Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Virgo gamers (Astrology files)
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- Pick Up and Deliver 864: Virgo gamers (Astrology files) 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 ] Greetings, listeners. It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. I'm enjoying my walk home. Well, I was looking at the list of episodes I've done recently and thinking about what I might record today, and I realized that it has been about three months since I recorded a Zodiac episode. Now, sometimes there's much bigger gaps than that, but if I ever want to finish this series, I need to do it. When I think of it, and when there is a available zodiac sign to do. It turns out the current sign is Virgo, which I have not covered yet. So today I'm going to do pick up and deliver gamer astrology. So as I usually do with this format, I have picked out several characteristics that allure dot com's what your star sign says about your personality article says about the personality of Virgo. And I'm going to use those to say what kinds of games you should play. If you were born in September and you think this stuff is worth thinking about. Okay, so let's start with. First off, the article tells me that Virgo is the goddess of wheat and the harvest. This is sort of a gimme for your eurogamers. Many, many European board games focus on farming in various ways. I think because it is a orderly, predictable practice or relatively predictable. Very few farming games that I've played involve things like changing crop yields or having the crops fail. My wife and I took a trip to the The maritime provinces of Canada, and we went to a potato museum. And one of the things that was stunning was just how many different ways potato crops could fail. But that's rarely in board games. So the goddess of wheat governs how Virgos operate or seems to. So if you're going to play a game that's about wheat and you want to think about wheat, the game to play is clearly going to be Agricola, which is all about planting wheat and then also planting pumpkins later, or vegetables, I guess. But it's a pumpkin in the thing. Many of Rosenberg games have a similar thing. I was also thinking of mosaic, a story of civilization uses wheat and fish as the different symbols for food. And then there are lots of other games that use wheat. I guess it's a central crop for Europe. And so there's a lot of games that use wheat as the primary foodstuff that you're growing. So farming games are obviously the thing to do. If you are a Virgo gamer. Next up, the article tells me that Virgo people are logical, practical, and systemic. Once again, it seems like Virgo is the ultimate star sign if you want to play Eurogames. Eurogames generally are meant to be practical and systemic. They are usually about trying to figure out how a system works and use it to the best of your ability, using logic to see connections between different pieces and to optimize those connections. As I think about games where the system is sort of strongest, I think about games like Trickerion, in which the economy is very tight, and you're thinking about how to handle a variety of inputs and the way to best get points while managing the very tight income you have. And then and then the Simone Luciani games like Darwin's Journey or Grand Austria Hotel. I don't think that one Simone Luciani it might be, though. These are games where there are systems of rewards and benefits, and as you play, you become more efficient in managing those systems till at the end you are really racking up lots of points from what appears to be a complicated and difficult system. Tzolkin is the sort of grandparent of that genre as far as I'm concerned. It's one of the first. I think it's Simone Luciani and Daniele Tacchini together games where they are working with this very complex system, and your job is to manipulate the system as efficiently as you can to get lots of points. One of the things that makes these games really interesting is that people who are good at them are can get just incredibly high scores over people who aren't good at them. And that it's fascinating to play a game like that where you can't always tell what they're doing to get such good scores, or you like it seems like you built a thing and I built a thing, but now you've got twice as much stuff as I do. Um, is sort of the experience I've had with that. When I'm playing with somebody who's much better than I am. And some of those games will click for me and I get a sense of how to make, how to do a good job playing them. And some of those games just will not open up. I cannot unpack their secrets, but perhaps that's because I'm not a Virgo. In fact, I'm the opposite of Virgo. I am a Gemini. And in this article it specifically said Gemini and Vertigo interact with the same forces but have opposite outcomes, which I'm not sure exactly what that means, except maybe I'm not logical. I don't know. The next category of personality trait that was suggested by this article was that you, Virgos are meticulous and perfectionist. Now, this was sort of presented as one of the negative sides of Virgos, and I can see that. And I think that that comes into play in the games we've been talking about already, but also other games where there are lots of different moving pieces, and you have to think about how they all interconnect. In particular, I'm thinking about certain games. These are ones where there's usually an intricate system of circular resource use, and getting into that system is difficult, and being efficient with it is difficult. But when you manage to do that, particularly in on Mars, you can get a pretty robust system going. But those games often do have a moment where you think you're going to do something and then you're missing something. And so you can't do that thing and you can't do the next thing. This also happens, I think, in many of the games I like most from Vladimir Suchy. The last play I have