Top 10 Gateway Games - JonGetsGames

welcome to Jong it's games this is the fourth and final bonus top ten video that is being created to help support and draw attention to the John goes pro patreon pledge drive this has been happening throughout the month of February 2018 now you may or may not know that I've recently turned John gets games into a professional endeavor and that means I have been pouring a ton of more time into making these videos at the start of the year and in order to make this financially make sense the support of all you viewers out there is really necessary so if you are interested in directly supporting the channel please check out patreon calm down its games and take a look and see if any of the pledge levels make sense to you alright so let's now get into the top 10 list itself and this week I'm covering what I think are ten of the best gateway games that are out there I do like these games as well but I'm trying to organize them based on just how well I think they do add actually introducing people into the Hobby and specifically trying to imagine what it'd be like to be somebody who is not familiar with games to sit down and play these games and try and consider the depth of the gameplay versus the actual rules length and all that kind of stuff so this is absolutely a very subjective list but let's go ahead and jump into it coming in at number 10 we have dimension which came out in 2014 and the idea of this game is really simple each player has a little board in front of themselves with a variety of the holes in it and a bunch of these colored large spheres and every single round you're going to flip up six rules in the middle of the table and everybody needs to simultaneously try and build a little three dimensional pyramid out of these balls that try to match all of those rules and the rules to the actual game itself are incredibly simple and then the actual game is just six of these rounds and each round only takes one minute each so when you account for maybe downtime in the middle as you score these things this overall game can take like maybe 15 minutes and I love the the kind of thoughts and things that go into actually processing how you're gonna put these balls out because the rules are relatively simple they might say you need to make sure that nothing is ever on top of an orange ball and it might also say you must always have more green balls at then black balls and you don't need to use all of the balls out into the middle of your area you just need to use the correct number of them and then on top of that if you're able to build a structure that matches all of those goals that's fine but you're also gonna get these little bonus tokens if you can do all six of those rules and then also make sure you use at least one of each of the colors because oftentimes it's easy to solve a rule like if it says you need more white than black if you just don't use any black then by definition even one white ball in the middle is going to satisfy that so I love it the fact that there are kind of these a couple different tiers of difficulty and I like how easy you're able to jump into this game and just kind of fall into the rules and the puzzles and all that kind of stuff that's happening and since it is real-time and only takes a minute that means that I guess if a player is just really not into this game they're gonna figure it out very quickly and the overall experience is not very long but what I found is that people really do dig this one and I have quite enjoyed this one as well of course meant this one when I was significantly into my board gaming career already so I have to imagine what it'd be like to be coming into this new and I do think that as possible and like feel a little bit stressful for people coming in to board games to try and try this experience out but at the same time it's a very low level stress because again it's just six rounds of one minute and the the idea of the game is so abstracted that you don't even need to worry about like theme pulling you in like you know how many people are gonna die or something like that you're just trying to get points and you're trying to do it better than the people around the table and I found that every time I've played this game the just the general ambience of voices and words and things that people are saying is just fun to hear as people are kind of struggling to make these things work kind of kiting themselves and trying to build this thing up in front themselves so yeah this one has pretty much always been a hit when I've seen a plane and I think that it would work really well for people coming into the Hobby next on the list we have the newest game we'll be talking about today which is a quaza which came out in 2017 now the idea of this game is you are trying to hide your gems behind a waterfall and from a visual perspective this is a really cool looking game you put it in middle of the table and you have all of these rows and columns and the majority of the columns are hidden by these water tiles and as the game goes on there's this large lizard cardboard piece that kind of slides across the waterfall opening up new locations to put your gems in and from an abstracted perspective all you're really doing in this game is drawing cards into your hand and then spending those cards to lodge these gems into with the different rows and columns on the waterfall and whenever a column is completed with the different tokens and you will do a scoring and you'll just see who has the most tokens in that specific column and they'll get some points and then you're going to also score every single row when you score the columns so that means that you can put the gems really far out and not necessarily into the column that's gonna score next because what you're looking for is you get points for the columns but