How to play Bagged & Boarded

0:01 You’ll never get away with this, Professor Perfidy! Hi. It’s Ryan from Nights Around a Table. Here’s how to play Bagged & Boarded. You and your friends play kids collecting comic books to read, to preserve, and to display. You’ll scour the bargain bin for good finds and travel to the comic con to snap up issues hot off the presses, getting them signed and certified, doing chores to earn extra money and bagging and boarding your best issues when you get home each night, potentially earning super powers for putting your prized possessions on display. At the end of the game, whichever kid has the most valuable collection wins! … because it ain’t a real hobby until capitalism sucks out its soul. [SUDDENLY] COMIC ANATOMY Each card in the game represents a different issue of a comic book. There are 6 different publishers, who each own the rights to 4 different heroes, like Catamaran Man, who’s ready to ship justice, and Gorgonzilla, the kaiju that pairs nicely with pinot noir. Each issue is numbered. So you can think of the heroes like the suits in a regular deck of playing cards. All heroes’ comics have issues 1-5, and issues 6-8 feature two different heroes in a crossover. Those issues can count as either suit. Within each publisher’s catalog, each hero has a crossover issue with each other hero, like that time The Incredible Hawk raced Bicyclops, the monocular marauder. But heroes

1:35 never cross over between publishers, so you’ll never find The Pacifier from Monster Comics squaring off against Garfunkle, the dissociated orange cat who loves minestrone, because HE belongs to the Inaction Comic Company. You kick off the game with a modest collection of 6 comics that you nabbed from an opening draft, and a ten cent starting allowance. As usual, if you want to see all the setup steps, skip to the end of the video because they’re a real snoozefest. There are three very important icons in the game: th e yellow “loose” icon, which represents comics that are just kicking around on your bedroom floor, which go face-down on the left side of your player board. This blue icon represents comics that are bagged and boarded — so you’ve stiffened them up with a cardboard backing and slid them into a sealed bag to preserve them. Though… who would ever do something so unbearably fastidious? Your bagged comics go face-down at the right side of your board. And this green icon denotes comics that you have displayed face-up here at the top of your player board. This is a set collection game, and this area is where you show off your sets. As you and the other players display your comics, you’ll increase the resale value of the different heroes they depict. The first time a player prizes a hero enough to display their comics, this marker moves right. When it reaches this stop marker, which starts at a different position depending on player count, the game is over. You play one final round, and then count up your money and the value of your collection to see who’s won.

3:07 [MEANWHILE] CLAIMING ACTIONS The two common boards represent the different places you can go to earn money and tailor your collection: home in the morning, home at night, the comic store, and the comic convention. You have a handful of 12 time cubes, representing each hour in the day. In the first phase, you’ll place your time cubes in different locations across the two boards, and once everyone has finished placing their cubes, you’ll resolve each area in numerical order. Each player takes a turn according to the turn order track — you don’t go clockwise around the table. On your turn, you can either claim an action with your time cubes, sweeten an action you’ve already claimed, or do both. To claim a spot, you pick an area on either of the two boards — doesn’t have to be in numerical order — where you see empty square spaces within a speech bubble. The game calls this an “action group.” These squares are often in different rows. The topmost rows are the best spots, and they get progressively less good as you go down, because those lower rows generally cost more cubes, and let you do less stuff. So pick any row — and let’s face it: it’ll probably be the topmost empty one — and fill it up with your cubes. You can’t fill a row that has someone else in it. You also can’t fill only part of a row — you have to fill the whole thing. If you already have cubes in an action group speech bubble, you can’t claim any other rows there. But you could,

4:37 for example, claim an action in the Reserve Bagged section if you already claimed a row there on a previous turn, because each of these rows is in its own separate action group. Alternatively or additionally, you can spend your cubes boosting an action you’ve already claimed. Pick an action group where you’ve already claimed an action, either on this turn or on a previous turn, and pay cubes to sweeten that action so you can do more stuff. Some of these boost areas only cost 1 cube, but some require you to commit 2 cubes at a time. You can’t boost an action that you haven’t yet claimed. The only exception here is the Chores space, which doesn’t have an associated action. You can just feed it as many cubes as you want. Multiple players can boost the same action. There’s no limit to the number of times you can boost an action, and you can do as much boosting on a turn as you want to, even across different actions, because it won’t affect other players’ turns.

