The Voynich Puzzle - Board Game Review - Death By 1000 Papercuts

0:00 Without further ado, let's crack on.

0:02 Two hours later,

0:03 I'm Batman.

0:27 Hi everyone. I'm the broken mele. Win or lose, I'm going to be honest with you. We've got the Voyage puzzle here today. This is another Danny Garcia game. Most of Danny Garcia games I'm going to ho on, but I do like Windmill Valley. That one I've still got, and I will do the expansion at some point. But this one is kind of like one again that just sort of came out of nowhere last year with from Salt and Pepper Games. I got it at the last second at Essen. Like they I think they had like five copies left and I just thought, you know what, grab it. People have obviously been buying it. People have obviously got good things to say about it. So I wanted to sort of give my take on it as well. It's essentially a game again one of those games where you have a bunch of mini games that supposedly synergize together based on a Voinich manuscript which I know sodled about. So you know don't expect me to be uh determining whether this is a fanatic game or not. Although to be honest I think the theme uh doesn't really make much difference once you get into it. But it's supposedly an interesting little puzzle game. But I've been hearing some disturbing thoughts about its practicality issues. So, oh, you know, I don't like impracticalities when it comes to my games. So, we'll see how much of an interesting time I have with this. Without further ado, let's crack on.

1:42 In the boy niche puzzle, you are seeking to gain the most overall knowledge points or VPs in this case. The way you do it is that there is four, effectively four, but sort of five mini games that interact with each other on this board. mostly essentially deriving of tracks. But as you get better in these respective actions, you will level up your knowledge marker in that respective in that respective little miniame. And the further they get up the track, the more points they can potentially be worth overall. You also have a little book here which has pairs of action cards that are grouped into pairs. Again, a pair for this action, a pair for this action, a pair for this action, and so forth. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to upgrade these as the game goes on. So, they'll start off in their most basic form. And what you'll do as an action is you'll effectively choose a double page spread that you didn't have before and say, "Okay, I'm going to do this particular action here. This may let me put a leaf on this track, you know, a water drop here, a text marker here, a star here, whatever. It will let you do some kind of a track moving action. But then after you've done that, you'll level up in that respective track. And what you're trying to do is by getting to certain points, you're trying to place these jigsaw puzzles on the middle part of the board here. By having jigsaw puzzles laid out, they're going to be in different colors, different clusters, different group sizes, and you'll have your little magnifying glasses that you have on them. During your turn, twice during your turn, in fact, you'll be able to upgrade cards in your book by removing magnifying glasses from this puzzle section depending on the

3:14 composition of the pieces in general. So, remove one from a cluster of four or more pieces, remove one from a cluster of at least two or more yellow pieces, that kind of thing. Once you do so, you effectively take the card out of the book, flip it over, and there's four different variations. They're double-sided, so you basically flip it over and then flip it over again, that sort of thing. And the actions get progressively better and better, as well as increase your endgame like scoring multiplier for the different markers. So, I mentioned that you're leveling up the different action markers as the game goes on. you'll pass by these yellow points on the track which essentially add as act as a multiplier for the endgame scoring. So for example, if my bath action here has got all the way to eight and my action card has four as the multiplier, four * 8 32 and you're basically applying that for all the different mini games. Um there's not a huge amount else to say about the typical turn structure and the game itself, but in terms of the mini games themselves, you've got, for example, a tree track here. You'll have your leaf tokens on this track. They can start it down at the stem, go up the branches.

4:16 These will get you, again, they'll beef you up certain tracks or they might let you do other things on other actions. The star astrology chart here, you can place little uh text markers or stars down on this track. And when you do so, depending where you put it, it will not only level up that particular marker, but putting it down might let you level up something in green as well. And that's what all the mini games do. They they benefit themselves, but they also occasionally influence some other part of the board. And the same goes for your action cards. You know, you'll level up, you know, one particular card that was saying do stuff on the green track, but then when it gets like higher and higher, suddenly it lets you do something else on potentially other tracks as well. And same goes over here. You can place little text markers down on here. And the more that you have in a road, the more bonuses you get, the more things that you can do on again other tracks. And the fountain is place water drops on these little fountain spouts.

