3 Board Games You Shouldn't Overlook

what are you supposed to do about the fact that there are hundreds of board games released every year and you can't play all of them well you ignore some right most of them and you pick based on some arbitrary thing the artwork the theme the description and you just decide i'm not gonna play that ball game i'm gonna focus on these ones but sometimes you miss something really good and it's happened to me as well so today i'm gonna talk about three board games that i think you probably overlooked including one that i definitely did and tell you about why i think they're worth giving a chance if you're new to the channel then please subscribe to get more board game recommendations and don't overlook that notification bell right let's get to the first game as a reviewer i've built up defenses to keep out bad games i've got a wall for kickstarter games another for miniatures but the last obstacle a game must face is my personal bodyguard who is trained to kill when he hears the word fantasy and the poor guy is seriously overworked but some games are so good that they get through anyway after three years of mild onslaught i finally played fantasy rounds and i need enough worried it contains nothing resembling fantasy it is a brilliant card game that could and should be about anything else what it's really about is creating the perfect hand of cards you start with seven cards that don't go together and you end with seven cards that hopefully complement each other so well that you score 300 points the cards all have their own specific demands imagine you're trying to host the perfect dinner party if you invite roger you can't invite nigel because they hate each other but you want nigel there because he'll get along really well with terry except terry isn't gonna be any fun without his wife marion so you invite her but now you can't serve the chicken you've already bought and so on that's exactly how fantasy realms feels getting a new card such as the king helps you score another card but now he wants something else and you're trying to find a harmonious balance that always feels just outside your grasp as the game hurries to its end but rather than feeling hampered by problems it's surprisingly positive almost all the cards give you more points the challenge is in finding the really lucrative combinations finding the moniker and chandler pairings not the rachel and joey's each turn you take a card and then discard one you can take a fresh card from the deck or from any previously discarded card out on the table it's nice to be able to see what's available so you can give up on one strategy and switch to another i love that some cards encourage you to take bigger risks candle gives you a hundred points but only if you get book of changes and bell tower what if they never come out of the deck it's always fun shooting for the moon and in fantasy realms there's more than one moon to aim for desperately seeking a card can cause you trouble because every time you take from the deck you get closer to the end once there are 10 cards in the discard area the game ends and if you wasted that time hoping for a card that never arrives you're gonna lose life is what happens when you're making other plans it's beauty is in its simplicity i never quite got that from listening to other reviews i think my fantasy bodyguard was screaming in my ear fantasy the genre my fantasy bodyguard is sajora mormont i'd assumed the card text would be complicated and that wrapping my head around it all would be a chore but it's fine and we didn't even ever have to go back to the rule book which is a rare and treasured thing these days in fact the most complicated aspect of the game is counting up the points but for a relatively solitary game you want to show off what you've collected and there's a wiz kids app which makes it a lot easier with the right theme and r i think this game could have been even bigger very few games are this simple and this satisfying it could be about organizing a party or trying to get the best foods that go together at a buffet or literally anything else except the one theme they went for but at the end of the day in the war of gameplay vs art gameplay will always win better to be ugly and fun than pretty and boring quick disclaimer i have done paid video work for pegasus the publisher behind the next game for their youtube channel i tried to keep that work separate from actual old but i wanted to declare it anyway i've never been paid by anyone to make a video on actual owl in six years and no one not even my mum has input into which games i cover or what i say about them let's carry on let's not be around the bush my farm shop looks like a mobile game that you wouldn't play one that pops up to advertise to you while you're playing a mobile game that you would play i don't think it looks bad it's not bad artwork i've just evolved to distrust it those shiny images and smiley faces feel like they're hiding gameplay designed by evil psychologists to make it as addictive as possible but it's actually designed by ruda gadon the man behind las vegas one of the best games of all time so i had to try it in case the premise of this video is still unclear i'm glad i did in my farm shop you own a farm and every time the dice are rolled it activates one of your fields so if i roll a 10 i get an egg and if i roll a five i get some honey it's a system borrowed from catan and later resurrected by matchy corro and space base but my farm shop is the best take on it yet the produce goes into my farm shop and now i need to sell it to get money to prove to my father's ghost that i'm capable of running a farm they're not explicit about that detail in the rule book but you've only got to look at the woman's sad eyes to fill in the blanks and selling your produce is not a full gone conclusion in this game you also have to roll the right number to make a sale now if you've never played katan rolling two dice is a troublesome affair those two dice absolutely love the number seven obsessed with it they are and they're not half partial to a six or an eight but they hate rolling the twos the elevens and twelves to the point that you'd think they're incapable of doing it like a child who won't make the bed you've seen it happen you know it's possible but don't hold your breath the point is if you can only sell produce when the dice rolls 11 you're not going to be selling very often thankfully that little genius rudiger dawn has got you covered katan space base matchy coro they all use two dice like a bunch of chumps my farm shop gives you 50 percent more dice to roll three dice cutting straight into the profit margin of the game the publisher was like we can't do it it will bankrupt us and rudiger said give me three dice or i walk and well the rest is history three dice means you can choose which two dice to pair up so you have options over which field to activate simple no it's not simple because the other die is used to choose one of six upgrades to