Variety Vlog March '18 - GAMA & 19 games to cover!

0:00 welcome to Jong it's games this is the variety blog for March 2018 and this was a pretty huge month honestly I have 19 different games of note I want to cover I also went to a convention and a variety of other things have been happening so feel free to skip ahead to the part that most interesting or stick around for the whole thing let's go ahead and start with some general updates and as always a very brief patreon update March was not as good of a month February by every single measure there were only three new people who pledged to the campaign for a total of a net gain of $15 a month which is certainly nice to see of course that no month is going to be like February with the humongous campaign that happened it was very successful and very happy with it where the patreon is but I was expecting maybe a little bit more of a tail of support coming off the back of that but either way I think it's going pretty well and the next thing I want to talk about also has to do with support and that is going to be the no pun included Kickstarter campaign now normally in the general update I talked about general updates for this channel but in this case no pun included the YouTube channel is run by Elaine an defconn and there are two very good friends of mine they make amazing board game reviews and their Kickstarter is a little over halfway done I think at this point maybe three quarters away done and they're not quite to their goal yet so I really want to drum up a little more attention so that people maybe go out and check it out and see if they want to support everything that only in and fkr doing because it's really wonderful stuff and I really think they deserve it next up I'd like to talk about my experiences at the gamma trade show now if this happened just a couple weeks ago in Reno and I only live about three and a half hour drive away from Reno so this

1:30 year I decided to try and check it out for the first time every previous year or at least for a long time it's been in Vegas which is a much longer drive and Stephan Utley a flight but this time around I decided I didn't want to just go to gamma as John from John games because I've never been to this trade show before and I knew that it was a bit different this is not a public trade show it's just for people in the industry talking to other people in this industry now wheeling and dealing and all that kind of stuff and so I decided to reach out to Scott Alden of BoardGameGeek and I asked them if they wanted any help with the livestream and I knew that they were going to be doing a live stream to show all the various new games were being showed off by various publishers at Gama and Scott said sure so he put me up to the hotel I drove out there and it was really fun I got to evolve with them for I guess it was essentially about three days the the mainstream was just two days long and I did a ton of video switching now I've never done this before but the way they do their livestream they have three different cameras going all at once and there's somebody in a computer and they're just switching from camera to camera alive as the actual preview is going and right at the very beginning Olinda the first main day Scott was like well you want to go for it and that's like uh I guess so I sat down and I did the video switching for probably about five to six hours straight at that point and I made that several goofs right there the beginning which I felt super embarrassed about like putting the wrong name on screen or like cutting to the wrong camera or looking at the wrong preview I definitely made some mistakes but they were really welcoming and warm and really made me feel part of the team it was really cool and they actually asked me to join I'm not jointed like take

3:00 over in front of the screen for a little bit and I did that I've been on the first day and quite a bit in the second day I think a total of about five to six hours of me and a BoardGameGeek Jersey which was a very new experience for me and I just kind of rolled into it and did the previews with a whole bunch of people and it was a really exciting experience overall I got to meet a ton of people and it was enjoyable doing that livestream thing and they're working with the BoardGameGeek team was a very satisfying overall thing and I don't know maybe I'll be able to do that more in the future or maybe this will be just a one-off thing but it was certainly a fun time going to gamma and I also got to play a bunch of games and it's part of the reason why I'm gonna be covering nineteen later on in this vlog so yeah I'll get to those when we get to them the last thing that I'd like to cover involves a small change to the beginning of most of the videos that I'm putting out going forward and that change is I'm gonna do a little bit of a blurb right after the intro and right before I go into like the rules or the playthroughs explaining about the patreon page and about subscribing to the channel and about how likes help the channel out and I have avoided doing this for the entire time that I have had this channel you know about four years I always felt it was really tacky being like like and subscribe the video like right there at the beginning but I realized now that I am doing this professionally I really need to do everything I can to try and get overall numbers up and if I can get the like numbers on each video to go up then that means that those videos will be suggested to other people more often so that they'll get more views and the more people that watch this stuff the more likely somebody is to potentially like my stuff enough to back the patreon campaign and just all the stuff is

4:31 cyclical and I feel like just mentioning it at the very end of the video is probably not good enough anymore so I'm gonna try to work through a couple different ideas the first one I did was ended up being like a 25 or so second blurb which is maybe a little bit longer than I wanted it to be but we'll see how it pans out and I guess I'm kind of apologizing in advance and I'm doing a little bit of advertising at the beginning of my videos from this point forward but I kind of have to do what I have to do to try this stuff out and we'll see if it works well that finishes up all of the updates and I think I'm gonna jump right into the initial impressions part of the vlog now I'm not gonna do any questions and answers or your opinion because I have 19 different games to cover and I don't want this video to be like two and a half hours long or something crazy so yes you can see all of them right over there I've sorted them in alphabetical order as always these are games that I played for the first time over the course of this month and 19 new games is a lot more than I expected when I was putting this list together I was pretty blown away by it so without further ado let's go ahead and start at the top the first game is council of four now this was designed by Simone Luciani and Danielle Cassini and these designers have designed many other games like Marco Polo Vulcan the Mayan calendar Lorenzo magnifico and many many others so the designer pedigree was pretty high when I went into trying this game out now this was sent to me by C Mon they got the English rights to this game but I believe it came out many years ago by cranial creations first and what's going on in this game is you have a euro style atmosphere where you are trying to put down your little of Councillors on to the various cities on the map and all these cities are connected via roads and you randomly put

6:03 bonuses down on all the cities at the beginning of the game now whenever you put a new counselor down onto a city you will get the bonus of that city and then you'll also get every bonus for every other city that is connected back to that first one so if you build over here and build over here you're not getting a bonus for having them next to each other but if you start here and build build build build build build build every single time you do that it activates everything behind it this means you have a great escalation feel to the game as well as a bit of engine building and I've played the game a couple times over the last month and it did seem like the way the tokens went out varied the gameplay from one to the next because if you had all of the money tokens it happened to me to be clustered together and you in that area suddenly you can get a ton of money constantly as you build out from your network but if that's kind of all scattered around then maybe you go for a worker economy and there's just a variety of different things going on here but when it comes to the decisions you're making it has a really nice simple structure where you have a main action and then you potentially have a secondary action and the main actions are pretty darn simple you will either spend cards in order to take permit so that you can build out into cities or you can move these little councillors around and this is where the name Council of four comes from because there are five different zones on the overall game board area the four zones are the main area and then there's a queen council and whenever you want to take apartment for a specific spot you have to discard cards that match the councilors that are in that the Council of four and there's all of these councils everywhere so you can influence these councils by pushing people out and putting new ones in and they are essentially neutral pawns and you can

7:33 make money when you do this action and of course you're trying to make it match up with the cards you have drawn randomly into your hand all in all I was pretty impressed by the game it did seem like maybe there's a bit of a runaway leader thing because if one person has their network going like crazy just how are people can catch up to them but also I've seen that that tends to go right as the game is about to end so one person kind of explodes and then the game ends that's not necessarily a big deal so I've enjoyed this one I think everyone I've taught it to so far has been like oh that was really cool so I'm looking forward to playing this one more next up we have de crypto now I played this one at Gama and they were showing it off at the yellow booth and I did not know anything about this game going into the convention but I kept hearing people talk about it so it's pretty interested in giving it a try at the first game night when I was over there and what's going on here is you have a clue style team-based game which immediately makes me and probably everyone else think of code names but this game it does some pretty different things so you split everybody else on everybody up into two teams and when I played it it was two teams of now well once he met three and one other team had two on it and then you all have this little board in front of yourself and you slide these little clues in and everybody on your team sees all these clues and they might be really generic type things like you know chair or door or something like that and then you go through a variety of rounds a sequence of rounds where one person on that each given team is going to be a clue giver and they draw this little card and it tells them which of the four clues is what they need their team to kind of guess this round and in what order and then they're gonna write down on a pad a variety of clues for each of

