First things first, huge thanks to Vitaliy Zavadskyy for gifting our podcast with some magical intro and outro themes. The UK finally has a second radio show to be proud of after the BBC World Service. In this episode Paul’s been hard at work testing Spyfall, Panamax and The Witcher Adventure Game as well as … Read more
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Quinns: Board games go in and out of print all the time. It’s like a party where sexy new friends arrive in a steady stream, only for each one to fall through a network of trapdoors.
But to quote patron saint of board game reviewers Tom Vasel, if a game is really good, it’ll always get another print run. The theme of this week’s games news is, apparently, an awful lot of sexy people arriving back at the party, dusting themselves off and grabbing another fistful of canapes.
Let’s start with the forthcoming 20th anniversary edition of El Grande! Or as we call it in my house, 50 Shades of Beige.
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This week, Matt and Quinns peek into the paperwork of Last Will, a game that challenges you to declare bankruptcy faster than your friends. A game of champagne, boat cruises, fabulous mansions, horses and you in the middle, trying to get rid of all of it.
But wait! There’s more! We’ve also played the expansion Last Will: Getting Sacked, which sees you having to do away with that beastly job of yours that insists on paying you every turn. A fabulously expensive marriage might be just the thing.
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Quinns: Bad news, readers. Our efforts to appease the grand old month of Expansionanuary seem to be for naught. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting darker. It’s now so cold in my flat that the carpet crunches underfoot.
We must have faith that this will end, friends. Unless the rumours are true, and this is indeed the year of twenty fifspansion.
It’s a possibility too horrid to contemplate. In the meantime, we will stay the course. Here’s a review of Trains: Rising Sun.
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Quinns: We open this week with Six Games to Introduce Your Kid to Roleplaying, an article published over the weekend by Shut Up & Sit Down’s own Matt Thrower. Some would say teaching your child that they’re an imaginary druid called Elwad constitutes child cruelty. Not this site, though.
I’m mentioning this first because I found the above image via Google image search and needed it on our front page. It’s perfect. The glazed expression of the father. The frozen terror on the boy’s face. “The dice will tell us whether you live or die, son. Don’t cry, now. Would Elwad cry? Of course not.”
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(Images sourced from BoardGameGeek.)
Thrower: You’re a platoon sergeant, patrolling the Normandy hedgerows in 1944. Suddenly, a burst of automatic fire opens up from the treeline. You don’t know what it is: it could be a machine gun, or a tank. It could be a lone rifleman, or the forward elements of an enemy brigade. Each demands a different course of action, and your life, and those of your men, depend on your picking the right one. What do you do?
Replicating this is the central problem faced by tactical wargame designers. Good tactics start with determining who your enemy is and where they are. Yet for all the effort they put in to simulating weapons and doctrine, tactical board games fail to take this into account. Most of the time you can see exactly what you’re facing.
Two new designers have decided to tackle this intractable issue with their first release, War Stories. It comes in two flavours, Liberty Road for the Western front and Red Storm for the east. As if implementing hidden movement wasn’t ambition enough, it also seeks to be realistic, quick-playing and easily learned. That’s two of the wildest dragons in wargaming, slain by the same title. No wonder people flocked to support the kickstarter.
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First off, be warned that there is an unexpected disco interlude starting at 06:46. Brendan spilled some raw beats on our editing PC and the resulting funk has gotten into the motherboard, but we’re uploading a fix (with slightly better overall audio) now. It should be up by midnight GMT.
Second off, allow us to present the crown jewel in our Expansionanuary festivities! A ginormous Let’s Play of us finishing a full-size game of Cosmic Encounter, proving once and for all in a controlled, scientific environment just how much fun this game can be.
Enjoy, everybody!
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Matt: What a wonderful world of Cosmic Encounters! If we only had spaceships and SPACE (in our hearts) then we might be able to build a better society on the fringes of our fragile galaxy.
Quinns: What are you doing Matt, this is a board games thing.
Matt: I’m getting everyone in that feel-good 1970’s vibe, when peace and hope and good-vibes ruled the planet and Cosmic Encounter first came out. A decade when man first stepped upon the moon, a famous rock band called Beatles was formed, and everyone had a nice time with flowers.
Quinns: I haven’t got time to fix you, Mattt, so let’s move on. Cosmic Encounter is a brilliant thing. Possibly THE BEST thing, as concluded in our gargantuan Top 25 list at the end of last year, and people who haven’t heard of it should check out this review. But the time for twenty-fives and tops is behind us, and we’re deep into the fog of a cruel Expansionanuary.
Matt: That’s true! I can’t even feel my fingers and fear that my extremities may soon be gone. But that darkness is being somewhat tempered by the fact that we now get to write a HOT ARTICLE about every single Cosmic expansion that’s been released to date. Five different boxes of madness that add a total of 115 (that’s one hundred and fifteen) new aliens to the base game – a staggering increase of 230% to the base game’s already ludicrous wad of 50 aliens.
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Brendan: Out of Dodge is a game that understands one of the golden rules of the criminal genre: a botched heist is a good heist. As four outlaws on the run from a job that went terribly wrong, there is room here for hi-jinks, comedy, seriousness and treachery. It is a short, one-shot RPG from Jason Morningstar of Fiasco fame and it has a dastardly fun set up: you arrange four seats in the shape of a car (or use an actual real-life moving car), get in and argue about what went wrong while you speed away from the crime scene with a bag of loot much lighter than you expected.
Oh yeah, and watch out for all the blood because one of you is dying.
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Quinns: Good morning table gamers! It is the 19th of January in the year 2015. Whatever crazy stuff is happening in your life, you are reading the Games News. After that, there will be lovely comments. Rely on these simple things. It’s all going to be OK.
Once again our cover story goes to the prettiest game, this time forthcoming Susumu Kawasaki release Traders of Osaka. Due out in 2015, this is actually a reimplementation of Susumu’s 2006 game Traders of Carthage, and it’s unclear whether anything’s changed about the game itself.
Fine by me! I’d buy a re-implementation of whooping cough if it was this sexy. God, I’m such a fop.
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