Board Games I Got Rid Of (And Why) - Episode 22

0:00 hey everybody and welcome to another installment of board games I got rid of and why so in this series I take a look at 10 games that I've previously had in my collection but for one reason or another no longer do and I try to give some ration out as to why I came to that decision before I get started on the games I want to give a shout out to the show sponsor keyienda dot Co dot UK who are my go-to online retailer here in the UK and if you use my link in the show notes or the QR code then you can get a five percent off your first order and help the channel in the process but let's get started on the games Okay so the first game I'm talking about is allegory so allegory is a game that really did intrigue me actually a very stunning looking game actually I love the artwork in this one but another thing that intrigued me was one of the core mechanisms so this is a an auction or bidding Style game I should say where you are trying to claim these cards um in different sets essentially um but whenever you win a bid for a card by the time everyone else has passed I believe anything you bid is divided out into the existing cards in the cardboard making it a lot more inviting for the other players to go and grab them um that for me was the big hook in practice it didn't work quite as well as I would have liked it to and it made the follow-up decisions a bit obvious and a bit easy and even made it easy for the person who won the bid to divide that probably almost always almost always equally which I did take a lot of the

1:31 air out the cells of this game additionally I do have quite a lot of auction and bidding games in the collection and this one did kind of fall short of a lot of them which just by default is going to make it seem you know not as exciting as you know as it could have been because it is against such stiff competition but I wanted to like this one I thought there was too many negative cards in the game where by the end of the game you had a very low final score which made it feel like you went through um you know a lot of the game without achieving much by the end of it and it was a bit of frustrating at times when you were constantly having points taken away from you but yeah again the last impression was I wanted to like it and was a little bit disappointed hence it had to go the next game I'm talking about is Four Seasons so Four Seasons actually a lot like allegory um hooked me because of a mechanism involved where you have this um 3D pagoda which is made up of these four different sections and this is like um a spinning device where on each face of these pagodas are going to point to a different player and it's going to show a certain number of resources on it and on your turn you're going to play one of these cards which can show you the action you can do but it's also going to show you the order you manipulate this Pagoda so it could say you know maybe rotate to the top section clockwise and that is going to again change the quantity of the resources available to you and when you collect these resources you either take them from top to bottom or

3:02 bottom to top which is very important because you only have a strict capacity to store resources meaning that if you want a resource right at the top but you're collecting from bottom to top you might want to make sure that all the kind of rungs up to that point are minimal as possible with few resources so that by the time it gets to that top rung you've still got capacity to store it I thought that was a fantastic mechanism however I thought it was a bit hamstrung by the fact that the rest of the game was pretty light and a bit too accessible and a bit too Gateway because I thought the potential was off the charts with this one but the rest of the game just held it back because it was a bit too copy and paste with a bunch of other games out there simple contract fulfillment that kind of thing but I think if there's ever a game that's ready or just a waiting um good expansion material to really up the left when you're up the anti of this game and make it feel more rich and a bit more satisfying then um this could be um it's certainly a good candidate for that but additionally I would love to see maybe the designer to go back and build another game around that core mechanism because I'd love to have a game like that in my collection but this one just isn't it so a ton of potential but um at the moment four Gardens was a bit lackluster add had to go so that is four Gardens the next game I'm talking about is design town which is a simple card driven push your luck game now I often say on the channel That I enjoy pushing like games because it's a hard thing not to enjoy because I think us as humans we just enjoy that pure tension or that

