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Four Things about Lords of Waterdeep · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:04
  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 episode to you while I walk
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  home. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon, listeners. It's a
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  race against time as I walk home from the train, and the clouds overhead
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  loom dark and gray. It has rained off and on a little bit in
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  the last few hours. The question is will it rain on me while I'm
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  walking home? And equally important, is the wind strong enough to yank the
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  glasses off my face? Because it feels like it might be the very first
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  pair of glasses I owned I lost because the wind yanked them off my face,
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  and I'm a little worried that will happen again. In fact, I
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  might take off my glasses and put them in my pocket for this walk,
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  just to avoid the glasses yanking that I think might occur with the wind at
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  its current pace. Of course, then I can't read my notes, so
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  it's a whole deal nonetheless. All right, So, dear listener, I
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  was thinking about what I might talk about today, and I realized I hadn't
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  really done a message from the Deep episode for a while. But a Message
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  from the Deep episode demands a game that I've played a lot, and I
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  feel like most of the games I've played a lot, I've done Message from
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  the Deep episodes about I was looking, and sure enough, yeah, most
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  of the games I've played a lot, I have done a Message from the
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  Deep episode about. But there was a game I played a couple weeks ago
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  which I realized I don't think I don't remember, though. I don't know
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  if I've ever talked about it on the podcast. Maybe in rare mention,
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  like in reference to something, but I certainly haven't talked about it in death.
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  It was a game I played long before I started doing the podcast,
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  so I never reviewed it, and that is Lords of Water Deep. Now
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  this is a game I've logged fourteen plays, which certainly puts it in the
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  category of being eligible for a Message from the Deep. I generally will require
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  at least ten plays or so in order to do a Message from the Deep
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  episode about a game. Maybe not always, but often, and so at
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  fourteen this is pretty good. I can also say none of these have been
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  digital. They're all in person plays. They're spread out over years, so
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  I've had time to get used to this. Game to cumulate. I didn't
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  even have a copy for a while. I was just playing other people's.
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  But I found a good used copy and it's the sort of game that just
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  like, actually, no, I didn't find a good used copy. I
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  just there was a good deal on it on Amazon, and I was like,
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  you know, this is a game I should have and it's fun every
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  time. Loads of Water Deep is a great time and a game that I'm
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  happy to have. So with that in mind, why don't we talk about
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  Loads of Water Deep a little bit now? If you haven't heard a Message
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  from the Deep episode, no shade, I haven't done very many of them
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  recently. But the idea of Message from the Deep is that I am talking
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  about a game I've played a lot and talking about it in depth. Right,
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  it's a deep episode, a deep discussion of the game. But I've
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  found that just doing that as a review, nah, that's not fun.
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  So sometimes I will do these as duels, where I'll take two games that
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  I know very well and I'll compare them to one another, and I'll say
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  which game is better or on these five metrics, which game is better?
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  You can look up dual episodes. I've done a couple of those. That's
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  d U E L, not du A L, although interestingly, because it's
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  about two games, it could be a DUL episode as well. Interesting but
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  I didn't want to do that, in part because all the games I could
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  think of that I thought should duel with Loads of water Deep in fact,
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  I had already used I had already talked about in the context of other games.
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  So like, I don't know that I want to do another duel of
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  games that are similar ones I've already talked about. So what I decided to
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  do instead is pick out four cat qualities of Loads of water Deep and talk
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  about how they work in the game, and two other games give or take
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  that have those same qualities or do that same thing. So if you play
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  these other games, they'll give you a feel. But to start with,
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  what is Lords of water Deep? Lords of water Deep is an entry level
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  work replacement game themed around dungeons and dragons. It's set in the Forgotten Realms,
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  setting in the town of Waterdeep, which is a huge city. The
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  ideas you are one of several sort of villainous or machiavellian anyway lords governing over
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  the city. In D and D terms, you're the person who visits the
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  pub and gives other people missions to do, rather than doing them yourself.
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  The game is played over a series of seven rounds. I believe it's seven,
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  could be eight, and each round you have work replacement. You have
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  agents workers that you put out onto the board, and those allow you to
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  collect resources. The resources are white, orange, purple, and black cubes,
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  and those are rogues, wizards, clerics, and fighters, and then
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  you use those heroes to complete missions in the mission scory points. There's a
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  bit more to it than that, but that's probably as much as you need
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  to know right now. One of the big salient features is they're a building
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  market, and so each round somebody can go to the building market, pay
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  a little money and add a building to the board. The building is another
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  workerplacement spot where players can go. The person who owns the building gets a
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  little spiff, a little bonus when the players go there, but usually the
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  spaces are better than the spaces otherwise on the board. So there are also
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  intrigue cards that allow you to mess with other players. It's kind of the
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  Those are the broad sweeping elements of the game. It was released in twenty
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  twelve, designed by Peter Lee and Rodney Thompson, and I would say the
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  general reaction I think most people have to it when they play it is that
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  it looks like a cheesy D and D branded game, and it's far better
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  than it has any right to be. Is maybe the way I've heard it
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  framed. There is an expansion called The Scoundrels of Skullport I have played that.
