REVIEW: TILETUM: SU&SD Newsletter #71

Tom: Tiletum is great! It’s a big, beige, bland eurogame that made my whole group sigh heartily when they saw it, but by about an hour in they were quieter than I’ve ever seen them during a game - entirely absorbed by the puzzle. It’s really quite something, so I thought I’d take a minute to review it here, in the newsletter.

Before we go on - it’s important to mention here that Tiletum is the last design of Daniele Tascini for publisher Board & Dice, who promptly dropped him after an exciting side-serving of racist remarks. This is a contributing factor to why this piece is not a video review - approaching it as a ‘standard’ piece of SU&SD content was probably not a possibility due to the prickliness of this particular situation. There’s certainly more ways that I could do a bit of proper research to dissect and talk about this, but, for now, we’ll leave it at the door. Tiletum time.

What happens in Tiletum? 2-4 players gaze down onto an endless beige expanse to accrue their victory point fortunes. Over the course of four surprisingly nippy rounds, you’ll snatch dice from a shared pool in order to take part in several minigames around the board - with a unifying gimmick that the colour and number of the dice will determine how many resources you get from picking it (a grey five means five stone) but you’ll get fewer actions the higher that number is (they always add to seven - so five resources for two actions, or one resource for six actions etc etc).

These actions and resources are spent on the different point-scoring areas of the board. Stones and Architect actions help in erecting pillars that’ll help build cathedrals for clusters of points. Merchant actions scoot a cart around the map that builds houses and takes part in fairs - end-of-round opportunities for even more points. Contract actions get you contracts that can be fulfilled to grant you more pillars and sponge up leftover resources, whilst character actions fill in a tiny house on your personal board so you have access to more merchant houses on the main board. But! They also come with their own unique one-off bonuses, and finishing a house with a seal (gathered from the contracts spaces, or from scooting your merchant and architect around the board) permanently improves one of the dice actions for you personally. There’s an action tied to a ‘King Track’ where the leading player becomes first in the turn order, collects points and gets a once-per-round bonus tile, and there’s a hotly contested joker action that’ll give you a slice of anything you fancy. There’s a lot going on.

A word that sums up much of Tiletum is entangled - each system connected to its neighbour through quite visible threads of design. Pulling on one necessitates movement in another, and there’s no way you can truly excel by heading down just one path - but light specialisation does yield substantial rewards. Central, though, is a shared central geography of dice rondel and main map that link arms into something quite heavily interactive, especially at the game’s (perhaps best) player count of just two.

I’m smitten with a lot of what this game does - a constant friction pressing on you from both the rondel and the other players round the table. Small, tight markets clash with hefty point totals for those who spot and capitalise on opportunities, and there’s just enough flexibility within these systems to pull your brain, kicking and screaming, through whatever problems might arise. There’s no individual element of Tiletum that pounces out at you as genius or groundbreaking, but a steady trickle of revelations builds into a… winding river? Of choices? That you punt a barge of… fun? …down? Sure, why not.

That’s Tiletum! It’s exceptional, it’s robust… and it’s not quite Concordia.

Concordia, the Mac Gerdts 2013 eurogame, is a SU&SD fan favourite. As Quinns pointed out in his original review, the cover-only-a-mother-could-love hides a puzzle so sleek, so satisfying, and so interactive that it beats out most other titles of its weight and style without breaking a sweat. When I think of Concordia, I think of something robust and reliable - the perfect dry treat to build a collection around.

Here’s the thing. I think that Tiletum might be as sturdy and strong a design as Concordia - and holding this box I am left wondering that maybe, in an alternate universe, it’s this beige monstrosity that wins the hearts and minds of the people. It’s this game that surges into the Top 100 of BGG, it’s this game that people cite as being their first truly great time with a eurogame.

See, Tiletum hit me with similar thrills - it sparked my brain in a way that only the most satisfying euros do! But it’s just…. different, isn’t it? It’s bulkier, it’s more unwieldy, it’s got a rulebook that’s thicker and more complex, and it’s ultimately trying to meet the expectations of a market that’s already seen Concordia; a market that knows it loves Concordia, a market that wants things that are newer, that are different, that will get them back to that time when every game was a new joy waiting to be uncovered!

But Tiletum just isn’t quite the same as that untouchable pinnacle of the genre. It never will be.

A Reddit post recently frustrated me. It’s titled ‘What Happened To Shut Up & Sit Down’. In it, the original poster loudly speculates about the past, present, and future of the site to an audience of users who similarly share concerns about things ‘not being like they used to be’. This whole post, in fact, springs out of a similar statement below the Horseless Carriage video - the most upvoted comment confused as to why only the second video of the year is another solo Tom video - followed by long-winded chats about ‘the good old days’, the reviews that folks really treasured.

