Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Glow, Underlings of Underwing, Acquire (revisited), Septima

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Glow, Underlings of Underwing, Acquire (revisited), Septima · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:05
  Welcome to pick up and deliver it the podcast where I pick up my audio
• 0:07
  recorder as I step off the train and delivered episode to you while I walk
• 0:10
  home. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good evening, friends. It's a
• 0:23
  lovely evening, crisp and cold, but lovely here in suburban Chicago. We
• 0:28
  got a dusting of snow Sunday all day Sunday, so we have a little
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  bit of snow sprinkled here and there, and it stayed cold enough that most
• 0:36
  of it is still around, although it's supposed to get warmer later this week,
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  so it's an early dusting and then it's going to be gone. It's
• 0:43
  crisp and cool. I am a little underdressed. My jacket that I wore
• 0:49
  is my cold or my chili but not super cold jacket, and it is
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  now into the cold realm, so I really should have my overcoat on and
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  I don't, so I'm a little cold today, but otherwise nic. It's
• 1:02
  also got a biting wind today, which doesn't feel great, but you know
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  whatever, that's what happens when you live in the Midwest. So today I
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  thought I would talk about a few games that I've played recently. For the
• 1:15
  first time and reflect on what I thought of them. That's right, it's
• 1:21
  a board game. Expresso Triple Shot does be new to the podcast. Board
• 1:26
  Game Espresso Triple Shot is a quick review segment I do pretty regularly most almost
• 1:32
  every other episode, in which I talk about three games I played for the
• 1:34
  first time recently and give kind of a first impressions review, and then I
• 1:40
  usually also talk about one game that I've dusted off. So that's what we're
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  doing today. Two of these three games come from a recent game night that
• 1:48
  I our game day that we had with some friends, and then the third
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  one is some of the new hotness. So the first game I want to
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  talk about is Glow. Glow was designed to buy Cedric Chobousse Ben and with
• 2:02
  art by Ben Basso and Vincent Gutre. I would say, very striking art.
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  This game trades a lot on its beautiful black and white line drawings of
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  sort of mystical, strange animals. The premise of the game is that you
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  are on a journey of some sort and you are collecting these animals that will
• 2:24
  help you on your journey. It is a deck builder of sorts or kind
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  of a hand management I think Tableau builder. It's been it's been like a
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  month since I played it, and I'm already forgetting some of the details.
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  But the idea is that you're building this sort of combo of powers and that
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  will help. It's a deck of cards that will help you move around this
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  mountain. In order to move from place to place on the mountain, you
• 2:50
  have to have certain activations and sort of like it reminds you a little clank
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  in that way, in order to move from one space to another, that
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  you have to have a key to move through one door or whatever. And
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  these activations are on the cards. But the cards then also do other things
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  as well. Your goal is to move around, and the place you get
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  points as you move around, but also the place where you end up gets
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  you a whole bunch of points. I will confess I'm not doing a great
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  job of explaining how it plays, because it was long enough ago and it
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  didn't make a huge impression on me. That said, I do remember liking
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  it enough that it certainly would fall into the I'd play again category, But
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  I didn't find myself jealous that I was the one that I wasn't the one
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  who owned it. I thought it was good, not amazing. The art,
• 3:36
  on the other hand, is incredible if you get a chance to go
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  look at the art the game. The design of the game is beautiful.
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  I think there's certainly it doesn't what's interesting is the art is credited to two
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  people, as I mentioned, Vincent Trey being one of them, but this
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  does not look like a Vincent do trade game, which most of the time
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  you can tell it's his art. He's got a very specific style. Well,
• 4:00
  obviously he's got a style that he does for lookouts. If you look
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  at the way that the people look in all the Uver Rosenberg games, he's
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  got that particular style. But then he also has the kind of more realist
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  style that you see in something like New York nineteen oh one and Tenpenny Parks.
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  But then this is totally different. It does not look anything like what
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  he's produced before. But it is beautiful. I don't know how much of
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  that has Ben Busso or Ben Russo, and how much of it is du
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  Trey guiding the art rather than actually drawing it. I don't know, but
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  it is beautiful and worth look if you get a chance. That's glow.
