Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Praga Caput Regni & Underwater Cities (Sibling Rivalry)
Transcript
- Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step out for a walk and deliver an episode to you while I stroll around. I'm Brendan Riley. [up-tempo intro music plays] Well, good afternoon, listener. It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. The sun is out. It's a little breezy, but it's shockingly warm for late February. the... uh... Google Home thing told me it was 30 degrees up right now and it feels warmer than that because it's nice and sunny. So it's a lovely day to be out enjoying the weather. So I thought I would take a walk, record a couple episodes of Pick up and Deliver. Since it was so cold earlier this week, I was not able to do so. So the backlog is a little behind. This first episode, I'm going to be feeling my way around it. It's sort of a new format suggested by regular listener Jason Keglovitz or jkegz. Hey, Jason. One of my constant opponents in online board gaming and consistently outplays me. Curses! I strive... I always strive to play better because of my games with Jason. Thank you. But Jason, we were talking in the chat about Underwater Cities and Jason was saying how much he likes that, and Praga Caput Regni. And if I understood the message, Jason's saying he doesn't really like Praga Caput Regni. But there's an interesting element in which the same designer created both games and Jason was sort of reflecting on how strange it was that the same designer created both games because they feel very different to him. And thought that might make for an interesting topic. And I thought it did. It's really interesting to think about how some designers will make a series of games that feel related. I can't help but think here of Uve Rosenberg's Polyomino games which kind of iterate along the same lines or some of his farming games feel like they're playing with the same theme or playing with the same kinds of mechanisms in different ways. And then you have somebody like Vladimir Suchy who, in creating a new game, will often experiment with things that seem pretty disparate. So I thought I would reflect today on those two games that Jason suggested and talk a little bit about where I see connections in thinking or in process and where I see distinct differences. And I don't know, just kind of compare the two games. This isn't really meant to be a duel. I'm not going to be declaring one game better than the other. Although I suppose I have done that in my top 50. I honestly don't remember which game I said was better -- off top my head I think right now I probably think Underwater Cities is better but I don't remember which one I put above on my top 50 and by the laws of publication I'm not allowed to change it for two years I don't know whatever. I like them both but it's interesting to talk about how they're different. So setting the stage in case you haven't played them or haven't played them in a while. Very quick summary. Underwater Cities is a game in which you are building a series of connected cities ... underwater. You saw that coming. In which you are creating different resource generation elements you are lining up for different kinds of bonuses and the action selection mechanism is a kind of worker placement mode where there is a board with a bunch of worker placement spaces and you put one of your little submarines or-- I don't know, they're weird tokens--on one of the spaces to take the action and then you discard a card. There are three different colors of cards: green, orange and red. If you discard a card that is the same color as the space where you are playing your worker then you get to take the action of the space and you get to do the whatever the card says. If you discard a card that does not match the color of the space where you're putting your worker then you don't get to use the card. You just discard it. So a big part of the game is managing which cards you have and paying attention to which spaces are open so that you maximize the efficiency of your game by using as many cards as you can. There's also an element in which you can get, there are a few cards you can get that will activate whenever you play a card that doesn't match the color. So there can be a strategy where if you've got a couple of those, or if you've got three of them really, you would have a tremendous engine for _not_ matching. There's a bunch of other stuff to talk about but that's the broad remit of the game. It's played over a series of rounds, a limited number of turns, 12 I think or 9. 9 rounds. and in each round you're going to have three turns. So 27 turns I guess. Is that right? Something like that. And then you score points at the end. Praga Caput Regni is also played overseas rounds you get 16 turns and each turn you're going to select an action tile. The action tiles have two different, two of the six different core actions depicted on the tile and you get to pick one of the two actions from the tile you select. The tiles are on this wheel and the wheel has a bunch of different bonus actions in the little spots on the wheel. The wheel is much bigger than the number of tiles that are available and so when you take your tile you also get to do the bonus action that's connected to the tile that you took. With your actions you are doing a variety of different things. It's sort of a potpourri of different activities that give you points in different ways. And then after the 16 turns the player with the most points wins. Alright so why do these games seem pretty distinctly different? I'll point to perhaps the biggest thing for me that feels different about the two games, and that's _tracks._ There is a sort of philosophy of Euro game design in which there are these tracks on which you can go up. The tracks give you different levels of bonuses or achievements and a big part of the game is setting up your moves, whatever you're doing, so that you move your piece up the tracks in different ways. Probably the most prominent version of a tracks game would be Russian Railroads which is a game where you just have a bunch of tracks and you're moving your pieces up the tracks and getting points from moving up the tracks. There's a number of different Simone Luciani games like Lorenzo El Magnifico or Newton where you have all of these pieces on tracks and you're doing other stuff also but managing the movement up the tracks is a key part of the game. Now Praga Caput Regni has very clearly and distinctly like five different tracks that are obvious. There is the King's Road, there is the Mining Track, there is the Income Track, there is the Hunger Wall, there is the Cathedral and... so that's five right? So there are five different tracks where you can move your token up. There are also these building spaces where you can add buildings and though the buildings aren't explicitly tracks they function kind of like tracks as you build the buildings you get bonuses based on which buildings you pick and as you get more of them they interact with each other a little bit. Oh, I left out two tracks, there is also the University track and the Technology Track. So there is like seven tracks in Praga Caput Regni. When you look at Underwater Cities, there are none. Now you could argue that like when you build a plant, when you build one of the water or one of the desalignization plants, that you now get a higher income so it's like there is an invisible track there. But I'm not going to monkey with those because functionally the game doesn't function the same way as it does a game of tracks. So the biggest difference is the sort of category of game that the two games land in. Praga Caput Regni is a tracks on tracks