Reviews 13 - Shut Up & Sit Down

Review: Mysterium

Quinns: Everybody, stop! STOP!

[Montage of factory workers looking up from industrial machinery. Doctors and nurses looking up from their surgery. Soldiers locked in deadly hand-to-hand combat, who freeze and turn to face the camera as one.]

I’ve played a new board game and it’s really, really good!

[Amiable mumbling as factory workers loosen their aprons and turn to face the camera, doctors take five on the edge of the operating table as blood spurts into the air, soldiers dust one another off and sit cross-legged like toddlers.]

Mysterium is a co-op game of ghosts, murder and hilarious incompetence, in that order. All but one player is a psychic spending the night in a horrid house where a killing took place. The final player, who may not speak, is a ghost sending everyone else horrible dreams. The ghost must guide the psychics to the correct murder weapon, crime scene and culprit before the week is over, or… well, I’m not sure. Maybe the psychics have concert tickets. It doesn’t matter, and you won’t care. You’ll be laughing too much and thinking too hard.

Paul: The problem I’m having writing this review is, rather than simply telling you how Saboteur works, I really want to give you a selection of quotes from some of my recent games. The thing is, none of these will be remotely illuminating, since they’re all going to be the same sort of questions, which all go like this:

“What are you doing?!” “Why did you do that?!” “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?!”

Or they’ll be the same sort of answers, which go like this:

“I’m helping!” “I have no choice!” “JUST TRUST ME.”

Or they’ll be the same end-of-round exasperation, the same old post-battle cry of Saboteur:

“I TOLD YOU SO.”

I guess Saboteur is something of a game of soundbites.

Matt: Remember those hot hot nights when we wore those masks, and danced as if our legs might melt any moment? I don’t remember that time either – just wanted to make sure we were all on the same page. Mascarade was a fun game with sexy art that forcibly entered my heart last year when I covered it for The Opener. The premise is simple: nobody knows what’s going on, it’ll only get worse as things go on, and you’re almost definitely not the queen but nobody else seems to have clocked that.

There are tons of hidden identity thingers to choose from these days, but what sets Mascarade apart from the crowd is the fact that you’re often not sure of who YOU are, let alone who everyone else might be. Taking a look at your card takes your whole turn so I’M THE BLOODY KING becomes I’M THE BLOODY KING, PROBABLY.

The general gist of all this chaotic magic is probably best expressed in my aforementioned video, so if you’re totally clueless seep that into your face and then come back to absorb my thoughts on the new, first expansion – because for reasons I’ll make clear shortly this may be a good time to go all-in and buy both.

Quinns: Bad news, readers. Our efforts to appease the grand old month of Expansionanuary seem to be for naught. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting darker. It’s now so cold in my flat that the carpet crunches underfoot.

We must have faith that this will end, friends. Unless the rumours are true, and this is indeed the year of twenty fifspansion.

It’s a possibility too horrid to contemplate. In the meantime, we will stay the course. Here’s a review of Trains: Rising Sun.

(Images sourced from BoardGameGeek.)

Thrower: You’re a platoon sergeant, patrolling the Normandy hedgerows in 1944. Suddenly, a burst of automatic fire opens up from the treeline. You don’t know what it is: it could be a machine gun, or a tank. It could be a lone rifleman, or the forward elements of an enemy brigade. Each demands a different course of action, and your life, and those of your men, depend on your picking the right one. What do you do?

Replicating this is the central problem faced by tactical wargame designers. Good tactics start with determining who your enemy is and where they are. Yet for all the effort they put in to simulating weapons and doctrine, tactical board games fail to take this into account. Most of the time you can see exactly what you’re facing.

Two new designers have decided to tackle this intractable issue with their first release, War Stories. It comes in two flavours, Liberty Road for the Western front and Red Storm for the east. As if implementing hidden movement wasn’t ambition enough, it also seeks to be realistic, quick-playing and easily learned. That’s two of the wildest dragons in wargaming, slain by the same title. No wonder people flocked to support the kickstarter.

A Guide to Cosmic Encounter's 5 Expansions!

Matt: What a wonderful world of Cosmic Encounters! If we only had spaceships and SPACE (in our hearts) then we might be able to build a better society on the fringes of our fragile galaxy.

