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The Top 3 Games From BoardGameGeek Con

Quinns: Good news, everybody! This month I was flown to America to talk at NYU’s unparallelled Practice conference, which meant it was only a cheap flight to Texas’s BoardGameGeek convention. I’d never been to a real-life American board game con, and it was full of surprises!

I picked up my badge and gun at the registration desk on the Thursday. As a first timer, I was only entitled to a Colt Single Action Army, but I wasn’t looking for trouble. I was looking for the best board games that were available to play here in the USA for the very first time. Stepping through the revolving doors, I tipped my hat at a table of strangers, and sat down for a game of Rampage.

Paul: Hacking my way through the games news jungle this month, I’ve parted the thick, oily leaves to reveal great swathes of forgotten expansions, many of them lost beneath the undergrowth. As birds of paradise call out, as creatures of the wild scream to one another from the treetops, I see that the sun is setting. Come, time is short. We’ll have to make camp here.

Review: Freedom: The Underground Railroad

It’s Friday once again! This week, Paul takes us on a historical tangent and, in a video a little more serious than some of our others, investigates Freedom: The Underground Railroad.

It’s a game about freeing slaves, about subverting and ultimately abolishing the slave trade, and it’s a co-operative challenge that you can also try solo. It’s also monstrously difficult. Too difficult?

A STORYTELLING BOARD GAME SET IN THE 1970s COLD WAR ERA.

SMERSH is a portmanteau of two Russian words that translates to “Death to Spies.” It operated as a counter-intelligence agency by the Red Army during the 1940s. Despite having had a large number of paid employees, little was known about the agency until recently when Russia opened their archives.

Agents of SMERSH is a cooperative Storytelling game that pits players as UN Secret Service Spies set in an alternate 1970s timeline against a newly formed and independent SMERSH. The game will be able to accommodate play with either The Encounter Book that contains over 1500 written encounters with a similar reaction matrix to Tales of the Arabian Nights – or played more simply with only encounter cards with shorter encounters and no matrix. Agents of SMERSH includes custom dice to determine success or failure of encounters, and more strategic play from what is typically expected of a Storytelling board game. There are plenty of James Bond gadgets, guns, cars, pop references and detailed artwork – not to mention a touch of humor. The game features the artwork of George Patsouras (The Resistance & Flash Point).

[Shut Up & Sit Down is immensely proud to present the following review of Agents of Smersh, a story game, by James Wallis, story game designer. James is the wonderful mind behind Once Upon a Time, and the actually-extraordinary Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. He’s also a lovely man. Enjoy!]

James: Agents of Smersh is a cooperative board-game for 1–4 players although it can be played by five if you want, and there’s part of its problem right there. The other problem is that Agents of Smersh is one of those children, like Carol Thatcher or Chelsea Clinton, whose parent is so dominant that it can never get away from them to build its own identity no matter how hard it tries.

What is Agents of Smersh? Agents of Smersh is Tales of the Arabian Nights given a rework and a re-skin. And at this point you are either looking slightly quizzical—’Tales of the Arabian Nights, is it that… oh I remember, Paul and Quinns reviewed it here, they dressed up, it was funny, I think they liked it quite a bit’—or you have just wet yourself with excitement. To understand Agents of Smersh it is important that you understand Tales first, so either read on or skip the next six paragraphs while you change your pants.

Paul: Hello and welcome again to another pumping, vibrant edition of Shut Up & Sit Down’s Games News. As the introductory sting fades away, let me swivel my chair to face camera two and sternly address you all with our lead story. Please duck to make way for the swooshing infographic, which gives thanks to both Meople’s Magazine and BoardGameGeek’s News Blog who, along with many publisher announcements, help to keep us informed.

Once again, purely for your amusement, we suffer yet more pain and indignity in deep space. This time, Pip, Matt, Brendan, Quinns and Paul are all playing Space Cadets, a co-operative game of spaceship piloting where everything can and will go wrong. Repeatedly. Forever. It’s okay! Quinns has played it before and knows what he’s doing, though he’s not actually in charge.

Brendan may have too, but that doesn’t mean he knows what he’s doing. Set engines to gingerly.

You’ve called for more Let’s Plays, so this is an HOUR LONG video and we very much hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it. We want to give special thanks to Ben Prunty for kindly giving us permission to use some of his music for this video. You might also have heard his work in the famous video game FTL.

Space Cadets is one big game made up of many, many minigames, which means that, if it goes to hell, it’s one big disaster made up of many smaller ones. But that’s not going to happen, is it?

Is it?

Keyflower is a game for two to six players played over four rounds. Each round represents a season: spring, summer, autumn, and finally winter. Each player starts the game with a “home” tile and an initial team of eight workers, each of which is colored red, yellow, or blue. Workers of matching colors are used by the players to bid for tiles to add to their villages. Matching workers may alternatively be used to generate resources, skills and additional workers, not only from the player’s own tiles, but also from the tiles in the other players’ villages and from the new tiles being auctioned.

In spring, summer, and autumn, more workers will arrive on board the Keyflower and her sister boats, with some of these workers possessing skills in the working of the key resources of iron, stone, and wood. In each of these seasons, village tiles are set out at random for auction. In the winter, no new workers arrive, and the players select the village tiles for auction from those they received at the beginning of the game. Each winter village tile offers VPs for certain combinations of resources, skills, and workers. The player whose village and workers generate the most VPs wins the game.

Europe, 1347. A disaster is about to strike. The Black Death reaches Europe, and during the next 4 – 5 years, the population of Europe will be halved. The players settle in the various regions of Europe, while the plague spreads throughout all of the continent. The players gain help from the various classes of the middle ages: The Peasants provide population growth, the wise Monks keep the rats away, the rich Merchants flee when the plague approaches, the warfare conducted by the Knights spreads the plague to new areas, the Witches control the spread through magic and witchcraft, whereas the Kings avoid the plague by staying in their fortified palaces. But the plague does not make any distinction: When the rats arrive, no one can feel safe. When the plague withdraws and the game ends, the player with the highest surviving population wins.

Early in the history of the United States, slavery was an institution that seemed unmovable but with efforts of men and women across the country, it was toppled. In Freedom: The Underground Railroad, players are working to build up the strength of the Abolitionist movement through the use of notable figures and pivotal events. By raising support for the cause and moving slaves to freedom in Canada, the minds of Americans can be changed and the institution of slavery can be brought down.

Freedom is a card-driven, cooperative game for one to four players in which the group is working for the abolitionist movement to help bring an end to slavery in the United States. The players use a combination of cards, which feature figures and events spanning from Early Independence until the Civil War, along with action tokens and the benefits of their role to impact the game.

Players need to strike the right balance between freeing slaves from plantations in the south and raising funds which are desperately needed to allow the group to continue their abolitionist activities as well as strengthen the cause.

The goal is not easy and in addition to people and events that can have a negative impact on the group’s progress, there are also slave catchers roaming the board, reacting to the movements of the slaves on the board and hoping to catch the runaway slaves and send them back to the plantations.

Through careful planning and working together, the group might see an end to slavery in their time.

The Top 3 Games From BoardGameGeek Con

Games News! 25/11/13

Review: Freedom: The Underground Railroad

Agents of SMERSH

Review: Agents of SMERSH

Games News! 18/11/13

SU&SD Play… Space Cadets

Keyflower

Rattus

Freedom: The Underground Railroad

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