My Father's Work Review - with Tom Vasel

[Music] [Music] and now it's time for another dice tower review with tom vassell hey everybody i'm tom vassell and today we're taking a look at my father's work in my father's work you are the son or daughter of a mad scientist and you want to make them proud you're trying to follow their legacy except in this game not only are you the son you will be the grandson and then great grandson you're playing through three generations against some other players in this game where you are a mad scientist okay so this game comes with an app you play through this app there are many many many various endings that you can have but you are playing against other players in a story based game that's all about worker placement trying to score points let me show you a little bit about how the game works [Music] to start the game you simply will click new game here in the app it will ask you to choose a voice the masculine voice is ben maddox the feminine voice i think sounds like a robot but you pick one and then you continue it asks you how many players are playing the game and then it's going to start having you give a name for each player after you pick the names of each player and the name of your town you're going to pick a scenario here so let's say you pick the first scenario the cost of disease so you're going to do it will tell you how to do this setup but you're also going to use the cost of disease scenario box so the game comes with three scenario boxes here and each of these scenario boxes is chock full of components here now i want to be really clear i don't consider this spoilers to show you stuff that's in these because you don't know what it means anyway but you'll see there's a bunch of components look there's heart components and frankenstein components you know what they mean yeah who cares you'll figure out and then there's some cards and things so all this is in here and much of it or i should say some of it will be used during the course your game but much of it will not there are still pieces in these scenarios that i don't know at this point the app is going to give you a fairly long story like show here's a letter here's more story and here's more story and now it's telling you what to do so this will tell you something set up to do specific to this scenario here's some it's telling you where to put some tokens on the track how to set things up and you can see there's a lot of different set up here and then this is what the app's going to look like during the course of a round now one of the things you'll do is you're going to be placing out the board so we're playing the cost of disease so usually we'll start on board one so we just put the board like this so this is how the board is going to look you have an insanity track down here a creepy track up here you're gonna be playing for three generations each generation is made up of three rounds over here you have different things you can build into your manner each player is going to start with you and you there's all different miniatures included with the game but it's the base that matters so the hexagon base is you the round circular base is your spouse and then you have a caretaker and you have another caretaker and two servants who are in the lost area you keep track here of your knowledge in chemistry biology engineering and the occult and here are spots for you to place rooms that you get everyone gets a storage shed now i don't want to get into all the details of the game but what's going to be happening over the course of each round our players are going to be taking their workers on your turn you're going to be putting one somewhere on the board or you're going to pass once everyone passes the round will end when the round ends you'll click continue here to go to the next round so i would click here and sometime it will tell you what to do at the end of a round and sometimes oh there's a special event with a lot more text to read and it will tell you oh everyone gets a servant from the lost pile and then we go back to the next round sometimes something will happen during the round if a player reaches the fourth space and the creepy track click here so you would click there and it will ask some questions like who did it and the three players in this game are named doom strange and evil all doctors and you would say doctor doom did this and this one dr doom's going to look at this and it's secret so secret you can't see it so players are going to be doing things and so you are going to be sending out your servants the round bases can go to town and your spouse is basically a servant in this game read into that what you will and your your main character they can go anywhere they can go to town or to the manor while your caretakers can only go to spaces in the manor most of the spaces in town at least in this beginning scenario and if they're mostly similar to this are going to give you resources there are gears there are animals there are dead bodies there are these chemicals here with these little vials sometimes also there's knowledge of the three different types and knowledge of the occult and then money of course is a resource so when we look at this one here for example if i go here to the park i get a vial if i go here i get an animal here i get a gear if i go to the builder's office i can pay money to build more buildings that will give me special abilities onto my board i can go to the cemetery to take a body but if i do so i move up on the creepy track and the villagers get more irritated if the villagers and you ever cross you're no longer to send able to send people to town except for the church you can always go to church and here you can pay money to move your token back on the creepy track or you can go to the town hall later on to move the villagers back you can go to the traveling caravan and you can get the occult knowledge but again that moves you up on the creepy track that's at the top of the board so this creepy track is important but there's also an insanity track down here as you move on the insanity track it moves you on the creepy track and can make certain your people go to this loss section but you also get these compulsion cards compulsion cards you must do something on them if you do it you're going to get the victory points you know it says must record knowledge so i record knowledge and yay i get a victory point but if you have two compulsion cards at the end of a generation then you get to draw one of these um mal adjustment cards which are you know you're clingy now your spouse has to go with someone else to take actions or have an existential crisis if you had a generation on space six or higher in the insanity track you lose five victory points and you'll have that for the next generation you'll also be placing people on your manner you can go here to record knowledge which means you spend cubes you spend one cube to move to the first level and spend two to go to the