Game Info
Year
2024
Players
2-5
Age
10+
Playtime
45 min
Complexity
1.5/5
Collection
Your Tier
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Mechanic profile
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Vibe profile
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Description
Players work as bath house staff caring for mythical creature guests by gathering ingredients for baths completing treatments nourishing guests and cleaning pools
Ask a Rules Question
Images
GID0453816.jpg
GID0453816_thumb.jpg
All mentions
Browse transcript mentions, sentiments, pros/cons, mechanics, topics, quotes, and references.
Total mentions: 3
This page: 3
Sentiment:
pos 2 ·
mix 0 ·
neu 0 ·
neg 1
Showing 1–3 of 3
Video Kw9MD3qHA6s
Board Game Critique Analysis at 20:15 sentiment: positive
video_pk 81166 · mention_pk 200198
Click to watch at 20:15 · YouTube ↗
Overall sentiment (raw)
Positive
Pros
- Spectacular at the table
Cons
- Rulebook issues necessitate community tutorials/summaries
Thematic elements
Comparison games
none
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Mechanics unknown.
Video topics + discussion points
No key topics recorded for this video.
Quotes (from this video)
- Great games shipped with terrible rulebooks.
- The problem isn't the design, it's the documentation.
- When the gate is broken, it doesn't matter how amazing the garden behind it is.
- The rulebook is supposed to be the gate that lets you into the experience.
- This isn't getting better. We're not talking about ancient games... we're talking about high production releases from the last few years that arrived with rulebooks that simply do not work.
- That's not a learning curve, that is a wall.
- The rulebook tried as hard as it could to hide all the weird stuff.
- The cruelty of it is the context. This is a re-release.
- A reprint is supposed to be your second bite at the apple, your chance to sand down every rough edge.
- The BGG threads at launch were just flooded with rules questions, and people were asking whether later retail copies shipped with a corrected version, which is the most damning signal a rulebook can possibly send.
- The publisher rewrites the rulebook and releases the new version as a paid product.
- The irony is doing some heavy lifting there. That's almost too perfect.
- Players blame themselves first.
- And that is the real damage of a bad rulebook. It makes people feel stupid.
- There is a difference between density and dysfunction.
- A good rulebook scaffolds complexity. It layers information in the order a player needs it.
- The structure is so dense and so poorly sequenced that you consistently have to read it multiple times across multiple sessions before anything coheres.
- Community-built rule summaries became the standard learning tool, more reliable and more frequently consulted than the rulebook the game shipped with.
- More than a decade after release, the standard recommendation for new players is still to skip the rule book and watch a video tutorial first, which is a clear signal that the official documentation never became trustworthy enough to stand on its own.
- That's not an FAQ, that is a corrective supplement to a deficient primary document.
- That's what bad rule books generate, this cottage industry of third-party fixes that should never have been necessary.
- At some point, a pattern is a policy.
- The rule book was written for people who already know how to play.
- A game asking players to invest significantly in both time and money should not require that players outsource explanation to volunteer fans online.
- Simplicity is no protection.
- Writing a clear rule book is a separate skill from designing a clear game.
- When you've spent that much money and waited that long, opening the box to find a document that cannot explain how to play feels like a betrayal of the implicit contract between publisher and backer.
- Complexity is not an excuse for poor structure.
- Game designers are not naturally positioned to ask that question because they already know everything. They need editors who do not.
- Professional technical writers exist. Rule book editors exist as a dedicated specialty within the hobby now.
- Until publishers treat rule book production as a non-negotiable line item rather than an afterthought squeezed into the final weeks of production, we will keep having this conversation, and players will keep arriving at what should have been a great first session armed with a document that sets them up to fail.
- Every single game we've talked about today is worth playing.
- The rulebook failures we've documented are a reason to seek out community tutorials and third-party summaries and how to play videos before your first session. They are not a reason to avoid the games entirely.
- The rulebook is supposed to be the gate that lets you into the experience. And when the gate is broken, it doesn't matter how amazing the garden behind it is.
- The Conan rule books were universally panned, and that experience cost Monolith both bad press and the additional expense of rewriting and posting replacement rule books to backers.
- That's the line that should be tattooed on every studio's wall. A game designer understands their game completely and intuitively, which is exactly why they are poorly positioned to write the document that explains it to someone with zero context.
- Until publishers treat rule book production as a non-negotiable line item rather than an afterthought squeezed into the final weeks of production, we will keep having this conversation...
References (from this video)
No references stored for this video.
Video Mca_NlNQyYI
The Dice Tower News at 16:39 sentiment: negative
video_pk 80715 · mention_pk 197513
Click to watch at 16:39 · YouTube ↗
Overall sentiment (raw)
negative
Pros
none
Cons
- Hates the cover art.
- Poor production compared to previous games.
Thematic elements
- Running a bathhouse for mythical creatures
Comparison games
none
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Resource Management — Keeping the baths clean for guests.
- Set Collection — Players are collecting ingredients and completing treatments.
Video topics + discussion points
No key topics recorded for this video.
Quotes (from this video)
- This is the new way they're doing campaigns.
- The core box comes with a three-chapter campaign, and when you buy a campaign, it's just three chapters.
- So, it's a much more like, I guess, approachable, you know, campaign.
- Questline, which is a card drafting game set in their definitely not D&D universe.
- It sounds a little bit like Fantasy Realms.
- This is a new standalone board game set in the same world as Isle of Cats
- Your expedition to the frozen lands in the north has suddenly become a rescue mission and you must rescue as many penguins as possible before the ice melts.
- So, it's an open drafting and penguin placement board game.
References (from this video)
No references stored for this video.
Video xv9xk9syWMw
Grant Lyon News at 12:36 sentiment: positive
video_pk 80325 · mention_pk 195339
Click to watch at 12:36 · YouTube ↗
Overall sentiment (raw)
positive
Pros
- interesting tension between serving customers and cleaning baths
- cool artwork
Cons
none
Thematic elements
- Serving mythical creatures
- Baths
- Recipe fulfillment
Comparison games
none
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- recipe fulfillment — This is mostly like a recipe fulfillment type of game.
- Resource Management — You have to collect these cards with different resources on them and then you will discard those resources to clean a specific customer.
- Set Collection — You have to collect these cards with different resources on them and then you will discard those resources to clean a specific customer.
- Worker Placement — Cleaning the baths uses a turn.
Video topics + discussion points
No key topics recorded for this video.
Quotes (from this video)
- Sorry this video is coming a little bit late this month.
- I have been on tour with my board game comedy show.
- Almost every single show has sold out so far which is better than I could have hoped for.
- So I hope to see you at those shows as well.
- This is a cooperative party game.
- The grid is smaller.
- This is a trick-taking game at its core.
- The twist of the game, the thing that makes it interesting and different from other games, is you will have sort of a background card and a transparency colored card. And when you combine those two things, they will create a different color.
- There is worker placement. There is hand management. There's a betting and bluffing aspect to the game.
- So yeah, that is 23 games coming to retail here in the month of June.
- I have been releasing episodes of It's All Funny and Games.
- Thank you so much. I'm Grant with Grant's Game Rex.
References (from this video)
No references stored for this video.
Transcript Navigation
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