Shut Up & Sit Down

Space Lions: The Story of Twilight Imperium

sexy turtles, a deadly broom-gun, a glass birthing canal, death by box

We’ve come a long way, baby!

Six years ago SU&SD published a review of the grand, weird game of Twilight Imperium 3rd edition. Today, we present a first for the board game industry. Please enjoy our amateur attempt at a documentary on the history of the game – which is really the history of Fantasy Flight Games – and the development of the new, shiny, 4th edition. Huge thanks to our donors, without whom this project (which we started work on back in 2015!) would never, ever have been possible.

As you buckle your seatbelt for this ride through time and outer space, please bear in mind that the doc doesn’t cover the nitty-gritty of game mechanics that have changed from 3rd to 4th edition. We’ll be covering that in our forthcoming review of Twilight Imperium 4th ed, which Quinns will be creating since he had almost no involvement in the doc.

Instead, we tried to make the documentary of broader interest, so please consider sharing it with board game-curious friends. Or just tell your mum it’s Netflix? That might work.

Enjoy, everybody!

Announcing The Metagame: Game Away

a boomerang made of jesus, hot dog-based misadventures, hit the club

Quinns: Hi everyone! Remember how 7 months ago we did a Kickstarter for an expansion for Monikers written by the SU&SD team? Since everyone seemed to love that and the finished product is now floating its way towards backers at a blistering 20 knots, when we were asked if we’d like to do that again, we said “Yes.”

The Metagame: The Game: The Games Expansion: Game Away is our expansion for The Metagame, which I awarded the SU&SD Recommends seal back in 2015. In a nutshell, The Metagame is ten funny, accessible games in a beautiful box, and it’s like nothing else in your collection.

Questions after the jump!

Podcast #65: Every Dog Has His Donner

Flip Flip Pancake, Urine Tokens, A Pyre of Praise, What Is Dogs

Drop everything! Our 65th ever podcast is live, Paul is talking about A Dog’s Life and Quinns is on about something called Yummy Yummy Pancake. These are the releases you’ve been waiting for, right? …No? Not to worry. We’ve also got Quinns’ exclusive thoughts on the new Netrunner core set and Paul’s advance review of Unearth, as well as chatter about Legend of the Five Rings, Donner Dinner Party and Cities of Splendor. Also, Quinns has finally played the game that Paul called Uwe Rosenberg’s greatest work ever, A Feast for Odin. Will the pair agree, or will this be Caverna all over again? Enjoy, everybody!

67 Comments

Games News! 11/09/2017

a bunch of winkers, getting digital wood, bad rodney, seafaring spuds

Paul: It was a case of bad timing when Z-Man Games announced Pandemic: Rising Tide, as their scheduling couldn’t possibly have foreseen simultaneously flooding in eastern Texas and eastern India, and they very quickly issued an apology. That could’ve been the end of it, but Z-Man are also donating five dollars from every pre-order to Hurricane Harvey relief efforts.

It’s a difficult time for a lot of people in the Caribbean and the Gulf Coast right now. Our thoughts are also with the Dice Tower team members who have been forced to evacuate their homes. We hope they can return to enjoying the board games we all love very soon.

149 Comments

Review: Legend of the Five Rings

Quinns: Phew! I birthed two of the year’s toughest reviews last week, but there’s no rest for the wicked. Today we’ve got some coverage that a lot of people have been asking for.

Remember when Fantasy Flight Games bought the rights to 1996 collectible card game Netrunner and released a new edition that took over my life? Well, Legend of the Five Rings (henceforth “L5R”) is them doing that again. This was originally a 1995 card game, but any week now shops will receive FFG’s beautimus new edition using the Living Card Game business model of releasing fixed expansions rather than randomised boosters. This makes it cheap compared to most collectable card games, albeit still expensive compared to board games.

In other words, we could have a hit on our hands. Have Fantasy Flight folded the original game’s steel into a captivating card katana?

Let’s find out.

