We Went to UKGE!: SU&SD Newsletter #73

Tom: Oh dear, I promised this months’ newsletter to contain ‘Juicy Info’! Alas, said info remains unripe and unsqueezed, and instead you’ll have to endure a recap of UKGE 2023! I can’t believe they’ve done over two thousand of these things.

A lot of these opinions and games are going to be talked about very soon on a SU&SD podcast near you - you’d be blameless if you’d rather have it in audio format rather than having to read, urgh!! But for those wanting a sneak preview, then continue perusing…

We immediately tucked into the much-touted Sea Salt & Paper on arriving at the convention - a card game that I still don’t entirely understand. The folks at the Bombyx stand were something of a proxy for demoers everywhere - able to competently explain every rule in the game, but not quite in the best order, whilst also seeming to deliberately skirt around why any of this is going to be fun. I’m being harsh, here - especially as getting demos first thing on Friday will catch everyone before they’ve had a chance to do a run through with real people. I’m keen to come back to Sea Salt & Paper though, even if just to look at that absolutely decadent origami art! What a looker!

Planet Unknown, by contrast, was demoed to us brilliantly, but maybe only because the game has about 8 rules. This one is mega-pleasing - a Tetris game with a lazy susan tile selection mechanism that both drew us to the table, and repelled us from the price. £70!!! That’s over 20 meal deals!!! Actually, that’s not so bad when you put it that way. I don’t think we’ll pursue coverage of this, though, past a simple ‘it’s good!’. It’s good! It’s also a Tetris game in a world where My City, Barenpark, New York Zoo, Patchwork, and Paris: La Cite De La Lumiere already exist. Go figure.

We then did a live show! Booted from our usual perch in the ‘Toute Suite’ (which had instead been given over to Warhammer LaserQuest) we had a strange table in the middle of the convention hall around which people could gather to play some Wavelength. I think I’m realising more and more that I’m at my most comfortable when live shows aren’t podcasts - not pressured to be both entertaining and informative means I can just be a bit more myself. You know where I really could have been myself, though? Warhammer LaserQuest. I really want to know what was going on inside that room - whether it’d been completely transfigured into an Imperium-Of-Man Hellscape or if they’d just switched the lights off and given everyone nerf guns. Either way, I’m gutted we didn’t get to visit.

In the evening, though, we got a real treat - finally sitting down to a game of John Company. I’d been trying to organise this for a while and had schedules not quite line up at every turn, and so it felt like a karmic treat that we not only got a game in, but we also got taught it by both Cole and Drew! Huge thanks to the both of them for their patience in guiding several fools through their first few turns of this monster. For those who don’t know, John Company is something of a sandbox simulation of the East India Trading Company, where players take the roles of incessantly greedy and petty families using the atrocious actions of the company to line their pockets. It’s sort of co-operative, insofar as everyone wants the company to make money so they can take a slice of it, and so are encouraged to do their jobs well to keep things buoyant. But there comes a time that the money doesn’t quite cut it, or that you’ve already made your riches and want out - at which point it’s a game about abandoning a sinking ship and retiring as comfortably as possible.It’s negotiations, threats, scheming and plundering all the way down, and it is as repulsive as it is entertaining.

I think I want to pursue coverage of John Company more vigorously, so I’ll save any nuance for that. At the moment, I just want to say that it’s a fabulously strange design that I had a great time messing around in - but also that I’ve had the game sat on my shelf for months before getting it played; and I play board games for my job. I think it’s fascinating, and if you know someone with a copy you should badger them immediately to sort out a game of it because there’s nothing quite like it out there. Equally, though, it’s a game that encouraged such vigorous and complex conversation about theme, representation, and history in the evening afterwards - conversation built on top of guilt rather than despair due to the white British perspective of five white British people sat round the game. This game makes you engage with something horrible - it makes you play as something horrible - a prospect that it would be understandable for wanting to avoid. It requires a trust in the designers’ politics to even begin engaging with it, and a faith in those politics to see it as a work of pure satire. What a weird game.

Saturday was mostly defined by the set of games we ended up playing in the evening - a trio of lighter games that were a palette cleanser for the heavier fare engaged with prior. First up we played some Phantom Ink - something of a decrypto-like where two teams of mediums try to extort a single word from a spirit on their team. Both teams’ spirits know the word in question, and can only communicate it by answering secret questions … a single letter at a time. Your team can yelp SILENCIO when you’ve pulled enough information from what’s being written, to hopefully save the other team from getting a juicy additional word for free. I think there’s a magic to this in the pure exasperation on the faces of the two silent spirits - but outside of that the verdict was mostly that Codenames, Decrypto, or Wavelength would be more exciting prospects. I don’t know why I’m writing all this - I didn’t really play this one - I was sat with Mr Thousand Year Vampire himself, Tim Hutchings, peeking at his new prototype (absolutely not what you’d expect) and talking about my fear of doing actual roleplaying. What a lovely guy.

