SETI, Flatiron, Motor City, A Message from the Stars, Tem-Purr-A Ranked and Reviewed

hey everybody and welcome to another chairman of the board ranking video this is where I take a look at the last five new to me board games that I've played and I rank and review them in order of preference now before I get started on these five games I want to give a shout out to the show sponsor kendra.

co.uk who are my go-to online retailer and if you use the link in the show notes or the QR code then you can get 5% off your first order at number five I have tempura now this is a pretty strange hybrid push your luck shedding card game where unlike most shedding games you are not trying to get rid of your cards first you are trying to stay in the round as long as you can now the shedding part of the game is really simple where you trying to match the at last card played so if someone plays a four then you're going to keep on playing fours until somebody can't if you're really stuck then you can play two of another number and change the number to that so for example if I play two far then everyone is trying to play fives there are also some bonus cards that can kind of um force you to pick up more cards later or change the turn order you know that kind of thing now the way this game differs to most other card games is that and when somebody cannot match um the the last card played then you're going to be forced to pick up cards and you're going to pick up cards based on the previous played one so say for example there was a stack of four number three card cards it'll be three times four and therefore that player would have to draw 12 cards from the deck and when you're drawing these cards it's not only a good thing because of course you can restock your hand to stay in around longer but scattered throughout that deck there are these um indigestion cards that will force the player to go bust and lose that round and I think it's the first player to go bust three times that loses the game and the winner of the game will be the player who has got the fewest indigestion cards now it's quite a cool concept I actually quite like the idea of of it that idea of you know that working that tight rope of trying to draw cars to keep your hand topped up but not drawing too many um kind of like that ticking time ball mechanism where you're thinning that deck out making it more likely that the next person will draw an indigestion card but I think this game does have some pretty clunky flaws and that is because there's sometimes such a huge incentive just to draw that many cards simply to top your hand up so say for example if someone is playing lots of high valued cards and the power builds up loads you know you might have say eight eight cards on the stack and there's a value five therefore that player is drawing 40 cards if they want to know take those yes you're almost guaranteed to go bust but you keep your hand for the next round meaning that you're in such a strong position that it's often worth doing it and although I'm not going to say the game is broken it kind of kind of feels like the game goes off the rails a bit too much and becomes a bit too chaotic and almost silly in a in a bad way now I think this game could have easily been fixed by um either when you draw a um a indigestion card you stop top decking from that point so maybe you know you are really pushing your luck that way and if you're going to um benefit by from by getting such a huge overspill then that's not going to be the case just by that small rules change um additionally as the game goes on through the rounds more of these indigestion cards are added to the deck and unfortunately the rule book says that as soon as you draw One indigestion card or whether you draw one or more you still only count as like kind of one loss for the round whereas if you ended up drawing more than one I think you should get a penalty for each one of those nestion cards that you draw therefore again you have't got such a huge incentive just to take so many cards at once so again it just feels a little bit messy it could have done with a little bit more refinement um you know maybe I'm missing something there because you know this game will kind of autobalance itself um but again it just feels like it goes way to a skew and it just feels again messy and untidy and it could have done with some some raining in so can't really recommend this one despite me liking the concept of it that is tempura at number five at number four I have Motor City so this is from the um the roll and right or draft and right series of um games by riddle and pinchback um this game also has a third designer who I I can't quite remember his name so sorry about that so this is from the same line of you know Fleet the dice game uh three sisters and I have played Fleet and I quite like it I still have it in my collection um I didn't manage to play Three Sisters but I must admit that one didn't quite um grabbed me I thought it looked too similar to um to the original fleet the dice game now this one Motor City looked a bit different and I do quite like the idea of this one you know manufacturing cars and stuff uh in practice this is very themeless it's definitely um a spreadsheet style of game has all the trappings you'd expect with a a roll and right this one is more of a draft and right although it is using dice um and you're drafting these um these bespoke dice based on obviously the symbols on the dice but also where they're sitting on this grid to get some bonus actions um and then of course you're climbing tracks you're ticking things off to get bonuses unlocking things for endgame scoring all the Combos and things you'd come to expect from a uh from a typical rooll and right Style game now I must admit I think these guys do a great job of these styles of games they know what they're doing everything works as it should um I think with this one I'm not a huge fan of the the graphic design it looks a little bit too spreadshe is to me looks a little bit homemade um which I thought I don't know took me out of it a little bit I didn't like the the visual appeal um but the game play is solid it's it's definitely has those satisfying turns and you can't really do everything so each game is going to feel a little bit different based on the dice available and you're going to have to you know use some tactical decisions rather than going in with a set game plan because of course you are subject to the dice that are rolled um and all in all I think this game is is solid as you'd expect um albeit maybe a little bit forgettable um I think the this line of games is maybe just