Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Cairn, Hadrian’s Wall, Mythic Mischief, A Handful of Stars (revisited)

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Cairn, Hadrian’s Wall, Mythic Mischief, A Handful of Stars (revisited) · 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
  out the door and deliver an episode to you while I walk the dog.
• 0:11
  I'm Brendan Riley.
• 0:15
  Well, good morning listeners.
• 0:22
  It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago.
• 0:24
  And when I say lovely, I mean, it's a little brisk but very nice.
• 0:29
  The weather normally on a day like this would be at this time of day would be mid to high
• 0:35
  70s, even the 80s though that's more July.
• 0:38
  Instead, it's a brisk mid 60s with a nice breeze.
• 0:42
  So I'm actually wearing long sleeves, which is pretty nice.
• 0:46
  It's a beautiful day.
• 0:47
  So the kind of weather I would expect in late September or early October.
• 0:51
  It's nice.
• 0:52
  Well, I thought I would do a, I felt like doing a board game espresso triple shot today,
• 0:57
  just talking about some games, not having a big topic.
• 1:00
  And then I looked and I don't have a bunch of new games played that I haven't talked
• 1:04
  about at all on the podcast.
• 1:06
  But I looked back and I do have a couple games that I've played recently that I've never
• 1:10
  talked about on the podcast as in an episode where I sort of do a mini review.
• 1:15
  So I'm doing a sort of weird board game espresso and I'll try to frame it a slightly different
• 1:19
  way as I do it.
• 1:21
  So here we go.
• 1:22
  It's a board game espresso triple shot.
• 1:26
  A latte machine, or espresso machine, noise. Espresso machine noise. Espresso machine noise.
• 1:34
  For those of you who knew the podcast, the board game espresso is an episode where I talk
• 1:37
  about games I've played recently for the first time or in this case a couple times, but
• 1:42
  not that deeply and haven't talked about them on the podcast before.
• 1:46
  The general idea of these episodes is that I'm not doing a full deep dive review.
• 1:50
  Instead, I'm doing a light conversation about what the game is like to play and giving
• 1:56
  my initial impressions of it for deep dive reviews.
• 1:59
  Look for a message from the deep episodes.
• 2:02
  The three games that I'm going to be talking about today, two of them I have played and
• 2:06
  talked about a little bit on the podcast before, but not in depth.
• 2:09
  So let's get started and we'll see what you think of these games.
• 2:13
  So the first game I want to talk about today is Cairn.
• 2:17
  Cairn is a two-player abstract game set around the theme of being, I don't know, some sort
• 2:23
  of the game calls them shamans.
• 2:25
  I always feel a little weird about using that term because it is, I think, often used by
• 2:31
  colonists to describe priests from colonized civilizations,
• 2:38
  but that's the term the game uses.
• 2:39
  Think of it as wizards or whatever
• 2:42
  in some sort of magical past and you are competing with one another to try and,
• 2:49
  I don't know, set up rocks on the board.
• 2:52
  It is an extremely tactical game with a little bit of strategy, an aggressive amount of player
• 2:59
  versus player conflict and really interesting, think a couple moves ahead kind of gameplay.
• 3:07
  If you like Onitama or on a larger scale, something like chess or Hive, these are the kinds
• 3:13
  of games Cairn sits comfortably in conversation with.
• 3:18
  The theme of Cairn, again, you have these sort of mystical-looking figures called shamans
• 3:25
  and your opponent has the same and you are moving them across a battlefield.
• 3:30
  In terms of look and feel of the game is very similar to Onitama.
• 3:34
  You have, there are a limited number of moves that you can make.
• 3:39
  Whenever you make a move, they're depicted on these tiles.
• 3:42
  Whenever you make a move on a tile, you then flip the tile over and there's a different
• 3:47
  move on the back.
• 3:48
  If you make a move, your opponent can't make that same move on their next turn because
• 3:53
  you have made that move.
• 3:54
  It's a grid of spaces, maybe five or six spaces wide.
• 3:58
  That's maybe five wide and six deep, something like that.