5:33 If you decide to claim an action at the store or the comic con, you have to pay cubes to account for your travel time. It’s 1 cube to go to the comic store, and 2 cubes for the convention, because it takes longer to ride your bike there. You don’t have to keep paying this travel cost every time you want to claim an action in one of these locations: as long as you’ve paid 1 cube to visit the comic store, you can claim one or more of the actions there, and as long as you’ve coughed up 2 cubes for travel over here, you can claim spaces on any or all of the comic con action groups, cubes permitting, and claiming one action per turn. When you pay to travel, that’s part of your action: you don’t have to pay for travel, and then wait until your next turn to claim an action. So you cycle through each player in turn order, claiming an action and/or boosting your claim, until everyone is out of cubes.

6:23 Then it’s on to the Actions phase. [MOMENTS LATER] EXECUTING ACTIONS The meat of the game is where you chip through each section in order, and everyone resolves the actions they claimed and boosted in the previous phase. Let’s go through them all one by one to find out what you can do. Number 1 is Chores. Anyone with one or more cubes here grabs 5 cents per cube. The living room carpet has never BEEN so thoroughly vacuumed. Spot number 2 is where you can secretly mail away for bagged issues. The first number next to the row you claimed is how many issues you get to blind-draw from the Comic Supply deck up here in the corner of the second board. The second number is how many comics you get to purchase from the cards you just drew. Each comic costs 15 cents. In certain circumstances throughout the game, the value of each hero matters when buying or selling comics, but that’s not the case here: whenever hero value matters, you’ll see this pink icon. No — when mail ordering, every issue is just straight-up 15 cents. Any comics you buy from the Mail Order action go face-down at the right side of your board with your other bagged issues.

7:33 The advantage to using this space is that the other players don’t get to see what you bought, so they have no idea what you’re collecting. For every cube you committed to this boost spot, you get to draw two additional comics from the pile. For every TWO cubes you have here, you get to buy an additional comic from the cards that you drew. Whenever you get an opportunity to buy comics in the game, buying is optional: you’re not forced to buy as many comics as your buy limit. You could even buy zero if nothing strikes your fancy. The comics you decide not to buy from the Mail Order catalogue go face down to the comic supply discard pile. This discard pile is a bit of a graveyard, so it’s a good place to bury comics your opponents might be looking for, because a lot has to happen in the game for these issues to get recirculated.

8:20 If you traveled to the comic book store and claimed a Reserve Loose action in action number 3, you get to buy a particular issue on the spot you claimed for half that character’s hero value. So if you claimed this issue of Wander Woman, the disoriented dynamo, and her hero value is 20 cents, you’d cough up 10 cents to claim the issue, putting it face-down in your loose pile. These face-down issues are only face down to keep them hidden from other players, by the way: YOU can look at them any time you want. If the issue you claimed is a crossover with two different characters depicted, you always go by the more valuable character’s cost, and this holds true throughout the game. Incidentally, if you ever find yourself in a situation where you can’t, or don’t want to, buy a comic, you can just take your cubes back without doing anything. Perhaps you even claimed that space just to prevent an opponent from nabbing a certain issue? But would you do something like that? i sure hope not.

