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Trophies, Smug Owls, Pretense, Shut the Box, That’s a Question!, Tapple · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:05
  Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
• 0:08
  as I step off the train and deliver an episode two while I walk home.
• 0:11
  I'm Brendan Riley. Good afternoon, listeners. It's a lovely day here
• 0:24
  in suburban Chicago. The temperature is in the high low fifties, which makes
• 0:29
  for a lovely walk home until you remember that it's February and it should be
• 0:33
  like in the thirties or the twenties, and you'll lament the state of the
• 0:37
  world. Nontheless, you can have a pleasant walk home and talk about board
• 0:41
  games with your friends, which is what I'm doing right now. So as
• 0:45
  I roll into season seven or approach season seven, I don't know if I
• 0:49
  don't know if I think of this as season seven yet or not. I
• 0:51
  think I'm gonna just think of once I hit episode six hundred, then we'll
• 0:55
  start season seven. So this is still the end of season six. It's
• 0:58
  just run an extra long So as I move toward that, I am working
• 1:00
  my way through the backlog of new games I played in December that I didn't
• 1:04
  get a chance to talk about yet before I went on my winter hiatus.
• 1:07
  And there are a couple that I skipped before the last Board Game Express Espresso
• 1:14
  episode because they were all just like little tastes, such small games that there's
• 1:19
  hardly anything to talk about, but I still want to mention them to you.
• 1:23
  So in that regard, today's episode is a board game Express as a
• 1:27
  board game Espresso Coffee Flight. I am going to talk about five games instead
• 1:33
  of three, and they're all just sort of little nibbles. You'll just get
• 1:37
  a little shot of espresso, a little taste of a different kind of coffee
• 1:42
  with each episode. With each game I'm talking about. They're even shorter than
• 1:46
  my first impressions reviews, just because there's not a lot to them. Nonetheless,
• 1:52
  here we go. So the first one is a game I played called
• 1:55
  Trophies. Trophies was published in twenty nineteen, designed by Travis Hancock and Holly
• 2:02
  Hancock, art by Holly Hancock and Sarah Keeley, and published by the Board
• 2:07
  Game Company, which I think was just an independent publisher designed created to publish
• 2:13
  this particular game. So in Trophies, it is a party game, a
• 2:16
  judge style party game in which one player is being the judge and all the
• 2:22
  other players are being the answerers, and it's sort of like a combination of
• 2:28
  taboo and categories. The part that you're borrowing from taboo is one person speaking
• 2:34
  and other people trying to answer quickly, although you're not playing in teams.
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  The part you're borrowing from categories is the idea of a category and a letter.
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  It's basically the way it works is you have a series of cards with
• 2:44
  letters on them and a series of cards with categories on them, and you
• 2:49
  pull a category and pull a letter. But I don't know if the category
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  cards have letters on the back. I don't exactly recall. But you pull
• 2:54
  a category and you pull a letter, and then the first person to say
• 2:59
  something fits the letter and fits the category wins the card. So if you
• 3:04
  think about it as like in categories, you roll a die and you have
• 3:07
  to there's a series of prompts and you have to come up with an answer
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  for each prompt that starts with the LETTERY rolled. This is the same thing
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  except instead of trying not to match the other person's answer, you're trying to
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  be the first one to shout it out. If you're the first one to
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  shout it out and the judge decides that your answer fits the category, then
• 3:24
  they give you the card. If they say you don't fit the category,
• 3:28
  then they can move on to the next person and saw on. At the
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  end of the person who got the most cards wins. On the back of
• 3:34
  the card is a little picture of a trophy, which is why the game's
• 3:36
  called trophies. This is a cute little party game. I'm not sure that
• 3:39
  it's worth seeking out. It's fun, you know, if you were to
• 3:43
  find it or somebody said, hey, let's play this, it's fun.
• 3:45
  I don't know that it's better than categories or taboo, but a good time
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  none less. That's trophies. That's trophies, all right. The next game
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  I want to talk about is smug Owls. In smug Owls, each player
• 4:00
  gets a bunch of clue cards, sort of like in Cards against Humanity or
• 4:03
  Apples to Apples, and the deck is full of riddle cards which have sort
• 4:11
  of open ended answers, and they have the style of like old time riddles
• 4:15
  or questions that should have a riddlely kind of answer. And so what happens
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  is the riddle card is laid out and everybody looks at their hand of cards
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  and they pick a couple of cards to go together to make an answer,
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  and they slap those down on the table. Once all but one player have
• 4:30
  picked an answer, then that player who's left is the smug owl and gets
• 4:34
  to decide whose answer is the best answer. It is, you know,
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  just a variant of Apples to Apples. It's fine. It's got cute owls
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  on the on different cards, which is I picked it up because it was
• 4:46
  called smug Owls and I like that. But and I like the twist of
• 4:50
  an answer to a riddle. That's a slightly different kind of mindset than something
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  like Apples to Apples. But ultimately, you know, I'm not a huge
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  fan of judge game that don't have any creativity, and picking two cards is
• 5:02
  the minimum of creativity. So it's fun, but you know, ultimately forgettable.
