Batman: Gotham City Chronicles Review

hey guys how's it going hope you're having a wonderful day after many play sessions probably already too many it's finally time for me to review Batman Gotham City chronicles by monolith if a game can give me a cow with a cape on it surely it has it'd be good right alright guys now real quick before I get into all the pros and cons of the game itself at least my view on it as I always do in these review videos I just wanted to do a quick shout out to all my patrons you guys rock and make this all possible I did three videos this week in case you didn't notice I did a painting video that took me a couple hours to do and then obviously a couple hours more to edit I did a Kickstarter video where I did a whole bunch of research to work with a few companies to try and get that out to you guys so I can give you my opinions on some of those and of course now a review after many many play sessions of a Batman so anyway if you appreciate that at all or any of the other past videos we're looking forward to some of the future videos of mine and found them at all helpful or enjoyable be sure to give this video a thumbs up it helps out the channel a lot subscribe if you haven't already for those kind of videos offices that helps and if you're really really awesome and able to link in the description load to my patron for all sorts of rewards look at discord and painting and miniatures and earlier videos and exclusive videos and behind the scenes stuff and all that's jazz alright let's get to the review now the first things first I cannot talk about this game without talking about the amazing artwork in it the core boxes alone are amazing monolith once again did a full art on their boxes tour they're not even their logos on their on the front it's just the artwork and it's beautiful artwork they actually commissioned it from an amazing artist I don't remember their name right now and I apologize for that in fact if I can I'm gonna put it in text somewhere on the screen right now because I would love for you guys to know it's really really good stuff they have a great Instagram account as well that I follow and I must say I really like the how the two core boxes the artworks like that I have it all up on my shelf all pretty and whatnot and I really really enjoy it and it's not just there the art keeps going further so even the character screens that you have especially for the heroes but also the villains are actually what they did is they took the 3d sculpt and colored it and what that means is it always perfectly matches the miniature which is very very nice now it's obviously a different style than the commissioned work that they did but I must say I still really like it and I love all the bright colors and the clean look in it and the art I feel even goes to like the technical document the rulebook itself they do a lot of stark white in their rule books lately list was claustrophobia and then again here with the Batman Gotham City chronicles and I must say I actually really dig this out it's really clear and concise and just looks good and then on the character sheets they do like this blue tint like this the character board of this whole thing is like part of like Batman's teching or seeing all the info that he has on these people it's just it's all really really well themed and really well done and I really like it now another nice thing about those boxes is it has room for storage so it's all really well stored I stored up right and there's not a whole lot of movement around though the worst thing I have right now is the villain tiles and even then that's because I'm putting it in the villain box where I could actually put it in the hero box just fine so it doesn't handle sleeve cards in the actual tray they have but there's not a whole lot of trace that aren't for the miniatures that are also separately boxed which is an image of where everything goes so it's pretty easy to find out - the shapes are pretty nice there's not a whole lot of overlap involved there and so it just stores very very well what you can do is you can either take out the the tray where the dice and cards come in and then put it all underneath there's plenty of space there and then if not you can actually I have the tray still - and it shoved in there for sleeved cards I actually just put them in the tray slots you know stacked up instead of on their side or something like that works out fine for me now I know how singing praises about how the rulebook will looked before and it does look great however I do have a few problems with it first of all I'm sure you can guess it but there is no index again no index why I don't know you spent a wonderful amount of time writing this overly wordy rulebook which helps people that in a second and there's no index so if I want to look up something like the size index or the Menace index of something I can't because there's no in in the back the rule book - still aside index mentioned on page 47 that would be great or whatever right instead I have to just hope I can find it under like hindering in the table of contents or something like that which again is all broken down a not necessarily alphabetical order and so it just is there's a lot of looking through the rulebook and this game is more complex than Conan it's is if you know Conan you're still gonna be learning new stuff stuff works different and has changed and you're gonna have to look through it and without an index even if you do find it you don't know if that's the only place that's mentioned maybe size indexes mentioned somewhere else like maybe it's like oh I read it under hindering but then under ranged attacks