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Digital Espresso · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:04
  Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
• 0:07
  as I head out for a walk and delivering episode duo while I stroll around.
• 0:10
  I'm Brendan Riley. Oh, good morning, listeners. It is a
• 0:22
  lovely day here in suburban Chicago. Looks like it's going to be a hot
• 0:25
  one. It's already seventy one degrees fahrenheit at eight am, so I imagine
• 0:29
  by noon it'll be in the eighties or even into the nineties. There are
• 0:32
  lawnmowers everywhere, so taking this walk is going to be an interesting challenge to
• 0:36
  avoid too much small machine noise, but we'll do our best. Well.
• 0:40
  I thought today I would do a kind of board game Espresso episode. I'm
• 0:45
  calling this Digital Espresso VENTI Edition. I know I feel terrible using that word,
• 0:51
  but I've I've put it out there already and I'm not going to go
• 0:54
  back. Now. That's editing, and that's not what this podcast is about.
• 0:58
  So I've mentioned a number of times and when I'm talking about new games,
• 1:00
  I've played that when I play a game online, it takes its online
• 1:04
  only, like in board game Arena or one of the other asynchronous online platforms,
• 1:10
  the experience of playing it is fundamentally different, and it takes me a
• 1:14
  lot longer to get the hang of it. Now, some games I'm able
• 1:17
  to rock more fully from the beginning, I'm able to grasp what it is
• 1:21
  they're doing and how they work. But most of the time it takes me
• 1:23
  several tries, in part because even if I watch a how to play video
• 1:27
  or read the rules yap and don't click the same way. In part because
• 1:32
  then I'm still taking turns once or twice a day, and it takes me
• 1:34
  a while to get to the point where I don't know the different aspects of
• 1:38
  the rules really kick in. So I find that my ability to really perceive
• 1:42
  the way that the game systems work develops much more slowly. Whis often why
• 1:47
  when I have a game that I've played only online, my record is very
• 1:51
  poor at the beginning because I don't know what I'm doing. Sometimes I'll also
• 1:53
  just discover that I missed some crucial rule or crucial aspect of scoring that I
• 1:57
  really should have understood, but because I was learning it online, I kind
• 2:01
  of like I'll just jump in and see what happens, and then only later
• 2:06
  I realize oh, I should have really understood this thing. For example,
• 2:09
  in Earth, I played Earth two or three times online, and even though
• 2:14
  I had read about it, I didn't really understand how the animal cards work
• 2:16
  the scoring goals until I played it on the table once, and then I
• 2:22
  kind of got the point of them. So this is all just to say
• 2:25
  when I played digital games fully digitally, it takes me longer to understand them,
• 2:30
  which is why I usually don't talk about them in my first play game
• 2:35
  episodes. Thus, every now and again, I'll get to the point where
• 2:38
  I'm like, oh, I have a bunch of new games I've played that
• 2:40
  I've never talked about on the podcast. And coincidentally, I also don't have
• 2:45
  three new games that I've played on the table to talk about right now.
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  I have two, but I need three. So in that regard, here
• 2:51
  we go our Digital Espresso episode. Now I have eight games to talk about.
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  I don't know if I'll talk about them all in this episode. We'll
• 2:59
  see how it's going. I may end up just talking up four of them,
• 3:00
  in which case then I'll have another episode later talking about the other four.
• 3:05
  On the other hand, maybe I'll just talk about all eight. Okay,
• 3:08
  The first one I want to talk about is Spots. So this is
• 3:10
  a twenty twenty three game. I have seen this played on the table.
