10* Button Shy* Games Reviewed In 10* Minutes!

[Music] wow 2021 what an amazing fantastic year where everything is fine and nothing is wrong i keep forgetting what year it is that's how good 2021 has been so far and so in the spirit of everything being normal and fine let's kick off our brand new spanking year of reviews with a hot review for a bunch of games from button shy you might have heard of them they're the ones that do dinky adorable little wallet games in a similar vein to oink games button shy make games that come in small packages with low price points the button should i take it all a step further the games are so small that they fit in your wallet they've often only got around 18 cards cost 12 to buy or three dollars if you print and play and are hand assembled you can also have them as part of a nifty game a month club so we asked button shy for a smorgasbord of their 10 finest games for us to put together a review and imagine my disappointment when they came in this their so-called wallet games came in a bloody satchel bag a bag that is bigger than a wallet it's the size of a little kitten and so with that utter disappointment firmly out the bag let's get started on our first review of this video starting with the chunkiest game of the bunch oh my god [Music] sprawl oppalin springbob bullied sprawlopolis is a game about building a lovely little city together at the start of the game you will draw just three cards from this slim deck of 18 and these will be your building objectives for that game perhaps this game you want to make a super highway tourist traps or the suburbs the starting player then takes a hand of three cards and deals one out to everyone else and then the game begins and all you do on your turn is place a card into your city pass two cards to the next player and then take another one to form your new hand at the end of the game you'll score points based on the biggest zone of each color you have and then each of those objectives you meet you'll then lose points for each individual road you have in your city incentivizing you to tie everything up into a nice petroleum bow so you're trying to cooperatively use these cards which are always slightly wrong to build a city that does a little bit of everything with a few compromises along the way once you have placed your last card you can add up all of your points and compare it to the little numbers at the top here add them all together and that's the target score you're going for that game did you exceed it then congratulations you have won your first game of sprawlopolis did you did you not meet that number you lose and so that concludes our talk about sprawlopolis a fantastic little city builder game that i have enjoyed every single time i've played it ah what a joy if only there was a more of the [Music] grappling that's right folks you heard it here first someone left sprolopolis alone in a jar and it mutated into its very own stand-alone sequel what does it add to the original animals agropolis takes sproalopolis to the countryside and little has changed aside from some creative new scoring criteria are you in charge of building a big orchard what about encircling some chickens or maybe whatever this is some of the new objectives play with the fact that you've got three kinds of livestock on these cards and they come in single or double pens pressing all kinds of new wrinkles into how you set up your tiles to score and all this is complicated by the feed fee meaning that you'll need extra points to win based on how many matching symbols you have at the bottom of these cards so combining the new lick of paint and fancy new scoring criteria agropolis is very much a iterative sequel it's non-essential if you have the original but it's a perfectly good place to start off because gosh the system is just so good and there's new wrinkles into it if you're a fan of that kind of thing great i only wish there was just a way to combine the two oh my god cambodian something that is lovely about sprawlopolis is how a raft of expansion materials turns this game into something that rivals the complexity of a classic euro game in under 50 cards the first of these is the combopolis expansion which combines agroplace and sprawlopolis into combopolis where you juggle the needs of rural and urban centers with just these few cards sandwiching the difference between the two and a raft of new objectives to shake things up a bit this is a really neat little thing if you need even more opolis but often i find the most rewarding additions to your sporopolis experience come in its many miniature expansions instead and what exciting expansions they are construction sites need to be built upon with specific criteria for exactly how you do that points of interest provide a point heavy hub for the very centre of your city wreckator is a disaster card that puts a giant lizard-shaped bomb in the middle of your town beaches provide permanent barriers to the sides of your city to limit its growth but also to give possible points and lastly the interstate expansion lets you place paulopoulos as a competitive jewel across a big chunky road that is a lot of expansions and the thing is they're all just good because the core of sporopolis is so simple and so solid perhaps the most telling thing about this game is that during the process of playing all of the wallet games for this video i'd often just go oh i'll have a little cheeky game of spreadopolis to start me off and then you know an hour would have passed i'd have played four games of sporopolis and had a great time doing it it's just guaranteed good i don't know if it can be topped or maybe maybe maybe maybe it maybe it can maybe it maybe you can maybe it can envino morte which roughly translates to in wine we trust is maybe also one of the best wallet games in this list but for entirely different reasons this might be the perfect game to slip into your wallet if you're going to the pub with a medium-sized group of people that want something juicy immediate and easy to drink to the teach here is silky smooth dealer deals face down they must deal at least one wine and one poison players swap their cards or drink on their turn no looking at any of the cards at the end of the round everyone drinks poison kills