Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Cat in the Box, Welcome to the Moon, Point City, Santo Domingo (revisited)

Transcript

Cat in the Box, Welcome to the Moon, Point City, Santo Domingo (revisited) · 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 deliver an episode two while I stroll
0:10
around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good morning, listeners. It is
0:23
a gloomy, cloudy, drizzly Tuesday afternoon here in suburban Chicago. It is
0:29
the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, which, for you out of American, I'm sure
0:34
it's quite possible that people who aren't in America have even heard of the American
0:38
Thanksgiving holiday. But essentially it's from the positive angle. It is a time
0:44
to celebrate family and things you're thankful for. Ostensibly, it stems from a
0:53
terrible myth about the colonial a terrible myth suggesting that the colonial occupiers coming over
1:00
from Europe were on friendly terms with Native Americans and that that was the foundation
1:07
of America, as opposed to cruel betrayal. A few years later, if
1:11
you want to read something interesting about that, Nathaniel Philbrooks book Mayflower does a
1:17
really good job of exploring the ways that even the first European settlers were remarkably
1:22
terrible to the indigenous people they encountered. But that's not really what my podcast
1:26
is about today. Instead, I'm talking about games I've played recently. It's
1:32
time for another board game Espresso episode. It's a board game Espresso Triple Shot.
1:37
As a reminder of the board game Espresso Triple Shot is a quick review
1:40
segment in which I reviewed three games I've played for the first time recently,
1:42
or maybe first and second time, and then one game that I dusted off
1:49
recently. So let's just jump into it today, I'm going to talk about
1:53
Cat in the Box. Cat in the Box is a twenty twenty two release
1:57
from Bezier Games in the in the United States. The designer is Mui Yuki
2:02
or Muni Yuki Yoko Uchi, and the artist is Osamu Yui. Catt in
2:09
the Boxes are really interesting. It is a trick taking game in which players
2:15
are trying to you bid how many tricks you think you're going to take during
2:20
the game. I think you can bid up to three, and then you
2:23
over the course of the hand of up to I think nine cards or maybe
2:28
ten, you try to take exactly as many cards as you bid or tricks
2:32
as you bid. The scoring is relatively simple. You get points if you
2:38
make your bid exactly and I think you lose points if you don't make your
2:44
bid. I think that's it. It's already been a couple of weeks.
2:46
I don't remember the scoring exactly, but it's partly because the scoring is not
2:51
the really interesting part of Cat in the Box. Cant in the Box is
2:53
loosely framed around the idea of Schrodinger's Cat, which is a thought experiment about
2:59
quantum physics, and essentially the idea is there are some things that, until
3:02
you examine them, exist in a quantum state being they exist both one way
3:07
or the other. The narrative of the Schrodinger's Cat is if you have a
3:10
cat in a box with some poison, and the box is sealed, you
3:14
have no ed of observing it. You don't know whether the cat is alive
3:16
or dead until you observe the cat. And that is what's happening with Schrodingers
3:23
or with a cat in the box. It is a trick taking game where
3:25
you have a bunch of cards that have numbers on them but no suits.
3:29
There are four suits in the game, of four different colors. One of
3:31
the suits, the red, I believe, is always trump. The other
3:35
three are different colors. On your turn, it's a trick taking game,
3:38
so somebody will lead and then everyone else will follow. And the interesting thing
3:42
is you have a bunch of cubes that belong to you, and there's a
3:45
little board showing all the different cards and suits that they could belong to.
