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7th Continent; Fiction; The Gardens; Tussie Mussie · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:08
  Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
• 0:11
  as I step off the train and delivering episode to you while I walk home.
• 0:14
  I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon, listeners. It's a lovely
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  day here in suburbans Chicago, temperatures in the high seventies, and I am
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  walking home from the train. It's the first time walking home from the train
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  since last May, and I am happy to be back recording for you on
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  my normal schedule. As you know, it's ben I took a significant break,
• 0:46
  and so I have plenty of games to talk about. So every other
• 0:49
  or every third episode for quite a while is definitely going to be a board
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  game Espresso Espresso. So let's get started. Board game Espresso Espresso is,
• 1:00
  of course the format in which I give brief discussion to three games I've tried
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  for the first time recently and one game I revisited from the past. This
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  is an opportunity to reflect on some games I've played, But do you keep
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  in mind these are first impressions, so these are not games I've played even
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  kind of a lot. Most of them are one or two plays only,
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  and so you should take anything I say about them with a grain of salt.
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  I will also remind you that I do I am part owner of a
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  board game company, and so I guess technically I have incentive to downplay other
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  board games. I'm not really sure what the bias exactly would be, but
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  I do want you to know there might be some implicit bias there. All
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  right, With that out of the way, let's chat about Seventh Continent.
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  Seventh Continent is a game that I had heard about a lot in the year
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  it came out, which I believe was twenty seventeen. It came out as
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  part of a kickstarter and then has been kicking around ever since I played it
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  as I picked it up using some birthday money as a game for my wife
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  and I to play now that we are done with Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective and
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  similar games. The premise of Seventh Continent is that you are you went to
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  a continent, and then you came back home and you found yourself cursed,
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  so you have to go back and resolve the curse before time runs out.
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  I think that's the premise. There are several different chapters of the game,
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  and each chapter I think is a standalone thing that you play. We played
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  and lost, so I don't really know how the second chapter works because we're
• 2:49
  gonna have to redo since we lost the first chapter. The gameplay is relatively
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  simple. There are a whole bunch of cards that are all numbered, and
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  you lay the cards out using iconography to figure out the way that the cards
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  are laid out, and then you have a little marker to indicate where you
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  are I think, and then you can resolve story beats by looking up numbers,
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  which let you then read entries in a book, and though sometimes involved,
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  you're drawing more cards as well. The game it's got to sort of
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  choose your own adventure kind of style to it. There's not a ton of
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  game here so much as it is an adventure story that involves choosing and reading
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  things, although you do have to decide when to spend your relatively limited turns
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  and resources. You can't just look at everything, as we found out in
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  our first play. The art is nice but functional. It feels a little
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  bit like the art from the much more recent game The Guild of Merchant Explorers.
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  It's sort of line art with a slightly cartoonish vibe, or like animated
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  vibe not cartoonish though, and the storyline is pretty interesting. There are some
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  really neat art elements that you when you're looking at the cards you will notice
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  things that you maybe didn't notice before. And as you interact with things,
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  you then draw new cards that you put over the old cards to represent the
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  changes in the world as you encounter them. All in all, it's a
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  pretty neat system and I liked the story. In the first chapter, we
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  did not do very well. I think we lost about two thirds of the
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  way through, but I'm looking forward to trying it again sometime and seeing if
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  we can do better on our next play. So that is Seventh Continent,
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  published by Serious Pulp designers Ludovic Rowdy and Bruno Soter. All right, next
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  up to talk about is Fiction. Fiction is a new publication from They used
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  to be boardgametables dot Com. Now they are all play I think, and
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  it was designed by Peter C. Hayward. We're going to know that name
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  from. Oh, he's the person who designed That Time You Killed Me.
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  That's the other game that he's best known for, although he has forty two
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  entries on board game Geeks, so he may have other games. I've played
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  anyhow, Fiction is most easily described as competitive wordle. In fiction, you
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  have one player who is the clue giver, and the other players are all
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  the guessers, and you have a wordle puzzle. I think it is actually
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  identical to a whortle puzzle. I think it's five letters if I recall,
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  and it might be nine guesses instead of seven, but otherwise it's pretty similar.
