" " - Shut Up & Sit Down

Review: Trains: Rising Sun

Quinns: Bad news, readers. Our efforts to appease the grand old month of Expansionanuary seem to be for naught. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting darker. It’s now so cold in my flat that the carpet crunches underfoot.

We must have faith that this will end, friends. Unless the rumours are true, and this is indeed the year of twenty fifspansion.

It’s a possibility too horrid to contemplate. In the meantime, we will stay the course. Here’s a review of Trains: Rising Sun.

Quinns: We open this week with Six Games to Introduce Your Kid to Roleplaying, an article published over the weekend by Shut Up & Sit Down’s own Matt Thrower. Some would say teaching your child that they’re an imaginary druid called Elwad constitutes child cruelty. Not this site, though.

I’m mentioning this first because I found the above image via Google image search and needed it on our front page. It’s perfect. The glazed expression of the father. The frozen terror on the boy’s face. “The dice will tell us whether you live or die, son. Don’t cry, now. Would Elwad cry? Of course not.”

(Images sourced from BoardGameGeek.)

Thrower: You’re a platoon sergeant, patrolling the Normandy hedgerows in 1944. Suddenly, a burst of automatic fire opens up from the treeline. You don’t know what it is: it could be a machine gun, or a tank. It could be a lone rifleman, or the forward elements of an enemy brigade. Each demands a different course of action, and your life, and those of your men, depend on your picking the right one. What do you do?

Replicating this is the central problem faced by tactical wargame designers. Good tactics start with determining who your enemy is and where they are. Yet for all the effort they put in to simulating weapons and doctrine, tactical board games fail to take this into account. Most of the time you can see exactly what you’re facing.

Two new designers have decided to tackle this intractable issue with their first release, War Stories. It comes in two flavours, Liberty Road for the Western front and Red Storm for the east. As if implementing hidden movement wasn’t ambition enough, it also seeks to be realistic, quick-playing and easily learned. That’s two of the wildest dragons in wargaming, slain by the same title. No wonder people flocked to support the kickstarter.

First off, be warned that there is an unexpected disco interlude starting at 06:46. Brendan spilled some raw beats on our editing PC and the resulting funk has gotten into the motherboard, but we’re uploading a fix (with slightly better overall audio) now. It should be up by midnight GMT.

Second off, allow us to present the crown jewel in our Expansionanuary festivities! A ginormous Let’s Play of us finishing a full-size game of Cosmic Encounter, proving once and for all in a controlled, scientific environment just how much fun this game can be.

Enjoy, everybody!

A Guide to Cosmic Encounter's 5 Expansions!

Matt: What a wonderful world of Cosmic Encounters! If we only had spaceships and SPACE (in our hearts) then we might be able to build a better society on the fringes of our fragile galaxy.

Quinns: What are you doing Matt, this is a board games thing.

Matt: I’m getting everyone in that feel-good 1970’s vibe, when peace and hope and good-vibes ruled the planet and Cosmic Encounter first came out. A decade when man first stepped upon the moon, a famous rock band called Beatles was formed, and everyone had a nice time with flowers.

Quinns: I haven’t got time to fix you, Mattt, so let’s move on. Cosmic Encounter is a brilliant thing. Possibly THE BEST thing, as concluded in our gargantuan Top 25 list at the end of last year, and people who haven’t heard of it should check out this review. But the time for twenty-fives and tops is behind us, and we’re deep into the fog of a cruel Expansionanuary.

Matt: That’s true! I can’t even feel my fingers and fear that my extremities may soon be gone. But that darkness is being somewhat tempered by the fact that we now get to write a HOT ARTICLE about every single Cosmic expansion that’s been released to date. Five different boxes of madness that add a total of 115 (that’s one hundred and fifteen) new aliens to the base game – a staggering increase of 230% to the base game’s already ludicrous wad of 50 aliens.

Brendan: Out of Dodge is a game that understands one of the golden rules of the criminal genre: a botched heist is a good heist. As four outlaws on the run from a job that went terribly wrong, there is room here for hi-jinks, comedy, seriousness and treachery. It is a short, one-shot RPG from Jason Morningstar of Fiasco fame and it has a dastardly fun set up: you arrange four seats in the shape of a car (or use an actual real-life moving car), get in and argue about what went wrong while you speed away from the crime scene with a bag of loot much lighter than you expected.

Oh yeah, and watch out for all the blood because one of you is dying.

Out of Dodge is a four-person, “American Freeform” live-action game about desperate criminals on a car ride to nowhere. Perfect for your next road trip!

The game requires four players, a small space arranged like a car, and should take around 1-2 hours to play. It can be played by responsible people in an actual moving car. There is no Game Master, but you’ll need one player to prepare the materials.

This game includes mature language in the rules and generally deals with themes of betrayal and extreme violence.

Quinns: Good morning table gamers! It is the 19th of January in the year 2015. Whatever crazy stuff is happening in your life, you are reading the Games News. After that, there will be lovely comments. Rely on these simple things. It’s all going to be OK.

Once again our cover story goes to the prettiest game, this time forthcoming Susumu Kawasaki release Traders of Osaka. Due out in 2015, this is actually a reimplementation of Susumu’s 2006 game Traders of Carthage, and it’s unclear whether anything’s changed about the game itself.

Fine by me! I’d buy a re-implementation of whooping cough if it was this sexy. God, I’m such a fop.

It’s big, it’s as colourful as a bag of sweets and it wants YOU to become a space-faring superstar. Xia: Legends of a Drift System was one of the Kickstarter success stories of 2013, and a retail version is finally upon us, complete with pre-painted ships and metal space-coins.

Quinns has buckled himself into the driver’s seat of this board-behemoth to deliver the official SU&SD verdict.

Xia: Legends of a Drift System is a 3-5 player sandbox style competitive space adventure. Each player starts as a lowly but hopeful captain of a small starship.

Players fly their ships about the system, completing a variety of missions, exploring new sectors and battling other ships. Navigating hazardous environments, players choose to mine, salvage, or trade valuable cargo. Captains vie with each other for Titles, riches, and most importantly Fame.

The most adaptive, risk taking, and creative players will excel. One captain will rise above the others, surpassing mortality by becoming Legend!

Customize: Each player begins the game by choosing and customizing a Tier 1 starship. Invest all your money in engines and be a rapid, yet fragile, explorer. Put all your credits into an uber missile and watch other players flee in terror. Get a small engine and save space and credits to invest in buying and selling cargo. Or create a well rounded ship, ready for anything. In Xia, the choice is always yours.

Adapt: The goal of Xia is to become the most famous captain. Completing missions, besting ships in combat, purchasing higher tier ships, selling Cargo Cubes and claiming Titles are all ways that players can earn Fame Points. The best pilots will adapt to their surroundings, making snap judgments and changing plans on-the-fly. If you can think on your feet, you’ll do well in Xia!

Sandbox: The real fun of Xia is that each game will be different. There is no set direction of play, players may choose to be peaceful traders, fierce pirates, workers, miners, opportunists, etc. The game board is randomly laid out and explored each time you play. Players might choose not to explore at all, creating a tiny arena for swift and deadly combat, or explore all 19 sectors and have a large play-scape to exploit. It’s up to you!

Review: Trains: Rising Sun

Games News! 26/01/15

Review: War Stories

SU&SD Play… Cosmic Encounter

A Guide to Cosmic Encounter’s 5 Expansions!

Review: Out of Dodge

Out of Dodge

Games News! Bog Wood Edition

Review: Xia: Legends of a Drift System

Xia: Legends of a Drift System

Feeds