Shut Up & Sit Down

Review: Merchants & Marauders

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:01:00 +0000

Quinns: Rum! Guns! Thievery and corruption! Broadsides and boarding actions, executed by daring captains, their magnificent ships reeking of fragrant spices and tobacco. A glittering sea, taken to foul moods and murderous storms. Sharks! MONEY!

Ain’t no backdrop like the 18th century Caribbean. If only there was a board game set amongst all this.

Oh wait!

In our last episode we said we thought Fortune & Glory was a poor example of Ameritrash, Ameritrash being board games that, generally, focus on conflict, cheap thrills and on smothering your table with components rather than being a fair and nuanced game. We’re covering Merchants & Marauders, then, to show you a beautiful example of Ameritrash. This game is a parade of unexpected happenings, satisfying rewards and crushing defeats that all mix together in a foul voodoo potion which brings the Caribbean, shuddering, to life.

There’s room for two to four players here, and you all control independent ship captains. You’ll be making money, hunting out rumours, accepting and completing missions, upgrading your ships and engaging in the unfathomably risky business of sinking or capturing bigger vessels, all of which will earns you glory. The first player to chalk up ten fat glory points, wins.

The twist (and imagine a dolphin bursting from the sea to twist languidly in the air, winking at you as you catch its little dolphin eye) is that the players are given complete freedom. You can be an honest merchant, buying low and selling high. You can be a pirate, hunting down merchant vessels and steadily earning the ire of the English, French, Spanish and the Dutch. Or you can forget about these titles, and simply take opportunities as you spot them.

You can methodically bank your gold in your big cardboard treasure chest, scrimping and saving your way to victory, or you can keep it in your pocket. You could dedicate yourself to creating the toughest crew these islands have ever seen, the nimblest ship, or anything in between. You can avoid tough fights, or risk everything in them. You can even attack other players, or you can mind your own business, or choose to work together with someone else to take down whoever’s leading the pack. You can chase mysterious rumours, or you can ignore them for the rock-hard reality of trying to chase down and capture a man-o’-war, the largest ship in the game.

This stretch of islands is nothing less than a playground. A huge, waterlogged playground. Where all of the kids have knives. Did I not mention yet? Merchants and Marauders is laughably, mercilessly mean.

At the start of the game the board’s empty. Players will float around, selling bananas, buying surgeons or navigators, charming governors and generally enjoying themselves. “That’s a lot of lumber you’ve bought!” someone will say. “Maybe I should come over their and take it off you” And you’ll all laugh. And then you’ll all start eyeing each other nervously, reinforcing your hulls, buying chainshot to load into your cannons that can wreck someone else’s masts, leaving them immobile.

Then event cards will start filling the board up with other ships. Pirate sloops. Spanish frigates. English captains of mortifying competence. And you’ll realise that if you do get into a scrap with any of these miniatures, and get yourself sunk or boarded, you could lose everything.

Die, and the only thing you keep is your glory score. The next turn you’re returned to the board with a fresh-faced captain and a basic ship. Which is exactly as frightening as defeating other players is appealing.

If you hunt down another player, board their ship and kill their crew, here’s a list of what you can take from them. You don’t just burgle the poor swine. You repossess their house. You get:

Their gold.
Their cargo.
Any special weapons, expensively bought at port.
Any specialist crew onboard, painstakingly located off the back of rumours.
Any other rumours learned at great expense from pubs across the Caribbean.
Their entire hand of special, one-shot glory cards you get each time you get a glory point.
…and their actual ship, along with any modifications they’ve made to it. The ultimate humiliation. If they were captaining something enviable, they’ll return to the board to find you, the victor, conducting business from it.

All of this crap you’ll have to physically lift off the table in front of the losing party to deposit it next to your own holdings, to a soundtrack of any other players sucking air through their teeth. And since you only have limited room for cargo and glory cards, you’ll probably end up chucking some of their cherished belongings overboard like unwanted sections of a newspaper.

You’ll also get a tidy stack of gold if the loser had a bounty on their head, and, as the kicker, you get a glory point for defeating another player (together with another glory card!). It’s all so brutal that while you’ll feel like grinning like an idiot, you’ll also be trying to look apologetic, since the freedom that defines the game will also leave the defeated guy free to spend the rest of the game plotting gory revenge.

Now, some of you might be sat there thinking, “That sounds horrible! I don’t know if I want this in my house.” But baby, oh sweet baby reader, you’d be wrong to think this cruelty is a bad thing, because it’s precisely what turns Merchants & Marauders from a good game into a great one. For starters, it’s made clear to players precisely how risky anything they want to do is, letting players gamble with that most exciting of board game gods, risk / reward. But there’s something bigger here.

Ordinarily, games where players run their own complex adventures can be phone-checkingly boring when it’s not your turn. You don’t care about the guy opposite you throwing handfuls of dice to see what happens to him in a fight.

Here? Because players are such appealing targets to one another, you’re nervously watching every move and every upgrade, and when someone gets into an enormous fight, it’s absolute theatre. Not only does the winner take all, while anyone can try and flee, it’s literally the hardest thing to do in the game and means you can’t shoot back, so even running away takes balls. Just not cannonballs.

And all this goes double when larger ships are duking it out, since every barrage of cannon fire is capable of inflicting wallet-crushing damage. Specifically, taking a full five hits will cost you 10 gold to repair. 10 gold which, if sequestered in your stash, would have equalled a glory point. Welcome to the suck. Please enjoy your stay!

Simply put, yes, the game is horrible. But in being horrible, it contains horror, and horror is made up of tension, tragedy, heroism and EXCITEMENT! Precisely one half of Merchants & Marauders is a pleasant, satisfying game where you build up your reputation, your crew and your ship, excitedly slotting each new specialist or upgrade into place, but this serves another purpose. It gives you something to lose.

The other half of the game is you risking everything in a way that will always delight someone, whether it’s you as you emerge unscathed time and time again, or the rest of the table, as you and everything you hold dear slips under the sea in a wash of foam and smoke. It’s almost as if the game is equal parts… Merchanting and equal parts… Mararauding.

And I haven’t even mentioned my favourite part, the decks of cards covering missions, rumours, events, captains and your own hard-earned glory powers. When I first got Merchants & Marauders I was disappointed that its hundreds of tiny cards had no art and barely any flavour text. A sharp contrast with Fortune & Glory, where every single glossy card boasts a gorgeous picture.

I was wrong to be grumpy. Oh, momma board game, I was wrong, I admit it, take me back.

Most Ameritrash games worthy of the title come with stacks of cards that’ll emerge frequently and twist a rule or two, because this keeps players intrigued, lets them surprise each other and forces them to adapt, since that’s often more fun than having to plan many turns in advance.

The cards here are brilliant. There’s a generous amount of them and they’re distributed judiciously, so in any given game you’ll only see a tiny fraction of the game’s secrets. But more importantly they were clearly created by someone with both a love of the theme and a sense of humour. These cards are thick sparks that fly from the hissing cannon fuse of the game proper, drawing out the humour and even more horror.

In my last game my happy French sugar merchant quietly hunted down and raided a Spanish merchant vessel, just because I was keen to play a “Framed!” glory card and spread a rumour that it was another player. But I forgot the fine print. You play it on another captain at sea. Since everyone else happened to be guzzling rum in ports, my perfect crime backfired and I had a Spanish bounty stamped on my horrified face. This particular joke kept the table laughing for the entire game, since every time I emerged by the skin of my ballsack from a battle with a lethal naval frigate someone would ask if my career as a pirate was working out yet.

But that’s just one card, and I don’t want to spoil any more. All told, Merchants & Marauders is about as solid a game as any we’ve recommended on Shut Up & Sit Down, which is saying something. It’s elegant, funny, satisfying, surprising, and a broad-minded use of a setting that’s so often used lazily. Meaning you won’t find a single eyepatch, parrot or “Arrr!” in the box. Thank Christ.

The only warnings I’d stencil onto it is that it’s a touch complex for casual gamers, and it’d probably fit most comfortably into a group with a sense of humour. After all the preparation and maneuvering is over, someone else taking your personal ship, together with all the time, care, luck and money invested into it, will always come down to one world-ending dice roll. Merchants & Marauders is a game for players who can suffer that loss (or have that elephantine prize slip between their fingers), feel their heart rotate 360 degrees, and come back the next minute with an expression like the guy on the box.

This man? He’s the star you should sail by.

Season 2, Episode 1: High Rollers

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:49:00 +0000

We’re BACK! What’s changed? Not much! We’re still straining like weightlifters to bring you the best board game reviews this side of the moon, and you should still relax, grab a glass of your favourite beverage and enjoy. This episode we’ve got a huge game, a brilliant game AND a party game! Come see.

02:37 - Fortune & Glory review

11:08 - K2 review

15:57 - Pipe Down & Take a Chair: Gaming During the Blitz

19:33 - Bang! review

24:40 - SU&SD’s Quaint Foreign Gamers From Afar

Review: The Pyramid of Horus

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:33:00 +0000

Quinns: We’re always squealing about smart games here at SU&SD. I’m guessing actually reading our site is a bit like untying the knot of a balloon with IMTELLIGENCE written on the side and having it noisily exhale into your face for hours on end. Which is misleading, because we love stupid games too.

“WHICH ONES,” you cry, anxious to get to the bottom of this unsettling admission.

Well, The Adventurers: The Pyramid of Horus is pretty perfect, for what it is. Let us tell you about it.

Here’s Pyramid of Horus’ conceit. All the players are treasure hunters that have found the legendary pyramid of Horus. Naturally, having found an architectural and historical marvel that’s lain untouched for thousands of years, you have one concern: looting the place blind.

During the 45 minutes the game lasts you all charge into the temple with the sole noble objective of leaving with as much loot as you can stagger under. The obstacles in your path are as follows: Scorpions, snakes, crocodiles, mummies, the ceiling falling in and, most worryingly, your own monstrous, bottomless greed.

Paul: Imma let you finish, but I think it’s a bit mean to call The Adventurers stupid. I mean. Yes, it’s not a complex or tactical game, but it’s not stupid, It’s simple. It’s all about quick decisions made in the heat of the moment, about seizing luck by the neck and throttling it until it coughs up death or glory. If I wanted to describe it in one word, I’d describe it as madcap.

Quinns: Madcap? I bet you’d also describe it as “Monopoly… on crack!” if I let you.

Paul: I would not do that, because I am not a journalist from the 1990s writing for a godawful pop culture rag.

Quinns: You’re right in that there’s plenty of un-stupid bits of design here. Such as the “WLL” system. WLL might sound like the noise you’d make if a doctor was gingerly exploring your rectum with one finger, but it’s a beautiful idea.

WLL stands for “Wound Load Level”. As you’re all sprinting through the pyramid you’ll pick up items, each of which takes the form of a card. As you get bitten, knocked about, groped by mummies and so on, you’ll amass “wounds”, which also take the form of cards. And the more cards you’re carrying, the slower you’ll become.

Everyone’s movement is dictated by five dice rolled at the start of each round. The higher your WLL level, the higher a number you’ll need on those dice to get an action. As the game begins, you only need a two or higher on these dice, so you’ll likely get five actions. Move one space! Search a square! Move again! Move again! Search a second time! What fun.

To begin with, anyway.

Paul: Unlike Quinns’s analogy, the great and cavernous space you’re not-so-gingerly probing in this game is full of exciting treasures. Rather than, you know.

And I mean full. This place is a veritable landfill of goods. Literally every square on the board can be searched, opened or unlocked. Just inside the front door the entrance hall is littered with shinies. Further in and you’ll find, amongst the crocodile-filled pool, sunken rubies. Then there are the sarcophagi that hide priceless artifacts. Imagine you were let loose in the British Museum with a hammer and a hoover, except that the British Museum was also being patrolled by the undead. And full of scorpions. And collapsing.

Every turn another randomly determined piece of the roof of this place falls in. It may fall on your head, which obviously hurts, but worse still, it may even fall between you and the way out. That’s all right, I guess, as long as you can work your way around it. As long as more blocks don’t make your route out of this place even more difficult. As long as you don’t find yourself completely walled off, at which point you’re out of the game.

That won’t happen though, will it? You wouldn’t be dumb, greedy and short-sighted enough to spend all your time loading up with goods and turn yourself into a bloated blimp of a tomb raider who’s too slow to get out in time, would you? You wouldn’t waste PRECIOUS TIME painfully crowbaring your way into another sarcophagus just to complete your set of idols while GIANT STONE BLOCKS are landing all around you, eh?

Quinns: Yes! Yes. It all comes back to that WLL level. Your character might have started full of wild, youthful energy, but slowly they’ll begin to move like withered pack mule.

And of course (of course!) the treasure gets more valuable the deeper into the temple you get. In the case of the Idol of Horus itself, the crown jewel of the temple, you need to trek there and then stand there as you pick the lock that protects it. Oh, and with temple’s five idols, each one carries a curse which locks out one of the five movement dice for you. Ha ha ha.

So, to summarise: The Adventurers: The Pyramid of Horus is a game where each turn you’ll get a random amount of actions, you’ll search spaces which randomly contain treasure or injuries, and deeper in the temple you’ll try and unlock idols through random chance, or pry open sarcophagi for random rewards while mummies move randomly each turn. …while the ceiling collapses randomly, ending the game at a random moment.

Worst game ever, right?

Paul: Right?

Quinns: Right?

Paul: Right?

Quinns: Right?

Paul: Right…?

Quinns: WRONG! The Adventurers is a great game for drunks and children both, and here’s why. The game makes it just clear enough what the odds of anything are, and each turn you’re free to test your luck in several ways. This is vital, because by giving you this degree of control, The Adventurers starts to offer the same kind of thrill you’d get from a casino. You’re not at the mercy of the game. You’re playing the odds you choose, free to walk away from the table/temple when you please. You’re a hustler!

This is a game of clicking your tongue against your teeth, wondering whether you feel lucky enough for another pass of the crocodile pond, or an idol, or just getting the hell out. There’s about a one in four chance you’ll be locked in this turn. One of the players has already left. Others are leaving. But of course, because everyone’s treasure is kept secret, it’s never known which of you has won until the final, climactic reveal.

