TOM'S CORNER AWARDS '22: SU&SD Newsletter #68

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Tom: My  goodness, what an exhausting month December has been! The team (sans Quintin) traveled over to PAXU for a weekend of live shows and games.  We then did a five-day-stint in the finger lakes, hosted by some  wonderful friends of the show to cook our brains on boxes like Roads & Boats and Stationfall.  A full day of travel later and we’re back in the UK, heads swimming  with rules and jetlag. It’s a great privilege to be able to travel as part of this job, and to play so many games, but sometimes that combination can lead to a comical brain-slurry so thick and stodgy that you just need ‘one massive lie down’.

Still, though, we’ve ended the year strong! By the time you get this newsletter we will have posted our final podcasts and final videos of 2022, and will be feverishly scribbling away in google docs to plan out what 2023 will bring. If you saw the donation drive video (Hello new donors! Thank you!) then you might have an inkling on what those plans are, but I won’t say any more for now ;)

We’ll  save our ‘game of the year’ or ‘year in review’ material for the first  newsletter back in January once everyone’s had a rest - but fear not,  reader! I still have a listicle up my sleeve.

One  of my favourite written features on the site was always “Quinns’ Corner  Awards” - a (semi?) yearly feature where Quinns listed a bunch of games that were good, bad, and weird. This year, I’m maybe the number one  contender for ‘Most Games Played’, which has meant I’ve put out plenty of reviews, but also missed a fair few, for sheer quantity of releases peeped. Readers, may I present to you: Tom’s Corner Awards 2022.

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THE ‘CLOSEST TO A REVIEW’ AWARD

SLEEPING GODS

Okay, I’m already breaking the 2022 rule here - Sleeping Gods has been on my shelf of shame for so long now. But the time has come for me to be realistic about its fate.

Sleeping Gods was a game I was so sure would get a review - an absolutely monstrous narrative adventure game packed with a campaign that promises boundless scope and scale. A journey that’s gilded in some of the chunkiest components and finest artwork I’ve seen within all of boardgames… but it just wasn’t quite right.

My  problems with the game can be summed up in one interaction. Early on in  the campaign, one of our party members gets visited by a ghost child. Cool! This was a suitably exciting narrative hook to get us to make  solving this mystery our primary goal - screw the ‘Main Story’, we want to get stuck into the sidequests! The Ghost Child wants us to travel to  another corner of the map, and we dutifully oblige, picking off other bits and bobs along the way, before arriving at our destination. With  zero fanfare, the ghost child says ‘thanks’ and departs. That was it! After a few of these point A to point B interactions that my group  affectionately dubbed ‘Questlets’, we stopped playing.

Listen;  the ‘Ghost Child’ interaction would have been disappointing even if it wasn’t our main goal - the point is that seeing Sleeping Gods as this  box packed with so much content quickly becomes a worrying thought rather than a reassuring one, with everyone tactically working out which quests will and will not pay dividends - a weird gamble of your emotional investment.

The  problem with turning this into a review was that my group bounced quite hard off of it - and any game that’s a chore for your friends quickly becomes a chore for you, too. But I also found the solo experience quite  tedious to do upkeep for, and what review I did write had a back  half complaining about some of the practicality of that admin and  upkeep regardless of player count… which pushed the script into this  slightly baggy and directionless place. It’s hard writing something like  this with an ultimately unclear end-point, especially as so much of my  experience is anchored around people not being that enthused to play it.  But I can’t get rid of it! It’s looking at me, Sleeping Gods, from the  out-tray. “Maybe after Frosthaven”, I tell myself.

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THE ‘GOOD BUT DULL' AWARDS

GALILEO PROJECT & VILLAGERS

­We’re constantly bumping into games on the site that are really strong, solid  boxes but that lack a spritz and vigour that get us talking. Galileo Project, which we SHUX Previewed, is a really rather nifty engine-builder that’s satisfying and short. Villagers, which we SHUX Previewed, is a really rather nifty engine-builder that’s satisfying and short.

I like both of these games. They’re plain sailing, easy-going yacht rock  numbers where you can whittle away 40 minutes and have a satisfactory time. That’s all in this section. Thank You.

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THE ‘ONE TO WATCH’ AWARD

WATCH

A game that we played right at the tail-end of this year was Watch, and in Watch, you work in a watch factory. In the watch factory, you make watches! But sometimes you smuggle watches out of the watch factory to make munitions, and maybe it might benefit you  to watch your fellow watchmakers, spilling the beans to the foreman that they’ve been smuggling on the side. Who Watches The Watchmen? You do! And you want to watch something else.

