Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Tipperary, Voidfall, Pax Pamier (2nd ed), and Hellboy the Board Game

Transcript

Tipperary, Voidfall, Pax Pamier (2nd ed), and Hellboy the Board Game · 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 out for a walk and deliver an episode to you while I
• 0:10
  stroll around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good morning, listener. It's
• 0:22
  a lovely day here in suburban Chicago and I'm out for a stroll. I
• 0:26
  say, lovely day. The temperature is nice, it is mid seventies and
• 0:30
  humid, but it is overcast. The clouds are like right on the edge
• 0:34
  of that temperature where it looks like maybe it's gonna rain, but it's not.
• 0:38
  The news says it's not, but or the weather forecast says it's not,
• 0:44
  but it sure looks like it's going to rain at any moment. So
• 0:49
  we'll see what we see. It's been a little while since I've talked about
• 0:51
  some new games I've played, and I do have some new games logged,
• 0:54
  so I thought I would take a moment to tell you about some new games.
• 0:59
  The three that I want to talk about today. I had a chance
• 1:02
  to play these over the last couple of weeks with some friends, and one
• 1:04
  of them is on board game Arena, so I've started playing it on Board
• 1:07
  Game Arena as well. I'd be happy to talk to you there about it
• 1:11
  if you're so inclined. So the first game is called Tipperary. This is
• 1:15
  from designer Gunther Gunther Burkhart, artists Ari Oliver and Clemens Franz, and it's
• 1:21
  published by Lookout Games. Tipperary is a game from a year or two ago.
• 1:26
  I picked it up on my birthday. Actually we ended up stopping at
• 1:32
  a game store and I was like, well, I haven't gotten a new
• 1:34
  game in a while, so get a game. And it looked pretty neat.
• 1:38
  One of the things I liked about it is it's from the Lookout thread
• 1:42
  of Family Weight Games, which meant it had a pretty good possibility of being
• 1:46
  a game it would be fun to play with my in laws or with visiting
• 1:49
  grandmothers, or you know. It's a good filler game, something we can
• 1:53
  get out in a variety of places. It is a tile laying game and
• 1:57
  it's got a couple of things that are pretty interesting about it. The pros
• 2:00
  you are sort of building out a village in County Tipperary in Ireland, and
• 2:05
  basically you're just trying to get points by raising sheep, and then there's a
• 2:08
  couple other sort of things that you can do to accumulate points. The gimmick,
• 2:14
  which I think is pretty neat, is that there's a pentagram shaped device
• 2:17
  in the middle. It's a board piece and it divides up into five spaces.
• 2:23
  In each space you're gonna put two tiles. Then on top of that
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  there is like a spinner with five different coats of arms, and the coats
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  of arms match the five different village starting spaces that you can take, which
• 2:34
  is like a little board around which you're gonna lay your tiles. Then turnm
• 2:38
  after turn. Each turn, somebody takes turn spinning the spinner, and whichever
• 2:44
  zone around of the five things your coat of arms ends up pointing at.
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  You take those two tiles and you pick one to put into your village.
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  It works pretty well as a mechanism. It's pretty neat. You put the
• 2:54
  other one back and then add a new one. The only thing I don't
• 2:58
  like is occasionally you it will spin to the same zone you were just in,
• 3:01
  and we added a house rule because generally that means one of the two
• 3:07
  tiles in the zone you were just in you already rejected it, so you
• 3:12
  might have wanted it, but most of the time it was not fun rather
• 3:15
  than fun to get the same zone again, so we added a house rule
• 3:17
  that if you spin it and it lands in the same zone, we rotated
• 3:21
  one notch clockwise so that you have a different selection. I mean, if
• 3:24
  you sort of start with that rule and everybody understands it, great. So
• 3:29
  what you do is you're taking the tiles, and then the tiles have a
• 3:30
  variety of different landscape features written on them. Among the landscape features are sheep,
• 3:38
  ruins, bogs, There are open pastures, grain fields, and there
• 3:43
  are grainaries. And basically what the game has is it's got a variety of
• 3:46
  different mechanisms by which you build up points. You're sort of competing for the
• 3:50
  biggest herd of sheep, so you kind of keep all the sheep together.
