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Chain of Goods · Pick Up and Deliver

0:04
Speaker 1: Welcome to pick up and Deliver the podcast where I
0:06
Speaker 1: pick up my audio recorder as I step out for
0:08
Speaker 1: a walk and deliver an episode two while I stroll around.
0:11
Speaker 1: I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good morning, listeners. It's a lovely
0:23
Speaker 1: day here in suburban Chicago. The weather is cool but
0:26
Speaker 1: not cold. It's forty one degrees. It snowed yesterday and
0:30
Speaker 1: we got some accumulation, but it's almost all gone now.
0:33
Speaker 1: I can see a few patches of snow here and
0:35
Speaker 1: there that haven't melted, but by the afternoon it'll be
0:38
Speaker 1: green again. The trees have mostly dropped their leaves, and
0:41
Speaker 1: we are definitely heading into the autumn or the winter. Well,
0:45
Speaker 1: I did get to play a game the other day
0:49
Speaker 1: that reminded me of a certain type of games. I
0:52
Speaker 1: thought I would talk about that a little bit and
0:54
Speaker 1: see if I could reflect on what's interesting or not
0:57
Speaker 1: interesting about it and sort of draw some boundary around
1:01
Speaker 1: a particular kind of subgenre of economic eurogame. Now, I'll
1:05
Speaker 1: be curious, as you're listening, does it seem like I'm
1:09
Speaker 1: making arbitrary or unreasonable distinctions between some games and others
1:13
Speaker 1: in how I'm thinking through this. So I'm gonna start
1:16
Speaker 1: with explaining I'm perhaps I'm spoiling a little bit. Spirits
1:19
Speaker 1: of the Rice Patty. I think I will probably not
1:21
Speaker 1: include this in a future board game Espresso, because I
1:25
Speaker 1: did play it, and normally it would go into one
1:27
Speaker 1: of those. But I want to talk it about a
1:29
Speaker 1: little bit to talk about this episode. So what I
1:32
Speaker 1: want what I'm going to talk about today are economic
1:36
Speaker 1: games with elaborate, uninterruptable production chains. In other words, games
1:42
Speaker 1: where in order to produce a thing or make a thing,
1:46
Speaker 1: you have to have something else, which requires you to
1:48
Speaker 1: get something else first and then do something else. So
1:50
Speaker 1: it's like this chain of production elements in order to
1:55
Speaker 1: get the outcome of the thing. Spirits of the Rice
1:58
Speaker 1: Patty is the game that I played that I was
2:00
Speaker 1: thinking of, and this is a farming simulation game. The
2:04
Speaker 1: two gimmicks in it are that you have that you're
2:08
Speaker 1: producing rice, which has a very specific set of needs
2:11
Speaker 1: and processes for how it's produced. And the game has
2:15
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of game breaking spirits which you draft,
2:18
Speaker 1: and that's the sort of really interesting engine of the game.
2:22
Speaker 1: In some ways, it's very much like a gricola, which
2:24
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk about next in the Agricola has
2:27
Speaker 1: the occupation cards and the tool cards, both of which
2:32
Speaker 1: are sort of somewhat game breaking. They usually give you
2:35
Speaker 1: a little bit of a bonus, and Agricola is all
2:37
Speaker 1: about eking out just a little more efficiency than the
2:39
Speaker 1: next player, and if you do that over time, you
2:42
Speaker 1: end up with a bunch of points where they had
2:43
Speaker 1: not as many. Spirits with the Rice Patty is more
2:46
Speaker 1: egregious in terms of how strong the powers are, and
2:50
Speaker 1: you get them for free instead of having to work
2:53
Speaker 1: for them. And Agricola you get your occupation cards, but
2:57
Speaker 1: to play them you have to spend actions which are
3:00
Speaker 1: extremely limited to get those cards into play, and then
3:03
Speaker 1: those cards give you minor benefits, which a gricle is
3:07
Speaker 1: all about minor benefits. In Spirits of the Rice Patty,
3:11
Speaker 1: there are a bunch of different spirits and they strongly
3:14
Speaker 1: influence how the game is played, and the turn order
3:17
Speaker 1: is a key thing of what they influence, so the
3:19
Speaker 1: way the game works. At the beginning of each round,
3:21
Speaker 1: or at the beginning of the first round and the
3:24
Speaker 1: fourth round, you get a hand of four spirit cards,
3:28
Speaker 1: and the spirit cards are number one through twenty and
3:31
Speaker 1: they have powers on them. The higher the number, the
3:34
Speaker 1: more powerful the card. The lower the number, the less powerful.
