Quinns: How is everybody? Are we all recovered from the biblical deluge that was last week’s news? I saw one of you got a token right in the eye, so I hope this week will be a little more sedate *is passed piece of paper* OH COME ON
Alright, then! Let’s get through this. Fantasy Flight has announced a new, English language edition of The Last Banquet (seen above). A feast of a game, The Last Banquet sits between 6 and 25 players, who (depending on their team and the scenario) will try and manipulate everybody’s seating positions. Like a kind of… turn-based musical chairs, with added poison?
At the start of the game you’ll get a card telling you your character, team, gender, and some background and quotes if you want to do a bit of roleplaying. In the simplest scenario, each team selects one player to carry their murder weapon, and wins if that player is sat next to the King player at the end.
A scepter is then passed around, signifying whose turn it is. On your turn you might do something simple, like swap seats with someone, or use one of your supremely undignified special powers. Let me just quote this review of the German version from Meople’s Magazine (which is absolutely worth reading if you want to know more):
“The Witch, for example, may seduce a Gentlemen from the opposing faction who will not leave her side for the rest of this round. The two players will share a seat and only move together. Even worse, the Jester may call a bunch of people into the center and make them dance with their eyes closed. When he counts to three, they all run to a seat of their choice.”
I think I knew both of those guys at university.
Another game that sounds like the most awful & best thing is PLANES! An announcement so weird I’m typing at half-speed, unsure of whether I’m being trolled.
A little background for you. AEG are branding this together with their game Trains, hence the same font. Trains is a game that baffled us by looking uniquely boring, but was actually great. Then they announced the first expansion using artwork of people LOOKING BORED.
I can’t quite believe this next bit. They’ve announced that Planes won’t be a game of flying planes, or operating an airport, or whatever. Planes will be a game of running to catch your plane.
Words fail me. Players will control a group of people attempting to “push their way through a congested airport”, and you’ll use your own family to passive-aggressively block other passengers. Imagine it! If someone called me and asked if I’d like to come over and play a board game about racing to catch a flight, I’d set fire to my phone.
I’ve panicked over flights before! It’s no fun! You end up running in a jacket, carrying a bag, and arrive at the gate looking like you’ve just been birthed from a vat of slime.
Ah, now here’s an uncomplicated announcement! Board Game Geek news has the scoop on Panicobloc (box and title not final), a twelve minute real-time game where you all play medical professionals, completing small tasks in a mad panic to keep a patient alive.
This might include “stitching” a wound by stitching a board with an actual needle and thread, finding the correct drugs and their dosage in a deck of cards, performing CPR on a whoopie cushion or “pedalling bicycles” to power equipment after a power cut:
This is going to be more fun than a barrel of codeine, not just because Repos Productions are a great publisher and Roberto Fraga is a great designer, but because I was grinning ear-to-ear while writing the last few paragraphs. This game isn’t even out, and it’s already making me happy.
BOOM! Zap! Ships. Here’s a big expansion for you to get excited about, in your brain.
Stronghold Games has announced a second, huge expansion to Core Worlds, the much-loved sci-fi game inspired by Dominion, which is, in turn, a massively popular game where players draw hands of cards from their own personal deck, and spend those cards to buy more cards for their deck.
Dominion is one-part shopping, one-part engineering, and it tickles your brain like nothing else. In Core Worlds, though, that somewhat drab medieval theme is swapped for aggressively claiming whole planets as if you were playing a supersized game of marbles.
Core worlds: Revolution will add just under 100 new cards to the game, including new Advancement cards that’ll let you build helpful infrastructures on the planets you’ve claimed, like schools, Wormhole Generators and Dark Energy Power Cores. One of those might be a lie.
If you were on the fence about picking up Core Worlds, or another deck-building game, though? I’d hold off until this Friday. We’re reviewing something very interesting indeed. Stay frosty.
Quick bit of good news from American game distributor Passport, which is that they’ll be publishing Funforge’s card games The Big Idea and Illusio stateside.
Illusio pitches players as competing magicians working to perform the most elaborate magic tricks, and it’s apparently good? The Big Idea I’ve actually played, and it’s basically Dragon’s Den: The card game, and very good. I remember my friend pitching me a Sports-Utility Machine Shovel. Happy days.
AND finally! If we head over to Kickstarter Korner we find something very cool indeed.
Mobile Frame Zero 002: Alpha Attack is a new Kickstarter for the second game in the Mobile Frame Zero series, which is turns out are rules for miniatures games that use lego! 002: Alpha Attack is a tactical space-ship game, with boarding and carriers and all sorts of stuff. And the first game, 001: Rapid Attack, has you building tiny giant tiny robots!
I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this. I mean, it’s not for me because I’m not into either miniatures games or Lego, but if you were? I can’t imagine what browsing Rapid Attack’s Flickr group would do to you.
This is the coolest way I’ve ever seen to duck the huge costs of miniatures gaming. The rules are even Creative Commons, so you can throw the developer as much money as you want and grab the .pdf for free. Absolute magic.
