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- Pick Up & Deliver 857: Back to School (Themestorm Redux) Transcript Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver: the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I walk home. I'm Brendan Riley. [ Intro music ] Well, greetings listeners. It's a lovely, busy day here in suburban Chicago. We don't get a ton of cicadas this year. It's not one of the big years, but we do have a bunch. I don't know if you can hear them. Uh, we'll see if the remove background noise piece of the audio editing equipment can pull them out a little bit. If not, that's what that buzzing is. Well, today is the second day I've gone back to campus since contract started, and in a week and a half, classes start. So just, uh, getting geared up for the semester, looking forward to a good time. I think along those lines. I looked through the boardgamegeek. I looked through the podcast archives to see whether I have done a themestorm around school. And looking around, I found I have not, uh, or I have, but it was a long time ago. So I did in episode 259, which if you're keeping track, would be six years ago, uh, almost exactly six years ago, because this is going to be eight fifty six, I think, or eight fifty seven, maybe. Eight fifty six so nearly exactly two years or six years ago, I did an episode about school going back to school. So I thought today I would review what that episode covered and cover some new aspects of it, as well as additional things we hadn't talked about yet. Back in on in episode two hundred and fifty nine, I had three broad categories. I had terrors of youth, life of the mind and for the love of books, those were the three subcategories of the theme storm related to Back to School. And so I'm going to explore similar ones today. To start with, we have library. It's kind of like for the love of books. Last time I talked about Ex Libris and the Grand Complication. Uh, the novel Grand complication. This time I'm going to talk about Athenaeum and the Big Book of Madness. So one of the themes that has popped up a lot is you're in a library and you shouldn't be, and it's causing trouble. Uh, the game Mystic Mayhem is about running around in the Magic School library. Actually, the school for monsters library. Big Book of Madness is a cooperative game about running around in the school library. The essentially. Thing is, you've gone into the restricted section of the library. You open up a book you shouldn't have, and monsters are coming out, and you and the other students on in the cooperative game have to use whatever spells you can to defeat the monster. The monsters enclosed the book. That's the game. I like the Big Book of Madness a lot. It's interesting. I have played it a bunch of times, and we play it on the hardest that we can, and we still win almost every time. I would have to look at my BGG stats, but I literally don't remember losing maybe once or twice. We've lost, but generally we don't. So the interesting part there is I was talking to somebody else about it and they said they've only won like once. I'm like, whoa. Either you are playing way wrong or I'm playing way wrong. Once somewhere in there, there's a missing rule. Now it's possible because I got this. I got that game a long time ago. It's possible that they updated the rules and the game in some way. That if you buy the game in a later printing, maybe they've changed some aspect of the rules that make the game harder. I'd love to know that because I do really like the game, but I think it's too easy. It's part of why we don't play it. So. But in the game you play a number of different child wizards who specialize in one of the four elements, but you all know spells from all the elements, and your goal is to use the spells to attack the monsters. And what you're trying to do is move around different aspects of your magic in order to take out the various challenges that are popping up before they cause too much trouble for you. It's a fun game. Like I said, too easy. The other one I wanted to point to is Athena or Athena or Athenaeum, something like that. This is the I think the subtitle of it is The Magic Library. This is a game I got in partly because I found it on sale, but also because it's about a magic library, and I already had Ex Libris and a big book of madness, and I felt like having a third game about a magic library was kind of fun. This one is my least favorite of those three. It's an interesting set collection game. The coolest gimmick about it. You are organizing books on the shelf for your magic library. The coolest thing about it is that you pick which books are going to end up on your shelf, and then you have to give books to the people on either side of you as well. So it's a drafting sequence where you get, I think, four cards. You're going to add two of them to your library, put one on your left and one on your right, and each other player does that as well. So then you are putting four books on your shelf, two of which you didn't pick, and your opponents picked them for you. So it's an interesting gamble or challenge to figure out what's the best approach. If you were going to pick one other book to play or one other game about books to play, I mean, A Place for All My books is another game that came out recently, which is about organizing books. That's a fun idea in the context of the conversation we're having here. I like that a lot as I think about other media to use, because part of the idea of a theme storm is it's not just games, but you think about related material I did in the last year, read Mr. Penumbra's twenty four hour bookstore, which is again, kind of about a magical library. And I think that that book would make a nice conversation. There's also another book I read a while ago about a woman who is the librarian in hell, and she's not actually someone who had been sent to hell, but rather she's someone who was sent into library service. And the librarian librarian hell had an opening, but I cannot remember the name of that book. I think if you searched Librarian and Hell novel, you would probably find it. And I'll put it in the show notes as well. I was also thinking about movies, about libraries. I mean, there's a section of a number of the Harry Potter movies about the restriction section in the library, but for the most part, libraries don't get a lot of films because there's not a lot to do in a library in films. I mean, there are spooky places, but they don't get a lot of play. So that is the theme storm based on the library from the last six years having to do with going back to school. Next up, an aspect of. So the next category I had here was the Terrors of Youth. I said, Matilda, the movie Matilda and the game Miskatonic School for girls. I do not have a follow up for that, so I decided to go with science instead. We're thinking about the school or return to school. Studying science, particularly science and history, is a big aspect of what you might do, and these are well trod spaces in board gaming. The two games I thought of first as I was thinking about science and history, the first one is the game I played within the last few months. This is Darwin's journey. Darwin's journey is a tracks on tracks Euro