Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Light Speed Arena; Core Worlds; Verdant; Underwater Cities - Data Era
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- Pick Up & Deliver 829: Light Speed Arena; Core Worlds; Verdant; Underwater Cities - Data Era 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. [ opening music ] And this is it's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. The temperature is in the high sixties, maybe low seventies. Uh, the sky is a mottled blue with a little bit of cloud and just the barest sprinkle of precipitation, even though it's like that kind of cloudy and sunny with a little bit of rain feeling. So I'm not worried I'm going to get poured upon on my walk home. Well, it's been a couple days since I've talked to you about what I've been playing, which means I've been playing some games, which means I want to talk to you about games I've been playing. That's right. It's time for a Board Game Espresso Triple Shot. [ coffee noises ] Order up! The Board Game Espresso Triple Shot is an episode format where I talk about three games I've played recently for the first time, and one game I dusted off, or an expansion I tried or something like that. So let's jump into it. The first game I want to talk about today is Light Speed Arena. This is a game I had on the top of my shelf in April, and I played it right there at the end of the month, so it's perfect time to talk to you about it because it is top of my head. Weirdly, this this game has one, two, three, four, four designers. It does not feel like a game that needs four designers, but it has them. They are Leonardo Alessi, James Ernest, which I wouldn't be at all surprised if it turns out this is based on a James Ernest design, Tom Jolly and Emmanuelle Santolini. Art is done by Marco Salogni and it's published by Pegasus Spiele. Although I saw Cranio Creations also publishes it. I bet they do. The Italian one. Light Speed arena is a quick playing real time game with a. Where there's a sort of quick playing, quick playing, real time element and then a scoring round, and then that's the game. It's like a ten minute game. It's very fast. It's along with other kinds of very quick games from James Ernest, like falling, and he's got one about fighting. I can't remember street brawl or something. Brawling. This is another game sort of played very quickly. The Pegasus Spiele edition which came out in 2025 I one on a board game geek contest. So thank you board game geek. And it's nicely made. It comes in a sort of code name size box with four sets of thick cardboard tiles that represent your ships, as well as some cardboard corners that represent the edge of the playing zone, and then some asteroids and bases. The way the game works, you start with your stack of chips. You put your base in your corner of the playing area. You put out these first. Okay, sorry. You start by putting out these corners, these cardboard corners to make a square playing area on the table. Then you each each player puts their base in the corner or the side of the playing area closest to them, and the game comes with instructions on how to do it. So it shows you the layout, and then you shuffle up the stack of spaceships that the game came with face down. Once you've got them shuffled and laid out face down on the table in front of you, then you're ready to play. The game comes with an app that you can use to time the rounds. The rounds are ten second timer, so you really need to because it would. You'd have to have another person running the timer to make the game work. So essentially the way it works is everybody draws the top tile off their stack and reveals it. And then the app counts down three, two, one, and then a ten second timer starts and you have to put your ship into the into the arena, the area, and you point its little lasers. It's got it'll have one, two or three lasers sort of coming on the art leaving the ship. And then sometimes there's a little arc of shield that's like maybe thirty degrees or forty degrees. And what you're doing is you're positioning the ship so that when it fires its weapons, it will hit things and you have to do it in order, but the ships are going to fire in number order. So there's an interesting mix of things to consider about where to put your ship. And you only have 10s, so it's pretty chaotic. The board space is also relatively small, although to be fair, we did not have anything to measure the size of the board, so we just guesstimated based on the table we were playing. And you put all of the ships out with 10s at a time to decide. The way it works is you, you can put your ship anywhere in the area, you can't overlap another tile. And if you ever let go of the ship, then you're done positioning it. You also have to let go when the 10 seconds is up, so everybody puts their ship into the arena, arranges it so that the lasers are pointing at stuff. Then you draw your next ship and you do the same thing in a four player game. Each person is putting in like six ships into the arena. In a two player game, you'd be putting in eight or nine, I think. So you put all your ships into the