In this episode, Paul and Roger talk about games we’ve played recently; then Roger talks with Albert Hernandez of the 1 Player Podcast, and Nick Marsh of Whartson Hall and Ribbon of Memes, about Sentinels of the Multiverse: the old version, the new version, and should you upgrade?
I believe I was the person who introduced @RogerBW to Rush’n’Crush and I’d like to add in the tale of serendipity that led to me purchasing it here. Many years ago as an avid player of Warhammer 40K I was introduced to Confrontation by Rackham. Remains the best minis wargame I’ve ever played but it died due to some bad business decisions by Rackham. Prior to their collapse they tried a sci-fi game called AT-43 and Rush’n’Crush is set in that world. At my first UKGE I was trying to work out the bring and buy and was stood accidentally near where games got stashed after being logged in. I was startled by unexpected noise/movement and looked down to see some new games and glaring at me was a Rackham logo. Picking up the game I saw it was £10 and so decided to purchase to play with my old Confrontation friends thinking if it’s rubbish £10 isn’t too much for a jokey purchase. Turns out we had so much fun it entered the rotation of games. Additionally of the purchases that year it and Keyflower are the 2 games still in my collection, Keyflower was throughly researched but was bumped up the list due to being codesigned by Sebastian Bleasdale which made me chuckle due to that same group’s history of playing On the Underground. So hoping to laugh with that group of people has given me some of the longest serving games in my collection at 7 years and still eager to play both of them.
I also concur with Roger about the wonderful abstraction of the gear box and stick for the players board. I also really like the incentives in the game. It’s heavily a push your luck game where you need to push harder the further back you are, but there’s a lot of timing involved in it so it feels very race like rather than just a skin to PYL.
You are indeed - yours is the only copy other than mine I’ve ever seen, and the BGG forums for it seem to be pretty much dead. I suppose someone still has the copyright locked up; it wouldn’t be too hard to make a print-and-play version…
(On eBay right now there seem to be a lot of copies in the US but none in the UK.)
Do you think it would unbalance things to let players select their own optional equipment rather than having the set pairs on the boards?
I’m not sure it would mess up the balance but I’d be more concerned about it being samey. Is the options are between 2 things that affect ramming/side swiping and the 2 ‘guns’ then presumably it would be all guns as they can be used more often and not need to worry about causing damage to yourself as your hit points are arguably the joint most important resource a player has.
There is one car that’s the best as it has the bonus armour and steering, so maybe if things were redone for a new version I’d be inclined to make everyone have 6 hull and 6 steering and put some other effects in as the most important change.
Also another note, all Rackham rulebooks are really bad. I’m assured by native French speakers that they were bad in the original French too so it’s not just a translation issue.
I once played a game of “Just One” where the 4 clue givers came up with 2 pairs of identical clue words, leaving the guesser nothing to go on… To make matters worse, when we told the guesser what the clues were, they still had no idea as to the answer, as we’d all gone for fairly obscure clues, assuming someone else would go for an obvious one…