So since I was a kid my grandma has always been playing the same kind of solitaire. But no one knows the name. After some digging I found out it must be some form of Yukon.
Deck:
Standard 52 card deck with no jokers.
Deal:
7 rows, first card face up, then 6 cards face down, repeat til the base is filled face up.
Then deal the rest of the cards on the six rows (face up) and let the first row stand alone with one card. (face up)
Play:
Same way as standard yukon, except you can only put the same type on each other in decending order: five of spades on six of spades etc.
Goal:
Build 4 foundations with ace at the foundation and building upwards from there in the same suit and type.
I play this all the time and would love to know the name!
Tom: Good morning everybody, and a happy… THURSDAY? Oh no. I have overslept terribly.
Listen, I can explain my tardiness. Each limb of Shut Up & Sit Down digitally assembled earlier in the week to chat about what exciting content we’re putting out, and all we had to show for it was a big collective moan. Well, that and the productive decision to not put out a video this week; sliding our schedule back a notch to make sure everything’s looking less exhausted. It’s ‘the year’, what else can we say?
You can still expect a podcast on Friday – Quinns and I are going to have a little ramble about a smattering of solo RPGs that I’ve been playing over the past couple days and weeks. I think it’ll be a lot of fun, so keep your ears open so that one can crawl in and have itself a home.
Normal video service will resume next week – and until then, stay hydrated! xx
Saw a publicity still of Celia Johnson playing a solitaire I haven’t seen. Celia is an English actor, pictured possibly in 1951 (thanks Michael Kinyon!).
Ava: February: Why bother? Well, because it’s nearly the end of the voidperiod. February is shorter than January and by the end you can actually feel the days getting longer. Unless you’re in the other half of this big weird ball, in which case you must hate me for always banging on about the seasons. SORRY!
This week on the very Shut Up & Sit Down website, Matt is taking the lead (to buy me some time for me to sing the praises of a little box in MY next review) and reviewing something he’s been excited enough about that I’m now also excited. Isn’t it great that it’s possible for enthusiasm to catch?
That should be Wednesday or thereabouts, and then Thursday, there may be a little sneaky surprise of a launch event on the old twitch channel. Don’t touch that dial if you want to catch some of us doing something silly. Though I guess it’s Twitch not radio so its more ‘set your notifications and then notice them at the right time’.
Finally on Friday, it’s a triple-headed pod-beast, as me, Quinns and Tom shake the cobwebs out and talk about some board games! We’ve got Ishtar, a desertified garden-grower that isn’t as fertile a crescent as I was hoping. Tom wants to talk about Endangered, and how good and/or bad he is at saving animals from endangerers. Finally Tom and Quinns delve into the beautiful duelling card game Radlands, and ask me if I can adjudicate a tricky piece of board game etiquette. I haven’t got a gavel though.
So, folks, what board game problems do YOU want me to pass judgment on? Do we reckon I can become an agony aunt? I’ll ask Matt. You’re probably better off just telling me what you got up to this weekend.
Matt: Hello! I’m crawling my way out of the Covid mines and am Technically Ready™ to do stuff again! This week on the website we’ve got another collection tour video. Ooh, very exciting! I’d offer further details, but I’m enjoying the mystery of it all too much. Will it be a collection of board games, or hedges, or eggs? Who will be the owner of the collection? Will it be Mystery Kevin, from Mystransylvania?
The mysteries continue: We’ve also got, potentially, another Tunic stream with Tom this week – You can watch the last bits as VODs on Twitch: give the channel a follow if you want to be notified if and when he’s logging on for more chill times.
I must depart the mystery zone now, as there are too many mysteries and I am getting scared. What are you getting up to this week, and how scared are you about that on a scale of 1 to 10?
Hi all! We’re off for the week getting a bunch of SHUX stuff nailed down and a couple team members are off on holiday, but have an awesome week, and enjoy exploring all the new GenCon releases, we’ll be dipping our toe in ourselves over the next couple weeks.
We also have SHUX previews coming next month for a bunch that we’re super excited to get hands on with, including Starship Captains, Turing Machine, Septima, Evergreen, Gutenberg, and Fit to Print!
If you missed it, make sure to also go give Ava some love on her awesome video last week on this year’s Kennerspiel winner, Living Forest!
Tom: Hello! How is everyone doing? In a reversal of fortunes since the last ‘This Week On Shut Up & Sit Down…’ post, I’ve garnered a copy of Frosthaven! This time I greeted the postman fully clothed! Hah! That’ll… show them?
We’ve got two absolutely fabulous weeks of content for you on the site this week to lead into the holidays with two incredibly HOT releases! Both sturdy Shut Up & Sit Down Recommends… what could they be? One is big, and the other is big! Both are games, and they feature boards! Both have cards, and one has dice! Knowing you lot, you will almost certainly guess ’em from those clues alone. Darn.
