" " - Shut Up & Sit Down

Games News! 05/08/13

Quinns: A few months ago we caught word that Fantasy Flight had a Lovecraft board game coming later this year. Something big that they were expecting to do VERY well. So Paul boiled the kettle and we held an emergency council of team SU&SD, where we all swore that it had to be a new edition of Arkham Horror, an immensely popular co-op game of struggle against Lovecraftian horrors.

It isn’t. It’s something much more evil.

Eldritch Horror is a new game “inspired” by Arkham Horror, allowing Fantasy Flight to sell the two games side-by-side. Arkham Horror, that hardcore horror with its nine (count ’em!) expansions, will soon be joined by Eldritch Horror, a more accessible game of otherworldly apocalypses.

Welcome to the fictional comic book world of Sentinel Comics, where powerful heroes fight dastardly villains to protect the entire Multiverse!

Sentinels of the Multiverse is a cooperative game in which players control heroes with powers and abilities in the form of cards. Two to five players control three to five heroes who must work together to defeat the villains and survive the dangerous environments in which the battles take place.

Ultimately, either the heroes will successfully defeat the villains and foil their plans, or the villains will triumph, and the heroes will be forced to regroup to fight another day.

Reviewers? ASSEMBLE!

It’s time to do battle with the increasingly popular Sentinels of the Multiverse! A co-operative, customisable, and increasingly collectible game of excitingly litigious superheroes fighting stinky villains. This game’s getting more and more popular, so it’s only natural we should see if you guys should get in on the action.

(Besides, it’s the best excuse we’ve had to dress up in AGES.)

Android: Netrunner - Creation and Control

Who will write the future? Creation and Control pits a new wave of enigmatic Shapers against the latest and greatest of Haas-Bioroid’s developments in artificial intelligence, efficiency, and security. The first deluxe expansion for Android: Netrunner The Card Game, Creation and Control introduces 165 new cards (three copies each of fifty-five individual cards), that will instigate dramatic new strategies and high-stakes battles for the control of valuable files and the futures outlined within them.

Creation and Control focuses on the struggles between the executives at Haas-Bioroid and those Shapers who are driven to tinker with their programs and hardware by an almost-religious compulsion, but fans of every Android: Netrunner faction will find plenty of great uses for their influence, as well as twenty-seven neutral cards (three copies each of nine individual cards) that can sharpen the focus of any deck.

Review: Netrunner - Creation and Control

Quinns: It’s no secret that we think Android: Netrunner is the collectible game right now. When I started playing it, I was seduced by the asymmetrical concept- one player as the glittering corporation, the other as a tiny hacker with cards as mundane as energy drinks and quality time with your partner. Since then, it’s the comedic tension of the game that’s kept me involved. Each new datapack of cards is filled not just with possibility, but comedy. I laugh as I leaf through these things. “Oh no,” I whisper, grinning. “Oh, no.“

So you can imagine how excited I was yesterday! The release of the first “deluxe” expansion, Creation and Control, containing 3 copies each of 55 new cards. The same evening I ended up taking two sets to the safehouse of my Netrunner nemesis for a good debugging. Here’s what we found out.

Quinns: No questioning what the big story is this week. Board game and erstwhile Kickstarter success story The Doom That Came To Atlantic City! has imploded like a great tower block made of dreams and balsa wood. Following 13 months and $122,874 of investment (less Kickstarter’s fee), Forking Path Co. has declared the project is now cancelled due to “Every possible mistake [being] made.”

It only gets sadder from here. In the same update project founder Erik Chevalier states that, despite having quit his job for the game, will now do his best to seek employment and steadily repay the project’s 1,246 backers. Not that this was enough to stop many of the backers from creating a bubbling lake of fury and vitriol in the comments.

Disclaimer: Since this video was published, SU&SD has been made aware of a striking quantity of homophobic and transphobic content in this board game. The game’s tone was first established by the first edition in 1985, and today, it’s definitely showing its age. More information is available here, courtesy of Meeple Like Us.

When was the last time you had some friends over, one of you got abducted by an elephant, one captained a war fleet and another had eight babies*? It was NEVER, wasn’t it? Admit it!

Tales of the Arabian Nights can fix that. You might not know it, but there’s a gaping hole in your board game collection. A hole that begs to be filled. And you must fill it. You must fill it with this. The finest storytelling board game in existence.

Have a great weekend, everybody! Ideally, make sure it’s great by playing this.

*And was then abducted by an elephant.

In Tales of the Arabian Nights, you are the hero or heroine in a story of adventure and wonder just like those told by Scheherazade to her spellbound sultan! You will travel the land seeking your own destiny and fortune. You will learn stories and gain wisdom to share with others. Will you be the first to fulfill your destiny? The next Tale is yours to tell! There is, of course, a winner in Tales of the Arabian Nights, but the point of the game is less to see who wins and more to enjoy the unfolding and telling of a great story!

In this new edition of the groundbreaking storytelling game, you enter the lands of the Arabian Nights alongside Sindbad, Ali Baba, and the other legendary heroes of the tales. Travel the world encountering imprisoned princesses, powerful ‘efreets, evil viziers, and such marvels as the Magnetic Mountain and the fabled Elephant’s Graveyard.

Choose your actions carefully and the skills you possess will reward you: become beloved, wealthy, mighty – even become sultan of a great land. Choose foolishly, however, and become a beggar, or be cursed with a beast’s form or become insane from terror! YOU will bring to life the stories of the inestimable Book of Tales in this vastly replayable board game with over 2002 tales that will challenge, amuse, astound and spellbind you for years to come.

Gearworld: The Borderlands is a game of negotiation, conquest, and construction in which two to four players compete to gain the favor of the Sky People for their tribe of scavengers in a post-apocalyptic landscape. Based on the classic board game Borderlands designed by Bill Eberle, Jack Kittredge and Peter Olotka, players must negotiate trades and alliances, conquer their rivals’ territory, and gather resources in a race to build the skyworks to win the favor of those who live in the World Above!

Gearworld: The Borderlands includes a game board with beautiful, detailed artwork, 220 tokens, and 100 plastic figures in four different colors.

Mark: Logistics! Three lovelier-sounding syllables were never spoke. Ah, what a dream, to play a strategically deep game about the beautiful, balletic, and somewhat subtle dance of getting much-needed materiel from one place to another — and then using it to blow stuff up. And how much dreamier were it a game that didn’t involve hundreds of cardboard counters sliding delicately around a hex grid to the tune of one in an endless string of historically accurate six-hour scenarios featuring Russian truck breakdowns and German trains running on time. (Though actually, I’d play that one too.)

Gearworld: The Borderlands is the latest in Fantasy Flight’s series of resurrected “classics” of yesteryear — i.e., games you wish you’d heard of when they’d first been released, if you were even alive back then — and just may be the game of which I dreamed a paragraph ago.

Games News! 05/08/13

Sentinels of the Multiverse

Review: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Android: Netrunner – Creation and Control

Review: Netrunner – Creation and Control

Games News! 29/07/13

Review: Tales of the Arabian Nights

Tales of the Arabian Nights

Gearworld: The Borderlands

Review: Gearworld: The Borderlands

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