SHUX Report and Everything Else Also (October 2022 newsletter) (Patreon)

Hello everyone! This month has been pretty incredible, I gotta say. Starting off with the Shut Up and Sit Down Expo was an excellent beginning. I got to play a ton of great games, but one of the ones I want to recommend the most is up above. Leaf recently finished their kickstarter (though you can late pledge if you want) and I got to try a demo of it. If you don't know, this is a tile laying game where the tiles you lay are leaves and you are the wind, arranging them in pleasing patterns that also earn you abilities based on where the leaf you placed touches the points of other leaves. It's such a lovely theme with some pretty great puzzley gameplay that I definitely plan on picking it up when it releases.

Another kickstarter demo I tried out was Fit to Print. This is another tile laying game, but this one shares a lot of DNA with Galaxy Trucker. Each round you pick a bunch of articles, pictures, and ads to go into the newspaper that you, an anthropomorphic animal because why not, are publishing. The trick is that you can't start placing these tiles until you've finished selecting all the ones you're going to use and have placed them on your desk, which is absolutely tiny, meaning that you're almost guaranteed to have grabbed too much or too little while racing to finish first and must be confronted by the consequences of your own hubris. One of my absolute favorite things in games. This one is coming to kickstarter real soon and is only gonna cost $29 (!!!) so it's an easy recommendation for me.

Maybe my favorite game I played (that's actually out) was High Rise. This city building game has a long board and some great table presence, but it also employs the same movement mechanics as games like Nova Luna, Patchwork, and Tokaido, where as long as you're behind everyone else, you can keep taking actions. When you move you can go as far as you want, but then that means that other players will have that much more time behind you. Honestly, if someone asked me for a game  like Monopoly that was actually good, I would probably recommend this one. I would love to play this one again, though preferably with more than 2 players next time.

Moon Base is a weird one. It's an abstract strategy game that involves balancing these different colored rings on top of each other. It's area control, so you want more of your rings on top than any other, but you choose the rings you place in stacks, so sometimes you have to settle for stopping your opponent from succeeding instead. I had played it once before and remembered it fondly, so I wanted to try it again to see if I still liked it, and yeah. I definitely do. I wish it were actually available in US markets, but maybe I'll just have to search BGG for someone selling a copy...

The last game from SHUX I wanted to mention is Imperium Classics. I met up with Tom Brewster and we happened to have this in front of us so we tried to play it. It seems like a cool civilization-y card game with some great asymmetry and beautiful artwork. Thing is, we had such a hard time with the rulebook that after an hour we had played through one round and had probably made every mistake you could possibly make. Of course, in doing so we eventually learned how it actually plays, but unfortunately Tom had to get to a panel and so we couldn't finish the game. Now that I know how it works, I definitely want to try it again, but man was that manual atrocious.

On the Rahdo front, I've got an upcoming video of this game: Galileo Project. This is a sequel to Ganymede, which is one of my favorite light engine builders. This one has the same art style, but it's got quite a bit more heft to it. I still like it a lot, but it's going to take another play or two to really cement how I feel about it.

Now, as for what I've got coming up. I've been hard at work finishing the Pax Pamir 2e tutorial, which is up a little late, but I'm quite pleased with it. I've also been jamming on the War of the Ring expansions, which will hopefully be finished by Friday, and the Root expansions, which should go up mid/late November. And then I was hoping to do Star Trek Ascendancy before New Years, but I have to push up a commissioned tutorial for Europa Universalis to that slot, so STA will probably go up in January. To make up for this delay, here is a picture of my new kitten Potato. 

He is a very fussy boy and was able to remove that collar within two days of us putting it on him, but he is also adorable, as I'm sure you will agree. Anyway, thank you all for supporting the channel! Have a happy Halloween!