9:06 those things and considering your team can see these words it seems pretty simple right you say if the the clue is door you could just write opening or something like that on there and it seems like okay well where is the catch for this game and that comes into play because after your team has guessed and hopefully they've guessed correctly then you tell your opposing team what the clues were and what the guesses were and then they can also make a guess back well I guess before they know the actual correct answers they are gonna make their own a guess at what they think the answer was so they don't have the ability to see the cards that are on front in front of the screen but as we go round and round and round and we developed this big cache of information of all the previous clues and how they align with the different numbers they will start to get a better idea like wait a minute all these clues seem to kind of line up do you think that word is like time or do you think that word might be carpet or you know all these words are relatively simple but as you start to see this buildup of clues you can start to really get an idea and if you are able to guess a couple times the opposing teams Clues based off of what they've had then you're just gonna win also you will just lose if you make your clues too esoteric so that your team can't actually guess them enough times now we played a full game but technically we lost like halfway through because I was being way too esoteric with my clothes I was trying to really I guess I was expecting my teammates to be able to figure it out a little bit better than they were so it was not I guess an official game because we should have died like four rounds into the eighth but we ended up going the full eight and it was a really cool experience and I do not it would not

10:36 surprise me if you are still very confused as to how this works because once you are in the middle of the game it totally makes sense and it clicks but me right now talking to you with an image it's not quite enough but either way I'm gonna tell you right now this was a very exciting game I'm looking forward to trying this one more it is probably the most interesting team-based clew game a game that I played it since codenames came out and it's possible that it's deeper and more interesting than code names actually was so we'll see how this one goes I don't think it's available for wide release just yet but it should be coming up pretty soon next up we have the third initial impression and that is for dinosaur island now I got to play this one about a week ago and victory point cafe in downtown Berkeley and this was a four player game yeah it was all four of us and this is essentially Jurassic Park the worker placement board game this game has a series of different phases that all the players are gonna be playing with at the same time and realistically they kind of feel like mini games like in the first phase everybody is drafting in these DNA dice and the DNA is going to be tracked on your little board and you will later like many rounds later spend DNA to make dinosaurs in order to attract more people to your park but in that first round you are kind of taking things away it's essentially thanks drafting cuz you'd roll bunch of dice but you can also pick up a new enclosures for the various dinosaurs you have and once you finish that phase you move on to the next phase and in that one you're going to be able to hire specialists which is from a depleting supply as well you can also pick up rides and do special abilities to get more DNA if you want to after that then everybody is gonna do a

12:06 real time not real time I guess a simultaneous action selection phase I guess you could call this one a work replacement phase because you have all these workers and you place them on various spots on your board but it's a completely simultaneous and multiplayer solitaire type situation in this phase because you never put your tokens down where somebody else might want to go so you're putting your little workers who are essentially actions on a variety of spots like increase your security or breed some newer dinosaurs or you know get extra points for various rides there's a variety of different things and you can actually increase the number of these different spots that you can do in the previous round when you were taking specialists and new enclosure and new technologies and that kind of thing then after that third phase you go into the fourth phase and that and at that point you figure out how exciting your park is and you pulled that number of guests out of a bag most of them are regular people but some of them are hooligans the hooligans don't pay you money and they tend to not get eaten by dinosaurs and the regular guests will give you money and then you'll kind of put them out on all the rides but if you're a threat level in your specific park is greater than your security level then you have to start killing people off so today they paid to come in so you get to keep their money but the ones that got to stick around or much more likely to actually give you victory points which certainly a good thing so you have these four minigames that kind of come together and they create this expansive experience where you are you know collecting DNA and bringing dinosaurs but also like time to build ferris wheels and you know hat stores and that kind of thing the game is definitely broad in its its attempt to actually

13:38 simulate this Jurassic Park style thing going on and I did enjoy the game but I will admit it did feel like maybe there was a few too many things going on like all these different minigames it certainly took a minute to actually teach everything and the game did work but I don't know if it necessarily blew me away but I am looking forward to trying it again I'm I can't really come up with like a linchpin point where like that was bad and that was good I was not expecting to like the hooligan mechanic where you're randomly pulling people out of the bag and some of them don't give you money and you know if they don't give you pressure points on the different spots on the board then that's gonna be sort of a luck based thing but the game it actually uses this in a pretty interesting way that mitigates for player order because at the end of every round you were going to change up the player order based off of whoever has the least number of points is gonna get to go first and that also means they're gonna be trying out of that bag first so you're somewhat incentivized not to go crazy in the lead because by the time it comes back to you to pull people out of the bag odds are good there are a bunch of hooligans in there because there are many abilities in the game to actually put hooligans back in the back so there were a couple times where in this particular play I was headed the whole game there were a couple times where I pulled a ton of hooligans out of the bag and when everything settled down very and I actually ended up winning the game so I don't feel like that the negative luck factor of pulling those things out ultimately hurt me that bad I still had a pretty good Jurassic Park type of engine going on and I also I tried to make it so that I was not too scary like throughout most of the game none of my people got eaten I think in the last round I decided it made sense to have a couple people get eaten out of the park but in general I had a very

15:08 safe area and I think that's why I was in the lead the whole time even though I was at a detriment because I was grabbing dice last and I was taking specialists and new technologies last and all these things seemed to work together quite well I suppose the last thing to mention is the art style in this game is pretty wonderful a lot of people don't like it but it's got these really vibrant wonderful colors all over the place and I really like it I think it was striking on the table and certain set itself apart from many other or games that you might see around so I think all in all it's a good package and yeah I decided I want to play this one again now we have game number 4 and this one is fairy tile and I played this one at the yellow booth at gamma as well in fact I played this as I was waiting in line to play decrypt oh and what fairy tile is is a rather light tile laying game that also hypothetically has a storytelling element to it although don't read into that too much when I played it it was a two-player experience with my friend auric and what you do in this game is on every turn you are gonna be you're gonna have a card in your hand and it's a condition out in the middle of the table you have a tile laying set of tiles and you have a princess and a knight and a dragon and these are all kind of public domain type things and the kid card you have in your hand is something you're trying to make happen out on the board you might want to have the princess be next to the night and have them also be on planes or you might want to have the dragon be in one corner and the knight is in the line of sight of the dragon or that kind of thing and all you're doing on your turn is you're moving one of these figures or you're

16:39 pulling out a new tile and the tiles will extend rivers and as well as forest areas of whatnot and it was a very neat experience honestly I mean it's a light game we played it in like 15 minutes or so but we were both really diggin it and the storytelling idea was that each one of these cards is progressing the story and whenever you match that situation you describe the car to draw the next one from you a little storybook and the first person to go through their whole story book is gonna be the one who wins now it would not surprise me if this one is more interesting at three and four players to player was fine but there were a couple moments where we like I move the dragon here and I move the dragon back and it's like well how do we get out of this infinite loop one of us has to blink and invariably it seemed like the person who blinked did less good then the other person did but the game seemed to work really well I don't think I'm necessarily chomping at the bit to play this one again but I would easily give another shot if I had the opportunity next up we have game number five and that is gods and shun clever and I apologize for my German pronunciation I do not know how to speak German but I've been when I looked it up online it appeared that the English translation for this game is pretty clever and this is a role in right game that I first learned about through one of the board game big live streams I saw the video of it and I said wow that looks really neat because what's going on in this game is each player has this rather large pad of paper in front of themselves and like many roll and write games you're gonna be rolling dice and then everybody is gonna have the opportunity to write things down onto your pad now I'm not gonna go into all the specifics but the real keys to this game and the reason I was excited about it is because you have a variety of different colors and you have different colored regions on this

