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Paul: Hello and welcome to this week’s Games News!

Quinns: paul why are you welcoming me i am always here-

Paul: I was welcoming them! Our readers! Quick, let’s get going, I’m writing my parts of this in a café that’s playing weird dance music at 1pm. I don’t know why it wants to be a club, but also a place that serves French toast. Anyway MONSTERHEARTS 2.

Quinns: HERE COMES MONSTERHEARTS 2!

Let’s have awkward sex again, like we did last summer

A 2nd edition for one of the most influential (and sexy!) independent roleplaying games of this era is seeking crowdfunding via the above Kickstarter, and it’s already sped past its funding target and into the realm of stretch goals, recruiting extra writers to its roster who will contribute new settings. If any of you had your interest piqued by our suitably sexy review, now’s the time to launch an expedition to the summit of that pique.

Paul: Designer Avery Alder streamlining and reworking the original game’s mechanics, as well as adding more material to cover things that include violence, sexuality and… texting! Texting. Of course! I haven’t yet played a roleplaying game that has really covered how a significant fraction of our lives is now communication through text mediums. WTF?

Quinns: paul no

Paul: omg

Quinns: Blocked and reported.

Mythic, the passionate French plastic-house behind the $3 million Conan kickstarter, has launched its next Kickstarter. Mythic Battles: Pantheon is a reworking of 2012 tactics game Mythic Battles, with figures of Ancient Greek legend once again slapping the heck out of each other for your entertainment.

As always, the stretch goals involved in this campaign will inevitably see you getting more than twice as much plastic for your money than if you wait for the retail release, but we’d still advise caution before you back it. It’s always safer to wait and see what the hype and reviews say about a board game after the marketing has quietened down. That kind of cool-headedness let Perseus kill Medusa, and it’s what will lead you to a world-class board game collection.

Paul:

Quinns: …I’m waiting.

Paul: Hang on I don’t think there’s a mirror emoji

Paul: While we’re still pushing our way around the the ever-bustling corridors of Kickstarter, I also want to point out Ghost Court, from Fiasco designer Jason Morningstar. This party game of court comedy is in its last day and somehow I missed all conversation about it before. It’s mostly a roleplaying affair, with a judge or judges ruling on cases that concern paranormal ridiculousness, with the aim of getting players to be as unreasonable, pompous and theatrical as possible, hashing out what’s fair and appropriate for human and spirit alike. A bit like Ghostbusters meets Judge Judy. Judebusters. Ghostjudgers.

I really like the idea of a light, low-commitment, crowd-pleasing party game and this could be a fine framework for lots of laughter and ludicrous rulings, much like some of our old games of Baron Munchausen had us tying ourselves in knots while everyone else looked on and laughed. The thing is, I really wish they’d shown off more of that sort of thing in their trailer video or in the examples on the Kickstarter page. The concept is good! For me, the pitch falls flat and I’m sure there are plenty who will not have looked beyond that.

Quinns: More games should play around with silly seating arrangements. I loved it in Out of Dodge, and I love it here.

Paul: There’s still a few game roundups trickling out of last month’s burst pipe of Spiel news, and BGG’s ever-overflowing feed brought Railroad Revolution to my attention. Now, I’m not usually particularly excited about modern (or relatively modern) games with economic themes, nor was I ever really one of those boys who liked trains, but I do rather want to give this game of network building, share selling and telegraph tapping a go.

At first I thought it was going to be some ponderously complex Eurogame in the style of Russian Railroads, but looking through the rules allayed those fears and cooed me in closer. I’m particularly interested in the game’s idea of promoting your workforce, where gaining skilled workers opens up new options, but also narrows your labour pool. Remember how much we liked Black Gold way, way back in the day? I think this has about the right level of economics for me: thematic, not too complex and with lots of colourful, visual representation.

Quinns: In further news of “Stuff we’re looking at but not really sure about??”, Quartermaster 1914 might be interesting.

