Review Explosion - Drive Thru FM #37

0:22 hey everybody welcome to another episode of driveth through FM uh today's going to be a little bit different it's going to be a r view explosion uh so just a lot of games to go through today I spent a lot of time over the holidays and into the new year playing a bunch of games uh took a little bit of a break I guess you know from the video making over the holidays and I've got some catchup to do from some games I didn't get a chance to cover last year uh I'm going to review a bunch of expansions for games that I played and I'll get to give you kind of a preview of what's coming up so we're going to talk about a few games that I will be getting to do videos for in the coming weeks just kind of a little preview of Coming Attractions and then I'll go through about uh seven or eight reviews of games and then I'll review four expansions at the end and uh this is going to be mostly a positive video I know I kind of tend to bury the negativity in the podcast a little bit there will be some negative reviews so to speak uh in this episode but uh mostly it's going to be positive so uh let's just take a quick little break we'll come back I'll give you kind of the first preview and take another break and to give you kind of review about seven or eight games and then finally we'll review some expansions to existing

1:57 games okay welcome back everybody uh let's just jump into kind of a preview of Coming Attractions um I'm going to talk about four different games here so we'll jump right in the first one I want to talk about is hegemony uh this is one that I mentioned in my end of the year video uh list as one I didn't get a chance to play last year I've had a chance to play it now a couple of times uh some different player counts uh using the crisis expansion I think it's called and you know using that or also just using the base game really have enjoyed it um I'm not really a fan of its solo so just come a little bit of spoiler there but other than that it's been a lot of fun I'd like to get a chance to try it out a couple of different ways and play all of the different uh factions I have not yet played as a middle class I played as the other three and uh yeah on on the whole I really enjoy it just want to get a couple plays in and then get to do a video of it and I'm excited for it it was better than I expected Ed it to be even cuz there was a lot of hype you know it's so sometimes you get a little nervous you're like is it is it going to be that good uh but it's really cool and I have a lot of thoughts about it so definitely look forward to that one relatively soon so that's hemin uh next one I want to talk about is a game from Martin Wallace called bloodstones and this is kind of a sort of an old school almost throwback Fantasy war game with like these nice uh balite or acrylic

3:28 tiles uh and you players are just it's very very simple uh to a degree and it's not you know there's not a lot of complex you know idiosyncrasies with all the rules and stuff there's six different factions and you just kind of pick a map the components are fantastic they're amazing like I said they have these really cool tiles that you move around and they have these nice little illustrations on them uh the maps I think there's six maps in the box they're cloth maps and so you draw the tiles out of a bag and it's kind of like almost like a hand of cards and you can play the tiles to you know put the unit out onto the bo onto the board or spend the units to give you like action points or spend them to recruit other units and stuff like that and you're kind of like you know just putting out Villages scoring points with your Villages sort of expanding your little Empire capturing other Villages having big fights and stuff um and like I said it's really simple but there's a lot of kind of really cool stuff around the edges which is really neat and it has this really big old solo Campaign which I've played uh I played I think four or five at this point of through the solo scenarios and played one four player game of it with you know other people really enjoy it I don't think it's going to be everyone's cup of tea cuz it is I'll leave some of this for the review but you got to I think be in the right mood and it it kind of sheds some of the modern sensibilities that you would might expect in a modern area control war game kind of thing

5:00 um but it has some nice it's got you know it's got some Martin Wallace signatures in there I guess you could call it um I'll explain that better when I get to the review but it's got some really cool stuff and it has some very very interesting things that it does that's very I think subtle so that's another one I want to probably at least try to play once more with with people um and then get back to that but I really enjoyed it it's very very different especially you know in 2024 um there's not really any other games like this one I really like it so that's blood Stones uh next one want to mention is a game that come out of nowhere it's called Plum Island horror and some of my friends my media friends were been talking about this for a little while and it's a GMT game which is known for like Twilight Struggle and a bunch of War games and you know all kinds of stuff dominant species um but typically war games and sometimes they kind of venture out of that little Boulevard there and they have really interesting game not the war games aren't interesting but they are but uh this is a co-op uh game set in the pseudo realistic Plum Island which there's some you know kind of conspiracy theory stuff around uh but this is completely fantasized and you know cooked up and exaggerated and it's just a co-op like tower defense game from the designer of dawn of the Zeds which was an old Victory point game which I reviewed probably 10 years ago or so and

6:31 so it has a similar kind of vibe to that kind of um you know instead of fighting zombies you're fighting all these kind of mutants and different weird creatures and stuff and you have different factions and it's you know kind of like bloodstones where it kind of has like an old school Vibe I was telling one of my friends about this I said it's like a game from the 80s but good that's what it feels like um again I think this is going to be one that's not for everybody but I've been really enjoying it played it a couple of times now and again I want to just play it a little bit more and the rules are like typical GMT complexity it's not that complex but it's you know it's kind of on the complex side if we're talking co-ops it's probably around a spirit Island but probably not even that complex really um you know one of the Hallmarks of a good kind of GMT game or kind of thematic war game kind of vibe is there is some rules to kind of catch some of the simulation so you know some people might seem as like why is this extra rule in here it's a little extraneous I don't think so in this case but I could see people kind of bouncing off some of that but I've been having a blast with it so I'll have more details about that when I get to the review very very cool artwork and everything just just just a wacky Vibe too which just makes a lot of fun you know it's not a typical theme that you that you see so that's uh Plum Island horror uh so the last game kind of a preview is Dune Imperium Uprising and so I've played

