Games That Have Left My Collection - Episode 1

0:00 hi welcome to actual Oh I'm John Perkis today I'm starting a new vlog series about the games have left my collection over the years I've got rid of over a hundred games in my time and I wanted to talk about why I got rid of them some of them very popular games and also talked about games that I prefer that do something a bit better than those games this is a series that I'm doing especially for my patreon backers so if you want to see the rest of this series and the next video is available right now head over to patreon comm forward slash actual low and back and you can see the next video and get notifications of all the future ones and the games that I cover in this video none of them are review copies I'm trying to focus on the games that I bought often games that I've had in my collection for years but have sort of waned over the years or I've come to realize that they just weren't for me so let's get on with the list the first up is betrayal at the house on the hill this is one of the first games I ever bought and I was super hyped about it because I really was taken in by the theme this idea that you're all adventurers that go into a haunted mansion you explore it and find out where the rooms are and then one of you turns on the rest of the group there's a haunt that happens and you play out some kind of horror cliche a classic or a story of which in the game there are 40 different stories that can happen now I love that as an idea because I don't really watch horror movies but I'd like to be a part of a horror movie and when

1:32 you're playing the game one of the best things I think about the game is the exploration aspect you start in the main corridor and then you reveal these rooms and they they come into the mansion at random so that every time you play the game the mansion is going to be completely different in its layout and there's some really interesting rooms such as the mystic elevator that transports you from one place of the building to another it's constantly jungling up where it is and and you're falling into traps and having to jump over things and that itself lends a really nice theme to the game the trouble is is that the rest of the game hasn't really worked for me and when you first play it you're taken in by the theme and you're so desperate for it to work that you kind of get bought in and so when I first played it the haunt happened and then the game ended about a turn later because it was massively waving to the balance of the bad guy and they just won on their next turn and unfortunately that's how the game is played out for me every single time I've played it not always in the balance of the the bad guy but sometimes the good guys win immediately and then I guess a couple of other times it's just played where it's gone on and on and there's been no tension you know which side is gonna win but it just comes down to the admin of going through the turns and waiting for it to happen and that's the real disappointment is that it's a horror

3:04 game you need the tension of a horror film you need to feel like you could die or lose it any minute and you could but you never feel like you're in with a fighting chance so it doesn't have that other it doesn't have that balance to it and I know for some people that doesn't matter that they still get bought in and I agreed with that when I first played it when I first owned it and now that I've played a lot more board games I've become a lot less forgiving of things like that because ultimately yes you can get through it with your imagination you can believe you can create answers in your head as to why those things happen the way they did but I think if a game can't provide you with the imagination if it can't provide you with that basic level of making sense when it's trying to be a thematic game then it's failing on the first thing that it attempted to be because betrayal at house on the hill isn't offering some wonderful strategic experience so what is it offering if it can't offer the theme that it promises in terms of games that do it better when I first tried mansions a mad in a second edition I thought that was the answer has this wonderful artwork the theme is incredible the app is amazing but if you see the review that I did I really ended up being disappointed by that game because it had so much promise and didn't meet any of it so for me there isn't a perfect alternative to

4:34 betrayal at house on Hill because there's no game out there that really covers generic horror in the way that I would like and I think I can't believe that that nobody else is doing that there's so many Cthulhu games and I'm personally not into Cthulhu as a theme but what I would love to see is that kind of scooby-doo mystery which is what betrayal covers or just any kind of generic horror with vampires or ghosts or or crazy beings like the the best horror movies that are out there so I don't have another horror game but what the best thing that I love about the trail is that moving through not knowing what you're going to deal with and revealing those rooms and so for me burgle brothers is a brilliant cooperative game where you're doing a bank heist together and every time you move to a room you don't know what's going to be there and you're revealing traps and alarms and you're creating problems for yourself now Bogle Brothers is a straight cooperative game it doesn't have that one versus many aspect that betrayal has and it certainly doesn't have those many many scenarios but unfortunately those scenarios seem to be part of the damn full of betrayal so I would recommend checking out burgle brothers and I would also recommend not getting into betrayal at house on the hill because for me my excitement my enthusiasm got me through about two or three games and then by the fourth fifth sick I was just getting really fed up with it and actually kind of regretting my naivety in the first few games the

6:05 next game is a popular one and that's Dixit Dixit is a party game made up of a bunch of wonderfully designed cards with with loads of surreal artwork on them and the idea of the game is that one person picks a card from their hand gives a clue with it that describes it a little bit but not too much everyone else then adds in a card to a pile that they feel could also be described like that they're shuffled up and then everyone has the guess which was the card that they they chose I've really wanted to like Dixie in fact I got two copies of Dixie I was really bought in by the idea of such a light Party game but with this creative aspect of coming up with these interesting clues that can be any word phrase sound anything that you like but I've always just found the game really dull and it goes on forever so I think that the one interesting part of the game is giving that clue and that happens just not often enough for you as a player so in a game with a lot of players which is kind of what you need for Dixit you get to do that you know once every 10 rounds with 10 players but you need a lot of players because otherwise it becomes too easy to guess what the card was so there's no challenge and then when it's your turn to creatively think of this clue that is the bit that I feel should be exciting

