Alphabet Challenge Completed - Reviews of All 26 Games We Played in January from A to Z

welcome to allies or enemies I'm Jess and I am Sean and today we are talking about our alphabet challenge I know a lot of folks are talking about this because it they just put it out on board game stats this year and we use board game stats to track all of our challenges this is not a plug for board game so that's not paying us she's the only board game app we've found that keeps all of our stats but they've got a challenge in there where you can just play games from A to Z so we thought you know what this January we're gonna do that and we finished it on January 30th and so now we're going to do very fast mini reviews of 26 games that we played for our alphabet champ and they weren't necessarily like our favorite game for each letter it was just kind of what we felt like playing on the day for a number of reasons yeah some of them were just because they were on board game arena we did not own games that started with that letter some of them are favorites we haven't played for a while some of them were just super fast and it was January 30th and we really wanted to complete this challenge in that month so you'll probably know what you're which so let's start with a [Music] A is Arc Nova and that was our most played game last year in terms of the length of time that we played it was the most hours that we played a game last year is like 11 or 12 hours of Arc Nova or something or even way more than that might be totally I think it was like 11 games and they counted for like two hours a game yeah yeah so it was like a day of Arc Nova and and last year it wasn't enough for us we already first like it was in the first week of January play played Arc Nova yet again and Jess continues to whoop me at it so that has not changed B is Ben o and this is this is a favorite of ours for a co-op game and it's just really quick I wish it took up a little less space though I wish it was more travelable because and it takes up a small box in terms of packing it but when you play it you need a giant giant table or just a giant floor space to play it yeah yeah you need a big chunk of space but it's just a super fun and we got bandida as well and we still I think I just prefer the Simplicity of bandito yeah it plays a little bit faster and we still escapes out half the time I think we caught him this time though yeah I think we're yeah we're pretty 50 50 with it C is Clank Expeditions Temple of the ape Lords and we don't own base game Clank and we own the Legacy version of Clank but you are able to use the Legacy cards with any of the kind of expansion boards and so we got a couple of the expansion boards and they're really great because each Spore has two different sides that all play a little bit differently yeah and I think there's two more boards as well that we don't have there's like a Sunken Treasures and a s well I want to say that there's something else too but I really like those two and with the Legacy I wasn't sure if it was going to work but we found the expansion board for like 10 bucks so I figured you know what let's see and you totally can't it's it works with like 95 98 of the cards that you end the game with with Legacy so I play all the way through then you can take those cards just you just got to change things a little like pickaxes become keys and we did play that uh board because we're trying to convince ourselves that we don't need catacombs because we're like we have so many versions of Clank we don't need it we're still we need it we definitely we definitely need it we'll end up with it at some point uh d d is for Dino World and one is I done a world you're probably gonna think dinosaur world no I mean the hebba card throwing game Dino World and this is this is a guilty pleasure game we bought for like two bucks as like a stocking stuffer yeah it was over the holidays as like one of those fun little holiday games and it is just a flicking game you have different size dinosaurs and you have to try and flick the cards onto the table where there's already some really small dinosaurs out and whatever you cover you get to pick up and then whoever's eaten the most dinosaurs at the end wins I think this is a take on like just a traditional I feel like I played this as a kid with like a just a deck of cards like a version of this game so I think this is a take on that but it's dinosaurs and it was like no money it was like cheaper to buy this than not to buy it so what the heck yeah it is what it is e is explorers of the North Sea and with the expansion I think this might be my favorite of the North Sea Trilogy we haven't played shipwright so that's not a contender but Raiders is really really good but this one I don't know I love building out the islands and getting to do like all kinds of Viking stuff yeah I feel like it sounds almost like like it is a bit of a hot take but I do Concur and I love Raiders I think it's great I think the take one play one super clever but I just I like I agree I really like exploring the islands and the expansion with like the asymmetric powers and with the um with all of the extra buildings and everything else it just it really knocks it up that Notch and yeah explorers is great um all right moving on F is for frost Haven and we have been playing a lot of this it has retired my