Holotype – A Worker DISplacement Game
Transcript
holotype which came out in 2023 is self-described as a competitive light strategy game for two to five players and as board game dad the first thing I want to know is is it a good family game I would designate this as a family game although I would say it's for families with older children and I'll talk more about that at the end of this video when I give you my overall impression but first as always I'd like to rate this game on the five attributes which are theme mechanics components strategy and complexity and through those ratings I will describe what the game is about and how you play it in a brief overview so first the game's theme there's actually a lot of information embedded in the title of this game which is Thoroughly described in the rule book so first holotype a hollow type is a single type specimen upon which the description of a new species is based and true to its name the game comes with dozens of unique cards Each of which describes a unique dinosaur species as well as the archaeologist and the date of the holotype publication so in this game you are those archaeologists discovering these Hollow types so in order to accomplish your objective as an archaeologist in this game you're going to be collecting fossils from the three periods and piecing them together in order to publish Hollow types now with that being said it's my job to rate this
game on how well this theme is being implemented but when I rate A Game's theme I'm not describing the quality of the game's artwork or its flavor text nor how educational the game is I want to know how the theme drives gameplay and to really get to that for this game I first have to describe exact how it's played so I will give you my theme rating for the game but not until after I've described the mechanics mechanically this is a worker placement game with a unique displacement mechanic every player has three types of workers and when placing a worker to perform an action the placed worker blocks the space from anybody else however another player or even the same player can take that space and displace the worker as long as the new worker is equal to or higher up on the chain of authority so the three types of workers are archaeologists grad students and field assistants a field assistant can displace another field assistant a grad student can displace a grad student or a field assistant and an archaeologist can displace anybody after this happens the displaced worker goes back to the owner to be used again so as long as a player has workers to use they can keep taking turns placing their workers but if they reach a point when they have no more workers left they can use their entire
turn to call back their workers so anytime you display place a worker so that you can take an action you're simultaneously aiding the owner of that displaced worker because they don't have to use their turn to call that worker back this is a really fun mechanic because it could be your turn and every place on the board has been taken but because you've got your archaeologist you can displace anybody so the question isn't only which action do you want to take but also which opponent do you feel like helping right now now enough about the worker placement mechanic let's talk more about what these actions are and what you're trying to accomplish at the beginning of the game there are several objectives made available to everybody there are the global objectives which anybody can claim as well as private objectives and these tell you what types of hollow types you want to try to publish during the course of the game so holotypes are represented on specimen cards so aside from the cards that you're dealt at the beginning of the game one of the actions you can take is the specimen lab the specimen lab will let you draw cards either from the discard pile or the deck and select some to hold into your hand for this brief overview I'm not going to go in depth about every action but you can see here in the iconography that a archaeologist or a grad student will allow you to draw and keep more cards than a field assistant and this is the case everywhere else on the board the higher ranking workers will be able to accomplish more than the lower ranking
field assistant every specimen card in the game is going to require two types of resources in order to publish it they'll have some sort of fossils as well as some sort of research cubes so in order to publish these specimen cards you'll need actions to help you get these things so the next two actions I'll talk about are forgetting these things the University Library is very simple when you place your worker here you just get to take research cubes and that's it to get fossils however you're going to have to depend on a little bit of luck the action is called field Expeditions and there you're going to be revealing cards from the field Expeditions deck and each of these has a dig site on it the dig site is going to allow you to roll dice and the dice have different colors based on what the Dig side is so you've got the Triassic dice purple the Jurassic dice blue and the Cretaceous dice green now because that's a bit of a mouthful for the rest of this video I'm just going to refer to those as purple blue and green anyway you'll reveal these cards it'll tell you which dice to roll and whether or not you have the opportunity to re-roll dice and after you roll the dice you'll collect as many fossils as are matching the icons on the dice the number of fossils you can store on your player board is limited and if you don't like what you've got you can use the museum collections action there you can use different trade ratios to trade fossils for different fossils or fossils for more research cubes the fifth and
final action is the publishing Journal this allows you to do one of two things and is only available to archaeologists or grad students the first thing you can do is you can discard your research cubes and fossil cubes to the supply in order to publish your holotype the hollow type will score you points at the end of the game as well as help you satisfy some of the objectives your other choice when taking this action is to use one of your player discs to publish one of the global objectives now this is a very interesting aspect of the game because when you put your player disc into one of the global objectives you can satisfy that objective in one of two ways the first way is that you yourself can have personally published all of the dinosaurs satisfied in that objective now depending on the objective that can be difficult so another thing you can do is you can discard five of your own research cubes in order to cite another player's research now you can do this no matter how many other players you're citing as long as you have five research cubes you can publish in one of the global objectives you can even do this if you yourself have not published any holotypes which means that this action is like trading research cubes for victory points however because they're Global objectives there is a bit of a ray to get there first now that describes the overall flow of the game
