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Shut Up & Sit Down, Quinns Quest, and The Year Ahead

February 1, 2024SU&SD News

Tom: Hey folks! We wanted to kick off the year with an update that goes over what Shut Up & Sit Down is going to be up to in 2024. This is the kind of thing we normally reserve for the newsletter, but we wanted this to be broadly accessible so that everyone’s in the loop!

First off, Quinns is going to share an exciting new project he’s been cooking up! Then, afterwards, I’ll take you behind the scenes on what to expect from the site going forward! It’s a long one, so let’s get into it…

Introducing: Quinns Quest!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c29Ecut4K_E

Quinns: So! My news, here goes….

I think the TTRPG scene is in a similar place to the board game scene in 2011. When we launched Shut Up & Sit Down it was with a sense of frothing confusion that board games were so good, they weren’t getting the attention they deserved, and at least part of that was because the kind of coverage we wanted to see just didn’t exist. So, we decided to try and make it.

Now I want to tackle that for tabletop roleplaying games, with an entirely seperate new programme I’m calling Quinns Quest. It’s me once again deciding to try and get a whole host of underreported, extraordinarily designers the attention they deserve, and helping everybody to have a bit more fun along the way. Shut Up & Sit Down is of course where I’ll cover board games whenever I feel the itch – and you can expect to see more of me on the new Top 100 Board Games feature – but Quinns Quest is where I’m putting my immediate focus.

This is a bit of a new chapter for me – and so I wanted to take a second to say thank you to the SU&SD community. You folks have been so generous with your attention over the years, especially in the earliest days of SU&SD when I had literally no idea how to be a presenter. I remember my loved ones giving me suggestions in 2012 along the lines of “What if you smiled when you were on camera?” and “What if you talked slower, so people could understand you?”. The fact that you folks stuck with me while I learned the trade, video by awkward video, has been life-changing, and I can’t wait to put all that learning into a new project that I’m more excited about than anything else right now.

But whilst I’m scaling down my role with SU&SD, I wanted to say how happy I am that the site has been in such capable hands!

Tom is editor-in-chief of Shut Up & Sit Down, but that’s been true for a while now. The guy’s a f***ing marvel, and – troublingly – he only seems to be getting better? Have you seen his video on John Company?? Apparently he plans to focus on making equally ambitious videos in the future??? The world isn’t ready.

Tom, you’re an extraordinarily rare talent. You’re hilarious, insightful, and technically-minded in a way I’ve never been (don’t know if you noticed this). But more importantly, you’re hungrier and more passionate about board games than my decrepit ass. Part of knowing when to step back a little is knowing when it’s time to make room for the next generation, and it’s past time I do that.

Matt- my time spent making 2-person videos with you is what I consider my most creatively fulfilling time with SU&SD. I have so, so many happy memories with you, not just of workshopping jokes in your living room, but just playing games with you.

In fact, if I had to name my favourite single instance of a game I’ve played, it would be the afternoon we spent playing head-to-head Tigris & Euphrates in advance of our marvellously unhinged review. London was caught in a sweltering headwave and sweat was literally beading on my forehead as we were locked in a near-silent, utterly intense battle, punctuated only by each of us complimenting the other’s move. You are the kind of collaborator a creative can only dream of, but you’re an even better opponent. You’ve made me so much sharper, in comedy, in editing, and in strategy. I have no choice but to be my best around you. I think you’ve even beaten me at a game once or twice.

And Emily! Holy kittens. Hiring Emily feels like going for a walk and finding a ruby on the ground. Her reviews are so good that it makes me ashamed of myself. It took me the better part of a decade to become as good a video reviewer as Emily was instantly. Emily, your future is inconceivably bright. I also understand you’ll be seeing more of the inimitable Pip Warr in the future of Shut Up & Sit Down, and nothing could make me happier. I also know nothing will make fans of the show happier, since one of the only pieces of feedback SU&SD fans were ever brave enough to give me in person – over and over again – was “More Pip”.

What a team. What an unbelievable, beautiful, side-splittingly funny clutch of folks.

