" " - Shut Up & Sit Down

Great Western Trail

America in the 19th century: You are a rancher and repeatedly herd your cattle from Texas to Kansas City, where you send them off by train. This earns you money and victory points. Needless to say, each time you arrive in Kansas City, you want to have your most valuable cattle in tow. However, the “Great Western Trail” not only requires that you keep your herd in good shape, but also that you wisely use the various buildings along the trail. Also, it might be a good idea to hire capable staff: cowboys to improve your herd, craftsmen to build your very own buildings, or engineers for the important railroad line.

If you cleverly manage your herd and navigate the opportunities and pitfalls of Great Western Trail, you surely will gain the most victory points and win the game.

Burgle Bros. is a cooperative game for 1-4 players. Players are unique members of a crew trying to pull off a robbery of a highly secure building — without getting caught. The building has three floors (4×4 tiles), each with its own safe to crack. Players start on the first floor and have to escape to their helicopter waiting on the roof.

Players each have three stealth tokens. Whenever they are on the same tile with a guard, they lose one. If any player is caught without a stealth token, the game is over. If players can open all three safes, and escape through the stairs to the roof they win.

Matt: Chucking Pandemic Legacy in the bin proved to be an uncomfortable day for my board game collection, causing a cardboard-flavoured existential wobble. As much as I love – had loved – Pandemic, experiencing the full-fat campaign spin-off had left me wondering if I’d ever bring myself to go back to the standard co-op game that had been such a household staple.

I’ve spent a while poking my nose around for a worthy replacement, and – for me – I think it might be Burgle Bros.

Dropping two to four players into a classic bank heist, Tim Fowers’ has squeezed an almost comical amount of theme and bits and ideas into a box that – being generous – might hold a small shoe. Our intrepid / idiotic thieves have failed to case the joint ahead of the job, so it’s up to you and your Colleagues-In-Crime to first find the safes, then crack them, grab the loot, and get out.

Tickets Now On Sale for The First SU&SD Convention!

Quinns: This is one of those times where you wish our headlines didn’t already use capital letters, so we could SHOUT!

Our team has been working ludicrously hard for the last five months putting together the first ever SU&SD convention. It’ll be in Vancouver, Canada on October 6th, 7th and 8th of this year, and tickets, details and hotel rooms are available through THIS LINK.

You can expect a board game lending library, tons of tables to play games, no less than three Megagames(!), a full track of talks and loads of special guests including every single member of the SU&SD team. It’s going to be ludicrously good fun. Practical info can be found on the above SHUX ’17 page, but I’ll pop a small F.A.Q. after the cut.

Paul: Here we are again, marshalling a whole host of new Games News arrivals! Please stand back as I wave the latest Games News to Gate F26, where it will disembark and make its way toward customs. Quintin, I believe you actually wanted to detain a particularly important story related to Fantasy Flight’s new Legend of the Five Rings card game, right?

Quinns: Ah, yes please, Paul. Please send it this way, where I will thoroughly inspect it, as well as the first of their preview articles…

Quickly, man the battlements! The podcastle is under attack from deadly waves of silence. Secure the chat parapets, and brace the gates of opinion! In episode 57 of our award-winning podcast Quinns offers thoughts on I’m the Boss!, the first Sid Sackson game that this site has ever covered, while Paul takes a look at the new edition of Citadels, the first game to ever appear on SU&SD. Quinns has also played an advance copy of the much-hyped Century: Spice Road, while Paul rounds off this week’s Fresco review by talking about that game’s expansions. There’s combat juggling in the folk game section and the boys chat about why Virgin Queen was Quinns’ lowest point, but perhaps the biggest surprise comes during our mailbag segment. We’ve received a reader mail that’s made us question our entire attitude towards not just box inlays, but board games in general. Listen in horror as one listener’s expensive opinion spreads across the very fabric of SU&SD, like a spilled glass of wine.

Paul: Here are two things that are absolutely and irrefutably true: 1) I love art. 2) I hate getting up early. Here are two more things that are painful in their truth: 1) Sometimes you have to get up early in the service of your art. 2) This feels awful.

Here are three other things that feel awful: 1) When the guy at the market has nothing to sell but combinations of the same sickly yellow paint (“I’ve got a bit of yellow, some yellow, or lots of yellow.”) 2) Mixing colours that you can’t then use because someone beat you to the cathedral again. 3) When the bishop buggers off. Honestly, what is the point of bishops?

Here’s something that’s great: Fresco.

In Fresco, players are master painters working to restore a fresco in a Renaissance church.

Each round begins with players deciding what time they would like to wake up for the day. The earlier you wake up, the earlier you will be in turn order, and the better options you will be guaranteed to have. Wake up early too often, however, and your apprentices will become unhappy and stop working as efficiently. They would much rather sleep in!

Then, players decide their actions for the turn, deploying their apprentice work force to various tasks. You’ll need to buy paint, mix paint, work on painting the fresco, raise money (which you’ll need to buy the aforementioned paint!) by painting portraits, and perhaps even send your apprentices to the opera in order to increase their happiness. Points are scored mostly by painting the fresco, which requires specific combinations of paints, so you’ll need to buy and mix your paints wisely, in addition to beating other players to the paints and fresco segments you would like to paint.

Fresco includes several expansion modules, so you can play without expansions for a lighter family game or add in expansions to vary play and increase the decision-making and difficulty, resulting in a very flexible game with a high replay value.

Paul: I stumbled into the Games News office this morning (much as I do every morning) to find it abandoned, a thin and smoky haze twisting through sunlight sliced a dozen times by crooked venetians. As I tried to blink away the hatred for this unsociable hour of the day, I spotted a single, cryptic note scrawled on Quinns’ desk:

“PAUL we haven’t covered Bear Park yet. We should definitely cover Bear Park. It’s the perfect lead story for your solo news.”

So, he was gone. And he’d left me with the bears.

It was time for the day’s first drink.

The third talk from our V&A collection is a sneak preview of a new talk that Quinns is working on. OooOOOooh!

A Feast of Friends is Quintin’s overlong, years-late answer to the question everyone asked when he left the video games press for board games, which was “Isn’t that a step down?” No, no it isn’t. Board games are beautiful, important and have a glittering future, and this is why.

Enjoy, everybody!

Great Western Trail

Burgle Bros.

Review: Burgle Bros.

Tickets Now On Sale for The First SU&SD Convention!

Games News! 01/05/2017

Podcast #57: A Purple Boss, A Spicy Path

Review: Fresco

Fresco

Games News! 24/04/2017

SU&SD Presents: A Feast of Friends!

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