For those of you who’ve literally been under a YouTube sized rock for the last decade, Shut Up & Sit Down have been one of the foremost voices in the tabletop world for a decade. In many ways, they’ve grown up with the hobby, starting in its scrappier, fly-by-theseat-of-your-pants years and overseeing a trend towards unimaginably high production quality in our games; but with the commercial expectations and vast businesses that go along with that.
We speak to founder Quentin Smith - known to most as Quinns - who is stepping out on his own with a new project on YouTube, called Quinns Quest, which changes focus from board games to the world of tabletop roleplaying.
I started with a simple question; “Why now?” Quinns laughed. “I’m not sure I’ve been awake long enough to do that one justice”, he said, sipping from a large mug of coffee with a Scrabble Q printed on it. “The board game scene has gotten really huge over the last ten years. Maybe it’s a bit saturated? Maybe that’s not the perfect word, but it does feel like everybody knows how good board games are now. But we’re at a cusp now where, thanks to projects like Critical Role or just the constant alienation of a life lived online, people are seeking more human, emotional, personal games. I think the next few years are just going to see roleplaying grow more and more”.