You know when you buy a game, and you know it’s going to be good?
“This will be a great time,” you announce to your cactus or spouse. “I have been convinced by this game’s art and premise that I will enjoy myself.”
Your coat’s still on. You pick up the phone. “Barry?” You say. “It’s me. Would you like to come over and have a great time?”
I was convinced Robinson Crusoe was the game for me. Guess what!
Quinns has written another Eurogamer review to tide you over until we return. If Tzolk’in was a huge, great club for your brain to wield, Skull & Roses is a rusty little shiv.
Shut Up & Sit Down absolutely recommends. Go read!
Here’s something to keep you guys hungry. Quinns has just posted his review of Tzolkin: The Mayan Calendar on Eurogamer, and it’s ONLY the most impressive game we’ve played this year.
Ooh, it’s a fine game. Go read!
Quinns: I’m meeting a lot of board gamers here in New York. It’s like Christmas, and I’m Santa, except they gift me with a game and only rarely sit on my lap and you know what this analogy doesn’t work at all
Today I was walked through WONDERFUL post-apocalyptic tactics game Neuroshima Hex!, released in 2006 and since expanded by a untidy bag of army packs. My friend took out this game, taught it to me, and promptly put it away again.
“We’ll play on the iPad,” he said. “It’s better on the iPad.”
My face promptly crumpled up like a plastic bag in a strong breeze. Worst part of it is, he was right.
Quinns: The first edition of Innovation, a card game ranked in Board Game Geek’s top 150 games of ALL TIME, looks - as you can see - supernaturally boring.
The tiny box looks like it should contain soviet suppositories, and inside it you’ll find 110 cards in the same hospitalised colour (Lung? Nicotine?). The deathly manual informs you that every one of these cards is an “innovation”, from archery to automobiles, and 2-4 players will use them to race from one end of history to the other.
Let’s say you agree to play Innovation, even though it’s clearly not your thing. That experience can be compared to going to drink a tall glass of dirty water, and discovering it’s neat whisky.
Quinns: Oh god. OK.
Because board games age so goddamn well, running a board game site can be a bit like running a daycare centre. Those guys can’t rest because it might mean a kid getting stuck behind a radiator or someone eating a rock. We can’t rest because even if we stay on top of new games, we’re writing under the weight of every awesome game we’ve never played.
Shadows over Camelot is one such older game we need to tell you about. One of HUNDREDS. It never ends, but all the same we’re going to talk about it with the good humour of men throwing a shiny penny into a wishing well.
Or a fabled lake. Here’s a co-operative game from 2005 about King Arthur and his knights trying to save Britannia (a similarly momentous task to our own, so we sympathise) EXCEPT their quest has a twist like the deadly whip of a dragon’s tail. One player might be a traitor trying to doom the kingdom. If you can’t figure out who’s against you, or if they aren’t, all might be lost. Probably.
(Paul: Hey hey hey, what’s this? For a while Quinns and I were discussing the idea of guest reviews, where we ask certain particularly sexy contributors if they’d like to take a spot on the blog. For our very first, we’re delighted to host the excellent Ludocracy Now, a wonderful group of gamers who you may remember tried to muscle in on our last show. This time, we’re going to be rather more obliging hosts.)
LN: You guys: Listen. I don’t have much time. I have circumvented the block placed on my transmissions to bring you this important report from America. Paul and Quinns have tried to censor my Belfort agitprop but here I am; I must bring news of this intriguing game to one and all.
Paul: Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Oh, Jesus! That looks like the lovechild of a maths textbook and hotel room art. I’m not having that in my house.”
Hold on. The Castles of Burgundy, which casts 2-4 players as the holders of estates in medieval France, has the whole board game community bleating with quiet joy. We absolutely had to get hold of a copy and try it out. You know what? I actually think it’s quite special, too, although I appreciate it’s such a placid, thoughtful, deeply European game that it won’t be Quinns’s kind of thing. Still-
Quinns: No, no, I really like it.
Paul: You do?
Quinns: Yeah, it’s excellent.
Paul: But-
Quinns: And here’s why!
Quinns: Listen up, ladies. Fiasco: A Game of Powerful Ambition & Poor Impulse Control (which you can buy from that same link) is very much outside the realm of what we usually cover. It’s a two hour table game, but it has no cards, cardboard, winners or losers. It has almost no rules. But despite that, it’s perhaps the best game you’ve never even conceived of.
All you’re paying for here is a very thin, very affordable book. And with this book, you and some of your friends are going to roleplay your evening away. And you’ll laugh like garbage disposal units doing it.
Yes, roleplaying. As in, Dungeons & Dragons. As in you describing what you do to the rest of the table. “I swing my sword at the orc!” before you roll dice and the dungeon master consults his charts, like some omnipotent medieval calculator, before telling you that the orc’s kneecap goes clattering away down a staircase.
The first two things you should know about Fiasco are: One, there’s no dungeon master. Everyone plays together. Two, Fiasco doesn’t simulate adventures. It creates hilarious, disastrous crime capers that will stick in your brain like chewing gum. For the rest of your life.