maybe it's mentioned somewhere else and it says a little you know note that I need to know I don't know that as a reader because there's no index unless I read through it all over and over again and just haven't memorized or something like that so you can I have to make do and that's kind of unfortunate and in index would solve all that so again if the game does not have an index you will get a negative mark on my video that's all there is to it put an index in your rule book okay now I got a little like a little sidetrack there with the index and I apologize for that it just mmm-hmm anyway the rule book itself answers a lot of questions and it's much better than the Conan one and I really like that however its fact they do they break it down which is kind of nice when it comes like timing which helps in a lot of situations that being said it can be fairly wordy and what I mean by that is the movement system in this game is not that complex it's a pretty straightforward movement system however it takes a hefty amount of reading to read about the movement system and even then it's kind of like organized weird like if you read it and didn't really understand the context too much like if you hadn't played Conan before he hadn't read a review and you're just reading it it almost seems like because there's only one sentence at the very beginning of this long spiel about movement that kind of mentions the fact that you're selecting you know a move it could have multiple movements but it makes it seem like you take it and then you take your destination which you and your mind destination is where you're wanting to go which is probably a few steps away a few spaces away and then calculate the movement based off that so it almost seems like you teleport there like all that matter is your start and your end and really what it is is you have a multiple start and ends over and over and over again and I just feel there's better ways to describe that and that's kind of a good way of viewing all of the rules here Coenen was too brief in their rulebook and I feel that now that they've done this kind of 2.0 on the river system and with the tile activation and all that kind of stuff which is great they over inflated it and it's a little too wordy for my for my taste he kind of can get lost in each individual rule and sometimes it's just kind of overly complex and other times it's just you know like if you're having to you know view evasion or something like that so evasion says you just subtract the the size index or whatever a menace index of the of you know whatever X is whatever value have but it's worded in a way towards as indexes and so then you're thinking maybe like oh so I subtract if you have a level one evasion I subtract all indexes of one when really because one is the most common value there one really it means what however many index amount is its listed so you subtract one index but the indexes implies plural yet the most common number is one and so there's still a lot of confusion about a lot of the rules and some of that comes from the translation speaking which there is French and even in the English book some of the examples have French one of the title headers is actually in French so there's a few interjections of non English stuff there and then again some of the translation you know like the indexes and stuff like that make it a little kind of odd when you do that some other minor things like on one of the maths they do a lot of math which is nice it's like you take your enemy and then you subtract the the ally and that's the difference whatever but one of them is this says Ally - Ally so it's like this the same number to be zero every time it some of it it could just use a little bit more proofreading a little bit more conciseness and index and you know just some maybe some better examples just something like that so the rule book it's better could have a lot of improvement so I'm gonna put it as a negative on the one though I do really like the improvements I've seen from previous games okay so apparently I could talk about rules for forever I apologize for that maybe we should put that towards the end of the video you're like he's gonna complain about the indexes for like ten minutes I don't know but anyway one of the big things that I really like is the components with an exception which we'll get to as a- later but the component just the the boxes are really nice they got a good gloss to it the scratch a little easy for my taste but you know it's it's a it's a box it is what it is it doesn't have that like a linen finish or something really rugged like that the cards seem nice the tokens monolith is the leader in cardboard tokens as far as I'm concerned they are exquisite they are amazing to punch out they are amazing to use the tiles are perfect in almost every way and I love them cardboard is awesome miniatures great detail you know a few mishaps you know if a few the hands are really small and so the details parently there some ice gulps that don't quite take paint perfectly but otherwise the detail level is fantastic and I'm happy with those and the the gems are good they didn't use the gyms like you get in claustrophobia or from Conan they use just the square gems those are fine though they work great and in fact they're a little bit easier just cuz they're square they sit nicer and whatnot they don't roll around quite as much all around great components really happy with it the game board amazing I didn't mention that art and that was a mistake the art on the game boards is the best and I love it fantastic guard on the game boards as well and obviously the quality is exquisite it's it's fantastic