Review: Blueprints

quinns' landlord aura, nipples deep in space cats, ginger tugging, landlord lightning
Review: Blueprints

Industriousness! Caution! Precision! Forethought! Patience! All skills vital to construction work that we don’t have. Surely then, an architecture game that we like must have done something wrong?

Or maybe not. Blueprints is a clean design, constructed by professionals. Does your collection have space for a small game of building tiny little structures, out of dice? Let’s be honest, now. How could it not?

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Amazing Star Wars Adventures: The Prologue

can you give us an example of your language, fhbbpbbbrp, ok thanks

And now for something a little different. We want to provide an exhaustive review of the new Star Wars: Edge of Empire Roleplaying Game, which means we’re going to have to spend lots of evenings being crap in space. So why not let you guys in on it? Presenting… SU&SD’s Amazing Star Wars Adventures! Starring … Read more

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Amazing Star Wars Adventures: The Prologue

can you give us an example of your language, fhbbpbbbrp, ok thanks
Amazing Star Wars Adventures: The Prologue

And now for something a little different.

We want to provide an exhaustive review of the new Star Wars: Edge of Empire Roleplaying Game, which means we’re going to have to spend lots of evenings being crap in space. So why not let you guys in on it? Presenting… SU&SD’s Amazing Star Wars Adventures! The prologue of which has just arrived in our podcast section.

Starring Leigh Alexander as Beetle, wannabe bounty hunter! Quinns as ZB-33, her jury-rigged protocol droid! And Matt Lees as Fuse, a grumpy fish with lots of bombs. Our first session was mostly character creation and puzzling over rules so we’re calling this instalment a “prologue”, but it features a very dramatic moment where we successfully open a door. Enjoy, everybody!

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Review: 2.8 Hours Later

fear juices, startled fawns, steve's stiff amygdala, athorough gut-worrying
Review: 2.8 Hours Later

[Following Pip’s escape from a room and Quinns’ attendance of the Betrayer’s Banquet, we’re continuing our coverage of event games with 2.8 Hours Later. A disturbingly real zombie apocalypse for you and your friends to survive. Huge thanks to friend of SU&SD Steve Hogarty for writing this up for us.]

Steve: “Don’t run into traffic.” That’s typically the warning you’ll get from the last out-of-character member of the 2.8 Hours Later team you’ll speak to before the game begins. “The zombies can’t hurt you, but the 47 to Shoreditch can.”

It seemed very unlikely to our assembled group of survivors that we might all at once shed our collective common sense and dash out in front of a lorry, that we’d be wholly consumed by some primitive fear at the first sight of a zombie actor and run screaming across a dual carriageway like startled fawns. Fawns that scream. But that’s almost precisely what ended up happening.

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Games News! 09/06/14

moist whistles, frosty zombies, wooden towns, thundy birds, krang
Monikers kickstarter

Quinns: Hey everyone! I come to you brimming with tea and delightfully alive. It’s now week two in my Streetwars water gun assassination game and my team is not only still in the running, we’ve got a kill. That’s right. We straight-up soaked a sucker, drenched his dreams, wet his whistle*. At the time of writing only 62 of our game’s 96 players are still alive, and I’ll tell you what else. We’re making quite the video of our exploits.

Big news this week is that King of New York, sequel to Richard Garfield’s much-loved dice game King of Tokyo, has come stomping into the limelight. You can read about it right here, but in short, your massive monsters are now hungry for fame as well as delicious humans. Oh, and the board will have different districts for you to run around! Except the army will be running around it too!

In other words, the definitive game of monster mayhem is getting some actual mayhem.

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Addendum to the Diskwars review

tight little cheats, an imbecile squared, that flipping feeling, straight-jacketed attacks
Addendum to the Diskwars review

[Following our Warhammer: Diskwars review, it was pointed out by basically all of you that we’d got one rule massively wrong. Taking this into account, Quinns wrote this quick epilogue.]

Quinns: There was a line I wrote for our Diskwars video that I ended up cutting. I really, really hate the manual. It splits the rules of crucial concepts between the first half of the manual (the beginner game), the second half the manual (the advanced game), a dedicated boxout, and two pages titled “Reference” that are basically the manual’s colostomy bag. Everything it forget to tell you elsewhere collects here.

In the end I decided that there were more important things for me to tell you about than the manual, and left it out. So really, in doing a video where I misunderstood a vital rule of Diskwars, I was wrong twice over. An imbecile squared. Because not only did I misunderstand the rules, but I underestimated how important manuals can be.

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Review: Warhammer Diskwars

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Review: Warhammer Diskwars

UPDATE: It had to happen eventually. We got one of the rules for Warhammer Diskwars partially wrong. We played the game again with the correct rules and you can find how that went here, though it didn’t change Quinns’ mind hugely. Apologies to everyone involved!

Today Quinns takes Warhammer: Diskwars out for a spin, the thinnest miniatures wargame a round. But will it be flippin’ great? Or wheely bad? Or just worth giving a quick whirl? We have to know! The world revolves around board games, after all.

OK, that’s all I got. And something tells me I’m still going to get shown up in the comments.

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Review: Jaipur

camels, nasa, flying camels, hot leathers, golden failures, stinky spices
Review: Jaipur

Brendan: Quinns? QUINNNNS. Where is he? He’s always late. Once again I have five crates of the finest Indian silks sitting in front of me, ready to buy — ready for transport! — and once again I can’t do anything with them because Quinns is late. He’s the one with all the camels! He should know by now to be ready! Where could he be?

Quinns [panting]: Sorry. Sorry! Whoo. Sorry.

Brendan: Just tell me you have the camels.

Quinns: Oh no, I traded those camels in ages ago. But don’t worry because – look! We have all these leather rags now.

Brendan: Hang on. Since when do you and I work as merchants in India, perched atop teetering camels, our saddlebags overflowing with rubies and saffron? I mostly remember us uploading penis jokes to the internet.

Quinns: This is a written review of Jaipur, Brendan! Anything is possible!

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Games News! 02/06/14

playing the cabbage, playing the dragon, sordid loops, unwelcome guests
Cosmic Dominion

Quinns: Morning, everyone! How’s your day going? Stuck at work? At least you don’t have a contract killer walking around with your personal details. Today is the first day of my Street Wars game, a four week, one-hit kill watergun fight. You can track our game here. Oh god, somebody’s already died. This is just like the Hunger Games. Except I’m only hungry because I’m too scared to go to the shops.

Gloom, seen above, is another popular game of pitiful situations, and this week we learned a 2nd edition is on the way. Unusually for a game about being trapped down wells and murdered by squids, the new edition will be a fairly undramatic thing. The best part is that Gloom’s three out-of-print expansions – Unwelcome Guests, Unhappy Homes and Unfortunate Expeditions – are all being reprinted! And we’ll get a host of “minor improvements to gameplay and card design”, but all still be compatible with your existing Gloom cards.

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The Opener: Takenoko and a Hot Toddy

you're all a panda, frightful charm, keep calm and do a thing ahhahahaah
The Opener: Takenoko and a Hot Toddy

It’s not hard to catch SU&SD’s eye. An award on your box will do it. Or a panda! Or the colour pink. Or three-dimensional components. Or an inlay with phallic slots. In offering all five at once, though, Takenoko could have been made for us.

Is it a good Opener, though? The perfect game to open a friend’s mind to the wonders of board gaming like you were opening a cheap tin of brain-beans? Tell us, Matt! We have to know.

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