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  Some of the tiles will give you an extra sheep, a wooden sheep that
• 3:55
  you put on one of the empty pastures, which could then connect two flocks
• 3:59
  of sheep to make a bigger flock of sheep. The greeneries allow you to
• 4:01
  move your whiskey barrel forward on this other track, and you get points and
• 4:06
  more sheep for moving forward on this whisk On this whiskey track. You also
• 4:12
  have the bogs, and the bogs give you these single tiles that you can
• 4:15
  use to sort of fill in holes in your board, because one of the
• 4:19
  things is all these tiles are really weirdly shaped. There's no it's not a
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  simple sort of set of Tetris pieces. The tiles vary in amount of space
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  that they take up, from like three or four squares to like maybe six
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  or seven, and they are really weird shaped, so it's hard to get
• 4:35
  them to fit together evenly so that you don't have gaps, particularly if you're
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  trying to do the other scoring things that the game asks you to. So
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  these little one pieces that you can slot into those gaps are really useful.
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  And then there are these ruins, and if you get three ruins in a
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  row, you get a little tower, and at the end of the game
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  you can slot the tower into one of those gaps as well. Then the
• 4:58
  other game you score points for having for your biggest sheep herd, you get
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  five extra points. If you have the biggest sheep herd of anybody on the
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  table. You get points for little stone circles at an even mention those but
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  those have points on them. You get points for your whiskey barrel. And
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  then you also get points for your largest complete rectangle in your village. So
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  you start to find the area where have the biggest rectangle of completed squares,
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  and you get one point for every square in that space, and you get
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  a few extra points I think eight or something. If you completely surrounded your
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  village instead of sort of working off in one direction, you worked around the
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  village, you get points for that too. So there's like a whole bunch
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  of different ways you can earn points, and it's the mix of these things
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  that results in you getting your score. That was more detailed than I intended
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  to be, but it felt like just to explain what's going on was necessary.
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  Tipperary was pretty fun. I thought it was a relatively easy learn Even
• 5:58
  though there are a variety of different things, none of them is very complicated.
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  I like the mix of different ways to score points, but also some
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  of the different pressures that arise then as you try to figure out what is
• 6:10
  the best balance you want to take in order to score the points you want.
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  It works really well and I think it makes for an interesting gameplay.
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  So if you get a chance to play Tipperary, I recommend that's Tipperary by
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  Gunther Bernhardt. Next up we have Voidfall. Void Fall is a big old
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  table hog of a game in which you have a number of different factions competing
• 6:36
  for control of the galaxy. It has a sort of four X vibe,
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  it might be actually a four X game, I don't know. And the
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  theme is there's all of these established houses is the term the game uses for
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  large space faring civilizations, and a civilization from another dimension. The void opens
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  up and all of the these malevolent beings sort of swarm in and infect everything.
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  As a group, the houses join together and are unable to close the
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  gate to the other dimension, but there are still plenty of Void creatures infesting
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  the galaxy, and so basically what you're doing is you're trying to expand exploit,
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  explore and the other ex exterminate with your faction, earning reputation points,
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  which is the victory condition, you know, at the end, that's how
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  we value victory. But at the same time, there are also this sort
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  of unified enemy, the Void, whom you can fight, so there's plenty
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  of sort of combat or conquest that doesn't involve going against other players. The
• 7:45
  game does allow for you to go against other players, but it doesn't seem
• 7:47
  to be the focus of the game. It seems like something you can do,
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  but probably not something you're gonna do a ton. The game was designed
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  by Nigel Buckle and David Turxy. David Terxy somebody I really like, although
• 7:59
  I found some of his output a little uneven. I mentioned that at the
• 8:03
  game, and the people who was playing with their like, what do you
• 8:05
  mean which games? And I struggled to think, but I would say like
• 8:09
  Redacted was his first game, it's a little uneven. Dice Settlers I liked,
• 8:13
  but the groups I've played it with haven't been super enamored of it.
