Reviews 15 - Shut Up & Sit Down

Review: Eight-Minute Empire

Paul: Brendan! That’s a fine flag there. What is that the flag of? An organisation? A cause? An idea? Please don’t tell me it’s the flag of those most arbitrary of constructions, the nation.

Brendan: This is the flag of the Brendovian Empire. You will respect it. You will honour it. You will put it on mugs and t-shirts and probably socks at some point. We have destroyed our enemies. Laid waste to continents. Far is the reach of Brendovia. No persons in the world match the might of our brave men and women. No foreign fiend can meet the ferocity of our will. Our national dish is lemon tart.

Paul: Is that… Is that the Brendovian flag on the news? Is that Panama? Has your empire invaded Panama!? I don’t understand. When did all this happen? When did you found an empire!?

Brendan: About eight minutes ago.

Paul: Oh no. I know exactly what you’ve been playing.

Brendan: Oh man, since Paul and Quinns left at the end of the sci-fi special I have nobody to play board games with. Hey, Supercomputer, do you want to play Anomia with me? It’s a quick-fire party game about blurting out words under pressure and beating your friends to the punch. You’ll like it!

Supercomputer: Anomia. Latin origin. Meaning “without name”. Would you like me to run a simulation of the universe without names, nouns, pronouns, designa—

Brendan: No! I mean, no Supercomputer, but thank you. I just want to play this simple card game with someone. I’m sad that my friends left. You remember what we talked about? Sad? It’s an emotion.

Supercomputer: Runtime error. Do you mean when those called Paul Dean and Quintin Smith inexplicably abandoned you to become an accountant and a low cost assassin respectively? Reducing the number of your human friendship circle from 2 to 0?

Brendan: It’s not zero! Matt is still my friend.

Supercomputer: Initial and ongoing analysis of his facial expressions indicates that the one called Matt Lees regards you as subhuman and without merit. Would you like me to run a simulation of some friends?

Brendan: …

Quinns: Remember our Tokaido review? It should stick in your mind. This was a piquant Antoine Bauza game that dreamt of players hiking along Japan’s East Sea Road, from Kyoto to old Edo, simply trying to have the nicest time.

You collected local handicrafts and soaked in hot springs. You’d arrive at an inn for the night and buy soup with the last two coins in your pocket. Best of all, you could arrive at Tokyo, destitute, with nothing but a handful of cloying sweets to your name, and still end up winning because you’d earned the most wonderful memories. This was a game that lingered in your life and living room, like a scented candle.

Which brings us to Tokaido: Crossroads! An expansion for Tokaido that updates it “for the gamer”. How on earth does that work?

No, wait. I know. It’ll add the yakuza, swords, magic spells and dice-rolling. Ha! Wouldn’t that be funny! Because that’s not going to… happen…

Wait. Why is there a sword on this card. No. NO.

Paul: A thing you should definitely know about Ugg-Tect is that, the very first time we started playing it, Brendan almost immediately began whacking himself over the head with a large club, really pounding at his own skull with a very singular sort of determination. He was going at it full speed, full strength, and looking at me with a particular sort of sadness in his eyes.

It’s important that I add that Brendan wasn’t wearing any sort of protection when he did this. Yes, the club was only inflatable, I will concede this, but I’m not sure this mattered much given the intensity of his self-inflicted blows. He was grunting one thing over and over again, one thing in the language of Ugg-Tect, and that was “Ignore me.”

Put yourself in my position for a moment. There is a man standing in front of you who is hammering away at his own head with an enormous inflatable weapon, grunting with great insistence that you ignore him. What do you do?

[Following our Warhammer: Diskwars review, it was pointed out by basically all of you that we’d got one rule massively wrong. Taking this into account, Quinns wrote this quick epilogue.]

Quinns: There was a line I wrote for our Diskwars video that I ended up cutting. I really, really hate the manual. It splits the rules of crucial concepts between the first half of the manual (the beginner game), the second half the manual (the advanced game), a dedicated boxout, and two pages titled “Reference” that are basically the manual’s colostomy bag. Everything it forget to tell you elsewhere collects here.

