The Best Small Games I Bought at the UK Games Expo!

0:00 Making it bigger doesn't make it clearer.

0:02 It does on CSI Miami. Hi everyone. I'm the broken mele. Win or lose, I'm going to be honest with you. And talking with my chin on these games is a little bit tricky. It's almost feels like I'm one of those like puppet beans that's like constantly almost yeah a bit like I'm Wallace and Gromit. But yeah, the reason I've got it is because I got this big tower of small games. And what I've wanted to do for some time, like literally since the UK games expo, is report on a bunch of these games which for the most part come from all play and in the case of where I bought some of these Hesh games, one of them is Grandpa Beck's games. But I'm trying to make a point here because I have gone on record, especially in the last few months, kind of ragging on games that are just too big. You know, everything that is popular, everything that everybody goes crazy for when it comes to the hype train is all about big massive crates. Here's my voy. Here's my gloom haven. Here's my, you know, big giant box game. I mean, Whisper Wood is getting a ton of uh, you know, um, praise at the moment. It's like, yeah, it's probably it it it was solid enough in the demo, but it's a big box full of stuff. That's why I want it. And it's like

1:23 the Magnus Alex 302 in TV. It's bigger.

1:27 Can we maybe just calm down and think about some smaller games once in a while? And honestly, when I went to the games expo this year, I was kind of disappointed by what I saw. I mean, games Games Expo doesn't really release a lot of stuff anyway, but they usually demo some other stuff coming out in the future. And of course, there were some big box grandio stuff and some were better than others, but for the most part, it was kind of meh or just not interested. You know, nothing there that was sold in a big box gave me any interest whatsoever.

1:58 Oh, hell.

2:01 And given that you've got some pretty mighty big box stuff there, I mean, you know, Fury, you know, and a few other publishers like that, that is saying something. These are all games that I bought while I was there at the games expo. And as I said, most of them, I think, came from the all play stand. I'm pretty sure that uh four of these ones did. And I'm pretty sure these two came from Hashet Games. And this one was Grandpa Beck, which is a pretty small publisher that I think only does this game. Maybe they do one or two others. I couldn't tell. But, you know, it's basically I'm making a point here that I think the small games dominated the UK Games Expo. For me, it was all about trying to find a bunch of hidden gems. That's kind of the main thing I get out of the UK GE. Finding those little games that you just don't expect to find, you know, not necessarily indie published games, but just small games, just small in terms of size and scope. And so what I did is I kind of went on a mission and looked around for a bunch of small games, demoed a few, and some I just bought on a whim. And a lot of these are trick takers. I mean, Skull King blah.

3:05 the amount of people who have been banging on at me to play Skull King ever since I did my TrickT takers list. I kept thinking I hate this game, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the Skull Pirate base card game I hate is not this one. I think it's something else cuz the mechanics were very different. We got a couple of games here that are mostly uh you know, this one's just a little filler game. This one's about card shedding. But these four are all trick takers from All Play. And I got to admit, I love the All Play stand, you know? I mean, it's it it's kind of like they have these free bookcase shelves effectively with like you take a game out and another one pushes through. It's a pretty elaborate setup actually. Got to give them credit. But they just have loads of these small games. They got some bigish stuff like they had container and a few others there. But for the most part, it's all games that are barely this big or just this big like in a small square box and they sell for relatively cheap. I mean, you're paying, you know, a tener or less for a lot of these games. And particularly in a couple of cases here, they're sold for like three, four quid because they're on their discontinued line or the line that they're eventually going to take off.

4:08 So, I just basically went there and bought a bunch of them. And I love how they tell you the mechanics of the game up front. There's a little label that says, is it card shedding? Is it hand management? Is it trick taking? Is it push your luck? You know, that kind of thing. So, I can immediately disregard any game that says push luck, for example, or area control. But as soon as I thought, all right, I want to look for more trick takers, I basically went and found four more trick taking games, including Sale, which is a game that's been out for a while that I've just never had a chance to play. So, bought a bunch of these on a whim, pretty cheap, including Skull King and all the rest of them. And now I'm just going to give you very quick overviews of what they are and what I think of them. You know, just to kind of eliterate my point that for me, the UK Games Expo was dominated by the small games list. That's not to say that every single one of these games is fantastic, but I am going to, spoiler alert, keep all of these games. I mean, a they don't take up a lot of space, but also, you know, they are all pretty solid games. Just some are better than others, and I want to go into some detail.

5:07 Get on with it.

5:08 So, let's take the ones I got from Het Game. So, this one is a Subvertie, I think, is the publisher, but basically it was sold. It's called Symbiosis. This is a very tiny little game, filler length. You know, you play this in about 15 20 minutes or so. And essentially all this is is a two to four player game where you have a bunch of cards that look a bit like this. So they've got a creature like a little insect on it as well as a number kind of scoring condition. It could be flat VP or it could be blue is worth 5 VP, dragonfly is worth 4 PV, that kind of thing. And the idea is is that you basically have eight of them laid out in front of you, but they're all face down. So you have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 eight. There you go. Eight cards like this and a few in the middle that you're going to pick from. Nope. I got to make this mistake and realize the camera only dips so far. So, I mean, let's just say I got these three here.

5:53 Okay,

5:53 careful. It's learning.

5:54 Now, one of these cards will be face up to begin with. So, here we've got a blue dragonfly, I think that is with red scoring four or orange scoring four. They're quite close colors. And the community cards there. What you do is that you basically exchange a card from here with one in the middle. So, I might take, you know what, I'll take this orange one because I've got orange is worth four points over here, and I'll exchange it and put it over here. Now, the idea is is that you'll keep rinse and repeating this. You'll be flipping these cards over and exchanging them in the middle until eventually you are going to have eight cards in front of you that have varying different colors, creatures, and scoring conditions. But the way the scoring happens is that you effectively have your tableau split into three areas. So, you have all of this stuff, right? So, you have this green, these oranges, these two blues, these two things, these two fish, these frogs, you know, that stuff that all of these belong to you. But in terms of how they score, these four score based on your tableau of cards. These two score based on the neighbor to your right's cards.

