Quetzal | Check It Out! (Episode #21)

okay well i'm gonna be really bold here [Music] hello everybody my name is ilya and my name is tyler together we make up calvary a couple that loves to play some board games that we do if you're new here hit that subscribe button and talk to us in the comments let us know what games we should be checking out welcome to an episode of check it out this is a series where we introduce various board games to you this week we're covering quetzal check it out check it out check it out check it out check it out quetzal is published by gigan it's designed by alexander garcia and the art is done by nastya lin in this two to five player worker placement game you'll hire adventurers to discover the realm of the city of sacred birds you'll discover different artifacts and collect them on your way bring them back to the harbor and sell them for victory points and the person with the most points at the end of the game wins now let's take a quick look at how to play the game so this game will last five rounds and each player will have four steps on their turn to complete but before then let's set up the game this is what the sorting board will essentially look like and each player will get their character meeples according to their player count and these two little discs one just mark the scoring track and one to mark the discovery track now like i said before there's four steps in each player's turn and they go as follows the first step is everybody will roll their meeple and that's right i said roll their meeples depending on the side they land on they'll be either archaeologists or adventurers now if they land on the side they're wild so you can choose if they're an archaeologist or an adventurer and if they land standing up not only are they wild but you also get a coin now after that you'll take churns placing your meeples in various spots and that is step two now step three is the execution of all those spots you'll notice that they have an order starting with a number here and going all the way down to seven and then the fourth step will involve cleaning up so resetting and moving all those cards that would have been taken from this round now let's take a look at the action spaces this one right here labeled number one is the stella of knowledge if you put an archaeologist here you'll gain the first player marker as well as move one space in the discovery track the discovery track essentially gets you bonuses the farther you go so you can see if you get all the way to the last space you'll get six extra victory points so the second space to go is the temple this will have all sorts of artifacts you can collect in exchange for points later in the game so here you mainly place archaeologists and as you can see the higher spaces cost more but they allow you first pick at the spaces as they'll go top to bottom and then you'll notice too on spaces three and four you'll pick a card from the temple but also a card from the top of the pile so you won't really know the second card you're picking these spaces right here are bidding spaces so essentially what you'll do is somebody will determine the worker that is going to be placed there by initiating the bid and from that point on only that type of worker can be placed there for the bidding the next player is able to outbid the individual who played first by playing more workers if that does happen the original player can return their workers and use them again later on now the idea of these spaces is if you win them you get the reward so you'll get two artifacts and depending on which space you'll go to an extra little bonus now this base is the black market you can set an adventure here to trade in one of your cards to get seven points the next space right here is called the village this acts similarly to a marketplace you'll place your worker there spend the coins and purchase the tile that of your desire and these tiles essentially will work towards upgrading your character some of them are immediate effects while others are long lasting now the harbor masters office and the ships are spaces where you can trade artifacts for points in the harbor masters office you can see that you can trade three now if you place a worker there and two coins you're able to send off any combination of cards that you have in your hand now it does benefit you to send the same cards as if you send multiples of the same one you can get more points as shown here now the ships are even better but they are bidding spaces so you're able to bid on if you can send six cards instead of three and then the last space we haven't talked about is the cap you'll notice it has a little lightning effect so this one doesn't happen in certain order so once you're placing meepo's you're able to place a worker there to gain a coin and re-roll your meeples now this will all happen over five rounds at the end of the fifth round you calculate the points and see who wins the only things to keep in mind for end scoring as well is the first player marker is worth two points coins are worth one point every three coins and any of your upgrades that you have that indicate points will get you points as well so you'll take a look at that and the person in the forest on the track wins quetzal so what do you think of quetzal i really like this game obviously i'm biased because it's a work replacement so huge fan but they've managed to tangle in other mechanics that make this game in my opinion relatively unique i think the part that really sells it for me that i haven't actually seen in any other games that i can think of is the fact that you have to roll meeples i think it just provides a really neat thematic twist of are you are they going to be archaeologists so they give me adventures and then you always want one to stand up because getting those coins especially if you get a couple is so strong but it doesn't happen very often i think i actually the in the in the many times if you play this game i think it only happened for me at once or twice but you definitely get more lucky with the standing well the the couple times he played it i feel like i got a little like a little more lucky with the standing but i also i also think that adds a little uh elements to complexity of the game because you really have to adapt to the players um that you roll and if you see that say ilia is bidding on all of these archaeology spaces or he's made them archaeology spaces and i have only adventurers then i'm kind of out