first character don't worry no spoilers but um we'll say I am not in love with the with the Outpost part of it at first I thought oh I really like this and now I'm like oh we have to do so much homework between every Mission I love the mission still I don't know I think you feel a bit different but I was gonna say I think because I really like the the world of frost Haven and the narrative element minutes and we got the audio bit which the audio bit is holy cow nine days it's such a difference because we can just press play and continue with like doing the setup instead of having to that to be an extra step and so I really like that aspect but the Outpost phase if it takes longer than the main Dungeon Crawl that that can feel a little bit offset and so it's a little bit tricky yeah just just a smidge but it still is worth it it's still back in Gloom having all that great stuff and G is guy or project and I think this was the first game we played of the new year of like January 1st first game of the year what do we want to play and it is one of your favorite games it was number one in my top 100 last year I don't know if it still will be next year but it might be so that was the one we chose to bring out and again it's just it's great yeah it's it's so good it's it's just such a like perfectly balanced asymmetrical game that's so hard to do especially with so many different races and it takes time mystica and makes it you know a little bit more complex and I think a little bit better and I just love it moving on H H is for horrified and horrified is one of our absolute favorite co-op games this is I think the second video that we did on that is one of the reasons we started doing the channel is we wanted to tell people about horrified because at the time we felt like no one's playing this people should play this now a lot of people are playing it and that's great because it's it's just terrific it is funny because we chose our name allies our enemies because we were going to do a competitive and then a Cooperative game alternating I think it lasted like the first four videos yeah we realized we have way more competitive games but we do love Cooperative gains this is a great quick one I is I love cats but specifically explore and draw and I just love the the kind of flip and write version of Isle of cats it takes the big game makes it really similar but in a much easier setup and quicker to play version and we just we just love drawing the cats on the boats and we just did our favorite expansions remakes and sequels of 2022 and I love cats exploring draw was number two but after playing Isle of cats explore and draw and frost Haven a bit more I think it might be number one for I love I I will play I love cats explore and draw every single day of the week yeah Ross Haven I kind of got to be in the mood for I really like it oh when I'm in the mood for it it's so good though it's so hard to judge this like heavy games versus like games and yeah but I love cows Explorer draw is really good another great game is our J and that was Jaipur and I especially liked it because I won and Jess has been on like a 15 game win streak of Jaipur and I finally stopped always taking camels yeah and you've kind of figured out how to play but this was one if I wanted to win I figured out we would play drive four and that we you won the first game and I won the second one so it came down to the third I thought oh no Sean better not take this win from me uh but yeah I actually figured that you didn't win by just taking camels yeah in the past I'm like oh there's camels I better take all those camels because I feel like it's a great way to load up to take a lot of stuff in the future but the problem is I'm always playing for the future and I'm never playing for the now so I've learned to play for the Nap K is King Domino origin specifically and so this is the newer version of King Domino that lets you add kind of various modules and so uh it just it looks great it's a caveman version so you have all these little people that are wearing like the fur togas and you got the little meeple resources so it spiffs up King Domino yeah I don't think that they were topaz yet I think they were loin class um but it does it adds these two extra steps apps to it is cool because you can play it totally as king Domino or you can add the one module and make it a little harder or you can have both modules well actually it's one of the other module yeah or you add the other module and it becomes it's not that complex is not Queen Domino complex but it's kind of that it's that perfect amount where people thought Queen Domino is too much this is right on The Sweet Spot I'd say l is look at the stars and look at the stars as one I think we plan to talk about a little bit more probably in another video too but really cool rolling right game from bombix um and it's it's got these white markers and I feel like Twilight's inscription did that as well this year and that's kind of a thing now but it's got these cool white markers on this black background here drawing constellations out and it's a little hard to figure out where the lines go spatially but the puzzle is really cool and what you end up was cool and the theme is really cool yeah and it is really neat because it simulates kind of the sun rising so as the game progresses you have access to