Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Trekking the World, Stick Stack, The Thing: The Board Game, revisiting One Night Ultimate Werewolf

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Trekking the World, Stick Stack, The Thing: The Board Game, revisiting One Night Ultimate Werewolf · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:03
  Welcome to pick Up and Deliver the podcast, where I pick up my audio
• 0:06
  recorder as I step out for a walk and deliver an episode to you while
• 0:09
  I stroll around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, hello, listeners. It's
• 0:22
  a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. It's cloudy, but the weather is
• 0:26
  nice. It's temperate, a little on the cool side for mid April.
• 0:30
  But we're in this middle of this weird up and down weather cycle. So
• 0:34
  I've reached an interesting point. I've gotten all caught up on the games I've
• 0:38
  been playing, but April has turned out to be a month of playing games
• 0:41
  I've already played. I only have like two or three new games on my
• 0:45
  list for April so far, and it's April twenty or twenty first today.
• 0:50
  Yikes, and I've played plenty of games. It's just so happened that I'm
• 0:55
  playing a lot of games I've played before, which is fine except that it
• 1:00
  means I don't have as many new games to talk about. But that's okay.
• 1:03
  I'm happy to talk about other new games anyway. Well, here we
• 1:07
  go. So I do have three though I have two from the end of
• 1:11
  March and one more of the new ones actually one from the end of March
• 1:15
  and two from April, and then I'm all caught up. I don't have
• 1:17
  any new ones to talk about for a while, but let's just jump into
• 1:19
  it. That's right, it's time for a board game espresso Espresso triple shot.
• 1:25
  If you haven't heard this episode before or this segment, this is in
• 1:30
  which I talk about three games I've played recently for the first or maybe first
• 1:33
  and second time, talk about my experience playing them, and give you some
• 1:37
  first impressions. This isn't a review proper. I haven't played a game enough
• 1:41
  times one or two plays to really have a sense of everything there is to
• 1:45
  know about the game, but I think it's reasonable for me to give you
• 1:47
  some impressions, so that's what I'm gonna do. If I have time.
• 1:49
  I may also talk about a game that I brought out of the dust and
• 1:55
  played this month, so let's just jump into it. To start with,
• 1:59
  I played Trekking the World. Now, to be fair, I did play
• 2:00
  this on board game Arena, so I did not play it on the table,
• 2:06
  which certainly does change the experience of the game absolutely. That said,
• 2:10
  I have played Trekking the National Parks and these games are similar, so I
• 2:15
  feel like I got enough of a sense of it that I can talk about
• 2:19
  it a little bit here. Trekking the World is a game themed around travel.
• 2:23
  It has pretty nice art, not entirely dissimilar from Parks, not as
• 2:29
  nice as Parks. The graphic design is a bit more rudimentary. The game
• 2:34
  is in the sort of the same family of weight and strategy level as Ticket
• 2:38
  to Ride. In this game, there are a series of visible destinations and
• 2:46
  you can collect those destinations by playing combinations of cards of different suits. There's
• 2:53
  like a row of cards similar to the Ticket to Ride row of train cars,
• 2:57
  and you collect the cards in different colors and then you spend to them
• 3:00
  to gain these locations. You also have a distance that you can travel each
• 3:04
  turn. And then the third key element is there is a grid of post
• 3:12
  There's a passport grid that has a bunch of spots on it with different colors,
• 3:16
  and whenever you travel to a location, you get a cube based on
• 3:21
  where you landed, and that cube goes on to your grid, and there's
• 3:25
  an alternate scoring element in that grid. When you get you have the first
• 3:30
  person to get a certain number of cubes of a certain color gets scoring thing,
• 3:36
  and if you stay in the lead with that, you get to keep
• 3:38
  it. There's also an element for when you complete a column, you get
• 3:42
  a bonus a column of all the different colors as well, So there's a
• 3:46
  number of different things going on here. The main way that you score points
• 3:49
  is by completing trips, by going to a place where there's a destination and
• 3:53
  spending the cards of the right color. Overall, it was fun. I
• 3:55
  found it fun to play a little bit more fun than checking the National Parks,
• 4:00
  although definitely close enough for government work that it feels like it's part of
• 4:04
  the same conversation. It is like tracking the National Parks a bit meaner than
• 4:11
  Ticket to Ride. Now, it might just be that my family does not
• 4:15
  play Ticket to Ride at the level of viciousness that many people do. I
• 4:18
  often hear about people really kind of going out of the way to spite folks.