8:03 this a few times now I played it solo played it three player played a four player um you know Dune Imperium is like my favorite board game of all time basically kind of right behind Frost grave and Rangers and Shadow deep which aren't board games um but it's it's it's it's right up there with kis which for a long time was my favorite game um I really like this I like it quite a bit but I want to wait to play the six player game and I have a game of that scheduled at the time of this recording about 3 or 4 weeks from now uh because when I look at it this way I could have stuffed this one at the end of this podcast when I review some of these other expansions and because I haven't played the six player game yet but at just without that to me it's just kind of like an expansion now it does some cool stuff that I really like that's different um there's some other stuff that I kind of miss now I've not played it with any of the expansions cuz this is kind of a standalone expansion kind of thing so it's like kind of like a new base game sort of and you can play this with um the X and the immortality expansions which are compatible with the base game you can even take cards from the base game and shuffle them in this and kind of mix and match stuff so I haven't really played too much with the mixing and matching or haven't played at all with that um just the basic Dune Imperium Uprising you know Standalone all by itself and playing it that way it just feels like oh just bling do an Imperium another expansion and yeah the board's slightly different but you know it just this expansion requires more you

9:35 know upheaval in the overall game um I really like the spies I really like the worms those are kind of like the two main uh updates and you have like the cont the CH contracts which are pretty cool and stuff like that and some new powers and things but I really like it you know it just does more of the same but slightly different um but before I jump into doing the video review I really want to play the three versus 3 six player game to me that is like I'm like okay that's starting to you know to get at some cool stuff there because that was one of the neat things about the original Dune board game was that kind of uh you in that game you like shifting alliances and stuff there won't be shifting alliances in this but you'll have a team versus Team um so I'm curious about that you know that's that to me is the main kind of takeaway U because if you if you ask me like do Imperium Uprising versus BAS Dune plus x i it would be a coin flip to me which one was was a better experience I haven't played Dune Imperium Uprising with X maybe that's the best one but uh but yeah so look forward to those four hegemony bloodstones Plum Island horror Dune Imperium Uprising and a couple others too um but uh you know we'll leave some surprise all right so we'll take another quick little break here and then uh we'll go and review some some new release games that came out last year most of these came out last year or at least the year before and then we'll come back and do some expansions so we'll take a quick break now and be

11:17 back all right welcome back everybody and uh this will be kind of be the uh the downer section of the podcast uh not all of these reviews are going to be negative um um but I'll probably have something negative to say about all of them um you know there's a reason these didn't get on video and some of these though I think are are objectively a good game it's just they either weren't for me or or they're objectively to me not objectively in my opinion not a good game so we'll start with one of those um this one is a GMT game called Mr President I was super excited for this game it's a solo game where it kind of sort of simulates being the president of the United States and I absolutely dislike this game top to bottom it is uh I'm I struggle to have a good thing to say about this game I will say the production and the way the rules and stuff are presented are really cool and the way it kind of walks you into kind of learning the game very well done you know GMT kind of let's say spared no expense in that regard I mean when you open the box you get like a a letter from your the previous president you know cuz that's kind of a tradition when the new president comes in the old one sticks a letter in the Oval Office desk or something and then the other one opens it up after they get moved in and who knows what those letters say um but uh this is kind of like hey it's going to be a tough job you know blah blah blah whatever and um so you kind and that

12:48 kind of starts you into getting through the different Rule books and stuff that's just a kind of a taste of that production but at the end of the day man this is just a dice Chuck fest with you know very very very little mitigation and it just constantly kicks you in the face and all this different things and I mean yeah I mean that's kind of what that job seems like it would be like you know you get in there and everybody's like fix it you know like wait wait I need a nap you know I don't know um but it's just like tons and tons of charts and tables and shifting things and then like you start out and there's like events or crisises that come up and just kick you in the teeth and you got to manage like the uh kind of like the um what do they call like the domestic policies and stuff like that economy and things like that that's like your core thing and you kind of get your bonus points out of like foreign policy and some of these other things but it's basically baked down to the core I don't know though I just don't it didn't it didn't get off for me from the beginning with the design I was like yeah this is not something I would I would want to do um because it just like it just constantly kicks you in the face and you feel like you got really no real agency it's one of the some of these solo games and there's been some that I like that do this probably the best example was an old game called Navajo Wars which was yeah that was a GMT game that one I felt like the game was playing me but I really enjoyed it as it went along I felt like I had some decisions here and there um but I felt like overall I was kind of like guided

14:19 through history in a way but this doesn't even achieve that to me it's just like a random procedurally generated you know machine that's just vomiting chaos at me and that's that's how I felt I was very disappointed because I was actually really looking forward to this because I think it' just be really cool um yeah anyway so that's probably the most negative that I'll be this entire podcast this game I absolutely did not like um so that's Mr President from GMT games the next one we'll talk about um this one is a DF romantic uh this I think won the Spiel desar last year this one is one of those kind of like not for me games I can see it is objectively a pretty good game you know what I mean I can see why it would win the Spiel jar but I did not really jive with it it was a little bit too simple and basic for me now that makes sense CU if it won the Spiel jar it should be targeted to you know a quote unquote family audience but it didn't I didn't really get any excitement out of it so you're placing these tiles in like form these different terrain groupings kind of like Carone or something and so you you form little shapes of terrains and you try to like close them off and score them some of the tiles have like little well there's like scoring tiles and there's like the regular tiles I forget what the game calls them but you you deal out of one stack and then you play out of the other and you go back and forth and so based on how many points you get you'll have like a a little sheet that you sort of