9:16 Once all of the claimed actions have been resolved left to right across this row, and even if no one claimed any of these actions, you sink any cards in these two spots face-down to the Bargain Bin discard pile, and slide the remaining cards to the right. In the number 4 area, you can sell any issues you don’t want. The number beside the row you claimed tells you how many issues you can sell, and every cube you placed here lets you sell an additional two issues. The pink icon is here, so prices go by hero value. Selling a loose comic from the left side of your board gets you half its hero value. Selling a bagged issue from the right side of your board gets you the full hero value, and so does selling one of your displayed comics, but the catch here is that displayed comics have to be in a minimum set of three. So you can sell the 5th or 4th issue from a displayed set, but as soon as you chisel it down to 3, you can’t sell any more of those, because you’re at the display minimum. If someone else has a displayed set of that hero, that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to reduce your set below 3 issues. Selling off pieces of a displayed set will also make the Hero Value of that character go down — we’ll see how that all works in more detail a little later. Eventually, you might get your sets graded at the comic con.

10:34 In this situation, you can’t sell any of these comics, no matter how many you have in the set. As you sell your comics, you put them in the rightmost empty spaces of the Reserve Loose row. If the row is full, you push the rightmost comic into the Bargain Bin discard pile, slide everything over, and place your sold comic here. So if you sell a bunch of issues, you could just conveyor belt comics straight into the Bargain Bin as your opponents look on in agony. Sometimes you can get your comics signed at the convention: if you sell a signed issue, you get double its hero value, or 30 cents, whichever is higher. If you do that, kick the signature off the issue and return it to the supply, and put the card into the Reserve Loose row as usual. Thematically, the store owner is keeping your signed issue and putting their unsigned copy on the store shelf. Action number 5, the Bargain Bin, works similarly to Mail Order: this is the number of comics you can draw from this pile, and this is the number you can buy from the ones that you draw. Each cube you placed here gets you an extra draw, and every 2 cubes you have here get you an extra buy. Each issue you buy from the Bargain Bin costs 5 cents and goes into your loose pile, and the issues you don’t buy go into the Bargain Bin discard. If the draw pile ever runs out, you shuffle the discards to form a new draw deck. If both draw and discard piles run out, you draw from the Comic Supply draw pile instead.

12:04 Finally, the number 6 spot in the Comic Store is the Reserve Bagged row. This works exactly like the Reserve Loose row, except you’re paying full hero value for whatever you buy here, and the issues go into your bagged area, face down on the right of your board. When all of these actions have been resolved from left to right, even if no one claimed any actions here, you once again sink any issues in these two spots to the Bargain Bin discard, and slide everything over. [BUT LITTLE DID THEY KNOW] ACTIONS PT 2 That’s it for all of the actions on the first board. Let’s run down the stuff that happens on the other common board. Actions 7 through 10 all take place at the Comic Con, which cost you 2 time cubes to attend. The Swag section lets you nab all of the comics in this pile for free and put them in your bagged area. i mean, they’re free, apart from the 3 hours you spent standing in line to get them!

12:58 Action number 8 gets you a Sneak Preview of which comics are due to hit store shelves tomorrow. Grab this entire face-down deck of cards and buy anything in there for 20 cents per issue. Those comics go into your bagged area. Whether or not you buy anything, you can rearrange this deck before you put it back face-down. That matters, because these are the cards that will feed the empty spots in the Reserve Bagged row next round, so you can potentially orchestrate things to help your collection, or deprive your opponents of the issues you think they’re hunting. Action number 9 lets you get a certain number of your bagged issues autographed. Every two cubes you have here gets you an additional autograph. To autograph a comic, flip one of your bagged issues and place an autograph tile on it: the issue’s now worth more money — as we saw from the Sell action, a signed issue sells for double its hero value — but flipping a card face-up also literally tips your hand and shows your opponents what you’ve been secretly collecting.

13:59 If you have any Displayed comics at the top of your board — action 12 lets you display, and we’ll get to it shortly — you can use action 10 to get a set graded by the quality experts at the comic con. In real life, grading means that you encase an issue in tamper-proof hard plastic and the quality experts give it a score, docking points for every dog-ear and nick they find throughout your book. But in Bagged & Boarded, grading lets you take one of these grading slabs, which are stacked from highest value to lowest, so it’s a race to claim them, and slap one across an entire displayed set to increase its value, and lock it down. Once a set is graded, you can no longer add issues to it, or remove issues from it, for example by selling them. Grading costs 15 cents, but if you have two time cubes here, that cost is waived.

