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Rando-writers revisited, again! · Pick Up and Deliver

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Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
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as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I walk
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home. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good evening, listeners. It's a
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lovely day here in suburban Chicago. I'm I'm walking home next to a car
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with a loud muffler and some cicadas. Do you hear that cicada? It
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is a lovely day. The weather, the sun is out. I would
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say it's probably in the high sixties temperature wise, just perfect for a nice
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walk home. And I talk about board games. So I had a stroke
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of luck or cursed stroke of luck, I guess if you're counting with my
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temptation to buy games at fair Game, I local game store. I went
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there and I perused the used game shelf, and I found a copy of
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Hadrian's Wall for twenty five dollars, which is probably I would put it on
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the knife edge in terms of value proposition, because as a new game it
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was like forty five or fifty dollars and maybe sixty, so it's a good
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deal for a new game. And actually looked it's unpunched, so it was
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not ever played, and all the pieces and cards were there, so it
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really is a very good copy of the game. And at twenty five dollars,
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it was right in that sweet spot where I didn't buy it right away.
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I'm like, oh, that's maybe too much, and then I thought
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about it for a while. I'm like, I've heard this game is really
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good. It's supposed to be fun solo, it's big and heavy. I
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haven't played very many big and heavy rolling rights, and I sort of went
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back and forth and I ended up picking it up. So the person who
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was selling it priced it exactly right because it was just at that point where
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yeah, I'll take that. So that was fun. But upon picking it
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up and looking at it, and basically, it's a couple of small tokens
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wooden pieces, four sort of cardboard player boards, and then two massive pads
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of paper, and every time you play, you're going to tear off one
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sheet off of each each pad, and each player is going to do that.
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So there's a reason that's massive pads of paper, because every time you
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play, you're using two of them. I didn't see if it was double
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sided or not. I hope it was, but there's certainly a lot of
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game play in the box. But I got to thinking about it and I
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realized in my head, I was like, oh, I haven't talked about
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games where you have a randomized event and then you write something on the podcast.
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Have I Yes? I have, Yes, I have twice. Actually
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in the there's an episode in the two hundreds and an episode in four hundreds
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where I talked about what I called Rando Writers as an umbrella term to cover
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both roll writes but also flipping Rights or any other kind of game where you
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have a randomized event and then you write something. The first episode is just
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called on Rando Writers or Rando Writers. The second one is called Rando Writers
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Revisited. And so this one's going to be called Rando Writers Revisited again because
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I have played I think I think I counted up one, two, three,
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four or five, six seven, or I've played six more Rando Writers
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since last time I did this, and I think it's worth talking about.
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I mean, I have talked about them, but it's worth noting the progression
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there and kind of pointing to them. And it's possible that I will Yep,
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I just thought of another one that I have not talked about. That's
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seven more, not counting Hadrian's Wall, of course, which I haven't played
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yet. What I thought I would do is I will talk about these seven
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r rando writers that put them into kind of conversation with the other ones I've
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covered already, and I'll go from there. If you want to hear the
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previous episodes that I did about rando writers, you can those over on rattlebox
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games dot com. In the show notes for this podcast, very quickly are
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the Here are the rando writers I talked about in the order that they're listed
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on the show notes for those two episodes. Yatzi Quis, Welcome to Welcome
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to Dino World. Coca Row, Avenue of the Kodama, Imperial Settlers,
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Rolling Right Cartographers, Rolled West Floor Plan, Railroad, Inc. Patchwork,
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Doodle, Riverside, Gonshan, Clever, Trails of Tucana, Three Sisters Fleet,
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The Dice Games, Silver and Gold, Lanterns, Longshot Dice, and
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Voyages. It's Lanterns the Dice game, of course. So I've talked about
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quite a few, but here are the new ones. First off, I
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have played a couple games that I would class as heavier Rolling Rights. One
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of those is Welcome to diner World, which I talked about before. The
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games from Motor City Games, particularly Three Sisters, and from Griffin Games Fleet
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the Dice Game. Those loaded rolling rights, you could kind of call those
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heavier rolling rights, but the heaviest one that I've played so far is Twilight
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Inscription. Twilight Inscription is a rolling right that comes with four sheets for the
