Games News! 16/11/15

One Night Werewolf

Quinns: Hello everybody! Shut Up & Sit Down is still four sheets to the wind this week. Paul’s off to Board Game Geek Con, Matt’s recovering from Fantasy Flight’s World Championships and I’m just back from New York University’s Practice gaming summit. These are important trips! If you don’t check up on Americans they’ll be marrying cobwebs and getting stuck behind radiators before you know it.

Fun fact! At Practice I saw a talk by Leslie Scott, inventor of Jenga. Did you know that as Jenga is manufactured, they make sure the bricks are all of varying sizes and weights to make the game work better?

Ah, but you’ve been waiting so long for your Games News! Not to worry. I may have spent five hours asleep in a cold corner of LAX this morning, but I’ve fetched some black coffee and classic rock (won’t you do the same?) and I’m ready to get to work.

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SU&SD on the spot: Two lovely interviews from FFG’s 2015 World Championships

SU&SD on the spot

Paul: We’re back from Minneapolis! And what a trip it was. We had a terrific time at Worlds, Fantasy Flight Games’ annual championships, watching hundreds of skilled players compete to for the title of the best of the best in games like Netrunner, Imperial Assault and X-Wing. It was also our chance to get first-hand experience with Star Wars: Rebellion, Wave 2 of Armada and the latest editions of both Runebound and Fury of Dracula.

BUT ALSO it was a chance for other people to make videos about us (for a change!) and this week we want to link you to two interviews we gave.

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Star Wars: Rebellion

Star Wars: Rebellion

Star Wars: Rebellion is a board game of epic conflict between the Galactic Empire and Rebel Alliance for two to four players!

Experience the Galactic Civil War like never before. In Rebellion, you control the entire Galactic Empire or the fledgling Rebel Alliance. You must command starships, account for troop movements, and rally systems to your cause. Given the differences between the Empire and Rebel Alliance, each side has different win conditions, and you’ll need to adjust your play style depending on who you represent:

• As the Imperial player, you can command legions of Stormtroopers, swarms of TIEs, Star Destroyers, and even the Death Star. You rule the galaxy by fear, relying on the power of your massive military to enforce your will. To win the game, you need to snuff out the budding Rebel Alliance by finding its base and obliterating it. Along the way, you can subjugate worlds or even destroy them.

• As the Rebel player, you can command dozens of troopers, T-47 airspeeders, Corellian corvettes, and fighter squadrons. However, these forces are no match for the Imperial military. In terms of raw strength, you’ll find yourself clearly overmatched from the very outset, so you’ll need to rally the planets to join your cause and execute targeted military strikes to sabotage Imperial build yards and steal valuable intelligence. To win the Galactic Civil War, you’ll need to sway the galaxy’s citizens to your cause. If you survive long enough and strengthen your reputation, you inspire the galaxy to a full-scale revolt, and you win.

Featuring more than 150 plastic miniatures and two game boards that account for thirty-two of the Star Wars galaxy’s most notable systems, Rebellion features a scope that is as large and sweeping as any Star Wars game before it.

Yet for all its grandiosity, Rebellion remains intensely personal, cinematic, and heroic. As much as your success depends upon the strength of your starships, vehicles, and troops, it depends upon the individual efforts of such notable characters as Leia Organa, Mon Mothma, Grand Moff Tarkin, and Emperor Palpatine. As civil war spreads throughout the galaxy, these leaders are invaluable to your efforts, and the secret missions they attempt will evoke many of the most inspiring moments from the classic trilogy. You might send Luke Skywalker to receive Jedi training on Dagobah or have Darth Vader spring a trap that freezes Han Solo in carbonite!

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Fury of Dracula (third edition)

Fury of Dracula (third edition)

Eight years ago Mina Harker and her companions returned home from Castle Dracula believing that they had definitively banished the vampire Count’s evil presence from the earth. They were wrong. The King of the Un-Dead has now risen again to menace mankind. Throughout Europe wolves are behaving strangely, superstitious peasants are growing fearful, and mysterious deaths are proliferating. Tormented by uncanny dreams and haunting visions of nighttime travel and drinking blood, Mina has rejoined her former companions, now even more determined to find Count Dracula and destroy him once and for all.

In Fury of Dracula you undertake their perilous quest, hunting Dracula across Europe and battling him wherever he is revealed. Or you take on the role of the legendary Count Dracula himself as he seeks to thwart these pursuers and plunge the entire continent into an unrelenting and evil darkness.

