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Bring Your Own Book

In Bring Your Own Book, players take turns drawing prompts from the deck, then race to find the best phrase in their own book that satisfies the prompt.

Everyone has a book and sits in a circle. The cards are placed face-down in the middle. The starting player should also have a 1-minute timer. Each player gets four cards (with 5-7 players) or five cards (with 3-4). The starting player takes the top card off the deck, picks a prompt, and reads it aloud. Everyone except the Picker searches their book for text to match the prompt. They’re seeking for sequential text of any length: a single word, half of a sentence, a whole sentence, multiple sentences.

The first Seeker to find matching text announces “I’ve got it” and starts the timer. When the timer runs out (or every Seeker announces “I’ve got it”), each Seeker reads what they’ve found. Seekers who didn’t find text in time open to a random page and read a random sentence from it.

The Picker chooses their favorite submission and awards that Reader the card. After each round, the person to the left of the last Picker starts the next round. Once any player reaches three cards, everyone passes their book to the player on their left. This happens any time a player reaches three cards during the game. As such, it can happen as many times as there are players. It is quite possible for players to pass until they have their original book back.

The game proceeds until one player reaches the set number of cards. With 5-7 players, four cards wins it; with 3-4 players, it’s better to play to five.

In Dragon’s Gold, each player controls a team of dragon hunters (two knights, a thief, and a wizard). Like all dragon hunters, they have only one goal: gold, silver, jewels and magic objects. As for actually killing a dragon? It’s a piece of cake. But the most difficult part comes after the dragon is dead: the adventuring party has to figure out how to share the spoils.

As soon as a dragon is overpowered, then some additional gems are revealed, and the players who had participated in that hunting party start a negotiation over how to divvy up the gems. If the sixty-second sand timer runs out, then no one gets treasure. When all of the dragons have been slain and the treasure claimed or discarded, the game ends and players score for their holdings, with silver and magic objects worth 1 point each, gold worth 3, the Black Diamond worth 7, and the colored gems scoring 10-15 points for those players who hold more than everyone else. (In the Advanced game, the colored gems score 8-12 points in addition to a variety bonus of 5 points for each set of different colored gems a player holds. The Black Diamond is worth 19 points [in the 2011 edition], but negates a player’s score for all colored gems.)

Imperial Assault is a strategy board game of tactical combat and missions for two to five players, offering two distinct games of battle and adventure in the Star Wars™ universe!

Imperial Assault puts you in the midst of the Galactic Civil War between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire after the destruction of the Death Star over Yavin 4. Imperial Assault offers two separate game experiences. The campaign game pits the limitless troops and resources of the Galactic Empire against a crack team of elite Rebel operatives as they strive to break the Empire’s hold on the galaxy, while the skirmish game invites you and a friend to muster strike teams and battle head-to-head over conflicting objectives.

Matt, Quinns and Paul re-unite in a stuffy room to discuss all the marvelous games they’ve seen on their travels around North America, the forgotten continent. We get off to a civilized start with Bring Your Own Book and the delicate negotiation of Dragon’s Gold, followed by total regression into childhood and the beautiful miniatures … Read more

In a special feature on this ancient pastime, Brendan discovers everything he was taught about chess to be wrong and goes on a quest to learn it properly. A written transcript is available here.

Quinns: Good morning, kiddos! Please form an orderly queue and allow me to vaccinate you against the most deadly disease of all: Ignorance.

No, wait, sorry. I had the wrong tab open. It’s ebola. Pandemic: Legacy will be arriving late this year, turning the fantastic game of disease-battling (see our review here) into a single, apocalyptic, simulated year at the Centre for Disease Control. Excited? You’re not the only one. Z-Man has already received a preposterous 50,000 pre-orders.

This week, Shut Up & Sit Down was invited to play a finished prototype of the game. An event we were wholly unable to make because Brendan got his arm stuck behind a radiator again. Instead, we left that job to the data hounds of Board Game Geek news, who’ve posted a blog on the inner-workings of this box, though you’ll find a summary below.

Remember when we told you that Skull was the game that’ll make you and your friends shout the loudest? Monikers (buy here) might be the funniest game we’ve ever reviewed. Weirder still, it might be more than 100 years old.

We’ve always suspected that old things were the best, but now we know. Time to cancel those forthcoming reviews of Armada and Dragon’s Gold. Next week, we’ll be reviewing whist, football and tuberculosis.

Mysterium is a purely co-operative game for 2-7 players. One player takes the role of a helpful ghost who lives in a mysterious ancient manor. Other players are a group of psychics invited by the manor owner to solve the mystery of the place and bring peace to its residents, as any person who stays in the castle sees strange dreams.

The ancient legend says the ghost is the soul of the manor’s previous resident, who was unjustly executed for a crime he didn’t commit, more than 100 years ago. Now he tries to use the mysterious signs to tell people the truth about what really happened then, so that justice would be established and he might rest in peace for ever. The specialists in the supernatural were invited to try to understand what the ghost wants to tell and in case of success be honoured by one more victory and receive a generous reward. They have 7 days and 7 nights to reach their goal. If they succeed in time, everyone wins the game (including the ghost).

Quinns: Everybody, stop! STOP!

[Montage of factory workers looking up from industrial machinery. Doctors and nurses looking up from their surgery. Soldiers locked in deadly hand-to-hand combat, who freeze and turn to face the camera as one.]

I’ve played a new board game and it’s really, really good!

[Amiable mumbling as factory workers loosen their aprons and turn to face the camera, doctors take five on the edge of the operating table as blood spurts into the air, soldiers dust one another off and sit cross-legged like toddlers.]

Mysterium is a co-op game of ghosts, murder and hilarious incompetence, in that order. All but one player is a psychic spending the night in a horrid house where a killing took place. The final player, who may not speak, is a ghost sending everyone else horrible dreams. The ghost must guide the psychics to the correct murder weapon, crime scene and culprit before the week is over, or… well, I’m not sure. Maybe the psychics have concert tickets. It doesn’t matter, and you won’t care. You’ll be laughing too much and thinking too hard.

Quinns: HELLO everybody! I’m back from running the board game lounge of San Francisco’s Game Developer’s Conference and am now 90% tacos and 10% flu germs. I think my skeleton was confiscated by customs on the way home.

We’ll get to the news in a second, I just have to tell you what we’ve got coming in the next two weeks, because I couldn’t be more excited.

Just to start, we’re playing the biggest UK Megagame EVER this weekend, controlling Japan in a game with no less than 47 game masters. We’ll be bringing that to you guys as a two-part documentary. Paul’s back in the UK this weekend to play it so we’ll be recording two (TWO) podcasts. Then we’ve got reviews of Mysterium, Star Wars: Armada, Imperial Assault and Alchemists all lined up.

My goodness. But let’s start, as always, with the humble Games News.

Bring Your Own Book

Dragon’s Gold

Star Wars: Imperial Assault

Podcast #26: Mostly Books and Wookies

Brendan’s Rooky Errors: A Story of Chess

Games News! 23/03/15

Review: Monikers

Mysterium

Review: Mysterium

Games News! 16/03/15

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