Brewing USA

I’m a big believer in board games and alcohol being a superb mix – not literally, my copy of Pandemic stinks of red wine, and some of the role cards are distinctly pink following an elbow-related incident last year. I also been drunk enough playing the Resistance that I’ve forgotten I’m a spy and accidentally battering rammed the good guys to victory. It’s since turned out that I’m ALWAYS a spy in The Resistance, so that’s a bit easier to remember. Anyway, Brewing USA takes booze and games a bit further by having you create and launch a myriad of beer types into different parts of the US, with the option of challenging other players to something called a Brewfest if they already control a certain city. Brilliant. Thinking caps on for a drinking-game version of this please. There’s a quick interview with designer Adam Rehberg in his local online rag here.

A beautiful chess piece

Poor, bullied Brendan from Shut Up and Sit Down has created another enticing long read for the site, this time about his rediscovery of chess following a brief childhood stint playing the wrong rules. There aren’t many people around writing gaming stories with such strong imagery and humour, and even if you don’t give a rook’s arse about the game you should load this up and let it lap over your eyeballs. Brendan also writes similarly deep, thoughtful pieces about video games over at Rock Paper Shotgun - you can check out his recent Elite: Dangerous diaries (there are five of them) here if you like that sort of thing.

The game shoves you and up to five friends onto a cartoon spaceship, with each person taking on exactly the sort of jobs you’d expect to find on board. Working as a well-oiled team, each running their station to perfection, you’ll see your vessel gracefully dance around the cosmos meeting new lifeforms and blowing them to smithereens.

Except you won’t. Because you’re all incompetent. At the game! I mean at the game.

Each station – Captain, Helm, Engineering, Weapons, Shields, Sensors, Tractor Beam, Damage & Repair and Jump Drive – requires whoever is in the chair to play a mini-game while a supposedly 30-second timer wooshes away at impossible speed. Sensors, for example, needs to pull the right tiny cardboard shape out of a bag of near-identical tiny cardboard shapes to lock onto an enemy ship, while shields sees you rearranging a small set of numbered tiles into poker-style hands to boost defences around different sides of the ship. Just look at them all!

As well as being almost impossible not to hideously screw up, these games are all played in tandem with several others, leading to the hilarious point each turn where everyone looks up meekly from their mess of a station to see the same look of agony on their team-mates’ faces staring back at them.

The beauty of this is that small mistakes on each station compound errors on the others. The helmsman accidentally sends the ship spinning forwards and to the right and straight through a nebula, meaning the sensor officer loses the lock on an enemy ship he spent the last turn sweating to acquire. Weapons only managed to load a single torpedo anyway, and now fails pitifully trying to blow up the evading enemy by flicking the torpedo counter all of two centimetres down the track.

At least shields got the port side well defended! Except the enemy is now up the ship’s arse thanks to helm’s  inability to fly in a straight line. Boom! The enemy’s attack causes a core breach, which is exactly as bad as it sounds and will need to be dealt with by some of the other stations in the next 30-second round. While they still try to do the jobs they were already royally ballsing up. You might as well drive into an asteroid at this point and be done with it.

It sounds hilarious right? Well it is – each of these mini games are light and breezy enough that you’ll more or less have the hang of them in a few turns, while also being obtuse enough that you’ll rarely completely nail them – and even if you do, someone else on the ship will have blown theirs. But let’s go back to the top.

Space Cadets is a belter of a concept.Who doesn’t want to zoom round the galaxy in a spaceship with your friends, tractor beaming space crystals and firing torpedos at all and sundry?

Correct. And the thing is, all of this is side-achingly, brilliant fun. For about an hour or so. And therein lies Space Cadets’ big problem.

This game should be an absolute gimme for new players, and to people new to board games in general. Everyone gets the theme, you get one job to do, everyone expects to do it badly and you all have to come together as a team to salvage something from your wreck of a mission.

In practice, it’s a slog. Working the helm makes navigating the 30-page rulebook look easy, and for a game centred on breezy mini-games the core rules are far too extensive to keep things light. None of it is too complicated in and of itself, but keeping myriad rules in your head for what happens when you fly into an asteroid field, how damage control works, can an enemy lock on and damage you – it all adds up to far too much leafing through pages of small text when you should be gearing up for the next action round.

It’s such a pity, as I feel that so much of the excitement me and my friends had for this game has been chipped away after a few plays. I’ve been trying to come up with ways to inject more spark into it, but I think really it just needs a group of players who have all gone through the mill a handful of times and a captain who knows the rulebook inside out. Sadly, getting to that stage seems to be the ultimate challenge that Space Cadets provides.