15:51 write things down and So eventually after you play the game enough or if you do really well you want to unlock these other boxes which will add new rules rules and stuff like that so it's kind of like a legacy campaign game kind of vibe but you don't destroy anything it's just like okay open up the box grab the stuff at it and now you have just a couple extra rules and then you kind of move on and you keep going till you get all the boxes and you're kind of just always trying to beat your high score and trying to be more efficient and stuff like that and that's cool but playing it it really reminded me of like a my City from Riner kitzia and that one is a little bit of a destructive Legacy game where you're like putting stickers on your board and writing things down and it's uh in that in that my city it's not a tile L game I mean it's a tile L game but it's not like CarZone it's more like uh Tetris tiles you know different uh what they call them polyomino and trying to arrange things and you kind of like you know rinse and repeat and you're the thing is DF romantic is a Cooperative game and so you're playing together just trying to get a high score whereas my city is competitive but to me having played both games as I was playing DF romantic I was like eh I'd rather just play My City again or the new one my Island which I haven't played but to me it was kind of like doing the same kind of thing as my city you know with some different mechanics but just not as good basically as how I kind of took away from it so anyway that's St from I think a lot of people will like it I know a friend of mine in my game group him and his family have loved playing it um and so all my kids are grown up and out of

17:24 the house and so and some have the kids their own and uh yeah so I if I had that kind of environment then I maybe would have gravitated to it more but uh as it stands I would say well I probably recommend you know my city over DF romantic okay that's DF romantic uh next one is a Vladimir sui game called evacuation and this one I liked about half of it so the concept of this game is you are leaving One Planet maybe like Earth or something and then trying to migrate uh your resources and your people and everything to another planet somewhere in you know another part of the Galaxy or the solar system or something and so you are playing like these action cards to do different actions which will let you you know do certain things like produce things or move things or um the cards are kind on Dual Purpose so allow you to sort of move this sort of like couple of shuttles that are on this like track between the two planets it has this track which is sort of loosely abstractly symbolizing kind of the movement of stuff your kind of capabilities and also like kind of which planet you're doing your production on because at the beginning you you don't really have anything on the new planet yet but as you move stuff there then you can start to activate buildings and stuff there and produce stuff there which help you kind of move the stragglers from the first planet to the new planet uh but that doesn't happen till about Midway through the game and then you kind of move stuff I like a lot of the game that track in the middle did

18:57 not care for that it felt very like uh sometimes the Euro game will like wear its design on its sleeve so it felt like oh this is the track to kind of cinch up the design and keep things balanced and I find that that bugs me you know to varying degrees it kind of just depends so this could just be kind of a me thing the other part that really soured the game for me was when you go to like put new production buildings and things on the new planet it's kind of Rand randomized which of the spaces are bonus spaces and which ones are the targeted I that ruin that kind of ruined the game for me because you're like trying to comp complete like this not a set collection but like this sort of a set collection CU they different spaces on the new planet have different terrain types and do different things and you're trying to like complete these objective cards where it's like you got to get you know three of the green ones that are in a horizontal row or these two that are all within one space of each other and all these like random things and I'm like no I want to do one that gives me you know I don't know ore or the orange resource or whatever and then I have to like then do this other thing where I'm like trying to combine for this objective card and it's really sucking me out of like what I think is a really neat theme and a theme that reminds me a little bit of on Mars because in on Mars you don't have like a earth is not really represented visually on the board but you have your like little as guy at the

20:28 top of the board so you kind of have a left side of worker placement the right side worker placement like some of the stuff is in the spaceship you know orbiting Mars other stuff is on Mars so you have that kind of back and forth vibe there which feels you know thematically similar to evacuation and I think similar to DF romantic I would just say yeah I would just play on Mars instead of evacuation um you know it touches on a lot of the same things they're relatively as complex I mean you could argue on Mars and more complex it probably is but the thing about it is the complexity there helps serve the theme so it makes me sucks me in a little bit more and that kind of thing so that's kind of where I come down on evacuation there's a lot I've really liked about it there's a lot of stuff that I just felt was a little bit too again on the sleeve sort of like you know here's my little oh you have to be on the new planet and like how are we going to do that uh give them objective cards so they can like put their buildings in a certain order I'm like uh okay whatever that means so yeah that kind of pulls me out of it so anyway that's evacuation Vladimir Suchi you know his stuff I'm like 50/50 on it's like a coin coin flip he has the game come out I'm like this is great you know like uh underwater cities or um praga copet regney or mesina but then there's other games on I'm like like this one or that one that was like uh you like elves

