Impressions June '18 - Lowlands, Quacksalber, & 4 more!

0:00 welcome to John gates games this is my impressions vlog for June 2018 and as you can see I'm gonna be covering six different games in this video and I played all of these for the first time within the last few weeks and here I will be talking about how those plays went and what I thought about them now before we jump into the first one of those I would like to mention that if you enjoyed this video and you please consider clicking the like button down below as well as the subscribe button also if you'd like to support the channel there are a lot of ways that you could do that and you can see them all at John gets Gamescom slash support and I would really appreciate that ok let's go ahead and start talking about these games and the first one is called D quacks Elber Vaughn Quinlan Berg now obviously that is a German name and I don't speak German so I apologize for the probable mispronunciation there but what's going on here is each player is essentially a quack doctor like somebody who's just like making random potions with various ingredients and trying to sell it to be able saying you would cure this or cure that and that's the theme of this game but realistically what it is is a bag building pusher luck game so you have a bag full of ingredients and it starts off at the very beginning of the game with most of the ingredients being this volatile white ingredient and whenever you pull too many of those out of your bag you your children is going to explode and then you will not get all the benefits that you maybe would have if you had built a better potion that did not explode in your face and so what the way this game works is everybody is gonna be kind of synchronously and hypothetically a say uh some taneous lee pulling tokens out of their bag and putting them into their cauldron as ingredients and you can stop at any

1:30 point in time but of course if you pull too many out then it'll explode and once you finish once you decide to stop or explode then you could look down to your cauldron and figure out how many victory points are getting first of all and then how much buying power you're getting has the secondary thing and that's gonna allow you to get new ingredients and you put those into your bag and then you go ahead and do this thing again and you pull out hopefully the new ingredients that will do bigger and better things for you now some of the ingredients have ongoing effects or or I guess mid potion effects where as soon as you pull it out it does something like maybe it doubles the next token that comes out or maybe it lets you draw a couple tokens out of the bag and inspect them and then use one of those or various things like that and then some of the other potions some of the other ingredients that is will you end-of-round scoring like based off of how many of those tokens you brought out or do you have more of this kind of token than your two adjacent neighbors and that kind of thing so you're trying to consider all of those things and the more stuff you put into your culture in the more victory points you get and the more buying power you get and another thing to keep in mind is that these ingredients have numbers on them the number it goes one two and four and that number tells you how far around this spiral of your cauldron you're gonna put that token down so obviously a four is gonna fill up your potion a lot more than a 1 value token would so at this point I've actually played this game four times over the last three weeks which is a lot more than I normally play a game for the first time especially for these you know initial impressions vlogs and I think that there is a lot of exciting stuff going on here like I in general in the past I've really enjoyed push your luck games

3:00 I think I'm cooling on push your luck a little bit as I go into the future as I enjoy more euro a style experiences but I do enjoy the thrill of push your luck I of course don't like it when things explode in your face but fortunately in Quicksilver the the penalty is not too horrible essentially if it explodes then you get to take your victory points or your buying power instead of taking victory points and buying power so you obviously don't want to explode because you know early in the game you probably forgo the points in order to get buying power to build a better bag and later in the game if it explodes well you just don't get to put a couple extra tokens in which you might not actually pull out in the next round so you maybe just take those points and not actually buy some extra stuff so it's not that big of a deal but it is fun it's just it's fun to pull these tokens out and one thing that I've noticed is that the designer of this game is Wolfgang warsh and he has designed several games suddenly he has not been designing games for that long but many of them have been nominated for the spiel des jahres this one was nominated for the kennerspiel but he also designed the mind which is nominated for the just regular spiel des jahres and he also designed a gone shun clever which is nominated for the kennerspiel so he is really exploded onto the scene and I've played all three of those games and what I've noticed about his salad games from the ones that I've seen so far is he's very good at creating high moments like where the emotion is high and like the peak is just like explosive like you know you like you jump up you're like really happy and that can happen in guns and clever when you have you fill something in on

