GAMES NEWS! 18/03/19

snicker-snack, 9999 spinoffs, a very white box, a sexy rash
Matt: Hot on the tracks of the Shut Up & Sit Down News Train, I am hurtling towards Exciting Board Game Information at a speed of ninety miles-per-hour, after briefly stopping at East Croydon Station.

As those of you who caught our unexpectedly tense stream of The Estates last week will know, today we’re about to start work with Kylie Wroe - our first intern of 2019! You’ll be reading and hearing bits from her in the future, but today you’re still lumped with Little Lees and Daddy Quinns, who will later be meeting to make a dent in our *teetering* stack of review copies.

Mr Quintin: please OPEN THE NEWS DOORS!

SU&SD Play… Twilight Imperium!

a big baldy cult, one bad bug, and a chocolate temptation
Hey, remember when we did a nine hour stream of Twilight Imperium with No Pun Included? After much grinding of CPUs and gnashing of bandwidth, we've just uploaded an HD recording to YouTube.

Above you'll find part 1 (or should that be Act 1?), part 2 is right here, and part 3, the finale, can be found here.

Huge thanks to Chris and Anni for their herculean efforts behind the desk that day. If you're at all into video games then be sure to check out their amazing video game documentary series, People Make Games.

Enjoy, everybody!

Card Games That Don’t Suck: Oh Hell

also known as..., blob, bust, burps, bap, billionaire's biscuits
For the third instalment of Card Games that Don't Suck, Quinns has dug up a game that's fun even if you don't gamble. That's right, everybody! Those card game scientists finally cracked it.

Oh Hell is a trick-taking game for 3-7 players that might be the ultimate idle time waster. It's a short, simple game that somehow expands to fill a whole hour, like a wad of dough rising in the oven of your minds.

On March 14th We’re Streaming The Estates!

not since primary school have coloured blocks been so fraught
Quinns: Hey everybody! Just a heads-up that on Thursday the 14th we'll be streaming one or two games of The Estates, a simple yet legendarily cruel auction game of (a) trying to work with your friends to construct just two short streets, (b) failing, and (c) fleeing the country with whatever money you managed to embezzle.

We talked a bit about this game back on podcast #84 and while we decided that it had a couple of problems that made it unsuitable for review, we realised it would be a perfect thing to stream. And as an added bonus, Matt and I will be joined on the stream by our very first intern, Ms. Kylie Wroe! Talk about one heck of a first day at work...

So, if you'd like to join us as we make each other swear, sweat and pray the mayor doesn't visit, be sure to click Follow on our Twitch page to get an email when we kick things off. But as always, don't worry if you can't make it on the day. The stream will be available as a Twitch video on demand for 60 days after the stream, and we'll be uploading it to YouTube after that.

Cheers!

GAMES NEWS! 11/03/19

smitten by crime, a ghost in a box, a game on a keyring, creamy-white
Matt: Good afternoon, newshunters! Steady thy quiver; wiggle thine swords - new news is blooming in the wildlands just behind you, if you stay very still I’ll shoot over your shoulder and kill a bit of great news that we can have for dinner.

Our top story this week is that I have just returned from a brief holiday and eaten a substantial quantity of tiny fruity meringues. I have never been so ready to be inundated with information about upcoming board games - Quintin, please tell me about a spooky team game, immediately.

Quinns: Yes sir!

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!

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 on our forum.

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.

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!

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!