Five Great SMALL Games!

I'm feeling pretty good about my collection of board games recently this dragons horde of boxes that people are slightly taken aback by when they enter my flat in fact you can almost see the exact moment that they realize that I am a weird little Goblin and their opinion of me is irreversibly changed yeah you know I think on balance like I'm doing okay like work's been a bit of a nightmare recently but you know at least it's the weekend how have you bored how have you bored games uh you've got a lot of these you got a l you you got a lot of board games why here's the thing I'm very happy with the tent pole chunky games in my collection there is barely a Miss in this Bunch not going to get rid of raw anytime soon that one's a classic and a Tonica Feast for Odin brass Birmingham those are all just great Euros earthborne Rangers is my current campaign game and it's great Jud Imperium is a new addition to the collection and it's nice and fighty for people who like that my partner likes ano 1800 and corrosion so I can't get rid of those and I guess I can keep this thing around but when I peruse my board game collection and I look at some of my favorite games of all time I'm somehow still left with a little hint of dissatisfaction and it's all because of these the little nooks and crannies of negative space this shelf is perfect this one's to here this one and so to address those irregularities I've been on on a mission to find the five very best small and shapely boxes to fill those ghastly gaps and I want to hear reinforce these games were only chosen for their shape and size this is not a lazily re-themed top five great small games feature that would be crazy only a complete chump would try and pull a maneuver like that we're often big fans of funny Gam names that shut up and sit down but often the specific kind of funny that we're after can be a little bit hard to find we're not that into wacky games with deliberately quirky writing or Winks to camera or silly quirky theming the kind of humor that we tend to get a kick out of in games is organic and generative quite dry and a bit absurd without leaning too hard into it it's the difference between agricola's wish for children only requiring one person and kava's more knowingly goofy cuddle room it's suburbia's old person's home next to a cliff Edge being funny until it's also next to draculus castle and a UFO even in party games this is true we loathe Cards Against Humanity's boring infantile Lego for jokes approach to humor but love the very human and creative approach to gags in games like monikas and wavelength we love games where imagination delivery and playing in the space are more important to humor than reading aoud a card that says a big bum head which is all to outline that I think Sky Team might be the next great example of exactly our kind of humor when it comes to games taking a look at this cover you might think this is a serious straight laced game of piloting a plane professionally but very quickly the implications of quite how bad you and your co-pilot are at your respective jobs are glaring and hilarious Sky team is a co-op game of two players trying to land a plane each of you get a set of dice and a screen to roll them behind in each round you'll roll those Dice and assign them one at a time in turns to these slots on your dashboard to accomplish various plane tasks tilting the plane slowing down speeding up extending the wheels or the flaps or maybe Brewing some coffee for your co-pilot and then at the end of the round you're going to check a whole bunch of things but mostly to see if you've crashed the difference between the dice you and your friend have put at the top of the board here is how much your plane is going to roll too big a difference and you'll tip to an untenable angle and lose these two dice combine their values to see how far you're going to move either one two or three spaces on this movement track that tucks into the board here if you go too fast and smack into one of these planes in your way you also lose but if you arrive at the airport by aligning your plane with it at the end of a round congratulations your home but if you're going too fast at this point you lose if you haven't flict all the switches you lose if you're even a slight angle you lose you lose you lose it's only by cleverly cooperating and aligning your dice perfectly that you'll accomplish all the landing tasks level out the plane Approach at the right speed and land perfectly without incident which might sound easy but I've left out a very important detail you may not communicate with your co-pilot at any point after the have been rolled this means that Sky team is a delightful mixture of cooperation and deduction where you're breeding between the lines of every die placed we both know that going any faster than eight at this point is going to crash us into these planes so why did my teammate just put a six there is it because they want me to clear the way so we can go super fast do they want me to start brewing coffee so that I can modify the rest of their dice or maybe just maybe they've only rolled sixes and we're doomed it's really really good there's a gripping Cooperative dice game here at the very core of this where flashes of communication in between rounds then give way to the randomness of the dice and silently staring at your partner willing them to do the right thing at the right time success in this game feels like you've pulled off a the Mind style brain meld with your co-pilot and failure is often so brutal and devastating and sudden that there's tension baked into every single round but I think Sky team is turned from a good co-op game into a great one