Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Dark Gothic, Whale Riders, Vantage, Love Letter (revisited)

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Dark Gothic, Whale Riders, Vantage, Love Letter (revisited) · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Welcome to pick up and delivered 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 delivering episode do well I strolled around.
• 0:10
  Speaker 2: I'm Brendon Ryley.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Well, greetings, listeners. It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: I'm out for my afternoon constitutional to give me a
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: little break from all that grading. So in that regard,
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: let's jump into it. I've been playing a lot of
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: games lately. In fact, I've played a bunch of games,
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: and I haven't made as many episodes as I could
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: have or should have, And so I'm doing another board
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: game Espresso Triple Shot bored Game Espresso Triple Shot is
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: a segment or an episode in which I talk about
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: three games I've played for the first time recently and
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: one game I dusted off.
• 0:59
  Speaker 3: So let's jump in it.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: The first one I want to talk about is A
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: Touch of Evil dark Gothic, So, as you know, A
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Touch of Evil is one of my favorite AMERI trash games.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: It's very silly and fun and goofy. I also really
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: like Last Night on Earth. Actually, last time I rated games,
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: I put Last Night on Earth above a Touch of Evil.
• 1:16
  Speaker 3: But I think they're both just a hoot.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: That said, I have everything that's made for a Touch
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: of Evil, and I have a friend who's got everything
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: for Last Time on Earth. So I haven't put a
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: lot of effort into acquiring more Last Night on Earth's stuff,
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: and I'm probably not going to. So instead, I decided
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: it was time to get something else from flying Frog,
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: and that's something else is A Touch of Evil.
• 1:39
  Speaker 3: Dark Gothic, So A Touch of Evil Dark Gothic.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Is a duck building game made by designed by Jason Hill,
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: with art by Jack Scott Hill, and published by flying
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Frog Productions in twenty fourteen. Dark Gothic is themed around
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: the same theme as A Touch of Evil. In fact,
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: it re uses a lot of the art and a
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: lot of the theme elements. You are a colonial era
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: investigator looking into supernatural disturbances in a New England colony
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: or a New England town in A.
• 2:11
  Speaker 3: Touch of Evil Dark Gothic.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: It is a cooperative game and you are trying to
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: work with the other players to defeat the Big Bad
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: There is a big bad monster. It's causing all kinds
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: of trouble, and then the game uses the sort of
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: ascension style river to bring cards into play, and the
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: game more recent most recently that I've played that feels
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: like that is Star Wars the deck building game. Star
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: Wars deck building game is a two player dueling game
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: in which one player plays the Empire and one player
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: plays the Rebellion. Both players are trying to destroy the
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: other by wiping out the cards from the middle as.
• 2:48
  Speaker 3: Well as their basis, So it's sort of.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Similar to Star Realms and similar to Ascension well a
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: touch of Evil. A deck building game has cossed before
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: either of those other games, and in this one, the
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: minions are just in the deck row, and what you're
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: trying to do is wipe out the minions and then
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: wipe out the big bad before he causes too much trouble.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: If he causes too much trouble, that's when the players
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: would lose. In Dark Gothic, you are trying to acquire
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: a deck of cards that are going to work together
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: synergistically to create a situation.
• 3:24
  Speaker 3: Where they will be able to play off each other.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: There are a lot of cards that give you amplication
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: if you have other cards of similar types. There are
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: cards that let you draw more cards, and cards that
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: give you more currency to spend or more fight, and
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: of course it's the combination of those things that makes
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: the deck building work. There are cards that will let
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: you trash cards as well, so like a lot of
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: deck builders, it's about building a set of combos that
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: works really well together, building a set of currency that
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: lets you buy the cards you need, and building the
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: attack that you need to defeat the minions and the
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: big Boss.
• 4:03
  Speaker 3: We found the game to be too easy. We played
• 4:06
  Speaker 3: it twice so far, and it was very easy.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: The difficulty level just didn't accelerate fast enough.
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: It was very.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: Easy to keep the minions from causing trouble until we
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: had enough power to take out the Big Bad, and
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: the Big Bad didn't trigger very often. Now, I'm told
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: if you mix the expansion in which I did acquire
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: the expansion as well, I'm told that that gives you a.
