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Actualol Newsletter - October 2022 (Patreon)
Content
Afternoon avid audience,
I hope you enjoyed my new Top 10 Couples Games video. It’s such a relief to have it finished and out in the world. In this newsletter, I’m continuing the list by sharing my Top 20-11 Couples Games, the games that almost made it. And I’m giving my strong opinions on three new games, Flamecraft, Tenpenny Parks and Maui. If you’re fond of them, you might want to avert your eyes!
I’m off to the coast to Eastbourne for our biannual Lobstercon convention to play games all weekend! I hope to return with news of wondrous games.
Actual Life
This month, Serena and I took part in a performance ball with our swing dancing class. It was a tough routine to master and we spent a lot of evenings practising. On the night it was over in a flash, but I’m so glad to have achieved it. Here’s a video of our performance - we’re in the back row, one in from the right!
Actual Games - “Pretty Vacant”
Tenpenny Parks is a very attractive theme park game, with art from Vincent Dutrait.
And it’s a serviceable design, there’s nothing glaringly wrong with it - you spend money to buy Tetris shaped attractions and place them in your park. In a twist from usual, you don’t want the shapes to interlock, they must all have space around them. It creates an interesting challenge, but it’s less satisfying - I’d rather be making things look neat.
It’s all very pleasant but it lacks a specific bite or hook. I didn't find the decisions to be tense or exciting - I never "needed" something. And yet to achieve that, there’s one too many things going on. It’s a medium sized game with the impact of a filler.
Flamecraft is enjoying some time on the BGG Hotness, it being a perfect storm of great artwork, Kickstarter hope, deluxe components and a cute theme. You visit local shops to collect resources, but you can also upgrade those shops by adding artisan dragons, and enchantments. In essence, what you’re doing is creating combo machines that shower you with stuff.
I'm not a fan of these types of "everything is great, have all the things" games. I want drama and tension and scarcity, and this has none of that. There's something so pointless about the constant taking of resources - the game won't stop giving them to you, that it devalues them and everything you're doing. And it feels like busywork - doing repetitive tasks with your hands to disguise the fact you're doing little with your brain.
The combos feel like a cheap attempt to release dopamine, but like an artificial sweetener my brain can tell the difference. Because there is no creativity to it - you can find a combo that pours out resources in any given shop on any given turn. And if all the world is incredible, then none of it is.
Flamecraft reminds me of another Kickstartered fantasy shopping success story - Bargain Quest. I could never understand its popularity, and five years on, I don’t hear anybody talking about it. Give it another five years, and the flame will have died out for Flamecraft too - I bet you.
Maui is the latest abstract tile game from four-letter-loving Azul creators, Plan B Games. You are taking beach towels and adding them to your personal beach, trying to line up matching patterns to go up on tracks, which will give you points.
There is a puzzle in there, but it feels half-hearted. Your options to select from are very limited, and you’re not given enough room to ever do anything that feels clever. It’s less taxing and puzzly than something like Sagrada, and with none of the freedom of Cascadia. And in comparison to Azul, the way you select tiles is dull and boring. It just doesn’t stand out on any front.
Top 20-11 Couples Games
As promised in the video, these are my next ten favourite games to play with Serena. In reality, we are always playing new games for review, but if we had some magical free time to play older games, these are the ones that would come to mind.
Click the links in the titles to see my video on that game.
When playing games with Serena, and my good friends, I like a game with bite - where we’re really in each other’s business - that’s what a lot of the games in my Top 10 feel like. But occasionally you want a break from that, to do your own thing. And that’s where the personal puzzle games come in. Sagrada is light and simple, but with enough puzzle to stress you out. This pick could easily be Cascadia or Spring Meadow instead.
19. Kings and Assassins
I love how thematic this game is, despite being very simple. It’s almost like they’ve taken the theme of Chess and brought it a little more to life. One player is slowly moving the King towards the safety of his castle, by moving his guards to create a protective shield around him. The other player gets to move the many townspeople that pose a threat to his safety, but only some of them are secret assassins, and the king doesn’t know which ones are. So every time a townsperson is moved - is it a bluff, a distraction, or is it a real threat? The bluffing and intrigue really lighten up what would otherwise be a dry, abstract game.
18. Paris: La Cité de la Lumière
This is such a novel game, it mixes a few mechanisms to create something unlike anything else. It took Serena longer to appreciate it, because it’s not immediately obvious what you should do in the game. You are first arranging cobblestones - the foundations of the city - that will allow for placement of Tetris buildings. But it doesn’t feel like a Tetris game. Instead it’s like you’re trying to carve out a space for yourself in a crowded city. Every turn, deciding between the two actions is so tough - do you plan first or just act?
This fills a very specific spot in our life. If we’ve got twenty minutes to spare, and it’s late, and we haven’t got the energy to think too much, we crack out MicroMacro (we’re on the 2nd box), and solve a case or two. I don’t think I’d ever play this with anyone else - I like that we share this cute little world together.
Knowing when to retreat from a battle - because your hand sucks or you’ve been bested - so that you are more likely to win the war, is such a strong mechanism. I love that it’s a small deck, so you can learn the cards and know what to expect. And they collide with each other in such interesting ways. And there’s a nice “fog of war” feeling to the card play, as well. I wish the theme wasn’t so dry, but it does fit the gameplay so perfectly.
The goal of Santorini is so unusual, so unfamiliar, that it’s both brilliant and obtuse. I know where I stand with other abstract games. But with Santorini I find that every time I play it, I have to relearn the basic strategies. It feels like a game that you explore, that you always feel you’re getting up to speed with right up until someone wins. I find that disconcerting, and that’s why it’s not higher on the list.
14. Blitzkrieg!
I love Blitzkrieg. If Caesar didn’t exist, it would have been in the Top 10. But Paolo Mori just couldn’t help himself. It manages to deliver such a sharp, thinky game with such a clean, effective system. Every choice is important. Trying to keep across five battles at once, whilst also defending yourself from being bombed out of existence always feels like a stretch.
It’s a meaner and slightly more complex game than Caesar, which is why the more palatable one made it into the Top 10. But it’s still brilliant.
If Serena had her way, this would have been in the Top 10. It’s the perfect distillation of a cat and mouse game, played out with numbered cards. And it’s two games in one, as the fugitive you have to push your luck and bluff. Whereas as the hunter, you’re playing a deduction game. It works so much better than it has any right to.
We both really love crime-solving detective games and we’ve played A LOT of Chronicles of Crime together. I don’t think sharing the app works as well with more than two players. We’ve played all through the Noir, Welcome To Redview, and 1200 campaigns, (thanks lockdown!) and found it all to be consistently great. I’m not always in the mood for playing with an app, but this game would be nothing without it, so it earns the right.
We don’t play cooperative games together as much as we used to, I think for the same reasons as the multiplayer solitaire games - I prefer that direct competition. Pandemic is still the gold standard, and when I do encourage myself to bring it out, I’m reminded why we love it. No other co-op game has such an engaging puzzle that promotes clever play, with such a light rules/admin experience. I can’t abide the faff of something like Spirit Island - I don’t think the reward is worth that much effort.
Been Enjoying Lately:
- Ra
- Caesar’s Empire
New Game Arrivals:
- HEAT: Pedal to the Metal
- The Great Split
- San Francisco
Song of the Month - Happiness and I’m In Love With You by The 1975
Now Watching - Only Murders in the Building
Now Reading - Atomic Habits by James Clear
Have a great weekend!
Actually yours,
Jon