Friendly Ties - Ark Nova Discussion Podcast

hey there welcome to friendly ties this is a podcast about board games and today i'm joined by my friends anastasia and nick and we just played a full game of arc nova uh that one was recorded and we've put a play through up for it on the john gets games youtube channel so definitely check that out if you want because i guarantee we are going to be spoiling it a lot today as we discuss that play and the game in general uh so yeah keep that in mind but you can find a link to it in the description if you'd like to check that out now at this point i'm going to have to jump in and interrupt myself because this is actually john from multiple days in the future uh now we've actually played this game a couple more times since we recorded this podcast and we had a lot more that we wanted to say so i wanted to let you know that at the end of this podcast episode we are going to talk about those extra plays that we had so i hope you stick around for that and you'll find that new section should show up about 40 minutes into this episode alright let's get back to jon from the past talking about this game so yeah let's talk about arc nova this was our second play for all of us and um it's like a franken euro game uh i guess i should have mentioned that at the start because not everybody has actually seen the playthrough but yeah it's got um it's got polyamino hexagonal polyaminos laying on your your own table tableau so kind of like a feast for odin but like a simplified version of that you get some bonuses and stuff based on where you place yeah it's got a terraforming mars vibe because it's got this gigantic deck of over 200 unique cards that you draw from frequently that have little icons on them that chain together and have various actions that you can utilize um it's got civilization a new dawn which is a civ style game where it's pretty much the exact same action system in both civ new dawn and uh arc nova where players have action cards in front of them and you activate the card and it's kind of next to a little track with a number and then you do it according to that number and then you slide that card down and the rest slide up so the longer you wait on not activating a card the farther it slides to the right and the bigger a number it's next to um on top of that there's rajas of the ganges which was a euro dice game that came out a few years ago and the big quirk for that one was there was two tracks one went clockwise one went counterclockwise and you won if you kind of connected your tokens on those two tracks and arcanova has that as well so there's a lot of stuff here from a whole bunch of other board games yeah so what if we just had like everything right like just put it all into one zoo based game yeah yeah plus plus the zoo theme which is i don't know i just i guess i was really playing birds this game so i was like is this wingspan on crack like is [Laughter] what i'm playing can you call having two birds a bird themed game you know what i don't wanna i don't wanna talk about it yeah so anyways i went in you know knowing very little about it other than you know people have been excited about it and you know i think for me concordia i mentioned this i think before it's like my favorite game so i actually was seeing the action track i didn't i didn't know it was in civ new dawn i haven't played that one but i was thinking okay look this is action selection in a very kind of unique and interesting way what's that going to be like and um i'll be honest also thought it was like it it's a it's a beast of a game there are a lot of rules to this game there's a lot going on there's a lot to learn and that kind of daunted me and you know i'm just going to go out there and say it i think this is a game because of that you've got to play a couple times you know um we're going to talk about this more but we had this first play where lots and lots and lots of mistakes were made and it was honestly it was a bit grueling i think even just not understanding enough of the mechanics the way we went about it um and i'll let the guys chip in on that uh it just it was it was a tough play and i came out the first play the first play um which is not what you guys would watch if you uh check out our playthrough that's not what we decided to post and we actually decided to play again um because because of how that play felt and yeah and coming off of that you know i was i don't want to say i was disappointed because i didn't go in with super high expectations i know you guys kind of have your own feelings on that but i um you know i wasn't really feeling it um but i will say the first time first time uh but i will say that uh you know there's playing it the second time and giving a little bit more you know space there's there's a lot a lot a lot of cool stuff going on here and so i definitely i'm intrigued to kind of explore it more and um and i'm pleasantly surprised to say that i you know i this is again becoming a theme here me losing horribly but i i lost horribly and uh and i still really enjoyed myself it's a huge boon when you [Music] you know lose and lose lose by a significant margin and that's not a frustrating experience and said that you had fun right like you were amped by the playthrough um i was opposite in terms of like coming into i was very hyped for this game uh part of the reason is you know it sounded like it had a collection of mechanics that i would like but really what stood out to me was the zoo theme um i love i love the opportunity for uh euro games to have a theme that um is first of all like not combative or not like controversial based on like where it's placed in the world so that's a nice thing um although zoos are their own controversies whatever yeah it's funny that you say that because that was actually yeah there's a bit of a turn off for me i was like zoo i don't know it's fair but i like also a game that allows you to create a narrative what you've done and i was really excited about the idea of like oh i would have like this kind of zoo and like i'd be like making jokes about you're this kind of zoo so that's all good and then people that i play with um my partner in particular like love animals right like this is a really appealing theme um and you know wingspan you know it brought up already is like a great example of that right like people like games about animals and like i'm i'm i'm i was i was excited for that my enthusiasm has been a little bit tempered after these plays the second play was a lot better than the first play um i absolutely agree with the two of you and there's stuff that i liked about this game but it didn't blow me away enough to make it worth the like learning and time hurdle um so it's like now that i've learned it and i've played it i'm like glad and i would play it again but i if i could go back in time i'm not sure that i would encourage myself to play this game just because of the the commitment that we really needed to put into learning it yeah so this game has a player driven end it doesn't have a set amount of rounds it just you keep playing until somebody crosses their tokens and in our first play uh it took a very long time for that to happen uh it's a little hard to say the exact amount of time because we were recording it anticipating putting it out as a playthrough and recording these things adds a lot of extra time but um that first play if we hadn't been recording would probably have taken close to four hours which is a very long time and i think a big part of that is because