18:11 pad in front of you and each one of these regions scores differently so you'll have like the origin region which you just put numbers down and there's no rules to it you can just put a six next row for next or two and that's fine and the end of the game that's gonna be six points four points and two points but also at certain points there's a 2x modifier so if you manage to take an orange when that happens and you put a six down there then suddenly that's worth twelve points which is much better you also have a purple zone where all the numbers have to be increasing as you go along and the purple zone has tons of different bonuses the Green has thresholds that you need to match but then the blue and the yellow section you don't need to go and order at all and you're kind of crossing things off in a two dimensional grid and in that case when you make a complete column or row you're either gonna score points or get more bonuses and the real benefit to this game is when you get these bonuses you can kind of bounce around and it has a really great like endorphin hitting thing going on because there'll be moments where you're like the midway through the game and you'll take like a purple for something like that and you get a bonus which says you can mark a blue spot so you go up there any mark and blue spot when she unlocks the ability to put down a green and so you're like okay well I mark off the green and that also unlocks the ability to do a yellow and you're like you end up doing so many things kind of bouncing back and forth back and forth and every single one of these fuels are interesting and often times gives you a pretty good decision to go along with it when it comes to the dice rolling aspect of the game there it's not the kind of where you just roll dice and everybody picks in this case you actually has the main player roll dice and pick one of

19:42 them and any die that as a pit lower than the one you picked goes into the middle of a table and you don't have access to it anymore and then you can roll the remaining ones and you can do this up to three times but that means if you take a six on the very first round odds are good you won't get to do it three times because so many dice are gonna go off into the middle once you pick two or three dice or less then everybody else gets to take an action based off of the ones in the middle and I play this one twice at both times I'm really enjoyed it it's a very satisfying experience kind of sinking up all of your various combos and it makes you feel good it gives you that moment you like yeah I did that that was awesome I just made a bunch of points and sure it's a die rolling game but the experience of it did work out pretty well I'm looking forward to playing this one more I think it would probably do well with laminating if there's a ton of different sheets in the box but at the same time I think lamination would be nice as well I suppose the last thing to mention is I did order this from amazon.de because it is not available in English I was able to find a English translation of the rules online and fortunately the actual pads are just numbers and symbols so that worked out pretty well and yeah this is a very neat roll in right style game moving on we now have game number six and this one is gold fever now I played this one at Gama in one of the open game nights and it looks like this one is coming out in like two or so months from stronghold games and I haven't heard it nothing about this game and if I'm being honest when I first saw it on the table I was pretty unimpressed I only played it because the lady who was running the booth was like you play this game and I was like okay well I'm not doing anything right now I guess I'll go ahead and play it and in this game everybody

21:13 has this this bag full of different little gem pieces and they the variety of colors deal with a couple different things like you have different types of rubble which is like white and grey in black but then you also have gold pieces and then these little emerald pieces oh no ruby pieces i don't refer to all the specific colors but either way there's that variety of colors and the game is very simple on your turn are you gonna do is draw these pieces out of the bag until you either bust or you stop and what you're trying to do is pull all of the gold out of your bag before anybody else so it's essentially a race there and whenever you pull to rubble then that's when you essentially lose your turn and I apologize I don't remember all the specifics of the rules but the general idea of it is that in those specific moments you will have to put some ruble back into your bag which isn't good if you stop in this trouble outside in front of you then you can actually give it to somebody else and they have to put the ruble into their bag which kind of makes it harder for them so that means if one person is pulling lots of gold out of the bag then you can keep giving them ruble so it's harder for them to find the last one the last real key to this game is one of the tokens that you pull out again I can't remember the exact color but one of them when you pull out immediately starts a real-time session in the game we're settling everybody needs to just frantically pull things out of the bag until they hit a gold this really was the crux of the game that pulled me in and made me realize that this is actually a fun experience as I mentioned my first impression was like it's just a bunch of bags with some kind of regular looking gems inside of them but when we were playing it we all really got into it especially when it's somebody else's

22:44 turn you have to be watching them like a hawk because the moment if they pull out one of those things then something you're just fear usually pulling these things out of your bag until you're hoping to hit the gold and you scream out that you hit gold and everybody stops and put their stuff back in the bag and then you go back to normal and I think this one really worked it's definitely a typical push your luck style game but these extra things of a sudden real-time thing keeping you engaged and also just the ability to kind of pile on the leader just keep on giving them all of the crap that comes out of your bag made it work out really well I'm very happy that lady like demanded if I play the game with her I mean she was being uh she was joking around with it but still it was a fun experience and the person who won I'm pretty sure it was Eric Martin from organ geek uh and he was definitely way in the back and then all the last heard of the game he just he pulled three gold right out of the bag it was just like what it was a crazy moment especially when they pulled that last one none of us could believe that would happen that many times in a row and that's what you're looking for in a push your luck style game where sure I lost but I still had a really fun time and I was yelling and all that kind of stuff I was were playing and yeah I'm surprised I was able to get those kind of emotions out of such simple pieces to the game so I recommend this one I would look forward to trying this one again I don't think I'm gonna like seek it out like crazy but I would definitely play this one if I had the opportunity up next we have game number 7 and that is guns and steel now this game first came out in 2015 and I remember when it came out and I felt pretty interested in it it's the idea of it it's like a hundred cards and it is a civilization style game for up to four people and I

24:14 really enjoy games that trying to do that and of course like how can it pull that off with just 100 cards and then the kind of game kind of came and went in my consciousness and I never tried it or never really saw it then last year at Gen Con when I was having a meeting with tasty minstrel games they had it in their booth and I asked if I could take her a few copy and they said sure so I grabbed it and unfortunately it's taken this long for me to actually get it played and I have to say that I actually enjoyed it I guess actually implies that I wasn't expecting to but you know after such a long time I wasn't really sure what my expectations would be I ended up playing it at two players and what you're doing in this game is you set up this big pyramid of cards and you're gonna always play with the same cards in this pyramid although the order in which they're in the pyramid is gonna be different then every single row the pyramid has a monument that is going to be adjacent to it I guess a wonder and that's going to be different from game to game and the mechanics of the game are you have a hand of cards and every single turn you must play one of your cards facedown and on the back of every card is a resource and then you also must play one of your cards from your hand face up and evaluate the action of that card after you do that you can then purchase cards from the central pyramid we have to purchase from the bottom and go up and you purchase them by exhausting the various cards you have in front of you as resources so you have this multi used card thing going on and as you go turn to turn playing a card as resource and a card as an action and buying cards in eventually you will run out of cards in your hand and when that happens if you have a certain amount of stuff that matches up with one of the wonders you can take that wonder and it'll be wars points to you and then you take everything back in your hand and

