SU&SD - Shut Up & Sit Down

Review: Discworld – Ankh Morpork

Quinns: TWO games based on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books have come out recently. Don’t worry, though. We’re here to guide you through this difficult time. There’s Guards! Guards! which we’ve heard is about as much fun as actually being arrested, but there’s also Discworld: Ankh-Morpork, which we heard is quite good! So we got it and played it. Isn’t that right, Paul?

Paul: That’s right Quinns, and-

Quinns: That’s right!

Paul: …so the best thing we can say about Discworld: Ankh-Morpork is that it’s equal parts family friendly and utter chaos, so it’s perfect for a Discworld game. Two to four players are trying to gain control of the 12 districts of the city of Ankh-Morpork, clutching at power with their clumsily, pudgy hands as if they’re all trying to model clay on the same pottery wheel.

Quinns: Fingers slipping over oily fingers, all of you swearing, someone’s got clay in their eye, until finally the thing comes to a stop and all you’ve made is a mess.

Quinns: London’s enduring an apocalyptic heatwave right now. I’m typing this with ice cubes taped to my neck, and Paul is lying face-down on the floor. We’re trying to stay hydrated, but liquid just comes flying out of us with the velocity of a water pistol.

Paul: I feel like a massive armpit. BUT it has been the perfect time to enjoy games in the sunshine. And then get bitten by everything, ever.

Quinns: Trust us when we say we’re in no state to review anything right now. Instead, enjoy a summery summary of what we’ve been playing this month. No less than THREE hot new board games, each hotter than the last.

Paul: What is Hive? That sounds like some horrid illness, some terrible disease. “I’ve got Hive Pocket!”
you shout down the telephone to your GP, sweaty hand gripping the receiver.

Quinns: Paul, telephones are all mobile nowadays, and your GP will just tell you that Hive is a two player board game without a board.

Paul: And then I would faint.

The We Are Back! Podcast, Because We Are Back

(Look, I tried to find pictures of us holding microphones, okay? OKAY?!)

Paul: Yep, that’s right, your eyes do not deceive you and nor do your ears. Shut Up & Sit Down is back and tightly, trimly encoded into a 64kbps podcast, streamlined for your pleasure and available for download right here. Just like your lunch break, it’s almost but not quite an hour long, far too fattening and ultimately nothing more than the briefest respite from the black and tentacled horrors of reality.

In this second podcast, between sips of tea, we talk about games we’ve played this summer, games we’re going to try and review in the coming months and even two particularly wicked games that we hold nothing but hatred for. That’s right, hatred! Can you guess which games those are?

Well, here’s the roll call. Step forward Dominant Species, El Grande, Dungeon Petz,Hive, Mag Blast, Munchkin, Labyrinth, Glen More, Citadels, Pictomania, 7 Wonders, Baron Munchausen, Virgin Queen, Warriors & Traders, The Resistance: Avalon (for which we don’t have a link yet!) and, for the briefest of mentions Flash Point: Fire Rescue, where we don’t talk enough about the excitement of driving the ambulance or taking control of the water cannon.

Also, anyone interested in finding out more about Henry, Lord Darnley should read this.

From here on, it’s full steam ahead, and we’ll be vigorously pumping out all sorts of exciting content in the weeks and months to come. Are you ready? Don’t kid yourself, you’re not remotely ready.

Paul: Cyclades! We turned SU&SD’s unblinking, cyclopic eye to look at it back in Episode 3 of this season. It’s a deadly, brilliant wargame where everybody plays different coloured Greeks trying to build two cities. Just two.

Quinns: We’ll recommend it to anyone. Spartan rules envelope a design where everything anyone does is tragic, comic or heroic. The self-contained islands you duel across means any attack will wrest control of a territory from someone else (exciting!), or see the aggressor getting kicked back into the water (EXCITING!). But doing anything means bidding for the affection one of the game’s four Gods, an auction that’s every bit as vicious as the main board.

