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Top 5 Gaming Moments of 2023 · Pick Up and Deliver

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Welcome to you pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio
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recorder as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I
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walk home. I'm Brendan Riley. Hello, dear listener. I am recording
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a preface for this episode of the podcast because I recorded this in January and
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never posted it, so I don't know what's on it. I don't remember.
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I will listen to it, of course before I post it, but
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I'm posting this entry before I listen to it, so it's a mystery to
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me and hopefully it will be enjoyable to you. But I'm posting it slightly
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out of order because I am back from my break and it was recorded in
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January and never uploaded, So it felt a little silly to have a single
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episode appear that was recorded weeks ago. But I think it's worth posting.
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I don't want to waste it, and I want you to hear it.
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But I just want you to understand why there might be some references to stuff
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that's out of order, because yeah, I'm posting it out of order.
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Deal with it. No, that's not it, rude, don't deal with
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it. You can send me messages at Wombat ninety nine on board game Geek,
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or email me Brendan at rattbox games dot com if you have questions or
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concerns or compliments. Compliments are nice, all right, Thanks for joining and
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enjoy the episode. Well, good evening, listener. It's a lovely day
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here in suburban Chicago. The cloud Actually it's not that lovely. It's kind
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of overcast and crummy. The weather is not warm, it's not cold,
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but it's chilly, and the clouds are dark and ominous and not so fun.
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But that's okay. I am on my way home from the train,
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still finishing up season six. It'll be interesting to see. I don't know
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if we're gonna I don't know if I'm gonna get done by the time January
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session ends. Who knows when season six will end. Oh well, maybe
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this is the year that pick Up and Deliver goes off of the one hundred
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episodes per year rhythm that we've been trying to maintain. We'll see. But
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anyway, I was thinking about what I might want to share with you,
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and I had an idea based on I've been seeing a bunch of tiktoks of
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people talking about their game of the year and that sort of thing, and
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I always like to do a Top Games of the Year episode at the beginning
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of the next season. Of course, I always do it one year late,
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so the beginning of next season, I'll be doing the Top Games of
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twenty twenty two. I do this for a number of reasons, but the
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main one is that it's very rare that I get to play the games of
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twenty twenty three or the year within the year that they come out, all
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the games that I think might end up in my top whatever. So by
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waiting an extra year, I get a chance to play a bunch more of
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the games that are sort of likely to top that list. So at the
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beginning of my of next season, that's what I'll be I'll be doing that.
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But I was thinking about what other ways might I reflect on the previous
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year, and I decided one of them would be Top five Gaming Moments of
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twenty twenty three. Now, huge caveat here. I did not review,
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Like I think somebody who did a better job preparing podcasts would take some sort
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of documentation that they have of their gameplays, like maybe the gameplay list and
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board game stats, and scroll through it to jog their memory about different games
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they played. As a way of kind of highlighting top gaming moments that would
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have been a good choice, I did not do that. Instead, I
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am I just picked five moments from my gaming that I've thought were particularly fun,
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and I am going to talk about those here. So these are in
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no particular order and do not reflect the overall experience of my gaming inherently,
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or they reflect sort of the top five that I could think of off the
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top of my head while I'm and storming. And some of these are going
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to be minor or like specific events, and some of these are going to
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be longer form sort of moments. And I don't know. I don't have
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solid rules about what counts and doesn't count for this list, so you'll see
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as we're playing. So I wanted to start with this. Last year I
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ran the board game society at my college, the Columbia College Board Game Society.
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We mean in the library every other Thursday during the school year. We
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have a dedicated core of regular participants, maybe eight or so, and another
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couple that kind of come and go. We had people who showed up once
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and didn't come back. We've had other people who come a couple times and
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then don't come a couple of times, so it varies, but the overall
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tenor of the group we tend to play games all together, which I wouldn't
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mind us more often splitting into two groups so we could play games with four
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or five people rather than always having to stay in a group of like nine
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or ten. But usually the group wants to stay in groups of nine or
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ten, so we play a lot of party games or other large group type
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games in that respect. One of my favorite moments gaming with that group was
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the first time this year that we busted out Anomia. Now, Anomia is
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a very reliably fun party game that, like Stroop or I think Stroop is
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the only other one I can think of, Wavelength maybe is named after the
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thing that it is about. In this case, anomia is the word for
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having trouble thinking of a word, and that is what anomia is all about.
