Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Wilmot’s Warehouse; Istanbul – The Dice Game; Hanabi (revisited)
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- Wilmot�s Warehouse; Istanbul � The Dice Game; Trekking the World; Hanabi (revisited) Transcript Welcome to Pickup and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I leave the library and deliver an episode to you while I stroll around. I'm Brendan Riley. [opening music] Greetings, listeners. It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. It's cloudy and drippy and rainy, but it's still very nice. The temperature is in the mid sixties, which is perfect walk in temperature because it's not so hot that I'm getting all sweaty and it's not so cold that I'm cold. I'm wearing a t shirt. It is a little rainy, so I do have an umbrella with me. But the rain has stopped for the present, so I'm enjoying the best of all three worlds or both worlds, I don't know but the best of the worlds. Well, I thought I would take a little time to talk to you about some games I've been playing lately. That's right. It's time for a Board Game Espresso Triple Shot. [coffee shop noises] Order up! The Board Game Espresso Triple Shot is an episode segment in which I talk about games I've played recently, and usually three games I've played recently, and at least one game that I've dusted off or for which I've played an expansion. The board game Espresso Triple Shot, is a feature I've been doing for a while. Its premise is that I'm having three shots of espresso, three quick, quick shots of coffee to get you excited in your day. So let's jump right in, huh? We'll start with Wilmot's Warehouse. This is a 2024 release from designers Ricky Haggett, Richard Hogg, David King (II). I think their names first names are Rich and Ricky, and I can't remember what King's name is. And the art is done by Richard Hogg. Published by cMYK in 2024. Wilmot's warehouse, I guess, is based on a video game of the same name, although I'm familiar with it, unfamiliar with it, it is a cooperative game in which you are, as a group, trying to keep things, trying to figure out where things go in a warehouse. So what you do is you have a series of items that are cards with semi-abstract art on them. The art is sort of Mondrian style, meaning it's like big blocks of color in semi-abstract shapes, but usually you can kind of find patterns in them that look, make them look like things, which is not surprising for art. The idea is you pick a place to put it in the warehouse, and then as a group, you tell a story about why it's there. Now, it doesn't have to be a super long story, but the idea is by telling a story to each other about why things are where they are, it helps you remember where they are And thus, when it comes time to find those things, you have the information about them you need. So, for example, if I drew a thing that looks like a dog bowl, I could put it in one spot and say, okay, this is where this is a dog bowl. It's in storage here. And then if I draw something else that seems like it could be related to a dog, like a, a brush, I could say, oh, this is a dog brush. We're going to put it right next to the dog bowl. And as things go out, when they seem like they could relate to a dog, we put them near that area and that helps us remember what they are. So that's the first half of the game. You're slowly populating the entire board with these thirty six items, and they're all face down. So after you've placed them, you no longer can remember what they were. There's also these extra cards that come into play that make it harder to place things. Some people won't get to look at them. There'll be other kinds of limitations as you go along. So then in the second stage of Wilmot's warehouse, the players have to serve the customers who are coming to buy the things that have been ordered and stored in the warehouse. So the way that works is there's a certain number of customer cards the group is going to get, and you divide those up roughly evenly. And the goal is as a group, to distribute all of the customer cards to their products as quickly as possible. So you start a timer and then when you say go, everybody starts looking at their customers and they try to find the items in the warehouse that the customers are asking for. I think there are some customers who will want things that aren't in the warehouse, and you can set those aside. And the idea is eventually you'll have all the customers that want things. And when you find one that wants the thing you want, then you put it on top of the item in the warehouse, but you don't look at the item in the warehouse. So you're not checking if you're correct because it's face down. Then once all thirty six items have been covered by customers or forty eight, I don't remember, it's a square. And then you stop the timer, and then you check each item. And for each item, I think it's forty eight for each item. If you're correct. Great. If you're incorrect, it adds like 10s or something to your time, and your goal is to see how much time your group takes. It's a really interesting game. Like the mind, it is a game that seems to have a kind of magic to it, where as you play, you find a sort of rhythm of cognition and storytelling that allows you as a group to remember things that you wouldn't have remembered otherwise. It's very clever. I really like the game. I'm not sure. Like, I feel like it's the kind of game I would play once with any given group of people. I would enjoy playing it a bunch of times, but the fun thing would be showing it to people and being like, isn't this a neat thing? Which makes me wonder if I want to own it or not. I do play with a variety of different people, and it would be fun to show people, but I also feel like it would have limited play. It's not that expensive. So that is one thing on the positive side. I certainly would pick it up used if I could. Or add a thrift store. Absolutely. It would be a no brainer. That is Wilmot's warehouse from cMYK games. Next up we have Istanbul, the Dice game. This is a 2017 game from R�diger Dorn and Andreas Resch, uh, from Andreas Resch and published by Pegasus Spiele. R�diger Dorn is