21:59 building like wooden pieces I'm like ah I I don't know what this is so anyway he's a 50 50 5050 guy all right so that's evacuation uh next one we're going to talk about is heat didn't this win a Spiel the jars or something too I guess I don't like these games so heat is kind of a redo of a game from the same designers the original game let's call it is flam Rouge which is like a bicycle race kind of like a tour to France or something and in that game you were you know it was like a deck building game but a racing game and so you're playing your cards and building your deck and and then racing your bikes and kind of drafting each other getting little bonus movements now Heat's kind of the same thing but with race cars but you have different asymmetric abilities and you have like uh you know Heat cards that can kind of go and you overheat your car and uh you know you can try to make different Maneuvers around corners then you flip cards off your deck to see if you maybe spin out and that kind of stuff and I honestly didn't care for flam Rouge either but I was kind of thinking oh maybe because flam Rouge was was actually it was fine let me let me back track a little bit flers was fine I was like this game just needs something a little bit more it's like a little bit too much just it just did what it did and you did deck building and you drafted bikes and that was it and you raced and so I felt like I'm like man this game just needs something else cuz I think this is a really cool mechanism and then then he would come along and I was like oh okay so this is this is what I was kind of

23:30 hoping for right so it's kind of like flam Rouge and you have the you know Drafting and the turning and heat and all the different things and some asymmetry and you got the gear shifting and all that stuff um because that'll kind of keep you kind of keep your heat levels running and you can play certain values of cards based on your gear that you're in and uh honestly I think I prefer FL rou to eat because one thing I noticed in this game and I played it twice and it happened to me in one of the games it happened to a friend in another was like if you get behind if you get like a bad draw and spin out then it's kind of like well you kind of have to like push your luck to get catch up and then you can kind of snowball against you which I didn't like that and then I also felt like it was too much it's kind of forced you to then you know having done that it kind of forced me to play too safe and then it kind of just ends up being like flam Rouge anyway which is some extra mechanics kind of around it it didn't really you know I was like ah okay I'm just well I'll just do the safe route and then he kind of wrinkles around the edges of like who gets ahead on the turns you know at that point and it was just like okay this is not that interesting cuz just I don't know it's every time you seemed like anybody really tried to push their luck and go for it that was like 100% of the time it was a spin out and it was just like okay now I'm just going to do this for the rest of the game and I don't know it just the snowball effect of it just kind of got to me a little a little bit um so if you asked me I would recommend flam Rouge over this I think

25:02 there is an expansion for flam Rouge which I've never played so maybe that's kind of where it would hit the sweet spot for me um but yeah generally and that's another thing with this with heat is once you started to add some of the mechanics that it added it really reminded me of rallyman or formula D or something like that it starts to kind of take on that Vibe or the there was the one from restoration games I'll look it up real quick oh down Force I mean that one well that's kind of a betting game but um CU some of these other racing camel camel cup that's also a betting game but made me think of that those games I don't know as I was playing heat I was like I'd rather play any of these four five six other games as well so yeah and I know some of those are betting game I mean Ready Set bet um but it has a race element to it it but if you want to talk pure racing gaming know rallyman or um uh or formula day right so yeah so that I would just rather play any of those anyway so that's heat the next one here is and this one is just a just a totally a me thing it's called zuis now this is a remake of a older kitzia game quovas this is also by kitzia and in that one I think in qu i' never played it but you're trying to like kind of get to the head of the senate or something in the government and in this

26:34 one well strangely enough I don't really like how the theme is works here but you have like different zoo animals that are trying to get to the end of the board so what happens is you have your zoo animals that you are and then you like put them in spaces and then you can based on how many of other animals are in the spaces you can move them out of the space but then you have to bribe each other and everybody has like a unique special ability and there's like some NPC zoo animals on the spaces and there's like a zookeeper that moves around that will affect things and what it ends up being is like kind of a pure negotiation game where you're sort of negotiating about like okay well if I give you a dollar then we can both move because there's just some I forget the rules it's been a couple of months but there's some rules about how and when you can move out of different spaces and you kind of need the vote that's what it is you kind of need the vote of everybody to move out and so there's some negotiation there and you can kind of use your ability and give somebody an ability or give them some of the coins and then also you can move the neutral NPCs and then you try to get yourself in situations to score like bonus points based on the different areas you're in and then also get bonus points for moving to the very end of the board it's all very very simple mechanically but it's all just again pure negotiation and I don't know I mean I thought about not talking about this CU I'm like this is not a game for me I just wish there was like like negotiation I like but like throw a game

28:07 underneath the hood there the peer negotiation just like oh okay so it's just we're just bullshitting each other like there's no you know what I mean like I want there to be like some other levers to pull on and something else kind of affecting uh the circumstance in the environment you know like okay we'll negotiate but then you know let's roll a die you know or whatever or like have some thing that you have to also do because we're going to negoti you know I'm trying to not use a political example but you know like in politics they say oh let's do this and do that and then hurricane comes you know and like well there goes our budget so I want there to be that Universe hitting everybody you know and then you're still negotiating and you're trying to like eek out your advantages based on that not just pure you know number crunching stuff because it becomes very like let me break out the spreadsheet you know that's to me like not enough under the covers there or above the covers with this uh with zuus so anyway again but I could see how people would get into that uh so that's zuus so we got two more to go in the normal review section here let's see uh next one is a game called Freelancers is from plat Hat games and this is kind of a followup um not a sequel necessarily but to forgotten Waters which is a game I really enjoyed

