Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Chroma Mix, Apiary, Apollo, Fantasy Realms (revisited)

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Chroma Mix, Apiary, Apollo, Fantasy Realms (revisited) · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:05
  Welcome to pick up and Deliver the podcast, where I pick up my audio
• 0:08
  recorders, I head out for a walk and delivering episode to you while I
• 0:10
  stroll around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good evening, listeners. It's
• 0:23
  a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. It is now. My phone thing
• 0:27
  says it's fifty one degrees out, but I can't believe it's that warm.
• 0:31
  I think it's in the mid forties as my guess, maybe even low forties.
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  I'm putting on a hat and gloves for this walk. Kind of been
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  inside all day doing some work. I thought i'd get out talk to you
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  my friends, take a little stroll, get the blood pumpin, get the
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  review rollin, et cetera, et cetera. So I thought I would talk
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  to you today about a few games because the last episode I did it was
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  not a review episode, and I'm still catching up, although I'm getting close
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  to getting caught up on the new games I've played list so that's exciting,
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  all right. So today is a board game Espresso triple shot. For those
• 1:10
  of you new to the podcast, This is a segment I do in which
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  I review three games that I've played. One or two times each, So
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  these are first impression reviews. And then I talk about one game that I
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  recently dusted off, meaning I got it out of I played it, and
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  it's been more than a year since I played it, so I'm kind of
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  bringing it back into play dusting it off so to speak generally. Like I
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  said, I've only played the most of the games once or twice when I'm
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  talking about them, so keep that in mind. Take my impressions with the
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  grain of salt. All right, So first game I want to talk about
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  is called Chroma Mix. This was a kickstarter game from an independent publisher,
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  and full disclosure, I am friends with the independent publisher's name is George Zeng.
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  He comes to Toggle Gaming and I think he's a really swell guy.
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  So take that with a grain of salt, a double double salt for this
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  podcast or this episode. But I will say this is a fun little card
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  game. Chroma Mix is a deck building game of sorts. Hand management.
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  Is probably a better a better sober quet, although it does have a deck
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  building component. In the game, you start with a couple different cards that
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  are different colors, either pink, you can do cyan magenta, or cyan
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  magenta, cmy k cm cyan magenta yellow. Okay, so C myk cyan
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  magenta yellow, and I think the case stanswer black. The idea being this
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  is a game about making colors using ink, and so you start with cards
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  from those three base colors, and the way the game works, you can
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  play a card onto the table and then when you play that card, it
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  will give you the option of doing something, or you can mix some new
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  ink by getting rid of cards you already have, or there is an action
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  you can do where you pick up all of the cards that you had played
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  on the table. The reason it's hand management and not deck building is that
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  you always have all your cards in your hand or on the table in front
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  of you. But because you always have to spend two cards to get a
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  new one, and the more elaborate colors require cards that kind of step up
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  to them, you're always thinning your deck as well. Your hand never gets
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  all that big, except toward the end of the game you might start to
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  assemble a big hand toward one of the winning conditions. The game has a
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  couple different win conditions that you achieve through buying one of the top level cards.
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  So that's one of the interesting things. You can't win until you buy
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  one of the top level cards, and then the top level card that you
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  buy gives you access to one of the win conditions, which you then achieve
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  through the same process of sort of buying and manipulating cards. It's a pretty
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  tactical game. I mean, you definitely need strategy, but there's tactics in
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  terms of which cards come out into the market. Then you are sort of
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  changing cards into other cards as you race toward the goal. Once you've played
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  a few times, you realize it is a race game. It's not that
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  long, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. The art is fine. It's not
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  amazing or anything, but it's passable, and there's fun little quotes and stuff
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  on the cards as well. I think if I recall quotes about the colors.
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  It comes in a nice little box. What's an equivalent size box.