In the end I decided that there were more important things for me to tell you about than the manual, and left it out. So really, in doing a video where I misunderstood a vital rule of Diskwars, I was wrong twice over. An imbecile squared. Because not only did I misunderstand the rules, but I underestimated how important manuals can be.

Brendan: Quinns? QUINNNNS. Where is he? He’s always late. Once again I have five crates of the finest Indian silks sitting in front of me, ready to buy — ready for transport! — and once again I can’t do anything with them because Quinns is late. He’s the one with all the camels! He should know by now to be ready! Where could he be?

Quinns [panting]: Sorry. Sorry! Whoo. Sorry.

Brendan: Just tell me you have the camels.

Quinns: Oh no, I traded those camels in ages ago. But don’t worry because – look! We have all these leather rags now.

Brendan: Hang on. Since when do you and I work as merchants in India, perched atop teetering camels, our saddlebags overflowing with rubies and saffron? I mostly remember us uploading penis jokes to the internet.

Quinns: This is a written review of Jaipur, Brendan! Anything is possible!

Matt Lees: Paul, do you like temples?

Paul Dean: I don’t really know much about temples and I don’t come across them much in Lewisham. The last templeish thing I saw was the Grand Lodge of the Freemasons in San Francisco. It had some pretty unusual sculptures outside and I was too scared to go in, so I took some photos really quickly and then scurried off.

Matt: How many points do you think it was worth?

Paul: Pardon?

Matt: How many points? How many levels was it? Are they winning?

Paul: Oh I get it, this is a Babel review.

Depending on the weather, what we’ve had for breakfast and whether Quinns has won a game of it recently, Cosmic Encounter will sometimes be SU&SD’s official favourite game. We’ve reviewed it before, chatted about it endlessly and played it even more than that. So of course now it’s back in stock Quinns had to spread the love to the mighty Eurogamer, who published his review this morning.

It starts well:

“I want you to imagine poker. It’s not untrue to call poker a perfect game. It’s also not untrue to call it occasionally boring and exhausting, and to disapprove of its chapped mathematical underbelly.

“Now, imagine if poker was made for gamers. Imagine if it was wildly inventive, with a mean streak and a wicked sense of humour. Best of all, imagine if it was a different, surprising game every single time you sat down to play. Or don’t imagine, and pay £40 for this set of linen-finished cards, plastic UFOs that stack like poker chips and gorgeously illustrated aliens. Odds are, you’ll be very glad you did.”

…But then quickly descends into him getting overexcited and just listing aliens. Do you have your copy yet, readers?

Brendan: Hey, Paul. Would you like to buy some of this?

Paul: What is it?

Brendan: It’s Snake Oil. It is made from snakes and it is an incredibly potent remedy for all sorts of ailments, from headaches to baldness.

Paul: I’ll take ten!

Brendan: But wait because all is not as it seems. You see –

Paul: Twenty!

Brendan: No Paul, because Snake Oil is not actually –

Paul: Just take my wallet, my PIN is 1234! Now give me that!

Brendan: No, Paul, stop! Just listen to me for one second! Come back. I need that box. It’s a board game I’m supposed to review. Paul! Paul? Nope, he’s gone.

Quinns: What I love most about Jungle Speed Safari is your friends’ fear when you set it up. If there’s a rule the manual’s missing, it’s that you’ve got to play this up. “OK,” you announce, dealing out the game’s cards. “If you’re wearing rings, take them off. It’s impossible to get blood out of cards.”

“Funny joke,” says one of your friends. “That was a joke, right?”

“What?” you say, and then: “Can everybody see something purple in this room?”

Your friends look around, assess the room, their chairs. They start to panic. “What do you mean?” someone says. “What are the wooden things in the middle of the table? And what do these pictures on the cards mean? WHAT ARE WE PLAYING?”

“Shhh,” you say, pressing a finger to their lips. “Don’t be scared. It’ll all be over soon.”

Review: Eight-Minute Empire

Review: Anomia

Review: Tokaido: Crossroads

Review: Ugg-Tect

Addendum to the Diskwars review

Review: Jaipur

Review: Babel

Eurogamer Review: Cosmic Encounter

Review: Snake Oil

Review: Jungle Speed Safari

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