29:37 a few years ago that one you kind of uh is a storybook game in a way and you had different missions and you were pirates and overseas on the Seas and all this stuff and had different characters and some cool like Mad Lib types of things and just aot really cool fun adventure now Freelancers is is kind of the same thing but it's set in kind of a more of a traditional role playing game kind of thing it's sort of set in a far future Earth where there's no people but all the animals are now anthropomorphic and can speak and all this stuff and so but you have like different classes like uh Fighters and wizards and stuff like that so so you kind of mash up uh two parts of a character sheet write down some madlib stuff and then you go through and have different adventures and there's six adventures in the Box I played two of them and let's talk about the positives first I think it does some things sort of technically and production wise um probably mechanically maybe better than forgotten Waters like I didn't even read the rule book I didn't watch a watch and played video I had kind of skimmed it a while before I got the game just kind of give me a sense of it but the app that walks you through the game I think is the best I've ever seen at that and I think that's just not just for apps I mean I'm just talking anything where by the end of that like probably halfway through the first um scenario first mission I was like I I got this game down and and in the rule

31:09 book itself like I don't think you could actually even learn the game from the rule book but it works as a really good reference because I was like what's that token do oh yeah okay got it and so and but not even that so in the app itself when you go to do a thing it somehow always has like that information kind of right your fingertips as well so you can just kind of tap on something like on a you're doing a test or something you tap on it and it'll have a little popup window that gives you oh this token does this and this does that so after a while you don't even need the rulebook even for that kind of thing now here's where I kind of come down on the negative side of it I thought the adventures and the quests and stuff in forgotten Waters were much more interesting and I that those I I replayed some of those and uh this one I don't think I would ever replay any if I if I did end up liking the game which I don't but to me the replayability was pretty low um and I think it comes down to a couple things one is in forgotten Waters you kind of moved around on this sort of grid with your ship your boat and you could kind of go different ways and stuff and you had some other like it was like kind of a I think it was like the crossroads engine part of it like the event generation so that could kind of wrinkle some stuff up too and you know based on where things kind of were dealt out the objective wouldn't necessarily be in the same place on that grids because you kind of like it's kind of has a had a fog of War kind of thing where you revealed parts of the ocean as you as

32:41 you went through it now the general plot everything would be the same but not 100% you know with the battles and everything work out exactly that way now in um Freelancers you have like a map and and each of the quests has a different map and then you draw you know you basically move from A to B to C to D and it has some forking branches but it's like you know you just go left or right and then they both kind of if you go left or right they both Circle back and meet in the middle and then you kind of keep going from there so they give you a couple of forks there but to me like um sort of pallet wise I didn't like that cuz it was just like uh so every time I go to this you know space number 32 it's going to kind of be this thing now the other part I didn't like about it and this I feel almost bad about saying this but some of the like story writing moments of it were some of them were really funny and I laughed out loud at them other of them took me too far out of the story and so some of the like encounters and stuff that you have you know along the way to your quest were just like I'm like oh this was just the only point of this little encounter was a setup for somebody to write this joke or this kind

34:13 of like skit and like I said some of them were actually honest to God really funny and I laughed out loud like this is ridiculous this is hilarious but okay the other ones I was like kind of getting into the main story of the thing and then it has this thing come out of sideways and I'm like what what is this what you just completely took me out of uh the adventure that I was starting to enjoy and it happened more than a few times so this way I would rather play forgotten Waters cuz I thought um you know I don't know I kind of felt like as the as the the gamer the player I was like H I'm just here I'm like an audience member or something and I I don't want to feel like that so anyway so you know those are my thoughts I think people would enjoy this cuz like I said there's some funny stuff in there and the mechanics are fine and everything kind of works well and um you know it's it's a tight little design i' say objectively it's probably a good game you know what I mean but just just missed me uh the last game we're going to talk about in this section before we get to the expansion section is a game called lands of Galer now I had a lot of folks reach out to me after my earthborne Rangers review and said oh this sounds you know kind of like lands of Galer um you got to check it out you got to check it out so I reached out to the publisher and sent me the game and checked out and I think similar to Freelancers there's a lot really I like about the game there a couple of things that keep

35:44 me from wanting to play it again now I played this I think five or six times so it took me a minute to get to the point where I was like uh you know you know what I think I don't like this game and so it had me for a little bit now let's talk about the stuff I did like first and the main thing that sticks out to me a couple things but the main thing is the skill system now each of the characters has like this this little wheel on their character Board of different colors and like one and those will represent the color dice you roll um on the check and they each will kind of correspond to an attribute like one will be like I can't remember what they're called but like agility or combat or Charisma like negotiation type stuff and all that stuff and so if you have like a Charisma check you and you have some points in Charisma let's say you have two points because you have these like it's almost like little little like radar things you have these really cool little plastic things you insert so as you improve or move skills around you'll pull some of these off and put them in other parts of this wheel so let's say I have two points in Charisma so say it's the orange dice so I do a Charisma check and you roll I think it's always like you roll five dice so I would pick of course oh I got two points Charisma I'll grab the two Charisma Dice and then if I have points in the abilities adjacent to it on the wheel I might grab one of those dice because the Charisma dice are going to have the most successes for

