Games News! 05/08/13

Skirmish: Ostrich, svelte like your mother, tat-mongers, vomiting libraries
Eldritch Horror

Quinns: A few months ago we caught word that Fantasy Flight had a Lovecraft board game coming later this year. Something big that they were expecting to do VERY well. So Paul boiled the kettle and we held an emergency council of team SU&SD, where we all swore that it had to be a new edition of Arkham Horror, an immensely popular co-op game of struggle against Lovecraftian horrors.

It isn’t. It’s something much more evil.

Eldritch Horror is a new game “inspired” by Arkham Horror, allowing Fantasy Flight to sell the two games side-by-side. Arkham Horror, that hardcore horror with its nine (count ’em!) expansions, will soon be joined by Eldritch Horror, a more accessible game of otherworldly apocalypses.

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Review: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Fabulous Boy, ladyrangs, The Remarkable Off-Screen Time Machine, dogs or crisps?
We probably shouldn't go into space.

Reviewers? ASSEMBLE!

It’s time to do battle with the increasingly popular Sentinels of the Multiverse! A co-operative, customisable, and increasingly collectible game of excitingly litigious superheroes fighting stinky villains. This game’s getting more and more popular, so it’s only natural we should see if you guys should get in on the action.

(Besides, it’s the best excuse we’ve had to dress up in AGES.)

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Review: Netrunner – Creation and Control

cyber chairs, Man Vs. Speedboat, Alix T4LB07, a good debugging
Review: Netrunner - Creation and Control

Quinns: It’s no secret that we think Android: Netrunner is the collectible game right now. When I started playing it, I was seduced by the asymmetrical concept- one player as the glittering corporation, the other as a tiny hacker with cards as mundane as energy drinks and quality time with your partner. Since then, it’s the comedic tension of the game that’s kept me involved. Each new datapack of cards is filled not just with possibility, but comedy. I laugh as I leaf through these things. “Oh no,” I whisper, grinning. “Oh, no.

So you can imagine how excited I was yesterday! The release of the first “deluxe” expansion, Creation and Control, containing 3 copies each of 55 new cards. The same evening I ended up taking two sets to the safehouse of my Netrunner nemesis for a good debugging. Here’s what we found out.

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Games News! 29/07/13

The Oleg Story™: Survival

Quinns: No questioning what the big story is this week. Board game and erstwhile Kickstarter success story The Doom That Came To Atlantic City! has imploded like a great tower block made of dreams and balsa wood. Following 13 months and $122,874 of investment (less Kickstarter’s fee), Forking Path Co. has declared the project is now cancelled due to “Every possible mistake [being] made.”

It only gets sadder from here. In the same update project founder Erik Chevalier states that, despite having quit his job for the game, will now do his best to seek employment and steadily repay the project’s 1,246 backers. Not that this was enough to stop many of the backers from creating a bubbling lake of fury and vitriol in the comments.

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Review: Tales of the Arabian Nights

the Hindenburg, genies, sultans, jewels, princes, ladies, elephants, lions
Review: Tales of the Arabian Nights

Disclaimer: Since this video was published, SU&SD has been made aware of a striking quantity of homophobic and transphobic content in this board game. The game’s tone was first established by the first edition in 1985, and today, it’s definitely showing its age. More information is available here, courtesy of Meeple Like Us.

When was the last time you had some friends over, one of you got abducted by an elephant, one captained a war fleet and another had eight babies*? It was NEVER, wasn’t it? Admit it!

Tales of the Arabian Nights can fix that. You might not know it, but there’s a gaping hole in your board game collection. A hole that begs to be filled. And you must fill it. You must fill it with this. The finest storytelling board game in existence.

Have a great weekend, everybody! Ideally, make sure it’s great by playing this.

*And was then abducted by an elephant.

