Impressions - Aftershock, Trismegistus, Throne of Allegoria, & Blind Spot

0:00 welcome to the jungin scams impressions vlog today I'll be discussing four new games that I was able to play recently and I will be going through them in alphabetical order now I do want to mention that if you are more interested in listening to this vlog than watching it then you can do so by going to the John gets games podcast now before we jump into the games I would like to ask that if you enjoy this video that you please click the like button for it down below as well as the subscribe button for the channel also if you would like to directly support the channel and the creation of future videos like this one then please go to John gets games.com slash support there you'll find a bunch of ways that you can really help things out and some of them come with pretty cool perks like voting on a couple of the videos that I fell in each month alright let's now start talking about games and the first one for today is aftershock now this is a relatively recently published game and I was able to play a single 5 player game of this about 5 days ago or so now what's going on in this game somatically is a massive earthquake has hit either the San Francisco Bay Area or you can flip the board over and then it hits in Venice now we obviously played with the San Francisco Bay Area side because that's where I live that's where all of us lives and it was a bit kind of close to home I guess because as we were playing on this map we see all of these regions that you know I know very well you have Fremont and Hayward in San Francisco and South San Francisco and you know these are all places that I Drive to someone often now mechanically what you're doing in this game is effectively trying to get area majorities within the different regions out on the map and each one of these cities has been I guess ripped apart from each other by this massive earthquake so a big thing you were doing in this game also is actually rebuilding

1:32 bridges out onto the board now mechanically what you're doing in this game is you're gonna go through a few different steps together within each round now the first step it involves dealing out a hand of cards to everybody and then everyone can spend their money in order to buy as many cards as they want to from this hand now these cards have a variety of different things on them some of them are really simple they might just say put a single one of your pawns into Fremont for instance and you're like okay well that's pretty simple other cards are a little more expensive and they let you build a bridge anywhere you want really and they also give you another pawn that you could put anywhere you want so that's a nice bit of flexibility and there are also aftershock cards now mechanically what you actually do in this game is you can cause aftershocks that happen in specific areas which means I guess we all have godlike powers but either way I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself because after you have finished buying all of the cards that you want from your hand you will then take the rest of the cards and put them face up in front of your player screen now at that point if players can now go around the table one at a time buying cards away from your opponents so if somebody buys one of the cards I did not buy then they take that card and they give me money and then I could use that money to buy another card that's in front of another one of the opponents now this idea definitely reminds me of Isle of Skye which is a brilliant game it's one of my favorite games overall so I was very excited when I learned about this mechanic I should say that I didn't actually read the rules to this one I went to a local game night and somebody was setting the game up and they had a space available so I sat down they taught the game and we were able to play it so after everybody

3:04 has spent their money buying cards away from their opponents then you go through rounds where you actually play the cards out you put your different pawns on down on to the specific spots and then behind a player screen everybody is going to secretly decide where bridges are going to be built where new pawns are going to go down and where things like aftershocks are going to happen so then you reveal these and you put all these down onto the board and the aftershocks cause you to roll a die it's a special diet has two ones two 2s and two threes and you have to then send that number of pawns from the specific aftershock area out now if there are no bridges then you just remove them from the board but if there is a bridge then they're gonna travel down the bridge now if it's their color bridge then they don't have to pay anything but if they go down somebody else's bridge they have to pay 1 million dollars or one dollar in the game to the person who owned that bridge now what that means is you are going to be playing cards to put down pawns in two specific areas to try and to take majorities and then also playing aftershocks to try and shake up those majorities literally as you try to get other people to go away now you might after shock an area and then only target your own pawns because the area majority isn't going very well for you and so you figure it's better to send these out to different places and you can actually send them out to multiple spots they don't just go to an adjacent location you can keep having them move and you just have to pay each time they go across one of the bridges now that is most of what you do on your turn but then the final kicker the final mechanical thing that kind of pieces everything together is that everyone is then going to in a hidden

