Board games and a medieval setting; the cheese and crackers of the table-top! Farming! Economics! Commerce! Mayhap some flax! But beneath the cheerily constructive historical tinkering, there are avaricious, power-hungry backstabbers lurking in the shadows. Hold onto coin purse strings, we’re going to Slyville.

The third title from relative newcomers Hexy Studio (Star Scrappers: Cave In, Hard City,) Slyville sees 3 to 5 rival guilds racing to gain influence over the titular medieval town. If you can successfully balance bluffing, timing, and the judicious application of blade to spine, then you’ll become the favoured guild of the capricious Prince and win the game. The city, rendered by Przemysław Gul, and given colourful life by Gul and Tomasz Larek, helps distinguish medieval Slyville from the multitude of similar settings. I especially enjoy the threat of the sawn-through stool on the Sabotage card.

Ayyy! Sit on it!

The heart of the game is a deck of seven cards, and the decisions, not only of which four (three in a 5-player game) you will play, and into which districts, but the manner in which you do so. Poker-face an Acquisition card into an uncontested spot to gain a good you need later, quietly seed a district with a Sabotage card to protect your upcoming Big Deal, or mislead the table by boldly slapping down a hopeless Small Deal; all the while trying to read your opponents’ moves and keep track of what goods lie on each player’s board. Once the districts are resolved, the cheesy grins and muttered cursing around the table will tell the truth of each game’s turn. The Prince’s Favourite (First Player) has the opportunity to further meddle by seeding the board with a Prince’s Decree, it’s effect on the turn known only to them until the latter phase of the turn, when the regions are resolved.

There is a lot I like about Slyville; Its engaging mix of forward planning, reading the table, bluffing, and luck reminds me pleasantly of Mission: Red Planet. It’s easy to learn, moves along at a fair clip, and always proceeds toward the 100-point goal, eschewing the grinding tug-of-war of games like Munchkin. Nobody is ever out of the race for long, the players don’t fight to balance the game, the board state doesn’t change chaotically, and your seven cards return to you each turn, ready to scheme anew. Similarly, your goods-gathering Henchman might be displaced, or exiled from the city entirely, but are soon back in the fray with a timely Takeover card. The Prince’s Favourite  resolves ties, and may be influenced by the other players, but we found they frequently default to supporting their own interests, or those of the player in the weakest position.

If this seems rather mild, it’s because it rather is.

The wealth of a city, in my ham-like grasp!

Slyville’s metagame revolves around convincing the Prince’s Favourite to act in your favour, or against an opponent. The only tools available to do this are promises of mutual back-scratching, or Brutal threats. Our group found that with the lack of any concrete bribes, table talk had minimal impact, but other groups may bring this aspect to life. There’s definitely a niche for a ‘mean family game’ where the stakes feel lower, the penalties less harsh, but Slyville has traded some drama along with chaos, to achieve its aim. This reduced amplitude between the peaks and troughs of glee and frustration risks the game falling between the cracks if it doesn’t reach its audience quickly. This is, I feel, the biggest challenge facing Slyville. With almost 10,000 games being produced annually, the window for a game to make its mark is extremely slim. Slyville feels complete and well-realised, appealing without gimmickry, or acres of plastic, though it can feel that this fox is stealing chicken nuggets, not raiding the hen house.

We built this city on enforced acquisition of material goods!

If the sneaky city of Slyville intrigues you, pre-orders will be open soon, and Hexy Studio will have final production copies ready at Essen 2019, booth 5-K105.

Notes on components:
This preview is of a prototype copy of the game. The art is close to finalised, but the components are subject to change. The iconography is clear and logical, though the colour-blind-proofing of the game could be improved if it extended to the player boards and main board districts. I would like to see the Goods tokens matched to the squares on the player boards, as they’re currently very small. I’d also like to see the Takeover and Goods Pile spaces on the main board outlined identically to the card placement spots for consistency’s sake. It was pointed out to me by another player that the art for Ulrika Krieger (Red Ruffians Gang) has her head in an impossible position and angle, and I cannot now un-see it.

Disclaimer: Hexy Studio kindly supplied a prototype of Slyville for the purpose of this preview.

Step lively, Rocketeers! Time to show how keen Earthlings can be!

Space! It is, mostly, but between the stardust and dead satellites lies adventure for those brave, well-groomed few who don the velour of the Rocket Patrol. Space also contains Cadets. Who go on Missions. Away. Space Cadets: Away Missions promises adventure and thrills in the wide, black yonder for you and your chums, but does it provide derring-do, or a herring, red? Smoke me a kipper, skipper, and I’ll tell you.

