Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Illiterati, Wormholes, Keystone: North America, Orleans (revisited)

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Illiterati, Wormholes, Keystone: North America, Orleans (revisited) · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:05
  Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick 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. Good afternoon, listeners. It's a lovely day
• 0:23
  here in suburban Chicago. It's about five pm and it is dark as disco.
• 0:28
  It's December seventh today, which means I'm fifteen days out from the solstice.
• 0:34
  Giver take a day, which means that it gets dark as early as
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  it gets For those of you not as far north as Chicago in the northern
• 0:42
  Hemisphere, it's already dark by four pm. And what a treat that is.
• 0:49
  Just kidding, it's kind of nice. The holidays are here, so
• 0:52
  people are putting out their holiday lights, mostly Christmas lights, but some other
• 0:57
  celebratory things. Maybe some people are planning to celebrate the solstice. Who knows
• 1:00
  Saturnalia is nigh. So with that in mind, I thought it's time to
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  talk about some games that I've been playing. The last two episodes were not
• 1:10
  directly games I've been playing episodes. We had a reading episode and we had
• 1:14
  a Top of the Stack. So now it's time for a episode about what
• 1:19
  I've been playing. That's right, it's time for a board game Espresso triple
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  shot. For those of you new to the podcast, board Game Espresso is
• 1:25
  a short review segment in which I talk about games I've tried for the first
• 1:27
  time and give them a brief first impressions overview. It's not a review,
• 1:34
  I haven't played the game well enough to really be able to review it,
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  but rather just first impressions. So the first game I want to talk about
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  it's called Illiterati. It was designed by Gary Alaka, Rob Chew, and
• 1:49
  John Kingo, illustrated by Audrey Jung, and published by Gap Closer Games.
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  According to Board game Geek, this game has the vibe on the front sort
• 2:00
  of vaguely cartoony, drifting toward anime, but certainly not anime style, but
• 2:05
  it looks like it could. It's anime adjacent. Maybe The art style is
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  crisp and like I said, a little cartoony. The characters or villains everyone.
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  The art style reminds me a little bit of Victorian Masterminds if you remember
• 2:16
  that game, or even it's got even a hint of the sort of pilfolio
• 2:22
  style cyberpunk or steampunk element, except the characters are a little more chiseled,
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  a little less rounded. Pilfolios characters tend to be kind of round in the
• 2:34
  way that they're drawn. But Illiterati is a cooperative real time word game.
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  In the game, you play a group of people trying to restore books to
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  the world because the world has become illiterate and there are squads of villains who
• 2:47
  are trying to destroy all books, so you're fans of books. The way
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  the game works, you start with a hand of tiles that's visible to everybody,
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  and each round you're going to draw some more tiles seven and then you
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  and your teammates are aiming for a couple things. First, you're aiming to
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  as a group, use as many of those tiles as you can to make
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  words you have to. You're allowed to trade tiles or hand them to each
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  other. It's a shared pool of tiles, and at the end of the
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  round, you can only have a certain number of them left. They call
• 3:21
  that your library. If you're playing on easy, it's three letters. In
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  a normal game it's two some of the time, and then there are rounds
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  where you can't have any left, so you have to use as many of
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  the letters as you can. That's your first priority. The only limit on
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  that is no player can have more than eight words, So as you're passing
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  tiles around and making words, you can't give them all the one person.
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  We generally don't want to. But then the second thing is if you succeed
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  at that goal of using all the letters, then players are allowed to bind
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  books. And the way they do that is each player has a challenge in
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  front of them. Some of the challenges are based on the content of words.
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  Some of the challenges are based on the nature of words, so like
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  the content of words would be like fast food restaurants, the nature of words
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  would be like we want three words, where half the letters are vowels,
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  and each player has one of these cards in front of them. And when
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  you get to the end of the timer, which is three minutes I think
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  three or four, then you examine. First you see did we succeed at
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  the round? Did we use all the letters? If not, there's a
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  process for taking a penalty, and you only get so many penalties per round,
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  and then you are per game and then you lose. But assuming you
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  pass the round, then you look at everyone's individual words and see did they
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  meet the requirement, So like did they have a group of words with a
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  total of eight or more letters that spell out the names of fast food restaurants.
