Specials 8 - Shut Up & Sit Down

Announcing our Summer Donation Drive!

Quinns: Hello, everybody. It’s that time again!

Twice a year, our team here at Shut Up & Sit Down requests donations for all of the heartfelt stuff that we’ve made over the last six months. You can donate using this very link.

We don’t like to bother our audience about it, but the fact is, Shut Up & Sit Down runs almost entirely on donations. It sounds improbable, but it does work. If you’ve not gotten involved yet, and you can afford it, perhaps this could be the Summer that you make a pledge?

If you’ve supported us at some point over the last eight years(!), I can’t tell you what a difference it’s made to us. This is the best job that any of us have ever made, and we hope that we’ve shown our dedication to paying it forward.

Have a great weekend, everybody. And thank you.

June 11, 2019 Specials

Monikers: Serious Nonsense, Monikers, Moniker

The Serious Nonsense Box is now available to buy online!

Fans of dumb jokes in a box, rejoice! The Monikers Serious Nonsense Box is on Kickstarter right now, offering 320 brand new cards for Monikers, each lovingly written by SU&SD and friends of the show. Even if you don’t want to buy it, it’s probably worth watching my ridiculous video to observe a man losing his sanity via greenscreen.

For those unaware, Monikers is the slick, boxed implementation of the folk party game more commonly known as fishbowl, celebrity, or the hat game. We reviewed it back in 2015, and eagle-brained readers will recall that in 2017 we created a small-box expansion titled “The Nonsense Box” (and since then, we’ve been careful not to mention Monikers in our editorial without caveating our involvement with the designers).

Back then, we had a lot of fun being deeply silly with our first foray into party game design, but this time we’ve really stepped up our game: taking onboard critical feedback, thinking carefully about the flow of the game, and squeezing in a higher density of solid jokes without getting in the way of what makes Monikers great.

If you’ll allow us a moment of heart on sleeve-ism, we honestly didn’t anticipate that so many people would have such a good time with the original Nonsense Box. Feedback we’ve had over the past two years both humbled us, and stuck a rocket to our bottom when designing the new box – it felt vital to us to reflect that love back, and ensure that this triple-sized Kickstarter sequel was the absolute *best* that it could possibly be. We love it, and we hope you do too.

Thanks everybody!

Oh Baby: SHUX’19 tickets are now on sale!

Quinns: Are you interested in coming to the third Shut Up & Sit Down convention this October? Because tickets are now on sale on the official event page!

If you’re one of our amazing attendees from previous years, you’ll know what to expect- a world-class buffet of published and experimental games, plenty of goofy stage shows, and all sorts of opportunities to make new friends.

It’s a huge privilege for us to be able to throw this party for the best community in board gaming. If you want to see what all the SHUX is about, we’d love to see you there!

In 2015, we posted our Top 50 Games Ever. In 2017, we lost our minds examining every game in the Board Game Geek Top 100.

This year, we’re doing something a little more personal: A series of videos on the team’s board game collections, starting with Quinns. After working on SU&SD for seven years, games slipping between his fingers like grains of sand, these are the 136 (plus) games that he’s chosen to keep (and a few that are in his flat despite his best efforts).

Enjoy, everybody!

What are the very best card and board games to play with coworkers and family this holiday? Games that are actually FUN – that you could bring to a party as a great gift for cheap, or tuck in the stocking for Christmas Eve?

Quinns will be writing a piece next week about games more suited to those who already love the hobby, but as part of our ongoing mission to convince the world that board games are great, we wanted to put together an easy resource for the question we seem to get almost all the time: “What game should I buy to play with my family?”

If you’ve been linked to this by someone else who loves board games, hello! We’ve put this list together as both a video and a written list. Enjoy!

Matt: Greetings Holiday Humans, it’s time to mildly panic as you realise that family will soon descend upon you like a flock of seagulls to a discarded ice-cream. Rather than trying to explain your job to relatives to the point that you might have a mental breakdown, we’d recommend playing board games instead.

These are the 15 best big-family games: all play with at least 6 people, and most can handle 8. In no particular order, let’s go!

Quinns: Paul and I are working on yet another B I G V I D E O for this Friday, but today we’ve got a little video featuring some very little people.

Recently I was invited by SU&SD fan Annie Langley to give a presentation to her school kids aged 10-11 about being a YouTuber, since it’s the job that most kids dream about. With a lot of help from my wife (who I can’t thank enough for telling me to remove all the bar charts from my talk), I put together this 20 minute rundown of what my work is actually like.

I know that a lot of SU&SD fans are parents, so I thought I’d chuck the talk online in case it’s of interest. Honestly, I worry that very few YouTubers or Streamers talk about the technical or psychological stresses of this job, and I feel like the world would be a healthier place if there was a bit more of a conversation around it.