stuff now I mentioned an exception there and that's the basis for the miniatures so during my unboxing if you watch that you would have seen plenty of bent miniatures if you've seen any of my painted miniatures I've done I'm able to paint them up because they're great quality but then they all have this wobbly base half the time I say it all and half the time really it's it seems about 50% of the bases are bent in some way and bent bases suck I'd rather have a bent anything than the base is that because ideally it has to be perfectly flat if you have a bent spear or bent sword you can get it just about close enough and it'll look fine right it doesn't have to be that perfect super edge line straight but a bent base makes it wobbly a bit base is noticeable a bent base sucks so monolith what I want from you is ABS plastic straight bases from now on that'd be amazing and I'd love you for it it matched the rest of your amazing content and the quality and production value in there let's get those bases straight and I'll be a happy camper all right so here's something else I like and that's all of the content now I went all in on this and so I have a ton of content so much so that I'll probably be playing it until season 2 comes out and they'll have even more to play probably but there are a lot of scenarios here and all the scenarios just act so different they just they seem to be themed very well in a Batman IP they're steeped in it I mean all the special rules per scenario really change things up a bit the objectives makes sense they're all buried and if you play them in order like I've been doing you get a good change of pace of what it is you're trying to do you know and some you might just be trying to like you know go through the sewers and disarm bombs and other ones maybe you're trying to like you know you have to like get contaminated and then get a serum and then or and then get the you know cure for it very quickly and then there's you know a big guy rampaging through and the best way to get rid of him is actually to get him with the serum and justice a lot of really fun things that you do in the scenarios and there's plenty of them there's a lot of content here and finally all the miniatures are used in all the snares which is great there's no unused of interests here with us some we're only used once and that's a big bummer but between the Overlord website that monolith runs where free snares will be uploaded and then of course season 2 stuff and then of course you can just make your own and there's this gonna be there's a magazine that they run that also has more there's gonna be a ton of scenarios for this a ton of content and I really really like that now additionally one of the benefits here if you are a player from Conan and you're thinking about this Batman for season 2 or something like this and that's where you're watching the review know that one of the big changes they did is the mega tour you can pick your characters now within options and that keeps it really balanced which is really good in fact I belong to this discord or running numbers on how balanced it is and it's literally like hovering at the 50% on whether or not the villain or the heroes win which is fantastic we're really impressed with that so far I'll see we're gonna keep digging into it but I'm really happy to see that and that's what it feels like - it feels very balanced but anyway you get you know like three heroes each so this is only a four player game not a five player game okay so there are three heroes at all times plus well I don't know if at all times I believe it there's a few if I leave through there where there's less but anyway up to three heroes against a villain player so four players but each of those hero slots you can pick between different ones so let's say one maybe always as Batman but it's different versions of Batman and one it's like maybe gonna have blue bird and maybe Catwoman or maybe Nightwing or maybe one of the Robins and so you can go there you can theme it you can have Batman and two Robins go through or maybe it's like Batman and then you know Catwoman and you know somebody else I just it's really cool that you can take different characters and it adds a lot to the replayability so first of all there's always different ways to go about it and some of that's from the utility belt where you get to pick items so if you picked a grapple hook and explosive gel maybe your strategy is to jump up somewhere and explode the wall and get to the item that way maybe another one you just pick the heavy hitters you need to fight your way through so depending on what you pick before they gave me even starts it really changes how that's narrow place so not only do you have a lot of scenarios but they're all replayable in like in a good way not like a I mean I guess you can replay it it seems like you could fundamentally enjoy yourself playing the same mission again even right after the last one you did whether it is because you want to start a new strategy or do new people or pick new items or whatever and that's really cool it's a great great amount of content here now another negative I have here is the amount of symbols and how close together they are now here's here's kind of my beef here you have let's say circular strike combo and berserk and I don't know if there's there's another one I think even two on top of that counter-attack okay so there are four symbols it's just a symbol in the character card that have fists as an icon and it's like they're two fists going and some there's a third fist coming and some there's a fist and a swipe and the some there's just a fist and while eventually you get to know