4:32 your pad and then it bounces around you get a punch for this and you get a bonus for that and get a bonus for this it just keeps giving you these endorphin hits into the mind you are trying to telepathically simultaneously play cards in order and when it works it is a wonderful feeling like you all high-five around the table and it's a really high sensation and in Quicksilver you get that as well because a lot of these tokens with these ingredients when you pull them out they do stuff based off of the last ingredient so it's random like you can't pick which ingredients gonna come out next but when you have a combo go off that you were trying to make happen like whenever you pull out a mushroom right after one of these volatile things and that means that the mushrooms gonna go really far forward or you pull out a really big thing after something that doubles the space that the next thing goes that's a great moment like it feels like that baked into these designs are just lots and lots of great moment possibilities and throughout my for place of this game I had lots of great moments I have seen that by and large people have enjoyed this one I think there's been a lot of fun to be had around the table and lots of people saying like I'm enjoying this more than I thought it would or just like like wow this is fun the the biggest thing that we've pumped into as far as I can issue with the game so far is that you can't have fall behind losers how like it is very possible to go into the last round of the game by the way you do you brew nine potions so you do this nine times throughout the game you can't go into that last round and realize that you have no chance of winning so maybe you're just kind of going for a second or third place but you look to the scoreboard and you just see how far ahead with a the winning person is and you look to where you are and Hantz are good they're really far ahead because they have a really good bag full of ingredients so maybe they'll

6:03 get incredibly lucky like intensely lucky and explode after pulling out almost nothing but like if there are situations where you can math it out and even in that case you might not be able to win fortunately this game takes about 45 minutes to play so if you are in a situation where you don't have a shot to win near the later ends of the game later parts of the game it's not that big of a deal and yeah we've we've really enjoyed it I guess there is one other thing I'd like to mention and it has to do with a catch-up mechanic like I just said that you can kind of have fall behind losers but the game does try to help you out because on the scoreboard there are these little rats in different spots and at the beginning of every round you check to see how many rat tails are between your score and a person who's winning and of that number of tails is going to be how far you actually start ahead inside your cauldron you essentially started with it pre filled up with rat tails which I guess are a good thing in this scenario so the game definitely knows I think other designer knew that there was a potential for runaway leader type things in here so they put a little bit of a break on that to try and let people who are falling behind have a chance to try and get back in but it's not a heavy-handed catch up mechanism so it only does so much for you so yeah either way I think that's everything I have to say about Kwok silver I probably won't be playing it again for the next month or so like I've enjoyed my for place of it and I do think I will get more plays in but after playing it so much I'm looking to play some other stuff soon but I will be coming back to this one it's just a fun time okay next up we have game number two which has gear works now this was sent to me by peacekeeper games who are the publishers of this one and this is a pretty neat game where players are

7:34 trying to vie for control of it these are rows and columns in a grid in the middle of the table now there are I believe four rows and five columns and everybody has a hand of cards and each card has a number on it as well as a color now when you turn all you're gonna do is play one of the cards from your hand out into an empty spot in the grid and you're gonna do three full rounds and at the beginning of each round the grid is mostly empty so it's gonna start filling in as people are playing and the restriction is that the number on that card must go into that row and make sure that the row either is ascending with their numbers or descending with their numbers you can have duplicates next to each other I believe and the other restriction is that each column cannot have more than one card of a specific color so it's kind of puzzling and the way you're trying to figure out where you're gonna put these cards down into the spot that will make sense for where you are but in addition to that you have the ability to gain sparks now these are the currency of the game little electrical sparks I think the theme is very steampunky in this way and when you put a card down if you look to the orthogonal closest adjacent cards and you're able to add two of them or subtract two of them from each other to match the value of the card you just put down then you will gain a spark and sparks are really good in this game because they might allow you to draw more cards into your hand so that you can go deeper into the round they also might allow you to play your card on top of a card that's already been played so there's a lot of versatile that comes from these sparks so you are really trying to make sure you're putting these cards down in such a way you can add two numbers together to make that or subtract two numbers to make that work now what you're trying to do