A fresh, pleasant morning in the Rocket Patrol: everything shipshape!

Space Cadets: Away Missions has little besides theme to tie it to previous Space Cadets games, and is a love letter to old-timey pulp sci-fi. Players cooperate to challenge an alien menace in all its forms, from squishy to chitinous, and ultimately save the day! The components offer a pleasing toybox of plastic figures, and clear, if a little dull, counters and board tiles, with a rulebook and reference sheets that are complete and concise.

Set up one of 16 scenarios, move heroes, roll dice, get stuff, move the monsters – on the surface level, SC:AM is a pale dot in the firmament of dice-and-miniatures titles, but by strictly limiting the fussiness of action points, status effects, dice modifiers, and random events SC:AM enables players to focus on decision making, and enjoying the bloody game. The design clarity and attention to detail is evident from the paired dice colours (you most commonly roll multiple pairs of dice for Saucerman attacks) to the airtight logic of the “AI” pathfinding. Everything is there to keep the situation clear and bring gameplay to the fore. It’s a testament to the design that SC:AM smoothly puppeteers no less than seven different rubber-suit aliens, each with their own behaviour, without taking longer than the players’ turn to do it.

A short while later: “Good job, crew! I’m right behind you!”

The result is an engaging, fun cooperative puzzle, in which dice luck never feels like it’s commanding the bridge, but affectionately chatting to the engines down in engineering. There are extrastellar threats and brave heroics, melon-headed Saucermen and brains-in-jars, jail-breaks, Hive Queens, and the Tunnel of Terror, all of it presented neatly and shipshape, as befits a true Rocketeer. Curiously, while the game plays with up to six, I’ve had the most enjoyment using four characters in my solitaire games, where the order of activations, and timing of abilities really shines. Like many cooperative games, there’s only the players themselves to limit a single person calling all the shots, and with no hands of cards, nor other hidden elements, SC:AM risks an emergent Game Commander. If everyone is on the same page, however, it is unforgettable fun to yank the tinfoil hat from a mind-enslaved human Thrall, wire it up to a chunk of Mysterium, and teleport to safety – just like in the movies!

Merry! Um…Happy! Err…it’s March.
Welcome, welcome, friends. Welcome to twenty-oughty-one-ety-seven. It’s a year AND SO MUCH MORE! But before I reveal what stupefying, death defying, shallow frying things the late-twenty-teens have in store for us all, THIS:

Midnight, January 1st, 2000. A slightly tipsy, definitely teenaged voice – maybe mine – from behind my parents’ sofa asks “Where’s my hovercar?”. As it turned out, the future was not one of shiny rockets and derring-do, but more akin to Pulp’s increasingly sobering Disco 2000. Still, in 2016 the non-stick futurama of the Rocket Patrol was heroically enacted on my battered table-top in Space Cadets: Away Missions.

Related by theme only to Space Cadets and Space Cadets: Dice Duel, Away Missions takes the dicey-dungeon-crawl formula into a hex-hopping, alien bopping, laser plopping game of tactical Dan Dareoism in a future that’s neither GRIM, nor DARK; favouring coke-bottle rocketships, bubble helmets and butt-chins you could lose a 5p coin in. From first contact on a mining colony, to the far-flung Invisible Planet via a thrilling space-jail breakout and the Tunnel of Terror, SC:AM (unfortunate acronym) joyously checks off outlandish pulp sci-fi clichés in it’s dog-eared I-Spy book and is home in time for astro-scones.

Gear up your crew for one of the 16 scenarios then, with the help of four pairs of sparkly D10s, scan-move-and-shoot until you are successful or dead. A typical turn sees you scan (flip over) a board hex tile, add aliens and items to it, then take actions allowing you to move, attack, use your Overkill ability, and interact with your fellow crew and the board. Once every Rocketeer has had a bit of fun, the alien turn begins and the attention to detail of SC:AM glitters. The game handles as smooth as the soapiest of space operas, resolving up to 7 unique alien AI types in a refreshingly logical manner. After a mere handful of plays I needed neither the rulebook, nor the still-unused-but-welcome reference sheets.

