2 Wombat Reviews - With Chris and Wendy Yi
Transcript
Hello and welcome out to the Dice Tower. I'm Wendy Yee.
And I'm Chris Yee. And today we have not one, but two wombat games for you. That's right. We're going to be taking a look at Wanted Wombat by Kyan Yano. And Wombat Poo by Joey Games. And so yes, so one of them is what these are both a little bit actually of push your luck wombat themed games. However, Wanted Wombats is one of the few wombat games that doesn't have cube they just cubes in it because wombats poo out cubes, that's what they're famous for. Mhm. So Wombat Poo is the first one we're going to take a look at here. Here's Wombat Poo set up on the table. This is a push your luck stacking game where in on your turn you will decide whether you want to poo or whether you want to wipe. If you poo, that means you're going to reveal the top wombat poop card and you're going to take that piece of wombat poop and place it out onto the board here. The next person has the choice to poo or to wipe. If you wipe, you're out of the round and you score points equal to the number of poop cubes in the tower. Well, this person's going to to poo again and now they have to stack up two of these small cubes here one at a time. When you reveal one of these larger brown ones, you have to stack that one onto the tower and if you eventually reveal one of the white ones, you'll have to stack that onto the tower as well. Now, on a player's turn they might choose to say, well, I'm going to wipe. I'm going to just score up two, four, six points right here. So they will move up their score tracker six steps on the score track. When someone hits 40 points, that'll trigger the final round of the game and players are going to try to exceed that person. So let's keep pooping here. At some point
in the game there might only be one player still pooping, so they get to take as many turns as they wish before they decide to quit or when they knock over the tower. If everybody passes within a round, then the round will reset, the person here will score all the points and then you continue playing. But let's see that tower knock over cuz that's what you all came here for. Ah, there it is. Wombat Boo.
All right, so we talked about how this is a Joey game, which means this company is owned by Phil Walker Harding, which is one of my most favorite designers of all time. Absolutely love a lot of his games. Now, if you watched the overview, you realize that this this like a know nothing game. Joey Games specializes in kids games.
Mhm. Uh however, the their previous full rate, the previous three games, some of which ranged for ages like four, as low as four, uh and they've had ones that are a little bit more uh robust of games. I think that the roll and write Squiggly Gum and then I think that the Busy Beaks are like pretty Yeah, they're like real games.
Yeah, pretty solid games that yes, are aimed at kids. This one aims real low, unfortunately. It does say six plus on the box, so it is meant for kids. But also, I think this is this is my biggest struggle with this particular game is that when I push my luck in a push your luck game is I want that luck to be affected by either me or some random card, dice, something, right? But instead, my luck is dependent on whether or not six-year-old Chris is going to knock down the tower. Yeah. Six-year-old Chris is not very good at stacking. Like you have to wait Six-year-old Chris is not good at a lot of things in life. I'll tell you what.
That's fair. Six-year-old Chris is crying about his dinosaur that his brother broke.
Right. Now, each player does have the incentive to not be the one to knock over the tower and everything, but you are kind of betting on it. It's It's interesting. It's unique in that sense and it does something that uh most push your luck games don't do. I don't mind the idea of factoring into your push your luck equation is other people's luck and skill, but it's it's not it's just not terribly done fun in this game. Yeah, it's it's super basic. You have what, three different sizes of cubes that it can possibly be and they're just cubes. There's nothing exciting about them. And because games exist like Animal Upon Animal, which is a unique shaped stacking game and I don't know, it teaches you to look at not just the shape or sorry, not just, you know, am I going to stack, but also the shape and you know, I just I feel like it fits the dexterity components along with like the educational learning how gravity works just a little bit better than this.
Right.
So I My favorite part of the game is that the if you flip over the card that says wipe or poo, uh so
There you go. Yeah, we recently reviewed What was the game we recently reviewed? Cats knocking things off of ledges? Yes. This is pretty much the
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. No, this is definitely lower than that. Like I feel like that had some strategic though it was minimal, there were some strategic decisions. This one is do I think that I'm going to be able to stack that tower on my turn and do I think that Jimmy over there is going to knock it over before I have a chance to? Yeah. Like oh, no. I it's not much for me. Score wise? Score wise for me, this is a three. Like I'm I'm not interested in this at all. I just feel like there's so many better kids stacking games. Why did we stick with cubes? I don't know. Because wombats.
Cuz wombats. I get it. Wombats, it's cute. The wiping thing is cute, but no, it's a three.
up toilet paper. He's a hero. No, I'm I'm coming in at much higher at a four. Ooh. Ooh.
This is the same Blowing me out of the water with your score there, sir. Yeah, it's same score I give to Cats Knocking Things Off Ledges. Each one is kind of, you know, has a little twist in its own way, but they're about the same for me. So yeah, unfortunately Wombat Poo, not a big fan, but recognize that Joey Games features animals and stuff about Australia and so yeah, we're just in a lot of ways not the target audience and that's okay. There we go. However, the next game The next game is Wanted Wombats. Chris is going to show you how this is played and then we'll come back. In the game of Wanted Wombats, players are going to predict the top card of a deck and see if they are correct all with the hopes of collecting those cards. They're cards worth 1,000, 3,000, 5, and 10,000 dollars with different distributions of each. If you collect those cards, they're worth that amount of money. However, if you collect three 1,000 dollar Wanted Wombats, they're actually worth 5,000 and the goal is to hit 15,000. The first person to do so will win the game and every set of three singles that you collect is worth 5,000.
