Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Project L, Freelancers, FlipOut, Kingdom Rush (revisited)

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Project L, Freelancers, FlipOut, Kingdom Rush (revisited) · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:05
  Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorders,
• 0:08
  I step off the train and deliver an episode two while I walk home.
• 0:11
  I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon, listeners. It's a lovely
• 0:23
  chilly day here in suburb in Chicago, and I'm taking a walk home from
• 0:27
  the train having had a fun day of teaching and administrative work at my college.
• 0:35
  Feels like it's been well, it hasn't been that long. Actually,
• 0:38
  two episodes ago I did one, but it's time to do another episode of
• 0:42
  board game Espresso Triple Shot. That's the latte sound, of course. So
• 0:50
  today I'll be talking to you about three games I played recently for the first
• 0:53
  time, and one game I dusted off because that's how I roll in a
• 0:57
  board game Espresso triple Shot. So the first I want to talk about is
• 1:00
  called Project L. Project L was designed by Michael Micis, Jan Sokoll,
• 1:08
  and Adam Spanel. I apologize for bad pronunciation. Every one of those names
• 1:15
  had some various diacritical marks over the letters, but I don't know what those
• 1:21
  due to the pronunciation, So apologies to those designers. Project L was published
• 1:27
  by Board Cubator and I think it first went out on Kickstarter, but i've
• 1:34
  seen it in stores now, so it's definitely around. It is an engine
• 1:38
  building tile laying game or tile recipe game that plays heavily on Tetris style pieces.
• 1:48
  They're not exactly Tetris pieces, but polyaminos anyway, and they're these cute,
• 1:53
  little plastic polyamenos. And what you have are cards with different patterns on
• 1:57
  them, and what you're trying to do is you're trying to use the tiles
• 2:04
  that you have to fill in the patterns on the cards, and then acquire
• 2:08
  more cards and fill in the patterns on those cards and so on. Each
• 2:13
  time you fill in the pattern on a card, it also gets you another
• 2:15
  tile, and you can turn actions to upgrade your tiles into better tiles by
• 2:22
  swapping them one for the next. The real trick of the game is that
• 2:28
  you can have multiple cards you're working on at once, and when you take
• 2:31
  the action that lets you put a tile on the card, there's a special
• 2:36
  action they call it the Master action or Grand Action or something, and you
• 2:39
  get to put one tile on each card you have. So if you're able
• 2:44
  to do that well, you can get to the point where you're completing two
• 2:47
  or three cards at the same time. Now, the trick to the game
• 2:52
  that I didn't understand when we first started playing. I think the person who
• 2:54
  was explaining it didn't articulate this very loudly, or I missed it. That's
• 2:58
  either way you finish a card. I sort of assumed that the tiles you
• 3:05
  had used to fill in that card get distributed back into the bank, but
• 3:13
  in fact it's the other way around. All the tiles you have stay in
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  your control, so as you complete more cards, not only do you get
• 3:20
  bonus tiles from completing cards, but you now have a bigger and bigger pot
• 3:23
  of tiles available to you to fill in other cards. So it's an accelerating
• 3:28
  engine builder kind of on top of this recipe fulfillment pattern matching game. Oh
• 3:38
  no, it's a nice little game. It takes like fifteen minutes to play.
• 3:42
  It's very tight and clean. The graphic design is very minimalist, with
• 3:49
  really nice and easy to understand iconography. It was a good time and I'd
• 3:54
  happily play it again. I don't think I would buy it, just because
• 4:00
  games at this size and depth are not something I play a ton of,
• 4:05
  and I do own a bunch of games already that play at this size and
• 4:09
  depth. So question is is this a game I would want to replace other
• 4:14
  games of this size and depth in my collection? And the answer is no.
• 4:17
  Nonetheless, Project L is pretty good and if you get a chance to
• 4:20
  try it, I would recommend it. Also definitely would be a game i'd
• 4:25
  pick up at Goodwill if I found it there, so or even maybe on
• 4:30
  sale for five or ten bucks, I might get it. I don't think
• 4:32
  i'd pay full retail though. That's Project L. Next step is the game
• 4:36
  Freelancers. Now, this game kind of came and went without much conversation,
• 4:43
  perhaps because it was designed by Donald Schultz rather than by Jerry Hawthorne, who
• 4:53
  seems to be plaid. Oh. This game is from plat Had Games.
• 4:56
  It was published in twenty twenty three, and it seems I think Jerry Hawthorne
• 5:01
  tends to get most of the spotlight for the crossroads games coming out of plat
• 5:05
  Hat. But for my money, the best class roads game since Dead of
• 5:10
  Winter was Forgotten Waters and Freelancers as essentially Forgotten Waters too. In Forgotten Waters,
• 5:18
  you play a group of pirates sale round an ocean, having adventures.
