Hello and welcome to this latest episode of the Shut Up and Sit Down podcast. This is a tremendously

late episode of the podcast because our whole schedule just started slipping and sliding around whilst we were making board games direct. If you weren't aware of what board games direct is, essentially we made a whole bunch of paid preview videos for all kinds of upcoming board games. We did one video per day, each video containing

like a ton of games. We did that for a week, totaling to about 60 games covered by the end.

It was a lot of work. And then the day after we finished all of that work, me and Matt wisely

decided we'd record a podcast. And lo and behold,

that podcast was really bad. Who could have predicted that being the two sleepiest men on earth

would make for a really odd podcast? It was a little bit incoherent and rambly and the energy was all wrong. And you,

the podcast listener, I'm pointing at you with my real finger now, you deserve better than that,

especially after such a tremendously long break whilst he made all of these ridiculous preview

videos. Now, I didn't just want to drop that episode of the podcast entirely,

so instead I have once again bravely chosen to embark upon a game gauntlet. You just got me

for this one. It's a solo episode of the podcast, and I'm going to tell you about six games.

There's less of a theme to this one. Last time there was a theme. I played them all in the week. This time, these are just games that I've played relatively recently that I liked, but they're also mostly games that I was a bit worried would sort of fall out of my brain if I didn't talk about them somewhere. There's a few of these that I'm hoping will get some video coverage at some point later down the line, but that some point might be

December, perhaps, at this rate. We've got a lot of really exciting games to cover soon,

and we make videos slowly. We make videos really slowly. I don't know if you know that about us.

Let's talk about some games.

First up on this weird little solo podcast, we've got Joraku. This is a game designed by Iori Tsukenami and is a trick-taking game mixed with an area control game.

Early doors from that description, it seems a lot like

arcs, doesn't it? Yeah. You use these cards to play a trick-taking game, and what cards you

choose to play will have you manipulate the board state. And you would be quite right by making that

assumption. There is some

real commonality between the two games, but I think that this one is so much more stripped down

...