Top 100 FILLER games - Part 4 (70-61)

0:00 hi I'm Adam Porter and this is my top 100 all killer all filler games and what that means is games with simple rule sets short durations and portable packages the sort of games you probably don't see all that often in top 100 lists So today we're looking at number 70 down to 61 and number 70 on the list is the game peanut Club from Lumberjacks studio and I've already featured two games from Lumberjack Studio on the list which were magic rabbit and oh my brain but this one is an auction game with the same great presentation that you saw in those previous ones and it's a really crazy wacky auction okay you've got three different currencies so you've got a hand of cards some of them are camels some of them are peanuts and some of them are millions of dollars and don't Bank on millions of dollars being worth more than a peanut right because you've got the three different currency cards and they keep switching positions so sometimes peanuts are worth more than camels and sometimes camels are worth more than millions of dollars but that can be reversed throughout the game each round you turn over or each turn you turn over a number of item cards with beautiful illustrations from this deck and they've got different symbols on them different colors you want to gather these things so that you can have pairs of matching colors and some of them are special ones you've got your own character who's got their own unique color that they want as well and things like that there's going to be end game scoring based on building up sets but what it's all about is the auction and this is a straight up shout out how much you want to bid sort of auction so I'll bid one camel well I'll bid two camels

1:32 I'll be three camels well I'll bid one peanut and we know the peanut is worth more than the camels right now so now we're bidding in peanuts and you might get to a situation where somebody's bid you know seven eight nine ten million dollars and then somebody else says well I'll bid one peanut and that one peanut is worth more than any total of millions of dollars so it's a crazy system but it works really well and then it's made even more chaotic by the fact that every player has a collection of different special abilities everyone has the same and these are single use but when you use them they can change which currency is worth more it can limit you to using only a certain type of currency in an auction or it can make all your cards down so they're only got a value of one irrespective of what's written in on them and and I say they're single use but actually at a certain point in the game and you don't know when it's going to happen a card comes out the deck which resets all your abilities so you can use them again so you may get a second use out of some of these it's really chaotic it's really fun and funny as well it's got some great artwork um I mean if you don't like chaos don't go for this one this is not a rhino kanitzia auction right this is a crazy shout it out and have a laugh I think it's great peanut Club really highly recommended 59 is one of helvetik's little tiny box games and this one's called Misty and it's a pick and pass game in the same sort of style as things like sushi go or seven wonders where you've got a hand of cards You're Gonna Keep one you're gonna pass the rest on and each of these cards has a little drawing on it as if it's been drawn with a finger on a on a con

3:02 uh condensation on a mirror or something like that that's why it's called Misty it's got these little sort of childish drawings but the card that you take goes into a grid that you lay out on the table and the position is really important because they've all got little symbols on them arrows and things like this so at the end of the game your card is going to follow the arrows so you'll choose one of the cards to activate in your grid and it might shift to the left that might mean it now covers another card so you're going to pick carefully where you're going to start with moving stuff around and if you don't cover the monster the monster's going to eat your plants but you don't want that to happen because the plants are worth points you want to get smiley faces next to each other and all that sort of stuff to maximize your scoring at the end of the game so a nice simple drafting uh pick and pass drafting mechanism but at the end a very simple little positional puzzle going on as well really good really fun simple game great for families great for kids but actually engaging and enjoyable for adults as well number 68 was a game that got an awful lot of Buzz this last year and that's Scout and I think it mainly got the Buzz for two reasons one is that it was nominated for the spielder's yara's award which is hugely prestigious right and the second reason is because it's from oink games and their games tend to have they've just got a little trendy aren't they they're so stylish that so the graphics and and the design of the box and everything like that is so stylish and Scout is an interesting uh climbing game really so what I mean by that is you're trying to play cards that are higher than the cards that have been played before but it's got a few really really interesting little mechanisms in

