Shut Up & Sit Down

Review: Mascarade Expansion

I'm the princess, no you're not, yes i am, no really, no i'm serious, no seriously

Matt: Remember those hot hot nights when we wore those masks, and danced as if our legs might melt any moment? I don’t remember that time either – just wanted to make sure we were all on the same page. Mascarade was a fun game with sexy art that forcibly entered my heart last year when I covered it for The Opener. The premise is simple: nobody knows what’s going on, it’ll only get worse as things go on, and you’re almost definitely not the queen but nobody else seems to have clocked that.

There are tons of hidden identity thingers to choose from these days, but what sets Mascarade apart from the crowd is the fact that you’re often not sure of who YOU are, let alone who everyone else might be. Taking a look at your card takes your whole turn so I’M THE BLOODY KING becomes I’M THE BLOODY KING, PROBABLY.

The general gist of all this chaotic magic is probably best expressed in my aforementioned video, so if you’re totally clueless seep that into your face and then come back to absorb my thoughts on the new, first expansion – because for reasons I’ll make clear shortly this may be a good time to go all-in and buy both.

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Games News! 09/02/15

malaysian jungles, amphibious cars, international phallus patrol, virgil was best

Quinns: Very rarely do we flaunt our being English on this site, so I think we’ve earned the following:

THUNDERBIIIIIIRDS BOARD GAME BOX ART REVEALED! And it’s got Thunderbird 2 dropping a little Thunderbird 4! F*** yes!

Back off, America! This box is ours. Oh, I vooow to theeee, my coountry, that I will buuuy this booox…

If you don’t know what Thunderbirds is (or if you know it by its name in the Czech Republic, “International Phallus Patrol”), I explained it in detail here, when this board game was first announced. And let’s be clear, this isn’t some cheap tie-in for the 50th Anniversary of Thunderbirds. It’s being designed by Matt Leacock, designer of amazing co-op games like Pandemic, Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert. It might not be shit!

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Review: XCOM: The Board Game

milk, panicking, in continents?, incontinence?, electric playpens

It’s here! XCOM: The Board Game is now in shops the world over, with its computerised component, its little plastic snipers and its starched lil’ navy blue box. Oooh. You want it.

OR DO YOU? Let Quinns and Paul cut a path for you through the jungle of hype around this game, all the way to the UFO crash site of truth. “Welcome to Earth,” indeed.

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Podcast #25: Stop! Let’s Banana

industrial rubber bands, beauteous mutants, the worst spies, montana

First things first, huge thanks to Vitaliy Zavadskyy for gifting our podcast with some magical intro and outro themes. The UK finally has a second radio show to be proud of after the BBC World Service. In this episode Paul’s been hard at work testing Spyfall, Panamax and The Witcher Adventure Game as well as … Read more

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Games News! 02/02/15

paddling pools, electric boogaloos, nukes of catan, collective pew-pews

Quinns: Board games go in and out of print all the time. It’s like a party where sexy new friends arrive in a steady stream, only for each one to fall through a network of trapdoors.

But to quote patron saint of board game reviewers Tom Vasel, if a game is really good, it’ll always get another print run. The theme of this week’s games news is, apparently, an awful lot of sexy people arriving back at the party, dusting themselves off and grabbing another fistful of canapes.

Let’s start with the forthcoming 20th anniversary edition of El Grande! Or as we call it in my house, 50 Shades of Beige.

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Review: Last Will & Getting Sacked

hectic days, old friends, not a wife exactly, the puzzle just got puzzlier

This week, Matt and Quinns peek into the paperwork of Last Will, a game that challenges you to declare bankruptcy faster than your friends. A game of champagne, boat cruises, fabulous mansions, horses and you in the middle, trying to get rid of all of it.

But wait! There’s more! We’ve also played the expansion Last Will: Getting Sacked, which sees you having to do away with that beastly job of yours that insists on paying you every turn. A fabulously expensive marriage might be just the thing.

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Review: Trains: Rising Sun

curvaceous foreign geography, laying rails, normal trains, longer than average trains

Quinns: Bad news, readers. Our efforts to appease the grand old month of Expansionanuary seem to be for naught. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting darker. It’s now so cold in my flat that the carpet crunches underfoot.

We must have faith that this will end, friends. Unless the rumours are true, and this is indeed the year of twenty fifspansion.

It’s a possibility too horrid to contemplate. In the meantime, we will stay the course. Here’s a review of Trains: Rising Sun.

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Games News! 26/01/15

the game dimension, exploding kittens, mouse bollocks, maximum mandom

Quinns: We open this week with Six Games to Introduce Your Kid to Roleplaying, an article published over the weekend by Shut Up & Sit Down’s own Matt Thrower. Some would say teaching your child that they’re an imaginary druid called Elwad constitutes child cruelty. Not this site, though.

I’m mentioning this first because I found the above image via Google image search and needed it on our front page. It’s perfect. The glazed expression of the father. The frozen terror on the boy’s face. “The dice will tell us whether you live or die, son. Don’t cry, now. Would Elwad cry? Of course not.”

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Review: War Stories

plague-ridden cardboard, licks of sense, wild paper dragons

(Images sourced from BoardGameGeek.)

Thrower: You’re a platoon sergeant, patrolling the Normandy hedgerows in 1944. Suddenly, a burst of automatic fire opens up from the treeline. You don’t know what it is: it could be a machine gun, or a tank. It could be a lone rifleman, or the forward elements of an enemy brigade. Each demands a different course of action, and your life, and those of your men, depend on your picking the right one. What do you do?

Replicating this is the central problem faced by tactical wargame designers. Good tactics start with determining who your enemy is and where they are. Yet for all the effort they put in to simulating weapons and doctrine, tactical board games fail to take this into account. Most of the time you can see exactly what you’re facing.

Two new designers have decided to tackle this intractable issue with their first release, War Stories. It comes in two flavours, Liberty Road for the Western front and Red Storm for the east. As if implementing hidden movement wasn’t ambition enough, it also seeks to be realistic, quick-playing and easily learned. That’s two of the wildest dragons in wargaming, slain by the same title. No wonder people flocked to support the kickstarter.

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SU&SD Play… Cosmic Encounter

delicious lemon drinks, horrible lizards, the terrible fairgrounds of matt's childhood

First off, be warned that there is an unexpected disco interlude starting at 06:46. Brendan spilled some raw beats on our editing PC and the resulting funk has gotten into the motherboard, but we’re uploading a fix (with slightly better overall audio) now. It should be up by midnight GMT.

Second off, allow us to present the crown jewel in our Expansionanuary festivities! A ginormous Let’s Play of us finishing a full-size game of Cosmic Encounter, proving once and for all in a controlled, scientific environment just how much fun this game can be.

Enjoy, everybody!

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