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.

Well, greetings listeners.

It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago.

The sun is out, the sky is blue with a few cottony clouds dotting it.

The weather is pretty warm for February.

I mean, it's chilly.

I've got a hat on and a jacket.

I do have gloves in my backpack in case they need them, but it feels pretty nice.

So I'm happy to be out talking to you.

I'm taking a walk up to the library to return a couple books and I thought it would be

a good time to record a couple episodes of Pick Up and Deliver.

These are going to be aired or released after the Top of the Stack episode, which I will

probably record and release on Monday, or maybe even Tuesday.

We'll see if I can get out over the weekend.

But tomorrow is the beginning of the month.

I guess I could record it today, but what if I play a game tonight?

Stats will be all screwy.

So I thought I would record a Board Game Espresso Triple Shot.

The Board Game Espresso Triple Shot is an episode segment in which I talk about three games

I played recently for the first time, and then something else I played that's significant.

Could be a game I dusted off.

It could be a new expansion I tried, something like that.

Just as a reminder, these are games I played maybe once or twice, so this isn't really

a review per se so much as a first impressions kind of episode.

So let's get into it.

First game I want to talk of.

These all three of the new games that I played came from a single game day with our friend

Paul--Hi Paul--in which I got to try out several new games I hadn't played before.

The first of which that I want to talk about is Ticket to Ride: Legacy.

It's actually called Ticket to Ride: Legacy - Legends of the West, which I imagine they put

that colon on there so they could do another one where it's like, "Europe on rails" or something.

They could do another one if this one was popular.

Obviously I won't say very much about it because I don't want to give anything away, but

Ticket to Ride is a game that we've all played many times and so Ticket to Ride: Legacy is

going to be an interesting development of that system.

At the beginning it feels it's almost as light as like one of the Ticket to Ride city

games like Ticket to Ride New York, not quite, but the map is not as developed as your

traditional Ticket to Ride game.

Games with most legacy games, there is a story that develops, there is ongoing stuff that

happens, there are changes that you make to game components, and all this starts off

right away.

I mean the game kind of assumes that you know how to play ticket to ride if follows the

usual rules, but you will develop over time.

I think some of the stuff that I can share without giving anything away, each player gets

a little box that's going to hold your stuff and half of the box is a side that you can open

up with the flap and you put cards and whatever in there.

And then the other side is, it's called your bank I think, and it's got a little slot in

the side and it does not open and after each game you're going to ride a little slip of paper

and you slide the paper in there.

So that's a really interesting bit of business that I think works really well.

We played two games in our first sitting, I imagine the early games will all be relatively

short, but as the game goes on it should get longer.

One of the other things you find when you first open the box and get it out is that the

game board is made of puzzle pieces, so that parts are interesting because we could just

tell at the beginning we only have the east coast of the United States and as the game

goes along presumably we are going to get more segments.

I mean it's kind of hard not to think the puzzle shaped game board will get more puzzle pieces.

So yeah and then there's there's stickers, there's all these spots in the rulebook where

stickers are going to go, so lots of room for narrative and mechanical growth.

Fun first couple games we'll see how it goes as we move along.

That's Ticket to Ride: Legacy - Legends of the West, designed by Rob Daviau, Matt Leacock and

Alan Moon, art by Cyrille Doja and Julien Delval.

The art looks very similar to other Ticket to Ride games so I don't know if they're just using

the same artist they always have or if they're having someone else do it and it's in a similar

style.

It is windy today, hopefully this recording isn't just full of windy feedback, but when

I told my wife I was going out for a walk today she said don't give one away and now I know

why.

Yes, windy as I'll get out.

Come to the next game, the next game is called Bomb Busters.

I discovered this game when Steph Hodge who is a streamer and board gamer was on board games

and talked about it being her most played game of 2024.

She said she and her partner played something like 60 games of it and I can absolutely see

why.

First off it takes about 10 minutes to play a game so like our group played I think six

games it's a really at the beginning it's really a rather uncomplicated deduction game basically

the way it works is you have a bunch of tiles in front of you that have numbers on them and

as a group you are trying to find and match the other numbers and you sort of use little

bits of logic to figure out who's got what kind of numbers and as the game goes on it gets

more complicated there are more possibilities and it takes a little bit more effort.

It's kind of in the neighborhood of something long lines of Hanabi although you can see

your own numbers but there is logic to be used in a similar way.

The art is very cutesy it looks like the same style as that one where you look at the map

and there's sort of crimes, crime city or whatever that one's called this sort of like picture

searching puzzle game.

It's designed by Hisashi Hayashi who designed Yokohama and Trains and like

a whole bunch of other games it's pretty renowned Japanese game designer.

It's really fun very accessible easy to play interesting bits of logic and deduction to

use the early training missions kind of ramp up in difficulty and I imagine the other there's

like 50 some missions in the box after you finish the training missions and I imagine they

just continue to get more interesting and harder.

If you get a chance to play this and you like deduction games it's definitely top notch

it's very fun easy to play quick if you lose it's not a big deal just reset it's a good

time that's Bomb Busters by Hisashi Hayashi.

The next up is Histrio. Histrio is one of those games I've kind of seen floating

around for a while I do recall seeing it on a kind of bargain bin price and it was always

sort of like maybe I'll get that one.