25:44 you start all over again so it was this interesting Evon float tableau style building game because you're just building this thing out in front of you and then it would all go away and then you build it out again one of the things that happened that persisted as you put stuff out is the military value because as you are actually playing some of the cards you can use to attack your opponents to cause them to exhaust some of the resources or potentially even steal some of their wanders and you just look at the amount of military strength you have and the amount of military strength they have and this put a pretty interesting spin on the game because as we were playing I was going really hard on military I had lots of military cards but I kept playing them in such a way that they were not found at the right time and my opponent who did not have as many military cards seem to have enough at the right moments to actually get attacks through me that certainly wasn't good unfortunately for my opponent they kind of miss read some of well they kind of misunderstood what they should be going for and realistically you need to be gunning hard for those monuments you get points for a lot of different things but the game ended and I blew him out of the water because I had so many of those and none of the attacks they got through actually stole the monuments or wanders away from me they just exhausted all my stuff so at the end of the day I quite enjoyed the play and my opponent was a bit lukewarm on its head maybe I enjoyed it because I won by so much I haven't had the opportunity to play it again but this box is so tiny and the decisions were actually pretty interesting that I am looking forward to trying this one again at game number 8 we now have class now technically I did actually play this once at Essen last year but over this last month I got a review copy end from

27:16 the publisher which I was not expecting this is a gigantic wooden dexterity game where it's one person versus one person and you have a little pawn on top and you magnetically control it from the bottom and you're just trying to knock a little ball into your opposing or your opponent's hole on their side of the board there are a couple other things going on but this is a very simple game that's frantic and just like kind of moving around like smacking the ball all over the place and I told the publisher it's like I'm not sure if this is the kind of game that I can review on my channel like it's not really the style of stuff that I actually cover but they insisted they said they wanted to send me a copy so I said okay hit at this point I think I played it five times over the last month and every single one of those plays was really fun I mean I enjoyed it NSM and I've enjoyed it all of these times and this seems like it's a great experience type of game it's certainly the kind of thing you can put out in the middle of a board game night and as people are trickling in and people are between games you can easily sit down and do this and you'll definitely be laughing and groaning and all that kind of stuff as you are playing these like 10 minute game and it works out really well unfortunately the game is huge so I don't actually store it on my main board game shelf I put it in my closet right next to glue Haven which is also a gigantic box this one is a fun deck sturdy style game I mean it doesn't have the finesse that something like chronal has but the real time craziness of it really does work out and I'm sure this one will get played a lot more at game number 9 we now have kung-fu zu now I play this one at the Gama trade show I'm like many of these other games and this one was being shown at the publishers booth this is done by whiz kids and I knew nothing

28:47 about this game going into it and it's a very light dice fling style game I think it took us 10 minutes or so to play a three player game I believe and what you are doing in this game is you have these dice and there are D sixes but each die is associated with various animals and you play as an animal I forget which animal it was maybe a zebra or something like that and the cork of this game is that each one these dice looks like the animal that it is on one face you have on one side of the dal you of the face on the backside you have a tail on the bottom of that you'll see little feet and on the other three sides you'll kind of have like the back and sides of the animal so you look at a little die and it's kind of like a cube version of an animal and then what you do is you put them down on the rim of this little playing area and you flick these dice around now you're trying to knock your opponent's dice into the various holes and if you ever have your die land so that the feet are face-up then that dying is stunned and you can't actually activate it so what that means is you need to try and hit your die with one of your other flick knife flicks later on to knock it out from being stun so that you can use it again and you just keep playing this until one person is the last person standing or at least last person that has a non stun dice out in the area each one of the different animals has a special ability they can do once per game and again the game took like eight nine minutes or something like that so it's a light definitely family kind of kid oriented style game and I had fun with it I don't think I'm ever gonna play this one again but I am super not the target target demographic I didn't really see any issues with it it was obviously adorable I really loved

30:18 the aesthetic of those little cube shaped animals and flicking dice around can be fun but it didn't really pull up pull enough out of it for me to be particularly interested in going for it again alright next up we have game number 10 and this is Senshi I played this one at gamma and this one was being displayed by arcane wonders who is the publisher for it I'm not sure exactly when this is coming but it seems like most of the games that were being showed at the convention are coming out relatively soon and this is a simple somewhat abstract but really bright and crunchy style game so in it you have all of these different stacks of these different colored little disks and what you're trying to do is score these disks in your overall little area but the way it works is you can't win as if any of your different color scoring's is the lowest out of anybody and if that is not the trick the case then you do win if any of your stacks he's also tallest so essentially you're trying to go nice and even so that you're not the worst at anything but then it still be the best at one thing now what you're actually doing on your turn is you're gonna start the game with a couple of these things at your hand and when it's returned you could do one of three things the first thing is you can take a stack of these tokens and put them into your area or instead of doing that you could take a token from the top of any of the ones that you claimed or from any of your opponents and put that into your hand and the third thing you could do is you could take your token out of your hand and when you do that all of the tokens that are on the top of the stacks that match that color or going to score you're also going to take that token and put it down in front of you so this is just an abstract puzzle that involves you and your opponents as

31:49 you're trying to score the tokens at the right moment so that you have a bunch of those specific colors while your opponents have less of them so you get the best benefit out of that but also you're trying to analyze the board situation to make sure you don't slip out of positions so that suddenly there are not enough of those specific colors out there to potentially not be the last and the game took like maybe 20 minutes or so for the three of us and the first few turns were just like I don't really know what I'm doing but by the time we got to the mid and late parts of the game I definitely had some strategy going into it and when the game was over I won and I felt like I not that I deserved to win like I necessarily you know played way better than my opponents but I felt like I made lots of smart decisions and therefore when I won I was like okay that makes sense I'm not sure how drawn I am to the game and I think part of that is it's very abstract in nature like I definitely play it again it certainly worked and the decisions I was making wallows playing were actively engaging but at the same time I don't generally find myself going after games of this depth /length all that often I think it's certainly going to be a decent filler style game and the pieces that we're playing with were really not great like they were not the final pieces that are gonna come in the box and normally I'm not too swayed by production quality and whatnot but it is likely that I would have enjoyed it even more if I had these big nice chunky pieces that really fit really nicely and together so yeah this one that certainly worked and I would I would try this one again I don't know if I need it in my collection but if this was at like a board game cafe or somebody brought it

33:19 over to a game night I would certainly play it again and I would actually try to keep my winning streak going I guess I've only won once but either way that's certainly a good start all right let's now move on to game number 11 and this is shards of infinity now I didn't know anything about this game going into the convention I played this one at game on just like so many of these and it was I believe this Wednesday or Thursday of the convention we're kind of later on into it and I was hanging out with Scott Alden and he said hey I'm Justin Gary wants me to go play his new game and I didn't really know who that was and we went over there and I found out oh this is the guy who designed ascension and I love ascension my wife and I have played ascension innumerable times on our iPads against each other it's a really great couples game for us so I was like cool let's see what this guy has coming out what shards of infinity is is a another deck builder in fact I think it's the first deck builder that he's done since ascension although ascension has had like 20 million expansion since it first came out but in shards of infinity you are going to be essentially attacking each other and the easiest way to abstract this game is it's it's kind of like star realms and it's also kind of like ascension with some new stuff mixed in together so the star realm side is that you are fighting back and forth and each player has a certain number of health points and you win if you are the last person standing we played a three player game of this one and you have these nice little boards in front of you that have two different wheels one of them tracks your health and the other one tracks your skill now this is the part that is certainly the most interesting aspect of the game and the one that got me the most excited and that's because the idea

