July 2021 Round Up - 20 Games in 48 minutes!

hey everybody the july 2021 roundup is brought to you by fun again games and july was a very big month verrado runs through because i launched a new show which is something i very rarely do i tend to stay in my lane and just run through games for the most part but last week on wednesday we put up the first episode of a brand new show the r r show and r r stands for rotto and ruel gaviola who's a friend of mine i've known him for over a year now ever since he first got online and started doing his own live youtube streaming uh channel actually started out on facebook then was on youtube for a little bit and then ultimately ended up on twitch where you can find him and his wife michelle all the time constantly playing games demonstrating games and royale is just the nicest person you are ever going to meet we did a couple of top 10 collaborations last year we did a kickstarter special and i mean i just enjoyed talking to him so much about games on camera but just about life off camera and i wanted more of that in my life and um you may recall last year i was doing a show for quite a while for many many months called corner to corner with tom vassell where it was just every week we would talk about various hundred game topics take questions and answers and all that and ever since that went offline because it was just getting tougher and tougher for um tom and i to to mesh our schedules we're both very busy it was tough to make it continue to work and so we happily parted ways the c to c show was um you know uh put out to pastor and ever since then people are saying we want more we want more that's where the r r show comes in because the intent is every week for the two of us to get together for about an hour and just talk games talk about future games present games past games take questions from the audience uh we'll bring back the audience suggested top five lists although i think they might be top threes now um and we have ideas for a whole bunch of segments um making roell rank his game library um some this or that type stuff all kinds of really cool things every week we should be giving you new interesting game related content and i can guarantee you he and i will be having a great time doing it we really enjoy each other's company and i i think we vibe really well i've got kind of a manic energy he's much more chill and laid back and you know just silky smooth and i mean actually obviously the first episode's been up it's got a bunch of comments i think my favorite one was somebody said it's so wholesome it's just two friends talking about board games for an hour and being very positive and upbeat and that's what we want this show to be whether we're talking about games or um giving away games for example and that's something um that i wanted to point out folks for the first episode we are giving away this is still in shrink copy of fort which is an excellent um card tableau building game all about recapturing those uh childhood summer days of building forts in your backyards and playing with all the neighborhood kids you can watch my run through to find out more about it it's an excellent card game and we are giving one copy away to one lucky winner and all you got to do to enter well not surprisingly is go watch the show um if you watch the show in the first 10 minutes it will be explained what you have to do basically have to send an email to an email address with a secret word that was mentioned at one point in the episode so if you would like fort and you sh if you don't have it you should it's an excellent game um really wonderful stuff there very very clever design um this could be coming your way free of charge anywhere in the world just go check out the first episode of the r r show you can hit that i in the top right corner of the screen there's a link for it or there's a link for it down in the show notes and hopefully you will find yourself enjoying it as much as we will enjoy putting it on and we'll be here every wednesday 12 noon pst um for the foreseeable future just talking about our deep deep love of games and i hope you can join us and tell us about your level games too okay that was the big news but you know what that's talking about the future let's talk about the past let's um count down all the games we played over the last four weeks because that's what this roundup is uh we'll start with our least favorite end with our most favorite uh new game of the month uh promised every month and uh before we start with all the games that my wife jen and i played and it was a very interesting oddball month actually i'll talk about that when we get to us first we gotta start out with shea my number one contributor who i believe played four games of his own and he's gonna walk us through them countdown style least favorite to most favorite starting now okay shay take it away hey folks so i played four games this month and while i am going to rank them because you know that's what we're here to do i do want to say upfront that i loved all four of these games so even though one of them is going to be on the bottom of the list i would gladly play all of them again they were a ton of fun and i really enjoyed them so i'm going to start with my number four lands of galaxies now this was a paid preview and this is a storytelling adventure game very much in the vein of tales of arabian nights but it is a much gentler theme it's got you know anthropomorphic animals in uh you know your sort of fantasy world you are going to be wandering around uh the different cities and towns and just sort of encountering the world but unlike uh the tales of arabian nights i think this game has a lot more focus and it is a lot more streamlined you have certain quests that you go on and these quests will un uh unfold into a a series of you know it's a series of quests that connect to make a narrative and that really helps you to get involved in the game i've really felt connected to the characters that i played and the stories that they told i also felt that this game was very accessible uh you know there was so much going on that uh it i think that anyone can really enjoy you know there are a lot of games that try to do storytelling games and try to make them dark or like really gritty no this is a much more pleasant experience than that i like i said in the final thoughts i was absolutely charmed by this game um i will say though that it is pretty mechanics light which is why it's on the bottom of the list um now like with tales of arabian nights which is similar the mechanics are not the point of the game you're telling you're playing this game to tell a story with your friends and what i like most about lanza galzir is that the story doesn't end at the end of the game instead you are going to uh once the game is over you pack up your character all their items any quests that they haven't finished and you're gonna pack it away because you will continue them on the next game you play it's not exactly a legacy game but it does have these ongoing elements so i really enjoyed that about it so that was my number four lands of galaxies