4:33 it firstly each card has two numbers on it and the card can be reversed one side up to the other to change the number on it so at the start of the game you're given a hand of cards and you're not allowed to change the orientation of any individual card but you could choose to flip your entire hand upside down so basically you've got a choice of do you want all your cards one way up or do you want them all the other way up so that's the first interesting twist in the game then you've also got this thing where you can if you're playing groups of cards you can put a single card you can play just from your hand but a group of cards if you're playing that like a run of cards or a pair of cards they must be next to each other in your hand and you're never allowed to change the position of the cards in your hand they must stay in the same order that they're there so that's an intriguing bit to it as well so you've got to play higher than the previous uh the previous person's played so let's say they've played a pair of sevens well you could play a pair of eights or something like that or you could play um a potentially play a run or something like that but with more cards in it so you might play a run of three consecutive cards and when you do this when you play cards you then take the cards that you've beaten and put them into your scoring pile and your card becomes the active set now if you can't play a card that beats the previous pile what you do is you take one of the cards from that display from their little set and you position it into your hand wherever you like and at this point you can flip it up one side or the other and you slot it into your hand wherever you like to try and build these cassettes of consecutive numbers or matching numbers

6:04 you know right next to each other in your hand and if nobody manages to play after you've played your set uh and and it comes back round to you then the round ends and you know you score points for the cards that you have in front of you and stuff like that there are also tokens that you gain whenever anybody takes a card from your active set and these are worth points as well so it's got some complexity and some interesting little bits in it it feels like many of the games in the Amigo spieler range uh that come out and you'll be seeing more of these throughout the list you've already seen quite a lot over the last few um 10 so far but this is a really good one so that's Scout number 67 is another game from migospieler this is not a tiny little card game like the games I've tended to show from them this is a slightly larger box and it's full of plastic cups of different colors this is speed cups and what you do it's very very simple this I always think this is a great game because you don't actually have to teach the rules you can just see it in action and you know what you're supposed to do so you turn over a card it's got an image on it of a bunch of I don't know it could be anything a bunch of different colored monkeys standing in a row and you have to get the same colored cups as the monkeys and ninja the line them up as you saw on the picture sometimes they have to be stacked on top of each other sometimes you just have to be lined up and you've just got to do it faster than anyone else and then hit the bell and if you do that you win the card you work through the deck and then whoever's got the most cards at the end wins really really simple stuff fast and frantic you're either gonna love it or hate it kids are gonna love it and it's just great for that reason that I mentioned that you

7:36 don't even have to teach the rules no one ever taught me to play Speed cups right I just saw someone playing it at Essence Spiel and I knew what was going on straight away and I think there are very few games where you can say that about them number 66 is another game that was nominated for the spielder's Yaris a few years ago this is llama which is a game from Amigo spieler small box game this one from reinik nitzia and it's a bit like Uno which is not necessarily a huge positive for a lot of people a lot of people are quite disdainful of that game but lava's got a little bit more thought going on in it so essentially a card is played and then you have to play a card equal to that or higher the highest card is a six and so if you're going to play higher than the six there is no seven you've got to play a llama and then if you want to beat a llama you've got to play a one okay so it goes round full circle one two three four five six llama one two three four five six so you play your card on top of it and you keep going like that until you decide you can't play or you find you're unable to play in which case you pass and when you pass you're gonna put your cards on the table and they're going to be worth negative points equal to the value on the card so a five is worth five negative points but if you've got a group of five let's say you've got four fives that's still only worth five negative points okay you don't get you you only pay for the value of one of them um and you're going to take these points as as tokens and then in future rounds if you win rounds you can get rid of tokens and and things like this but great thing about it is when you stop

9:07 playing just because you've passed and everybody else has passed if there's one player who's left they can keep on playing so sometimes it's good to actually build up these these groups of cards so that then you can just wait until everyone else has passed and you've stayed in and then you can just play right one five another five another five another five a six another six alarm or alarm or a one you know and you can get clear out your hand and then you can get rid of big tokens you've got this nice little system where some of the tokens are worth one point and then you can change them for a ten pointer so if you've got there's kind of a catch-up mechanism really because if you've got loads of negative points and at the end of the round you can give up one token well if you've got loads of points you can give up a 10 point token right right whereas somebody who's got very few points uh negative points they're only going to be able to give up on one because they probably don't have 10 points worth of tokens so it's got some just some neat little clever things as you'd expect from rhinocchnitzia um I think I think it's great it's it's really really fun simple easy to teach attractive you know it's it's worth looking at if you want something with just a little bit just a tiny bit more bite to it than than uno number 65 is Kings and creatures this one from zoc verlag fairly recent one for the last year or two from soccer lag this is a drafting game where not the pick and pass drafting like we've seen before this is open drafting where a bunch of cards are laid out on the table and we're going to select them to try and build up sets which are going to score us points but the key in this one is that each view starts with like a little castle that's got a number on it and the

