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

Transcript

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

0:01
Welcome back to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio
0:05
recorder as I step out of my house and record an episode to you while
0:09
I walk around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon, friends.
0:23
It is February seventh, and I'm finally back. A combination of lots of
0:28
different things have gotten in the way of me getting back onto the podcasting horse,
0:33
no specific things in particular, but it's been a little while. Now
0:37
that we're in February, I thought I would start with a episode kind of
0:41
letting you know how my January went gaming wise, and started giving some plans
0:44
for the upcoming year. Well, I do want to say I've missed you
0:48
all, listeners. It's been a busy month, and it was a busy
0:54
December and a very busy January, and I just did not have the bandwidth
0:57
to record episodes. And though the whole point of the podcast, of the
1:02
way I do it is meant to be something I do during a time I
1:03
wouldn't do anything anyway, it's still it just got got out of me.
1:07
So I'm glad to be back. I'm not one hundred percent sure how regular
1:11
this is going to be. I would like to do it a couple times
1:12
a week as per usual, get back into the habit of doing it when
1:15
I'm walking home from the train as was the original design, which would be
1:19
twice every three or three times every two weeks. I have two days a
1:23
week that I'm going into campus right now, but one of those every other
1:26
week i'm driving in, so but I also need a little more exercise on
1:29
the days when I'm not going, I might start taking walks. So we'll
1:32
see. I'm not sure exactly what this year, at least for the next
1:36
couple months, what the schedule is gonna look like. But I'm gonna try
1:38
get to try to get back to regular posting. But it is February and
1:42
I haven't been an episode since January, so it feels like I should start
1:47
with the Top of the Stack. Apologies if you're listening to these, you
1:49
know, sort of shotgun style, and I just did a Top of the
1:53
Stack like two episodes ago, but it's been a month for me, So
1:56
here we go. Top of the Stack, February twenty twenty five. This
2:00
is also this would be the first episode of the next season. I did
2:06
not end up doing one hundred episodes in the last season, so the number
2:08
is no longer a round number. But I decided seasons are going to be
2:13
by calendar year, not by number, so or starting in February is always
2:19
the new season. So we'll see if I'm If I'm extra ambitious, maybe
2:23
I can make up those thirteen missing episodes and we'll end the year on episode
2:29
what seven hundred. I think this is season seven, So that's kind of
2:34
where I am in terms of the episode numbers onto the top of the sack.
2:38
So in January of twenty twenty four, I played sixty five plays of
2:43
forty games. A significant chunk of those were online. I did not have
2:46
time for a ton of in person playing, although it wasn't nothing my shelf
2:51
of opportunity. This year, I'm trying to again helve. I started the
2:54
year with sixty six games on my shelf, which is more than I started
3:00
last year with. So I did not make any progress in terms of getting
3:02
rid of games on my shelf opportunity. So my shelf of opportunity goal is
3:07
to reduce the shelf by half from sixty six to thirty three games. Instead,
3:13
I went up three games and at sixty nine now, so not great
3:16
at that so far, we'll see how we can get rolling. I also
3:20
should reduce the collection size. I still have in my head that an ideal
3:23
collection size is about five hundred games for the space that I have for storage,
3:29
and I'm at five point eighty one now, so not reducing. My
3:34
most played game this month was frost Haven with four plays and in real life
3:38
and Matainai online with four asynchronous plays. I had four games on the top
3:44
of the stack, as you remember, I consider it a successful month if
3:46
I play three of them, and starting off the year awkwardly, I only
3:51
played one. I did manage to play Vagrant Song, which was my top
3:54
choice for the month, so I'm glad I got that done. Future Brendan
4:00
here, I made a mistake when I was reporting my top of the stack.
4:04
The top of the stack that I was using was actually the December games,
4:08
not the January games, which means that I actually played two games instead
4:12
of one. The January games were Vagrant Song as reported, but then it
4:16
was dream Home, my Little Scythe and Star Wars the deck Building Game.
4:21
You'll hear me talk about Star Wars the Deck Building Game a little bit later.
4:25
I played that as well. As Vagrant Song. I did not,
4:28
however, get to Dream Home or My Little Scythe My apologies for the confusion.
4:32
If you're hearing me refer to other games that I did or didn't play,
4:36
that was a mistake. Those were the games from December, not the
4:39
games from January. So I got two out of three, not one out
4:43
of three. Thanks. I only tried four new games this month, which
4:50
is not very many. You'll recall most months it's somewhere in the neighborhood of
4:55
eight to ten that I try. So four this really speaks to how a
5:00
abbreviated my game playing was this month in terms of in person and the main
5:03
thing was that I missed two different toggle game nights, one for medical reasons
5:09
and one for scheduling reasons, and so between those two that's a big chunk
5:14
of my game playing for the month, especially where I play new games,
5:17
because I go to a game club and people bring games I haven't played.
