Actualol Newsletter - December 2023 (Patreon)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a wonderful festive season, and are ringing in the new year with some games this evening! I will be cursing all the fireworks this year, and sleeping through midnight for the first time to catch up on my dad sleep.

I filmed my next video - a 100K subscriber special - two days ago, and will have it with you in the coming week. I was hoping YouTube would send me my 100K silver plaque in time to film it, but I couldn’t wait any longer.

In this newsletter, I review three new games - 5 Towers, Havalandia and How Dare You.

And as ever my question for you at this time of year - which games from 2023 should I make sure to play before compiling my Top 10 list? If you’ve played something you think I’d like - let me know in the comments - I hate to miss out on a gem!

Actual Life

We had a nice, chilled Christmas in London, just the three of us. And took the easy way out on the roast dinner by ordering a frozen pre-prepared meal that you stick in the oven. But it still looked pretty Instagrammable to me.

We experienced two Christmas miracles this year. First, Aurelia slept through the night for the first time on Christmas Eve, so we were well rested for the day. And second, we managed to play a game together for the first time in 5 months - fitting in a game of Fugitive during her nap.

Actual Games

5 Towers is standing out as one of the best new simple card games I’ve played this year. You’re each trying to build tall towers in five colours by playing cards in descending order. You’ll score points for every card in your tower - so you want to take as many cards as possible, but you can never go backwards - once you've placed “8”, you can only take cards lower than 8 onto that tower.

The way you get your cards is the interesting bit of the game. 5 cards are laid out from the deck, and you each bid on how many you're willing to take. Whoever takes the most will win and place all those cards in their towers. So to get cards you really want you will have to bid high to get cards you don't want that will cause you problems later on. There's a really nice push your luck feel to it, you can see what situation the next bidder is at with their towers so you have to decide whether you need to bid high enough so they won't steal what you want.

You can take the top card off of one of your towers to make room for a higher number but it will go in your teardown pile and score you some hefty minus points.

It feels classic and fresh at the same time. I need to play it more but first impressions are great.

Havalandi is this month's Reiner Knizia game. It has the most rarest of treasures in 2023 games - a shared board. And that's what got me excited for it.

It is a tile-laying game, in which you place out your hot air balloons in clusters to score points in a variety of different ways. It is reminiscent of his games Blue Lagoon and Through The Desert, because other players will get in your way.

One of the differences with those games is that you don't get free reign of where to place your tiles. Each turn you roll the die and move big balloon around the board - you must place along the two lines it points in. That luck in some ways lessens the AP of having too much choice, but it also adds this extra bit of admin that stifles the free-flowing turns of those games.

And the scoring options feel less competitive - you're not racing to grab items ahead of another player, or trying to control regions.

The feeling that I come away with is not that it's bad, but just that I'd rather play either of those two games.

How Dare You? is a tiny little party game that falls into the growing genre of “number trivia”. How deep into the ocean is the Titanic in metres? How many people die in Romeo and Juliet? Most people don't know the answer but they can have a guess.

One person makes a stab at a number and the next player must decide to raise or call them out (Perudo style), if they think the number is too high. When someone does call someone out, the answer is revealed and whoever was wrong gets some penalty points. Once someone gets too many wrong, they lose and everyone else wins.

The thing is, How Dare You is not a GREAT design, but it is fun. It's fun to guess at interesting trivia, and get closer than you think you would. You're learning stuff together at a group. I've played a lot of these games and it's not my favourite - Wits and Wagers takes that mantle. But it's small and perfect to take anywhere, it's dead simple to play and jump into, and it has interesting questions. It shouldn't win any awards, but I am inclined to keep it because I think it's useful.

Happy New Year!

Actually yours,

Jon