• 4:30
  Speaker 3: Much better play experience.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: At least according to board game Geek, you get a
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: much better play experience if you mix in the expansion
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: as well. So I'm hoping we can do that next
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: time we play, but I may need to go with
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: one of the homebrew alternatives to amp up the effectiveness
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: of the villains to make the game more difficult, because
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: I think we did try one with the expansion mixed
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: in and it still did hardly anything in terms of
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: which wasn't very hard. So it might be that we
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: aren't playing right or we got lucky, that's certainly a possibility,
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: but generally it was too easy, so that's a touch
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: of evil dark gothic. Next up, we have the twenty
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: one game Whale Riders, which has just recently been republished
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: by Ape Games. It was originally published by Grail Games.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: This is designed by Ryner Kinisia with art by Vincent
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: du Traite. Whale Riders is a classic simple Kinetsia in
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: the realm of something more like It's not even as
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: complex as raw something simpler than that, like maybe on
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: the level of indigo. Really not difficult to learn, but
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: there is some interesting spiciness in the game.
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: Essentially, what you're doing.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: You have a whale that you are riding, and you
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: are going down the coast and then back up the coast.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: When you go down the coast, you are picking up
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: different goods and things, and then when you come back
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: up the coast, you're picking up different goods and things.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: And then when you get to the top you're just
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: claiming resources. The game goes until all of the resource
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: tokens at the top have been claimed, so there is
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: a timer. Once the first person gets to the top,
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: if they're they're only one there, they have I think
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: four turns or something, and then the game is over.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: If someone else gets there, the game ends twice as
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: quickly because they're both taking cards from the top, and
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: the number of cards that are up there depends on
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: how many players there are. The way that you play
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: is when you land at a location, you take one
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: of the resource cards that's available. And I can't remember
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: because we played it in August. I can't remember now
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: whether you have to pay a small wonderstyle to skip
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: your way up the like if you want to take
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: the second one you have to pay one, and the
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: third one you have to pay two. I don't think so.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: I think you can take just one of the ones
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: on offer. At least there's a couple free ones maybe.
• 6:49
  Speaker 3: But what you're doing is you're taking.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: These cards and then those cards translate into goods, and
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: then you can trade the goods into fulfilled contracts. There
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: are a variety of different contracts available, and you have
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: a couple in your hand and you can draw more.
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: Whenever you complete one, you can draw more.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: There's also a way that you can draw an additional
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: contract when you.
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: Want, and that's kind of it.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: So it's a time track game in so far and
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: insofar as that you decide how far ahead you want
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: to go, or it's not a time track game. It
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: is a progression game where you're taking turns, but you
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: can never go backwards, so or you can turn around
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: once I guess is the thing you have to go
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: down to the bottom and then turn around and come
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: all the way back to the top. So an interesting
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: element is deciding how fast to go down. If you
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: see something really good that's a ways down, you could
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: speed ahead, but.
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: Then you miss all this stuff in between.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: And when you're down there, you're allowed to just take
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: turns where you just sit in one spot. So there's
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: an interesting element of deciding to stay where you are
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: and start of deciding how slow you want to go,
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: with the acknowledgement that when other people get to the
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: top they are going to get a bonus that you
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: won't be able to get it if you aren't finished.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: Like I said, it's a relatively simple set collection and
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: contract fulfillment game. It's easy to play, but there's interesting decisions,
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: and I'm looking forward to playing it somemore. It's definitely
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: a good filler game for the group that knows.
• 8:15
  Speaker 3: How to play.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: It probably takes in the neighborhood of half our to
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: forty five minutes once you know what you're doing. I
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: think our first play with four took us an hour
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: because we were just a little slower. But yeah, interesting
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: fun game, well worth giving it a try if you can.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: That's Oil Riders.
• 8:30
  Speaker 3: Next up.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: I got a chance to dust off a game. I
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: reached into the back of our small games drawer and
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: I pulled out love Letter for our trip. My wife
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: and I took our daughter out to Washington State to
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: go to college, and on our drive out there, I
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: brought love Letter with and had it just in my pocket.
• 8:47
  Speaker 3: And when we would go in to eat for dinner
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: or whatever.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: I would take Love Letter with we'd play a round
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: or two of love Letter. It had been one year
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: in five months since I played this game. It's relatively
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: it stays in rotation. There are a lot of games
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: that are dustier in my collection, but this one is
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: so simple to play. You can play even though a
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: game is a game takes like twenty minutes, one round
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: takes like three, and just one round is satisfying it.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: It's fun just to do a little bit of bluffing
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: in the game.
• 9:16
  Speaker 3: You are. So.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: We have the Tempest version, which is the original edition.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: It's designed by Segi Kini and published by AEG originally.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: I don't know if they still have it or if
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: they've sold it on, but the premise is pretty simple.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: There are eighteen cards in the deck, representing a variety
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: of different figures, from guards all the way up to
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: the Princess and actually the king as well. But the
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: Princess is the highest card because that's who you're trying.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: You're trying to get in contact with the Princess, trying
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: to find her. If you find her, you win.
• 9:46
  Speaker 3: Essentially.
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: The way the game goes is that you have one
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: card in hand, You draw a card at the beginning
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: of your turn, and then from the two cards you have,
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: you play one of them.
