Shut Up & Sit Down

Quinns Talks to Schoolkids About Being a YouTuber!

this is among the hardest things quinns ever did, but you wouldn't know it

Quinns: Paul and I are working on yet another B I G V I D E O for this Friday, but today we’ve got a little video featuring some very little people.

Recently I was invited by SU&SD fan Annie Langley to give a presentation to her school kids aged 10-11 about being a YouTuber, since it’s the job that most kids dream about. With a lot of help from my wife (who I can’t thank enough for telling me to remove all the bar charts from my talk), I put together this 20 minute rundown of what my work is actually like.

I know that a lot of SU&SD fans are parents, so I thought I’d chuck the talk online in case it’s of interest. Honestly, I worry that very few YouTubers or Streamers talk about the technical or psychological stresses of this job, and I feel like the world would be a healthier place if there was a bit more of a conversation around it.

Timestamps…

00:00 – Intro about my job and board games

06:49 – Me talking about the mental health problems with producing content (without using those exact words)

12:46 – Me talking about the technical bit of the job: scripting, lighting, microphones and editing

18:21 – Me telling kids to go and make things, but do so safely. Also, a poorly-chosen Hunger Games analogy

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Games News! 11/06/18

right inside the sausage, the generous bushes of Kickstarter island, axe-barons

Quinns: Have you heard the news? I’ve been playing sad fanfares on my cyber-bugle all weekend. On Friday Fantasy Flight announced that Wizards of the Coast has ended the licensing agreement for Netrunner, which means that Fantasy Flight’s phenomenal living card game Android: Netrunner will be coming to an abrupt end after the next big expansion, Reign and Reverie.

Paul: What?! But Fantasy Flight have only just released the revamped starter set!

Quinns: Yeah. As you’d imagine, the unexpected announcement has left the Netrunner community in a state of shock.

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Podcast #79: Law, Order and the Order of Logging

what can you do with wood, why paul left the band, what is embezzling

Excuse me, are you ready to report for jury duty? In this episode of our award-winning podcast, Matt, Quinns and Paul discuss the hellish lumber management of Lignum, the lumbering hell-management of Huns, they have a troubling conversation about Holding on: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr and have a good laugh about Band Manager: The Boardgame. After that? This show throws open the doors of the SU&SD law courts. Matt claims that Quinns threw away his copy of Pandemic Legacy Season 2, and is requesting that he pays £65 in damages. Quinns would prefer not to pay the fee and has invited a real-life lawyer, his friend Clark Burscough, onto the podcast. Will he be proven guilty, innocent, or somewhere in between? This podcast is also available as a video.

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Games News! 04/06/18

bad alchemist, calf-pumping, collegiate crabs

Paul: Hunting for games news is a little like going on safari a hundred years ago. You spend days lost in the wilderness, stalking your prey silently through the underbrush, before finally bagging the prize you have worked so hard to claim. Then you transport it back overseas, have it stuffed by a professional and mount it where you can show it off to everyone.

This week, I’ve started by bagging a particularly curious catch. Let’s look at the enormous and extraordinary City of Chaos!

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Review: War of the Ring

king of the bobbits, gothic seagulls, shut up and war of the ring

If you were looking for one game to rule them all, War of the Ring might be it. This magical game has more than 200 plastic miniatures, 40 pages of rules and a depth that most board games could only dream of.

But what will Matt and Quinns make of it? For one thing, this wouldn’t be the first time that Lord of the Rings was accused of being too long.

Click play, and let their opinions seep into your very bones.

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Podcast #78: Paul’s Good Lamp Years

putting boys up chimneys, thinking about dogs, breaking poker

Rain falling on cracked windowpanes. Once-boisterous assembly rooms, now silent. Mr. Paul stalks the halls of his once-proud lamp factory, his mind a warren of regret. How did my business venture go so wrong? Excitingly, this week on the Shut Up & Sit Down podcast Paul and Quinns discuss their experience of running 19th century factories in the ENORMOUS game of Arkwright. Also, there’s chat about why Quinns didn’t get along with the beautiful new edition of card game High Society, the pair once again discuss the superb NMBR 9, and Quinns talks about being a brave weather fairy in the game of Broom Service. Finally, the pair take their shoes off and paddle around the mailbag to answer not one, not two, but three little questions! Don’t come in, the water’s cold and full of jigsaw puzzles and binding agreements. New podcast feeds (if you’re missing episodes 71 onwards, try these): iTunes Google Play RSS for your favourite player

