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2014 Look Back · 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, listeners. It's
• 0:23
  a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. We've turned the corner into firm fall
• 0:27
  weather. I've got a stocking cap on in a light jacket. It is
• 0:32
  in the low or the high forties right now as I take my walk.
• 0:35
  It's a Friday, so I've got a long day of zoom meetings and answering
• 0:39
  emails and grading stuff, so that's going to be a fun time. But
• 0:43
  before that, I'm talking to you, my good friends, for a nice
• 0:46
  little stroll. So I was looking back. I mentioned at the beginning of
• 0:50
  the year I had a project I was going to try to do maybe once
• 0:53
  a month or once every two months. And it's been about eight weeks since
• 0:57
  I did this, maybe seven weeks, so it's time for or another look
• 1:00
  back. This is your first time hearing this, I'd be surprised. It
• 1:03
  feels like our audience is pretty stable at this point. But if you're new,
• 1:04
  welcome. I'm Brendan in a look Back episode. What I'm doing is
• 1:10
  I'm going back to the years before I was doing the podcast and looking at
• 1:15
  the games that came out in that year and doing a sort of favorite games
• 1:19
  of that year. Generally, I filter four games I've played, which makes
• 1:23
  sense. I couldn't. It doesn't seem reasonable to declare a game one of
• 1:26
  my favorite games from that year if I haven't played it, But also for
• 1:29
  games I own, and generally I will do a list of my top five
• 1:34
  games from that year that I own, and then or a top some number
• 1:38
  of games from that year that I own, and then some other games that
• 1:42
  I like from that year, and then a couple I'd like to try.
• 1:46
  As always, though, as I'm looking back at twenty fourteen, the first
• 1:49
  thing I do is I disqualify any game that is in my top fifty.
• 1:52
  Obviously, if games are in my top fifty, they're going to be at
• 1:55
  the top of my favorite games from that year list, at least they ought
• 1:57
  to be, unless they're jig games I will played since my last top fifty,
• 2:01
  which I don't know if there are any on here that fit that category.
• 2:05
  There might be maybe one. No, I didn't even think that one.
• 2:08
  I don't think there are any games on here that from twenty fourteen that
• 2:12
  I've played that I hadn't played two years ago anyway, So the three games
• 2:16
  that I'm eliminating from consideration for favorite games from twenty fourteen are games that are
• 2:22
  already in my top fifty. That's or Leon's which is currently at number seventeen
• 2:24
  in my top fifty, Dead of Winter, which is at thirty five,
• 2:29
  and five Tribes, which is at forty six and is one of the few
• 2:31
  games in my top fifty that I don't own. So of those so those
• 2:36
  three are eliminated, you can consider them positions one, two, and three
• 2:38
  in that order on my top on my favorite games of twenty fourteen. So
• 2:44
  now I'll give you ten more that I really like. The way that I
• 2:46
  do this survey is that I go on Board game Geek and I do an
• 2:50
  advanced search. I look for games published between the time of twenty fourteen and
• 2:53
  twenty fourteen, and I say, don't show me expansions, and then I
• 2:58
  click the things so that they they are ordered in board game in rank according
• 3:02
  to their Board Game Geek rank, and then I looked through all the games
• 3:07
  in that list until I hit a game that is ranked number ten thousand,
• 3:13
  and then my assumption is if a game is ranked higher than ten thousand,
• 3:16
  it's probably not one of my top favorite games from that year. So this
• 3:22
  year I had roughly forty five games that went into consideration, and so I
• 3:29
  picked out ten that I thought are worth talking about. The very first one
• 3:31
  is Roll for the Galaxy. It is a kind of dice version of Tom
• 3:35
  Lehman's more well known Race for the Galaxy. Now, I like Roll for
• 3:39
  the Galaxy better. I love all the little dice in the game. They
• 3:43
  released two different expansions for it, one of them I have and have played
• 3:46
  a little bit and the other one I picked up because it was on clearance
• 3:51
  at gen Con, and so even though the game was I think eighty dollars,
• 3:53
  the expansion was eighty dollars new I got it for thirty, which was
• 3:58
  quite a deal. And so but I haven't tried anything from that one yet,
• 4:02
  so I will confess I haven't been keeping up on my Role for the
• 4:05
  Galaxy Delight. But I do like Role for the Galaxy a lot, and
• 4:10
  it is in fact my favorite of the games from twenty fourteen on this list.