9:04 every time you put these down is also vie for control of the rows and the columns as I mentioned before and the way that works is every row and column has a gear and this game is called gear works and whenever you put a card down into a spot then you're gonna find the gear that's associated with that row and you're gonna spin it so that the your player color is pointing down that row and then you'll find a column and you'll spend that gear so that your color is pointing down that column this essentially means that you now control that row and that column but as soon as anybody else plays a card a to that row or call them and they're gonna spend the gear round and now it's gonna be their control so it's kind of like whoever was last in each row in each column is gonna be the one who controls it at the end of the round and you're just gonna keep playing until everybody passes and you're gonna pass because you might not be able to play cards if you pass you can actually jump back in it costs you a spark but this allows you to maybe stall out and then try to jump back in at the right moment to maybe spend a couple sparks to put a card down on top of somebody else's card to then spin the control back around and the reason you're trying to get control of these things is because the person who wins every single row and column is going to get to a specific resource now there are nine resources in the game and everybody has these victory point cards they'll require one resource from the row section and one resource from the column section and after every round you're just trying to have those two things to match up to get the points for it and if you have one of the two then you get points for it as well and you get points just for taking tokens that don't match up with these cards at all but that is the real crux of this game is trying to puzzle them all that out now I've played this once and we played it at four players and it worked pretty well I think it took us about an hour to play

10:35 and I quite enjoyed the decisions I was making while I was playing it I didn't realize just how important the pacing and tempo of this game was until we were pretty far into the game and by that I mean in the beginning of the round it's easy to throw cards around there's lots of spots all over the place but you want to make sure that you're holding back the right card for the right moment to place down into a row or column to probably finish out that row so that you take control in such a way that you are also hopeful that nobody can cover up one of the other cards to take that back so it kind of feels like you're in a pool that's that's freezing you know like you can swim all over the place early in the round but as it gets colder and colder things get more and more rigid until it locks down everybody passes and then that's gonna be how you score the round and I really enjoyed that aspect to it this is definitely a thinking game although I don't think it was crazy crunchy like analysis process was not too bad as we were playing in I do feel like it probably would have been better at three players because of downtime like I said if he wasn't excruciating but there was a lot to think about and I think having just two people between your turns would probably be a little bit more beneficial I would play it at four players again though I thought that was pretty darn good and there is also a catch-up mechanism where at the end of every round people are gonna gain these sparks based off of how many fewer resources they took in the previous round so if one person has a huge round then everybody else is gonna start the next round with tons of sparks which means they're probably gonna do really well and it was kind of a slingshot thing when we played it the first round I dominated I got almost all the points and then in the

12:06 second round I scored nothing and in the third round I scored almost nothing as well because my opponents were able to kind of slingshot back and have so much control with all of these sparks that they used to spend to get more cards and they could cover things up and really be you know much more down into position in the second third rounds now this is not a criticism of the game I think I probably played it quite poorly because I was not really understanding the dynamic nature of waiting until later parts of the round to put these cards down I think I dominated in that first round mostly out of luck because none of us really knew what we were doing at that point but I think there is some pretty cool stuff here I'm looking forward to playing this one again I don't think I'm like rapidly excited too but I do think this one will seem one play it's an enjoyable competitive puzzle and yeah it was just a fun time all right next up we have game number three and this one is lowlands now I'm gonna start this thing off by saying that this was the best game that I played over this last month and I've only played it once and it was just a couple days ago and when you first hear about it you're probably not gonna be particularly excited because when you see the name lowlands that doesn't really do much for you you look at the box cover and it's got a big sheep on the front you're like okay there's sheep in these lowlands I don't really know what that is and then you'll notice that the the designers this is their first game I think it's a husband-and-wife duo C&J Parton himer I believe it said on the box but the box cover does say that it's okay Rosenberg approved and the more you learn about this game the more you're gonna say wow this really sounds like a new way Rosenberg game because what you're trying to do is breed a bunch of sheep while trying to build a dike to stop the ocean from coming in and drowning your sheep now that is the the basic crux of this game and so it sounds

