Welcome, Donors, One and All! SU&SD Newsletter #47

Matt: Thank you so much to everyone for your  support! If you’ve just become a donor, WELCOME TO NEWSLETTER LAND. I’m  today’s official Mayor of Newsletter - we’re thrilled to have you here,  please don’t stain the curtains.

And hey! Let’s have a sneaky-peek at what’s coming up in the next  month or so. First up, we’ve a big-hitter waiting just around the corner  - Quintin will be reviewing Pandemic Legacy: Season 0 in the frankly QUITE IMMINENT future, while my thoughts on Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion will likely take a little longer on account of the ACTUAL pandemic.

Honestly, right now I’m taking a breather in the run-up to AwSHUX -  our digital weekend-convention thing that I reckon will be an absolute  blast. Expect long days of silliness and plenty of treats: the end of  this year might be particularly bleak for many, so know that you can  expect a blast of brightness from the 16th to the 18th of October. And  obviously, anyone in the world will be able to attend on account of the  fact that IT DOESN’T REALLY EXIST.

Quinns: Hm, what can I share? My big project this month was a hefty video review of Go.  In the early days of Shut Up & Sit Down we had plenty of fun taking  classic games down a peg, but now I’ve given glowing coverage to  Cribbage and Go in the same 12 month span, it’s probably time to admit  that sometimes these games endure for a good reason (as opposed to  enduring because Hasbro is propping them up with vast marketing  budgets).

That said, I ended up arriving at the same sad conclusion with Go as I did with Cribbage. These games are great, but I have no idea how they fit into a modern life.

The thing that both games have in common is that they demand to be not just experienced, but explored. Your first few plays feel like prying open the door to a long-locked  attic, with a dense assortment of discoveries waiting for you everywhere  you look. There’s an immediate moment of “Wow, I could play this game  for months!” Followed by a slow realisation that... no, you can’t play  it for months. Our lives aren’t structured like that anymore.

The  explosion of games on today’s open market is a thing of beauty. Of  course it is. Ideas are being iterated on almost instantly, or there’s  some new edition of a game you loved, or a publisher updating a design  from 10 years ago with a striking new look.

But in this context, it’s hard to see committing part of your gaming to  ‘exploring Go’ as anything other than an act of sacrifice. I’m not  saying it wouldn’t be worth making that decision (and it’d almost  certainly be cheaper than buying new games every month), but the  opportunity cost would be massive. And that’s a sad, sad thing.

Ava: Quinns, I’ve got a confession to make. I didn’t  quite pick up in the slack that you were genuinely going to be reviewing  Go, so I never told you I had a Go phase and am about the right  combination of ‘a bit rubbish’ but also ‘actually understand some of the  depths of how that game works’ that means we probably should have  started duelling while you were learning. I will say that you absolutely  nailed your review, covering why it’s so exciting, why it’s so  daunting, and throwing an enormous amount of shade at Chess, which is  pretty rubbish in comparison.

Quinns: WHAT! Do you know how many favours I owe my friends for letting me kick their ass at Go over and over?

Ava: Oh dear. I’m sorry!

Ava: Is  it okay that what I want out of Chess month is basically...less people  being excited by chess? Maybe I’m cruel, but I hate that game. I find it  so distressing to play something and always feel like if I’m losing,  it’s not because I’m bad at the game, it’s because I wasn’t paying close  enough attention. Maybe that’s weirdly convoluted arrogance, I don’t  know.

I will say that Matt’s thoughts of chess in the Ice Team review were really, really powerful to me. The status chess has in society as  something that is just permanently set up in places is kind of  beautiful. I wish we had little carved stone Go sets in parks, but also  that barmats actually came with the rules of Skull on them, or that you  could buy tables with Patchwork boards beautifully etched into them. I  care quite passionately about public spaces, having worked in libraries  for a long time, and I think there’s so much scope for play to help  embed community. My favourite library in my strange little Yorkshire  valley has a feature that I’ve never seen in a library before, but I  think every single one should have, which is a puzzle club. Now this  group meets up every Thursday night (or did before the apocalypse) as  does massive thousand piece puzzles together, but that’s not the special  thing here. What delights me about puzzle club is that they leave the  puzzle set up, with a little sign that doesn’t just invite you to come  to the club, but to take a seat and just spend a few minutes slotting  puzzle pieces in. There’s just always a half completed puzzle in that  library. It melts my heart. It’s a little invitation to meditation,  collaboration and play right there in the middle of the room, available  to absolutely anyone who walks in. I want more of that in the world  please.

