Daft Souls is a new gaming podcast! With us!

pearstations, onlime games, really terrible digital ports of board games
Daft Souls is a new gaming podcast! With us!

Quinns: Sound the competence klaxon! Matt and myself have a quick announcement. We’ve joined forces with a few other UK games writer luminaries to create DAFT SOULS, a new weekly podcast about video games! And much like SU&SD, it has the single, lofty goal of not being shit.

So if you like SU&SD and you do play video games, give the first episode a listen. Underneath your seat you’ll find the iTunes page, SoundCloud, RSS feed, and even Youtube. Oh, and you can follow Daft Souls on Twitter here.

It’s kind of amazing how good a job Matt and I do of seeming like we’re not hurtling towards 30 when we’re talking about cool games like Luftrausers, Dark Souls 2 and Heroes of the Storm. And no, this doesn’t mean we’ll be spending any less time on this site or the SU&SD podcast. We’ll be revealing a similar refurbishment of our own podcast in just a couple of weeks.

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Review: Rampage

passionate kisses, accidental spit, cardstock crucible, eating teeth, the french
Review: Rampage

Quinns: A lot of you guys said you were really excited about Rampage, and it’s easy to see why. A game of destroying a real-life three dimensional city? AND enjoy misadventures with real-life spit? Sold!

I just gave my review to the mighty Eurogamer. It starts like this…

In Rampage, everybody plays a big, stompy kaiju monster, and the game ends when you’ve all levelled a town. Like a board game from the ’80s (think of the merciless TV advertising, the photogenic kids shouting and high-fiving), a game of Rampage starts by offering you an immaculate, three-dimensional city, and wants you to delight in knocking it over. At the end of the game, the player who caused the most destruction to the city, its inhabitants and the other monsters is the winner.

And then, like the lashing of a great monster tail, the review goes on to have not one, but TWO separate twists. Go have a read, people! And definitely don’t write this one off as too silly for you. It has a lizard brain to it, full of animal cunning.

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Games News! 24/03/14

octopus allies, fox mulder, wooden wizards, the card bogs, malfunctioning elbows
D-Day Landings

Quinns: Guys. GUYS. Before I went to bed last night I said a little prayer to the Gods of Gaming. I asked for a very special game to be announced.

I wanted a game from Bruno Cathala, the designer of Shadows Over Camelot and Cyclades, where the players all control wizened undersea lords. A game of politicking and pushing your luck, where you can ally with crabs, control the algae trade and stockpile pearls. A game with beautiful art that’s at once ridiculous, otherworldly and beautiful.

YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHAT HAPPENED.

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The Opener: Skull & Roses with Fresh Pizza

cheese & cheese & cheese, yeasty stuffs, lost skulls, raw souls
The Opener: Skull & Roses with Fresh Pizza

We end Simplicity Week with a bang, and the bang in question comes from you executing your friends, one after another.

Skull & Roses is the game Matt’s reviewing here, although throughout the review he calls it Skulls and Roses, and actually, the new, gorgeous edition is just called “Skull”.

But never mind our charming incompetence! This isn’t just one of the simplest games we’ve ever played. It’s one of our favourite games, period. And just to make sure your friends come over and get involved, Matt’s also going to teach you the single darkest secret known to SU&SD. How to “make” “pizza”.

But what if I were to tell you that for the next Opener, we’re planning something even better? Ah, it’s a good time to be a board gamer. A very good time.

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Review: Concept

charahhdes, feverishness, below house, down cone, our lord satan
Review: Concept

Brendan: It’s simplicity week here on Shut Up & Sit Down and I am celebrating with margherita pizza, simplest of the foods. But also with a board game. Concept is a new party game from the French publisher behind Mascarade and City of Horror. But it is about as far removed from those games as you can get.

This is a game all about guesswork, language and stifled communication, about creating brilliant new ways to express old ideas – oh, I forgot the game. Hang on, I’ll go get it. Quinns, don’t eat my pizza while I’m gone.

Quinns: Of course not!

Brendan: Okay, I’ve got the … You’ve eaten my pizza.

