Untitled - June 18, 2025

00:00:00 Speaker: 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 and I'm out for a walk. I'm heading up to the library to pick up some stuff, and I thought I would talk to you about some games while I do it. Oh yeah, it is a very warm day and I foolishly waited till midday to do it. So I'm walking in temperatures in the mid 80s, which is about what you would expect for mid June here in Chicagoland. Looking forward to chatting with you about these games. So let's jump into it. I've decided to record a board game Espresso episode. It's been a little while since I've talked about some games, so here we are. Board game. Espresso. Triple shot. Actually, it's going to be more like a board game flight. Well, it's anyway. I don't know. So the idea of the board game espresso is I'm giving you quick sips of games that I've tried recently for the first time, or maybe the first and second time. These are games I have not played thoroughly enough to do a full review of, but it's just kind of first impressions. So if you're willing to join me on that journey, let's take it for the next 15 minutes or so. I'm going to change my direction here because I can hear there's somebody using a nail gun up this one street. So if I go that way, I'm going to have to stop talking while they use their nail gun. And I say, no thank you to that. All right. So first I just wanted to mention a game that I played, but I'm not really gonna talk about much. And this is one night ultimate alien. One Night Ultimate Alien, a friend brought over and we tried it out. It was fine. It is one night ultimate werewolf, just with the roles changed around a little bit. Otherwise almost identical. So I'm not gonna spend time on it because it's the same game. All right, so first up is nefarious. Nefarious is from 2011. It was designed by Donald X Vaccarino with art by Nick Acosta. Mary Elmer Chicago, Glenn Gustafson and Tatiana. My fat or fat? The design on this. The art is really cool looking. It's got a kind of spindly drawing style that feels familiar, looks a little bit like. Reminds me a little of Phineas and Ferb. The way that the evil mad scientists in that show is drawn in this game, you are mad scientists doing mad, scientist y things. You're building devices, you're doing crimes. You have minions that are running around doing stuff. It's a simultaneous action selection game where you are choosing to do things and sending your minions to do work for you. Uh, it was fine. I don't there wasn't a lot. There's not a lot to say about it. It was not great. I won't mind if I never play it again. It was a friend. A friend got it cheap. And I think there's a reason that it's a game that's often available at goodwill and such. Having played it now, I think I would pass it up if I found it at goodwill. It's not great, but it was. It was fine. I had an enjoyable time playing it with with my friends, and it's always fun to try a new game. So that's Donald X Vaccarino nefarious. Uh, next up we have Trick Draw. This was published in 2022 by Good Games Publishing. Uh, the designers were Blake and Martiza. There were several artists. Michael Kuroda and Li Chengmei are listed as the main ones. Actually, no, those are the two. This game is a two player dueling game, in which you have a series of cards that you're laying out. Each turn you get to lay, you can either draw a card and lay out a card, or I think you can draw a card and then draw two more cards. Maybe there's a limit to how many cards that you can have in your hand, and you're trying to lay out a tableau of cards, and the tableau of cards gives you either coins or powers, and you get coins by laying the cards face down. Powers by laying the cards face up. And then many of the cards either activate immediately when you lay them down, they have activate immediately when you reveal them, meaning you turn them from face down coin side to face up power side, or they give you an ongoing power you can use once per turn. And these powers let you flip cards over. So the whole gimmick is you're trying to flip the cards over in a pattern so that you have ten points. And if you flip the card over in a way that you have ten points, that triggers the end of the game. And then I can't remember if you get one, the other player gets one more turn, or if it's a thing where the person who caused the ten points ends the game immediately. I think everybody gets one more turn. Or the third option would be you keep going until everyone's had an even number of points. Honestly, I don't remember which one it is. Might be even number of turns. And then you reveal and then how many, however many coins you have at the end is how many coins you have in the winner is the person with the most coins. You know, I may have said that this was a two player game, but it might in fact be a four up to a 3 or 4 player game, I don't recall. I know we played it at two. Yeah. No, it definitely it plays for this game. Reminds me a lot of two different games that I've played in the last year. One of them is flip ology and the other one is, uh, drones versus seagulls now, drones versus seagulls. It's similar because you have this, these powers that you're messing with the other player and you're flipping them around to give you the power or give them the power. You're trying to set things up so that you have the most points when the game ends. That's where that reminds me of, uh, drones versus seagulls. The flip flop thing has to do with your flipping cards face down or face up, and you get points based on which way they're facing, and you have a line of cards. So those two things together both seem related to trick draw the art and trick draw is this sort of weird, like weird West style cowboys