10:39 player with the lowest number is the first one to play and so they select another card from the from the open display and they put that alongside their Castle but that's got a number on it as well and every single term we look around the table and we go right who's got the lowest number they're going to be the next person to play and so you might actually end up getting multiple turns in a row before anyone else gets a turn because you keep taking low numbers and adding them to your display while somebody else is jumping way ahead and getting a really high number which means they're going to be waiting a while for their term but they've got the card that they wanted you bow out of the round as soon as you've got three cards you can't overtake more than three cards in a round or if you ever take a card which is lower than the number that you had previously okay that's Gonna Knock You Out of the round but that's quite a good thing to do because that means going into the next round you're gonna have a low number in front of you which means you're gonna start playing first and taking things first at the end of each round of play you compare to your neighbors how many soldiers you've got and that's going to score you points and then at the end of the game you're comparing how many cards of a certain color you've got to the left and right of you you're taking different points for different sets you've got set collection bonuses all this sort of stuff like you'd see in a game like sushi go or something like that so it's sort of like a card game version of a Time Track like you'd see in takaido or Glenn Moore or um you know those games where or Patchwork games where you can jump quite

12:09 far ahead and then it means you're waiting a few times to get your turn but you've got the thing that you wanted right so that's what Kings and creatures is and it's a really nice clever a little bit different sort of drafting game from zoc number 64 is Chip it now chipit has a very similar feel to something like Scout which I've mentioned before but chip it totally under the radar I've never heard anybody else mention chip it before but I think it's great chip it what you essentially do it's another climbing game you're um playing cards to beat the card that was played previously or the combination of cards that was played previously but in chipit you can adjust the value of your cards to find these pairs so let's say you've got a you know a seven and you've got a five well you can adjust that five to make it a seven so you can you can you can play a pair but in order to do that you have to take chips from the central display and you don't want chips really okay but you can take them and one of the colors taking a chip is just going to increase it by by one right whereas another colored card taking a chip is gonna a double the value of it and so there's some some real sort of decisions to make around that sort of stuff and then when you pass when you're unable to play or you pass then you give up chips okay so that's the point where you can start to get rid of your chips but ultimately you want to end the game with no cards no chips that's how you're going to win the game there's quite a bit of maths going on here because you've got to work out right well if I multiply this by two or even by three by

13:41 playing a couple of chips you know what happens there how can I match that up with another card in order to play higher than somebody else but that's going to be giving me lots of chips lots of that sort of decision making going on I think it's really clever it's not the most intuitive game in the world um but yeah it's well worth exploring and I think more people should be talking about it number 63 is stickmeister from freedom and freeze this is another Amigo speeder game so stick Meister is a trick taking game very simple trick taking game actually you know simple cut play a card follow suit there might be a trump suit in there something like that seems simple enough right it's like any other trick taking game but here we have an enormous deck of cards that all have different rules on them and at the start of each round every player gets three of these cards and they can select one rule which they're going to put into play so each round you can have multiple rules in effect that totally change the way the game works it's a bit like playing flux okay but as a trick taking game so you've got really wildly different rounds it Alters the scoring of the tricks it Alters the way that a trick works it Alters who plays next it Alters you know all sorts of things um get changed now this game's only available in German so if you want to play it I mean you can find nice crib sheets on on Board Game Geek where with all the English information on there I've pasted mine up um so that there is you know the rules are sort of stuck on the cards um and it's it's chaotic and it's not entirely Fair okay it's hard to create a

15:13 set of rules for every situation that's going to be completely balanced and all that sort of thing so you've got to play it light-heartedly with a little bit of just salt you know it doesn't really matter who wins or loses it's the fun of seeing how all these different systems work together actually this game was a big inspiration for my game Throne which is my dice um it's a trick taking game that uses dice but every round there are different powers in effect and a lot of the powers were were inspired by things that happening in in stickmeister um so it was a bit of an inspiration on me and actually we've later seen freedom and freeze a few years later go on to create his massive game 504 was it 504 or 501 I think it was 504 which just was a board game that had so many different mix and match rules um very experimental design of freedom and freeze and stickmeister much simpler easier small package than 504 it's similar to I understand the game dwarf King from yellow which I really ought to play I think that's probably right up my street but I haven't come across it yet um but I'd like to see an English translation of stickmeister at some point but it's been years who knows number 62 is King Domino Spirit yara's winner from Bruno katala and the publisher blue orange games this is a game where you've got Domino tiles with two squares on them and each Square represents a different type of terrain a different colored terrain and when you take a domino you've got to fit it into your five by five Grid or you could play with a slightly larger grid if you want to but you've got to match terrain types with each other so that you're building these bigger areas of terrain at the end