• 3:14
  I had a friend who brought a copy to our game night Toggle Gaming,
• 3:19
  and they played it there, but I did not play it there, and
• 3:23
  since then played online several times, which you know, gave me the sense
• 3:27
  of how the game worked, but I did not get a I did not
• 3:30
  get a strong sense of it, or I was missing some key elements,
• 3:35
  I think nonetheless. So Spots is a game. It is a dice rolling
• 3:38
  push your luck game in which you are trying to roll dice to then put
• 3:43
  on these dogs. And the dogs I'll have spots on them that match the
• 3:46
  pips on the dice. It's a pretty simple, easy to understand how the
• 3:52
  physical properties of the game work. You roll a die, you put it
• 3:54
  on a dog that matches. But the clever bit is that you have these
• 3:59
  cars that you activate. There are six of them, and the card gives
• 4:02
  you a specific requirement about how many dice you're going to place or what you're
• 4:05
  gonna do with them, and any dice that you can't place according that rule
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  go into the I don't know what you call it discard bin, and if
• 4:14
  you ever get over seven pips worth of dice in the discard bin, then
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  you lose all your dice that are on dogs, and you only get to
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  and you claim the dice. You claim the dogs if you fill up the
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  dog, and then on your next turn you get to claim it. So
• 4:28
  there's a push your luck element in that you Sometimes you don't want to waste
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  the turn claiming dogs if you feel like you have room to get more stuff,
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  right, the ideal situation is to try really hard to claim more than
• 4:45
  one dog at a time. I would say I was really bad at this
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  game. I don't know if it was the asynchronous nature of it or just
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  that I am a bad I'm bad at predicting things that I'd like to push
• 4:54
  my luck too far. But the penalty in pushing your luck of losing maybe
• 4:59
  one completed you're one and a half dogs. It's really pretty brutal. I've
• 5:01
  played it a couple of times. I think if someone offered to play it
• 5:03
  again, I would I be interested in trying it on the table. Maybe
• 5:06
  it would feel different. So I put it in the category of yeah,
• 5:12
  maybe, but generally not my favorite. That was spots. Next up is
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  break the Code, another one that was suggested to me about my friend Joe.
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  I don't think Joe listens, but if he does, Hi Joe,
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  he also suggests the spots. I really like to break the code. This
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  was a logic deduction game. The clues in it reminds me an awful lot
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  of Turing Machine, which is also a logic deduction game. And break the
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  code you have There are ten code tiles, zero through nine in white,
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  and then zero through nine in black, but the fives are each green,
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  so there's two green fives and then four or eight or nine of each of
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  the other numbers in white and nine in black. And what you're trying to
• 5:55
  do is figure out which five tiles your opponent is using, and they're trying
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  to figure which five year using and the person who guesses it first wins,
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  although you do get to take the same number of turns, so if your
• 6:04
  opponent guesses it and you went second, you have a chance to guess it
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  and then tie. The clever part, or the part that's interesting, is
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  on your turn, you can either guess the pattern or you can ask a
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  question of them. But you can't just ask any question. There are five
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  questions laid out on the table, and you pick one of those questions to
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  ask, and of course different questions result give different kinds of options, like
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  you know, it'll be like how many numbers below three do you have?
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  Or three year below or I don't know, there's there's any number you can
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  think, any question you can think of about that sort of thing works.
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  Like I said, I like this cred a bit. The logic in deduction
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  part was interesting. I wasn't all that good at it the first couple of
• 6:48
  plays. I felt like I was getting the hang of it as we went
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  along. We didn't play tons of times of it. We played two or
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  three times and that was that was enough. I mean, if other people
• 6:58
  suggess playing it, I'll play it again. Probably won't go out of my
• 7:00
  way to play it much, although every now and again it might be like,
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  let's do a couple rounds of break the code. So let's break the
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  code. Except we have the new Uva Rosenberg game apple Jack. Apple Jack
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  is a simple tile layer, probably more in line with Pashwork or Novoluna that
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  kind of game, rather than the games that have other mechanisms at play,
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  like moncalas as in New York Zoo, or working placement in a curricola.
• 7:28
  It's one of Uvia Rosenberg's simpler games all the way. The way the game
• 7:31
  works. On your turn, you can pick from a number of hexagonal shapes
• 7:35
  to put into your apple orchard. And those hexagonal tiles have there are like
• 7:41
  five or six different kinds of apples. They'll have a combination of apples,
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  beehives, and flowers on them. And when you place the tile on your
• 7:48
  board, you pay an amount of points equal to the number on the beehives
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  on the card. So it might have a beehive of that says three,
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  So you're gonna pay three points now, because all the cards have beehives on
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  them, and they're on one of the six sides of the hexagon, or
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  sometimes two or three. There's one tie that has behive on all seven.