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  The publisher is Bombix on that one, all right. The second game I
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  want to talk about comes from that same game day. It's another game my
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  buddy Paul had picked up, and this is Underlings of Underwing. This is
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  a game about dragons. You're cultivating resources that you need to to raise to
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  hatch dragon eggs, and then the dragons do stuff for you. So the
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  game gives you a very limited number of workers, and the process basically is
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  you're acquiring resources and then you have to put those resources onto eggs, and
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  you often end up having more resources than you can put onto one egg,
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  and so you end up putting resources on eggs that you don't either you aren't
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  going to be able to get or you don't want, which means that you
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  end up inadvertently helping one another. That said, this game, I don't
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  know we need a category for it. Maybe you call it cutthroat cute.
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  This is a game it reminds me in terms of tension of Bob Ross The
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  Art of Chill. Now, if you haven't played Bob Ross The Art of
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  Chill, it appears to be a relatively calm and easy game. In it,
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  you are doing paintings, you're acquiring paint you're acquiring brushes. You're making
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  paintings. However, because there's a relatively limited set of paints and brushes available,
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  and there's a relatively limited set of paintings available, acquiring those paints and
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  paint brushes in the right order and at the right time becomes an incredibly cutthroat
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  activity, meaning that Bob Ross the Art of Chill turns into something nightmarish.
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  I mean, not in a bad way, but it is a much less
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  chill game than you'd expect. The same can be said for Underlings of Underwing.
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  This is a game that, on the face of it looks like it's
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  going to be very cute. You have these cutesee little drawings of dragons with
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  cute little names, and generally the game has this sort of pastel color set
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  or jewels color set to it that looks lovely. And then you start playing
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  and immediately you realize that somebody else is going to take the egg you want,
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  so you're trying to think of a different one to take, and then
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  somebody else steals your stuff, and boy, this game gets really cutthroat,
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  really fast. We had a good time playing it, but boy, it
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  was meaner than most games I would generally choose to play, and I probably
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  wouldn't suggest playing it again because of that. That's how The art had this
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  nice watercolor sort of style with a kind of scratchy look for the dragons,
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  and they were very cute. The gameplay was simple enough to understand, but
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  vicious in its ramifications, so we had a lot of fun, but boy,
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  it did get mean and it was very easy to go on tilt when
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  you're playing Underlings and Underwings. So check it out if you dare, but
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  be wary of it. This was an independently produced game as far as I
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  understand it. The designer The main designer was Kevin Balastrini, also credited our
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  Skyler Scota and Alicia Volkman. Those last two are also credited as the artists.
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  So it really was a very constrained or small group activity. And Pericles
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  Limited is the name of the publishing house, which I imagine is the publisher
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  house for Underlings and under Things or Underlings and Underwings. There's no under Things
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  as far as I understand, zero laingerie in the game. So I would
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  play again if someone else suggested, but I certainly wouldn't ask for it.
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  And it's pretty mean, so beware of that, all right. Next up
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  is the game I got off the shelf. As a reminder, off the
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  shelf or out of the dust means that the game has been. The game
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  has been It's been more than a year since I've played it, and so
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  metaphorically or not, it's gotten dusty. And so when I take it out
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  of the dust, I've taken off the shelf to play and it's been more
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  than a year. This is a game I brought on Economic Night to my
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  college Board Game Society that I host every other Thursday. And basically, this
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  is the game I told my students, this is what people should be playing
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  instead of Monopoly. It's just it's just cutthroat but more interesting decisions, more
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  fun, well worth it if you get a chance. Acquire is the game
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  I was talking about. Of course, I have the three m Bookshelf edition
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  with like the stern businessmen and pale green on the cover, and so's it
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  feels like a game from the sixties. But of course Acquir is from the
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  brilliant mind of Sid Saxon. It turns out to be an excellent game,
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  well worth a play. More often than I have played it, namely,
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  it's been two years, three months, and seven days since last time I
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  played a Choir. Now if you haven't played a Choir, the game is,
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  like I said, it's an economic game of buying and selling companies.
