Shut Up & Sit Down

Review: The Quest for El Dorado and the Heroes & Hexes expansion

uncle bagface, steamy analogies, chrono trigger, gertrude everdeen

With the release of The Quest for El Dorado, it seems that board gaming owes yet another debt to venerable designer Reiner Knizia. This game is a nail-biting race through a troublesome jungle, and we think it’s superb. A solid, simple, clean design.

…But what if you want a wobbly, complex, dirty design? Well, then you could pick up the Heroes & Hexes expansion, which Quinns also investigates in this video.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

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Podcast #91: The 2018 Pearple’s Choice Awards!

the board game manger, hallucinatory spaghetti, art, burps

It’s a podcast! You know the drill, everybody. Recover your audio tubing from the protective sheaths and retreat to your listening hutch. In this episode Matt and Quinns share their experiences with Wingspan (you’ll find the NPI review here), Chronicles of Crime (our SHUX Preview here), Franchise and Woodlouse Chaos, before strapping on their tuxedos for the annual Pearple’s Choice Awards, which we last celebrated back on podcast #73. Who will win Best Game? Best Production? Best Designer? And will SU&SD’s audience finally decide that mum and dad… are bad and wrong? Enjoy the show, everybody, and thanks again to clg6000 for putting these awards together.

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GAMES NEWS! 04/03/19

a dog becomes a waitress, matt falls in a well, wine for dinner again

Quinns: Matt left for a skiing holiday this weekend, while I stayed in and didn’t just play Scrabble, I lost at Scrabble.

The less said about this horrid state of affairs, the better. I hope Matt skiis down a well. Let’s get on with the news.

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SU&SD Play… Great Western Trail: Rails to the North

beautiful cows, wonky cows, space cows, branchlets

Slowly but surely, SU&SD is learning what makes a good board game stream. “Two and a half hours of Matt and Quinns playing a complicated resource management game” might not be the answer, but one thing’s for certain: That’s what we’ve uploaded to YouTube this week.

This video also documents Matt and Quinns playing the new expansion for the terrific Great Western Trail, Rails to the North, for the very first time. To be charitable, it’s not what they expect. To be candid, they play the worst game of Great Western Trail of their adult lives.

Enjoy, everybody!

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It’s gonna be a wonky week

planet bunk, a drawing of a dreadnaught, the diary room pushed to its limits

Quinns: Hey everybody! After doing a nine hour(!) stream of Twilight Imperium this weekend, Matt and I are going to spend this week resting up and finishing up our quest to find this year’s SU&SD interns.

Normal service (Monday news, Wednesday podcast, Friday review) will be resumed next week, although we’re still going to be posting little bits for you to watch. Some of our best panels from SHUX ’18 will be going up on our YouTube channel, and on Friday we’ll post our playthrough video of SEAL Team Flix.

Best of all, you can watch our epic game of Twilight Imperium right here as a video-on-demand, but if you do that, we’d actually like to ask a favour…

In a couple of months we’re going to upload this gargantuan 9 hour video to YouTube, but we want to start preserving some of the best comments from Twitch chat as text pop-ups within the YouTube video. So, pretty please, if you watch any of the video on Twitch and something in Twitch chat makes you laugh, could you leave a comment on this post with the line of chat, the username and the timestamp where it appears? You should be able to copy-paste everything you see, so it should be pretty easy.

Thanks so much everybody, and have a great week!

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Today we’re streaming Twilight Imperium!

matt will be lions, elaine will be gnomes, quinns will be bad

Quinns: HELLO! After a literal week of preparation, today is the day we’re going to be streaming a full game of Twilight Imperium 4th edition. And with a bit of luck, it’s going to be the most exhaustive playthrough of Twilight Imperium that the internet has ever seen. We will have…

Our secret diary room for whenever players want to share their secret plans
A tactical overlay showing the map, the objectives and who’s completed them
The “Galactic News” readout showing the best Twitch comments
And even more!

Obviously after the stream is over you’ll be able to watch it as a Twitch video on demand, and after that’s gone we’ll be uploading it to YouTube, but if you want to come along and join in the fun we’ll be starting at 2PM GMT, 9AM EST, 6AM PST.

See you there!

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Card Games That Don’t Suck: Fight the Landlord

when the revolution comes kirby will be the first up against the wall

Did you catch the first instalment of Card Games That Don’t Suck, Ricochet Poker? This week we’re travelling from America to China to tell you about a fantastic shedding game called Fight the Landlord.

Watching the video, you’ll notice that “2s” are valued higher than royals. It’s possible that this comes from the game’s communist roots, in much that same way that following the French revolution, it was considered distasteful to play games where kings and queens were desirable. The more you know!

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GAMES NEWS! 18/02/19

cowforge, ex-lovers, won't you take me to, funko town

Matt: Morning Quinns! How was your weeken–

Quinns: Matt I watched SO MUCH of The Expanse. I was thinking we could write the whole Games News in Belter Creole.

Matt: OK. I hear you, but I worry that might make it a bit hard to read. How about you write it while crossplaying as Chrisjen Avasarala?

Quinns: You’ve got yourself a deal, beltalowda. You cover the first story, I’ll see what earrings my wife has.

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Review: Game of Thrones – Mother of Dragons

Oho, with the unexpected release of the Mother of Dragons expansion for the Game of Thrones board game, did Fantasy Flight think they were the only ones who could return to an old game?

They’ve got another thing coming. We reviewed this board game back in 2011, and now we’re reviewing it AGAIN. So stick that in your moon door and smoke it.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

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GAMES NEWS! 11/02/19

salty bet, ice cream mines, tremorers

Matt: Good morning, Quintin! I awaken from a vivid dream in which the twist at the end of Return of the Jedi was that the whole thing was entirely being imagined by a man called Ryan who worked in Market Research, who was having a fantasy about what it might be like to be a smuggler called “Han Solo”.

And now – as if by space magic – I’m being thrown straight back into Star Wars again. Another game in the genre of Firefly, Merchant of Venus, or Xia: Legends of a Drift System – Star Wars: Outer Rim sees players competing to be the cream of the galaxy’s scum and villainy. Flying around space, smuggling goods, hiring recognisable crew members and reasonably frequently rolling some dice.

Quinns: Let us apply Occam’s Razor. Is the simplest possible explanation here that you, Matt Lees, created this game in a dream?

Matt: Yes

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