• 9:54
  Speaker 3: The card that you play indicates what you have to do.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: Some cards give you an action of some the guard
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: card lets you guess what card another player has. There's
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: a handmade card that gives you protection. There are other
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: cards that let you peek at cards or compare cards.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: There's a bunch of different ways that you interact between
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: the two cards. If along the way you manage to
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: oust another player with one of the different rules, they're out.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: So like with the guard card, if you guess the
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: card another player is holding, they're out of the game.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: There are a number of different cards that do this.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: If you have the Princess and get caught with the Princess,
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: you also are out, or it depends on how you
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: get caught with the Princess. Like there's a comparison card
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: where two cards compare and the higher value one wins.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: If you compare and you have the Princess, now everybody
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: knows you have the Princess, and it's really hard to
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: get rid of the princess. Also, you're not allowed to
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: discard the Princess. This is the crucial thing. So if
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: you have two cards, you have or you can't play
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: the Princess. I guess there is a way that you
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: can trade cards with somebody else, so you could use
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: that to get rid of the Princess, but you can't
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: play it.
• 10:58
  Speaker 3: So if someone else knows you have it.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: You're on a kind of ticking clock to find one
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: of the cards that lets you get rid of it
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: or eliminate the other players. It's a very simple game,
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: but really effective and really fun. If you haven't played
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: love Letter, you really should. It's an excellent game to
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: spend time with friends and family. Our copy, I think
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: I've mentioned before is sleeved because we spilled water on
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: it at a diner at one point, so the cards
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: are all marked, so I sleeved them because it's fun
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: to keep playing with that old copy. So that is
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: one year, five months Dusty love Letter. Finally I got
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: a chance to play a couple games of Vantage. This
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: is the twenty twenty five story game release from Jamie Stigmayer.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: This is sort of Jamie Stigmier's answer to Seventh Citadel
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: and Tales of the Arabian Nights. In this game, you
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: represent a explorer on a fantasy planet or sci fi planet.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: Your ship has crashed, and each player deployed in a
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: escape pod and landed in a different spot on the planet.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: On your turn, you take an exploration action of some
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: sort to interact.
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: With the planet, and then it's.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: The next player's turn. On your turn the location you're at.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: You have a card that shows the scene that you're
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: looking at, and there are six different action words in
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: six different colors on the card.
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: You can do any of those six. The way the game.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: Works is really clever in that you never fail in
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: an action, you just expend more resources to accomplish it.
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: So there's some action like every action will give you
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: a test and a level, so it could be a
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: level too blue test. And then if you have no
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: blue tokens to spend, or you don't want to spend
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: blue tokens, then you roll two dice and the dice
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: have different results on them, which result in different penalties
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: for you unless you can place them, which some of
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: the cards you have in your tableau will have these
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: little placement tiles on them, and if you roll the
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: right symbol, you could place it on the card and
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: then you don't take any damage. Once all the dice
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: have been used or placed on cards, then everything resets.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: The dice go back in the pool and you have
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: back your spaces that let you mitigate the dice. It's
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: a fun game and interesting idea. There's a complex storytelling
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: element that is really interesting and neat it is kind
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: of finicky, and I found the rules surprisingly difficult to grock.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: I kept having to look stuff up, even though it
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: should be pretty straightforward, and now I understand it. I
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: think it is, but early on there were some challenges.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: The biggest thing is that often the words that describe
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: the actions you're taking don't really seem to map very
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: clearly to what you think might happen.
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: So like you could be at a you could.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: Be at a building and there's a monster coming, and
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: the card might say run as you run, and run
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: means run and try to jump over the monster and
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: it eats you instead of running away. Because you don't
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: get to pick what it means to do that verb.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: You just the game tells you what you do when
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: you do that verb. So there's a little bit of that,
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: which I think is also a thing that people complained
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: about with Tales from the Arabian Nights. But generally it's
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: a really ambitious, interesting game that if you want a
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: sort of choose your own adventure kind of story with
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: a lot more depth in terms of choices you get
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: to make, but ultimately the feeling of exploring a strange
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: space and hopefully finding fun things to do. Vantage is
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: going to be your game. Those things sound like they're
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: not good for you. I would try it before you
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: buy it. Well, that brings me to the end of
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: the episode. I want to say thank you for joining
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: me today. If you'd like to talk about these games,
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: head over to board game geek Guild three two sixty
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: nine and share your thoughts there, or you can send
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: me a message on board get geek Wombat nineteen nine
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: is my user name there. I want to say thanks
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: for joining me on my want today and I hope
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: your next lock.
• 14:54
  Speaker 3: Is as pleasant as mind one.
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: Bye bye.
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: Brought to you by rattle Box