6:53 These ones score based on the neighbor to your left. So you're looking at what they're doing throughout the game while also deciding whe to get cards on the right, but also which ones you're going to harbor for yourself. It is pretty much as simple as that. You just create a tableau of eight cards in front of you and score, keeping an eye on your two neighbors. The one person opposite you, yeah, four player is not particularly useful. This is best played as a free player game, but even two, it's not so bad. But I mean, even if you play it with four, this game's like a 15inute filler. It's done super fast. But it's a neat little game. It's just really easy to teach. It's like something you can do while waiting for other people to arrive. You get it done in no time at all. The cards are nice and big. The scoring conditions are really easy to tell. It's not fiddly. Very easy rules. And you know, you can sleeve them. I use sleeve kings for all of these. And it stores in the box still fine. And you even get a very useful score pad where basically it sort of emphasizes, you know, what cards you've got. You score them up individually so you haven't got to do any complicated maths and everything just stores in there really nicely. And I think this was bought for something like I can't remember. It was like it was 10 quid max, but it might have been like 8 quid or something. You know, it was a pretty cheap little card game. And yeah, no space taken up at all. It's just nice, simple, really cool little filler.

8:09 We are Finn.

8:11 All right, let's take a look at the other one. Omens. Now, this one has definitely had some interesting feedback from people I've played it with. And I got a brief demo of this at the expo, but very brief. Like, I pretty much filled in a spot just so the guy could illustrate what it was like with certain number of players. And this is basically a card shedding game. So, the publisher of the Is it Hashet or is it somebody else? I forget with this one. Um, I mean, it's Oh, yeah. Well, it is Hashet that did it, but we got like spiral editions and Watts on it. So, this is a card shedter. So, card shedding slash kind of pseudo trick taking. It's kind of weird, but the idea is is that you have got a bunch of these cards that are sort of tarot cards and they've all got a number of and suit on them. So, you start off by shuffling a few of these absolute cards which are the highest number and they have the same power.

9:00 Exchange a card with the player of your choice. But the rest of them, which aren't all in the game at any one time, basically players will get dealt a small hand of them and they come in different colors and they have like the numbers and on the back of the uh you know your player team card effectively, it'll tell you what the the denominations and everything in the deck are. So numbers 1 to eight are green, numbers 9 to six is 16 are yellow, there's a universal 17, 18 to 25 is red, etc. And the way this works is that you play this in teams. So, first you set up with these randomizer cards who's on what team. And it's all based on player count. You may have uneven teams with odd players, but the game still kind of works at those counts, but I do think it's better if you play this with even players. Four is just a good sweet number. What's it do?

9:45 Four to six. So, yeah, you can do this with um five players, but and you can have odd teams, but I think this is probably better if you played this with four or six. But the idea is is that once you've got the team sorted out and you know who's on what team, you're dealt these cards. One of them will be an absolute to begin with. And then what happens is that you play it kind of like a trick taking game. Somebody will play a card in front of them, resolve the ability on it. If it's a lightning bolt or if it's an hourglass, it happens at the end of the turn, right? And then next player will play one as well. So I mean I play this 11 yellow. Somebody else plays a six green. Somebody else played their 34 um absolute and did some shenanigans with exchanging and somebody else plays a 15 yellow here for example. So I've just played a bunch of cards and you will still have cards left in your hand. The idea is is that you're trying to sort of win the trick but for a different reason that you might think.

10:36 So the highest number will be discarded that card right but other cards have effects that also say they may get discarded as well. So, for example, this green six here says, "Discard this card if it is the lowest value card in play." Well, I've got an 11, a 15, a 34, and a six here. So, based on this, the 34, these are the two um yeah, discard this card if the only other yellow is in. This is the only yellow in play. There's two yellows. Sorry, doesn't happen. And this one was an immediate effect. I'm just not going over at this point, but that means these two don't get discarded or win the trick. This one wins the trick. And so, the player discards this out of the hand. And this one is the lowest green. So, this one gets discarded. If you didn't win or if you if your card didn't get discarded, you draw it back up into your hand and you get to use it again. But you'll notice that obviously other players are now short one card in a hand. And that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to get somebody on your team to get it so that they've only got one card left in their hand. It's a card shedding game. You only start off with, I think, four or five cards and you're trying to get them down to one. And it's neat cuz these abilities are not like crazy complicated, but there's based on who's what teams are around, where they're sitting, who went first, who's going last, who won the last trick. There's a lot of interesting little tactical play you can do, but you can't discuss it with your teammates. So, you can't say, "Well, I'm going to play this if you play that kind of thing." So, you have to try and get into your teammates's heads and think about what is it that they need in order to win. And only one of you has to get down to one card. So,

12:06 you might get into a situation where somebody is doing pretty well at discarding cards. I then focus on getting them to discard their card by playing cards that are going to hinder the opponents. And it's just some cool tactical play. And of course, these cards do some cool funky shenanigans and you won't have them all in the game. But the interesting is is when you it's a bit like Skull. When your team wins, you flip the card and you have to basically win again in order to claim like total victory. But the cards that you had get shuffled back in. So, previously everybody had an absolute card and a bunch of little cards. Now though, all of the ones that got played get shuffled back together and dealt out. So, you will see cards rinse repeated, but the absolute cards could end up in different players hands. You might not turn up with one when it's your turn. So, you get a little bit of an interesting kind of variety uh change between the next rounds. It's a really weird game, and I may not have explained it that well, but it's clever. It's interesting. It's something a little different. team based, you know, can work quite nicely.

13:06 Only takes about 30 minutes to play the game. You know, 30 to 40 minutes tops, I would say. You know, maybe catches a couple of new players out at first, but, you know, does not take long to get the rules down. The cards look great. You know, the art is, you know, very colorful, very striking and that. So, they do it does turn pad heads when they come around and go, "Oh, yeah. This looks interesting." And of course, stores in a nice little box. This is just one of those quirky card games. I'm like, huh, this is something a little bit different, something a little bit clever. It's given me a little bit of card shedding, which I'm pseudo okay on. I I don't mind card shedding games. I don't dislike them. I don't overly love them either, but just given me a tiny flavor of trick taken in there as well, just to kind of spice it up a bit. This one was quite popular, I think, with people that were playing it. And when I've been playing it with people at the club, they have definitely been liking it. It's got strong interaction, team-based, unique cards, looks the part, small box. I think this was maybe a little bit pricier than I would expect for the box. You know, somewhere between 10 to 15, but it's worth it. This is a neat little game and worth your time.

