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 the dog.
I'm Brendan Riley.
Well, good morning listeners.
It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago.
And when I say lovely, I mean, it's a little brisk but very nice.
The weather normally on a day like this would be at this time of day would be mid to high
70s, even the 80s though that's more July.
Instead, it's a brisk mid 60s with a nice breeze.
So I'm actually wearing long sleeves, which is pretty nice.
It's a beautiful day.
So the kind of weather I would expect in late September or early October.
It's nice.
Well, I thought I would do a, I felt like doing a board game espresso triple shot today,
just talking about some games, not having a big topic.
And then I looked and I don't have a bunch of new games played that I haven't talked
about at all on the podcast.
But I looked back and I do have a couple games that I've played recently that I've never
talked about on the podcast as in an episode where I sort of do a mini review.
So I'm doing a sort of weird board game espresso and I'll try to frame it a slightly different
way as I do it.
So here we go.
It's a board game espresso triple shot.
A latte machine, or espresso machine, noise. Espresso machine noise. Espresso machine noise.
For those of you who knew the podcast, the board game espresso is an episode where I talk
about games I've played recently for the first time or in this case a couple times, but
not that deeply and haven't talked about them on the podcast before.
The general idea of these episodes is that I'm not doing a full deep dive review.
Instead, I'm doing a light conversation about what the game is like to play and giving
my initial impressions of it for deep dive reviews.
Look for a message from the deep episodes.
The three games that I'm going to be talking about today, two of them I have played and
talked about a little bit on the podcast before, but not in depth.
So let's get started and we'll see what you think of these games.
So the first game I want to talk about today is Cairn.
Cairn is a two-player abstract game set around the theme of being, I don't know, some sort
of the game calls them shamans.
I always feel a little weird about using that term because it is, I think, often used by
colonists to describe priests from colonized civilizations,
but that's the term the game uses.
Think of it as wizards or whatever
in some sort of magical past and you are competing with one another to try and,
I don't know, set up rocks on the board.
It is an extremely tactical game with a little bit of strategy, an aggressive amount of player
versus player conflict and really interesting, think a couple moves ahead kind of gameplay.
If you like Onitama or on a larger scale, something like chess or Hive, these are the kinds
of games Cairn sits comfortably in conversation with.
The theme of Cairn, again, you have these sort of mystical-looking figures called shamans
and your opponent has the same and you are moving them across a battlefield.
In terms of look and feel of the game is very similar to Onitama.
You have, there are a limited number of moves that you can make.
Whenever you make a move, they're depicted on these tiles.
Whenever you make a move on a tile, you then flip the tile over and there's a different
move on the back.
If you make a move, your opponent can't make that same move on their next turn because
you have made that move.
It's a grid of spaces, maybe five or six spaces wide.
That's maybe five wide and six deep, something like that.
In the middle, there are these two stones called monoliths that are megaliths that have special
powers on them.
On your turn, you're going to use one of the action tiles to move one of your pieces
on the board and there's a couple different ways you could do that.
Then if you end up with a shaman on one of the megaliths, then you can activate that megalith.
Actually, I think you have to activate it and no, you can usually skip it.
I don't remember.
But you activate the megalith and then it alters the board in some additional way.
There are always a couple megaliths off to the side.
Those are available to be brought onto the board.
There are two ways to win the game.
The first way, actually, there's one way to win the game.
There's two ways to score points.
The first person to, I think, three points wins the game.
One way to score points is to get your figure into your opponent's camp.
The thing is, the only way to score when you move into your opponent's camp is by using
the jump tile.
There are one of the movement tiles as a jump tile.
That's you jump over your piece or jump over an opponent's piece.
When you do that, if you jump off of the play space into your opponent's village, then
you score a point.
If you just move into your opponent's village using the move tile, you don't score the
point.
In fact, you just go back to the start.
Basically, lose your piece off the board, which sometimes would be preferable to having
your opponent capture your piece.
That's another story.
The second way you can score a point is if you have an opponent on an empty space and
you're able to capture them or banish is the word, then you get to create a megalith in
the spot that they were standing.
When you create that megalith, you pick one of the two that are off to the side that aren't
being used presently, although there's a whole bunch, so there's just two in play.
And then you get a point.
So first three points wins.
Cairn is a really interesting game.
I find it very compelling.
It puts me in the same mindset as something like Tash-Kalar on the more complex end, or
like I said, on the top on the less complex end.
You know something complex and not deep.
These are very deep games.
