Special Features 8 - Shut Up & Sit Down

Paul’s Roleplay Design Diary! Part 2

Paul: Wow. Thank you all so much for your feedback and interest in the first installment of my RPG design diary. I’ve been tweaking and tinkering games since I was tiny, but starting something from scratch is a quite different experience. I feel very much like I’m fumbling in the dark, but your responses have been very encouraging and I think I’ve started off on the right foot.

After chewing out a few rough concepts (as well as doing an awful lot of scribbling on notepads), what I’d like to talk (write?) about in this installment is mechanics. Not beefy, sweaty people with large wrenches, but numbers and dice and systems, the engine room of the game. How big do I want that engine room to be? How complicated? Mechanics will affect the pace and feel of the game as much as, perhaps more than, any background or histories I write.

[Following on from last month’s interview with Eric Zimmerman, we dispatched intergalactic bounty hunters to next track down Geoff Engelstein, the man behind SU&SD favourites Space Cadets and Space Cadets: Dice Duel. With two expansions and a new Space Cadets game on the horizon, we needed details on the future of this runaway brand, and how it came to be.]

Quinns: Wake up! Alright “Geoff”, you can earn your freedom by answering no less than eight questions.

Geoff: What? You wanted an interview? You could have just asked.

Quinns: Oh, you’d have liked that, wouldn’t you. NOW: The year of Space Cadets, eh? Does the prospect of continuing to work with the Space Cadets license exhaust you at all? No new and fair pastures for Mr. Engelstein?

[And now, a special treat for Simplicity Week. We’re very lucky today to be joined by Eric Zimmerman, games academic and designer of Quantum, a great new release that simplifies the space warfare genre into a few riotous handfuls of candy-coloured dice. In the first of a series of new developer post-mortems, we talked to Eric about exactly how simple the process was.]

Quinns: So, Quantum’s out, but board games don’t enjoy the immediacy of communication and online play you’d get with the video games you worked on before. How does it feel knowing this labour of love is being purchased and played in secret, the world over? HI, by the way.

Zimmerman: Glad to be here!

Paul: Every year I make myself a new, sometimes private resolution and every year I do my best to see it through, but 2013 proved an exception. I told myself I’d try to design a tabletop roleplaying game and it wouldn’t matter if I was particularly successful or not, the point was to try and to learn from my mistakes. Then 2013 happened and I might as well have been Lear yelling at the storm. I was mostly wet and useless.

So I’m trying again and this time I’m going to write about it. Over the next few weeks I’m going to look back at games I’ve played and the systems I’ve played with, poke at mechanics that I have and haven’t liked and, most importantly, try and put some ideas together. Sometimes there will be some number crunching and design theory. Other times, there will be stories. Sometimes the two will meet and we’ll discover that dragons used to fly at five miles per hour.

So, let’s not delay. I want to start with a the story of how I was inspired to do this, over a year ago, then look at the sort of things I might want people doing in my game, then give a rough outline of what sort of game I’m going to fumble towards. Why not come with me and, I hope, not chuckle too much as I stumble my way through my thought process?

[Our own Leigh Alexander has been learning Netrunner, which we reviewed here. She found the experience pretty important, and we arrived at this. A long collaborative feature, with comments from Quinns and art from Jesse Turner. Enjoy, everybody.]

Leigh: “I can’t,” I say, and my voice sounds small and far away.

“Yes, you can,” says Quinns across the table. “Just think. You just have to stay calm.”

I have to stay calm, I think, but my body revolts. My guts secede, and warm fingers of shame crawl up my cheeks. Panic knocks gently but insistently at my breastbone. “I can’t,” I say, and it feels true. “I just can’t.”

“Look,” he says, gently. “You can get through this.”

“How,” I say, and there is a genuine tremor, an unhinged note I hear in my own voice and it makes me even angrier.

[This is the story of Earth #00001941. It comes to us from American journalist and fan of SU&SD Jacob Tierney, and holds the honour of being the first retrospective to almost make Quinns cry.

The following is spoiler-free. Images courtesy of BoardGameGeek.]

“NOTE: What’s done can never be undone.”

The statement is emblazoned on the sticker that seals every copy of Risk Legacy, forcing you to acknowledge it before you even open the box. It’s a warning, but also a promise. This game will be something completely different.

It was the last week of 2011. My friends and I had chipped in for one of the most-discussed games of recent memory, and we planned to complete it before I returned to college for my final semester the following month.

Completion is a weird concept in board games, which are usually meant to be infinitely replayable. But then, Risk Legacy is all about weird concepts.

Hive Mind: How To Win At Hive Like a Master

Paul: Hello. You may not think it to look at him but Brendan is a Hive Grandmaster of a hyper-unbeatable calibre. It’s the truth. To bring this insectoid chess-alike closer to everyone’s hearts and deeper into their viscous, nutrient-rich brains, Shut Up & Sit Down has asked Brendan to guide our readers through the more complex and obscure manipulations of this brain-breaking game.

Here then, is a set of problems for you to ponder. Can you discover the correct move(s)? Or maybe even better Brendan’s efforts? There is only one way to find out. Read on for the problems! (Note: If the only problem you see is a mess of abstract shapes untied to rules or regulations, please check out our review of Hive, which is a lovely game about creepy crawlies.)

Quinns: At the end of last year Kotaku asked me for my top table games of the year, and I pulled this article from my bottom with the grace of a magician plucking a dove from his jacket. It starts like this…

As I’ve talked about before, board games aren’t simply enjoying a resurgence right now. They’re in a glittering golden age with fabulous releases every single week, the entire hobby evolving and adapting with Borg-like ease. There’s no easier way to prove it than with my favourite releases from 2013.

Included on this list are a real-time Star Trek simulator, a uniquely dark game of managing a sunny colony, and a card game… with just 15 cards. But each one of these is a classic.

And proceeds to list my three favourite releases from 2013, plus one runner up. Does that sound like something that might interest you guys? If so, please, go read!

Paul: Like a snowman at the door, having a wank through your letterbox, Christmas is coming fast. Everyone and their dog is going to be asking for board games and hoping to unwrap something special but, but not everything that you ask for is going to be suited to families.

Does your brother want to play Twilight Imperium for eight hours? Does your dad understand how the Ambush card works in Memoir ‘44? Will your mum flip the table again if she loses another game of Space Hulk?

Here, then, are Shut Up & Sit Down’s recommendations for games your family can play at Christmas. These are all games with rules you can learn in just a few minutes, and won’t keep you returning to the manual. Some are simple, some are smart, some are physical and some are outright dangerous. But they’re all terribly, terribly good fun.

Quinns: Good news, everybody! This month I was flown to America to talk at NYU’s unparallelled Practice conference, which meant it was only a cheap flight to Texas’s BoardGameGeek convention. I’d never been to a real-life American board game con, and it was full of surprises!

I picked up my badge and gun at the registration desk on the Thursday. As a first timer, I was only entitled to a Colt Single Action Army, but I wasn’t looking for trouble. I was looking for the best board games that were available to play here in the USA for the very first time. Stepping through the revolving doors, I tipped my hat at a table of strangers, and sat down for a game of Rampage.

Paul’s Roleplay Design Diary! Part 2

An Actual Interview: Space Cadets

An Actual Interview: Quantum

Paul’s Roleplay Design Diary! Part 1

Life Hacks: A Netrunner Story

Retrospective: Risk Legacy

Hive Mind: How To Win At Hive Like a Master

Quinns’ Top 3 Games of 2013

SU&SD’s Best Games For Your Family

The Top 3 Games From BoardGameGeek Con

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