Push Your Luck Podcast Ep68: What have we played?

Its been some time since Jon and I got together to chat again and this time we talk about some games we played recently! Games covered are: 

Pandemic Legacy
Inhabit the Earth
Advanced Civilization
The Pursuit of Happiness
Grand Austria Hotel
Dark Moon

Exciting news! My 2nd article at Kotaku has been published and its all about Pandemic Legacy! You can read about it here http://kotaku.com/the-great-board-game-pandemic-is-even-bett...

Also, I have released a game! Its called Gutsy and it was designed together with Susan Perkins and Barry Joseph from the American Museum of Natural History. Its my first card game and more details will be released once the boardgamegeek site is up. You can order the game here http://shop.amnh.org/a701/amnh-gutsy-card-game.html

Push Your Luck Podcast is a BIPPITY BOPPITY BOOP member of the Dicetower network. Visit our websitewww.pushurluckpodcast.com, follow @duckizz on twitter and subscribe to our youtube channel youtube.com/duckizz for other random blabbering and video reviews - VISIT NOW!

Podcast can be found here
http://feeds.feedburner.com/PushUrLuckPodcastpulp

Woot Woot! my second article on Kotaku talking about Pandemic Legacy!

In short, its an amazing game. Never has a boardgame made me want to keep playing it so often! Contender for my Game of the Year!

Check out the link for more on the article!
http://kotaku.com/the-great-board-game-pandemic-is-even-better-with-the-r-1740546203

Push Your Luck Podcast Ep 67: Let's Talk with Emerson Matsuuchi and Arnold Rauers

In the next installment of Let's Talk, I chat with Emerson who designed Specter Ops, a tabletop game inspired by a video game, and Arnold who designed Card Crawl, a card based video game that looks to be inspired by a tabletop game. In Let's Talk, we chat with a video game designer and a tabletop game designer and discuss game design concepts and I try to get different perspectives about games from their respective industries.

Exciting news! My article at Kotaku has been published! It is about the Best 5 recent games you should be playing right now and you can find it here http://kotaku.com/five-new-board-games-you-should-play-17316...

Push Your Luck Podcast is a ADAPTING member of the Dicetower network. Visit our websitewww.pushurluckpodcast.com, follow Eric as @duckizz on twitter and subscribe to our youtube channel youtube.com/duckizz for other random blabbering and video reviews - VISIT NOW!


http://feeds.feedburner.com/PushUrLuckPodcastpulp

Push Your Luck Episode 66: Essen Top 7 and a new section!

Jon is back and we talk about our Top 7 anticipated games from the upcoming Essen convention! I also introduce a new section called Can't Stop the Sackson where my classmate Alexander Bevier and I discuss his thesis where he is writing a paper or a book about Sid Sackson, the designer of Acquire and many other games. Every episode, I will interview Alex and discuss what he has found out, researched and hopefully reveal to you more and more about Sid Sackson and his influence on the modern boardgame industry. If you want to chat with Alex, he can be found on twitter as @AlexanderBevier

Exciting news! My article at Kotaku has been published! It is about the Best 5 recent games you should be playing right now and you can find it here http://kotaku.com/five-new-board-games-you-should-play-1731648888
If you are visiting this website because of the article, thank you for reading and checking out my twitter and this page! I am very excited and hope to continue writing for Kotaku on a more regular basis!

Push Your Luck Podcast is a TRENDING member of the Dicetower network. Visit our website www.pushurluckpodcast.com, follow Eric as @duckizz on twitter and subscribe to our youtube channel youtube.com/duckizz for other random blabbering and video reviews - VISIT NOW!

You can check out the podcast here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/PushUrLuckPodcastpulp

CODENAMES Tournament! (NYU Game Center students only)

Well its official! I will be organizing a CODENAMES tournament for NYU Game Center students on 1st October 2015, thursday, 7-10 pm (after playtest thursday).

Form teams of 4 members each and sign up here http://goo.gl/forms/6eIFvgtrrW by end of September!

The tournament is free to enter and the winning team members will stand to win 1 copy of CODENAMES each! Much thanks to Czech Games Edition for sponsoring the prizes!

The game is easy to learn and play so even if you want to sign up by yourself and form a team then, please feel free to do so!

Grief and The Grizzled

For the "Lost Generation", World War I was the Great War, the War to End All Wars. Today, what we remember are the numbers - 100 years ago, 19th century tactics against 20th century tech, hundreds of men charging to their deaths between the trenches.

The war has stopped becoming deeply personal. Lost in the statistics is the fact that it claimed the lives of individual people who were spoonfed abstract notions of brotherhood, liberty, and country. We don't think about their suffering anymore simply because too much time has passed - and because there is still quite enough suffering today.


But The Grizzled has stepped in so that we can experience some of that suffering. It is a cooperative card game that puts you in the shoes of French infantrymen trying to survive in time for the war's end. You play, win, and lose together, trying to answer the game's tagline: "Can friendship be stronger than war?"

Before you find out, you need to know how to play. Here's the quick version; for the full explanation, check out Eric's video review. The game moves through Missions, and you deal out Trial cards from the Peace deck. When the Peace deck is gone and you can see the Dove of Peace, everyone wins.

Different cards in the original French game, courtesy of boardgamegeek.

There are 6 types of trials, and you must play these Trials from your hand without talking about what your hand contains. But if there are 3 types of any Trial at a time in the center, you lose the Mission. So you can withdraw from the Mission in order to help your friends, but any cards you have left in your hand will add cards to the Peace deck, making it harder.

See the Peace card in the center? We almost won! But Eric died of his wounds, so we all lost.

Two things are immediately apparent about the game: first, it is really, really hard to beat. Trials that are Traumas, Traps, and Phobias make it difficult to complete Missions. One bad Mission will eventually cause the Peace deck to just fill up and make it impossible to win.

Second, there is just so much grief inherent to the game and its creation. The soldiers you play as have the names of actual people, the designers' ancestors, who fought in WWI. These same names are carved into a Monument card, placed opposite the Peace card, which signals that you have lost the game. And artist Tignous was killed in the attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo earlier this year just after submitting his final illustrations.

This makes playing a very emotional experience. At the very least, you don't talk about the Trials in your hand, which in some sense parallels the reluctance of trauma sufferers to speak of their experiences after the fact. Anyone who hadn't been through it simply wouldn't understand.

Can friendship be stronger than war? I do hope so, but The Grizzled makes me skeptical. I think it is a "must buy". The game simply seems set up to make you fail, which I love since so many friends did die during the war. It is a work that delivers a very tough experience which is highly relevant to its theme, and hits on emotionally bittersweet spots along the way.

The homage to Tignous, bottom right.

Area Control with a Chinese Flavor

Legend has it that the board game Go was used to train future leaders in the hopes that it would aid them in the struggle for control of a fragmented China. Had it been around, Eternal Dynasty might have been a better simulation of the trials they would soon face. Playing it just seems so much like preserving an empire that is constantly under attack.