next level and you do that because you get bonuses um as you get to the second level and when you get to the third level you get to build these special buildings which are worth victory points but also when you do experiments in the future you don't need two green cubes you're already on here so it counts as if you have two of them and that's the main focus of this game you have experiments this is where you perform experiments now experiments come in three different decks a b and c at least for the base game when you do an experiment let's say i want to do this obedience training i need to give up an animal and then i get two green cubes and one victory point this is the main way to get knowledge cubes it also gives me an a experiment which is important because to do a b experiment i need an a this one i need an animal and two green cubes but look i don't need the green cubes because my token's there i just need an animal again and this gives me two animals moves me one in a creepy track and gives me three victory points if i have one a and two b's done i can do the c which costs three of those vials three blue cubes gives me seven victory points eight victory points beyond that if i do it in the first generations and four if i do it in the second generation and then in many of the scenarios you will even have some major thing that you're trying to do so for example i might be trying to do this like anthropic strength i'm trying to become a werewolf but this needs one a two b's three c's and then a whole pile of other stuff you can use occult knowledge as wilds so that's fantastic but every time you use a cult knowledge your madness increases by one all kinds of events and things will happen as the rounds go by after the third round you go to the next generation and you lose everything you lose your money your resources your experiments you've done you can keep one experiment in your hand you haven't done you can keep one experiment underneath here to record experiments so i can say oh well i already did a c so i don't need to do that c later on and of course some buildings might allow you to keep stuff from game to game and then all kinds of things might happen this might be your town but later on the town might change to a a town that has a different building or this is your town now or look how nice the town looks at this point there's all kinds of towns and various things and i've not seen all of them in each scenario i think each scenario has i think 18 18 different possibilities for towns and all kinds of things can happen with the tokens there's a lot going on there's going to be victory points given at the end of the game for a few buildings but many of the victory points will be gotten during the game and then the tokens and things in this box are also going to affect how you get points over the course of the game after three generations whoever has the most points is the winner so for the most part i really like the components there's a lot to talk about with components so i'll try to be as brief as i can the book being placed here on the board is fantastic to have these different towns i mean they all kind of look the same but there is minor subtle changes i like the different characters the miniatures look great it doesn't really matter what miniature goes in that which is kind of cool when you at the beginning of the game they're like pick a miniature every game i played everyone just takes one of each although these trays are nice but it's kind of annoying that these tokens these bases don't stay on the miniatures so you have to snap them on and off every time there's some tokens here that you'll put on the board to show hey when something gets to a certain track piece you need to read the app the other trays work pretty well this is like really overproduced everyone who walked by when i was playing this said oh it's a kickstarter yeah it is i mean like the coffins are different the animals are different uh you know me i love blinging out games but even i was like do you really need to have all these animals different well it's cool and they fit in here well i don't mind this although i was disappointed that these vials were empty i've got to film with hot glue or something uh the only major component issue i have are these tokens here as you can see fall over so easily i would have actually rather had cubes for these just because they fall over and when you're playing the game they hide the bonus that you got from them found that to be annoying so that part was a little annoying the cards the artwork and everything else is good now of course the main feature here when it comes to components is the app itself now the app has a back button which lets you skip back to find different things sometimes it's skipped back a little farther than i wanted to but i do like this i like that the apps here it explains the special rules you know if you do something here or at the end of a round you click on here it will tell you exactly what to do i found this to be very handy and then there's text and folks there is text text text text text tons of it some of it's red not all of it is um and we got to the point when our games where we were playing we just started kind of cycling through the text because there was so much of it but other than that everything does fit in the box and happily they tell you on the side just how it fits in the rule book was very clear i very rarely needed to look anything up in it i was pretty happy with all you know with the components all [Music] around okay so let's talk about some of the negatives of my father's work because spoiler i like this game but i want to talk about there are some issues with it it is a long game there is no question i don't care how fast you play because i'm pretty fast at playing this now i've played this multiple times here and it you know there's just so much going on in it that i don't think it can be played quickly i won't play at this point with four it's just too long with three players every game of three players for me has taken three hours i played one two player game that took two and a half hours so um it's it's a lengthy game so that you just got to realize that's the thing it would be even more lengthy if you read out loud or listen to out loud all the text there is essentially a novel in this thing now let me be clear it's good writing it's not bad it does feel like they were trying to sneak a book in here at some point and you don't necessarily need all that writing i mean some of the writing for example in the third scenario time of war there was some really funny stuff in there i thought and it's you know it's just silliness involved but i think they could have pared it down a lot and i would have still got the same kind of feeling i'm a fast reader and even i was like ah and if you read all out it would add hours to the game i think so we're at the point where like yeah yeah yeah yeah what does it actually tell us to do and i don't