Wyrd Science Issue 5 Cover Reveal!
plus some other great stuff, we don't mind sharing the lime light...
With October just around the corner, and with it our fifth issue, we figured it was time for to reveal just what Mat Pringle’s cooked up in his Margate studio for the cover. Look upon his works, ye mighty, and despair!
And despair is the order of the day as our Future Imperfect issue arrives with several familiar faces from our favourite grim, and indeed dark, dystopias putting in an appearance, faces that you’ll get to read a lot more about within its pages.
If, like me, you’re thinking that cover would also look pretty good up on your wall then you’re also in luck as Mat has also created a limited number of hand pulled linocut prints that will be on sale, on our website, in October.
For more information on what’s in this issue, to pre-order a copy, grab some back issues at a ridiculously low price or subscribe and never miss an issue head over to our online store now and fill your boots.
In the meantime we’ll just leave you with this pair of charmers by Lukasz Kowalczuk who have somehow escaped the pages of Shannon Appelcline’s feature on the history of dystopian games and are on the lookout for some bovver.
Right, keep reading for a couple of very interesting looking things we think you should consider chucking some cash at plus the usual mix of stuff that’s caught our eye over the past week or so…
On y va!
John
Battle Card: Series 1
It’s fair to say that David Thompson is one of the top wargame designers around at the moment, his Undaunted series -created with Trevor Benjamin- both a huge critical and commercial success, and Undaunted Stalingrad being hailed as a ‘masterpiece’ by Dan Thurot in his review of the game for us.
Undaunted Stalingrad in particular is a big game, both in terms of its actual components and its scale, as its campaign takes you through the bleak, bloody moment where the Nazi tide was finally turned back at the cost of more than a million casualties. It’s an incredible experience but one that does demand time, space and commitment.
Battle Card then, whilst also focused on the events of the Second World War, is a much different beast. Created in partnership with artist and graphic designer Nils Johansson, this is an elegant print and play, one-player game where each scenario fits on a single piece of A4 paper, makes use of just a handful of regular D6 and can be played in just a few minutes.
In Battle Card each scenario, of which you get 5 in this Kickstarter, depicts a famous campaign or event from the War and each offers unique challenges as you must go on the attack, reinforce defensive positions or manage supplies and artillery support.
Each scenario comes with a wonderfully designed map that your units (the dice) must negotiate in some way, whether that’s advancing along paths, fighting a rearguard action as you retreat from superior forces or taking and holding specific objectives.
Whilst there are subtle variations in each scenario to reflect the different objectives, the core structure of the game remains the same, and in the scenario we’ve played we’ve found that you’ll probably only need to consult them once or twice before you have it all down pat.
If you fancy giving that scenario, the failed Market Garden campaign and Battle of Arnhem, a go you can right now as it’s free to download here (check the Files section).
At first glance, and even first play (we steamrolled the Germans on our first attempt) it seems too simple, too easy, too limited in choices, all in all just too reductive.
But then you find yourself playing it again, and soon you realise that whilst those choices are few - attack, defend, advance individual units or the main battlegroup - those limited options are still enough to provide you with a sense of what was actually unfolding and how you can still make impactful choices.
On our next go one bad roll at the start set us on an inexorable path to defeat. The next time we ground our way up the road from Belgium to Arnhem, only to get bogged down in Nijmegen and watch as the German reinforcements relentlessly built up, ultimately crushing the isolated and doomed 1st Airborne Division.
On and on it went, and with each game only taking 5 or 6 minutes to play we soon racked up a dozen plays and began to marvel at how Thompson has captured in this scenario the, as it happened in reality hopeless, race against time that the Allied forces faced and our few and far between victories began to feel like genuine achievements.
Battle Cards is remarkably simple and yet in a board game industry filled with plastic bloat and copy pasted efforts Thompson and Johansson have created something rather wonderful here, a fiendishly smart and compelling game that packs a surprising amount in its incredibly small package.
