Lairs Preview | Build a Dungeon in a Board Game by KTBG!

0:00 let's talk about layers a hilarious Dungeon Crawler for two players welcome to brains on games I'm Dr Brian McDonald and in this episode I'm super excited to share with you a game that's coming to Kickstarter very soon I will put information about the campaign in the show notes below the video I was super excited to receive this prototype of a game called layers from kids table board games now Lay's is a two-player game kids age 10 and up can figure this one out and games take only about 40 minutes to play but you might get super involved in creating your lair then that could make things take longer uh but let's take a deeper look at layers from kids tableboard games now this is a prototype of a game I played a very early prototype of this one at breakout in March and I was very excited this even just with little plain pieces this was a fun game to play little cubes for Monsters it was still fun but the Prototype is incredible it's probably the fanciest prototype I think I've ever received this game is light in terms of its complexity and what are you trying to do in layers well you're you're exploring your opponent's lirer and you're trying to earn the most victory points by collecting treasures and defeating monsters and being the first to get to the exit of your opponent's lirer so this is a fascinating game to me I just had so

1:31 much fun playing it and it's hilarious so I'm already telling you what I think of this thing uh each player has a dual layer player board in the Prototype and a screen to hide what they're building you're going to start with three treasure chests three traps and three monsters you've got 20 walls you have to use all of those components but you can use only 17 walls if you want to um we always wish that we had more walls but um this is what things are to look like once you've built your lair so you're really trying to kind of bluff the other player and lead them and slow them down um but you're creating the map that the other player is going to explore so two players are opposite one another with these screens the screens are great because they've got all of the rules that you need to remember are right there so it's super easy to keep track of everything uh this is a straightforward game to figure out once you've built one of these layers you're going to be good to go but you might notice here on the Prototype that there are some spots for removable stickers this game comes with boxes of slowly advancing and and slowly advancing rules and extra components and I'm not allowed to share those with you but I wish I could because the the the extra rules in this game are just incredible by the time we open the second box my goodness we were having a lot of fun um but even with the base game we were having a great time playing so it's it it is neat in that it can sort of slowly ease you

3:03 along in terms of understanding the more complex rules you start with a very simple basic game and it becomes more complex from there conveniently I think I'm allowed to say this about the components that are in the other boxes everything's marked to make it easy to reset the game if you want to play with someone who um hasn't played the more advanced modules yet your layer is going to have a start and an exit and so the player of course is going to start at the start point they're trying to earn some Treasures to get to the exit I'll tell you how the how the exploration part goes I have to say as we were playing through this game by the time we got to the second game you could just even when I wasn't playing other my son was playing this with some one of his friends you could hear them cackling as they were building their dungeon and thinking oh just wait till he sees this trap that I've set for him um so much fun just even this part of the game interestingly and this is a rule that I quite liked about it the first player to finish their dungeon is the one who decides who's going to do the exploration first so there is a little bit of an incentive to be the first one done so you do want to rush along but you do also take your time building this thing because you want you there are a couple of things you need to be careful about only a c only a few rules really when it comes to building your dungeon you can't have an enclosed space each space on the grid has to be accessible and each goal that you've got here a treasure chest or the exit there has to be a pathway at least one pathway

4:36 that doesn't pass through two of the same hazards you can't have two traps or two Monsters uh and and have that be the only way that you can get to the exit so for example I've got this pathway up here there's really only one way to get through you'll kind of be zigzagging along here but there is a pathway that can get to the exit that only passes through one monster and one trap once your layer is Built Well now you get to start exploring so there are uh four different meeples there's a big one and a small one in uh purple and in Orange and you've got the small one on your map and the big one on the the other map and you're just going to start at the start point and then the the player who's designed the layer is going to tell you the details of where you are sort of a Dungeons and Dragons style kind of a situation so in this case you start at B1 and you're your meeple is going to be on your map at B1 and the designer of the layer is going to say there's a wall to the north and a wall to the east then you shade that in by the time you've explored everything let me grab this sheet by the time you've explored everything you're going to have a sheet that looks something like this so you put a circle to show you've explored the space you color in the walls if there's a trap it's a triangle if there's a monster it's a square if there's a treasure chest it looks kind of like a a little basket but it might look like a treasure chest I guess um and those are kind of the basic things that you're going to find on the initial part of the

6:09 map to this game once the start space has been described then you can start moving around and how you do that is well well each player is going to have this little player board that has spots for cubes on it you're going to have six Cubes at the start four of them are white one is yellow one is green the yellow and green ones give you some special abilities and the white ones are generic but you can spend cubes in any way it's just that you have some special ones that make it easy to do certain kinds of actions so you can walk to the next Space by spending one Cube and then you just walk into it if there's a trap you're going to set off the Trap if there's a monster the monster is going to hit you before you get a chance to fight back these green cubes here have a little eye on them I don't know if you'll be able to tell on the camera these are are special cubes that you can spend this green Cube to peer into the next room so you can peek into it without moving in so you won't set off a trap and once you know the Trap is there you can kind of sneak into it and try and disarm that trap now I could peer into a room by spending two white Cubes but you do want to conserve those cubes as you're playing through the game the the yellow Cube has two different uses you can spend two white cubes or one yellow to run to rush through you're going to be able to move three spaces ahead unless you hit some obstacle that's going to stop you so a trap will stop your movement a monster will stop your movement the other special thing that these yellow cubes can do and you can't spend two generic cubes for this you can backtrack so once you've explored part of the map maybe you want to go back to a fork in in the road and