Paul: Yes! And what a theme, as well. The lot of you diving head-first into that frantic pic’n’mix of ancient Egyptian artifacts, all wanting to be the brave one who surfaces last, no doubt with a glittering golden necklace clenched between their teeth. Hedonism. Hedonism! Risk verses reward, and while there’s so much risk… Oh boy. The rewards!

So, are we recommending people buy it?

Quinns: Calm down. Of course not.

Paul: What? Oh, you’re a real pain in the artifact.

Quinns: LOOK. You and me are in the business of recommending the sort of games you could play hungrily for the rest of your life. The Adventurers: The Pyramid of Horus is more like the traditional perception of a board game. Something you produce from your cupboard a few times a year and have a good laugh over, not unlike a secret mutant son.

If that’s what people want, they should motor ahead and get this. But only if they want it.

Paul: Although in that field, it still beats the socks off something like Monopoly, because it’s faster, it ends with a dramatic escape rather than a grim slump, and even if it relies just as heavily on luck, you’re the one choosing when to take the risks or when to keep your hands safely in their pockets.

Quinns: And that’s another review in the bag! Quick and simple. Just like The Adventurers. Time for a bath!

Paul: Can I just add that the “Pyramid of Horus” makes NO SENSE because pharaohs were buried in pyramids while Horus was a god, so-

Quinns: TIME FOR A BATH PAUL.

Paul's Nostalgia Trip

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:21:13 +0000

Imagine Paul sat by a crackling fire, speaking calmly to you in his warm, academic, almost mahogany voice…

In fifty years time I shall be a very wrinkly and very old man, but all the stats suggest I’ll still be very much alive and, I imagine, probably still playing board games too. I imagine myself sat with the odd youngster now and then, perhaps grandchildren, great nephews, or just the odd whippersnapper who has tossed a coin in my cup and told me to get a job, but whoever it is I’m sure they’ll ask me what board games were like in my day.

“Board games?” I’ll ask, with a Santa-like twinkle in my eye, a Twainish bounce in my crazy-old-dude hair, “Oh, well it was all very different back then. They didn’t self-assemble, for a start. In fact, it was all something like this…”

“Why is everything going wobbly?!” the Dickensian sprog would cry. “I am afeared!”

“Worry not, tis but a flashback! A flashback to… TORPEDO RUN.”

“Of course, when I was wee, the war was still on. All of England Isle was blockaded on every side by the Gibrovian Navy and many of our favourite Eurogames and Ameritrash couldn’t get through. Even King George IX himself was hit by board game rationing and we once saw pictures of the Royal Family having to make do with a copy of Ludo. The country was at a low.

“Then Torpedo Run came along and changed everything. Invented by those boffins at Bletchley Park, it was a dexterity game that you laid out on the floor, or a huge table if you had one, and upon which you arranged a battleship and a fleet of destroyers, before loading up your submarine with plastic discs and then firing those discs across the board to blow those ships to bits!”

“Cor!”

“Not ‘alf. Each ship had a little hole at the bottom of its hull and you were trying to fire your discs into those. Bits of each ship’s superstructure were attached by elastic bands, and a little jolt would release them and send them flying into the air!”

“Blimey!”

“What’s more, Torpedo Run was such an accurate simulation of naval warfare that we were able to yank many of our youths out of the mines and chuck them straight into boiler rooms or submarines. It turned the war right around and within a year Prime Minister Cummington Cabbage was able to claim victory over the Gibrovian Fascists, although we’d won a war that the Americans again tried to take credit for, even though they joined it late and insisted on fighting every battle in wigs.”

“It must’ve been fantastic, Mister Paul,” the child will say, almost adrift in their own fascination.

“Well. Well. Actually, quite often you’d find the elastic didn’t work properly, so it wouldn’t release ship components when they were struck, or it would be too sensitive and even a slight nudge would make all the vulnerable parts of your battleship explode after one near miss. It was just the sort of ropey manufacturing that inspired a thousand arguments.”

“Oo, look at the size of those guns on that battleship! Could you move them about?”

“Nope!”

“Did the game have all sorts of interesting rules?”

“Nope!”

“Wow!”

“Of course, after the war came Space Crusade, inspired by our own attempts to colonise that dangerous and alien land we now call Wales,” I’ll say as I tap my nose.

“How exciting, Mister Paul! Did you really wear such strange clothes when you were younger?”

“Yes,” I’ll reply, “All our space suits really were gold, and we had lashings of ginger beer piped directly into our mouthpieces. Of course, back in my day we still had to read a lot of things too, rather than sit passively and unquestioningly accept the media that was pumped into our brains, so I wrote a piece about it way back. It’s probably been censored since. Space Crusade was followed up by Advanced Space Crusade, which nobody bought.”

“Nobody bought?!” the child’s eyes would widen like the petals of a young flower, opening up to receive the sunlight of knowledge. They receive a flash of inspiration: “But in that advert the child shouts ‘Plasma gun!’ while revealing a card that shows ‘plasma grenades.’”

“That’s true, but then nothing in that advert remotely resembles how you’d play the game. Just like how the HeroQuest advert was also complete and total nonsense.”

“Oh, Mister Paul,” the child will reply, in an almost seasoned tone, “We’ve all seen that advert. We’ve all mocked it. We’ve all done the silly voices of the children. We’ve all asked if it was Christopher Lee who did the voiceover, and not yet met anyone who could give us a firm answer.”

My frustration will rise. “But don’t you see?! It’s not that, it’s the fact that you don’t play the damn cards that way! The whole advert is entirely inaccurate! It’s a false representation of the game!”

“Do not bellow so!” the child suddenly cries at me, as if possessed of the voice of a Titan, “I am but a fictional representation, a gentle caricature of your own devising through which you indulge in this neo-Platonic dialogue of self-obsessed retro-bilge. I suppose you want to talk about Key to the Kingdom now, too?”

Taken aback, I’ll find myself almost lost for words. “No I do not! Give me some respect. I’d never play a game with such an embarrassing advert. In fact, I don’t remember anyone I know ever buying that, we all the advert was utter tosh. Nor did I ever play the nonsense that was Guess Who. Well, perhaps once.”

“…And I most certainly did not expect the game cards to talk to me. I wasn’t that idiotic. No, uh, in my quaint bedroom under the stairs I was actually playing Ghost Castle, which was endlessly rebranded and reprinted. Some people knew it as Which Witch? or The Real Ghostbusters Game. Here’s a video of it in Dutch, which we all spoke back then, and which nevertheless demonstrates that it was a roll and move game with the most tenuous excuse for dropping a skull onto the board that was supposed to make a few shoddy components move, such as a floor shake or an axe fall. Something they rarely did.”

“I suppose,” the child will go on, hands on hips, “you’re going to say that, as you got older, these adverts got wiser, more savvy and less Dutch.”

I will sense the conversation is slipping away from me. “Well, no,” will be my limp reply.

“In fact,” I explain, wagging my arthritic finger, “I’ve got a perfectly legitimate point to make. The 1980s were the peak of board games advertising, probably the time when they’d have the strongest audience. Since then, we experienced a sad decline. That was no doubt due to the meteoric rise of computer games. It was a little strange, really, as our board games got smarter and smarter, were increasingly better designed and came forward in leaps and bounds. They presented all kinds of clever systems and scenarios for us to get involved with. By, oh, 2012, I was really hoping we’d see them advertised en masse once more. I remember thinking that it was time for things to turn around, time for us all to return to the tabletop. After all, we were all gamers one way or another. What do you have to say to that, eh, you little brat?”

“I hate people who use that phrase,” the child will sneer, “Meteors, by definition, are falling towards the earth.”

“I hope you fall off a bridge,” I’ll say, as the pompous little thing stamps all over my nostalgia.

And that, my friends, is typical of the kind of quaint daydream I indulge in, and of how such things take a tragic tangent. I don’t know if I miss these adverts in particular, but I do miss adverts on television that were telling us to play together. They were as much adverts for friendship as they were for any particular product.

Board games are coming back. We said it when we started the series and many of you already knew this. Here’s hoping the advertising is too.

Excitement: The Top 10 Games Coming in 2012

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:49:00 +0000

Paul: If 2011 didn’t spoil us enough with board games, it looks like 2012 will. Below we present our top ten games coming this year. Ten whole games! That’s a towering collection, a veritable Cleopatra’s needle, so you lot had better start commissioning specially-constructed barges to ferry those needles home to you. Games barges. For these towering games needles. Yes.

One thing’s for sure, though. The most exciting games in the coming year are definitely something Quinns and I will both agreed on. Definitely.

Quinns: Oh, god. Let’s get this over with.

#1: X-Wing

Paul: So obviously, the most exciting game of this coming year will be the X-Wing one, where you get to actually have genuine proper space starfighter star fights like in the films. It also fills a (space) void that’s long needed attending to. We want and we need good Star Wars board games, if only to alleviate the horrid nose-dive that the series took with the last three films. And everything since 1999.

Quinns: Of course, last year Fantasy Flight announced they picked up the Star Wars license, and this will be the first fruit of that sale.

Paul: And some of those fruits are pre-painted X-Wing and TIE fighter models, which is a pretty neat way to start.

Quinns: Of course.

Paul: And, of course, it’s got all sorts of expansion possibilities. I think the starter pack is just supposed to be X-Wings and TIEs, but there’s the option for adding all sorts of alphabetti-spaghetti spaceships, with your B-Wings and your Y-Wings and your Millennium Falcons and maybe a chase through an asteroid field and some of the other special ships from the films and the computer games and the series and all sorts of things I mean can’t you just wouldn’t you just surely this can get you more excited Quintin Smith.

Quinns: LOOK, I’m just feeling very cynical about this.

Paul: Pull out, Quinns. You can’t do any more good back there.

Quinns: Shut up! Between me hearing from people who played a prototype at a convention that it heavily leans on the Wings of War rules, the product page boasting quick, intuitive rules “that’ll have you fighting in minutes”, and a general… thin-ness to everything they’ve announced so far, I just can’t get excited. Honestly, what, besides this flaky thematic coating, is there to get excited about?

Paul: Well, come on then, what’s your suggestion for a game to kick off our top ten?

Quinns: I thought you’d NEVER ASK!

#2: Wok Star

Paul: …

Quinns: Right, Wok Star is a real time game where all the players-

Paul: Simultaneously and permanently lose their dignity?

Quinns: -work in the kitchen of the same Chinese restaurant. Everyone’s in charge of cooking different bits of food, different orders require different sorts of co-operation, and there’s a twenty second timer and you’re all rushing and shouting! And then between rounds you can take money you’ve earned and spend it advertising your restaurant, buying new recipes, upgrade your kitchen…

Paul: Upgrade your kitchen.

Quinns: Paul! Would you hurry it up with that chow mein! I need fried rice! Where are the wontons?

Paul: Did you hit your head. Is that what happened. Shall I call an ambulance.

Quinns: WHERE ARE THE WONTONS? Whatever. We’ll play it and that cynicism of yours will crack apart like the crunchy pastry on a spring roll. Last year Space Alert showed me how much fun frenzied co-op against the clock can be, and I want more.

Anyway, what’s next on the list?

#3: Virgin Queen

Paul: It’s been a while since I was able to let myself get excited about a grand strategy game. Especially a nerdy, beardy, historical one. We’ve not talked about them much so far and, though we reviewed Twilight Imperium in the last series, it was an area I feel we largely avoided.

BUT if we get ourselves a copy of Virgin Queen, we can remedy all that. Look at its expansive map of Europe. Imagine the clash of armies, the plotting of politicians, the conspiracies, the religious conflicts.

Quinns: Imagine your friends making excuses to momentarily leave the table, only to escape the game and your house via a second storey kitchen window.

Paul: No, I’ve already thought of that. I’ve boarded it up. Look, Europe is in turmoil and we can be right in the middle of it!

Quinns: What kind of turmoil. Hang on, let me look this up on BoardGameGeek… Okay, I’m coming around. It says here I can play the Ottoman empire, we can send handgun-equipped assassins at one another, compete for the favour of artists and the game has a “secret negotiation phase”.

Paul: Not yet convinced? Let me say one thing… Marriage: Plus two Victory Points.

Quinns: What are you talking about? Marriage of who?

Paul: …I don’t know. But marriage! Maybe… the marriage of us? Perhaps we-

Quinns: WHAT IS NEXT.

#4: Merchant of Venus

Quinns: Aha! Now here’s a proper space game. This is a brilliant classic from 1988 and, bizarrely, two board game publishers are releasing their own edition of it this year. The original publishers and the original designer both believe they hold the rights, and both sold the rights, so now the two new owners of those rights are both making remakes.

Paul: What? What do you even do in the game? Is it something to do with… merchants? And… love?

Quinns: A love of MONEY! Basically it’s really crunchy economic stuff. You’re flying around, buying low, selling high, you’re permanently changing the supply and demand for different commodities in different regions, you’re building factories, you’re changing your ship, uh, you can be famous… and meet horses…

Paul: This had quite the reputation, didn’t it? I’ve heard it mentioned many a time, but I’ve never played it, and the problem I have now is that I’m not sure what edition I want to play. Both Fantasy Flight and Stronghold Games are going to re-release… hang on, horses?

Quinns: It says right there on the Fantasy Flight page. There are four races in the game, including “Whynom: A strong race of intelligent horses.”

Paul: Whynom.

Quinns: Some people ask me, why have horses in this game? I say, why no’? …m.

Paul: Someone somewhere was paid money to come up with that. Whynom.

Quinns: The alien names are all pretty good. You’ve also got Eeepeeep and Qossuth. Uh. Have we got any business-type games that are a little less embarrassing?

#5: Crude: The Oil Game

Paul: This is another re-release and it actually has something of an exciting story behind it. The original Crude, a game all about the trials and tribulations of managing an energy company, was actually designed by a businessman. It was a cult hit way back in the 70s, then illegally republished by a German company called Hexagames under the name McMulti. What a rubbish name.

