Which GEN CON Game Should You Play First?
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Transcript
Gen Con is in our rear view mirror, but the games of Gen Con live on. Yeah.
Uh right here on our table, in fact, we have four of what I would call four of the hotter games from Gen Con. There were more games and more hot games at Gen Con, but these are the four we wanted to talk about today. We've got Jogi.
We've got Drillers from CGE. We've got Grey Loon from Pandasaurus. And we've got Tag Team up here from Scorpion Masque. Uh Jasogi is from Good Games Publishing. By the way, I wanted to give everyone credit.
Uh but these are games that were I think pretty big hits. I don't know if all of them sold out, but I do know that Driller sold out twice.
Yeah, Driller sold out. Sold out. they went and got more and then they sold out again which is pretty incredible.
I don't know about tag team. I know that um some of the publishers had difficulty getting units but I think I do think it showed up eventually.
Tag team was there um obviously Grey Lon. Uh so we did a you know our most anticipated video. Drillers and tag team were both on there. So we're very excited to get those to the table.
A couple other games that we were really excited about or that I think were really popular like Entropy for example, we already played and actually did some content on that. Uh, no. Still,
I'm just kidding. It was It was
still great. It
was a huge hit and it sold out again.
Speaking of old news, Joi is actually an Essen release, I think, from last year.
It was an Essen release last year, but it was not widely available. I was lucky enough to get to play Jogi. I had a friend uh imported from Essen. Um, and so we were able to play that. And Adam, who's a big part of the Hi,
Adam. Shout out to Adam, everybody.
Yeah. He's like, "You're going to love this game. It's, you know," and I actually really did. Um, but then like Grey Loom was a surprise that didn't make it onto our our lists, but
No, it didn't. We did get a copy just before I've read and the rules. Now, speaking of reading the rules, to be fair, even though we said it in the thumbnail, which one should we play?
Uh, we have played some of these already.
Well, combined between the two of us, we've played all four, but not together. That's the key part. Well, and then just to be very candid, I've played drillers.
Uh I've played Drillers. I've read the rules for Grey Loon. Uh I've played, of course, the original tag team, and this is new and with new characters, but I have not technically played the new characters yet. And I haven't played Jizogi, but uh is it Jizogi or Jogo?
Joji, I think it's
Please let us know how much we're butchering.
Anime Studio Tycoon. Uh which
uh and these are of varying weights and lengths, but none of them are like heavy heavy games for sure.
No, I think Joji is um heavier than it looks when you think of the fact that it's you know it's a game about making anime but it is like it it has a lot of like I I don't want to call it heavy cuz you know it's not but it veers more maybe more on the heavier side than like of the four I would say
of the four drillers is not heavy and we're going to talk a little bit about them today. Here's the here's the whole idea of this video. Which one did you play first? If you got any of these games, which one do you think we should play first or should have played first if you we want to look in the rearview mirror? Uh and then which one should we cover?
Yeah, one one of these is going to get full coverage soon. So,
yeah, we might we might we might do more than one of them.
Yeah, but we're going to
we want to know which one we should cover first. Uh but just to talk a little bit about other we'll start with just uh this is like Ryan said, Anime Studio Tycoon. and it's from Good Games. And this game I didn't know much about at all going into Gen Con and then I saw it on the table
and I had to have it.
It's beautiful, right?
It is gorgeous. Uh I'm an anime fan. Both of us are anime fans, but the cards, some of them, not all of them, but some of the cards in this have a foil treatment that is
chef's kiss. A lot of them do.
Yeah. I mean, the the whole goal is you're making anime, but it it's a worker placement game, but what's cool about this uh and we've seen variations on this before, but each of your workers is a different worker. You have like your animator, you have your rider, you have your head guy that can kind of do anything. And they uh start off generic, but one a big part of the game is recruiting your team of writers and animators and such. And there's a pool of them and each one of them has special abilities and genres that they work in. And so you're kind of creating your own unique workforce. So when I go to a specific location, I do it better because I trigger the power of my guy. So I might have a better option or or a better version of that location than you do when you go there. Uh and what's really fun about the game is you're collecting these different like plots.
There's like plots, locations, and twists. You're building your own anime. And then there's like a sea a row of like genres that are popular right now. The hot. So if you could make it sci-fi. So you have this thing where it's like a kid in high school, you know, in a town that's haunted who has to achieve his destiny, but it's like a sci-fi. And so
it's Dan to Dan.