3:37
Speaker 1: But you go in turn order based on the highest
3:40
Speaker 1: number you've played. So if you've played A twenty, A two,
3:44
Speaker 1: and a three, you're going in turn order twenty. If
3:47
Speaker 1: you played A two, three and four, turn order four.
3:50
Speaker 1: But your powers that you get from those cards are
3:52
Speaker 1: pretty weak, so there's a trade off to be made,
3:55
Speaker 1: and you get to play one card each round. You're
3:57
Speaker 1: going to draft one from your hand, pass the hand,
3:59
Speaker 1: draft another hand, draft another, so you have three cards
4:02
Speaker 1: and then the fourth one gets discarded, and then we
4:05
Speaker 1: do the same thing again at round four. So by
4:06
Speaker 1: the end of the game you have six powers and
4:08
Speaker 1: they're all in play the whole time, so the effect
4:12
Speaker 1: of them accumulates and the scores get wild by the
4:15
Speaker 1: end or can. But what made me think of or
4:19
Speaker 1: what made me start imagining Spirits of the Rice Patty
4:22
Speaker 1: as part of this tiny group of games that I'm
4:25
Speaker 1: thinking of, was not in fact those cards, but rather
4:30
Speaker 1: the way that you produce rice. So in the game,
4:33
Speaker 1: you have these rice patties fields where you can plant rice,
4:38
Speaker 1: and in order to plant rice, the field needs to
4:42
Speaker 1: be flooded, so you flood it and plant rice, then
4:47
Speaker 1: you can then in the next round when you get
4:51
Speaker 1: to the grow phase, if there's water in the field,
4:54
Speaker 1: then the rice will grow. And then in the next round,
4:58
Speaker 1: if you have grown rice and you drain the field,
5:02
Speaker 1: then you can harvest the rice. If you don't drain
5:05
Speaker 1: the field, then you can't harvest the rice, and the
5:08
Speaker 1: rice rots and you actually lose it. So there's an
5:10
Speaker 1: element of precision there in terms of if you have
5:14
Speaker 1: a field with no rice on it, it takes three
5:16
Speaker 1: rounds to get rice harvested. You have to plant in
5:19
Speaker 1: the first round, grow it in the second round, harvest
5:22
Speaker 1: it in the third round. Now the game does allow
5:25
Speaker 1: you to harvest rice and then plant it in the
5:30
Speaker 1: same round, so you can immediately plant again. And then
5:33
Speaker 1: there's a whole bunch of bonus cards that will let
5:35
Speaker 1: you do things like harvest and grow in the same
5:38
Speaker 1: or grow, harvest, plant all in the same round. A
5:45
Speaker 1: little bit, it gets pretty complicated, but there's some pretty
5:48
Speaker 1: interesting stuff going on there. My point is, in order
5:51
Speaker 1: to make the game do what it needs to do,
5:54
Speaker 1: and of course to do all that, you have these
5:55
Speaker 1: workers and you're trying to coordinate the workers. So there's
5:58
Speaker 1: just a whole bunch of interconnected things you have to
6:00
Speaker 1: do in the right order at the right time. And
6:03
Speaker 1: I was thinking about this as a subgenre of economic game,
6:06
Speaker 1: because not all economic games work this way. Something like Everdell,
6:10
Speaker 1: which is an economic game. You've got scarce resources, but
6:13
Speaker 1: the way the turns work, you're using the resources to
6:17
Speaker 1: accumulate things, and then you use the things you've accumulated
6:21
Speaker 1: to buy something. But the timing isn't as crucial. You
6:25
Speaker 1: don't lose out if you miss something, and you don't
6:29
Speaker 1: have you do have pretty limited actions, but the careful
6:32
Speaker 1: chain of ordering isn't so important. You might be able
6:36
Speaker 1: to point to brass Okay, So backing up, So I
6:40
Speaker 1: was thinking about what other games fit this model, and
6:43
Speaker 1: there's a couple that come to mind. The first is Agricola.