There's a lot going on and you could be very good at planning way ahead, I suspect.
So Cairn is an interesting game.
It looks beautiful.
It's got a really lovely art design and color palette, orange and blue interacting nicely.
If you get a chance to try Cairn, I highly recommend it.
You can play it over in board game arena, which is where I've been playing it.
So the thing that makes it different than other games I review on a board game is press
up.
So is that I've actually played this several times now, but I've played it on board game
arena.
So it takes me a lot of time to a lot longer time to grasp the game.
Now that might not be true if I play it live, but I very rarely play board game arena
games live.
I usually play them not real time.
So it's taking me a little bit longer.
So you may have heard me discuss Cairn before.
I've played it, but I only recently felt like I know it's strong enough to talk about
it here.
Cairn is designed by Christian Martinez and with art by Vincent Gilbert or Joubert.
It's J-O-U-B-E-R-T.
And it's published by Matagot.
The next game I'm going to talk about fits in the same category.
It's a game I played a couple times on board game arena, but didn't really understand it.
I tried to play it once in person and I kind of learned enough to start, but I didn't
really read the whole rulebook thoroughly and it turns out Heyrian's Wall is the game
I'm talking about.
Where you really need to understand the rulebook thoroughly in order to grasp everything that's
happening.
The systems are relatively uniform and so once you understand the way that the information
flows in Hadrian's Wall is relatively easy to understand how section 2 works versus how
section 1 works and so on.
But overall, it is a game you have to understand before you can play well.
So the first couple times I played it, I was kind of just clicking stuff.
I didn't really understand what was going on.
I finally did get it to the table, I sat down and played it on the table on paper and it
worked a lot better.
Like I understood why everything worked the way it did and it just went much more smoothly
for me and thus I felt pretty good about it.
And thus I feel like I can talk about it with you now.
So Hadrian's Wall is a complicated roll and write.
I can't remember the term.
The people at Motor City Gameworks, Matt Riddle and Ben Pinchback and Adam... somebody, are
using, they have a term, complex role and right or big roll and write or something like
that to describe games where there's a lot of overlapping and amplifying sort of sets
of bonuses that you get as you check things off.
And those games are really interesting.
If you're looking for, if you're trying to figure out what I mean, I'm talking about something
like Fleet: the Dice Game or Three Sisters are the two that I've played.
I know they also have Motor City and recently French Quarter.
I think after three sisters I was sort of like, I've got, I like this a lot but
it's enough of it.
I don't need another one or another two loaded roll and writes.
That's what they call them, like loaded big potato I think.
But Hadrian's Wall is in the same genre of the loaded roll and write.
It does have a little bit of player interaction but just a tiny bit.
Obviously you're just competing for how many points did you get?
How many points did the other players get?
In Hadrian's Wall you represent, I guess Hadrian?
One of Hadrian's people: you represent a prominent Roman person who is trying to help defend
the British Isles for Rome against the Picts and you do so by building up
the Roman stuff in your thing.
The game comes with two score pads and you're going to put each score pad, you're going to take
one sheet from each, score pad and put them next to each other so you have two score pads that
you're working on.
Unlike a lot of games Hadrian's Wall does not have any dice at all.
There are two random, there's two randomized elements.
You have a series of 12 building cards or diplomatic cards, I don't remember what it calls them,
12 cards that are yours alone.
And then there's a deck called the Fate Deck and this is the only randomized element for the
game.
So for the cards that you own, each round you're going to draw two and you pick one to be
the resources you're going, extra resources you're going to get and you pick the other to
be the scoring condition that you are going to have available to you at the end of the game.
Each round you do that.
At the end of the game you have six scoring cards that you can get points from.
Once the points is varies from like one to six points maybe, I don't think there are
very many cards where you can get more than six points.
And the resource you can get are usually just one or two of a couple different resources
that the game uses.
The game uses four different colors of workers and it uses these stone blocks.
And so basically what you do is you get your resources further round and then you spend
those resources in order to check boxes on your different sheets and the boxes will then
create.
Sometimes they'll give you bonuses that allow you to check other boxes and over time you
build up a system and a score.
The game works really well.
It's a really fun solo game, an interesting puzzle and challenge.
I like it as a multiplayer game on Board Game Arena as well because you play it like a solo
game but there's a little bit of watching what other people are doing and you feed off
of them a little bit.
But it works really well as a solo game.
I've actually kept it out with a plan to play it again when I have a half an hour here
or there because it is just so fun.
It's really an interesting puzzle.