5:07 And as they move down, other players with water drops will get little bonuses as well as yourself, but you're trying to clean the water over there, and again, level up tracks. You know, I know it sounds like it's more of the same, but that's kind of what this game is. It is literally a puzzle. You're building up a big puzzle in the middle here, taking magnifying glasses off in order to upgrade your cards. Once these get better, you can do more stuff on these little mini games until eventually the game ends and everybody totals up their points and see who wins.

5:34 Too many questions. So visually it's not half bad actually. I mean this is obviously a game of tracks at the end of the day. It's a very dry euro. Whether this has got any relation to the voyage manuscript is frankly going to go out the window the second you start playing. But it's a nice box. It's a nice sish cover. And I like the, you know, the kind of sort of very basic. It's a basic art style, but it's colorful. It's interesting. You know, it makes it look a little bit prettier on the table. and it does turn the occasional head once people come by and have a look at it. I also like the way that the action cards not only being like fairly big size um also like go they kind of increase in terms of how much is on the card. So when they start in their basic form it's barely like a sketch outline on a beige pad and then when you flip that over it's like oh it's a white pad and there's a bit more detail and then once you flip the card over it's like right now it's color on the beige and then you flip it again and it's the full-on picture. So, it's a nice little way of seeing the progression of your action cards as you level them up. And the upgrading of the action cards themselves and the jigsaw puzzle element is really kind of the highlight of the game. You know, the mini tracks, we'll get on to those a little bit later, but really when it comes to what is the mechanism in the game that's the most interesting, it's the cards. Like, hands down. The jigsaw puzzle pieces are basically a means to an end. You put the the jigsaw puzzle pieces on, get them into groups, and take the magnifying glasses off. That's all well and good, but I like the use of

7:06 these action cards, having the different ones, which you've got to select a different one each turn. So, you can't just focus entirely on one certain miniame, you do have to diversify a bit. And given that these actions do synergize with each other, there is a means of like, okay, I need to work on this action right now. Now, I need to work over here. Now, I need to work over here. And these action cards help to facilitate that. So, you know, once you've got a bunch of these upgraded, you can do some fairly powerful chain comboing stuff. And so, it's going to appeal to people in that respect. You'll also have different cards that you use every game, which I quite like. You know, you get given essentially them in pairs, like a pair of greens, a pair of reds, pair of yellows, but which ones you get is from a deck of like 40 odd of these cards. And so if you're playing this by yourself solo or two player, you're going to have a fair amount of variety in this game before you even see every single action card that there is.

7:58 Even in a four player, you're still going to have a fair bit of variety because you might have say eight cards for a particular pairing. And then you're only going to see two of them. And it could be any of the eight that you see pair. You don't necessarily have one and two and three and four. It could be two and seven next time. So yeah, they're not like drastically different these action cards, but they do influence a little bit of what you can do. Although that is a positive and a negative. You know, the the positive is that you do get a bit of variety with this game. The negative is that these action cards do kind of dictate what you can do in the game. So, if you have a bunch of action cards that say, "I can do this various stuff on the leaves, but I can only do part of the water." Well, tough. I mean, you're going to have to find some other way to make that happen, or you're just going to have to accept that's something you can't do very well in the game. And when you've got a fairly tight four player setup of this, like people clogging up spaces, if people clog up spaces where you've got a limited scope to be able to do anything, then it could render some of your action cards slightly useless in that regard.

8:56 So that is a bit of a negative that goes with it. But, you know, it's why I think the game works better with uh possibly less players or certainly I think the solo is uh probably the best way. And well, why don't we go on to that? Now, the solo mode is again a little bit hit and miss. You do have some extra rules to learn in order to actually learn it. I mean, I was hoping that the solo mode would be a bit easier to grasp, but you have a good, let's see, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. You've got eight pages for the solo mode in this game. Now, when it all boils down to it, the majority of the solo mode is effectively having a a preset up, you know, done at random. And as you can see, this is the solo side of the board. And you won't see it as clearly in here, but basically there's yellow numbers dotted all over the place. And so they essentially build up a little deck of action cards from themselves and depending what's on the the top or I think they done with the help cards. I it's one of those. But the idea is is that the number that's on the top of the deck kind of dictates the priority for what happens in a particular action. So they'll say, right, they've got to do the bot action over here. And then you go, right, what's the number on the top of their deck? 26. Well, the closest thing to that is 25, right? So, they're going up that way. And it's quite a nice little way to do it. And I like the fact that it's all printed on the board, so you can actually see what they're supposed to do. But you do have to learn a decent amount of rules on top of the rules that are already in place before you can really crack into the solo mode.