• 4:15
  The next one is on a Rim. On a Rim from Shady Torby
• 4:19
  is a solo card game. I guess you can play it two player,
• 4:23
  but there's no reason too. There's plenty of good two player games, no
• 4:28
  reason to retro fit a one player game. I don't know if that sound
• 4:30
  is messing up my recording or not. We'll see if you can hear some
• 4:33
  noise in the background. It is a wood chipper up the block, and
• 4:39
  so hopefully you can still hear me talking about owner Rim. It's an interesting
• 4:42
  solo game where you have this decade cards and you are a traveler in a
• 4:46
  dream world and you're trying to find these keys, and you deal out cards
• 4:48
  and you make decisions about which cards when you're started to push your luck thing,
• 4:53
  and then there are a few cards that help or change things. The
• 4:57
  game comes with like six different modules that you can plug in change how it
• 5:00
  plays a little bit. Each One on a Rim is. It's great.
• 5:05
  I return to it every couple of years. I'll pull it out and I'll
• 5:09
  play it for half a dozen plays or something, and it always suits.
• 5:12
  I always like to bring it with me when I'm traveling because it's an easy
• 5:15
  to play solo game, and it's a lot of fun. So on a
• 5:17
  rim is my number. I guess number five, but number two I'm just
• 5:21
  going to number the new one, so it's my number two. Twenty fourteen
• 5:25
  game. Next up is one I don't play it often, but I really
• 5:29
  like This is The Castles of Mad King Ludwig. This game got a little
• 5:31
  bit of a boost recently because they did a new addition of it with fancy
• 5:34
  tiles and deluxe stuff. I did not buy that because I don't play it
• 5:39
  that often and the copy I have works great, so I didn't see the
• 5:41
  point in reinvesting in that game. But I really do like the idea of
• 5:46
  all these weird, different shaped tiles and you're building your castle and you get
• 5:49
  points for which rooms you put where. And the really fun thing about it
• 5:54
  is the auction system. Players take turns being auctioneers. When you're doing the
• 5:59
  auctioning, you are doing that by laying out the tiles that are for sale
• 6:02
  in these predetermined price spots, but you get to design which one goes to
• 6:06
  which spot so and then you get all the money that people use to buy
• 6:11
  it. So if you see a tile that somebody really wants, you can
• 6:14
  kind of keep them from getting it by putting it in the really expensive spot,
• 6:16
  or you can put it relatively low so they'll buy it and then you
• 6:19
  get the money. It's a great mechanism and it works excellently. The game
• 6:24
  runs a little bit long, but otherwise it's really fun. That's The Castles
• 6:28
  of Mad King Ludwig designed by It's from Bezier Games, and it's designed by
• 6:33
  the person who runs Bezier Games, whose name I'm blanking on right now.
• 6:38
  It'll come back to me and when it is all interjected. Next up we
• 6:41
  have Lords of zid It. I would have been surprised to suggest that this
• 6:44
  game would find itself as high as it did, but I really enjoyed it
• 6:46
  when we played it. Lords of Zidit is from the same design team that
• 6:50
  designs Seasons, and it takes place in the same world. But in the
• 6:56
  game, you are these traveling adventurers and you're trying to raise your glory,
• 7:01
  raise your money, and something else. There's like three different things you're trying
• 7:06
  to achieve over the course of the game, and there's an order at the
• 7:11
  top of the board that shows what order those three different categories are going to
• 7:15
  be scored in, and the way the scoring works is that whichever those categories
• 7:20
  scores first, you all compare them, and whoever has the lowest value in
• 7:25
  that category is out of the game. Then you compare the second category,
• 7:28
  whoever has the lowest value of that category is out of the game, and
• 7:31
  finally, of the people who are left, whoever has the highest value of
• 7:34
  the third category wins the game. So it's a really neat elimination system that
• 7:40
  forces you to kind of balance things, but you really only have to balance
• 7:43
  enough to not be last place in either of the first two scoring things.