we didn't know what we were doing and we played very poorly in the first part of the game uh did not play towards you know getting points in ways that we should have it's not that we we didn't know that we needed to get points like we weren't dawdling around but we just we made a lot of strategic mistakes that we realized pretty quickly on and that's also part of the reason why we wanted to not showcase that first playthrough and uh we just we didn't feel like it it was we didn't really feel like it was that much fun uh like it like anastasia said it got a bit grueling there because it was such a long recording process and a long just a game to play and we wanted to give it another shot so we just played it again that was actually a week there's a full week between these two plays and the second time we played we think it would probably have taken around three hours total if we were not recording it took longer than that because we were recording this thing so it's still a long game but i feel like early on we were making a lot less silly mistakes and we were able to do interesting stuff much faster and um i think for other people like the first time you play this game you're gonna have some trouble like like definitely picking some cards thinking you could do this and like oh wait nope this restriction doesn't quite work that way and you know this this plan that you've been working towards you know several turns or maybe even many many turns kind of comes apart because you're a couple of money shy or you just misunderstood how one specific mechanic worked that happened a few times in that first play and it didn't really happen at all in the second play so that was nice to see that we went from making a ton of rules mistakes frustrating uh demoralizing rules mistakes in the first play to making essentially none in the second game until near the end right like where where we did have like a couple like oh i would have rather done this or i would like a little tick back and we just i mean it's just the game has so much stuff that we're like that's true do it so i think as the game expanded again you know we were all inclined towards making little mistakes and fixing those things right whereas like in the in the first playthrough we like absolutely like there were things that were like multiple turns back made decisions it was like oh my god i didn't understand that was like the consequence of these actions there's no way to like even fix this yeah i i definitely don't want to harp too much on that first play because you know it was artificially long because we were filming um but i do think there's a it's a large an interesting gap in enjoyment from that first frustrating play to this one where i i definitely had a great time like i felt like i was pretty much always juggling between really good options whereas the first time that was kind of the opposite and again i think that's just getting used to it there's a forum post on board game geek that the publisher put out they said that you know people who get experience with this game can play a two out two-player game of it in like less than 90 minutes and um i think with time you could definitely get to that point uh but for the first game it definitely i feel like so the game comes with a whole bunch of maps um there's these map a's which are the tutorial maps then there's map zero which is kind of like a catch-up map that's easier than the other ones which are all uh asymmetric and the rule book suggests you play with map a first and that's the only map option that we had so we played that one twice and part of me wishes that map a was maybe a little bit even more gifting to kind of catapult you in and make a shorter first play uh honestly maybe even just you know saying you know start at 20 appeal or something like that i don't know but i just feel like the first experience the first impression is going to be really important and uh reading from a bunch of posts online they say like once you play the game once like you really should jump into those asymmetric boards and that's something that i am actually quite interested in doing and i guess this is a long way of me saying we played on the tutorial beginner beginner map so like our impressions are also you know fixated on that we haven't even done the stuff that hypothetically seasoned board gamers should be experiencing the game for the most part i actually want to kind of you know before we kind of dive in a little bit deeper to this play and kind of more of our overall thoughts on the game i i do want to kind of pull out something that that did happen you know again we don't want to harp on our first play here but one thing that was a big change um was that we decided to play the uh care bear version i think that's what is that what the designer call it or then that's what i called it yeah the nice that way you're calling it yeah we're gonna call it it's a variant uh believe john you said the designer posted i think it was on bgg about this um and the idea is that there's these ten interactive cards they have a little bit at the bottom that is just for the solo game and um that's kind of important actually because if if you do play with them the normal way one of the things that kind of caught us up which we didn't realize um at first was that you don't actually get that extra benefit so that was one kind of thing that that we ran into but the other thing is just that these interactive cards they they're like a take down the leader uh mechanic not all of them but definitely one like the pilfering one a couple of them and they hurt and they're mean and that was that was really hard so you know in the first place in the first play um uh just to give a little tiny bit of context it's just nick had actually made a mistake and he had um you know played a card he didn't realize he could play and kind of built his game around it and then i had this card that was one of these attack cards and i was waiting for him to kind of get into the lead on both tracks so that i could then take you know play this card and i think it forced him to lose 10 money or or let me take two cards from his hand and you know this is a this is a heavy serious euro like i'm gonna put this in like for me this is like on the level of gaia project i'm sure some you know people would disagree but it's like that level of like depth and complexity and planning and and like every little energy counts you know that's what this is every little money and everything you're doing counts so to even though it's like the player can choose the person that's being attacked can choose you know we had a really difficult moment where i was like do i play this card i really need to play it but it just feels so bad and and it was a really it was a difficult moment for all of us and and and and it really made us reflect like we didn't want to play with these cards uh i think nick drew several of them he actually buried them in the game um i ultimately did end up playing that card i think as it turns out i couldn't play it then it doesn't matter but the point is in that first play for me personally it completely colored my experience of the game i was like i don't want to play this again with these cards and then you know john mentioned that the designer that's variant i think it's great and i have to say taking them out for me personally really helped the game i i didn't want the tension of knowing that those could be played against me i didn't want the emotional conflict of choosing whether or not to play them i'm just i'm very