Shut Up & Sit Down

Oh god. Sit down. The new podcast is out, and we've peaked. We'll never have a lineup like this again. Last week we enjoyed exclusive access to scalding-hot 2016 Fantasy Flight epic Star Wars: Rebellion , and on this podcast we want to tell you all about the fun we had with it. But that's not all! We also discuss our time with the wonderful new edition of Fury of Dracula , return to Star Wars: Arm...

In what could be our most exciting reader mail ever , Quinns has helped a marine biologist pick some board games to take to the above Antarctic research station for 18 months. Tune in next year to hear how those games fared against penguins, boredom and the deadliest winters on planet Earth. But that's not all! Join Paul and Quinns as they walk the tightrope of talking about Pandemic Legacy withou...

Market research tells us that the median SU&SD reader is, at a given moment, most likely to be thatching their mead hall. How boring! You'd best pop our 33rd ever podcast on in the background. Matt and Quinns are desperate to talk about their crippling Infinity habit, while Paul's been playing the beloved game of Battlecon . We've got a quick interview with Fantasy Flight CEO Christian Peterse...

My god! 32 podcasts in and we're finally approaching "professional". Paul, Matt and Quinns discuss the bold new Game of Thrones card game and think back on classic lie-athon Battlestar Galactica , before clearing the floor for an interview with veteran designer Eric Lang (Quarriors, XCOM: The Board Game , Chaos in the Old World). We close with a quick trip to the SU&SD mailbag and an impromptu...

(This podcast is also available as a video .) Last year team SU&SD hustled 300 people into a dingy Gen Con annex to record a live podcast . It was incredible. So this year we did it again! After a shaky start where Matt, Quinns and Pip realise their audience is only there to hear about their hotel, the board game chat begins in earnest. We discuss the croquet mallets of T.I.M.E. Stories, the w...

You ever eat Nerd Rope ? Just an endlessly long, glutinous tongue, speckled with sour little gobbets? That's basically the 30th ever SU&SD podcast. On this lengthy journey of no less than one hour and one minute, we discuss the absence of bitterness in the magnificent Forbidden Stars . We chat about the sheer joy of Funemployed (alas, we're still waiting on the European release), and the sweet...

Now Quinns is back from the UK Games Expo, we slid a microphone under the door of the con-tamination chamber to record a new podcast! Paul's got questions about the sublime Welcome to the Dungeon , the prototype of Vlaada's Codenames and Quinns' performance at the UK Netrunner Nationals. But that's not all! Quinns is starved for company and wants to know about the games Paul's been playing: For th...

Sometimes Team SU&SD can be compared to a marching band, except instead of playing musical instruments we make awful mistakes, and instead of moving forward we stay in the same place forever. Not today, though! Today, in podcast #28, we prove our competence. Paul discusses overcoming Panamax 's awful manual to discover the fabulous game within, while Matt and Quinns discuss the great time they...

STOP! This is the police. You're under arrest for being in possession of 27th Shut up & Sit Down podcast. I'm afraid it's very illegal indeed. First there was that scaremongering at the beginning about ghosts in Mysterium . Then they openly discussed how they were underqualified for their work as politicians in the recent Megagame , detectives in Consulting Detective and alchemists in Alchemis...

Matt, Quinns and Paul re-unite in a stuffy room to discuss all the marvelous games they've seen on their travels around North America, the forgotten continent. We get off to a civilized start with Bring Your Own Book and the delicate negotiation of Dragon's Gold , followed by total regression into childhood and the beautiful miniatures and deadly turbolasers of Imperial Assault . Finally, Matt's h...

Paul : Here's the story of how I bunked off school to play a board game and how that board game changed my life. Saying that immediately makes me excited to tell it.

After discovering everything he was taught about chess to be wrong, Brendan goes on a quest to learn the game properly, in this special feature on the ancient pastime.

First things first, huge thanks to Vitaliy Zavadskyy for gifting our podcast with some magical intro and outro themes. The UK finally has a second radio show to be proud of after the BBC World Service. In this episode Paul's been hard at work testing Spyfall , Panamax and The Witcher Adventure Game as well as continuing to plumb the depths of the new edition of D&D . Meanwhile, Matt and Quinns...