Timestamps…

00:00 – Intro about my job and board games

06:49 – Me talking about the mental health problems with producing content (without using those exact words)

12:46 – Me talking about the technical bit of the job: scripting, lighting, microphones and editing

18:21 – Me telling kids to go and make things, but do so safely. Also, a poorly-chosen Hunger Games analogy

April 3, 2018 Specials

SHUX, SHUX 2018

Quinns: Oh my goodness, here we go! Tickets are now on sale for SHUX 2018, Shut Up & Sit Down’s second annual convention in October this year.

Would you like to meet team SU&SD at a fabulous, warm, profoundly silly three day gaming party? Well, now you can! Last year tickets sold out in just over a week, so this year we’re moving to a substantially bigger venue that can contain even more SU&SD fans. Still, we’d recommend you book early to avoid disappointment.

For an idea of what there is to do at SHUX, you can either watch the above video or click on that link. But most importantly, if you’ve never been to a board game convention before, that’s perfect. SHUX will be designed with you foremost in mind.

As a glimpse of the madness of last year’s SHUX, below we’ve uploaded this late-nite Q&A with myself, Paul, Matt and RPG reviewer Cynthia Hornbeck. I’m not sure I’ve laughed that hard since!

Gosh, watching that video makes me so happy.

For more information, check out the SHUX 18 site. Any further questions? Email [email protected]. Would you like to join our fabulous team of con volunteers? Amazing! Email [email protected] with a couple of hundred words of why you’d make a great volunteer.

Finally, do you represent a business who’d like to inquire about sponsorship or getting a booth in front of 2,000 SU&SD fans? That’s [email protected].

Our Xmas Pledge Drive is Now Open!

Quinns: Oh my goodness! With just Matt’s Gloomhaven review and a year-end podcast to go, that’s almost it for us this year.

“But wait!” you cry. “I haven’t had nearly enough Shut Up & Sit Down!”

Then please, consider thanking us for the service we’ve been providing for more than six years with a donation. Anyone who signs up to donate in a given month will enter the prestigious SU&SD Gold Club, and members receive a monthly behind-the-scenes newsletter, discounts on merchandise and early access to ticket sales for SHUX, the SU&SD convention.

Paul: This December’s newsletter goes out in a week’s time and it’ll be a holiday special, containing our plans for 2018, a blooper reel and access to ALL previous newsletters!

Thanks, everybody. We’ve had a great time putting together a year’s worth of board game coverage for you guys. Who fancies another year?

Merry Christmas from Team SU&SD.

We’ve come a long way, baby!

Six years ago SU&SD published a review of the grand, weird game of Twilight Imperium 3rd edition. Today, we present a first for the board game industry. Please enjoy our amateur attempt at a documentary on the history of the game – which is really the history of Fantasy Flight Games – and the development of the new, shiny, 4th edition. Huge thanks to our donors, without whom this project (which we started work on back in 2015!) would never, ever have been possible.

As you buckle your seatbelt for this ride through time and outer space, please bear in mind that the doc doesn’t cover the nitty-gritty of game mechanics that have changed from 3rd to 4th edition. We’ll be covering that in our forthcoming review of Twilight Imperium 4th ed, which Quinns will be creating since he had almost no involvement in the doc.

Instead, we tried to make the documentary of broader interest, so please consider sharing it with board game-curious friends. Or just tell your mum it’s Netflix? That might work.

Enjoy, everybody!

Big news everyone! Fantasy Flight Games have just announced a new edition of their galaxy-sized flagship game, Twilight Imperium. Which means we can announce something of our own… !

Here at Shut Up & Sit Down we’ve been huge fans of Twilight Imperium since we reviewed the 3rd edition all those years ago. It’s the grandest, silliest game that we know; an epic brawl featuring everything from capitalist cats to a race of sentient vegetables. So back in 2014 we got to talking with owner of Fantasy Flight and original designer of TI Christian Peterson, one thing led to another, and we agreed to document the process of making TI 4th edition.

How do you go about making the grandest board game in the world even more grand? Find out later this month!

Announcing our Summer Donation Drive!

Announcing the second SU&SD Monikers Kickstarter!

Oh Baby: SHUX’19 tickets are now on sale!

Quinns Walks You Through His Game Collection!

15 Great Games to Fill Your Table This Christmas

Quinns Talks to Schoolkids About Being a YouTuber!

Oh baby: SHUX ’18 tickets are now on sale!

Our Xmas Pledge Drive is Now Open!

Space Lions: The Story of Twilight Imperium

Announcing the SU&SD Twilight Imperium Mini-Doc!

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