5 Mini Board Game Reviews | Board Game Snapshots

0:00 je when you get when you get back from Kentucky see how easily we problem solve that with the help of the internet remember when internet wasn't a thing D how do people silence their eye watches back then it's true hello everyone welcome back to Foster the meele a Channel all about Bo games board gamy things exactly we're here today to do another episode of board game

0:42 snapshots and if you can hear something going it's because winter is coming and we've got the space heater ONN Winter's coming fast going to have to get used to a little background noise again people we've gone months without it mhm and now here we are again with it yeah it's cold it is it's all heck now for anybody that doesn't know our board game snapshot series is all about reviews okay so we have five mini reviews for you here today now all but one all but one of these games were sent to us for review so we will let you know every time whether or not a game has been sent us to review for to sent to us for review and sometimes we even include all the words in our sentences sometimes not every time I need to shave yeah so you think so I just was agreeing with you cuz you said you did sometimes Jamie just humors me mhm Jack's got a lot of salt and pepper in that beard so salt and Pepper's here and it is in Jeff beard do you know sometimes I'd rather you just give me your genuine opinion as opposed to just humoring me what do you mean I don't know when a beard needs to be it's not like out of control when is a beard not a beard that's that's a really good question when is a beard not a beard like if it's just gone I guess if you're smooth like is stubble considered a beard I don't know these are the questions we have these are the questions answers the first game that

2:13 we're going to talk about today is none other than apiary and this is the newest game from Stone Meer games which was sent to us for review so thank you to ston Meer games we did get an early review copy of this we've been sitting on it for a good two months at least been busy man we've been busy now listen this game been busy get it busy life is busy Bey bees this game is about bees in space you want to talk about busy bees space bees space bees they got so much to do so many things to do they do now apiary this game has a lot of different mechanics within it but in a nutshell it is basically you are putting out bees as worker so it's worker placement but it's not like pure worker placement where you're blocking spaces corre you can always bump people bumping bees there's actually trigger space off of the bumping too which for sure for sure so essentially what you're doing is you're either placing one of your B workers onto the board each section of the board with each b space corresponds to a different action that you can take so you're either doing that or you're retrieving your bees and doing some retrieve actions like sending some bees into hibernation maybe gaining some income that kind of thing there's a variety of different action spaces which include gaining some tiles so you're kind of I would say is it colonizing like colonizing the

3:43 be expanding expanding your high terraforming yeah be forming I don't know in space so everybody's going to have their own individual little player board and you're going to be putting hexagonal tiles out each of those could be different things some you're recruiting in new bees some you're uh gaining a farm you might be doing some development or expanding The Hive whatever it might be okay so you're gaining tiles you are also able to do some conversions with different resources there's an explore action where you can move the space b queen bee around not Beyonce she is not in the game however there is a queen bee in the game and they are moving around and they're collecting resources and doing some stuff like that exploring planets exploring planets exactly then there's one where you can gain more bees because once the bee gets to level four so each be kind of rotates and it goes 1 2 3 4 once it's at four then it has to hibernate and actually goes off the board so you need to be able to gain that be back so that's one um there's also some cards which are called seeds that you are either using for an action or using for end of game points so essentially that's what it is you're placing at workers really you're building up this big engine so that you can gain resources in order to spend those resource resources to gain tiles in order to gain victory points and gain the favor of the queen bee and it's just point salad I just want to mention Jamie

5:16 uh was referencing the be's uh scaling up in levels yeah uh certain slots once it gets to level four will have added ability Triggers on those on those spots if they're at level four and the hibernation thing is interesting because it's also pushing endgame so as your be gets hibernated you'll put a token on the hibernation track and as that fills up that's actually going to trigger endgame I really really liked this game at first it was a little bit of a slow starter it's a slow burn at the beginning but slow burn at the beginning but then as you build out your little engine and your hive it's like oh I'm going to do this which lets me do this and I'm going to get two resources and I'm going to bump you and it's yeah exactly because you're building out that like Hive area and you only have limited resource storage so you need to build it out so you can store more because the more resources you have the more things that you can do and I really liked it I love engine builder games and this definitely has a flavor of that and it just it feels like there's a lot to do like you you have a lot of options however you only have four bees and sometimes you don't even have four bees because one of them is hibernating mhm so you have to really kind of think about what you're doing two things about this game one the production is beautiful just like stunning most Stone Meer games two it's got that stone Meer feel wherein there's a ton of things you

