BGG.con Game Impressions Part 3

0:00 welcome to John gits games this is part three of my board game geekcon 2014's impression list I've already covered 16 games I'm going to do the final eight now so the first of those is Deus this was right near the top of my most excited about list games to play it was also the first game that I played at the convention and it did not disappoint me I sat down I played a four-player game of it and it was great it was everything that I was hoping for it to be uh if you aren't familiar with it really briefly you get a hand of cards and they have buildings on them with various engine effects you can like it'll might tell you to um spend some gold to get some resources or it might say move this piece over here it does various things get you lots of resources based on where you have things on the map and you either play them down and you always put them into a column of the same color and when you do that you get to evaluate every other card you've done in that color so you're building a little color engine you want to do uh certain cards first and then next ones you want to do them in an order so you evaluate them you get to do awesome stuff uh also the other mechanic of the game is you can discard cards from your hand and evaluate I think five different types of or maybe six anyway several different types of discard abilities where you might discard cards from your hand and you get money for that or you discard cards in your hand and you get um you get uh new cards or you might get new buildings or resources like all these different things you can get which essentially means you might get a bad hand but that's okay ditch the hand get a bunch of resources draw new cards and now you have a bunch of resources to play them it was exactly as it was advertised in fact about halfway two-thirds way through the game I was thinking to myself I'm really enjoying

1:30 this but I am not going to win I had like nine in-game victory points at the end of the game you start with five so I acred like four I had taken one tiny Barbarian Village and I had no Victory Point engine in front of me whereas the other players a couple of them were at like 24 26 points and I was like there's no way I'm going to win however I was able to get three of the endgame scoring temples built whereas one other player got two and the other people just got one and I ended up winning I was really surprised by like at least five or six points I was very happy to see that I went for well I wasn't necessarily going for a low Victory Point strategy I was didn't have the option to build a victory Point engine instead I did other things and it was still very viable I came back with victory points and I won really really love the game game two is Abyss this is another game that I talked about and John gets excited that was super excited to play uh it's one of those games where you have some push your luck but the way you push your luck is you don't bust in this game it's more like you don't want to present great opportunities for your opponents to get really good cards you got um it's set collection and you spend those cards to get uh engine ability kind of uh Victory Point Lords and you get them for a little while and you get victory points but the main mechanic of the game is you're kind of making decisions based on around how many good opportunities you want to give to your opponents and this game totally worked for me uh it's got a lot of had a lot of hype and then a lot of people were disappointed because I thought there should be more to it and I went in thinking it would be exactly what it was and hoping it would be exactly what it was and I was very happy

3:02 with what it was I ended up playing twice I lost the first game terribly I won the first game I me I won the second game and I will definitely be picking this up it's gorgeous the only flaw with the game is that monster track there are these Monster cards where you when you play them this track goes up and the higher up on the track you go the better rewards there are for the person who cashes out but there are so few Monster cards in the deck and the re the rewards you get on the bottom of the track are so good that we never saw go past the third out of like six or seven slots on that monster track feel like something is up with that I've seen lots of people online have the same critique part of me wants to just take the monsters out of the deck and get rid of that and just play the game without it I feel like it might feel a little more cohesive at that point or some variant either way I like the game as it is just one weird mechanic that just did it doesn't seem to be playing out the way I think the designer expected it to when he released it the third game is pandemic The Cure this is essentially pandemic the dice game uh in it every single player has a unique roll and they have a unique set of dice for that roll and you can roll them as many times as you want to on your turn however there's a push your luck method because if you get a certain die face it's going to push up your epidemic track which means you're going to roll more disease dice which means you're going to die faster and we died fast I played this game twice we didn't get past curing one disease in either of those games before we got overrun by outbreaks this game is very difficult now part of that is because we started on the standard difficulty instead of intro I think we're a little full of ourselves we thought we're at a board gaming convention we should start at standard that was wrong everybody start with intro beat it a couple times and