• 5:25
  In Freelancers, you play basically a D and D campaign group with a wider
• 5:31
  variety of professions and goals, and you're doing a sort of land based adventure
• 5:40
  party. As you play, you are encountering different enemies, you're coming into
• 5:49
  different villages, you're having different explorations, and just like in Forgotten Waters,
• 5:56
  there is a playbook with a variety of different actionations you can go to and
• 6:01
  you play on them. If you've played Forgotten Waters, the game feels very
• 6:06
  very similar. There are a couple differences, the big one being this game
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  has a journey map that you use that is distinct from the playbook and separate
• 6:19
  from board, So you have a map you're drawing on, and as you're
• 6:24
  doing that, you actually interact with things as well. Like Forgotten Waters,
• 6:28
  Freelancers really excels from its incredible writing. In Forgotten Waters, there were lots
• 6:36
  of like hidden gems, beautiful moments of just hilarity and bizarreness, and Freelancers
• 6:44
  is the same way. I'm going to give one away here, but you
• 6:46
  could skip ahead thirty seconds or a minute if you want. When you enter
• 6:51
  the town, the talent, the narrator tells you about the town that you
• 6:57
  go in, and they say there's all sorts of strange bits of culture that
• 7:00
  you've never encountered before. They say like no yodling, and you hear this
• 7:05
  like a little and then competitive yogurting. It is so funny. We had
• 7:14
  to stop the thing because we're all laughing so hard. I didn't do it
• 7:18
  justice, I'm sure so. The voice narration is great. In fact,
• 7:26
  if you've played Forgotten Waters, you'll recognize the main narrator is the same narrator
• 7:30
  from Forgotten Waters. I haven't looked up the name of that narrator, but
• 7:35
  full credit where credits do this person? Is amazing. Yeah. And then
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  you engage in different activities at each stop, and your skill level in those
• 7:50
  activities in those different realms goes up, and you're earning little dots on your
• 7:57
  completion track that get you toward life goals, and you're developing the story for
• 8:01
  your character and so on and so on. It works really well. If
• 8:07
  you like Forgotten Waters, it is as good or better as Forgotten Waters,
• 8:13
  and you should check it out. That's called Freelancers, a crossroads game from
• 8:18
  blad had games really good. Next up, I wanted to talk about a
• 8:24
  game, I dust it off as a reminder. The idea of dusting of
• 8:30
  a dusty game is that if I have a game that I haven't played for
• 8:33
  a year or more, it's sat on the shelf and gotten dusty, hence
• 8:37
  a dusty game. Now, this game was not incredibly dusty. It had
• 8:43
  been over a year, but not I don't even think it. I don't
• 8:46
  think. I don't even think it had been eighteen months, so relatively light
• 8:52
  on the dust. Nonetheless, my son suggested he might like to play it
• 8:56
  when he and I had a little time, and so we busted out Kingdom
• 9:00
  Rushed Rift in time. This is based on a computer game of the same
• 9:05
  name, Kingdom Rush. It's a tower defense game, and the board game
• 9:09
  is a tower defense game as well. The clever bit is that you have
• 9:13
  these trays with cards on them that show arrangements of enemies, and in order
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  to stop them, you place these tiny tetrominal pieces or polyomenal pieces onto the
• 9:24
  trays based on the damage that's done by the buildings that you include. You
• 9:33
  also have a character who can intervene in various ways and add more polyomenal pieces.
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  You can also put your character on a group on one of the cards
• 9:43
  to stop it from moving, and you take damage, but you know you
• 9:48
  can do that, and just overall the game really has a tight set of
• 9:58
  rules that feel really difficult but doable. In fact, this last game we
• 10:05
  played, we won the scenario even though it felt incredibly difficult, so that
• 10:09
  was a nice success. The game was designed by Alara Cameron, Halana Hope,
• 10:18
  and Seng Fung Limb and published by Lucky Duck Games. The miniatures are
• 10:22
  really nice and the card trays are good and everything. The main thing for
• 10:26
  me was that is that the game does feel really hard. Like I said,
• 10:31
  we won, so it can't have been too hard, especially because it
• 10:35
  had been a while since we played. So it's not like ghost Stories or
• 10:37
  something where you need to have a really deep and thorough knowledge of the game
• 10:41
  and do really well in order to win. Our Kingdom Rush is more deterministic.
• 10:46
  The only thing not deterministic are the what order the cards are going to
• 10:50
  come out, but everything else you can see what's coming and you control how
• 10:56
  the different pieces move around, so it's a collaborative puzzle to solve, and
• 11:01
  from that regard it's really fun. It is not my favorite. Given my
• 11:05
  druthers, I'd rather play a lot of other games, but it's a good
• 11:11
  time. I enjoyed playing it with my son. It's cool art and a
• 11:15
  thoughtful puzzle. Definitely worth checking out if you get a chance. Kingdom Rush
• 11:20
  ripped in time. I haven't played the other Kingdom Rush. They did an
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  expansion to it, that is, I think, more characters and more enemies
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  and blah blah blah. So he dusted out dust that off and had a
• 11:31
  good time doing so. All right. The final game too, that I'm
• 11:33
  going to talk about in my board game Espresso is a game that robbed my
• 11:39
  design partner and co leader of Toggle Gaming and friend found at goodwill. This
• 11:45
  is a game called Patchwork. Now all of you are like Brendan, how
• 11:48
  have you never talked about patchwork on your podcast before? And I say,
• 11:52
  haha, fooled you. This is not Uve Rosenberg's tile laying game Patchwork.