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  That said, I did buy a copy, so that's from Mike Bell
• 5:12
  Sold and Grace Kensell the art. I presume the person who drew the smug
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  Owls is Kevin Ruel and it was published by Runaway Parade Games in twenty twenty
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  three. Next up, we have Pretense. Pretense is a meta party game.
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  My son asked for this for Christmas after seeing I think a TikTok about
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  it maybe or an ad for it, And it turned out it was out
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  of print, so I couldn't get it for him, and I tricked him.
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  I said, oh, it looks like it's out of print. I'll
• 5:39
  have to find something else for you. Or I said, it looks like
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  it's out of print, I can't buy it from the publisher, and he
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  said, oh okay. Meanwhile, I went on eBay and I ordered it
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  A tricked him, so I did give it to him. Like I said,
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  it's a meta party game. So the way it works is you have
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  a group of people at a game night, and at the beginning of the
• 5:55
  night, they each get a pretense card which gives them a secret role something
• 6:00
  they're trying to do at the party, and ideally for fairness, you review
• 6:04
  what all the different roles are, so everybody kind of knows what's possible,
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  or you could go and blind and have nobody know. Maybe the person who
• 6:13
  owns the game wouldn't play. But then over the course of the evening,
• 6:17
  everybody is trying to figure out who has which role, and most of the
• 6:25
  roles have some activity something that's supposed to happen like if you can get someone
• 6:28
  to read out of the rule book or hand you the rule book is one
• 6:31
  of them, or give you some food, all right, those are a
• 6:35
  couple. Always, if you complete the thing on your card, then you
• 6:43
  declare that you completed it. You steal the card from the person that the
• 6:46
  person that you got tricked with it, which means that you have to do
• 6:49
  it to someone else who's still in the game, and then you take their
• 6:53
  role. They're not allowed to say what role you have. They're out of
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  the game. They can't guess anymore. It keeps going that like that sort
• 6:58
  of like sort of like Assassin or something where you're stealing each other's roles and
• 7:03
  wain going down to one player winning or the person who got the most by
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  the end of the night. You can also call out somebody if you think
• 7:11
  if you are still in the game and you think someone else is trying to
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  like I say, hey, can you have me that rule book? And
• 7:15
  you're like no, because I think you're the rule handing person, which I
• 7:19
  can't remember what the game calls the rule book handing person, But you know
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  there's like a role like the rules lawyer. I think if you accuse somebody
• 7:29
  of being one of the roles. Then they show you their role card.
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  If they are correct, you steal their role card. You still have your
• 7:34
  role. They're out. If you're wrong, then you forfeit your role card
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  to them and they keep their role card and continue on. Or I think
• 7:42
  they maybe they can choose. I don't remember exactly either way, like Coup
• 7:46
  for example, Like in Coup, if you only had one life, if
• 7:49
  you challenge somebody and you're wrong, you're out. In concept, pretense is
• 7:54
  really fun. In reality, the roles are either way too hard to achieve
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  or way too easy to achieve. So in practice it wasn't as much fun
• 8:01
  as we thought it was. There were a number of roles that were just
• 8:03
  like we shouldn't even include that one in there. But I'm sure we'll try
• 8:07
  it again sometime. It's a fun It was a fun experiment and I'm sure
• 8:09
  it'll be fun to play again at some point. So that's pretense from Jason
• 8:15
  Tagmire and Aldrac Entertainment Group. All right, Next up is this is the
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  game I got. My in laws visited. They visit England. My in
• 8:24
  laws of visited somewhere. I didn't think it was England, But now I'm
• 8:26
  feeling like it was England anyway. My in laws visited and they had found
• 8:31
  for me on their travels a copy of the classic British pub game Shut the
• 8:37
  Box, Now, Shut the Box. Like I said, it's been around
• 8:39
  a long time. I guess it was introduced in seventeen fifty. And basically
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  the way it works is it's a wooden box and it's got a little horizontal
• 8:48
  bar inside, and on the bar are nine pegs or nine little tiles that
• 8:54
  swivel up. You can sort of swivel them up or knock them down.
