Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step
off the train and deliver an episode to you while I walk home.
I'm Brendan Riley.
Well, good afternoon listeners.
It's a kind of drizzly night here in suburban Chicago.
And you know what that means?
More road noise than usual.
Whenever cars go by they're going to be extremely noisy.
So I may do a little bit more pausing and editing than usual.
If I've been counting correctly and I think I have, this is the first episode of season
7.
Because yes, this is the first episode of season 7, episode number 601 of Pick Up and Deliver.
Now every year up till now, episode 1 has been roughly January 25th of the season.
And this year I got behind in the winter and then January was really busy and so I didn't
even, I was still 20 some episodes away when January rolled around.
So I just, I ended the episode at the end of March.
It's now the beginning of April and I'm starting the new season.
We'll see.
This one's just going to go as long as it does.
Just part of me that has a fantasy that I'm going to file enough episodes that I will finish
around December 15th or December 20th with the season.
But that would be a significant uptick in production over what I usually do.
So who knows what we'll do.
I'm just going to be in it for the fun now.
For those of you new to the podcast, welcome! Season 7 is here.
And as is often the case, the first episode of a month, I do a very particular kind of
episode.
I do the Top of the Stack.
It feels like it's been a couple of months since I mentioned it.
So Top of the Stack is a format I swiped from the beloved podcast of nonsensical gamers.
They used to do a segment each episode where they would talk about games they want to play
that are sort of sitting on top of their metaphorical stack or it might have been an actual
stack, I don't know.
In my house it is, I'll get the games that are on the top of the stack out and bring them
upstairs.
So they're ready to play if I need them.
As an aside, the one of the hosts of the podcast of nonsensical gamers was Dan Halstad
who is the designer of Beez and more recently Aqua, which just came out and has been getting
a fair amount of coverage.
So good, good on you Dan.
Dan's also the person who introduced me to Barenpark, which is one of my favorites.
So begin the month, it's the Top of the Stack episode, which is where I review my play
experience from previous month and talk a little bit about what I'm planning to do next
month.
So if you're brand new to the podcast, maybe this isn't the very best episode to listen to
because it's a lot of sort of reading of lists and such, but I'll try to make it interesting
nonetheless.
So this month in May, or in March, I picked out four games and the goal is to play three
of them during that month.
There are games I haven't played before, although that's not always the case.
That was the case this month.
And the four games were Forum Trajanum, Bastion, Hunted: Wood Ridge, and Medieval Academy.
And I did not get Forum Trajanum or Hunted: Wood Ridge played, but I did manage to succeed
at playing Bastion and Medieval Academy.
So I got two of my four played, which is about the same as last month and the same as January.
So I am now at six out of nine potential plays in my Top of the Stacks.
If I just change my goal to two, I'm hitting 100%.
I'm not going to do that, but there it is.
All right, time for some stats.
I had 85 game plays of 56 different games this month, which comes out to a total of 218
plays of 98 different games.
As usual, many of those plays are in digital form on board game arena.
I made significant progress on my shelf of opportunity, reducing it from 66 to 61 plays.
And my collection size went up one game from 578 to 579.
Now that's not in the right direction.
My goal is to make a smaller collection, not a bigger collection, but given that some games
I'm getting, some months I end up with like four or five games if I have a good, if I have
a strong visit to a goodwill, one game isn't so bad.
Also I bought the game with points, credit card points, so it was like free money.
That's gamer math right there, baby.
Okay, the most played game this month in real life was Aeon's End, which we played four times.
And my most played game online were Gaia Project and Daybreak, each of which I played four
times.
My plays of Through the Ages have slowed down a little bit.
I have one person I'm playing with regularly, but at one point I was playing regular games
of Through the Ages of three people that has died off a bit.
So that's okay.
I've played that game so many times.
I don't need to play at every moment.
On to first plays.
I had eleven, oh I had ten games that I played this month for the first time.
These were new to me games.
They're not all brand new publications.
In fact, I think none of them are brand new publications, but they were first time to
me.
They are Dream Home, Medieval Academy, Forest Shuffle, on Board Game Arena, Wyrmspan,
Charty Party, Herd Mentality, Titanic.
That's the 2020 release designed by Daryl Adams and Adrian Adamescu with Leonardo and
Kate Winslet on the cover, not the older Titanic game, SMARTish, Aeon's End, and Bastion.
So a good game.
I will be talking about, or a good month.
I will be talking about a lot of those new games in upcoming episodes, although I still
have some games from February to cover.