you get bonus tokens for the rows and so this extra level of trying to do some area majority within rows and columns and trying to keep up with the tempo of the game means that from a rules perspective the game is incredibly simple but what you're trying to think about you know this turn and in the future is a really satisfying situation and I think that for people coming into the Hobby this would be a great way to be introduced to the idea of area majorities as well as the idea of just what are you trying to do on this turn like tactical thinking with hand management but also what are you gonna want to do multiple turns out and how are you going to want to compete in some of those competitions many turns out by putting those gems really far out onto the waterfall area I think that graphically this game looks really great out on the table so I think that's gonna definitely pull people in but like I said just the simplicity of the gameplay going into the decisions that you're making and also the reward you feel as you evaluate all of these columns and the rows and you get all these tokens and this and that you really feel like you're being rewarded for the good decisions that you've made whether or not those were actually good decisions for yourself or maybe your opponent's just didn't play off you as well as they maybe could have so in general this game really impressed me and I think that it would work very well for people coming into the Hobby moving on we now have the oldest game and that I'll be talking about today and that is can't stop which came out in 1980 now this is a pusher luck style game with a very simple rule set all you do on your turn is you roll four dice and then you need to split those four dice into two pairs and they're just regular d sixes and you sum up those two dice and then you have this big board in the middle of the table that looks like a stop sign and on it you have all of the columns that go from 2 to 12 which are the possible numbers that you can get by adding two regular d6 dice and you're going to put these little temporary markers out there and then you can roll the dice again and if you hit another number that you've already done on this turn you can move your temporary marker up and you are going to keep going until you either choose to stop or if you can't stop which is the name of the game and you're gonna keep rolling until you bust which means there's no combination of those two those four dice that will give you numbers that you've already done earlier in that give and turn and then you lose all of your progress and then the next person takes their turn and this is a very simple game you keep playing until one person it's their marker up to the very top of the level their permanent marker because when you stop you replace the temporary ones with your permanent ones and you're just gonna keep going until somebody gets there and the fun from this game comes from the atmosphere that is generated like the rules are so simple but when it's your turn you have this wonderful stress of like do I keep going why not you always have this just one more roll type of feeling and then when it's not your turn even though you're not actually actively making decisions you are just like heckling the person you like you're trying to tell them you like roll again of course you'll be fine you know you want them to bust and then when they roll and they somehow hit it and you could like groan or if they bust then everybody cheers and you pass the dice all round so you need to make sure that you are okay with everybody cheering at your failure but you also know that if that happens then you are about to be cheering on but other people's failure as well and so I just love the atmosphere that this game brings to the table and especially if people are not familiar with modern board gaming and of this game is like almost 30 years old but I'm still going to lump it in together that if people aren't familiar with it there's often a feeling that board gaming is kind of a dry quiet affair and this one definitely up ends that and I really enjoy this game I haven't played it that much recently but my copy is from in the early 80s and I have actually been playing this game since I was a child like I have no idea what exact age I was but probably like seven or eight the first time I actually played this one and that's still the copy and as all its faded glory and in my collection so this one I think is a really solid game okay the next game we'll be talking about is ascension now this game came out in 2010 and I think it brings a couple really interesting things to the table when it comes to modern board gaming and kind of opening people's eyes to some of the interesting cool things that it does now from ascensions perspective this is one of the first deck building games and deck building again is that the idea where you have a really basic decks that's the same as everybody else's and as you play the game you're going to get new cards to put into that deck shuffle it up and then play those repeatedly as that gets bigger and you get deeper into the game and hopefully these cards are gonna combo with each other and do some really cool satisfying things and now while this is of course deck-building in a nutshell it's also a engine building style thing you know the idea that this thing is an engine and you're kind of feeding things into it and you hope it's not a clunky engine you really want to run smooth and spew out a whole bunch of currency so you can get really high victory point stuff back into that deck and I think that this is a a really cool idea if you kind of step back and if you're familiar with that building games you step back and try to consider a world without deck building like it's a very interesting idea especially for people who maybe are only familiar with