a a smidge above my preferred weight level when it comes to roll or draft and right star games I tend to like them being a bit smaller and more compact shorter as well this one you are looking around 45 minutes to play it I'm not saying it out stays as welcome but I think maybe there's a mental block when I see a rolling right game and it's that long I kind of tend to like them in the 20 minute Mark um with a with a unique mechanism or twist or two whereas this one is definitely heads down in your sheet um trying to minmax everything which is completely fine again I'm not I'm not criticizing the game it's just that I prefer mine to be a little bit lighter in general and if I'm looking towards a you know 45 minute game I probably want to play something with a little bit more to it um so you it's a solid one again I think it's a bit forgettable but I have only played it once or twice so it's you know take take that for what it's worth um but you know it's good there's nothing more I can say I think it's going to Fade Into Obscurity because I think it lacks a certain something it lacks something special and unique about it but if you find a you know uh a secondhand copy or a cheap copy on the market and you like this genre of games I think you're going to get some enjoyment out of Motor City at number three I have flat iron so this is a twop player only game and it's somewhat a worker movement game where you are moving around these five different spots on this uh main board as well as a sideboard and as long as you are on the spot the other player cannot go there and when you're going to these different locations you you are doing kind of one of three actions at number one is to buy a card in that region and when you buy that card you're going to tuck it under your own personal player board which means that when you go to a certain location again in the future it comes with another benefit so it has this degree of engine building another thing you can do is you can actually activate your abilities assigned to that location based on the cards you previously drafted as well as the inbuilt ones on your player board and the third option you can do is simply to gain money now the premise of this game and the idea is that you are building the the famous flat building in New York uh and this one you do that by uh buying and then placing these columns and each floor of the flat iring building needs three um columns and generally speaking they need to be different colors each time so if I build the you know the blue column then my opponent cannot build the blue column this turn or I canot build another one um but of course as you'd expect those cards that you're Drafting and um increasing your player board abilities with and will let you break some rules so maybe it will say you can duplicate a column or you can buy columns for cheaper uh you can maybe increase your income each time you go to a region because money in this game is pretty tight and you might want to focus on um building up that economy so that you are more efficient on gaining gaining money so you're not wasting turns each time you go somewhere but at the same time each location on your player board could only ever hold three cards um and this is actually interesting little facet of the game where generally speaking the more powerful engine building cards will come with either a thumbs up or or thumbs down rating you know the more powerful they art normally comes with a thumbs down rating and the weaker version will come with a thumbs up rating and at the end of the game if you have more thumbs up than thumbs down on each location then you'll gain some points but if you have more thumbs down then you'll lose some endgame points which is obviously quite important and there is a separate location you can go to as well where you can spend quite a bit of money to get these endgame scoring cards which of course will get you things such as you know this will get you x amount of points for each column of this color in the flat IR building and so on and you the framework of the game is actually rather simple again just move somewhere and take the action but it's those extra wrinkles that make it quite interesting you know not only the the engine building and tailoring it to what you want you know do you want to go all in on one location do you want to spread yourself thinner um mixed with that card system of a thumbs up and thumbs down and on top of that each time you um you build a new floor on the flat IR building there's going to be like a new rule in play that will kind of change things so maybe it will say might be something simple like when you go to this location you get an extra coin or this particular round you can um have the same color column in each floor or there's even one that says you can now share locations with somebody else so all these things kind of just add a bit more flavor to a pretty simple game and I do like the fact that this game feels different to a lot of other two-player games you know most two-player games fit a certain certain Vibe a certain feeling where you know have that head-to-head kind of tug of war feeling this one feels more like a a traditional Euro I suppose but it is very tight and compact um pretty quick as well you're looking at around 45 minutes to play this one and I think it does walk that fine line between being a filler Style game but having enough meat on the bones to feel like you've played a full game by the end of it so I think this one could do quite well if more people knew about it I think it didn't really gain much momentum or gain the the wind under its CS last year but it could be a slow burner because I think this is actually a solid design and I'm looking forward to playing it some more and seeing how those combos of those cards come together so that is flat iron at number three at number two I have a message from the Stars which is a fascinating deduction game that's it's going to be harder to explain I think uh you know verbally than if you were to see it played in person but this is a cooptive game at least the way I've played it I've only played this at three players I'm not sure if there are different modes but in a three player game you do work together albe you are on different teams so essentially you are trying to work out the the numbered value assigned to different letters in the alphabet in a somewhat Mastermind style way so essentially one side of the team is going to be um providing words to the other player then that player is going to um give a numbered value back and so some of these um letters are worth say one point each some of