Oho! What's this? Board gaming's most excitable hour of chatter is back, as Matt and Quinns discuss everything they played and saw over the New Year, including a visit to London's first board game cafe . After that, this one's all about crap houses. The boys discuss the terrible property investments they made in Last Will and the Getting Sacked expansion , Matt makes fun of Quintin's horrible esta...

Quinns spent his youth as a "Keeper of Drinking Games". Whenever him and his friends were boozing as kids, in those empty kitchens or under trees, he'd lay the games out. He wants to share a few with the world now, before he dies. A written transcript is available here , and Brendan's essay on craic is here .

For our 23rd podcast Paul and Quinns discuss board games past, present and future. That sounds more hifalutin than it probably is. We begin by discussing the consenting tentacle sex of Consentacle , and how our next live podcast will be an excuse to review Cat on Yer Head . We fret about Prophecy , chat about Tammany Hall , ponder Istanbul and gossip about Warhammer 40,000: Conquest , a game of wa...

Last month Grant Howitt Kickstarted a silly RPG called Goblin Quest . A game where players take the role of a steady stream of goblins trying to compete banal tasks, but mostly just dying along the way. This week Grant sent us a preview of one of the variants in the back of the book, titled "Sean Bean Quest". The less you know about this the better. Just hit play and enjoy Matt, Paul and Quinns ap...

Halloween is upon us! That wonderful time of the year where bumps are forcibly inserted into the night, and we can bookend our podcast with creaky door sound effects. In this horrifying installment we discuss the gore-flecked teenagers of Zombie 15' , the forbidden pouches of Sheriff of Nottingham , the... uh... terrifying suburbs and sidewalks of Subdivision , before finally giving up and chattin...

Our very 21st podcast is a magical journey into the realm of card games. We start in our Lifeboat , fall into Bruno Cathala's undersea Abyss , and wash up in the exotic Eastern home of Samurai Spirit , Panda Poker and Seiji Kanai's Say Bye to the Villains . Matt, Quinns and Paul have played all of these games, but that's not the best part. It turns out we can't agree about a single one of them. Ab...

At Gen Con 2014 we hosted a special, live podcast for 300 of our closest fans. It was unbelievable. If you were there, thank you. If you weren't there, contained within is us yammering about the new XCOM board game , Ca$h 'n Guns and one huge game of Two Rooms and a Boom , before running two games of our own! True (or False) Dungeon and Question Jenga. It's more madness than you can shake a sedati...

Yes, we're still playing the Star Wars: Edge of Empire roleplaying game! No, our intrepid gang of sob stories and space-wastrels hasn't been arrested yet. In session #3 the gang stretch their luck to the very limits by attempting a heist at the height of a terrible electric storm. And... oh, no. Are they really pretending to be musicians as a cover story? With no knowledge of music, and no musical...

For the month of June 2014, Leigh played a deadly femme fatale in a month long watergun assassination game. This is her story of stalking her prey, shivering in bushes and battling the most dangerous enemy of all. GUILT. A companion podcast where Leigh, Paul and Quinns review the game itself is just over here , and a written transcript is available here .

In June, Paul, Leigh and Quinns took part in a month-long, city-wide, entirely ludicrous watergun assassination game. In podcast #19 they cast off their disguises, holster their leaky weapons and assemble for the official SU&SD review. A downloadable .pdf of Killer by Steve Jackson is available right here , the official Streetwars site is here and Leigh's AMAZING story of her time as a murdere...

It's part 2 of our entirely amazing Star Wars adventures! In this session our team of heroes arrive at a space station, kill an orc (kind of), succeed at crime (mostly) and (almost) begin working as a team. I'm calling it now. There is no way this ends well. If you missed part 1 we should stress that we haven't retreated into a child-like fantasy world and are in fact playing the new Star Wars RPG...

Podcast #18, "The Turbocast", has been sighted in the Earth's atmosphere! Not to be confused with podcast #17, the Megacast, the Turbocast sees Team SU&SD compressing 60 minutes of board game chatter into a super-dense 30 minutes. We recommended you pop your ears before listening so the change in pressure doesn't cause your head to collapse like an egg. The games that underwent this revolution...