" " - Shut Up & Sit Down

Miniatures Game Review: Dropzone Commander

Eric: If you’re like me, some days you want something small and cozy, an intimate exploration of a few characters. Other days, you want something big and brassy.

Some days, though, you just want to flatten a building with your opponent’s soldiers still inside it.

Today I’m talking about the sweeping Dropzone Commander by Hawk Wargames. DzC (as we’ll abbreviate it for time and acronyminal sexiness) is a large-scale science fiction game set in the 27th century. As you all know, in the 25th century humanity was driven from its core worlds, including Earth, by the invasion of the parasitic Scourge. Now, 160 years later, it is time to TAKE THEM BACK!

DzC is a game about combined arms – the necessity of diverse units fulfilling specialized roles. On a given turn, you will have squads of infantry searching high rises for precious objectives and engaging in running close combats through their halls. You will field tanks and walkers unleashing massive firepower into each other and those high rises, causing them to collapse. Your aircraft will zip across the whole table at supersonic speeds while blowing up said tanks and bombing high rises as well (in the 27th century you really don’t want to be a footsoldier) and your anti-air firepower will hunt down these aircraft.

And you will have dropships – lots of dropships. We’ll come back to them in a minute.

Paul: They come unseen.

Quinns: …what?

Paul: They come unseen!

Quinns: I’m a bit concerned.

Paul: They Come Unseen! It’s a new hidden movement game designed by an actual Royal Navy submariner! Andrew Benford was a real Commander, just like Commander Riker.

You can’t knock Royal Navy submarines, Quinns.

Quinns: I wasn–

Paul: While everyone else was posturing with their toys in the cold war, the RN was the only service that ever actually used a nuclear submarine to sink an enemy warship. This man comes from one heck of a pedigree, AND his game’s asymmetric! You like those.

Quinns: Wait a second. I’ve checked his profile on BoardGameGeek and he’s definitely not a Will Riker.

What do board games, miniatures games, dexterity games, dinosaurs, dancing, Spider-Man, hot cosplay, leather kilts, hugs, remorse, death-defying climbs, arguments, soapy baths, vampires, fragile cities, farkles, conferences, boffing, children and blindfolds all have in common?

Why, they’re all featured in our GEN CON SPECIAL EPISODE, of course!

Exposure to this special may create a burning desire for more Gen Con Specials. If this occurs, go and watch last year’s Gen Con Special again.

Cacao is a quick game of placing workers in a jungle to harvest cocoa, mine gold and claim temples, all the while outmanoeuvring other players for the limited resources found in this colourful climate.

Paul: Do you like jungles? How do you feel about jungles? I think I would be a disaster in a jungle. Coming from the mild and unremarkable environs of suburban Hampshire, where any deviation from the overcast and temperate ambience causes wonderment and confusion amongst the locals, I would be helpless. It seems like everything in the jungle wants to kill or poison you. Everything is massive. The trees are massive. The cats are massive. The ants are massive.

But when I saw Cacao, I saw a safe jungle that I could enjoy, a jungle free of carnivorous plants, raging thunderstorms and toxic frogs. Yes, I will happily admit that the first thing that attracted me to the game was how Carcassonne-like it seemed. It has meeples. It has square tiles you lay down as you map out a patchwork world. How gentle! I thought. How soothing. There would be no rumble in the jungle here, just a… while with some tiles?

Burning Wheel is an award-winning fantasy roleplaying game in which players take on the roles of vibrant, dynamic characters whose very beliefs propel the story forward. Starting with a simple D6 dice pool mechanic, this game intuitively builds on its core concepts. The rules detail dramatic systems for task resolution, advancement, trials of belief, tests of nerve, searing social conflict, dangerous sorcery, miraculous faith, and brutal, gut-wrenching martial combat.

Behind the dice, your decisions drive the game’s systems. Their choices tangibly affect every outcome—from glorious victory to ignominious defeat. But there are consequences to every decision, ramifications to every action. The choices you make close off one path, while opening another. This philosophy underpins the character creation system for Burning Wheel. And it’s not just a matter of pushing a point here, or nudging a number there: As soon as a player decides to make a character in Burning Wheel, he is confronted with decisions about the character’s past, ethics, beliefs, scars, goals and dreams. Questions whose answers affect not only the player’s character, but the shape of the story as a whole. Burning Wheel is presented in an easy-to-read writing style, with plenty of insight and advice from the designer. If you’re not careful, Burning Wheel will change the way you play roleplaying games. The Gold Edition combines both the Revised Edition’s Burning Wheel and Character Burner. It has been reorganized for clarity and updated by the author.

Lately I’ve had Burning Wheel on my mind.

Some friends recently started up a streamed campaign with Roll20, and I tuned in to watch all 4 hours of their character creation. I joked around in chat, explained bits of the rules and mechanics to people who asked, and generally had a great time. But I haven’t been watching them actually play. I’ve stayed away partially because the timing doesn’t quite work for me, partially because one of my roommates is in the game and I can hear him talking in real time and then again 10 seconds later via Twitch’s time delay, but, most of all, because I am way too jealous.

Burning Wheel is one of those games I’ve played just enough to fall in love with, but not nearly enough to be sick of. Or even remotely satisfied.

Paul: It’s Games News time! Welcome, everybody, welcome. Please, come into my Games News hovel, the tiny hut in which I construct all of our Games News by hand, painstakingly assembling each tiny cog, ratchet and spring, bent over my work from dawn to dusk.

Today’s Games News is a special, post GenCon Games News, with no loud noises or big names. Instead, we’ve worked hard to bring you a few what you might call artisanal news pieces. Some are funny, some are very serious, but they are all the choicest pieces of news. Nobody brings you better Games News than Shut Up & Sit Down.

Quinns: So let’s start with some candles.

Time Stories offers a unique blend of role-playing and boardgaming experience. It is a decksploring game, and each deck of 120+ cards is a new story to explore.

The players are agents in a futuristic TSA (Time Survey Agency) that detects time discrepancies and sends you on mission, usually to prevent temporal rifts. Each mission is different, being set in a different atmosphere and illustrated by a different artist, with each mission having a core mechanism that differs from the next.

You usually take possession of local hosts to navigate in a given environment, but who knows what you’ll have to do to succeed? Roam a med-fan city, looking for the dungeon where the Syaan king is hiding? Survive in the Antarctic while enormous creatures lurk beneath the surface of the ice? Solve a puzzle in an early 20th century asylum? That is all possible, and you might even have to jump from one host to another, or play against your fellow agents from time to time…

Time Stories is a decksploring game in which each deck makes anything possible!

(This podcast is also available as a video.) Last year team SU&SD hustled 300 people into a dingy Gen Con annex to record a live podcast. It was incredible. So this year we did it again! After a shaky start where Matt, Quinns and Pip realise their audience is only there to hear about their … Read more

Miniatures Game Review: Dropzone Commander

Games News! 17/08/15

The 2015 Gen Con Special!

Cacao

Review: Cacao

The Burning Wheel

RPG Review: The Burning Wheel

Games News! 10/08/15

T.I.M.E Stories

Podcast #31: Return of the Gen-Cast

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