All my favorite board games - 40 years of board game reviews

This video is brought to you by the threeminute board game patrons. Keep us independent by supporting us on Patreon. [Music] Kyoto and welcome to this much longer than 3 minutes 3minut board games video. Today I'm inspired by a geek list I saw on board game geek where a user called Moonrock went through his entire life history and looked at the favorite games at different stages of his life.

I thought this was a really cool idea. I reached out to Moonrock and said, "Hey, I'm I'm inspired by your geek list. Can I make a video doing my own story?" And they said that was a really cool idea. So, here I am. I'm going to run through my favorite games evolving from when I was a kid all the way through to now and have a look at all the collateral and stuff I've got left behind of those games.

Now, some of those games are lost to the past and I don't have any connection to them whatsoever anymore. But some some I still have quite a bit of stuff of many many years after I last played my last game of them. The cool thing about this list and the reason I was inspired to do it is everyone has a different journey here.

Everyone starts off playing different games and ends up with different favorite games and we go through different cycles in our life. And I think it's a cool thing to look back at who we were and how that's informed who we are now. It's kind of thing you can do to all facets of your life, but here we're just going to do it about board gaming.

X. >> So, like a lot of people, I started off playing a whole bunch of toy store games. And when I was a kid, I played a bunch of them. I really can't recall what my favorites were, but I definitely know I played snakes and ladders to start off with and then moved on to things like careers uh and the game of life and something called the game of knowledge, which was a kids trivia game.

I played those a bunch. Careers especially, I remember playing that. It's just a roll and move game, but it was fun when I was like six or seven. really enjoyed it. I don't have any of those old games anymore. My family used to have a box of about 20 board games and those were all thrown out when I turned about 13 cuz my father's a very very strange conservative man in that regard.

He was like, "Oh, you've turned 13. You don't need board games anymore. Off they go to the tip." So, there's a whole bunch of messy early childhood stuff here, but I can't really remember what my favorite was at any particular time. The first game I can really remember being my favorite is Connect 4.

new wave. This is a song from the 80s. >> So, the very first game I recall being really into was Connect 4 and friends and I used to play this at lunchtime quite a bit. Uh quite a few people had a copy of it. But one of the really interesting things at this time is I'm old enough that computers were a brand new thing in schools at this point and Connect 4 was one of the first things that popped up on computers.

You could play a computerized game of Connect 4 and that was kind of a big deal. It was such a big deal in fact that my school organized a Connect Four tournament and uh people would play Connect 4 in classrooms and enter into a big like roundroin thing and they hosted the finals in front of the school assembly.

So the top two uh Connect Four players in in our primary school which is a elementary school for Americans got to play a game of Connect 4 in front of an audience. It's like like a a proto live stream of of something and um I found that really hilarious because I was one of the final two players. I lost the final.

I I didn't win the final. I'm not going to brag and say I was the uh Hillrest High uh sorry, Hillrest Normal School Connect 4 champion, but I did come second in the tournament and that was uh that was quite funny. It's something I remember playing Connect Four uh in front of an audience. Very, very odd when you think about it, but one of those little wacky childhood experiences.

And Connect 4 is the kind of game that practically any game you can set this up, put it in front of them, and just start playing a game, and everyone will instinctively know how to play. I saw a really cool set of videos of this guy who walks around with a a portable Connect 4 board and just walks up to people to see if they'll have a game, and people just play it.

It's It's delightfully simple and still delightfully a a good game. And it's one I expect to be playing a fair few games of it with with Ann when she's a little bit older. I think she'll really really like the puzzle here. Uh I think it's fascinating. Such a simple abstract game, but such a really good one.

And this this I absolutely loved Connect 4 for like a good good number of years. It was my favorite game. A game I played a ton. And it's it's remarkable how well it holds up and just how much I'm smiling just just playing a a game by myself just throwing down coins. I actually don't know if I was playing that completely in sequence because it was kind of half focusing on talking and half focusing on putting the pieces down.

But yeah, connect four. I I feel a whole bunch of nostalgia looking at this and um a lot of really good good strong memories and kind of I can see why this has sold a gazillion copies. It's just so easy to play in so far. Before we move on to the next board game, I'm going to give a shout out to the Fighting Fantasy series of books.

Uh, this was the very first one I got. Uh, it's got a message in there from my sister from my birthday in 1987 when I was 10. And these were a huge part of my gaming history and still are. I still pick them up when they come out. These books in no small part got me into solo gaming, got me into board gaming in general and got me into fantasy role playing and a whole bunch of other stuff.

So, so Fighting Fantasy was a really big part of my story along with games like Dungeons and Dragons and a whole bunch of other role playing games. Uh, but a big part of my board game journey, principally solo gaming, I think, because without these, I don't think I would be that much into solo gaming.

Oh, yeah. And that is a full collection of all the fighting fantasies that took me quite a while to assemble. years. In fact, a lot of raids of secondhand bookstores across New Zealand. [Music] >> Probably the first gamers game that I got into was a game called Talisman. Now, Talisman was the game of fantasy adventure.

You're roll some dice, you move your people around the board, you draw cards, and stuff happens. It was a bit of a random event generator. The goal was to get into the middle of the table and defeat the dragon in there. I think that was Either way, I haven't played Talisman in a very long time. I do, however, have a copy of Relic.

Now, Relic is essentially the same game with a few tweaks, but with the Warhammer 40,000 theme. And you've got your characters. You move around the board. You're drawing counter cards. You get wargeear. You level up. And ultimately, you're trying to get to the middle of the board and fight the baddy in the middle.

Talisman was real simple stuff. But when you're 10, when you're like 10 or 11 years old, it is amazing. You're rolling dice, you've got a character, you're leveling up, you're drawing all these cards, you're getting cool stuff, you're killing monsters, you're getting money and powerups. And if you know someone who has all of the add-ons, the board got massive.

