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Pisces Gamers (Astrology files) · Pick Up and Deliver

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(soft music)
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- Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver, the Podcast
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where I pick up my audio recorder as I leave the library
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and deliver an episode to you while I walk home.
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I'm Brendan Riley.
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(upbeat music)
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Good afternoon listeners, it's a lovely blustery day
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here in suburban Chicago.
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It's still late February, although if my math is correct,
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this episode's coming out in early March,
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so you're traveling back in time like a week.
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Yep, you know it.
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So I was looking back over episodes I'd done recently,
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trying to think about, like, what should I do?
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And I found a segment that I did like episode 680 or so
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that was meant to be kind of a new format,
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a new way to approach talking about board games
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and generally what I do with a new segment
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is if I enjoy doing it and I didn't hear from anyone
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that it was stupid, then I put it in the category of,
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'yeah, I can do that again.'
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This one of course is set up to be able to do 12 different
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episodes using this format.
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And so I figure if I do three or four a year
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in the next three seasons, I'll do all of them.
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Or am I doing more often?
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Who knows?
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We'll see.
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But this is board game astrology.
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I can't remember what I called it.
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The idea is that I look up a description of one of the
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astrological star signs and then I talk about games
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that people with that star sign might like.
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I do want to caveat, this isn't really a very important
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or significant or, to be frank, thing I think is real,
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but I find it interesting and reading the description
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did give me some keywords that I can use
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to come up with some game suggestions.
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So if you are a Pisces, meaning that your birthday
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was in late February through late March,
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you might be somebody who enjoys these games.
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So according to the webpage that I found,
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link in the show notes, the first keyword for Pisces
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is "intuitive."
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So what are some games... and I planed the keywords out,
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but I did not plan what games I'm gonna recommend.
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So this is off the top of the old dome.
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So what games are intuitive?
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Seems like the first game that comes to mind is The Mind.
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Now The Mind is a game that was really popular
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a couple several years ago.
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The premise is pretty simple.
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Everybody's got some cards in their hand
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and you're kind of working together to play them in order
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from lowest to highest.
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When your group is in sync, there's a really interesting
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element in which you play them in the right order
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and it's fascinating to kind of see how quickly people
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are able to get on the same wavelength and match up.
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Now you have to get through five rounds of the game.
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The fifth round is really hard because each round
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you get one more card.
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So the first round everybody gets one card.
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The fifth round everyone gets five cards,
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meaning if you're playing like three players,
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there are 15 cards that you need to play in order.
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And I think the game gives you like three lives.
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If you play in the wrong order, you lose a life
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and if you lose all three lives, the game's over.
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I think you can get an extra life at some point.
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And now that I think about it,
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maybe you play more than five rounds.
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I feel like you play more than five rounds.
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Maybe it's eight rounds?
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Oh, it depends on how many players you have.
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The more players you have, the fewer players,
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the more rounds.
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So a two player game, you have to play eight rounds.
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I guess so that the top one you're getting
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to 15 or 16 cards, which is the hardest mode.
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So the first and most intuitive game that I would think of,
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I would say is The Mind.
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Another game that I would put in this category is
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Mysterium or its slightly simpler
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sibling Mysterium Park.
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Both of these are games in which you are trying to communicate
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with one another using sort of abstract or dreamy pictures
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and trying to have the other person kind of get what you're
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saying based on those pictures.
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And so the elements that feel intuitive here
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are can I intuit what you were trying to say?
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Will we be able to connect on that level?
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And you can understand what I'm trying to say.
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There's an interesting element where the way that this works
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is the players collaboratively need to intuit what the ghost
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is trying to say solitarily.
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So there is an element of teamwork in trying
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to interpret the ghost's visions that feels a little bit
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different than intuition.
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But at the heart of it, if you are highly intuitive,
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I suspect Mysterium would be another game you'd enjoy it.
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And finally, it feels like a whole genre of games
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that run on intuition are social deduction games.
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So just for the sake of simplicity, let's say,
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The Resistance is a game that you would be very good at
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if you are somebody who is highly intuitive.
