Thebai - Board Game Review - 10 Turns Are Forever

The port is quite good. >> Yes, quite good indeed. >> Most certainly. >> What year is it? >> 51. >> Ah, dectable indeed. >> Yes. Hi everyone, I'm Luke Hector and this is the Broken Evil, a show where I rave and rant about board games, but usually more the latter part if we're honest. We'll get on with the review in just a moment, but Verse, my sponsor needs a quick word with you.

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So, let's make Gaps in Your Collection a down to Kiender and start saving today. Thank you for listening and enjoy the rest of the video. >> Get on with it. >> So, today we got a big one. This review is going to take me a long time to do an edit. I can see it now. This is Fei. This is apparently how Google pronounces the name.

So, if you don't like it, well, blame Google. Seriously, publishers, can we just get like can we just make games where the pronunciation of the title doesn't need to be googled in advance? I mean, what we had this one where it's we just seem to be getting a lot of names that just come out of nowhere and it's like, hang on, how do you pronounce this?

Oh, I see. Right. >> Hello. >> Bonjour. Crazy gibberish. >> This is another in the line of the tea series. And if you know anything about the tea series, they tend to be for the most part heavyweight games. Big heavy euros. Couple of little midweights here and there, but for the most part, heavy. Sometimes even encroaching into super heavy territory, as I like to define some games.

And designed by David Turks as well. We know who he is in the Euro game industry, so expect a lot of heaviness, a lot expect a lot of interwoven mechanics. You know, he is best known for a lot of solo modes and a lot of pretty crunchy game affairs, you know, and even some funky crunchy card games as well.

Remember, you know, Imperium and Captain's Chair, for example. So, this is going to be quite a big review. There's a ton to get into here in terms of pieces, rules, solo mode, multiplayer, the works. Strap in. >> This is light. >> Quick little disclaimer before I start. You'll notice that this is packaged a bit differently from the normal copy.

That is because I got given a few folded space inserts at Essen. And so I decided to manufacture the insert for this one as well. You can check out my Instagram if you want to see a bit more detail as to like the insides of the box. Suffice to say though, this insert is pretty damn good and does the job nicely, but we'll talk more about the organization of everything in the future.

So, let's get on with the actual game and we're going to have to simplify this overview down quite a bit. So, there's a lot to talk about. The idea is is that you are basically populating a city with cadmir tiles. So, these cadmir tiles are basically buildings that come in these clunky little square forms.

These will populate the board and represent action spaces that you can go on. You only play 10 turns in this game, which doesn't sound like a lot. You play 10 rounds and that is it, but quite a bit is going on on each turn. What you can do is you can place a die down on the board and they slot in between the different cadmir spaces or alongside one.

And with this die, you're allowed to do one or two of the actions alongside it if you're willing to pay the money. On top of that, you can also move your archcom piece around the board. So, you're going to have multiple tiles with, you know, different effects all over the board. The archon piece sits on top of the relevant piece and on your turn you can basically move it across the tiles but there is a limitation.

You can only cross over one empty gap. It costs money and also if you run over your own dice these dice rank upwards and you're trying to ascend them. So if you run over your own dice they actually demote in value whereas if you run over an opponent's dice it increases in value. So you got to be careful where you're sending this guy to.

On top of that, you're also able to use metic tiles, which basically represent kind of little temporary workers that you can use. Once you've used them, they'll go away soon. And the last thing you can do on your turn is fulfill a contract, which like every other Euro game in existence. Pay resources, get a cool bonus, and get victory points at the end of the game for set collection or diversification of symbols.

We've seen this before. It's nothing particularly new in terms of that's just taking into account the actual board. You could instead place a D on your estate board. This represents your player board. It will normally be full of different cadmia tiles that you have yet to build. As the game goes on, I'll just put a bunch here as an example.

As you build more, you'll free up action spaces that you can use, but you can also stick a die down on one of these spaces to trigger a particular estate action. Some of them gear off the value of the die. Sometimes they don't, but the more of these cmage that you build, the more actions open up and they get progressively more powerful in their respective rows.

Unlocking columns also means that when you refresh and get dice back, they'll come in at a higher value than the base number of one depending on how much you have built. Now, what's this whole thing about ascending dice? Well, if you ascend a die, and you've got two different types of die. You've got the citizen dice, which is about actions, and the hoplight die, which is about combat.

We'll go on to that in a minute. Then, if you ascend a citizen die, it goes onto this council board. And this basically is a bunch of endgame scoring objectives that you know ahead of time. You pick one, it goes there, and this is what you're going to try and score points for at the end of the game.

Happy days. The hop lights are ones where when you ascend them, they turn into like a little general stande, and it basically just is better in combat. But what are these hoplights for? Well, you have to contend with invaders. The board, let's say, I'm going to take this board and put it on here for a second.

The board is broken up into rows. So, at certain points during the game, there's going to be an invasion from an outside force on certain rows. And the hoplight dice, the I'm just, you know, the warrior dice basically that sit on the row will defend against the invading force. It will have a bra base strength value modified by a card that you won't see in advance.

And you'll get victory points for how well you beat it. You'll lose victory points if you lose against it. And you'll get a little bonus from its respective gate tile that's on there. And if you did the best in the battle, like I contributed the most people will remember my name, you get the tile and it helps with contract endgame scoring.

So, there's a lot that can potentially happen in your turn. The game, as I said, is played over 10 rounds, and you are marking this out with these tiles. So, some of these tiles have end of round bonuses or actions that you can take, and some of them will tell you what combat row is going to take place.