• 4:24
  In my experience, that isn't That isn't fun, but also not the
• 4:29
  best way to win, because right like, if I do something to cost
• 4:31
  you ten points, sure that makes you lose ten points, but it doesn't
• 4:34
  gain me any points. Unless we're playing two player. It's not a zero
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  sum game. In tracking the national parks and tracking the world, there's much
• 4:41
  more direct competition, I think for the things that you're getting, and there's
• 4:46
  a bumping element where I need to go somewhere in you're in my way.
• 4:49
  I can bump you out of the way, and that costs you in the
• 4:53
  game. So I enjoyed tracking the world. If I was that my game
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  club and someone who started say hey, you want to play Talk in the
• 5:00
  World, I would play. I'm certainly not going to go buy it,
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  and it's not a game that I feel compelled to seek out and play.
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  But it was a fun time, nonetheless, and I'm glad to have tried
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  it. So that's Trekking the World, designed by Charlie Bink, published by
• 5:15
  Underdog Games. The next game I will talking about is a silly little dexterity
• 5:19
  game. This is one that Rob picked up at Goodwill. I believe he
• 5:28
  may have bought it somewhere else. I think he said Goodwill. It is
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  a game from I believe twenty seventeen. It's the publication date, and like
• 5:33
  I said, it's called stick Stack. The way this game works is you
• 5:38
  have a little tower that you set up that's maybe four or five inches off
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  the table, with a little upside down bowl on the top of the table,
• 5:47
  and the bowl is sort of coated in orange, bumpy plastic, and
• 5:53
  then an inside the bowl there's a tiny little pedestal with a thin bass,
• 6:00
  and then a flat top that sticks out and that's white. Then and actually
• 6:03
  the bowl now that I think about, the bowl is multi colored. There's
• 6:06
  three colors on it, two or three colors on it as you go around
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  the bowl, so part of the bowl is orange, part of its blue,
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  part of its I don't know, on another color I don't remember,
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  pink green. And so what you do is on your turn you take a
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  stick. And the sticks are sort of like jumbo stirring sticks from a coffee
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  shop in terms of shape. They're flat and long and thin. They're maybe
• 6:30
  six or seven inches long and then maybe a quarter inch wide, not very
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  wide, maybe half inch, and they are covered in the same sort of
• 6:40
  plastic or rubber material. And the key thing about this material is it's got
• 6:45
  tiny little bumps in it, so it's high friction. And then the sticks
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  are covered in this material and in the different colors that match the colors of
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  the other parts of the game. Some of the sticks are just one color,
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  some of them will be like half or a third one color half of
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  another color. They all have a white tip. White tips so that you
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  can balance them using that little pedestal I described in the middle. And so
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  what happens on your first turn if you're the very first person to go,
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  you're gonna take one of these sticks and you're gonna balance it on the upside
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  down thing. And the way you do that is either across the bowl so
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  that it's sort of resting on it's touching the bowl on two sides, or
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  you put it lengthwise into the bowl so that the tip is under that little
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  pedestal and then it's just kind of hanging off of the bowl. The rule
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  is, though, that wherever you put it, the color of the rubber
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  material on the stick, whatever it's touching on the bowl or on other sticks,
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  has to be the same color. And now that stick, the post
• 7:47
  that the bowl balances on is kind of bendy, and so as you're putting
• 7:51
  on things, the tower will begin to lean one way or another. And
• 7:56
  the more sticks you put on, the more it's leaning, and you can
• 7:59
  kind of put you can put a new stick across two other sticks, or
• 8:01
  you can put it on the bowl, or you can sort of balance it
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  in the way that the very first stick might have been, where you put
• 8:09
  the end in and then have it just sticking off. And your goal,
• 8:11
  of course is to get rid of all your sticks. But the way the
• 8:13
  game works is that you if when you put your stick on the bowl some
• 8:20
  sticks fall off, then you take the sticks that fell off and they get
• 8:24
  added to your hand, and then the game continues. Now, if you
• 8:30
  knock all of the sticks off the bowl, then I believe the round ends
• 8:35
  and you get all the sticks that fell off, and the idea is to
• 8:39
  get rid of all your sticks. Or when the game is over, and
• 8:43
  if you have sticks in your hand, then you lose points. It's a
• 8:46
  relatively simple game. It's a dexterity game, you know, in the neighborhood
• 8:50
  of that game with all the sticks sticking into like a metal and glass bowl
• 8:56
  with the marbles. I can't remember what it's called right now to winks.