They were like add-on boards for a dungeon and for a city. I only had like two of the expansions, but I had a friend who had all of them, and we used to love going around to their place and just playing all afternoon. I still keep a copy of Relic as a cozy game. This is a game I'll pop out when my friends are not in the mood to actually play something and we just need something in the middle of the table as an activity because people are talking about real life stuff or everyone's just really tired from work and just doesn't want to do anything that requires that much thought cuz these aren't deep games.

Relic and Talisman, they're not deep games. They are literally random event generators. You can have some games where you just have the worst rolls, the worst card flips, and everything goes terribly for you. And you can have other games where things go perfectly for you and you end up with great power weapons and all this cool stuff and you romp home and win the game.

None of that has anything to do with skill, but it is a good bit of mindless fun and I'm quite glad I still have a copy of Relic. I don't think I'd ever get Talisman back in itself. Relic fills a very specific niche now for a very specific group of people. Next up, we have my favorite game of my tween, and that game is Gameamar orders.

It's an everyone versus everyone post-apocalyptic game where each of you is playing a distinct faction that survived the apocalypse. The quirk of the game is each of you has a giant bio, a mutated animal that you've strapped weapons to. Uh that might be Squawk the Penguinoid, or Blip the teleport turtle, or even Drax the packula.

These big monster things. Oh yeah, here's here's Dweish the hamsterion. He's a giant hamster. He's a he's a 20 foot tall hamster uh strapped with weapons. And that was like the the quirky fun thing of this game is you had a whole bunch of units called popcorn. And they're called popcorn because the biobs eat them like popcorn, but they were your support forces.

And then this one big scary unit that you'd roam around the board collecting these things called pods. And energy pods gave you boost in combat and also allowed you to do other things. The pods, by the way, were randomly allocated in a 2d6 system, uh, where you would put pods on the board based on 2d6 numbers rolled on hex's.

And if this looks very familiar, it's because Katan would use the same system to much more success nearly a decade later. It's not a great game. It hasn't held up well. It has several big glaring problems. One is that the combat, if you get enough popcorn together, each of them adds like plus one. So, if you have like 20 popcorn and someone's bioborg is rolling 1d8 plus five or something, it doesn't really matter.

The the the person with the most popcorn is probably going to win unless someone is holding these cards. And these cards are utter madness. Uh reverse combat result. So, over time, the game evolved into being a race on who could hold the reverse combat results and use them the best. And that kind of killed the game in the end for us.

Uh but this was quite a bit of silly fun. I'm glad I've kept it. It does have a really cool feature which um other games would later copy and that is introducing a one versus all mode to an existing uh all versus all game. So one person would play the gameaurus in that mode and you everyone else would team up against them.

They created quite a different gameplay experience. But I have not played gamma orders probably in 25 years. I've kept the box the whole time because it has big sentimental value. but it's not one that anyone ever says, "Hey, let's let's play Gamma Orders." >> It's the '9s. >> So, while we're playing Gameamar orders at school, it wasn't really the game I wanted to be playing.

I wanted to be playing Battletech. The problem is, I was 11 and 12, and my peers were 11 and 12, and I tried teaching them how to play Battletech at 11 or 12, but it just didn't stick with most of them. It wasn't until I got to high school, and there was some older people I could play with that I got to play a lot of Battletech, and it became my favorite game.

I have not played an actual physical game of tabletop battletech in an age. I literally cannot recall the last time I played it. I have played a whole bunch of Battletech related computer games, however, and I've spent hundreds of hours playing Battletech on Hairbrain Schemes Battletech game. I much prefer it as a computer game that does all the work for you.

I don't have my original Battletech box, but these are the original Battletech maps and the original standees from that game. I do have the original City Tech box, uh, which is one of the first expansions for Battletech and Battletech Reinforcements over here, which was a whole bunch of standes for it.

That's all the old stuff. I've got some maps. So, these are the original maps from the core box. And while I had a whole bunch of fun playing Battletech most of the way through high school, what really stands out for me now is not the game mechanics at all. It was the world building. When I got into the game, it had some of the most amazing world building I've ever seen for a game.

It had these great house books that told you all the history of the great houses, and they're written in such rich and vivid detail. I've still got one of those books here, Battletech Technical Readout 3025. This is just a splat book. This is just a book that has a whole bunch of different mechs in it and their their loadouts, their capabilities.

But every single one of them comes with this big amount of text over here, this big world building, all this history stuff. And I just read and reread this technical readout back back to front. I love this kind of building a world around your game. And it's something that's really influenced me and why Red Dust Rebellion, I think, why I was so focused on making sure that that world was believable because the world of Battletech with its giant stompy robots has some giant holes in it, but overall feel with the houses and everything was really great.

Uh, the reason I stopped playing this one was the clans. Uh, the clans to me felt like they were from a completely different series, from a completely different setting. you had this very grounded, realistic inner sphere and all of a sudden they added clingons to it and it just it broke the game for me.

That also mechanically broke the game for me as well because the clans are on a whole different power curve and I just didn't care for that story and moved away from the game after that point. [Music] Up next, we head into my late teenage years where I joined a cult, a very sinister worldwide cult known as being a Games Workshop fan.

During that time, I had a ton of different favorite games and they were all Games Workshop on one. There's Blood Bowl, which I played so many times, and here's some surviving members of my original Blood Bowl human team. There's space hulk which I've got set up in front of me which I had the original of and then that got thrown out or destroyed somehow and I ended up buying the third edition much later and painting that up and I'm really proud of the paint jobs I did on this.