• 4:02
  In the middle, there are these two stones called monoliths that are megaliths that have special
• 4:09
  powers on them.
• 4:11
  On your turn, you're going to use one of the action tiles to move one of your pieces
• 4:15
  on the board and there's a couple different ways you could do that.
• 4:18
  Then if you end up with a shaman on one of the megaliths, then you can activate that megalith.
• 4:25
  Actually, I think you have to activate it and no, you can usually skip it.
• 4:30
  I don't remember.
• 4:31
  But you activate the megalith and then it alters the board in some additional way.
• 4:37
  There are always a couple megaliths off to the side.
• 4:39
  Those are available to be brought onto the board.
• 4:42
  There are two ways to win the game.
• 4:46
  The first way, actually, there's one way to win the game.
• 4:49
  There's two ways to score points.
• 4:50
  The first person to, I think, three points wins the game.
• 4:53
  One way to score points is to get your figure into your opponent's camp.
• 4:58
  The thing is, the only way to score when you move into your opponent's camp is by using
• 5:03
  the jump tile.
• 5:04
  There are one of the movement tiles as a jump tile.
• 5:07
  That's you jump over your piece or jump over an opponent's piece.
• 5:10
  When you do that, if you jump off of the play space into your opponent's village, then
• 5:16
  you score a point.
• 5:17
  If you just move into your opponent's village using the move tile, you don't score the
• 5:22
  point.
• 5:23
  In fact, you just go back to the start.
• 5:25
  Basically, lose your piece off the board, which sometimes would be preferable to having
• 5:29
  your opponent capture your piece.
• 5:31
  That's another story.
• 5:32
  The second way you can score a point is if you have an opponent on an empty space and
• 5:38
  you're able to capture them or banish is the word, then you get to create a megalith in
• 5:43
  the spot that they were standing.
• 5:44
  When you create that megalith, you pick one of the two that are off to the side that aren't
• 5:48
  being used presently, although there's a whole bunch, so there's just two in play.
• 5:53
  And then you get a point.
• 5:55
  So first three points wins.
• 5:57
  Cairn is a really interesting game.
• 5:59
  I find it very compelling.
• 6:02
  It puts me in the same mindset as something like Tash-Kalar on the more complex end, or
• 6:07
  like I said, on the top on the less complex end.
• 6:11
  You know something complex and not deep.
• 6:13
  These are very deep games.
• 6:14
  There's a lot going on and you could be very good at planning way ahead, I suspect.
• 6:19
  So Cairn is an interesting game.
• 6:21
  It looks beautiful.
• 6:22
  It's got a really lovely art design and color palette, orange and blue interacting nicely.
• 6:29
  If you get a chance to try Cairn, I highly recommend it.
• 6:32
  You can play it over in board game arena, which is where I've been playing it.
• 6:35
  So the thing that makes it different than other games I review on a board game is press
• 6:39
  up.
• 6:40
  So is that I've actually played this several times now, but I've played it on board game
• 6:43
  arena.
• 6:44
  So it takes me a lot of time to a lot longer time to grasp the game.
• 6:47
  Now that might not be true if I play it live, but I very rarely play board game arena
• 6:50
  games live.
• 6:51
  I usually play them not real time.
• 6:55
  So it's taking me a little bit longer.
• 6:57
  So you may have heard me discuss Cairn before.
• 6:59
  I've played it, but I only recently felt like I know it's strong enough to talk about
• 7:04
  it here.
• 7:05
  Cairn is designed by Christian Martinez and with art by Vincent Gilbert or Joubert.
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  It's J-O-U-B-E-R-T.
• 7:14
  And it's published by Matagot.
• 7:17
  The next game I'm going to talk about fits in the same category.
• 7:20
  It's a game I played a couple times on board game arena, but didn't really understand it.
• 7:24
  I tried to play it once in person and I kind of learned enough to start, but I didn't
• 7:29
  really read the whole rulebook thoroughly and it turns out Heyrian's Wall is the game
• 7:33
  I'm talking about.
