Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Chicken!, Picture Perfect, Inventions, Nexus Ops (revisited)

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Chicken!, Picture Perfect, Inventions, Nexus Ops (revisited) · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:04
  Welcome to pick up and Deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
• 0:07
  as I step out for a walk and deliver an episode two while I stroll
• 0:10
  around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good morning, listeners. It's a
• 0:23
  lovely day here in suburban Chicago. It's slightly overcast with hints of blue peeking
• 0:28
  through the clouds. There are sparrows everywhere. As I mentioned before, we
• 0:33
  had a boon of sparrow berths around here this year, and it is a
• 0:37
  lovely day to go out on a walk. Not too sunny, not too
• 0:40
  hot, very comfy. Well, I was looking at the recent episodes I
• 0:44
  played and I realized it's been a minute since I talked about new games I
• 0:47
  played, so I thought it was time for another board game Espresso Triple Shot.
• 0:54
  That's right. Board Game Espresso Triple Shot is a mini review episode in
• 0:58
  which I talk about three games I've played recently for the first time, and
• 1:02
  I give them each like a five minute mini review. Of course, having
• 1:06
  only played these games once, I don't really know them well enough to actually
• 1:08
  do a review, but it's more just a first impressions kind of deal.
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  I also usually pick out one game that I've dusted off recently to talk about
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  as well. So from that regard, why don't we get started? So
• 1:19
  the first game I don't talk about, I did mention on the Top of
• 1:22
  the Stack episode a little bit as a game I had tried, and that
• 1:26
  is Chicken. Chicken is a very light and I played this game twice.
• 1:29
  Actually we played two rounds of it. The first round was just we played
• 1:32
  regular chicken. The second round we played Chicken along with the egg explosion or
• 1:38
  the egg spansion, which included a couple more dice. Chicken is a very
• 1:42
  light dice rolling push your luck game, sort of in the neighborhood of something
• 1:47
  like zombie Dice, where of course zombie dice has a push your luck mechanism
• 1:51
  where you're trying not to bust. The same is true of Chicken. In
• 1:53
  Chicken, you are rolling a variety of different dice that have chicken and fock
• 2:00
  and a dog, a couple other things on them, and eggs, and
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  the idea is that you can set aside some dice, reroll others, and
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  you get to keep rolling as many times as you like until you choose to
• 2:12
  stop, or until you bust. When you stop, you get to claim
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  points based on the combination of dice you rolled, and if you bust,
• 2:19
  of course, you don't get to claim those dice. The interesting difference of
• 2:23
  this game to most others is that when you stop, you pass along the
• 2:29
  dice you stopped with to the next player. So if you're pushing your luck
• 2:31
  to add more dice to the pool, you then pass all of those dice
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  on to the next player. So if someone else has a particularly successful turn,
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  they might pass you a huge pile of dice and you could immediately roll
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  and bust, which is an amusing thing. It would be kind of annoying
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  as a potential thing to happen if it were in a more serious or complicated
• 2:50
  game, but in a game as simple as Chicken is, it ends up
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  just being an amusing twist to have the potential of busting on your first roll.
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  I guess that's actually true of something like Zombie Dice as well. You
• 3:01
  could bust on your first role of that game as well. So Chicken the
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  Egg spansion comes with a couple other dice that you can add. One of
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  them is a dog that will chase away foxes. I don't remember what the
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  other one is, but they're both additional dice that add a little bit more
• 3:20
  to the game, just give it a little bit extra pizaz. The game
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  comes in a little cylinder with a bag, and it sort of reminds me
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  of Zombie Dice in terms of form factor, although it does have a little
• 3:31
  mat that you can spread out to play on. This is an excellent example
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  of a cute little game that if you don't have any games like this in
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  your collection or you're looking for a new one, it's a great one to
• 3:42
  break out for a few minutes. It's very light, easy to teach to
• 3:46
  non gamers or new gamers, and has an experience that is easy to learn
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  and fun to replicate. And it's short enough that if the dice aren't going
• 3:54
  your way, you don't feel too bad about it, because the game's over
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  by the time you start to resent them. Then you can start up and
• 4:00
  reset your luck with the dice, because we all know that's how dice work.
