Games News! 06/06/16

boatylicious boats, paul's broken jungle, wooden lemons

Quinns: Exhausted from the UK Games Expo, I have slithered up to my desk with a biscuit and a cup of tea to write the news. Huge thanks to everyone who came along to our live shows, played a part in our live review or witnessed our epic game of Question Wood Toy Folds High. If you weren’t there, not to worry! All will be posted on this site in good time.

As for the spicy slivers of news I’ll be dishing up like a powerful dad, we begin with the announcement of 2016’s Spiel des Jahres nominations! A shadowy council of German board gamers has once again met to hand out board gaming’s most prestigious award, and the only one that can multiply a game’s sales 100 times over. But this year we’ve played all the nominees!

I wonder what we shall think…

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Review: Quadropolis

the furtive pigeon, the exciting office, the bechstein's bat, so easily forgotten

June 3, 2016 Reviews Quadropolis, SU&SD Recommends, New to Games?, Conflict-Free Games, Quick Games, Games for Two HOT TAMALE-BEANS! It’s Quinns with a Shut Up & Sit Down review of Quadropolis! Who could have guessed I am writing this from the UK Games Expo we just did a live podcast and I’ve got no energy … Read more

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Podcast #41: Misery, farkles and Soren Johnson

sexy space cops, sexy church games, bad dryads, wizard martinis

Psst! Down here! Climb into this cramped cave of chat with us. There’s room for one more person. In what could well be our most feature-filled podcast ever, Matt, Paul and Quinns discuss Torchbearer, Merchant of Venus, Dragon FarkleThe Red Dragon Inn and the concept of playing board games in virtual reality, before getting down to (yet another) peculiarly erotic folk game. But wait! There’s more! Quinns snagged video game designer Soren Johnson of Offworld Trading Company to discuss civilisation-building and trading board games. Enjoy, everybody.

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RPG Review: Torchbearer

stay hydrated, you'll never be fresh again, serious triumphs

Hilary: Torchbearer is a dungeon-crawling role-playing game.

So what? There are a lot of dungeon exploration games in tabletop roleplaying. It’s the genesis of the genre, and most of the big tabletop RPGs people are familiar with are of this style. One of the things that differentiates Torchbearer is its heavy emphasis on the crawl. While other games are focused on getting loot, fighting monsters, and generally being completely badass adventurers, Torchbearer is about attempting to get loot and deal with monsters, while being completely worn down by the dungeon experience.

It turns out exploring dangerous unknown environments while lugging a bunch of heavy gear and trying to stay hydrated and rested and fed is really, really hard! It turns out there’s only so much space in your backpack and your habit of checking over every room you enter sometimes gets you into trouble and it’s hard to avoid getting cranky as all hell when you’ve been stuck wandering around dank passageways for hours without any snacks.

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How to Play Lords of Vegas!

gramblin' in the casios, throwing up in a hedge, missing your easyjet flight home

Ever since our review, Lords of Vegas is the economic warfare game that we find ourselves recommending the most. Why pay for flights to Las Vegas when this game lets you gamble, drink heavily, invest unwisely and come to loathe your friends, all from the comfort of your own home?

For other entry-level economic slugfests, do check out Chinatown, or dip way back into the SU&SD archives for a peek at our Black Gold review. It’s one of our earliest ever bits of criticism, and a game we still have a soft (and oily) spot for.

(And yes, this IS our first video to use our YouTube channel instead of Vimeo! We’ll slowly be moving the back catalogue over, as well as putting all future videos on YouTube, but it’s still worth popping over now to check out Matt’s completely dope header image.)

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Golden Week, Day 5: The Hot New Newsletter

are you on email, you simply have to be these days

Quinns: Matt, what is that incredible noise? Ooh, I bet you’re hard at work assembling our next video review!

Matt: No I was just banging these two bits of wood together. Hey, on Monday you said that on Friday we’d tell everyone about the cool projects we’re doing in the near future!

Quinns: Ah. Right. The thing is, I’ve realised that we have to put that in volume #1 of our Hot New Newletter!

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Golden Week, Day 4: Why You Guys Donate

oh god I hope none of these letters are from paul's dad

Paul: Alright, where do you want me? Gimme the A-1.

Quinns: What? Put the saxophone away, Paul. For day 4 of Golden Week we’re doing something a little different. Five months ago I asked our SU&SD donors to tell us why they donate. Today, we’re going to let them do the talking.

