Variety Vlog June '18 - Big change to the channel!

welcome to John gates games this is my variety vlog for June at 2018 and as always I have a bunch of different things I'll be covering in this episode although in particular I have one large announcement that I'll be covering in the general update section before we get into that though I would like to mention that I currently have no questions so there is not going to be a questions and answer section if you'd like me to do some in a future vlog then feel free to send some over to John gets games at gmail.com and I'll add those onto the list alright without further ado let's jump into the general update and the first thing I always do is briefly mention how the patreon campaign is doing and there were nine new people who added into the campaign which is really nice to see although the overall total per month went down by $18 there were quite a few deletions and Loring's of support and I think that that's kind of noise realistically that's not a gigantic amount and overall the support is still quite strong and I'm looking forward to seeing how this one is going to be going into the future especially considering the big announcement that I'm gonna be talking about and I may as well talk about it now that has to do with the types of videos that I'm gonna continue putting out in the future now for a little bit of context I've been doing John gates games for a little bit over four years and the first thing I ever did was a review it was for a game called Tallulah and over the past four years I've published 107 a board game reviews which really has added up over time I've of course put out a bunch of vlogs as well as full game playthroughs over those years and after doing quite a bit of soul-searching over the last two months I have made the decision to stop making my reviews now there are a lot of reasons to do this and I've had a lot of conversations with different people as I really felt this out and tried to figure out if this is the right direction for me to be going and at the moment I do think that's the case and I may as well tell you about a couple of those thoughts that really went into this the first one which was really the catalyst for this thought experiment that has turned into a course change for the channel is that I do not enjoy making reviews honestly my worst emotional moments with John gates games in general happens when I am staring at the camera trying to do these reviews trying to do the filming process it's oftentimes quite anxiety ridden and just really not fun I have found that I dread planning to film and when I actually turned the camera on I just had this lump in my stomach and over time it's just gotten worse and after four years or so I just kind of kept doing it because it's something that I'd always done and I had a moment Ross like you know what just because I've always done this does not mean I need to continue doing this and I really started to think about the ramifications what would happen if I stop making reviews and just the thought of not doing them anymore already amazed made a lot of my anxiety for the channel fade away to a certain extent the next thing that I'd like to mention as a big factor has to do with the the way that reviews really dictate the games that I play now I started making videos for board games because I love board games and I've been crazy about them for over 10 years at this point and now because of the reviews I've found that almost every time I get together to play with friends they all first ask like a jobs or anything that you need to get played for one of your reviews and more often than I say yeah I really need to play this one game at the three player count I've only played it for and I really need to talk about it the three player account I've kind of over playing it already but let's play it now so that I have that context to make the review better and I found that I just it's made me less excited to play board games and I have a bunch of games on my shelf that I haven't even touched or games that are old classics that I love that I've already reviewed or they're just so old I never even considered reviewing them then I would like to continue playing and I want to have the ability to pull those off the shelf and play the games that I want to play to have fun and that's realistically what's happened is that the reviews have caused it to feel more like work when it's you know a Friday night and I'm trying to play board games with my friends so that is another significant factor and the third factor that I'll mention there's a lot more than three but these are the main ones has to do with some of the plans that I have for the future when it comes to being in the board game industry I guess I've been doing this for four years and I've got a whole bunch of support and a lot of people know who I am so I sort of am in the industry to a certain extent and I've been doing this professionally now for six months now so definitely it's a big part of my life but I don't necessarily want to be making YouTube content for my full-time job for my career for the rest of my life I started making these videos because I was bored and I have a lot to say about board games very excited about them but when I think about where I want to be going I want to be making these videos long into the future I do really enjoy making them but I think I want this to continue to be a part time sort of endeavor like you know a significant portion of my hours going into it but not like 40 hours a week there are other things that I'd like to do specifically with board games and one of those things has to do with making board games better before I even started making reviews way back in like 2010 I decided I wanted to be a board game designer and I made a design blog and I worked on like four or five designs only one of which sort of got finished and I realized throughout that process that I'm really not a very good board game designer I don't have the iterative chops to continue making the game over and over and making it a little bit better than making an entire new prototype and then you know throwing that prototype away bringing a whole new one out but over that process I met a lot of people who were board game designers and I realized that I love play testing other people's games and trying to make those other games better essentially one of my favorite things in board gaming is looking at the whole game and trying to figure out how it should be better and in a lot of ways that's what my reviews have been over the last four years