normally like the phrase you know too long don't read type thing but in this case it would have been kind of helpful um so i i just feel like they could have cut it down by almost 50 percent the amount of text in the game the game also has a smidgen of luck in the sense of sometimes you just get the cards you need there's a space you can go on the board that lets you draw three cards from the deck when you record knowledge you can cycle cards so you can get the cards out but if you get the cards that perfectly match each other then which could happen sometimes it you don't have to do that cycling so you're ahead of the other players slightly and there's also a very small smidgen of take that and smack the leader down although in this game i did not have as much of a problem with it so i say all that to say this game is so fun like unbelievably fun i did not think when i first played the first game of this and it was three hours and a euro i was like i don't know and then i played through that first scenario again i played the disease one and everything was different now they say your choices will change things and sometimes they change regardless of your choice or whatever you know you're not sure i made definitely made different choices and it was a completely different game and then i played the second one and the third one and like the first one you are like a mad scientist trying to cure people's illnesses with being mad scientists like at one time i think i was trying to bring them back from the dead or something to that effect in the the second one the town people just hate you and you're like you will love me which as we all know works very well and the third one you're just like let's take over the world so i i it's so amusing and and that's the thing the game is long but i am invested the whole time for a couple reasons one turns are really quick i'm like i'm putting out a worker get a resource i'm doing this finish the experiment but i care about what you're doing i'm watching where you place your stuff you when you do things there's events happening and the app has things happen and consistently change and the world's dynamic and it's interesting and when it's done i'm like wow that was three hours but it was a very fun involved three hours see we're not opposed necessarily to long games here we're as opposed to long games like long down time there's not much down time in this and it's entertaining the fact that it's different each time the names of the experiments are funny i had a flaming pitchfork i created in one game um in another game uh what did i uh i was i had a duel with somebody um and there's just all kinds of things that are going on and it's it's intriguing that you never know what's around the corner i guess if you play a scenario over make the same decisions you might get to a point and go oh i know what this choice will lead to but even then who cares this is like a euro game but this euro game evolves and it almost has a legacy-esque feel within three hours by the way the three hours also mitigate it because you can pack up the game and save your game i would never do that play through it or don't play through it at all but i really enjoy this the worker placement if you place a worker on the main board your workers and you place and someone and you place your worker where someone else already is or you already are you have to pay a coin but your master doesn't have to do that in fact when they go to a spot they get to do it twice well that means your master's fantastic but i also need my master back here in the in my manner conducting experiments and also i want to figure out how to get more workers because sometimes that pops up and do i touch do you cold or not because it's tempting it's wild and wild it's amazing but it also makes you insane and insanity is good sometimes but also bad and all this comes out this has an incredibly strong theme this whole mad scientist thing i'm sick of games that pretend to be mad scientisty and they just show you a picture of frankenstein also a nice aside here i guess you can build frankenstein in this game or something like akin to that but there's so much more to mad scientists than building frankenstein and this game lets you do all of them now like i said it is a straight euro like if you're looking for mansions of madness this is not that this is not going through and fighting off baddies i mean that sort of thing could happen maybe in the background but it's all about worker placement collecting resources to fulfill contracts experiments in this game but it does so in an entertaining interesting way this game feels like tc petty's magnum opus like you you you can tell he's worked on this for a long time is it bumpy occasionally did i find little minor things in the app that felt like bugs possibly nothing that was overwhelmingly but there was a couple times i was like did the app did they mean to tell me this to pay this money when we don't even have no one you just made us all lose our money or something to that effect it's minor things but i'm sure that stuff will be ironed out as it went through but the app was neat it wasn't distracting the app isn't taking over the game you set it aside you're playing a game every once while you're like get the app out app what's our this happened oh my goodness and i like that i like the tough choices it makes the the the low downtime and i overlook the length i overlook the overly effusive pros i'll overlook the you know just some of these minor things because it's so much fun that comes ahead i was at a place and i took a pile of games and i sat there and i was like of all these new games but i can play my father's work fine i'll play my father's work so we played it then i was like and i want to play some other games or i could play my father's work again i can't tell you folks how rarely that happens to me i love games but i'm always going out and seeking a new one now part of that is i'll be honest this is like a new game each time i play so that's interesting to me and it's very very fun i very much recommend this now there's some caveats again you need to know you're getting into and it's long and all that but if you get into the experience i'll tell you what this is absolutely a blast lots of fun my father's work very high recommendation for me i'm tom vassell we'll see you next time dice tower judgment excellent [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 40,095

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, GeekUsername: TomVasel, board game review, boardgame, uno, ticket to ride, apples to apples, educational games, educational, top 10, juegosdemesa, Brettspiele, ボードゲーム, brädspel, jeuxdesociété, משחקילוח, 보드게임, deskováhra, graplanszowa, bordspel, 棋盘游戏, gioco da tavolo, desková hra, gra planszowa, настольная игра, trò chơi trên bàn cờ, jogo de tabuleiro, لعبة اللوحة

Id: fCi2kbs_IPc

Length: 21min 11sec (1271 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 26 2022