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 sky is clear and crystal blue with the little hint of clouds here

and there.

A train rumbles in the background and I'm hoping I'll spot some fun birds on the walk home.

But it's time for me to chat with you about some more board game stuff.

I was thinking about what other ways I might engage with gaming, what things haven't I

talked about lately that might be interesting to you.

And I was reflecting on my recent interest and continued work on the game Revive.

So the game Revive is one of my newest favorite games.

It came out two years ago and is already my number, I think 16 game on my top 50 list.

I think it's really good, very interesting, really complex, lots of nuanced choices to make.

I'm really bad at it, but it's really fun.

So I'm excited to continue working on it and sort of seeing where it can go, what I

can do with it.

And in that regard, I was thinking about the designer.

He was a very interesting person.

I'm actually corresponded with him very briefly because I made some new, I don't like the player

aides that are available on board game geek.

They're a little too bulky and they're not complete because they don't include the stuff

from the expansion.

And so I was, we also have the different powers that the individual try, uh, plans get.

And so I made some planned specific, uh, player aides, which I then wanted to post on board game

geek and in order to do that, I had to get permission to do so because I was using art from the rulebook.

So I did get permission, so that was the correspondence.

"Hey, here's these player aides.

"Is it okay if I put them on boardgamegeek?", "yes, go ahead."

It was the, uh, response.

But that did get me thinking about the fact that I do have a bunch of his games and I thought

it might be interesting to talk about them a little bit.

And I will say most of the games that I have that he's designed are co-designed with other

people.

Almost all of them also include Eilif Svensson to the point that I almost included

Eilif Svensson on this list here because it would be, I think I have one, I know it's one game

that Østby is on that Svensson is not.

And I actually have one game that Svensson is on.

Østby is not.

So maybe I should just say that it's both of them.

Yeah, all right, I'm, I'm retconning it, and saying Eilif Svensson and

Kristian Amundsen Østby together.

So to start with, so what I'm going to do, this is a great, an episode of the great designer's

series.

Great designer's series is a ongoing, very occasional episode in which I focus on the

games I've played by one designer and talk about what's great about them to give you a sense

of a particular designer's aptitude and, uh, work for me.

Generally, I don't like to use a designer until they have five or more games in my collection

and, uh, these guys, uh, do fit that description.

The last, uh, great designer's game episode I did was about, uh, Kramer and Keisling, or

Keisling and Kramer.

And I talked about how I have played some of the games that each of them has designed

and then I have some that they both designed.

So it's a mix.

Along that line, I thought I would talk about these guys.

So to start with, I'll do the games that they did by themselves.

Kristian Amundsen Østby designed Escape Curse of the Temple, which is one of my favorite

real-time games.

It was an early addition to our collection.

I got it, uh, at recommendation of my friend, Rolfe.

And it is a really fun game in which you're trying to race through the temple to get out

before the timer runs out.

It's high tension, really goofy and silly and fun.

I have the big box, although I haven't played very many of the expansion parts.

Mostly I have just played the base game, but there's lots of really fun stuff available

for it.

and if you get a chance to play it, you definitely should because it is a hoot.

So that's a game that was designed, I think it's 2011 by Østby solo.

I also have one design that I know is by Eilif Svensson and actually another person with

the last name Svensson, I assume it's a sibling... could be a parent or a child, I guess.

Uh, and this is a Riverside.

Riverside is a, uh, what, uh, the folks over at Motor City Gameworks are calling loaded

roll-and-write, right?

It's a, it's a roll-and-write game that has a whole bunch of different things you can check

and it's got cascading bonuses that then bounce off of each other and reinforce one another.

It's a little simpler than the, Fleet the Dice Game or the Three Sisters, the sort of

high points for me of that loaded roll-and-write genre.

Instead, it's just one pad, it's a little more contained, but pretty interesting.

That's one where I, uh, I think it was not very widely distributed, so if you wanted to

check that out, you got to kind of seek it out.

So that's Riverside.

I'm from Eilif Svensson and another Svensson.

All right, I've covered the two that are solo games.

Uh, now I have a bunch of shared games to talk about.

The first one, Revive.

I've mentioned this a number of times.

It is a really interesting, it's not really worker placement, although there's a bunch

of different actions you can take.

You are sort of building out your civilization, your exploration group.

There are all of these different cascading bonuses.

The thing that makes the game interesting is the collection of different things that you

could score with and the complex combination of those potential scoring elements that makes

the game really shine.

There is this tech board where you get these machines and there's little, uh, activation

tokens that you can get when you get the machines.

I'm definitely not doing great as I'm playing the game at learning how to amplify and accelerate

that those sets of bonuses because that's where the real heart of the game goes, but the

people who are good at it really can, uh, rock at their score up.

Uh, so I'm interested in playing that some more so that I can get better at it and I,

uh, yeah, I'm just keen to play more rounds of revive.

The next one I want to mention is Trails of Tucana.

Trails of Tucana is one of my favorite roll-and-write games.

It's got a really, it's got the, it's actually a flip-and-write game.

Basically, it's really simple.

You have this map with a bunch of different terrains on it.

You flip a card, you draw a line between, or you flip two cards, you draw a line between

those two terrains.

Your goal is to build a series of paths that connect to bonuses on the map and those

bonuses then get you points, uh, and additional lines.

So as you go, you uncover additional bonuses, uh, your, part, you're balancing the, the idea

between connecting as many bonuses as you can to connecting different points on the map.

It's a little bit of push your luck because you're kind of paying attention to how many

of which card have come out so you can kind of guess what your opportunities are for making

connections.