Beecher’s Bibles
In our new issue (go on, why not pre-order a copy) we have an incredible feature by Dan Thurot looking at how tabletop games, and board games specifically, deal with contentious political issues and historical events, such as the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage and LGBTQ+ rights.
The games that Dan looks at, such as Amabel Holland’s This Guilty Land and Tory Brown’s Votes For Women, emphasise the bitter struggle to enact change within a political system that favour the status quo, no matter how unjust it is, and the amount of effort it takes to build fragile coalitions, create a consensus and, in these particular games, amend the US Constitution.
There is, of course, another way.
As Mao Zedong once said, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun and Beecher's Bibles was the name given to the breech-loading Sharps rifles that abolitionist Minister Henry Ward Beecher smuggled into Kansas in the 1850s to supply the state’s anti-slavery free staters.
This Beecher’s Bibles then is a new 32 page A5 black & white zine from Monkey’s Paw Games. Based on the Mothership RPG’s Panic Engine system, Beecher’s Bibles puts you in the role of said guerrilla fighters who were engaged in the bloody Border War against pro-slavery forces.
It’s been around before but this updated version features “new character creation system, rules for gruesome injuries and morale-breaking shootouts, travel, camping, scrounging, and survival in a hostile frontier”, which all sounds like fairly useful stuff to have.
The zine also includes, for the first time, an introductory adventure based on the historical arrest and jail break of abolitionist Jacob Branson, so if you’ve tired of playing fantasy bailiffs exterminating goblin camps with extreme prejudice and fancy something bit different and righteous head over to Kickstarter now to check it out.
A collection of other things, both interesting and inspiring, gaming related and not, culled from around the web...
Did everyone’s favourite electric mouse, Pikachu, almost single-handedly defeat Warhammer? Eurogamer speak to Chris Prentice, CEO of Games Workshop in the late 90s to find out…
Do we include a link to Dan Thurot’s blog every week? I mean he’s had about 3 mentions just in this newsletter alone, still it’s always deserved. Anyway this time Dan takes aim at Lovecraft with his piece, The Shoggoth and the Shotgun.
Looking at our continued fascination with the old rotter it’s an even handed piece from someone that, like us, has felt that fascination too and looks at how instead of shying away from the worst aspects of his character, creators of tabletop games, films, TV and books are increasingly making use of them to both tell better stories and make more interesting games. Well worth a read.We’re always partial to a skull on a t-shirt and this new design by Becky Cloonan for Rogue Print Co. delivers in spades. Usual limited edition business, 1 week drop, pre-order before Oct 4.
Napalm Death’s Shane Embury is doing the rounds to promote his new memoir, and it sounds like it could be fascinating read. Anyway he popped over to The Quietus to do their Baker’s Dozen feature, and I have to tip my hat to the man, his choices were not at all what I would have expected. Great stuff.
We take a look at Jo Reid’s Border Riding in the next issue of Wyrd Science but its good to see a game like this getting some coverage from the BBC instead of them recycling the usual “Dungeons & Dragons is a thing that exists!” story that appears every 6-12 months either there or in The Guardian.
This story’s a couple of weeks old but as big fans of the Voyager probes we’re delighted to hear NASA have managed to make contact again with Voyager 2 after a couple of fraught months.
Polygon’s Charlie Hall spoke to Indie Game Studios’ Travis Worthington about the decision to use AI art in the new Terraforming Mars expansion and the Simpsons’ quote “No, no. Dig up stupid!” came to mind several times…
Barnsley folk, head down to the Experience Barnsley Museum as a new exhibition opens tomorrow titled the Magic of Middle Earth, focused on, and I’m sure this is no surprise, the works of Tolkien and their influence on “writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, environmentalists, creators, and game designers”.
Thanks for the link to the Shane Embury article. I'm always interested to see what music catches the interest of people who are into games!