STAG | Evolve Your Beetles, Then Risk Everything | Kickstarter Board Game Preview
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Transcript
And you as a player get to decide. Do you want to be friendly and forage with the other beetles or fight?
Hello everybody. My name is Ilya.
My name is Tyler.
Together we make up Coffee Break, a couple that loves to play board games.
And today we'll be telling you about Stag.
Stag is a one to four player game designed by JJ Neville and published by Split Stone Games who helped sponsor this video.
Now, this is a prototype of the game, so everything may be subject to change. But with that said, let's give you an overview of how the game works.
In Stag, you'll guide a collection of beetles
through their entire life cycle, growing them from tiny grubs into fully developed beetles. Along the way, you'll gather resources, evolve powerful traits, complete objectives, and ultimately risk everything in dramatic showdowns against the other players. This game features simultaneous play. Instead of taking turns one at a time, everyone will plan out their actions then resolve them together.
Let's break down the round structure. At the start of each round, part of the circular board rotates, changing which spaces line up with one another, opening or blocking opportunities for your beetles as the game progresses. Following this, players will proceed to place tiles. You'll do this by arranging your five action tiles across your action board. Each tile can perform one of several different actions depending on its placement. So, deciding both which actions you'll take and what order you'll perform them in is one of the core puzzles of the game. Once everyone has planned their action tiles, you'll all reveal that you're ready and begin resolving your five actions from left to right simultaneously with the other players. The most common thing you'll be doing is growing your beetles through their life cycle. To grow a grub, you'll choose a beetle card from your hand, pay its egg cost, place it onto your player board, and add the grub to the outer ring of the main board matching the symbol of the card.
Every beetle is different, requiring different resources to develop, scoring different amount of points, and contributing towards different end game objectives. As your grub matures, you'll eventually use the grow pupa action. If you've collected the required wood and water and your grub has aged enough, you'll spend those resources and transform it into a pupa. You move its token onto the next ring of the board and if you're the first player to claim that space, you'll also collect a pupa trait token. You immediately advance on the corresponding evolution track and potentially earn an extra point if it perfectly matches your beetle. After aging your pupa enough, you can use the grow beetle action. Move your beetle onto the final ring of the board. If you're the first beetle in that space, you'll collect a bonus victory point.
Now, your beetles won't develop on their own. So, several actions will help support your engine along the way. You can draw additional beetle cards to expand your options, gain eggs to help play more beetles, or pay for certain actions, or exchange resources to convert one type of resource into another. The age action advance the timers in your grubs or pupae, bringing them closer to the next stage. You can split that aging between multiple beetles, giving you flexibility depending on what you're trying to evolve. You can also pay to advance one of your three trait tracks, mandibles, coloring, or wingspan. These tracks provide valuable end-game points, but whoever currently leads each track also unlocks a unique ongoing ability, making them worth competing over throughout the game. Another key actions is paying to upgrade one of your action tiles. Choose a tile and flip it. From then on, you'll use a stronger version for the rest of the game. Upgrading your action tiles will allow your engine to become increasingly more efficient throughout the game.
Finally, you can tuck a beetle card from your hand beneath your player board. Depending on where you'll tuck it, you'll either gain a permanent ability for the rest of the game or an additional resource whenever you collect income. Each tucked card also provides another end-game objective to work toward, giving you even more ways to score. After everyone has finished resolving their actions, you'll collect the resources based on the spaces still visible on your action board. As you upgrade tiles and rearrange your engine throughout each of the rounds, the resources you generate will change. Next, every player checks whether any of their beetles can be fed by paying the required food cost shown on their card. Any fed beetles are flipped over, which means we're one step closer to a showdown. In the showdown phase, if there's no beetles on the board, nothing will happen. If there's only a single beetle on the board, regardless of whether it's fed or not, that player will advance one space on the trade track of their choice. No showdowns will occur. If multiple beetles are on the board, but only one player's beetles have been fed, that player advances one space on the trade tracker of their choice for each fed beetle they have. Again, no showdown occurs here. However, if two or more players have at least one fed beetle, those players will move one of their fed beetles into the center of the board and a showdown will begin. Here, each player will secretly choose whether they'll fight or forage.
