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Tales of the Arabian Nights

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.

Quinns: Have you heard? Kate Middleton’s Royal Baby™ arrives today! Time to get the news done sharpish so I can attend the ceremony of Gilded Silver where we find out if it’s a changeling.

Fantasy Flight have published the most audacious preview yet of Netrunner’s first deluxe expansion, Creation and Control. The 55 new cards are going to slip into our decks as professionally and powerfully as acupuncture needles, making us fitter. Stronger. Deadlier. Or possibly it’ll just cost a bunch of money and we’ll feel exactly the same, except we’ll get really bad gas, which happened to my friend Alex. When he tried acupuncture, that is. Not when he played Netrunner.

Quinns: Also in celebration of our 2nd anniversary, we’ve done something a bit different. And hopefully, a bit useful.

It’s a short video about board gaming that’s not for you, but any friends, family or colleagues who don’t yet know about your hobby. A glimmering, electric antidote, if you will, for anyone who hears “Board games” and thinks “Monopoly”. There aren’t any swears at all, and only a smidge of dressing up, so please:

Share away. Let’s tell the world about this glorious hobby of ours.

Happy anniversary, everybody. We love you.

— Team SU&SD

Paul: Did you know that Shut Up & Sit Down is now two years old? This month is our anniversary month and, to celebrate that, we thought we’d give you something very special. It’s something you’ve all been asking for since we started and it’s our way of thanking you for your terrific support.

You, our viewers, our readers, our commenters, have been a brilliant audience. You’ve been friendly and patient and kind and insightful and generally excellent, so we really hope you enjoy fourteen minutes of Shut Up & Sit Down outtakes, fourteen minutes that pull back the curtain and expose the ramshackle workings behind this show.

We should warn you that there’s liberal use of cursing and swears and also bad language and even some rude words. There’s a fair amount of embarrassment. There’s a lot of silliness.

Oh, and this is only a compilation that spans our first series. It takes a little while to edit a collection like this together and we need to rummage through our rushes to see what we can serve up next. There’ll be more to come.

In Pandemic, several virulent diseases have broken out simultaneously all over the world! The players are disease-fighting specialists whose mission is to treat disease hotspots while researching cures for each of four plagues before they get out of hand.

The game board depicts several major population centers on Earth. On each turn, a player can use up to four actions to travel between cities, treat infected populaces, discover a cure, or build a research station. A deck of cards provides the players with these abilities, but sprinkled throughout this deck are Epidemic! cards that accelerate and intensify the diseases’ activity. A second, separate deck of cards controls the “normal” spread of the infections.

Taking a unique role within the team, players must plan their strategy to mesh with their specialists’ strengths in order to conquer the diseases. For example, the Operations Expert can build research stations which are needed to find cures for the diseases and which allow for greater mobility between cities; the Scientist needs only four cards of a particular disease to cure it instead of the normal five—but the diseases are spreading quickly and time is running out. If one or more diseases spreads beyond recovery or if too much time elapses, the players all lose. If they cure the four diseases, they all win!

Quinns is live on the mighty Eurogamer once again, reviewing Pandemic! A game so popular that for a while there, we were taking this monument on the board gaming landscape for granted. But you know what? It’s actually amazing, and the perfect game for this sweaty, lethargic, feverish summer.

“Pandemic’s cheap, at just £25. The manual’s flimsy few pages are crystal clear. It’s a co-op game, so no-one’s going to get too competitive, and it has you working at the Centre for Disease Control, flying around the world trying to cure four doomsday plagues before they skim humankind from the surface of the earth, so it’s not even nerdy.

“It’s captivating, pacey and dramatic. In fact, it’s the perfect game to start your board game collection.”

So some good did come from Quarantine, after all! We finally got this sucker reviewed. No messin’. Go read!

What other classics would you like to see us review, readers?

Quinns: Good afternoon you pretty people! Did you have a nice weekend?

Mine was mostly spent questing for the One Beverage that would make me feel better in this heat, but I perked up on Sunday when I spotted Fantasy Flight’s announcement of Blood Bound. Like Mayday! Mayday!, which I looked at in the news a few weeks back, this looks to be part of the post-Resistance wave of games. An incredibly tight game of hidden roles, negotiation and lying, but with more… game.

In Quarantine, players seek to build the biggest and most efficient hospital, while trying to keep ahead of the steady stream of incoming patients arriving at their doors. In this tense struggle for medical supremacy, players must infuse new life into their hospitals through the timely addition of special rooms and abilities. But beware the highly contagious patients! Infection can spread quickly, causing entire wards to be shut down under quarantine!

In game terms Quarantine is a tile-laying game with each player having an entrance and lobby. More than fifty other tiles are available, with two each of 14 different “special room” tiles, and players acquire these tiles and others via “price-drafting”. Players set a price for the tiles they want to draft, but other players get the chance to buy them first, so you’ll need to price your services accurately in order to supply your hospital while not overpaying. With dozens of tiles available, no two hospitals will be set up the same way…

Tales of the Arabian Nights

Gearworld: The Borderlands

Review: Gearworld: The Borderlands

Games News! 22/07/13

An Intro to Board Gaming, For your Friends!

The SU&SD Incredible Outtakes Project, Pt. 1

Pandemic

Review: Pandemic

Games News! 15/07/13

Quarantine

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