بلاگ

Welcome to the Pathfinder Society! — The Treehouse

The Lore, The Merrier

Something that really excites me about Pathfinder is the sheer tonnage of setting information available. The home setting for Pathfinder is the world of Golarion, a setting that has been slowly built up over the last decade and a half of game design to encompass dozens of countries and hundreds of diverse settlements.

In this campaign specifically, players are agents of the Pathfinder Society, a group of individuals empowered to explore the distant lands of the world, report on what they find, and cooperate to ensure the tenets of good are upheld. With the resources of the Pathfinder Society behind you you can be whisked to any number of far-away locations, so every session offers something totally new.

High Society

What makes Pathfinder Society so exciting is not just the chance to explore a fantasy world, but the structure of the games themselves. Unlike a normally roleplaying campaign, where you’re expected to show up regularly to experience every beat of the story, Pathfinder Society is a totally commitment-free experience.

Every session is a standalone adventure, but put together they begin to point towards a larger metaplot. If you want to just attend once to try it out, you can do that! But if you start to attend multiple sessions, whether consecutively or with gaps in between, you’ll be able to level up your character and acquire exclusive treasures! You might play with new players every single time or find new friends to battle by your side through multiple sessions.

I feel like this flexibility makes it a great fit for Treehouse Worlds. We’ve always thought of ourselves as a way to build up community through RPGs, and through regular Pathfinder sessions we’re hoping to do just that.

Let The Adventure Begin!

If you’re as excited by the idea of Pathfinder Society as I am, then we can’t wait to see you for our first sessions in October! If you already know your stuff, you can feel free to build a character beforehand – I recommend skimming through the Guide to Organised Play to see what is and isn’t accessible to your character.

If you’d like a little bit more of a helping hand, we’ll be running a free character creation session on Thursday 6th October. You can attend this session whether you’re planning to play in Pathfinder Society or not – just as with the rest of the Society, there’s no prior commitment required. I’ll be taking you through the basics of the system in a chilled environment alongside your fellow players, and we’ll have rulebooks on hand to help you create characters. Find out more information here!

Tickets for our sessions go on sale two weeks before the event date, so keep an eye out on our events calendar to get your seat at the table. And, as ever, you can get in contact with me and the other Treehouse Worlds GMS (as well as your fellow Pathfinders) on the Treehouse Worlds Discord server, where we’ve created a special channel for Pathfinder discussion.

Pathfinder Society is a brilliant bold new chapter in the Treehouse Worlds story, and we’re hoping you’re just as excited to see it come to fruition!

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27/04/2025
This Week On Shut Up & Sit Down…

November 28, 2022SU&SD News

Tom: Hello! How is everyone doing? In a reversal of fortunes since the last ‘This Week On Shut Up & Sit Down…’ post, I’ve garnered a copy of Frosthaven! This time I greeted the postman fully clothed! Hah! That’ll… show them?

We’ve got two absolutely fabulous weeks of content for you on the site this week to lead into the holidays with two incredibly HOT releases! Both sturdy Shut Up & Sit Down Recommends… what could they be? One is big, and the other is big! Both are games, and they feature boards! Both have cards, and one has dice! Knowing you lot, you will almost certainly guess ’em from those clues alone. Darn.

Podcast-wise, we’ve got Matt and Ava on this episode chatting about Libertalia and Oltree – two games that… well I can’t remember exactly what the thematic cohesion is there, but I’m sure they’ll have worked something out!

That’s all for this week – I’m busy sprinting the last bits of content out before nipping over to PAX Unplugged in… two days?! Oh my. What have you been up to, everybody?

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26/04/2025
Ticket to Ride UK card deck and Base game

The Ticket to Ride UK map collection comes with a new deck of train cards. The rules call out that the deck includes an additional six locomotive cards, but are there any other differences from the base set of Train cards?

Our base cards are a bit tired looking and could do with being replaced.

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26/04/2025
Watch the Skies in retrospect — The Treehouse

A Bollywood remake of Star Wars?

As outside observers, we don’t feel equipped to do this one justice, so here’s the inside scoop from two of the players:

“My personal favourite moment was announcing the release of our eight-hour epic Bollywood Star Wars rip-off over the tannoy as a way to cover up the fact that we (India) were going DEFCON 1 as part of our unsuccessful plan to nuke the moon!”

