(soft music)
- Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver, the podcast
where I pick up my audio recorder
as I leave the library and deliver an episode
to you while I walk home.
I'm Brennan Riley.
(upbeat music)
Well good afternoon listeners.
It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago.
And by lovely I mean it's warm enough
that I don't need my jacket,
but it is also on the verge of raining.
So I guess I'll leave you to decide
what counts as lovely.
Nonetheless, I thought I would talk to you
a little bit about some games I've been playing recently.
That's right, it's time for another
Board Game Espresso, Triple Shot.
(Brendan makes latte steaming sounds)
Got that latte all prepared?
Okay, let's go to it.
Those of you who are new to the podcast,
Board Game Espresso Triple Shot is a short review
episode in which I talk about three games I've tried
recently for the first time.
I give a quick first impression of them.
And then usually I talk about one game I've dusted off
or in otherwise played, that's not a brand new game.
These are, you know, on the par of three to five minutes.
So they are very quick first impression.
They should not be taken as a review
and I try to caution about that, but you never know.
So today is the first game that I'm gonna talk about
is Titanic.
This game was published in 2020 and has the cover
to match the 1997 James Cameron film of the same name.
It's got Jack and Rose looking at each other,
all lovey-dovey and this game is from Adrian Adamescu
and Daryl Andrews and published by Spin Master Limited.
If those names sound familiar, Adamescu and Andrews
are the designers of Sagrada, which is a better game,
just a little.
I'm just kidding, just a lot.
So Titanic is a game that I own because I am really interested
in the Titanic, so I own a bunch of games about the Titanic.
This one in particular is interesting and amusing
and kind of silly that definitely falls
into my novelty game category.
That said, it is the best of the Titanic novelty games
that I've played.
In this game, you play either Rose or Jack or Captain Smith
or Cal or Rose's mom.
I can't remember her name,
but those are the five characters that you can play.
The game does not have an inherent positive or negative.
You're not like on teams.
You can win as Cal and it's not seen as being horrible.
That said, each character does have a special ability
that you can use once and you can reset
by going up to the top of the ship.
The mechanisms in Titanic are actually pretty interesting
for a game that's clearly a mass market
game meant for folks who aren't really deep into the hobby.
In Titanic, you are running around in your goal
is to get passengers from the ship over to the lifeboat
and then launch them into the ocean.
Different passengers will give you different amounts of points
and there are a limited number of lifeboats
and so there's a limited number of passengers who can be saved.
There's also a timer in the game as you're playing
where you're revealing these flood cards
and the ship is flooding from the bottom to the top.
You can get these items as well.
The main choices you're making as you're playing
are kind of deciding which way you want to run
and the conflict comes with the other players
as you there are limited spots on the lifeboats
and so you can't get points
unless you put people on lifeboats
and other people are competing to put people
on those lifeboats.
So it's a pretty simple game.
I won't exaggerate its qualities.
It is a bit more complex than most mass market games
but I think well within the possibility of people playing
who don't play the kinds of games I talk about on here.
The product design is, the art is fine.
The pieces are all pretty crappy.
There are, for instance, there are these rings
that in most games would be a nice thick piece of card stock
and in this game they're like a thin piece of like
plastic card stock kind of plasticized stock very thin
as much as I like that because this is meant to be a mass market game.
I think I got it for $10 on sale at Amazon.
I think the full price of it at the store was probably $20.
I can't imagine that it was more than that.
So it's a pretty cheap product.
That said, we had an amusing time playing it.
It is a very standard mass market game.
So from a novelty perspective it is what it is.
But I enjoyed it.
If you get a chance to play,
if you're a Titanic enthusiast
and you get a chance to play a Titanic game,
you should probably play either Deck Chairs on the Titanic
or SOS Titanic, but there's worse games to play than Titanic
from 2020.
The second game I want to talk about today is from
indie boards and cards, designer Jenny Iglesias,
Nick Little and Kevin Riley.
And this is Aeon's End.
Aeon's End is a cooperative game in which you play
wizards fighting magical monsters that are attacking your town,
the gimmick of the game is that you have to defend the town.
And so if you let a certain amount of damage get through,
then the town is destroyed and you lose.
You can lose a player without losing the game,
which is a nice twist.
The big thing that makes Aon's End interesting,
it's a deck building game and you never shuffle your deck.
The order you discard your cards in is the order
you're going to draw them in because when you're done
with playing your hand, you're just going to flip it over.
Flip when your deck runs out,
you're going to take your discard pile and just flip it over
and start drawing from them.
What was the bottom.
This makes for a really interesting game
because you have to sort of plan as your discarding cards
where you're going to put them.
The game is also very specific about when things get discarded
because you have to do it in the right order.
We played a couple rounds of this.
I think we played three games altogether.
We got this as a family game to play,
mostly with my mother-in-law who really enjoys this kind of game
and we've run out of games to play
of Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle. We finished that game.
We completed all of the different missions
and while that game was really fun,
I don't think we want to keep playing it
on missions we've already played.
So I was looking for something that had a similar feel
that was challenging that we wouldn't win every time.
It was interesting.
They had a lot of variety and potential for a lot of expansion
and it turns out Aeon's End is just the trick.
Aeon's End is interesting, it's fun to play,
it's reasonably challenging.
Each enemy is difficult in a different way.
The hero characters play very similarly
but each has their own thing that they do.
