Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Something Wild! Marvel: Holiday Baby Groot; Vagrantsong; Nucleum; Allow Me to Mansplain (revisited)

Transcript

Something Wild! Marvel: Holiday Baby Groot; Vagrantsong; Nucleum; Allow Me to Mansplain (revisited) · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:04
  Welcome to pick up and Deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
• 0:07
  as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I walk
• 0:10
  home. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon, listener. It's a
• 0:22
  lovely day here in suburban Chicago. The sun is out and it's surprisingly warm
• 0:27
  for early March. My phone says at sixty six degrees, which is probably
• 0:33
  twenty degrees warmer than it should be, but it makes for a nice walk
• 0:37
  home. Well, it's been a little while since I talked about some new
• 0:39
  games I played, so I thought I would talk about some new games I
• 0:42
  played. That's right, it's time for a board game. Expresso triple Shot.
• 0:47
  It's funny I make the late noise. I don't generally drink lattes.
• 0:51
  I mean, I enjoy them just fine, but I prefer black coffee most
• 0:54
  of the time. So aha. Anyhow, Well, today I thought I
• 0:58
  would talk about three new games that I tried in January of this year and
• 1:03
  let you know what I thought of them. So there might be some games
• 1:07
  from December that I haven't covered yet, but I can't remember off the top
• 1:11
  of my head, and so I thought I'll just jump into January. So
• 1:15
  the first game I'd like to talk about today is called Something Wild Marvel Holiday
• 1:19
  Baby Groot. Now that is quite a mouthful, so let me break it
• 1:23
  down for you. It's called Something Wild exclamation point Marvel colon Holiday Baby Groot.
• 1:30
  So there's three parts to it. And the idea is it is a
• 1:34
  flavored version of a game that they have a bunch of flavored versions of called
• 1:38
  Something Wild Marvel. And the idea is it is it is a set and
• 1:45
  run taking game with a little bit of a scoring element and this figure that
• 1:49
  a little tiny baby Groot figure that gets to move around and help you score
• 1:53
  points. It's a relatively simple game, not a lot to it, but
• 1:59
  a muse enough as a kind of sit around and play a game kind of
• 2:02
  game. Apparently it's part of a larger selection of games in the similar vein
• 2:08
  Something Wild is the game title, and they have a number of different games
• 2:13
  with this flavor, both Marvel and out of Marvel, and you can mix
• 2:16
  and match them to make a more elaborate game. As they recall, there
• 2:21
  are a variety of scoring cards as well, and so different games will have
• 2:23
  different ways of scoring. But this is a very simple, very light game
• 2:29
  meant to be family friendly and easily played by non hobby gamers. So as
• 2:34
  a result, we found it just fine. It wasn't all that exceptional.
• 2:38
  It does come with a neat little, tiny sized fun copop Baby Groot,
• 2:43
  which is fun. It's neat to have some of those. I do have
• 2:46
  one of those that I bought off eBay, a tiny fun size verus,
• 2:51
  which I use in our copy of Hand of the King from Game of Thrones.
• 2:54
  I stole that idea from my cousin and her husband who did the same
• 2:59
  thing. So something wild. Marvel Colin Baby Groot was released in twenty twenty
• 3:05
  two and it was published by Prospero Hall is the designer publisher fun Co Games.
• 3:09
  As you may or may not know, Prospero Hall is no longer design
• 3:15
  studio. That the all of the licensing that fun Co owned for their game
• 3:21
  division they sold to another firm, but apparently they did not also then sell
• 3:24
  the Prospero Hall design group, so it's been dissolved. My understanding is those
• 3:30
  designers have formed Some of those designers have formed a new studio and will be
• 3:34
  releasing games soon under the same model. Next up, we have Vagrant Song.
• 3:38
  A Vagrant Song is a boss battler where you have characters that are in
• 3:46
  a boss environment. They fight a boss character, and then they go to
• 3:50
  camp and sort of refresh. The game has played over a series of It's
• 3:55
  like a campaign game played over a series of battles with the boss. Each
• 4:00
  round you go back to camp, you get more stuff, you go back
• 4:03
  and fight the next boss, and so on. The designers are Matt Carter,
• 4:09
  Justin Gibbs, and Kyle Rowan. Published by Weird Games That's Wyrd.
