Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Expeditions, That Time You Killed Me, After Us, revisiting Coimbra

Transcript

Expeditions, That Time You Killed Me, After Us, revisiting Coimbra · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:05
  Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I picked up my audio recorder
• 0:08
  as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I walk
• 0:10
  home. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good morning, good afternoon, listeners.
• 0:23
  It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. I'm on the way home
• 0:27
  from work and I thought that I would chat with you about board games a
• 0:31
  little bit. So today I am going to be talking about a couple of
• 0:35
  games I've played recently for the first time. That's right, it's time for
• 0:39
  Board Game Espresso triple Shot. Real, I don't know why I made that
• 0:43
  noise, Actually I do. I used to use a different name. Let's
• 0:46
  try that again. It's time for Board Game Espresso Espresso Triple Shot. For
• 0:51
  those of you new to this podcast, the Board Game Espresso Espresso episodes represent
• 0:56
  a chance to talk about games that I've encountered for the first time recently.
• 1:00
  This sort of a first impressions episode. In the game I will or in
• 1:03
  the episode, I will be talking about three games that I played for the
• 1:07
  first time recently in one game that I dusted off, and I'll be giving
• 1:12
  you just my initial thoughts on these games. These aren't full reviews because obviously
• 1:17
  I haven't played them very much. So the first game I want to talk
• 1:19
  about is Psythe Expeditions, or just called Expeditions. It's in the Psythe universe,
• 1:25
  but it is not actually called Site, It's just called Expeditions. This
• 1:29
  is a game designed by Jamie Stegmeyer and published by stone Meyer Games art by
• 1:36
  Jacob Razolski. Expeditions takes place in the same sort of steampunk world that happened
• 1:42
  that takes place post World War One that Psythe is in, and in this
• 1:48
  game you are investigating the strange wasteland that occurs after the Tunguska Blast. The
• 1:55
  Suska Blast is a mysterious explosion that happened in the arctic part of the Ukraine
• 2:00
  or Siberia, in which hundreds of thousands of trees were knocked down and a
• 2:06
  fire may or may not have happened. It was years after it happened that
• 2:09
  people that in the real world people got there to investigate. So prevailing theory
• 2:15
  that I'm familiar with is that it was a meteor strike or an asteroid came
• 2:22
  in and it got superheated by entering the atmosphere and then exploded in the air
• 2:25
  and caused this explosion or this damage, but people don't really know. Fun
• 2:31
  fact that the Tunguska blast is one of the things I first learned about it
• 2:35
  from Ray and Ghostbusters when he was talking about different mysterious phenomenon, he talks
• 2:43
  about the Tunguska Blast. So in expeditions, you play representatives of the competing
• 2:51
  countries that have a stake in the world of Scythe, and you are leading
• 2:57
  an expedition to explore the air are contaminated by the blast. The idea is
• 3:02
  that the meteor that landed had a mutagenic property of some sort, and so
• 3:08
  it caused all kinds of disruptions to the ecosystem. It caused animal mutations and
• 3:15
  all sorts of other problems. The game is a little bit of pickup and
• 3:32
  deliver and a little bit of economic or action management as you are trying to
• 3:40
  achieve your goal as efficiently as possible. It borrows something from Scythe that is
• 3:47
  a sort of key part of how that game works. In Pythe, if
• 3:51
  you haven't played it, there are these action markers, and each time you
• 3:55
  take a turn, you have to move your action marker from one space to
• 3:59
  another media. You can number use the same action twice in a row.
• 4:02
  That idea is continued in expeditions, with the exception of if you do a
• 4:08
  reset action, then you return components. You sort of reset your board,
• 4:14
  and that's all you do. You do all three actions on the turn after
• 4:16
  your reset, and then you go back to doing two actions per turning.
