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 walk around.
I'm Brendan Riley.
Well, good morning listeners.
It's a lovely, if little noisy day here in suburban Chicago.
I'm happy to be talking to you about all things board games.
The sun is out.
Some people are watering their lawns if you can believe watering your lawn.
What are you doing?
Well, that's fine.
People can water their lawns, I suppose.
Not really my bag, but that's okay.
It is May 1st, and that means it's time for us to review how we did in April and talk
about what's going on.
That's right, it's time for Top of the Stack!
Top of the Stack is a monthly segment, in which I talk about what I played in the last month
and plan some plays for the next month.
Let's jump right into it.
So to start off, I like to start with a few stats, let you know how my game
playing went in April.
I played 83 plays of 52 different games, making my year total 304 plays of 124 games.
Pretty good.
It means I'm on pace for 1200 plays this year, I think.
Is that right?
I've done four months and 300 plays.
So I guess, well, 900.
I'm on track for 900.
I usually hit 1000, so 900 is a little behind pace, but April was very busy.
I suspect May will be very busy as well.
We'll probably see a pickup in gameplay in the summer.
But for now, 83 plays of 52 different games.
My shelf of opportunity saw a big swell.
I'm always trying to reduce it, trying to bring it down, but I had a jackpot at Goodwill,
where I picked up like, something like, 11 games for $31.
Some of them I got as games for my board game club at my school.
Some of them I got for other things, but for the most part, the idea is to get as much as
I can when I find new games for cheap, especially if they look kind of cool.
I'm going to try them.
But that means that my collection size boosted.
At a time when I normally am, or my shelf of opportunity boosted at a time when I'm normally
trying to reduce it, but that's why we saw the increase.
We also saw the collection size boost up from 579 to 588 games.
That includes the games that I got at Goodwill, which went into my collection.
But also then I picked up two more games last night, April 30th.
The [toggle Gaming] club had a used game sale, and I like to support my fellow used game merchants.
So I bought a couple things.
And thus we saw the boost.
My most played game in real life last year, or last month, was Frosthaven.
I played three games of it in real life, and my most played game online was Daybreak with
five plays.
I feel like I'm getting the hang of that game now, although I'm still pretty bad at it.
It feels like the people I've been playing with are much better at it than I am.
The penalties in particular, I need to spend a little time with the rulebook to really understand
how they work.
They just kind of happen.
And I would probably be better at the game if I understood it better.
The biggest part of my Top of the Stack each month is deciding on which games I'm going
to try to play for the next month.
I always pick out four games, and the goal is to play three of them in the month.
Generally not all of them are brand new, but they're either new or I haven't played
them in a long time.
This month, the four that I picked were Porta Nigra, Raised the Titanic!, Hunted Wood Ridge
and Alien Artifacts.
And I'm sad to say, I only got one of those played.
We played Alien Artifacts, and it was a little longer than I'd like, but actually pretty fun.
I really like it.
I think it probably has a lower popularity because the rulebook isn't great, and it's a little
more complicated than it needs to be.
But the game itself is pretty fun.
I'll talk about that in a future board game espresso.
But I liked it a lot, staying in the collection for a while at least.
I read the rules for Porta Nigra, got ready to play, and then didn't play it.
I was a bummer, but I think there's a lot of potential there.
So I'm looking forward to trying that maybe next week at Game Club.
Raise the Titanic!, we just didn't get around to it.
And Hunted Wood Ridge, I don't know, I haven't made time for solo gaming.
It's been pretty busy.
This next month, I'm going to switch back to another game I've been trying to play forever.
We'll see if I do better on that.
Next up is First Plays.
Each month I like to talk about games that I played for the first time in a given month.
I had six new games that I tried this month that I hadn't played before.
They are Habitat, Ted Lasso the Party game, Alien Artifacts, Really Loud Librarians.
That's Not a Hat, and Wild Serengeti.
All of these were pretty fun.
I really like Wild Serengeti in particular and That's Not a Hat; and Alien Artifacts is
pretty good.
I'll talk about all of these in upcoming board game espresso episodes.
Now, six new games is a relatively minor amount for the number of games I normally play in
a month.
But again, it was a busy month.
So next up, we've got Expansion Plays.
We have two expansion plays that I got played this month.
You remember this is a new category I'm trying, which is where I'm trying out different
expansions, trying to get those off the shelf.
And the two that I tried were more monikers and expansion for monikers.
And fantasy Realms, cursed Horde.
I thought I was also getting a new expansion played by playing the life expansion, the
great Facades - Life in Sagrada, but turns out I had played that a while ago, so it's not a new
expansion.
Oops, or not a new expansion anyway.
Oops, we did get three games out of the dust.