• 7:34
  Where you really need to understand the rulebook thoroughly in order to grasp everything that's
• 7:40
  happening.
• 7:41
  The systems are relatively uniform and so once you understand the way that the information
• 7:46
  flows in Hadrian's Wall is relatively easy to understand how section 2 works versus how
• 7:51
  section 1 works and so on.
• 7:53
  But overall, it is a game you have to understand before you can play well.
• 7:56
  So the first couple times I played it, I was kind of just clicking stuff.
• 7:58
  I didn't really understand what was going on.
• 8:00
  I finally did get it to the table, I sat down and played it on the table on paper and it
• 8:06
  worked a lot better.
• 8:07
  Like I understood why everything worked the way it did and it just went much more smoothly
• 8:11
  for me and thus I felt pretty good about it.
• 8:16
  And thus I feel like I can talk about it with you now.
• 8:18
  So Hadrian's Wall is a complicated roll and write.
• 8:23
  I can't remember the term.
• 8:25
  The people at Motor City Gameworks, Matt Riddle and Ben Pinchback and Adam... somebody, are
• 8:32
  using, they have a term, complex role and right or big roll and write or something like
• 8:37
  that to describe games where there's a lot of overlapping and amplifying sort of sets
• 8:46
  of bonuses that you get as you check things off.
• 8:50
  And those games are really interesting.
• 8:51
  If you're looking for, if you're trying to figure out what I mean, I'm talking about something
• 8:53
  like Fleet: the Dice Game or Three Sisters are the two that I've played.
• 8:59
  I know they also have Motor City and recently French Quarter.
• 9:03
  I think after three sisters I was sort of like, I've got, I like this a lot but
• 9:07
  it's enough of it.
• 9:08
  I don't need another one or another two loaded roll and writes.
• 9:11
  That's what they call them, like loaded big potato I think.
• 9:13
  But Hadrian's Wall is in the same genre of the loaded roll and write.
• 9:18
  It does have a little bit of player interaction but just a tiny bit.
• 9:21
  Obviously you're just competing for how many points did you get?
• 9:24
  How many points did the other players get?
• 9:26
  In Hadrian's Wall you represent, I guess Hadrian?
• 9:30
  One of Hadrian's people: you represent a prominent Roman person who is trying to help defend
• 9:42
  the British Isles for Rome against the Picts and you do so by building up
• 9:51
  the Roman stuff in your thing.
• 9:52
  The game comes with two score pads and you're going to put each score pad, you're going to take
• 9:57
  one sheet from each, score pad and put them next to each other so you have two score pads that
• 10:01
  you're working on.
• 10:03
  Unlike a lot of games Hadrian's Wall does not have any dice at all.
• 10:07
  There are two random, there's two randomized elements.
• 10:11
  You have a series of 12 building cards or diplomatic cards, I don't remember what it calls them,
• 10:16
  12 cards that are yours alone.
• 10:19
  And then there's a deck called the Fate Deck and this is the only randomized element for the
• 10:22
  game.
• 10:23
  So for the cards that you own, each round you're going to draw two and you pick one to be
• 10:30
  the resources you're going, extra resources you're going to get and you pick the other to
• 10:34
  be the scoring condition that you are going to have available to you at the end of the game.
• 10:39
  Each round you do that.
• 10:40
  At the end of the game you have six scoring cards that you can get points from.
• 10:43
  Once the points is varies from like one to six points maybe, I don't think there are
• 10:49
  very many cards where you can get more than six points.
• 10:53
  And the resource you can get are usually just one or two of a couple different resources
• 10:59
  that the game uses.
• 11:00
  The game uses four different colors of workers and it uses these stone blocks.
• 11:07
  And so basically what you do is you get your resources further round and then you spend
• 11:14
  those resources in order to check boxes on your different sheets and the boxes will then
• 11:18
  create.
• 11:20
  Sometimes they'll give you bonuses that allow you to check other boxes and over time you
• 11:26
  build up a system and a score.
• 11:29
  The game works really well.
• 11:31
  It's a really fun solo game, an interesting puzzle and challenge.
