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Paul: Quinns. Quinns I have a strange comment from you here in the Games News notes. It just says-

Quinns: DO NOT READ THAT OUT.

Paul: “Where did the boobs and swinging dicks go”?

Quinns: Ok, I can explain.

Paul: There’s no need! It’s a question all men must eventually ask themselves.

Quinns: I don’t doubt that, but that note actually refers to the Kickstarter for Kingdom Death: Monster, version 1.5. Not only has Kickstarter’s most ambitious board game made a comeback, it seems to have been de-sexed.

Paul: Ohhh here we are all over again, the very grandest of fantasy games, absolutely throbbing with miniatures and drenched in money, yet still not something I’ve ever seen a copy of in the real world. The first Kickstarter was sent to its backers and nowhere else, right?

It’s still hard for me to believe this is real. My God. Look at those totals. Five million of dollars at the time of writing. An estimated final delivery date FOUR YEARS HENCE. What the hell is going on?

Quinns: I dunno man, but I can tell you that the principal thing I remember from Kingdom Death’s original purgatorial setting, the monsters that were just sheets of rippling tits or gargantuan penis-gorgons (or even used imagery of pregnancy and babies). But so far, every miniature depicted in the 1.5 Kickstarter just looks like Dark Souls.

Paul: I’m glad about that. And you know what? I always liked the idea of Kingdom Death, particularly the idea of so much development, about trying to hold together a settlement in a hostile world. I like campaigns that are about more than just getting bigger weapons and more hit points, so I’d love to watch something that I nurture grow and grow, in spite of all that might want to kill and/or eat it. Do I want to put down two hundred and fifty dollars to try and get the core game? Where would I keep it? Where will I even be living in four years? MY LIFE ISN’T LIKE THAT.

Quinns: Paul shh be calm. You can get most of what’s on offer sent to you by next summer. It’s only the most outlying extras and expansions that will take three or four more years.

I don’t mean to keep harping on about sex but I’m wondering at the Kickstarter not showing any more of that striking, unsettling (nauseating, even) vision of hell. When a game lets you customise a miniature with a Hieronymus Bosch-looking skirt made of dicks I sit up and take notice. Who wouldn’t?! Even the plus-size female sculpts of the first edition have been swapped out for skinnier anime-looking ladies who nonetheless have huge boobs.

Here’s my thinking: If you’re going to have a box full of boobs, at least go the whole hog and have players battling a disgusting boob god, you know? If you’re going to have a horror game then give me miniatures that are truly unsettling to even think about. Kingdom Death is demonstrably a game where the designer doesn’t hold back in the slightest, but so far the marketing for the 2nd Kickstarter is much plainer. It’s possible the Kickstarter will reveal increasingly mad stuff as it continues, of course. We’ll have to wait and see.

EDIT: Holy shit, almost a third of this Kickstarter’s total funding is coming from 1,000 people who’ve backed this game at the $1,666 dollar level. Imagine spending almost two thousand dollars on a game you’ve never played before.

Speaking of Kickstarters I’ll probably never get to play, a second printing of Vast: The Crystal Caverns is now live on Kickstarter!

Remember this one? I talked about it back in podcast #47. In competition for the most asymmetrical board game ever made, Vast sees five different players separately put in charge of a hero, a thief, a dragon, some goblin tribes or the cave where the game takes place. It’s not just that these roles all have different objectives and only one of them can win, each one operates under utterly different rules. You really need to listen to the podcast to understand.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of Vast but I am a fan of lunatic designers (see above re: dick skirts) and I’m thrilled to say that this second Kickstarter for Vast adds TWO NEW ROLES! Oh yes. If you and your friends so please, a sixth player can play as a ghost and a seventh can be a ghoul.

Paul: SEVEN PLAYERS? WHAT IS HE DOING

JAMAÏCA the crew – final full illustrated prototype – to be released spring 2017 pic.twitter.com/FNPor5Y9zy — bruno des montagnes (@BDMontagnes) November 27, 2016

Quinns: Paul, you seem a little rattled today. Perhaps you’d enjoy something much gentler instead, like an expansion for the Caribbean caper Jamaica? You talked about that one back in podcast #15. According to the above tweet from Bruno Cathala, Jamaica: The Crew adds crewmembers for players to hire and will be available early next year.