So it'll be a little while before I'm talking about those, but you'll have to hold your breath
until I do.
I played one expansion this month.
I'm keeping on the pace of, oh that's 20, by the way, that's 21 new games I've played thus
far this year.
Pretty good pace.
In terms of expansions, I played one expansion this month.
It was the Forgotten Waters DLC Pack 1, The Kraken's Eye.
If you haven't played Forgotten Waters, it's a delight.
I will post a link to my previous review of Forgotten Waters in the show notes.
It's a storytelling game, or it's a story reading game I guess.
It has a light adventure element and lots of choices to make.
It's kind of a choose your own adventure game with a bit of randomness.
It's very funny, pretty enjoyable.
I really like it.
We've been playing Freelancers lately, which is like the new version of it, but they did
release this one DLC Pack, which we downloaded and enjoyed.
It was good, but it's one adventure.
It took us almost five hours to play.
We played in two halves.
And I guess there were five of us playing.
It took about five hours, and it was $10.
So that's not a terrible deal.
You know when you compare it to an EXIT game, which is 15 bucks, and you play in an hour,
that's a pretty good deal.
But I'm not sure whether I thought it was worth it or not.
Yeah, we had a good time.
I'll say it was worth it.
Almost anything else we had to pay 10 bucks to do it would have been shorter and not
as much fun.
A good time with it.
That's the Forgotten Waters DLC Pack 1.
I played a couple more games.
I got a couple more games out of the dust. As a reminder.
a game is dusty if I've gone a year or more without playing it.
So I get a game out of the dust when I play it again.
That's like I have dusted it off.
And I had three games that I played out of the dust this month.
The first one was Sushi Go.
I hadn't played Sushi Go in a while.
In fact, it had been a one year, five months, and a day between this time and last time.
Sushi Go is always a winner.
It used to be a very regular staple in our household.
We've kind of grown it a little bit, but it is always excellent.
I don't have Sushi Go: Party.
I did play it online once.
I didn't count it as a play because I feel like I didn't really...
I don't know.
Sometimes I count online plays as plays.
Sometimes when I play a new game, I don't count it as a play because I didn't feel like
I grasped the game enough.
It's kind of weird, all in it.
But yeah, so Sushi Go.
We played that.
It had been a year.
I played Potion Explosion, which had been one year, one month, and six days since the last
time I played that.
That might have been since the last digital play.
Who knows how long it had been since the last audio play?
Who knows how long it had been since the last real life play?
I did on Potion Explosion, but that game is always fun.
I really enjoy it.
I haven't really played it with super strong competitors in person in this...
I mean, when I say super strong competitors, I mean people who have played the game enough
to kind of get how it works.
One of the people I played with got it pretty fast and kept pace with me, but it took them
a round or two, and that's the kind of game where once you get ahead, it's really hard
to catch up.
So, that was a good time.
That was one year, one month, and six days.
And then, Century: Golem Edition, we hadn't played in a while either.
I like Century.
I have all three of the games, and I enjoy them all, but the first one is just head and
shoulders above the others.
It is really, really good.
And that was one year, eight months, and 19 days since the last time I played that.
That makes seven games this far, this year, so far.
I've dusted off, averaging just over two a month.
If I keep up that pace, that's not bad, 24 a year.
I'd expect to be more than that, but you never know.
A lot of the games that I play, I keep in regular circulation.
So, getting older games back to the table is a little harder.
I've added a new category to my logging on boardgamegeek, because I am trying to get
games played more often.
I'll sometimes have plays that I think are interesting, and I want to mention, but they
don't fit any of the other categories I'm tracking, so I'm calling these notable plays.
And if I have a play of a game that just I wanted to mention on the podcast, I put it in
a notable place, so here they are.
I got to play Altiplano again.
This game continues to reward.
I might have to go back, I do really like Altiplano, but I think I'm shifting back to liking
Orléans more.
The box in Altiplano is better.
If you haven't played either of them, they're both bag builders, where you're buying chips,
and putting them in a bag, or tokens, and then you pull the tokens out and you get to
spend the tokens.
In Orléans, you just put the tokens right in the bag when you buy new tokens.
And as a result, because you're always putting the used tokens back in the bag, you might not
ever get tokens you buy.
You could buy a token, and then you use a couple tokens, put them in, you draw the ones
you used again, unless you're taking a concerted effort to really get rid of the ones you're using,
which is hard to do.
You might end up never drawing one of the tiles you've bought.
