Actualol

Actualol Newsletter - April 2025

Added 2025-04-28 11:32:48 +0000 UTC

Hello patrons!

Normal service is being resumed. It’s been a busy month settling into our new home, but we return with a good old fashioned Actualol newsletter.

This month, I catch you up with what I’ve been up to, and tell you about all the games I played at Handycon.

Actual Life

Moving house, moving town, with a toddler? I don’t recommend it. You don’t appreciate how delicately constructed your life is until you try to unpack it and put it back together again in a new place, and you can’t find that one power supply and nothing else can happen until you find it, so you spend an hour looking for it and then give up and order another one online.

We’ve lived in our new house for a month, and we’re finally feeling settled. It’s been an adjustment even living in a house - I haven’t used stairs for the last twenty years of my life. They’re silly little things - insisting that you use them all the time, gatekeepers to all the things you left behind in another room. I’m not fully sold on them as a concept.

We’ve also moved to a new town - where we don’t know anyone. Side note, I’ve chosen not to say which town it is online for privacy, but I don’t know how realistic it is to keep it a secret long term. It’s not often in life you get a chance for a clean slate - so I’m pressing the button and seeing how it goes.

And it’s been really exciting exploring this new place - every pub and café is new and different, there’s so many cakes and pizzas to taste before we get bored of it all. And everyone has been so friendly, we’ve even tentatively made some new friends (don’t tell them I called them that!).

Finding people to game with has been more challenging - there’s a regular game group I’ve been to a few times, but the experiences have been very mixed. It has a democratic approach, where everyone pitches games, but I’ve found that people stick to playing with their friendship cliques, and I’m pitching on deaf ears. So then I have to awkwardly invite myself to join another game, but the options aren’t really to my tastes. I was expecting to be overwhelmed by heavy euro games (that was the case in London), but here there’s more of a preference for dodgy Kickstarter games fresh off the boat, and childish party games. I’m yet to find any serious Knizia-heads, but I must stay hopeful that they’ll appear.

We’re painting my studio this weekend, so I’ll soon be back to filming Patreon exclusive videos, and my mind is bubbling with new channel ideas.

Actual Games

At this time of year there’s a nice gap after finishing the games released last year, and before the new games are released in the summer. It’s a rare opportunity for a reviewer to play their old games, guilt-free, and it’s been really nice to refresh my brain on why I love these games, before talking about them in my Top 100. Handycon sat right in that window, and with the right selection of friends in attendance - we were able to resurrect some meaty classics.

Starting on Friday, with Battlestar Galactica - a game I keep threatening to sell. But I had fun!

It took a while to get going - we didn’t have a Cylon in the first half of the game, but when it ramped up we had some fun moments - Cally Tyrol became both Admiral and President, and the humans were one turn away from winning when the Cylons clinched it. And it was a mercifully short 3 hours. Making it one of the shortest games of the weekend!

We followed that with Cyclades: Legendary Edition - where everyone felt in with a chance of victory at some point. We killed Pegasus pre-game, because you can fly your troops anywhere, making your slow tactical build-up feel redundant. It makes me think of this sketch from Mitchell and Webb, you spend the whole game being the BMX bandit, and then someone is the Angel Summoner for a turn, and makes you feel useless. But then we found that the hero Jason could do the same thing but every turn - so I guess I just have to accept the designer’s plan.

Time for something light, we tried Combo formerly known as Surfosaurus Max, which is like a collaborative poker game. You each add two card to a collective hand - and work out the best poker set you’ve created - Royal Flush, Straight etc - scoring points if you’ve contributed to it. There’s some mild joy from trying to convince players to join your plans, but if you don’t have the right cards, you’re powerless. Not bad, but not good enough.

As simple card games go - there’s much more consistent fun from Flip 7 - an entertaining blackjack style card flipping push your luck game. It doesn’t try to be too modern or clever, but it manages to entertain any group with the bits you want. If Trio was last year’s crossover success, this is 2025’s.

In the morning, I had a fun game of Blue Lagoon, in which I got absolutely trounced by better minds.