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player to use. They come on whiteboard or erasable boards, and you get
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these special chalk pens to use, which I think are terrible. But on
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your turn, you're going to roll some dice and that's going to let you
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advance on one of the four You pick which of the four boards you want
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to advance on, and there's all kinds of symbols and combos to benefit from,
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and it is everything you would expect from a game meant to be kind
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of the Twilight Imperium of rolling rights. You can listen to a specific reflection
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on that in the Shooting from the Hip Triple Shot episode that I did about
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that game. I will say I found the idea of a heavy rolling right
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that involves a lot of tech, ticking off boxes and keeping track of stuff
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really interesting, and that was part of why having played Twilight Inscription, I'm
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interested in Hadrian's Wall. Even though I really Twilight Inscription definitely did not make
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a list of like games I want to buy. I would probably play it
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again if somebody got it out and said, hey, we're gonna play this,
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I'd probably play it again. But it wasn't my favorite, mostly because
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of the components, Like I really didn't I really really didn't like the markers
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that you use in that game. So that's Twilight Inscription. The next two
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that I want to talk about, I'm going to talk about that way because
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I feel like they're related because they use a similar mechanism. This is Truck
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twelve and on tour now. Truck twelve is about hiking, and they've done
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a number of different trek games. And the hiking that you do in the
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games, you're going like up a mountain and you're rolling dice and sort of
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laying them out on the page, and you're doing that in the context of
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these different numbers that you have. And the trick is when you put numbers
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on the sheet, you have to connect other numbers, either of the same
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type, and then you make a sort of set of numbers of the same
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number, or you have higher or lower value, and you have to make
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a chain of higher and lower values in your set and if your if you
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ever can't do that, then you take a penalty. The same mechan now
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that in Truck twelve, that's kind of the whole game. It goes relatively
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quickly. It's a simple game. In On Tour, it uses that same
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mechanism, but it spreads it out a bit more and it has a bit
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more going on. And that one you are managing a rock band that is
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touring the country and you're supposed to set up the route that you're going to
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take using these dice. Now. I played two games of On Tour on
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board game Arena, and I played one game of Truck twelve the pay on
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Paper at Origins in twenty twenty two, I think, and I enjoyed both
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the games to a degree, but they both it was like, I'm glad
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X parents that I probably don't want to play it again. Another one in
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that same vein, which was not on my list here but I just remembered,
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is Lumen. Lumen is a game that uses that same sort of chaining
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mechanism, and then there's a board that you're competing on as well, and
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on your paper you're writing the board, you're using tokens for a kind of
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area control battle instead of writing, So that one's a mix of like a
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roll and write and then a token based map game. Lumin is probably my
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favorite of those three. I liked it a bit better. There's a little
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more going on. I felt like I had a little more choice in what
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I was doing when I was playing the token playing the bit. But ultimately,
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I think that mechanism, the chaining of numbers just doesn't Oh if it
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doesn't click for me, it doesn't wow me in a way that makes me
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want to go buy a bunch of games with that mechanism. So that's Truck
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twelve on Tour and Lumen another game that I have played a few times and
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I actually have the original and the expansion. The expansion I have not tried
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yet. I can't remember the name of it. It's Pinball four kade,
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but I can't remember the super Pinball four kade is what it's called. This
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is a role in write with a whiteboard. In it, you are playing
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essentially a simulation of a pinball machine. One of the things I like about
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this game in particular, is that really does feel very thematic. The components
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are great. The piece that you're moving around the board is like a tiny
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metal pinball that's been cut in half. It's not metal, the piece is
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plastic, but it looks like a metal pinball, and it's cut in half
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so it looks like it's sticking out of the board, and then you're sliding
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it around. The mechanism is relatively easy to understand, but there's a lot
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of choices, and you're constantly making difficult decisions about where you want to put,
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where you want to spend your tokens to try to maximize your score before
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you drain the ball. I would say the one thing that this game misses
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is that it doesn't allow for you to play forever. Right. I guess
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really good pinball players could play for a very long time. This game,
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you're much more limited in how long you can play, but that's okay.
