Shut Up & Sit Down

Games News! 23/03/15

Quinns: Good morning, kiddos! Please form an orderly queue and allow me to vaccinate you against the most deadly disease of all: Ignorance.

No, wait, sorry. I had the wrong tab open. It’s ebola. Pandemic: Legacy will be arriving late this year, turning the fantastic game of disease-battling (see our review here) into a single, apocalyptic, simulated year at the Centre for Disease Control. Excited? You’re not the only one. Z-Man has already received a preposterous 50,000 pre-orders.

This week, Shut Up & Sit Down was invited to play a finished prototype of the game. An event we were wholly unable to make because Brendan got his arm stuck behind a radiator again. Instead, we left that job to the data hounds of Board Game Geek news, who’ve posted a blog on the inner-workings of this box, though you’ll find a summary below.

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Review: Monikers

is it mall santa, it's mall santa, mall santa, it must be mall-OH MY GOD IT'S TAPEWORM

Remember when we told you that Skull was the game that’ll make you and your friends shout the loudest? Monikers (buy here) might be the funniest game we’ve ever reviewed. Weirder still, it might be more than 100 years old.

We’ve always suspected that old things were the best, but now we know. Time to cancel those forthcoming reviews of Armada and Dragon’s Gold. Next week, we’ll be reviewing whist, football and tuberculosis.

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Review: Mysterium

dreamy psychics, incompetent ghosts, toast crumbs, terror crumbs

Quinns: Everybody, stop! STOP!

[Montage of factory workers looking up from industrial machinery. Doctors and nurses looking up from their surgery. Soldiers locked in deadly hand-to-hand combat, who freeze and turn to face the camera as one.]

I’ve played a new board game and it’s really, really good!

[Amiable mumbling as factory workers loosen their aprons and turn to face the camera, doctors take five on the edge of the operating table as blood spurts into the air, soldiers dust one another off and sit cross-legged like toddlers.]

Mysterium is a co-op game of ghosts, murder and hilarious incompetence, in that order. All but one player is a psychic spending the night in a horrid house where a killing took place. The final player, who may not speak, is a ghost sending everyone else horrible dreams. The ghost must guide the psychics to the correct murder weapon, crime scene and culprit before the week is over, or… well, I’m not sure. Maybe the psychics have concert tickets. It doesn’t matter, and you won’t care. You’ll be laughing too much and thinking too hard.

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Games News! 16/03/15

Quinns: HELLO everybody! I’m back from running the board game lounge of San Francisco’s Game Developer’s Conference and am now 90% tacos and 10% flu germs. I think my skeleton was confiscated by customs on the way home.

We’ll get to the news in a second, I just have to tell you what we’ve got coming in the next two weeks, because I couldn’t be more excited.

Just to start, we’re playing the biggest UK Megagame EVER this weekend, controlling Japan in a game with no less than 47 game masters. We’ll be bringing that to you guys as a two-part documentary. Paul’s back in the UK this weekend to play it so we’ll be recording two (TWO) podcasts. Then we’ve got reviews of Mysterium, Star Wars: Armada, Imperial Assault and Alchemists all lined up.

My goodness. But let’s start, as always, with the humble Games News.

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Review: Saboteur

peek at my deposits, its dwarfs or dwarves, some dwarves just want to watch the world burn

Paul: The problem I’m having writing this review is, rather than simply telling you how Saboteur works, I really want to give you a selection of quotes from some of my recent games. The thing is, none of these will be remotely illuminating, since they’re all going to be the same sort of questions, which all go like this:

“What are you doing?!” “Why did you do that?!” “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?!”

Or they’ll be the same sort of answers, which go like this:

“I’m helping!” “I have no choice!” “JUST TRUST ME.”

Or they’ll be the same end-of-round exasperation, the same old post-battle cry of Saboteur:

“I TOLD YOU SO.”

I guess Saboteur is something of a game of soundbites.

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Pip Remembers When Life was Just a Game

plastic humps, pink pegs, why isn't there a dragon, tuhtuhtuhtuh

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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Games News! 09/03/15

standing a lot, are those ionic or corinthian columns, red rover red rover send glen drover right over

Paul: Games news, is it? You’d better step this way.

I hope you have a strong stomach.

I’m sorry that you have to see this. There’s no way to make this easy. We’re still trying to piece together what happened. Maybe you can help?

Paul’s Greatest Gaming Memory

sketch of a natural object, distant reading, wolfenstein 3D the board game

Paul: 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. A written transcript, with pictures, is available here.

Paul’s Greatest Gaming Memory

sketch of a natural object, distant reading, wolfenstein 3D the board game

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

j-pop girl group fighting evil spirits, diversity, inclusion, something different to just rolling another d20

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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