Quinns: Hey everyone! I come to you brimming with tea and delightfully alive. It’s now week two in my Streetwars water gun assassination game and my team is not only still in the running, we’ve got a kill. That’s right. We straight-up soaked a sucker, drenched his dreams, wet his whistle*. At the time of writing only 62 of our game’s 96 players are still alive, and I’ll tell you what else. We’re making quite the video of our exploits.
Big news this week is that King of New York, sequel to Richard Garfield’s much-loved dice game King of Tokyo, has come stomping into the limelight. You can read about it right here, but in short, your massive monsters are now hungry for fame as well as delicious humans. Oh, and the board will have different districts for you to run around! Except the army will be running around it too!
In other words, the definitive game of monster mayhem is getting some actual mayhem.
This is all sounding very good to me. One of the revealed cards even has you throwing rubbish at your friends to make them less famous. Imagine it! Reaching into the sky to snap a jet in half with one hand, flinging dumpsters at your most famous friend with the other. A perfect Sunday afternoon.
Here’s another BoardGameGeek scoop! Matt Leacock, designer of such fantastic despair-generators as Pandemic and Forbidden Island is working on another co-operative game with the Thunderbirds license. I’m trembling with excitement, even though the project isn’t releasing until next year and Leacock says it’ll will lean towards a more accessible style of board game.
Wait. I’ve just had a terrible thought. What if you’re not from the UK and don’t know what Thunderbirds is? Watch this immediately!
Thunderbirds was a cult kids TV show from the 1960s about a billionaire father who’d routinely dispatch his five sons** to crises around the world in the titular “thunderbirds”, solving industrial accidents and terrorism with the POWER OF MACHINES.
Looking back, Thunderbirds is interesting for its bizarre “supermarionation” puppetry (which would later be re-visited Team America), sure. But it’s more interesting for being the product of an age that had yet to grow tired of engineering or wary of money (Thunderbird 1 literally launches from the pool on the patriarch’s island resort).
I mean, compare it to the modern “billionaire hero powered by technology” of Iron Man, and you can see just how inward-facing we’ve become. Tony Stark’s technology is nothing more than the clothing of the man himself, and is given no agency or respect. In comparison, Thunderbirds is vehicular pornography. It’s all straining conveyor belts and the whining of engines.
If you’re interested, there’s a full Thunderbirds movie from 1965 on YouTube right here, and you can watch one of my favourite sequences here, which is just cool son Virgil helping to land a plane which has had its landing gears sabotaged.
Also, Thunderbird 2 is the best Thunderbird and if you disagree I will fight you
Plaid Hat’s Dead of Winter has started appearing in game expos the world over, which means a commercial release can’t be far behind! We don’t usually announce a game’s imminent release, but (a) if this game were any more up our street it’d be up our collective bottom, and (b) we’ve heard good things from people we trust.
Fittingly, Dead of Winter is a game about trust. It’s about working with your friends to survive from zombies in a snow-covered encampment, all the while scavenging for food, weaponry and gasoline, building fences, maintaining morale and much more. But players are also wrestling with their own secret objectives, and might be plotting the camp’s downfall. There’s even the possibility for players to be permanently cast out of the camp with a vote.
It all sounds hugely emotional, and very, very exciting. We’ll be getting you the earliest possible review.
Stronghold Games seem to have contracted some variant of tourettes related to announcing games. Every week it’s something new! We wish them the best in working through this unfortunate disorder, but in the meantime we’ll point you guys towards Medina, a 2001 release that Stronghold will be re-publishing this year. And doesn’t it look gorgeous!
Players in Medina either expand a building on their turn, create one or claim one for points, in what I’d guess plays a little bit like a 3D Carcassonne. Guess I’ll find out when Stronghold’s new edition comes out, which will feature a double-sided board, updated rules and new components. Ee!
Finally, we’ve got the cream of this week’s Kickstarter krop for you guys.
Forge War is doing very well indeed following this breathless bit of praise from excellent board game videographer Rahdo, and the concept is certainly very cool. It’s essentially a fantasy saga in three acts where the players aren’t the heroes, but their blacksmiths, attempting to wrench valuable ores from the mines, equip their mighty patrons and dispatch them on deadly quests.
…Or if you were after something a little lighter, the Monikers kickstarter has now launched! Which you might remember as the game we were breathlessly praising on our 16th podcast.
We did appreciate you guys pointing out that Monikers is just the public domain game “Celebrity“! We did. But in offering something pre-built, pacy, and with lovely presentation, Monikers is still something we’d love to see on the shelves of homes the world over.
*whistle is a euphemism here, meaning “penis”
** Technically one of the sons, John Tracy, monitors the earth from the space station “Thunderbird 5” and appears only briefly in each episode in a sort of Skype call. I always thought that was a super messed up thing to do to your kid. Especially when they’d call him at the end of the episode, John’s extended family enjoying champagne cocktails while he watches, from outer space, monstrously alone.