“My absolute favourite moment on my team (India) was our plan to cover up the alien invasion by using code words related to a science fiction Bollywood film. We spent $10M to realise our hit movie “Space Sabers: the Return of the New Hope”, an eight-hour epic featuring a two-hour-long dance section, which additionally starred the Olympic gold medal-winning UK Prime minister. Getting that published in the newspaper and announcing it over the mic along with our move to DEFCON 1 made my evening.”

And finally, a perspective from Russia…

We feel this gives an insight into the incredible number and range of stories told during a single game of Watch the Skies: no two players will have had the same experience or viewed proceedings in the same way.

“Once our chief Russian scientist (somehow) managed to negotiate getting direct access to the aliens, we immediately decided they were a force for good and that the Chinese team had been right in trying to protect the aliens from hostile interceptors. From then on, we basically decided that anyone still attacking them was a threat to humanity and decided we’d take any action up to and including deploying our nukes to neutralise unforgivably short-sighted anti-alien aggression.

After we defended some alien landings in Siberia and China, and heard that the USA had gone to DEFCON 1 after our foreign minister was assassinated, we were certain that we, China and Japan were about to face a full combined-arms attack led by the US. Without much money left to spend on defence, we pre-committed to trying for a first strike on America to leave their government in chaos.

It turned out (I think?!) that the aliens lied to us, no-one was immune to the space-plague, and the US never launched their nukes at us after a global espionage surge disarmed them, so the end of the game left the US functionally in chaos, a deadly alien plague spreading in Europe, and Russia probably facing a conventional army attack by most of the Western world in retaliation for incinerating San Franciso…”

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26/04/2025
magic the gathering – Does Arc Spitter’s ability resolve if the equipped creature dies?

Arc Spitter‘s ability reads

Equipped creature has “{1}: This creature deals 1 damage to target creature that’s blocking it.”

I’m not sure what “target creature that’s blocking it” means when the equipped creature changes zones. Suppose my 1/1 blocks another 1/1 equipped with Arc Splitter. My opponent activates its ability, targeting my blocker, and in response I destroy the attacker. Does the damage ability resolve?

Of course I’m aware of the basic principle that abilities on the stack are independent of their source (Does an ability resolve if the source of the ability leaves the battlefield?), but in this case the source’s zone change seems like it could affect the legality of the target.

The key question seems to be, is my blocker still “blocking it (i.e., the attacking creature)”? If so, it’s a legal target and takes damage; if not, it’s an illegal target and the ability fizzles. 509.1g clearly says it’s still a blocking creature, but I’m not sure what rule specifies whether it’s blocking anything specific.

My best guess is rule 608.2b, which reads in part:

If the source of an ability has left the zone it was in, its last known information is used during this process [of checking whether its targets are legal].

That clearly applies here, so we should use the LKI of the attacker, and maybe that includes the set of creatures blocking it. On the other hand, the blocker is still on the battlefield, so we should use its current information. It’s a blocking creature, but it isn’t blocking any other creatures.

What should actually happen here and why?

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26/04/2025
This January on Shut Up & Sit Down

January 17, 2023Tom Brewster News

Tom: Happy new year folks! The team has had a little rest, played some little games, and are generally emerging from hibernation ready to make content… and a few changes. You may have noticed the title of this post is a little different than usual, because we’re going to try swapping out our weekly ‘This Week On’ posts for ‘This Month On’ posts in the first half of 2023.

So, why the change? Mostly this comes from me sitting down to write the weekly posts and realising that the format was increasingly becoming either ‘we are posting a video and a podcast’ or ‘we are not posting a video but there will be a podcast’ for most weeks in 2022. This wasn’t terrible, of course – but it was a weird little job that didn’t feel all that useful! Now we want these posts to be more substantial, and to give folks who are interested more of a peek behind the curtain as to what we’re getting up to, as well as affording us a little more flexibility in how we approach things. Video reviews can get changed, pushed back, shuffled around and entirely canned for all manner of reasons, and we want to reflect that reality in our scheduling updates.