6:48 can do there's a bunch of tracks there's the queen track there's all of these little like Nuance areas you can go to but if you do too much you will not be successful you kind of have to focus on something like you have to find a Synergy between a couple things in order in order to maximize your score yes um I also found the speed of the game at two player was Che kiss yeah it ramped really well um it it did not overstay its welcome I didn't feel like I lost anything playing at two-player no um because you're bumping and constantly exchanging your bees yeah you don't get blocked off so it's not like this okay now this round is over you kind of have to reset like everything's so fluid with that bumping like everyone limited player interaction no the the only yeah sorry the only play like player interaction is like the tiles you can grab like you might grab a tile that I'm going after which I did faster than than I do which you did um but yeah limited player action because you can't technically block people out but if you bump someone you're giving them either an upgraded be mhm or a chance to trigger uh their income which can be lucrative right yeah through hibernation and all that stuff anyways really really enjoyed it um I've not I don't know if this is this designer's first game her name is Connie vogan but uh really great job I'm too obvious yeah

8:21 it's beautiful stunning um yeah if you're interested I would say it's definitely worth a try for sure um I mean ston Meer makes good games so what can you expect we've only played it at two we've only played it at two yeah space be all right next up on the list is from 25th Century games and this one was also sent to us from the publisher from 21st century so thank you to them for that um raw is a bidding game where ultimately that is the main mechanic uh you are going to be exchanging bidding tokens with all the other players in the game and basically you'll have three on your player board and if you use one to win a successful bid you're actually going to replace it with the remaining bid that's on the bidding track so for example I might bid a 12 and win the tiles that are on the bidding track and I'll replace the tile with whatever bidding tile is on there maybe it's a two bidding tile so for the next round I lose the 12 but I'm getting the two for next round so there's this give and take of like I really want these tiles but I know I'm going to be losing the 12 for next round um so you're kind of just going back and forth and all of these different tiles will score you different types of victory points so some of them are set collection some of them are multiplication like the Nile tile will only score if you have the flood tile as well um some of them are just straight victory points for each God tile you can

9:52 use it to do a special ability or it scores two so again there's it's all bidding so tiles are going to come out pulled out of a bag one by one people can choose to take then to invoke the power of raw I invoke raw to to trigger a bid um and then it goes around everyone chooses to bid or pass and then however that oome is that person will gain the tiles and what's really cool is the end game the each round is only going to be three times the amount of players M because you only have three bidding tiles once you use one you flip it you don't get to do it again so you can kind of start also seeing some strategy develop where and it's like yeah maybe I have a one or a two and if I wait till the very end maybe I'm the only one left with a bidding tile so I can kind of play around with what what comes out in the bidding row um but in essence that's raw you're bidding on tiles in order to put them into your playboard in order to maximize your play your points yeah I really like this is the best bidding game that we've ever played and one of the reasons why we liked it so much I think is because you only get one chance to bid so if I say pass it's not going to come back to me again or if I bid and then it comes back to me I can't then bid up again so we really like that and it's simple because it is primarily set collection so like you're drawing the tile your whatever so you can see what's out and you can be like hm I see what I've got I can see that this is worth it for me or I can see it might be worth it for Jeff so I

