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5-Minute Mystery, Telestrations: Upside Drawn, voluspa revisited, Last Friday · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:04
  Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
• 0:07
  as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I stroll
• 0:10
  around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good evening, listeners. It's a
• 0:23
  lovely day here in suburban Chicago. I'm happy to be talking to you about
• 0:26
  some board games while I walk home. Oh, sort of continuing the line
• 0:30
  of discussion that we've been doing, so, continuing to get caught up.
• 0:34
  I am now into the games I played in October. So if you listen
• 0:37
  to the Top of the Stack a couple episodes ago, the games I talked
• 0:40
  about now are the ones I'm starting to talk about. So this is the
• 0:43
  board game Espresso. Triple Shot. Board Game Espresso is a sort of quick
• 0:49
  first play response episode in which I talk about three games that I've tried recently
• 0:54
  for the first time, and one game that I dusted off recently. So
• 0:58
  let's just jump right into it. The first game I want to talk about
• 1:00
  it is five Minute Mystery. This is a game I picked up in a
• 1:03
  recent sale that somebody was having, or he just had a couple games he
• 1:07
  was selling in One of them was this one. It looked pretty good,
• 1:10
  so I said, yeah, I'll give it a try. That looks fun.
• 1:12
  It is a puzzle game in which you have puzzle cards and then you
• 1:18
  have this thing called the codex, which is basically just a circular combination code
• 1:23
  thing with a whole bunch of different dials on it, and you have to
• 1:26
  rotate the dials to get in the right arrangement in order to solve the puzzle.
• 1:30
  The puzzle itself is a sort of find the Shapes diagram in which you're
• 1:36
  supposed to look at a picture and you find these shapes and you use the
• 1:40
  shapes to solve the puzzle. The idea is that it's done in real time
• 1:45
  and you have five minutes to play, and they have of they have a
• 1:52
  varying difficulty scale as you play, so you can pick a version or an
• 1:57
  episode of it that is of the right difficult level for your taste and go
• 2:01
  from there. We played a couple times when we tried it out, I
• 2:05
  think three games of it, and figured it out pretty well. We had
• 2:07
  a lot of fun with it. It's I mean, it's a cute,
• 2:10
  very simple filler game, but you know, reasonably enjoyable and I can see
• 2:15
  how the harder ones might get difficult enough that it's sort of compelling. It
• 2:19
  isn't really a mystery game in the way that a lot of the mystery games
• 2:22
  I talk about on this podcast are. It's more of just a sort of
• 2:27
  a puzzle selling game or a fine in search game. Nonetheless, I had
• 2:30
  a good time. That's five minute mystery from designer Connor read and published by
• 2:38
  Spinmaster, I believe is the American publisher, except we have another party style
• 2:42
  game. This is when I found a goodwill that looked kind of interesting,
• 2:46
  and I now use it to keep my main party. So one party game
• 2:49
  that I like that regularly comes out and is usually enjoyable is telestrations. In
• 2:54
  telestrations, you have a little notepad with white board pages, and you have
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  a dry erase marker, and you get a clue, and the idea is
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  that you're going to try to draw the clue on the whiteboard. After you've
• 3:14
  drawn the clue on the whiteboard, you then are you write the clue in
• 3:16
  the first page, and then depending on whether it's even or odd, you
• 3:21
  draw the clue on the second page, and then you pass the whiteboard to
• 3:24
  other people. The next person and they have to look at your drawing and
• 3:28
  write down what they think the clue was. Then next person looks at the
• 3:30
  new clue that's been written down and draws that. And the idea is to
• 3:35
  try to have the end to be the same as the beginning. There is
• 3:38
  a scoring element to it, but I don't think we've ever actually played with
• 3:42
  it. Usually it's just fun to pay attention to the way that the drawing
• 3:46
  evolves. Sometimes it's called a game of telephone as a drawing game. That's
• 3:51
  Telestrations. That's not what I'm talking about today. What we're talking about today
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  is a spinoff game from Telestrations called Telestrations Upside Drawn. And I would bet
• 4:00
  is that this is the kind of game where somebody had a game that was
• 4:04
  fun and the publisher wanted to leverage an already known title to make that game
• 4:13
  more popular. We of course see this occasionally in movies. Diehard three was
• 4:16
  originally a Bruce Willis Samuel L. Jackson action movie directed by John McTiernan.
• 4:23
  Then after they were all ready to make the movie, then they said,
• 4:26
  you know, with a little tweaking to the script or another, you know,
• 4:29
  our rewrite, we could make this a Diehard movie, and that's where
• 4:31
  Diehard three came from, and it feels like that's what happened with this.