Tom: Wahoo! Anyone who watched Quinns’ fantastic Get into RPGs video, or Alice is Missing coverage has probably felt this shift coming for a while now, and Quinns making a dedicated space for RPG fans is fabulous! We’re excited to keep working with him on the brand new Top 100 Series and any other board game shenanigans that take his fancy, and of course we can’t wait to see all the… roles he…. plays? Is that how it works?

Quinns: You’re sort of making it sound like a sex thing. It’s not a sex thing.

Matt: It’s definitely a sex thing.

Quinns: Shut UP!

Tom: And… sit……?

RIGHT! So! With Quinns taking on this new project, what’s happening with the rest of SU&SD? Let’s talk about the cracking year of board games ahead!

The First Ever Top 100

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ojqjk5k9sA

Tom’s New Hat

Tom: With Quinns formally changing his position within the site to ‘contributor’, I am taking up the mantle of SU&SD’s editorial lead, a hat you’ve already seen me sporting for the last year or two!

To address an obvious question about this change in role, though – “Why not Matt, apparent heir to the cardboard throne”? There’s one reason! It’s because he’s an incredibly talented creative with years of experience making brilliant work who, with all the love in the world, has the organisational talents of a level one goblin.

Matt: It’s true! I once accidentally put my passport in the bin. My wife rescued it for me.

Tom: He’s doing just fine, and we’re very proud. Me, on the other hand? I’m an organisation freak! I’m a dweeb! I like lists and bullet points and sorting my socks by colour! I’m the guy who likes packing away my board games into custom labelled bags. This one’s for me, gang!

Realistically, this expanded role does little to actually affect our creative output one iota – like I say, you’ve been watching this restructured SU&SD for the past two years! Matt and I are creative partners on most everything we put out – we’ve got workflows to help each other with edits, we love filming together, and we’re very much aligned on what we want the site to be.The studio is finally a place where we can easily film (don’t worry, it’s not replacing our classic “reviews from the living room”), and we’re going to get stuck right in, and bring our growing roster of contributors right along with us! It’ll be a treat, and I’m so excited!

Videos and Podcasts

We’ve got one main goal for this year, and it’s sustainability. We’re really proud of this website, and we want it to exist… forever? That might sound crazy, but we truly want the spirit of things to continue on even if the faces might vary. To that end, we’re pushing our resources in 2024 towards creating a dependable and stable slate of videos to gently branch out from.

The precedent set when SU&SD was growing the most was to upload a video every single week, no matter what. This (sometimes!) worked, but simply does not scale with the production values and ambition we’re looking for in videos these days. Attempting this approach in this more modern, less ‘handheld and poorly white-balanced’ era of SU&SD? It led to a whole lot of trying to make more elaborate and high production videos within a schedule that didn’t fit – and subsequently getting said videos delayed, pushed back, completely canned… or otherwise just completely knackering us.

We want everything we put out to be of exceptional quality, and we want to be energised by every project! So, in 2024, we’re shedding that old and often-missed schedule to instead focus on three videos per month, one of which will consistently be an entry in our Top 100 series. It’s not a huge change, but it’s a meaningful one.

Already this simple, semantic shift is making me feel better, more creative, and more in control of my work. I think this is an excellent baseline to work from, and I’m certain you’ll agree that the ‘fewer and better’ approach to video is going to result in some of the best work we’ve done in recent memory. I’m not going to spoil some of the chunkier projects we’ve got planned, but I think they’ll be exceptional.

What about the podcast? Exactly the same deal here. We never truly managed to sort out one a week, so we’ll take a week out for every three podcasts released from now on. I want to make sure those podcasts are of dependable quality – so nailing down our format to three games per podcast discussed by two hosts will be the norm. However, I do want to pursue more ‘topic’ episodes where we have wider conversations with more people involved – but I want to get a dependable offering running first!

What’s Going on with SHUX?

Goodness, deposits are just so expensive. We love it as much as you do, and we really want it to come back… it just might be a bit of a wait. When it does return, we want it to be as good as ever and to be in a position to run it in a healthy way that doesn’t obliterate the team completely! We’re going to be quiet on this front for a good while, but you’ll know about the future of SHUX as soon as we do.

Bonus Bits?

