Actualol Newsletter - January 2020 (Patreon)

Unhappy January patrons! I hope that if you live in the Northern Hemisphere all the grey days aren’t turning you too blue. 

Hopefully you’ve seen the video I released today “Things You Can Say Wearing An Actualol Lanyard” - my first dip back into making comedy. I’ve got more planned for next month, but this was a quick one I could get filmed before I head off on my honeymoon.

In the land of games, I’ve been studiously playing back through the good games of last year to decide whether they deserve a place in my Top 10. Spoiler alert: some of them DON’T. And I’ve become a slave to my friends’ calendars trying to organise Clank Legacy and Kings Dilemma sessions, so I can get far enough through them to give them a fair trial.

Actual Life

It’s been an uneventful month - the headlines are that I had a cold, and I did my taxes. What a ride! 

I started going to a Pilates class again - for the first time in ten years, which is terrifying, because it feels like yesterday. Pilates is great for anyone with back, shoulder or neck pain from sitting at a desk all day. Ten years on and the moves are all the same, I’m grateful to still be as able (and unable) to do them as I was when I was twenty-five. And I still remain the only man in a class of fifteen.

We’re off on our honeymoon soon to New Orleans, to feast ourselves on food and music, so I will be going quiet for a bit - but expect more videos when I return! 

Actual Games

As usual, here are my thoughts on games that I won’t be talking about on the channel:

Horrified is a cooperative game that pits you against such classic cinematic monsters as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Set in a generic creepy town, your heroes must visit locations to collect items to dispatch the monsters. The goal to kill each monster is different - to kill Dracula you need to bash up his coffins - but I’m not buying the “thematic” distinction, each one involves collecting coloured, numbered items. 

And delivering them. This is a pick up and deliver game, a mechanism known for striking “mehs” into the hearts of gamers. And here it’s serviceable. It works as a basic family game, but I couldn’t find the agonising decisions or clever plays that a great co-op game like Pandemic gives you.

If you love the theme, the gameplay won’t get in your way. But if you removed the theme, you’d be left with a game that can’t compete with the best of its genre. And beyond some great artwork, I didn’t see much theme there in the first place.

Laser Drive is an expansion for the excellent Decrypto that encourages unusual clue giving.

It's simply a deck of cards, and each round you flip one to reveal a category, such as "An Animal" or "A Disease". Each clue giver must make one of their clues fit the category, or be punished with a failure token. It forces you be creative and makes thinking of clues a little more challenging.

But it encourages you to be braver, because if all three of your clues match the category you win a laser disc. And if you have two, you can spend them to do something never before possible in Decrypto, you can guess one of the other team's secret words. If your guess is correct, you win a decryption token (50% towards winning the game). Which adds another big moment of suspense to the game.

It's a fun, simple addition to the game that I will probably always play with now. I can't say it transforms the experience, or is a must-buy, but for a game that didn't need an expansion this one is surprisingly good.

Quirky Circuits is a clever combination of Robo Rally and The Mind. It’s a co-operative programming game, in which you’re all trying to move a helpful robot vacuum cleaner (in the early scenarios) around a room to hoover up dust.

The task of programming is shared between you, and you will play cards in a line to tell the robot how to move. You must play them face down, so you can’t see what other people have played. And you can’t talk about your cards. So, you have to guess from their behaviour (how quickly did they play that card?) what they played. The back of the cards does at least tell you if they moved the robot, or rotated it.

I should love this game, but I found it really hard to interpret the other players’ intentions. There’s so much context attached to each card play that there’s a lot more to consider than with The Mind. And when it goes wrong, rather than it being an unfortunate mistake (our numbers were so close!), it was a complete misunderstanding of intent. “How did you not know that by me playing a card in silence that I had planned to move the robot backwards so you could turn it left!” There’s so much more information lost in the silence, and I found it became infuriating. With the same group, you might slowly develop a group-think - but I found the early bonding games to just not be fun. 

Rival Restaurants is a light board game about running a restaurant. The goal is to collect the right ingredients to complete recipe cards to get points.

You simultaneously pick which shop to go to, and have one minute to spend your money and trade with the other players. You can trade everything in the game, so you can collaborate with others to buy each other the ingredients you need in the shops.

On the surface it's fun to be trading everything, but it's a sign of how loose the game is. Luck runs amok - as it determines whether the ingredients you need to finish recipes will be available or impossible to get. 

There’s no depth to the game. If it wasn’t for the impressive production value, it would feel like a game released before the modern era of board games, because it shares none of the tight gameplay or interesting decisions of today’s greats. I can’t recommend this game to anyone.

Games I’ve been enjoying lately:

- Clank Legacy

- Kings Dilemma

- First Contact

Games that have just arrived:

- Stay Cool

- Gorilla Marketing

Song of the month - Loose Ends - Loyle Carner feat. Jorja Smith 

Video of the month - Eagles Are Turning People Into Horses 

Currently watching on TV - Dark - Season 1, Shrill 

Thanks to those of you who have let me know that their lanyards arrived, I hope you’re all wearing them to the supermarket as stipulated in the small print of your Patron agreement.

Actually yours,

Jon