However! We still want to be updating the community and sharing the ins and outs of being living human beings working on things – so, to that end, we’re going to loosely start the Twitch Channel up again for some much needed chill and chat time. We’ll probably keep these very casual to begin with, and be guided by you lot on what you want to see next! The first of these will likely be next week where I’ll be playing a splash of the new Firaxis game: Marvel’s Midnight Suns, and I’ll be open for questions and rambling about SU&SD in 2023! We’ll post a date for that over on the SU&SD Twitter account once I’ve got things in order.

So! With that change out the way, what’s going on in January?

First up, you can expect a really lovely raft of podcasts. We just released our 2023 predictions episode last week, and we’ll follow that up this week with a chat about the first few games we played this year – The Wolves, The Search for Lost Species, and Ginkgopolis! After that, we’ve got a few more episodes lined up in the hopper – a CCG Special talking about Flesh & Blood and Solforge: Fusion, as well as a lengthy chat about Stationfall and some of the games we’d played after PAXU. Good times!

Over in videoville, a couple things are in the cooker. We’ll soon have a video on classic family game Rummikub, in which I have a complete critical breakdown. Why am I making it? I don’t really know. On top of that, myself and Quinns are sketching out the borders of a ‘Top 10 Small Games’ feature, but that might end up being a February project – such is the way when we’re trying to feature a whole bunch of games at once. There’s a few other scripts that are in the ‘maybe’ pile for turning into full-fat videofilms – but I think our January and February will likely be a little quieter on the video side of things whilst Matt continues to assemble the video studio for new features, and I navigate the absolute state that is Brighton’s rental market.

Thanks all! See you next week for a stream, and next month for another this month on Shut Up & Sit Down!

[oh, and I know this is a little late for ‘This January in Shut Up & Sit Down! We’ll hopefully have these updates much earlier – so we sandwich the month with a ‘This Month On…’ and a Newsletter!]

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26/04/2025

Roblox Beaks All Birds – The Escapist

A picture of a Birds player aiming at birds from a first person view and the title at the top and bottom of the page

Screenshot by The Escapist

Don’t worry, you only need to capture them.

Published: Apr 25, 2025 11:41 am

Beaks is a new relaxing Roblox game where you’re in a lush, tranquil forest where you can frolick around, listen to the wonderful melodies of birds chirping… before you gun them down for profit. Other than making a profit from the poor birds you sell, Beaks has several bestiaries that are fun to fill out and we’re here to help you. Here are All Birds in Roblox Beaks.

Beaks All Birds Beakwoods

All the birds in this zone are pretty easy to get, so just don’t forget to aim at those that fly high in the air.

Beaks All Birds Quill Lake

Quill Lake currently has two birds that can’t yet be obtained. You can capture most of these on the main lake. The only exception is the Ashwing, which flies really high in the sky.

Beaks All Birds Mt. Beaks

Unlike all other birds in the game, all birds at Mt. Beaks fly super high. We definitely recommend you get the level 15 Hunting Rifle from Quill Lake before you start hunting here.

Name	Prefered Time	Preferred Weather	Average Value ($)
Brown Creeper	Day	Sunny	44
Harris Hawk	Day	Sunny	60
Mountain Bluebird	Day	Rain	63
Chikadee	Day	Fog	29
Sparrowhawk	Day	Fog	98
Buzzard	Day	Rain	99
Snowfinch	Day	Fog	80
Falcon	Day	Rain	176
Harpy Eagle	Day	Rain	171
Goshawk	Day	Fog	338
Red Tailed Hawk	Day	Fog	462

Beaks All Birds Deadlands

Half of the birds still haven’t been added to Deadlands yet. Those that have are mostly just creepy versions of existing birds.

Name	Prefered Time	Preferred Weather	Average Value ($)
???	Night	Sunny, Rain	40
???	Day	Fog	41
Crow	Night	Sunny	40
Skeleton Crow	Day	Rain, Fog	56
Skeleton Pidgeon	Day	Fog, Rain	125
Skeletal Eagle	Day	Fog	189
???	Night	Fog	500
???	Night	Rain	409
Ghost Hawk	Day	Rain	494

That’s all there is to it. Once the new birds get added to the bestiaries, and after new zones get added, we’ll update the list. In the meantime, check out our Beaks codes for some cool in-game freebies.