Everything with our bonus bits and donations will stay exactly the same. We’re going to shoot for monthly newsletters with a couple fun extra videos to go along with them. This month, we’ve got a video where I ramble about Shadow Gambit, and a Bonus Podcast! I’m also really excited about some potential weirder directions for this – we’ve heard you loud and clear that early access isn’t as exciting as odd exclusives, so I want to focus on making exactly that.

A Personal Note

Finally, I wanted to take a second to share something from the heart. Shut Up & Sit Down has been around for about thirteen trips around the sun, which is about eighty seven in ‘Internet Years’. Managing the trajectory of this creaky old ship is a real challenge – one that I feel in a uniquely odd position to tackle. I was a fan of the site before I started working here, watching videos whilst I was still in secondary school! I want to make sure I protect the soul of the thing that got me into board games, but I also want to make sure I’ve got my own voice within it. I want this site to be run in a way that’s healthy and exciting for everyone involved, without losing the spark that got me hooked.

But it’s often tricky to achieve that. Foundational to my role as the ‘new face’ on the site is a constant background radiation of comparison. That comparison starts in my own brain, and then takes up more and more room as the internet-at-large pumps air into it until it dominates my headspace and paralyses me to continue. I’ve always felt like there’s another pair of shoes to fill, that I’ll never quite satisfy people’s desire for something they can no longer have.

I’m pretty done with that thinking. 2024 marks a subtle new chapter for SU&SD, where we’re going to play to our tempo and make great work for the people who like what we do for what it is now.

I truly hope you’re as excited for that as we are!

Questions?

Of course there will be! What do you want to know? For a couple of weeks or so we’ll be keeping an eye on this page and will reply to queries to build up something of an FAQ for people to take a peek at when one of those ‘What Happened to SU&SD?’ Reddit posts inevitably crops up within the next… week? Day? Those things are maddening, aren’t they. Thanks to everyone who engages in those in good faith and can accept that we are only human, and that in 13 years, things do change. We’ll do our best to build and maintain a site you can love, and if you don’t? A reminder that we’re out there on the internet as well, and we’re human beings too!

Be gentle, folks, it’s been a mad few years but we’ve still got our whole hearts in this wonderful thing. If you do too, then everything we do is for you, and we hope you’re able to enjoy it with us in the years to come!

Big Love,
Team SU&SD

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15/04/2025
HUTAN: Life in the Rainforest Review
I’m a big fan of games that have a nice table presence, so I was excited when we received HUTAN: Life in the Rainforest from The Op and Sidekick Games. This puzzley, nature themed game is for 1 to 4 players and plays in around 45 minutes. HUTAN was created by the design team of Asger Granerud and Daniel Pedersen who are known for Heat, Flamme Rouge, and Copenhagen. Let’s dig in and see what this game is all about.

Flora and Fauna

Players will have a board made up of four rainforest segments. The first player will decide the board layout that each player has to follow. In each of the nine rounds of the game, players will take two turns as they build up their unique rainforest board.

Your turn starts by drafting a flower card from the market. There are five different flower types/colors represented on the cards. Once you draft one of these cards, you’ll add the new flowers onto your board, obeying a couple of rules:
- The first new flower has to be placed next to a previously placed flower (except for the first round).
- The flower(s) on the card have to be placed adjacent to one another (not diagonal).
- Flowers can be placed on top of flowers of the same color.
Your rainforest board is broken into areas of two to five blocks that are separated by waterways. Ideally, players want to fill these sections with a single flower color to score the points listed on the area. Players want to pay attention to the three water spaces on their rainforest board since flowers cannot be placed in these locations.

After adding the flowers from the card you drafted, you’ll move onto checking for the growth of trees. When you place a second identical flower color on a place, a tree grows on that space. HUTAN comes with four unique tree types which are different sizes and shapes to give player boards some variety. Each tree on a player board will be worth two victory points at the end of the game.

A Perfect Habitat

The final phase of your turn is checking to see if you’ve created the perfect habitat. Players earn big points by filling an area with a single flower color and having trees on each block in the area. When you place the last tree in an area, you can attract an animal of the same color on the space. Having a wildlife token in an area will earn you the points shown on that space at the end of the game.