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  Not a lot more to say about it. The art and design is
• 4:06
  really cool, it's all. It's a sort of color palette of oranges,
• 4:11
  yellows and reds, and the iconography on the box and the instruction book and
• 4:16
  Whatnot is pretty interesting as well, So from a design perspective, it's pretty
• 4:21
  nice looking. Chicken was designed by Scott Olmes and is published by key Master
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  Games. The art is credited to the Carpenter Collective, which I presume is
• 4:30
  a group of people who do art for board games. Worth checking out if
• 4:34
  you get a chance. I was published in twenty twenty three. Next up,
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  we have picture Perfect. Picture Perfect is a game from twenty twenty I
• 4:42
  remember it was all the rage at gen Con that year, which was the
• 4:45
  big COVID year. The designer is Anthony Luveau and the art is done by
• 4:51
  Ronnie Libor and several other people. I just included the name of the first
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  person on the list. I didn't want to read all the names on thee.
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  Picture Perfectly is an interesting game in premise, it's a really cool premise.
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  So you get there are a series of cards. There's a whole bunch
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  of them, and they get shuffled up and dealt out, and these are
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  clue cards. What they are is there are cards that give you points for
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  there are cards that explain what different characters want. And your job is to
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  put characters into a tableau in which you are going to take a picture,
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  and the idea of the tableau is you take a picture with your camera on
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  your phone to score. So you have these little standees and a little table
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  and you have this grid of on the floor, and each of the cards
• 5:48
  depicts a different one of the characters in the tableau, and you all have
• 5:51
  the same set of characters. You all have the same set of clue cards.
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  And the idea is like one care character will want to be somewhere on
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  the left side of the board. Another character will want to be next to
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  this other particular character. Another character won't want to be any other by any
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  characters of this type. And so each person has things they want or things
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  they don't want, and sometimes things they want and don't want. And you
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  get to see a couple of the characters, and then through a sort of
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  system of trading cards, you get to show other people. You would trade
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  cards with some of those people, some of the other players so that they
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  see some combination of the cards that you saw before. So sometimes you end
• 6:34
  up getting back the cards that you got before. Sometimes you get to see
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  new things. Sometimes you can do a little bit to hide one of the
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  cards from other players, but The other thing about it is that you all
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  have the same group of people. You're all building the same tableau of these
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  little standees in a carefully arranged situation. But the thing is when you get
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  to scoring, you score each figure that you have in your tableau. So
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  there is an element of as you arrange figures in the tableau, you score
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  points for them or lose points for them. But if there's a character you
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  can't particularly well fit, you don't have to put it in the tableau.
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  The trick is once you put it in, you have to keep it in,
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  so you can't take it back out. Like if you put a character
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  in without knowing what they want, and then then you find out that what
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  they want is going to ruin a lot of your other plans, well,
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  too bad. You can't take them back out. You have to leave them
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  in. So there's an interesting element of pushing your luck in terms of deciding
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  when to add a new figure to the tableau so that you can accomplish other
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  goals but also score points. It's an interesting game with a clever set of
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  inner related scoring conditions that often involve choosing some things that for good and some
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  things for bad, and then leaning into that or moving around. A good
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  example of that, I think is at least the way the scoring conditions work,
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  something like point salad, which has a whole bunch of different scoring conditions,
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  a lot of which overlap, some of which are oxymoronic or that's not
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  the word I'm looking for, counterproductive or cancel, cancel each other out,
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  and what you're trying to do as a person arranging the photograph has got all
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  of them, my favorite ones. There are a few photos or a few
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  people who, depending on the card you draw, want to be seen,
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  but they don't want you to see their face, or they want you to
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  see their face but not their hands. And so part of what you're doing
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  is physically arranging the standees in a way that when you take a picture you
• 8:31
  can see them, but you only see them in the way that is required
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  for their rules. Of course, there are light rules about where you have
• 8:39
  to hold the camera in order to accomplish these this photo. So it's a
• 8:43
  neat it's a neat idea. It's the sort of game that I would play
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  occasionally if somebody got it out, not probably the kind of game I would
• 8:52
  purchase for a full price. I did get to play a friend's copy,
• 8:56
  which was cool. And if I found this at a thrift store, I
• 8:58
  would definitely get it. I might even pick it up used for ten or
• 9:01
  fifteen bucks because it's just a neat experience, and so it's the kind of
• 9:05
  game that would be fun to play once a year, or to play with
• 9:07
  people who haven't played it before, because it's just unique. Yeah, so
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  that's where I sit on in terms of my interest in acquiring it. But
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  it is an interesting experience if you get a chance to play it, that's
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  picture perfect. I believe they also have added an expansion. There's a Sherlock
• 9:22
  Holmes expansion that involves solving a murder mystery using the clues. I don't really
• 9:26
  know how that works, but it sounds pretty neat and I would like to
• 9:28
  try that at some point. So that game came out in twenty twenty.
