3 Wallets, 2 Players: A Review with Zee Garcia

0:08 Hey everybody and welcome back to the Dice Tower. My name is Z Garcia. Today I'm going to be taking a look at three tiny pocketsized games for two players. Uh Dustbiters Pocket Edition. Here we are taking a look at Sukiji Market and we are taking a look at Dionissia. two of these. These two wh these two are from Buttonshy Games. Uh this one over here is from Mato, but again, they're all in the same kind of vein. They fit in your pocket. They have between 18 and 20 cards, and they are very, very easy to play generally. Plus, they're all for two players. Now, one of them, Dust Biders here, has come out in a previous edition. this edition right here that had a couple of extra cards, but basically straight up a reprint of what's in this box. So, we're taking a look at all of these and I'll tell you what I think of them each.

1:02 Let's kick it off. To set up the game, we're going to deal eight cards face up on the table. Four in the back facing the first player. Four in the front facing the second player. This is the back. This is the front. Each player has three cards. And we are ready to begin. At any moment if you have no cars in the race because they've all been consumed by the dust storm then you are going to lose. And on your turn you are going to have three actions after which the car in the back is a goner. So on your turn you can do one of three things like I said and you can build a card which means take one from your hand put it at the front. So I could do that and put that card at the front there. That could be one of my actions. You can drive.

1:48 take one car and move it one space forward or backwards. So, I can move this car here like that. That could be an action. I could instead of that I could draw a card from the deck until it's gone anyway. Or I could activate an ability on one of my cars. Okay, one of the ones facing me that has that symbol. Anything else that doesn't have that symbol is probably an ongoing ability. So, make sure you read those. So, it's my turn. I'm the first player with the four cards being threatened. Here's what I'm going to do. My first action, I'm going to drive the teleporter one forward. Second action, I'm going to activate the ability on the hijacker. The hijacker says, "Take ownership of any enemy car." The other player takes ownership of the hijacker. Awesome. I'm going to take uh the jammer away from them. And they get the hijacker. That was two actions. And for my third action, oh, I don't know.

2:44 I'm going to drive my sniper forward one. With that done, the storm consumes this vehicle. And now it is the other player's turn in which they're going to do their three actions. Like I said, this continues until one of the two players has no cards facing them. At that point, that player loses, the other player wins. I have previously reviewed Dust Biters here, but I wanted to take a look at it again because, well, some time has passed since I played the game and reviewed the original release and because I want to highlight that this is available now in this new form factor, more portable than it's ever been before and more affordable than it's ever been before. So, it's one that I've enjoyed in the past, and I have a lot of positives to say and some negatives. But my my big takeaways here are that the theme and the look of the game are still fantastic. It is charming. It's funny.

3:40 It's got that Grace po post-apocalyptic vibe with a lot of humor uh uh charm built into it. Uh and so I like that. I like the attrition game you're playing in this one. That sort of feeling of sudden death. When you're out, you're out. There's no scoring. The game's over. And the biggest negative, which is still very much true, is that this game, I think, makes a pretty bad first impression. I would say if you intend to check this one out, I wholeheartedly recommend you play with the same other player several times in a row at least so that you start understanding what the cards do, so that you start understanding some of the combos you might come across and that feeling of, wow, this game is just lucky and or unfair starts to diminish a little bit.

4:33 Otherwise, it will absolutely feel like, well, I got dealt the garbage cards and nothing worked out in my favor and there was nothing I could do about it. The more you play and learn what the things do, how they interact, the more that feeling is going to go away. I think this is a winner. Uh, this is a fantastic little addition of a really neat and distinct game. So, for me, this is going to get an 8 out of 10. I gave the original printing, this printing, which is from my personal collection, an 8 out of 10. same thing. And this is now cheaper and more portable. So, absolutely excellent. Very much recommend you check this one out if you are liking the vibe of the post-apocalyptic, you know, war of attrition kind of thing. So, there you go. Dust biters pocket edition. 8 out of 10. The first thing you'll do is make sure that the cards are nice and mixed up. You can turn parts of the deck over, mix it up some more until you are satisfied. And then you are going to reveal two of those like so. Put the deck aside. We're going to get to that later. Then the two players are going to sit across from each other, set up this scale like this, and you are going to be bidding to take one of these cards and add it to a pile of that color in front of you. Your players are going to count to three by going wasabi. And you will flash between one and four fingers at the end of that count. So let's say the two players sitting across go wasabi. This player says two. This player says one. That player is going to win. They're going to push this scale one step this way. And

