Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Orphan Black; Nimalia; Suspects; revisiting Altiplano

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Orphan Black; Nimalia; Suspects; revisiting Altiplano · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:04
  Welcome to pick up and delivery of the podcast, where I pick up my
• 0:06
  audio recorder as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while
• 0:09
  I walk home. I'm Brendan Riley. We're good afternoon, listeners. It's
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  a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. It's pretty warm, but you'd expect
• 0:29
  that from mid August. I've just gotten off a different train than usual because
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  I'm going to a different place than usual. Just because of the complications of
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  my schedule, it made more sense to go to my buddy Rob's house and
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  ride with him to our game club than it did to go all the way
• 0:45
  home and then meet him to carpool to game club. So that's what I'm
• 0:49
  doing now. I am on my way to his house. I don't know
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  how long this walk will be, so it might be a short episode.
• 0:53
  Apologies in advance if it is. I thought I would take a few minutes
• 0:57
  to do a board game presso Espresso Triple Shot. For those of you new
• 1:03
  to the podcast, the board game Espresso Espresso is Triple Shot is an episode
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  in which I talk about three games that I've played for the first time recently
• 1:11
  and what I think of them. These are first impression and reviews, so
• 1:15
  I've played them each once or maybe once or twice, but I don't have
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  a robust sense of the game. They're not reviews in the traditional sense because
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  I haven't played them thoroughly enough to make it reasonable to call them reviews.
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  So let's jump right in. The first game I want to talk about is
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  Orphan Black. The card game Orphan Black is a game from I Believe Gail
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  Force nine. If you haven't seen the show. Loosely speaking, the show
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  is about a woman who discovers that something weird is going on in her life
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  and there are conspiracies galore all around her. I don't really want to say
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  a lot more than that, because there's a big part of what makes the
• 1:59
  show interesting is not knowing what's happening. So I'm not gonna tell you what
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  happens in the show. While the game was designed by Jay Cormier and send
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  Fu send fung Limb and published by IDW and Pandasaurus, So I was wrong
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  when I said Gail Force nine. My apologies to IDWN, Pandasaurus. In
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  Orphan back of the card game, it is an area control game of sorts
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  and a set collection game of sorts. Each player has a faction card that
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  represents one of the three factions of people who are trying to manipulate the characters
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  in the show, the three different conspiratorial groups. In the game, you
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  are trying to manipulate the different characters to persuade them to join your conspiratorial group,
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  and at the end of the game, the player who influenced the most
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  of them wins. There's a really interesting mechanism by which the different characters will
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  do different things when you play on them, and so you're trying to anticipate
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  how other people will play and to play yourself a number of the different A
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  number the characters will sort of roll or be recruited once there's enough influence on
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  them. So part of what's going on is you're trying to manage the influence
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  that's in play on the different factions so that you can have the character go
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  to you or go to the right faction when you want it to go to
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  the right faction. It's kind of hard to explain, but it's a relatively
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  simple game. The theme is pretty pasted on. If you were to take
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  all of the theme away, it would be a little less interesting, but
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  it also doesn't feel it doesn't feel deeply connected to the source material in the
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  way that one generally hopes a thematic game will. That said, it's not
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  really all that expected to me that it would. It's a pretty difficult source
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  material to imagine making a game out of, particularly a card game. Nonetheless,
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  Orphan Black the card game, it was a fun experience and worth a
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  try if you get a chance. I don't know if I would buy it,
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  but certainly if you get a chance to try it, I would recommend.
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  The next game I want to talk about is Namalia. Namalia is a
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  small box game I picked up on based on its light price, the fact
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  that I had some points to spend, and the fact that Rado put it
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  as like his favorite one of his favorite games of last year. Is designed
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  by William leah Ven and the publisher is Lebot d Jou Lucky Duck Games.
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  It's probably the US publisher looking at the list. Namalia is a card tiling
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  game. So you have cards with different features on them, and you're laying
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  them out in a grid and you're sort of tiling them over. Each card
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  has four quadrants and every time each round you have to take a card and
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  put it into your grid, you have to cover at least one quadrant of
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  previous cards in the grid. You only make a four by four grid,
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  though, and there are four rounds, so very quickly. By the end
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  you're sort of your grid is almost full or full maybe it's six by sixth
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  grade excuse me, and up covering up stuff you don't want to just because
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  you have to cover up something. The game uses Isle of Sky scoring,
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  which works really well, meaning that there are a series of scoring goals laid
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  out on the table and you pick which ones are Each round, a different
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  combination of them is going to trigger, and at the end of the round
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  you score whichever combination of them is active that round. It works pretty well.
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  There's a reason people copy that scoring style. Naumali is really fun.
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  It's a nice light game, easy to teach, with a lot of depth.