4:33 then maybe work into standard once so you have an idea what the mid late game is like because we didn't even get to that point it was very difficult game and I think it's supposed to be difficult by Design and that's fine you want a Cooperative game to not be um uh to be too easy but it's also a dice game so we had some very bad rolls we had a couple times where someone would just roll two to three of the EP of The Biohazard symbols on the first roll so they pretty much don't have a turn because most of the dice were already locked out and then we have another um uh epidemic happened and things shifted down very quickly and I think that's going to happen in a game with dice and the people around the table who disliked it I think were more were disposed to disliking it because I'm not a huge fan of dice I enjoyed it I like dice I know one people at the table doesn't like dice but likes co-ops and he liked it so I think I'm going to acquire it and try to beat it on the intro level and uh yeah I think I want it I was just a little bit of a downer how incredibly difficult how not even close we got to beating this game in either of the times we played game four is Nations the dice game and this is one of the many the dice game games that were at at pgcon I've already talked about several of them and this takes a sprawling epic civilization game that lasts like 45 minutes a player into a small distilled uh dice game that lasts about 45 minutes for four players total and it does a very good job of getting Nations the nation's Vibe into this game like you you have the book track U that's just the same as in the other game and you got military and you're trying to get food food to go over famines and the way you um you draft the tiles much like the cards

6:04 worked very similar I I felt like I was playing nation's light and that's a good thing that's what the game was going for and I really enjoyed playing it I you you roll your dice and then you spend dice to buy tiles and those tiles have new dice on them so you get rid of those other dice and you get better dice so you start with white dice then you get might get blue dice that have lots of ore or yellow dice that have lots of gold on them and you can kind of specialize an engine The Ore lets you build monuments the gold lets you buy new cards and that's really great you're building an engine while you go you roll them immediately you get to use them immediately the only problem I have with the game is that there is a very small amount of diversity in the tiles that you actually buy they might all look different like this tile might right here might say it's you know the the Apothecary or something and this to right here might say it's the aqueduct but both of them will might cost the same amount of money based on where they are on the the board but they both just get you a blue dye they're functionally identical even though they have different art and a different name it seemed like when you put all the towels out on the board I was kind of waiting for that oh wow that one's great oh that one's really interesting and ultimately they're all just get a get a better die get a better die you're upgrading your dice pool without much variety so I feel like this game is not going to have as much replayability as I want which is probably why I'm not going to rush out to get it I feel like after three or four games you're going to feel like you've done everything you you've seen every tile you pretty much see every tile in the first game anyway because there's so many duplicates function functionality wise and and I think that if this game comes out with expansion which I hope it does well enough and I hope it does come out with an expansion I'll be all over that the expansion

7:36 brings in new tiles that maybe have an interesting ability on them in addition to getting a dice or just doesn't get you a dice just has abilities then I will get that guaranteed because the mechanics of this game are solid I really like them I just wanted more diversity in the options that I'm going to have so for now I'm holding off I'm very glad I played it I hope to play it again soon but it probably won't be for my collection game five is cell swords and this is one I had no idea existed until I was wandering around the demo Hall and I got to the level 99 games booth and I I was chatting with them with my friend about Argent Consortium a bit and then I looked over and there was this very small table like you know maybe like this big and there was this little game on it with these Square cards with numbers in each of the sides and the little graphic on the middle and I walked over and I said wow this game looks a lot like that card miname that you play in uh was it Final Fantasy 10 or several of the Final Fantasy games and I remember loving it in the video game The Final Fantasy video game and the guy said yeah that's exactly pretty much what this game is uh it's a tile L game they're they're cards but they're square tiles with a number in each side and you place them down on the board they have a red side and a blue side you're trying to get the most of your color out there and when you compare the two cards the one with the number that's greater is going to flip the other one over and now you have more control and every single card has except for one I guess every single card has a special ability that does all sorts of things it might flip this one over there it might move this one around here it might shift that it might rotate all these around and I only played a a demo at the convention but I've now played a game of it subsequently and it really worked well as a disclaimer they noticed that I