by two key components first off we've got all the expansion modules now Sky Team gives you a whole different raft of airports to try your hand at visiting with their own unique modifiers but more excitingly you can graft these extra player boards onto your plane's cockpit making the challenge even harder if you thought the game was too easy how about introducing a traffic die that adds in more planes on the way to your destination what about turns that force you to be at specific specific angles at specific times maybe there's fuel that slowly drains out of your plane an intern that needs to be trained wind that tilts your direction or most frighteningly of all a real time mode where you have only 60 seconds to place out all of your dice so that's good it adds longevity it adds extra depth to an already crunchy and Cooperative experience but the real kicker is that Sky team is just so funny that lack of communication for the bulk of the game leads to these wonderful moments of shrugged shoulders and simmering frustration you're constantly exasperated with each other a perfectly water type plan absolutely falling apart as soon as you see the dice that you've rolled this round the tension that's baked into this game is in and of itself a constant source of Chuckles but it's heightened by the imaginative implications of what you're doing these dice spaces are simple but evocative for those with even a lick of imagination One Pilot shoveling coffee into another like they're the h hungry engine of a steam locomotive whilst the plane tilts ever further towards a clean 90° crash one player idly clicking on all of these go faster switches whilst their co-pilot looks on in horror because you need to slow down now it's wonderful stuff but we're here for a more important reason how does it fit into your collection Sky Team measures a delectable 18 1/2 CM by 25 1/2 CM with a depth of just five making it perfect to go oh just about there we got sent basically every single one of all play's Square small box Series in one go and Big Top might secretly be my favorite of the whole bunch not to say that the others aren't good that there's a couple of good games in there uh but the big top might have been overlooked because of its very haunted ring Master on the cover in this game you're going to the circus except not really you're doing auctions and you're trying to score points but they are juicy auctions and they are chunky points in fact Big Top is really a game of very specific auctions each round the auctioneer draws a card from the deck and adds it to their hand of just one card and then chooses one of their two cards to play into the center of the table bids work as you expect circling the table until everyone's out bar one player who PID pays the auctioneer for the card and adds it into their Tableau in front of them you keep doing auctions until the end of game card is drawn from your big stack of possible auctionblock and if a card is Ever full of coins it's put in the score pile of whichever player won it and only completed cards are going to score at the end of the game the thing is that doesn't just matter for the cards that are in the center of the table but also oops all of the cards in front of all the players when you make a bid that matches one of the slots on your quads quads you can take coins from your supply and park them on the corresponding slots completing these cards gets you their points and will get you your money back but the money on cards is still able to be spent so you might start abandoning all of the cards you worked so hard on just to get a stab at that juicy one in the middle that's loaded with currency so you're trying to bid very specifically in order to make a card juicy either your own or the one in the center or actually deliberately avoiding the numbers on the card in question to deter others from going for it the card in the middle is fluctuating in value depending on the specific bids that have been made on it but you're also navigating the cards in your own Tableau the current bid is three so we should bid four but the next player needs to bid five for their own card so maybe we hop up to five blocking them and forcing a six bid that will fill a slot in that card and hopefully the bidding might get high enough that this is the round you can bid 12 and finish off this guy there's a lot of good decisions built on this auction that's constantly fluctuating in value it's a really clean really simple really effective auction game with some incredibly haunted artwork but don't worry I know what you really want to know does box fit in collection good big Top's portly proportions of 16 M by 28 M make it the perfect game to slot kind of here but it has so few components that maybe you fancy storing it Loose just a little bit in there just a little bit in there yeah lovely this next game is a really odd Beast spectral is a deduction game set inside a haunted house each player takes a team of treasure hunters and uses them to peruse the hallways trying to find precious gems each turn you'll Place some of your gang next to one of these tiles and get a clue as to the location of the treasure this card says there's a gem two rooms clockwise from this one this room says there's a gem in the opposite corner of its quadrant and this one says the gems were inside of you all along go and see a doctor now none of these cards are going to say there is a gem right here they all point to another tile like that spidered man meme and at the end of the full game you'll flip over all the tiles follow all the clues place out all the gems and then divvy them up amongst the treasure Hunters who found them the thing is you don't just score these