Tom: Happy new year folks! The team has had a little rest, played some little games, and are generally emerging from hibernation ready to make content… and a few changes. You may have noticed the title of this post is a little different than usual, because we’re going to try swapping out our weekly ‘This Week On’ posts for ‘This Month On’ posts in the first half of 2023. 

So, why the change? Mostly this comes from me sitting down to write the weekly posts and realising that the format was increasingly becoming either ‘we are posting a video and a podcast’ or ‘we are not posting a video but there will be a podcast’ for most weeks in 2022. This wasn’t terrible, of course – but it was a weird little job that didn’t feel all that useful! Now we want these posts to be more substantial, and to give folks who are interested more of a peek behind the curtain as to what we’re getting up to, as well as affording us a little more flexibility in how we approach things. Video reviews can get changed, pushed back, shuffled around and entirely canned for all manner of reasons, and we want to reflect that reality in our scheduling updates.

However! We still want to be updating the community and sharing the ins and outs of being living human beings working on things – so, to that end, we’re going to loosely start the Twitch Channel up again for some much needed chill and chat time. We’ll probably keep these very casual to begin with, and be guided by you lot on what you want to see next! The first of these will likely be next week where I’ll be playing a splash of the new Firaxis game: Marvel’s Midnight Suns, and I’ll be open for questions and rambling about SU&SD in 2023! We’ll post a date for that over on the SU&SD Twitter account once I’ve got things in order.

So! With that change out the way, what’s going on in January?

First up, you can expect a really lovely raft of podcasts. We just released our 2023 predictions episode last week, and we’ll follow that up this week with a chat about the first few games we played this year – The Wolves, The Search for Lost Species, and Ginkgopolis! After that, we’ve got a few more episodes lined up in the hopper – a CCG Special talking about Flesh & Blood and Solforge: Fusion, as well as a lengthy chat about Stationfall and some of the games we’d played after PAXU. Good times!

Over in videoville, a couple things are in the cooker. We’ll soon have a video on classic family game Rummikub, in which I have a complete critical breakdown. Why am I making it? I don’t really know. On top of that, myself and Quinns are sketching out the borders of a ‘Top 10 Small Games’ feature, but that might end up being a February project – such is the way when we’re trying to feature a whole bunch of games at once. There’s a few other scripts that are in the ‘maybe’ pile for turning into full-fat videofilms – but I think our January and February will likely be a little quieter on the video side of things whilst Matt continues to assemble the video studio for new features, and I navigate the absolute state that is Brighton’s rental market.

Thanks all! See you next week for a stream, and next month for another this month on Shut Up & Sit Down!