I think third edition of Space Hulk is is a beautiful board game and this is one I still actually like to play. I like that I spent the time to make it look really cool. Uh and then there was also Warhammer 40,000 and this is all the Warhammer 40k stuff I've got left. It's It's one tons of Medusa's army using models that you just can't use in the game anymore cuz they're all the wrong size and they're all on the wrong bases.

Uh my Terminators are about the size of a current Terminator's leg. Everything's just not the scale. The tanks are bigger, the marines are bigger, everything's just way, way bigger. None of these models are currently usable. I mostly just keep them cuz they were an art project and I enjoyed doing that.

I also played a lot of another game called Space Marine Epic, but I have no models left of that. The Games Workshop stage was an interesting one cuz back then they actually made some pretty good games. Space Hulk and Blood Bowl are really neat games and I still like them and I've still played different versions of on the PC and I played Space Hulk itself in person quite a bit.

To say I'm not a fan of the Warhammer 40,000 system is a bit of an understatement. I think the fact that it's rooted in a single D6 system is just going to hamper it for all time as far as I'm concerned as a player. I also think Games Workshop are very halfbaked when it comes to making any idea of what balance is in a game.

And I don't think they really care. I think they just want to shift product. So, they're quite happy for new list to be completely overpowered. That means you buy the new stuff and you go and play it and you win and you feel big and strong even though you're winning because the list is overpowered. That's not a particular game loop I find rewarding.

In fact, I find it quite exploitative. So, I haven't played Warhammer 40,000 in any real fashion since fourth edition. played a tiny bit of horror seriously because I was curious on that because I like the books and that seemed a little bit better because everyone in that game are space marines so the the field's quite level.

So having this system where you can't show much granularity isn't that big a deal and it just seems kind of fair having Legion versus Legion. You're not going to get really strange things happening. But yeah, overall Games Workshop even today they're a company I'm a little bit sus of. I think they're not as bad as they used to be.

They definitely seem a lot more friendly with influencers and with their community in general. And there was a period where they were quite a cult. And uh I got no real regrets not being a big GDUB fan anymore. [Music] So after leaving the Warhammer Games Workshop cult, what did I do next? That's right.

I joined a different cult. I joined the cult of collectible card games. Now unlike most people, I didn't get into Magic the Gathering. What I got into was a different game and that was Vampire the Eternal Struggle or as I knew it, Jiad. And I had still have all of these binders. All of these binders full of cards for a game that I have not played at a donkey's age.

This one's definitely like 15 years since I've played it. I have everything from the first, I think, five sets. Uh cuz then the game went a bit dormant for a while. So they put out the original, then Dark Sovereigns. Um, oh, I can't remember what the other sets were called. Sabat and Sabat War. And yeah, so I got all that stuff.

And And by all of it, I I do mean all of it. I fidiously collected this stuff. So this is like Yeah, these are all just the the vampire cards for those sets. Then there's then there's all the binders full of the actual um cards and boxes and boxes of duplicates. So this is like just one card of each I think in here.

Uh the funny thing about uh Vampire the Eternal Struggle uh we were playing a lot of uh Vampire the Masquerade at the time. It was it was the thing to do and doing a lot of the live role playing game and we played this but I learned it the rules role. We we all learned the rules role. We played in our city a variant of the game that was completely different to what everyone else was doing around the world.

We played with card restrictions. So, normally like in a game like Magic the Gathering, you're only allowed four of any card in a deck. And we played with those rules. We played with restrictions of four of any card in the deck just because the people who taught it to me uh played Magic and that's just how they made decks.

You had a limit of four of any card. That's not a rule in in Vampire the Eternal Struggle. That's not a rule in Jihad at all. You can have 20 of one card if you want. And we went out of town and we played against people from out of town and they had these decks that were completely uh different to how we played the game.

So, we'd been spending years and I mean like two or three years playing this game routinely over and over again, like late nights. This was like a university late night gaming game. Uh playing till 3 4:00 in the morning some nights. and then finding out that we were just doing it completely and utterly wrong.

I' I've never felt interest in a game just disappear overnight uh like it did for for this particular vampire the card game. Uh because we then had to re revise or we' we'd um traded and built our collections around that idea as well. So if you had more than four of a good card, you traded those away uh because you had no real need for them.

So things like Freak Drive, which is a fantastic uh fortitude card. Allows you to take an action, spend one uh resource, and then untap and take another action. Exceedingly powerful card, cornerstone of a whole bunch of decks. We thought four of those was a sensible limit. We came across people who had 20 uh 20 in one deck, and all they did was basically one action, freak drive, do something else, and that that was their their game plan, just play constantly play freak drives.

So yeah. Um, I have no idea uh how much or if anyone's still interested in these cards. I feel like it'd be fun to pull together some decks and and and play with the game again, but then you'd have to teach people. You'd have to you'd have to teach people how to play it and that's that's not particularly easy because it is quite a it's quite an odd game.

Uh unlike magic which really works as a jewel probably best uh vampire worked best at like five players where you had a big group going and it became almost like a diplomacy card game. It was a very unusual experience and not one I really see as being a particularly good like tournament game at all.

We played it like you would say Twilight Imperium. It would be like a big big event game. We'd play for two hours and people would uh fight amongst themselves and then we'd pull out different decks and do it again. We'd just play multiple rounds of this sort of politicking, backstabbing, betraying card game.

Something really different. Um, and something I've not really seen again. Really interesting card game. Uh, but one that really requires a group that are super into it. We had that for a good number of years until finally everyone just went, "Oh, oh, we've been doing it all wrong." and uh the game just kind of died.

Well, if anyone's got like a really good offer for a full collection of all these things, um let me know. As I say, I'm not entirely too sure what this would be valued at. I don't even know if it has any value. That's the problem with collectible card games. If this had been Magic, if I'd had all of these early sets of Magic in here in pretty good condition, I could probably afford to pay off my house.