Gems by finding out where they are you score them by being present at their location preferably more so than any other player the folks you're using to harvest Clues are also the way in which you stake a claim on the treasure at the end of the game where the value of the gem is split evenly between the teams that are next to it this 12-point gem is here split between two different players because two sides are covered one by Blue and one by yellow they'll get six points each but over here three sides are covered two of them by green one of them by yellow and so it's an uneven split more goes to Green than to Yellow often times in this game both players can make a correct deduction but the person who wins is who put more stake in themselves being right other players can dislodge you from a space but they need to double the number of explorers that you had there so you have to be dead certain that somewhere is valuable real estate and not just deadly curses are where the spice of spectral is located because some of these tiles will not show you where a gem is they will show you where a curse is located at the end of the game before you score any of your points curses will delete any adventurers that are next to that particular tile and because spectrals Clues are additive you could very easily have a situation where a tile gets absolutely pounced on by everyone as they realize it's got shedloads of gems on it but then you get a clue that tells you it is cursed trapped evil and bad and that all of those players are going to die even better you might realize that there isn't actually a curse on the tile you're bordering instead they are on the tiles next to yours which means you've gone from splitting this treasure between three people to getting it all to yourself it's a great dance of deduction and misdirection as you plop your adventurers down in tantalizing locations using low bids to tempt people into over bidding and getting bitten in the bum by the curse early plays of this can feel a little bit like a lethal version of Storage Wars where greedy buyers are dead certain that a space is being way overlooked by their fellow adventurers and end up bidding loads on it only to end up certainly dead it's also just so quick compared to deduction games that the site has recommended in the past this is refreshingly Breezy and lends itself to backto back puzzling but you don't care about how good the game is whether it's fun or if you should buy it do you I know you I've got your number you don't care you're here for one segment and one segment only and that segment is called how does it shelves spectral has got a kind of a rectangle Vibe and you can just put it in kind of like this and then the other games can go on top just cram them stuff them in yeah ooh just just right [Music] drop halter is the perfect dumb game it's the Pinnacle of the dumb game genre it has about four rules and all of them are great here's how you play every player takes these five trinkets into one hand the top card of the deck is flipped and players raised to drop only the required items using only the hand that the items are in once you've dropped those required items and no more you can grab the Ghost and the first player to grab that ghost gets one point represented here by these jingly jangly bells pop one in your hand with the rest of your Trinkets and you're ready to play another round five Bells gets you the win here is the catch though if you accidentally drop an item that is not listed on the card that's fine pick it back up along with all your other items and keep going trying to drop only the correct items from your hand and grabbing a bell but if you drop a bell then that's really bad because you just lose the Bell forever you don't get to pick it back up you lose the point it's gone Nightmare and these things are so small and so irritating and so easy to let slip this means that drala has a wonderful Arc where players who are merrily blasting through cards dropping items left right in center are picking up tons of these bells and making their hands substantially more difficult to navigate as they jingle and jangle their way through around the game of untangling the right object and dispensing it onto the table is sometimes quite simple and some sometimes quite tricky but always Complicated by these tiny bell bastards on top of this droter is maybe one of the first games that scales with stickiness the more you play the more clammmy and sticky your hands become and items begin adhering to your skin making them harder to drop or maybe more secure when you don't want to drop them anchored to your palms by your own sticky sweat it's gross it's really gross initially these shake up your items in two clasped hands step of the round seems kind of pointless and silly and you don't do it but as the game goes on it's necessary to un adhere the items from your own skin absolutely grty that's just so it's so disgusting and also as bells get added to successful players hands this step kind of audibly shows how well any given player is doing and pip pointed out that if you drop all of your bells and then you shake your items the next round you mourn their absence no more jingle jangling so sad it's good it's not the second coming of Christ or anything obviously but it certainly is coming with me to the pub to play with some slightly Tipsy adults who want to yell but where does it fit in the collection it's the segment you've all been waiting for roll the videotape drala measures 2x one oinks and as such goes on top of the pile of your canonically good oink games right here these are the these are the good ones you don't need to worry about anymore our final game in this feature is