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So if you're a Pisces and the highly intuitive part
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fits your brand, perhaps you should try The Resistance
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in which you're trying to gauge, are these people lying to me
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or not?
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The next keyword that the profile offered was sympathetic
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or sensitive or empathetic.
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This one feels more like it's a whole category of games.
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If you're somebody who feels really sensitive when
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you have to do something that affects another player
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or maybe you get really affected by other players,
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one, maybe you want to go for cooperative games where you're
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not affecting another player negatively.
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You're not doing something to them.
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Although many cooperative games still do have an element
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in which I can make a mistake and screw our team up.
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There's an element also of games that allow us to play
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side by side and sure there's a winner,
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but it doesn't really feel like it's about winning.
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It feels like it's about doing a thing.
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Often these are games that involve building stuff,
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Agricola.
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Can feel really vicious if someone else takes the thing you want.
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But in my experience, most of the time,
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I'm fighting with you a little bit,
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but mostly I'm just fighting with the system,
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trying to find the best combination of things to do
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with the cards.
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And if I win, great, but what feels better is just
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if I feel like I did a good job.
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If I captured the system in a way that accelerated my score
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and resulted in a really interesting outcome,
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that's what makes Agricola feel interesting to me.
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So I guess I would say for the sensitive category,
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I would say, "Carebear games are probably the way to go."
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That you could do cooperative games or you do games that
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are heavily care-bear,
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or also sort of side-by-side non-interactive Euro games.
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You know, one of my favorite games that's like that
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is Bärenpark.
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Now Bärenpark definitely has some race elements to it.
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If I can see that you're going for a thing
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and I could get there a little faster,
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I can block you from getting the top reward
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or I can block you from getting that first statue.
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But for the most part, in Bärenpark,
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what I'm doing is wrestling with the tiles that are available
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and wrestling with the cards that I have
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or wrestling with the situation I'm in
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to try to just do the best I can.
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And sometimes that means I win, some people I don't,
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but it's a puzzle for myself more than a puzzle with you
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or a puzzle against you.
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And then of course, the most sensitive of sensitive games
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would be a C.
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This is a game from Kevin Wilson,
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who's, or Richard Launius, Kevin Wilson,
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who's a fairly prominent game designer of often
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Euro trash or a merit trash style games,
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American style games that have a significant amount
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of player conflict and luck.
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But Wilson also talked about having created this game
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just to relax and he showed it to some friends
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and they're like, yeah, you should publish this.
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It's a great little relaxation device.
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And so it's fun to have that available.
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So I would say if you're looking for a sensitive
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or empathetic games, you want to co-op something like Hanabi
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or you could have Care Bear games like Bärenpark
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or a game that's just about self soothing
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and self and that would be Gentle Rain.
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All right, next up it describes the symbol of the Pisces
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as two fish swimming in opposite directions.
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So kind of going the opposite direction from sympathetic,
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I'm thinking about like great two player games
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where you are swimming in opposite directions.
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It is a tug of war style two player game.
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My favorite of these is the sort of Reiner Knizia
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line of things that we have to challenge.
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Battle line is the sort of high version of that.
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I've never played Battle Line.
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I've always played Shotten Totten,
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but it's the same deal.
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Let me have Lost Cities, which is kind of the highest achievement
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in that category where you have a series of things
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that you're fighting over and you try to win them
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and you're doing that in competition with somebody else.
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More recently I played Drones versus Seagulls,
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which has a similar kind of pulling in opposite directions
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approach.
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So I could point to that as well if you're thinking
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about like two similar fish pulling in opposite directions.
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And then I would say as a third version of that,
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thinking about Seven Wonders duel.
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Seven Wonders duel is a really interesting version
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of that kind of game because we are just,
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we're going head to head and we have opposite approaches
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to things.
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I am trying to get some stuff you're trying to get another.
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And there are a couple places where we are competing
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to get there first like science tokens.
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If one of us gets enough science tokens,
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we automatically win.
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But there is a direct tug of war on the military track,
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where if I pull the military track toward me,
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it moves away from you.