• 4:20
  I think spend a little bit, but you get the idea anyhow, And
• 4:26
  the actual play of the game involves trying to find variety of resources and use
• 4:33
  those resources to get different kinds of treasure or tools that will then help you
• 4:42
  accomplish goals and get points. The goal of the game is to accomplish these
• 4:46
  different objectives that get you stars, and if you remember from scythe the numbers,
• 4:50
  having a certain number of stars turns the end of the game, and
• 4:53
  then you score points based on those stars. Now, in expeditions, in
• 4:58
  order to gain a start, you have to boast about something you've done,
• 5:00
  and so there's a two step process by which you have to meet the condition
• 5:03
  for a star, and then you have to go take a boast action in
• 5:08
  order to actually earn the star, which was a complication that I found kind
• 5:13
  of annoying. I imagine that the game loses a lot of its tension if
• 5:16
  you're able to just get the star as soon as you achieve it, it
• 5:19
  probably goes too fast. But I'm not sure that having an action you have
• 5:25
  to take to earn a star is my favorite. I wonder if you played
• 5:29
  it more. I wonder if you could telegraph too easily when somebody is going
• 5:32
  to win based on that. The other mechanism in the game that's pretty interesting
• 5:38
  is this idea of having a row of cards and then having different kinds of
• 5:43
  activations that happen when you play cards out of your hand. This is actually
• 5:47
  my other complaint about the game. It uses the terminology hand to describe the
• 5:53
  group of cards to the left of your player board. All of your pay
• 5:56
  all of your cards are always on the table. You have the cards the
• 6:00
  left of the board and the cards on the right of the board. The
• 6:01
  cards on the left of the board are available to be played. The cards
• 6:04
  on the right of the board have been played. When you play a card,
• 6:08
  you often can add a worker to it if you have the right kind
• 6:11
  of worker, and then you get a bonus, and then the card goes
• 6:14
  on to the right side, and sometimes it will create an ongoing power or
• 6:18
  it'll give you an at one time bonus or something like that. The cards
• 6:21
  on the left side of the board, like I said, are available to
• 6:24
  be played. You can also acquire new cards by taking a certain action on
• 6:28
  the board, and so on and so on. When you do the reset
• 6:30
  action I was talking about, you pick up the cards from the right side
• 6:33
  of the board and put them down on the left side of the board,
• 6:35
  and the whole time the game refers to the cards on the left side of
• 6:39
  the board as your hand. This was eminently frustrating to me when I learned
• 6:44
  it, and I'm not happy about it all. In all, Expeditions is
• 6:48
  a fine game. It's fun. I would happily play it if someone asked
• 6:53
  me to. It doesn't rise to the level of, oh man, I
• 6:56
  gotta have that in my collection, or even if I didn't know someone who
• 7:00
  has it, I would get it, which is kind of where that's kind
• 7:02
  of where a Psythe is, right. I like Pythe. I would enjoy
• 7:05
  having that in my collection, But I know at least two different people,
• 7:09
  maybe three, who have it and with whom I can easily play games.
• 7:13
  So with that much access to it, I don't feel the need to own
• 7:15
  it myself. Expeditions is that same way. I have a friend who has
• 7:19
  it. That's how I got to play it. But in terms of on
• 7:24
  the scale of games that I want to have it, it's just in the
• 7:28
  middle. It's fine, and I would definitely urge you to try it if
• 7:31
  you get a chance, but it doesn't have quite that magic that Sythe has
• 7:38
  for me. All right, So that was Expeditions. The next game I
• 7:42
  want to talk about is That Time You Killed Me. That Time You Killed
• 7:46
  Me is a game that got a whole bunch of buzz when I first came
• 7:48
  out, and then I didn't hear much about it after that for a while.
• 7:54
  I just happened to play it once with a friend of mine and we
• 7:58
  thought, oh, that'll be fun to try more. And then Gabriel,
• 8:01
  Hey, Gabriel has invited me to play it on board Game Arena and we're
• 8:03
  playing it there and he's kicking my butt. Well done, sir. That's
• 8:07
  designed by Peter C. Heyward and published by pandas Urs Games. That Time
• 8:11
  You Killed Me as sort of a chess variant. I mean, it's not
• 8:15
  a chess variant. It is an abstract game that you have four three boards
• 8:22
  that are four by four, so sixteen spaces, and the idea is the
• 8:26
  board on the left or the board on one side is the early board,
• 8:31
  the board in the middle is the middle board, and the board on the
• 8:33
  right is the late board. And these are it's a time travel thing,
• 8:37
  so you have this idea of you. If you move forward, you just
• 8:43
  move your piece forward. If you move back, you actually make a copy
• 8:46
  of your piece and send it backwards, and then those two copies can run
• 8:50
  around separately. These are your clones, and the goal of the game is
• 8:54
  to eliminate the other player either entirely or I think from two of the three
• 9:01
  boards at the beginning of your turn. Is I think how it goes,
• 9:05
  I'd have to go look again. There are relatively simple rules for capturing.
