Actualol Newsletter - January 2023 (Patreon)

Welcome winners and losers to another newsletter!

Thank you for watching my Top 10 Games of the Year video. In this newsletter, I will be sharing my next ten favourite games from 2022.

Coming up on the channel, I’m working on something a bit different from my usual fare - but still about board games!

Actual Life

It’s been a quiet month for me, hiding in from the cold and playing board games. So here’s a picture of a fox that I took on the way to game night at 5:30pm, he was roaming around like a local cat.

Games of 2022 - Top 20-11

It’s weird making lists of games sometimes. It’s hard to compare a two hour board game to a 10 minute party game, because they both operate on different terms, they are good for completely different reasons. It’s like trying to rank films against TV shows.

It also feels disingenuous to rank a game highly that I haven’t kept in my own collection. If I don’t think it’s worth keeping around (in a collection of 250 games) that says a lot. So this list is split into two halves. The first are games that I haven’t kept, but still had fun with. The second half are mostly very light games that I have kept.

Games I enjoyed but haven’t stayed in my collection:

20. Clank Catacombs

I really wanted to like Clank Catacombs more. It’s such a great idea - turning Clank into a game where you explore the map as you move by revealing tiles, making the dungeon different every time you play. Thematically, it’s a big improvement, you don’t know what to expect as you venture further into the catacombs. But that also means you can’t plan. And my experience of Clank Catacombs is that it’s much more of a game that happens to you. You can’t make a plan of which artefact to aim for, and buy the types of cards that suit that plan.

And the game is a lot more unpredictable. In one game we all died really quickly before we had time to collect an artefact, meaning we all lost - unsatisfying. In another game, there were so many opportunities for healing that one player ended the game with a clean damage track - making the threat of the dragon attacks, the timer of the game, redundant.

Clank has always been a game with a lot of luck - you’re at the whim of your deck of cards and the dragon bag, and I enjoyed that unknown. But now that’s multiplied by what tiles come out – for example, there’s no knowing which player will reveal and claim the best artefact. And our scores have reflected that - with one or two players way ahead of the rest. For a 2+ hour game, that asks you to care about the deck you’re building, I need to feel that my decisions are having an impact on my success, and I’m struggling to feel that when winning or losing. I’d just rather play the original Clank.

19. Kites

Kites is a neat little cooperative real-time game about keeping kites up in the air. Each sand-timer represents a kite, and you’re trying to keep the sand-timers alive by turning them over at the right time so they never stop flowing. You take it in turns to choose a card from your hand that will flip one or two timers. You have to communicate who has what cards - and each sand-timer has a different amount of sand in, so some need saving all the time, and others are more chilled.

It’s such a simple idea, but it just works. And when someone draws a plane card you have to stop talking because you can’t hear each other, which makes it even harder. It’s addictive fun. I haven’t picked this one up because I don’t have as much appetite for real time games these days, but I’d still play it at a convention.

18. Orichalcum

There’s lots to like about Orichalcum. And there’s lots going on. Thematically, you are exploring an island, although it feels more like you’re building an island. Each turn you take a card from the board that carries with it a tile. You add the tile to your map. Meanwhile the card gives you an action to do.

You can mine for orichalcum, the golden resource in the game. Or recruit hoplites, the fighters. You can fight monsters that arrive on certain tiles, sending hoplites to attack them and rolling dice. And you can build - either special buildings which give you ongoing powerful abilities. Or you can build a temple, if you have 4 different terrains next to each other - to gain a point. Or trade in 5 orichalcum for a point.

The game is a race to get five points, and you really have to balance improving your strength with buildings, versus just getting the job done and aiming for points.

The decisions are fascinating, because often the tile you want doesn’t come with the action you need. And there’s a lot of room for interesting turns, because you can spend ore/hoplites/dead monsters to take an extra action. But what that also means is that turns can be SLOW and downtime is a real problem. Orichalcum doesn’t feel like a big game in its gameplay, and yet the amount of components and the downtime are what you’d expect from something bigger and deeper. And that disconnect is what ultimately put me off the game.

17. Evergreen

Evergreen is a really clever puzzle that I reviewed in the last newsletter. I can’t fault anything it’s doing - it’s streamlined, innovative and really gets you thinking. It’s just not really my kind of game - it’s a very personal puzzle. And longer and more involved than the games of that type I prefer, like Cascadia or Sagrada. I would play it again, but I wouldn’t ask for it.

