Quinns: Everyone remembers the 10 plagues of Egypt. Blood, frogs, flies, pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, fire, darkness, and mediocre card games.
Today, we’re doing our bit to rebuild society. Gin Rummy is most certainly a card game that doesn’t suck. This is a tense, tight little race for 2 players that plays a lot like an affordable version of Arboretum.
What are some of your favourite games in the creepily-named “Rummy family”?
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Since a quick’n’shifty discussion on podcast #68, there hasn’t been much discussion on this site of Andean carpet-crafter & bag-builder Altiplano… until TODAY!
This game has recently been gifted with The Traveller expansion, which Matt is convinced turns a good game into a great one by… adding a strange man who wanders around in circles? Can that be right?
Read our review of Altiplano’s predecessor Orléans here.
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Hey, remember when we did a nine hour stream of Twilight Imperium with No Pun Included? After much grinding of CPUs and gnashing of bandwidth, we’ve just uploaded an HD recording to YouTube.
Above you’ll find part 1 (or should that be Act 1?), part 2 is right here, and part 3, the finale, can be found here.
Huge thanks to Chris and Anni for their herculean efforts behind the desk that day. If you’re at all into video games then be sure to check out their amazing video game documentary series, People Make Games.
Enjoy, everybody!
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For the third instalment of Card Games that Don’t Suck, Quinns has dug up a game that’s fun even if you don’t gamble. That’s right, everybody! Those card game scientists finally cracked it.
Oh Hell is a trick-taking game for 3-7 players that might be the ultimate idle time waster. It’s a short, simple game that somehow expands to fill a whole hour, like a wad of dough rising in the oven of your minds.
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With the release of The Quest for El Dorado, it seems that board gaming owes yet another debt to venerable designer Reiner Knizia. This game is a nail-biting race through a troublesome jungle, and we think it’s superb. A solid, simple, clean design.
…But what if you want a wobbly, complex, dirty design? Well, then you could pick up the Heroes & Hexes expansion, which Quinns also investigates in this video.
Have a great weekend, everybody!
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Slowly but surely, SU&SD is learning what makes a good board game stream. “Two and a half hours of Matt and Quinns playing a complicated resource management game” might not be the answer, but one thing’s for certain: That’s what we’ve uploaded to YouTube this week.
This video also documents Matt and Quinns playing the new expansion for the terrific Great Western Trail, Rails to the North, for the very first time. To be charitable, it’s not what they expect. To be candid, they play the worst game of Great Western Trail of their adult lives.
Enjoy, everybody!
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Did you catch the first instalment of Card Games That Don’t Suck, Ricochet Poker? This week we’re travelling from America to China to tell you about a fantastic shedding game called Fight the Landlord.
Watching the video, you’ll notice that “2s” are valued higher than royals. It’s possible that this comes from the game’s communist roots, in much that same way that following the French revolution, it was considered distasteful to play games where kings and queens were desirable. The more you know!
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Oho, with the unexpected release of the Mother of Dragons expansion for the Game of Thrones board game, did Fantasy Flight think they were the only ones who could return to an old game?
They’ve got another thing coming. We reviewed this board game back in 2011, and now we’re reviewing it AGAIN. So stick that in your moon door and smoke it.
Have a great weekend, everybody.
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Oh my GOODNESS! Today marks the start of a brand-new series for Shut Up & Sit Down.
Every two weeks, Card Games That Don’t Suck will teach you how to play a game that we love, that you can play with an ordinary deck of cards. In doing so, we hope to make table gaming more accessible and wide-ranging, and maybe even learn a little bit of history along the way.
But there’s no history in our first instalment! Ricochet Poker is, in fact, a brand new game by designer James Ernest, and we think it’s just superb.
Enjoy, everybody!
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Do you feel a faint stirring in your heart? That’ll probably be because of Quacks of Quedlinburg, a game about stirring, excitement, dread, capitalism, and even more stirring. It’s also the second game about managing your own personal gambling den we’ve reviewed recently, following on from the very good Space Base. But this is better.
Special thanks to Wizarding Harry of Wizarding Harry’s Child Wizarding School for Top Wizarding Harrys for being such a superb special guest.
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