• 9:11
  You can push a piece off the board and that will capture it. Or
• 9:16
  you can push a piece into one of its own pieces. So if you
• 9:20
  have two of my white pieces next to each other and you push one of
• 9:22
  them into the other, they're both captured. Because two clones can't occupy the
• 9:28
  same space, it causes a temporal rift or something. There are scenarios that
• 9:33
  will emerge as you play, so each game you play, something gets added
• 9:39
  to the game. Apparently I haven't gone down that road very far yet,
• 9:41
  but it's interesting. It does take a bit of time to think about,
• 9:46
  so I have a feeling I'm going to be losing to Gabriel for a while
• 9:50
  before I start to get the feel for the how the game moves and what
• 9:54
  are good and bad choices in playing. Nonetheless, it's interesting and I'm looking
• 9:58
  forward to playing some more or game Arena or with my friend who has a
• 10:01
  copy. The components are nice, although fairly standard, black and white boards
• 10:07
  with kind of funky chest pawns as the pieces. The theme is great,
• 10:11
  and the art as much as there is there's not much, but the art
• 10:15
  as much as there is this quantity morio, which is always a plus for
• 10:18
  me. So definitely, again I recommend to try this is That Time You
• 10:24
  Killed Me? If it's the sort of thing that sounds like it's really up
• 10:26
  your alley, it probably is. I don't tend to play a ton of
• 10:30
  abstract games so or buy them anyway, so I'm not sure this would be
• 10:35
  on my shopping list, but especially if you have somebody you like to play
• 10:39
  complex abstract games with. That time you killed me really would fit the bill
• 10:43
  for that kind of game. So that is that time you killed me My
• 10:48
  Peter C. Heyward in Pandasaurus games. The next game I want to go
• 10:52
  to is the game I dusted off this month, or one of them,
• 10:54
  and that's Coimbra. Coimbra I mentioned I picked up at a store in Canada
• 11:01
  because they happen to have a copy, and it's a game that I really
• 11:03
  like, but I haven't played in a long time because the person I know
• 11:07
  who owns it moved away. In fact, I've since talked to them and
• 11:09
  they said, oh yeah, they got rid of it. It's like,
• 11:11
  no, you got rid of Coimbra. No. I had resisted buying it,
• 11:16
  or I hadn't bought it, in part because I felt like I had
• 11:20
  access to a copy mentally. Like mentally, I had an idea in my
• 11:24
  head that I had had access to a copy even though the friend that owned
• 11:28
  it had had moved away, and it turns out now I didn't even have
• 11:31
  it anymore. So I finally did decide to pick up a copy, and
• 11:35
  boy, I really liked this game at its heart is a really interesting decision
• 11:41
  to be made on your turn you're going to be So it's played in a
• 11:45
  number of rounds. There is a drafting round and a purchasing round. In
• 11:52
  the drafting round, you are putting out dice to bid for different card and
• 12:00
  the cards represent different kinds of different people you're gaining sway with. They also
• 12:05
  give you either one time bonuses or ongoing bonuses, and they raise your influence
• 12:09
  with certain groups of people. Then you recruit the cards and you have to
• 12:15
  pay the amount on the die in order to recruit them, which can be
• 12:18
  very tricky. No, you don't. You don't pay the amount on the
• 12:22
  die, You pay the amount on the card. The cards that you get
• 12:24
  will raise your influence with different groups, and that it all comes down to
• 12:28
  endgame scoring. The game has a variable scoring based on a track where you
• 12:31
  move around and you gain bonuses based on a whole bunch of different ways that
• 12:35
  you can use these cards. At the end of the game, you get
• 12:39
  points based on kind of how high you went up on this track and the
• 12:41
  multipliers for these different kinds of action. It's a very thinky game, really
• 12:48
  really cool. I love the double use so like I said. You use
• 12:52
  dice to bid, and then the color of the dye that you take to
• 12:56
  bid with gives you one kind of resource and the value on it gives you
• 13:03
  another number. And so you're using these dice in multiple waves, which I
• 13:07
  think works really well as you then go through the rounds of drafting cards and
• 13:13
  so on. The biggest downside to the game is it is language independent,
• 13:16
  which means all the cards just have symbols on them and they can be pretty
• 13:18
  tricky to read until you can learn what the symbols mean, so be very
• 13:22
  careful the first time you play. And this is a mistake I made.