game. Honestly I hadn't really thought of it that way the first few times I played it just because the tracks are kind of distributed in particular ways and they don't feel quite so track like it's hard to explain to me but that's clearly what they are and Underwater Cities is not. Underwater Cities has a much higher level of choice for the players to make in terms of where you're going to put your priority for what things you're going to do. I don't know how to articulate this. So card management is a big part of Underwater Cities. You get these cards that do really cool things and then on your turn you're going to take the sort of basic actions from the board that are really important and then the cards augment them. The cards let you build up a series of bonuses and connections between them that trigger when you do actions. So you might get a card that gives you a bonus whenever you build a tunnel. So now when you build a tunnel you then get a bonus from the card. A lot of the cards are one-off uses some cards that you can do actions with--there's an action space. But I think as you manage those you're building a sort of engine for yourself that it's not quite as robust as the engine, an engine builder like in Race for the Galaxy or something but that's not the point, right? The point is you interact with the city you're building and then you also want to maximize the city you're building to benefit from the bonuses that you get. Of course you have to take actions to get the bonuses and build those into your city. So underwater cities becomes a efficiency puzzle of efficiency of actions used to build an infrastructure that provides you income that lets you make more efficient actions and build more infrastructure leading toward getting bonuses that you can then lean into. That's where the engine part of underwater cities comes from. The pleasure of the game often comes from trying to navigate that space most efficiently, particularly since depending how you build some of the resources can be relatively rare or relatively hard to get in great quantity. This makes for a pretty interesting game. You also have the cruel limiting factor of the hand of cards because you generally don't get to have more than three cards. You can draw more cards but inevitably at the end of your turn you have to discard down actually the beginning of your turn. It's a crucial thing because you get to keep your cards while other people are playing and that's useful because you might have a card that is only good if you're going to get to go to this one action and then if you don't get to go the action you might not get to keep. I say that honestly I might have to go back and look at the rules again to see whether I'm right that you get to keep your cards. I think you discard your cards at the beginning of your turn not the end but that is a crucial piece of the puzzle which honestly we've never really spent much time on because we're often so heads down with the game just watching which space other people take. So this crucial piece of managing your hand to be able to decide which actions you're going to take is a really interesting part of the puzzle. By contrast in Praga it's the series of tracks and often when I've had games that felt more successful it's because I've carefully balanced which track I was going up, and when. So thinking about which track I'm leaning into and which set of bonuses I want to lead into those often play off of each other. So generally in games where I've been very successful it's because I've managed to get kind of to the top of two or three tracks and I've leaned into the bonuses those tracks provide. So for instance if I manage to get to the top of the cathedral track, meaning I've moved my little token along the cathedral both horizontally and vertically up to the top corner, then in that same process I also want to make sure I'm leaning into getting red discs. Red discs are these bonus multipliers that are based on how high you got your token on the cathedral track. So getting more red discs is good if I'm also moving a lot on the red track. If I am moving a lot on the blue track on the hunger wall, it doesn't make sense for me to spend a lot of time getting red discs because they're not going to pay off very much in the way at points. Praga is I think... I want to say Praga is a bit more tactical. Because each turn you're picking from a relatively limited number of different actions that you can take based on which combo of tiles have combined with which bonus and which ones have been left available to you. You can almost always take any action you want if you're willing to pay for it but income is hard to come by and there is no income phase. So if you want to get more stone or more gold, the two main incomes that allow you to do a lot of the other stuff, you have to use a turn to run your gold mine or run your quarry to get those things. And you only get 16 turns. So using a turn on income kind of hurts. The thing that really makes Praga fun for me is the tactical choosing of the different actions, combined with the different bonuses, to lean into the choices I've made to really amplify the points I'm scoring. Whereas often what's fun about underwater cities is managing the card play and the worker of selection space so that I get to maximize the results of each card play. I feel like underwater cities has slightly stronger feel of control over what you get to do. Often in Praga it's so limited in income that is you often feel like you're choosing between the best of a couple of bad choices or you have to give up a turn to get income which never feels great. That part is harder than the income phases in underwater cities. I can see how you could look at these two games and not see how one designer made them. But at the same time the development of bonuses that trigger off of other choices that you make, the systems of payout that come from either the choices you make in Praga, regarding building in the cities, getting different kinds of bonuses, completing different tracks that give you again different kinds of bonuses compared to underwater cities that cards you might get to get you endgame scoring or the special cards you might take that give you different kinds of bonuses. Those feel very similar to me and I can see how the same designer might come up with both. But the essential action selection mechanism is the thing I think that feels so distinct between the two. And the overt use of tracks Praga Caput Regni contrast strongly with the subtle use of different kinds of incomes in underwater cities. Well that represents about 15-20 minutes of me pontificating on these two games. Not sure that I got anywhere but I think that I elucidated some of the differences between how I see the experience of these two games and maybe that will help you determine which one would be the best fit for you. I think it also highlighted some of the places where you can see Vladimir Suchy's design philosophy coming through on the two games. So hopefully that was interesting. Let me know over on board game geek guild 3269. I'd love to hear what you thought of this format and should I do it some more? If so, what are some other games from one designer that you would suggest? Like hey, here's two games from one designer, I don't get how the same person made both of these. That kind of thing. I would love to do more episodes like this. I may choose to do it but if I get feedback that this was interesting, all the better. So that's about it for me today. Thanks for joining me in my walk. I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine wants. Bye bye. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] Brought to you by Rattlebox Games [MUSIC]