Review: Ticket to Ride AND Rails & Sails

Choo Choo Baby, Thomas the Tank Engine and the Cauldron of Souls, flubbin clags
What happens when immovable critics meet unstoppable sales figures? Find out in our long-awaited review of Ticket to Ride, followed by our review of new, giant box Ticket to Ride: Rails and Sails! Which is basically Ticket to Ride².

Do you have a favourite Ticket to Ride memory? A favourite board? A favourite train? Let us know in the comments! If there's any justice in the world, these comments will be a veritable hotbed of Train Chat before the day is through.

GAMES NEWS! 26/09/16

forgotten rooves, hot backflips, a child (a CHILD), praul's broats
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Quinns: Paul, do you remember in the last Games News when I accidentally broke the embargo for Mechs Vs. Minions (the new League of Legends board game) and had to scrub all trace of it from this site in a terrified panic?

Paul: Do you know, I don't remember that.

Quinns: Neither do I.

Moving swiftly on, the embargo on this gigantic box has now been lifted. If people would like to learn more they can head to the official site or read this lovely Polygon article on how it came about. Mechs vs. Minions will be available to order direct from Riot on the 13th of October and will cost $75 plus shipping, a price that means - purely in terms of components - this box is the best value for money that the board game scene has ever seen.

Feature: A Day in the Life of Quinns’ Game Collection!

Downton Abbey, an accident, 300 games, 800 spiders
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Quinns: Ladies and gentlemen, roll up! It's time for a new series where we take a look a team SU&SD's board game collections. Come and see! Be amazed. Be aghast. Be envious. Comment with thought-provoking assertions like "why do you have that game it is bad".

You guys will have seen my collection in the background of loads of SU&SD videos, but I don't think you've seen the work that goes into it. Come with me today as I perform... a CULL.

Podcast #47: Struggling in a Vast Aquarium

veggies, struggles, sociopathic geological formations, the kissing game
Like a Jaguar (the car) or a jaguar (the cat), our 47th ever podcast is an absolute classic.

Paul and Quinns discuss board games ranging from Vast: The Crystal Caverns, to Twilight Struggle, to Aquarium and The Dragon & Flagon. They answer reader mails! They review three idiotic folk games. They discuss their love of vegetables and their problems with jam. It's everything you want in a single, mid-sized audio file.

Do you agree with Paul and Quinns on these folk games? Do you own a real-life Aquarium? Have you eaten World War 2 jam? Let us know in the comments!

How to Play Dead of Winter (and The Long Night)!

the best rules, the worst die, quintin smithu mooltipas, honest-to-god sex
It was two years ago that Paul and Quinns ordered you guys to buy Dead of Winter. Today, we’ve got fantastic news for everyone who disobeyed us!

Dead of Winter: The Long Night is a new, standalone expansion for Dead of Winter that’s bigger and sexier than the original game. But since it’s mostly the same game again, we figured that instead of a review we’d do a rules explanation for both games with a teeny buyer’s guide on the end.

And yes, we’re aware of the irony that our filming date for this frosty game fell on the hottest day of the year. At least

Review – Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower

to deposit by vomit, to leap at your peril, to become a child once again
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Thrower: The Silver Tower is the abode of a mad wizard, designed to chew up and spit out heroic interlopers by the dozen. Yet its first victim was small and personal: my finger.

After looking in the box, I pulled the sheath off my craft knife for the first time in a decade and immediately slit a digit open. It didn't bode well for the three-hour assembly time I'd heard boasted of on the internet.

What you get in this box is a literal plastic kit with assembly instructions, like scale models of tanks and planes. There is even a dwarf with a multi-part beard to glue together. But I was swayed by the fond memory of twisting whole plastics off sprues in my Warhammer days, so I figured I could handle it. Plaster on finger, I dusted off my other modelling tools and set to work with one simple question in my mind. Could this board game be worth it?

GAMES NEWS! 12/09/16

endangered orphans, tasty mints, the ol' groove sweats, having your period
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Quinns: Paul, it’s time for a dance as old as time. Put on this lycra onesie and take my hand.

Paul: But... there’s no music?

Quinns: Ah, but there is! The news dance is performed to the rhythm of the world’s news, to the crashing rhythm of current events and the harmony of headlines.

Paul: I do sometimes wonder if these contrived scenarios in which we read the news do anything for the site. But...

Quinns: But?

Paul: But not today! Olé!

The Dean Dexterity Double Reviews: Junk Art and Pingo Pingo

Pinata land mine, lurching and leaping, organics
This week, Paul springs into action and plays against type as he looks at not one, but two games of the more physical variety. First up, he takes on the chunky and junky Junk Art, before going on to wrestle with (and shoot at) the penguins of Pingo Pingo. It's all guns and blocks and dashing and crashing. Good heavens, I'm getting a headache.

Why this strange change of interest? What's with Paul's new, more active lifestyle? And what is the meaning of Quinns' unusual delivery? That's a lot of questions for a Friday. Let's all go and have a lie down.

RPG Review: The World Wide Wrestling RPG

adequate crabs, building heat, the wrestler whisperer
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[Everybody, please welcome back freelance writer Jon Bolding, who tackled the highly-recommended game of Orleans for us. This time, he's covering one of his favourite RPGs.]

Review Soundtrack: Beat the Champ by The Mountain Goats

Bolds: A siren call of my youth. The gravel-voiced radio or television announcer chanting “Sunday!” and pointing you at an arena of legends. A contest of champions. A wholly made-up, entirely absurd, totally fixed contest of champions. If you did not grow up with it, if you’re just a roleplaying game enthusiast, well, I have an experience for you.

In an entirely approachable, well-laid-out 160-page volume, World Wide Wrestling gives you a set of rules that drive you into a world of entertainment and drama, screaming and spandex, costumes and camel clutches, masks and monsters. In the game, players are archetypal wrestlers - working people who play a role in a show, but also have to live their own lives. It adapts well to either small-scale independent wrestling or the big, media-frenzy contemporary wrestling that gave birth to people like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Hell, allow me some contradiction: I think it’s so precisely designed that it reaches beyond the world of wrestling.

Review: Seafall

swab yourself, stormy stories, that's so pbrbrbpt, sea wasps
Joy of joys! The latest SU&SD review has arrived at port, having completed its grand tour of Seafall. Ah, see how it's sitting low in the water? It must be carrying a tremendous cargo of opinions and insight. That, or it's leaking.

If you haven't heard the hype around this game, all you need to know is that it's designer Rob Daviau's third legacy game following on from the amazing Risk Legacy and Pandemic Legacy. But while those two games were fairly straightforward, Seafall is an ambitious epic. In other words, it's the most exciting box we're expecting to review all year. So what are you waiting for? Click play! Watch. And be amazed.