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  He also helped design Welcome to Dinah World and Roman Role. I haven't played
• 8:24
  Roman Role yet, but Welcome to dinal World a lot of people found a
• 8:26
  little befuddling. That said, I do like a lot of his games as
• 8:30
  well. I really like an Acrony, I like his solo bot for Cerebria.
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  I think he's a great designer and I'm excited to try games when they
• 8:41
  come up, but he's not an auto play for me, like I have
• 8:43
  to kind of investigate which games are going to be a good fit, but
• 8:46
  this really did look neat. I did not get this because I knew at
• 8:50
  least one friend was getting it also, and I'm trying to be a little
• 8:52
  more conservative and how I'm spending my game buying money, and this was a
• 8:56
  big beast of a game. It is the first Mind Clash game I didn't
• 8:58
  buy for myself, and I wish I had a little bit. I'm super
• 9:03
  jealous of the of having the game, but I'm never gonna play it without
• 9:09
  one of these folks, and or like, if I had it, somehow
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  I had a game, they couldn't make it, but I really want to
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  play it. I'm sure they would loan it to me, so you know,
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  I have access to this game. I didn't need my own copy.
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  But the collector in me really covets the game. It's beautiful. It's huge,
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  tons of pieces. The Collector's Edition, which we got to play,
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  comes with these triple layer boards which have insets, and then the base game
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  comes with card stock player mats, and if you have the double layer boards,
• 9:41
  the player mats slide into the double layer board. So that's a really
• 9:46
  neat choice in terms of gameplay construction. The graphic design is by EU and
• 9:50
  o'tool, and it feels like it. You can kind of you can see
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  a consistency of the symbols that makes it easy to read the game. So
• 10:00
  I haven't really explained what the game is, Like I said, it's a
• 10:01
  four x game your conquest. The gameplay mechanism is a hand management thing.
• 10:07
  You have a set of action cards that you can play, and on a
• 10:11
  turn, you're going to play one of them and then you do the thing
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  that action says. There's a lot of different kinds of resources in managing how
• 10:18
  they flow. There's corruption you have to manage, and you're going to do
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  like five of those different research cards, and then the round will end,
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  and there's some end round stuff, the void attack and all of that,
• 10:33
  and then you do another round and there's I think you play three rounds,
• 10:37
  so you have like fifteen turns, give or take. I don't remember exactly
• 10:39
  how many cards you play, but that's sort of how it works. But
• 10:43
  a turn is a pretty elaborate deal in a four player game. You're easily
• 10:46
  sitting eight to ten minutes between turns, but it doesn't feel like unpleasant downtime
• 10:52
  to me because you have so much time you have so much to think about,
• 10:56
  you have a lot of planning to do. I did find in sort
• 10:58
  of like the third age. By the second card play of the five,
• 11:03
  I had figured out everything I was planning to do for the round, and
• 11:07
  then it felt like I was just it was a little bit more downtime.
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  But like I said, there's a lot going on in the game, so
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  really fun. There's great technology trees. You can advance technologies and get these
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  bonuses for yourself. The combat is entirely deterministic, which is nice, so
• 11:24
  you can figure out before you go in how you're gonna do in the combat.