14:53 You can’t grade an already-graded set, and you can only grade one set when resolving this action. If you returned home to claim action 11, you can sit on your bedroom floor and bag up your prized finds. Move up to this many of your loose comics to the “bagged” side of your player board. Every cube you have here lets you bag another loosey. There’s an 8 issue limit to the number of bagged comics you can have. If you ever acquire more than 8 bagged comics, say by purchasing them at spots like the Reserve Bagged row, Swag action, Sneak Preview, and so on, you’re allowed to exceed that 8-issue limit initially, but then you have to immediately whittle it down to 8 bagged comics total by moving comics to your Loose area until you’re down to 8 or fewer bagged comics. If you decide to unbag an autographed comic, you lose the autograph. You’re allowed to unbag your comics whenever you want — not just when you exceed the bagged limit. There’s no limit to the number of loose issues you can have.

15:58 Action 12 is where you get to move your bagged comics up to the display area at the top of your board to show them off. This number is how many comics you can display depending on which row you claimed, and each cube you’ve got here adds another display point to that total. Issues can only be displayed in sets of 3 or more, so if you had only 1 display point, you couldn’t just display this bagged issue of Doctor Weird, the physician of freakiness, on its own: if this is your first time displaying him, you’d need at least 3 display points to put 3 Doctor Weird issues above your board. But if you already had a display of 3 or more issues of Hovergirl, the crimefighter who defies both villains AND gravity, you could spend a single display point adding another bagged issue to her displayed set. Crossovers count, so this issue with Doctor Weird and Diversion Man, who puts the “action” in “distraction,” could be added to either of these sets, but you can’t use it as, like, a linking card to make one gigantic mega-set.

17:04 One particular hero has to be present in all issues in a set. That’s why this set of Haberdash and Bicyclops, Gumslinger and Bicyclops, and Gumslinger and Haberdash isn’t a valid set: the same hero needs to appear across all the issues. As we saw earlier, if a set is graded, it’s locked up tight, and you can’t add any more issues to it. And you can’t start a new set of that hero over here: by grading a set, you’re essentially saying you’re done with displaying that hero for the rest of the game. Grading a set doesn’t stop your opponents from displaying that hero, though. You CAN spend this action putting together or adding issues to multiple different sets, if you have enough display points. So you can display a new set of Rat Man: half rat, half man, all vengeance, and add an issue of The Pacifier: the baby enforcer with a stinky duty, in the same action, if you have 4 display points to spend. Displaying sets of comics nets you extra money, but this is end-game money: you don’t collect it right now.

18:12 Whenever a hero is displayed, you count up all of the displayed issues for that hero above all players’ boards, and move the token for that hero to the appropriate Hero Value space. So if there are 7 displayed issues of Quokkamole, the marsupial who can turn brown in a single day, even if you have 3 of them and your opponent’s displaying the other 4, Quokkamole’s marker gets bumped up here to space 7. If this is the first time this hero’s comics have ever been displayed, by you or any other player, you move this Unique Heroes marker to the right. So if this is the first time anyone has displayed Dr Weird, the WTF MD, then you move the Unique Hero marker. But if you’ve already displayed The Flush, who plumbs the depths of the criminal underworld, and someone else creates a new display of her comics, the marker doesn’t move, because it already moved the first time her comics got displayed.

