Reviewing all 11 new-to-me games I played at PAX Unplugged 2022 - TCbH

welcome to the cardboard Herald hey everyone I am Jack and I am freshly back from Philadelphia where I went to Pax unplugged 2022 my fourth Pax unplugged I had a great time and I played so many games and I wanted to talk about them and some of these games that I'm going to give little tiny micro reviews to will have review content on the channel down the road and some of that's already actually scheduled as of me recording it but I enjoy doing one of these compilations for the last convention I went to and thought it was a good format and hey I gotta make some content so let's make some content and go over all of the games that are new to me whether they're new or old games that I played as part of my trip for PAX unplugged 2022.

starting this out we have a banger radlands this is a game that a lot of people have talked to me about anytime I post anything about top 10 small box games or top 10 two-player games or head-to-head games people are like well what about revlance what do you think about that game it's so good and I'm like I haven't played radlands yet and then I played radlands I picked up a copy and yeah you're not wrong it is super good the extremely tight economy in the game where every decision that you make is a resource in and of itself like do you choose to exhaust to your water to draw a card versus actually putting cards into play the lanes in which you set up the different cards I mean I'm getting serious light Netrunner Vibes out of this game the artwork is beautiful the materials are to die for I picked up the the kind of collectors edition the nicer Edition with the flip up magnetic box I didn't realize that wasn't just like the biggest retail Edition and just like deck of cards was insane just there there's no cardboard interior it's just all plastic if it's heavy anyway point being radlands completely captivated me the amount of asymmetry that's born out of the three locations that you choose out of the game is unbelievable especially considering that you're playing with a shared pool of cards if you like tight head-to-head games that have a small rule system but heavy impact with everything that you do in games that you could repeat game after game after game with about 20 minutes per session radlings you definitely gotta check it out next up is another small game it's dice conquest by whiz kids which is surprising that it's not actually a licensed Dungeons and Dragons game despite the amount of effort they put into giving it the tone and aesthetic of modern Dungeons and Dragons and Whiz Kids actually holding the license including putting out games like d d Onslaught this is a Dungeons and Dragons dragons or Adventure Epic Fantasy like dice rolling fully Cooperative game where you and other players each have your own hero who crit off a certain dice you roll the dice at the beginning of a round and then you allocate them to the different monsters who are in play the monsters a crew turn after turn any that you don't kill do damage back to you that you have to endure and you just kind of go through the oncoming onslaught of card based monsters there are a couple really cool ideas in it especially with the multi-use cards some of the monsters actually give you loot after killing them but I wish that that loot were a little bit more enduring that you had something to do with it afterwards or that you had another Avenue to play the game I've enjoyed it every time that I've played it but there's a sneaking suspicion that it is just too thin yeah there are a lot of Heroes and that does affect how you play the game but you play with every single Monster every time that you play and effectively you're making the same sort of mathy decisions about what you do with the dice every time that you play it's a great sort of ease into the DND session while waiting for the rest of your players to show up and in those conditions I think it works perfect but as a main course I think it feels a little unsatisfying next up voyages a print and play game that is a roll in right print and play a game played with markers and laminated boards or I guess you could do it with just sheets of paper and have to print up all kinds of sheets of paper but who wants to worry with that this is a perfectly good example of a game that capitalizes on its minimalistic aesthetic being perfect for print and play The Rolling right functions of it are novel and interesting I think the best thing about it is the amount of flexibility that you have in how you direct your turn as you navigate these C's using the dice rolled as your compass and movement and then a lot of flexibility in the resources that you produce if it were a box game I don't think I'd get as much out of it but I think it capitalizes on what is and totally succeeds knowing the market that it's going for as a print and play game can't go wrong now or a calcum you know if you've been following this channel for some time I'm a big Bruno katala fan and this is exactly what I look for out of a Bruno katala game very simple easy to understand decisions with huge ramifications with the main competing tension between the things you want to do and what other players are observing and interacting with you is all about opportunity cost at first I thought it was going to be a little too rudimentary a little too family friendly for what I really wanted out of a media game but it balances that line really well between the approachability and being those meaty interesting decisions that you want it has this Vibrance that I haven't seen in this level of game in a while so much so that it Harkens back to the Glory Days of days of wonder in a really positive way there's a lot of Polish there's maybe too big of components in some regards but the presentation the aesthetic and the sort of minimalism in the decision Matrix that you have but the impact of those decisions and understanding the Strategic implications of them really made it something that I wanted to play more of and will be playing more of because I definitely have a review of that coming on the channel it