grateful to have taken them out and the game for me is 10 times better because we didn't play with them i understand people will like them and they want to keep them but i'm just saying if those turn you off try playing without them because it really helped just to to confirm like we played with the cards we just played with the solo effects on the bottom instead of the right effects on the top yeah and the weird thing about these is that there's 212 cards in that deck and 10 of them are interactive so it's like four percent of this deck can punch somebody in the face which is really a small amount like you could easily play this game and never see any of those but we drew so many of them we drew more of those than we drew birds let me tell you yeah not a great experience but it's interesting because the closest comparison is terraforming mars again right not only it's a big stack of cards but there are a few cards in this big stack of cards that attack another player but a difference that exists between this game in that game is that in terraforming mars you choose what player you hit and in this game it just says hey you target the players who have uh the most points or someone who's in front of you um and there's a couple things that i find weird about that i mean i i can appreciate what they're trying to do with it right they're trying to take away that part in like terraforming mars where you're like take that to the person who's already down right that you or you like misjudge who's winning and therefore like target that person which i appreciate that being said you know in euro in many euro games having the most points at a given point in time is not a good indicator of who's winning um in a lot of instances and so it's a it's a really rough proxy for saying hey like i want to take down the leader and like you might even have a perception of the gamer it's like it's very obvious that this person is winning but they don't actually have more points so i can't even target them with this negative card um i find that to be a weird dynamic so i i i almost wanted to be like if the game is going to be interactive and have those cards like great that's a part of the mechanic but here it just it seems almost like this little hanging appendix and when we excised the appendix it didn't change anything about the game and we were happier for it yeah i mean i think another part of it to i mean wrap up my thoughts on the the interactive cards is that some of them could take cards out of other people's hands and that's really kind of that's a big stumbling point some of them just made an action cost higher or had a little coin penalty and those are going to slow you down but actually removing a card from your hand felt like a line i personally didn't want to cross because this game is a like you said it's a heavy euro tons of planning some of these cards you will spend half your game trying to get played and if at the wrong moment somebody plays a pilfer card on you and you don't have the money to pay them off and they take that away from you i just i just don't want to play that version of the game and i was i have to admit i was overjoyed when i saw this variant posted by the designer um it was actually in a reply to a forum thread that i put out there uh asking if you know we were playing these really mean cards this way and yeah as soon as i saw that i was like this is the way i want to play it and before we started recording this second playthrough i asked if you two were okay with it and you were and i'm i'm certainly happy that that we went with that interpretation um so there's a whole bunch of other stuff happening in this game and it's really easy to get bogged down into the minutia and i'm sure we've already gone too far into the minutia overall but from a very high level perspective i really liked the planning perspective of like planning through the cards the action cards especially and we're broken records at this point but especially the second time we played the first time it i felt very motivated to just play the biggest card you know whatever card was in my five slot or my four slot to get the biggest bang for my buck but in the second play where i came a relatively close second i feel like i played this one quite a lot better than the first one i was frequently activating cards when they were relatively low specifically because i knew that would kick them down to the bottom and then when i did other stuff they would start to filter back up again more quickly so specifically there's this association action and i knew i wanted to do that a lot so i kept doing it when it hit like the two or three spot to kick it down so it would get back up there instead of waiting to get to the five all those extra actions to bump it down i kind of used the tempo of the game to really lean into that and i think i placed way more uh conservation cubes down because of that association action throughout the game than anybody else did because i was really enjoying that action juggle yeah i think it it there's definitely a really interesting dance that occurs with within this game like you've got these this action selection you know row you know as you were just talking about that how you time that and when you time that and the power of each of those cards and that is really fun um but then you've also got these kind of rolling bonuses and you do kind of the way nick was saying you have to kind of be patient because they don't they don't they take a little while to come out and so i will say that you know one of the tricky parts of that is if you plan it well and i think we can all agree that john in this play planned it particularly well he had a lot of things that kind of played into especially the first half like it was first half it was it was all coming up john the first half of the game it was all coming up john and it was like he was able to do a lot of combos and if you can make those combos happen it feels really good i mean and very similar to terraforming mars where you know things if they kind of match up and you can make them work together that's that's really great um and other games and but it does have this kind of reaping reward kind of what some other games that we like i always reference grand austria hotel for this but you know um darwin's journey which is obviously not out yet but uh but let's see there's some other games lots of games where you you know thing after things just kind of like rolling bonuses kind of come out and i like that but you can also i will say that it induces a lot of ap like this is this is an ap party like just get ready embrace it you know which is probably part of the reason why it's so long especially for your first couple of plays there are so many different things you can do the way those cards move and keeping track of that and then keeping track of the way you can get different things but then also it's you know i found myself in a lot of this play stuck you know like not a lot but but during john's first half when he was doing great my first half i spent a lot of it stuck and you and it doesn't feel good to do those actions you know at the two or threes if you're not getting much or you just really need to get that up to the five but then you've got to take another one and yeah you can move your five card down to the one and take an x token but like then you're just wasting that action so so you can find yourself in the middle of this machine and when it's flowing great like a lot of these games where they're when they're when they're flowing