6 Games I Played so You Don’t Have To - with Tom Vasel
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Transcript
Hey everybody, I'm Tom Vassal. Today I'm talking about six games I played so you don't have to. These are six games that I played that I don't like particularly well and didn't really give them a huge amount of my energy. So I'm kind of putting them here in a short video going through them one at a time. Of course, this means I could be completely wrong about these. These are just my opinions. So if you have different opinions, definitely let me know in the comments. So we're going to go through these one at a time. I'm going to talk about the game briefly and tell you what I wasn't a big fan of it and then we'll keep going. So let's get started. Era is a little mind-blowing to me. This is a historical card game from Steve Easton World Within Games, but I was surprised to find out that this was supposed to be delivered from Kickstarter in October of 2015.
I was I didn't realize it was that late of a delivery. That's a decade. This game better be amazing. What it is is it's a deck versus deck game. You take a deck against your opponent's deck, but the decks could be anything. I might have a NASA themed deck and you might have a mobster deck, a Revolutionary War deck, Cold War, Wild West, Neanderthals, all sorts of decks. And you're going to take these decks and well, rulebook's not great, but here's basically how it works. Yeah, you shuffle your deck, but you also have some bad cards for your deck that are like will attack you that you shuffle into your opponent's deck. And then these you you draw eight cards each turn. You're going to put them in two different kind of resource decks. And then any cards that you don't put in these resource decks, you can flip over and that's your hand. And then it costs money from one deck to do them. The other The other deck of resources is used for attacking. Though, when you attack your opponent, you are using their cards that are in your deck to attack them, or your cards to attack the cards that they played against you if they match in different ways. There's ways that unlock cards. Some cards can't be played. Cards will give you resources. There's money that you get that you can add to conflict and or to build things.
But, it doesn't work for me for a lot of reasons. One, I love the asymmetrical thing of, "Hey, you're NASA and I'm the Revolutionary War." Or, "Hey, you're mobsters and I'm, you know, uh, the uh, early America, you know, medieval, or Egypt, or whatever." That sort of thing is is an interesting concept, but half the decks don't work. Way back in the day I played collectible card games where sometimes they don't like match up, and this happens a lot in this game. And so, each of the decks has its own thing. You get the idea. The iconography is not particularly good. Attacking is unfun and boring. The multiplayer rules are, "Eh, I'm not that thing." And you're also fighting against cards that against your own deck that you put in. Now, this is a thing that's been done before in a game called Disney Villainous, but here I don't think it works particularly well. I feel like I'm playing past you some of the times.
And you just keep drawing cards. The idea of using cards you have for resources is a good one, but to do it before you see which ones you keep? Like, I'll just draw four and, "Oh, never mind, these aren't ones I wanted." I don't know. The whole thing, it doesn't really look entirely inspired. It's a forgettable product in many ways. It's a five a four out of 10 for me, actually. That's Era. Chess Joker from Asmodee Games and Charles Shaddick, who has done some really great games in the past like Innovation. I was interested in this one cuz I love taking chess and messing with it. And that's what this game does. In this game, there are two two to win, which is why you normally checkmating your opponent or through getting an 800 Elo ranking, which I looked up online and basically means you are acceptable to play in tournaments to get 800. This game comes with 256 joke cards. And what you're doing on your turn is you're going to get one of these cards and if your turn that's face up in front of you. And if you can play this card on your next turn, you get the amount of points that it shows on this card. And so if you get 800 points, you win or you can take a normal move discard card.
Points that every the back of every card is 25 points for checkmating your opponent or if you have only three pieces left, your opponent gets 25 points. But these cards are like really weird and unusual cards that are going to let you do things. So for example, let me just grab some random cards here. This one says move your bishop like a rook within a rank. Well, that's pretty easy to do. I take my bishop and I move it like a rook. I do that action even capturing another piece with it and I get the 25 points. But this one's harder. It says move your piece through a piece that is pinned to your king. So there's a lot of terminology in this and you have to look up a lot of things, but this means that there's a piece that can't move cuz if it does, my king will then be in check and I get if I move a piece through that piece, then I get 200 points. So the concept of this is pretty intriguing is the idea of move a weird piece and make a very sub-optimal move likely. Maybe it's sometimes it's optimal, but it likely isn't or take an optimal move and just forget points and you can win either way.
