News 27 - Shut Up & Sit Down

Games News! 03/02/14

Quinns: Ooh, it’s nice to have dramatic news to lead off with. Fantasy Flight has done a grand reveal of the first “Huge Ship Expansion” for their excellent X-Wing Miniatures Game, the GR-75 Rebel transport. Just look at it! Imagine how many new players it’s going to bring to the game when they double-take at it in their local game shop.

We all knew that these huge ship packs would be an investment (the Rebel transport will cost $60), so it’s nice to see that they’ll be a mini-expansion in and of themselves, with new rules for damage, movement and energy, an x-tra X-wing, and a deluge of tokens and cards. And this is just the first of the two huge ships revealed at Gen Con last year, with the other being approx. 20% huger (and $90).

But wait, because I’ve got some expansion news that’s even more exciting!

Quinns: Morning, everyone! Are you WELL? Is your soul a-thrum with jazz and song? If not, have another coffee, we’ll get you there.

Our news begins with a Washington Post article, “In the world of war games, Volko Ruhnke has become a hero”. Mr. Ruhnke is a national security analyst for the CIA, as well as the gunpowder mind behind GMT’s fascinating COIN series (COunter INsurgency). It’s great to see table gaming treated with such glimmering professionalism. It’s even greater to see the conversation around the hobby elevated. Then you’ve got lines like this:

Quinns: I’ll just pre-empt this one before you all start shouting. Wretchedly-named German publisher ABACUSSPIELE has announced Limes! And it’s limes, but not as we know it.

A limes is actually the singular form of the Latin “limites”- a line deliniating the boundary of the Roman empire. The actual game of Limes will be a reimplementation of Cities, and that’s probably all you need to know about a game that looks monumentally mediocre!

Look at me, coaxed into an oxymoron not six hours into the week. Awful!

Quinns: Small announcement, everybody. Last week, a Mr. Keith Block saw fit to make fun of me in the comments of Games News, pointing out that some of the stories I was running were from 2013.

Now, I love jokes. I can take a joke. But Keith, I’d like to suggest you be a bit more like Ben Rubenstein, who in the same comments thread pointed me toward some news and didn’t feel the need to be a disrespectful twerp who also smells.

One such story was the Kickstarter for Fief, which looks absolutely fantastic. Most Kickstarters set off my internal effluvium klaxon, but this? This is a classic French board game, being updated and translated by the enormously talented Academy Games, who made 1812 and Freedom.

Quinns: *yaaawn*

Oh, good morning! What are you doing in my house? This is weird. It’d be rude to bother the police this early, though. Why don’t you just tuck up in bed next to me and we’ll look at the games news together?

So far, the best news of 2014 is that this talk by Rob Daviau, designer of Risk Legacy (and the upcoming SeaFall: A Legacy Game), is now online. Delivered at New York University’s Practice game design conference last year, it’s a fascinating, unexpectedly hilarious hour of insight, and doubles as a preview of SeaFall.

I’ve embedded it beneath the jump, too. Do make time for it! You’ll be glad you did.

Quinns: Welcome to a Very Special edition of the Games News, in which Quinns finds out that Ryuutama exists.

The Kickstarter for an English release just ended, and it sounds like the roleplaying game I was born to play. Players journey across a fantasy land in a party, but you’re not adventurers. You’re merchants, healers, bakers, or other tradesfolk, travelling because you’re struck by an incredible wanderlust. It’s a game of wonder, relationships, and seeing what lies over the next hill in a very real sense. I cannot think of a game I’d rather have on my table.

Quinns: Hello! Is it time for Games News? I feel so jetlagged that this is quite likely to be a terrible dream. Any second I’ll wake up still on the plane, one of my eyes gummed shut, the overweight man on my right having spilled an entire vodka miniature in my crotch.

Best to just enjoy this reality while it lasts, with its crunchy toast, hot coffee and board game news.

First up is the mighty Eurogamer, which has published a couple of articles about Chess 2 and Pandante, games that attempt to “fix” chess and poker, respectively.

Paul: December arrives, and with it comes a large, old man dressed in red, banging on my door after midnight with one leather-gloved fist while another tightly clutches a ragged cloth sack that smells of old skin. The crazy hours I keep means I can’t begin to claim was anywhere near asleep, but as I hold open the door to let in the moonlight, the winter air and the sight of his craggy, crumpled face, I sourly ask him what he wants and what’s in the bag.

He strikes me across the bridge of the nose with the butt of a concealed weapon. “GAMES NEWS,” he bellows, his voice heavy with rum. I wake up tied to a chair in my living room. The man rants as he paces back and forth, my head throbbing in time with every syllable.

Paul: Hacking my way through the games news jungle this month, I’ve parted the thick, oily leaves to reveal great swathes of forgotten expansions, many of them lost beneath the undergrowth. As birds of paradise call out, as creatures of the wild scream to one another from the treetops, I see that the sun is setting. Come, time is short. We’ll have to make camp here.

Paul: Hello and welcome again to another pumping, vibrant edition of Shut Up & Sit Down’s Games News. As the introductory sting fades away, let me swivel my chair to face camera two and sternly address you all with our lead story. Please duck to make way for the swooshing infographic, which gives thanks to both Meople’s Magazine and BoardGameGeek’s News Blog who, along with many publisher announcements, help to keep us informed.

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