there's sort of like development notes for a board game that's fully published and cannot be altered in the future so it's almost like um what's the saying like the the horse before the carriage or the horse has already left the barn or something like that when it comes to a lot of the things I say so one thing that I would like to try and work myself towards it's I don't really have a roadmap for this yet but is potentially working with publishers as another part of my job to try and do some late stage play testing of board games and do professional development work for those games so that the notes and the thoughts and all the the things that the thoughts that I have for these games can actually go into tweaking these games so that when they actually get published they don't have the issues and flaws that I see in them and of course I'm just one person and a lot of people don't agree with the issues that I see in games but overall I think that's a better direction for me to try and work towards and I actually talked to a couple publishers about this at the UK games Expo which I'll talk about in just a minute but overall I'm excited and hopeful to try and work with this in the future it's not really the thing that I'm gonna be focusing on right now and what I'm actually gonna be focusing on instead is trying to make more playthroughs I probably should have mentioned this at the very beginning of this section but I am not planning on scaling back Jong it's games from where it is currently when I'm talking about this potential development work type stuff that's essentially me wanting to push out my other main job which currently is event lighting and I've been doing that for about 10 years now and I would like to keep junkets games about the amount of time that I spend on it maybe a little bit more maybe add a third day to the week because right now I'm doing it two days a week for the entire day and then have the other time be spent on this other aspect of board gaming that I'd really enjoy so in that time I am planning on trying to make a lot more playthroughs I kind of realized that I enjoy the process of making playthroughs more because I'm playing board games and I love to play board games and also I feel like doing these full game playthroughs is a better way in my opinion to show how the game works and to show people if they feel like it would be one for them they're usually quite long you know most of the places are over an hour long but I believe that you get the idea of almost every one of these playthroughs or at the idea of how the game plays in each one of these within the first 10 minutes or so of these playthroughs so to a certain extent watching a playthrough is gonna give you more context for how the game plays and whether or not you'd enjoy it then watching one of my 25 or 30 minute reviews so at this point I think I've talked about this one a lot more than I planned on but that's kind of where I'm at going forward I have a lot of excitement about trying to get more of these games played through the playthrough context and yeah so let's go ahead and wrap up this section or this one part and move on to the next general update for this one it's a little bit more procedural for Johnny his games and you might have noticed actually at the beginning of this vlog he said hey wait a minute he said this is the variety vlog for June there was no variety vlog for May because in the past I've always named these vlogs for the previous month and what I've decided to do now is I'm taking these of writing vlogs and I'm splitting them in half so to speak you may have also noticed in the beginning of the video when I showed the different options that there were no there's no initial impressions at segments that's what I've decided to do since that is usually the vast majority of the content in one of these writing blocks I'm going to pull out that into a separate initial impressions vlog and I'm gonna be trying to do those at the beginning of each month and then I'll be doing a variety vlog right in the middle of each month so essentially I'm gonna try to do one of these vlogs every two weeks instead of every four weeks I'm just gonna kind of split the content out and I'm not really gonna touch the initial impressions that's gonna be just purely all of the initial impressions of all the games I played in that previous month but when it comes to the variety vlog itself I have decided to tweak things a little bit I am adding a a schedule part I'm not really sure what to call it yet I guess maybe upcoming projects because I figure people are probably interested in the videos that I'm planning on putting out in the future and I have a calendar you know I have a schedule where I saw in all these different games so I have a very good idea of what I will be filming this week and next week and the week after that and I figure why not show that to everybody else in the world so I'll be getting to that section pretty soon and at the other new segment that I'm adding to the variety vlog which I'll be covering in a little bit in this video as well is a games of interest segment I realized that it might be kind of interesting for other people to see what games I have started subscribing to on BoardGameGeek essentially what I'm gonna do is look to the previous month to my BoardGameGeek subscription feed and see all of the new games that I click subscribe to you because that's what I do when I when I see a new game that I'm at all interested in I subscribe to it and then I hope to learn more about it so I will see how that one goes and I'm certainly gonna be looking for feedback on whether people find that section interesting or not but yeah with that I'm done talking about some of this procedural stuff and but now we can talk about in the UK games expo for 2018 then I went to for the first time this year I believe that I mentioned in the last vlog that Jessica and I were going to be going away for a two week vacation over in Europe and right in the middle of those two weeks we were going to be going to the UK games Expo now this is one of the larger board game conventions in the world at this point they released the total numbers for this year and I believe it was over 20,000 people who went over to it and we had a really good time a couple of our friends Matt and Claire flew out there as well and we got to spend pretty much the whole weekend hanging out with Emma as well f-con Alain from the no pun included pod podcast a YouTube channel and they are both really good friends of mine as well so we just had a wonderful