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And if you let it get too far toward me, I win.
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So there is this really interesting back and forth
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going on in Seven Wonders duel that I think fits the approach
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really well and makes for an interesting game.
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So when we think about two fish swimming in opposite directions,
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I think of two player tug of war games.
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And those are three examples.
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Finally, the last element of Pisces,
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I like to just look at the icon itself.
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And that would be fish.
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I talked about two fish swimming in opposite directions,
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but I focused on the opposite directions part.
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Now let's think about the fish.
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What are some of my favorite games that involve fish?
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One that came to mind first was Oceans,
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which is the kind of newer version of evolution
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takes place in the ocean.
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That one I thought was fine, but it didn't really wow me.
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Another game that came to mind as a fish game is Finspan.
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I haven't tried that one yet.
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It seems to be a sort of lighter version of Wingspan
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less complicated in its fish themed apparently.
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Haven't played that one yet.
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I certainly would play it if someone put it in front of me,
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but Jenny and I really like Wingspan,
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so there's no reason for me to get one of the other spans.
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I thought Wyrmspan was fine,
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but I didn't like the extra complexity over Wingspan.
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And I suspect Finspan will be fine,
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but I won't like the under complexity.
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So what are some fish related games that I do like?
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Well, that's funny, as I was walking to the library
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in the previous episode, one of my neighbors
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came out and got in his car,
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and now that I am arriving home from the library,
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he is arriving home in his car as well, so that's funny.
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All right, so three more games that actually are about fish
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that I like.
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The first one I'll say is Fleet: the dice game.
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Now, I haven't played Fleet the card game a couple times.
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I thought it was fine, but Fleet: the dice game,
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is really interesting.
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It is sort of the first of the Matt Riddle, Ben Pinchback.
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What do they call them?
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Deluxe, not Deluxe, like loaded roll and writes,
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where you have just this huge array of things
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you can check off based on what you roll,
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and you get points based on these sort of cascading bonuses
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that you pick.
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So it's an element of kind of a little bit of playing your luck,
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but a lot of just sort of trying to mix those things together
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and get a nice cascaded bonuses.
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The second thing I'll point to as fish related
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would be Ark Nova.
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The Ark Nova Marine Worlds expansion particularly
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adds a significant number of fish to the board.
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It adds aquariums as a thing you can build,
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and it has this whole reef mechanism
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that I think is really interesting and fun.
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The fish are really expensive,
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but every time you add another one with a reef,
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it triggers again a whole bunch of times.
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So I really like the combination of things that happen
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when you have the reef creatures in your zoo.
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I also just like the fish that they've picked.
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They're fun to look at and it makes for a nice zoo
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if you get the chance.
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So the Ark Nova Marine World's expansion is a nice fit.
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And finally, the last game I want to point to
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as being a fun fish related game would be Nusfjord.
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Nusfjord is of course about a town full of fishing people.
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Players run fishing companies.
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You're trying to get lots of fish,
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and there's a big element in which your town has elders,
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and you wanna make sure that the elders are fed,
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but then they also help you with your company.
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And so like the wisdom of the elders helps with the company.
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And of course the resource that you're trading in,
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a lot of the time is fish.
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You're spending fish to do everything.
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So Nusfjord is perhaps the most fish focused game
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that I have even though it's really about a business.
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Now that I'm thinking about paying for things with fish,
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I will offer a honorable mention to Isle of Cats,
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which also uses fish as the main currency.
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You pay fish to catch the cats and to buy the cards.
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So.
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Well that's about it for Pisces related games for me.
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If you are a Pisces head over to Boardgamegeek Guild 3269
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and let me know what games you enjoy
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and whether or not you feel like being a Pisces
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has influenced the games that you like.
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You can reach out to me directly.
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And Wombat929 is my username on board GameGeek
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or my email address is Brendan at Rattleboxgames.com
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I appreciate you joining me today
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and I hope that the weather is pleasant for you
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so that your next walk will be as pleasant as my ones.
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Bye bye.
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