now number three was assassin's creed uh brotherhood of venice and this i really really dug now i don't have a ton of time for long campaign games which is one part of the reason why this is uh at number three instead of any higher but for a campaign game i think this is excellent now it is not just a great game on its own which it is but it's also a great adaptation of a video game series assassin's creed is a stealth assassination game and that's what you've got here a lot of campaign games and this style are about brawling you're gonna face up against a bunch of enemies or some really big ones and you have to defeat them in combat and while you do do that in assassin's creed the primary focus is on stealth you are trying to avoid danger as long as you can and you're only really fighting when you have to that i think really helps tie you into the setting and i think that is a kind of a fresh take on this kind of game now the slight problem i had with it is just that it's so big and it's so there's so many minis in it that it is a very expensive game and it's a very big box which you know for hobbyist board gamers might not be an issue but because this is based on a video game and because it's so accessible and it's such a good game i think that it could otherwise be really appealing to get video gamers into the hobby and so i wish that there was a budget option if there was this would be definitely be higher on the list as it is right now it is still a very good game it's just a little expensive which is why it's down at number three now number two is another paid preview and it's one that i've already previewed on the channel before that is iss vanguard and the reason i am looking at it again was because there were a lot of changes from the original prototype to now and they wanted to you know update people on what has been going on and i can tell you all of those updates are for the better this game which i already loved is even better it is a fantastic game again it is a campaign game it takes up a lot of my time but i played every mission in the prototype that i got i didn't have to uh once i was done uh and once i filmed the run through i could have packed it up send it to the next reviewer but i didn't i made sure to get in even more gameplays to finish the what little story i had because i enjoy it so much i am so hooked on this story of it's a little bit in the future and we are exploring the galaxy because we've discovered this mystery encoded into our dna and we need to solve this mystery to to figure out you know what is the secret of our existence like why are we here and why are all of these clues uh bounds together by this strange alien signal it is a fascinating story and the gameplay is also a ton of fun there's two halves of it there's the planetary exploration which you're you're going to different planets you're bringing a different members of the different crew sections like security or science or recon or engineering each section has multiple different crew members that you can take on a mission you bring equipment with you but you also have certain skills and those skills are going to help you with various encounters on the map it's a lot of dice chucking but you do have a fair amount of control over your probabilities at least but on top of that you have or aside from it and the other half of the game which is the ship phase and this has you managing the different sections of your ship and deciding where you're going to go what you're going to allocate your uh what you're going to allocate your resources on and uh you know how you are going to interact with the rest of the story i like the the um i like the planetary phase a lot i love the ship phase in this game i really like management games uh in you know video games i like civilization a lot things like that so something that really gets lets you get into the nitty-gritty of this um i i really responded to so i absolutely loved that side of it um but it was not my number one game uh even though i absolutely love iss vanguard my number one game uh was watergate and this is a game that i had the good fortune to play alongside ruel gaviola who is not just a friend of mine not just a friend of the show is now a contributor of uh to the rado channel and in case richard hasn't said anything about it yet i want to uh at least throw my uh foot in and to say that the r r show with richard and well is a ton of fun i got to catch the first episode and i really enjoyed it they're talking games they're answering questions they're doing giveaways it's a ton of fun i really recommend it and i got to sit down with royle and play a game with him okay i did not expect shea to actually do a call out for that i did not ask but thank you very much shea again we had a great time the r and r show links for it down in the show notes win your copy of fort but let's get back to shae i'm glad he enjoyed it too all righty which i absolutely love doing uh and we played watergate now this is a game that both of us have played before and absolutely love we i mean like we said in the run through uh or in the final thoughts i think it's just kind of a perfect game it's a two-player strategy game where one player is nixon and the other player are the press trying to uncover all the secrets that nixon is trying to keep buried it involves connecting evidence between informants or hiding evidence and uh securing the informant's silence depending on who you're playing but the main part of the game is this tug of war uh there's a number of things that each player is trying to control either the initiative which helps you go first and do more actions each round you're trying to get momentum which for nixon is how they win the game you know they ride out the storm and finish their term but for the press it gives you extra powers if you can get enough momentum and then there's bits of evidence which nixon knows what they are but the the press they are the ones who really need it so they can connect this big honeycomb web of uh of evidence and informants it's it's a very tight game mechanically there's no wasted space and it's just it's so tense when you're playing it every every moment every move has you tense because you have to you have to give up certain things to gain ground in other areas and like i said in the run-through i have never won this game and i keep wanting to come back to it and that's how i know that i love a game because i even though i've never won it i've never had the satisfaction i thought i was going to against royale i was so close but he snatched away from me no but i still want to keep coming back and and play more watergate uh like we said in the final thoughts it reminded us a little bit of twilight struggle but a very pared-down very tight version of it uh that kind of just focuses on the best parts of it the card play in particular is what uh really reminded us of it but it's even if you haven't played that or even if you played that and wasn't really your bag i definitely think you should check out watergate it is a ton of fun it's a great two-player strategy game and it's quick it's not like