There's a variety of different cards
that you can put in the market
so you can change it up that way.
And they've released a ton of expansion content for it.
So after we've played our way through the base villains
and tried out the different heroes,
I can always order another expansion for $15 or $20
and we'll have some new material to play through.
So it looks like Aon's End is gonna be a great fit
for that role in our family gaming.
And yeah, it turns out there's a reason it's rated 7.9.
It's pretty dang good.
We had a lot of fun with it.
The way the game works, I really like this mechanism too.
You have these spell slots
and each player can cast spells into the spell slots
which then kind of grow for a turn
and then on your next turn you get to actually resolve those spells.
So the game has some options of like,
the enemies might hurt the person
as the most spells waiting the cast
or it might get rid of your best spell
or that sort of thing.
So there's some really interesting mechanisms there.
You also can put energy toward opening more spell slots
but of course anytime you're doing that,
you're not actually casting spells.
There's a lot of really interesting stuff
where you help each other.
And then the turn order mechanism is neat.
There's a deck of cards that have each of the characters
that are playing and it has two cards for the enemies
and you shuffle up these six cards
and then you go through all six.
So you could go right away at the beginning of the round
or you could not go to the end of the round.
The enemy might go twice in a row.
The enemy might go right at the beginning
and then you have like four turns to set up
before they're gonna go again.
It's a really interesting mechanism.
It can make for some long downtime though
in a four player game.
We did have a couple times where somebody was at the beginning
of one round of play
and at the end of the next round of play.
So they actually had like what, five,
10 turns in between their turns,
which isn't, isn't great.
But overall pretty fun.
So if you get a chance to play Aeon's End,
I highly recommend it.
Really good time.
We'll be playing it a lot
and I'm sure I'll mention the expansions as we go.
I do always like to talk about a dusty game
and I did dust off a game recently
that is just, it's a little more slow of a game.
There's not a lot to it
but it's a good time every now and again.
And this is 'dude' and it's sequel 'more dude'.
The basic premise of the game is pretty simple.
You have a card that says dude on it.
You have to say dude in a way that you think evokes
the way that the word dude is written on the card
and then other people will also be saying dude
and you try to figure out if you and another person
are saying dude the same way.
And if you are, you get a point.
If you're not, you lose those cards.
We go until someone has gone through all their cards.
It's pretty dumb
but it's a really nice five minutes
or 10 minutes if you play the sequel more dude.
So that's usually I suggest playing two rounds
dude and more dude.
And it makes for a very entertaining play
as people interpret how the cards are written
and try to figure out who's matching them.
There's not like I said, there's not a lot to it.
I've explained the entire game to you
and frankly most of the inherent depth
at work in the game also.
So it is not something that you should write home about
but I thought of it the other day
because I saw somebody was talking about their,
I saw somebody was showing their thrift store purchases
and they showed that dude was on the shelf
and they passed it up and I was like,
oh you missed out, not picking up dude.
It's a goofy fun game that you should have checked out.
They're like it looked pretty stupid.
I'm like I didn't say it wasn't stupid.
I just said it's a fun game that you should've checked out.
So that is dude designed by Bo Beckett and Jeff Stahl
and published by North Star Game Studio.
Finally the last game I wanna talk about is a game
from Z-man Games from 2015.
So it's a little older, it's called Bastion.
Bastion is a tower defense game
in which you have a castle in the middle of the board
and you have a variety of enemies
that are marching around the side,
trying to attack the castle.
It is a, as a tower defense game,
it feels very similar to sort of slightly more grown-up
castle panic.
I will say I thought it was pretty interesting.
There was a fair amount of conversation back and forth.
My son said he likes castle panic better.
I can see that, I can see why you might.
I thought Bastion was pretty interesting as well.
The mechanisms are slightly different.
There are these crystals that you're managing
which I thought made for an interesting play.
I think at least after our first play
I didn't say I should sell Bastion,
but I don't think it'll stay in our collection very long.
I think one or two more plays
and that'll probably be enough of that game for me.
And so it will move right along.
On the other hand, I do, there is a game sale at toggle next week
and I wanna bring a few games to sell.
So maybe Bastion will go into that pile.
We'll see.
But Bastion is from 2015 designed by Evgeny Nikitin
and Nicolay Pegasov, published by Zman Games.
So that brings me to the end of my episode
and my end of my chat with you.
It does make me curious what games have you been playing lately?
Head over to boardgamegeek guild 3269
you can share the games that you've been playing,
your recent quick plays and I'd love to hear what those are
so I can compare and say, yeah, that looks good
or no, that doesn't look good or whatever.
You could also email me,
Brendan at Rattlebox Games,
or send a geek mail message to Wombat929
which is my boardgamegeek username.
I'd love to hear from you there.
Beyond that, I hope that you have a lovely day
and the ducks are still hanging out at my bird feeder.
So if you listened yesterday or last time,
I left the ducks were there and I'm returning home.
The ducks are still there having a good time,
eating some bird seed.
So, aha, well, I hope that your next walk
is as pleasant as mine was.
Bye bye.
(upbeat music)
(out-take beep)
Speaking of expansions instead of a dusty game today,
I'm gonna talk about an expansion.
We downloaded the, oh, I'm sorry, nevermind. (blows raspberry)
(out-take beep) Brought to you by Rattlebox Games.
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