9:06 was a board game reviewer and they they gave this game to me for free as a review copy so that was super cool it's one of the first times it's ever happened to me but I also enjoyed the game I wanted to it felt like if you've heard of Equinox which is a game by asmati games that came out recently and it is excellent uh this was like Equinox light because Equinox is like a real brain burner it's so awesome with hexagons and you're flipping tiles and there's all these very intricate combinations and this game is just simple light and fun I I look forward to playing it a bunch more unfortunately the text on the cards was is could be very vague and then you look to the rules and they have explanations of every card and even that can seem to be pretty vague seemed like maybe they needed a little bit more editing to make those more concise and more obvious as to what exactly some of the more complicated cards do but at the end of the day it's it's a very neat game it's a very small box and I look forward to playing this one more game six is spellcaster which is a game I was looking for at the convention I was interested to see how it played wasn't necessarily excited about it because it's seems very light so I got to sit down and play at the booth play a full game because it's very quick and the way it works is you have a it's a two-player only game between two Mages and you have health and you have victory points essentially they have different WS for it in the game and you either win by getting to a certain number of victory points before your opponent or you um remove all the health from your opponent and there are four different colored Magics in the game and you have a hand of cards you play them them down to a communal board like if it's a green card you put it in the green card slot and then you can activate it and it might attack them or give you a buff and on their turn if they play a green card it

10:37 will cover up your green card and it'll be facing them and then they can use it so you kind of build a little public Tableau engine but you only get to use the cards that are facing you and your opponent has a way of destroying that engine by just covering it up with a card that might be good for them this game was very quick I got destroyed I got completely slaughtered because the guy at the demo booth has probably played this a bunch and I could see a game in there I I could see playing this more unfortunately I don't think it's necessarily my type of game it is so fast and I just don't have that much room in my collection for more very fast two-player games that I don't know how much depth it's going to have I kind of wish I'd played it a couple more times to get a feel for it to see some more of the combos it was an interesting experience I wouldn't mind playing it again at some point but for the moment it might it might fill an order to get to free shipping at some point but it's not going to be one of the reasons I make a purchase order at some point in the future game seven is Argent the Consortium this is another game by level 99 games and I actually backed this on Kickstarter so I'll be getting it relatively soon uh a friend of mine who I went to borain geekon was very interested in playing this game like he saw it online he was really really excited to play it I told him I was getting it and he's he still really wanted to play at the convention so I figured why not so we got it out and we put it out on the table and this game is humongous we played a three-player game and it took the entire table it was incredible how much space this worker placement game has and like many level 99 games games it has an incredible amount of replayability because there's so much stuff in the Box you're only

12:08 using this much of this and this much of that we use the intro beginner setup to play the game and you are all Mages at an academy you have a certain number of um workers it's a worker placement game but every worker has a special attribute like some can be placed uh as a double move uh some come out when you cast a certain spell others when you place them they can wound another one they can kick it off and go to the the infirmary another one is immune from being kicked off and on top of that then you get spells which have uh several levels on them and you can upgrade them and you spend Mana to activate the Spells and then you are uh getting influence it's going to break ties and you're getting mana and you're getting money and the money let you buy artifacts and the artifacts are either U immediate use or you can keep using them and then you could also get followers who can let you do all this uh other things like get different things they might be one time use they might keep going and if it sounds like there's a lot going on it's because there is a lot going on and ultimately the way you win the game is you're trying to win the votes of these um these I guess voters uh people who uh will see how well you did at various things and you will get the card for it so the person who gets the most influence gets this card the person who has the most go at the end the game gets that card the person with the most um followers in blue or something like that gets this card and most of those voting cards are faed down at the beginning of the game so one of the actions you're doing in the game is to look at these cards and put it down and put a little token on it say I've seen it I can look at it later and one of them gives you most points for seeing the most of those so it has this weird effect where you're playing the game you have so much you can do and you're not even sure what you're supposed to be doing and ultimately it fell flat for all three of