6:47
Speaker 1: Obviously I mentioned a Gricola here, but I think about
6:49
Speaker 1: what is it that what is it that I would
6:51
Speaker 1: see as part of a game that I would let
6:54
Speaker 1: it be in this category? And I think the crucial
6:56
Speaker 1: thing is, in order to get what you need, you
6:59
Speaker 1: have to have four steps. If it takes less than
7:02
Speaker 1: four steps to get the thing you need, then I
7:04
Speaker 1: think it doesn't count for this category. So right in
7:07
Speaker 1: flood in spirits of the rice patty, you have to
7:10
Speaker 1: flood the field. You have to plant the crops. You
7:13
Speaker 1: can drain the field and weed it. If you get
7:17
Speaker 1: weeds or bugs in there, you drain it and weed it,
7:21
Speaker 1: get bugs out, then you flood it again. It'll grow,
7:24
Speaker 1: then you drain it again and it'll be harvested. So
7:27
Speaker 1: that's it's either flood, plant, grow, drain harvest, which is
7:31
Speaker 1: five steps, or flood plant, drain, weed, flood, grow, drain harvest,
7:39
Speaker 1: which is eight steps. And of course in there you
7:41
Speaker 1: have to have workers to do some of those things
7:43
Speaker 1: as well. So spirits of the rice patty and then
7:45
Speaker 1: and then when you get at the end is rice
7:47
Speaker 1: which is your currency which you can use to buy
7:48
Speaker 1: more workers, more farmland, more farm animals, et cetera. There
7:53
Speaker 1: are other actions as well, but the base crop management
7:56
Speaker 1: action is that. So, like I said, agricola is one
7:59
Speaker 1: of the main things that I think about as a
8:03
Speaker 1: similar thing. There are a couple steps in a gricola
8:06
Speaker 1: that you can do out of order. You have to
8:10
Speaker 1: till the land, you have to get grain. Those are
8:14
Speaker 1: both kind of out of order, there are two steps
8:16
Speaker 1: we can then we think of that as one step
8:18
Speaker 1: as preparation, it takes two actions, but it's preparation gathering
8:21
Speaker 1: the materials, then you have to plant the crops. Then
8:25
Speaker 1: you have to bake bread. So I guess there's the
8:28
Speaker 1: four steps. There's till, gather the seed, plant the seed,
8:32
Speaker 1: bake the bread. So that's four steps. If anything that
8:36
Speaker 1: required less than four steps to get the food or
8:40
Speaker 1: the final thing would be less effective. And again in agricola,
8:44
Speaker 1: what you're trying to do there is get the final
8:46
Speaker 1: the stage of food. Now that's one of the many
8:48
Speaker 1: things you can get in a gricola, but most of
8:50
Speaker 1: the other things are one step. Like if you need
8:51
Speaker 1: a bunch of clay, you do one step to get
8:54
Speaker 1: the clay. Then you can use that clay to build things.
8:56
Speaker 1: So that's more like the traditional gather and build. But
8:59
Speaker 1: I think a gricle does have this four step process,
9:01
Speaker 1: and it's part of the reason I'm oh and I
9:04
Speaker 1: left out. You can't just bake. You have to have
9:07
Speaker 1: a thing to bake with. So there's also build the kiln.
9:10
Speaker 1: That's I knew. I was like, wait, there's not enough
9:12
Speaker 1: steps here. Yeah, So it's till the ground, get grain,
9:15
Speaker 1: plant the grain. Harvesting the grain is free. You don't
9:18
Speaker 1: have to do anything to do that. But then you
9:20
Speaker 1: have to build the kiln, use the and use the
9:24
Speaker 1: kiln to make the bread. Now you can just use
9:26
Speaker 1: the grain as food, but that's a terrible way to
9:28
Speaker 1: play you really, it doesn't work. You don't get enough
9:30
Speaker 1: food out of it. Because you can use a grain
9:32
Speaker 1: as one food or you can bake to make it
9:34
Speaker 1: two or three food. So that's the core food loop
9:38
Speaker 1: in Agricola, which again, like I said, is pretty complex, complex,
9:42
Speaker 1: and then the whole idea of the game is you
9:46
Speaker 1: have to get that efficiency going and then keep that
9:49
Speaker 1: food going so you can feed your people. And then
9:51
Speaker 1: you also have to get more workers build things, and
9:54
Speaker 1: your points come from all the other stuff you do.