All credit is due to Stronghold games who, almost forty years later, managed to get in touch with the original designer and will be re-releasing a shinier, tweaked version this year, with new input from the gent who first made it. And yet who sadly passed away and won’t witness the re-release.

Quinns: Goodness. That is a good story. As for the game, I’m imagining something like Black Gold but a little more depressing.

Paul: Me too. Of course, the problem is that in the intervening years we’ve been spoiled for choice with corporate, capitalist and cash-counting business games. Apparently, Crude has had quite the reputation among dedicated gamers, but I can’t say I’ve ever played it or that I know anyone who has. What’s it like? What’s it about? What mysteries does-

Quinns: Paul, I’m getting bored again.

Paul: Okay, what have we got that’ll wake you up?

#6: BATTLE BEYOND SPACE

Paul: You like games in space, don’t you? It’s the only place your ego will fit.

Quinns: Paul, what is beyond space?

Paul: A battle, clearly. Battle Beyond Space by Z-Man games will be a sort of war game with all of the unnecessary stuff taken out, like common sense and human decency. Three or four players each drag 20 plastic ships into an asteroid field. There is a stupendous fight. You put the game back in its box. Fin. Supposedly it takes less than an hour, too.

Quinns: Less than an hour!

Paul: And look at the size of that guy’s neck on the cover!

Quinns: The artist clearly sent the boss his first mock-up and the reply was a one-line email reading LONGER NECK.

Paul: I really like how this feels very much like a game that’s just about unashamed, unmitigated and shameless war. Laser war in space, but also a fast and furious war, which is how I think wargames should feel. They should have the pace of a battle, they shouldn’t get bogged down in their own minutia.

Quinns: But I like minutia. That’s why I’m looking forward to-

#7: REX

Quinns: REX is actually yet another game tied to an older title, this time to backstabbing board game classic Dune. Rather than seeking to “replicate or replace” Dune, though, Fantasy Flight are instead implementing all sorts of new, modern mechanics to make a game of their own. Including a sexy little system they call the “Simultaneous Dial Based Order System” system.

Paul: Ah. Aha. I wondered when you were going to get onto this. I knew you had it up your sleeve. That, or you had the most incredible boxy-shaped cyst on your arm.

Quinns: That’s gross, Paul. The readers don’t come here to read you being gross.

Paul: :(

Quinns: Dune, and by extent Rex (or REX or whatever), are games where many alien factions are trying to gain control of a planet using military and economic resources, but more excitingly negotiation and backstabbery. Where these game get really interesting is that unlike most games of negotiation (Game of Thrones, say) it’s possible for two players to not just form an alliance, but win the game as an alliance. They just have to overcome a tougher victory condition. Which means other players have to test and tease these alliances to encourage one half to break off to pursue a solo victory.

Paul: Dune is a game whose reputation I’m all too aware of, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever get a chance to properly play it. Although this will apparently by a different game, I’m still pretty keen to give it a go and I’m glad Dune’s game mechanics get to see the light of day again. I’m also a big fan of any and all strategy games where you find yourself in tenuous, cracking alliances. Although there doesn’t seem to be anything to do with marriage in this one, does there?

Quinns: I guess maybe you can marry a sandworm.

Paul: We’re really diving into the remakes this year, aren’t we? I suppose that leads us neatly to…

#8: Descent: Journeys into the Dark, Second Edition

Quinns: Ah yes! Descent. The game Paul and I loved so much we devoted an entire episode of the show to it. Or should that be “the game Paul and I played so much we devoted an entire episode of the show to it to justify those hundreds of hours.”

Paul: Or should that be the game we played so much that we broke it? Like overeager archaeologists, we dived in so deep that we uncovered every one of its flaws and, much as we loved it, we came to see some of the ugliness underneath.

Quinns: Mm. And this year we’re getting a heavily altered, much prettier “second edition”, which is a modest name for what’s sounding like a total overhaul, from the rules to the components. And I couldn’t be happier. I’d be the first to admit Descent needed a reboot following its… five expansions? All of which just added more monsters, skills, treasures, dungeons, until finally the game was a big teetering Jenga tower of rules. I’m also glad that the second edition is going to include, out of the box, the rules for players to embark on epic campaigns rather than just one-shot dungeons, because, let’s be frank, that’s what kept us playing.

Paul: And that’s definitely what this needs most of all, that campaign option right out of the box. It was the best part of our Descent experience and it would be nothing less than cruel to deny new players the opportunity to launch into an epic quest as soon as their miniatures hit the table. My gaming history started with dungeon crawls and I’ve always held the burning fireball of desire within me for new, beautiful and beastly examples of the genre. It’s a tough thing to get right and, believe it not, the Heroica games that Lego are releasing now got me really excited for a while. Then they turned out to be a little-

Quinns: Plastic?

Paul: I was going to say vapid. Someone forgot to put any rules in the box and, yes, I know Descent’s problems were the rules, but a second edition is a second chance. A fresh start. A new adventure. To battle!

Quinns: To battle!

We’re on the home stretch now. Game number nine is…

#9: Thunderstone Advance

Quinns: I reviewed Thunderstone not on Shut Up & Sit Down, but here. It’s a deck building game in the style of Dominion, except instead of you all playing abstract, OCD-afflicted baron trying to snatch more land/points than your opponents, you’re sending a party of adventurers down the mouth of a dungeon in an expedition to recover a relic. It’s all a bit grim, and the card artwork done by Jason Engle is just beautiful.

Anyway, this year Thunderstone’s getting Thunderstone: Advance, which is some kind of all-new game (compatible with any Thunderstone cards you have) that’ll… Advance it?

Basically, the only interesting thing AEG have promised about this game is that it’ll feature “new rules” and a “new board”. Which is a bit like saying the restaurant you’re building will feature new tables and chairs.

Paul: Every time I think of Thunderstone I think of how I haven’t played it enough and I want to give it another go, I want to tie up my pack, purchase a few more torches and, for some reason, recruit that dreadfully dirty looking man who lingers in the town square to come with me.

Sure, it’s a deck-building game, but it really plays with that mechanic in a way I think is so very smart, forcing you to carefully consider every card you add to your collection. It’s an intelligent and very wicked game, and I’m so, so nosy to see exactly what AEG are doing with this new expansion.

Quinns: Paul, do you smell that?

Paul: Smell what?

Quinns: The smell of the BEST SETTING EVER!

#10: Congo: Expedition to Africa 1884

Quinns: Just imagine it. 2-4 players slinking up the Congo. Your steamboat sputters onwards, like a key sliding into the lock that will surely unlock Africa itself. Dark jungles crowding in on either side. Crocodiles snapping at your sandwiches. Malaria in your tea. …shit, I’m going to be disappointed in this game, aren’t I.

Paul: I want to say this right off the bat: This has been a long time coming, for me. I’ve always wanted to see more games set in the heart of Africa, and who doesn’t want to set off on a deadly expedition?

Quinns: Mmm. My worry, now I think about it, is that I love this setting so much I’m going to be disappointed if the rules aren’t so absurdly detailed as to include a section on daily moustache grooming.

Paul: I’m a massive child, I suppose, but I also like the fact that it comes with flags. 20 flags, they say. I don’t mind if they’re just tokens and not real flags, I just want to put them everywhere. Maybe I’ll take them out of the box and carry them around with me, too, leaving them dotted about the flat or perhaps just lay them places in London and look at them. Wistfully.

Quinns: Hmm. I guess that’s our ten games. Shame, as I had one more.

Paul: Me too. Oh, sod it. Quinns! We’re adults now! I say we push on.

Quinns: Let’s do this!

#11: Wiz-War

Quinns: Wiz-War! This is yet another remake of yet another fantastic 80s board game, one which may have gone on to inspire classic videogame Chaos on the ZX Spectrum. Players all control wizards in a deadly and comedic close-quarters battle, with everyone keeping a hand of unique spells close to their chest. You just don’t know what any of your opponents will do. Ever.

Paul: Chaos! Man, those were the days. Well, usually I’d be groaning like a ghoul at a list of remakes, but my fingers are tingling to try this, as well as everything else we’ve covered, and if there’s one thing we can always rely on Fantasy Flight to do it’s to make things shiny, glossy and indulgent. This is looking ever so pretty. Even magical, you might say.

Quinns: Yessir. Imagine it! Players knocking down walls, producing new walls, turning into slime, turning into mist, flinging lighting, growing arms, summoning thorn bushes, casting counterspells and god knows what else. However many cards get shipped with this game, I’ll wish there were more.

Paul: It all sounds very much like a great big magical toybox, to which you and your friends have been given the glowing keys.

Quinns: Very much Fantasy Flight’s area of expertise, then. I expect great things from this one. Oh god what the hell is this last game on the list.

#12: Divided Republic

Quinns: Paul, no.

Paul: Guess who I was born on the same day as?

Quinns: Paul, no.

Paul: Abraham Lincoln!

Quinns: Paul, no.

Paul: So for this game I figured I could put on a hat and I could grow my beard and-

Quinns: And I could shoot you, yes. Let me read out the designer’s description of the game for the good people at home.

“Divided Republic is a card driven two to four player game representing the last calm before the storm that was to become the American Civil War. Players represent the four major parties (Constitutional Unionists, Northern Democrats, Republicans, and Southern Democrats) and attempt to win the presidency by defeating their opponents…

This is a light to medium weight game with intense player interaction… and a play time of about 2-3 hours depending upon how events proceed. There are even a few laughs along the way.”

Paul: Intense player interaction! What’s wrong, Quinns? Can’t you handle that?

Quinns: I’m just glad there are a few laughs along the way because it’s a three hour historical card game.

Paul: Well then, you should enjoy it, seeing as it’s all about division and argument and splitting hairs. It’s political intrigue! It’s campaigning! It’s racing for the White House! You get to accuse your opponents of being scandalous cads, you vie for control of states and try to expand your political influence. As the election gets ever closer, will you manage to gain control of the country? Or will it collapse into civil war, Quinns? …Quinns?

Quinns: Let’s just end on something we can both agree on: Making things bigger.

#13: The Expansions

Quinns: 2012 will see the release of not one, not two, but five expansions for SU&SD favourites. We’ve got:

Quarriors: Quarmageddon, which will add 40 new dice to the cuboid extravaganza in the form of new monsters, new spells and new rules.

Race for the Galaxy: Alien Artifacts, which will apparently repurpose Race for the Galaxy, Paul and my joint favourite game of 2012, into a whole new experience. Players will no longer just build an empire. No, now that empire will merely be a backdrop as we all force our way into an enormous alien spaceship in the centre of the table.

Galaxy Trucker: Another Big Expansion, adding hostile aliens and new components and god knows what else to the funniest game we’ve reviewed to date.

Cosmic Encounter: Cosmic Alliance, chucking another twenty aliens and all-new team rules into the unspeakably beautiful game of negotiation and cunning. I’ll be honest, I’d still buy this if it included just five alien races and a polaroid of Fantasy Flight’s CEO giving me the finger.

Paul: Team rules! Team rules! Empires united in their glory!

Quinns: Ah yes. Cosmic Alliance will also add team rules, where players and their randomly assigned partner must both get the required number of foreign colonies. I have high hopes for this. I’m imagining a kind of super-freaky bridge. And finally, we’ve got:

Seven Wonders: Cities, which should greatly up player interaction and colour in a game that already knits players together in a colourful tapestry.

Paul: Team rules! Team rules! Empires united in their glory in this game, too!

Quinns: For heaven’s sake. Yes, Cities will add team rules too.

Paul: Our first full year with Shut Up & Sit Down looks like it’ll be a busy one and an exciting one. There are so many games I want to try and, of course, there’ll be so many more surprises along the way. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for 2012 to arrive.

Quinns: (It’s arrived already.)

Paul: It has? Hooray!

Quinns: Why do you always have to write conclusions that make you sound like a marriage counselor.

Paul: How do you even know what a marriage counselor sounds like.

Quinns: Look, it was two extra victory points and the guy was a catch. Leave me alone.

EDIT:

Quinns: Two days after publishing this article Paul and I simultaneously slapped our palms to our foreheads, realising we’d forgotten something very special indeed. Vanuatu. So here it is, fashionably late.

#14: Vanuatu

Quinns: Check this theme out. Vanuatu (set in the uniquely poor South Pacific volcanic archipelago of Vanuatu) is an economics game that sees the players all striving for wealth. So far, so ordinary.

Except it’s all a bit chintzy. You’re trying to catch fish, poke around ship wrecks, take part in the traditional Vanuatuan art of drawing in the sand and shuttling tourists around to survey these drawings, or just buy tacky stuff at your stalls you’ve built. There’s also some interesting gamey stuff about area control and timing and requesting help from the islands’ ten wise characters.

But there’s a TWIST! In Vanuatu, wealth and success aren’t measured by how much you earn, but rather how much you give away. So while money is a useful thing to have, mechanically, it’s only in buying beef and booze and coconut flesh from foreign ships and handing these out to your fellow Vanuatuans, or simply handing out the money itself, that you’ll be able to transform your intrinsically useless cash into the “prosperity points” that’ll win you the game.

Very lovely. Very zen. You can bet your bottom that the moment this comes out I’ll be inviting my friends over with the phone in one hand and a cocktail shaker full of daquiris in the other. We’ll be bringing you the earliest possible review.

Review: Dungeon Run

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:36:00 +0000

Quinns: The idea behind Dungeon Run is as sharp and alluring as a crescent moon. Up to six players control heroes running (of course!) through a monster-packed dungeon (yep!) on a breakneck quest to locate a huge dungeon boss, break its neck and snatch the all-powerful relic known as the Summoning Stone from its still-twitching claws.

…which is where the action takes off, because Dungeon Run isn’t actually a cooperative game. Only one hero can leave with the stone, you see. This isn’t some gameshow where everyone goes home with a pat on the ass and a consolation prize.

