This Three-Song Run from The Herbaliser’s 2006 FabricLive Set is Why I Get Up Every Morning

My conversation with Josh Buergel about his favorite part of a 1994 DJ Q-Bert mix had me on a hunt for more, except something more focused on a blend that used large slabs of the song and had less emphasis on turntable work.

The answer came in the form of The Herbaliser’s FabricLive.26 set. I’ve played my favorite sections almost daily, and it gets run end to end about once a week. I like the personality of the selections. I liked learning about more UK MCs I never paid attention to and had to look up. And I really like the three-cut run where they mix “I.D.S.T.” by a lad named Cappo into “Spin it Round” by the Nextmen feat. Dynamite MC right into a Jackson 5 cut.

This three-song run starts about right here and is my gravitational center of the mix, satisfying my appetite for meaty beats and playful aggression in a fresh way.

What I usually do every night around 9:30 is cue the mix right to the point where Cappo asserts himself over the thudding metallic snare of I.D.S.T.

The Herbaliser then slides the fader into a full party with the Nextmen’s “Spin it Round.” You are permitted to jump around and bump into your friends in a smoky room now. I can never stay on the couch once that stupid two-note bass kicks in.

But before you know it, they’re lightening the mood with the Jackson 5’s “It’s Great to Be Here.” This is typical of the set’s frolicsome nature, offering a throwback and a cool-down while carrying the rollicking, pub-hopping Nextmen energy forward by going backward through the crates:

There are many tasty clusters, little mini-sets, across this mix. With its inclusion of soul and funk classics blending into clever UK boom-bap and U.S. underground, it fills a very particular need for me right now.

It feels like your friends took over a club and are playing a set just for you. It feels like I was taking a new journey with one foot in the semi-familiar, feeling stuck here in my living room by this season of my life and needing something different, but not jarringly different.

This was just what I needed. Thanks for the set, lads.

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Check out 50 Golden Era Hip Hop Deep Cuts You Must Experience

How to Learn Complex Board Games When You’re Depressed (SETI First Play Report)

This is adapted from the script of Episode 108, “SETI First Play + Arkham Horror Retrospective.”

When I launched my first probe in SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, it felt like my soul leaving the gravitic well of paralytic depression. That game's been set up since November and was untouched until last weekend.

The anhedonic sensations had me bound so tight, I found myself wondering if I hadn’t lost the love of play entirely. Usually a good thing to do when you get bogged down learning a monster game is to break out a good groove game that’s still challenging but that you know well enough to run smoothly. That woulda been Resist! But I couldn’t even bring myself to set up the cards for that.

My ludic nerve system was inert.

SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Look at all the “space dust” on that board, this is super realistic

So it’s exciting when you stop feeling like a piece of shit and get yourself together like DiCaprio did in The Aviator and appear, shockingly clean, in front of your gaping engineering team with a gleam in your eye: “People. We’re gonna launch a probe and find ourselves some of those OmNomNom fellers out there in those milky stars.”

How do you learn games?

How much does your general state or life circumstances impact how and when you play?

These factors always come to the fore when I’m reflecting on what I think about a game, so I’m giving you two things:

• A journal of my step-by-step guide for learning complex games

• My notes on my first-ever solo play of SETI

Field Guide to Learning Heavy Euros While Being Morbidly Depressed in a Collapsing Economy in a Country With Fake Institutions That Fall Over in Three Seconds if Given a Hard Nudge by a Few Tech CEOs and an Opportunistic Rapist With a TV Fan Base:

Step 1: The box lands in the driveway. Feel the heft of that box. Holy moly, it’s a two-hander! Curl it every morning, for three to four days. Three sets of 10.

Step 2: Once you’re yoked, pop the cardboard. Then get so paranoid that you’re going to lose a piece, keep all the cardboard sproules in a big pile on your floor, which you slip on one night while heading into the spare room.

Realize the following morning that you missed your chance at the most hilarious country bachelor death of all time. Hold each sproule up to the light to make sure no unpunched pieces are in there, stack and sort the pieces and do a count. Now we know what things are called and that we have enough of them.

