Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Everdell: Emerland; Darwin’s Journey; Tranquility; Thunder Road: Vendetta (revisited)
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- Pick Up & Deliver 855: Everdell: Emerland; Darwin's Journey; Tranquility; Thunder Road: Vendetta (revisited) Transcript Welcome to Pickup and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step out for a walk and deliver an episode to you while I stroll around. I'm Brendan Riley. [ intro music ] Well, greetings listeners. It is a lovely, if a little gloomy day here in suburban Chicago. It is on the brink of rain, but hopefully it won't. I am on my way home from the walk doing the second half of a walk. I just finished recording the board game espresso episode about GenCon, and then just looking ahead at episodes I've banked and episodes that are still coming. I had this one to record, so I'm talking to you now about more games I played recently. That's right. It's time for another Board Game Espresso Triple Shot. You should order up. For those of you new to the podcast, the Board Game Espresso Triple Shot is a segment in which I talk about games I've tried recently for the first time. And maybe one or one I've dusted off or played an expansion or something like that. This isn't a full review episode because I'm not. I haven't played these games in depth enough to do a review of them, but it's more like first impressions. What are some things I noticed on playing the game for the first or second time, and what can I tell you to help guide you in your spending of your time on board games? Let's jump right in. First game I got to play is Everdell Emerland. So if you have never played any of these games before, Everdell is a game about building an a village in a forest, and all of the characters in the village are little anthropomorphized creatures, and they trade in resources like berries, wood, stone, and resin. In the game you are doing a variety of different things. There is a worker placement element. As the game goes along, you get more and more workers to use. There is a card play element where you have cards that you can play by spending resources. There is an escalation element where if you play a card that that is a location. All the cards have a little icon on them that indicates who, like which creature of the forest works on that building. And if you have that card from that creature in the forest, you then get to play that as well. Everdell has a couple things that make it really different than a lot of board games. It does not run on the same rounds. You decide when your round is over, meaning that the rhythm of the game is very much dependent on watching other players. When they decide to reset, then they will take their characters off of spaces and those become available again. And there's also a card market in the middle that you can never buy from, but you can always play from. So the entire card market of eight cards, I think, is basically as if it's in your hand the whole time. You can't discard from it. But if you want to build a card, you can always use one from the market. There's a whole bunch of other stuff too. It's a very combo-tastic game. It's a game very much where once you've played a few times, you just become very efficient in ways that you can't. There's really nice mechanism where you can only have fifteen cards in your display, so you bump up against that if you're not careful. You've loaded up with a bunch of engine building cards, and then you don't have any room for the high score point scoring cards. It's delicious. So that is Everdell. That's the base game. They've released several expansions for it, and a couple years ago now, they released a complete collection box that collected the, I think four expansions they had released for the base game of Everdell. And then they started releasing spin off games. So instead of releasing expansions, more expansions upon more expansions, they released standalone spin off games for in the Everdell world. And as far as I know, there are three of them so far there's Everdell. What's the Far Shore, Everdell Silver Lake and now Everdell Emerland. We played Far Shore and it did not really go well for us. It was okay, But the scoring. The scoring effect was different enough that we didn't really like it. And mostly we were just like, why are we playing this instead of regular everdell? What does this get us? Except less stuff because it doesn't have all the expansion. So we sold Everdell far shore and we haven't played any of the others thus far. I have friends however, who are are all in on all the everdell. And so recently one of those friends, hi Paul brought over Everdell Ember land for us to try or ammerland not Ember land. Excuse me if I've said that Ammerland Ammerland is sort of themed around emeralds, and it is the crunchiest apparently of the Everdell. It's certainly more crunchy than base Everdell. The economy is tighter. They change the rules about when you get to play the free character, you now have to acquire a resource. These little mirrors I think they are in order to play one of the free characters that you're supposed to get because you have a building, it's no longer free. You have to have this resource like the original Everdell. You have to build an engine and then shift that engine into point scoring. There are a variety of different things that they've borrowed from other expansions. Like there is this an adventure trail where there's like one piece that you're moving along this track and you pay resources to move it each time. The further it gets, the more points you get, but you also get bonuses. It's very lost ruins of NAC, but also reminds me of the of one of the expansions, Spire Crest. I think of Base Game, which included a track that your character is moving along. There are a few other differences in mechanisms, and overall, the game is much more crunchy. The. There's more overlapping, more opportunity to twist the. Than knobs and pull the levers in ways that will get you one extra thing. Maryland