Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver, the Podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I head
out for a walk and deliver an episode to you while I stroll around.
I'm Brendan Riley.
It's a lovely day and that feels like a lovely time to talk about some games I've tried
for the first time recently.
Time for another board game espresso triple shot.
For those of you new to the podcast, the board game espresso triple shot is an episode
where I do three mini reviews of three games I've tried for the first time recently.
So it's not full reviews.
I haven't played these games enough to confidently tell you anything about them, but they are
a good place to start for understanding what I think of them and getting a sense of how
the games play.
So in that regard, today I'm going to talk about three games I've tried recently and
I often will pick one that I dusted off to talk about as well and I'll be doing that too.
So to start with, this is the game that was on the top of my stack last month and I did
not get it played, but I am happy to report that I got to play it today.
That is Porta Nigra.
Porta Nigra is a game from Michael Kiesling and Wolfgang Kramer.
I talked about it a little bit in the Kramer and Kiesling full episode that I did
the other week, but I'm going to talk about it a little more now in more detail.
This game was published by Stronghold Games in 2015, which I don't understand how it was
published in 2015 because I didn't feel like I was all that deep in the hobby yet, but I
remember being just bombarded with discussions of this game.
So confusing.
Oh, the cicadas are loud today.
Anyhow, in Porta Nigra, you play some sort of Roman organizer who's helping to build a
famous Roman city and set it up for success, I guess, in the Roman Empire.
The game has a relatively simple mechanism.
Essentially, it is a game where you're helping to build the city and you do that by buying
bricks, spending those bricks to build towers and then scoring based on where you built
those towers.
The game has a variety of different features that score.
Part of what makes the game interesting is it's an area control game, so you're trying
to gain majorities in different areas, but each area score is a little bit different way.
So paying attention to how to score in those different areas is a crucial part of making
the game work.
The gameplay mechanism is really interesting.
You, everybody gets an identical deck of cards.
If you're playing in a two player game, you're going to go through that deck of cards
twice in a three player in a... Sorry. In a three or four player game, you're going to go through
the deck of cards twice. In a two player game, you'll go through it three times.
And the cards have three or four actions on them, so they have
like three or four different actions depicted on the card of like five or six different
actions that are available in the game.
Then at the bottom of the card is a little picture of a torch and generally the way it
works is if the card has three actions on the card, there are two torches at the bottom
of the card.
If there are four actions available on the card, there are three torches.
So you get to do most of the card, but not all of it.
And then what you do is you set the card down in front of you and then you have these little
action discs and you play them onto the card and when you cover up an action, then you
do that action.
And the actions are things like buying bricks, spending bricks to build things and giving
money.
Those are three main actions.
There's a couple of others as well.
The couple of things that make the game really have interesting choices
are deciding which areas you want to fight for control of.
It is an area control game.
So scrambling for that control is interesting.
Deciding how much money you want to spend moving around trying to get efficiency and movement
because the one of the challenging parts of the game is you can only do stuff in the
quadrant of the board that you're in.
And if you want to move, you have to move clockwise around the board and you have to pay
one coin for each step you take in that movement.
So there's a really frustrating and fascinating thing where you're trying to figure out how
you're going to move and where to maximize efficiency, particularly given the limited number
of terms.
The movement isn't one of those actions.
You can always move right before you take an action, but you still have to pay.
And then the third thing that is equally interesting about the movement and the different
choices is that the bricks you're buying, the game has a really clever way of managing
its supplies, its components.
The bricks that you're buying are each designated as part of a color.
And the way it works is that the bricks themselves are all gray.
And when you buy them, they are sitting in one of five color depots.
They've got red, blue, black, yellow, and white.
And when you buy the brick, it is the color that it is in the depot.
And then you take the brick and you put it in your tableau in your storage space for that
color brick.
You only have one, the only had to manufacture one color of brick.
The bricks themselves just maintain their color by where you put them.
So that's a really clever bit of game mechanism.
When you're building your little towers to gain your area of majorities, each majority
works in a different way.
And I'm not going to talk about all of those.
But you also get this thing whenever you build, if you build matching a certain pattern,
then you can take these bonus cards.
And that's probably where the true efficiency and true skill lies is acquiring these
bonus cards while you're also winning out on majorities.
It was really good.
I liked it a lot.
I'm looking forward to playing it some more.
It's definitely staying in the collection.
There's a reason it's highly rated.
So that's Porta Nigra from Kramer and Kiesling from Stronghold Games.
The next game I want to talk about was just published last year.
It's called Faraway.
The designers are Johannes Goupy and Corentin Lebrat.
And it's published by Catch Up Games.
This is not a problem.
It's not a publisher and those aren't, are not designers that I know at all.
Both designers have games to their credit, but I, oh, I have played.