it's awesome and when they're not flowing it can be a little bit frustrating you know and and you can you can really kind of work through a lot of machinations to still find yourself a little bit caught or that it's going to take you three turns to do something and then you have to wait a while while your opponents do these massive turns or think through their turns so i will say i can see if you played a lot you're going to get to that 90 minutes but definitely a lot to think about which is if you want to grind your brain you know which i enjoy um this is this is a place to do it you will get you'll get a good workout from it totally i think part of the um reason that that like getting stuck or that like rigidity that you felt earlier in the game at one point in the middle of the game i i joked with anastasia like it felt like she had kind of like one path i had two paths and john had like seven paths right um and john talked about the options as being really fun for his game and i i know that anastasia and i also had fun in this game but it was a different kind of fun it wasn't about making choices it was about making it work and very much i was thinking the whole time about like how can i make this work because i think it's because of the structure of the cards right in order to play an animal into your zoo which is like really the primary thing that you're trying to do you need to have built a building that's the appropriate size you might need some other prerequisites which include maybe having an association with a certain university or an association with like a certain other continent and uh in order to have built that building you need to pay some money in order to buy this animal you need some money you also need to have drawn the cards in the first place which is his own separate action and so there's this like pretty you know tightly constrained flow about what you need to do to play things under the board and it can lead to this like sort of like frustration getting stuck but it also has this other side of like when you accomplish something it feels really good uh in that first game which you know we said before was like a frustrating thing at the beginning i said i want to play this nile crocodile which requires me to play three reptiles and i like bee-lined towards like upgrading my action i flipped it over i put a reptile house in play i started slamming down reptiles i was drawing reptiles off the board i was like prioritizing those cards and when i played that nile crocodile it did feel very satisfying and i i like that right i enjoy that part of the game like it is it is a double double edged sword right because that constraining um feeling can be frustrating if you're having a hard time getting out of it but once you get to cross that line it's like oh man like i finally got to like put this bad boy down and that felt very satisfying i was like this is the game plan it's falling into place like it's totally been worth these like four or five steps that i took to get here yeah definitely i mean i think and i think that just kind of goes back to what we were just saying about you know how with those interactive cards how much like exactly what you said like all of that all of that grinding all of that working to get there and then get that satisfaction is and that is that's the joy of this game that's what made losing with a score of negative 41 spoilers right off the top just losing there it was still fun because i was able to get you know my kangaroo down and i was able to get these different card you know do these different things and create these different combos and that alone makes for a a really fun experience but i will say and i'm curious to hear your guys's thoughts on this this is a euro game with a 200 card deck and i drew so many cards from that deck and i wanted to play a bird strategy and i did not draw i drew one bird in all of the times that i drew cards and i drew a lot of cards and you know that that is the randomness you have to adapt to that deck and i and i and in this play i tried to do that i went and shifted into a whole reptile strategy but again i i just i was not able to make it come together in a way that worked and so that's obviously gonna need a little bit more playing for me to see how much can you adapt to the cards in your hand if you're not getting a synergy and i knew that from when i you know i said that to you guys when i pulled my starting hand um i was like i don't have a synergy here and i'm gonna try and make one work and i i felt like i went through a lot of that deck and i never found one i'm you guys found great ones and i found enough of one but um that is i know that's gonna be that randomness is gonna be a point of frustration and i'm i yeah i'm curious what you guys have to think about that the draw deck and the river of cars in the middle of the board is part of the reason why i was very excited to try this game i was very excited much like nick for for all sorts of mechanical reasons but looking at the terraforming mars comparison specifically with that gigantic deck of cards uh in terraforming mars in my opinion the best way to play that game is a drafting variant where you hand draft cards every single round so you're passing cards around you get to see a whole bunch of them and in arc nova there's a lot of drawing blind from the top of the deck early in the game and there's this interesting evolving mechanic where you can actually upgrade the cards that you have in front of you and i think four out of the five action cards that you have interact with a reputation track which is along those cards in the middle and this is a long way of saying that as the game goes deeper and you upgrade your cards you can start to actually access those face up cards in the middle much more often you could play them as if they were in your hand that happened at one point nick just uh played a sponsor card from the middle of the table oh i felt so good yeah that was an amazing moment when i did that and uh and it seems like that's how arc nova is trying to get around that that card draw randomness is as you get deeper in the game and you start to upgrade your cards you have much more options available to you face up in the middle of the table but you are potentially competing for those options with your opponents um in my opinion that sort of came to reality like there were many times where i had an opportunity to draw cards from the middle and i just didn't really like the cards options there there are six cards there and every time a break happens which is it probably it's kind of a round income scoring thing i won't go into the details of but it's probably happened about five or six times throughout the game every time that happens you ditch two of these cards so there's a little bit of cycling but it did feel to me like the promise of having this extra large hand of more options that you can choose from didn't quite end up being that helpful for me i i desperately needed an asia icon and i kept drawing blind from the top of the deck because there weren't any out there and maybe that's because i was being too specific like anastasia hunting desperately for uh for birds i expanded it to birds i i wanted birds and what else did i want i wanted herbivores and then i wanted like i was i was trying to be really open-minded but i feel this i totally agree with you john well i'm curious about the future of arc nova and how we all land on it um i personally like we've said a couple times really enjoyed the second play i actually