Cubitos Review - with Tom Vasel

[Music] [Music] and now it's time for another dice tower review with tom vassell hey everybody i'm tom vassell and today we're taking a look at a game called qubitos from aeg and john d claire now the aeg john declare combination is one that is always interesting to me aeg puts out only a few games over the course of the year but i find that their games are usually quite good and john declare has made some of my favorite games so i was very interested in this one especially its cubes now the cover itself which looks like a german spongebob i'm not really sure what's going on there that's kind of a weird thing and this game is about a race of cubes it's like hey we're taking the theme of cubes and everything's cube scoops cubes but what this actually is is it's a dice building game or a bag building game there's no bag think of a deck building game like dominion except in this case you're using dice instead of cards and it's a race now that sounds maybe a little confusing it sounds like something you may have heard of before i don't disagree let's take a look at how the game works and then we'll be back in this game you are racing you each have your own little cube racer and you're going to race around a track there are four different tracks included with the game each of them having different types of terrain and different spaces you can land on with a start line and a finish line there's also going to be various cubes of different colors there are eight different colors and each of these colors comes with different cards and you're going to pick a set of cards there are seven cards per color and so the the book comes with like a set of eight that you can use although you can pick any eight that you want to uh when playing the game each round of the game players are going to take dice from their draw pile and put it into their roll area now at the beginning of the game you're just going to start with these very basic dice these light gray dice which simply have a coin on one of their six sides and the dark gray dice which have a coin on one side and a foot on the other and so what you do and everyone does this simultaneously you're going to take nine of the dice from your draw pile which at the beginning of the game is all of them and you'll move it over to your roll pile then you roll so you'll take your dice and you roll any die that shows something automatically gets moved to your active pile at this point you can stop or you can roll again you can kind of push your luck now that's not a problem but once you have three dice here in the active pile if all the sides i roll are blank i busted well let's try it here i got another one now i could stop or keep rolling i'm feeling lucky all right good i got another one only four dice left i'm still feeling lucky what a good roll here i bust when you bust all the dice that you have are discarded and you are allowed to take as many of the dice in the roll area move them to the discard pile if you want to also but let's say i decided not to roll one more time at that point you're going to be able to use your dice each foot that you roll is going to let you move on the track one space and these coins that you get is a virtual currency which will let you buy more dice now you don't block other people's path when moving on the board so it doesn't really matter so you can move any way you want you're going forward or moving diagonally around the board sometimes there's special features here if i land here i might be able to jump here sometimes you land on a spot you can get rid of a die other times you'll be able to get a die that costs four or less here there are different spots on the board that give you these chips here and these chips are essentially money but you can save it from turn to turn you saw for example that i rolled five coins this turn that's virtual currency and i have to use it this turn or lose it but if i get these chips i'll be able to keep them so that's great i'll be able to buy dice and move but what if i busted i get nothing well you do get nothing but at least you move one spot on this track here now as you move along on this track there's a little reward you get i guess or compensation you get some of this currency that you'll be able to save and then you can get these little tokens here which will increase your hand size and then of course like i said there are other dice that you can buy and you can buy these as long as they are available so i might say i have five i can buy up the two dice of two different colors so i might want to buy the fat cat this shows you the different sides of the fat cat die it has a foot in two sides and it has a picture of a cat on the other and when i roll that cat i do the run section here which says get a coin and i get another gray die and three feet oh man that's great now it's only on one of six sides but that's pretty good for five or i might buy the bench warmer which has two different sides to the die when i roll those i lose it and another die so if i want to get rid of some basic dice out of my deck so i can use just the colored dice the wizard here each time you push and do not bust so i press my luck i get money huh that's interesting but if i roll the dog simple i lose the die and of course as they get more expensive they get better the red dice with the swords at the end of each round you'll compare whoever has rolled the most swords in this case you compare and you'll get money equal to your flag account account which is that space that you move on when you bust so if you're really far on that track this die could be pretty handy and like i said each of these has different things in it so like just compare the blue ones here this one costs eight but when you roll the symbol you get three and you move up on that track here here after you move step game one reward space that's two one or two space away so when you're moving around the track you can get something that's close to you here you can roll your gray and white dice in your draw and roll zones gain two feet these feet can be used to go into the water spaces normally can't move into water but this undercover fish allows you to do that and so you can see there's a whole pile of combos out here so that's pretty much the game you're going to be rolling and then using your dice or busting moving these dice to discard when you need to draw if you don't have enough dice in your draw all the discard dice come back and hopefully you'll be getting more dice and cooler dice to go as the game goes by moving on the track here you'll notice there's these red lines these red lines are important because if you are a certain number of red lines behind the leader let's say it's like this white is one red line behind the leader so white increases their hand size by one yellow by two and blue by four because they're that far back but at the end of the game it is just the