Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / The Game Makers; Wanted Wombats; Wandering Towers; The Downfall of Pompei (revisited)
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- Pick Up & Deliver 863: The Game Makers; Wanted Wombats; Wandering Towers; The Downfall of Pompei (revisited) Transcript Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I walk home. I'm Brendan Riley. [ Intro music ] Greetings, listeners. It's a lovely evening here in suburban Chicago. The temperature has been dropping, meaning it's actually a rather pleasant walk home. The sun is setting, so cicadas are out and I'm enjoying the dusk and, uh, my stroll home. It's been a couple episodes since I talked about some new games I've played, so I think it's time for a Board Game Espresso Triple Shot. [coffee noises] Order up! For those of you new to the podcast, the Board Game Espresso Triple Shot is a segment in which I talk about three games I've played recently for the first time and one game I dusted off or expansion. These are not full reviews. They're first impressions. Generally after one or two plays. So let's jump into it. This first one is a game I've only played digitally, but I played two games of it, and I feel like I got a pretty good feel for the game, and so I feel comfortable talking about it. This is the Game Makers, designed by Ben Rosset, published by B�zier Games. Now, this game got a lot of buzz last year because it looks really cool and it has all the games in it. Like this is a game where you get to make. It is a game about making board games, specifically working, I think, at the Panda factory or managing the Panda production facility and in the game itself are images, cover images and descriptions of many, many top tier board games. So if you are a board game geek like I am, All of the stuff that you're encountering in the game fits the hobby that you're experiencing. Okay, so the action selection element in the in the game, you are making a shelf full of games, twelve games. And I think when somebody finishes their shelf, everybody else gets one more turn. And then all of the games score in different ways. There are four categories of games, and the different categories score in different ways. One of them, some of them are competitive with the other players. Some of them involve being next to games that had certain kinds of elements in them. Some of them involve set collection and positionality in the shelf that you're putting together. The mechanism is pretty clever. The board is is divided into a pie of, I think, six or maybe eight spaces or could be twelve, a bunch of spaces. The display rotates around this pie of spaces, and you have these forklifts that you use to maneuver around those spaces. Turns out this is hard to explain, but essentially on your turn, you are going to move your forklifts forward one, two or three spaces and they're going to trigger a bonus that is sort of level one, level two or level three strength. But then you won't get to use that forklift again for one, two, or three turns. So if you move it just one space, you get to use it again the next turn. But the strength of the action it takes is just a one. Whereas if you move it three spaces, it takes an action strength of three, but then you don't get to use it again for three turns. If that sounds sort of familiar, especially given that I said Ben Rosset was the designer. That's because this is a very similar mechanism to the game Fromage. And when I played this, I couldn't help but think of fromage. The gameplay itself is pretty different, but that action selection mechanism, the idea of getting a stronger action but having a longer delay on your pieces. Those definitely feel of a piece with the cheese making game. So when you're using your forklifts, you're using them to collect different resources. And there's a variety of different ways that you can deploy those resources. There's a sort of bonus track. There are employees that you can hire, and then there are materials you can collect the bonus track in. The employees give you access to accelerators, which then make you more efficient in collecting the other things and get you extra points at the end of the game. All in all, the game is pretty fun. It the theme is really neat, and it's the sort of game that I think would be fun to play occasionally. There is the really interesting element of it being about things you like, because then you have the, let's see, the thematic pressure rather than the strategic pressure of what games you pick. Like if I get the card for a game, I don't like flux. Am I going to produce flux because it meets certain requirements in terms of what game I want, or do I discard it and use it for cards instead because I don't want to make that game? That is an interesting aspect of it. Now all of the cards score in different ways, so there are benefits to making any individual game. But sort of like in wingspan, when I'm acquiring birds that I like, it's hard to or there is a pressure in your mind to go for the aesthetically pleasing and thematically pleasing rather than the strategically pleasing. Now, I haven't played the physical game of this. I have