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Podcast #35: Rebellion in an Airport

Oh god. Sit down. The new podcast is out, and we’ve peaked. We’ll never have a lineup like this again. Last week we enjoyed exclusive access to scalding-hot 2016 Fantasy Flight epic Star Wars: Rebellion, and on this podcast we want to tell you all about the fun we had with it. But that’s not all! We also discuss our time with the wonderful new edition of Fury of Dracula, return to Star Wars: Armada and Quinns has sat down with Jeff Cannata of the DLC Podcast for a (well signposted) spoiler-ridden chat about Pandemic Legacy. That’s more amazing board games than is wholly decent. But you deserve it.

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Review: Star Wars Armada, Wave 2

Review: Star Wars Armada, Wave 2

Paul: Quinns I am so sorry that I blew up your space ship. I know you liked that space ship and you wanted to try out that space ship as part of Armada’s Second Wave of Expansions, so I apologise for shooting it until it exploded. It was only a small space ship and it did not take much shooting before the exploding happened, so you cannot accuse me of excess.

However, I hope this won’t colour your experience or your impressions of Wave 2, even though I, a completely inexperienced Armada player, blew up your space ship. And also a lot of your TIE fighters. Obviously I didn’t do great, being new to the game and a little overwhelmed, yet I still seem to have shot a lot of things. How do you feel?

Quinns: I feel like a man who’s been waiting six months for the Imperial Raider, and then you blew it up before it had fired a shot. So much for continuing our coverage of Star Wars Armada, which started with this written review and this fun Let’s Play.

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Impressions: Fury of Dracula 3rd Ed.

Impressions: Fury of Dracula 3rd edition

Paul : I’m a doctor. I’m not the Doctor, but I have dogs and garlic and a knife and a gun, along with train tickets that take me all over Europe. That’s better than anything Colin Baker ran around with. The dogs are particularly useful because they saved me from an ambush. This was just one of all sorts of unpleasant surprises that Dracula had left in his wake, like horrid slime behind a slug, as he slipped his way across Europe. In this case, he’d left a nasty surprise in Edinburgh, one of my very favourite cities. Damn you, Dracula, for ruining such a fine town.

Quinns: Paul, are you excited about the new edition of Fury of Dracula? Fantasy Flight’s gothic hidden movement game, originally from Games Workshop back in the distant past, has been out of print for so long now that it’s almost passed into legend. Now and then, copies surface online with ridiculous three-figure price tags, but they’re as rare as hen’s teeth.

Paul: As rare as vampire fangs! Except those fangs aren’t rare any more. Dracula’s back! He’s back in style, too, with a glossier cape, a smoother style and even an improved map of Europe. I’m glad to see Dracula back because the boy done good.

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Impressions: Runebound 3rd Ed.

Impressions: Runebound 3rd Ed.

Quinns: Paul, do you remember our Runebound review?

Paul: No? Who are you? Get out of my house.

Quinns: That’s because it doesn’t exist! I played the 2nd edition of fantasy quest game Runebound back in 2011 and didn’t think it was vitally important to tell our readers about it.

Paul: That’s probably because it wasn’t vitally important. It wasn’t the most compelling fantasy quest game I’ve ever played, either. It was a bit stodgy, a bit brown, a bit turgid, a bit-

Quinns: BUT PAUL! Fantasy Flight are about to release a new, beautiful, 3rd edition of Runebound and we PLAYED IT HERE AT THEIR WORLDS EVENT!

Paul: YES I KNOW THIS WHY ARE YOU YELLING AT ME here we are all asweat with excitement right now, reporting LIVE FROM THE SCENE and completely surrounded by X-wings and Netrunner decks and people live-streaming who have been repeatedly told DON’T SWEAR ON THE STREAMS.

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Games News! 02/11/15

Escape rooms

Quinns: I write to you, toothbrush in mouth, suitcase open, packing for the trip of a lifetime.

Tomorrow Team SU&SD will fly to Fantasy Flight’s 2015 World Championships. We’ll be interviewing folks, previewing new releases and generally luxuriating at the world’s best publisher of licensed games. We are also going to steal so much stationary.

We’ll have lots of content up on the site for the next week, but probably in unusual shapes. In the meantime, here’s a quick Games News! A gasp of normalcy before Paul and myself climb onto a jetplane, bound for five days of board gaming. Ah, Roseville, Minnesota! Truly, a field of dreams…

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Spoiler-Free Review: T.I.M.E Stories

T.I.M.E. Stories is a whole new kind of co-op board game

It’s time for another of 2015’s most breathtaking releases, and that’s not a euphemism for a fart. Rather, T.I.M.E. Stories is a whole new kind of co-op board game. Your team will complete each time travel scenario in a blistering five hours and then it’s time to buy a whole new deck, making this the most expensive game we’ve ever covered. Great Scott!

On the other hand, the only thing Quinns loves more than the movie Primer are board game expansions. What happens when an immovable force meets an unstoppable object? Tune in and find out.

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