The simplicity of the rules allows you to focus on tackling the challenge of the game itself – and like most cooperative games it definitely feels like a puzzle to be solved. You choose on the fly who will go first, second and so on, allowing you to change your plan based on how each player’s turn pans out. The heart (of Gold) and soul of the puzzle is the aforementioned Overkills which turn excess die roll successes into freebie actions based on your rocketeer’s innate ability, weapons, and even the different alien types. Overkills can be spent in any combination, giving a lot of potential for fun combos; Failed to kill that ominous Brain-in-a-Jar? Get the Professor to open the door, so the Chief can Strafe and blast it. Missing that vital teleporter component? The First Officer can tell the Captain to Move Out and bring it to you! Concerned about that hidden Leader herding endless Saucer Men at you next turn? Shoot his friend and stun him with their dying Psychic Scream! I have had some truly memorable skin-of-my-teeth victories where we’ve seen the exact order of operations which will save everyone’s velour-clad butts and they have involved everything from a Soft-Focus Lens to manipulating gravity itself. However, if but one of your brave crew runs out of oxygen or ‘being alive’ then the whole mission fails; our on your own out there, Rocketeers, make a wrong move and you’ll be lost in space!

Aliens to the left of me, aliens to the right…

For what was a hefty price tag of around £60 (a sum now dwarfed by other Kickstarters and recent Brexit-inflicted hikes up into the £80+ range) SC:AM gives you a lot of competent, if not altogether exciting cards, chits, and tiles. The artwork is clean and functional, if rather bland on the board tiles, while the character art hits a pleasantly pulpy note while remaining on the right side of silliness. The inevitable miniatures shade toward the ‘playing piece’ end of the scale, but are sturdy, well-defined, and serve the gameplay well. Each model is easy to identify by colour, shape, and size, from tiny Bugs to the ‘rubber-chicken-meets-Predator’ Sentinel, with perhaps the exception of the Thralls’ colouring which needed really to be distinct from the similarly-sized Saucermen. A special mention has to be made of the Brain-in-a-Jar, which is indeed a three-part model of a tiny think-bulb in a clear containment tube. Gross, but cool!

The scenarios offer a slightly vague narrative arc, and with no campaign system in place to carry things through the missions the plot could have used a little more fleshing out in the flavour text. The 16 scenarios offer plenty of variety, from a solo suicide run, to expunging all alien life from an infested rocket, and minor rules tweaks are used to switch up the formula and keep players on their toes. This isn’t to say that Away Missions relies upon cheap B-picture tricks to surprise you; I was more than happy with its sparing use of random events, which are limited to one instance each and can be accounted for in your plan, though they may or may not turn up in the tile draw.

It seems that GRIMDARK sci-fi still rules the space-waves and the more gaudy, bright space adventures of the Rocket Patrol haven’t caught the gaming world’s imaginations quite so easily. Space Cadets: Away Missions may not have been the biggest blip on anyone’s view screen, but I’ve returned to it time and again, clocking up over 30 hours of play, mostly as a solo game. The game scales well, though I feel that it plays best with four characters, which can easily be handled by one, or two players. It’s easy enough to learn and play, but with a surprisingly food-pill meatiness to the tactical decisions each turn, and yes, there are dice, but I’ve rarely felt that they’ve been the deciding factor in my wins and losses.

If you fancy an adventure beyond the stars, meeting and blasting new and exciting creatures and nicking their stuff, then this future dungeoncrawl-o-rama may well be enough to get you strapping on your Robbie’s Rocket Pants and jetting off into the black. If you’re looking for a solitaire game and have a few extra credits to splash around, then Danger! Away Missions might siren-sing you behind an asteroid and have it’s way with your wallet. If, like me, you’re tired of the FUTUREOFWAR style seriousness of science-fiction board games and want an adventure with your buddies where the ability to open a door is actually really important then sign yourselves up for a tour in the Rocket Patrol!

Britain’s flopping about in the sea, Mr. Punch is the president elect, and I ran out of whisky!

Ah, board games! What would this fine country be without the quintessential activity of the white-middle-classes! What? No, not that activity, it’ll ruin the carpets.

How does one write about board games these days? There are plenty of voices offering their opinions and reviews, reporting on the latest news and new releases, or merely parroting press release copy spammed out to them via email, so what makes my particular message worth corking into a bottle and tossing amidst the waves? Is it worth the wear on my fingertips and scant free time to yank up the sash and honk some words into the busy street of the internet?

Being of a generally positive disposition, I like to think I might somewhat influence a pigeon. Anyway, the window’s open now, letting in a rather brisk gif, so here are some ways in which I have happily frittered my time while 2016 collapsed into near-dystopian sci-fi nonsense:

Sausage Negotiator! Hostage. Hostage. Hostage Negotiator. 10-15 minutes of surprisingly tense, solitaire card-and-dice play. Armed with Cool Shades and a goatee, you must Hold a Telephone in Interesting Ways to save the lives of (at least half of) the innocents and capture or splatter one of three abductors. It initially feels like a standard dice chucker in a fancy turtleneck, but there’s enough genuine gameplay to be worth conceding a slice of your lunch hour, hitting all the expected movie tropes; you’ll keep the abductor calm, listen to their demands, even call in a sniper, or rush the building if you have to – though sometimes the maths works out such that you kind of want the last couple of hostages to conveniently snuff it so that you can win the game.

