Paul: Hello everyone! Welcome to this exclusive tour of the Shut Up & Sit Down News Battery, where our News Hens squeeze out News Eggs for us every week. These are then rigorously inspected by our team of News Experts, so that only the very best News is served up for you in whatever form and fashion you prefer.
For example, take this delicious omelette courtesy of Fantasy Flight, who are releasing their first ever… wait a second… a trivia game? Game of Thrones: The Trivia Game seems an unusual release until you see that it’s a trivia game “of strategy” with alliances and resources and special powers.
You’re answering questions about the show (of which there seem to be over 1,200) in your attempt to take over locations across Westeros. Wisely, these are labelled by season, so you can avoid spoilers if you’re still catching up with the story. While this still might not be quite my cup of poisoned wine, Fantasy Flight have really shaken up the traditional trivia format here and I appreciate ideas like winning resources that allow you to play special characters, or asking another player to answer a question you can’t and promising them rewards in return.
There’s a push-your-luck dynamic where you can try to answer several questions in a row to attempt to take a location and, naturally, questions are sorted by how difficult or easy they might be, from very specific ones (“To whom does Meryn Trant owe fealty?” – House Baratheon) right down to the blatantly obvious ones (“Who are the best characters?” – Stannis and Catelyn).
More standard news comes from this sizzling, sunny-side-up announcement about an expansion for Colt Express, the three-dimensional Western game that Brendan reviewed last November. The moment it slid out of a clucking bird, we thought Horses & Stagecoach was interesting. It adds a stagecoach that trundles alongside the main game’s train, full of potential hostages for ransom, and also gives the bandits horses that they can use to ride between cars. It even has whiskey flasks which “enhance the faculties of the bandits,” a claim that I feel is debatable at best.
That said, the strange 3D render in this image, which I assume isn’t really how the finished pieces will look, definitely seems whiskey-enhanced.
As you read this, Quinns will be preparing to fly back to Britain. Waiting for him in his mailbox there’s likely to be a terribly diseased copy of Gutsy, a card game from the American Museum of Natural History all about the things that live inside your guts. The many things. The things that digest eggs whenever you eat them. “The AMNH has published the grossest game ever!” Quinns told me. I’m glad it’s going to his house and not mine.
Did you know that your body is basically a city full of of lots of other microorganisms? Really, you’re a colony. It’s not something I like to think about all that often and I prefer to just tuck into my hollandaise, much as I also don’t want to think about how this game lets you swap microbes with other players by kissing them. I should take this opportunity to remind you that all our News Hens are happy and healthy, while we always vaccinate against salmonella. Please, tuck in. You have to feed all your tenants.
A cluck and a pop announces the arrival of the Bill and Ted board game, a game about exactly what you’d expect. Would you like to travel through time in order to get better history grades? Admittedly, I would, plus it would be interesting to take Neo from The Matrix with me, quoting such famous Bill and Ted lines as “Whoa, there’s a bomb on the bus.”
Steve Jackson Games haven’t yet said exactly how this will work (or look), so we remain reserved in our excitemet. We’ve also never been very excited by anything that Steve Jackson Games has released, but who knows? Maybe this’ll be the one? What historical personages would you most like to meet? The correct answer, of course, is Stannis and Catelyn.
Also surprising us from left-field comes the frittata that is This War of Mine: The Board Game. We’re still plucking the feathers off this one, but it appears it’s being designed with the aid of the developers of the original video game, a very serious affair about the civilian struggle to survive in a war zone. The board game’s admirable (and challenging) goal is to be playable right out of the box, without even a glance at the manual.
After pecking away in our special Kickstarter Pen, the brood has gifted us a few more choice ovoid blessings. The Adventurer’s Kit is a very cute children’s game all about travelling around the world, uncovering ancient artifacts while learning about cultures and civilisations. It’s pricey, on account of its having metal, wood, porcelain andterracotta playing pieces, but it’s a lovely idea for a game and I like anything that encourages learning more about our very big and very wide world.
Wouldn’t you want your children to both learn and have fun? I mean, I guess you would. None of us have any children. Maybe we’d just give ours Galaxy Trucker and let them die in space. I seem to remember my own youth featuring a lot of those sorts of experiences.
Finally, exquisitely poached mere minutes after it tumbled, all fresh, out of the backside of a dinosaur descendent, we have news of yet more flashy custom dice. The Luma Diceare glowing metal D6s that demand A POWER KICKSTARTER of TREMEDOUS DRAMA AND GRAVITY. They light up when you roll them and possibly leave dents or scratches on your more delicate surfaces. They’re pretty things, for sure, but I find them just a tiny bit sinister and can’t stop being reminded of the evil cubes from Terrahawks. Remember those? Wait, what do you mean nobody remembers Terrahawks?