You only know so many of them ahead of time, though, and as the game goes on, some of these will get revealed. So, you go, "Right, we were fighting in row six and three. Oh, now there's going to be a fight in row seven. All right, how do I defend against that then?" You know, it's a kind of like, you know, a little bit ahead of time, but not the whole game ahead of time.

Uh, what else can you do? Well, on top of that, you've got these two devotion tracks here. I mean, if you're going to play anything that's themed around Greece or something like that, of course, you're going to have gods to contend with. So, yes, you got two devotion tracks. One for the wine god, one for Aries, the war god.

I forget the wine god's name. Dionosis or something. I don't know. I'll put the name up on the screen. But, basically, you level up these two tracks. They get you bonuses. One is geared for war and combat and the other one is geared for citizen die and you know resource gathering and stuff. So you can pick and choose which one you like to go for there.

>> You are no god. >> Other little things that come into play if you ascend a hoplight die you'll be able to gain a commander which is a really cool special ability, an instant bonus and ability going forward. But then also when you build these cadmir tiles, they've got roof colors on the corners so that when you place them on the board, if you can match the colors up with adjacent rows and that, then you basically get, you know, some other little bonuses.

It's basically a 10 round game where you've got to maximize as much as physically possible that you achieve in each of the 10 rounds. You know, you've got to be hyper efficient. You've got to get an engine going. You cannot have mediocre turns. It's just not going to be good enough. This is going to reward you highly strategic and highly adaptable play.

You carry on through the 10 rounds of which a lot of the points will be scored during the game, but then at the end you will score for having those icon sets with the contracts. You'll score for any endgame bonuses of your estate board. And anything on the council board that I mentioned earlier, you will score in the respective one.

And this can be anything from like placement of tiles to unloading your board and rows, you know, going really high up the the tracks, getting loads of contracts, you know, pretty much every aspect of the game you can score for. You've just got to get there first. And you can only do that by ascending citizen dice.

And once you do, you get first dibs on where you want to go. So, it's a bit of a race to get on this board in order to score a decent amount of points from there. Once you've done the 10 rounds, total up your end game points as that. And then, of course, the one with the most, >> of course, A fairly simplistic overview, but funny enough, this game is one more about the options rather than the amount of rules it has.

Surprisingly, when you learn this game, there's not a lot of rules to learn. I know that seems weird for a game that tries to quote like 2 and 1 half hour plus time length and has all of these different options and figgginess and is designed by David Turxy, but no, there's actually not a ton of rules in the game.

When you read through the rule book, it is only about say h 16 17 odd pages and most of that is to deal with the you know some of that is appendices and two player game but there's only so much for the actual main bulk of the game itself which is kind of surprising really. This game is kind of designed with a sort of vertical standpoint in mind rather than the horizontal one.

And what I mean by that is you can imagine a heavy horizontal game having a ton of rules that you've got to learn but only so much depth. This one is definitely going from that whole vertical standpoint where there's only so many rules, but boy is there a lot of depth when you're trying to drill down into it.

And that's kind of like this game's major selling point. It's definitely going to be one for the heavy, super heavy fans of these tea games. You know, you cannot play this as a casual game. I'm going to stress that right now. This is not for you if you're in that target audience. You know, there's a lot of options that you got to contend with and each one is of paramount importance.

But, you know, surprisingly, when you're doing the teach the teach, there's not a huge amount of rules to necessarily teach. And even when you're learning the game itself, there's surprisingly not a ton to read. The rule book could have been better. It's um a little hit and miss. There are certain icons that, you know, I don't think get mentioned.

There's a couple of rules that are a bit hard to reference here and there. I think like maybe the layout could have been slightly improved, but it's not bad. I've seen much worse, you know, in terms of rule books for these tea games. This one's definitely, I think, on the sort of the higher end of being, you know, clear enough to read, but yeah, it's still not perfect.

But I was just kind of surprised that when I had to teach the game, it's like, oh wow, I don't actually have to teach that many in, you know, major rules. And the reference aids do a decent job of giving you a good sort of fairly detailed reminder of how the rules work. I mean, it goes into step-by-step detail of how the archon bit works, how the die placing the die out works, the refresh step, how to fulfill a contract.

you know, that sort of thing. And then even for the conflicts where you've got to like, right, okay, who's got what power, what's the invader strength, who won by this much, who gets the reward, etc. All laid out in a nice stepbystep guide. So, from a rules perspective, it's surprisingly quite I don't want to say the words straightforward, meaning that this is like an easy entry game or anything.

It surely bloody well isn't, but it definitely just felt a bit more, I don't know, elegant. >> I don't think any of us expected him to say that. >> Production wise, it ain't half bad either. I mean, you've got a lot of different custom dice with, you know, all the the faces on them and all the different numbers.

These Cadmir tiles are really, you know, these are very solid. >> You're a monster >> wooden tiles. I mean, this is only just a few of them. You know, you got about about 10, you know, was it like 3, six, nine, you know, nine 10 or 10 or 11 of these in the box. And yeah, they're pretty sweet on top of the neutral ones.

This is just like core. They feel good. They're really nicely produced. I like these uh the, you know, round tiles, etc., are, you know, all pretty good. The you got little standies for the the commander. It's kind of weird that the standy for the commander, you know, doesn't cover up any important information, but then the one for the um general tiles, the ones where you ascend a hotlight die, for some reason cover up the number when you use them.

That's kind of weird, but it's a minor blemish. I mean, it's pretty easy to tell what number it is, but everything in here, even though that you're using cardboard tokens for the resources and that, is just produced to a pretty high standard. You know, there are some blemishes here and there. I do think that some of the uh graphic design could have been improved in some respects.

