Actualol Newsletter - July 2021 (Patreon)

Hey there Actual Heroes,

I am writing this from a train to and from Scotland. I wanted to get the video out before we went away, hence the delay with the newsletter.

Hopefully you’ve seen my Top 5 Pub Games, a video I filmed with help from Bartosz Jokiel, a videographer I hired to help me out. It’s the first step in a plan to try and make more regular videos. It’s still early days and I can’t predict how it will turn out, but I’m hopeful. I’ll be filming with him again this week.

In the newsletter, I’m reviewing a new game, and talking about two good games I’ve chosen to remove from my collection.

Actual Life

Last week we had a holiday visiting friends and celebrating our wedding anniversary. It’s the first time we’ve been able to return to Edinburgh since we got married there two years ago.

Our beloved Edinburgh Fringe festival is a shell of its former self this year (Covid effect), but we managed to find some laughs with a comedian called Sunil Patel saving our evening after sitting through one of the worst shows we’ve ever seen.

I also got to visit Glasgow for the first time, which is a beautiful city, rivalling only Edinburgh for the British city with the best old buildings. Friendly people too.

As is often the way, I carried around some games hoping to find a window to pull them out, but we were having too much fun chatting, eating and drinking. We did play Felix: The Cat in the Sack one evening, an older auction card game that went down really well.

And in a pub I met someone who when talking about board games (“what do you do, Jon?”), said he hadn’t heard of Catan, but did know Codenames! I love hearing about people playing Codenames - hopefully in twenty years it will have eclipsed games like Trivial Pursuit.

Actual Games

I was excited to try So Clover, because it’s the new party game from Repos Production, the makers of Just One and Concept. And it is in a very similar vein.

You each have a plastic four leaf clover contraption, and four square word cards. The leaves are whiteboards, and on each one you must write a clue that combines the two words. For a pro-Codenames player like myself, it’s a meagre challenge.

Then you take off the cards, shuffle them up with one more card, and take it in turns to try and recreate each player’s board. Can you put the cards in the right places to match the clues?

Yes, yes you can. Because the game is too easy. It is too easy to think of a clue, but it is even easier to guess, because the cards have clues on two sides to guide their arrangement.

The game suggests you can shuffle in more rogue cards to make it more difficult, but then it’s just pure luck if you end up with another card with two similar words. And how is that fun to be blindly beaten by the draw of a card?

So Clover is an inappropriate (and interminable) pun, because it doesn’t allow for clever play at all. The cluer has no obstacles to clue around, as found in Codenames or Just One.

Worst of all, the game has no drama. Success isn’t hard won, it’s expected. And that doesn’t make for a fun party game. I would not recommend this game to anyone, especially when Just One and Codenames does it all so much better.

Good games I got rid of

As with last summer, I have a vigorous urge to purge games from my collection. And the hardest games to release are those which you believe are “good” but you just don’t like them enough.

It’s a war between my analytical thoughts of games and my feelings toward them. My head and my heart. My heart always wins, as it should, but my brain doesn’t admit defeat easily.

You may recall I recommended Cartographers to my gaming soulmate Daniel Radcliffe. He would be heartbroken to hear that I no longer own the game, but perhaps he deserves his heart broken after what he put me through.

I have too many flip and write games, and Cartographers just isn’t a favourite. I prefer the clear, simplicity of Avenue and On Tour. Having so many conflicting goals pushes it over the edge in terms of options, and therefore AP, and I don’t find that any flip and write is worth that.

My least favourite part of the game are the monsters, which involve giving your sheet to another player to draw on it. It always feels like a chore, and it’s a brief moment of take that which feels incongruous with the thoughtful placement of the rest of the game.

The Crew is an award-winning card game that I am a little frightened to admit I got rid of, but I did. I didn’t even give it a final test, a last hurrah, as I did with Cartographers.

There’s the potential for the game to make you feel an incredible sense of teamwork when you are all on the same page. But to get that point with new players, you have to let them learn from their mistakes, and I found that to be a drag.

With the same group every time it would be better, but even still it feels like a team-building exercise. You have to collectively learn how to beat each new challenge, but without communicating. And if one person doesn’t get it, it will fail, and they will feel stupid, and there’s this awkward, unavoidable “why didn’t you do that?” situation.

I don’t really like that the entire challenge can be destroyed by one distracted player not being in sync with the other player’s line of thinking. Especially when that line of thinking can’t ever be communicated! With the right group, maybe. But I’m bored of keeping games for the right group.

I would much rather play The Mind or Magic Maze for a mind-reading co-operative game which don’t rely on everyone having the same aptitude for puzzles.

I don’t mean to be so negative. I think it’s just that to convince myself to get rid of a “good game” I need a strong justification.

Games I’ve been enjoying lately

- What Next?

- A War of Whispers

New arrivals

 - Gladius

 - Juicy Fruits

 - Riverside

Song of the Month: This whole Spotify playlist (Gramatik Style Tunes)

Video of the Month: Hamish and Andy - Who’s Lost Touch (my new YouTube obsession)

Currently watching: Handmaids Tale Season 4

Currently reading: Persuasion by Jane Austen - still

See you in half a month,

Jon