34:49 is that your cards while in your deck can get better as the game goes on that's because many of the cards have conditional readings on that they will do one effect but then it says if your skill is 10 or better then do this effect instead if your skill is 20 or better then do this instead and they get they escalate in there Toomas there are many cars that let you increase your skill and you start at I believe zero or one and you can go all the way up to 30 what this means is that you are bolstering up the abilities of the cars you've already drafted which is a very neat idea and as you are just fighting back and forth and then the ascention bits are very essentially yes and there is a card area with six cards you can buy there is only one currency in this game and you buy the cards and they go in your discard pile some of the cards can stay out and linger just like constructs so it felt very familiar in that respect but when you add in the skill thing and had a different feel to it but it is definitely a deck builder like it it feels like you're trying to generate the engine you're trying to get the cards that are gonna combo really well together and there is a little bit of card culling like removing cards from your deck but it didn't seem like there was as many as some other games necessarily are and I guess the last thing to mention it is one of the starting cards that you have evaluates based off your skill level and if you get your skill all the way to 30 that means you have achieved ultimate skill and when you and when you get that neck that card into your hand the next time and play it it has a condition it says if you were at 30 skill then you win essentially because what it does is it gives you infinite power and power is the thing that used to hit your opponents and when you attack your

36:19 opponent's you can split it up like if I have 10 power this turn I can hit one person for 7 and the other person for 3 so if you get to 30 skill and play this card you have infinite power he just do infinite damage to everybody else around and you win and that's a really neat idea when I played it I was like oh I want to try to do infinite damage I knew that I wasn't gonna get there but I tried and I super failed and I got knocked out the deck head built was not very good the person who ended up winning apparently helped develop a section and was like a expert at deck building style game so I don't feel too bad about it but at the end of the day this is a rather small box and it plays up to 4 players and as the designer mentioned many times it's like $20 I think so it's a very very low price point for a deputy game that plays this number of people and even though it felt familiar to ascension and familiar to star realms the the way it all came together was a lot of fun and actually reached out to him afterwards and I said I would love a review copy of this one I certainly like to play this one some more the overall play time of it was probably like 2530 minutes so it's not a super big time commitment and he told me that he is actually gonna send me a review copy so I'm looking forward to trying this one more again it's not necessarily groundbreaking but the stuff that I saw there was pretty cool in particular I really want to explore that skill increasing engine more in my future plays okay next up we have game number 12 and this is siesta now if that doesn't sound familiar to you don't feel bad because it was not familiar to me at all either I played this like a couple weeks ago at a local board game night and one of the people I've known for at least 10 years have been playing games with him showed up for this game he said hey you want to play this game siesta and it's a abstract game with a bunch of

37:51 wooden pieces all over the place and this game actually came out in 1999 so what you're doing in this game is you are gonna have a certain number of action points I think it's three and on every turn you are gonna be putting out tokens onto the board you can either put houses down you can put shadow areas down or you could put Suns down so yes that means there's gonna be Suns all over the place so it's certainly an abstract sound game but there are rules when it comes to how you can place all these things like you have to put the shadow so that it is on the other side of a house to the Sun and then you can have multiple shadows over there so it kind of makes sense the Sun is going to make a shadow and you can never have a Sun next to a shadow in that respect and then you're gonna score points based off of the number of shadows associated with your specific houses on the map there are a couple patterns that are gonna give you points as well and I don't remember all the specifics but I do remember that it was a significantly engaging experience I was not expecting that going in I was like okay a three player abstract game I'll see what this actually does and when I was in the middle of that game man those turns were crunchy like if you were just trying to figure out how to get points over here to get points over there it kind of reminded me of corkle and some minor ways in that you're trying to analyze all the various points and find the spot that's gonna give you the most points but this game is so fluid like you don't have specific and you don't like draw a hand of anything you just have actions and you can spend all these things from a variable from a complete supply available to front of everybody and you're gonna keep playing until one person runs out of their houses and then the game ends immediately which means it was sort of a race to actually get all of your houses out because being in control of the

39:23 endgame is usually a good thing and when it was all said and done we finished playing the game in like 45 minutes it ended in a tie that's because I was in a winning position and my opponent realized there was no way to get over that so they decided to end the game by placing down their final house tying me up and yeah there was actually no tiebreaker in the game which I was a little bummed about but I was happy at how competitive I was because the first few rounds of the game I felt like I had already completely sunk myself like I was completely out of it but the decisions and the puzzling nature of this thing and how it kind of grew out from where it started into every single corner of this really beautiful on board and setup was quite satisfying like sure it's kind of weird having all these various suns scattered all over the place but this is certainly the style gain of game where if you walked by a table where somebody was playing it you would stop and be like what is going on over there like oh we have sons and house isn't shadow and you're like oh that's pretty cool and it all worked out very well it would not surprise me if I don't play this one ever again but if I am at another game night where my friend is there and has this I think I'd probably say yes to give it another go okay we've now reached game number thirteen and this is soul the last days of a star so this was sent to me as a review copy many months ago not sure exactly how many like maybe four or so months and it's been sitting on my shelf of games in the area of games that I need to get to try and it's just kind of sad that as new games came in and I played all the games and I've been feeling like man I really got to try that game out first of all because I was sent to a review copy and I feel an obligation to actually try it out but also because it looked pretty

40:54 neat it is also an abstract style game and it has these wonderful pieces like really tall plastic molded pieces and what you are doing is trying to influence this board area in front of you and try to extract the most energy out of the Sun and before it explodes the idea is that you have this mothership and it orbits around the outside of the circular board and in we played a two-player game and so my mothership is here and my opponents was on the opposite side and they kind of orbited around each other and on your turn you can do one of three or four different actions I believe and one of them is movement which allows you to put these little Sun diver pieces down on the map these are essentially your pawns and they can move easily and you could use your movement points in order to move them and as you go deeper into the game you will get more and more movement points as you influence more layers of the various some layers on the board and you're trying to put these little pieces in various combinations of Orion patience so like if a piece is on top of another piece they can collapse into a gate to allow you to move it down even farther to the Sun or if pieces are adjacent to each other they can combined at four to make a forge which will allow you to create more of these little Sun diver pieces and so you are just moving all over the place and the real the part that really got me that the interesting part was the fact that when you place these new pieces down they always go down from where your mothership is and your mothership is orbiting around the board and you're building all these buildings as your mothership is just wandering away from it and there's no way to change the course or make your mothership go faster so you're trying to figure out the timing to actually have it the right moment to dump all your little Sun divers in the right spot and

42:26 then your motor should kind of runs away and if you put more down you're gonna have to try and meet them back up together at the end of the day I enjoyed the experience but I don't think it worked very well at - when you're playing this game you can utilize your opponent's buildings and whenever you do that you just give them various bonuses but you always make out better than your opponent does but what happened in a two-player game is I started here my opponent started there and we both built buildings right here and then our ships moved over to here and then there's nothing in this kind of half of the game so we're kind of waiting for our motherships to get to the other side we make more Sun divers and activate stuff and then kind of wait again I think I really want to try this one at 3:00 because then you're gonna be equidistant around the Sun so if you start here and you move that way that means you're constantly very close to another set of buildings or at least an initial set of buildings and I think things will start to mix up better as you are roaming around the star it's not very often that you say that an abstract game is better with more than two people this one plays I think up to five people but either way I think a three and a four player game could be pretty satisfying so I'm looking forward to try this one again a couple other things in the game as you are going you're gonna be pulling solar flares and that's gonna end the game but there's also this huge deck of ability carts and as you do various things in the game you're gonna draw building cards and they activate based off of what the different colors are and so from a variability perspective this game is gigantic because you only play with one more card than the number of players so we had three of these abilities in this game and there's got to be like 20 more of them in the box so yeah I'm definitely looking forward to trying out a variety of the different special bonus