If everyone chooses to forage, everyone peacefully shares the available points and gains valuable traits. If only one player chooses to fight, they intimidate the other, claiming all the bonus points for themselves and still improve one of their traits. The player who chose forage will be able to improve traits two times. But, greed comes with a risk. If multiple players choose to fight, the battle goes poorly for everybody involved. No one will gain the points, everyone will lose a trait, and those beetle cards are discarded entirely, meaning that they will not score at the end of the game. Now, throughout the showdown phase, players can bluff, negotiate, or promise cooperation before revealing their choices, meaning every showdown will become a memorable deduction moment where you're constantly trying to read everyone else at the table. After the showdown phase, surviving beetles are tucked behind your player mats where they'll safely remain for end game scoring. While defeated beetles are discarded and lost forever. The game then continues into the next round with players growing new beetles, improving their engines, and preparing for the next showdown.
Once all the five large showdown point tokens have been claimed, the game comes to an end. You'll score points for your surviving beetles, both those on your player mats and those that survived previous showdowns. Your collected point tokens, your position on the trait tracker, including points for your placement on each individual track, and your lowest ranking across all three, completed tuck card objectives, and your pupa trait token objectives. These include the universal objective of collecting one token of each color for a single trait, as well as your personal objective card which requires three specific pupa trait tokens. You'll tally the points and the player with the most wins.
Now with that overview out of the way, let's dive into some of the key features of Stag.
Key features. Now, the first one, the beetles.
Obviously.
Look at them.
There are so many different beetles in this game and the art and the presentation of the whole package of the game is just outstanding. If you want to learn more about beetles just even from seeing how many different species there are out there, this is a fantastic way to dive into that and then you can take some time to look at those beetles yourself.
Google. Google.
And if you're fearful of beetles, like Tyler,
Yes.
you can have some exposure therapy.
Especially the big ones.
Especially if they have a horn. I feel like horn beetles are Tyler's weakness.
I'm mostly okay with the rest of the beetles, but horns, uh-uh.
What what about the horn makes you so spooked?
I feel like they're going to stab me.
I think another element of this game is the flow of the game.
Mhm.
Everything just makes sense of how it progresses, what the costs are, the iconography, the presentation of the game, and it just looks so crisp on the table.
Mhm. The design really shines through in exactly what Ilya is saying, the flow of the game. And that centerpiece where you end up moving up your beetles and evolving them until they are finally ready for that final showdown is quite dynamic in the sense of resource management, which is probably the next thing that we want to talk about.
Exactly, the action selection system.
It is simultaneous play, but it requires a lot of simultaneous brain crunching because you have these five tiles, and how you position these tiles will determine your future.
Mhm. Order does matter in this because you can place one tile at the very beginning, and then the last tile you place because of all of the actions you are taking will have finally allowed you to do it, whereas you might not have been able to do it if you played that tile earlier on in your sequence.
To add a layer to complexity there, too, so you can upgrade these action tiles, and you can upgrade a tile later in the action sequence, so you can use the upgraded tiles' ability, which is just
The planning ahead in this game is quite interesting. The decisions that you have to make, the strategy that goes into it, the resources that you're even going to gain depending on how you sequence your actions at the end of the round is quite dynamic, and it will be really important for how you manage your resources.
And there's a lot of future factors to consider as well. Because of the board rotating, because of spaces being occupied by other players, not only are you planning what you're doing for yourself, but you're competing with the other beetles. They're out there looking at you with their horn.
It's a bit of organizational madness, if you ask me.
Now, speaking of the beetles looking at each other and paying attention, the game has a pinnacle, the climax of the beetles' evolution cycle, which is the showdown.
Yeah.
