Arboretum - Shut Up & Sit Down Review (with Spicy Trees)

hello welcome to a very special edition of the opener today we have an ASMR relaxation special recovered I'm trying to do a relaxing video can you just watch I'm trying to do a relaxing video I'm sorry I was using a streamer orbital opto auditorium is a relaxing card game about trees sorry I was just using my driller how's it going why are you doing here quince is the opener you don't do the opener yeah I do now what do you go there oh this whole thing this is our terrarium it's game for 2 to 4 players about building and our Batarian but Matt what's an RB Torrey rector its things a goal it's like being in a rock and roll band Billy treats nice can i play you bet your acorns jokes aside Alba Torian is as refreshing as a nice cold glass of elderflower cordial on a hot summer's day being gently spilled down your face and lip it comes in a beautiful box full of beautiful cards from beautiful trees and it's got a lovely unique theme about building a nice garden have trees but not only that it's tough or boy is it tough it's like General Patton except if General Patton was a lilac tree set up of our board Tory Rory em starts with you potentially removing some tree types if you're playing with two or three dealing everyone seven cards place in the draw pile in the middle and then creating a discard pile for every player except the start player and then playing arbor retire or root the tree Park game is just as simple on your turn you're going to draw two cards from any kind of piles you want then you're going to discard a card and then you're going to play a tree and you're also going to feel this day and all of its possibilities rolling over your head like a thundercloud over an ARB Boreum so you're building a nice lovely walk for a mystery person to go through but how do you actually do that well the game continues until all of the draw deck is gone when you picked up all the lovely trees and place them all in your garden you look at how high points you've got and you do that by what let's take a walk through an arbiter aureum I made earlier we're playing a two-player game which means we have six different types of tree no more no less let's start by scoring the maples how do we do that where we go maples red trees you find your lowest maple the highest maple you draw the path of the most cards through it so you go two three six seven eight the number has to go up but it can jump numbers that's fine it just has to start with a maple and end with a maple how do you score it easy you just count the number of cards one two three four five I've got five points I'm on top of the world but actually I got more than that because there's another thing if your chain starts with a card that's a 1 and you get a bonus point for that chain and if your chain ends with a chain card that isn't eight then you get two bonus points but that's not all of it if your chain is entirely made up of one type of tree if these are all maples and that chain is at least four cards long then the whole chain gets you twice as many points and I know that this might seem a bit boring but it's not because there's another roll a secret hidden rule we've saved the best till last love or we saved the best till last so actually each tree is only scored by one player at the end of Arboretum and matt has space got some good matter to lose another 68 that's great but where are the other maples nah-ah where are they you know do you know what they are they're in my hand they're in my hand which means I score maples I do you don't get you look you get nothing oh no this single tiny rule grows into an entire branching structure of deception risk taking an outright mind-bending puzzling oh look you've got a lovely collection of Jacaranda trees the best in the land but you made it too nice and now your friends going to score Jacaranda and you're not let me give you an example of how this affects the game let's say it's your turn and you draw into or some hot property the sexiest ticket in town the 8 of Magnolia now you can put that down into your Arboretum or you can hang on to it because it might be your key to scoring Magnolia but for the sake of argument let's say you put it down your opponent then might think holy moly that's gonna score him a lot of points I'd better start collecting Magnolia so he can't score any Magnolia or they might think oh wow he put down the 8 of Magnolia if he did that he must be confident that I can't collect enough Magnolia to deny him the score so he's probably already holding the 6 and the 7 so I guess I won't bother collecting any Magnolia or they might even think he put down the age of Magnolia he's trying to bluff that he's holding the 6 & 7 of Magnolia but he's a fool cuz I'm holding the 6 & 7 of Magnolia and now I know where the 8 is so I know I can score Magnolia at the end so I can play Magnolia safely for the whole game hahahahahahahahaa I could just think what did he just do oh my god I don't actually care just give me the Jacaranda give me the Jacquie round give me that sweet sweet Jacaranda I got that jack around this simple mechanic takes a basic game and just charges every element of it with electricity because let's think about this you take two cards let's start yet so then you look at what you've got and you think well some of these are quite nice but then I've got these cards that I need to keep so I can score that kind of tree but then he's collecting that kind of tree so I'm keeping a couple of those and then I'm also keeping a couple of those to stop him from scoring back country but then I've got these other cards I wanna play in the next turn but then that's ten cards and I can only hold seven it just becomes this horribly constrictive tree thing it's like trying to play football in a cupboard but the key is keeping your opponent hungry staring an imperfect arbiter areum that will never ever match up to the beautiful one they dreamed of I think you should tell the story about cassia no I don't eat I think I need to know the reason tonight I think they need to know what happened in one game I drew in really early to the six and seven of cassia I hung on to them and then I proceeded to discard kasia's really no little Casias the whole game and then Matt kept picking up the kasia's and putting them in his a moratorium because he thought you thought you thought I didn't notice that you were picking up all the kasia's when really I was making you build with the only color of tree you could never score yeah and I'm not a massive collection of Casias I thought that's gonna score me about twelve points and it got me nothing on you for the whole game that it would get me nothing any sand I don't to what I used to watch and yeah I'm the sort of horticultural virus I think we've got enough about that now I think I think that nothing I think I'm the best I think the fender are we haven't talked about the most important thing about the game it's not really but we just can't talk about this now it's about how you you structure your trees it's sort of grid based system I think let's all buy that now yeah what you want to do obviously would just be to put down a lovely two and then three and then four and then five and then a six and just build this perfect chain of maybe like lots of opportunities going oh you can cut through there for that it's going to be beautiful doesn't work because you've only got certain number of cars and you want to keep a hold of some of the cars and you want to so what do you do well maybe you start off by putting down like a five so you've got options and then you think well I put down a four there and then you think I'll have any threes so I'll just put a two and then you think are will last six can go there and then you think that three has to go there before you know you kind of create this kind of weird kind of blocky mess which just resembles just something just giving you the thing and then you think I will ah and it's just not neat and it's not clean and you've got some points in there but it's messy or all over you don't maybe you nail it and the beautiful thing about arbitrary 'm is that you can have these moments where you have a plan of how you're going to craft this out and it just works and it's just beautiful functional clean and you just gotta hope that you've got the points in your hand afterwards to actually make all of your work worth anything and there's another final rule which is quite important quite cool when it comes to scoring if you've got an 8 in your hand that's worth 8 points that's great but if somebody else has the 1 of the same color in their hand at the end they say is worth nothing now we already know what this these thematically it's like the idea that somebody else is just rocked up at the last minute and said oh there's trees a very gauche aren't they but it works wonderfully it just adds this horrible tension you spend the whole game going they've got the one they've got the one I can't believe they've got the one in their hand the bastards they've got the one they've got the one and then like you draw the one and you go they didn't have the one making a mistake shut up and sit down recommends arboretum it's incredible how much tension and skill and depth packs into