13:38 like a typical euro in a lot of ways and I do love euros but the thing that really sets this game apart is the indirect player interaction that goes on here now it looks like a worker placement game at first because each player has three different workers but you only ever play them on to your own board so it really feels like an action selection type thing where you are picking and choosing from at these five different things that you can do on your board and these five things are you can buy or sell sheep you can just draw more cards you can also help build the dike you can build up fences because you need to put your sheep and pastures or else it will run away and lastly you can build buildings and features now these are tiles have coming into your little player board area and they will give you one time benefits as well as potentially ongoing things and you can put these into your area to try and piece together a nice little engine that's going to work for you now this is a very streamlined game in a lot of ways there are only three resources and there's a lot of hand management here because you are drawing cards into your hand and then you're using those cards to help build a dike you're using those cars to pay for buildings and are using these cards to also build fences that you're gonna put out into your area and it's really important to try and figure out how best you're gonna do those things because the the indirect player interaction comes into play by seeing how much people are like breeding sheep and how much people are building the dike because every single round and there are three rounds to the game three overall rounds to the game the ocean is going to have a high tide moment and you need to check to see if the water is higher than the dike and if that happens and then people are gonna start taking

15:10 these dike breached tokens which are potentially really bad for you but if the water holds if the dike holds and the water stays back then people are gonna get coins which are victory points in this game and the crux here is that in both those situations you look to see who did the most and who did the least as far as actually building that dike out so if the dike does not hold and it breaks the person who helped build the dike the most losses that they don't gain any of these negative tokens you know they're like a hero like I did my best to build this dike but everybody else is gonna take these dike Beach tokens equal to the distance between how much they contributed to the dike and the person did the most so if you barely did any you could take a bunch of these tokens now the inverse is true if the dike holds because in this case you see who contributed the least and they get nothing and then everybody gets coins which are points equal to the distance between the person did the least and the person and where they're at so that means if you do a whole bunch of dike building and the dike holds you could get a lot of coins from that perspective but then there is this sliding scale in the middle of the board where every time the dike fails it's gonna slide in such a way to make it so that sheep are gonna be less uh they're worth less points at the end of the game and the aid that you put into building the tank will be worth more points and if instead the dike holds and it shifts the other way and suddenly sheep are worth more points and helping build the dike is worth less so what that means is it you can't go into this game and say I'm just gonna do a dike building strategy because that's what I'm gonna do and that's how I'm gonna play this one because if you do that and everybody else helps build a

16:40 dike enough so that it holds every single time your dike points could be worth zero points at the end of the game if it holds every single time so that's definitely not something you want to invest in in that case you probably want to make sure that you are also breeding sheep because sheep can definitely be worth points and them more often than the dike holds the more points those sheep are going to be worth and the inverse is also true because if people are just going you don't want to say I'm gonna breed sheep like crazy and just ignore the dike because if the tank doesn't hold you could be in a really bad situation and that is what happened in the first game that an only game that I played that of this so far as we were playing the game the water rose pretty quickly like you know you can see how much water is gonna be coming in within a range and it was coming in really hard early on in the game and I realized that I was probably gonna focus on trying to build the tank but also breed some sheep as well but a couple of my opponents just went crazy on breeding sheep and they didn't do anything for the dike essentially throughout the whole game which meant that the dike failed all three times it was checked and because I contributed the most of the dike I never took any of these negative tokens so my modest amount of we're not worth that many points each but I got to keep all of them but at the end of the game if the Dyke fails at the very end when the storm comes and everybody has to kill one of their sheep for every one of those Dyke breech tokens that they've taken throughout the game so that meant that a couple of my opponents between the two of them they lost like 43 sheep one person lost like almost 30 another person lost like in the low-to-mid teens and that just washed away their score literally

