RPS Feature The End
Goodbye youse.
It’s been six long years since Cardboard Children began here on the world’s best computer games website, and it’s time for the column to come to an end. Yes, I’ve packed my bags, and I’m standing by the RPS door, ready to leave. My hand is on the doorknob. But before I go, I’d like to point you towards some of my favourite pieces during the run, so we can all have a little nostalgia trip together.
RPS Feature A conscious uncoupling
The rumours were true. Fantasy Flight Games and Games Workshop are ending their relationship. It’s a conscious uncoupling that will send shockwaves through the board gaming community, and no wonder. For a blissful period, the two were a match made in heaven. But now it’s over, and everyone is just trying to wrap their heads around what it all means.
As for you? You need to act fast.
RPS Feature Worth having kids for
Sometimes you play a board game that you know will just be a joy to write about. Rhino Hero is one of those games. It’s not really a board game, of course. It’s actually a card game. But it’s kinda a dexterity game too. And it’s also a kids game, for kids of all ages. If you don’t have kids, buy Rhino Hero anyway. If you feel weird about having a kids game with no kids at home, then this game is worth having some kids for. Go have children immediately.
RPS Feature Three exciting upcoming boardgames
Hello youse.
On the board game scene, there’s always a great deal of buzz. Indeed, the industry depends on buzz – be it the mindless drone-buzz of pre-release hype or the more alluring summer’s day busy-buzz of post-launch word-of-mouth. Buzz is what makes a game hot, while silence is what makes a game not. Today we take a look at a few upcoming games that are making people startle and dash away because they think there might be a wasp in the room.
RPS Feature Are they!?
Hello youse.
A man called Robert Florence gets on a train to London at 2pm, leaving from Glasgow. If the train is travelling at 80 miles per hour, and the distance to London is 860 miles, how clear is it that Robert doesn’t know how far it is to London? But what I really want to know is: How tall is Robert when he’s on that train, if he’s sitting down? And how tall is he if he’s crawling around on the floor, crying? And are board games dumbing down?
RPS Feature Pirates do battle
Hello youse.
I have no idea what a MOBA is.* I’m not even joking.** I’ve never played one. I think I dabbled with one of the PC ones for an hour or so once, but that was it. What does MOBA even stand for? I know what MMORPG means, and I know what an FPS is. But a MOBA? About the only thing I know about the MOBA is that people who play them play them for about a million hours, and that baddies move in pre-set channels, in lanes, in one direction. Or something. Maybe. Anyway, it was all the talk about Rum & Bones being like a MOBA that put me off it. That was a very silly of me.
Hello youse.
It’s safe to say that some of the news I’m about to share with you is the most exciting news that I’ve shared on this site in a long, long time. If you’re deep into board gaming, you’ll probably know most of this news already, but have you heard my incisive analysis? No. If you’re only casually into board games, all this exciting news might just drag you much deeper into our cardboard world. And if you don’t care about board games at all, some of this might change your mind.
Take a few minutes of your day to read more.
RPS Feature An HP Lovecraft RPG you can play with a robot
Hello youse.
As I speak to you now, I am about to crack open Mansions of Madness Second Edition. The original was a game I loved. But it was a difficult game to get to the table. It took a fair bit of time to set up, a lot of maintenance, and so that great, ambitious game didn’t get the plays that it deserved. It also had a troubled roll-out of its companion expansions, and the game seemed to lose some lustre. But now it’s a do-over, and all that hard work will be dealt with by the game’s companion app. This is an exciting game release. If this works, we might have something very special on our hands.
Read on, and I’ll give you my first impressions.
RPS Feature Strange and beautiful steampunk
Hello youse.
City of Iron, a game by Ryan Laukat, impresses not only with its gameplay – which is deep and intriguing – but with its sense of aesthetic cohesiveness. This is a game designed from the ground-up, brick by brick, until it hangs together as a statement of the designer’s artistic intent. The art, by the designer, tells a story of a steampunk world populated by varied strange factions. The game itself tells a story of struggle and greed, and the allure of evil. I like it very much.
RPS Feature An unbalanced game we'd recommend.
There was a time when people who played board games weren’t obsessed with things like “balance”. Back in the day, you’d sit and play a board game and no-one would say anything about the “mechanics”. Nobody ever talked about design. There was a time when a board game was a game inside a cardboard box, and if you were lucky it gave you a measure of fun that you wanted to experience again and again and again.
Lost Patrol is exactly that kind of game. It is a game of inevitable death in the jungle. A game you can’t win unless you get really lucky. A game that if you do win, you’ll be talking about it for months. It’s to Games Workshop’s credit that they brought back this old-school game with its ridiculous hostility intact. This is a 2-player game without balance. One player is probably going to lose, and the other is going to win. The only question is how soon the enemy player will win, and how hard the good guys will get smashed.
RPS Feature Boardgames we loved but now never play
Hello youse.