Well, so you're kind of like you're kind of like creating these enemies. As you're doing, you're like, "Oh, I feel like I just invented Full Metal Alchemist as I was making my anime." But you're turning but all of that. It's like it is a pretty thinky puzzly game. Uh, and it's it's a solid worker placement game. So, I I honestly think that even if you're not an anime fan, that idea of just like creating any kind of animation.
That's true.
It feels like that. You're like you're sending guys to the drawing room to do the drawing or you're you're going to the writer room to come up with the plots and stuff.
I think if you are an anime fan,
oh, doubly so. big bonus for sure because you'll really the art like a lot of companies that will do sort of an anime genre but not have any licensed anime oftent times you can tell
sure
by looking at the art and everything but all of the artwork that I saw on these cards it looks legit that looks like real potential anime and is really well done
if you look at each of the genre cards you're like where can I watch this particular show
yeah the genre cards in particular by the way I think we've answered our own question we just covered Soji first.
No, we'll do a I you you need to get that to the table.
Okay. Well, we'll we'll streamline the rest of these drillers. I've played Ryan hasn't. This is the one he hasn't played a full game on. This is
uh to say it's a deck builder is only part of the story. A lot of people have called this uh kind of a baby between Clank and like Lost Ruins of
which is funny because Lost Ruins is already a hybrid between like a deck building and a worker placement. So, like,
but you are you're you're digging and drilling down into this sort of like mine. Uh, collecting minerals, going back up, selling those minerals, buying new cards to do all of that better.
Yeah,
that's effectively the cycle. And it is really, really fun. The turns that you can have in this game are very uh surprisingly uh
No, well, I I don't want to. They are deep. uh they are thinking but what I was going to say is they're rarely really rewarding and generous so you get a lot out of them but with that comes some thinkiness so I would say and I think there's other people who have made this critique is with like four players particularly if the players are prone to like really thinking through their turns it might take a little bit longer than the box would suggest. I don't want that to scare you off though because I've played it and I played it at two players and Alicia and I we are the thinkiest of thinkers. Uh, not that not that's not a brag. That means we're slow. Uh, we take our time.
I don't think better than you. I just think longer than you.
Right. Exactly. Uh, but it's really fun. And what I would recommend on that, by the way, is if you find yourself at a table and you're like, "Oh, everyone's taking so long." Try to enjoy their turns as much as you enjoy your turns. It can be fun to enjoy everybody's turns and not just think about your own. The next one is Grey Lon. Again, I've read the rules, but Ryan, you've played it.
I have played it. And this is so I I found this out. The mechanic in this game is called a Dutch auction, which is not something I was really aware of before.
The the worker placement.
Yeah, apparently it's a thing. It's an actual So, you're you're laying out a grid of cards and there's nine cards out there and you're placing your workers at the intersections between two cards. So, like horizontally or vertically between two adjacent cards. And when it comes time to activate your worker, you you pick them back up. you can take or use one of the two cards that was adjacent to when you placed it, but there's a cost involved in using those cards and that cost increases based on the number of workers that are adjacent to it. So, if I put two guys below a card, you put one guy to the right of it and somebody else goes above it, the cost of that card is going up and up and up. And the whole idea of greater than is like you're
Is that what makes it a Dutch option?
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I've never played another game that uses. By the way, I don't endorse this claim. Uh, this is just what I was told. So,
we'll research it and down below, we'll either have a text that says Ryan was right
or Ryan was wrong.
But the cards that you're taking, you've got like these ally cards that give you abilities and more workers to increase your worker pool. You've got um items that come to your character that are like one time use or once per round use items. And then you've got these buildings that activate and do a variety of different things. You're increasing some stats in your playerboard. And the fun part for me uh is that you're sending your knight out on this little adventure. And a lot of the stories.
Yeah. You're like telling stories. You're collecting these cards along your adventure. It's actually you're not physically telling stories. It's a mechanic.
No, no, it's not a storytelling game.
You go on these adventures and you collect these story cards and then on that grid, a lot of the actions you can do let you turn in some number of story cards to to tell a story and get some bonuses. the stronger the story, the more cards you turn in, the better rewards you get for that story. Um, and there's some quests that you can go on. But that that whole auction element is very interesting because if you're placing those workers out, some of these like the buildings remain out there and multiple people can activate them, but the allies and the items will go away. So, if you and I both place in a spot, I'm debating, are you going to take that item or are you like, is this the first worker I activate so I can get that item now or do I activate a different worker? Because you can also activate your workers to just take money instead of spending money. So, there's this really interesting timing balance that's happening with all the players.