3:50
When you play a card, you put one of your cubes on the number
3:55
box associated with the suit that you are asserting your card belongs to. For
4:00
example, let's say, as the first player, I play a nine,
4:03
which is the highest card in a suit, and I put a yellow a
4:06
token on the yellow number line at the nine. That means I'm saying this
4:11
is a yellow nine. Now, any other nine that anyone else has cannot
4:15
be yellow because the yellow nine has already been played. That means anyone else
4:19
who wants to play, if they follow suit, they have to pick another
4:24
number and put their cube on that in the yellow line. If they don't
4:29
want to follow suit, they can assert I don't have any yellows and then
4:32
play a card in a different color. Here's the trick. Once they assert
4:36
they don't have any yellows, they also have to put a cube on their
4:39
yellow zone and indicate like, I don't have any yellow anymore. Of this
4:43
hand, which means later on they can't play any more yellow. As the
4:46
game goes along, you either finish out the whole trick, or what happens
4:50
more often is that somebody will cause a paradox, and you get a paradox
4:57
if you get to a point where you can't play any cards because all of
5:00
your cards are already taken by other cards in the number line. It's a
5:03
fascinating game, really interesting, and I thought pretty fun. I really enjoyed
5:09
playing it. I love the idea of it. The biggest challenge for me
5:12
would be I think it is not a game for people who aren't who don't
5:15
understand trick taking games like it is definitely a gamer's game insofar as I wouldn't
5:19
want to play it with somebody who doesn't already know how to play trick taking
5:23
games. If there was somebody who didn't already know how taking games, I
5:27
would want to play something else with them first, Hearts or Spades or something,
5:30
just to help them get the feel for how this kind of game works
5:33
before you are asking them to hold in their head multiple sets of information.
5:39
It's not a tremendously long game. I think it took us like forty five
5:42
minutes to an hour to play. It goes, and it goes a certain
5:45
number of hands. I think it's one hand led by each or doubt by
5:48
each player in the game. So in a five or six player game,
5:51
you would play five or six hands, and you get points, like I
5:55
said, if you make your bid, and you lose points if you cause
6:00
a paradox, and I think you don't get any points if you don't make
6:02
your bid. Okay, on to the next one. The next game I
6:06
played is Welcome to the Moon. Welcome to the Moon is a twenty twenty
6:11
one release from Alexis Allard and ben Wah Turpin. Ben Wa Turpin is the
6:15
designer of the original Welcome to Your Perfect Home or just Welcome to and by
6:23
Anne has Deck, published by Blue Cocker Games in twenty twenty one. Welcome
6:28
to the Moon is a newer version or a newer iteration on the idea of
6:34
Welcome to which at its core is you have three choices of pairs of things
6:41
to do, both a card and an action, and you have a role
6:46
in writing erasable or writing style grid on which you're marking those different actions.
6:55
Each turn, you are choosing from one of those pairs and marking things on
6:58
your board, and your goal is to do the best on a variety of
7:01
different scoring objectives and idea different ways of interacting with the board based on the
7:09
choices you make. Now, that description I just gave you could give you
7:13
could describe Welcome To or any of its alternate boards. I think it could
7:16
describe Welcome to Las Vegas, although I haven't played that one, and it
7:19
could describe Welcome to the Moon as well. The big difference with Welcome to
7:24
the Moon is that Welcome to the Moon actually comes with eight alternate boards,
7:29
whereas the original Welcome To game just comes with the one. And more importantly,
7:32
the eight alternate boards that Welcome To comes with are pretty dramatically different from
7:39
game to game, whereas the alternate boards that they released for Welcome To add
7:45
like one mechanism per game, they'll add one extra thing to think about or
7:48
one extra thing to do. The extra boards and Welcome To are fully a
7:54
different arrangement and a different set of rules. So the idea in Welcome to
8:00
the Moon is that it tells the story of the human colonization of the Moon.
8:05
The players start as colonists, going up and landing on the Moon,
8:09
and then you start colonizing the Moon, and then you're building infrastructure on the
8:13
Moon, and so on and so on. I don't really know what all
8:16
eight are. It is a sort of campaign. Although you can play any
8:20
of the games out of order, it doesn't demand that you carry one game
8:24
to the next. I thought Welcome to the Moon was fun. My understanding
8:28
is that all eight games are really good, and that the progression from them
8:33
is really good as well. I think if I didn't already have Welcome To,
8:37
I would be pretty enthusiastic about picking up Welcome to the Moon. That
8:41
said, you know, welcome To went through its arc in our family playtime.
