Scoop City U.S.A. : SU&SD Newsletter #85

Tom: This newsletter? It’s all about the SCOOPS!

I’m writing this just before the team engages in some Essen - the biggest, the most German convention ever to grace god’s green earth. I can’t believe that the site never went to Essen before 2023? They have so many games there. We love those!

Matt: It's ridiculous that I've never attended! Especially considering it's in the UK’s back garden, aka “Germany”. Hugely excited to remedy that this year, and be shown the ropes by 2023 VETERAN ‘T.BREWSTRO’.

Tom: In preparation for this oncoming avalanche of cardboard, I’m using this newsletter as something of a mental purge of all the games we’d played just before; forget about those fusty old designs, we’re engaging with the cutting edge of games about turning resources into other resources to get points.

I joke, of course - a lot of the games listed below will see coverage on the site imminently - but I did want to chat about them before that coverage reaches your eyeballs. We used to use the newsletter pretty readily as a place to get the inside scoop on upcoming coverage from the site, and I definitely want to start highlighting that as a dependable feature in these monthly bulletins.

Let’s look at some games, shall we?

Eternal Decks

This first one represents a classic problem for Shut Up & Sit Down. Eternal Decks was sent to me before the Kickstarter went live - but it’s a production copy that’s not a prototype and is entirely ‘content complete’. The thing is, we can’t promise it’ll deliver exactly as it sits in my hands right now, making our coverage a little thorny. So here’s the dilemma; do we cover it immediately and get frustrated comments because it’s not available right now? Chatting about it later risks perhaps a bigger problem - we work best when capturing the here-and-now excitement of stumbling across a cool weird game! Pencilling in a future review risks losing that zesty spark that drives our best, most immediate work. Filming it now and releasing it later? We need to have videos for the here and now, not some random point in the future - and there’s zero guarantee that the game will even become more available than it is currently! UarGh!

Maybe this kind of game necessitates a new feature? Maybe it needs a boilerplate disclaimer? The industry increasingly skews towards Kickstarter and Gamefound with every passing day and it’s something we ought to adapt to… but hold on a second; this was meant to be about the games! Let’s get back on track.

Eternal Decks is terrifically interesting. Players are trying to…. well, if I’m honest, I don’t really know what the players are trying to do. Ascend to heaven? Descend to hell? You’re mostly playing cards. And Eternal Decks makes the act of playing those cards intensely fricative.

There’s three rows on the table, and each row comes with its own restriction (ascending order only thanks, these specific suits please). Your reward for finishing a row? It’s more restrictions. Finishing rows and subsequently ‘waking up the Eternals’ is the stated goal of the game - but each one you rouse introduces new table-wide tangles. No more reds from anyone, no more sixes, no more of the wild cards that enable you to plug the gaps in your hands. All of these present problems for ‘Wild Red Tony’ over there who gulps at the omen of the devil clasped in his mitts.

The twist? You do all of this with zero communication whatsoever, save for a couple of ‘The Crew’ style disks that you chuck out onto the board to hint at your intentions. Deduce as you go, and you’ll feel like a sleek team that’s connected at the cerebellum. Mess up, and it all falls apart deliciously quickly - yet always feels salvageable with enough collective brainpower.

That makes for a compelling core - but the magic is in the weird and wacky shapes that Eternal Decks repeatedly bends itself into over the course of multiple games. Maybe the Eternals now have keys used to unlock a door that leads to the next level? What if that level is a labyrinth that requires incredibly specific placement of colours across all three rows? What if there was a boss fight? Or two! Go hog wild, baby. 

It’s lovely. It’ll certainly find a home in some coverage on the site sometime in the future. I just need to finish it, first - and work out what the hell we’re doing with Kickstarters these days anyhow.