Uh maybe I should have got into magic back in the day. After finishing university, I moved city. I decided that Hamilton, where I grew up, wasn't going to be a great town for me to live in long term. I found the place quite depressing and wanted a totally different scene. So, I moved to Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand, and I've never looked back.

Getting down here, though, I had to build up a new network of friends. and I started joining some board game groups and other things to get to know some people down here. And the first game I really got into was a Game of Thrones, the board game. This game had a lot of the elements that I was enjoying in Jiad.

That being that it's a reasonably long multiplayer negotiation game with some cardplay and a lot of intrigue. I played this game a whole bunch and it's how I met a ton of people I still game with today down in Wellington. I'm also one of the few people, I think, who came to a Game of Thrones not from a TV show, uh, not from the books, but the board game is literally my first experience of the setting.

So, I'd sit down to play the game and people would be talking about the different cards and how they represented different characters from the books, and I'd have no idea what they were talking about. And they talk about things like the Red Wedding, and I just kind of I'd blank it out. It didn't mean anything to me.

There weren't enough hooks or anything like that. I ended up reading a Game of Thrones. And I don't really read a lot of fiction. I don't particularly enjoy reading fiction, but I read the books just to understand this game, which is which is a big thing for me because I, as I say, I don't really enjoy uh reading a lot of fiction.

And I probably could have picked a better series to start reading as 20 years later, the series is still not finished. And we've had a full TV show run in in that time as well. The reason this game called on me in the end is everyone needs to be up to speed and up to skill with the game. It works well when everyone knows the game in and out and you play it over and over again and you develop sort of familiar patterns within the game.

It's a game that demands a group that treats it with respect and plays it again and again and learns it and learns how to the counterbalances and weights in the game work. I've had a couple of plays of it in the last 10 years where there's been learners at the table or new players to the game and it just it's not balanced.

It's not fair. you know that that player doesn't have a chance and they're going to make missteps that are going to throw the game's inherent balance out of place. So if you got a new player and they're playing as Lannister, it doesn't really matter what the Greyjoy player does. Baratheon and Tur just got a little bit of a boost.

If your new player is playing as Stark, then that's great news to Baratheon and Greyjoy. And after a bunch of frustrating games like that where I'm sitting at one end of the table, seeing something unfold at the other end of the table I know I can't do anything about. And it just it just wasn't fun.

One of the weird things about this one is I played it 30 or 40 times before the TV show came out and then maybe twice after uh because I'd long lost interest in the game at that point. Still, this is a very good game if you can get that group that will play it over and over again. It really sucks if you just play it once.

>> Okay, so I've gone from Games Workshop being a cult to collectible card games as a cult. And now I've got two Fantasy Flight games in a row. Am I in another cult? I think I might be, but uh this one I don't feel quite so bad about because from about 2003 to 2018 or so, Fantasy Flight Games put out a hell of a lot of good games.

Like a ton of great games. Arkham Horror Second Edition was one of them. And this is a game I have played an oodle just so much. I have played absolutely so much. And I still love it. We played this uh 3 weeks ago. So, three weeks ago, this was on the table. Uh, my friends and I, we were have our regular D and D game.

Some players were missing. We were down to four people. So, we played Arkham Horror Second Edition, and we had a great time. It is still hilariously good fun. We play it a very specific way, or I run it a very specific way, which is I tend to play with the core game and one module at a time. So, we'll play with one sideboard, say Inmouth, or play with the King and Yellow turning up, but not including all or eight or nine of the expansions at once because then the game becomes really messy and it actually becomes very watered down as well because you'll have Dunage sitting there, but you might only have one or two gates open and done it for the whole game and it just doesn't justify the entire board being out there if it's not doing anything.

Whereas if you play with just the core and done it and showcase that expansion, you get a richer, better experience for it. I love this game. I am never getting rid of uh Arkham Horror second edition unless an Arkham Horror fourth edition comes out that is just this but better and I don't have to pay for it.

Uh I can't imagine me wanting to get rid of this. And that that is definitely not Arkham Horror third edition. Let me let me tell you that it will also hold a special place in my heart. uh very specifically because I got very very sick. Uh one year I had an illness called viral paricarditis uh causes inflammation of the heart sack and it was very much a life or death kind of thing there for a while and it kept recurring.

So every couple of months I was heading back into hospital having spent you know two or three days in the cardio ward being monitored on you know in case I had a heart attack or died. It was it was really bad and I couldn't work. I also have incredibly strong flu-l like symptoms and massive fatigue.

So going up a flight of stairs would just just completely do me in for the rest of the afternoon. I had to take things very very slowly for a year and I was living in a busted rundown hvel of a place uh a boarding house and uh one room shared facilities and I was on a sickness benefit. So you know I I did not have a lot of spare money and but I did own uh Arkham Horror at the time.

I had bought it before I got sick. I didn't have internet either at the time. I had a computer, but I wasn't connected to the internet. I played this pretty much every day. Every day for a year. Um that I wasn't in hospital uh for or doing doing something else. I had a table in that room that I would leave it set up on and I would play this over and over again.

I'd occasionally put a Game of Thrones on there as well and play like six player games against myself, but mostly I played a ton of Arkham Horror. Yeah, this this game got me through a pretty rough period of time. It's one of the reasons why I'm a big advocate of solo gaming with with recovery from things because it's something to keep your brain going.

Uh something to help you not get quite so depressed about your state of affairs uh when you are very much alone. Like I had some people visiting me and stuff, but I couldn't really go out. Like if I was going somewhere, someone would have to drive pick me up and then you know it'd have to be a low pressure kind of thing.

And that that was a whole year or so of that. Yeah. I kept loving this game for a long time after I recovered and it was my favorite game for a good five, six years and it's still a game that brings a smile to my face even today. And I'm I'm really glad I still have it and have all the things for it.