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  Again. The designer was Anthony Nuvau, and it was published by Arcane Wonders
• 9:35
  in the United States. I did get to dust off one game that I
• 9:41
  wanted to talk about a little bit here. I think some of this may
• 9:43
  overlap with the discussion I did on the Top of the Stack episode, because
• 9:48
  I believe that I talked about this game there or possibly in another podcast since
• 9:52
  then, maybe my When to keep a game podcast? Anyhow, This is
• 9:58
  Nexus Ops. Nexus Ops is a game from It was originally published by Avalon
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  Hill in two thousand and five. It was republished by Fantasy Flight sometime between
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  then and now, and then has been out of print for a long time.
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  I heard rumblings that there is a new addition being developed and that's going
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  to be published on Kickstarter, and I can see why, and I'd be
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  happy to talk about the game and what it was. It was designed by
• 10:24
  Charlie Katino, who I looked and has He did a little bit more design
• 10:28
  work, but not a ton, and also Steve Kindell and Steve Kendell actually
• 10:33
  did a lot has done a lot of design work. Most prominently he worked
• 10:37
  for Fantasy Flight and there's a bunch of games that he on his board game
• 10:41
  geek page he says he had significant input on, and then there's a bunch
• 10:46
  of games where he's listed as the designer. So lots of game output from
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  him, particularly from Fantasy Flight. He had a big role in Star Wars
• 10:56
  X Wing and other things. So Nexus Ops is a very aggressive area control
• 11:01
  game in which players are trying to gather points and by taking control of this
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  mining planet on that is the base of the game. The way the game
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  works, each player controls a faction of that is, a mining corporation who
• 11:18
  is trying to mine this valuable material let's call it unobtainium because that's funny,
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  and they are actually doing battle with other mining corporations that are also trying to
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  mine that same material from this planet. The indigenous species of the planet are
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  easily manipulated with technology, and so the different units that you have are actually
• 11:41
  captured wildlife from the planet that you're using to compete with the other mining companies.
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  You also have your human engineers who are actually doing the mining, and
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  they also do some fighting. The gameplay mechanisms are relatively simple. Basically,
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  you just have these units and you get to spawn some round and then you
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  are moving them into combat with other players. Each time you lose a combat,
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  you get this one of these cards that gives you an advantage. Later.
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  Each time you win a combat with another player, you get a point.
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  So you are in combat with the other players and you're doing it through
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  very aggressive interactions. Each round, you can spend resources that you've gathered to
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  generate new troops, which you then put on the board and move into combat
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  or move into defensive spaces. The combat is really simple. The way it
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  works is you the units all have varying power from one to six, and
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  that power determines when they go in the battle and what die they roll,
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  And generally the level six creature rolls a D six. I mean, they're
• 12:46
  all rolling a single side die, but it's what do they need to hit?
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  The level six creature rolls and as long as it doesn't roll a one,
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  it kills one unit of your opponents. People. Now, if you
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  both have one or more of those units, you roll at the same time
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  in the kill, So you could have two equal sized units kill each other.
• 13:03
  But generally the other player is going to pick something weaker to kill with
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  the idea of not giving up their best unit, and then each lesser powered
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  unit gets to go and they have a lower chance of hitting. So there's
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  some that hit only on a five, or only on a two or better,
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  some that hit on three or better, something hit on a four or
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  five, or even the weakest units only hit on a six, and so
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  you go back. You go through the whole line once and then if there's
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  an army, if there's one army left on the board without the other,
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  then they gain control of that space, which sometimes will mean that they can
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  gain control of a mining facility, which would let them gain minerals. And
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  also, if you win the battle, then you get to take a victory
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  point card. And again the game only goes to ten points, so it
• 13:52
  actually plays relatively quick. This is a debt by definition, a sort of
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  knife fight in a phone booth game. I played it once a long time.
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  I think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of seven years Dusty and if.
• 14:03
  That was pretty clever at the time, but I didn't really explore it well.
• 14:05
  In the seven years since, I've grown less interested in this kind of
• 14:07
  game, not more so. I Having played it this time, I was
• 14:09
  sort of like, well, I don't think I need to play this again,
• 14:13
  or at least I don't need it in my collection, so I have
• 14:15
  passed it along to a friend who will make better use of it. Nonetheless,
• 14:18
  you know, if that sounds like your kind of game, do give
• 14:20
  it to try. It is well made, and it does what it's intended
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  to do. Very well, It's just not my cup of tea. That
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  is Nexus ops. I was playing the Fantasy Flight version with designed by Charlie
• 14:31
  Catino and Steve Kindell and art by Christopher Burdette and many other people. So
• 14:37
  the last new game I want to talk about is Inventions The Evolution of Ideas.
