Shut Up & Sit Down

Review: Cyclades – Hades

Intoxicating baskets, Underfed tourists, Quinns' uncle

Paul: Cyclades! We turned SU&SD’s unblinking, cyclopic eye to look at it back in Episode 3 of this season. It’s a deadly, brilliant wargame where everybody plays different coloured Greeks trying to build two cities. Just two.

Quinns: We’ll recommend it to anyone. Spartan rules envelope a design where everything anyone does is tragic, comic or heroic. The self-contained islands you duel across means any attack will wrest control of a territory from someone else (exciting!), or see the aggressor getting kicked back into the water (EXCITING!). But doing anything means bidding for the affection one of the game’s four Gods, an auction that’s every bit as vicious as the main board.

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Review: Cyclades – Hades

Intoxicating baskets, Underfed tourists, Quinns' uncle

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Season 2 – Episode 4

June 4, 2012 Reviews, Specials Wiz-War, Epic Spell Wars, Mage Knight Board Game WIZARDS! What are they? What do they do? No, seriously, we don’t know. But ignorance is for cowards! We’ve created a Wizard Special our board game review show, where we review Wiz-War, Epic Spell Wars and Mage Knight.

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Review: The Castles of Burgundy

review, The Castles of Burgundy, ape balls, piglets

Paul: Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Oh, Jesus! That looks like the lovechild of a maths textbook and hotel room art. I’m not having that in my house.”

Hold on. The Castles of Burgundy, which casts 2-4 players as the holders of estates in medieval France, has the whole board game community bleating with quiet joy. We absolutely had to get hold of a copy and try it out. You know what? I actually think it’s quite special, too, although I appreciate it’s such a placid, thoughtful, deeply European game that it won’t be Quinns’s kind of thing. Still-

Quinns: No, no, I really like it.

Paul: You do?

Quinns: Yeah, it’s excellent.

Paul: But-

Quinns: And here’s why!

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The First Ever Shut Up & Sit Down Podcast

podcast, seeds, hexagons, Rex

Paul: What is this?! Why, it’s the Shut Up & Sit Down Podcast! At last, you can enjoy SU&SD while shelling crabs, or during an exceptionally banal bout of lovemaking. As our chat bubbles (and meanders) like a mountain stream, we touch on some of our viewer responses, beautiful hexagons, a dream about plants, some … Read more

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The Podcast

podcast, Rex, hexagons, seeds

Paul: What is this?! Why, it’s the Shut Up & Sit Down Podcast! And it’s also available right here. At last, you can enjoy SU&SD while shelling crabs, or during an exceptionally banal bout of lovemaking.

As our chat bubbles (and meanders) like a mountain stream, we touch on games we haven’t reviewed yet (and why), some of our viewer responses, beautiful hexagons and a dream about plants. But we also cover games! Lots of them. Topics of discussion include
Rex,
Mage Knight,
Runebound,
Alien Frontiers,
Race for the Galaxy,
A Game of Thrones,
Dixit,
The Castles of Burgundy,
Galaxy Trucker,
Kingdom Builder,
Arkham Horror,
Carcassonne,
Skull and Roses,
which I misunderstood the rules for, Sneaks & Snitches,
Shadow Hunters and some of our recent experiences with birds.

We’re between episodes right now, and also up to our necks in all sorts of business, be it our jobs or Mr. Smith’s trouble with his internet connection, but we also wanted to try something a little different. Do tell us what you think of the podcast idea and, who knows, perhaps this could be the start of something exciting.

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Impressions: April

postal snakebite simulator, Liar Training, Bedsheet-tugging

We’re trying a new format! Sometimes Paul and I don’t have time to assemble a true, riotous review, but we are always playing new games, our bodies like a pair of unreliable steam engines powered by a smouldering pile of cardstock. So how about this: a quick’n’dirty roundup of the best games we tried last month.

Click on through, then, for some impressions of Star Trek: Fleet Captains, German hit Thurn & Taxis and the talking-tastic Baron Munchhausen. But were we actually impressed? Well!

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Season 2 – Episode 3

April 20, 2012 Reviews, Specials The Walking Dead: The Board Game, Catacombs, Belfort, Cyclades Thabwam! That’s the noise of another half-hour of board game review goodness landing in your world like a bit of glittering space junk. You’re very welcome. In this episode, the boys are going to be on REAL LIFE TELEVISION! They’re just … Read more

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RPG Review: Fiasco

review, Fiasco, I'm going to kill you with electricity, We have to burn the zoo

Quinns: Listen up, ladies. Fiasco: A Game of Powerful Ambition & Poor Impulse Control (which you can buy from that same link) is very much outside the realm of what we usually cover. It’s a two hour table game, but it has no cards, cardboard, winners or losers. It has almost no rules. But despite that, it’s perhaps the best game you’ve never even conceived of.

All you’re paying for here is a very thin, very affordable book. And with this book, you and some of your friends are going to roleplay your evening away. And you’ll laugh like garbage disposal units doing it.

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Review: The Mines of Zavandor

review, The Mines of Zavandor, blood and bluster, halcyon cue balls

Quinns: CAPITALISM! It’s what’s for dinner.

Paul: It’s what’s for dessert, surely, especially if it’s about excess. The Mines of Zavandor is just the kind of cash-clutching economy management we can put all of our pasty weight behind. That’s because it treats running a business
with the same giddy lack of dignity as J.K. Rowling gave to the arcane.

The Dwarf king is dead. Two to four players control Dwarf clans attending his interminable funeral procession, winding through an entire mountain. Yet what you’re doing isn’t mourning, but receiving gems from back home and using them to buy, buy, BUY at the many auctions of useful or decorative tat you’re passing by. That’s because at the end of the procession (game) the richest clan is the new king (winner)!

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