them are doublers so they will double the value of those or of the letters that are worth point in that word um and I think some of them even turn it into like a negative value and of course you know if you provideed this word your your teammate will give you the the number value back and trying to deduce what each letter could be you're filtering letters out as you go um if one letter is worked out then you know it's not going to apply to the other categories um and yeah essentially you're trying to work out what letters are worth points what letters are worth double and what letters worth negative but there are some kind of subcategories um that can help you work things out further so for example some letters are red but there can only be up to like a maximum of one or I can't remember one or two red letters amongst all the letters on in the game so if you worked out these two red letters then you know that all the other ones can't be red so that's more things you can tick off on your sheet so it does become quite a crunchy game especially considering how few turns you get you know this is a very fast game it's only like eight turns or something so you have very little slack to make mistakes and you need to be making sure that you're punching straight through to the Crux of those letters and um you know squeezing as much information out of each word that you can um on top of that you don't quite have the the free will to give any word you want because the other player is trying to guess some of these words on this other sheet that the other team can see so it almost works like a game like decrypto if you're familiar with that where you're trying to give Clues all Associated to another word and basically at the end of the game you're going to get points based on all the correct answers you've given based on again those those letters that are worth numbers those letters that are worth doubles they the negative letters as well as the correct words that the other players guessed from the clues that you're given so although it might sound like a mess um and it's actually like a a hybrid of several different deduction games you know this game reminds me of a game called de crypto it reminds me of a game called hookie um but it's actually a a more refined version of all of them despite my my mess in explaining how it works I think a big part of that is actually because um number one the the player boards look fantastic that's well not necessarily look fantastic but they're designed brilliantly because you given the whole alphabet for each category all in front of you so you have all of the information available to you at all times which I love and um on top of that the scoring system I think the scoring system is brilliant it doesn't try try too hard to be um you know creative in the way it scores You're simply going to get points based on how many things you've got correct um and I must admit as time has gone by um although I've play more and more deduction games and deduction games are generally something I enjoy I find myself leaning towards the simpler ones that don't rely on gimmicks or bells and whistles you know I think of games like um you know the SE of Planet X or games like archaeologic although the deduction part of those games is fantastic I feel like the little Contraptions and things get in the way of the actual cracks of the game and the fun of the game whereas my favorite deduction games are ones like like this one the message from the stars games like the Lost Code where it's you know the focus is all on the games and not sorry all on the deduction and not on the additional mechanisms to build up around that deduction so this one really smart game um some real crunchy again brain burner decisions you have to make or working out you have to do and I'm thoroughly impressed so that is a message from the stars at number two and finally at number one I have set definitely one of the hits from 2024 I haven't really seen many bad reviews or feedback on this rather heavy and involved card driven Euro um you know I wasn't so sure I was going to dive into this one because I thought it might be a little bit too heavy and too long for my collection and I probably wouldn't get it played but after hearing so much positive feedback I thought you know let's give this one a go because I'm probably going to miss out if I don't um and you know is number one here so you can probably tell that I do like this game quite a lot but I do have some issues with it which hopefully I can explain now so um let's start with a bit of an overview of the game so what you're trying to do is that you are launching these probes into space landing on these different planets on this based on this really cool kind of universe system where as the game goes on just passively the board is going to rotate which means the orientation of these planets is going to change and line up differently meaning that the the distance between certain planets and from the Earth is going to change around it might take you longer or shorter to do certain routes once you've landed on these planets you can either again land on the planet itself or you can orbit the planet which is a bit cheaper um get bonuses as you do uh the bonuses are things such as know C money you got data you got these presence as well where you are trying to compete for majorities in these different segments on the board and that's probably my first nitpick of the game is that I think the the area majority thing when it comes to scanning it's called um and competing for the majorities of these little sections I thought that was a little bit weak although it's definitely worth doing because of course you can um you get data from it which is another facet of the game um but you are often rewarded for of course cre being the majority are pres in these regions but it only cashes out once it's completed and what that means is that you are kind of relying on the other players to partake in that part of the game as well and I found over my games of playing this people would start quite enthusiastically competing for these regions but as the game developed and people bought built up more of an engine of cards and things it would be ignored and it kind of just faded Into Obscurity and nobody really touched it anymore and when you had presentence there already it seemed like you wasted your previous efforts um again maybe that's just the way we played it as a group but I definitely noticed it in each time I play this one so that's one kind of small nitpick now another thing you're trying to do is you're trying to build up your engine on your player