weekend it was very productive for me because I was able to give my business card to a bunch of different publishers and start a relationship with many people that and publishers that I have not actually worked with in the past it's very likely that you will start to see me covering games from some of these more European publishers based off of the relationships that I have hopefully started off on a good foot at this convention but I also just got to play a bunch of games and demo a bunch of games and that's part of the reason why I'm gonna have so many games to cover in the initial impressions vlog which I will be putting out this week as well but I'll talk about that in a minute overall the UK games Expo was a really fun time I've been meaning to go to it for the last two years and it finally made sense to go and we can kind of roll it into a greater vacation where we went to Scotland for like five days after Expo I got to meet up with a cousin of mine who lives in England and then we actually flew down to France and spent a few days there with my uncle so it was a really relaxing great time where I got to spend a bunch of time with not only family but great friends and I believe I was able to make probably couple new friends out there as well the convention itself it felt a lot like a smaller version of Gen Con I went to Gen Con last year and it doesn't have anywhere near as much space area in the overall convention halls but there were a ton of booths and the convention itself was Friday Saturday and Sunday and we didn't really go into the convention on Sunday because after Friday and Saturday we felt very satisfied in fact we spent about seven hours on each of those days just wandering around at this convention hall demoing games so there was a lot of stuff to get to and the convention is over in Birmingham in England and the weather was surprisingly nice it was much warmer than we anticipated we definitely packed with way too many thick clothes for that convention but it was a really nice area for a convention because you have this convention center and then right next to it like a three minute walk is a kind of mole thing with a bunch of different food options and what ended up happening happening is we would go over there to eat and we inevitably bumped into other people that we knew and then we would go and try to play games the end of the the night in at the Hilton I believe it was called so yeah overall I really enjoyed this convention I would likely want to go to it every year if I lived in England but England is a very long way from California and because of that I think this is likely one that I won't be attending in 2019 or maybe even 2020 it might be when I try to get to every few years because again I do have family out in Europe so I kind of calm was pretty well as seeing them but either way I had a really great time at his convention oh the last thing I of course I didn't I forgot almost forgot to mention that I was part of a comedy musical panel show that's f kin Elaine from the no pun included YouTube channel put on and it was an amazing time it was team-based it was myself Tom Vassell and Rachel from the semi co-op comic and we were playing against Richard ham as well as John Perkis from the actual law YouTube channel and heinze who is also part of semi co-op and it was all about trying to guess what games Elaine's songs were she wrote these songs and played him on the guitar they were kind of parodies and they were hilarious and it was an amazing really amazingly fun time and I know that they are planning on putting a video of that up onto YouTube so I'm looking forward to seeing that one and I'm hoping I don't look too dumb in that one alright so that I think is enough talk of Expo and the last thing that I would like to mention is that FK and I put out a new episode of the last place podcast about three weeks ago or so I've decided I want to mention that in these vlogs because a lot of people don't know that I have a podcast and it's essentially just myself and my really good friend Africa talking about usually three different games and our impressions of them in that podcast we covered a memoir 44 the Overlord version we also talked a bunch about Manhattan Project 2 as well as a few them so I would definitely recommend giving that one a listen I put a link down to the youtube version of that one in the description down below and I think with that we are now done with all of the general updates for this one all right let's now move into the first of the new segments for this vlog and that is going to be my upcoming projects now it is currently week 24 of 2018 and obviously I'm putting out this variety blog and I am also planning on putting out an initial Russian vlog that's gonna cover all the games that I played for the past six weeks so essentially are maybe five ish weeks for all of May and then June up until about yesterday after that next week I'm planning on doing a full playthrough for century eastern wonders and I talked about that one into the initial impressions vlog because I did get to play that and I picked it up at the UK games Expo and that game was picked by one of the sponsor level patrons on the patreon campaign they get to choose one game of a year and that's the game that was chosen so I'm gonna be doing that one as well as hopefully doing a full playthrough for quack silver Vaughn Quinlan Berg which is one of the kennerspiel nominees I'm hoping to get that one done next week as well in week 26 I am planning on doing a sponsored full playthrough for few time which is a gigantic game I am a little bit nervous about this one and that's kind of why I'm blocking off the whole week to try and get this one done because it's probably gonna be one of the longer ones that I've ever had to film and it's certainly gonna be a challenging one to get as many rules right as possible in that one and then in week 27 that's gonna be the first week in July and I'll be doing another initial impressions vlog at that point it's just gonna cover the games that I played in those last two weeks trying to get myself caught up to this new schedule where I'll be doing these initial impressions vlogs once every month at the beginning of the month in that same week I'm planning on trying to get a full playthrough out for Luxor which is one of the velocity RS nominees and then in a week 28 I'm currently planning on putting out a sponsored full playthrough for New Bedford which is published by greater-than games and I have a really good relationship with them and I've done quite a few sponsor