it's not easy it's not uh i mean it's the rules are not particularly complicated but there's definitely strategy you absolutely have to strategize in this game but even with the depth of it it's over in like 30 minutes it's a nice really quick game that really leaves you satisfied in the end so my number one watergate and that was all of the games that i played this month uh so i will pass it back to you uh richard but everyone else thank you for watching my little bit of this and i will see you folks next time bye yeah i gotta say uh his run through or his in royale's run through for watergate was nail biting right up to the end and i'm i'm kind of bummed he just spoiled the ending but i think it would still be very very enjoyable to show off why this game is so hugely popular and well loved so i was really happy to see that but okay we're done with shea's stuff now we're gonna move on to the games jen and i played and this was kind of a weird month because we played a bunch of games at a friend of ours so we were playing a lot of four player games which actually puts me in kind of an odd situation because normally i rank all my games relative to each other about how they are as a two-player experience but some of these i've only now played as a four player so we'll get to that as we come along but for starters i'm going to talk about a handful of expansions we played in countdown form and then once i've done the expansions i'll talk about the new games so let's go to expansion countdown starting at number five if i recall correctly runestone enchanted forest and nocturnal creatures and here's the deal these are two great little box expansions that add some very much appreciated additional content for runestone and runestone is already or was it runestone of runestones oh my gosh it's runestones sorry everybody um roon stones is a fantastic deck building game from rudiger dorne uh who is you know like one of the og modern euro designers he has done so many really important games over the years istanbul go up and i don't think runestones gets as much attention as other ones but oh my gosh it's fantastic it's just full from beginning to end with really nail-biting agonizing decisions and both expansions add some really cool stuff if i could only own one of them i'd probably go with enchanted force because it adds the super important new runestones in the original game every time you play you just play with the same runestones that players are trying to get and unlock special power stuff like that now there's a whole bunch of new ones so you can mix and match and get a different layout every time that's gigantic and i was a big fan of that absolutely must have it also has this side objective where we're trying to make our way through a little winding path collecting mushrooms and getting bonus points that was nice but i was really kind of disappointed by how it was um implemented because there was no two-player scaling at all and this kind of thing it's so easy to get that right and they got it wrong so enchanted force is really important and it's great at a higher player count but it kind of misses the boat just by tiny bit for two player on the actual enchanted forest sideboard nocturnal creatures is the other one this adds wisps and it adds a new type of creature it actually brings in a little bit of uh pvp take that kind of stuff some of these new creatures they were pretty mild though i don't think they really bothered me and jen very much at all and we're really super care bears the whiffs were very cool the ability to get these really super powerful one-off bonuses that you can use at the exact right time was very very satisfying and um yeah runestones is already great these are both great expansions i'm just going to lump them together as one and then knock them down they come in at the bottom of the list because of the total and complete lack of two-player scaling in the enchanted force but still kind of a must-have um then we move on to number four it's a wonderful world ascension and corruption and now this is a very simple expansion for one of the best engine building car drafting games of all time it's a wonderful world was a huge hit everybody loves it and ascension and corruption adds well really two new concepts the ascension is a bunch of new um i was going to say buildings you can build but they're not they're all kind of mythological like you can discover valhalla now in a game that was formerly very grounded in like a near future um you know society now you can get like some really far out mystical elements going on and that was kind of nice to mix things up i think more importantly is the corruption which adds this new concept of cards that when you add them to your overall goods generating engine they actually weaken your engine but the cards are so good or so cheap you're in you're inclined to do it anyway even if it might gum up your works and i found that really fascinating the reason essentially corruption comes in at number four and doesn't rate higher it has nothing to do with it it's just it's kind of a a little bit more uh expansion you know sometimes expansions like really blow the doors off and reinvent a game and come up with really new interesting takes on it and sometimes you say oh here's just a few more cards kind of like what you've already got this is like that and it does it wonderfully it just didn't quite get me as excited as some of the stuff that's coming and so uh coming at number four is wonderful world ascension and corruption really if you like it's a wonderful world you gotta get it because more is always good anyway let's move on to number three excavation earth it belongs in a museum and now this was a paid kickstarter preview for an expansion uh for a really interesting sci-fi uh market manipulation game where it's the far future humanity has died out and now aliens come to earth to find uh weird quirky artifacts of our civilization and sell them on the open market or the black market what this expansion adds is now we can take those artifacts and donate them to a museum which i have to say thematically i really like um you know just the idea that um you know even though we're long forgotten rather than all of our artifacts of our society just ending up on some millionaire alien shelf they actually end up in a museum where people can come and learn about us i mean it's neither here or there i mean this is pretty much just a market manipulation game but it was kind of a nice feeling but the gameplay it adds an entirely new avenue a new path to victory because you can get tons of points by instead of selling on the open market or the black market donating them at the right time to make the curators of the museum happy and they're constantly in rotation every time somebody interacts with the museum it changes everything like everything else in this game uh you know excavation earth is all about synergy between players and looking for opportunities that other players create and the museum module does that wonderfully but that's not all in addition to the museum module there's two completely new playable alien races that