what they are it's very simple heavy that's just an example one of them where it's just there are ton of symbols in this game especially on a character card we're even even after playing almost you know like about half a dozen I want to say I've played about six times now maybe not either way I've played plenty of this and we're still looking it up every single time when you go to pick out especially new characters like okay what does this one do again or or I'll be looking a bit like I'm trying to like look at it's like oh the three fists there or two are they swiping or is one a fist and one that I know I need to look it up and see if that's counter attack now not only that but to look it up looking it up is alphabetical by its name but on the character card it's just a symbol so even if I think it's counter attack I have to look at counter attack to see if it is I can't just or just look for the symbol and if it's not then I have to look and find wherever it is it's listed which is a huge bummer it takes longer than it should to ideally what it would have because they all have a unique name anyway is a list of names and you could have done it in the theme too right you could have had the list and it's like oh and then there's stats and it says you know how old they are how much they weigh all that kind of silliness and then skills and under skills that would listed you know counter attack you know berserk you know circular strike all these kind of different ones at the gun ones are bad - it's like some bullets are this way some bullets hitting at some it's just a bullet what's the difference I don't know you got to look it up each time and there are better ways to do it so I would much much much prefer just the names because then you know all they have counter-attack and all that instead of they have this symbol to symbol this symbol this symbol is a one two one two this and this is what this means it just it would be way better with the names in there that would be awesome and I would be so happy if they did that but it's not and so that's super super symbol heavy which is kind of a bummer and definitely not a part of the game I enjoy speaking of symbols they updated the active and resting way mark that now so in Coney and you put a gym on two different slots on this one you essentially just have a token that you flip which I actually like I like that concept in practice though it really sucks because you have the character game board and then you you put on the character sheet on the game board and then on top of the character sheet that's on top of the game board you have the token that you're supposed to pick up and flip the promises is barely there so the slides around so half the time when you're moving gyms or you bump the table whatever and your token this slider it's not locked into place or anything ideally each game board would have had a little slot we could put a gym in our little red gym just like how you track health for the villains on the villains they have a track that's just one through nine I believe and you put the gym where it belongs and you just take it out and put it somewhere else if it needs to go somewhere else one of the benefits of the square gems I just sit there right so they could have had two slots right underneath that had act you know act resting and active or active and resting and you just swapped that I would much prefer that because then it's locked in there it's obvious what you choose it's not just token floating around in your game sheet and this only token you float on there too it's it's just an odd system and I don't know why they did it that way but I think it could use some improvement now yet another complaint I have here is it can be kind of confusing for people who didn't go all-in or that did and the problem is because his Kickstarter exclusive because they made this entire game kind of as one thing they actually put some tokens in the core box that are only for expansions or mentioned in expansions so there were several components I had where I was like I don't know what these components are there's no component list in the rulebook another negative on the rulebook show me an image with titles of this as this this is that this is that so that I know how much it is he can't just say you know a you know 24 health trackers will show me what the health trackers are right because that would have helped solve this but the problem is some of these tokens aren't mentioned in the rule because the rulebook is meant for the core game and these tokens that are in the core game box are for an expansion you might not own or in my case have not read yet because I'm not playing that yet I'm playing through the core game first so I have no idea what these are someone's gonna miss something I wasted way more time than I care to reading through that very wordy rulebook trying to figure out where these symbols were I saw some specifics there's a different token that covers up some of the armory roles and the villain board from four slots to three slots it's used for the verses box but it's not in the versus expansion it's in the core expansion but only used for the versus expansion again kind of confusing I've seen many people ask that luckily it seemed that question before I got my copy and so I already knew that but one I did have a question for is there is like some generic health tokens again it's not listed anywhere it's not shown anywhere but it is mentioned in the batmobile expansion where it says hey use this to you know track its health or whatever whoa okay that's great except it's in the core box not the Batman expansion so I didn't know so I had these symbols I'm like