Podcast-wise, we’ve got Matt and Ava on this episode chatting about Libertalia and Oltree – two games that… well I can’t remember exactly what the thematic cohesion is there, but I’m sure they’ll have worked something out!
That’s all for this week – I’m busy sprinting the last bits of content out before nipping over to PAX Unplugged in… two days?! Oh my. What have you been up to, everybody?
Tom:Happy new year folks! The team has had a little rest, played some little games, and are generally emerging from hibernation ready to make content… and a few changes. You may have noticed the title of this post is a little different than usual, because we’re going to try swapping out our weekly ‘This Week On’ posts for ‘This Month On’ posts in the first half of 2023.
So, why the change? Mostly this comes from me sitting down to write the weekly posts and realising that the format was increasingly becoming either ‘we are posting a video and a podcast’ or ‘we are not posting a video but there will be a podcast’ for most weeks in 2022. This wasn’t terrible, of course – but it was a weird little job that didn’t feel all that useful! Now we want these posts to be more substantial, and to give folks who are interested more of a peek behind the curtain as to what we’re getting up to, as well as affording us a little more flexibility in how we approach things. Video reviews can get changed, pushed back, shuffled around and entirely canned for all manner of reasons, and we want to reflect that reality in our scheduling updates.
However! We still want to be updating the community and sharing the ins and outs of being living human beings working on things – so, to that end, we’re going to loosely start the Twitch Channel up again for some much needed chill and chat time. We’ll probably keep these very casual to begin with, and be guided by you lot on what you want to see next! The first of these will likely be next week where I’ll be playing a splash of the new Firaxis game: Marvel’s Midnight Suns, and I’ll be open for questions and rambling about SU&SD in 2023! We’ll post a date for that over on the SU&SD Twitter account once I’ve got things in order.
So! With that change out the way, what’s going on in January?
First up, you can expect a really lovely raft of podcasts. We just released our 2023 predictions episode last week, and we’ll follow that up this week with a chat about the first few games we played this year – The Wolves, The Search for Lost Species, and Ginkgopolis! After that, we’ve got a few more episodes lined up in the hopper – a CCG Special talking about Flesh & Blood and Solforge: Fusion, as well as a lengthy chat about Stationfall and some of the games we’d played after PAXU. Good times!
Over in videoville, a couple things are in the cooker. We’ll soon have a video on classic family game Rummikub, in which I have a complete critical breakdown. Why am I making it? I don’t really know. On top of that, myself and Quinns are sketching out the borders of a ‘Top 10 Small Games’ feature, but that might end up being a February project – such is the way when we’re trying to feature a whole bunch of games at once. There’s a few other scripts that are in the ‘maybe’ pile for turning into full-fat videofilms – but I think our January and February will likely be a little quieter on the video side of things whilst Matt continues to assemble the video studio for new features, and I navigate the absolute state that is Brighton’s rental market.
Thanks all! See you next week for a stream, and next month for another this month on Shut Up & Sit Down!
[oh, and I know this is a little late for ‘This January in Shut Up & Sit Down! We’ll hopefully have these updates much earlier – so we sandwich the month with a ‘This Month On…’ and a Newsletter!]
The F1 series’ Braking Point modes have always been an interesting thing to dip into, getting more refined as the TV-drama elements of the sport itself become more prominent. The mode may not be what you’re looking for if you’re in the mood to go all-in on the real-world simulation aspect of the game, or just stick to being out on track as much as possible, but there’s a place – and an audience – for it.
Drama’s always been part of the draw, don’t get me wrong, but it feels more central to how we all interact with our watching of cars going round in circles today. That’s for better or worse, depending on who you are, but if you’re looking for a bit of the dramz to spice up your Sundays, the third instalment of Braking Point in F1 25 sounds pretty promising.
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“When we introduced characters of Braking Point in ’21, and then when we introduced Konnersport – the team – back in ‘23, it was kind of really important to us that it felt authentic,” creative director Gavin Cooper explained when introing this year’s mode. “It didn’t feel realistic that those characters could come in and start winning championships right from the outset.”
Braking Point 3 changes that. Konnersport is now at the front following a winter with some fresh investment and a strong opening test, set to take on the existing real-world frontrunners of F1. Cooper alluded to a “key event that happens early in the story which throws the team into chaos”, and from the brief bit I played, it looks like the ongoing drama of the Butler family long-time players’ll be familiar with is set to still be a key cog this time around.
Following the events of Braking Point 2, Aiden Jackson and Callie Mayer are the driver pairing, and you’ll be able to choose which of them to race as for key races and events in the story.
Codemasters says it’s put a bigger focus on this offering more player agency this time around, with some “different on-track objectives and narrative elements” popping up depending on who you pick. You’ll also get an “alternative ending” to the story depending on which you’ve raced as more often, so we’ll have to see whether those feel distinct enough to be worth trying both.