So if it's my turn, I just flip over a card and predict. I predict this is going to be a one. I flip this over. I'm correct. I can choose to stop now and collect it or I could keep going. I'm going to say, well, another one. Flip it over and I feel pretty good. I'm going to say one more one. Okay. Well, I've done it. I'm going to choose to stop now. I grab these and as I said, because I have a set of three of them, this is worth 5,000 points. I'm going to keep this in front of me. The next person's going to go and they're going to say, one. And then they say, well, I'm feeling lucky, three. Oh, they feel good now. They're going to stop and so they collect these and then you just keep taking turns. 1,000. Oh, this person's wrong. So any incorrectly predicted cards will go to the discard pile over here. You will discard cards face up. All of players gathered cards are face up visible so everyone can count and see what the odds are so they know the probabilities.
You'll continue to have a big old discard pile. So someone will say, well, you know what, let's go for another 5,000. Oh, if you incorrectly guess when you reveal a 10,000 dollar Wanted Wombat, you will take this card and all of the discards and shuffle them back into the deck and then continue playing from there until someone hits 15,000 points. There's also just a few little uh variants you can play where instead of ending immediately when someone hits 15,000, you continue playing until uh one last round so everyone can try to exceed them. You can play to 12 to 18,000 or you can play best of three games and those are the rules of Wanted Wombat. So also absolute silly rule set. I mean, this When I first read the rules of this, I thought Is that the whole game? That's the whole game.
Like is that possible? Yes. So it's just predicting, right? And then you have the odds in front of you. It is a nice player aid reference so you know how many of what are where. Uh I think I did not show off is that Oh.
so you can visualize and see more exactly how many of what are out there.
my first card counter. It is kind of yeah.
Baby Blackjack, baby. Yeah, let's begin. But what I will say is, and I don't know if you had this experience or not, but I've taught this to a lot of different groups of people and it's shockingly more fun than it sounds like it should be. It is. Okay, so my first experience with it I was laying down on the couch. I don't know, I had a headache or I was just tired and I wanted to take a nap or something and Chris sat down on the living room floor with our daughter like near me. Our daughter wanted to play a game.
Yeah, she wanted to play a game, so he's just like, okay, flip over a card and tell me if, you know, what amount you think it's going to be. And then she played, he played and I was like, I can do this from laying on the couch. And I was invested in spite of being like just like laid out for the afternoon. Yeah. So yeah, I've I've not had that experience myself, but I uh well, I mean, I was there. But no, I've taught this to a lot of different people and it's because and because of its simple rule set, gamers look at this and go, this is going to be so stupid. Three. You flip it over and it's a three and suddenly they're hooked. This is uh so Kyan Yano is the same designer as uh Panda Panda, Llama Llama, both from All Play, but also Trio from uh from Happy Camper Games or Cocktail Games.
Uh Kyan Yano as a designer has this knack to be able to say like, here's a really dumb sounding rule set, but as soon as you start kind of getting it, you go, show me more. Let's run that one again. I bet I can get it. 10. 10. 10. Yes. What I like about this, too, is you have those moments as board gamers where everyone's kind of coming in and you need that filler game. Not everyone's arrived. Um, and often times I feel like you have someone that's like collecting stuff in the kitchen or they're doing something over here and they can still play this. You'll be like, "Hey Chris in the kitchen. What number you going to One. It's a one. Do you keep going? Yeah.
Yeah. And so I I love that or um families that have kids, you know, when you're playing with someone that has like a toddler or a baby and they are constantly distracted during a game because they're trying to entertain that child. Like this is another one of those games that like they can participate without having to sit at the table and focus and make sure the kid doesn't touch the pieces and you know, like I feel like it has a little niche there, which is kind of nice. Yeah, that kind of like a game you can play and if people walk in the middle of it, you go, "Hey, you can start playing right now." And you honestly might win. Is it a great game? No, not really. Right, but is it more fun than it should be in a lot of ways? Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I I enjoy this one. I like that the math is out there and the probabilities never work out in the way that it seems like they should and we we watched our daughter win by flipping over a 10 and then flipping over a five.
She collected two cards the whole game. Done. Yep. But that's a viable way to play. So I'm going to come in at a 7.5 with this. I think that it's fun and I think that it has, like you mentioned, more of a place than I expected it to have. Um, and so I think this is great and it's literally the just super fast set up, shuffle cards, start flipping the stuff over. Yeah, I'm giving this one a 7.5 as well. I think that uh Trio from the same designer is is a little bit better of a game in a in a couple of different ways, but this one has uh big kudos especially for being just so accessible and fitting for so many kind of weird occasions as as Wendy's talked about. So yeah, uh I really do like Wanted One Bat despite its super simple but adorable rule set. Uh nice art, nice production here. And if you do get this play mat, it is thin enough that you can fold it up and put it in this box. So uh kudos there for Barrel Aged Games.
Yeah, for planning it out. Well, there you go. Don't step in wombat poo and uh Catch your catch your Wanted One Bat. There you go. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Wendy Yee.
I'm Chris Yee. And uh are there any other wombat games coming out cuz seriously? Hey everybody, thanks for watching another video from The Dice Tower. Hey, you want to learn more about us, communicate with us? We have a Facebook group, we have a Discord channel, lots of different ways to get involved with The Dice Tower. You can find that in our link tree link below. So just click that, it will take you and you can communicate with us on Facebook, join our Facebook groups. There's lots of cool things that you can find and become part of The Dice Tower. Thanks so much for watching. I'm Tom Vasel.