Paul: Here we are again, marshalling a whole host of new Games News arrivals! Please stand back as I wave the latest Games News to Gate F26, where it will disembark and make its way toward customs. Quintin, I believe you actually wanted to detain a particularly important story related to Fantasy Flight’s new Legend of the Five Rings card game, right?
Quinns: Ah, yes please, Paul. Please send it this way, where I will thoroughly inspect it, as well as the first of their preview articles…
Paul: I stumbled into the Games News office this morning (much as I do every morning) to find it abandoned, a thin and smoky haze twisting through sunlight sliced a dozen times by crooked venetians. As I tried to blink away the hatred for this unsociable hour of the day, I spotted a single, cryptic note scrawled on Quinns’ desk:
“PAUL we haven’t covered Bear Park yet. We should definitely cover Bear Park. It’s the perfect lead story for your solo news.”
So, he was gone. And he’d left me with the bears.
It was time for the day’s first drink.
Quinns: I hope you all had a nice weekend, because it’s time to get to work. Chop chop! Into the mine with you! Shut Up & Sit Down might be done with classic board game Brass after filming our review, but apparently this game isn’t done with you lot: the unwashed, coin-clipping masses.
Roxley, a Canadian publisher of truly gorgeous-looking games, has posted some stunning teaser images of two games titled Brass: Lancashire (pictured above) and Brass: Birmingham (pictured below). Brass: Lancashire will be a new edition of the original game (which we reviewed) with a few tiny rules tweaks and a radical visual overhaul. Seriously, go and take a peek at the images in that link. It’s not so much “a new coat of paint” as it is “burning down the original building and buying a gothic mansion”. Heavens!
And as for Brass: Birmingham? Why, it’s a collaborative effort between original designer Martin Wallace and two new co-designers, and Roxley is calling it a sequel. A sequel to what many would call a masterpiece of game design. Hold onto your stovepipe hats!
Paul: Oh my GOODNESS Red Scare looks very interesting indeed! This is officially Paul’s Most Exciting Game of the Week, without a doubt, with its fancy social deduction, special glasses and double agents. SPECIAL GLASSES, I hear you shout! In glee! In awe!
Y’see, everybody is playing a team of FBI agents who know that somewhere in their midst are communists that they absolutely have to rat out. Everybody sports a special pair of glasses and, depending upon which ones you wear, you can read certain secret text written on some of the game’s many cards, while remaining completely blind to other text. This is a wonderfully simple idea and I’m immediately thrilled at the idea of players trying to convince one another of what they can or can’t see, blusteringly bluffing and desperately trying to get someone else to confirm (or deny) that things are (or aren’t) what they seem.
Quinns: What a concept, indeed! I’m very excited to test this box from first time designer Benjamin Kanelos. If you were wondering about the box’s striking appearance, this is actually yet another work from Ian O’Toole, who does the layout and illustration for all the breathtakingly lovely new Vital Lacerda games like Vinhos Deluxe. What a guy.
Are we entering an age where artists get as much kudos as designers? Being an enormous fop, I hope so.
Paul: All right, everyone, keep your heads low! The seas are choppy today and that doesn’t make it any easier for the headlines to land on Shut Up & Sit Down’s Games News carrier. This 100,000 tonne vessel carries the very latest in state-of-the-art news-projection technology and, oh boy, that sound you hear RIGHT NOW IS A BIG KICKSTARTER COMING IN OKAY I GOTTA GUIDE THIS BABY DOWN HOLD TIGHT PREPARE FOR 878 VIKINGS!!!
Paul: Oh crikey, what a week it’s been. There’s been all sorts of news exploding out of GAMA, the Game Manufacturers Association trade show in Ohio, but probably the most significant of these was publisher CMON casually announcing that they’re kickstarting a tabletop miniatures game based on A Song of Ice & Fire. Yep, they’ve got a Game of Thrones wargame on the way. That’s quite the license to muscle in on and with the first box being a Stark vs. Lannister “Starter Set” there’s no doubt they have aspirations to grow this substantially.