your farm every turn you get a new card to improve a field and as the game goes on they get more powerful when you take it you can put it on any field remembering that some numbers get rolled more than others do you want eggs more often or do you want the opportunity to sell more often the truth is you don't know this is exactly what your father's ghost was on about the challenge in my farm shop is balancing stock turnover there are times when your shop will be bursting with produce and you just can't sell it to the point that excess goes to waste and other times the dice will grant you a rare chance to sell and you've got nothing to sell it's a pain that you learn from and because of the freedom of the game it never feels like luck it feels like you focus too much on one thing or the other the other players also have their influence because you activate a field on everyone else's turn as well so the dice they choose to pair up will help you or hurt you it means you're always interested in what's going on even if they roll a number you don't want you can alter it by playing a burlap sack and they become so important later on when you've got a really good field that you want to keep activating beyond that there are some flowers which you can earn and place on a field to make it produce double every little rule is intuitive and adds its own weight to the decisions you make it's absolutely simple enough to teach to newbies but there's hidden depth and it's well hidden underneath a name and some artwork that would make a gamer dismiss it which is a real shame because it's one of the most engaging games i've played this year i can completely understand anyone who might have overlooked fairy tale inn because on the face of it it looks like disney connect four and that is the least appealing three word combo in board games since d-day monopoly it's a two-player game played in this vertical plastic board in which you drop fairy tale characters into the top of a column and they fall to the bottom it's as if to destroy disney connect four it had to become disney connect four fairytale inn starts in the same place but with every new idea it sprints ahead leaving connect four on the starting line sucking its thumb okay so the olympics was on this week its first revolution is that when you drop a tile into the grid it faces you you sit on either side of the plastic contraption and you can see where your characters are because they're in color whereas your opponents are in silhouette the designers must have taken the afternoon off after coming up with that one the second revolution is that you're not trying to just connect four things in a line you have many different goals all in the search of gaining coins each character tie you place in your inn scores in its own way some will get you coins during the game such as the princess who gets you a coin for every other princess in a diagonal line whereas others only score at the end like red riding hood who gets you a coin for every one of your characters you manage to place next to her it gives you loads to consider do you place defensively to stop your opponent from scoring big or focus on your own endeavors and your options aren't only where to place but what to place because each turn you can choose which tile to take the bottom two are free whereas the others cost you coins remember coins are points but it can be worth the cost if you can make more from it or stop your opponent taking it tiles join the track at random from the back so there's a healthy frustration in the tiles you want not coming up and you have to think on your feet and find another way to prosper some characters are more interesting than others i particularly like the big bad wolf which makes each row a battle for having the most wolves on the other end of the excitement spectrum is jack who is always followed by a beanstalk tile which i just found really boring because he doesn't actually change the scoring thankfully you only play with five characters so you can mix them up each game to create a new dynamic but the game only comes with eight characters which feels really cheap it's like they found the bare minimum they could include before it would damage the gameplay maybe c'mon forgot that they weren't running a kickstarter and left the expansion characters in stretch goal purgatory and if that makes you angry enough to want to scream into the void the box can provide the void because even a light two-player game needs to fill up half a shelf these days it's not like we're living in a golden age of board games which are all competing for space or anything god it's hard to recommend this game maybe you should overlook it or just play it in a board game cafe so you don't have to commit the third revolution let's get back to that is making certain grid locations appealing if you put your tile here you get a free coin and it becomes a game of chicken with who is gonna take the spot below that thereby giving that space to the other player even better are these mean spaces in the heart of the board that cancel your character's power fairytale inn feels like an abstract game the way you desperately try not to grant your opponent an opening but with a flourish of luck that keeps it from getting too serious because you can't plan for everything it's co-designed by paolo mori who has a great track record with games like libitalia and blitzkrieg i love that he turns his hands at different types of games and the common thread among them all is how big an experience he gets across with such simple rules you get the impression that the designers sat down and said how do we turn connect four into a modern game and in that respect it's a hundred percent success it retains what people would think of the ascetics and the spatial puzzle but its changes are so effective that it makes someone who would only ever play connect four to silence a screaming child want to keep it and play it despite its oversized box poultry content and bland theme as always there are links to buy these games below if you want to know which games you should overlook i review games that don't make it onto the channel in my patreon newsletter sign up for that at patreon.com forward slash actual and if you want more recommendations subscribe to the channel or go back and watch some old videos those games are still good i'm john perkins thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Actualol

Views: 5,265

Rating: 4.9423075 out of 5

Keywords: Jon Purkis, Board games, Board game, Gaming UK, family board games, board games for couples, popular board games, top board games, best board games, new board games, new games, tabletop gaming, shut up and sit down, Dice Tower, Family Games, board games for 2 people, no pun included, board games for 3 people, uk games expo, 2021 board games, hidden gems, overlooked, Fairy Tale Inn, My Farm Shop, Fantasy Realms, great card games, Connect Four, Catan, Machi Koro

Id: ceKQm4bdjmg

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 30 2021