seen a copy and it's enormous. This is a huge game. Think of the boxes the size of like the terraforming Mars big box or the obsession Big box. It still fits in a kallax, but barely. So I haven't gotten to play this on the table, but I played it twice on board game arena and I thought it was pretty fun. This is definitely in the category of game I would play if someone else brought it, but I don't think I would buy it. It's pretty light in terms of The strategic loop is relatively limited and you get benefit from it. But compared to some of the depth of other games, it's on the lighter side. Definitely worth trying if you get a chance, I definitely would. I wouldn't suggest buying it unless you really investigate it and can tell that it is a game you know you'll like. That is the game makers from B�zier games and designer Ben Rosset, a twenty twenty six game. Next up, we have Wanted Wombats. This is a 2022 game that Toggle Gaming got as a donation from Barrel Aged Games. It was designed by Kaya Miyano with art from Josh Nelson. The art is a delightful mix of Old West tropes and anthropomorphized wombats in cowboy hats with guns. So basically they are wanted posters with cartoon wombats. And this is a push your luck game where you reveal a card off the deck and if it is a wombat. You can reveal another card to try to get points for getting more wombats, but if you reveal the wrong thing, if you reveal one of the bust cards, then your run of cards you revealed stops and you don't collect anything. It is a very simple push your luck game, but you get points for the different kinds of wombats you've collected, but also you get points for sets. And it's the sets that will really push you over to scoring the big points. Like I said, it's very simple. It takes like five to ten minutes to play. Um, as push your luck games go, I guess for the amount of time it takes. It's decent. Like if I had the, if I had to choose between this and zombie dice, I would still I would rather play zombie dice. So from that perspective it's fine, but not really a game. I'm all that excited to play again except for the super cute wombat art is delightful. So, you know, I think as a push your luck game, it's fine. But I think I'd rather play something like Dead Man's Draw that has a little bit more meat to it. Um, or Las Vegas. So that is wanted wombats a 2022 game. Well, uh, at the toggle meet up that's closest to August twenty fourth. I played a game of The Downfall of Pompeii. Now, August twenty fourth is one of the proposed dates for the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii in like eighty, fifty or whatever. The records were not kept with enough accuracy for people to know for sure. And there for a long time. August twenty sixth was seen as the official day. But I guess that in the last couple decades, there has been some new findings that suggest it was maybe an October instead. So but there's not a specific date assigned to that. So I put August twenty fourth as the date. So Pompeii is, of course, the town at the base of Mount Vesuvius that was destroyed when Vesuvius erupted. It's sort of famous because when Vesuvius erupted, a huge pyroclastic flow of vapor and hot gas and ash rolled down the mountain lightning fast and enveloped the people in Pompeii, leading to sort of frozen tableaus of people. And then when they were discovered, we learned a lot about the community at the time. The game, the downfall of Pompeii doesn't take any of that seriously. Instead, you represent a family of people in the city and you're trying to get out. The game is played in two phases. In the first phase, you're trying to put people in the city. You play cards and you add people to the city. When you add people to a building, you get to add more people if those people are already there. The mechanism for taking turns is you draw a card off the deck and whatever number of building it reveals, that's where you're going to put your people. Eventually, you reveal a certain number of explosion cards, and then the mountain erupts and the placement phase ends. When that happens everyone shifts to drawing tiles out of a bag instead. When you do that, you're going to draw a tile out of the bag, and it will show you one of the five spots that lava is moving into the city. You add it to the spot and then you get to move two of your people. Your goal is to get your people out of the city before they're killed by the lava. This game is relatively straightforward and incredibly cutthroat. You are definitely going after each other. It's got a fun gimmick of when you are. When somebody's person gets killed by the lava, you toss it in the volcano. This is a very pleasant game. I really like it as a light, highly competitive, fun game of volcanoes and screaming. It turns out it's been more than four years since I played it, which feels like a really long time. I didn't feel like it had been that long, but we had a good time with it. Overall, I love the nuances of the game and it's definitely going to stay in my collection for a while. This was originally published in 2004. Designed by Klaus-j�rgen Wrede and published by Mayfair in the United States. Klaus-j�rgen Wrede