fast becoming a designer whose designs I don't look away from now. He's somebody I've heard about for a while, old school board game reviewers would mention him a lot. He doesn't get as much play now as he used to, but he certainly is one of the names. So from that perspective, he's popular and populated in the sphere. He's also got a bunch of games in the top one hundred, or at least the top five hundred. So he certainly is somebody to watch for the only game. I've only played a few games of his. The main one that I play the most is Las Vegas, which I promote here whenever I can. So when I saw in the board game trade Istanbul the dice game, I thought, oh, I got to try this. It's a Rudiger Dorn classic. Now, Istanbul itself is supposed to be very, very good. It's in the top. It's definitely in the top two hundred. I think it might be in the top one hundred. And I have not played that. So I feel like I'm missing a trick by by having Istanbul the dice game, be my prime Istanbul game. Nonetheless, I think there's something really interesting about playing a game revisited by the same designer and Istanbul. The dice game is not badly reviewed. So what is it? It is a filler game set around the theme of Istanbul. In the original game, you are a merchant and you have a bunch of helpers, and you put the helpers out on the board, and then you get to like use the path that you have crafted with your helpers and activate a bunch of stuff. In the dice game, your helpers are dice and each round you roll them and then you get to do the thing that you roll. The dice have six different sides. They are standard dice. And the way that the six dice combine, I think you get I think you get a Yahtzee style roll. No you don't. You get a regular roll. And then there are these blue crystals that you can spend. And each blue crystal you spend, you can reroll up to all of the dice. So you could, you could have many rerolls, but you have to spend something. Each time you reroll the dice that you have. You can trade them in based on formulas. So if you have a couple of the same dice, you get one thing. If you have three different results, you get a different thing. There's a variety of different things you can get from the dice you have. Sometimes you're able to activate one thing, sometimes you're able to do two, you can spend the dice to do a bunch of different stuff. That's your turn. I'm trying to think if you also get one action. No, the actions are the dice. You spend the dice to do things, but some of the things that you spend the days to do involve getting more tokens, getting these tokens, which then later on you'll be able to spend as though you had extra dice. You were rolling. Now the game has a variety of things. There's a path you can take where you're spending your limited resources and turns buying things that make you more efficient, which helps you in the long run. But in the short run you get behind. There are ways that you can save things you have and trade them for better things so that. Or you can save dice results you have and trade them. So then in future turns you have more results that you can spend. And then the goal of the game is to collect these jewels. There are a bunch of different ways to collect jewels. And as the game goes along, as people start collecting them, they get harder to get. They get more expensive. But the goal is if you get four jewels, you win the game. Uh, actually, if you get four jewels, you end the game and then you finish the round where everybody gets a turn. Or everybody who hasn't had a turn yet gets one. So it's even. And then you compare how many jewels everybody has. And the person with the most jewels wins. And if there are leftover, if it's a tie, then the person who has the most resources left over wins. It's an interesting game. It's a it's very it's a very light filler. Like once you know how to play, it's a fifteen minute or twenty minute game. But I really enjoyed it and I thought it would make a nice addition to the. We've got twenty minutes left. What kind of game should we play? Category of games, which since Las Vegas is in that same category, I would say. Nice job Rudiger Dorn. I'm looking forward to playing more games from him, but uh. Istanbul, the dice game was a real winner for me. Next up we have Hanabi. Hanabi is a 2010 game from Antoine Bauza with art from many different people and published originally by Abacus Spiele. Antoine Bauza is, of course, the master game designer behind Seven Wonders and Paku Paku, which is, I'm sure, the second game that everyone thinks of when they think of Antoine Bauza. Uh, he also designed ghost stories and samurai spirit and terror in Meeple City. He's got a lot of designs. This is another one. Hanabi is an excellent example of using a simple idea to build a game on, and just doing something a little bit different than most people do. In this case, in Hanabi, you get your hand of cards, but you're not allowed to look at it. You hold it up facing away from you. And then as a group, your goal is to play a stack of cards of each, each of the colors that go one, two, three, four, five. That's it. That's the whole game. The trick is that on your turn, you can only do one of three things. You can give a clue. When you give a clue to somebody, you're going to point to some of the cards in their hand And then you can either say a number like all of these cards are ones, or you can say a color. All of these cards are green. But the thing is, you're not allowed to say both color and number. You can say one or the other and you have to point to all the cards. So this gets into a really interesting situation where somebody has got one card that you want them to play, and one card you don't want them to play. You have to figure out how to signal which card it is that you want them to play. Of course, you're not allowed to talk about the strategies of the subtle implications. That's cheating. Now, if you could just give clues or play cards, that would be too easy. So there's another factor. There is a limited number of tokens, I think eight. And once those tokens have been used, each time you give a clue you use a token. You put it in the used pile. Once