Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Bloom; Crossing Oceans; Mansions of Madness; Fire in the Library

Transcript

Bloom; Crossing Oceans; Mansions of Madness; Fire in the Library · 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 two while I walk home.
• 0:10
  I'm Brendan Riley. Look good afternoon, friends. It's a lovely day
• 0:24
  here in suburbans Chicago. I'm walking home from the train and the weather is
• 0:28
  beautiful. I'd say it's mid seventies, and I'm really enjoying the opportunity to
• 0:38
  talk to you as I stroll along. Now, the last episode I recorded
• 0:46
  was a board game Espresso Espresso, where I do three quick three quick reviews,
• 0:51
  and I'm gonna do another one of those today. Glad, I think
• 0:53
  I'm gonna publish this episode out of order. So if the last episode you
• 0:56
  heard was not a board game Espresso Espresso, that's the magic of podcasting.
• 1:00
  So anyway, I'm still catching up at played lots of games in July that
• 1:03
  I haven't talked about yet, and here are three of them for those of
• 1:07
  you. Dow. The podcast of the board game Espresso Espresso is an episode
• 1:11
  where I talk about three new games that I've tried for the first time and
• 1:14
  one game I've dusted off, meaning and I haven't played it in more than
• 1:17
  a year, and I just talk about the experience of playing them. It's
• 1:19
  generally a first Impressions podcast episode type of review because I've played the game once
• 1:26
  maybe twice, and I don't have deep thoughts about it because I've only just
• 1:29
  played it once or twice. So with that in mind, first game I
• 1:33
  want to talk about it is Bloom. Bloom is from game Right Games and
• 1:37
  it comes in the same small cardboard box with the magnetic lid that Quicks comes
• 1:42
  in, and it is meant to be sort of in the same vein as
• 1:47
  Quicks. In the game, there are a series of dice and you have
• 1:51
  a little sheet to write on, just like in Quicks, and each player
• 1:55
  is going to roll and then you're going to do stuff with those dice.
• 1:59
  The premise of the game is you have six planting boxes, and in each
• 2:01
  planting boxes you have a variety of different flowers of different colors and shapes,
• 2:07
  and what you do on your turn is you are going to pick one of
• 2:10
  the dice and circle a certain number of the flowers in the box. There
• 2:15
  is a wild dye that you can combine with the dye that you picked,
• 2:20
  and you gain or lose points based on a couple different factors, but the
• 2:25
  main idea is you are either trying to fill up the flower boxes the groups
• 2:30
  of the six sort of quadrants of the board, not quadrants, sextants.
• 2:34
  I don't know the boards of it in the six areas. If you fill
• 2:37
  up one of those areas, you get some points, and you also get
• 2:39
  some bonus points if you circle all the flowers of a certain color. And
• 2:45
  so those are kind of the two main ways that you score points, and
• 2:50
  generally it's a fairly low scoring affair. You know, Quicks. A good
• 2:53
  game of Quicks, you can break one hundred points in Bloom. I think
• 2:59
  twenty or thirty points. It is probably the max. And I've only played
• 3:01
  it twice, so I could be totally wrong about that, but that's my
• 3:05
  impression from the game. I would say Bloom fits the profile of the game
• 3:10
  that you'd expect in picking up the box that Bloom and Quicks come in.
• 3:15
  In other words, when you first go to play one of these games,
• 3:19
  you expect that it'll be basically like what it is. By contrast, when
• 3:24
  you go to play Quicks, it turns out to be a lot better,
• 3:29
  more robust, a deeper game. So Bloom is a fine game, and
• 3:34
  I'm happy to play it, happy to have it available to me, and
• 3:37
  it's going to stay in my collection for a while at least. But compared
• 3:39
  to Quicks, not in the same category. That's The designer is Wouter Vanstran
• 3:49
  and it's from game right. That's Bloom, all right. The second game
• 3:53
  I'd like to talk about is Crossing Oceans. This game has its own strange
• 3:57
  history. It was designed by Man Girtz. Crossing Oceans, published by pd
• 4:02
  Verlog and distributed us by Real Grand is the spiritual reimagining of Transatlantic. So
• 4:12
  Transatlantic is Macgert's game focused on the Atlantic shipping trade or the world shipping trade,
• 4:20
  particularly during the heyday of the steamship era, so starting in the late
• 4:26
  eighteen hundreds and going through the nineteen twenties or thirties. During that time,
• 4:31
  steam travel was all the rage, and the liners were getting bigger and faster
• 4:38
  and more opulent. They were able to carry more goods and more people.
• 4:42
  Was the sort of golden age of that idea. In Transatlantic, which I've
• 4:46
  talked about a number of times here on the show, Matt Gertz approached the
• 4:50
  game with the idea of using and amplifying the card hand management system from Concordia,
• 4:59
  where you have a series of cards that do different things and you have
• 5:03
  the ability to acquire more cards, and at the end of the game,
• 5:06
  they're scoring based on how many of the cards you have of a particular type.