The wildlife tokens in HUTAN are limited to only three in each flower color. Once a token is exhausted from the supply, they’re unavailable for the rest of the game. Even though you earned a wildlife token, you don’t have to place one. On occasion, players will create two perfect habitats in a single turn. You’re limited to earning one token per turn, so players have to decide on which area receives this token.

Another perk of earning a wildlife token is that they can fertilize the spaces orthogonally adjacent to their location. You can place any color flower in the spaces around the wildlife token. This is an optional perk but is almost always worth taking.

One player will take the start player token during the round which comes with a single flower of your chose. HUTAN is a game where being the start player can be incredibly useful.

Advanced Gameplay

In the early rounds of HUTAN, gameplay is pretty simple and the options are plentiful. It’s in the later rounds where players will start to feel the complexity of optimizing points and trying not to earn negative points.

At the end of the game, areas that have a mixture of flower colors are called mixed areas. Players score negative points for each mixed area and each incomplete areas. Strategically keeping away from some areas can be helpful. An area that doesn’t have any flowers will be zero points, keeping players from incurring negative effects.

Once players get the basics down, players can introduce Ecosystem cards into the game. Pull five Ecosystem goal cards that will award points to each player who completes these goals by the end of the game.

Final Thoughts

HUTAN is a beautiful and puzzley game that draws you in with its table presence. The game has a nice flow to it and keeping your negative points to a minimum is a challenge. After your first game, adding in the advanced scoring of the Ecosystem cards is a must for most gamers.

This game has the same publishing duo as Aqua, a 2024 release that we really enjoy. Not only did Vincent Dutrait do the artwork, but it also includes a couple extras that I love. There’s a family variant that adjusts a couple rules and removes the negative scoring.

In the back of the rulebook, you’ll find scenarios that have preset board layouts and Ecosystem cards. You are working toward hitting a specific score to accomplish the goal. There are also challenges and game modifications that you can tackle at any player count. Having these achievements adds a lot to the replayability of the game.

HUTAN: Life in the Rainforest is a great addition to our game library. If you enjoy games like Life of the Amazonia and Harmonies, two of our absolute favorites, HUTAN is a game that you have to check out.

HUTAN: Life in the Rainforest is available at your local game store, from The Op webstore, or online through Amazon today.

This game was provided to us by the publisher for review. Read more about our review policies at One Board Family.

Highs
- Excellent table presence and box organization
- Puzzley gameplay that gets more challenging each round
- Achievements and scenarios adds to the replayability
- Drafting the first player token in the late game is key
Lows
- Negative points can be a turn off to some (family variant removes this)
- Trees can come apart easily after a couple plays
Complexity

Time Commitment

Replayability
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14/04/2025
Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s Nintendo Switch 2 edition will make you fork out for DLC separately, but hey, it’s not like you’ll already have spent a lot on other Switch 2 stuff

Since Nintendo revealed its new console, the prices of Switch 2 itself, Mario Kart World and the Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour have all discourses.

There’s even been some spamming of ‘DROP THE PRICE’ by fans in Treehouse livestream chats and some subtweeting by Reggie Fils-Aimé about the Welcome Tour not being free. It’s ok though, it’s not like if you get the Switch 2 edition of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you’ll have to buy the DLC/expansion pass separately. Oh no, hang on, you do.

Nintendo has confirmed as much in a statement to IGN, saying: “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition does not include The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Expansion Pass DLC. That DLC is available as a separate purchase.”

Very to the point, but what it’ll mean for you depends on your current Breath of the Wild ownership status. If you already own the game on OG Switch as well as all its DLC, and opt to buy the $10 “upgrade pack” that turns it into the Switch 2 edition on that console, you’ll not need to buy the DLC again.

However, if you don’t already own the DLC, just upgrading isn’t gonna hand it to you for free. The main folks affected by this are people who don’t own the game at all, and buy the Switch 2 edition, which will costs $70. Since it’s not included, they’ll end up paying $90 in total for Switch 2 Breath of the Wild plus DLC, since the game’s expansion pass costs $20.

Is it that egregious a decision on its own? Not really, even if it’s kinda taking p**s with a game from 2017. However, when taken alongside all the other stuff I mentioned earlier, it does seem like Nintando kinda bumbling into kicking itself in the dick again from a PR perspective.