What was a real breath of fresh air, though, was My Favourite Things - a faithful remake/reprint of a Japanese trick taking game of the same name from Play For Keeps. This one’s super hard to explain, but I’ll endeavour to anyway. Each player gets given a category by the player to their left, as well as a hand of plastic cards - cards that are actually two cards in one sleeve; a hidden bottom card with a number, and a top card that’s got a dry-erase section. Players then write their top 5 favourite things in the category they’ve been given on the dry-erase cards labelled 1-5, and their least favourite thing in that category on a special ‘heartbreak’ card. They then slide the cards into the sleeves to hide the number, and pass the cards back to the player who set the category. What follows is then a trick-taking game where you don’t know the value of your cards - but you can make guesses as to their value based on what you know about your friends’ opinions of, say, 2000s indie bands, Christmas Songs, or Pizza Toppings. Hark! The Herald Angels Sing vs Radiohead vs Ham. The reasons this game is delightful are, to me, self-evident.

The last game we played was Cursed Court - a betting game that’s best explained as being ‘a bit like bingo, but if everyone got a tiny trickle of information as to what balls would show up’. That’s oversimplifying, but it is the core of a pretty compelling box - one where other players’ bets form the basis of your strategy as you deduce and bluff your way through an increasingly knotty net of intentions.

HERE’S THE THING THOUGH! This game awakened something in me - an opinion that rivals Quinns’ ‘Boards Should Be Too Big Or Too Small’ or Matt’s ‘Hollow Knight is a Bad Game’ in its absurdity. I think I have an incredibly narrow field of view when it comes to justifying poker chips in a game. Here’s my manifesto

• You MUST be allowed To LOSE them
• If You GAIN them, it MUST be because someone else LOSES them.
• You MUST be able to ADD to a STACK.
• There MUST be a point where a single player grabs a BIG STACK and goes ‘HAHAHA, YES’

I will not elaborate further. If your game uses poker chips and does not have these things then it doesn’t matter if they’re the most convenient component in other ways - they MUST be gone. Never have I been more disappointed in poker chips than I was during Cursed Court. Cool game though!

Matt: I DON'T think it's a BAD game I just think it's BORING, but almost all games are so it is in EXCELLENT company.

The games we played on Sunday are most likely getting further coverage elsewhere that’ll be more juicy and informative than the info I’m spilling here, and I’ve probably used up the time than buying a single coffee will afford me in this cafe. Instead of spoiling the big stuff, I’ll instead stick to nothing more than a short ramble about Dirty Pig.

Look at this hideous cover. These pigs crave filth and you must deliver it unto them. On your turn, you play a card, and draw back up to a full hand - a sequence so simple that it must hide depth (it does not). A mud card makes your pig dirty. Three dirty pigs gets you the W. Rain cards make everyone’s pigs clean again (nooo!). A barn keeps your pigs from getting rained on. A lightning card burns down a barn (what happens to the pigs inside?!). A lightning rod stops your barns getting burned down. A ‘wash a pig’ card gets a farmer to wash your hog, regardless of their be-barned status. A ‘board up the barn’ card stops the farmer from getting in so your pigs can stay gross, with the presence of hammers and nails on the inside of the barn challenging your preconceptions of porcine dexterity.

But wait, there’s more! (why!?). The ‘Piggin Amazing’ (???) expansion gives you options to pretty your pork - giving an alternate victory condition for the player with the nicest looking… flock? Herd? Murder? You can pretty up a dirty pig but you can’t dirty a pretty pig, of course, the laws of equivalent exchange are very clear. Of course, you can de-pretty a pig with an ‘escape’ card - and a lipstick prevents an escape to quickly re-pretty it in a pinch. Matt and friend-of-the-show Clark were sat one table over playing a quite serious eurogame, and absolutely cackling whenever they heard a single rule from this game. I never want to play Dirty Pig again, but it will forever be in my mind - those absolutely filthy hogs living it large in the mud.

What are we video games!  🎮

Quinns: I’ve been waiting impatiently for the release of Street Fighter 6 for a year, so the fact that it’s finally in my hands, and precisely as good as everyone says, is unreal. This last week I’ve been experiencing the disbelieving glee of a gentleman thief: “It’s in my hands! AT LAST!”

I’ve always been interested in fighting games abstractly, from the sidelines - a splinter of the same academic interest that first got me to try board games - but I knew that all it would take is the right fighting game at the right time to let me get involved myself, and Street Fighter 6 is precisely that game. When I’m not training, or fighting online, I’m trying to assemble a group of local players into a real community (which is currently 3 people, including me and Tom). It felt like a genuine loss when the recent reddit blackout left me unable to access my nightly street fighter subreddit memes.