classical style board and card games like you're really just building this thing in front of you this like little beautiful little sand castle is gonna be different every single time you play based off the shuffle of that deck and that I believe is gonna be a very novel experience and also I think that the decisions that you're making as you are playing through the game can be very satisfying and also you will feel the ramifications of your bad decisions and your good decisions and feel ownership of those as you're actually playing through the game so I think for all these reasons ascension makes for a really good gateway experience alright let's keep working down the list and for the next one I have a two-for-one because this is code names and code names pictures which came out in 2015 and 2016 respectively and they're effectively the same game just in one you have these clue cards with words on them and in the other one you have clue cards with images and this is a team-based game where you put these clue cards into a grid in the middle of the table and each team has a single clue giver and they try to give these clues to their teams so they can figure out which cards are theirs before the opposing team figures out which are all of their cards and so this game does a lot of really good things from a gateway perspective the first is that it incorporates a wide variety of player counts like it plays six very well it also plays ten players very well and I have noticed that sometimes when people are getting into the Hobby and coming to game nights for the first time they have an inclination to try and play bigger games where everybody's playing the same thing at the same time as opposed to splitting off into smaller groups and codenames does that very well also you have the ability for people to collaborate with each other as long as they're not the clew giver if they are on the rest of the team they can't discuss what the options are and try to figure out what they should really go with as far as the clues that they're doing and what order they should do and that whole experience gives it a cooperative feel while also being competitive because you want to be to the other half of the people on the table so these are just a few of the reasons why I think code names work so well as being gateway experience also from a rules perspective as long as the clues giver clue givers know the rules pretty much everyone else you don't even really need to teach the game you just set it up and you start playing so it has a very low barrier to entry when it comes to rules and the gameplay experience seems to have gone off very well every time I've seen it play next up we have patchwork which came out in 2014 and this is a two-player only game where you're trying to build the best quilt or at least one that can beat out your opponents and from a mechanics perspective this game does a couple really interesting modern type of board game things while also having a relatively low amount of rules overhead because what you are doing on each turn is drafting these really funky shapes and puzzle pieces and you're putting them into your quilt in front of you but in order to grab those pieces you have to spend a currency which is buttons but also a currency which is time and you only take your turn to when you are farthest back on this a central time spiral in the middle of the table so if you spend too much time then you might give your opponent several turns and this is a pretty neat idea the first time you run into it and it works out very well and it also has a little bit of engine building in the game because the pieces themselves are going to generate buttons which are a resource that you use to buy more pieces so it has that kind of escalating feel of you know playing off the good decisions that you made previously in the game and also since it's a two-player only experience it usually runs relatively quickly because it's just you and the other opponent trying to go head-to-head with this quilt making experience and this one has gone over very well with pretty much everyone I've seen play it and I think it's just a combination of the interesting and low-overhead rules as well as a satisfying experience kind of nestling all of these little puzzle pieces together okay let's keep moving down the list and for this next game we have Stone Age now this came out in 2008 and it is a worker placement style game that does a whole bunch of things right and I think from a rules overhead perspective you can get into this one relatively quickly but it has quite a bit of strategic depth especially for people who are just now approaching the modern board gaming hobby now the reason for this is because you have this pool of workers and on every single round you need to kind of plan out how you're gonna be using these workers you know you only have so many of them and you can actually get more workers by going to a specific spot on the board or maybe you need to go over here to get some wood over there to get some brick and then over here so you can use the wood and the brick in order to build that building and then go over there to grab that development card and all of these things are potentially blockable by your opponents because if they go on to those spots then it's gonna be harder for you to get gain access to those locations depending on which spots they are on the board and I think from a worker placement perspective this is probably one of the best games to actually learn this style and I think that's there are a lot of great things that you can think about while you're playing the game in addition to the fact that this is a worker placement game where you can actually spend multiple workers with an action many of this tile game it's always just one worker one worker one worker but here you need to think like do I