Reviews 8 - Shut Up & Sit Down

Review – Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower

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?

[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.

Paul: Ah, you’re here, dear reader. Excellent. Come closer, come closer, and let me tell you the torrid tale of mushroom corruption that is Crossing. It’s a tale of riches and of theft, of cunning and of deception. It’s a tale of gems and fungi, like none you’ve ever heard before.

Are you sitting comfortably? Are you ready for the story of the tiny little game that was full of wonder? Then I’ll begin.

Paul: I am glad that I will never lay an egg.

I will, thank the heavens, never have to strain to squeeze one along the length of my oviduct, before groaning as I expel it from my cloaca. I will never birth a child in a form in which they might accidentally roll away. Nature has determined that such things need not concern this human male.

I am, nevertheless, a nest-builder. This I cannot deny. I’ve just moved home and the process of unpacking, arranging furniture and buying a rug is, I reckon, basically identical to building a nest. I make a snug, safe space for myself, into which I can cram everyone and everything that I want to take care of. Then I sit atop it all, making sure nothing can escape.

This is why I’m so good at Go Cuckoo.

Quinns: Phew! Paul and I are back from Gen Con and I’m $200 poorer after being charged by United Airlines for my overweight bag, stuffed as it was with board games and gifted bourbon. I know! Your heart bleeds, right?

Huge thanks to everyone who came to our extra-ridiculous live shows. They’ll be up on the site in the coming weeks. Huger thanks still to the rest of you for being patient during this site’s quiet time, and we’re going make it up to you with a whole series of dramatic reviews showcasing the best games we found at Gen Con, including Captain Sonar, Seafall and Inis, but we’re starting right this second with Smirk & Dagger’s Dead Last.

So Dead Last is basically Ca$h ‘n Guns meets Diplomacy, it’s the best new party game I’ve played all year and it’s the first game this site’s covered that will play completely differently depending on the size and shape of your table.

Do I have your interest? Come with me! I promise I won’t shoot you.

Pip: Last night I went to see Star Trek Beyond while surfing the edges of an anxiety attack. I think I cried three times, nearly threw up once and laughed for a full minute during one sequence. I’m bringing this up because Haru Ichiban is the exact opposite of that experience.

Haru Ichiban is a game about water lilies which I picked up entirely based on the cover art at the UK Games Expo and then covertly Googled because I have a habit of finding games that look adorable and then find out that that’s where their positive qualities begin and end. Lovely box art, shame about the… everything that isn’t the box art.

Thankfully this seemed to be at least non-terrible and was designed by Bruno Cathala of Cyclades and Five Tribes fame. Cyclades! I liked Cyclades! PLEASE TAKE MY CREDIT CARD, MADAM.

Haru Ichiban turned out to be a two-player game of logic and planting. You take it in turns to place coloured water lilies on pads and push them round a pond until one player has an arrangement that will net them some points. The best way I can think to describe it is that it’s floral connect four but fancied up a bit and you can pretend you are Very Serious Gardeners Doing Grown-Up Employment Business.

[Team SU&SD grows ever-stronger! Please give a warm welcome to game writer Jon Bolding, who comes bearing gifs. Enjoy, everybody.]

Bolds: Welcome! Welcome to Medieval France’s fabulous Loire valley, and its jewel, its shining, brocaded, wine-and-cheese-filled capital city of Orléans.

Orléans has a lot in common with those ever-popular “deck-building” games, in that you’re still accruing little somethings to go in your something, but each something is different, and has a different purpose – and your something, certainly, is different from everyone else’s something. In Orléans these somethings aren’t cards, but are little circular people, and you stuff them in your personal bag like a kind of hungry giant saving them for later, never quite sure what delicious treat you’ll pull forth when you go plunging in for a snack.

Ugh, peasants again? Why don’t we ever have Boatmen? Love Boatmen. The little crunchy paddles and rafts. The delicate waterlogged texture.

And speaking of crunch, Orleans is a good deal heavier than most deck-building games. Really, what we’ve got here is a fabulous fusion of a “building” game and a heavy eurogame, and it’s almost entirely delicious.

Pip: Chris! I have a brilliant idea for a new business.

Chris: Who do we have to kill.

Pip: No-one! That’s the beauty of it. It’s more about who we choose to kill. It’s a STRATEGIC business plan.

Chris: Sounds great! I choose to variously kill/hire/build houses for a string of 19th century rural Frenchmen in the hopes of defeating you (and our friends) in the great game of capitalism. It’s a fine thing that this is what I have chosen to do, because it turns out that The Bloody Inn is a game about exactly this.

Pip: That sounds like useful practice for my business venture. What do we need to do in The Bloody Inn?

Good news, everyone! Supremely talented game reviewers and SU&SD contributors Philippa Warr and Chris Thursten are going to be working together on SU&SD reviews. Like butter and mushrooms, we’re sure you’ll all agree that this is a tasty combination and (probably?) not at all poisonous.

Pip: CHRIS! You know how I’ve always wanted to go mushrooming but was afraid I would kill us all by accident? Well, GOOD NEWS! With Fungi we can now do this from the safety of the living room table and no-one needs to die at all.

Chris: Nobody needs to die, but somebody needs to win. This is because mushrooming is an intensely passive-aggressive competitive exercise, obviously.

Pip: Only when someone decides to take all of the frying pans. Well, the joke’s on you this time because I brought my own frying pan which I found in the kitchen. There is literally nothing in the rules that says I can’t.

Chris: This is because everybody starts with a pan. One pan. On a card. You can sub in your (my, actually) real pan if you like, but that would be purely an act of roleplay. And this is no time for roleplay, Pip. This is time for passive-aggressive competitive mushroom maths.

Thrower: Why don’t you play wargames? Why, after all I’ve forced SU&SD to publish about them at gunpoint, have you not pressed the nuclear button on this this amazing corner of our hobby? There’s lots of reasons I can think of. Possibly it’s their rumoured rules complexity. Maybe the focus on simulating men being sad in some mud. Or perhaps it’s the drab art and thin components?

WELL, I’ve got a game for you with none of that! It’s called Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear (a series you might remember from my primer on wargames or my article on the best introductory wargames) and Academy Games made it just for you. Yes, you. The publisher even said so on its sister game, Storms of Steel. “The historical wargame that Eurogamers love to play,” was the actual marketing copy.

You can smell the difference between CoH and typical wargames the second you open the lid. It’s the faint scent of solvents from the decadent, multi-coloured printing used on the mounted boards and fat counters. Oddly-named German tanks rumble around in the box. You can even see a flamethrower doing what flamethrowers do in slightly more detail than you probably want. Alas, in spite of the name, there are no actual bears.

Review – Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower

RPG Review: The World Wide Wrestling RPG

Review: Crossing

Review: Go Cuckoo

Review: Dead Last

Review: Haru Ichiban

Review: Orléans

Review: The Bloody Inn

Review: Fungi

Review: Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear

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