Actualol Newsletter - May 2024 (Patreon)

Hello patrons,

I hope you enjoyed my descent into madness in my box ranking video. I've just filmed my next normal Actualol video (and Patron bonus video!) - it should be ready next week. Expect small games, lots of them!

In this newsletter, I'm running down all of the 28 games I played at Lobstercon. But first, a sad story with a good ending.

Actual Life

Last week, we went on our first family holiday with Aurelia before Serena goes back to work. A week in Corfu, Greece. It started really well - Aurelia really enjoyed the flight, being surrounded by friendly faces willing to smile at her - her favourite thing in life.

And we had a nice few days of swimming, eating Greek food and the occasional board game before disaster struck. We noticed that Aurelia’s chest had turned blue, and after a visit from the hotel doctor we were rushed to hospital. A trip that lasted an agonising hour.

It was a scary arrival to an alien hospital, with an exhausted baby who was terrified of the masked doctors and blood tests. They had no idea what had happened, so we spent the first night awake in fear, watching her sleep.

We spent two nights and days in the children's ward, as they tried to work out what was wrong. But after a chest x-ray, abdominal ultrasound and heart scan, they still had no idea. The blue eventually faded and we hope it never comes back.

The hospital was desperately unloved - the visitor toilets had no toilet seat, toilet roll or soap. We shared a room with a 16 year old boy and his family, with no privacy screen between us. They were very nice though, and his Grandma brought us some homemade pastitsio, which made a nice change from our convenience shop snacks.

Overall, it was a terrifying way to spend a holiday and we've come home more exhausted than when we left. We’re not sure if the NHS will follow up on it, but for now she’s back to normal and we may never know what happened.

It feels strange sharing something so personal on here, but it would also feel strange to not mention it. You patrons are the closest thing I have to a boss - and it’s a story I would have told my boss in the olden days of traditional workplaces.

Lobstercon roundup

Earlier this month, I went to Lobstercon and played 28 games in three days, here's a rundown of them.

Pueblo is an older abstract game that has you collaboratively building a 3D building. You're trying to place your colour blocks so they aren't visible from the sides. It was fun once, but I don't feel excited to play it again. I've seen what it has to offer.

In Harvest you're trying to plant vegetables in rows of three to harvest them. To do that you must work with your neighbouring farmers. But you can also sabotage each other, planting bad vegetables for negative points. It's a light, silly game that felt a bit unfair at 5 players, but would be better at 3 or 4.

Mind Up! is a card game that is so hard to explain in simple terms - so let's wait for the inevitable video. It's fun.

Schadenfreude is a trick-taking game in which you win a trick by having the second highest card. You're collecting cards that you've won but if you ever get two of the same number you lose them. Clever ideas but the game didn't grab me.

Money! is a light Reiner Knizia game in which you are bidding money cards to exchange for other money cards - trying to collect all of one currency. It's okay but pretty chaotic, and very thin.

Penguin Party is possibly one of the worst Reiner Knizia games I've ever played. It's like Lama without any of the good bits. I need to play this one more time before writing it off entirely. (I have, I was right).

Trio is a memory game that keeps on growing on me. You're trying to find a trio of numbers, and you can ask other players to reveal their highest or lowest card in their hand. It's very simple, but has fun moments.

Lama Kadabra is Lama but with some extra ideas. The main one being that you can give up a negative point token when you play a lama, and once there's five down a magic show starts. Then everyone has to play a lama to continue the magic show and if you can't, you have to pick up all the tokens. Which sounds more fun than it is in practice. Basically, stick to Lama, because this one is worse.

The new Through The Desert is in a nice small box. And the gameplay remains great - you're carving up the desert with your caravans of camels, purposely getting in each other's way to stop them from getting anything. It's a thinky, shared board experience, but I slightly prefer Blue Lagoon.

One Page War is a print at home, 2 player war game. You roll a dice and write that number in a particularly column trying to create poker sets, a bit like Battle Line. Ultimately it felt too thin of an idea to keep us interested.

Fort is a deckbuilding game about collecting a band of kids to build a fort. The artwork is adorable but I wish the theme came through more. Mechanically, it's quite different from typical deckbuilders which was hard to get our heads around. I didn't find enough in here to come back for another time.

Little Tavern is a cute filler game. You each have a table in the tavern and when you take a card you can place it at your table or someone else's. Each customer will tip based on who they're sat with, so you're trying to collect a group that works well together. But everyone else is trying to screw you over. It's fun once or twice, but I'm not sure there's much room to be good at this game - timing and luck will pick the winner.

Spectral is a new deduction game. You send your investigators to different spots in the grid to look at face down cards. The cards will tell you where the gems and curses are. And so you want to place your investigators where the gems will appear. I don't really like deduction games and this didn't fix that. The mild player interaction wasn't very exciting. And even for deduction fans it hardly seems revolutionary.

