Dirtbustin & Bear Chess: SU&SD Newsletter #35 (Patreon)

Quinns: Hello everybody! As always, thank you so,  so much for pledging your money to the continued existence of Shut Up  & Sit Down. For all of our new donors, this newsletter is where we  give you a behind-the-scenes tour of what we’ve been up to.

This month, I’ve got one word for you, and what a word it is: Games! The UK Games Expo took place last week, and this year we came  home dragging multiple giant suitcases full of review copies (my  exceptionally powerful case is known within our team as "The Big Bronze  Bastard”).

That means we’ve got some very exciting podcasts and reviews coming in the next few months, featuring great games like Welcome to Dino World, Stay Cool and (believe it or not) Power Rangers: Heroes of the Grid. But for reasons of space, there are also lots of interesting games that we won’t find the time to talk about on the site.

But then I thought, “Hey! Why not give all of our hard-workin’  donors a little something special? Some impressions of neat games that  might not otherwise make it to the site’s front page?” It’s rare for  SU&SD to overflow like this, but when it does, I think it’s nice  that you folks are the beneficiaries.

First off, we got in a play of Namiji,  the upcoming sequel to Tokaido. My goodness, it really is extremely  similar to Tokaido, and even prompted a discussion within our team about  whether anyone could ever need both games. What was even more  surprising, however, is that despite the version we played being a paper  prototype (seen above) with none of Xavier Durin’s terrific art, Namiji  was still perfectly entertaining. Honestly, I remembered Tokaido being a  case of style over substance, and Namiji reminded me that actually,  there’s a sneaky streak of substance in there.

As to what’s different, Namiji is no longer a game of trekking  across Japan and is instead a game of fisherman drawing a leisurely  circle in the sea before returning home to sell their catch. To that  end, there’s a lovely mechanic of steadily filling up your nets with  fish, trying to make clean rows and columns of matching seafood.

Matt: My favourite little surprise from the show was Ice Team - a two player racing game that sees competing squads of dapper polar  bears trying to slide, swim, and hop their way to victory. It has the  same core mechanic as Hey, That’s My Fish! in that many of the icebergs  that players stand on will collapse the moment they leave that space,  and you’re also rewarded at the end of the game for collecting loads of  delicious fish. The rules for movement are abstract enough that it  becomes an interesting little dynamic puzzle, leaving us jokingly  referring to it for the rest of the weekend as “Bear Chess”.

Quinns: Drop It (pictured at the top of this email) was another nice surprise. It’s  exactly what it looks like- players take turns dropping shapes in a  plastic trap. However, the shapes only score you points if they don’t  touch anything of the same colour OR a matching shape. The end result  was as simple as it was exciting. Bizarrely, our entire group of four  players began offering one another advice almost immediately, because  the discussion of how to win was even more fun than competing.

If you find Drop It at a cheap price and fancy a novelty, I think it’s a  really cool little purchase. You’ll never have more fun, or be filled  with more misplaced hope, trying to balance a square on top of a circle.

Matt: I’m really excited to find the time to try another game of Silk (pictured  above), too - a competitive game in which you farm giant silkworms  whilst hoping that they don’t get eaten by A BEAST. Much like Ice Team  this is one of those games that manages to hide fairly substantial  abstract game beneath a theme that’s tight enough to be believable. In  this case, Silk sees you shuffling different types of pieces around the  board using an incredibly specific hierarchy of power: people can push  around silkworms and dogs, dogs can shephard worms too, but also block  the monster. Obviously, dogs can’t move humans. Humans, dogs, and the  monster treat the game’s grid of spaces as a circular world, while worms  that are forced to leave via an edge are unfortunately “lost in the  mountains”.

It’s all a bit bonkers, but in practice, it works. I think my  favourite feature of the game is the fact that it’s the players  themselves that move the monster around the board, stealing away other  people’s silkworms and hoarding them in an evil cave. It’s always  pleasant to play a colourful and cute little game that also has a  quantity of bite.

Quinns: Oh, and Rome and Roll absolutely deserves a mention, too. This is a collaboration between  Nick Shaw and Dávid Turczi, whose design credits include such weighty  games as Anarchrony and Cerebria: The Inside World, and it’s a heavy  eurogame that uses some features of a roll’n’write.

