The 6th annual Golden Kriegy Awards

0:03 Hello and welcome to the 6th annual Golden Cregy Awards. Now, I bet you're wondering why a channel that's only been around for one year is having its sixth annual award show. And the reason for that is I had a blog for years before I started doing this channel, and I started doing awards back in around about 2013. This is the first time the awards are going to be done in video format, but I thought I'd continue along with the tradition I established on my blog. Now, there are some things to note about the Cregi Awards that are a little different to most others. First of all, if a game's new to me, it's new to me. I don't care if a game was published in 1980. If I played it for the first time in 2018, it's a new game to me. Therefore, it counts for the awards. This is pretty much because I'm always a bit behind the times when it comes to checking out the new hotness. But also, if I miss out on a game because I didn't see it that year, it feels kind of stink to exclude it. And then there's the conceit of awards. Awards are always just the opinion of a group or a person who's decided that's what they think is the best thing. And there's complete transparency on who the committee is for this award. It's me, me and me alone. I am the one self-appointed expert who has decided to arbitrarily give awards to things I want to in categories I've made up. Now, this is no different to any award show like say the Oscars. I'm just being really upfront about it. All right, so let's move on to the awards.

1:17 The good things come in small packages award for best small box game. Getting bang for your buck is hard these days. A lot of games come with a lot of components and extra deluxe stuff that while that's really cool, sometimes you just want to pay a small amount to get a lot of game that you can take with you places. And Wajaka is my small box game of the year. Despite being a tiny box game, there is an awful lot of game in here. There's engine building, there's worker placement, there's dice manipulation. It's got a neat theme, and Will and Sarah Reed have done an excellent job of creating a really neat thematic game that does a good job of representing the culture it's about and provides really solid gameplay. If you're looking for a game to take with you on a trip or to a games club that doesn't require you to carry them in a big bag, Waka would be a game to pick up. It's also quite affordable. The distant future, the year 2000 award for most interesting technology that could change board gaming. In the past, this award has gone to things like custom 3D model printing, tabletop simulator, and app integrated gameplay. But this year, the one thing that really stood out as revolutionary in board game design was procedural generation. And of course, only two games came out using that this year. Keyforge and Discover Lands Unknown. One of which has become a smash hit and shows exactly what you can do with procedurally generated content within a game. And the other has demonstrated the pitfalls and traps of procedural generation, which is that the content can end up being far too generic. I'm interested to see where this goes. I don't know whether the unique game box experience is something

2:49 I'm particularly keen to engage with. And I like that they're trying something different. The Bearcave Award for best solo game. The two previous winners of this award were Terraforming Mars and Anacriny, and those are multiplayer games that had exceptional solo modes. But this year, I want to give a shout out to a dedicated solo game, and that's Nemo's War Second Edition. If you are a solo gamer and you haven't given this a go yet, do check it out. It combines a really strong decision-making process, optimization, and is absolutely dripping in theme. It's a unique game, but one I recommend anyone who's keen on solo gaming check out. the leading cause of paper cuts in 2018 award the best card ccentric game. Previous winners of this award have been Smashup, Netrunner, BudB team manager and Millennium Blade. So this game doesn't have to be a CCG or an LCG. It's a game that focuses on cards as the core of the action. So it's going to be a little bit of a stretch to say that this one is Gloom Haven. And yeah, Gloom Haven's a lot more than just the cards, but it is a card- driven game.

3:48 Your actions do revolve around cards. And Gloom Haven, well, it's been on everyone else's awards. It's going to get an award from me. It's an excellent game and honestly, if you don't know what we're talking about with Gloom Haven, go check out the recap. It It's really good. My group's also been playing it once a week for pretty much most of the year. So, it's probably our most played game as well. The This is Serious Mom award for adult content in a board game. Now, this is an award I pretty much created last year for this war of mine because I wanted to look at games that had more serious themes, darker themes, and who delved into more sensitive and serious subject matter than say selling beans. No disrespect to any games about selling beans. And the winner this year is Black Orchestra. And the reason I'm picking Black Orchestra is took a challenging and confronting topic of working inside the Nazi regime and presented it in a very true-to-life, very honest and real way that felt like you were members of a conspiracy inside that regime. It also didn't shy away from the actual horrors of what was going on. The Holocaust is part of the game. If one of your characters is low motivation, a trip to see what they're doing out in Ashitz is exactly what will give you the motivation to come back and do what needs to be done. It's also an exciting and interesting game. Where most co-ops are about steady ongoing risk management and firefighting, Black Orchestra is about a single decisive point in the game and maneuvering yourself into that place. If you're interested in a subject matter or just playing a game where you get to shoot Hitler in the face, poison him, or drop