I have little uh acrylic gate markers and stuff like that. A little Cthulhu first player marker from Hero Clicks that I picked up. Um, and I painted all the characters cuz it normally comes with standies, but I got the miniatures and I painted those up as well. I love this game. It is a great co-op.

Uh, don't go into it expecting it to be fair. Uh, it's a little bit like Relic and Talisman and that is a random events generator, but you have so many levers on your character sheet with your your sliders and how you spend clues that it's not it's not total like there's there's enough player controls to make it feel like you've earned a victory most of the time.

Uh yeah, love this game. Really happy I have it. And uh I'm getting a little little misty eyed thinking about how how important it is to me. And it's kind of fascinating me that a board game and an inanimate thing like this can just bring up those memories and and and make you remember all that stuff.

But um definitely does with a horror. So for a few years there I was a communications consultant working for different government department and I was doing quite all right in terms of money. That is why I got into war machine because I needed to have less money. I bought a lot of War Machine figures.

As you can see here, they're almost all painted. This is, you know, quite an impressive War Machine set. It's a big Sigar army. This is all one army. And I played this game up to tournament level. I played quite a few tournaments of War Machine. Something like uh 10 tournaments in the end. And I really, really liked this game.

It was everything I wanted from Warhammer 40,000 that Warhammer 40,000 just wasn't. It was properly competitive. It had a huge skill element. Characters had cool, wacky special powers. And there's always something really neat you could do. The way the game worked is you had a signature warcaster who was leading your force.

So here's one one warcaster here. This is Siege. And each of them has their own unique spell list and abilities and whatnot. But they have this once per game power. Every single warcaster in the game has one broken power they can use once per game. And when I describe how strong these powers are and how big their area effects are, you'll think the game is absolutely crazy.

But uh siege chair, every enemy figure within 12 in of him for that turn. The first time they take damage, their armor is halved. Uh that is massive. That means standard guns just punch through heavily armored things and do horrific amounts of damage. There's another warcaster who knocks down everyone in their control radius down onto the ground.

Every single one of these casters has some crazy silly game altering thing and everything's balanced around that. It's balanced around that everyone is broken. So if everything's broken, nothing's really that broken. It's it's a fascinating game to play. It's all about positioning. So in say Warhammer 40,000, a longrange gun will have a range of 48 in.

In War Machine, it's more like 14 or 16 in. That's that's a really long range weapon. And I've seen some people say, "Oh, it's just a dice space war game. It's all luck based." Completely not true. In the time I was playing, this one guy, Chris, I think won all bar two or three tournaments, and he would normally go seven and0 in a in a tournament.

He'd go all the way through, not get beaten. He might get beaten in one round, but that's it. Like six and one was about his worst record. I gave him one of his defeats at one tournament. I I beat him on the first day. He still went six and one and won the tournament. It's one of those games that was just so highly skilled, but there were so many factions and each faction had over a dozen warcasters and each faction also had a variety of units about this big.

They had so many options. So knowing what your opponents did became a matter of having to have encyclopedic knowledge. That's something I'm quite good at. I'm quite good at learning a whole bunch of systems for a game and a whole bunch of rules. We were playing second edition and I was really enjoying it.

And then third edition dropped and we had to relearn the rules and relearn all the abilities and things had just changed slightly and it drove me mad. But it was really fascinating to see how quickly that killed off the hobby here. That and the company Privateier Press who was running it, they used to have this thing called press gangers where they would have a local person who would organize events and get people involved.

And those press gangers occasionally got little treats. they got like a maybe a little model or a little bit of a discount or some exclusive information and stuff. It was just like a little Avon lady kind of thing but for their their board game. And uh the company got rid of that and not long after the game kind of collapsed or at least it did here.

And I can't help but think that they grew the game because they had these great customer support reps all over the place who were getting people to play. Then they kind of disrespected them and got rid of them. And those people went, "Well, I I guess I'll I'll go play something else." And they did. And they took everyone who played the game with them.

That combined with the new third edition, which just uh was just relearning and relitigating a whole bunch of stuff. Sit there. I'm going to go and get all of the splatbooks with all of the stats that you had to remember for this game. Two seconds. Okay. Okay, so there are a bunch of stories in here as well, but there are a lot of units and a lot of stats and a lot of spells and a lot of abilities to remember for every single faction.

And when you're having to relearn them, that's somehow worse than learning them from scratch because you've got all the old information sitting in your head and you instinctively think that's correct and then it's wrong and it's so very frustrating. I had a lot of fun playing War Machine. I think I played it at possibly the best time of the game as well for second edition.

We had some really big tournaments and for a time there it was a bigger game in Wellington than Warhammer 40,000 was. There are a lot more people playing in our tournaments than there were in the 40k ones and they were really competitive too. So, with the lessons learned from collectible card games like Vampire the Eternal Struggle and Magic the Gathering, there was no way I was going to get drawn into another collectible card game.

Aha! I didn't get drawn into another collectible card game. I got drawn into a living card game, Netrunner in this case. And living card games, they're totally different. They they don't end up with you buying uh giant piles of cards and spending way more money on the game than you actually intended to.

They are better than collectible card games. You don't have to go chasing rares and chasing boosters that it's a much better better system than uh the collectible card game thing. Uh but I did get into Netrunner hard for about two years. two years this was the game I love to play and it was about the only thing I'd talk about and I still maintain uh here eight tournament ready well I don't know if you consider it tournament ready but tournament ready for the time decks uh four for the corporations four for the uh runners even got a couple of like special cards and stuff that I won at tournaments this is one of the few games I actually played at a tournament level I really liked u netrunner I played it quite a bit and I was quite quite good.