playthroughs for them in the past so as always this is my rough schedule for the next few weeks things certainly could change around but now you have a reasonable idea for what I'm hoping to put out soon next up we have it the other new segment for this vlog and that is games of interest now as I mentioned in the intro the idea here is I'm just planning on very briefly talking about all of the new games that I have subscribed to on BoardGameGeek over the last month by me clicking the subscribe button within BoardGameGeek that means I am interested in learning more so I don't know a lot about most of these games and I'm honestly curious if you find this segment interesting so please comment down below I'm out what you think about how I'm doing this there are gonna be 14 games and I'm gonna try to briefly cover here and I'm also got my laptop right here I'm planning on just kind of surfing through the different pages while I'm talking in real time to try and briefly talk about what I'm thinking so let's go ahead and start things off the first one I'm just going in alphabetical order is a game called Atlantis island of the gods now this one that currently has a hundred and forty-six people subscribing to it and the designer I'm not even gonna try to pronounce their name and the publisher is called red IMP games and I've haven't heard of either of them before and the reason I subscribe to this one is largely due to the quick blurb which essentially says that you are doing it's a logical card game with four different boards as you're trying to build monuments on Atlantis before obviously it sinks into the ocean the mechanisms it has listed our action movement programming action point allowance card rafting and hand management so all of those things are stuff that I like and one of the more intriguing parts is it says it plays in twenty to sixty minutes so it's supposed to be pretty quick I have no idea if this game is gonna be good but either way I've got my eye on it the next one is called Mirage this one is designed by Tommaso Bautista and Simone luciani and that is the main reason why I subscribe to this one it's being published by cranial creations and I'm actually curious if I've recognized Tommaso Batista's other games no this is the only game that he has logged into BoardGameGeek right now so this one right here says as far as mechanisms are concerned it's action movement programming route network building and worker placement so none of those things really get me particularly excited but I think that Simone luciani makes some really stellar games and so I'm looking forward to trying this one out it looks like the theme is a dystopic 1930s and it's a resource management strategic game we're trying to build dams and raise them to increase the capacity of water to deliver power to tunnels connected to turbines and stuff like that either way I'm looking forward to learning more about this one mostly due to the designer pedigree looks like 163 people are subscribing to that one so about the same as the last one next up we have habitats and this one actually came out to in 2016 but I only heard about it about well I guess in this last month I watched rod OHS run-through of this one it's like man that game looks fun it's got it's a Thailand game but it has a really interesting idea where you move a worker along a grid of tiles and that is gonna be how you select the various different tile so you're gonna be putting into your little habitat reserve I'm not sure if I'm gonna be running out to grab this one but I'm quite intrigued by it I'm definitely looking forward to giving this one a shot it's not particularly new and the designer is corn a van morsel so I've never heard of them then next up we've got key flow this one obviously well for many people it's gonna be obvious that it has the word key in the name which means that it's gonna be designed by Richard priests and it's gonna be the next game in the key series there's a whole bunch of key games and I've only played a couple of them but I love to keep her so that was the last key game to come out so kind of by definition I'm gonna be curious to see what's gonna be coming out with this a new one it looks like this one that says its mechanisms are card drafting route network building site collection simultaneous action selection and worker placement a lot of worker placement games still being made out here and this one looks like it's about a river that's passing through with ships laden with resources doing some trade it's a card driven game based on many ideas contained within key flour okay well I've never actually played key flour but I've heard a lot of good things about that one and so I'm definitely looking forward to learning more about this one it also has two other designers listed and I should mention them Oh Sebastian please Dale and Ian Vincent Sebastian please Dale is a very familiar name I think they did black fleet let me take a quick look here yeah they did black fleet Oh as well as key flower and a bunch of other games that I won't look at right now so I'm pretty good design a pedigree going on right there the next game I subscribe to is the longest one on this list it's a little monster that came for lunch and stayed for tea this one's being published by strawberry Studios which is kind of like the lighter game counterpart to n skn games and this one is designed by Robin Leeza and Steven McKenzie who are a designing duo who have designed many games they did be on Baker Street and a couple other ones as well and I met Robin last year at as an ridiculously nice guy and also as far as this game is concerned the mechanisms are hand management and variable player powers and it's listed as a 15 to 20 minute play time and it looks like a light racing game where you're playing cards with abilities and everybody has unique monster abilities I don't know much more than that then the art looks cute and I'm just looking forward to seeing what more is going on there because it looks like that could be a pretty cute little filler next up we've got another Atlantis game this one's called lost Atlantis the designers of this one are Johnny Mullis and Tarot Mullis those names aren't familiar to me looks like they have made other games like Templars journey robot Factory Hornet foreclosed I haven't actually played any of those before but the reason this one jumped out of me was very simple the description is just one line and says Los Atlantis is described by the publisher as a 3 X game under the sea now 3 X is a play off of the idea of 4 X which is expand exploit