with laser guns? Kind of, uh, drawing reminds me a little bit of Doomtown reloaded in terms of the style, although a bit more maniacal, like the magic and stuff. I don't know if Magic The Gathering has ever done a old West theme set, but if they did, I could see the art from this being in those on those cards. It's really good. Really good art. Uh, the game was fine. I can't say I would probably, I will probably want to play the game a bunch of times more, but it's a fine little filler, and it might be the sort of thing where when you have a few minutes. Oh, yeah, let's let's bust this one out. Uh, we can, um, there's an interesting tactical element of getting the cards and dealing them out. Now, I think we played best of three. I think that's what the game suggests that you do. But, um. Yeah, so that's trick draw. I did get a chance to revisit a game. Um, sometimes here in these board game espresso episodes, I talk about a game that I dusted off. This is a game from 2017 that I played once or twice in 2017, and then haven't played again since. So really long time. But I did get a chance to play it again. This is crossfire. Crossfire is a game from Emerson Matsushita, the designer of Spectre Ops and Century Spice Road. Uh, in crossfire, crossfire is a, uh, quick light social deduction game. Each player gets a card assigning you a role. You are either an assassin, a VIP, a target, a decoy. Those are the three roles, really. And your goal is to either assassinate the VIP or hide the VIP. And the game goes really quick. Basically, there is a couple different stages in which things get revealed. People can look at a couple, people can look at a couple other people's cards and they can communicate. There's a little bit of bluffing, a little bit of accusing, and then you point three, two, one point. It's very similar to something like One Night Ultimate Werewolf, but there's almost no shenanigans. So One Night Ultimate Werewolf, there's all these shenanigans where you're moving cards around and stuff. This is sort of like hyper quick One Night Werewolf, if you didn't have those shenanigans, you know, like some of the other games today. It's fine. I'd play it if somebody got it out and said they want to, but it's probably not a game. I'm going to be super excited to play a bunch of times. It's very simple, not a lot of depth to it and frankly, not a lot of room to spend time bickering. So not my highest rating for a small scale social deduction game, but it was fine. So that is crossfire from 2017. I don't remember exactly what the dust rating on this was, but I dusted it off in 20 or I originally played it in 2017 and not since. So it was something like seven years or eight years. Uh, and that's again designed by Emerson Masucci with art by Gen Z. That's Gen Z, as opposed to all of the people born in the millennium after the millennials were no longer being born. Uh, finally, the last game I want to talk about today is a game called Savernake Forest. I assume that's how it's pronounced. I haven't looked it up. It is a game from De Vere, published by De Vere in 2023. Savernake forest was designed by Rodrigo Rodrigo and with art from Nuria Aparicio. The art is very cute in this game. Uh, in this game it is the autumn in the Savernake Forest, which I found it is in Britain. I was surprised it was in Britain, but there it is. Uh. And you play animals getting ready for the winter. It's a pretty simple game. In the game, you have a. You start with one animal and a couple cards, and on your turn you're drafting cards and laying down cards. And what you're trying to do is build these paths in your forest that provide food for your animals. So you have to kind of balance between drafting animals and drafting path cards. But also each animal likes different kind of food and they can only store so much food. So you have to build a path that gets each animal the most food that you can, while also doing that quickly. Because if you like, have your path full of stuff they hello. Whereas if you have your path full of stuff that they don't eat, they actually take it, fill up their storage with stuff they don't eat or don't give you points for. So that's a sort of funny and frustrating part of the flow of the game is that you could gather up all of this food that you're, then that your animals won't eat. Uh, the game goes until everyone's built, I think. A 4x4 grid or a five by five grid. And then at the end, you score each of the animals you have. There are also some things you can get that, uh, bolster, the bolster, the kinds of food the animals are willing to eat or how many points they get for collecting those foods. It's a very simple filler game. Easy to play. Cute. We'll definitely keep it around. It'll be one we'll bust out once or twice a year. Um. Very tactical. Not a huge amount of depth like if I wanted. If I wanted a cute animal game that had a bit more depth to it, I would grab Mammalia, for example. Uh, this is a little lighter than that, but, uh, it is amusing. And I said, like I said, really cute. So something we'll hold on to for a little while anyway. That is Savernake Forest from Devir games, So, dear listener, what have you been playing lately? Head over to BoardGameGeek. Yield 3269 and share your game plays there. I'd love to know, have you tried any of these games that I mentioned, or do you have other games you've been playing that you'd like to tell me about? Um, you can reach out to me directly, Brendan at rattlebox. Games.com is my email address, or you can send me a board game geek message. Wombat 929 is my username over on the geek. Well, thanks for joining me on my walk today. I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Buh bye. Brought to you by Rattlebox Games.