5:20
So but the games I did play, I played Star Wars, the deck
5:24
building game, which was given to me by my friend Chris Chris listens Hi,
5:28
and that was really pretty good. I'll talk about that more later.
5:30
We played Vagrant Song like I said, I tried Nucleum, which is a
5:34
new game from that group of Italian designers. It was made by Cranial Creations.
5:42
It's sort of like if there was a sort of spectrum that had barrage
5:45
and brass on it, Nucleum kind of lands in between them, with a
5:49
little bit more brass than barrage. I like it, looking forward to playing
5:54
it again. I don't think I like it enough to buy it. And
5:56
it's not better than Brass, but still very good. It's Nucleum. And
6:01
then I also tried Something Wild Marvel Holiday Baby Groot. This is a very
6:06
simple card game that my son got for Christmas, and we busted it out
6:11
and played it had a good time. Something Wild it's called. I tried
6:15
out one expansion this month that was ark Nova Marine Worlds and I really like
6:18
it. I'm very glad to have it, and it will just stay in
6:21
my set from now on. It makes everything better, doesn't make anything worse.
6:26
It's not any harder, so it's not like it adds a whole bunch
6:28
of new stuff to learn. It's great. So ark Nova Marine Worlds gets
6:31
top marks from me and is an incomer into the collection and then finally I
6:36
did dust off one game this year that was City of Horror. Now,
6:41
as often happens in my zombie class, I stayed after word after my zombie
6:46
class to play games on a couple of the Fridays, and City of Horror
6:50
is one of the games we played. So this game is sort of barely
6:56
dusty because it was a game that I hadn't played for a year. In
7:00
six days, so it was dusty. But it really is just sort of
7:03
like which week I bring it to the game club or to the zombie class,
7:08
whether we play it within a year or not. People who are picky
7:11
would probably have a little bit of a grace period over a year that the
7:14
game wouldn't count as dusty yet. But you gotta have a drop line at
7:16
some point, so I drawed it exactly a year. So that is my
7:21
reports on the normal lists. Now, last time we talked, I had
7:26
not yet decided what my ten for ten was going to be. I think
7:29
maybe I had decided, but I hadn't come up with the list yet.
7:31
And this year I have decided I'm just doing my own ten for ten.
7:35
I'm not doing the challenge thing. I found that it was I wasn't getting
7:42
it done. I was basically just completing those challenges by accident. I wasn't
7:46
going out of my way to do them, and so it felt silly to
7:48
do it. So I'd rather focus and actually complete my ten for ten this
7:51
year. Or it's kind of a ten by ten what I did. I
7:56
think I mentioned that I might be doing this last time, but I've confirmed
7:59
yep. That's what we're doing. Is we picked ten categories of game,
8:03
and as I play them, I'm marking them played, and then over the
8:09
course of the year, hopefully I'll play these hundred games that fit in these
8:11
categories. As you may remember, I have a wooden piece in our family
8:18
house, in our living room that displays meples in these sort of rows,
8:22
and you could label the front of each row. It's meant to be like
8:26
a ten for ten display, and interestingly it has eleven columns because it was
8:31
meant to be a thing where you put one mapule in each row and then
8:35
you move it up one notch from zero to ten as you play games.
8:39
But instead, somehow I ended up with one hundred meeples, maybe as you
8:43
fill it up as you play, but there's one hundred and ten spots.
8:46
So I'm not sure exactly what to do with the finishing one. But in
8:52
the last time in what pass that I've done is I just have a gap
8:54
in the middle. Once you get to five, you leave a gap to
8:56
make it easy to count. So here are the ten category is that we
9:00
have on the board. Now, some of these are going to be a
9:03
little easier to achieve than others, but that's fine. When you have a
9:07
ten by ten board, it's nice to have some gimmes, which means the
9:11
things that aren't gimmeis you have to do a little more work on. We
9:15
have legacy Slash campaign games. That's pretty self explanatory, I should think,
9:20
and we've already played five of those. I mentioned. Frost Haven has been
9:24
getting play. We've played frost Haven twice, Vagrant Song once, and Segrata
9:28
Artisans twice. So I imagine the Legacy Slash campaign category will be finished by
9:35
March at the latest. I wouldn't be surprised. Well, we haven't played
9:39
very many more in February here. It's been really busy in the last part
9:43
of January in the early part of February, but it wouldn't surprise me if
9:46
we finish well ahead of schedule. Next category we have Nature slash Animal.
