Shut Up & Sit Down

Brendan’s Correct Way to Scratch

scratch theorists, aryan myths, come ooonnnnnnnnnn, nnnaaaaghh, the tear

[We’re trying something a little different here. Brendan recently wrote an article about scratchcards on his blog which we thought was rather special. He’s kindly let us republish it here as text (below) and as an improbably transporting spoken word piece in our podcast section. Take your pick, everybody! And enjoy.]

Brendan: Scratchcards – the most worldly and humble of the lesser gambles. Although I am far from being one of the people who are inexplicably and tragically addicted to them, scratchcards nevertheless maintain a power over me. I was talking about them with some friends recently and concluded that my enjoying a scratchcard has more to do with ritual than money. Although, let’s be honest, like all forms of gambling, the money is at the nucleus of its strange charm.

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Review: Anomia

pulling a wild one, bellied laughs, tongue springs, hot team quillian and deen

Brendan: Oh man, since Paul and Quinns left at the end of the sci-fi special I have nobody to play board games with. Hey, Supercomputer, do you want to play Anomia with me? It’s a quick-fire party game about blurting out words under pressure and beating your friends to the punch. You’ll like it!

Supercomputer: Anomia. Latin origin. Meaning “without name”. Would you like me to run a simulation of the universe without names, nouns, pronouns, designa—

Brendan: No! I mean, no Supercomputer, but thank you. I just want to play this simple card game with someone. I’m sad that my friends left. You remember what we talked about? Sad? It’s an emotion.

Supercomputer: Runtime error. Do you mean when those called Paul Dean and Quintin Smith inexplicably abandoned you to become an accountant and a low cost assassin respectively? Reducing the number of your human friendship circle from 2 to 0?

Brendan: It’s not zero! Matt is still my friend.

Supercomputer: Initial and ongoing analysis of his facial expressions indicates that the one called Matt Lees regards you as subhuman and without merit. Would you like me to run a simulation of some friends?

Brendan: …

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Games News! 07/07/14

panic in hand land, real zombies, timequakes, the path of souls, bursting assistants

Quinns: Good morning, my playful pickles! Before we start, realise what a marvelous audience you are. You want for nothing more than a glimpse of the fun you’ll be having with your friends in the future. You’re beautiful, all of you.

If you’re anything like me, Hand Made Wonders (pictured above) will be the source at least one evening of boozy giggling. This is an upcoming Taiwanese game where players build monuments out of their hands, but where your left AND right hand will need 3 points each to win, and everyone’s hand is part of a different team (determined by the two different-coloured bracelets you’re wearing).

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The Opener: Gravwell & Wicked Beans

the singularity, warp gates, the ninth dimension, gravity, beans

It’s an Opener! With Quinns! Has the world gone mad? No, but Gravwell definitely has. It’s a racing game set in the ninth dimension with no gravity except that created by your friends. And weirdest of all, it actually works!

And finally, two years after we first mentioned it, you guys are receiving the recipe for Quinns’ Wicked Beans. Enjoy, everybody!

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Review: Tokaido: Crossroads

a splatter of soy, a clatter of coins, wrong turns, foot rubs

Quinns: Remember our Tokaido review? It should stick in your mind. This was a piquant Antoine Bauza game that dreamt of players hiking along Japan’s East Sea Road, from Kyoto to old Edo, simply trying to have the nicest time.

You collected local handicrafts and soaked in hot springs. You’d arrive at an inn for the night and buy soup with the last two coins in your pocket. Best of all, you could arrive at Tokyo, destitute, with nothing but a handful of cloying sweets to your name, and still end up winning because you’d earned the most wonderful memories. This was a game that lingered in your life and living room, like a scented candle.

Which brings us to Tokaido: Crossroads! An expansion for Tokaido that updates it “for the gamer”. How on earth does that work?

No, wait. I know. It’ll add the yakuza, swords, magic spells and dice-rolling. Ha! Wouldn’t that be funny! Because that’s not going to… happen…

Wait. Why is there a sword on this card. No. NO.