The um well, we'll talk about that maybe a little bit later in the negative section, but yeah, production-wise, you you're paying a decent amount of money for this game, and it weighs an absolute ton when you get hold of the box, but that's just because there's a lot of stuff in here. Um but again, we'll talk about setup and the graphic design a little bit more in the negative section.

I want to focus on the pros if I may. Um, the thinkiness, the amount of options, definitely a bunch going on here. I mean, you've only got 10 turns. You've got to make the most of these 10 turns. And the options that you have available are plentiful each round. I mean, there's a lot to consider. You You may think, well, I've only got to put a die on here or die on my estate board and move a piece.

How bad can that be? But you've got, you know, an evolving state of different action tiles on the board itself, but you've also got your estate board that you're emptying out as well. So, it's it's doing a good job of giving you a lot of different ways to approach the situation here. I know that there's a combat coming up soon.

If I don't participate, I lose a ton of points. Okay. Well, how can I just get something over there? I could do it off my estate board, but maybe there's a contract I've got here that lets me put a die out. Uh, I could Yeah, I could play this one. If I can get that fulfilled, do that before the archon's turn.

Then when they put the archon out, I can trigger this, which would get me something else to use next turn for that objective. That would be pretty sweet. >> Oh no, I've gone crosseyed. >> Oh, blime me. You need to think a few turns ahead in this one. And there's definitely a lot of combo chaining opportunities here.

You need to be able to, you know, structure your turn in such a way that it's going to be the most beneficial. And because you can do these contracts in between the action steps, the only thing that is desperately in sequence is you must refresh, you must place a die, and then you must move your archon piece.

The contracts can happen in between the steps, though. So, you actually get situations where you'll think, well, hang on, let me just put the die out first, trigger this, right? That gives me some of the bits I need. Right now, I can do this contract here, which now lets me level up on this track. By doing that, I can promote the die over here.

And then that means when I move the archon across this piece, I can actually promote that one, ascend it, get it on the council board. You got to think about these kind of things. And it's rewarding. It feels good to get a turn, you know, when you are able to achieve so much. Granted, it's also pretty debilitating when you have a turn that felt like it sucked, especially when you've only got 10 of them.

But, you know, if you're able to plan your turns well enough, you do feel like you're achieving a decent amount. And you know, with the board state changing as the game goes on with the tiles of who's blocking what tile, what dice are in between them, you know what, you know, what new stuff has been built.

It's it's got a good evolving game state and a lot of thinky options. It's not sandbox. We're not saying that, oh yeah, the world's your oyster. You can do pretty much whatever you want. There's going to be restrictions. And this is a very resource- tight game. I mean, you've got, you know, grapes, pottery, and bronze, I think, is what the armor is.

Although somebody refers to the armor as abs. I can kind of see why because it basically looks like the armor has a six-pack. It's kind of weird. [laughter] But is that what the armor was back then? But oh well, I'm not an history expert, but yeah, there's not a lot of resources in the game. You're going to be tight.

You're not going to be swimming in them. It's going to have to be very, you know, particular planning. That being said, that does lead onto a negative we'll get on to soon. But yeah, for for the market that is into really heavy crunchy euros, you're going to get your money's worth here. But this is why I'm also saying that this game is not for casual Euro players.

You know, if you thought, you know, Tatum, you know, and that kind of thing, Tatum and Teenu, if you thought they were plenty heavy enough for you, then don't touch this because it's just going to completely overwhelm you. This is there's about as many like thinky options as you have here and stuff like the, you know, the Taiwent Suyu games, you know, the ones with like a million different things going.

I was like, "Oh, okay. What what should I do? what's the best option? And because you've only got 10 turns to do it, each one you get something wrong, it's going to have long reaching effects cuz one turn is a tenth of your game. So getting it wrong really is pretty detrimental. So by all means, you can give this one a try.

And I think for a heavy euro market that, you know, there's going to be a lot of people that are interested in this. Certainly the reviews coming out are certainly um hinting that way. But if you're if you're on the fence about whether this game's going to be a bit too heavy for you, you might want to step back.

Replay value is pretty strong overall because you've got your tiles here, but they're different for each player color. There's subtle differences between the effects that the green player has over the red player. So yeah, you may have your preferred player color, but you might want to change things up now and again so you've got different buildings to work with.

They're also going to be rearranged randomly on your board to start with. So just because you built this one last game doesn't mean it's going to be on that side of the board to build in the next one. And you know depending on what everybody else builds, it's going to open up different actions. But in terms of paths to victory, there's quite a decent amount of ways to get VP here.

I mean, you could focus so hard on warriors. You know, I get all my warrior dice out. They're really high level. Get the generals out. Get some commander abilities. Completely muller the invaders for extra victory points there and level up on the Aries track. Next game, complete opposite. I'm just going to participate in the combats.

I don't really need to. I'm going up the wine track. My estate board is going to be a thing of beauty. Everything gets built. Got all these cool actions here. And you know what? Most of my dice are going to be on here rather than the board. Another game focusing on getting council objectives. I mean, you should try to get some council objectives.

But you might just get a couple on there and be okay with it. Or you might do what I did in the last game I taught, which was focus hard on the council board. Like I was just like, I need to ascend the citizen dice quick and fast now and then build towards those things. And that worked out pretty well as as well.

So there's a lot of different ways to approach the game. I mean, even just going for some of these end round objectives can be pretty good. You know, here you get victory points once or twice if you want to spend the resources of the value of all your citizen die on the board. You might just think, well, you know what?

You know, whatever it is I'm planning to do, round eight, I need to make certain that I have got, you know, a ton of dice on the board that are of high value because that could be a like a good 12, you know, I say that's I don't know, you know, 8 to 12 point gain over somebody who just had one die on there and it was only level one.

