Check out Aaron’s comic, Ship Wrecked, and please consider donating to the Kickstarter!

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Today I will be trying not to make any references to the male genitalia as I discuss Package!?

2016 continues apace, mowing down celebrities left and right, even stretching a tendril to snatch away one of our much-loved furry family members. Occasionally penetrating the persistent, oppressive gloom are bright shafts of joy; this year saw my brother’s marriage, the birth of my daughter, and my bro and his wife just recently announcing a child of their own – congratulations again, Bee and Monkey! The playing of games remains a point of stability for me against this chiaroscuro of deathly shade and celestial laser beams, and none presented me with a more perplexing puzzle than Package!?.

In Package!? you deliver food to famished punters, dropping off sausagey treats and cheesy batons to any of five scoring locations. As your spies’ briefcases pile up at the drop points, actions will trigger to redistribute your opponents’ crates of meat and veg to other harbours, which may trigger further shuffling of letters into other post boxes in a pleasing cascade of events. When the final cage of animals is unloaded at the zoo, the game ends and you will ask me what the bollocks I’m talking about.

You see, this game is about delivering things to places – the specifics are left to your foetid imagination. Using only minimal components, Package!? is a fast-paced, 1-4 player abstract game in which you deliver the titular items to locations, worth one to five end-game points. Your options, initially constrained to seeding the board, are dictated by the roll of a standard D6 and cause your coloured wooden “packages” to be placed, moved, and removed, sometimes triggering further actions. It’s neither long, nor hard to grasp, but is nonetheless an intriguing and strangely addictive exercise in logic and luck.

Unusually for an abstract game, player turns in Package!?  revolve around the roll of a die, in fact, my early games felt like they played themselves: Roll die, place cube, repeat. Often I’d go through the list of options and think “I can do A, B, or C, but A is impossible, and B is stupid, so….” You’re given your options, and frequently the decisions you make feel either simple, or are made willy-nilly and what you want to do may be confounded by the die roll. However, the game has a mathematical heart: the number three.

For starters, scoring is restricted to three cubes at locations four and five, capping off their maximum scoring potential, and making location three desirable for both its unlimited scoring, and the potential to bump cubes up a notch (to four or five) increasing their value. Cubes in a location at game-end also score two points for each set of three, but threes are vulnerable as an opponent can potentially junk one of them out of the game entirely. Delivering a third cube to a location also allows you to wang a cube down to the next lowest location, or eject it from play, too. It’s a game of granular gains and losses; of forming sets, and of leaving spaces for sets to form; of being able to nobble your opponent now, or setting them up to hurt themselves later; of taking high-scoring locations early and becoming a target, or lurking at a lower location and edging upward.

It’s neither dice game, nor deterministic abstract, and I suspect that Package!? will cause many people to cock their head on first blush, as it did me. Similarly to Kingdom Builder’s ‘flip a card and place three pieces’, it’s easy to feel the game commands you to do as it says and no more, but I can feel that there is genuine gameplay in this tidy little box, with its neat and classic components, even if I’m not sure I can quite grasp it. A lot of thought and time has been spent on this, well, package, and it has been designed to play virtually anywhere, at any time.

In short, Package!? feels a like an exclusive club; I’m curious to sidle in the door and abuse the bar facilities, but I’m not sure I’ll ever learn the handshake well enough to become a full member. If you fancy paying the (very reasonable) entrance fee, you can find the Kickstarter page here; it’s well over-funded, with just under a week to go.
Disclosure: A preview copy of Package!? was kindly provided by the designer for this article.

JJ and his amazing friend Jason start the new batch of 100 episodes like you might expect…awkwardly. JJ talks about his Kickstarter project Standing Out In The Crowd, and Jason talks about his wave of 70s appreciation. The pair then proceed to recommend, then give spoilers for the film “It Follows”. Have no fear, the spoilers are plenty warned.

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In 1977, a signal was received. It is the only recorded incident of alien contact. The source of the transmission has never been revealed… until now…

• Woodward and Burnie-stein?

Right off the bat we see the sci-fi action comedy set in the real world with hard, timely issues regarding America’s great conspiracies. I feel like they missed a beat with this one. No “Real Moon Landing Footage”, no “Obama Birth Video”, no “Global Warming is actually Australia forgetting to close the window while the air is on.” for shame.