exterminate and experiment there's a little bit of I sometimes get those wrong but those are the kind of ideas for civilization install games and every time I've seen a 3x game that means there's no extermination so instead you're just doing the expanding and exploiting and experimentation and I enjoy those things that's really all this has a listed oh it's by um AEG so definitely a well-known publisher so looking forward to seeing more about this one it might not actually be anything I'm actually interested to but anytime I see 3 X I get interested because I don't really like finding people that much on boards next oh the artist also has Vince in do trait so a lot of people are going to be interested in that purely off the art next up we have a low Lance now this one is designed by Claudia part-timer and Rolf part-timer and I believe that this is a first design for them yeah it is but this one's being published by Z man and from my understanding is that eBay Rosenberg had a somewhat significant hand in the development of this game and it really does look like a nuva Rosenberg game I know more about this one than most of the rest on this list because I actually got to watch my friends play almost an entire game of this at the UK games Expo so I did not personally play this one but looks like it has some really cool ideas I was pretty excited just watching what they were doing the listed mechanics are action point allowance system tile placement and worker placement which really doesn't do it justice because the main idea for this game is you are trying to breed sheep and put a little fences out so that to make sure that they're nice and safe and you score points for them you're gonna build buildings which can give you kind of combo II action equal abilities but also there are these storm surges and you're trying to build up a dike to stop the ocean from flooding in and doing damage and the main idea here is that everybody is collectively building the dike and a big part of this game is how much have you contributed to the dike if the dank holds its big enough to stop the water then the person who contributed the most is gonna get points equal to the difference between how much they added to the dike and the person who added the least and then the second-place person will get that gap in the third place what person will get that gap and the inverse is that if the dike is not built big enough and the ocean water floods in then the person who contributed the least is gonna take these negative tokens based off of how far they are for the person who contributed the most and then likewise for the second least and third least and the person who contributed the most takes no penalties at all so they're actually someone incentivized to build a lot and then let the dam actually break there's a lot more ideas going on here and it looked like a lot of fun and my friends really enjoyed this one so I'm looking forward to getting my hands on this one it looks like it's also being published by foil and spheal so yeah very excited for this one next up we have minerals now the main reason that this one is on the list is because it looks beautiful this is a tie line game the mechanisms are listed as grid movement modular board powder building set collection and tile placement and you just have to look this one up on BoardGameGeek it's got some gorgeous pictures of these really great colorful tiles and it looks like it might be a bit like hey that's my fish where as you move around if the tiles get removed from a centralized playing board so it gets harder and harder to get to different stuff and I think you're trying to do some set collection there the designer is magdalena so lil whit sky or something along those lines and looks like she is also the artist for it so I was definitely a beautiful looking game published by games Factory I don't know much more than that but I mean in learning more because mostly just aesthetically I think it's a very nice looking game the next one I want to talk about is called pass tally now this one is designed by Misaki sugah and it's published by an analogue lunch box which is a Japanese board game publisher and this one is very hard to come by in fact just yesterday as the course of me filming this board game we put up on their store like 20 copies and I am super excited because I was able to purchase one of those copies because I'm really looking forward to trying this game out the list of mechanics on this one our route network building and tile placement but really this feels a lot like a sorrow or indigo style game where you are putting tiles down onto a board and then kind of the path that gets traced is going to do different things for you in sorrow and indigo it didn't matter how long the path was you just tried to connect different things or just keep moving in sorrow I suppose but in past tally it's all about trying to have the longest craziest spinny type pattern through the biggest sacks of tiles to get the most points it looks like it's pretty brain Bernie and a big reason why this one excites me is because there was an iPad game that came out years ago that Jessica and I love to play and I honestly can't remember the name of it I'll put it on screen when after I film this I don't know if you could actually get it anymore but this one which is super fun and you got points for the longer you actually spun around on this area so I've loved playing that iPad game with Jessica so I think that's part of the reason why I'm so excited to play this one and it also it has a very nice aesthetic appeal to it so yep that one is done and next up we've got quantified this one is listed at the designer is Janna Ulrich and the publisher is quality beast now I haven't heard of either of them before it looks like this is the only design that's on board game week for Jonna and the mechanisms are area movement and cooperative play and honestly I don't know anything else about this game the only reason I click Subscribe on this one is because my friend Jeff qey played a prototype of this one at UK games Expo and said that he was pretty impressed by it and I haven't actually picked his brain to find out why and either way it's that that's enough for me to click the subscribe button and try to learn more the description says it's a cooperative board game set in a world where everyone's behavior is constantly surveilled and analyzed players behavior results in a social credit score determining the position on the social ladder players start from different positions on the social ladder as a refugees unemployed