6:05 they are going to take one of these two fish. Let's say they take that fish, add it to the green pile. If they had taken this one, they can say it's red or blue. By the way, then this card goes away. And we do it again, revealing two more cards. And we do it one more time. Now, a few things are going to happen here. Some of the cards have special abilities uh that you'll see in the corner. If that card is triggered, uh you will deal with that special ability. Also, over here you have the scale. If it ever makes it to the end, if this gets all the way over here, you steal a card from your opponent and this goes back to the middle. Also, if the two players tie on the bid, if it's on this side, you'll just flip it over and leave it where it is. If players tie again, then whoever has this on their side picks one and then the other player picks the other one and then we flip this back over. So, let's say we do it again. The players go wasabi and they do it again. Look at that. That player still bidding two.

7:02 This player bid one, they take it and move it one more time. But then the player takes this card here, which has a special ability there that says move the scale ones towards you. So, they actually whoop take that back just a little bit and we reveal the next two cards and we have a new symbol available to us. This one, the wasabi symbol. At the end of the game, you are going to get victory points for every fish you have in every color. But if a color has two or more wasabi seen within it, then you are going to double the score for all those fish. So, if I get two wasabi and yellow fish, I'm going to double the score for all of my yellow fish. There will also be special abilities that trigger. If you get three green fish, four blue, uh, three yellow, or three of the pink, and you are going to be taking a card from the deck, stealing a card, moving the scale your way, or discarding a card from your opponent. Uh, that's what those things there mean. Finally, there are some fish that are going to have a knife symbol. And if you ever get four of these in front of you, game's immediately over. You win the entire thing. We don't need to score.

8:11 Otherwise, when we run out the deck two times, we are going to score. You'll score your strength in every fish category like I said, like this. And then if you have two wasabi, double that. And based on where the scale is, you're going to be getting victory points for that as well. Uh, two victory points for every step. I believe whoever has the most points is the winner or sudden death for knives. Sukiji market here has a lot of game packed into a little wallet. Uh, there's a a lot going on in here. I like the different abilities. I like the the the sort of back and forth, the fighting, the simultaneous bidding. I like that you have to be careful with how much you bid or you're basically feeding your opponent your own cards. I like that there is a way for the game to be over in game, a sudden death ending. If you get four of those knives or you go to the end of the game and then we see who's got the most victory points and if you go to that route then you want to get those wasabi symbols because you're going to duplicate your scoring.

9:15 There's a lot of little things. The flip side of that is well there's a lot of little rules to explain and understand and internalize and the game can feel a little repetitive even in 15 minutes which it is about 15 minutes. There's a lot of you'll be doing the wasabi thing a lot and it might get a little repetitive. That cute gimmick is probably going to get dropped about halfway through the game. you'll stop doing it because it's funny 10 times, eight times, and then after that you're like, "All right, that's that's enough. Let's just one, two, three, go." Um, so that's my my sort of main drawback there. There's a lot of little finicky rules, and that gets repetitive really quickly, that bidding system, but I like what it does. I like what it offers. I love that at the beginning of the game you randomize that deck with some cards, you know, flipped over so that you can't count on exactly the cards that are available. I love that. Uh so yeah, I really enjoy this one. This is going to get a seven out of 10 from me. It's one I certainly recommend if you like bidding and you want to try a game that works with set collecting and bidding for only two players with this cute look and and a lot of decisions, a lot of sort of interest packed into it. This does really well for being, you know, 20 cards that do that. So, Sukiji Market gets a seven out of 10. Over nine rounds, the players are each going to create a threeact tragedy by taking a card on their turn from the

10:46 stage here and placing that in front of them, adding it to the first act, the second act, or the third act, which they'll have to declare and [snorts] either putting that scene on top uh or upstaging one or downstaging one. And I'll explain that in one second. So, this player goes, they take that card, they put it right there. They say that is going to be the first act. We flip over a new one. This player will go and they will take this and they'll say this is going to be the second act. Okay, you'll just keep track of that. We go again. Now, this player is going to take one and let's say they take this card here. And they could make this one of the other acts, act two or act three. Or they could upstage this one by doing that, leaving the bottom available, or downstaging it by putting it beneath.

