Dude! Take Your Turn!
A Gaming Life
App Review – Istanbul
Rubies make the world go around. Isn’t that what Marilyn Monroe always said? (Editor – Dating yourself *and* being wrong all in one sentence. That’s quite the accomplishment!)
If you’re a merchant in Istanbul in some vague time period of the past, rubies are your ultimate goal and the reason you’re doing all of that trading to begin with.
At least that’s the case if you’re playing Istanbul, the new boardgame app from Acram Digital, adapting the boardgame designed by Rüdiger Dorn.
Acram Digital is known for their stellar boardgame app editions of Steam and 8-Minute Empire and Istanbul blows those out of the park (it probably helps that I like this game better than the other two to begin with).
Expansion Review – Smash Up: What Were We Thinking?
Another day, another Smash Up expansion.
This is becoming almost a weekly thing! Or maybe it just seems that way.
Anyway, with my latest expansion acquisition (not the latest expansion period, since I am nothing if not eclectic (Editor: You mean random, right?) in my Smash Up buying habits).
Still haven’t come up with the meta joke yet to open these reviews, but I guess that will probably happen with the last one.
Ain’t that always the way!
My latest expansion is What Were We Thinking? The expansion is once again designed by the illustrious (and probably extremely handsome) Paul Peterson with art this time by Alberto Tavira, Marcel Stobinski, Gong Studios, and Francisco Rico Torres. It is once again published by Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) and was released in 2017.
The Completionist Mindset
I was just going to do one post today, but something that I saw last night made me wonder.
And making me wonder is a really dangerous thing sometimes.
On Boardgame Geek in the Smash Up forum, there’s a thread called “Play mat unavailable?”
In it, “Michael” asks an innocent question to start it off:
“Just wondering why this is only available to retailers and scalpers. Would be nice if us regular people could get ahold of it.”
A representative from Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) answers that they are using promotional materials for retailers to give them some reason to notice Smash Up (Editor: Dave would love that job!) and that their policy is to have promotional factions available to the general public in some fashion around a year after the retailer material is released.
While this applies to factions, items like the playmat are too cost-prohibitive to produce for retail sale. The money made from them wouldn’t equal the cost to produce them.
Review – Fort Sumter: The Secession Crisis, 1860-61
(Edit – 3/26/19) – Guess what! Playdek is bringing this game to digital platforms!
Check out my post with the announcement.
(Edit – 5/27/19) – Here’s my review of the app!
(Edit: This is one of my Top 25 Games Played of all Time, as of February 2019 anyway. Check out the other games as well!)
Original post below.
The Civil War (or “American Civil War” for those who aren’t, you know, American) was one of the bloodiest wars in American history, and many military history buffs know a lot about the battles that took place in it.
Gettysburg, Antietam, Vicksburg, all are extremely well-known to anybody with a bit of knowledge about the war.
What isn’t necessarily as prominent in the eye of those not steeped in history is what led up to the war. What led to brother fighting brother, families being torn apart, Clark Gable getting his best known role a country being divided unto itself?
Fort Sumter: The Secession Crisis, 1860-61 is a game that will give you a little bit of that history (and that is last time I’m writing the entire name out. From now on, it will just be Fort Sumter).
Fort Sumter is a 2-player card-driven game designed by Mark Herman, with art by Knut Grünitz and Rodger B. MacGowan and published in 2018 by GMT Games. It plays in 25-40 minutes (in my experience, it’s been around 25-30 though).
Review – Sentient
The Robot Revolution is upon us. Soon, robots will be taking over our lives, providing us with every luxury, moving us around, serving us, fighting our wars, and all of that good stuff.
And our economy will tank because nobody’s actually working.
Then we’ll be ripe for the picking. Skynet is giggling gleefully.
Maybe because of the wrecked economy is why there is actually no money in the Sentient game?
Food for thought.
But I digress.
Sentient is a 2-4 player game designed by J. Alex Kevern with art by Anita Osburn, Chris Ostrowski, and Gordon Tucker. It’s published by Renegade Games and came out in 2017.
And it is a really simple brain-burner, depending on how you feel about arithmetic.
Lord Eradikus Getting More Annoyed in August
To end the week, how about some news that I missed out on while I was saving the world away?
One of my favourite games played in 2017, Clank! In! Space!, is expanding! (too many exclamation marks…I’m going to run out! Damn, there’s another one…).
This beautiful, wonderful deck-building heist game is getting a new expansion this August.
Renegade Game Studios recently announced Clank! In! Space! Apocalypse! (oh, my poor exclamation mark key! Damn it, did it again…)
From the Renegade blurb:
The deck-building adventure of Clank! In! Space! continues. Small pockets of resistance continue to oppose Lord Eradikus, but the evil cyborg now plots to wipe them out with one grand and wicked scheme!
Thwart the efforts of Lord Eradikus!
Reap the rewards of noble (and sometimes reluctant) heroism!