this tiny little box it's just a wicked design but it gets away with that skill and that tension because it still got something relaxing about it there's still that's the joy of gambling and getting exactly what you need or someone else needs and there's still that gentle joy of building something really nice across the game you've made a beautiful work of art by the end of it yeah and then it just might be the case that somebody walks over to your beautiful work of art garden and tells you that it it's absolutely worthless it's great it's just great it looks great comes at a tiny little package and you know what it can be played as a tiny little thing you can play it on the table but you can also compress it right down to complete in bars you can play it on a plane we literally played it on the plane quite a few times all those tiny tables and it's the kind of game where no matter how many players you play it with you Media afterwards think I'd love to play this with three people I'd love to play some two people yeah let's go super because you just know it's gonna be different yeah you know and also you know it's gonna have more trees yes don't even use all the trees oh my god I love this I love this if you play with four you get with all of them you get the the creepy olive you get the the noble dogwoods you get the bunk Euler oak you get the funereal willow you know what else you can do when you sit people bound to play this with you three or two you put all the types of trees out and say to your friends hey pick which six or eight trees you will play with really the start you can offer you know what kind of trees you want what in what tree is best man what areas best not the willows well as a I tell you what final point if you ever thinking if you make a card game of putting your logo on the card you are an idiot because look how nice that is look you can just tell an artist to make a completely awesome design that looks gorgeous yeah it's great and in terms of picking trees I think it's time for us to pick some trees ourselves pick those trees into our mouths let's get extravagant hello welcome to the kitchen time with Matt I'm going to teach you to cook some today it's going to be called Hart pasture with trees what's it going to have in it I don't know you're going to want to chop up an onion then you're going to chop up two cloves of garlic a big chili I'm using jalapenos cuz I'm just I've got some and after you've chopped up the 2 cloves of garlic and the chili you're then going to chop up another half of chili and another clove guy is you just think wow I know olive oil soften up the onions on a medium heat and it's going to take a little while for them to kind of don't do that don't put your hand in the pan just put in just some anchovies I don't really know how many to be honest let's say to two and a half three a63 they are salty salty bastards which is great because they add like salt but it means that you've got to make sure you don't go nuts we're adding adding salt so I'm going to add a bit of salt just to bring out some of the liquid from the onions because salt just does that vegetables some reason and then just a bit of pepper anchovies are on a listen don't freak out to think about anchovies when you put them in a sauce is they disappear you put them in the oil early on and they just melt away and nobody will know they're there so unless you're cooking for vegetarians in which case obviously done it's fine just try it I didn't I didn't need that I didn't need that anyway that's that's it was probably gonna be too spicy this rivers probably gonna be too spicy sirs please but it's the best hello I'm gonna put a cover on this actually because the thing about onions sometimes if you're not careful onions will like they'll still have that kind of Tang gotta make sure you cook them all the way through to make them kind of sweet rather than like bitter and if you're not sure about that then covering them up and letting them sweat basically in their own in their own dirty steam it's hard to get a gauge for how hot you want the pan to be for this sort of thing but if it's too hot and you can't go back there's nothing wrong if you're cooking onions or you cooking tomorrow there's nothing wrong we're just cooking them really really slowly on a really low heat for a really long time it will only make them better tomatoes peas let's have a look in fact oh it's all steaming and maybe going slightly brown there so I'm going to put an end to that by putting some tomatoes in cuz I don't want the onions to go Brown they're not really going Brown I think they've just been tainted by anchovies they're a bad influence I'm not going to cover this because actually what I want to happen here is just to reduce the once you got you too much stuff going you just want to get a huge pan of pasta water always use more water than you want because pasta is greedy this is what you want it's just very gently letting out some that liquid getting it down to be a bit more of a saucy paste obviously don't put your fingers actually in the pan just keep you keep your hands out of the pan this is probably bubbling too much actually I'm probably gonna move this onto a smaller heat you want it to just be very very gently going down because you know we've got to wait about ten minutes for that past the wards a boil I'm going to wait ten minutes with the pasta now is the important thing though you've got our turn to your camera and ask them do you want this to be do you want the extra spicy broccoli with this why would I not then we're doing it hot hot pot pasta with heart heart heart raises rocketry yes this is broccoli it's tree from another planet and it graced us with a with its presence and it's a really it's a really good vegetable it's actually slightly poisonous which is why it's good for you that's that's a true fact and I haven't washed I'm going to go wash it we're going to do is going to put these trees into a kind of tree container this is kind of an D thing for me because it's it it's the thing that goes on top of my pasture Bowl so I can steam them with the same water as the pasta bit an orrery human would use he's a colander on top of the saucepan and boiling water so got some more garlic here we've already used three cloves of garlic I know it is just a meal for two people I know but come on garlic's nice who cares just go nuts earlier on when I was putting her sauce sort of garlic together you can you can crush that or whatever you can do whatever you like with that just get it into the pan in some form of destroyed state with this though you do kind of want to have a bit more pieces rather than just mush for reasons you'll understand that I might so the sauce is very gradually getting kind of nice and oily and thick just how we want it and now it's time to add some pasta what kind of practice I got I've got some of this kind of faster tortellini totally so I'm going to put some tubes in this because it's boiling I'm gonna blow on the shooting whoa whoa all that much after past has been going for about five minutes put a little bit of oil into a smaller pan or big whatever doesn't really matter and then get some garlic and it's a little garlic in there very gently you're probably going to want to bash the garlic a little bit just to kind of get the pieces the slices separated so I can fry properly and this is good look at this it's kind of bubbling a little bit it means it is actually frying rather than just sort of bloke glumly going google circular oil that you can see there it's pretty much done doesn't take long at all just takes basically maybe a minute if fat and when you send the heat off we'll add a little bit of chili both for color and variety I'm not going to put some fresh chili in here put instant dried chilli that'll probably fine it's not much but it'll add something extra because I am worried this might be inedibly hot did I mention I've never made this before after the past has been going for about five minutes or so maybe let's get our broccoli on it's vital that you don't steam the broccoli for too long four or five minutes any more than that no kill it so by now you've been keeping this moving so it doesn't catch on the bottom of the pan but it is getting lovely and thick and all those flavors are intensifying and becoming quite possibly dangerous next up the broccoli it's been for about five minutes it's probably done look at last night now fun part this goes in here you obviously done this you've taken off the heat whack some heat under again and I'm literally just going to go whoop there it is it's broccoli you've drained the pasta put it straight in there don't worry about it being too dry if you let it drive too long bad things happen and then just pour it straight into the sauce so that's why it's good to have a big pan for the sauce we can big wide one or I like a big wide one meanwhile just sort of it's impossible to sort a things this big in a pan this tiny but do your best to sort of juggle it around a bit come on come on come on that's it oh yeah Dada it looks quite plain but it's probably going to blow your face off then finally just because Parmesan on it and some black pepper and that's food for now what's it like Quinn's is edible it's edible