18:11 because these sheep are worth points at the end of the game and they went so hard and these sheep bred like crazy because at the end of each one of these sub rounds and there's six of those in the game every two sheep are gonna make a another sheep so that means if you have five sheep you're gonna get two more sheep but if you have ten sheep you're gonna get five more sheep so they multiply like crazy if you're able to actually put them into your fence areas in your spot so if you're going with a sheep strategy you have to obviously invest a ton of time building fences and moving fences on around in such a way to hold these sheep and then buy of buildings and features that can hold more sheep because you have a regular cap of just one sheet per tile spot on your area so in that case I just went crazy on the dike and I ended up winning the game even though I had almost no sheep at the end but the person who came in a close second did a little bit of both and I think that's one of the things that has me so hopeful about this game being great long-term because my first impression is that it was great but I don't know how it's gonna play out in the future is that it seems like going with a mixed strategy is usually going to be the right way to play this game and it's gonna be all about figuring out how mix the strategy that's gonna be like is it gonna be 60% sheep and 40% dike building or is it gonna be 90% dike building and 10% cheap and every single time you play this game it's gonna be different and you have to feel out the table and you have to feel out of the game like is the water coming in really fast if it is then you should probably tilt towards building more dike spots if the water is coming in really slowly and we're having no problem

19:41 building up enough banks to hold it back then you better breed some sheep or else you're gonna have no chance of winning and at the end of the day the person who bounces out that out correctly and finds the right a spot for it he's gonna be the one who wins and I think in the game that I played it was kind of like 80% dike building 20% sheep and that proved to be victorious for me but one person went kind of like 70% a dike building and 30% sheep and they they almost won the game as well so it was really closer to the end and it was just really exciting like I really enjoyed all that interaction that was going on as I saw my opponents just not building as I can be being excited to try and keep building it to get my distance between them and myself even bigger because that meant every single time I did that they got more of these dike breach tokens which meant that they were gonna have to have more of their sheep beach round at the end of the game which meant they did get points and oh man it just really worked out well and it just feels like this game is highly streamlined like it feels like it was very well developed it wouldn't surprise me if they had four resources at one point and if there were more than just sheep if there were more animals but it seems like all of those things have been cut away to just be a very polished and sleek design and it just seems to work so well and again this is after only one play and I'm really looking forward to playing this one more but I'm just bending over all very impressed with the decisions they made and the tension that appeared on the table it just felt like a new experience to me and I am very much looking forward playing this one more at this point let's now cover game number four which is a Luxor now this was designed by Ruettiger Dorn and he

21:13 has designed that lots of games including kuba as well as Montana and many others that are not coming to my mind immediately right now but he is a well-known designer who does some really good stuff in design spaces and for the most part his games are light to light medium if that makes sense like I've never really seen a intense in depth euro crazy game prime rüdiger Dorn and Luxor is no exception in this game players are racing through a spiral pyramid trying to pick up as many B M treasures as they can't just looting this pyramid I suppose and the key to this game is an interesting hand management idea where you always have five cards in your hand and you were only ever allowed to play a card that is on the outside of your hand so you always have two cards that are an option for you and those cards have numbers on them which tell you how far you can move one of your little looters throughout this Perriman and sometimes there are other benefits on that card as well like maybe it'll move all of your people on the board or maybe it'll let you roll it and then that's part of the option of how far you can actually before and then once you're done playing that card you'll only have four cards in your hand left and then you draw a card and you put it right in the middle of your hand so it kind of splays your hand out so your cards are is constantly sorting to the left and the right in your hand and that means that there's definitely some planning things going on here where you can see what your options are this turn and if you did this well then you could do that let's turn and then maybe you could do that into this other spot to try and get your people around because it's not just about landing on a spot to take a piece of treasure you have to get

