The next level of hurt is here! Malifaux is back with bigger guns, sharper teeth, and more chest-pounding action than you can believe! Malifaux 2nd Edition introduces new characters to the game, as well as never-before-seen crews, a new way to build characters using a brand-new upgrade system, and new stories branching from Twisting Fates to keep you on your toes!
Read More
[Our tour of the most popular miniatures games is almost at an end! If you missed Eric Tonjes’ first few delightful and accessible reviews, do check out Infinity, Warmachine and Dropzone Commander.]
Eric: I’ll start with a confession. Every month, as I sit down to write this column, I feel a dilemma. Miniatures games are, of course, games. Part of the goal of these columns is to expose you to clever or innovative gaming ideas being developed in the miniatures world. Thanks to limits on space and the amount of time I’m comfortable demanding, I end up exploring the gamishness of the game and have little space for anything else.
Yet miniatures games are also more than simple games, and none exemplify this better than Malifaux, our pick for this month. They are, in a real sense, about style. You don’t spend outrageous amounts of time and money on little models just for the act of gaming – you could use cardboard tokens and cereal boxes with their rules. You buy and assemble and paint the models and build the terrain and read the lore for the same reason I own aviators and a (fake) leather jacket – because you want to feel cool. You want some panache and style with your dice rolls and movement decisions.
If that is true, then Malifaux by Wyrd miniatures is the coolest of the cool kids. It drips theme – a theme that is something like Western-Gothic-Industrial-Steampunk-Horror.
Read More
Quinns: Haikus! Like poems that went through a trash compactor. I think they’re awesome, and have decided to write this week’s Games News entirely in haiku form.
If you think you can do better than any of these, pop your entry in the comments! I’ll pick a winner to go beside my own poems and inevitably outshine them.
Stronghold’s back again
A game of deadly sieges
Enduring the years
Leigh & Quinns collaborated on Life Hacks last year, a very personal article about learning to play Netrunner. They return for this article about the 2015 UK Netrunner Nationals.
Quinns: I am slumped on the floor of the Birmingham Hilton. My head almost between my knees, I break into an orange by pressing my fingers into it until the skin splits. I begin eating. The flesh is both dry and watery in my mouth.
“I don’t know if I’ll make it,” I tell Leigh. Then a pause, weighing my next words with the pulp in my mouth. “And I don’t know if I want to play.”
Read More
Market research tells us that the median SU&SD reader is, at a given moment, most likely to be thatching their mead hall. How boring! You’d best pop our 33rd ever podcast on in the background.
Matt and Quinns are desperate to talk about their crippling Infinity habit, while Paul’s been playing the beloved game of Battlecon. We’ve got a quick interview with Fantasy Flight CEO Christian Petersen where he answers such lovely questions as “What happens to board games that don’t sell” and “What is the most stressful thing about your job”. And we receive an email from Brooklyn-based SU&SD fan Nate Kushner titled The Sad Room.
The fun never stops! The thatching shouldn’t either, though. Chop chop.
Read More
Paul: Good morning, Quinns!
Quinns: Good morning, Paul!
Paul: You know what, I think it’s going to be an exciting Games News this week! Let’s get right into the Games News Forecast, beginning with a look at the satellite picture that shows a heavy cloud of zombies coming in from the north.
Quinns: That sounds like one of the all-time bad weeks.
Paul: Don’t worry! It’s just the forthcoming single-player campaign for Zombie 15’. If our review of that one slipped you by, you should know that we recorded it in a single 15 minute take.
Read More
Quinns: HELLO everybody! No video this week as Paul’s on holiday and I’m working on something that I want to get just right, but we’ve still got something for your weekend.
Cool Ghosts is a new project from Matt Lees and I that’s kind of “Shut Up & Sit Down, for video games”. Don’t worry about either of us taking time away from SU&SD, though! Matt’s working on Cool Ghosts instead of his prior YouTube channel, and I’m just swapping it in for my old video game freelance work.
Good places to jump in would be my roundup of new releases on Steam, Matt revealing the new Hyper Realistic Turbo 3D Edition of The Witcher 3, of both of us bickering like a married couple as we play Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime.
You’ll find a load of familiar faces from the SU&SD comments making themselves at home, too. Do go check it out! Unless you hate video games, in which case here’s a video of a sleepy ferret.
Read More
In charge of valuable cargo, you must deliver it from Osaka to Edo. But fierce competition and the Black Tide may sink your hopes for fortune! Set sail for Japan in this exciting game for traders full of opportunities… and opportunists!
A compact game that plays fast with impactful choices every turn.
Buy, take coins, or reserve a card: no matter the choice, it will always affect your opponents’ turns.
Read More
Quinns: Today we finish our review triplet of games set in Japan!
First we had the beautiful, and beautifully clean design of Samurai. Next was the grand old game of Shogun, which was no less impressive. Today we look at Traders of Osaka, a small box game that was actually designed in Japan by one Susumu Kawasaki. And today I want to talk about yet another kind of beauty.
I don’t say this enough, but one of my favourite things about board games is that each one feels like receiving a shrink-wrapped idea, direct from the designer. I’ve called board games a “lossless” format before, meaning that unlike trying to write a novel or make a videogame, in the creative process of making a board game you can directly transmute the thing you have in your head into a real, physical box. It’s because of this that even bad board games (no- especially bad board games) have something intensely personal about them.
The difficulty with designing board games is, of course, making sure they arrive in one piece at their destination. That players can unpack them, study the documentation, and enjoy themselves as you intended.
So it’s fitting that Traders of Osaka is a game about shipping handicrafts across treacherous waters. As you hold this box, you’re holding Susumu Kawasaki’s beloved idea, designed in Japan, manufactured in China, handed to you by some dutiful postman. Did it get here in one piece?
Read More
Quinns: We’ve got a very special Games News for you today. Paul is quite literally in the Yukon, but coming to us live from a satellite phone!
Can you hear us, Paul?
Paul: Quinns? This isn’t a great time. I’m up a tree at 63.9946° N, 135.4902° W. There’s a bear after me, or I THINK it’s a bear–
Quinns: Paul, the first images have come through for Pandemic Legacy!
Paul: Seriously?
Quinns: Yes! There’s a whole video trailer.
Read More