feels really modern but it also feels so classic in a good way now life siphon Winslow award for maybe best visual aesthetic of any game that I played at Pax unplugged 2022 but at the same time was kind of a slog this was a disappointment because I wanted something more out of this game and I like a lot of abstracts which this is absolutely trying to play into this abstract strategy realm with a little bit more thematic resonance with these awesome meeples with this great theme that's put on top of it where you're like competing forces of darkness and you're marching your units forward and this great rigidity that I think is actually interesting on paper where you're only allowed to attack your neighbor directly to the left of you though you can interfere using your cards in some of the combat that's happening elsewhere around the table and that presents a lot of interesting opportunities and a degree of nuance but in practice I felt like it was a little too restrictive for a modern boxed hobby strategy game but it also feels a little too loose and a little too random with the card draw for the sort of abstract world of showboos and santorinis that they're also kind of going for so great visual presence and there are some novel Concepts but I wish there were more Avenues to interact with the game to make it a more satisfying experience and certainly more things to do in those first couple of turns other than everyone just painstakingly marching their units forward until they get to the center of the swirly toilet bowl of Darkness to actually be able to fight with their opponents and now the oldest game that you'll see on this list 1993's once upon a time a game that starts with a player narrating a story based off of the Beats on the cards that they're putting into play until they lose the thread or another player hops in stealing it by capitalizing on cards that they have following the narrative structure it's a very novel and interesting Concept in practice and something that we had fun with but it did feel extremely dated especially in that it wasn't Cooperative but you're playing your piggybacking off of each other's stories without any sort of strategic levers to really rely on or mechanical points of interference it depends too much on the player's personalities and exploits the social weaknesses of any players who don't necessarily have those skills or those skills to match other people at the table it is fun it is novel it's interesting that it's so old and yet does hold up to a degree but it's a game that I played once and was happy to move on from there and now for the first of two real-time games we're going to talk about starfighters rapid fire is a dope new game by Alley Cat games which I should say Michael Dunsmore the designer of the game is a friend of mine and he's come up and hung out at conventions up here and we hung out with him quite a bit at Pax unplugged so there's that little disclaimer but even if I hated Dunsmore with all my guts I'd have to admit this is a really Dope Game I love Space Cadets dice duel I love Captain sonar I love pandemic rap response I like frantic dice rolling but one of the weaknesses especially of the first two of those games is the dependence on having a team you have to have a big environment of players to be able to play that and in a modern setting post pandemic it's harder and harder to get those big groups together and having a game that captures the spirit of that high-flying rolling competitive action while depending entirely just on you helming oneship yourself and scaling well between two to four players is excellent there's a good mix of this frenetic rolling with strategic decisions that you're making the investment of dice is a cool idea and the tight Arena that you're playing within but focusing on the momentum and movement and orientation of your ships within that Arena and having all of the Torpedoes inch forward anytime anyone stops the clock for whatever reason is a really cool idea that adds a desperate a Nuance a sense of place and a pressure to this game that works really well for this tight small structure I think it could be better as far as production values I love just a spelled looking game and this looks good but not nearly as good as I think the gameplay deserves but as far as that gameplay it knocked it out of the park and speaking of real time we got to talk about kitchen Rush this was one that I particularly wanted to get around to because my family has been playing a lot of those mobile games where you're doing a lot of cooking together and you have Desperate outcomes as you're trying to serve all of the denizens or the residents the patrons of your restaurant I should get around to the correct nouns when I'm describing things but kitchen Rush is a fantastic implementation of real-time gameplay while still giving you a degree of nuance an escalation that you can invest in certain things you can take advantage of certain things you can expand on your capabilities there are some legit gameplay hooks in this as time Ticks by so there's a sense of investment in the game as it goes on now some of the production on this game does feel pretty dated especially the art Assets in it I feel like it could really deserve a new addition with really fantastic components and especially better timers I noticed that some of our sand timers were getting stuck from time to time and I think the expectation the victory condition is overwhelmingly difficult at least for us we tried playing on the medium difficulty thinking hey we're legit Gamers we can handle this and all of us at the table were experienced real-time Gamers and it just felt brutally hard but what I really loved about the game is that everyone at the table felt like they had a purpose and yeah you were hopping to all kinds of different things but you could strategize you could feel like you were capitalizing on your Niche not an asymmetric power but your role in the kitchen and that helped with immersion and also helped make the game feel like it truly was a Cooperative experience where everyone was working on things desperately at the same time