arena in the time set by the timer. So it takes like a minute and a half to do. Then the app has you pick up your phone and take a picture of the playing space. Then you set the app down on the table and hit go and it goes through the ships one at a time, showing which one hits which one. And the game tallies up how much damage each ship has taken. And or the app tallies up, how much damage each ship has taken, tallies up how many points you get, you tap it to acknowledge the different points that you're getting, which is unnecessary, I guess. And then when it's done running through, it tells you how many points each person got and who won. I can see there being a kernel of fun here in the laying out of the ships, but honestly, having the app score it for you sucks. Like it was really, it felt really dumb, like I'd done. I mean, it's already sort of frantic, so it's hard to feel a ton of ownership of these choices because you made them so fast. But then the app scores it for you and you just watch. And I mean, I think the scoring is probably the most interesting part, where you're going one by one at the ships and figuring out if the ships hit the other ships. But the app does that for you. So you're all just kind of looking at the phone as it says, this ship hit that ship, this hit this ship, hit that ship, and so on. When the app is done running, it tells everyone your scores and you learn who won. Honestly, after the game ended, I said, �do any of you want this game? I never need to play it again.� Uh. A big goose egg for me wasn't really interesting. The choices of where to put your ships were moderately entertaining, and I always like something with interesting real time choices. But the automatic scoring, I don't know, it just it was not for me. So that is Light Speed arena, a game that took four designers to make. Next up, we have Core Worlds. This is a game from 2012 by designer Andrew Parks, with art from Alex Figini or Figini, and published by Stronghold Games. Core worlds is a sort of classic deck building game from the. The sort of Golden Age or golden age of early deck builders, where Dominion came out in twenty eleven or two thousand and eight, and the whole world went, whoa, what is this idea? And then Arctic Scavengers came out within a year of that, and everybody thought that was pretty cool. And then we began the deck building craze, and the deck building craze still hasn't ended. We have Clank, which is a deck building juggernaut. We had Marvel legendary for a very long time. Deck building juggernaut. Deck building has become part of one part of the lingua franca of board game design. It's in all sorts of games. It's used in modular ways now between Clank and Lost ruins of Arnak and, uh, Root. I guess not root. Root is hand building, but there are tons of games that use a Dune Imperium that use a little bit of deckbuilding. So Core Worlds came from that early first blush of interesting deck building games, and it uses the Ascension River model rather than an open market. But in an interesting twist, the idea is you are a barbarian civilization on the outskirts of the galaxy, and you are driving inward, invading and capturing worlds heading toward the eponymous core worlds. As you're going, you have the opportunity to build ships, recruit troops, and capture planets. So the way that the river works is pretty interesting. At the beginning of the game, all the cards are divided up into ten eras or five eras and each round you're going to deal out a market of cards from the deck related to the era that the game is currently in, and you play two rounds per era for a total of ten rounds. In the game, you're buying cards from the deck. Using energy is the sort of currency. The energy is produced by the planets you've captured, which stay on the board in front of you in a tableau. I like that twist. It's a little different than most of the other games I've played, and makes for a really interesting mix of things. As the game goes along, you start acquiring ships that have ships and troops that are worth points in themselves, but also at the end of the game, in the last era, there's a bunch of planets that and people that are worth points by themselves. And so you're going to want to capture those in the last couple rounds. Now, I bought when I bought Core Worlds, it also came with the Galactic Order's expansion, which everything I've read says is a must have. so I'm definitely going to mix that in for next time I play. But overall Core Worlds was really interesting. It definitely you could see it was a little old, but I thought it played really well and is a solid deck builder of a different style than almost anything I have. The generating of the resources through the planets is really interesting. I thought that the mix of different items you could get and the ways that you conquer the planets was interesting. I'm hoping with the addition of the Galactic Orders expansion, that the cards will become a little more flexible. I think if they didn't, this game would probably get kind of boring in two or three or ten plays. I don't think it would have a ton of durability, but the mix of