I played on a site called Octagon uh for quite a quite a while. Like I'd be playing two or three games a night uh just triing out decks of random people on the internet and playing a hell of a lot of Netrunner for a while. Then two things kind of happened with this one. Uh the first of that is I played at a tournament and I got into the the last match of the round.

cuz it was me versus the guy who won the tournament. And uh I counted up how much resources he had on his board and I was going to trace him and then kill him. And then he lifted his elbow up because he'd been covering one of his cards. He goes, "Oh, I've got one more resource." And the judges didn't catch it.

And I was like, "This prick cheated." And they're like, "We didn't see it. You miscalculated. Um so there's not much we can do." And I felt so utterly utterly annoyed at this tournament and the whole tournament environment because a guy blatantly cheated in front of me and cheated me out of winning uh my very first Netrunner tournament that the game just kind of fizzled off almost immediately for me.

I was just furious. I didn't want to go to any more organized events. Um I was just a real grumpy grumpy sod over that. And it also got me thinking, one of the problems with with games like this is you do kind of need a competitive scene. And once they start tickling off, and they do, they always start uh trailing off.

It's a wonderful thing about Magic the Gathering is it when it trails off, it picks back up again. A lot of other card games just don't do that. And Net Runner, it eventually trailed off here long after I left. Like I left pretty early on, and then by the time I was interested in going back, the scene was dead.

And then the game started to die as well. Games like this need support. It's very cool that it's been brought back by Null Signal and it is getting some support, but it's not like it was back in the day when you'd go along to a game store, there'd be 20 odd people playing and you'd have price support.

It's it's just not like that or at least not not in Wellington. This is still a fantastic game and I do keep these decks around cuz occasionally I'm like h anyone just want to play a couple of hands of Net Runner with me? I probably could like track down and play it online a bit more, but I I just don't know if I have the time or inclination to keep up with the meta.

It's another thing about these sort of games. You have to keep up with them. As new cards come out, you need to adapt and and follow them along. They need to be you need to be quite trendy in your thinking with them. You need to be there and be present with the game as it moves and evolves. And I find I can only do that with like one or maybe two systems at a time.

And currently I have a completely different living card game occupying my brain space that would be used for potential Netrunner decks. And that game's Arkham Horror the card game which we will get to later. But Netrunner, the headto-head in it, the bluffing, the different style of decks you can play, just how much of a feel and skill game it is.

You can have like a very powerful deck, but if you are a complete muppet, you will lose every game of Netrunner because there's such a big skill element to it. far more than say Magic the Gathering where I I personally think 80% of that is deck design and 20% of that is piloting. Uh a pretty ordinary player with an amazing deck will still do pretty well because they're just drawing out the cards and it'll be a set sequence.

Netrunner isn't like that. It's about feel. It's about knowing when to run, when not to run. It's about bluffing and putting out defenses on some things that you know they're going to run but are traps. There's so many layers and mind games to it that player skill and the ability to read your opponent counts for so much more than just having an awesome deck.

Now, having a top draw deck really helps, but the pilot really, really makes a difference. And I think that's why this is one of my favorite dueling games of all time. So, even more proof that I was on pretty good money there for a while is X-Wing. The next game I got into the next game that also ended after an addition change when they went to X-Wing Second Edition and I looked at all my models and went, I don't want to buy conversion packs for all those.

I think I'll stop playing. That said, I didn't play this one that much competitively. I just really enjoyed playing it with my friends. You see, I ran this really big Star Wars campaign. It was called Teleathine Sector, and we designed the sector in Star Wars collaboratively, and the players were playing the leaders of different rebel factions, working together against the Empire, but with their own slightly conflicting and contrasting goals.

And what we do is we'd have like a political stage where they decide what they were doing. and this mega game I designed which had a whole bunch of different systems. And then we would resolve things using X-wing, occasionally Armada, occasionally Imperial Assault, and sometimes the role playing game to zoom down to different missions that were happening all around the sector.

So we played a bunch of very narrative driven X-wing. So that was where I would design the battles based on what they were committing to the fight and what the mission was. And I'd run it like a like it was part of a role playing session. Everyone else was piloting their squadrons and I was the game master running the whole show.

It was amazing and fun and we ran that for over a year. That campaign reached its natural conclusion and we had a two table finale with an Imperial assault mission going on to destroy some shield generators while there was a space battle going on. We had a ton of fun with that and I do not regret buying these.

I still occasionally run the Star Wars RPG and these are just going to be a great resource for that. Just Yeah, they're cool as toys. I've still got all the materials to play the game, but I'll probably just play it narratively. I don't think of any interest whatsoever in playing this as a competitive game again.

If you want to read up about that campaign and look at my notes, I wrote most of it up on my blog years ago called Von Creed. I'll have a link in the description. I didn't get around to finishing off the finale and writing it all up just because a whole bunch of other stuff was happening at that time.

The next game I fell in love with and it became my favorite for a number of years was Twilight Struggle from GMT. Now, my academic background, I have a master's degree in international relations and a post-graduate diploma in defense and strategic studies as well as a post-graduate diploma in history teaching and a bachelor's degree in politics and history.

My master's thesis was on the Japanese defense force during the first 50 years of the cold war. So, the Cold War and all of the decisions and everything happening in it were a really big part of my education and something I found really fascinating and I got to play Twilight Struggle for the first time and I was immediately hooked by it.

I love how the games played across these multiple different theaters and they're all scored independently. I absolutely love the idea and theme of the superpowers and conflict. But the really big thing I loved here was its multi-use cards. Twilight Struggle has one of the most clever card systems out there.

So, it's pretty normal in a card- driven war game to have cards that can be used for events and they can be used for their OP points, and you use those OP points to move troops around the boards and do attacks and different things. That's cool. Twilight Struggle does do that, but it has this extra thing where the cards in the deck represent either American, Soviet, or neutral interests.