37:14 Charisma the ones adjacent to it will I think they each have like one success and then you have some like generic black or white dice that have a little bit of each as well so then you roll that so it's kind of because if I go do a test that's not Charisma but it's the one adjacent to it I can still take my Charisma Dice and then give them add them to the test and the way that the Wheel Works everything kind of makes sense of like in terms of what is next to the next thing so you know you might have a a a sneaking attribute that's kind of close to the combat attribute so you might be more of a sneaky thing so even though it's not a direct combat attribute it's still like combat adjacent and that's just a really really clever thing I mean it's freaking awesome the other cool thing is when you go to do a test in this thing and it is also like Freelancers it's an anthromorph anthropomorphized adventure fantasy thing right so you're going to be running around doing a bunch of different tests and so you will do a test but then sometimes the the app or the story book will um say okay you did this test so you have these successes but did you get any success in combat CU it's not strictly combat test but if you got a bunch of these you can choose to do this other outcome and if you one of your uh weapons that you used that generated like an extra combat success was it a firearm or was it this type of weapon then you can do that and

38:45 so it kind of like organically generates the result targeted to your character sort of your your specializations and all that stuff that was just amazing I think it's one of the coolest mechanics I've seen in a long long time and the way that that worked out and the way that it would generate narrative events based on that and then what happens is when you do these things you get these little effect cards like status cards like you you have you're inspired or you're depressed or you're weakened or you're in jail and all these different things and so that will then affect certain things and then usually when you get a status card you'll grab it you'll put a little token on the card and then a matching token on the track on the game board which shows the days because you usually play the game for like a week in game terms and then it'll say oh put this token here and then 3 days out for put the other token so when the day moves along then that status will just disappear because it's like gone away because you can only stay inspired for so long you can't stay inspired for 24 hours for the rest of your life and so there's or like a companion will show up with you and it'll hang out with you for a couple of days and then it'll go away so so the bonus just naturally kind of dissipates and so you kind of just bounce around this world which is kind of what you can do in earthborn Rangers which is one of the parts I really like about it you kind of bounce around this world interact with these different NPC characters have fights get you know involved in some of these different quests and stuff like that now the thing is there's nothing like

40:17 binding you to any thread in the game there are there's this giant deck of cards huge like hundreds of cards and they have these different State effects and items and things and there's also like a big old stack of quest cards that you can go on and you kind of go and do quests and things happen and you're like oh cool that happened and then you know stuff goes away you know you you you did the quest one way or did it another way so it kind of affects your character that way and uh and you play competitively in the app and this one also has an app it's not in this case the app's not required I really would recommend it because there's a lot of text a lot of text and it actually turned on the text to speech which is a little bit jarring because it's just like a robotic is voice but I got used to it I thought it was fine um I would say if you're not playing with the app you're going to do a ton of reading I'm like H that's a lot of reading I don't like a lot of reading and in recitation uh in in my games anyway um but you know using the app using the kind of robotic text to speech voice I thought it was fine um but the thing is it has some quests that are like I can't remember what they're called they're like then it's it's not epic but it's like you know it's a key Quest and there and there's a handful of them in there they're kind of like the main plot but you can just like not stumble into those for a while I stumbled into one and even the result of that was like okay this did kind of make a world changing thing um and the thing is it has so many cool things though because you have like different cards

41:48 that you slot into places on the board and they will like flip up and down so like you know the state of different towns and places will will change some of one it's a double-sided board so one side is winter one side is not so you have different cards for that and you know different little things will happen it's very easy to keep track of you think it would be fiddly and a mess but it's not but after like I said playing like six times I was like well what nothing was like pulling me back into this world I was like oh what about this character and that character n none of the characters like stood out um you know they eventually started to kind of all blend in together um and so there was like I said there was not really like a main thread and I I think if I were to keep playing it you know maybe played it another six times and maybe a couple of those would sort of you know sort of naturally arise from this procedurally generated stuff but yeah I just that was the part where the game just kind of fell fell away from me I would love to see this system again I would love to see a lot of the stuff cuz honestly it's really worth trying just to kind of play around with that for a little bit and it's not like a legacy campaign thing so it's very easy to kind of reset the decks so if you did get a chance to try it and you were able to get the game you could play you know like I said five six times and you can give it to a friend or whatever and then kind of reset the decks for them that's what I did and um the same friend that uh they they like DF

43:19 romantic I like I know what you have kids I think this could be really cool because um mechanics are very immersive and but they're very simple it's it's not complex to to to do and I think uh him and his kids could have a lot of fun with it for a few sessions so um you know kind of of a caveat recommend there but again I think I'd like to see sort of a reinvestigation of these some of these mechanics CU are really really cool I think they could easily make something that was you know a little bit more linear a little bit more like you know like a main thread a main quest a main plot but then still kind of decorated and colored up with a lot of cool side quests and stuff like that anyway so that's lands of Galer all right we'll take one more little break and we'll review couple expansions and um and yeah all right welcome back everybody uh got three expansions to to talk about we'll just jump right in here um I thought about maybe doing videos on these but eh let me just talk about them I enjoy all of these I recommend all of these but uh let's let's just jump in forget it Ark Nova Marina that's the first expansion that we want to talk

