Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step
out the door and deliver an episode to you while I stroll around.
I'm Brendan Riley.
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Oh, good afternoon listeners.
It's a deceptively cool day here in suburban Chicago.
Now, I don't know whether this deceptively cool means it's hot.
It's cooler than it appears to be because that's what I mean to say.
It is.
The last couple days have been very warm.
When you look outside, it looks like it should be very warm.
Then when you get outside, it's deceptively cool.
Not cold.
Just, you know, light hoodie weather because it's April.
Anyway, welcome to Pick Up and Deliver.
Glad to have you here.
Well, I'm on my way to pick up my car.
My daughter was running late today so she had to drive herself to school and we don't have
a parking permit for her to park at school so she parks on one of the streets nearby.
But those streets have parking that's limited for a couple hours so if you park there all
day, you can get a ticket.
So we've done this a couple times now where she's got, I have some time in my day to take
a little walk and she's running behind so she takes the car, parks at school, texts me
a picture of where it is on Google Maps and then I walk and pick it up and drive it home.
Gets me a little exercise in the middle of the day gives me a chance to record my podcast
with my favorite friends and works out just fine for everybody.
So there we are.
Well, I've fallen away from or I've moved a little bit away from doing a review episode every
other episode because I have caught up so that's good.
But it has been a couple episodes and since I talked about some new games I played so that
means it's time for a board game espresso triple shot.
Ready for some tasty board game lattes and actually this is a highly caffeinated addition
because it's a quadruple shot.
That's right, I'm not doing three board game espresso reviews I'm doing four in part
because three of the games that I'm going to be talking about today are all pretty light
party games and so they're reviewable a little faster.
It's not quite the five game party, five party games survey that I did while back but it's
in the same ballpark.
I also have one dusty game that I thought I would talk about because it's been a little
while since I've discussed that one and I thought I'd bring it up to you again.
So to start with the first game which is neither a dusty nor one of the three party games
is the big busy boy of the current and that's Wyrmspan.
Wyrmspan is a sort of sequel or remix of the game Wingspan but it is different in a
couple of key ways. One thematically it's about giant dragons instead of birds.
It's called W Y R M, Wyrmspan and then it is sort of the more gamerly version of the
Wingspan model so instead of building a habitat for birds you are building a habitat for
dragons.
More importantly the habitat for dragons that you're building is more complicated and perhaps
more strategic.
So if you haven't gotten a chance this is this mini review assumes that you have played
Wingspan.
If you've never played Wingspan it's hard to tell you what the differences are with Wyrmspan
but I'll give you a I'll give it a go.
So in Wyrmspan you are digging out caves and building habitats for dragons.
There are hatchling dragons and there are adult dragons.
There are dragons of different types that do different things.
If you've played Wingspan you're going to recognize a lot of stuff about this game.
You have a board with three horizontal tracks where you're placing different flying beasts
that you have acquired for your menezery.
You have a couple different resources to manage and there's little eggs.
There's also a huge deck of colorful individual cards with art on each one and different design
sensibility for each one.
The gameplay is roughly similar in that you take turns and you have a limited number
of turns per round and on those turns you're doing something in one of the three different
rows.
Those three different rows let you do different things.
You can also acquire new dragons.
So that's kind of where the similarities end.
Wyrmspan has a number of additional wrinkles before you can put a dragon in a cave for instance
you have to dig out that cave and when you use a cave you do it by going for a walk in
the cave and often the things that you can do are a bit more complicated in that regard.
The game has a variable number of action markers.
In Wingspan you always start with I think eight and then you lose one each round as you score
the scoring round so that in the last round you'll have five actions which makes sense
because the game is getting longer because you're building these big chains of actions
that you do when you take your action.
By contrast in Wyrmspan you have a set number of actions you can do which are represented
by coins and then you actually can do things to get more coins.
So when we played we had some people were taking a whole bunch of extra actions each round
because they had more coins.
However you can also end up spending multiple coins on one action if you keep taking the
same action.
So the game has a compounding expense feature where you can take the same action more
than once but you have to pay extra action coins to do so.
So that difference is interesting.
There's also these guilds that can score you points and there's a bunch of different
stuff that scores points in different ways but the long and short bit is I think the
best summary is just it's like Wingspan but charged up a couple matches to appeal to more
the gamers who like a bit more elaborate work.