I think it had a low six rating on board game geek so I wasn't always super intense about

it but it looked interesting and the art is very cute it's got a sort of Elizabethan

era art style so think about Elizabethan England but all the characters are anthropomorphic

animals and the premise is that you are competing traveling troops of performers who are

going from city to city I think in blimps performing different kinds of plays building up your reputation

so that you can go performed for the king at the end of the game.

As the game goes along you are working on recruiting a top notch troop of players but also

building your reputation and trying to sway the king about what type of play he wants

to see.

There are two rounds and each round at the end of the round you're gonna see what kind

of play the king wants to see and you get a bonus if your troop has more people who are

good at that kind of play than at the other kind so there's tragedy and comedy but there's

also all these other bonus scoring cards that you can pick up and there's a whole bunch

of nuance between the different actions it is and a location selection game and the idea

is that you're picking where you're gonna go and you get the cards that are at that location

unless someone else also picks that location in which case then neither of you get the cards.

The tricky part is you can see which locations everyone else has gone to already so you can

tell which ones they could go to and of course there is a way to get all of your locations.

There are cards that will let you take all of your location blimps back and then there are

also a couple you also if you get down so you only have one left then you get to take

them all back as well so there's two different ways you might get them all back and then

it's a matter of kind of choosing the cards that provide the least negative effects toward

the scoring goals you're going for and the best combinations of outcomes.

It's a cute game it's actually pretty fun better than I thought it was gonna be given

how often and long it was on discount I thought it wasn't gonna be great but it actually

was pretty great are pretty good anyway I don't know that I would necessarily run out to

buy it although having played it now if I encountered it for 10 bucks I might pick it up it

was good definitely worth playing Bruno Cathala is always I've had Bruno Cathala very consistently

games that are good they're very rarely great I don't think I have any of his games in my

top 50 but I do have several in my collection and I almost always enjoy them they are always

just for me good but he is a very strong designer and a lot of people really like his stuff so

definitely worth checking out if you get a chance that's called Histrio and finally I

did this a little out of order usually I saved the third new game for the end but I didn't

I did get a chance to dust off a game that I hadn't played in while this was a Flash Point: Fire Rescue.

Flash Point: Fire Rescue is a cooperative game in which you play a group of firefighters

who are working together to try to put out a fire I know that's super surprising that

that's what it could be about but there it is in the game you take on the role of a specific

firefighter and each firefighter has their own kind of special power that they get to use

so one firefighter might be better at oh let's say rescuing people another one might be

better at moving faster through the fire and that sort of thing so different firefighters

will have a different level of ability when they go through the house generally. When I played

this game back in the day which was eight years and eighteen days dusty so it

had been a very long time since I played it. Back when I used to play it we mostly played on

the simple version which is designed for families with children and it's easier to play I never

really got to play the advanced version much but we did play the advanced version for this

one and it was pretty great. Kevin Lansing the designer did an excellent job with the overall flow of

the game. The way it works is on your turn it's an action point system you get a number of

actions you get to take. As you take those actions you then move through the house you put out fires.

You do all this different stuff and you're trying to rescue people and the goal is to rescue people

putting out the fire is a way of slowing down the end of the game but I guess it's... I don't know if

it's possible to actually put out the whole fire in the game, like if it if you had really good play

and you got really lucky with your rolls if you could put out the entire fire, would the game...

can you end the game that way? I don't know but you do win the game by rescuing all the people in the

house and if you're not putting out the fire then the fire will burn the house down and you won't

succeed in the second half or in that second goal. So on your turn you use actions to move around to

douse the fire. You can chop through doors and walls to get to people then you find people and what you

get is these little tokens on the board, these question mark tokens, that say there's something here

that you have to investigate and some of them are blank, some of them are animals which I really

want to rescue the cats and the dogs, and then some of them are people and you have to get all of

the survivors out. Or as many as... you're allowed to lose a certain number but it's not that many

before the game ends and after each turn then we roll dice and we add smoke or fire to the house

it spreads. Basically how it works is if you roll dice and it adds smoke to a space where there isn't

smoke already, we add smoke; if there's already smoke though that smoke turns into fire. It's like

it's smoldering and then it bursts into flame and there's this insidious spreading mechanism where if

I recall correctly like if you have a bank of three or four spots that have smoke and one of them

triggers into fire the whole thing turns into fire, which kind of makes sense. Like I said different

players have different skills and different abilities and they get to use different equipment

as they go through, so it makes for a pretty lively and entertaining game. I enjoyed myself a

fair amount, I don't know like in the classic co-op games I don't know if I like this better than say

Castle Panic or Pandemic like I like I definitely found Pandemic better just because it's a little

bit more predictable the dice in Flash Point, which can just screw you and there's nothing you can do about it

which is frustrating. But generally it's a pretty good game and well worth it I'll play if you

don't mind playing a game about a fire. Yeah pretty fun--that's flashpoint fire rescue from indie boards

and cards designer Kevin Landzing. Well those are three new games that I've played recently and one

expansion that I tried so that's about it for me today. I hope that you have tried some new games and

I'd love to hear about them you can share those over on boardgamegeek in guild 3269. I'd

love to hear about them there. You could also send me a direct message wombat 929 on board game geek

or brendan@rattleboxgames.com by email. well like I said that's about it for me today thanks for joining me on my

walk. I hope that your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. bye bye!