Guess What! We've Played Some Games! SU&SD Newsletter #48

Matt: It has! Still, it’ll be a real bummer to be  missing out on SHUX this year - but over the next month I’ll be working  behind the scenes a lot more to get us geared up for the weekend of  AwSHUX. There are silver linings to every cloud, and at least we’re able  to fully concentrate this year on an event that literally no-one can attend but by extension everyone can  potentially take part in. And OOH, the first major bit of news on that  front is that as part of AwSHUX we’ll be selling some brand new  T-shirts, ON-LINE! Below you’ll find a SNEAKY SNEAKY preview of some of  the designs you can expect to see. Subject to change, obviously - I’m  not quite done yet - but here’s a little taste of what’s to come!Quinns: Hello everyone, and thank you for pledging your support to SU&SD for another month! The month of [checks notes] hmm. This just says “the month doesn’t matter, 2020 will never end”.Matt: 2020 doesn’t end, no, but it does fluctuate.  Here in the UK the government’s decided it’s time for everyone to go  “back to normal”, so our team is furtively squeezing in some precious  social time before the risk of transmission inevitably creeps upward. As  much as we’ve poked fun at Digital Boardgames, I’m sure that as it gets  chillier inside we’ll be more and more thankful to even have the  option. The other day on Tabletopia I had a delightful time playing Renature with Tom - an upcoming physical release that’s seeing a Digital Demo -  and while nothing will compare to the glorious clunks and clinks of  wooden pieces, it’s very cool being able to try upcoming designs without  wading through the sometimes intense bustle of board game conventions.Quinns: Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared has ruined the word “digital” for all time.

Quinns: So long as we’re offering illegal tastes,  allow me to throw caution to the wind and announce that in a few weeks,  we’ll be publishing a video I’m very excited about- our 5 New Favourite  Roll’n’writes, starring Tom, Matt and me. It’ll be a social-distanced collab! It’ll also be a great opportunity to show off Super Skill Pinball 4cade from the endlessly-inventive Geoff Engelstein.

The fact is that we all really like the format of our Oink review roundup or our 5 Favourite New Card Games. Reviewing lots of little games at once is a nice way to get more eyes  on games that would otherwise escape people’s attention, and we think it  brings out the silliness in our writing. It’s counter-intuitive, but  doing a 10 minute review of a game means you have to approach it  seriously. If you’re covering a game in 2 or 3 minutes, that process is  so intrinsically ridiculous that it’s hard not to get a bit ridiculous  yourself.

Other than that, this month I’ll be losing myself in the mighty Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy in preparation for a big ol’ review. Yesterday I put the cat among the  pigeons in SU&SD’s slack channel when I said that I might be getting  rid of my copy of Twilight Imperium 4th edition to make room for it in  my collection. The key word there is “might”. I’m going to have to do  some soul-searching, I think.

Even if this War Chest review is going to be an absolute mess.Tom: I don’t have masses of exciting news for  August, as my month has mostly been characterised by constantly shifting  around a script for a War Chest review like a picky child pushing vegetables around their dinner plate.  The game itself is quietly brilliant, but bears an unfortunately  yawn-inducing presentation that’s hard to get around when you’re trying  to write a piece that’s going to be watched by people who want to be at  least a smidge entertained.Luckily, inspiration has struck at just the right time. Every  single game I’ve played in the closing days of August (it’s SEPTEMBER  NOW - crikey) has been a sheer delight and enthused me with an  incredible amount of forbidden cardboard energy. The Search For Planet X was the most fun exam I’ve ever played, Renature was a beautiful,  savage puzzle that’s going straight to the top of my collection, I  actually beat Quinns at a game for once (!) in Omen, and I sat down to some back-to-back Kniz’ with Through The Desert and Modern Art.Now that I'm all hopped up on pure, unfiltered mechanics, that War  Chest review was pouring out of my brain and into a script with a pace  that’s quite frightening. It’s going to be an absolute mess, I can tell.But, in recent conversations with these supportive humans ^^^, I’m  coming around to that messiness being… kind of okay? To give you a peek  behind the anxious curtain - I’ve been stressing an awful lot about a  relative lack of experience in ‘playing the classics’ - Through The  Desert and Modern Art? Those were the first Reiner Knizia games I’d ever played, and I played them yesterday.  I’m constantly struck with a feeling of being nestled amongst people  that know this hobby better than I, and I’ve been cramming designer  names into my brain like I’m revising for a ‘The Search For Planet X’.But in playing all those wonderful, diverse and exciting designs at  the back end of last month, I’m coming round to the fact that my job  isn’t to be an encyclopedia, it’s to act as a conduit between those  exciting designs and the people that get just as pumped as I do about  them. That’s given me some perspective and comfort in my inexperience,  and I hope that I can continue to act as that conduit for as long as  you’ll have me for.

Ava: My  mainstays of play this month have been an intense set of dueling  rematches of unusual space deckbuilder with the unfortunate name of Eminent Domain, and a sprawling asynchronous game of 18Chesapeake, which I talked a little about on Podcast 117.  The former has been a delight, in slowly getting schooled into the  weird efficiency nuances and patterns of a deep but very specific game.  The latter featured me being the worst person I’ve ever been in a  boardgame, and at least it won me the game because I would’ve felt significantly worse if I’d done it for nothing. But oh wow, is it possible to be  deeply mean in an 18xx game. I’m still only scratching the surface, and  I’m not sure quite how far I’m going to dig, but there’s some intriguing  stuff in there.