wine survives the dealer changes and the last player standing wins many have said that skull is the perfect bluffing game because it is the simplest bluffing game and in vinomorte takes those grapes of bluffing and pulverizes them into something even sweeter this game is an utter delight shut up and sit down spent an episode of card games that don't suck talking about a game called egyptian rat screw a game which is basically just glorified snap but has quickly become one of my absolute favorite pub games we've also talked a lot on the podcast about games like the mind games with almost no mechanics at all that still manage to be absolutely scintillating when put in front of a group of good people these are games that are incredibly airy when it comes down to it but there is a magic in that air that propels them into being something completely different when the decision is death or wine the mental acrobatics and hysterics that come out of it are absolutely wonderful to behold and all that air in the design is so welcome because invino morte is so short breezy and watchable that drinking yourself to death in the first round is never a problem there's little to no chance for sour grapes in something this short and simple you know speaking of sour grapes this all reminds me of one of the first concerts i ever went to a concert that i decided would also be the event in which i graduated to the adult world of alcohol to try and impress the person i was there with and of course i decided that what i would do was take a plastic bottle and decant a full bottle of red wine into it in my parents garage and then bring that plastic bottle with me to the concert at the time i wasn't aware of the policy that venues had on bringing wine into the premises in a unmarked plastic bottle the lady at the door told me i could not bring the wine with me into the venue so i drank it then and there the taste of the wine was nasty it was overwhelming pungent and acrid i drank on i had to look cool and i drank it all despite the frankly caustic flavor palette and older me would reflect on this wine experience and understand that that wine was in fact rancid it had been opened and it did taste absolutely disgusting but at the time i just thought that was what wine tasted like bad of course what i didn't anticipate was what happened afterwards halfway through the support act my body began to rebel the mounting pressure teenage nerves that jumping around it all came to a four in this sarcophagus juice-esque bile that was forming in the pits of my stomach i spent the rest of the evening hunched over the toilets at the o2 brixton spewing bright red bile into the bowl creating a sort of vinaigrette punch that would be served at the school disco from hell the black plague has overcrowded the graveyard hooray you're the assistant to mr bones the grave tender and you've got to rearrange everyone's dead skulls into a nice little pattern so that everyone's happy when they're gone and just like that you have captured me with this theme rearranging skulls in a crypt is engaging macabre and tracks seamlessly with the way that points are scored at the end of the game which we shall go over first why not you know structure's a myth peasants are just happy to be there they'll get one point each so long as their bones are on display royals are also just happy to be there but they're likely a little happier if they're on top they score for every peasant and in a lovely thematic twist every other royal that's below them romantics want to be buried together they'll score a juicy six points if buried next to one another which is sweet and priests want to be spread evenly throughout the stack giving you a point for each unique level they appear on lastly convicts want to atone for their sins and will score lovely heaven points if placed next to priests what you've got here is a lovely web of interactions that immediately makes sense but what's important here is that it makes sense but it's maybe hard to achieve because your turns in skulls of sedlec are just a little bit twisty you can either pluck a card from what is already available or flip over the top cards of two piles in the hopes of getting something good but having to pick one of the cards that's revealed stacking cards into your pyramid takes an entire turn and you can only stack if you have two cards supporting the one below it and that is combined with the fact that you have an incredibly restricted hand of just two cards so getting everything to fall snugly into place exactly how you want it is gonna take some cool plays and also compromises and just like sprawlopolis it's got a trio of lovely little expansions monstrance adds a solo mode with weirdly specific shapes to make out of your skulls like a board game serial killer executioners adds chains of criminals to be chopped for extra points and royal guards adds these bumpy blue boys who want to be above your lofty royals to best protect them the raft of expansion materials and lovely simple and juicy decisions means that skulls of sedlec is in my book a simple winner it's another one of those games i would love to slip into my wallet and take to the pub for a more chill evening of shuffling cards and being nice to each other and also a little bit mean sometimes and for what it's worth my family really enjoyed this one so skulls of sedlec simple winner juicy and nice and good that is a lot of positivity for one and two and three of these games how about we talk about a couple of duds hierarchy seems like a smart game hamstrung by its presentation essentially each game you will get dealt a hand of seven cards and then lay those cards out in a hand in front of you the cards are labeled 1 to 13 and on your turn you take a card and place it into the line in the center with the restriction that you must play a card that's higher than whatever came before it and then if you cannot place a card on your turn you lose the game and your opponent wins the problem is of course that each of these characters has a specific ability or restriction for example the leper prevents cards marked with the royalty symbol to be placed next or the knight a card labelled six can be played on top of the dragon a card labelled nine what this boils down to is you sitting