Shut Up & Sit Down

Games News! 28/09/15

vampire trains, helicopter dice, table regurgitations, mind sports

Quinns: Welcome to the NEWS!

Never mind the jokes and reviews. The NEWS is what you come to this site for for, isn’t it? A great sluice-tube of consumer information, poking through your window and filling your life with piping hot knowledge. Praise be to NEWS.

Today’s first NEWS is that the latest map pack for Ticket to Ride is now available for pre-order, and will add new United Kingdom and Pennsylvania boards to the train-placement smash hit. As always with Ticket to Ride map packs, the new boards each boast new rules. The UK will feature technology upgrades, while Pennsylvania gets stocks and shares.

“This is boll****,” UK Prime Minister David Cameron was heard to have said upon hearing the news. “We waited 11 years to be included in Ticket to Ride, and we’re bundled with Pennsylvania? I don’t even know where that is. Nobody does.”

Leave a comment

Tips for the Top 5 Problem Players

comedy fascists, the eastenders board game, he's like an unbearably zen dan

Recently we tweeted asking which “problem players” you struggle with on a game night, and we’ve never seen a response like it. Our grumpometer actually shattered and we had to send Matt out for a new one.

Clearly you guys could do with a helping hand, so to go along with our Tips for Rules Explanations and An Intro to Board Gaming For Your Friends, we now have this! With a little help from us you’ll be cool as a cucumber.

Leave a comment

Miniatures Game Review: Malifaux

railway golems, sexy sombreros, cool zombies, cheating, underwear

[Our tour of the most popular miniatures games is almost at an end! If you missed Eric Tonjes’ first few delightful and accessible reviews, do check out Infinity, Warmachine and Dropzone Commander.]

Eric: I’ll start with a confession. Every month, as I sit down to write this column, I feel a dilemma. Miniatures games are, of course, games. Part of the goal of these columns is to expose you to clever or innovative gaming ideas being developed in the miniatures world. Thanks to limits on space and the amount of time I’m comfortable demanding, I end up exploring the gamishness of the game and have little space for anything else.

Yet miniatures games are also more than simple games, and none exemplify this better than Malifaux, our pick for this month. They are, in a real sense, about style. You don’t spend outrageous amounts of time and money on little models just for the act of gaming – you could use cardboard tokens and cereal boxes with their rules. You buy and assemble and paint the models and build the terrain and read the lore for the same reason I own aviators and a (fake) leather jacket – because you want to feel cool. You want some panache and style with your dice rolls and movement decisions.

If that is true, then Malifaux by Wyrd miniatures is the coolest of the cool kids. It drips theme – a theme that is something like Western-Gothic-Industrial-Steampunk-Horror.

273 Comments

Games News! 21/09/15

my fingers hurt from counting to 5 so many times

Quinns: Haikus! Like poems that went through a trash compactor. I think they’re awesome, and have decided to write this week’s Games News entirely in haiku form.

If you think you can do better than any of these, pop your entry in the comments! I’ll pick a winner to go beside my own poems and inevitably outshine them.

Stronghold’s back again
A game of deadly sieges
Enduring the years

Leave a comment

On Playmats: A Netrunner Story

oranges, forgetfulness, under my breath, slipping hearts

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.”

Leave a comment

Podcast #33: Paints, Knocks and Christian Petersen

did we mention Quinns came 7th in the UK netrunner nationals yet

Market research tells us that the median SU&SD reader is, at a given moment, most likely to be thatching their mead hall. How boring! You’d best pop our 33rd ever podcast on in the background.

Matt and Quinns are desperate to talk about their crippling Infinity habit, while Paul’s been playing the beloved game of Battlecon. We’ve got a quick interview with Fantasy Flight CEO Christian Petersen where he answers such lovely questions as “What happens to board games that don’t sell” and “What is the most stressful thing about your job”. And we receive an email from Brooklyn-based SU&SD fan Nate Kushner titled The Sad Room.

The fun never stops! The thatching shouldn’t either, though. Chop chop.

Leave a comment

Games News! 14/09/15

whisked away, friend-feasting, beating them until they're bulbous

Paul: Good morning, Quinns!

Quinns: Good morning, Paul!

Paul: You know what, I think it’s going to be an exciting Games News this week! Let’s get right into the Games News Forecast, beginning with a look at the satellite picture that shows a heavy cloud of zombies coming in from the north.

Quinns: That sounds like one of the all-time bad weeks.

Paul: Don’t worry! It’s just the forthcoming single-player campaign for Zombie 15’. If our review of that one slipped you by, you should know that we recorded it in a single 15 minute take.

158 Comments

Introducing… Cool Ghosts!

cool ghosts, sleepy ferrets, absent friends, binary boogie boards

Quinns: HELLO everybody! No video this week as Paul’s on holiday and I’m working on something that I want to get just right, but we’ve still got something for your weekend.

Cool Ghosts is a new project from Matt Lees and I that’s kind of “Shut Up & Sit Down, for video games”. Don’t worry about either of us taking time away from SU&SD, though! Matt’s working on Cool Ghosts instead of his prior YouTube channel, and I’m just swapping it in for my old video game freelance work.

Good places to jump in would be my roundup of new releases on Steam, Matt revealing the new Hyper Realistic Turbo 3D Edition of The Witcher 3, of both of us bickering like a married couple as we play Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime.

You’ll find a load of familiar faces from the SU&SD comments making themselves at home, too. Do go check it out! Unless you hate video games, in which case here’s a video of a sleepy ferret.

40 Comments

Review: Traders of Osaka

greasy squids, spider maths, black tides, pretty boats

Quinns: Today we finish our review triplet of games set in Japan!

First we had the beautiful, and beautifully clean design of Samurai. Next was the grand old game of Shogun, which was no less impressive. Today we look at Traders of Osaka, a small box game that was actually designed in Japan by one Susumu Kawasaki. And today I want to talk about yet another kind of beauty.

I don’t say this enough, but one of my favourite things about board games is that each one feels like receiving a shrink-wrapped idea, direct from the designer. I’ve called board games a “lossless” format before, meaning that unlike trying to write a novel or make a videogame, in the creative process of making a board game you can directly transmute the thing you have in your head into a real, physical box. It’s because of this that even bad board games (no- especially bad board games) have something intensely personal about them.

The difficulty with designing board games is, of course, making sure they arrive in one piece at their destination. That players can unpack them, study the documentation, and enjoy themselves as you intended.

So it’s fitting that Traders of Osaka is a game about shipping handicrafts across treacherous waters. As you hold this box, you’re holding Susumu Kawasaki’s beloved idea, designed in Japan, manufactured in China, handed to you by some dutiful postman. Did it get here in one piece?

61 Comments