• 7:46
  So fascinating, really interesting. I like it a lot. It's a programmed
• 7:50
  movement game with some kind of deterministic fighting. Excellent, Lords of visit it.
• 7:56
  Next tip, we have a game I purchased during my early get as
• 7:59
  much Martin Wallace as I can phase, and I think this one pays off.
• 8:03
  This is Onward to Venus. Onward to Venus has a sort of remarkable
• 8:07
  gameplay setup where you have a series of discs that represent planets, and it
• 8:11
  takes place in a sort of steampunk Victorian space travel era where you are colonizing
• 8:18
  different planets and trying to gain resources from them. It's an area control and
• 8:22
  point scoring game with lots of really interesting events. It's a little chaotic and
• 8:26
  a lot of fun, very thematic, really emblematic of the time that this
• 8:33
  took place during the Martin Wallace tree Frog era is what it was part of.
• 8:37
  So that is onward to Venus and next up we have Aqua Sphere.
• 8:41
  Aqua Sphere is a game I like very much. I did get rid of
• 8:45
  it ultimately because I only need so many heavy games and this one wasn't getting
• 8:48
  played that much. And there are a lot of other games I like more,
• 8:52
  but from twenty fourteen, this one really fits the bill. I love
• 8:56
  the mix of different things you have to do in order to advance the science
• 9:01
  in your underwater laboratory. There are several different sort of levers you have to
• 9:05
  pull, and you get points for all of them. But like many Stephenfeld
• 9:11
  games, some of the things allow you to buy widgets that plug into your
• 9:16
  player board and give you advantages in other elements. It's got this great action
• 9:20
  mechanism action selection mechanism where you have the sideboard with these tokens on it,
• 9:26
  and as your tokens move up the sideboard, you then activate your robots that
• 9:31
  are in your lab. There's like a lot of these games, there's a
• 9:35
  lot of spinning plates to be managed, and it's a pretty good time.
• 9:41
  Sometimes when I think about this game, this is one of the ones that
• 9:43
  sort of borders on regret in terms of not having it. But then I
• 9:46
  just remember all the games that I like better that I haven't played as much,
• 9:50
  and I'm like, well, I should play those other games instead of
• 9:54
  regretting that I don't still own Aquosphere, even though I don't have time to
• 9:58
  play it either. But I did really enjoy and if I were a game
• 10:01
  club and someone was setting up and said, hey, Brennan, we're playing
• 10:01
  an aquasphere. You want to play, absolutely I do. So. That's
• 10:05
  Aquasphere by Stephenfeld from TC Minstro Games. I believe. Next up is Deep
• 10:11
  Sea Adventure. This is a game that makes a regular appearance here on the
• 10:15
  pod as I talk about it and play it relatively frequently. The first several
• 10:20
  times I played it, I did not own a copy. My design partner
• 10:22
  and friend Rob has a copy and would often feature it. It was a
• 10:28
  regular game that we used during our online game nights during the COVID pandemic and
• 10:33
  it works really well visually or over a zoom and so with that, from
• 10:39
  that perspective, I recommend it. And it's a really tight push your luck
• 10:41
  game. I like it a lot, and it's well worth checking out if
• 10:43
  you get a chance. That's Deep Sea Adventure. I do own a copy
• 10:48
  myself and play it occasionally. Next up is a game that I imagine is
• 10:52
  not appearing on anyone else's Top Games from twenty fourteen list because they're all dumb
• 10:56
  and don't have a copy. No, that's not nice. But this is
• 11:00
  a game that I backed on Kickstarter. It's called Strife Legacy of the Eternals,
• 11:03
  and boy do I like this game. In Strife, two players each
• 11:09
  start with a hand of nine cards. These nine cards have nine different roles
• 11:13
  on them, and each role has two powers. It's got the Action and
• 11:18
  then the Legacy power on the way the game works is that you have a
• 11:22
  series of locations and the players are battling for control of these locations over time,
• 11:28
  and when the game ends, the player who has the most points wins.
