Shut Up & Sit Down

Review: 2.8 Hours Later

fear juices, startled fawns, steve's stiff amygdala, athorough gut-worrying

[Following Pip’s escape from a room and Quinns’ attendance of the Betrayer’s Banquet, we’re continuing our coverage of event games with 2.8 Hours Later. A disturbingly real zombie apocalypse for you and your friends to survive. Huge thanks to friend of SU&SD Steve Hogarty for writing this up for us.]

Steve: “Don’t run into traffic.” That’s typically the warning you’ll get from the last out-of-character member of the 2.8 Hours Later team you’ll speak to before the game begins. “The zombies can’t hurt you, but the 47 to Shoreditch can.”

It seemed very unlikely to our assembled group of survivors that we might all at once shed our collective common sense and dash out in front of a lorry, that we’d be wholly consumed by some primitive fear at the first sight of a zombie actor and run screaming across a dual carriageway like startled fawns. Fawns that scream. But that’s almost precisely what ended up happening.

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Games News! 09/06/14

moist whistles, frosty zombies, wooden towns, thundy birds, krang

Quinns: Hey everyone! I come to you brimming with tea and delightfully alive. It’s now week two in my Streetwars water gun assassination game and my team is not only still in the running, we’ve got a kill. That’s right. We straight-up soaked a sucker, drenched his dreams, wet his whistle*. At the time of writing only 62 of our game’s 96 players are still alive, and I’ll tell you what else. We’re making quite the video of our exploits.

Big news this week is that King of New York, sequel to Richard Garfield’s much-loved dice game King of Tokyo, has come stomping into the limelight. You can read about it right here, but in short, your massive monsters are now hungry for fame as well as delicious humans. Oh, and the board will have different districts for you to run around! Except the army will be running around it too!

In other words, the definitive game of monster mayhem is getting some actual mayhem.

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Addendum to the Diskwars review

tight little cheats, an imbecile squared, that flipping feeling, straight-jacketed attacks

[Following our Warhammer: Diskwars review, it was pointed out by basically all of you that we’d got one rule massively wrong. Taking this into account, Quinns wrote this quick epilogue.]

Quinns: There was a line I wrote for our Diskwars video that I ended up cutting. I really, really hate the manual. It splits the rules of crucial concepts between the first half of the manual (the beginner game), the second half the manual (the advanced game), a dedicated boxout, and two pages titled “Reference” that are basically the manual’s colostomy bag. Everything it forget to tell you elsewhere collects here.

In the end I decided that there were more important things for me to tell you about than the manual, and left it out. So really, in doing a video where I misunderstood a vital rule of Diskwars, I was wrong twice over. An imbecile squared. Because not only did I misunderstand the rules, but I underestimated how important manuals can be.

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Review: Warhammer Diskwars

bisto, the ancient game of frisbé, additional bog

UPDATE: It had to happen eventually. We got one of the rules for Warhammer Diskwars partially wrong. We played the game again with the correct rules and you can find how that went here, though it didn’t change Quinns’ mind hugely. Apologies to everyone involved!

Today Quinns takes Warhammer: Diskwars out for a spin, the thinnest miniatures wargame a round. But will it be flippin’ great? Or wheely bad? Or just worth giving a quick whirl? We have to know! The world revolves around board games, after all.

OK, that’s all I got. And something tells me I’m still going to get shown up in the comments.

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Review: Jaipur

camels, nasa, flying camels, hot leathers, golden failures, stinky spices

Brendan: Quinns? QUINNNNS. Where is he? He’s always late. Once again I have five crates of the finest Indian silks sitting in front of me, ready to buy — ready for transport! — and once again I can’t do anything with them because Quinns is late. He’s the one with all the camels! He should know by now to be ready! Where could he be?

Quinns [panting]: Sorry. Sorry! Whoo. Sorry.

Brendan: Just tell me you have the camels.

