Our Shopping Guide to the Best Cheap Board Games!

Paul: Hot summer strawberries! It’s the middle of August, the sun is (sometimes) in the sky (here it’s mostly just windy) and this is the season that you finally get into board games. It’s an intimidating prospect: you’ve eyed those enormous boxes on the shelves with price tags that would make a banker blush, but this really doesn’t have to be a hobby that destroys your wallet.

Wait! What’s that noise? An approaching siren? An… ice cream van?! It’s me pedalling furiously toward you in the Shut Up & Sit Down Budget Bus, adding a host of surprising prices in this sequel to our indispensable article, How To Build an Amazing Board Game Collection for $10. GET ON BOARD.

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Santorini

Santorini

Santorini is a non-abstract re-imagining of the 2004 edition. Since its original inception over 30 years ago, Santorini has been endlessly developed, enhanced and refined by mathematician and educator, Dr. Gordon Hamilton.

Santorini is a highly accessible pure strategy game that is simple enough for an elementary school classroom. But with enough gameplay depth and content for even hardcore gamers to explore, Santorini is truly a game for everyone. The rules are deceptively simple. Each turn consists of 2 steps:

1. Move – move one of your builders into a neighboring space. You may move your Builder Pawn on the same level, step-up one level, or step down any number of levels.

2. Build – Then construct a building level adjacent to the builder you moved. When building on top of the third level, place a dome instead, removing that space from play.

Winning the game – If either of your builders reaches the third level, you win.

Variable player powers – What makes Santorini truly special is its seamless integration of variable player powers into a pure-strategy game. Dr Hamilton has designed over 40 thematic god and hero powers, each fundamentally changing the way the game is played.

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Podcast #53: Matt and Quinns go to the Past!

magic matt

Like the plot of every time-travel movie ever, Matt and Quinns have officially gone too far into the past and may never be the same again. In this unusually raunchy edition of the acclaimed SU&SD podcast the pair discuss/complain about some titans of the 80’s and 90’s- Space Hulk, Blood Bowl and Magic: The Gathering. Meanwhile, Paul offers much more sedate comments on Scythe and Santorini. Finally, the group discuss some folk games sent in by an anthropologist… which are played by monkeys. Join us for the critical analysis of Magic, but stick around for our description “Hair In Mouth Game”. Have you played any games from your childhood recently? And were they rubbish?

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Games News! 04/04/16

Quinns: Oh, wow. Making the news bi-weekly in 2016 was a fantastic decision. We always have so many stories to choose from! Admittedly they’re less new, so technically we’re working with less news, but if it’s new news to you then whoops can somebody get me a tissue I just got a nosebleed FIRST UP, board games once again crept into the peripheral vision of the public eye this month as Russia banned the Polish board game Queue for its depiction of the dismal experience of shopping in USSR-era Poland, with its lengthy queues, poor stock availability and rife black market trading.

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