4:34 manner select where is going to score now each person has I believe it was 2/3 of these scoring tokens and they can put them down on to the different regions on the map behind your shield and then everybody reveals these and a region will only score if at least two people have selected that region so what this means is this is a or area majority game where you might be in the majority and you might not actually get any points for it because that area might not score so there is a bit of a negotiation aspect to this game now when we play to our five player game which is I believe the max player account we only did two rounds of this I think there are three rounds at lower player accounts and in the second round especially when we were in the the phase of the game where we were actually trying to figure out where was gonna score people were talking a lot it was like I look across the table and be like hey Nick you and me Fremont right like sure I'm at first but you're in second I'm only gonna make one more point than you you want those five points right you know that kind of thing now the problem is that you only have three of these markers and there are a lot of regions and another thing that you can cause to score are bridges now this is just a majority of bridge pieces out on the board so again that's only gonna score if multiple people think that makes sense now there is an asterisk to this because one of the cards that you can buy essentially gives you a bonus influence token which means you can put it down with one of your basic ones to force a scoring without having anyone's help now these cards are pretty expensive but obviously they are very important because you might find yourself in a situation like we had in our game where one player was dominating the bridge game and they knew that nobody else was really in a position to want to throw a token over there to give

6:06 them all these points so they just forced it to happen by spending money to get the card to make that happen and they ended up winning by a pretty large amount but in general that's my friend Nick and he wins games a lot and it was not just the bridge thing that caused him to win now speaking of the inverse of winning I came in dead last in this game and a major recent event is because the two regions that I had the majorities in in that second round did not score at all I tried I put my scoring tokens down on them I talked to the people who were in second place in both spots and I tried to convince them to score those spots but everyone who only has three of these tokens and they all decided to go somewhere else and I kind of ended up at the bottom of the pile there and when the dust settle at the end of the game I couldn't help but feel a little bit weird about it overall so we had a bit of a discussion and it really seems like this game has a lot of really cool ideas like pretty much every one of these ideas that I mentioned so far are things that I really like the idea of buying cards and then leaving some out on a market that other people can buy to give you money to buy more cards well that's awesome I love that in eyeless sky and it works really well in this game the idea that you have an area majority game or not every area is gonna score sounds fascinating but in reality it was pretty frustrating and then when it came to the actual putting of pawns down and doing the aftershocks well that's a really neat idea from a thematic perspective as well as a mechanical one is you're trying to like work out your majorities but you also roll a die to see just how many of these pawns are gonna move now there are better aftershocks that you can buy as

7:37 cards and they add +1 or +2 to your die roll but that doesn't change the fact that you might buy the cheap aftershock and roll of one and that might not actually really do anything now this is an area majority game so that one movement might actually be huge but either way it just seemed like this game did not come together very well for me maybe it's because this was a 5 player game and we were playing just two rounds instead of more rounds overall but it seemed like I liked each individual part of this game I thought there were really cool ideas and each step of the way but when it actually flowed together as a game I did not feel actually that much ownership a on how well I did and B I didn't feel that enthusiastic about where it was you know I came in dead last and I wasn't I didn't feel all that bad about it I was honestly just kind of happy that the game was over so that I can move on to something else now that kind of makes me it sound like I hated the game which is not the case at all because it was an interesting experience through each step of the way and I have a hard time really pinpointing an exact flaw or something about it I just have to say that you know my perspective and the perspective of a couple friends that I talked to after the game was just that we weren't actually that interested in playing it again it just it did not come together very well and it's hard to exactly say why this is not my copy I'm sure I will see it getting played again and I don't know if I have an opportunity to play it at maybe players in the future I might give that a shot I think I heard that you might get more of the influence tokens to Cosmo regions to score at lower player accounts so it's possible that we just played this game at a bad player account and I have I had initial impression of

