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Hot Hot Hot … Games (Themestorm) · 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
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  stroll around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon, listeners. It
• 0:23
  is a pleasant day in late July, and it's a little too pleasant to
• 0:27
  be making the podcast. I'm making, I think because I've come up with
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  an idea for an episode that's wrapped up in something that doesn't apply right now,
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  which is very hot temperatures. The last week or so has been very
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  hot here in the United States. I recently read that this has been the
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  hottest This was the hottest week in history or something in terms of recorded history.
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  So not really surprising, but a bit of a bummer. And I
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  thought I would take a walk up to the library to return some books and
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  talk to you a little bit about some games. And I thought, what
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  better theme to work with today then games about heat and hot places. So
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  that's what I'm gonna do. I picked out a few games that are about
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  heat and hot places, and I'll talk to you about them and we can
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  share an enjoyment of the conversation therein So, to start with, I was
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  thinking about the worst heat for my money, which is sort of muggy heat
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  and one of the worst places I've read about. There's an excellent book called
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  The Lost City of z by David gran and in it we learn about a
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  explorers from the first half of the twentieth century who went to the Amazon to
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  try to find evidence of a huge city built by the indigenous people of the
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  Amazon region in the era like either just colonial times or just before colonial times.
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  In the book, toward the end, we learned that in fact,
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  there are there is strong evidence that there was a massive wooden city here.
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  Of course, being mostly wooden, it's lost to the ages now, but
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  the remnants of the earthworks are still there, and there's plenty of evidence to
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  suggest that there was in fact a massive city there. That said, the
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  book is about this explorer who went looking for the city and ended up lost
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  in the Amazon. I will admit I don't remember a lot of the details
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  from that character are from the book. I don't remember the explorer's name,
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  for instance. But what I'm talking about today is not the explorer. I'm
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  talking about a game inspired by that explorer, and that is the game The
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  Lost Expedition Lost Expedition is a game from Peer Sylvester published by Osprey Games.
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  It's a delightful little solo or two person game. I like it solo.
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  I think it works great that way. And what you are doing is you
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  are leading this expedition into the jungle to try and find the Lost City.
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  You do that, you pick out three adventurers, and you have a certain
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  amount of food and health, and then you're playing cards that let you move
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  further and further into the jungle, and you're trying to collect supplies and stay
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  alive as long as you can. It's a sort of dark game because you
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  just have to make it to the Lost City to win. There's nothing about
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  making it back out, which is of course kind of funny. But watching
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  it or looking at that book particularly reminding me, like when I encounter the
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  dehydration card, or there's a card where like animal bite and shows this like
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  throbbing hand with a spider running away. Those moments remind me really strongly of
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  the excellent work David Grant did writing and writing that book and make you just
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  think how hot and unbearable the jungle can be, particularly not suited for it,
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  and it seems like it drove them a bit mad. So it seems
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  like a good one to talk about on a day when I'm trying to talk
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  about games about heat. So the Lost Expedition next up, I have two
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  games about the desert. The desert is, of course the epitome of hot
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  places. The desert is dangerous if you don't know what you're doing there.
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  It's dangerous even if you do know what you're doing there, particularly because you
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  can get lost out there. The heat will be mesmerizing, can be confusing.
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  If you don't know where to go to get water, you can find
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  yourself trapped and really in trouble. So the two games that I was thinking
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  about. One of these games is about being trapped, and one of the
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  games is about the people live in the desert. It says through the Desert
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  and Forbidden Desert. Let's start with through the Desert. If you haven't played
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  this, this is a rhinor Kinisia abstract game themed around the desert. You
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  have a map full of hex spaces, and on that map you have oasises
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  that are these trees. They give you points, and then you have a
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  bunch of little tokens here and there they give you points when you get them,
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  and then you have the desert itself. The idea of the game is
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  that each player starts with five different tracks of camels, and in your game
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  you are going to be extending those tracks of camels through the desert. Your
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  goal is to use tracks of camels to sort of block off pieces of the
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  desert for your control. The bigger the piece of the desert, the more
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  points you get. The idea of the game is that each player is trying
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  to get points from collecting these tokens, from visiting oasises, and from blocking
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  off these areas on the map. Mixing those things together gives you a really
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  nice blend of different mechanisms and different things to think about. It makes for
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  a really interesting game. Like I said, it's themed around the folks of
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  the desert, but is really an abstract game that has a little bit of
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  theme to help you understand what's going on, but it doesn't need to have
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  it. I have the Fantasy Flight version that has the animal pieces that look
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  like Grandma's mints, so those are fun. I know there's a new addition
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  out that's supposed to look pretty snazzy. I haven't seen it myself, but
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  I'm sure it's great. If you get a chance to play through the desert,
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  definitely do so. There's a reason writer Canisia's name goes above the title
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  on most games that he designs. The other desert game I want to talk
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  about is Forbidden Desert. This is the Matt Leecock game, the second game
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  in the Forbidden Something series from game right. In Forbidden Desert, you play
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  the people who have built or who have got crashed landed in the desert in
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  the place where there is an ancient civilization full of weird steampunk technology and the
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  pieces of an ancient airship. Over the course of the game, you and
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  your friends are going to navigate the desert looking for the pieces of the airship,
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  while also trying to hold back the tide of sand being created by a
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  giant sandstorm that's swirling around and moving around. Every now and again, a
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  sun beats down card will come up, and when that happens, if you
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  are not under shade, you lose some of your water, and if you
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  get too low on your water, you die, and the game's over.
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  If any of the players dies, the game is over. So, of
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  course you're also constantly looking for water. There are these oasises. Three of
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  the four of them are real, but one of them is is a dead
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  well. So if you go there and you find the dead well, that's
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  really frustrating if you needed the water very soon. It's a really interesting game.