It has been YEARS since I played Celestia and I was delighted to get this one to the table. A classic push your luck game. You're all in an airship and each turn the Captain must roll the dice and be able to pay the right cards to continue the journey. The other players must decide whether to leave the ship before the Captain reveals the cards. And if they don't have them, the ship will crash and everyone onboard will get nothing. I love the collective push your luck experience, and deciding whether to trust someone. I managed to pull off a great bluff to send some players to their demise and win the game, which was the cherry on the top. This was my best game of Lobstercon, and a reminder that the classics are classics for a reason!

American Bookshop is another quirky trick-taking game, where you sum up the cards played and if it ever exceeds a certain total, the trick ends early and the player who pushed it over the edge wins it. You're trying to win the majority of cards in one suit to get points. It was okay, but I find it hard to get excited by trick-taking games and this one was no different in that regard.

Vale of Eternity is a light tableau/engine building game. You're drafting creatures, collecting currencies to pay for them, and adding them to your tableau - and the system for all that is well implemented. You're trying to find cards that work well with each other. While I liked framework of the game, I found the rest of it rather dry. I focused on one colour and kept buying those cards and won the game. So it felt like the strategy was on rails. I'd rather play something with more interaction.

Expressions is a limited communication coop card game. You're giving each other clues about what cards you have left in your hand by playing cards on the table - for example “this is my highest yellow card”. Then you're guessing a card that another player has in their hand. It works, but it feels like a less interesting Hanabi. 

Can't Stop is a classic push your luck dice game from the 80s. You're rolling four dice and splitting them into pairs to climb the mountain. But if you can't continue up the three paths you're on, with the dice you just rolled you go bust. It's fun, but I find that dice rolling push your luck games have a lot of downtime when it's not your turn. I prefer something where you're all involved at once.

Too Much Info is a party game in which one play is trying to describe something (“Mars” or “The Wire") but not give away too much. They want everyone to get the answer but one person. It's fun for a bit but it's quite a loose game, there's no rules on how much you can say, or how long you can drag out your vague description for. I wouldn't really recommend it.

How Dare You? is a trivia game where you're asked to guess a number - for example, what percentage of people in prison in the US are men. You go round raising on each others guesses until someone calls out an answer for being too high. A simple and small take on these kinds of games that just works. 

Pixies is the new beautiful card game in the same line as Sea, Salt and Paper. And I'm delighted to find I really like it. You're drafting cards adding them to a 1-9 grid. There's a few ways to get points and the decisions are light but interesting. More on it in a video soonish.

I put off playing Reiner Knizia’s Mille Fiori because the way it was described sounded dull. But I shouldn't have because it's brilliant. You are picking a card which lets you place your diamond in a certain part of the board. Each section scores in it's own way, and they each create exciting interactions where you're desperate to get in and claim the points before the other players. It's so simple and yet so engaging. No-one does it like Knizia.

Amun Re: The Card Game is a medium sized auction game that simplifies the overly long Amun Re. I like this style of bidding in which you bump players off. I like deciding how much to spend on pyramids (for points) versus keep for the next round of bidding. And I like the blind bid/offering to the gods to get the bonus. In fact, there's lots to like. But as a whole package it doesn't fully sing to me. I prefer it to Amun Re, but I'd rather play Ra instead.

Cascadero is the new Reiner Knizia tile-laying game. You're connecting your horses to cities on the board to move up tracks, with some cascading actions, hence Cascadero. I find the board to be a little bit misleading - it's not as interactive as you'd think it is. You will occasionally get in each other's way, but you're often doing your own thing near each other, compared to Through The Desert which is constant interaction. It's a strong game but I'm not sure it's my style.

Big Top is a fun little auction game. You're bidding on circus acts - the winning bid goes to the auctioneer so the money cycles between players, and sometimes you can be absolutely skint. It has a clever way of encouraging bids - each card has numbers on - you will need to bid those amounts in other auctions to activate the card. And the cherry on top is that you must have a star act to win the game - which encourages some desperate spending. I expect to talk about this one in a video. The only shame is that it is only plays 3 and 4 players. 

I treated myself to the Korean edition of Piece of Cake, for the remarkably small box it comes in. I own it's other incarnation - New York Slice which comes in a very thematic but large pizza box. It is an I split, you choose game. One player divides a cake, made up of different slices - chocolate, strawberry etc. And you each pick a section, with the splitter picking last. You're trying to own the majority of a flavour to win its points. But if you don't think you will, you can eat a slice as soon as you take it for the whipped cream points on it. It's effortlessly simple, but with some fun decisions and nice competition. It's hard to justify the bigger New York Slice box, but I do like the extra “Daily Specials” mechanism that game adds. So now I will awkwardly own both it seems. Not ideal.

My last game was Skull King, a trick taking game I haven't played in a while, but usually enjoy. Sadly we didn't have time to finish the game properly. 

Song of the Month - Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter

New arrivals:

Relic Hunters

Stereo Mind

Here's hoping for a brighter June!

Actually yours,

Jon