9:07 it because of that so yeah I guess with that in mind I might give it a shot again at a lower Claire account I'm not going to completely say no overall but it's certainly not a game that I am actively chasing down to play again ok let's now move on to the second game and this one is blind spot now this is a game that I had not heard anything about before I started playing it it was brought out by a friend of mine at a local game night and it was pitched to me as a real-time competitive word search type game and I am awful at word games in general but I decided to give it a shot now let's talk a little bit about how it works before I discuss how it went and the the main mechanic of this game is is word searching you effectively take out these different titles that have letters on them they make a square grid of different letters and when it's your turn you are trying to find a word either in a row or a column now the word can be forwards or backwards as you're finding it but the big catch for this game is that when you take your turn you have to put one of your little tiddlywink disks down onto the board in the middle of that word blocking out one of the letters so what that means is if you want to sell spell the word cat for instance you might look out to the board and it might say like C Z 80 so now I have to take my token and I cover that Z so now it just says CIT that's the word I say that and then my turn is done so now the next person can go now I did say that this is a timed game and that's because everybody has a little hourglass which is I think 30 seconds that you flip over when it's your turn so it's not simultaneous real time or anything like that but you do have a time crunch trying to find these

10:39 words now as far as a mechanical catch that's a pretty interesting idea like you could look out and find words but you don't want to find it correct words you want to find words with one error to then put that token down and then when it's your turn again you actually have the opportunity to flow past the tokens that you put down already so like I said before it says see token 80 so now maybe on your next turn you can use that C a and T on a longer line to make a better word than I cannot come up with at this moment and you just skip over your token now you cannot skip over your opponent's tokens which means this is a word search type game it also has a bit of an area control vibe to it because as you put your tokens down you are blocking options from your opponent's around the table they cannot cross over your pawn now as soon as you have a turn where you cannot put a pawn down you have to put one of your little tokens out onto a little board that says okay I've missed one turn and once you do that twice you are out of the game entirely however once you do it once you then unlock the ability to find diagonal words so effectively this means the flow of the game hypothetically is players find all of the good words things get more and more crowded it's harder and harder to find stuff because your opponent's pieces are around so then you can't find anything you take upon a token you put it on the thing so you're one step towards losing but now diagonals are available and so there's this whole new you know gold rush of new opportunities out there on the board and yeah that's essentially the game you keep playing I believe until one person is remaining now what actually happened in our game

12:10 is it very swiftly became a two-player game from the three of us because as I said I am awful at word games now what ended up happening is I was able to find my first word and that was fine and then it came back around to me and then I believe I found my second word and then it came back around to me and I just could not find a third word my opponents had no problems but I stalled out 30 seconds went by so I put my token down suddenly diagnosed diagonals are available so now my opponents go and just in quick succession they find words that I didn't see so suddenly it's my turn again now I can do diagonals I still can't see anything and the 30-second timer goes out I put my other token down and I was just out so fast now what ended up happening was my two opponents played a two-player game for I don't know a good 10 plus minutes after that and it was actually really entertaining to watch them the board got really crowded it got really tense as things got really close and I don't actually remember who won but I definitely felt a little bit of shame because and they kept playing and playing and I just looked out to this board where they're just these two little red tokens out there the only two things I was able to do so at the end of the day blind spot is a game that I am awful at it's a game that I will likely never play again but I have to admit I think it's a pretty cool game if I liked word games this is one that I think I would be pretty jazzed about because that idea of of finding the words with the the letters that you don't want in the middle and trying to take over space to kind of hem your opponents in while you are also potentially unlocking diagonals it just seems like there are a lot of really great ideas in here that people who like word games will probably really like so