9:56
Speaker 1: Once you've got that sustainability piece trucking. There's also a
10:00
Speaker 1: whole other loop about farm animals, but I'm leaving that
10:03
Speaker 1: out for now. Another game I identified that has this
10:06
Speaker 1: at least four steps involved in the process is Barrage.
10:11
Speaker 1: Barrage is a energy management game. I don't actually like
10:14
Speaker 1: it that much. I think the puzzle of it is interesting,
10:17
Speaker 1: but it's really mean, and you can have your You
10:21
Speaker 1: can do a lot of work to get everything set
10:22
Speaker 1: up and then have someone else just take build a
10:26
Speaker 1: thing in a way that screws you over, and I
10:28
Speaker 1: don't find that particularly fun. This might be one of
10:32
Speaker 1: those ones that really suffers from asynchronous play. The one
10:36
Speaker 1: time I played it in person on the table, I
10:38
Speaker 1: enjoyed it much more than when I played it when
10:41
Speaker 1: I've played it online. So I think maybe there's an
10:43
Speaker 1: element of being able to keep all this stuff in
10:45
Speaker 1: your head is really important. If you haven't played Barrage.
10:49
Speaker 1: The steps are you have to build a damp, you
10:53
Speaker 1: have to build an energy processing plant, you have to
10:57
Speaker 1: build water pumping station, and you have to build a
11:00
Speaker 1: dam that will hold all the water. Now, sometimes other
11:02
Speaker 1: people will do some of those things as you're doing this.
11:05
Speaker 1: You have to accumulate machines that will let you do
11:07
Speaker 1: all this building. And then once you've got all those
11:09
Speaker 1: things in place, then you take an action to generate
11:12
Speaker 1: energy based on how much water is there. So it's
11:15
Speaker 1: four steps. Build, bill, build, generate. In that regard, Barrage
11:21
Speaker 1: might fit better into a category of what you call
11:24
Speaker 1: brass like games. Brass works this way too. You build
11:29
Speaker 1: the railroad tracks or the canals, you build the factories,
11:34
Speaker 1: you get the coal, or you have to get coal,
11:39
Speaker 1: build the factories, build the railroad tracks, and then you
11:43
Speaker 1: take an action to sell everything. So maybe barrage doesn't
11:48
Speaker 1: fit this thing, because I was thinking brass doesn't count
11:52
Speaker 1: in there because you can kind of fiddle with the
11:54
Speaker 1: order that you're doing things. Part of what I found
11:57
Speaker 1: really interesting about Spirits of the Rice Patty particularly is
12:01
Speaker 1: you really have to do everything in order in order
12:04
Speaker 1: to make it work. And that's actually not quite as
12:08
Speaker 1: true as a gricola either, which is part of I
12:11
Speaker 1: think why Spirits of the Rice Patty really got me
12:13
Speaker 1: fascinated by this process, because there's so many things you
12:17
Speaker 1: have to do in order and keep the timing right.
12:20
Speaker 1: I was thinking about other games that really challenge you
12:22
Speaker 1: that way. Speaking of which, the third game on my
12:26
Speaker 1: list that I put in the Spirits of the Rice
12:27
Speaker 1: Patty category is Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico in Puerto Rico
12:33
Speaker 1: or Puerto Rico eighteen ninety seven is the version that
12:36
Speaker 1: I play. In that game, you are trying to manage
12:39
Speaker 1: a farm and get goods and points from your farm.
12:44
Speaker 1: And the means by which you produce your materials is
12:47
Speaker 1: really complicated. First, you have to add farmland that grows
12:51
Speaker 1: a particular type of crop. Then you have to build
12:54
Speaker 1: a factory. The exception of corn, but all the other ones.
