Six Reviews: One Good Game

0:00 Hey everybody, welcome back to the Dice Tower. My name is Chris Yei and as you can imagine from the title of this video, take a look at six games, five of which I think are quite bad and one of them is actually quite good. Now, I am doing this because it's worthwhile to do negative reviews. Uh, one of these I will let you know right now is a one. That's kind of the benchmark to show you what I really do consider like bad bad design. Uh, and several of these are not much higher than that. So, let's go ahead and get started. I've been accused sometimes of giving too many games very high ratings, and sometimes when a video like this comes out, I've been accused of giving way too many games negative ratings. I don't do this to be mean, but because people do want to know what is worth exploring, worth spending their time on. And of course, people will disagree with me on different things. So, of course, I invite that you if you enjoy one of these games, go ahead, talk about why you do enjoy it. But as for me, I'm going to be giving my honest thoughts on these different ones here. And starting with this, Cards at War. Cards at War is War. It literally is the card game war.

1:12 Every player flips over the top card of their deck, and whoever has the highest card takes all these cards and puts them into their discard pile. And when you run out of cards in your deck, you shuffle up your discard pile, and you keep playing. Uh this is war with special powers. The only difference is that there are some god cards. So if you uh flip over a god card and win with that god card, then you activate its special power. In this case here, this is a war. So one, two, three, and then we reveal ah this person wins and they win with Aries. If Aries wins a war, take 10 cards from each opponent. So there you go. And then they collect these ones and then everybody leaves the table. This is a riff on war. This is clearly just a little product made to be sold on the counter of a of this escape room there. In fact, it comes with a card that is just like an escape room puzzle. It comes with advertisements for it. I think the escape room place is probably pretty good. I haven't been there myself, but this as a as a product, as a board game is not one that I'm going to recommend. In fact, it's it's the opposite. I'm going to highly recommend if you are a gamer, don't pick this up. If you're a family that looks at you say, "Oh, I want to I want a deck of cards to play war with, but just with cool little like zany powers that are really going to be super swingy and lucky and really change the tide." But no, that's not what families are thinking. They think that's a cool looking deck of cards. I think it's a very cool looking deck of cards in terms of gameplay. Obviously, I think very lowly of it. It's war, but even luckier

2:44 and swingier and sometimes going to extend it. Sometimes mercifully will make it quicker. This is a one. It's a one out of 10 for me. Uh, and I'm not trying to be mean. I think that what they're marketing this for is fine, but it's not even that great. I do maybe wish that uh instead of selling this on the counter that they would have something like some of the unlock games, something else that can kind of be a better bridge into home tabletop experiences for people that like escape rooms and such. So, not recommending it. Uh next up, I'm going to go to this. This is Pet Quartet from Game Head here, designed by Robert Brower. Fantastic art by Bianca Papalado Papalardo. And so, let me show you this one. Pet Quartet is a game in which you're trying to collect sets of these different cards. This is a triangular deck, meaning that there's 111vens, there's seven sevens, 88s, so on and so forth. And they're all named after different pun type names. The number nine suits my favorite because they're named after jazz musicians. Uh, in this game, you're going to on your turn either flip over a card and add it to one of these four areas here underneath one of the maestros, or uh the player, the next player would go then and take their turn. They can either flip an ad or they can choose to grab all the cards under one of these maestros. And they take this maestro to show that they've already grabbed cards for this turn. The next player goes, I go, the next player goes, the next player goes. At some point, I say, I would like to take these as well. Uh, and then you keep playing like this until all players have taken from a stack. Stacks can have four max.

4:16 And then you're going to play through the entire deck here. The goal of the game is to end with either soloists, meaning just one card of each number, and you'll get a point, or if you're able to grab a quartet, meaning four cards of the same number, then you will also score one point for that. There's advanced rules where instead of scoring a single point for a quartet, you will score the numerical value of it. And there's also advanced rules where underneath each of the maestros, you can choose to place one of these rule tokens. So, like this one says, "When you place a card here, you can also choose to take it at once." Uh, or this one that says, "When you take from here, pass one of your cards to your left." This one can have a maximum of two cards. This one forces you to discard one of the cards from here or discard one of the previous cards you've collected or draw an extra card from the top of the deck when you take from here.