43:56 actions with more people around the table I think it'll come together even better up next we now have game number 14 and this is sorcerer and stones now this one is being published by deep water games but it was originally published last year by emperor s4 games which is based out of Taiwan now it's my understanding that deep water games is a new publisher that is doing a lot of localized versions of the emperor s4 titles and probably other titles as well and what's going on in this game is you have a variety of these little square tiles in the middle of the table and on every single Square you're going to put down four of these colored cubes now what you're trying to do in this game is use a hand of action cards to manipulate your pawn that's out here on one of these squares so that they can end up on a location where you also have at the cubes match each other by color from one Square to another so you have like a green on one square next to a green on another Square then you can actually grab one of those and put it back into your area and then you can use these as a currency to take a bunch of cards that will give you victory points then another thing is there's this little map area that's kind of built out by some of these tiles and when you go ahead and claim some of these colors that will unlock the ability for you to move a little wandering person on this map to a spot of that color and the main goal of the game is to wander your person around to hit all of the various locations and get victory points for doing that and the sooner you get to each location the more points you get so this really is a puzzle game you are trying to figure out how to manipulate the board and you can move your pawn you can spin these tiles you can move these tiles around and even swap the different colored cubes you're

45:26 trying to manipulate all that around so that you take the right colored cubes that will match up to make your wander or move in the right direction to go to the where you want to go but then also have the right cubes to spend them to get victory point cards to put in front of you so there's actually quite a lot of game going on for a relatively small box but unfortunately we played it at a three player game and reason I said unfortunately is because it definitely falls into the trap of a very tactical experience because so much changes between your turn and the next person like even if I am waiting for the person who's just to my right to take their turn they might completely change all of these different plans so that I may as well not even think that much before it's actually my turn so down time did start to become a problem because every single person kind of started analyzing the situation when their turn began and of course that's not entirely true like I was definitely trying to come up with good plans but more often than not I'd be like yes I'll do this this and this and then my opponent sees that too and they do it instead and they take those things I'm like ah well now I gotta back to the drawing board and trying to find some other things to do I don't remember actually how it panned out I don't think I won I'm actually pretty confident I didn't win I don't think I did very well I didn't enjoy the puzzling nature of it like trying to find the color trying to match the cubes to match the color to move the person to get the stuff but the thing I didn't like was the anxiety that was kind of growing up in me as I was taking longer and longer on my turns to try and puzzle out and find all of the different things going on so it definitely worked it was a pretty cool experience but I'm not sure if it was necessarily one I want to come back to a game number 15 we now have space base

46:56 now this game is being published by AEG and I had never heard of it until I went to gamma but then a lot of people were talking about it because a EEG had a big stack of production copies of the game that they were giving away to certain people who went through who jumped through a few hoops so to speak they were giving out these little cards and if you went to certain booths and gotten certain stamps then you can get a copy of the game but fortunately I was able to talk to AEG I've been wanting to kind of start a relationship with them anyway I gave them my card and they gave me a review copy of the game I was able to play this one twice last week both at two players and I enjoyed what was going on so let's say let's talk about how the game works you started the game with this board in front of you and there are 12 different slots on it and they are numbered from 1 to 12 in each of those slots you have a card and on each card you have some sort of ability like gain of money or gain a victory point or gain income though money and income are different in this case but anyway what you're doing on return is you're gonna roll two dice and the regular D sixes and then you're either gonna add up the value of both of those dice and then evaluate the card that matches that value or you will do each die individually and do the cards that match those two values once you have done that and you've gained the points or the money then you can spend your money in order to take a new card and that new card is gonna tell you which one of these twelve slots it goes into if I took like maybe has six for instance I would take it down here and I would remove the card that was in the sixth spot and put the new card down so you only ever have one card in those spots but then that card I just removed I turn it upside down and slide in kind of backwards into that six location and then it's my opponent's turn

48:27 and if they roll a six with their two dice then I can activate the card that was kind of tucked in behind and they tuck in behind actions are usually not quite as good as the main actions on the cards and you can only do the main actions on your cards in general when it's your turn but you can actually stack up these cards on the backside so as you're playing through the game you're doing this engine building where you're trying to upgrade your cards to get better and better effects that you can evaluate them as the dice get rolled but if you go really hard on a specific spot and keep upgrading it you'll keep tucking more and more things behind it to the point where you might actually get a lot more benefit from somebody else rolling a six then you're rolling a six and that is fine you're gonna keep playing the game until one person gets to 40 points and there's a variety of ways to get points through activations and some little colony cards you can grab but altogether it worked really well and if you're saying to yourself huh that game sounds kind of familiar that would be because this is quite similar to machi Koro as well as a game called Valyria card kingdoms both of them use a similar die rolling and then everybody gets the results type of thing I guess Settlers of Catan does too but after those two plays I can safely say I'm already enjoying this one way more than machi Koro and definitely significantly more than Valyria for a variety of reasons but I really want to try this one at more players before I really start giving out too many of the opinions but either way this one is really fun and I'm happy to have a copy of it I'm not really sure when it's hitting general distribution but it wouldn't surprise me if this one is seen far and wide because they were obviously pushing it really hard at Gama so I think this is one that I'm surprised I didn't know about it going into the convention but I think the marketing push is certainly coming out soon so

49:58 yeah I'm honestly I'm playing games tonight and I'm hoping to get a three or four player game but amen and we'll see how it works at a higher player account all right let's now move on to game number 16 and this is definitely the heaviest game that I'm going to be covering today and that is Teotihuacan now this game is being published by nsk in games and it isn't actually coming out until essentially essence peels so around an October time frame but I played it in March because I was at Gama and they had a prototype there so there's certainly an asterisk on this play because after we finished playing the game they mentioned like this is gonna change and we're tweaking that so it's definitely in flux but it was also largely complete I was getting the feeling like it was like 90 to 95% done and this game was being designed by Daniel to who sound familiar because I talked about him earlier he helped design to council a for and he also designed Vulcan the Mayan calendar and in a lot of ways it seems like Teotihuacan is a spiritual successor to Zoltan because it's once again set in a city and Central America and what's mechanically is going on here is you have a point salad style euro rondell Cana game so you have these boards in the middle and then on the outside of the main board or these action locations and there are eight of them and every single time you play the game you're gonna shuffle them all up and put them out and that's gonna form a rondelle that you're gonna be moving your workers around the board as you're playing the game the other thing that's going on here is your workers are dice but you don't roll them they're essentially counters and at the beginning of the game they all start as level one and whenever you move them on to a spot and activate that location

51:28 more often than not you will get to upgrade one of the die sets on that spot so when you upgrade it it goes from one to a two and now it is more potent in lots of the different spots now there's eight different locations and not all of them do better with higher pip values but some of them do and not all of them do better with more than one dice on the spot but some of them do and so what you're trying to do as you're playing the game is activate your dice in such a way to build up really nice powerful turns when it's your turn all you do is take one of your dice workers and you move them up to three spaces around the track and evaluate the spot that they land on but if you had already left a die worker on that spot earlier and you land on that spot with like a powerful spot a powerful worker then you can evaluate not only the number of dice but the value of the worst dice on that spot and then some of them have a little graph and you get certain number of wood or gold or various resources but on other locations it allowing you to get technology that is going to manipulate the way you play with the board it might to bend or break some of the different rules other things that you're going to be doing involve building a houses for all of your people will get which will give you a decent amount of points and you're gonna be building up a massive pyramid so this pyramid is in the middle of the board and it's assembled with all these different tiles that are covered in different symbols and as you when you go to the spot to build these down you're gonna pick one of the ones out and put it down in the pyramid that's kind of build itself up and based off of how the symbols on the time you put down it match the symbols that are already out there you can generate a bunch of points this is probably the way as part of the game week is an overstatement it's definitely in the the part I'm most concerned about with the

