Thanks for stopping by the Shut Up & Sit Down Game Lounge! We’re so happy you’re here!
What Is Shut Up & Sit Down?
Shut Up & Sit Down is the world’s best board game review show! We’re trying to find the very best table games out there and show them to a wider audience – highlighting the exciting designs that continually surprise us year-on-year with naught but cardboard, wood, and plastic. “Board games have come a long way since ‘Pac-Man: The Board Game (1982)”! Take a look at our YouTube channel or website if you want to see what’s exciting in board games right now.
What Is The Shut Up & Sit Down GDC Game Lounge?
Want to see some of those games in action, right now?! The Shut Up & Sit Down GDC Game Lounge or SU&SDGDCGL (for ease) is a safe space to play a bunch of interesting, inspiring, and entertaining table games from the past few years. We’ve hand-picked a selection of cracking boxes that can be played at a wide range of player counts – just find a game that appeals to you and get playing! We’ve a gaggle of friendly folks on hand to guide you towards the right game for you, to teach the rules, and to answer any questions you might have whilst playing. Have fun!
Why Did We Choose These Games?
In our selection process, we looked for a bunch of titles that would appeal to a range of people who are interested in plumbing the board game space for design inspiration. We’ve got a broad spectrum of ideas on show – everything from sleek and simple puzzles to highly thematic strategy games. We also chose these games because we think they’re fun, engaging ways to meet new people or bond with the ones you’ve already met! Finally, we considered practical factors like the amount of time you might have to play, how many of you there are, and what complexity level you might be comfortable with.
Wilmot’s Warehouse: Where can I get it?
Direct from Publisher
Amazon.com
Rain City Games (Canada)
Wilmot’s Warehouse is currently in the process of being localised in a variety of countries. Keep an eye out for it at your friendly local game store soon!
Games at the SU&SD Game Lounge for 2025
Wilmot’s Warehouse
Plays: 2-6
- ‘Try to remember the exact locations of thirty five individual abstract objects’ does not seem like a fun way to spend around thirty minutes of your precious human lifespan. Thing is, Wilmot’s Warehouse is a weird little magic trick that turns the much-maligned mechanics of the ‘Memory Game’ on their head; corralling its players towards telling daft, playful, and organic stories about the colours and shapes they’re scrambling to remember. It’s a blast. I promise you at least one (or more!) human chuckles.
Earthborne Rangers
Plays: 1-4
- Earthborne Rangers is the new gold standard in ‘thematic’ boardgaming. Set in an overgrown future, players trek through undulating landscapes pitted with flora and fauna both peaceful and hostile. It’s an adventure game, right? We’ve all played those before… right?
The joy of Earthborne Rangers is how it brazenly disassembles genre expectations; sessions are rambles that last as long as the players feel they should, locations are approached in a wandering order that rejects strict narrative arcs, stakes vary wildly from the world-endingly huge to microscopic. It’s all tied together with a genius ‘ecosystem’ of cards and keywords that builds a lived world on your kitchen table – with all manner of creatures, terrain, and equipment organically interacting in unexpected and evocative ways.
Arcs
Plays: 2-4
- Of all the games released in 2024, Arcs might well be the most divisive. Tearing apart the storied ‘space game’ archetype, Arcs plays fast, loose, and mean. Players wrestle to control their forces using a trick-taking-inspired card system that’s brutally restrictive, but deeply rewarding to quick-thinking players. It’s a tactical game, through-and-through, with desperate raids and last-minute pivots keeping proceedings tense and dramatic. It’s a box that’s bubbling with fresh ideas, and an unmissable title for anyone interested in where the future of tabletop design is headed.
Leviathan Wilds
Plays: 1-4
- Monster Hunter by way of Jusant, Leviathan Wilds is a co-operative boss-battler replete with charms. Players take the role of climbers tasked with scaling the titular Leviathans, and mining corrupting crystals from their slippery backs; all whilst avoiding falling debris, stray limbs, and plummeting hundreds of meters directly towards the ground. The actual mechanics here are simple enough, but beautifully upholstered. The decks that players draw from represent their grip, and running out of cards spells a swift downward tumble – but climbers can freely help each other out, at any time, by burning cards from their already compact hands! When to help and when to hold is a crucial question asked of the team every single round – complicated by unpredictable monsters and the slim spots of refuge and respite pitted across the creatures themselves.
Spectral
Plays: 2-5
- Welcome to Spook City U.S.A! Population 2-5 players. Spectral has a gang of intrepid explorers spelunking through a haunted house to find gems – using the powers of deduction to correctly locate the biggest bounties around. However – complicating the search are curses that render those very same bounties deadly, and therefore, deeply unprofitable. What follows is a really intriguing game of deduction, bidding, and bluffing – as our amateur sleuths puzzle out which rooms will delight and which rooms will doom. Lovely stuff.
Slay The Spire
Plays: 1-4
- It’s Slay The Spire, but a boardgame. Weird, right? Slay the Spire was kind of a boardgame already, but on the ‘video computer’. Why would I want to turn my 1s and 0s into cardboard and plastic? The reason is simply the fabulous design work that’s gone into the translation from one medium to another; not just a simple “port”, but a top-down reworking of Slay the Spire’s familiar systems into a game that feels the same despite so much having changed. It’s also, as an added bonus, entirely co-operative! There’s a simple joy of having your friends able to hop into a previously solitary experience with you; but the real spice is seeing how these familiar characters interact. The Ironclad covering the block needs of you entire party whilst The Silent sprays daggers from the shadows – The Watcher flitting between danger and safety as a Defect dishes damage over time. It’s quite something.
