Hello everybody and welcome to the Shut Up and Sit Down podcast. A podcast all about board

games. That's it. That's certainly it in this episode. We're going to be talking about

two board games. My name is Quentin Smith and I am joined by Tom Brewster. Tom, how many

board games are we? You're careful. Careful Tom. Steady now.

How many board games are we talking about? Two board games. That's right. And how many of them

do we like? Two. Two. Yeah. Two. However, we have to get serious for a second Tom.

Oh yeah. This is going to be a difficult episode. It was a difficult day yesterday because these

two games have two of the most boring themes. There's no getting around this. Like back to back,

both games that we had a blast playing that I own and I'm going to keep in my collection.

And both games with themes that if you were to say like, Quentin's, these themes are bad,

I'd be like, yeah. You would agree. Yeah, they're not great. I think one of them at least has a

theme. The other ones theme is so nebulous that you could barely even call it a theme. Yeah,

yeah, that's true. The best thing we can say about these themes is neither of them are problematic,

although one of them is nearly problematic. So with that, like, tepid, you know,

Briamble, let's go. First on our tricky theme podcast is Imperial

Steam. This is a game where you'll spend upwards of two hours managing a failing train company.

This is brought to us by Alexander Humor and Capstone Games. And it's a hub

one to explain, right? Because I'm not going to get bogged down in the details because it's quite a

complicated game. There is loads of stuff going on here. So I think instead we'll do a sort of guided

tour of the fun systems and the weird stuff. But first, let me just say what it is like,

broadly, it's a train game. But well, you know what? Even saying it's a train game is bad because

train games and economic games that feature trains are like two separate things in board games,

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