The Sleepy, Snoozy, End [Start!] of Year Special: SU&SD Newsletter #87

Note: This newsletter was meant to go out just before Christmas, but we didn’t get things shaped up in time. Please enjoy this somewhat meager issue to kick off the new year, packed with the hubris of December 2024 Tom.

Tom: You know, every single time I get back from PAX Unplugged, I proudly suggest that ‘This time, I don’t think I’m nearly as jetlagged!’... and I am proven so wrong, every time.

Folks, I am ‘lagged to the gills. I’m sleepy out of the wazoo. I’ve got a voracious appetite for snoozes, yawns, and being thoroughly horizontal. I am surely, as the kids say, cooked.

But it’s the very best kind of cooked; the comfortable kind! I’m a barbequed boy. A stewed son. I’ve not been pan-seared, or boiled, or deep-fried, or microwaved - this motherf**ker is sous vide*

PAX Unplugged is the event that the back half of our year builds towards; it’s when we really get our act together and crunch a little harder to get out a great slate of videos to cap off the year, which in turn lets us fully enjoy the convention and sign off for Christmas. When we’re back from the states, we pour our remaining energy into what next year holds, spotting our calendars with reviews we’re itching to make.

This year’s PAX was a blast, as always. We tried out a new live show format, inspired by this great video on ‘1000 Blank White Cards’ by Tim!! - check it out! You can find our live show version here, which was enjoyable for us but also the most chaotic thing I think we’ve done on stage. I don’t entirely know what happened up there, but I received a truly bizarre cluster of post-show gifts from kind folks who waited around to say hi. Whatever I said in that show that prompted someone to gift me a sachet of lactaid… Thanks? I think? I’m confused by myself.

It was a great convention - topped off with a lovely post-PAXU “cabin break” with some friends of the show where we played a list of games so staggeringly long it gets tiring to read. We’ll be talking about a good crop of them in upcoming podcasts and a whole bunch of them are turning into video reviews over the next few months.

So what’s on the docket for this year? Great question, you! Always asking the right thing at the right time, eh? You little scamp. 

I’ve got some big chunky projects to bite into, and a few smaller things to snap up whilst those larger thoughts stew. It feels like radical and strange designs have always been out there - but recently those boxes have been more accessible to purchase and play than ever. The growing ambition of designers is an absolute joy to behold - and I’d love to be part of a critical sphere that meets it all where it’s at.

What’s going to be a tricky one to tackle this year is the Top 100 - which needs a bit of a makeover. Bluntly - we’re not sure what the future holds for the studio space that we spent a lot of time getting set up in. This is due to factors outside of our control, which is a phenomenal bummer. We’re taking that loss as an opportunity, though, and re-thinking the format entirely - how we might get it made more reliably, and how we might have it better serve the niche we’d carved for it.

With that all in mind - expect everything else to wind back up again in mid-january - though we’ll always trend a little later so we can build up a little buffer for the kinds of coughs and colds that crop up and wipe out about 30% of the team in one go. Winter! EUGH! **

Thanks everyone! Happy holidays!

*I have absolutely no clue of the relative harshness of a sous vide. Is it brutal? I just think it sounds nice. Like a big warm bath that cooks you tender. That’s how I want to go.

** This proved to be DEEPLY prescient!

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What are we board games!  🎲

At PAX Unplugged, we played SO MANY GAMES that it’s frankly a struggle to keep them all inside our brains. We have spreadsheets! Oh my!

And while the full roster will slowly be revealed as we play and replay them over the coming months and tell you about most of them in the weeks and months to follow, I just wanted to share a handful of magical little moments we had with some of these games.

HELLO, YOU’RE A SHOP NOW

The upcoming Lord of the Rings trick-taker is perhaps a little slower and more bucolic than I wanted or was expecting - essentially taking the formula of The Crew and coating it in a lovely glaze of Tolkein-flavoured butter. And gosh, there really were a lot of characters in those books, huh? Not just Elf and Sex Man and Gandalf and Sean Bean?

Each mission has you playing as a revolving cast of temporary characters, as you gradually make your way outwards from The Shire - creating new rules and tweaks to the rules of this co-operative - communications limited - trick-taking game. But one of the characters is a shopkeeper! And… Ooh! OOH!

Instead of  having a full hand of cards that’s hidden from everyone else, that player instead lays out their cards in different sections, as if they’re setting up a stall for folks to buy from. It’s a silly thing that basically takes control out of their hands - meaning the cards they have & what they’ll be forced to play is entirely knowable, for that round - but what a delightfully simple and silly premise! JOY!

