Review: Gearworld: The Borderlands

apocalyptic shoulders, precious ponies, cajoling worms, scrapwater
Review: Gearworld: The Borderlands

Mark: Logistics! Three lovelier-sounding syllables were never spoke. Ah, what a dream, to play a strategically deep game about the beautiful, balletic, and somewhat subtle dance of getting much-needed materiel from one place to another — and then using it to blow stuff up. And how much dreamier were it a game that didn’t involve hundreds of cardboard counters sliding delicately around a hex grid to the tune of one in an endless string of historically accurate six-hour scenarios featuring Russian truck breakdowns and German trains running on time. (Though actually, I’d play that one too.)

Gearworld: The Borderlands is the latest in Fantasy Flight’s series of resurrected “classics” of yesteryear — i.e., games you wish you’d heard of when they’d first been released, if you were even alive back then — and just may be the game of which I dreamed a paragraph ago.

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Games News! 22/07/13

owl tokens, ooze turn is it next, the murder giant, wiener melange, gore storage
Blocky Mountains

Quinns: Have you heard? Kate Middleton’s Royal Baby™ arrives today! Time to get the news done sharpish so I can attend the ceremony of Gilded Silver where we find out if it’s a changeling.

Fantasy Flight have published the most audacious preview yet of Netrunner’s first deluxe expansion, Creation and Control. The 55 new cards are going to slip into our decks as professionally and powerfully as acupuncture needles, making us fitter. Stronger. Deadlier. Or possibly it’ll just cost a bunch of money and we’ll feel exactly the same, except we’ll get really bad gas, which happened to my friend Alex. When he tried acupuncture, that is. Not when he played Netrunner.

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An Intro to Board Gaming, For your Friends!

Daniel Cheney, Dick Crag, racism, eyeliner, public service announcements
An Intro to Board Gaming

Quinns: Also in celebration of our 2nd anniversary, we’ve done something a bit different. And hopefully, a bit useful.

It’s a short video about board gaming that’s not for you, but any friends, family or colleagues who don’t yet know about your hobby. A glimmering, electric antidote, if you will, for anyone who hears “Board games” and thinks “Monopoly”. There aren’t any swears at all, and only a smidge of dressing up, so please:

Share away. Let’s tell the world about this glorious hobby of ours.

Happy anniversary, everybody. We love you.

— Team SU&SD

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The SU&SD Incredible Outtakes Project, Pt. 1

outtakes, swears, 81 seconds of Christmas, a spy
The SU&SD Incredible Outtakes Project

Paul: Did you know that Shut Up & Sit Down is now two years old? This month is our anniversary month and, to celebrate that, we thought we’d give you something very special. It’s something you’ve all been asking for since we started and it’s our way of thanking you for your terrific support.

You, our viewers, our readers, our commenters, have been a brilliant audience. You’ve been friendly and patient and kind and insightful and generally excellent, so we really hope you enjoy fourteen minutes of Shut Up & Sit Down outtakes, fourteen minutes that pull back the curtain and expose the ramshackle workings behind this show.

We should warn you that there’s liberal use of cursing and swears and also bad language and even some rude words. There’s a fair amount of embarrassment. There’s a lot of silliness.

Oh, and this is only a compilation that spans our first series. It takes a little while to edit a collection like this together and we need to rummage through our rushes to see what we can serve up next. There’ll be more to come.

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Review: Pandemic

hot bacteria water, rippling infections, a bottle of wine, why is the manual upside-down
Review: Pandemic

Quinns is live on the mighty Eurogamer once again, reviewing Pandemic! A game so popular that for a while there, we were taking this monument on the board gaming landscape for granted. But you know what? It’s actually amazing, and the perfect game for this sweaty, lethargic, feverish summer.

“Pandemic’s cheap, at just £25. The manual’s flimsy few pages are crystal clear. It’s a co-op game, so no-one’s going to get too competitive, and it has you working at the Centre for Disease Control, flying around the world trying to cure four doomsday plagues before they skim humankind from the surface of the earth, so it’s not even nerdy.

“It’s captivating, pacey and dramatic. In fact, it’s the perfect game to start your board game collection.”

So some good did come from Quarantine, after all! We finally got this sucker reviewed. No messin’. Go read!

What other classics would you like to see us review, readers?

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Games News! 15/07/13

pro molds, trolleys in time, plastic ninjas, pet slugs, pro knifings
Shuriken

Quinns: Good afternoon you pretty people! Did you have a nice weekend?

Mine was mostly spent questing for the One Beverage that would make me feel better in this heat, but I perked up on Sunday when I spotted Fantasy Flight’s announcement of Blood Bound. Like Mayday! Mayday!, which I looked at in the news a few weeks back, this looks to be part of the post-Resistance wave of games. An incredibly tight game of hidden roles, negotiation and lying, but with more… game.

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Review: Quarantine

scalpels, spiders, the forbidden twix, quinns is a bad doctor
Review: Quarantine

Quarantine, an adorable little game of running a hospital, has launched! Seems like only yesterday that Quinns was squeaking about its design diaries over in the games news, and now it’s on shelves worldwide. They grow up so fast!

This one’s a game that Quinns really wants to like. But he’s also the owner of a degree in Tough Love from Newcastle University. Will it meet his ever-soaring standards? Or will he toss it aside like so much medical waste?

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The Ludological Investigation Society: A Story

St. Punishment's School for Boys, Missiles, O.B.E.s (withdrawn)
The Ludological Investigation Society: A Story

[SU&SD is hugely proud to introduce the Ludological Investigation Society. A regular column on not just what we’re playing, but how we play, written by none other than England’s own Lord Custard Smingleigh.

In this inaugral column Smingleigh offers a heartfelt tale of play, galactic war, and more beautiful boys than he.]

It was the end of the school year at St. Punishment’s School for Boys, and we had finished our end of year exams. Our school work was done, but our time still belonged to the school until it had finished forcing the oldest boys through the educational sausage machine that is the GCSE system, so the teachers allowed us to bring something in to entertain ourselves.

Some brought in decks of cards (with strict gambling prohibition enforced by form master Dr. Blandshaw), some brought in books and magazines, some brought in Game Boys (I’m dating myself here, aren’t I?), and I brought in a board game.

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Games News! 08/07/13

hot boilings, feral stories, grimy madmen, time AND space, space, time
Going, Going, GONE!

Quinns: Summer is here! That magical time of year when we move from playing board games indoors to playing them outdoors. As a result the entire SU&SD crew now look like boiled lobsters. Bright red, but with a hint of decadence.

Today’s games news will be arranged from stuff that excites Quinns the most to least, starting with THIS: Neuroshima Hex 3.0 has been announced by Z-Man games. You can read our impressions of 2.0 here, but basically it’s a tricky, colourful, inventive strategy game that’s so lightweight as to practically float off the table. Better yet, 3.0 sounds even better.

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The Opener: Infinity Dungeon & Awful Jelly

hang on does he live in the box, Mr. Blobby, decanthings, I... am a wizard
The Opener: Infinity Dungeon & Awful Jelly

Get ready to GET EXTRAVAGANT! Matt Lees’ The Opener is back with another game to kick off your evening, and a perfect accompanying snack.

This week Matt picks over the crashed zepplin of ideas that is Level 99 Games’ Minigame Library, and finds something interesting but it goes a bit wrong. He also applies his trademark culinary expertise to an English delicacy known as “vodka jelly”, which seems quite interesting but it goes a bit wrong.

We blame the heat. Englishmen react about as well to heat as chocolate does. When will it end? It must be 20°C in here.

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