Shut Up & Sit Down

Review: Dead Last

are you looking at me for luck punk, go ahead and make the days punk

Quinns: Phew! Paul and I are back from Gen Con and I’m $200 poorer after being charged by United Airlines for my overweight bag, stuffed as it was with board games and gifted bourbon. I know! Your heart bleeds, right?

Huge thanks to everyone who came to our extra-ridiculous live shows. They’ll be up on the site in the coming weeks. Huger thanks still to the rest of you for being patient during this site’s quiet time, and we’re going make it up to you with a whole series of dramatic reviews showcasing the best games we found at Gen Con, including Captain Sonar, Seafall and Inis, but we’re starting right this second with Smirk & Dagger’s Dead Last.

So Dead Last is basically Ca$h ‘n Guns meets Diplomacy, it’s the best new party game I’ve played all year and it’s the first game this site’s covered that will play completely differently depending on the size and shape of your table.

Do I have your interest? Come with me! I promise I won’t shoot you.

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Podcast #45: A Nebulous Boneyard

bananas, square pigs, pigs, ekans, bones, even more square pigs

Oh god, it’s too much. Asmodee has announced a new edition of Citadels – the first game SU&SD ever reviewed – and Quinns has a hangover that’s lasted all day. Is our end near?! Not yet, it’s not. In this episode Quinns proves he’s young by playing the Pokémon Trading Card Game, Happy Pigs and Via Nebula, while Paul proves he’s not by playing Meuterer, Mission: Red Planet and the profoundly apt Great Dinosaur Rush. We receive correspondence from our Antarctic SU&SD fan, and end with an interview with a proper board game veteran: Dr. Reiner Knizia. Also there is this vine of a man eating a banana. Thanks to BGG user Hexanauta for our podcast image of Via Nebula!

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Shirt My Feelings, PART TWO

thank you, Shirt gnomes, Pokémon, Emotional emoji

Paul: It’s with more than a little pride (and quite a lot of excitement!) that I announce the next phase of our t-shirt design competition!

Like the evolution of a fearsome and beautiful Pokémon, it’s transforming from its pitching stage into its selection stage. We’ve put together a curated list of our favourite popular designs (mixing older hits alongside some of the strongest last-minute entries) and now we’re asking our lovely fans to help us select which to produce.

I’d also like to thank everyone, really absolutely everyone, who submitted designs and contributed.

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Games News, 01/08/16: The Asmodee Edition

conan what is best in life, to eat some companies, and see the rest driven before you

Quinns: OK. Wow. Who wants to play a game of real-life Monopoly! None of you? Well, you’re out of luck. Put on this top hat and climb into my weird, narrow car.

News emerged last week that Asmodee, the largest conglomerate of designer board games publishers in the world, was acquiring F2Z Entertainment, the second largest publisher. This will make them such a big company that their rivals will realistically be Hasbro and Mattel.

Does this sound like inside baseball? It’s not. You’re about to personally feel the impact on your wallet.

After this merger goes ahead, Asmodee will be in control of the following designer board game companies: Asmodee, Fantasy Flight, Days of Wonder, Z-Man Games, Plaid Hat, Catan Studio, Windrider Games, Space Cowboys, Pretzel Games and Filosofia Éditions. Asmodee and F2Z’s combined publishing rights for tons of other games (including those of Bombyx, Repos Productions, Matagot, Carcassonne and Spot It!) will also be brought together under one roof.

That’s some 75% of the companies SU&SD regularly deals with, the others being Stronghold Games, Portal Games, AEG, Iello and Czech Games Edition. But of course, Asmodee isn’t done acquiring board game publishers yet.

Until this week I’d have said that Asmodee’s corporate game of Hungry Hungry Hippos wasn’t detrimental to the hobby. With this latest merger, though, I think Asmodee are going to be a lot more comfortable dictating the price of designer board games, starting… oh god it’s already happening

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Review: Ra

croc bait, tripping balls, thoth, seth, quins

July 29, 2016 Reviews Ra Dr. Reiner Knizia returns to SU&SD with a new edition of Ra, one of his most-loved designs ever. What will Quinns make of this 1999 classic in the blessed light of 2016? Why isn’t Paul at Quinns’ party? And what the shit is Quinns wearing? One thing’s for sure. Auction … Read more

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Review: Haru Ichiban

junior senior, frog eyes, simple plan, savage garden

Pip: Last night I went to see Star Trek Beyond while surfing the edges of an anxiety attack. I think I cried three times, nearly threw up once and laughed for a full minute during one sequence. I’m bringing this up because Haru Ichiban is the exact opposite of that experience.

Haru Ichiban is a game about water lilies which I picked up entirely based on the cover art at the UK Games Expo and then covertly Googled because I have a habit of finding games that look adorable and then find out that that’s where their positive qualities begin and end. Lovely box art, shame about the… everything that isn’t the box art.

Thankfully this seemed to be at least non-terrible and was designed by Bruno Cathala of Cyclades and Five Tribes fame. Cyclades! I liked Cyclades! PLEASE TAKE MY CREDIT CARD, MADAM.

Haru Ichiban turned out to be a two-player game of logic and planting. You take it in turns to place coloured water lilies on pads and push them round a pond until one player has an arrangement that will net them some points. The best way I can think to describe it is that it’s floral connect four but fancied up a bit and you can pretend you are Very Serious Gardeners Doing Grown-Up Employment Business.

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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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