If you are the American player and you play one of your own cards, you can play it for the points or the event. If you play one of the Soviet cards, you play it for its points and the event goes off anyway and you're both drawing from the same deck of cards. So, you're going to have a handful of cards that benefit your opponent massively and they're going to have the same.

And there's something special about that. I just love how this game took something as complex as the Cold War and made it playable in an hour or two. Really clever game. And this got me onto my GMT thing. So, after playing Twilight Struggle, I was like, "Oh, what other games have they got?" I know they've got that cool looking game, uh, Paths of Glory, which is about the First World War.

I want to give that a go. Oh, it uses a similar kind of system, but it's also a war game. So, I got into playing a whole bunch of card driven war games as well, of which Path of Glory remains my favorite. Then I was like, what else have they got? Oh, they've got things like Kamar Sharia, these like solo games, historic solo war games.

I got to have a look at that. And then I got into this thing called the coin series. You have like a distant plane about the Afghanistan conflict and fire in the lake about Vietnam. And I was like, "Wow, this coin series, asymmetric warfare. How cool is that? How about I design my own damn game?" And I was like, "Cool." And then I got to make my own game in the series.

And this this wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been absolutely obsessed with Twilight Struggle for a good amount of time cuz Twilight Struggle got me into the GMT games sphere of influence. And from there I went in and dug into their other titles and fell in love with their other titles as well. But this Twilight Struggle was my number one game for quite a number of years.

And it wasn't until I eventually started getting annoyed with the defcon system in the game. it just started to bug me a little um that it sort of fell out of favor with me. Oh, and I played it like 200 times on the app and probably burned myself out on it. GMT Games, I mean, I'm I'm biased cuz I've got a a game with them, but they they do something special.

They do war games that are good, and there are a lot of rubbish war games out there on the market, and they just have a much higher standard of quality. Uh, I would I would call it they're probably defined by the games they kick away as much as they are defined by the games they publish. But yeah, congrats to me, by the way, for being uh GMT's number one selling game of the last year or so.

Go Red Dust Rebellion. Uh, try it out. Check out my videos. Doing a shameless plug for myself here. Even though this has never been one of my favorite games of myself because it's been work, um, I still think I've created something pretty cool there. And so is the rest of the team that helped me. We're up to the last two games, and these are my two favorite games I've been playing in the 2020s.

And I go back and forth between these two games on which one is my favorite. The first of those, of course, is Spirit Island. Cooperative game of destroying settlers as they invade an island. Spirit Island's always been an important game to me for several reasons. The first of which is it's an absolute banger of a game.

The second is its narrative and its story is about a Pacific island that is getting colonized and it's being defended by spirits and these spirits are very similar to a lot of the local legends and stories we have growing up here in Aurora New Zealand. A lot of real world games feel very distant to me.

Games about Europe and stuff in the in the Americas, that's something that happens very much overseas. Spirit Island, despite its fantastical nature, feels a lot closer to home for me. And it's just so damn good. One thing I I have to say is there are all these different spirits in the game. And they've done this amazing Eric, the designer, has done a masterful job of creating all these characterful, interesting, unique spirits that have very different play styles.

Uh, combine that with a game that works with emergent powers as is, and you have so many different paths to play each time you play the game. It's a game that I have played well over 100 times, and I still consider myself a moderately okay player of. I've seen people online uh play this game. It was so so much better than me.

Like embarrassingly better than me. I look at what they're doing and go, "Wow." Um, I wish I thought to do that. And that again is despite me being a professional player of board games and someone who has played this around about 100 times because there's all of these spirits and they're all really different to play.

Plus, there's different invader types. There's different scenarios. There's all these different combinations around what is a rock solid foundation of a game. And it's just it's just cool. I did a video about this one quite recently where I went through all of these different spirits. I went through every single one of them and did a breakdown on where I rated them like in terms of a power curve.

Uh both in terms of raw power and my ability to get a good result out of them and how much fun they were to play. And uh that video is up on the channel. And it was really great to talk about a game that I love for that amount of time. It ended up being like nearly a 100 minutes long because there's just so much content to get through.

And that's just talking about the spirits. It wasn't talking about the scenarios or the adversaries. It's just these 34 different spirits. It's a game I could see myself playing forever, like until I until I can't can't play no more because there's just so much to it. And every time I set it up and play it, I just go, "Damn, I wish I was playing that more." And there's very few games where I feel that way.

And um yeah, Spirit Island, it's it's high complexity. I'm not going to lie. There's it's not an easy game to get into, but there's a whole bunch of resources online and ways to ease yourself into it. And once you do, and if it clicks for you, it's such a rewarding game. and just just the exploration phase of going through all of these spirits.

That's a that's a 100 plays or so at least. Uh because you're not going to fully understand one after your first play. You're going to have to give it uh multiple tries. And once you've done three tries for every single spirit, that's 100 plays right there. Uh and that's probably you the end of that you'd have a pretty basic understanding of how Spirit Island works.

Fantastic game. Uh, absolutely love it. More stuff that comes out for it. There hasn't really been a dud yet. There's a slight power creep. Uh, I think the latest expansion, um, spirits are a little bit better than some of the earlier ones, but they're still all just brilliant. This is an amazing game, and I want to send out some wellw wishes to Greater Than Games, who have shuttered themselves down over the whole tariffs thing that's happened in the States.

I'm really hoping we hear good news from them any day now that they're going to be coming back because I think they have some really great games. Particular Spirit Island. They also have Sentinels of the Multiverse and a few other titles and they're a publisher that really needs to be publishing games because baby wants more Spirit Island.