Compile
Plays: 2
- Sleek, satisfying, and simple. Compile takes the ‘lane battler’ format and abstracts it into a sprawling cyberpunk infinite – with players taking control of concepts rather than something so trivial as people, or places. Fight for control by playing more powerful cards than your opponent, but try to avoid falling prey to spiteful traps and nasty surprises. It’s a simple setup, but executed cleanly across a slim deck and a svelte box.
The Gang
Plays: 3-6
- Taking Poker in a very unusual direction, The Gang takes the world’s favourite way to lose money and bends it into a co-operative game. The table is trying to guess the relative strength of everyone’s hands using incredibly limited communication, with almost zero room for error. What follows is a game that texturally is poker, but inverted into something far friendlier, with options to scale the difficulty of the puzzle until your brain falls out of your eyes.
Joyride: Survival of the Fastest
Plays: 2-4
- Racing games are plentiful within modern boardgaming, but none hit quite the same spot as Joyride: Survival of the Fastest. It leans far more into the messy thrills of the demolition derby than its contemporaries; lumbering cars commanding huge amounts of space on the board as they slide around corners and crunch into one another. It’s tremendously daft to play, yet secretly peppered with smart design under the hood. Well worth a spin.
Power Vacuum
Plays: 1-5
- Mash up ‘The Death of Stalin’ with ‘The Brave Little Toaster’ and you’ve got yourself ‘The Brave Little Stalin’. What else did you expect?
Okay, you’ve also got Power Vacuum, I guess? Players pilot sentient household appliances vying for control after the passing of ‘Supreme Hoover’ – jostling for position in the cabinet through uneasy alliances and cutthroat bargaining. All this theme is crammed into an innovative and unusual trick-taking game, bedecked in whimsical illustration and a gorgeous colour palette.
Kelp
Plays: 2
- We think this game should be called ‘Two Fin Eight Leg Deathmatch: It’s Better Wetter’, but the designers stopped responding to our emails. Kelp: Shark vs Octopus does what it says on the tin – one of you plays as a shark (rolling dice, swimming around) and the other, an octopus (playing cards, shifting spaces). It’s a tense, asymmetric game stuffed to the gills with smart ideas, perfect for a one-two-punch of trying out both sides.
Fishing
Plays: 3-5
- Okay, it looks absolutely terrible, but we promise you that this one is worth your time. Yet another weirdo entry into boardgames’ growing fascination with trick takers, Fishing is a simultaneous trick taker and deck builder. Cards won each hand are added into a ‘deck’ that the winning player will later draw from, with those falling behind getting a few treats from a deck of ‘better’ cards to fill out their mitts. There’s a truly unusual cadence to this one – with players trying to win the right cards in order to spin up momentum and avoid clogging their deck with rubbish.
Daybreak
Plays: 1-4
- “The designer of Pandemic takes on climate change” is a compelling pitch, and Daybreak absolutely sticks the landing. Each player takes control of a world power trying to simultaneously meet energy demands and reduce their carbon footprint – deploying a range of time-tested and cutting-edge technologies to do so. Co-operating effectively requires each player to manage their personal needs in tandem with those of the global community, but tip the scales too far in one direction, and failure may come knocking. Publishers CMYK have sprinkled their usual panache across this one – a striking box combined with more environmentally conscious production values that ties everything neatly together.
Sky Team
Plays: 2
- An absolute joy. Sky Team asks two players to land a plane together without so much as a whisper of communication. Roll dice secretly behind your screen, and take turns to place them out across the control panel of the craft; hoping to heaven that your co-pilot will intuit intention from where you’ve placed what.
With the landing gear out, our speed decreased, the runway clear, and the plane perfectly level, you’re going to safely land – with anything but a squeaky-clean finish being best not to think about. Thing is, that initial safe landing isn’t so hard to achieve – and so Sky Team gradually ratchets up the difficulty with a series of modular expansions that chuck more systems into the mix. A few scenarios deep and you’ll find yourself in a plane that’s running out of fuel whilst it dodges bad weather and navigates fluctuating wind speeds – will you be able to land it in time? You haven’t even started to train the intern yet!
Dro Polter
Plays: 2-5
- It’s daft. It’s so daft. It’s the daftest game we could reasonably find. But it’s so good.
Dro Polter has a table of grown adults fumbling a tiny wooden biscuit through their fingers. It has people yelling in agony as the single point they’ve worked so hard to obtain pops out from a clammy palm. It’s fast nonsense. Give it a whirl.
Ito
Plays: 2-8
- Put everything ever onto a scale of 0 to 100. Ito is a very simple game that encourages spirited conversation – a malleable design where the game gets out of the way so that you can yell about what the best form of structural starch is. Bread! It’s always bread!
Robotrick
Plays: 3
- “Are You Smarter Than A Cardboard Robot?”. Another left-field tricktaking game, RoboTrick inverts Bridge to cast the role of ‘The Dummy’ into a spiteful new light. Three players (and only three players) compete to win tricks against a robot player with all of their cards spelled out for the round – with a ‘brain’ determining which cards it’ll dispense from its mitts every trick. Winning against the robot nets you positive points, but losing against the robot nets everyone negatives. Delightfully cruel.