or employed with unequal rights access to human rights the goal of the game is to make all rights accessible to all players and to fight the implementation of two Attalla terian policies that's a pretty cool theme that I just learned reading that for the first time so either way I'm looking forward to trying that one out in the future next up we've got ragussis this one is listed as a 2019 publish date so it's really far out in the future there's only seven people subscribed to this one yet so far and for this one the entire reason I click the subscribe button on this one is because of the designer his name is Fabio Luciano and the only other game listed in the BoardGameGeek database for him is Kali ma which came out last year and I was super impressed by I really enjoyed that one so based purely on the pedigree of the designers single really good last game I would like to definitely know more about this one it looks like the mechanic mechanisms are listed as commodity speculation training and worker placement I'm not actually crazy about commodity speculation so I will definitely look into more on this one because of the designer it's being published by brain crack games which I've never heard of before but it looks like the description of this one says it's set in the legendary City of Ragusa which is now dub bro Vinick and the game charges players for the task of building Ragusa in the 15th century constructing its great towers boosting trade with the east and finding the fortunes players are gonna be building houses between hexes it looks like which gives you access to various resources and works sort of like worker placement so either way there's two photos on BoardGameGeek right now and they look like euro a goodness to me so I'm looking forward to trying this one out for sure although it'll be a while because that one's listed again as 2019 I've just got three more of these left the next one is a railroad revolution railroad evolution : in between there this is the first expansion for a railroad revolution which came out from what's your game two years ago I believe and it's designed by Marco caneta and Stefan EO Nicolini which Stefania Nicolini sorry and I really enjoyed railroad revolution for the first like two plays and then two things happened one there was something very strange with how some of the numbers worked and I actually instituted a significant house rule to make a certain thing much more expensive which made the game better and the other thing was the variability was not super high like after I played this one about four times I didn't feel the super urge to come back to it so it kind of felt like I kept playing the same game over and over again and this this vision which is called railroad evolution I believe is a big modular expansion for railroad revolution so I don't know much more about that but I really liked the core mechanisms of railroad revolution so I'm looking forward to seeing what this can bring him and maybe I will end up giving this one a try and maybe it'll revitalize the game for me that one's listed as 2018 and the next game is spring meadow this is also listed as 2018 and this one is designed by Gouveia Rosenberg and it is game 3 in movie Rosenberg's tile placement trilogy the second game was Indian summer and the first game was cottage garden for some reason they don't include games like patchwork in that one but either way I thought cottage garden was fine I thought Indian summer was incredibly bland and based off what I've seen in spring meadow I'm actually very excited I think this one might be the one that I'm most interested in it's once again doing tile placement with kind of Tetris II polyomino type pieces it also once again just like in Indian summer it has holes in the pieces but it looks like in this game the holes are gonna be much more interesting and how you actually put them down and it sort of seems like maybe it's a combo but a cross between cottage garden and Indian summer because the picking mechanism for this one has a big grid of tiles in the middle of the table which is somewhat similar to cottage garden but the way you actually grab them is different it's definitely a different game and I don't know too many of the specifics on this one but I believe that when you're putting the tiles in they kind of slide in from the top kind of tetra Seaway don't quote me on that one I've intentionally not done a ton of research for this section because with 14 games to talk about I would just kind of forget things as they go but either way I'm definitely looking forward to trying this one out it looks like the the theming of this one is the first delicate flowers Herald the end of a harsh winter the Sun shines longer day by day and pushes the snow back lush meadows bloom and curious marmots slowly awaken from hibernation so it's kind of similar I guess the theme wise to Indian summer and yeah either way I'm definitely looking forward to trying this one and the last one that I'm going to talk about is called underwater cities now this one is also listed as a 2018 game it is being published by delicious games which is not familiar to me but the entire reason why I've clicked subscribe on this one is because it's being designed by Vladimir suchi who has designed several other games that I really liked like pulsar 20 and 49 as well as particles Club and last will I think that he has some really great ideas and his designs and I don't know what ton about this one the mechanisms are listed as a modular board route network building and worker placement and the the start of the description says that in underwater cities which takes 30 to 45 minutes per player Oh per player okay this might be a somewhat long game players representing the most powerful brains in the world brains nominated too due to the overpopulation of Earth to establish at the best and most livable underwater areas possible the main principle of the game is card placement we're gonna be making three by five slots and yeah it just there's a bunch of photos online two prototypes it looks like your wee goodness that I would certainly be interested in so I am gonna keep my eye on this one I'm curious I haven't heard of delicious games before and it looks like this is the only game they have listed so they must be there a small check family project that's been started for the specific game so that'll be interesting to see how that one goes and that is going to round out all of the games of interest so once again this is kind of my first try with this new segment please let me know if there are parts of this that you liked or parts of this that you thought I shouldn't do or was it too long or too short or whatever I would love to hear your feedback on this section it's certainly one that I find interesting because it's nice to talk about the stuff that I am looking forward to in the future all right let's now move from talking about a bunch of games in the future to a bunch of games in the now because this is the shifting shelf segment where I talked about all of the new games that I acquired since that the last of the variety blogs and also all of the games I had to pull off my shelf in order to make room for it and there is certainly a lot of action if you look over there for this specific month the first game that I got was caverna K vs.