across from your opponent and trying to map out the exact path that is going to be taken between these cards that will get you to snooker them in the final stretches and it's all right i think that what i find most frustrating about hierarchy is that all of the abilities of the cards are relegated to this tiny space up here the numbers are of course important to work out what goes where but when each ability fundamentally breaks the way that the game works having it up here and not visible upside down just isn't good enough and of course this little quick reference has a list of all the abilities but then you're trying to read the number and name of the cards upside down as well i'm not sold i'm not sold avignon a clash of popes is another of the two player games in this list making it contractually part of chess month the month that just keeps on giving and just like chess avignon is well alright in this tiny little tug of war game you are trying to tug your way to pokedom by moving these little characters across to different sides of the board and eventually absorbing them into your congregation like a voltron made of religion pope fact the first pope was actually three men all called ken on your turn you can pull a card towards you push a card away from you or petition a card using its unique ability the cardinal for example lets you pull everything towards you but it costs two actions if you ever manage the herculean feat of dragging a card over to your side then they become part of your congregation and three of those cards in your little court wins you the game unless you have a noble in the mix and that's where things get confusing the noble means you will win the game if you have a noble and your opponent has a knight but it means your rival wins the game if you have a peasant and a noble pope fact the pope hates it when you harbour the paw which is a set of conditions so core to the game but also something you need reminding of every turn the last action is to pick up something from the main play area put it in the discard pile and swap it out with something new and that meant that a couple of my games ended in a really bizarre way where my opponent just swapped out the last card it happened to be a noble they pulled across the line happened to have a peasant and won and that feels super unsatisfying and what also feels unsatisfying is the other way you win the game which typically is just some ambient pushing and pulling until someone manages to get enough things over the line and take the crown maybe a better way of putting it is it's a game of pushing popes like peas around your plate i don't think i ever had a moment in this game where i went oh that's a good move i sort of went yeah that that's fine and then people made fine moves until the game was over and that to me is avignon a clash of popes it's good but it's no caravaggio pope fact that wasn't a very good joke [Music] which is english slang for and then regretting it afterwards is all about exchanging flowers that have secret messages [Music] involves taking two cards as your offer sliding them across the table to your opponent they will choose which one they want to take and you will choose which one you want to take and both of you will add them into your little bouquet in front of you each of these cards has a unique value and a special ability so to win hands in tassie mussy you want a bunch of cards that combo together neatly to maximize your point potential you play until both players have four cards in front of them and then score whoever has the most total points after three rounds will win the game the big wrinkle here is that when you play these cards as an offer you play one face up and one face down it's i-cut you choose but with only half of the chews visible at any given time and this is a lovely little wrinkle to this game it means that all the time you're second guessing what your opponent has in their bouquet and trying to work out which one you should offer which way up and also trying to manage how much of your own bouquet you're keeping secret from your opponent to get those juicy points and much like designer elizabeth hargrave's other kind of well-known design wingspan this game does try and suck you into its theme quite nicely the rulebook encourages you to sprinkle the smattering of flavor text from your cards into every interaction in the game oh you have deceived me or you have been cruel oh thank you very much okay so that is tussy massey one of the better wallet games if you're after something light and breezy and you like the theme and you know what i am going to say again this would be one of those perfect games to slip into your wallet and take to the pub with okay so about here in the edit i realized that i'd said why not take this game one day to the pub way too many times so i thought i would fix that by creating a virtual environment in which i could simulate being in the pub with matt i used a combination of tabletop simulator discord voice and video so i could see matt's face and the video game sea of thieves where we could be inside of an actual tavern i provided snacks and drinks in tts and i provided beverages in sea of thieves and i think it went really well so what we've got here we've got the real pub in tabletop simulator and then also in sea of thieves i'm here with mr jam sponge gold swabby um looking looking just like he does in real life having a delicious beverage just like being it's like the old time do you think like do you think this is how we should always play games this is how we should always play board games online together i don't think i'm gonna drink real grog ever again i'm just gonna drink digital you could enjoy a delicious coza or a branic matt what do you think of of circle the wagons oh wait wait hold on hold on i need to put a tattoo slide in yeah it's all right circle the wagons is in many ways the predecessor to sprawlopolis coming from the same designers and featuring the same building your city block by block core cards overlap into a little tapestry of contiguous squares to score some criteria however circle the wagons is a strictly two-player competitive number with cards being distributed through a simple central rondelle of options this little thing is rather