The Opinionated Gamers

Designer: 木皿儀 隼一 (Hayato Kisaragi)
Artist: ryo@にゃも (Ryo Nyamo)
Publisher: ワンドロー (ONE DRAW)
Players: 3-4
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 30-45 minutes
Times Played: 5 with purchased copy. (Deliverer: 3; Mayor: 2)
Availability Note: The copy I have was acquired by a friend at the 2018 fall Game Market, but at the time of this review, copies are available from bodoge.hoobby (transship service such as Tenso required).

When I’m old, I’ll eat pizza on Fridays.  It has a name in my life: Pizza Fridays. It also has a black twist: it starts when my wife dies.

I try to make it to the gym 3 or 4 days a week.  I often don’t because things come up. It’s important to me, but y’all: so are many other things. The weekends are when I succeed.  Weekdays inevitably come down to making it once or twice, but if I can make it on Saturday and Sunday, I’m likely to hit my 3 or 4.

I don’t do it to lose weight or build muscle or really anything too specific, other than trying to die later than I otherwise would. I go as preventative maintenance. Medicine. It makes for some interesting dynamics while I’m there.

Whichever of us dies first, the other will be crushed. If we have our faculties enough about us, the plan is some sort of ‘taboo travel’: if something happens on a pirate cargo ship on the way to see Socotra, well, we hope to have had a good life. But if something else happens, well, the plan is to make sure I don’t die first.  If I don’t, there’s a vision of me curled into a fetal position by the front door, awaiting a pizza delivery on Fridays. (Until then, it’s a too-many-carbs thing and boo dairy; no pizza.)

In the meantime, I sometimes make guacamole with bananas instead of avocados because of a Shopsin twist on a Carlin joke. Shopsin puts eggs in most everything, including as pizza crust. It’s like a broiled open-face omelet with marinara. I ate that frequently years ago. Might have been every night.

I have a complicated relationship with pizza.

Anyway, in PPDGttGT, the players are pizza deliverers attempting to complete deliveries in a ghost town.  But, here’s the thing. The ghosts that live in the pitch dark ghost town like to play pranks, like stealing your pizzas.  So you, the psychic deliverers, attempt to use your powers of perception to find the pizzas, fight the ghosts, and get the pizzas delivered.

In 20 minutes.  Otherwise the pizza is free and you lose.

Designer: Corné van Moorsel
Artist: Steven Tu
Publisher: Cwali
Players: 2-5
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 30-50 minutes
Times Played: 8 with purchased copies or convention library copies

This is going to be a post about the paths we take.  I don’t think I mean in some sort of life choices sense.  More the physical directions we go.

Here’s one:

It’s for elevation. I told my wife that when I get dementia or am in any similar situation, to take me back to that trail. I just found recently that alltrails.com will show you these elevation graphs of given trails. This specific trail brought me an unexplainable amount of mental comfort. If I remember it or not, if I’m aware of what’s happening or not -if something can break through to bring me solace, it’ll be that trail.

Here’s another.

One day last year, that’s the sequence of paths I took. A sort of double figure-8.  

I like to count stop signs on the way to work. This thru street has 8.  The next has 7, but is one block further out of the way. Is there a time saving. That highway exit leads to x stop lights while the next one has y, but it also will involve z left turns.  If I take the bus, it’s a larger time commitment, but I’m free from driving and supporting public transit and other things; it is a much different path.

Here’s another one.

This time a second or third grade project to map out the path between your house and school.  Glad to see I noted where the ice cream parlor was and that I was distinguishing between banks and savings and loans.

A few years ago, a friend mapped out the patterns of his day and designed his new house around the paths of his home life.

In general, I don’t notice the paths in my life (despite being very aware of them), but I’m coming to recognize that it’s something featured in many board games that I love, and it’s important to me in an effort to understand myself, that I trace back the games I love to my life outside of these games. In my ongoing efforts to catch up with games I love that we’ve never reviewed, today I’m going to talk about Habitats.