Shut Up & Sit Down

Review: Flipships

Hoth on highballs, subtle seasoning, flicked to the full

(This review contains gifs. Viewing it on a mobile device may use a lot of roaming data. If your usage is metered, consider reading this at home!)

Paul: The aliens are coming. Aggressively advancing, ever encroaching, nothing seems to stop their dreadful descent. The sunlight shines off their silver spacecraft as they pierce the heavens and prepare to bring down so much death and destruction onto the city below.

You and your friends are all that stand in their way. Together, you will use a small flight of fighters and the most precise cardboard-flipping skills the galaxy has ever seen to win the hour. You will flip them round the moons. You will flip them in low orbit. You will flip them in the atmosphere. You will never surrender.

Or you’ll flick a state-of-the-art starfighter straight across the room and lose it behind the sofa. Who’s to say?

63 Comments

Games News! 16/10/17

earnestly inflating, Gene Squeakmons, I’m not lion to you

Paul: Phew! What a week it’s been, eh? Did you catch those sports? The local news about the animal that did the thing? Gee whiz! Or the town gossip about Ol’ Uncle Bobbins and his brand new motor-car? Life sure moves fast these days!

Me? Oh, I don’t have much to share. Just this lil wee board game called Cosmogenesis, where you get to be a star.

52 Comments

The best games of SHUX 2017!

Pavlovian puppies, sightless stooge, sumptuously silly smorgasbord of stuff

Paul: It feels so very, very strange to be doing this. We’re always writing post-con roundups, flying home and tapping out our thoughts on the best new games we tried, but to do that after our own con? It feels a little peculiar, like the first time a doctor shone a light into my ear. But that’s a proper, sensible thing that doctors do, right? It’s not just for giggles?

Matt: At the time, it was straight-up stressful! We hadn’t accounted for the fact that people might be showing off things we really wanted to look at, so we frantically juggled schedules to try and check stuff out. There was still so much we missed, but we caught some REAL GOOD BITS.

Paul: For a start, Matagot only went and rolled up with an Inis expansion that they just casually announced IS A THING THAT EXISTS?

68 Comments

Normal Service Will Be Resumed Shortly!

phew, sheesh, oh goodness, oh my, so many people clapped

Paul: Wow.

So SHUX happened. Our first ever convention collected together hundreds of wonderful people for a weekend so amazingly positive that I’m still trying to process everything. I’m sat here looking at a blank page, trying to work out how to express how it was so much more than I could even have imagined it would be. It’s not so much that I’m lost for words as I’ve almost entirely forgotten what words are.

Matt: I know what words are! They come out of a mouth and are sometimes good or bad. Normal service will resume shortly, but today we’d just like to share some words and pictures.

107 Comments

Review: The Voyages of Marco Polo

embarrassing dads, a really good candy-based joke, bouncing bags of bananas

October 7, 2017 Reviews Conflict-Free Games, Games for Two, Heavy Games, The Voyages of Marco Polo Hot dog! At the time of writing The Voyages of Marco Polo is ranked as BoardGameGeek’s 39th best game ever. Our team has now comprehensively tested, teased and tutted over every aspect of its complicated machinery to bring you what we … Read more

Games News! 01/10/17

pester a picnic, dice urologists, Boarbatusk I choose you

Paul: Drop the sandbags, the Games News dirigible is aloft! Carried on cool currents and buoyed by the balmiest of gasses (their exact composition a closely-guarded secret), it carries up above the clouds to where the spriteliest gaming news flies, soaring across a sapphire sky. Are you ready for a spectacular trip, a voyage like no other, where we glimpse… oh! Look, it’s Dice Hospital! How wondrous!

Wait what? The dice are sick, you say?! THIS IS A DISASTER.

32 Comments

Review: Modern Art

Machiavelli-maths, i've made a huge mistake, Rafael Silveira is rubbish though

Quinns: With CMON’s new edition of Modern Art, a game of blisteringly quick and dangerous art auctions, Shut Up & Sit Down continues its exploration of classic Knizia. Just who is Reiner Knizia? Where did he come from? What is he doing? We’ve interviewed him and I still don’t know. All I can tell you is that he’s responsible for more than 500 games, literally some of which are good.

But Modern Art isn’t just the oldest Knizia game we’ve ever reviewed. With the exception of 1981’s Consulting Detective, I think this is the oldest game we’ve reviewed, period. It came out way back in 1992, when Paul was celebrating his 30th birthday and Matt hadn’t even been born yet.

Can you feel it? This site is trembling with time right now. Slip inside my cardboard Tardis. Let’s see if the years have been kind.

75 Comments

RPG Review: Unknown Armies

poisonous cat masks, erotic pastries, trains that literally go to hell, inhaling rules

Cynthia: The third edition of Unknown Armies appeared in May of this year and got my attention with this pitch: “An occult game about broken people conspiring to fix the world.”

Alright, I thought, I’m hungry for games set in the actual ~~dumpster fire~~ world we live in, and I enjoy creepy, occult things, and I always want to investigate characters with secrets, traumas, and unsolvable problems. So I gathered a small cabal and led them into a morally ambiguous underworld of deadly rituals, paramilitary organizations, ancient crypts that appear only at midnight, young women without tongues, and murder. I plunged them into an international struggle for the future of the TransCanada oil pipeline, of Vancouver real estate, of the White House, and the world.

If you’re ready for a game of of vast conspiracies and sleepless nights, a game in which your obsessions give you strength and great power comes with great corruption, in which you’ll be haunted by invisible demons with ten-inch claws and compelled to do bloody deeds, where heroes are less Captain America and much more Jessica Jones… then read on. Just be warned: in case you haven’t figured it out yet, this game is not family-friendly. Nor is it for the faint of heart.

43 Comments

Games News! 25/09/2017

a gurgling relative, deadly dancers, a wobbly future, the star bean

Quinns: You know how we usually do silly intros for the Games News?

Paul: Absolutely. That’s classic Games News.

Quinns: Well, I dunno if we have to today. I think our top story already sounds like a Dr. Seuss story.

Board game designer Friedemann Friese, who likes to make games that begin with the letter ‘F’, has announced a series of sequels to his title Fabled Fruit. Fear, Fortress and Flee are his three new games in the Fast Forward line, all of which use the Fable system (see below). All of these games are green, because Friedemann likes green games (and has green hair).

Speaking of which, they’ve also announced the first expansion to Fabled Fruit, and you’ll never guess what it adds.

Paul: What does it add?

Quinns: Limes.

Paul: Limes?

Quinns: Limes.

56 Comments

SU&SD Play… The Metagame!

speedos & cigarettes, quintin: fan of children, congratulations matt

In the words of Tom Jones, “What’s new pussycat?”

We’re so glad you asked, Tom! It’s a video of Shut Up & Sit Down and special guest Mark Hulmes playing The Metagame in honour of our Kickstarter for Metagame: The Game: The Games Expansion: Game Away. It’s hard to express exactly how good The Metagame is in words alone, so we decided that we’d make an actual play video that proves, once and for all, that this game is not messing around.

And if you think this game looks like pots of fun? We’ve got good news! We’ve just unlocked our stretch goal so any who backs the Kickstarter (where you can also get the base game) gets a free booster of board game-related cards.

As promised, this video isn’t replacing an ordinary SU&SD video. We’re sticking to our bi-weekly schedule, and Quinns will have a fresh’n’tasty new video review for you next week.

Enjoy, everybody!

(This review contains gifs. Viewing it on a mobile device may use a lot of roaming data. If your usage is metered, consider reading this at home!)

Feeds