Yeah, it is. Just from reading the rules, I could tell that it was all about the timing. And in fact, the rules told me that it was all about the timing. In the very first paragraph, it says, "This game is very much about timing." I would say, I haven't played it, so I'm going to trust Ryan on this. Just from the auction standpoint, I didn't get the vibe that this feels like an auction game.
Oh, that's just what it's called.
Yeah, I think it's just what it's called because the the that everything we described there feels more like worker placement to me with some of the spaces that a worker's going to disappearing.
Yeah. And I think that's the the auction part is like they basically put all these cards out and you're it's not really you're not bidding on it, but you are putting your guys out
and increasing the value of a card. I can make it so that you can't afford to take a card.
I can see how much money you have. I can place my guys in a in a way that makes that card really expensive. And then as we remove our guys to do other things, that card gets cheaper and cheaper until it's the right moment when I can afford to buy it again.
Unless you take that card, unless somebody else takes it, you moved on to the next phase of the game. And you can do that while other players are still on the last phase. You might be able to take cards and then that card is not even there for them to utilize.
Happens. Yep.
Yeah. So that is Grey Loon. And then finally, we've got Tag Team. If you've watched the channel, you talk about this. This is Arthur's Legacy. It's basically a standalone expansion. So you can just play this. You can mix and match with the original Tag Team, which
we'll have to try to do that. If we cover this one first, we will do that. Um, but yeah, it's got new characters. And the characters, uh, obviously it has the Arththeran vibe to it. But they've got some interesting characters. One of the characters is Excalibur.
Yeah. Which is fun.
It's not a person. It's a sword. There's a dragon, of course. Uh, the Merlin character, by the way, which I happen I don't know where I got it. It must have been in a promo bag that I picked up at Gen Con. I got a promo version of Merlin, uh, which I'm showing you right now on screen. Uh, but Merlin also comes with like a secondary board that looks like I don't know how it works at all, but it looks it has the appearance of like a skill tree, but it's this thing I think that kind of like dynamically you can go up or go down and it affects I assume some of his abilities.
Yeah, the Arththeran mythos is I love it. I guess I should say it's I think it's very interesting mythos. I like the characters they chose for this. Um, interestingly enough, like Arthur himself is represented by Excalibur.
Yeah. Um, which is interesting.
Yeah, it's it's Arthur's legacy. It's not Arthur.
It's post Arthur. Um, but if you like tag team, like the game hasn't changed for this version of the game. It's still the same game, which is why you can mix and match the characters. But by this point, people that love tag team have probably played
many if not all of the possible combinations.
I don't know. It's a lot of combinations.
I mean, it is a lot of combinations, but but some people like I'll play like three or four games in a day on BGA at some point. So having six new characters added into the roster I think is appealing. And then also this is just a new entry point for people that want to play tag team and you just jump into the new one.
I've changed my mind completely about the premise of this video. No longer do I want you to tell us which one to play first or cover first. I want you to tell me if you've played the original tag team if you've tapped every possible combination.
We can have multiple premises to the video.
That's a lot. I mean that's true. That's that that's another premise to the video. Should we have multiple premises for videos?
Oh my gosh. Oh, did you see also so that they've already announced the next tag team which is SNK?
Yeah. Yeah.
Wild.
Wild. Like so
who's that for? Me. But like who I I guess people still love SNK.
They Well, I think it's cool cuz it's like
it's like a they had this tease in the box that had obviously these sort of like digitized uh fighting characters. I'd assumed when I saw this that it was just going to be their own
like their own fighting game, but they actually licensed with SNK, which I actually think is kind of cool.
I think it's super cool.
Could they have done Street Fighter or some other fighting game? Sure. Would that have cost them more on the license? Sure. But SNK is super cool cuz it's like a fun niche sort of vibe.
Yeah, it kind of it's very nostalgic for me.
Anyway, these are the four games. Let us know which one you played first, which one we should play first. If we haven't played it, which one we should cover first? What were the other premises to the video?
If you've played all combinations of tag team,
uh, and then if are you okay with multiple premises to a video?
And if you're still watching, thank you very much. Uh, and until next time, make sure everyone has fun at the table.