add new cool special powers that was all very nice and then there's also mysterious artifacts and these really change things up because these can't be sold instead what you need to do with artifacts is when you send envoys to the space station they can take the artifacts you find the mysterious artifacts and take them up there as like a little bonus action and then they get researched and when you do that what happens is you unlock cool special reverse engineering cards and these cards are radically game changing super powerful stuff um and the interesting thing is every time another player researches one of these mysterious artifacts um the remaining ones that could still be found in the world become more valuable to sell on the black market because the more the aliens know about our society the more they're willing to pay so in the early game you try to research them in the late game when you don't need those powers anymore you try to sell them because they're worth a lot and they can really change the game up and then there was other stuff too big improvement to the solo mode huge improvement because now the solo player can run out of cubes like a human player big uh big improvement and um you know other stuff like research cubes you can use brokers you can use to turn your cards into wild cards which is a big deal as well everything about this expansion is fantastic this is why i was this is not just oh here's a little bit more content there are big game-changing ideas but they don't lose the spirit of the original game and i think that's implemented perfectly by dave turchey and the crew at mighty boards uh my number three of the month excavation earth it belongs in a museum then we go on to number two hey it wouldn't be a rattle roundup if i didn't play some marvel champions and this month i got venom in the mail uh this is not the original classic venom everything says this is the modern venom in marvel comics flash thompson uh who was peter parker's nemesis in high school eventually went to war um i you know lost his legs came back was bitter bounded with the symbiote and then became an international or an intergalactic space cop it's a really weird funky thing if you read the comics venom is not what you expect it to be if you've seen the movies or you know red classic venom but this is a very very cool character who probably more than anybody else is really focused on weaponry because that's a big part of uh this you know american soldier who has you know a space symbiote as a best buddy you can break the rules for how many restricted items you can carry and uh it's just a really good fun solid uh you know addition i wouldn't say it's quite as mind bending i mean it did you know some of the heroes have like really just blown my eyes out with oh my gosh how did you capture the spirit of that character just in these cards this one just feels a little bit more like it's just another nice great addition to the game i had a very uh fun time playing with venom and as always it keeps uh keeps me coming back to marvel champions so that was my number two of the month venom but the number one expansion was such a big deal such a wonderful wonderful experience my wife and i had playing rococo the deluxe edition now i covered rococo many many years ago um but you know the original first station was it from pegasus i think is that right um well i don't know who the publishers were but you know the designers matias kramer and the maltz's stefan and louis maltz a great great game um which i raved about at the time and between then and now some uh expansion content came out for the original version of coco including the jewelry expansion which i always wanted to try but he got an incredibly small print run it was incredibly hard to find fast forward to now we have the new deluxe edition and so i finally got to experience the jewelry expansion which is it's exactly what i like to see in expansions it's a big game changer it doesn't um you know alter the fundamental dna of the game it just gives you this whole new path you can focus on in addition to making garments for all the rich people who are going to a party at louis uh 15th um you know palace now you can get them jewelry as well that's nice but what's more important is if you you have a checklist of actions you can have your apprentices do and once you do all these in the process of doing all your normal stuff you unlock new super powerful journeymen and then once you've done that you can train journeyman to become new super powerful upgraded masters with all kinds of powers that you have not seen before and this new sideboard really opens up the game and gives you so much more to focus on and so many more opportunities to try to get super hyper efficient moves my wife absolutely loved this this significantly raised the game in her opinion and i thought it was fun too i i wan i want to play a little bit more because maybe it makes the game a little bit more prescribed because you really want to get those bonuses but um still i you know the two times we played it plus the run through i filmed of it we had such a great time i was blown away and just reminded just how wonderful the core design of rococo always was so that's my number one expansion the deluxe edition specifically the jewelry expansion plus the other promos that have all been boxed together in a new lavish reprint that just looks lovely okay so that was that folks now let's start talking about games and let's begin with for sale and i can't rank this one folks because normally all of my games are played two player and so i rank them relative to that but for sale is not a two player game um it is acquires at least a minimum of three and so here's the deal if i were to rank this game day solely on its merits this is probably my game of the month easily and i can see why it is so well loved it's a it's a modern classic from designer steven dora it's basically a real estate auction game it's in two halves the first half of the game we are um using uh unique money chits to bid on houses and it's a go around everybody keeps raising until somebody gets what they want the interesting thing about that half of the game is in most auction games yeah you just keep bidding up bidding up never expecting to buy you're just trying to make it more expensive for other players and there's a little risk that you might end up getting stuck with it in this game if you end up passing you end up losing half of the money you threw into those averaging bids so that makes it much more tension filled trying to drive the price up but that's only the first half of the game then the second half of the game is we take all the houses we won in the first half and we use them as bidding um in a blind auction where every round for a number of players there's going to be um these checks which are the actual points checks signed for and we're trying to sell these houses for those checks and the brilliant thing about this obviously i'm not really a big fan often of blind bidding but it works so well here because um everybody's bidding not just for one there's a bunch out and you know if you