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  I think that it might suffer long term from playability issue replayability issues because
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  there just aren't that many different combinations of scoring goals. But it is an
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  incredibly tactical game, so that works in its favor in terms of replayability,
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  because every game is a little different. Because it's the tactics of which cards
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  you get, the cards you're using, I forgot to mention, are drafted,
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  and so the main mechanism is pick and pass, where you have a
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  hand of cards, you take one, you pass it around, and you
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  wrote back and forth which hand which person you're giving them too. Overall,
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  a fine game and one I look forward to playing a lot. It's going
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  to be a great one to like. Oh, we've got twenty minutes here,
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  check out Nomalia. This game is great. So that's Namalia. Next
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  up, I want to talk about a game that I dusted off. This
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  is Altiplano. Altiplano is one of my favorite games. It is in my
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  top fifty and part of the reason I want to play it is in the
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  list of games that I was hoping to get played this year. Aultiplano is
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  a bag building game from Rhyner Stockhausen. You are managing a bunch of crops
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  and different items in the pompous in the andies, and in the course of
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  the game you are managing lamas. You're getting resources and you're getting points by
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  storing those resources into your warehouse as well as building boats and houses, and
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  the boats and houses will help you also by giving you access to more efficient
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  re sources creation and conversion. A lot of people compare this to or Leons,
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  Rhiner Stockhausen's other bag building game, and I think that it compares favorably.
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  One of the big differences is in or Leons you put your new tokens.
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  Anytime you use tokens, they go right back in the bag, and
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  so you could buy a new token and never draw it out, depending how
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  many tokens you have. In Altiplano, you put your tokens into a box,
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  and once you've emptied your bag, then you put the box back into
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  the bag. So there's always a churn where you're going to use your tokens
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  before you discard them. I find that pretty satisfying and ultimately pretty fun.
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  Altiplano is one of my favorites. I really like it. I think it
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  is as good, if not a little better, than or Leons, but
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  that is a controversial opinion. So I played if you had a chance,
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  that's the game. I dusted it off Ultiplano Well. For what might be
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  the first time in the five one hundred and fifty two episodes of this podcast,
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  I'm actually recording an episode in two parts at two different times and stitching
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  them together. The episode that was preceding this moment I recorded on a different
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  day, and I actually did not have enough time on my walk to finish
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  the episodes, so I'm finishing it now. The third game I wanted to
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  talk about in this board game Espresso Espresso is Suspects. Claire Harper takes the
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  stage. This is by Guillaum Montage and published by Studio H which I believe
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  is the board game division of Hatchet, who I mostly know from Hatchet Audio
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  anyway. Suspects is a mystery solving game. It comes with three cases in
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  the box, and I think it costs about thirty dollars. That's a pretty
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  good deal as far as these kinds of games go. In this game,
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  you are exploring a mystery, and you are playing the part of Claire Harper,
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  who is a sort of young amateur sleuth, kind of like a Stephanie
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  Plum maybe, or like if Miss Marple were in her thirties rather than her
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  seventies sixties, and you're trying to solve a mystery. Narratively, that's the
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  premise. You get called in or invited to help solve this mystery, and
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  the gameplay is pretty interesting. Its uses cards almost entirely. The game comes
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  with a couple larger sort of slightly smaller than eight and a half by eleven
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  pieces of card stock for each mystery that tell you a little bit about the
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  mystery and give you some initial setups, like in the first one I played,
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  all of this is before you start the mystery, so I don't feel
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  like I'm giving anyway. The first one I played was the Murder at Something
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  Something Mansion, and you get a family tree and a map of the mansion,
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  and the family tree shows all the different people in the family, and
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  a bunch of them have numbers next to them, and the mansion shows all
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  the rooms, and a bunch of those have numbers next to them. So
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  the way you play the game is you take turns choosing where you're going to
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  go and you or who you're going to talk to, and then you take
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  that card out of the deck and you read it, and sometimes that card
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  will give you access to other cards, like if you go in a room
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  and there's piece of evidence there, you might get card and access to that
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  piece of evidence, and then you use those cards and that evidence to try
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  to solve the mystery. And then at the end you open up the solution
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  envelope to see whether or not you're correct in solving the mystery. The game
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  takes about an hour to play, maybe a little bit longer. There's not
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  a timer. There's not a timer, so you can as a group kind
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  of set your own pace, but then you find out if you solved the
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  mystery correctly or not. There are two aspects to the game that I think
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  are pretty interesting and make it unusual for this mystery solving type of game.
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  Number One, the way that you solve the mystery. I really like.