PUT IT IN A CAMEL!

A volunteer at PAXU very kindly taught us the whole of Refasa, the new eurogame of producing and trading resources whilst building structures and… irrigation? Traditional wet management? I really didn’t do much of that, so I can’t really recall it. Anyway, I was thrilled to have been taught such a fiddly game in such a thorough & clear fashion, only to be HORRIFIED at the discovery that they had failed to mention the game’s most exciting feature:

You can put the little tiles INSIDE the camels?? Their little humpy-bits have slots in-between them, meaning that you literally load up your camels with stuff and then move them around the board, to different markets?? I am a six year old boy in many ways, and good gravy I loved doing this.

FROGGY LOVING (HOPPENED SO FAST)

Nothing really beats the delirious delight of playing a classic card game when you’re way too tired for anything new, or different - and one of the highlights of last year’s show for me was playing Rebel Princess in a hotel bar whilst utterly exhausted.

It’s a trick-taking game that verges on being slightly too complicated for my tastes - with player powers and round modifiers alongside all the other rules of specific cards & trump - but the theme is a DELIGHT: you're all princesses that don't want to get married, and so the cards you DON'T want to win in tricks are all prospective suitors: naff-looking, irritating princes that you're aiming to avoid.

Ending up with too many suitors gets you negative points, and those of you who’ve played a bunch of trick-taking games will know - it’s often the case that one player’s plans go south and they end up caught in a spiral & losing hand after hand.

In this, watching that happen is just so raucously funny: not only is one player losing - honestly quite badly - they're doing so with the context of being lumped with an extraordinary quantity of boring me that they can't get rid of. The worst of these suitor cards is a literal frog - adding insult to injury as you deflect this gloopy, unwanted lover into the vicinity of somebody else. Horribly good fun.

What are we video games!  🎮

Matt: Having dipped in and out of it more times than I can count, I’m increasingly convinced that Slice & Dice might be one of the best mobile phone games I’ve ever played, and certainly one of my favourite implementations of those classic cuboid items and characters that appear absolutely… useless? I’m now gosh-knows how many hours into it, and now having a broad knowledge of most of the game, it’s the closest anything has tapped into this part of my brain since Slay The Spire - which is about as high as praise can get? Check it out!

Tom: My flights to and from Philly were eaten by one game - Nine Sols. In a sentence, it’s Hollow Knight blended together with Sekiro. Aside from a turbo-boring stealth section and rather verbose lore, I think it’s a standout this year, for me. There’s this really interesting cadence to the combat - timed parries are present, but have to be followed up by a ‘talisman attack’ that sticks your enemies with a seal that takes away mighty chunks of their health - depending on how long you’re willing to “charge” it after landing the attack. Picture that decision you’re frequently presented with in the Souls series, where you elect to forgo an attack window in order to take a big slurp of estus. It’s that kind of rhythm, but instead for your main source of damage. There’s other funkiness too - a counter that triggers ‘on release’ and various forms of unblockable and unblockable attacks that keep the fights captivating. It’s really good stuff. My flight to Philly was then capped off with my final Balatro gold stake win - Black Deck. It’s over. For now.

I’ve also been addicted to The Bazaar after watching what feels like every single run that Northernlion has done to date. It too, is a mashup - the midpoint between Hearthstone and an auto-battler, but with a whole lot of weird personality. I was going to explain more, but honestly watching any single one of this man’s videos will have you up to speed and thoroughly entertained. I sort of can’t decide if I prefer playing the game or watching him make some truly disgusting builds as chat looks on in horror.

What are we music!  🎵

Matt: I got properly hooked a few years ago to Tropical Fuck Storm’s “A Laughing Death In Meatspace” - which honestly in itself is just such a fun thing to SAY. Nothing else of theirs has grabbed me so strongly until their recent release of Goody Goody Gumdrops - the apparent soundtrack of a film they’ve made, that I haven’t looked up? ANYWAY, it’s gorgeous - scuzzy and dreamy and a little bit sad, and clearly recorded in the presence of a dog that gets in the way of things sometimes. Ticks all of the boxes?

Tom: Haley Heynderickx’s new record is a complete delight and well worth the wait! The three-song run to kick things off is utterly stellar, before settling into a really soothing folk pattern for the remaining runtime. ‘Redwoods (Anxious God)’,  ‘Swoop’, ‘Gemini’, and ‘Foxglove’ are personal highlights.

My yearly tradition of picking out highlights from the Quietus Album of the Year list has also proved fruitful - putting Saagara, Xylitol, and Ex-Easter Island Head on my radar. All well worth a spin if you want something a little more quirky.