• 11:31
  You get points for having control of the locations. So that part sounds
• 11:35
  all fine and good. What makes the game really interesting is the actions and
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  the legacy component, or I think at legacy or legendary the legendary component.
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  So it works is on your first turn, you're gonna play one of your
• 11:50
  cards, and your opponent plays one of their cards, and whichever number is
• 11:54
  higher activates first, and then the other number activates, and then that's the
• 11:58
  end of the turn. Then you are going to activate and you're gonna play
• 12:03
  another card, and your opponent play another card. You do that same time
• 12:05
  simultaneously and reveal them. And now is where it gets interesting, because the
• 12:09
  player whose number is higher on this new card activates first, then the player
• 12:15
  on the other card activates, and then the player who has the higher numbered
• 12:20
  legendary card does activates its legendary power, and then the other player does theirs
• 12:26
  as well. I could have that backwards as possible, the legendary powers activate
• 12:30
  first, but the idea is, since each of the nine cards has two
• 12:33
  different powers and they're always going to be they're going to be using both.
• 12:37
  There's a ton of interaction between the cards, and a huge part of the
• 12:41
  game is figuring out what order you're going to play that and trying to anticipate
• 12:43
  which cards your opponent's going to play because it is a perfect information game.
• 12:48
  You both have the same nine cards and you both can play them in whatever
• 12:52
  order you like, so it's a really interesting game. The art is this
• 12:56
  cool kind of scratchy art. It's got a kind of fantasy bent that reminds
• 13:03
  me a little bit of Jacob Krisowsky from US the artists from Scythe not in
• 13:11
  the visuals but in the or not in the subjects, but in the style.
• 13:16
  And it also reminds me a little bit of the artist who did the
• 13:18
  new release of Avalon or previously did the Bloody In So that art style is
• 13:26
  really evocative, and then the locations have this kind of cool theme and then
• 13:31
  it's all about the card play. Maybe that's Strife Legacy of the Eternals.
• 13:35
  They also published a second one called Strife Smoke and Steam or something like that,
• 13:39
  and that one is also very good. You can even mix and match
• 13:43
  them as long as everybody has the same nine cards to start, and it's
• 13:48
  a lot of fun. So recommend that Next up is Valley of the Kings.
• 13:52
  This is a small box deck building game with a really interesting mechanism by
• 13:56
  which you are you score points by burying cards, meaning that you have these
• 14:01
  awesome cards that you want to use, but if you don't bury them,
• 14:03
  they're not worth anything. I have not played the original Value of the King's
• 14:07
  version because I have the Deluxe Final Edition that includes all the expansions and stuff.
• 14:11
  But Value of the Kings is a twenty fourteen game, so I'm going
• 14:15
  to call it that, and I really like it, So that's that pick.
• 14:20
  And finally, the last of my top ten games for twenty fourteen that
• 14:22
  aren't already in my top fifty is One Night Ultimate Werewolf. Now, this
• 14:26
  is a game that I will acknowledge It's not a great game, but I
• 14:28
  consistently have fun with it, and it is a game that continues to return
• 14:33
  to the table for casual groups. My board game club at my college really
• 14:35
  enjoys it. The players my family enjoys it when we get a chance to
• 14:41
  get it out. It is reliably fun for casual gamers, and I just
• 14:46
  have a good time playing it. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of
• 14:48
  my copy of One and Ultimate Werewolf, and I'm happy to keep playing it.
• 14:52
  That's One Ultimate Werewolf. I have three games for honorable mention games I
• 14:56
  really wanted to put in the list, but I just couldn't put them above
• 14:58
  the other choic that I had here. The first one is a lot Isla.