That’s a bit harsh - we had a good time with Watch - it’s tight and tactical and unusual in both its theme and its economics! I just felt like that central  conceit, of watching, of being watched, didn’t ever pop for us as much  as we expected it to - the punishment being a docking of a final score didn’t feel final and brutal enough to instil the paranoia and worry  suggested by the total domination of its ‘Watch’ motif. And that’s  without getting into the endgame scoring stuff, which muddies the previously clear waters of the theme until you end up with something  that’s less focused than the title suggests.

Thing is, this is very close to being compelling - it’s rare you see honest-to-god THEMES coursing through the heart of a board game, and Watch is a shining  example of what you can do in that space, similarly to other Spielworxx/punxx history-leaning-hits like The Cost. I’m intrigued to see more in this vein, but Watch didn’t quite spark the joy I wanted it to.

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THE REINER KNIZIA AWARD

THE CRIMINAL CAPERS TRILOGY

Meeting  the Reiner Knizia Quota for the year is always a struggle, and I thought I’d smash out a triple-review of the Reiner Knizia Criminal  Capers Trilogy with time to spare! But.

Would you like to play a Reiner-Knizia’d version of Sheriff of Nottingham? Play Soda Smugglers. Would you like to play a Reiner-Knizia’d version of 6 Nimmt? Play Pumafiosi. Would you like to play a Reiner-Knizia'd version of 6 Nimmt that's a little different and a little better than the other one, but still not a game we'd recommend over, or in addition to, 6 Nimmt? Play Hot Lead.

These  are all good little boxes, they've got great art, and they've got that classic ‘Reiner Teach’ that can be completed in about four sentences! But they're not on the same level as the classics they're shooting in  the same direction as. Plus, the magnet-clasp boxes have been registered  as a ‘Medium Explosive’ twice on airport security! That Reiner fellas is up to no good.

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THE SPRING CLEANING AWARD

TERRA NOVA & GWT: ARGENTINA     ­   ­

When myself, Matt, and Quinns sat down to play Terra Nova, we were adamant that they’d hardly changed anything. We were so wrong. Dear reader; the whole game is just completely goosed.

But that’s what’s amazing about this box! It cuts to the core of the Mystica system in such a way that you can readily forget about things like the cult tracks, the favour tiles, the entire second currency, and more! I’m  forgetting about things right now!

What’s left is an incredibly sleek version of this game that’s deeply approachable and far more immediate. I still prefer Mystica, though - it’s opulent, Sunday-Afternoon gaming at its finest. But what  was truly eye-opening, though, was that I thought Nova would be an  on-ramp to Grandad, the ‘real deal oldhead supreme’, from this new shiny boy. My group were in fact not convinced by full-fat-Mystica in the slightest, preferring the slimmed-down version vastly. I was shocked, and I still don’t entirely know what to make of it!

Great Western Trail: Argentina is a tricker one - a more complex and nuanced puzzle, but one that I  sort of wasn’t ready to solve. I feel like I fumbled my way through base game GWT and so charging full-tilt into a more complex semi-sequel  wasn’t really… useful? They’ve changed a bunch, certainly, and people who have played the base game to death are sure to appreciate said  changes - but when it came time to choose which box to eject from my  collection, the easygoing charm of the original kept it firmly planted.

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THE REALLY REALLY SMALL GAME AWARD

PAPERBAG DUNGEON  ­     ­    ­

I didn’t quite click with Paperbag Dungeon, but I want to give it a shout out here for being something that is so utterly charming I can’t ever get rid of it.

Paperbag Dungeon is a deck of cards that very quickly spill out onto your table  in an explosion of warrens and burrows - a vast catacomb that you are the author of. I really like the premise here; defend the core of  your dungeon from monsters by creating a tower-defence labyrinth that eventually eats itself; an ouroboros of granite.

Personally,  I found this game hitting me at a time where I was playing fewer and  fewer solo games, making it a hard sell for my table. But if you’re  interested in Button Shy Games, if you’re interested in Dungeon Keeper,  if you enjoyed games like DELVE, then Paperbag Dungeon is cheap and cute enough to be worth a punt - the art is just absolutely lovely. Oh, and it has an expansion! It adds mushrooms and they are delightful. ­    ­

What are we video games!  🎮
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Tom: I played The Marvel Game! The new one. The one with the cards. Not that one, the other one.

Matt: it is SO useful having you to check Midnight Suns out for me so I can save time, and fifty bringlish pounds.

Tom: I wanted to wholeheartedly love this game! But, no. It’s so close! I just wish that some of the combat stuff was a little less fiddly, the precision dialled up a touch, and that I’d eventually be granted the  ability to undo mistakes that are annoying rather than the result of any  mismanagement on the tactical layer. The combat in this game is so  close to being sparky enough to live up to those Into The Breach comparisons people are throwing its way, but it’s a shade too clumsy to  reach those heights! Combine that with a strategic layer that’s far less compelling than anything in XCOM and you have a game that I’m returning to in manageable bites rather than gluttonous evenings - panning for (admittedly sizeable!) chunks of gold in a far less  palatable muck that surrounds them.