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  Then what you want to do is match that beehive up with another beehive,
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  and then as soon as you match that, you pay the amount written in
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  the number on your behive, so three in our example. And then when
• 8:20
  you match the beehive up with another beehive, you get back the number of
• 8:24
  points of the smaller beehive that you lined up. So let's say you have
• 8:28
  a beehive of six and your new tile has a beehive of three. If
• 8:33
  you match it with the behive of six, you pay three, and then
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  you get three back. The crafty part. The tricky part is sometimes you'll
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  be able to put it next to a couple different tiles, and if both
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  of them have beehives and the tile you're putting down has multiple beehives, if
• 8:48
  you can line them up, you still only pay three, but then you
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  get the lower value on the beehives from both of the matchups that you did.
• 8:56
  That's pretty rare for me. I find that I'm not very good at
• 8:58
  that, and maybe that's why I haven't. I don't know if I've won
• 9:01
  the game yet. But the other thing you're trying to do is make contiguous
• 9:05
  lines of the same kind of tree. So when you put down a hexagon,
• 9:09
  it's got one of those six types of apple tree. When you put
• 9:13
  it next to another hexagon with some of those same six types of apple tree
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  on it, now you've got an area of those apple trees. And as
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  the game goes along, different apple trees score in this kind of clearly visible
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  order, and if your group of apple trees is bigger than the round number,
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  then you score whatever the expresses, so like, if it's round three,
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  you have to have a group of four trees of that color to score
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  any points. That was more detailed than I meant it to be, but
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  it is that kind of game. It's very puzzly. Reminds me of Nolvoluna
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  a little bit in terms of you're putting down a tile and you're thinking about
• 9:48
  several different aspects of how things go at the same time. It's relatively simple,
• 9:52
  but at the same time there's a lot of depth in the interaction between
• 9:54
  the pieces. Apple Jack is pretty fun. It's not probably a game I
• 9:58
  would want to play on the tap. It's a little too matthey. I
• 10:01
  mean I would play it if someone else brought it. It's probably not a
• 10:03
  game I'm gonna buy. Sometimes you just feel hemmed in by the choices that
• 10:07
  you're given from the tiles that are available. And I'm not good at it
• 10:09
  enough at it yet to be like looking ahead two or three tiles and thinking
• 10:13
  about which tiles are my opponent's going to take, and which tile is going
• 10:16
  to be available for me? Particularly because it's not a solid market. You're
• 10:18
  actually moving this dye around the market, and so the tiles that are available
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  to you are not the tiles that were available who are not all the same
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  tiles that were available to your opponent in the last round. I mean it
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  makes for an interesting game, and I enjoy it, so I'll happily play
• 10:33
  a few more times on board game Marina, I think, but I don't
• 10:35
  think I'm gonna buy it. That's Applejack from Uba Rosenberg. It might be
• 10:39
  related to Johnny Appleseed in terms of I think like the character drawn on the
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  board is a kind of crusty it tuner and apple farmer, but it's hard
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  to tell. Next episde Watergate. Watergate is a very well renowned two player
• 10:54
  card driven game based around the Nixon Scandal. Theme Wise, I'm not super
• 11:01
  keen on playing the Nixon Scandal. I don't like ving Nixon, being the
• 11:05
  reporters trying to expose Nixon's kind of fun, but then losing makes it feels
• 11:09
  real bad too. Nonetheless, it is an interesting theme, and like a
• 11:13
  lot of card driven games, it does draw a lot of history out like
• 11:16
  I'm more likely to recognize in the abstract the name of one of the Nixon
• 11:20
  conspirator conspirators than I would have otherwise, so that works pretty well. When
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  I say card driven play, it's much like nineteen sixty The Making of a
• 11:31
  President, or Twilight Struggle, which I haven't played, or The Expanse,
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  the board game in which you have cards that give special powers, and then
• 11:39
  the cards have some sort of value as well, and you can either use
• 11:43
  the card for the value they offer to move a number of sort of control
• 11:48
  tokens around, or you can use them for the special power they have,
• 11:50
  which usually swings the game in your favor or your opponent's favor. In Watergate,
• 11:58
  you just have your own deck of cards, so it's not like in
• 12:01
  Twilight Struggle or the Expanse, where you would get sometimes you'd get cards that
• 12:05
  belong to your opponent. The push and pull is pretty interesting. The reporters
• 12:11
  win by connecting two different people to evidence and or getting five of the red
• 12:16
  momentum tokens. I think they're called NIX and wins by getting five of the
• 12:20
  red momentum tokens, or that might be the only way I guess. If
• 12:26
  you prevent prevent your opponent from getting I think that's how you win. I
• 12:30
  don't remember if there's another way or not, and I think it's just about
• 12:33
  momentum tokens and blocking your opponent from getting those sources. I'm enjoying it.
