Monikers - Shut Up & Sit Down

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.

Quinns: If you own the party game Monikers, then this is an emergency! There are just 24 hours left to back our Serious Nonsense Box on Kickstarter. Packing a whopping 330 new cards, all of them hewn from tiny fragments of our funny bones, it’s a massive expansion and we’re tremendously proud of it.

But guess what? If you don’t own Monikers, the good news is that the Serious Nonsense Box is a completely standalone game. The bad news is, that makes this an emergency for you as well.

There’s no time to waste! Well, actually, there are about 22 hours to waste. But absolutely no more than that.

Thanks so much, everybody.

June 11, 2019 Specials

Monikers: Serious Nonsense, Monikers, Moniker

The Serious Nonsense Box is now available to buy online!

Fans of dumb jokes in a box, rejoice! The Monikers Serious Nonsense Box is on Kickstarter right now, offering 320 brand new cards for Monikers, each lovingly written by SU&SD and friends of the show. Even if you don’t want to buy it, it’s probably worth watching my ridiculous video to observe a man losing his sanity via greenscreen.

For those unaware, Monikers is the slick, boxed implementation of the folk party game more commonly known as fishbowl, celebrity, or the hat game. We reviewed it back in 2015, and eagle-brained readers will recall that in 2017 we created a small-box expansion titled “The Nonsense Box” (and since then, we’ve been careful not to mention Monikers in our editorial without caveating our involvement with the designers).

Back then, we had a lot of fun being deeply silly with our first foray into party game design, but this time we’ve really stepped up our game: taking onboard critical feedback, thinking carefully about the flow of the game, and squeezing in a higher density of solid jokes without getting in the way of what makes Monikers great.

If you’ll allow us a moment of heart on sleeve-ism, we honestly didn’t anticipate that so many people would have such a good time with the original Nonsense Box. Feedback we’ve had over the past two years both humbled us, and stuck a rocket to our bottom when designing the new box – it felt vital to us to reflect that love back, and ensure that this triple-sized Kickstarter sequel was the absolute *best* that it could possibly be. We love it, and we hope you do too.

Thanks everybody!

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!

Quinns: Last week we wrote the news in a cider pub, tapping away at our keyboards to the merry belching of a few old men. Today, we thought we’d write the news in a fashionable local coffee shop.

Paul: This is a disaster. Why can’t people put their mugs into the saucers gently. Why are they all bashing them together like toddlers.

Quinns: There are at least two women within ten feet of me who think they’re Carrie Bradshaw. I’m friends with a lot of writers and none of them look this stylish or pleased with themselves as they write. They all put their hair up and enter a kind of sticky and hypnotised state.

Paul: I did like that yappy animal that was behind you though. The one that looked like a Normal Dog that a level 5 wizard had cast Reduce Dog on.

Quinns: I don’t want to ever come back here. Why would anyone come here instead of sitting snug in the shadowy confines of a quiet pub. I feel like I’m in an iPhone advert.

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!

Quinns: Ladies, gentlemen, non-binary folks, and anyone else who’s left a comment over the last six years along the lines of “ARRRGH STOP MAKING ME SPEND MONEY.” Today, SU&SD amends for its capitalist crimes.

We talk a lot on this site about how we want board games to be “for everyone”, but to an awful lot of people the games we recommend are prohibitively expensive. That said, putting together an amazing board game collection can be cheap. Below, we’ve assembled a list of the very best games that could collectively cost you less than ten bucks, depending on your situation.

This isn’t some unsatisfying sampler platter. What lurks below is a moveable feast of some of the greatest games ever made. Were you to gather all of these games, I’d prefer your collection to ones I’ve seen costing $1000.

If you approve of this feature, please do share it far and wide! It represents a lot of work for both Team SU&SD and our donors, who we bothered about cheap games we might have missed (special thanks to subscribers Amanda and Jeff, who were especially great).

Let’s get started.

Quinns: Hey everybody! With just seven days left on our Kickstarter for the Monikers Nonsense Box – a standalone expansion for Monikers written entirely by SU&SD staff – all backers now get a free gift!

Basically we reached 2,500 backers and decided we’d like to improve the product you guys were getting. Think of it as a kind of thank you for helping us to stretch past our original goal. We’re calling this addition a “Girth Objective” and it’s my guess that by 2020 every Kickstarter will have one.

As of this week every backer of the Nonsense Box Kickstarter will get a free pack of Hopelessly Stupid Fourth Round Cards. You see, Monikers is a game that starts off very pedestrian in round 1 and becomes marginally more interesting in round 2 before going completely insane in round 3. But as old Monikers pros will tell you, you can keep playing and the game gets dumber and funnier with every additional round. “Charades but under a bedsheet” has to be played to be believed.

We have a tenative list already drawn up, but we’re well aware that you guys are often funnier and smarter than us in our comment threads. If you have an idea for a fourth round for Monikers, and would like to see it on a card with your name on it and a professional illustration, please leave a comment below!

Thanks so much, everyone. <3

Quinns: Everybody, we’ve got a Kickstarter we’d like to point you towards! Do you all remember Monikers, the effortlessly funny and accessible party game? How would you like an expansion for it created ENTIRELY by the cast of Shut Up & Sit Down?

Ooh, yes! The Shut Up & Sit Down Nonsense Box (this is the link you click on) (click it!) is no less than 112 cards that were dreamed up and playtested by… us! We didn’t get the memo that the card descriptions were only supposed to be informative, so we made those really funny too. Oops.

Don’t have the Monikers base game? Not a problem. The Nonsense Box is a standalone game, or you can chuck the base game onto your pledge as an add-on.

A micro-FAQ follows, after the jump!

[Following on from our expedition into Quinns’ board game collection and the polite visit to Paul’s, it’s now Matt’s turn. Enjoy, everybody!]

Matt: Contrary to popular belief, I am not a man of infinite luxury. Paul has an entire cupboard just for games – Quintin has a cavernous loft to explore. Many have climbed that ladder and never been seen alive again, fading away to become a new addition to the dark and dusty collage of cardboard and bones. Basically those boys have space to play with. I however, have a shelf.

But it’s a big shelf! Oh my. There’s plenty of room in the rest of my flat, but my wife is a bit of a cheery dictator when it comes to interior design – so the sins of the husband must be tidied away. It’s occasionally annoying, but it does mean I get to live in a genuinely beautiful, tidy place? Swings and roundabouts, life is compromise.

SU&SD’s Christmas Gift Guide 2022

It’s the Final 24 Hours on our second Monikers Kickstarter!

Announcing the second SU&SD Monikers Kickstarter!

15 Great Games to Fill Your Table This Christmas

Games News! 26/06/18

Our Holiday Gift Guide, 2017!

How to build an amazing board game collection for $10!

Update: Our Nonsense Box Kickstarter Just Got Sexier!

Announcing the SU&SD Expansion for Monikers!

Feature: A Day in the Life of Matt’s Game Collection!

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