Top 10 Weeknight Games - with Wendy

0:05 Hi, I'm Wendy Ye. I hope you are having a great winter spectacular so far. Today I want to share with you my top 10 games that are weekn night games from 2025. So, what do I mean by weekn night games? I mean games that are less than an hour. Games that on a busy day where I want to get a game in, but I just don't have a ton of time um I can sit down and I can play. So, let's go ahead and get started. Starting with number 10 on my list, this is Yoteay. So, this is a cute little game about uh vacationing and resorting in the Yotay Mountains. Um, and what I like about this game is it's very splendor-like. So, you are starting with very basic level cards. You're building your engine, and as you get to build it up a little bit higher, you can move on to level two cards and ultimately the level three cards. uh the higher the level of cards, the more likely you are to get hearts, which are the points of the game. Uh but also the game is going to trigger by the time that someone gets two of those level three cards. So, it moves pretty quickly. Um and each round is pretty simple. Everyone places out little workers on the cards that they want to purchase. There's some bidding that goes on with some potatoes. Uh and then you are going to resolve them all. So, like I get all the cards in my turn, I resolve them. And it's just a fun like engine building game that you can enjoy on a week night. Number nine on my list is A Carnivore Did It. And this is honestly the shortest game that I have on my list. Uh so this can be played a single scenario in like two minutes. Um and it's just a quick deduction game

1:35 where you lay out some suspects, some different animals and you are trying to use the clues and knowing how many people are lying to figure out who did it. Um and so basically you have like little interviews with all of them. I love how simple and quick this is. I also love that it scales. There are so many scenarios in this. We're talking like a thousand. Um, and so you can either like do some really easy ones at the beginning and kind of work straight through or you can hop around if you feel like they're too simple or you just want to try something different. Um, kind of explore where the game goes. So, this one is fabulous if you don't have a lot of time. A carnivore did it. Number eight on my list is Happy Mochi. This is a super cute little card game. Um, and it is a shedding game where you are trying to get rid of all the cards from your hand, but there is a card in the middle that flips over back and forth and it's going to determine whether you have to follow higher or lower as you are going around in the game putting out cards. And so this is one where you have to draw cards, play cards, you're trying to get cards that match so that you can use them as a wild. Like there's just some fun things that are going on in this game and it's just it's nice. It's cute and I enjoy playing this uh really any evening. Number seven on my list is Piñatas. Now, this is a game that we have played for years and years uh as a previous in former version which was Marshmallow Test, but now this year piñatas came out. It is a reprint. Uh but I still love this game. This is a

3:06 trick- taking game, but instead of wanting to always be the one who wins, you get points based on how many tricks other people have won as long as you have been able to uh go out for the round, as in you've gotten enough tricks to trigger yourself to score. And so I love that this is that push and pull of trying to feed people tricks and try to feed them cards so that you can build them up, but then also being prepared that you can have enough wins so that you can trigger uh you're basically going out and scoring. Love this. Love the pinata theme. Super cute. Number six on my list is Arapa Space. Now this game is a deduction game. And so what you're trying to do is you're trying to figure out where the other player has placed their planets. And you're going to do that by sending in waves of light or basically guesses from one quadrant like one area. And it's going to bounce around amongst all the planets and changing colors and then it's going to exit somewhere else hopefully. Um and so you're going to find out where it exits and what color it is. I love this seduction style game. The Arapa Space is very similar to Arapa Mine. Uh but it has magnets. it can stand up in front of you of you. It's a little bit easier to see. Um, but also it's a little bit harder because the planets are different. You've got some bigger and smaller planets that are uh they change the way that stuff bounces around. So, you have to be a little bit careful there. But, it's a fun one. I enjoy the seduction game and I really like it at two players where we both are guessing and we are both giving answers. I just

4:36 think that it's a great level of interaction and it's something that you can play in not too much time. Number five on my list is Seven Wonders Dice. Now, this is a roll and write game where one person is going to roll all of the dice in this little box. And when you open it up, it's going to uh basically have had all the dice fall into these quadrants based on the quadrant that it's in and the face that's showing. It's going to determine a price and an action that you can take. And so you basically get to choose which die you want to use based on how much you're willing to spend. And you're going to build up all the normal seven wonder things. You've got your wonder and you know the upper lefthand corner. You've got some military on the side so you can fight your neighbors. Um and then you have some technology and some other things that you can you know invest into the green cards, the purple cards, the yellow cards, but instead they're on a roll and write paper. I like rolling rights. Super fun. I like the seven wonders theme. Uh so this one is great and it doesn't take too long to play. On to number four. This is another little card game. It's called up or down. And basically, there is a circle of cards in ascending order. And you are trying to collect those cards to place them in three different columns in front of you.