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  And within those eight or more letters, there are three letters that have
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  a little gold star on them that would be an example of one of the
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  requirements. So some of the letters have these four different colorful symbols on them.
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  So not only are you trying to make words that fit your goal and
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  make sure all the letters get used, you also need to make sure you
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  have the right the letters in your words that have these symbols, or else
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  you won't pass your thing. So in a round where you succeed, then
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  everyone who passed their thing gets a new card, or you only have I
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  think you do two cards each two challenges each in the easy game, four
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  challenges each in the normal difficulty, and then it goes Actually it's normal and
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  hard are the only two levels we played. I think there were four levels
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  of difficulty though, And if you succeed at your challenge and you get a
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  new one. Once you succeeded at the full number of challenges that you need
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  to meet, then you are just helping other people. You can have update
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  words and all that then after you've resolved challenges or not, you draw a
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  villain card and they do something. They make people discard letters. They manipulate
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  the board in some way, because the whole thing is the only time you're
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  discarding any letters out of the pool is when you are meeting one of those
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  challenge cards. When you meet a challenge card, you discard all of the
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  words that you used to meet that requirement. Any other time, the letters
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  that you use to make words stay in the pool and you can use them
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  again next time, along with the new ones you're drawing. So you're constantly
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  adding more letters to the pool, except when you can clear those challenges.
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  And then the final round is once everybody's done enough challenges, there's one challenge
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  that's put on the board that's harder, and all the players have to meet
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  that challenge at the same time in a round where the team succeeded in order
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  for the game to get over. And remember those enemies that I talked about,
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  where you draw one enemy card per round, those get successfully more dangerous
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  because there are five of each enemy in this deck, and I think there's
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  eight total enemies, so it's like a forty card deck and there's five of
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  each, and if you draw a second card of the same enemy, then
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  both of the penalties on Then the penalty on that enemy card triggers, but
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  so does the one on the previous card you drew, so over time,
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  if you draw multiples of the same enemy, the penalties get more and more
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  vicious as the game goes along. We had a lot of fun with Alliterati.
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  I have played it probably five times. We played on both easy or
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  normal and hard. On normal, we were able to win every time we
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  played. I don't think we ever won on hard, so that's an interesting
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  mix of challenges to face. Like I said, there's also very hard or
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  expert or something. There's at least one other level that's harder than the one
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  we couldn't beat. But I imagine as you played it over time, you'd
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  get better and better at it. So that's good. Illiterati is pretty fun
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  if you like word games. It's an interesting co op it's not something that
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  you encounter all that often, and it's a good time. I really liked
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  it. That's Illiterati. The next game I want to talk about is Wormholes.
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  This is a game that got a lot of press when it came out,
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  was published, or was covered pretty well. People seem to think it
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  was pretty neat, And then I didn't hear that much more about it.
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  I thought it sounded fun, but when I would see to the story,
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  it would be like fifty dollars or something, and I'm like, I don't
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  think I want to spend fifty dollars on that. I do like Peter McPherson
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  as the designer. I do like his work. I think Tiny Towns is
• 8:03
  another of his, which is a game I really like. I should have
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  looked that up beforehand, but whatever, so I was interested in the game.
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  It's from AEG and they their games are never bad. There was at
• 8:13
  least decent. It had art by carrying Wong, who was in anybody I
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  know. But the art art was pretty good. I mean, I like
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  the look of it, but like I said, fifty dollars was too much
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  for me. But then I was at Half Priced Books and they had it
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  for nineteen used but whatever, nineteen. I was like, I'll give it
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  a try for nineteen and I really liked it. We played it with our
• 8:31
  neighbors, so it was four of us playing. If you're not familiar with
• 8:35
  it at all, it's sort of a pick up and deliver game where you
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  are shuttling resources and or you're shuttling passengers from one planet to another around the
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  galaxy. The gimmick of the game is that each player gets five actually each
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  player gets ten wormhole generators that are built in pairs. So the first tesday
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  one on them, the second tes say two on them, and so on
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  up to five, and on your turn you can drop a wormhole generator or
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  even two wormhole generators whenever you like. There are some limits about how many
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  can be placed where, but generally you can drop a wormhole generator wherever you
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  like, and then thereafter, in order to move from one part of the
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  Solar System to another, you just move on to your wormhole generator and you
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  pop out the other side without using any movement. It's a really neat mechanism
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  that makes the travel in the game extend dramatically, even though the actual number
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  of spaces you're allowed to move is not getting that much bigger. And the
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  Greek gimmick of the game is that everybody has these wormholes and they're all dropping
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  them all over the place so they can move around the galaxy faster. And
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  the thing is you can use other people's wormholes too. When you use someone
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  else's wormhole, they get a point, but they're you're not paying them the
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  point. They get the point from the bank. And so there's a thing
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  where like, well, if I use this word, if I use their
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  wormhole, I can go get a five I can deliver a five point card.
