Rob looks at City of Demons all i can say is ..WOW!
Transcript
This video is brought to you by Miniature Market. Thousands of board games, miniatures, and paints. Discount prices at miniaturemarket.com. Hi everybody, it's your old pal Rob. Today we're going to be looking at a game that really caught me off guard. Uh it's from Nightingale Games. It is called City of Demons. Now, what could this mean? Uh there's only one way to find out. Let's go down to the table and check this one out. This is a very long board, so I'm going to try to fit everything in here, so you kind of get a brief overview. I'm not going to explain everything. Your whole thing is you were trying to conquer each one of these areas to get to the control room and activate. Your opponent is trying to do the same thing. There is a solo variant where you can play against an auto um an an automatic player, and there are certain things that you'll do, but we're not going to explain that here. You're going to start the game with on your on your board here with three health, one junk. You're saying, "Oh, what do what do I need junk for?"
Well, you need junk, trust me. Um there are info tokens that you're going to be trying to get. They're very important. Oh, not info, these are beacons, I'm sorry. And uh also there are info tokens. These are very important as well, because they are going to help you do certain things. Uh increase your health and invade demons. Uh demons, you say? Yeah, not only are you trying to race up this board, but you are trying to evade demons, okay? Now, if you're at this first area, you are going to roll each one as you can see you get these big dice, and you are progressively going up these dice. They have all kinds of different symbols on them, and we'll explain each one. This one for instance, okay, means I'm going to get uh two two junk, which would be great. But the problem is with that, also there is a symbol for radiation, which means I would lose one health.
Now, that's not good, okay? Losing health really stinks, because if you get too far, you're going to get stunned, and you're going to go back, and you're going to you're going to lose stuff. Okay, and you're going to have to start all over again. So, you have to make a decision. Do I want to press forward? Okay? Do I want to try to use one of these abilities? And that's what these these beacons are going to be for. If you have a beacon, oh, wow, okay, so I took that one health loss, no problem. Okay? I'm going to come down here, pay the one beacon, okay? And what that's going to do is bring me back to full health. But the problem is you can't go forward unless you get the arrow that moves you forward. Okay? That is not going to help you, okay? So, you have to have that arrow.
That means that you can go in and you can get a beacon, but you have to roll it. So, you're here, and you may have lost that health and say, "Ah, well, you know, I'm going to stay here." And then your opponent will go. Um if you ever want to, you can always go back to camp, okay? You can go go back to full health, okay? You can you can dump off your your junk and stuff like that, and you can take and use junk to get gear cards, okay? And you're going to pull two gear cards, and you're going to and you're going to pay that junk and you're going to decide which one you're going to keep. Now, these these these gear cards are going to help you, and their cost is how much junk they're going to be. So, you're going to want to take a look and possibly fix this gear.
I'm going to pay the one junk and have this discard the regain two health, but not your maximum. Okay, that's good. Uh discard to re to reroll a die. These things are going to come in handy, and you want to get these, because you're never going to make it all the way through without getting some gear cards, and you are going to need gear cards. And there's all kinds of stuff. There's cool things like this. Uh you can pay five to get this maintenance android. Can take five damage from demons. Now, as you roll, you're going to run into demons, and that's what a demon is. And for each demon, you are going to take uh you're going to lose two health. So, you also have to figure out how you are going to mitigate that, too, because there are certain things that you can trade in that will mitigate or you'll have certain cards that will prevent you from taking any damage when you roll that. So, for instance, we're here, and we want to roll, and oh, okay.
Well, we got an info. That's great, because you start piling up your info, you can start and I'll move the camera here, so you can see down here, you can start to maximize your health. So, now you start having six health, you can start you can stay in a spot and take some chances. Uh also, you are going to want to pay it and you're going to pay info to move that up each time. You're as much info as you can get, five info, well, that's going to be a demon invasion evasion. So, if you roll a demon invasion, it automatically cancels the one of them. So, you're constantly trying to build this up to get to the control room to activate. And the only way you are going to activate is if you pay the cost in beacons, and that's five beacons. So, you can sit here all day and roll and roll, and yeah, you got a bunch of junk, you got radiation, but oh, well, hey, this one here, you're going to take an info, but you're going to turn around and you're going to go back. Okay? So, it's not easy. You are constantly trying to get the beacons and make that move here, hopefully roll the correct die to get to the control room, so you can activate it with your five beacons and win the game.
Good luck. It's not easy, but boy, is it fun. Uh also, there is a swamp. You can go underground instead. So, if you start at your camp and you want to go underground, well, guess what? You can roll your this die here. Sometimes it's got good things, a lot of times it's got a lot of bad stuff. It's a lot of risk and reward uh going underneath the tunnel, because you're not going to take as bad as a beating as you would hope, but if you're able to mitigate things and be able to to to have the right gear and everything else that you need, it's all going to pay off in the end. And there are tons of fantastic cards, so this game just has an unbelievable amount of replayability. Uh the AI works really, really well. It actually puts you under a lot of pressure.
Um and uh this is just just a fun a lot of fun, okay? So, you are just constantly, constantly going to be trying to do this, and you are a runner trying to get there. On your turn, like I said, there are a couple things that you're going to do. You can decide to either uh enter a location or or go to through the underground tunnel, which I don't suggest. City levels are one to five, swamp uh move to the outer perimeter and roll that swamp die, like I told you, not not really thing. Or go back to the camp and uh gain a junk, uh stay, or draw new new gear card, try to complete that with as much info info as you possibly can. And the end of turn you're going to be converting those beacons and things like that to try to help yourself get better and better, so each run becomes progressively farther until you can finish it.
Uh the real pain in the neck are these damn demons. They run in you run into them at the wrong time, and if you can't mitigate them, you are going to be in trouble. The rule book is nice and clean. It's only about 11 pages. Um the nice thing about it, it has a nice summary. Tells you everything that you need to do uh and and what to look out for. You never die, you get stung. You set to one health, you go back, you discard two junk, and discard one beacon. Um and you know, there are penalties for not for for pushing too hard. Um really a lot a lot of fun, and something that you need to check out what and that is City of Demon. Let's go up top and get my final thoughts on this.
The thing I love about this, and the thing that really sits out for me, is how you are going about it and rolling those dice and taking a chance, and you're kind of pushing your luck a little bit. Um you are going to get destroyed. The the smart thing is is trying to get what you can, get back, try to build up, try to build yourself up to keep taking that step. But sometimes you just keep taking that step, and you don't get the benefit of of being able to go back and take your trash back or your salvage back um and and trade that in and some and some of the other stuff that you have to do to create items, because those items really help you. And getting additional health. Um um you know, getting the the the the scavenge tokens and so forth and so on and and just working your way through it to get to that final room is is is really a lot of fun. It's great with two players. Uh my son and I were messing with it, because it was something I could teach to him quickly, and it was just a lot of fun. This is a great, great little game that people are are I I think are kind of sleeping on, but uh I'm going to tell you this much.
Uh I I really enjoy this. Uh very thematic, works very well. Um you're you're just you're the runner in the tribe and you are trying to figure it out and boy um this is just fun. The solo is even even just as good. So, definitely go check this out. Uh it's from uh I can't believe I did that. I was sitting there like that for half half the time. Uh from Nightingale Games uh and from Jim Deboe, um brilliant, brilliant guy. Just just made a great, great game. Definitely check this out. [clears throat] Don't mind me turning the box sideways. It doesn't matter which way you turn this. This is fun no matter how you look at it. Until next time, it's your old pal Rob.
We'll see you soon, everybody.