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  I do like it a lot, but I don't own that one.
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  I should keep an eye out for some time when it's cheap on Amazon and
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  pick it up, because it does add a nice element to the game and
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  makes it worth playing. So I want to talk about four things about the
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  game that I really like and some other games that do similar things so that
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  we can compare them. I will say, in almost every case, the
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  other games that do similar things came after Lords of water Deep. So Lords
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  of water Deep is a classic, and these other games I can't say they
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  were borring from it, because I don't know that there's very much in Lords
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  of water Deep that wasn't in games before yet, but it brought them together
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  in a nice package. So to start with limited Workers, Now you've played
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  a lot of Worker placement games. If you've played Agricola, or you've played
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  like the classics like Agricola or Zulk in the My Encounter. These are interesting
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  fun games that involve placing workers, but they also involve getting more workers.
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  The key strategy of the game is to recruit more workers to be able to
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  play more workers throughout the game. Lords of Water Deep does not do that.
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  Instead, what happens is you get two workers, and you have the
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  two workers for the first half of the game, and then in round five
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  everybody gets a third worker. You get the third worker for the rest of
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  the game, and that's it. The only other way you can get an
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  extra worker. There is a building that lets somebody have an extra worker on
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  the next round, and there is one mission that you can accomplish that will
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  allow you have an extra worker for the rest of the game. So if
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  you get that mission, you could have one more worker, but generally the
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  game does not allow you to get a whole bunch of extras. The nice
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  thing is about this is it keeps the game really tight, It keeps it
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  moving. The game doesn't bloat as you go along. I mean Agricola,
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  the later rounds can get really hefty. If everybody has four or five workers,
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  the rounds take just forever. Lord's water Deep stays pretty tight because of
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  that limitation. The two games that it reminds me of Lost Ruins of Arnak.
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  You only have your two workers. I think there might be a way
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  to get a third, but I don't think so. Or do you get
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  three? Maybe you get three, but you only have three for the whole
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  game or the whole Yeah, you just don't have that many workers. So
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  the Lost Ruins of Arnak, you only have the two workers. Those are
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  the workers you get for the whole game. The rest of the game comes
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  through efficiency of doing other kinds of actions in order to amplify your turns.
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  Everdell feels the same way, although in Everdell you're actually gaining workers such that
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  by the end of the game you have I think five, So you do
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  get more as the game goes along, but the early stretch of the game
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  in Everdell feels really tight the way that Lords of Water Deep does, and
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  both Lost Ruins Varnak and Everdell have this element where they amplify the number of
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  actions you get based on your successful use of the game's mechanisms, and it's
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  that second part that's not in Lords of water Deep and Loads of water Deep,
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  you get two actions, or sometimes you get a third action if you
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  play one of your workers to the harbor, because the harbor allows you to
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  play a card, So you go to the harbor, you play a card.
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  Then at the end of the round, after everyone else has placed all
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  the workers, everybody to harbor gets to move their worker to another location,
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  so you do get a third action if you do that, and then those
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  rare ways that you could get one more worker. So Lords of Water Deep
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  maintains it pretty tight, but that tight feeling of limited actions, especially early
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  in the game and lost runs or early in the game in Everdell feels similar.
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  So the second aspect I want to talk about is contract fulfillment. As
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  I said in Lord's the water Deep, the main way that you get points
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  is you accumulate these different resources in the form of these different warrior figures,
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  and then you spend those resources in order to fulfill contracts. And the contracts
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  are in the game things that you might want people to do. So some
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  of them are themed good, some of them are seemed bad. The idea
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  is they are things that you, as a lord of Waterdeep, might want
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  people to do. So you might want them to break people out of the
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  prison, or you might want them to raid a cave and kill a dragon
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  or whatever. Right, and so you use these different workers in order to
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  accomplish these missions, and you get points for the missions. That's the main
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  way you get points. Now, this is something that pops up in a
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  number of other games. The two in particularly that I was thinking of that
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  feel very similar via Nebula, the Martin Wallace game, the sort of like
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  train game Light Without Trains has contract fulfillment that I think fits the genre pretty
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  well. You have these cards that you get and you have to fulfill them.