Mass Effect The Board Game: Priority Hagalaz

We ought to also use this space to talk about games that we’re likely not covering in video - the kinds of boxes we might ultimately recommend against. I was initially pretty excited for Mass Effect’s board game adaptation - feeling like it could perhaps serve as an ample in-road to the series of games that I’ve put off for so long, or at the very least a brisk and breezy campaign game that’ll keep my table entertained.

I felt a little crazy in my distaste for this box given the wealth of more positive critical responses for this game that are out there, but I found it to be deeply middling! The novelties are apparent - a pacy campaign that’s short, but built with replayability in mind through branching paths and optional ‘loyalty missions’. Characters quickly leap through a skill tree that allows for immediate differentiation and specialisation. Sessions run short, rules are kept terse, boards are dry-erase for on-the-fly scribbling; and it’s all wrapped in a scenario book-slash-board that cribs from Jaws of the Lion, to keep things as ‘pick up and play’ as possible.

But I can’t recall a memorable or exciting moment from our sessions, not a single mechanic in the rulebook that raised an intrigued eyebrow, not a lick of dialogue that felt more textured than an NPC bark. To put it simply - it’s mid! The “Paragon or Renegade” system in particular seems so banal that I’ve almost no idea why it was s even a choice at all other than to serve as a blip of recognition for fans of the series. Perhaps the more salient decision - which objective to pursue - felt equally flat! Hack a terminal or shoot a robot. Rinse and repeat. This time it’s not a ‘terminal’ but a conduit - it doesn’t matter, the interaction is the same and the outcomes are unimportant. 

The presentation reflects this in earnest - near identical enemy tokens resting on a board restricted only to dull blue-greys. Which is such a shame! The shining advantage of the scenario-book format over the modular tiles found in most dungeon crawlers is that you can decorate and personalise these arenas however you like - not needing to re-use those same assets elsewhere and subsequently anonymise them. The various slices of planet and crashed ship we wandered through felt like spaces on a board; a line of hexes rather than a dark corridor. Maybe this feels especially stark when directly contrasted with one of the recent video reviews on the site - s worlds apart, despite being another sci fi game set on some dusty moon. The colour pops, the interiors sparkle, it maintains a deep readability alongside a robust and charming character despite moving in a relatively grounded setting.

You know, I think it all stems from a lack of a sharp core hook to tie it all together. You roll a big fistful of dice in Mass Effect that’ll reliably let you do ‘a bit of moving and shooting’ - with player powers cleanly built to solve the problems presented by a round - but fundamentally there’s nothing in the bones of the game that made anyone at my table sit up in their seat. It’s safe. It’s fine.

Minecart Town

Finally, I want to talk about something of a hidden gem. I’ve only played Minecart Town a handful of times, but each one of those plays was a minty-fresh hit of logistics.

So you’re making a town. A Minecart Town! It’s in the name of the game, silly! Rounds are as straightforward as they come, and proceed thusly. Your production buildings produce resources. You build new buildings from a shared market. Your buildings with consume powers use up any resources placed on them, and will hopefully get you some points. Rinse and repeat four times, tuck yourself into bed, and congratulate everyone on a hard days’ graft.

In the middle though, I’ve leapt over a crucial step. In between adding new buildings and converting goods to points, you must first ship those goods around your dinky hamlet via minecart tiles that you’ve placed previously to connect supply and demand. You did… you did save resources to place those tiles, didn’t you? Oh dear.

With no minecarts to ship things around, you’re out of luck! That wheat will stay stagnant in the fields rather than get combined with sheep to make pies, in a process that I can only assume is utterly humane. And that tiny slip? It might be absolutely devastating. You’ve got four rounds to work with, and one wasted efficiency can spiral into a slump.

My first game of Minecart Town was a peaceful little town building game that I wanted to see expanded into something bigger and better. I still kind of feel that way - I’d love to see a eurogame that takes these logistical woes to new heights and concerns you with where goods actually are rather than resorting to the tried and tested ‘infinite vault of bricks in the sky’.