• 9:00
  Maybe yeah, so it's a dixterity game. I feel like it's a really
• 9:03
  long time to explain that, when I could have just said, go look
• 9:05
  at a picture of it. But this is an audio podcast. Maybe you're
• 9:07
  driving or doing something and you wanted a carefully described mental image of a relatively
• 9:13
  simple Dixterity game. Well that's what you got. It was fun. I'd
• 9:16
  play it again. Innocuous, but amusing another one that you know. I
• 9:22
  don't know that I'd go out of my way to obtain it, and but
• 9:24
  I'm happy to play it. If somebody brought it out, I will say
• 9:28
  I probably would not. If I found this at a Goodwill tomorrow, I
• 9:33
  probably would not buy it, just because of reach a point where I don't
• 9:37
  I'm trying to get rid of games I don't need more, especially if it's
• 9:39
  a game I'm not super compelled about. But if you get a chance to
• 9:41
  play it, you see it at a game library or something you look from
• 9:43
  an end of the night game, it's a funny one. It's also meant
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  totally conversible, right like you can start playing it and then you can chitch
• 9:50
  out while you play. Doesn't take any it doesn't lock you down. That
• 9:56
  game was designed, interestingly by the Forest Pruison Creation. That's the name of
• 10:01
  the designer, Forest preus On Creative. I presume it's a Creative Group.
• 10:05
  There are a couple other credited designers as well, published by Broadway Toys.
• 10:09
  All Right, the third game I want to talk about is the most involved,
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  and this is The Thing, the board game. Now, as you
• 10:16
  know, there have been many games like about the Thing or sort of thing
• 10:22
  adjacent. I would point to at least I would point to several that I
• 10:28
  could that you could arguably describe as the Thing is of course the Thing Infectionate
• 10:33
  Outpost thirty one, which is directly again about the John Carpenter movie. There
• 10:39
  is Who Goes There, which is a board game adaptation of the novella from
• 10:43
  John Campbell, which is of course the basis of the Thing from Outer Space,
• 10:48
  which is of course the basis of the Thing. So you know,
• 10:50
  these all kind of ratchet on top of each other, but the point is
• 10:54
  that you have a couple different options for how you might play the Thing.
• 10:58
  I would also point to Panic Station, which is I think twenty fourteen Stronghold
• 11:03
  Games game, which is also set around this theme. You have a base,
• 11:09
  and you have you are going through the base looking for these parasites,
• 11:13
  and you can get infected by the parasites, and you have to interact with
• 11:16
  each other and so on. There's an interesting conversation we had about how soon
• 11:22
  a new version of a movie game should be made. The thing outposted Infection
• 11:26
  and Outpost thirty one is I think six years old. It was published in
• 11:30
  twenty seventeen, so that means this new one is the same license, or
• 11:33
  a new game based on the same property six years later. That's pretty fast.
