Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I

step out for a walk and deliver an episode to you while I stroll around.

I'm Brendan Riley.

Well, good afternoon listeners.

It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago.

The sun is out.

The birds are chirping.

I'm taking a walk and run some errands.

I'm going to go to the hardware store.

I'm going to swing by the board game store to see what new stuff they have and I'm going

to head over to the library.

It's going to be a great afternoon.

You know it.

Booya!

Somebody just came the wrong way out of the parking lot at the nursing home.

It drives me crazy when they do that.

You're not supposed to go that way.

Here we go.

Well, it is June 2nd.

That means it's the beginning of the month, which means it's the end of another month,

which means it's time for top of the stack.

[airhorn noises]

"Top of the stack" is a monthly segment I do as ideally the first episode to come out

in each calendar month.

In which I talk about the last month's game plays, I give you some stats.

Talk about my goals for the next month and we enjoy our time together.

So that's what we're doing today.

Top of the stack, maybe.

Alright, so May 2025, final monthly play stats.

Starting off strong.

We had 65 plays of 45 different games.

My running total for the year is 352 plays of 165 games.

So I'm well on my way to a robust and delightful year.

As you know, I'm always trying to reduce my shelf of opportunity.

Well this month I totally screwed that up.

At the beginning of the month I had 62 games on my shelf of opportunity and at the end of

the month I had 77.

That's right, I increased it by 15, but that's because I got a whole bunch of new games

in a math trade.

So I have a whole bunch of new games to try and I did that without buying a bunch of new

games, which was nice.

So my collection size, my goal is to reduce it and I did make some progress there.

I started the year, I started the month with 620 games and I ended the month with 614.

So even though I brought 20 new games into my collection or so, I got rid of I think 29

and I guess not quite 29.

But I got rid of a bunch and I brought fewer of them in.

So my collection size is going down.

I'll talk about that a little bit more at the end.

My most played game this month was Free Radicals, which I played three times and my most played

online game was 7 Wonders.

Actually when I, the online one is in table and/or online.

So if I played a mix it can count toward that.

7 Wonders I played once on the table and twice online.

So three times.

My top of the stack is the set of games that I'm hoping to play that month.

This month I picked out three four games to play.

If I play three of them it counts as a success.

The four games I picked out were Sorcerer City, Badass Zombie Killers, Fallen Angel, and

Pulsar 2849.

Alas the only one of those that I got played is the one I had played before.

Pulsar 2849 none of the other ones got played.

I was trying to get Sorcerer City played pretty hard.

I learned the rules, got it already and then I didn't get it played.

Oops.

The other two honestly I didn't even get a chance to try.

I just never came up.

So we'll see a lot of those coming back another time.

But for now that was one out of three.

Not great.

Although now they look at that's my success level in both May and April as well.

February I got three out of three, March I got four out of three.

But it's been not great on the success level since then.

I did however get to try a whole lot of new games this month.

I'm just gonna blast through the list here.

Coming into the month I had tried 36 new games.

Going out I tried 50.

So here are the games I tried this month.

Free radicals, moon colony blood bath, ethnos, red rising, 51st state master set,

Whitehall mystery, time bomb evolution, Madame Madora's House of Curiosity's, one night

ultimate alien, nefarious Lord of the Rings, fate of the Fellowship, the great Zimbabwe,

Trick Draw and Savor Nackie Forest as a lot of games.

It was great.

I also tried out one expansion this month.

This was the innovation cities of Destiny expansion.

Cities of Destiny is one of many expansions of innovation that I got when I got the ultimate

innovation ultimate box set.

So I have all of the different sets of innovation.

I tried cities of destiny over on Yukata.

Played with Gabriel.

Hey Gabriel.

Thanks for joining me for exploring innovation.

I've been also dusting off some games.

I dusted off Pulsar 2849.

It had been one year, 11 months, and 15 days since I played that.

I dusted off Cockroach Poker, two years, eight months, 29 days for that one.

Crossfire, seven years, four months, 18 days for that one, seven years.

Whew.

A study in Emerald, two years, seven months, 19 days, Royals, five years, 11 months,

stick stack, two years, one month, 13 days, and King Domino, six years, two months, and five

days.

Lots of games dusted off, and most of those actually pretty enjoyable.

It was 33 games altogether.

As you know, I'm going through my top 50 lists and I'm trying to pick out, trying to get

one or two, ideally two games from my top 50 played on the table each month.

Online plays do not count for trying out my top 50 again.

They got to be on the table.

And I did get three played this month.

Pulsar 2849.

A study in Emerald, we actually played twice, and 7 wonders.

Pulsar 2849 was great, had a really fun time with that.

Study in Emerald decidedly mixed.

The first play went really quick, which was funny.

The second play not as quick, but wasn't as fun.

Just the balance of the characters came out, and one of the cards that came out let everybody

know, publicly, who was on which team, and it just ended up not being super fun.

So I think there's a level of experience there.

I feel like the three of us that ended up on one team in that second game should have

been fighting harder against each other to be in the lead.

But we didn't do that well enough, so we just let one player kind of run away with the

win, which was lame.

7 wonders was fun as always.

I'm up to 17 out of my 50 games played on the table, which is pretty good.

I really want to get to like 30, 35 of them this year because the more that I play, the

other ones are just really hard to get to the table.

So making good progress on that.

Next up is my 10 for 10.

As you know, a normal 10 for 10 is where you pick 10 games and try to play the meach 10 times

in a year.

What I would have done instead this year is I picked 10 categories, and I'm trying to play

10 games that fit those categories in the year, or 10 game plays.

So I can reuse a game if it fits a category more than once.

So I only advanced one category this month, which doesn't, that's not great.

That was the game's by color of the box.

So I have 10 colors of the box picked out.