• 5:12
  In trans Atlantic, the scoring is less tied to the cards. It's
• 5:15
  more tied to the kinds of ships that you buy and the trading houses that
• 5:19
  you put on the board. Now, that game was I think that game
• 5:25
  was hurt by when it was released. It came out in the beginning of
• 5:28
  the COVID year, Marketing was not good for it, and while the while
• 5:32
  COVID was actually pretty good for the board game industry generally, I don't know
• 5:36
  that it was very good for new releases, particularly games that were new at
• 5:40
  the beginning of the COVID pandemic. That said, among the people who did
• 5:44
  pick up trans Atlantic, it still wasn't all that well received. So Matt
• 5:48
  Gertz, apparently disappointed or interested in taking another bite at the apple, redesigned
• 5:55
  the game. Kept a lot of the same theme, but changed it so
• 6:00
  instead of using cards and being card driven like Concordia. It now used a
• 6:04
  Rondell and was Rondel driven like some of his older games. I honestly this
• 6:09
  is I haven't played any other Mattgerts Rondel games, maybe antiq as one.
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  It keeps a lot of the same ideas. You're still buying ships, You're
• 6:18
  still putting them in regions. When you put it in a region, if
• 6:21
  the ship is the old if the ship that's if there's not a room.
• 6:27
  When you put a new ship in the region, it has to be newer
• 6:30
  than some of the other ships, and the oldest ship in that region is
• 6:32
  then removed and it can go back into circulation if there are other regions where
• 6:38
  there are still older ships. But if it's the oldest ship, you have
• 6:41
  to retire it. You're still trying to score points by delivering passengers, by
• 6:46
  delivering goods. You're still trying to gain money and using that money to buy
• 6:50
  other ships. You are still building trading houses and scoring things based on how
• 6:58
  many trading houses you've built. I think generally the game is a little simpler.
• 7:01
  I think, based on a first impression, I think I like trans
• 7:04
  Atlantic better than crossing oceans, but crossing Oceans is still very good, and
• 7:11
  everybody who played it with me, none of whom I played Transatlantic, said
• 7:14
  they liked it and would enjoy playing it again. So it's definitely good and
• 7:16
  I enjoyed it. But I couldn't spend help but spend the whole time focusing
• 7:20
  on how it was different than Transatlantic, rather than sort of really digging into
• 7:26
  the meat of Crossing Oceans. It is very similar, and it's hard not
• 7:30
  to do that if you've played both I did. I was very happy that
• 7:33
  Rio Grand and pd verlog I guess made a upgrade kit available because, like
• 7:40
  I said, a significant portion of trans Atlantic is the same as Crossing Oceans.
• 7:46
  In particular, most of the tokens, the wooden pieces, the cardboard
• 7:49
  pieces, the little tokens are all the same. The money is all the
• 7:53
  same. The difference is you have tiles and set of cards, and you
• 7:56
  have a different board and so in a real book, obviously, So when
• 7:59
  you could buy the Crossing Oceans upgrade kit and it was like half the price
• 8:03
  of a full inbox copy of Crossing Oceans, and then you can put it
• 8:07
  in the box with Transatlantic and you have both available to So that's pretty cool.
• 8:13
  That said, so I have them both in the same box, and
• 8:16
  at some point maybe I'll compare the two or we'll try both, and it's
• 8:20
  definitely going to stay in my collection for a while. I definitely when I
• 8:22
  played again, but that's crossing Oceans. Next up are out of the Dust
• 8:28
  game is Mansions of Madness second Edition. Mansions of Madness is a game that
• 8:33
  came out in twenty sixteen, I think maybe twenty seventeen, and it made
• 8:37
  a big splash because it was a redo of an older game also called Mansions
• 8:41
  of Madness, but the older game you had it was a one versus many
• 8:46
  game. We had a dungeon keeper who didn't really make a lot of decisions.
• 8:50
  Instead, they just kind of ran the game for you. And apparently
• 8:54
  one of the things that was the game was relatively fragile. If the dungeon
• 8:56
  keeper and setting up this elaborate game missed the token, or missed a rule,
• 9:01
  or missed something, it could break the whole scenario. And this took
• 9:05
  a long This game took a long time to play, so that was a
• 9:07
  challenge with it. When they came out with Mansions a man As second edition,
• 9:11
  they kept a lot of the same stuff, but they moved the position
• 9:13
  of the gamekeeper into an app so now the game interacts with you instead,
• 9:20
  and honestly, it's great. This is a game we really enjoyed back when
• 9:24
  we played it a few times in twenty sixteen twenty seventeen, and my buddy
• 9:28
  Paul has continued to buy expansions for it and play it not with me,
• 9:33
  So this is a game that stayed in his collection and I mentioned it recently
• 9:35
  as a game it'd be fun to play, and he brought it over and
• 9:39
  we had a good time running around killing elder things. So how does Mansion
• 9:43
  the Man second edition hold up? We had a lot of fun with it.
