Actualol Newsletter - June 2020 (Patreon)

Greetings gamers,

This week we celebrate five whole years of Actualol, which is quite unbelievable. It’s been funny watching back through the videos for the highlights reel - I never used to smile in the early videos! I’ll be sharing that video this week. 

I’m delighted by the positive response to the Daniel Radcliffe video - it’s always nerve-wracking putting out a full comedy video in case people don’t find it funny. The response has already inspired the next video in that vein (not Daniel related!).

I’ve also been trying my hand at filming a more VLOG type of video - thanks to a suggestion from Patron Larry. I’ve tried a few times in the past to film VLOGs at conventions but it’s never quite worked to my liking - conventions are very noisy and stressful! I’ll be releasing that this month.

Actual Life

I turned 36 this month, with a low-key lockdown celebration. Birthdays for me revolve around eating - we had waffles for breakfast courtesy of a waffle machine gift from my mum. 

We had planned a picnic, but it was raining, so we cycled to get some buffalo wings, and capped it off with some burgers for dinner. It seems I have a taste for American cuisine!

In the evening, we played some games over Zoom with old friends. It was nice to return to Bring Your Own Book (video), where you answer prompts by finding a funny excerpt from your chosen book. It’s a great use for books that were unwanted gifts - and the no-nonsense language of bad-boy motorcyclist Guy Martin's autobiography was a particular standout. 

The other niche party game that worked really well over webcam was Huh? (video) Which is a sort of slowed-down version of Monikers (which I found a little too fast and shouty for webcams to handle). You’re given a famous name or film and your aim is to give such obtuse clues that only one person gets it right. The challenge is in knowing when to stop talking, and it’s so easy to give away too much so that everyone gets it and you score no points.

Collection Thinning

This month I axed two trivia games that I’ve owned for a long while. Before I got heavily into games, I always enjoyed going to a pub quiz, and it’s left me with a fondness for trivia. But good questions are impossible to come by - if they’re too easy it’s boring, if they’re too hard it’s futile.

IKNOW and Bezzerwizer both hail from Nordic countries, and both hooked me with clever gameplay twists. In IKNOW, each card has a famous thing (place, person, company etc.) and three clues that get progressively easier. You’re asked an opening question “Which 80s metal band?", and then you must choose after which clue you’ll make your guess. The less clues you take, the more points you get. On top of that, you can bet on whether another player will get it wrong or right.

In Bezzerwizzer, the question cards are split into 20 categories. You draw four category tiles and order them by how well you think you’ll know them, getting 1 point for getting the first right, and four points for the last. You also get two special powers, to swap categories with another player, and jump in to answer their question if you think you know the answer.

Both games have found clever ways to mitigate a lack of general knowledge, and add some extra decision-making and drama to proceedings. Sadly, the questions just don’t hold up. Both constantly swung from bleedingly obvious to “never heard of that before in my life”.

If they ever got a re-launch with questions for a UK audience, I’d definitely give them another try.

Elsewhere, I unceremoniously uprooted Harvest Dice, a perfectly quaint roll and write game that I talk about in this video. It’s a game that I’ve often thought of ditching, because I have so many roll and write games, and this one hasn’t got the excitement of others. Plus, it uses dice drafting which I tend to avoid in roll and writes because it slows them down.

I granted a stay of execution this month to Pluckin’ Pairs, which worked nicely as a webcam game. 

The goal is to find pairs in a selection of 9 photos that other players will agree on. You get a point for every player you match with. There’s something inherently fun about trying to think with the group, and the brief outcast status of not matching with anyone. See also, Hive Mind and Sixes. 

Actual Games

This section is a little quieter this month. New releases have slowed down and I am saving the other games I’ve played for future videos.

Ecosystem is a pick and pass card-drafting game, in which you try to build a thriving ecosystem of wildlife. The cards represent animals, such as bears, bees and foxes, as well as meadows and streams. Every turn you take a card and add it to your expanding grid.

Each species scores in its own thematic way, with most of them dependent on the positioning of other cards. Bears eat bees and trout, so will score 2 points for every adjacent bee and trout card. Whereas bees want to be next to meadows, and trout want to be next to streams and dragonfly.

All of these rules make for a challenging puzzle to find the best placement, and give you dilemmas when deciding which cards to pick. It’s engaging, but it’s also prone to rarely looking up from your cards - making the game fairly antisocial.

Ecosystem doesn’t quite have the jeopardy, or interaction that I’d want from a card game. But it is a neat design, that carries its theme well, and since it plays from 2 to 6 players in a small box - it could be a great getaway game for nature lovers.

Luxor: The Mummy’s Curse is an expansion to one of my favourite games of 2018 - Luxor (see video). It comes with five modules that you can drop in and out as you see fit. Here’s my take on them:

Module 1 - The Mummy. A Mummy standee moves back through the temple, hunting you - if it passes an adventurer it knocks them down until you revive them. I like that it introduces a threat, but one you can plan for by staying out of its way. It also introduces mummy tiles which you can pay for to get extra movement - a nice option but I’m not sure it’s worth the extra faff. 

Module 2 - Equipment. This introduces new cards that become your starting hand. You get five out of seven possible cards, to give some variety each game. The card powers are welcome additions to the deck, such as a zero which allows you to perform the action on the tile you’re already on. This module doesn’t add too much setup or rules, so I will likely always play with it.

Module 3 - Artifact Treasure Tiles. This is a new type of artifact you can collect, which when paired with a normal set of three artifacts, gives an additional three points. This is the least exciting addition, but it does make sense to introduce these extra tiles when playing with five players, which this expansion lets you do.

Module 4 - Characters. These give each player a powerful special ability, such as getting an extra VP whenever you collect a treasure tile, or allowing a player to reroll a dice. I didn’t enjoy these as much as I thought I would. They don’t seem to be well balanced, and they’re also not so exciting that they transform the game.

Overall, the expansion is solid but not strong enough to rave about. The beauty of original Luxor is in its simplicity, so it’s a challenge to clamp on extra bits to it without losing some of that beauty. I will be keeping it in my collection, but with a permanent disquiet at the weaker modules weighing down my shelves with their nutritionless cardboard.

Games I’ve been enjoying lately

-  Pan Am (on Tabletop Simulator)

- A War of Whispers (on Tabletop Simulator)

- Fast Sloths (on Tabletop Simulator)

Games that have just arrived

• Unmatched (Robin vs Bigfoot)
• Dig Deeper (expansion for Detective)
• Village Green
• Project Elite

Now watching - Upload - A sweet comedy drama TV series about a near future where you can be uploaded to a virtual afterlife when you die, on Amazon Prime.

Actually yours,

Jon