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Did you guess the Kickstarter would go quickly – even this quickly – or were you prepared for more of a slog?

I expected that fans would jump on board but really didn’t have any idea how quickly this would go. It’s been exciting watching the campaign unfold.

How did you come to work on the game – were you approached, or did you go to a publisher/The Thunderbirds people with the idea?

Chris Birch approached me at Spiel in 2013 and asked if I’d be interested in designing a co-op version of the game. After digging into the shows, movies, source books, and comics, I realized it was perfect for this sort of game and signed up.

How did your experience creating Pandemic translate into the Thunderbirds game – they seem to have some similarities in style, but what would you say are the key differences (apart from theme of course).

I wanted the game to truly reflect the spirit of the show — where you and your fellow players could work together to people from disasters with highly specialized equipment in the world of 2065. It was vitally important that the vehicles play a central role.

As far as the game mechanisms go, Thunderbirds is all about managing time and risk. You need to complete missions under a tight timeframe and are never really certain if you’ll be successful or not.

You can spend a great deal of time assembling the perfect team for a given mission but at the possible expense of other priorities around the world. So, you get the emotional roller coaster, but it’s squarely set in the world of International Rescue.

Have you put any thought into potential expansions, beyond the extra disaster cards detailed in the stretch goals?

Yes, we’ve been working quite a bit on this. Expansions offer a wonderful way to offer more – more vehicles, more challenge, more story and so on, without sacrificing the simplicity, accessibility, and price of the base game.

Have you any fun/interesting stories or anecdotes from the design/creation process you can share?

It’s always fun to see how the game can break during testing. One of our testers had a fun experience (using an early version of an event card) where they stranded Thunderbird 3 on Mars and could never call it back.

I also enjoyed sculpting the vehicles out of clay and foam with my daughters for use in the prototypes. Incredibly fun.

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Thanks Matt!

Unsurprisingly the game has more than a touch of the Pandemics about it, with players each controlling one of the Tracy brothers and flying across the globe – and into space – in the various vehicles to avert disasters and defeat the mysterious Hood.

There’s still plenty of time to get in on the Kickstarter of course – £40 gets you the base game and any of the stretch goals which get unlocked (at this rate all the backers will probably end up getting flown into space on Thunderbird 3).

Thunderbirds is breaking Kickstarter ground in more ways than just zooming past its target, though. Leacock has decided to include a Google Doc of the rules so people can check them out as they are edited in the final few weeks of production. You can check out the spreadsheet here.

GAMES WORKSHOP: THE INSIDE STORY

One of the true gaming big boys, Games Workshop marked my own introduction to gaming as a tender primary school pupil, wide-eyed and slack-brained leafing through my first White Dwarf magazine and coveting various metal dwarfs and space marines. I distinctly remember visiting the store for the first time in Portsmouth and goggling my way around the display cases checking out beautifully-painted models while Two Princes by Spin Doctors played on the stereo – at that point I genuinely couldn’t imagine anything cooler. For anyone who’s gone in and out of a Games Workshop phase, it’s easy to feel that your own fledgling memories coincide with what must have been the early years of the company, but the old codger goes back further than you might think. Fellow newbie board gaming website Unplugged Gaming has released the first part of its history of Games Workshop , and it’s a bloody super read.

SETTLERS OF CATAN: THE MOVIE

Or TV show! The marvel of modern board gaming continues to infiltrate popular culture 20 years after some nerdy Germans began swapping wood and bricks around the dining table. Now Hollywood has got its hands on the rights in the form of veteran film, TV and theatre producer Gail Katz, whose previous work includes In The Line of Fire, Air Force One, Outbreak and The Perfect Storm. So expect a Catan where the fugitive robber is being hunted by ex-CIA operatives, who have to avoid a deadly sheep-borne virus as they scour the island for their prey (building towns and roads as they go). She said in a statement, “The island of Catan is a vivid, visual, exciting and timeless world with classic themes and moral challenges that resonate today.  There is a tremendous opportunity to take what people love about the game and its mythology as a starting point for the narrative.” Sounds like it might be all right to be honest.

