The audio didn’t and then did work this week on the stream. Of course, then a webcam started acting up, so that was fun. But we got a whole stream in and I managed to get in three games of Metro X in 45 minutes. If you are curious about this route making roll and write, I’ll talk about it more but you can also see how it is played.

The Game(s)

Only one game this week, but it is a game that I have had a fair number of plays of now solo. And I wanted to highlight it as an interesting roll and write (flip and write technically) game.

Metro X

This game I originally got interested in when I saw Tom Vasel play it on the Dice Tower. It seems like a good puzzle and one that is nice and easy to teach. Now, I haven’t had the opportunity to teach it yet, I’ve only played it solo, but I will say, it is a very enjoyable puzzle of a game.

In this game you have a collection of routes that you are trying to complete on your metro transit system, one side is tubes and the other bus routes. You flip a card from the top of the deck and then fill in that number of spots along one of the routes. That sounds simple, but there are a few small rules that make it interesting for me. Firstly, the routes intersect, so you fill in a spot and it can count for two routes. But because the routes interconnect if you hit an already filled in spot on a route, you stop filling in bubbles.

And then there are also the transit locations. These give you points if you get the card flipped, but they also limit how much you can fill up. Each route can only use a certain number of cards. So while you have to use the transit stops when they are flipped, pretty often you don’t want to because it’ll mean empty spots at the end of the game, and the more empty spots, the more negative points you get.

Overall a fun game and you can see my review here. I will say that while I am enjoying this solo quite a lot, I think it’ll be better with multiple players. There is a lot of randomness from the cards, but when everyone one is getting the same randomness it will be interesting to see how much score vary. In my three games my scores vary a lot, but that is because of the card flips. So it is hard to compare.

The Beer

So last nights beer was a pretty boringly named one Schells IPA. Schells is a Minnesota brewery based out of New Ulm, MN. And I was not a huge fan of their IPA. I talk about the different ways to use hops and how different hops have different profiles. I tend to like the money piney hops and the more citrus hops. This was more in line with tropical fruits. And while that can be okay, it isn’t my preferred. Mainly, the tropical fruit flavor in this was a bit muddied between a number of flavors and the bitterness didn’t match with the flavor set. I tend to want my IPA’s to be more focused on the bitter.

Have you tried Metro X, what do you think of that roll and write?

And if you are a beer drinker, what hop profile do you look for in your IPA’s? Or do you even like IPA’s?

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.
Support us on Patreon here.