5:10 And that's Pet Quartet. I've enjoyed my fair share of Game Head games, but I've also had negative thoughts on several of them. Corgi pileup being from the first batch of six that they published. This is one of my least favorite of the this current the second batch of six. It is clearly very very inspired by the game colorto which is inspired by Zulerto same designer everything. But this is a game that uses that little push your luck sort of system flip over card or take cards but it doesn't really have teeth and it doesn't have interesting scoring. I think the basic scoring is awful where you either score one point for one card or one point for four cards. Uh, and so I think it's better if you play with the if you have four of a kind, you score its face value, so of nines or of eles or 13s if you're playing with a higher player count. But it's still not interesting. Colorado that this game is inspired by, and I and I'm not faulting it for having the same card flipping system. I think plenty of games should use a system like that, a game mechanism and do and explore interesting paths. The path that this explores is not as interesting, has no teeth to the scoring. It's not very whereas Zulerto or Colorado uh you only score for a few of the colors and so if you take more colors then you're going to be scoring negative points from those. And it creates this real sense of tension of do I want to keep flipping and possibly other people will grab from the piles that I really want and I'll be stuck with a single pile. Well, I'm stuck with this pile. Do I draw another

6:41 card and add to it? That delightful tension isn't there in the way that this game approaches that mechanism. And because of that, I really can't recommend Pet Quartet. I'm giving this one a four. The puns, the art, it's so delightful. Some of the puns are cringey, but that's what they're going for. But I I just don't like it. Four out of 10 for Pet Quartet. Moving along here to Honeypot. This is from uh AEG in Flatout Games. Joseph Zchen, who's the designer of Fantastic Factory, is a game I went into with some good expectations because of that. So, let's take a look. Here's Honeypot set up on the table for four players. The game is played over five rounds, and you'll alternate between passing cards clockwise and counterclockwise each round. uh you are going to be dealt six cards and you get the option of how you would like to stack these with two cards on the top and then two cards below that and then two cards on the bottom. And this is going to be important because players will then pass these dossas clockwise to the left and then everyone is going to uh be revealing them one at a time. So, starting with the first player, let's say that I received here from yellow. I would flip over these two cards. And I would choose whether I wanted to keep these two or pass on them and then flip over the next two cards. And maybe I choose to keep these ones. Oh, I don't know about this. So, I'm going to pass on these. I'm going to reveal the bottom two. Oh, good. I'm going to collect these ones. And these will sit in front of me. Now, the next player is going to go and they're going to flip over two cards. And let's say they're good with this one here. Now, there's still cards left over. So, starting clockwise, this

8:13 player can say, "I will choose to swipe." They're going to spend a twopoint swipe token in order to then continue doing the flipping. They flip over these two and they say, "You know what? Yeah, I'll take those." Uh, and so they will get all of the benefits of the cards here. And now this player has the option to swipe and they say, "Um, no, I don't want to." Now, because this is from my dossier, I don't get to swipe these. These cards simply go away. And so you'll just continue playing like this, revealing all the cards, and you'll play five rounds of this. Whoever has the most negative points from this bad intel is going to get a compensation card here from the middle. And this keeps track of the five rounds. There's different types of cards. There are action cards where if you choose to keep them, you'll gain the action on them right away, drawing extra cards, getting rid of cards, or gaining more swipe tokens. There is good intel, which is just simply worth one, two, or three points. there's bad intel worth negative 1, two, or three points. However, you if you collect a set of negative one, two, and three, you get to discard all of them. There are also different types of set collection if you have a lot or multiple of the same type of thing. And there's also disguises where you want different letter disguises. This one's a wild. And on top of that, some cards have these rubies on top here in the top right corner, which are also points.

