Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Top of the Stack, May 2024

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Top of the Stack, May 2024 · Pick Up and Deliver

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Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step out
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the door and deliver an episode to you while I walk around.
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I'm Brendan Riley.
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Well, good morning listeners.
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It's a lovely, if little noisy day here in suburban Chicago.
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I'm happy to be talking to you about all things board games.
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The sun is out.
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Some people are watering their lawns if you can believe watering your lawn.
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What are you doing?
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Well, that's fine.
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People can water their lawns, I suppose.
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Not really my bag, but that's okay.
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It is May 1st, and that means it's time for us to review how we did in April and talk
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about what's going on.
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That's right, it's time for Top of the Stack!
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Top of the Stack is a monthly segment, in which I talk about what I played in the last month
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and plan some plays for the next month.
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Let's jump right into it.
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So to start off, I like to start with a few stats, let you know how my game
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playing went in April.
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I played 83 plays of 52 different games, making my year total 304 plays of 124 games.
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Pretty good.
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It means I'm on pace for 1200 plays this year, I think.
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Is that right?
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I've done four months and 300 plays.
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So I guess, well, 900.
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I'm on track for 900.
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I usually hit 1000, so 900 is a little behind pace, but April was very busy.
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I suspect May will be very busy as well.
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We'll probably see a pickup in gameplay in the summer.
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But for now, 83 plays of 52 different games.
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My shelf of opportunity saw a big swell.
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I'm always trying to reduce it, trying to bring it down, but I had a jackpot at Goodwill,
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where I picked up like, something like, 11 games for $31.
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Some of them I got as games for my board game club at my school.
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Some of them I got for other things, but for the most part, the idea is to get as much as
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I can when I find new games for cheap, especially if they look kind of cool.
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I'm going to try them.
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But that means that my collection size boosted.
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At a time when I normally am, or my shelf of opportunity boosted at a time when I'm normally
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trying to reduce it, but that's why we saw the increase.
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We also saw the collection size boost up from 579 to 588 games.
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That includes the games that I got at Goodwill, which went into my collection.
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But also then I picked up two more games last night, April 30th.
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The [toggle Gaming] club had a used game sale, and I like to support my fellow used game merchants.
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So I bought a couple things.
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And thus we saw the boost.
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My most played game in real life last year, or last month, was Frosthaven.
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I played three games of it in real life, and my most played game online was Daybreak with
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five plays.
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I feel like I'm getting the hang of that game now, although I'm still pretty bad at it.
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It feels like the people I've been playing with are much better at it than I am.
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The penalties in particular, I need to spend a little time with the rulebook to really understand
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how they work.
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They just kind of happen.
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And I would probably be better at the game if I understood it better.
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The biggest part of my Top of the Stack each month is deciding on which games I'm going
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to try to play for the next month.
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I always pick out four games, and the goal is to play three of them in the month.
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Generally not all of them are brand new, but they're either new or I haven't played
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them in a long time.
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This month, the four that I picked were Porta Nigra, Raised the Titanic!, Hunted Wood Ridge
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and Alien Artifacts.
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And I'm sad to say, I only got one of those played.
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We played Alien Artifacts, and it was a little longer than I'd like, but actually pretty fun.
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I really like it.
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I think it probably has a lower popularity because the rulebook isn't great, and it's a little
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more complicated than it needs to be.
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But the game itself is pretty fun.
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I'll talk about that in a future board game espresso.
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But I liked it a lot, staying in the collection for a while at least.
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I read the rules for Porta Nigra, got ready to play, and then didn't play it.
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I was a bummer, but I think there's a lot of potential there.
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So I'm looking forward to trying that maybe next week at Game Club.
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Raise the Titanic!, we just didn't get around to it.
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And Hunted Wood Ridge, I don't know, I haven't made time for solo gaming.
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It's been pretty busy.
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This next month, I'm going to switch back to another game I've been trying to play forever.
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We'll see if I do better on that.
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Next up is First Plays.
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Each month I like to talk about games that I played for the first time in a given month.
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I had six new games that I tried this month that I hadn't played before.
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They are Habitat, Ted Lasso the Party game, Alien Artifacts, Really Loud Librarians.
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That's Not a Hat, and Wild Serengeti.
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All of these were pretty fun.
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I really like Wild Serengeti in particular and That's Not a Hat; and Alien Artifacts is
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pretty good.
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I'll talk about all of these in upcoming board game espresso episodes.
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Now, six new games is a relatively minor amount for the number of games I normally play in
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a month.
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But again, it was a busy month.
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So next up, we've got Expansion Plays.
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We have two expansion plays that I got played this month.
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You remember this is a new category I'm trying, which is where I'm trying out different
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expansions, trying to get those off the shelf.
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And the two that I tried were more monikers and expansion for monikers.
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And fantasy Realms, cursed Horde.
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I thought I was also getting a new expansion played by playing the life expansion, the
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great Facades - Life in Sagrada, but turns out I had played that a while ago, so it's not a new
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expansion.
