Spokes Review: Different Spokes For Different Folks

[music] [music] >> Hey everybody, I'm Tom Vasel and today we're taking a look at Spokes. Spokes, kids, these are the things back in the day that we would put uh baseball cards. You need to take a paper clip, stick that baseball card in, and it would make your bike sound like a motorcycle. Until we grew up and found out that people took cycling very seriously.

We thought you just jumped on bikes and went all over town. Nope, it's a serious thing. It's racing in the in the bicycle racing dome where it's tilted and I don't know how people don't fall over. Anyway, this is a a bicycle cyclist racing game game in the velodrome as you're cycling around, but you're doing it through colors of your spokes.

That might sound a little confusing, but take a look. At the beginning of the game, you're going to scatter all these different sticks that are made up of these six different colors: white, pink, yellow, green, purple, and blue across the board. Each player is also going to have those six colors in these spokes of their wheels, as well as a cube here, a marker to show you which lap you're on, and then your bicycle itself.

Now, what players are doing on their turn is they're going to move this clockwise one, two, or three spaces. You'll then take the stick that you cross over, the last one you crossed over, and you replace another stick on the board, putting that stick here, and then you move along sticks of that color, but it you have to go over the stick you put out.

So, this would be the most boring of moves. It's one here. I could have replaced this one and bounced like that, but that's pretty much the same thing. Now, I could have probably made a better move if I had uh moved past the pink here because then I could have switched the pink with this yellow one.

And then I could have moved up here, or even over here if I want to on the inside track. Or even better, I could have switched this purple with the yellow one, and then I could have moved all the way up here, or even over to here. And so, that's what you're going to do each turn, and your colors in the spokes are going to change.

Now, you can pass through other players, but you can never end on another player. So, let's say I was here and I had yellow, and I moved all the way up, I can't land there, I'll bounce back. But when that happens, you'll flip over this tile, and this says in the future I can spend this tile whenever I want to change any color to the color of the things I'm moving from.

So, let's say later on I move the green, and I put that green here, and now I say I'm going to move and I'm going to say I'm going to use my tile to say this yellow's also a green. So, green green green green green green. Whenever you pass the start line, you move this up one, and the first person to cross all the way across the line three laps is the winner of the game.

>> [music] >> Spokes was a surprisingly enjoyable game. I don't know that it's particularly attractive. Yeah, there's these color spokes all over the place, and you have your own thing there, but it doesn't it just looks like a blob of color, really. But underneath that, there's some fun decisions to make, and surprisingly, I think this is a racing game that isn't terrible at two, most racing games are.

Because again, it's more of a who can get to their spot first. Now, I will say with two, you'll very rarely land on each other, so you won't get to use that drafting card, you know, the oh, I was about to land on you. It's you even a little bit thematic. It's about to land you, but now I'm catching a draft and I'll zoom around you.

But it's fun to try to set up this really long chain of green, and you're like, ooh, I'm going to use that chain of green. Oh, I don't have any green spokes. So, I might actually go slow somewhere just to take a green spoke, put that in my wheel so that I can use that later on to use that big chain I have coming around.

That's the And also, three laps. I'm always very wary of racing games when they're like multiple laps. I'm like, it took us 45 minutes to go around once. This game is a 30-minute game, and it works, I think, because there's not a lot of analysis paralysis in it. You're going to go, I could go pink here, yellow here, or white there.

I'll do that one. That's it. It's not that complex, and in fact, I think it might bug some people cuz they might say there's not enough strategy in it, but I enjoy it. It's the fun of taking a stick, putting it on, moving your bike around. The back and forth, I think it scales pretty well. Like I said, with two, you don't have that bumping into each other, but you could also just each use two racers, and I don't think it would be that complex.

It wouldn't be that hard to have the two bikes going at the same time, and you could even draft off each other. So, this is a mild little game. It's not one that a lot of people have heard of. The the front of this cover very, you know, raw on your face, and it's not necessarily looker on the table, but >> [snorts] >> it does some neat things with racing.

It almost reminds me of a grown-up version of a very popular kids racing game called Monza, m o n z a. This feels like if you play that, this is the next level up from that, and a lot of people I think will enjoy it. So, seven out of 10 for me, that is Spokes. I'm Tom Vasel, and you're watching the Dice Tower.

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