my big thing with SUSD has been that the games they really really like are always games that require you and whatever group you’re trying it with to already be into board games SO MUCH
like i always admired their commitment to being ambassadors for the hobby which makes it kind of strange when their favorite games ever are so difficult to sell the average person on
not that they’re not allowed to be excited about things they like tho
my second big issue is that they are not as critical of very obvious orientalism as they should be considering how fucking much of it there is in board games
this is true but I feel like it’s true in a fairly unintuitive way: they tend to like shorter, self-contained, social games, but also games that are more convoluted and frictive. and I am absolutely here for it, but I think that sweet spot tends to come across as too loose or light or hipstery to most people who are very willing to internalize complex rules, and too involved to most people who aren’t. I do my best to cultivate a group that gets it, but even then, yeah, it’s a lot. and even if I couldn’t tell by two minutes into any of their reviews whether they’d made up their minds to sell me something or not I also have to try to parse out whether I’ll be able to get anyone to put up with whatever it is.
For people that were once capable of sustained and interesting criticism, they’ve certainly uh… reduced their scope to selling people on games their friends made that they played once, and grumping about anything that doesn’t have a ‘social friction’ element to it or that has rules that are maybe too much for quinns to understand without paul around to explain them.
Literally all they have going for them is that it is not literally painful to watch them talk about games (when they don’t decide to wear dodgy orientalist caricature outfits like for that tales of the arabian nights review), their tastes are pretty uniformly bad both for people new to games and people who too deep into games. Like, I wouldn’t say their tastes are hipstery so much as an undiscerning craving for any game that lets them roleplay without the weight of actually playing an RPG or story game.
All the games they’ve liked for the past few years could be summed up as ‘theater geek Mafia clones’
actually this is a really good clarification of what I meant to say; my “hipstery” in this context was an attempt to signify “flighty and high functioning and non-commital,” which is exactly why I’m normally much more interested in a self-contained social game than actually committing to an RPG. I don’t think there’s necessarily a better way to signal “high engagement, low commitment” like that – “games for people with jobs” or “games with people with families” both have inflections I’m not crazy about (and if we conclude on this basis that SU&SD have become successful in part by demographically resembling the people in this hobby who have money, that should be held against them at least a bit), but it’s nonetheless squarely inside of my tastes and some distance from yours (which is also I think at least part of why we reacted differently to Sekiro). though we already agree that SU&SD have been really undermining their credibility even so.
It amazes me how much of the ship Paul was steering in retrospect now that he’s gone. Like I had already thought the Matt/Quinns stuff wasn’t as good as the Paul/Quinns stuff, but it really is shocking seeing how far they’ve been stumbling recently. Reviewing a kinckstarter board game you need twenty people to play but requires a good GM that their friends made??
Plus I think there has been exactly one ‘card game that doesn’t suck’ video where the game seemed like it didn’t actually suck, and that was Gin Rummy. A bunch of the rest had less actual game in them than fucking solitaire. Solitaire!!