is a brain burn in a way that I think Everdell is not, and I really liked it for that reason. That said, I have plenty of brain burning games, and while I liked it, it wasn't good enough that it's going to displace some other game, or I'm going to go out and buy it, particularly because my friend has it, so I'm not going to pick up a copy for myself. Also, the completionist in me is almost all the way there with regular everdell, and so getting another one of these spin offs would probably push me toward getting the other ones as well. And we already don't play everdell enough. So that is Everdell Emerland. Pretty great. Designed by James Wilson and Clarissa Wilson with art from Lena, Cosette and David Forrest, published by Tycoon Games. That's the 2026 game. Next up is the 2023 game Darwin's Journey. This is Simone Luciani, nester Megan Mangone, uh, Christiane Nederlanden, uh, with art from Christian der Nederlanden and Paolo Votto, published by Thundergriff games. One of the things I really like about Thundergriff Games, the publisher makes an effort to make them slim. These games come in boxes very similar to the size of the non-fancy version of the brass game of brass. Birmingham or Brass? Uh, Lancashire. They're sort of the same square shape and size as the ticket to ride box, but about half the depth. Really compact and it works great. Darwin's journey. You are one of Darwin's assistants going on the journey on the Beagle with him as he goes around learning about animals and coming up with a theory of evolution. It's a tracks on tracks game. You have little explorers on each of these three different islands, which are a track which are tracks, and as you complete, as you move it along, you get bonuses and you also build up the sort of engine which gives you more bonuses. When you do things and cascades back into itself. You are trying to get papers, quote unquote, published so that you gain these ideas that will help you work with Darwin as he works on his ideas of evolution, but also gain you fame and glory. If you have played any of the recent Simone Luciani games, the tracks on tracks, ones like Newton or to a degree, Lorenzo IL Magnifico, although not really. You have played a similar game there. It feels very much in the wheelhouse of that designer and not, but not in a bad way. The action selection mechanism is pretty interesting. The choices that you're making about when and where you go work really well. It is a brain burn, crunchy game with a tight economy where you're constantly trying to decide like, do I go and put this in the museum now and get money for putting it there? Or do I wait till someone else has put some more stuff in and then put it in there for points? There are end game scoring conditions that you can work toward. There are points you get during the game. You're increasing the effectiveness of your pieces. I think this game is full of little corners where you can figure out a way to do a thing you want to do. Often somebody will want to do a thing. So they were doing like two or three other things that cascaded into each other to get to that one thing they wanted to do. And from that perspective, it's really interesting. I can see why this game is beloved and I will happily play it again. I don't know that it certainly isn't different enough for me to seek out my own copy. It's not going to displace anything in my collection, but if I had it in place of something else, if I already had it and there was another game, you know, this would, I could happily play this instead of your Newton, which I don't have. Or your Lorenzo IL magnifico, which I don't have, or even tzolkin. I like Tzolkin a lot. I think the wheel mechanism is neat. I think I like this game better. I mean, the real lesson here is that someone Luciani is not my favorite. There's a reason I like Vladimir Suchy games, not Simone Luciani, even though they are pretty similar, I think a little bit more of the taste that Suchy has for how you build combos and how you acquire things fits my appetite better than Simone Luciani, and I shouldn't neglect Nestor. Megan Mangone either. So Thunder grift games. Darwin's journey very fun. Definitely worth playing if you get a chance. A nice crunchy, heavy or mid mid to heavy euro a delight. Next up I got a chance to dust off Thunder Road Vendetta. It was two years, six months and five days. Dusty. I believe this is either my second or third game of Thunder Road vendetta. Thunder Road Vendetta was designed by Dave Chalker, Brett Myers and five more people with art from Marie Bergeron and Garrett Kaida. Published by Restoration Games. Restoration games, if you don't know, is a publisher who. They publish some original stuff too, but one of the things they do is they go find designs from the past that they think have a lot of character and a lot of value, but have gone out of print and been neglected, and they update those designs and bring them forward. Thunder Road Vendetta is a remake of an old game called Thunder Road, which had a similar function, but this one is much more elaborate and interesting. This game is pretty fun in abstract. I love the idea of it, but it takes way too long. Honestly, it's the same problem I have with Roborally. I love the idea of it. It takes way too long to do. This is the kind of game that's most fun when there are six players, but that means five other players take their turns between you getting to move your car and you get to move your car. Sometimes there's fun, dice and stuff. It's also a pretty random game. You move your car, you're going to roll some dice. Sometimes you're going to crash into things. Sometimes you're going to blow people up. You do get three or four cars depending on which faction you're playing. So sometimes you get extra. You like you're not out the first time one of your cars crash. But this is a game that does have a player elimination element and it is a racing game. So all that, I don't know if that makes it sound like I enjoyed it or not. I didn't have a lot of fun. While it was good, it was