Hello! And welcome to the new dawn of The Boarding Kennel, which after several months of hibernation has uncurled its hairy little body, wiped the sleepy-dust from its eyes and begun taking some tentative steps out of the burrow in the hunt for sustenance. Board games! It eats board games. It’s an expensive and complicated diet, but not nearly as complicated as this analogy is becoming.
The long and the short of it is I’ve gone part-time in my current journalism job, which has freed me up to dedicate myself to things like this website, as well as sitting around in my pants eating Wotsits for breakfast.
Seeing as our last review was for the jolly excellent expansion packs to futuristic spy-em-up The Resistance, it seems fitting to kick off with a game about sneaks and assassins. On holiday! The excellently named Hitman Holiday, which had its own secret identity of Deadly Vacation while in development, has bowled up on Kickstarter offering players the chance to surreptitiously knife, poison and blow each other up in a luxury tropical resort.
Singapore-based developer Medieval Lords describes the game as Werewolf or Mafia meets Battlestar Galactica meets Cluedo, which sounds like the sort of TV show pitch I’ve been waiting for all my life. In game terms, we’re talking between two and ten people moving spies around the resort, planting bombs and security cameras and generally trying to eff up whichever other player has been selected as their secret target. Each of those players is also being hunted by one of the other spies, though, so plenty of room for outrageous lying, loudly stitching up other people, and generally all the other oafish behaviour we use these games as an excuse to get away with. Puts me in mind of the excellent Spy vs Spy video game from the 80s, which let you run from room to room booby trapping doors with car batteries and guns on strings. Magic.
As well as a mechanism for dobbing people into the security guards if you think they’re the ones after you, Hitman Holiday is also the only game I’ve ever come across in which your characters have to regularly take bathroom breaks, so that should sell you if the spying and murder business isn’t up your alley. The Kickstarter’s here, with the base game currently going for about $54, or £35-ish. Looks like there’s a pretty hefty overseas shipping charge though if you live in the EU as the box weighs more than 5lbs, which is about the same as a regular-sized Chihuahua. Woof!
There’s a pretty good rundown of how the game plays in this video from Board To Death if that’s left you licking your lips. The article, not the dog. Good grief.
The Boarding Kennel 