send three or four workers over into that area to gather wood for instance on this turn and how many workers do I have left and what can I do with those different things and activating all of those great decisions is just a big part of why this game has had some really good staying power throughout the years and why I really enjoyed playing this one a bunch this was one of my gateway games I think it was the second game I really got into when I was getting into mana board gaming and I must have played this one 30 or 40 times way back then so I can tell you from personal experience that this is an excellent game gateway a gaming experience and I'm not sure how easy it is to acquire these days but it should still definitely be out there and you should totally give it a try if you haven't let's now move on to what is likely the most well known game of this list which is Settlers of Catan now this game came out to end at 1995 and I suppose recently it's just called Catan these days but from my personal perspective this was my gateway game I had no experience with anything modern board gaming and then ten years ago back in 2008 I met some new friends who loved Settlers of Catan and they taught me the game and we proceeded to play it almost weekly for well over a year and I have everything all of this to thank for Settlers of Catan because this is the reason this game is a reason I found BoardGameGeek and I found so many other games and kind of really fell into loving this hobby and so let's talk about the game itself I suppose so what you're doing in this game is you have an island in the middle of the table and you have a handful of resource cards and you're gonna spend those cards to build out roads and settlements and cities and those settlements and cities are going to generate you more resources based off of a die roll you're gonna roll these two dice between every single turn and then everybody who is adjacent to the specific spots based off the die are gonna generate those resources so this game does a whole bunch of really good things from a gameplay perspective the first is you get stuff when it's not your turn you get resources when it's not your turn but also you get to interact when it's not your turn because a big part of this game is trading and negotiation you have cards in your hand and you don't necessarily need to use all of them and your opponent might desperately need this one type of card so now you're gonna negotiate trading this card or that card back and forth of them but maybe they're also trying to make a deal with this person over there so now you're trying to make a better deal then that person to try and make this thing happen so that you can build the stuff that you really need to down in front of you also the game has a great mechanic where whenever a7 is rolled on this pair of dice then anybody who is hoarding 20 cards is gonna lose a whole bunch of cards so you are very much motivated to try and stay under the card threshold which means you might find yourself doing trades just to not have so many cards in your hand but have the correct cards in your hand by the time it actually comes back around to you so this game has a very low rules threshold you can really get into it belted B quickly it's very very interactive and if you enjoy getting in each other's way and really like squeezing the last bit of trading of you can out of specific things and this one's definitely going to appeal to people but also I think that the variance of the dice somewhat levels the playing field it does mean that you will have players where you just feel like you just could not catch a break and you're like I lost because of the dice and that can't happen but I suppose any game with where you have a roll you roll dice and see what happens because of it could have that potentially happen and I think the trading amount in the game levels that down to a very reasonable amount and while I have not actually played this game in many years at this point I can say that it was played to death for me I suppose death implies I'll never play it again but I think I am kind of over it at this point because it was played so much as I got into the hobby and that's realistically what gateway games are all about at this point we've reached a game number two and that is gonna be concept now this one came out in 2013 and it is more of an activity than a game if I'm being totally honest with you because what you have is a large board in the middle of the table and it is covered in a variety of little descriptor boxes of a wide variety of different things so you might have an area that's just colors you have an area that shapes you have an area that might be like professions and temperatures and you know just an incredible number of different icons on the board and what you're doing is you have one person who has a clue that they're trying to get to out to to the people around the table and all they could do is put cubes down on the board and the cubes can match colors to little question mark so you can make an idea like you say you put a red question mark down on to this one spot and then the spot is a box and then maybe you put a little cube down on to the brown spot and it's people say oh so it's a brown box and then you do another thing over here and try to integrate all of these different concepts together to get to the ultimate goal and the game itself has rules in it and victory points and you should never ever play with those realistically the best way this game is played is you just put it at the board of the mill at the table and you just have people start going for it like I have one person trying to give clues we've found also that it often times makes sense to have two people giving a clue together and I think that the official rules has you doing that but since we never really played with