Shut Up & Sit Down

Review: Twilight Struggle

humourless burgs, warheads, war heads, The Spirit of Communism, PartyMember9231

[Last month saw an argument between Quinns and Matt Thrower, our resident wargamer, over Here I Stand, a game of reformation-era revolution. It might be the nerdiest thing we’ve ever published. This month, we present the debate’s thrilling conclusion! All images in this article are courtesy of BoardGameGeek.]

Quinns: Matt, slow down! I’d never have guessed that a militaristic, paranoid, survivalist maniac would have a house riddled with secret passageways!

Thrower: Don’t forget the booby traps. Have you been treading where I tread?

Quinns: What?

Thrower: Ah, here we are! The heart of my house.

Quinns: It looks like a panic room. Except with a map of the world and… a big, red button?

Thrower: Naturally! It’s a room dedicated to my favourite game. Doesn’t every gamer have one? In my case, the game is Twilight Struggle, a card-driven recreation of the cold war and nuclear Armageddon. And, much as I hate to stand with the mainstream, it’s not just me that feels that way. It’s currently the number one ranked game on the global graveyard of game statistics, BoardGameGeek.

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Games News! 30/09/13

Quinns: Forget the new game announcements from famous designers! Let’s start with the big news, which is, of course, GAME BOARD.

The last-ever episode of excellent UK sitcom The IT Crowd aired on Friday, and you can watch it online right here. It was a brilliant double-length special, but much more importantly, it featured a scene making fun of online board game review shows.

It’s the best thing we’ve seen all month, and not just because we’ve heard from the writer himself that he likes Shut Up & Sit Down, and is explicitly not making fun of us. Which is at once a relief and kind of a shame?

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Review: Mage Wars

flying leeches, flaming unicorns, terror ferrets, beast masting, staff meetings

Mage Wars, the entirely straight-faced “Customisable Game of Dueling Mages”, was one of the most exciting releases of last year. We were never going to be finished with it following our quick impressions article. Quinns has done the right thing and published a full, red-blooded review over on Eurogamer, and it goes like this:

“Make no mistake. This isn’t just a great card game. It’s one of the best two-player games I’ve ever played. It’s at once a puzzle strong enough to leave you thinking about it when you go to sleep, and also profoundly human. Mage Wars gets the most out of the human opponent, because of its emphasis on surprise, countering and predicting.”

It also features a very good joke about a staff meeting. Go read! WIZARD! Ahem.

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Review: Winter Tales

limes, carpet corner, pinocchio's magic ring, happy endings

We love stories here at SU&SD, and if there’s one thing we like better than telling stories to our parents or the police, it’s storytelling games! Enter Winter Tales, stage right. A game where players control familiar fairytale characters viewed through a dark, oil-streaked lens.

In this video we also find the time for a quick peek at gaming institution Once Upon a Time, which just recently received a gorgeous 3rd edition!

Which will win? The classic, or the newcomer? Or NEITHER? Or both! Such terrible tension! We’d click play and find out as soon as possible, if we were you.

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Lord Smingleigh On… House Rules, Pt. 2

QUINNS YOU SCOUNDREL, The French Unmentionable, Earl Grey's litterbox, the fez

[Did you all catch Lord Smingleigh’s Introduction to House Rules last week? Naturally, an exploration on making games simpler should be followed with notes on making them trickier…]

No time for a long introduction! Grab your hat, coat, and thrashing-stick and come with me. This time I maunder about some house rules the Gaming Chums use to ratchet up the tension and increase the complexity of games, and possibly to increase the conflict and turn the finest of friends turn into slavering killbeasts*.

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Games News! 23/09/13

tea-off, knucklebones, no roses, dice-building, mushroom-nibbling

Quinns: What a news segment we have for you this week! Disasters! Pillaging! A game made of bones! Another game made of SKULLS! It’s all a bit much. I’m going to start off with a nice cup of tea, and a nice game of tea.

Yunnan will be arriving later this year, and it’s a game of controlling a Chinese TEA DYNASTY. That distant, jangling noise you heard was the noise of our entire English readership simultaneously reaching for their wallets.

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SU&SD Needs You! Donations are now open.

here we go, help, the man, the banisters, the gold club

Quinns: Today we’d like to present a Very Special Episode of Shut Up & Sit Down, meant to raise awareness of the issues. Well, one issue. Which is that the amount of money that we have is… or rather, it doesn’t… this amount, it doesn’t really exist.

Paul: Right. After two years of you guys asking how you can give money to SU&SD, we’re finally letting you. Please, go check out our fancy new donations section, our new video, and all of the fabulous rewards on offer.

Quinns: We’re so proud of everything we’ve achieved since we began Shut Up & Sit Down, and we’re stupidly excited about how we’ll grow next. With your help, we’ll be able to find out.

Paul: Thank you all very much.

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SU&SD Will Be At Eurogamer Expo 2013!

chilling out, craning necks, being rude, hotting dogs

Paul: We’ve got some exciting news for you!

Quinns: But you’ve already put the news in the title.

Paul: Well-

Quinns: So there’s not really anything to share now. I mean, there’s not much point in us writing any more. I guess we could get onto the details?

Paul: That’s not very exciting.

Quinns: Don’t get mad at me because you ruined it.

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Review: Gauntlet of Fools

heroic hangovers, roving perverts, cheeky zombies, controlled nonsense

Quinns: Have you heard of Munchkin? It might be the most popular standalone card game in our hobby. You all play Dungeons & Dragons-type heroes racing to reach level 10, alternately working together and wrenching one another backwards. It’s a grinning figurehead for table gaming. And I hate it.

I hate that in parodying D&D so focusedly it erects walls around gaming as a whole, its 20 year-old injokes acting like barbed wire. I hate that it goes on for 30 minutes longer than anyone wants. I hate how the game is entirely based around attacking the lead player, rendering the entire first 60 minutes almost pointless. But most of all, I hate how it gets everywhere.

I’ll be at the pub, explaining SU&SD to some friend or stranger or travelling pervert, and they’ll say “Oh! Yeah, I’ve played Munchkin. It was OK!” And with that, all the icecubes will disappear from my drink, a new wrinkle will appear on my body and all the babies within two miles of us will start crying.

So here it is. My counter-offer. If you want a light, mad card game with a Dungeons & Dragons theme, buy Gauntlet of Fools instead, a game from no less than the creator of Dominion. Also, a game of battling trolls with a hangover, and getting skewered by spear traps while hopping on one leg.

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Games News! 16/09/13

Rboadts, pooping Schwarzeneggers, poster children, geese breeding, Kaboom faces

Quinns: Morning, all! It’s a high tech start to this week. The Kickstarter for Golem Arcana has launched, reaching deep into gamers’ pockets the world over. But not in a sexy way.

Well, it is a little sexy, I guess. This is a miniatures game of unparalleled luxury. You’re getting gorgeous, pre-painted golem things, and also a pen thing that reads the microdots on the miniatures’ bases, so a companion app can act as “a referee, rule book, and tracking device all-in-one”. Which is… good? And it might be… the future?

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