Springsign: Win an election against anarchists!

0:00 let's talk about spring sign an upcoming game about running for May against anarchists welcome to brains on games I'm Dr Brian McDonald in this episode we're going to talk about an upcoming game that was sent to me recently uh by the folks over at the end games and it's a game that's about running for mayor of a Forest Town everybody's going to play as animal characters it's a game called Spring sign now spring sign is a game for between one and six players so there are Solo rules in the Box it's it works with kids age 10 and up and games only take about an hour or two to play Let's Take a deeper look at Spring sign from the end games this is a prototype so tokens and artwork and even the rules might change a little bit one change I know that's coming for sure is that they're working on finalizing Advanced player boards they're making sure that everything balances out but you'll be able to play Boards that are asymmetric so that not everybody has the same well everyone has the same actions that they can take but they might cost different resources and everyone will have some special ability that their player board will allow them to use spring sign is a light game it's not too too complicated I mean the resource management is the hardest part maybe of the game but it is light and

1:30 what you're trying to do in this game you're going to win by earning enough votes to be elected mayor and you you need a different number of votes depending on the player count and two to four players you've got to get four votes in order to win the game you're not just competing against the other players though there's also this Anarchy token and if Anarchy is more popular than the players then Anarchy wins and all of the players lose this the way that I've set things up here is not quite the way that the actual board will be set up when you're playing the game there are particular buildings that are going to be out buildings are interesting because any player can use them they're not controlled by any player and if a new building comes up it it covers up the old one you've got relics that give you some ongoing permanent ability unless somebody steals that Relic from you these things are pretty powerful too uh of course you've got your popularity tracker and your vote tracker here on the side at the beginning of each turn you start by by filling up these little spaces on the board on the settlers even on the troublemakers and bandits that are coming into town anywhere where you've got a symbol with a little clock underneath is going to get another one of these tokens these are super important because you spend these tokens to take different actions in the game so you need fish to feed settlers um you you need to have some might over here or you some these sword tokens in order to fight against Bandits for example you need to to study you need those blue

3:01 scroll tokens in order to get one of these relics so there's there are lots of different ways that you're going to be spending these resources but they're going to pile up through the game unless you take them as you go through so these resources especially the ones on the board here are going to pile up and pile up the every turn and so you might get a great big stack of them uh when you take some action that allows you to to grab those resources and you spend those resources to take action so I can spend a fish to feed a settler that's going to allow me to take one of the tokens off of that sett so you've got these buildings the buildings are are going to allow all of the players to maybe spend some resources or give them some ongoing ability you can buy these these relics our fa well my favorite Relic was an a backpack that gave you two Extra Spaces two extra resource spaces because you find as you get through the game that this the number of spaces you have in your backpack it's way too limited to do all the things you want to do some of these actions take four tokens in order to do them and you've only got a limited number here that you can hold at any given time so you can buy these relics you can use the buildings you can replace buildings you can also hire these settlers and bring them into your homestead and then at the beginning of the turn instead of these tokens being available to all of the players if they feed that settler those tokens go right into your backpack at the start of each

4:32 turn and that's how you're kind of building up an engine that's going to give you those resources that will allow you to take the actions that you want to take although you are as I said limited by the number of spaces you have in that backpack so everybody's going to spend their resources sometimes you'll do something that will make you more popular and you might have your tokens moving on the popularity board over here then at the when everyone's done and if I'm done all of the actions that I want to take maybe I want to save some resources or I'm totally out of resources then I the action I can take is to go home and when you go home you get to choose one of these little they're called Harvest tokens so the first one to finish gets his choice of whichever ones he wants this is going to give me two food and make sure that I get the first player token uh for the next round once everyone has returned home well there's a few things that you need to do you need to check on these troublemakers and to see how popular maybe Anarchy is in your city so if you look over here you've got those fire symbols this is a bandit he's got two fire symbols this is just a settler who's a troublemaker he's got one and that means that anarchy is going to move up one two three spaces on the board now the turtle and Anarchy are tied right now for being the most popular those guys are both going to get a vote here and then they go all the way back down to zero now if you managed on a turn to cross over and get more than six popular get up to more than six popularity you

6:03 don't have to get it all in one turn then you can go back down to one but you get a vote so there's there are a number of different ways you can earn these votes and the game's going to end when someone gets to that set amount at the top of the board but it's very easy for Anarchy to kind of run away with the game you have to be careful here even though the players are competing with one another to be the one who's the most popular who's going to get that vote at the end of each round um if you don't kind of work together to make sure that these Anarchy symbols go away you're going to find that anarchy very quickly becomes the the most popular and you wind up everybody winds up losing and no one wins so you're you're going to want to earn or save up some might tokens so that you can get rid of those Bandits because that's two Anarchy symbols at the beginning of every turn and you need to be careful when you draw from this world deck because if you do decide to explore in the hopes of finding a good Relic to go down here or another building with a different ability I mean this is where the bandits come from there are a lot of bandits in this deck so you wind up adding more and more and more Bandits to your stock here and I mean look at this a Bandit's going to get a vote right away as soon as you count those things up so you've got settlers that you can take resources from or you can hire them into your homestead and that's going to earn you resources that go into your backpack every single turn once you've counted up those votes and you've figured out the popularity of all the players in the game you add a couple of settlers to the board you replenish all of those spots