have this game on pre-order i pre-ordered this along with a few other games and i am going to keep that pre-order going um this is a a really cool game that's mixing together a whole bunch of stuff that i like realistically my only real problem with it is it's longer than i'd like at this point and i've seen many people mention that online so i don't think i'm necessarily alone in that respect but still like the both of you know how to play it so that definitely motivates me to want to play this more and in particular i don't think i'm interested in playing it anymore with the map a's which are essentially the tutorial maps and those are the only ones currently on the tabletop simulator mod but i'm quite interested to try this more with the other ones to see how that variability goes because i know there's maps where like if you build around certain spots you get double money for various things there's there's a whole bunch of asymmetric effects that come and i haven't briefed myself on them that recently but i remember when i looked at them thinking oh this map looks fun oh that map looks really fun like i want to see how that one plays out and it's even more than that like the bonuses underneath spots that you cover up like with the zoo tokens and the uh universities all that stuff is different from one board to the next so i'm i'm quite excited to experience those situations yeah i i love some asymmetry so i uh i would have said even without the other boards that i would absolutely play this game again with the other boards i'm excited to play this game again i think the thing that i just it it really is a long and taxing game and if someone if anyone is new to the game i'm gonna assume it's gonna be three hours you know minimum i also would say that if i was playing this game with someone who was just learning for the first time i kind of wonder if i would recommend playing with opening with open hands until the first break um because i think the the loop of of play progress until the first break is is pretty tight you know it's basically like you're gonna build once maybe twice you're gonna sponsor once you're gonna add you know animals once you're gonna draw some cards um but if someone you know takes their starting cards and and hasn't really kind of thought through like what they're gonna pay to build the structure and then pay to build the animals i think they can really shoot themselves on the foot uh in the first cycle there and so preventing a new player from having that miserable first cycle i think really adds to the ability of this game to blossom so that's something that i would keep in mind uh when playing with someone else yeah that's interesting uh one other thing that i've read is that once you play this game a bunch and maybe you you're playing it with the asymmetric boards and then you bring somebody else new in um the rules uh recommend that you let that new person i believe play the map zero boards which we didn't play with but i'm not sure exactly what they look like but apparently they are a little bit of a not a ketchup thing but a stepping stool for the new players to kind of even the situation out a little bit and i like the fact that the game comes with options like that uh yeah it just seems like you know we've played the game with training wheels and i i'm i'm super curious to try it after the training wheels have been removed so at this point a few days ago we wrapped up this podcast with some nice things about how we want to play the game in the future but uh well we haven't published a podcast yet and we've ended up playing this game a couple more times so this is being recorded a few days later anastasia's here along with nick um and anastasia's actually played this game two more times and nick and i both played it once and we wanted to talk a little bit more about this game even though we've talked quite a bit now that we have even more experience with it yeah i think the first thing we should just update is that you know in playing the two player games both games took about two hours to play uh maybe a smidge less if you were getting better at it but it does kind of crack a little bit faster with two which is what you'd expect i think yeah it's been an arc nova day for you right anastasia yeah now it has been i played it with john this morning and then honestly i was riding so high off of the play with john in which i i lost by a smidge but did so much better i wish that had been the game we were recorded like i my game was like unfolding it was just like card after card after combo and it felt so good we can let's just say this i didn't lose by negative 41 points again um i felt like i drew what i needed to draw it was just it was great and um and yeah and then nick was free and i was like let's do it again so then i got nick to uh play with me again this afternoon i likely had a free day today and um it was fun it's fun to just kind of dive into the game and really see the breadth of it i will say playing against nick as he does it wasn't quite i wasn't quite as successful come at the king now one big thing about these plays and realistically the reason why we suddenly like jumped on this to play it a bunch is that the asymmetric boards became available to be used but up till now the the tts module only had the basic one which is why we played them twice so we were all super excited to play with those because as we just mentioned in the podcast um playing with the map a was kind of like training wheels so we wanted to try without the training wheels and anastasia's now actually seen half of them there are eight of them total and we played two in our game and you you two played two other ones in yours the boards seem to be uh basically just on default a little bit less uh rewards than than kind of that a board that we were playing at the sort of training wheels board but then each of them has like one you know special thing that they're good at which mostly falls into the category of being good at this type of card being good at getting money or getting some extra points for doing this or that or maybe easing restrictions like the one that i played let me play animals out for one less requirement and and i came right out of the gate in that game i played the first two animals i put down one needed a zoo partnership that i didn't have and the other one needed you know a european icon and i didn't have any of that but i was immediately quote unquote cheating out these animals because of the asymmetric effect of that board that i chose and you know that was fun yeah for sure i mean the thing that they definitely bring out of the game is is they do add this like kind of special power that you get so in both of the games that i played today you know i had abilities that gave me lots of money too much money if i'm being perfectly honest i was just so flush with cash i couldn't figure out how to spend it all um and neither and in neither of the games did i actually upgrade my association action and use it to donate so um so i didn't i didn't quite do much with it but but the point is that they they give you almost i i'm not going to call them game breaking powers they're not game breaking they're just they do shape your play a little bit so for example i had one when i was playing with nick that i could discard a card every turn for three money which i you know was actually crazy powerful i thought i thought i i thought i'd read it wrong for the first half of the game i thought it was every break i thought i was like once per you know round if you