Shut Up & Sit Down

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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The Second Sci-Fi Special

brendan prime, space cats, math bombs, dice boundaries

So Mars is under attack from Reiner Knizia, right, and Team SU&SD are the only ones who can stop him. We also welcome back Susie Pumfsk, and Brendan is an alien!

Look, don’t ask questions. Basically we had too much sugar and when we regained our senses we’d filmed this extra-special episode, featuring reviews of Infamy, Time’n’Space AND Rex: Final Days of an Empire, with time to spare for a re-review of Netrunner (original review here).

Huge thanks to Rachel Leipacher for her vocal stylings and to Team Covenant for their sexy Netrunner footage. And everybody, beware of Knizia. Even if some of his games are suspiciously good, he’s still out there. Watching. Waiting. Mathsing.

Thanks so much, everybody!

(Donor note! This is the second of our super-videos, promised in the stretch goals of our first donation season. Did you miss the first, our Megagame Special? Definitely don’t miss that! That would be awful. — Team SU&SD)

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Announcing our 3rd ever Gold Club bag!

rpgs, a swarm of cardboard bats, the powerhouse from cornwall, where am i

HELLO! You all probably know how the Gold Club works by now. If you like SU&SD you can support us with a donation, and we can have fun mailing you a little packet of joy.

With just 12 days left on the current season, we can proudly reveal that in addition to the usual papery surprises and a limited edition physical object (which is our favourite one so far), Gold Club 3 will contain Quinns’ Guide For The Beginner Netrunner! Downloads for the full audio for our Star Wars RPG evenings and any other RPGs we play for the next three months, which is literally dozens of hours of content! And a gut-busting compilation of outtakes, following on from where the last one left off.

If any of that tickles your pickle, our donate page awaits.

Sincerely,

— Team SU&SD

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Games News! 16/06/14

wet wings wet words, bonus ghosts, galactic cheeks, glass nipples

Quinns: Wow. 14 days in and Team SU&SD is out of the running in our month-long watergun hitman tournament. That was… an unexpected ending. Expect a video in a few weeks, featuring nature documentary-like footage of Paul executing his prey.

We kick off the news today with the unveiling of the “Premium” edition of Doomtown: Reloaded. Look at it up there! Originally a collectible card game of Lovecraftian cowboys which ran from 1998 to 2000, Doomtown will come back from the dead this Summer in a new, “expandable” format.

In other words, publishers Alderac are aping what Fantasy Flight have done with their collectible card games, where randomised booster packs are ignored in favour of healthier fixed expansion packs.

“Have you felt the weight of this thing?” Alderac CEO Perk Bojangles did not say yesterday to the assembled press. “I killed an intern with one of them. One blow! Back of the head! Pow.”

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Review: Blueprints

quinns' landlord aura, nipples deep in space cats, ginger tugging, landlord lightning

Industriousness! Caution! Precision! Forethought! Patience! All skills vital to construction work that we don’t have. Surely then, an architecture game that we like must have done something wrong?

Or maybe not. Blueprints is a clean design, constructed by professionals. Does your collection have space for a small game of building tiny little structures, out of dice? Let’s be honest, now. How could it not?

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