You know, it can be a sizable leap, but it it does open up a lot of different ways to play. Even the contracts, you're a bit confused, a little bit like, "Oh my god, I don't know how to deal with the war at all. this slot. I'm just going to go and farm contracts constantly. Just get resources and farm contracts.

Do it. Just make that your thing. I mean, there's some estate actions that are perfect for that little strategy. There's some estate actions that are perfect for the devotion track, some that are better for war, some that are better for building. You know, there's a lot of different ways to approach it regardless of whether you're going to build stuff or put stuff on council tracks or even care about the two gods.

Um, it's you don't get a huge amount of variety, say in the end round tiles. These are going to rinse repeat a lot of times, you know, particularly the bonus ones. And you only do four out of the four combat. So, some of the rows aren't going to actually get a combat round, but yeah. So, some there's some things on rinse repeat here and there.

You know, the blessing tiles won't change. The contracts will they'll come out in different orders each time, but they are unique, but at the end of the day, you know, you're going to see a lot of these each time. So, it's not like the most amount of replay value that you can get, but because the game state is going to change each time, it is going to give you a bit of a different experience each time, particularly if the other players are also going to try all sorts of weird and wonderful things.

>> Hooray, people are paying attention to me. >> Screw continuity. I had to remember to put this in the good section. This is another aspect of the game I quite like with the player interaction side of things. Yes, you're not necessarily directly affecting a player, but you you've got this evolving board state as I mentioned.

So, when you're placing dice, you're looking at cool places you can put your dice because you want to see, all right, well, let's see. You've got your archon piece there. If you're going to put it there and you can't take it off the board with an effect, you're going to need to move it to other actions.

And I think you're going to be doing this. So, therefore, I think you're going to wander over my dice. And I think putting my dice central in this grid of tokens means that people are going to wander over my dice quite often. You know, if I can find a way around it, that's cool. And it adds a little bit of an interactive element to the game.

However, this does have a corresponding negative point. But I still think the good outweighs the bad here. The problem is that the player scaling is a bit hit and miss. In two-player mode, you get this like herald cards that come out and try and make things a bit more interesting, but even then, there's only two of you acting on the board.

It solves the time issue. We'll go on to that a bit later, but the it it doesn't mean that there's only so much going on on the main board that I don't think two player is the way to play this. Free player does seem to be a pretty good sweet spot. You know, you minimize some of the uh the time issue again, you know, talk about foreshadowing here, but you you also do at least get a bit more interaction on the table.

You're going to get the most enjoyment from that aspect with four players. So definitely with four players, you're going to have a lot of stuff going on, a lot of block spaces, a lot of tiles hopefully being built, lots of dice to manipulate. So, and certainly a lot of people getting involved in the combat.

So, you'll probably get a more fulfilling experience from a fourplayer game, but as you'll see later, four players is going to demand a lot of attention from you. So, it does mean that, you know, you have to sacrifice something at every player count. At two players, you'll benefit in this way, but you'll suffer in this way.

at four players, you'll benefit in this way, but you're going to suffer in this way. Three again hits that sweet spot of a, you know, a balance of the two, but even then, the free player is not perfect. So, I can't really say that there's a perfect player count for this game. No matter what the tactic, they all have a flaw.

So, the negatives, and when I look at a lot of video reviews that have come out recently for this, they do seem to gloss over a lot of these points as like not being an issue or they say, "I'm struggling to find critiques with this game." Well, that's why you come to me because as much as there is a lot to praise here, there's also a few things to address.

Firstly, I mentioned about the graphic design. This is an iconographyheavy game. Okay, there's a ton of iconography everywhere. Some of it is easy to tell what it is. Two grapes, two grapes. Well, that's pretty straightforward, but there's a lot of times where it's a little bit confusing. You on sometimes you'll get like two different dice level up.

Another one you'll get two equals dice level up. And then sometimes you won't get an equals or a non-equal sign. Well, what does that mean? I mean, it's either equals or it's not equals. If you don't put the equals or not equal sign there, does that mean it's equal or not? Hang on. How does that work?

You know, some of the other iconography is like unique to this game. So, it's not intuitive. You know, you look at it and go, "What the hell is that supposed to mean? It's got a cadmir tile with an exclamation mark on it. Okay, what does that mean?" And, you know, they do at least give you an icon guide for the back of the book, but man, there's quite a lot.

And they're not all represented here. There are the occasional one or two that are kind of on the cards and you just kind of have to piece them together almost like a bit of a jigsaw to try and figure out what some of them do. The dice themselves also are a little bit hard to read at times, particularly the white ones.

The they put like the face of the character on there, which is fine, and a big number to say if it's one, two, or three, but the star is quite easy to miss. You could be looking across the table at the board and kind of miss the fact that they've got stars on. It's not the largest symbol on there. It's not helped by the fact that also, especially with the citizens, they've got like a little bit of hair at the back, which makes me look at the die and every time I see it, it makes me look like it it looks like it's two cubed, one cubed, three cubed, because it looks like a tiny little three at the back of the head and it gets in the way of the star as well.

So, you know, the dice could have just been a little bit clearer when you're trying to level them up or say, "Hang on, that's a two star." All right. Okay. Hang on a minute. And do not knock these over because you're going to forget what um you know like what type of thing they were. But yeah, there's definitely a few like FAQ moments that are going to arise, not just from you know deciphering an icon, but even just some of the rules.

As I said, the rule book could be better. Um and there's certainly some threads on BG where people have got questions about how certain things work, particularly with regards to the general tiles and the commanders. I mean, the commanders are probably in that region of something that should have just been cut out of the game.