13:41 I'm gonna end this by highly recommending it if you enjoy real time and/or word games but if you are atrocious at word games like I am and it's really not worth your time to play alright let's now move on to the third game I'll be discussing today and that one is throne of a Liguria now this is a pretty recent published game from spiel works games and I bought a copy from the BoardGameGeek store because that's the main way that I can get it here in the United States that's the main way to get spiel works games now thrown of a Liguria is a game with quite a bit going on and I'll talk a bit about the mechanics of it now and I'll try not to go into too much detail but the main thing that you're doing in this game is you are doing blind bidding on two actions and then when you reveal those actions the strongest person who put the best bid down there is to do the most actions and then after that the next person can take less and less now these bid tokens that you have while you have six of them two of them are zeros you have a couple ones you have a two and then you have one that could be a one or a two now those zeros are effectively Bluff bids if you send those out and they get revealed they don't do anything and you just pull them right back off the board now at the start of each round players are just gonna be putting down these bidding tokens on to seven different action areas on the board and you won't know what your phones have done so that's really where the zeros come into play you can put that down and then maybe stack a zero on top of a one that you put there and your opponent might be worried that that might be a 1 and a 2 so they might over commit to that area to put more bidding power there because they're concerned about that tile which ends up being a zero now what you then do once you have put all your tokens out

15:13 is you go through each of the seven areas and the person who has the highest power in that spot it's the best version of that action now some of those actions involve giving you work force cards which will help you bolster tracks which I'll talk about in a second another spot lets you get in-game goals which you can cash in when you do specific quests essentially and they give you points and the that these actions will do essentially five out of the seven actions will be influencing the board in a variety of ways now a big thing about this game is the little nipples that you have that you're going to put out onto the board and they can be one of three different things depending on where they are if they are in a battlefield they are a soldier if they're in a tavern they are a spy and if they are over in a marketplace than they are a merchant and there are different action spots for each one of these different types of Units now when you do these actions based off of how much you've been compared to your opponent's you can do things like add more soldiers spies of merchants you can also move them around the board and you can do main actions with them now there are effectively two different types of actions in the game there are deploy actions and there are task actions that the deploy actions just let you put out the unit's and move them and the task ones let you have those units do their special thing soldiers are going to fight when you use the task actions these spies are going to do intrigue and the merchants will let you do trade and I'm gonna try really hard not to go into the specifics of how old this works otherwise I'd be talking for quite a while but realistically soldiers are gonna fight soldiers and when that happens you are going to compare the amount of

16:43 soldiers one person has to the other and then you roll a special die now that die has a couple of zero phases and then has a 1 a 2 a 3 and a 4 and you add that to the amount of soldiers that you have and then the person with the most power is gonna win that battle and they take spoils based off of the difference now the spoils could be just removing opponents soldiers from that area or you could just take influence which is points now if you try to go battle with your soldiers and there's no one there then you can do a raid action and for this you just take a soldier off the board to gain a point or there is now a I guess a sanctioned designer variant that I did play in my second game where you can roll that 0 to 4 die and add to those extra points we need to that first raid with an action now that's the details of raiding and I guess I shouldn't talk about all of the specifics of everything else too much but realistically in this game you're doing all of these seven areas and then you're gonna go back into the bidding phase and you're gonna do this six times now at the start of each of these rounds you're gonna draw an event card and there's a pretty wide variety of them and they do a bunch of different things but a neat thing about these event cards is there's a top and a bottom now the top is activated if the queen is alive I guess no matically the Queen is dying and you're not sure when that will happen and at some point you will draw a card that says the queen is dead and then you topple the Queen figure down and now for the rest of the game when you draw those event cards you read the bottom part instead of the top now I wasn't able to get a huge data set but it seemed like the top actions are more beneficial and the bottom actions are a little bit more aggressive and costly

18:16 around like the top action might give stuff and the bottom action might take stuff away but it definitely buries the gameplay especially from a thematic perspective as everybody's you know vying for control of the land as the monarch is dying so you're gonna play through six rounds of the game like this and I know I've glossed over humongous amounts of the mechanics but I think I'd like to now start talking about how the game actually played for us now I played two games of this one the first game was a four player game and the second game was a three-player game now the only difference between these two plays besides the player account is in that second game I played with the designer variant that I mentioned and a big reason for that is because in our first game we all had fun playing it but there did seem to be the strange thing where soldiers didn't seem very good you would spend a bunch of energy to make your soldiers to send them out but only one person out of the rest of us around the table decided to make soldiers and so they had nobody to fight so they just did the raid action which just gave one influence when you pull the soldier back so I'm actually friends with one of the designers of this game and I was chatting with him on online and he mentioned this variant that he was working with and it's now been published into the official errata for the game and I was quite curious to try the game again with that variant to make the soldiers a little bit more impactful like knowing that you could raid in an area and get that guaranteed point and then roll the die and potentially get up to four more points definitely incentivizes making soldiers and deploying them and what ended up happening in our second game which was just three players is there were quite a few more soldiers made no there was not a lot of raiding and battles happening

