Playing With Myself - Blood of the Zombies
(Written by Aaron)

(Written by Aaron)

Battlestar Galactica is, at its core, a cooperative game. You and your fellow players take to the table as crewmembers of the aforementioned spaceship, and the few hours you spend at the board chronicles your ongoing journey through space, and the crises that occur during it.
And boy, are there crises. A whole deck of them, in fact, and it’s these crisis cards that create the chewy centre that the crunchy, sugary, sci-fi-enhanced shell surrounds.

(This post transmitted via the astral plane by Aaron)
MAGIC.
Hello, what’s out this week? I’m not sure as I’m a spirit now but I’m getting something MAGIC over the astral internet…
If the mortal form of Esdevium Games is still bound to your plane then you may find a release sheet MAGIC.
(This post written by Aaron’s ghost)
Hello, sorry about last week. I went to London for an exciting interview and my reward was to catch a hell-spawned illness on the tube. Hooray.
But don’t worry, because I’m dead now and that leaves me more time to look at the new releases every week. Head over to Esdevium and look at this weeks’ release sheet.
Hmm.
I don’t envy the first issue of any series. In order to be considered properly successful they have to do a whole multitude of things: Introduce characters, set the story, have some form of closure as a self contained story, and (most importantly), make the reader want to come back for more.
Planetoid manages all of these, but perhaps not quite in the right order.

(This post by Aaron)
This week there are games galore. Grab a copy of the release sheet from Esdevium and have a look. I will give you my ill-formed opinions on games I haven’t played. It’ll be fun.
(Written by Abi)
I’ve asked myself this question over and over. Fumbled with board games whose names I’ve forgotten. Found myself on specialist websites ogling their wares. I’ve consulted experts, witch doctors, and cornered close friends for a session of intimate over-sharing in an effort to discover the answer. Yet it still seems to elude me.
Well, it did – I think. I had a bit of an epiphany, if you can call a self-indulgent rant such a thing. This moment happened to me when fellow ‘bot Chris and I were leaving the UK Games Expo in Birmingham. We were laden down with games and expansion packs, trekking through the heat towards the car, which unbeknownst to either of us would soon belch horrifyingly hot air at us as we attempted to enter it. We were still reeling from the Expo, high on stacks of cards and dizzy from too many multi-coloured dice, our minds ruffled with a thousand new rules applied to a hundred new worlds. The sweet nectar of new board games was simply dripping from our skin. And suddenly I knew.
Suddenly, I just knew what board games, upon being offered to me, I would tell to fuck off. Such moments of clarity, of epiphany, rarely occur and thus Chris spent the entirety of our arduous journey back to the car having his ear bent about which types of board games made me want to rend the flesh from my own face and which made me do one of my many little happy dances.

Quarriors.
Quarriors.
Quirriors.
Yeah. Quarriors is, to put it bluntly… A thing.
Stay with me.
It’s a sort of competitive deck-building strategy and economy management game, except you don’t build a deck and there’s hardly any economy and there’s an awful lot of luck involved in winning. So it isn’t that at all.
So. Quarriors is a thing, because it’s definitely something, but it isn’t any of the things that it looks like it is.
We’re good at this, aren’t we?

Hello, to make up for last week’s lack of things there are lots of things in the shops this week. THINGS.
Let’s have a look at the Esdevium release sheet. I’ll read it over your shoulder while breathing heavily in your ear.