There's always, always comments that unfavourably compare me to Quinns, Paul, and Matt. Those comments never point to anything specific where I could improve - they just wave their hands around the subject and point at some kind of unattainable magic that those videos had. This normally doesn’t bother me, but seeing it collated and shared so openly most certainly got me down! Not just out of an insecurity in my own work, but also borne out of this slightly hopeless feeling that, no matter how hard I try, I’ll never reach the heights of ‘what it used to be’. And in these threads sat the comment that sparked this whole chain of thought off:

‘My favorite SUSD review is still Paul’s review of Concordia’

Everyone remembers who made that video, right? Surely?

Matt: Oh gosh of COURSE I remember - Quinns didn’t stop talking about that game for months after reviewing it: we played it a ton of times and I could NEVER flipping beat him at it - it is probably the game that I think of when I think of Quinns.

Tom: Right!? And I think this comment stuck out because it reinforced that we can never truly win against people’s nostalgia. I can never cut through that network of positive associations to create something that’ll spark the same feelings as those memories, even if those memories don’t align with reality.

And so I can personally relate to Tiletum! Loaded with the baggage of expectations; a little fussy and weird; unable to escape the orbit of that which surrounds it. These interactions remind me that a video too straight will be seen as dull, and a video too silly will be seen as try-hard. Nothing real can beat a memory.

In city building video games I always wipe the slate clean. I always play for a spell until something unhinges my plans and then, frustrated, I start again. I plan for that eventuality. Of course, then I reach another hitch, and it’s hard to overcome the desire to turn back the clock again. Each time I’ll get an inch closer to the perfect game - something wholly in my grasp. I can’t do that here. I’m building atop of a pre-existing foundation, heavy with expectation and through a lens that is so unbelievably rosy.

I hate that we fixate on these comments - too often neglecting to mention the hundreds of lovely responses we get the pleasure of reading every day. But it is, unfortunately, the negatives that sting! Initially I felt pretty impervious to such things, but it’s been getting to me recently - the panic that people visibly seem to feel when the channel is ‘just me’ for a bit - as if the work I’m making represents a death of sorts to them - I am the Tiletum to someone else’s Concordia.

I’m sorry for venting, for the second Tom-flavoured newsletter in a row. Thank you to everyone who supports the show and supports me doing it. Your voices are loud enough that they normally pave clean over the wistful grumbles, but it’s also useful as hell for me to write, to think, and to share these thoughts. Being ‘on the internet’ is weird and you’re here on that journey with me, suckers!

Matt: Someone stop the bus we need to get off. Hopping in as the editorial bigwig to cap off Tom’s thoughts, it IS good to share these thoughts - even if it’s tough for even me to sit and read them. There’s a seemingly inescapable cycle to working on the internet in the ways that we do, and Tom here echoes so many of the same things I’ve had to wrestle through myself over the last ten years.

It’s rough to see that nobody is impervious, and for me - to be candid - it is both personally and professionally frustrating to realise that I’ve been unable to use my prior experiences to prevent those that work with us from falling through the same obstacle course. The internet is weird, and it’s a colossal influence that’s bigger than all of us - knowing the shapes of the waves in advance might be purely academic in the face of a tsunami.

I think if anything, right now is even harder - the strange collective trauma of the past few years has folks leaning on those pillars of nostalgia with quite a substantial force, and when people look to their beloved sources of entertainment as a salve for the stresses bubbling up in their life? The weight of those expectations can feel amplified. We’re so lucky to have lives in which we’re able to focus on spreading joy and evangelising the very act of play - but despite the massive privilege of our position it would be a lie to pretend that these expectations add up, and sometimes crush. Just like the people we aim to entertain and inform, we too are often plagued by the ghosts of nostalgia: many would like the energy of Matt from ten years ago. Honestly, I would absolutely adore that too.

Time though now to take a deep breath and whack a plug into the vent-pipe. Thanks as ever for your love and patience, and a special nod to all the sharp ones out there who continually recognise the fresh qualities that Tom brings - before we know it he will have destroyed everything you love, consumed us all whole like a gigantic snake - attacking the moon and dealing quad-damage. And personally? I think that is GOOD.

­What are we video games!  🎮

Matt: Hades! I already rinsed it on my Personal PC Computer, but I am “back on my bullshit” and playing it on Switch, having gotten to the credits within less than a day and now continuing towards possibly… 100%? There’s so much of it, and I’m definitely not supposed to be playing it as much as I am. I think the commuting and the life-stasis of moving home is getting to me - on the other hand, WHAT A GAME.

