Shut Up & Sit Down

Review: BattleLore

whoa there hippogriff, fireside chat, The Forest of Lewisham

Battle Lore! Battle or…? Battle Lore!

This week, Paul seems to have found exactly the sort of game that would appeal to his twelve-year-old self, a game of magic and monsters, of hexes and strategy. Battle Lore is Fantasy Flight’s attempt at an easily-digestible miniatures wargame, the kind of thing where you slaughter an army in an afternoon and still have time for biscuits.

But is that going to be your sort of thing? The game, we mean, not the biscuits. After all, Battle Lore may have a bigger, bolder relative whose company you might well prefer…

Apologies for the lateness of this, everybody! Sometimes the internet is a very slow thing, but we don’t give up easy.

EDIT: It seems we have a problem with the right sound channel. An audio fix is on its way!

ANOTHER EDIT: The audio should be behaving better now. Sorry about that!

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Brendan’s Correct Way to Scratch

scratch theorists, aryan myths, the tear, come ooonnnnNNNNNNNNNAAaaghh

Have you ever considered the humble scratchcard? Brendan would like you to. There’s a ceremony involved, you see. Like a papery King Canute, you must take joy in coaxing a tide of wealth forward, and agonise in watching it retreat. Within the scratchcard, perhaps, is all of life. A written transcript is available here.

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Brendan’s Correct Way to Scratch

scratch theorists, aryan myths, come ooonnnnnnnnnn, nnnaaaaghh, the tear

[We’re trying something a little different here. Brendan recently wrote an article about scratchcards on his blog which we thought was rather special. He’s kindly let us republish it here as text (below) and as an improbably transporting spoken word piece in our podcast section. Take your pick, everybody! And enjoy.]

Brendan: Scratchcards – the most worldly and humble of the lesser gambles. Although I am far from being one of the people who are inexplicably and tragically addicted to them, scratchcards nevertheless maintain a power over me. I was talking about them with some friends recently and concluded that my enjoying a scratchcard has more to do with ritual than money. Although, let’s be honest, like all forms of gambling, the money is at the nucleus of its strange charm.

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Review: Anomia

pulling a wild one, bellied laughs, tongue springs, hot team quillian and deen

Brendan: Oh man, since Paul and Quinns left at the end of the sci-fi special I have nobody to play board games with. Hey, Supercomputer, do you want to play Anomia with me? It’s a quick-fire party game about blurting out words under pressure and beating your friends to the punch. You’ll like it!

Supercomputer: Anomia. Latin origin. Meaning “without name”. Would you like me to run a simulation of the universe without names, nouns, pronouns, designa—

Brendan: No! I mean, no Supercomputer, but thank you. I just want to play this simple card game with someone. I’m sad that my friends left. You remember what we talked about? Sad? It’s an emotion.

Supercomputer: Runtime error. Do you mean when those called Paul Dean and Quintin Smith inexplicably abandoned you to become an accountant and a low cost assassin respectively? Reducing the number of your human friendship circle from 2 to 0?

Brendan: It’s not zero! Matt is still my friend.

Supercomputer: Initial and ongoing analysis of his facial expressions indicates that the one called Matt Lees regards you as subhuman and without merit. Would you like me to run a simulation of some friends?

Brendan: …

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Games News! 07/07/14

panic in hand land, real zombies, timequakes, the path of souls, bursting assistants

Quinns: Good morning, my playful pickles! Before we start, realise what a marvelous audience you are. You want for nothing more than a glimpse of the fun you’ll be having with your friends in the future. You’re beautiful, all of you.

If you’re anything like me, Hand Made Wonders (pictured above) will be the source at least one evening of boozy giggling. This is an upcoming Taiwanese game where players build monuments out of their hands, but where your left AND right hand will need 3 points each to win, and everyone’s hand is part of a different team (determined by the two different-coloured bracelets you’re wearing).