But we get a good look at the secret government agency that knows about the aliens, has a plan for the aliens, and is going to de-alien any aliens that alien around the Earth. Alien.

• The Team…of Lazers

Three looks at are team of regular idiots as they progress into world-saving idiots.

From what they’ve talked about, they weren’t supposed to have the suit, and now the DETIA (which from what I can tell is something like Defense Extraterrestrial Intelligence Agency) are stuck with them as the suit’s operators. Shenanigans ensue, allegedly.

• Cool Guys Don’t Look At Explosions

It actually looks to me like Colton Dunn’s character (Herman) is taking a break from all the dumb. Ignoring the problems of the rest of his teammates Woody and Zach (Gavin Free and Michael Jones, respectively) and being a cool guy.

As we clearly see from this scene earlier in the trailer as Burnie Burns’ character (Hagan) falls helplessly onto the hood of that car. Herman still stands, smoking, cool guy-ing.

I’m really looking forward to the team dynamic they pull together. The four-man comedy movie is nothing new (see: Ghostbusters, Hangover 1/2/3, Hot Tub Time Machine 1/2, Anchorman 1/2, Bridesmaids, a whole damn lot of other movies 1/2/3) but it works because you can get vastly contrasting characters moving towards the same goal, hilariously. This doesn’t look to break that form.

• X-Ray Cliché

Aside from the obvious problems that X-RAYS DON’T WORK LIKE THIS!, I found it interesting that advanced military technology has a beer goggles setting.

Sensor overload indeed.

• Danger Face

All in all, it looks to be a fun time. Sci-fi comedy is something these guys have been doing well for 10 years, so I don’t expect them to have forgotten what that looks like. Lazer Team, a great first feature effort and, most refreshingly, an original idea for a comedy. What did you think? Let us in the comments!

As a general rule, dice games are underwhelming. Luchador! Mexican Wrestling Dice slams that notion through a table full of tacos!

Just before Christmas, me and my wife were looking for  a cheap, fast and fun game that could be played with one hand, while our as-yet unborn son would be occupying the other. Naturally, dice games were the best solution, but that brought up a bit of a problem: many dice games are turds, riding a turbid sewage-slick of mediocrity before sinking mercifully without trace.

And some games are this game. This game is!

See, dice are lovely, deceptive little things with their pleasingly chunky tumbling, able to make us believe we can cheat fate when we ‘roll well’ and that it’s not our fault when we don’t. Dice games, however, often forget this and hold a pretence of sincere depth and strategy; grand, tottering designs on inherently fickle, random foundations. The better dice games know what they are and Luchador! is one of the best. Packed into this little box – with room to spare – is all the loud, colourful, tense hilarity of Mexican wrestling. Larger-than-life characters, special moves, the twatting of people with chairs, it is all there and it is FUN.

Lots of dice enter. All too often, lots of dice leave.

While great as a two-player duel, Luchador! shines even brighter as a 4-player tag-team game and due to its brevity, playing entire tournaments is easy. Everyone plays at the same level, there’s no real technique, nor strategy to learn because that’s really not the point – and if you’re not a fan of random filler, then this probably won’t convince you – it’s about the atmosphere the game generates and for something so simple, it exudes a surprising amount.

Choose a champion and get in the ring!

What shines through is the feeling that the designer made the game exactly as it needed to be; the rules are easy to grasp and teach, the turns are hectic, simultaneous and easily resolved and most importantly, the game proceeds steadily toward an end point. Luchador! is a five-minute filler that you can be certain will not outstay its welcome, you get a blast of dice-chucking, table slapping, high-fiving (no really, it’s in the rules) action which ends in shouts of victory and threats of retribution.

Luchador! Mexican Wrestling Dice is currently one of my most played games and is a fantastic warm-up, icebreaker, filler and dispute settler. Don your mask, speak horribly mangled Mexicanglish and deliver your foes a chair-assisted nap! Viva Luchador!

Luchador! is produced by Backspindle Games and a second edition is currently being Kickstarted here.

Edit 01/06/2014: Luchador! 2nd Edition is well on its way to being funded and has just won Best Family Game at the UK Games Expo!