the official rules I can't speak to that very well but I can say that this one seems to get along great with pretty much everyone who's tried it and this is another game that plays pretty much any player camp like I mentioned with code names earlier I've seen code names work and I've seen the concept to work with four people and I've seen it work with 10 or 11 people and you just kind of go until you're ready to do something else for quite a while it was played somewhat often at the end of or game nights as kind of a way to ease ourselves out of it but I have also taught this game to many people who have been just getting into the Hobby and it's been wonderful to see how engaged people can get with it now I will mention that I have seen one or two people - people just not get it they just don't figure it out and I suppose that can happen with most games but the reason this game is so high up on lists again is because you just get it out - and just start playing as long as one person understands the rules and they are the first person to actually do a concept the board you'll see all these little lights turn on in people's heads as they kind of grasp it and in general have a really good time playing it okay we finally reached my number one gateway game and that one's gonna be Colorado now this game came out in 2003 and at first it doesn't look like much it's just a little deck of cards in this small box and all you do on your turn is you either draw a card and then add it onto one of the face-up piles in the middle of the table or you take one of the piles in the middle of the table that's essentially the whole game so from a rules overhead perspective it is a very easy game to get into and it does play two to five players so it's somewhat flexible in that respect but the reason this game works so well is because you have a wonderful tension when it comes to the scoring because what you're trying to do is get sets of the different colored echoes but you're only gonna score positive points for three of those sets and so that means for any other colored geckos that you have outside of three they're gonna give you negative points for that set again and the more of that color that you have the more points you're gonna have and of course if you go really wide then you're going to get more and more negative points for that fourth or fifth color that you have in front of you so what you're trying to do in this game is figure out the right moment to grab the cards from the middle of the table and you need to decide is this the moment or maybe not and I'll draw a card and maybe this card is great for you so you want to try and put it on a pile that you don't think anybody else is gonna take but they can see what you wanted so they might take it just to kind of messy you over and every single round there's gonna be one pile per player in the middle of the table as long as you're not playing with the two-player variant that is which means then as you kind of build these piles out invariably somebody's probably gonna get something they want and somebody's probably gonna get a pile they really don't want within that give it around and then you just add more cars and you just go round around around until you get through that whole deck and in general it seems like this game plays in like fifteen to twenty minutes or so and from a gateway perspective this was not a gateway game for me but I have taught this game to probably six to eight people that have essentially no experience with modern board gaming I kept it in my work backpack for quite a while actually and I would teach it to some my co-workers when we had a break at work and I would always say you know this little deck of cards is gonna get you guys yelling at each other in about ten minutes and they could look at me incredulous Lee and then we start playing and then sure enough it would happen because the way you draw those cards and the way you picked to put them down the pile you're gonna put them down such a way to really try and make things hard for your opponents and it's been wonderful to see this game come alive pretty much every single time I played it like it seems like people just enjoy the decisions that come into play here as long as you don't mind a little bit of conflict back and forth between everybody and just the amount of game and enjoyment that has come out of this small little box has been really surprising to me and this is part of the reason why I actually bought the 10-year anniversary version with nicer artwork but there are a couple different versions of this game that I think you can go ahead and acquire but for this one I think for its size and its complexity level to the overall rules Ness it really deserves the top spot on my list of game way games well with that it looks like we have now reached the end of this list and I hope that you found this one interesting as well as the previous three that I did earlier on in this month again all of these were made to help support the pledge drive that is happening right now and the patreon campaign that is really kind of boosting the ability for me to make these videos professionally well into the future from a financial perspective because obviously I'm spending just a ton of time working on them so if you would like to support the channel and support all the stuff that I'm doing please consider going to patreon.com/scishow Nets games and checking out all the variety of different things that are over there speaking of patreon as always I'd like to thank all of these producing level pledges as well as everyone else who has been supporting this channel through the years now if you'd like to see more vlogs style content like this one as well as the in-depth board game reviews that I do and the full game playthroughs please subscribe to the channel thanks for watching you