The keywords are difficult and hard to parse. Some things let you warp pieces. There's a lot of things I constantly kept looking for the rule book and if you don't know a lot about chess, the game does teach you how to play chess in case you don't know, it could be tricky. But the game and I've seen the game went one both ways, but the game is wacky without being wacky. What I mean is they're like, hey, you can do all this funny stuff, but it never feels that way. You're like, I can't even do this." So, anyway, discard a card, make a normal move. Um I I don't even want to set up to do this. And it just feels these cards are random as they come out like, "Oh, the one first one I read you, that actually could be a really useful thing." Oh, but that's why it only gives you 25 points out of 800. And there's other games in the genre like Nightmare Chess, which is wacky.
You can play cards and do crazy things. And I get it, but you have to remember the people who play chess are usually pretty die hard. They're not going to be interested in Chess Joker at all. Uh I doubt. Maybe except as a lark. I'm This is made for people like me who like chess fine, but want to see more in it. And yeah, this this just doesn't do enough for me. I didn't enjoy it. It's not a huge fan of chess. I'm I mean, I'm not a huge fan of chess, but I think chess is better than this. So, five out of 10. Sinister Institute here from Phil Walker-Harding, Mojito Games. This is clearly a play on Harry Potter where they just changed up the main characters of it. It's a cooperative game where you need to complete rituals to defeat an evil sorcerer. In this game, you're going to be moving around, exploring, flipping over tiles, drawing the top card of a deck each round, which will move this evil sorcerer around the board. He's hurting players. Also, there's minions. You don't want too many minions on the board, or you'll lose the game. And then you have some sort of event that you have. And then you have four actions, which apparently is a staple for cooperative games. You can move, explore, pick up, drop, use items, channel, complete rituals.
Um so, using items lets you find these items that you pick up that let you move some extra spaces. Channeling will level you up, making your special ability Each character has a special ability better. These are cool concepts, but there's a lot of problems with Sinister Institute for me. First of all, it feels generic. Yeah, it's Harry Potter, we get it. Can we do something that's not Harry Potter at this point or a very clear copy of it? Two, it's a little boring. So, the idea is let's move around in this moving shifting thing, and we're all working together to do that, but it just feels slow. Oh, I need that item. Pick up a ritual. You're over there. Can you pick it up and run towards me and drop it off, and I'll pick up and run towards you. Meanwhile, we slap a few minions around to make sure they go away. It also feels very deterministic. You know, sometimes you turn something over and you're like, "Oh, this is easy to do."
And other times, it's quite difficult. And I know that's in a lot of cooperative games, but it doesn't really This one just feels wooden when I look at all that. And then, I really don't like the look of it. It just That That's a personal thing. I just think it looks meh. And it's not exciting. And when I played this with my kids, I thought they would be more excited about it, and they were kind of like, "Why Why are we doing all this?" And we You can get into the game and try to accomplish it, and it is a I guess a reasonably difficult cooperative game, not too hard, not too easy, but I need to care a little bit, and I didn't. So, five out of 10 for me. Send us their answer to The Seven Seas from Joseph LaMarca, Critical Hut. Now, this is a game that was on Game Found, and it's a pretty game. There's a lot of cool things.
There's cool player boards you're going to be upgrading. There's sea tiles around the board where you can do various actions. On your turn, you're going to be going to these various seas and patching up your ship if it's gotten blown up, and then you're going to do worker placement where you place your officer or your captain, but it's If you put your captain down in a spot where there's already a captain, or if you put your officer down and there's anybody there, you take a much lesser action, which is not particularly fun. It's an okay worker placement system. Um But then, you're going to You can do basic actions like fish or await fortune, but there's all kinds of actions based on these cards that are kind of on this rondel around the outside, and you can do exploration, trading, combat, seamanship. But almost everything is resources. You'll be getting some resources and then spending these resources over here for these resources and then you want enough resources to accomplish and explore or you'll roll dice or bad things will happen. The game often comes to a standstill because there's a lot of spots out there that no one wants to go to or there's a trading post where the thing that they want no one really has or only one person has it and I found off times that there's so much to do in this game but so few things you can actually do that it just kind of fizzles out. There's two versions, a base version, advanced version. I tried both. Wasn't a big fan of either one.
