" " - Shut Up & Sit Down

Games News! 22/07/13

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.

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

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.

In Pandemic, several virulent diseases have broken out simultaneously all over the world! The players are disease-fighting specialists whose mission is to treat disease hotspots while researching cures for each of four plagues before they get out of hand.

The game board depicts several major population centers on Earth. On each turn, a player can use up to four actions to travel between cities, treat infected populaces, discover a cure, or build a research station. A deck of cards provides the players with these abilities, but sprinkled throughout this deck are Epidemic! cards that accelerate and intensify the diseases’ activity. A second, separate deck of cards controls the “normal” spread of the infections.

Taking a unique role within the team, players must plan their strategy to mesh with their specialists’ strengths in order to conquer the diseases. For example, the Operations Expert can build research stations which are needed to find cures for the diseases and which allow for greater mobility between cities; the Scientist needs only four cards of a particular disease to cure it instead of the normal five—but the diseases are spreading quickly and time is running out. If one or more diseases spreads beyond recovery or if too much time elapses, the players all lose. If they cure the four diseases, they all win!

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?

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.

In Quarantine, players seek to build the biggest and most efficient hospital, while trying to keep ahead of the steady stream of incoming patients arriving at their doors. In this tense struggle for medical supremacy, players must infuse new life into their hospitals through the timely addition of special rooms and abilities. But beware the highly contagious patients! Infection can spread quickly, causing entire wards to be shut down under quarantine!

In game terms Quarantine is a tile-laying game with each player having an entrance and lobby. More than fifty other tiles are available, with two each of 14 different “special room” tiles, and players acquire these tiles and others via “price-drafting”. Players set a price for the tiles they want to draft, but other players get the chance to buy them first, so you’ll need to price your services accurately in order to supply your hospital while not overpaying. With dozens of tiles available, no two hospitals will be set up the same way…

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?

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.

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.

Games News! 22/07/13

An Intro to Board Gaming, For your Friends!

The SU&SD Incredible Outtakes Project, Pt. 1

Pandemic

Review: Pandemic

Games News! 15/07/13

Quarantine

Review: Quarantine

The Ludological Investigation Society: A Story

Games News! 08/07/13

Feeds