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  Sure, I'll give them a point in order to save me having to
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  do the work of laying that down. It's a really neat game. It's
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  not incredibly dense. It's relatively easy to learn. It takes about an hour
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  to play, maybe a little less, and I think there's a lot of
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  space to get better at it. On our first game, I did not
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  do very well, but that's okay. But I think there's a lot of
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  room as we play it more to get the hang of it, to understand
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  how the pieces fit together. And I'm really excited to continue trying it.
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  It's definitely gonna stay in my collection for a while, so I'm happy to
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  have had it, and i'd love to hear if you've played at what you
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  think. Is this a game that holds up to lots of plays. I
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  think it's going to hold up to at least a few before I'll want to
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  move it along. So that's Wormholes, published by EEG, designed by Peter
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  McPherson. One of the things I like to do during these board game espresso
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  episodes is I like to address one game that I've gotten out of the dust.
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  A dusty game is one that we haven't play in a year, or
• 11:00
  more so metaphorically, it sits on yourself so long it becomes dusty. Today's
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  dusty game is one of my favorites. It is Orleans. This classic from
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  Reiner Stockhausen, originally published by Tasty Minstrel Games with art from Clemens Franz,
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  is now available at from DLP and Capstone. I believe, as far as
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  I know, the Capstone edition is essentially the same as the Tasty Minstrual edition
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  was. I don't think that they have changed it. In Orleans, you
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  play a medieval merchant trying to build up your community and make as much money
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  and prestige as you can. The game has this great mechanism. It's a
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  bag pull mechanism. You have a bag full of tokens and on your turn
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  you're gonna pull tokens out of the bag. And the then you use them
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  in a variety of action spaces. I'm not going to go into it too
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  much. Either you've played Orleans or you haven't. If you're interested, go
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  to the show notes. I will have a link to my deep dive on
• 11:56
  Orleans so you can get learn more about it. I don't need to talk
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  about it here, but I will say, returning to it from over a
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  year, I like it a lot. I like it just as much as
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  I liked it before. It is constantly battling in my mind with Altaplano,
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  which, as you know, when I play Altiplano that I come away from
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  that going man. I like Altiplano a lot, maybe even more than Orleons,
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  and every time I play Orleons that makes me want to play it again.
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  And I have the Invasion expansion, which includes a co op mode,
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  and I really like to try that. I keep not getting it out of
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  the table, but I am going too soon because I really like that game
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  and I want to. I also do have a number of other Orleans products.
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  I have Orleons Stories, and I have the Joan of Arc the Orleans
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  Rolling Right, both unplayed, so plenty of that to go around. If
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  I decide I want to play more. There's also the Orleans Plague game that
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  just came out recently, and so I'll be picking that up. I'm sure.
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  Part of what's really fun about it is you get your as you go
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  along, you're buying these tokens that it works kind of like a deck builder
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  a little bit. In the it's random which tokens you're going to get out
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  of the bag and what you're going to get for them, and so you're
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  sort of tactically trying to maximize what you get from your play, but you're
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  also trying to decide, like when do I start spending these tokens I've been
• 13:20
  getting, because throughout the first half of the game, you're getting all these
• 13:24
  tokens and pretty soon you're sort of drowning them that you can't draw them fast
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  enough. And then one of the things you can do is you can send
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  your tokens to the town hall, which sends them to this market spot where
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  they where you get points for spending them, and then you don't get them
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  back, like they're permanently gone. Oh that was fun. I just saw
• 13:45
  a couple who are like seeing each other on the way out, like as
• 13:46
  one of them pulled up the other pulled out of the driveway, and they
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  just beated at each other and moved right along. That was fun. And
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  then the game has a number of scoring conditions, but one of the big
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  ones is you move your marker up this one scoring track and then you get
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  points for all of the merchant houses you built and for all of the scoring
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  tokens that you got. It is a kind of dusty euro thematically, but
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  it is really good and I really like Orleons, and every time I play
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  it, I want to play it more. That's Orleons from Reiner Stockhausen.