11:33 And the game's going to be over when we have three stacks three times here with three cards each. Okay, that'll be act one, act two, and act three for each of the two players. You cannot when you are taking a new card. By the way, let's say this player has these two. You could not take one and put it in between two cards. It has to go on top or on the bottom. Obviously, the one revealed on top is the one that's going to give you your scoring opportunities. So you want to keep track of that. And also having the two stacks or the three stacks rather adjacent to each other will create patterns that bleed over from one card to another. So you want to be careful of that as well. This one over here says four victory points if you score each of your patterns at least once. This is a pattern here. This is a pattern here. You'll get one victory point for every time you make that pattern there. One victory point every time I make that pattern there. As you can see, I'm not doing a great job here of making patterns. But maybe if this was an earlier act like so then I have the skull, the knife, and the skull there once. And that would be worth some victory points. Every time I do it, I'm getting that. And same thing with the third act then, which perhaps would look like this and give me some victory points for various conditions there as well. Whoever has the most victory points, adding up all of your patterns, all of your scoring conditions, is going to be the winner of the game. Dionia

13:05 here is my favorite of these three games. I have to say, though, I'm going to give it the same score as I'm giving another one. I'll more on that in one second here. Uh, but it does inch out the other two in a couple of different ways. I find it to have the best balance uh between tactics and strategy. I really like that. Uh, I love the look of it quite a bit, though the other two are very attractive as well. And I love the theme, I think, is partly it. Uh, you know, why it puts it above the other two. That idea of you building the structure for a threeact play is fantastic. I just find a lot of character in this little in this little game. It's very engaging, very interesting. Plus, mechanically, this one's really straightforward. There's nothing too weird going on here. You take a card, you put it in front of you, you're making three stacks of three cards each, and the card goes on top or underneath. That's kind of all the rules. The things you can see at the end are the things you score. That's sort of it. So, I really like that. A lot of interesting choices, great look, great theme. My drawback here, my main negative would be that this has uh that feeling that um your choices towards the end of the game, you're you're more and more limited, right? It's that uh I assign that feeling now to uh Calico um in which towards the end of the game, you're doing as much breaking of your own hopeful combos as you are actually building new ones. The last maybe two, maybe even three cards you take in this game just don't help. And you go, well,

14:38 okay, that sucks. I have to take this one. I have to put it here. It's not helping me build anything. And that that could happen. And so it has that sort of that feeling of getting locked down of unfortunately the last two turns are sort of well that didn't do anything for me kind of feeling that wraps up quickly. The game is short, right? I mean so the last two out of nine turns okay sure but I still really enjoy that journey and you might it might happen. I'm not saying it does happen guaranteed the last two or three turns. It just might happen where you have to take something that just isn't working. But the journey there and the abilities and the little building chains of symbols and oh I'm going to pick this and go for that. Try to feed my little machine all of these interesting ideas. Really is neat. So this is getting an eight out of 10 for me. I gave one of the other ones an eight out of 10. I like it better than that, but not not that much, right?

15:35 Uh uh so it's still going to get an eight out of 10 from me. And this is one I very much recommend. If you enjoy the idea of putting on a play, the idea of the Greek tragedies, uh, if you like this look, then this is one I think you're going to have a lot of fun with. And it's a little simpler to internalize and teach than I would say the other two are. The other two are a little more quirky. This one isn't. So, there you go. That is Diania 8 out of 10. Thanks everybody for tuning in and checking these three little games out with me. As you can see, I recommend them all. I certainly would say that these are all worthy of your uh time and attention. Maybe pick the one that speaks to you more thematically. Uh but mechanically they're all do clever interesting things. So there you go. Thank you very much for tuning in everybody. My name is Z Garcia and I'll see you on the next one.

16:32 Hey folks, I'm Tom Vassel. 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 you 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 dicetowwer.com. I'm Tom Bassel. Thanks for watching another video on the Dice Tower.