cave which is the two-player only kind of modification on caverna I have played that one and I'll discuss that one in the initial impressions blog I also picked up the German copy of die kwok cell were a volunteer in Limburg which is one of the games that's nominated for the kennerspiel des jahres I am hoping to do a full playthrough for that one as I mentioned before I'd say push your luck that building game looks very cool I also got a copy of drop it and that's a review copy I guess it was sent over although I did tell things in cosmos that I was not planning on reviewing it but I am hoping to try that one and give an initial impression on it and the one after that cuz I haven't played this one yet and it involves dropping these little kind of polygon shapes into a various areas that's two or four players it looks light and fun of heard really good things about it next up I got a copy of gear works which was sent to me by the publisher it looks like it's a relatively quick kind of puzzle II almost add oh who asked card placement game it looks kind of neat so I'm looking forward to trying that one out I also picked up a copy of lost cities this is a super old game it's a 2 player only card playing game that I never really got around to and I had some store credit and I saw it in a local game store so I decided to pick up a copy that one although I haven't played that one yet I grabbed a German copy of a Luxor as soon as that one got nominated for this field as Yaris I decided I really wanted to get a copy of that one as soon as possible to try and cover it for the channel and as I mentioned I am hoping to do a playthrough for that one in a couple weeks that one's designed by rüdiger Dorn um next up we have menara this one looks like a cooperative follow up to via Poletti if you're familiar with that one in menara you are cooperatively trying to put all these little dowels down onto the boat down onto the board and then you put these funcly' shaped cardboard pieces on top and you just try to build this tower and get all of certain things done before the whole thing collapses I enjoy dexterity games in general this one just looks aesthetically very pleasing I also picked up a copy of one deck dungeon the forest of Shadows which is a standalone expansion to the original one deck dungeon this game is a want to player game and I picked this one up at the same time I grabbed lost cities just kind of on a whim I had a store credit so I haven't actually played this one with anybody else at this point but it's apparently a one a two-player game like I said where you're trying to delve into a dungeon it's got a lot of dice rolling type things going on next up I got a copy sent to me of sailing towards Osiris that came from the publisher I did a full playthrough of that one actually last year for the Kickstarter and they were kind enough to send me a final copy of that one so I enjoyed playing it last year when I did the full playthrough so I'm looking forward to giving that one a shot with the final components it's a worker placement game as you kind of move a ship down a river and you build lots of monuments towards the Pharaoh it's got some pretty neat ideas I also grabbed a copy of the mind this one is kind of all over the place right now in social media it is also a game that was nominated for this bill - Aras and I talked about this one a couple months ago in my variety vlog after the game a trade show cuz I played it there it's a very strange game fully cooperatively trying to play cards in order without communicating it's kind of like telepathy but not really and it's a strange one and it was cheap and I was already doing an Amazon de order so I threw it onto that I also picked up a copy of War of the buttons I bought this one at UK games Expo it was 30 pounds and I got this one because it's designed by andreas tedding who is a designer that I really like he designed haunted to Tonica Stoffer dynasty as well as Firenze a and several others that I haven't actually tried and Jessica and I actually got to play that game and I'll be talking about that one in my initial impressions and I liked it enough to pick up a copy also it looks like it's gonna be very difficult to acquire that one in the United States so I figured I was there I decided to grab it the last one that I picked up is central eastern Wonders oops these were supposed to be an alphabetical order but that one that did not get sorted well either way I picked up Eastern wonders which is the second game in the century trilogy the first game was century spice road and this game is very similar in its DNA to spice road but it's definitely a different experience it's much more there's a lot more icons going on there's just a bunch of tiles in the middle of the table as you're trying to convert spices into various things and cash them in for various points I did play this one at the expo so I'm going to talk about that one in the initial impressions vlog as well and as I mentioned before I'm hoping to get to a playthrough of this one filmed next week all right I had to take a bunch of games off the shelf I tried to do a little bit of cleaning to make room but also also maybe remove some stuff that's maybe even sticking around for a while the first thing that I got rid of is a 51st state the master set this is an engine building game that was published a couple years ago by portal I quite liked it I reviewed it favorably but I just haven't played it in a couple years and there's lots of other stuff that I'd rather play instead I got rid of a copy of bubbly pop which was sent to me by the publisher it's a two-player very light game that didn't really end up doing much for me I'm also gonna be pulling City of Kings off the shelf I talked about that one last month in my impressions and it really didn't work out well