44:50 about uh or sorry Marine worlds not Marina um this I think is is a almost a must-have expansion I think once you've played Arc NOA a bunch which I have then this this will serve you nicely um it's got basically two two main things um that sort of change things up the first thing is as the name implies you've got different kind of like aquatic type creatures that you can you know build into your zoo and it just just gives you some you know a bunch of new cards and and updates the deck in general and it gives you a couple of new what is it universities uh that uh will interact with uh well it'll give you like another icon for the different creature types the different animal types as well so that gives you another way to kind of go after some of those bonuses and stuff so that's kind of the the the main part of it and then the other main part of it is each player has kind of like their own deck of action cards because if you play AR Nova you know like you've got one through five and you've got build buildings you know put animals in enclosures you've got the the little what's it called the association card right that you can do different uh projects and stuff like that and uh you know you have the five action cards well this one you can kind of draft unique versions of those action cards so everybody ends up with uh a couple of

46:20 unique ones that do the you know the basic same action but then a little bit different and to me that's really a really cool part of the game so you could play without that you can just play with the new cards and the new aquatic you know enclosures and creatures and stuff like that that'd be fine but I think to me the best part of it is those unique action cards really have enjoyed that it just spices up the game it's just going to make it very different each time because there's a ton of them there's a ton of them and you don't play with like completely you know revamp there only you only play with a smattering every single time uh so and everybody's going to have different stuff like I said there's a bunch so I really recommend this I've been playing this game more and more more recently and um this is this is slowly becoming one of my one one of my all-time favorites I mean this is really creeping up there it's it's one of those where I don't know like it's it's really killing off a lot of games you know it's kind of like in that race for the Galaxy terraforming Mars space and it's really just to me just kind of just decimated all the competition um with any of these kind of card driven you know Tableau building card games um yeah and then this just adds to it anyway so that's AR NOA Marine worlds uh next one we'll talk about is lost ruins of arac the missing Expedition um this one is fantastic uh I played through now I have

47:53 not played this competitively uh cuz cuz it's got two new um Temple maps that you can put on uh you know your board and and play that way and just play straight up but it also has a six-part campaign which I played all the way through and absolutely loved it now the last expansion which was I think called Expedition leaders had leaders that was the main thing and then there was like a free expansion which had a four-part Quest from what I remember and this Quest is it's kind of like the same Quest cuz in that one the Professor kind of goes missing or whatever and then you're like competing with some like frogue um you know archaeologist freak kind of like bellock and the Indiana Jones movie you know like your arch nemesis so it's similar kind of it's it's like the same almost story but it's it's different and it works out a little bit differently now I would say I think this Quest is much better uh the way it scores and everything is really cool and it gives you lots of cool bonus objectives and like you can carry over certain cards from you know mission to Mission you actually pull you don't use any of the new cards uh in the deck at all and then you kind of have to like find them un lock them and then eventually by the time you get through the end you've unlocked some of the new um other little companion characters as well don't get mixed in right away um so you put those in and then there's like these all these little decks of like little narrative story events and stuff and it's just really really cool um I quite enjoyed it um it uh I think it's

49:24 the basic sort of normal mode is a little bit on the easy side like I abolutely destroyed the thing um but you know you can always up the difficulty too and I can see myself going back through it on like the purple difficulty or whatever oh no you actually don't do that cuz you know you have the solo cards with the green the red and the purple in this one based on the scenario it's kind of a fixed setup of cards but there are other rules in the scenarios that kind of tweak the difficulty so yeah so I would go back uh through that and it adds a couple of new leaders I played um at first I played with the uh like the mechanic that was a lot of fun that first scenario and then I played with the journalist in the second one and then I love that one I just played it all the way through and that really the journalist is really cool like as as an ability and the other thing that's cool um is it gives you like two new um sort of leaders but they don't have any like special board they just have um like you just set up the deck in a certain way there's no other like other mechanics like the leaders have already I'm like that's pretty cool cuz if you were teaching people you could do one of two things you could say well here's here's you know one of these normal leaders that's got this cool involved thing and I'll as a handicap or whatever I'll play as you know one of these more basic Expedition leaders or you could say you know what here's a simpler one you don't have to go learn all these other mechanics I just give you kind of a cool starting deck and you get some cards that are special and they're self-explanatory so I like that too so it kind of gives you four leaders two kind of real leaders and then two sort

50:54 of more basic ones on and like I said the journalist I thought was awesome I love playing the journalist I think that's my favorite leader uh so far um but yeah I can't recommend it enough you know I thought the base game was great and once I played the expansion the first expansion with that free campaign I was like oh this is one of the best games I ever played and this just kind of does more of the same um so really really can't recommend that enough if you if you enjoyed the base game at all this is an easy pickup all right and then the last uh expansion we're going to talk about is return to Dark Tower Covenant uh this is the newest expansion kind of the second expansion for the game although I think the alliances expansion I don't think you can get that separately I think that was a Kickstarter only thing I'm not super sure but it this is not you don't mix this with alliances so if you either play with alliances or you play with a covenant um and I was honestly a little disappointed but then I thought about it I was like like uh that would be kind of a headache because there would just be I think too much going on and it would probably be really hard to kind of balance out all the stuff um and the way that this works is sort of It kind of has a similar vibe to alliances because alliances you have the guilds in each of the different regions and they kind of the guilds kind of start off like hindering you they kind of give you a debuff or a penalty you've got to kind of work to improve the guilds in in the different zones and