7:40 go another way well you can spend one yellow Cube to do that that makes it a lot easier you're not kind of inching Along on your turn to get to a spot you haven't explored the fun starts when you move into a space that's occupied by something whether it's a goal or some sort of a hazard so I'm I've moved my my me down here on my pad I haven't drawn everything out I don't want to ruin the pads for the next person who's going to play this game uh but on my pad I'm on E2 on the lir designer has has moved my meeple to E2 on their grid so that everyone everyone knows where everyone else is and what's coming up next if I decide to move to E3 I've got this choice I can go to D2 or E3 say I decide to move to the east well now I've encountered a monster the monster in the base game is a hungry blob it's got a health of six but I just walked into it it's an unexplored space so I wasn't expecting to get hit by a monster I have to fatigue two cubes how does that work well let me show you here you've got your player board with your cubes on it and then you have a choice of Cubes it says any two on here if you take damage from that monster and the way they handle damage is clever so I'm going to have to move some Cube cubes either from the Fresh or from the spent side so that they're fatigued that means it the cubes that are fatigued I'm not going to have access to them for two turns I'll show you how that works at the at the end of

9:11 the turn that's when you're kind of cleaning things up I I might not want to spend my special cubes because I might want to use them next turn so maybe I'll fatigue some fresh ones but that's not going to leave me very many cubes to work with but now I've hit this monster I fatigued two cubes I decided to fatigue the the white ones I've got two cubes left how do I fight that monster I want to defeat it so that I can exit the dungeon I can't leave the dungeon until I've either defeated three monsters and I do get some victory points once I start defeating them uh or I've opened up three treasure chest or I've got two of each two killed two monsters and open two chests then I can leave I can't exit the dungeon until those things happen so I'm going to want to fight this hungry blob you fight by spending your cubes to get dice so are three dice here I could buy more and roll one of the dice you know an extra time but I've only got two cubes left so I'm going to spend two cubes that's going to give me two dice these dice do not go all the way up to six the highest number is four so there's two faces with twos there's two threes and then there's a one and a four that's all you're going to get so you're not going to beat it with just one die you can't roll a six if the dice only go up to four I'm going to want to roll a four and two in order to defeat that monster then if I do defeat it it comes off the map off my the the lir designer's map and it goes onto my player board to show that I've defeated that monster if I don't defeat it I'm going to have to fatigue two more cubes

10:41 I'll take damage from it again I'll write down the amount of Health that it has left and that's the difficulty I have to beat next time so you can Whittle it down but it's doing damage to you each time you try to do that once a monster is defeated you just fill in the monster Square to show that that space is empty now you you don't have to worry about it anymore uh and then you can run through it without having to hit the the Monster again uh as I said the the defeated monster goes on the board of the player who defeated it the second monster is going to earn you two victory points and the third earns you four more so you get a ton of victory points by killing monsters fighting monsters though or running into traps is going to slow down your progress in terms of your exploration because you're fatiguing these cubes you're running out of cubes to spend at the end of my turn now I've spent everything I spent my last two cubes to buy those dice we'll say that uh I did defeat the monster on that first row uh when I'm ready for my next turn I'm going to move things up one space on my player boards now the fatigued ones go to spent the spent ones go to Fresh now I have four cubes that I can spend if you decide that oh I don't want to spend those cubes this turn I can conserve up to three and that means next turn I I can spend it twice uh so it's like you're saving an act ction for a later turn and then you're doing both of your actions so if I wanted to buy two dice I could spend this white and move it into fresh and I can spend it again and move it into spent now I've got two dice just with this one Cube

12:11 that was able to move two spaces when you hit a treasure chest you can open that Treasure Chest that's going to give you a random card from the treasure deck and it's also going to allow you to choose a card from a three card Market the cards interact together to give you victory points at the end of the game this one G has a base Victory point of one most of the time the statues are going to give you more victory points if you have other statues this one also will give you two if you have a goblet of some kind so they're different symbols on the treasure so you can wind up with six cards if you find all three chests because you're going to get one random one and one chosen one uh you really only get to use the ability of four you have to flip two of them face down they're they're only going to give you one Victory Point each but you're trying to form those combos of treasure cards which is not easy to do you really have to find those chests and and get lucky in terms of the the treasure that's available the first player to exit the dungeon is going to get four victory points that gives the next player one more turn to do to do their best to get out or to earn as many points as they can before the game ends then you're just going to count up your victory points and determine who the winner is and then probably you're going to want to play this game again what skills though are you practicing by playing layers well this is very much a visual spatial game visual spatial problem solving is what you're doing both when you're you're running through your opponent's layer and when you're designing your own you're really using those spatial skills to lay things out in a way that's going to create a fun experience uh and we haven't had any dungeons that weren't fun they were always silly and crazy you