clever and it looks a lot clearer when you're not filming on top of your sock drawer let's say you want this lovely little gun card because the scoring criteria insists you must have a bunch of guns in your town at the end of the game you can pick it even though it's a couple spaces away sure fill those cowboy boots but your opponent gets every card in between adding them to their own town at their own leisure and this rondelle system can be used offensively as well some cards will mean that you deduct points for having certain things in your town so making your opponent pick one of those up is an absolute delight but often cut with the regret that you also gave them a load of other great cards in the process circle the wagons is a neat little game i would easily play it above a couple of other games on this list but i do think that sprawlopolis is the better more iterated upon design with better expansions and that is stop oh [Music] i'm editing out the lines as you speak no i mean yeah see whatever you just said there oh it's gone it's not interesting just get get onto the thing get on to the thing that you care about that you're here for and then we can move on the geography of the shot doesn't even make sense it doesn't even no it does it works like no look i can move i can move the camera i'm here i'm right here and you're not you're not even you're not even there people don't know that just do the just do the bit sure hey you just circle the wagon sound like a good game but but you want you want something better that we that we wanted to cover earlier but we we didn't cover glasgow it's a two-player game from lookout it says it says on the bottom of the box it's from lookout games it's really it's really good it's really good it's very glasgow it's a two-player game from lookout games says so on the box it's got a mean rondel in the middle and you build a city together that city is glasgow it says so on the box and you place things and it gives you points there's lots of little bells and whistles like the way that some tiles score you point it they're on corners and some score you point if you've got a complete set but your opponent might stop you trying to do that and it's really portable because it's got no cards or cardboard or wood and you can take it anywhere and you can play it anywhere and it's easy to set up and you can teach it teach it to anyone you can teach it to anyone are you done yeah okay circle the wagons a lovely little thinky game that maybe sprawlopolis is a bit better than and maybe glasgow is also a bit better than if you want something larger still if you want to print and play it's a perfectly good way to pass the antimony is a game all about time going forwards through it going backwards through it but curiously never going upwards through it your goal in antimony is to create paradoxes with three cards of the same kind symbol number or color and each paradox is worth one point with five points to win but it's the way you form these little triplets that's intriguing essentially you'll move your little staff along this line of cards playing a card for its number to move that many spaces forwards in time and it's symbol or color to move backwards to a corresponding symbol or color in time whatever you land on you pick up and replace with the card you use to move there when you have made a trio of cards that are all the same these these aren't the same then you swap the ones to the left or right with the cards you use to make the paradox i think it's called taking the ones that are to the left or right of you replacing them with those and gaining a point this is a fascinating puzzle in and of itself but it's complicated by the fact that if your opponent ever lands on the same space as you you will both compare the strength of your hands adding up all the numbers on the card and comparing who has the highest and whoever has the highest will steal a point from their opponent a time point made of time look i'll level with you it is definitely hard to make antimony sound any less sexless than it already is but i will also tell you that antimony is an interesting little abstract number and i think that's because the puzzle is so easy to read and interface with that you can engage with the puzzle every single time you play and you don't get lost in a swamp of deduction numbers and bluffing but there are enough little hidden elements to the game that make it always a little bit spicy and exciting this is the kind of abstract i am here for because it's not about reading little bits of text or confusing iconography the game makes itself as clear as it can so that the puzzle is as easy to interface with as possible so if you're in the market for a little dinky tiny two-player abstract then i would recommend antimony the only drawback i would say is that it needs ten little standalone pieces to use as points which doesn't sound like a problem but it might be if you're in a hurry and just want to get the game to the table and you're playing it somehow you don't have 10 of the same thing available at any given time i use 10 standard reference palettes and heaven knows those are tricky to transport without getting them all mucky with pocket fluff liberation offers a very simple pitch what if star wars rebellion but very very small this is a minuscule deduction game where each player takes the role of one of two asymmetric factions trying their best to outsmart the other in a tug-of-war of information the bad player is playing locations from their hand forming a network of spaces that they can launch into attack from and adding new abilities to their suite if they manage to find the location of the good guys is secret base then they will win the game instantly meanwhile the liberation player has to launch sneak attacks sabotage plans laid by their opponent and shift their base around the map as best as possible to avoid their demise if they can time the game out cycling the deck three times then they will win instead here's the thing you might think that three cycles of this deck sounds like a lot but it really isn't when you can count the number of cards in the game on your hand if you had four extra fingers and on top of that three cards start in the hand of each player and one starts in the