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  It's kind of a race to see how many you can get filled by
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  the end of the game. In via Nebula, the number you fill triggers
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  the end of the game, whereas in these other game in Bload's water Deep,
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  there's a set number of rounds. The other one I was thinking of
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  was Obsession, and arguably Obsessions not a contract fulfillment game. But one way
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  to look at Obsession is you have these workers and you have guests. In
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  order to do anything, you take one of your tiles that has a set
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  of requirements on it, and you have to meet all those requirements, and
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  then you get points based on what you spent. Then at cycles and you
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  can do it again. But really the best way to do it is to
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  go buy another tile and then activate that tile. If you keep activating the
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  tiles you already have, you're not amplifying enough points because you get points for
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  each tile that you buy, and then more points if you use the tile
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  once or fulfill that contract. So it's maybe arguable that a obsession is or
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  isn't a contract fulfillment game, but I feel like it's pretty close an obsession.
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  You all also have the secret goal, which I'll come back to.
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  Another contract fulfillment game I really like, and I've talked about a fair amount
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  here on the podcast, is the Kings of Aaron Steam, which is straight
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  up pick them deliver game where you're trying to fulfill contracts. Next up is
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  what I'm calling push Me, Pull You. One of my least favorite thing
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  about Lords of water Deep is there are a few cards you can play that
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  interfere with other players kind of aggressively, and if you play them at the
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  right time, they can be really game ruining, which is part of why
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  I don't like that aspect of the game. But if I'm in the mood
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  for that, or I'm playing with people and we've all kind of agreed,
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  yeah, it's going to be a knife fight in the phone booth, then
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  the game that reminds me the most of that is Nanty Narking and Nanty Narking.
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  You're getting these cards in you're using them to just do wild stuff to
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  each other. The reason I pick that one over many other games where you're
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  doing wild stuff to each other is it's card based. It's based on the
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  cards you draw, much like the Injurgu cards and Lords of Water Deep.
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  But also more importantly, some of the cards in Nanty Narky help other people,
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  so you have to pick who to help with your cards, not just
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  who to hurt or you have to sometimes what you're doing is not hurting a
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  person so much as rearranging their board or something. So those two things kind
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  of together make Nancy Knarking feel more like the kind of push me, pull
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  you effects in Lord's of Water Deep, and I like that a lot.
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  The other game that I would put in the category of ark Nova or of
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  Lord's water Deep I give it away is ark Nova. Ark Nova is a
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  tableau builder with card draw and some tile placement, but the element of hurting
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  the other players occasionally is there. If you choose to play with the attack
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  cards, then there are some cards that come out that allow you to play
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  nasty to other players, and if you play at the right time, they
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  can really disrupt what the other player is trying to do. So that's actually
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  a very close fit to what's going on in Lords of water Deep with the
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  intrigue cards. All right, and the finally, the last goal, last
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  thing I want to talk about is the secret goal. The first thing you
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  do in Lords of water Deep is you get your identity cards showing which Lord
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  you are, and that lord gives you a bonus every time you complete one
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  of the quests of a certain type. So you might get a bonus every
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  time you complete a Skulldugger request or cleric quest, or sometimes it's you get
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  a bonus points for every building you build, Like there's like nine different lords
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  and you're gonna have one of them, and that goal is secret. And
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  I like the games that have a secret goal that you reveal Segrata is one
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  of my favorites. In that one, you have a color that you're trying
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  to go for, but if you go to it too aggressively, other players
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  might might notice it, might start stealing those ones out from under you.
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  And I think Segrata is tight enough that nobody's doing that. I think you
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  focus on your own board, not other people's. But maybe the other one
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  that has those reveals is Ticket to Ride. And Ticket to Ride you have
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  these paths you're going for, and other people don't know exactly which paths you're
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  going for, but there's a lot of different ways that you can try to
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  complete those, and at the end of the game, you score points for
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  the paths you've completed. So that's another example of secret goals. Now Obsession
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  has secret goals in it as well as does Nanty nark King Nancy Narking,
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  you have a secret identity, you have a thing you're trying to do.
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  So both of those games you could call sort of double whammy with Lords of
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  Water Deep. So what do you think about Lords of Water Deep? Do
• 14:09
  you like it? Let me know by heading over to board game Gekill three
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  sixty nine and sharing your experience there. Thanks for joining me im walk today.
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  Your next walk is opposing his mind loss. Bye bye, thank you
• 14:45
  you are Come on you get your right m all right. Brought to you
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  by rattle Box