19:47 but at least there were some whereas in the first game there was no die rolling at all nobody rolled it too high because the only person who had soldiers just fought nothing and just pulled their soldiers back to get points now from a points perspective they or a few different ways to get them in the game and one thing I do want to mention is a diplomacy track now you get to go up this track whenever you do the main task action - for spies and this gives you a point multiplier based off of the number of those in-game goals that you've taken now you only get these in-game goals when you go to that action so the main way that you get them is just once per turn so that's effectively six for the whole game now there is another way that you can get a couple more but it's pretty expensive but what you do is you complete these goals that they give you points but then at the end of the game your diplomacy track multiplies on those goals so it seemed to me especially in my first play that I needed to go really hard on that diplomacy track and then try to complete six and game goals and when you max the track out that's six times five I think it wasn't and it ended up being about thirty points or six times six something like that now that seemed to be a great thing when you consider the fact that a good score in this game is about sixty and in that game I think I lost on the tiebreaker and I went really hard on those goals and the intrigue now in the second game I was quite curious to try battling because I was gonna be playing with this variant I wanted to see how that went and so I did not emphasize the diplomacy track as much and I did very poorly in that game I'm really not sure

21:17 after only two points of data it just does not feel like the the soldier strategy trying to get out and do lots of battles is all that effective and it's very possible that I'm just very bad at pulling that off so maybe it's just a harder thing to do as a newer person to the game but I did find that to be a little bit strange now there is another mechanic so I have not mentioned at all that I really should and that is the fact that each player has a board in front themselves with a bunch of tracks now these tracks are in line with the different guilds in the game and as you push up these tracks you are gonna essentially get points at the end of the game but you can also go down these tracks in order to get bonus actions which will really help you out as you're trying to piece together good turns to make units and movement into units and actually activate them to do the stuff that you want now obviously these tracks are important because getting extra actions is good and the main way you go up these tracks is through spending these work force cards you can get as an action now there are other ways to do this and I am really trying hard not to go into the weeds on a lot of these different mechanics but another thing that happens with these tracks is if you go too far down in any given track to get points you will take anarchy now anarchy our little negative point tokens and they are each worth a variable amount of negative points based off of how much Anarchy the entire table has it could be minus one point or they could be - four points each depending on how many are out there in the system now what ended up happening in both of our games is people were constantly taking Anarchy because getting bonus actions is important so going down in your tracks

22:48 is good even though going up on your tanks gives you points but what happens is one of the action spaces that you can go to lets you get rid of Anarchy to kind of give almost to the poor and then you actually get to go up a little oldest track which gives you bonuses so it seemed like it was relatively easy to get a bunch of Anarchy and then get rid of that Anarchy as we were playing and in either of the games we never had the negative value of Anarchy ever go over one so I'm not really sure what was going on there maybe we were being still a little bit too cautious with our ability to take Anarchy because lots of the actions let you take an anarchy to add something like when you're battling and you're rolling a die against an opponent if you are the aggressor you can take an Enter key to add +1 to that die to give you a little bit of control over how that battle is going so that's just another thing that you aren't balancing with all of this other stuff going on so at this point I feel like I've been a little bit disjointed as I've been trying to describe how this game goes but realistically the main beat of this game is trying to complete these goals you have goals that you get in the middle of the game and then at the start of the game you also get five special goals you're gonna keep three of them and you will try to complete them at the end of the game now I do want to mention these specifically because in the first game I don't remember exactly what those final and again end of game goals were but they didn't seem all that difficult to work towards it seemed like there were each things I could wait until the very end of the game effectively to try and cash those in and it's really important to cash all goals in because if you get