52:26 then after a while they're like you know you become a lot more powerful so you have these monuments and the way that those work is you take one of each building type so you got you know your sanctuaries and your Villages and all that stuff and you replace one of each of those and then in one of each of the four different regions and that building's gone there's no building like that and you put like this little blueprint token down and each of those the app will like randomly tell you which ones to to do and then each of those buildings and they're like these giant like crazy Grim dark monuments like there's like a nightmare Tower and a giant Colossus and all these different things and so there will be certain sort of requirements that you have to do to unlock the ability to even build the building and usually those requirements are bad so it'll be like uh or or you have to do some kind of you know thing objective that kind of puts you in danger and like one is like anytime somebody gets a corruption then you put a mark and so once there's been three Corruptions dealt out to anybody in the game then that kind of unlocks the ability for that Monument to be erected then you've got to move to that spot take the action to get the Monument built and the monument will be kind of a souped up version of the building that it replaced so if it's a sanctuary or a citadel or something you'll still have the ability

53:57 kind of the free um I can't remember what they're called the free action ability that you can do but then the the beefed up version of that action is different than the base uh version of that building so it gives you a cool thing and then you tell the app that you have built it and so the building will act as like one of the uh the companions that you can get because the if you you know rescue different companions or find them they will kind of do things in the app in the AI or whatever the app the building these monuments are kind of the same thing they'll they'll help prevent things or give you little bonuses and stuff as well as well as being able to interact with them you know in the kind of the the normal board game Space so it kind of sort of works out in a way like the guilds where the guilds are kind of negative at first there's bad stuff going on and then you take actions to improve them and this is like you know you do some stuff and then once you unlock it then you've got some cool stuff and sometimes the app will uh uh you know require you depending on the boss that let you fight and stuff they're required to build some of these so you can't like usually ever ignore them and then the games I've played of it played it a few times solo and with two no three and four other players and uh um and so in in in in the games that we've played we usually build you know at least two of them that it seems like you got to build at least two of them I I I haven't played a game where you build all four yet I think you'd probably be I don't know maybe you could do it but sometimes it just doesn't it's not conducive to you know the objective of trying to win the game um so that

55:28 that's that's the main new part and then there's these other things that come out uh Wasteland markers and every time you play with the expansion in the app it has you put out these Wasteland markers which basically sort of desolate all of the different zones on the board which basically turns off or deactivates the terrain type so many terrain bonuses that you might have had you know if you get like a force bonus or desert bonus doesn't work in that space if there's a wasteland token there can't do it and also if you move into that space you have to stop moving you cannot move out of there until the start of your next turn well by the end of the game you know you're on month three month four month five there's a bunch of these Wasteland tokens out there so you are having to go on these crazy roundabout routes to get to where you want to go and spending Spirit to double your movement becomes a lot more important than this and so there's that part of it so that kind of to me fixes a little something where it was kind of easy to get around um you know maybe in the bait I don't know it's it's a wrinkle um I would say if I had a criticism of the expansion would be that specific thing because it kind of like obviously fixing that you know how easy it is to get places on the board so it's kind of just like eh you know okay but it's fine I don't know that's my only thing I'm seeing now I really like some of the other interactions everything else about the expansion I really really like and I'd say I think overall I like this expansion better than alliances but having played this a few times now I kind of want to go back and play alliances so I kind of like that there

56:58 is sort of a plug-and-play aspect to this where you know you play with alliances you can play with Covenant you can kind of move back and forth it kind of just helps round out the world kind of feels like you're playing in different sort of timelines or or periods you know in the sort of the history of this of this area um where different things were going on you know the time of The Monuments the time of the guilds and all that so really enjoy the game I mean we have played um um some of the setups like I like I said when I did the review and when I've talked about this in my top 50 games of all time there are some setups in this that I'm like this is really hard to win um specifically there's one that we I haven't beat it yet one time I got my face caved in the other time I was playing with my friends we almost beat it so it's definitely beatable um there is a you know I talked about the Wasteland so you get the Wasteland and then if you choose the uh the dryad as the companion so like guess the main quest what it has you do in that case is move some of the the different Grove tokens that that companion comes with and you have to get them into a region where you've built a monument and where you have to move those Grove tokens to sort of cover up the Wasteland tokens well if you don't get on that right away you're going to and there's only eight Grove tokens you're going to probably be in such a situation that you just it's going to be really hard to move those

58:28 Grove tokens now in the second game we got a quest item that helped us do that a lot quicker and easier we still lost but I was like okay if you don't get that Quest impossible to win so yeah so that's cool though I mean I like that so like we you know the first time we did it and I just ignored the quest because I don't know what I was off doing something else and then we just like we got the quest this time we're like oh yeah Sho we should uh totally do this every single time um but yeah I like that that you can have all these different kind of setups and things that are going to you know kind of vary in difficulty and so it's still kind of you know hits home and does that same thing so anyway that's the return to Dark Tower Covenant expansion uh that is the last uh little piece of review uh that we're going to have for today so if you're still listening thanks for hanging in there and uh listening to all these reviews and uh I wanted to kind of get all these behind me you know especially these expansions and I was like ah just you know I'll put everything in the in the podcast you know get it all taken care of and then uh I I'm looking forward to doing some videos on hegemony and bloodstones and Plum Island and do Imperium Uprising down the road and stuff like that so anyway thanks for listening take care of yourselves thanks