10:24 Do not, under any circumstances, try to learn the solo mode before you've had a chance to do a run through of this game, whether with other players or a dummy run by yourself. you will just confuse the hell out of yourself and not be able to really get cracking with this.

10:37 But no, you can't. Don't even try.

10:39 I mentioned that the solo mode is probably my favorite way to play this. But that's not to say that the multiplayer is entirely devoid of interaction. There's not a ton of it. It's mostly just the blocking of spaces. So, it's not like what I do directly screws over your your um your setup, but people different people are putting jigsaw puzzles on here and they might put them in clusters where you don't want them. Uh people are leveling up the tree track and if you've got a leaf on that track and somebody else comes by with their leaf, well, they jump over you. So that might make their action a little bit better, you know, and everybody's basically taking up spots and even pushing water droplets down here. So every time you push water droplets down, everybody who gets pushed is getting something for it. So you might get something, but you're also giving opponents other things. So it's not that the multiplayer is entirely a multiplayer solitaire experience. I just think that when you consider how long the game takes, I mean, you are talking a good 2 and 1 half to 3 hours to play a four-player game of this. It is somewhat lengthy. And the fact that the game does have a decent amount of AP generation from as a regard of not only what action am I going to do next, but the fact that somebody might suddenly make my leaf action better and it's like, oh great, now I need to rethink maybe the leaf actually better to do this round. It does come with some little negatives like here and there, but it's not entirely a solitire game when you play it with other players. So, I prefer it solo, but there is something here for multiplayer.

12:06 Right, let's get on to the negatives and strap yourselves in, guys. We might be on this particular part of the negatives for a while. I mentioned at the start that people have mentioned about impracticalities for this game. Oh, you don't know the half of it, sir. This game is trying to do everything possible to make what is at the end of the day not the hardest game I've ever come across as irritating as possible. Whether it's the rule book or the components or the graphic design, whatever that there it's just I don't get how some of these design decisions came into the final publication. There are so many in fact that not after watching, you know, some playthroughs, you know, Meeple University and Paul Grogan and stuff like that, I've actually had to write them down on a piece of paper because I can't remember them all. But ah, where do we start?

12:55 Right. Well, let's start with the rule book. Okay, the rule book is I have seen worse, but it's not great. I mean, this game uses a lot of terminology like boty action and water droplet and things like that where it's not particularly intuitive, but the layout of the book is just annoying. You know, some of the rules in here are worded a little bit weird to try and understand how they work, but they end up putting stuff that's pretty important, you know, in terms of the actions and how certain things work in the appendix at the end. So, when it's explaining the certain actions, it doesn't explain certain other key features that you need to know. Instead, it expects you to go to a specific page in the back of the book for the action icons to be able to work it out there. How about new? You crazy Dutch bastard.

13:44 Because when I'm reading through this rule book, I'm reading it and I'm confused as to what the hell. This is meant to be that. That's meant to be that. Okay. Hey, what? So, wait a minute. You pass by these spots on the end. Do they do anything? Do these yellow bits do anything? Am I supposed to do something instant? Cuz that's typically in games. Oh, no. No, you score them at the end. Well, why don't you tell me that when you get to there? It's like you have to read the entire book from start to finish before it actually starts making any lick of sense, you know, and I know I have seen worse, but and you will get it eventually, but you're going to have to accept that you're going to be flipping back and forth, back and forth, back and forth between like iconography guides and the rule book to try and understand certain aspects of this. And on the iconography sense, I can't believe it. I just can't believe it. This game has a ton of iconography in it. And I mean a ton. There is a lot here. You've got all the different iconography on these action cards. None of which has any text to go with it. I mean, there's so much dead space on these cards. It's unreal.

14:46 Yeah. You've got the action itself. You've got a tiny little bit there that says how it flips over and then another tiny little bit to read to say how to, you know, score at the end of the game and what might be on the other side. The rest of it is all just artwork and dead space which could have had a little bit of text to say what the action did, you know, just for, you know, an easy like referencing. But it's like, it's okay. Just look at your player aid.

15:08 Hold on a second. Something's missing.

