UK Games Expo and Dungeon Crawling (Board Games)

hello I'm Adam in Wales and this is my board gaming vlog today is just a little update on what I've been playing what I've been doing the first thing I wanted to talk about is the UK games Expo that happened in Birmingham a couple of weeks ago now the UK games Expo has become one of the largest board game conventions in the world at this point I mean it's not quite up there with essen and Gen Con but it rivals the other American conventions and it's quite a big event now I've been going for the last few years and I've watched it grow and I have a mixed sort of feeling when I go to the UK games Expo every time I can't quite put my finger on what that is I think perhaps it's because I'm not just going there socially I'm kind of going there too to see if I can talk to publishers and that sort of thing and it never quite delivers on that front in the same way that essen does you can't really get in that many meetings with that many significant people and a large portion of the people at the UK games Expo showing off their games are self publishers and Kickstarter sort of outfits now again I have a mixed sort of relationship with the Kickstarter thing I bought lots of games from Kickstarter in the past and I've frequently been quite disappointed usually components fantastic artwork fantastic the whole thing looks great often with a fantastic central idea to the game but then little things crop up as you're playing the game things that really could have been ironed out by a good developer or a good publisher which is why I myself and my own games intending to go down the route of trying to contact publishers rather than considering self-publishing so UK games Expo I always think about the the newcomer to the hobby what are they going to find when they go there and realistically they're going to find several large publishers yes with very well developed very well tested games and then they're going to find a lot of the smaller untested sort of Kickstarter style or self publish kids and it's going to be hard for them to determine which is which and so I just slightly worried about the the possibility of that negative response that they might get ice not to say your kick starters have been bad I've had some good ones in the past where I've been very happy and where those gains could well have come out of a standard sort of well-established publisher and you wouldn't have seen the difference but that's my slight concern I spoke to one individual at the fair and he very proudly told me he had this idea for this game it was a fantastic looking game and same evening he set up his Kickstarter campaign and he told me this with a real sort of glow of pride I just thought that's not really how publishing of board games should be working where's the quality control in that the Kickstarter's up there people are pledging and now he starts to test and starts to design that game this is all starting to sound a bit negative a little bit cynical isn't it i I'm going to move on I'm going to move on but this is my experience with the games Expo I love the thirsty meatballs gaming library is wonderful to be able to go there and play all sorts of different games I love the play test zone I love all the guys in the play test UK group I've tested my own games there a lot and I find that a fantastic part of the expo some hand look forward to every time it's nice to see new games being released and and you know that their first thing coming out at the UK games expert rather than at the American conventions that's great to see and so there's a lot of fantastic things going on at the expo but as I say I always have that slightly mixed reaction anyway these are the games that I picked up only two of them that I picked up at the convention neither of them knew the first one was camisado i bought the pocket version because i'm running out of space at this point but a lovely little abstract i was so impressed by the simplicity of the mechanism in this and so camisado pocket fantastic 2 player abstract game dimension an apron sort of abstract where we're stacking balls it's more of a puzzle really a puzzle that we all try and solve within a very short one minute time slot and then compare and see who's done the best no real interaction but a speed sort of puzzle solving game excellent game dimension I should briefly mention three other games that caught my eye at the UK games expo the first was this sign that I saw on the side of one of the Asmoday booths and this is for a british version of timeline british history now I like the timeline games very much I'm eagerly awaiting hopefully at some point a UK release of the the board game version timeline challenge but it's nice to have a British set the second game is I school now this is a flicking game so we've got these weighted penguins that we flick around this board and it's a simple game from brain games and I always love a good flicking game finally the other game that I played that was brand new was animals on board i actually bought a copy of this but my copy was faulty and had to go back because it was all sort of miss cut but as far as I can tell no one else has had that problem and it's it's a great game it's one of these sort of set collection games except there's a nice and I I split you choose sort of mechanism which would make sense to you if you played things like zoo loreto and stuff like that neat game from Pegasus spiel aside from the UK games expo the other games that i've been playing have been well at over the last few months three games have firmly sort of established himself as games that i always want to play and they're now hitting my sort of top 10 games of all time in fact evolution has really become my favorite game at this point i absolutely love evolution i'm ready to play at any time the flight expansion makes it even better i can't wait for the climate version which is Ben or Kickstarter very reasonable should be out soon and the new beginner version that North Star Games is making evolution is a wonderful thing Matt 'ok game i had to make another video really to rave about quite why I love it so much but it's an excellent game the theme is deeply immersed into the whole experience the mechanisms are greatly our was fantastic another game like really enjoy playing over the last few months is abyss abyss by Bruno khattala now this looks like it should be a big a mirror trash game it's not it's a euro game but it's a really really good and the beautiful artwork only helps fantastic components fantastic artwork some great different mechanisms in it stunning game abyss and then the third big box game that I've been playing a lot is roll for the galaxy again it's a classic Europe but it's got loads of dice and I love games with loads of dice particularly euro games with loads of dice and roll for the galaxy it it's much harder to teach than the other