The Hungry Gamer's Game of the Year Winner 2024

0:00 ooh that looks tasty welcome folks to the hunger gamer is back with the results of the hungry gamer Game of the Year Awards and for those of you that missed the nominations you can find a link down the description kind of take you you can see that see what's going on but in a nutshell the only time that I am totally swayed only by my personal opinion is when I make lists in general the best 10 whatever all the other games I review throughout the year I really try to look at it from a do these mechanics work does this work together does it look good and sometimes I give actually very good reviews to games that they're not really for me but they're just good games because I do try to recognize that I have my own biases I lean towards kind of mediumweight games I lean towards Adventure dungeon crawls though ironically there are un nominated this year I'm looking for interesting fun themes I'm also and I'm often looking for kind of color and Whimsy and joy those are just things that I personally like so you will often see that in my game of the year nominees in any event I spent the last five six weeks or so replaying all five games that were nominated this year which as a reminder was in no particular order collab explorers of navor Buu Conquest princess

1:30 and andromeda's Edge some of those games are showing up on other people's lists some of them are not and some of them you've never heard of but I spent the time replaying all of them to try to counterbalance the end of the year bias that is kind of there in public opinion because games that get released closer to the end of the year are the ones that you have a lot of excitement about because you just got them whereas a game that you've had since I don't know January or I think in the case of Bo I may have gotten that last December I can't remember exactly but I do my award Year from November to November has been played a lot and has maybe been put back on the shelf for a little bit and doesn't coming and isn't coming out as much as a hot new game that just arrived so I replay all of them and this year I made a real special effort to not only replay all of them but replay all of them in a way I haven't done before or hadn't done extensively and all of them I played with people who had not played them before so I got to kind of experience someone else's reaction how they felt how they reacted both good and bad and while this is something that is only about my own opinion one of the things that I think is my biggest perhaps failing as a gamer is I'm very much affected by other people around the table very very much and so when people are really really excited about things I tend to get really excited when people aren't having fun I tend to feel like oh my gosh I've done something horrible and now you're miserable so it affects me a

3:00 little bit but again this is really truly at the end of the day which of these games was one I thought you know what that's the game that stands out to me the most and this year I'm doing things a little bit differently rather than do kind of five through one because that's always felt a little crappy to me because that's saying oh hey one of you you're last but no these are fantastic so what I'm doing instead this year is there I is I'm going to tell about the top two so I have a runner up and the winner and the other three I could I have so many arguments for all of them and the way I looked at them this year was I broke it down into categories I broke it down into theme what's the theme I'm most excited about what's the replay value like what is is the weight of the game something that's really what I want to keep going back to over and over again is the game one that I think is really playable at a convention cuz that to me is a thing I like to go to a convention and take a game sometimes and being able to take one of these and say boom I can play this with new people that actually does matter to me a little bit how unique is the game when I talk about how unique is a game I'm talking about both theme and mechanics kind of coming together when I talk about theme it's really what theme is I what theme makes me smile the most and then of course there's art and production which are again two separate things so what art do I like the most and then of course of course there's also the straight up production

4:31 of the game how good of a game is it now I can say that this year there's pretty much a tie on production I would give the slight edge to andromeda's edge something because of the amazing deluxe version that there is and also a really good retail version that doesn't feel like I'm losing much other than some of like the metal coins and things like that so but all all five of these games I think are really good Productions just across the board I just for what they are they're different levels of game and complexity all of them have really good Productions so that's kind of a wash slight Edge to Andromeda Edge now I'm not going to go through all the rankings I've ranked actually all of them that's actually how I determined which one of these is my winner but just kind of really quickly going through I want to point out that every single game topped out in one of these categories was number one in one of these categories I want to make sure highlight that for all of them because well it deserves to be highlighted that all of these games are wonderful and I love all of them so I'm going start with theme theme was a close one for me it was a very close kind of tossup between Conquest princess with its fashion meets Voltron meets friendship meets really hard game thrown together and boom out onto the page or the table I should say and collab which is these you're mad scientist but you're down your Lux you're working a shared workspace and you're abusing each other's minions and

