Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Top of the Stack, September 2023

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Top of the Stack, September 2023 · Pick Up and Deliver

0:03
Welcome to pick up and Deliver the podcast, where I pick up my audio
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recorder as I head out for a walk and delivering EPISODEY while I stroll around.
0:11
I'm Brendan Riley. Good morning listeners. It's a lovely day here in
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suburban Chicago, and I'm out for a Saturday morning walk with a game day
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coming up. I don't know what we're going to play. I think we're
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going to do an exit game for sure, but other than that, the
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sky's the limit. Actually, we're gonna want to pick some six player games
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because we have six of us there, and then some five player games after
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that. So this guy isn't really the limit the player count of five players,
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it's the limit, but we'll see what we see. So four.
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It is also September second, which means that it's time to do a Top
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of the Stack. For those of you new to the podcast. Top of
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the Stack is an episode where I talk about the last month's game play and
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make a plan for next month's game play. This month, of course,
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i'll be talking about August twenty twenty three, talking about what I played,
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what I planned to play next month, and uh yeah, it's gonna be
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a good time. It was a good month for gaming. As always,
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I'll start with some general stats. Over the course of the month, I
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played eighty one different game plays. Remember that includes asynchronous online plays, which
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is a big percentage of my game plays. I also played forty five different
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games, so eighty one plays of forty five different games. My year total
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is six hundred and eighty four plays of two hundred and forty five games.
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So yeah, doing pretty good. Six hundred and eighty four is a nice
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chunk on the way toward a thousand plays for the year. I think I've
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got a decent chance at making that. That'd be pretty fun, don't I
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don't know why a thousand sounds good, but it seems pretty great. My
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shelf of opportunity, this is the list of games that I own that I
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I haven't played. Ideally, that list would be going down because I would
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be playing the games that I've purchased. August because of gen conten was a
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month where I got some new games, which means that I went from fifty
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six games on my shelf of opportunity up to sixty one, So not really
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making progress on the old shelf of opportunity. Still having fun though, my
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collection size. I was trying to have it reduced, not doing so well
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on that either, where we went from five hundred and sixty two games up
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to five hundred and sixty eight, so collection is growing. My most played
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game this month in person was frost Haven with four plays. That's been really
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fun. We've been trying to make sure we get to play every week with
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the family, particularly now that we've got a countdown going. My daughter and
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goes away to college next year, so we have one year to get as
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much of frost Haven played as we can before we have to decide are we
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playing it without her or does it go on to some sort of like decade
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long arc where we're only going to play when she's home and when my son
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is home. So I think she sort of resigned herself to the idea that
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we would play without her. I think she's sad about that too, anyway,
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So yeah, we played frost Haven four times. We also got our
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butts kicked in the last two games, which was not super fun, and
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so I think we're gonna we're gonna not notch it down one level of difficulty
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for a bit, just to just to get some confidence, sense of fun
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back in the In the play online, I played Through the Ages and apple
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Jack each four times. Those are both pretty fun. Apple Jack, I
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am. I like it fine as an online game. If someone had it
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at like a game night and wanted to play it, I would play it
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there, but I'm not really jazzed by it. Like I think it's fine.
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It's a good tactical game. There's a level of strategy that you can
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build in there, but you're limited by the choices you have of the tiles
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and so kind of like Uve Rosenberg's other lighter games, I find that most
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of those I like okay, but I'm not super jazzed about. So that's
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apple Jack and Through the Ages, of course, continues to be one of
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my most played games. I don't think i've hit two hundred plays yet,
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but I'm pretty close, all right. So Top of the Stack, as
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I mentioned almost every episode, because I like to cite ideas that come from
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other people, Top of the Stack is the idea of it comes from the
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podcast of Nonsensical Gamers, which was a podcast that I listened to a lot
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right when I started gaming and doing this work, and they had a thing
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where each time they would check in and say what have you been playing lately
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and what do you plan to play next time? And when they did the
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plan to play next time, they'd say, what's on the top of your
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stack? Like they have a stack of games to play, what's at the
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top. So I stole that idea, and that's what I used to call
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the monthly plan. This month, I did not do well ticking games off
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the top of my stack. I had four to play, Revive, Chris
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Majistics, Vagrant Song, and Time Pirates, time Pirates being the novelty choice
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there, Revive and Vagrant Song being the brand new game choices, and Chris
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Majistics being a Top fifty choice that I'm trying to get played because I want
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to play all my Top fifty games before the end of the year. Along
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those lines, I did not get Transmajustice to the table. I did not
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get Vagrant Song to the table. Neither of those really got in the position
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where I was trying. Revive is a sad story, a sad story for
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gamers, and a sad story of bad memory. So you're excited to hear
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this, I'm sure. So I generally will make plans to play big games
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at my game Club well in advance, in order to try to get people
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to try them, or to get sort of in the position where we can
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play them. And so I arranged with a friend a couple of weeks ago.