15:11 What's making player aid? The player aid for this is non-existent. This is a game littered with iconography all over the place, and there is not a single playerade for people. Are you freaking kidding me? Seriously, you could not be, you know, you charged a good 50, 60 euro for this game. I think it was like a 60 odd euro purchase and you could not be bothered to put a player age. You thought that this was acceptable just sticking something in the back of the book, not even anything on the rear page. The rear page is all dead space. They just expect you to constantly be passing this around all the time. And you know, the iconography is not the most intuitive in the world. I mean, some of it's not bad, you know, where it's got, all right, put a water droplet on this action. You then have to remember how the actions work, which involves going back to the rule book again, which is tricky to reference. But then you've got, I kid you not, there is a good, let's see, 12 24. Yeah, that's yeah, there's about 24 different variations right on this page of how cards upgrade. So all the different permutations of whether it's a cluster of pieces, red, yellow, green, blue, you know, two pieces, three pieces, four pieces, or whatever like that are all explained on one page here that you constantly have to pass around, you know, and some of them make sense, some of them don't. And it just makes it like life harder. I mean, come on. Could you have just put a player aid in the box?

16:32 Would it have made, you know, it would have made a massive difference.

16:36 Now, evidently, my psychoptic colleague informs me that that can't be done. Honestly, you know, some of these flaws that I'm going to go into, people have fixed on Board Game Geek, but I'm reviewing this as a first edition print as it stands in the box. I am not giving you credit for what other people have done to fix your publication issues. So, okay, rule book, not exactly great, but not the worst thing ever. You will eventually get it. It's just going to take a bit longer than it should. But also, let's go on to some of the other impracticalities here. So, let's um you know, going from the list here. I'm going to keep this within eyeshot cuz I am going to need this. This might take a while, guys. Let's go. Okay, so first up, we have got the booklets themselves, right? So, you've got this booklet here. It's got the double page spread, and you know, you're going to find yourself basically like putting the cards in here at the start of the game and using this as your thing. Right,

17:31 you're a monster.

17:32 Ditch the books. They are pointless. They are complete gimmick. I mean, the problem with this is that you're going to be spending most of the game going, they're annoying, all right, they are stupid. I get that it's meant to be a manuscript and that, but all this is is a gimmick and it's just impractical and it's just going to cause people such AP nonsense trying to figure out what they're doing with here, especially when the iconography for what is on the reverse of the card and that is so goddamn tiny that you need like zoom specs in order to be able to see it. Now, they do supposedly assist with help cards, these little mini ones. The idea being that you're supposed to take help cards, which again adds to the very long setup this game has, and basically sort of pops them down in front of you so that you can keep referring it and flipping them over. Have fun looking at 10 of these cards in front of you, constantly flipping them over and rotating them to see what's what, especially as these are smaller than all the other cards. The main solution that I've seen do and some other people have suggested is that you simply ignore the book. Please ignore the book and put the cards in front of you. so that you can basically have them in pairs. So you put the two pairs of that one there, the two pairs of that one there, the two pairs of that one there. And the idea is is that they're all in front of you. All you know is that you just have to choose a different double each time. You could use a marker or you could just use your common sense. And basically you can flip, rotate, do what you like as you see please. Yes, it adds to the table space. And this game is, you know,

19:03 doesn't take up a huge amount of table space by itself. And yes, you're going to need table space in order to have 10 cards in front of you, but trust me, that is the easiest way to do it. You need to do it that way. Just ditch the book and use the 10 cards in front of you. Trust me, you're going to have a much easier time doing it. Right. What's next? Uh the magnifying glasses. They are very tiny. And when you've got four of you playing this game, you've got all these puzzle pieces sort of stuck together and various guys and that. And you're going to be balancing these tiny little magnifying glasses all over the place, clustered on these bits. They are tiny. They're all over the place. And all it takes is a little little knock like that and you're going to be sending these, you know, like off this kilter or you're going to have to make certain they're straight and that and it gets really fiddly. The puzzle pieces as well. If you've ever played a normal jigsaw puzzle, they normally clip together quite easily cuz they're normally wellmade. Here though, blimey.

19:54 I mean, when you put a bunch of these pieces together, sometimes they just do not want to fit. You could be there with a hammer just like like trying to like get these pieces to fit. And again, not like the end of the world, but as you can see, the way I'm going with this is that it is very much death by a thousand cuts. Okay, what next? Um, the pushing the water drops, for example. So, you got the water drops over here, but you're going to have water drops from every player on this thing as well as leaf tokens. So, when you've got this thing populated with all the different water droplets, the second you start putting some in, right, you've got to push them down. So, you got to push that down, push that down, and then you've got to track what everybody gets from this. All right, I got a track. You got the two there, right? You got to get those there. You've got to get those and you get a bonus from this. It's like fiddly and annoying.

