My retro weekend
(mostly music and video games, I'm afraid!)
Are gigs getting quieter, or is my hearing just getting worse with old age?
I’m really not sure. I suspect it might be a mixture of both. But whichever of those it is, I’m finding it very pleasant to not spend the next 24 hours after a concert feeling like my ears are full of cotton wool and my head is submerged in a bucket of water 😁
So… yeah, I missed the early October Newcastle Gamers session due to a night out in Leeds, watching a trio of early-90s guitar-and-sampler bands make an audience of 50-somethings behave like 20 years olds.
“Reach for the lasers?? … with MY sciatica?”
And the next day… the nostalgia continued! …with a visit to one of the largest remaining video arcades in europe: Arcade Club Leeds.
It was, truly, a Gen X retro-gamers paradise; room after room (spread over three floors) of classic arcade cabinets, pinball machines, shooting games … all set to free play!
I had NO memory of the seat in the sit-down version of Atari Star Wars being quite so close to the floor. Thirteen-year-old MrShep didn’t have nearly as much difficulty getting in and out of his X-Wing fighter as fifty-something-year-old Mr Shep did! 😜
I enjoyed my time at Arcade Club. A lot. But, sadly, the journey home would take me a couple of hours, and I’d promised Mrs Shep that I’d be home in time for tea. So, despite the fact that the entry fee allows you to “play all day”, I was only able to spend a few hours there; not nearly enough time to have a go on everything of interest. I’ll definitely need to pay a return trip the next time I have an excuse to be in Leeds (Or Bury, or Blackpool… the other places that the club has a branch!) … and if you’re at all into the golden age of arcade games, I’d highly recommend a visit!
Anyway… I guess board games are the main reason you’re here. So I’d better post some board game stuff. Though, to be honest, the October gaming drought has continued. Partly because I was so busy last weekend … and also partly because the symptoms of a really, really bad cold came on just a couple of days after my return from Leeds, which left me generally feeling like not doing very much of anything at all. (Well, that’ll teach me not to go jumping up and down in a stuffy room full of sweaty shouting strangers, won’t it?) I did, however, manage to slip in an online game of Snowdonia at yucata.de on Monday night (always a pleasure!), and a new boardgame-of-the-month package arrived from Button Shy Games on Tuesday.
I haven’t talked about Button Shy for a bit, have I?
And I’m starting to wonder if I have a bit of a Button Shy problem… 😁
I’m not sure when I first joined the Button Shy board-game-of-the-month club. I suspect it must’ve been around the time of the pandemic (especially when I look at the total number of wallet games that I’ve acumulated in that photo!). At the time I already owned quite a few of their better-regarded wallet games, and figured it might be a fun thing to subscribe to. If nothing else, it would likely give me something to blog about when pickings were slim (that was back in the days when I had a definitely-almost-daily BGG blog!).
When I joined, the fact that it was called a “board game” club was probably a slightly better desciption than how it operates nowadays, as you’d often get post-card based games — with little cut-out tokens — or print-and-play roll-and-writes, and things like that included. These days the club is, essentially, just a subscription service for all of Button Shy’s core wallet game releases and expansions — with occasional bonus micro-games and exclusive wallet games thrown in that you can’t get anywhere else.
And as you’d perhaps expect … it’s a mixed bag. Some of the releases are solid gold; Skulls of Sedlec (and its many, many expansions), and the Sprawlopolis range rank amongst the best games that I own. Some of the games I can accept as being very clever designs (particularly some of the puzzlier solo games in the Scott Almes series), but aren’t really my kind of thing. Some of the games I take one look at, quickly realise that I’ll likely never ever feel the urge, or have the right group, to play it, and into storage it goes … perhaps never to see the light of day again. And there are, naturally, all kind of levels and degrees between the extremes.
One of the games in this month’s delivery is a game called Adventurous. And — for my tastes at least — I think it’s one of the more interesting BGOTM things to arrive in a long time.
In essence: Adventurous is a solo game, with an option to play it co-operatively (so take that 1-4 player count with a very hefty pinch of salt!). Lay down cards — in an overlapping (sprawlopolis-ish) style — to chart a single, continuous, dotted-line route across the ocean. Your route cards also show a variety of symbols; whirlpools, sharks, tridents and tentacles … and you have a number of “marvel” cards that you need to place into your tableau by covering up a requisite set of symbols specific to that marvel. Lay out all of your cards successfully, and you then get a score based on the length of your route, whether you got all the marvel cards played, and how many “uncovered” symbols are still showing in your tableau (with too many symbols of a specific kind causing you to go “bust”, and score nothing in that category).
It’s a very pleasant, elegant brain teaser, which plays quickly. The easy levels aren’t too challenging, and break you in gently …but there’s definitely a bit of bite as you move through to the more complicated variations. And, perhaps most importantly (bear with me here; this might be hard to explain!) … a session with Adventurous somehow feels more like “playing a game” to me, rather than “doing a puzzle”. 🤔
I think the problem that I have with a lot of Button Shy solo games — by which, I guess I mean, their solo games — is that they sometimes feel a little bit too much like trying to solve a rubiks cube … or complete a super-difficult logic problem, rather than playing a game. They make me feel like I’ve been set a task with a very specific solution; a puzzle for which I need to plan perfectly from my very first move in order to succeed …and I’m often left feeling just a little bit stupid and annoyed when I don’t spot that required route to victory (or questioning if there even WAS a route to victory for this particular set-up!).
Adventurous, by comparison just feels a whole lot more … “playful?”
So yeah, I enjoyed this one. Games of Adventurous are perhaps a little bit samey, which might be a problem for some players (though a mini-expansion included with the package introduces a new kind of ship with alternative rules, and a set of marvels with slightly-more-complicated pre-requisites than the base set … so there’s definitely scope for content injections to keep things interesting!).
But it’s one of the better Button Shy packages, I think.
I hope a few more mini-expansions will follow!
I’m 100% in for a board gamers play retro arcade games meet-up.
Have you played any of the Converge games yet? I noticed one in your picture. I think they are excellent 2 player games, presenting engaging choices each turn.