Woodcraft Board Game Review

hello everybody Welcome to totally tabled my name is Shaggy and today I'm just going to give you my quick thoughts on Woodcraft I just did a full solo playthrough so please go check that out as always when I do one of these review videos I assume that you've either watched that play through or you know how the game works I now played Woodcraft multiple times both solo and at two players so I'll speak to both of those now this is a game that's really my wheelhouse because it's a medium weight Euro and it's from a designer that I really love Vladimir tsuchi he has a co-designer on this one Ross Arnold I'm not familiar with him but I love underwater cities that made my top 50 games of all time go check out that list if you haven't I'm also a big fan of Shipyard and Pulsar 20 uh whatever that date is on that game I was I was looking through my collection here in my office I can't can't seem to find it I'm pretty much a fan of of every game that he's made to varying degrees and one of the things I really love about Woodcraft is that it uses dice as resources there's actually not a lot of games that do that I can think of uh rajas or the Ganges for instance does that and I love that the dice here are different kinds of wood because all those dice manipulations that are so puzzly and so satisfying make a lot of thematic sense right you can cut the dice you can add little bits to the dice you can glue two dice together these are sort of standard dice manipulation things but here it makes a lot of sense because you're using saw blades to cut them in half you're using glue to glue two pieces of wood together or you're using some scrap wood to just increase it by one or two great thematic integration and it just makes sense right it's just easy to understand these rules rules I also particularly love that you can do all these things as any time actions you can do them as many times as you want in any order so long as you have the resources and the tools available that's fantastic because it means there is a limit to how much you can do it but it doesn't feel like a slog it doesn't feel like I have to use my turn just to manipulate these dice now I can do them as much as I want anytime it gives you that great puzzly feeling and it means that you can have these Mega turns it's one of my favorite things in games as being able to have mega turns Macau is sort of the shining example of a game that gives you Mega turns but you get it here you you know you sell a die for double its value you buy a six you cut it in half you glue a bit on you fuse these two together you get to fulfill this contract that then gives you another die that you cut and you can fulfill another contractor you plant it you get to have these really satisfying turns and it also just makes the puzzle that much more fun and clever so I really love the dice mechanism here now the other kind of star of the show is this wheel this big imposing wheel in the center of the table it's incredibly clever as well now it's really just sort of like a really souped up version of a kind of river mechanism or I'm not sure what you call it but you know it's in small world it's in PAX Premiere oh there's a great old game called forenze that uses it to good effect where if you pass over cards you have to put points or money on them to make the cards that people aren't taking the actions that people aren't taking more valuable more enticing and this is basically what's happening here you have your seven action wedges out there and all the actions are really simple and easy to understand and I really appreciate that and so as you're taking these actions the old actions are slowly becoming more valuable giving you more bonuses it's a pretty complicated system because it really matters the order that things are taken in you know if you take one action over and over and over again all the previous actions are going to get much more valuable there's going to be many more bonuses associated with them and those bonuses are really critical when I just like my first couple of games I was just sort of taking the actions that I wanted to take for my strategy not really paying much attention to those bonuses and in the later games I've really been adjusting what I do if there's an action that's going to give you a ton of stuff I'll just take that for the bonuses and I've done much better so I really feel like those bonuses and taking advantage of them are critical and I just really like how that wheel works now one thing I sort of glossed over I meant I meant to talk about it more in the playthrough but I just sort of forgot to double back to it is those lanterns and how you can use them and you can actually do some clever things by using those lanterns now I usually just save three of them and get an extra turn but you can spin a lantern to basically move any of the actions get the bonuses associated with them and then take a different action and that could be valuable and you could use that at the right time to really good effect you know maybe you don't want a new Helper but no one's taking that helper action in a while and there's some juicy bonuses on there I'll spend a lantern I'll move that one get the bonuses and then I'll just take whatever action I want there's also an edge case where if an action is used too much it can get stuck where you can't use it again until you know like that first quadrant is cleared off so that the needle can move because a needle can only move if the quadrant is completely empty and so that's another case where maybe you use a lantern to be able to take that action again just really clever stuff all of these mechanisms are streamlined and extremely clever now one thing to note here is that this is a very low interaction game you are taking actions which may change the bonuses for someone you're taking uh helpers and contracts that maybe they wanted maybe taking dice of certain values that they wanted and there is a little bit of a race for some of the objectives the public objectives and for those tracks like the reputation track but I've experienced very little sort of hate drafting in that sense you're more just working on your own puzzle and occasionally getting in someone's way so for that reason I think the two-player game is great and I'm not really sure I have any desire to play it at higher player counts I'm not not sure how much that would add except for more movement on the wheel and maybe that could be an interesting Dynamic I don't know I thought it would grade it too really happy with it at two as a low interaction casual and fairly quick playing game and because it's so low interaction I really love the implementation of the solo mode this is a beat your own high score type of solo game that I know a lot of people don't really like I like it here in a game like this because the puzzle is so strong and satisfying and because the interaction with the other players is so low I don't really need another player to be competing against right this little deck of cards is manipulating things kind of as another player might and honestly that's enough I'm happy to not have a lot of Maintenance of an AI opponent and I can just focus on the good stuff the puzzle it's so quick playing so Breezy and like I said before like I've said with uh you know the arc Nova solo mode I don't want every solo mode to be like this but for low interaction Euros I think it works great I can really see this hitting the table a lot as a solo game because of just how easy it is so at the end of the day Woodcraft is getting an eight from me both as a solo game and as a two player game I think this is a fantastic low interaction medium weight Euro and if you like those sorts of things if you like the puzzly nature of this dice mechanism I highly recommend it this made my top 10 games from 2022 go check out that list I've played it even a little bit more after that and I've only enjoyed it more so this one's definitely a keeper for me and I feel like in the rush to move to the next hotness this game is getting a little bit overlooked now maybe my perception of that is wrong but yeah give this one a second look it deserves it and there you go that's all from me thank you so much for watching and goodbye