The Escapist is supported by our audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Learn more about our Affiliate Policy

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26/04/2025

God Save Birmingham just became my most anticipated new zombie game

If you know the British Isles as well as I do, you’ll know that the fine city of Birmingham doesn’t exactly scream ‘potential videogame location.’ But what about if you take things back to the 14th century? And fill it with zombies. Now it’s got a chance. That’s exactly what God Save Birmingham is looking to do, and after watching around eight minutes of new gameplay footage, it’s just shot to the top of my ‘most anticipated zombie games’ list.

Now, I’ll admit that I usually prefer my zombie games to be co-op affairs that are full of massive, dynamic hordes and ludicrous weapons. Call of Duty Zombies. Dead Island 2. You know the vibe. For that reason, the likes of Killing Floor 3 and the concerningly silent John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando have been way up on my list of upcoming PC games that I’m looking forward to. However, I think God Save Birmingham just surpassed them.

This isn’t some co-op horde blaster where you can smack shamblers with an electrified baseball bat or suck zombies up into a portable jet turbine. I’ve seen snippets of gameplay before, but looking at the new extended trailer posted by IGN, it actually comes across as very The Last of Us-y with its third-person sneaking and meaty takedown animations. I doubt the narrative juice will be quite as potent in God Saves Birmingham, but when it comes to taking down zombs, it’s definitely got that TLOU flavor.

There’s also a big focus on using and reacting to the environment around you. Furniture can be moved to block doorways. Ladders can be repurposed as bridges for crossing gaps. Standing on chairs can help you jump up to ledges that would typically be too high. Everything (including you and the zombies) has realistic and reactive physics, and looks like a really fun sandbox.

The new trailer also shows just how deep its survival game mechanics go. Meters for hunger, thirst, fatigue, and panic can be seen. Trying to replenish these with items in your inventory will require real-time actions and menu scanning – there’s no pausing the action and instantly eating a loaf of bread here. Falling from a height inflicts a leg injury, which then hampers your movement speed. Objects can be disassembled for raw materials. There’s a proper cooking system too.

I think it all looks marvelous, and the medieval setting feels like a novel one for a zombie survival experience. God Save Birmingham is currently without a release date, but an early access launch is on the cards for it.

Be sure to check out our list of the best medieval games if, like me, you’re loving ye olde vibes of God Save Birmingham. Our upcoming PC games list is also on hand to show you what else is on the way in the near and distant future.

You can follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides. We’ve also got a vibrant community Discord server, where you can chat about this story with members of the team and fellow readers.

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26/04/2025
Finding Your Board Game’s Market
I haven’t queried manufacturers to find out the cost of the game at ~64 dice and 4 players, but I don’t expect it to be cheap. I know that keeping a laser focus on unit economics will be very important if we want to publish a profitable game.

Ways to Keep Costs Down

A rule of thumb is that board games retail for about 5x their landed cost. This is because games sell into distribution at about 18-20% msrp, which works out to a 50% unit margin. For reference Nut Hunt which we are now selling for $39 (we recently reduced the price from $49) had a landed cost of $9.68. The breakdown was:
- Manufacture & Component Testing – $29,415 / 4,000 = $7.35 per game
- Freight – $6,154 / 3,732 = $1.65 per game
- Customs Inspection Fees – $2,529 / 3,732 = $0.68 per game
This was for a 4,000 unit print run with most of the units shipped Stateside. The $2,529 customs inspection fee was due to our container being pulled for inspection (which is a rare occurrence).

As you can see, we are breaking the 5x rule for Nut Hunt.

Our original MSRP was $49, but the $39 price point resonates more with consumers and is in line with peers (also a family weight gateway game although a bit higher complexity & component skew than its closest comps).
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26/04/2025
Conservas Review – One Board Family
I’m a sucker for a good fishing themed board game. For some reason, fishing of the cardboard variety is far better than the real-life kind. Conservas is a solo bag building game from Scott Almes, a designer that I really enjoy. Even though I’m not a fan of solo gaming, Conservas has its hooks in me and keeps reeling me in.

The Daily Catch

In this game, you’ll run a fishing and canning operation off the coast of Spain. Each season starts with a single boat, some cash in hand, and a bag of tokens that is dictated for that season. Conservas takes you through 12 months of fishing using a spiral bound book. Each month will have a unique win condition, some have special rules, and two difficulty goals to reach.