19:10 If the Unique Heroes marker ever meets this marker, that triggers game end. You finish out the current day, and then play one more full day before counting up the final scores. When you display a hero and move the marker, because this is that hero’s first outing on anyone’s display shelf, you also get to claim a super power. Choose one of these cards from the face-up display. You can either keep it, or sell the card immediately for whatever value that hero is currently at — so if you create a 4-card set of The Troll, who makes the internet a better place one “um, actually” at a time — and if this is the first time The Troll is being displayed, you set The Troll’s token to 4 and move the Unique Hero marker up. Moving the Unique Hero marker entitles you to claim a superpower card which, if you sell it, goes for 30 cents, according to The Troll’s hero value. The sold superpower card leaves the game. Of course, instead of selling it, you can decide to keep the card.. Superpowers come in three flavours: some are triggered immediately, like this Spring Cleaning card that lets you sell any number of comics for their full hero value. Some cards are a one-time use that you cash in during your turn, like this Celebrity Sighting card that lets you get autographs on 2 of your comics, bagged or loose. And some Superpowers are ongoing and take effect throughout the game, like Electric Scooter, which discounts your travel cost to the store by 1 cube, making it free to place there.

20:38 Once the unique heroes tokens meet, nobody can claim any more Superpowers for displaying their comics, because they’re all gone. But you CAN still display your comics past that point. The final action space is number 13, Early Bedtime. This is how you jockey for position on the turn order track. You resolve each row from the top down. This player gets to move their token to the top of the turn order track, then this player moves to the top, and then this player. So the player who spends the most time sleeping winds up at the top of the turn order track for the next day. This is the one spot where it may be worth it to you to skip the topmost rows and gun for straight for this one: whoever claims this row is guaranteed to go first the following day.So maybe you rearranged the Sneak Preview deck and you know that an issue you desperately need is due to hit store shelves tomorrow, so you gotta get the jump on it.

21:36 The actions all get resolved in order, but the rulebook says that to keep the game flowing without a lot of downtime, everyone’s free to just resolve their actions without waiting for other players, except in moments where timing matters: for example, don’t start flipping cards and assigning autographs until the Sneak Preview player has finished rearranging that deck, because the cards you turn over to autograph may affect that player’s decision. Likewise, when you’re resolving actions like Mail Order or Bargain Bin, let all involved players draw their cards first, and then they can spend time figuring out which cards to buy, so that you don’t have to go player by player waiting for everyone to finish shopping. [THE NEXT DAY] BEDTIME CLEANUP Once you’ve resolved all 13 actions, you perform a bit of bedtime cleanup. Everyone takes their time cubes back from the main boards.

22:27 Fill up the Reserve Loose row from right to left using cards from the Bargain Bin draw deck. Then, fill up the Reserve Bagged row from right to left with cards drawn from the Sneak Preview deck. If Sneak Preview runs dry, keep filling the row from the Comic Supply draw deck. Grab a card from the Comic Supply draw deck and put it face down in the Swag section. This stack will just accumulate comics until a player claims this action to take them all. Then, refill the Sneak Preview deck so that it has 5 cards. Take the cards from the Comic Supply draw pile, and put them beneath the existing stack so that the order of those remaining cards is maintained. Once again, if your Bargain Bin or Comic Supply draw decks run out, shuffle the discards to form a new draw deck. It’s unlikely to happen, but if the draw and discard piles in the comic supply ever run out entirely, the game ends immediately and you move on to final scoring. Once all of these bedtime cleanup steps are complete, you move on to the next day, starting with the player at the top of the player order stack, claiming actions with your time cubes. [DAYS LATER] FINAL SCORING When these two markers meet and you’ve played through one more final day, or in the rare case that the Comic Supply piles run out, it’s time to see which kid made the most bank.

23:46 First, count up your leftover cash. Then, count up the value of your displayed sets: a set of 3 is worth a buck, 4’s worth a buck fifty, 5 gets you 2.50, 6 gets you 4, 7 gets you 6, and a full complement of all 8 issues, which includes all of a hero’s crossovers, nets you an absolutely mind-boggling eight dollars and fifty cents. Each autographed issue in a displayed set gets you another 20 cents, and all of the grading slabs you acquired have different bonus dollar amounts on them. The hero values don’t enter into it when you’re counting up your display comics money. Not so on the bagged side of your board: each autographed bagged comic gets you 1 and a half times its hero value, and each regular bagged issue gets you half its hero value.