Haha, good to see you practicing your English, Georgees. >> I think the commander should have been cut out of this game entirely because yes, they've got cool abilities and stuff, but the problem is is that not one single commander in this entire lot is easy to tell what they do from the icons alone.

So basically, the commanders have a thing of grinding the game to a halt because you can't explain what they all do at the start of the game cuz I guarantee within seconds everybody's forgotten what they do at that point because you might not even touch one of these in the entire game. And most people won't even touch one until about halfway through the game by the time they've actually ascended hot lights and stuff.

So by the time you get to this point, if somebody gets a commander, you've got to grind the game to a hole and go, "All right, hang on. Let me get the book." [sighs] Right. Let me open up this page. All right. Here we go. So, right, that commander is right. This commander is right. >> What the hell are you talking about?

>> You got to do this for all seven of them, okay? It's a challenge. And if you've got new players to this game, that won't be the only time you read their abilities. I guarantee a round or two later when somebody else gets a commander, you're going to need to read them all again. It's a pain to deal with these guys.

they've got just too much going on with them and it just feels like an extra bit of rule set that just didn't need to be there. It's already good enough to get a general on a row. Maybe give yourself some other quicky instant bonuses from that. I just think the commanders were like that little bit of extra topping on top of the cake that really is like, you know what, we could just scrape that off.

You know, we don't need this extra layer in this cake. It's already a rainbow cake as it is. We don't need anymore. >> The spirit is willing, but the flesh is spongy and bruised. the setup for this game. I mean, I've been showcasing the folded space insert. If you're going to get this game, you're going to want to invest in it, or at least an insert of some description, because this can be a bit of a chore to set up.

You've got to sort out all the tiles on your board. You've got to sort out the random tiles on the main board. You've got the contracts. You've got the invader cards. You've got the commander cards. You've got the the uh different resources that you need, the neutral tiles. You've got the card selection for, you know, determining whether some of these council bits get blocked because even in a fourplayer game, some of them will get blocked.

There's quite a lot of moving parts and particularly this thing becomes a bit of a faf where you've got to set out the tiles for the 10 rounds. They've all got different like Greek letters on the back of them and you got to go right hang on. So I need the alpha and the beta and then I need a Y1, a B1, a Y1 and then I need an omega one and I don't know all the letters of the Greek alphabet.

>> You uncured swine, >> you know, and you got to sort all the 10 of them out and get them in a line. And as if the setup wasn't going to take long enough, God, this thing demands your entire room, let alone the table. you need to have like, you know, spare tables nearby because this board, as you can see, is already pretty huge.

I've then got to put this giant track next door to it. I've then got to find somewhere to put this giant monstrosity, plus a little extra. If you're playing with four players, you need like a little bit like bolted on the side here. And then everybody needs a board this big. And then you need somewhere to put your cards and your resources.

And it's like, oh my god, >> please excuse the crudity of this model. I didn't have time to build it to scale or to paint it. >> You know, if you if you're playing this on a small coffee table, I was like, "Have fun with that." Cuz even at the convention Gridcon I was at, man, the tables the tables at Gridcon, the typical rectangular tables you get aren't big enough to easily encompass this game.

You need like a big circular one or like a big geeken table like I've got here. And even then, I need every last speck of space on it. It really is going to suck it up and demand that its presence be known. remember me. >> This is a game clearly designed for very crunchyheavy gamers who are going to play this game and maybe only this game or have played all the other tea games and know them like like the back of their head and also are going to play this with the same group of people because this game is not new player friendly at all.

You've got all the different iconography to deal with. You've got all the like different options that are there. You've got those commander cards. The game is going to be brutal for anybody who comes into this the first time because you are just going to get absolutely creamed by somebody who knows what they're doing.

And it generates some of the most chronic analysis paralysis and downtime that I have seen in a Euro game. Possibly the most I have seen in a Euro game of this year. Excluding something like a Europa Universalis or whatever, you know, the giant civ games. If we're just talking a heavy euro game, I haven't come [clears throat] across anything this year that generates as much AP and downtime as this one does because all the options are going to freeze players.

It's going to be like, "Oh, Grace, what the hell should I even do on my turn?" You may have time to plan your next turn, but only to an extent because new tiles will come out. Contracts will get taken. Um, you know, dice will ascend and descend and whichever. And your your die might have ascended sooner than you thought it was going to.

you know, a space that you want to use on a tile might suddenly get covered up by an archon, in which case you now can't use it at all. And so, you know, you have to be able to think tactically and adapt at times, which is fun from a gameplay perspective, but it means that people just cannot plan a lot of their turn ahead of time.

You know, half of it they can, half of it they can't. And it overwhelms people so easily. You could be waiting a long time for somebody to think about what they're going to do. And anybody who suffers from analysis paralysis needs to stay the hell away from this game. and not even touch it with the barge pole.

But even added on to that, the downtime is pretty heavy as well because there is not a lot of interaction, you know, in terms of like, oh, I need to be really concentrating for this on your turn. Yes, you do have some extent of that with, okay, are they leveling up my dice? Maybe I've got to ascend something and I need to be able to adapt if somebody covers up my action.

But, you know, you could be sitting there waiting a long time for your turn to come back round, particularly in four players. We four player games of this at Gridcom were taking as long as a fourplayer non-eing game of of Tracarion. Okay, if you know Mine Clash games and you know what Trarion is, you know that that is a big mammoth beast of a game.

Okay, games of that were comparable to this. This is a long game, you know. I mean, the box tries to play 90 to 150 minutes. I'm pretty sure the designers can play it in that time. I'm not sure anybody else on the planet Earth is capable of that. >> But your weak link is this is Earth. >> Yeah. Two and a half hours for a four player game at this.