13:43 know sometimes there would be one great big open space in the middle of the map and you have to explore each one to find the treasure in the middle um it's just a silly funny game so but you are exercising those spatial skills and then you're double checking your work to make sure that you've got a pathway that doesn't pass two the same hazards quantitative reasoning is involved here as well you're evaluating probability um and you're you're doing your best to defeat those monsters by Rolling dice I didn't even mention traps the traps the greased pit in these dungeons this these ones are special because you have to fatigue two fresh cubes if you set off a trap so if you run into it it's going to be set off you can discern it and there's a Trapster Medallion some treasure that will give you victory points if you discern the Trap but if you fail your rooll and you don't discern it it's going to go off and hit you and then it gets discarded from the game you don't get to get any extra victory points if you have that Trapster medallion for a trap that you set off but the quantitative reasoning element here is all about the probability and dice rolls it's all about the um keeping track of how many walls you've hit how many traps you've hit so that you know what's left and then you're making some judgments about probability and the likelihood that you're going to be able to accomplish your goal by earning enough dice or do you want to save some cubes for the next turn and do it then final thoughts about layers and I you it is a preview this is a prototype I don't know that I can say final thoughts because it might change over

15:14 time but this is the fanciest most beautiful prototype I've played I have to tell you I've had so much fun with layers and everyone who's played it it's just knocked it out of the park people are laughing while they're building their dungeons They're laughing while they're running through it and running into traps and getting those bad rolls it it's hilarious and fun even when you're just playing with the base game the components for this prototype are amazing the walls have texture to them I don't know if you can see on the camera I'll try and hold it up to the little camera they're all screen printed the walls have texture they fit into the the Dual layer boards here um the pieces are great the monsters are thematic and funny and like this hungry blob has crazy spiraly eyes on it it's just Ridiculousness from start to finish um I will say on the Prototype that sometimes it's not really a downside it is a prototype sometimes we would knock over those walls like it wasn't a perfect tight fit you don't want it to be too tight I don't know what the solution is to that but we had to be a bit careful when we're placing the walls that we didn't knock them down while we were moving meeples around inside um but what a beautiful game what elegant mechanics when it comes to spending those C cubes and how are you going to spend them in order to move through the map and defeat the monsters and grab those chests um there were some boxes that like like I said I'm not allowed to talk about there's boxes and envelopes that have extra things in them and they're just incredible I cannot wait to play the

16:45 final version of this game I'm so excited uh about it it it eases you in because those boxes aren't all added at the beginning and you've got all of the reminders you need on these player boards like you know exactly what you can do how you spend the cubes if you need a reminder it's right there in front of you you don't have to flip through the rule book we didn't even open the rule book once we got started because we had all of the reminders we needed right here uh and then you've got the removable stickers that are going to go on there as well that could add some extra abilities it's the base game is simple it is basic I mean there's less replayability of the base game but I do like how it eases you in by slowly increasing the complexity that's a a great me mechanism to ease the learning curve for new players and they have designed it in a way that you can reset the game because those stickers are reusable you want to hang onto the the little uh uh the piece of paper that the stickers are the wax paper that the stickers are on so that you can put them away uh if you need to um it is two-player only if that's a downside it is two-player only you can't play you you could maybe work together or take turns but then one player is waiting while the other player runs through the dungeon um but it it's a two-player game so if you've got three players one person might be entertained by watching I have to tell you when my son was playing he called me down multiple times oh look at my dungeon look what I did oh look what just happened to my friend when he tried to run through it they were having so much

18:16 fun with the game and as I said once once you open those next boxes there are some additional wrinkles that really do increase the enj enjoyment and increase the replayability this I mean it's a perfect game uh I have no notes for ktbg on this one not that I'm a game designer but I have no notes on this thing it's a simple game but what a fun fun experience with amazing components it's so thematic it reminded me of when I first started playing Dungeons and Dragons and the focus of the game was just crawling through those Dungeons and getting Loot and defeating monsters it reminded me of that but you get to be the dungeon master as well as the player at the same time so I mean what a lot of fun we had when when playing this game I'm going to be a day one backer on this one I will confess to you this might be one of the top five gaming experiences I've had this year um I I can't wait to see how the campaign goes so thanks so much to the folks at ktbg for sending layers my way like I said I'll put information about the campaign in the show notes if you have any questions or comments you can leave them in the comment section below or you can email me at Brian brains on.cafe.com is the website that's where future episodes will go and the previous ones are already up there brains on games is the X handle and the Facebook page and the Instagram feed so we're all over the place and if you enjoyed this video and you want to be notified of future ones you can head on over to YouTube and click that subscribe button thanks for joining me and hopefully I'll see you next time