22:43 there with enough of your people most of these tiles require at least two of your little adventuring looter guys on top of that spot so you have to work it so that you get one on there and then another one there before your opponents are able to do the same thing first person to get that us the correct set of number of people on that spot is gonna take the tile so you are racing to try and do that but also racing to get deeper and deeper into the pyramid because the farther you go the fat and the faster you go the quicker you will unlock more people they're kind of scattered throughout the pyramid so you are gonna get more people that start back in the staircase and so the people are running in and then new people are coming in and running in and new people are coming running in so it's this crazy like spiral of looters running all throughout this Perriman and then once two people get to the very center then the game is gonna be over and you count up your points but how far you got your people into the pyramid is also going to be worth points to you and on top of all this stuff you have a couple other things that you can do for instance there are spots that will kind of jump you forward almost like a slide in sorry if you're playing that game but there are also some more powerful cards that you can draw when you land on certain spots which will give you more effective actions as you play these cards out and interestingly enough those go into the discard pile and then you shuffle the discard pile and suddenly everybody could just randomly draw one of those more powerful cards so it seems like the overall game state becomes everybody becomes stronger as you go deeper into the game because that deck of cards that you're drawing from has more more of these special cards in there and I played this one once and I enjoyed the experience I think I came in last so I

24:15 don't think I did very well but it's a very light game and it plays very fast and I guess I say it's very light but there were definitely decisions like there were multi turn plans that I was making and get my people on the certain spot and look around and decide is it possible that my opponents might get there first because you don't want to invest a couple turns trying to make something happen just to realize one of your opponent's kids there are one term too soon and now you've wasted those terms because this is effectively a race game as you're racing to get to the center of this pyramid and I just I found it to be quite enjoyable like that's just a thing that I've noticed for most of rüdiger Dorn's games that the decisions are pleasant and usually interesting and usually not too complicated and I usually walk away from one of his games saying that was fun and I definitely had that experience here now I haven't played it again and part of that's because I haven't played that many games obviously over this last month I'm only covering six for this vlog but also I've video played Quicksilver four times and I've been playing it more excited to maybe play some other stuff first but I do see myself coming back to this one hopefully on numerous occasions in the future because it played in under an hour and it teaches very quick and sometimes you just want to play a game where you play card you move a person and in 30 seconds it's returned again because sometimes it would lock down a little bit as somebody tried to plan out a thing but for the most part it was play card move a person ten seconds later they played a card moved a person and just kind of briskly went around the table oftentimes it was your turn before you even realized it and I definitely enjoyed that aspect to it so yeah that's pretty much all I have to say about Luxor it's not exactly burning down my

25:46 game shelf with excitement but I hope to see a get played against him okay next up we have game number five which is menara now this is a cooperative tower building game and I bought this one from Germany I don't think it currently has US distribution but it did have English rules in the box now what's going on in this game is you have a bunch of different colored columns and they're about gate also definitely not short in this game and when it's your turn you are going to draw a card from the top of one of these challenge stacks there are easy there's an easy stack a medium stacking a hard stack and when you flip that over it's gonna tell you how many columns you need to add to the structure that's in the middle of the table or perhaps how many columns you need to move from the structure to higher points on the structure there's a couple different ways this works but you were just constantly trying to put these down onto the different spots and on each one of the tower levels there are these locations that are colored and you have to put a column down onto a matching spot on the tower so as you are building this thing up it's gonna get more and more precarious and every time you complete one of the tower levels you have to take another level and put it down somewhere on the table so you really have to be smart about when you actually put that last column down onto one of the floors because you can look down and see what the next floor is gonna be it's a random my stack and you have to make sure that you're in a situation where you can actually put that down onto something good because you want to make sure you have a stable Tower that you are building throughout the game because the way it works is you're gonna keep planning until the tower falls over or until you put every

