" " - Shut Up & Sit Down

Relic Runners

In Relic Runners, each player takes on the role of a character keen to exploit and acquire relics that have been unearthed in a long lost part of the jungle. Each would-be archaeologist has a colorful past — retired university professor, former army captain, etc. — and wants to be the first to get their hands on the precious loot to earn the most victory points.

Players must navigate a series of paths in order to visit temples. The archaeologists are restricted in their movement by their access to rations, but thankfully they can place markers on paths to allow them to travel for free in future turns. The players also have a toolkit that can be upgraded in three particular ways to break the rules in some way or offer them an advantage as they move around.

Each time a player visits a temple, he takes a token. Initially the temples offer up victory points or some form of in-game bonus. When the final token is taken, a relic is placed there to be collected. The players earn large victory points for collecting relics of different types (set collection) and players can also earn bonus points for creating long routes and traveling along these to collect relics.

[We’ve found another article Quinns never published! Honestly, that boy was so disorganised. This death thing is a much better arrangement.]

Quinns: Relic Runners knocks one thing absolutely out of the park. It feels like a board game.

The box shows characters falling over themselves in giddy adventure. Open said box and you’ll find it loaded with gorgeous components, from a three-dimensional board to dozens of shiny plastic relics. The game itself lasts an entirely reasonable 60 minutes, and fits as snugly around 2 players as it does 5. It’s all just quietly joyous.

It’s also not surprising. When I profiled Days of Wonder a few months back, I found a company proud of their policy of only releasing between zero and one new game each year. In other words, investing all of their energy in trying to create a second Ticket to Ride, or failing that, a second Small World. They want another game straightforward, accessible and cheerful enough to break into bookshops all over the world. Or maybe not even a game- a brand, something that’ll sell for years.

The Shut Up & Sit Down Supercomputer: I have spent the week exhaustively probing and sampling the corpses of Quinns and Paul, and have arrived at a conclusion: They are still dead. Therefore I shall continue to transmit the “Games News” as if they were not. I recommend that you all perform the human act of “denial”, as it sounds quite soothing.

Paul: Good morning everybaby!

Quinns: Paul, I cannot believe this. You will remember that two months ago I performed such that the people should buy real-time game Escape: The Curse of the Temple.

Paul: I remember it well, it made me birth eight giggles from my larynx.

Quinns: What a friend. But this week Queen Games has announced Escape from Zombie City. A tremendously similar game of rolling dice and escaping zombies, this time taking 15 minutes instead of 10. Just after I told everyone to buy the first Escape!

Paul: That is the limit!

Quinns: Stow your bum! This story gets even crazier.

The two men knelt in the shadow of the rock outcropping and gazed at the destruction in the crater below them. Combat reporters, they made their living with words, but this time words failed them. The ambush had been perfectly executed. For less than an hour of soundless fury, moondust had erupted below them as the well-hidden crawlers, MCUs, and PMC soldiers of the Luna Mining Corp poured fire into the exposed ranks of the troops and MCUs of Mond Bergbau AG. Now as the dust drifted lethargically down, the two men could see wreckage and death spread out before them across the lunar surface.

Moonbase Alpha is a simulation of lunar combat in an alternative history between two exo-planetary private corporations that have hired private “security” companies to enforce their territorial and intellectual property rights. In Moonbase Alpha, the first player to inflict enough casualties on his or her opponent to drive their stock price down or earn enough profit to maximize their own stock price wins a major victory. The corporation with the highest stock price at the end of negotiations wins a minor victory.

Darkest Night, by designer Jeremy Lennert, is a fully-cooperative board game for one to four players (up to six with variants), set in a kingdom broken under a necromancer’s shadow. Each player takes on the role of one of the kingdom’s last heroes (nine playable characters), each with a unique set of special abilities, just as they hatch a plan to save the realm.

