Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Epona, Marshmallow Test, Finspan, Gizmos (revisited)
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- Epona, Marshmallow Test, Finspan, Gizmos (revisited) Transcript Welcome to Pick Up 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. [opening music] Well, greetings listeners. It's a cool day here in suburban Chicago, by which I mean, it's awesome. No, uh, it's actually mid 50s and it's April, which is about the right temperature, I guess. It's kind of a gloomy day. I asked our home hub if it thought it would rain while I was out walking today and said, probably. And it said rain is likely tonight. So dumb. AI doesn't know or smart AI knows and I'm going to complain about getting rained on, but I'm out for my afternoon constitutional on a day from work and home, and I thought I would take a chance to chat with you about some games. So let's jump into some games I've been playing. It's time for a Board Game Espresso Triple Shot. The Board Game Espresso Triple Shot is an episode segment in which I talk about three games that I've played recently. For the first time, I take quick shots of them. If you get it, an espresso shot, you got it. And one other game that I've either played a new expansion for or played or refreshed it. It's a game that's gotten dusty, and I've brought it out of the archives to try again and letting you know what I think. So it's sort of the what have I been playing version of the show? Let's jump right in. So to start with, I got a chance to play Epona. Epona, the 2025 release from Vladimir Suchy and delicious games with art from Marcella Rajasekhar. And for other people, Epona is a game about managing a stable of horses. You're a horse farmer, you have a stable, you have racehorses and workhorses, or show horses and workhorses and racehorses. And the idea is that you are gathering those horses. You're using them to breed foals. Sometimes you're studying them out to other farms. You can get points from other players from doing that, and you are trying to get a good combo of cards. It is a tableau builder built around a card drafting mechanism. The idea is that you have these. You have several stables which are the the rows, and then you're laying out cards in columns. And then all the cards have many of the cards have scoring elements on them that allow you to score points based on the other cards that are in the rows. Many of the stables themselves have scoring elements as well, and you complete a stable by getting enough of the different elements that it wants into the row before it's full, and then you're going to get points for that. There are these bonuses that you get as the you have an owner card and as you complete different things the owner wants, then you get these bonuses that you can activate. It is a kind of a light hit on a bigger system of sort of bonus accumulation, something like you would see in what's a Messina does that a little bit. The bonus accumulation. You see some of that in some of the other games. The previous Vladimir Suchy game, it reminded me most of was last Will in that it is you are bidding on groups of cards or you're taking groups of cards and the cards that you take, you then get to spend some of them, but you probably can't spend all of them, which is something that happens in last. Will you often get more cards than you can spend? I think last will is a better game. This is pretty low on my list in terms of. Well, first off, the interesting thing, the card drafting is interesting. There is a clever combination of the way that the cards interact with each other as you lay them out. So there's a real interesting challenge of trying to get your grid to be in the right row, or to be in the right arrangement to maximize your points. There is a strong element of did you just did you draw the right cards? You are trying to get cards from these different row, different piles and the decks aren't guaranteed to give you what you want. So you may really need one particular kind of card. And you could draw two or three cards out of the deck and not get that card you wanted. That part's a little frustrating, and there's a lot of iconography. So I found that the player aids were a little subpar. We did have to look some stuff up, but it also is simple enough that I think if you played it two or three times, you'd have it really solid. The downside, like I said, the drawing the cards feels very luck dependent, and it didn't feel like there was enough interest there to really drive it. This is significantly down the list on my how much I like Vladimir Suchy games. Even the games that I've purchased but not played a bunch like Woodcraft and Evacuation are both games that I think are really interesting, and I can definitely see there's stuff there to do, and it would be really fun to master those systems. Epona doesn't pay off that way. Pretty low in my list of games that I enjoy from him. I mean, I'll probably keep it because I do kind of have mostly every other game he has. I don't have monster baby rescue, but. And I don't have the one he made about the forty Niners but the miners. Not the football team. But it is not great. Or my first play of it wasn't that great. I'll give it another play or two before I shelve it indefinitely. Uh, not not the best. That was Epona 2025. Next up, we have Marshmallow Test. This is a 2020 game from, Reiner Knizia. It is a trick taking game. And the gimmick of the game is that you score points based on when you go out. Okay, so first off, to make sure you know, the marshmallow test is a classic psychological test, which I've recently learned because I looked it up when I got this game that is called the Stanford Marshmallow Test. So like the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Stanford Marshmallow test are in the same tranche of ideas, which is disturbing. But the premise is psychologists have a small child, like a two or three year old in a room, and they have one of those big campfire marshmallows on a plate with the kid, and they're like, I'm gonna leave for a little while. Don't eat this marshmallow. If you don't eat the marshmallow while I'm gone. I'll give you another marshmallow, and you can have both when I come back. If you eat the marshmallow. Then you don't get another one. The whole idea is to test children's ability to delay gratification. So delayed gratification is the is the premise of this simple yet relatively interesting trick taker. So in the game, we deal out cards as this kind of standard trick taker. In the first hand, there is no Trump. And after that, the person who's leading gets to declare Trump. And then you're trying to take tricks. But the gimmick is once you take three tricks, you're out of the hand, lay down the rest. Any cards that you have left are laid down and not played. And so your goal is to be one of the people who takes three tricks. Because if you're playing like a four hander, you can play this three, four or five players maybe, uh, if you are the last player who still has cards, you don't get any points. But everybody else, when you go out, you get as many points as other players have taken tricks. So let