Are you currently staring at your bank account wondering how you’re going to send half of your lide savings to Nintendo and still afford unimportant things like rent and food? Let us know below!

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14/04/2025
Capturing the Core of the Combat Commander System – InsideGMT

While the game comes with 12 scenarios, there is also a 2-page roll-your-own scenario system that will generate a HISTORICAL situation in about 5 minutes, after which both players secretly choose from one of many historical forces of platoon-to-company size with which to fight.

-Chad Jensen on Combat Commander: Europe (2006)

Magical Realism

The premise of Combat Commander’s Random Scenario Generator teeters close to absurd for a board wargame. Not Campaign for North Africa absurd where you’re tracking pasta rations, but “is that even possible” absurd. Random variables that generate plausible wargame scenarios across the breadth of World War II sounds like magical thinking. The number of permutations that can be generated from the variables of the RSG are astronomical. Just the two Allies and their troop quality, across the five years in the base Europe box, has tens of thousands of combinations. Balancing the outputs, so that a high percentage of the generated scenarios exist within a margin of error for fidelity sounds impossible. Yet, you roll one up and the evidence is right there waiting to be played. Magical. I became obsessed with that magic, and as I studied it I soon found Chad’s secret – research and data. Understanding how this data bridged the gap between history and the model, was central to our design process for Combat Commander: Vietnam.

Orders of Battle and Support Tables from Combat Commander: Europe

Wargame systems are notoriously data driven. Variables on counters placed in hexes with scale measurements and visual references for terrain with modifying effects. Detailed play sequences, with phases referring to one or more charts to resolve actions with sub sequences. Where Combat Commander differs is that the majority of charts in the game are for the Orders of Battle (OoB) and Support. In other words, the tables are focused on the receipt of units and their weapons, not about their use.

A design decision Chad made was to put most of the actionable data onto the unit counters and in the fate decks. Many mistake this shift to card driven mechanics as an abstraction that might reduce the game’s fidelity. Yet these asymmetric decks pack more faction and game data across their card counts than you would find in most of the tables and charts from other wargames. They also keep the games flowing smoothly, the actions immediately resolved, with little need to consult a table to determine a result. The heavy lifting of the design is not in the play itself but rather how each game is set up. Becoming a strong Combat Commander player includes understanding how setup impacts play. This is taken one step further with the RSG, which includes scenario as well as unit set up. For Combat Commander: Vietnam we wanted to provide a similar level of agency for players, grounded in the history, but balanced by their choices.

Page from the RSG rules in Combat Commander: Europe

The Balancing Act

To shape the balance of the RSG system, Chad provides agency in the setup process. Players are able to build formations with a bid for initiative balanced against available support weapons and fortifications. Playing through the RSG and having to make these decisions takes practice but it is where the model reveals itself. With experience, players will find the fidelity of the scenarios they generate increase. This comes from an increased understanding of the Orders of Battle and Support tables, and their competitive values in various situations. That they map closely to their historical values for the theater and period generated reinforces the decision space of a historical company commander, and we wanted to take the same approach with Combat Commander: Vietnam.

The first two volumes of Combat Commander, Europe and Mediterranean, were originally designed as one box, a point stressed to us by Kai Jensen when we first started working on Combat Commander: Vietnam. In order for the system to work across multiple years and areas, all of the faction data had to be balanced against each other, which meant that they all had to be designed at once (the following volume Pacific, redesigned the system to account for the additional theater). The primary reason for this was the central role the RSG system had on the whole design. Even some designed scenarios are balanced against what the RSG might generate.

This is a testament to just how powerful Chad’s design approach was. By putting so much of his research and data into getting the variables of the RSG system right, he designed a sandbox from which any WWII engagement at the tactical level could be modeled and validated. Appreciative of this, our first goal for Combat Commander: Vietnam was to build from the premise and design an RSG system that could generate scenarios for any region, with historical combatants, across the 15 years of the Indochina conflict. If we got the RSG right it would mean we could design and validate scenarios for any engagement at the game’s scale.

Anderson, Arnsten, and Averch, Insurgent Organization and Operations (August 1967).

