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Look Back at 2009 · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:00
  Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step
• 0:07
  off the train and deliver an episode to you while I walk home.
• 0:11
  I'm Brendan Riley.
• 0:12
  Well, good afternoon listeners.
• 0:23
  It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago.
• 0:25
  It's partly cloudy, so the sun is up in the sky and we've got puffs of clouds.
• 0:29
  That are thick enough, they're gray on the bottom, but you can still see around them,
• 0:33
  so they've got little rings of white along the cottony edges, and you can see plenty of
• 0:38
  blue sky as well.
• 0:39
  It's very windy though, apologies if the microphone's picking up some wind.
• 0:43
  I do have the little fuzz ball on it, so it shouldn't get too much wind, but sometimes
• 0:48
  you still get a little bit of it.
• 0:50
  On my way home today I went and looked, and it's been a little while since I've done
• 0:55
  a Look Back at a year episode, so I thought I would give one of those a try.
• 1:00
  First one of season eight.
• 1:02
  I mean, if you don't count the best games of 2023, which I don't count, because that's
• 1:07
  the thing I do every year.
• 1:09
  So for those of you new to a Look Back episode, the idea of these is that I am looking
• 1:14
  back at a year of gaming from before I was doing the podcast and naming my top five games
• 1:19
  and some superlatives from that year.
• 1:22
  Now, as I get further and further back in time, there are fewer and fewer games that I've
• 1:26
  played that make it worth considering.
• 1:29
  Pretty soon I'm going to have to start doing like two or even three years at a time in
• 1:33
  order to have a big enough pool that it makes it worthwhile to do a top five.
• 1:37
  You know, if I've only played eight games doing a top five feels a little silly, but it
• 1:41
  turns out 2009 was either a robust year for the board game industry, or
• 1:48
  it somehow been a robust year for old games to cross my transom.
• 1:52
  But either way, I have played a fair number of games from 2009 enough that I feel comfortable
• 1:58
  doing a top five.
• 2:00
  So in that regard, let's jump in.
• 2:04
  First I will say, of course, normally I don't allow games that are in my top 50 to be considered.
• 2:11
  And there is one game that is not currently in my top 50 that has been before, but I am
• 2:17
  allowing it because it's not currently in my top 30 and that is Shipyard.
• 2:20
  Shipyard is of course Vladimir Suchy's first sort of big complicated design.
• 2:26
  The previous to that he had published a game called The League of Six, which is pretty
• 2:30
  interesting.
• 2:31
  And after that he published 20th Century and a game called Klondike, like 1836 or something,
• 2:38
  I haven't played that one and it's not well reviewed, so I'm not striving to find it and
• 2:41
  then Last Will after that.
• 2:43
  The Shipyard was 2009 kind of burst onto the scene and made big waves.
• 2:48
  I haven't played the new edition that he brought out last year, published with his new Delicious
• 2:53
  Games company.
• 2:54
  The people on So Very Wrong About Games did not, they were not glowing about it, but I
• 2:59
  don't know that they were glowing about Shipyard to begin with.
• 3:02
  And I think that they don't like the sort of chaotic puzzliness of some of his games.
• 3:10
  They really like Pulsar 2849, which I feel is kind of an outlier for him compared to
• 3:14
  some of the other designs.
• 3:16
  But so my number one game from 2009 is Shipyard.
• 3:22
  I brought that one up first because it had been in my top 50, so that one is my number one,
• 3:27
  now I'm going to go 5-4-3-2.
• 3:29
  So my number five game from 2009 is a Vlada Chvaatil, so another CGE game and this
• 3:39
  is Dungeon Lords.
• 3:40
  Dungeon Lords is a game of simultaneous action bidding and resource management followed
• 3:49
  by a sort of cascade of challenges.
• 3:51
  So the way the game works, you play an evil monster of some sort who owns a dungeon and you
• 3:58
  are trying to build the dungeon to be a place where you and your monsters can hang out and
• 4:03
  enjoy yourselves.
• 4:04
  But of course those pesky adventurers keep coming in and wrecking all your stuff.