• 4:14
  In twenty twenty three, Vagrant Song has a really great or twenty twenty two,
• 4:18
  actually, excuse me, Vagorrant Song has a really great art style reminiscent
• 4:24
  of old cartoons, like the Merry Melodies cartoons. A lot of younger people
• 4:29
  would call it the Cuphead style, sort of not recognizing the cup Heads itself
• 4:32
  aping an older style. But there was a touch point for you with me
• 4:39
  saying the old cartoons don't really that doesn't really mean anything for you. The
• 4:44
  premise of the game is that characters are vagrants, sort of hobos in the
• 4:48
  nineteen twenty style or nineteen thirty style, riding this ghost train and the boss
• 4:55
  each round is a haint, which is an Appalachian word for ghost, and
• 5:00
  you have to try to defeat that ghost by beating it, and it has
• 5:03
  different things that's trying to do. It's got a sort of set number of
• 5:08
  things that it does in a specific way. The players can if you get
• 5:12
  defeated, you become a ghost yourself, and if you're still a ghost at
• 5:16
  the end of the game, you can lose some of your achievements, but
• 5:19
  you can be resurrected or brought back to the good side. I think the
• 5:24
  whole thing we're already ghosts. We're on this ghost train, but you're sort
• 5:29
  of still half alive or something. It's a little unclear, but the theming
• 5:32
  is really strong in the game. The gameplay was fine. I enjoyed our
• 5:36
  first play of it was a little complicated, and I'm afraid we've let it
• 5:41
  go about a month now, month and a half, and I'm afraid if
• 5:43
  we go back and play it again, I'm going to have to relearn the
• 5:46
  whole thing. It didn't stick all that well and it wasn't super intuitive for
• 5:49
  me. But I love the theming and I like the overall play of the
• 5:53
  game. Once we figured out how it worked like it actually moves pretty quick
• 5:56
  once you know what you're doing. So we definitely are going to play a
• 5:59
  few more time before we decide whether or not to keep it keep it going.
• 6:02
  Although it might just be my wife and I playing, I'm not sure
• 6:04
  my son we were going to play it with him. I'm not sure he
• 6:09
  liked it. So in terms of aesthetics, the game is really neat.
• 6:14
  Like I said, I told you about the style the pieces themselves. The
• 6:18
  game comes with acrylic standees where the heroes are printed on opaque stand e's so
• 6:26
  they look sort of solid, and the heats are all printed on these translucent
• 6:30
  standies with the kind of blue tint like their ghosts. That part works really
• 6:34
  well. All the tokens have these neat little icons that make it easy to
• 6:38
  understand what's going on, and the whole thing is very thoroughly themed. It's
• 6:43
  definitely a very thematic game and pretty neat. You do roll dice occasionally,
• 6:47
  so it isn't a eurogame, but I like that the actions are determined by
• 6:53
  how you choose to spend your tokens, and the enemy's actions get determined by
• 6:58
  pulling a token out of a bag. So it's a neat concept and there
• 7:02
  are a lot of different scenarios. So if we played again a couple more
• 7:06
  times than it really sticks, there's a lot of play to do. If
• 7:10
  it doesn't stick, it'll have been a bummer because I spent a fair amount
• 7:13
  of money on it. I bought it from the publisher at gen Con,
• 7:16
  so kind of full price. And it's neat, but I'm not sure.
• 7:20
  I'm not sure it was the best investment. We'll see. I'm looking forward
• 7:24
  to trying it some more. Still undecided on how much I like Vagrant Song.
• 7:29
  So next up, dusted Games dusted Off. I only had one game
• 7:34
  dusted Off in January, and I think I talked about that on an earlier
• 7:38
  podcast that was City of Horror. So why don't I talk about Allow me
• 7:46
  to mansplain? Allow me tomands plain. It is a independently published party game.
• 7:50
  I was published by four y Games. It's the company fr space wy
• 8:01
  So for why, I followed the designer and publisher on TikTok, which is
• 8:07
  sort of where I found the game and got it. It's okay, Now
• 8:13
  I am not the target audience for this. I like party games just fine.
• 8:16
  But they're not my bread and butter, so perhaps that's part of it.
• 8:22
  But I will say we played it once, we thought it was fine.
• 8:24
  It kind of sat around for a year. I played it again at
• 8:26
  my board game club and it did not go over very well. I think
• 8:31
  the idea of man explaining a thing the group thought was funny, but ultimately
• 8:37
  it wasn't that fun and I don't think I'll probably play it again. I
• 8:41
  think it's going to go on the solar trade pile. It didn't help that
• 8:45
  the game doesn't come with instructions. You have to go online and look at
• 8:46
  them, and frankly, they were not super easy to read on the fly.
