Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Champions of Midgard, Plants vs. Zombies, Marvel United, The Adventurer – Pyramid of Horus (revisited)

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Champions of Midgard, Plants vs. Zombies, Marvel United, The Adventurer – Pyramid of Horus (revisited) · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:02
  Welcome to pick Up and Deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
• 0:05
  as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I walk
• 0:09
  home. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoons listeners. It's a gloomy,
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  cloudy day here in suburban Chicago. The weather is chilly, but not
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  outrageously cold, though it does look like it could rain at any moment,
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  so hopefully I won't get rained upon while I am walking. I'm just on
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  my way home from work on a Tuesday and happy to talk to you about
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  some games. It's been a little while. In fact, yesterday was my
• 0:46
  Top of the Stack episode, and I was looking at my list from the
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  Top of the Stack and they realized, Hey, there's three games on there
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  that I've played for the first time that I haven't talked to you about.
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  So let's do it. That's right, it's time for Board Game Espresso Triple
• 1:03
  Shot. For those of you new to the podcast, Board Game Espresso Triple
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  Shot is a podcast, an episode segment, or an episode style that I
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  do occasionally where I talk briefly about three games that I tried recently for the
• 1:19
  first time. The whole idea is that these are games I have not played
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  thoroughly, so they're not reviews, but I tried them first time, and
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  I'm gonna give you my initial feedback on them. I also like to slip
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  in one discussion of a game that came out of the dust recently, meaning
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  I played it for the first times in a while recently, so I'm going
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  to do that as well. So the first game I want to talk to
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  about today is Champions of Midguard. Champions of Midguard is one of my three
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  top of the stack games for last month. You'll remember I acquired this game
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  in early March by accident sort of. So originally I bought the I bought
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  I got the Valhalla expansion to Championship mid Guard as part of a board game
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  math trade, and then I discovered that I wasn't getting the game. I
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  was getting the game expansion, but not the game itself. Championship Midguard carries
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  a board game geeg rating of well over seven I think seven point eight or
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  something, and so I thought, hey, this is a game I should
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  check out. So I used some free am some Amazon points I had built
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  up to get a copy of Champions of Mid Guard. So I've not tried
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  the Valhalla expansion expansion yet, but I did pick up the base game of
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  champions At Midguard and I got to try it. If you haven't played it,
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  Championship Midguard is probably most easily described as a Lords of Water Deep style
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  game with a little bit of luck in dice. Basically, the way the
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  game works, you are one of the potential new yarls for a Viking village
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  in sort of fantasy Viking times. There is a village with a number of
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  different places that can get you resources, and then there are some locations where
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  you can go adventuring. There are a couple of different kinds of adventuring locations.
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  There are trolls that come down from the mountains and mess with the village.
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  There are other mountain monsters I can't young time maybe are what they called,
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  and then there are monsters that you have to fight by going on a
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  thie voyage. The way the game works, it's played over eight rounds,
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  and each round has a number of phases in which you place workers, you
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  accumulate goods, and you go on adventures. The placing workers face is lets
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  you accumulate goods like money and wood and food as well as Viking warriors.
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  The Viking warriors are dice. They're either in the White Swordsman mode, the
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  Red Spearman mode, or the Black Axemen mode or style. Of course,
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  the Red Swordsmen have two two swords in a shield and three blank sides.
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  The Red Spearmen have three spears and a shield and a blank side, and
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  the or two blank sides, and the Black Axemen have four sides that have
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  axes on it and two blank sides no shields at all. So when you
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  acquire these warriors, they go into your hut. You can have eight warriors
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  total. You can't have more than that. So the way the game goes,
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  you are putting out your workers, and your workers can either go to
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  one of these resource gathering spots. You can go to a spot where you
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  can buy another worker. You can do that one time, and then there
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  are warrior spots where you can go to fight a battle with one of the
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  monsters. So the troll in the mountain is relatively easy to defeat, not
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  always though. The Yundheim in the mountains are variable, and then the monsters
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  across the sea are variable. If you're going across the sea, you also
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  have you may encounter journey events that can disrupt your sea travel, and then
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  when you fight the monsters, there's dice rolling. So broadly speaking, you're
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  collecting sets and earning points in a variety of different ways, usually by getting
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  glory through killing monsters. You also can get I don't remember what they're called,
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  blame tokens if you are not helping keep the trolls out of the village.