14:11 Thank you, Mr. Cowboy. I'll take it under advisement.

14:13 Okay, next up, let's look at Let's take it. Come on. Let's look it up. Skull King. Loads of you have been banging on at me to give my verdict on this one. I have finally got it. I have finally played some games. This is a pirate themed trick taking card game where you play 10 rounds. Each round you'll total up points and at the end see who's got the most. No teams, no nothing, right? And it's got a lot of tropes from typical trick takers. You know, you play a card, you typically follow suit. But this one has a bit of a twist where you've got a bunch of special cards as well. Now, you can play with an advanced variant that introduces more special cards. Honestly, I haven't played that variant that much. I'm mainly commenting on this from the base game and that's mainly because when you play this with new players, I'm not sure I recommend you use the advanced mode with like pirate special powers and you know other special effects cuz honestly this game has maybe a few too many effects that are going off and it's not easy to kind of follow what they all do. But for the most part, you have essentially got free sorry uh is it free uh free I think it's free suits of cards. So you've got all the yellows here which are just a generic suit. You've got all the greens which are just a generic suit and I think that's Oh no, you've got purples as well. So purple, another generic suit. Three suits numbered, you know, one to 14. All good. You've also then got a black Jolly Rodger suit which are kind of like trump cards, but it's not exactly necessarily the best thing that you have in a game because you've got a few other weird cards in here as well.

15:43 You've got escape cards which let you, you know, drop out of the hand entirely and lose the trick. You've got uh pirate cards, so which are basically these red cards that are better than Trump's but worse than certain other cards. You've got the uh skull king. Um I'll put this one aside for that. You've got the skull king, who basically beats every other card in the normal game.

16:04 You'll be brave and free, the soul of

16:08 except for the mermaid cards, which get killed off by other pirate cards, but are the only thing that can beat the skull king. WHY DIDN'T SOMEBODY TELL ME THAT HE HAD ONE OF THOSE THINGS?

16:19 SO, they've all got like weird little quirky rules. And certainly, it does get a little bit chaotic. This is one of the more chaotic trick takers I have played, but the scoring system in this is kind of weird and the way this game evolves because what happens is you essentially play through 10 rounds and in each round you predict how many tricks you're going to do. It's a simultaneous 3 2 1 go. There's rules in here about bashing a table and going three, two, one or whatever. It's like whatever. I'm not playing your game to do little kid stuff on the table and act like an idiot. All right, so just do three, two, one, go. And you hold up as many fingers as how many tricks you think you're going to win. But in the round, you only have as many cards as the round number. So in the first round, you have one card. In the second round, you have two cards. In the ninth round, you have nine cards.

17:09 Okay. Odd. And certainly in the first round it's interesting because you're basically saying can I win one trick or no tricks. It's not much of a prediction to go for and certainly uh the later rounds dominate a bit more than the earlier rounds. Although there's no harm having a bit of a leg up, but it's this weird quirky little scoring system. And this does take a little bit to get used to. That's one of the flaws of this game is that you've got these special cards with special rules where, you know, you've got these reference cards to help you, but they're not the easiest thing to have to keep referring to all the time. You've got bonus points that apply when you play certain cards at certain times in the round. Trying to keep track of those in the game is a bit of a pain in the butt sometimes. So, there's a bit more juggling in terms of rules here. This is not a simple trick taker. It's definitely up there with, you know, slightly more complex ones. But the scoring is kind of where this like quirk of this game comes in. So I'm just looking at the last game I played with two friends of mine here. And you know, basically if you predict correctly, so you decide, right, I was going to win one trick and the others thought they weren't going to win a trick at all or something like that. And the idea is is that if you get your prediction right, you get 20 points for every card that was in the round. So in the first round, the max you can score is 20. But in later rounds, you know, you could predict six tricks in one round and get like, you know, 120 odd points there.

18:29 You know, you can get quite a decent amount. But the idea is is that if you fail your prediction, you lose 10 points for every one off you were from that total. So, if you predict that you're going to get four tricks and you only get two, you actually lose 20 points. So, you can see that these scores fluctuate quite rapidly. You got a few bonus points, like for example, if you win the 14 cards, you get plus 10. If you win the um you know the 14 Trump, you get 20. If a a mermaid capt Yeah. If a pirate captures a mermaid, you get 20 points. If the skull king captures a pirate, you get 30. It's you know, you've got these bonus points there. And they do sort of mention it on some of the cards, but other times you just have to remember it's a thing in the game, which is kind of annoying, but it's a weird quirky game. I mean, the powers and of the different cards make some of the, you know, special cards like these pirates and the mermaids can be played at any time. Normally, you have to play a card and follow suit and the highest wins. That is the standard rules of trick taking, but then you got all these weird quirky rules. And I find that the advanced mode is maybe taking the game a step too far, like you've really got to play this with skullking fanatics. But when you're teaching the game, just use the normal mode. And it's a fairly interesting game. I mean, with this scoring sheet here, we finished on a total of 110, 140, 160. I came third out of the three of them. But for a lot of the time, I was dominating. Right in round uh six, sorry, round five, I was on 120, another one was on 30, and another one was on 10. I came third. I was dominating for half the game because things just kind

20:00 of went a bit downhill after that, and everybody else was getting a lot more points with their predictions. So, it does kind of undermine the early game a bit that the later part of the game certainly can earn you a damn site more points, but it does make the scores interesting that you, you know, just because you're falling far behind does not mean you're out of the game. You can carry on and try and pull it back and you can succeed as proven by this particular three-way game we had. But yeah, this is a neat trick taker. I like it. I like the bidding process. There's some hard decisions to make. There's some interesting like, do I try to win this trick? Do I try to lose it? What other cards do I think you've got? You know, do you have a pirate in your hand? Are you going to kill off my mermaid if I play it? H, do I wait to play the mermaid or do I play it early and hope? Can I get some of these bonus points? There's a lot of interesting little decisions that you could do in this game. It's just that you've got such a smores board of different like specials.