different parts of your board because those Stars aren't visible anymore so really neat although I always leave Sean to wipe off the marker because with the white marker the black eraser it just gets dirty really quick so you have to like use a little bit of water the next up m is Metro X so this is a another flipping right and you have various tube maps and then you're just building it out and we love Metro X because it's just it seems really simple but you always kind of end up putting yourself into a corner and you can never fill all of the stations so I don't know it's depth I think is deceptive I would love for them to release some expansion ones to this as well because we've played it's got two sides to it and they do play a little bit different so it's got two different um well I guess it's subway maps or it's it's in Japan I think I think it's meant to represent the Tokyo and Kyoto actual train lines I may be totally out to lunch with that but I'd love to see them do it for some other cities as well and have some more maps because yeah we've just we played so much of it that I want even more n is for the networks and networks is one that I think still really flies under the radar and they brought out a Duo version and I didn't hear a lot about it and honestly it wasn't that Keen because this plays perfectly fine for two players you don't need anything else this works great for two players and it's just it's a tableau building TV running TV station running game so you don't need this for two players but just in general for the game I do recommend the expansion because that gives you the different types of networks and the asymmetry and we've been really enjoying playing the different networks because each of them have very different goals for what they're trying to achieve and it makes it does play very differently yeah they all have totally different they've totally different play Styles and it's cool too because they all play a bit like different um if if you watch TV in the 70s and 80s you would recognize these sorts of TV stations which I really appreciate too o is Odin's Raven so this is a great two-player racing game you just deal out your cards and then you have your Ravens that you are racing along but one of the things that helps with that is the the Loki cards and so they're kind of the trickster cards that either give you a benefit or you can play it to kind of give a detriment to your opponent and this is the newer version so this has been around for a while I think and yeah there's an older version I've never played the older version but the newer version like looks great it's super simple it's got these weird shaped cards which I feel like works well for it as well it's a it's just it's a solid filler race game and there are very few two-player race games in the world so it's nice to have this one p is Parks and I think I talked in our top 100 we had a time when we played Parks totally wrong and this was my fault because we were playing with other people we kept screwing stuff up but it had been established so I was like you know what we've already done it that's fine this game would play like that but we had like four of those and it broke the game so we played again after a little bit of a reset um with the correct rules and I'll tell you having the right rules to a game makes a big difference it played so much better and it turns out it's still super fun and I think there was even an original rule that we didn't quite get right that this time when we were checking the rules to figure out the thing we messed up we realized there was like something on top of that that we also messed up and so playing it completely correctly great experience Q is quacks of quedlinburg I don't know if there are a lot of Q games out there there yeah there's a few there's quixel there's some of those um some of those weird short ones from that abstract game series I want to say I don't even know if that's true well quacks was the first one that came to mind yeah there aren't a lot there aren't a lot and yeah we played quacks with the witch's expansion uh that's kind of the preferred way to play that we've found is is using those two with the other side of the board and yeah it was just a great Pusher looking it yeah quacks quacks is quacks is terrific wax is such a good um like Gateway game too I will Alchemists I'm still on the fence about having The Alchemist expansion there sometimes is great but that's certainly not an every game expansion that's like uh I played a lot of quacks lately and I want to play one more but I wanted to feel a little bit different but I think I think witches is an every time expansion and it's yeah it's great adds a little you don't need it but it adds a little song R is a root and I feel like a win every time I talk Jess into playing this with me whether I want to lose it and the higherlings it made a huge difference in root and I think you bet you're on like a four game win streak so that probably helps too that probably does help I'd like to say it's not just that I've been winning recently and it has been the edition of the higher Lanes but it could be that I haven't but the highlands are great and I just love getting these like various characters they all look amazing like on my team temporarily and so that has that won me over yeah I think the last time we had a