The second game, however, was completely different. Myself and Matt played a barbed and spiteful game of Minecart Town that really stressed the importance of a cleanly laid out network. See, Matt wanted to collect sheep - pinching two buildings that let him produce a bunch of the docile little gits over on his side of the table. Feeling like I was missing out on all the action, I purposefully pinched the only building that let him do something with those sheep.

This then caused poor Matthew to enter ‘Sheep Hell’

His buildings produced dozens of sheep - a chattering horde that would get ferried around a series of increasingly inappropriate buildings - but ultimately never spent on anything. He was constantly building tracks to move sheep into new enclosures where they would sit for a round before being pootled somewhere else. Why? So that he could produce more sheep, for a purpose unknown.

The grim twist, to the tale? Matt ended up buying a whole bunch of buildings that used ‘coal’ to get points! And there was one particular building that let him turn any resource he wanted - any resource at all - into coal!

The incinerator.

You can tell instantly that this is made by the folks behind Little Town - a focus placed on very simple mechanics that turn cutthroat if pushed in just the right direction, and a length of game that lets you linger on every decision because you’re not making so many as to dilute their importance. It’s all wrapped in some really charming work from Sai Beppu - an artist who is just so relentlessly talented at adapting to whatever the game demands. What a delightful game.

So that’s a little cluster of games that I’m excited to tell you about before we might cover them elsewhere - but what else is coming up from SU&SD over the next month or so? Here’s what we’re working on.

• Matt’s cooked up a review for Compile that’s slated to come out real soon. I think that this game deserves a review just because of the box?! What a sharp and sleek bit of product design. Stay tuned for that very very soon.

• We’ve got a full playthrough of Wilmot’s Warehouse soon to go out on the channel! We recorded it purely to get some fun B-Roll for the preview trailer, but ended up struggling to find bits to clip because we just had such a fun time playing. I think it’s lovely.

• My next review is Ironwood - a deeply thematic two player head-to-head asymmetric battler with some really swish production. That’ll either be out the week immediately after Essen, or the week after that? It entirely depends on how full of con-crud I am.

• I’m also keen to put together reviews of Joyride, and SETI: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence… but I haven’t worked out a date for those just yet.  I think they need a few more plays to get that script really popping!

• Finally, the ‘Games with No Rules’ video I’ve been simmering is getting flung into the far future… but that’s a good thing? I almost immediately realised that the potential scope for the video was far bigger than I first thought - and so I’m trying some new methods to gently percolate that one into existence sometime in 2025. It’ll be a big one! 

That’s all from us, this month! Here’s that ‘What Are We’s…

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What are we video games!  🎮

Tom: You should be playing UFO 50. You should own it, and have it in your Steam library as a well-stocked pantry of glowing nuggets of design to break off a morsel whenever you so desire. I’m in awe of how good this thing is.

For those not in the know, UFO 50 is a collection of 50 entire video games, smashed into one bumper pack that documents the history of a fictional company (UFOSoft) and their fictional console (The ‘LX’). You open the game, and a vast collection sits in front of you. Peruse the titles at your leisure. Dust one off, give it a whirl. Maybe it’ll hook you, maybe it won’t. Spend a few minutes on one or a full five hours on another. Revisit games you bounced off of and find new depths to appreciate. Master a game so deeply that you forget 49 more of them exist. Have the staggering realisation that so many of them have fully fleshed out multiplayer modes. It is a wonderful achievement, and I cannot stop playing.

I think I want to make a full Bonus Bit on UFO 50 sometime soon - I know that Emily and Matt have both been having a flutter too - but for now? I can only offer my breathless enthusiasm, because I feel sort of unable to get a good set of sentences together that gets into why this collection feels so special. I’ll work on it. But for now, take my word that it’s a treat, and absolutely worth your time.

If anyone’s been playing, I’d love to chat about it. So far I’ve cleared Ninpek, Magic Garden, Velgress, Waldorf’s Journey (My Beloved), and Hyper Contender. I only just realised Pilot Quest exists and I’m reeling. AAaH!