9:31 Unspent swipe tokens are two points. play five rounds and whoever has the most points is the winner of Honeybot. Sometimes an interesting sounding system ends up not having peaks and valleys of excitement and disappointment and such. And that's kind of how I feel about Honeypot. It has this push your luck type of a of a structure to it, but without the high highs nor those lows. I flip over two cards. And often times I just look at it go, that's fine. I can just take those. games like this, you want enough negative cards that it feels like those are okay cards. Maybe there's great cards next, but there also might be terrible traps. And I felt like that wasn't present in here. The difference between the best card in the game and the worst card in the game was was too compressed. Uh it just like the the range of it wasn't wide enough. Uh and I know that sounds weird, right? Because of obviously people don't like big luck kind of moments, but also if you don't have those moments of excitement, then you walk away with a game that you just don't have very memorable moments from.

10:37 And this seems like a game that structurally is set up for exciting moments, but then the actual what the cards do, what the what those reactions are are too minimal. Uh it it's also hard sometimes when you're dealt six cards to to split into those stacks of two to slide to your neighbor. Sometimes you look at them and go, "Well, these are all good. This is not going to be interesting." And unlike a lot of I split, you choose type games. It's not like you as the splitter, as the person who sets up the deck of cards, gets a reward based on what the other person chooses to keep or not to keep. That's almost always a very interesting tension to me in Rome in a Day or The Great Split or some of those games. This one does it where other people can kind of draft off of what that person did or did not take and it's too clunky. This game feels like once again structure versus actuality. It's almost structured like it's supposed to be a simultaneous game.

11:37 It plays up to six people. My first game of this was six player and it was such a slog because it has to be turnbased because the person actively flips over cards, chooses whether to keep going or to stop on there and then if they stop and if there's cards left over then the next person can choose to spend a twopoint token. They're giving up points for the opportunity to swipe in and maybe reveal some cards and then I don't know if I should uh I'll pass. Okay, next person. You also get that same choice. It just keeps going around and it's so long and it takes it really takes the wind out of the sales of what should be interesting. Unfortunately, I really disliked this game and I was hoping that I would enjoy it a lot. Also giving Honeypot a four out of 10. I did not care for it and I can't recommend it at all. Next, let's go to medievalons.

12:30 Medieval onions. [singing]

12:35 Medievalons. It's a cute little game. Let's take a look. Here's Medieval on set up on the table. In this case, we're three players. Uh the point of the game is to play cards out of your hand. Play a group of three or more cards down together as a single guild. And the first player to have three guilds on the table at the same time will win the game. Now, you can have all sorts of effects here that will mess with that. So, on your turn, you will always take one action and then you'll draw a card into your hand. Your action could be to play a card, to play out a guild of cards, uh to extend a guild that you already have on the table by adding more to it, or to simply activate the effects of a guild that you already have down. So on my turn, I could choose to, for example, play these three rangers together. Or I can use this jester as a wild like this player has over here to extend to play a more extended guild.

13:24 When you play out a guild, you'll activate its effects. Or I could have simply just played this card to the discard pile to activate its effect. But in this case, I get to activate a ranger. It says, "Take a guild card from one of the guilds on the table." If I took this knight right here into my hand now that this guild has two or fewer cards left in it, it will get discarded and is no longer a guild for this player. And I end my turn by drawing a card. Now, whether you play a guild, play a single card for its effect, uh extend a guild that you already have on the table, or if you were to simply activate the effect of a guild. So, my turn, I could just say, "Oh, it's my action. I'm going to do this." Ha. And then at the end of my turn, I draw a card. And then the next player goes and they'll take an action and then draw cards. Take an action, draw cards, and you keep going. There's all sorts of effects like assassins, which is to get rid of a card in a guild. Rangers steal a card from a guild. uh draw cards from the top of the deck. All players draw a card. So on and so forth. And that's the whole idea of the game. Play till someone has three guilds. This game has a better structure to it. That feels so familiar, right? Take an action and draw a card. That's good, right? I think I feel like that that works. Okay. But it's full of just these very obvious kind of take that type of effects, right? take a card from someone else, look at someone's hand, steal a card, uh, blow up stuff that's on the table, blow up the stuff that works towards the end of the game. This game, uh, now, one thing I I I think I miss shown in the

14:55 video is that when you force someone's guild to you get rid of a card from their guild, now they only have two left on the table and they have to they have to get rid of it. They go back into their player's hand. I think I showed it in the discard pile. That was a mistake. Uh the the thing is that still even with that this game feels like it's one step forward almost an entire step back pretty frequently and that's kind of the flow of the game. Munchkin is known for having that same type of issue where as players progress there's also so many blatant easy ways to then pull them back and say no you didn't really progress that much and two steps forward one step back is not a great feeling in a game. you know, marching towards the end of the goal, one step forward, almost an entire step back feels kind of like proportionally worse. Trying to get to three of those guilds on the table. It's It's not easy because the way that the content of the game, what is there to do? Mostly hurt other people. There's a few effects that are like, "Yeah, draw extra cards. Everybody draws a card."

