Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Whitehall Mystery; Time Bomb: Evolution; Madame Medora’s House of Curiosities; Cockroach Poker (revisited)
Transcript
- Untitled - June 11, 2025 00:00:00 Speaker: Welcome to pick Up and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step out for a walk and deliver an episode to you as I stroll around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good morning, listeners. It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago and I'm out walking around talking about games. This episode I'm recording a little bit ahead. It may be a week or two before I post it, so apologies if it feels out of date. I'm recording at the end of May, but it's definitely not going to come up for a couple episodes because our next one will be top of the stack, and then I may have a more content focused episode or two before I get back to What Have you been Playing? Which is the genre of this game here, of this episode? Here, because this episode is another Board Game Espresso Triple shot. Order up! a Board Game Espresso Triple Shot is an episode in which I talk about three games I've tried for the first time recently, and one game I'm revisiting or trying an expansion for. Generally, these are short impression conversations rather than full on reviews. Most of the games I've only played once or maybe twice, so I don't have enough perspective to give a solid review yet. But I can give you a sense of what I thought of the game on my first impression, and whether I'll be playing it again. So that's my plan. All right. The first game I want to talk about today is Whitehall Mystery. This is designed by Gabriel Mori and Gianluca Santopietro, with art by Alan D'Amico and Gianluca Santopietro. This was published by Fantasy Flight Games I believe in 2017. Whitehall Mystery is sort of a narrowed down version of the Jack the Ripper hunting game letters from Whitechapel. I'm not sure if it's the same designers. I did not look that up, but generally the idea is three of the four players, it's up to four players. You can play as few as two. One player is always going to be the killer. It's supposed to be sort of the Jack the Ripper killer who has evaded police and is now taunting them by killing another person and leaving their body parts all over London to scare the populace. Meanwhile, the other up to three people are playing investigators who are chasing the villain. This is a hidden movement game very similar to Scotland Yard, except we don't have the different forms of transport. Instead, we have different kinds of different ways of interacting with the board in Scotland Yard. If you land on the spot where the murder, where the Mr. X is, you win. In this game, you have to investigate. So you could be where the killer is. And if you don't do the right move, you won't catch them. There are a couple clever aspects to the game that I really like. The detectives move on different spaces than the killer, so you slide around the board in slightly different ways. There are a number of action cards you can use that give the killer a little bit of extra movement. Most of my students, when they've played this have said that they think the killer is harder to be than the detectives, but I think it's a mixed bag. And, uh, yeah, the generally the idea is the killer moves and they keep a secret log of where they moved. Then the detectives move and they search for the killer. You go back and forth. If the killer gets to their goal spot within 15 moves, then they declare that they made it to their goal spot, and then they're off and running again, and the board resets. Like you lose all your clues because now you're chasing them from a new spot. It's a fun game, a reasonably quick, easy to play. I think once you've played a time or two and you can add the special rules that the detectives get and the special advantage cards that the killer gets, the game becomes a little more involved or a little more interesting. I think it does require a level of interaction among the detectives that could very easily lead to people bossing other people around. When I played, it felt like one of the players was pretty outside the realm of possible when they were making their moves, so it was sort of frustrating to not be able to intervene without bossing them around, and you don't want to boss other players around. So that part wasn't my favorite. But generally the game was fun to play. Now, I've had the weird experience of knowing how to play this for a couple of years, because I use it in my literature and gaming class, where we play board games and we talk about them as literary objects. So that part is particularly interesting because I have this experience of understanding the game, knowing how to play it, but not being able to play it because I can't play it with my students. That is Whitehall mystery. Next up we have a little a small box card game called Time Bomb Evolution. This is a team based deduction game with a heavy amount of luck. In the game, you play members of Sherlock Holmes team trying to stop moriarty from blowing up London. The gameplay