will i was like oh i you know and then i realized oh wait that's every turn so that was awesome except it does change the way i interacted with my hand a lot like i was telling them afterwards you know i felt like i i kept my hand really slim because i was constantly you know trying to play out cards every turn or discard cards and focus on getting more cards to kind of work that engine and so it really did change the way that i play as opposed to my game with you john where my board just gave me basically an extra five income um for for having placing around this one place on my board and again you had a rocking restaurant in the middle of your yeah i focused on doing that very quickly yeah and it shaped how i started the beginning of my game in that i did that immediately and then that extra income boost really kind of fueled things along as i went so so if they're not they they kind of run the gamut they're not crazy changes but they do they do kind of add that little extra ability and then of course as nick already pointed out they they have different little changes all over the board so the what you get and how you get it is is is changed up and that's really quite fun yeah that was actually something i wanted to mention you know in broad strokes you see the board and there's text on the bottom and it says you know this you know john gets to you have one less restriction and anastasia gets a bunch more income uh but there's these subtle things around like with little different spots i don't want to go into too many details but one for me was an income thing that i could unlock with a conservation and it said every time we do a break which again is every variable number of turns you get to take income with a break every time i did a break i could move cards my action cards around two of them i could tank them all the way to the bottom which seemed really fascinating to me it seemed like maybe conditionally good but i actually think that's a big reason as to why i won because i got to use that twice near the end of the game to cycle through my cards far faster than i normally would it's effectively two full turns of cycling those cards in order to get the right cards in the right positions to get a whole bunch of animals into my zoo and then i barely won so i really think that's manipulation from that tiny little icon in one spot on the board which i don't i haven't seen on any of the other boards was a really big factor and you know i was the research institute so like that made sense like you know jiggering around with the different action cards i think thematically that worked yeah just looking through them it seemed like the one of the conservation bonuses is unique on each of them and then there's a couple other small things that change from one to another so you know difference is there but i think that at the end of the day your strategy is still going to be largely determined by the animal cards that you're drawing or the sponsor cards that you're drawing and kind of making your game plan around that for sure i actually like that i don't think that the asymmetry doesn't take over i was worried that the asymmetry was going to be too dictating of what your strategy was and i thought that actually it was just kind of like a nice nice perks or cheating or corner cutting rather than like a total dictation of what you were doing so my question is did it feel like the training wheels were off when we played with these asymmetric boards versus the the map a which we all played twice so i think for me it did like i felt like and i already said this that the game kind of unfolded for me and my play with you john like i felt like having that extra little ability helped kind of frame my direction of play it helped me kind of i'm not sure the order of this but in both cases we picked our boards before we went through our hands so it helped me think like okay this is kind of how i'm gonna play now i'm gonna kind of do it in this direction i also thought it was fun to kind of work to the board instead of kind of feeling like everyone's working around the same thing you're kind of you're all good at some point going to get that extra person you're going to get that extra income that came on those a boards i felt like you had to adapt to a very different map to a very different series of bonuses and each of those was kind of fun and like how am i going to make this strategy work and and you know nick said something about the game that really resonated with me um he said that it's a game of restrictions and how you adapt to that is is how you play the game and i felt like playing at the today you know was i was able to to see the puzzle that was there and it's addictive and it's fun and it's fun to like to keep playing it and to have it get better and better on you i definitely want to segue off that comment obviously like i i do very much believe that this is a game restrictions i said this even in the in the earlier podcast that we were talking about where it it's a game about that the good feeling is do you manage to pull something off with all these limitations of what it is that you're trying to do i still felt that way playing through this game uh but you know we figured out ways a little bit more now and into your your question john about are the training wheels off to use your money a little bit more sparingly and you know where you really need to focus your efforts so that you can unlock an extra association worker which we've all determined like wow that second one is is so huge the third and fourth find you can get away with it but you really want that second one at some point in the game um i think overall my biggest kind of flow issue with this game is that i don't like the first cycle of the game and the first cycle i mean like the actions that you're taking before the first break because you have a specific amount of cash you know 25 to 30 dollars probably you have basically one association worker short of some something like really amazing happening in the game and that first sequence is is tight and and annoying like i find the game kind of stalls at the beginning and it is as soon as we get past that first break the game starts sailing a little bit more and then those restrictions feel um you know very very valid and you can work around them you know it's how much you're willing to commit to like how am i going to adapt to these restrictions so for me the beginning is a little rocky and then once we get past that point it feels really good again i would agree with that uh in my play with anastasia earlier today uh we were probably about a third the way through and i commented that i was just i didn't feel like i was doing anything like i my my stuff was so slow i kept doing all these high powerful actions for low um payoff and then i look over at anastasia and she would do a build action put three things down that covers up this icon and then that lets you put this card down she could pay that for this and getting the special bonus for that and then you know i blink and three minutes have gone by and she put like 10 spaces worth of stuff on her board and i like comes back to me and i'm like i'm gonna build and i put a size one enclosure down okay it's your turn again and like that felt i remember being worried i felt like i was gonna you know lose the game i felt like it was running away but then you know the game really started picking up for me i got an awesome predator engine going um cheetahs and hyenas and all sorts of stuff going on and i ended up squeaking out a