• 4:08
  So your goal is to build a dungeon that is going to earn you points mostly by defeating the
• 4:14
  adventurers when they come in.
• 4:15
  You can make these traps and other things.
• 4:19
  You can kind of see the adventurers coming, you don't always know which one is going to
• 4:21
  come to get you.
• 4:23
  The thing that makes the game really interesting is the action selection mechanism.
• 4:28
  So the way the game works, you have a bunch of different actions that you can take and
• 4:32
  you're going to pick which actions you want to send your minions to.
• 4:38
  And I'm trying to remember, I don't particularly remember the order in which, like if you pick
• 4:45
  which one you're going to first and that sort of thing, but you have to plan it out ahead
• 4:50
  of time.
• 4:51
  Yeah, that sort of is, you pick which ones you're going to win and you plan it out ahead
• 4:54
  of time.
• 4:55
  And then when you send your workers, they go in the first, second or third slot and each
• 4:59
  one pays off a little differently and gets to go a little bit differently.
• 5:02
  So if you're like the first one to go there, you're going to get different results than
• 5:07
  if you're the second or third one to get there.
• 5:10
  So the tricky part is trying to balance when your workers are going to go there and what
• 5:14
  order they are going to land in.
• 5:16
  And that's what makes the game really interesting is this balance between those two things.
• 5:21
  Dungeon Lords is a pretty interesting game.
• 5:23
  It's very finicky by today's standards.
• 5:25
  It's a little clunky, but it's pretty enjoyable.
• 5:30
  If you're interested in the early Vlada Chvaatil game design, you can't do much worse than Dungeon
• 5:35
  Lords.
• 5:36
  It's pretty fun... Er... you can't do much better than Dungeon Lords.
• 5:39
  It's pretty fun.
• 5:40
  So my number four game from 2009 is Arctic Scavengers.
• 5:44
  Arctic Scavengers is a deck building game in the shadow of Dominion.
• 5:51
  It works very much like Dominion did in that you have a market of cards that you can purchase
• 5:56
  from and you have a starting deck and you use the starting deck to buy the cards that
• 6:02
  you're purchasing.
• 6:03
  The gimmick or the tricky part of the game, the thing that makes it most interesting is
• 6:07
  that the cards have a variety of different actions on them, not just one.
• 6:11
  So there's several different things you can do.
• 6:13
  And then on top of that, there is this thing called the skirmish.
• 6:16
  And this part, I think, is a pretty neat gimmick.
• 6:18
  You have your five cards in your hand.
• 6:21
  And on your turn, you can play as many of them as you like to do things.
• 6:26
  But any that you don't play, then go into your skirmish pile, then go into your skirmish
• 6:31
  pile.
• 6:32
  The round is over and everyone has played their cards.
• 6:35
  Then there is a skirmish and everyone reveals the people they've sent to the skirmish.
• 6:40
  And the player who sent the strongest group to the skirmish wins the card off of the skirmish
• 6:46
  deck, which is not something you can buy.
• 6:48
  Generally, it's really good.
• 6:49
  It's a really good person or equipment.
• 6:52
  In addition, the first player each round, which rotates, got to peak at the skirmish deck.
• 6:59
  So they know how good the skirmish card is or whether it will fit their design or not.
• 7:04
  In terms of game flow, it is very much in the style of dominion.
• 7:08
  You are trying to gain points through having lots of people in your deck, which is like
• 7:13
  a community and a sort of post-apocalyptic frozen landscape.
• 7:17
  The tricky part is that you have to choose when to start going for more and more people,
• 7:22
  but that will clog your deck up and you won't be able to be efficient.
• 7:25
  All in all, Arctic Scavengers just is really good.
• 7:26
  I think it's very good once you add in the expansions, which did come after 2009, but I'm kind
• 7:32
  of counting them in my consideration of the game.
• 7:35
  And thus, it is my number four game of 2009, Arctic Scavengers.
• 7:39
  My number three game of 2009 is Small World.
• 7:42
  Small World is a reimagining of an older game called Vinci.
