Actualol Newsletter - May 2020 (Patreon)

Hi de ho patroninos!
The days don’t change, and neither do the useless platitudes. Nevertheless, I hope you are hanging in there.
Lockdown has turned me into Rahdo - I am now only interested in two player games. And as such, I have shared four with you in my latest video. I’m very lucky that Serena has an appetite for games, or this whole thing would be a lot harder.
I’m still playing on Tabletop Simulator when I can, and that’s giving me a taste of group gaming. But so often I come away with “well, that was okay online, but I really need to play it in real life to get the full experience”, and so it goes back on the shelf, unresolved.
This month I appear in the latest Senet magazine. A new, classier, board game magazine edited by Dan Jolin (Empire, The Guardian). 

It feels like a more mature look at games, with interesting articles from Owen Duffy about colonialism in board games, Alexandra Sonechkina about the history of deckbuilding, and interviews with Rob Daviau and Kwanchai Moriya. I took part in a regular feature called "Shelf of Shame" where I played a game that I've owned for ages but never played. If you'd like to buy a copy, go here. 

Collection Thinning

I go through phases of wanting to thin out my collection. I’m very grateful for the urge, because it keeps me from overflowing my bookcases. I didn’t use to feel this way - for the first few years of my obsession with board games I just wanted to grow and grow. But eventually the balance tipped and ever since I’ve been religious in weeding out the weak games.
I’ve played some of the games one last time, to see if I should grant them a stay of execution. Others have been stripped from the shelves without fair trial. I’ve found myself a few times just staring at my shelves, begging for something cull, and I can’t promise the games that suffered on those days deserved it.
I thought I’d share the departures, and my dubious reasons. The games are all very good or I wouldn’t have kept them in the first place.
Warstones - I really enjoyed this unique dexterity game a few years ago. You flick poker chips that represent your army units onto a battlefield and compete for area control. The trouble is, the tablecloth battlefield doesn’t fit my table, and it’s not the sort of two player game I can imagine playing with Serena. 
Word Domination - I like word games, but I don’t know many other people that do. I think this one is a fun, interactive, approachable game - but it does lend itself to downtime, trying to get the perfect word. It also has a weird honour that I played it after my first serious anxiety attack a few years ago, and it’s always been tainted by that memory.
Beasts of Balance is a wonderful experience, it’s charming and striking. But it’s perhaps too much like a video game for me. There isn’t an addictive challenge to it, and I never found myself pulled back to it. The huge box made it an easy target for culling.
A Tale of Pirates is a brilliant co-operative real-time game on a 3D pirate ship that really encourages teamwork. Unfortunately for it, I have a lot of brilliant real-time co-operative games. And the set up for each round was a little more effort than I could be bothered with. It didn’t work in its favour that it was tested, two player with Serena, who isn’t generally fond of realtime games.
Trapwords is an unfortunate soul. It’s a great party game, but it’s very similar to a newer arrival - Banned Words. And while there are some differences I might prefer about Trapwords, I’m getting rid of it because it’s more complicated. If I’m trying to teach a game to eight drunken players, I can’t imagine ever choosing the game with fussier rules and setup.  
Games that survived the cull:
Terra comes in a big box that shouts “get rid of me Jon, I’m just a party game”. And it’s size and weight has meant it has NEVER been taken to a party. But, when we played it two player, I was reminded of why it had earned its place. Informed guessing is the magical formula to great trivia games, and Terra sits alongside Timeline and Wits and Wagers, but with famous places and geographical sites of interest. You have to guess where somewhere is on a map, but you still get points if you’re close. Or if you’re not sure, you can guess in another category - whether it’s a date, height or population. I’ve also got the animal version, Fauna, stuffed into the same box for added value.
Escape: Curse of the Temple feels like the original real-time cooperative game. I hadn’t played it in a long time, and I wanted to see if it still had a place after Magic Maze and Rush MD had come along. I think it does. It’s really pulls you to work together and save each other, which sets it apart from other games. I did end up ditching Escape: Zombie City without playing, not because it’s bad, but I just don’t play them enough to own both, and I felt the theme of Temple has wider appeal.
I took Doodle Rush off the shelf, in a fit of Marie Kondocity, knowing that I couldn’t possibly test its worth during lockdown. It was harsh, but I was out for blood. I took the game to Serena, who I always consult before getting rid of game, even though she’s almost never heard of them. I need a sounding board to feel confident in my decision. She remembered Doodle Rush and insisted without equivocation that I keep it. I had been told. I was wrong, and Doodle Rush stays.

Actual Games

Tang Garden is a new Kickstarter behemoth with excessively beautiful and beautifully excessive components. Beneath its selling point is a fairly simple tile-laying game. You are building a shared garden. When you place a tile, you will move up tracks or score points depending on how you place it.

The intriguing hook of the game is that you will be placing nobles into your fancy garden, to marvel at the view. Around the outside of the garden, you will win the opportunity to place vistas, with temples, towns, dragons and trees, as a backdrop. Each noble has their own opinion on beauty, and will prefer to be placed facing certain landscapes.
They will also score points for the garden ornaments in their line of sight, so as you lay the tiles you want to be creating a beautiful view for your noble. 