That is not happening. If you played this game 20 times over, maybe. But even then, I would struggle to think you're going to do this in two and a half hours. And that is not including the setup or the teach at all. No way. There's no way you're playing a four-player game of this with teaching and setup in two and a half hours.

That is impossible fact. It's just it's going to take up the time. And some of that is with only 10 turns in the game, you're going to be waiting for your next turn a lot. And if somebody's new and they've got AP, you are going to be there with your hand on your face waiting and waiting and waiting.

>> How long is THIS GOING TO TAKE? >> And and when you get to your turn, you may not have as lucrative a turn. So that it just feels like the weight wasn't worth it because sometimes can be very lucrative for a player, but then it becomes a nightmare to track what it is you're doing. It's like, right, hang on.

So I've played this down. So now that triggers those two effects, which is now going to make that ascend, right? Okay, when that sends choice, I'll get that one. Um, this commander lets me do this every time I put on the stateboard. So I get those. Right? Now I can fulfill this contract. Right. Well, this one's now letting me uh, you know, build something from my thing which goes on the board.

Right? That will trigger the effect of the tile. So that keys off. Also, I'm um aligning myself with purple and brown rubes, which means I get those bonuses, which now ascends that hotlight die. Oh my god. Some turns you are just wanting to scream out. [screaming] It really can drag out like mad. And it it would have been nice maybe.

I think it would have been better if they'd split the turns up. Had it so that you had a phase where after or before every turn you do, you can do a contract. So that's fine. But first up, you do the die action. Next player die action. Next player die action. Next player die action. Then you will do the archon bit.

First archon, then next archon, then next archon. If they just split up the turn sequence so that you had your turns more often, you know, or you were engaged more often, I think that would have been a much better way of doing it. But having your entire action phase all at once with all of these different combos keying off means that one player's turn might take them, you know, 30 seconds to a minute to finish or something like that and somebody else's turn could take, you know, 10 times that to finish.

It can be insane at times and it really can kill your enjoyment. I mean, I watched other people play this um at Gridcon as well, and I got their reactions afterwards, and a lot of the negative feedback was down from just how long they had to sit around waiting for the game to finish. Like, it took a long, long time.

It wasn't the gameplay aspects. Gameplay aspects were pretty sweet. I heard a lot of positives about that. And even I'm saying that the main positives of this game are the thinky crunchy n aspects of it. But it's demanding your space. It's demanding your time. It's demanding your sanity in some respects.

And you know, you need to be prepared that this is going to be a game that you are going to want to find the same two or three players that you're going to play this with and nobody else because I'm not sure this is a game I would ever want to teach again. >> Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong.

>> So, now we get to the solo mode. And if you know anything about David Turxy, I mean, not so much about the new designer. Um um well um yeah that sorry I'm not great with the these kind of names but you know if you know anything about David Totzi particularly with his solo modes in the past they tended to be very overroought designs really good designs but oh my god you're going to need to read a encyclopedia of knowledge to get them and have the flowchart of decision priority spacing on your wall that you can refer to at a moment's notice.

You know they were quite detailed solo modes. You know, even from like Captain's Chair and Imperium recently, I say they're quite detailed. Surprisingly, this one isn't anywhere near that kind of level by comparison. There's only a small rule book here. And some of that is I mean there's a wasted page for a picture there.

Why? And you know, some iconography like referencing on the back, but there's only really about say three pages of actual main rules and then a bit of setup and that. And some of the setup is mostly utilizing components from the two-player mode, which basically has these cards that come out that, you know, put like random stuff on the board to make it so the board is like filled a bit.

But yeah, it's just like, okay, fine. I mean, this does actually feel like a game where if you told me that this was a solo mode, I wouldn't have thought David designed it because it's like it's too short. It's too short to be a David Tury solo mode. But yeah, it, you know, granted it's co-designed, you know, in this respect, but the rules for it are, you know, relatively easy for you to get going if you're familiar with the actual game.

And I certainly do not recommend you try the solo mode without actually trying the game first, but the solo mode rule book is the like big miss here though because yes, it's short, but it makes me feel like they spent more time on the main rule book and then this was kind of an afterthought or maybe done by a different committee because there's a lot of stuff in here where I was asking FAQ questions um for certain aspects um particularly with the way that the AI prioritizes certain things or does their turn.

I mean, they use certain cards to determine priority, but even then you get some FAQ moments of, oh, hang on, well, what do they do in that instance then? And, you know, why would they do this D? And it's it it just feels like maybe this rulebook needed a rewrite. You know, it's not you can still play the solo mode with it.

It's not like really horrible and bad, but I I struggled a bit with this rule book. And I didn't struggle anywhere near as much with the main rule book. But this one, I don't know, just felt a little bit like maybe it needed to be a slightly bigger rule book or maybe it just needed, you know, a little bit of a kind of like an editor just to go through and just go, hang on, that's phrased a bit weird or maybe we can uh, you know, do another big example or maybe just reword that slightly.

It's just like, hm, maybe like, [clears throat] you know, humans wrote the main rule book and then they got AI to write the other rule book. It kind of has that feeling of I swear these were done by two separate committees here. But the solo mode is actually not too bad. The AI is cheaty in the sense that it doesn't really care about resources and things like that.

But it basically, you know, has its dice. It will level them up. It will join in combats. You know, it gets into combats a lot easier than you will. So, there's definitely going to be a factor there. But you still do all your stuff. You're still using the actions and dealing with your board. They don't have an estate board.

So they're just basically putting tiles on in various places to score points for matching colors etc. So it's it's cheaty but it's done in that way so that it can basically you know be relatively easy to pilot and s short of those little blemishes with understanding some of the rule sets. It is actually by comparison to a lot of tea games in the past a much easier solo mode to pilot than you know others have done.