• 9:48
  It's a good time. The story is neat, the combat is interesting.
• 9:52
  It is very much Amerat trash in the classic sense of there's a lot
• 9:56
  of dice resolving issues. There are practical decisions to make, but often role
• 10:01
  to resolve becomes a key part of the experience, and it's very hard.
• 10:07
  Now, we made it much easier on ourselves by giving ourselves three actions instead
• 10:11
  of two, because one of the things that happens often in Mansion the Madness
• 10:16
  is if you only have two actions, you spend your whole action, your
• 10:18
  whole turn moving, and so you just don't get to do as much.
• 10:22
  It's not fun. That said, with three actions, it's not as hard,
• 10:26
  so that's maybe more fun if it's not as hard. But it was
• 10:28
  maybe not too much, not as hard. I thought we had a good
• 10:31
  time with it. I'm not sure about the three actions rule. Maybe maybe
• 10:37
  there's some moderation to be had there. In a four player game you get
• 10:41
  two extra actions or something, just to keep it a little bit tighter.
• 10:46
  But we had a great time and the game was sufficiently delightful in story and
• 10:54
  activity to be well worth a play. So that's Mansion the Man in the
• 10:58
  second edition, a game I got got off the shelves and hadn't played in
• 11:01
  several years. So the last new game I want to talk about is Fire
• 11:05
  in the Library. Fire in the Library is a game and I borrowed from
• 11:09
  the XYZ Game Labs library. It's one of our games that we've we have
• 11:15
  in the office there, but I want to give it a try, so
• 11:18
  I brought it home. This is a push your luck game in which you
• 11:20
  play one of several librarians in the library of Alexandria trying to save books.
• 11:26
  Basically, the way it works is it's a push your luck game. You're
• 11:31
  drawing cards, and you can keep drawing cards as long as you want,
• 11:33
  but after a certain amount of amount of cards drawn, you could draw a
• 11:37
  bust and then you lose everything that you have drawn, or you could stop
• 11:39
  early and you save those particular books, but maybe you don't get as much.
• 11:45
  That's the basic flow of it. There are some small details that give
• 11:50
  the game a bit of verve. You're doing a little set collection is trying
• 11:54
  to get different kinds of books too. Then you get points for having the
• 12:00
  most of a particular set. If I recall, the art is pretty neat.
• 12:03
  One of the things that I think it works well is that the fire
• 12:07
  cubes keep going back in the bag. So as the game goes on,
• 12:11
  the fire gets more and more prevalent. It gets easier and easier to draw
• 12:15
  fire cubes and end up burning up the stuff that you have, So that
• 12:18
  part is a that is an interesting twist. All in all, we thought
• 12:22
  Fire in the Library was pretty fun. Yeah, it falls again into that
• 12:24
  category of a fun game. If I didn't have other games like this that
• 12:28
  we're already part of our regular gameplay. I would probably be interested in owning
• 12:33
  a copy, but as it is, it's a lot like other games.
• 12:39
  As I think of other games to compare it to, I might say that
• 12:43
  I don't want to play it over Ink and Gold or dead Man's Draw is
• 12:48
  probably a closer comparison because you're individually deciding how far to push your luck and
• 12:52
  taking turns rather than in Gold. You know, it's a shared element of
• 12:56
  pusherrlucks. You're also pushing against the other players, so those two things together
• 13:01
  work pretty well. Fire in the Library was designed by Tony Miller and John
• 13:03
  Prather, published by Weird Giraffe Games. As a side note, that is
• 13:09
  not the only game about the burning of the Library of Alexandria as it I've
• 13:11
  played. They'll remember. A while ago, I had a game from I
• 13:15
  Think a Porta Games called I Think Just Alexandria, which is also about a
• 13:20
  fire in the Library. We played it once or twice and thought it was
• 13:22
  fine, but again it did not see in the collection. So what games
• 13:26
  have you been playing recently. I'd love to hear about it. You can
• 13:28
  share them over on board game geek can kill three, two, six nine
• 13:31
  If you want to reach out to me directly. Wombat nine two nine over
• 13:35
  on board game Geek is my user name. You can send me a message
• 13:37
  there. You could email me Brendan at rattlebox games dot com, or you
• 13:41
  can send me a message through one of the asynchronous gaming platforms, either Board
• 13:48
  Game Arena or Yukata dot d and both of those places. My name is
• 13:52
  Wombat nine two nine, and I'd be happy to play a game with you
• 13:54
  a synchronously. Who's got time to sit down at play games live? At
• 13:58
  least? Really, I'll like to play games live on the table. So
• 14:03
  I hope that you have been playing some games, and I hope that you
• 14:05
  enjoyed this discussion of these games that I've played, and I hope that if
• 14:09
  you decide to go for a walk your next block. This is pleasant as
• 14:13
  mind losses. Thanks for joining me, goe bye. Brought to you by Rattlebox