Paul: Phew! What a week it’s been, eh? Did you catch those sports? The local news about the animal that did the thing? Gee whiz! Or the town gossip about Ol’ Uncle Bobbins and his brand new motor-car? Life sure moves fast these days!
Me? Oh, I don’t have much to share. Just this lil wee board game called Cosmogenesis, where you get to be a star.
Paul: Drop the sandbags, the Games News dirigible is aloft! Carried on cool currents and buoyed by the balmiest of gasses (their exact composition a closely-guarded secret), it carries up above the clouds to where the spriteliest gaming news flies, soaring across a sapphire sky. Are you ready for a spectacular trip, a voyage like no other, where we glimpse… oh! Look, it’s Dice Hospital! How wondrous!
Wait what? The dice are sick, you say?! THIS IS A DISASTER.
Quinns: You know how we usually do silly intros for the Games News?
Paul: Absolutely. That’s classic Games News.
Quinns: Well, I dunno if we have to today. I think our top story already sounds like a Dr. Seuss story.
Board game designer Friedemann Friese, who likes to make games that begin with the letter ‘F’, has announced a series of sequels to his title Fabled Fruit. Fear, Fortress and Flee are his three new games in the Fast Forward line, all of which use the Fable system (see below). All of these games are green, because Friedemann likes green games (and has green hair).
Speaking of which, they’ve also announced the first expansion to Fabled Fruit, and you’ll never guess what it adds.
Paul: What does it add?
Quinns: Limes.
Paul: Limes?
Quinns: Limes.
Paul: Oh boy, do I feel excited about this week’s Games News! We have just SO MANY interesting and exciting stories. Where do we even begin? With the Huge Humble Bundle? The slew of Kickstarters? Or the new Netrunner core set?
Quinns: Ooh, I’d love to start with the Kickstarter for The Champion of the Wild.
SU&SD is often late to any kind of party, but TCotW is a fantastic game that we can recommend before everybody else. It’s a low-stakes, high-entertainment party game about pitching animals against each other in ridiculous tests of… well, everything from hide and seek to self-stacking. Do you think your animal would win in its category? Is a gorilla good at jousting? Maaaaaybeeee? Go on then, convince me! And enjoy the beautiful, hilarious art while you’re at it.
If you’d like to hear a little more, you can hear us playing it at the very end of podcast #60 and having a whale of a time.
Paul: It was a case of bad timing when Z-Man Games announced Pandemic: Rising Tide, as their scheduling couldn’t possibly have foreseen simultaneously flooding in eastern Texas and eastern India, and they very quickly issued an apology. That could’ve been the end of it, but Z-Man are also donating five dollars from every pre-order to Hurricane Harvey relief efforts.
It’s a difficult time for a lot of people in the Caribbean and the Gulf Coast right now. Our thoughts are also with the Dice Tower team members who have been forced to evacuate their homes. We hope they can return to enjoying the board games we all love very soon.
Paul: Good News to you, my friends. Or, as we say here in Canada, News Be With You. I’m writing this Games News from atop a rock on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, watching the sun plunge past the horizon, thinking about the final touches we’re putting to SHUX. I’m already considering how to make next year bigger, better and cheaper, so it’s all that I can do to pull my head out of all this and tell you about Fantasy Flight’s BATTLE FOR ROKUGAN.
Quinns: It’s time to have a Really Honorable War.
Paul: The Games News comes at you live today from the Shut Up & Sit Down jacuzzi. We always thought it would be cool to have one, so we splashed out but didn’t actually think about where it would go or how we were going to install it. So now we’re just sat in an empty jacuzzi. In our swimming trunks. With no water and no bubbles.
Still, there’s a new Uwe Rosenberg game coming, hooray! Let’s all hail Nusfjord, a game of fishing and worker placement.
Quinns: Hooray! That said, we made this our top story without thinking about how we were going to illustrate it. So up there is just a picture of the real-life town of Nusfjord.
Paul: This isn’t our finest hour, is it?
Quinns: Quick, let’s distract them with the box!
Paul: It’s all hands to the pumps here at Shut Up & Sit Down this week. The News Dam has burst under the weight of stories gushing out of the fiftieth GenCon, along with everything else independent of that massive show that has continued trickling forth. Dual wielding mops all week, we’ve been doing the best that we can to soak up all the information. Some stories are HUGE, others are CRUEL TEASES. It’s all too much.
Put on your lifejackets as we dive right into this BUMPER EDITION and start at the deep end with the BRAND NEW STAR WARS MINIATURES GAME.
Quinns: Hold onto your hats! Twilight Imperium 4th edition wasn’t the only news-belch to erupt from Fantasy Flight Games’ silky gullet this week. For many folks the bigger announcement was Fallout: The Board Game. The world’s most popular post-apocalyptic video game franchise is finally coming to tabletop*.
Releasing in just a few months, the game will offer 1-4 players the chance to steer a tiny plastic miniature through the wasteland, racing the other miniatures to complete objectives and thereby acquire the most “Influence”.
Reading the preview, it sounds like the game’s trying to offer an irradiated sampler platter of what you do in the video game: Scrounge rare loot, level up, tangle with radscorpions, align yourself with factions and resolve the occasional moral quandary.
Sounds good, right? Well, here at SU&SD we’re keeping our feet off the excitement-ometer for the time being, and here’s why.
Quinns: GOOD MORNING. That noise you hear is me cranking the Games News press, pumping out hundreds of thousands of individual copies of this for all of you, our fine and beautiful readers.
Paul: And THAT noise you hear is me pedalling away on my bike, after hurling THIS, your very own copy, onto your doorstep. Look at me ride! A dog is chasing me! You look down at our headline…
Quinns: ANOTHER CLASSIC REBORN: Just like Tigris & Euphrates, Ra and Samurai, Reiner Knizia’s Through the Desert is back in a shinier, sexier incarnation, care of Z-Man Games. Will this be yet another refurbished classic that we fall dramatically in love with?