hedgehog Highwayman in the Hedgehog Highwaymen I think are a real favorite they they're great s is a summer camp so this is a Phil Walker Harding game and it is a race game but uh through a summer camp setting and so you get to choose what activities your Camp is participating in which is great because you can choose like friendship and Outdoors and Adventures yeah there's like seven different mini boxes it's kind of nice that they actually come in boxes and you pick three of them each time and you're you're racing on all three tracks so even though some of them work very differently on our little on balance it's at least different for everybody because you know it's not like one type of activity it's just from one person yeah it does change the game up and this is one that is only available in the states I think it's one of his Target exclusive games so we got lucky and we got um actually I think your mom sent it over here for us um and yeah and it's it's just super fun quick Phil Walker Harding it's what he does so well and he does it again here T is Trails of tucana and this is if this isn't our most played game of all time it's got to be pretty darn close um and I just I like I like anything where I'm drawing a map I love making the little bonus combos um yeah I just play this all day it's one of my favorite uh flipping right games and I'm always the person that announces the terrain and I don't know I just really like having that role of making those announcements and it helps that it's double-sided I don't think there's ever been a time when we've only played one side so anytime we play it we do play it twice guaranteed we're gonna play two yep U is Ultimate railroads and so this is just a fantastic work replacement game and this is one that I wasn't that interesting because I thought it was going to be kind of more of a train game but it's very much more of an engine building work replacement game that is just is just fascinating particularly the ultimate version where you can play four different ones four different boards plus they've got another and yeah it's it's a train like it's the loosest Train theme ever this could be anything this could be like training Penguins um it could be any anything you can think of they could put this theme on but but the mechanics are so good and it's just such a fun um track moving game which happens to be train tracks which is great that's a literal a literal translation tracks the tracks um and it's so satisfying and the combos are so great and oh I when I set Gaia project may not be my number one this is the game I was thinking of it has such a fun ramp up too because I feel like round one you're getting like eight to ten points and then the last round you're like 200 points so it's just that progression is is wonderful yeah it's oh it's a good one uh V we played Village Green which is a game we do not play a lot and it's it's an interesting Tableau Builder card game so you've got you've got like scoring conditions that go on the outside so you got three on the top three on the side then you've got nine Village cards like Garden cards and so you want your scoring conditions to line up with those flower cards but then the flowers have these rules where you've got to play a matching shape or color next to each one see it just becomes this puzzle of like your own doing yeah and there is no way that you'll be able to do it perfectly because because of that placement rules for the flowers you can never find the ideal card that will score for both the kind of horizontal and vertical for all three of them so it is kind of that compromise because it also a race it's triggered when one person is finished yes so you do have to do it quick and decide like all right I'll just put this here because then later on that will let me put another card down it's got a bit of that Calico thing so like if you love Calico and you love that like I I'm not going to do it all but I'm going to do as much as I can and I'm okay with that this is a really good thing but I I do like it I'm a fan of it w is welcome to which is my other favorite flip and write game it's just a it's like it probably is my favorite one it's just it's just so good every time we play it because there's just so many different kind of paths that you can go down and it just it's one of the uh flip and ride of roller blunt games that I that feels the most replayable I think we actually played the ice cream module which we don't have the ice cream papers but it's on board game arena um and I I like the little alternate things from time to time we got like the zombies and the Doomsday thing and the Halloween and a few of them um but yeah they're always nice as I said that that it's just a little extra thing to think about when you played a lot of Welcome to yeah I feel like the ice cream one could be good but I didn't really get it the first time and I think you like managed to get to the end of your streets faster with your truck so I uh missed out on the bus why I liked it so much because I got a little bit quicker so so I won that one well which was nice X was this was a brand spanking new one to us Zhang Ki um which is like a and I'm I apologize I'm almost certainly sang that wrong but it's like an old Chinese version of Chess um and it's going to be great for some folks I just am not a huge chess fan and