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  It's a small box card game, sort of a shot and tott and size
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  card box. Maybe a little bit bigger than that, but it's like a
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  double deck box but a little thicker. Yeah, something like that. So
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  that was published by George Zeng with art from Nicolage, Jasper Cyan and The
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  publishing house is jay z Games jy Zee, which are George Zang's initials.
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  Now, keep an eye on George. I think he's going to go far.
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  I'm not gonna say where, but I am aware that he got a
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  job starting in March at a publishing house, like an actual full time job
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  as a game developer, so our a game designer. So that's really exciting
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  and I wish him the best. Okay, the next game I want to
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  talk about is apary. Apiary is the newest and exciting game from stone Meier
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  Games. The premises it's the far future. Human beings wiped ourselves out,
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  and the next dominant species to rise on Earth were bees. The bees expanded
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  over the planet, they took over everything, they evolved into HyperIntelligence, and
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  then they went into space. So the game is about space bees. I
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  mean, pretty self explanatory. I mean, I'm kind of tired of all
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  the space bees games, but you know, one more won't hurt anything.
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  I'm kidding, of course. I actually do own quite a few games about
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  bees. I have three that I can think of. I have honey Buzz,
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  which is a market engine or a market tableau builder with some worker placement.
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  I have bes Be Easy, which is a abstract strategy game with cute
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  little bees on it. And then I have Bees, which is a real
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  time flower construction and harvesting game, which I think is b with five e's
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  and then a S and an apostrophe exclamation point. So you would have thought,
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  Brendan, you picked up a copy of Apry Huh. I did not.
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  And there's a couple of reasons. One, at first glance, it
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  was not yes for sure, which tends to be the case with Stone myre
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  games. For me, I generally like them, but they're not top top
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  shelf for me. The one that really has tickled my fancy, and really
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  I've gone all in on his wingspan. The moment I saw that game,
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  I knew it was for me, and I've got every expansion so far.
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  I don't have the Gigantic Box, but everything else, so that one is
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  really top notch for me. Most of the others are good. I enjoy
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  playing them. I really do like Size quite a bit. I like Tapestry
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  quite a bit. But in every case when I've played them and someone else
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  had them, I'm sort of like, well, I'm glad I didn't buy
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  this. It wouldn't get played much at my house, I can play it
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  with other people, and that's frankly, that's the case with API as well.
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  API is a work replacement game. It uses a bumping in growth mechanism,
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  not dissimilar from Euphoria, where you have your workers are dice. In
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  this case, they're like b shaped dice, sort of with four sides,
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  so that as they go along they get stronger from level one to level four.
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  And then once a level four bee gets bumped, it then goes into
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  hibernation and you lose it, but you get a bonus when you do that.
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  So the game has played over a series of turns. On your turn,
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  you are placing your bees, bumping other people's bees that you're getting benefits
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  from the places where you place the bees. The bees are exploring the galaxy
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  doing sort of three X stuff. There's no extermination, you're not fighting each
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  other, but you are exploring, exploiting and expanding. For sure, the
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  theme is pretty fun. I do like game that carefully thinks through its theme,
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  and I would say most of the components are pretty thematic and how they
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  engage with what it is they're doing. It fits. The game fits its
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  own theme very well, so I like that. The components are pretty nice.
