It's been…4 weeks since we started this </Barenaked ladies>. Like most of you, I've been locked up in the house, only going out for the essentials. First of all, if you work in any of the fields keeping us afloat during this time, thank you so much! Also, my heart goes out to everyone who's having trouble during this time, whether it be loss of job, dealing with family issues, etc. I've been lucky in that my job situation is fairly stable, but I know that is not the case for a large portion of the world right now.
Read More
On the past couple of episodes of Boards & Swords, I’ve been hinting at a big project that I’ve been working on over the past few months. Well, its time to pull the rug out from under myself and show the world! Since we launched our Patreon last year, we’ve promised an Actual Play RPG featuring the Boards & Swords cast playing as Cats. I originally called it “Yarnfinder” because I was going to use the Starfinder RPG. However, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to create something new.
So I am! Sorta. Going off the premise of “Firefly, but with Cats,” I’m going to be working on my own custom version of the Blades in the Dark from Evil Hat Publishing (using their “Forged in the Dark” license). This means you if you’ve never played a RPG, you wouldn’t need to go buy fancy D&D dice, you can use just regular six sided dice (or our Patreon dice if you are a backer)!
Read More
Philip isn't here, but the rest of us have our Ion some board games! Featuring Ion from Genius Games, My Little Scythe from Stonemaier Games, and Snowman Dice is from Brain Games.
News
Retrayal Rat Rouse Ron Rhe Rill Raggy!
https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/101005/grab-your-scooby-snacks-and-prepare-betrayal-myste
Plaid Hat Gives Asmodee the pink slip
https://www.plaidhatgames.com/news/1047
Wizards announces an Odyssey
https://dnd.wizards.com/products/tabletop-games/rpg-products/mythic-odysseys-theros
New Bill would cost Amazon some bills
https://www.pcmag.com/news/new-bill-would-make-amazon-ebay-liable-for-counterfeits
Millennium long Kickstarter for Chronicles of Crime
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/destinies/chronicles-of-crime-the-millennium-series?ref=section-homepage-projectcollection-3-staff-picks-newest#
Taken from episode 144 of Boards and Swords, Collin and Cindy talk about this social deduction game from Smirk and Dagger and their thoughts on it.
Read More
I wanted this post to be my initial look at the new Thor Hero deck for Marvel Champions that released last week. However, I haven’t had the chance to get it to the table just yet. Luckily for me, Fantasy Flight Games had a stream where they teased the upcoming Hulk Hero pack that should be coming out in the June time frame. Just like I did for Black Widow and Doctor Strange, let’s take a look at the cards that were teased from the FFG stream and announcement post.
Read More
“Wait….The Broken Token doesn’t make an insert for Arcadia Quest,” you might be saying to yourself right now. This is technically true, but I have figured out a solution that might be “close enough” for me. First, some backstory:
Read More
Disclaimer: If you haven't heard about Arkham Horror: The Card Game, you might have trouble with this post. Also, potential spoilers ahead.
Last time we talked about Path to Carcosa, we had gone inside a library to investigate a rumor that weird play “The Yellow King” had toured through Arkham years beforehand. In our search, we found that one man, Daniel Chesterfield, survived that encounter and was now being held at Arkham Asylum. So in this scenario, we venture to the asylum to find the Joker…..I mean Daniel Chesterfield. This was the first scenario in Path to Carcosa that I haven’t previously played before, so I was kind of excited to play this scenario and experience some new content.
Read More
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) 5th Edition hit a big milestone last year, as it was the game’s fifth anniversary. Which means for us players, we should probably expect to hear rumors of the next edition coming along shortly. However, for Wizards of the Coast, they took the opportunity to celebrate the big milestone with some hefty gifts...if you were willing to spend the money. The most elegant of these was the Sapphire anniversary dice set, which was a magnificent set of dice for the low price of just $299.99…Wow.
Equally as elegant, but not as back breaking, was the Special Edition reprint of “Tyranny of Dragons”, the adventure series that launched with D&D 5th Edition with the books “Hoard of the Dragon Queen” and “Rise of Tiamat”. It’s a great idea: celebrate all the good years that D&D has had by going back to where 5th edition started. Plus, it took these two adventure books and combined them into a single looking hardcover with a new beautiful cover.
Read More
It’s time for our little level 1 halflings to show their talents in combat! Will everyone come out of this first encounter alive? Only one way to find out!
Read More
February was a very busy month for me, so I didn’t get a whole lot of board gaming in. Especially when it comes to the Marvel Champions card game from Fantasy Flight Games (FFG). I did get a chance to go back to North Carolina and play the game with my dad, but we ended up playing Rhino again since we convinced my wife to play (that’s a story for another time). I was fortunate enough to get a copy of The Wrecking Crew scenario expansion, it wasn’t until earlier this week that I was able to get it to the table and try it out.