This was dude, and I guess technically more dude, but I consider more dude an expansion
for dude, not a game in itself, even though they're sold in separate boxes.
I keep them in one box myself, so that's how I see it.
So I got dude played.
It'd been three years, five months, or 25 days since I played that.
Call of the Wild, two years, one month, and three days.
And Strike, three years, five months, 26 games.
Just six games dusted off so far this year.
So I need to up my revisiting game if I want to do better on those numbers.
My 10 for 10, the progress is going pretty well.
Legacy and campaign games, we've already locked down.
I did get a number of nature and animal games played this month.
I got Habitats, Trails of Tucana, and Wild Serengeti, which puts me up to five, that's halfway
to the goal.
We did play Frosthaven once for three hours.
The other two plays were not three hours this month or the other place, so we're on pace
because that's up to eight games that have been taking more than three hours to play.
No cute animal games this month.
We played an unlock game, W-A-F-Fs Odyssey, Wafs Odyssey, which gets us two, so we're a little
behind on Escape Room games, but we'll get there.
One novelty game, that's Ted Lasso, the party game.
Four expanded game, we got one expanded game, I said.
Although that's obviously wrong because we also played Fantasy Realms and Monikers.
So I guess I got three expanded games there.
I'm going to go back and fix that, which means we're up to seven expanded games.
Nice.
Oh no, no, I have Sagrada and Fantasy Realms there.
Maybe I didn't consider Monikers interesting enough to be expanded in the context of the
board.
I played one game starting with every letter from A to J. We're up to 8 games from K to
T, and we've only played 2 games from U to Z, and then starting with numbers.
So making good progress on my 10 for 10.
This one's really enjoyable.
It's fun to make progress, it's fun to see where we have to go.
It's fun to start planning a little bit.
I should, for next month, I should do a survey of how many plays we have left to do and
kind of make a plan to make sure we're going to hit our target.
So yeah, that works really well.
I did no painting this month for like the, I don't know if I've done any painting this
year.
It's been really hard to find time to do it, and when I do have time to myself, I've
just been doing other things.
So painting has been slow, but I really do want to get back to it, and my family was given
me grief about the fact that I still have Gloomhaven or Frosthaven characters that haven't
been painted.
"So get on that, Brendan," they say.
So my shelf of opportunity, I've checked off a number of games this month, one, two, three,
four, five, so that's good, but I added more than I checked off.
I added one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12.
I added 12, and I only checked off five.
So falling behind, 68, unplayed as of the last update.
I haven't really talked about my H index much for this year.
The H index is of course the number of games that you've played that many times.
So like if you've played one game one time, you have an H index of one.
If you have two different games that you've played two times each, that's an index of two,
and so on.
My current H index for this year is eight.
I have many games that I've played.
Why is it only eight?
Oh, I have eight games that I've played at least eight times.
In fact, I've played them all nine times.
The ninth game I've only played eight times, so that's where I'm stuck on that list.
But my games are daybreak with 19 plays.
Oh, and I see... shoot.
I log "unpublished prototype" when my design partner and I play a game that we haven't
published yet.
I log that as unpublished prototype and then the board variant area on the board variant
area on board on the board game stats.
I will mark that as which variant we're playing in other words, which game we're testing.
That's part of how I keep track of scores, but also who tested our game so that we're going
to get to the point where we're putting people in the rulebook.
We've got the names of our testers.
So I guess my H Index still is eight.
If you take out unpublished prototype, then that means Daybreak with 19 plays, That Time
You Killed me with 16 plays, almost entirely with Gabriel Edge.
Hey, Gabriel, nice job.
We're having fun with that.
We may take a break a little bit and play Cairn for a while.
That's another game that's similar in nature and I haven't played that one as much and
we don't want to burn ourselves out.
I think Gaia Project.
I'm at 13 plays of session.
I'm at 11.
Frosthaven.
I'm at 10.
Res Arccana
I'm at 9.
Mottainai.
I'm at 9.
And Through the Ages, I'm at 8.
So that's my H Index at 8.
I'll set up a bunch of plays of a couple other games that are quickly climbing the ranks.
I'm having a lot of fun on board game arena lately.
So if you aren't on there, you should definitely head over.
I've got a bunch of plays of Gaia Project under my belt, obviously, as I said.
That one's really interesting because for a long time, I really liked Terra Mystica better.
I think I've probably been swayed that Gaia Project is the better game, but I have never
played it on the table.
So it's in this weird space where I've played a lot, but I've also never played it, sort
of.
And I'm not sure I would have been able to grasp what's going on in Gaia Project without
having played Terra Mystica first.
And even so, I still feel like I've got a lot to learn.
