Quinns: Have you heard? Kate Middleton’s Royal Baby™ arrives today! Time to get the news done sharpish so I can attend the ceremony of Gilded Silver where we find out if it’s a changeling.
Fantasy Flight have published the most audacious preview yet of Netrunner’s first deluxe expansion, Creation and Control. The 55 new cards are going to slip into our decks as professionally and powerfully as acupuncture needles, making us fitter. Stronger. Deadlier. Or possibly it’ll just cost a bunch of money and we’ll feel exactly the same, except we’ll get really bad gas, which happened to my friend Alex. When he tried acupuncture, that is. Not when he played Netrunner.
Netrunner is getting to be big business. More of my friends and acquaintences play it than any other game I know, and it just disappears off the shelves of my local hobby shops like autumn leaves on a gusty day. Go read my review if you’re at all interested. This game is cool. It’s just cool. Why can’t more games be cool? Cave Evil, do you know?
No, you… you probably don’t, do you. A second printing of CAVE EVIL is now taking pre-orders, and basically sounds like something Paul and I would design.
A game of “necro-demonic dungeon warfare”, this is an entirely black and white game portraying players as grisly Necromancers, “More ancient than ooze”, who battle one another beneath the earth by creating creatures using the game’s three resources: metals, shadowflame and gore.
It’s a theme that hits close to home, since Paul was obviously reared beneath the earth and I’m forever collecting gore off the motorway in my spare time. Weirder still, the promotional video looks like something Paul and I would film.
But weirdest of all, according to every review of the 1st printing I can find, Cave Evil’s supposed to be quite good!
While it has creature cards titled “The Stabbist,” “The Murder Giant” and “The Evil Bitch”, they’re part of more than 340 unique, illustrated cards included in the game, making for tremendous variety. And the game proper involves tunneling to create pathways and amass resources, and caving theose spaces in against to create walls.
It’s probably not something we’ll review, since this 2nd print run will have exceptionally limited availability of 1,000 copies, and almost half of those will go to pre-order customers, and the designers have said it’ll be the last print run. That makes Cave Evil a sticky little curio, then. Pre-order if you’re at all interested?
Speaking of ooze, we’ve FINALLY got some details on the In the Lab expansion for Pandemic. Hooray! …Except I’m now no longer excited about it. Booo.
The Lab board, it turns out, is a tricky flow diagram that at one end gets filled with any cubes you cure, and then you can slip them through the centrifugre (keeping all cubes of the same colour) or the seperator (keeping 1 of each colour), then optionally grow your samples, before finally assigning them all to cards to help you manufacture a cure.
I’m sure being In the Lab will work, in the game, in practice. It is designed by Leacock, Pandemic’s original designer. But it also seems like the clumsiest kind of expansion. Something bolted on, simply another thing to think about, rather than elevating the original game.
There’ll be other modules in the box, so it could be the case that this is a failure of PR rather than design, but at £5 more expensive than the existing On the Brink expansion, I’m still just nervous.
Effortlessly winning the award for best title ever, Wiener Melange was announced this week. BGG News were too polite to make fun of this, but not me. I’m sincerely hoping it becomes the accepted term for a multicultural sausage party.
It’s ACTUALLY the German name for a kind of Viennese coffee drink, and the game will have you running the year 1910’s most erudite coffeshop. Using “logic and deduction”, players will have to carefully seat guests next to prominent figures at the time including Trotzky, Freud and (prominent painter) Klimt. No other info as yet, but I’m very curious indeed. Mostly because in that prototype shot there are three pairs of people each sharing one chair, and no coffee whatsoever. Worst cafe EVER.
AND FINALLY, 21 Mutinies: Arrr Edition has appeared on German publisher-friendly crowdfunding site Spieleschmiede, and it looks like amazing fun.
Originally a Spanish game, 21 Mutinies had players working on the same ship to gain victory points, with a single captain player deciding whether – on that turn – the ship is fishing, hunting for treasures, or going to the market. Other players could EITHER do this action, or mutiny to become captain next round.
Arr Edition might end up turning fun idea into a great game, adding shipwrecks, the opportunity to steal from other players, the chance to collect rum, as well as the chance to pour it into a merchant like gas into a tank to get a better deal when selling.
Oh no wait there’s one more thing. AND DOUBLE-FINALLY!
Blocky Mountains is the funniest dexterity game I’ve seen in a while. First you build one of the game’s courses, then the game will randomly tell you whether, using a stick with a hook (and possibly some string), you have to push, pull, lift, slide or swing the “Adventurer” to the end of the course. Choose from a deck with a higher difficulty, and you might have to kick your Food (a disc) along with you the entire way, or simultaneously move a Bear with your other hand.
Oh, and the description ends with this:
“The game includes other details – e.g., owls and squirrel tokens for managing your skills and special actions – but this is more or less the whole game.”
Dammit, Germany! Don’t just throw in the owl and squirrel tokens in there at the end, as if they’re not the most exciting part!
In any case, I’m sold. It sounds exactly bonkers enough to work.