Games I’ve kept (for now):

16. No Mercy!

No Mercy! is a push your luck card game from Reiner Knizia. You take it in turns to flip cards off the deck, in classic stick or twist style. If you twist and draw a card of the same number as you already have, you go bust and get nothing. It’s all very familiar, but with two important twists. First, is that you can’t go bust in your first three cards, so you can always get something.

Second is that you can steal cards from an opponent, if you flip that number. So if you flip an eight, you can steal the stack of eights in front of Stephanie. This gives you a big reason to keep pushing your luck, because if Stephanie gets to her next turn she will stash those eights forever. It makes it such an interactive game, as the cards are jumping back and forth between players all the time - so much that you can’t be mad at it, it’s the whole game. And you’re just hoping to flip what you need to steal, and they don’t. It’s random, of course, but it’s a lot more entertaining and straightforward than other push your luck card games. Although I still really like PUSH, in this genre.

15. Noggin

Noggin is a quick little card game that tests your reactions. It is very similar to Anomia, which might give you an idea if it’s for you. You flip cards into the middle. There are three stacks of letters. Then when someone reveals a challenge card, you have to race to say something the fastest, using the two visible letter cards.

For example, if the challenge is Bookend and the letters are S and N, you have to say a word that has those letters at the start and end of the word, such as “station”. If the challenge is Middle Letters, you have to say a word with them in the middle, such as “ascent”. If the challenge is Initials you have to think of a famous person with those initials, such as Stevie Nicks or Sam Neill. It’s HARD. But it’s a lot of fun.

14. Phantom Ink

I’ve had a lot of fun with this team party game. Two teams, each with a ghost. Both trying to communicate the same word to their team first. The teams give their ghost two questions to answer, such as “Where in the world would you find this thing”, and the ghost picks a question to answer. Then slowly, letter by letter, writes their answer, as if they’re communicating through a Ouija board. Their team can (and should) stop them when they have enough letters to guess at what the answer could be. Because only they know the context, the question they were answering - whereas if they reveal the full word, the other team will get that information for free.

I really like the rivalry between the teams, racing to get it before the other team. And there’s a fun challenge in deciphering the other team’s fragments of words, to help you get closer to the answer. It’s a game with a lot of discussion and when the right answer clicks, it feels amazing.

13. Air, Land and Sea: Spies, Lies and Supplies

I really like Air, Land and Sea, (see my video), the two player card game that packs so much punch into 18 cards. And I really like this standalone sequel to it. The framework of the game (gamework?) is the same (samegamework?), but the cards are completely different. It feels the same and new. I’m not sure I need both, but it really is as good as the original - and if you’ve not played either, you should try one.

12. Fun Facts

I’ve always wanted a good party game that plays on the knowledge of your friends, and this is the first I’ve found that pulls it off. You play co-operatively, trying to rank yourselves based on a question such as “how much do you enjoy dancing?”, you all write a secret answer (1 to 100) and place yourself somewhere in the order. 

Then reveal all the answers, hoping that you’ve managed to guess the order. Then, you have the inevitable chat about how you really feel about dancing, and why you thought you liked it less than Ben but more than Tom.

It’s not going to blow anyone’s socks off. It is not a brilliant, creative party game design like Codenames. But it works really well for what it is, and would be great with non-gamers.

11. Get On Board: London and New York

This is a reprint of “Let’s Make A Bus Route” from 2019, and I really like the retro 60s aesthetic they’ve gone with. It’s a flip and write game transplanted to a board, where you’re creating a bus route in London (yay) or New York (boo) on a shared board. Each turn you’re given a pathway to add to the end of your route, and you decide what direction to go in, so you can pick up the passengers you want.

I like that it's more interactive than other “and write” games, because if you drive down the same road as someone else you create traffic and lose points. 

The different passengers all score in their own way, and it makes every turn an interesting decision. It’s super short - you only take 12 turns and you’re done, so it’s very light, but it manages to pack a lot in.

Games I’ve been enjoying lately

• Winner’s Circle
• Warsaw: City of Ruins

Now Watching - Dead to Me (Season 3)

Now Reading - It’s All A Game: The History of Board Games from Monopoly to Settlers of Catan

Song of the Month - Heartfirst by Kelsea Ballerini

Actually yours,

Jon