The game is designed by Connie Vogelman who I think is also came out with Apiary this
year from Stonemeier Games and Elizabeth Hargrave consulted on it I believe I don't think
she has a co-design credit.
So I'm playing Wyrmspan the one time and I played it with a couple of people who played
a bunch of times before and one person who had not played it all before.
In that context I thought it was fun I can see why people like it.
I probably wouldn't turn down a game of it again but ultimately for me it wasn't different
enough from Wingspan to make me want to have both and I already really like Wingspan.
I like the theme better.
I honestly I like the simpler play the extra wrinkles did add a bit more planning to do
but I have plenty of games where you do complicated planning.
So the question is is this a better one than those because it isn't a better game than
Wingspan for me in terms of the kind of things Wingspan is doing.
So ultimately the answer was no.
Like I think there's interesting stuff in Wyrmspan if I didn't have Wingspan at all and
I weren't interested in birds Wyrmspan would probably be the better game for me and I
certainly will enjoy playing it without people get it but barring some other thing like
my wife saying you know what I really like to that dragon game let's go try that again
or can you pick that one up.
I don't see myself getting Wyrmspan as part of my collection but I still thought it was
pretty enjoyable and I encourage you to try it if you get a chance especially if you
are like a lot of people you like Wingspan but you thought it was a little too random or
you thought it was not game really enough because this game solves both of those problems
for sure that's Wyrmspan.
Alright next up I have three light party games that I played recently now all three of them
I played once one of them I only played for about 10 minutes and then we wanted something
else I got just the latest taste of it but you'll hear from my discussion and it is what
it is.
So let's talk about that first that's Charty Party this is a game I picked up mostly on the
strength of its name and the fact that it was two dollars at Goodwill so even if it turns
out to be terrible I can use the cards as backing for sleeving or something but the way
Charty Party works is you have a bunch of decks of tarot size cards the whole bunch of
tarot size cards which are unit which are charts when you look at them they are they have
a horizontal axis and a vertical axis the horizontal axis is labeled with some unit and you
have a line going up and down and measurements and then the vertical axis is not labeled or
vice versa the vertical axis might be labeled the horizontal one might not and the players
all have a hand of cards that provide the label for the other axis and the idea is that
the judge presents the chart to the group and everybody chooses and turns in one of their
answers for what is this a chart of and everybody looks at the results and then the judge picks
the one they think is funniest so it's a Apples to Apples style judge game which is generally
not my favorite it's a little bit cute because the charts are different but ultimately this
is pretty forgettable in terms of this kind of party game not a whole lot to it and we
played it for ten minutes and I don't know that I ever need to play it again I kept it
around but it's fine that's Charty Party.
The second game is another one I played at my board game club this one was a student brought
it and it's called Herd Mentality Herd Mentality comes from the same design space as games like
say anything or blank slate or green team wins in which these are games where there is
a relatively generic prompt and as players you're trying to find similarities or avoid
similarities or differences with other players I mean all this goes back actually to the game
Scattergories which does the same thing in a sort of different rhythm but a similar mode
in Herd Mentality your goal is to say the same thing as the most people who said it so like
if the question is super here you'd least likely to get on the wrong least likely want
to be on the wrong side of then people write down whatever they're going to write down and
all reveal and if more people say one answer than any other answer they'll get a point
if there's multiple groups that say the thing but they're all tied nobody gets a point
if you went out by yourself and you're the only person who said an answer and you're the
only person who's the only person who said an answer then you get a point but you don't
get a point if two people said so low answers you know it's the it is a very similar mechanism
to Green Team Wins where the answer the team that answers the most of a series of choices
is the green team and everybody's on the green team gets a point again these are fine party
games I don't find them particularly compelling it's an amusing way to spend the half an hour
but I don't generally think that it's not a generally I think I would advocate to spend
a lot of time playing but you know let's find that's Herd Mentality and then finally
we played a trivia game called SMARTish and the way SMARTish works is that you have you
draw a series of tiles that give you categories and then you put those tiles into categories
and rate them one to five you get points based on what category you put the question in
you know so answer a question of difficulty based on the category I think so like the
higher point value the harder the question no that's not how it works it's just you get more
points so you put the question you think you're more likely to get in a higher value if
you get it wrong your opponents steal and then they get the points that you assigned it
instead yeah it's okay it's a trivia game and I'm sort of spoiled now because I played
