Doomtown: Reloaded

Games News! 18/09/2017

Paul: Oh boy, do I feel excited about this week’s Games News! We have just SO MANY interesting and exciting stories. Where do we even begin? With the Huge Humble Bundle? The slew of Kickstarters? Or the new Netrunner core set?

Quinns: Ooh, I’d love to start with the Kickstarter for The Champion of the Wild.

SU&SD is often late to any kind of party, but TCotW is a fantastic game that we can recommend before everybody else. It’s a low-stakes, high-entertainment party game about pitching animals against each other in ridiculous tests of… well, everything from hide and seek to self-stacking. Do you think your animal would win in its category? Is a gorilla good at jousting? Maaaaaybeeee? Go on then, convince me! And enjoy the beautiful, hilarious art while you’re at it.

If you’d like to hear a little more, you can hear us playing it at the very end of podcast #60 and having a whale of a time.

Quinns: Hello everybody! So glad you could meet me here, at the Games News pub. It’s my round! Who’s for a pint of news? [points at you] News and soda, was it?

It’s happy hour, so we’re going to start out with a double news on the rocks. The nonsense-mongers at Hasbro have just unveiled two new games. Speak Out: Kids vs Parents is a familial evolution of their game Speak Out, both of which feature your team trying to work out what the hell you’re saying while you wear a dentist’s cheek retractor.

Doesn’t that sound like a game we’d make up as part of a skit? I can only approve that Hasbro has made it a reality.

The press image for it (above) is freaking me out, though. The combination of Habro’s clean-cut toy photography (which has always looked a little “uncanny valley” to me) with rictus grins is absolutely terrifying. Imagine coming downstairs and finding them in your living room. “WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME,” bleats the mother, spraying spit across the room.

Games News: Crowdsourced Edition! 15/06/15

Quinns: Good news everyone! This morning I wrote 1,000 words of Games News in the SU&SD backend and then accidentally hit Ctrl+F5, erasing it from existence.

Writing it all again would be heartbreaking, so I turn to you guys, the best community in the business. I’m going to link to six stories, and if one of you wants to write it up in an informative yet funny SU&SD style, just do so in a comment and I’ll paste you into the article proper and attribute it with your handle!

Try not to put us to shame, and GOOD LUCK!

Games News! 23/02/15

Quinns: Ships! Like streets that float.

In a curious reminder of our hobby’s boxy lil’ nature, 29 United States west coast ports were shut down this week, delaying countless board game shipments. Spare a thought for the many games were stranded at sea this weekend, as well as containers of less important stuff like shoes and food.

Rumours that SU&SD’s newly-formed American division were behind the delay have been grossly exaggerated. It’s all down to a dispute between shipping companies and dockworkers.

Gizmodo has the details here. But if you were wondering why the new 6th Wave of X-Wing miniatures is taking longer than anticipated, this is why.

Following on from XCOM, it’s time for our second big review of the year. Doomtown: Reloaded is a portable game with some big ideas. It’s a generous box with a golden future. It is, in fact, the first real competitor to the awesome Android: Netrunner.

Is this town big enough for the both of ’em?

You can read Quinns’ extended impressions on Doomtown’s combat system here, and get your own fancy Netrunner tokens right here.

Quinns: I want to play Doomtown: Reloaded a little more before I’m ready for our official review, but I also want to write about it before SU&SD wraps up for the year. Greedy boy that I am, I intend to have my cowboy cake and eat it by writin’ up some impressions.

Silas: Yeeee-hawww! Let’s get to it.

Quinns: …Who are you?

Silas: Ah’m Silas McCoy, a fictional character invented by that dirty Brendan fella fer his Colt Express review. Yeeee-hawww!

Quinns: Yeah, I don’t think so.

[BANG]

The classic collectible card game Deadlands: Doomtown returns as an Expandable Card Game in Doomtown: Reloaded. Featuring four factions fighting for control of Gomorra, California. Doomtown: Reloaded allows you to build your own deck from a fixed set of cards in the box. Play your dudes to control deeds in the town, and use actions, hexes, and more to thwart your opponents.

Shootouts are resolved via a poker mechanism as every card has a suit and value. Preparing for the hands you want to draw is as much a part of deck building as choosing the actions and dudes you’ll want to play. Your deck is built around an Outfit, one of the four main groups attempting to control Gomorra, California, and these outfits are:

The Law Dogs: The Sheriff and his deputies, tasked with enforcing law and order in an extremely chaotic town.
The Sloane Gang: The main cause of a lot of the chaos, the Sloane Gang takes what they want, no matter who it costs.
The Morgan Cattle Company: Progress and investment, Morgan Cattle has moved into the surrounding ranch lands and uses its deep pockets to influence the town.
The Fourth Ring: It’s that circus that’s been here for months, but I swear it just arrived…

The base set of Doomtown: Reloaded will be followed by Saddlebag expansions, in-store OP events, and the Badge Series of tournaments.

Quinns: Wow. 14 days in and Team SU&SD is out of the running in our month-long watergun hitman tournament. That was… an unexpected ending. Expect a video in a few weeks, featuring nature documentary-like footage of Paul executing his prey.

We kick off the news today with the unveiling of the “Premium” edition of Doomtown: Reloaded. Look at it up there! Originally a collectible card game of Lovecraftian cowboys which ran from 1998 to 2000, Doomtown will come back from the dead this Summer in a new, “expandable” format.

In other words, publishers Alderac are aping what Fantasy Flight have done with their collectible card games, where randomised booster packs are ignored in favour of healthier fixed expansion packs.

“Have you felt the weight of this thing?” Alderac CEO Perk Bojangles did not say yesterday to the assembled press. “I killed an intern with one of them. One blow! Back of the head! Pow.”

Games News! 18/09/2017

Games News! 06/03/2017

Games News: Crowdsourced Edition! 15/06/15

Games News! 23/02/15

Review: Doomtown: Reloaded

Holy Cow: Doomtown Is Pretty Neat

Games News! 16/06/14

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