• 7:47
  And it is an area control game with a very clever theme of having to retire your forces.
• 7:54
  So the idea is you have a civilization and you get to take over stuff on the board and
• 7:59
  you get points for the land you hold.
• 8:01
  And at some point on your turn, instead of trying to take over more land, you can choose
• 8:05
  to retire your civilization.
• 8:07
  And then they go into decline and then you take a new group instead.
• 8:12
  The new group then has sort of robust new team energy and you still score points for
• 8:18
  your previous group until they are wiped off the board.
• 8:20
  So there is this really nice mechanism by which you want to, and the game has attrition
• 8:26
  built in, so it is very hard to just keep using the same group.
• 8:30
  Like they are going to get weaker as time goes by.
• 8:32
  And so what you really want to do is have a burst of effective energy, get as many points
• 8:37
  as you can in a round or two, and then retire and bring out the next one at the opportune
• 8:42
  moment to get the next points.
• 8:45
  The gimmick of the game is that the civilizations that are available are not set.
• 8:49
  They are tactically decided.
• 8:51
  So there is a deck of races and a deck of powers.
• 8:54
  And each group that comes out goes into this river from which you can buy from that has
• 8:59
  the combines a race with the power.
• 9:01
  And so each game you have to kind of evaluate is this race with this power, a good combination
• 9:07
  or is it a bad combination.
• 9:09
  And when you go to select a new one, you have to pay to take it.
• 9:13
  If you take the bottom one, it is free.
• 9:15
  Which additional one that you go up the river, you have to pay a point to take.
• 9:20
  So there is this element of spending victory points in order to take a better one.
• 9:26
  But also later if someone then takes that one, it has got victory points on it.
• 9:30
  That is the crux of small world.
• 9:32
  And then it is like fantasy races.
• 9:34
  It is a really good game.
• 9:35
  If you haven't played it, it is definitely worth checking out.
• 9:37
  There is a reason it is still in print.
• 9:39
  It is a classic Small World.
• 9:40
  All right, my number two game from 2009 is the best social deduction game they have made
• 9:47
  as far as I am concerned.
• 9:48
  This is The Resistance.
• 9:50
  The Resistance is essentially the answer to how do we make a social deduction game like
• 9:55
  Werewolf, but fun.
• 9:58
  The Resistance is the answer.
• 9:59
  So my problems with Werewolf are twofold.
• 10:02
  One, generally you are operating from zero information.
• 10:06
  In Werewolf, you don't know anything if you are not a Werewolf.
• 10:09
  And when the game became a published and evolved thing, there started to be these roles that
• 10:14
  did have information.
• 10:15
  But still significant portions of the people in the game did not have any information at
• 10:18
  all.
• 10:19
  And the second part is that people get kicked out of the game.
• 10:22
  Sometimes like one round in, you haven't gotten to do hardly anything in your out of the
• 10:26
  game.
• 10:27
  That is not fun.
• 10:28
  So the solution to that is The Resistance where there is always just five rounds.
• 10:33
  There are some people that have roles and some people that don't.
• 10:37
  But as the game goes along, you have this information that emerges in how people vote for things.
• 10:43
  There are also some cards that come with it if you want to play with these bonus cards.
• 10:46
  Those aren't part of the original game.
• 10:47
  But I think they add a lot to adding, complicated and sometimes reliable, but sometimes difficult
• 10:54
  to rock information to the flow of the game.
• 10:58
  I really like The Resistance.
• 10:59
  I think it's an amazing game.
• 11:01
  It holds up over time.
• 11:02
  I haven't played it in a while, but every time I do play it, it's really good.
• 11:06
  I think it is best of breed.
• 11:08
  I think it is much better than Secret Hitler.
• 11:10
  I think it is much better than some of the other ones that are still fun.
• 11:14
  Like Donner Dinner Party is fun, but I like The Resistance better.
• 11:18
  So top notch, The Resistance.
• 11:21
  Definitely great to play if you get a chance.
• 11:23
  The Resistance: Avalon is just as good.