all the tokens have been used, you may no longer give clues. Then your choice is to either play a card or discard a card. If you play a card, you say, I'm going to play this card and you reveal it, and if it can go on one of the stacks, then it gets to go on the stack. If it can't go on one of the stacks. Then we lose a point, or we lose one of our misses and you only get three misses. The fourth miss, we lose the game. If it can go on a stack, then it gets to go on the stack. We looked it up and I don't remember off the top of my head right now. Whether you have to say which stack you're playing it on, when you declare that you're playing before you look at it, I think you do. But maybe you don't, I don't remember, it's pretty hard either way. So that's one thing you can do on your turn. That's not giving a clue. And when you do that, then you draw another card. But the clues are still what they were. The other thing you can do is discard a card. If you discard a card, then you get to put a clue back in the shared clue pool and you get to draw a new card. There are times when you definitely want to discard cards. So like for example, let's say that the yellow stack of one, two, three, four, five has a two on it already and you have a yellow two, you don't need a yellow two. You can't do anything with it. So discarding it to get a clue is exactly what you need to do. But you don't always know it's a yellow two. Sometimes you think it's a green two and maybe the green needs a two. The game also has a wider. There's like, I think there's three ones, three twos, two threes, two fours and a five of each color. So if you discard a five, the group automatically can't get the top score because there's no way to get the list to the pile to five because you discarded it. So being careful about what cards you're discarding is also part of the game. There's a little bit of luck, a little bit of mentalism and a lot of shared joy in Hanabi. This is a fun game. I like it every time I play it. It's not a it's not a game my family enjoys very much, which is actually, I don't have a copy. My copy is at school. The copy in my college board game club is the copy I own. So that. So it says how it how it goes over at my house, but I think it's really neat. I love the design conceit. Just your cards face away from you. That's a cool idea. So that is Hanabi. All right. The last game I want to talk about today is Trekking the World. Trekking the world is a 2020 design from Charlie Bink with art from Csaba Bern�th, Charlie Bink, and several other people. Trekking The World is part of a series of games that started with trekking the national parks. Then they made trekking the world they have trekking through history, I think, or trekking through time is. I think history is the third one. These are games that are about a sort of a pick up and deliver mechanism, usually with some set collection elements and mostly moving around the board. Now, if you look back, uh, trekking the national parks is a game I've played a number of times. I may have put it on my nah I'm good list. It's really an unreasonably mean. It reminds me a little bit of Ticket to ride. If Ticket to Ride were inherently cutthroat. Like Ticket to ride is often cutthroat, but you can play it relatively generously in trekking the national parks. That is not a possibility. The only way to play is cutthroat because you are aggressively competing with other people for goods and cards, and you block each other, whether intentionally or not. And it's a brutal game. Trekking the world is not nearly so aggressive. You can share spaces. There is not the same blocking, really. The only thing is the standard Euro game blocking of. I took the thing you wanted. Now that did happen to me a couple times, but I shouldn't complain too much because I did win the game so bad to complain about that. Trekking the world is a route building game where you are moving your character around the board, trying to land on different destinations and score points based on landing on those destinations. There is one set of cards that have bonuses or spiffs, and you get those if you land on the destination that is indicated on those cards. So if you land on a card, if you land on a destination where one of the cards in the spiff market is that destination, you get that card. Now, your ideal situation would be to also end up on the space for the one of your destinations that you're aiming for. Each player has a number of destinations they're trying to get as part of their quote unquote bucket list. This is an expansion, but apparently it's so, so minimal that we just put it in there as well. So if you have the ability to land on one of the spaces that your bucket list is on, all the better. That works really well. The third thing you can do is you can also get a variety of bonuses by completing different tasks. Those tasks give you bonus tokens that allow you to accelerate your way up these sort of bonus tracks, and you get points that way. So there's sort of three sets of points that you can score based on where you're landing, what kind of card you're redeeming, what kind of cubes you're getting, what kind of tokens you're getting, what kind of destinations you're completing. All in all, it's a nice middleweight game. I like it much better than trekking the national parks. It's beautifully designed with great art. It's a fun theme traveling around the world, enjoying yourself. I really like it. Definitely worth playing if you get a chance. That's trekking. The world. I hear trekking through time is even better. Or trekking through history. But I haven't played that one yet. But I'm interested to try that at some point as well. Well folks, that's about it for me today. I want to say thank you for joining me on my walk. If you have questions or comments, you can send them to me on board Game Geek through their messaging system. Wombat929 is my username there. You could also send me a direct message. brendan@rattleboxgames.com is my email. I want to say thank you for joining me in my walk today, and I hope that your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. [closing music] Brought to you by Rattlebox games.