Good morning, trouble! It’s Monday. The bad news is you’re back at work, but the good news is that so are the world’s board game designers! Imagine them all, staring at blank pieces of paper, perspiring faintly like chickens trying to birth unnaturally large eggs.
We start with Plaid Hat Games, who’ve just let slip a wad of information on their upcoming BioShock Infinite board game, The Siege of Columbia, AND have begun accepting pre-orders for $25 off the retail price. But will it be good, or not-good?! We just don’t know. The designer, Isaac Vega, has two games coming this year from Plaid Hat, this and the dramatic-looking (and sounding) City of Remnants, but has yet to ship anything. We’ll have to wait and see.
This is what I’m excited about, though. Ultimate Werewolf: Inquisition was announced this week. Like The Resistance, Werewolf cuts a table full of people into ignorant good guys and hunted bad guys, except unlike The Resistance’s fragile mission structure, in Werewolf you’re just trying to murder each other.
The Resistance was actually created to circumnavigate Werewolf’s player elimination, but if anything was going to coax me back to Werewolf, it’d be this.
Inquisition, which has been in development for the last two years, expands the game beyond the genre’s traditional lying and voting. Players now visit different village institutions, which might let them “peek at residents, protect them from lynching, add additional votes, learn the identity of other players, and move the Grand Inquisitor token.”
In other words the politics of the game is turning from “LYNCH HIM, HE’S A WEREWOLF,” into delicate maneuvering to first amass the required votes while keeping yourself safe. Better still, the game will support an even broader number of players- from a cosy 3 to a heaving 12.
I could not be more excited. Ultimate Werewolf: Inquisition arrives this June.
You Suck was also announced this week. I haven’t had my breakfast yet, so I’m not got going to write (or even think) about it and let the designers do that instead.
All your life all you’ve wanted was to have the best, the biggest, and the most awesome tick collection in the world. With You Suck, that dream is close to becoming a reality.
A game about collecting cute lil’ bloodsucking parasites. Speaking of unsettling ideas:
That’s a clip from lowest-common-denominator trough The Big Bang Theory in which they play a fictional card game called Mystic Warlords of Ka’a. Guess what got announced this week!
Yes, in what might be the geek equivalent of the horses eating one another in Macbeth, the license-mongers at Cryptozoic Entertainment have announced the official Mystic Warlords of Ka’a game.
This year will also see Cryptozoic releasing The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Deck-Building Game, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Expandable Card Game, The Walking Dead Card Game, The Walking Dead Board Game: The Best Defense, Castle: The Detective Card Game, True Blood: Night Eternal and Assassin’s Creed: The Board Game.
And we’ll be trying to review each and every one. Just… not very hard.
Scott Almes, designer of the forthcoming Kings of Air and Steam, has published a lovely designer diary over on the wonderful BoardGameGeek News blog. Scott’s an engineer, and approached his design with the simple plan of fixing everything he disliked about route-planning games.
Oooh, I love it when board game design gets all scientific. When I sit down with a game, I want to feel like I’m in the presence of genius. That’s what I’m in this for.
I almost poured coffee on my cereal yesterday, is the thing. Are you a genius, reader? What’s it like?
OK. Way back in Shut Up & Sit Down’s Christmas Special I reviewed Phantom Leader, a fairly hardcore solo wargame about commanding a wing of jet fighters in Vietnam, and basically watching them all lose their minds and/or dinner and/or bodies. I did this while wearing a snuggie and drinking cocktails.
After Phantom Leader DVG released Hornet Leader: Carrier Operations. Same kind of game, but they’ve just announced an expansion called Hornet Leader: The Cthulu Conflict. Yes, R’yleh.
I had to triple-check this to make sure it wasn’t an April Fools. Coming soon, you’ll be able to manage the specific bombs and pilots of your aircraft in a battle against H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic entity that is the source of humankind’s constant anxiety.
Anything I close with now will be a disappointment, but let’s soldier on.
THIS is my copy of Level 99 Games’ Minigame Library. It got brought to my attention when the fabulous Rab Florence of RPS’ Cardboard Children column began noisily pinwheeling his arms about Infinity Dungeon, one of the included games.
Ready for the cool part? Would you love to be a game designer? Think you could start with something small? Something… mini?
The designer is now accepting submissions for his 2014 Minigame library. He’ll take care of the art and logo, so you just need the playtested idea. And if you’d rather go even smaller than a deck of cards, he’s also accepting submissions for Microgames, which fit on a single postcard.
What do we think, people? Do we have any designers in the audience? Don’t be put off about the sweaty egg analogy from before. I’m sure it’s easy. Maybe.