• 11:36
  I like it as a multiplayer game on Board Game Arena as well because you play it like a solo
• 11:40
  game but there's a little bit of watching what other people are doing and you feed off
• 11:43
  of them a little bit.
• 11:45
  But it works really well as a solo game.
• 11:47
  I've actually kept it out with a plan to play it again when I have a half an hour here
• 11:51
  or there because it is just so fun.
• 11:54
  It's really an interesting puzzle.
• 11:56
  Now I imagine once you've played it half a dozen times or something it'll lose some of
• 12:00
  that luster because the sheet is the same every time.
• 12:04
  So there's a bit of exploration where you sort of like well what if I lean this way instead
• 12:07
  of that way?
• 12:08
  What if I explore this route instead of that route?
• 12:10
  But there's always a temptation once you get a really good score to just replicate that
• 12:14
  score or get it's close, you know, follow the same path again.
• 12:18
  And this is actually the problem I had with other loaded roll and writes like Three Sisters
• 12:22
  or Fleet: The Dice Game is that while there are some tactics involved in what you roll,
• 12:28
  generally it seems like there's a strategy like it's all kind of the same.
• 12:33
  The Hadrian's Wall is published by Garphill Games.
• 12:35
  Garphill Games.
• 12:36
  Bobby Hill is the designer, the artist is Sam Phillips.
• 12:39
  I really enjoyed playing Hadrian's Wall and I'm looking forward to playing it again.
• 12:44
  All right, the third game I'm going to talk, oh, now I'm going to do a dusty game.
• 12:48
  As you know, I usually pick one game that I played recently that I hadn't played in a
• 12:52
  long time and I dust that game off or talk about dusting that game off.
• 12:56
  This time it was A Handful of Stars.
• 12:58
  I mentioned A Handful of Stars a couple episodes ago when I talked about betrayal in games that
• 13:04
  I thought the challenge of a game where there's some negotiation and you might end up betraying
• 13:11
  somebody was an interesting challenge and made gameplay complex for me.
• 13:20
  So A Handful of Stars is an area of control game.
• 13:23
  I can't, it's not, never mind, it's not area of control game.
• 13:27
  And so I guess it is just a, huh.
• 13:37
  I walked around, I walked one way around the house to avoid the dog barking at us and
• 13:42
  turns out that dog has a fence on either side of the block so they were able to come around
• 13:45
  the corner and bark at us anyway.
• 13:48
  So A Handful of Stars is not an area control game.
• 13:50
  I think of area control as contested spaces where you put different resources in and
• 13:57
  the person who comes out on top gets points but often their secondary points for being
• 14:03
  the person who control, the second most control, that sort of thing.
• 14:07
  Porta Nigra I talked about is an area control game.
• 14:10
  In A Handful of Stars each point on the board can only be held by one person at a time.
• 14:15
  So you just struggle for control of areas but there is no blended control either you control
• 14:22
  it or you don't.
• 14:23
  I guess it still might be an area control game.
• 14:25
  I've heard people talk about it as a 4x game, explore, exploit, expand and exterminate.
• 14:32
  I guess there's some of that there.
• 14:34
  That might be the best thing.
• 14:35
  It's built into a deck building game and in the tradition of the Martin Wallace deck building
• 14:40
  games of the 2010s.
• 14:42
  So Martin Wallace created A Few Acres of Snow, A Study in Emerald, Mythotopia,
• 14:49
  and A Handful of Stars as four games.
• 14:51
  I guess to a degree Lincoln though that one is a little different but to a degree all three
• 14:56
  of these are deck building games where you're acquiring areas and when you acquire the area
• 15:00
  you get the card that goes to the area and then you use the resources on those cards to
• 15:04
  do other things in the game.
• 15:07
  And Wallace has a couple things that he does in his area control games that don't tend to
• 15:11
  get done in other ones.
• 15:13
  Particularly he only lets you use one resource on each card instead of using all of them
• 15:18
  and you generally can't discard your, you don't discard your game.
• 15:21
  Your hand at the end of the turn the way other deck builders have you do.
