes to the board state between players. Assassinate an enemy agent, move your own agents, collect some money, steal some money, build a structure that grants a small perk, and so on. Gradually, the board will fill with your collective efforts, and those efforts will jostle with one another, elbowing for a bit of breathing room.

Mechanically Speaking

So there’s some light deduction, take that-ery, hand management, area control and spatial movement going on. It seems like a lot, but I have yet to have a session take longer than an hour, even at max players and teaching. Once you’re into it, the whole thing breezes by.

Additionally, the actions on cards fall into only about half a dozen types. Most offer some choice behind them: which building to purchase for a special ability, or where to allot your network. But none are convoluted, and so even the chained, multi-card turns are generally over in about 30 seconds. This keeps things moving briskly.

All else being equal, games that leave you wanting more are better than those that overstay their welcome slightly. As we’ll get into momentarily, Nanty Narking’s more chaotic elements mean that I wouldn’t necessarily want it to last much longer than it does. But it doesn’t, and thus falls on the side of leaving me excited to play next time.

The Chaos Element

If there’s a style of gameplay that will be assured to drive away swaths of hobby gamers, it’s randomness.

Various cards dictate that an event card be pulled, and its text resolved. These events are…well, they’re extremely random. A zeppelin might crash on a particular area of the map, destroying every piece of plastic on it. And you might think this would be awesome, if only you could decide which area gets nuked. But you can’t; a d12 dice roll decides for you. Not all will rearrange the map so profoundly, but none of the events are without potentially catastrophic consequences for one or more players.

These event cards tend to come in the game’s latter half, in which the late-game cards (the deck is divided into two types) have more swingy powers and abilities on them, compared to the early game’s more benign and quietly tactical cards.

Collectively, they take something that feels like a tactical deduction game, and turn it into a game that may be decided by the roll of that d12.

This is bad, right? It will be for some. Slyly, though, I think designer Martin Wallace had something a bit more nuanced in mind when he inserted these insanely random elements into a game where they don’t quite seem to belong.

Card draw will sort of equal out over the course of the game, but in any situation, there are better and worse actions for you, and you might be unlucky enough to have fewer “better” actions than your opponents. Savvy use of abilities matters more than card draw, but it can be hard in the game’s later stages to take turns that both further your own ends while preventing others from winning, particularly if you’ve fallen behind and are further from your goal than others.

So the event cards, and their capriciousness wrath or boons, act as a possible catchup mechanism. But not an assured one. It’s giving a bazooka to the players, but asking them to fire blindfolded.

So if you reconceptualize these events as emergency levers to pull if you’re falling behind in the tactical game, the gods may smile upon you and equalize things swiftly. Or they may punish you for your hubris and destroy your already meager chances.

This interpretation of the random event mechanic won’t save the game for those who simply can’t abide this level of chaos. But it’s allowed me not just to tolerate their presence but actually enjoy them. I include my light strategic notes on events now when I teach the game, and it becomes an amusing reminder that at any point, someone could huck a grenade into your carefully laid plans just to see what happens.

What’s In a Theme

Some friends of mine who will otherwise tell you how little they care about theme in board games have, somewhat paradoxically, sworn up and down that this game is made lesser with its Victorian retheme.

This is in comparison to the game’s first edition, Discworld: Ankh-Morpork, based on the titular Discworld series by author Terry Pratchett.

Mechanically, the games are identical, plus or minus some optional persona cards and such. So does the theme really make or break it?

It’s here that I have to claim at least a bit of bias on their part, because their fervor is invariably tied to a love of Pratchett and his book series. Which isn’t misplaced; I’ve enjoyed what little work of his I’ve read (which doesn’t include Discworld stuff).  These same people become equally perturbed when I tell them I haven’t read any Discworld novels, and I’m assured I need to read them.

Meanwhile, with no knowledge of the novels, playing the Discworld version of the game would actually be less evocative for me personally. The Victorian grab-bag is fun to me because I’m versed in so many of its characters and tropes. To anyone who hasn’t read Discworld, it’s just another fantasy world with comic leanings. I have read and have more affinity toward others like the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy or those set in the world of Xanth by Piers Anthony. So I can understand the appeal for those who have read the books, but nothing about my experience with Nanty Narking suggests that a lot is lost in the translation to Victorian aesthetics.

I say that not to disparage Discworld, but to recognize that a theme’s appeal goes only so far as its cultural resonance with a particular player.

And so for fans of Pratchett, there’s a clearly better version, whereas for the rest of us, the gameplay will be the thing that carries or sinks the game for us.

The Issue of Meta

I do have a more pointed criticism of this game, but it’s in fact related to our modern play habits more than the game itself.

You see, the various ways to win and the responsibility it places on players to self-police everyone at the table means that you’ll never have the best session of this on the first play. Or the second, and so on. It’s meant for the long haul, once you can deduce better and also understand how to better position yourself in ways that hinder other players’ goals.

Some goals will flatly be harder to achieve for new players as well, which means commentary for the game includes a lot of “Such-and-such character is broken! They’re too easy (or hard) to win with!”

Are these criticisms true? In one case, I suspect there’s some truth. But in others I’m convinced it’s just lack of of experience.

The problem, though, is that the perception of these flaws is enough to stop this game in its tracks for some groups, before they develop the requisite experience with the game to elicit the most from its structure.

And so I’ve had fun with this game. Lots of it, in fact! But I ultimately shuffled it out of my collection because too many sessions felt like “first” sessions (largely because they were first sessions for someone; I play games of this length a lot in a large club, so it’s rare to play with the same group lots). The heights of intrigue that the game is capable of came through, but sporadically enough that it was noticeable.

A Note On Production

I haven’t said much about the components, because I rarely do. But here there’s one item worth noting. Amidst the attractive board, serviceable card art and minis, the game’s insert for the minis increases the box size about 60% beyond what it needs to be. It’s one of the more egregious, space-hoarding production decisions I’ve ever seen. I removed mine and just bagged the minis, and I am quite certain I could fit a second copy of the game in the same box if I needed to.

The weird part is, the game doesn’t feel overproduced to me in other ways, even with its semi-custom miniature designs. So why this boxing decision came about is quite beyond me.

Publishers, please do better when it comes to space management. Some of us don’t want to buy extra shelves just because you wanted to appeal to a few more miniature collectors or ensure your game has more shelf presence or whatever.

Nanty Narking – Conclusions

The game always ends in a burst. “I won,” someone says, and it’s always a minor surprise, even if you suspected their victory condition. As such, my only true criticism might be that it lacks a good narrative climax, one that’s worthy of the buildup provided by the gameplay.

But the table talk that the hidden goals can inspire, and the simple but compelling tactical action selection, consistently engage me and those I’ve played with. It makes me want to play again once it’s done, because I was that close to winning, or maybe I won by a hair and want to see if I can recreate that success with other end goals.

Either way, as we pack up the game into the too-large box, musing on strategic or deductive insights we had throughout the game, I’m already excited to pull the game again sometime to give it one more go.