of Messina 1347, for example, my last three turns, I basically made one bad choice on the fourth to last turn about where I put a person, and then I wasn't able to do something on the third turn, which then led me to not being able to do something on the second to last turn, which then my final turn was basically just wasted. And I had all these plans to get like basically two or three more achievements in those last four turns. And I didn't accomplish any of them. It was pretty heartbreaking. I ended up losing by more than twenty points, which is fine. The other players did very well and absolutely, but it was a little crushing knowing, knowing that I did it to myself. By Misplaying one or two turns halfway through the final round or second two turns into the final round. I misplayed something in that and that was enough. So I guess again, I'm not a vertigo. I'm not. I'm not a Virgo. So I'm not meticulous in the way that they are and the way that those kinds of games really reward you. Uh, the other place that being meticulous might pay to your benefit would be detective or mystery games like Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective or deduction games like cryptid. Uh, both of these kinds of games involve really thinking through what's going on and drawing inferences and making leaps. Uh, I really like that about both of them. They function in different ways. There's a lot more induction inductive reasoning going on in Sherlock Holmes, whereas deductive reasoning is more in the puzzle games like Cryptid or Turing Machine or got five. Got Five is the one I've been playing recently. It's pretty short. It's like twenty minutes. But it's a really interesting puzzle in which you are trying to figure out which five tiles you have in front of you, and there's a whole bunch of logic that goes into which tiles you have in front of you, and thinking about how you understand which tile is which, and how you eliminate the ones you have. It's just very effective, really interesting. I like it a lot. We've played it several times at toggle, and I feel like it's a going to be a regular for me. I haven't yet decided to purchase it, but I might. It's really good. It's got five, which would be a perfect game for somebody who's a meticulous perfectionist. Last, the characteristic that this article says is most dominant in Virgo is to be helpful and supportive of others. So thinking about what are some cooperative games, most cooperative games you are supportive of others. That is the thing. But I was thinking about, are there games where you specifically help other people? And there are two that I could think of right off the bat that explicitly involve helping. The first one is Big Book of Madness. This is a game where you have a bunch of resource cards that give you magical power. And one of the things you can do is commit those magical power cards to your public space. And when they're in your public space, other players can use them. You're offering help to other players. And sometimes you end up using your whole turn just to put these powers into place so that other players are able to use them on their turn. And this is a really effective technique because sometimes other players will have access to a spell that's going to be more useful than the one you have access to right now. Or you're just trying to get more cards into play. You always refill your hand at the end of the turn, so if you can get cards into the sharing area, then those are cards that aren't in your hand and you're able to draw more cards. It's a really effective tool and makes for a really interesting game. The other game where helping is a significant piece of what you're doing is daybreak. This is another Matt Leacock game from the designer of pandemic. This one is about trying to prevent worldwide ecological collapse. And you play as one of four major powers trying to work on this problem. It's a really thorough and interesting game. Maybe there's five major powers. It's a thorough and interesting game, really complex, but useful. Thinking about how to tackle this problem positively and more importantly, an interesting mechanism for helping other players. So I really like the way that the game encourages you to collaborate and resolve problems together. That is daybreak. Finally, the symbol of Virgo itself is, as I said at the beginning, represented by a goddess of wheat and agriculture. I wonder if that is connected to the Persephone myth. Uh, Persephone being the Greek god. I don't know if Virgo is the Roman equivalent, but she is lured into. Or she is kidnapped and taken to the underworld. And while she is there, she eats some pomegranate seeds. And so she has to. And that then she has to stay. But the gods are mad that she was kidnapped. So they work out a deal where she has to stay half the year. And that's sort of the Greek mythological explanation of winter. And so given that she's got a oh, I guess Demeter is the Greek god of agriculture, goddess of agriculture, hearth and home. So if Romans used the same one, that would be Virgo, I guess. So we've already talked about agriculture being part of the thing. It's part of the game. There are a couple of games that have to do with Olympic gods. There's Virgo, uh, Olympus. You actually can invoke the Greek gods. There's also Santorini in which the gods help you in trying to achieve your goals. Well, that's about it. I'd love to hear if you're a Virgo, do any of these sound like they fit your personality? If you have other advice for Virgos who want to play games, I'd love to hear it. You can head over to BoardGameGeek Guild three, two, six, nine and share your thoughts there. I'd also love to get email from you Brendan at rattlebox dot com. Or if you wanted to send a direct message to me on BoardGameGeek. Wombat929 is my username there. Well, I want to say thank you for joining me on my walk today. I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. [ exit music ] Brought to you by Rattlebox games.