Actualol Newsletter - February 2021 (Patreon)

Hi-de-ho patroninos,

I’ve started dreaming about game nights. Literally. Or more like, I’m dreaming about other people having amazing game nights and I can’t get there because the door is locked or I’m stuck in traffic. I think my brain is trying to tell me something!

As we say farewell to February, I’ve been playing Furnace, Funfair and Auf Teufel Komm Raus (if only it began with F!). Read my thoughts on those below. And make sure to watch my review of Cantaloop.

Coming up on the channel, I will be going through my entire collection. A lot has changed since I did it three years ago. There are 100 less games, for starters! And I’m planning a behind the scenes video about my studio.

Actual Life

It’s been a tough month of lockdown this one - a little too much enduring and not enough enjoying. I’ve learnt from years of working from home that I need regular social activity to stay sane - that’s precisely why I got into board gaming in the first place. And it’s been almost four months since I did anything social in person - and it’s been getting to me.

Not a moment too soon, hope is appearing on the horizon. My parents have now both had their first vaccines, and it’s looking like we’ll be getting ours somewhere between May and July. The government has announced dates for when restrictions will ease, and it’s given us some much needed hope. I’ve started dreaming about game nights and pubs and being somewhere beyond the 1 mile radius of our flat again.

Highlights this month have been the few days of snow that we had, giving us something different to look at. 

And on pancake day, we made Bananas Foster waffles (our pancake attempts failed miserably!) something we loved in New Orleans. It’s bananas, brown sugar, butter, cinnamon rum and vanilla ice cream - what’s not to love?

Actual Games

Auf Teufel Komm Raus is an older game that I was put onto by Adam Board Game Wales. It’s a quirky push your luck game with a fun betting element.

There are 48 facedown coal pieces, and you take a turn flipping them over one by one, hoping to not reveal a devil. If you do you’ll go bust. The safe pieces have numbers on them, and you’re trying to get as big a total as possible.

Because you’ve all made a bet on how much one player will win without going bust. So you’re incentivised to keep going to win your bet. And, you get a bonus for flipping over the biggest total.

The final, key incentive is that if the highest bet wins - it doubles. So everything is encouraging you to take risks - to bet higher and flip more tokens. And with that comes big wins and big losses. It is loads of fun.

I played this one on Tabletop Simulator - though I do have a copy I got in a trade. This could become one of my favourites. It’s sad to see it has faded out of print.

Funfair

Funfair is the new, streamlined version of Unfair. Both are light, tableau building card games about building a theme park. The common complaint with Unfair was that it had some unpleasant take-that cards in it, and so Funfair fixes that issue. Incidentally, the Tabletop Simulator mod for Funfair is incredible, and makes playing it online a breeze.

It’s easy to get into, you spend money to build rides and attractions that you have in your hand. There’s some nice combos to be found, and there are staff which can make you more money or points. At the end of each round, you get income based on your attraction level.

There’s a good amount of options to consider - such as the blueprints which are personal goals to build certain features. You can take more, but you will be punished for not completing them a la Ticket To Ride.

Overall, Funfair feels pleasant. But it lacks any real excitement or drama, and it suffers from the common cold of modern games - no player interaction. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the decision-making, and the theme is cute. I’ll try it again in analogue form to be certain, but it seems like a perfectly fine creation in a period of history when perfectly fine isn’t good enough anymore.

Furnace completes this trilogy of games that I own in real life, but played on Tabletop Simulator. It’s a card game from Ivan Lashin, the designer of Smartphone Inc, a game that I really enjoyed last year.

You play as a capitalist making your millions (thousands?) during the Industrial Revolution. By buying buildings that produce and convert coal, oil and steel into money. It’s a classic engine-building system, and you try to get the cards that best complement your engine.

To get the cards, you take part in an auction. Bidding with four chips 1,2,3,4. The clever twist is that you still get a benefit from any auction you lose - gaining resources shown at the top of the card. This is a crucial way to get resources, so you often want to lose an auction, making the interplay between players really interesting. This mechanism makes Furnace, and I’d love to see it in other games too.

The gameplay is light but thinky, until you reach the fourth round when suddenly your engine becomes such a behemoth that you all think it over for 5+ minutes. It felt a bit silly and at odds with the lightness of the rest of the game. 

There’s a variant which may address this, so I’m hopeful. I don’t tend to enjoy engine building games, but the auctions in Furnace kept me engaged. Definitely worth a try, this one.

Games I’ve been enjoying lately:

- Chronicles of Crime: Noir

 - Chronicles of Crime: 1400

 - Micromacro: Crime City

New arrivals:

- Detective: City of Angels

- Fantasy Realms

- War of Whispers

Song of the Month - ENNY ft Jorja Smith - Peng Black Girls Remix

Now watching - The Outsider, Modern Family Season 9

Now reading - Ghosts by Dolly Alderton

Here’s to better times,

Actually yours,

Jon