Save the galaxy…. And get rich in the process!Maybe you can avert the Apocalypse! (Or at least escape with the treasure while someone else does!)
The original game has so many cards with nods to popular science fiction properties that I’m surprised they could find more.
But I trust designer Paul Dennen to come up with some!
The game comes with 35 new cards, two double-sided modules (the only expansion the game really needed was more modules to vary the map even more), 8 scheme cards (schemes? Hoo boy!!! This sounds awesome), and somebody named Lord Haldos.
I can only imagine what he’s doing there and his relationship to Lord Eradikus!
Clank! In! Space! Apocalypse! is scheduled for a GenCon release and to hit stores in August, and to retail for $25.
And I’d better end this post before I totally wear out my exclamation mark key! (Damn it)
New to Me – May 2018
Sorry for the super-long delay in posting here at Dude Central (not counting yesterday’s repost).
I had a mission, should I have chosen to accept it, that I had to take care of.
Yes, you are looking at Tom Cruise, why do you ask?
Anyway, I’m back now and hoping to keep up the blogging goodness that you all (well, my one reader anyway) are expecting.
And why not start again with this month’s “New to Me games” post?
It was a pretty lean month for games (I was away saving the world, you know) (Editor: Ssshhhh!!!! That was classified!). But I did manage to get four new games in, and three of them were pretty good!
First, though, we are recruiting new Cult of the New to Me members. We especially need somebody to be treasurer because…well, let’s just say that the books are pretty much the opposite of balanced.
But that’s not important right now.
So without further adieu (all the adieu went up in a fiery explosion in the jungles of Brazil anyway), let’s get started!
Modern Dating – A Flash From the Past
I just heard today that Game Informer Online (GIO), one of the best video game sites and magazines that I’m aware of, is going to be releasing their new web site design soon. Part of the redesign, unfortunately, is the closure of the “user blog” section, where anybody could sign up as a member of the site and write blogs, comment on blogs, and basically become part of the Game Informer community.
I met a lot of new friends on that site when I started there in 2010, some of whom I am still in touch with today, and I treasure the time I had on there before I started moving away from video games and stopped blogging there.
I cut my blogging teeth on that site, and one of my most popular posts was one I did to satirize the aggravation of all the preorder codes that you were (maybe still are? I don’t know anymore) required to enter to get all of the preorder content that you were entitled to.
To date, it has 18,207 views in five and a half years (not bad for a user blog). It was originally posted on November 12, 2012. I had just finished entering a bunch of codes for one of the new games I had bought (I can’t remember which one) and everything just flowed in about 30 minutes. I don’t think I edited it much except for grammar/clarity.
(I have edited it for the repost, but just a touch here and there)
The post also includes some satire of the video game industry in general (at the time, though I’m sure not much has changed)
Since those blogs are going to be inaccessible soon, I’m reposting it here for your enjoyment.
If you aren’t a fan, don’t worry. Board game posts will be back later this week.
Thank you, and thank you to all of the friends I made on GIO. We were a fantastic group!
*******
Flashpoint South China Sea – Let’s Get This Produced!
Just a quick post is all I have time for on this sunny Monday.
Lately I have been on a bit of a GMT Games kick, mainly starting with Time of Crisis. It’s not so much the wargames or the COIN games, because I unfortunately wouldn’t get much chance to get those played, so while I look through the window with longing eyes, I don’t pick those up.
Instead, I’ve seen some quick-playing 2-player games that would make perfect lunchtime games with a co-worker, and I’ve snatched them up quickly (ok, as quickly as promising to pay the P500 pre-order price and then patiently waiting for them to be produced and released can be).
I jumped on Fort Sumter: the Succession Crisis because I love learning about the American Civil War and this game hits that sweet spot of 20-45 minutes.
I say all of this as an introduction to the fact that there’s a game that sounds completely totally awesome oh my god I can’t wait to see it, it can’t come soon enough oh why does it have to take so long… (Editor: *SLAP*).
Oh, thank you.
This game is called Flashpoint: South China Sea and it’s not a wargame either.
Necrodude Coming to Meteorfall – Gamers Go Nuts
Meteorfall, the rogue-like deck-building card game app created by Slothwerks, was one of my favourite apps of the last year.
It was the perfect blend of difficult but not impossible game play, where you could spend a good deal of time with it but eventually you would finish it with all four classes.
Of course, like many games, once you’ve done it with all of the classes, what is there to do? You could try and better your scores, but that’s not very interesting for me.
So I’ve set it aside for a while.
However, fans of the game (like me) were greeted with wondrous news on Twitter this morning:
The Meteorfall Necrodude update has been approved and will launch May 9 on iOS and Android for the low, low price of free. I think you guys are gonna love it 🙂 pic.twitter.com/lH1FSeDw31
— Slothwerks (@slothwerks) May 4, 2018
Dude! Take Your Turn! 