Quinns: I might have just read too many Game of Thrones books, but this announcement seemed undercut with an amount of… intrigue.
Paul: What do you mean? MURDER?
Quinns: Oh god, no! No-one’s murdering one another.
It’s… EVEN WORSE.
Quinns: OH MY GOD YOU’RE BACK.
Paul: OH MY GOD I’M BACK.
Quinns: OH MY GOD.
Paul: Did I miss anything while I was aw-
Quinns: ONLY THE GIGANTIC RISING SUN KICKSTARTER, THE CAMPAIGN FOR THE GRIZZLED, THE BIG NEWS ABOUT RUNE WARS AND THIS CRAZY NEW MUSIC MIXING GAME.
Paul: …Were you eating properly while I was gone?
Quinns: Hello everybody! So glad you could meet me here, at the Games News pub. It’s my round! Who’s for a pint of news? [points at you] News and soda, was it?
It’s happy hour, so we’re going to start out with a double news on the rocks. The nonsense-mongers at Hasbro have just unveiled two new games. Speak Out: Kids vs Parents is a familial evolution of their game Speak Out, both of which feature your team trying to work out what the hell you’re saying while you wear a dentist’s cheek retractor.
Doesn’t that sound like a game we’d make up as part of a skit? I can only approve that Hasbro has made it a reality.
The press image for it (above) is freaking me out, though. The combination of Habro’s clean-cut toy photography (which has always looked a little “uncanny valley” to me) with rictus grins is absolutely terrifying. Imagine coming downstairs and finding them in your living room. “WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME,” bleats the mother, spraying spit across the room.
Quinns: Good morning sweet shut-upsters! Today is the start of a very solitary couple of weeks on the site. Paul and Matt have gone overseas to run our board game lounge at the yearly Game Developer’s Conference, and then they’re making a top-secret visit to a board game publisher. Like a lighthouse keeper I will be maintaining a lonely vigil. And maybe talking to myself and going a bit mad. We’ll see.
Speaking of maddening things, our top story this week is the above header image that was tweeted by BoardGameGeek. Looks boring, eh? WELL, you’re actually looking at a prototype of Monolith’s next project, Batman: The Board Game, and judging from the dice and stamina crystals it’ll be an evolution of Conan, a miniatures game that this site loved to pieces.
This adaptation makes perfect sense! Conan’s brutal choreography and breathless heroism would be perfect for Batman. But there’s a problem that has me finding this announcement to be bittersweet.
Monolith’s Kickstarters for Conan ($3.3 million) and then Mythic Battles ($2.6 million) have shown that they know how to run an exciting Kickstarter. Clearly, the page for Batman is going to make millions of dollars. But in addition to the sexism that’s run across their games like an oil spill, in this pundit’s opinion Monolith’s been botching the post-release support that I’ve come to expect from expensive games.
Paul: My goodness! We start the news this week with the continuing success story of Vlaada Chvátil and Czech Games. Two new, licensed versions of Codenames have been announced, themed around Marvel and Disney. Surprised?
I can’t say I’m ever likely to buy or play either of them, nor that I’m at all invested in the worlds of either of these entertainment giants, but I do see this as a wonderful way to bring different kinds of licensed games to more players, particularly families, beyond another bloody Monopoly, as well as for Czech Games to earn more well-deserved cash. If someone tells me, in twenty years, that they got into board games through trying to interpret obscure clues about Frozen characters, I’m going to be okay with that.
Okay, hold on, there is also comic potential here. I’m sure there’s all sorts of hilarious clues you can give if you want people to guess both a talking candlestick and a singing elephant, or something slightly sassy you can say about Spider-Man, Victoria Hand and Captain America. Maybe? I don’t actually know anything about comics. Is Garfield DC or Marvel?