The SIX Games I Brought Home from PAX Unplugged

0:02 hi my name is Ben this is board game dad and I just got back from Pax unplugged this was a bit of a surprise for me because it probably isn't a surprise to you but I spend a lot of time researching board games especially family board games and I very recently put together a list uh gift giving guide trying to like finish out the year 2022 so I was doing all of this Research into uh the best new family games and you know sometimes I get to a point where it feels like I've played them all I know that's probably ridiculous but when you spend enough time playing and researching Games you start to feel like yeah you know what I think I've heard of everything I go to Pax and uh I find six new games that I'm very excited to take home so uh by the way though if you haven't seen my most recent video you can check out this one I will leave a link in the description this is a list of all of the new games I very recently researched and I organized them by age group uh I was really excited about that list and uh it's not too late to check it out if you want to give some gifts anyway let's talk about what's new so

1:32 here we go I went to packs with my daughters uh and my intention was to find the games that they were interested in I just really wanted to have a good weekend I just want to have a good weekend playing with them uh seeing what they wanted to try out and just like have some fun so I thought maybe well maybe I'll you know buy one or two we found a lot of games that we were really interested in and the first one I want to show you is called bites so well bites so bytes came out in 2020 and it plays two to five players this is put out by board game tables now board game tables is one of my favorite companies they create let's see they make um mountain goats which I am not I won't show it to you well they make mountain goats I've been recommending mountain goats for a really long time I think it's a brilliant little game that anybody can approach but it's got some really enriching material in it and of course I'm always looking for family board games that uh aren't just fun but are also enriching for children so uh they have a few like very small boxes uh GPS mountain goats Sequoia they recently came out with dandelions these are all very small but I haven't really

3:04 tried any of their larger box games and um well except for one that I discovered in Essen and I ended up taking home but I'm going to get to that one last bites was entirely new to me anyway invites uh you are managing an ant hill and uh you have these little ants and you set up a trail of food and all of the food has different colors so apples are red and green peppers are green and bread is brown and so on and then you've got ants that match all of the colors so you've got a red ant and a brown ant and a green ant Etc and so you set all this food up in a trail and on a player's turn they can move any ant it's not like a game where uh you are the red color or you're the green color you can move any color ant and you can move it along the trail until it gets to the next Food of its matching color and when it lands there you can take the food that's in front of the ant or behind the ant so that means you could move the red ant but take a green food or take a purple food and uh you add this food to your collection and people are doing this they're moving ants along the trail and then eventually an ant will get to the end of the trail and into the Ant Hill when the ant gets to the Anto then it takes its position on the ant hill and that becomes the number of victory points for the matching color of food so if the red ant gets to the until first that means all red food is worth

4:34 Four Points so it makes this so very interesting is in order to move an ant you usually take a color of food that doesn't match the ant so the ant is getting closer to the finish and possibly its color of food is becoming worth more victory points but when you move an ant you can only take food that doesn't match that color and you have to pay attention to what other players are trying to do in order to figure out well which ant is probably going to finish the track first and then how can I get that color of food it's just a really interesting mechanic it's so simple and then what they've done is they've added all of these extra cards to mix up the gameplay so there are special rules there are like special um like Power Cards that you can use without going too much more into it but the core mechanic there is just moving and taking the food I loved it my kids really enjoyed it and you know what I've got to show this really quick the components for this game are fantastic it came with these uh cardboard punch outs like you would normally see but the cardboard pieces are actually glued together so a chocolate like if you can see this it's actually two layers of cardboard and it creates this three-dimensional effect let me show you a green pepper that comes through see how that that like little depth is added I really like these components they're they're nice and heavy the ants are made out of wood um I'm not gonna take them out of the bag but they're made out of wood the whole thing is just an incredibly