Quinns: …

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An Actual Interview: Quantum

sweet pleasures, poems, rust on our hands, atoms vs. bits, fussy powers
An Actual Interview: Quantum

[And now, a special treat for Simplicity Week. We’re very lucky today to be joined by Eric Zimmerman, games academic and designer of Quantum, a great new release that simplifies the space warfare genre into a few riotous handfuls of candy-coloured dice. In the first of a series of new developer post-mortems, we talked to Eric about exactly how simple the process was.]

Quinns: So, Quantum’s out, but board games don’t enjoy the immediacy of communication and online play you’d get with the video games you worked on before. How does it feel knowing this labour of love is being purchased and played in secret, the world over? HI, by the way.

Zimmerman: Glad to be here!

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Games News! 17/03/14

cold alaskan soil, angry ponies, actual handcuffs, the cheese expansion, such wrists
Pay Dirt

Quinns: It’s still Simplicity Week here at SU&SD! While I have no control over what the news is (such things are beyond the grasp of mere mortals, like the weather or burning oven pizzas), I will be rating each news story on how wonderfully simple it manages to be.

Our top story is the announcement of Lords of Xidit! Seen above, this is a re-invention of award-winning 2002 release Himalaya, set in the universe of Seasons. They are taking a game about managing yak caravans, and turning it into a game where you play an Idrakys in the realm of Xidit working together but also competing to fight The Black Southern Host while hiring bards and not forgetting to build sorcerer’s guilds.

SIMPLICITY RATING: An abomination, burn it with fire.

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Review: Going, Going, GONE!

worse decisions, bad decisions, bad counting, sugaring the bed, two cups, five cups
Review: Going

Today’s the beginning of Simplicity Week here at SU&SD! Aren’t games a little too complex? Isn’t life a little too complex, with all these mobly phones and dark webs and human rights? We think so, so from today through next Friday we’ll be turning our simple brains to some simple games, inarguably the most beautiful games of all.

Quinns kicks us off with a look at Going, Going, GONE! A bargain-hunting game that could be the savviest and funniest purchase you’ve made this year.

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Introducing our Gold Club, Season 2!

ferrero rocher, life on set, a brendan, minutes of london, hours of mice
Introducing our Gold Club, Season 2!

HELLO everybody! Do you enjoy SU&SD? Would you like to help us do what we do, and receive a goodie bag from us in April? There are just 19 days left to get in on the second ever Gold Club bag, which is hardly any days at all!

Of course, if you’re a subscriber, you can just sit back and wait for the goods to come to you!

A couple of other announcements. By now, your rewards for our first pledge season should have arrived. If you’ve yet to receive these, or your bag was damaged, please email Quinns directly via [email protected] and he’ll ship a replacement out immediately with some extra Haribo inside.

Second, for everybody waiting for a forum or full episodes, we request your patience for a little while longer. Turns out turning SU&SD into a sustainable business is a lot of work, and we’ve never done work before, so it’s very confusing. Apparently there are “lawyers” involved, who are a bit like wizards but a lot less fun.

Sincerely,

— Team SU&SD

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Paul’s Roleplay Design Diary! Part 1

wallopings, bludgeonings, emboggenings, capering, roll to remove tonsils
Paul's Roleplay Design Diary! Part 1

Paul: Every year I make myself a new, sometimes private resolution and every year I do my best to see it through, but 2013 proved an exception. I told myself I’d try to design a tabletop roleplaying game and it wouldn’t matter if I was particularly successful or not, the point was to try and to learn from my mistakes. Then 2013 happened and I might as well have been Lear yelling at the storm. I was mostly wet and useless.

So I’m trying again and this time I’m going to write about it. Over the next few weeks I’m going to look back at games I’ve played and the systems I’ve played with, poke at mechanics that I have and haven’t liked and, most importantly, try and put some ideas together. Sometimes there will be some number crunching and design theory. Other times, there will be stories. Sometimes the two will meet and we’ll discover that dragons used to fly at five miles per hour.

So, let’s not delay. I want to start with a the story of how I was inspired to do this, over a year ago, then look at the sort of things I might want people doing in my game, then give a rough outline of what sort of game I’m going to fumble towards. Why not come with me and, I hope, not chuckle too much as I stumble my way through my thought process?

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