7:36 and I think it is the best bit but it's still for me just not interesting enough because you don't know what card it's gonna be hiding and you don't know where it's gonna be hiding if you could see the cards it was hiding in then you would have much more of a challenge of of knowing okay how can I get across this card but without giving away the others and then the other thing that I guess has always bugged me about this game is this weird balance of trying to get people to guess your card but not too many people to guess your card it's such a weird thing in my head to get to wrap my my head around because do I want to get everyone to guess my card in which case great that's what so many games are like or do I want to hide it perfectly so nobody gets it no I want to have this weird balance where everyone except one person gets it it just feels a bit unsatisfying of course that's a lot more likely to happen in in a 8 player game than in a 5 player game and I think Dixit was a very unique original game that was bringing something new to party games so I really appreciate it for that and I think ultimately inspired the game that I think is a hundred times better that I would recommend to anyone and that's Mysterium Mysterium is a game with all the wonderful artwork but it has a real game to it as far as I'm concerned a real challenge to it where one player trying to get across an idea ie who a murderer is and the weapon they used using these artwork cards so

9:09 they're trying to use this art to really convey a message and so it it really solves that problem that I had with Dixit I would never play Dixit again I feel that it goes on too long that there's there's too much admin the the joy lasts for sort of 30 seconds and then you've got to go around again you've got to work out what different points everyone has and I find the point system just a tiny bit too complicated that I never remember it I always have to go back to the rule book so personally I would never play Dixit again but I would play mysterium forever and 50 other party games so unfortunately it had no place in my collection arctic scavengers is a deck building game that I had for many years this is set in a post-apocalyptic winter imagine the film the road and everyone's just trying to survive they're trying to find food and they're trying to build up a tribe to be bigger than all the other tribes in the game and I was brought into this game by the theme but generally I haven't loved deck-building games I find them a little bit mechanical not that exciting and Arctic scavengers was sold to me as being a debt building game with a theme that makes sense and I would agree with that you are using your people you your deck of cards are people in your tribe you're using them to go and dig out in the snow to find new items you're then using them

10:41 to get into skirmish battles with the other players to compete for other contested resources which are usually other members of tribes or weapons things like that you're trying to get bigger and bigger and so there are some very neat mechanisms in the game such as digging through the the scrap pile and that skirmish thing at the end which is quite different to other debt building games but whilst they make sense theoretically I don't ever feel the theme of the game come through it still feels like a deck building game I don't feel like I'm trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic winter I just feel like I'm using things to get more things and on and on and on so that is it so first downfall and then this skirmish thing it it's a very nice idea where you are saving some cards back to send into this fight but it also means that the game it just feels the same every turn a little bit and every game can feel quite similar because you always have the identical set of cards that you can buy so there's always a medic and a scavenger and and a saboteur and and so if you like a certain card in the middle you probably try and go for that card every game now of course that will change slightly based on what comes out of your deck and what you get from the scrap pile so there are there are random elements that make it different but the overall field doesn't really change I

12:13 think a big part of why I don't like active scavengers is that I'm just not into deck building games that much I've had to just kind of come to terms with that when you first start a board game collection you sort of think that you need to have a worker placement game and a deck building game in a negotiation game in a war game and for some people that's true but there's always going to be certain types of games that you don't like as much as others and I I think eventually got to get to a point where you just embrace that you you don't like a certain type of game now for me that is deck-building games and there's really only one deck building game left in my collection as far as I know and that's Clank if you check out my Clank review I really love that game and that's because it does something very different that no other deck builder does so for us it's Gavin jizz didn't quite hit the spot for me it's not a terrible game I feel like it goes on a bit too long for what it is I would rather it lasts about half an hour whereas I was finding it was lasting more like an hour or an hour and a half depending on the number of players it's got some cool ideas but it just wasn't quite enough for me I'd still play it but certainly don't want it in my collection anymore and that's arctic scavengers so those are three of the games that have left my collection over the years and the games that I would recommend ahead of them are Berger Brothers Clank and mysterion if you want to see the next video in this series it's available right now on my patreon page all you have to do is go and back its patreon.com forward slash actual low and there's a bunch of other rewards

13:43 available as well in that video I'm talking about why I got rid of the game Cosmic Encounter so that should be a divisive one thank you so much for watching I'm John Perkis