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Giving Thanks for Games · Pick Up and Deliver

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Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
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as I step out for a walk and deliver an episode to you while I
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stroll around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good, good afternoon, listeners.
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It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. The weather is nice.
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It's a low forties and not too breezy, so it's chilly but not cold.
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And yeah, it's a nice time to go out for a walk.
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It's a mid afternoon. It's a break from work, taking a little stroll
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talking to my friends about board games. So the last episode, there was
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about a week break there because we had Thanksgiving and I went with my family
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to visit my in laws in Michigan. As I think I've mentioned on the
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podcast before, my mother in law really likes playing games, but doesn't get
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a ton of opportunity to do so except when we visit. So when we
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visit, I make sure to bring a lot of games, and she does
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have the kind of interesting games that fits my general approach, which is she
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likes playing a wide variety of games. So if we visit her for a
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couple of days, she doesn't want to play the same game twice. She
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wants to play a bunch of different games. This time. I also discovered
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that like stuff she played on her last visit, is maybe also verbolten.
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She likes a variety and stuff that she hasn't played in a while. So
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that suits me just fine as somebody who likes to play a lot of different
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stuff. Now, I did bring probably too many games, and I would
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say there are maybe five or six we didn't play if I think of it.
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By the end, I will tell you what we didn't play. But
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what I thought I would do on the strip on this walk today is tell
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you about the games we did play and the experience of playing them. So
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how I chose I chose for a number of different factors. I was thinking
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about the people who would be playing, which is me and my family,
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my wife, my two kids, and we would always be playing in some
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combination of me and some of them, and then my mother in law and
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then my father in law would occasionally play. So I was looking for a
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variety of different games that engaged sort of on different levels or in different ways
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and tangled with different sort of aspects of gameplay that work for up to six
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people, sometimes with as many five player games as I could, because often
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it would be the four of us plus my mother in law, not my
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father in law, but some four players, and then a couple two players
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just in case. And then I also left out games that I knew she
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wouldn't like, in games that my wife absolutely didn't like, because my wife
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did play most of the games with us. Her name is Jenny, by
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the way, and maybe i'll just call her Jenny from now, and saying
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my wife over and over again it sounds, I don't know, weird,
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So if you hear me refer to Jenny, that's my wife. The general
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there are a couple of things that I generally did not bring. Things involving
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manipulation of shapes is a particular dislike for this group. My mother in law
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does not like games like Barren Park where you are trying to figure out how
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to fix fit shapes into things, and so any game that has us doing
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that is a no go g. Generally, worker placement games are less popular
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for her as well. I'm not sure why, but and games where your
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drawing pads are not her favorite. So start of putting those three things into
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the mix, I did end up bringing a whole bunch of games, and
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let's talk about them. So to start with quickly, what I'm gonna do
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is I'm gonna go chronologically from the time we got there Wednesday afternoon to the
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time we or Wednesday evening to the time we left Saturday evening. We were
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planning originally to leave Sunday morning after breakfast, but the news said there was
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a snowstorm coming in and it wasn't gonna be outrageous, but you know,
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if you're driving a long way and it's gonna the snow, it slows traffic
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down just inherently. So we thought better to leave Saturday night, beat the
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storm home, and have an easier drive of it, and that worked out
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just nicely. So yeah, so that's what we did, all right.
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So to start off, the first game we played when we got there,
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of something easy, something we could all play, we played Wits and Wagers.
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It's Vegas, Baby, now. This is my favorite version of Wits
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and Wagers, although frankly they're all so similar that really you can just any
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Wits and Wagers will do. If you've never played Wits and Wagers, this
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is definitely one to keep your eye out for at a thrift store. I've
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seen a number of different copies. In fact, with the exception of the
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very first Witch and Wagers, which I think I bought for full price,
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every copy I've gotten since then, which I bought a copy for school,
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I got Wes and Wagers Party, I get Wits and Wagres. Faily,
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I get Wits and Waiters Vegas. Have all been purchased at thrift stores,
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so you should be able to find them pretty easily. But it is a
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great game. Now. The way it works is all the questions are focused
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on numbers, and so you're betting. So you answer question with your guests
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as to the answer. But usually they're the kind of questions where it's it's
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not super likely that anybody knows the exact answer. Some people might get close,
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but generally you're trying to get closest without going over. And the answers
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are all number related. You put all the answers in a line and then
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everybody bets on the different answers, and whoever's answer is right gets a little
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bit of money betting money whatever, and the people who picked the right answer
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also get some betting money. We also played quicks. This is a game
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I've talked about a lot here on the podcast, so I won't talk about
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it again. But this game never fails to never fails to please. It
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is always fun, it's easy to teach. It takes like fifteen or twenty
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minutes. It's a great snack sized game. If you haven't played Quicks yet,
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what are you doing? Get out there play some Quicks. Another good
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one to keep your eye out for at thrift stores. I have not purchased
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a new copy of it. That was all we played Wednesday night. As
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I said, we got in in the mid evening, so we didn't have
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a ton of time for games. But the next day saw us returning to
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the game table and playing a bunch more games. The first one is Illiterati.