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Review: Gearworld: The Borderlands

apocalyptic shoulders, precious ponies, cajoling worms, scrapwater
Review: Gearworld: The Borderlands

Mark: Logistics! Three lovelier-sounding syllables were never spoke. Ah, what a dream, to play a strategically deep game about the beautiful, balletic, and somewhat subtle dance of getting much-needed materiel from one place to another — and then using it to blow stuff up. And how much dreamier were it a game that didn’t involve hundreds of cardboard counters sliding delicately around a hex grid to the tune of one in an endless string of historically accurate six-hour scenarios featuring Russian truck breakdowns and German trains running on time. (Though actually, I’d play that one too.)

Gearworld: The Borderlands is the latest in Fantasy Flight’s series of resurrected “classics” of yesteryear — i.e., games you wish you’d heard of when they’d first been released, if you were even alive back then — and just may be the game of which I dreamed a paragraph ago.

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Games News! 22/07/13

owl tokens, ooze turn is it next, the murder giant, wiener melange, gore storage
Blocky Mountains

Quinns: Have you heard? Kate Middleton’s Royal Baby™ arrives today! Time to get the news done sharpish so I can attend the ceremony of Gilded Silver where we find out if it’s a changeling.

Fantasy Flight have published the most audacious preview yet of Netrunner’s first deluxe expansion, Creation and Control. The 55 new cards are going to slip into our decks as professionally and powerfully as acupuncture needles, making us fitter. Stronger. Deadlier. Or possibly it’ll just cost a bunch of money and we’ll feel exactly the same, except we’ll get really bad gas, which happened to my friend Alex. When he tried acupuncture, that is. Not when he played Netrunner.

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An Intro to Board Gaming, For your Friends!

Daniel Cheney, Dick Crag, racism, eyeliner, public service announcements
An Intro to Board Gaming

Quinns: Also in celebration of our 2nd anniversary, we’ve done something a bit different. And hopefully, a bit useful.

It’s a short video about board gaming that’s not for you, but any friends, family or colleagues who don’t yet know about your hobby. A glimmering, electric antidote, if you will, for anyone who hears “Board games” and thinks “Monopoly”. There aren’t any swears at all, and only a smidge of dressing up, so please:

Share away. Let’s tell the world about this glorious hobby of ours.

Happy anniversary, everybody. We love you.

— Team SU&SD

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The SU&SD Incredible Outtakes Project, Pt. 1

outtakes, swears, 81 seconds of Christmas, a spy
The SU&SD Incredible Outtakes Project

Paul: Did you know that Shut Up & Sit Down is now two years old? This month is our anniversary month and, to celebrate that, we thought we’d give you something very special. It’s something you’ve all been asking for since we started and it’s our way of thanking you for your terrific support.

You, our viewers, our readers, our commenters, have been a brilliant audience. You’ve been friendly and patient and kind and insightful and generally excellent, so we really hope you enjoy fourteen minutes of Shut Up & Sit Down outtakes, fourteen minutes that pull back the curtain and expose the ramshackle workings behind this show.

We should warn you that there’s liberal use of cursing and swears and also bad language and even some rude words. There’s a fair amount of embarrassment. There’s a lot of silliness.

Oh, and this is only a compilation that spans our first series. It takes a little while to edit a collection like this together and we need to rummage through our rushes to see what we can serve up next. There’ll be more to come.

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Review: Pandemic

hot bacteria water, rippling infections, a bottle of wine, why is the manual upside-down
Review: Pandemic

Quinns is live on the mighty Eurogamer once again, reviewing Pandemic! A game so popular that for a while there, we were taking this monument on the board gaming landscape for granted. But you know what? It’s actually amazing, and the perfect game for this sweaty, lethargic, feverish summer.

“Pandemic’s cheap, at just £25. The manual’s flimsy few pages are crystal clear. It’s a co-op game, so no-one’s going to get too competitive, and it has you working at the Centre for Disease Control, flying around the world trying to cure four doomsday plagues before they skim humankind from the surface of the earth, so it’s not even nerdy.

“It’s captivating, pacey and dramatic. In fact, it’s the perfect game to start your board game collection.”

So some good did come from Quarantine, after all! We finally got this sucker reviewed. No messin’. Go read!

What other classics would you like to see us review, readers?

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