Button Shy's Wallet Games

[Phil]

I finally got to play Handsome yesterday. What a lovely little word game that is! The design is also an ingenious response to the 18 card constraint, which causes it to be quite unlike any other word game I own. It looks to me as if it supports 2-6 players equally well, and of course it’s ultra-portable. I thoroughly recommend having a look at this if you enjoy word games.

Here are the cards:

Handsome

Together they comprise all of the consonants of the English alphabet, and none of the vowels.

Each round players will be working with a private hand of 2 cards, plus a public pool of 5, and trying to come up with a word using any/all of those 7 cards combined with as many arbitrary vowels as they require. Each card may be used once only (so no repeated consonants are possible, but repeat vowels may be used); and for the cards with two letters you may use either one of the letters, but not both.

The cards come in three suits (necklaces, bow ties, and bolos) and each round there is one point allocated for each of the three suits, going to the player(s) whose word used the most cards of that suit. A given word may score in multiple suits, and the “dual suit” cards count for both of those suits. The S/Y card has no suit. Finally, the longest word of the round scores a bonus point, regardless of suits. The winner is the first player to 9 points.

My sole caveat is that I think it’s a challenging word game for some of us – my brain struggled with linking up the consonants I could physically see in front of me with vowels which had to be conjured up mentally. Regardless of this, I greatly enjoyed it; but the BGG comments section tells me that I am far from alone in finding the visualisation difficult, and that some people have ditched the game on that basis, so YMMV.

We only had time for one full game, and I came last, but I got the best word of the game with “exfoliation” (which was dramatically better than all of my other words!)

My first impressions are that this is a little gem, and absolutely a keeper for me.

Edit: Solo variant on BGG: HandSolo - Unofficial Single-Player (Solo) Variant | Handsome

[Phil]

Scott Almes’ latest is A Nice Cuppa. On the one hand I’m a sucker for a game themed around having a cup of tea. On the other hand, this game seems to be themed around Soothing your Worries with a cup of tea, and in service of that they have cards with some pretty genuine Worries. I’m not sure that a game about tea is going to have the same soothing effect as the actual tea, whereas the cards which are actively reminding me of things that can cause stress might well cause actual stress. This might not be the game for me…

[mistercrayon]

i Can appreciate the attempt here. You can see this easily being replaced by something generic (although here it might be useful as a memory guide to have specific words attached to certain moves). It’s obviously a risk to illicit real feelings but I like a bit of a gamble sometimes.

(and you wonder what this tea is doing to make someone forget all of this!)

[Phil]

Don’t ask questions; just give in to the power of the tea…

[Phil]

2025 preview:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/2025-button-shy-117894869

Plus:

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We added a new coupon code to the site for the rest of the year. Use coupon code 24FOR2024 to get 24% off your orders through December 31st.

[Phil]

My first game of ROVE (I completed only 5 of 7 missions!) along with the other acquisitions from the order (which arrived yesterday):

The ROVE module which must jump over at least one other module is evil.

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I managed a win in game two :). I’m playing at “Normal” difficulty. The other two difficulty levels are “Hard” and “Impossible” (and I suspect the latter isn’t too far off the mark).

The artwork is a delight. Each mission card (the ones showing scenes from the story) is requiring you to rearrange the modules into a specific shape (and always with some particular module in a specific position in that pattern), and the pattern always mimics what the story picture shows (notice how the five generic positions of the pattern match the joints of the robot’s arms, extending from the ‘body’ module). And the way the cards form a series of events is beautifully done. What a nice way to apply some theme to what is really a thoroughly abstract game.

(And the Aqua Rove cards switch the orientation of the story cards, to show you descending into the ocean depths instead of along a planet surface, which is another neat touch.)

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Edit: I had another win at Normal difficulty. I thought it was going badly for the first half of the game, but the final three missions turned out to be a doddle, and I finished with two cards still in hand, and a couple of special abilities unused. I’ll have a crack at Hard difficulty next time.

[Whistle_Pig]

@Phil

The ROVE module which must jump over at least one other module is evil.