• 13:26
  I didn't really have player aids for everybody, and that was a blunder.
• 13:30
  But Coiinbra is really good. I like it a lot and I'm glad to
• 13:33
  have in my collection Coiinbra. Finally, the last game I wanted to mention
• 13:37
  today is After Us. After Us is a game that a friend of mine
• 13:43
  picked up at gen Con and we got to play it while we were there.
• 13:48
  It is an engine builder, pretty a pretty pure engine builder. The
• 13:52
  way the game works, you have a token that you can use to activate
• 13:58
  one of four different troops of monkeys, and you have a series of cards
• 14:01
  that's the deck builder, and you lay those cards out in order on the
• 14:05
  table, and each card has a series of boxes that represent different kinds of
• 14:11
  resources and actions. If you connect two boxes in a way, that closes
• 14:16
  in the box. So some of the boxes on the cards are like you
• 14:20
  have three sides on the card. In one side that opens up. If
• 14:22
  you connect to that to another card that has a box open that opens up,
• 14:28
  then the two together result in being able to get to activate those powers.
• 14:33
  It's a really neat system that works very well. The four different colors
• 14:39
  of cards represent four different kinds of apes or monkeys, and those apes or
• 14:43
  monkeys give you different kinds of resources. Narratively, human beings are gone from
• 14:48
  the planet and apes have taken over, and so you're trying to build up
• 14:52
  a troop of apes that has the most points. There is a neat mechanism
• 14:56
  by which when you take your action, the other players get to take a
• 15:01
  minor version of that action, or the other players can spend a resource to
• 15:05
  take that action as well. So there's an interesting element by which you want
• 15:09
  to get that You want to get that resource that lets you take the extra
• 15:13
  actions so that you can, you know, take extra actions after you activate
• 15:16
  all your cards, then you recruit new cards and you get points and money
• 15:22
  and resources, and you go again. You do several rounds of this,
• 15:24
  and the player who's acquired the most stuff wins. The big downside too,
• 15:28
  after us, is that you never, you very rarely interact with the other
• 15:35
  players, and there's nothing in which direct interaction happens at all. Because the
• 15:39
  cards are all drawn from decks. You're not even competing for stuff in the
• 15:41
  market. You're just drawing off the top of the cards. You have no
• 15:43
  idea whether the card you're getting now is better than the card they're going to
• 15:46
  take or what. So they're really the only interaction is do you use their
• 15:50
  action when they take an action or do you not? So that was the
• 15:56
  big downside of that game for me. I thought the engine building aspect of
• 15:58
  it was really fun. It was very satisfying, really quick game. It
• 16:03
  was the card, the cards, the boxes that connect across the cards was
• 16:08
  an interesting choice to make and made for solid and interesting discussions, but ultimately
• 16:15
  the game would have worked better for me if there was a little more interaction.
• 16:19
  Unless a fun time if you get a chance to try after us.
• 16:22
  I do recommend if the art is lovely, it's then sit. You trade
• 16:26
  art with apes, with guns and stuff, so that's always fun. Well
• 16:29
  that's my board game Espresso Espresso episode. Those are three games I played recently.
• 16:33
  Thanks for joining me on my walk today. I hope your next box
• 16:37
  because it closing mind was bye bye to you. Buy Rattlebox Games