GAMES NEWS! 14/09/20

Troyes wasn’t in Byzantium either, Stop doing that Ronald, Das Dice

Tom: Ahhhh. Don’t you love the fresh air, the rolling hills, the dry stone walls, the tiny paddocks? The babbling brook, the adorable bleats, the bark of the collie hard at work? ‘Tis a fine day to work the fields.

Ava: I don’t know why you’ve brought me here, but I’m pretty sure there’s a terrible joke coming.

Tom: It’s time to round up the Games Ewes.

Ava: Yup. There we go.

Ava: I wasn’t particularly gripped by the pitch for Disney Shadowed Kingdom in the press release, but at the last minute it said that this was going to be followed up by new bits for Unmatched, and realising Mondo was the same publisher almost made me curious. After all, Quinns recently gave Unmatched a pretty glowing review.

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Podcast #118: Stuck Holding Double Badgers

how big is a stick, how evil is a crystal, how rude is tom, how good is eclipse

Hark! Tom, Matt and Quinns have eaten the sacred pod-beans and soon opinions will grow from their open mouths. Please remain calm, the procedure is perfectly natural. Specifically, these potent, home-grown opinions will relate to the board games of Renature (01:41), Pictures (17:33), The Search for Planet X (34:12) and Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy (49:50). There’s also some organic chat about Ride the Rails, Paranormal Detectives and Decrypto. Thanks to our amazing community, podcast transcripts are available here, and are usually completed within a week of the podcast’s release.

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Review: War Chest

Scalding Hot Trouble, Real Science Diagrams, Delicious Poker Chips, A Big Box of Battles

War! HUH!? What is it good for!? According to David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin, it’s good for business. They literally said that. I promise.

Live from a bedroom, Tom tackles this square brown box of War Chest in just under 10 square brown minutes, with each one more salient than the last. Marvel at the hastily-strung-together introduction! Guffaw at the complete lack of pacing! Be thrilled by the knowledge that yes, he did have to clean up that dirt/those poker chips/this whole edit with only a handful of hours to spare! He even makes time to (not) review the Nobility expansion!

For SU&SD website denizens, there’s also a secret treasure. Check out this fantastic online implementation from web character SpruceGoose. I had a tonne of fun testing the game on this site, as well as having a fab little 4 player game with him and his lovely friends (thanks guys!). Check that out here: https://warchestonline.com/login

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GAMES NEWS! 31/08/20

Quinns’ Quick Quince Wince, unexpectedly fancy, Rats-in-a-blanket, The Naughty Doctor

Quinns: Morning Ava! I am wearing my Tom suit and Tom hat and am happy to help you with the news today

Ava: Quinns, have you just glued a rat to your face and stapled bacon to your clothes? I don’t even understand why you would think that was a Tom Suit.

Quinns: Wait, no. The suit and hat was just a bit of the theatre of the mind. You would just pretend I was dressed like Tom and we could start the news after some light banter.

Ava: So what’s the deal with the bacon and the rat?

Quinns: Let’s roast us some news!

Ava: Sit Down games just never shut up with their constant weird ideas, and I’m into it.

Dive features an unusual blend of see-through cards and diving for treasure. Players build a stack of these clear plastic cards, then peer down into them and try to judge how far down certain obstacles and treasures are. You’ll use oxygen to program a safe route down, hoarding valuable tokens on the levels where they think there’s something particularly tasty. Once everyone’s built their route, you’ll be removing cards to see how far everybody got. Get the furthest with the most treasure and you’ve won the dive. I can think of several ways this might be really boring or awful, but if it works, it could be a really lovely unique game.

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Podcast #117: Live from the UKGE!

Micro(wave) Chef, Twisty Brain-Numbers, The Five Queen Jamboree, Nighty Night Listeners xoxo

In this preposterously 117th episode of the Shut Up and Sit Down podcast Quinns, Ava and Tom are going absolutely LIVE to the UK Games Expo, threatening to snarf endless pizza in Fort, crunch the numbers in 18Chesapeake, and do ‘Good Japanese Business’ in Yokohama. Then, in a secret less-than-live twist, they’ll yoko-yammer-on-about 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel for far too long.

Apologies for some occasionally crunchy audio at times on this one, and have a great weekend, everybody!

Tap below for full timestamps and more info!

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Review – Anomia

bonsai beach, introducing your bad brain, mmmmmmmmmaryland

Following last week’s review of Decrypto, this week we’re revisiting another brilliant game that had previously been wasting away in the dungeons of Shut Up & Sit Down in a written review.

Anomia might not be the funniest game we’ve ever covered if you were to judge it in terms of decibels, but it is the game we’ve reviewed that gets the most people laughing the hardest the fastest.

Does that sentence make sense? We’re not sure. We just know that this game is ace.

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GAMES NEWS! 24/08/20

Actually maybe that’s too much digression, Contiguous Hops, Vapes’n’Japes

Ava: Welcome to Board Game Celebrity Squares! The quiz where all the biggest names in board games have games coming out soon, and they’ll probably mostly be coming out in boxes that are square shaped. Hence the squares.

Tom: Ava, I don’t think that sounds much like a game show.

Ava: What’s a game show?

Ava: There’s a fair bit of buzz around Alexander Pfister’s next big box game, as the designer of Great Western Trail, Oh My Goods and Maracaibo reaches for the future, and the skies.

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Review – Decrypto

They say the past is a foreign country, but this week we’ve popped on the ferry regardless, going back to revisit a game we’ve already reviewed and recommended – on the sole basis that Matt didn’t feel like we’d recommended it strongly enough? Find out why we’ve come to feel that Decrypto is a modern classic – with a special report on the Laser Drive expansion from Tom, who isn’t actually here.

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