Quinns: It’s the week of Spiel, Germany’s largest board game convention! Break out the bratwurst.
Paul: Keep calm and curryworst… on?
Quinns: I wonder which games will have stollen our hearts by the end.
Paul: Let’s talk card games over kartoffelpuffer. Print runs and fischbrötchen!
Quinns: Are you just looking at the Wikipedia page on German food?
Paul: Yes.
Quinns: Well nevermind that! I want to tell the people about my most-anticipated Spiel releases!
Pip: My grandfather was the first person to teach me cards. My memory of exactly how I came to understand the possibilities of suits and tricks, the dual nature of aces and the hierarchy of the royal court (even though the knave would remain for many years as this weird professional tart thief who was inexplicably allowed to keep hanging out with the monarchy – perhaps by dint of being popular because of the tarts?) has faded over time. It’s in the same bracket as learning to read or write. I don’t remember a time when the shapes didn’t make sense. But I do know that it was my grandfather’s doing.
He was fond of cards in that way that doesn’t seem to be common now. My mother tells me that he had a bridge group. My grandmother would also attend, but more for my grandfather than her own amusement. Cards were also a source of entertainment and distraction during his time in Egypt in the second world war and a valuable pastime while he was a prisoner during that war.
None of this ever came into what he was sharing with me – I learned all of that far later during a phone call with my mother as I wondered whether it had just been a way of keeping me occupied during long visits. It was a relief to realise he’d enjoyed it as neither of my parents can stand card games. That’s part of why it was my grandfather who taught me; we didn’t even have a deck of cards at my parents’ house unless one sneaked past the front door as part of a Christmas cracker.
Quinns: One leathery fruit borne from the article on my board game collection was a lot of people telling me to finally play Lancaster. “It’s a classic,” they said. “I’d never turn down a game of Lancaster,” they said.
We’ll get to what I thought of it, but first I owe this game an apology. I realise now that I’d mentally compartmentalised Lancaster in the same place as Alhambra- a weird box that was continually being printed by Queen Games long before Shut Up & Sit Down began, that would be printed long after we’re gone.
I remember finding a copy of Alhambra Big Box in my friendly local game store in 2013. “What is that game?” I asked a staff member, and we both gawped at it as if it were the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Today Quinns and Matt have joined forces to teach El Grande, one of the grand old girls of board gaming. This box is every bit as charming and dangerous as she was back in 1995, and with stock availability of the new “Big Box” still excellent, she remains a very smart purchase.
Any requests for what game we should teach next? Please first check that someone else hasn’t requested the same game as you, in which case you should just upvote their comment!
Read More
What happens when immovable critics meet unstoppable sales figures? Find out in our long-awaited review of Ticket to Ride, followed by our review of new, giant box Ticket to Ride: Rails and Sails! Which is basically Ticket to Ride².
Do you have a favourite Ticket to Ride memory? A favourite board? A favourite train? Let us know in the comments! If there’s any justice in the world, these comments will be a veritable hotbed of Train Chat before the day is through.
Read More
Quinns: Paul, do you remember in the last Games News when I accidentally broke the embargo for Mechs Vs. Minions (the new League of Legends board game) and had to scrub all trace of it from this site in a terrified panic?
Paul: Do you know, I don’t remember that.
Quinns: Neither do I.
Moving swiftly on, the embargo on this gigantic box has now been lifted. If people would like to learn more they can head to the official site or read this lovely Polygon article on how it came about. Mechs vs. Minions will be available to order direct from Riot on the 13th of October and will cost $75 plus shipping, a price that means – purely in terms of components – this box is the best value for money that the board game scene has ever seen.
Quinns: Ladies and gentlemen, roll up! It’s time for a new series where we take a look a team SU&SD’s board game collections. Come and see! Be amazed. Be aghast. Be envious. Comment with thought-provoking assertions like “why do you have that game it is bad”.
You guys will have seen my collection in the background of loads of SU&SD videos, but I don’t think you’ve seen the work that goes into it. Come with me today as I perform… a CULL.
But before that, let me show you my collection as it stands. It’s both completely ridiculous and not as ridiculous as you might think.
Like a Jaguar (the car) or a jaguar (the cat), our 47th ever podcast is an absolute classic. Paul and Quinns discuss board games ranging from Vast: The Crystal Caverns, to Twilight Struggle, to Aquarium and The Dragon & Flagon. They answer reader mails! They review three idiotic folk games. They discuss their love of vegetables and their problems with jam. It’s everything you want in a single, mid-sized audio file. Do you agree with Paul and Quinns on these folk games? Do you own a real-life Aquarium? Have you eaten World War 2 jam? Let us know in the comments!
Read More
September 19, 2016 Learn to Play Dead of Winter: The Long Night, Heavy Games, SU&SD Recommends, Bluffing Games, Cooperative Games It was two years ago that Paul and Quinns ordered you guys to buy Dead of Winter. Today, we’ve got fantastic news for everyone who disobeyed us! Dead of Winter: The Long Night is a … Read more
Read More
Thrower: The Silver Tower is the abode of a mad wizard, designed to chew up and spit out heroic interlopers by the dozen. Yet its first victim was small and personal: my finger.
After looking in the box, I pulled the sheath off my craft knife for the first time in a decade and immediately slit a digit open. It didn’t bode well for the three-hour assembly time I’d heard boasted of on the internet.
What you get in this box is a literal plastic kit with assembly instructions, like scale models of tanks and planes. There is even a dwarf with a multi-part beard to glue together. But I was swayed by the fond memory of twisting whole plastics off sprues in my Warhammer days, so I figured I could handle it. Plaster on finger, I dusted off my other modelling tools and set to work with one simple question in my mind. Could this board game be worth it?