Step 3: For the next several weeks, turn on the work light after dinner and walk to the edge of the table where sits your expectant star-combing enterprise. Pick up the rulebook and sigh.

Feel the edges of your soul, this winter-hardened obsidian stranger scraping against your ribs as it rotates, maddeningly slow. Decide to ride out the mid-evening hours instead by getting into bed and reading Letters of the Century, America 1900-1999, edited by Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler.

Oooh, here’s one. Turns out Clyde Barrow, the famous male half of Bonnie and Clyde, appreciated their getaway car so much that he personally wrote Henry Ford:

Tulsa Okla
10th April, 1934

Dear Sir:

While I still have got breath in my lungs I will tell you what a dandy car you make. I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got ever other skinned, and even if my business hasen’t been strickly legal it don’t hurt enything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8.

Yours truly,
Clyde Champion Barrow

Step 4: Ride out Christmas and New Years’ listening to jazz in a darkened room.

Step 5: What’s that ticklish feeling? It’s like somewhere, cut off from everyone and the tinny signals of the holidays, I felt the earth turn, and my heart with it, there in the dark with some personally crafted Bethlehem star glowing in the deeps of Roland Kirk’s saxophone.

I’m suddenly desperate to get a client job done on a Friday so I can wake up Saturday with work that can take as much time as it wants. Time uncrimped at either end. No chores. Light meals only. No shopping. The weekend and my mind are clear. By Sunday afternoon I’ve logged my first play.

If you follow my patented system, you, too, can get your first play of a heavy solo game done in under 90 days. [Insert call to action for expensive online course here.]

Attaboy, get that rulebook out and work this thing

Now that we’ve covered how to learn games, here are my notes on my first-ever playthrough of SETI, a game where you race to build the capabilities of an agency that’s trying to locate and make contact with alien species before any of the other jerk agencies.

 1. I played the game on the easiest solo setting, which uses an automa to simulate another player getting stuff done across the table from you. More on that mode later.

2. I found the rulebook extremely solid. I just started choosing major actions that would take me across as much of the board as I could. Plenty of reading and double-checking, but the rules for each action are well-written and the illustrated examples are helpful.

The main action menu is pretty straightforward: It centers around the tension between building out your capabilities in data gathering and handling, improving your cash/card flow, or actually getting a probe somewhere. The major source of head scratching will stem from the fact that one of the actions is playing one of the multi-use cards in your hand for its printed effect, which can override or alter the basic actions.

There there are nearly 200 damned multi-use action cards that will have you re-reading their effects because you’re not sure how the particular card effects trigger in time with or instead of the base rules. You will not be alone. Here is an excellent FAQ from the publisher for you English speakers. I was a frequent visitor to the rules forum on BoardGameGeek, where I saw the trails of other confused people who had drifted around the same subtle interpretive stuff I did.

3. Maybe this was rookie incompetence, but I was expecting money and energy tokens to be the worst chokepoint for getting things done. Cash, energy, and publicity status are the three things you spend to get stuff online and working. I had plenty of all three by the third of the game’s five rounds. What I didn’t have was enough of the major actions like launching probes or upgrading the tech stack, because you can only do one of those on a turn. 

4. I liked seeing how the accretion of little actions started to push this game’s broad and varied ecosystem of scoring options to the game’s central gimmick: Actually making contact with an alien species.

It didn’t happen until the last turn, but the furtive Oumuamua race poked their head out from behind an asteroid just before the final curtain. This might sound like a strange comparison, but the alien reveal reminded me of the one time I played Betrayal at the House on the Hill, which I did not enjoy years ago in part because having to set up a finale minigame shattered what little interest I already had in playing Betrayal in the first place.

I read a criticism somewhere that stopping SETI to adjust for the new conditions of alien contact can similarly dampen the game’s flow. It certainly stalled me on my first try; I told the Oumuamua that there were sandwiches in the fridge and to knock themselves out, I was going to bed.

5. The fact that the progress markers on the game went so slowly was likely due to a mix of incompetence and still missing some basic rules. Next time I’ve gotta make sure that the automa was notching progress correctly.