24:19 them then you get points and if you don't at the end of the game you actually lose points now I had one goal for instance I believe it said more spies on the board than soldiers well in that game I never made a single soldier so I made one spy and I easily got that goal there were a couple other ones that seem to be very tactical and things that I could worry about in the last round now I'm gonna compare that to my second play of the game where it was three players and two out of the three cards that I had were things that I needed to work towards from the very first turn of the game they involved getting to a specific spot on the tracks on my board and it was not easy to get to that specific spot so I strived really hard to get those tracks up while still spinning going back down the tracks to get bonus actions when I needed to and when the dust settle at the end of that second game I made one of those two and I lost the other one by a single step and that's a pretty impactful loss because those end of game cards give you five points if you get them or they lose you three points if you don't so it's effectively an eight point swing and again a good score is like 60 so losing a points based off of being so close but not quite getting there can be a little bit painful overall so overall this is how the game plays you're just gonna go through six rounds you're placing bidding tokens down you're moving things around the board a major thing that you're paying attention to are your in-game goals so you might decide to make those soldiers because you have a goal that says have soldiers here there and there so you're like okay well I don't want to lose points for this card so let's make the soldiers let's move them out and then I believe you know the

25:50 intended tension there as well you have soldiers now so cash in on those soldiers do stuff with them go fight raid do these things and hypothetically multiple people will get goals which will cause them to make soldiers make spies make merchants and then have them kind of clash in a variety of different ways although it's just the soldiers that actually clash so you were just gonna ease goals as you were playing the game and I couldn't help but have a feeling after both of the plays that I didn't really build anything in this game and that's not a slight against the game at all because that's obviously not something that they were gunning for as an overall design it seemed like this game was all about kind of the race you know you're like you know constantly trying to make these goals working okay good this one's done okay give a new goal oh can I do that yeah I'll try to make that happen so it's it's all about modifying your situation and then spending resources to make schools happen and then cash out extra points after you have those resources already invested in out on the board and I have to admit that I don't really know if it did all that much for me I liked a lot of the individual ideas of this game I thought the bidding worked really well the bluff bids were interesting I definitely saw times where people over committed because of those bluff bids you can also use those zero bids to get in early because you can break a tie on the strength of your bid by getting into that spot earlier and then just stack on top of your bluff bid with the two that you wanted to do all along so I really liked the bidding structure I really liked the track system in this game where you could you were trying to go up the tracks to get points and then the higher up on the tracks you are the more efficient you move I didn't mention that

27:21 but that's the thing and then also getting bonus actions by going down and then getting anarchy they got to balance I just love all of these ideas but I can't help but feel like I'm kind of repeating myself from aftershock earlier where it seemed like the game was a bunch of really interesting ideas that came together in a way that I just don't fancy that much I think realistically and after playing this game twice I don't think I'm gonna be playing it again overall it was not that hard to teach the game comes with a great player aid that really helped people jump right into it I liked the idea of the monarch dying and like you know people vying for control as you know we have events coming out and I really liked the way that people were trying to piece together and make these goals work it just seemed like it was I don't know maybe too restrictive to make the goals happen although I got the goals done where I needed to for the most part but it just the game did not really click with me overall and I'm having a hard time exactly saying why but at the end of the day I think this is where I stand all right let's now move on to the final game I'll be discussing today and that is Trismegistus now before I move on I do want to be very clear about the fact that I have an ongoing professional relationship with the publisher of this game in fact they paid me to make a sponsored tutorial playthrough for Trismegistus so if what I'm about to say interests you or confuses you then definitely check out the tutorial because it will certainly help things now obviously I am going to be biased with my opinion because of that professional relationship but I played this with friends and I did want to talk about it so there