Okay.
So, Corentin Lebrat is credited with, uh, helping design Draftasaurus and Trek 12 Himalayas,
both games I have played.
And so, I will say I'm familiar with their work.
Faraway is a really interesting, I don't know you call it,
path-making game, involving drafting cards.
It's a drafting game first.
There's a market of cards on each round.
You're going to play a card.
All the cards have numbers between like one and 70 on them.
You're going to play the card and then you're going to draft in the order of lowest to highest
number that you played.
So, if you played a low numbered card, you get to draft first from the market.
If you played a high number card, you draft the last.
And what you do when you draft is you take one of five cards from the market.
I don't know if it's always five or if it's just, or I think it was four cards from the market
when we played.
I don't know if you're playing with a three-player game, or like a two-player game.
If there would be three cards in the market, I don't know exactly how that works.
But you're, you're taking a card from the market and you have a hand of like two or three
cards, I think three.
Uh, then if the card you just played was a higher number than the card you played in
the last round, then you also get to take a shrine, which is like a smaller card that gives
you something as well.
Okay, so Brendan, why are you taking these cards and what are you trying to do?
You're planning a journey with these cards and the bonus cards that you take will
help with the journey.
So, here's the cool part.
Each card has some resources on it, sometimes, a scoring condition on it, sometimes,
and that number value.
The number value is not anything at the end of the game.
The cards themselves, the resources they give you are useful once they're revealed, and
the scoring condition happens when the card is revealed.
So here's the tricky part, the gimmick, and I'll see if I can explain this without searching.
So you're gonna play eight cards.
You're laying them out in a row, one through eight.
As you go, you're playing them from one to eight, and each time you play a number that's
higher than the previous number, you get a bonus card.
So, you know, if you go 1, 25, 45, 60, and then the next card you play is 10,
then you don't get a bonus between 60 and 10, but you did get a bonus card between
the others.
So, everybody plays until you have eight cards in the display.
Once everyone has eight, you turn them all face down.
Then, starting with the last card you played, you reveal and score the cards one at a time.
And what's interesting is, the cards require that you have resources in play, and the resources
are on the cards and on the bonus cards.
So, like, for example, let's say you have a card that will score the number one, and
one point for every bull's head icon that you have in play.
Great, but in order to score that card, you have to have two pineapples in play.
The game doesn't call them pineapples, but they look like pineapples.
So, if your card, with the bull's head scoring on it, is your eighth card, when you flip it
up, it's only going to score for itself and the cards in your bonus tableau.
Then, and it'll only score if you have those pineapples showing.
Then, you flip a card seven, and you assess the tableau again for card seven to figure out
whether it scores.
Card six, card five, and so on.
So, there's this interesting thing where, when you put a card down, you're planning that
the display that you take after the card you put down will be able to support the win
condition or the scoring condition of the card that you're playing.
Because you don't score it if it isn't showing when the card is flipped face up, and the
card is flipped face up in backwards drafting order.
I hope that that explained it because if it didn't, I can't explain it better.
That's the best I'm going to do, so hopefully that did it.
So, the way that's going to work is you draw all eight cards in your score.
We had a lot of fun.
The game was actually relatively close, but a really interesting game.
Now, I thought it was fun. It definitely would go on the category of,
"I will happily play at any time somebody brings it out."
I don't think I liked it enough to seek it out myself, but I definitely would go on the
"I'd buy it if I found it cheap" category.
And cheap even like 'five to ten dollar range,' rather than the 'only at goodwill' kind of
purchase.
It's really interesting.
It's probably the kind of game that you get much better at once.
You've played a few times.
And if I didn't have a big collection, I definitely would be considered getting this, but just
with the number of games I have, I can't see this making a huge splash in the games that
we choose to play.
But I had a good time with it.
That's far away.
So, I did get a chance to dust off one game recently, and that game was, Photosynthesis.
released in 2017, designed by Sabrina Miramon, and published by, oh, sorry, designed by Hjalmar Hach
with art by Sabrina Miramon, published by Blue Orange in the United States, along
with other companies elsewhere.
Photosynthesis is a beautiful looking game.
It's really nice to look at, to manipulate the pieces.
You get these really cool-looking cardboard trees that represent your share of the forest.
Each person is a different species of tree, and it's a lot of fun to look at the game.
It is a very mean game, and it's a game that sort of forces you to be mean, which isn't my
favorite model.
The idea that if you are playing well, you end up definitely being mean to other players,
whether you want to or not.
And I find that a little frustrating, because I don't generally like to be mean.
But also that this is one of those games where a simple mistake can really just wreck you
in terms of gameplay.
I have played Photosynthesis...
this is my fourth time now.
I'm mentioning it on the pod, because I dusted it off.
It had been a year and a month or so.