LEARNING TO PLAY HEROCLIX

Another one from a relatively new blog, Hilary Goldstein from Dog and Thimble shines a light on the daunting challenge of getting into Heroclix, a tabletop figure-collecting game in which you assemble a team of superheroes to duff over your mates. Their own teams I mean, not jamming Martian Manhunter up their nose and Black Widow up their bum. If you like the sound of a massively-collectible Marvel and DC-themed addition to your games box, you could do worse than checking out Goldstein’s smart introduction to the hobby here.

That sparked (sigh) Telsa striking out on his own and working on his favoured AC current, which is more efficient than DC at transmitting electricity over long distances. No money in that for DC-focused Edison, though, so he launched a hate campaign against AC which saw him electrocuting stray dogs and cats and even unwanted cows and horses to prove how dangerous it was. He topped that by funding the first working electric chair. Thanks Edison! Tesla, on the other hand, was a bloody legend who liked the idea of creating lightning and shooting it around – without him these guys would not exist.

Revenge is at hand though! Tesla vs. Edison: War of Currents lets two to five people control pioneering electric companies of the time in a race to dominate the light and power industries. Or will do when it’s ready – it’s due to hit Kickstarter later this year.

Publisher Conquistador Games describes Tesla vs. Edison as a 90-minute “medium weight strategy” game with lots of player interaction, which sounds pretty good to us. Each players gets a famous investor as well as two other “luminaries” who can be tapped for their skills in invention, manufacturing, finance and public relations. Sounds like you’ll need plenty of the latter if cats and dogs are going up in smoke all over the show. Fingers crossed for this one – it’s got a lovely theme over the top of what sounds like standard card-driven worker placement, so hopefully the actual game measures up – and isn’t massively boring. Designer Dirk Knemeyer’s previous offerings include Tomorrow, a game of controlling post-apocalyptic superpowers to make terrifying-sounding decisions about how to best go about depopulating each other’s countries. Which sounds like a lot of things (namely the sort of video games kids play in Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake), but definitely not boring, so hopefully Tesla vs. Edison is in with a shout.

You can sign up for an early invite to the Kickstarter when it goes live here.

Part Two of a feature looking at some of the ace new Netrunner cards just released in the Order and Chaos big box. Find out which of the new Weyland cards caught my eye and witness the creation of what could eventually become a below-average deck with a bit of work.

Right, let’s cut to the chase – amid all the new tools and whizzes which Weyland gets in Order & Chaos, there’s one card which is unlike anything in the game. A card which many players did not believe could be real when it was spoiled last year. A card which can almost win you the game – or lose you it – in a single play. That card is, of course:

It’s amazing! Or terrible! I genuinely can’t decide, so what better card to start building my new deck around. You can only include one of course, but that’s definitely for the best as there’s no way I want the runner picking these out of R&D willy nilly. The first thing Government Takeover does is chew up a whole ton of agenda space, which opens up the possibility of playing 5/3s and keeping agenda density to a bare minimum. I’m going to go the other way though and make up the points with as many one-pointers as I can, because my ID is going to be this little beauty:

Argus got a pretty lukewarm reception from the Terminal7 podcast guys in their Weyland Order & Chaos overview, but I’m sold on the idea of trying to make stealing an agenda a bloody pain for the runner whichever choice they make. Filling up on one-pointers means dishing out plenty of meat damage from stealing agendas alone if the runner wants to win. I don’t want them inching their way to victory though, which is where the latest ‘executive’ asset comes in.

Getting one of these out means any of those one-pointers are worthless, although keeping it well defended will be essential even with its massive trash cost. Maybe there’s some kind of mega new ‘end the run’ card in the set?

Holy crap! I love this – the monster cost pacified by the advancement ability, and the option of shoving and extra ‘end the run’ on there if I have an Ice Wall out sounds pretty good to me. I suspect this will team well with Archer too, as I can choose another program destruction subroutine or grab a bit of cash depending on the situation. New cards Builder and Satellite Grid can both help fill this up with tokens to keep it cheap, but I worry that including too much advanceable ice-related business won’t leave me enough room for my main strategy – murder. I’ve only got one core set so am limited to two Scorched Earths, but I’ll be bolstering those with:

A lovely card – free to play for two meat damage, but the wrinkle is obviously getting those two tags on in the first place. Might be that the odd runner decides to float them, but I can’t rely on getting there without a little help. I’ve decided that’s going to come from:

It’s a bucketload of influence cost, but I’m hoping a couple of these will allow me to sit tight and collect Scorches and Traffic Accidents, stick a crap agenda out for the runner to pinch, and then fire this off and see what happens.