of luck when it comes to bidding for those particular items and i really have to adapt and the other element i really like in this game as well is that talking pull of when you should sell your artifacts and ship them off because you're not by any means bound to collect three of each one like you can actually just sell three very different artifacts and get less scoring opportunities but the really interesting element here is that you're not always able to sell everything that you want this base although unlimited any amount of work can be placed in the three space the ships are where it's at and bidding for those spaces especially later in the game when you have like 10 or 12 cars that you really want to ship off it can be really damaging if all of a sudden someone outbids you and you just are stuck with this hand of cards that doesn't equate to any points yep yeah it's a shift in momentum it's really cool um i think by like collecting those sets is also kind of neat too because you can see it tells you on the card how many are like total in the deck yeah and you kind of have to adjust to like what people are picking up and obviously that's more like jumping into the thinking a little bit harder of the game but yeah yeah it's a fair in my head it's a fairly simple game but there's a lot of complexity in how everyone plays it and you can play differently every time and have different strategies which i really really enjoy about games but let's talk about why you should check it out well if you really like work replacements set collections a little bit of push of luck then quetzal is a combination of all three it's a lot of fun to play it's pretty easy to learn and it's basically indiana jones it's an adventure game so if you're into those types of games i would definitely recommend it okay well i'm gonna be really bold here and i'm gonna say that this is actually one of the best introductory work replacement games that i've played because the goal of it is really simple it's really based in that set collection and everything you do with your workers is surrounded by that said collection where in other work replacement games there's a lot of overarching things that are happening you have to kind of connect them here it's pretty simple you're getting artifacts you're sending off artifacts oh you can't get these artifacts anymore money well get money get the artifacts and send them off so i think it's very simple to grasp and for that sense i think this is a really good introductory work replacement game that you can actually share with pretty much anybody yeah that's a really good point you're very like linear in your decisions so it really you don't have to step back and think outside of the box of like how you're gonna score the most points because really set collection is the main way to score points and i like it too because it has a lot of grand moments you can build up this perfect set of artifacts you're about to sell them and then oh no tyler took my spots where i was gonna sell them yeah and that leaves for a memorable experience and you also learn and kind of can take that to the next game yeah very good point so on that note though why wouldn't you want to check this out well there is a big bird on this game and the game is called the city of sacred birds but beyond a couple of seagulls on the docks of the ships there's no birds in this game well the discovery track is like a bird symbol but no not a reason to not check out this game but it was i definitely was expecting more birds in this game it was a little bit by surprise that there wasn't as many birds i was definitely caught by surprise i was shook it yeah i didn't mind it as much because of the rolling meeples yeah yeah but that that's not really a deterrent for this game it is really fantastic the one thing i will say is because it's super light um or in my opinion i wouldn't say i feel like it's relatively light it's light for a worker placement yes so if if you're looking for a game that is a little more heavier then quetzal might not be that game for you the other element twos there's quite a lot of pusher luck elements here too you really want to get the right workers and sometimes that may not be to your favor uh although you do have the ability to re-roll re-roll them if you go here it can be a little bit frustrating if you roll all the ones that you don't want for example yep but because there's only two it's not not as bad yeah and you never know what set's going to come up what card's going to come up and who's going to grab what so there's that piece to it so overall what do we think yeah i really enjoy this game i definitely would recommend it i can't wait i feel the rolling of meepos is the really selling point of this game it's a mechanic that really stands out it's very different but then take everything else with how you can upgrade how you can re-roll and consider everything at the table it's just a very welcoming game and the art behind is beautiful no complaints for me yep and the goal is pretty straightforward it's sell artifacts i'll say it again but i'm biased towards work replacements any work replacement games i am all for so i would recommend checking this out and look at this green printed meatball so cool true yeah so now for our question of the day because this was a game that really tricked us a little bit the cover wasn't quite like what the game was i want to ask you what board game cover tricked you and you had a completely different experience than what you expected from the first glance and looking at a game that's a really good question i think for me brew the new pandasaurus game that's coming out that one caught me by surprise because beautiful art super inviting super friendly and just absolutely like gorgeous all around and you wouldn't think about it but it's very take that and which usually i'm not a fan of uh but something good about that game it definitely was not what i was expecting there's a lot of fires and scorches well with that thank you so much for watching we really appreciate all the support that you folks have been providing us it's unbelievable we love you all and we will see you in the next one and before you leave make sure you hit that subscribe button give us a thumbs up talk to us in the comments hit that bell notification so you can know when more videos release we love all your engagement and your support it means the world to us thank you so much and until next time this is us checking out bye [Music] you