Matt: That’s lush! And yeah, I’d love to travel  back in time to the hey-day of UK pubs and make Skull a universal thing.  It’s just the best game - imagine if everyone knew and loved THE BEST  GAME?

Matt: I am now very tentatively getting board games slowly back into my life,  but even having added a single person to my Quarantini Bubble - I’m  back to a different issue with physicality: public transport within a  city feels unwise, which means lugging games from A to B and back is  once again a matter of strength and endurance? If anything though, I  think it’s a levelling kind of karma - when I had a central office space  and a cupboard to fill with games, it was the BIG BOX products that got  looked at most frequently, a symptom of me wanting to try and not run  out of space. In my first trip across the city to play a game with  another human being? Almost exclusively tiny little games. I think  that’s the key aspect of all SU&SD coverage, really - we constantly  steer heavily towards one specific niche or thing, but longer stretches of time it all tends to balance out.

Aside from that, I also played a bunch of Paris: La Cite De La Lumiere, eventually filming a perplexing review of it in my garage, which, I think, went okay - but next time? Who  knows. I’ve got no idea how I’m going to make that setting look  interesting again, but I will try my bestest to improvise, adapt and  overcome - and improvise, adapt and overcome I must - to please YOU - the reader of this very newsletter. I’m incredibly grateful to work  for a company funded by its viewers, readers and listeners - it's your  generosity that makes my job exist, and I hope that I can please with  some whimsical content in the horrible year of 2020. With so many of my  nearest and dearest struggling to find their feet at the moment, I  greatly appreciate quite how generous this community is with both their  wallets and positive encouragement - the latest video came together a  hell of a lot quicker, and with much less anxiety, than any of the  previous - all due to the sheer amount of good words and support from  both within the company and outside of it. Thank you, all. One big kiss.  Share it nicely.Tom: I’ve also been relishing a new addition to my  quarantine bubble, and carving out a once-weekly session to try out  something new (and, most often, return to something old too) has been an  absolute balm to the stresses of moving back to my hometown, away from  the big comfy group I had before “the situation”. Those little sessions  have led to playing a reasonable dollop of Far Away - a  game that I'm absolutely perplexed and intrigued by. Don’t loosen your  purse-strings just yet - it’s probably not a game I’d feel comfortable  recommending any time soon, but it’s one of the more unique offerings  I’ve sat down to this year - expect thoughts on a podcast near you quite  soon, if I can bring myself to play it again. I realise how that  sounds, but it’s the most honest sentiment I can muster in relation to  that wild, wild box.

What are we reading? 📙

Ava: After a random conversation with an old friend led to talking about the  Becky Chambers books I’ve already talked about, she mentioned Natasha  Pulley, a writer who is not really anything like Chambers, but promises  the same warm, humane and slightly skewed take on classic genre fiction.  The Watchmaker of Filigree Street was a little  rattling delight of a Victorian clockwork fantasy tale, but with  absolutely none of the awful things that something advertised as  Victorian clockwork fantasy would normally be carrying. There’s no  steampunk imperialism here, but also no white-washing of the problems of  empire, instead we have a sensitive look at culture clash, the morality  of some classic sci-fi tropes and just some really lovely but flawed  people falling quietly in love. It was delightful. I hammered through  it, then marched straight onto The Bedlam Stacks, which  was similarly bound up in colonial narratives, but provided a unique  and eerie perspective on anthropological colonialism and mission work.  I’m not sure I enjoyed it as much as watchmaker, but it had a haunting,  mysterious quality that was quite unlike anything I’d seen before. I’m  now halfway through The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, a  more direct follow up to watchmaker, that I think might be quite far up  Quinns’ proverbial street, and I am having a delightful time with it, as  it digs deep into a moral quandary I’ve spent a lot of time musing on. I  can’t say more without potentially spoiling at least two of the books,  so I’m leaving it all there, but take this as a full hearted  recommendation, if anything I’ve said sparks a curiosity.

Quinns: [reading list intensifies]

What are we watching? 📺

Quinns: I never, *ever* would have expected that  I’d get interested in Formula 1, but that was before a friend of mine  recommended I watch the first season of Drive to Survive on Netflix.