But overall flow of the game is really fast.

Usually when we play, I end up playing twice because you can play the small map and then

play the big map in short succession.

Two games usually an hour or less.

Uh, it's really clean, easy to teach, fun to play.

That's Trails of Tucana.

I do not have the ferry expansion.

I don't know of any way to get it and I think the only way to get it now is to buy the

updated version of the game that comes with the fairy expansion in it, which is a bummer

because I already have the game.

So I don't really want to buy it again.

Uh, I suppose at some point I might and then just donate the game to one of our game clubs

and keep the version with the expansion, but I've got too many games to go buying...

to go rebuying games right now.

But that's Trails of Tucana.

If you think this sounds interesting, look up Rahdo's play--Richard Ham--on YouTube of that

game because his play, he, I think he posted a link to or you can find a copy of the map

for the game and so you can actually play the game with him on his thing, which I did and

by the end of my play, I, I had ordered it because I really liked it.

I thought the flow was smooth and, uh, it's excellent.

So that's Trails of Tucana.

On a related note, Østby and Svensson created a game earlier called Avenue, which was then

republished as Kokoro Avenue of the Kodama, but it's the same game.

Basically what you're doing is you're trying to draw lines on a map to connect different

points and connect bonuses.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it's not super dissimilar from Trails of Tucana.

I would say the big difference is Trails of Tucana feels expansive yet sometimes frustrating

because what you want isn't coming up.

Avenue feels constricting and frustrating because what you want isn't coming up.

So they both have this frustrating element to them, but one of them feels more expansive

and the other feels more constrained.

So it's sort of, it reminds me a little bit of the difference seen Calico constrained

and Cascadia expansive.

Either in both cases you're hoping things will come up and if they don't it's kind of annoying,

but yeah, so that's kind of the relationship between the two.

But both are good, uh, in their own ways and interesting and relatively short and fun

to play.

So if you were only going to play one, I would definitely recommend Trails of Tucana, but

both of them are good.

I have recently mentioned playing Capital Lux, so I'm not going to go into depth on that

one right now, but that's another one from these two designers.

The more I read about it, the more I sort of wish I had capital lux 2 because it seems

like that's the game that's got the breadth of options that can make, make it have a little

bit more variety, but that's not widely available right now and it's pretty expensive.

So I'll wait for a reprint or when I find a copy cheap somewhere.

Next up is The Magnificent.

The Magnificent is a really interesting game similar to revive actually in terms of a bunch

of different related subsystems in which you are making a choice about how to use your

turns, managing a variety of different resources, trying to complete a variety of different scoring

tasks.

The art and design is really cool on it. I think that the mask on the cover of the box,

which is meant to be a smile, gets a little too close to looking like 1920s American minstrelry

in art, which is a bummer because it certainly isn't intended to be that, but I think there's

sort of glimpsing overlap there that is a bummer.

But other than that, I don't think that's what it actually is depicting nor is it intentional.

The rest of the game that, so that cover art gaff aside, I think the rest of the game is

really compelling.

It's very interesting.

The idea is you're running a circus and recruiting people for your circus, you're managing the

circus grounds and I love the interplay of the different pieces.

It makes for a really compelling experience.

I have the expansion, the snow expansion, but I haven't had chance to play it yet, but

it's definitely on my radar to get played sometimes.

That's The Magnificent.

Finally, the last game I want to mention that I have played is Mammut.

Mammoth is again, I think, just Kristian Amundsen Østby.

I don't think Eilif Svensson is involved in this one.

This is an "I Split You Choose" game and my favorite "I Split You Choose" game.

You play members of a group of prehistoric humans who have hunted a mammoth and you're

dividing up the spoils of the hunt.

Unlike a lot of other "I Split You Choose" games where you have to settle for the split,

the original person made.

Instead in this game, you can always take one of the splits that was already claimed, but

just make it a little worse.

So you have the spoils, they get divided up into a pot.

The first person goes, they take one piece of the pot.

The second person goes, they can take one of the unclaimed pieces in the pot or they could

go back and take the thing that the first person claimed, but they have to take one piece

of what was in that claim and put it back in the middle, adding it to one of the other

pots.

And then it keeps going around until everyone has claimed something.

But that means that you could have multiple rounds because if people keep claiming other

people's things, then the stuff in the middle keeps getting bigger, but until someone claims

the last one in the middle, the round's not over.

It's sort of like a white elephant, an ongoing, never-ending white elephant where the gifts

get a little worse with each claim.

So pretty interesting, actually.

And then there's a bunch of different types of tiles and you score them in different ways

that I think is really fun.

So this is a game I really like.

I haven't played it in a very long time and it wasn't, I kept off suggesting it at home,

it wasn't in any play.

So I took it to school, it's in my college board game club where it's also not gotten

any play.

At some point I may just invoke, hey, here's the game I want to play.

Usually if I just get it out and set it up, somebody'll join me, but I haven't decided

to do that yet.

Maybe sometime this year.

I have a pre-ordered saltfjord, so when that comes in, I'll tell you about that.

And I did get to play a bad company which is sort of like space-based, but with a game

doing heists.

It's the easiest way I can explain it.

That was pretty good.

So, that brings me to the end of my conversation today.

I'd love to know which Kristian Amundsen Østby and Eilif Svensson games you think

are great.

What do you think of these designers?

Are they people that you're on the lookout for?

They are definitely top of the radar for me because I've been loving the stuff they've

been producing in the last few years.

Well, thank you for joining me on my walk today.

I hope that you will share with me what you think of these games and I hope that your

next walk is as nice as mine was.

Bye-bye.

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