20:53 And if you play with the advanced mode where you've got like the Kraken card and you've got different abilities for the pirates, so many that you've actually got another reference sheet to use them, I think the game just gets to a point where it's just way too fiddly and too complicated for its own good. I'm pretty much happy to play this in basic mode. And when you do, you have a pretty quirky game. So, I like the game. I don't think it's an amazing trick taker. It might grow on me over time, but this new edition has some revised artwork, which is pretty decent. you know, the Grandpa Beck's version. Small box. Um, it takes a bit longer than most Trick Takers. I mean, it says 30 to 45 minutes. I think you're looking more closer to an hour, I think. But yeah, it's a neat game and I'm glad I finally have played it and I'm going to put it in my collection of Trick Takers. But I don't think it's a maze bars. I don't think it's the best thing since sliced bread. And it does get maybe a little bit too fiddly and a little bit over complicated for its own good, but it's still a pretty solid game.

21:51 All right, let's move on to all play now with their four games here. Like a lot to talk about, but hopefully I'll try and skim over them as much as I can. So, Prey, this one's nice and easy. I mean, this is literally a 10, 15 minute fill earlier. Like, it takes no time at all. Three to four players, little trick taker, and it comes in the tiniest box ever. It comes with dice, and it comes with cards. And it's very straightforward. You basically have 12 cards that you deal the players and they've got two numbers on them with kind of like a predatory animal on one side and a random other little bit of food item on the other side, right? And there's two numbers, one in big, one in small. So the big number is what you're looking at and the the small number is what it is when you turn the card upside down. Yeah, it's one of those games. Basically, you roll your dice and this is essentially how many tricks you're kind of aiming for. You're aiming to match one of those dice in terms of a trick predictions, kind of like a NOU dice field. You get dealt 12 of these cards and you play like a traditional trick taking game. You play the card. If you can follow suit, you have to and you basically win with the highest card. The quirk here though is that when you get down to six cards left, so let me just find one of them's got all stuck to that one. We will um There we go. Separate out. 1 2 3 4 5 six. So you get down to six cards. You then flip your hand over and you start playing with the numbers that were on the prey side. So you start with predator and move on to prey. And

23:23 now you got different numbers. So the cards that you play earlier in the game, you might be influenced by what numbers you're going to have for the second half of the round. It might make your hand worse. It might make it considerably better. And it can even, you know, like it doesn't like change the suit for that. It's still the same type of suits, but it's an interesting little quirk. And that's literally it. You basically carry on until somebody's won twice. That's it. That is basically the game. The game takes 20 minutes or so. It is not long. It is not complicated. Really easy to teach. I mean, people sort of go, "Oh, yeah, Pinata is a great one to teach new players how to do trick- taking games." I'm sorry. This is the game that you teach people how to play trick taking games. Maybe diamonds is another good example, but this one is so simple, so easy, and so tiny a little game that this is the one I'm pulling out when I want to teach people how tricking works because it's so damn simple and so damn fast. It is a quick little filler that you can teach in 2 seconds and play in 15 minutes. What more do you need from a trick taking filler?

24:25 Of course, it's so simple.

24:27 Okay, next on the agenda, we're going to look at uh Mory. So, Mory, I'd never heard of this game, but I like the cover. It's got a skull in the midst of all these different color flowers. All right. And uh the art is by Beth Serbel. Yeah. Who knows what Beth Sel has done. You know, Wingspan fame and a few others. You know, she does pretty good artwork. But this was a trick taker. I think it was barely like a Fiverr or something. It was on their discontinued line. So, this was one that was going to go out of uh uh out of fashion. 30 minutes, three to five players. I thought, okay, for a tick taker, let's give this one a try. So, you got a dry erase pen here, which is mainly for the scoreboard, which comes on a little dry erase uh board like this, which is pretty sweet. Uh you play as many rounds as there are a number of players. Now, this one is a fun game, but there's a bit of a caveat. It's also the hardest one to kind of explain. This one has a couple of quirky rules which people are like, "Huh? How does that work?" And when it says 30 minutes, it's lying through its back teeth. I'm sorry, but these are the games you can play in that short space of time. You cannot play Mory in 30 minutes. Maybe with three players if you're going at lightning speed, but honestly, this is a game where there is too much thinking going on that you can do this in 30 minutes.

25:43 You're playing this for an hour easily. Okay, so I don't know where they got 30 minutes from, but it's a quirky game and then some. Oh, the bag was open. That's handy. So, you got these dice here and they correspond to four suits which are the seasons. And we'll get on to graphic design a little bit later, but basically a bunch of these are going to be rolled and they'll be kind of like in the middle like stacked as a bit of a pool. And players will have cards which are kind of standard trick taking cards. So, they'll be, you know, cards of the various suits. And I love the art on these. I mean, they've got skulls mixed with flowers and some other X cards that have got like, you know, rotting leaves on it and stuff like that. But with Beth Sobel's artwork, they do look very striking. It's like one of the most more interesting decks of cards that I have seen with this game. It's really, really nice and pretty. But the idea is is you'll be dealt a bunch of these. And for trick- taking purposes, it's very much like a typical trick taker. Play a card, follow suit, highest wins, that kind of thing. But there's a little twist with the scoring and what you're doing with these dice. So you can end up with dice which can be played kind of a bit like nikosu dice where they can be played as if they were cards in your hand. A quirk that I really do like.