I love how well put together the narratives are in each episode,  but mostly I love it for helping me see the sport with new eyes. For  starters, I never realised that since there are just 18 drivers in the sport in total, you can get to know them all on a human level before  they’re bundled into their incredibly dangerous machines. And on that  note, I thought the crashes I’d seen on TV were rare things, clipped out  for the highlight reels. I didn’t realise that these posh boys in their expensive machines go flying off the track in almost every race. Good gravy!

What are we music!  🎵

Tom: This month I did a mad thing and listened to every single album on The Quietus’ ‘Top 100 Records of 2020 So Far’ list, which has cemented a few new favourites and has also left my hearing permanently damaged. The first is World Serpent by Memnon Sa - a gloomy, pagan record that seems to be continually  beckoning to any and all eldritch horrors that might be listening to  come on over and have a nice cup of tea. After that, I delved into the  sprightly, rubbery sounds of DJ Lycox’s Kizas do Ly and its frantic, metallic counterpart in upsammy’s Zoom - both wonderful electronic records on both ends of the BPM spectrum.  Then I washed it all down with some of the scuzziest, crustiest (and  most charming) punk on the whole list - BLOM’s Flower Violence.  There’s lots to love on that EP - but I’m continually amazed by the  fact that they’re getting all that sound with just a bass guitar, at  least one drums and more than a little angry. Oh, AND Morusque's The End of Music - an album made entirely from the last notes of existing songs - it's dangerously whimsical.

The favourite new discovery though, was Phantom Posse’s Forever Underground. tQ’s review is going to be better than whatever garbage bundle of adjectives I come  up with, so I’ll link that for your reading pleasure. It’s a new GOAT.

Ava: I actually get to sound like I vaguely know  music that was released in the last year for once. I dropped myself into  The Soft Pink Truth’s Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? which is not just the best album title I’ve heard in years, but also a  warm, almost choral techno soundscape that sounds unlike Drew Daniel’s  previous ‘electro covers of new wave or black metal’ records, but also  unlike anything he’s done with Matmos. Sprawling, epic and emotional,  and very much my jam.

What are we video games!  🎮

Quinns: This week I’ve gotten monstrously hooked on Oxygen Not Included. I’ve always enjoyed these Dwarf Fortress / Rimworld / Prison  Architect-style games where you slowly carve out a compound until  something goes “extremely wrong”, but ONI is the first one that’s taken  over my brain.

The game resides in not only trying to design a nice base and  manage your resources, but /also/ negotiate the game’s simple modelling  of (a) gases, (b) liquids, and (c) temperature, which is exactly as  complicated as it needs to be for you to quickly get your head around  it, but still make giant, forehead-slapping mistakes that somehow end in  chlorine gas saturating your mess hall. I can’t recommend it highly  enough. Are Klei my favourite video game studio? I think they might be,  yes.

Tom: I took a dive into the slightly weird with NaissancE this month, a game that I was put onto through watching the excellent video essays of Jacob Geller - a creator I’d thoroughly recommend if you’re interested in paying  lots of attention to little things in games big and small. NaissancE is  an incredibly hostile platformer/exploration hybrid with some of the  most alienating and frustrating architecture in any game I’ve played,  ever. Remember that bit in Dark Souls where you realise there’s two sets  of stairs in Anor Londo, one for humans and one for giants? That’s this  whole game, over and over, and it’s also dark all the time. 10/10.

I’ve also been enjoying a small portion of Barotrauma - a co-op submarine simulator where you and your friends cope with  omnipresent giant alien fish. The real threat, as ever though, comes  from within - as a randomly-selected traitor tries to fill you from head  to toe with the contents of a nearby medicine cabinet before nursing an  alien egg in the pockets of their dungarees. It’s great, it’s tense,  and has provided some of the most organic and enjoyable roleplaying i’ve  seen in a videogame for quite a while; it’s not at all uncommon to see  the captain and security officers continually let fictional power  immediately go to their heads whenever they see activity that can be  even slightly construed as suspicious. I think it’s games like this (and  Sea of Thieves) that have kept me sane in lockdown - connections to  friends that have stretched themselves thinly across the UK (and abroad)  in the covid-stricken wasteland of post-university-life. Games can be  great little anchors, sometimes. Even if that anchor is currently buried  in a giant alien fish.

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