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  The little bee dice things are good, although they would have been better
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  had the numbers been painted at a higher contrast, at a high contrast thing
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  they want. The numbers aren't painted, and so they're actually kind of hard
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  to see. I think if I owned this game, I would take a
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  brush and some white paint and I would paint the numbers on the dice so
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  that we had read a legible dice in light. That isn't great. I
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  know I haven't really said what you're doing in Apiary, but I mean the
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  reality is it is kind of what you would expect for a game that makes
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  use of most of the exes the exploit and expand and so on. From
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  that perspective, it does what you would think it's going to. The art
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  is from Quan Chai Moria. It's really great. It does look like space
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  bes. If you can imagine what a space B would look like. Quantai
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  Maria nailed it. I don't think there's any doubt when you're looking at the
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  game that that's what it's about, and everybody's pretty happy with it from my
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  perspective, So all in all, Apiary it's a fun one. It's definitely
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  well worth trying. It does fall into for me the stone Meyer category of
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  I'm glad I didn't buy it. It doesn't. It's not a game that
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  I need to own. But if someone brings in and says, hey,
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  you want to play Apiary, I probably will play ay Apary When it shows
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  up on board game Marina, I'm sure I will log a dozen plays of
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  it as I figure out how it works and kind of get the hang of
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  it better. But for now, I'm happy to have played it once and
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  gotten to try it. Apary was designed by Connie Vogelman with art by Kwanchai
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  Maria and published by stone Meyer Games. Next up, I'm going to talk
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  about a game I dusted off, and that game is Fantasy Realms. Fantasy
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  Realms is a game that's had an interesting arc. It came out in twenty
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  seventeen, and I specifically remember the year it came out because I was at
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  Origins when I met its designer and he told me it was coming out,
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  and I confess I didn't go by it. I probably should have. It
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  would have been nice to help get his sales up at the first con,
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  and it had a slow burn like. At that first con, I didn't
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  hear anybody talking about it, and for a while after I did not hear
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  any talk about it, But slowly and surely conversation built about. Fantasy Realms
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  is a really interesting handbuilding game where you have a deck of cards and all
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  the cards have different scoring conditions on them, and they all kind of interplay
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  off each other, and as you're playing your drawing cards and trying to get
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  the best hand you can. But it sort of uses Gin rules, like
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  you draw a card and discard a card, and then the next person draws
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  a card and discards a card. The big difference is in Fantasy Realms,
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  every time you discard a card, you're discarding a card to the open market,
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  and everyone when they're drawing a card can take a card from any of
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  the cards in the open market. It's a big open space rather than you
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  know, in Gin or other games like that, you can only take the
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  top card on the discard pile. In Fantasy Realms you can take any of
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  the cards in the open market. And the game goes until there are ten
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  cards in the open market, and then it immediately ends, and whoever has
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  the best hand wins the hands all have these different scoring conditions on them,
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  and often they depend on what else you have in your hand. In some
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  ways, it's a little bit like point salad, only instead of building a
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  tableau, you are assembling it all in your hand. And in point Salid,
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  you have vegetable cards that give you points, and you have the scoring
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  cards that earn the points from the vegetable cards. In Fantasy Realms, there's
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  no I mean, most of the cards do have points on them also,
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  but really it's a game where your hand gives you points. Now, there
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  was some early criticism, which I thought was reasonable, of Fantasy Realms that
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  it takes as long to score as it does to play. And that's fair.
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  If you're going through the cards one at a time and talking about how
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  they score, you could spend more time than you could spend ten or fifteen
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  minutes scoring four or five people, and the game only takes ten or fifteen
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  minutes, So that's definitely true. However, they've released an app where you
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  load up the app, you take a picture of the tableau and it identifies
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  for you all the cards that are in the tableaux. You double check that
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  they're all there, and then you click score and it figures out your score
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  for you. And boy, that's great. I highly recommend finding that because