So what follows is a cruel, Cheeto-fueled re-dreaming of American football where everyone’s goal is to grab that stone, which will then give them full control of all the monsters in the dungeon, and escape through a last line of defense made of their former friends. Or, as the Dungeon Run box proclaims it, “YOU are the end boss!” A sentence so exquisite that if you repeat it to yourself over and over in a dark room you get an actual contact high off the game’s designer.

That’s Dungeon Run’s concept, anyway. The reality is… well, look, nobody said designing a board game was easy.

Dungeon Run is a lightweight game. You could set it up, explain it to your friends or house plants or even parents and finish a game in under 60 minutes. Now, the best lightweight games - Seven Wonders, Condottiere or Dixit, say - have rules as economical as the muscles on a lightweight boxer. Rules so deceptively simple that it’s only when you start playing and getting hit in the face, guts and ribs with fun that you realise the intelligence of the design.

Dungeon Run, by comparison, has rules which are flabby in places and emaciated in others. You just want to take it home and give it a healthy meal, which in our gaming group was represented by everyone breaking out into discussions as to how to fix it the second we finished our first game.

One problem with it becomes evident in its opening minutes. There’s little incentive to work together as the manual seems to expect of you. Experience points for overcoming dangers aren’t shared, so your group immediately fans out alone with the hope of finding some small mushroom or owl to beat up in a corner.

This makes for a lonely, lopsided experience where a few players are bound to be tortured at the hands of random chance and end up knocked unconscious by something hideously fast and angry. For all of Dungeon Run’s generosity in its quantity of treasures, heroes and special abilities (eight heroes! each with around thirteen unique abilities! shit is bananas!), the actual results in its encounters often still come down to a dice roll or two, or frank incompatibility. Your magical wizard bravely discovering that the next room over contains a magic-proof golem, for example.

But we can deal with this! We can. Same as we can forgive Betrayal at the House on the Hill for its opening third quite literally simulating a some children and an elderly man walking around an empty house, because when it does kick off it’s always surprising and entertaining. But the most demoralising part of Dungeon Run actually happens after all this buildup, when it’s revealed that the endgame is as awkward as a wrestling match where the only rule is that nobody can bend their legs. Or arms.

What you want at this point is a panicked, slightly political struggle, the mother of all scraps. What you get, because of the boss’s bizarre ability to teleport anywhere the players choose and because of every hero’s limit of moving precisely two tiles each turn (or moving one and attacking), is a sort of nervous and spasmodic squaredance. Everyone shifts around the dungeon like embarrassed chess pieces, doing their best to scrape an advantage from any powers they’ve got.

Eventually, after some amount of the brutal shankings that occur when heroes actually do cross paths, one of you will go crawling sideways out of the dungeon with the Summoning Stone, leaving most if not all of your friends as so much grimy jam on the dungeon walls. Overcoming the odds to leave with the stone does feel like a victory, just not one that’s particularly deserved.

Oof! Listen to me, moaning like a sailor with his penis trapped in some unlikely household object (a bottle?). While I wouldn’t recommend you buy Dungeon Run, at this point I’ve probably lowered your expectations enough that if you did pick it up you’d be pleasantly surprised. As well as those eight heroes you’ve got four unique bosses…

…thirty-eight dungeon encounters and twenty-six pieces of treasure, so you’ll at least be paddling in the sunny waters we call “variety” for your first few games.

What’s almost as good is that the game’s colour and brutality lends itself to some funny stories. In one game our group’s evil wizard came upon a tome of magic so powerful that after recovering the Summoning Stone he was able to turn the rest of us inside-out as easily as breathing, only to botch a strength check and get crushed by a portcullis on the way out of the dungeon. None of us left the dungeon alive. Presumably the Summoning Stone was later picked up by a wandering goat herder.

Hmm. I’ve still been a bit downbeat. Maybe Paul has something sweeter to say… ?

Paul: The end of this game, it’s supposed climax, is a little like how Reservoir Dogs might have gone if everyone involved wasn’t pointing guns at everyone else, but instead raisins. They’d then wave these ineffectually once or twice, whilst also posturing, before eventually… I’m not sure where I’m going with this.

What I do know is that I wanted to turn the Dungeon Run box upside down and shake it to see if some of the suspense hadn’t fallen out, or to check we weren’t missing some key component. The idea of a game where you begin by helping each other out to achieve an objective, before turning on one another to achieve total victory, is a brilliant one, but that idea must have grown wings or a set of burrowing claws because somewhere along the design process it simply escaped. Dungeon Run feels like a game made out of many intricate and finely-crafted pieces, but completely lacking the conceptual glue that holds them all together. Much as I dread to say it, this game feels broken.

I’m so sorry to end this review with a whimper instead of a bang, or a decapitation, an explosion or a colossal barrage of magic, but that’s how it goes with Dungeon Run too. The final showdown is underwhelming because all the game’s potential for co-operation, co-dependence or ultimate corruption is lost, set adrift in a sea of indifference.

Quinns: So.

Paul: Back to work on season 2?

Quinns: Hell yes.

Episode 7: The Christmas Special

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:48:00 +0000

Come all ye gentlemen. Come ye ladies, too! The boys have released their Christmas Special, a frantic fumble with the quirky lady of board games. We’ve got dice games, solitaire games, print’n’play games, classics and MORE!

02:12 - Quarriors review

09:44 - Christmas… is… ruined?!

10:52 - Phantom Leader review

13:57 - Print’n’Play reviews

26:29 - Cosmic Encounter review

Review: Pictomania

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:39:00 +0000

Paul: Draw Christmas, without drawing a Christmas tree. How would you do it? The clock is ticking. Tick tock, tick tock. Tick. Tock. Maybe you’d draw a Christmas dinner! Of course! Wait, no, what you’ve drawn looks like the Last Supper fix it QUICKLY NOW oh dear too late everyone’s finished and you didn’t even bother trying to guess what they were drawing-

Quinns: Don’t be difficult. You’re being difficult-

Paul: DRAW “DIFFICULT.”

Quinns: Pictomania is our game of Christmas, our recommendation for what you play with your relatives on the day itself. It’s our game for everyone. Sure, we looked at Game of Thrones to see if that was a gamer’s game for Christmas, but we still need a game to replace all those tired favourites you trot out on the day. In this review-

Paul: DRAW “REVIEW”.

Quinns: DRAW “PAIN IN THE ASS” oh God don’t actually jesus Paul stop.

Quinns: You know Pictionary, right? The classic family game where one of you tries to draw something, and their team has to guess what it is. It’s not a bad game. It’s fun.

Pictomania is literally Pictionary designed by Vlaada Chvatil, our favourite board game designer here at SU&SD, and it plays like the game Pictionary might have been in its youth. Pictionary, but leaner, funnier, more experimental, stronger and so, so much more of a man. Game. More of a game.

Paul: Pictomania has a few big differences from Pictionary. In Pictionary, you’re given a word to try to represent as a picture and it could be a film title, an abstract concept, or something else that’s a bit challenging. Then, something like this might happen…

Excited Player: Spartacus Spartacus is it Spartacus it’s Spartacus Spartacus Spartacus is it Spartacus it’s Office Space it’s Local Hero it’s Spartacus is it Spartacus shit what was the film with that guy with the OH MY GOD IT’S THE MATRIX.

Paul: …And the person who shouts loudest or longest might well win the game for their team, simply by spamming their environment.

In Pictomania, that problem is eliminated right away because you can only guess once, by playing a token that you can’t get back. You also guess while you’re drawing, because you’re all drawing a word and guessing everyone else’s at the same time. Aha.

Quinns: What’s more, all the words everyone’s drawing are actually on display. At the start of each round you deal six cards into the game’s card holders, each displaying seven similar words (so a card might list only jungle animals, or Harry Potter books, or whatever), and everyone’s assigned both a card and a number.

So a round goes something like this: You’re drawing something. Frantically. You’re also watching what everyone else is drawing. Frantically. Your eyes are darting back and forth between the drawings and the cards on display to try and guess who is drawing what. Then you commit one of your guess tokens by slapping it down in front of a player only to find what you thought was some form of camel has suddenly grown a trunk. But it’s too late. Hopefully your own picture is clearer, because the more people who guess correctly, the more points you win.

Paul: You want to be quick, though. You have to be. Guessing faster than anyone else gets you extra points, assuming you’re correct. Finishing your picture and all your guessing also means you get to grab a chequered flag tokens from the centre of the table. They’re all worth different amounts of points too, so if you’re quick enough you can get the most valuable one.

So, to recap, Pictomania goes something like this: Draw as quick as you can. Guess as quick as you can. Draw well, so people guess correctly. Guess well, so you also score points. Finish quickly, so that you can get bonus points. Sweat. Panic. Dribble. End up being committed.

Quinns: The whole multiple choice and one-shot system feels like the perfect evolution of Pictionary. Squinting at a picture you don’t recognise in Pictionary is about as much fun as looking at anything you don’t recognise. In a sense, Pictionary is just a simulation of being old. “Is that… my son? No. It’s, it’s a kettle. Shit no IT’S SPARTACUS.”

By comparison, Pictomania is a window into being high as a kite. You’re often able to determine which card a picture comes from, whether it’s an animal, a family member, a heat source or whatever, so you’re never entirely in the dark, your brain is just on permanent overtime as it stares many evolving puzzles in the face.

Paul: Every round becomes a recipe for wonderful and terrible disaster. Your rushed drawing will be awful because you’re trying to guess everybody else’s. Or, your guesses are going to be awful because you spent too long trying to draw something. But no matter how quickly you try and act, it’s assured, unavoidable, inevitable that you’ll find yourself gawping, slack-jawed at something that’s happening. It’s brilliant- Pictomania is a game about speed that always succeeds at reducing you to immobility. What the hell is that person drawing? How is it that two people seem to have such similar pictures, when they have to be drawing two different things? How are you ever supposed to draw a sociologist?

A sociologist, yes. Depending upon how much you want to make your friends and family suffer, Pictomania has different levels of difficulty. Above you can see the lowest-level green cards and the slightly harder orange cards. Below, you can see the third level cards.

Do you see? At a lower level, you might be trying to draw seomthing simple- different kinds of vehicle, say. At higher levels, things get more abstract and arbitrary and seeing a list of ridiculous and punishing possibilities laid out in front of everyone only makes the guessing and the drawing even more frantic.

The fourth level cards, the purple ones, are especially amazing.

Quinns: Yes. These can range from subtle traps (drawing “drawing” will sound easy unless you notice that the words “sketch” and “doodle” are also on the card) to balls to the wall nightmares. Just look at the above examples! How the crap would you draw selflessness without drawing generosity, bravery or willingness? And don’t forget, you’re doing this while trying to correctly guess everyone else’s comedically dickish words.

Paul: Of course, you’re free to set fire to these purple cards in terror, if you must. Your group can play with whatever difficulty level they want. If they’re newbies. Weaklings. Softies. Wimps. People who can’t draw the difference between a softie and a weakling.

Quinns: God, it’s just so tense and so exciting and so, so ridiculous, from the second you start playing to the second you put everything back in the box. If you’ve somehow gotten this far into the review despite having no interest in a “family game”, know that no game we have ever covered on Shut Up & Sit Down offers more excitement per minute than Pictomania.

In fact, Pictomania’s biggest failing is that it’s a family game I wouldn’t be comfortable taking with me to half the families I know, because it’s too fierce and demanding. Not only is it an extraordinarily tricky mental challenge, on every other round who gets the most valuable chequered flag token will come down to how fast players can move their arms. Just imagine. Christmas day, you’re all a bit drunk, and your nephew and and nan simultaneously slingshot their hands forward to grab that all-important three point token. A sound like a crab dropped off an apartment block fills the room. The ambulance is on its way. Christmas is ruined.

Paul: …he’s joking, of course. Sure, the game is intense, but don’t expect it to cause injury outside of Quinns’ monstrous family. And can I just repeat that you don’t have to play with the hard cards? The easiest cards are genuinely easy, but the game will still be brilliant. Genuinely brilliant as an idea, as an accessible game, as a family game, as something everybody gets in seconds but can play for hours… It’s just brilliant.

Pictomania is to Pictionary what the Eiffel Tower is to an electricity pylon. Buy it. Put it under your Christmas tree. Play it all holiday long.

Review: A Game of Thrones

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 22:47:00 +0000

Quinns: This month saw the release of a beautiful new edition of the Game of Thrones board game, a game of duplicity and scheming that, according to rumours, is so mean it’s actually capable of damaging friendships. Yesterday Paul and I played it, and today we seek to answer two very serious questions. One, should you buy it? And two, following his incredible defeat, will Paul manage to assemble an objective opinion?

Paul: I’m not bitter! There’s a lot about A Game of Thrones I want people to know, but they can start by knowing I was graceful in defeat. Under my rule House Tyrell were a staunch and honest ally for the entire game, which definitely wins me the moral victory.

Quinns: Aw! You must tell me how that feels, because I only know what it’s like to win the actual game of thrones. It’s also interesting you’re talking ethics when you spent the entire game convincing my neighbours to war against me.

Paul: I console myself with the terrible truth that success in A Game of Thrones means being a very, very bad person. Someone with no moral fiber, that maidens flee from and dogs turn their noses up at. Just like in the books, then.

Quinns: Absolutely. This game’s biggest success is how it feels worryingly like taking part in the baleful power struggles of George R.R. Martin’s novels. Click on through to read how we discovered that this game would make both the best and worst Christmas present imaginable.

Paul: A Game of Thrones is a grand strategy board game for three to six players where each of you controls a House vying for domination over the fantasy land of Westeros, but it’s not about slow, plodding planning. No. It’s a mix of diplomacy and deception. It’s cruel, tense and very personal.

The box says the game takes two to four hours, which sure is optimistic! Our game took over six hours, and while you could shave some time off that if you all already knew the rules, we weren’t bickering and brokering deals as much as we could have been. If your group loves to talk or even roleplay, this game could probably fill eight hours.

A quick description might call it a more political and rather more intense version of Risk, but I’d feel mean if I said that. There’s a lot more going on here than goes on in a game of Risk.

