Rock, Paper, Shotgun

AN EXCERPT FROM THE WRITINGS
OF LAURENCE LUKE-BAZA

And in Venice, the game ended.
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Hello youse.

I haven’t seen Spartacus, but from what I hear there is a lot of blood in it and plenty of exposed breasts. I don’t know why I haven’t watched the show, because I enjoy both of these things. Don’t you think there are too many TV shows to watch these days? It seems like people are recommending new TV shows every week, and expecting you to buy a box set and watch about seven episodes before it starts to get good. Seriously! “You need to watch about the first five episodes to get properly into it.” Five hours?! You mad?! I barely have one spare hour these days, never mind five.

But let me say this. Whenever I do have some spare time, I want to play some board games with my lovely friends. And now I can play Spartacus: The Board Game. And it’s bloody brilliant.
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Hello youse.

There are a lot of zombie themed board games. Let’s be honest – everything has a zombie theme these days. Films, TV shows, lipstick – zombies are everywhere. But the greatest zombie board game of all time was Mall of Horror. I’ve told you about it before. I made a little video about it. I love it. But it’s long out of print, and very difficult to find.

Now, City of Horror comes along. Where Mall of Horror was the low budget, cool, indie zombie masterpiece, City of Horror is the big budget remake. Everything is bigger, everything is slicker, and remarkably EVERYTHING IS BETTER. This game is my darling Mall of Horror with the niggles fixed and the action ramped up to the maximum. If you buy any board game this year, it must be this. Let’s chat a little bit about it.

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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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