352 Comments

Games News! 04/09/2017

wok star, bagged alpacas, a tile-laying tile layer, one very angry passenger

Paul: Good News to you, my friends. Or, as we say here in Canada, News Be With You. I’m writing this Games News from atop a rock on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, watching the sun plunge past the horizon, thinking about the final touches we’re putting to SHUX. I’m already considering how to make next year bigger, better and cheaper, so it’s all that I can do to pull my head out of all this and tell you about Fantasy Flight’s BATTLE FOR ROKUGAN.

Quinns: It’s time to have a Really Honorable War.

67 Comments

Review: First Martians

plodding & prodding, it's a crane not a gun, every flavour of lozenge

OH MY GOODNESS! It’s time for a fantastically exciting box. First Martians: Adventures on the Red Planet is a game of surviving as the very first colonists on the Solar Satsuma, and keeping your wits about you as your home crumbles like a dunked biscuit.

It’s also the sequel to 2012 release Robinson Crusoe, which Quinns didn’t get on with very well. What’s changed in five years? A lot, we can tell you.

RPG Review: Blades in the Dark

a georgian george clooney, a ghost whisperer, word-confetti

Quinns: Remember last month when we reviewed Tales from the Loop, the charming sci-fi RPG of bicycles, bottle rockets and 1980s theme songs? Today we’re going to look at the other new role-playing game that’s been turning heads among my friends, and we’re going as villainous as Tales from the Loop was innocent.

Blades in the Dark is a game by John Harper, who you might remember from Cynthia’s review of superb free RPG Lady Blackbird. But while that game was an improbable 15 pages, Blades is 336 pages. By comparison, it’s his opus.

Which is very good news if (like me) you’re a fan of Scott Lynch’s Locke Lamora books or the heist genre in general, because Blades is a game of playing regency-era criminals. Oh, yes. This is a scoundrel simulator, and whether you want to play a crew of classy vice dealers, some down-and-dirty brawlers, or even a worrisome cult is simply the first of one million entertaining decisions that you’ll be making.

Blades in the Dark also offers a vast, seductive backdrop to your escapades: The haunted city of Doskvol, which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever escaped into gloompunk videogames like Thief, Dishonored, Sunless Sea or Fallen London.

This is going to be a long review, and not just because this is a huge book. You see, not only is Blades the most fun that my friends and I have ever had playing an RPG, it’s also like nothing I’ve ever played.

157 Comments

Games News! 28/08/2017

sky bastards, staying in vegas, cardboard fishes, marble madness

Paul: The Games News comes at you live today from the Shut Up & Sit Down jacuzzi. We always thought it would be cool to have one, so we splashed out but didn’t actually think about where it would go or how we were going to install it. So now we’re just sat in an empty jacuzzi. In our swimming trunks. With no water and no bubbles.

Still, there’s a new Uwe Rosenberg game coming, hooray! Let’s all hail Nusfjord, a game of fishing and worker placement.

Quinns: Hooray! That said, we made this our top story without thinking about how we were going to illustrate it. So up there is just a picture of the real-life town of Nusfjord.

Paul: This isn’t our finest hour, is it?

Quinns: Quick, let’s distract them with the box!

73 Comments

A Re-Review? Arkham Horror: The Card Game

a surprise pterodactyl, vomiting into a trumpet, cereal box fiction

Quinns: So, we’re seven months on from when Matt and I first peeled the delicate outer membrane from the otherworldly Arkham Horror: The Card Game (otherwise known as ‘shrink-wrap’). We were stunned at how much fun we had. After years of rolling our eyes at Fantasy Flight’s Lovecraft products, we found that inside this small, unassuming box was an absolutely electric experience. I was as surprised as anyone when I announced that it was my favourite game of 2016.

Now, you’ll remember that while you can go back and play this game’s scenarios on “Hard” and “Expert” modes, most of the appeal is in the first playthrough, making each new expansion pack feel like a long-awaited episode of a favourite TV show. You call your friends over, microwave some popcorn, put the popcorn in the bin so nobody can get grease on the cards and sit down to see what happens to your characters (and their decks!) next.

Which begs a question. Now that the first full campaign has been published (seven expansions that make up The Dunwich Legacy), how’s this TV show doing?

And I think most players would answer you the same way. A small laugh, a faraway look, and then they’d say “Oh, man. It’s good. And… weird.”

141 Comments

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