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  And what you can do, or what you do is each turn you're
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  going to take a guess, and at the beginning you get a category which
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  helps you a little bit in terms of start at your starting point. And
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  then you take a guess, and then you get the usual kinds of clues
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  that you would get for wordle. You get this letter is in the puzzle
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  and in the right spot. This letter is in the puzzle, but not
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  in the right spot. These letters are not in the puzzle, that sort
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  of thing. The big difference is each time the clue giver gives you an
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  answer, they have to lie about something, so one of the answers is
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  a lie in every single response. Now you get I think one or two
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  truth tokens that you can use to put on a specific letter and have the
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  true. Have the clue giver tell you of that letter is true or not,
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  so you can kind of suss out a little bit where they're misleading you.
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  Then basically the idea is as a group, you are going to do
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  your best to find and guess the word that the clue giver is working with,
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  and that's how you play fiction. This is a fine game. It
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  taps into the shared shared deduction space and if you like word games like wordle,
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  this one definitely would fit the bill for that. The art is passive,
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  I mean, that's nothing special, but it's not unpleasant either. The
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  theme is for some somehow around books, and so on your turn, you're
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  gonna if you're the clue giver, you're gonna draw a couple of cards and
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  choose one of them to be the category for the for the questions you're giving.
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  If you get a chance to play fiction, I do recommend it.
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  I'm not sure I would recommend buying it because it is so similar to wordle
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  that it's basically just playing competitive wordle, which I like solving a wordle on
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  my own. I don't know that I need to spend a lot of time
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  talking it over with other people, but If that sounds fun to you,
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  you should give it a try. That's fiction by designer Peter Hayward and all
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  play games all right. I thought I would take a minute to talk about
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  a game that I got out of the dust recently. I mentioned this a
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  little bit a while ago on the July Top of the Stack podcast. This
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  is Tussy Mussy. Tussy Musty is, of course and Elizabeth Elizabeth Hargrave game
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  published by Button Shy and In Tussey Mussey, you play Victorian courtiers giving flowers
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  to one another. If you read the instruction booklets a Tussi Mussy or and
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  you're a dope about the Victorian traditions as I am, or perhaps you already
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  know this. Victorians often gave flowers, and each flower was known to have
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  a certain meaning, So giving a carnation meant something different than giving a red
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  rose, which wants something different than giving a tulip. Each flower had its
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  own meaning, and what flower you gave to somebody passed along a message.
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  In the game of Tussi Mussy, you play players who are competing to earn
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  points from taking and playing flower cards. Each turn, you're going to draw
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  two cards. You're gonna put one face up and one face down, and
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  then your opponent gets to pick which one of them they want to take,
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  and they're going to keep it in the direction it is. So if you
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  put a card face down and face up and they take the face down one,
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  it says face down in there tableau. As far as I remember,
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  a card being faced down just makes it harder to see. It doesn't affect
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  it's scoring at all. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure you
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  turn all the cards face up when it's time to score them, and then
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  the idea is you just do that and until you go through the eighteen cards,
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  or maybe half of the eighteen cards, and then you score however many
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  cards you've gotten, and you get points for the different kinds of flowers each
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  have a scoring condition on them that lets them score in a different way based
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  on combination of flowers or flowers that you have, and so on. They
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  did recent release an expansion wallet of modules for the game as well. I
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  have not had an opportunity to try those, but we did play the base
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  game of Tusty Mussy a couple times on our trip. This is a cute
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  little game. I don't know that I would go out of my way to
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  buy it again. But it is a nice what's the word of looking of
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  our diversion from like Quicks or Lost Cities, which are our usual go to
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  two player games. This gives you just a slightly different feeling and is pretty
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  fun. So if you get a chance to try Tussi Mussy, I recommend
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  that is my out of the dust game. Finally, the last game I
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  want to talk about today is The Gardens. Now. The Gardens is a
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  game from designers Matt Dunson and Brett Gilbert, whom you know I adore.
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  They are best known perhaps for Elysium, but they have worked together on a
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  number of different titles. I have their Chocolate Factory game, and I have
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  Costa Rica which they published together. And I feel like I have one more
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  game from them as well, oh Raids. So they have worked together quite
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  a few times. I also have some games separately by one or the other
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  of them. I believe that the Adventure Inc. Games are from Phil Walker
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  Hard and Matt Matt Dunston. I believe so. In The Gardens you play
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  Gardeners at Australia at the Sydney Botanical Gardens in Australia. That's the theme.
