September 19, 2016 Learn to Play Dead of Winter: The Long Night, Heavy Games, SU&SD Recommends, Bluffing Games, Cooperative Games It was two years ago that Paul and Quinns ordered you guys to buy Dead of Winter. Today, we’ve got fantastic news for everyone who disobeyed us! Dead of Winter: The Long Night is a … Read more
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Dead of Winter: The Long Night is the new stand-alone expansion for Dead of Winter: A Crossroads game.
Obtain more of everything that made Dead of Winter an epic struggle for power and survival! Experience a new colony full of new survivors and new gameplay elements, each of which is introduced to players through its own game scenario. Fight off bandits from another colony, build improvements to your colony, and most intriguingly, unravel the mysteries of the new Raxxon Pharmaceutical location. It is full of powerful items, but also full of Raxxon’s twisted human experiments that show up in the game as disturbing new enemies.
Dead of Winter: The Long Night can be bought alone and is a fully-realized Dead of Winter experience by itself. You can also combine everything – characters, items, objectives, crossroad cards, etc – between The Long Night and the original Dead of Winter.
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Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower is a stunning boxed game for 2-4 players, set in the shifting, labyrinthine lair of a sinister Gaunt Summoner! Work with your friends to conquer the secrets of the Silver Tower, or take the glory for yourself – characters carry over the skills and treasures they have earned in previous games. The 13 double-sided board tiles mean no two adventures need be the same; a roll of the dice can send your adventurers off on wild tangents, with literally thousands of different dungeon-crawl combinations.
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Thrower: The Silver Tower is the abode of a mad wizard, designed to chew up and spit out heroic interlopers by the dozen. Yet its first victim was small and personal: my finger.
After looking in the box, I pulled the sheath off my craft knife for the first time in a decade and immediately slit a digit open. It didn’t bode well for the three-hour assembly time I’d heard boasted of on the internet.
What you get in this box is a literal plastic kit with assembly instructions, like scale models of tanks and planes. There is even a dwarf with a multi-part beard to glue together. But I was swayed by the fond memory of twisting whole plastics off sprues in my Warhammer days, so I figured I could handle it. Plaster on finger, I dusted off my other modelling tools and set to work with one simple question in my mind. Could this board game be worth it?
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Quinns: Paul, it’s time for a dance as old as time. Put on this lycra onesie and take my hand.
Paul: But… there’s no music?
Quinns: Ah, but there is! The news dance is performed to the rhythm of the world’s news, to the crashing rhythm of current events and the harmony of headlines.
Paul: I do sometimes wonder if these contrived scenarios in which we read the news do anything for the site. But…
Quinns: But?
Paul: But not today! Olé!
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This week, Paul springs into action and plays against type as he looks at not one, but two games of the more physical variety. First up, he takes on the chunky and junky Junk Art, before going on to wrestle with (and shoot at) the penguins of Pingo Pingo. It’s all guns and blocks and dashing and crashing. Good heavens, I’m getting a headache.
Why this strange change of interest? What’s with Paul’s new, more active lifestyle? And what is the meaning of Quinns’ unusual delivery? That’s a lot of questions for a Friday. Let’s all go and have a lie down.
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Junk Art challenges players to transform a collection of disparate junk into something meaningful, a construction of size and significance.
Junk Art contains over ten game different ways of playing and more than sixty large, colorful wooden components. It challenges players to create large, stable and cannily-built works of “art” from these pieces, according to the rules of whatever game mode they’re playing. Some are collaborative, some are competitive and some are plain old chaos.
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Pingo Pingo has everyone searching for the Golden Pineapple while trying to avoid warrior penguins and reacting to a real-time soundtrack. A frenetic dexterity game driven by an action-packed soundtrack, Pingo Pingo demands players collect the most treasure, but avoid traps critters and fearsome foes. Be brave, fast, focused, and precise as the soundtrack counts down, while you attempt to face every challenge and make it safely back to your boat.
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[Everybody, please welcome back freelance writer Jon Bolding, who tackled the highly-recommended game of Orleans for us. This time, he’s covering one of his favourite RPGs.]
Review Soundtrack: Beat the Champ by The Mountain Goats
Bolds: A siren call of my youth. The gravel-voiced radio or television announcer chanting “Sunday!” and pointing you at an arena of legends. A contest of champions. A wholly made-up, entirely absurd, totally fixed contest of champions. If you did not grow up with it, if you’re just a roleplaying game enthusiast, well, I have an experience for you.
In an entirely approachable, well-laid-out 160-page volume, World Wide Wrestling gives you a set of rules that drive you into a world of entertainment and drama, screaming and spandex, costumes and camel clutches, masks and monsters. In the game, players are archetypal wrestlers – working people who play a role in a show, but also have to live their own lives. It adapts well to either small-scale independent wrestling or the big, media-frenzy contemporary wrestling that gave birth to people like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Hell, allow me some contradiction: I think it’s so precisely designed that it reaches beyond the world of wrestling.
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Joy of joys! The latest SU&SD review has arrived at port, having completed its grand tour of Seafall. Ah, see how it’s sitting low in the water? It must be carrying a tremendous cargo of opinions and insight. That, or it’s leaking.
If you haven’t heard the hype around this game, all you need to know is that it’s designer Rob Daviau’s third legacy game following on from the amazing Risk Legacy and Pandemic Legacy. But while those two games were fairly straightforward, Seafall is an ambitious epic. In other words, it’s the most exciting box we’re expecting to review all year. So what are you waiting for? Click play! Watch. And be amazed.
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