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 lovely day here in suburban Chicago.
The sun is out.
The jets are flying by and I'm walking home from the train.
It's the last week of classes and I did teach one of my classes today so that means
I'm halfway toward being done with all my classes for the semester.
Yee-haw!
So it's been a little while since I've talked to you about games I've played recently.
So I feel it's time for a board game espresso triple shot.
(Coffee noises) Espresso up!
The board game espresso triple shot is a short review episode where I talk about three games
I've played recently for the first time and one game I dusted off and tell you
what I think of them.
Not strictly a review because I've only played these games one or maybe two times so I don't
really have enough information about them to give you a reasonable review of them.
But the idea is that you get a sense of the game and you come to understand what I think
about it and what makes it tick.
So let's just jump right in.
First game I want to talk about today is Habitats.
Habitats was designed by Corné van Moorsel published in 2016 and it's been republished
recently by AllPlay.
Habitats is a tile placement game where you are working to score points by playing down tiles
Or cards? Tiles or cards. Tiles, with different animals on them and the idea is that you're
trying to score the different cards by their relationship to other cards around them.
It's kind of hard to articulate except to say that the bird requires three green next
to it and two blue.
Then in the four adjacent spots around the bird you have to have at least one blue and one
green and then adjacent to those you can have the other one.
So the thing that makes it interesting is that you might have one blue and one green adjacent
to the card that's scoring but if there are other greens adjacent to the green that you're
scoring with that would count toward that number.
So when I say it has to be adjacent to three blue and two green those don't have to be
immediately around it and said they can be kind of spread out as long as they're kind
of in chains of associated area with the cards that are next to it.
If I didn't explain it well enough for you to conceive it from that there's no hope.
I can't.
I can't do any better.
What makes Habitats interesting is this chained scoring situation and the idea is that
you're sort of set collecting or you're trying to score these different cards based on that
chained scoring.
Now when I started to play this it felt a little familiar and then I remember hearing I think
from the Salt and Sass podcast that Habitats is a game that Uwe Rosenberg the designer,
the famous designer of Agricola and other games played just before he designed Nova Luna.
And Nova Luna is actually a less complex version of Habitats in which you have just these tiles
you're putting out and very simple scoring conditions around them but they are scoring
conditions built around this idea of connected spaces all counting in the scoring.
Apparently, and this is the story they told on Salt and Sass, Rosenberg was so captivated
by that particular aspect of the tiling scoring that he took it and designed his own game
just around that mechanism.
And then he called up Corné van Moorsel and said, "Hey I'm giving you a co-design credit
on this because your idea was so integral to what's going on, I feel like you co-designed it."
Which I think is a really nice thing for Uwe Rosenberg to do and it's probably part
of the reason that Habitats got reprinted by Allplay in this nice new edition.
Now having played Habitats and Nova Luna, I like Habitats better.
The simple game of Nova Luna is a nice puzzle but it doesn't have the pleasurable theme
that I like in Habitats.
Now you could argue Rosenberg tried that again.
He took that same mechanism, altered it a bit more and used it in Applejack but I don't,
really, Applejack was fine.
It played it a few times on board game arena but it didn't really captivate me either.
So Habitats worth trying if you get a chance, really interesting game, fun to play.
Next up we have one of the games that fulfilled a Novelty game role in my 10 for 10 this
year.
This is Ted Lasso Party Game.
I picked this up for three bucks at Goodwill and for three bucks I think it's well worth
it.
The Ted Lasso Party Game is a simple timed game in which players are taking turns contributing
sort of vibes to different problems facing the soccer team, the football team that Ted
Lasso coaches.
There are a number of different locations and different characters that get played
into those locations and those characters have different problems and on your turn
you're adding sort of solution cards to try to solve those problems.
If you get the right combination of solutions then that problem is removed.
And the goal over the course of the game is to remove all the problems and solve the problems
of all the team.
It's a relatively simple game, definitely very light, easy to teach.
This is not a gamer's game, it is very much a party game for regular folks.
What said is pretty fun and it's cooperative which you would hope a Ted Lasso game would
not be competitive and I like it.
I'm definitely keeping it in my collection, probably won't play it very often but every now
and again the right people might say hey let's put the Ted Lasso Party Game.
If I say that a few times and I get nose then it might move over to my collection at school
but we'll see.
That's designed by Prospero Hall and published by Funko Games.
Of course Prospero Hall is the design studio that Funko Games purchased and was using to
do all of their IP based development.
I have heard in the last few months that apparently Prospero or apparently Funko sold off their
game licensing and game development assets to another company but they did not sell
Prospero Hall with them.
They just disbanded it.
It's all the people who were at Prospero Hall where cast adrift.
I'm told that some of them have collaborated, have joined up into a new design studio and
are putting their shingle out in the board game space.
Which is good to hear because Prospero Hall is a force for really clever game design in
the tabletop market.
They did a bunch of stuff for Ravensburger, the JAWS game.
I believe Horrified.
I don't know if they designed Villainous but they certainly did it quite a bit to really
bring license games up to the forefront I think.