We went through a number of iterations for the Order of Battle tables for Combat Commander: Vietnam, sourcing documentation of the force composition and weapons across the factions. Translating this data to unit values on the OoB formed the basis of the RSG system. As we started working on building out the maps for the base game, pulling from the 1:50,000 scale maps used during the conflict, we could immediately check the composition of forces from the primary sources against how they would be represented by the RSG. After months of iterations we started to find the magic.

Orders of Battle with Support Tables from the Combat Commander: Vietnam Playtest Kit

Campaign for Randomness

As the map count for Combat Commander: Vietnam increased and we continued playing RSG scenarios across them, something started to feel missing. In isolation the playthroughs gave a decent overview of the types of small-scale engagements seen across the conflict, but, without the context to really place where and how they fit into the broader war effort. To provide that context, we had to bring something completely new to the Combat Commander system.

When it comes to military operations, the easiest way to provide context is to go up in scale, and understand the significance of an engagement to the higher command. Combat Commander was originally called Company Commander in reference to the scale it models. Going up from the company is the battalion. We posited that if Combat Commander: Vietnam players could play a series of connected games as a battalion campaign it would contextualize the choices made in the individual engagements to better understand why fighting in Vietnam was so different.

Records of an ANZAC Battalion’s Operations. The Combat Commander: Vietnam Campaign system is built to represent this level of operation.

Campaigns have been in Combat Commander since John Foley introduced them in the second battle pack. To this point however they have primarily been a way of sequencing scenarios, both designed and randomly generated, to play in a historical succession. This allowed players to fight out multiple days of battle in Normandy or Stalingrad to great effect. Yet, these campaigns have only existed as add ons, not parts of the core rules. The last challenge we gave ourselves with the Combat Commander: Vietnam design was to build out a campaign system that was a part of the core. This meant expanding the system to be able to generate random campaigns across the factions, for any region, at any time during the conflict.

Composing the large battles are any number of small fights, little connected, and sometimes at cross-purposes one with the other. Each is local and limited in the feelings of the men who engage. Company fights company, platoon goes against platoon. How the regiment or brigade fared as a whole is something that has to be computed later.

-S.L.A. Marshall, Battles in the Monsoon (1967)

From the Combat Commander: Vietnam core box, using the Random Campaign Generator (RCG), players will be able to generate an area of responsibility for a battalion commander over a month-long operation as a campaign. The perspective provided by this form of play contextualizes the individual engagements in a way that allows players to experience the decision space of Vietnam at the tactical level with the context to understand the implications of their decisions operationally.

Campaign Map showing a Free World Forces Battalion operating in a relatively remote, Communist controlled area of II Corps.

With the RCG system in place we are also able to design historical campaigns which allow players to replay known operations. So much of the research that went into the design captured primary accounts from all sides including their operational maps. The campaign framework is a direct reflection of this, with the historical campaigns providing the decision space of their historic counterparts.

What will come in the base box for Combat Commander: Vietnam will be all of the things players already love about the system. 24 scenarios that can be set up at any time for a dynamic game full of the flavor but grounded in the historical realities of the conflict. The RSG system will expand the scenario potential from those base maps increasing replayability. The amount of variety you will get playing one off scenarios will be satisfying to system veterans and newcomers alike.

The Hurricane II, FFV Magazine, May 1967

For those looking to form a better understanding of the war and how it progressed over time, Combat Commander: Vietnam’s Random Campaign Generator will prove to be the central experience. Playing campaigns with a single faction will provide a deeper understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. Across multiple campaigns you can see how their capabilities changed over time. Explore how the terrain in the different corps zones affected how formations operated. With the historic campaigns you can face the decisions of your historic counterparts.

All of this has been done in an effort to make Combat Commander: Vietnam the most comprehensive tactical wargame experience on the conflict. It gives players infinite replayability with the opportunity to enrich their understanding of the challenges faced by all sides during the war. Even more, all parts of the design are fully extensible which means future battle packs and expansions will provide even broader coverage. For anyone looking to immerse themselves in the Vietnam Experience, this is the starting point.

Previous Article: For Everything There is a Season: The Origin Story of Combat Commander: Vietnam

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14/04/2025