4:33 innate tension of are we going to gamble or are we not good to go double and keep what we have however despite that design Town managed to pull off um a push-like game that was not fun at all this was convoluted it was drawn out in a very long game for no reason you were constantly going bust often um you know without having made a single decision and it was just a frustrating mess of a game that I absolutely despised I could not um recommend a game to avoid more than design Town um yeah a big big Miss for me and obviously that one had to go so that is design town the next game I'm talking about is hierarchy and which is a tiny little micro game by button shy so it only has like 17 or 18 cards in the entire deck and in this game you are trying to play these cards out in almost numerical order um but these cards also have powers on them which can manipulate the game State and you're trying to play um cards in order to back your opponent into a corner to the point where they can't play a card and if you can't play you're going to to lose the game essentially now I must admit I only played this one a few times and this was a little while ago so other than what I've probably already said I have almost forgotten what the gaming tells but for that reason I suppose it always speaks for itself where I thought the game was somewhat forgettable I wasn't really drawn back to play it that much more but I remember it being at least a quality design that I think if if you have again two players or so who are going to get really invested and learn all those cards back to back then

6:04 this is one of those games where you can certainly start to unravel some of the layers and nuances on how to play these cards most efficiently and how to manage your hand of cards so yeah I remember liking it but I wasn't blown away and you know the fact that I had forgotten so much about it speaks for itself so that is hierarchy the next game I'm talking about is oriflan which is almost like a bluffing and trapping Style game as you're playing out these character cards with all different abilities on them and trying to eliminate people trying to score points of different ways and a bunch of different roles and things that you're trying to score the most from now much like hierarchy I am tending to lean away from games where every single card does a different ability I find it a hard thing to process in my mind at times and often I'm not willing to put in the effort to remember what each card does now despite that I another one with auroflam I thought the game worked well for what it was trying to be got some cool bluffing tools as you can play things face up or face down and if people attack your face down cars you can potentially lose them but you have things such as like ambushes you know if people attack you you can leave them thinking they're attacking something where when they attack it they're getting killed themselves and you're attacking cars up and down this column or Road system and it worked well and I must admit this had some of the best artwork that I've ever seen in my life I love the art style of this one just beautiful to look at very atmospheric But ultimately I think that yeah the style of gameplay isn't quite for me nowadays I would play this one if asked

7:34 um because again it has some qualities that's for sure and has some upside but yeah nothing I'm really going to request to play and this was my brother's game and he's a big fan of this game but he said the online digital implementation of it is better than the physical card game so I'll take his word at that not really something I've dive deeply into but uh but yeah I know there are fans of this game but uh maybe the online version is better um who knows so that is oriflower the next game I'm talking about is going to be a controversial one because this is a very popular game and this is the crew of The Quest for planet nine so this is a game that blew up a few years ago it's a Cooperative trick taking game I suppose this is almost like the first game of that genre or of that hybrid I suppose and in this game of course you are working together to resolve these tricks in a particular order and you're going to play through a whole bunch of scenarios each getting more complex and more difficult than the last so you have a ton of replayability here and I have to say objectively this game is so clever it's very meticulously designed and I if you like trick taking and you like co-op gameplay you're gonna love it simple as that however me personally I've never enjoyed trick taking I don't get any enjoyment or satisfaction from them they're just a part of my brain that's missing when it comes to um you know getting anything from trick taking games so therefore um inevitably I'm not going to enjoy a game like this and while still sitting back and appreciating how it's put together it's just nothing I'm going to request to play and when I do play it

9:06 um I can sit back think you know this is clever but I'm not getting any enjoyment from it so therefore it had to go that is the crew the next game is monstrosity so this game actually is a very cool concept it's a party game as one person is going to look at this card which is going to have a very wild and wacky alien drawn on it and you're trying to remember all the features of this alien um as detailed as possible and then flip it down and then try to recollect or you know re-explain what that alien looks like almost as if you're you know providing a description to the police and all the other players are going to draw that picture based on the description um and whoever most accurately depicts that alien is going to um you know it's going to score the point essentially it's one of those games where you never go to calculate scoring it's just a fun activity and a simple activity to play now I have to say that when playing this with purely adults um I think is a little bit too easy because it's not that difficult to remember these these um these aliens and I found in my experiences and we'd happily from quite a few times that everyone's images look almost identical and they pretty much perfectly drawn the monster or alien so for that reason it was always came down to Artistic skill and when it comes down to Artistic skill and you know innate abilities um is not going to be as enjoyable so if I'm going to play a drawing party game there are others I'd lead towards you know always the Classic telestrations