• 4:35
  So teleustration is upside drawn. The gimmick is you play in teams where one
• 4:40
  person is the artist and the other person is the artist assistant, and then
• 4:45
  everybody else on their team is guessing. You might also have the artist's assistant
• 4:48
  guessing, which is how we played. You have the person who's doing the
• 4:53
  drawing is also the guesser. And the way it works is the person who's
• 4:59
  doing the drawing has a pen and they're holding the pen, and the other
• 5:04
  person has a whiteboard sitting on the table and the person holding the whiteboard has
• 5:10
  to have one finger on each side of the whiteboard, and they're moving the
• 5:13
  whiteboard. The person with the pen is allowed to follow two instructions up or
• 5:16
  down. If they put down, then they put the pen down so it's
• 5:19
  touching the whiteboard. If they say up, they lift it up so it's
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  not touching the whiteboard. And the goal is for the person who's maneuvering the
• 5:28
  whiteboard doing the drawing, they say up and down to get the person they're
• 5:30
  lift and lower the pen and then their goal is to get the other person
• 5:34
  to answer a clue. It's basically pictionary with limitations on how you draw.
• 5:40
  The game was designed by Kane Klinko, who designed Fuses, the game I
• 5:44
  know him best for, but I think he also designed dead Men Tell No
• 5:48
  Tales, which was originally published by Minion Games and I believe was picked up
• 5:53
  by Renegade Games. So Kan Klinko is the designer of Upside Drawn. It's
• 5:58
  published by the OP, and I think I think this was just a drawing
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  game that he came up with, and then when the OP picked it up,
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  they said, you know what, if we put the Telestration's name on
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  it, it has a little brand recognition, which is what happened with me.
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  I'm I might have gotten it anyway. If it was called just Upside
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  Drawn. It looks interesting and it was cheap at the Goodwill, But having
• 6:15
  say Telestrations really did lure me in, so strategy worked anyway. It's a
• 6:21
  cute little party game, nothing to write home about, but if you enjoy
• 6:26
  cute little party games with a drawing element, it'll be right up your alley
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  if you get a chance to play it. That's Telestrations Upside drawn. I
• 6:32
  would like to take a moment to talk about a dusted off game when I
• 6:35
  get the opportunity, and in this case, the game I want to talk
• 6:39
  about is Voluspa or better yet pronounced Vulooseba. I said it that way because
• 6:45
  I heard about Voluspa because it's one of the favorite abstracts of Rob and Christina
• 6:50
  from the Blue Peg Pink Peg podcast. They like Valuspa and often when they
• 6:57
  talk about it they say Voluspa like that, like they shouted uh thematically.
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  It's a game about the North mythology and battling in Norse mythology. It is
• 7:08
  entirely an abstract game. The idea is you have these rows and columns of
• 7:13
  tiles. On your turn, you're going to take a tile. You have
• 7:15
  a couple to choose from. You pick one of the ones you have to
• 7:16
  choose from, and they have a number on them, and you put the
• 7:19
  tile, usually on the end of a rower column. If that rower column
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  has seven or fewer tiles, and your number tile is the highest value tile
• 7:29
  in that row or column, then you score points equal to the number of
• 7:33
  tiles in that rower column. So if there's a row of four tiles with
• 7:39
  the value is one, two, three, and four in it, and
• 7:41
  you put a five at the end, you would score five points. Similarly
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  if it had if there was a row of four tiles that had one,
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  one, two, three and you put a nine at the end, you're
• 7:50
  still only only scoring five points because there's five tiles there. Now, that
• 7:55
  sounds pretty dull, actually, until you realize that all of the tieles or
• 8:00
  most of the tiles have special effects that they do as well. Some tiles
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  you're not allowed to put other tiles next to them. Some tiles make the
• 8:07
  tiles next to them be blank. Some tiles let you retrieve other tiles.
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  Some tiles get more points based on how many other tiles of that type are
• 8:15
  in them, and so on and so on. Lusa was a really good
• 8:18
  sort of classic abstract. I enjoyed quite a bit, and I haven't played
• 8:22
  it in person in a long time, but it did play it on board
• 8:24
  game Arena or Yukata dot E. I think it was Yukata, and I
• 8:28
  enjoyed my play of it very much. So happy to play Valuspa from designer
• 8:33
  Scott Caputo. Finally, I want to talk about a game by Antonio Ferrara,
• 8:39
  and Sebastino Fiorillo published by Pendragon Game Studio and This Is Last Friday.
• 8:45
  Last Friday is a horror themed horror movie themed game styled around a slasher film
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  in which one it's a one versus many game where one player plays the horror
• 8:56
  movie villain and the other players play the kids at the camp or the counselors
• 9:01
  at the camp. The game has played over four rounds, each one taking
• 9:05
  about a half an hour. There is a mechanism in the game to stop
• 9:09
  after one round and kind of save your progress, but really it's meant to
• 9:13
  be played in four rounds using the ongoing thing like basically the setup between one
• 9:18
  round and the next is identical, and so it really works best if you
• 9:24
  play it in one sitting. But anyway, so the player one player takes
• 9:28
  the role of the Maniac, who is basically Jason from Friday the thirteenth,
• 9:33
  that's probably the closest of the horror movie villains to it, and the other
• 9:37
  players play the counselors who are there to try to set up the camp.