In each round of the season, you’ll draw five tokens blindly from the bag for each boat you own and the Open Water card on the table. You’ll have to assign the five tokens before drawing five more, eventually filling each available card.

Each boat in the game has a catch requirement that has to be met. You can meet this requirement with fish tokens or the worthless water tokens that are clogging up the bag. All the other tokens are placed at the bottom of the card, showing that they are still in the “open water” and not on the boat.

To Can or Not to Can

As you pull the sea life on board, you have to make decisions on how to use these tokens. Each season has spots in the book that pay cash if you choose to can your fish. Money can be tight in this game and you’ll need cash to purchase new boats to expand your saltwater empire.

The canning requirements can sometimes be a single fish type, or multiples of a specific fish in order to get paid. In some seasons, you’ll earn more money as you can specific types of fish. In other seasons, you can saturate the market, earning less money if you keep canning the same type of catch.

Your fish tokens can also be spent on Upgrade cards which give your operation some nice perks. Conservas does a great job of giving players multiple avenues to solve the puzzle. Some Upgrade cards definitely feel more powerful than others. You’ll start to look for some of these after your first couple games.

Before the end of each round, you can purchase a new boat and wipe the Upgrade and Boat cards to get a fresh set of three on the table. During the night phase of the round, you’ll spend your cash to maintain your fleet of boats as you head into the next day. By the way, the punny boat names in the game are fantastic.

Conservation is Key

The fish you catch in Conservas is almost as important as the fish you leave in the sea. During the night phase of each round, any fish that were in the Open Water (this includes the fish under the boats that were not caught) will spawn new tokens. If you leave three mussels uncaught, you’ll spawn that number of mussels minus one. This is vital to making sure that you have fish in the bag as you move from round to round.

Conservas is all about making sure that you don’t overfish the sea and long term planning to meet the goals of that season. In my first two games, I bought a fleet of boats too early and sold every fish I could. I found myself grabbing water token after water token, unable to fulfill any orders and failing pretty quickly.

Since Conservas is a bag builder, a big part of the game is keeping a mental tally of what you believe is in the bag. Unless an Upgrade card gives you the chance, you cannot look into the bag to survey what’s available.

Trial and Error

While I love the artwork and I’m a fan of the designer, I was immediately repelled because it was a solo game. I’m an extravert that loves this hobby so much because of the social atmosphere that gaming brings. I gave Conservas a try and it’s been one of my favorite gaming experiences this year.

Each game of Conservas takes around twenty minutes and there are times when you know the mistakes you made in round four are going to sink your operation. The game plays quickly and I’ve gotten into the habit of playing back to back games because of it. Also, because I’m terrible at the game.

I only found success after five attempts at the first season of the game. Since then, I’ve crawled my way past three more seasons. The game is tough and sometimes I’m just barely clearing the standard difficulty. Each time I fail a season, I take a look at where I went wrong. Most of the time, it’s a mix of overfishing or not using the Upgrades that were available to me.

There’s an economy to Conservas that works really well. It’s a tight game that rarely leaves you confident that you’ll succeed until the last final round of a season. This is why coming back to the game and enjoying its twenty minute playtime is so enjoyable.

Final Thoughts

Conservas is a perfect storm of theme, art, and gameplay that has me excited every time I sit down with the game. I could never see myself playing solo games on a regular basis, but Conservas has shown me how enjoyable they can be. My time with A Gentle Rain, another amazing solo game, was all about relaxing and finding a moment of peace. Conservas is all about pressing my luck, practicing moderation, and finding a delicate balance to succeed.

If you had told me a couple months ago that a solo board game would be one of my biggest surprises of the year, I would have laughed in your face. But here I am. Sitting alone at my kitchen table, smelling like an old sea captain, playing a board game by myself, and loving every minute of it.

Conservas is published by 25th Century Games in the US and Salt & Pepper Games in Europe. You can find Conservas at your local game store, on the 25th Century webstore or online through Amazon today.

This game was provided to us by the publisher for review. Read more about our review policies at One Board Family.

Highs
- Twelve seasons with multiple difficulties
- Excellent art and components
- Great balance in conserving and catching sea life
Lows
- Some might be turned off by the repetitive gameplay
- Kind of wish there was a multiplayer version
Complexity

Time Commitment

Replayability
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25/04/2025