Special Features 5 - Shut Up & Sit Down

Dumb Games, or “Why I Sometimes Yearn To Punch You”

[Brendan returns! The author of Rooky Errors: A Story of Chess and The Correct Way to Scratch is back, this time talking about Dumb Games. Enjoy, everyone.]

“Did you ever play ‘Butt Comin’ at Ye’?” said Colly. We were walking through Lurgan, my hometown, and we had begun to talk about some of the more esoteric memories of our shared childhood. Fifty metres away, the town’s police station rose like a fortress out of the street, surrounded in green sheets of amoured metal, steel grates and breezeblock walls the colour of the Irish sky. We walked on past it.

“Butt comin’ at ye?” I said.

“Dave and I used to play it. You finish smoking your cigarette and you say ‘here Dave, butt comin’ at ye’ and then you just…”

He mimed flicking a cigarette. I laughed.

Leigh & Quinns collaborated on Life Hacks last year, a very personal article about learning to play Netrunner. They return for this article about the 2015 UK Netrunner Nationals.

Quinns: I am slumped on the floor of the Birmingham Hilton. My head almost between my knees, I break into an orange by pressing my fingers into it until the skin splits. I begin eating. The flesh is both dry and watery in my mouth.

“I don’t know if I’ll make it,” I tell Leigh. Then a pause, weighing my next words with the pulp in my mouth. “And I don’t know if I want to play.”

Pip: I hadn’t really thought of what I did to my copy of travel Guess Who as modding – it was just a fun project which saved me from a gift-giving conundrum. But Quinns thought other people might fancy doing something similar so he asked me to share the instructions. First, though, some backstory:

Sometimes there are people in your life who are impossible to buy presents for. These people are terrible jerks. They often have a single big main interest or hobby. “Hooray,” you think. “I will buy them a thing from this interest or hobby and all will be well. This is genius!”

Then you realise that actually they buy everything they value from that hobby the second it comes out and if they don’t own it it’s because it’s not worth having or is beyond the reach of a mortal wallet.

“Don’t worry,” they say magnanimously. “I’m sure I will love whatever you get me.”

These are the words of a terrible jerk.

Thrower: Do you find numbers scary? Do you dread the pointy 1, the razor-sharp 7, the misery of an unsolved sum? If you do, you’ve probably realised that most board games are just fearsome equations wearing friendly grins.

Designers, however, understand this, and more. They welcome it, glory in it, roll in it like pigs in mathematical mud. Because it’s what they use to build the foundations of something fun, yet something real.

Take Volko Ruhnke, designer of contemporary wargames Labyrinth and the Counter-Insurgency (or COIN) series. “Most board games and video games that are about something are models,” he told me. “Trading games, railroad building games, shooting games, strategic war games. They all communicate the game designers’ model of certain aspects of human affairs.”

Paul: I can’t count the number of chips I have. There are too many.

The croupier has smeared them across the felt toward me and I’m hurriedly scooping up these coloured disks as if they were spilled bonbons. I’m trying to arrange them in piles of five so that I have some idea how much I have, how many I have, except I’ve forgotten to return my cards and now the croupier is reminding me that he needs them before he can deal out the next hand. So I’m now trying to collect my chips, arrange my chips, return my cards and also put in my blind bet. If I was an octopus I could pull this off. Instead, I’m more of a puppy, flailing at my winnings. I must look so clumsy and everybody can see.

The noise was the first thing that got me. Forty-seven people entered this tournament, spread across five tables of ten or nine players. Before the first hand came out there was nothing but the sound of chips clacking. So many chips clacking as dozens of players flipped and fingered and meshed them together like mantis mandibles. I was pretty sure the young man in a black hoodie to my right was good, but I couldn’t quite explain why. Opposite me sat someone who could have just slithered off a Harley Davidson. His face was the greying crags of a cliff. His rings would mangle anybody he swung at. His top was as ragged as his features. His clothes were worn. His cap was worn. His face was worn. His indifference was underlined by a mustache that never, ever moved. He looked like Danny Trejo.