Quinns: Yes, which is immediately apparent from the moment you sit down at a table covered in little laquered men and cards and a massive board and SO MUCH BEAUTIFUL STUFF.

Each of you will be dispatching nobles, armies and navies to fight over the twenty castles on the map, with the first player to hold seven of them winning immediately, though this is comparable to trying to hold seven basketballs. The game also ends after ten turns, whereupon he or she holding the most castles wins.

Every player begins with a modest and secluded chunk of Westeros, but to expand both your economy and political influence you’ll have to grab more land. By the end of the first turn everybody will have developed borders with two or three other Houses, which is where things get interesting. Players can barely field enough armies to protect two borders, let alone fight two wars, so it’s in everyone interests to make friends fast.

Paul: Good friends would include Houses that have wormed their way to the top of the game’s three influence tracks. Whoever’s at the top of the Iron Throne track holds a tenuous rulership over the land and decides all ties in the game. The Fiefdoms track beneath it decides ties in battles, and the King’s Court track allows players to swap out one of their order tokens for another.

Quinns: Those order tokens are what make Game of Thrones a Devious Bastard’s Game instead of a wargame. Come with me, friend, on a journey into the heart of darkness.

Every turn starts with all players simultaneously assigning orders to their armies by putting a token face-down in each region. These orders can be defensive, offensive, support, raids or the politics-boosting and entirely peaceful “Consolidate Power”. Only when everyone’s placed their orders are the tokens flipped and revealed, letting you see that your peaceful House Stark neighbours are raiding your lands, those Lannisters bordering you to the South have received marching orders while Baratheon aren’t, in fact, supporting your push East. Which is fine, because you probably aren’t doing anything you promised either.

Strategy gamers will find themselves very much not in Kansas anymore. Shuffling units around the map in clever ways is actually less important than making the most of who trusts you, since the only thing in this game more powerful than an alliance is the invasion of an unsuspecting ally.

The rules explicitly state that nobody can show anyone else an order token before they’re all flipped and made public, meaning alliances and cease-fires are at all times based on trust. The horror. Simply put, it’s this order token mechanic that makes Game of Thrones the fearsome, fantastic, entirely faithful game it is. Everything else is almost window dressing.

It’s also what makes Game of Thrones a game that destroys relationships. On three occasions in our game - the repelling of a Stark invasion of Greyjoy’s foothold in the mainland, a sudden Greyjoy invasion of Lannisport and the undignified destruction of some Tyrell forces down South - players were reduced the kind of polite yet utterly transparent fury that I know, had we been kids, would have seen players walking away from the table to have a cry.

Paul: But we’re not kids and so we didn’t, and of course the best friends are the ones you can betray, get mad at, or invade at a moment’s notice and they won’t put laxatives in your beer the next time you come round to visit, right? Right, Quinns? Quinns?

The thing is, even after you’ve flipped your order tokens it’s still possible for people to surprise one another, or wrangle new and ever wickeder deals.

One of the cruelest plays in the game is to tell a player you’ll support their attack, reveal a support token as normal, then actually support the other side when the battle is met. But you could go even further than that. Units that lose a battle are tipped on their side and considered “routed”, leaving said colossally odious player free to march on these routed attackers that were expecting your support, delivering the final blow that removes their miniatures from the game even as you conquer their territory.

Quinns: You make it sound like a miserable way to play, but winners simply cannot be wimps here. A common complaint about these sorts of games is that the higher someone climbs on the greased pole of the victory point track, the more likely the rest of the table are to put aside their differences to yank them back down, meaning the only way anyone is ever going to win is by picking their moment with the patience of a saint before making their play with the speed and mercy of a wet cat.

Paul: And you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?

Quinns: Yes. Towards the tail-end of our game I was strong enough that for three turns straight I hatched plans that would, with a lot of luck, win me the game right there. And for three turns straight the lot of you took time out of your wars to drown that luck in the bogs and latrines of the land. By the third hour of having such an agonisingly close victory denied to me I needed a lie down. Every turn was the same- incredible adrenaline rush, followed by a brutal surge of disappointment. It was a lesson in how smart you have to be to end the game early.

Paul: See, I was right to turn others again you-

Quinns: To try and turn them against me. Didn’t work out so well, as I remember. Maybe if you were prettier.

Paul: Or bustier. But my plotting was wholly vindicated. It explains why you sat there sweating and mumbling for so long, too. A clear sign of too much ambition, of being unable to handle the tension.

Quinns: Speaking of tension, let’s talk about the hateful, beautiful commander cards.

So, everyone gets a hand of characters who make up the nobility of their House. Each participant must play one of these cards, secretly, into each battle. Some commanders simply give a big, fat bonus to your army’s combat value, while others allow you to pull wily tricks. More pertinently, some of your commanders are incredible and some are so shit you’ll wince at the idea of using them.

The thing is, once you’ve committed one of your commanders to a battle you can’t use them again until you’ve cycled through all the rest. Imagine that you sent them out somewhere to lead a campaign. You can’t simply expect them to be available for the next engagement.

It’s thematically reasonable, but in practice it’s almost comedically mean. The game is demanding you voluntarily penalise yourself from time to time in a game where all battles are important. Worse, if you think you’re going to lose a fight then playing your worst commander makes sense, but if your opponent knows you’ll do that then he can chuck in a terrible commander too, which means if you play a good one you might actually WIN, which means… you get the idea. It’s an excellently unpleasant little mind game where every competent commander you send into your discard pile marks you as an easier target for the other Houses.

Paul: Perhaps you’re now seeing why this would be both an excellent and terrible Christmas present. It’s a gorgeous game. Smart, cruel and pretty in equal measure. A perfect present for that special boy or girl in your life who’s both a gamer and a Song of Ice and Fire fan.

But board games received on Christmas day tend to be played on Christmas day, and a list of games I’d rather play with my drunk relatives would be as long as my leg and include spin the bottle. Even if everyone understood what the crap they were doing, someone getting betrayed and entering a year-long sulk is a very real prospect. And you know how we said it’s a little more complex than Risk? Sometimes, it shows.

Quinns: It shows through twenty-nine pages of rules typed out in a tiny font, for starters. If an accurate simulation of the source material is AGoT’s biggest success, the flabbiness of its rules are its biggest failing.

I’ve got to get this out of my system: This game is more complex than it had to be, and twice as complex as it should have been to appeal to any non-gamers who simply love A Song of Ice and Fire. It took me a twenty minute monologue to explain the rules to you lot, and I felt like an asshole for at least nine of those minutes because I was explaining the nuances of ports. And there were still at least half a dozen instances after we’d started where I had to inform you that you couldn’t do that move you’d hinged your strategy on because “it’s against the rules.”

It bugs me because social interaction and deal brokering are what make this game both unique and entertaining, but my god there’s a lot of nerdy fluff in between. If Fantasy Flight were insistent on having a game this complex, why not add political marriages and hostage exchanges instead of tiny marbled siege engines and a system where you all occasionally send troops to the Wall to bring about a variety of underwhelming penalties and rewards.

All right, I’m done. Final thoughts, Paul of House Tyrell?

Paul: I feel a bit mean wrapping up this review already as not all of that nerdy fluff is without merit, like the blind auctions for the influence tracks, but the most important thing to remember is that A Game of Thrones is A Game of Dirty Politics and it’s a great chance to enjoy some scheming.

The anecdote that this game can damage friendships isn’t hyperbole, though, and I think gaming groups out there should be wary that they’ll be expected to manipulate, lie and betray one another. But then, it’s important to remember what the title is, I guess: A Game of Thrones. You might feel sour after a terrible loss, but do you really expect to win every game you play?

Perhaps it’s best to consider A Game of Thrones the ultimate test of your quality as a player, as to whether you’re able to pack up your animosity along with the game. If bitterness dies fast in your circle of friends, then consider the ability to betray, burn and backstab them as a wonderful asset in your friendship and that’s one more reason to pick this game up.

Quinns: It’s interesting, because those betrayals and unexpected attacks are so incredibly unpleasant to be on the receiving end of. Yet because the possibility of them is always there, the game as a whole benefits as every turn becomes unbelievably tense.

Shut Up & Sit Down recommends, then? God, I’m desperate to play it again, but the idea actually makes me nervous. There’s no other game I can say that about.

Paul: We recommend. That is, we recommend it if you don’t mind taking a game to get the rules firm in your mind and, of course, if you don’t take getting manipulated, ganged-up on, brutalised or outwitted too seriously. But if you can’t handle the cold, get off the Wall.

It's war: Player Interaction

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:25:00 +0000

Quinns: There’s a WAR ON here at SU&SD. A disagreement of olympic proportions. You see, I think board games should be about interacting with one another, and Paul is an asshole. I’ll let him explain.

Paul: Quinns is not a fan of certain kinds of games. Worker placement games, games where the players are a bit more independent, or games where players are otherwise free to act without having to worry about one another. You know, all those great games like Runebound and Agricola, and a while ago he got mad at Stone Age. All those well-lived, charming, innovative games that are adored by millions. He’s going to try to explain why and he’ll flap more than an army of penguins. Watch.

Quinns: Oh, I’ll state my case, alright. Games “where the players are a bit more independent” is a cute euphemism. What we’re talking about here are games that don’t see the players interacting.

Games where, fundamentally, each player is off in their own world, worrying about their own problems, and not in anything resembling dynamic conflict or co-operation with their friends. I find them dull. But I’d go further than that. I’d actually call them failures of design.

Paul: Okay. When we talked about this before you raised some good points about how lots of games don’t actually see the players interacting directly. But the thing is, we don’t always have to be on each other’s backs in games. We don’t need everything we play to have intimately interlinked us at each and every turn. Board games are about us coming together and enjoying ourselves. Isn’t it possible that some gamers out there don’t want all these experiences to be ones of direct conflict?

We, as people, get together to do lots of things. If we sit down and watch a film, or a TV show, or have dinner, or all these other social things we enjoy, we don’t necessarily have to have our own personal experiences directly interlinked to what everyone else is up to, do we? We don’t all have to eat off the same plate, but we can still enjoy our experience together. Get me? And is it me or are you already EDITING THE PARAGRAPH ABOVE?

Quinns: Just fixing your ENDLESS TYPOS. Anyway, that’s just it. Board gaming is obviously a social hobby, and my problem with solitaire multiplayer games is that they’re actively antisocial. I have no problem with being sat around a table, a drink in one hand, or perhaps both hands, just talking with my friends. But when you’re playing Agricola you’re not even doing that for half the time. The game has you all staring at your own private board, doing your own calculations. Agricola is obviously a rich and fascinating game, but it doesn’t break down walls between people. It builds them.

Paul: I know you have no problem with having a drink in both hands. But Agricola is all about reacting, responding, timing and picking your moment, one careful move at a time. It’s almost chesslike. It’s a game where you cut other people off, beat them to a key resource, diversify your options and use all your guile so that you’re ready to make do with whatever cheap farming goods you’re able to bring home that seas-

Quinns: BLAH BLAH BLAH-

Paul: THAT SEASON DO NOT INTERRUPT-

Quinns: You don’t need to explain to me why Agricola is a good game. You need to explain to me-

Paul: How to dress in the morning, I know.

Quinns: YOU NEED TO EXPLAIN TO ME why, when you’re surrounded by people you like, you’d want to engage in an activity where for the most part any player’s moves are uninteresting to the rest of the table. It’s inarguable that in Agricola or Dungeon Lords you’re often only half listening when the player sat furthest from you announces what they’re building, a degree of attention usually reserved for family dinners where you know you’re safe in not paying attention as your aging aunt whinges about her back or crack or carbuncles or whatever. I never want to be uninterested in my friends and family. Ever. I certainly don’t want to pay for the privilege.

But let’s move this argument into stormier seas. Let’s hear your defense of Runebound or Talisman, games where all the players are travelling around a board and defeating things in an attempt to gain magical items and experience the fastest. More importantly, unlike Agricola, these are games that so divorce you from one another that you could play alone and have almost exactly the same adventure.

Paul: Adventuring! Now there’s a glorious thing. All of you dashing across the dangerous lands of Terenoth, or Talismanland, or whatever. Questing, fighting monsters, drinking ale, climbing mountains and going to the toilet in bushes. You’re all racing each other, sharing stories, laughing at each other’s defeats and either cheering or booing their victories, you grow powerful, or you grow jealous. You plot revenge and then you execute that revenge. “I’M COMIN’ AFTER YOU, MILLICENT!” you roar, as you chase her Dwarf through the Forests of Hamildorf, waving your Axe of Cleaving +6/+5/+4. Bloody Millicent. If that’s not a group of people around a table having fun, then, well…

Quinns: …

Paul: Okay, you know what? I’ll tell you something. I’ll tell you about some games that you like. You like some games called Dominion and Race for the Galaxy. Tell me about what makes those different to the games you described. Tell me about the interaction in those, Mister Line-of-Anime-Character-Dots-Representing-Silence. Fits, I guess. You do have messy anime hair.

Quinns: Get out of town. Race for the Galaxy, like Seven Wonders, is a card game where any decision you make is 50% based on what your opponents have built. If you notice that your opponents have gone for trading strategies, you start dropping production worlds into your tableaux to cling onto the coat tails of their plans. And watching your opponents like hawks is often rewarded in other, instantaneous ways. You can almost hear the crunching sound when you trigger a production phase when your opponents’ factories are already full.

Tell me, exactly, how watching my friends like a hawk is going to help me in a game of Talisman.

Paul: Are you kidding. Are you actually kidding. Is there a hidden camera in here. What have you done with Quinns.

Quinns: …

Paul: STOP DOING THAT.

In Talisman you watch your other players like a hawk because you get to see their own stories unfold. This is nonetheless an experience you’re all sharing, writing your own chapters, waiting for your stories to intersect, perhaps in mutual respect, perhaps in bitter, sour rivalry, or perhaps in one of you “accidentally” knocking the board off the table if you’re playing endless first edition Talisman.

More generally though, in games with less interaction you watch your opponents to learn from what they do. Like in Dominion. That game you enjoy. You remember Dominion?

