Shut Up & Sit Down

Games News! 25/07/16

bleating in the barn, i wonder if judi dench is a half-elf, who’s been holding up the damn elevator

Paul: Oh my word. This week’s Games News is a BUMPER CROP. It seems that, as harvest season approaches, the industry is just so damn fertile. The boughs are heavy with games. The fields are thick with gossip. The vineyards are ripe with new releases. Let’s get our scythes out and SWING AWAY.

First up, though, let’s pluck and bite right into the biggest piece of industry news in some time: Board games titan Asmodee has moved to acquire F2Z Entertainment, no small fry in their own right. With each passing year, Asmodee grow ever stronger…

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SU&SD Play… Infinity!

sexy lady apes, Robot and the Holograms, Dr. Worm, back on the shelf

We delight in throwing curveballs, so here’s a video you’d never have expected. A fat Let’s Play of fantastic miniatures game Infinity, with scenery provided by the excellent people at Battle Systems!

The truth is that ever since our spirited review of this game last year, Matt and Quinns have been collecting Infinity together with a few of their friends, and anything we’re interested in, we want to show you why. So we ended up making the above heartfelt half-hour, demonstrating just how tense and dangerous this game is. Enjoy, everybody.

NOTE: There’s about 45 seconds of insane strobing in this video, especially during the final interview segment. Rest assured that Quinns is working on a fix.

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Review: Orléans

crunchy boatmen, hot jests, herb gardens, winning beer

[Team SU&SD grows ever-stronger! Please give a warm welcome to game writer Jon Bolding, who comes bearing gifs. Enjoy, everybody.]

Bolds: Welcome! Welcome to Medieval France’s fabulous Loire valley, and its jewel, its shining, brocaded, wine-and-cheese-filled capital city of Orléans.

Orléans has a lot in common with those ever-popular “deck-building” games, in that you’re still accruing little somethings to go in your something, but each something is different, and has a different purpose – and your something, certainly, is different from everyone else’s something. In Orléans these somethings aren’t cards, but are little circular people, and you stuff them in your personal bag like a kind of hungry giant saving them for later, never quite sure what delicious treat you’ll pull forth when you go plunging in for a snack.

Ugh, peasants again? Why don’t we ever have Boatmen? Love Boatmen. The little crunchy paddles and rafts. The delicate waterlogged texture.

And speaking of crunch, Orleans is a good deal heavier than most deck-building games. Really, what we’ve got here is a fabulous fusion of a “building” game and a heavy eurogame, and it’s almost entirely delicious.

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Review: Cat On Yer Head with 200 Players!

are you winning or losing, who wants to be a hole, alcoholic mice

Here’s something a little different! During a live podcast at the UK Games Expo we finally had an opportunity to play Cat On Yer Head, a game designed entirely for crowds. So we thought, why not film it? And why not do Shut Up & Sit Down’s first ever collaborative review, with Paul and Quinns presenting, Matt and Pip doing some panicked camerawork and 200 SU&SD fans lending a hand?

Because you know what they say. You can never have too many cooks.

Enjoy, everybody! If you’d like to buy Cat On Yer Head either digitally or as a physical book, you can do so via the above link.

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Podcast #44: Mausoleums of Birmingham

swanseas, "families", yetis, dad's mausoleum, fun with rope

Hot diggity and a lack of dignity! It’s the second podcast we recorded live at the 2016 UK Games Expo. This time we offer definitive feels on Spiel des Jahres-nominated games Karuba and Imhotep, as well as chatting about Beyond Baker Street, Yeti, Coup: Rebellion G54 and a game jam winner called Lantern. We also ask an important question: Have you started building your mausoleum? If you’d rather watch this podcast as a high-tech video, you can do so right here.

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Podcast #44: The video!

yetis, swansea, fun with rope, dad's mausoleum, "families"

Hot diggity and a lack of dignity! It’s the second podcast we recorded live at the 2016 UK Games Expo. This time we offer definitive feels on Spiel des Jahres-nominted games Karuba and Imhotep, as well as chatting about Beyond Baker Street, Yeti, Coup: Rebellion G54 and a game jam winner called Lantern. We also ask an important question: Have you started building your mausoleum?

If you’d rather listen to this as a slim-fit podcast, you can do so right here. But you’ll miss Matt and Pip having some trouble with their stools…

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GAMES NEWS! 12/07/16

a carnival of crap, digestive enzymes, dragonlance, bouncy missiles

Paul: Oh God! It’s Games News! Surfacing from the incalculable depths of the most primeval ocean of our aged and weary world, Games News thrusts forth, it’s horrid, gnarled body made entirely from board game stories. It reaches toward a tiny fishing tug, crushing the terrified sailors within with a single blow from a throbbing tentacle ten fathoms long…

But let’s just take a closer look at that tentacle. It’s made entirely out of an announcement for the forthcoming 4 Gods, a new game from the designer of the excellent Archipelago! Hooray!

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SU&SD Play… Mysterium: Hidden Signs!

Katherine F. Tynderflail-Crustington, he's the worst, who invited that guy

Following on from our early review of Mysterium and our video that teaches you the rules, today we’re rounding off our coverage with something a bit special. It’s our most ambitious Let’s Play EVER, featuring both more cameras and more dressing up than ever before. We’re also playing exclusively with the new characters, locations and weapons found in the new expansion, Mysterium: Hidden Signs!

Huge thanks to T.D. for the set-dressing on this one, and to Leigh and Jessi for being thoroughly excellent 1920s psychics.

Everyone else, have a great weekend!

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Review: The Bloody Inn

the corpse annex, police conventions, stinky pootling, NOBCON

Pip: Chris! I have a brilliant idea for a new business.

Chris: Who do we have to kill.

Pip: No-one! That’s the beauty of it. It’s more about who we choose to kill. It’s a STRATEGIC business plan.

Chris: Sounds great! I choose to variously kill/hire/build houses for a string of 19th century rural Frenchmen in the hopes of defeating you (and our friends) in the great game of capitalism. It’s a fine thing that this is what I have chosen to do, because it turns out that The Bloody Inn is a game about exactly this.

Pip: That sounds like useful practice for my business venture. What do we need to do in The Bloody Inn?

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Announcing the SU&SD T-Shirt Design Contest!

shirts, who doesn't love shirts, ooh, soft lovely shirts, mm, stop someone might see us

Quinns: Good news, everyone! This summer’s going to be SU&SD’s 5th anniversary and as part of the festivities we’re FINALLY going to be offering merchandise. I know! You’d be forgiven for thinking this was literally never going to happen.

Anyway, to make our initial offering a little more special we’ll be letting you guys choose the shirts that you want the most. After all, we have almost five years of catch-phrases, stupid jokes and board games to pull from. Nobody knows what you guys want better than you!

The details are all in this forum thread, but very simply any one of you can (and should!) link a design of your very own in that thread, then at the start of August we’re going to run a poll featuring every single design, and the three that get the highest votes will (a) be made available for sale, and (b) the creators will all receive one of each shirt AND a board game of their choice, purchased from a retailer of their choice.

(Unless Matt’s designs win! If they win then we’ll send the prize to fourth place. Sorry, Matt.)

It’s as simple as that! And if you don’t have a lick of artistic talent, why not drop your idea for a shirt in the comment thread in this post, or better yet in the forum thread itself. Help artists help us to help you to your dream design.

Good luck, everyone!

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