12:57
Speaker 1: You have to build a factory that can take the
13:00
Speaker 1: raw goods produced by that farm and turn them into
13:03
Speaker 1: saleable goods. Then you need to hire workers for both
13:06
Speaker 1: the factory and the farmland. Then you need to take
13:10
Speaker 1: the produce action to turn the stuff from the farmland
13:14
Speaker 1: through the factory into goods. Then you need to either
13:17
Speaker 1: take the trade action or the market action to sell
13:21
Speaker 1: your goods or trade them. As with the other games,
13:26
Speaker 1: there are efficiencies that you can build by buying things
13:30
Speaker 1: with the results of your work. In Puerto Rico, you
13:35
Speaker 1: are separating points from goods or points from money. Money
13:40
Speaker 1: allows you to continue the game. Points are what you
13:42
Speaker 1: win with, so if you trade your goods away you
13:44
Speaker 1: get points. If you sell the goods, you get money,
13:47
Speaker 1: but that money isn't points. I think leftover money does
13:50
Speaker 1: translate into points at some ratio, but it's not a
13:53
Speaker 1: one to one spirits of the rice patty. By contrast,
13:56
Speaker 1: all the rice is points, so anytime you're buying something,
13:59
Speaker 1: you spend rice to buy it. When you harvest your
14:02
Speaker 1: harvesting rice, and at the end of the game, the
14:05
Speaker 1: amount of rice you have is how much is your points,
14:08
Speaker 1: So there's an element of who had the most points what.
14:11
Speaker 1: Puerto Rico maybe is the most complicated of these systems
14:14
Speaker 1: because you have to get so many things in place
14:16
Speaker 1: in order to have it work. On the other hand,
14:18
Speaker 1: they don't have the rigidity of Spirits of the Rice Patty,
14:22
Speaker 1: where you have these phases that you have to manage
14:24
Speaker 1: and you can only do certain things with certain states
14:27
Speaker 1: of the water, and in that way, that game might
14:30
Speaker 1: actually be different than all of these because of the
14:33
Speaker 1: careful management of type. So those are the three games
14:37
Speaker 1: I could think of that felt most like Spirits of
14:39
Speaker 1: the Rice Patty, Agricola, Barrage, and Puerto Rico. I do
14:42
Speaker 1: have a couple honorable mentions already mentioned brass as being
14:46
Speaker 1: very very much like Spirits of the Rice Patty in
14:50
Speaker 1: terms of building a bunch of things and having things
14:52
Speaker 1: in place. In that way, it's a lot more like Barrage. Actually.
14:56
Speaker 1: Another game that fits that model is Nucleum Liam feels
15:00
Speaker 1: very much like brass with a couple extra things. I think,
15:04
Speaker 1: and I think they're good. I enjoy nuclear, I think
15:07
Speaker 1: brass is better, but I think they're both interesting. Another
15:11
Speaker 1: game that I think might be like Spirits of the
15:14
Speaker 1: Rice Patty is viticulture. Viticulture. In viticulture, you are opening
15:19
Speaker 1: up farm fields, you are planting grapes in those fields,
15:23
Speaker 1: you are harvesting the grapes, you are aging the grapes
15:26
Speaker 1: in your vineyard, which you do just by taking time,
15:30
Speaker 1: and then you're fulfilling contracts with the aged grapes. So
15:33
Speaker 1: there is this process, this timeliness thing that really does
15:38
Speaker 1: feel a lot like Spirits of the Rice Patty in
15:40
Speaker 1: terms of if you have certain kinds of contracts you
15:44
Speaker 1: want to fulfill, you have to have the grapes harvested
15:46
Speaker 1: and then let them sit, and that letting them sit
15:49
Speaker 1: makes a time element that isn't part of Spirits of
15:53
Speaker 1: the Rice Patty. You also have the two seasons of
15:55
Speaker 1: the year, and you can only do certain actions in
15:57
Speaker 1: certain seasons, and that part also feels like Spirits of
16:00
Speaker 1: the Rice Patty. So I don't know, Maybe viticulture is
16:04
Speaker 1: the closest one. I was thinking of it as an
16:05
Speaker 1: honorable mention. But the more I talk about it, the
16:07
Speaker 1: more I think maybe it is. It is the closest
16:10
Speaker 1: to Spirits of the Rice Patty. That's interesting because I
16:12
Speaker 1: didn't I don't feel like Viticulture has that same time crunch,
16:17
Speaker 1: but I might be wrong. I haven't played it in
16:19
Speaker 1: a while. I may have to go back and play
16:21
Speaker 1: it now and see see if I noticed that time
16:23
Speaker 1: crunch there. Anyway, that's Viticulture. I did have three more
16:27
Speaker 1: honorable mentions of games that I feel like have similar
16:31
Speaker 1: kinds of setup that you have to do in order
16:33
Speaker 1: to get them in a place where you can succeed.
