Paul: Today’s Games News comes bursting through your front door like a SWAT team seizing all your pirate DVDs. Why DO you have quite so many pirate DVDs? Why haven’t you moved on to Blu-ray? These are questions we’ve all been asking and I guess you’ll have plenty of time to ponder them in the COUNTY JAIL.
ANYWAY, Pandemic: Fall of Rome is on the way from Z-Man Games, it puts a new spin on the the classic cube-busting series and… I can also reveal that I’ve already tried it.
Welcome To… made its debut in podcast #82, but now it’s time for the real housewarming party: The official SU&SD review of one of the best roll’n’write games ever designed.
Are you a sharp enough architect to assemble three streets, speckle them with swimming pools, dab them with parkland and negotiate with real estate agents and contractors? You’re probably not, no. But you’ll have a great time trying.
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Come on up! Make yourself at home in our twiggy podcast nest, where Paul and Quinns are ready to regurgitate some warmed-up board game knowledge into your waiting beak. This episode features the quietly fabulous tile-laying of Gunkimono. There’s Taj Mahal, the fourth in a fantastic series of beautiful Reiner Knizia remakes. We’ve had a first play of Trade on the Tigris, a new negotiation game from the designer of Space Cadets. Quinns talks about how GKR: Heavy Hitters is almost his favourite game of all time, if it could just be combined somehow with Critical Mass (see podcast #84). Also, like the rest of the internet, we’ve begun playing Root and can’t seem to stop. Finally, the pair chat about a reader mail asking when, and where, we’d consider playing board games for money. Full podcast transcript available here.
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Paul: I specifically told American punk rockers Green Day to wake me up when September came* and they have done with an absolute earful of games news. We’ve got everything from castles to fish to Lara Croft this week, so let’s get this season rolling…
Quinns: …with WARHAMMER.
Wait, hang on. Warhammer… in schools?
A photo of the game GKR: Heavy Hitters from SU&SD’s fancy new instagram.
Quinns: Hi everybody! Our editorial team is off this week. Before we begin the content marathon represented by the final few months of the year, we thought we’d take a short break to recharge our batteries.
To give you a peek behind the curtain, our traffic actually spikes significantly in the final third of the year. As we approach Christmas our audience all want to know which games they should buy and/or play. It’s an important time for us, one where we want to deliver the absolute best videos we can, covering the very best games we can find, so we thought we’d be sensible and dedicate this week to relaxing and playtesting.
Thanks so much for your patience, everybody. We’ll be back Monday.
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Did you think SU&SD only scoured new releases for the very best games? Oh goodness no. This week Paul examines Champions of Midgard, a 2015 game of running around a town, assembling a posse of dice and launching them at the biggest monster who’s currently available.
But wait! There’s more! Paul’s also spent some time with the Dark Mountain and Valhalla expansions. He’s been high, and he’s been low. And we’ll tell you what else- he’s had a very good time.
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Paul: Hot summer strawberries! It’s the middle of August, the sun is (sometimes) in the sky (here it’s mostly just windy) and this is the season that you finally get into board games. It’s an intimidating prospect: you’ve eyed those enormous boxes on the shelves with price tags that would make a banker blush, but this really doesn’t have to be a hobby that destroys your wallet.
Wait! What’s that noise? An approaching siren? An… ice cream van?! It’s me pedalling furiously toward you in the Shut Up & Sit Down Budget Bus, adding a host of surprising prices in this sequel to our indispensable article, How To Build an Amazing Board Game Collection for $10. GET ON BOARD.
Paul: What’s that in the sky, soaring above us?! Is it a bird? A plane? Is it the GAMES NEWS, descending down upon us to… No, it is a bird. Oh no. It’s dead. Quinns, the bird is dead.
Quinns: That’s OK, I was just on my way to bury this copy of Risk. We’ll pop the bird in the box.
Paul: OK, but hurry back! There’s a news story in the Games News’ news about the Dune games that will soon be news?
Can you hear a distant rumble of people applauding, firing party poppers and doing synchronised donuts in their cars? Don’t panic! Nothing could be more natural when our post-Gen Con podcast rolls around. It’s possible that there’s never been such a diverse and exciting array of games tucked into a single SU&SD podcast. Today, Paul and Quinns exchange first impressions of Keyforge: Call of the Archons, Fantasy Flight’s new collaboration with Richard Garfield where every deck ever printed will be unique to you. Up next is Gen 7, the dramatic and curious sequel to Dead of Winter that takes place aboard a generation ship. Then there’s Nyctophobia, a game where all but one player is blindfolded and being hunted by a murderer. Critical Mass, which might be the best game of mecha-on-mecha violence ever made? Railroad Ink, which is the first roll-and-write game we’ve found that could steal the throne from Welcome To. And the pair close by talking about The Estates, which is both the meanest and most devious game of auctions that Quinns has ever experienced. Among those six games are no less than four contenders for the prestigious SU&SD Recommends badge. You heard it here first- the rest of 2018 is going to be absolutely fabulous. UPDATE: We now have a complete transcription of this podcast, courtesy of SU&SD fan InkyBloc!
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Quinns: Oh my goodness. As always, a deluge of announcements came out of Gen Con this year. We should probably start by covering all of the news to gush forth from the excellent studio that is Fantasy Flight Games.
The centrepiece of this press conference? Keyforge. A new card game from Richard Garfield, designer of both Magic: The Gathering and Netrunner, that uses very advanced technology. In fact, the technology behind printing Keyforge is so bonkers that just about everybody in the audience couldn’t wrap their heads around it.