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Renaissance Man

In Renaissance Man, each player is an example of the title character – skilled as a scholar, a merchant, a knight, and a baker – and throughout the game will hire, recruit and train others with the goal of producing a Master of one of these four areas of study. Each round consists of players creating actions by combining a worker in play with a card from hand:

Merchants hire new workers.
Knights compete to recruit workers from the common pool.
Bakers offer their goods in exchange for workers’ actions.
Scholars train others in the ways of the Renaissance Man.

Instead of providing these actions for a player, a worker in play can be assigned to support higher-level workers. Two workers are required for support, and they are laid out as such in a pyramid-fashion. Five workers create a player’s foundation, and the first player to complete a pyramid structure of fifteen workers creates a single Master of study, thus winning the game. A little luck will help along the way, but the day will surely go to the player who finds the most clever ways out of the trickiest situations in Renaissance Man!

The card game with ever changing rules! It starts out simple, with just the Basic Rule card: draw one card and play one card during each player’s turn. But New Rule cards quickly make things chaotic.

Even the object of the game will often change as you play, as players swap out one Goal card for another. Can you get the Rocket to the Moon before someone changes the goal to Death by Chocolate?

In the far future, humanoid empires of the universe turned to an intense study of ancient civilizations that existed on a planet known as Earth. They learned that these ancients simultaneously built pyramids towards the sky and had an extensive knowledge of the stars. It was rumored that perhaps they were the original colonizers and space-farers of the first human age.

Now, at the edge of a colossal black hole, a pyramid-craft known as the Zoneplex has emerged with legendary markings and glyphs of the deep past. The known empires have sent their elite warrior-monk mystics on a one-way mission to gain control of the Zoneplex, to emerge victorious and ultimately control the pathways of the universe and time itself.

Zoneplex is a game that combines a tile-laying/exploration mechanism, a collaborative battle system and a zone control system to create an intriguing adventure in an alien pyramid.

The NINTH EVER Shut Up & Sit Down podcast has arrived like a beautiful steam train! It’s impressive, quite long and harnesses only rudimentary technology. Several days after recording it, we’ve arbitrarily decided that this one has the theme of reigning! We’ve got detailed impressions of new, absurdly tricky card game Reignaissance Man, we discuss … Read more

Quinns: Happy Monday, everybody! How was your weekend? Team SU&SD spent ours road-testing Ultimate Werewolf, and after six hours of heavy drinking and heavier lynching, I’m proud to say all our friendships survived intact. A minor miracle, really. Expect a video of our exploits this Friday.

Lots of news this week, so let’s get cracking! And let’s kick off with the Kickstarter for Marrying Mr. Darcy: A Pride & Prejudice Card Game. Which is… well, it’s a Pride & Prejudice card game.

The railways of today are amazing things and bullet trains, freight trains and more keep entire countries running. From transporting the populace to carrying essential materials, trains play an integral part in a nation’s power and economic development.

You will start with a small set of cards, but by building a more effective deck throughout the game, you will be able to place stations and lay rails over the maps of Osaka or Tokyo. Gain enough points from your railways and you will ultimately manage the most powerful railroads in modern Japan!

This English edition of Trains, designed by Hisashi Hayashi, features updated graphics, artwork, and streamlined card abilities. With extensive replay value, Trains is one game you won’t want to leave the station without!

It’s come to this. After a phenomenally successful first year, in which the British press described us as “the sound of the summer” and “London’s two most eligible bachelors”, team SU&SD are now cold, alone, and reviewing a board game about trains. It’s called Trains. This is us at our lowest, surely.

On frosty Autumn nights like these, we’re glad for the company of the SU&SD supercomputer. She’s our one true friend. …Right?

“Now the trumpet summons us again, not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are – but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle.” – John F. Kennedy

In 1945, unlikely allies toppled Hitler’s war machine, while humanity’s most devastating weapons forced the Japanese Empire to its knees in a storm of fire. Where once there stood many great powers, there now stood only two – the United States and the Soviet Union. The world had scant months to collectively sigh in relief before a new conflict threatened. Unlike the titanic struggles of the preceding decades, this conflict would be waged not primarily by soldiers and tanks, but by spies and politicians, scientists and intellectuals, artists and traitors. Twilight Struggle is a two-player game simulating the 45 year dance of intrigue, prestige, and occasional flares of warfare between the USSR and the USA. The entire world is the stage on which these two titans fight. The game begins amidst the ruins of Europe as the two new superpowers scramble over the wreckage of WWII and ends in 1989, when only the United States remained standing.

Twilight Struggle inherits its fundamental systems from the card-driven classics We the People and Hannibal. It is a quick-playing, low-complexity game in that same tradition. The game map is a world map of the period, whereon players move units and exert influence in attempts to gain allies and control for their superpower.

Twilight Struggle’s Event cards add detail and flavor to the game. They cover a vast array of historical happenings: the Arab-Israeli conflicts, Vietnam, the peace movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and other such incidents that brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Subsystems capture the prestige-laden Space Race as well as nuclear tensions, with the possibility of game-ending nuclear war. Can you, as the U.S. President or Soviet Premier, lead your nation to victory? Play Twilight Struggle and find out.

[Last month saw an argument between Quinns and Matt Thrower, our resident wargamer, over Here I Stand, a game of reformation-era revolution. It might be the nerdiest thing we’ve ever published. This month, we present the debate’s thrilling conclusion! All images in this article are courtesy of BoardGameGeek.]

Quinns: Matt, slow down! I’d never have guessed that a militaristic, paranoid, survivalist maniac would have a house riddled with secret passageways!

Thrower: Don’t forget the booby traps. Have you been treading where I tread?

Quinns: What?

Thrower: Ah, here we are! The heart of my house.

Quinns: It looks like a panic room. Except with a map of the world and… a big, red button?

Thrower: Naturally! It’s a room dedicated to my favourite game. Doesn’t every gamer have one? In my case, the game is Twilight Struggle, a card-driven recreation of the cold war and nuclear Armageddon. And, much as I hate to stand with the mainstream, it’s not just me that feels that way. It’s currently the number one ranked game on the global graveyard of game statistics, BoardGameGeek.

Quinns: Forget the new game announcements from famous designers! Let’s start with the big news, which is, of course, GAME BOARD.

The last-ever episode of excellent UK sitcom The IT Crowd aired on Friday, and you can watch it online right here. It was a brilliant double-length special, but much more importantly, it featured a scene making fun of online board game review shows.

It’s the best thing we’ve seen all month, and not just because we’ve heard from the writer himself that he likes Shut Up & Sit Down, and is explicitly not making fun of us. Which is at once a relief and kind of a shame?

Renaissance Man

Fluxx

Zoneplex

Podcast #9: Reigning Supreme

Games News! 07/10/13

Trains

Review: Trains

Twilight Struggle

Review: Twilight Struggle

Games News! 30/09/13

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