is relatively simple. There's a bunch of cards that have bombs on them, and a few cards that have wires that allow you to dee Uh, d um, disarm the bombs. If, as a group, you manage to find the wires before the bomb goes off, then you win. If you don't find the wires before the bomb goes off, you lose. Broadly speaking, the way that works is every round, everybody gets a bunch of cards. So in a five player game, you get five cards. And in the deck there's a bunch of different cards for bombs. And the rule is if you ever draw four of the same, if as a group, you have drawn four of the same card for a bomb, it goes off and the Sherlock team loses. They're also in a like a six person game, which is what we played. There were five. There were two Moriarty players who are working against the group, so they want the bombs to go off. Otherwise you have to find all five disarmament disarm cards. So the way the game works is you have a bunch of cards in front of you, and on your turn, you're going to pick a card that's in front of someone else and cut the wire on it. Then you flip it over. If it's one of the bombs, you add it into a tableau showing how many cards of that bomb you have drawn. If it's a disarm card, then you reveal how many disarmament checkmarks you have. Or you add it to the disarm pile. And if you get one of those for each bomb, you win the game. The deduction part comes from or the the social sneaky part comes from the fact that everybody gets this hand of cards. So you know how many of the checkmarks you have, but then you shuffle them up and put them on the table so you don't know which card has the bomb in it or which card has the disarm and which ones are the bombs. So you're talking to each other about probability and chance, but there's every chance that you'll have disarm and someone will cut a card in front of you and they'll find a bomb instead. So there's some risk management. Now this game is Time Bomb Evolution. It's a reimplementation of the original Time Bomb game, and it includes the evolution variant, which adds additional effects when you find cards. Now, we did not play with that because we played one round and everybody's like it's That's fine. And they didn't need to play another round. And frankly, that's kind of where I am too. I would be curious to try the evolution variant, and I might just next time I play it. Now that I understand it, I might just introduce that because it's not that much more complicated. But the reality is that so much of this is random, that I don't know how fun it would be in the long term, because you don't really get control over whether you succeed or not. Most of the time, when you're going to cut a wire and you find a bomb, you don't know whether the person has lied or whether they just. We just got bad luck and found the bomb. So that part's not my favorite. Yeah. So that's time bomb evolution. Designed by Yosuke Saito with art by Bibou and Katara Okawa. That's from 2016. I played Cockroach Poker again. This is a game I played once a number of years ago, and then I got a copy in the math trade, which I donated to my college board game club, because I know a couple of them really like it. And one of them said, hey, we got to play cockroach poker. So I tried it out and I still don't like it. Cockroach Poker is a bluffing game in which you are trying not to be the one who loses. The way the game works, everybody gets some cards in hand, and on your turn you are putting cards. Your whoever's turn it is, is going to take a card out of their hand, slide it face down to somebody and say, this is a and then name one of the five types of bugs in the game. Then the person receiving that card can either challenge, they can either challenge the card, or they can, uh, pass it along. If they pass it along, basically what they do is they look at it and then they pass it to someone else and they say something about it. This is a whatever, and they're allowed to change what they're saying. It is, I believe. But the everyone has heard what the other person stuff I said. I pass everything and said, this is a rat. And then you look at it and you pass it to me and say, this is a cockroach. Now I know one of the two of you is lying, but I don't know which. And then I can either take it and pass it along to other people, or I can, uh, challenge. Now, if you challenge what you're saying is like, I think I know what this card is. And you challenge by saying, I believe you, this is a rat or I don't believe you, this is not a rat. And then you flip it face up for everyone to see if you are correct in your prediction about whether it is or is not what they said it was, then they get it in front of them as a penalty. If you are incorrect in your prediction about what it was, then you take it as a penalty in front of you. The first person to have four cards of the same type in front of them loses the game. And the whole thing is there's one loser in the game. There's not. You don't declare winners, you declare one loser, and that's the game over. I thought it was fine. There's just I guess there's a little bit of strategy to it. It's