16:36
Speaker 1: The three that I'm thinking of. One is Great Western Trail,
16:41
Speaker 1: and this one just has to do with having a
16:43
Speaker 1: whole bunch of different things that are in play and
16:47
Speaker 1: kind of knowing how to manage when you have them.
16:50
Speaker 1: The whole thing is there are different buildings that you use,
16:52
Speaker 1: and you're running through this circuit, and you want to
16:55
Speaker 1: have the right payout when you get to the end
16:57
Speaker 1: of the circuit and you're selling your cows. I will
16:59
Speaker 1: confess I'm really bad at the game. I have not
17:02
Speaker 1: been able to get my brain to click around how
17:05
Speaker 1: the rhythm of it works, and so I do pretty
17:07
Speaker 1: poorly compared to many other people playing that game. I
17:11
Speaker 1: do think it's interesting, and so I've still played it.
17:14
Speaker 1: I've held onto my copy. I play it online a
17:16
Speaker 1: fair amount, but I'm just not good at it. I
17:18
Speaker 1: think I need to play it in person a few
17:20
Speaker 1: times so I can really get the feel of it down.
17:23
Speaker 1: But even when I played it in person, I didn't
17:25
Speaker 1: really understand why I was doing well or why other
17:27
Speaker 1: people were doing better. But it feels to me like
17:31
Speaker 1: there is that similar system. Lahavre, which is another Uve
17:35
Speaker 1: Rosenberg game, has a similar set of constraints, although it
17:41
Speaker 1: is less time focused than these other games. You're collecting things,
17:46
Speaker 1: you're trading those things in for other things, but it's
17:48
Speaker 1: more like Everdell, or say Everdell's more like Lajavre in
17:52
Speaker 1: that you have these places that you're going to do
17:55
Speaker 1: these actions, and if you like miss around, you don't
17:58
Speaker 1: wait till the next round to do it really hurt
18:00
Speaker 1: you that much. It's not so time focused. You might
18:03
Speaker 1: be able to look at a Glass Road as a
18:05
Speaker 1: game that's pretty time focused because it has such a
18:08
Speaker 1: tight connection between when you do things and what you
18:11
Speaker 1: get The other game I was thinking of is having
18:13
Speaker 1: this complex system of interrelated pieces is ON eighteen hundred
18:18
Speaker 1: or ANNO eighteen hundred, because you have all these different tiles,
18:20
Speaker 1: and the tiles depend on using different resources and different
18:24
Speaker 1: workers and drawing on different technologies, and you're sort of
18:28
Speaker 1: moving things around to upgrade. The reason that I put
18:31
Speaker 1: in honorable mention and not just part of the whole
18:34
Speaker 1: thing is again the timeliness isn't so much of a factor,
18:38
Speaker 1: and you don't get a thing at the end that
18:41
Speaker 1: then has utility. You just are clearing points with the
18:44
Speaker 1: output of those things. So from that perspective, ONO eighteen
18:48
Speaker 1: hundred is in a slightly different category. Now, if you've
18:51
Speaker 1: been listening to this and E've been holding back a
18:53
Speaker 1: scream because I'm not mentioning the most obvious connection, well
18:56
Speaker 1: I'll take the moment to mention it now. Many vital
18:59
Speaker 1: asserted games feel very much like the process I was
19:02
Speaker 1: talking about in Spirits of the Rice Patty. While it
19:05
Speaker 1: doesn't have the time pressure, you don't have to do
19:07
Speaker 1: things in a particular moment, A lot of them don't.
