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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• French publisher Jactalea has unveiled details on the "button game" hinted at in its New Year's announcement, mentioned on BGG News in January 2012. Button Up! is a small abstract game from Bruno Cathala, and here's a rundown of the game's setting and how it plays:
Quote: 1814: Napoleon Buttonaparte and General Ludwig Von York Buttonburg wage a war without mercy, and a new battle is about to begin. The armies are deployed, awaiting orders to move, and in both headquarters the same speech is being presented: "For you, Buttons, the goal is clear: End up on top!" Soon the battle will commence, with each general trying to use the available spies as well as he possibly can to dominate the final battlefield.
As you might guess from the punny names, Button Up! is a non-serious look at combat during war – so non-serious, mind you, that the pieces are buttons, none of which are eliminated due to sucking chest wounds during play. In fact, Button Up! is an abstract game in which players try to manipulate the button troops to score more points than the opponent.
To set up each round of the game, randomly arrange nine buttons in a circle: three red for Buttonaparte, three black for Von York Buttonburg, and three neutral white spies. On a turn, the active player takes one stack that contains a spy, then distributes that stack clockwise one button at a time, with the buttons coming off the bottom of the stack as they're placed. Thus, the first move is a single white button being placed on its neighbor to the left; if that stack is moved on the second turn, the bottom button is placed on its left neighbor, then the white button on top placed to the left of that. If the last button placed matches color with the button it covers, the player who moved it takes another turn. (This doesn't apply if the stack being moved contains more buttons than remaining stacks; in this case, the final buttons are placed on the last stack without rearranging their order.)
When only one stack remains, the round ends. Each button has strength equal to its height in the stack; players sum their strength, and the player with the most strength earns points equal to the difference between the two sums. If one player now has 15 or more points, he wins; if not, shuffle the buttons and start another round with the player who has the fewest points going first.
• In other news from French publishers, Blackrock Editions and Cocktail Games are jointly issuing a new version of Richard Borg's Ces Années-là (aka, Times to Remember). Yes, Richard Borg does (or at least did) trivia games, too. Did you know that? No word on a new English edition of the game.
• Spanish publisher nestorgames has released Sleepers from designer Stephen Tavener and no, this game is not a ludic adaption of the Woody Allen film – although I would pay to play that. Instead, this game is about sleeper agents in occupied France during World War II with multiple ways to both win or lose.
• In a Feb. 4, 2012 post, I mentioned the Surprised Stare Games title Mountain Railway as one of the designs that will be on hand in playtest form at the 2012 UK Games Expo. Well, designer Tony Boydell has now unveiled the final title of the game – Snowdonia – its expected release date of October 2012 (specifically Spiel 2012), and many details of the look of and goings-on in the game in a long series of posts on the Snowdonia game page. Incredibly charming artwork on the action cards and game board!
As for the other Surprised Stare title I had mentioned – Guilds of London – Boydell says, "I'll have a playtest copy to show anyone who's interested at UK Games Expo, but it's still not scheduled for release yet."
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Quote:1814: Napoleon Buttonaparte and General Ludwig Von York Buttonburg wage a war without mercy, and a new battle is about to begin. The armies are deployed, awaiting orders to move, and in both headquarters the same speech is being presented: "For you, Buttons, the goal is clear: End up on top!" Soon the battle will commence, with each general trying to use the available spies as well as he possibly can to dominate the final battlefield.