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I said, Hey, do you want to try Revive? And he
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said sure, Hey, can I bring my friend Brian? And I said
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sure, so right, so we've got three seats already taken. Right fast
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forward a couple of weeks and I'm planning, and I remembered that I asked
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my friend, but I forgot that he asked if he could bring a friend.
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So then I asked another friend, George, if he wanted to play.
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Said sure, He said, do we have another seat available? I
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said, oh, it's just Joshua and I and George, so sure,
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bring another friend. And so George and Joshua both showed up with extra friends,
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as I had told them they should, And because I'm not a jerk,
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I decided to sit out so they could all play, because I had
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told them I could all play. So I have seen my game played,
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but I have not played it. So that's the sad story of Revive,
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as it was played on our table, or I should say not played on
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our table or not played on my table. Oh well, in September,
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perhaps I did have seventy or I did have Sorry. Before this, I
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had seventy games that I've tried this year for the first time, and I
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had some new ones this month as well, actually quite a few. I'm
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just going to run through the list. You'll hear more about these as I
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get to them in the quick review episodes that I like to do. But
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so, the games I tried this month were Rah After Us, Dungeons and
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Dragons, Bedlam In Never Winter Ever, Dull Far Short, Lama, Time
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Pirates, Irish Gage Kites, Forbidden Jungle Woodcraft, Letter Jam, Mother of
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Frankenstein, Nana also known as Trio, and Sagrata Artisans. That brings me
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up to eighty four new games played this year. I'm going to crest well
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over one hundred unless something slows down dramatically, which I don't see why I
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would. So that it was a great month for gaming, really fun.
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I did get to try one expansion this month that I hadn't tried before,
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and that was the Dream Eaters expansion from Arkham Horror Up the card game.
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My son and my wife and I started a new campaign. We played a
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couple missions on the dream Eaters. I did get five games out of the
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dust this month. The first one was Spirit Island, which I hadn't played
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for two years, six months, and thirteen days, and even though it
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had been a long time, I liked it even more than the last time
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I played. So every time I play I like Spirit Island a little bit
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more. It's a good game that I find really intriguing, and I can
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see why people make it a style game. There's a lot of a lot
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of depth in the game, and there's a lot of really interesting cooperation in
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terms of how you work together to make your play your powers play off each
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other. I like that the game lets people take actions in whatever whatever order
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they want, creates a lot of decision space, but also a lot of
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flexibility to really maximize the effect of your powers. Overall, Spirit Island is
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great. This time I played the green one, the one about forests overgrowing
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the trees or something like that. It was a great time. Next up
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is Awkward Guests. Awkward Guests was one year, three months, and twenty
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seven days Dusty, so almost one year in four months. It feels like
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I played that more often than I do because I use that game in one
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of my classes at school, so I get to see people play it,
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which makes me feel like I'm playing it, even though I didn't actually play
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it. When we did play it, though, we had a great time
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except that boy and my wife is good at that game, which is awesome.
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But like, we finishing around, and if you haven't played, it's
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a mystery game and you get close each round and at the end of the
9:05
round you can take a guess or not. So we got to the end
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of the round and I was thinking, if I get a couple of good
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cards the next round, I'll take a guess, and my wife took a
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guest and won the game the whole Like I was thinking about maybe I'd take
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a guess next round, and she's like, boom done, which turns out
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happens a lot. I looked at our records. She's won sixty six percent
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of the games of Awkward Guests that we play, and that's a large player
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account game, so we're almost always playing with five, six, seven people.
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And yeah, so it turns out I'm bad at that and she's great
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at it, which is awesome. Awkward Guests really fun. Next up,
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is Tenpenny Parks. This one would count as barely dusty one year, one
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month, at twenty one days. It also has the weird, the weird
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idea of being dusty even though I didn't own it, right, I count
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a game as dusty if I haven't played it in that time, and that
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that means sometimes when I'm calling a game dusty, it isn't even a game
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I owned, right, It's a metaphorical dust that I'm eating off. And
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in this case, Tenpenny Parks is a game I played a couple of times.