cards that's available is really pretty great, especially with the galactic orders. This is a game I'm going to keep in my collection for a while. I'm looking forward to playing it again when I can. That's core worlds. Next up, I had a chance to play Underwater Cities: Data Era. This is the second expansion for underwater cities. It's a mini expansion. So instead of being a big box expansion, which costs as much as the base game, which is what happened with the new discoveries, box data era is a smaller expansion, and it introduces data cities which provide more flexibility, give you more opportunity to get stuff done, and additional ways to score points. I've seen some criticism that the data, the data cities might be too valuable, and I think there might be something to that. When we played one, one guy went heavily into data cities and nobody else really. I mean, I had a couple, but nobody else really fought him for them. And so he got a lot of them and his score was crazy big at the end compared to everybody else. So it might be one of those things where you can't let someone do that. You have to fight them on it. But the ability to spend data to do extra actions really adds a lot of flexibility to the game. Now, people who like underwater cities because its resources are tight might find this too flexible. And I certainly did did see that. You know, one of my favorite things about a game is where you don't, you just don't quite have enough stuff to do what you want to do. And the data era part reduces the likelihood of having that limitation. That said, I had a lot of fun with it, and I'm probably gonna include it in my plays in future. Except if somebody is really new to games and they want to try underwater cities. But anybody who's played this kind of game before, I don't think the data, the data era cards are so much extra complication that I wouldn't have just a new player use them. So that is underwater cities data era expansion. And finally I got a chance to try Verdant. This is a 2022 game from designers Molly Johnson, Sean Stankovich, Robert Melvin, Kevin Russ and Eric Melbourne. It was with art from Beth Sobol. It's published by Flat Out and AEG. If you were going to suggest that Calico and Cascadia are related, you could point to a third game, verdant, as a kind of third piece of the triumvirate of cute games about naturalistic themes or fun themes that are sort of tied to the idea of entwined drafting. [ sounds of children shouting excitedly, and tinny music from an ice cream truck drift in and out.] Wow. The old fashioned ice cream truck is driving on my street. All the children are running and yelling ice cream! Wow. Who thought this was still a thing? I guess I guess it is still playing the rooted-in-racism �Turkey in the straw� song. Oh well. So in verdant you play people who like plants. You are accumulating houseplants and arranging them in your house so that you can enjoy the houseplants. It doesn't have a ton of depth beyond that. I mean it plot wise, in the same way that calico is about making a blanket for your cats to sit on, and Cascadia is about arranging a mountainous region. So in verdant, you are acquiring a bunch of different kinds of plants as well as different items, and you are building rooms in your house. And the goal is to put the plants next to the rooms in a way that the plants will get the right illumination to grow. The cards often play off each other and score points based on their relationship to where other cards are. The cards have different colors that represent sort of different suits. So if you can get matching colors on things, you get points that way. Like I said, it's got entwined. Drafting it even has a mechanism that reminds me of the pine cone from Cascadia. It's cute. I think if you really like houseplants, it's probably right up your alley. But to me, it's not nearly as good as either Calico or Cascadia. Now, if I hadn't played either of those, maybe verdant would be amazing. But to me, the brutal tightness of trying to make the patterns work in calico and the expansive possibility belied by the limited choices at the root of Cascadia, are both much superior to the, I don't know, middle ground that is verdant. It feels a little bit tighter than Cascadia, a little bit looser than calico. It feels like the pattern is much less. You have much less control over the pattern, and as a result, you get locked in in ways that aren't fun, as opposed to being stressfully fun the way it is in Cascadia. That's my long and short way of saying I thought verdant was fine. I would play it again if someone asked, but I don't think it is as good as either of the other two games in that trilogy. Well, that brings me to the end of my walk and the end of our conversation about these different games. I would love to hear what you think of them. Had them head over to BoardGameGeek Guild 3269 and share your thoughts over there about these games. Tell me what you think of them and whether I'm right or wrong. Thanks for joining me on my walk today. I hope next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. [ closing music ] Brought to you by Rattlebox games.