16:46 of the game you're going to score one point for each square of terrain multiplied by the number of I think they're crowns that are that are in these different terrain areas so you want to gather the crowns but also build them up into these these big areas of matching colors but the most interesting thing in the game is the way that you get these dominoes because at the start of each round a number of them are laid out and on the back of the dominoes they've got numbers on them which tells you the sort of order of them okay the the priority order of them when you take one of these dominoes you place your token in that spot so at the end of the round when everyone's taking a token and your token you're taking a domino your tokens are positioned in a certain order and that's going to dictate the player order the turn order for the next round so basically when you're selecting a domino you're selecting the Domino that you want yeah to fill your grid effectively but also your position in turn order for the next round and that's the most interesting thing in the game that's the key decision in it really interesting system huge success I mean it won this field is Yaris but then went on to have lots of sequels and expansions uh Queen Domino and dragomino and King Domino Origins all these other versions of the game which I really need to explore but King Domino lovely little filler looks like a children's game but actually there's enough substance here that you can play this with adults as well and have a good time number 61 is Deep Sea Adventure which is another game from oink games now oink games makes these lovely little stylish games like we've seen previously with Scout this

18:16 one is a push your luck game where we're in a submarine and we've got to die beef to try and get treasure so there's this little chain of treasure tokens extending down the table from the from the submarine and you don't know the value of these tokens it's a roller move game so you roll some dice and then you move your your little diver a few spaces down onto the you know according to the the dice roll and then you pick up the treasure that you've got there now on subsequent turns your treasure the number of treasure tokens you've got is going to reduce the oxygen available to all players and at a certain point you're going to be thinking I can't really afford to go any deeper into this ocean because we're running out of oxygen and I've got to get back to that submarine before the oxygen runs out so you're rolling dice now to try and get back up to the submarine but the trouble is the treasures that you're carrying are weighing you down okay so there the the number of treasures you're carrying is subtracted from your dice roll so it's a real element of how much risk can I take how far can I push it in terms of going to the depths where the bigger Treasures are which are worth more points or do I want to just take a few simple treasures and then get back up to the top and hope that the other players perish and end up getting nothing so exciting little push your luck game in a tiny tiny package very very popular this one Deep Sea Adventure so that's 70 to 61 and as always we're going to look at patterns and see if there's been any upsets right has anybody risen up and and taken the taken the lead so starting with designers how many games by these

19:49 designers have there been in the list so far okay so we're we've done 40 games so far so Rhino canitzia has taken the lead so Reina kanitzia currently has um three games three games for Ryan because this actually hasn't got the lead Bruno catala also has three games actually there's a newcomer to this and you may not have heard of this designer is Haim shafir but one of those designers that you just don't hear anything about even though they're relatively prolific if we move on to looking at Pub Publishers Amigo speed has taken the lead eight games from Amigo spieler on my list there's six games from zoc verlag and that means nsv is now falling behind with three games on my list in terms of themes well abstract themes are ahead you know with games like chip it and and stuff like that which don't have any theme so there's 11 games that are abstract but it's a bit more interesting to look at the games that do have themes and anthropomorphic animals we've got seven games with antrimorphic animals on the list next most popular is Fantasy games games based around generic sort of fantasy we've got four of them on the list and then three farming games and in terms of game mechanisms well dice rolling is in the lead with six but trick taking is close behind with five games on the list a climbing also five games I thought that one must be high on the list I feel like I've been saying a lot this is a climbing game this is a climbing game so trick taking and climbing a level pegging and actually they're very similar those sort of

21:20 mechanisms if you like trick taking you probably like climbing okay they're very similar and they appeal to the same sort of people uh what's next shedding that's pretty much the same as climbing shedding and climbing tend to go hand in hand I've actually made a video previously about the difference between trick taking climbing and shedding so if you're interested you could watch that okay I'll put a link to it above and beyond that push your luck four games and then we're into all the other types including Roland rights with three games with modular rule sets there's three of them party games pick and pass and so on which have got two games a piece so I hope you found this 10 interesting I hope it uh introduced some games to you that you hadn't heard of that you might want to look at and I'll see you next time for another 10 games