EO and I should mention up front that this game is quite hard to find at the moment you can get import copies from sites like travel games who we've shouted out in the past but you might be better off just waiting for the reprint that's coming later on I think from Arcane wonders fact check Tom in the future fact check if this is true if I'm feeling Rogue this game might be the first thing that approaches a replacement for w length for me that chunky game show style board game with the wheel oh what a treat that game is a delightful engine for discussion and a wonderful object to bring with you to the pub but Ito is small and Compact and Dinky I don't know which I prefer but they're both very good they're filling a similar Niche let me show you how this one works first a category for a round is set by picking a number randomly from 1 to 100 there's a whole bunch of prompts you can pick on here but there's nothing stopping you from just making up your own and going from there these prompts take the form of a spectrum things that give you Goosebumps from 1 to 100 everyday items that could be a strong weapon important things in life think like a hero what's your pose and make sure to act it out each player then gets dealt just one card with a number on it from 0 to 100 and your Collective goal is to place these cards in order face down giving a clue as to where it might fit on that 0 to 100 spectrum for example if your spectrum was important things in life with zero being not important at all and 100 being crucial to your existence then 90 would be entertaining and informative board game reviews and two would be shelter but it's in the middle ground that things get a little bit interesting what does 40 look like on this spectrum maybe companionship and uh someone to chat to what does 75 look like again on this spectrum probably uh a dice tower review Maybe obviously EO is a fantastic engine for sort of whimsical conversations that we really really like like we like wavelength this is incredibly similar to wavelength but I think one of the magic tricks that this game pulls is that you can adjust your cards and your Clues at any given time which means that of sometimes you'll have players debating over whether they think that their sandwich is more or less disgusting than the person to their left they're like no my sandwich is really gross and they're like are you sure it's gross cuz mine's pretty bad and they're like yeah this one's awful I don't know what spectrum that would be like disgusting sandwiches good to good to bad I don't know I've sort of deliberately left my script for the section Ono a little bit fluffy because I think if you see this game if you see its premise and you're like yeah that sounds like the kind of thing that I like then you'll like it right if you want a game that's going to offer you just enough systems to push you and your friends into having a heated ridiculous argument about absolutely nothing uh then ETO is exactly the game for you it's that kind of game you know this kind kind of game you know what you're getting in for it's one of those and it's a great one it's a really good one it's fun but where does it fit in the ca ETO comes in at a lean 7 by yes and whilst you could put it in this little slot here where it fits perfectly you could instead take out the little cards and put them where they belong in the fridge to set and that's the end of this week's episode of shut up and sit down where we talked about five small games you can put in those weird gaps in your cax but we're not done we got a Bonus game it's through the desert alongside all of those small box card games that we got sent by allplay we also got sent their new shrunken down version of rhino kitzia classic through the desert and it is still great if you want to know how it plays you can check out our stream of it that came out quite a long time ago now but that's the old version of the game this is a new version it's exactly the same it's just a hell of a lot smaller I didn't want to include it in the sort of main body of this video because I thought the space could be better served by a sort of new and fresh game but this is still good still holds up if you want a great version of a classic G get it but what if you want even more small box game content well if you donate to Shad upin it down this month then you get access to a definitive ranking a truthful and accurate ranking of every single one of those allplay small boox games that have been peering out with me from my cupboard ever since I played them all over a weekend in a slightly exhaustive manner and haven't really known what to do with it since that's available to anyone who donates to shut upit down via either our website or our patreon and you get that alongside a whole host of other bonus bits this month me and Emily went head-to-head in the New York Times connections pig pen is peanuts a guy in peanuts mes horse dump horse what is a dump horse and you also get access to a full playthrough of Baron Park that me and Matt sat down to a nice cozy little viewing experience for when you to do the dishes last month we had first impressions on arcs we've had bonus podcasts about stuff we've been watching and playing recently it's just a good time donate to shut up and sit down and get a whole host of extra stuff for a meal deal a month thanks for watching everyone and we'll see you next week for more videos bye-bye

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 147,739

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, Big Top, Dro Polter, Ito, Sky Team, Spectral, Through the Desert

Id: rk2V_0CUjJc

Length: 23min 18sec (1398 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2024