Actualol Newsletter - November 2024

Season’s greetings!

On the 3rd day of Christmas, your true love (me) has brought you 3 game reviews - Worms: The Board Game, Focus and Shenanigrams, the last two of which have a certain Christmassy charm, or maybe I’m just listening to Christmas music while I’m writing this.

I hope you enjoyed my Board Game Gift Guide video, and Best Board Games I Don’t Own exclusive. The next video will be my Top 10 Games of 2024! And the next patron exclusive will be my 10 Biggest Gaming Disappointments.

Actual Life

This month we went on a trip to Norwich, where we sampled their local board game cafe Slice + Dice, which was very nice. They serve artisanal crumpets! Quite the game changer.

It’s always fascinating seeing what games people pick. I overheard a group there who had been sent some tips by a friend to try Quacks or Parks, but then they opted to ignore the advice and chose The Animals of Baker Street. They should have trusted their friend!

Last night I was in another board game cafe, and the young couple next to us were on a first date. They started by playing Chess, and within minutes the guy had taken half her pieces! That’s a daring opening gambit to try and win a second date! 

Actual Games

Shenanigrams is a bold challenger to the Scrabble space - that combines the competition of Scrabble, with the simplicity of Bananagrams. 

You take it in turns to add a letter to the “board”, so you’re growing words together rather than having to place them down fully complete. Once you do finish a 3+ letter word, you place your token on it to claim it. But another player can then steal it off you, by adding a letter of theirs to it - either extending it (e.g. SHOW into SHOWY) or swapping out a letter (e.g. SHOW into SHOT). 

So the game is about spotting opportunities where you can finish off words, or improve on them to make them yours. So it feels like Scrabble, but it’s less hard to pull things off, because you don’t need to have the full word in front of you. 

And the stealing of words isn’t as common as you might think - you can only steal by switching one letter, and as the grid grows, it becomes impossible to change certain words anymore because they’re blocked.

It’s light and simple - a much quicker, less stressful alternative to Scrabble. My least favourite thing about it are the stupid tokens they expect you to balance on the words to mark them as yours, because they’re not fit for purpose. Annoying, but you can muddle on regardless. 

It doesn’t have any of the clever notes of a modern board game - this is an unapologetic mass market family game. But I don’t mind that in a word game, and I’m hoping to try it with more players at Christmas.

Worms: The Board Game is exactly what you assume it will be. A slightly dodgy simulation of a beloved video game, packed full of nostalgia.

I loved Worms back in the day, but it’s been 20 years since I’ve played it, and the board game brought it all flooding back. You each have a group of worms that you’re trying to keep alive while you kill off everyone else. You will collect crates, blow up fuel cans, set off mines, and fire at each other with bazookas, cluster bombs and super sheep. 

If anything it’s probably too faithful to the original game. It tries to simulate every aspect that you remember, but in a way that bogs it down with rules intricacies. And they don’t mesh with the buckets of luck in the game. You can forgive detailed rules in a strategic war game. But in Worms, you slog through the steps of a turn, only to have your worm killed by a die roll.

But the fatal flaw of board-gamifying Worms is that you can’t emulate what made worms special - the physics engine that makes it challenging and funny. You can’t feel smug that you pulled off some expert ninja rope acrobatics, followed by a perfectly weighted grenade throw - because here your skill is replaced by the roll of a dice.  

It is very silly, and very chaotic - and I think some groups will find some joy in that. But I’d rather play something like Colt Express, that is also both of those things but doesn’t weigh you down with rules.

This year there’s also a game called Snails which is very clearly inspired by Worms, and may well be better. But no matter how close they come, I think that trying to recreate Worms for the tabletop is a fool's errand.

Focus is a cute little two player cooperative game. There’s a 4x4 grid of images - and you’re both secretly assigned one of them.

Your goal is to give clues to your partner about which one is yours by taking other cards from the grid in front of you. The first card you take is the best clue, and so on. And the clues must do the talking, because you can’t. 

You have to be careful not to take your partner’s card as one of your clues, because if you do you immediately lose! So it’s not just about taking what best represents your card, but also keeping an eye on their clues and not taking what could be theirs. 

It’s a cosy little two player game that works nicely. It probably won’t set anyone’s world on fire. But I enjoyed it. Will I keep it long term? I’m not sure - but I’d happily play it a bunch of times in a row by the fire (I don’t have a fire), and be very content. 

Playlist of the month: Jon’s Christmas Crackers

I hope you get to play some wonderful games this holiday season.

Merry Christmas from the Actualol household!

Jon