• 14:15
  Finally, the last new game I played that I want to talk about is
• 14:18
  Keystone North America. Keystone North America is a game from Rose Gauntlet Entertainment designed
• 14:24
  by Isaac Vega and Jeffrey Joyce, with art by Ibram Ibidi and two other
• 14:33
  people. It is a beautiful game about the Keystone National wetlands or national park
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  or something. It's about a specific or no, no, sorry, it's
• 14:43
  about Keystone species. So the idea is that you're accumulating these ecosystems and you
• 14:48
  get extra points if you acquire the Keystone species, which you put in your
• 14:54
  grid. Now, ultimately it's like it's a tile placement game or a card
• 14:58
  placement game, where you're drawing these cards and you're putting them into this grid
• 15:03
  and in the grid, these cards meet specific requirements. Essentially, they have
• 15:09
  habitats that match, and they have numbers that go in order either one to
• 15:13
  four or four or one to five or five to one. And what you're
• 15:16
  trying to do is put them matching cards with matching habitats in order in Rosen
• 15:22
  columns, and you can adjust the Rosen columns, but ultimately you're trying to
• 15:28
  get as many of them to fit as you can. You also have these
• 15:30
  scoring conditions that you're trying to do to get extra points, and you're drafting
• 15:35
  from tiles. In gameplay, it feels very similar to something like Calico because
• 15:41
  the game has a sort of condensed play space that's easy to it's easy to
• 15:48
  find, difficult to fill, or it's tricky to get just right. The
• 15:52
  art is beautiful, lots of animals to admire. The gameplay is relatively easy,
• 15:56
  but the scoring conditions are rather complex. The scoring takes a little while.
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  It reminds me of Cascadia in that way, but all in all,
• 16:04
  Keystone North America is pretty fun. Would now I would say putting it into
• 16:08
  the neighborhood of Kascadia and Calico and maybe you know, bordering on something like
• 16:18
  Wingspan, it's not as good as any of those. I think it's fun
• 16:22
  and fine. My family likes it. This is another one I borrowed from
• 16:26
  the X y Z game Library, and I'm gonna hold on to for a
• 16:29
  while. We're going to keep playing it for a bit. But I certainly
• 16:30
  don't feel the need to go buy it, and I don't think it's a
• 16:33
  game that I think if I sort of forgot about it, I don't see
• 16:37
  people asking for it a lot. It's amusing and decently. It's well made,
• 16:41
  but just doesn't break new ground in a way that is captivating nonetheless enjoyable.
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  If you get a chance to play it, I would definitely recommend and
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  maybe it'll maybe it'll fit a niche for you that it doesn't for me,
• 16:52
  and really knock it out of the park. That's Keystone North America from Rose
• 16:56
  Gauntlet Games. Jeffrey Joyce and Isaac Big are our designers. So what have
• 17:02
  you been playing lately? I've now reached my home so I'm about to sign
• 17:04
  off, but I'd love to hear from you. If you head over to
• 17:07
  board game Geek and enter guild three two sixty nine, you'll find a forum
• 17:11
  for Pickup and Deliver, and I would love it if you'd post there and
• 17:14
  let me know what you've been playing. I look forward to hearing from you.
• 17:18
  If you want to send me a message directly, you can email me
• 17:21
  at Rattlebox Game Brendan at rattleboxgames dot com, or you can send me a
• 17:25
  message on Board game Geek. Wombat nine two nine is my user name there.
• 17:29
  Thanks for joining me in my walk today. I hope that your next
• 17:30
  block is as pleasant as mind was. Bybye, Brought to you by rattle Box yeh