there are a few more things that affect the course of the entire game the first is unlocking that grad student players begin the game with only the archaeologist and the field assistant and they can unlock the grad student after they've published their third holotype furthermore as players are publishing holotypes they're going to be increasing a counter which marks the length of the game and there are a few checkpoints along this track that will trigger a few events that can happen so one of these events is to refresh the museum collections which means replacing any of the cubes there and setting them back to some default resources but another more substantial event is triggering an upgrade for all players so at the beginning players have different upgrade tiles and win the holotype counter gets to one of these points on the track a player can choose one upgrade to to add to their player board then from then on the players have that benefit whenever they take the action associated with the upgrade so for example it can be going to the University library and getting an extra research Cube or going to field Expeditions and getting more fossils or being able to draw more cards when you go to the specimen lab or even increasing your player board's capacity for cubes this really does help pick up the momentum of the game so while the game begins and it may seem a little slow initially the game really picks up
pace and becomes exciting up to the very end so now let's talk about how I would rate this game this game is very much driven by the worker placement mechanic the fun in this game comes from choosing who you're going to displace and how you're going to position yourself so that an opponent is compelled to displace your worker you can actually Target actions that you know other people want to take so that when they take them you get your worker back that's really what makes this game very interesting as far as the theme is concerned I did not get a very strong motivation for doing this for the sake of these dinosaurs during the course of the game everyone I played with simply referred to the cubes as purple blue and green we were flipping cards over we're saying oh look I got two two cards with green dice all right well I'll take this one and I'll roll these green dice I want to trade for green for purple despite the level of attention that went into the flavored texts in this game you are not thinking about the different periods of the Mesozoic Era as you play even as you're drawing specimen cards you've got objectives and your objective may be to publish six blue cards or you know two green two blue two purple and you're drawing you're saying oh I really needed purple and now all I got was blue and green I already have blue and green like you're not even referring to the dinosaurs by name you're just thinking about abstracting it into the colors that you need but I do really like the
displacement based on this hierarchy of authority and I really like publishing to these journals and paying research cubes to cite other uh opponents that makes thematic sense everything about dinosaurs it could have been anything else it could have been recipes for cookbooks it's just colors to satisfy abstract colors on other cards thematically this game is really only a two for my mechanics rating like I said this game is entirely driven by the fun of the worker placement mechanic there is also a huge element of luck in this game there's luck in what you draw off the specimen lab the luck of the field Expeditions is almost ridiculous you're taking an action to draw cards to get you Dice to roll the dice and possibly re-roll the dice so you can get colored cubes I mean there's it's luck stacked on top of luck you start the game even from the rules teach and you go wow there's a lot of luck in this game and you learn very quickly that you're just going like it's not a really big deal what you choose you're just going to have to take whatever whatever cubes you get and then play it the best you can um and that's and you know I think that actually harms the theme as well but you end up not emphasizing what you do just how you do it how do you block actions from other players how do you get yourself in a position where your worker gets displaced that's where all of the fun is for mechanics I give this game a
nine now for components there's a lot about this game that I'm really satisfied with the dinosaur artwork itself is very nice the symbols throughout the entire game are extremely clear if you look at all of the objectives even though they've written it out in words they've also included it in symbols that make it very obvious they're using color and they're using icons which are consistent with what's on the cards so it makes it very easy even for somebody who's sitting across the table to look over and identify what the objectives are I really really like that not only that but instead of doing what so many other games do and marking on the board that this space is only for three player game this space is only for four player game this game actually just includes different boards for every player count which gives it so much Clarity I do think that the color and the icons are so overwhelming that they almost impact the aesthetic in a negative way it's almost like too clear almost like you're staring at street signs so ultimately while I don't think the symbology could be any better I do think it compromises the beauty of the game for components I give this game an 8.
for strategy you really have to de-emphasize what dinosaurs you are publishing because all of that seems like it's up for luck it's all about the work replacement mechanic here the element of luck kind of disrupts a lot of strategy I'd give the strategy score about a three or four for complexity I ask myself how difficult is it to teach this game and how many factors are there to consider so I think with only five actions it's really not that hard to teach doing the private objectives and being able to keep track of how many public objectives there are there are a lot of things to pay attention to so I would probably give this game about 4.5 for complexity so finally My overall impression I have to say I really agree with the description that this game puts on the rule book it is a competitive light strategy game for two to five players this is a fantastic entry-level game this is a fun work replacement game that you can play with people who haven't played games that are Euro style or very complex I would equate this game with something like Katan like 15 years ago it can really expand Horizons for what a board game can be but for hobbyists who are really in the game they're not going to think it goes deep enough and they're probably going to be a little bit disappointed that the theme doesn't come through in a more powerful way but I played it five player at one
of my board game Gatherings and everyone just described this game is really fun not not an overly involved game not a taxing game but a fun and relaxed game I think this is an excellent game for families but at the beginning of the video I said for with older kids because I don't think my younger child my six-year-old would enjoy a game that's driven so much by the mechanics KK would not enjoy a game with this much focus on just playing the game I don't think she could appreciate the the Nuance in trying to see what other players are doing so that she could put her worker there and the worker gets displaced that's what's fun for me so I love the pace of this game I love that the turns are so fast that's what made it so light and fun for us I think it could be really fun in a family that really likes dinosaurs like for the sake of the artwork I love the drawings on every individual card but I would rate the game for ages 8 and up so that's holotype if you're interested in this game or if you want to find more games that are like it you can go to the perfectboard game.com you can look up holotype and then those attributes will populate a search result for you and you can find other similar games with this game profile that's all for today thank you for watching and I'll see you next time bye