big fan next up we got a triplicate of Banger starting with Twilight inscription and to be honest I have played this once before and I have a video about my first impressions that hasn't even gone up on the channel yet but will be up shortly so we'll see how that actually reflects but my first time playing was with the learn to play mode which is a slightly reduced version of the game and this is my channel so I can make up the rules so I'm going to put it in here because I played Twilight inscription again at the con and I had a great time I still think that there are some limitations to the game that uh perplexed me that vex me I wonder who is this game for because it is absolutely a rolling right but for people who don't like Roland rights but has very little player interaction it has very little thematic immersion there's an immense amount of information cryptically presented amongst the four sheets that you're marking up in front of you that feels like you're staring at spreadsheets for a while I mean it's a game that does do the rolling right thing and you do get a lot of pleasure out of allocating different things that tick boxes that make other boxes happen that you can invest in other boxes that make you roll more dice that make you do more things there is this sense of acceleration like a clicker game or something but it still feels like it doesn't really know whether it wants to be this cute smaller rolling right game or a much larger game now this was the second time that we played and I did like the fact that we were competing over the goals more and so that added just a smidge more player in our activity not a lot but a little bit more and I thought that was good but on the other hand playing through all five eras felt like it was just a hair too long you want a game to end with you wanting more not a game ending with you going like that could have been like 15 shorter all of this is kind of nitpicks I did enjoy my experience and I'm looking forward to playing more but Twilight inscription is still kind of a weird Beast for me so you know what isn't vexing Dinosaur Island Roar and right unless you're talking about how vexed I am that I love it so much this is a game that surprised me completely because I've not loved the Dinosaur Island games up until this point I did like dualishore Island considerably in spite of its flaws but I've always felt that the games were a little too plotting a little too unfocused a little bit messy and this one absolutely delivers on the tight focused media experience that I'm looking for and while it isn't as big as say a Twilight inscription or Hadrian's Wall it still feels so much more substantial than a lot of rolling right games out there and also provides meaningful player interaction in the form of drafting the dice because what you take is your resources what you leave at the table is opportunity for other players what all players leave at the table is threat that you're going to have to contend with when securing your part and then after you've drafted the dice those dice become workers that you're going to place into spots which are going to occupy the spots that deny other players a huge amount of interactivity in a genre that typically lacks it this is now my favorite Dinosaur Island game this is now my favorite larger Roland right game and the only real complaints that I have about it the things that frustrate me because otherwise it completely blew my expectations away was that it doesn't have pencils in the Box you should be able to buy any game and play it off the shelf it's kind of a cheap move to not have pencils in the box and for all of the cool imagery in the game for the Fantastic Quan chai Moria artwork that's in there for all of the the beautiful presentation it's kind of funky that dinosaurs take a back seat to everything else there's lots of personality and character as far as humans and buildings but dinosaurs are rarely depicted in the dinosaurs that you put into your Park they're just boxes yeah you can draw them on the board which I've started doing but I wish the different dinosaurs had more of a mechanical impact on the game I mean it's it's a freaking ankylosaurus it should be different than a stegosaur and the last game that we're going to talk about today is flamecraft this is one of the mega hits out there because it super adorbs it's super kawaii it is the cuteness incarnate this is a game of dragon allocation at different Studio Ghibli looking shops throughout a town that is occupied by uh classic fantasy denizens and and little cute dragons and it is cool it is an interesting game the the way you set up a rhythm of allocating these dragons and then activating the shops and getting the resources spending the resources to enchant the shops the escalation of the City's power as it goes on the the spots that you activate kind of in a worker placement system are going to accelerate in their own potency and the diversity of shops that you're going to have access to is going to change as the game goes on but it does feel a little shallow like strategically for as much breadth as there is in the game it's very wide it doesn't feel like it's particularly deep and that's not to say there aren't good decisions that you can make in the game but for as many components as you have for as much setup as you have for as many rules as you have it feels like more or less you're having mostly the same experience which is is made up for in large part by just how incredible the artwork is in the game but nonetheless one of my lingering feelings was am I going to grow tired of this after a four or five plays I've enjoyed it so far but we'll see what ends up coming out of it and those are our games let me know what did you think of any of these did you go to Pax unplugged what were the games of the con for you and what of these games do you most want to see coverage for on this channel as always thanks for watching thanks for supporting thanks for being an awesome community and thanks for helping support me to go to conventions like this to cover games for you you know I've been Jack for the cardboard Harold