7:35 that requireed to replenish them you're going to fill up your backpack and then the first player of the turn starts all over again and you continue until you get up to that number of votes that you need in order to win the game what skills though are you practicing when you play spring sign well this is a game that does require some budgeting of course you're budgeting your resources you're budg budgeting the actions that you can take you're trying to be very careful about making sure that you you don't get too many of those fire symbols at the bottom that's going to cause the players to lose the game um so there is a lot of budgeting there's planning ahead you get so few resources at the beginning of the game and then you have to figure out which which of these settlers down here do I want to hire in order to get the right symbols that I want later on to do whatever action it is that I want to take so you're budgeting and your planning and whenever those are are things that are happening in in a game as and they do happen in most strategy games we're talking about executive functioning skills those skills and behaviors that you need to work toward goals and that's what this game is about for sure it's light there's not you know a super amount of complex planning and problem solving to be done here but you are doing planning you're doing that budgeting and Resource Management as well so those are definite examples of executive functioning skills final thoughts about spring sign um well this is a game that you're doing a

9:06 little bit of not very complex but you're doing a little bit of engine building you're doing a lot of resource management uh and so it's you've got those cute animals you're going to have those Advanced player boards I'm so excited for the advanced player boards we really enjoyed playing this game every time I played it with my group this was a hit what made it a hit was The Limited number of resources that you could hold so you were always making choices towards the end of the game about which what you needed the most um you you were really working hard to get the right relics that would would give you an ability uh that would allow you to earn more votes um and it was re it was the Anarchy really that I I think kind of elevated um spring sign because you you're it's not a Cooperative game but in a way you might sometimes need to Cooper up in order to make sure that this fire symbol doesn't run away with it um that was our favorite part it really made it a different experience I think than some of these other um engine builders or worker placement games because you've got a not well it's it's sort of like another player but there's no real AI to to speak of you're just counting up those symbols each turn so um super simple to keep track of but wow do you ever need to save up those battle tokens so that you can get rid of the bandits or maybe you want to make sure that the other players don't take all of

10:36 the resources off of one of these troublemakers so they get discarded uh before you count up the the fire symbols on them so um that anarchy element to it that extra it's not even a dummy player because I don't like games where you have to control a dummy player it's just that simple count of you know are the are the players doing what they need to do to become mayor of this town or are people just getting fed up um so such a neat mechanism that we really really like we like The Animal theme and uh I'm super excited about those asymmetric player abilities the ones that I've seen the examples that I've seen so far they're going to be a lot of fun uh although you might sometimes get players fighting over one that they particularly prefer uh but you've got a game that's quick to play it's easy to learn well I say quick it's under hours for sure honestly if you're not careful it's going to end very quickly because Anarchy is just going to win the game um but it's it's not it's it's not too challenging um there's a little bit of take that in terms of relics that might allow you to steal someone's Relic um but there's not too much take that there's a there's interaction in terms of figuring out when you need to cooperate to do something about um Anarchy taking over uh so it's just a fun experience it's there it's not a brain burner um but

12:07 there are interesting decisions in terms of managing those resources there's fun choices in terms of the actions that you're taking uh You've Got The Animal theme the artwork on the cards is fun this was a great game I mean are there downsides um maybe some of the cards are extra powerful it might be the most desirable ones you know I wanted that backpack every game if the backpack came up I needed to make sure that I had enough tokens on my board in order to get that Relic before anyone else got it because that gives you two extra spaces for resources which is a fantastic ability to have um so there might be some cards that would be extra sought after but that's a minor not even a quibble really of course in a game like this there's going to be some cards that are going to speak to a player strategy but um we just had a great time this was a winner every time I pulled it out it was a winner some some of my friends would come over and be like well let's play Springside again so it's just a prototype but everybody enjoyed it everybody wanted to play it again so I have to say thanks so much to the folks at the end games for sending the spring sign prototype my way if you have any questions or comments or suggestions you can leave them in the comment section below the video I reply to all of those comments or you can email me at Brian brains on.cafe.com brains on games.cz the website that's where future episodes will go previous ones are already up there brain on games is the X handle on the Facebook page and the Instagram feeds are all over the place and if you

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