Special Features

Some Tips From SU&SD, 100 Videos In!

Some Tips From SU&SD, 100 Videos In!

Quinns: Hello everybody!

It’s been a slow week on the site due to a scheduling snafu, so I’m here to wave a white flag and apologise. But wait, what’s that written on the white flag? Why, it’s news that Shut Up & Sit Down just passed 100 published videos!

While SU&SD is very precocious for a four year old, able to tell simple stories and bend over without falling (mostly), it’s the videos that we’re most proud of. Since we receive a ton of emails about how to do what we do, I thought I’d do an FAQ.

Behold! Everything we’ve learned pratting around on camera for four years.

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Pip Remembers When Life was Just a Game

Pip Remembers When Life was Just a Game

Paul: This week, Pip is also sharing one of her early board gaming memories. Here’s a story about a game we don’t talk about much here, but which we’re sure you’ll all know. I don’t know about you, but I certainly share some of Pip’s frustrations about this…

Pip: I think the first board game I ever thought of as a favourite was The Game Of Life.

We had a copy which I think my brother and sister and I had worn my parents down until they bought, then played properly only a handful of times (thus neatly adding fuel to their “board games are awful and we won’t have anything to do with them” fire). But I kept coming back to the box and opening it up at odd moments, sometimes working my way along the track on my own.

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Paul’s Greatest Gaming Memory

Advanced HeroQuest

Following the lovely responses we’ve had to our other spoken word pieces (see Brendan’s Correct Way to Scratch, Leigh’s Month as an Assassin and Quinns’ favourite drinking games) this week in the podcast section we have Paul telling us about the quite singular way that he remembers the most influential, most important board game in his life. And how it lead him astray.

Here’s the story of how I bunked off school to play a board game and how that board game changed my life.

Saying that immediately makes me excited to tell it.

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Interview: Different Play on bringing diversity to tabletop gaming

Interview: Different Play on bringing diversity to tabletop gaming

Paul: One of the reasons we started Shut Up & Sit Down, arguably the biggest reason we did so,* was to get more people into board and tabletop gaming. We wanted to share something that we enjoyed. Board and tabletop gaming was (and largely still is) ignored by a lot of people who had preconceptions, even prejudices, about how boring, weird or bizarre it was. We don’t like that sort of thing and hopefully we’ve helped change that. Hopefully our invitation to the hobby has also been inclusive and reached out to all sorts of people.

You can imagine, then, how impressed we were to hear about the work being done by Different Play, a collective of experienced mentors reaching out to actively support diversity and inclusion in analog game design, both in terms of the kinds of games being made and also the kinds of people making them. The games industry, even the tabletop games industry, has a diversity problem and this can make it (among other things) intimidating and even outright unfriendly. Different Play wants to make sure that new and different designers are heard, published and paid. We asked them more about their work and their plans.

(Due to the complications of our job/our innate impressiveness,** it was Quinns who got in touch with the brains behind Different Play and talked to them about their aims and philosophy, but it’s me who’s collating and writing up their answers here. So, while it’s my byline, Smith did the legwork on this.)

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Rooky Errors: A Story of Chess

Rooky Errors: A Story of Chess

After discovering everything he was taught about chess to be wrong, Brendan goes on a quest to learn the game properly, in this special feature on the ancient pastime.

Brendan: Amar moves his knight to c6 and I feel my lungs seize up. It is my first game of chess against another human being in over 10 years and remembering to breathe has become a problem.

When I first arrived at the chess club, hidden away on the shadowy second floor of an old school hall, like some secret society, Amar greeted me with a kind smile and a friendly handshake. He had a soft voice and an Einstein moustache. Now he is moving his knight to c6. Sometimes Amar makes his moves slowly, thoughtfully. Other times, he takes seconds, as if the order of play was pre-ordained and he was just there in some formal capacity as piecemover. What else can I say about Amar? Oh yes. He is destroying me.

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Shut Up & Sit Down’s Tales of Betrayal!

Shut Up & Sit Down's Tales of Betrayal!

(Some images courtesy of BoardGameGeek.com)

Pip: Shut Up and Sit down – despite the confrontational name – is almost always a hive of lovely cardboardy activity. That’s why I started playing games with them and that’s why I’m working with them now.

Almost always.

But sometimes in gaming there are acts of betrayal, of contrarian buttheadedness, so large they cannot be forgotten. Instead they lurk in your mental back pocket, ready to be drawn out at a moments notice – reminders that these glorious friends and colleague care as much about boardgames as you do and will do almost anything for a few victory points. Or a cheap laugh.

I’m not talking about the lower level stuff here. This isn’t about how Quinns will fail to tell you a rule until partway through the game (“Oh! Did I tell you about [rule which suddenly advantages what Quinns has been doing and nullifies any and all Pip-strats]?”). No. This is about Brendan and this is about City of Horror.

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