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  When they're you can read them. They read one through nine. The game
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  comes with two dice, and what you do on your turn is you you
• 9:05
  roll the dice and then you can either you add then you add the dice
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  together. You can knock down one or two tiles that add up to the
• 9:13
  value that you roll. Once you have lower than once you've knocked down everything
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  below or above six, then you only roll one die and the goal is
• 9:24
  to keep rolling until you can until you can't knock down anymore tiles. So
• 9:30
  there's a tiny bit of choice in terms of which combination of tiles you knock
• 9:33
  down. But there's also a ton of luck. Right, If you only
• 9:37
  have the two and the four left and you roll a three, well you're
• 9:41
  done. And then the way the game works is you're trying to knock down
• 9:43
  as many tiles as you can. Once you can't knock down any tiles on
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  your turn, then the tiles that are left red from left to right is
• 9:52
  your score. So if you have the two and the four left standing,
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  your score is twenty four. If you have the one and the nine standing,
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  your score is nineteen. If you have the one, four, eight,
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  and nine, your score is four hundred eighty nine. It's a ridiculous
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  scoring system that's really fun because you can have these wildly different scores. You
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  know, I had three hundred and sixty four and I had twelve hundred and
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  eighty nine or something, or you could even have I've even had games where
• 10:20
  I had like five tiles still up when I lost, in which case then
• 10:24
  you have a score in the tens of thousands. It's funny and amusing.
• 10:31
  It's been around a long time. It's called shut the Box. I mean,
• 10:33
  it's nothing to write home about, but sometimes my son and I'll use
• 10:37
  it if we have like ten minutes before we have to leave for something,
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  or five minutes before we have to leave for something, or we're waiting for
• 10:41
  everybody to be ready to go out the door. We'll just play around.
• 10:45
  Up shut the box. Next up is that's a question. That's a question?
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  Is the twenty seventeen follow up from Vlada Chevado to his mind bending world
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  ending success Code Names, which I think was twenty sixteen or twenty five,
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  and that's a question. Chavado returns to the party game Sphere with the idea
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  of trying to have people ask questions and then vote on what other people are
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  going to say. On your turn, you're going to pick from a number
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  of cards that you have. There's three different kinds of prompts, and then
• 11:18
  you're going to choose cards from your hand to create a question. And it
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  would be an AARB question usually, and everybody votes AARB depending how they think
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  the person who's asking the question is going to answer it. Then you get
• 11:33
  points based on who voted correctly about how the person asking the question would answer
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  it. It's a pretty simple party game. There's a couple other elements and
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  well as well. There's a triple your score if you're really sure you can
• 11:46
  play that once. There's a little scoring track. It's squirrel themed for some
• 11:50
  reason, but it's really unclear why. As a party game, it's fine,
• 11:56
  like most of the ones in Today's thing in sort of reviewing games that
• 11:58
  are but probably not worth writing home about. I enjoyed that's a question,
• 12:03
  and I'm glad I picked it up for two dollars from goodwill. I don't
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  think I would want to pick it up for twenty dollars, but it was
• 12:09
  a good time. Nonetheless, that is that's a question. So that is
• 12:15
  five simple party games that I've played recently. Oh there's one last one.
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  I don't think I talked about this yet. The last one is a game
• 12:22
  I've seen in a number of places. This is Taple. Taple is a
• 12:26
  very simple party game where you have a gizmo in the center of the table
• 12:28
  that is a circle, and it's got a series of letters around the edge.
• 12:33
  On your turn or at the beginning of the round, somebody is going
• 12:37
  to flip a card that reveals a category, and then you go around like
• 12:41
  like in the classic folk party game, and everybody is going to say an
• 12:45
  answer that starts with a different letter but meets the obligation of the category.
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  And then when they say the answer, they are going to hit the button
• 12:54
  on the edge of the circle that matches the letter they just said, and
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  then they hit the button in the middle to reset the timer. Then the
• 13:00
  next player goes. You keep going until somebody takes too long. If they
• 13:03
  take too long and the timer buzzes, they're out, or if all the
• 13:07
  letters run out, then you continue that way as well. Tackles. It's
• 13:13
  a fun little party game. It's great like Opener or a Closer. There's
• 13:16
  not a lot to it, but it's amusing and you should try to to
• 13:18
  you get a chance. Well, that's the last of the simple quick bite
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  games. I hope you enjoyed this flight of coffee or flight of espressoes today.
• 13:26
  What simple games do you enjoy? Head over to board game geek Guild
• 13:28
  Preach sixty nine, share them in the forums there and beyond that. Thank
• 13:33
  you for joining me on my walk today. I hope your next walk because
• 13:35
  the pleasiness as mind was oh bye. Brought to rattle Box