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  I like it much better than Forbidden Desert. It's a little harder,
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  or Forbidden Island. It's a little harder. It's more of a everyone game
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  rather than sort of a game ideal for younger folks, at least once you're
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  in the hobby. I mean, Forbidden Island is reasonably interactive and entertaining if
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  you're new to the hobby, but once you've played a few co op games,
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  it is a pretty easy game to win until you get to the point
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  where it's hard because of luck. And Forbidden Desert I think, is a
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  little more even that way, and a little bit harder, which is fun.
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  So and of course that's it's all about being hot, managing your heat,
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  trying to find ways to avoid getting caught out in the sun when those
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  carts come up. Works really well. So that is Forbidden Desert. Next
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  time I want to talk about evacuation. Evacuation is a Vladimir suki game in
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  which you play leaders of three different large civilizations from one plan that's about to
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  be consumed by its sun, and so you are leading your civilization to move
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  to another planet that is more habitable. Over the course the game, you're
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  going to be rocketing ships back and forth, spending resources in both places to
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  make the transition of as many of your people as possible. It's a kind
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  of a dark game theme wise, because inevitably you can't get everybody from your
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  home planet, but the idea is good as many as you can and hopefully
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  keep those folks happy on the new planet. That said, the art on
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  the game is really good in terms of imagining this heat. You have the
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  image of the large and expanding star next to your original home planet, which
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  is of course making everything hot and terrible, and so fits really well this
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  theme of heat overwhelming everything. That said, it is probably the least heat
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  focused game on my list. The evacuation necessities come from this heat element,
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  but again probably the least applicable of the ones on my list. Nonetheless,
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  it still feels related to heat. But that does lead me in to my
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  last game, which feels eminently relatable, and this is Daybreak. Daybreak is
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  Matt Leecock, the recent Matt Leecock cooperative game, sort of his next step
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  after Pandemic. In this game, you are building a tableau of cards and
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  you are using it to fight climate change in a variety of ways. Your
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  goal is to get your country. You play either the United States, China,
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  Europe I think is the third one, and then the rest of the
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  world is the fourth one. And what you're trying to do is bring into
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  control the greenhouse emissions from those places and put into place social and civil structures
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  and technological structures that help combat the changes due to climate change. As you
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  go along, these changes get worse and you start to have environmental collapse,
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  various kinds of ron mental cascades. So not only you have to reduce your
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  carbon emissions and actually get into a place called draw down where you're pulling carbon
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  out of the air, but you also then have to deal with the ramifications
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  of these steadily increasing terrible tipping points. It is a sobering game to play
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  because it's really a dramatic theme that is applicable, but it also is also
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  hopeful. The whole game is full of these different technologies and different ideas that
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  very smart people have been thinking about with regard to how do we try to
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  make the world a better place for people to live in, and how do
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  we try to rein back some of the ecological damage we've been doing. It's
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  a really compelling and important part of the conversation about climate change. And every
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  card has a QR quote on it that you can scan and will take you
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  to a page telling you about that technological idea or that social idea. The
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  gameplay itself is really interesting. You have these tableaus of cards and you're putting
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  out cards that give you tags not unlike oh something like terraforming Mars, and
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  then you have at the bottom of each of your five stacks of cards there
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  is a power and you can use the power on that card if you've got
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  enough icons in that stack to activate it. And there's a lot of collaboration.
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  The game doesn't have turns, it's just got rounds, and so everybody
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  does work that they can, but there's a lot of ability to help one
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  another. There's a game I've only played in board game Arena. I have
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  not played it on the table yet. I'd be interested to try, and
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  it looks really neat, so if you get a chance to play Daybreak,
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  I recommend It's really an interesting idea and something I'm looking forward to playing some
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  more So, I have a couple honorable mentions that I wanted to bring up
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  as I'm wrapping up the podcast here in the line of Daybreak, there is
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  CO two and CO two Second Chance. These are the sala Aserta games about
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  climate change, but also about being companies that depend on carbon emissions, thinking
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  about how to maintain economy without destroying the planet. I haven't played them,
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  and they aren't the best rated of his games, but it would be a
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  game to play if you're interested in thinking about heat or climate change from more
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  science fictional point of view. The game an Acrony also imagines a world where
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  the environment has gone out of control and heat has become an issue. Water
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  becomes the currency of the game because things are so dire for people, although
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  it's possible that that's just processed water or clean water is the hard part to
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  get, rather than that the world is so dry everyone needs water. Lastly,
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  the two other games I thought about mentioning but didn't for various reasons are
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  Heat Pedal to the Metal, which is a game about car racing in which
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  you're literally managing how much heat is going into your engine. And then Scoville,
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  which is a game about growing peppers. And I bring this up,
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  of course because Scoville is a measure of how hot peppers are, and the
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  scale is one of the ways they talk about what peppers are and how they
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  work. So this is the game. Scoville is all about heat as well.
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  Well, that's my take on some games about heat. It's a hot
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  time right now and these are hot games. Oh one other honorable mention,
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  of course, POMPEII. Pompey is a great little tile layer in which you're
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  doing a little area control and you're trying to get different stuff accomplished with your
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  people. It's also about the city of Pompey getting over overrun by a volcano.
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  So it's got those little volcano you get to throw people in. That's
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  kind of fun. So that's it for my thoughts on heat and games about
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  heat. I hope that you've enjoyed this rumination, and i'd love to hear
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  what games come to your mind from your collections when you think about playing games
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  about the heat. Head over to board game geek Gild three two sixty nine
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  and share your thoughts there or send me a message. Wombat nineteen nine is
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  my username on board game geek. Brendan at Rattadox Games is my user is
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  my email for this podcast. Thanks for joining me on the walk today.
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  I hope your next monk because it pleasant is money. Brought to you by rattle Box