19:11
Speaker 1: They do have this vast interconnected chain of productions and
19:15
Speaker 1: resources that allow you to do things or not. On
19:18
Speaker 1: Mars is the one I found most that most feels
19:21
Speaker 1: this way, where you have a whole bunch of different
19:23
Speaker 1: stuff you want to do, and anything you want to
19:24
Speaker 1: do you need stuff from something else you might have done,
19:27
Speaker 1: and it's all a question of sort of how efficiently
19:29
Speaker 1: can you do step C so that you can do
19:31
Speaker 1: step A again or whatever. And I think that's really
19:34
Speaker 1: productive and interesting, but a little bit confusing in the
19:38
Speaker 1: context of the time thing that I'm seeing in spirits
19:41
Speaker 1: of the rice patty or in viticulture. Both of those
19:47
Speaker 1: have this time pressure, but that is there also on
19:52
Speaker 1: Mars because you have the rocket ship going back and
19:55
Speaker 1: forth to the moon, and if you aren't timing yet
20:00
Speaker 1: so that you can use the main action when it's
20:03
Speaker 1: where you want it or be where you want that
20:06
Speaker 1: can really screw you up. Or weather machine actually feels
20:09
Speaker 1: more time dependent because you have the scientist guy moving
20:12
Speaker 1: from place to place, and when he gets to a
20:14
Speaker 1: spot it will trigger an event, and in order for
20:18
Speaker 1: you to do well at the event, you have to
20:19
Speaker 1: have set up a four part thing that often depends
20:22
Speaker 1: on three different things being interconnected. That part can get
20:26
Speaker 1: really tricky as compared to something like even Agricola, where
20:32
Speaker 1: there are all these interconnected pieces. But maybe there's fewer
20:36
Speaker 1: currencies that rely on a chain of production, like your clay.
20:40
Speaker 1: You're just going to pick up clay, or you might
20:42
Speaker 1: get one clay from one thing you built in on Mars.
20:48
Speaker 1: The oxygen you have depends on the action you took
20:50
Speaker 1: last round to produce oxygen, which you could take because
20:53
Speaker 1: you took the oxygen before that. Let you build a
20:55
Speaker 1: building that gave you oxygen and so on. It's on backwards.
21:00
Speaker 1: Vatal Aserta games definitely feel related to what I'm talking
21:03
Speaker 1: about with Spirits of the Rice Petty, but I also
21:06
Speaker 1: put them an honorable mention because they Spirits of the
21:09
Speaker 1: Rice Patty does not feel like well, it has a
21:11
Speaker 1: precise ordering of things. You have to do, things you
21:13
Speaker 1: have to manage, the when they are going to happen,
21:15
Speaker 1: and how. It doesn't have the brain burn that the
21:19
Speaker 1: vatal Aserta games do or even frankly Brass does, because
21:23
Speaker 1: the game is only dealing in the one currency, the rice.
21:27
Speaker 1: It's about timing, and that's why I said it feels
21:29
Speaker 1: more like the Agricula food element than about any of
21:32
Speaker 1: these other things, so Altho. In all, it's an interesting
21:35
Speaker 1: game and I'm looking forward to playing it some more.
21:36
Speaker 1: It's definitely gonna stand my collection. I can't imagine it's
21:39
Speaker 1: going to get played a ton because it is kind
21:41
Speaker 1: of complicated, but it's really interesting and the rhythm is interesting,
21:46
Speaker 1: so I'm looking forward to keeping it on the shelf
21:48
Speaker 1: and trying again at some point. Well that's about it
21:51
Speaker 1: for me today. Hopefully you found this meditation on cycles
21:55
Speaker 1: of production interesting. I'd love to hear what you think
21:58
Speaker 1: of it. More generally, you can share those ideas over
22:01
Speaker 1: on Board game Geek and Guild three two six y nine.
22:03
Speaker 1: I've started a thread where I updated with information about
22:07
Speaker 1: each podcast as they come out. The idea being that
22:10
Speaker 1: this thread will be active for a week or two,
22:13
Speaker 1: and then I'll start a new thread with the next
22:15
Speaker 1: round of episodes. Maybe five episodes per thread or something.
22:19
Speaker 1: I don't know. We'll see. If you find that interesting,
22:21
Speaker 1: head over to board game Geek Guild and sharing the
22:24
Speaker 1: conversation there. You can also send me a message on
22:27
Speaker 1: Board game Geek. Wombat nineteen nine is my username there.
22:29
Speaker 1: I do have an email Brendan at Rattobox Games as
22:32
Speaker 1: well Brendan at radobox games dot Com, which you could
22:36
Speaker 1: send two as well. Thanks for joining me on my
22:38
Speaker 1: walk today. I hope your next walk is pleasant. His
22:40
Speaker 1: mind one Bye bye, brought to you by rattle Box