bid lowest you just get last dibs if you bid highest you get first dibs and it's interesting that you'll be in situations where oh i've got some of my low value houses i don't mind throwing them out there or i'm sorry uh because all the checks were bidding on the second half they're all terrible this round so now is a good time to burn the crappy houses i won and so it creates a wonderful two auctions you play back to back in like less than 20 minutes and it's absolutely brilliant and like i said this would be my game of the month except since i can't really rate it as a two-player game like i'm going to rate every other game i'm talking about today i'm leaving it off the rating scale but if i had the opportunity to i would play for sale in a heartbeat one of the best auction games i have ever played in my life it is brilliant it deserves its ongoing modern classic status that's for sale okay now let's move on to my number 10 of the month majesty for the realm which is a car tableau building game where we have a whole bunch of different buildings in front of us and we're trying to grab medieval characters who belong in those buildings the bartender and the bar the blacksmith and the smithy and stuff like that and the more of a given type of card we get and lay in front of our building the more we get to activate that type of building and the more powerful it becomes it's a good sharp game from the designer marc andre of splendor and like splendor it is an incredibly simple clean fast playing elegant game with some interesting decisions throughout it comes in fairly low for us uh because one as a two player game um some of this some stuff doesn't work as well there are certain benefits you get for hey if somebody does this for you know drafts this particular character and activates this power then everybody else gets a bonus and in a two-player game there's not going to be very many opportunities for that whereas the higher player count the better it's going to be plus there's an unfortunate amount of take that of players just kind if you get soldiers you can really mess with opponents it's like why is this here this doesn't need to be here there are so many great examples these days of positive interaction between players why are we punching each other or trying to defend ourselves from being punched throughout the whole game so that was kind of a bummer but it was still a sharp game and if i were looking for a very very light card tableau building game that has a healthy dollop of punchy punch and is great for higher player counts i'd give majestic majesty for the realm of go it's just not our cup of tea and that's why it comes in number 10 of the month majesty for the realm okay then we go on to number nine nidavelir now this is another auction game it is set in a fantasy kingdom where a bunch of dwarves are hanging around at three taverns and we have been charged to go to those taverns and use all the money we've got on hand to recruit them to join an army to save the kingdom that's the theme really this is just a game where every round we're going to be bidding on three different auctions but we all have to place our bid simultaneously in secret at the beginning of a round so if i see there's a dwarf in the first bar who i really want um and then the other two bars i don't really care that much about then i mean i've only got so many coins i can use and i'll probably put the really high bid on that one um and then you know the low bids on the other ones but what if i don't get that high one um you know because i'm i'm further down in um an initiative because if there's a tie on bids there's an initiative system that means i may or may not win i don't want to waste my most valuable coin and not get that person i want so maybe i should go on ahead and bid lower the fact that it is three simultaneous secret reveal auctions is really interesting and creates a lot of depth especially because one of the bids you can make is effectively zero i'm not going to bid anything for this but it means i can upgrade my other coins but i'll just have to take last dibs on whatever is available now here's the deal this game is brilliant there's so many cool special powers when you know in different ways to score points and so much tension throughout if you play at a higher player count which we got to do jen and i played it as a two player game afterwards and it all disappears all that cool fun excitement and tension and drama because um at a lower player count there are enough dwarves that you never really feel very tense about what you're bidding on you're always going to get something good you're never going to get left out in the cold and i think they just didn't do a very good job there would have been a simple simple rule change i think for two player that would have brought that tension back and simply this um you know when your three dwarves are at each bar when we're trying to figure out of in the first bar okay do i want a bit higher low because i really like that dwarf if i win the high bid of that bar i take the dwarf i want and then i eliminate one of the other two and then that means you the low bidder are stuck with whatever i gave you and then all of a sudden all of that tension and drama would come back and it would be just that i suspect i didn't actually try this this is uh you know a homebrew variant you can try yourself if you have a copy of netevalier i believe this would so elevate the two-player experience and bring all that excitement and tension and fear back because there's a two-player game it's like it's so laid-back oh yeah i don't care what i bid i'm always going to get something good because there's just an overflow of riches and that doesn't happen at the higher player counts so um that's why nidaleer as a two-player game with the rules as written comes in at my number nine of the month but again at a higher player count oh my gosh an amazing auction game i can see why people love it so much nidovalier okay let's move on to number eight clever cubed now this is the third game in the gonzone clever series of roland rights and i would have to say of the three this is probably the heaviest one um you know some of the uh stuff you have to go through to figure out um you know how to you know draft the dice you know hold some dice for yourself the rest go to you know a common pool that everybody can share from um but you know the different colored dice activate different scoring tracks and they some of these ones are really far out they really push the envelope and make you have to really commit and take big big risks and gambles also not for nothing i would say this is the hardest one to teach because some of the ideas here really break the rules of traditional um rolling rights and i mean that in the best possible way this is a brilliant game my wife absolutely loved it i thought it was really great too now like what i've been talking about so far gone shown clever is definitely a better game at higher player counts because every die you don't take that goes to more players if there's more players that just creates more drama and excitement but i