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Oops, or not a new expansion anyway.
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Oops, we did get three games out of the dust.
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This was dude, and I guess technically more dude, but I consider more dude an expansion
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for dude, not a game in itself, even though they're sold in separate boxes.
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I keep them in one box myself, so that's how I see it.
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So I got dude played.
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It'd been three years, five months, or 25 days since I played that.
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Call of the Wild, two years, one month, and three days.
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And Strike, three years, five months, 26 games.
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Just six games dusted off so far this year.
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So I need to up my revisiting game if I want to do better on those numbers.
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My 10 for 10, the progress is going pretty well.
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Legacy and campaign games, we've already locked down.
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I did get a number of nature and animal games played this month.
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I got Habitats, Trails of Tucana, and Wild Serengeti, which puts me up to five, that's halfway
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to the goal.
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We did play Frosthaven once for three hours.
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The other two plays were not three hours this month or the other place, so we're on pace
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because that's up to eight games that have been taking more than three hours to play.
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No cute animal games this month.
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We played an unlock game, W-A-F-Fs Odyssey, Wafs Odyssey, which gets us two, so we're a little
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behind on Escape Room games, but we'll get there.
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One novelty game, that's Ted Lasso, the party game.
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Four expanded game, we got one expanded game, I said.
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Although that's obviously wrong because we also played Fantasy Realms and Monikers.
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So I guess I got three expanded games there.
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I'm going to go back and fix that, which means we're up to seven expanded games.
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Nice.
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Oh no, no, I have Sagrada and Fantasy Realms there.
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Maybe I didn't consider Monikers interesting enough to be expanded in the context of the
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board.
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I played one game starting with every letter from A to J. We're up to 8 games from K to
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T, and we've only played 2 games from U to Z, and then starting with numbers.
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So making good progress on my 10 for 10.
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This one's really enjoyable.
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It's fun to make progress, it's fun to see where we have to go.
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It's fun to start planning a little bit.
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I should, for next month, I should do a survey of how many plays we have left to do and
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kind of make a plan to make sure we're going to hit our target.
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So yeah, that works really well.
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I did no painting this month for like the, I don't know if I've done any painting this
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year.
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It's been really hard to find time to do it, and when I do have time to myself, I've
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just been doing other things.
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So painting has been slow, but I really do want to get back to it, and my family was given
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me grief about the fact that I still have Gloomhaven or Frosthaven characters that haven't
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been painted.
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"So get on that, Brendan," they say.
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So my shelf of opportunity, I've checked off a number of games this month, one, two, three,
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four, five, so that's good, but I added more than I checked off.
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I added one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12.
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I added 12, and I only checked off five.
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So falling behind, 68, unplayed as of the last update.
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I haven't really talked about my H index much for this year.
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The H index is of course the number of games that you've played that many times.
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So like if you've played one game one time, you have an H index of one.
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If you have two different games that you've played two times each, that's an index of two,
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and so on.
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My current H index for this year is eight.
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I have many games that I've played.
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Why is it only eight?
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Oh, I have eight games that I've played at least eight times.
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In fact, I've played them all nine times.
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The ninth game I've only played eight times, so that's where I'm stuck on that list.
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But my games are daybreak with 19 plays.
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Oh, and I see... shoot.
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I log "unpublished prototype" when my design partner and I play a game that we haven't
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published yet.
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I log that as unpublished prototype and then the board variant area on the board variant
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area on board on the board game stats.
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I will mark that as which variant we're playing in other words, which game we're testing.
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That's part of how I keep track of scores, but also who tested our game so that we're going
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to get to the point where we're putting people in the rulebook.
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We've got the names of our testers.
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So I guess my H Index still is eight.
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If you take out unpublished prototype, then that means Daybreak with 19 plays, That Time
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You Killed me with 16 plays, almost entirely with Gabriel Edge.
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Hey, Gabriel, nice job.
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We're having fun with that.
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We may take a break a little bit and play Cairn for a while.
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That's another game that's similar in nature and I haven't played that one as much and
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we don't want to burn ourselves out.
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I think Gaia Project.
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I'm at 13 plays of session.
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I'm at 11.
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Frosthaven.
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I'm at 10.
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Res Arccana
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I'm at 9.
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Mottainai.
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I'm at 9.
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And Through the Ages, I'm at 8.
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So that's my H Index at 8.
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I'll set up a bunch of plays of a couple other games that are quickly climbing the ranks.
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I'm having a lot of fun on board game arena lately.
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So if you aren't on there, you should definitely head over.
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I've got a bunch of plays of Gaia Project under my belt, obviously, as I said.
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That one's really interesting because for a long time, I really liked Terra Mystica better.
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I think I've probably been swayed that Gaia Project is the better game, but I have never
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played it on the table.
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So it's in this weird space where I've played a lot, but I've also never played it, sort
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of.
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And I'm not sure I would have been able to grasp what's going on in Gaia Project without
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having played Terra Mystica first.