27:17 tower into this every tower level into this tower also you will keep going until maybe you run out of the columns in the back and once you end the game through one of those means you check to see if you actually won the game and you win the game by making sure your tower is a certain height and at the start of the game you have a goal height which might be like three or four and then every time you cannot successfully achieve one of those challenges that you do in your turn you put it facedown on top of that area to show that you now have another level that you have to go up so it's really important you don't want to pull a challenge and then not have the correct columns to be able to go into the spots to be able to meet it because obviously the difficulty is gonna ramp up and you're gonna have to get this tower higher and higher on your table the more times you mess up in those ways but you're also able to put these tower levels onto the table itself to kind of go for a wider base but every time you do that you also increase the difficulty now this is as I said a fully cooperative game and the rules as written say that if the tower parts of the tower fall down then you can still win if enough of the tower still matches that criteria but that kind of lends itself to a situation where you might intentionally knock over a part of the tower to end the game and find yourself in a winning situation for the rest so I've kind of ignored that rule I don't really want to play with that rule and I just want to say if any of the tower pieces fall then you just lose and it doesn't matter and at this point I've played the game twice now over the last couple weeks and I had fun with it I think it's a a fun challenge for everybody around the table there's definitely dexterity going on as you're trying to put these columns down sometimes on precarious spots also

28:48 sometimes you have to pull a column out almost Jenga style from it's been previously placed they have to make sure that it's not load-bearing and he just carefully pull it out and put it higher up on the tower and the pieces as you can see are a variety of wacky shapes and the tower that you build can be very aesthetically pleasing now I've played this game twice I think the first game we played on medium difficulty or the normal difficulty that is and we failed but we really did not build our tower well we essentially built two towers next to each other and then eventually one of them fell over so really what I took away from that is that you need to build your tower in a cross supporting way so that you need to build up here and then put a piece across there to kind of cement these two towers together and then you kind of want to work your way around so that it branches out and the second time I played it it was with some people who were relatively new to gaming and I decided to just play on easy because they were a little bit nervous about the dexterity aspect of the game and we ended up building a really cool Tower that branched across different ways and a lot of different styles and we did a lot of planning we did a lot of discussing about what was the right place to put all these different things and we ended up winning the game we won somewhat easily and I guess we were playing on easy mode so and the future I think I won't play with that anymore now that I have a good grasp about how to build a good tower in the middle of the table but this is just a very aesthetically pleasing game like I was at a game night when this was played and every new person who showed up was like what is going on over there like they've come over and look at this awesome tower

30:19 that we had been building from nothing you know it has such a tiny such a tiny start just you know a couple pieces of cardboard on the table and the end of the game you have this wonderful massive structure and I just found it to be very satisfying and yeah I don't think this one's gonna get played all the time because not everybody is into dexterity cooperative games but I think that I will be looking forward to playing this one it has kind of a medium filler on several occasions going forward especially depending on the play group that I'm playing with it took us about 45 minutes to play so it's not super fast but I was very happy with how it played out and I'm looking forward to playing this one more just cuz this has got a good raw fun and satisfaction power to it as you're building this thing up and hopefully winning in the end of the day all right we've reached the sixth and final game we'll be talking about today and that one is the little flower shop now this one was created by dr. Finn games and they sent this to me a few months ago and I've been meaning to get this one played and I'm happy that I finally did because what's going on here is everybody is trying to compete to make the best looking window display for their little flower shops now each person has a board that's in front of themselves which shows the window and the shelf and some hanging spots you can put some stuff in and it's a rather large thing honestly you put it on the table and everybody has these big window displays at their building and then the mechanic of the game is hand drafting so it's kind of similar to sushi go in that at the beginning of every round you're gonna draw a certain umber of cards and then everybody is gonna simultaneously pick one card and then pass the rest and then once everybody's picked you reveal it and then you put that card down somewhere in your area now that card