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  it makes all the difference. Fantasy Realms is really fun. It's been more
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  than a year since I played it, but I'm happy to have gotten it
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  out again because it really works well. So that is Fantasy Realms, designed
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  by Bruce Glascow, which if that name seems familiar, it's because it's also
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  the name under the title Betrayal at House on the Hill, So Bruce has
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  two bangers out there, and with art by Anthony Cornomyer and published by whiz
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  Kids. Finally, today I'm going to talk about a third game. This
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  is a game I picked up at Goodwill for a couple bucks, and I'm
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  glad I got it a Goodwill for a couple of bucks because it was fun,
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  but not a game I need to keep. I'm not that interested in
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  holding onto it, so it's gone onto the cell pile. So that gives
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  you a sense of my review. But this is Apollo, a game inspired
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  by the NASA Moon Missions. The designer the design team is interesting. It's
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  Sarah Addison and John Gilmore. John Gilmore, best known for being one of
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  the code designers of Dead of Winter. He also designed the auction game Vault
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  Wars, which is what I have and enjoy and I think, yep,
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  no, that's it. I know he's done more, but that's all I
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  have in my head about him. And the art is Thomas Rainier. I
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  think you can look it up on board game Geek. It's published by Buffalo
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  Games in partnership with Pandasaurus. I believe so Apollo the NASA Moon Missions is
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  a game inspired by that. One player plays Houston, and so you have
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  this big control panel with all these indicators that you're tracking, and then the
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  other players play the astronauts in the ship. And what you're doing is you're
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  trying to deal with problems as they come up, accomplish experiments as you fly
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  around in space, and accomplish missions for NASA before your ship gets back to
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  where you're going. The game is I think, mostly built around the idea
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  that you not necessarily are going to crash, but rather that you're dealing with
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  these things in an orderly fashion and an amount of time that's necessary. It's
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  pretty tight in terms of turns and as far as the cooperative game based in
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  history goes it's pretty neat. The downside to it, the thing that makes
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  it difficult to really enjoy from my perspective is that it was incredibly finicky that
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  the NASA player. One of the key things they're doing is they are tracking
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  all this information, and that is like the that is most of what they're
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  doing, and I do have a little bit more to do, but a
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  significant part of the game that they're doing is tracking information. And then the
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  other players have limited ability to communicate with Houston and have to solve these problems
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  and have relatively minor things you can do for your actions. And so,
• 14:54
  to use a phrase they use on the board game Brawl or a board game
• 14:58
  Barrage podcast, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. In other words, the
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  game is, the game has a lot you have to kind of keep track
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  of and learn, and then it just it really isn't that fun. I
• 15:09
  will say, we only played the first mission, and there are like five
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  in the box, so it's possible that one of the other missions is more
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  fun, or as you play more it gets more interesting. But for me,
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  the interesting part was the very careful product design that went into this game.
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  It's really carefully made, really thoughtfully crafted. It's beautifully designed from a
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  graphic design standpoint, and it evokes the thing that it's selling very well.
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  I just didn't think it was all that fun as a game. Sad to
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  say, but if you're somebody who really is interested in the NASA Moon missions,
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  that it's well worth picking up, and I would. I haven't heard
• 15:46
  anyone talk about this. I can't imagine it was super successful, meaning you
• 15:50
  can probably pick it up pretty cheap. If not, you know, send
• 15:52
  me a message. Maybe you can buy my copy for maybe just five dollars
• 15:56
  more than postage. We'll see. But that is Apollo, a game inspired
• 16:03
  by the NASA Moon Missions. Well, that brings me to the end of
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  my time today. I'm curious, friends, what have you been playing lately?
• 16:08
  Head over to board game Geek guild three two sixty nine and share the
• 16:14
  games that you've been playing with your friends in the pick Up and Deliver guild.
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  We'd love to hear from you. I am over on board game Arena
• 16:19
  with the username Wombat nine two nine. I'm also on board game Geek itself
• 16:23
  with the username Wombat nine two nine, and I hope that we'll get to
• 16:29
  chat sometime we can talk. We could play a game online and I'd love
• 16:33
  to hear what you've been playing. We are approaching the end of the year,
• 16:36
  so I'm always interested to hear in December, what are our things you
• 16:38
  like or don't like about the podcast? Are there episodes that you thought were
• 16:42
  particularly fun that would be a good idea for me to keep going on.
• 16:48
  It's always tricky to understand what the viewers like best and figure out what the
• 16:55
  best approach will be for episodes in the coming year. So while you're thinking
• 17:00
  about that, I am going to finish up my walk here and head inside.
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  So thanks for joining me on my walk today. I hope your next
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  walk is a supposed as mine. Once Bye Bye. Brought to you by rattle Box