20:39 But wait, there's more.

20:42 Player colors. Well, player colors. You've got yellow, red, uh, was it sort of greenish and blue, which is fine except the scoring markers are all the same color as your player color. And the colors of the actions are green, yellow, red, purple, and blue. So, ignore the purple. That's kind of like a side one. But the player colors are matching the color icons for the actions themselves. But when you've got the scoring markers on the track, you can't differentiate them without having the without seeing the icon on the marker itself. So you keep getting confused as like, oh, I'll move this yellow one. Lost that one. Um, you keep moving this yellow one up. It's like, stop moving the yellow piece up, but I've just done the starlight astrology action. Yeah, but that's my player piece. Yours is the red one here with the star in it. you know, moved that one up. And countless times this keeps happening in games. You know, why did they not differentiate them somehow, but the story markers, oh boy, I can't I can't grasp what is this.

21:39 You know, I like to assume that most of these games go through some kind of play testing to, you know, basically say, right, you know, we've looked at this and people have given us feedback and we've taken on the feedback and we're going to make little changes here and there. Nobody play tested this aspect of the game because I can't fathom any play testing group that let this through. Right, you've got five scoring markers a piece. Okay, fun. You know, you've got four of your normal ones and your overall one. Okay, so there's five scoring markers per player on one track,

22:15 right? Yeah, I'm not kidding. So, in a four-player game, you are expected to balance 20 scoring markers on top of each other on this scoring track. [cough and laughter] Who who said this was a good idea? I mean, at one point did anybody think 20 scoring markers on a track was a good idea for fiddliness, like for practicality sense? I mean, how how how

22:54 Woo! Woo! All right. Well, you know, can we fix that problem? Yes. As I mentioned, VGG to the rescue. You know, third parties coming to fix your game here, chaps, and I'm going to put links in the description to a couple of these. One for the player that is fantastic. Somebody has done a much better player for this game. Print that out and it's going to do you well. that's got the icon as well as text to explain the actual action. So, it gives you a good memory jogger. Perfect. Somebody has also printed, and Grogan actually used this in his playthrough, um, a separate scoring track with the multiple columns that you level up the markers on the separate columns. Again, that is so much easier to deal with in a four-player game. Trust me, you need to print that and put it out. Um, you know, I'm not showcasing them here per se, but you know, I'll put links in the description so you can have a look and grab them because trust me, you need to do it.

23:45 You need to do it. Anything else on the practicality sense? Cuz I'm not sure we're finished. Um, terminology. I mean, this is a kind of minor thing. You know, you you're struggling to sort of like, right, hang on. bot is this and you know the stem is this part of the track and the the branch is this part of the track and you've got faded arrows all over the shot pointing in every which d way direction but it's not entirely clear as to sometimes where you can go from where or where you're supposed to like start off in some respects and they keep putting really faded icons on areas. So, like you can see a water drop icon on these bits here, but it's faded into the background. Here you've got a you know you it says when you do the bath action, you know, put the water droplet in the fountain. Starting fountain space. What fountain? Where's the fountain? That's what you call a fountain.

24:34 I don't think it means what you think it means.

24:36 That ain't a fountain. Okay, that's not a fountain. But and if you thinking, well, it must be there surely. Well, if you spot the really faded icon of a water droplet there, then you can sort of figure it out there. But they make a lot of these other things like clear as day, like the icons for the solo mode and all the different action icons. And yet certain really key elements for figuring out where things start and go is faded into the background. It's like, why didn't they make these stand out a lot more? You know, you're thinking, well, does is this a track? Is this a track? And it's just really tiny iconography shoved everywhere with weird terminology like fountains and stuff that doesn't, you know, is not intuitive. And you know, that's the biggest thing. I mean, I know this section has gone on for a while, but this is what I'm getting at. And it's not just me saying this. A lot of people say this. Fans of the game say this.

