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.

Temperatures are high.

I'd say mid to high 70s.

And it is the last day I have to go to campus before the end of the semester.

I usually have Thursday class, but I've canceled it.

And because it's a twice-a-week class, and when we met on Tuesday, that really was the

end of what we needed to do.

So it didn't make sense to meet again on Thursday.

And I don't have any more meetings this week, so I am effectively done with my semester.

Now I have a whole bunch of grading to do in the next 10 days, which is fine.

In the meantime, I thought it would be fun to talk to you about some games I've been playing.

That's right, it's time for a board game espresso triple shot.

Board game espresso triple shot is an episode in which I talk about three games I've played

recently for the first time, and one game that I revisited or tried in expansion or something

like that.

These are generally not a elaborate review.

They're more like first impressions.

So take everything I say with a little bit of a grain of salt, because they are my impressions,

but we all know when you play a game a second time, a third time, a fifth time, a tenth

time, your experience of it changes.

So with that in mind, let's jump right in.

All right, the first game I want to talk about today is Ponzi Scheme.

As you know from the top of the sack, this is one of my games from April.

I did manage to get it played in April right at the end of the month, and so I'm happy

to talk to you about it now.

Charles Ponzi of course is the famous scammer who ran the Ponzi Scheme.

Of course at the time he didn't call it that.

He called it an investment opportunity in international postal coupons.

The game isn't really about that, instead it's about running a Ponzi Scheme and trying

to not be the one caught running the Ponzi Scheme.

If you're not aware of what that kind of scam is, a Ponzi Scheme is where you offer an

investment opportunity with an unreasonably high return on investment.

And then when the time comes to pay the return on investment, you pay out the return with

the money from other investors rather than with money you've actually earned through the

investment opportunity.

The reason this is bad of course is that at some point you won't have new money from new

investors coming in, and thus you won't be able to make the pay-outs that

you've promised in the whole thing of the collapse.

So the way that the game Ponzi Scheme works, your goal is to acquire shares in businesses

that are worth as much money as you can and have the most of these valuable shares in businesses

when somebody is unable to pay their obligations.

The way it works is each round you can take a contract or an investment contract, and

that investment contract gives you cash but has a very high payoff rate at some time in

the future.

So first you have to pay off your obligations with that money, then you can use the money

to buy a property, and then you can also make a trade offer with another player.

The trade offer mechanism is actually pretty neat, it's very similar to the exchange offer

in Isle of Skye, although it's individual and secret.

But basically what you do is you put some money in an envelope and you hand that envelope

to another player, and you say I'd like to buy your blue share.

You can only offer to buy a share in one of the, each there's five companies and they have

different colors.

You can only offer to buy a share in a company where you already have a share in that company

at least one.

So remember I said the first thing you could do is buy a share in the company so you're

allowed to, oh that's what the investment part is.

At the beginning of the round you take a share in a company with it comes in an investment

contract.

So the shares in the company are what you're scoring.

This gets you at the end of the game.

The more shares you have in each company the more points you get.

So having three shares in one company is better than three separate shares in a company, for

example.

But it's much more expensive to take a share in a later company that is to get an earlier

one.

Once you have at least one then you're allowed to offer to buy more from your opponents.

The way that works is you put money in an envelope and you hand it to an opponent and you

say I want to buy a share in the blue company from you.

And they look at the amount of money you offered and they have two choices.

They can either accept your offer and give you the blue share that you just offered and

they keep the money.

Or they can put that amount of money in the envelope.

So if you put in $10 let's say they can put in $10.

So now the envelope has $20 in it.

They hand you back the envelope and now you have to sell them the blue share.

So what you're doing is you are trying to find a level at which your offer is more

valuable to them than the share they have.

But you aren't spending so much money that you're emptying out your coffers because if you

can't pay your bill when it comes to you lose.

That's the whole game.

Basically go around and because every contract you take has a higher payout and you have

to keep paying them out over and over again.

You have to keep taking more money until somebody can't pay their bill and then the game is

over and you add up points.

It's fun and theory, it was mediocre in practice.

Part of it was some of the people playing weren't super into it.

They were kind of playing it because I said hey let's try this and they didn't really like

it.

But I think it's got potential.

I would enjoy playing it again at some point.

But it's also a very strictly financial kind of abstracted game.

The theme is pretty dumb or pretty uninteresting.

I think the mechanism of constantly trying to stay ahead of the ever rising tide of debt

is an interesting mechanism in the game.

But ultimately it was just okay.

That is Ponzi Scheme, designed by Jesse Li with art by Chih-Fan Chen.

It was recently republished I think in 2021 or 2022 with a new art on the cover.

I haven't actually seen that version in print.

I have the old version.

At the next game I'll talk about is called Free Radicals.

This is a game I heard about many times because Richard Ham or Rahdo really likes this game.

He thinks it's an incredible game.

And I will say Richard Ham really liking a game is a thing he does a lot.

I've learned to sort of stop putting too much faith in him saying a game is really great.

At least to the point of buying it without trying it myself because he, when he talks about

a game it's usually because he really likes it.

And sometimes that matches my taste and often it doesn't.

But him saying he really liked it did put it on my radar.

One of the students in my board game club brought it for us to play.

And they let me know ahead of time they were going to bring it so I got to review the rules

a little bit.

And I was excited to try it out.

The way the game works there are five different player colors.

Each player color has a player board that's double sided.

One side of the player board is a faction and on the other side of the player board is a

different faction.

Kind of like you know revive or something has two player boards one of each faction.

There has some double sided player boards where there's different versions of the faction

on each side.

The factions in this game are much more dramatically different.

There are ten different factions to per each player board.

So there's five colors.

If you're going to be red you're going to be one group or the other and that's true for

all the colors.