• 8:52
  They were a little confusing, so that part didn't That part didn't make
• 8:56
  it easier to play. I like this game in concept, in execution,
• 9:03
  it came up short for us, so that's allow me to man explain.
• 9:07
  I'll put a link to my original reflections on it. We'll see. Maybe
• 9:11
  I liked it better last time we played. So that's the game I dusted
• 9:15
  off. It had been just over eight years since I played it. Finally,
• 9:22
  the last game I'm going to talk about today is Nucleon. Nucleum is
• 9:26
  sort of the new hotness. It's from publisher Board and Dice, designed by
• 9:31
  Simone Luciani and David Turksi. Simone Luciani, of course part of the Italian
• 9:35
  Design group, best known for stuff like Barrage and I think Zulkin of David
• 9:43
  Turky for a bunch of things in my collection. His most prominent design is
• 9:46
  anacrony Nucleum is sort of a I mean it is a route building, resource
• 9:52
  management, board building, or empire building game. It feels like it's definitely
• 10:01
  in the neighborhood of something like Brass. The big difference, the big gimmick
• 10:05
  in this game is that you have these action tiles that you use to take
• 10:09
  turns, and the action tiles have different things on them that you can do,
• 10:13
  so whenever you want to do an action, you have to have a
• 10:16
  tile that does that thing. One of the actions you can take is an
• 10:18
  action that lets you take more tiles, so you can expand your options,
• 10:22
  and usually the tiles you're taking are better than the ones you started with.
• 10:26
  They'll give you a couple different things you can do that are cheaper, or
• 10:31
  a couple different things that are cheaper, or perhaps give you some other efficiency
• 10:35
  as you're playing those they vary in quality depending what you're leaning toward in the
• 10:41
  game. And then the clever bit is that when you're building routes, when
• 10:46
  you go to lay railroads, particularly, you take the action tiles that you're
• 10:52
  using. You get to use them once more and then you put them on
• 10:54
  the board and they're gone. So there's this push pull of spending your tiles
• 10:58
  to put rails on the board, and the rails are essential for developing your
• 11:03
  different buildings and then losing the actions that we're on those tiles. As for
• 11:09
  the board itself, you are putting out tiles in the sort of style of
• 11:13
  Brass. You have a player board full of tiles that you can put out,
• 11:16
  and the different tiles you put out overth different points, and in order
• 11:20
  to use those tiles or score those points, you have to power them.
• 11:22
  This game is all about generating power, and you power them by connecting them
• 11:26
  to a power plant, spending the fuel that you need to spend, either
• 11:31
  coal or nuclear material nucleum, and then you get a certain amount of power
• 11:37
  based on a variety of different things you've put out on the board already.
• 11:41
  And if you have enough power to power your building. Then you flip the
• 11:43
  building over in your score points. It feels very similar to taking the cell
• 11:48
  action in Brass that lets you flip a tile over, but that's separate from
• 11:52
  the building action. This is sort of like variation on that theme. The
• 11:58
  people I played Ucleium with thought it was really good, and I have played
• 12:03
  it a second time since then, and I think it is really good.
• 12:05
  It's very fun. I can't imagine turning down a game of Nucleum if I
• 12:09
  have the time and you know, sort of bandwidth to do that. It
• 12:13
  does not supplant Brass for me. I still think Brass is a better game,
• 12:16
  and either iteration neither of Lancaster or Birmingham, but Nucleum is an interesting
• 12:22
  variation on it, and the action tiles are pretty interesting. It does make
• 12:26
  for a fun game, and unlike a lot of Simone Luciani games, you
• 12:31
  don't have to climb up any tracks, or at least not the same way.
• 12:33
  There are some achievements to get and stuff. There's plenty of scaling of
• 12:37
  bonuses and that sort of thing, but at least you're not climbing in a
• 12:41
  tracks, so Nuclear well worth checking out if you get an opportunity I like
• 12:46
  it a lot. The game design is pretty good, it's pretty, it's
• 12:48
  kind of it's a little on the garish side, so if you have sensitivity
• 12:52
  to bright colors, maybe not for you, but otherwise really fun, definitely
• 12:56
  worth checking out. I enjoy it. I don't see myself, but I'm
• 13:00
  happy to play it when other people have it. That's nuclear That brings me
• 13:03
  the end of my podcast today. Thanks for joining me on my walk.
• 13:07
  I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mind was. Good Bye.
• 13:30
  Brought to you by rattle Box