We have Roy G Biv and then brown, black and white.

And I did play a game where the box cover was primarily white.

This was bomb busters.

There's a game we've played a lot actually, but this is the first time I thought to apply

it in this category.

So I'm up to seven of the colors having been played thus far.

We're at 44 out of 100 complete.

So making good progress there, but I really am going to have to buckle down if I want to

finish it by the end of the year.

My painting challenge is pathetic and sad I haven't done any painting.

I would like to, I keep meaning to just haven't gotten back to it.

So the top priority of painting is to paint up frost haven minis.

I think if I get rolling again, maybe I'll just paint all the frost haven minis and then

I can get started on some other things.

I really want to do that.

I just haven't made the time.

My shelf of opportunity has been very productive.

As I mentioned before, it's beginning of the month.

There were six two games.

Now there are 77 on played, but you heard all of the new, all of the games I played.

I also had several games that I dusted off that were on my shelf of opportunity that were

removed.

So like King Domino and Royals and those two for example are games that I had played before.

So they're not new games, but they were added to my shelf of opportunity because of the

acquiring a copy.

That is one of my rules.

If I buy a copy of a game, it goes on my shelf of opportunity until I play it.

So I have made progress on that even though we did add a whole bunch of games to that list.

My expansion list, I only added one game to the expansion list this month and that was

Fresco.

I got, Fresco is one of the games I got in the trade.

And for some reason, the module number seven, the scrolls, was in the box.

So I have one expansion module number seven for some reason.

But that's added to expansions I have to play.

My collection size, I wanted to give you share the update on my collection size and ended

up being so funny, just yoyo up and down experience.

My collection started at 623 games this month.

Then I got rid of 27 games in the math trade, which was pretty cool.

Actually had a whole bunch more games that I've offered.

So I've got this big stack of games I've been meeting to sell.

Actually, it might be something I could do this afternoon is post those up on Facebook

Marketplace, see what I can get for them.

And then I have 18 games that I got in the math trade.

I actually got more than that.

But several games I got, I got with the intent of donating them to the college board game

club, which adonates the wrong word because they're still mine.

I haven't actually yielded ownership of them, but I think of them as part of the board game

club.

I don't have them in my collection.

I have them listed in the board game club collection.

And so that's what we're doing there.

I had several there, but I did end up with 18 new games added to my collection from that

math trade.

And then I purchased free radicals with points from my Amazon card.

I got red rising.

I actually had that game that I got a while back and I just had never marked it added to

my collection.

So I marked it added to my collection.

And then the board game club, my college board game club was doing a giveaway, like a little

drawing for some games.

And so I put adorable panda ring and boss monster into that giveaway.

I actually put in several games, but some of the other games had already been marked as

removed from my collection, even though we still had them in the house.

That was bad collection management on my part.

So I didn't give away four or five games actually, but only three, only two of them were still

marked in the collection.

So those two.

But then I went on a trip for school to a conference.

As I often do then, I found a game shop to visit and I bought myself two small games, Savin

Aki Forest and Time Bomb Evolution.

So those are in my collection now.

They're both cute little games.

I've talked about them in an episode I've recorded already, which will come out two episodes

from now.

So one of the games I get, one of the games I got in trade was Crossfire, which is a low

level social deduction game.

We had a good time with it at the board game club, but I quickly figured out, I don't

need this game in my collection at home.

So it has been added to the board game club collection.

So I removed it from mine.

And then finally I got Madame Madora's House of Curiosity's, which is a one play puzzle

game.

So I gave Madame Madora's House of Curiosity's away after we finished it.

And that marked one more game away, which got me down to 614.

So overall, a productive effort in terms of the collection.

And hopefully I'll continue that trend of reducing the collection size because that's

one of the goals.

Alright finally, what am I going to play next month?

I picked out a couple two older games to play.

I have Martin Wallace's Arrow Plains, which is a 2012 economic game.

I think it looks pretty good.

I bet I could get people to toggle the play if I set it up.

So I'm hoping I can do that.

I picked out in the year of the Dragon, which is a stuff and fell game.

One of my friends at toggle enjoys it and has it.

So I'm hoping that another night I can play that with him, if not maybe at home sometime.

I have Xenoshift Dreadmire.

This is a cooperative game, which I think my son kind of looked intrigued at when I was

showing him the games I got in my trade.

So I'm hoping I'll be able to play with him.

And finally I picked out Ghost Stories, which I worse that can play by myself.

But I know my son enjoys it, so I'm hoping I can play with him as well.

I'd love to play a couple rounds of it so we can get it back in memory, maybe win one.

And then try out the White Moon expansion, which I've had for a long time, is on my Expand

Your Shelf list, but I haven't gotten a chance to play.

So the White Moon expansion part is not actually part of my top of the stack goals, but I'm throwing

my hat over the wall and saying, "I am hoping to do that."

So that is my plan.

Aeroplanes in the air of the dragon, Xenoshift Dreadmire and Ghost Stories.

Well there are listeners.

I'd love to hear what you've been playing.

Head over to BoardGameGeek, Guild 3269, and share your game plays over there.

Our friends and mine will join us in the podcast comment section and tell us what they've

been playing as well.

If you'd like to send me a message, you can do so.

Wombat 929 on BoardGameGeek is my username.

I'd love to hear from you there.

You can also send me an email, breadin@radoboxgames.com.

I will probably hear it at some point.

Well that's about it for me today.

I want to say thank you for joining me on my walk and I hope your next walk is a pleasant

good mind loss.

Bye bye.

I've got an opportunity.

No, I'll get hold on.

I'm going to the train.

But the acoustics in here are not good.

I don't walk this way when I'm recording.

So I don't know what I was thinking, but it sounds bad.

So I'm holding off.

This is a post credits blooper message I guess.

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