Read More
Rut roh! All the shelves have gotten full! Now what do you do? We talk about whether or not we purge board games from our collection and what we do with them if we do.
News
MTG Arena getting smaller in 2020
https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/02/mtg-arena-will-come-to-mobile-in-2020/
FFG's RPGs crit fail their saving throw
http://www.d20radio.com/main/fantasy-flight-games-long-term-plan-will-discontinue-rpg-development/
Asmodee updates their customer service by deleting it
https://www.asmodeena.com/en/customer-service-faq/
Hold the liiiiiiineeeee, Kickstarter isn't always on tiiiiime....
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/18/kickstarter-workers-vote-to-unionize/
Lets Get Villainous....Villainous....
https://io9.gizmodo.com/marvels-baddies-are-getting-their-own-disney-villainous-1841702456
We love getting feedback, and so this next campaign was actually a suggestion from one of our listeners, Beetle! He suggested we take the new D&D 5th edition adventure “Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus”, and play it as a party of only halflings! Now he gets to see what a poor decision he has made! In this episode, we meet most of the party as they answer a summons to see a local Captain in Baldur’s Gate.
Read More
This week, I had the opportunity to sit down with 2 creators of another Kickstarter in the Roleplaying Game (RPG) genre, Richard Kreutz-Landry and Rich Howard of Descent into Midnight (DiM). Based on the popular Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) engine, this Kickstarter still has a couple of weeks to go and is already well above its $25,000 goal.
In DiM, you play as characters in an underwater society, one that has not interacted with any type of human society. It is your responsibility to create this community and defend it from some type of threat. The exact nature of that threat can vary between games, as the game is centered around how the characters respond to these varying threats. I’ve kept an eye on the development of DiM for a while now, ever since I played in a couple of games with Richard at Acadecon a few years ago.
Read More
Disclaimer: If you haven't heard about Arkham Horror: The Card Game, you might have trouble with this post. Also, potential spoilers ahead.
Last time, I continued our recap of playing through the Path to Carcosa campaign. Now that we’ve witnessed a crazy play and made a party get “lit” (har har), it was time to get down to business. The next scenario, Echoes of the Past, has us go to the nearby museum to investigate a rumor that this is not the first time that “The King in Yellow” has come to Arkham.
Read More
One thing I’d like to start doing on this blog is interviewing various people in the tabletop gaming communities (board games, RPGs, etc.). I used to do this back when I did the Boards & Swords podcast solo, and I miss talking with new people and finding out about cool new projects in the works. At the time that I realized this, I also came across a brand new Kickstarter called “Decuma” from first time Kickstarter company Golden Lasso Games.
Golden Lasso Games is the brainchild of Kimi Hughes, one of the hosts of the Happy Jacks RPG podcast. I’ve talked about Happy Jacks before in my video last year highlighting women in RPGs. I also follow a few cosplayers, and Kimi is very active in that community as well (her company name stems off the fact that she is a big fan of Wonder Woman).
Read More
We've got the news, the reviews (Silver from Bezier Games, Menace Among Us from Smirk & Dagger, and more!), and the.....cool personalities?
News
Secret Hilter being played in State Senate
https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/gop-senator-wants-legislative-pages-to-stop-playing-secret-hitler/article_d5b4ed05-c503-5e86-8534-8de650fd3e1d.html
New J. Alex Kevern game I'm required to talk about
http://www.tabletopgamingnews.com/Renegade-Game-Studios-Taking-Pre-Orders-For-Succulent-Board
Game Games announced I really don't care about https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/100003/spielwarenmesse-2020-ravensburger-teases-castles-t
Expansion for Journey into Middle Earth https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2020/1/28/shadowed-paths/
New Keyforge cards! https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2020/1/30/mass-mutation/
Read More
It’s the last part of our DC Comics Adventures game! The last bit was a little short, so I threw in the few outtakes we had at the very end for you to enjoy. Come back next time as we start our newest D&D 5th edition campaign: Descent into Avernus!
Read More
Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) has been announcing a lot of new stuff for their Marvel Champions Living Card Game (LCG). Some might argue that they should focus on getting more stock of the products that have been already released, but those kinds of issues usually take weeks to fix. In the meantime, last week we found out about the newest hero that will be coming to the game, Doctor Strange. Currently, the schedule has this hero deck becoming available in May (March = Thor, April = Black Widow, May = Doctor Strange).
Read More
Unless this is your first visit to this website, you are probably familiar with the fact that I am a big fan of the board games made by Fantasy Flight Games, specifically their cooperative Living Card Games (LCGs): Arkham Horror the Card Game and Marvel Champions the Card Game. Both of these games come in smaller “core” boxes, but with the vast waves of expansions that FFG is known for putting out, these types of games quickly outgrow these boxes.
Read More