• 15:01
  This is a Stephenfeld game which is still in my collection. I really
• 15:05
  like it. It's an area control game. You're putting these pieces out on
• 15:09
  this sort of magical island and you're collecting tokens and you're scoring points based on
• 15:13
  how many of different tokens that you have multiplied by some multiplier. It's a
• 15:18
  very mechanical game, but the theme is really neat. You're collecting these tokens
• 15:22
  related to these animals, and the action selection mechanism is awesome. You get
• 15:26
  three cards, and each card has a phase A, phase B and phase
• 15:31
  D power, and on your turn you're going to put one of each card
• 15:35
  in one of those phases. So there's constantly this really interesting choice of what
• 15:39
  is the combination of these three cards that I'm going to use to best maximize
• 15:45
  how the play comes out on the board. It's really interesting and well worth
• 15:48
  looking at if you get a chance to check it out. That's la Isla.
• 15:52
  Love it. Our second honor we'll mention from twenty fourteen is Mithotopia This
• 15:56
  is a Martin Wallace deck builder, and some would say the best of the
• 15:58
  Martin Wallace deck between a few acres of Snow and Mithotopia and a handful of
• 16:03
  Stars. There are some people who really like Methotopia as the top one there.
• 16:08
  I've only played it twice, and I thought it was really good.
• 16:11
  It was on my top fifty at one point. It has since dropped off
• 16:14
  just because I haven't gotten it back to the table, but I do really
• 16:15
  like it. I want to mention it here. The last one is one
• 16:18
  of the first kickstarters that I did. I backed both of the expansions.
• 16:22
  I really like the idea of the game, but I haven't played it in
• 16:23
  forever. This is Heroes Wanted and Heroes Wanted. You play a bunch of
• 16:27
  sort of bumbling third tier superheroes who are trying to get into the news and
• 16:32
  the mega team from Town has disappeared, and so you're showing up trying to
• 16:37
  get headlines by making waves and capturing criminals. You're also allowed to fight each
• 16:41
  other like so you can punch the other person the other superheroes out of the
• 16:45
  way so that you can get the glory. It's got a really neat action
• 16:48
  selection mechanism with these cards. The heroes are this really fun sort of combination
• 16:53
  of different cards that allow you to be these sort of wacky superheroes, and
• 16:59
  it's just it's a lot of fun. I haven't played it in years,
• 17:02
  but I really would like to at some point again play it. I do
• 17:04
  still have it keeps staying through multiple coals, so it is meaningful to me
• 17:11
  and I would like to play it again sometime. That's heroes wanted, all
• 17:15
  right. So I'm gonna buzz through just a couple of other things, some
• 17:18
  favorites from twenty fourteen that I don't own, and a couple games from twenty
• 17:22
  fourteen that I really As I was looking through this, I was, man,
• 17:25
  I want to play that. The first is Favorites that I don't own.
• 17:30
  Alchemists is an excellent game. It's a sort of standard euro with interesting
• 17:34
  action selection. Reminds me a little bit of Dungeon Lords in terms of the
• 17:37
  way the action selection works, but has this neat component where you are trying
• 17:44
  to figure out how potions work and use an app to determine which potions do
• 17:48
  what. Really interesting, A little bit ahead of its time, great components
• 17:52
  Alchemists. Next up is Legendary Alien. Legendary is of course the deck building
• 17:56
  series from Upper Deck, and Legendary is the narrative twist on it that they
• 18:02
  did. It's focused on the four Alien movies. I really really like this
• 18:07
  system. I think it's very thematic. The idea of like, you get
• 18:11
  a face hugger on you, and then you have a chest burster somewhere in
• 18:14
  your deck. When that comes up, it bursts out and kills you.
• 18:15
  It's really delightful. I mean, it's gross, but fits the theme very
• 18:21
  very well. And I really like the challenges that you get when you play
• 18:25
  Alien or Legendary Alien. So check that out if you get a chance.
• 18:30
  Next up is Camel Up. Camel Up is maybe my favorite racing game.