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The Opener: Gravwell & Wicked Beans

the singularity, warp gates, the ninth dimension, gravity, beans

It’s an Opener! With Quinns! Has the world gone mad? No, but Gravwell definitely has. It’s a racing game set in the ninth dimension with no gravity except that created by your friends. And weirdest of all, it actually works!

And finally, two years after we first mentioned it, you guys are receiving the recipe for Quinns’ Wicked Beans. Enjoy, everybody!

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Review: Tokaido: Crossroads

a splatter of soy, a clatter of coins, wrong turns, foot rubs

Quinns: Remember our Tokaido review? It should stick in your mind. This was a piquant Antoine Bauza game that dreamt of players hiking along Japan’s East Sea Road, from Kyoto to old Edo, simply trying to have the nicest time.

You collected local handicrafts and soaked in hot springs. You’d arrive at an inn for the night and buy soup with the last two coins in your pocket. Best of all, you could arrive at Tokyo, destitute, with nothing but a handful of cloying sweets to your name, and still end up winning because you’d earned the most wonderful memories. This was a game that lingered in your life and living room, like a scented candle.

Which brings us to Tokaido: Crossroads! An expansion for Tokaido that updates it “for the gamer”. How on earth does that work?

No, wait. I know. It’ll add the yakuza, swords, magic spells and dice-rolling. Ha! Wouldn’t that be funny! Because that’s not going to… happen…

Wait. Why is there a sword on this card. No. NO.

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Games News! 30/06/14

cold story spoils, beast mode, soviet show trials, feverish infection, hot dragon spoils

Quinns: How is everybody? Like something out of Nathan Barley, I spent my Saturday night queuing for an hour to get into a dancefloor that was literally a room with no lights. It was well weapon.

Board game news! Forthcoming Antoine Bauza co-operative stress-fest Samurai Spirit takes the top slot with a publisher image of the finished game (seen above).

It’s only now that I realise Samurai Spirit sounds an awful lot like a mashup of Antoine Bauza’s two other co-operative games, Ghost Stories, where you defend a village of a firehose-like stream of ghosts, and Hanabi, ostensibly a game of fireworks displays where players all hold their cards backwards, in practice a game where you win by following additional rules which the smartest player invents between games.

We didn’t like Hanabi very much. Heresy, I know.

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Gold Club 3 closes in 24 hours!

like a colony of cardboard bats taking flight but instead of eating bugs they bring smiles

Hello everybody!

With donations closing again in just 24 hours (at midnight EST, June 30th) we’ve got a last-minute addition to our third ever Gold Club bag. This season’s donors and all donors from previous seasons will get 2-4 weeks of early access to the SU&SD forum as we perform stress testing, ensure it doesn’t bring down the site and train our moderators in the rapid destruction of Quinns’ Netrunner threads.

If you hadn’t considered supporting SU&SD via the Gold Club, know that this one promises to be a doozy. It’ll have unedited RPG sessions, outtakes, Quinns’ Decks for the Aspiring Netrunner, a lovely bit of secret merchandise and a whole variety of limited-edition jokes. It’s basically an episode of SU&SD that you can have in your house, containing our actual fingerprints and DNA! So it’s kind of like we’re holding hands with all of you.

As always, a huge thanks to our donors. It’s amazing to be able to repay you guys, even if it’s in such a very silly way.

— Team SU&SD

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Review: The X-Wing Miniatures Game

making it so, special riker moments, the holodeck, photon torpedoes

We’ve got some continuity to sort out after last week’s sci-fi special, but let’s sort out another bit of continuity first.

Almost two years ago Quinns sat down to write this review of the X-Wing Miniatures Game core set. Today, Paul joins him in the stifling cockpit of internet television for a review of the game proper.

HUGE thanks to our fans at Industrial Light & Magic for providing that intro sequence. We were skeptical at first when they asked for literally all of our donation money, but the results speak for themselves.

Enjoy, everybody!

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