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Here's some bragging with Nate Lynn Hurt, the designer who is sometime regular
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at my board game club, and I was very excited to play the game
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a few times with him, and so I finally got around to picking up
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my own copy in June or July maybe, and so then we got us
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to the table with the family, and that was the incident of getting it
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played. If you haven't played it, it's a great tile layer. It's
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got this really quirky thing where tiles can never be next to each other.
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The closer they can be as diagonal, So it really challenges your thinking about
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how you're going to place your tiles. Really fun game, nice quick play,
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maybe an hour and a half at the most, sometimes a little faster
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tenpenny parks. It's great. Next up is Horrified. I played it took
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you. This was Dusty one year and nine months in twenty five days.
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Like Awkward Guests, this is a game I use in my board game class,
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and so we do have a little bit of the different effects of people
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playing the game around me, making it feel like I've played it, but
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in fact I haven't played it since, you know, almost two years.
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It's great. It's sort of like Pandemic but less scary, and it's a
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little easy if you're only playing with two monsters, which we did because three
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of the five players were brand new to the game and hadn't played it before,
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so we're like, yeah, well we'll play with it on two monsters.
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Three monsters is more fun, I think, but also much harder,
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and I guess introducing its people it's more fun if they have a good time.
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So that's Horrified American or the Universal Monsters is the one we've played.
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And then finally, this game I had to estimate because the last time I
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played it was before I started tracking games. But like not a little bit
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before, like shocking drastically before I started tracking games, and this is Rummy
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Cube. Rummy Cube is a tile laying game based loosely around Gin Rummy,
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in which you have a series of tiles that represent values of like playing cards,
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and they're in colors which kind of represent suits, and you're making runs
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and straights just like you do in Rummy. The couple differences is are one,
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there are these wild tiles that you can put in that represent a card
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but or a tile, but you can steal them by placing the correct tile
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that belongs where they go there and taking the tile out and then using them
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wild tiles anything. And then a big part of the game is remaking the
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different arrangements or tiles that people have put out. So the way the game
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works, you're putting on your tiles and runs and straights, and when you
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put out more runs and straights, you can then share them with other people
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and use their runs and straights to put out more of your tiles. And
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your goal is to get rid of all your tiles. On a turn where
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you can't put out anything, you have to take a tile instead, and
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you're not allowed to put any tiles out until you can put fifty points worth
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on the board at once, So it turns out it's really fun. It's
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been getting a lot of play at our game club. At least once a
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week or every week, somebody is playing pulling it Out. It's kind of
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the same group playing it all the time, but other people have started playing
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it because they're reminded, oh, yes, this game is pretty good.
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So it's a rummy cube all right, So lots of great games dusted off.
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I had a good time with that. My ten by ten challenge,
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I'm kind of doing two, actually doing an asynchronous one and a synchronous one,
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but with the same list of people, which is designers. As you
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recall the ten by ten challenges where you try to play normally, it's you've
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tried to play ten games ten times each over the course of the year.
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For my approach, what I tried to do is I picked designers. I
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want to play ten games by each of those designers ten times over the course
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of the year, and then I decided to track both asynchronous plays and synchronous
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plays. On the asynchronous plays, I'm doing pretty well. I have completed
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ten plays of Vladimirsucci games, Ryder Kanitzia Games, INCA Brand games, Tom
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Layman games, a lot of Holotel games and Uve Rosenberg games I still have.
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I've only played four Martin Wallace games synchronously. I've played four Phil Walker
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Harding games synchronously, and I've played four Elizabeth Hargrave games asynchronously. So a
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little bit more to do there, but not a ton, and I think
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that I'm gonna really try to power through and finish those on the table.
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However, I'm doing much more poorly. I've played five Martin Wallace games.
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I've played seven Vladimir Succi six, Rynter Knesia, only two INCA Brand games.
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I picked Inca Brand without really thinking through the ramifications of picking her,
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because while I've played a lot of online games for her, I don't actually
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own any of her games and I encounter them very rarely, so my ability
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to play her games is really hampered. Basically, those are both exit games,
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the ones that I marked. Phil Walker Harding is at three. That
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one's kind of sad because I have a lot of Phil Walker Harding games.
