Actualol Newsletter - September 2023 (Patreon)

And we’re back! Thank you for your paternity leave patience. I hope you’ve enjoyed the Top 100 videos. I’m excited to say that I’ve started work on my next proper Actualol video and I’m ready to continue with the newsletter.

Today, I’ll give my thoughts on the new games The Last Kingdom, Fiction, Keydom’s Dragons and On The Road. I’ve got plenty of Essen games arriving at my door - so I’ll give you the lowdown on them in future newsletters.

Actual Life

The last two months have been a whirlwind since Aurelia was born. I’m so excited to see her every day and watch her grow. She’s started smiling and making noises at us, which is a nice reward for all the challenges. Putting a baby to sleep is harder than all the heavy euro games combined!

I knew it was hard going in, but it’s quite remarkable how all encompassing it is. I’m so thankful that I was able to take time off to look after both her and Serena. I couldn’t have done that without patrons - so thank you everyone. Two months in and it’s still the hardest job I’ve ever had, but you look back to that first week and realise that it has got easier. Either she’s got easier to deal with, or we’ve got better at coping.

Everything is different - I’m writing this newsletter in a pitch black room, as I take the 7pm-3am shift watching her. And I’m thankful to my friends who are able to play games during the day at a board game cafe. We’re even talking about moving my game shelves to the living room to make space. It’s all change - but it’s a small price to pay for her smiles :)

Actual Games

The Last Kingdom looks like it would be bad. Nothing inspires trepidation like photographic art, and “A Netflix series” badge on the front of the box. But if you look a little further, you see the name John D. Clair - he of Space Base and Mystic Vale acclaim.

I couldn’t get on with the TV series - but it’s a good subject matter for a board game - Danes vs Saxons. It’s a game about switching sides when it suits you, and timing when to be loyal to either side is a big part of this game, and a lot of fun.

You each play as a singular character - and the armies on the board (the Danes and three types of Saxon) aren’t controlled by any one player. Imagine that they’re off having battles regardless. But if you want you can mess with proceedings to get the outcome you’re hoping for.

The game is just resolving conflicts in the five regions of England and Wales. And before the victor is named you can each do your meddling, like sending troops in or killing them. You have a hand of four cards, some action tokens and your special abilities. It’s quite a meagre set of powers and you have to be careful to conserve them, not waste them all trying to win the first battle, and then having nothing left you can do.

Your character has different affinity levels with each faction. If you’re loyal to the winning side (Dane or Saxon) you will score points based on your affinity to them. So Jon and Tom might both want the Danes to win, but if Tom has more affinity - Tom will score way more points. So is a win actually in Jon’s interest?

And that’s the challenge - how can you share interests but not let your allies prosper ahead of you? It’s a game of watching how well everyone is doing, and making sure not to let them run away with it. It feels impressively thematic in that regard. And it feels like a fresh take on this sort of game. It’s more streamlined, but perhaps a little drier. I’m looking forward to playing more of it.

Fiction is very simply - Wordle with lying. One player becomes the lie-brarian (I bet they took the afternoon off after coming up with that), and picks a five letter word. The prompt cards are excerpts from famous books which is a cute touch.

Then the guesser will make a guess. And the lie-brarian will give a response to each letter - just like in Wordle - saying if the letter is in the right place, in the wrong place, or not in the word at all. BUT - one of those bits of information will always be false. The lie-brarian can pick which letter to lie about - changing one of the answers. So you could pretend a letter is in the word when it actually isn’t, or when they’ve got a letter in the right place try to throw them off by telling them it’s not.

For the guesser it becomes a game of deduction, trying to re-test the letters to see if the lie-brarian is trying to keep up the same lie, or that the info is actually true. You get either ten guesses or 20 minutes to solve it. And it’s challenging!

I always enjoy Wordle, and it definitely gives that feel with some extra deduction. This is a neat implementation of it in board game form - I’m just not sure that a social board game is the best setting for this kind of puzzle. As the lie-brarian I found it quite boring waiting around for the guessers to guess. I didn’t find watching them working it out entertaining enough, given that it takes 20 minutes.

It does exactly what it sets out to do, and I’d happily play it again, but there’s not enough excitement in it for me. It manages to capture Wordle really well - but makes you realise that it doesn’t have much to offer beyond 2 minutes on your phone in bed.

Keydom’s Dragons is an updated version of Aladdin’s Dragons, a game from the year 2000 that I’d heard good things about and always wanted to try. It turns out that was an evolution itself of Keydom from 1998. So the idea has been around for a while!

And it has an old school feel, that is solidified by its lazy graphic design, where someone has plonked Times New Roman text on top of some artwork.

The idea is you’re villagers sending your people to steal treasure back from dragons. And then you use that treasure to trade for artefacts, which you need to win the game.

You each have a pool of worker tokens, numbered to show their strength. And you take it in turns to place them at locations in the town where you want to get something. You place them face down, in what is a blind bid for using that location. Once all the workers are out, you reveal them - and see which player wins each location, getting treasure.

It’s a fun mechanism, you don’t know how big to go - sometimes you’ll waste lots of really good workers, when it turns out you only needed to beat a one. But there’s also a big helping of luck - because it’s hard to get a read on what the other players need which means you’re just winging it.

Part of the reason I wanted to try this game was because I’d enjoyed this mechanism in the game Lockup. Whereas Lockup is a little too long and overdone, Keydom’s Dragons feels too light. The chaos of the bidding is fun for a bit, but there isn’t enough to hold onto in terms of strategy to make you want to come back.

It would work well as a family game, with simple rules and some good interaction - but the generic theme, weird name, and dated look aren’t likely to help it find that audience.

On The Road is a beautiful game from Helvetiq, the Swiss publisher who make consistently beautiful games, but often with little between the ears.

This has the wonderful theme of being a rock band, taking your tour bus on the road to perform gigs, and pick up fans. The band with the most fans on the mainstage at the big summer festival wins the game.

Using movement cards, you move your bus to a venue along the path, taking a matching token. The more tokens you have of the same type, the more fans you put in the shared bag. When you stop at a city, you get to draw fans from the bag - if you draw your colour then they join the mainstage (victory points). If you draw someone else’s colour they end up in the festival toilets.

And this is where the tour bus veers off a cliff, because that bag drawing dictates the winner of the game, and it is a pure, unbridled luck fest. I had less fans in the bag, but just happened to keep drawing my colour and I won the game by a landslide, whereas another player only drew themselves once!

Elsewhere, you have very little agency, with the movement deck often giving you no choice between where you move. I kept drawing big movement cards, so I ended up only making three gigs before my tour ended - whereas the other players carried on much longer. It was really frustrating. And yet despite my tour being so short, I still won anyway!

I haven’t played a game this bad in a long time. And certainly not one with such a promising theme and artwork. Avoid this game at all costs - there is no joy to be found here.

Games I’ve Been Enjoying lately:

• Archeos Society
• The Rich and the Good
• General Orders: World War II

As for books, TV and music - I haven’t done any of that in the last two months!

See you next month,

Actually yours,

Jon