And Mark Dy's done a notboard game has done a solo review as well. And like he he didn't particularly struggle too much with piloting it. I mean, he plays solo games all the time. I still don't believe you can play the solo mode of this in 90 minutes. [laughter] You know, every single solo game I played takes longer than that.

>> How's this look? >> Okay, that's good. >> Mainly just because you've got to do a lot of rulebook checking and set the whole thing up by yourself, which it's a long setup with a lot of people. Doing it by yourself is an absolute chore. So, you know, only made better with the insert, you know. #folded space.

But yeah, it there's a few little things that get in the way of it making it a smooth, elegant affair. It's just by comparison a much easier affair. The you still do a lot of the crunchy gameplay and you'll still be able to enjoy the main sort of strategic and tactical aspects of the game through solo mode.

So, that's always a good thing. Here's the elephant in the room though, and I am not alone in this. Go on BG and have a look at some of the Freds in there. The difficulty rating of this game is on a scale beyond human comprehension. You know, most difficulty ratings in games should be easy, normal, hard, and easy should be beatable at least threequarters of the time, if not more.

Normal should be the 50/50 sort of ratio, and then hard should be lower than that. That is how difficulty ratings should be done. The easy rating on this, and I mean the easy rating on this, is kind of basically like being kicked in the nuts, you know, repeatedly throughout the whole game and then expecting to be able to tap dance the fandango when you're done.

>> Just give US A [ __ ] CHANCE, YOU SON OF A [ __ ] >> IT'S barbaric in how punishing it is. the the score for the AI is quite swingy because the stuff it does will just influence its points. A bit like how Galactic Cruise was quite swingy with the AI. This one has that same problem with the AI in it where the points just are arbitrary like really high or really low.

But, you know, I might have one game where the AI scores, you know, 150 odd points and I get close enough to that, but even then it's a challenge to get to that many points. And this is on easy, but there are times when the AI on easy mode can reach the high hundreds. IT'S OVER 9,000. [screaming] WHAT?

9,000? THERE'S NO WAY that could be right. >> And it's just ridiculous that players are expected to keep up with it because it can't. And you know, the excuse that I've heard or that what it seems to be is like, well, you know, you know, one of the designers, you know, you got like 211 the other time, you know, in regularly when we've done testing, you know, players have got to 170 plus.

Yeah. If you're testing this with people who have played the game religiously, of course they're going to have high scores. >> Hello. Hello. Anybody home? [laughter] >> You know, that's the nature of the beast. You can't base a difficulty rating on whether the designer OF THE FREAKING SOLO mode can get a good score against it or not.

Design your easy difficulty so that some schmuck who's never played the game before can beat the AI. But the amount of people on that Fred who are saying that this game is way too hard. And I think they've actually, you know, the designers have actually relented and said, "Look, in the future, we're going to bring some stuff out to make it easier.

Please do. And if you do, I think that will fix the main problem that this mode has. It is just too barbarically difficult. You know, I don't even want to touch normal and hard mode because easy is already painful in that respect. you're playing knowing you're probably going to lose on the difficulty that's meant to get you into the solo mode.

That's not how solo should work. And you know, I mentioned the swinginess of the AI. The other big problem I have is that you have no idea during the entire game how well you're doing at all because the you get your points on a slow basis. You're just like, "Oh, two points here, three points there, a couple of points there, two points there.

That's nice. Five points there. That's quite nice." And that the AI basically goes like this. Right, let's start the game. It just goes around the board like Speedy Gonzalez with a bucketload of points and then at the end game it gets a few extra but then you get your massive wad of endgame points and hopefully overtake it.

This means though that you can never never gauge how well you're doing. You know I you know throughout the game I'm just like the AI just gets like 10 points here, five points here. This just doesn't feel fair. All right. Well, let's go through the motions. Let's get this game over with. You know, two and a bit hours later or whatever, right?

Let's get this game done. Right. Okay. Have I caught up? Have I caught up? Have I caught up? You know, and lost. I have beaten it on easy mode just I mean it is not easy to beat this AI. So I have beaten it just on easy mode. And I can beat players in multiplayer with half decent scores and win by a decent margin.

But the AI is just consistently playing like a decent expert player at this game and you just struggle to keep up with it. You will never keep up with it during the game. So whilst it's miles ahead on points, you don't know if I'm playing this well or not. You just have to wait and see until you get to the very end and see if you catch it up.

And honestly, I would have much preferred it if you were kind of neck and neck for a lot of it, but you could kind of gauge what their endgame score was going to be, not have this really debilitating feeling that it's basically almost a bit like a tortoise and hair scenario where you're going nice and slow, the hair runs on miles, and then somehow the tortoise catches up to it at the end.

It's that I don't like it when scores do that. And it's not just, you know, I'm not, it may sound like I'm just ragging on this particular game for it. Remember Frost Punk? You know, one of my favorite games. Frost Punk. Such a great game for Magic. Great. But by God, it was too difficult out of the box.

I mean, it was way more punishing than even the video game was. What did they do? They brought out an easy set of difficulty cards to use, and now I use them in every single game. And suddenly that problem is fixed. That's all they need to do with this. They just need to find a way to bring the AI's difficulty down a few notches, you know?

I mean, if you want to call it, you want to call it [ __ ] difficulty, then fine. >> Some [ __ ] are always trying to ice skate uphill. >> We want to enjoy the solo mode, and a lot of the solo mode is still enjoyable. Just make a difficulty that's a bit more, you know, shall we say, realistic. Yeah, this is a big one.