If If are two beetles or more that are ready, they're fed, they're reached their final stage, a showdown occurs.
Mhm.
And you as a player get to decide, do you want to be friendly and forage with the other beetles, or fight? This is where the game can get very, very interesting. You are often, in my opinion, incentivized to maybe always forage with each other, but the breaking point of this game is that will put If you choose to fight, it will push you over the top, and you'll be able to break that bounds of like the scoring that is going on. It's pretty important in terms of getting ahead in this game, and I think battling with that dynamic of when to fight, when to forage, and hope that your opponent doesn't fight with you, cuz that's the worst outcome that can happen, is really, really interesting.
The risk factor of this is huge, because the thing is is if you fight and both of you fight, you lose your beetles, which is really valuable points, and you'll lose a trait as well, which is potential points.
Yes.
So, the loss of the showdown is humongous. And as a person who loves the risk factor and liking playing the odds, I chose to forage more often than not, which is spicy, it's interesting, it's a dynamic that I want to explore more within the game.
Mhm.
And of course, the game adds that social element. You can negotiate with other players, you can threaten them. You can say, "Hey, I'm going to do this. Watch me."
Mhm.
[clears throat]
And cuz it doesn't feel as bad if one player is attacking and the other player forages, it's not as You lose some victory points, but you get to move up twice on the trait markers. It's only if you both attack, that's when everything comes crumbling down.
So, there's some communication that can happen. There's also some fun dynamics that can happen around the table. Maybe it can get a little bit of heated, who knows. But if that's something that interests you, Stag is definitely something you'll want to check out.
Mhm.
And we also mentioned the trait marker. This will be a really core aspect of the game, as well, because as you collect pupa tokens as you progress on the different traits, not only will you be able to score points cuz you're competing to be the highest within each of the tracks and your lowest overall, but each of them also provides abilities if you're the highest.
Yeah, those positive interactions with being the top of the trait marker is really interesting. So, there's an action where each time you draw, you'll draw an additional card and you'll be able to choose between them. There's one where you get to move up on a trait track regardless of the outcome of the showdown. And the last one will allow you to have one swap for your resources during the round.
Now, all of this will potentially incentivize you to go up one or the other and kind of balance all of that strategy. It's just another layer to consider in your beetle evolutions.
So, that's interesting, too, when it comes to scoring because each of those traits will be the highest person scores this many points, the second does this, and so on and so forth. But, also you want to be moving them up almost in tandem to try and score that base minimum because the lowest one you have will score you points.
And then there's a general engine building of this game as well. You're be able to tuck cards, which will give you bonuses and abilities throughout the game. You'll have a personal objective you'll be trying to reach. As your action tiles get upgraded, moved around strategically, you'll be able to do more. You'll be able to grow your beetles and hopefully have a full board of them because each of them on your board will score points. Which is a good strategy tip. You want to place lots of beetles on the board. That's a lot of points.
All that to say is Stag is definitely a game for people who enjoy optimizing their turns, strategizing about how they're going to move up on different tracks, and given that engine building feel along with how the showdowns are done, if you're interested in a bit of player interaction, that's definitely a game you're going to want to check out.
Lots of thinking ahead.
Mhm.
Now, if you want to learn more about Stag, you can hit that link in the description down below. It'll take you to the crowdfunding page where you can learn much, much more.
Mhm. And if you found this video helpful, make sure you hit that thumbs up button, hit that subscribe button if you're new here cuz we love talking board games.
Now, for our question of the day today, I have to ask, do you have a favorite beetle?
Do I have a favorite beetle?
Is it the horned beetle?
The the the colorful ones. I like the colorful ones that stay away from me.
The ones that kind of glisten with a different They're like fluorescent colors.
Yeah, exactly.
Those are really really cool. What if they had a horn?
Maybe I'd like them. From a distance. From a distance.
[gasps]
Well, thank you so much for watching and we'll catch you
in the next one.
Bye.