victory because i was able to kind of slingshot back by getting some stuff together and i think i think my early game suffered a little bit more from that stall than anastasia's did and that was partly my fault i had this awesome tiger in my hand at the start of the game and i really wanted to play this incredibly expensive tiger and so you know i shot myself in the foot a little bit trying to make that happen but once i got the tiger played you know things really started going well for my predator zoo yeah yeah and and i think like the variable this actually something we talked about earlier in the podcast is like the variable end game also really affects how this plays out right so like john and you and i played a little bit longer you had time to come back like i was worried too like and i i actually i think it's a credit to this game it really does feel like it plays long enough that you can kind of have a slow rolling start that you you can come back from it if you can kind of roll things out well but nick did something really interesting in our play which is that he just hammered the brake track and it's not that that overly affected me but it did because obviously i was getting income too but what he was getting was he was getting all of the x tokens and he was just controlling the momentum of the game and the resetting and the things i was doing it's like oh well that doesn't matter because now we're breaking and that kept the speed of the game much faster i can definitely see how once you know this game if you're playing two player i mean we we were already talking in the beginning we were just like turn after turn after turn like you could you can you can play this thing in 90 minutes i don't i didn't believe that but now i can see it it is possible but he was doing that and that tempo meant that i couldn't come back like you know once he started to slip i was like i'm i'm just slipping and it's over you know we were laughing because he was like i was like i need four more turns and then he like drew a no card and ended it and i was like i told you i needed four more turns that brings us to like the differences between these you know we played we've all played two three player games and now you know we've all have some experience with the two-player game yeah i mean at the end of the day it's still the same game unsurprisingly in a two-player game you have a little bit more control right like controlling over when the break tempo happens um is more in your wheelhouse the back and forth is faster uh the the conservation and like who is racing for what it's it's it's a lot easier to say like oh like you have two birds i have two birds um not that that's difficult in a three-player game but just with with heads up it's obviously just more straightforward so it feels the same as i i would say like most euro games in terms of the difference between two and three players i am going to say though the tension that you feel is someone gonna get in my way that is for me at least that is thick at three like i was just like oh boy this is like like i i just i i was like on the edge of my computer this is gonna happen um that is not the case when you play with two um and i actually prefer that i prefer having the more control i prefer being able to kind of like the chest that's kind of back and forth kind of anticipating but i will say it too it was also a lot easier to just get like be in my own strategy and just be like oh you did something okay fine back to me like it because it's moving so fast and because there's only one other player the chances that they're going to get in your way are much less and so this did feel a lot more like multiplayer solitaire which for me is not a bad thing but for some others it might be at two than it did at three and i was surprised at how different that tension was um i think it does lose some of that it too yeah and for me the biggest impact is it's just shorter the the the endgame trigger doesn't change between the player counts so there's just less time waiting to take your next turn and that's fine with me uh i think you know i mentioned earlier on in the podcast i didn't really see myself wanting to play this before um i could totally see myself playing at three again but i think two is probably gonna be my favorite player count because the joy for me of this game and and we'll talk a little bit about where we're at now about our opinions but i'm going to say like i had a lot of joy today in our two-player game the joy was putting that combo together in my own my own little zoo my my predators working off of each other the other kind of things i had going on i had tons of zoo partnerships for discounts and universities and all that kind of stuff and i loved chaining all that kind of stuff together and yeah occasionally looking over at what anastasia's doing and being like whoa you did some pretty cool stuff too okay back to my cool stuff um and you know focusing on that that puzzle you know with when there's less people around the table you can spend more time pressing those buttons and uh yeah like we briefly mentioned um both of these two player games were essentially two hours i think mine in anastasia's was like two hours and ten minutes and nick on stages was like an hour and 50 or something like that yeah no and i think john you like absolutely and i think i feel the same way i think i'd love to jam this at two i think that's gonna be my preferred player count for it too i would i prefer just kind of like creating my little sand castle and then just seeing like is my sand castle better than yours and having lost this game at this point four times in a row just like a streak of losses that i've got going i do i have won games before i swear you've had a positive score in two out of these four games that's not that's not something to brag about [Laughter] but i you know it it is it is fun you know i i have to say this is one that has unlocked for me a little bit and that i i was definitely not positive on it after our first play i don't think any of us were no no i think we were all disappointed and worried about after our first play it's a good sign that that i think each of us has had more fun essentially on each subsequent play yeah yeah for sure and i definitely think that this is one we know we said that already like you got to kind of like commit to it and it is a it is a it is a heavy load this is this is not this is not one you're going to go into lightly but once you do i think if you are able to keep playing it it does improve and it has improved for me and i'm actually really happy to see that because it is it's a fun game i enjoy the puzzle of that um i still cannot figure out how to get conservation points i don't know what i'm doing but like conservation early game it is it is hard it's hard to unlock that but i i will say for me that playing with you john and having things go so well at the beginning and feeling like i'd cracked the puzzle was was it was intoxicating it was so much fun even losing which i don't really want to talk about it was so much fun to to have that happen and i you know i was like oh i get i get the game now you just have to be really tactical you can't hold on anything and it was really unfolding for me and so when we finished i i was like oh man i want to play it again i want to play it again and then i will say i was a little tempered playing it with nick because things didn't unfold quite as easily so there is that terrible to play with yeah you are that's why i keep doing it um no it just it