• 18:33
  It's an interesting betting game where you have these camels that are moving around your
• 18:36
  betting on which camel's going to finish first. And the gimmick of the game
• 18:40
  is that when one camel lands on top of another, it's now riding it,
• 18:44
  and if the bottom camel has to move, any camels that are on
• 18:48
  top of it will move with it, so you get this nice sort of
• 18:51
  progression and then you're betting on the outcome of the race. So Camel Up
• 18:55
  check it out if you haven't played it, it's great, or camel Cup
• 18:57
  if you're interested in the complicated graphic design history of the original edition. Next
• 19:03
  up is Lagronha. This is the only game I'm mentioning here that I haven't
• 19:07
  actually played on the table. Lagranha is a It's a sort of standard market
• 19:15
  focused multi use cards game that has some really nice payoffs. It's one of
• 19:19
  those games that I played a bunch online, and I always was struggling a
• 19:22
  little bit with getting the system into my head, because when you're playing slowly
• 19:26
  asynchronously, it's very hard to keep track of some of those things. But
• 19:30
  I was still really interesting. I could tell why people like it so much,
• 19:34
  and it was excited to play it when I got a chance. That's
• 19:37
  La Granha. I'd love to play it. Or that is one that I
• 19:41
  don't own that I think is fun. Next up, we've got Onatama.
• 19:45
  Onatama is an excellent, excellent two player abstract game, sort of in the
• 19:51
  neighborhood of like light Chess. In the game, you play competing I don't
• 19:56
  know, Japanese Warriors of some sort. Your goal is to wipe out the
• 20:03
  opponent's leader or get one of your pieces on the opponent's throne, and that's
• 20:07
  kind of the game. But the big twist is you have two or three
• 20:11
  cards in hand, I think two, your opponent has two, and there's
• 20:14
  one in the discard pile in the middle, And on your turn you're gonna
• 20:17
  play one of your two cards that will let you move. You move your
• 20:19
  piece, and then you put the card that you just played in the discard
• 20:25
  and you take the card that was in the discard. So, in other
• 20:26
  words, every time that you play a move, you are giving that move
• 20:30
  to your opponent for their next turn or for the turn after the next,
• 20:34
  and that back and forth is really fascinating makes the game great. So if
• 20:41
  you get a chance to play on Atama, don't slow down on that one.
• 20:44
  Finally, there are three games that I've heard about that I want to
• 20:45
  play, and I would say they escalate in terms of complexity and depth.
• 20:52
  How The first one is Fields of RL. This is a Uve Rosenberg game
• 20:56
  that gets lots of love. It seems to drift in and out of print.
• 20:59
  I was getting confused with Aura at Labora, but frankly, any Uvi
• 21:03
  Rosenberg game that I hear about I want to try, with the exception of
• 21:06
  a Hengist I've heard that is horrible. That said, I might even be
• 21:10
  willing to try that, just because you know, trying out a horrible Uber
• 21:12
  Rosenberg game might be amusing. But I really do want to play Fields of
• 21:15
  varro Zaia. Legends of a Drift System is a sort of really famous early
• 21:21
  sandbox space game that is sort of legendary for its wild stuff, and I
• 21:26
  would love to try that sometime. And finally, Conbon is of an early
• 21:30
  vital asserted game that gets a lot of love. They've more recently released a
• 21:33
  new edition of it called Conbon ev. I'd be happy to play that one
• 21:37
  as well, and I consider that the same game, but the original Conbon
• 21:41
  is the one that came out in twenty fourteen, and I sure would enjoy
• 21:45
  playing that. So what twenty fourteen games do you have on your list that
• 21:51
  you wish I'd covered? Head over to board game geek Gild three two sixty
• 21:55
  nine and share your thoughts there. You can send me an email there as
• 21:56
  well, or a geek mail there as well, to Wombat nine two nine
• 22:00
  or you could send me a email at Brendan at rattleboxgames dot com. I
• 22:06
  look forward to hearing from you and learning what twenty fourteen games do you think
• 22:10
  are amazing? And I look forward to the next time I talk with you.
• 22:12
  I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mind w oh bye.
• 22:36
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