This is the next game in the series started by Quartermaster General, a fast-playing World War 2 strategy game where players play cards from their country’s personal deck to affect a board covered in miniatures. No die-rolling or miniature management here. Just little ol’ cards.

…Hmm. Now I’m researching these games it seems we should absolutely get the site a copy and take a closer look. We always say there aren’t enough team board games, but here’s one with a decent average Board Game Geek rating that we’ve never tried! Except while the original game requires a whopping six players for the full experience, Quartermaster 1914 will top out at a much more manageable 5 players. Maybe we should just wait for that?

Paul: Quinns, stop doing your job in public! It’s embarrassing.

Quinns: brb I’m going to refill the toilet soap dispenser

Paul: The men and women at Gale Force Nine sure love to expand their games – the SU&SD Supercomputer now crashes when you ask how many expansions there are for Firefly: The Game – so it’s no great surprise that they announced an expansion for Tyrants of the Underdark before I’d taken the shrinkwrap off of my review copy.

Before players begin vying for control of the under-realm in Tyrants of the Underdark you first build a “market” of cards you can buy that’s 50% of one faction, and 50% of another. The base set contains Drow, Dragons, Demons and Elemental Evil, and this first expansion will add Undead and Aberrations.

Quinns: More games should have additional aberrations.

Paul: You’re covered in soap.

Quinns: I had an accident.

Anyway, play the music! It’s time for a new regular feature in the news, Size Up & Sit Down: Pictures From Our Readers.

Paul: Oho, what’s this?

Quinns: It’s basically a video that doesn’t move.

I’ll let SU&SD fan Jenny Gaudion and her lovely Carcassonne fan-art kick us off. She writes:

Hi lovely SUSD team! It’s a beautiful sunny Autumn day and I have the morning off work so I thought I’d sent you some art. There seems to be loads of great artists, as seen by your T-shirt competition, so perhaps we can get a “Fan art feature” something like image of the month? For me, board games are beautiful and a game with art that gets my imagination going can lead to stories which transcend the game. Dixit is an obvious example where the game basically turns into “oooh look at this picture” but I’d say both Carcassonne and Forbidden Island have led to a friend and myself ignoring the game entirely because we are trying to build a story around the city/island. Also Cluedo was my first “love” of a game – and it’s a terrible game to play – but the artwork of the characters (and theme) meant it was fun to make stories up based on the game.

Paul: Oh, this is a fantastic idea!

Quinns: I thought so! But I also wanted this gallery to extend to photos…

SU&SD fan Andrés Schiffer sent in the above photo. He writes:

Hello SU&SD, I’m writing you from the lovely city of Buenos Aires just to give you a huge thank you for your amazing work. The thing is, buying board games in Argentina is absolutley nothing like buying games in Europe or North America for one reason: board games literally don’t exist here (you can find monopoly, cluedo or scrabble, but not so much more besides that). I can’t buy online either because board games are imported and Argentina has very strange customs politics which don’t allow me to buy things online from outside the country without filling a crapload of paperwork. I can only get new board games when I travel or when someone I know travels (which doesn’t happen very often). For that reason I have to be very selective when it comes to decide what to buy. Thanks to you I managed to get a decent board game collection over the years (almost exclusively composed with “SU&SD recommends”) and get lots of my friends into board gaming, so I just wanted to say THANK YOU and send all of you greetings from the almost bottom of the world. Thank you again, and have a great week!

Finally, I tweeted the above photo this week but in case anyone was worried about my attic of games falling in, that’s now a little less likely. Above you can see a donation I made to my old school, who in a bizarre cosmic coincidence reached out to me to see if I wanted to donate anything to some board game-loving students.

It’s hard to think of a better home for our old review copies than schools, so next year I’ll be asking if any UK schools have an interest in board games and want the same thing, just so long as they can come by and pick them up.

If you have any fan art, photos from faraway places of just great shots of you enjoying a board game night, send them in to [email protected] with the subject “Gallery”!

Paul: I’m so excited for what you guys come up with. Roll on next week!

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