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The ‘geek Asks 11 · 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 leave the game store and delivering up so to you while I walk
• 0:10
  home. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon, listeners. It's a
• 0:22
  lovely day here in suburbans, Chicago. I just dropped my son off for
• 0:25
  his D and D game at the local game store, and I'm now walking
• 0:28
  home. I thought I would take a few minutes to chat with you.
• 0:31
  I was thinking about it, and I hadn't done one of my favorite weird
• 0:34
  episodes in a while, and this is The Geek Asks. Those of you
• 0:38
  new the podcast, The Geek Asks is an episode where I, in all
• 0:42
  of my arrogance, pretend that the Board Game Geek Forums are in fact an
• 0:45
  advice column in which I have been requested to give advice to people asking questions
• 0:52
  in the board game Geek forums. So what I do is I open up
• 0:54
  the Board Game Geek Forums, I look at the recent posts, and then
• 0:59
  I just answered questions based on the subject line of the post. I don't
• 1:02
  look at every I don't read every post because a lot of them can't translate
• 1:04
  into clear questions or things that seem like they meet inquiry, but hopefully there'll
• 1:08
  be enough that this is amusing when I create the show notes for this episode.
• 1:15
  If you go to rattleboxgames dot com and click on podcasts and then this
• 1:19
  episode, you will find links to each of the forums where this advice is
• 1:26
  aimed and find out whether or not it was at all relevant. Of course,
• 1:29
  I don't go post this advice here. Let's jump in, all right,
• 1:33
  help please tell me more about this mini. I would say you're in
• 1:37
  the right place. Generally, if you want to know more about a mini,
• 1:40
  going to board game geek is going to be the thing that you need.
• 1:44
  Setting history versus real life history. I don't know what that means.
• 1:48
  Expansions for Relic impossible to find. Now, this is an interesting problem that
• 1:53
  plagues all of us when we discover a game that is older, is that
• 1:57
  expansions four games generally have a much smaller print run and are very difficult to
• 2:01
  find once the game has sort of reached its life cycle. Now, some
• 2:06
  games where the selling of the expansion is the whole of the game, like
• 2:10
  Arkham Horror or the Card Game, will intentionally keep all the expansions in print
• 2:15
  or as much as possible a lot of other board games. However, they
• 2:17
  don't keep the expansions in print unless the game itself is maintained in print.
• 2:23
  So, for example, if you want to go buy Seven Wonders, they've
• 2:27
  slowly released the expansions for the updated edition of Seven Wonders over the last couple
• 2:30
  of years. All of those are generally kept in print because the base game
• 2:35
  is in print, but if the base game is not, then they generally
• 2:38
  don't keep the expansions in print. Relic, which is based on I believe
• 2:43
  it's a sort of a fantasy version of Talisman or a sci fi version of
• 2:46
  Talisman, is out of print as far as I understand it, which means
• 2:50
  that the expansions for it are pretty hard to find and probably more expensive than
• 2:55
  the expansions for than the base game is just because there's your copies of them.
• 3:00
  So, yes, expansions are difficult to get in. If you want
• 3:04
  an expansion for a game and you aren't sure the game is an evergreen,
• 3:07
  probably get the expansion as soon as you can. Okay. Lots of auctions
• 3:10
  today brainstorming to find a name of a boardgaming event. Oh that's fun.
• 3:16
  Let's see if we can come up with a few. I'm gonna do five
• 3:19
  and then we'll quit. We'll call it dice Thunder. That would be a
• 3:23
  fun one. Chits and giggles. That would be a war game event designed
• 3:29
  around funny things. Perhaps how about I think power to the mepole is already
• 3:36
  a board game channel, so that one won't work. Play cool games,
• 3:39
  win cool prizes. That's more of a slogan than an event name tabletop of
• 3:45
  Geddon free reroll. That's five. It's interesting to think about, like,
• 3:49
  what is the character of a board game event you're naming. I think part
• 3:53
  of it depends on is that a event you want people to be lured into
• 3:57
  if they don't know board gaming or don't know your event. For example,
• 4:00
  Toggle Top Day is the name of our tabletop day event that we hold for
• 4:04
  Toggle. It's probably not going to lure in a lot of people who don't
• 4:06
  already know the Toggle event is a tabletop board gaming event. But whatever can
• 4:12
  you suggest? Games where you can walk in rooms on a big board on
• 4:17
  a big board is the tricky part. So I presume this as a person
• 4:23
  who's looking for something kind of like clue where you can walk into rooms.