• 11:25
  It's got a slightly tweaked rules, but also very, very good.
• 11:30
  But The Resistance is my number two game.
• 11:34
  My number one game from 2009, as I said, is Shipyard.
• 11:37
  Like I said, Shipyard is this complex debut from Vladimir Suchy.
• 11:41
  You are building these big ships and then running them on shakedown cruises in these canals.
• 11:47
  And you get points for the variety of different additions that you made to the ship, the variety
• 11:52
  of different features that you added to it, and the people who are interested in buying
• 11:56
  those features and additions.
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  It's a game with these really complex and interesting randals.
• 12:01
  It's sort of like the design, like Vladimir Suchy said, oh you like rondels, huh?
• 12:06
  Here's a game with rondels on rondels.
• 12:09
  And from that perspective, really cool.
• 12:11
  Not a lot more to say about it.
• 12:13
  I have talked about Shipyard in the past.
• 12:15
  It is an excellent game.
• 12:17
  The old rule of it being the top 50 gets delayed a little bit there because it has been
• 12:23
  in my top 50.
• 12:24
  I'm a little divided about whether I should have included it or not, but it did.
• 12:29
  And it is my number one game from 2009.
• 12:32
  That Shipyard from Vladimir Suchy currently published by Delicious Games in a shiny new
• 12:38
  edition.
• 12:39
  I have the CGE edition and it's really fun.
• 12:42
  So that comes the end of the top five games from 2009.
• 12:46
  Now I want to offer a couple superlatives and talk a little bit about the things that are
• 12:50
  missing here.
• 12:51
  So start with the things that are missing.
• 12:53
  The way that I found that made this list is that I went on board game geek.
• 12:57
  I did an advanced search.
• 12:58
  I put in year published 2009 to 2009.
• 13:01
  So I just got the games from 2009.
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  And then I had it list them in order of boardgamegeek rank.
• 13:07
  Then I scrolled through.
• 13:09
  At the beginning I was reading every title.
• 13:12
  Once I got maybe, once I got to game like rank 3000 or so, then I started just looking for
• 13:18
  games that I had logged plays of.
• 13:20
  And I went until I was at game rank 25,000, which was about two and a half pages of entries.
• 13:27
  So I looked through the top 25,000 games on board game geek, but filtered out everything
• 13:33
  except the games from 2009.
• 13:35
  So it was like 250 games I looked through.
• 13:37
  And from that I found a list of about 20 or 25 games that I played.
• 13:43
  But I did pick out six games that I haven't played that I would like to.
• 13:48
  Two of them are on my shelf of opportunity.
• 13:49
  This is Steam and Last Train to Wensleydale.
• 13:53
  These are both Martin Wallace games.
• 13:55
  Both about trains, he must have been in a train mood at that time.
• 13:59
  And both games that I would like to play.
• 14:00
  I also have four games from that era that are not on my shelf of opportunity, but I would
• 14:05
  like to play as well.
• 14:06
  We have automobile, also Martin Wallace.
• 14:09
  We have Tales of Arabian Nights, which I think they're either they just kickstarted or they
• 14:14
  are about to kickstart a new edition of, which is a game that seems like it'd be really
• 14:18
  fun as a storytelling game.
• 14:21
  And I would definitely like to try that when the new edition comes out.
• 14:24
  It may even go on my purchase list, but we'll see.
• 14:27
  Then Cyclades, which is a game from Madagot, it's part of their area control trilogy that
• 14:32
  includes Kemet and Inis.
• 14:34
  I haven't played any of these games, but I always hear good things.
• 14:37
  And Hansa Tutonica, which is supposed to be very, very good.
• 14:41
  I don't really know much about it, except it's dusty and musty and it's supposed to be
• 14:46
  very, very good.
• 14:47
  And they recently released a big box version of it, which I was tempted to buy just
• 14:52
  because of the reputation of the game, but I did not, but I am interested in trying it.
• 14:57
  That's Hansa Tutonica.
• 14:58
  All right, we've got a couple superlative games.