• 15:24
  So there's a bit more deliberation in when you use your cards and how you use your cards.
• 15:28
  So A Handful of Stars is really fun.
• 15:32
  I like A Study in Emerald better theme wise but I really like A Handful of Stars.
• 15:35
  I haven't gone back and played Mythotopia again for a while.
• 15:38
  I probably ought to before declaring that I like A Handful of Stars second best out of
• 15:42
  the four but I like A Handful of Stars second best out of the four.
• 15:46
  The faction play is really fun.
• 15:48
  There's a lot of different stuff you can do with the cards.
• 15:51
  I like the way that the board control stuff works.
• 15:54
  The biggest challenge for me was that as I maybe described in the last play, the feeling
• 16:01
  of fun at the table did not match the correct strategic point for me.
• 16:06
  That in order for me to play to win, I had to really go after the person who was in first
• 16:12
  place but they were sort of on tilt when I started going after them and I didn't go
• 16:16
  after them in the way I probably should have.
• 16:18
  If I were playing really strategically.
• 16:22
  But in the end it was a really fun and memorable game with the exception of that part of it.
• 16:27
  So I don't know where the expectation setting would work better.
• 16:31
  Like do I continue to play the way I have and try to get over myself in terms of feeling
• 16:36
  bad for attacking somebody in a game where you win by attacking somebody or do I set expectations
• 16:44
  more clearly at the beginning or during the game.
• 16:47
  Make it more clear like yeah this is a really cutthroat game.
• 16:51
  Watch out or do I be more obvious in the way that I interact about alliances.
• 16:57
  One of the things you could if you watched our game carefully and I'm being honest with
• 17:01
  myself here, you could interpret it that I sort of allowed the other player to think we
• 17:05
  had an alliance.
• 17:06
  I didn't actively say I want to attack you but I didn't actively discourage that view
• 17:12
  either and then betrayed them or surprised them at least.
• 17:17
  And that is an interesting question for myself.
• 17:20
  Like which part of it would be fun and I don't know any of those strategies would be fun
• 17:25
  if the other person sort of gets really upset when I attack them.
• 17:28
  And the other question here is like just motives too.
• 17:31
  I was talking with another friend about this and I like well that other person clearly
• 17:34
  one of the main motivators one of the things that really drives them in the moment of the
• 17:38
  game is winning.
• 17:39
  And so when they have an upset they get upset for a bit that's not, that doesn't mean
• 17:44
  they didn't have fun.
• 17:45
  And I would say by the end of the night this person was clearly having fun again but I also
• 17:49
  didn't keep attacking them.
• 17:50
  I'm not sure how much fun they would have had had I gone after them, continued to go after
• 17:56
  them the way I strategically probably should have because they were still in the lead after
• 18:00
  my sort of significant play and the correct move I think strategically would have been
• 18:06
  to keep attacking their places because every time I took a planet away from them I was
• 18:11
  raising my score and lowering theirs whereas anything else I did like if I attacked any of
• 18:16
  the other players I'm lowering one of the players who's not beating me and not gaining on
• 18:21
  the player who I mean I'm gaining a little bit but not as much as I would have had I gone
• 18:25
  after them more.
• 18:26
  So it's an interesting puzzle that maybe is a problem in my own head more than a problem
• 18:31
  in the game but something to think about as I continue to play because I really like
• 18:34
  a handful of stars and I would like to play again.
• 18:36
  So that's Martin Wallace the artist is Odysseas Stamoglou, publisher Treefrog games.
• 18:43
  I apologize for talking so much about that game it's pretty hard to get a hold of.
• 18:46
  There was a really small print run and I think most people who have it like it so I don't
• 18:51
  know how much it circulates.
• 18:52
  So last game I want to talk about here is Mythic Mischief this is published by IV Studio who
• 18:56
  have gone on to publish Moon Rakers and at least one other game that's gotten a fair amount
• 19:01
  of buzz designed by Max Anderson, Zach Dixon and Austin Harrison.