25:25 Krogan had problems with this. Mele University mentioned it. It's this is a game where regardless of whether you like the mechanics or not, you have got a lot of little impracticalities in this game, Death by a Thousand Cuts, that are just going to make it irritating, particularly for your first few plays. If you're playing this religiously, then eventually you're going to be able to conquer some of that stuff. And you know, if you print those BG aids, as I mentioned, the player aids and the scoring tracks, it's going to make life a lot easier as well. But again, you do not get brownie points for somebody else fixing problems in your game. Now, they will effectively do a second print of this and they have mentioned I don't know specifics, but they have mentioned they are going to like tweak certain bits to make it a little bit easier to grasp, but I don't think they're actually going to put a scoring track in the game. Why? We are literally telling you that 20 score counters on this track is a stupid idea and you're not going to print us a score track. Uh, can you remind me what I pay you people for?

26:25 Honestly, throw me a bone here.

26:27 Now, I've already mentioned like the high AP nature of the game. You know, we're like constantly having to check flipping and rotating all these cards and, you know, the fact that the game two and a half to three hours is a long time to play a four-player game of this. It takes a fair while to get through this. You know, solo is definitely a little bit better in that respect. But, you know, let's just assume let's let's assume that all those impracticalities I mentioned don't bother you. Let's assume that you somehow were one of the lucky people that guessed how certain rules worked in the rule book and just got it clear as day. Let's assume that you're willing to forgive its impracticalities. You've got those BGAs I mentioned. You've printed them and all life is good. So, let's assume that none of that is on the table, okay? And we'll focus on the gameplay itself. Surely, you are now left with a fantastic game as a result. Sadly, not. I mean, I mentioned my highlight of the game is basically the flipping of the cards and the jigsaw puzzle. And to be honest, it's more the flipping of the cards than it is the jigsaw puzzle. So yeah, that element is good, but these bits are literally just every cookie cutter euro you've ever seen. They're just tracks. That's all they are. There's no real like differentiation between a lot of them, frankly. It's tracks. The tree track, you start at the bottom, you level up the track, right? you the blue fountain one, you put your droplets on, you move along the track. You put these text markers on here, it's effectively a horizontal track. The star one, not exactly a track, but it's basically just little segments and you put it on and

27:59 get a bonus. So, it's segments and tracks. That's pretty much what the mini games like devoid down to. I mean, I've seen worse games like AR and whatever. you know, I've got more, you know, I've got less interesting mini gamess in them, but yeah, the mini gamess in this aren't exactly, you know, the hotness stellar interesting. And you the idea that certain aspects of these mini games you're not even going to be able to do very well depending on what action cards you're given at the start is going to, you know, have an impact as well. Like I really need to do certain elements in order to be able to do this because I don't have the cards that let me do this particular action. But if those elements get blocked up by other people, you're kind of semi-screwed. You know, you're really going to have some suboptimal turns while everybody else is, you know, getting all the sorts. And it's definitely a kind of rich get richer feeling in this where if you start off well, you're just going to snowball and get better and better and better, whereas everybody else is going to get held up as a result. I mean, there's many times where even though you've got all that different scoring at the end, I can typically call, yeah, you're probably going to win because you had a lightning fast start and everything's kind of going well for you. And, you know, it tends to end up being that way.

29:08 But, you just mini games just aren't that interesting. It's like, yay, I put a text marker here and I get some bonuses. Yay, I put a star here and that lets me move a leaf up there, which lets me, you know, get some markers points. Okay, fine. And and that's basically what the actions themselves are. If it wasn't for the coolness of the flipping of the cards, it'd be boring as hell, frankly. It's just not, you know, that interesting. The cards make it interesting. And the jigsaw puzzle kind of helps a little bit. But individually, the games are nothing to really write home about. They're just what you've seen in every other Euro game, just with a lot of stuff written all over the board that just kind of gets in the way and the irritations of the death by a thousand cuts.

