Top 10 Games to Play with Your Family This Christmas

Matt: Hello! My name is Matt from Shut Up & Sit Down, and maybe you want to play a game with your family in the not too distant future.

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered!

Today we’re going to go through a bunch of games, most of which are available almost all of the time, because we appreciate it’s a pain in the *** when we say “hey, we love these games” and then you go on the internet and they’ve all gone.

Not only that, we are going to be giving you two options for each of our suggestions – we’re going to go with like “Yes! This is a great suggestion, everyone will love this. You cannot go wrong.” And we’re also going to give you a side suggestion for each game that’s a dash more spicy! And what do we mean by that? The second options will be the sort of thing where you start playing with your dad and then halfway through he says “I don’t understand the rules. I don’t like this. I want to go home.” “Dad, you can’t go home. This is your home. We’ve talked about this. And secondly, I love you, but gosh if you don’t understand how the game works just tell us before we get to the end?”

We got a big stack of games here and we’ve categorized them into all the different types of games that you might want to play. So feel free to just watch it all and pick a favorite, or scrub and jump around like an absolute maniac.

Read more

Read More

SU&SD’s Christmas Gift Guide 2022

Matt: Hello! Merry Christmas slash Holidays slash December internet folks and gentle folks!

Today we’ve got a little treat for you!

It’s our wrap-up of Christmas gifts that you might consider buying for people in your life, of the board game variety. We’ve got a whole bunch of different categories here, and the whole team giving their recommendations of the things that they think are going to be absolutely cracking gifts.

Without further ado, “games that you’ll play with a family” – maybe your family, maybe not. It’s not for us to judge.

Read More

Quinns vs. Tom Vasel: Who is more wrong?

Quinns: Morning everybody! We can’t offer you a new video this week, but we can offer you something significantly more stupid.

This week BoardGameGeek user ThunderCat23 sent me quite the gift! ThunderCat23 wanted to chart the BGG game ratings of Tom Vasel, pater familias of popular board game content network The Dice Tower, against the ratings of the Dice Tower’s Mike Dilisio.

Entirely by accident, ThunderCat23 ended up charting Tom’s BGG ratings against my BGG ratings. Not wanting to waste their work, they then sent me this data, letting me write an article listing all the games Tom and I disagree on the most.

Strap in, folks! The opinions are gonna fly hard and fast. Someone could lose an arm.

Read more

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

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.

Read More

15 Great Games to Fill Your Table This Christmas

What are the very best card and board games to play with coworkers and family this holiday? Games that are actually FUN – that you could bring to a party as a great gift for cheap, or tuck in the stocking for Christmas Eve?

Quinns will be writing a piece next week about games more suited to those who already love the hobby, but as part of our ongoing mission to convince the world that board games are great, we wanted to put together an easy resource for the question we seem to get almost all the time: “What game should I buy to play with my family?”

If you’ve been linked to this by someone else who loves board games, hello! We’ve put this list together as both a video and a written list. Enjoy!

Matt: Greetings Holiday Humans, it’s time to mildly panic as you realise that family will soon descend upon you like a flock of seagulls to a discarded ice-cream. Rather than trying to explain your job to relatives to the point that you might have a mental breakdown, we’d recommend playing board games instead.

These are the 15 best big-family games: all play with at least 6 people, and most can handle 8. In no particular order, let’s go!

Read More

Review: Cockroach Poker Royal

As our team continues playtesting and preparing for the first of the year’s Big Reviews, here’s a cheeky appetiser! While Quinns was on holiday this month he filmed a couple of lightweight reviews on his favourite travel games, starting with the ever-entertaining Cockroach Poker.

(Yes, we published an article about Cockroach Poker before, but in 2018 our written articles reach a fraction of the audience that our video reviews do. In other words, if a game’s absolutely awesome then us writing about it is basically the worst thing that could happen to it, so going forward you can expect us to occasionally re-visit a classic game in video format.)

(And no, you’re not wrong, Quinns mentions Galaxy Trucker in this video but forgot to film that bit of the script. His waterlogged English brain was probably struggling with all that sunshine.)

Read More

Our Holiday Gift Guide, 2017!

Quinns: Christmas is almost upon us, everyone! That sweet stretch of the calendar where board games take center stage, or at the very least share the stage with potatoes and Jesus Christ.

Are you thinking about buying a new game to play with your relatives? Or are you wondering which game to buy for the stalwart board game collector in your life?

Either way, we’ve got you covered with the below holiday game guide. Enjoy, everyone!

Read More

SU&SD’s Top 50 Games Ever, 2015! The Also-rans

Panamax

Paul: Aha! Did you think we were done? Did you think it was all over? The sad truth is that, in assembling our gigantic Top 50 list, so many games don’t quite make the cut. We shift them up and down. We debate their inclusion. We resign ourselves to seeing favourites fail to break the Top 50 by the tiniest of margins. That’s how it is, though. You stick in a Codenames and the whole list shifts. Someone has to be number 51.

All the games that follow are good games. We don’t want you think we’ve lost our love for them because they weren’t featured last week. These are our Honourable Mentions.

Read More

Review: Cockroach Poker Royal

Review: Cockroach Poker Royal

Quinns: Catch Team SU&SD at our most tired and soul-blasted, when we’re done walking the halls of a giant convention, and there’s a single game we’ll always still be able to play. It’s Skull.

It’s the arsenic-laced wafer thin mint of board gaming, and there’s always room for its lies and laughter. The one thing more impressive than Asmodee daring to call Skull “the very quintessence of bluffing” is that actually, I don’t think they’re wrong.

Two months ago I was in a pub with a friend who I trust completely. “If you like Skull,” he said, “Then write this down. ‘Cockroach Poker’. Best £10 you’ll ever spend.”

Today I’m the proud owner of one “Cockroach Poker Royal”, the en-complicated 2012 sequel to 2004’s Cockroach Poker. And I’ll tell you what! It’s not just a great game of lying to your friends. It’s a great game of lying with your friends.

Read More

Cockroach Poker Royal

Cockroach Poker Royal

As in its parent game Kakerlakenpoker, Kakerlakenpoker Royal has nothing to do with poker – except that the game is all about bluffing, but with cards showing cockroaches, rats and stink bugs instead of queens, 10s and aces. To set up the game, shuffle the deck and deal the cards out to players. On a turn, a player takes one card from his hand, lays it face down on the table, slides it to a player of his choice, and declares a type of critter, e.g., “Stink bug”. The player receiving the card either:

Accepts the card, says either “true” or “false”, then reveals the card. If this player is wrong in her claim, she keeps the card on the table in front of her face up; if she is right, the player who gave her the card places it face up before him.

Or passes the card to another player, peeking at it first, then keeping it face-down and either saying the original type of critter or saying a new type. This new player again has the choice of accepting the card or passing it, unless the card has already been seen by all other players in which case the player must accept it and make a true/false claim.

The game ends when a player has no cards to pass on his turn or when a player has four cards of the same critter on the table in front of him. In either case, this player loses and everyone else wins.

To this, Kakerlakenpoker Royal adds new rules and new nasty “royal” critters to create more options for players during the game.

Read More