Pictured: Failure.

In a manner similar to many co-op games, Bratwurst Blagger Hostage Negotiator revolves around managing a worsening situation while generating ‘conversation points’ to buy useful one-shot cards for future rounds. Your options are relatively few, but the decisions you make feel like they genuinely matter; you can pursue obvious short term gains, card-burning ‘hail mary’ schemes, even multiple-turn plots, which may, or may not disintegrate due to the frustrations of the aptly named event-card-cum-game-timer Terror Deck. The abductor’s demands add the nifty twist of trading you brief windows of hope for permanent handicaps, and the game setup is semi-random to keep you on your toes. The core box contains three different nefarious people-hoarders with their own special rules to mix things up yet further, with more available in the four slightly pricey 16-card expansions.

About the theme: the hostages are sometimes killed, and in one case the hostages are a class of kids. The treatment is generally well-considered, neither cartoonishly broad, nor ghoulishly realistic, and while you do get a Die Hard-esque cool-headed terrorist, and ‘crazy teacher Pushed Too Far’, the abductors are given back story beyond “is a baddie” – one is even surprisingly sympathetic. In terms of diversity and representation my main frown was at the conversation cards, which represent you, the player, talking directly to the abductor. The art for the negotiator unnecessarily gives you a specifically white, male in-game presence. The negotiator has no independent character, nor back-story; there’s no use for him, nor his receding hairline. Cool shades though. The characters in the game (and it’s currently released expansions) are mostly male, though the soon to be released sequel Hostage Negotiator: Crime Wave stars an (again, unnecessary) female negotiator on all conversation cards. It, and its wave of expansions, deliberately include more female antagonists to redress the balance, while somewhat oddly introducing a a mix of male and female gendered hostage meeples, replacing the original’s perfectly appropriate, neutral pawns. Maybe they just want the player to identify more personally with them when one of those little wooden bits “dies”.

So that’s good, is it?

Production quality is pretty high throughout, including custom moulded dice and well-finished wooden bits. The player board is sturdy, though the cards are a shade thin. My copy of the game had a nasty gouge down the edge of the card deck, but Van Ryder Games replaced them swiftly and politely – thanks guys! it’s also worth noting that the designer actively supports the game on Boardgamegeek, responding quickly to rules queries and general questions.

Ultimately, while Hostage Negotiator doesn’t venture beyond the well-worn co-op template, it distils that style of play into a short, focused thriller of a game. It’s a sound framework, allowing neat variations through small tweaks to the game’s core rules. Yes, the card and dice luck can derail your plans, but the level of randomness feels right to me and there are ways to use the cards which can mitigate, or even dodge the dice altogether. Never before has such a small, dice-based title put me on a hotplate, and made me feel that the choices I made really mattered, even to the point of being genuinely stressful.

If you don’t like dice, then Hostage Negotiator won’t change your mind, but despite some thematic wonkiness in places I am impressed at how invested I have been in the lives and deaths of a handful of little, yellow, wooden tokens. I’ll happily concede my time to the demands of this little banger, even when the bock is ticking and the wurst is yet to come!

Crushed beneath my mighty, unreliable justice!

Ay up,

This is the story of how table-top games came into and eventually more-or-less took over my life.
I call it “The story of how table-top games came into and eventually more-or-less took over my life” and it goes like this:
Back in 2005 I bought a game called Zombies!!! to play with my university housemates. This blew my formerly Monopoly-based games experience wide open with it’s grisly art, unique (at the time) theme, and numerous, tiny, plastic undead. Doom: The Board Game was next, which I played with my then-girlfriend, now wife, and which we both thoroughly disliked. Surprisingly undeterred by this expensive dud, and with the discovery of the excellent shop Spirit Games in a nearby town, Last Night on Earth and Arkham Horror followed, becoming our earliest breakthrough games.

At this point, I was very much taken by what is often fondly referred to as ‘Ameritrash’ – games with big, cinematic themes, fancy components, and lots of cards to draw and dice to throw. Games which left us and our gaming friends with stories to tell and memories of heroic deeds, dismal, if hilarious failures, and the sort of bizarre quirks such game systems throw up at random – ask me about the horse in the antique shop, the magician who got drunk, was mugged, and then died an insane hero, or the wonky, bum-pinching zombie. We hosted regular games nights at our house, until strangers started showing up; we were left with no choice but to take our games out into the wider world. We bravely stacked our game boxes and, never looking back, we went to the pub.

