" " - Shut Up & Sit Down

Meteor

There is a storm of meteors heading directly toward our planet! Estimated time of impact is five minutes. We need to work together to destroy them all or the world will be blown to bits. Are you brave and resourceful enough to save our planet? If even one meteor gets through our defenses and hits the planet, life as we know it will be no more. Good luck citizens. It’s up to you.

Meteor is a real-time, cooperative, resource management card game.

You need to work together building and launching rockets as the time ticks down and the meteors get closer and closer to destroying the planet. Will you blow up all the meteors in time? Only one way to know for sure.

Meteor plays as a real-time card game. Each player has a hand of cards and a build area (build areas are shared in the six player game). A number of meteor cards are placed in the center of the table. Players must co-cooperatively build rockets to launch at the meteors before the time runs out.

[EDIT: Since publishing this article the 2nd edition of Meteor has gone live on Kickstarter! That’s probably a wiser investment than buying the first edition Quinns reviews here.]

Quinns: Imagine you and your friends are protecting the earth from meteors, assembling rockets from the cards in your hand. Sounds fun, right?

Now imagine you don’t have the right cards for a successful launch. And the clock is ticking and you only have five minutes to clear the board. And now imagine you don’t know how big a payload to launch at each meteor, and if you launch one that’s too big the terrific explosion will accelerate all the other meteors.

Oh, yes. Today we’re reviewing Meteor! It’s mean, exhausting and the art design ranges from underwhelming to unclear, but it’s a megaton of fun. For what it’s worth, if you like high-fiving people, this box could be considered a cardboard portal to the high-five dimension.

Quinns: Good morning everybody! News: I’ve got it, you want it. Let’s conduct this transaction like a couple of consenting adults. Stop looking at the door! News is entirely legal in the UK.

Board Game Geek News has a Big Book of Madness designer diary up, and goodness me this game looks like a treat. It’s a deeply co-operative, Harry Potter-style deckbuilder, but with a more flexible interpretation of deckbuilding that I find very welcome.

Players are attempting to close an evil book and defeat all the monsters spilling out of it, but you’re not simply slowly improving your deck as the game goes on. You can improve your deck, or spend your turn putting good cards in your friend’s deck, or trying to expunge horrible Madness cards that you’ll slowly amass as the game goes on, or actually closing the damn book.

Good news! Funemployed, a game of applying for jobs with the world’s worst CV, is so good that it’s snatched away Pictomania‘s paper crown to become our favourite lightweight party game.

Better news! Now you can watch Matt play it with the cast of Regular Features, his VERY RUDE comedy podcast (the video’s not rude, though).

Other good news: Funemployed is currently available with several of our partners.

Enjoy your weekend, everybody!

Dumb Games, or "Why I Sometimes Yearn To Punch You"

[Brendan returns! The author of Rooky Errors: A Story of Chess and The Correct Way to Scratch is back, this time talking about Dumb Games. Enjoy, everyone.]

“Did you ever play ‘Butt Comin’ at Ye’?” said Colly. We were walking through Lurgan, my hometown, and we had begun to talk about some of the more esoteric memories of our shared childhood. Fifty metres away, the town’s police station rose like a fortress out of the street, surrounded in green sheets of amoured metal, steel grates and breezeblock walls the colour of the Irish sky. We walked on past it.

“Butt comin’ at ye?” I said.

“Dave and I used to play it. You finish smoking your cigarette and you say ‘here Dave, butt comin’ at ye’ and then you just…”

He mimed flicking a cigarette. I laughed.

Paul: Quinns hello Quinns good morning Quinns have you seen? There’s a few interesting things that came in the Games News Sack this morning.

Quinns: That’s not the “Games News Sack”, Paul, that’s the postman’s bag.

Paul: Well he won’t be needing it any more. The important thing is that we’ve got the Games News today. As well as everyone else’s mail. And a few spare, loose limbs.

Quinns: Okay then. I guess now is as good a time as any to start telling people about Tail Feathers! A new skirmish game from Plaid Hat arriving in just a few months that combines Mice & Mystics with the X-Wing Miniatures game.

This week, Paul takes a trip to the clinic, as a result of looking at another new title from Plaid Hat Games. To everyone’s surprise, he finds himself deckbuilding with Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn. Deckbuilding! Whatever will happen next?

Seriously, what will happen next? Paul’s been unable to get hold of Quinns since setting up the North American office and now he’s acting a little out of character.

In Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn, an expandable card game, players take on the roles of Phoenixborns, demi-gods and protectors of this world. These characters are the great saviors of their civilizations. Before they came into existence, the humans were plagued by monsters like chimeras that took away their lands and forced them to live in walled-off cities. When the Phoenixborns came, they fought off the chimeras and freed the lands for humans to take over once again.

But the time of peace was short-lived. A prophecy arose that if one Phoenixborn was able to absorb enough Ashes of others, they would ascend into full gods and take mastery over this world. This, as well as humans’ greed for land, fueled the War of Ashes. The great cities now fight among each other, each one of them with a Phoenixborn at its helm, and you will decide who will rise and who will fall to ashes.

Evolution: Flight, an expansion for Evolution, introduces avian species into the ecosystem. Now your species can swoop on unsuspecting prey from above, fly away from predators, or soar to a new location when food is scarce. Will the ability to fly propel you to new heights? Or will it bring your downfall? Explore the expanding Evolution world and find out!

With this expansion, you may now choose between creating a normal species and creating a flying species! The expansion changes tactics and strategy dramatically, but it doesn’t change the base game’s core mechanics, so it’s a snap to learn.

Matt: I’m a robust bird looking to nest who is terrified of fat carnivores, looking to meet someone with a GSOH and wait this isn’t OK Cupid

Quinns: No, you silly goose! It’s a review of Evolution, the new game from North Star Games that is about evolution.

Evolution starts with 2-6 players being given control of their very own bouncing baby bit of cardboard, tracking the only two features a parent should care about: POPULATION and BODY SIZE. Each turn players receive cards depicting new evolutionary traits, you all play one to contribute to the food on the Watering Hole, and you play the rest onto your species, either as the traits they depict or to increase that species’ population or size, or you can burn cards to create whole new species.

And that’s the entire game! With these wonderfully simple rules, you’re off to the races. Although at these races we’ll simultaneously be betting on horses and praying our favourite horse doesn’t get eaten by another horse.

Meteor

Review: Meteor

Games News! 12/10/15

SU&SD Play… Funemployed

Dumb Games, or “Why I Sometimes Yearn To Punch You”

Games News! 05/10/15

Review: Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn

Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn

Evolution: Flight

Review: Evolution & the Flight Expansion

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