Simone Luciani

actually by...

Simone Luciani.

So it's by Tommaso Battista, Simone Luciani, and Nestore Mangones.

So apologies if I have mispronounced those names.

They all sound very either Italian or French or maybe something else.

It is born and die.

So, it's got some nice pieces in there.

Like, Simone Luciani, you know, Tommaso Batista, you know, just really, really good designers.

So I don't know.

It is from Simone Luciani, which is a designer that I do generally enjoy.

This is also from Hisashi Hayashi, which did Bomb Busters and Yokohama and trains.

So like he has a pretty good design pedigree, but I don't know, not up my alley.

This week, we are talking about Gollum.

This is a one to four player game designed by Flaminia Brassini, Virginio Gigli, and Simone Luciani.

Artists Francesco Campani and Roberto Grasso.

And published by Cranio Creations.

I even wrote it down.

This is a, I think, another Simone Luciani game where you are, and a couple other people, he's always designing with co-authors.

where you are members of Sigmund Freud's inner circle in Austria in the early 1900s.

You're exploring the ideas of psychology and unconsciousness and basically innovating the idea, the experience of psychotherapy.

All right? On the topic of Tommaso Battista, I get to play Barrage: The Colorado Connection.

This is an expansion to Barrage by Tommaso Battista and Simone Luciani, the same designers as Barrage, put up by Cranio Creations in 2024.

And I was playing with a whole bunch of, huh, what's the term? Uh, expert try-hards.

You know the kind of player who says, "Ah, I see why you're doing that," and you're like, "I have no idea what I just did." It's like, "Well, you're making sure that you're gonna be first in turn order when the next round comes up.

Next up is the 2023 game Darwin's Journey.

This is Simone Luciani, Nestor Magon- Mangone, uh, Christian der Nederlander, uh, with art from Christian der Nederlander and Paolo Voto, published by ThunderGryph Games.

One of the things I really like about ThunderGryph Games, the publisher makes an effort to make them slim.

These games come in boxes very similar to the size of the non-fancy version of the Brass ga-- of Brass: Birmingham or Brass, uh, Lancashire.

You have little explorers on each of these three different islands, which are a track ... which are tracks, and as you complete-- as you move it along, you get bonuses, and you also build up this sort of engine which gives you more bonuses when you do things and cascades back into itself.

You are trying to get papers, quote-unquote, "published" so that you gain these ideas that will help you work with Darwin as he works on his ideas of evolution, but also gain you fame and glory.

If you have played any of the recent Simone Luciani games, the tracks on tracks ones like Newton or, to a degree, Lorenzo Il Magnifico, although not really, you have played a similar game.

They're, uh, it feels very much in the wheelhouse of that designer and not, but not in a bad way.

Which Italian designers do I think are the best stroke most consistent? It's tricky.

I mean, if we're talking about best, we're probably looking at Daniele Tascini, Simone Luciani, Nestor Mangone.

There's probably a few others as well.

But as far as being consistent, I think probably Daniele Tascini for consistency.

What are you curious about? Why have you been so interested in this game?

Well, if anybody knows me, you know that I am a huge Simone Luciani fan.

And this is a co-design with him and Nestor Mangoni.

And one other designer, I think.

Yeah

... from, you know, the normal duo of designer Simone Luciani and Daniele Tittini, and it has a very interesting sort of dice drafting system.

You're gonna choose a die, and it's gonna be a certain color, and the pips on it are going to tell you how much of that resource you're going to get.

You know, so, you know, yellow for coins and gray for, unfortunately, gray for this, gray for that, gray...