Tom: Street Fighter 6 is absolutely electric. I’d tried to dabble in previous iterations of the series over the years, but the learning curve just felt horrifyingly steep and scary, the language too knotty and complicated. But, with Quinns tempting me onwards, I took the plunge and have loved it. So many changes make Street Fighter 6 more approachable than previous entries - various reviews can explain the nuances of why - but I’m here to say that the result of that approachability means that the core of why fighting games are so cool is laid bare. The tactical and strategic layers are so much easier to dive into now the controls have been simplified, and once you’ve locked into those aspects of the game you’re more free to actually learn and understand how to be a better player outside of ‘get faster’ or ‘learn combos’. That’s not even mentioning how great the visuals and sound of this thing are - every single punch and kick sound meaty, every battle theme a delight to listen to, every menu clicky and satisfying. Great stuff.

I also love the roster in this one. After a brief period of messing about with Ryu to get the basics down, I’ve decided to main Manon - a terrifyingly strong French woman who combines ballet and judo? Her bread-and-butter move is a throw that pulls the opponent towards you in balletic embrace, before heaving them over your shoulder and slamming them into the concrete. Every time you do this, though, you earn a ‘Medal’ that makes your next throw just a bit stronger - and so matches against her turn into this absolutely demoralising uphill climb as you get tossed about the arena again and again and again - damage multiplying upwards until you are terrified of getting close. Delightful.

Matt: I've been dipping into Diablo IV after getting a free copy with a graphics card, and I think it might be RUBBISH? It's very difficult to discern whether I'm Wrong or just Old these days, but it's so strange to try and align this open-world game of collecting ore and herbs with my first experience of the original Diablo: an unknowable and strange and sometimes FRIGHTENING game of delving deeper and deeper into Very Bad Things. Within ten minutes of the latest iteration I was holding down one button for 20 seconds until a boss ran out of health, and while the aesthetic and grandeur has wholly bloomed, I can't help but feel like something fundamental has been lost along the way? I'm off to shake my fist at clouds, speak soon.

­What are we music!  🎵

Matt: I think it's the baking weather seeping into my bones, but I'm back listening to albums from the heatwaves of yesteryear - Prince Rama's Top 10 Hits of the End of the World is a messy and raucous slice of hypnotic scuzz that I appreciate more eagerly as the years tick by: there's something wonderful about the core concept of a band channelling songs from the artists of the future - let alone from THE END OF THE WORLD. It's good

Tom: The new Julie Byrne track ‘Summer Glass’ is really something and has arrived at exactly the right time of year. I hadn’t thought that Byrne would do so much as dare to dabble with synthesisers, but the pairing of those watery, crystalline arpeggios and her typically breathy vocal performance is refreshing and expansive. It’s a fabulous track, and her whole catalogue is really worth a listen whilst the sun is oozing through your windows. I’m really enjoying Hoops’ record ‘Tapes #1-3’ in a similar mode as well - hazy, laid-back, poolside indie rock that’s got some lovely little hooks across its three short discs. Opposing that are both the new Squid record (nailing it with album #2) and Gilla Band’s 2022 record ‘Most Normal’. I really recommend the latter especially if you’re after something harsh and noisy! New Colin Stetson is predictably great, as is the new Protomartyr, as is the new King Krule, and I also can’t believe we got a new Darkside live record! 2023 is a great year to ‘Music’ in.

What are we watching? 📺

Tom: I don’t know if this counts, but that Devolver Digital event at ‘Not E3’ was fantastic. Thoroughly recommend you take a minute to watch that one.

Quinns: That Everglades guy on TikTok.

What are we reading? 📚

Quinns: In donor newsletter #70 I spoke adoringly (and twenty-two years late) about Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. A big, funny, poignant, and ultimately forgiving portrait of a miserable family.

Well, guess what! This newsletter I’ve got no choice but to tell you about another Franzen novel. And once again, it’s a big, funny, poignant and ultimately forgiving portrait of a miserable family, but this time it’s a new book. It’s called Crossroads, it’s a lot gentler and more mature than his younger efforts, and I’m every bit as addicted to it as I was The Corrections.

I wonder about the utility of me recommending multiple books by the same author in exactly the same milieu... but these books just feel like such piles of riches to me. It’s quite the feeling to realise, 100 pages into a book, that you’re having the time of your life, and there are another 500 pages to go. Even more ridiculously, Crossroads is just the first book in a projected trilogy, with each book taking place in a different decade of the 20th century, so that could be... 1800 pages? On a single, normal American family? I can’t wait.

Matt: I am not reading BUT I'm massively addicted to If Books Could Kill - the incredible podcast which researches and debunks a wide range of deeply popular books from the last half century. I presumed as someone who doesn't read much but likes the IDEA of doing so that the podcast would merely compound my guilt - in reality it feels like a necessary shortcut, saving me from delving into depths of tremendously naff material and in doing so providing a really clear illustration of how the culture we live in has been gradually constructed. It is both depressing AND cathartic: seeing the thoughtless and consistently wrong-headed ideas that have congealed to create reality around us, but presented by minds sharp enough to enjoyably ridicule the source material. Perhaps it isn't useful, as an approach? I think I might be on the verge of past caring, at this stage it's truly just joyous to learn and laugh.