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  You can also figure out what's gonna happen during the invasion phase, so
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  it's very mechanical and euro that way. I really like that. Void Fall
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  is just it's a beast of a game, but really cool and definitely a
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  game I'd like to play again. Definitely a game I really enjoyed. So
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  if you get a chance to try out Void Fall from Nigel Buckle and David
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  Terxy, I definitely recommend Ian O'Toole as the designer. Mind Clash Games is
• 11:52
  the publisher, all right. The third game I got to try is Pax
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  Premiere second edition. Now this one falls into the category of games I generally
• 12:00
  not super keen to try, but it turns out that it's a good fit
• 12:05
  for me. And these are sort of historical wargames I've mentioned on the show
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  before, my hesitance or my dislike about this process. You know, Pax
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  Premiere is an interesting case because part of what's going on in the game is
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  talking a little bit about the way that the British and the Russians were kind
• 12:22
  of struggling over the area of Afghanistan, and the people of Afghanistan had very
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  little self control or self determination over the area. And in the game you
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  represent kind of nebulous forces or persons in power in Afghanistan, but in the
• 12:39
  trying to gain the most influence in the context of these larger questions are these
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  larger power forces. So in the game, you are allied with one of
• 12:50
  the three factions, either the Brits, the Russians, or the and you
• 12:54
  don't represent anyone particular in the game, but instead you represent people competing for
• 13:01
  power or control in the context of the struggle the Great Game, as the
• 13:07
  British and the Russians sort so arrogantly called it. So the idea of the
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  game is there are these three factions, right There's the British, the Afghans,
• 13:15
  and the Russians, and you represent power brokers, sort of mixing back
• 13:22
  and forth. You and are allied with one or another, and there are
• 13:24
  occasionally dominance cards that come into play to check and if you are allied with
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  the power that's in domination, then you look at who has the most influence
• 13:33
  with them, and that person scores points. It turns out so far it's
• 13:37
  a game I'm not very good at. I'm doing pretty badly. I did
• 13:39
  pretty badly in the one game we played on the table, and I've done
• 13:41
  pretty badly in the three games that I've played on board game Arena, So
• 13:46
  I haven't been super successful yet with the experience of the game. But generally
• 13:52
  it looks like something I should enjoy and should be good at. It resonates
• 13:56
  a lot kind of halfway between card driven games like Twighlight Struggle or the Expanse
• 14:03
  board game is a card game I've played, a card driven game I've played,
• 14:07
  or nineteen sixty the Making them a President, So it resonates with that,
• 14:11
  but then it also feels a lot like the other game that I've played
• 14:15
  with the name packs at the beginning, and that's Packs Renaissance. Now that
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  game has the card driven thing. You're buying from a market, and I
• 14:22
  believe that buying from the market and having to pay for those is part of
• 14:26
  the pas idea. If you're saying that, that's kind of once one of
• 14:28
  the things you're asserting, but that has also got this element of putting cards
• 14:31
  in your tableau, and the cards in your tableau have powers on them,
• 14:35
  and you can use the powers on them to do your turn. But also
• 14:39
  the idea that you are not part of the nation states but rather individual power
• 14:46
  brokers. That is something that's also happening in Packs of Renaissance. Now.
• 14:50
  In Packs Renaissance, you get to pick from a variety of different win conditions.