This was a lot to get through. And certainly I got very um shall we say uh excited during the negative [laughter] stuff and certainly the solo mode aspect. But that's not to downplay what this game does well and it does do a lot of stuff well. You know, for a game that has this much depth. I expected there to be a lot more rules complexity with this and there really isn't.

And that is a solid plus point for a heavy game. You know, a good solid heavy game should not be wrought with too many complex fiddly rules. It should be one that you can get stuck in and then you're rewarded for multiple plays, for getting into the depth, for you know, really honing your skills at this, which clearly the ones who designed a solo mode have already done.

But, you know, and it's it's got a lot of good crunchy things to it. A decent amount of replay value, lots of, you know, very good combo chaining opportunities here. They could have trimmed the fat down a bit certainly. I think the commander card should be gone. I think that should be entirely scrapped and replaced with something a bit more streamlined, one that doesn't require me to go into the rule book and check its iconography all the time.

And some of that does get in the way. The graphic design is not the most intuitive really. And you're having to check the rule book for how certain things work quite often. But, you know, those all sound like negatives. The crunchy aspects of what you do in this game are still really, really good. You know, there's still a lot here to award heavy gamers.

And I like heavy games. Do not use that argument that I don't like heavy games, people. Seriously, it's getting old. You know, I enjoy a lot of the stuff that this game has. And when I'm thinking about my turn and going, "All right, well, I can do this and do this, right? I chain that and this shows this combo and all that." It's very fulfilling.

So, I get a lot of enjoyment from that. But the problem is that this game is just not a very practical one. You need to have the same group of people playing this. You can't teach this to new players. you know, the game is going to take you a good, you know, four hours odd to get through a four player game of this when you're teaching new.

And it's just going to be too much downtime, too much AP, and just too much of a a barrier to entry to make this something that I would want to bring out on a regular basis, but I totally get the market for this game. You know, there's there's going to be people out there that are going to sing the praises of this, and I can see why.

From a mechanical standpoint, this game gets a lot right. It just needed to like really like trim a bit of the fat, hone down some of the the rule sets in places and find a way to make it so that you're not waiting an eon for your next turn before you actually get to deal with anything. Especially in a game where you only have 10 turns.

You can't have stupid amounts of downtime in a 10 turn game. It just it kind of destroys it. And I would have liked the solo mode to have just been a bit less punishing and a bit like, you know, more less like, oh, if if the designer can get 200 points, therefore the game's on easy mode. No, that's not how it works.

So, there's a few things that get in the way from a personal standpoint. Like, I can't see myself wanting to teach this game again because of the the the hurdles you have to jump over in order to do that. But that being said, I do like playing it. And if they did fix the solo modes difficulty rating problem, I could see myself wanting to play this solo on a reasonable basis.

But then you lose some of that coolness that you get from the multiplayer, which is the whole idea that the, you know, you're going over other people's dice and you're trying to block each other's path and use the different tunnels. So, the solo mode loses a little bit there. It's gets a lot of things right, but the negatives are pretty big negatives for me.

So, I can see people giving this like really really high ratings. For me, I'm still giving it a good rating, but not quite good enough for a seal on this one. This one is a very high six out of 10. It's above average. It's, you know, decent. It's a decent game. You know, somebody like wants to play it and the players know what they're doing.

I'd be willing to jump into this and play it and I would get a decent amount of enjoyment out of it. But, you know, they got to fix that difficulty problem with the solo and then I would jump into that more often. But even then, teaching this to new players, the downtime, the AP potential, the setup, the, you know, the amount you've got to contend with, it does get in the way of making this a game that will come off the shelf a lot.

You know, it's like some of the other Mind Clash stuff. You know, they they can be great mechanical games, but trying to get it to the table outside of a convention is difficult going. In fact, this one, I think, will get played more as a convention game than it will as a typical game night game, just because of all the time you're going to need to play it.

So, I can certainly see why people would be giving this eight out of 10. And, you know, seven, eight out of 10, I could see easily for this game. Nine out of 10. If you really, really love the tea games and you've got the perfect group for it and you're not really going to care about the solo mode, I could see that.

But to say that there's not a lot to critique in this game is a lie, I'm afraid. There there is definitely stuff to critique here. You need to know this going in. Just like with the old King's Crown, you need to know what the problems you could be facing here and know if you're comfortable with that.

And for me, it may not be a game that I can personally hang on to, but it's a game that I would certainly like to play when it comes up every now and again. It's just probably going to be not often that that opportunity will arise because you're going to need the right players, the right time, the right setting, the right table space.

There's a lot of factors that need to align first. So, it's a decent game. Honestly, I give it props. It's definitely probably uh in the It's definitely in the top half of the tea games for me. You know, there are tea games I dislike, you know, compared to this one. I think this is still a solid title, just not quite one that I can sing the, you know, sing off the mountain tops.

It's a good effort. It's certainly a good effort. I just just needed a little bit of like a little bit of trimming, a little bit of tweaks here and there. >> Are you prepared for the kind of death you've earned, little man? >> So, that's it for me on this episode of the Broken Even. If you like what you see, then please thumb up on YouTube and thumb up on board geek when it goes live on the page.

Don't forget to check out the rest of my content and let me know your comments down below. Talk about this game, all the different mechanics. Do you think some of this should have been trimmed? Do you love it? Do you hate it? What about the solo mode? Do you think it's too easy, too hard? There's a lot to discuss here.

And even as long as this video is, I'm sure by the time I edit this, this is going to be like a 45minute video. You know, there's still more that could be covered. There's a lot going on, you know, for good and for bad. You know, I want to get your comments down below and see what you have to say. So, take care and remember, regardless of whether you think your armor should have a six-pack or not, it's still only a game.

So, bye for now.