15:58 Well, I don't really want to do that one. I'd rather get the guild that says blow up other players than the guild that says everyone draws a card. So, I don't like this one structurally. Uh I I I was hoping that maybe it would do something clever with the type of space that it resides in. It didn't. It feels like a lot of other games without adding anything new to it. So, uh A4 for Medievalons. Go now here to Word Wipe. A box that's uh what do you call it's rotationally symmetric. This is a word party game from Matt Bunchie and Peter C. Hayward. Let me show you this one. Here's Word Wipe set up on the table. This is cooperative. So, as a team, players are trying to within five minute timer here get all of these words cleared off of the table. How do they do that? Well, they're going to have one of these hand cards at a time, which is also a word. And in free form order, there's no turns or anything. Players are going to try to come up with a secret word that connects their hand word and any number of cards here from the table. So, let's say uh I say, "Oh, I've got one here for uh thief, spy, makeup, and black is going to combine.

17:06 I'm thinking of a word in my mind." And now players have 30 seconds to uh come up with the word that I'm thinking of. It has to be a single word noun. And so players start throwing out anything. Cat, burglar, no. Uh this thing, no. And I'm allowed to use these three hint cards. I can I'm allowed to say like a being, right? I'm allowed to tap on this and say, "Oh, it's a being." Someone says, "Uh, Catwoman." I'm like, "Yeah, I was totally thinking Catwoman." So, this is gone. And we've cleared these three words now. And then I draw another word card into hand. And I am now thinking about how to connect any of these words with cheap. And we have a uh fiveminut timer going here. And so, you try to just clear them all out. If you want to play a harder version, you just have more word cards out on the table uh at the beginning and you just keep playing.

17:56 man, is this a game I wish I liked? It feels familiar, but it feels different from the word game party space. And it's it is unique in that way where you okay, I have to use I have to use this card from my hand and there's ones on the table. How do I make them match up? The answer is most of the time, if you're me, you don't. Most of the time you sit there and you struggle and you struggle and you struggle and you can come up with like single word clues be like, "Oh, I have this one and it works with this card." But even at that, it takes so long to go through that. Obviously, the best way to do this is to be able to match it up with like three or four words out there on the table at once. Now, players who are maybe more quick on their feet, have stronger vocabulary, and have a group of people they play with that will really like jive with them will have a more fun experience with this. I thought it was clever at first, and then the more I played it, I got really tired of it. I got tired of the moments where I locked up way too much. Just sometimes an entire game, a fiveminute game, I just sat there. I can't really think of a clue. Now, I am playing by guessing other people's clues because it's all cooperative. It's all teambased, but I want to do the thing, right? I feel like I need to carry my weight on the team. And and when every person at the table just feels like I can't really line up the words here on the table with the word in my hand, it's too restrictive. It requires too much creativity in too short of a time. Uh, word wipe is a five for me. As clever as I think it is, it's not it's not one that I want to keep coming back to. So,

19:27 I've talked about five bad games. So, what does Stack Nabbit have to offer? Here's stack nabbit set up on the table. You see this gold foiling on the box, by the way. Nice little touch. Uh here's three players each with a few stacks of cards in front of them. Uh if you're able to bank these or hold on to them till the end of the game, they're going to be worth the number of points as shown on the face value there. On a player's turn, if I'm going here, I'm going to flip over a card. And I can choose to keep going up to five times or to stop. And whenever I stop, I will take the card here that I the last card I flipped over, as well as any cards that match it from the player to my left and to my right, and potentially from the vault, this non-player area over here. So, if I stopped right now, I could take this five, this five, and this five. If I kept going, I could flip over the zero. Now, if I stop, I only take the zero, and I don't steal from any uh anybody else, nor the vault. So, I'm going to keep going. Why would you take a zero point card, by the way?