Wits and Wagers and Wits and Wagers is an amazing trivia game because you don't actually
have to know the answers to the trivia and it's just more fun I mean I really like a
trivia game where I'm doing my best to get the get the right answer and say the answer
first but compared to Wits and Wagers where there's a whole element of trying to bet I just
find that much more I'm using so SMARTish is a fine trivia game better than Trivial
Pursuit or something but not good I don't like I don't think I like to as much as a
Bezzerwizzer either although it's be frank I don't really remember Bezzerwizzer
except that I thought it was pretty good so that's SMARTish and then finally I did dust
off one game this month or last month that I want to talk about and this is Century now
Century was the game that came out quite a while ago I want to say 2016 and it made a huge
splash at GenCon everybody wanted this game everybody was fighting over it there were
playmats and everything but the game also had a little bit of notoriety because there was
a rumor that they were going to release addition an addition of it with fantasy art instead
of boring trading in the Sahara trading in the Sahara art and sure enough they did they
released this thing called Century Golem Edition and they said that they even though the other
games are going to be released eventually they were not going to do that for Century but I
only want to play Century if it's golems so I got Century Golem Edition has the crystals
it was great and then I emailed the company and I said hey I would buy these other sequels
to spice road if you release them in the Golem Edition but I'm not going to go buy
the dumb spice trading Edition and they did and I followed through in that I actually have
all three of the Century games in the Golem Edition I do like the other two the neither of them
is as good as Century spice or Century Golem Edition the original century is just so
good it is a engine building game that has a series of cards that are conversion engines
they convert crystals from one color to another and then there's a series of golems that
you can recruit that you pay the crystals to get the idea is that each golem cost gets
you a certain number of points and so by playing the crystals you can get the golems that
are in the list and get the points that are for them as the game goes along a river of golems
comes up the first person to take five of them ends the game and then you add up your points
it's a pretty simple resource conversion game it is very similar in feel and look to
something like Splendor in fact when this game out when this game came out people often
talked about it as a Splendor killer I mean I think that's probably not true because Splendor
is still there and selling more than Century does in fact Splendor is new dual version
might be the Splendor killer that everyone keeps talking about but nonetheless it's a really
interesting game and I think really fulfilling like I like it better than Splendor even
though both of them involve there's a certain amount of input randomness a certain amount
of luck in terms of what comes out when you're the person who gets to buy stuff next but
there is a rhythm to Century that I find immensely satisfying and the race that you can
get into and I really love the rhythm where one person could be going flat out just trying
to get five cards as quickly as they can and they could win against somebody who is going
a little bit fat a little bit slower but trying to really get an engine going where they're
going to be a little rack up those big cards the last game we played I ended up with I
think three cards claimed and the person who won had claimed claim to their fifth card
I was one round away from claiming my fourth card and had I gotten my fourth card I would
have won they won because they closed the game one round before I could claim it which
is great that was a very tight game because even though they had five and I had three I
had taken three high point ones and they took five the first five they could get really
cheap ones and like I said they edged me out by one round it was really intense so I love
the way that it works it's relatively simple to explain fun to play takes like 20 minutes
to half an hour I think the other two Century games are good but not as good as Century
Spice Road so our Century Golem Edition it's weird because in the original one Century
Spice Road is the name of the game so there is no analog for the spice road part it's
called Century Golem Edition but then the next one is like century colon something something
something golem edition so there's no something something equivalent to spice road so I keep
something over that but it's great if you haven't played it definitely we're trying it's
probably fun in the spice mode too but look who cares about that theme not me so that's
a game dusted off and I'm happy to play that's by Emerson Matsuchi originally published
by plan b games I think still so but I'm not sure who is who is the publisher there well
thank you for joining me on my walk today I hope that you enjoyed it let me know what
you've been playing over on boardgamegeek and post a message in our guild with
just number 3269 or just google "pick up and deliver guild boardgamegeek"
that'll get you there you could also send a message to me wombat929 is my
username there brendan@rattleboxgames.com is my email that you can use to contact me I don't
know or look me up on board game arena wombat929 is my username there I'd love to play a game
with you invite me I'll play so thanks for joining me on the walk today I hope your next
walk is pleasant to mine was bye bye
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brought to you by Rattlebox Games
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