13:40 us I we really wanted to like this game we started playing the first turn we're like this is so cool there's so much going on I've never played a worker placement game with this many things that you can do and they all seem neat and you got the spell let you blow things up and you got this spell that does this and I got an epic spell that let me do other things but ultimately once we got a couple turns in it felt like well first of all one of my friends made a ridiculous combo and he just destroyed us like between his spell and the certain Mages that he had he was able to dump almost all of his Mages out on the first or second turn and then he just tried to end the round as quickly as possible leaving myself and the other player with pieces that were stranded and to the best of my knowledge we didn't know rules incorrectly he just had an astonishingly good combo with slow time and these black Mages and it was very good but also I just felt like I'm not sure what I want to do with this Mage because I've only seen three out of the 10 Victory Point conditions for the end of the game and I know what those are I know one of them I'm not going to win at all because I'm already like five marks behind somebody else and these other two were really public and so I found myself just doing kind of almost random things like hopefully one of them is have the most gold and then I didn't even have the most gold so I felt like I feel like if that voting rule thing was not in the game if you just got victory points for doing various things and whoever had the most victory points won the game was the game I think I would like this game way more because I loved the Combos and the I loved having tons of stuff to to do but that extra Lev layer of not knowing what I should do and often times having a hard time getting into the position to even look at the cards to see and the the one of the players was able to see like eight of the 10 cards and she was overwhelmed

15:12 by all the knowledge of all the things that she saw and she was she said she's like you pretty much get you know there's pretty much one for doing everything in this game and I don't know maybe if we went down to like six instead of 10 or four instead of 10 and that wasn't the only endgame Victory Point thing I just feel like something was missing here there's just too many things going on they needed to pull one of these things out uh to make this game great and as it stands I think it's okay I'm going to get it and the the backer we already we've already talked about various variants we're going to play because we all want to like it so much and we will try it again when I get it but it was it was underwhelming unfortunately and the final game of all of these Impressions is really goofy I just had to throw it in here it's called wacky wit and it is essentially Pac-Man the board game it has it's two player only one person plays the ghosts one person plays back Pac-Man it was in the middle of the gaming Hall my friend and I ended up playing it while we were waiting for somebody else the rules are printed right on the board and I played Pac-Man he played the ghosts I won very easily actually but we still enjoyed playing it it's you roll a D12 it lets the Pac-Man person move that many spots and you you poke these little magnetic pegs down so you really feel like you're like you're like eating little white things and then the ghost player is rolling the dice and tells them which ghosts can move and how far they can move but it felt really random you're rolling these D12 the ghosts can only get out of the p 10 on certain numbers it took like six turns for him to get any ghost out he just got really unlucky and you know in a game where you're rolling D um D12 it's essentially a Rolland move game luck is gonna play a really big part but that doesn't change the fact that I don't know we both we

16:43 both were laughing we both thought it was great you get a little yellow pill and suddenly I could eat some of his ghosts and they went back it really came together well it looks like it's expensive I will definitely not be buying this game but if I see that bggg con next year I wouldn't be surprised if I end up playing it once or twice and that wraps up my first impressions on 24 games that I played at bcon 2014 I played more than that but believe it or not I actually distill down a bit to get to this list I had an amazing time at this convention I look forward to going back next year it was phenomenal to play just games for 15 17 hours straight I felt like I was in this la la land where sleep and food didn't really make sense and all the only thing that mattered was games it it's good to be back in reality it's great to think about my uh feelings on these games in retrospect and I look forward to adding several of them to my collection I hope you enjoyed these videos if you did please consider subscribing to my channel thanks for watching