"Play the game based on Britain's favourite newspaper."
This is a promo game for the UK tabloid, The Sun, and Virgin Mobile. Players are competing to edit the best version of the Sun, by first moving their journalist around the board to chase stories and then editing a version of the paper from the cards in their hands in a print run.
Stories fall in four categories (News, Sport, Features and Bizarre) and Editor's Choice (a kind of event/joker) and each edition must contain enough stories from each category. Categories are subdivided into sets of stories from the same news item. A few ads for Virgin Mobile are also included.
In the print runs, players place cards (stories) in front of them, one by one, and thus have a chance to select what stories they publish depending on their opponent's choices, and also affect the game with their Editor's Choices. Scoring is based on how many stories they have from the same set, if they have an exclusive of the news item, or if they were able to ruin another player's exclusive by also publishing a story from their set. The ads also score points. The player with the most points after the 4th print run wins.
- IP tie-in and narrative focus
- Older design feel
- component quality variances
- storytelling, career progression, chaotic life sims
- The Sims video game world
- narrative-driven
- Iliad
- Two Towers
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Speed Matching — collect matching symbols while meeting goals
- story-building — craft your own stories through cards and actions
- Storytelling — craft your own stories through cards and actions
- symbol matching — collect matching symbols while meeting goals
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- The core hook is asymmetric gameplay.
- Be the first to get all your tokens onto the board.
- The game's hook is charming and immediately understandable.
- Rematch, lose again in a completely different way.
- Truly, this game hath been unlike any sequence known to me.