• 11:39
  If I were the company that had that other game, I might be
• 11:43
  kind of irritated. Although presumably the contract did not offer them exclusive use to
• 11:46
  the rights beyond a certain time, But I know that game is still commercially
• 11:50
  available, so I'm not sure how they worked that out. That said,
• 11:54
  I will say the new game is it feels about on par first impression on
• 11:58
  play feels about the same both games have. Both games suffer from the particular
• 12:05
  problem of being very complicated. In order to work well and in order to
• 12:11
  play them well, you need to have one person who really understands the rules
• 12:16
  who can run the game. This is also true of something like a flying
• 12:20
  frog game like a Touch of Evil or Last Night on Earth. Those games
• 12:24
  work very well if you have one person who really knows the rules well and
• 12:26
  the other people can kind of just come along for the ride. I would
• 12:30
  say my experience of the other The Thing game worked that way, and my
• 12:33
  experience of this one was that way as well. We had two people who
• 12:37
  really understood the rules well, and in playing that man, the rest of
• 12:41
  us could understand them enough, and that would work. So if you're not
• 12:45
  familiar with this property at all, the Thing is a story about a bunch
• 12:48
  of people in Antarctica at a research station who come across a alien life form
• 12:54
  that appears to be able to mimic other life forms, so the Thing can
• 13:01
  take over or say a dog, and be in the camp as a dog
• 13:05
  and nobody knows it's an alien. They can also take over people when they're
• 13:09
  discovered. They have a body morphing ability that is super gross and really terrifying
• 13:16
  and deadly, and so the game is about trying to figure out which of
• 13:22
  the players is infected as the Thing and isolate them or kill them, and
• 13:28
  to get rescued. Over the course of the game, you are going on
• 13:31
  missions, you're interacting with other players, trying not to get infected or trying
• 13:35
  to infect the other people, and eventually rescue. There are a couple different
• 13:41
  ways the humans can escape, one of them as a rescue helicopter. They
• 13:43
  have this neat mechanism by which people get to get in and then let other
• 13:46
  people in or not, And that part is really interesting intension field because the
• 13:52
  humans have to let in all the humans and not let in any of the
• 13:56
  things in order to win. If even one thing on the helicopter, they
• 14:01
  lose, and all the things win, so it becomes a really interesting tension.
• 14:07
  That was the that's the positive description of the game. The negative a
• 14:11
  description of the game is that this is a pretty hard game to learn,
• 14:13
  with a lot of finicky little rules that once someone knows them, can be
• 14:18
  smoothed out through gameplay, but in the initial learning were arduous to tackle,
• 14:26
  and then the gameplay itself took a very long time, like it was like
• 14:28
  a three hour game with like a forty five minute teach, so it used
• 14:33
  up our whole game night, which I enjoyed myself. I certainly had fun,
• 14:35
  and I probably would play again, especially if everybody already knew how to
• 14:39
  play, so we didn't have to do the long teach at the beginning.
• 14:41
  But there are a couple design elements in this game that I thought were really
• 14:45
  frustrating. The first one is the beginning of the game. The way that
• 14:48
  we determine who the thing is is we all draw tokens out of the bag,
• 14:54
  and the tokens either show like a picture of a robust, healthy husky
• 14:58
  or a sort of mutated creepy dog face. And the problem is these are
• 15:01
  kind of silhouettes, so while you can tell what they are, they are
• 15:05
  kind of confusing, and it would just make a lot more sense if they
• 15:09
  were clearly labeled they just said infected or human on them, or had a
• 15:16
  more, very much more clear image and the same ghost. I think for
• 15:20
  the infection tokens that you use, the human one is very clearly human.
• 15:26
  It's a little silhouette of a person surrounded by a kind of stylized image of
• 15:31
  human DNA. And then but then the other one is I think supposed to
• 15:35
  be a face of a thing or something, but it's not. It's not
• 15:41
  understandable as that instead of really the way that you understand that you're infected if
• 15:46
  you look at those tiles is you didn't get the human one. So that
• 15:50
  part was not great. The game is also really fragile to error, in
• 15:56
  particular, like after you do an exchange with people, you're supposed to take
• 16:00
  your role cards and shuffle them up. You have a role card that says
• 16:03
  you're the thing, and you have a role card that says you're human.