Quinns: Sure, sure. I’d agree that there are indeed a few limp, unconvincing reasons to let your gaze settle on one of your friends like a pigeon on a clothesline.

But I mentioned above that I actually consider these games a failure of design. You yourself mentioned in our Dixit review… hang on, let me find the quote

Paul: Go on, flap away, penguin-man. Fly! Fly like the wind!

Quinns: “It’s so fantastic when board game designers try and experiment with what can be achieved with a group of people sat around a table. It’s not just that we have brains, personalities and imaginations. We love to use them as weapons…

Dixit is one of those very special game ideas that makes the most of the human brain while also keeping its rules to a minimum.”

…and I totally agree with that. The art of designing a table game is at its most beautiful and powerful when it simply presents its players with a fascinating, new environment in which to interact. Games that don’t see the players interacting, games that could be played solo without cutting out the heart of the challenge, don’t make use of the single most exciting resource available to any board game designer - the players themselves. We’re where the stories, the intrigue and excitement will come from. Everything else is maths. This is why James Bond plays poker and not sudoku.

Paul: How do you feel, then, about Monopoly? After all, that’s a game where you’re all directly interacting, each of you manipulating an environment that you all share. Is that a more interesting game for you than Talisman, or Stone Age, or Agricola?

Quinns: Haha. It’s like watching a cat try and catch a beam of light. OBVIOUSLY I’m not saying that all games that feature conflict are better than all games that don’t. Although, aha, I will say that I find the auction mechanic in Monopoly - the only part of it that sees the players in direct conflict - the single best, most exciting part of it.

Paul: So then, there’s more to game than just interactong, or conflict-

Quinns: You wrote interactong up there. I don’t know if that was deliberate. Was it deliberate?

Paul: I was distracted by this funny beam of light darting across the wall. What I was going to say is that obviously player interaction isn’t a binary thing, and that it’s possible to have different degrees of it in a game. Maybe some of us simply want more or less of that aspect in our games? Perhaps you want x amount of that, while other gamers are happy with less? Or prefer the dynamics of something like Agricola rather than something where we’re all very tightly interlinked at all times, like Citadels? Is this a discussion we can even resolve, or is it really about personal preference?

Quinns: It is, of course. But you know what bugs me about games with minimal player interaction, regardless of personal taste? We started this site to get more people into board gaming, because it’s not at all the dismal, childish thing people have in their heads. Right?

To me, this hobby is never more tepid and geeky than when you’re sat around a table and playing a game that doesn’t encourage you to talk, laugh, or otherwise bring you into contact; when a game simply presents each of you with the same challenge and says that whoever does it best, wins. To me, it’s only in those occasions that this hobby starts to resemble the stereotype non-gamers have in their heads.

Paul: Hm. Yet in my experience, all sorts of gamers are playing these games. Just because the dynamics are less “social”, it doesn’t necessarily mean the gamers are. Or the experience. This could be a debate that’d go on for a while. Our readers might well have some interesting things to say in their comments below, which is great because we probably have the smartest readers around. That’s definitely not a sycophantic appeal for comments and responses to what we’ve been talking about here, though.

Quinns: I’m expecting to get slaughtered in the comments, but we’ll see.

Paul: Well, I actually think you’ve made some really interesting points and that this is something that deserves to be talked about. Sure, it might be an issue of preference, but it’s still something worth having a debate about. Plus, if it turns out you do have a minority opinion, so what? It’s a sad world where everyone agrees all the time.

Quinns: Agreed.

Episode 6: The Vlaada Chvátil Special

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 13:10:00 +0000

A whole episode about one board game designer?! Have the boys found true love? Or have they just had too many cups of tea? One thing’s for certain - they’re getting pretty good at this video review business.

02:39 - Dungeon Lords review

11:22 - Bunny Bunny Moose Moose review

15:59 - Vlaada News! Ft. previews of Mage Knight, Dungeon Petz & Pictomania

22:05 - Galaxy Trucker review

Review: Dixit

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:13:00 +0000

Quinns: I’m going to go ahead and stick my fork-like opinion into your ribeye reality, here-

Paul: That’s disgusting.

Quinns: Dixit is a multi-award winning game that everyone should know about. An honest-to-god revelation. That’s because where most board games test your logic, wit, or even dexterity, Dixit tests your ability to toy with the imagination of your friends.

Imagine you were reading some beautiful, surrealist children’s novel and the rag-tag band of loveable protagonists wander into a smoky tavern for a drink of… apple ale, or something. Dixit is the card game they would start playing that would get you whispering “Man, why doesn’t that exist in real life.”

But Dixit is as real as it gets, and you should have a good long think about buying it.

Paul: Let’s explain. You play Dixit using six cards which you selfishly hold close to your chest, like a poker hand. Already sounds intriguing, eh? But imagine this was a poker variant devised by Lewis Carroll, because upon these cards is no writing, no rules, no clauses and no directions. Instead, each one features a deeply unusual, abstract, fantastical picture of something that doesn’t quite make sense.

On your turn you are the “Storyteller”, and you need to think of a title or a description for one of these cards (or even a poem, sound, dance or anything else you can dream up), which you’ll announce to the table before placing the card face-down. Then everyone else will select one of their picture cards that might match this description, and you’ll shuffle all these cards together before laying them face up for everyone to see.

With the exception of the Storyteller, everyone then votes, in secret, as to which they think was the Storyteller’s original card. Guessing correctly will earn them points, as will other people voting for their card.

But you have to be subtle. The Storyteller only scores points if some of the players around the table guess correctly. If you’re too obvious in your description, or too obtuse, and everybody or nobody guesses your card, they all get points while you get absolutely nothing. Disaster. The best possible result for the Storyteller is that only a single player around the table guesses correctly. That’ll send you rocketing around the scoring track while leaving most of your opponents in your dust.

Quinns: That’s the entireity of Dixit. The rules fit on a single sheet of paper, yet this game is a cardboard carnival ride for the mind. The challenge Dixit sets in front of you - be mysterious in your description, but not too mysterious - is so utterly unlike anything you’ll ever have been forced to do before as to be almost nauseating. Like stretching a muscle you never knew you had. Except it’s not a muscle, it’s your brain, and Dixit delights in tugging it apart like a fat piece of taffy.

But the rewards for succeeding are every bit as affecting. Each time you cast your vote correctly, you’re not displaying some tedious bit of familiarity with the rules or nuances of the game. You’re inside somebody’s head. Holy shit!

Similarly, when you get really clever as Storyteller and make your description an entire metaphorical sentence, or just a weird squelching noise, and nobody gets it, you’ll be crushed. You didn’t just fail on some mechanical level. You failed on an imaginative level. Which feels an awful lot like a failure as a human being.

Paul: We live in a special time for board gaming. Many of us grew up with dismal examples of rolling dice and slowly, painfully crawling our way around a board as we tried to either collect stuff or outrun everyone else, an experience that has more in common with Christmas shopping than anything else.

It’s so fantastic when board game designers try and experiment with what can be achieved with a group of people sat around a table. It’s not just that we have brains, personalities and imaginations. We love to use them as weapons. We like to bluff, cheat and out-manoeuvre one another in new ways. We like to adapt.

Dixit is one of those very special game ideas that makes the most of the human brain while also keeping its rules to a minimum. In fact, it’s so deceptively simple that I’m aware our above rules explanation might seem a little underwhelming.

Quinns: Yeah. But it can’t be overstated that Dixit is not as simple as its rules. There are all kinds of sinister moments when you’ll be looking at a row of pictures and you’ll realise that of course Millicent would choose a card with a cat on to reference happiness! She’s so predictable. And once you’re trying to follow the plot thread of someone’s imagination, things can get dark fast. I’m not sure I can name another game that might have you factoring the history of someone’s relationships into your plays, trying to figure out whether their clue of “The small war” refers to the couple having dinner or the ants swordfighting atop a pile of coins.

Anyway, once you’re holding the deck of oversized cards Dixit comes with, there’s no way you could be underwhelmed. For reference, look how big the cards are compared to an ordinary playing card or an ordinary pear.

Good job, Reference Pear!

Paul: Oh god not the Reference Pear thing again.

Quinns: Watch your mouth in front of Reference Pear!

This deck of cards, it’s emotionally heavy as well as physically heavy. The consistently touching pictures are all drawn in such as way as to be both happy and sad, or transparent and secretive, or funny and grim.

Dixit could have come slipping into existence out of a dream to be found under someone’s pillow the next morning. It’s that devoid of flaws and cynicism. And while it’s not something I’d want to play as often as some of the sharper, more manipulatively dramatic or grand games in my collection, the Dixit box and its colourful contents are a wonderful thing to find in any house.

Paul: Yes. And if you want to get people into board gaming, Dixit is as good as any entry title on sale today. Shut Up & Sit Down absolutely recommends.

The playing pieces are rabbits, by the way. Why? Why not. What’s marginally more interesting is that you can be PINK. No games let you be pink. None at all.

Review: Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:54:00 +0000

Quinns: We didn’t provide the most glowing of reviews in our recent Halloween Special, which raises a question. What would we actually choose to play on Halloween here at SU&SD?

Absolute no brainer. Say hello to Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space. Not only is it much smaller and cheaper than Arkham Horror, while Arkham has a grim setting, this game is genuinely horrible.

All you’ll find in the box is a thin handful of cards, a handful of black and white paper maps and a second handful of pencils, but what the game achieves with them… it’s just alchemy.

Paul: Imagine you and all the other players are stuck on a poorly-lit spaceship where an experiment has gone horribly wrong. Some people were mutated into alien monsters. Others weren’t. Everyone around the table is either a merciless alien predator or a helpless human, desperately trying to escape. But nobody knows who is who. It’s just too dark to tell what’s going on.

But you can hear. You can hear movement. The sound of a footstep, a distant cough, the thud of a… body? As soon as the game starts, everybody’s picking their way through the darkness towards the escape pods. The humans, because it’s the only way to out of here. The aliens, because it’s best place to ambush your dinner. But because nobody knows where anyone else is in this lightless labyrinth, the game is played with everyone marking their location, and any noises, on their own individual map. It’s sort of like Battleships with biting.

Quinns: Ooh, it’s clever. Every player gets their own hex map of the ship. On your turn you secretly write down the co-ordinates of the hex you’re moving to, with a little fold-up bit at the end of the map keeping this information a secret from everyone else. Different hexes are either dark or white to denote whether moving there will be silent, or whether you’ll have to draw a card from a deck, telling you whether you slipped, tripped, burped or otherwise gave yourself away.

Half the cards tell you that you made a noise, at which point you have to announce to your fellow players that they hear a noise from the hex you’re on. The other half of the cards give you the opportunity to lie. If this happens, you tell the table that they hear a noise coming from any hex of your choosing. Nobody reveals the card they’ve drawn, so nobody else knows if you’re telling the truth or lying about where the noise came from, only that there WAS a noise. The only thing they know for certain is that you just moved onto a darkened hex, which can be telling in itself.

All the players do this all the time, whether they’re aliens or humans. The aliens don’t know who the other aliens are. The humans don’t know who their companions are. The only thing everyone around the table knows are the starting hexes for humans and aliens, where the escape pods are, which hexes are potentially noisy ones and that aliens can move two hexes a turn, if they want, not one.

And from out of these simple rules comes a tangible, choking, paralysing terror.

Paul: Yes. The game quickly becomes very tense and very worrying. There might be noises coming from right behind you, or worse- the area where you want to go. Noises might even be coming from the hex you’re on- something’s out there in the darkness beside you, maybe it’s your friend, maybe it’s not, but you daren’t even breathe out all the same.

The aliens, meanwhile, might be trying to behave as if they were humans, as if they were fleeing rather than stalking. Once they feel sure they’ve landed on the same hex as a human, they can finally reveal their hungry, hungry identity by announcing that, if anyone is on that hex, they’ve just been eaten. In doing so they reveal to the table both their status as a cannibal as well as the spot they’re standing on at that very moment, but regardless of whether their attempt at feeding succeeded or failed, after this brief, illuminating flicker of information, the lights go back out.

Quinns: Humans can’t kill their predators, they can only avoid them through guesswork and bluffing as they pick their way to an escape pod. Once they get there, they make a similar announcement that they’re trying to activate it that allows the aliens to identify both their dinner and its present location. The best bit is, there’s no guarantee that the escape pods will even work. The human players might well need to rush to the next one over and try that instead. Providing another human hasn’t just launched it and left.

The humans, then, have to deal with contradictory needs to both creep about in strange, indirect patterns, while moving faster than their former friends. What was that sound?! Is someone going for the same escape pod as you? Run! RUN!

The aliens can be their own worst enemy, too. There is, after all, nothing to stop one hungry xenomorph accidentally tracking and killing one of their own kind, someone who did all too good a job of pretending to be human. Such things happen in space all the time.

Paul: Some friend that would be, eh?

Quinns: I said I was sorr—

Paul: SHUT UP. So, we’ve got this whole, brilliant, achingly balanced mind game going on here. Can we just remind you it’s all happening on just a few cards and some floppy maps? This is a triumph of design. An honest-to-god antithesis the big, expensive, glossy and fundamentally unfair monsterpiece that is Arkham Horror.

Escape from the Aliens’ simple rules act like an onion. Each layer you peel away reveals another layer of tactics. Don’t forget that the aliens can move faster. This is both a great hunting advantage, but also a potential giveaway. Instead, it’s better they creep coolly about the darkness until they find their moment. Meanwhile, using those cards that let them make noises anywhere, the humans can give the impression they’re moving faster than should be possible. And then you get into double bluffs, where the humans act like humans, and, and, and all this is before we’ve gotten into the territory of mind games, where you might act scared or fall silent at the table to fool others into thinking that they’re zeroing in on your tender little takeaway of a character.

This, bless it, is a game where a lapse in your poker face can literally mean the difference between life and death.

Quinns: But the game isn’t entirely minimalist. Included in the box is a variant where you play with a second deck of item cards that players can draw from every so often, granting human players one-shot abilities such as teleporting back to the human start location, dropping a spotlight on a hex of their choosing or - yes - attacking someone in the same hex as them. Course, although aliens can’t use these, they can and will draw them into their hand to keep up the pretense of being a human. Sneaky.