would still say gunshot clever is a great two player game as well so the third in the series which i would say is arguably the heaviest most gamey i mean this i would never recommend somebody start the gone series with clever cubed start with the first move on to the second and then you've elevated this is for gonz aficionado super experts and it's great it comes in low for me because it's abstract and that drives me nuts uh there could be a theme here in fact as i understand it um the designer um wolfgang varsh originally had a farming theme that was layered on top and the the the publishers just stripped it out that's always kind of bugged me the gameplay is as always fantastic a little bit heavier a little bit crunchier a little bit wonkier and more quirky but still great and if you don't mind pure abstracts then you're going to have a great time with clever cubed or gone shown clever three okay now we move on to number seven tussy mussy this is a micro game if i recall correctly i think i think it comes with 18 cards maybe it's 16. but it's there's a lot of game packed into a tiny little package from publisher button shy and designer elizabeth hargraves miss wingspan herself yes that wingspan and also um the uh monarch butterfly game that his name completely escapes me at the moment oh that's driving me nuts but anyway elizabeth hargraves is definitely you know one of the preeminent premier designers because wingspan was so game-changing for the industry in such a big way it's a brilliant design and here's the deal tussy mussy is brilliant too and having played wingspan and now this that solidifies my feeling that um you know elizabeth hargraves is not a one-hit wonder she is here to stay here's the way the game works it's super simple on my turn i draw two cards and i look to my neighbor and i s and i put play one card face up the other one face down they're gonna take one of those two cards i'm gonna keep one and the mind games can begin it is so deep so tense because um you know if they take a face down one i and they know what that is nobody else around the table knows what it is if they take a face up one i keep the face one down for myself and nobody knows what it is but me and these cards interact in so many different ways if um you take a card that's face up that says well you'll get a lot of bonus points if you get a lot of red cards your neighbor knows don't keep the red cards away but how can they do it they just draw two cards and they have to give you one so do they hide it um do you take the one that's hidden because it's something that's being kept from you or is it a trap because not all cards are created equal some of them might be completely useless to you and so when you are on the receiving end from the player to your right oh it's so attached why are you hiding that seems like a really obvious one you probably think i'm going to take that which means i should take the hidden one but did you put that because you knew that's the way i think and you don't want me to take the obvious one and the hidden one is a trap and then after you've made that decision you get whatever you get you turn around and you do the same thing to your neighbor it's brilliant oh my gosh this would also be in my top three games of the month when viewed as a higher player count game as a two player game it still works it's a lot of fun a fast little five minute game you can play at a bar but only having one opponent robs 50 of the experience because it's so fun what am i going to give to you and what am i going to take from you when both of those questions are related to the same person and there's not two different sets of cards that i'm keeping track of it's still great it just loses some of what makes this game truly resplendent so this is why i have to put in number seven but this would be one of my top rated games period for the month gosh i mean i don't know what gear this came out this could be a top 10 for the year if i rated games based on their qualities at higher player counts as a two-player game it's nice it's very nice as a three or more player game it's resplendent either way it's my number seven of the month tussy mussy uh great job elizabeth fantastic can't wait to see what we come up with next okay let's move on to number six indus 2500 bce another roll in right and um you know i think a lot of people if they go and watch my run through there you could be forgiven for the game wait a minute isn't this a cartographer's spin-off or something like that because uh you know at first glance there are certain things about it that really feel the same uh every turn you're going to end up getting a card that has a tetris polyamino shape on it and some type of terrain forest rivers buildings and stuff like that and you're going to have to somewhere on your grid draw that polyamino shape with those particular resources and that's very cartographers eat um now this game is actually set you know in oh is it stone age no i think it was bronze age um you know the indus valley and uh it really puts a lot of work and attention on getting the theme right and really capturing the way the world works back then and one of the big things it adds is calamities because in the big deck of cards that we're you know getting all of these directive cards from there will be two calamities one early one late the last one triggers the end of the game and you have to build to try and score the most points because every time you play there's going to be a different combination of four different bonus ways to score points and you also are trying to get majorities in pretty much everything because that's a lot of points too but you also have to build anticipating those um calamities you can put walls up to protect yourself from some you can effectively quarantine certain areas to protect you from other types of calamities and you got to keep all this in your brain while you're playing and it is surprisingly crunchy and actually i talked to developers they were developing this long before they'd ever heard of cartographers so um you know it's it's kind of unfortunate there's overlap that some people say oh i already have cartographers why would i want this personally i would take this one over cartographers because the calamities i do think the objectives um really create a lot more interesting tension and it's a game where you're not attacking each other unlike cartographers which has a healthy dollop of art right how can i mess up the stuff you've made this is a wonderful care bear game my wife really loved it a lot too and uh yeah if you wanna know more go check out my run through for my number six of the month indus 2500 bce then we go on to number five rajas are the gang she's the dice charmers lovely rolling right from um you know inca and marcus brand the design duo behind so many great wonderful big box euros i mean too many to mention um including raja's the ganges which was an absolutely brilliant resource gathering manipulation game which the central crux was all about hey i'm trying to make money but i'm trying to make prestige these are two different score tracks and they go