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I don't think I've talked about this one on the podcast yet, but
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it is a letter cooperative spelling game that's done in real time. It's an
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interesting game, pretty fun. It is a bit of a challenge if you
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aren't somebody who is super If you aren't somebody who is super quick with letters,
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you're probably not gonna like it. But it's got a really interesting cooperative
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element. It's got an interesting scaling negative space and We've had a lot of
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fun with it, so definitely we're checking out I will do. I'm sure
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it'll come up in a board game Espresso episode sometime soon. That is Illitterati.
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Next up, we played Celestia. Celestia is a really interesting push your
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luck game that I get played once or twice a year. In it,
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you are a group of people going on a journey and there is an airship,
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and on the airship you're taking turns as the captain, flying from one
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floating city to the next. The trick is that when you roll the dice,
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you then have to tackle a challenge by spending cards, and you may
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or may not have cards that let you beat that challenge. So everybody has
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to decide do they want to stay on and want and hope that you can
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beat that challenge? Are they going to hop off to avoid the ship crashing
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when you fail to beat the challenge. It's a neat twist on the push
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your luck genre and well worth playing if you get a chance, just the
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right length, interesting decisions all along. I really like I really like Celestia.
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Next up is Code Names Duet. Code Names Do is a two player
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version of the well known word game from Vladavato Code Names do it as a
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two player version of Code Names, in which you are giving clues to each
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other and using a shared map page. You're trying to give each other clues
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to get the answers, just as you wouldn't a normal game of Code Names,
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except that generally the you have some that are overlapping answers, and you
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basically are looking at the same grid of words, and you have two different
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sets of clues together, you're trying to identify nine things. Well, my
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phone is dying here, so I'm just going to have to remember the different
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games that we played from here on out, all right. Next up,
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we played the big beefy game of the night that was ark Nova. Arkanova
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is, of course, a delightful tableau builder with a giant deck of cards
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and a really interesting set of interlocking mechanisms. If you haven't played Arknova at
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all, a whole episode about it where I covered in a board game Espresso.
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This one was the challenge of the weekend because I wasn't sure if it
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was a good fit for the audience. In particular, this is on the
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higher end of complexity for games that we played. We did have a pretty
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good time with it developed. My daughter ran ran the table. She got
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a ton of points. It was a lot of fun showing it to my
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mother in law and helping her kind of explore the different systems. We did
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get a whole game played. It took quite a while, as is not
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surprising with four people and one of them is new and one of them had
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only played once, so there was a lot of discussion of rules in thinking.
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But it was really fun and it just reminded me how much I like
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ark Nova. It's a great game to get to the table, fun game
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to play. Let's see what's next. We played Ticket to Ride. I
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wanted to play the Sweden or the Switzerland map. I had brought it with
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me, but the general consensus was, oh no, it was a two
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to three player map. I did not realize at the time Switzerland is only
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a two to three player map. So I got it out and we're all
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like, oh, can't play it. So we played regular Ticket to Ride,
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which was pretty fun. It did get kind of intense toward the end.
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There was a lot of sort of negotiating of tracks and spaces, trying
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to figure out, Okay, do I have enough room? To get that
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track before time runs out. You know, where are you trying to go?
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Can I get ahead of you? You know? We played this sort
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of balance game where we try not to cut each other off too much.
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We don't deliberately do it, but it's inevitable if you're trying to make your
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tickets. Ticket to Ride is always a good time, and this was no
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exception. We also played five Minute Mystery, which is a game I've talked
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about on board game Espresso. This is a pretty simple puzzle solving game.