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  You draw tiles and place hotels they're called in the game on this grid board,
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  and whenever you place the place one hotel next to another, it starts
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  a hotel chain where it's added to the hotel chain, and then you get
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  to buy stock in the chain, and the bigger the chain is, the
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  more the stock is worth. And then you merge the chain with another chain,
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  and the bigger one eats up the smaller one, and the people who
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  own the smaller one get a dividend payout, and you can either take the
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  cash, which feels buying more stock, or you can take at a price
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  of two to one stock certificates in the new chain. And then at the
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  end of the game, all the chains that are left payout big time,
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  depending on whether you have the most or second most or whatever. It's a
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  really really good game, excellent if you've never played it and you have any
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  memory of liking some aspect of monopoly or a competitive economic game. Acquire is
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  the game for you. They just released a new edition of it this year.
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  I think Renegade Games picked it up and released a nice new edition,
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  so it should be available. In fact, one of my students who played
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  that game with me said that she asked her mom to buy it, and
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  her mom bought it. They're gonna play over Christmas, so that's a victory
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  acquire from Sidzacion. All right, my last new game that I want to
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  talk about today is Septima. Septima is a game from mind Clash Games.
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  It's designed by Robin Hegelis with art by Bakenburg and Villo Farkez. I may
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  get the I may not only may I have pronounced those badly, but I'm
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  also reading my handwriting on a scrap of paper in the dark, so I
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  might not have said anything correct. There you can go look, I'll there
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  be a link in the show notes to the game's page on board game gieg
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  This is published by mind Clash Games, a company that I am unabashedly a
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  fanboy for. I believe I own every game they've published except for Astra and
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  void Fall. Voidfall was just too expensive at the wrong time, and I've
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  seen a copy of void Fall in person, and boy did I have some
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  fomo for that anyway. Septima is a game of witches witch covens running around
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  a sort of faux New England town or a medieval town, healing people and
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  trying not to get caught by the witch finders. The game has these witch
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  finders who are running around and you are trying to avoid getting caught by them,
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  or if you do get caught, you want to win your trial so
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  you don't lose your witch. And you are trying to heal people and gain
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  reputation by healing people and keep the townspeople from getting too angry with you,
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  and put some of your loyal people in the jury pool so that when the
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  vote comes up, the loyal pro witch folks are there and witches don't get
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  banished. The game's quite explicit that they get banished at its heart. This
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  is a euro game that has a really interesting action selection mechanism. Everybody's got
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  a deck of I think nine cards that do different things now, and you're
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  sure you're going to pick one to do. If you and another player pick
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  the same card, you get a bonus, but you also become more suspicious,
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  which makes it more likely that the witch cutchers will find you. There
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  is also the Grand Septima, which is the matriarch of all witches, and
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  if you match her, you also get that matching bonus, but then you
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  become more suspicious as well, so it's a game of managing expectations. It's
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  also hand management. You'll keep those cards in hand for a certain amount of
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  time, then you pick them back up, so there's a little bit of
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  knowing who's going to play what. You can talk to each other and kind
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  of arrange. It works really well. It's it's really fun. It's very
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  eurofocused for how thematic it sounds, which fits the mind clash mold for sure.
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  I also couldn't help but notice that the plot is basically identical to the
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  plot of Trick Carryon, which is there's a master magician who's retiring and you're
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  competing to become the new master Magician. That's the plot of Septima. There's
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  a matriarchal witch who's retiring and you're competing to become the new Septima. That's
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  about where the similarity ends. Though both games are pretty crunchy. Trick Carryon
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  is way heavier, but I would put Septima as heavier than say, anacrony,
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  so I'd put it between an acrony and tra carryon if you know your
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  mind clash big box games. Overall, it's really fun and I look forward
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  to playing it again. I don't have a lot more to say to it
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  right now, except it hits all of those buttons that you like in a
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  mind clash game. Lots of systems to keep track of, lots of ways
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  to get points, lots of things to keep yourself from losing points. It's
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  excellent. So if you get a chance to try Septima, I encourage you
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  to do so. Well, that's about it for me today. Thanks for
• 14:00
  joining me. I'm a walk out to your next walk. This pleasant as
• 14:03
  mind was, byebye. Brought to you by rattle Box