discard so that's a really slim deck of cards to start from and add to that that the goods player gets to draw a card every single turn and the bad player gets to choose which is an agonizing decision it's more information but less time to put that information to use and liberation really does use that slim deck to its utter advantage each location can be neatly mnemoniced with butter letter and a color so remembering what you've seen what's in play and what is yet to be unearthed is incredibly streamlined and for the good player seeing your opponent lay out a visual web of places that they can attack from makes choosing where to spring from next a delight is your base here is it here like a drunk edm fan you will be searching for base until the sun rises but only if you play about five billion games of liberation thing is you can play a game of this and then swap sides and then play again in one twelfth of the time it takes to play an entire game of star wars rebellion so my advice this is a weird little curio take it on have a little go have a bit of fun you can print and play it for about one billionth of the cost of star wars rebellion it's a neat little curio and i like it that's liberation moving on okay so let's finish off this video with one last game it is the only dedicated solo game on this list and it might be my favorite of the bunch this is food chain island and it is a absolutely wonderful game for someone who wants to sit around deal out some cards shuffle them around a bit and just get a bit chilled out while doing it each game of food chain island involves you dealing out the entire deck of animals into a 4x4 grid in front of you with the goal of condensing them down into three or fewer stacks of creatures on any given turn a creature must eat another sliding their card over the top of something orthogonally adjacent to them and then following through with any of their activation effects thing is each animal can only eat something that's between one and three sizes smaller than it so this fox can eat this snake but can't eat this mouse it's a food chain it's how it works and very quickly you can realize that you've shifted power around your grid in a very strange way that gets you into a bit of an edible bind most of the time you've got a perfect plan sussed out but very quickly your grid gets all wonky and soon animals are too far away from each other to have a snack you'll realize that you've made a horrible ecosystem where not a single creature is left to lick this ant there's also some helpful sea creatures that have one-time abilities that will help you get out of a pickle and there's also these horrible birds that will mess up your strategy you can add them in if you want but generally speaking food chain island is just a simple little joy it's a lovely solo puzzle where you slide cards over the top of other cards trying to get them into piles and have a nice time for 10 minutes and then it's over and when it's over because of the nature of stacking all these things into nice little piles it's already packed away so it's lovely food chain island a lovely solo game but why is it my favorite it's because of this alligator look at his face that's too much pleasure what's wrong with you alligator what kind of sick sensual enjoyment are you getting out of this experience i feel disgusting just looking at you it is not the alligator because he is a pervert i think the reason it is this is because it's the only solo game on this list and every single time i've tested one of these games i've felt a distinct sense of melancholy for the people who i'm missing this year and how i wish i could be playing these games round a table with them most of my testing for these games has either been with some family who don't really play board games very much or with people online in a weird sanitized environment that doesn't suit these games very well at all ava had a great point on the shuttle and sit down game of the year podcast when talking about subjectivity which i will awkwardly put in here this is all subjectivity yeah everything is subjectivity and everyone's subjectivity is like i'm the hugest all from this like global ridiculous thing so like it's okay just i wanna just set expectations that like i think these answers are gonna be really really bizarre because they've been made in a really bizarre year and that reflects the time that we've been in rather than the reality of what is and game during this review i felt that more than any other project i've been involved with on this site so far everyone's subjectivity feels so under fire that i can't tell if these games are half as good or half as bad as i think they are i am missing that human component of games these days and that's why it's all a bit weird okay doom and gloom over that is me done 10 wallet games in i'm gonna assume like 17 minutes you know i don't want anyone to get the wrong impression whilst that last part of the video was a little bit melancholy i do want to stress that it's been one of my favorite videos to research write and edit i i said that while filming it definitely wasn't my favorite to edit because these games are so easy to pop open and just play they have the same energy as opening a pack of trading cards but instead of 10 useless bits of paper you get 18. instead when you pop them open you get a full exciting game with unique arts unique rules and unique mechanics every time there's only two of these that i thought weren't that good and even those games were pretty alright and that's the thing that i love about these games in general is that i can't wait to get excited about more of them to play more games in this little wallet game world and share these nice little bundles of design with people like myself in person please please in person sued okay that is the end of this week's installment of the shut up and sit down youtube show we have got an exciting year ahead because we're committing to a thrice weekly upload plan so you can look forward to a new stream a new video and a new podcast every single week you can check those out here if they appear and you can also check out all of the other cool videos here they won't appear here they never do and that is the end of the video have yourself a lovely day bye you

