Trickerion: Discussion

[music] [music] Some viewers may find the following video disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised. >> Hey everyone, welcome back to Board Games Unlocked. And today I'm doing a discussion over Tracarion. Not necessarily the collector's edition, but the anniversary of Tracarion. 10 years that this game uh has been out.

And that's kind of insane cuz I I feel like I vividly remember um the release of this game and its expand. Maybe it's just it's the expansions that I mainly remember uh having to having to play whenever it came out. But um yeah, I mean I've been a huge advocate for this game. It has kind it put kind of Mind Clash on on the map cuz I want to say this was its their first game cuz I thought uh Anacrony was but then I saw that these uh that this one was actually out before it.

So 2016 is whenever this one came out. 2015. Oh jeez. Um and then Anacrony was 2018 I think. 2017. I'm just a year behind apparently. But this one has always captivated me for a variety of reasons. One, it is a midweight uh Euro that even even though my shifts on Euro um has been quite drastic where I was like not into them at all.

Then I was slightly slightly into them. Then I wanted the the heaviest of heavy with Valarda and those types of games. Um, and then I've kind of went down on them where I just find playing them perfectly fine, but I don't really seek them out as much. But I've always kept Tracaron in my collection because it's such a solid game.

And what's funny is the How to Play that I watch, which was came out years and years ago whenever this was first released, they were talking about the convoluted nature of a lot of this. And I just I don't really see it. Maybe because I'm playing the collector's edition and the update pack has streamlined some of the stuff that I just missed.

I think this game is is very smooth. There are some weird aspects to kind of they to wrap your head around as you're first learning it, but to me it's always just made sense because the mechanics in this game were thematic. At least to me. So, with Mine Clash being what it is and the recent game, uh, Voidfall that came out that I thought was also outstanding, but I just was never going to play it again, I had revisited this, especially since I got the anniversary upgrade pack to see if it still held up.

And I am so happy to say that it does. This game still is so solid and the the aspects of it just did not they they aged super well. So in this game with Trarion, one of the things I also love about it is the theme. It is a you are a stage magician, not a real magician. It's not fantasy themed to anyway.

The best example I can give again is if you've seen The Prestige, which I know you're probably like, "Oh, when's he gonna say it?" It's The Prestige. Just which is in my opinion Christopher Nolan's best movie. Uh that's probably a hot take, but I I love The Prestige so much. And it but it's that you're you're stage magicians.

you are uh going out acquiring items and uh setting up practicing them to then perform them and get fame and whoever has most fame by the end of the game wins. And what's cool is out of the box there's already like a built-in expansion uh with the dark alley. So you already have tons of variety in how you want to play this game uh from the get-go.

So, what's really cool about this one as well is it to me it never felt like it was overly complicated. You have your magician and then you have assistants. Uh you have one assistant and then you have a specialist which could be an assistant, could be a manager, could be an engineer, whichever one you want to start with.

Or you can just look at the rule book and it tells you first game start with this. And then you have there are four schools of magic. There's uh illusion, optical, uh mechanical, and escapey. I think those are the four. Does it tell me? Nope, it doesn't. But I think those are the four. And there are different levels to those uh to those uh spells, not spells, to those tricks that you're going to need to acquire materials for.

But you pick a school of magic that you want to start with and the level. And as you gain more fame, you try you can level up this the tricks that you're trying to perform. But but yeah, so that's kind of how you start out. And then what's really neat is this game is kind of a programming game. There [clears throat] are four I mean there are three areas you can go to, but then uh four if you're playing with the dark alley.

But everyone has the same hand of cards of the locations and you program them by putting them face down on your magician, on your assistant, on your specialist. And then once everyone does that, you flip them and that determines where you're going to go. And each location has a spot on it that it's basically first come, first serve where your worker has a certain number of action points.

Like your magician has three. And if you go to the first spot in any given location, that gives them a boost of two. So you have five action points to spend at that location. In downtown, it could be to get money. It could be to learn a new trick. It could be to hire a new assistant or a new specialist.

Market row is going and getting items that you need for your tricks. It could be hiring, not hiring but acquiring quickly new items or pre-ordering items so that they will replace the market in future rows. And then at the theater it is setting up your people when what day you want to actually perform and that's going to be huge because that's where you get a lot of your points.