24:38 The loose issues that you’ve stepped on or that were destroyed by tragic spills of Count Chocula are worth… ha-NOTHING! At setup, you dealt out three endgame scoring cards: evaluate your collection against each of these to earn even more money. So for example, Fan Club gets you an extra buck twenty if you have the most autographed issues from New World Comics. Runner up gets 60 cents. These endgame scoring cards don’t combo off one another: evaluate each card individually. A few of the orange endgame scoring cards have the bagged comic symbol on them. Be sure to evaluate these before tallying up everyone’s bagged comics scores. Whoever winds up as the richest kid, wins! As in life, so in board games. [BUT FIRST] SETUP To set up the game, lay out both common boards. One side is for 2-3 player games, and the other is for 4-6 player games. Cover up any of these spaces that have a number higher than your player count with a “Nope” tag to block them off. Grab all the grading slabs that match your player count, and then stack them so the highest-value slabs are on top.

25:51 Place the Unique Heroes token here, and the “stop” token on the space matching your player count — so 4 players, 5 players, 6 players. Randomly deal out a display of 5, 7, 9, 11, or 12 Superpowers cards for a 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-, or 6-player game. You’ll use a different number of publishers depending on your player count, and you can shake up the publisher tokens to randomize which ones to use. At 2 players, you’ll use 3 publishers. It’s 4 publishers in a 3 player game, 5 publishers in a 4 player game, or all 6 publishers in a 5 or 6 player game. Look for the publisher’s logo at the top right of each card, and make sure your deck contains only the cards from the publishers you chose to include. Then, shuffle that deck up reeeal good. The unused publishers’ comics go back in the box.

26:41 Round up the publisher and hero tokens for the cards you’re using. All of the hero tokens go on the ten cent space of the Hero Values track. Shuffle the three different endgame scoring decks, and deal out one card from each deck. If any of those cards require a publisher token, shake up the ones you’ve got and then randomly place them. The unused publisher tokens can go back in the box. The rulebook recommends using these two endgame scoring cards alone for your first game. Next, deal 1 face-down comic to the Swag pile, and 5 face-down comics to the Sneak Preview action. Fill the Reserve Loose and Reserve Bagged slots, but in a 2-player game, skip the leftmost slot of the Reserve Loose row. Deal out 7 cards to the Bargain Bin draw pile for a 2 player game, or 10 cards total for higher player counts.

27:30 The rest of the comics go face-down into the Comic Supply to form the draw pile. Put the autographs and coins… somewhere. Everyone fights tooth and nail for their favourite colour, and then takes their player board, 12 time cubes, and their player marker. The player who most recently read a comic book gets to determine initial player order, or you can just shake up the tokens and determine it randomly. Everyone gets 10 cents starting allowance. To smooth over the starting player advantage, players have to give up a certain number of time cubes for the initial round according to player count and turn order. In a 2 player game, the starting player has to forfeit 1 time cube. At 3 players, it’s 2, and so on. In 5 or 6 player games, the last players in turn order get additional allowance money to make it up to them. All of the forfeited time cubes are returned to these players on day 2.

28:21 The game kicks off with a draft: from the Comic Supply pile, deal everyone 8 comics. You keep one card in your loose pile face down to the left of your board, and pass your hand to the player on your left. Then, you select another loosey, pass the hand, and then pick a third loosey and pass the hand. 5 cards remain: your next three picks go face down into your Bagged area to the right of your board. Pick a card, pass the hand, pick a card, pass the hand, and then bag a card from the final hand of three. At any point during the draft, you can look at the bagged and loose cards you decided to keep, but you’re not allowed to move the cards around between those two areas: it’s three loosies, then three bagged issues, and then you discard the remaining two comics that nobody wanted into the Bargain Bin discard pile. Then you begin the game with the action claiming round, starting with the player at the top of the turn order track.

29:17 And now, you’re ready to play Bagged & Boarded!