And as I look, that's about the time between each of my plays.
And I feel like maybe that's about the time that it takes me to forget how much I dislike
this game.
I can see that it is a game of tactics and strategy that really rewards thoughtful play.
Something about the thoughtful play that it demands does not click with the kind of
thoughtful play that I can... does not fit with the kind of thoughtful play that
I can achieve.
So there's a really strong disconnect there that makes it not fun.
And then on top of that, I do really badly at it.
So I don't have fun and I do badly.
And the game forces me to be mean.
I don't know why I keep playing it.
Maybe this will be my lesson learned.
Next time I see someone setting up, I'll be like, "Hmm, that game is not for me."
But until then, it's probably on a year and a month or a little more than that.
You'll hear me talking about Photosynthesis again and I'll say,
"Why haven't I learned yet?"
Well, it's a pretty looking game.
So I'm like, "Ooh, that game looks pretty.
I want to play it."
And instead I should say, "Hmm, maybe I won't play it.
It's not for me."
So that's Photosynthesis from Blue Orange games.
I didn't even explain how you play.
In the game, you're putting trees into the forest and you gain basically currency, which is
energy harvested by the sun in order to, by sort of, grow more trees, plant more trees,
increase the size of the trees you've planted.
But the thing is, the trees block each other's light.
So if your tree is next to a tree of equal or smaller or larger size, your tree doesn't
get any light when the sun is pointing out.
Now the sun rotates around the board, so different trees get light in different stages.
But ultimately, I find it really frustrating.
So, all right, that's enough of photosynthesis.
I'm, lots of people like it.
It's not for me.
All right, the last game I want to talk about today is another new game I tried and
this is Dro Polter.
Dro Polter was designed by Paul Schultz, published by Oink Games
with Art by Rie Komatsuzaki and Jun Sasaki in 2023.
It is, it fits in the standard Oink Games line, meaning it's one of those very small
box games, which look really amazing, are cute and usually are fun to play.
Now I find that Oink Games tend to be relatively simple affairs, particularly because they
come in a small box and they're relatively easy to play, but they also usually turn on a
really interesting gimmick.
In Dro Polter, the idea is everybody gets five weird shapes, all relatively small, and
the game comes with a little bag full of bells, these tiny metal bells.
So you get these five weird shapes, like one is a ring, one is a little yellow square, one
is a red cube, like they're all slightly different, they're all really small, though, think
about the size of a meatball.
And you put them all in one hand and then somebody flips a card at the beginning, it's
random after that, it's whoever won the last turn, you're going to flip over a card and
you reveal on the card, there are pictures of some of the five components, not all of
them, some of them, between two... no, there were some cards that had one...
up to four.
And what you have to do is, using only the hand that the components are in, you have to
drop the components depicted on the card.
So if it's a ring and a red cube, you have to drop the ring and the red cube, but you have
to hold on to the other components.
Once you have dropped those, then with your other hand, or with the hand holding stuff,
you grab this white ghost, which is the polter part, I guess, to claim the round.
So you could have multiple people who successfully dropped the things, kind of simultaneously.
Then it's the first person to grab the ghost that ends up being the winner.
So you grab the ghost, you're the first person to grab the ghost, you win the round.
When you win the round, then you take one of the little metal bells and you add that metal
bell to your hand full of items.
Then you're going to shake, put both hands together and shake up the items,
and then kind of put them all into one hand and close it.
Then remember your bell, if you won the bell, it's included in there.
Then whoever it is that won the bell is going to flip over the next card and then everybody
goes again.
But now, if you have a bell in your hand, you have to try not only to drop the right things,
but you'll stop to hold on to the bell.
The bells are small and round, really easy to drop.
If you drop the bell, you lose it.
You don't get to pick it back up.
All the other items that you drop, you get to pick up.
If you drop the wrong thing, you pick up everything you've dropped and start over.
But if you drop a bell, the bell is gone back to the score thing no matter what.
If you're playing, we did have a rule like if you're going to shake your hand up and the
bell falls out and we're in between rounds, that's okay, it doesn't count.
It's only during the round that you have to worry about dropping the bell.
So, Dro Polter is fun and really really easy to play, an interesting dexterity game
if that's your sort of thing.
Now, the challenge, of course, is that it is also a dexterity game that you play with
one hand.
So, it's very limited for people with mobility or dexterity issues, but that's going
to be true of any dexterity game.
So, what games have you tried recently?
I'd love to hear over on Boardgamegeek in Guild 3269 or you can send me a message,
wombat929 on boardGameGeek is my username.
You can send me an email, brendan@rattleboxgames.com.
I thank you for joining me today and I hope your next walk
is as pleasant as mine was.
Bye-bye.
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Brought to you by Rattlebox Days.
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