Searching the kingdom provides new powers and equipment to strengthen you and your party, as well as the keys that can unlock the holy relics and defeat the necromancer. You can acquire many powerful abilities—unique to each hero—that can help to fight the undead, elude the necromancer’s forces, accelerate your searches for items and artifacts, and more. The knight is a brave and powerful warrior; the prince can rally and inspire the people; the scholar excels at locating and restoring the treasures of the past.

But ravenous undead roam the realm, and as the necromancer continues to build his power base, he blights the land and his army steadily grows. As the game wears on, the necromancer becomes more and more powerful, creating blights more quickly and effectively. If an area becomes too blighted, it gets overrun—and the monastery receives the spillover. And if the monastery is ever overrun, the necromancer wins and the kingdom is swallowed in darkness!

Before the monastery falls, it’s up to you and your party to defeat the necromancer in one of two ways: If you can gather three holy relics and bring them all back to the monastery, you can perform a powerful ritual to break the necromancer’s power and scour the land of the undead. Alternatively, you can try to defeat the necromancer in direct combat—but be warned, he will readily sacrifice his minions to save himself.

Can you save the kingdom from darkness? Do you have the courage, the cunning and the will to withstand the necromancer and his forces? Strategize, plan and bring out the best of your abilities to end our Darkest Night!

Look what we found! The unaired SU&SD pilot from 1974! And reviewing such contemporary board games! Crazy.

Watch as the boys take their first halting steps through the gorgeous Legends of Andor, and stick it to the man with a look at two titles from Victory Point Games’ catalogue: Darkest Night and Moonbase Alpha. You might remember VPG as the small publisher Quinns talked about earlier in the year, whose games come with a complimentary napkin.

Keep on rocking, guys.

[Good news, everyone! We were clearing out Quinns’ stuff and we found something he was apparently too scared to publish. By way of showing respect, we’ve published it here in full.]

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really want to write about this event. In the words of one of the people I ate with, I come out looking like a “c*nt.”

Last month SU&SD was invited to the Betrayers’ Banquet, another London-based installation, perhaps a little sexier than Pip’s recent adventures of being locked in a room for an hour. It is, essentially, Satan’s dinner party. At one end of the table you’re served course after course of wonderful food. Down at the bottom, you get inedible slop. But you can improve (or potentially ruin) your position by engaging in the prisoner’s dilemma with the diner sat opposite you.

As a pro boardgamer, surely this would go well for me. Surely.

Legends of Andor is a cooperative adventure board game for two to four players in which a band of heroes must work together to defend a fantasy realm from invading hordes. To secure Andor’s borders, the heroes will embark on dangerous quests over the course of five unique scenarios (as well as a final scenario created by the players themselves). But as the clever game system keeps monsters on the march toward the castle, the players must balance their priorities carefully. Will their heroes roam the land completing quests in the name of glory, or devote themselves to the defense of the realm? Uncover epic tales of glory as you live the Legends of Andor!

The Capo is getting old and about to retire. You think. Maybe it’s time for you to make your moves from behind the scenes, to put the gangsters into play that support your goals. Will you gain the most respect?

Nothing Personal is a game for 3-5 players. Players attempt to gain the most respect in five turns (five years) by amassing respect amongst the mafia through influence, negotiation, blackmail and bribery.

Players take turns playing influence cards to take control of gangsters and work them up the chain of power. Each position and gangster has their own special abilities that give players the edge they need to accrue the respect they deserve – to become the Boss of Bosses.

Space Cadets: Dice Duel – the “Team vs. Team, Real-time, Dice-Rolling Game of Starship Combat!” – pits two spaceships against one another in quick-paced combat. The players are divided into two teams, each team playing the crew of a ship and winning or losing together based on how well they perform. The game ends when one side destroys their opponent by causing four points of damage through torpedoes or mines.

Relic Runners

Review: Relic Runners

Games News! 04/11/13

Moonbase Alpha

Darkest Night

The Unaired SU&SD Pilot

Review: Betrayer’s Banquet

Legends of Andor

Nothing Personal

Space Cadets: Dice Duel

Feeds