6:06 well done game it's elegant this is the kind of game I would rate very very highly for mechanics um and then it's thinking like it's it's totally strategy you know you're not rolling any dice you're just moving ants and trying to figure out what other players are doing it's such an enriching game to play with any age of people and in fact I think the box says it's for six and up but it you could play as as young as four uh it's got this oh my goodness the box says 14 and up based on the variation that you can add I would think that you can play this with much younger kids um the woman who was there when she saw that I was with my children she said she played it with her four-year-old all she had to do was remove some of the bonus effects and some of the other effects in the game in order to simplify it a little bit but there's so much you can do to add replayability this is an excellent excellent purchase especially for families um by the way this game and other games they all have links in the description so if you'd like to check it out you can go ahead and take a look at the link so the next game I got um we saw this one on display I think this was the first one that we that we purchased it's called Kabuto Sumo it's also by board game tables we were the same booth when we picked it up and um if you've looked at my family game list uh the the gift guide I talked about a game called ice flows and foes about moving tiles around and pausing

7:36 them to fall off the game and this is very similar to that mechanic what you're trying to do is wrestle with uh insects and so I think I'm just gonna hold up the picture but um the table looks like this you've got all these little discs and then what you're doing is you're pushing a disc onto the table and any discs that fall off the table go into your inventory so if you can push off more disks you'll have more disks for future turns now there's two ways to win one way to win is to push off your opponent who is a little Beetle little wooden beetle the other way you can win is by having your opponent run out of discs so whether you're pushing off other beetles or just other plane disks both are necessary in order to win the game you'll be exhausted if you run out of disks in your inventory now this is very similar to ice flows and foes but I think and I didn't end up purchasing ice flows and foes for myself though think the reason why I wanted to go with this is because this game has something very unique each Beetle that you play with I think this is worth taking out

8:57 each Beetle that you play with there we go has special powers and special pieces so you can have four different beetles each with its own player power and each with its own signature piece so like the Spanish fly has this huge insect that you can use and there are conditions that you need to meet in order to pull out these pieces this is like a cactus needle or bug or something um what is this a stag beetle has this cool pincer thing you can put onto the board I love the the um variable player powers in this game so we played that yesterday for the first time and the kids loved it the only thing I would say though is that they didn't really want my kids didn't want to beat each other they wanted to team up and make well actually they wanted to make the game last actually they didn't want to end which is why I think there's an advantage to ice flows and foes ice flows and foes you're you're trying to eliminate poachers everybody wants to get rid of a poacher but you're playing this wrestling game and you kind of don't want to like oh I don't want to like knock you off my kids aren't very aggressive like that so depending on if you want to be aggressive or not one of those two games may be better for you um all right the next game is called pizza or psychic Pizza delivers go to

10:27 the ghost town which is a little bit older it actually came out in 2018 and I have never heard of it before um this game is the first game that I've ever purchased that um player one player can't win one player is the mayor of the ghost town and the mayor of the ghost town is like the game master they have all of the information and they're kind of the guide for every other player so that makes this game a little different and if you're not into that if you want a game where everybody can compete you might not like this one but um aside from that I really really like what's being done here I'm going to open the box foreign

11:19 thanks for dropping in oh boy it's kind of a lot of stuff in here well the mayor of the ghost town prepares a grid there it is okay so they prepare a little grid and what they're doing is they're putting in ghosts and little houses and pizzas and the whole and fences and the whole grid is filled with these obstacles and then every other player can see or has a dry erase board with nothing on it at all what they're doing is they're using their dry erase marker and they're moving One Direction or another they're moving I say to the mayor I want to move to the west and then the mayor takes the little figurine the little pizza delivery that corresponds to that player moves them to the west and tells the player who represents that pizza deliverer what obstacles are around them so they might say there's a fence to your North and there are three ghosts around you or there are two pizza boxes or there is one house around you and then the players are using their dry erase board to make little symbols to show where their information is now initially they just have hints so they're putting down the numbers like one uh one house two ghosts one pizza right and as they get