And then with the Dark Alley expansion, that's how you can modify the um like the fortune, which is kind of like an a a round event, like it it'll change the the effects of the whole round, or you can acquire new uh programming cards that have special abilities on them. So, but you do that and if you don't want to go, then you just don't go cuz there's not it's not worth going there.

But all of that is just to aid you in performing your tricks. And another thing about this game that I've always liked is the sense that you don't have to spend your resources once you acquire them. You need a certain amount depending on the trick you're wanting. But like let's see the stocks escape that you can start with is you need two wood and two metal.

And so once you acquire two wood and two metal, you will always have two wood and two metal. And that will allow you to perform this trick. I think maybe some of the stuff that is the most that's that's the the weirdest is the way that they've done the iconography. Like the example I gave with uh the wood and the metal.

they have like it it's stacked instead of just saying wood times two, which I feel like would have just been way easier to do. But once you kind of understand that that's how they're doing it, it it's uniform across all like all the cards. So the various tricks are awesome. I and and whenever you are leveling up as you gain more and more fame and you want to go to level one then level two or level three tricks then you could just look at the resources you have and see that oh hey I'm doing I'm doing escapee stuff.

The stocks escape is two wood and two metal. Okay. Well, I can do walled that just requires wood and metal. It requires three wood and three metal and one lock. So, I could try and go for that because I already have the resources. Um, and then if I go to level three stuff, um, I could do buried alive.

That requires three locks and three wood. I don't need the metal anymore, but I already have the lock. And there are ways for you to uh have resources count as more than what you already have. the um I think the manager is the one that does that where if you move over a a resource to your uh to your manager accounts as if it's has one more of it.

Oh yeah, also there's the workshop you can go to. The workshop is always I always forget about it because it's mainly it's practicing your tricks. So each of these cards you assign a token to and uh the tokens are one of the four suits in a deck of cards. So whenever you learn stock escape, you just put oh this one's going to be spades and you have four spade tokens.

So whenever you are putting them onto the play bill, you know what the trick is. Um but that's how you refill these. It's once you have performed all of the trick of this stock escape, then you can go to your workshop and actually refill it. I know this isn't necessarily how to play, but I I love just how everything is interconnected.

And after like a round of play, it's immediately apparent just how the systems work. Uh, I do think though this game does benefit from having played it before because most people are still trying on their first game and stuff, they're going to be trying to just figure out how the how the tricks work and how you score them.

And other players will know that at a certain point, you're going to want to get away from your level one tricks and go to level two and then level three. Well, the level three ones are only if you're playing with the Dark Alley expansion, which I highly recommend. I I I think The Dark Alley is not necessarily integral to the game, but it does feel like that's the game that they were making and they just took it out for an easier experience.

But the level three spells do come in and with with having that expansion. But if you're playing with that, then there is a certain point where you want to start doing level three spells. Although the last game of this I played, I was playing with funny enough three new people and the guy who came in second place never deviated from his level ones and he uh he he got pretty high up there on victory points.

So, it was funny thinking about that. He just got he had like linking rings as his level one spell. I keep saying spell, I mean trick. And he got a lot of points for it. It's like, god damn, thematically you were the best Linking Rings magician. You just I mean, you were doing everything, pulling out all the stops just to make Linking Rings cool.

While uh thematic, I mean, I won that game, but I was Vanishing Elephants. >> [laughter] >> And it's I wasn't necessarily that far ahead if you think about it where the play bill is me vanishing elephants and my opener is linking rings and people were just easily amazed by both [laughter] which I guess in this in this case all of it is magic to to people and how they get that that's that's a physical object.

That's a physical metal ring. I felt it myself. How do you get them to link together? and [clears throat] then oh there was an elephant there and now there isn't one. Oh witchcraft but it's just it one the game I feel has always just kind of oozed theme uh especially if you have seen the prestige and I don't know I don't know I I I just really really like this one.

So then and and the game does have a ton of not a ton of expansions has a few expansions with different magician abilities because there are you you are a magician that is trying to make a name for himself. So there's specialized abilities that you can have. So that's always cool. Then they have this other expansion, Doll Guards Academy, that probably the last time I talked about this game was when I played that and I have not played that in a very long time.

