The Shmup Book Club?

The Shmup Book Club is ei’s casual shmup competition run out of his discord (with a weekly stream/discord call on Thursday evenings, at ~7:30 PM CDT). Three shmups are run at a time, one on a monthly schedule and two on a quarterly schedule.

All scores are submitted in the #shmup-book-club channel on discord, with a screenshot needed. Please follow whichever version/settings are noted for the individual shmup in the pins. Note that you do not need to be on the weekly call/stream to participate -- just post a screenshot of your record in the #shmup-book-club channel and you’re good to go!

Monthly Shmup

The monthly shmup is chosen via poll, run out of the #sbc-poll-zone channel. The top two scores + two random other participants choose the options for the poll, and the winning option is the shmup for the next month.

The person who selected the winning shmup is ineligible to select the following month’s shmup. (This will be shown on the leaderboard as a “non-place”; they will sorted correctly but do not get a numbered rank.)

Quarterly Shmups

The quarterly shmups are hand-chosen by ei. These are solely for bragging rights and having additional options to play if the monthly shmup isn’t your speed. There are two quarterly shmups -- the SCC (Shmup Challenge Circuit), which follows the same system guidelines as the monthlies (see below) and the SIG (Shmup’m ifya Got’m), which can be on any system or cost any amount, and is usually tailored to things outside the below guidelines for those that have the game handy or are willing to pick it up.

What are you playing right now?

The best source of that is the pins in the #shmup-book-club channel or the topmost entries of each type in the leaderboards.

What systems are we playing shmups on?

For the monthly shmup and the SCC quarterly, in general, things are kept to the below set of systems:

• NES
• SNES
• Genesis
• GB
• GBA
• MAME
• TurboGrafx-16
• Steam/PC (~$10 or less for paid games, freeware fine as long as it’s not super difficult to get running)
• (anything not on this list, please talk with ei to clear it before submitting)
• (SIG games can be on any platform, hence “Shmup’m ifya Got’m”)

What games have been played in the past?

The leaderboards on this website offer an up-to-date list of games played throughout the SBC’s history, including each game’s leaderboards at the time it was played.