QUINNS ON THE CLOCKTOWER: SU&SD Newsletter #64

Quinns: It’s my turn at the top of the newsletter, and I’d like to get a little bit serious. I want to tell you about the  game night I went to on Saturday. It was a night I didn’t want to go to, and one that ended up healing me a little bit.

So, a lot of you might be aware that our 2019 review of Blood on the Clocktower ended up being pretty bad for my mental health. I really put my heart  into that video- the game nights we ran were massive and exhausting (I  struggle to think of another SU&SD review that involved so much worrying about having enough chairs), the script was something we fine-tuned over weeks, and it involved a lot of coordination between the designers and our editorial team to release the video in time for the Kickstarter. Ultimately, I decided that this was my favourite board game of all time. The release of the video should have been a day of celebration!

Instead, the backlash was immediate and monumentally depressing. People  interpreted our praise for this game - which almost all of them hadn’t  played - as a rare failure of SU&SD’s critical faculties. In the 11 year history of SU&SD, I’ve never seen a less charitable comment  section. It was so bad that Board Game Barrage spent some time discussing it on their show, making the observation that in addition to the well-established trend of people not liking it when you disparage a Kickstarter game that they backed, people apparently also don’t like it when you breathlessly encourage them to back a Kickstarter that they can’t see themselves playing.

So, yeah. The week we released that video was a bad week for me. It also wasn’t anywhere near as bad a week as I’ve seen online content creators have- working in the games industry means witnessing abhorrent abuse that women and minority creators have to tolerate on a daily  basis. But it still left me in a creative funk for months and months. I really felt like I was baring my heart to my audience, and for reasons of tone and timing the response from our audience - who I’d come to love  and trust - felt like a surprising, resounding rejection of that love.

Fast forward to 2022, and gorgeous copies of Blood on the Clocktower are finally arriving at the front doors of Kickstarter backers the world over, and the same friends that I tested the game with  in 2019 are running weekly nights of it.

...so of course they asked if I wanted to come and play.

I don’t know what it’s like for the rest of team SU&SD (perhaps they’ll tell you below), but playing any board game after I’ve published a review of it brings a sense of dread. What if I don’t like it as much as I remember liking it? That wouldn’t make the review wrong, exactly, as a review can only ever be a presentation on the feelings  you had at the time, but it does warp the review in my memory, like a plastic toy left on a hot car dashboard. That bit of work I did - and to some extent, my whole career - becomes just a bit sadder, smaller,  uglier.

I know, it shouldn’t be that way. I should have some emotional detachment from my work. But if we didn’t put a little fragment of our heart in every review, would SU&SD be the site that it is?

So in the end, more because I wanted to see old friends than I wanted to play Blood on the Clocktower, I went along to this game night in the suburbs outside Brighton and sat down with 14 other people (most of them strangers) to once again play this vast, weird, and now slightly cursed game.

And you know what? I had the best time I’ve had playing board games since... well. If I’m honest with you, it might have been the most fun I’ve had with a board game since I last played Blood on the Clocktower in 2019.

I forgot so much about this game. In all the drama and seriousness that swirled around our review, I forgot how stupid this game is. During this game I watched players give speeches to the group that were purposefully awful, just to deflect attention away from their secret team-mate. I forgot how charming the game is, with players constantly asking one another into breakout rooms to have a whispered conversations  where you make plans with the giddy fervor of two 9 year olds agreeing to be best friends for life, even though this might be your first time  speaking! And I absolutely forgot how much of it there is! In all the  games of Blood on the Clocktower I’ve played, I still haven’t experienced even a third of the content in this box. But I’m working on that- I’m playing Blood on the Clocktower again next week.

You, reading this, might still dislike SU&SD’s review of Blood on the Clocktower. And that’s fine! It’s always been fine. But the important thing is, I don’t think I dislike it anymore. And that feels  just... really good.

What are we video games!  🎮

Tom: This month, basically all I’ve been doing ‘in videogames’ is playing Destiny 2. After bouncing off it a couple of times, I’m now fully plugged into trying to sift through many years of content I do not understand - which I think might be the most compelling hook, for me?

