Paul: Matt! Welcome to the Games News Office! I can’t believe it’s your first time here!
Matt: Paul, this is just a bin with a laptop and-
Paul: Uh, what’s that? You’re also excited about the Pandemic Legacy Season 2 trailer? And it’s official release date being so near?
This week’s video is a playthrough of the outrageously silly and frustrating Meeple Circus -a game so hot and squeaky-fresh that it isn’t actually available yet. Sorry. (If you want to read more, Paul recently tried and enjoyed it at SHUX). But if you’ll just put that goat and plank down for a moment – look at who we’ve got with us in this flipping video?
Assembling an incredible sort of UK board game supergroup/cabal, this video features guest appearances from Jon Purkis (aka Actualol) as well as Efka and Elaine! (No Pun Included). For the inititated, we’d love to point you towards Jon’s song about Pandemic Legacy, and NoPunIncluded’s review of Great Western Trail – if only for the shocking revelation that cows are no longer required for fresh milk.
But do go and poke around! Both channels do great stuff, and it’s worth noting that just last month Actualol popped onto Patreon. Finally, special apologies to Efka – Matt got a bit too involved in the game and literally wasn’t a proficient cameraman. Everyone else: enjoy!
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Paul: The aliens are coming. Aggressively advancing, ever encroaching, nothing seems to stop their dreadful descent. The sunlight shines off their silver spacecraft as they pierce the heavens and prepare to bring down so much death and destruction onto the city below.
You and your friends are all that stand in their way. Together, you will use a small flight of fighters and the most precise cardboard-flipping skills the galaxy has ever seen to win the hour. You will flip them round the moons. You will flip them in low orbit. You will flip them in the atmosphere. You will never surrender.
Or you’ll flick a state-of-the-art starfighter straight across the room and lose it behind the sofa. Who’s to say?
Paul: Phew! What a week it’s been, eh? Did you catch those sports? The local news about the animal that did the thing? Gee whiz! Or the town gossip about Ol’ Uncle Bobbins and his brand new motor-car? Life sure moves fast these days!
Me? Oh, I don’t have much to share. Just this lil wee board game called Cosmogenesis, where you get to be a star.
Paul: It feels so very, very strange to be doing this. We’re always writing post-con roundups, flying home and tapping out our thoughts on the best new games we tried, but to do that after our own con? It feels a little peculiar, like the first time a doctor shone a light into my ear. But that’s a proper, sensible thing that doctors do, right? It’s not just for giggles?
Matt: At the time, it was straight-up stressful! We hadn’t accounted for the fact that people might be showing off things we really wanted to look at, so we frantically juggled schedules to try and check stuff out. There was still so much we missed, but we caught some REAL GOOD BITS.
Paul: For a start, Matagot only went and rolled up with an Inis expansion that they just casually announced IS A THING THAT EXISTS?
Paul: Wow.
So SHUX happened. Our first ever convention collected together hundreds of wonderful people for a weekend so amazingly positive that I’m still trying to process everything. I’m sat here looking at a blank page, trying to work out how to express how it was so much more than I could even have imagined it would be. It’s not so much that I’m lost for words as I’ve almost entirely forgotten what words are.
Matt: I know what words are! They come out of a mouth and are sometimes good or bad. Normal service will resume shortly, but today we’d just like to share some words and pictures.
October 7, 2017 Reviews Conflict-Free Games, Games for Two, Heavy Games, The Voyages of Marco Polo Hot dog! At the time of writing The Voyages of Marco Polo is ranked as BoardGameGeek’s 39th best game ever. Our team has now comprehensively tested, teased and tutted over every aspect of its complicated machinery to bring you what we … Read more
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Paul: Drop the sandbags, the Games News dirigible is aloft! Carried on cool currents and buoyed by the balmiest of gasses (their exact composition a closely-guarded secret), it carries up above the clouds to where the spriteliest gaming news flies, soaring across a sapphire sky. Are you ready for a spectacular trip, a voyage like no other, where we glimpse… oh! Look, it’s Dice Hospital! How wondrous!
Wait what? The dice are sick, you say?! THIS IS A DISASTER.
Quinns: With CMON’s new edition of Modern Art, a game of blisteringly quick and dangerous art auctions, Shut Up & Sit Down continues its exploration of classic Knizia. Just who is Reiner Knizia? Where did he come from? What is he doing? We’ve interviewed him and I still don’t know. All I can tell you is that he’s responsible for more than 500 games, literally some of which are good.
But Modern Art isn’t just the oldest Knizia game we’ve ever reviewed. With the exception of 1981’s Consulting Detective, I think this is the oldest game we’ve reviewed, period. It came out way back in 1992, when Paul was celebrating his 30th birthday and Matt hadn’t even been born yet.
Can you feel it? This site is trembling with time right now. Slip inside my cardboard Tardis. Let’s see if the years have been kind.
Cynthia: The third edition of Unknown Armies appeared in May of this year and got my attention with this pitch: “An occult game about broken people conspiring to fix the world.”
Alright, I thought, I’m hungry for games set in the actual dumpster fire world we live in, and I enjoy creepy, occult things, and I always want to investigate characters with secrets, traumas, and unsolvable problems. So I gathered a small cabal and led them into a morally ambiguous underworld of deadly rituals, paramilitary organizations, ancient crypts that appear only at midnight, young women without tongues, and murder. I plunged them into an international struggle for the future of the TransCanada oil pipeline, of Vancouver real estate, of the White House, and the world.
If you’re ready for a game of of vast conspiracies and sleepless nights, a game in which your obsessions give you strength and great power comes with great corruption, in which you’ll be haunted by invisible demons with ten-inch claws and compelled to do bloody deeds, where heroes are less Captain America and much more Jessica Jones… then read on. Just be warned: in case you haven’t figured it out yet, this game is not family-friendly. Nor is it for the faint of heart.