Now I imagine once you've played it half a dozen times or something it'll lose some of
that luster because the sheet is the same every time.
So there's a bit of exploration where you sort of like well what if I lean this way instead
of that way?
What if I explore this route instead of that route?
But there's always a temptation once you get a really good score to just replicate that
score or get it's close, you know, follow the same path again.
And this is actually the problem I had with other loaded roll and writes like Three Sisters
or Fleet: The Dice Game is that while there are some tactics involved in what you roll,
generally it seems like there's a strategy like it's all kind of the same.
The Hadrian's Wall is published by Garphill Games.
Garphill Games.
Bobby Hill is the designer, the artist is Sam Phillips.
I really enjoyed playing Hadrian's Wall and I'm looking forward to playing it again.
All right, the third game I'm going to talk, oh, now I'm going to do a dusty game.
As you know, I usually pick one game that I played recently that I hadn't played in a
long time and I dust that game off or talk about dusting that game off.
This time it was A Handful of Stars.
I mentioned A Handful of Stars a couple episodes ago when I talked about betrayal in games that
I thought the challenge of a game where there's some negotiation and you might end up betraying
somebody was an interesting challenge and made gameplay complex for me.
So A Handful of Stars is an area of control game.
I can't, it's not, never mind, it's not area of control game.
And so I guess it is just a, huh.
I walked around, I walked one way around the house to avoid the dog barking at us and
turns out that dog has a fence on either side of the block so they were able to come around
the corner and bark at us anyway.
So A Handful of Stars is not an area control game.
I think of area control as contested spaces where you put different resources in and
the person who comes out on top gets points but often their secondary points for being
the person who control, the second most control, that sort of thing.
Porta Nigra I talked about is an area control game.
In A Handful of Stars each point on the board can only be held by one person at a time.
So you just struggle for control of areas but there is no blended control either you control
it or you don't.
I guess it still might be an area control game.
I've heard people talk about it as a 4x game, explore, exploit, expand and exterminate.
I guess there's some of that there.
That might be the best thing.
It's built into a deck building game and in the tradition of the Martin Wallace deck building
games of the 2010s.
So Martin Wallace created A Few Acres of Snow, A Study in Emerald, Mythotopia,
and A Handful of Stars as four games.
I guess to a degree Lincoln though that one is a little different but to a degree all three
of these are deck building games where you're acquiring areas and when you acquire the area
you get the card that goes to the area and then you use the resources on those cards to
do other things in the game.
And Wallace has a couple things that he does in his area control games that don't tend to
get done in other ones.
Particularly he only lets you use one resource on each card instead of using all of them
and you generally can't discard your, you don't discard your game.
Your hand at the end of the turn the way other deck builders have you do.
So there's a bit more deliberation in when you use your cards and how you use your cards.
So A Handful of Stars is really fun.
I like A Study in Emerald better theme wise but I really like A Handful of Stars.
I haven't gone back and played Mythotopia again for a while.
I probably ought to before declaring that I like A Handful of Stars second best out of
the four but I like A Handful of Stars second best out of the four.
The faction play is really fun.
There's a lot of different stuff you can do with the cards.
I like the way that the board control stuff works.
The biggest challenge for me was that as I maybe described in the last play, the feeling
of fun at the table did not match the correct strategic point for me.
That in order for me to play to win, I had to really go after the person who was in first
place but they were sort of on tilt when I started going after them and I didn't go
after them in the way I probably should have.
If I were playing really strategically.
But in the end it was a really fun and memorable game with the exception of that part of it.
So I don't know where the expectation setting would work better.
Like do I continue to play the way I have and try to get over myself in terms of feeling
bad for attacking somebody in a game where you win by attacking somebody or do I set expectations
more clearly at the beginning or during the game.
Make it more clear like yeah this is a really cutthroat game.
Watch out or do I be more obvious in the way that I interact about alliances.
One of the things you could if you watched our game carefully and I'm being honest with
myself here, you could interpret it that I sort of allowed the other player to think we
had an alliance.
I didn't actively say I want to attack you but I didn't actively discourage that view
either and then betrayed them or surprised them at least.
And that is an interesting question for myself.
Like which part of it would be fun and I don't know any of those strategies would be fun
if the other person sort of gets really upset when I attack them.
And the other question here is like just motives too.
I was talking with another friend about this and I like well that other person clearly
one of the main motivators one of the things that really drives them in the moment of the
game is winning.
And so when they have an upset they get upset for a bit that's not, that doesn't mean
they didn't have fun.