Tom: A whole bunch of good stuff, this month! I'm really enjoying Tchia - a game taking heavy inspiration from Breath of the Wild to create a fabulous adventure game set in a real-world archipelago. Slightly more fantastical, though, is the protagonists ability to posses basically anything in the environment - with the bountiful animals of the island available continually making traversal deeply joyous.

On a very different end of the spectrum, I've also been digging into the Dead Space remake. It's cracking. I didn't realise how much I missed very straightforward, linear action games with a nuts arsenal - and it's an added bonus that it happens to look stunning. On top of that, King of the Castle has been great fun to stream and I'm really looking forward to playing some Slay The Spire: Downfall next week, should be fun.

Is there any point talking about Destiny stuff, too? I've no idea how many of you will actually be interested to hear ‘wot i think’ - but the new Lightfall expansion is healthily restocking my enthusiasm for the game (not that it was in any danger of running out). It does feel like a great time to try the game - buildcrafting being streamlined and the difficulty being tuned working in tandem with the new tutorial system to provide a great arc through all the activities the game has to offer. I've been raiding nonstop. Send help.

­What are we music!  🎵

Tom: I've been a bit dull for music this month, aside from the new JPEGMAFIA & Danny Brown collaboration SCARING THE HOES. Great record. I think the nuts production and mixing choices are distracting a lot of folks from this thing just having such a strong core - fab samples, great bars, and a really goofy sense of humour. It's not going to be many people's thing, but it's such a natural collaboration between two pretty left-field rappers that the results are exactly as off-kilter as you'd expect.

What are we watching? 📺

Matt: I’m increasingly obsessed with Barry - the black comedy about a hitman who decides he wants to be an actor. It starts quite trad-american comedy, but gradually slides into a place of pure darkness that has taken me aback and delighted me tremendously. I’d similarly like to give a special mention to Back To Life - a UK show that follows the story of a woman released from prison after 20 years, having been jailed for murder as a teenager. It isn’t even nearly as bleak as it sounds, though, and instead is a bit of very funny drama that’s tinged with flecks of unusual, unexpected humanity. I’ve never seen anything quite like it - it is perfectly written and expertly cast - I’d highly recommend it.

Ava:  Did someone say golden age of television? I certainly do it, it’d make me sound like an absolute arse. But there was a bit of last Friday where I was starting season two of Yellowjackets, finishing season one of Shrinking, messaging someone about whether we thought Ted Lasso was holding up into season three (tentatively, I think yes), and partway through a rewatch of Succession so I can remember who is the most awful before I start the final season. It’s a lot of stuff! I think it’s all incredible, in mostly very different ways? What do these shows have in common? Well. I honestly think they’re all shows that look at trauma with clear-eyed attention. The horror of Succession is reinforced by the thin thread running through that lets you know how much pain these horrific powerful monsters are in. The generational traps. Yellowjackets can sell the most ridiculous plot twists, because all the characters are either teenagers trapped in an awful situation or adults who have still not recovered from that situation. Ted Lasso pays such close attention to forms of masculinity that don’t do folks many favours, and includes so many people completely shaped by terrible, terrible fathers. Shrinking is perhaps the most literal, therapists dealing with grief and causing chaos. The finale had me in tears. It’s a very beautiful series, with some compelling performances.

I guess a lot of stories are about this stuff, right back to the Greeks and maybe further. But I think there’s a nuance that we’re seeing in television these days that uses these powerful, resonant topics for something very special. Whether it’s the horrors of capitalism or teenagers, or the joys of football and family. Emotions can be amplified with eyes as kind as these.

Also, I still reckon that Gerri as Miss Piggy and Kermit as Roman is the best bit of muppetcasting I’ve ever managed. I called this before I saw [redacted for reasons of common decency].

What are we reading? 📚

Ava: I am still struggling to start the increasing pile of fantasy novels I’m very excited for, and it’s not being helped by more stuff showing up constantly. I bumped into James Wallis at Airecon, and had a little catch up (fun fact, I met him trying to find a table for him to run a game of Once Upon A Time at a convention at least a decade ago). He sent me a copy of his new book Everybody Wins, which is a history of boardgamey boardgames specifically through the lens of the Spiel Des Jahres. This is built out of a column for Tabletop magazine. It looks exciting, and it sounds like the research uncovered some weird little tidbits. Obviously I would’ve called it ‘Reeling in the Jahres’ though.