Players in this game have a shared piece of paper depicting Rome,  which you’re working together to rebuild, and a private sheet of  (A4-sized!) paper for keeping track of your personal resources and  advancements. Working very slowly and carefully, players amass resources  on their personal sheet that they then use to draw buildings on Rome,  hoping to spin up outrageous combos. Oh, you built an army camp? That  gets you a Roman legion, which you can use to conquer, which gets a  resource, that lets you build a road, which gets you POINTS POINTS  POINTS POINTS POINTS--

In Matt’s words, the kindest thing we have to say about Rome and  Roll is that due to the design of the stand, this was a heavy game that  we had to play on the show floor while standing up, but we still played it for around two hours.

Matt: I honestly wasn’t happy about that initially, but then I started building ROME.

Finally this week we’d be remiss not to point you to the Kickstarter that we launched this week for a brand-new Monikers expansion.  The first Monikers mini-expansion we wrote was really well received by  the people who played it, and it was a privilege and a thrill to take  that anxious sense of responsibility and channel it into doing A REALLY  GREAT JOB. It wasn’t until we finished writing the Monikers Serious  Nonsense Box that we went back and looked at the original set, and it  was pretty clear that this second run is a tremendous improvement.  Thanks to those who’ve already backed it - we hope you love it too!

OH! And as eagerly promised last month, we’re capping off this month’s newsletter with a pretty fun treat for you guys - the video of myself and Quinns at Denmark’s Fastaval doing a morning of work as “Dirt Busters”.  We don’t really like the practice of gating off content to those who  donate money (it’s way healthier for people who support us to know that  they help us create something that's free for everyone) but as discussed  in last month’s newsletter this wasn’t a thing that we felt comfortable  pinging out into the wider world of YouTube, a place in which nuance  tends to immediately get lost.

There’s a couple of notes on the content at the start of the video,  but there’s a final bit of context I’d like to add regarding some of  the stuff that you’ll see in the background of the video: the Dirt  Busters’ thoughtless use of American iconography to ape the style of  biker gangs is, in the current climate, quite clearly unacceptable.  Whilst all of the individuals involved that we spoke to clearly had  radically different politics to the ones hinted at by this iconography,  it's still worth clarification from us that we didn’t feel convinced by  any of the excuses made for their continued inclusion. Perhaps this was  an understandable disconnect between those who have built a community in  a physical, remote space vs. people like us who have an online  community that stretches a long way around the world.

We’d like to assure all of you that at the point at which we  actually noticed the flags, we made it quite clear that it wasn’t  acceptable or justifiable. It shouldn’t be seen as a defense of their  choices, but it feels valid to point out that their inclusion clearly  came from a place of ignorance rather than malice.

With that chunky caveat out of the way, please go ahead and enjoy something that is honestly VERY SILLY.

What are we music? 🎶

Matt:  I’ve switched back from “Mostly Editing Video” to “Mostly Writing”,  which means instrumental music is BACK ON THE MENU. Beak> have been a  lovely background drone in my life this week, and finishing the last  episode of Cool Ghosts has me back on Neutral Milk Hotel. Right on the  noisiest end of the spectrum is Head Wound City - a Karen O side project  that somehow evaded my detection until now.

Quinns: For me, it's ZOOSPA, the new album from J-E-T-S.

God, if we keep recommending artists with names like "J-E-T-S" and  "Beak>" people are going to think that we're making them up.

What are we reading? 📙

Quinns:  For a while I've been meaning to talk about Generation Decks: The  Unofficial History of Gaming Phenomenon Magic: The Gathering (what a  title!).

It turns out that the history of Magic: The Gathering is fascinating. From Richard Garfield's blissfully ignorant first playtesting sessions,  to trying to launch the game in a world obsessed with roleplaying, to  the startlingly druggy launch of the "Pro Tour", I lapped the whole  thing up.

Well, I lapped up the history chapters, and not the author's bizarre self-insert chapters. You might want to skip those.

What are we videogames! 🎮

Matt:  I spent a weekend playing AutoChess on my mobile phone, and then it  made me very sad. I really must avoid addictive games! I’m looking  forward to having a bit of spare time to play a chunkier videogame  sometime this month, but for now I’m mostly poking mobile stuff and  always on the lookout for pay-then-play gems. I just bought a pretty  rough-looking game called Templar Battleforce: it’s like an absolutely  no-frills mashup of XCOM and Space Hulk, and so far I really like it?  I’m increasingly loving strangely lo-fi passion project games these  days, I got totally hooked for a lot of last year to Creeper World 3:  Arc Eternal, and have almost no regrets about any of it.

Quinns: Thanks so much for donating, everybody. Remember, if you have any feedback on how the site is run, you can reach me at quinns@shutupandsitdown.com. I can't promise to reply to your email, but I read everything that comes my way.

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