is, of course, the designer of Carcassonne. I believe that was downfall of Pompeii. Finally, the last game I have to talk about today is a game I got at GenCon. This is one where I started listening to the demo of the game, and the basic demo of the game was perfect. Like I'm like, oh, this is an excellent light game that will make for interesting play and hopefully be accessible and long lived. Last time I had an experience like that was furnace, which I think did live up to that, but my family didn't really like it. I think Wandering Towers is a little better. I didn't say the name of it. This is Wandering Towers, designed by Kiessling and Kramer and published by Capstone Games in 2022. In Wandering Towers, it has this lovely presence of these little cardboard craft stone towers and. There's one big tower that's open on the top. Then you have a bunch of little wizards that are around the circle, and on your turn, you're either moving wizards or you're moving towers. What you're trying to do is get all five of your potions built or filled, and you fill a potion. Every time you move a tower onto a wizard, you trap the wizard inside and you get some of their magic and that fills the potion you. If there's more than one wizard in there, you still only get one potion, so you have to have like five different turns where you capture a wizard, and then you have to move the towers and your wizards in such a way that they all end up in the tower, in the Black Tower. Then you win. Or then you trigger the end of the game and everybody gets one more turn. Anybody who didn't get all their wizards in and all their potions made loses. And then the tiebreaker is potions spent. Because this is the clever gimmick, each game you're going to put a certain number of spells in the middle. The beginner game recommends two, but they say you can put as many as you want in. I think three is probably a good number. And it comes with a stack of like twelve different spells. And each spell does something a little bit different where you spend one of the potions that you've built up, filled up, and you get to do something special. You're allowed to use one spell per turn. And the tiebreaker is who has the most filled up potions left. So if you spend one of your potions to do a spell, you're now reducing the likelihood that you'll win the in the tiebreaker, but you might end up winning. Ending the game quicker. And then you win because you finished the game and no one else did. It is an excellent lightweight game, easy to teach, relatively easy to play. I have a good time with it, I think there is a. Well, there is a wizard's tower expansion which I bought, and I think without that the game might get stale pretty quick, but I think that's going to add enough verve to the game that there'll be a lot of exploring to do in the future. One of the things I really like about this game is that the table presence is off the charts. So like I said, the game is this big circle of spaces and you have these cardboard craft little towers. When you move a tower, you pick it up and you set it on top of whatever is at the space that it's landing on. And then you have like two towers. Then on your next turn, when you play the next when you move the next tower, you can either pick up the bottom tower of the stack and move them both, or you can pick up the top tower and separate them. The reason you might do that is maybe one of your wizards is trapped in between. So there's this interesting mix of when the wizards are trapped, you sometimes have to move things in order to get your wizards out. It's a very tactical game. It's really hard to plan ahead because the board moves around so much every time somebody gets a wizard into the Black Tower. The Black Tower moves, so that becomes tricky as well. But there's a lot of strategy or there's a lot of tactical strategy, I guess, tactics to try and manage your own play and keep an eye on other people to see, oh, is that person close to winning or not? I think this is a great one. Like I said, it's going to stay in the collection a while because it's darn fun. That is Wandering Towers. Well, that's about it for me. That's three games tried and one game dusted off. I want to say thanks for joining me on my walk. I hope that I'd love to hear what you think of these games. You can head over to BoardGameGeek Guild three, two, six, nine and share your thoughts there. I'd also love to hear what new games you've been playing. Share on the forum there as well. If you want to reach out to me directly, you can send me a message on BoardGameGeek. My username is wombat929. You could also send me an email, brendan@rattleboxgames.com, or send me a message on board Game Arena, where my username is also wombat929. I'd love to play an asynchronous game with you over there. They might have wandering towers, although I think that game is light enough that I'm not sure how fun it would be played asynchronously. But given that you take turns, it could work. Well, that's about it for me. Today I want to say thanks for joining me on my walk, and I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. [ Exit music ] Brought to you by Rattle Box Games.