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  It's got a scaled mystery, a scaled timeline where you write your guests down
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  about the solution of the mystery, and you count how many cards you've looked
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  at, and then you can continue solving the mystery so they they've broken one
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  of the defeated one of the central problems with this kind of mystery game,
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  which is that you want to solve the mystery, but you also want to
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  encounter more information and check out more stuff, and a lot of these games
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  fight the desire to see the whole mystery because they want to have a level
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  of skill or a level of achievement in finishing the mystery quickly. Well,
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  what Suspects does is they have a chart that tells you that gives you a
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  different sort of rating about how well you did in the game based on how
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  many cards you looked at, And there's a threshold by which you know,
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  once you've looked at this many cards, if you haven't solved it, then
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  you go down to the next level of achievement or whatever. So here's the
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  part I. Like the game's written, you take your guess at that initial
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  time, like say, when you come to the first threshold where you'll leave
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  the top rank. You can take your guess at what you think the answer
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  is. You write it down, and then you can keep playing. You
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  can keep investigating. If you encounter something that tells you, oh, no,
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  my initial guess was wrong, you can write a new guess. You
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  just have to record the new level that you're at for the achievement, so
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  you can keep your old guess you don't know the answer yet, or if
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  you find something that says, oh, we probably were wrong, let's change
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  our answer, you're allowed to change your answer. You just record what level
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  you're at when you change your answer, and you write that down and you
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  could do that more than once if you want. I really like that system
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  because it's sort of the best of both worlds. If you solve it right
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  the first time, then you get the pleasure of having the rest of the
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  clues reinforce what you came up with. If you missed something or you took
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  or you know you were wrong in your first guess and it turns out that
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  it was another thing, you still get the pleasure of solving it. Yeah,
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  you get the lower score, but you're not You didn't ruin the game
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  by looking at the answer after your first guess, So I really like that
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  scoring technique. The other thing about the game that I really like is the
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  way that the game helps you see what clues are. For There are a
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  number of places where there are like these little lines on cards, and when
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  you get another clue or another piece of information or a piece of evidence or
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  something, sometimes the cards will have these lines on them. If you put
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  the two cards next to each other and they line up, then that tells
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  you something more about it, like reinforces a piece of information that was between
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  the two cards. It kind of helps explain or elucidate what the clue was
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  meant. To do. That was very satisfying because there'd be times where we
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  like find a piece of evidence, we're like, oh, I think this
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  means that, and then you notice this got the lines and you're like,
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  oh, yeah, looks put it next to that other observer or that other
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  witness, and sure enough the thing that the witness said connects to that piece
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  of evidence, and you're like, oh, yes, we figured it out.
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  So we played. We've only played one mystery so far, so it's
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  possible the other two are stinkers, but I don't think that's likely, assuming
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  they're just as good as the first one. Claire Harper takes the stage.
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  The first of the Suspects boxes is quite a delight. It might not be
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  the first one. I'm correcting myself there. I actually look, there are
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  like five of these or six of these. This is a series that has
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  been around for a while. It seems like it'll be a lot of fun
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  to do. The other ones. I think they're definitely on the acquisitions list
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  because we like them quite a bit. So that's Suspects. Claire Harper takes
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  the stage by Guilliam Montague and Hatchet Board Games or Studio h I guess it
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  is the name of the company. Well, that's it for my podcast today.
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  Thank you for joining me. I hope that you had a good time
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  and that you'll let me know what games you've tried lately. You can head
• 14:28
  over to board game Geek Gilt three two six nine and share your experience there.
• 14:33
  I'd love to hear what games you've been playing. If you would like
• 14:37
  to get in contact with me, you can send me a message on board
• 14:39
  game Geek. My user name is Wombat nine two nine over there. You
• 14:43
  can also send me an email, run in at rattlebox games dot com,
• 14:46
  or you and I could play an asynchronous board game online either at board Game
• 14:50
  Arena or Yukata dot d In either of those places, my user name is
• 14:54
  also a Wombat nine two nine. Look me up. Let's play a game.
• 14:58
  I just discovered recently that I am eleven and are ten and one in
• 15:03
  Games of Matty and I against Jason Keglwitz. Hey Jason, I know he's
• 15:07
  a listener. So it's turning out to be quite a challenge to get better
• 15:11
  at the game. But I am slowly perhaps getting better. No, I'm
• 15:16
  not. I'm eleven and I'm one and ten, so it's gonna be a
• 15:20
  while before I could declare myself that are at it. Or maybe Jason is
• 15:24
  very very good at it. I don't know either way, I'm having a
• 15:26
  lot of fun and continuing to play Tay and I over at Ukada. Well,
• 15:31
  thanks for joining me on my walk today. I hope your next box,
• 15:33
  as it wasn't a his mind, was bye Bye, brought to you
• 15:56
  by Rattle Box Day. Oh yeah, I am