5:19 him off a bridge, give Black Orchestra a go. The Toy Soldiers are serious business award for miniatures heavy game of the year. Now, I like painting miniatures. I'm a sucker for miniatures games and I've done a lot of miniatures wargaming over the years. So things like War Machine have been miniatures games that I've played to death and painted to death. So one of the many reasons this game wins this award is that I didn't have to paint it. And that's Lords of Helis. Now Lords of Hell is an asymmetric dudes on a map game with so many different paths to victory and these gloriously preainted miniatures that I just haven't had to go and paint yet. And I really like that. But that's not the reason it wins the award. The reason it wins the award is that the gameplay is exceptional. The theme's really neat, and I really respect games that give me multiple paths to victory and multiple different strategies to try out. The only downer of this game is I'm still waiting for the second half of it to arrive. The 21st Century Digital Boy Award for best app assisted game. So, only played a few new app assisted games this year, and some of them weren't that great. One that was pretty damn good was Chronicles of Crime. And the reason it's going to win this award is not because of the smart code scanning thing in the game, which is pretty good, but because of the crime scene investigation part of the game. You get 30 seconds to look at a crime scene through your phone and call out what you see. Where there's a knife on the floor, where there's a security camera on the wall, where the blood's positioned, what the person's wearing, all those details while your friends scramble around to find the evidence. And I thought that was really neat. It's the first time playing a

6:49 detective game you've actually been able to detect things. And I think that thing alone is why I think Chronicles of Crime is a cut above a lot of the other detective games out there. The computer counts as a friend, right? Award for best digital version. There's a fair number of good digital versions coming out this year. I had really high hopes for Terraforming Mars, but it's not quite there yet. So, lamentably, I can't give the award to that game. There's also the Through the Ages app, which is a really good app as well. But the winner for me this year is Sentinels of the Multiverse. I personally don't like Sentinels as a board game. It's a little too cumbersome. There's a lot of bookkeeping and well, it's just cumbersome. The app takes all of that away and just makes it a lot of fun. You sit down, you pick the characters you want to play, you play your powers, and it does all the annoying bookkeeping for you. The digital version is exceptionally good, and I don't know if I'll play the physical version again.

7:41 the I like my toast dry award for best abstract games. I don't like abstract games. Well, I didn't like abstract games. I'm very much about theme and games. So, finding myself liking a bunch of abstract games this year was kind of weird. But, I played Sigrada Santorini and I I really like those games. And the winner is Azil. I mean, Azil's a game about tiling where you're placing tiles. There's no real theme to it. But the gameplay was so compelling and it's so popular with my partner as well that has quickly become one of our favorite games. And if you told me five years ago that one of my favorite games would be a tiling game about tiling, I would have laughed at you. The Tana Altera Award for best New Zealand game. This was an amazing year for New Zealand board gaming. There are a lot of popular games coming out of New Zealand this year.

8:28 Australia by Martin Wallace was published by a New Zealand company. Endeavor was very successful on Kickstarter and is around the top 200 on board gamegeeek. plus a bunch of other games as well. And of course, the winner of this award, Architects of the West Kingdom. Hardly surprising. This was a big Kickstarter and it's been reviewed exceptionally well by a lot of people. It was a big hit at Essen and it's just a neat game. A great take on worker placement, speeding up worker placement, and doing something a little different with it. And I really like that I had three solid hit games to choose from in this category. That's really neat. And I'm hoping that New Zealand gaming just keeps on building and building and gets stronger and stronger. the Nick Garden Memorial Award for services to gaming. Now, Nick Gen was a close friend of mine who passed away in his 30s, and he was the moral compass of our wargaming group. Whenever anyone was getting worked up or too serious, he would be the one to say, "Toy soldiers are serious business." And that would immediately make people realize that they're arguing over a board game or a war game or a miniatures game, you know, nothing of consequence. He grounded our group and I really miss him. So, this award will go out yearly to the person I think has contributed the most to board gaming in the community, either locally or internationally. And this year, I want to call out Mele like us. There are hundreds of reviewers and previewers out there. Dozens and dozens of people doing playthroughs, but only one person is doing accessibility tearowns for those people who need them. And I think this is a valuable service to the gaming community as a whole, and that we should support people like us to keep doing what they're doing. And finally, the

10:00 Golden Creeky Award for best overall game of 2018. Now, there's some obvious candidates here that I will talk about that did not win the award, and those are Gloom Haven, Azil, and Root. Now, all three of those games could have won this award, and they're all quite deserving of it. But the game I going to pick is a game I picked up early in the year that has steadily grown and grown and grown on me, and that is 2015's Thunderbirds by Matt Lok. Now, this game came out in 2015, but I only picked it up this year, and I really can't say enough good things about it. If you like Pandemic, you'll probably really like Thunderbirds. Whereas the other Pandemic games I've played have seemed like a retread, this actually seems like an evolution. It's the next step of the pandemic idea. And while the theme might not appeal to a lot of people out there, it's a super good co-op game. It requires a lot of forethought and planning, has easily alterable difficulty, executes its theme perfectly, and works equally well as a co-op or solo. It kind of blows my mind that this game wasn't a big a deal when it came out, as the game is really, really good. Well, it didn't do particularly well, so I'm guessing that there are versions available out there for not a lot of money. So, get your hands on it and give it a go, especially if you like Pandemic. Well, that's my award show for the year. If you enjoy this video, like it, subscribe to the channel, and check out our Patreon.