From what I remember, it's I think you're teaching the tricks now. There's something about taking the tricks that you've learned and moving them over to the academy and getting benefits of being like a teacher at a magician school, but I'm just talking based off memory. I might not even be right, but I do feel like I remember the expansion just kind of being a little bit over the top for this kind of game.

I feel like the Dark Alley is is is perfect to where I'm at with Euro games now. And and then with the new thing that came out with the Trarion Anniversary Update Pack, which was this, what would they call it? Arcane Arts expansion. It's another mini expansion that just has a new kind of action thing that you can do.

There's a caravan that moves from location to location and when you're there, you can spend action points to mess with these. And this gives you there are these uh the the the shards, the arcane shards that are worth victory points, but they also are modifiers. Um, and the the caravan can modify those into into these specialized shards that just make them a little bit more powerful.

But there's also new assistants that you can get from them that have special abilities for that. Uh, it's fine. It's it's something that they threw in that if you just if you really play Trarion a lot, then you're going to then you could just throw it in to add a wrinkle to things. It doesn't it it's not overly complicated, but at the time at the same time, if you're teaching new people to this game, I would just completely forego adding it because they're already going to be trying to figure out how the game works.

Um, out of everything that the game has, I think one of the most complicated ones to understand is how how the the play bills work and go into the theater. So one thing that I don't find that I find kind of weird is you have a Thursday through Sunday schedule where you can you pick a day that you are going to perform on and you you if you go earlier in the week like on Thursday it's negative one to everything negative one to fame negative one to money because apparently no one cares on going on a Thursday but people love Sunday so if you go Sunday then you get plus one to everything plus one fame, plus one coin.

But the problem is is you assign your tricks to a play bill. And I mentioned that there were those those tokens that you place. And there's a spatial element to these as well. I think this might be the one that's the biggest disconnect. But if you think of it thematically, it works for me anyway in the sense that you're not looking at this bill as what tokens go on.

If you look at it as a play bill of oh it's going to be stocks escape and that links into card manipulation and then there's mind reading and the way you can position these can give you a benefit of either shards or fame or something. But once this play bill is filled out that's the trick. So when people are coming to a Thursday showing that's what they're here to see.

That's what's always helped me. But mechanically yes that's what you're doing. This is whenever you're performing. But there are certain number of these out on the board. And if multiple people are going to the theater, then yeah, if you're going Thursday, you're getting negative to everything. But you also get to pick the play bill because when you choose a card, you trigger everyone's tricks, not just yours.

So you can only pick one that has yours on it. But the problem is is you get benefits for you being the main show. So when you're the one that actually picks the card, you're the one that gets the benefit at the bottom. You're the one that gets the performance benefit of how many links there are. Um, and things like that.

So there are definite times where if you're going first before someone, let's say you went on Saturday and someone is going on Sunday and they have all their tricks on one thing, but you have one. Well, you can pick that one and you're they're still going to get to perform their tricks. Like, it's you don't just dick them over on not getting anything.

They still will get their their tricks, fame, and money for whatever is on the card, but you get everything else. You get the play bill uh performance bonus. You get the linking performance bonus. So, I've always liked that element of of being able to go to deciding what day you want to go because if you hedge your bets, you can put them you can put some of your tricks on every single day so that no matter what, you're going to get to perform something that is yours.

But if you put them all on one, you can reap huge benefits, especially if you have many uh you know, you can do multiple different types of tricks. But the reason why I bring up the theater in the sense that one that that can be a mean area to go, but you're competing magicians and if you watch the prestige, it makes sense.

But the one thing I do find weird is if you go on Thursday, like you performing on Thursday, that's where you have your magician and stuff and you go, "Okay, cool. I'm on Thursday. I pick the play bill. I get minus one to everything." That that makes sense. But then let's say you have a trick on another play bill and someone else on Saturday picks their trick and or picks their play bill but you're on it.

You also get the Thursday negative modifier that that I still can't really figure out why cuz it's a different day. Maybe I guess thematically I guess I'm trying to think is you performed on Thursday. So you did your tricks and you only have a certain number of tricks. You can only have three unless you have a certain assistant that lets you have four.