And that stinks.
By contrast, in Altiplano, you only refill the bag after you've emptied it, and you put
the tokens you're using in a little box, and then you double-mall in once you empty the
bag.
It actually takes a little bit longer, usually, to get a chip you purchased, because you
have to put in the box first.
So except in very rare circumstances, you almost never draw the tile you just bought
on the turn after you buy it.
But by contrast, you'll never, any chip you buy in the first half of the game, you definitely
will get to see, because you'll empty out the bag.
But I do really like Altiplano, and I really like it with The Traveler expansion, and
I haven't played with that in a while, so that may need to get back out to the table again.
Sagrada: Artisans, my wife and I finished the campaign of that.
That was a lot of fun.
We have a whole bunch of bonus windows for it, so I imagine we'll keep playing it for a while.
If you get a chance to play Sagrada: Artisans, if you like Sagrada, it's well worth it, I
think.
Really fun.
I guess if I'm doing the same analysis of the per game cost that I put on forgotten waters
on Sagrada: Artisans, it's pretty close to the same, roughly the same.
Oh, there's a turtle dove.
Or a morning dove.
A morning dove, excuse me.
Sagrada: Artisans was a delight.
It's a legacy game, by the way.
You're coloring in a coloring book, and over the course of the game, you are learning about
or you're playing different stained glass windows and rolling dice and stuff.
It's pretty great.
I like the lot.
Weather Machine.
I got to play again.
It feels like I'm getting the hang of it now, but I just got clobbered early on.
Actually, my son played with us, and early on, he made a move that kind of cut my knees
out from under me, and instead of backing off, I kind of doubled down on it, and it was
a terrible choice.
And I really, I ended up with like 20 points less than my son, who ended up with like 10 points
less than the winner.
So, clobbered.
On my 10 for 10 progress, you'll remember that this year, the 10 for 10 is categories of
games, and we are trucking along nicely.
We've completed two categories, the Legacy/Campaign category and the alphabet A through
J category are done.
Several of the other categories are over five, and we're at a total of 47 out of 100 plays
already in March, which is a great start.
Now, the reality of 10 for 10 is they always get much harder as it goes along because the
later ones are games you have to really go out of your way to play, so I'm going to try
to get some of those up.
We did get our first novelty game played, that was a Titanic.
I think I'm going to put one of those on my top of the stack this month.
No painting done this month, bummer.
I show up for opportunity, I've kind of talked about, and that just brings us to the question
of what games I'm going to play for next month.
You know, I'm going to die on this hill, I am keeping Hunted: Wode Ridge as the solo
game.
I'm going to play that eventually, and when I do, yee haw, it's going to be great.
So, Hunted: Wode Ridge will stay as my priority game to play for solo games.
My heavier game that I want to play is Porta Nigra, I guess.
This is the stronghold game from Keisling in 2015.
It's a very well-regarded, euro game about, I don't know, building stuff in Rome.
I got it at a Goodwill for not nothing.
It was like eight bucks or ten bucks, but it's a game that's pretty well-regarded, so I'm
looking forward to try that.
And then I think I'm going to pick a novelty game, try to play this month because, yeah,
because I want to.
So, what novelty game am I going to put on there?
Well, it is the month of the Titanic sinking, April.
So I'm going to say one of my other Titanic games.
I have two.
I have Titanic, the board game, and I have raised the Titanic, which is a game based on a
Clive Cussler novel or movie.
Both are look silly in their own ways, and I'm going to play one of them this month.
And then finally, I usually pick just one other game that I'm excited to play from the
collection.
Let's try Alien Artifacts again.
This is a game I really wanted to get played, and I've put it on the list a couple times,
and I never seem to make it stick.
This month, I'm going to make it stick.
I'm going to try.
So my four games are Porta Nigra, Hunted World Ridge, Raise the Titanic, or Titanic the
board game, and Alien Artifacts.
So the big question then, what games have you been playing?
What games did you play brand new in April or in March of 2024?
What games are you playing to play in April?
Head over to boardgamegeek guild 3269, or search Pick Up and Deliver boardgamegeek,
and you'll find it.
And share your gaming from the month with the Pick Up and Deliver pals.
It's season seven, I suppose we should have a nickname for you.
What do you think is a nickname for a listener of Pick Up and Deliver should be?
I want to hear it.
You include that in your post.
Well thanks for joining me on my walk today.
I hope your next walk is a pleasantest mind loss.
Bye-bye.
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Brought to you by Rattlebox Games.
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