And  that’s on top of some really undisgestable dialogue that’s a stark  (hah) reminder of why I dislike the tone of Marvel stuff. It’s  incessantly quippy, referential, smug, and terminally boring to someone who doesn’t already like these big plastic boys and girls. It’s funny  when it doesn’t mean to be, and annoying when it’s trying - the ‘fish  out of water’ protagonist is this utterly glassy-eyed dullard who is even more grating than the characters that won’t stop talking. I think  I’m being harsh just because of how much I love everything else this  studio puts out, but also because this game is so, so close.

Outside of that, I’ve been playing some Dwarf Fortress - which is now approaching accessible with its new graphical sheen, and I’ve also been glued to Vampire Survivors now that it’s on mobile. Dangerous little thing to have in your pocket, that.

Matt: It is! My thumb hurts! What a ridiculous thing that game is - a mess of  bad pastiche and full-frontal stupidity that also somehow ends up  feeling CLEVER? Or at least interesting? It's quite clearly a brilliant  thing, although I'll be glad when I reach the point that my brain tells me is the point at which to stop. Who on earth could have foreseen that  Castlevania would be the springboard for something that eventually looks  more like a game by Jeff Minter?

My big recommendation this month is Immortality - a strange and fascinating video-based mystery that's brilliantly acted and quite unlike anything I've ever seen within games. The closest  comparison I can offer would be Punchdrunk shows: it's a messy collage of characters that you slowly piece together - or perhaps don't? The  internet is convinced there's one True reading of it all, but I found the fuzziness and confusion to be a genuine delight; a poetic blur that  blew me away over a couple of obsessive days of scrubbing through film  clips.

Tom: ‘That  Song’. It's just something else. One of the most gorgeously intertextual bits of game and narrative design I've ever witnessed. Fantastic game.

Quinns: The wife and I are both huge fans of RPGs that skew closer to branching  interaction fiction than anything else, so during the holiday break we ended up working our way through parallel runs of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist. It was a delight making fun of one another’s choices and heartaches, but more than anything we were both just really surprised at how much it achieves with such a light touch.

RPGs  have a handful of traditions that, in my opinion, only hold back the  genre’s storytelling. “Numbers always go up,” “You will generally overcome obstacles,” “You will get what (and who) you want.” And games like Disco Elysium and Teenage Exocolonist both show how much more affecting and literary games can be when they prioritise humanity over being a power fantasy. If that sounds like your kind of thing, I can’t recommend it enough. Really fun little piece (and weird little deckbuilder as well!). ­    ­    ­

What are we music!  🎵

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Tom: Alright. I made a Steely Dan Tier List video. It's not very exciting, it's very low effort, but it's a good ‘background watch’? Maybe? Who knows. I just felt I had to put this out into the world. ­  ­ ­    ­    ­    ­

What are we watching? 📺

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Matt: Loads of people told me to watch The Traitors - a BBC version of an  Australian show that extrapolates Werewolf into a hammy gameshow that runs for about 7-10 days? I think people were understandably excited to see social deduction getting some mainstream attention, but my feelings  on the show have been incredibly mixed. The core remains almost identical to vanilla Werewolf, but played at such a glacial pace that I  can't help but feel it's more like playing Subterfuge: the always-on game that seemed incredible on paper and then rapidly degraded my mental health. And that isn't a joke! It really messed me up, I can't  recommend it.

It  seems like The Traitors gets around this by having daily activities in which everyone works together - softening the barbs of prior accusations  and letting players think about something else for a while before diving back into the nitty gritty of the show. These tasks are barely connected to the main game, mechanically, and it seems like they exist  for no reason other than to act as a pressure valve. It's necessary though, clearly - without them I think we'd see players having some serious meltdowns.

It's  good to see they've got a psychological expert on-hand to oversee the safety of the show, but I'd still strongly question the morality of the setup, and I'm uncomfortable with the idea it's great exposure for the hobby. Social deduction can be intense and exhausting, but half of the  fun is the debrief at the end of it: strip away the bit where you laugh with your mates about how terrifically dishonest you were for the past half an hour, and the drama you're left with is no longer collaborative storytelling: it's just an amplification of discomfort designed to  titillate viewers.

It's  a prank without a punchline, and players in their distressed moments frequently remind themselves that "it's just a game" - which only  reinforces my sympathies for their discomfort.

The  framework of a game is there, certainly - and from afar all the  hallmarks of a game appear present - but there's so little room for actual  play in the format they've created, no joy or  catharsis has been carved out for its players. This doesn't feel like a fresh perspective on games for UK viewers, merely an extension of our  Monopoly-founded culture of borderline masochism.

I also watched the Cyberpunk anime on Netflix it was really good.