SU&SD - Shut Up & Sit Down

Review: Thunderbirds

Quinns: Leigh! Thank you for joining us for this review of the Thunderbirds board game, although as you’ve never seen an episode of 1960s TV series you won’t be allowed to talk. You can nod along, though, and say things like “Wow!”.

Leigh: What? You told me you wanted me here as a counterpoint, reviewing this game as someone with no interest in the show.

Quinns: Yes, but I’ve changed my mind. Some things in life are sacred. God, for example, and tea, and the exploits of the Tracy brothers and International Rescue.

Leigh: I mean, I actually have learned a lot about Thunderbirds from playing this game. It’s about boys moving boats and planes around the world and swapping a pink woman among the different vehicles. And then one of them is a tragic space exile. It’s really monstrous.

Quinns: There will be time for me to explain the many and varied ways you are wrong. For now, let’s review!

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GO!

Paul: I saw a curious mix of games at this year’s BGGCon, from hard euros to simple set collection games to the rising tensions of Win, Lose, Banana Legacy.† Of all the many things I saw while hiding from the baking Texas sun in the cavernous, subterranean depths of Dallas Fort Worth’s Hyatt Regency, Above and Below was my favourite. Appropriately, it was my underground adventure.

Also, it gave me a chance to try out a Pear Strategy. I went Full Pear, All Out Fruit, and didn’t do too badly for it, either. I quested, I recruited, I constructed and then I made all my money from Big Pear. Meanwhile, my friends hired adventurers, fought bandits and found the legendary Moss King. All in a day’s work.

Quinns: How was your weekend, everybody? I’m happy to say that more than four years since Paul and I started SU&SD, I was found myself thinking “Board games are awesome. I’m not playing enough board games. I’m going to play lots more.”

Good thing, then, that talented designers are making lots more. We kick off the news with Secret Hitler, which is bound to be one of the year’s biggest Kickstarters. This is an absolutely beautiful, heavily-playtested interpretation of Werewolf / The Resistance from a trio of designers that includes Max Temkin, co-creator of Cards Against Humanity.

As you probably know, we’re not the biggest fans of Cards Against Humanity. But Secret Hitler looks just great.

Quinns: Hello everybody! Shut Up & Sit Down is still four sheets to the wind this week. Paul’s off to Board Game Geek Con, Matt’s recovering from Fantasy Flight’s World Championships and I’m just back from New York University’s Practice gaming summit. These are important trips! If you don’t check up on Americans they’ll be marrying cobwebs and getting stuck behind radiators before you know it.

Fun fact! At Practice I saw a talk by Leslie Scott, inventor of Jenga. Did you know that as Jenga is manufactured, they make sure the bricks are all of varying sizes and weights to make the game work better?

Ah, but you’ve been waiting so long for your Games News! Not to worry. I may have spent five hours asleep in a cold corner of LAX this morning, but I’ve fetched some black coffee and classic rock (won’t you do the same?) and I’m ready to get to work.

Paul: Quinns I am so sorry that I blew up your space ship. I know you liked that space ship and you wanted to try out that space ship as part of Armada’s Second Wave of Expansions, so I apologise for shooting it until it exploded. It was only a small space ship and it did not take much shooting before the exploding happened, so you cannot accuse me of excess.

However, I hope this won’t colour your experience or your impressions of Wave 2, even though I, a completely inexperienced Armada player, blew up your space ship. And also a lot of your TIE fighters. Obviously I didn’t do great, being new to the game and a little overwhelmed, yet I still seem to have shot a lot of things. How do you feel?

Quinns: I feel like a man who’s been waiting six months for the Imperial Raider, and then you blew it up before it had fired a shot. So much for continuing our coverage of Star Wars Armada, which started with this written review and this fun Let’s Play.