26:55 There isn't a Trump suit specifically, but there is a Trump sequence of affairs. Basically the seasons are meant to be that the um and I may get this back to front. I do apologize, but basically the season that um follows another season trumps that season. So, for example, I've got uh this thing that basically tells me that summer cards will trump spring cards, autumn cards will trump summer cards, and winter cards will trump autumn cards. The, you know, it's a cool little system and it means that the trumps will change based on, you know, what's being played as the lead card in that. But the cards have also got leaves and skulls on the side of them. And the idea is is that the leaves are plus one point, the skulls are a negative point. And if you win the trick, you're basically taking all the cards. So you're basically giving the other players, you know, plus or negative points on that front. But every time you win a trick, you take a dye from the middle, which could be another die of a suit that you want to play. You know, it could be a, you know, specific uh thing, or it could be a rotting X.

27:59 And the rotting X is basically this kind of push your luck um scoring mechanism where you end up with a bunch of these like X. You start off with a couple of X cards, but you end up with more X's and you'll win some cards with X's in them. And if you have the most of them at the end of a round, you lose a point for everyone you had. But if you have the second most, you gain a point for everyone that you have. So there's kind of like a, [snorts] you know, can I make certain I don't have the most because it'll hurt me if I do, but if I can get to second most, that's great. and then everybody else it doesn't matter. So everybody is really coordinated like where these X's are turning up and you start with two in your hands. So where are they going to go? But an X basically loses the trick. It's an auto fail for the trick. Now the game is cool and over the course of the rounds you'll score up and you can end up with some pretty tight games. But if you thought the rules of me explaining that were a little bit confusing, you try doing this in person. It is a bit of a nightmare to teach this game. The reference card is fine, but it's not amazing. It's fine to explain how the scoring works with the rotting cards. And dice may follow a trick. So, you don't have to use a dice to follow a trick like in Dosu dice, but I think they could have done a better job with the graphic design for how the trump system works because it is a little bit hard to tell from like the crown symbols and the artwork and that, especially if you use the nice side of this board, what trump is meant to do what. And if you follow the diagram on here, it's a little bit easier, but man, if you try and read it from the rule

29:29 book, it confuses the hell out of players. It's a little bit insane. The rule book is not the best. And the seasons don't even really make sense because you just get this squiggle symbol of a flower basically as representative of the season. So autumn is red and it's basically a spyograph thing. Well, just a bit of a squiggle really. And then yellow is obviously a type of flower and that's supposed to be summer. green is spring and that's just mostly a squiggle. And then the flower of purple is winter. Why can't winter be blue? You know, why not make it blue? Because we would normally associate blue with winter or maybe white or something. But they also use a flower symbol for those particular ones. Now, maybe that's just because of the type of flower they put on the cards, which would make sense, you know, cuz there's definitely like red tends to be roses and things like that, but I feel like they should have denoted the seasons not by the type of flower, but maybe by something that's representative of the season because it's confuses players to make out what seasons are what. And it's just an added bit of like, huh, okay, that they've got to contend with. It's like a barrier to entry. But you can't play this in 30 minutes because you've got to think hard about what cards you're playing for your hand. You got to think hard about which dice you want. You got to, you know, juggle around those X tokens. And when you're playing a round per player, it only says 30 minutes on the box. You cannot play this in 30 minutes when you play with three people, frankly, but let alone when you play this with four or even five because the game just gets longer and longer. It doesn't scale back. So, this one has maybe the most

30:59 issues kind of out of all the games I'm showing here. Maybe next to something like Skull King because of all the quirky special cards it's got. But when this one is played, it is good fun. It does make you think a little bit harder about what cards you're playing for the tricks. And you know that when you play a card, you know, certain numbers, like the high numbers are generally the ones with skulls on them, and the lower ones are the ones with leaves. So, it's good to win a trick with leaves on it because it gives you more points. But then you might deliberately suffer some negative points to win a trick with a card that's going to earn you skulls just so that you can take a die which might help you a little bit later. It's a very cool tactical trick taker game. It's got some iffiness with trying to explain it and certainly I think they could have improved the graphic design a bit to make it a bit more new player friendly and certainly 30 minutes is a garbage time that they put on here. But it is a neat game. Very unexpected little hidden gem. I think it is definitely mechanically one of the more interesting trick taking games I've got. But I wish they just made it a little bit easier and maybe just a little bit quicker.

32:03 that's what's holding it back. But otherwise, it's a very neat little hidden gem that I never expected to kind of like, you know, impress me as much as it did. And it certainly impressed a few people that I have shown it to as well. They even give you maybe a few too many baggies on this one. But, uh, yeah, neat little game. All fits back in. Maybe with a tiny bit of lip, but there you go. So, Mory, an unexpected little hidden gem that one, but not without a couple of caveats.

32:29 I don't know what it is, but I want to try it.

32:30 All right. Uh, let's go for nine lives. Nine lives is probably I would say ooh out of all the trick takers I've got here. I'm going to say this one's the best of the lot. So, Skull King, Sale, Symbio, um, Mory, uh, Prey, and this one, this is the hidden gem. And this was again in a discontinued line. I think I bought this for like a five or six quid or something. It was like really dirt cheap. And man, that was money well spent. This is a cool trick taker. So, the idea with this one is you have this board in the middle of the table and you're racing to get a certain number of points before that player wins the board. And that this is probably the one flaw I'm going to say about this game. I don't like the graphic design and font they've used. They have tried to make it really stylish with this kind of weird almost like glitchy computer font or something like that. And when it's on the cards, it does not work. I mean, some of these numbers don't look like the number that they're supposed to represent.

33:28 You can get over it. You get used to it. But man, they could have made this so much better if they just used a normal font. They tried to be funky. They tried to be fancy. And in doing so, they made the game worse as a result. So that is a negative, but hear me out on this one. So basically, you have these cat tokens here, one for each player. And the idea is is that this board represents how many tricks you think you're going to win in a round. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 nine. So it can sort of loop back on itself. But you don't just go for one number. I mean, you could, but what you do is you basically place your cat on this rug to represent what your prediction is going to be in. You do it in turn order in these block spaces. So, if I think I am definitely going to only get three or seven tricks in a round, you know, I'm going to put my cat so that it's on the rug kind of like so, right? So, I'm definitely aiming for that. If I make it, I'll score a decent amount of points. You could play the safer option where you don't score as many points, but you get a little bit of flexibility and you put it on the rug so that I'm covering two numbers on a particular side, but it takes up the space. So, somebody else cannot put their cat in the same block. They might be able to put it on the other side, but then somebody else might have gone, well, I'm doing a two and a three as a safety bit.