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I think if I make an effort, I could finish his. Tom Layman
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is at four. That one's also a little sad. I have several Tom
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Layman games, including rez Arcana and the City, both of which I think
15:01
are really good, and Role for the Galaxy, which I think is really
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good. And I have some Role for the Galaxy expansions that I haven't played
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that I think are really sound really cool. So Tom Layman, I really
15:09
should be doing better. Elizabeth Hargrave I picked because my wife and I really
15:13
liked Wingspan, but we haven't been playing it much lately, so I'm hoping
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maybe we can get back into it here. There have been a couple of
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campaigns that people have released. Maybe I'll download one of those, and I
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don't get us a little impetus to finish it. But now that we're playing
15:26
Sagrata Artisans, it feels like that's really where we're going. And then finally
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Vlada Hivado. I've only played two games in person Via Rosenberg. I've only
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played two in person. Carl Chudick, I've played two in person, but
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I have completed the asynchronous Carl Chuddick, I forgot to mention him. I've
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completed his asynchronous ones as well. My h index, which is how many
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number of games that you've played the same number of times. So like,
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if you have four games that you've played four times each, your H index
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is four. Makes sense, So my H index is eleven right now,
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including a synchronous plays and those games are Through the Ages Resarcana, My City,
16:06
frost Haven, Guy A Project, Arkham, Horror, the card game
16:08
ark Nova, Apple Jack, Mataynai Quicks, and Age of Civilization. Making
16:14
progress on my fifty two game challenge. You remember, this is a list
16:18
of fifty two prompts and you're supposed to fulfill each prompt by playing a game,
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a particular game. So, for example, this month, I fulfilled
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three of the prompts. It's slowing down because at the beginning of the year
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I was getting like eight to ten in a month because they're the easy to
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do, like I sort of fulfill them. Incidentally, now we're at the
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point where in order from me to fulfill them, I really need to focus
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in like specifically choose, Okay, I'm going to play a game that meets
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this criteria so that I can fulfill one of the requirements. So I only
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got three this month. Once again, I wasn't really trying, and you
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know the fact that I only got three while I wasn't trying, and there's
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still eleven left. Says that I really need to for the last few months
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here of the year. I really need to focus on specifically completing themes.
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But number six, play your favorite prompt from twenty twenty one. Looking through
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the twenty twenty one lest I picked a game with Easter eggs, and my
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winning thing was here Awkward Guests. In Awkward Guests, they have these little
17:22
tokens that represent which detective you are, and at first glance, they appear
17:26
to be just like little different characters, but if you are paying attention,
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you'll notice that they represent classic detectives like Colombo and Miss Marpole, and so
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playing as one of those is fun. Second, play a game with a
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round tracker fitting to the theme. Like I said, I haven't talked about
17:45
yet on the show, but I played Raw, the classic Ryder Knitzia auction
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game, and in Raw, the Raw the round tracker is a little boat
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that looks like the boat to the Afterlife that's with the God and Raw is
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all about sort of making sacrifices the gods and the favor of the gods and
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so on, so it fits the story really well, and that's why I
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picked it as the game with a roundtracker fitting to the theme. And then
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finally play a game that takes place in your favorite season. Now, I've
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often said my favorite season is Autumn. One of my favorite things about autumn
18:18
is apple picking. So I've decided that Applejack is a game that takes place
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in my favorite season. I don't know if it really does, but I'm
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calling it and saying that it does. So there Applejack, which I actually
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the first time I played that was in May, but I decided this is
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the month I decided, so I'm counting it. This month is having finished
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it. So I'm up to thirty nine of the fifty two prompts, which
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means that I have so I have thirteen fourteen to go, so looking forward
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to finishing those out At fourteen to go, and I have four months left
18:48
of the year. That means I need to finish roughly three or four a
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month, So I should look at those carefully and kind of plan out what
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games I might play along those lines. My painting challenge did not go great
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this month. I was planning to finish the Nazi minis from Hellboy and then
19:06
maybe start on the minis from Cerebria. I did not complete that goal,
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and I did, however, paint one mini. This month. My son
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started a new D and D campaign and so he made a mini for his
19:21
new character. I think what he does is he goes on hero Fords and
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he builds the three D model of the mini on hero Fords, and then
19:27
you can buy the STL for the three D model, and then he prints
19:30
it on our printer and then he gives it to me and I painted,
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and so that's what he did. So I did get that done, but
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I did not make any progress on the Hellboy minis. I will do that
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next month for sure. Finishing up the collection size. Like I said at
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the beginning of the month, it was five hundred and sixty two games.