11:23 might do a high bid knowing he really wants it so he has to spend his higher bidding chip this kitzy game this is a reimplementation of the original game with IO tool art now the production copy the copy that yeah we didn't play this version yeah we played a friend's version the Pharaoh I think it's like the Pharaoh Edition which is like full Deluxe big yeah anyways I really really liked it best spitting game we've ever played yeah we're full uh transparency here bidding games are not usually our cup of tea no this is probably the best one I've ever played let me introduce you to a little game called psychic Pizza delivers go to the ghost town now this game was sent to us for review from allplay which used to be boardgametables.com this game I believe came out either last year or a couple of years ago I had seen a few people with it and saw it and thought eh it leaves a lot to be desired like I was like I I never would have thought however um we did get a package from allplay and this was actually one of the games that I requested because it's octobo right so hello this is Ghost I didn't know anything about this game literally nothing but this game is essentially a deduction Style game where one person is playing as the mayor and I do this because I myself have only ever played as the mayor and I think I'm an

12:54 excellent mayor mayor is basically like a dungeon master it's kind of like a DM exactly so in this game the mayor has a map set up in front of them that shows them where there's different things like ghosts fences pieces of pizza hoses different things and the players each player has a little whiteboard and they are trying to find a slice of pizza in the town and then they are trying to find the host that their slice of pizza belongs to they're in um a three deliverer like a four place game there are three different slices of pizza each one of them goes to a different house so the players are wandering around they're saying I'd like to move north and then as the mayor you say success you have moved North and then you give a surrounding report saying there's a fence to your North and there's two ghosts surrounding you so that's the type of thing you're giving them Clues so they're drawing it out on their little whiteboard trying to deduce where they are in the town to try try and find their pizza and then when they find their Pizza they then have to find their host because the host doesn't appear until the slice of pizza is in hand another really fun thing about this is that there are portals on the board so somebody could uh innocently wander themselves into a portal and get spat out in a completely different space on the board they have no idea where the portals are they could be literally right next to each other so they could

14:25 walk into one and then walk out just one space away m who's to say it's chaos and it is so much fun it is so much fun this game has been a hit every time that we've played it I have such a blast telling people boo you've run into a ghost or like you have found a house but you can't deliver your pizza there cuz we had one game where everybody delivered their slice to each other's houses total chaos and confusion so much fun yeah I just want to say quickly like uh I don't know if you mentioned this I don't think you did but like everyone's playing on the same 7 by7 grid M so that's why it's like you know you can kind of deduce and figure out where maybe other people are and it's yeah it's super fun I really like there's a little bit of card play so like if you find a ghost and then you take an action to attack the ghost you'll get a card and the cards like Break The Rules a little bit um I really want to try I want you to try it not as the DM yeah I think next time we play it I'd like to try dming surprise hit of maybe this year for me same um I I would need to like go back and remember everything we've played but like certainly of the last few months I had zero expectation and as soon as I played it I was like I would play that immediately again and everyone we've played it with has loved it and it's just like it's a riot it's so much fun because people just get confused you make leaps and logic and then you're like where am I and there was one section in our last game where

15:57 Jeff and Christy were literally on the same space and the surrounding report for Chrissy was like there's one ghost around you and then Jeff fought a ghost and then the next time there was no ghost and she's like what how how is that and then I was like Christy I just killed the ghost the same space anyways this is a fantastic game if it sounds like something that you're interested in don't walk by because you look at it and you think oh this is cuz it does look like a little kid game like this it is 11 and up like this is not meant for like little little children it would be very confusing for them anyways so so good next up is a big boy that was not sent to us for review this one was not sent to us for review cuz it's ancient it is Star Trek ascendency and I'm only going to put this up for a second because it's going to take up too much room but also the Borg assimilation expansion oh my Borg I'm just going to move these but these are the two games we'll talking you probably put this one here so you can at least see it okay let's do this then sure Star Trek ascendency is basically a 4X Star Trek game so I'm just briefly going to talk about the base game and then I'll mention what the Borg expansion ads so Star Trek ascendency is a I think you can play it three or four player three players three players three exactly okay so three player only game which is like I as I mentioned a 4X game you're going around exploring the Galaxy uncovering new worlds new events phenomenon finding