34:38 So, third player comes on, it's like, well, crap. That means I've either got to do one and five or nine, or I can do two or six on its own. I can't do three or seven, and I can only do four on its own. and I can't do forward out a safety measure. So, it's an interesting little quirk with the prediction mechanic, which is normally same old same old in games, but here it's just a little bit different. But that's not all. You then play the game with a bunch of suits and basically three of them are normal. One of them is a Trump suit. I think the purple is the Trump suit in this. And they're just numbered the same. Other than that, they're generic. They don't have any special traits. And the thing is, what's weird with this is you might have noticed the colors are all different on the back. Yeah. You don't know what cards people have got, but you know what colors everybody's got. So, you know if they're going to run out of a particular suit or they've got to follow suit in that and it's like that's an interesting little quirk in itself.

35:29 But it gets better because basically what happens is you play the hand as normal and you win tricks. Okay, so D you can see what cards I've got. You can see I got a bunch of trumps and all that lot. I forget how many cards you draw, but you know it's a certain amount. And basically when the trick is played, so let's say we've got here we go. blue blue that and um a like trump card or something like that. Right. What you do is you basically win the trick and then one of the cards that wasn't yours, you draw the card and put it back into your hand. So there's my trick that I've won. But the card that you played, I now take and can use on a future trick. Okay. Interesting. You can have some cool tactical play with that, particularly when some people are playing cards that are out of suit. But that's not the only point. You may be thinking, "Well, hang on a minute. You now have more cards than everybody else after winning a trick." So, how does that work? Because the round ends when one player runs out of cards, a single player. You don't play a certain number of cards. You play until somebody runs out. And that could be anybody on the table. But if you're winning a bunch of tricks, it's not going to be you. So, you don't have control over when the round ends. But because you can see when it could end, you may play cards tactically to try and get the round to end by forcing somebody to, you know, not win the trick or, you know, bin some of their cards. And when you can see that one person's only got one card left, it's like, well, if they don't win this trick, the round ends.

36:59 Ah, how many tricks do I need? Well, I could play a card and make sure that you win this trick. You know, you've played a card. I can play one lower. So, now you win this trick. Take a card. Right. The round's still going, right? Keep going. And I can get a couple of tricks somehow. There's one. And man, the the drawing of a card in your hand, the tactical position of these cats on this board here and the drawing and the drawing of the card and the way the round ends is a really interesting variant on the trick taking mechanic. I mean, this is just basically get to nine points and first person to do it wins and stuff. But yeah, it's it's interesting. It's really cool. And you track your tricks with a cube on here and if it loops over, I mean, you can go 1 2 3 4 and then it has to go five nine. I get why they've done that on here because of the way the cap positioning works. But it can be a little bit hard to sort of remember. Oh yeah, I need this many tricks in that. Really, I think this is a great game. It's 30 minutes, three to four players, and 30 minutes is roughly about accurate. Tops 45 minutes, but honestly, I think 30 to 40 is about right. But the only problem with this game is the artwork choice that they've made. I mean, it's quirky.

38:05 You've got all these weird looking cats all over it. And I like cats, so that's all good. But I hate the font they used for these numbers. I mean, they've got a symbol to denote if you're color blind. That's fine. But man, did they have to use this weird computerized Atari font or whatever the hell it is?

38:21 Crazy gibberish.

38:22 You know, the amount of times people look at the cards in the middle and go, "Oh, oh, wait, that's a thing." Ah, right. Okay. It constantly happens and it's the one annoying quirk with this game. But if you can get over it or if somehow you can read this without any problems, this is an excellent trick taker. This is like one of the favorites I have played in a while. It is cool. It is quirky and it just adds enough of a difference with the whole prediction mechanic, but those little touches about drawing a card and when the round ends, it just adds so much more sort of tactical depth to the formula as well. For a game that I think cost me5 pound, this was an absolute freaking steal. Love it. This is the best one I have bought out of the Ames Expo.

39:04 Demand suddenly skyrocketed. You all saw it.

39:06 Not to say that Sale is a bad game, but it's not the best one here. I mean, it it's kind of a hitand- miss one this one. I mean, Sale I've wanted to try for so long, but it's a twoplayer only game. I don't get two-player games to the table very often, but it's a co-op trick taker. 20 minutes. I wanted to try it. Okay. I just never really got a chance to find it, but then I realized, oh yeah, all Play has it. So, I went over and bought it. Bit expensive. I think it was like 15 quid, maybe even slightly over. So, I do think that this is an expensive game for what you get, but this one's an interesting one. Basically, you're playing a scenario with your friend, and basically, you have this map that is I'm just going to put it together randomly. I'm not going to like worry too much about its length, that kind of thing. But the idea is is that this Oh, actually, I might have to Yeah. Go on. Create the map. There we go. Little jigsaw puzzle right there.

39:58 And And even then, if I put it the right way around. Nope, I haven't. So, here we go. It's basically got grid references on it. And I don't care if it's upside down or whatever. I'm just trying to showcase here. And you may have some storm counters on it, and you may have other pieces, but you'll basically litter it out with island pieces, some Kraken pieces, that kind of thing. And then you've got a little sideboard here with the round track and like discard pile and player decks and stuff. But otherwise, you're essentially playing a traditional trick taker game. And there's not that many suits and not that many cards period. I mean, for a trick taker, this probably has like the least amount of cards I've seen in any trick taker for playing it. And you've got a few other sort of special cards for like variants in the game and such. But for the most part, you've got free suits, no trumps, and they're just numbered from, you know, particular numbers. I think it's like three to nine or something weird like that. But you have a ship token, and I'm definitely going to have to get this out and showcase, I think.