8:45
We played a lot of it when we first got it. Now it's
8:48
once every few months kind of game. And I don't know that I need
8:50
more welcome To in my collection. I think I'm happy with the I have
8:56
the regular game, and I have several of the expansion maps, so we
8:58
have more Welcome To than we'll ever play, and I think that's probably good
9:03
for me. I don't know that I need to Head to the Moon,
9:05
although I think it's pretty The one mission we played I think was Mission number
9:09
three was pretty good, and I can see why you would want to.
9:13
So if you haven't played Welcome To at all, I would recommend to Welcome
9:16
To. You can play it on board game Arena. But if you really
9:20
like Welcome To and you want to try the more sort of gamerly version,
9:24
Welcome to the Moon is a good good one to try. All right,
9:28
on to our dusted off game. As a reminder, a game gets dusty
9:31
when it goes a year or more without having been played. This game is
9:35
actually four years dusty. That means it's been four years since I played it.
9:41
We busted it out at a game night with our neighbors. As I
9:43
was getting ready to bring some games over to our neighbor's house, he texted
9:46
me and he said, hey, I'd really like you to bring games that
9:50
have more interaction, games where the stuff that I do interferes with the stuff
9:54
you do and so on. And I said, very well, challenge accepted.
9:56
So I picked out several games that meet that criteria. The standout of
10:03
the evening was Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo is a twenty seventeen release from Stephan
10:07
Wristhouse with art by Clemens Franz and it was released by Pegasus Spiel. I'm
10:13
not sure if it got a release in the US, and if it did
10:16
from whom This is a game where I heard a review of it, I
10:20
think maybe on the Shut Up and Sit Down podcast, although I can't guarantee
10:26
that that's the case. And the discussion of it was so intriguing to me
10:28
that I want to online to look at Amazon dot dee Germany to see what
10:35
it was. And it wasn't really that expensive. It was maybe fifteen or
10:37
eighteen dollars and then another eight shipping to get it shipped over from Germany,
10:41
which seemed sort of reasonable at the time, and it was frankly a really
10:46
good bye. Santo Domingo. Is an excellent game, and I'm really happy
10:50
to have it. I will put a link in the show notes to my
10:52
original review of the game, because I think that, I mean, I
10:56
should have reviewed it on the podcast or mentioned it at least seventeen being within
11:01
the last five years so the podcast was going when I got this game.
11:05
Anyway, in the game, I would say the one big downside to the
11:09
game for me is the theme. In the theme you are miscellaneous European merchants
11:16
trading goods in the Caribbean. There's no reason for it to have that theme.
11:22
It literally is almost themeless. It could be literally just anywhere else.
11:26
The game Santo Domingo is an empty signifier. You know, if you haven't
11:31
played these games, Puerto Rico, Santa Domingo, San Juan, they all
11:37
they'll just sort of signify European game about merchants set in the Caribbean, somewhat
11:46
distastefully. So I'm sort of sad that Santo Domingo didn't aspire to just picking
11:50
a theme that was just as interesting but not maybe not so insensitive anyway,
11:58
that aside, because it's almost theameless. In the game, you have nine
12:01
cards, and in those nine cards you have three cards that are two cards
12:07
that get you goods, two cards that get you points, one card that
12:13
gets you points if other players are getting goods, one card that gets you
12:16
goods if other players are getting points, one card that lets you trade goods
12:20
for points, one card that gets you points if other people are trading good
12:24
for points, and one card that lets you get all your cards back.
12:28
Essentially, it is a game of psychology. You are trying to anticipate what
12:33
cards your opponents will play and when and in so doing, you're going to
12:39
get the bulk of the points or goods that are available that round for yourself.