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Games News! 30/06/14

cold story spoils, beast mode, soviet show trials, feverish infection, hot dragon spoils

Quinns: How is everybody? Like something out of Nathan Barley, I spent my Saturday night queuing for an hour to get into a dancefloor that was literally a room with no lights. It was well weapon.

Board game news! Forthcoming Antoine Bauza co-operative stress-fest Samurai Spirit takes the top slot with a publisher image of the finished game (seen above).

It’s only now that I realise Samurai Spirit sounds an awful lot like a mashup of Antoine Bauza’s two other co-operative games, Ghost Stories, where you defend a village of a firehose-like stream of ghosts, and Hanabi, ostensibly a game of fireworks displays where players all hold their cards backwards, in practice a game where you win by following additional rules which the smartest player invents between games.

We didn’t like Hanabi very much. Heresy, I know.

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Gold Club 3 closes in 24 hours!

like a colony of cardboard bats taking flight but instead of eating bugs they bring smiles

Hello everybody!

With donations closing again in just 24 hours (at midnight EST, June 30th) we’ve got a last-minute addition to our third ever Gold Club bag. This season’s donors and all donors from previous seasons will get 2-4 weeks of early access to the SU&SD forum as we perform stress testing, ensure it doesn’t bring down the site and train our moderators in the rapid destruction of Quinns’ Netrunner threads.

If you hadn’t considered supporting SU&SD via the Gold Club, know that this one promises to be a doozy. It’ll have unedited RPG sessions, outtakes, Quinns’ Decks for the Aspiring Netrunner, a lovely bit of secret merchandise and a whole variety of limited-edition jokes. It’s basically an episode of SU&SD that you can have in your house, containing our actual fingerprints and DNA! So it’s kind of like we’re holding hands with all of you.

As always, a huge thanks to our donors. It’s amazing to be able to repay you guys, even if it’s in such a very silly way.

— Team SU&SD

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Review: The X-Wing Miniatures Game

making it so, special riker moments, the holodeck, photon torpedoes

We’ve got some continuity to sort out after last week’s sci-fi special, but let’s sort out another bit of continuity first.

Almost two years ago Quinns sat down to write this review of the X-Wing Miniatures Game core set. Today, Paul joins him in the stifling cockpit of internet television for a review of the game proper.

HUGE thanks to our fans at Industrial Light & Magic for providing that intro sequence. We were skeptical at first when they asked for literally all of our donation money, but the results speak for themselves.

Enjoy, everybody!

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Review: Ugg-Tect

akungu, akungu akungu, karungu, mazungu mazungu, what the hell are they talking about

Paul: A thing you should definitely know about Ugg-Tect is that, the very first time we started playing it, Brendan almost immediately began whacking himself over the head with a large club, really pounding at his own skull with a very singular sort of determination. He was going at it full speed, full strength, and looking at me with a particular sort of sadness in his eyes.

It’s important that I add that Brendan wasn’t wearing any sort of protection when he did this. Yes, the club was only inflatable, I will concede this, but I’m not sure this mattered much given the intensity of his self-inflicted blows. He was grunting one thing over and over again, one thing in the language of Ugg-Tect, and that was “Ignore me.”

Put yourself in my position for a moment. There is a man standing in front of you who is hammering away at his own head with an enormous inflatable weapon, grunting with great insistence that you ignore him. What do you do?

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Games News! 23/06/14

bulging erections, aquatic guts, dusty basements, crazy lazers

Quinns: Hello Quintin’s kittens, or my quiddens! Is that a good intro? It’s the worst, isn’t it. Let’s never do that again.

Our big news this week is that Days of Wonder has unveiled the box and artwork for Five Tribes, and you can see it above! We covered this classy collaboration with Bruno Cathala, designer of such unapproachably perfect games as Shadows Over Camelot and Cyclades, back in February. And as you can see above…

(The turn order tokens look like penises. Don’t say that. But what else can you say? It’s the elephant in the room, except it’s a neat row of penises pointing RIGHT AT ME)

…the board is, um… ah…

(DON’T SAY IT, QUINNS. YOU’RE BETTER THAN THAT)

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