Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Irish Gauge; Time Pirates; revisiting Rummikub; Kites

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Irish Gauge; Time Pirates; revisiting Rummikub; Kites · 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 episodes you while I walk home
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in the rain. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon, listeners.
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It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago, though it is raining quite a
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bit within the realm of it raining. I am trying this recording. I
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may end up having to scrap the whole thing because I haven't done a recording
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in the rain before, at least not one this vigorous, and I definitely
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expect that the audio recorder is going to be picking up the sounds of rain
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on the umbrella, and if that makes it unpleasant to listen to, I'll
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scrap the whole episode. But I thought i'd give it a try. Anyway,
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I am walking home, so I thought this would be a good opportunity
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to do a board board game Espresso triple show. For those of you new
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to the podcast, a board game Espresso triple shot is where I talk in
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a quick manner or expressly about three games I've tried recently for the first time,
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and one game I've dusted off. The triple shot is the three games.
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So the dusted off is done. I know it's a cake pop you're
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getting along with your espresso. So today I'll be talking about three games I
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tried recently, all of them on the same day. I had a free
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Saturday where my family, where my wife and daughter were gone and my son
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was doing his own thing, and so I invited a couple of friends over
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and we played several different games, and here are three of them. First
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one I'm gonna talk about is Irish Gauge. Irish Gauge is designed by Annabel
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Holland with art by Ian O'Toole, and it was published by Capstone Games and
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before that Winsome Games. I believe that it's a republish of an older title.
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Perhaps I'm not exactly sure, but Annabel Holland is of course the lead
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designer for Holland Spiel, so she has a well established mutation. Irish Gauge
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is essentially an accessible, a more accessible eighteen xx game than most people have
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played. In Irish Gage, you are buying stock in in train companies and
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advancing the train tracks to try to maximize the payout and value of those train
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stocks. Meanwhile, you're there's other people also claiming train stocks as well,
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and the person who has the most shares of the train stock gets the most
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payout, and so on. It is a crisply designed product that looks like
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a lot of the in o'tool designed train games. If you saw the design
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for the Age of Steam that O'Toole did, this feels a lot like that.
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It's easy to read and easy to play. Not all that flashy,
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though, which is okay, it's not meant to be. The art on
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the cover is pretty, and the idea is that you are building railroads in
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Ireland. I thought this game was I had a good time with it,
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but it did confirm to me a basic aspect of my nature as a gamer,
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which is that I don't really like train stock games. The theme doesn't
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really do much for me, and while the gameplay is interesting during the game,
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it's not something that I find myself jonesing to pursue afterward. I imagine
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when people have a train game and they're like, I really want to play
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this, I'll be happy to play it, or when they're like, you
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know, this one does something different, you should really check it out.
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I'll check it out. But overall, it's not generally going to be my
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bag. The interesting tension at the heart of Irish Gauge has to do with
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a competition to get your foothold in different cities and your competition to get your
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foothold in different companies, so that you can maximize the payout of the companies
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you have your foot holding and minimize the payout of the companies that you don't
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worth checking out. If train games and stock games are something you enjoy and
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it's beautifully done, at least the newer edition is That's Irish Gauge from Annabelle
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Holland. Next up is Time Pirates. Time Pirates is published in the year
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two thousand, designed by Alan Moon and Aaron Weissblum. I don't know who
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Aaron Weisblum is. Alan Moon of course most famous for Ticket to Ride,
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but has published a number of other games as well, also made also published
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by Rio Grand Games. I've mentioned Time Pirates as a game I got for
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free at Origins in twenty seventeen. They were just going around handing it out.
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I think they were doing that because the cover art is so laughably bad,
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Like I feel bad for the artist, the credited artist in the game
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because it's really hard to see what's going on in any kind of positive light.
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The game itself is a decent set collection game in which you are thematically
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zooming around through time trying to find and capture artifacts that will be a productive
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and and exciting addition to your collection of time traveling artifacts. The things that
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you find, in some cases in interesting shape. In other cases they are
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grotesque and perhaps offensive. They're the statue that you get from Africa, the
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image that represents the thing that you get in Africa. The ancient artifact is
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a sort of traditional African fertility idol, which in itself isn't inherently offensive,
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but when used by white game designers to encapsulate the art of Africa, feels
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very exoticized and limiting. The game itself involves players trying to collect sets of
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icons of the same color of tokens of the same color. When you get
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enough tokens of the same color, then you can go to the future and
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sell those tokens for points to collectors in the future. That's kind of the
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game. You are running around trying to collect these sets, and then there
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is a time cop I can't remember what the actual name of the figure is,
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but it's another pond that's moving around in a somewhat predictable way, and
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if it lands where you are, it confiscates one of your items and you
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can't travel into the future from that space, so you have to spend a
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turn moving away, and it could chase you, and then you're stuck following
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it again or with it following you. The game is pretty simple to learn
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and pretty It's got some interesting mechanisms in terms of the way that the sets
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accumulate on the board, the way that the time travel agent moves around,
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the way that the rounds end. There's three rounds, and once the round
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ends in a couple different ways, but one of them is once the time
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travel agent has moved a certain number of times, then the round will end.
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All this works pretty well. I mean as a game, it's fine.
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Like if somebody said, hey, do you want to play Time Pirates
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and it had a more palatable theme or production, I guess production rather than
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theme, because the theme's fine. I would I would probably say sure.
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It's a light set collection game with a little bit of take that in,
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a little bit of push your luck. It works, but the graphic design
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is so bad. That I don't want to play this game again, and
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it's going on the trade pile. I can't believe I would be able to
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sell it. Maybe if I can find an Alan Moon diehard out there who
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doesn't already have it, perhaps, But other than that, so that's a
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disappointing play of Time Pirates by Alan Moon, published by Rio Grand Games or
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Alanon and Aaron Weisblum. Don't make Moon take credit for that whole thing himself.
