Transcript for PU&D775
Speaker Welcome to pick Up and Delivery, 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. I'm strolling home from the first day of meetings back. We have a very tight turnaround to get the semester together and, uh, get everything rolling. So exciting times are here, my friend. Exciting times are here. So I thought it's a good chance to get back to good old board game talk that I usually like to do. And and it's been a little bit. So I'm going to do a board game. Espresso triple shot. Board game. Espresso triple shot is a format in which I talk about three games that I've tried recently for the first time, and one game that I revisited. These aren't full reviews. These are mini reviews generally. First impressions. Often I can tell whether I'm going to like a game or what the game is like based on the review, and you can get a sense of if this is something you'd like to try. So let's jump right in. The first game is a game I picked up at goodwill called monstrosity. It's like monstrosity, but they replace Truss with draw monstrosity. So the premise is you are part of some sort of monster hunting police group, and somebody has seen a monster, and you are supposed to be the police sketch artists listening to the testimony of the individuals and drawing the monster. The way the game works, as the person who is witnessing the monster, you get to look at a card for 30s, I think 20s. And this card has a very elaborate drawing illustration of a monster. Then you have two minutes to try to describe what you saw on the card to the other players who I'll have these sketch pads and they're. Well, they're whiteboards and they're going to sketch the monster they think. You're explaining. Then everybody shows their pictures, and the person who saw the monster flips over the card and reveals what the monster looked like from the card, and then they secretly write down which one they think was the best. And then the group votes on which one they think was the best, and points are rewarded for those votes. Then the next person takes a moment to look at a card and so on until everybody's had a chance to look at two monsters. Uh, this is a very fun game, but it definitely hinges on drawing ability. People who have who are better at doing drawings generally are going to have a better chance of getting it right, although a lot of it has to do with kind of interpreting what the person who's describing the monster is saying and finding the best way to represent that. So sometimes you'll get wildly different drawings. Sometimes you get very similar ones. It's a fun, goofy time. If you like Telestrations, this is probably a game you're gonna like. If you don't like Telestrations, particularly if you don't think you can draw, this is probably a game you aren't going to like. That is monstrosity. Designed by Eric Simonson with art from Hector Amavizca. Kennedy, cook, Gaza, Shawn Daley, Mihajlo Dimitrievski and four more people. Published by Bread and Circuses. I definitely recommend giving this a try if you can. Particularly if you do like games where you have to draw. If you don't like games where you have to draw, I wouldn't bother. But generally I would say, yeah, go for it. Uh, next up we have Skip-bo. Skip-bo is one of those classic card games that I have never gotten around to playing. I assumed because it's a classic card game, that it's bad. Of course it could be good, but I figured if it were good, I would hear about it occasionally. And I did not. I would put it in the category of fine. Recently I have been playing some Sky Joe. I think Sky Joe is a better game than Skip-bo. But, uh skip-bo feels like it's in the same, um, neighborhood as Sky Joe. The both games involve playing cards out and trying to get your, uh, trying to get a certain score. Uh Skip-bo actually is very close to a classic game. Dutch blitz. Uh, in Dutch Blitz, you have a deck of cards and you have some cards that are sticking out, and you're trying to play the cards to, um, clear them. And the mechanics of Skip-bo are very similar, except that in Dutch Blitz, it's a real time game. And in Skip-bo you're taking turns. I thought this actually was pretty fun. It's a really good conversation game. So if you want to chat about stuff while also playing, once everyone's played a few times, a couple times and you understand it, it would work really well for that, as does Sky Shijo. As I said, I thought Shijo was a better game. I think that was more fun. The main problem was skip bows. It's way too long playing by the rules. You'd have to play like two hours to have somebody end up being a winner. If you're wondering where the name comes from, the game was designed by Hazel Skip Bowman. Skip was her nickname, so Skip was her middle, her nickname, and Bowman was her last name. So Skip bow. There you go. It's published by Amigo Games and Mattel, and it's been around since nineteen sixty seven. That's Skip bow, I think, worth playing if you like. Sort of simple games that are friendly for regular folk. Well, honestly, I would just play. I would just play Ichijo or Dutch Blitz. If either of those is available to you, they're both better than Skip-bo. Well, next up I would like to talk about one game that I am dusting off. You'll recall that a game gets dusty if it's been a year or more since I've played it. In this game I'm talking about is Magic Rabbit, which was published in twenty twenty and designed by, well, five people Julie de Trois Romaric Galinier, Ludovic Simonet and Cecile Ziegler. That's four people! Published