Quinns: What are you doing Matt, this is a board games thing.

Matt: I’m getting everyone in that feel-good 1970’s vibe, when peace and hope and good-vibes ruled the planet and Cosmic Encounter first came out. A decade when man first stepped upon the moon, a famous rock band called Beatles was formed, and everyone had a nice time with flowers.

Quinns: I haven’t got time to fix you, Mattt, so let’s move on. Cosmic Encounter is a brilliant thing. Possibly THE BEST thing, as concluded in our gargantuan Top 25 list at the end of last year, and people who haven’t heard of it should check out this review. But the time for twenty-fives and tops is behind us, and we’re deep into the fog of a cruel Expansionanuary.

Matt: That’s true! I can’t even feel my fingers and fear that my extremities may soon be gone. But that darkness is being somewhat tempered by the fact that we now get to write a HOT ARTICLE about every single Cosmic expansion that’s been released to date. Five different boxes of madness that add a total of 115 (that’s one hundred and fifteen) new aliens to the base game – a staggering increase of 230% to the base game’s already ludicrous wad of 50 aliens.

Brendan: Out of Dodge is a game that understands one of the golden rules of the criminal genre: a botched heist is a good heist. As four outlaws on the run from a job that went terribly wrong, there is room here for hi-jinks, comedy, seriousness and treachery. It is a short, one-shot RPG from Jason Morningstar of Fiasco fame and it has a dastardly fun set up: you arrange four seats in the shape of a car (or use an actual real-life moving car), get in and argue about what went wrong while you speed away from the crime scene with a bag of loot much lighter than you expected.

Oh yeah, and watch out for all the blood because one of you is dying.

Your Guide to Space Cadets: Resistance is Mostly Futile

Quinns: Last year we floated the idea of “Expansion January” or “Expansionanuary”, where we’d start the year by revisiting old favourites and seeing how they’ve been updated. Since you guys weren’t entirely repelled by the concept, welcome to the FIRST EVER Shut Up & Sit Down Expansionanuary.

We’re kicking it off with what’s being called the “first” expansion for Space Cadets, Resistance is Mostly Futile. Remember how we first covered Space Cadets with an itemised guide as to why your friends are going to do a terrible job of flying a spaceship together (and then later demonstrated it in a Let’s Play)?

Let’s give you a guide to the new terrors in the expansion! Starting with a new job that nobody’s going to want to do: the Science Station.

Pip: Brendan, you know that thing when your parents ask you to look after their plants or cats or whatever while they go on holiday and suddenly the crushing weight of responsibility and not abusing the access you suddenly have to the wine cupboard rests heavy on your shoulders?

Brendan: I have heard of this feeling.

Pip: Is that what’s happened with Shut Up and Sit Down with Paul in the US and Quinns off in Bali? And now we have to water the board games and take the cards to the vet?

Brendan: What? What are you doing with that watering can? Get away from the board games! Oh God, what have you done? Everything is all… mushy.

Pip: No no, it’s fine, there are two left! Yardmaster and Paradise Fallen. We can still do a review of these and Paul won’t do his disappointed face at us.

Brendan: I hate Paul’s disappointed face. It looks like Gary Oldman. Still, it’s kind of wet and cold in here now.

Pip: Pub?

Pip: I’m currently playing single-player Zooloretto. It doesn’t have a single player mode so I’ll explain that in a moment. In the meantime, what on earth is Zooloretto?

Zooloretto is a game about running a zoo. The aim is to collect animals, pack enclosures with them and augment these with kiosks, all of which give you points. Your zoo starts as a board with one barn and three enclosures, each of which has a different number of squares corresponding to how many camels or kangaroos they can hold (before the creatures presumably starve, turn on one another or climb atop their friends to escape). There are also spaces overlooking the enclosures where you can put the kiosks that, in a real zoo, would be dispensing stuffed toys, souvenir keyrings and emergency ponchos to stressed parents.

Review: Mysterium

Review: Saboteur

Review: Mascarade Expansion

Review: Trains: Rising Sun

Review: War Stories

A Guide to Cosmic Encounter’s 5 Expansions!

Review: Out of Dodge

Your Guide to Space Cadets: Resistance is Mostly Futile

Review: Paradise Fallen & Yardmaster

Review: Zooloretto

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