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In this game, you have a card in front of you that's got
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a subject on it like magazine or I don't know, car brand or city
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would be like American City, something like that, and then you have a
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symbol that's one of like eight different symbols that would be like a hashtag or
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a circle or a triangle, et cetera. And what happens is if someone
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else draws a card that features that matches yours then like it has the same
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symbol on their card that your card has, then you immediately enter a duel.
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And when you're in that character in a duel, you're trying to name
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something from their card faster than they name your card. So you draw a
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card that's got a triangle, and you see that I have American cities in
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front of me, and I see that in front of you, you've got
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seasoning. And then we're in a race to see who can name something first.
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And it is surprisingly hard because while under when you're not under pressure,
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may be very easy to think of an American city, once the clock is
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ticking or you're trying to race the other person to do it, your brain
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freezes up. It's a remarkable feeling, if not kind of annoying. The
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other thing is, once a answer has been given, it's spoiled, so
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you're not allowed to reuse answers. So the big thing, the big way
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that would happen is let's say you and I have seasoning and an American city
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and very close to one another. One of us says Chicago and the other
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one says Cumin. Both of those answers are right, so it's whoever finished
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speaking first would get the point. And then the other person likes to say
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the city. The person who's trying to name Chicago that card is still out.
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The card that says an American city on it, but Chicago because it's
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been I've been said aloud. Is a spoiled answer, and you're not allowed
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to use it. That's the basic idea. Anomia is a great deal of
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fun. I have the party set for my board Game Club, which means
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you've got six different decks of cards, which makes for a fun game,
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but also means you're not reusing the same prompts too quickly. So that's anomia.
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With the Columbia College Board Game Society, my number five gameplay experience,
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the number four gameplay experience I want to offer is I'm going to say the
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games. The Heubre Games is a home con hosted by my friend and design
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partner Rob once a year in November. In order to come to Huber Games,
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you have to have played a game with him, So seek him out
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and play games if you're somebody who thinks you want to play games with him,
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and we play a variety of different games in the We play a variety
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of different games over the course of the weekend. Now, I participated in
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a game of Battles Star Galactica, I played a game of Cat in the
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Box, I played a game, a couple other games, and then the
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highlight for me was I got to show some friends of mine two different games
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that I think are just great. The first of these was Orleans, the
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Rhyner Stockhausen chip drawing game bag building game, which I think is just really
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really good. And the other one was Brass Birmingham, which that one was
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really fun because the teach is a little tough on it and the people I
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was teaching it too, found it a little bewildering, but by the end
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they were just rocket and they really had a good time. I lost to
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one of them, which is a bummer, but also fun and generally it
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was great. So yeah, absolutely top notch for me. Brass Birmingham is
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a great experience getting to play it with my friends one of the best.
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So that's Brass Birmingham and Orleon's at the Hebrew Games. Next up, my
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family and I got we tried out a new escape room place. This is
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I don't know, maybe this isn't a gaming moment. I'm counting in this
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one. My family and I played out tried out a new escape room place
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that we hadn't been to before, called Escapeology. The first time we tried
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it was for my son's birthday. We went into a Scooby Doo themed escape
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room. Not to be fair, it was a little on the easy side,
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but the construction of it was very good. It was really high quality
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and nicely made escape room set up, and we had a really good time
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doing it. And then they gave us a coupon for fifty teen percent off
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on our next visit. Well, the game room, like this scape room
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was a little expensive, but that fifteen percent off took a little of the
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bite off, and so we went back with my wife's parents and did another
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one there, and then then we got a twenty percent off coupon. And
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then the twenty percent off is I think the highest it goes, but it's
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good for however many times we want to use it. So from now on
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we get twenty percent off when we go there, and that is really nice
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because it makes it more reasonably priced. And those are really good escape rooms
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are really neat, really well made, really fun, So yeah, it
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was. It was a hoot. That was the escape room fund, particularly
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the Scooby Doo escape Room had a lot of really fun thematic stuff based around
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the kind of mysteries that the Scooby Gang would solve, and you kind of
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use the Scooby Gang as part of the solution. So lots of fun at
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escape Ology here in the Chicago Land area. I'm glad to try that out.
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That was my number my number three moments, so number five, number
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one or number three. My number two moment is from my online game playing.
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Now, as you know from listening to me, I play tons of
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games online and these are played with a variety of friends from around the world,
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although I think most of them are in North America anyway. And although
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I don't have anything against playing games with people in other countries, I just
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don't think I've got regular player friends in other places. That said, I've
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had a really good time getting to know some games very well. I've played
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many games of MATAINI many many games of res Arkhana. Like continue to play
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many games of through the Ages. I played Gaya Project a lot this year.