5:46 So, you place out a card in between two where they would numerically fit. So, if you had like a 68, you'd put it between like a 70 and maybe a 43. Um, and then you can choose to pick one of the two cards that are on the side of it and place them in your columns in front of you. The thing is is that each one of those columns has to either all go up or all go down. And so if you ever get to a point where you cannot get a card that fits in one of those columns, uh, then it busts. So, I just enjoy the pusher luck. I enjoy the way that you're manipulating that market of cards in front of you as you're trying to, you know, the cards in hand are not the cards that you're putting in front of you, but instead you're putting them in the market for other people to take or maybe yourself eventually, you know, in a couple rounds. And so, I just really love that manipulation. You could have it to where all the cards are high, all the cards are low, somewhere in between.

6:36 And um it's just it's fun how that works. I really enjoy this card game and uh it's a great weekn night game. Number three on my list is Chronologic Cusco 1950. This is the last deduction game on my list. Um I find that deduction games are very often quick and simple things and so uh they fit really well on this list and I just really enjoy them. So this is kind of a clue-like mystery where uh it takes place in um in Cusco. So there's like this Incan theme behind it. you're basically trying to solve a mystery and you're going to do that by interrogating or interviewing people. Um, and so you have this set of basically locations and you're trying to figure out who was there, who was by themselves, who was together with another person, you know, depending on the scenario. Um, you're trying to figure something out, but you've got it across time, across location, and across people. And so you're going to be placing these cards and these cardboard things together and it's going to tell you who was where, why, and how. And um I just think it's a such a cool system and it's a fun way to do deduction and each scenario is relatively quick. So this is such a fun deduction game.

7:48 Number two on my list is Toy Battle. And this is honestly probably my most played game of the year. It's so quick and easy to pull out. And every time I pull it out, we do these little tournaments in my family where like I'll play against Chris and then the winner will play against our daughter and then our daughter will play against me and it just because Chris always wins. Um but it's such a fun game. It is um kind of an area control thing where you have tiles in front of you. They're cute little characters. They all have special abilities and numbers and you're trying to connect and push through uh the board to be able to get to the other side, connect to the other player's base, or you're trying to collect these little tokens by surrounding regions. Um it's such a fun, simple game and yet every tile in this game is like really good.

8:34 There's never a moment where I draw something and I'm like, "Oh, this is the useless tile that's never good." It might not be good for the situation that I want right at this moment, but they all have their moments where they are just really strong and exactly what you need. There's also a ton of maps and they all work a little bit differently. You know, you may be able to resurrect ones. Other ones have cute little like floaties in them and rubber duckies. What adorable. So, there you go. That's toy battle. What a cute fun game. Last on my list is Please Don't Burn My Village. This is an economic game where you are basically price setting, but it has this fun theme of we're trying to bribe a dragon so he doesn't burn down our village. And so we're trying to give him the most valuable stuff. Uh so at the end of the game, he's just going to pick one of us and everyone else is going to burn. So I love this because I enjoy uh price manipulation in games.

9:26 And as you are donating or bribing the dragon, you're also affecting the values of the prices of the things that you give him. You could give him a ton of stuff that could be worthless at the end of the game or you could just, you know, maybe give him a few things that are worth a ton. So, I just really love the way that it works, the the fun little scoring and the price manipulation. So, there you go. That is all of the weekn night games that I have to share with you today. There's a ton more. I love that this category is so big. There's so many great small games that play in maybe 20, 30 minutes. You can pull out just kind of any night, any time. And I love that. Um, I'm a big fan of really big games, but honestly, it's the small ones that get played all the time. So, thanks for joining to me today. I hope you enjoy the rest of the spectacular.

10:12 I'm Wendy. Hey folks, I'm Tom Vassel. Thanks for watching this video. Check out our channel. We have a lot of videos on our channel. We have live videos that go up each week from live Q&As's to videos where we take a look at the newest stuff on Kickstarter crowd surfing to top 10 lists and more. There's lots of stuff on this channel. We encourage you to explore it. You can find out more at our website dicetowwer.com. I'm Tom Bassel. Thanks for watching another video on the Dice Tower.