6. Basic story of my first game:
• I overinvested in computers, then got itchy to get something off the ground, launched a probe and pushed it all over the place, eventually landing it on Uranus for some pretty nice rewards. I’m not even gonna make the joke, I did not fly to that planet to make the joke, make it quietly on your own time.

• But back to the major action bottleneck: Launching a probe is a major action, committing it to orbit is a major action, landing on a planet is a major action. That’s three turns out of five where that was the focus of everything I was doing. I think I’m gonna have to get a lot better at using the free actions to accelerate things. But right now, I’m in my favorite part of the journey: learning and exploring and seeing how things fit together. Optimization is a problem for a future version of my space agency.

• The automa didn’t do much of note except to be wildly successful at pinging various sectors with radiotelescopes and raking in tons of data from them. The basic difficulty setting seems designed a lot like the tutorial or training module of a video game: a low-stakes white room where you can poke around and learn some moves. Even with the rules I doubtlessly got wrong, it seemed very forgiving. I was easily outpacing the bot on the scoring track by midgame. But in the future, I’ll have five more difficulty levels to pick from, and they get harder because these modes layer on a bunch of annoying mini-objectives you have to hit every turn, with the automa scoring extra points for the ones you can’t hit. I’m probably going to do one more full play on super-easy mode to cement the rules before I see what life’s like with a better opponent.

Main Takeaway: While finally walking the ins and outs of the actions delivered several puffs of jubilation throughout the day, there were no big surprises. I’ve been tracking the chatter for a year, and SETI is just what I expected in service of breaking my 2025 war/historical game diet: Lush, sprawling, detailed, well-built, a galaxy’s worth of potential decisions squeezed into a few windows of opportunity. I think the baseline for Euro game design in general is high enough that you’re not going to put out a game with this much cardboard that’s bad.

So thanks for bearing with me as I finally worked up the focus. I’m going to report back when I have more plays under my Orion’s Belt. Right now the sheer busy-ness of this game feels like it’s running neck-and-neck with its promise, but I’ve turned this corner enough times to know that the second, third and fourth games will run way faster.

Mapping the black expanse of my winter soul has shrunk it with familiarity. It has more well-defined edges now — much like stubbornly launching probe after probe will compress the initial bewilderment of SETI in good time.

But I’m enjoying the journey so far. I like SETI. But I knew I’d like it. By February I’ll know if I love it.

Stay tuned for further reports.

UPDATE: SETI Session Report 1.1

“Good news!” wrote one Redditor when I posted the SETI play report above on a board game sub. “You have fundamentally misunderstood SETI and played a much worse game of your own invention instead of SETI, so you'll have more fun next time :)”

They were right. Everything that puzzled me about the game’s pace and action economy stemmed from a bad misreading of Page 7 of the rulebook. I looked up similar questions about turns and rounds on BoardGameGeek, and I still got it wrong. Essentially I didn’t realize that a round of the game will keep having turns as long as players still have something to do. I was giving myself and the bot a single turn each, then closing the round. 

This constricted the action to near-nothingness. The turn baton was supposed to pass back and forth between players until all had taken the Pass action that formally concluded a round. 

My misplay meant that I’d essentially played about 1/3 of a game despite logging five rounds. Not enough stuff happened.

So here are my impressions from what I’m calling SETI First Play 1.1. My job in this heavy Euro space exploration game was to scale the ops of a space agency that is trying to make contact with aliens.

It’s safe to say I failed that job. 

Reminds me of a note I got along with a no-credit grade on a history paper in college from the professor: “The assignment was to write a history paper considering original sources. I cannot give you a grade as you have managed to evade the enterprise entirely.”

So with the catcalls from more experienced players ringing in my ears. I set the game back up on the easiest solo setting and walked it again. Some notes from that experience as follows:

1. I still say this is an excellent rulebook given the range of things to do and profusion of icons. During my first round of taking the correct amount of turns, I’m looking up every little collision with the game’s action. Each time I do this, I’m rewarded with a new leap of insight into the layered system thinking evident in every piece and step. But it’s still chewy enough of a learn to where I’m bouncing back and forth between that, the FAQ, and rules threads on BoardGameGeek. This does not look like an uncommon experience.