Okay so I've started to explain that.

So what makes the game interesting is there are these buildings in the middle of the board.

In each building is a useful place to go.

Think of lords of water deep right?

There's a useful thing that you can go to.

You can't go there until someone builds it.

So there are buildings like that.

There are those buildings.

There are ten of them.

Each one of them benefits one of the players extra.

So there's one building if you're the entrepreneurs is one of the groups or the hotelliers is

another group.

If you're the hotelliers one of the ten buildings in the middle of the board is extra good

for the hotelliers and you can go there and get the regular benefit or you can do the

hotellier benefit.

There are also some shared currencies.

There are three different kinds of resources and there's money and then there's points.

Then there's also the prestige token which is the sort of like, I don't know it's a point

generating token.

If you have it at the beginning of your turn you get a point or two points and if you take

it during your turn you get a point.

I think you get a point if you have it during your turn and if you take it during your

turn you get a point.

If you already have it and you do the action that would normally take it you get another

point anyway.

The prestige token can be a way to get points.

What makes the game interesting to play though is the fact that there are ten different

factions.

Each faction is playing a different game.

You have these shared components and shared some shared goals but the actual game play

that you're doing is dramatically different.

I can't remember what the name of my group was, the underground.

I had eight different little characters, each of whom could be upgraded three times.

At the base level they're able to do or they could be upgraded twice.

On level one they're able to, each character has a thing they can do and if they're upgraded

to level two they have a different slightly better thing they can do.

If they're upgraded to level three they have a different, even better thing they can do.

The way the game works is or the way that my character played was on your turn you get to

activate like four of your characters.

Sometimes more than that depending on how things shake out and the characters that you

activate you can pick what level thing they do if they're upgraded.

So if you have a character that's upgraded to level three you have three different choices

about what they do on their turn when you activate them.

The activation comes through cards.

Okay.

The player who is playing hotelliers they are playing a polyomino placement game where they

get bonuses based on where they play the polyominos.

Another player is playing a elaborate Mancola game sort of like Trajan.

I mean at least the mechanism for determining your turn was like Trajan.

It's less complicated there.

There's another character who is playing a pickup and deliver game.

So there are ten different mini games in the game and depending on which faction you're

playing the mini game for your faction.

And then there are central things that everybody is trying to do to score points.

I really liked this game.

I thought it was pretty neat.

I thought that the different factions were interesting.

I liked the theme of the game.

And there was an element of you can do things to build in the center board like loads of

water deep and then people can take those actions that are helpful to them but you get

a little bonus when they do that.

And the game has a bunch of things where like you help other players you get a bonus of

a token of their player color and getting other player color tokens is a big part of where

you get points at the end.

So you want to help each other which is really neat.

I like free radicals a lot.

I thought it was a nifty game.

In fact I liked it so much I went and looked.

It wasn't all that popular so it's relatively inexpensive.

I think it was $35 and I had some points so I was able to order it without spending any

cash.

So I actually bought it because I liked it so much.

Which means it's on my shelf of opportunity even though I just played it because when I buy

a new game it goes on my shelf of opportunity until I play it.

That was free radicals designed by Nathan Woll with Art by Thomas Chistowski.

I think I'm going to skip the, I'm just going to go straight to the third game because

I've used up a lot of time talking about free radicals.

The third game that I played that I wanted to share is Moon Colony Bloodbath.

This is a neat little game.

It's not incredible but it's neat.

It's a fun game to play once or twice I think.

It's got a hilarious theme and it's really good.

It's a really good theme like well crafted maintained throughout both through mechanisms

and art.

It's got a funny title, Moon Colony Bloodbath.

It's a great title.

The premise is each player is running a Moon Colony and there are robots and the robots

start to go out of control and kill everybody.

And your goal is to have the most people left in your colony when somebody runs out of

people entirely.

So again, kind of like Ponzi Scheme, one player loses and then the player who's doing best

of the remaining players wins.

This is a deck, it's sort of a engine builder.

In the game you, it is, there's a shared deck and there are several cards in the deck that

let you do positive actions in your Moon Colony.

So early in the game, those positive actions help you build up your colony by drawing cards,

by building, building things by managing resources and generally trying to recruit more

and more people to your colony.

And then as the game goes along, the shared deck acquires a bunch of bad events.

And these events keep coming back over and over.

Think of like a deck builder, you know, if you have a card that does something that card

comes up over and over again.

Well the way it works is these bad events go into the deck and then the cards that let

you do positive things in your colony are fewer and farther between as more and more

bad things get put into the deck.

So the bad things start accumulating, your people start dying, you start having to

destroy buildings to get more people because the people living in the buildings are kind

of banked there.

So if you need to four-foot-five people, you might choose to forfeit a building that has

five people living in it.

And eventually somebody runs out of people and then whoever has the most people left

wins.

It was pretty fun.

It reminded me a little dominion in that the person who had played before did the best.

They kind of understood how it was going to work and had the most opportunity to really

succeed.

I mean overall it was an interesting game.

Definitely one I would play again if somebody offered it.

I would certainly pick it up if it were, if I found it somewhere pretty cheap, but I'm

not going to go out and buy it at full price.

I thought was fine, but it won't be a game I would play a ton of times even if I had a copy.

That's MoonColony Bloodbath designed by Donald X Vaccarino.

I don't know if I said that with art from Franz Volwinkle.

Donald X Vaccarino, of course, is the designer of Dominion.

So that's not surprising.

He knows how to make a game that has interesting card combos.

Well that's about it for me today.

I'm not going to revisit a game because I'm home and I want to go inside.

So thanks for joining me on the walk.

I hope your next walk is pleasant as mine was.

Bye bye.

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Brought to you by Rattlebox Games.

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