10:37 this one just felt a little bit short of the mark and I know there are households you can play to make it more difficult but still I rather just play something a bit more pure like illustrations but that being said I thought this is a good game I had some fun with it but wasn't quite a keeper the next game is love letter so love letter is another kid that was massively popular you know five six years ago another micro game as you're using this ability to try and eliminate players or be the last man standing with the highest card in order to collect a point essentially it's going to be a race to a certain amount of points um and I like the way that some of these cards interact with each other there's some good Mind Games and Things and actually quite a nice meta game builds up if you keep playing with the same players now if there was ever an example of a game that I've just played to death um it must have played this one over a hundred times I'm just completely warm out on this game um I don't feel the need to go back and play it anymore and we've had more than our money's worth from it um I can certainly see why people like it and I did like it for a long period of time and it's certainly a quality micro game um but yeah once you've played the game that many times and there's just nothing else to explore and I just found myself by the end of the end of the um plays I was just going through the motions doing do the same thing over and again and not making any key decisions so that's why it was time to move on from love letter and ultimately I am talking about Village Green so this is a little Tableau Builder a little drafting game as you're

12:08 acquiring these cars and trying to align them into these rows and columns and try to score in different you know categories essentially you know have these trees in this row these trees in this column that kind of thing however with each card placement there would be almost a Litany of um of restrictions which would make it very difficult to place things and that puzzle become Tighter and Tighter meaning that you're going to start you know blowing away or you know wasting away all those scoring opportunities so every single placement is important here um I thought this one was a good design I thought the restrictions were a little bit debilitating but you didn't quite have the freedom to do what you were going to do and it felt like if you've got to commit to something you're almost going to completely sacrifice something else so yeah a little bit too tight for me a little bit too dry in the way it works um and it just lacks something maybe lacked up a fun factor for me but a nice filler game certainly you know well designed and put together game but again that fun wasn't quite there for me and when it comes to again it's going to take less than half an hour I'm probably going to play something a little bit more Breezy and again a little bit more joyful than what the experience of a Village Green offered so that is vida's green had to go because it just simply wasn't that fun to be honest and the final game I'm talking about this episode is die of the dead so this is a memory and dice rolling game as you're trying to commit these dice of your color into these caskets and then use

13:40 the Ability assigned to that casket which would be things such as now add new Dice from your pool into your personal Supply add them to the casket all these kind of things or take these bonus tokens which will give you like little mitigation tools um but every time you use an action or every now and then you would shift these caskets along to the next action slot and their lid would go onto these caskets meaning that you could not look inside meaning that you'd have to memorize where you have dice allocated because you don't want to be selecting the spinal casket if you have no dice in them because whoever rolls the most or the highest number on the dice in that casket is going to do almost Ascend their dice to the scoring track and you're trying to get to the top rung of the scoring track and that was kind of where the fun was for me and remembering where you allocated the dice because often you know people would select these Cascades thinking they had loads of dice in there and they'd have none and then you'd forget where your dice were Etc so that was the fun part I thought decision wise there was almost nothing here and it was very formulaic it was almost like a production line a conveyor of action that you just keep rinsing and repeating you know take them into your pool put them into the casket shuffle along Ascend and repeat same insane again so again decisions were not here for me looked nice you know very cool components very bright and I'm nice to look at but yeah the gameplay was certainly lacking and um I think for every single additional player I played this one my enjoyment decreased so I thought the replayability just was not there and I thought this was another game where if you added more

15:11 modularity where each game would feel different then um this would certainly um increase my impression of this one and it certainly has that framework to do that so I'm surprised it didn't come with more than one game mode I suppose so that is dialer dead um yeah definitely fell short of the mark so there we have it those are another 10 games that have left my collection if you've enjoyed the video please be sure to hit like And subscribe to the channel and leave a comment and let me know what you've called recently from your collection but for everybody else I'll see you next time on chairman of the board bye-bye