20:21 because at the end of the game, whoever has the most of these will get 30 points. Now, if I choose to take this one, well, this is great. This is a six-point card. Plus, I steal this six. And then I also steal this one over here. The last thing you'll do at the end of your turn is if the card that you took matches any cards that you already previously had, you would flip them over. So, if I already had a six, this player had a six. And I flip this one over, I would steal, or I would take, I would steal, and since I already have a six, I would lock this down. And now, no one can mess with those cards. These cards would come over here to the vault, ready to be taken by another player. The next player takes the turn. You keep going until the deck runs out and whoever has the most points at the end of the game wins. So, as you can see, this is a very simple little pushy luck game. It has a structure that feels familiar in some ways, but then is different in others. You never bust necessarily, but as you flip over a card, you say, "Uh, ooh, I do want to keep that one, but there is another card I'd rather go for." And you keep flipping, go, "I'm not getting that one either. Oh no, I wish I had taken that earlier one." This one to me manages to pull off that right amount of tension.

21:26 It's a softer tension than other push your luck games like the game Push or Dead Man's Draw games that I love, but it's also a slightly more approachable type of attention. You're you're always wanting something. And even when there's like such a good move, you go, I wonder if there is a better move now. I'll go with this one. I think that it nails that just right. This is, by the way, from Taco Cat Games. Tacoat Goat Cheese Pizza. Same company. I've played a lot of their follow-up games and they're not as good. This one I think is pretty dang solid actually. Uh it's a little rinse and repeat and it's a large deck and you are going to go through it. But and so even if it does feel a little bit repetitive, there are enough moments of high tension and high excitement where you go I really want a four. Someone's sitting on a stack of four fours over there. And because you only take from your left and your right neighbor if you're playing four players, uh then these two people sitting opposite each other cannot steal from each other. So sometimes you're in this great position where you go, if I flip over a dang four, I'm going to steal from you. I'm going to steal from you. And I'm going to take from that vault in the middle of the table. That's so exciting. And then you have to sit there and hope, okay, now no one steal from me. This reminds me of the Rhino game Fruit Fight or No Mercy. That game scores things differently and it does have a you can bust if you flip over matching cards in the middle. Uh but and so yeah, this one is quite familiar, but also quite different and I I appreciate just how

22:58 different it is. I'm giving this one a seven. I'm recommending this one. Uh if you see this one available and you want a game that almost anybody can play, uh and it doesn't have it barely has rules to it. You the big thing you got to remember is like why why does anyone want zeros? Oh, cuz most zeros is 30 points. Ooh, I like that. Cuz I was sitting there playing this thinking like, well, a six is six times better than a one card. uh and three times as good as the twos, for example. Uh if there's ones, I know that there's twos. And so you sit there and think like, well, I don't want twos. They're terrible. But when someone is sitting there with a giant stack of twos, and you realize that's 27 28 27, that's 28 points sitting over there. I would like to steal that actually more than I want to steal fives this round. So it has this interesting tension where even the low value cards kind of ramp up and mean something over the course of the game.

23:48 I'm pleasantly surprised with it. I am recommending you check this one out. If you like push your luck games, cute, adorable ones at that, then check out Stack Nabbit. Uh, so there you go folks, that's the five games I didn't like and one that I did enjoy. If you have different thoughts, please share them below and uh, thanks for coming out this review here on the Dice Tower. My name is Chris Ye. You folks have yourselves a stack nabity time.

24:17 Hey folks, I'm Tom Bassel. Thanks for watching this video. Check out our channel. We have a lot of videos on our channel. We have live videos that go up each week from live Q&As's to videos where we take a look at the newest stuff on Kickstarter, crowd surfing to top 10 lists and more. There's lots of stuff on this channel. We encourage you to explore it. You can find out more at our website, dicetower.com. I'm Don Bassel. Thanks for watching another video on the Dice Valley.

24:50 I got rust blades in my pocket.