one goes clockwise around the board the other goes counterclockwise and when they meet that's what triggers the end of the game that and so much else is captured from the big box and brought into a tiny little dice drafting game that just is the bee's knees jen and i instantly fell in love with it um it's got all the great raja's feel but in a fraction of the time and i would say a fair bit more interaction because of the way the draft works because now we're drafting for dice and um you know these are really cool special dice with all kinds of special powers on them and whatnot and really i think morning anything else what really makes me love this game is more so than the original rajas oh my gosh this is so combo tastic you know if you're familiar with the gone shown clever series of rolling rights which is all about oh i did this one thing which unlocked this which allowed me to do this and because i'd already saved up and done all that that undoes this other thing and you can have these monster turns where you do five or six or seven big actions all chained together that happens all over the place in rajas of the ganges dice charmers and i love it i love it and gone shown clever but gonchon clever is a very abstract game raj is the ganges dice charmer shows how you don't have to be abstract you can actually have a nice thematic role in right and still get all that really cool wonderful puzzly roll and right goodness with um you know dealing with all the different characters from the palace or going down the river or you know you know building buildings in the surrounding countryside it feels like you're doing something in this game instead of just filling in colored boxes and that's what so elevates rajas of the ganges the dice charmers my number five of the month it is excellent okay then we go on to number four oros which is a paid kickstarter for you for a game that i think is on right now and wow this game is really unique quite unlike anything else out there we are gods in the primordial earth we are worshiped by followers and we can use our powers to basically sculpt the world to our whim we can grab entire continents and shift them around and slam them into other continents and that will create new mega continents and it will also create volcanoes which over time can erupt and spill and create new land over the empty ocean and we're doing all of this to try to sculpt this world to make a better place for our followers um who are also our workers in a quasi-worker placement game that um actually somebody pointed out in my run-through in the comments that it kind of has sort of a feel of scythe in the worker placement game and it's really well implemented but what really is special about this game is i mean i when i talked about it in my main run-through i likened it to populist the old peter molyneux video game you really do feel like a god just sculpting this world in front of you slamming all these things together making a volcanoes erupt and then directing where the lava will flow to create new land for your people to live in and to prosper in and it's awesome and then on top of that it's got a really fantastically implemented upgradeable tech tree as well um i mean you've got to check this game out folks it's kind of blowing up uh in a in a in a you know not like a you know multi-million uh you know campaign on kickstarter but it's doing very very well and it really deserves to it's you know it's a fresh design from you know a fresh designer it's what kickstarter was made for to support dreams like this and bring us something like we've never seen before it's my number four of the month oros okay now we move on to number three venice from design duo of uh dave turchi and andre novak and these two guys working together have made something very special and what i mean by that this is for my money probably the best pickup and delivery game i've ever played or certainly the best the one i have enjoyed the most because um we are influential patrons in venice you know trying to make deals and um you know upstanding you know investments into properties but also back channel nefarious stuff you know earning special powers that we can use at certain points deploying our operatives to different buildings so we can activate them to get more buildings and leveling them up over the course of the game so they get stronger and stronger so when we visit them on our gondolas they will give us big paydays but at its heart all that's going on your main thing is you have two gondolas on the board any given time you've got these objectives where you have to pick up certain cubes in one place and deliver them somewhere else and the thing that makes it really unique is that you have two gondolas and you must unless you're willing to pay a huge price you must alternate back and forth between the two so the level of logistical planning in this game is off the charts brilliant and i was really blown away by it i mean like i said both my wife and i vehemently dislike pick up and deliver as a mechanism but here we found ourselves pulled in because of all the extra levels of complexity of trying to manage two different delivery trucks or gondolas getting them to coincide knowing when to pay the extra to have the one go multiple times in a row also this game just has an amazing sense of escalation you start out very small but by the end you can pull off really major super moves you could easily go from one side of vents to the other without even blinking an eye whereas you know it was unthinkable to be in the game so incredible satisfaction the uh the arc that you travel through as you level up in this game both you and your followers as they get stronger and stronger in all the buildings and become more powerful pit stops for you there's also a lot of really interesting um not really aggressive or nasty take that interaction players but rather um your position in my position is really impetual if i'm in a dock and you come to the same dock i'm at i get bonus points for showing up so you don't want to go there until i leave but my next move is going to be the other gondola so are you going to wait um there's a lot to juggle you're really invested in what the other players are doing and i think it's a brilliant design my only complaints and they're pretty significant the board is too small and it makes it much more fiddly than it should be to play this game if the board were 30 bigger this game would be 80 percent more playable now it's a problem i don't care the gameplay is still good enough to um to warrant play inspire that the other thing there are a bunch of little special case rules and it's kind of hard to keep track of it now a lot of the depth and complexity of the game comes from those rules so i can't complain too much um you know i mean some rough edges could have been sanded off you could have simplified and streamlined a little bit but i don't know if the game would be as good at that point quite frankly and i mean the gameplay is brilliant watch for my run through coming soon just waiting for paulo to goof check it really blown away by this i think it's really flying