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Those are sort of the four that I have kind of running as a
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constant refrain, and then I've played other games as well quite a bit.
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But this year in particular, I had two really delightful wins in online games
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that I find memorable and I'm looking forward to sharing with you. One of
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them was a game of res Arkhana, and res Arkhana is a game I
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don't consider myself particularly good at, but I'm getting better. I'm getting the
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hang of it. I'm starting to see how cards combo together and look for
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paths that I can take to get to victory. Normally, when I play
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with Chris Hey, Chris, he and I tend to win in five five
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rounds, I believe. Sometimes it goes into six, sometimes it's four,
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but usually it's five. And I had a really good game of res Arkhana
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where I managed to get a couple different pieces that connect well together, and
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I was able to make a massive amount of one particular resource, and then
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I was able to convert it to gold, which I could use to buy
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cards and win the game. That way. I also took another one of
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the properties, and I ended up winning by like I think I had fourteen
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points or something, and it was in round four. So that one was
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really fun because it's very rare that I like if I win in round four.
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Most of the times I squeak over to ten just ahead of my on
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it, but that one particular was a really good run. And then in
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Mataynai, I had a similar thing. If you haven't played Mataynai, the
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game ends when somebody has five works of art on one side of their tableau
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or the other, so you kind of have more than five works if you
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split them up. But once somebody has five, the game immediately ends,
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and then you tally up scores, and the scores come from also the different
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stuff. I'm not going to go into it, so if I say it's
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complicated, and i'd been, I've been on a long losing streak on that
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game. And I found I got a card that says if you have one
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of each of the five types of works, you win instantly. So in
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this case, instead of having to come up with the most points when you
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trigger the end of the game, and this one, you just have to
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make one of each of the paper stone, clay, metal, and cloth
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works and if the stone one you make is the turtle, which says if
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you have one of each type you win, then boom, you just instantly
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win. And that one I was just on the verge of losing. My
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opponent was just the just in the moment of getting his engine running when I
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was able to drop the turtle and win through the turtle, like I said,
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like, along with the robust engine and res Arkhana, these are hard
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things to accomplish, depend a lot on luck in terms of which cards you
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get, and then I feel pretty lucky to have been able to pilot the
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game to fit that need. So that was pretty fun. So my number
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two moment were these sort of high end combo wins in Resarkhana and Matina on
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Portage Arena and Yukatta dot De respectively. Finally, my top gaming moment of
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the year can be broadly summarized as playing campaign games with my family. This
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year, we have been playing frost Haven quite a bit, and we've been
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playing Arkham Horror the card game quite a bit. My wife and son and
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I completed two campaigns and Arkham Horror of the Card game maybe three we completed
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three excuse me three campaigns, which was really fun. And it's been fun
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watching my son sort of learn about deck building and get into that our deck
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construction, I guess, and get into that and having a good time with
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us there. And then we also have been playing frost Haven a lot,
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and I wanted to share one moment frost Haven that was particularly delightful. We
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were in a fight and we were on the higher end of the skill tree,
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meaning we were surviving okay, but we were losing or we were doing
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It was quite precarious. When I say higher end, I mean we were
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playing on normal. We always play either normal or easy. We never play
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better than normal. So I don't understand people who play plus two or plus
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three. They're operating on a different level than we are. But so we
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had this moment where my son, his character got kind of isolated by the
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monsters and they're all just pounded on him. And his character wasn't somebody who
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had a lot of health anyway, and he was down to the last couple
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of cards. We were gonna probably win in the next round, but we
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didn't want him to be exhausted, and he had just enough cards that he
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had survived, but basically if he took any more damage, he was going
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to be defeated. He didn't have any more cards he could discard or any
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more health he could lose. So his enemy attacked the one enemy who was
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left and they did an attack fight of three and Finn looked at it and
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he's like, the only way I can witness to draw the miss And then
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he drew the miss for the monster and survived to the next round, which
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allowed us to win the game. It was incredible. We all cheered,
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kind of jumped up and down very excitedly, and we were really glad to
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see him accomplish. That was great and frost Haven does generate moments like that.
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It's awesome. So frost Haven and Arkhamoor are playing with the family.
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Those are my top moments, my top moment from twenty twenty three. So
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what are your top gaming moments for twenty twenty three? Head over to board
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game he Guiltree, Dusic sign and share them there. I hope that I
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can find out what they are and revel in the glory that was your achievement.
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Thanks for joining me on my walk today. I hope your next box
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is this fine one. Good Bye, brought to you by rattle Box