Sometimes you like a board game a little, sometimes you like it a lot. The great games stay great forever, giving you a little tremor of excitement every time you think about them. Others fade a bit over time, as you become too familiar with their dynamics and play other games that improve upon what they do. Other games just fade away for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on. This week, I talk about a few games that I find less fantastic than I used to. I’ll try to understand why.
RPS Feature Magic, Ninjato and Gears of War
Hey folks. This week I want to do something special – I want to quickly revisit a few board games I’ve covered before – because board games often reveal more of themselves over time. The games I cover this week are ones that have grown in my estimation since I first covered them here. Next week I’ll be talking about games that have gone down in my estimation for one reason or another. I think it might be interesting to see how time has affected my take on these titles, and to see what you fine people think of these games the more you’ve played them.
Let’s begin.
RPS Feature Monopoly monstrosities
Do you like Monopoly? Most of you probably don’t. Many of you probably don’t even play the game by the correct rules. It’s a fact, an actual proven scientific statistical actual factual fact, that most people have played Monopoly by the wrong rules. If you play Monopoly by the rules as written, it’s a faster, even more cut-throat game. And it’s good. Sure, there are many better games, but I will defend Monopoly’s honour to the death. But how does this tickle your fancy – a game that is kind of like a reverseMonopoly, where you destroy buildings instead of building them? And you don’t strive to make your opponents bankrupt. You work instead to make reality itself bankrupt, because you are an impossible, immeasurably powerful Elder God and that’s how you like to spend your weekends.
This is The Doom That Came To Atlantic City.
Hello youse.
It’s June! We’re smack bang in the middle of the start of the summer, unless you live in Scotland as I do. We’re still in winter, and will be until winter starts. But that doesn’t mean I’m not full of all the summer joys. I am. I am absolutely rammed to the gills with the joys of summer, so much so that my gills are about ready to explode with all that joy-juice. Shall we see what’s happening news-wise in the world of board gaming? I’ll cherry-pick a few interesting things for you to rub your nose into.
RPS Feature The Art of Design
Hello youse.
If you’re going to call your board game “Sun Tzu”, then you better be damn sure that the game in question makes art out of war. If you’re going to call your game “Sun Tzu” then you better make sure that it’s going to get your brain ticking. You better make sure that players will sit at the table and feel like they have control and options.
There’s nothing to fear with this classic.
RPS Feature World of Weird
The biggest surprise about Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower is how brilliant it is. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise. The last Games Workshop standalone game I played was the lithe Betrayal At Calth, a fantastic run and gun scenario/skirmish game. And yet, as the beauty of this Silver Tower makes itself known, the main thing I feel is surprise. This is a game that has merged modern dungeoncrawl mechanics with (and I hate simplifying it like this, but you might understand what I mean) a very British old-school eccentricity. The Silver Tower is electrifying, a shining lightning rod for all those feelings that make us want to play games. Read on.
RPS Feature Through The Portal
Hello youse.
Last week I started talking about Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower, the new big box board game release from Games Workshop. Actually, it’s not a board game. Oh, it is. But it’s a strange hybrid thing, where miniatures from further into the GW line can be incorporated into the game, and characters from the board game can be used in the GW miniatures game Age Of Sigmar. It’s an interesting product, incorporating a classic design ethos and fusing it with modern marketing sensibilities. That’s why I continue to tell you about it this week.
RPS Feature Diving deep into The Hobby
With the release of the new Warhammer Quest from Games Workshop – full name “Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower” – I thought it might be good to do a deeper exploration of what it is to go deep into a new Games Workshop game. Buying something like Warhammer Quest (isn’t it exciting that there’s a new Warhammer Quest?) is not the same as buying your average board game. First of all, it’s a bigger investment. Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower retails for 95 pounds. That’s not a game you buy on a whim – that’s a commitment. And with that commitment comes a lot of work. Because as any fool knows, Games Workshop products aren’t just about play. They’re about construction, and painting, and that’s why the whole Games Workshop thing – encapsulating Warhammer 40K, Age of Sigmar, and many more – is referred to as “The Hobby” by fans of the product.
The Hobby. If you want to play a new Games Workshop game, you’re going to have to dip into The Hobby. Come with.
RPS Feature A diamond of a game about diamonds
Hello youse.
I’ve been playing board and card games with my daughter far more regularly these days. She’s 9 now, and so she’s crossed over into an area where lots of games are suddenly entirely playable, and to a high level of ability. In fact, I’ll be honest, she’s more often than not hammering me at games. The most recent game she completely dismantled me over is a new favourite of ours. It’s a game about creating and selling beautiful jewels, and it’s called Queen’s Necklace.
Hello youse.
I’ve covered T.I.M.E. Stories before, and I was very interested in the response to that review in the comments. I’ve also found the discussion about T.I.M.E. Stories across the internet in general to be, quite honestly, very entertaining. There’s never really been a game quite like T.I.M.E. Stories before, and so, almost four months after my initial review, I want to talk about it again. Let’s take another run and see how T.I.M.E. Stories feels further down the timeline of our lives.