• 15:01
  These are games from 2009 that I've played.
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  They did not make my top five, but I want to give them a congratulatory title anyway.
• 15:08
  So the best two-player game from 2009 is Jaipur.
• 15:13
  Jaipur is an excellent little two-player back in tug of war game.
• 15:17
  There's a market of cards and you take cards out of it and your goal is to get a certain
• 15:22
  number of cards of the same type, which you can then trade in to get chips.
• 15:26
  And the chips are worth different points.
• 15:29
  And at the end of the game, the person with the most points wins.
• 15:31
  It's a really clever game.
• 15:32
  There's some really good back and forth in it.
• 15:35
  There's some interesting push-your-luck elements where you hold on to cards so that you
• 15:39
  can try to get better cards.
• 15:41
  Sometimes that pays off, sometimes it doesn't.
• 15:43
  But it is a real top-notch game.
• 15:46
  It's all worth exploring if you haven't.
• 15:48
  That's Jaipur.
• 15:49
  Next up, the coolest game from 2009 is Claustrophobia.
• 15:54
  This was originally published as a fantasy flight game and it is the one that I played.
• 15:57
  Although they did publish a, I think, 10th anniversary edition or something like that from C'MON
• 16:02
  Games and it was, they gave it a year, so it was like Claustrophobia 1689 or something.
• 16:07
  The premise is that there's a gateway to hell that's been opened up and some warrior monks
• 16:12
  are taking some condemned prisoners in to fight demons who are trying to escape.
• 16:17
  One player plays the humans, the other player plays the demons and the game has a really
• 16:21
  fascinating action selection system where you roll dice and then those dice go into your
• 16:27
  action tray.
• 16:28
  And you can take actions for your player, your character is based on the results you rolled
• 16:33
  in the dice, but you also just have a certain number of actions you could take.
• 16:37
  So there's this interesting back and forth.
• 16:39
  As you get injured, if I recall, you lose health, but there are ways to either get more dice
• 16:44
  or lose some dice and that's really interesting too.
• 16:47
  I mean, at its heart, it is a kind of dice-chucking battle, but there is some area control or some
• 16:54
  miniature movement and it's just a really neat looking game and it was really fun to play
• 16:59
  when I played it.
• 17:00
  So if you haven't gotten a chance to play Claustrophobia or it's new sibling, I encourage you
• 17:05
  to do so because it's a really neat idea and a really good execute.
• 17:09
  It's Claustrophobia the coolest game of 2009.
• 17:13
  The best family game from 2009 is Castle Panic.
• 17:15
  Oh man, we had so many great games of Castle Panic with my kids.
• 17:19
  This is a cooperative game where you are, it's a tower defense game.
• 17:23
  You have a tower in the middle, you're defending it against all these monsters that are coming
• 17:26
  in.
• 17:27
  We found the game was fine by itself, but if you add the Wizard's Tower expansion and
• 17:32
  the Dragon expansion or whatever it is, that it gets just great.
• 17:36
  The enemies are hard, but not undefeatable.
• 17:39
  The Wizard powers are really good.
• 17:41
  You have to manage your stuff really well so you can get as many Wizard powers as you can.
• 17:46
  You have to work together and talk it out.
• 17:48
  But there's interesting decisions to be made that just along the lines of "Can I get lucky?"
• 17:52
  It's a great game.
• 17:53
  They have released a shiny new edition of it that I encourage you to check out.
• 17:57
  It looks beautiful and I know there's an edition that's got all these miniatures and everything
• 18:01
  instead of little tiles.
• 18:03
  I probably would just want the tile version because it's much easier to get onto the table.
• 18:07
  Although the miniatures version would then make a playset for kids, I think, that would
• 18:11
  be pretty fun.
• 18:12
  Yeah, so Fireside Games has a real winner with Castle Panic.
• 18:15
  It's an excellent game.
• 18:17
  Well worth checking out if you get a chance and a real winner for a family game.
• 18:22
  In fact, I'd say the best family game from 2009.
• 18:25
  That's Castle Panic.
• 18:26
  Two more.