29:57 So, the void puzzle is a frustrating one. At the end of the day, there's some good stuff here. It looks visually pleasing. They have produced, you know, wooden pieces and it's colorful and it's, you know, I like the design they've used for the cards in terms of the artwork. I wish that the iconography was bigger on these cards. Maybe these cards needed to be like, you know, Seven Wonders Dixit style card size rather than this. But, you know, I like those sort of aspects. I like the jigsaw puzzle part. I mean, it gets a little bit cluttered with all the magnifying glasses. And certainly, I wish they were like fit together a bit easier. And I don't like how you've got to constantly keep looking through these to find the letters to go on there. It's like makes it a bit of a chore. But overall, the jigsaw puzzle and the upgrading of the cards is the highlight of the game as well as it looking quite nice. So, there's some positives here. And I do like that the mini gamess do synergize a little bit with each other so that you have, you know, one game will influence another so they're not completely devoid. And there's a little bit of multiplayer interaction with people sort of leaprogging on tracks or putting water droplets in your way. Not tons of interaction, but enough so that it's not a multiplayer solitire game. The solo mode is a good way to play it as well, providing you can get through the barriers to entry, but you know, it's another interesting way to play it. So, there's good aspects here, but man, do all those impracticalities get in the way. I mean, at the end of the day, you are basically just leveling up four tracks. Whoopy friaking do. So, you're going to cap your enjoyment at some level anyway, unless you're just one of those beige Euro gamers that loves

31:28 tracks. Railway Boom much. But the, you know, the the impracticalities are such a pain. you know, they completely destroy your initial thoughts on this game because you've got to deal with a subpar rule book. You've got to deal with iconography all over the place that isn't explained except for a very specific location. You've got, you know, very tiny iconography and faded iconography sort of written in various places. You've then got balancing 20 score counters on a track. You've got no player aids for each person. You've got the player colors matching the colors of the actions. You've got the, you know, the tracking of the water droplets. There's so many little things that just add up. And I know that BGG people have fixed a couple of these things. The scoring track issue is for the most part fixed with that. There is a good player aid on BGG. But yes, that will help. It could improve the game for you. But I am not reviewing this based on what people on BG have done for you. I'm reviewing a first printing of the game as I've got it in the book because not everybody is glued to the internet. Not everybody knows of BG or bothers to use it and you know not everybody is prepared to go through the extra effort of having to find aids and god knows what else. They expect for their 60 price tag or whatever everything to be in the box and everything to have been done properly.

32:48 And here that hasn't happened. Maybe in the second printing they'll fix all of it. Although by the sound of it, they're not going to fix all of it. They're just going to improve on certain aspects. It gets in the way. So, how to review this? I can't overlook a lot of those impracticalities. But, I do like the card system. Although, having to have 10 cards in front of you and constantly be flipping and rotating to try and figure out what's what. Here's a mental chore. There's just there's too much it gets in the way. I'm I got to be tough. I got to be tough. I think with the BG8s and stuff like that, you could bump this up to a six out of 10, a respectable six out of 10 and have a decent enough time. Maybe for some people, you could even bump it up to a seven in that regard. But I can't overlook those issues and the fact that at the end of the day, you are just leveling up four tracks. As cool as the card system is, I'm giving this one a five out of 10. A decent five out of 10. It's a respectable average game. It could potentially easily be above average or even a good game if you can fix all those little annoying issues. But even then, you're capped at a point because at the end of the day, it's just a bunch of tracks. And it seems that with games like Railway Boom and a few others, everybody just loves a game with tracks. I for one like something a little bit different and more interesting in my Euro games for the most part than just tracks. But I don't know, maybe that's just what we've got down to now. It's just tracks and that is the be all or end all of Eurogame. So a potential good title for

34:18 the future for a 2.0. You 2.0 this game, clear up some of these annoying issues and fix the rule book and that you could be on with a decent solid game here for some people. But for me, I've got no desire to return to this to go through all those niggles every time I return to the game and forget a few rules. It's just too much. And a lot of these things could have been found out in like five seconds of play testing. Could have found out most of these publication issues. So, I cannot fathom. I don't know what went on behind the scenes, but I cannot fathom how a lot of these irritations got into the final print. Something went wrong here, guys, and it's ruined a potentially solid game.

35:00 You cut me deep, Shrek. You cut me real deep just now.

35:03 So, that's it for me on this episode of the Broken Evil. If you like what you see, then please thumb it up wherever you see it. YouTube board game geek the works. By all means, get your comments down below. Be civil. I know there's fans of this game that are going to rip my head off for this, but you cannot deny that these irritations are present in this game. It's just a case of whether they bug you or not. I mean, they got some of these are going to bug you, surely. But maybe some of you had, you know, got over them pretty quickly. Maybe some of you are like me and they just flustered you like crazy. By all means, it'll be interesting to get your thoughts down below. So until next time, remember it's only a game and I'll see you hopefully with some of my sanity left on the next broken people video. Take care, guys.