• 12:37
  I've played three games now, I think, and I'm either in the midst
• 12:41
  of a third or the midst of fourth. It's it's an interesting push pull
• 12:45
  game. You know, Generally, I'm not a huge fan of two player
• 12:48
  pushing pull games. I prefer games where we're speeding side by side toward a
• 12:52
  finish and trying to get the most points versus I'll do stuff to take your
• 12:58
  stuff away. But I guess I like innovation, which is very much about
• 13:01
  that, So maybe I'm just getting used to it. All in all,
• 13:05
  this game is growing on me. I'm liking it more each time I play
• 13:07
  it, so I will keep playing it. I'm pretty sure it's a game
• 13:11
  I'm never going to play on the table because it's definitely not a game my
• 13:13
  wife would enjoy, and so I'm not gonna buy it. Probably maybe at
• 13:18
  game night sometime. That's Watergate. Well, that was four games. I'm
• 13:22
  gonna I'm gonna charge on because the next two I'm going to kind of do
• 13:24
  together. Yeah, So the next two I want to talk about our on
• 13:28
  tour and Lumen the Lost World. I will recall back to a two after
• 13:33
  gen Con last year. One of the games that I had tried there was
• 13:37
  gen I think it's called gen twelve or Trek twelve, and this is a
• 13:41
  game where you have a sheet and you're rolling dice and you're putting numbers into
• 13:46
  the sheet, and the idea is that you're making chains of numbers on the
• 13:50
  sheet. That core idea is also used in Lumen the Lost World, except
• 13:56
  that you also have these transformation things. So you roll two dice and then
• 14:01
  you can either multiply them, add them, subtract them, use the higher
• 14:03
  one, use the lower one. And the idea is that each time you
• 14:07
  use one of these operations you check it off. You have a limited number
• 14:09
  of uses of each one. The game ends, I think when you've filled
• 14:15
  up the different options, but there might be some other end condition as well.
• 14:20
  And the idea is that you're either putting chains of numbers of in ordinal
• 14:24
  order, or you are doing groups of the same number, and one of
• 14:30
  those options ads ads your units, your military airy control units to the shared
• 14:37
  board the other of those. So if the ordinal number adds units the shared
• 14:43
  board, then the groups of the same number let you move those units about
• 14:46
  and activate them. And so it's an area control game that's driven by your
• 14:50
  skill and or luck with this number chaining game. Now you'll recall I say
• 14:56
  that Trek twelve wasn't really for me. I thought it was fine, but
• 15:00
  it didn't really work for me. I like Lumen the Dark World a bit
• 15:05
  better, but ultimately I think it's probably not for me as well. I'm
• 15:07
  certainly not going to go buy it Wes Hey. Wes has been suggesting we
• 15:11
  play it on board Game Arena, and I've tried it a few times and
• 15:15
  had a good time, although Wes is clearly cleaning my clock, which is
• 15:18
  maybe why I'd hate to think that I don't like it just for them bad
• 15:22
  at it. But sometimes you have a game you're bad at and you feel
• 15:26
  like you can see yourself getting better. And other times you have a game
• 15:30
  you're bad at and you're just like, well, this just doesn't fit with
• 15:31
  the way I think about things or the way I strategize, And then you're
• 15:35
  bad at because you're bad at it. And often those games are less fun.
• 15:37
  I think maybe Lumen lands in that category. For me, I'm just
• 15:41
  not that good at it, which is also how I felt about On Tour.
• 15:46
  I've played a couple games of on tour on Board Game Arena, and
• 15:50
  that one also has for me this feeling of just not really fitting the kind
• 15:54
  of thing I like to do, which is interesting because I do generally like
• 15:58
  push your luck games, and as an element of your luck, I do
• 16:00
  generally like kind of tactical strategy and my role in rights and that stuff is
• 16:04
  there as well. Yeah, for some reason, that game didn't really click
• 16:08
  for me either. So that was on tour and Loomen the Lost World.