12:51 more and more information more hints from the mayor they can infer the location of the houses the pizzas and the ghosts and they also have cards that they can play in order to gain special ability what they're trying to do is find a pizza and then deliver it to the right house but they can't see anything they have to do everything by inferring from the hints that are given to them I think it's such a clever puzzle and such a cute um cute implementation of theme you know I rate these games on theme all the time in my big complaint is that a game will have a theme but then the mechanics don't support the theme now I can tell you what you they did for this game they definitely started with what they wanted the game to be they wanted a game where you had to figure out what was around you and and everything else and they're like well what's a good theme for this game they match the theme to The Mechanics and not the other way around and as a result I really think it's perfect I mean you're trying to find what you need in order to get to the house you're delivering a pizza and you don't know where anything is but you have this connection with uh the ghost mayor and you can get your hints just thought it was brilliant Pizza delivers a rye or go to the ghost town psychic pizza deliveries all right that was game number three if you are sorry yeah three bites Kabuto Simo Pizza delivers we're gonna go on to four okay this one really surprised me

14:22 people who've watched this channel know that I'm famous for my dislike of everdel right well we walked away with my little everdel which I haven't opened yet but I did a 60-second overview on what makes uh my little everdel different from the original everdel basically I'll go over it again really briefly so in the original everdel you know that you can either place a worker or you can play a card and then you get more workers as the game goes on and of course you have a bigger engine for getting more resources so that you can play more cards so each round is longer than the previous round because you have more that you can do what my little everdel does is it streamlines it streamlines it by giving you three workers and four rounds and on your turn you can place a worker and if you wish buy one card but you can only buy a card after playing a worker so that means you only will ever get 12 actions and 12 cards period That's all really simplifies the gameplay another big thing that's different is in everdel you can chain cards together so you can get the location and then if you have the proper location for the the matching Critter you can add the Critter for free there is no benefit in this game where you can add something for free because you can only add a card after playing an action so it it just again it kind of just keeps the game a little bit shorter

15:53 um it can play a lot faster and I think that's what makes me most satisfied about my little everdown um I'm not gonna talk about original Evadale and why I don't think it's the best but basically I feel like very briefly it's too long for two little action that's actually significant um this game has the same mechanics but it's so much shorter that it's much more satisfying you can play it you can get that taste of everdel and then you don't have to play for two hours you can play for 30 minutes and be done with it all right so I that was that was actually very satisfying to play I haven't played it again with my wife but when I played with the kids they picked it up immediately they really enjoyed it um you can buy that one on starling's website also there are links in the description I did see though that it's not available on Amazon so because it came out on Thursday it was like launched at Pax unplugged very new this game Boop is also brand new it came out this year Boop really surprised me this is by the same company um smirk and laughter games that does the uh The Spill which I also talked about in the family uh gift giving guide um Boop is a really simple and I'm just going to show the picture of it but it's a simple and Abstract game so this reminded me a lot of a game like um

17:25 oh man I get these blanks when I'm on the video Santorini there's too many games I have that start with an S Santorini so if you like Santorini this reminded me a lot like it where it's a really simple abstract mechanic and then there are all these like cool implications that you kind of have to figure out as you play what's happening is you're trying to place your kittens on the mat in such a way it's a it's a square grid you're trying to place them so that they form three in a row and every time you place a new kitten it boops the kittens that are next to it which means every kit next to it moves one space away from the newly placed kitten so and you're trying to get three in a row right so imagine you've got uh two kittens and a space right between them well what you want to do is get three in a row so naturally you'd like to put a kitten right between them but when you do the other kittens let's see if I can do this with my fingers move away that that's not that I almost feel like that was an obscene gesture but they move away from the center kitten so you can't just put three in a row because it'll always cause the kittens to to spread out instead we have to do is Boop the kittens into each other to make three in a row um and then once you get three kittens in a row they graduate and become cats and the difference with cats is that cats can Boop other cats and kittens but kittens can't poop cats because they're too small so once you get three cats in

18:55 a row you win um this is a very interesting abstract game I will say that even though my youngest daughter can play it and she's six um it's hard to play with her because of course if you are an adult and you're sophisticated and you've played strategy games or like chess before you're going to come up with and be able to think farther ahead than your children will you kind of have to take that into account but I really thought it was a neat um game mechanic and the mathematician in me really likes to engage with these new things that I've never seen before so I got booked okay I got six games this is the last one now the last game this is not a family game all right I actually played this game for the first time in Essen and I picked it up because I really enjoyed it and I had wished that I bought it in Essen it's again from board game tables it is QE which came out in 2020.