You get points for everything at the end of a game and it's a giant point salad. But the game itself isn't particularly fun. It drags out too long. All these cool pieces, it just wasn't one that I was very impressed with. Um I was excited when I got it out as I thought the rules sounded interesting, but I was tired of having to look up what these cards meant all the time on all these different things and then there's analysis paralysis of pausing and looking at all the different spots you can go to and the workers and oh, I can't even take a very good action, so who cares? All that just kind of fizzled out for me. So five out of 10, the seven seas. Sky Bridge has a good pedigree here. Michael Rieneck and Franz Woyke both have designed great games and it's a really neat game where you're building this giant bridge to the sky, a fantastic world beyond imagination from what I understand. The world for this game was designed for this game. It's not like based on anything and you're building a bridge between Throne and Bienville hands eye, a sky bridge. And so you have these factions that are building things and there's this really kind of cool theme and background.
Although you're not going [clears throat] to see any of it in the game really. You have your own these little hand of faction cards, there's different faction stacks out there. You're trying to build this sky bridge and get the favor of the gods, I don't know how you pronounce that, and keeping these rebels in check on the map. So the rebels is moving down a track and at the beginning of each turn you reveal cards from each faction. You'll take a face up card in your hand where you you that face up card you get a bonus which is usually a resource. Um then you'll play a card, which might activate things and or do something when you play it, but then you get to activate the cards that are at the top of all your stacks. And so, that's kind of interesting, and there's a building a bridge where you each section of bridge needs resources, and then you put population there, and at the end of the game you get points for everything. But the theme for me actively is annoying because it looks so cool it doesn't really come through. There's some weirdness where you build a bridge, and each time a bridge is built, we check at the end of turn, has anyone paid two wood, one gold, or whatever you you need for the bridge, and you flip it over.
And then we go to build the next section. But if two people go to build that bridge, they both pay the same amount of resources. And that's just an odd theming thing. I get why it's a game issue. But then also, if you've been collecting to build that section and you miss it by one resource, the next section's probably going to need other resources, so then you have to recalibrate, and you've missed out, and that's a decent amount of points. So, it's has a bunch of cool ideas in it, but it's so forgetful. I mean, I I played this a few months ago, Sky Bridge, and I had to go back and look it up to remember how does it even play? But I, you know, it it's fine. It's This is the This This one isn't like terrible. I give it a six out of 10 cuz there's some interesting ideas in there. I'm just probably never going to think about it again, Sky Bridge. The last spell from Nestor Mangone and Alessandro Ferrachi and Tabula Games.
Now, Tabula Games makes games that are well, often hybrid style games. They often look like they're this big Ameritrash style game, and then they have Euro mechanisms, and they do some interesting things. This one is based on a video game, which I have not played, so I can't talk about that. And I don't know if I played it right because the rule book is awful. But what this game is is sort of, you have all these bad guys who are coming towards you, and you are moving and upgrading and building defenses and using powers and moving around and fighting off these enemies. Sounds very exciting. It's a tower defense game, essentially. But it is a slow tower defense game. It's just really slow, very thoughtful, and so much effort going in. And then when you play the game, you're like, "Wow, these guys come in, and I run over here, and I do this."
Compared to other games like Project Elite where it's speed and fast, this feels like a mismatch. And that's the problem with this game is I'm not sure who is it for. Is it for people who love these Euro style games with tons of optimization? And you're doing all this optimization, those people will like that part of it while everyone else who doesn't like that are going to hate it. And then there's random die rolls to see if you hit the people or not. Which is going to drive the optimization people crazy, while the people who like to just roll dice and have fun with it are going to go nuts with how how kind of slow that is. There's just so much randomness in it, and it doesn't help that the rule book is vague and unclear, and the whole thing just moves so slowly. It's really quite boring, unfortunately.
I really wanted to like this game. I was excited, but wow, I was like, "Is it over yet? Is it over yet?" Cuz it's just kind of going, "Oh, these bad guys are coming in." And there are so many of these tower defense games out there, and they're usually snappy, quick, keep things moving. This is the very opposite of that, and so therefore, I can't really recommend it. Great pieces, cool look, and maybe it is like the video game, I wouldn't know, but not a board game I want to play. A five out of 10. Well, there you go. Six games I played so you don't have to. Course, maybe you think I'm wrong on these, maybe these are amazing games, then let people know in the comments. But either way, thank you as always for watching The Dice Tower. I'm Tom Vasel. We'll see you next time.
Hey folks, thanks for watching another one of our videos. If you like our videos, if you like our channel, you would love to game with us at one of our conventions. Check out Dice Tower Cruise, Dice Tower East, and Dice Tower West. Fantastic conventions where we play games with wonderful people, a humongous library, and lots of other events and stuff. Also, don't forget to check out our channel, like and subscribe. I'm Tom Vasel.