The Industrial Revolution in Lancashire. The game starts at the beginning of the Canal Age and ends after the development of railways. Players take the roles of entrepreneurs attempting to make the most money from the various industries of the time. Cotton dominates the game but players ignore the other industries such as coal mining and engineering at their peril.
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April 15, 2016 Reviews Brass, Heavy Games, Brass: Lancashire OH MY GOODNESS! Just one week on from Paul tackling Through the Ages, Quinns is cracking open another board game classic. Brass is an incredibly nuanced game of carving out the industries of England’s industrial revolution that dates all the way back to 2007, when Elvis … Read more
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In some ways, Memoir ’44 is the game that birthed SU&SD. Paul and Quinns were playing a long campaign of this definitive game of toy soldiers when they decided to create a board game web series. Historians can find our ye olde review of Memoir right here (timestamp 15:01), filmed on a borrowed camcorder on a sweltering summer’s evening.
A more recent Memoir video we did is our Operation Overlord Let’s Play. While Memoir’s campaign books make it a longer game and the Breakthrough rules are there if you want to make it more tactical, Overlord is what you get if you want an epic experience.
If only all games could be tailored to the same extent! What a world that would be.
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Fiasco is inspired by cinematic tales of small time capers gone disastrously wrong – inspired by films like Blood Simple, Fargo, The Way of the Gun, Burn After Reading, and A Simple Plan. You’ll play ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control. There will be big dreams and flawed execution. It won’t go well for them, to put it mildly, and in the end it will probably all go south in a glorious heap of jealousy, murder, and recrimination. Lives and reputations will be lost, painful wisdom will be gained, and if you are really lucky, your guy just might end up back where he started.
FIASCO is an award-winning, GM-less game for 3-5 players, designed to be played in a few hours with six-sided dice and no preparation. During a game you will engineer and play out stupid, disastrous situations, usually at the intersection of greed, fear, and lust. It’s like making your own Coen brothers movie, in about the same amount of time it’d take to watch one.
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April 8, 2016 Reviews Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization, Heavy Games Steady your socks, folks, this week’s review is a bumper one! Paul has been looking at Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization, the latest version of Through the Ages. To many, this is new iteration of a modern classic, yet … Read more
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Incan Gold is a quick, fun and tense game in which you and other adventurers explore an old Incan temple in search of gold and treasure. In each of the five rounds, you secretly choose if you want to continue exploring the temple in search of more treasure or retreat to the safety of your camp with your share of the treasure that has been discovered so far.
Each time that an explorer braves new territory, more treasure or a danger appears. When a second card of the same type of danger is turned over, all exposed treasure is buried, leaving the remaining adventurers with nothing. Do you flee the dangerous temple with your portion of the treasure that has been uncovered so far or do you venture into the exciting temple in search of more hidden valuables?
After five rounds of exploration, whoever has the most treasure is the ultimate explorer and winner!
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Mexica plots the development of the city of the same name on an island in lake Texcoco. Players attempt to partition it into districts, place buildings, and construct canals.
Districts are formed by completely surrounding areas of the island with water and then placing a District marker. The player who founds a district scores points immediately.
Canals and Lake Texcoco act as a quick method of moving throughout the city. Players erect bridges and move from one bridge to the next, which costs 1 action point regardless of the distance. They must also erect buildings. This costs action points, the exact number being dependent upon the building’s size.
In the scoring phases of the game, players score points (El Grande style) based upon their dominance in a District. In the 4 player game, players with the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd most buildings score decreasing numbers of points.
Only districts are scored in the first scoring round.
In the second scoring round at the end of the game, all land areas are scored, not just districts.
The player with the most points wins.
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[Oh my goodness, so many words! Following on from writer Chris Thursten’s awesome article about his first X-Wing tournament, he’s back with seven separate, hilarious reviews of X-Wing’s newest ships.
Chris: As of March, the latest round of expansions for Fantasy Flight’s enormously popular spaceship miniatures game, X-Wing, is finally and fully here. The first – er – wave of Wave 8 arrived in December, so a few of these ships and cards have had longer to bed in than others. Even so, it’s time to round the lot of them up and force them to answer hard questions, like: WHAT DO YOU BRING TO THE GAME? WHY ARE YOU NICE? WHY DO I FEEL COMPELLED TO OWN YOU? And: IS IT EVEN POSSIBLE FOR THE SAME WAVE TO ARRIVE TWICE? WOULD THAT NOT MAKE IT TWO SEPARATE WAVES, LIKE, IN BOTH A MARITIME AND A PHILOSOPHICAL SENSE?
The answer to that last one is evidently ‘yes’, by the way. Haha! Eat it, Heraclitus!
Read MoreQuinns: Oh, wow. Making the news bi-weekly in 2016 was a fantastic decision. We always have so many stories to choose from! Admittedly they’re less new, so technically we’re working with less news, but if it’s new news to you then whoops can somebody get me a tissue I just got a nosebleed FIRST UP, board games once again crept into the peripheral vision of the public eye this month as Russia banned the Polish board game Queue for its depiction of the dismal experience of shopping in USSR-era Poland, with its lengthy queues, poor stock availability and rife black market trading.
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