19:52 in QE you are central banks of different countries and what you are trying to do after a crash is buy out all of the banks and the other industries that have failed so the only way you do this is It's a bidding game every round a new company will come out in all of the different countries all of the different players are going to bid on the new company and they've got objectives too so they get different victory points based on which companies they get so everybody places or they write out how much money they want to bid they put it to the auctioneer people rotate who's the auctioneer and then the auctioneer Awards the company to whoever paid the most money okay that's pretty simple and you get to keep it it's a very um simple mechanic there's only one twist because you are a central banks you get to print your own money and you can write a bid for as much money as you want this is interesting because the scale of every game can be different you can play one game where players are bidding tens of dollars and you can play another game where players are bidding billions of dollars it literally doesn't matter however the catch is if you are the player who bid the most money all together you automatically lose you cannot win if you bid the most money too much inflation in your country so you kind of have to figure out what other players are doing because once an auction is over and the company

21:22 is awarded to whoever bid the most you'll know who got the money but you won't know how much they bid so you put in a bid for three million dollars and you lose well you don't know how much the other player bid but you know it was more than three million dollars so you kind of to figure okay well how much how much more can I spend to not spend more than the other players based on the information that I've been following so far I think it was just a really interesting easy to teach almost like it almost feels like a party game but a little bit headier than that which is why I liked it so I picked it up those are the games now I will have there's one bonus game um that I wanted to mention because I found I really get excited when I find really good games for young players this game was not available to buy if it was I would have purchased it it is called Magic Mountain in Magic Mountain oh man I wonder if I can put I'm gonna see if I can transfer this file over and show it in the video oh no I won't be able to well Magic Mountain is a slope maybe what I can do is just show it off my phone this is kind of lame but okay here we go see there's a slope and what's happening is they're going to drop a ball down the slope oh it's so oh there we go see the ball getting stuck there it goes all right so what's happening is you're trying to get witches to move to the

22:55 bottom of the slope and the way you move a witch is you drop a ball down the slope and if the ball hits a witch then the witch gets to move to the next space matching the color of the bulb so you drop a bread ball the witch that hits gets to move to the next red space you want to save the blue Witches by getting them all the way down the mountain you don't want the black witches to get all the way down the mountain so this is a Cooperative game where players take turns dropping a ball they can pick which part of the slope they want to drop it down and then there's a little bit of element of luck as the ball hits different obstacles and goes left or right and hopefully you've placed the ball and it hits blue witches but if it hits a black witch you just try to get more blue before the Box really simple Cooperative game you look you cannot play this game wrong no matter how old you are you could be a baby and all you have to do is drop a ball the decision making comes from which path do I want to drop it down and based on the color of the ball that was drawn from the bag you can kind of like aim for the Witch and hopefully by encountering it it'll move really far like kind of like Candyland right where you know that if you draw a red card well sometimes a red card means you can move one space and other times you can move 13 spaces hopefully you're trying to make the witches move very very far by dropping a ball that hits them and the next color of that matching color is very very far ahead which is Advanced it's kind of the AIM I really

24:26 liked it thought wow what a brilliant game for little kids um so I'm going to share that too that's what we learned at Pax I will be away for Christmas so there will be a few more videos coming before we take off I'm definitely going to try to make some full-length reviews of the games that I just shared with you um I you know what oh man I hope I don't buy any more games this year because I my high shelves are so full we've got stuff under the tree too well anyway thank you for watching thanks for