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 165,158

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, Shut Up, Sit Down, Board Games, Board Gaming, Family Games, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Arboretum, Cooking With Trees, Spicy Trees, Brocolli, SU&SD, Matt Lees, Quinns, Quintin Smith, Dan Cassar, ZMan Games

Id: mmiXSOG1BtQ

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/ColnelCoitus]

What the hell is this... it's amazing

[u/thoughtsy]

Ar-bor-EE-tum

[u/ThomasPhilipSimon]

This is one of the few card games I regularly play. It has rather simple rules, but there a lot of strategy going on every step of the way. In my experience, it's most important to remember that every card is unique, so if someone has placed the Oak 8, nobody has that card in their hand (I don't think I'm explaining this in the best way, but basically there's a lot of card counting).

There's no words involved, just numbers, which is nice if you play with children or people for whom English is a second language. Yet, there's usually a lot of talking among players, think Settlers of Catan, since through the discard mechanic there's a way for players to openly trade cards (and for other players to steal the card being traded).

Overall, I'd recommend this game to anyone who likes trees, counting, and being sneaky.

[u/Spe1983]

I thought this was going to be Toc Toc Woodman for a second...

[u/SweaterFish]

Just bought it. Couldn't resist. Those cards look beautiful. Even if I only use the deck for playing Bullshit and never end up playing the designed game, I think it'll be worth it.

If anyone else is thinking of getting it, this site has the best deal I could find.