Miniatures Games - Shut Up & Sit Down

Review – Descent: Legends of the Dark

Descent is BACK, BABY! The game that inspired Shut Up & Sit Down’s second ever episode has returned in an eye-popping new edition with a wallet-clutching pricetag.

In the new Descent: Legends of the Dark, gone is the opportunity to play a callous and maleficent (and frequently out-gunned) dungeon master. This time around, every player at the table will control a hero, and you’ll all be steered through the campaign using an app.

It’s a bracing innovation, but what will Quinns make of it? Click play, and find out.

With 2020 finally, improbably, coming to an end, we’re onto our final two video reviews of the year. And the first is a BIG ONE.

Following a terrifically successful Kickstarter campaign, Etherfields has been delivered to backers the world over. This massive box offers 1-4 players a surreal quest in a world of dreams, letting people go and beat up Mr. Sandman once and for all.

But does this box succeed? Or is it a bit of a nightmare? Click play, and find out.

Our miniatures correspondent, Eric Tonjes, returns! If you missed Eric’s most recent reviews, don’t miss him on Guild Ball, Necromunda: Underhive and Warhammer 40,000 (8th edition).

Eric: Gentlepeople, start your engines. It’s Eric here, back after a bit of a hiatus to talk about one of the most interesting miniatures games to come out in the last few years: Gaslands Refueled.

While rarely remarked upon, automobiles are deeply violent machines. This is true on the level of raw mechanics, as we strap ourselves into steel boxes that harness explosions in order to drag us at high velocity. They are also some of the most dangerous devices made available to the average consumer – globally, autos cause somewhere north of a million fatalities per year.

Little wonder, then, that they have created a niche genre where this violence is made explicit. In movies like Death Race and Mad Max and video games like the Twisted Metal series I played with gusto as a teen, spikes and guns are strapped to these death machines to make them, well, Machines of Death.

Gaslands seeks to transliterate vehicle violence to the tabletop. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where earth has been turned to a wasteland and its citizens compete in contests of vehicular mayhem in the hope of escape, it simulates the belching exhaust, squealing transmissions and rat-a-tat gunfire that my inner teenager still craves.

Who’s a fan of Greece’s Pieces?

This week, Matt’s strapped on his cyber-sandals for a jaunt through Lords of Hellas. This is an enormous, Kickstarted “dudes on a map” game of slaying cyber-monsters, building cyber-statues, amassing cyber-hoplites and going on cyber-adventures.

Will this game triumph, like Homer? Or fall out of the sky like a big Icarus idiot?

Have a fantastic weekend, everybody!

It’s time for the second review of Chronicles month, and oh boy, have we got a chronicle for you.

With a price point of $130, Batman: Gotham City Chronicles is the second most expensive game we’ve ever reviewed. If there’s a bat-thing you love, you’re bound to find it sequestered in one (one!) of this game’s many, many boxes.

But could some boxes of fictitious bats ever be worth that much money? Click play, let us tell you what we think.

In yesterday’s Twitch stream, masculinity was stretched to its very limits. Bandanas? Check. Beer? Check. Punching a warehouse full of bad dudes right in the mouth? Check.

The game we’re playing is Street Masters, which has a new expansion (as well as the base game) on Kickstarter RIGHT NOW. If you’re in the mood for some dumb, schlocky fun, Street Masters is precisely the kind of smart dumb fun that we can get behind.

If you’d like to watch the video and our gut-busting Twitch commenters at the same time, the stream will be available here for the next couple of months. Oh, and look forward to more co-op combat in a couple of weeks, because on the 22nd of November we’ll be streaming Gloomhaven, and Quinns will be doing his best to make a permanent impact on Matt’s campaign.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

Eric: As a teenager, one summer I decided I wanted to learn all of the trick taking card games, a genre that I found strangely fascinating (I suppose this tells you a lot about me as a teenager and the rural midwestern world of the United States where I grew up). I learned the rules for Spades, Pinochle, and Pitch. I sort of learned how to play Bridge. I at least read the rules for Whist and Euchre. At the end of the process, though, I found myself feeling confused. In theory, I knew that the variations between these games should excite and engage me. In practice, I was at a loss to differentiate one from the other. None of them could really hold my interest.

That is probably a strange place to start my review of Games Workshop’s newest offering, Kill Team! A re-release of a variant of Warhammer 40,000, the game’s big selling point is its size. Unlike the sell-your-car-budget armies of its larger cousin, in Kill Team each player uses a small band of 5-20 miniatures to do battle in a space designed to fit on a kitchen table. As I’ve played around with it, though, I find myself at a loss as to what to say.

Kill Team is, at the same time, an exhausting incremental iteration on a tired system… and the best thing Games Workshop has released in years.

If you were looking for one game to rule them all, War of the Ring might be it. This magical game has more than 200 plastic miniatures, 40 pages of rules and a depth that most board games could only dream of.

But what will Matt and Quinns make of it? For one thing, this wouldn’t be the first time that Lord of the Rings was accused of being too long.

Click play, and let their opinions seep into your very bones.

Who remembers Quinns’ anciente video reviewe of 1812: The Invasion of Canada? Well, today we’ve got a redux for you! It’s our review of the latest game in that series, 878 Vikings, as well as the Viking Age expansion.

And boy, those mechanics have stood the test of time. It’s still tons of fun to invade a country with a buddy, rolling handfuls of dice together and stretching your armies too far, too fast. Click play and find out why Quinns calls this series the mac & cheese of wargaming.

Matt: Rising Sun is a big-box Kickstarter darling filled with frankly massive plastic things, with a hefty retail price of £75 / $80. Set in a god-powered version of feudal Japan, players act as one of six different clans vying for control of those lovely islands. But the plus-size map and plastic armies are slightly misleading: Rising Sun is not what it appears to be.

If you’re expecting a traditional game of nudging toy soldiers around a map, Rising Sun might leave players bored, confused, or quietly in a huff. But if you can get your head around what it is, and teach your friends what it is (and isn’t), Rising Sun can be really very good.

Review – Descent: Legends of the Dark

Review: Etherfields

Miniatures Game Review – Gaslands: Refueled

Review: Lords of Hellas

Review – Batman: Gotham City Chronicles

SU&SD Play… Street Masters!

Review – Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team

Review: War of the Ring

Review: 878 Vikings & Viking Age expansion

Review: Rising Sun

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