it's got that same kind of abstract feel it's very Chessy it's just it's got some it's got like elephants and like a river a lot of real cool stuff actually I think if I was into chess I'd really like this but I realized when playing it and you whoop me at it that when you lose at a game like chess like kind of an intense like head-to-head game it just feels so much worse than when you lose to like like a game like ultimate railroads where I'm like oh you know what I lost but I did all this cool stuff yeah it is something that I'm I'm not a big fan of and you get that I feel like often an abstract strategy games um but I what I was interested to play this version because almost all of the pieces do translate to our version that we know of Chess but there's some really interesting exceptions there's some that can only move in like a small grid and some that can't cross your half and so those differences um just mixed up chest made it a different different way to play and the next one is another game that we don't own so we had to play on board game arena and that is Yahtzee and I had actually never played Yahtzee before so it was it was fun to play it and actually for a game that came out as like it's not a modern board game I thought it played pretty well you know it's just some fun dice rolling and Crossing it off and it it does what a roll and write should do it's the I think you're probably the original one uh but I was glad to play it yeah I I bet that there's a board game historian watching this who's gonna tell us no it is not but it came out I don't know like the 40s the 50s it's been around forever and you say we don't own it but really if you've got five dice and a piece of paper you're on Yahtzee it's you need very little to play Yahtzee and this is a game we played all the time when I was camping as a kid so I just got like warm feelings about Yahtzee and I really liked playing it again it uh yeah it's it's there's so little to it compared to Modern rolling rights but it's still sometimes it's worth revisiting those Classics so still fun Zed is for zuly and we love zoo I feel like we talked about Zulily a lot because we are suckers for Zuli it's just it's got that cute little cartoony art which at first I was like ah this is too Kitty and this goes against it but the more we play it I see it as a positive and this has just become a comfort game for us it's a really fun drafting game where you are building out your zoo but it's not just deciding like what animals can go because you're also having to draft the spaces that they can go in and so it is just this fun puzzle particularly for two player when you can eye up kind of how much room the other person has or what they're collecting and and try and get in their way as much as you can but you're limited because you don't have like ample amounts of space either yeah we get a lot of uh get left with an elephant yes at the end of a round and take the the space first as well though you don't always do that and I end up with a ton of space no no I've been doing that because you have to take the space first and then especially if the other person's collecting it up as well you're going to need that space and I like too that this is just this is like a small print local UK game um I always like supporting that sort of thing too there's a lot of real cool games coming out of the UK especially right now as well and I think we'll probably talk about more of those soon too uh but that's that's it that's our 26 we played 26 different games I think we played even more than that last month but 26 games starting with each letter of the alphabet and it was fun it was fun to be forced to play stuff like like janky and to revisit Yahtzee in summer camp um we haven't played in a while it was fun to have a framework that kind of just made us do those so I would highly recommend it yeah because it's something it's hard to choose what game to play and I would say probably about half of of these were games that we kind of just chose to play that ended up taking off for this Challenge and then the other half were ones that we sought out of one of those evenings of oh what should we play tonight well what letters do we need to tackle and going from that approach which which is great because I can we can get stuck on decision making sometimes and if if you don't have most people are not going to have a game that start I bet almost nobody has again that starts with every letter of the alphabet we did find on board game arena I think they had every letter represented I think you could you could do it just on board game right now maybe not Zed I'm uncertain but even pretty darn close to do it on board game arena so yeah so if if you don't have the physical copies just do it that way but thank you so much for watching uh as usual please like subscribe if you're doing an alphabet challenge or if you have ideas of what ones you'd want to play for your your A to Z do pop those in the comments and let us know if you got other challenges too because we are just looking for other I like having a framework for playing games because it just makes it easier when you're choosing what to play and it's it's fun to have these little challenges a framework for fun if you got like a an Excel sheet for fun that's even better uh thank you so much and hopefully we'll see you next time