40:53 Here we go. So, you may have some islands dotted around that you got to dodge around. And the idea is is that you start off on, you know, one bit here with your ship token and you are trying to sail it to a certain point on the other side. It's represented by this kind of little uh like tile here. So this could be like the tutorial variant. We've only got to get halfway across the board. And you may have a storm counter say uh let's say there and there. And basically what happens, you're trying to sail this from here to here, dodging the various uh obstacles. You also have to get past the cloud markers at certain times of the game, otherwise you'll lose. And the idea is is that you play a co-op trick taker where you can't communicate with the opponent, but you can only play each round until one of you has won four tricks. Then the round ends and you have to go through some damage. You have a separate Kraken deck, which gives you some worse cards, you know, lower numbers and that. Um, but you also can't have that deck run out of cards because you automatically lose the game. The cards have got little symbols on them though, steering wheels, cannons, and fish and kraken tentacles and stuff. And the idea is is when you play these tricks, depending on what symbols are played as a pair, will trigger other effects where you get to add cards to the Kraken deck. You get to move in a straight line, which is quicker, or you have to move in a certain other direction. Uh, whoever has the highest number kind of gets to steer it in their direction. So, you might deliberately lose the trick to let the opponent move the ship in their direction. There's some cool little things with this. And it basically is an interesting quirky game. It's definitely

42:26 a cool co-op, but man is this one of the hardest trick takers I have ever played. I mean, wow. This is um beat you over the head type hard.

42:35 JUST GIVE US THE YOU SON OF A

42:38 YEAH, this game brutalizes you. And this is not a new player friendly game. I mean, if you play, you can teach this to a new player, fine. But you're not going to get good at this game until both of you are in sync or you play this game a couple of times because it is hard. It took several attempts just for me and a friend to like get through the tutorial learning scenario where you've only got to go from like here to here or something like that. But in these later scenarios that you play through, you've got to go from like here to here, here to there, here to the other end of the freaking board. And it's like, how the hell do you possibly beat these later scenarios? It just seems impossible because you've got this Kraken marker over here where the Kraken mele is on there and you've got this Kraken deck where every time you get damaged by the Kraken, you get littered with a bunch of cards that are basically rubbish. You know, they're like twos and ones, you know, low cards, but they do have other symbols on them and they could still be useful in some respect. But if that deck runs out, you lose, which is pretty easy to do because when you hit rocks or when you hit Kraken tentacles, the Kraken damages you and certain pairs that you play could have the Kraken damage you.

43:41 But it's also got a little marker track where you auto lose if the Kraken gets all the way to the end. But at the end of a round when you've played some of these one four tricks, the Kraken damages you enough times based on that number and it starts at three. So that's already removing free cards from that deck, which isn't very big, and sticking them into your various like discard piles and stuff. This game just beats you down from the get-go. And it never feels like you're doing that well or it more feels like the game like the stars have got to align for you in order to do decently well at this. You've got some, you know, other like tiny quirks and you've got like some pirate abilities you can have, but honestly I'm not too fussy. You know, they're nice, but they're not amazing. But it's a quirky game and I do like it. I mean, it is a challenge. But man, you have got to be in sync with your opponent. When they play a card, you need to know why they've played it. You need to know what kind of symbols you're going to play and maybe you don't get a choice. Maybe you just cannot uh play it, you know, and you know what you play doesn't really help you. But cool blimey, you are going to lose way more games with this than you are going to win. So if you want a hard challenge, this is one for you. But it is a cool co-op trick taker. I do think I prefer easily the Fox in the Forest Duel um or Fox in the Forest Co-op or whatever it was. The uh the one that has you play Fox in the Forest 2 player. I think that one is a better two-player co-op game, but this one is still solid. I do just wish that maybe it was a little bit easier to grasp what the hell's going on at times, but also

45:12 the fact that it's just relentlessly hard. Like, I can't just really take this to a convention, play it with a random person, and expect to win the scenario cuz you're probably not going to. The game's just going to completely eviscerate you. And I wish maybe that they just made it a little bit easier to win and such because the amount of times I've played the learning scenario rather than any of the other scenarios and I even tried the bloody later ones. I mean I took ages to beat the learning. It took just as long to build the first one two three four and five. I'm not sure I've even beaten two three four and five. It's just really hard to bloody win this game. And artwork wise is fine. I mean you get a decent amount of components in the box for your money. And I do like this uh track in the middle tracking it with the boat. But I'm not a big fan of the card artwork. It is very muted, very basic. And I get that's the color scheme they've gone for, but they could have made these brighter. These are very uninspiring looking cards. I'm just not, you know, the picture in the middle is nice, but the colors they use, you know, are not great. And you've got, you know, different colors on different backgrounds, which doesn't work from a um graphic design perspective. I mean, they're all on black banners, yes, but you've got yellow on black, which is fine. And you got pink on black, which is a bit harder. You've then got uh you know, you know, was it orange on black.

46:26 And for some of these, it's just a little bit kind of weird. And it's odd that they put the dark banner in two corners of the car, but they don't put it in the other two. So, the other two, you've got lettering and numbers that you can't even read, but on those two, you've got it. So, if you're right or left-handed, you can kind of deal with it. But then why not just don't put the thing on the ones that don't have banners or put banners on all four corners? Why leave it, you know, why leave bits that you can't read on the card? It's just kind of odd. Um, it is a neat game and I do like it, but it's not my, you know, favorite one that we've got here. It's certainly like, okay, this is cool. It's something a little bit different, but I'm not going to jump up and say, oh yeah, this is a must buy. But if you are a twoplayer game play, if you if you're the sort of person that gets a lot of two-player games to the table and you really want to have like a challenge with you and your partner as a co-op, then this is a pretty good one to go for. Obviously, you got like trick taking games and the like, but also know that you are in for one hell of a freaking challenge because uh it's not geared very well difficulty wise for casual play. I think it's just a bit too hard for that.

47:34 Listen, you just got to GIVE ME MORE TIME. DON'T MAKE A FOOL OUT OF ME, MAN.