too slow for my taste. It is very, very confrontational. Really, your choice is shoot other people or run away from other people. Those are the kinds of things you do. And often you do both. You run away with one of your characters and shoot with the other. There's a ton of luck involved with the dice, which is part and parcel of this sort of game, this kind of thematic romp, stomping, crashing, crazy game. Sure, I understand that's how it goes. I think that's fine. I. It just wasn't very fun. Um, it was okay, but I would like it to be more fun. I don't know how that would happen without ruining the character of the game. It might be that I am a sourpuss, but this is the second time I played the game, and the second time I thought it was just okay. Not really for me. I think I'm not going to put it on my. Nah, I'm good list yet. I will try it one more time. Maybe third time's a charm. Maybe I'll be in the right mood. Maybe it'll be one of the expansions that clicks for me. But overall, not really my thing. But if you think it sounds fun to play like mad Max, The road, the Road Warrior, the Board Game, or mad Max Fury Road, the board game, you should. Because that is. That's what's going on with Thunder Road vendetta. All right. Finally I got to try the cooperative game Tranquility from James Emerson. Tristram Rawson and published by Board Game Hub. Although I could have sworn that I have seen it in the last couple of years at the booth for all play. I did not see all play listed as one of the publishers, so I don't know if they have more recently bought that and it hasn't been updated on board Game Geek. Or maybe they are selling the game for Board Game Hub, but they might not be publishing it. I don't know, but I feel like I have seen it there and it fits with the aesthetic of their tiny box games. Tranquility is a solo game or a cooperative game about sailing your ship through the ocean, trying to get from one port to another. Sounds simple enough. In the game there are eighty cards and there is a grid with something like forty eight slots or maybe forty slots. Eighty cards in forty slots. That sounds about right. On your turn, you are going to play a card into the grid, discard some cards, and then draw back up to five at the. If. When the deck runs out, there's no recycling the deck. We just. That is the end of the deck. And then once everybody has run out of cards or either gotten to a point where they can't play. Actually, if anybody gets to a point where they can't play, the game is over unless you've successfully filled in the whole grid. So how's the game work? On the cards? Are numbers, like I said, from one to eighty. I didn't say that, but they're numbered from one to eighty. The idea is you're going to fill in the whole grid, and the cards always have to go from lowest to highest, left to right. So the bottom left corner is the lowest card. Then you're going to go straight across the bottom until you've until you get to the other side. And then you go up to the next row with. And on the left side of the next row is the card that's higher than the right side of the previous row. So you do that for all the rows, all the columns. Game over. You don't have to place them in order. Of course you can place them anywhere in the grid. And the tricky part is whenever you place a card, you pick if it's directly next to one card and one card only, then you don't have a choice. If it's if it's in between two cards, then directly in between two, then you have a choice. What you do is you evaluate how far apart are the cards. You have to discard that many cards. So if you put the forty nine next to the fifty, you discard one card. If you put the forty seven next to the fifty, you have to discard three cards. So that is the challenge. You have five cards in your hand. On your turn, you play one card and you discard up to, I guess, four. You can pretty much never play a card that's further from its edge than that. Now you can have two cards next, like you could have, let's say there's three cards in a row and it goes thirty five, forty, forty five, forty six. You would only if you're putting the forty five in, you would only pay one card because you get to pick which side, which gap you want to pay for. And that's really the game there are trying to think if there were some cards that did something else. Oh, there's a start card. There are five start cards in the deck and or maybe three three start cards in the deck. When one of them comes out, it gets immediately played, and then everyone has to discard some number of cards. I don't remember exactly how we know. Or I think as a group you have to discard five cards, but it can be any any mix of the players who does that. Then they draw back up to five. And at the end of the game you have to. I think there are five. There are number of players plus one end cards in the deck. So if you're playing with four players, there's five of them in the deck. And when you get to the end of the game where you filled in the whole grid, the player whose turn it is after the whole grid is filled in has to play a the end card, a finished card, and if they don't, you lose. Now you can pass. I just remembered you could pass and when you pass, you discard two cards and draw back up to five. So the problem is there's only eighty cards in the deck. You have to spend cards every time you play them, so you really can't discard too many before it becomes very difficult to win the game. I really like tranquility. It's a simple game without too much complexity. I like the way that the different pieces overlap and, um, the puzzle involved. Well, that's about it for me today. I want to say thanks for joining me on my walk. If you'd like to reach out, I'm over on boardgamegeek username is wombat929. You can drop me an email, brendan@rattleboxgames.com, or you can connect with me on asynchronous board game spaces like Board game arena and yukata dot de and all of those places. My username is wombat929. I want to say, thanks 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.