17:29 other players attacking other players uh there's basically two ways you can win this game either by like eliminating everyone else or by getting I think five ascendency tokens which is done through diplomacy and all of these things it's a very very Star Trek theme I haven't played any other Star Trek games but some people have said this is like known as the Star Trek game to play and I definitely felt it when I played it so Borg expansion allows you to play start track ascendency with one or two players so that's going to jump into how I played it I played this solo with the Borg expansion I have not played it uh Jamie has not played it so the Borg expansion what it adds is the Borg uh character to the base game so I played as the Federation against the Borg the Borg's objective is basically to go around and it's kind of an otoma so it's basically uh in Star Trek theme uh going around trying to assimilate the Galaxy and is doing that by going to new planets uh hunkering down and building Bor cubes and assimilating the populace and that sort of thing so the Borg wins if they assimilate a certain amount of planets you win by going around diplomatically gaining ascendency tokens in the same way you would in a base game but it's kind of a timer thing because you have to control the Borg as more planets come up they assimilate more things and it becomes more and more difficult and they're

18:59 super powerful um I very much enjoyed this game M what I would say is I need to play it with someone that really knows how to play it because I basically stumbled through it however I think this is my would always be my preferred way to play this game because it takes like solo you mean yeah I think it's yeah this is a 1 hour per player game so you're looking at 3 to four hours probably a bit more if it's your first play this knocks it down to like hour oh like you can play this at one to two player in my opinion in like an hourish and I think you get everything that you would have get gotten in the base game you play with all of it though like you yeah except for you wouldn't play with the other two factions so in this it's Federation cling on and uh Romulan so you would nope that's Vulcan um so you wouldn't play with those other two faction you basically pick one and then play as it right um so the the thing you're I guess you're missing is that you're not going to combat with the two players in the Borg expansion so it becomes a Cooperative experience unless you're playing the solo game got it but really technically if you play it at two players it is kind of like a three player game because the Borg is a player yeah yeah but uh but again you would be cooperatively kind of trying to defeat the board I think I would prefer that because I don't know anything about Star Trek so all that being said I very much enjoyed it if you like Star Trek and big box heavy games don't don't scare you away uh I think it's something worth

20:29 trying if a friend has it or if you get a chance to try it out without investing I don't know how accessible it is now like I don't know how readily available it is I bought it at lances there's a ton of expansion content for the base game like a ton of different races you can you can grab but including these ones I don't know probably I'm sure you could grab the Vulcans but anyway long story short the Borg expansion is really cool if you're looking to play this game at a 1 to2 player you know uh variant I guess yeah and live long and prosper my friends I did that one right though didn't I I did that one right though didn't I I don't know you're obsessed with the Vulcans oh was that Vulcans too I think so cuz they do this live long and prosper yeah that's fans all right one last game to talk about and that is going to be silicon Vania from Whiz Kids this game was sent to us from whiz kids thank you to Whiz Kids for sending this game this was actually one on one of our videos for like most anticipated releases because number one I love vampires number two I love the mo art and so I was immediately like ooh what's this um now this game is about vampires who were like Transylvania it's really falling behind in the times how can we make it how can we make it hip again I know we'll turn it into like Silicon Valley but it's

22:02 silicon Vania Transylvania Tech Hub exactly now in a nutshell though this game is a bidding type of game right so everybody has um cards in their hand there's Specialists and then you also have these different tiles that you're going to be bidding on and so you are actually building out a grid in front of you of tiles in order to essentially optimize it to score as many points as possible this is kind of like overboss with bidding so if you think about overboss and how each different type of tile works it's the same with this so there's you know red tiles that have like blood drops that if you are the more you have like the more you score if you have a certain thing all in a row that's all different then you're going to score points and like so there's all these different objectives that you're trying to hit while you are building out this Grid in front of you so you have bidding cards that everybody's going to place down like secretly and then you'll flip them up and whoever has the highest number gets to choose which tile they want but you're also placing down a specialist card that you're going to be flipping up and that allows you to get first dibs on other Specialists so there's a little bit of a deck building element to this and the reason why you want some of those specialist cards is because they have special actions attached to them the lower the card the better the thing that it's going to give you everything in this game is inversely proportional so the higher Specialists