Hello, Danny Trejo, I am English, what what. I weigh less than 130lbs and yesterday I was so tired during my fencing class that I couldn’t hold my sword up.

Imperial Assault: Joining the Dark Sidekick

Matt: Initially, I didn’t spot the mistake. Enthusiastically firing out a message that proposed a date for a day of Star Wars: Imperial Assault, I was met with five excited replies. I looked at the box. “2-5 players”. Bums.

Telling one soul that Christmas was cancelled while their sisters unwrapped a BMX mountain felt too cruel to be any kind of option – I had to make six players work.

Quinns: Hello everybody!

It’s been a slow week on the site due to a scheduling snafu, so I’m here to wave a white flag and apologise. But wait, what’s that written on the white flag? Why, it’s news that Shut Up & Sit Down just passed 100 published videos!

While SU&SD is very precocious for a four year old, able to tell simple stories and bend over without falling (mostly), it’s the videos that we’re most proud of. Since we receive a ton of emails about how to do what we do, I thought I’d do an FAQ.

Behold! Everything we’ve learned pratting around on camera for four years.

Paul: This week, Pip is also sharing one of her early board gaming memories. Here’s a story about a game we don’t talk about much here, but which we’re sure you’ll all know. I don’t know about you, but I certainly share some of Pip’s frustrations about this…

Pip: I think the first board game I ever thought of as a favourite was The Game Of Life.

We had a copy which I think my brother and sister and I had worn my parents down until they bought, then played properly only a handful of times (thus neatly adding fuel to their “board games are awful and we won’t have anything to do with them” fire). But I kept coming back to the box and opening it up at odd moments, sometimes working my way along the track on my own.

Following the lovely responses we’ve had to our other spoken word pieces (see Brendan’s Correct Way to Scratch, Leigh’s Month as an Assassin and Quinns’ favourite drinking games) this week in the podcast section we have Paul telling us about the quite singular way that he remembers the most influential, most important board game in his life. And how it lead him astray.

Here’s the story of how I bunked off school to play a board game and how that board game changed my life.

Saying that immediately makes me excited to tell it.

Interview: Different Play on bringing diversity to tabletop gaming

Paul: One of the reasons we started Shut Up & Sit Down, arguably the biggest reason we did so,* was to get more people into board and tabletop gaming. We wanted to share something that we enjoyed. Board and tabletop gaming was (and largely still is) ignored by a lot of people who had preconceptions, even prejudices, about how boring, weird or bizarre it was. We don’t like that sort of thing and hopefully we’ve helped change that. Hopefully our invitation to the hobby has also been inclusive and reached out to all sorts of people.

You can imagine, then, how impressed we were to hear about the work being done by Different Play, a collective of experienced mentors reaching out to actively support diversity and inclusion in analog game design, both in terms of the kinds of games being made and also the kinds of people making them. The games industry, even the tabletop games industry, has a diversity problem and this can make it (among other things) intimidating and even outright unfriendly. Different Play wants to make sure that new and different designers are heard, published and paid. We asked them more about their work and their plans.

(Due to the complications of our job/our innate impressiveness,** it was Quinns who got in touch with the brains behind Different Play and talked to them about their aims and philosophy, but it’s me who’s collating and writing up their answers here. So, while it’s my byline, Smith did the legwork on this.)

Dumb Games, or “Why I Sometimes Yearn To Punch You”

On Playmats: A Netrunner Story

Crafty: How Pip Made Guess Who Better!

Interview: Volko Ruhnke’s Modern Wargames

Spent: The Story of a Poker Tournament

Imperial Assault: Joining the Dark Sidekick

Some Tips From SU&SD, 100 Videos In!

Pip Remembers When Life was Just a Game

Paul’s Greatest Gaming Memory

Interview: Different Play on bringing diversity to tabletop gaming

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