• 14:54
  In Packs Premiere, there are only two. There are two ways to
• 14:58
  score points, and there's a one way to win. You score points either
• 15:01
  by being allied with the dominant faction when there's a dominance check and then gaining
• 15:09
  points from being the most influential with them, or the second thing would be
• 15:13
  if there is no clear dominant faction during a dominance check, then being the
• 15:20
  person who has the most influence on the board generally, and those are two
• 15:24
  slightly different ways of measuring things, which makes for an interesting balance because you
• 15:31
  could put a lot of energy into having influence, and then if the faction
• 15:35
  you're allied with isn't dominant, you get nothing, and then the scores are
• 15:41
  relatively low. But the idea is if at any point anybody is four full
• 15:46
  points ahead of all the other players, so ahead of the second place person,
• 15:50
  then the game is instantly over and they win. Otherwise, you play
• 15:54
  out until four dominance cards have come out, and after the fourth dominance card,
• 15:58
  whoever has the most points wins, and if there's a tie, whoever
• 16:00
  as the most military strength wins. So the wind condition is relatively straightforward,
• 16:03
  but how you get there is pretty complex. I'm not going to go into
• 16:07
  the full explanation of the game. If you're interested in it, you can
• 16:08
  look it up from somebody who's going to do a more thorough review. But
• 16:12
  I will say it's a really interesting take on the packs system, fascinating dynamic
• 16:18
  between the different elements. Of course, it requires a stern sense of how
• 16:25
  games interact and how players interact because it is all cutthroat, going after each
• 16:30
  other like, it turns out, I don't mind. I mean, I've
• 16:33
  mentioned before, I don't mind that kind of game when I know it's coming,
• 16:37
  and when that's the key part of the game, like when what you're
• 16:38
  doing in the game is going after each other the whole time. I don't
• 16:41
  generally mind that. I just like to know have clarity of purpose about what
• 16:47
  you're doing there. So from that perspective, it's pretty interesting. I will
• 16:51
  say, the mechanisms is still a little opaque to me, and I had
• 16:56
  some significant issues with our first interpretation of the rules, so we play our
• 17:00
  in person game pretty substantially incorrect. It was still fun, but really off
• 17:04
  from the way the rules are supposed to work. So I'm, like I
• 17:07
  said, I'm in my I think simultaneously second and third game of Pax Premiere
• 17:11
  Online right now, and so I'm just kind of getting my feet wet and
• 17:15
  playing it. But so far, I think it's pretty interesting. And if
• 17:19
  it's a thing you'd like to play with me, send me an invite on
• 17:22
  board game Arena. I'd be happy to play with you. Oh. My
• 17:26
  son and I dusted off Hellboy recently. Hellboy is a delightful amri trash style
• 17:33
  fight them up game in which you are one of the members of the Bureau
• 17:37
  for Paranormic Paranormal Research and Development the BPRD, and you and your friends are
• 17:42
  going to investigate some sort of supernatural horror. We had a lot of fun
• 17:48
  just romping around fighting baddies. The hell Boy system is really neat. It's
• 17:53
  got different kinds of skills, and you have different levels of dice that you
• 17:59
  use in the skills, and the level of the dice you use determines how
• 18:06
  likely you are to succeed in what's going to happen to you. It's a
• 18:08
  really smooth system that works pretty well, and once you kind of understand the
• 18:11
  game, it runs pretty quick. I mean we played in eighty or ninety
• 18:15
  minutes, and we played one of the medium length scenarios or the shorter scenarios,
• 18:18
  one of the two. But it's good to get that out again and
• 18:22
  makes me want to get back to playing it and painting it. Which I
• 18:26
  painted a bunch of the lizards and a bunch of the Nazis, but I
• 18:29
  haven't painted nearly. I don't think. I don't even think I've played half
• 18:33
  of the figures altogether, so there's a lot to unpack there. Yeah,
• 18:37
  so if you get a chance to play hell Boy the board game, I
• 18:40
  recommend Well, that is just about it for me today. I hope that
• 18:44
  you have enjoyed walking with me. I'd like to know what you've been playing.
• 18:47
  Head over to board game geek Gild three two sixty nine and share your
• 18:49
  thoughts there. I am going to try to start posting there more about the
• 18:55
  podcast. Maybe each week I'll do a week in review post, sort of
• 19:00
  finding everybody what I posted this week, just because I'd like to see a
• 19:03
  little bit more action on the guild. And I think when people post there,
• 19:07
  then other people see it and we go from there. So I'll try
• 19:10
  to remember to do that. If not, you can always send me a
• 19:11
  geekmail message while I bat nineteen nine. Name is my user name, or
• 19:15
  you can send me an email Brendan at Rattlebox Game. Well, thanks for
• 19:18
  joining me in my walk today. I hope your next walk is as posed
• 19:21
  as mine was. Bybye, Brought to you by Rattlebox Game.