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I picked up three games at gen Con. I got Revive Vagrant Song and
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Sherlock Holmes and The Baker Street of Regulars, which is a puzzle game built
20:00
around comic books. Then I added one more game, Sagrata Artisans, which
20:04
I had backed on Kickstarter, and that came in and fulfilled right either,
20:08
I think it. I think it arrived while I was at gen Con.
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Actually, then I had three more games show up Every doll Far Shore,
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Apollo, and Kittens in a Blender. All three of those games also made
20:22
their way onto my list. And finally I was at the local half priced
20:27
books and on their stock of clearance games, they had copies of In the
20:33
Year of the Dragon from Stephen Feld for ten dollars, and while I didn't
20:38
want to buy it, when they were charging twenty two dollars for it at
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ten dollars, I was like, yes, I will give In the Year
20:44
of the Dragon to try for ten dollars. So that was my Those were
20:48
my Oh and actually, now that I look at it, I think,
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well, I think the four Gameek said I have five hundred sixty eight games
20:57
in my collection. My tally here is five hundred and seventy, so I'm
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not sure where the mismatches. Maybe I've missed something, but I usually use
21:06
the board game geek tally as the final one, so five to sixty eight
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is the number that's there. I already mentioned playing the Dream Meters in Arkham
21:15
Horror. I haven't talked about my Top fifty challenge in a while. As
21:18
you remember, every other year I do a Top fifty board games of all
21:22
time list and I update it. The last time I updated it was the
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beginning of twenty twenty two, so I'm just about up for doing it again
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here at the beginning of twenty twenty four or the end of twenty twenty three,
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and I try to in the time in between those two play all fifty
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of my top fifty games. It seems like if I have fifty games that
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I think are the best games, and I play a thousand games in a
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year, I ought to play those fifty right or at least every other year.
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So the games. As of the end of twenty twenty two, I
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had played forty eight or thirty eight of those fifty games, which left twelve
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to be played communiely. There's twelve months in this year, and so I
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had twelve to play. I have played Altiplano, Last Will, Shipyard,
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Five Tribes, and Clank. I have not played net Runner, Terraforming,
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Mars Cerebria, Vampire, The Eternal Struggle, A Touch of Evil, Terromistica,
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or Trusmistice. So I will be trying to play those seven games as
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we raced toward the end of the year. I'm not sure I will get
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all seven played, because that's a lot in four months when I haven't been
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managed to do it in eight. But we'll see finally top of the stack
22:33
September. These are the games that I planned to play in September. You'll
22:36
remember that three of the four games I played last month for games I really
22:38
wanted to play and did not get played. So I'm putting them all back
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on the list. Vagrant Song, Terraforming Mars, and Revive. They all
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roll over to September and I will get them all played this month, come
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hell or high water, which means I have one more to choose. You'll
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remember the last game that was in the original batch that I played was Time
22:56
Pirates, which was this silly little game from Alan Moon that I got played
23:02
and got off of my shelf of opportunity. That left a space open.
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So I'm going to play Hunted wood Ridge, which is the newest game from
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Gabe Gabe who runs the Board Game Design Lab podcast. I can't remember his
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last name right now, but I have the other two hundred games and I
23:18
like them, and this is the third one that just arrived in June,
23:21
I think, via the mail. So what have you been playing? Head
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over to board Game Geek Guild three two six nine and share your thoughts on
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your top of the stack. There is already a thread there, I believe,
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and let us know what you've been playing and what you plan to play
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next month. If you'd like to get ahold of me, you can send
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me an email Brendan at rattlebox games dot com. You can send me a
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message on board game geek wanba at nine two nine is my user name there.
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That is actually probably the easiest way to get ahold of me, and
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or you could send me a message on or a game invite on Board Game
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Arena or Yukata. In both places, I'm Wombat nine two nine and I'd
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love to play a game with you. So thanks for joining me for another
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month of gaming and game podcasts. I'm looking for or to talking with you
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more and seeing you on the game table. Thanks for joining me. I
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hope your next blocks The closest mind Lost Go bye. Brought to you by Rattlebox