Actualol Newsletter - December 2022 (Patreon)

New Year, New...sletter!

Happy New Year to you all! I hope you’ve had a fun Christmas period and received all the games you were hoping for.

2022 was a much better year for new games than the one before, and I’m working on my Top 10 Games of 2022 video (there will be ten this time). What have been your favourites from last year?

In this newsletter, I review Evergreen, Verdant and Challengers.

Actual Year

Thank you to all of you for your support this year. It’s been a good year for the channel, we’ve almost doubled in subscribers since last January, from 32,700 to 64,600. It’s been a nice surprise to learn that my style of videos can reach bigger audiences - my Top 10 Mistakes video is at 450,000 views. And it’s given me the enthusiasm to make more videos in that vein such as my Top 10 Couples video. More of that sort of thing to come.

Actual Life

This Christmas we went to visit Serena’s family in East Sussex. My gaming opportunities on Christmas Day were limited to Guess Who and Dobble with my niece and nephew - I look forward to when they’re ready to play something a little more advanced!

And what do you give the gamer who doesn’t need any games? Snacks! My Christmas haul this year will keep my gaming table filled with snacks for quite a while 🙂

Actual Games

Evergreen is the successor to Photosynthesis - but it takes it from a feisty, competitive abstract game, to a less interactive, personal puzzle - and to my surprise I prefer it.

You each have a planet, on which you’re growing trees. You draft cards that represent the biomes (areas) on your planet. When you take a card, you can only grow in that biome. Trees start as sprouts, then grow into small trees, then big trees.

You gain points at the end of each season for your trees that are in sunlight. The trees will cast shadow on others, losing you points - so you’re trying to arrange them so that they’ll receive sunlight every season. But you also score points for your largest connected forest, which encourages you to cluster trees together and leave no gaps.

At the end of the game, your big trees will score points based on the biome cards left in the fertility zone - these are the cards that people didn’t draft - so the card you leave can be just as important as the card you take.

Each card comes with a special power, which gives even more weight to which card you pick. And the more you use a specific power, the stronger it gets. It’s a really clever system, that feels light, but there’s so much depth to which card you pick.

The puzzle is engaging and challenging - I’ve definitely succumbed to AP here and there. For my tastes, it’s a little too solitary, the way you resolve your actions simultaneously makes it feel a little lonely. And the game takes longer to finish than I’d like. I don’t think it’s one for me long term, but it is a really good game. I prefer the simpler, faster rhythm of Cascadia - but Evergreen will be preferred by those who relish more to consider, and less luck.

I was excited for Verdant, the third in the vague line of flora and fauna puzzle games from the studio behind Calico and Cascadia.

You’re creating a tableau of house plants and rooms that you’re placing next to each other in a grid. The rooms want certain types of plants next to them. And you’re trying to place the plants next to the light conditions that suit them. Because the plants need to collect enough “verdancy” to score.

You’re also collecting items - some that you add to rooms to double their score, and others are special powers, such as a watering can to give more verdancy to plants.

The overwhelming feeling I get from Verdant is of fiddliness. The beauty of Cascadia, and even Calico, is the simplicity of what you do each turn. There’s a depth to the scoring and the strategy, but the mechanics of the game are smooth. In Verdant, there’s a fussiness to collecting the verdancy tokens and using the items, which means the turns take longer and don’t become intuitive - there’s less of a rhythm to it all.

Usually, fuss and admin comes with a reward, but I didn’t find the puzzle of Verdant to be any more rewarding. It leans more towards Calico, with a fixed puzzle space. You’re at the mercy of the card draw as to whether the types of plants you want will be available, which is expected, but once you have cards down, it’s hard to pivot your plans without losing points.

I don’t own Calico, but I can appreciate its merits - and understand why others might prefer it. With Verdant, I don’t see the appeal.

Challengers! is an unusual game. One game of Challengers! is actually seven short duels. You’re playing a tournament, and you go head to head against all the other players, hoping to make it into the final and win it.

But that’s not the weird part - it’s that the duels are largely predetermined. A foregone conclusion. You flip cards off the top of your deck, without choosing them, until you can match the strength of your opponent. Then they do the same to you. And it goes back and forth, until someone runs out of cards, or space on their “bench” for their discards.

So, you’re going through the motions. There’s a mild excitement to the card flipping, to see how it plays out. But you don’t make any decisions during the duel (a few cards change that, but we’re talking 5%). How your cards fare against your opponent is often down to the shuffle - the timing of when they come out, and if they manage to combo.

Where the decisions lie, is in the moments between the duels, when you’re choosing new cards to add to your deck. The cards come in a few suits, and have powers that will combine to give you different strategies. But I don’t want to overstate them - they all feel very slight. These aren’t the kind of epic game-breaking combos that you get in something like Magic: The Gathering.

There’s no doubt that those decisions count, but it’s such a weird feeling to make them and then effectively act as the AI of the game, to play through the calculation of who will win. I didn’t enjoy that balance - it feels like it breaks an unwritten rule of modern board games -  that there should be consistent decision-making throughout to keep it interesting.

Games I’ve been enjoying lately

• Orichalcum

Mists Over Carcassonne

• Cat in the Box

Games that have just arrived

• Foundations of Rome
• Swindler
• Clank Catacombs

Now Watching - The Bear

Now Reading - Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

Here’s to 2023!

Actually yours,

Jon