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  So the troll creature, if nobody goes and kills it in a given
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  round, then everybody gets a blame token because they didn't go and kill the
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  troll. If you do kill a troll, you get to discard one of
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  your blame tokens and make someone else take one. So there's only one spot
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  you can go to to fight the troll. So there's a little bit of
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  back and forth there. Now I was playing a two player game, so
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  it's pretty easy to balance it. If you get the end of the game
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  and you have a bunch of blame tokens, they end up hurting your score
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  a lot, sort of like the poverty cubes in London, although not nearly
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  so hard to manage. The voyages, Like I said, you face some
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  danger which could kill some of your vikings or disrupt some of your food,
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  and then you have to feed your vikings before they can go fight the monsters.
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  The further away you go, the more difficult it is to fight them.
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  Then you fight them by rolling dice, and they do damage and kill
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  some of your dice, and if you kill them, then you get the
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  points. I don't know that playing with my son, I don't know that
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  we ever failed to kill a monster. Maybe once early in the game when
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  we didn't really realize how the dice worked and we didn't have the reroll tokens
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  built up yet. One time we failed to kill the monster, but generally
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  it was pretty reliable to kill them. The art in the game is great.
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  The pictures of monsters are excellent, and the various tokens and village pieces
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  are good. The style of the art reminded me, I know it's backwards,
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  but reminded me of my father's work. It has a kind of isometric
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  view with a realist style but a slight hint of cartoon to it, and
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  very pragmatic. Easy to read, although the font in the game is not
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  easy to read. I had to pick up almost every card in order to
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  read it. I couldn't read it from where I was sitting, and there's
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  lots of cards with different texts on them. All in all, Champions of
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  Midguard was fine. It wasn't amazing. It's decent. Not as good as
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  Loads of Water Deep, although like I said, I do often hear them
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  compared. The journey to fight monsters is amusing. That is kind of one
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  of the fun sides of things. But ultimately it was not amazing. It
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  was good. We had a good time. I'm not going to get rid
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  of it yet. I definitely want to try it with a Valhalla expansion.
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  Everything I've seen or read suggests to the Valhalla expansion is a must have and
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  it makes the game much more interesting. So I'm looking forward to trying that
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  definitely before the game would get traded. After that, we'll see if my
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  son really likes it, which he played it with me. If he really
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  likes it, I would keep it. If not, I'm not sure it
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  needs to stay in my collection. It's good, but probably a couple of
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  plays was enough for me. We'll see. I'm going to try the expansion
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  first. That's Champions of mid Guard from Grey Fox Game and designer Olie steinas
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  all right, the next game I want to talk about is Risk Plants Versus
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  Zombies. Risk Plants Versus Zombies is, of course an adaptation of Risk published
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  by the OP and designer Andrew Wolf. Andrew Wolf, that's a name that's
• 9:18
  familiar. Oh, Andrew Wolfe designed Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle, as well as
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  quite a few other games for the OP, so Andrew Wolf as an in
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  house designer at the opp Risk Plants Versus Zombies is an interesting twist on the
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  Risk mode. It involves only two teams, as you can guess. Plants
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  and Zombies comes with a colorful board and some very cheap cards and sort of
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  the style of the Monopoly Community Chest. Cards are full color print, but
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  it's a card stock with square corners. The miniatures are tiny little zombies or
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  tiny little plants, and then you get them in singles or in triples like
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  three in a bunch. The board on one side it represents the town where
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  Plants Versus Zombies takes place. On the other side it represents the house,
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  which is sort of the main venue of the original game. When you go
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  to play, it's always a two player game. There are three different play
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  modes. There is basic Risk mode, there is Advanced Risk mode, and
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  then there is front Yard Battle, which you play on the back of the
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  board using the map. Now we have so far only played the basic Risk
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  mode. I figured we'll try it in its initial formula formulation. Particularly because
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  my son had never played risk before, he was agreed to give it a
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  try with me. In this mode, it feels a lot like Risk.
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  Unlike Risk, where you win by eliminating the other player, in this game,
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  you win by achieving objectives. There are eight objectives. I think the
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  game comes with twelve. You put out eight of them. You put out
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  eight of them, and the first player to get three wins the game.
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  Now, the way the game is set up originally, it's not too hard
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  to get them. I mean a couple tries them. We're good, my
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  son and I. Basically we're going back and forth. You're only allowed to
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  get one objective a turn, and I think I won at the end of
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  my fourth turn, so basically just one objective a turn. After the first
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  turn was done. There were a couple of things my son could have done
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  to slow me down getting that last objective, but I think had he done
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  any of those then he wouldn't have been able to get an objective on his
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  turn. And I would say from my first play, the big flaw with
• 11:45
  the base game is that it feels like the player who goes first has a
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  huge advantage. As far as I can tell, there's no disadvantage it built
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  into the game, or there's no balancing built into the game before the first
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  player thing. You definitely don't finish out the round. You just play somebody
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  has three objectives, So in gameplay it feels very much like the original Risk.