Impressions: Fury of Dracula 3rd edition

Paul : I’m a doctor. I’m not the Doctor, but I have dogs and garlic and a knife and a gun, along with train tickets that take me all over Europe. That’s better than anything Colin Baker ran around with. The dogs are particularly useful because they saved me from an ambush. This was just one of all sorts of unpleasant surprises that Dracula had left in his wake, like horrid slime behind a slug, as he slipped his way across Europe. In this case, he’d left a nasty surprise in Edinburgh, one of my very favourite cities. Damn you, Dracula, for ruining such a fine town.

Quinns: Paul, are you excited about the new edition of Fury of Dracula? Fantasy Flight’s gothic hidden movement game, originally from Games Workshop back in the distant past, has been out of print for so long now that it’s almost passed into legend. Now and then, copies surface online with ridiculous three-figure price tags, but they’re as rare as hen’s teeth.

Paul: As rare as vampire fangs! Except those fangs aren’t rare any more. Dracula’s back! He’s back in style, too, with a glossier cape, a smoother style and even an improved map of Europe. I’m glad to see Dracula back because the boy done good.

Quinns: Paul, do you remember our Runebound review?

Paul: No? Who are you? Get out of my house.

Quinns: That’s because it doesn’t exist! I played the 2nd edition of fantasy quest game Runebound back in 2011 and didn’t think it was vitally important to tell our readers about it.

Paul: That’s probably because it wasn’t vitally important. It wasn’t the most compelling fantasy quest game I’ve ever played, either. It was a bit stodgy, a bit brown, a bit turgid, a bit-

Quinns: BUT PAUL! Fantasy Flight are about to release a new, beautiful, 3rd edition of Runebound and we PLAYED IT HERE AT THEIR WORLDS EVENT!

Paul: YES I KNOW THIS WHY ARE YOU YELLING AT ME here we are all asweat with excitement right now, reporting LIVE FROM THE SCENE and completely surrounded by X-wings and Netrunner decks and people live-streaming who have been repeatedly told DON’T SWEAR ON THE STREAMS.

Paul: QUINNS IT’S AWFUL.

Quinns: paul wha-

Paul: QUINNS IT’S AWFUL. HAVE YOU HEARD THE NEWS. IT’S AWFUL.

Quinns: paul of course i have not heard the news nor any other news this is games news this is where i hear the news pau-

Paul: QUINNS THE BUNNIES ARE GETTING DIVORCED.

Paul: Quinns hello Quinns good morning Quinns have you seen? There’s a few interesting things that came in the Games News Sack this morning.

Quinns: That’s not the “Games News Sack”, Paul, that’s the postman’s bag.

Paul: Well he won’t be needing it any more. The important thing is that we’ve got the Games News today. As well as everyone else’s mail. And a few spare, loose limbs.

Quinns: Okay then. I guess now is as good a time as any to start telling people about Tail Feathers! A new skirmish game from Plaid Hat arriving in just a few months that combines Mice & Mystics with the X-Wing Miniatures game.

Matt: I’m a robust bird looking to nest who is terrified of fat carnivores, looking to meet someone with a GSOH and wait this isn’t OK Cupid

Quinns: No, you silly goose! It’s a review of Evolution, the new game from North Star Games that is about evolution.

Evolution starts with 2-6 players being given control of their very own bouncing baby bit of cardboard, tracking the only two features a parent should care about: POPULATION and BODY SIZE. Each turn players receive cards depicting new evolutionary traits, you all play one to contribute to the food on the Watering Hole, and you play the rest onto your species, either as the traits they depict or to increase that species’ population or size, or you can burn cards to create whole new species.

And that’s the entire game! With these wonderfully simple rules, you’re off to the races. Although at these races we’ll simultaneously be betting on horses and praying our favourite horse doesn’t get eaten by another horse.

Review: Thunderbirds

Paul’s Best Game of BGGCon2015: Above and Below

Games News! 23/11/15

Games News! 16/11/15

Review: Star Wars Armada, Wave 2

Impressions: Fury of Dracula 3rd Ed.

Impressions: Runebound 3rd Ed.

Games News! 26/10/15

Games News! 05/10/15

Review: Evolution & the Flight Expansion

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