didn't and it was but it wasn't him right it's the cards it's the it's it they're the cards are random there's so many of them that the way they unlock it i thought that you know it i'm sure this is a game as you get to know the cards no matter what you can you can turn it into something magical but it that didn't that didn't happen for me in the second play and that does temper it a little bit you i was reminded right game of restrictions it's hard and when it's hard it's hard and you can't always bring that together but you know right when we finished you know i was late and i was still like let's go again even though we don't have time and we're not going to but i just meant like even when you finish it you do then you you're like let's play it again because you you you keep wanting to crack that puzzle and and you know that's that that definitely is going to keep me coming back yeah um digging this game more it's fun to play i'm looking forward to playing with the two of you some more um it was a lot of work to get here though i feel like just the amount of hours that we took into like learning the rules and then playing the game you know and i wonder how i would feel playing this game with someone else and i think i would be very wary about teaching this to someone new that isn't open to coaching um and the reason for that is because it's not that the rules of the game are that hard you know in this third play here i don't think there was like a single rules mistake or even question that felt like it came up it is about the sequencing of the game and you know you flip over one action card and like three rounds later you're like oh my god now i can't do this other thing i need to get another action card flip and they're not available to me and that just sucks like you know you can you could really back yourself into a corner you need to have a lot of foresight in this game um in order to play it not even well but just like to do the things you want to do and you can get to a point where you're like i can't do anything and and you know that's that's that's really tough for for um until you really get what's going on so i i do stand by that that learning curve is is rough to get into it the other thing is you know play with people who are who are cozy with take backs like we are i think in my play with anastasia there were two significant take backs you know it wasn't like there was no new information but like he was like oh i want to do this enclosure that i didn't realize already three enclosure and things like that and i think anastasia had one big one and you know we're our group is is totally down with those kind of things to help out these situations because i definitely had a chicken and egg situation at one point where i said you know i'm gonna activate the thing in the five and then the thing in the form like i have to do the thing in the four before the five and the five before the four and and you know i just kind of my brain spiraled off into an infinity um and i took me a minute to rebound from that but i guess where i'm at now is i had so much fun with the third play and a lot of fun with the second play and not a lot of fun with the first play so i think that's a pretty good curve uh and i do attribute a decent amount of the the first plays bummer-ness to the fact that we're recording it so it went really long and uh because of that as well but you know part of it's the game but you know the the high moments of drawing the perfect card which happened to me when i pulled a cheetah in our predators game that was just amazing that those kind of things are great and i drew a lot of cards for it you know part of that's luck part of that's you know randomness but part of it also was was building towards something like i kept a card in my starting hand that benefited me for predators so i was looking for them all game long and and i was rewarded for that and i was not rewarded for other things uh you know i spent a bunch of energy getting a sponsorship down that gave me discounts on large animal restrictions and i didn't use it once so you know it's easy to rose-colored glasses and remember all those those big high moments and i don't i think i'm gonna be coming back to this one quite a bit i certainly hope to i certainly hope to especially at two players because i've been really enjoying where it's going yeah yeah for sure and i think that that's like the last thing that i want to say on it is like something that you brought up john when we were playing which is there is because of that massive deck because like there is that randomness but there is also a lot here in the four plays of it that i've had now the three for each of you we have seen a lot of different things come out we we have i saw cards come out with john that i'd never seen i nick and i were looking up things that i was like wait that what's this times two token that i'd like you will play this game differently every single time let alone the the different boards and all of that but i will i will say that there all that teach all that stuff going in does does pay dividends in the variety of the game and that is a credit to the game because there is there are a lot there's a lot of moving pieces here there's a lot of ways things can unfold for you and and the game does reward you handsomely when that all works together and it also can make it really hard to never find a single bird in the freaking deck and then watch nick draw literally nine of them i was like yes nick you play the bird strategy because you'll never draw one and then you know to have them all come out and so that also speaks to how difficult it can be sometimes to focus on one thing i mean it really does encourage you to like let things go you know it's like like you said john you put something down and it just never came out but there there's a lot a lot here and so if you are willing to take the time to invest in it and you're willing to go there you will enjoy it and it'll be different and fresh and it will have a long journey with you it's also been fun putting this little addendum in like i'm glad we didn't publish the podcast yet because now we could we could keep on talking because we just cannot stop ourselves from talking about these games so uh yeah hopefully this wasn't too disorienting for people uh hearing two different versions of us about three or four days apart but uh yeah this has been uh an interesting pretty big project that we've been uh going and it's been a fun project playing games uh and i think that's gonna essentially wrap up everything we have to say about this one um if you have any comments if you want to weigh in about this game uh then please go to the youtube version of this podcast you can find a link to it in the description and comment over there we'd love to see that kind of thing and as always thank you so much for listening bye as always i'd like to thank everyone who's been supporting this channel including these producer level patreon supporters if you too would like to directly support the channel in the creation of future videos like this one then please go to johngetsgames.com support also if you enjoyed this video please click the like button for it down below as well as the subscribe button for the channel thanks for watching

Channel: JonGetsGames

Views: 12,660

Keywords: friendly ties, friendly ties podcast, ark nova, ark nova jongetsgames, ark nova friendly ties, ark nova podcast, review

Id: i-eSjvMHDRM

Length: 57min 13sec (3433 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 02 2021