me say that again. When you take your third trick, your score for the hand is the number of other tricks that players have taken. So if you take the first three tricks, your score is zero. Let's say if you're playing a four player game, I think there's three, six, nine, there's ten cards in the Or eleven, eleven cards in the trick or in the hand, whatever. There's enough that three people can go out. But the fourth one, but that's that's how it works. Three people go out. One person doesn't. If you're the last person to go out, you could get like six points because there have been six other tricks that were taken before you, maybe even seven or eight, if I don't remember exactly how it works out. So there's a really interesting element where you are trying to figure out you're trying to manipulate the board so that you can go out later, but not be the last one. We only played one game of this, so several hands. I thought, it's a really neat idea. I thought it was fun. It's very simple. Like it's the kind of game we're like, hey, you guys should try this. It's interesting. And you play a couple hands of it, maybe a game or a couple games of it and like, yeah, it's a really good filler and it's got an interesting twist that you're trying to you're spending the whole game trying to figure out how to manipulate it. Like, you know, it is a trick taker. So in some ways you're hampered by the cards you have, but the whole element of trying to manipulate it. So when you get your third trick is really interesting. And I don't know that I've played any other trick takers before where people stop playing in the middle of the hand. So if you take when you take your third trick, you don't play your remaining cards. They're laid down. They're not in the trick anymore, which can really mess with card counting and trying to understand what cards are available because people are literally taking cards out of the game. It's fascinating. It's not an amazing game, but really interesting. And if you get a chance to try it, I urge you to. I'm going to hold on to it and play it a few times, I think to get a feel for it. That's marshmallow test from Reiner Knizia. I don't even know if I said that the one and only true doctor Reiner Knizia. Next up, we have Finspan. This is the most recent of the span series from Stonemaier games. These are games that are sort of adaptations or spin offs of the wingspan model. Finn Span is supposedly the lighter of the series, just like Worm Span was the heavier of the series. In my experience, worm span is a little bit heavier, and Finn Span is a little bit lighter, but not much. Toward the end of the game, there's an awful lot going on that you have to keep track of. Essentially, the big difference is you are playing vertically instead of horizontally, although you're also playing horizontally. You have, I think, six or seven rows that represent going deeper and deeper in your aquatic fish zone. And you have three columns. And the column where you play the fish then determines what kind of thing you get, and you get to activate a column and move your worker down the column. The way you move birds across the rows in wingspan. Of course, in this game it's all a bunch of fish instead of birds, and a lot of the fish have really interesting powers. There's a whole thing where the fish eat other fish. So in order to play a fish, you have to put it on top of another fish that's smaller than it. I liked this quite a bit. I think if I didn't have wingspan, it certainly would be on the option to pick up. As is true of wyrmspan as well. But we've played enough wingspan. I don't really need another �span� game, but I would happily play this one again if people introduced it. I will say I thought wyrmspan was a little more complicated than it needed to be, and I did not find that to be the case with Finspan. I thought this was right where it should be and was pretty good as usual. Great art. You can always count on Stonemaier to put really good art into a game, and there is no doubt that that happened with Finspan. It's designed by David Gordo and Michael O'Connell with art from Catalina Martinez, Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo, and Mesa Schumacher. Oh, Street cleaner going by! I feel like there was one other thing I wanted to share about Finspan that I thought was pretty interesting. There's this whole thing where the eggs hatch and they turn into little, little fish, which then turn into schools of little fish. I love that it's so different than the way that the eggs work in wingspan, where you spend the eggs to play other cards. You do that a little bit with the fish and fin span, but mostly you hatch the fish and turn them into point scoring tokens. I like it, it's a cool it's a cool twist on the system. Yeah. Overall, I give finspan approval. If you haven't played it and you think it sounds fun, you should give it a try. And finally, I dusted off Gizmos. Gizmos is a 2018 game from Phil Walker Harding and publisher C�Mon. Gizmos is a light engine builder with a really clever acceleration. It is essentially a very strong engine builder. I really like the effective speed that it works at. It is almost always a half an hour, and it gets really exciting as the game goes along, because you start having more and more machines that you can trigger. It is one of those games where you can kind of see who's winning well ahead of somebody winning, which is a little frustrating sometimes because you can tell three turns out that you're probably not going to win. But overall, it's a delightful approach to gameplay. I haven't even explained how the game works. In the game, you are building a tableau of little machines that are called gizmos. By taking four simple actions, the actions are to collect energy balls, which are these little marbles, or build a machine, or get plans for a machine, or search for plans for a machine. That's really all you're doing. One of those four and the machines you build then all have triggers so that when you do something, you get to do something else. So at the end of the game, when you take a turn, you're then triggering a whole bunch of other things. I've found that it's really useful. I've added a set of little cubes to my game so that in late stage, when you're triggering a bunch of machines, you can put cubes on them. Remember which machines you've triggered because it's really easy to forget, and you're only allowed to trigger each machine once. It had been two years and four months since I played that game, and I wish it hadn't been as long. I really like it. It's tight, it's easy to play. It's got fun interaction with the other players as you race to win and you take the machines they want, but it is generally pretty friendly. So it is one of the pinnacles of Phil Walker Harding's design career. As far as I'm concerned. I really like it. That is gizmos. Well, that's about it for me today. I hope that you have played some of those games. If so, head over to BoardGameGeek Guild 3269 and let me know. Otherwise, thanks for joining me in my walk today. I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. [closing music] Brought to you by Rattlebox games.