board which will make you more efficient at different actions again gaining data um which is going to populate this different kind of strip on your player board and an action is to cash it in in order to gain I think it's called like um DNA or kind of um intelligence based on these two alien races that are going to um be randomly determined for each game and what you're trying to do is again you're trying to get three different types of I think it's called DNA and once you've done that you're going to unlock the alien race which will kind of throw a bit of um make the game feel a bit different based on different rules and you're essentially competing to get more of that DNA to put more of your control markers down there to get points bonuses combos uh and so on so there's a lot of moving Parts on to this game but um it's actually pretty simple to play Because all you're doing is you're either launching a probe Landing orbiting or or scanning essentially um but where the main fun of the game lies at least for me is in the in the card play so this is definitely one of those multi-use card games where you can use these cards for of course multiple different reasons and number one of course paying for those cards in order to get the the benefit from them and that could be like a little engine building benefit so whenever you take a certain action you get an improved version of it it can be like a one-off benefit um it can be endgame um objectiv so of course it'll give you something to aim towards it can even be something like these uh little Milestone objectives where if you do something from that point on then you'll gain a benefit um and give you little boosts and so on now if you don't want to use these cards for the kind of um the main ability you can just discard them for the corner ability that will give you like little boosts so that could be like an extra bit of cash or an extra data token or even like free movement with your um with your little probe that's going around the the universe so sometimes there is a bit of a dilemma on the cars you want to keep which cards you want to get rid of um and you're even building up a bit of an an engine or like an income engine um where at the end of each round based on cards you've tucked beneath your little player card your starting card that will give you a boost of income at the start of each round which again which again can be more like money um more energy which is like a secondary currency or even more cards and so on so again lots of moving Parts here tons of strategy you can go for you can kind of ignore certain parts of the game and just focus on other things um and yeah it's definitely a feast For The Senses you're not going to find yourself bored with this one because you're always kind of thinking of your next step what you're going to do how you're going to combo these cards what action are you going to prioritize are you going to move before the the universe shifts are you going to wait until the universe shifts that you can be more efficient uh and I even like the way that you can you know leave your probes in certain areas and just like the board itself can kind of push you along into more optimal or sometimes sub optimal positions um so yeah I think if you like your your heavier Euros um especially if you like games like I think underwater cities games like AR Nova um I think this is going to be the sweet spot for you this style of game again lots of meat on the bones clever combos good card play um Min maxing everything trying to squeeze everything out of the round you can stay in the G stay in the rounds you an exhaust yourself if you want to um and it's quite interesting to see how much mileage you can get out of these cars to again do everything you can so I don't really have many negative things to say about it other than again I thought the the competing for the majorities was a little bit weak um and most importantly the game is rather long so each time I play this one it's taken around 3 hours to play and although I wouldn't say it's outstay it's welcome uh I would say that by the end of it I was I was ready to move on and these styles of games I don't have that many opportunities to play them um and after the few times I've played this one I feel like I've kind of seen what the game has to offer um I'm sure people will bounce back on that um but I feel like I've got the setti experience if that makes sense i' I've enjoyed it I've got a lot of value out of it but is this a game I'm going to pull off the shelf regularly and choose this one over other kind of Epic larger more grandiose Euros probably not I would rather lean towards something like civil lution or something like barrage those games just have like a bit more unique about them and a bit more engaging for me whereas this one I'm really grateful I played it and I I've thoroughly enjoyed it and I I even recommend it to the right Gamers for me the main issue is that I simply wouldn't play it I think and once again is going to be suck on my shelf for a year or two before I play it it just needs to move on because we're so we're drowned in in so many games but objectively a fantastic design got love the card play um and even generally speaking I'm not a huge fan of um know sci-fi or Space theme games I think this game did a really good job of um using that theme to The Max and especially that the presence of the board it looks awesome on the table where the planet shift around it's just got a really nice uh table presence and even some little some little additional wrinkles of the game I really enjoy such as these Milestones that you're hitting by going up the score track which will let you invest in different endgame scoring categories um and kind of the earlier you go to them the better points of return you get based on your own strategies that you're going for so this game is probably more suited for a review when you can actually see everything and um a more in-depth sty review but I just wanted to share My overall overarching thoughts on the game where it's a solid game in fact is an excellent design um but it's one that's not quite right for me and my gaming group um and yeah it just simply would not get played but still it's I think it's going to be really well regarded for a long time to come because it's clearly um a very well polished game so that is set at number one so there we have it that concludes the video hopefully you've enjoyed this one uh if you have please be sure to hit like And subscribe to the channel and check my other content too but for everybody else I'll see you next time on chairman of the board bye-bye