2. During this play, the automa and I triggered the appearance of the Oumuamua and the Anomalies, two of the five species you can find during play.

Boy, what a speedbump that is for a player who’s just getting his head around how to properly take moves, mark things and trigger stuff — all while running the automa properly. Again, the rules seem well-built, but my brain mirrors what it must be like in the boardrooms and control rooms of the agency that discovered these traces: pandemonium that maxes out the allostatic load of your already busy staff.

I still run into a couple confusing cul-de-sacs and have to take a break. I already know I’m going to use these exact same species the next time I play, because I don’t want this procedural stretch of washboard road to include yet two more species with their own rules and pieces. It’s just more than I want at this stage of my learning.

I think in SETI I’ve probably found my uppermost tolerance for how much fuss I can tolerate in a game. A couple years ago, I learned to embrace solo play, but looking back, the games I played the most were light ranging up to chewy middleweights. This is a different order of ask, and while I’m enjoying the hard-won forward yardage, fatigue and exasperation are a factor.

Also noted an interesting — and incorrect — assumption I had about contact: The discoveries sit more inside a contemporary scientific world. The traces are real and verified, but that excitement does not, like I assumed, imply that spindly critters are walking down a gangway to give you a pound and start signing energy drink sponsorships. I appreciate the subtlety of the choice.

Pardon me for zooming in on this, but how they portray the discovery of Anomalies is a perfect example. When aliens come out, so do new pieces and cards. One of the cards is an action that — in beautiful thumbnail fashion — tells us how to imagine contact in the world of the game. In the illustration, a child in a sandbox has made three concentric rings of sand and is playing with a small model of one of the anomalies while a frowning mother looks on. I loved this touch.

3. The outcome. Take this number with a grain of salt, but when the dust settles, I have outscored the automa 121 to 107 — owing mostly to a nice bushel of points from the tucked income card set collection gold tile and an all-hands effort to drop a lander on Triton, one of Neptune’s moons.

Keep in mind that for learning purposes, I played this game without the scoring objectives, which put extra pressure on your actions choices and come at five levels of difficulty. But when I’m learning something chunky, I like to take the option of as few elective complications as possible. I think the fact that I won — allowing for lingering areas where I’m still making mistakes — is likely a clear demonstration that I’m ready for the proper solo mode.

NEXT: I finish the match with a handful of lingering edge-case rules questions, a sense of wonder and admiration for this game system, and, most importantly, an immediate desire to try it again. I’m about to tear it down and set it back up under the exact same conditions because there are some procedures I’m still shaky on.

I’m giving myself the license to do this at my own pace. It’s hard not to compare myself to all the tabletop media people out there who seem to inhale and crystallize whole mountains of cardboard every week. That ain’t me. That’s OK.

One of the things I find I like most about being a solo board gamer is the freedom to stare, stumble, and wander through a session without the anxiety of pacing, teaching or generating immediate and decisive rulings for others. Isn’t that the reason we do this, anyway, to build a fort of our time that doesn’t answer to the hellish speed of the world?

Or, sometimes, the hell of other people?

Looking forward, there’s only one Big Question, and that’s the Wingspan Question. I bought that smash hit from Stonemaier a few summers ago to find out What the Kids Were Up To and to challenge my regular biases when I’m shopping for a game.

Of the solo games I’ve learned during this stretch of my solo career, Wingspan has more parallels with SETI than any of my other recent off-menu choices, although it was much easier to learn than this. I played Wingspan solo twice. It was one of the 40-odd games I gave to a neighbor a few months ago.

I liked Wingspan very much. But because I learn slowly and play what I learn obsessively, I knew by last year that there was no way Wingspan was going to contend with Pavlov’s House, Thunderbolt Apache Leader, Vijayanagara or Final Girl for table time. I’m wondering how SETI challenges this middleweight lineup. The fact that I’m excited to try it again is promising, and the challenge of slowing down to learn it has been an odd confidence booster. Look for more reports, maybe even a proper review, in later episodes.

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May I send you a custom cocktail booklet and this handsome frog?