52:59 game because of downtime because everything else just works so well I mean spoiler alert this game was amazing I've really really enjoyed the play but when it came to putting the tiles down in the the pyramid there's so much thinking like do I go here or here or here or here this could mean six points this could be seven points and you really had to crunch a whole bunch and I'm also if I had to mention that this game is not fully done and they mentioned that they are not done with that pyramid style they're probably gonna be tweaking the numbers and actually we're moving one of the mechanics that will definitely simplify that situation so don't take this as a critique this is a prototype game and it really is going in a great direction and the other real thing that I have to mention is in the middle of the board you have all these different tracks and they definitely remind me of the temple tracks that exist in Tolkien and in this game as you do a variety of other things you would get to bump yourself up a variety of these different tracks and some of them are going to give you food which you will need to feed your workers that is something you have to do as you're playing the game but other ones will give you points or get you actual resources or just give you a variety of different things and all of the things that you do in this game give you points that's why I said it's kind of a point sound experience like almost anything you do is going to be good for you you just need to find a way to develop a strategy to really work yourself into a good position and when it comes to being a strategy game this one really does pull it off like there's very little randomness because the dice are not rolled you are planning multiple turns ahead trying to get this die on to that spot and leave this die over there and have the right resources when you go to that spot to evaluate this other thing and another thing to consider is that the food of this game is cacao which is kind of funny it means and

54:30 you're feeding your people chocolate which I like but if you go 2-1 to a spot with multiple dice you're gonna have to pay cacao for each one of the dice that are still there including your dice so you might be trying to set up a big turn with a bunch of your dice there but you still have to pay for all the stuff going down at oh my gosh I'm already talking about it way too much there's so much going on and I can't afford to say this game is amazing or I honestly can't even say this game is good yet because it was a prototype version but what I can say is I was smiling from ear-to-ear like the whole time I was playing this game it was a four player game we're all new to it and I think it probably took about two hours and it was just so much fun so I'm very hopeful that as they finalized the production process of this one tweaking things here and there that the finalized prod product will be just as fun as the one that I played there and I'm hoping that after I played it a few more times I can say that yes this game is great because after one play of a prototype I certainly can't tell you if it seemed balanced or any of that kind of stuff so I talked about this one too much I'm very excited about Teotihuacan and I am actually looking forward to playing this one more all right let's now move on to game number 17 and this one is called the mind now I played this one at Gama and I actually played it several times Eric Martin who works with BoardGameGeek I got a copy of this one I have one of the conventions he went to and he is super stoked about this game I think he said he'd played it like 50 times going into gamma and I must have seen him play at least 15 more times at that convention the first time I played it was actually live on the stream with with Eric and we played a two-player game and this game is so simple to the

56:02 point where it almost feels like it is it even a game like the rules are essentially as so you have a deck of 100 cards and when you're playing you're gonna deal out you're gonna go through a certain of all levels and the number of levels is gonna change depending on the player count and it you are gonna deal one card per level number forty so if it's level one each person gets one card you look at the card and then you have to play the cards in order without communicating at all with each other like no voids and then oh no voice no words no nothing and so that's why this game is called the mind because you're trying to like you know read their mind to see like is my card higher or lower because you have to play these in order and then you kind of put one down you put one next one down you're like yeah we did it and then you go to level two so now you give two cards and two cards and now you have to play these in order again and you go level 3 level 4 and in a two-player game you have to go to level 12 and you have a certain number of losses like when you play them out of order you lose a life and in that first play of it we lost pretty quick and in the second play at 2 players we got all the way to level 11 that means we each had 11 cards in our hand and we're trying to just read each other's minds to play these down in it it doesn't sound like it should work and realistically what's going on is you're constantly cheating when you're playing this game the rules say you're not supposed to communicate in any way but you are constantly communicating with your eyebrows you like are you reaching for that card and if they see you reaching for that card maybe there no play and you're just constantly reading it to your body language and all these different things and I think in that respect it's probably kind of like hanami in that I'm not gonna go to specifics of hanami but that's also a cooperative game with limited knowledge where you're in limited communication

57:33 where you can kind of have groupthink like when I do this it means that when I do that it means this thing and so as you play this game with the same people over and over again you will start to read their mannerisms and their eyebrows and their head nods and all that kind of stuff and I played this one I think three or so more times with a higher player counts and it was a really cool experience it's certainly a game and I can understand why a lot of people are very excited about it and I will likely play this one again I think I think I'd probably like to have a copy of this like it's a fun and odd thing and probably one of the best parts about it is teaching it to do players and seeing them realize it's actually sort of working because it doesn't feel like it should work it almost feels like it should be random but there's a lot of gameplay that comes out of this seemingly incredibly simple set of rules but at the same time it's not necessarily my favorite thing like I we we certainly haven't won and it does still feel quite random so this is the kind of thing I could see playing and it's a filler situation or I guess would be pretty fun if you're maybe having a couple beers and then playing this one although I suppose you'd probably be playing even worse but either way the mind is getting quite a bit of attention on social media because it is such a strange game and it is currently not available in English although they're just numbers on the cards I heard it's surprisingly difficult to get a copy from Germany right now but I also heard that Panna source games is going to be publishing in America at some point soon it's a very simple thing in the box so hypothetically it shouldn't take too long to get the production of that one going so anyway that's the mind okay we're almost done let's now go on to game number 18 which is the sanctuary

59:04 now I picked this one up at Essen last year i pre-ordered it so it's not a review copy at all and the main reason I got this game is because it seemed like it had a very cool take on worker placement so what's going on in this game is you're going to construct these decks of action cards in a very labor-intensive way unfortunately the setup for this game is a bit of a pain to actually put these different sacks together but then at the beginning of the round you're going to shuffle it up and put out this line of cards and then you're going to do worker placement onto those cards there's a top part and a bottom part and you're going to put all these workers out and then evaluate them once the workers are down and when you evaluate that worker you get to do the top action and then you get to do every bottom action that you can see which is adjacent to your worker now you're going to see until you see an opponent opponent's worker or the end of the line or the specific like Bush symbol on the card so you're trying to place these workers down to get good main actions and as many of these sub actions as you can but your opponent's obviously see that so they're gonna put their workers down to try and cut off the number of these secondary actions that you can evaluate under turn now the theme of this game is you are building a wildlife sanctuary for endangered species and realistically what you are doing is reading a million icons all over the place and trying to build up to the point where you get the most points at the end and there are so many different things that you are doing in this game like you are getting permits to get more land for your sanctuary and then you can authorize getting links and putting trees over there you can also get the actual animals themselves and get more animals or increase the happiness of those animals because at the end of the game the number of animals times the happiness is going to be your score for that specific thing and then there's