Wholeheartedly agreed

[lalunaverde]

ROVE is super cute

[Phil]

I’ve continued playing ROVE on hard difficulty (and generally getting the win, although I haven’t yet been willing to try Impossible! :‍) I haven’t tried any of the expansion cards yet, but will no doubt do that soon. It’s a lovely spacial puzzle. The same co-designers have worked together a bunch, and Dobson was behind Skulls of Sedlec which I also have/like, and they have Adventurous in the works at present which I’ll have to keep an eye on.

At the Helm hasn’t grabbed me yet, but I’ve only had a couple of games. It might go on the sell pile if I still don’t feel a hook the next time I try, though.

The Last Lighthouse I’m enjoying. The cards are a linear “sea” moving towards the lighthouse. Each card can be either a Nightmare (bad) or a Trap (good), and they all have different effects and attack ranges (which can vary in each direction). The nightmares want to destroy the lighthouse (or consume it with darkness), and your goal is for the lighthouse to survive until the face-down deck of nightmares is empty.

You start with a hand of 4 Traps and you only gain more of them by defeating the Nightmares. Every round you have two actions (place a trap at any position in the sea; or defeat a nightmare if you’re able), after which (1) a new nightmare is added at the far end of the sea; (2) the nightmares attack either the Lighthouse (if they can; damaging it) or else one of your Traps (if they can; destroying it); (3) the card nearest to the Lighthouse is then either destroyed (if a Trap) or shifted to the far end of the sea (if a Nightmare).

To destroy a nightmare you’ll regularly need to have 2 or even 3 traps which which can attack it simultaneously, so you want to get the most out each of your limited traps before they are inevitably destroyed – but keeping your traps safe for another round generally means allowing the lighthouse to take damage.

The special card effects happen either when they are placed or when they are destroyed, and because every card is different you’re always trying to decide which cards to place where for best effect; but there are never too many of them in play at one time, so the choices never seem overwhelming. I don’t feel any sense of an overall strategy – I’m basically just puzzling out the best move I can make with what I have each turn – but I’m finding it quite an enjoyable balance.

The card art is nice, but (as with most of these games) it’s all pretty abstract. The rules insanely fail to clarify what the attack range values mean, but BGG confirms that a range of zero does mean “you cannot attack in that direction”. There really are a lot of rules queries on BGG, but that one was the only really absurd omission I could see. The game might be slightly too easy – I’ve yet to lose (although I haven’t yet tried the hardest difficulty, and maybe that’s where it’s best). I think that’s ok, though – so long as I feel I won due to making good decisions, that’s fine by me :).

As thematically disparate as they are, I get a vaguely similar gameplay feel from this one as I do from Elevenses For One, which is the micro-game (from a different publisher) that made me interested in the Wallet Game series in the first place. That’s a good thing too (at least for my tastes).

[Phil]

Unless I go cold on the game, The Last Lighthouse Expansion Collection – Button Shy is something I’ll most likely pick up in future. I’m now playing on the hardest difficulty and still haven’t lost a game, and BGG agrees that the game is too easy, but suggests that the expansions make it harder. I might try some house rules in the meantime.

Looking at BGG comments yesterday, I kept seeing people describe this game as a “Tower Defence” game, which threw me a little. That’s the label for a style of video game where you have long streams of enemies marching towards your ‘tower’ and you have to place defensive elements at strategic points, such that they will ultimately be able to deal with all the enemies before your tower is destroyed.

I’ve played a handful of tower defence video games, and learned that they are not for me. It’s not that they’re objectively bad – lots of people absolutely love them – but without exception, the ones I tried (most of which had rave reviews) I found to be tedious, and so I quickly put the phrase into my lexicon of things which, if I saw it in a game’s description, would make me immediately lose all interest.

I don’t think I’d feel any differently about the video games today, and I do see why people have described TLL that way, but this game feels to me like a focussed little card puzzle with only the, well, Trappings of that video game genre.

[Acacia]

Tower Defense: kingdom rush frontiers. If you don’t like that, then nothing will in you over:)

Yes, there are a lot of bad ones out there.