Quinns: Oh no, I traded those camels in ages ago. But don’t worry because – look! We have all these leather rags now.

Brendan: Hang on. Since when do you and I work as merchants in India, perched atop teetering camels, our saddlebags overflowing with rubies and saffron? I mostly remember us uploading penis jokes to the internet.

Quinns: This is a written review of Jaipur, Brendan! Anything is possible!

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Games News! 02/06/14

playing the cabbage, playing the dragon, sordid loops, unwelcome guests

Quinns: Morning, everyone! How’s your day going? Stuck at work? At least you don’t have a contract killer walking around with your personal details. Today is the first day of my Street Wars game, a four week, one-hit kill watergun fight. You can track our game here. Oh god, somebody’s already died. This is just like the Hunger Games. Except I’m only hungry because I’m too scared to go to the shops.

Gloom, seen above, is another popular game of pitiful situations, and this week we learned a 2nd edition is on the way. Unusually for a game about being trapped down wells and murdered by squids, the new edition will be a fairly undramatic thing. The best part is that Gloom’s three out-of-print expansions – Unwelcome Guests, Unhappy Homes and Unfortunate Expeditions – are all being reprinted! And we’ll get a host of “minor improvements to gameplay and card design”, but all still be compatible with your existing Gloom cards.

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The Opener: Takenoko and a Hot Toddy

you're all a panda, frightful charm, keep calm and do a thing ahhahahaah

It’s not hard to catch SU&SD’s eye. An award on your box will do it. Or a panda! Or the colour pink. Or three-dimensional components. Or an inlay with phallic slots. In offering all five at once, though, Takenoko could have been made for us.

Is it a good Opener, though? The perfect game to open a friend’s mind to the wonders of board gaming like you were opening a cheap tin of brain-beans? Tell us, Matt! We have to know.

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Podcast #17: The Megacast

Hopefully by now you’ve all enjoyed the majestic clusterbump that is our video report of Watch the Skies. This was a “Megagame” that featured dozens of players posing as world leaders, scientists and dastardly aliens, in something like a model U.N. turned up to 11 until the tables start exploding. While videos of Matt accidentally … Read more

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Games News! 26/05/14

still more octopus, most noble murder, the colour milk, the secret of spiel des jahres

Quinns: Hello! Or as they say in Germany, das hallo! It’s a special Mostly-German edition of the games news today, because a lot of our news is from Germany and I am very creative.

Uwe Rosenberg, designer behind such pastoral heavyweights as Agricola, Le Havre and Caverna has revealed his next project! What bold new setting are we getting this time, Uwe? What magical new mechanics have you birthed from the recesses of your labyrinthine mind?

“In the worker placement game Arler Erde, set in the German region of East Frisia, players develop an estate and expand their territory by cutting peat and building dikes.”

Ah. More of the same, then. That’s a shame! In the very same week, similarly prolific German mentat Stefan Feld has announced that his next game is about scientists that hang out with octopuses and crystals at the bottom of the ocean. Is “Team Feld” a thing? We should make it a thing. SU&SD hereby announces it is TEAM FELD!

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SU&SD Play… A Goddamn Megagame

anger, passion, drama, I can't believe you don't have your foreign minister's number

Last weekend team SU&SD defended the world from aliens, had an international incident with the USA and almost dissolved the United Nations, all from the safety of a town hall in South London. This experience came courtesy of the Megagame Makers, an English society of game designers who specialise in the supermassive. It was an astonishing day, and so of course we had to make this supermassive video in tribute (WARNING: it also contains megaswears, so keep megakids away).

We’re hugely proud of this one. Enjoy, everybody. And our overwhelming thanks to the association of Megagamers to hosting us for the day.

(Donor note! This is the first of our super-videos, promised in the stretch goals of our first donation season. We know some of you wanted videos in the old SU&SD style. Don’t worry! We’ve got those coming too. 😀 — Team SU&SD)

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