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 181,204

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Tom Brewster, Button Shy Games, Wallet Games, Sprawlopolis, Agropolis, Combopolis, In Vino Morte, Skulls of Sedlec, Heirarchy, Avignon: A Clash of Popes, Avignon, A Clash of Popes, Tussie Mussie, Circle the Wagons, Glasgow, Antimony, Liberation, Food Chain Island

Id: LK1JySceRZk

Length: 34min 50sec (2090 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Jtatooine]

I almost didn’t send In Vino Morte. Glad I did. :)

[u/everythings_alright]

Ok but whats up with the Framed Uncut Gems picture??

[u/truthwritten]

“Like a drunk EDM fan, you’ll be searching for base until the sun rises.” - Tom on Liberation 🤣

[u/UNO_LegacyTM]

Enjoyed the tramampoline, trabompoline! reference. Also, cute kitty.

[u/Tranquili5]

Reference kitten for the win!

Also, ran over to buttonshygames, ordered all in a jiffy. Tom is starting to have a very Quinns-like effect on me.

[u/PharmSuki]

Tom is aging like a fine vinos. Superb sir.

[u/Bone_Dogg]

Sprawlopolis is the only one I have. It’s very nice.

[u/mgrier123]

The games reviewed for those curious:

• Circle the Wagons
• Antimony
• Liberation
• Avignon: A Clash of Popes
• Heirarchy
• Skulls of Sedlec
• In Vino Morte
• Sprawlopolis/Agropolis/Combopolis
• Food Chain Island
• Tussie Mussie

[u/Master_of_Fail]

Just as a suggestion, it LOOKS like there's a Kickstart reprint campaign coming up for Button Shy sometime this month. So if you're hoping to grab some of these, that may be the time! (If we're super nice to u/Jtatooine he might tell us...)

I've been a big fan of their stuff for some time now but things go in and out of stock quite often...

Shout out to Liberation. Tons of fun, very tense. Rules are a bit complicated to teach, but after that, smooth sailing. Tussie Mussie is a close second. That face up/face down decision is so good. Really makes the game.