Here’s our box opening video for Wild Blue Yonder from GMT Games
Here’s our box opening video for South China Sea from Compass Games
Here’s our box opening video for Holland ’44 from GMT
Here’s our box opening video for Operation Mercury from MMP
Here’s a box opening video for Baptism By Fire from MMP
I’d been looking forward to SW:R since it was announced. I’m a big Star Wars fan and the game was generating some serious buzz. I’d deliberately not read too much about it as I wanted to find out for myself how it worked so when I opened my copy at the games club last night most of the game was new to me. It comes in a big box, very big, and as usually with FFG stuff there’s an amount of spare room in the box and an insert to help take up that room. There’s minis (of course!), cards, two player sheets, card counters, two rulebooks and a large, two-part map.
First con of the year for me over at Bucklow Hill, south of Manchester saw me with a game of Prague prearranged, part of the Battles of the Age of Reason (BAR) series from Clash of Arms. I hadn’t played BAR for a while but I’ve always loved the series and having not managed to get much wargaming in over the last few years I was looking forward to a meaty game.
Thursday
By the time I got there Thursday morning I had an absolutely streaming cold but luckily I still felt fairly ok. Although my nose would stop running eventually the cold continued to get worse. How brave am I?
I grabbed the other two that were there, Tom and Richard, and introduced them to a new game, Automobiles. This is a race game, but also a deck building game, without cards. You’re no doubt confused by now but to explain you buy cubes that allow you to move on the track, white grey and black cubes move you on the progressively longer white, grey and black spaces, or take an action of some type, eg remove wear from your discarded cubes, move faster if you’re lower down the track, take wear to move faster etc. The coloured cues actions are shown by cards, and there’s one chosen from a selection for each colour so the game is different each time. Any cubes you don’t use in a turn can be taken as credit towards buying more cubes, hence the deck building aspect. I think this is a very original and exciting variant on the deck building genre. Not only do you have to think about what cubes/cards you wish to put in your bag/deck, but positioning on the track becomes very important. For example in a game I played this week, one of my fellow players ended up stuck when she was only able to reach the white part of the track due to another player blocking her, but she had no white cubes. And this was two spaces before the end of the track on the last lap! Highly recommended.

The latest GMT game Bomber Command is now in stock. Covering the Night Raids over Germany from 1943-45 it contains:
- One 8.5″ x 11″ Play Aid Card (2-sided)
- One 8.5″ x 11″ Bombing Card (2-sided)
- One 8.5″ x 11″ Planning Map (2-sided)
- One sheet of 5/8″ counters & markers
- One sheet of 1/2″ counters & markers
- Four 8.5″ x 11″ City Map Sheets
- One deck of 55 British cards
- One deck of 55 German cards
- Two six-sided dice
- One Rule book
- One Play book
- Two 22″ x 34″ maps
It costs £49.99 and
is in stock now
Sun of York is a card game depicting the tactical battles
fought between the Houses of York and Lancaster during the Wars of the Roses.
2 players, low complexity.
Humanity’s final stand against the overwhelming horde.
Complete one of the many missions or try to survive the nail-biting action of the Horde Mode. Relive classic moments from the video games.
Contains
32 highly
detailed plastic figures. 1-4 players, 1-3 hours.