What’s a little weird about this is that Jamaica is in the current Asmodee holiday sale. But if Asmodee is having trouble shifting their stock it seems odd to then pay someone to design and deliver an expansion. Unless this expansion was always on the cards, so they have to shift extra copies of Jamaica to ensure people then buy the expansion… ?

I don’t understand business

Paul: Here’s a surprise. I thought there might have been more of a build-up to this announcement, but apparently not! Materialising quite suddenly, like a long-abandoned derelict bursting out of the Warp, Space Hulk is back. When is it back? Extremely soon! This weekend! Oh my goodness. OH MY GOODNESS.

Quinns: Paul are you ok

Paul: Though you’re most likely to think of miniatures wargaming when you think of Games Workshop, they’ve also designed and published their fair share of board games over the years and you’d have to search far and wide to find anyone who doesn’t think Space Hulk has always been one of the very best among them. This asymmetric game of alien-infested gothic starships is like a knife fight in a dumpster. With a crocodile. At night. It’s also oh so frequently out of print, despite being so well-loved, so expect this new run to sell very well and, quite possibly, sell out all over again, putting us back into another state of Space Hulk Drought.

Quinns: A kindly trade manager at Games Workshop actually emailed me this week to talk about review copies. I said we’d happily review Space Hulk if he could confirm that there’d be stock around for people to buy it after our review, but he had absolutely no idea. It was as if I’d asked him how many bananas he’d eat in the next year. So I decided what the hell and asked for a copy.

People can expect our review of Space Hulk in early 2017, though I can’t speak for whether you’ll actually be able to buy the game afterwards.

Quinns: Days of Wonder, the famously sparse publisher who only release one delicately-chosen, beautifully-designed box each year, have teased their next release. Following on from 2016’s Quadropolis (an expansion for which is being announced soon and I’m VERY excited), 2017 will play host to Yamatai.

Paul: I watched that same prototype of Yamatai from that picture being played at this year’s BGGCon, but there were no spaces for me at the table when I dropped by (possibly because I famously disliked Five Tribes and am now blackballed for life). Everybody was excited, either because they liked the game itself or because they liked being near Bruno Cathala, the designer who, and props to him for this, puts in a fine turn appearing in the adverts for his own games.

Quinns: How about this for a weird idea. AEG has announced a box containing expansions for Planes, Trains and Automobiles all in the same box! And where are they going? FUN! Because the destination is fun in Destination: Fun.

This site has posted glowing reviews of Trains and Automobiles but I don’t think you can blame us for never having touched Planes. “Running to catch your plane” is something I’ve had to do several times in my real life with varying success, and just remembering those times causes my heart to constrict like a clenched fist. I can’t imagine a theme I want less.

I get the feeling that a lot of people will be in the same boat as me, owning one or two games from this series. Do we then buy the expansion and discard the extra bits? Hmm.

Finally, this site’s own Matt Thrower has posted a breathless review of something called Hands in the Sea. Paul and I are both huge fans of A Few Acres of Snow and apparently this game is part love letter to that design, part enlargement and part modern update (while dragging the theme a few thousand years backwards through history).

And that’s a wrap for another week! Goodness, what an interesting week of stories. Remember when we’d sometimes struggle to find new things to report on? It’s obvious now that the industry runs in a much higher gear all the time now.

Paul: Okay, I am SO GLAD GAMES NEWS IS OVER. After a problem in my apartment, I’ve been writing this in a 24 hour café down the road and the staff here spend 100% of their time noisily hurling things on the floor. I AM GOING HOME.

Quinns: No, Paul, don’t leave yet! Reader Steven Collins sent us in a photo of a Junk Art tower that uses EVERY SINGLE PIECE!

In the words of Arrested Development’s Gob Bluth: “MONSTER!”

If you have a picture of an exceptional game night, achievement or something you’ve drawn, please send it in to [email protected] with the subject “Gallery!”

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