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Welcome, Donors, One and All! SU&SD Newsletter #47
🕑 Added 2022-06-22 17:53:25 +0000 UTC
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.