game where you are managing the time and energy of your explorers as you document different species and consider the idea of evolution and figuring out how to explain it in scientific research. It's an interesting game, very crunchy. I like it a lot. It's in the top tier of Simone Luciani games for me, and I think he's pretty good, so it's a good time. Definitely worth trying if you get a chance. The other science game I wanted to point to was Lovelace and Babbage, which is almost more math than science. It's a game about programming a big gear works steam powered computer, mostly through doing speed arithmetic. It's an interesting game, which was made worse by the deluxe components. It's a weird twist on the experience. I ordered the game. It came with these deluxe components, which are these instead of cardboard tokens or cardboard tiles, they're sort of thicker wooden tiles that have like a coppery color on them, which made them really hard to read because they're kind of shiny. So actually they were more difficult to use than the cardboard tokens, which is a bummer to have the deluxe tokens not be as good for gameplay. Uh, I also have mentioned before, I have a rare deck of cards that was is unavailable generally to the public. As one of the Kickstarter goals for Lovelace, Lovelace, and Babbage, the publisher made an alternate deck of the patron cards. Instead of having the patrons be luminaries in the scientific community, they were various board game creators and content folks. But the. Somewhere in the publishing loop, the person who should have asked those people for their permission to use their likeness did not. And so when it came out that they had this deck of board game creators, some of them said, I don't want to be in there. And so the publisher, instead of pursuing asking permission for all these people, they just withdrew that deck. That promo deck, which means it did not get sent out with Kickstarter backing. And they explained why. But if you were going to GenCon, you could arrange to pick your game up at GenCon, and this was before they delivered it to Kickstarter backers and before the controversy emerged. Actually, the controversy emerged at GenCon. And so if you pick your game up at GenCon that first year, instead of taking Kickstarter delivery, you got that deck. No one else did. So it became kind of exclusive. I don't know what this has to do with school, but I think it's a fun story. I apologize if you've heard it before. There are lots of good movies that are kind of about science and about scientific discovery. I can't think of any movies that are about Darwin, necessarily. There are certainly movies about computers. Most of them are focused on later times. There's a couple movies about Alan Turing that I think are pretty good. There's The Imitation Game, and I guess the Eddie Redmayne movie is not about Alan Turing. It's about a young Stephen Hawking. So never mind. There's just the one Alan Turing game, The Imitation Game, which is I really like that movie. I don't know if it's a fair depiction of what Alan Turing was like, but I really liked the movie and I thought it was pretty fun. I'm trying to think of what other science movies there are. You would think that science would be an exciting topic for film, but I don't. I can't really think of them. Oh. Unconscious mind is the other game. I even wrote it down. This is a, I think another Simone Luciano game where you are and a couple other people. He's always designing with co-authors where you are members of Sigmund Freud's inner circle in Austria in the early nineteen hundreds. You're exploring the ideas of psychology and unconsciousness and basically innovating the idea, the experience of psychotherapy. This is a beautiful game, well worth looking at, if nothing else. It's a lovely to play and I like the mechanisms in the game. I had a good time with it. So that is science. The third theme I wanted to point to are universities. More generally the culture of university. The idea of university originally That is not life of the mind. It's probably the closest I got. I did recommend Alchemists and Alma mater, along with Newton and Coimbra, as books, as games that have universities in them. If we're thinking more about the about universities themselves, the three games I could think of would be Argent the Consortium, which again is about a magical school much more like Hogwarts or something. The idea is the headmaster is retiring, and there's a competition among the faculty about who will become the new headmaster. There are judges who are going to decide who the new headmaster is, and those judges each have their own criteria, which is secret. So as the game goes along, your goal is to increase your standing in a variety of different contexts. With the idea of winning the judgment of the characters, you can win the judgement of the characters by knowing what the judgment is. So part of the game is exploring what the secret motives of those judges are. And then trying doing your best to be at the top of those particular criteria. It's really fun. It's very cutthroat, but an excellent game. One I need to get back to the table. There's also alma mater, which is not a game I have played very much. In fact, I don't think I've played it at all. I got ready to play it once or twice, but I didn't get it to the table. Uh. In it, you are a scholar in the medieval era or the early Renaissance, and you are publishing books and gaining mentors, mentees, students who are your you're their mentor and you're navigating the world of the medieval university. The art looks a lot like Coimbra. And the game comes with these cute little books that are excellent little game pieces. So like I said, I haven't played that one, but I am interested in it. Uh, and third, I also was going to point to the Dahlgard�s Academy expansion for Trickerion, which has sort of, again, these same functions of thinking about how you teach people things and what you teach them. As an honorable mention, I will say the game from the mid-90s. Publish or perish. Survival of the witless, which is a game about academia written by somebody who quit academia bitterly. It's good, but it's very grim. And it's got a mid nineties snapshot of what academia is like. So things haven't changed that much. Or not all. Not everywhere anyway. If you wanted to watch a movie or read a book, the book is Moo by Jane Smiley. It's absolutely the book to read. Uh, as for the film, I mean, I think the satire of higher Education starring Adam Driver, White Noise is probably your best one there. That's Don DeLillo's book. That's a really good satire of education. There are a number of other ones, but I would say go ahead and start with that. Well, that just about brings me to the end of my walk. I'm curious, what do you think of these three themes? What are some games or books or films that I should have included here? And I did not. I'd love to hear from you. Head over to BoardGameGeek. Yield three, two, six, nine and share your thoughts there. Uh. Otherwise, I look forward to next time you take a walk with me. I want to say thanks for taking a walk with me, and I hope your next walk is as close to the mind one. Bye bye. [ Exit music ] Brought to you by Rattlebox games.