Slowly building up this picture of exactly what the game is, what a new menu actually does, or why exactly some big buff boy is wrecking my house is a feature/bug that I cannot get enough of. See, Destiny 2 has  an infamously terrible new player experience - but I kind of love that  about it? The game wants you to get to ‘the depths’ but gives you a tiny  plastic spoon to dig yourself there - which is awful if you’re used to having a drill but great if you love a bit of amateur archaeology along the way. Is that a bit of a stretch? Maybe. But I really can’t recommend diving in enough.

Ava: Always one to be ahead of the curve, I finally played Untitled Goose Game, and I think I did it in the absolute perfect conditions: I played it with a six year old chaos goblin. The two player mode appears to literally just add an extra goose, not any extra challenge, so it was the ideal situation. My goose pal caused chaos that I could use as a distraction, and occasionally we’d team up.  Absolutely ideal way for us both to enjoy the game on a level field but  also with no pressure to play a certain way? Any recommends for more games (preferably on switch) that fit this dual layer bill would be appreciated. Goosey-chaos-goblin suitability and simplicity would be helpful too.

I even FINALLY started Gloomhaven, with my long distance war game pal. The digital edition is… a touch buggy, but a mostly strong implementation, and the core game is such a delight. I can finally see what everyone’s going on about and now quite want to try Frosthaven, but am also worried I won’t actually be able to handle the upkeep in person? Electrified versions of boardgames are weird in how they change your perception of their cardboard cousins.

What are we music!  🎵

Tom: A slow music month for me, where I’m mostly just blasting shoegaze to offset/enhance weather that is ‘proper melty’. Outside of that, though; an album I am absolutely adoring at the moment is billy woods’ Aethoipes - this haunted, dusty thing where ‘listening to it loud’ isn’t an amplifier but a microscope, letting your ears pick up on those fiddly details of production. Lovely stuff.

What are we watching? 📺

Ava: Oh god am I really going to admit that I enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick more than I expected? The bulk of the film is quite tiresome and predictable, but in a way that is great fun to be  sassy about. Then the final third is one of the best executed piece of  action film nonsense I’ve seen in years? It really showed up how bad a lot of big stuff lately is showy pyrotechnics where you can’t quite  follow the stakes and action enough to care about it much. It’s impressive but not engaging. I’m so used to switching off my brain for those bits, that it was quite a treat to have a sequence where the action had been explained and belaboured so clearly both emotionally and practically throughout the rest of the film, that every shot felt powerful. Even the bit where I lost track of what was going on was kind of perfect because it was... well... The bit where it was impossible to keep track of what was going on, dropping you into the absolute chaos of  it all. The whole thing was frustratingly well executed on some very  specific levels. I’m not going to say it was great. Or even necessarily good? But it did what it set out to do incredibly well, and I do respect that.

What are we reading? 📚

Ava: I got sent a copy of Coyote and Crow, and I’m not quite sure how we’d cover it, so rather than risk letting it drop into nowhere, here’s a few words because, while I’ve not played it, and actually really want to think about how I would review rpgs if I ever need to (I already certainly WANT to), it’s a spectacular thing.

The core conceit of a near future built on an alternate pass where a somewhat magical natural disaster in the fifteenth century stopped Europeans from landing in what we now call the Americas. This leaves the book to imagine a continent built around the Native American people  that were decimated by sickness, colonialism and violence from Europe. Following on from thought processes I’ve been having after reading 1491, which I talked about before, it’s a wonderful piece of work. Huge, expansive world building from indigenous creators, advice for how to approach this if you are native or not, and an exploration of an unreal  version of an actually lost world. It’s huge and fascinating, and I think it’s well worth a look, even just as a coffee table book for  letting you imagine games and worlds you might one day hope to be part of. Which is about where it currently sits for me. (Unfortunately, what I’m normally looking for in a role playing game is a small book that I can grasp enough to actually run. Now I’m just waiting for someone to come along and run a campaign in this world. I’m sure they’ll be here any second now.)


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