first person across the finish line who is the winner i am of a mixed mind about the components for this game overall i think they're fine there's really nice dice here these dice are the same kind of dice and size that you would have seen maybe in aeg's other games space base or in the game warriors the pictures are really funky and weird and they have weird names on them but the symbology is very clear some of the cards have a extra four dots around the symbol and there's a few cards that will also activate that so this one here this one when this is active blah blah blah and this is also active when this one is done too so there's a few things like that the symbology works pretty well where i have a big problem are these things now i know why these are in the game because the game is cubitos and it's all about cubes and the rule book itself which by the way very well written rule book at the end of the rule book it has explanations of how each card works but here in the back there's these dice box assembly and they tell you how to put this together this is really hard because what happens is you need to push down on this because what they want this to be is hey it's a place to store these cubes during the you know when you're not playing the game and then when you are playing the game you put them here but this just does not fold well it is it is not good i was very disappointed with how this worked out and after this review i'll be getting rid of these boxes i don't think they're useful at all the also and this is a weird little thing the game comes with this token here it says is how the game plays you roll you draw you roll you move hits and then this is the run phase on how that works usabilities move buy discard okay pretty simple and then you have this here i do not know why these are separate why is this just stuff not listed here at the top of this board i found that to be a little odd now that's it again i'm complaining about extra stuff again the dice the colors the the cards themselves all of that works really well so overall i'm very happy with the components now this game here definitely is a bit of a frankenstein of a game uh the the dice and the cubes and the different sides has a very strong remembrance of quarriers or dice masters the racing around the track calls back another game from aeg where they did the planes trains and automobile series the automobile series was where you pulled dice or cubes from a bag and raced your cars around the track so it has some similarities to that and it's also similar to the very popular game quacks at quedlingberg where you can kind of push your luck uh by rolling the dice over again and yet these things work together to make a very good game now the reason i'm not putting this game at the height of excellence is because there is some fiddliness moving those dice around and i don't really know how they could fix it you have this track here and you take the dice and you move nine over here then you roll those dice down here then they come back up here and some come over here then they move over here and then come back to here and that feels like it should be smooth but it's not a lot of games like dominion have a deck or if there's a dice building game or something there's usually a bag you throw the dice in but they want you to be able to pick your dice so that's kind of neat but because you're picking your dice i almost wish that the picking your dice wasn't there and there just was a bag you pulled dice out of it would make the game slightly less strategic but also slightly less fiddly and so i find that a little bit of a dissonance in the game but i do feel also that as time goes by perhaps my rating for this game will go up because i really do enjoy it i'm a big fan of deck building games anyway a game where i get to pick different dice is really fun the game where the dice are different each time and then combining that with a race makes this really fun and then you throw in a mechanism that i like and hate i mean i like it but i'm really bad at it and that's push your luck so to push your luck aspect of this is very good right if you roll your dice at the beginning and you roll all blanks you don't bust you can't bust till you get at least three faces so that's a good thing right you're not going to bust on your first roll oh just bad luck no you you might you still might have bad luck but if you get three faces or on your first roll and that's it you have the ability to stop yes it's not great yes you might not be able to get anything fantastic and maybe just move your die one space or so but you could get something and then you decide to push it farther than that also the racetrack's very interesting as you move your cube around the track you can move usually a longer way around but hit those bonus spots or you can just cut for the chase and try to win the game but you're not getting as much stuff as the other people this all comes together in a really nice way and everyone can play simultaneously now there is points in the game where it might matter and the game then says all right then you take turns and turn order like maybe there's only one red dye left and multiple people want to buy it or maybe i'm really concerned about how i'm going to move them i can take a shorter area it depends on how you move then that matters but i found that those cases are very few and far between so most of the time you can just all simultaneously go you all roll until someone busts or stays in you all then move on the track you all buy new dice and you go to the next round games are not long every game is different you know the expandabilities here they don't even have to add more dice to the game they can just add like six more cards for each color and so all that combines to make a game that i really like and i feel that if i keep playing this game it could move into that i really love this game this is just kind of it almost feels like it's tailor made for me and so there's a lot of excitement here yes there's some missteps like these cube boxes and things like that and the theme almost feels more tacky than anything else like everything's a cube i don't care um but underneath it the mechanisms are interesting and fun and yes they're a combination of stuff that we've seen before but it's done in a really good way i think this one's going to be fairly popular i think a lot of people are going to enjoy this one if they buy it despite the cover so check it out that's cubitos i'm tom vassell we'll see you next time dice tower judgment approved [Music] you

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 36,605

Rating: 4.9541545 out of 5

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, GeekUsername: TomVasel, board game review, boardgame, uno, ticket to ride, apples to apples, educational games, educational, top 10

Id: 1dVLjueHREQ

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 15 2020