• 12:00
  This is a game from two thousand and nine called Patchwork that was republished as
• 12:05
  flip Out. So if you were going to go looking for it today,
• 12:09
  you should look for a flip out. It's one word flip out. It
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  was published by game Right and designed by Daniel Weaver. Now, the premise
• 12:20
  of this game is pretty simple. You get a hand of cards, six
• 12:22
  cards, does that recall, and on those cards are a pat are one
• 12:28
  of eight patterns, six patterns something like that. There's a bunch of patterns,
• 12:33
  and you take those cards and you put them in a card holder in
• 12:37
  front of you, and the gimmick is on the other side of the cards
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  is another pattern And you don't know what cards are on those what patterns are
• 12:48
  on those cards, and it's totally random. So you might have one card
• 12:50
  that's got the sort of yellow wavy lines and on the back it's purple grid,
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  and another card is purple grid on the side you have and purple grid
• 13:00
  on the other side, and another card is blue squares with red diamonds on
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  the back, and another card might have so you know, it's a variety.
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  What you do in the game is you on your turn, you can
• 13:11
  trade a pair of cards from your cardholder to theirs, and you keep the
• 13:18
  side facing you facing you, and the side facing the person whose tray you're
• 13:22
  putting it on facing them. The second thing you can do is switch the
• 13:28
  place of two cards in any card holder, either yours or one of your
• 13:31
  opponents. The third thing you can do is score a set of four or
• 13:35
  more cards, and a set of four more cards have to all have the
• 13:39
  same pattern and be adjacent to each other. So there's this whole thing where
• 13:43
  you're like moving cards that you can see onto other people's trays and then scoring
• 13:48
  the cards off their trays that they didn't even know were part of a pattern,
• 13:52
  or vice versa. People don't know you've got a pattern going, and
• 13:54
  then you score the cards from on your own tray. It's a clever,
• 14:01
  simple game, very easy to play, pretty easy to teach, not a
• 14:05
  whole lot of depth to it. It's very luck driven. So this is
• 14:09
  not a tournament style game. I think you can be better at it or
• 14:15
  not, depending how good you are at spotting patterns, but that's not a
• 14:20
  huge part of it. Is just which cards you have in your hand and
• 14:22
  whether or not you can make them be into a pattern before someone else scores
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  the pattern on your hand. Because one of the things that happens a lot
• 14:30
  is you have a pattern on the backs of your cards that you don't know
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  is there, and you're getting all ready to do something, and then someone
• 14:35
  scores half your hand and you have to draw new cards, so that part's
• 14:39
  a little frustrating, but overall, I mean, part of what tells you
• 14:43
  is don't try to score stuff in your hand, try to score stuff in
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  other people's hands because you can see it. But yeah, overall, it's
• 14:54
  a really good, very simple, very light not going to be a and
• 15:00
  Berner are not going to be anyone's favorite game, but fun, a good
• 15:03
  time, well worth taking a look at if you get a chance. Like
• 15:07
  I said, it was called patchwork. It's a deck of cards and four
• 15:11
  card holders, so it's nothing actually six cardholders, maybe nothing right home about,
• 15:16
  but really entertaining and a fun game to have played. I've actually played
• 15:20
  it twice enjoyed it both times. What games have you played lately? Head
• 15:24
  over to board game get Guild three two sixty nine and share your new plays
• 15:28
  there. Let me know if you've played any of the games that I've played,
• 15:33
  or what other new games you've been trying, any of those things I
• 15:37
  would love to hear from you. You can send me a geekmail message.
• 15:39
  Wombat nine two nine is my user name there. You can also email me
• 15:43
  Brendan at rautoboxgames dot com if you wanted to send me an email more future
• 15:50
  Brendan here. As I was recording this, I didn't realize it was going
• 15:54
  to be the last episode of season six, but here we are. This
• 15:58
  is episode six hundred, so it's the last episode of season six, and
• 16:00
  that brings me to the end of my season only three months late. Next
• 16:04
  week is spring break at my school, so this seems like a good time
• 16:07
  to take a week break, and then starting in April, I'll be back
• 16:10
  with the Top of the Stack April first, and the first thing out of
• 16:12
  the gate we're going to do is my new top fifty because the last time
• 16:15
  I did one was at the end of twenty twenty two or at the end
• 16:19
  of twenty twenty one, and so now it's time to do a new top
• 16:25
  fifty. So looking forward to going out over that with you in the first
• 16:27
  few episodes of the next season. I'll see you on April first. Well
• 16:36
  that's just about it for my board Game Espresso episode for today. Thanks for
• 16:40
  joining me on my walk. I hope your next walk is a pleasant is
• 16:44
  mind one by bye, brought to you by rattle Box. Hello testing Okay, Hm