So Ted Lasso Party Game is worth checking out.
I guess if you like Ted Lasso I don't know that it's probably worth playing if you don't
like Ted Lasso.
Next up I often like to talk about a game that I've pulled out of the dust in the last
month and so today I'm going to continue with the small party recognition shouting games
which I started last month when I talk about dusting off dude.
I also dusted off Call of the Wild.
Call of the Wild is a tiny little shouting game that I heard about from the Board Game
Blitz podcast and I think that I have the copy is one of maybe a hundred copies that the
designer made off of a very small but successful Kickstarter.
I think I ordered it from the designer directly off their website and it was mailed to me from
the designer.
Very niche game I'm not sure if it's available at all anymore. The way the game works, it uses
round cards in the size of coasters although they're just cards they're not coasters.
And each player gets a deck of identical cards and on the card there is a circle of life
a sort of group of different sort of fictional animals in a circle showing a path of predation
so you have this one animal and it eats a different animal and that animal eats a different
animal and so on.
Each animal has a noise associated with it and the idea of the game is that you are trying
to either find a mate or find food for your creature.
The way it works is you have a deck of cards and you draw one and I don't remember the exact
draw play mechanism because I feel like it's not the same as dude or Happy Salmon but I reverse
engineer it to be the same same rule as dude and then only later did I realize I had not
I was teaching it wrong it actually uses some other rule but I don't I don't know it anyway.
You draw a card and it's got a creature on it, let's say the Chi Chi, and all these creatures
have names but I don't remember the names because what you need to know is the the noise they
make so there's noise that goes "Chi Chi" and so then you have the choice do you want to
say "Chi Chi" make the noise that the creature makes or do you want to make one of the other
noises you could make the noise that the creature's food makes or you could make the noise that
the creature's predator makes and the goal that you have is to find another creature making
a noise and it's got to be a creature making the same noise you're making and then you
agree to compare cards and if you are in fact the same creature then you mate and you each
keep the card the other person handed you as a score card or if one of you is the predator
of the other then the one who played the predated creature forfits their card and so the
person who played the predator gets both or if you are not adjacent on the predator prey
circle then both cards are returned to their owners and you continue play so the idea is
there's a number a couple different things you might say when you have a creature in your
hand with the goal of getting someone else who's saying the same thing to match you it sounds
maybe more complicated than it is it's sort of like if dude were competitive instead of
cooperative or semi-corporative but it's a fun little game. I can't say it's amazing
but you know I play it maybe once a year, once every 18 months, and at that and mostly with
new people and at that pace it's really fun it's an excellent little game well worth your
time if you get a chance. That's the Call of the Wild designed by David Medley and Evan
Shidegger published by Play All Day Games and Rather Fun Games. So the last game I'm going to
talk about is one of my top of the stack games from April: this is Alien Artifacts published
from portal games the designers are Viola Kajoska and Marcin senior Robka like I said published
by portal games now this game has a really nice aesthetic: crisp graphics, white box, white
backgrounds. it feels a little bit like an apple product at least on the front of each
piece. The premise is it's a 4x game you are expanding exploring exploiting and exterminating
your opponents and planets and the idea is that there are an abandoned set of ancient artifacts
spread through the galaxy (I know that sounds unfamiliar right) that if the human if that any whatever
species gets a hold of them they provide a significant amount of power and advanced technology
such that the race that has the most of these is going to accelerate faster so your goal
is to build a civilization a space-faring civilization that outcompetes your opponents and
you have the best engine to trigger the end of the game. Now I will say once we get this
game going it was really fun. I liked Alien Artifacts quite a bit. looking forward to playing
it more. That said the once we get it got it going was way more of a burden than that should
have been or then I would have liked it to be. So the main thing is the rule book was hard
to read, both small text and difficult to understand the cards, all have very small text so I
definitely needed my glasses I mean I do all the time anyway but it was really hard to read
some of the text on the cards and gameplay just wasn't super efficient or smooth it was
a little rough so it took us a little while to get the feel for it. there were just a few
things that happened that just aren't intuitive. it was hard to... like you couldn't predict that
that's how this would work... and so they kind of got in the way so all
of that goes to suggest that the way that the game is put together is just not smooth
and not smooth like you would like it to be. that said I really like the engine building component
of this a big part of it: there's three different kinds of things that you can get and
kind of like Innovation when you get them they give you a power and kind of like Mottainai you have
to pick whether you're going to use one power or another and the power you pick determines
what you get from it but also how much you score from it so if you lean into one type of power then
you aren't going to score anything if you lean into the other type of power then you don't have
enough power it's a really compelling mix of mechanisms and I thought it was really fun so if
you get a chance to play Alien Artifacts especially with someone who's played it before and can do a
smooth teach it's definitely worth giving a try. so that's alien artifacts from portal games. well that's
about it for me today I'm just about home so I'll say what games have you been playing recently? head
over to boardgamegeek guild 3269 and share over there. I'd love to hear what you've been trying.
until next time I hope that your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. bye bye!
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