Euro board games sometimes catch criticism for using a narrow and repetitive band of themes: trading in the Mediterranean, finding efficiencies in agricultural or industrial processes, fussing around in a great city of the renaissance or antiquity while assembling a victory point salad. The Voynich Puzzle is, technically, a historically themed game, but it draws inspiration from a truly occult source - the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval book written in a still-unknown language, packed with obscure illustrations, that still mystifies historians to this day.
Publisher Salt and Pepper Games announced The Voynich Puzzle was in development back in March this year, and a Gamefound crowdfunding campaign for the game launches on August 4. S&P is building a brand around strategy board games with niche historical themes: the solo board game Onoda, which follows the life of Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda as he continued to fight WW2 on an isolated island for decades after the war ended, is a great example.
From the description on the S&P blog, it seems The Voynich Puzzle's designer Dani Garcia is using the game's core mechanics to represent the act of decoding a text. Each player has a stack of action cards that represents their copy of the Voynich Manuscript. Your turn will involve choosing a 'page' and taking the actions from the top of the card to interact with one of five sections of the book; "botany, astrology, baths, writings, and recipes".
This will build up your "knowledge" of that section: when you have enough, you can share your knowledge, adding a puzzle piece to the central board. Sharing knowledge gives you improved actions and end-game scores, but helps all players to "decipher the manuscript", which in the game is "represented by turning and flipping the cards in their books".
It's a slight spin on an action card system. Many eurogames give you a hand of action cards which you'll steadily whittle away at as you play them, until something lets you refreshes them. Here, your ability to change position within the 'book' of action cards (and thus choose different actions) will start narrow, but should increase as the game goes on.
Without knowing more I can't make much judgment on this other than to say that the art by Jorge Tabanera is lovely. But I am delighted by the theme, if only because more people should know about the Voynich Manuscript. It's just so weird.
Named for the book-seller who first documented it in 1912, the Manuscript has been carbon-dated to the early 1400s. Barring a few annotations, it is entirely written in an unknown language (or particularly dense cypher) which has never been translated or decoded. The person who wrote the Manuscript may be the only human to ever read it.
The illustrations suggest the Manuscript addresses common themes for the period: recipes, bathing and cleanliness, herbology, astronomy and cosmology. But everything in it is totally unique: the hundreds of plants cannot be unambiguously matched to any real world species, the astronomical diagrams are unlike any seen in other manuscripts, the bathing diagrams are sui generis, and so on.
It's possible that this is a relatively normal nonfiction manuscript written by someone with a great grasp of cryptography. It may also be a constructed language, or even an otherwise undocumented natural language. It could be the result of automatic writing, or a work of fantasy fiction - history's first ever RPG sourcebook. We just don't know.
And to quote my historian friend Sarah Gilbert: "the team has created a perfect premise for a board game, because even if it's a giant pile of frustrating nonsense that makes you feel like you didn't achieve very much while you played it, they will at the very least have perfectly replicated what it feels like to work on the manuscript".
If you're a fan of Salt and Pepper Games, or the Voynich Manuscript, come and chat about them in the official Wargamer Discord community.
This is one I hope to review - whether or not it makes it onto our guide to the best board games, it's an excuse to learn more about the Voynich manuscript. That's always welcome.