Ava: Hlph um kumphlll. Mummph blumph fulmph bugublfu
Quinns: What was that, Ava?
Ava: *large tearing noise and a series of ragged gasps* Help me, Quinns, I’m stuck inside this baseball!
Quinns: …
Ava: It’s an allegory, Quinns, and a warning that this week’s games news is a bit more inside baseball than usual.
Quinns: I can just about understand that, but how did you get in there!?
Ava: Never doubt my commitment to a bit, Quinns. Also, I’m sorry I ruined your baseball.
Ava: It’s Gencon this week, and do you know what that means? We’ve got to get in the news-canoe, sail to the heart of a newsicane, going right by a violent newscano. I’m all on my ownsome, without a Quinns to cling to. Wish me luck, and good news to you all.
This is the news, be careful out there, there’s a lot of it about.
First up we’re taking a trip to Cooper Island, a game that finally answers the question: ‘what if a eurogame, but taller?’
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.
Paul: BoardGameGeek is a titan of the board game scene, one of the most comprehensive and consulted sites the hobby has, as well as a place to which we owe a huge debt of inspiration. It’s also home to the absolute Board Game Geekiest among us, namely those with a monthly allowance for small zip-lock baggies. While we undoubtedly fall into that category too, we appreciate that not everyone does and it’s inevitable that our opinions will diverge, right?
Just what do we make of those most esteemed of titles that are forever locked in an eternal battle for a place in BGG’s Top 100 rankings? This week, we’ll be giving an extensive, nay, exhaustive breakdown of that list, telling you what we’ve covered, what we thought and even admitting what we’ve missed out on. So come with us as we count down the games in a whole week’s worth of analysis and adventure!
What happens when immovable critics meet unstoppable sales figures? Find out in our long-awaited review of Ticket to Ride, followed by our review of new, giant box Ticket to Ride: Rails and Sails! Which is basically Ticket to Ride².
Do you have a favourite Ticket to Ride memory? A favourite board? A favourite train? Let us know in the comments! If there’s any justice in the world, these comments will be a veritable hotbed of Train Chat before the day is through.
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Ticket to Ride is a cross-country train adventure in which players collect and play matching train cards to claim railway routes connecting cities throughout North America.
The longer the routes, the more points they earn.
Additional points come to those who can fulfill their Destination Tickets by connecting two distant cities, and to the player who builds the longest continuous railway.
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Quinns: Ladies and gentlemen, roll up! It’s time for a new series where we take a look a team SU&SD’s board game collections. Come and see! Be amazed. Be aghast. Be envious. Comment with thought-provoking assertions like “why do you have that game it is bad”.
You guys will have seen my collection in the background of loads of SU&SD videos, but I don’t think you’ve seen the work that goes into it. Come with me today as I perform… a CULL.
But before that, let me show you my collection as it stands. It’s both completely ridiculous and not as ridiculous as you might think.
Paul: Aha! Did you think we were done? Did you think it was all over? The sad truth is that, in assembling our gigantic Top 50 list, so many games don’t quite make the cut. We shift them up and down. We debate their inclusion. We resign ourselves to seeing favourites fail to break the Top 50 by the tiniest of margins. That’s how it is, though. You stick in a Codenames and the whole list shifts. Someone has to be number 51.
All the games that follow are good games. We don’t want you think we’ve lost our love for them because they weren’t featured last week. These are our Honourable Mentions.
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Quinns: Welcome to the NEWS!
Never mind the jokes and reviews. The NEWS is what you come to this site for for, isn’t it? A great sluice-tube of consumer information, poking through your window and filling your life with piping hot knowledge. Praise be to NEWS.
Today’s first NEWS is that the latest map pack for Ticket to Ride is now available for pre-order, and will add new United Kingdom and Pennsylvania boards to the train-placement smash hit. As always with Ticket to Ride map packs, the new boards each boast new rules. The UK will feature technology upgrades, while Pennsylvania gets stocks and shares.
“This is boll****,” UK Prime Minister David Cameron was heard to have said upon hearing the news. “We waited 11 years to be included in Ticket to Ride, and we’re bundled with Pennsylvania? I don’t even know where that is. Nobody does.”
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