• 16:07
  Anytime you interact with another player, you're supposed to take your role cards,
• 16:10
  shuffle them up, and then put the correct one on top and set them
• 16:14
  both down. Right. Well, if you forget to do that, even
• 16:18
  once you do the exchange, and you know there's a lot going on,
• 16:19
  so you kind of you forget to rearrange your cards, well you've just communicated
• 16:23
  to people that you in fact nothing that in fact nothing changed because you'll always
• 16:29
  remember to go do it if you got infected, right, So that part
• 16:33
  is not good. I really like there's this suspicion track that is my favorite
• 16:38
  part of the game, where anytime you interact with another player, your suspicion
• 16:44
  goes up, and that's how the group decides who to test when they get
• 16:48
  ahold of tests. Finally, thematically, there's a really weird thing where the
• 16:52
  sabotage cards get placed into this deck and sabotage happens, but there's a disconnect
• 16:59
  between where the sabotage happens and where the characters go. So like if I
• 17:02
  can night send my character to the machine room to repair the boiler, and
• 17:07
  I put a repair card in the deck, and then we draw a sabotage
• 17:11
  card the group. The captain of the group can decide that the sabotage card
• 17:15
  gets played on me and the boiler, and then later when the repair card
• 17:18
  comes up, there might not be anything to repair. In fact, that
• 17:21
  repair card gets wasted. Well, it feels weird to say, like my
• 17:23
  character is going to go there and be sabotaged, but we get to choose
• 17:27
  where that sabotage happens. Like the sabotage isn't being directed by the person who
• 17:32
  played it, it's just generally being used. It's weird and anti thematic,
• 17:37
  but overall, I had a good time with the thing. I would recommend
• 17:38
  playing it if the negatives I've offered here, particularly the play length, aren't
• 17:45
  don't turn you off too much. But I enjoyed it, and I thought
• 17:48
  it was as good as the other the Thing game Infectionate outpost thirty one.
• 17:52
  I'll have to report back to you later if how it compares to Panic Station,
• 17:56
  because Panic Station is still yes, still on my shelf of opportunity,
• 18:02
  so I do have a couple out of the dust plays to talk about today.
• 18:07
  Unfortunately, I did not bring my phone with me, so I can't
• 18:10
  remember if I talked about One Night Ultimate Werewolf. I think I did not,
• 18:14
  so I'm going to talk about it again, but I may cut that
• 18:17
  if it turns out I didn't. So. One Night Ultimate Werewolf is a
• 18:19
  classic game from Bezier Games, which is, of course the studio that introduced
• 18:26
  Ultimate Werewolf, the sort of commercialized version of the classic folk game Mafia or
• 18:33
  Werewolf. In One Night Ultimate Werewolf, each player gets a role, and
• 18:37
  then there's a series of eyes closed commands in which players are maneuvering the tokens
• 18:44
  on the board and then accusing each other having maneuvered the tokens on the board.
• 18:48
  The goal of the game is to figure out which players are werewolves and
• 18:52
  identify at least one of them, and then they get in trouble and we
• 18:56
  go from there. It's a delightful game, really easy to play. Takes
• 19:00
  like seven minutes to play, like two minutes of the commands being read by
• 19:06
  the app, and then five minutes of play. So I definitely recommend it
• 19:11
  if you've never played One Night Ultimate Warwolf before. It's it's a good time.
• 19:15
  It's pretty fun. I really like the there's a variety of different roles
• 19:21
  that you get to do that create add information into the system, and so
• 19:25
  the big part is to try to figure out who's lying and what they're lying
• 19:27
  about and accuse the person. It's very light without much consequence, so the
• 19:33
  gameplay of it is not it's an end of the night or beginning night thing.
• 19:37
  It's not serious enough to be to warrant long term play. But it
• 19:45
  is a good time and I would recommend it if you get a chance.
• 19:48
  That's One Night Ultimate Werewolf from Bezier Games worth a look. If you've never
• 19:53
  played it, or even if you have, go back check it out again.
• 19:56
  It's a good time. Well that's about it for me today. What
• 20:00
  have you been playing lately? Head over to board game get Gilt three,
• 20:03
  two, six nine and share your experiences there. You can find show notes
• 20:07
  about all of the games we talked about today on rattlebox games dot com,
• 20:11
  where you can also email me Brendan at rattlebox games dot com if you'd like
• 20:15
  to retach me on board game geek. Wombat nine two nine is my user
• 20:18
  name there. If you'd like to play in a synchronous game with me,
• 20:21
  he should send me a message on board game arena, what has you?
• 20:23
  Or you have a dote in all three places, my user name is Wombat
• 20:27
  nine two nine. Thanks for joining me on my walk today. I hope
• 20:30
  to your next walk this as pleasant as minds. Goodbye. Brought two by
• 20:56
  rattle Box m H.