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And even so, I still feel like I've got a lot to learn.
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I don't really understand some of the systems.
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And then again, I don't think I was ever all that good at Terra Mystica either.
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Although I did come to grasp how the cult tracks worked in that game.
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And I think Gaia Project, the technology, they run just a different way.
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And it makes it harder to...
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There's more choices to make, so it takes a bit more struggle.
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That said, I'm having a good time with that.
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I've been playing that regularly with Eric Gee and Chris Henjy.
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Hey, Chris.
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Those are my two Gaia Project pals.
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I continue playing through the ages, mostly with Chris.
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I've not played it with Ray very much.
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Mostly with Ray, I've switched into playing games with Ray and Rich.
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And I think a guy named Kyle Matt, his name is Matt.
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So we're playing mostly four player games now with that group, which has been fun.
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I do sort of miss the two player games with Ray, but I guess I could always start one if
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I missed it that badly.
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One other category in my board game plays that I include on my page, but haven't really
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talked about much on here, are what I'm calling notable plays.
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These are plays of games that just are interesting, because I haven't played them a lot.
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One game that's become a recurring pleasure for the whole family.
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Everybody likes it, and we often are able to play it with one of our grandmas is Illiterati.
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Illiterati is a word creation, a real-time word creation game where each player gets a stack
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of letters.
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And then we flip a timer and you have, I think, two minutes or three minutes to, for everybody
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to use all the letters they have, makes with all the letters everybody else has, to make
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words.
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And your first priority is every round to make complete words.
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The thing is, if you just make complete words, all you're doing is staving off the inevitable.
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Instead, what you have to start doing is you start, you have these cards that give you challenges.
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So instead of just three complete words, or instead of just use all the letters to make
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words, you might have a thing that says, "Use the letters to make names of fast food restaurants,
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and you have to have three different fast food restaurants."
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And so if you complete your challenge, then you move on to the next challenge, but you
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also still have to make letters with everybody else to make sure all the letters get used.
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So now you have these competing goals.
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On top of that, each of the letters has one of five colors on it.
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There's a neutral color that doesn't count as a color at all, black.
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But then there's teal, red, purple, and orange.
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And they have a little symbol that goes with them, so it's colorblind friendly.
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But you have to use on a lot of the challenges, you also have to have a certain number of
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cards, tiles with those symbols.
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And so you're also distracted by that.
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And the big thing is, defeating the challenges distracts you, and then sometimes you don't
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get all the words made by the time the timer runs out.
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And if you don't have all the words made, then you take these penalties.
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And the penalties just get brutal.
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And when you're playing normal, you can take three rounds where you get penalties.
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If you're playing on hard, you only get two rounds.
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Two other games that I'd like to offer as notable plays.
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Praga Kaput Regney has now become available on board game arena.
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And the play of it's very smooth.
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I really like it.
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I'm a little sad to move away from Yukata for that game, but the interface is nicer on board
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game arena.
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And I just like the overall play better there.
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So we've been playing that a couple times.
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It's making me realize how much I like that game again.
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It's bringing me back to it.
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I need to get it on the table again.
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And then I've really been enjoying getting to know Spirit Island better.
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I have a copy I borrowed and my son and I have been playing it once a week or so.
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And it's really great to get to feel, get to learn the system better, to start anticipating
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what the enemies do, to work together to block what they're doing or manipulate the
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boards so that they don't overwhelm us too quick.
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We've got like a 50% win ratio.
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Sometimes we lose.
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And we're trying harder games as we go along and try to get a different spirit.
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It's been really fun.
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And I can see this being a game that will play a lot as time goes by.
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That leaves me to my next month's plan.
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Next month I will be playing some new games.
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In particular, I'll be looking at Ryu is on my top of my stack.
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We've got the Colombo Detective game.
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And I'm returning to Hadrian's Wall.
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Hadrian's Wall is of course a solo game that was on my to play list several times last
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year and I never got played.
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I did finally play it one time or two times on board game arena enough that I kind of
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marked it played.
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I still don't feel like I really got a good grasp of it so I want to give it another go on
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paper.
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And I haven't I still haven't removed it from myself of opportunity yet because I feel
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like I have to play the game on paper in order to remove it.
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I haven't done that yet.
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And then finally I put Porta Nigra on there again.
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I know it's a new one and just repeating it another month isn't super exciting from
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the listener perspective but I did put a bunch of work into learning it and I'm ready
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to play it so I really want to get it to the table.
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I think I'm going to try it post about it and bring it next week and hopefully some
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people will join me.
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I'll talk them.
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Well that's about it for me.
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I hope that you'll head over to board game geek guild 3269 and share your games that
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you've been playing this month so we can know a little bit more about what games excited
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you in April and what games you're playing to play in May.
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If you want to send me a direct message, wombat929 on board game geek it's probably the easiest
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way.
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I also have an email address at brendan@rattleboxgames.com.
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Just for joining me on my walk today I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine was.
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Bye bye.
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