for us which is a shame because it's a beautiful expansive game with a lot of really cool ideas but it just didn't work and I just don't see us coming back to it I also got rid of my copy of a dead man straw which I've had for years I backed it on Kickstarter years ago it's a really site really a simple light pusher like game but it works great on the iPad and I think I just rather play it on the iPad instead of playing it in person I'm also a pulled Destination X off which I don't know a whole lot about and I picked it up last year at spheal not knowing much and then I read the rules and was actually pretty disappointed by what I saw and so I never actually got around to trying that one I pulled ex-libris off the shelf this one I reviewed favorably last year it's a neat highly asymmetric worker placement game where you're trying to build out a library that has a very keltus II feel as you're trying to put these cards down and they push your luck style but I just haven't found myself really coming back to it since I just there's so many new games coming in and I need to make room and I am not particularly excited about playing that one anymore next up I pulled Pictou mania off for a couple reasons one it's a frantic drawing game a real-time but stress me out like crazy it just did not really work for me that much and I found out that they're putting out a new copy a new version of Pictou mania that is kind of streamlined its smaller box and it's less overwhelming with the amount of stuff it throws at you in real time so I'm definitely gonna be interested in looking into maybe picking up a copy of the new one but I'm really not interested in playing the current copy the stronghold version that I've had for a couple years I've also taken off a copy of red 7 which was actually a print on demand version from before you could even buy it all under the bookshelf when I first heard about it it's a cultural game a really strange game of like rules changing on the fly I've had it for years and years now and haven't played it in all that time it's a small game but you know I need to bite the bullet at some point just say I'm not gonna be playing this one again it doesn't take up a lot of space but I may as well remove it I've also taken Sagrada off this one was a dice pool drafting dice placement too kind of game that felt kind of pseudo cuy and puzzle tee as you're trying to put all the dice into your area but it just really didn't connect with us we played it a couple times and it did not really show us the game that we were hoping it would be so we haven't really played it since and I've no problem getting rid of that one next up is a game called sigil which is also a I say also kind of like route 7 in that it's a small game taking up a very small amount of shelf space but after playing in a couple times it just did not really engage me if you'd like you can search back if you type in sigil and John gets games into Google you should be able to find and my initial impressions of that one when I played it it didn't really blow me away and I haven't touched it in years so that one's being pulled off the shelf also space race I played that one last year and talked about my initial impressions on that one as well it's very strange engine building game that's very difficult to teach and I haven't found myself even slightly interested to come back and play it again subsequently so yeah I'm decided to pull that one off it's also a strange sized box so it was felt kind of good to pull that one off the shelf to make room for more standardized sized boxes next up we have a game called spires which is a strange trick-taking style game and I played this one once and I talked about that one in an in an initial impression section as well and it just didn't grab me then and I haven't found myself coming back to it and so removing it for shelf space same with super hot the card game it's about the same size actually as aspires it's a one to two player I guess technically you could play three players as well a strange deck building game based off of superhot - the video game and I think it had some pretty cool ideas definitely some weird tweaks on deck building but it was very strange at two players it really feels like it's best as a one player game and it's probably great as a one player game but I just don't play solo games so I pulled that one off and the last one is transatlantic this one was the follow-up to Concordia from the designer Matt Kurtz I picked this one up at spiel last year and I made a full playthrough of that one and the last time I played it actually I had a pretty good time with it but I am not excited at all to pull it off the shelf again so I'm kind of hoping to maybe give this one to one of my friends so that it stays within the friend group and I can have the opportunity to play it again because I would like to play it again but it's a large box and I don't think I'm excited enough to keep it in the collection just on the off chance that I happen to maybe play it again at some point in the future because I had more fun than I expected the last time I played it's a bit funny but I decided that was good enough for me to pull it off and that is gonna wrap up the shifting shelf and this is also going to wrap up to this video I hope you've enjoyed it I've definitely tweaks some various things I would love to hear your feedback on well any of these new things in this video sorry it took so long I guess sorry's the silly thing I'm not gonna apologize for this but it's certainly a much larger gap that I'm used to between variety vlogs because we went on that vacation where we got to go to the UK games Expo it's just been a really great last five weeks and at this point I'm just looking forward to kind of hitting the grindstone and trying to get a lot more playthroughs put out and then I normally do now that I am kind of redoubling my efforts to focus on making that kind of content for the channel so yeah with that I think I have now come to the end of this vlog and I'll see you in well I guess if you watch the initial pressure this video very soon but I'll do another one of these in four weeks in the middle of July as always I'd like to thank everyone who's been supporting this channel including all of these producer level patreon backers if you two would like to directly support these videos and please junkets Gamescom slash support to see a variety of ways with which you could do that also if you enjoyed this video please consider clicking the like button down below as well as a subscribe button thanks for watching