Paul: Quinns. This is my dad’s saxophone. You can’t tell me to go and get it and then have me put it away without busting loose at least one hot splank. That’s just funk-a-logical.

Quinns: I never told you to go get it

Paul: B♭ E♭ ♫ A♯

Quinns: STOP IT

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Review: Automobiles

featuring all the main cars, the ferrari car, the cable car, the rest

[It’s a classic SU&SD mid-Golden Week turnaround review! We couldn’t go a whole week without telling you guys what to buy, so here’s Matt Thrower talking about something thoroughly awesome.]

Thrower: Deckbuilding is the dampest squib in board gaming. Riding the crest of a hype wave, it promised to change the hobby forever, yet lead to only a bunch of mediocre efficiency engine titles. The only games in the genre to stand the test of time were Arctic Scavengers, which was truly excellent, and then Trains, which worked because it supplemented the cards with a board. But you know this, because Paul and Quinns already told you it was sexy enough to make them want to have babies.

Maybe that’s why Paul went to Canada.

Now, from the same publisher, we have the even sexier Automobiles. You know it’s sexier because you’ve seen all the sexy race cars in sexy film franchises like The Fast and the Furious. A film so sexy you can use its title as a double entendre. And when you flip through the cards in Automobiles, you’ll see they have sexy names like “Boost” and “Supercharged” instead of “Normal Train” or “Limited Train”.

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Golden Week, Day 2: Helping via Amazon!

if you do find any portals to the amazon river on this site then let us know

Quinns: First things first, a huge thanks (and warm hello) to all of our new donors! There are no words for how understanding you guys are. There is, however, a dance, and Matt is doing it right now! He won’t stop. Oh god.

Anyway, today we want to tell you about a way to support us that takes no time and costs nothing. Do you use Amazon? The web site, not the river.

You might have noticed that there are all sorts of links to Amazon on this site. If you travel through one of those links before navigating to any items you want to buy on Amazon, whether that means batteries or bananas, then add them to your shopping cart, we can get around 7% of their retail value on checkout.

Yes. You heard that right. Simply by bookmarking one of the links below and clicking on it before you go shopping, you give us a small chunk of your checkout costs. All of these little payments add up! So please, bookmark away and don’t forget to click!

United States!    Y’all are alright, I reckon’.
United Kingdom!    You are a marvellous fellow.
Germany!    Vielen Dank, baby!
France!    Je vous remercie pour l’accueil de cette radis dans votre maison.
Spain!    Nosotros nunca, ni sus axilas olvidaremos.
Italy!    Dimenticate gli spagnoli, siete il nostro vero amore.
Canada!    [language unknown]

Please note that we’re not suggesting that anyone change their shopping habits! We’re well aware that some of our audience have ethical reasons for not supporting Amazon. All we’re saying is that if you’re planning on using their services already, you can effortlessly ensure that your shopping helps keep this site running. Nothing could be simpler.

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Announcing our 2016 donation drive! It’s Golden Week

it's all lies we're just saving up to buy a yacht, a yacht full of haribo

Quinns: Hi everybody. This week we’re asking for new Shut Up & Sit Down donations for 2016. I’ll keep this brief in case you have an important job, like mending street lights or selling ice cream. If you’d like more details, you’ll find them all after the cut.

Shut Up & Sit Down is kept alive through donations

Have you noticed that SU&SD has no adverts? There’s more – unlike many commercial board game review sites, Shut Up & Sit Down doesn’t accept money from publishers or designers in exchange for content (though we still get emailed about it every week). Instead, this site is kept running by our Gold Club members, the fans of SU&SD who pay for it to keep running.

This week, we’re asking you to sign up!

“Why now?” A better question is why it’s been so long! Our last donation drive was actually in 2014(!), but we wanted to make good on our promises before we asked for money again. Now Quinns has fallen in a canal and we’ve launched the new site, we’re ready to plan the next leg of our trip up Mt. Nonsense.

Fabulous rewards on offer for donors!

98% of your money is going right back into this site, BUT ALSO anyone who donates or signs up for a subscription in a given month will receive our new, monthly behind-the-scenes newsletter, explaining what we’re working on, what games we’re planning on recommending and mystery extra bits.

The first edition of this newsletter will be sent out on May 31st.

More info on donating awaits, after the jump!

 

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