Jackson or Mayer – it’s your call. | Image credit: EA/Codemasters
I picked Mayer for the first two events I got time to play through, one of which was just testing in Bahrain and took the form of your standard ‘do a few laps to get comfortable with the car and nail a certain lap time’ affair. The first proper race at Imola was a bit more exciting, with you being plunged into the action mid-race after losing ground in a turn one collision with a certain Dutch Red Bull driver (points for accuracy to Codemasters there).
Starting from about seventh, the goal was to get back the podium by the chequered flag and earn some additional points by getting back past Verstappen prior to a certain lap in the process. Since this was the first bit of the game I played, I wanted to get a feel for the car and so opted for about the most minimalistic level of driver aids I can generally cope with alongside a pretty steep difficulty.
It’s fair to say that with the cars up ahead already well strung out given the late stage of the race, I really struggled to make any ground. Knocking things back down made it thoroughly doable though, so more than anything, this was a lesson in how much the higher-level AI is tuned to face either folks running on rails with plenty of aids, or the elite of the elite.
Codemasters says it’s rebalanced the difficulty levels this year, with the addition of a fourth hardness rung to the existing three supposedly having the aim of making it easier for everyone to find their ideal setting. However, in this brief hands-on, the cut-off between too hand and too easy did still seem to be missing in-between that’d constitute the exact best match for my pace. That said, such a thing is nearly impossible for developers to help you nail down without endless tweaking, since everyone’s pace will vary from track to track and condition to condition.
Where will Callie’s story lead? I’m quite keen to find out. | Image credit: EA
Going back to the off-track drama of Braking Point, that new investment I mentioned has come from the mode’s long-time rich guy Davidoff Butler, father of both Callie Mayer and Devon Butler, the latter of whom is now a sort of team advisor after being forced to retire from racing in BP2. Jackson’s in there too, as is team boss Casper Akkerman, but it looks like the relationships between Davidoff and his kids are going to be key to a lot of the drama.
While I’m not all that invested in the tale Braking Point’s been weaving to this point, I’m at least interested to see how this year’s edition advances Mayer’s story as a fictional first female F2 champion; now stepping up for a full season in the big time. Real-world F1, lest we forget, hasn’t had a female driver actually be entered for a full race weekend since Giovanna Amati back in 1992 (though there has been testing and development work done for teams much more recently by the likes of Jamie Chadwick, Jessica Hawkins, and Tatiana Calderón). Shout-out, also, to the all-female F1 Academy series that’s been a part of the F1 support series package for a good couple of years, now.
To bring the tale to life, Codemasters has invested in some Nvidia Audio2Face facial animation tech, which feeds into a more detailed and realistic setup for press conferences and interviews, allowing you to actually watch your driver deliver the answer you’ve picked. Plus, once you’ve run through the story, you’re now given the option to import your Konnersport team into the MyTeam 2.0 mode, so you can carry on beyond the single season of Braking Point, though obviously in that mode’s regular team management fashion.
Though, whether you’ll be engrossed enough to want to do that once you reach the end of Braking Point 3, or whether you’ll have had your fill of the Drive To Survive-ish drama, remains to be seen.
Tom: Hello folks! Welcome to Wednesday, the very first of February! You’re reading this direct from the café where I’ve set up a temporary office to fill out our monthly schedule, to craft this very post, and to write our next video review! It’s all very exciting. I’ve got my laptop, a big coffee, an HP Deskjet 2710e, a second monitor, and a massive boom mic for a quick podcast record while I’m here. My ‘associates’ should be arriving any minute.
Let’s talk about videos! Our next review will be for the hot new Splotter game – Horseless Carriage! You can look forward to that, hopefully, next week. Where does it sit in the Splotter Canon? You’re going to have to wait to find out, but I should hope it’ll be an interesting video. The next video after that will be the first from Quinns this year – on yet another classic family-weight game involving pleasing, clacky components! What might it be? I’m going to leave this one as a teaser, just for fun!
Audio-wise, we’ve got some treats! This week’s pod will be the fabled CCG Double-Feature, where myself and Quinns go head to head in a… well, hopefully quite a nice chat about two interesting new CCGs! After that, you can expect a smattering of ‘what have we been playing’ podcasts, as well as some full-fat-thoughts on Paperback Adventures! I’m hoping, too, that we might even have something special ready for the end of the month, but I’ll tease no more than that.
Lastly, what about streams? Yesterday we played some Against The Storm, a fascinating little Roguelike City Builder! That, and the previous stream, will be available as VODs over on the Twitch. Next week’s stream will most likely be a Destiny 2 dungeon or two with a couple friends of the show, schedules permitting, and the week after that we’ll be playing some of the digital implementation of Paperback Adventures.
That’s the month! Some great stuff coming down the pipe for you all to look forward to – hopefully not too messed around by me moving into a new flat! Wish us luck, we’re hoping to get the paperwork signed so I can continue on living life as normally as a professional board game reviewer can.
Thanks everyone! What have you been up to, recently?
