Paul: Help me out here. I’m in a bit of a dilemma.
I keep telling people that I’m not especially enamoured with Sagrada, that it’s just my latest diversion, but then I say they should still try a game with me. Then it hits the table again. Then I’m playing it once more. Then we have a good time and I think about the next person I want to try it with. Then it goes back into my bag and I bring it to someone new.
Am I in denial about just how much I like this?
Paul: Quinns help me I have Kickstarters coming out of my-
Quinns: OH MY GOD WE NEED TO GET YOU TO A DOCTOR.
Paul: Yep. Maybe that doctor could help me with Star Realms Frontiers. This beloved tiny card game that you first wrote about in your 2015 Corner Awards has grown so large! Perhaps it needs to be lanced? It’s up to nearly five hundred thousand dollars. Half a million!
That’s a lot of money, but then this is no small deal, is it? No sir, this Kickstarter is offering a whole new wave of Star Realms products, from a new standalone expansion that can be combined with the original game or Colony Wars, to a whole load of other, smaller card sets, all of which can be freely intermingled to create a (wait for it) STAR GALAXY of cards. This is an absolutely colossal edition to a game that’s already a) not small and b) ever-growing in both scope and popularity.
Hello everybody! It’s been 17 videos, 14 podcasts and 55 articles since we asked our audience for donations in (who could forget?) our Christmas advert.
Today, we’re once again asking you to give as much or as little as you can afford. Please, click here (or if you’d prefer, click the seductive, golden button in the upper-right) to join the thousands of people who’ve donated to SU&SD in the past, paying us to keep working, and to keep finding great games.
The above video says it all, but two things bear repeating. First off, we’re putting up two videos in the next two weeks to make up for starting the pledge drive today. And second, we really are confident that the next six months will be the greatest in the site’s history. There is so much cool stuff coming up.
We hope you’re having a great summer, and thanks for sticking with us for just over six years of Shut Up & Sit Down.
Who wants another six?
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Eric: For any of what follows to make sense, I need to take you to a place in my past. Imagine the house where I grew up. Follow me down into the basement, past the unfinished walls and pantry shelving and washing machine. Back here, hidden under the stairs. Do you see it?
That was my desk.
It isn’t much to look at – an austere, industrial thing. The kind of desk I now imagine factory workers flipping over in some proletarian revolution. But I spent huge amounts of my late childhood and early teenage years here. Pouring through those roleplaying manuals stacked in one corner, drawing elaborate maps on that graph paper, and – as the spackling of color attests – painting the little figurines that line the shelf above.
Those were my first space marines.
About a month ago, Games Workshop released their 8th edition of the Warhammer 40,000 rules. Back when I was painting at that desk, it was 3rd edition I played. As much as those iterations between then and now can be seen as cynical cash grabs – partly because some of them were – there is something noteworthy about this new one. But more on that in a minute.
Quinns: Paul, I understand you enjoy placing illustrated tiles on a grid.
Paul: I hope this is alluding to the Kickstarter for Founders of Gloomhaven, and not my rare sex fetish.
Quinns: Exactly that! Wait, what?
Paul: You haven’t heard? Founders of Gloomhaven is board gaming’s latest Kickstarter smash hit. Remember Kickstarter fantasy co-op adventure Gloomhaven? Well, Founders of Gloomhaven is a second game from designer Isaac Childres set in the same world, but this time he’s offering a competitive game of building a city featuring “a unique mix of tile placement, action selection, hand management, worker placement, and blind bidding.”
Quinns: It sounded like you said “rare sex fetish.”
Paul: Founders of Gloomhaven has already raised almost $300,000, and it still has twenty-four more days to soar past its funding goal.
You know what doesn’t get enough kudos? Bags. Big ones, small ones, soft ones, leathery ones. Where would we be without bags? Walking home from the shops, clutching cucumbers to our chest with onions in our armpits, that’s where. Our 63rd podcast is all about great games with some great bags. Paul’s been building (and cursing at) stained glass windows in Sagrada, Quinns has been carelessly eroding his car in the amazing Automobiles (see our review of that one here), and this time we remember to have the chat about Orleans that was meant to go the previous episode. Inspired by these three titles, Shut Up & Sit Down’s campaign for More Bags In Games begins next week. Please send money now. Could you give two figs about bags? Are they “Not your bag”? Not a problem! Paul and Quinns also provide some early impressions of the ludicrously pretty Wasteland Express Delivery Service, and answer a reader mail about why long games lead to a special kind of exhaustion.
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Quinns: Ladies, gentlemen, non-binary folks, and anyone else who’s left a comment over the last six years along the lines of “ARRRGH STOP MAKING ME SPEND MONEY.” Today, SU&SD amends for its capitalist crimes.
We talk a lot on this site about how we want board games to be “for everyone”, but to an awful lot of people the games we recommend are prohibitively expensive. That said, putting together an amazing board game collection can be cheap. Below, we’ve assembled a list of the very best games that could collectively cost you less than ten bucks, depending on your situation.
This isn’t some unsatisfying sampler platter. What lurks below is a moveable feast of some of the greatest games ever made. Were you to gather all of these games, I’d prefer your collection to ones I’ve seen costing $1000.
If you approve of this feature, please do share it far and wide! It represents a lot of work for both Team SU&SD and our donors, who we bothered about cheap games we might have missed (special thanks to subscribers Amanda and Jeff, who were especially great).
Let’s get started.
Quinns: Paul have you had enough of game of thrones yet
Paul: The honest, complex and difficult answer to that question is both yes and no.
Quinns: Paul would you like another game of thrones board game
Paul: no
Quinns: Terrific because here comes A Game of Thrones Catan Brotherhood of the Watch!
Paul: I’m glad they picked a name that rolls off the tongue.
July 8, 2017 Reviews Near and Far, New to Games? Paul has been hankering to try Ryan Laukat’s Near and Far for over a year now, but being a Kickstarter release, all the world’s copies only went out to backers, right? Wrong! Hearing that this game of epic adventure and dangerous expeditions was now out in … Read more
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Cynthia: Everyone, I have a little secret that I want to share with you. Ok. Maybe it’s a decently-sized secret. Maybe it’s not that secret at all. MAYBE it will change your tabletop gaming life.
DON’T TELL ANYONE, but some of the best roleplaying games out there are not available at your local retailer. Thanks to the magic of the internet, they’re completely free.
These irresistible blossoms of RPGs can suddenly appear on Twitter or Reddit only to vanish within a few days. Sometimes they’ll quietly bloom on a designer’s Tumblr or publisher’s homepage. A few older ones thrive quietly in the dark places of the internet to be occasionally plucked by some intrepid RPG gatherer who brings them back into the light. There’s even a contest-fed bouquet of 200-word RPGs out there, as Quinns and Paul mentioned in a recent edition of Games News. The brightest flower of all these lovely free RPGs, however, is Lady Blackbird.