Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Hello youse,

Having played exactly NO board games this week, because of work and Dishonored, I come to you empty-handed. I have no new board games to recommend. Your money is safe for one week. OR IS IT? I’ve spoken before about my mistrust of Kickstarter. I just feel icky and weird about it. I veer between “Fucking Parasites!” and “Oh coooool!” But my mistrust is making me feel like a party-pooper, so I’ve decided to join the rest of those idiots and back something. Join me as I take a look at some of the board games we could back right now on Kickstarter. And join me in making the leap. Let’s back a potential turkey!
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Hello youse.

This week’s column will be straight to the point. It will barely be a review. It will be a body of text designed to make you hurry into action. There will be no photos. I want you to google and find the photos yourself, on your way to buying the game. The X-Wing Miniatures Game is going to sell fast, guaranteed. I’m hearing talk that it might not reprint until January, and that would be a disaster for you, because you really should have this to play on Christmas Day.
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Hello youse.

The X-Wing Miniatures game review will have to slip to next week now, because I haven’t been sent it yet and I want to roll up in a ball and cry about that. I want to crawl into a little hole and weep, just like I did after I watched The Phantom Menace.

Look, we all know that the Star Wars brand is cheapened to the point of no return by now, but that X-Wing shit looks tight, fun and amazing. And I haven’t got it yet, so I want to slide under the carpet and scream for three hours.

What we gonna do now then? I should have been telling you about beautiful X-Wings and beautiful TIE Fighters from the days when Star Wars wasn’t about Yoda doing adverts for mobile phone companies. WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO NOW?!

We are going to talk about THE WAIT.
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Hello youse.

Before this past couple of weeks, I had never played Netrunner. I had heard about it. Usually you’d hear about it whenever people were getting excited about some new card game. Someone would slide into the conversation and drop a little “Mmm. Netrunner was the best, though…” and slide away again. In truth, there was never much more discussion than that. “Netrunner was better than Magic, to be honest.” But that was it. It remained, to most, a mystery.

I think there was a little bit of “gamer guilt” attached to it. When you spoke to card gamers, you could tell that they felt bad that things didn’t work out for Netrunner. Magic is great and all (and let’s not let that go without being reinforced – Magic: The Gathering is an incredible design) but you could see in these card gamers’ eyes, these gamers who had been around at the time Netrunner briefly flashed across tables, that there was a sadness there. Something great had landed, but with all that tapping going on not enough people had noticed.

But now it’s back. It’s here. It’s now.
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Hello youse,

I’ve been playing Netrunner this week, but I’m not ready to talk to you about it yet. I’m still getting my head round it. So this week I will bring you up to date on all the gaming news. I like you all to be well informed, so that you can plan your purchases and then suffer that sweet sense of shopping guilt alongside me.

So what’s happening?

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Hello youse.

There is a real craft to writing a good board game rulebook. A great rulebook gives you the information you need in an elegant and simple way, and excites you about the game you’re about to play. A bad rulebook hides the information within clutter, intimidates the reader, and makes them put the game away and pull out King of Tokyo instead. Rulebooks fascinate me, and so I’d like to take a little step away from our usual coverage this week so that you can read some rules.

The rules for Life itself.
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Hello youse.

This week I can finally talk about Libertalia, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. It’s the strongest game of the year contender so far, so I’ll whip through this and then you can get on with ordering it and stuff. If it’s tl;dr then just take this away with you – BUY THIS GAME. Let’s not beat around the bush. Even James Purefoy liked it.

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In this world of pain and misery, we survive from day to day on the promise of better things. We look down the line, and pinpoint a moment that we can move towards in hope. For people like us, these moments are often the release dates of toys and games. There is a moment at the end of that line, and it is always in sight. It is death, and it is inevitable. We stack our toys and games in front of that moment and try to hide it from view. Today I help you hide it.
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Hello youse.

I’m not going to tell you about Libertalia yet. I’m not even going to tell you how I feel about it. I’m going to, somehow, hold all that in for a while longer. It’s not properly released in shops yet, anyway, so… HOLD. HOLD. If you can. HOLD. Oh man.

Honestly, I can’t really talk about how I’ve played it and played it and played it. I’ll – HOLD! HOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLD!

What I will do today, is show you something beautiful, and then send you off to find it.
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Hello youse.

During the week I hunted across Glasgow city centre to find a shop that was stocking the new Fighting Fantasy gamebook “Blood of The Zombies”. I think most places that sell books have cleared out all of their stock to make room for a thousand copies of 50 Shades of Grey. Which is fine. But I wanted to get fucked by dice, not by riding crops, and so was delighted to find a single copy of the book in the Sauchiehall Street Waterstones, in the kids department, where I looked like a paedophile.

DO YOU DARE READ ON?
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