by Lumberjacks Studio, with art from Jonathan Conte and Olivier de Richelieu. My guess is this game was originally in French. The game is called Magic Rabbit and it is a speed. It is a cooperative speed game in which you are trying to match up rabbits with hats. The basic setup is pretty simple. You have nine hats and you have nine rabbits. And you are trying to get the rabbits and the hats. You're trying to get the hats onto the right rabbits, and you're trying to get the rabbits in the order in the right order. One through nine. The game starts with all nine hats and all nine rabbits mixed up and upside down. And on your turn you can look at. I don't remember exactly. On your turn, you can, like, look at a hat and a rabbit. Or you can move a hat or a rabbit. Swap it with another one so you're trying to get them into place, but on your turn you can either look or move. So you get this thing where people are looking at things and then other people are moving them around. There are these two pigeon tokens, and the pigeons represent I mean, they stop you from moving something in that stack so you can as part of your turn, you can move a pigeon in addition to the other things you might do. And of course, moving the pigeon then tells people they can't adjust that stack unless someone else moves the pigeon off. So that gives you a little bit of a way to give a hint. But generally the game is supposed to be played in silence. You don't get to give hints to each other. The game has a number of modules of different difficulty that involve additional tiles that come into play, additional complications that make it harder to complete the task. I think I mentioned the games played in real time with the timer, So that's the that's the part that makes it difficult that without real time and without a timer, it would just be a matter of tedium. But having to do it at speed is the fun part. This is a game I played once before, a while ago, and we had a good time with it, but I haven't played it in a little while, which is why it was dusty. It had been, uh, one year, four months and twenty four days since we played it. This is a really good cooperative game. It's very light, very silly, but a lot of fun. Definitely worth trying if you get a chance. That's magic rabbit. Finally, I want to talk a moment about Conquest of Pangaea. This is a two thousand and six game from designer Doug Kovacs, published by Immortal Eyes Gaming and Winning Moves as a game that a friend brought from goodwill. And I will confess, they hadn't done a thorough read of the rules when we went to play. Or if they had, they weren't. They didn't do a very thorough explanation of the rules, so it was a little hard to understand how things were supposed to work. But generally what you're trying to do is gain. You are sort of competing tribes trying to gain control of the continent that is Pangaea, or else you're competing gods. Maybe. It's unclear, but you're trying to gain control of Pangaea, and as the game goes along, you're fighting for that control. You are putting out area control pieces and collecting resources that allow you to put out more pieces. As time goes along, the continents break apart and it becomes harder to add pieces to the continents that have broken off and drifted away. But generally, that's the game. The pieces are very small and fiddly. I think if this game came out now, people would say this the production is subpar and really needs a polish. I would say for a game coming out in two thousand and six, it was probably fine. It might have might even have been a good production for that era, but generally it's fine. Uh, I don't have a lot to say about this game. I think if my friend brings it to Game Club again, I definitely would be willing to try it again If we had the rules down correctly, because I don't think we played played it in the way that it was meant to be played. So the rhythm of the game probably was off. That said, to me it was a pretty straightforward area control game and not nearly as good as the top end area control game, something like Blood Rage. Or even if you wanted to go something simple, something like Small World, which is probably the same level of complexity, probably the same level of complexity as Small World. Um, and a little bit less complex than something like El Gran or El Gran is pretty simple too. I don't know that El Gran is any more complex than Small World, so either of those would probably be better to play than Conquest of Pangaea. So not really recommended, but I would be willing to give it another try. So that is Conquest of Pangea from two thousand and six designer Doug Kovacs. Well, dear listener, what games have you been playing lately? I would love to hear from you. You can share that information with me over on BoardGameGeek in Guild three two six nine, which is where I share my information about what I've been playing and would love to hear about what you've been playing. If you want to message me directly, you can send me a message on BoardGameGeek. Username wombat nine two nine. You could also email me directly Brendan at chessgames.com, though that is less reliable just because it's busy and I don't check that email as often as I check BoardGameGeek. I would love to hear what you've been playing over on the forums. That's probably the best way to get Ahold of me and to talk to other pick up and deliver listeners. Well, thanks for joining me on my walk today. I hope that your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. Brought to you by Rattlebox Games.