12:43
Each round, you pick a card, you play it, you resolve
12:46
it in order, and then you pick your next card. As you play
12:50
your cards, you have fewer and fewer choices until you play the I'm going
12:54
to pick up all my cards card, which gives you a benefit if you
12:56
play most of your cards first. Doesn't mean it's ever a good idea to
13:00
pick your cards back up, but it's a kind of a lost turn if
13:03
you do it too soon. And then the idea is the first person gets
13:07
to thirty points wins, and then you play again. I will say,
13:11
in my experience, you can usually tell two or three turns out who's gonna
13:16
win, because often somebody gets an early leader gets lucky where everybody plays for
13:20
points and they play for goods, so they get this huge pile of goods,
13:24
and often there's little you can do to catch up with them, because
13:30
that's just kind of the flow of the game. It's not to say you
13:31
can't, but it's very rare that I've found if somebody is more than like
13:37
five points ahead. It's pretty hard to catch up to them. Depending but
13:41
we played two rounds of that game and my wife won one and I won
13:43
one. James seeks a little bit to the experience. We both played the
13:46
game before. The other two players had never played it before, and they
13:52
did not do as well, but they still had fun. They said they
13:54
liked it, and I will say it holds up theme aside. Santo Domingo
13:58
is a great and it's an excellent little filler. It takes about twenty minutes
14:03
to play really interesting decisions throughout great mind bluff game where you're trying to say,
14:07
like, does my can I anticipate what you're gonna do? And yeah,
14:13
you should check it out if you get a chance. That's Santo Domingo.
14:16
All right. The last game I want to talk about today is Point
14:18
City. Point City was designed by Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Sean Stankovic,
14:24
and the art is from Dylan Mangini. It's published by flat Out Games.
14:30
Now. Flat Out has been on a tear recently. They've had a
14:33
number of really good games come out. I believe that they had I believe
14:37
that Cascadia was one of theirs, and certainly Point Salad before from these,
14:43
the same design team was one of theirs. Point Salad and Point City are
14:48
quite clearly connected. If you see the boxes on the shelf next to them,
14:52
they look Point City looks like a sequel to Point Salad, or they
14:56
definitely look like they're in the same line. I think if you look at
14:58
a both next to each other, you can't tell which is which, except
15:01
that Point Salad has a name that makes sense in Point City does not.
15:05
Point City makes sense as you could say it's sequel to Point Salid. Okay,
15:09
I see where they got that by itself. It's just it's kind of
15:11
a nonsense phrase that said. Point City has a lot of DNA of Point
15:18
Salad. It feels like a game that is very closely related to that other
15:22
game. In it, you are collecting cards and you are trying to get
15:26
points through a variety of different mechanisms, but mostly about building buildings, and
15:33
then those buildings let you score points for other buildings. I thought Point City
15:39
was interesting, and I suspect that if I encountered Point City out in the
15:43
wild, unconnected to Point Salad as a game, I would think it's pretty
15:46
neat, and I might even be interested in buying it. That said,
15:50
it's presented as a related game to Point Salad, and what makes Point Salad
15:56
so compelling is that it is pure is a game of simple choices, complex
16:04
realities, dealing with what comes up, pushing your luck a little bit,
16:10
and ultimately a very easy to understand, an easy to play game. Point
16:15
City tries to play that song again and doesn't quite achieve it, and part
16:22
it couldn't because they have to change it in some way. And I would
16:26
point to Point Salad as pretty close to a perfect filler game, and so
16:30
Point City it's pretty hard to figure out how to do that again. They
16:34
did find it, like I said, a different riff on the idea,
16:37
and it is an interesting game to play. I would recommend trying it if
16:42
you get a chance, but if you've never played either. And so he
16:45
says you want to play Point Salad or Point City Point Salad every day and
16:48
twice on Sunday. I think Point Salad is amazing and this game just made
16:53
me want to play Point Salad. So I admire what they're doing. It's
16:57
a really good game, but doesn't quite get there in terms of its predecessors.
17:03
So those are the three new games and one dusty game that I played
17:07
recently that I want to talk to you about here. If you have some
17:11
new games you've tried, I'd love to hear about them. Do you know
17:15
where you can tell me? That's right, the board game Geek Guild three
17:17
two six y nine. I'm also keen to hear what kinds of games are
17:21
you playing with the family or the holiday. Thanks for joining me on my
17:25
walk today. Head over to board game get Guild three two sixty nine and
17:27
let me know what games you've been trying recently. Send me a message Wombat
17:30
nineteen nine the user name there, or email me Brendan at radawacksgames dot com.
17:36
Thanks for joining me, and I hope you're next walk business presence as
17:40
mine was, Bye bye. Brought to you by rattle Box