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I always like to spend a little bit of time talking about a flashback
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game, and this game is the flashback gist of flashback games. There are
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few games I can think of where I can creditably say I haven't played that
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in twenty years, but I do want to play it again. And that
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was the with this game. This game has sort of moved into my consciousness
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again because we have a couple of regulars at our Tuesday night game club who
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play it. I mean, it is their game. They aren't really hobby
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gamers, but they do come and often most time what they're playing is this
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game. And then because they've been playing at other people have tried it and
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they're like, oh, yeah, there's a reason this is a classic.
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So we've actually seen quite a few plays of Rummy Cube at our local game
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club, and I decided to give it a whirl last time. I are
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a couple of weeks ago. So Rummy Cube, if you've never played it,
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as a classic game in which you have a tray full of tiles,
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and the tiles represent numbers, and they represent numbers one through thirteen and colors.
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There are four colors, and then there are a couple wild tokens that
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represent any number in any color depending where they're placed. Now, the four
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different colors and the thirteen numbers should sound familiar to you because that is the
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makeup of a standard deck of playing card. And you notice that the first
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two syllables of this game are Rummy, So this game is sort of loosely
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based on Rummy. The way the game works is that you get a bunch
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of tiles to start, and then you're trying to make sets and runs using
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the classic Rummy definition of those things that total up to fifty points. Now,
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points come from the value of the tiles, so a run of four
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thirteens of different colors would give you fifty two points. Right, thirteen times
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four is fifty two. I think that to begin with, you have to
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make you have to make at least thirty points worth of moves in one turns.
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You have to be able to put out sets and runs equal to thirty
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points worth. So if you're getting a lot of twos, you could have
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a very robust set of twos. You could have two sets of four twos,
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and that only gets you sixteen points. That's not enough to go out
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to start the game. Once you start the game, then you're allowed to
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play your other tiles on your turn. And basically, on your turn,
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you're either playing tiles or you're drawing a tile. If you're playing tiles,
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very simply, the way you do that is you play the tiles out onto
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the board in a way that continues to make sets and runs. Now,
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the fun part of Rummy Cube is that once you're out, once you've gone
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out onto the board, then you're allowed to play by rearranging all of the
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different sets and runs that are out on the board in order to make your
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sets and runs for your turn. So it's a very simple example. Let's
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say there was a group of five fours of four different colors, five,
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five or four. Sorry, there's four fours, one in each color,
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four five's one in each color, and let's say that you had a six.
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What you could do is take the four and the five from those sets,
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because three or four is a legitimate number. Four a set, you
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could take the four and the five of the color that matches your six,
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and then you can player six and add the four and the five from those
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sets to make a run that includes your six. That's a pretty simple example,
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but you can do a lot of really interesting things once you have a
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big set of tiles out there. You know, it's actually pretty fun.
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It's a game I hadn't played in a long time, and I'll confess I
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thought it was a sort of musty old classic, and it is pretty limited
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in what it is. Every time you play, it's basically going to be
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the same game. But it is a really interesting mental puzzle and a good
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time, and there's just enough luck in it that if you're doing badly you
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can blame your draws from the tiles. So that's Rummy Cube designed to buy.
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Ephraim hurt Zano and I don't I think Pressman published the edition that we
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played with. It's been published all over the world in a lot of different
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editions, but so that's Rummy Cube. Finally, the last game I'm going
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to talk about today is Kites. Kites is a game by Kevin Hamano with
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Art Sobel, published by Floodgate Games in the US. Kites is a real
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time cooperative game in which the goal is to fly your kites for the whole
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course of the game. I don't remember exactly how long the game goes.
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Oh it's not. Is it a limited number of times? I don't think
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it is. I think the limit is the cards. So on your turn,
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you are going to play a card, and the card shows either a
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color and the cards shows some combination of the kites. The kites in the
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game are represented by sand timers, So on your turn, you're gonna play
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a card and then you're gonna flip that sand timer. And the goal is
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once the game starts, once we've put all four kites in the air,
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then you have to keep all the four kites in the air by keeping their
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sand timers running by judiciously flipping their timers at specific moments. There are a
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couple different obstacle cards that you can put in the deck that will limit talking
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or they will limit flipping, or they will limit various things for a short
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while, but then the rest of it is about drawing cards, flipping things,
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passing the turn, and doing that in a way that you try to
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keep the kites in the air. We played three games of Kites. I
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believe the first game was a disaster because we didn't really understand what we're doing,
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and we put in all the hardest cards. The second round we scaled
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it back to easy and played in one, and then the third round I
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think we added one difficulty card and we want again. If I recall,
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I could be wrong, but it's raining, so I don't want my phone
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out again and check how I did. Overall, Kites is a great real
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time game. I have enough of those, and there aren't enough people in
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my gaming life, at least at home, who want to play real time
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games, so I'm not tempted to buy it myself, but I would love
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for us to have a copy at our game club. I think Kites is
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the kind of game that would get a lot of play there. It's a
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good fifteen minute, quick burn dice game with a lot of heart, or
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it's a lot of fun anyway. So that's Kites and floody eight games.
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So what games have you been playing recently? Head over to board game Gee
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gild three T six nine and join the conversation. Have you played any of
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the games I've played? Do you have the same opinions of them that I
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do? I'd love to hear those answers, and you can share them over
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there. If you want to message me individually, you can send a message
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to Wanba at nine two nine on Board Game Geek or Brendan at rattlebox games
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dot com. Thanks for joining me on my walk today, and I hope
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your walk isn't as rainy as mine wasn't. Good Bye, Brought to you
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by Rattlebox Ga.