It’s a fresh idea, BUT it’s swamped by other mechanisms. There is just way too many bits to Tang Garden. And bits that aren’t satisfying. The tile-laying isn’t challenging or engaging, it’s just a set up for another part of the game. The track climbing is such a transparent mechanism for mechanisms sake. And there’s a whole set collection thing with the garden ornaments which also feels tacked on. 
All this mechanical depth might be fine if it brought same amount of strategic depth, but it doesn’t. It has a striking level of luck for such a complicated game, and I just can’t see the audience they’re aiming for. It’s not tight enough for strategy gamers, and it’s too overwrought for anyone else.
Calico is an upcoming Kickstartered tile-laying game from the design team that brought us Point Salad. In Calico, you are sewing together quilts to appeal to cats. And the gameplay is as taxing as working out what a cat wants.

It’s nice and straightforward, you take it in turns to take a hexagonal patch and sew it to your player board. Placement is everything, there are three goal tiles on your board which want a certain set to score. For example, you must surround it by three pairs of tile types to score it. It can be pairs of patterns or colours. But if you’re a genius, you can have 6 tiles that are contain pairs of patterns AND colours, for more points.

Beyond that, there are cats that want collections of adjacent patterns in certain shapes, and you score coloured buttons when you have adjacent collections of colours.

The point is, there is a lot to be thinking about. And yet the game is as simple as taking a tile from the two available and placing it on a fairly small board. The puzzle is hard, but engrossing. I definitely got lost in it a few times. There’s huge potential for analysis paralysis, so be warned. And that would lead to downtime in a game where you’re only ever focused on your own thing. 
But if you like intense, puzzley games then I’d highly recommend it. The line of enjoyment for me with puzzley games is grey and blurry. This one was probably a little too much work, and left me feeling stupid. I’d absolutely play it again, but won’t be hunting it down.
Isle of Cats is also a tile-laying game from a successful Kickstarter, and I must say, it shows. The box is formidable. The gameplay is…fine. 

It’s a Tetris game at heart, you place polyomino-shaped cats onto a boat (for thematic reasons I can’t get excited about). We started with the family mode, which is a lovely take on Tetris games. You’re trying to group together cats of the same colour, and desperately trying to fill up rooms of your ships and cover rats to avoid minus points, as well as complete goal cards. It is pleasant and taxing, and I would give it a firm 7 out of 10 for that mode.
The full game adds another four phases to the game, which all felt like an arduous pre-amble to the main event. You draft cards (baskets, goals, special powers), then pay for the cards you want, then play goal cards, then play baskets to determine how many cats you can get and in what turn order. Then, finally, you are allowed to take a cat (but not before paying for it), and work out where to put it on your boat. Early on, you might only have two baskets, so you did all of that for the privilege of placing two tiles, then do it again.

I don’t doubt that all of that rigmarole makes the game more balanced and strategic, it also makes it drawn out and boring. I don’t think the appealing simplicity of Tetris puzzling is a game format that can withstand that level of complication. I’d just rather play Spring Meadow or Barenpark or the family mode of Isle of Cats. Except, with the box size there’s no way I can justify keeping it for that. Isle of Cats is a game with some great ideas, and I believe in the hands of a seasoned developer it would have ended up a tighter game (see Copenhagen). To me, it feels like complexity for complexity’s sake.

Actual Life

I remember a time when I would tell tales of trips to Sevilla and weddings. Life isn’t nearly as eventful as it used to be, but it is what you make of it, and I’ve been filling my time.
My bold recipe challenge of last month has crashed into the rocks of exhaustion. But we did make a surprisingly delicious street salad from Jamie's Italy, which was so good it has since been remade. 

And an aubergine parmigiana, which also rated highly, despite the effort required.

I had set myself a similar challenge to read through the books on our bookcase that I’ve never finished. Some which have sat there for 15 years. Young Jon had aspirations of reading philosophy, but seldom did. I’ve been catching up with Alain de Botton’s “The Consolations of Philosophy” and “How Proust Can Change Your Life”. Here’s a quote from Proust I really liked:
There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or even lived in a way which was so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man - so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise - unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory."

Free Games for UK folks

I have a few games I’d like to give away to some patrons. I’m afraid it is UK only because of shipping costs. If you’re in the UK and you’ve read this far, you deserve a reward. Let’s say one game each, unless they’re aren’t enough interested Brits. First comment below wins.
The games are:
- Beasts of Balance (In my Top 10 Christmas Gifts video) - A stacking game that works with an app. Great for kids and families.
- A Tale of Pirates (In my Top 20 Games of 2017 video) - A real-time co-operative game on a pirate ship.
- Warstones  (In this Now Playing video) - A 2 player flicking dexterity game. You might not have have heard of it, but I do think it’s fun.
- I also have a playmat for Word Domination if anyone has the game and wants that?

Games I’ve been enjoying lately

We Need To Talk
Lockup: A Roll Player Tale
Thrive

Games that have just arrived

Metro X
Abandon All Artichokes

Video of the month - Colt Clark and the Quarantine Kids play You Can Call Me Al 

Now watching - Normal People 

Now reading - Status Anxiety by Alain De Botton 

I hope there’s sunshine where you are this month,
Actually yours,
Jon