28:51 you now have a couple grains of salt to deal with but let's now go ahead and talk about how the game plays now matically what you are is alchemists trying to create the Philosopher's Stone now mechanically what you're doing in this game is you are drafting a dice of a wide variety of types and you're gonna use those dice to try and get materials get essences transmute materials into better materials and use those essences in order to complete experiments which will give you bonuses and let you keep doing all of these things now there's a lot going on to this game and I'm gonna try to take a very high-level approach to explaining it but mechanically when it is your turn if you don't have a guy then you have to draft one from the center of the board now the dye that you choose is going to have a potency level which is essentially how powerful it is and that is equal to the amount of dice of that type that is still on the board so at the beginning of the round you roll a bunch of dice and if on your turn you take an iron die and there are three iron dice in that spot then that iron die that you took has a potency of three now you put that onto your board onto the three spot on a track and then you take your main action which is going to use potency of that dice but not necessarily all of the potency so what that means is some turns you're gonna drop dice and other turns you are just going to use the potency from a dime that you are still extracting value out of essentially now with that potency you can do a wide variety of things some of that i've already talked about already and realistically you are trying to match everything up to make these experiments happen now you have to spend potency to get new experiments and the

30:22 experiments usually want refined versions of goods now in order to get refined goods you have to turn raw goods into the refined version but you don't take a raw tin and turn it into refined tin no rotten gets transmuted into refined mercury so that means if you want rotten or refined to ten then you need to get raw copper which is farther down the track now at the bottom of every players board there is this flowing path that goes from lead all the way to gold and there are many steps along the way and one of the things you're gonna spend potency from your die on is to transmute now the dye that you choose is going to have a color it might be red white or black and when you transmit you just care about the color because different parts the transmutation chain or associated with those different colors now when you transmit you can obviously upgrade that material but you also have to spend an essence and when you do that the essence is associated with a specific element for instance ether is associated with I believe it was water and salt is associated with fire etc etc now when you spend that you actually go up a mastery track for that specific type of element and that's important if we double back to the experiments because when you complete them you have to get rid of resources but you also have to prove that you have mastered that type of element enough to actually complete the experiment now each one of these cards it tells you a threshold you have to be at it might say like five water and that means you have to be at the five spot on the water mastery track which means you have to have found some way to go up five times and in general that means transmuting getting rid of

31:54 ether because the ether is associated with water now there are a lot of other ways that you can make all of this stuff happen and realistically the rubber meets the road in this game when it comes to combos now one of the things that you can get in this game are artifacts and they get slotted in underneath each one of the different transmutation paths and when you do that transportation if you have an active artifact then that's going to give you bonuses and this game is all about piecing together bonus combo engines so what ends up happening when you're playing this game is you might have a turn where you drafted I and then you spend one potency to take a single raw material for that and that's it your entire turn is done and it took you like ten seconds but on your next turn you might through the use of bonus actions and combos find yourself doing stuff for like five minutes straight you might start off by saying okay as a free action I'm going to complete this experiment cool the experiment gives me bonuses it lets me get a free transmutation and then with that transportation I'm going to move this over here I spend an essence which bumps me up a track and then when I do that transportation it activates an artifact which is going to give me more essences as well as more materials and now with those materials and essences I can use that bonus transportation that I just talked about already to double back into that thing and oh I went on a different area now that new artifact is gonna activate and then that finishes but now you have enough stuff to complete another experiment and then this whole thing jumps right back in again and there are other free actions which can give you these formula tokens which you can put down into the middle of your board and when you fill rows and columns you get more bonuses so