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You can still get tons of points if you know what you're doing and luck
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is on your side. The original game comes with four boards, and then
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the sequel comes with four more, and then they've done I think two other
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sets. There's a Christmas set which I haven't played, and a Star Trek
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set, which I haven't played, but both of those look like they would
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be fun. I probably wouldn't buy the Star Trek set, it's just not
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my bag. The Christmas set I might, but I really enjoy that game,
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and it's pretty different than anything else out there, so definitely recommend trying
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it if you get a chance. That's super Pinball four Kid. The next
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three in the last three of the Roland Rights that I wanted to talk about
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are all like Twilight Inscription adaptations of other games into Roland Rite form. To
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start with is Rajas Dice. Now. I've only played the regular Rajas of
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the Ganges a couple times on Yukata, and then I played Raja's Dice on
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Yukata, and it turns out I really like that game. I like the
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way that the combos chain better. I understand the mechanisms a little better than
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I do, and Rajah's Dice or the Raja's the regular Dice game, and
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so all in all, Rajah's Dice, the rolling Right game is far more
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to my taste. So I'm really glad to have played that one, and
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I've played in a number of times. It is combotastic. So you have
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lots of turns where you're not doing a lot, but then every now and
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again you'll have a turn where you really hit it, and that is fantastic
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when you get one of those turns. So Rajah's Dice definitely worth checking out
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and worth pursuing at least to try. And you can play that on Ukata
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dot d if you want to play it without buying it. The next one
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is Quicks Deluxe. Now I've talked about Quicks a lot. It is one
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of my favorite rolling rights. Quicks Deluxe I picked up and it has a
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couple innovations, the main one being it has the Quicks mix boards. So
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in Quicks, the main thing is you are increasing four tracks, one relay
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to each color of the four mean colors of Dice. In the Quicks mix
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version, you're still upgrading four tracks. There's still four colors, but every
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third number on the track the color changes. So you have two, three,
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four in yellow, you have then five six seven, then five six
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seven in green, eight nine ten in blue, and eleven twelve locke in
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red or whatever. So you have this mix and in each row there's a
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different color in the row. So as you're going the number of marks you
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have for a particular color is much more complicated and much more interesting. So
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that's the quick Mix side of Quick DeLux. I will say the downside to
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Quicks Deluxe is that the white boards are terrible. It comes with these white
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boards, and I think it's actually the markers that come with them are just
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really bad. The markers don't work very well or something about the combination of
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the markers and the boards. So I find that while the boards are great,
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you'll need to supply your own markers because the markers that comes with are
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not good. That said, I would almost prefer just to be able to
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buy a pad of the quicks Mix pages and put those in my Regular quicksbox,
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because I think the roll and right, the compact form of Regular Quicks
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is so perfect that I wish that I had that to play all the time.
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Right. The last game that I wanted to wanted to talk about was
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Asle of Cats flippin draw or drawing right, drawing right, that's what it
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is. Asle of Cats Drawing Right actually came about during COVID. Frank West,
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the head person at as of a City of Games, which makes Asle
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of Cats. He developed this new copy, this new game of Isle of
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Cats. It's called Isle of Cats Drawn Right as a remote playable version of
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Asle of Cats for people to play during COVID. It's a bingo style game
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where everybody can select something and you all play at the same time. And
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it went over really well. It was a lot of fun. Actually played
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it several times as my game that I was leading in our COVID remote times
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at Tago Gaming. So when the Isle of Cats Drawn Right came out,
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actually didn't buy it because I felt like, oh, I can already play
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this game with the stuff that's there. But when Christmas came around and I
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was trying to figure out what to get my wife, I thought she would
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like that one. So I got that for her and it fit pretty well
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into our collection because we like Aisle of Cats a lot. In the Draw
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and Right game, you there's a grid of cards and you're picking one row
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of cards to draw the shapes into your board, and you also use those
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to get the lessons that will let you score. And you have these powers
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you can use that let you break the rules a little bit, and it's
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a lot of fun. It's not as good as the regular draw Aisle of
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Cats, which I really like, but it is pretty good and worth checking
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out if you get a chance. So next up I'm gonna try Adrian's Wall.
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That'll probably be on my top of the stack list for October. But
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in the meantime, now you know the updates on my latest games of Something
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in Writing in my collection? What Something in Writing games do you enjoy?
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Head over to board game geek Guilt three two six nine and share your thoughts
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there. I'd love to hear from you. You can send me a direct
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message on board game Geek oneb at nine two nine, or send me an
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email Brendan at ratibox games dot com. Thanks for joining me on my walk
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today. I hope your next walk as its pleasant as the mindlaws. Golle
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bye. Brought to you by Rattlebox Game