News 36 - Shut Up & Sit Down

Games News! 13/10/14

Quinns: Morning everybody! Can you feel it? Halloween has officially begun. Yesterday Paul and I recorded a spooky podcast announcing the game we’ll review at the end of the month, and in the evening I went to see long-running London play Ghost Stories. Which, if you’ve got a free evening in our city and felt like peeing yourself a little bit, I can’t recommend highly enough.

So naturally we begin our news with forthcoming board game Planes! Scariest of all the modes of transport. Imagine opening your bedroom curtains at night and seeing a plane right there, staring in at you! It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Quinns: Good morning everybody! At least, I think it’s morning. Popular new videogame Destiny has afflicted Team SU&SD like a Dinklebot-powered plague. Sleep has become a luxury. Buttocks have fused with beanbag chairs. As I type this my right index finger is continually twitching, still trying to attain headshots on digital aliens. I’m not sure I can remember how to Games News, but I shall try.

Ooh, they’ve released the full rules for the new Space Cadets expansion, Resistance Is Mostly Futile, and it will add a SPACE KRAKEN. Which is probably the only thing that could have made our Let’s Play any more ridiculous.

Quinns: Morning everybody! This is the second time we’ve used Colt Express’s 3D train as our header image, but that’s because it’s a 3D train. I live in hope other board game publishers are reading this and paying attention.

Heralding the game’s release in a few months, Ludonaute has published an exhaustive official site. The site contains a manual, and the manual contains good news! This game’s going to be an absolute cluster****. But in a good way!

Quinns: Morning, everybody! For the second week running we’re leading with our Kickstarters, this time with action movie RPG Feng Shui 2.

I know about the original Feng Shui because of the time my friend was breathlessly espousing one of the mechanics. Your character is more likely to pass a check if they’re doing something ludicrous. So, shooting two bad guys is a harder check to pass than throwing a bottle between them, then shooting it so it explodes. Or dodging a falling rock is harder than uppercutting it in half.

If that hasn’t sold you on it, I’m not sure there’s anything else I could say. But I’ll try!

Quinns: Morning, everybody! I know these pieces usually appear at about 5pm GMT, but I like that greeting too much to change it. As such, I’m now ruling that it is never “midday” in England until after the Games News. Please update your calendars accordingly.

I’m gonna lead with the week’s Kickstarters, but only because our first one has just four hours left! Rogues to Riches looks just lovely. This is storytelling & card game hybrid that casts the players as thieves sharing stories of last night’s exploits. Can you explain to the other players how you used nothing but your hat to steal the pub’s most valuable sandwich?

Quinns: Morning, everyone. The bad news is, you’re all going to die because the end of the world is coming. The good news is, you can pick your flavour of ragnarok.

I’m referring to Fantasy Flight’s new range of pen and paper role-playing games! From left to right they’ll cover zombies, angry gods, aliens and murderous machines. In a great little twist, though, all the players control themselves. So, Paul Dean and Matt Lees having to use their real-life skills to survive when their fridges and lawnmowers start wanting them dead.

Quinns: It’s the games news! It’s a slow news day, though, where even our top stories are trundling like treacle down a sandy slope, so we’re letting loose a blast of our own news.

Our FORUM (hence the header image, do you see) is now just around the corner. While we’re expecting it to be every bit as kind and respectful as our comments, if the movies of Bruce Willis have taught us one thing, it’s that sometimes polite society needs tough dudes to walk around with no shoes on.

If being a forum moderator is something you think you’d be good at, you’ll find the application email address after the break.

Quinns: Morning, everybody! I’m not 100% sure what happened to me this weekend, but this vine exists so I suppose it was pretty awesome.

Once again our top story is the one with the prettiest image, again proving that SU&SD is as shallow and corrupt as a dwarven bidet. What you see above is Realm of Wonder, an upcoming Finnish game that’s caught the attention of indefatigable outlet BoardGameGeek News. Each player controls a fantasy character trying to complete a secret objective, then return to the king’s castle.

But there are problems! The two innermost continents of the board can be physically rotated, locking new paths in place and (hopefully) leaving your friends stranded in some faerie bog. And while Realm of Wonder can be played with young children, advanced rules add bluffing, the claiming of resource pools, magic spells, monstrous combat and the fantasy equivalent of road blocks.

Quinns: My goodness! 18 hours of travelling to Indianapolis, 4 jam-packed days of Gen Con, I’ve just this second arrived home after another 18 hours of travelling and now it’s time to do the Games News again. Don’t feel sorry for me, friends! If I wasn’t working I’d probably be asleep on all fours, with my face (and only my face) on the bed. This way I’ll get to sleep at a more sensible hour.

Gen Con was astonishing, by the way. We’re going to try and salvage the audio of our live podcast first, then post a huge preview article, and finally release our Gen Con special episode. It’s going to be a superb couple of weeks.

SO! Hot on the heels of Fantasy Flight announcing Star Wars: Armada, they’ve come out with the biggest X-Wing news of the year. We’re getting a third faction, to go with the Rebels and Imperials! Scum and Villainy will arrive in a big box full of cards to convert some existing ships to Team Scum, and a suite of old ships with new paint-jobs and brand-new ships will be arriving too.

Quinns: Hold onto your unmentionables! Fantasy Flight have apparently decided they had too much to announce at Gen Con later this week, and have revealed a couple of massive new games early. Very wise of them. The SU&SD supercomputer warns us that a press conference of sufficient magnitude might just reduce Indianapolis to a smouldering, game-shaped crater.

Appearing one miserable month after our glowing re-review of the X-Wing Miniatures Game, Star Wars: Armada will offer some strikingly similar 2 player space battles, but EMBIGGENED. The profoundly personal pilot management of X-Wing replaced with cumbersome capital ships and whole, abstracted squads of fighter craft.

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