The staff at our local were kind enough to let us have a small function room upstairs for free one Friday evening per month. They were also grumpy enough to regard us with wary suspicion, but we kept out of the way and bought drinks, and D6+Beer! was born. Our group grew along with our games collection, and before long I was also attending Wednesday night gaming at Spirit, whose friendly, inclusive patrons opened up a far wider scope of games to me, and around this time we discovered another fledgling crowd who met at a cafe near the city centre. I also started a Youtube channel in my spare time, mostly reviewing games; some I already owned, and some cheekily sourced from publishers, aided by my joining this very website. A house move brought with it a change of venue for D6 – another pub of course – and at yet another pub, this time on our street, we identified and invaded a dead-end Xbox night, establishing a Monday evening table-top session which brought the combined number of events to two per month and one every single week.

Things couldn’t run completely without incident. Our Mondays became a battle of wills with an entrenched clique of obnoxious drunks who didn’t want to give up ‘their table’ to us moderately-drinking pretenders, and no matter how much discussion or compromise was attempted with the management it was clear that they felt unable, or unwilling to intervene. We also had our cafe venue whipped out from beneath us without notice despite reliable attendance and zero trouble from our group. In the meantime, however, something else had changed in my life; in 2013 our son was born.

Being immobile and portable, babies aren’t much of a barrier to board gaming. They do, however,  change your priorities. We still made it to events, including the group’s first all-dayer, but my Youtube videos and blog posts slowed to a mere trickle. Ironically I found myself far less able to make it to the shop for their late-night Wednesday sessions because they employed me – initially to cover one of the owners’ recovery from surgery, but it’s been nearly two years and they’ve not kicked me out yet. With game time increasingly scarce as my son grew older, my taste took a swing toward more concise, focused, satisfying and ultimately ‘Euro’ fare, though I still love some good old D6 chucking and plastic toys.

This brings things nearly up to date; last year I attended my first UK Games Expo (working of course), and there have now been four all-day events with more to come, though I’ve taken a bit of a back-seat when it comes to organising. I’m still working at Spirit Games, dishing out friendly advice, introducing people to new games that I think they’ll love, and vicariously enjoying other people buying the games I can’t generally afford, though how long this will last is a little up in the air with baby number 2 due soon. More than anything now I’m thinking about the future, and about what games we might play with our children when they’re older.

That’s my excuse for buying Cat Tower and I am sticking to it.

Hi, I’m Colin and I am a Cardcore Gamer.

American games tend to be big, bold bowls full of toys, smothered in rich, tasty theme; They can be dramatic, tense and incredibly stupid, but fun, like a cardboard Labrador. American games often depend on throwing dice, drawing cards and laughing in the face of the Gods Of Dice until They take Their Inevitable Due. ‘Ameritrash’ embraces the knockabout side of gaming, where alliances are forged and broken, while vast, plastic armies clash in glorious conflict. If a game box contains something like this:

In those bags are 146 plastic toys and you don’t have to be elbow-deep in cereal to get at them!

It’s probably Ameritrash.

So that all sounds like great, right? Well sure, it can be, but as with blockbuster movie directors, Ameritrash games can get so excited by visually impressing you, that they forget to provide any actual depth. Dice and card draws are random factors and while many games are about mitigating the element of luck, sometimes American games just don’t have enough actual game in there; a bit like a Happy Meal, but one that costs £40. Ameritrash is often about the experience and the storytelling and the fun of throwing dice with friends, with all the table-talk, backstabbing, laughter and rueful shaking of fists that entails and that is where they shine, but without a solid, entertaining game under their sugary shell, they fall flatter than an incomplete metaphor.

Life is like an angry penguin…

It’s really a case of decisions; in Ameritrash, your best laid plans can be foiled by a bad die roll, or by another player slapping down a card to negate your scheme. Your decisions are frequently overridden by other players, or the game itself and this gives rise to tactical and reactionary play, rather than a satisfyingly strategic ‘long game’ where every choice counts. In fact, you may not even be there to see the end of the game, as eliminating players from the game is another Ameritrash favourite.

So that’s American-style games, then; not always the deepest, most elegant style of game design, but with a lot of heart, thematic gameplay and a real spirit of playfulness. What makes it for me are the stories you come away with – that time when I escaped the zombies and ran to the antique shop, wherein, after I had boarded the windows, I found a horse! or the time when, as an amateur sleuth, I went to talk with the locals at a bar and woke up hours later with a migraine and no wallet.

These stories, our stories, were created and played out with my friends over a bowl of snacks and a few beers and to me, that’s Ameritrash.

Want an example of an Ameritrash game? Take a look at my video review of Wiz-War 8th Edition.