under the radar but it's uh super smart i mean again it takes a really fantastic design to get me and jen to be invested in pick up and deliver and for my money this is probably the best pickup in the game i've ever played my number three of the month venice then we got number two remember our trip oh my gosh this is so lovely so wonderful so charming from japanese publishers sashi and sashi i believe who are known for really kind of quirky offbeat themes the theme of this game is we are all working to try to remember a trip we recently got back from and whoever can best remember is going to win the game and the thing is we all have our own board where we're draft for these memory chips that represent the hotels we stayed at the parks we went through the tourist sites we saw the shops we shopped at stuff like that and every round i'm gonna end up getting uh two or three of these chips and there every round there is a blueprint that says how i must play them on my board and i'm trying to lay them out to create certain patterns so that i can confirm yes this was the hotel we stayed at that was the park i went for a walk in on the second day this was the place where i bought you that umbrella this shop over here because once you have actually built the little polyamino shape that you need to to be able to confirm yes this was a shop this was a restaurant whatever you can then flip them in score points but you also transcribe the memory of that building onto a communal board which is where you can score a lot of bonus points and the thing is as soon as i say you know what it was up in the northeast corner that's where that restaurant was and i put that up there and now that might drive you nuts because you were building on your board i was remembering that there was a park over there and all of a sudden you can still say no this is the park on my own board but i can't transcribe it to the communal board so it's kind of this really interesting area control-esque game it's hard to describe watch my run-through it's brilliant it's such a really far out um uh approach to uh gaming i've i was blown away by it just talking about right now it makes me want to play it again it's my number two of the month remember our trip but the number one folks that has to go to now or never which was also a paid preview this is the culmination of the asriem or the azirium series trilogy from designer artist ryan lockett first he gave us um above and below which was a great little um you know kind of city building worker placement e-type game then he gave us near and far which was a great little narrative adventure traveling the world while managing your resources game there was a direct sequel and it carried the story on um and now we have the third game now or never which kind of combines the spirit of those two previous games it's got the really interesting um worker management because a lot of what you can do is by having a crew of people with all kinds of special powers but you can only activate them once per round and so trying to figure out the correct order to activate these followers of yours to get the most out of them is really important but the tricky thing is your opponents can pay you to use your followers and like hey i'm really glad you gave me the three coins but i was planning on using him to build myself now i gotta wait till next turn unless i turn around and use one of your followers instead so there's a really wonderful interplay between players that isn't aggressive or nasty uh it's just really interesting and interactive in a positive way um and one of the main things you're using those followers for is to rebuild a massive city and this rebuilding game it can almost be a game by itself it has kind of a goa feel with the snake-like draft where once you take a tile from a place you have to take future tiles from that spot and once you build that tile place you have to build off that spot the city building is wonderful in this game really dense and puzzly but then on top of all that it's got a big sweeping landscape that you can travel from one side to the other and complete quests and fight monsters and level up and get cool powers and you can focus on any or all of these things uh um and it's all driven by a big multi-chapter narrative story where our unique characters go and grow as people and um it's just everything about this game just works perfectly actually blown away by it i'll i'll deduct a minor point because combat is still a dice thing um although it's much better than most dice combat quite frankly i don't know if i want to detect that uh basically you've got four powers when you attack a monster you roll a d4 to activate power number one two three or four there are ways you can mitigate and re-roll but you know if you level up your powers you should always be able to get some good rolls it's it's just the best it's ryan lock it's it's what he's been building towards and a lot of us thought what we use bid building towards all these years is sleeping gods you know uh you know a lot of us thought hey that's his masterpiece but i'm here to tell you folks if if you had if i had to pick you want to play some sleeping gods from now or never oh my gosh now it's not i'm going to have the song stuck in my head for the rest of the day i was about to start singing it i will not do it to you but it's my game of the month it is absolutely fantastic ryan it's the culmination of everything he's done so far i love it to pieces my number one of the month now or never okay folks that's it another roundup done and dusted and uh hope you agree those are some very very cool games and wait let's see what we uh have in august the most important thing we of course will have in august is going to be more r and r with me and rouel check us out every wednesday live although if you can't make it don't worry you can watch it after the fact you can just subscribe to the channel and you'll always be able to catch them again on twitch on facebook or on youtube come and join i mean we really want to try to get a lot of audience participation q and a's having the audience make suggestions for us i mean this is really if you're a long time fan of the show you might have watched a show i was doing uh last year with tom vassell called corner to corner ever since that ended um folks have been saying we want more corner in a corner and so um you know tom's too busy to do it and you know our schedules don't always match but rowell and i were able to find a way to um well i don't know well mostly first and foremost we're just having a great time and i hope you come along and have a great time too and if you do it quick you could win a copy of fort but anyway folks that was it and as always thanks for watching and thanks to fun again games for sponsoring the show talk to you later so long bye

Channel: Rahdo

Views: 8,309

Rating: 4.8454938 out of 5

Keywords: board games, boardgames, radho, baord game, baordgames, rahdo, baord games, baordgame, boardgame, board game, game, rhado, review

Id: bCksX0m2k_o

Length: 53min 53sec (3233 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 01 2021