The big game of Saturday was Fief: France 1429. An epic game of diplomacy in medieval France - in which you’re trying to claim regions to become Fief lords, bishops, cardinals, king and even pope! One of the best bits of Fief is that you can marry another player and win the game together. Sadly I made a terrible choice of my starting position, left myself pretty weak and no-one wanted to marry me 😭 Despite the many troops on the board - it’s not a game with lots of fights - and much more about protecting borders and threatening attacks. The winner actually killed their partner in the last round to dissolve the marriage and win the game on their own!

It was nice to return to Legacy: The Testament of Duke De Crecy, a thematic worker placement about building your family’s legacy by marrying them off to rich and noble friends, trying to score points by collecting the right people in your family, and having lots of children and grandchildren. It’s not the most interactive game, but I enjoy the challenges of trying to make it all work, and steal friend cards before other players can get them.

I have too many negotiation games, so I was hoping to realise that I didn’t need Goodcritters, but it was a fun time, playing with six players, for the first time in years. I spent a long time as the boss - handing out cash to some compliant allies who would vote for my proposals to pass, so they could keep getting rich. But I was busy getting richer. It was surprising how well the game balances - as it gives players other ways to make money. You have to be ruthless in this one - but if you’re cool with that, then it’s great.

Then we played a few rounds of Werewords - the 20 questions game with a hidden traitor that I slightly prefer to Insider. The Werewolf knows the secret word but is trying to throw everyone off the scent by asking useless questions, and the Seer knows the word, but is trying to help. But both of them have to do it without being detected, because if they win - the opposing team has a chance to identify them to steal the win. We had one or two games dampened by a dodgy secret word - but the saving grace of these games is that they’re so short, that you can forgive it and just go again.

My friend Paul was feeling impulsive (impaulsive), and he bought the 10th anniversary edition of Sushi Go, which comes in a fancy Bento box. We were excited by the new bits they’ve added, but gameplay-wise all you get that’s different is some new desserts to swap in for the basic ones. We played with the most exciting type - the Froyo - which have special heat sensitive cards - you can only see how much they’re worth at the end of the game, when you rub them to heat them up. It’s a cute gimmick, but it didn’t make this version worth buying, for me.

The almost final game of the night was a seven player game of That Escalated Quickly, which was nominated for the Spiel Des Jahres as “Top Ten”. You’re all given a scenario - “your dog can talk what do they say”, and a scale “from least to most disturbing”, and you’re each given a number on that scale. If you get number 1, then you have to come up with the least disturbing thing your dog would say “I’m hungry”, and if you get number 10, you might say “everytime I bark at you, I’ve been trying to tell you that I want to die” (credit: Pankaj). And then the current judge has to decide how to rank people’s answers - to see if they can get them in the right order. It’s a fun twist on something like Wavelength - where you’re a little more involved. And it’s really good at making each other laugh - because you naturally come up with clues that call back to previous rounds.

The final, final game was a Mountain Goats - which is a solid little dice rolling filler. You roll four dice and decide which mountains to climb, to try and grab points at the top. But if someone else reaches the top they bump you back down to the bottom. I prefer this one to the classic Can’t Stop, because it moves quicker - but I wish it didn’t take up so much table space for such a small box.

Sunday was consumed by a huge game of New Angeles - an epic game of political negotiation, that we got very invested in - which meant it lasted much longer than is reasonable. I love the secret goals in this game - to win you’re trying to make more money than one specific player - I was ahead of my rival for 5 hours or more, then they overtook me in the last turn, so I lost the game! It’s a game that I wish someone would condense into half the time - because it doesn’t need to be as long as it is. It’s hard to imagine finding the time for another game of it, but I can’t get rid of it, because it’s completely out of print.

Finally, we finished the weekend with a quick game of Typeset, a flip and write word building game. Every round a letter is revealed and you must add it to one of your six words. You’re trying to build long words - but the more letters you add - the harder it becomes to finish those words, because the pool of words it could end up being diminishes. Very tough, but a fun challenge. But like most flip and write games, it’s a solitary experience.