• 18:27
  I have the weirdest game.
• 18:29
  2009's weirdest game is Bunny Bunny Moose Moose.
• 18:32
  This is another CGE production from Vlada Chvaatil.
• 18:36
  It is a game of putting your hands in funny positions in real time as you try to anticipate
• 18:43
  what the shot-caller is going to say.
• 18:45
  You're moving your hands back and forth and trying to get the best score you can based
• 18:48
  on the display on the table.
• 18:52
  When the shot-caller fires the gun, "bang."
• 18:55
  Everyone freezes.
• 18:56
  New score points based on where your hands are.
• 18:58
  They're making moose antlers or bunny ears in a particular arrangement and it's hilarious.
• 19:04
  It's really dumb, really fun.
• 19:07
  It depends on everybody being able-bodied because you have to hold your arms up and move
• 19:13
  your hands around in a way.
• 19:14
  But assuming that's your group is a real fun goofy time.
• 19:18
  That's Bunny Bunny Moose Moose.
• 19:19
  The weirdest game of 2009.
• 19:20
  Finally, the game with the best table presence from 2009 is the Adventurers, the Temple
• 19:26
  of Chac.
• 19:27
  This is the first Adventurers game.
• 19:28
  They made another one called the Pyramid of Horus.
• 19:30
  It's equally good or better, but Pyramid of Chac is pretty great.
• 19:35
  Basically it's Indiana Jones.
• 19:37
  Think of the first, the opening of Indiana Jones in the Rages of the Lost Ark where he's running
• 19:42
  through this temple.
• 19:44
  That's what you're doing.
• 19:45
  At one point you're being chased by a big boulder.
• 19:47
  You're going through these obstacles.
• 19:48
  You're trying to find treasure without getting killed and it's a delight.
• 19:52
  It's a real weird game.
• 19:53
  Very fun.
• 19:55
  The art is pretty sexist.
• 19:57
  I think the art was done by some French folks and it looks pretty sexist.
• 20:03
  There are characters that are sort of these, the women are drawn in ways that generally
• 20:08
  we wouldn't like to see these days just because it's a very exploitative style.
• 20:14
  Other than that, the game is really fun.
• 20:16
  It's real weird and it looks awesome on the table.
• 20:19
  That is the Adventurers, the Temple of Chac.
• 20:25
  The last thing I would like to do is just read to you the other games from 2009 that I had
• 20:29
  played but did not make any of my lists just so you can get a sense of what games were
• 20:35
  under consideration.
• 20:36
  I'm just going to buzz through this list of games that I considered but did not play or
• 20:42
  but did not award.
• 20:44
  Telestrations.
• 20:45
  Egizia.
• 20:46
  Finca.
• 20:47
  Stronghold.
• 20:48
  String Railway.
• 20:49
  Nemo's War.
• 20:50
  Funglish, and Flip Out.
• 20:53
  I guess of the games I played I gave either top five or superlatives to about half of them.
• 21:00
  This might just be on the border of maybe you didn't play enough 2009 games.
• 21:05
  The thing is sometimes I have a list of 15 to 20 games that I played and not many of them
• 21:11
  are good.
• 21:12
  This one I was actually literally debating about which ones I think are worth getting
• 21:16
  the award.
• 21:17
  I feel pretty confident and happy in the selections I made and I'm happy to talk about them
• 21:22
  with you.
• 21:23
  The best place to do that is over on boardgamegeek and guild 3269 where you can post
• 21:27
  about this list and argue with me about what's good about it.
• 21:31
  We also could have a discussion by boardgamegeek message.
• 21:35
  Wombat929 is my username there or by email Brendan at rattleboxgames.com.
• 21:40
  I hope that you enjoyed this discussion of 2009 games and I'd love to hear your thoughts
• 21:44
  on it.
• 21:45
  Thanks for joining me.
• 21:46
  I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine was.
• 21:48
  Bye bye.
• 21:49
  [Music]
• 22:09
  Brought to you by Rattlebox Games
• 22:13
  (soft piano music)