Actualol Newsletter - October 2023 (Patreon)

Good day patrons! Happy Halloween!

I hope you liked my 10 Pitfalls Board Gamers Should Avoid - it’s great to be back making the kind of videos I enjoy after paternity leave. And it’s had a nice response, which is lovely. I’m really hoping it helps me get to 100,000 subscribers before the end of the year - we’re so close!

In today’s newsletter we have some BIG NEWS, plus thoughts on Waterfall Park (new Chinatown), Sunrise Lane (new, old Knizia), and Point City (not new Point Salad).

Actual News

Big news! I have a studio! Today, I got the keys to a studio that I’ve found to make my videos in. Tomorrow, I’ve enlisted the help of some lovely friends to paint it the trademark Actualol blue. And on Friday I’m moving my stuff in. It’s an exciting, if slightly daunting time!

It’s always been a dream to find a proper studio to work from, and it’s become more of a necessity now that my office is Aurelia’s bedroom. It’s early days, but my hope is that with a permanent place to keep things set up, and more room to manoeuvre, it will mean good things for Actualol.

Actual Life

This month, I got to hang out with long-time, all-star patron Ceedee (of Actualol character fame) who was over from New Zealand for Essen and UK travels. She runs Wellycon, in Wellington, and it’s amazing how easy it is to chat to someone you’ve never met for hours when you’ve got board games in common! Her support since the smaller days of the channel has been vital, and it was great to thank her in person and play some games together.

Actual Games

Waterfall Park is a reimagining of Chinatown, that is so unrecognisable I saw it on the table at UK Games Expo and had no idea the two games were related. Chinatown is a classic (1999) negotiation game about setting up businesses to make the most money.

Waterfall Park is the softest retheme I’ve ever seen, you are now building attractions at a theme park. Each round you’re given locations on the board, and business tiles. You need to own locations next to each other, so you can put down tiles of the same type, to create lucrative businesses.

The point being - that Ben has the location you need adjacent to yours, and Anna has the tiles you need - so you’ll offer up money, locations or tiles to get them for a good price. And at the end of each round you’ll gain income for the businesses you’ve built.

The same simple but brilliant framework from Chinatown is there. And it’s still loads of fun. Waterfall Park has been shortened down to 4 rounds (from six). And the board is only divided into two sections, not six, so it’s easier to make adjacencies, which I prefer.

The theme doesn’t work as well for me, and the plastic feels cheap and unnecessary, BUT, being shorter and more forgiving, I think it’s an easier sell. I can’t decide which game I will keep, but they’re both fun - IF you like negotiation.

Sunrise Lane is a reprint of an older Reiner Knizia game I’ve never played called Rondo. Horrible Guild have brought it into modern times with some extra rules.

It is VERY simple. You play coloured cards to build your houses on matching coloured spaces - gaining  the points shown on the space. If you play more than one card of the same colour you build that many storeys, gaining extra points. You can keep building next door, if you have the right colour cards - and it’s fun making a run of houses.

It is largely a game of short term thinking, the shared board is changing constantly, so you have to assess what’s available on your turn and go with that. You’re looking to grab the big 4 or 5 point spaces where you can.

That seems to be all that Rondo had to offer. Thankfully, Horrible Guild added some extra bits to beef the game up. You are competing to have the longest connected set of houses, which inspires players to block each other off. And in two quadrants you want lots of houses, in the other two you want tall blocks. These objectives give you something to aim for long term and a reason to care about what the others are doing - the game would be really dull without them.

But even with them, it feels a little lacking. The luck is heavy - to refill your hand you draw off the top of the deck - so good luck getting what you need. And that gives you a feeling of a lack of control - you might be desperate to fight to retain your tallest houses objective but the colours never match.

In many ways it’s refreshing - unusual gameplay, player interaction, a shared board. There are glimmers of Knizia magic, but not quite enough for me to wholeheartedly recommend it.

Point City is the sequel to Point Salad, a very good card game that didn’t quite make the cut in my collection. Point City is a very typical engine building game - I feel like I’ve played many games like it.

On your turn, you take two cards that are next to each other on the grid. At the start you’ll be taking resource cards, which are what you need to pay for building cards. Once you’ve built something, it adds to your engine giving you a resource discount on future buildings. If you’ve played Splendor, it works exactly like that.

The cards get better and more expensive as the game goes on - so you’re trying to carve a strategic path through the game, spotting the cards that score big points off your engine. But as with Point Salad, at lower player counts a lot of the cards are randomly missing - so it could be a nightmare if all the high scoring cards needing “energy” have been shuffled out.

And yet at higher player counts, the game would really bog down - with 16 cards to pick from there’s a lot to consider on your turn. I found the turns a lot slower than Splendor, but I wouldn’t say I was getting anything more from the game to repay that.

It is similar to Point Salad in that it offers thinky decisions in a small, cute package. But I find that both of them can be really swung by the luck of the draw. And with Point Salad I forgive that a little more because it’s snappy - well, until you have to score the darn thing. But Point City encourages you to take time over your turn, then undercuts that by gifting your opponent the perfect card.

Have a great month!

Actually yours,

Jon