I don't know what these are there were three of them they were obviously four they were blue it's I think the other side may have been great but it looked like it was for the heroes like maybe the heroes track something I don't know so I'm sitting there we're trying to play our first game and I'm just googling trying to and looking through the rulebook and asking on this discord like hey what are these symbols for because I'm just trying to play the game and so it's just kind of confusing that they did that either either list everything that's in the box or keep the boxes separated or what it was just it was rather confusing and wasted a bit of my time okay so I already mentioned balance but I want to speak a little bit more about that because I think it's one of monoliths strong suit I've yet to play a monolith game actually that wasn't well balanced and that's saying a lot mainly because there's a lot of times where I can't play to my full potential what I mean by that is I am normally the most well versed gamer in my group that's why I run a whole channel in this stuff but often times they play the bad guy that Overlord the Nemesis is the villain whatever you want to call it and use one versus many games and because you're having to track I know a bit more and often times I have to not play the optimal move or you know not pick the optimal set because all that would that would be kind of broken I can go all out on monoliths games and really try to win and sometimes I do and sometimes I don't sometimes I get be bad and that's really cool that that works and oftentimes you can you can point at where the issue is and oftentimes it comes down to like one turn which is really exciting for instance we've just played a mission where we had the heroes had to like activate five tokens I forget what the token stood for exactly in this one by turns by the end of turn seven and so we were running through that and they were like it was getting close it was like turn six at the start of turn six and they saw they're like okay we got a like get these last few ones and it's a mad dash to that and whether or not they can succeed or not and that's exciting it brings so much excitement when it gets down to the wire when it's not clear who's gonna win so I like playing risk we're halfway through the game of Risk you know who's gonna win it's not like that at all even if you don't think you're gonna win they didn't within my first turn I had almost killed Nightwing and so it was looking grim it was looking bad but they were able to recover and that's fantastic so it looks like you know yeah most games you just throw in the Italica yeah that ended up terrible that did not work but in this one no it's well balanced and there's a lot of great great times with that and so I really like the balance of this game speaking of balance I really like the dice and mitigation in this game as a terrible roller myself I need all the dice and mitigation I can have or at least as much control as I can over it now the heroes have a bit more than the villain because they can actually pump up their attacks which is great I wish I could do that but sadly I can't but you know so if you're like hey I need to get five on this roll and I could roll to red diocese which gives me either I could roll five or a six and win or I could put in that extra gym in there a roll three red or maybe I do the two red and then put the gym in a reroll so I have a higher chance of getting in so you can add dice you can re-roll dice they also added some great dice which are like my favorite is the black dice so in this one versus Conan they have black dice which is a 50/50 so three sites are completely blank they were missed and three sites actually hit now not only that but one of them hits for a one so it does a barely hit and two of them hit for a four which is the highest in the game so that that hurts so if you're rolling multiple of them or you get a reroll that's bad and so it's that kind of like a all-or-nothing kind of scenario just within the dice so the dice are just meant to kind of emulate that and it's really good it's really fun to do that yet white Dicer kind of the opposite they miss more often than not but they can still hit a - they still have a - as good as a yellow or as good as a kind of a normal red roll and so that's awesome that I've gotten for damage off of - white with a reroll and so you think oh man it's gonna be blank and then BAM nope actually I got four and that's a lot of good dice mechanics in this game which as a fan of rolling dice I'm happy about now I also already kind of mentioned the utility belt the back utility belt mechanic in this game but essentially all the people of the bat family so not everybody but the people the bat family get a utility belt with value and what you can do is you can pick from the all these cards that do different things and make that part of utility boat and what's really great about that is it allows you to adjust to the situation make up for a weakness of something or perhaps it's actually helping with the campaign or perhaps it's playing To Your Strengths there's a lot of different personalities a shoe that you do so even if you pick the same characters if you change the utility belt it changes a lot about how you would play and that's really cool and really exciting and there's a lot of like it's not deck-building but there's a lot of kind of strategize ation about okay well if I do Nightwing and he's already doing this perhaps I add another for instance okay so Nightwing he had to like stun batons or whatever so dude this electricity damage which is great right and he's ambidextrous surgeon attack with