23:32 are going to let you bid on specialist first but the bonus you get off them are going to be weaker than like the even negative bonuses right and so that's kind of like what you're trying to do like H does the special ability give me more than what I would get by gaining that tile and eventually you're going to start to put down multiple specialist cards because you actually can't score specific colors in your grds specific color tiles unless you have a face up Specialist of that color and so there's a lot kind of going on it's not a complicated game but there is a lot going on in it it is really fun actually we've played it twice over the past month and we played it just the two of us and then we played it with a group of four and I think everybody seemed to enjoy it it is it can be a little bit of a struggle of a teach I think I there's certain ele ments of it that I think people were maybe having a bit of a harder time grasping just because there's like well there's this grid but there's also this bidding and actually like at this stage of the game cuz not all throughout at this stage of the game well you need to play two cards and that card needs to go up but make sure you keep this card separate because if it's face up and then like do you know what I mean like there's a lot of things that I feel like you're making it seem more complicated than it is but it's not complicated but what I'm saying is that it can be a little bit overwhelming I think the rounds are a little bit new nuanced wherein it's like after round four you have to start playing two

25:03 specialist oats cuz to Jamie's point one specialist is going to be used to bid on new Specialists the other one is going to be tucked by your board to score its corresponding color on your 4x4 grid yes and the bidding cards that you have are also only onetime use as well there's a way to get some of them back but that's another thing that you have to think of and also kind of pay attention to because if I know Jeff's used his five then I might hold on to mine because I know maybe I'll be able to beat him later so lots going on but with that being said I really enjoyed it definitely I think plays best with more players we played at two and I think it actually worked quite well at two I think three is probably perfect yeah three is definitely probably perfect because it gives you enough interaction and enough like competition whereas like not dragging up to the the length of the exactly but yeah so so I liked it did you like it I did um it it felt like I mean there's a ton of tile placement kind of like little like I don't want to call it City Builder but you know what I mean like little like Tableau Builder with tiles like over boss etc etc etc this one felt very unique I that bidding mechanic and how the rounds kind of function were all different I've never played anything quite like it so if you're looking for like if you like those types of games like we do you like over boss if you like King Domino if you like playing those types of games with those types of tiles but you're looking for something a little bit

26:34 more nuanced and different um be something worth checking out it's probably not something that I would bring out outside of Halloween season correct I would agree with that just based on the theme alone however if it had a different theme like the theme doesn't matter it's just based on the theme I'd probably only play it in October but anyway so that is silicon Vania and those are five more games that we've been playing recently we would love to know in the comments Below have you played any of these what do you think about them please tell us if you want to talk even more about them you can join our Discord people be talking about games in there literally all the time that's just what we be doing all the time now if you're interested in buying board games like any of the many games that we talked about today you should first start by checking your friendly local gaming store and for us that is the boardroom Game Cafe yes it is do you like snacks I do perfect where do people even find snacks Munch pack Munch pack we have a code $5 off and finally just a special shout out to our Channel sponsor Ras skers Who provided us with this beautiful table we will have a full review coming soon we wanted to play on it with multiple people we wanted to film on it so we are going to give you our in-depth thoughts coming very soon yes spoiler alert spoiler alert is beautiful yep I'm just saying I said it all loud thank you so much for watching if you like what you see please subscribe hope to see you again soon and now we say goodbye goodbye later

28:07 days we both adjusted ourselves cuz we knew they see Jeff I don't understand how this is happening sound just suddenly appeared on Jeff's eyewatch I couldn't help him I don't have an eyewatch it was a different life ago where I did have one it was that one on his wrist who knows I'm blending in with the background anyway we're missing a game oh okay um I don't like they're in I don't know are the Vulcans even in yeah they are they they must be popular if that's the I know I got to look this up now is that next gen so the Vulcans are like barely in Next Generation I didn't think they were yeah I didn't think they were either like they show up a handful of times but they're not like a main race they are in like the OG I thought that's what Spock was SP is but you're confusing I'm so confused well like there's different versions of Star Trek that was the same one that you watched no next Generations Jean Luke Bard and the Klingons and the romulans yeah Spock and all that is like the OG Shatner yes nice he