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This April In Shut Up & Sit Down!
Tom: April! The month of my birth. In it we shall surely make some videos, some podcasts, and some streams! Here’s what’s happening this month on Shut Up & Sit Down.
Coming soon, we’ve got a few great video reviews. I’m just about to embark on playtesting a chunky box with a robust community around it to see if a video springs forth – but I’ll be coy about exactly what game that is, just to keep things exciting. Myself and Quinns are working on a ‘Top 10 Small Games Video’ that’ll hopefully be done this month – a rapidfire assessment of a bunch of little boxes we’ve been digging into that’ll hopefully capture some of the energy of the 10 Oink Games video we made all the way back in 2019. We’ve got some other ideas simmering too – one incredibly large box in particular finally getting a full script from Matt – but I will not over-promise!
Podcasts! We’ve got some great games to cover on that front too! If the right boxes arrive on my doorstep at the right time, a ‘Retrospective Special’ on a few old favourites in shiny new jackets might appear somewhere on the podfeed – and we’ve also got a plump stack of new games to natter about too. I’ve not quite sorted out the schedule for such delights – a week of holiday was followed by a week of video… which was then followed by a week of ILL! Rubbish.
Stream-wise, things should be really fun. I’m going to play some Slay The Spire: Downfall on Tuesday – a wildly impressive fanmade mod to one of my favourite deckbuilders! We’ll also probably squeeze some more King Of The Castle in at some point, alongside any suggestions thrown out by the general Twitch public. I’m not sure what to do on my birthday – as it does fall on a stream day! Do I go out and enjoy a nice meal with my partner, or do I use the occasion to force Quinns to play Fortnite in front of you folks? We’ll see.
What have you been up to, everybody?
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This February In Shut Up & Sit Down
Tom: Hello folks! Welcome to Wednesday, the very first of February! You’re reading this direct from the café where I’ve set up a temporary office to fill out our monthly schedule, to craft this very post, and to write our next video review! It’s all very exciting. I’ve got my laptop, a big coffee, an HP Deskjet 2710e, a second monitor, and a massive boom mic for a quick podcast record while I’m here. My ‘associates’ should be arriving any minute.
Let’s talk about videos! Our next review will be for the hot new Splotter game – Horseless Carriage! You can look forward to that, hopefully, next week. Where does it sit in the Splotter Canon? You’re going to have to wait to find out, but I should hope it’ll be an interesting video. The next video after that will be the first from Quinns this year – on yet another classic family-weight game involving pleasing, clacky components! What might it be? I’m going to leave this one as a teaser, just for fun!
Audio-wise, we’ve got some treats! This week’s pod will be the fabled CCG Double-Feature, where myself and Quinns go head to head in a… well, hopefully quite a nice chat about two interesting new CCGs! After that, you can expect a smattering of ‘what have we been playing’ podcasts, as well as some full-fat-thoughts on Paperback Adventures! I’m hoping, too, that we might even have something special ready for the end of the month, but I’ll tease no more than that.
Lastly, what about streams? Yesterday we played some Against The Storm, a fascinating little Roguelike City Builder! That, and the previous stream, will be available as VODs over on the Twitch. Next week’s stream will most likely be a Destiny 2 dungeon or two with a couple friends of the show, schedules permitting, and the week after that we’ll be playing some of the digital implementation of Paperback Adventures.
That’s the month! Some great stuff coming down the pipe for you all to look forward to – hopefully not too messed around by me moving into a new flat! Wish us luck, we’re hoping to get the paperwork signed so I can continue on living life as normally as a professional board game reviewer can. Thanks everyone! What have you been up to, recently?
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This January in Shut Up & Sit Down!
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!
Read MoreThis Week On Shut Up & Sit Down…
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?
Read MoreThis Week On Shut Up & Sit Down…
Tom: Welcome to Monday! How’s it going? I just heard the doorbell of my flat ring and – thinking it was Frosthaven – rushed out of the shower I was in the process of having so I could gallop to the door wearing merely a towel. Turns out it was just a microwave.
This week on Shut Up & Sit Down you can expect both a video review and a bumper 200th episode of the Shut Up & Sit Down Podcast! The video review, contrary to a previous post, actually contains less gore than advertised, and the podcast will contain none whatsoever. A terrible loss for meatfans everywhere.
Little else to report this week! We’re cooking up two reviews of games we’re really excited about this November, and I’m eager to get right back to writing one of them! What have you been up to, everybody?
Read MoreThis Week On Shut Up & Sit Down…
Tom: Welcome to Monday! Enjoy this absolutely garish header image of Quinns ‘searching for cheeky boards’ (his words, not mine) to gradually guide you into this week like it were a scalding hot bath and the image is, I don’t know, a big hoist or something. It’s been a long week.
This Thursday, we should have that bumper four-pack review ready and waiting – a whole cluster of games that are perhaps as exciting as they are expensive. Keep ‘em peeled over on the YouTube channel for that one – I think it’s shaping up to be a ‘big giggler’ (my words, unfortunately).
On Friday, Quinns and I are tackling a perfectly-plotted arc of a podcast – charting a course from clear cards (3000 Scoundrels) through asymmetric pirates (Ahoy) to finally land at a perfect merger of those very same ideas! That game is Dead Reckoning, and we reckon it’s dead weird.
That’s this week! What have you been up to, everybody?
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