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  You each have a single tile that you're going to use to lay out cards.
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  It's similar to the starting board of Santa Monica. It's a long,
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  thin tile that is about the width of a card, but it is hot
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  taller than the card. In Santa Monica, the starting tile is double the
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  height of a card. In the Gardens it's triple. So you have three
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  rows of cards. In the game. There is a market of cards that
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  get put out, and each turn you're going to take one card from the
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  market. On your turn, you're going to take a card from the market,
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  and you're going to add it either to the left or to the right
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  of your board, and you're going to put it in the row that it
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  belongs in. Each card definitely clearly goes in the top row of the middle
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  row or the bottom row. You have to add it next any other cards
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  that you've already got in that row. And there's a limit to how wide
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  your board can be. I think it's maybe twelve cards on each side,
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  so four columns deep on each side of your board. When you play the
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  card, you then move the pedestrian in that row from where they are to
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  where you put the card. If they pass any of the significant symbols on
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  the card that you played, they score points. For instance, if I
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  think there's ginko trees, there are ginko trees in one of the one of
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  the things I think is ginko trees. I might be wrong about that,
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  but let's say it is. So. If you take a Ginko tree card
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  and put it in your garden, then the little pedestrian in that row moves
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  from the card they're on to the new card you just played. If they
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  pass any Ginko trees, then you score one point for each tree that they
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  passed. There's also a different scoring mechanism for fountains, and a different one
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  still for these little rivers that appear, and a different one still for benches
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  and statues, and so there's a bunch of different ways that you score points
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  during the game. Each round lasts three card takings until everyone has taken one
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  card from each row and added it to their board. Once everyone has had
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  three turns, then the next round occurs and you deal out another series of
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  cards. The game is over once everyone has filled their tableau, and then
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  there's some final game. There's some finals scoring for some of the different types.
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  The Gardens is a beautiful, carefully stylish game, with really nice art
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  and pretty solid graphic design. It's relatively simple as far as gameplay goes.
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  I wouldn't necessarily say entry level, but very teachable, with a variety of
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  different scoring conditions. There's a lot to grab onto, and you can kind
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  of focus on one thing and sometimes you can get a lot of points from
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  it, especially if you're competitors aren't paying attention to or don't care that you're
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  focusing on one particular thing. There's a little bit of hate drafting involved in
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  the game. You can see what other people are working on, and it's
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  really easy to sabotage them. For instance, if someone else has taken a
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  two vertical streams, one for the top row and one for the bottom row,
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  you could take the last vertical stream for the middle and leave them without
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  a connector, in which case they don't score points for those That kind of
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  thing is relatively easy to do and pretty fun. All in all, The
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  Gardens is an enjoyable game. I would put it in a sort of middle
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  category, neither too hard nor too easy, enjoyably fun, and worth checking
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  out. I'm not sure I'd recommend buying it side unseen, but definitely give
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  it a play if you get a chance, or at least check it out
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  at the store. Again. That's from Matt Dunstan and Brett Gilbert and Grail
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  Games. Well, this brings me to the end of my podcast. I'm
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  glad to be back, glad to be top in games with you. Hopefully
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  this was a fun way to hear about a couple of new games I've been
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  playing if i'd like, If you'd like to let me know what you've been
• 15:07
  playing, I would love to know. You can post those ideas on board
• 15:09
  game Geek and Guilt three two six nine. You could send me an email
• 15:13
  Brendan at Rattlebox Games or a message in board game Geek to Wombat nine two
• 15:18
  nine. Honestly, I'm probably more likely to see the Wombat nine two nine
• 15:20
  one that I'm not as attentive as my email as I should be. If
• 15:26
  you would like to play a game with me, I am Wombat nine two
• 15:28
  nine on Board game Arena and Ukata dot D. I'd be happy to play
• 15:33
  a game with you in either of those places, although I usually play asynchronously,
• 15:37
  so you will have to take turns well. I hope that this was
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  enjoyable to you, and I hope that you've had a pleasant gaming week,
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  and I look forward to next time I talk to you. I hope that
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  your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye Bye, Brought to
• 16:11
  you by Rattlebox