Paul: Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Oh, Jesus! That looks like the lovechild of a maths textbook and hotel room art. I’m not having that in my house.”

Hold on. The Castles of Burgundy, which casts 2-4 players as the holders of estates in medieval France, has the whole board game community bleating with quiet joy. We absolutely had to get hold of a copy and try it out. You know what? I actually think it’s quite special, too, although I appreciate it’s such a placid, thoughtful, deeply European game that it won’t be Quinns’s kind of thing. Still-

Quinns: No, no, I really like it.

Paul: You do?

Quinns: Yeah, it’s excellent.

Paul: But-

Quinns: And here’s why!

Paul: What is this?! Why, it’s the Shut Up & Sit Down Podcast! And it’s also available right here. At last, you can enjoy SU&SD while shelling crabs, or during an exceptionally banal bout of lovemaking.

As our chat bubbles (and meanders) like a mountain stream, we touch on games we haven’t reviewed yet (and why), some of our viewer responses, beautiful hexagons and a dream about plants. But we also cover games! Lots of them. Topics of discussion include
Rex,
Mage Knight,
Runebound,
Alien Frontiers,
Race for the Galaxy,
A Game of Thrones,
Dixit,
The Castles of Burgundy,
Galaxy Trucker,
Kingdom Builder,
Arkham Horror,
Carcassonne,
Skull and Roses,
which I misunderstood the rules for, Sneaks & Snitches,
Shadow Hunters and some of our recent experiences with birds.

We’re between episodes right now, and also up to our necks in all sorts of business, be it our jobs or Mr. Smith’s trouble with his internet connection, but we also wanted to try something a little different. Do tell us what you think of the podcast idea and, who knows, perhaps this could be the start of something exciting.

Quinns: Listen up, ladies. Fiasco: A Game of Powerful Ambition & Poor Impulse Control (which you can buy from that same link) is very much outside the realm of what we usually cover. It’s a two hour table game, but it has no cards, cardboard, winners or losers. It has almost no rules. But despite that, it’s perhaps the best game you’ve never even conceived of.

All you’re paying for here is a very thin, very affordable book. And with this book, you and some of your friends are going to roleplay your evening away. And you’ll laugh like garbage disposal units doing it.

Quinns: CAPITALISM! It’s what’s for dinner.

Paul: It’s what’s for dessert, surely, especially if it’s about excess. The Mines of Zavandor is just the kind of cash-clutching economy management we can put all of our pasty weight behind. That’s because it treats running a business
with the same giddy lack of dignity as J.K. Rowling gave to the arcane.

The Dwarf king is dead. Two to four players control Dwarf clans attending his interminable funeral procession, winding through an entire mountain. Yet what you’re doing isn’t mourning, but receiving gems from back home and using them to buy, buy, BUY at the many auctions of useful or decorative tat you’re passing by. That’s because at the end of the procession (game) the richest clan is the new king (winner)!

Quinns: Myself and Paul don’t talk much about how Shut Up & Sit Down’s episodes are made, for much the same reason that we don’t talk about times when we’ve fallen over while trying to climb stairs two at a time. We have, in the past, spent whole afternoons thinking we were turning the camera on when we were really it off, resulting in hours of captivating footage of our crotches floating around rooms with the alien purpose of jellyfish.
So we find a kindred spirit in Red November, a little co-operative game about Stuff Going Wrong. Up to eight players act as the Gnome crew of a submarine so fantastically broken that you won’t see a problem with downing entire bottles of grog, because it grants the courage you need to put out fires. You won’t see a problem with swimming outside to battle a squid, because the oxygen pumps were failing anyway. And you won’t see a problem with flooding the ship, because it puts out fires.

Wait. Why did you start drinking again?

Review: Discworld – Ankh Morpork

Impressions: August

Review: Hive

The We Are Back! Podcast, Because We Are Back

Review: Cyclades – Hades

Review: The Castles of Burgundy

The Podcast

RPG Review: Fiasco

Review: The Mines of Zavandor

Review: Red November

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