The weird stories of Wilmot's Warehouse
This cooperative memory board game will get you to tell the strangest stories.
Every now and again, a game comes around with a pitch that seems like it shouldn’t work.
“Trick-taking, but you can’t see your cards’ ranks,” but Magic Trick/Xylotar and Vamp on the Batwalk, among others, accomplished the feat and did it well. “Play cards in order, but you can’t talk or otherwise communicate in any way,” but here’s both Hanabi and The Mind, doing their things. Board games are full of interesting twists and turns on tried-and-true ideas.
Still, even knowing there are plenty of weird premises that work, I was initially skeptical of a game pitched as “cooperative Memory storytelling with a real-time component,” because really, why would that work? What about the premise really seems like a hit game in the making? Games aren’t played on paper. (Don’t think too hard about that sentence. I did, and I had to reel myself back in.)
A cooperative memory-based storytelling game played partly in real-time: that’s Wilmot’s Warehouse. This two-to-six player cooperative game, designed by Ricky Haggett, Richard Hogg and David King, could have just been a game of collective memory, wherein you turn over a tile, place it somewhere in a grid adjacent to other tiles you’ve placed, and then try later to remember everything’s location on said grid. And really, if you wanted to boil it down to its most core elements, that’s what Wilmot’s Warehouse is, and there’s a little bit of artifice around it to keep things interesting.
While the game’s core premise doesn’t particularly change, the game is split into five rounds, and in each round, you’ll place seven tiles on the board. Each tile has a simple illustration on them depicting — well, something? It’s not entirely what’s being depicted, and that’s the point. I mean, look at these tiles.
When you look at the art in Wilmot’s Warehouse, you have to interpret it. Some interpretations might come more smoothly than others, but it builds an immediate connection with the game and its symbols. You’re not drawing a tile with a spoon on it; you’re more likely to say, “I think this is a spoon — can we all agree this a spoon?” It’s an idea that’s been used to great effect in plenty of other games, few better than the card game Spaceteam, a cooperative and real-time video-game-turned-card-game, in which you and your team are frantically trying to solve problems on your space ship by yelling about indecipherable but somehow comprehensible illustrations of theoretical space ship parts.
Each turn has a player turning over a tile, discussing it, and placing it face-down somewhere on the grid. The game actively encourages you to find a system to figure out its placement. This isn’t a game simply about having a great memory after all, and that system will be vital. The game’s best recommendation is to use the tiles to tell a story, though you might find yourself instead grouping items in other ways, too. Maybe you’ll remember well that the guitar pick is next to the lips, because you sometimes hold your pick between them when you’re fingerpicking. That’s alright. (Just, you know, don’t swallow the pick. I’ve yet to swallow one, but I do worry a bit about it.)
In each round after the first, you’ll be confronted with an Idea card. That card introduces some constraint on gameplay — maybe everyone can utter only a single word repeatedly instead of discussing options, or maybe you’ll have to move your arm around like a crane, dropping the tile in the right place when the other players tell you. It gets weird, and it’s a lovely constraint on gameplay.
After five rounds have been played, the memory aspect comes roaring into view: You have just five minutes in which you’ll be given a whole bunch of cards showing customers on them, and on the reverse of each of those cards is an item. Maybe it’s an item you placed, maybe it’s one you never saw. (Each game, after all, is played with a subset of tiles.) Each customer card must be placed on its matching tile, but you don’t know which tile is which unless you’ve crafted that system for remembering. After five minutes are up or you’re confident that you’ve placed all the tiles correctly, you’ll assess your score; incorrect placement earns you 10 additional seconds on your time for each tile, so you’re both incentivized to go fast and to get it right.
Of course, you don’t have to play that way. You could, if nobody from publisher CMYK is watching, complete the last section without a timer. Maybe you’re playing with younger players for whom using a stopwatch won’t improve gameplay, and taking a little more time without feeling penalized is an acceptable trade-off. Sure, you’ll miss the excitement of watching the clock tick down and having to rapidly remember what went where. That’s OK.
After all, the point really is the stories you tell along the way — maybe you’re telling a story about a farmer who had to call a plumber, and the plumber recently returned from a boating trip with an island, and on that island, there was a shield embedded in the dirt that they discovered after running ashore against a big rock. (It’s been two weeks. I still remember that session. There were more details, but I’ll spare you the section about how the plumber was given a gift, and there was dynamite hidden inside the gift.)
The secret video game past of Wilmot’s Warehouse
We must talk about a bit of a secret here: Wilmot’s Warehouse is a spiritual adaptation of a video game. The marketing for the game doesn’t note it, and it’s sort of buried on the BoardGameGeek entry for the game. It does appear at the end of the rulebook, but it feels more like a pleasant surprise than an advertisement. (It’s certainly an advertisement, though, and I don’t blame anyone for that.)
I don’t think CMYK is attempting to bury that fact, but there’s an interesting thing happening here all the same. Where we see board games like Stardew Valley and Slay the Spire being transmogrified into board games, we see an attempt at some sort of faithful adaptation. In the case of the former, it’s an adaptation that doesn’t come entirely naturally to the form; with the latter, it’s nearly just a modified port.
Wilmot’s Warehouse takes a different approach. In the video game, you’re moving a character around a warehouse, grabbing items for orders, organizing new items as they come in, and generally running around frantically — then organizing again, accepting new orders, and continuing the frenetic process. As you run around picking orders, items will fade from your view, and there’s no map telling you where you might have placed, say, the thing that looks sort of like a guitar pick. The page of the game is ever-increasing, and you’ll find yourself struggling to keep up.
The genesis of the board game is there, just five years earlier: Those items are illustrated as in the board game, with that sort of hazy ‘I think this fits here’ sort of thought process taking hold. You’ll develop systems for where things go, telling yourself things like “of course this horseshoe belongs with musical instruments” without any real sort of reason.
Wilmot’s Warehouse is not a straightforward adaptation. It’s not just that the board game adopted the same art and general warehouse theme, though on a surface level, that’s most of what’s been brought over. The most important thing that’s carried through is not the art, the theme, or even that you have to rely on your memory.
This game shines because it’s based around building systems for remembering these symbols. The video game executes the idea differently than the board game, and that’s a beautiful thing, because they both work splendidly.
Hey there! Thanks for reading again this week. Wilmot’s Warehouse really is one of the coolest games I’ve played in the last year, and that’s making me reflect on other great games released in 2024. Any you’ve played that have stood out? I’ll talk about some of my favorites soon, but we played Nocturne and Tír na nÓg last week — both interesting outings. (Can you believe it’s already September?)
Next week: 2024 in games — so far