• 4:27
  I mean I would say the best one here would be um Mansions of Madness,
• 4:31
  which takes place in the Arkham Files world. But it doesn't use a
• 4:36
  board so much as a series of tiles that you put together to make a
• 4:40
  board. But generally that one has a big board you put together at the
• 4:44
  beginning and it is the board you'll use for the whole games. You have
• 4:46
  a kind of a sense of scope of the board before you'll get to do
• 4:50
  it. I would say another one that I'd point to is Last Night on
• 4:55
  Earth, the zombie game. This one has a bunch of bi buildings spread
• 5:00
  out over a town, and the different rooms in the buildings are rooms that
• 5:04
  you can walk into. I feel like that works pretty well to meet the
• 5:09
  criteria they're asking for here of rooms where you can games where you can walk
• 5:15
  in a room on a big board. I mean Betrayler at House on the
• 5:17
  Hill also feels like it would meet that requirement, except it's a series of
• 5:20
  tiles, not a big board. I'm not sure why they want specifically a
• 5:24
  big board, but that feels like the tricky part there. Inventions evolution of
• 5:29
  ideas Lacerda group Buy from Australia. I think group Buys are a great idea.
• 5:34
  I did that for a number of games that allows you to save money
• 5:40
  on shipping. Generally if the game is large. I can't see how it
• 5:45
  saves them money on shipping, but it does. Maybe it saves them money
• 5:48
  on handling because they have one less order to handle. My best version of
• 5:53
  my group buy. I did a group buy for the game as Australia,
• 5:57
  the Martin Wallace Game, and I believe we ended up arding six copies at
• 6:00
  a significant discount. Ten or fifteen dollars per person was not nothing, So
• 6:05
  I wonder if they do that. Okay, not seeing a lot here that
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  look like questions lower weight games that are good for five to six players.
• 6:15
  Great question, random person. Actually the name of the person asking it as
• 6:20
  Neil Well Neil. I have lots of suggestions for you. The top choice
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  for me would be Ink and Gold. I think inc and Gold is an
• 6:29
  excellent game that allows four or five to six players to have a great times,
• 6:33
  low stakes. You get five rounds of fun. If you're not looking
• 6:38
  for a trivia game or a strictly party game, Ink and Gold is top
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  notch. If you were looking for a couple others, I mean, if
• 6:45
  you wanted to give people a weird experience. Just one is really fun,
• 6:48
  and so Clover if they are a little bit more puzzle minded. Each of
• 6:53
  those has some real benefits and joy four five to six players, if you
• 7:04
  can go a little bit heavier but not too much. I think Lords of
• 7:08
  Water Deep works really well at five to six. You may have to get
• 7:11
  the you have to get the Scoundrels a Skullport expansion to play six. I'm
• 7:18
  not sure. I know it plays five. That one is a little heavier
• 7:23
  than your lightweight games, but he wrote Neil wrote lower weight, not lightweight.
• 7:29
  It's a lower weight to me, says you don't want of a taliserta
• 7:32
  game you don't even maybe even Everdell is too much, but you're looking for
• 7:36
  something on that entry level, but not necessarily featherweight. I'd also say if
• 7:42
  you're looking for something short point Salad is really good, easy to understand,
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  quick to teach, plays in about half an hour or six people, maybe
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  forty five minutes, depending if people are spending a lot of time thinking.
• 7:53
  It could go faster. If you want just a notch up and difficulty,
• 7:57
  Libertalia is great for five to six players, so that's a bunch of games
• 8:00
  I've just recommended that aren't party games. What kind of board game cafe would
• 8:05
  you like? This is an interesting question because I find a board game cafe
• 8:09
  is not a thing I really care for. And here's why a board game
• 8:13
  meetup event like toggle gaming we do at our at the bar where we meet.
• 8:18
  If there were a board game cafe that had a board game meetup like
• 8:22
  that, I would be all for it. But I think most board game
• 8:24
  cafe is actually cater to groups that have come in together who want to play
• 8:31
  games together. And in that case, unless I'm traveling, a board game
• 8:35
  cafe doesn't offer me anything. If I have a group that I already have
• 8:39
  together, we'll just play at somebody's house, going to a board game cafe
• 8:43
  so that I can pay either for the food and beverage or just pay to
• 8:48
  rent the table space, and then play around a bunch of people that I'm
• 8:52
  not interacting with. I don't really find that an interesting or exciting experience.