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We played a couple rounds of it and had a good time. I think
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we won one and lost too. The basic level is easy enough to do,
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but man, once you get to the five minute version, you really
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have to be quick in order to solve the mystery in time, and boy
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we were not. We did fine on the nine minute version, but on
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the three to five minute versions, no, thank you, way too hard.
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We had a good time though. We also played Quirkel. Quirkl is
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of course an excellent tile layer. It's great for conversation. As the board
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game. Our board game Barrage pointed out sometime in the past, there is
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an interesting tension where you are trying to hold tiles, but other people might
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take the spot that you're trying to go because there's more than one copy of
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each tile out there. But you also don't want to just play one tile
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because sometimes you open someone up for the quirkel, which is a doubler if
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you haven't played before. There are tiles that are six different shapes, and
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there are six different colors, and each shape comes in all six colors,
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and each color comes is not all six shapes, so and I think there's
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three of each in the bag. And so the idea is you're laying out
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rows and columns in the sort of interlocking grid, and you know, in
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one direction. Basically, whenever you add a new row or column, you
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have to add they have to be all the same shape and different colors,
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or all the same color and different shapes. You can't have overlapping or you
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can't have repeating on either side of that. The trick is if you get
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to a spot where a row has six things in it or a line has
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six things in it, so six stars of different of the different colors,
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or six red things of the six different shapes, then when you play that
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sixth one, you say corkl and you get six extra points. So you
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get six points for adding to a line that is now six long, and
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you get six more points for making it six long, whereas like let's say
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it's four long and you add one point one tile that that's worth five points,
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then because the line is now five long. It is. It's a
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really interesting game. It's not incredibly intense. There is a lot of luck.
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You know, if you draw good tiles, great, If the person
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before you is giving you lots of opportunities to score big points, great.
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You could just have bad scores the whole time and do poorly. That's entirely
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possible, nonetheless worth playing. It's an excellent there's a reason it's a classic.
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It's excellent. That's quirkal We tried out A Walk in the Park,
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which is a very light roll and write game, which actually came as part
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of a bundle when we bought The Gardens, which I believe I've talked about
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here on the podcast before. I'll talk about a Walk in the Park on
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a Board Game Espresso episode. Although I will say there's not going to be
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a lot to say about it. It's pretty simple. It might even fall
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into the category of one and done for me. I don't see myself playing
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it again. See here's where my so. I had a phone with me
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that told me all the games we played instead of making a little list on
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paper, and of course my phone rapidly died. I don't know what happened.
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It was at like fifteen percent, and then suddenly it was at seven
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percent, and then very quickly went to two percent, and I put it
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away and now I'm operating from memory. We did an unlock. I had
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an unlocked game that had one chapter left. It was the It was one
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of the No Side Adventures. I think it was Unlock Mythic Adventures, and
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we had the No Side Animal Omadic Adventure left and we played that. It
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was fun. I like the No Side ones. This one. It was
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sort of ridiculous, but pretty interesting and fun. Solved the puzzles pretty easily,
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and there was like one or two where we got clues, but for
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the most part we were able to work our way through it pretty well.
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Finally, the last time we'll talk about we played Costa Rica. Costa Rica
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is from Dunston and Gilbert. It was a Mayfair publication and basically it's a
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push your luck game. Where you're trying to elect resources from a grid,
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and as you're leading this expedition, you can either take the resources or keep
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going. Only each person has the opportunity to take the resource, and if
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they do, that stops the exploration. And so there's an interesting counterweight where
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if you go early and take the resources, that's great. If you try
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to wait too long, then sometimes you can get cut off. I actually
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had one of my pieces not even get to finish its expedition because it just
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got cut off by another expedition and all the tiles were gone. So that
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was not super fun. But I like that game a lot. It's a
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great filler, or a good filler anyway, and I'm glad to keep in
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my collection. That's Costa Rica from Dunstan and Gilbert, published by Mayfair.
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Well. There might be a couple more games. I can't recall off top
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my head what else we played. But if you go to board game geig
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guild three two six nine and look there, no, that won't help you
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there. I would like you to post games you played over Thanksgiving. I'd
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love to hear what you've played in when If you go to rattlebox games dot
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com you'll find the show page for this episode, where I will have listed
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the other games we played as well as the games I brought with me that
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we did not play, so you can see the whole panelty of stuff I
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brought with me. Well, thanks for joining me on my walk today.
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I hope your next walk isn't says mine Walks, Bye bye. Brought to you by