9:50
Now, these are games where nature or animals are depicted in a more realistic
9:56
way, So something like Wingspan would fit in there, but we have not
10:00
played any games in that category yet, so I'm gonna have to get on
10:03
that. My guess is most of the plays there will be Wingspan, Parks,
10:09
Cascadia. I would imagine those three maybe Pneumalia as well. I guess
10:13
New York Zoo would fit in that category. Into any new games that we
10:18
get that meet that requirement. The third one is a three hour game,
10:22
onto like ten three hour game three plus games that tak three hours or more,
10:26
and the two I've played so far are front. One of our plays
10:30
of frost Haven went over three hours and my play of Nucleum went over three
10:35
hours, So those two we've got two plays so far. Then, aside
10:39
from nature and animal games, we also have acute animal games. Now,
10:43
this is meant to be games where we sort of have anthropomorphized animals doing cute
10:48
human stuff, like running businesses. That's what that's the idea of the Cute
10:52
Animal category. And of course Everdell is the sort of poster game for this
10:56
category, and sure enough we played Everydell, so we have one play of
11:01
Everde Next up, I have novelty games. This one's gonna take a little
11:05
more effort. But part of the reason I put on here is I own
11:07
a number of novelty games that I haven't played, and I would like to
11:11
get them played, and so I put them on my challenge list. This
11:13
might involve doing a little bit of effort to take them to toggle to play
11:16
them, see if I can get people who are gamed to try out these
11:20
different weird games, weird, cheesing, obscure games. But yeah, so
11:24
that's that's kind of the point of that. It isn't a huge piece of
11:30
my game collection, but a useful one or an important one. So those
11:35
are novelty games. So far as zero of those, then the next one
11:37
is expanded. By expanded, I mean playing a game where the expansion is
11:43
in the game and being used. So like, for example, when we
11:46
played ark Nova and we added in the Marine World's expansion, that would be
11:52
an expanded game. Now not allowed. There are legacy games that have built
11:58
in expansions as you're playing, in part because that's a different category the Legacy
12:01
and campaign game. I would not consider those expanded. Also, I would
12:05
exclude here Arkham Horror, which is a game that's got expansions but is not
12:09
going to be part of what I'm looking at there. But we've played one
12:13
of those, and then the last three columns or three rows. I have
12:16
twenty six different spots and then four more. So the idea is I want
12:22
to play one game starting with each letter of the alphabet, of course of
12:24
the year, and four games that have numbers in them. They don't have
12:28
to start with a number, but they have to have a number in the
12:31
title, and the number of digits in the number is the requirement. So
12:37
I have four spots for numbers. First one is a game that has a
12:41
single digit number in the title. Second one would be two digit number,
12:46
third one would be three digit number, fourth one would be a four digit
12:48
number. So those would be the remaining thirty spots. I've already played quite
12:54
a bit. I played Castles of Mad King Ludwig for C, I played
12:56
frost Haven for F, ghost Story for G, Last Time on Earth for
13:01
L, Star Wars, Deck Building Game for US, Quicks for Q,
13:05
and that's it. So those that's my top ten. I will give you
13:13
updates as we go along on games that add plays. The other thing I'm
13:16
doing this year, which I did not do in the past and I wish
13:18
I had, is I printed out a piece of paper that I'm keeping with
13:22
my top ten display. Are my ten for ten display that shows every game
13:26
I've played and when I played it. So as I'm playing games and adding
13:31
them to the shell or to the display as like counted for the system,
13:35
then I am also revealing to myself or keeping track for myself of which plays
13:41
and when count for those. Finally, just a matter of physical administration.