47:38 But if you're going to dedicate time and practice to this, then you could be in with a very rewarding trick taker. So, you know, solid overall, and I'm certainly glad I've played it, but I don't think it's the bee's knees. I think it's decent, just not amazing. So, there you go. That is a lot of small games. And even though I have some, you know, gripes with some of these games, all of these are still seven out of 10 plus. I mean, they're all games I would consider good. And this is why I'm saying that the games expo was dominated by small box games because all of these are going to sit on my shelf with the small box games. And you know, some of them I love. I mean, I'm not going to rank them in order here, but let's just sort of go with what I say. So, Symbiosis, quick and easy filler. Does what it says, probably a seven out of 10. Okay, so good. Uh, Prey, very easy one to teach new players trick taking.

48:28 There's only so many quirks to it, but it does what it says on the tin in a very short space of time and comes in a very tiny box. Seven out of 10. It's still pretty good. Uh, I'm going to then say probably I'm going to say Sale is the next one here. Or I am going to rank them in order, whatever. But this one I would probably give a seven out of 10 to as well. I do like it, but two-player only makes it hard to get to the table. And that difficulty spike is a bit off-putting. It's one that I'm not sure it would hit the table as often as it should, but it's still good and I can still recommend it. So, I'd say that's a seven out of 10 as well. Then, we're going to move on to eight out of 10 where I'm going to say the first eight out of 10 will be uh Skull King. Great. I do think this is a really cool trick taking game. It's let down by the amount of sort of special rules and other point cards that you got to deal with, but I think the scoring system in this really neat and it has created some very fun rounds with players that I'm playing with where you're trying to like get in each other's head. Have you got that card? Do I dare play this? So, I can see why people recommended this one to me and I'm glad you did. It's clearly not the one I played from ages ago. I don't know what that game was, but it wasn't this. I can't imagine I would have played this and hated it in the past. So clearly I got my names mixed up, but I've got it now. So are you happy? 8 out of 10. Another eight out of 10 I'm going to say is for Omens. I think Omen's is definitely worthy of an eight. It's a funky little card sheddder uh game. Um you know, looks the part, different

50:00 style of game, team rules, card shedding with a tactical element to it, pseudo trick taker, but strong interaction. It's a very unique card game out there. You know, it's filling a gap on my shelf for me. So eight out of 10. Also great. And then I'm going to say Mory is the other eight out of 10. Yes, it's let down a bit by the slight complexity we're trying to explain the season rules with the trumps and the way the uh rotten card scoring works. And it certainly is way longer than the box would have you believe. Those are gripes with the game. But other than that, I think this creates some very cool little tactical choices. I think the scoring is a cool system. I think the way the trumps work is a cool system and the dice is a cool system. It's not quite neg how they work, but it does give me a little bit of like, oh, yeah, this brings back those kind of feels. It's a really solid game and could have possibly been a 9 out of 10 if it wasn't for those problems that it does have.

50:53 But for nine out of 10, we're going to give it to nine lives. You know, I do think that the visual style they've used for this is kind of annoying and not the best. And you know, and you know, there are it's not it's only for three to four players, so it's a little bit restricted, but I like the way that the cards are predicted in this one. I like the drawing of the card. I like the way that the round end is going to influence your choices. There's a lot of quirky things to this game that elevate it above a bunch of other trick takers. And the fact that this was bought for like a Fiverr or whatever it was off their discontinued shelf. I mean, I don't know if that means you'll never see it again, but keep an eye out for it maybe on secondhand sales, but you know what I'm getting at here is that all of these games were fun and solid and they're all in small boxes. Who needs giant crate games for £150 or more money that you've spent time earning when I could buy all of these games and barely even come to half the cost of one of your giant crate games? you know, it's like so they're so much more cost effective and they'll barely take up any space on the callex shelf where they're going. And all of these I like all of these are 7 out of 10 plus. You know, the worst one is probably um how I'd say the worst one's probably symbiosis. You know, you're not one that you're going to get out and play all the time, but it's a neat little filler and it does the job. So, you know, but that's no slur on it. It's just that these are all fun games and yes, I like trick takers a lot. So maybe there's an ounce of bias there, but then Omens is not a trick taker, nor is

52:23 Symbiosis. You know, it's just a lot of these are trick takers. So yes, okay, that's probably going to elevate my score a little bit. I will concede. But for me, this was the highlight of my UK Games Expo, buying these games and finding that all these little games I bought for mostly dirt cheap could still give me as much, if not more enjoyment than these giant big box games that everybody jumps on the hype train about. So, uh, before you look at a massive game and decide, "Oh, yeah, I must have this cuz everybody else says it's amazing." And by everybody else, I mean the 0.1% of people who probably have that game. They're just very loud about it. Maybe consider wandering over to Hashet, All Play, or some of these other little indie publishers like Grandpa Beex and a few others and check out the small games because you might be surprised at what you find. Certainly, I'm very impressed with what All Play has given me here for kickoff, but even these other ones, you know, Hashet, All Play, you know, a lot of these, particularly French, French and Japanese, I find when it comes to small quirky card games, I always look for French publishers and I always look for, I mean, Aette is like a UK one as well, but it's kind of like a distributor in that, but a lot of these games are kind of made by, you know, French French designers and that. And you know, the Japanese also make very quirky card games as well. Whenever I look for them, I always look for those two nationalities, and they just seem to have a knack for making great small card games. Anyway, I've rabbited on enough.

53:48 So, uh, if you want to check out these games, hopefully you'll be able to find them. If not, I'll bring them to conventions and you'll be able to try some there. So, that's it for me on this episode of The Broken People. If you like what you see, then please fun this video up on YouTube and let me know your thoughts down below on any of these games. Have you played them? Do you love them? Do you hate them? I mean, I'm pretty sure Skull King is going to get some feedback given that most of you are desperate I try it. But what do you think about the my my stance that I think the small games dominated to UK Games Expo and that more love should be given to small games rather than getting all hyped up about these giant mammoth crates that are all expensive. I'd like to know your thoughts. Let's discuss it down below. Hopefully this video wasn't too long, but if it is, what the hell? I like making content. So, take care and remember, it's only a game and I'll see you on the next Broken People video. Bye for now.