33:25 this game is all about just tiny little setup turns and then explosive massive turns you have a turn where you do like one thing and the next turn you do like 18 different things in this precise intricate path that get you to is the very end and I have to tell you that it feels incredibly satisfying to pull it off but I also have to tell you that it's very brain intensive this game it's very heavy from a rules perspective honestly it's not that bad I think I've taught this game in under 30 minutes why I guess I only taught it once but I did not have a hard time teaching the game and the concepts of the game were not that hard to get through to my opponents around the table but when you start realizing the ramifications of all of your decisions analysis paralysis can absolutely set in now I don't remember exactly how long it took but in our three player game it was it was at least three hours our three player game was at least three hours and that means this was an hour per player now it was not overly long I was actually shocked at how much time had gone by when I looked at my phone when the game was over because I spent that entire three hours just with steam coming out of my ears trying to figure out what I was gonna do sure my opponent was doing a big turn over there and they're taking a bunch of time and they're humming and hawing about what thing to do but that's fine because I'm over here like how am I gonna piece this together okay I'm gonna transmit this over there now activates this to add this over here that's gonna be gone okay then I'm gonna get rid of this experiment so these are gone but then I'm gonna get this stuff and then will that let me do this other thing and there's just so much stuff to think

34:56 about and that also came into play with the playthrough it took much longer than average to actually fill me even though it was only a two-player perspective because there's just a lot of ramifications of your decisions and if you want to play this game well then you're gonna have to plot a course through these wonderfully satisfying combos and if you don't do a very good job of that then you might actually find yourself not particularly close to your opponents now there is one other thing that I do want to mention it adds one more layer of complexity to the game and that involves these publications now you start the game with one of the and you can get more as you're playing through the game and they simply give you conditional endgame victory points for doing a wide variety of things now as far as euros are concerned this is super standard like conditional and game points yes give me more of that I love that stuff in Euro games however in order to get those points you have to activate them by spending elements and how do you get elements well the experiments that you complete give you elements the artifacts that you take it give you elements and you can also get elements by maxing out to your mastery tracks so in addition to all of these convoy things that you are thinking about you are also trying to piece together the things that you have completed you know the artifacts you've spent a lot of potency taking and the experiments that you've put a bunch of effort into completing well you don't want to end the game with a bunch of elements unused so you want to make sure those piece together with the publication's that you have and that means you also want to make sure that you are gunning towards the conditional benefit of that publication and as you can see this is just one more layer on top of this analysis cake stack thing

36:29 that is going on in this game and and I feel a bit conflicted about it honestly our three player game took three hours and I I just don't play three hour games all that often now I haven't sat down to play a two-player game with somebody else and I think if I did it would be quite a bit shorter it would probably be more like two hours or so and I do think that I would potentially do that because the combos when you pull them off or so incredibly satisfying honestly they could be exciting at times there were a couple moments and both of the games even when I was filming it where I was excited about a term because I was like oh my gosh I'm about to do so much stuff this is gonna be so cool but then of course there's a lot of other time sitting there thinking I am just one thing away from doing the cool thing how do I figure this out and you know how much time do you invest into trying to figure out how to overcome that one thing versus just saying okay well that awesome plan isn't gonna work time for a new plan so I think that's gonna pretty much wrap up everything I have to say about Trismegistus where I stand is I honestly might not play it again because it is so analysis paralysis inducing but I really enjoyed a lot of the stuff that's going on in and I like the flow and even though I played a three hour game of it it did not feel that long because I was in a time warp of extreme mental calculations I just find these days in general I'm not necessarily looking to play games that are this intense and this crunchy but a lot of people are and if you are looking for intense crunchy combo a wacky games where you can pull off some pretty crazy things then Trismegistus is

38:00 probably something you should try to play at some point well at this point we have now reached the end of this impressions vlog and I think it was a bit of a long one a couple of these games were somewhat heavy and honestly I did not have super glowing things to say about some of them you know and sometimes in these impressions vlogs I'd say every single game that I played was great and a lot of that has to do with selection bias because I choose to try and play games and I think I'm already gonna like but you know with some games you hit and sometimes you miss obviously I probably liked Trismegistus the most out of all of the ones that I talked about today but even that one I have some reservations about playing even more so yeah I think that's gonna bring it this impressions vlog to a close as always I'd like to thank everyone who's been supporting this channel including all of these producer level patreon backers if you two would like to directly support the channel and the creation of videos like this one then please go to John gets games.com slash support to see a variety of ways with which you can do that also if you enjoy this video please click the like button down below as well as the subscribe button for the channel thanks for watching