May I present to you Tag and Bag Takeover v1.0:

I’ve plumped for Posted Bounties as they have the potential to shove a surprise tag on a runner, which I can turn into three with Big Brother. Closed Accounts stops them clearing tags one I’ve piled them on, while False Lead can cut the runner’s turn short if they pick up a tag running through ICE like Shadow or the lovely new Searchlight. New ICE Checkpoint adds some more meat damage and could force the runner to take a tag if it protects an agenda.

Archers, Ice Walls and Orions will work on keeping the runner out of R&D and away from Government Takeover and The Board. I’ve rounded out the agenda suite with the easy-to-score Hostile Takeover for cash, Private Security Force for more meat damage and a single NAPD because it’s already such a pain to steal. I’ve thrown some PAD Campaigns in for cash, but I worry making money is an area of the deck which is currently way too light.

On to playtesting! In Part Three I’ll reveal how the first few games went with both decks and what changes I’ve made in their wake.

Click here to head back and bean up on my Anarch deck from Part One.

Fujian Trader has the sort of beige box art that risks it being stuck on a shop shelf until another history professor brushes off the dust in about 300 years, but cracking it open reveals a much lovelier bunch of bits. Wooden ships, little tokens representing rice and silks, and that lovely map, which has been tidied up and recoloured to emphasise the trading lines which form the core of play.

The game, which can be backed on Kickstarter until March 19, looks like a case of players vying to control ports across East Asia to supply them with goods, which they race to sell at other ports for silver before the Ming empire comes crashing down. That’s what that dragon’s for! Brilliantly it represents the Manchu dynasty, who sweep in towards the end of the game and grab territory to kill off any bonuses players were receiving from them.

Sounds like there’s plenty of opportunity for grabbing other players’ ports and such, while events like famine, blockade and war also creep in each turn to change up everyone’s priorities and tactics. Publisher Thinking Past describes it as a “gateway strategy game”, so there shouldn’t be too much mind-numbing maths to stress everyone out.

Like plenty of Kickstarters the shipping costs are way steep unless you live in the US, where you’ll be paying $76 all-in for the game. The rest of the world is looking at $106 (£69), so any ancient Chinese silver you already happen to have will come in handy. Thinking Past are on to that though, and have produced a digital download version for $20 if you don’t mind whittling your own wooden sloops.

Here’s the original watercolour map in all its glory – it was listed in the Bodleian’s contents in 1721 as “A very odd mapp of China”. How rude. Bits of Korea look like they’re on fire though, and Christ knows what’s going on with Japan so maybe they had a point. Click to go big.

XCOM: THE BOARD GAME

The big one everyone in board game (and some video game) circles has been waiting for dropped at the end of last month – XCOM: The Board Game. A beloved turn-based strategy video game from the 1990s, UFO: Enemy Unknown, got shined up into a brand new whizzy reboot in 2012 as XCOM: Enemy Unknown and made the entire video gaming press simultaneously fall over with how brilliant it was. XCOM: The Board Game takes that reboot and attempts to translate it to the tabletop, with the novel addition of a digital app to bustle you along and do some of the maths. Shut Up and Sit Down have the skinny on the game here.

GHOSTBUSTERS: THE BOARD GAME

Another classic franchise to be reimagined in plastic and cardboard is Ghostbusters, which launched onto Kickstarter three days ago and almost immediately exploded past its $250,000 target like a containment unit inadvisably shut down by the US Environmental Protection Agency. It’s got all the stuff you’d expect like PKE meters, ECTO-1 and Slimer, and sees each player control one of the four heroes wandering round proton-packing and trapping ghosts. An obvious worry is that it’ll look lovely but the underlying game will be dire, but we live in hope. Seems a bit light on ghost types as well, but maybe that a side-effect of me playing so much Ghost Stories. You’ve got until March 12 to get in on the funding at the Kickstarter site here. It’s $125 with P&P to most of the world though – whoosh!

LACERUNNER

Game designer and lecturer Naomi Clark has revealed she’s working on a beautiful Victorian-themed reskin for cyberpunk card game Netrunner, changing corporations to noble houses and tasking them with defending their households from riff-raff such as anarchic Revolutionaries and the social-climbing Bourgeoisie. Sounds like the game maps over amazingly well, with runs replaced by attempting to make social appearances and ICE representing things like obnoxious guests at parties. Anyone who prefers early morning duels and demands of etiquette to hacking servers and plugging junk into your brain should check out this piece from thinking-person’s gaming website Kill Screen.