Pip: I was thinking about picking up UFO 50, but a friend sent me a code for Smite 2 and I have been playing that instead. Am I any good? NOPE! In fact, somewhere between Smite and Smite 2, Hi-Rez seemed to have nerfed me, which is a shame. That said, my swearing has become even more creative to fill the skill void. I would include examples here, but I'm assuming the newsletter would immediately become R rated and not make it through anyone's spam filters!

What are we music!  🎵

Tom: New Floating Points is always a good thing, and Cascade is a frighteningly enjoyable collection of tracks. I think I’m more fond of the second half than the first - when the dancefloor fades into some more sparse and burbling arrangements of disparate synths less tied to the ready pulse of a ‘four-on-the-floor’. Great record.

I’ve also been loving ‘Windswept’ from Photay - a slightly genre-defying set of tracks full of weird woodwinds and synthesisers tied together with clattering percussion. It’s a hard one to describe, but I’ve found it an ample companion for editing sessions these past few weeks.

Emily: Ginger Root put out their debut album and it’s great great stuff. SHINBANGUMI is filled to the brim with the lo-fi yet highly polished synth-pop production that has made Ginger Root’s EPs over the years feel so special. Songs like ‘No Problems’, ‘There Was A Time’, and ‘Giddy Up’ have such an infectious groove and nostalgic flair to them that has had me listening to this album again and again since it was released. 

Pip: I've been listening to Chappell Roan's The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess almost non-stop this last week. Sometimes an album sits just right in terms of the amount of energy it invokes to become one of my gotta-get-through-this-deadline albums. For years it's been Metallica's Hardwired… To Self-Destruct (and I can only apologise to the colleagues sitting nearby when I worked on a magazine and had headphones with audio bleed issues!), but Midwest Princess has apparently wormed its way in as a new contender. The only problem is that I always have to take some time to appreciate the lyric "I heard you like magic/ I got a wand and a rabbit…". Metallica is far more "Cthulhu awaken!" and "My life, the war that never ends!"

What are we watching? 📺

Tom: Are you, like me, getting hopelessly addicted to Deadlock? I’ve been enjoying the calm and collected nature of videos from Schizug - who I would probably point to as the single reason my games have gotten better and better recently. It’s good morning coffee material. It’s good exercise bike viewing. It’s probably better for me than my usual diet of Northernlion clips? Don’t get it twisted.

Emily: Don’t get it twisted is so appropriate, Tom! It’s so relevant to what I’m going to talk about! What a great segue that is in no way ruined by extensively writing about what a great segue it is! Perfect.

The first episode of the new Uzumaki mini-series from Adult Swim is out and it’s about as great of an adaptation of the manga as you could hope. If you aren’t familiar with Uzumaki, it is a fantastic surreal horror manga from Junji Ito. You almost certainly would recognise its visuals if not its story about a town being corrupted by spirals and the intense obsessions they incite. It’s weird, spooky fun. You should watch. It’s perfect for the season :) (please don’t watch the 2000 film. We don’t talk about that).

Pip: I should not have read through what you two are watching before I tried to write mine. I feel like I want to be cool and fit in with your cool viewings, but actually, I'm watching comfort shows like Monk and The Good Place to soothe my tired brain.

I guess I've also rediscovered Instagram and am also watching a lot of short videos from zoos I followed years ago. Relatedly, I've also discovered that I'm an insufferable hipster about baby hippos. Like, all you people chatting about Moo Deng, but where were you when Cincinnati Zoo's Fiona was born premature in 2017 and has been totally amazing ever since, or her little brother Fritz (born in 2022), and that's to say nothing of Berlin Zoo's current baby pygmy hippo, Toni! I forget where I was going with this. Maybe just that hippos are cool and all of them deserve our respect. And I'm somehow cool by association? Yeah. Let's go with that.