supposed to be funny. We did have a good time. People were laughing, but ultimately I don't. There's not much to it and I didn't find it entertaining. So cockroach poker, not a game I'm going to play very often, if ever. So that's cockroach poker, created by Jack Zimet and Rolf Voigt. Now to be clear, we have the cockroach. poker. Cockroach poker royale game, which has some of the bugs have little crowns on them. And there are some rules for something to do with those crown bug crowns, but it's not clear what that would be. And, uh, we did not play that way. So maybe that's a future, uh, variant or expansion I can comment on. Uh, and finally, the third game that I wanted to talk about this week is a new escape room style game. This is Madame Medora's House of curiosities. I have a kind of standing practice on this podcast that if I play an escape room style game from a series, the first one I play from that series, I count as a new game. Any future ones that I play from that series, I count as expansions. This is purely for the context of how many new games I've played, how many different games, because I feel like once you've got the system, if it's the same system, it's not new. But this one is a new system from a new company. It's called Madame Medora's House of curiosities. The company is called created with love. And like Prospero Hall, they don't credit different participants. They just call themselves created with love. Now what this game is, it's a very nice box with really elaborate art that looks sort of like a wonder cabinet or a cabinet of curiosities. Lots of different objects drawn, you know, depicted in this cabinet. And then if you open it up, there are two other versions of the cabinet with the shelves rearranged a little bit, but very similar objects and some slight differences. And of course the differences are important. Then the game comes with a whole bunch of square cards that you lay out on the table, face up. And the square cards, there's like 25 of them. It's a five by five grid, I believe, and or maybe five by six grid. There's 30 of them, and each object in the on the cards is a different object that you might find in a cabinet of curiosity. Some of them are actually depicted on the cover, but not all of them. And then the game comes with an introductory letter and a puzzle to start. And after you solve the puzzle, then it has you flip you to check. If you're right, you flip over a card, and when you flip over that card, it'll say, well done, open this envelope. And so there's a process by which you make your way through a number of different puzzles. These are lateral thinking puzzles for the most part, but some other kinds, generally just the same kind of puzzle solutions that you would find in escape or unlock games. I would still say the exit games tend to be the most tricky. Unlock games tend to be mostly accessible, with a few sort of weird quirks that make it hard to do them. The exit games, like I said, are often tricky, require some real thinking, and then sometimes have solutions that are just a little unintuitive or don't quite work right. You have to really work to make them work once you understand what to do. House of curiosities did not have either of those problems. The puzzles were all pretty straightforward, and once you figure out what to do, they're very solvable. I would say the downside is they're pretty easy. I would call this a two out of five in difficulty there. I have played easier escape room games, but not a ton of them. And if you've played very many of them, it won't be a challenge. It'll be interesting from an intellectual perspective. There was one puzzle that we spent enough time on that I started contemplating. Hmm, I wonder if we should check the hint book and then we solved it. But for the most part, it's pretty accessible, pretty easy to play, and reasonably high quality components. Although it's all cards of various sizes and envelopes, there's no extra doodads or gizmos in there. I would recommend, if you're going to play it, have a scanner nearby or a phone that you that you can take, or a tablet, or you can take a picture and then draw on the tablet. Because there are like four things in the game that you can that you have to write on. So if you were to copy those, which is what we did, then you could play the game without ruining it and pass it along to somebody else. So that's my recommendation. If you try this, this is Madame Medora's House of curiosities, published in 2024. Well, that's about it for me today. I want to say thank you for joining me on the walk and ask, what games of the. Which of these games have you played? Head over to BoardGameGeek. Guild 3269 and share your gameplays there. I'd love to know which which of these games really stand out to you as exciting and interesting. Which ones have you enjoyed? Let us know over there! You can also reach out to me directly. Brendan at Chessgames.com or Wombat 929 is my username on BoardGameGeek. Well, thanks for joining me on my walk today. I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. Brought to you by Rattlebox Games.