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Games News! 28/05/18

stride down to the beach, John McClane’s watch, microfilm and sniper rifles

Paul: Hello, everybody, and welcome to this special Bank Holiday edition of Games News! For those of you who aren’t from the UK and not familiar with the concept, bank holidays are special days when banks are allowed to close, lift themselves up out of the ground and stride down to the beach, shedding bricks and mortar as they go. Each year, thousands are squashed by buildings stomping their way toward the sea. You might call it madness, but I call it tradition.

Anyway, board games, eh? They holiday for no-one. Let’s talk about the sudden explosion of board games from video games publisher Paradox Interactive!

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Our convention schedule for 2018: Come see us!

come see how tall matt and quinns are, and how tiny paul is, he's like a jelly baby

Photo courtesy of photographer Ben Broomfield.

Quinns: Hi everybody! You know what’s better than watching Shut Up & Sit Down on a screen? Watching us live, or actually meeting us. Did that handshake linger a little longer than it should have? Were we… flirting with you? Was it just a dream… ?

In chronological order, here are all the conventions you can see us at in 2018.

Coming up just next week is the UK Games Expo, where we’re doing a live podcast on Friday, another podcast on Saturday, Paul’s doing an on-stage interview with designer Martin Wallace, and we’ll also be appearing as guests on the Sunday show of Knightmare Live, though for that you’ll have to buy tickets in advance. Also, we’re hoping to do a meet-and-greet and hopefully have merchandise for sale at our booth. Keep your eyes on our Twitter for the when and the where!

In August, we’ll be returning to Gen Con in Indianapolis. On Thursday at 10am we’ll be kicking the convention off with a live show in their grand 1200 person ballroom. It’s a big responsibility, and we’re planning on making it our best live show ever. We’ll also be the hosts of the What’s New at Asmodee Digital event, so come along to that if you want to watch us try, and fail, to be professional.

In October we will of COURSE be doing more than a dozen shows at SHUX ’18, our very own Shut Up & Sit Down convention. If you’re still on the fence about attending, don’t worry! We’ll be doing an update in the coming months about all the guests, publishers and events we’ve confirmed so far. Or you could just buy a ticket right now, because that update is gonna be awesome.

Finally, at the end of November you might be able to catch us at PAX Unplugged, depending on whether the organisers decide to again invite us as special guests. We’re hoping that they will, since we had a great time last year, but we’ll let you know on Twitter as soon as we’re invited.

Thanks, everybody!

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Review: The Mind

THE PROBLEM OF THE INTERNAL, THE PROBLEM OF THE EXTERNAL, Commander J’Pec

Paul: The Mind is one of the very best games that I have played this year. In the last twelve months. In the last twenty-four. Brace yourself, plant your feet, tense your muscles and tug that timeline back as far as you want and I think The Mind is still one of the very best games I have played between now and whenever. I have written so much about it and yet I still can’t communicate its gentle brilliance.

It’s also barely a game, not so much a skeleton of rules as a single bony finger, the sort that would be tentatively and timidly excavated, brush by brush, by archaeologists baffled by both its simplicity and its profundity. How, they might ask, could something so simple be so magnificent?

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Games News! 21/05/18

hard raisins, crab attacks, needle size, Underwater Cities

Images from MojoNation.com

Paul: This year’s Spiel Des Jahres nominees are coming at us like hail in a windstorm. That’s to say SIDEWAYS and KIND OF PAINFULLY. Like HARD RAISINS. A HARD RAISINS’ A-GONNA FALL.

Quinns: Well said, Paul! I can hardly tell you just had a big coffee.

If you’re not aware, once a year this prestigious German prize is awarded by a jury of critics for “excellence in game design”. Because the winner of the Spiel des Jahres can sell up to half a million copies, it’s basically the only prize in board gaming that matters. You can see the past winners here.

It’s now also tradition that every year Shut Up & Sit Down looks at the nominees and contort our faces into the kind of expression you might wear when checking if you’ve broken a toe.

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