13:46
I've had problems with this display with the mepals in the little spots falling off,
13:52
and so I took some I have some blue tack and I'm sticking it
13:54
to the back of the mepals as I stick them on. So I thought
13:58
you'd be interested in that. Okay, almost done. Like I said,
14:03
there are sixty nine games on my shelf of opportunity. I acquired four games
14:07
five games this in January. At the beginning of the month, I had
14:13
five hundred and seventy six games. I acquired porta, Nigra and CHARTI party
14:18
at Goodwill porta Negro was kind of expensive. Actually it was ten bucks,
14:22
which is right on the cusp. But I remember that game getting pretty good
14:26
reviews. Lots of people think it was pretty interesting, and it's a wolf
14:28
game, it's a Cramer and Keesling game, so I thought, yeah,
14:31
I'll give it a try, and it's in good condition. So happy to
14:35
get that and try it out where I haven't tried it out yet to get
14:39
that. And then Charity Party is a party game that I'm sure will get
14:43
played at some point, probably at my board game club at school. I
14:48
also, when we were visiting Indianapolis, the local game store there, the
14:52
Game Preserve or one of them, has an incredible selection, and last year
14:58
they had Woodcraft, and I would have purchased it, but I had already
15:01
pre ordered it from my game shop and then my game shop didn't get Woodcraft
15:05
for me until like June, and so this year I did not pre order
15:11
the latest Vladimir Suki game, and sure enough they had a copy of it
15:13
there. So I have my grubby little hands on Evacuation, which as of
15:18
two weeks ago had only been out for a week in the US. So
15:22
really excited to play that. And then I had some Amazon points and I
15:30
had a purchase because I'm using I'm playing mystery games in my board game class
15:35
and one of the games we're playing is White Hall Mystery, which is a
15:37
game about it's a hidden movement game where you're chasing somebody, and so we
15:43
had Whitehall Mystery. I needed to get a copy of that because I didn't
15:48
have it. And then I also picked up Brian Boru, which you'll maybe
15:54
remember. I think I mentioned that I played that in December with my friend
15:56
Chris, Hi Chris, and it stuck with me. I thought it was
16:00
really neat, very interesting, beautiful art, and I'm excited to try it
16:03
again. So I picked it up to be played at future dates by me,
16:08
and I brought it Totago the last two weeks but haven't gotten it played
16:11
yet. Maybe next week. So that brings it up to five to eighty
16:17
one as my collection size. I also got a copy of Lost Ruins of
16:22
Arnac Missing Expedition, which makes it a co op. I'm really excited to
16:26
try that. So finally I had to designate games I want to play in
16:30
February. As you remember, I'm going to pick four games each month.
16:34
To try to play, and I think giving myself a little more room to
16:38
catch up. On the top of the sack, sometimes I will put games
16:41
in there, or you know, I often will put games in there again.
16:45
So as I was putting together the top of the sack, I decided
16:51
to keep a couple of games that I had last time. So the four
16:53
games I picked for February are Evacuation Alien, Fate of the Nostromo, Hunted
17:00
wood Ridge that's a solo game, and Brian Boreux. So those are the
17:04
four games I want to get played in February. It's already February seventh,
17:07
so I'm under the gun already. You remember February as shorter than the other
17:12
months, although it's a leap year, so we do have a twenty ninth
17:15
day in February. Well, listeners, that brings me to the end of
17:21
my monthly report, so I thought i'd take a minute here before I get
17:23
home to talk about the podcast. So I think this year will continue much
17:29
as it has in the past. I'm trying to let go of some of
17:33
my feeling of obligation to churn out two or three episodes a week, although
17:37
often what happens, as you know from long experience, is after a dry
17:41
spell that I get into it again and I really am able to publish a
17:44
bunch. One of the big factors in me not publishing in the last couple
17:48
months was that my computer died. My main computer that I used to do
17:52
all my work suffered some fatal visual errors and became unusable, and it was
17:57
eight years old, so it wasn't worth trying to repair again. Instead,
18:02
I went and got a new computer, really snazzy, h does all the
18:07
stuff you'd wanted to do, works nicely, has lots of room, and
18:11
I'm just I'm very glad to have another computer, a new one that works
18:15
well. So part of the reason I fell out of the habit was that
18:19
I was not I was not a place where I could easily edit new episodes.
18:23
I could do it on my laptop, but my school laptop just didn't
18:27
have the right combination of easy to use things that made it practical to post
18:33
episodes. So being back on my main computer, I now can do so,
18:38
and looking and looking forward to doing this. This will be the first
18:41
one. First episode I edited on my computer and I posted the day I
18:44
recorded, speaking of which I am going to post a second another episode after
18:51
this one, probably today, maybe tomorrow. That is old, so on
18:56
lookout for that. Well. That brings me to the end of HI time
19:00
recording for you right now. That brings me to the end of my walk.
19:03
I'm out of practice. Yeah, so I'd love to hear from you.
19:07
You can email me Brendan at rattleboxgames dot com, or you could send
19:11
me a direct mail message on Board game Geek Wombat nine two nine if you
19:15
post in the Pickup and Deliver guild. I'm a little behind on my notification,
19:18
so I am catching up, but slowly, slowly, and so I
19:22
may not see it for a little while. If you have something direct to
19:25
say, board game Geek message is probably the most efficient way to get a
19:27
hold of me. I hope that you'll post a little bit about what you've
19:30
been playing. I'd love to hear where you all are. If anyone's still
19:33
listening, a little note to say, hey, I didn't remove you from
19:37
my feed, and I'm happy to talk with you about games again. So
19:41
welcome to season seven and let's enjoy it. Thanks for joining me on my
19:47
walk today. I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine was bye bye,