• 16:14
  Now the next game I want to talk about. It is a game that
• 16:17
  definitely falls into the category of a game I started out not doing well at
• 16:21
  at all, and I've played it twice now and I did a little better
• 16:22
  the second time, but definitely a game I'm enjoying and I could see in
• 16:26
  the long term enjoying. And that's Caverna the Cave Farmers. I got try
• 16:29
  Caverna on Board Game Arena, and of course you all know I'm a big
• 16:33
  uva Rosenberg fan. I like a Gricola, and I've played dozens or hundreds
• 16:37
  of games of a Gricola. I like a feast for Odin. I also
• 16:41
  have a number of other Uvia Rosenberg games in my collection, So Caverna is
• 16:45
  a game I've always thought I would want to try. I like the difference
• 16:49
  of the adventuring mechanism where you have a dwarf and you go adventure. I
• 16:52
  can see how that would that becomes a kind of progenitor for a feast for
• 16:56
  Odin's adventuring mechanism. I like the gentler food handling in Caverna, where it's
• 17:06
  easier to find ways to get enough food for your folks. I like the
• 17:11
  surfeit of options that opens up as the game goes along. It feels a
• 17:15
  bit more like a Feast for Odin that way, rather than Coverna, where
• 17:19
  sometimes somebody's in your way, but but often you are able to do what
• 17:22
  you want to do. All those things are pretty neat. I'm still trying
• 17:26
  to get the hang of, like how to shift from building an engine that
• 17:30
  will give me food and workers into how to I generate points. The last
• 17:34
  game I played felt like I was doing pretty well, and then we got
• 17:37
  to the end, I got literally half the points of the other people at
• 17:40
  the table, which you know isn't all that unusual in a gricola, But
• 17:42
  in gricola you can tell it's coming because you did badly organizing your food or
• 17:47
  whatever. But I am enjoying what Caverna has to offer and looking forward to
• 17:52
  continuing to try it as we go along. So I think that's I think
• 17:56
  that's kind of where I am with Caverna and looking forward to playing it more.
• 18:03
  Finally, the last game I want to talk about on this digital Espresso
• 18:06
  a day is Memoir forty four. Now, this one might be the longest
• 18:08
  arc between first game played and discussion on the podcast, because over the years
• 18:14
  I've tried Memoir forty four a number of times, and I may even have
• 18:18
  talked about it before I don't recall, but I'm talking about again as though
• 18:21
  I haven't. Memoir forty four is, of course, a relatively rules light
• 18:26
  board game about World War Two, and generally it involves small scale skirmishes with
• 18:32
  several squads of soldiers or of infantry and or some tanks and artillery. And
• 18:38
  the way the game works as the board is divided into three pieces or three
• 18:42
  columns, and you get a number of cards that allow you to command different
• 18:47
  units on the board. Sometimes it'll be like command a certain number of units
• 18:49
  of this type, but then other times it'll be like command a certain number
• 18:52
  of units in this column. And so a lot of what you're trying to
• 18:56
  do is manage when you're going to move your troops and where, and looking
• 18:59
  ahead did the cards you have and seeing how you can manipulate them. Taking
• 19:03
  me a little while to get the hang of it, but I've played several
• 19:04
  times in a row now, and that's really starting to come together in terms
• 19:08
  of a game. I kind of understand how to play. The theme isn't
• 19:11
  my one hundred percent favorite, but the gameplay is good enough that I am
• 19:15
  interested in playing more. If my opponents suggest it, I suggest it.
• 19:19
  I don't know that I'll go out of the way to suggest or rematch,
• 19:22
  but we'll see. Well, if you want to try playing some games on
• 19:25
  board game Arena with me or you Kata dot D or I guess I don't
• 19:29
  really play on blad as you much anymore because it's going to close down any
• 19:32
  day. You can head over to one of those places and direct message me
• 19:36
  or add me as a friend and ask me to play a game. Wombat
• 19:38
  nine two nine is my user name there. If you want to send me
• 19:41
  messages relate to other things, you can email me Brendan at rattlebox games dot
• 19:45
  com. You could send me a message on board game geek, where Wombat
• 19:51
  nine two nine is my user name. If you haven't joined our guild there
• 19:56
  and posted in our guild, you really should do that. See for fun.
• 20:00
  Our guild is guild three two six nine, and you can post in
• 20:03
  the guild there. I hope to see you do that. Thanks for joining
• 20:07
  me on walk today. I'll do your next walk as as posed as his
• 20:10
  mind was. Good Bye. Brought to you by rattle Box