• 19:05
  I had a bit of a deja vu moment I had a friend in high school named Austin Harrison who
• 19:12
  has gone on to work in Hollywood as an animator and so it's weird to see someone named Austin
• 19:21
  Harrison they're not the same person I checked.
• 19:24
  Person I know doesn't live in Nashville in this Austin Harrison does so different Austin
• 19:29
  Harrison but it was weird.
• 19:30
  The art is by Amin Farah and Holo Kazemi.
• 19:35
  Mythic Mischief is a really it's a first off if you are going to try to define the idea
• 19:41
  of overproduced which I think is a problematic idea because if you buy a product and you
• 19:47
  enjoy it to have a certain form factor then I don't know how you can say it's overproduced
• 19:52
  but if you're going to argue that games could be overproduced Mythic Mischief and I think
• 19:56
  a lot of the games from IV Studios maybe fit that profile.
• 20:00
  I got Mythic Mischief at Goodwill someone had given it away and boy was it a lucky find
• 20:04
  for us I paid three dollars for it and I believed if I'm reading the kickstarter right it was
• 20:09
  a ninety five dollar game and I'm not sure I would pay ninety five dollars for it but boy
• 20:13
  it was fun.
• 20:14
  Mythic Mischief is a squad based tactical skirmish game in which you have a group of kids
• 20:21
  magical kids there's like Frankensteins and Draculas and ghosts and whatnot and zombies
• 20:27
  and you're hiding out in the midst of a library at your school. Think sort of Hogwarts but
• 20:31
  for monsters and you aren't supposed to be in there and so there's a librarian that the
• 20:36
  kids call the tome keeper who's wandering around in the library and if it catches you in there
• 20:41
  he sends you back to your dorm and your team loot the other team the team who basically
• 20:46
  tricked you into getting caught by the tome keeper gets a point first team to ten point wins.
• 20:52
  What makes Mythic Mischief interesting is that each team each squad has a set of four
• 20:57
  actions that are all very similar but not identical two of them are identical the move action
• 21:02
  that everyone can take is identical and that there's another action that everyone can take
• 21:07
  I don't recall right now but then everyone else has two unique actions that are slightly
• 21:12
  different there's one action allows you to move and opponent and there's one action that
• 21:16
  does something else oh rearrange the bookshelves in the library and then each team also has
• 21:23
  an epic maneuver that you can do once and then you can recharge to do again later so during
• 21:31
  the game you take turns manipulating the setup of the board with the goal of getting as many
• 21:35
  of your opponents figures into the way of the tome keeper as you can and then the team does
• 21:42
  that the best is going to win because the tome keeper will you'll get ten points and the
• 21:46
  tome keeper has a set path that they're going to walk in the library although you can change
• 21:50
  that by moving the bookshelves around. This game is pretty fun; I think if you get a chance to play it
• 21:56
  you definitely should--it's a really interesting tactical game. It's maybe a little bit more complex
• 22:01
  than it needs to be for the level of game it is in terms of how long it's going to take how deep
• 22:08
  the strategy is, but it is pretty cool and I really enjoyed playing it the couple times in my son and
• 22:15
  I and his cousins played the game. He definitely really liked it and asked me to definitely keep it,
• 22:22
  so it's I'm sure it'll come up again. You'll see me talking about having played it or whatever
• 22:27
  in future but it's really fun. We also did end up with the "headmaster box" which is the sort of deluxe
• 22:34
  edition meaning that we got three more factions than you would get if you just have the base set
• 22:39
  which is nice because I think the game lives in its variety. I think if you get stuck with one
• 22:45
  set of factions it's probably not as good as you were hoping it would be, and so that is probably the
• 22:52
  challenge of the game Mythic Mischief. Like I said, a fun game; I'm happy to have it, going to keep it,
• 22:59
  going to play it some more, and that's what I have to say about that. Well thanks for joining me
• 23:03
  on my walk today I hope the year next walk is this pleasant is mine Was. Bye-bye
• 23:09
  [Music]
• 23:27
  [out take beep] where is the paper? okay I definitely put it in my pocket what the heck what here is[out-take beep]
• 23:35
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