Actualol Newsletter - August 2022 (Patreon)

Hello everyone,

Happy gaming season! That’s enough Vitamin D for now. It’s time to lock ourselves indoors and get some games in. The summer is barely over and I’ve already noticed an uptick in the amount of gaming I’m doing.

I’d always noticed that I’ve never had a “successful” video on the channel over the summer, and after 7 years I’ve only just realised it’s probably because people are watching less videos and playing less games. Duh!

This month, I put together my Ultimate Gateway Games guide. And now I’m working on my next video, comparing the two new hidden movement games on the market, to see which one is the best. Today in the newsletter, I review three new games, Village Rails, E.T. and Rear Window.

Actual Life

This month, we had a last minute weekend in Edinburgh to catch the Fringe festival. We had planned not to go this year, for the first time in seven years, because the accommodation is so expensive. And the FOMO was eating us alive. So when my friend Tom invited us to stay,  we couldn’t resist! Here we are in the front row of our favourite show called The Mr. Thing Show - which is like a fictional TV show with a puppet, where the guests are the audience.

And here’s Serena, who was pulled on stage to be “interviewed”, but a few minutes later, we were all singing a song called “we’re not listening” to her. It is so hard to describe the show, and how brilliant and creative it is. Above all, it was just so funny and positive - the perfect show for the Fringe’s return.

Gaming Crisis Update

I still own Battlestar Galactica. It has escaped the axe for now. At least two of my friends have offered to play it with me “one more time”. But whether that happens within five years, we will see. Thanks for all your moral support on this delicate matter!

Actual Games

Village Rails is a personal puzzle game (has that caught on yet?) from Osprey Games. You have 12 turns in which you take a train track and add it to your railway tableau, connecting to the lines at the edge of your grid.

You can also buy a trip card, adding it to the end of a line, to give it a scoring condition. When a line reaches the edge of the grid, you score points for its trip cards, as well as features on the line, like farms which want different terrain types.

When you finish a line, you also resolve a terminus card, which is a little mini private objective which gets you cash. And you need money to be able to buy trip cards. Or to take cards further down the display. Poor cash flow can really hinder your options, so you need to finish lines to let other ones prosper.

There is a surprising amount to consider - this is a really thinky game, where clever planning will be rewarded. The puzzle is engrossing, and we definitely got caught up with some AP. But with only 12 turns, it wasn’t unbearable.

As with most personal puzzle games, you are solely focused on your own board. But if you like these sorts of games, I would recommend checking out Village Rails. It has hidden depths, especially for its small box. I found the puzzle challenging but never frustrating, which was the problem I had with its sister game, Village Green. (Same publisher, different designers).

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The team at Funko Games have made a business out of making solid nostalgia games like Jaws and Horrified. So far, none of their IP games have entered my collection, but they’ve always impressed me enough to keep giving them a chance.

The latest two at my door were E.T. - Light Years From Home and Rear Window. Both with immaculate aesthetics. E.T. is dripping with 80s vibes with its orangey yellow colour palette.

Funko are exceptionally good at making games that don’t just carry an IP, but tap into all of the same erogenous zones. And E.T. feels like their zenith. I mean - you can put a miniature E.T. in the basket of your character’s bikes and cycle it around - that is going to be enough to win over most people. But we’re not most people!

It’s a co-operative game and you’re being chased around town by three police cars and a bunch of FBI agents, trying to catch you and ET. Your goal is to find, then pick up and deliver sets of tools to build a phone, so that ET can phone home.

It’s pretty standard co-op fare - you have actions you can take to move and pick up items. If you have ET in your basket, you also get to use the very powerful ET action cards. But if you finish your turn with ET, you have to roll the danger die, which will attract the baddies.

It is incredibly impressive that they can design a mechanically sound game that manages to tap into so many aspects of E.T.’s story, without feeling bloated. You can spend “candy” to lure E.T. away from danger, and cycle over ramps to jump the police. It is all very cute.

But once you look past the nostalgia, the gameplay just isn’t interesting enough. The decisions are mostly obvious, there is little room for clever play, and there is too much luck - both in the AI that activates each turn, and your success, rolling the dice to phone home.

It feels like a family game - one that adults can enjoy with kids, but would never choose to play on their own. But even there, it flounders a little - because it’s not as straightforward as you’d want. You can take three basic actions each turn, but there are also 6 free actions you can take - and it’s really hard to remember which are free. Picking up an item is a basic action, but dropping one is free. Picking up candy is a basic action, but moving ET with candy is free. Whereas when it comes to picking up or dropping ET, those are both free! It is confusing, and something a parent would constantly have to oversee to make sure their kids were getting it right.

It’s a hurdle that can be overcome by a deep love for the theme. If you’re a big E.T. fan, I’m sure you’ll find fun in this one. I’d personally only play it with kids, but then what kids care about a film from 1982? I suppose you’d just tell them it’s based on Stranger Things and they wouldn’t know the difference.

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And who is the target audience for the board game based on 1954’s Rear Window? Well, I suppose it caught my eye, because the film has such a strong premise that it feels ripe for adaptation.

Put simply, Rear Window is a remake of the game Mysterium. One player is the “director”, trying to communicate what is going on by playing picture cards into the windows, so that the other players can cooperatively guess the solution.

The four apartments are assigned a character, and an attribute. Such as, “Miss Lonely Hearts is The Animal Lover”.

The director draws exactly 8 cards and decides where to put them. The cards are all window scenes, and will have characters and silhouettes and objects. You have to use all the cards, so you are forced into giving not always helpful information. The guessers agree on a solution, and you tell them how many aspects are correct, but not which. Then you do it all again for another day.

There’s no doubt, games like this are fun. It’s a real challenge trying to communicate the information you want with the cards you’re given. Except, weirdly, sometimes you are given a card that shows your exact character, and nothing else, which presents no challenge at all.

And the game encourages plenty of discussion between the guessers, who struggle to make sense of it all.

My issue with the game is that the window cards are too boring. It feels like a window scene is too limited in scope and there’s not enough variation to allow for creative cluing or wild interpretation. And because there are two windows for each apartment, and two facets to each statement, i.e. “Miss Body is The Art Collector” - you naturally put a card cluing the character in the left pane, and a card cluing the attribute in the right pane - which feels like cheating.

If you’d never played Mysterium before, you’d love Rear Window and give it an 8/10. It is fun, because games like this ARE fun. The game fits the premise perfectly, but by staying so loyal to it, it lets itself down. And I’d just rather play Mysterium.

Song of the Month - Hate by Loyle Carner

Video of the Month - I designed a game and it bombed - Adam Boardgame Wales

Now Watching - Station Eleven 

Now Reading - Back on Emma by Jane Austen 

Happy gaming!

Actually yours,

Jon