This game is a diamond. Pure, hard and glorious. Unlike the Resistance (which we reviewed back in Episode 3) where only the spies will be bluffing, here EVERYONE will be bluffing ALL THE TIME because everyone has everything to lose on every single turn. It’s a splendid, glorious liar’s convention where you do your very best to hide the sweat that’s massing on your brow.

About the only flaw is that it doesn’t exactly foster laughter or friendly chatter around the gaming table. You’re all far too engrossed for that.

Paul: Agreed. This game is a must-play just for what it manages with so little, just for being a dark little reminder that ideas, and not theme, and certainly not production values, are the heart and soul of any game.

Escape from the Aliens in Outer Spaces, ladies and gentlemen. Buy it.

Episode 5½: The Halloween Special

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 14:56:14 +0000

The rumours… they’re all true. Say “Hallo” to our first ever Halloween Special! It’s a little shorter than we usually manage, but that’s only because we’re working so hard on Episode 6.

Happy Halloween, everybody.

It's Out: The Summoner Wars Master Set

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:17:00 +0100

Oh my GOODNESS! If you’ve watched Episode 3: Civil Surface you’ll have seen us squeaking about a great little two-player game called Summoner Wars. Well, it’s just gained some weight. The luxurious Master Set is now on sale, containing everything you need to play, a “premium board” (read: an actual board) and six all-new races to play.

Prior to this your only option for getting involved with Summoner Wars was to buy a Starter Set containing a couple of races and a paper disasterpiece of a playing mat. Whether our review of Summoner Wars piqued your interest or you’ve invested in your first decks, you’ll probably be wanting this.

There’s no sense in doing a proper Shut Up & Sit Down review here since the game itself is exactly the same. You’re still trying to protect your Summoner while hatching desperate plots to chip away at the other Summoner, and you’re still using cards from a tiny deck as spells, servants and fuel to summon those servants. Also, the Summoner all still have names that make them sound like Ikea furniture. Mugglugg is definitely a bit of kitchenware, Tundle is a coffee table, and Tacullu is almost certainly some kind of shelf.

In short, the game is still a lovely bit of fun if you’re a competitive type. What’s exciting here are those new decks! Allow me to provide a robust and totally unbiased analysis of each new race you can play.

SAND GOBLINS

Jerks. Just huge jerks. A race of guerrilla desert fighters, the Sand Goblins all have abilities relating to running away, hiding, and picking over dead enemies.

Their summoner’s special ability is monstrous, too. By paying a couple of magic points he can take three nearby enemy units, move them all around and have a chance of damaging them as they become lost in a sandstorm. Horrible.

SWAMP ORCS

Colossal jerks. The Swamp Orcs are the single most innovative Summoner Wars race yet released, coming as they do with a seperate deck of “Vine wall” cards. When certain Swamp Orcs die they leave behind walls of vines that act like obstacle courses for your opponent, but boost your orcs.

In short, the Swamp Orc player is trying to choke the entire board with a wilderness of tangling weeds. Terrible.

MOUNTAIN VARGATH

Aggressive jerks. These goat-people all have special abilities that kick in when they’re on the opponent’s half of the board, meaning anyone playing against the Vargath will find their opponent kicking furiously against any defenses keeping them from running rampant in your territory. Awful.

SHADOW ELVES

Dangerous jerks. Dangerks? The Shadow Elves burn through their deck quicker than any other Summoner Wars deck I’ve seen. Not so much burning the candle at both ends as burning it in an oven, the Shadow Elves are (for the most part) pathetically frail with a cheap summoning cost, yet they’re fast and vicious enough that every turn feels like one where you could slice up the enemy summoner.

The result? You’re discarding cards ceaselessly to make the most of an exciting chance to assassinate the enemy summoner, a “chance” which never really goes away. Dreadful.

DEEP DWARVES

Mystery jerks. The Deep Dwarves are medidative scholars, and not only do some of them actually have an attack rating of zero, their mediocre special abilities require you to pay magic points to activate them.

Worst race ever, right? Well. Yeah. Try believing that when that force of peaceful Deep Dwarves arrayed against you abruptly turns around and kicks in your champion’s head in a single turn. Try believing it when three Deep Dwarves emerge from the earth beside your Summoner and start trying to drag them back down their bottomless hole. Frightful.

BENDERS

Planet-sized jerks. The Benders… you know what? I should explain.

UK readers! Yes, Benders is their actual name.

US readers! Bender is English slang for a homosexual gentleman.

Anyway, the Benders are psychics from another dimension where everybody dresses like they’re in a 90s dance video. I genuinely have no idea what’s going on with them. What I do know is that all of their powers relate to not just moving or obliterating their opponent’s units, but actually taking control of them.

So there you have it. Six new races, irritating freaks down to the very last card. In other words, Plaid Hat games have done a sterling job here. I couldn’t be happier.

Actually, I could. The sole criticism I have is that the new style of artwork on all of the cards can make a tough game of just trying to distinguish between your opponent’s unit types, seeing as they often look quite similar, but that’s a small quibble. The Master Set represents Summoner Wars getting more generous and more inventive than it’s ever been before. It doesn’t nudge this lovely little game any closer to being a classic, but it does make it an even safer purchase than before.

— Quinns

Review: Black Gold

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 19:28:00 +0100

Quinns: We know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “SU&SD, what I really want is a board game about being an oil prospector, except with all the tension and exclusively brutal interaction of a wrestling match.” Well today’s your lucky day! We’re reviewing Black Gold, a game of racing across Texas in a pick-up truck, trying to build wells before your opponents, as well as fierce, arena-like auctions where everyone bids for the right to sell their oil. There Will Be Blood? Yes. Yes, there will.

Paul: You know what? This is the sort of game I wish Monopoly was. A capitalist, pugilist slugging-it-out where the only thing that matters is money and how much of it you can wrench out of the hands of others. And it doesn’t have disgusting paper notes in, either, so that’s another pro. I’m not really sure there will be blood, but there will be a lot of oil and an awful lot of very cruel business practices…

Quinns: I’ll give you another reason it’s the slicker game than Monopoly. These components! Tiny pick-up trucks! Tiny trains! Tiny derricks that squirt tiny plumes of oil into the air! Seeing the spread of multi-coloured derricks in a five player game is like a little party on your table. It’s almost enough to make you forget about the stress of your truck being stuck behind a mountain, your oil-bearing train being behind schedule, and that you don’t have a hope in hell of winning the upcoming auction at the company where you so wisely chose to stash all of your oil.

There are three reasons why the auctions in this game have such teeth:

ONE! The prices at each of the game’s three companies fluctuate each turn. Everybody wants to sell high, nobody wants to sell low.

TWO! If you have more than two plumes of oil in a company’s tank and you lose the auction to sell it, that oil “overflows”. It’s lost. If you’ve seen There Will Be Blood, this can be compared to not so much drinking someone else’s milkshake as upending your own into your lap.

THREE! You don’t bid with cash. You bid with cards called Sales Licenses, and everyone’s encouraged to keep these hidden in their pocket. This is awesome in itself, because it means a lot of leaning back from the table to count your licenses like you’re in some backroom poker game, but what’s more awesome is that it’s legal for people to bid more than what they’re holding just so long as they don’t win the auction (at which point they lose half their licenses and the auction happens again).

In other words, everybody’s encouraged to participate in auctions and drive the price up just to scrape more sales licenses from their opponents’ hands.

You will routinely win an important auction in Black Gold and feel like you need a lie down afterwards. But you can sleep when you’re dead, boystuff! There’s money to be made!

Paul: You can already see the amount of bluffing and bickering this game is going to generate. While Monopoly has you endlessly orbiting the same board, testing your luck over and over to see where you land, Black Gold is very, very much about directly interacting with every player on every turn. You make your money as you make your choices, not with a roll of a die. And, God, that’s so much better than roll-and-move-rubbish. Let’s look at some of the other game mechanics too:

Each turn, players choose from a selection of cards that allow them different actions in different quantities. Some give a great deal of movement points, allowing them to surge their trucks or trains ahead of the pack. Other cards inflate the price of their oil or allow them extra sales licenses. Everyone gets to see what cards everyone else has picked, so you get an idea of what your opponents are aiming for, but you’ll never know the exact value of the wad of sales licenses in their pocket.

If you trundle your truck across Texas you get to drive past oil deposits and prospect, to see how rich the wells might be. Thrust your train forward, and you lengthen your supply line. If your train hasn’t travelled as far as your oil wells, you’re in trouble, as you’re not actually able to transport your oil back to make money. However, if another player’s train is that far ahead you can pay them a transport fee. Obviously it pays to send your own trains surging ahead, in the hope that other overstretched prospectors have to rely on you to send their sludge home.

Quinns: My defining memory of the last game we played was one of mounting horror. The game ends when a special black train reaches the edge of the board, symbolising the arrival of the “Big Oil” companies that buy up anything and everything. Predictably, at this point the player with the most money is the winner, so towards the tail-end of this game I made the decision to stop ploughing cash into new derricks and simply make sure I sold every drop of my oil at a high price.

It was agony. As oil kept pouring in for everybody else and they kept trundling around and yelping excitedly, I just sat there, amassing sales licenses and watching the auction board like a hawk. Was this idiocy? And then, all of a sudden, that black train just… stopped moving, as it’s liable to do. I needed the game to end and it just wouldn’t.

Finally, terribly, the train crossed the line and we all counted up our cash. And do you know what? I was within spitting distance of the winner. But my god, what a tense finish that had been.

Paul: I think this game is absolutely the antidote to Monop-

Quinns: How are you still talking about Monopoly!

Paul: Because! If anyone out there thinks that board games really have to be about ruthless, cut-throat capitalism, then this is a fantastic alternative to Monopoly. That ever-advancing black train, the always hidden sales licenses that both you and your opponents sit on, the bidding for oil you desperately have to sell before you lose it. This game has inertia, it moves, it’s all about making big-money decisions quickly, about out-thinking your rivals, about grabbing a chance before it sinks forever in the Texas sand. Fine, I’ll admit it, Monopoly is an okay game, but this is so much better. It feels like big business.

Quinns: You’re big business.

Paul: Damn right. You’re not going to keep that in, are you?

Quinns: Of course not. I can never keep it in.

Episode 5: The Sci-Fi Special

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 19:52:00 +0100

In this unholy union of “cardboard” and “the future”, the boys review their three favourite sci-fi games on a dangerous journey through time and space. Will they make it home in one piece? Now, that would be telling…

03:22 - Twilight Imperium review

14:30 - Race for the Galaxy review

25:01 - Space Alert review

33:01 - The end… or IS IT?

Episode 5: The Trailer

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 16:52:34 +0100

Review: Fury of Dracula

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 22:18:00 +0100

Quinns: Did you ever play hide and seek as a kid? Do you remember the hysterical thrill of wedging yourself under the bed, trying to control the unbelievable noise of your own lungs? Or being the hunter, creeping through a familiar environment with carbonated anticipation tingling along your veins? Because I’m inclined to call board game Fury of Dracula hide and seek for adults. This is a beautiful, beautiful game, and it deserves a place in houses the world over.

Paul: I didn’t have anywhere exciting to hide as a child or very many people to play with anyway. But we did play a game called Nine Nine In on our school field, which involved-

Quinns: FURY OF DRACULA sees four players each controlling a vampire hunter chasing Dracula across Europe. It’s a glossy update of a classic called Scotland Yard, which was a board game about catching a runaway criminal in London, but here a fifth player gets to control the immortal Count Dracula rather than some greasy burglar, so it’s already the better game.

Paul: And a bit more Gothic or romantic. There’s only so much excitement to be found in chasing someone who’s stolen a Skoda from a lockup in Peckham. Fury of Dracula gives you most of 19th Century Europe, with all its huffing trains, winding lanes and creaking, heaving ships. Dracula could be anywhere between Galway and Genoa, or even further afield, though when the chase takes you to Eastern Europe it gets even more difficult.

Quinns: Right. Fury of Dracula might well be the only game I’ve ever played with a thematic beauty, and a physical beauty, with its embossed cards and gorgeous board, and a mechanical beauty, because the actual game on offer here is about as perfect as I’ve ever seen.

At its core Fury of Dracula is a “hidden movement” game. What that means is that while the hunters all have little playing pieces that you’ll be shuffling about between Frankfurt and Cologne, or Milan and Marseilles, Dracula keeps his playing piece off the board. Instead, he’ll be tracking his movement via a deck of cards (each bearing a printed location) that he’ll be playing, face down, into six spaces along the top of the board. That’s his “trail”. Every time a hunter moves into a land or sea location, Dracula must announce whether that location is in his trail by turning the card face up. Like this:

In the above example one of the hunters might have moved into the North Sea. Dracula turns the card face up. “Oh my god!” cries the hunter. “And that next card is a land card, so he must have moved into a port attached to the North Sea! Quick, Millicent, check out Amsterdam!” Millicent catches a train to Amsterdam, and sure enough, Dracula flips that card up as well. There are only two cards to the right of Amsterdam, meaning there are only a handful of places the count might be. The hunters start chatting, heatedly discussing possibilities, and all the while the Dracula player is listening in, giggling obnoxiously but panicking on the inside. He can feel the net closing. The game is afoot.

Paul: One of my favourite things about this game is how it isn’t merely a chase, but really is a hunt. You’re pursuing deadly prey who might, at some vital moment, take the opportunity to turn and strike before fleeing (or flapping, or dissolving) away into the darkness. The hunters are a dangerous team of professionals and not to be trifled with and, sure, Dracula is outnumbered, but he’s not necessarily outclassed. If you think catching him will end the game then, well, oh dear. You’re in for a terrible surprise.