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  You're rolling dice to take over land. You do get these cards which
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  you can trade in for more properties or more soldiers, but the cards also
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  have special powers on them which are much more interesting, and it seems like
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  in the Advanced mode those cards come into play even more directly, which would
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  be nice. This was okay, not real good. My guess is if
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  you like Risk a lot and you haven't played a lot of hobby games,
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  this would be pretty fun. But as somebody who's played a lot of hobby
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  games, Risk isn't really my jam anymore, and this game did not bring
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  enough new stuff to it to make it worthwhile. We'll see, I may
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  want to try the front yard battle mode that's more like the original game,
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  but I'm not sure we'll be able to muster the interest because it wasn't that
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  great. So that's risk plants versus zombies. When I look at games coming
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  out of the dust, there was one I want to mention, which is
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  a game I played recently. Again. This is The Adventurers The Pyramid of
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  Horace. The Adventurers is a Fantasy Flight classic amertrash game where you're running into
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  a temple a pyramid actually, and you're trying to get as much loot as
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  you can and then run back out. The gimmick of the game is the
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  more loot you're carrying, the slower you move, so kind of like Deep
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  Sea Adventure, where you slow down as you gather things. It gets harder
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  and harder to leave, and you not often have turns where if you're carying
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  a bunch of stuff, depending on how the dice roll goes, you can't
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  move at all, or you can only move one space since you have this
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  delicious tension of having picked up all these goods, which are how you win
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  the game, but you have to get out of the temple. The other
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  gimmick is that the game comes with all these big plastic blocks, and the
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  idea is once you start entering the temple, every round one of the blocks
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  falls from the ceiling. There's thirty six marked spaces on the board and you
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  randomly draw a block and put it on the marked space. If somebody's there,
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  they take an injury, which slows them down the game. If the
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  exit to the game ever gets blocked off, then anybody's still in the temple
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  loses. There's also mummies running around and special powers you can get, and
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  it's a delightful silly time. This is not a game I would recommend running
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  out and trying to buy. It's long out of print, so it's kind
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  of expensive, I think, but tentially worth playing if you get a chance
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  and you think sort of goofy silly fun would be an enjoyable way to spend
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  an hour. That's the Adventures the Pyramid of Horace. There is also the
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  Adventure is the Temple of Shock, which involves a big rolling boulder. That
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  one's not quite as smooth. The rules are a little clunkier, but it's
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  also pretty fun if you get a chance to play that one. All right,
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  Finally, the last new game and we'll talk about today. This is
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  Marvel United. Marvel United is a miniatures a cooperative miniatures battle game in which
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  you not really miniature game. I mean, there are miniatures in it,
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  but it's a cooperative battle game in which you play members of of Marvel superhero
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  universe fighting Marvel Marvel villains. There is a group of locations where the Marvel
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  villains are causing trouble, and as the heroes, you're running around solving problems,
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  rescuing people, fighting the villains, and generally trying to win the game.
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  This was not bad. I got this for eleven dollars at a discount
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  store. It's just the base game, so we have six heroes and like
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  four villains that you can play, so we get a taste of the game.
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  It's not the giant cornucopia of stuff that you get if you back to
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  the Kickstarter, but it was a fun little co op. We had a
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  good time trying to figure out how to beat Red Skull. We ended up
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  coming down to the very the wire in the game. There are a number
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  of different ways you can lose, and one of them is I think if
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  the Red Skull runs out of cards or something, and we were just very
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  close to losing. When we won, like it was like the next turn
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  we would have lost, and we beat them, so that was delight.
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  The characters play a little bit different, but it's a very simple game.
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  This would be a good thing to play with somebody who's a new gamer and
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  you want to try something. You might get them in through the theme.
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  The minis have the sort of chevy style that's cute and fun, and the
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  art is great, so this is a fun time. I'm really glad I
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  did not back the kickstarter for hundreds of dollars. This one game would will
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  get us several plays if we decide to keep playing it. I'm sort of
• 16:32
  middling on it, but again we'll see if my son asks to bring it
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  back out. Overall, it was fun, a good time, a nice
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  co op game worth checking out again if you get an opportunity that's Marvel United.
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  I'm glad I spent. I'm glad I got it at the discount store.
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  Thanks for joining me on my walk today. I hope that your next
• 16:48
  walk because this pleasant His mind was Oh Bye. Brought to you by Rattlebox.
• 17:14
  Three year. Following year