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  This is the newest vital Aserta game. It delivered sometime in the last
• 14:45
  few months. It has marked. It's a twenty twenty four game. I
• 14:48
  have a couple of different friends who are vital Aserta heads, so it was
• 14:50
  fun to be able to join them and get this one played. This kind
• 14:56
  of game is of course a huge overlap of interconnected systems, and while I
• 15:01
  really like this one, actually I found it easier to put all the pieces
• 15:07
  in my head in a coherent way than either weather Machine or something like The
• 15:13
  Gallerists, which you all know I didn't really enjoy The Gallerists. I found
• 15:16
  this one made a lot more sense to me. Something about the narrative of
• 15:20
  the world and how the different actions can be explained narratively really worked well for
• 15:26
  me. So I was able to understand what the game is trying to have
• 15:28
  me do pretty well. It is a very intricate game with lots of overlapping
• 15:33
  pieces. I don't even want to try to explain how the game works except
• 15:37
  to say it is a world map, and the idea is you are evolving
• 15:41
  a civilization through time, So you start with very simple things, and over
• 15:45
  time ideas are developed, and then they become public domain and other people can
• 15:50
  build on them. But there is an interesting middle ground where somebody creates an
• 15:54
  idea and then they're the only one who has access to it for a little
• 15:56
  while, or you can get access to it, but you have to pay
• 16:00
  for it or pay them for it with an action, which, as in
• 16:03
  all of these games, the actions are very limited. In action efficiency is
• 16:06
  the key to good play. The art, the design art and design was
• 16:10
  as always very good. You know, o'tool has a very specific style for
• 16:15
  Vital Asserta games, and I thought it fit that really well if you like
• 16:18
  his style of game, particularly something like I see this as kind of a
• 16:22
  cross between the opulence of weather Machine and the tight simplicity of lis Boa in
• 16:30
  terms of the design aesthetic, so it definitely feels of a part of a
• 16:36
  piece of these other systems, and I think it's one of the more legible
• 16:38
  games or more comprehensible games now. I don't know if that's just because the
• 16:44
  theme fits better for me and I was able to make narrative sense of it,
• 16:47
  or I actually read the whole rule book before the game, like I
• 16:49
  sat down and read the whole rule book, which I will confess I haven't
• 16:52
  always done for other games. And I think I think I often rely on
• 16:56
  a video if someone's going to be doing a teach, and I probably would
• 16:59
  be better to watch to read the rule book because it really doesn't take that
• 17:02
  long. This was a big rule book, and it took me a half
• 17:04
  hour forty five minutes. So and I've played enough games now that I'm able
• 17:08
  to comprehend a rule book in ways that I probably couldn't have ten years ago
• 17:11
  or five years ago. Even not a ton to say about it because I
• 17:15
  don't want to go deep into mechanisms. I don't think that helps make you
• 17:17
  decide if you want to play this or not. If you think it sounds
• 17:19
  interesting, definitely check out some videos of gameplay. If you've never played a
• 17:22
  vital aserta game, I think this one's probably as approachable as any I would
• 17:26
  probably put this and Liz Boa at the top of my list for games to
• 17:30
  try. Now. I've heard Conbin is incredible and I haven't played that one,
• 17:34
  so I would like to try that at some point. But generally I
• 17:38
  really like this one, and I think it's worth checking out if you get
• 17:41
  a chance. That's Inventions The Evolution of Ideas from twenty twenty four, designed
• 17:47
  by Vitala Aserta with graphic design and art by Ian O'Toole, published by Ego
• 17:52
  Griffin Games this year. Well, those are some new to me games that
• 17:56
  I've played recently. What games have you tried recently? Head over to board
• 18:00
  game geekill three two sixty nine and share your thoughts on that. I'd love
• 18:03
  to hear them. Otherwise, I hope that your next walk business pleasant as
• 18:07
  mind was, Oh bye. The game is over when somebody gets ten points.
• 18:32
  So there's a real distinct focus that involves sorry, there's a cardinal just
• 18:44
  really chirping up a storm on a branch that I'm walking by, and I'm
• 18:48
  finding it distracting. Brought to you by rattle boy Eh