6:02 so it was a tossup for me on the theme of those two but leaning a little bit towards collab just because I know nothing about fashion and I feel like I could be a mad scientist if I was smart next one replay value that that this one without question is Andromeda Edge there's so many different ways you can play that game without question just amazingly replayable jumping into weight of game and this is just literally how complex of a game is it and again there's two of them that kind of Boom locked in at right around the weight I am always interested in playing and that's Conquest princess and collab just really much really midweight games in in my opinion then looking at the ones that are are convention playable and really I think Buu is one of the best convention games I've ever had it is fast you can play max player count and almost the same amount of time you can play a two-player game it's beautiful it's attra it's attractive on the table so people are interested in playing it it's easy to teach and just wonderful wonderful con game so that that one I'm like well that's absolutely buru then we talk just pure art and for pure art my personal Aesthetics that's explorers of navor I I love that Whimsical and cartoony nature and so that one took the top there so and as I kind of go across that list you can hear that each game is topping out in one of the categories and that that's not even counting how many of them oh well you know they're not first but they're second they're not

7:34 second they're third and so it was a really hard decision for me and what I'm saying is I made this list and thought Oh this is going to make it obvious it didn't it didn't it was still really hard but with that said the top two games for me came down to collab and Conquest Princess and the real tiebreaker for me of what set those two apart went back to the theme and I just was so struck by the theming of these and the theme alone in both of these games makes me smile happy face right it makes me smile and so that's what pushed those up plus a little bit on the second level being the uniqueness kind of of the mechanics now that's it there are other games out there I'm sure Euro games that have the shared resources that you're sharing between each other but I'd never seen that before I'm talking about collap and the way you go out there and you have your minions and everyone can kind of use those minions when their scientist is around and the way that that ties into the theme is fantastic I love that and then on the other hand we have Conquest princess which again I'm sure there's other games to have this shared bag Builder that you're doing but the way that you are building this bag and

9:05 you're all building the bag together you're putting things in but as you're taking stuff out it stays on the board until someone brings it back so not only do you have this shared bag but there's a little bit of this kind of counting that you're doing as you doing a lot of Eur games well okay all these things are out so I know that bag is looking pretty bad but then when you combine that with the ability to then hold on to the bad things you've missed so you can know I'm going to have one less action next turn I'm going to keep this thing I'm going to power myself up a little bit but that's going to make the bag better for everybody which ties right back into that theme and you know the fashion and friendship and working together and making each other stronger it just it just really really works so how do I pick the last one so at the end of the day I actually had to go back and play both of these games again this the video was actually delayed for me by a week because I had to go back and play more collab and I had to go back and play more Conquest princess and and still they came out really really close and I was really struggling to separate these two and I was very very close to doing a second year of having a shared title but at the end of the day I found one sliver of differentiation between the two and that was which game to

10:35 me have I never seen anything like which is the most unique to me and so because of that my game of the year winner for 2024 is Conquest princess the batshit fever dream insane game that is way harder than you would expect it to be because of the cartoon art and friendship and fashion and we will destroy you it's wonderful I love it it's great and that means my runnerup is collab and of course we also have andromeda's Edge Buu and explores on devoria all fantastic games but congratulations Conquest princess on being the game of the year 2024 you are now the recipient of this amazing seal right there and at some point you have a trophy on your way but there you have it folks please leave down in the comments what your game of the year is and if you want to tell me I'm wrong please go right ahead and tell me I'm wrong but if you're G to tell me I'm wrong tell me what it is about the game that you would pick that you love that makes it a more worthy winner than what I think because I don't think I'm wrong but I want to know why you think I'm wrong and why you love these other games so so there you have folks another really good year of gaming I'm really excited for what's coming next year I already have some games in that are December arrivals that I'm thinking oh man these might be like vuru

12:07 and going to make it into my game of the year in 12 months from now there's some good stuff already coming in but there you have it folks as always if you found this video useful please like subscribe share maybe become a channel member as always thank you so much for watching have a wonderful wonderful day