1:00:35 also these technologies that you can grab that will let you modify things in different ways and get bonus victory points for doing a variety of different things there's just so much going on with this game and every single card is covered in these icons but what I found I was pleasantly surprised that even after one turn into the game the icons really started to make sense and I enjoyed this one a lot more than I expected to after fully reading the rules now I did pre-order it and buy the copy but the reason I haven't played it in the last three months is because I was honestly kind of dreading it like I bought the game for that work replacement mechanic but then once I open it up and punched all the millions of tiny cardboard pieces and read the rules again I was like maybe this one isn't actually gonna be that great so I eventually finally got a three player game of it played and when the game was over I was like man that was fun like I really enjoyed all the actions I was doing and even though there's tons of side tertiary mechanics all over the place it did seem to come together very well so I'm looking forward to playing this one again I'm glad I have a copy and I do think it's likely there's maybe just a little bit too many side things going on in the game but the central mechanic is so interesting and different then I'm looking forward to explore anymore all right we've finally reached 19 which is the final initial impression I'll be covering and this is a ver file and now again just like Danza Shawn clever that I talked about earlier I got this one from Amazon de and it's a German game her file and means dice land and English and this is also a roll in right style game but unlike most of this salad game instead of having pads of paper and pencils this one comes with dry erase boards and dry erase pens right in the

1:02:07 box now what you're doing in this game it's a much simpler game than constant clever was you have this board in front of you with a variety of little hexes in different colors and on your turn you're gonna roll the dice in the middle of the table and then you will get a certain number of free rolls based off of the color that you're going for you're going to be going after a specific color and then you're going to be marking off the different spots on your board and it's just a race to X out to a certain number of the stars as well as X out and entirety of a color on your board after you have finished your rolling your the opponents can also get an action based off of what you did and every time you cross off one of those stars you get a bonus roll to try and keep things going so this is a very light style game and the main catch for it is that if you ever roll the dice so that you have like maybe four orange but the area that you've already started with orange only has three slots left you cannot fill that in you have to do at least the amount of those dice into that area and once you've started filling in a section of orange you cannot fill in another section of orange so there's a bit of push your luck here as you're trying to get exactly enough to finish out that area to move on to another orange spot but you don't want to go too far and then have too many of these dice because it will just mean that you're not gonna get an action and your opponent's will there is not a ton going on with this game but I found I flipped twice now I found that both times I played it I really enjoyed what was going on it was just light and fun crossing things off all over the place I will admit that not everybody had this opinion one person really disliked it and felt like they were making no interesting decisions at all and I disagree but you know they're more

1:03:37 than willing to have their opinion of it I'm happy that I have this one it's certainly a filler style game and the box is also nice it's like this really skinny square box and on the inside the lid there is this foam so you have a nice area to roll the dice onto so they kind of bounce around and they don't make a it's a really nice production in this game I mean of course I had it shipped over from Germany and I have no idea if this one is going to be made widely available in the United States but I certainly enjoy playing it and I can see myself playing this one more okay it's now time to move into the next section and this is the shifting shelf so this is where I list out all the new games I picked up this month and also listing out all the games I have to remove for my collection to make room for them I was able to pick up 12 games so if I apologize I'm gonna hold my phone and read them out the first one is die settlers and this is actually a high quality prototype that I got to go home with from gamma this is being produced by NS KN and I met them when I played Te'o - a con and they said we don't really want this anymore you want to go home with a copy so I said sure I haven't been able to play yet but I'm looking forward to it next up we have fate of the Elder Gods this one came out at Gen Con last year and I'm gonna be doing a sponsored playthrough of this one at next month for greater than games that one I'm looking forward to playing that one a little bit more I got a copy of few them in this is a Monstress euro ridiculous game with amazing art and not a cheap game it's not a small game either and they sent me a review copy I was actually a little hesitant about accepting it but they really wanted me to get a review copy so I said okay I'll give it a shot but the rule book on that one is really intimidating next up we

1:05:09 have gonzo and clever which I already talked about in the initial impressions we have herbalism which is another game that's being produced by deep water games because it was originally done by emperor s4 this is a logical deduction style game that I haven't had a chance to play with yet it seems pretty light but I'm looking forward to trying it we have Istanbul the dice game which is coming out from AEG and they gave me a review copy of this one at the same time is giving me a review copy of space base I played that one and in Essen last year and no no at beautycon and I've actually played it last month too I'm really enjoying that one next we have classic which I talked about already New Bedford is another game that is coming out from greater than games and dice heimi games and I'll be doing a sponsor playthrough of this one in a few months in like three months or so to kind of coincide with a the next printing hitting the shelves so you'll definitely see more about that one space space I already mentioned the city of Kings this is a really large box at saying venture style game it also has some worker placement going on as well as some campaign scenario style storytelling elements it's a huge box it's designed by a friend of mine Frank West I met him at Gen Con and Essen last year anyway it's a little intimidated by it but I'm looking forward to giving it a shot then we have the little flower shop which is a small card drafting game that's coming from a dr. Finn labs I think they're called he's reached out to me before about covering some of his games and this one looked very interesting it's like a 20 minute card drafting game where you put flowers in

1:06:40 two faces and put them in your shop window I'm looking forward to trying it and then lastly we have a Wuerffel and which I just talked about so yeah lots of games came in to the collection over this last month and unfortunately that means that I had to remove a few Ave Roma is a medium-weight euro with worker placement I enjoyed it but not enough to really keep it around dye city is just straight-up replaced by the Masters trials because I like the co-op version better than the competitive fog of love was a review copy I got before I covered it in a variety vlog but I didn't really like it enough to even play it enough times to really review it it's more of an experience situation where you're going through a relationship I played it a couple times and well I guess technically I played it one and a half times and it didn't really grab me legacy the testament of Duke to Crecy I've had this one for years I really enjoyed it I've reviewed it it's just not really getting played anymore so I figured somebody else should enjoy it as well Montana is when I picked up at Essen last year I played it once I talked about it in one of the variety blogs I haven't gotten back to playing it again because I was really disappointed with that first play and you know what I just need that space in my shelf and I don't think I'm gonna be playing that one again next we have nations the dice game which I reviewed years ago and I've kept in my collection just on the off chance of getting an expansion to make the game better and expansion came out last year and I never really made an effort to get the expansion and I'm like you know what if I don't care about getting the expansion then why should I keep this around for an expansion that I don't really care about so I'm gonna get rid of that one and then lastly is Star Trek panic this one is similar to castle panic but it's in the Star Trek universe and I've really enjoyed playing this one but if I'm being honest friend of mine

1:08:11 has it in our gaming group and this is a big box so this is another one that hopefully somebody else will enjoy and it doesn't need a spot on my shelf well with that we have now reached the end of this probably pretty long vlog that was a ton of games I had to just talk about I knew I was playing a lot of games in March I just didn't realize it was gonna be so many as I kind of put the list together it's like oh my gosh I'm talking about 19 games today my voice is getting a little bit sore but I hope you enjoyed the content that I put out here I hope the initial impressions have helped you with trying to find games that you're interested in or maybe just waiting you from other things either way March was a really huge month and I'm looking forward to April I'm not going to any specific conventions and honestly I have one week in April where I'm working like crazy at my other part-time jobs so I'm going to be working things around it to try and make sure I can get all of the videos out that I need to there's gonna be a lot going on in April and I have quite a few games that I'm looking forward to playing tonight at a game night as well as a future one's going into the month so yeah looking forward to talking about that new stuff in a month from now and that's gonna wrap this up as always I'd like to thank everyone who's been supporting this channel including all of these producer level patreon backers please check out John gets Gamescom slash support to see a variety of ways the YouTube can't support the channel and if you'd like to see more vlogs like this one as well as in-depth reviews and full playthroughs please subscribe to the channel thanks for watching