• 9:41
  In the first round, the Maniac is trying to capture and kill as many
• 9:46
  campers as it can, and there are extra campers that you can bring in
• 9:50
  for the second and third and fourth rounds in case somebody does get killed.
• 9:54
  But the campers are also trying to avoid getting killed and trying to turn on
• 9:58
  the lights in the different cabins, because if they can get cabins lit,
• 10:03
  those cabins are then safe and it becomes harder for the killer to move around
• 10:07
  the board. One of the things that we experience with our play that I
• 10:09
  don't know if it's true or not always true, but it certainly was true
• 10:13
  for our play is that doing well in the first round is crucial for how
• 10:18
  well the killer is going to do in later rounds. That because the game
• 10:22
  sort of cascades one on top of the necks, and I can't say maybe
• 10:26
  it's equally true for the campers. Maybe doing badly in the first round means
• 10:30
  the campers are going to do badly throughout. But as the maniac, I
• 10:35
  did not do very well. I think I caught one camper and they were
• 10:39
  able to open like three of the cabins. The reality is that having done
• 10:41
  that, it became very hard for me in the whole rest of the game
• 10:46
  to move around and to get stuff done, because in the first round.
• 10:50
  In the third round, when the Maniac is stalking the campers, big parts
• 10:54
  of the border lit up, so it's very easy to get away from me
• 10:56
  because they can see where I'm going. And in the for in the second
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  and fourth rounds when the campers are trying to catch the maniac, same thing.
• 11:05
  I am limited in how far where I can go. And on top
• 11:09
  of it, there's a lot of campers because I didn't kill them, so
• 11:13
  I playing as the maniac did not have a lot of fun with this one.
• 11:16
  I will say the campers it seemed like they thought it was a little
• 11:18
  bit better, but ultimately none of them wanted to play it again before I
• 11:24
  gave it back to the person I borrowed it from. And overall, the
• 11:28
  discussion of the game focus more on the things that didn't work for us than
• 11:33
  one of the things that did. Just so, it was a bad sign.
• 11:37
  When you're on a first you know, first response play, you really
• 11:39
  want to find yourself talking about what was great about the game, and our
• 11:43
  conversation was mostly about was not great about the game. The theme of the
• 11:46
  game is really fun. I think the campground, having the campground and the
• 11:50
  cabins and all the pads and everything worked really well. And I think having
• 11:54
  the Maniac just the way the Maniac was figured in the game worked really well
• 12:00
  and was a lot of fun. So like those parts of the game,
• 12:03
  I think functioned pretty well. The theme came through really nicely, and that
• 12:09
  part was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the gameplay itself really fell flat
• 12:13
  for me, and I did not enjoy it. I probably would not want
• 12:18
  to play again. Like if someone brought it to my game club and said,
• 12:20
  we really want to play this game. If it was the only game
• 12:24
  being played, I would probably play, but it really not. Really was
• 12:28
  not for me, but maybe it'll be for you. Take a look anyway.
• 12:31
  That's last Friday. I believe there are also other Killer characters that if
• 12:35
  you back the game on Kickstarter, they had a wider variety of the Murderer
• 12:41
  characters, but with the base game it was just the Maniac. So those
• 12:45
  are three games I tried recently for the first time, and one game I
• 12:48
  dusted off. What have you been playing? I'd love to hear You can
• 12:50
  let me know by heading to board game Geek and visiting our guild guild number
• 12:54
  three two six y nine, or you can just google pick Up and Deliver
• 12:58
  Guild and you'll probably will we find it on Board game Geek. If you
• 13:01
  want to see show notes for this podcast, you can go over to rattleboxgames
• 13:05
  dot com, where I post notes and episodes every week to give a good
• 13:13
  sense of what it is we're doing with the game. Where I post notes
• 13:16
  and recordings so you can see the podcast. If you would like to reach
• 13:22
  out to me, you can email me Brendan at rattleboxgames dot com, or
• 13:26
  you could send me a direct message on Board game Geek. Wombat nine two
• 13:31
  nine is my user name there. I also play a lot of asynchronous games
• 13:33
  online on Board Game Arena and Yukata dot Dee. In either of those places,
• 13:39
  you can also reach out to me. Wombat nine two nine is much
• 13:43
  use you name there as well. I'd love to hear what games you've tried
• 13:46
  recently and how you're coming along with your shelf of opportunity. As you know
• 13:50
  from my top of the Stack episodes, I am not coming along very quickly
• 13:54
  with it, but that's okay. Well, thanks for joining me on my
• 13:58
  walk today. Your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye.
• 14:22
  Brought to you by rattle Box h