Actualol Newsletter - October 2024

Good day to you!

I return from Lobstercon with news of all the games I played there. I hope you liked my Alternatives to Clue(do) video. 

I’ve decided to hold off the Patron exclusive video until next week. I keep releasing the exclusive video immediately after the main video, and I thought it made sense to spread them out a bit. 

The next channel video will be my Top 10 Christmas Gifts for this year. I’ll be dividing up the recommendations by price, and focusing on games you could buy for anybody.

Lobstercon

This time, I was keen to play as many hot new 2024 games as I could. Let’s see how I got on. Sadly, I had to leave early on Sunday, so it isn't quite the bumper list I'm used to.

Tower Up (2024) is a light, city building game with a shared board. On your turn you either collect building blocks, or you build something with them - adding your colour roof. Building helps you move up tracks. It’s very abstracted, but it’s got a nice mix of spotting the opportunities and getting in front of your rivals. I look forward to playing this one more. It was a good but not transcendent first impression.

Harmonies (2024) is this year’s popular personal puzzle game - I’d played this on BGA, but I wanted to try it in real life. You are drafting coloured wooden discs trying to arrange them 

on your board to score objective cards - which represent animals you’re trying to build habitats for. It’s endlessly compared to Cascadia, because it’s a personal puzzle game with wooden tiles and animals, but they feel very different. 

What I love about Cascadia is how forgiving it feels - you can pivot away from misfortune. Whereas the Harmonies board feels constrictive, and not getting what you want is more frustrating. And Cascadia gives you more reasons to care about what the other players are doing: fighting over the largest habitat, and all following the same scoring objectives. Whereas in Harmonies you’re very much doing your own thing. It’s a tight design, with pretty artwork but (sorry Discorders!), I’d rather puzzle elsewhere.

Bomb Busters (2024) is a cooperative deduction game - in which you’re trying to carefully cut wires to stop a bomb from going off. You each have some numbered wires that the other players can’t see, and you’re trying to make educated guesses about each other’s wires, saying: “that wire is a six” - to defuse the bomb. I like the premise, but the first few games aren’t interesting enough. However, this is a campaign game so it should get better, and I will play it some more. My concern is that for a cooperative game, you basically can’t discuss anything without cheating, so it’s not very sociable. It reminds me of The Crew in that respect - you all have to work it out on your own in parallel with each other. 

Rebirth (2024) is the new Reiner Knizia tile laying game, with very pretty artwork, about rebuilding Scotland after a civilization collapse. And it takes inspiration from many of Knizia’s former games, but is probably closest in weight and style to Babylonia. Interestingly - you draw a singular tile and place it - you don’t get to pick from two or three options. But where you place it is vitally important. 

You will try to create big, growing farms that score every time you add to them. You will fight over the ownership of castles, by trying to have the most spaces adjacent to them. And if you place next to cathedrals you will draw private objectives, which feel unKnizian - because you could easily get lucky and draw an objective you’ve already completed. There are things I like about this one, but it’s got a tough act to follow - so I’m not sure where it will end up in my Knizia rankings. Definitely a Designer Reiner, but I’m not sure it will reach higher. I also played the advanced variant later in the weekend. Expect to see this in a video!

Altay: Dawn of Civilization (2024) is a deckbuilding civilization game from designers Paolo Mori (Libertalia) and Ole Steiness (Champions of Midgard) - so I was excited to see what they could conjure up together. The gist is that you use your deck to create resources which you spend to buy new cards, to create technologies which give you ongoing abilities and to build settlements on the board. You’ll also be attacking other players' settlements to win points. 

It feels very streamlined, but perhaps too much so - the game is over quite quickly, and I don’t think it conjures much feeling of building a civilization. I had hoped the board would be a more interesting aspect of the game. To be honest, I’ve never found a civilization game I’ve been content with - so it might just be me, but I was at least expecting some Paolo Mori magic, and I didn’t find that either. By no means bad, but uninspiring. 

Mountain Goats (2010) I’ve never played this simple filler game, and it was a fun time. You roll four dice and decide how to split them - to move your goats up the numbered tracks. Once you get to the top, you win a token of that number. But if someone else gets to the top they bump you off back to the bottom of the mountain. The decisions are light, but it’s fun and interactive. It’s a good small game, but an unnecessary table hog. 

Intarsia (2024) is the new personal puzzle game from Azul designer Michael Kiesling. This one is also about designing floors 🙃 - this time with concentric wooden shapes that slot neatly into each other. You buy the tiles by playing matching coloured cards, and you’re racing to complete designs ahead of the other players to score more points than them. It’s more convoluted than Azul, and I found the procedure of getting stuff done to be a little more drawn out and AP-inducing than I prefer. It’s hard to pinpoint a specific problem with it - but  whereas a game like Azul flows and clicks with your brain easily - Intarsia didn’t have the same smoothness for me. 

Medical Mysteries: NYC Emergency Room (2024) is like a detective game, but around diagnosing a patient - think Dr. House: the board game. It presents you with a patient, their medical history and symptoms - and you must decide how to test and treat them. I love how much it is based on real medicine - and you’re given these small booklets to teach you about the relevant conditions, so you don’t need to know any of it before the game. The case we played was quite easy, but I think that’s because it’s the first one. I’m very excited to try this one again - it’s right up my street.

Typeset (2024) is a flip and write word-building game. Each round you flip over new letter tiles, and you must write them on your whiteboard, starting or adding to rows of words - trying to make them as long as possible. It’s a really nice level of difficulty - you can always add vowels to help build the word, and there’s opportunities to unlock wilds to make things easier. It’s a pretty solitary experience, but as word building games go, I really liked it. Unfortunately, I think this one is hard to get hold of - hopefully a bigger publisher will pick it up.

Veiled Fate (2022) was the big failure of the weekend. This game is all looks and no brains. You each have a secret connection to one of the 9 Demi Gods. And try to improve your score without giving away your allegiance. So you do a bunch of pointless stuff to try and obfuscate, but it’s impossible to track what everyone else is doing, so you feel lost the whole time. I wouldn’t touch this with a barge pole.

Citrus (2013) is an interactive tile-laying game that I was intrigued to try, that we found in the library. You are laying out citrus groves of different colours, next to buildings that will score when they’re completely surrounded. You place your meeples onto your groves, and you will score the most points from a building if you have the biggest connected group of groves next to it. I really liked fighting for control, but overall I felt the game could have flowed better. Not one I’ll be hunting down a copy of, but it was solid.

Rheinlander (1999) - We returned to this Reiner Knizia game from my Tier Ranking video, to give it another go. It was a fun time at 5 players - but I’d love a reprint with a cleaned up rulebook. 

Have a great month!

Actually yours,

Jon