Creative Games - Shut Up & Sit Down

Review: Dream Crush

“It’s time to GUSH… about your CRUSH!”

It’s challenging to imagine a more nauseating line of marketing copy, and yet that’s exactly what Dream Crush expects you to do. I won’t stand for it.

Wait, Quinns thinks this game is good? He thinks this game is good? He thinks this game is good? I’m uncertain about all of this, but I’m going to press play all the same.

Ben: Picture the scene: you are in an art gallery. The curator asks you to pick two paintings that match a specific word. They won’t, however, tell you what that word is. You run off and pick two different paintings; one of a horse, the other of an apple in a window. The curator then tells you the word they were thinking of was “escape”, and asks you why on earth you picked those two paintings.

Welcome to the most unusual club in the world!

Detective Club is a party game that sees 4-8 players trying to match fabulous picture cards to different words. Each round, a different player will choose a word, write it on all but one of the adorable tiny notebooks the game comes with, shuffles them, and deals them out. Can you see where this is going?

Paul: I have never, in my life, seen so much frantic, last-minute lying. I’ve never seen so many misunderstandings over cake. I’ve never thought I’d have to explain to someone how oil is obviously, indisputably associated with Texas. And I never thought a tiny misunderstanding over a simple word like “heat” could, and would, ruin everything.

But that’s Decrypto for you, a game of discord and deception that somehow ends up fraught, funny and absolutely fantastic. It sets you the simplest of challenges and creates the most convoluted complications as you and your friends try to tell secrets out in the open, right in front of each other.

Pip: In the time it takes my companion/opponent to move his knight to a new square I have broken off a piece of the game board and stuffed it into my mouth, crumbs on my T-shirt volunteering the specifics of my crime.

On the plus side, I am road testing one of Jenn Sandercock’s edible games – The Order Of The Oven Mitt – and thus I have a mouthful of gingerbread rather than cardboard. On the less plus side you aren’t supposed to eat the board yet and I’ve just remembered I don’t like gingerbread.

The gingerbread debacle happens every year around Christmas. Faced with the dramatic potential of pretending to be a giant devouring a village I will tuck into any number of gingerbread houses and gingerbread folk, trying to ignore my tastebuds. I mention this to make it clear that the gingerbread problem is my own cross to bear rather than anything to do with Jenn. BUT gingerbread is a really useful building material so it’s working really well as the substrate for the game.

A mere thirty-six years after the release of the amazing Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, the board game industry has leapt into action! This month sees the release of the West End Adventures standalone expansion, and… we’re not reviewing it.

That’s because this month we’re also getting a new English-language edition of Watson & Holmes, and that’s EVEN MORE EXCITING. This game takes the original, superlative co-op experience that is Consulting Detective and makes it… competitive. Is this a work of evil genius to rival Moriarty? Or simply an error in deductive reasoning? Let’s find out.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

Cynthia: There’s something extra lovely about roleplaying games in the winter. Where I live in Minnesota, going outside can often be quite deadly, so I prefer to huddle around a table with friends and food and drink. The problem is, being trapped indoors makes me crave adventure. I want to slay monsters, battle evil, brave the ice and cold on a magnificent quest deep into forests and mountains – though I’m not actually going to go outside, of course, that would be insane. The point is, a good RPG lets me have it both ways: grand adventures and the cozy modern comforts of heating, lighting, warm beverages, and pizza delivery. And we all like having it both ways, right? …Right?

Anyway, there is one RPG that this winter has been mollifying my seasonal adventure disorder and warming my heart just like a good cup of hot chocolate with whiskey in it warms your body. That game, my dear readers, is Mouse Guard. So grab your weapons, fluff up your fur, tweak your whiskers, and tap into your anxieties about owls, weasels, and raccoons. You’re about to undertake great and perilous deeds for the sake of all mousekind.

[Introducing RPG columnist Cynthia Hornbeck! As a former Utahn, temporary Minnesotan, PhD dropout and current public school teacher she is radically overqualified for a job with SU&SD. Please, nobody tell her.]

Cynthia: Hello, dear readers! I’d like to invite you all to accompany me to the end of the world, and to your death. Don’t worry! I assure you that you’re perfectly capable and prepared for the end – as it manifests in the phenomenal indie storytelling game Ten Candles, that is.

Ten Candles is a flexible, firelit game of “tragic horror” designed by Stephen Dewey and published by Cavalry Games. And I’m so totally in love with it. It’s many scenarios take place in a variety of apocalypses where thick darkness blankets the earth and an evil force known as “Them” threatens humanity. Oh I know, there are plenty of post-apocalyptic games out there, and I imagine you’re all raising your hands to ask what’s so special about this one. Well, let me show you. Because what’s special about Ten Candles is pretty much everything.

Following on from our early review of Mysterium and our video that teaches you the rules, today we’re rounding off our coverage with something a bit special. It’s our most ambitious Let’s Play EVER, featuring both more cameras and more dressing up than ever before. We’re also playing exclusively with the new characters, locations and weapons found in the new expansion, Mysterium: Hidden Signs!

Huge thanks to T.D. for the set-dressing on this one, and to Leigh and Jessi for being thoroughly excellent 1920s psychics.

Everyone else, have a great weekend!

April 25, 2016 Learn to Play Mysterium, SU&SD Recommends, New to Games?, Creative Games, Card Games We reviewed Mysterium so early (and so breathlessly) that we never got to do a video on it. Gaw bless these rules explanations for letting us fix that! Mysterium didn’t so much replace Dixit as murder it in the … Read more

What would it be like to live in a world without words? How difficult might it be to communicate the idea of a person, an object or a work of art through nothing but a collection of slightly ambiguous icons? How would that even go?

If you think the answers to those questions, in turn, are “Pretty awkward!” “Very difficult!” and “It would be a disaster!” then you’re already primed for our first playthrough video of 2016. Paul sat down with some of his friends, a copy of Concept and some very simple rules:

Divide into two teams of two.
Play to a two minute turn limit.
Choose the card (though not the exact concept) the other team must play.
Play the game on the middle of its three difficulty levels. That should be fine, right?

This is what happened.

Review: Dream Crush

Review: Detective Club

Review: Decrypto

Review: Watson & Holmes

Review: Mouse Guard

Review: Ten Candles

SU&SD Play… Mysterium: Hidden Signs!

How to Play Mysterium!

SU&SD Play… Concept

Feeds