31:50 could be a variety of different things it could be a vase which you will put into your window it could be a set of flowers which you have to put into a matching vase it could also be a hanging basket of flowers which you could put up on the top of your window but you have to spend money on those and another thing you could draft is actual money that you just put into your cash register I think the last thing that you can pull out of the drafting phase is an order and that would allow you to sell some of the flowers that you drafted earlier and you can get even more money by selling flowers in a matching vase so that's gonna get you the money that you can then spend getting these hanging baskets in your window and all of these things are gonna give you flower power which are victory points in this game and you can see that by the number of petals kind of on the floor around the bases and the baskets themselves just tell you how many points they're gonna be worth and so what you're trying to do is match all these things together because every flower goes into a specific type of vase like the base has a restriction on it and sometimes it just restricts you on how many flowers can be in the bundle that goes in but sometimes it's even more strict than that it says it has to be you know a blue flower and a white flower and then you have to draft exactly that card that has a blue flower and a white flower on it because you can never put multiple flower cards into a specific base so you are definitely trying to keep track of the cards that you've seen throughout the draft because it will come back around to you around the table so you might try to draft a vase hoping that the flower that matches it is going to come back around or maybe you remember you seeing that flower and earlier phase of this drafting and you hope to see that one come back into your area now obviously that would be a lot of

33:21 memory brainpower and you do not need to play this game with that intensity and I certainly didn't we played this one for players I believe and it took us probably about 30 minutes so it's not a particularly long game but all of us seem to enjoy the game quite a bit especially aesthetic from an aesthetic perspective like he really are putting together all of these big faces with these flowers and from a theme perspective on the aesthetics it's unusual right if you're building window displays of flowers like that's a lot different than sushi go for instance where you're just getting different pieces of sushi and doing some set collection in this game you aren't doing set collection you're doing tiny little combos to get you points because at the end of the game if any of your vases are empty then you have to throw it in the trash and you lose flower power points for things that are in your trash so you certainly don't want to do that and in fact everything in your storage which is another place you can put stuff is going to go into your trash but I also like the fact that you have a storage so when you draft those flowers you might not have a vase for them yet but you can put them into storage and then pull them out at any point later on the game you can freely move things in between storage and your window display which makes a lot of thematic sense so at the end of the day I don't think that the little flower shop is doing anything in particular that's like gigantically new but it didn't come together to be a very pleasant and pleasurable hand drafting experience and I guess from a mechanical perspective there's one tiny thing that they did new for this genre that I liked and that is that when you get to the end of the round obviously there's one card left and you pass it to the next person and they just

34:52 get that card well you are given the option of spending two of your money to instead discard that card and just draw the top card from the deck and then put that into your area potentially into storage or into your window and that gives you a decision for that final round you don't just take the dregs of what other people had you have the option of potentially spending a couple money if you have it to take another random card which will obviously you're going to do that if the card you get is bad then going for a random card off the top of the deck is a good thing to gun for because odds are much higher that you're going to find something you can work with so yeah I think that's pretty much everything I have to say about this one I'm not particularly a crazy excited to play this one again mostly because I don't play hand drafting games all that often but I do think that it will be played again in a filler type atmosphere when we want to play a game that's maybe 30 minutes before people show up because yeah when you're playing this game and I look around you're just gonna see a lot of smiles as people are not making crazy hard decisions but just enjoying the experience of putting these vases and these flowers together and at the end of the game you look down and you have this nice window dressing in front of yourself and hopefully yours is gonna be the best out of everyone so yeah I think that's everything I have to say about this one okay with that we've now reached the end of the vlog I hope you enjoyed hearing about these six new games that I played throughout this month I've been getting a ton of new games over this last three to four weeks and I have only played this some of them so I'm hoping to get more new stuff played for the next one of these impressions vlogs although if I'm being honest it probably won't be more than six games I have a lot of work there's a

36:23 lot of stuff going on so I won't have as many opportunities to play board games over the next few weeks as I maybe normally like to but there should be some new ones that I'm looking forward to talking about in particular there's a game called past telling that I really want to try and race to the newfound land those both came in and they're both sitting in my game shelf they both really want to get played and so hopefully I can make that happen in the next four weeks so that I can talk about it in the next one of these vlogs but for now I think we've come to the end 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 then please go to 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