• 8:58
  Now, if I'm in another city, my wife and I just want to
• 9:01
  like we're touring for the day, and we did our morning travel and we're
• 9:05
  just resting for a couple hours. Going to a board game cafe playing a
• 9:09
  couple of light games from their collection. That is the sort of thing I
• 9:11
  would want. Which case i'd want a robust collection of games in the twenty
• 9:18
  fifteen to sixty minute window i'd want. I don't like having to pay for
• 9:24
  a table. I'd rather pay for food. If you have a food and
• 9:26
  beverage minimum, that's fine with me. Usually, Or even if there's a
• 9:31
  table cost which you then get as a credit toward the food and beverage minimum,
• 9:35
  I don't have a problem with that either. That maybe even is better,
• 9:39
  because then if you don't feel like buying anything, you could just pay
• 9:41
  to rent the table. Yeah, it's nice to have game teachers there,
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  so if you want to try a new game, there's somebody who can come
• 9:46
  and teach it to you. You know, Snakes and Lattes has kind of
• 9:50
  gotten a system down pat and I would say that's probably the place to go.
• 9:54
  So that's the kind of board game cafe I would like. Would a
• 9:56
  board games graphics routed in a pick pixel art esthetic be accepted? Absolutely?
• 10:03
  Maybe they mean rooted, not routed. It's routed, which suggests some sort
• 10:09
  of path I think if they said rooted the sentence would make more sense.
• 10:11
  I'm assume they just made a misspelling. I would say yes. In the
• 10:16
  abstract, this is a thing that has happened a number of times. Boss
• 10:18
  Monster famously used it a pixel Lincoln, which is not a game I've played,
• 10:22
  but presumably uses pixel art. In fact, the follow up games for
• 10:26
  Boss Monster also used pixelized art, so this is not a thing that's unheard
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  of. That said, I would not want it except in a game where
• 10:35
  that is sort of very specifically the esthetic they're going for in Boss Monster,
• 10:39
  you really are trying to sort of replicate the nes style video game. Look,
• 10:45
  if you have another game that's not doing that actively, I wouldn't want
• 10:48
  pixel art. I don't find it really charming or anything. Did you find
• 10:52
  it? Did you prefer it when digital games were low res and faithful recreation
• 10:58
  recreations of the original That second half I read this story earlier, so I'm
• 11:03
  returning to a thing I've read before. That second half is not very well
• 11:07
  explained, but I think what they mean is in some newer iterations of online
• 11:13
  or digital versions of games, the animations and other things that happen when you
• 11:18
  interact with the game look and feel different than the physical components, whereas some
• 11:24
  games they just represent the physical components of the game and you interact with them
• 11:30
  as you would on the table. Of course, like Tabletop Simulator does this
• 11:33
  directly, and I think table Topia usually does as well. Oh there's a
• 11:37
  children's party, we're having some sadness there that you might interact with pieces just
• 11:43
  like you would on the table. I think that's what this person is talking
• 11:46
  about. They're also speaking I think about like on board game Arena, they
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  often take components of the game and refigure them to work better on the screen.
• 11:54
  So, for instance, the scoreboard from Arc Nova is not represented in
• 12:01
  the same way on the screen, in part because they don't want to put
• 12:03
  this long, thin game board on the screen. It works well as a
• 12:09
  physical object on the table, but on the screen it looks weird, and
• 12:13
  so they've changed how that score works. And there's a number of things like
• 12:16
  that where the game displays different things for you than the physical experience does.
• 12:22
  I prefer for a game to work with the affordances of its medium, so
• 12:28
  I prefer for the game experience to be as close as possible, but if
• 12:31
  it works better to change the interface or change the look of something to make
• 12:35
  it easier to play online. They should do that, and anytime there's like
• 12:39
  an animation element, I like it. The one thing I wish games had
• 12:41
  more of, and they're doing this more and more, but I think you
• 12:43
  and more would be better is checking to make sure that you want to do
• 12:48
  what you did. I really like when the game says are you sure?
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  Confirm your whole turn? Even just a confirm your whole turn at the end
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  of the thing, or if you click something where it's about to make it
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  so you can't go back, it should say, are you sure about your
• 13:01
  current turn up till this point? You can't go back once you've done this,
• 13:05
  and then every other thing should be able to go back. So well,
• 13:09
  there's some stickers for you or some well, there's some advice for you
• 13:13
  based on the board Gange forums. I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for
• 13:16
  joining me on my walk today. I hope your next boss is a pleasant
• 13:18
  to mind. Lost gold Bye brought to you by Rattlebox Game