What are we reading? 📙

Quinns: Ordinarily I use this bit of the newsletter to recommend stuff...  I don’t know if I could comfortably recommend Virinie Despentes’ Vernon Subutex: Volume 1 on account of it being “extremely raunchy”, but I will say that it’s a book which I’ve had a very easy time losing myself in.

The novel tracks the slow-motion collapse of a hard-partying man at  an age when the party really should have stopped already, and sees him  traipsing through a rogue’s gallery of Parisian contacts looking for a  bed to sleep in, or at least some valuables to sell. Literally everybody  in the book is monstrously crude, but the author hides crumbs in love  in all of them. This is jagged-edged French feminism that doesn’t want  to demarcate right and wrong, but luxuriate in the hypocrisy and nuance  of being human.

Ava: I’m probably not really allowed to use this  space to re-recommend things I picked up off the back of Quinns’  recommendation in these hallowed (?) pages (?), but hot damn was Samantha Shannon’s Priory of the Orange Tree a gripping pile of pulped wood. Religious differences, court intrigue,  dragon-based culture clash and just a little splash of love story.  Thanks Quinns. Thuinns.

What are we watching? 📺

Quinns: Proof, if it were needed, that I am a man who cannot be defined, I enjoyed three very different movies this month: The Personal History of David Copperfield, The Lighthouse and The Meg.

David Copperfield I’d recommend to anybody who wants to see a  brigade of the world’s best actors, each dashing onto the screen with  the mission of being even more charming than whoever came  before. The Lighthouse is more engrossing than it has any right to be,  considering it’s basically 110 minutes of Willem Dafoe and Robert  Pattinson trying to reclaim nautical accents from Talk Like a Pirate  Day. As for The Meg... well. If you watch the trailer and think “That  might be fun?”, then you should trust your gut. It is at least Some Fun.

Matt: I’m about three episodes away from the end  of The Sopranos, which I’d never seen before and has been an absolute  delight. Hardly a hot tip, but if you missed it at the time as well? It  stands up beautifully. The most striking thing about it is how gorgeous  it looks - you really can’t beat filming with a lovely bit of glass.

Other than that, I’ve mostly been immersed in tosh - Umbrella Academy’s second season felt much more comfortable within its own shoes, having  shifted away from the plotting of the comic into a form that better  suited the strengths of the TV show, and I absolutely adored the stride  that it found. It’s one of those shows I feel I could simply watch  forever, the ultimate serving of popcorn for the brain.

What are we music!  🎵

Matt: Music has definitely been the media I’ve  consumed the most over the last six months, voraciously chewing through a  ton of stuff, both old and new. I had a Grandaddy binge a few weeks ago, and this week I’ve been really digging the use of woodwind on the latest Protomartyr album. This video is wonderfully lo-fi and silly, and all - they seem like good eggs.

Tom: That video is absolutely brilliant - and only  after a little comment-searching did I realise it’s a somewhat  remastered version of this real-life event on Brazilian TV.  The whole record is absolutely fab, though - the fact that it was  mostly recorded in 2019 makes an awful lot of the lyrics (especially on  that track in particular) worryingly prescient. Outside of the total  gloom of Protomartyr, I’ve been indulging in the splintered,  aggressively obtuse sounds of Still House Plants - who have put out no less than two incredibly compelling experimental records in 2020 alone. It’s not  exactly music to get you grooving, but there’s a depth to their  super-minimal setup that few acts can match.

Ava: I excitedly messaged Tom this month about the new Matmos album ‘The Consuming Flame’  on account of it coming with an enormous timeline poster to try and  explain exactly how it’s been stitched together. Partly in response to  pandemic lockdown, but also a bit of a troll of someone accusing them of  being ‘a bit too high concept’, this album is a mash up of  contributions made by literally SO MANY collaborators. Basically Matmos  did a shout out for artists and musicians to make audio content with the  only stipulation being that any rhythmic content should be 99 beats per  minute. Then Drew and Martin spliced it all together in to a three hour  monstrosity. For ‘making money’ reasons, it’s been split up into  smaller tracks with names on streaming, but it’s best enjoyed as a  sprawling montage of jazz, downbeat and just utter bafflement. It’s  kinda special.

What are we video games!  🎮

But mostly this month I’ve been playing Spiritfarer,  a game of sailing around a coy and colourful afterlife, managing a ship  and temporarily housing souls until they’re willing to travel to their  final rest. It’s perfect for anyone looking for something in the vibe of  Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, even if I’m not sure the game’s  content needed to be smeared across quite as many hours as it is. That  said, it’s not often that games make me cry, so I’d still absolutely  recommend grabbing the demo and seeing if you gel with it.Quinns: If you missed Tom and me talking about 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel on podcast #117, well... I’m not going to tell you to buy it. But it’s definitely the best 9mb download I enjoyed this month.

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