Get to it. It's somewhat accidental that I film most of my videos directly in front of my co-op game shelf, but here we are standing actually in front of the co-op game shelf. And as you can see, uh, Spirit Island's right there. But taking the top of the shelf is the entirety of Arkham Horror the Card Game, my current number one game along with Spirit Island.

Now, when Arkham Horror the card game came out, it had all the hallmarks of something I was absolutely going to get into, but they sold it in this ridiculous format. You buy a starter box and then six blister packs over another 6 months to get a single campaign. Now, living in our Toyota New Zealand, we were subject to the whims and thickleness of the shipping system.

We'd sometimes get one pack before the previous one would turn up. So, we get pack four in a cycle before pack three would turn up. I forgot to mention this in the Netrunner section, but that's another thing that killed my interest in Netrunner was chasing down these packs. I also played a fair bit of Star Wars the LCG, and the same thing happened there.

We were somewhat victimized by remoteness, and if one pack went out of circulation, it would take months or sometimes a year for it to come back into circulation. It was a giant pain in the ass and I just gave up on the game. About the same time I gave up on Netrunner. Then a few years back they decided to change that model and go to this big box format.

So instead of buying one mediumsiz box and six boosters, you bought one big box for the story and one mediumsiz box for all the player cards. I've chucked all those away, but I've kept the story boxes. Two years ago as well, I had only played through the Dunich Legacy. Since then, I've done Path to Carosa, Circle Undone, Dream Eaters, Inmouth, Edge of the Earth, Scarlet Keys, Beast of Hemlock Veil, nearly finished The Drown City, and the only one left to do is The Forgotten Age.

I have played so much freaking Arkham in the last two years, and it's been excellent. While I have multiple gaming groups with multiple different interests, I have one gaming group on a regular week night that is just Arkham Horror, the Card Game, and that's how we're getting through the campaigns. It just does so much that I find engaging.

First, it's a co-op, and I find it so much easier to get a co-op group together for an extended period of time than I do to get a group together for something like Game of Thrones that's competitive for an extended period of time. And people are playing competitive games, they mostly seem to be wanting to swap and change a fair bit more.

It builds off Arkham Horror Second Edition, another one of my all-time favorite games and a huge influence on me. And then it has all the deck construction and card manipulation stuff I love from a game like Netrunner. But instead of in Netrunner where I'm trying to beat someone else, I'm using my powers for good.

If I build a janky deck that's completely busted, it's helping out my friends and not making them feel like they shouldn't have turned up to play that day. And I just love the stories. I love the vibes. I love everything about these campaigns. They're all slightly different in their own wacky way. out of two years of solid play, and that's just about every week, there's still more for me to play through.

And that's only playing through each of these campaigns once with one character. Every single one of these boxes has a lot more replay-ability than just going through once. And I know that because I have played a bunch of them again on Tabletop Simulator as well, but that's all solo plays. For me, Arkham Horror the card game looks back at a whole bunch of my past and takes bits I like from a ton of different games and puts them into one singular experience.

It's got the coziness of the Arkham Horror card game and the whole Lovecraft universe that I love so much. And it's got that power gaming list building deck construction thing that I miss from games like Warhammer 40,000, War Machine, and Netrunner. My only trepidation with the game is they seem to be taking it in a whole new direction.

And there's the possibility that some of the stuff up here is going to become less available in the future, and that sucks. Every single one of these campaigns is worth playing, and I've enjoyed playing each of them. I've enjoyed playing some of them a lot more than others. Uh, say Carosa and the Insmith Conspiracy are my absolute favorites, but every single one of them has had its bright moments and has definitely not been a waste of my time to get through.

and Bad Arkham is still better than most games. Now, once I get through the Forgotten Age, I'm going to be doing a whole bunch of deep dive videos on Arkham Horror as well, a little bit like my Spirit Island tier ranking video because preparing for this video has made me think about how I like to play games and how I like to consume game product.

And that is I really like to play set games over and over again. I am someone who likes to play games deep. Being a reviewer, I have to play a whole bunch of games shallow, like one or two a week. I have to play them three or so times, get familiar with the games, and do the review of them. That's not necessarily the type of gamer I feel comfortable being or want to be.

I like games like Arkham Horror the card game, Spirit Island, Final Girl is another example of a game that I like that has just a ton of stuff to explore that I can play over and over and over again. And I think I want to do more content on that type of game. I want to do more content on the games that I'm comfortable with.

videos about strategy, about ranking different characters and factions, all that kind of stuff on the games I actually play over and over again rather than the games that I play three times, have a bit of a review of, and then never think about again. Because there are a lot of games on the channel that once I've reviewed them and put them on the shelf, I never see them again.

I never touch them again. And while I get to that's part of the gig, what I really want to do is play the games I love more. And that brings us to the end of the video. I'm just looking back at the list of games starting off at Connect 4 and going all the way through to Arkham Horror the card game. And I think there's some themes there.

I tend to be attracted to games that are very thematic. I tend to like games that allow me to do a bunch that have a whole bunch of options and variabilities and things I can explore. Games that let me be creative within their system. I actually like that I can look back at most of the games I've played in my past and not snobby look down on them.

What I'm really looked down on is my own financial decisions and spending entirely way too much money on certain games that I probably shouldn't have. But that's a whole that's just part of growing up. Maybe you can learn from my mistakes and not, you know, throw all your money into one game and then not be playing it in 5 years time.

I don't know if there's a great life lesson to be learned from this video or not. Uh, but it was fun to take a look back at some of the old games. And, you know, I want to hear about your board game journeys. Where did you start off in the hobby? What were the first games you remember playing? How has your tastes in games evolved over the years?

What's your current favorites now? Uh, let me know those in the comments. And as always, 3Minut Board Games does not do paid content, aside from the occasional plug for my own games. Uh, please support us on Patreon if you want to keep independent voices in board game media. And until next time, take care everyone.