Should a hunter spot Dracula skulking past the Trevi Fountain, or corner him on a dead end in Prague’s Old Town, he’s not simply going to put his hands up and declare “It’s a fair cop, guv.” Dracula is a master of escape, a shapechanger extraordinaire and irritatingly athletic for a centuries old walking corpse. It’s generally a pretty bad idea for a single hunter to go up against a vampire and Dracula’s player might well want to take a nip at an isolated, lonely pursuiant. Finding the sanguine sonofabitch is only the start of it. You need to organise how you take him down.

Quinns: Worse, you see all those square tokens in the above image? Those are nasty little encounters that Dracula gets to place, face-down, on every location he visits. Unveiling of a scrap of Dracula’s trail is a victory for the hunters, yes, but also a potentially wince-inducing brush with a thief, an assassin, a saboteur, or perhaps something more earthly- a blinding fog, a pack of wolves, even a bolt of lightning. And as Paul says, it all gets tougher in Eastern Europe. Should Dracula retreat to his Translyvanian castle then the hunters will know about it from their spies, but they’ll have to ride even less reliable trains to get them there, while Dracula will have the aid of even more reliable minions.

Paul: That’s one of the best things about this pursuit and as Dracula getting the chance to seed the path behind you with all sorts of ambushes and inconveniences is a joy. You’ll even find yourself wanting to lure the hunters onwards, to tease them and to torture them with your traps. Won’t you, Quinns!

Quinns: …yes.

Paul: Quinns, why don’t you tell the story of the first time you were Dracula.

Quinns: …I deliberately walked into the same city as a hunter.

Paul: And why did you do that, Quinns.

Quinns: …because it was night, when Dracula is strongest, and I thought fighting one of my hunters would be awesome.

Paul: But it wasn’t awesome, was it, Quinns.

Quinns: No.

Paul: No. Quinns actually got himself killed and all of our friends had to leave my house early. Playing as Dracula is an amazing experience, because you’re at once an empowered, invisible skirmisher, yet the tiniest of mistakes will be pounced on by the four minds united against you.

As a hunter, you’re similarly torn. It’s vital you stay on Dracula’s scent in spite of all the dangers he may have seeded, but you’re also on the lookout for something else: Your prey can leave new vampires in his wake, biting helpless damsels in whatever European bedsit he decides to visit next. Should Dracula’s player draw a New Vampire encounter token, and should that recently-nibbled damsel fail to be located before her token drops off the track at the top of the board… well, she’s matured into a brand new vampire and boosted Dracula two whole days closer to his objective of surviving for six days. Meaning the hunters are at once trying to lock Dracula into some geographic dead-end while worriedly cleaning up his mess.

Quinns: This whole game is a puzzle, a thick hotpot of Hungarian goulash for the brain, and it’s made ever-spicier by the powers at Dracula’s disposal. The twin rules that hobble Dracula, that he must move every turn and can’t cross his own trail, are broken by his Hide and Double Back cards. Then there’s Feed, which restores some of Dracula’s dwindling stock of blood but the card is double-sided, so when he drops it into his trail you know he’s standing still for a bite to eat. You just don’t know where. Or do you?

Then, THEN there’s the terrifying legal outcast that is Dracula’s Wolf Form power, which means he can move twice in one turn- for example, clean through the net that the four of you have strung around him. Excellently, nothing stops Dracula from using Wolf Form with the “Hide” card, meaning the hunters will start assuming Dracula just leapt across the map, when in reality he’s right where you originally suspected. Or didn’t expect.

Heh. I’ll tell you another great thing about Fury of Dracula. As a hunter, you don’t have to work very hard to get into character. You want this bastard dead.

Paul: Similarly, the Dracula player will start drawing an evil thrill from outwitting and outmaneuvering four others, playing all the clever tricks they can, taking all the most confusing route possible and doing their very best to throw all four players off the scent all while getting the chance to listen to their pathetic theories. It is tremendously, tremendously exciting to rush about Europe either as the hunter or the hunted and this game seems all too much fun for an adult, which makes me wonder if playing it causes me to regress to a younger mental state. Ten years old, maybe.

Quinns: Sure. Or Paul circa 10,000 B.C., hiding from bears and hunting squirrels.

Paul: I like bears.

Quinns: Not as much as they like you.

Paul: As I mentioned, it’s also not necessarily over the moment Dracula is pounced on. Combat can be bloody and unforgiving, but it’s not necessarily the end of all things. Hunters can employ a variety of weapons or special items against the Transylvanian troublemaker and the vamp himself will, if he plays his cards right, often foil everything with a well-timed strike or even by dissolving into a vampiric mist. The hunters might catch Dracula just once and finish him for good, or they might win and lose difficult fights in half a dozen different locations, in Lisbon or Liverpool, each side injuring the other, before retreating to lick (or suck) their wounds. This isn’t necessarily a quick game and it can make for a long, tense and very exciting evening.

Quinns: And of course, having no idea whether each showdown is going to end the game or just leave a hunter with a bite and a broken ego lends unbelievable tension to the game. Everything’s to play for, all the time, until finally the hunters are standing over Dracula’s ashen corpse, gasping for breath.

Because I should mention neither myself or Paul have ever seen Dracula win a game of this. And isn’t that a great reason for you to buy it? Surely you, the person reading this, have got what it takes to outwit a posse of upstart mortals.

Paul: Listen. I was doing fine as Dracula and then I had to go and catch the last tube.

Quinns: Oh, don’t worry. I remember you fleeing into the night.

Paul: Hmph.

Listen! This is definitely a game to buy, a great showcase of just how tense and terrific a time you can have sat around a table with your friends. The only downside is that you really want to have five players in all five roles to get the best out of it, but there’s nothing to stop a player taking on the role more than one hunter. With each hunter having to hold their own hand of cards it’ll be both a literal and figurative handful, but it’ll still the chase of your life.

Quinns: That’s not the only downside.

Paul: Oh God. You’re not going to start talking about the box inlay again are you.

Quinns: Right, first of all, shut up, second of all, this game comes with the most catastrophically stupid plastic inlay I’ve ever seen. It’s dumbfounding. First of all you have those three massive rectangular holding pens. For what? What did the man or sea sponge or whatever it was that designed this think that the inlay would be storing? Then you’ve got the cylindrical thing which I guess has to content itself with doing a shoddy job of holding the dice, because it’s a touch too small to hold the fragile miniatures which are instead left to rattle around inside those cavernous pens. And then, then there are the indents that hold the cards. Which aren’t big enough to hold the cards. I’ve had to wrap my cards in plastic bags so they don’t spill outwards like drunks from a club at closing time the moment I move the box. It’s-

Paul: Quinns, really, I don’t think the peopl—

Quinns: I’M NOT FINISHED. There’s also a slight indentation on one corner of the inlay that allows the game to hold the postcard-sized character sheets, but the inlay is only lowered on one side, so if you tilt the box even slightly in two of four possible directions those reference cards will go wandering around the box. The whole thing is, in fact, meticulously designed so that anybody who opens it after the box has been so much as nudged is going to have a terrible time.

Paul: The outside of the box looks good, though.

Quinns: Well… yes. Yes, it does.

Quinns: Ah, who am I kidding. Buy it!

Review: Zombies!!!

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 04:22:00 +0100

(Photo credit: verminose on BoardGameGeek.)

We’ve reviewed a lot of smart games lately, a lot of intricate and very cleverly designed ones. Let me tell you, we have some even smarter and even bigger ones coming too, with all sorts of clever twists, but sometimes size isn’t everything. Sometimes smarts aren’t everything, either. It’s not always about brains, you know.

Unless, of course, you’re playing Zombies, in which case it really is about brains. Brains and bullets and using the bullets to keep your brains where God intended. Sure, you can try and tell those wandering cadavers that brains are overrated, that they should consider a vegetarian option, but it’s really very difficult to engage them in any kind of extended dialogue. Because they’re dead.

The goal of Zombies (or Zombies!!! if you’re a pedant, which I’m not) is as straightforward as the rest of the game: Get to the chopper without getting eaten. The game is fast, mean, messy and very economically designed, so if you fancy something with simple rules that you’ll be able to drop onto any table the world over and have everyone rolling dice and making threats within 60 seconds, your credit card should, at this point, be emerging from your wallet like a mouse from its hole.

What I like most about Zombies is how all the players have a hand in everything that goes on. The post-apocalyptic city that they’ll wander through is randomly generated, with each player laying out a new tile on their turn. These could be just another humdrum street, or they could hold a special building like a hardware store or hospital. The corners of the tiles also tell you the amount of ammunition, first aid and zombies to place on that tile. Then, you roll a die and you move that many of the city’s zombies anywhere you like, preferably away from you towards other people. Easy.

But, of course, with everyone laying out new tiles on their turn, wherever they fancy, and then moving zombies where they want, nobody’s dash for the chopper is going to be easy. In fact, you won’t actually see that chopper for a while, since it’s hidden near the bottom of the deck of tiles, so you may as well bide your time stocking up on equipment.

Zombies even has a streak of cruelty in the way it dishes out perks. Although each tile contains ammunition and health, valuable special items and special events are administered via a deck of cards that players draw from every turn, plenty of which actually give you a chance to penalise another player (perhaps a wicked act of revenge for an earlier slight), while others only grant you a special item or bonus only if you can reach a certain part of the city. Get to the police station and you can liberate a shotgun. Find the army surplus store and grab a grenade. Fantastic.

Where’s the police station? Oh, there it is, halfway across town and it might as well be a hundred miles from where you’re stood right now. You’ll need a shotgun just to get there. There must be twenty zombies between you and it and… oh no. That guy who’s path you blocked by laying out a dead end city tile has just played a card that spawned even more zombies. Right next to you. Great. Thanks.

Combat in Zombies is as easy and murderous as everything else in the game. On a roll of a six sided die, your regular gun lets you kill a zombie on a 4 or higher. If you miss, it takes a bite out of your wellbeing. You use your stack of ammunition tokens not to fire, but to boost your die roll by one point per token, so if you rolled a two, spending two of these will save your bacon, inasmuch as bacon is ever saved in Zombies (imagine fumbling it from one frying pan into another slightly cooler one). Otherwise, if you fail to hit… well, you’d better start hunting around for more of those heart tokens, as you just lost another one. Pick up more ammunition, while you’re at it, as it never seems to last as long as you’d like.

Both these tokens appear on almost every new tile placed in the city, but your challenge is in sizing up the risks involved in getting to them. In fact, the risks involved in getting anywhere. Zombies is all about what you choose to chase after and how much you really want to put your neck, head and cerebral cortex on the line.

Importantly, though, Zombies takes steps to prevent a player from ever feeling victimised. If you do end up as dinner for the dead, you’re refreshed, returned to the starting tile and given a chance to start over. You can and surely will send zombies against whatever players you might blame for your demise. When the helicopter finally appears you will, of course, absolutely cover it in zombies. You complete knob. But that’s fine. That’s the sort of thing you’re all doing to each other, all the time.

You won’t run out of zombies either, because even just the base game has ONE HUNDRED ZOMBIES in it, which is pretty incredible considering it comes in a small box and is a borderline budget game. Add a few expansions that include extra cards, city tiles, types of zombie and perhaps even glowing zombie figures and you can absolutely terrify the people you game with. One expansion is even a dirt-cheap BAG OF ZOMBIES and nothing else. Horror.

(I should probably add that there’s also a second way to win the game: Kill 25 zombies. I’ve never, ever seen this happen and it’s surely almost impossible because a) dying takes zombies away from your total and b) they’re zombies and you should be avoiding them. They’re bloody dangerous.)

If you fancy something on the scale of Descent or Space Hulk, but perhaps something that’s both simpler and more immediately violent, Zombies is well worth a go. By the way, it’s also a roll-and-move game. Don’t tell Quinns.

— Paul

*crawling intro dressing gown, blinking heavily at the monitor*

What’s this? Paul wrote a review of Zombies!!! in the dead of night? Well, I guess that’s all right.

I owned Zombies as a teenager and wasn’t particularly impressed by it. There are a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would want to play something this simple and this… cruel. At the time I had no concept of an “entry” game that eases non-board gamers into the cardboardy waters of more complex games, or the appeal of a game that nobody has to take seriously, or that can be played while drinking as heavily as you please.

The second reason that Zombies didn’t impress me is because it just isn’t very impressive. Paul hits the nail on the head up there when he describes the rules as economical. Some games manage to compress fantastic systems into tiny manuals. This isn’t one of them. It fits a functional system into a tiny manual. It’s economical.

And yet, and yet, Zombies!!! does succeed thematically, and this is the reason I’d recommend it to anyone over the more expensive zombie apocalypse sim that is Last Night on Earth. It impresses a couple of feelings on its players that are so vital to the genre.

One! You can, and will, feel like a badass as you shoot each zombie and pluck it off the board, yet this can give way to utter panic as the zombie crowd redoubles itself or you run out of ammunition. Zombies!!! routinely coughs up absolutely hopeless situations, where you’re backed into a corner with one bullet left and IT’S HOPELESS and OH GOD.

Two! As Paul says, despite its small box Zombies!!! understands the importance of pitting you against an actual horde of the bastards. Want to get into the shopping mall? Good call. But there are zombies in the street, zombies in the foyer, zombies in every goddamn room of the place. The fact that Last Night on Earth only comes with enough zombies to pack out the average kitchen is a joke.

There’s one other reason I eye up Zombies!!! every time I’m in a game shop these days. It’s because I have no choice. This game has more expansions than I’ve had hot dinners (I have had about eight hot dinners), and together they physically block my line of sight.

Thoughtfully, they’re all numbered. Zombies!!! 5: School’s Out Forever adds a massive university onto the town, and a host of improvised weaponry. Zombies!!! 7: Send in the Clowns adds a carnival and zombie clowns. Does any of this make the game better? You bet your ass it doesn’t. But it does make it bigger, bigger, bigger, and - uh - I’ve forgotten where I was going with this. But they certainly make it bigger.

Oh yes! I’ve heard that Humans!!!, which is both an expansion for Zombies!!! and a standalone game that lets some players (or all of them) play as the zombies, is actually the more entertaining game. So, if you feel like picking up Zombies!!! and an expansion, that might be the one to get.

— Quinns