both well there's also a utility card that can add more shock to it so maybe he does if he gets a hit and he's gonna hit hard maybe he's not the boss killer and he's just gonna kill the villain and that's awesome you could do that or not I think he only has a parkour one maybe give him the grappling hook so it has a higher parkour knee just jumping around everywhere hidden everybody still doing decent damage but you've kind of up to a weakness of his when it comes to how much he can kind of climb around and move around there's just a lot of stuff like that maybe make him a bit more defensive with a back cape maybe yeah it just there's a lot of options there are a lot of theory crafting you can do and you can change a person era to really match now additionally there's a lot of times where an opportunity arises or like this is appropriate time to use this like a boss comes in he's just go like oh he's gonna tear us well I have an exploding bat-arang that does two black dice - you explode you die okay fun stuff the only thing I think would be kind of fun and I might even at Wright house ruled a little bit on normal you can said is to keep those secret from the villain player so what if you had the bat utility belt and he had all these tricks up your sleeve that really up your sleeve I was unaware of as a villain player so I'm just thrown around and suddenly out of this belt you get this perfect you know you know bat item you know kind like a joke in the sixties move a tv-show you know or something like that I just thought that that'd be great and so uh either way I really like the system it's a lot of fun it's a good addition alright we're almost done here I got one more positive thing to say and then we'll conclude and that's really just the amount of support extended supported the game so season one has already come out the first Kickstarter has and it already has a ton but on top of that the Overlord net where a community is gonna make more and I know they will so we're gonna have plenty of scenarios there continuing for months or even years later if Conan has anything to say about it additionally they have this magazine I think it's called - now the Overlord tío that it I already already backed it for one because it comes with another item card or utility card camera which one but a card for the game cool and more scenarios more official scenarios which means they're gonna be well balanced and well made and well themed and they're use all my content there's gonna be so much content for this not it not even including the second season so they're gonna do another season another Kickstarter here on June 4th were again even more content you can get some of the content you didn't get the first time we didn't get anything you can actually get the game and then of course there's a new stuff too it's even more they monolith supports their games in a way I haven't really seen another company do especially when it comes with the free stuff the community stuff and the support for that or though actually you know kind of I get this community stuff and get the best of Anna package it and advertise it and it just really cool stuff like that I even did like a painting competition earlier where they were giving away like a mini if you won the painting competitions so you got like an exclusive version of a mini there and there's a lot of cool stuff like that a lot of support for this game and that makes me a happy backer and happy consumer it means that my 300 plus dollars are spent on this darn thing isn't a total waste and instead will give me a lot of joy for years to come all right so time for conclusion monolith really knocked out of the park here well yes it just is shy of perfection because of those complaints at the end of the day those complaints are in fact fairly minor there's nothing fundamentally broken about this game at all it's a ton of fun with a ton of content of quality content and I'm sure I'm going to get plenty of extra game time even after this video with my gaming group for a long time to come monolith took what was already well reviewed and well regarded in Conan and made it even better made smart and interesting decisions to improve upon that core experience and then on top of that added Batman into the equation so obviously it improved it's really really good and I highly recommend it to any of you out there if you kind of align with me when it comes to the kind of games you like if you like throwing dice if you like moving miniatures if you like a Batman in other words if you're like me you need to get this game it's well worth it a fantastic game and right now game of the year so we'll see if that changes there's a lot coming out obviously which I will be covering in the future so speaking of which if you want to see that coverage subscribe if you like this review give it a thumbs up if you have any opinions or any questions or just want to say anything comment below I'll be sure to read and respond to it as always thanks so much for being here I always appreciate it I hope you have a wonderful day I'll talk to you soon [Music]

Channel: The King of Average

Views: 7,108

Rating: 4.8228784 out of 5

Keywords: the king of average, miniatures, batman gotham city chronicles, batman board game, monolith, kickstarter, kickstarter board game, batman game, batman gotham city chronicles review, batman gotham city chronicles gameplay, board game review, review, board game, tabletop game, batman gotham city chronicles kickstarter, kickstarter exclusive, batman gotham city chronicles miniatures, kickstarter games

Id: vxfDHnLRaY0

Length: 30min 34sec (1834 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2019