Actualol Newsletter - January 2025

Hellooooooooo!

Thanks for your supportive comments on my last outpouring newsletter. It’s been a positive opening to the year for Actualol, with my Top 10 Games video getting off to a flying start. 

And I’ve already been to a convention! So in this newsletter I’ll tell you about the fun games I played there. 

Actual Games

Yamatai

Bruno Cathala’s games are all palpably unthematic, which make them a little hard to warm up to. But their combination of mechanisms usually deliver fun decisions, and Yamatai is full of that. I liked the fight for space on the shared board, but I wish it was a bigger part of the game. And the turns are a little convoluted. A solid game, but I won’t race back to it.

Stranger Things: Upside Down

I was cynical of this cooperative game from Rob Daviau - it seemed repetitive, and it is - you fight stacks of tokens - representing challenges. You have to decide how much power to waste on a stack before you reveal it and see if you have beaten it. It’s a fun risk-taking choice that you do over and over again. And you will try to build up your strength by recruiting allies before tackling the Demogorgon and trying to rescue Will - all represented by stacks. It isn’t as good as Pandemic or the Forbidden series, but I prefer it to Horrified, it carries the theme well enough, and as a family game for fans of the show, I think it’s better than you might expect. 

Mythic Mischief

This is an abstract strategy game with extra fluff. There’s a professor roaming the halls on a fixed path, Burgle Bros style. Your goal is to make your opponent get caught, by using special powers that let you move the walls and your opponent’s pieces. A fun premise but there’s way too much going on.

You have these annoying tiny dice that track the strength of each power and it’s so fiddly and drawn out. I really hated this game.

Five Tribes: The Djinns of Naqala

The other Days of Wonder/Cathala joint is much stronger. But like Yamatai it’s initially very obtuse, then slowly reveals itself. The way it uses the core of Mancala is what makes every turn interesting - you’re trying to spot the perfect opportunities to take - so a lot of time is spent staring at the board, trying to will something into existence that isn’t there. You can’t help but get AP in this one. But there’s something so engaging about the puzzle, that it justifies it.

Nyakuza

This is a brand new reprint of Orongo, a Reiner Knizia game from 2014 that I’d not played. Tiles are added to the board each round, and you must blind bid to earn the right to place the most boats this round. You use the boats to connect up matching fish to the wharf, to build shacks. Build all your shacks first and you win. 

I wasn’t impressed by this one. The bidding isn’t nearly as exciting as his other auction games. And the production choices are TERRIBLE - chintzy transparent plastic with pointless 3D cardboard buildings - the board becomes a disgusting mess that is very hard to follow. I’m glad I didn’t enjoy the gameplay either, because I’d be devastated to own a product this bad.

Nova Era

And yet from the same publisher, CMON, comes this beautiful experience. I’ve never found a civilization game that won me over, and this might just be it. You are drafting dice which you can use to buy cards and influential people to add to your civilization.

There’s a really nice fight over options, and some competition for points that keeps it surprisingly interactive for this genre of games. The engine building isn’t overpowering, you’re not getting lost in AP - but every decision is crucial. The full game took us a while, but it felt like it moved quickly. I’ll be going back for more.

Arcs

Shock horror! Actualol plays Arcs! And you might be surprised to learn I enjoyed it - well, most of it. To me, it’s not that surprising - I like a fighty game, and Arcs gets to that point much quicker and easier than Root. 

I like the way it delivers on this space domination theme in a much simpler, smoother way than others I’ve played. I can’t fault the design and the way it all comes together. Ultimately,  I’d maybe rather be playing a game with more negotiation to keep me interested. And in our game there were some major point swings in the last few dice rolls, rendering it all a bit pointless, but I suspect that might be down to our inexperience. For once, it’s nice to understand why the hype is there. 

Puerto Banana

This is a very, very light alternative to QE. You each secretly bid a number of bananas to try and win more bananas. You can bid as much as you want, but you have to pay the difference between your bid and the second highest bid to the second highest bidder. It’s very silly and pretty random. I didn’t have a bad time, but I have no desire to return to it, and I’d much rather play Q.E. which has more meat for a reason.

Loot

On my return to this 1992 Knizia card game, I found it wasn’t quite as great as I’d remembered. It’s a fun, combative time, but it perhaps lacks a magic quality. I’m officially downgrading it from Designer Reiner to It’s Just A Game Boy.

Wizard Extreme aka Sluff Off

I like a trick-taking game where you have to bid on how many tricks you’ll win, but in this you have to bid which colours of tricks you’ll win! Which just feels like an impossible thing to predict. This one didn’t shake my usual trick-taking indifference.

Finca

This is a beautiful reprint of a previous ugly, but approachable rondel game. You either move your worker on the rondel to claim fruit (one for each worker on your space). Or you fulfill a customer request - spending your fruit to collect points. It’s a really delightful combination of insanely simple, and yet nice and thinky. I really like the competition between the players - you can see what everyone else is collecting, and whether you can deliver before them. I wish they still made games like this. I hope to talk about it on the channel some day.

Fractured Sky

I disappointed my friends by bringing the more portable (non magnetic) version of this. And I actually think it’s easy to set up, because there’s less faffing around with player boards and putting things in their special recess. See my Top 10 Games of 2024 to understand why I love it. And once again it delivered.

Rebirth

Finally, we revisited another game from my Top 10 - getting to play my friend’s deluxe version, which has some pretty handy canvas bags, and thicker cardboard tokens. I wish I had that version. I got absolutely trounced in this one - I focused too much on those stupid objectives and let them get away with massive farms! What a fool. Let’s blame tiredness.

Have a great month!

Actually yours,

Jon