TDG: Grind House
Transcript
Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the discriminating gamer. Say, what do you get when you cross a boomerang with a ghost? Something that'll come back to haunt you. Ladies and gentlemen, today we're going to go ahead and take a look at Grindhouse from Everything Epic.
In Grindhouse from Everything Epic, two to eight players take on the roles of various investigators, and they're looking to enter a haunted house and to see what's going on. Yikes. Players are going to get player boards that actually have a perfectly healthy person. All their limbs, their head, everything looks fine on the playerboard. But you're also going to get a number of tiles that on one side has a kind of a wounded uh side and then another side where the limbs aren't there at all. So you're going to go ahead and get that and use that to track your health during the game. Now you have the haunted house in front of you and you have a number of room cards and you have final room cards. Now if you're playing with less than six players, you're going to put out four room cards and a final room card. If you've got six players or more, you're going to have uh five room cards and the final room card.
But what you're going to do is you're going to shuffle the cards. You're going to place them out there on the board. Now, the first player is going to go ahead and reveal that first door. And there's some kind of a narrative story behind that door and certain conditions that must be met or satisfied or otherwise players have to interact with maybe choices to make. And what happens there can result in players taking damage. Now again, if you take damage, you are going to add a tile to your board and you may have to, if you've got all those tiles, you may have to flip over a tile. This again is your limbs being damaged or being removed. And watch out if your head or your heart go, that's it. Now, after the first door is opened, the next door is going to open. And the process repeats itself all through the doors. Now, here is the dealio. If at any time you are killed by taking too much damage, you are still in the game, you will essentially become a ghost and you can still theoretically win. Now, some of these rooms may call for dice rolloffs. Some of these rooms may call for volunteers that actually engage with the room that to see what's going to happen. You never know what's behind those doors.
Now, after you've completed the first four rooms, you actually will then the the current player will then reveal the final room. And the final room, the stakes are a little higher, the story is a little scarier, and you try to get through that hopefully without dying. Now, if you've completed all the rooms, including the final room, you go to scoring. For every healthy limb you have, you score two points. For every damaged limb you have, you just score one point. And if the limb is amputated, if it's gone, you don't score any points. Now, critically, at this time, you're going to reveal your persona. And again, the persona is kind of what you're working toward. There's different conditions that you can kind of manipulate to try to get to that persona card. If you've completed the persona card, you will get extra uh points. And then, of course, you look at who's got the most points. Who's ever got the most wins.
Grindhouse. We'll get back to the review in just a moment. I want to take a minute to ask you to check out my other channel that is Cody Carlson PhD where we talk about history books on history, military history. I even post some of my uh lectures for my classes on there. Please check that out. Please subscribe to that channel. And now back to the review. All right, ladies and gentlemen, Grindhouse. So, uh this was a game I I hadn't heard anything about. The good people at Everything Epic sent me a copy of this game, and my friends and I sat down to play it. played a four-player game. And as we're playing the game, my initial thought was it almost felt more like an activity than a game because you're you're revealing the um you're revealing the cards. And you know, I was scared it would be a thing where the cards play you instead of you you know, the game plays you instead of you playing the game. I quickly dismissed that notion though. I do feel like this is a game rather than an activity because there are choices here and they do matter. And one of the most critical ones is deciding what persona you're going to you're going to take on and then trying the best you can to to to meet that outcome. And sometimes some of them are easier, some of them you can manipulate things a little bit better to get to that, but not always. Now, as you're playing through the game and you are opening these these doors and reading them aloud, there's a lot of different kind of story elements in these different rooms, right? And they're they're very different. They're very funny. You never know what's going to come up. And there's, of course, a finite number of cards in this deck. And
they tell you what room it is on the the the the, you know, pack of the card. But there are a lot of I know there's a lot of other decks. actually sent me a few of the other decks and there's like a ton of different decks you can buy for this game to plug into it so you can keep that going if this is something you really enjoy. Now, I have to tell you this game is short. We play this game I think what we played like 20 minutes. So, it's not a long game. It's a pretty quick game. And I have to tell you for being a pretty quick game, it's a lot of fun. I think we all really enjoyed it. Uh maybe some of us to varying degrees, but we all got a kick out of it. And I I I have to tell you, you know, if this were an hourlong game, I would hate it. It would not I don't think there's enough there's enough choice to sustain an hourlong game. But for a 20 minute game for a, you know, an opener on game night or a filler or just something you want to pull out and just have fun with and laugh at, this is a great game. This one is really fun. It really has a great sense of uh like spookiness and and it really puts you into the idea of going into a haunted house here. I really like the artwork with the wounds that you just gradually get over the game. That's fun. The different personas and the objectives you can chase. Uh that's pretty good as well. And there's a lot of variety there. And it's nice that, you know, again, it's not dealt randomly. You get two cards and you choose. I think you could even deal out more than two and and give people a greater choice there, too. But the game is fun. I It's really fun. It's for what it is. It's a light and and and engaging
and fun horror themed game. So, I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to give Grindhouse a seven on the Cody scale. I think if you're looking for kind of a light, quick, fun horror game that packs a punch, I think you should check out Grindhouse. Thank you once again for joining us today on the Discriminating Gamer. As always, we'd ask you to please leave a comment for us here on YouTube, on Board Gamegegeek, on our Facebook page, on Twitter. We'd ask you to like and subscribe to all of these. It's very important that you like and subscribe to this channel. That means a lot to us. And if you like what we do here, please check out my other channel. that is Cody Carlson PhD where we talk about history, military history, books on history, even post some of my lectures on that channel. Uh, please subscribe to that. It would mean the world to me. And if you do really like what we do on this channel, I would humbly ask you to click on the super thanks button and leave a tip. You know, I started to tear up when my wife was cutting onions the other day.
Onions was a good dog. have me on my feet again. And I DON'T KNOW WHERE I'M GOING. AND I don't know where I've been. Please help me ground. IT'S A LONG TIME AND I'LL BE dying once a year. I wind up
me playing. No, no, no, no. Not playing board games. I'M OUT DOING VAMPIRE STUFF, you know, killing people, drinking blood, blah, blah, blah. you know,