Actualol Newsletter April 2024 (Patreon)

Good day to you, fine patrons!

I hope you enjoyed my collection video and the patron extended cut! I've got more exclusive videos on the way too.

Yesterday, I filmed the next video which is currently being edited by my new editor. I had lots of great responses to the editor search and it's a relief to hand it off to someone else so I can focus more on writing/filming. It means more patron exclusive videos as well.

I've also been working on this year's small games video, but this one is much more ambitious than last year's. I want to tell you the idea but I also don't 😛

In this newsletter, I'm reviewing Healthy Heart Hospital, Five Tribes and Medici.

Actual Life 

We had a few good days of sleep with Aurelia that made us feel like we could achieve anything, so I managed to go to my first board game night in 9 months!

It was as if no time had passed at all, the basement of the pub was as dark as ever, there were lots of familiar faces and everyone around me was still playing Dune Imperium.

I managed to get in a fun game of Mille Fiori and a middling game of Medici - escaping early before the tube turned into a pumpkin at 9pm. It was good to be back!

And this weekend I will attend my first con - Lobstercon with my wife and baby in tow. New levels of convention tiredness will be achieved! But I'm very excited to get an opportunity to play lots of games. I'm currently on a mission to play 100 Reiner Knizia games (I'm at 76) for a video, so we'll see how many I can tick off.

Actual Games 

Healthy Heart Hospital (Third Edition) is a cooperative game about running a hospital. The wards and the waiting rooms are filling up with sick patients, and you need to stop too many of them from dying to win the game.

But treating a patient isn't a forgone conclusion, you will draw cubes from the bag hoping to get the matching colour. Draw black cubes and they will make the patient sicker!

And in many ways that is the whole game. You pick a colour and try to draw it from the bag. The bag is like a more intelligent set of dice - you can track which colour is more likely to come out, or even add a colour back in to help the odds.

And while I like that in theory, it becomes really repetitive after the 20th time you've done it. And it's not just your actions, the game’s end of round admin involves even more cube pulling. 

There are some uninspired player powers, and hospital upgrades, but they don't play a big enough role to get excited about them. Beyond that, there's also a frustrating lack of healing patients, it's often more useful to just move them between wards to make space. 

Mechanically, it works and it's a tough challenge - but it left me feeling empty. My search for a medical game for my collection continues.

I'd never played Five Tribes, the feted 2014 game from Bruno Cathala. And I had mixed expectations for it. It's clearly well loved, but also described as themeless and with a fair amount of downtime. And whilst all of that is true, I really enjoyed the game.

The board is a grid of tiles, each with a random selection of coloured meeples, representing the five tribes. Each turn you must pick up all the meeples from one tile then drop them off one by one at nearby tiles. A mechanism inspired by the historic game Mancala.

The final Meeple you drop off must land on a spot with a friend of the same colour. That colour determines which action you will take. For example, Red lets you assassinate nearby tribespeople.

It's a game where you have to look at the state of the board and find the best moves. And it can take a while - hence the analysis paralysis. But it's really rewarding when you find a great move because you can have a big impact.

There's a real tension to get to the good bits before other players, and the game plays up to that by making you bid for who goes first with your victory points. 

For me, it's a reminder that you can't dismiss a game until you play it. On paper it doesn't have much to attract me. But the way it all comes together is really satisfying. There's a reason it's back in print after 10 years.

Having said that, Medici is a Reiner Knizia game (groan) that is back in print that I'm not sure needs to be!

It's an auction game from the master of auction games. But the auction itself is pretty generic - not nearly as innovative as Ra or Modern Art.

You're bidding on goods to fill up your ship. The game is all about being the best at stuff. The highest value ship will win a cash prize, then second place etc. Same for the goods - if you have the most silk or spices you get 10 florins. And if you get really high up the goods tracks you can get a +20 florin bonus.

The trouble is that your points are your spending money. You have to spend money to make money. But what inevitably happens (with inexperienced players) is that people bid too much for things because it's hard to gauge their value. And because the FOMO is too much to bear.

Which makes you feel uneasy - have I just ruined my chances by bidding too much? Answer: yes probably. It's not a fun feeling, even to witness in a fellow player. And if someone overbids, or gets something too cheap, that has a huge impact on who wins, which makes the game feel fragile. 

So it needs you to play it a few times to feel balanced. But I don't think it's worth that because it just doesn't have enough going for it over other games. There are sprinkles of Knizia fairy dust in there, but it's not one of his best.

Games I've been enjoying recently

• Mille Fiori

• Set & Match 

• Pixies 

New arrivals:

• Cascadero

• Big Top

• Through the Desert

Song of the Month - Red Wine Supernova by Chappell Roan

Have a great month, see you soon for the next video!

Actually yours,

Jon