SU&SD
Hello everybody. Today we’ve got an announcement about this October’s SHUX, the Shut Up & Sit Down convention. To state the obvious, hosting an event where thousands of people from all over the world can meet and sit in close proximity is no longer “a great idea”.
If you were planning on attending SHUX in 2020, or even 2021, here’s everything you need to know. And if you weren’t planning on that, scroll down to the next image on this post for a fun surprise!
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!
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!
Matt: Morning Quinns! How was your weeken–
Quinns: Matt I watched SO MUCH of The Expanse. I was thinking we could write the whole Games News in Belter Creole.
Matt: OK. I hear you, but I worry that might make it a bit hard to read. How about you write it while crossplaying as Chrisjen Avasarala?
Quinns: You’ve got yourself a deal, beltalowda. You cover the first story, I’ll see what earrings my wife has.
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Matt: Good morning, Quintin! I awaken from a vivid dream in which the twist at the end of Return of the Jedi was that the whole thing was entirely being imagined by a man called Ryan who worked in Market Research, who was having a fantasy about what it might be like to be a smuggler called “Han Solo”.
And now – as if by space magic – I’m being thrown straight back into Star Wars again. Another game in the genre of Firefly, Merchant of Venus, or Xia: Legends of a Drift System – Star Wars: Outer Rim sees players competing to be the cream of the galaxy’s scum and villainy. Flying around space, smuggling goods, hiring recognisable crew members and reasonably frequently rolling some dice.
Quinns: Let us apply Occam’s Razor. Is the simplest possible explanation here that you, Matt Lees, created this game in a dream?
Matt: Yes
Quinns: How was your weekend, Matt? I got in some of our first playtests of Blood on the Clocktower. Adopting the role of a devious moderator, I cast a room full of players into a cutthroat logic puzzle that had them doubting not just their friends, but themselves. As I stalked back and forth with my grimoire that held all of the game’s secrets, men screamed, women died, and the forces of evil proliferated in the shadows.
Matt: I had IBS
Quinns: Oh no
Matt: Good MORNING Shut Up & Sit Down Shupuppers. That’s my new name for anyone reading the news right now – you can’t do anything about it, I’ve sent the stickers to print. It’s a bright and bracing day in London and I am positively brimming with vigor and vizz – partially because of a chilly morning bike ride, but mostly because of the weekend efforts of everyone involved in Hbomberguy’s charity stream. Raising almost $350,000 for the UK trans support charity Mermaids – in response to other mainstream funding being cancelled after a campaign of organised spite – this colossal achievement had me grinning all weekend at the sheer joy of what now seems possible. A US Congresswoman dropping in on a Donkey Kong 64 stream is exactly the tenor of madness that I get out of bed for – but the whole event has flicked some sort of switch in my head, and I now feel so much better about reality in general. So if you were involved in that in any way – thank you! Quinns: Wow! I just spent the weekend making some falafels.
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Matt: It’s a snappy news roundup this week, as Quinns and I are both prepping and packing for a journey to Philadelphia’s PAX Unplugged! And once again we’re stuck with an impossible question- how many games do you bring to a gaming convention?
Quinns: URGH. Bring too many and there’s no room in your bag for more games, bring too few I am reduced to a grumpy banshee, stalking the halls of my hotel and wondering why I have naught to plaaaay!!
Matt: One of the games I’m definitely bringing is Keyforge, which Quinns and I are currently playtesting for our big, end-of-year blowout review.
And actually, that game made headlines this month…
Quinns: Hello all! Big news today. With Paul moving on to pastures new, we’re beginning the search for new team members. Today, we’re excited to announce a new, paid, part-time internship.
Throughout 2019, SU&SD will be offering a series of 3 month positions open to anyone in the UK interested in working with us, getting in front of our audience and learning everything that we can reasonably teach you about board games, scripting, video production, and all of the admin that gets stuck in-between.
We can’t promise that any of these paid internships will lead to future work, but they really might. That said, even if they don’t, we’re confident we’ll be able to teach you a whole lot, and – if it’s something you want – we can help you to find your own audience.
Matt: We’ve gotten pretty good at what we do, but new voices and perspectives are always important – so whilst wit and on-camera charisma are a boon, we’d like to make it clear that applicants for these internship needn’t have all the same skills that we do. Both myself and Quinns were lucky to start our careers in magazine writing – a culture that naturally cultivated mentorship and gave us both a really solid head start. In 2019 we’d like to try and pay this forward.
If you or someone you know would like to apply, all of the details can be found here, and the deadline for applications is January 31st.
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Matt: After being firmly informed by readers last week that it is “never too early for ice-cream”, I have been scavenging in a safe radius around the news desk, seizing control of Viennetta factories, busting Cornetto bunkers wide, wide open – and generally taking control of all dairy choke-points. My mastery of breakfast sugar knows no bounds, and I am now fully prepared to dance upon the news desk.
Quinns: I just woke up and WHY IS THERE CREAM EVERYWHERE
…Cream, but also news. Let’s get stuck in.