games it's a really convoluted weird system I think if race for the galaxy hadn't already been a big success I can't see how this would have never got past a publisher because it's so unintuitive but once you're playing it goes so smoothly it works so well roll for the galaxy is a fantastic euro game I'm really excited to finally be able to talk about the fact that blue orange games is going to be publishing one of my own games my second sort of published game and so that will be make it snappy this is my little prototype in a little tin here but essentially it's a speed game if you think of something like jungle speed or maybe you've played this new again gobbet and even things like double it's that sort of a world of speed trying to make decisions quicker than your opponent and games like shaky Mickey and go splits are some of my favorite games i love these speed games and make it snappy as an example of that sort of genre of game so that will be coming out hopefully in the next of 18 months or so i think blue orange have quite a large catalog of games so it's at the back of the list at the moment but it's exciting to be working with them yesterday I had quite an exciting little delve into a world board game so I don't often pay that much attention to dungeon crawls so we started off the day by looking at the Warhammer Quest adventure card game in the knowledge that soon one of my friends is going to be getting a hold of a copy of silver tower the new Warhammer Quest miniatures game and we're going to be working on painting that together and playing it we started out with the adventure card game which was very similar to a game i have played quite a lot which is the pathfinder adventure card game I say similar in that they have exactly the same theme albeit one in the Pathfinder world and one in the Warhammer world which is that we're looking for bad guys and then we're going to fight them and does why I'm a quest won't play really well so does the Pathfinder one frankly and it's it's playing card and it is just that it's just fighting all the time fighting the monsters and very little else going on my friend sort of joked will you know when I was moaning about this that it might be a little bit repetitive he so why can't we talk to the monsters and to be honest that's what I would like I would like some sort of missions in these games we have to do something more than just hack and slash your way through them and these card games I never find quite as immersive as getting some miniatures on the board and actually moving them around and that's not my style genre I but at least with that i seent at the tactile thing seems to take me more into it I can genuinely believe a little bit more in what's happening after we played this venture card game we moved on to looking at heroquest no hero quest is a game that came out in the 80s it's a one of those sort of old classics that's never been re-released probably never will be rereleased because it was a unique working between mb games and games workshop and it's a children's game but i found it fascinating to revisit it we played a couple of missions and i really really enjoyed the experience one of the things that was great was actually seeing a roller move game but for the first time in many many years and finding some excitement and enjoyment in that and you know all the movies is so outdated and it's something that doesn't feature and hardly any of the board games I play maybe formula d that's the only one probably where it actually functions but he requests is old-school roller move on my turn I want to move somewhere I roll two dice so i might get anything between two and twelve movement that's a massive swing but it's exciting because i need to get away from those bad guys and I have a little plan and I roll the dice and my plan has to change just like that because I can't get away so I'm going to have to stand fight I actually found it exciting it was like meeting a new mechanism rather than rather than what I've always considered which is that it's something completely outdated so I I found that quite inspiring actually there's still something in that mechanism it's not quite as as bad as everyone's made it sound other than that he request was quite hard I didn't think that I i assume did this being a game I played as a child this would be quite easy no I I my characters were dying and I was the good guys you know in the first mission I was finding it tough and so that was that was neat actually and the simplicity of the game I just I just love the simplicity it it and it plays so well so neatly and I'm sure there is that whole repetitive thing which just plowing three monsters but at least we can explore rooms we've got a nice furniture in there's different little story elements that can crop up and I think it's a neat game heroquest aside from heroquest the other dungeon crawls that I've played a fair amount of over the years I've played a lot of super dungeon explore now super dungeon explore mainly I like because of the miniatures although these miniatures are slightly dubious in terms of their hopes of sexualized and treatment of the of the females in the game the fact that chibi smile doesn't make that a little bit more disturbing in the way when I said chibi style I mean that sort of childlike big head big eyes sort of thing your request avoids that all togetherness sexualize of women by leaving women out of the game altogether the classics of the 80s approach to this problem and so that's not great either and whereas super dungeon explore has loads of female characters but they are treated a little bit oddly and Star Wars Imperial assault is a great essentially dungeon crawl but a science-fiction one in that sort of universe that that's so familiar the comparing this to he request is like night and day imperial assault is complex and it's got I think where you have to constantly look up little keywords now fantasy flights got quite good at making reference guides that help you with this stuff and try to put as much as they can on to the cards which ends up making the cards a little cluttered and things like that but then the Masters doing it but the degree of complexity is like night and day with he request he request is so simple you never have to look up anything and that was nice and I enjoy your period us all as well I particularly enjoyed a skirmish game actually and but but but but it shows how these games have evolved so that's what's been going on with me the last couple of weeks I hope to keep these vlogs fairly regular I can't promise to do them weekly and I'll be back with more sort of news about board games over the next couple of weeks I hope in the meantime if you want to follow my twitter channel it's at board game wales I'm Adam in Wales or boardgamegeek I'm Adam 78 and I hope that you'll subscribe to the channel and continue to watch my videos all the best