Newsletter No# 92

Okay, this might be the one. Shut Up & Sit Down has had a hot-and-cold relationship with GMT Games over the years; entranced by the potential contained in those boxes packed with systems and stories, but put-off by the fiddle and faff. ‘A Gest of Robin Hood’ could break that curse - with a sharp and simple core action system that leaves plenty of room for narrative swings and feisty feints. Robin Hood has to inspire the people and turn the locals revolting (har har) whilst the big bad sheriff wants a stacked cache of loot and a subdued populace under his thumb - but both goals center around a tug-of-war core that can end the game in a snap if you play your cards right…

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Recommended to us by friend-of-the-show Tim Clare, Joraku is a fitting treasure. It’s a trick-taking area control game! Cards are used not just to win tricks, but also to shuffle your sturdy samurai around a board that’ll score points for whoever has the majority in each distinct area at the end of a round. But! Holding onto the lead gives you the opportunity to score smaller bonuses along the way - and a sneaky ‘ninja’ card can be deployed to snatch the lead from a greedy player.

This one takes just as much time and space as it needs to, with three snappy rounds to get used to systems packed with opportunities for doing something a little clever. There’s ample opportunity to ‘Fine Move’ your friends!

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Tag Team comes from the tried-and-tested GameBrains at Scorpion Masqué , and absolutely nails its premise. It’s a two-player-only auto-battling card game, where each player makes their tag-team-of-two from a stacked roster of quirky characters, and then watches them duke it out until someone falls over from being hit in the head one too many times.

There’s only two phases to wrap your brain around - a ‘Battle’ phase where each player flips a card from their personal deck and simultaneously resolves its effect (do some damage, heal some damage, set the other person on fire, summon a small gnome etc etc) followed by a ‘Shop’ phase where you add just one card into that deck.

Here’s the sauce, though! Once a card is added, its relative order can never be changed. So both players are programming their fighter in parallel, seeding in counters to what they think the other player is going to do.

It’s all over so fast that it’s almost impossible to refuse setting it up and going again. We ploughed through every single character in the box in one silly sitting - continually bemused by not just the gimmicks of each one, but how said gimmicks combine into weird engines when paired with the right partner. It’s very cool.

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Tom: Sloclap’s ‘REMATCH’ is absolutely fantastic. There’s a lot of negative reviews swirling around the game at present, as folks have been reporting a slew of bugs that - if I’m being honest - I haven’t really seen in my thirty-odd-hours of SWEET, SWEET FOOTBALL!

I’m not a football guy. I don’t follow it, nor do I play it - I did not expect to enjoy a videogame about it as much as I do! But there’s something about the kinetic spark behind this one that’s frighteningly moreish. The audiovisual feedback combined with that crunched-in third person camera puts you there! It has you leaning into your screen and viscerally reacting when you’re stood in the box making split decisions in front of a twitchy keeper, or driving the ball down the wings to your nervous team-mate. It’s the most tense I’ve felt in a multiplayer game in years.

I’m always looking for co-operative games that rely on actual co-operation rather than mere parallel play, and Rematch fits the bill perfectly; ranked ladder climbing requires co-ordination, trust, and cohesion! This is not a game of star players and solo carries, but determined strangers pooling their efforts into something far greater than themselves. It’s something quite special.

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