You can only have three tricks and let's say again it's stocks escape linking rings and card manipulation. Those are the tricks that you have and you perform them on Thursday. Then come Saturday and you're you're performing stocks escape again. I guess you reap the ben. The only way I could thematically make this is that no one didn't want to really see it on Thursday for some reason, but then they come and see it again on Saturday.

I guess you get the negative because they've already seen it. I'm trying to thematically tie it in because I really think that this game makes it is a lot more digestible if you can thematically tie all the mechanics to it. That's all I got. Other than that, I do think it's really weird that hey, I chose to do the performance on Thursday because I wanted to go first.

I understand I'm getting negative to everything. That's fine. But now I'm on Saturday and people are, you know, or on Sunday and everyone's like, "Yay, we love this stuff." Oh, but for some reason I'm getting negative anyway. That's that's honestly a minor complaint. It It's just I'm trying to think of like major negatives that this game has, especially with the collector's edition.

The storage solution is awesome. Um this is one game I've never had to feel the need to go out and get a 3D printer. Uh yeah, it's just it's so solid. I really really like this game. It's it's it's clean and thematic. It's a theme that is never touched on. It's always real magic. And I like that this isn't uh I think the art maybe not on the board.

The board is still funny enough. It's like hey, it came with an updated board. Um alternate art main board. I don't know what the alternate art is, [laughter] honestly. I think Oh, maybe I don't have the the main board. Oh, wait. No, I do. I think it's actually in this box. It is. So, yeah, the alternate art on the main board is it I unless my version with the collector's edition was um like was the same.

The only difference I can immediately tell maybe I maybe was Oh, no. Yeah, this is the Huh. Do I have the um Maybe I have the boards mixed up cuz this the doll guards one and it's at night. Huh. Maybe maybe I accidentally mixed up the boards. That would be funny. Well, I'll take another look cuz the alternate art main board always just whenever I was playing this I was thinking it just looked the same.

Um, yeah, it's like the same on both sides. Hm. Anyway, uh, so that was that was the difference. So, the board art was always just fine, but the card art I've really liked. And another thing that this game came with that I thought was just such a blessing was the magician's workbook. How every player had their own book that would tell them what the dark alley tokens do, what the locations do at all the spots and the all the cards that were available to you from a given school.

So you don't have to sit there and look through them every time. You could just make your plans by looking at this. And everyone has one of these. Everyone has one for the Doll Guards Academy, too, if you're playing with that. So, over 10 years that this game came out, and I feel like it it honestly hasn't aged today.

There are a lot of games, especially Euro games like this, that you either look at and you're like, hm, yeah, yeah, this one was good 10 years ago. It just doesn't really hold up anymore. or it's getting a awakened realms, you know, Gleaked on version and that's going to cost, hey, the base game for the original was 60 bucks.

Now it's 800. Um, it looks pretty. There's minis now and don't get me wrong, I love the Castles of Burgundy Awaken Realm stuff, but this game wasn't getting any of that, and I don't think it needs it. So, it's it's so nice to come back all these years later and be like, man, it's still so good. And that's my opinion.

That's my thoughts on the carry-on update upgrade pack. My dog, he always he knows when I'm ending a video. He's like, "Oh, what are we doing?" But does it uh do you need the the Arcane Arts expansion? Cuz I think that's the only new thing that has coming out. No, I I don't think so. I think if you already have Trarion, it's just nice to have, but honestly, I would be surprised if I ever really threw it in um a whole lot besides just to throw it in.

Um so yeah, that's my thoughts on Tracarion Legends of Illusion. On a scale of 1 to 10, what do I have this rated at right now? Um let's see. Tracarion Collector's Edition. Yeah, I have it at a nine and I'm gonna keep it there. I think I think this game is just super duper solid. Why is it not getting a 10?

Um, that's a good question. I don't know. I don't know why it's not getting a 10, but [laughter] I I maybe maybe just because I don't still I still don't have it hit the table all that much, but it's still a nine and it's phenomenal. And that's it. That's my thoughts on Traceron. Let me know what you think of the game in the comments below.

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