I don't really understand some of the systems.
And then again, I don't think I was ever all that good at Terra Mystica either.
Although I did come to grasp how the cult tracks worked in that game.
And I think Gaia Project, the technology, they run just a different way.
And it makes it harder to...
There's more choices to make, so it takes a bit more struggle.
That said, I'm having a good time with that.
I've been playing that regularly with Eric Gee and Chris Henjy.
Hey, Chris.
Those are my two Gaia Project pals.
I continue playing through the ages, mostly with Chris.
I've not played it with Ray very much.
Mostly with Ray, I've switched into playing games with Ray and Rich.
And I think a guy named Kyle Matt, his name is Matt.
So we're playing mostly four player games now with that group, which has been fun.
I do sort of miss the two player games with Ray, but I guess I could always start one if
I missed it that badly.
One other category in my board game plays that I include on my page, but haven't really
talked about much on here, are what I'm calling notable plays.
These are plays of games that just are interesting, because I haven't played them a lot.
One game that's become a recurring pleasure for the whole family.
Everybody likes it, and we often are able to play it with one of our grandmas is Illiterati.
Illiterati is a word creation, a real-time word creation game where each player gets a stack
of letters.
And then we flip a timer and you have, I think, two minutes or three minutes to, for everybody
to use all the letters they have, makes with all the letters everybody else has, to make
words.
And your first priority is every round to make complete words.
The thing is, if you just make complete words, all you're doing is staving off the inevitable.
Instead, what you have to start doing is you start, you have these cards that give you challenges.
So instead of just three complete words, or instead of just use all the letters to make
words, you might have a thing that says, "Use the letters to make names of fast food restaurants,
and you have to have three different fast food restaurants."
And so if you complete your challenge, then you move on to the next challenge, but you
also still have to make letters with everybody else to make sure all the letters get used.
So now you have these competing goals.
On top of that, each of the letters has one of five colors on it.
There's a neutral color that doesn't count as a color at all, black.
But then there's teal, red, purple, and orange.
And they have a little symbol that goes with them, so it's colorblind friendly.
But you have to use on a lot of the challenges, you also have to have a certain number of
cards, tiles with those symbols.
And so you're also distracted by that.
And the big thing is, defeating the challenges distracts you, and then sometimes you don't
get all the words made by the time the timer runs out.
And if you don't have all the words made, then you take these penalties.
And the penalties just get brutal.
And when you're playing normal, you can take three rounds where you get penalties.
If you're playing on hard, you only get two rounds.
Two other games that I'd like to offer as notable plays.
Praga Kaput Regney has now become available on board game arena.
And the play of it's very smooth.
I really like it.
I'm a little sad to move away from Yukata for that game, but the interface is nicer on board
game arena.
And I just like the overall play better there.
So we've been playing that a couple times.
It's making me realize how much I like that game again.
It's bringing me back to it.
I need to get it on the table again.
And then I've really been enjoying getting to know Spirit Island better.
I have a copy I borrowed and my son and I have been playing it once a week or so.
And it's really great to get to feel, get to learn the system better, to start anticipating
what the enemies do, to work together to block what they're doing or manipulate the
boards so that they don't overwhelm us too quick.
We've got like a 50% win ratio.
Sometimes we lose.
And we're trying harder games as we go along and try to get a different spirit.
It's been really fun.
And I can see this being a game that will play a lot as time goes by.
That leaves me to my next month's plan.
Next month I will be playing some new games.
In particular, I'll be looking at Ryu is on my top of my stack.
We've got the Colombo Detective game.
And I'm returning to Hadrian's Wall.
Hadrian's Wall is of course a solo game that was on my to play list several times last
year and I never got played.
I did finally play it one time or two times on board game arena enough that I kind of
marked it played.
I still don't feel like I really got a good grasp of it so I want to give it another go on
paper.
And I haven't I still haven't removed it from myself of opportunity yet because I feel
like I have to play the game on paper in order to remove it.
I haven't done that yet.
And then finally I put Porta Nigra on there again.
I know it's a new one and just repeating it another month isn't super exciting from
the listener perspective but I did put a bunch of work into learning it and I'm ready
to play it so I really want to get it to the table.
I think I'm going to try it post about it and bring it next week and hopefully some
people will join me.
I'll talk them.
Well that's about it for me.
I hope that you'll head over to board game geek guild 3269 and share your games that
you've been playing this month so we can know a little bit more about what games excited
you in April and what games you're playing to play in May.
If you want to send me a direct message, wombat929 on board game geek it's probably the easiest
way.
I also have an email address at brendan@rattleboxgames.com.
Just for joining me on my walk today I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine was.
Bye bye.
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