And I would say by the end of the night this person was clearly having fun again but I also
didn't keep attacking them.
I'm not sure how much fun they would have had had I gone after them, continued to go after
them the way I strategically probably should have because they were still in the lead after
my sort of significant play and the correct move I think strategically would have been
to keep attacking their places because every time I took a planet away from them I was
raising my score and lowering theirs whereas anything else I did like if I attacked any of
the other players I'm lowering one of the players who's not beating me and not gaining on
the player who I mean I'm gaining a little bit but not as much as I would have had I gone
after them more.
So it's an interesting puzzle that maybe is a problem in my own head more than a problem
in the game but something to think about as I continue to play because I really like
a handful of stars and I would like to play again.
So that's Martin Wallace the artist is Odysseas Stamoglou, publisher Treefrog games.
I apologize for talking so much about that game it's pretty hard to get a hold of.
There was a really small print run and I think most people who have it like it so I don't
know how much it circulates.
So last game I want to talk about here is Mythic Mischief this is published by IV Studio who
have gone on to publish Moon Rakers and at least one other game that's gotten a fair amount
of buzz designed by Max Anderson, Zach Dixon and Austin Harrison.
I had a bit of a deja vu moment I had a friend in high school named Austin Harrison who
has gone on to work in Hollywood as an animator and so it's weird to see someone named Austin
Harrison they're not the same person I checked.
Person I know doesn't live in Nashville in this Austin Harrison does so different Austin
Harrison but it was weird.
The art is by Amin Farah and Holo Kazemi.
Mythic Mischief is a really it's a first off if you are going to try to define the idea
of overproduced which I think is a problematic idea because if you buy a product and you
enjoy it to have a certain form factor then I don't know how you can say it's overproduced
but if you're going to argue that games could be overproduced Mythic Mischief and I think
a lot of the games from IV Studios maybe fit that profile.
I got Mythic Mischief at Goodwill someone had given it away and boy was it a lucky find
for us I paid three dollars for it and I believed if I'm reading the kickstarter right it was
a ninety five dollar game and I'm not sure I would pay ninety five dollars for it but boy
it was fun.
Mythic Mischief is a squad based tactical skirmish game in which you have a group of kids
magical kids there's like Frankensteins and Draculas and ghosts and whatnot and zombies
and you're hiding out in the midst of a library at your school. Think sort of Hogwarts but
for monsters and you aren't supposed to be in there and so there's a librarian that the
kids call the tome keeper who's wandering around in the library and if it catches you in there
he sends you back to your dorm and your team loot the other team the team who basically
tricked you into getting caught by the tome keeper gets a point first team to ten point wins.
What makes Mythic Mischief interesting is that each team each squad has a set of four
actions that are all very similar but not identical two of them are identical the move action
that everyone can take is identical and that there's another action that everyone can take
I don't recall right now but then everyone else has two unique actions that are slightly
different there's one action allows you to move and opponent and there's one action that
does something else oh rearrange the bookshelves in the library and then each team also has
an epic maneuver that you can do once and then you can recharge to do again later so during
the game you take turns manipulating the setup of the board with the goal of getting as many
of your opponents figures into the way of the tome keeper as you can and then the team does
that the best is going to win because the tome keeper will you'll get ten points and the
tome keeper has a set path that they're going to walk in the library although you can change
that by moving the bookshelves around. This game is pretty fun; I think if you get a chance to play it
you definitely should--it's a really interesting tactical game. It's maybe a little bit more complex
than it needs to be for the level of game it is in terms of how long it's going to take how deep
the strategy is, but it is pretty cool and I really enjoyed playing it the couple times in my son and
I and his cousins played the game. He definitely really liked it and asked me to definitely keep it,
so it's I'm sure it'll come up again. You'll see me talking about having played it or whatever
in future but it's really fun. We also did end up with the "headmaster box" which is the sort of deluxe
edition meaning that we got three more factions than you would get if you just have the base set
which is nice because I think the game lives in its variety. I think if you get stuck with one
set of factions it's probably not as good as you were hoping it would be, and so that is probably the
challenge of the game Mythic Mischief. Like I said, a fun game; I'm happy to have it, going to keep it,
going to play it some more, and that's what I have to say about that. Well thanks for joining me
on my walk today I hope the year next walk is this pleasant is mine Was. Bye-bye
[Music]
[out take beep] where is the paper? okay I definitely put it in my pocket what the heck what here is[out-take beep]
brought to you by Rattlebox Games