Obsession - Why Own It? (Spoiler: Maggie's Obsessed...) Mechanics & Theme Board Game Review

[Music] hi everybody i'm maggie and with me is living proof that a courtship can be extremely successful this is my partner amy together we're a thinker themer in our channel we try and tackle games from two different perspectives the thinker side where amy will look at the mechanics and how things work in a game and the themer side will be all about story and how well the theme is integrated into the gaming experience today we're going to be looking at obsession which is designed by dan halligan and it's by kayenta games and in obsession you play one of the different families in victorian england where you're all trying to build the best estate have the most reputation have the most influence so that your offspring can snatch up one of the eligible bachelors or young young ladies and young men available to again have the fair child of the fair child family super desirable to be yeah to be the most desirable family or the most successful family in uh in all of england um i wanted to for a second talk about the kickstarter campaign for this today uh we are specifically talking about the second edition of the original uh game based game obsession but we also have from the most recent kickstarter campaign um obsession the wessex expansion and the upstairs downstairs expansion which is um the new part of the latest kickstarter and i do want to give a shout out to dan because he has crafted an amazing community around this game and the way that he engaged with that community and with all of the new backers that were just learning about the game in the throughout the kickstarter has been incredible and i mean his passion comes through so strongly definitely yes well maggie is super excited to talk about this game she's been talking about doing this review all week some would say i'm upset she's obsessed um and i'm going to not let her talk for a second how unusual um because i want to tell you about how the game works as a brief overview um so that you can understand just how the theme is coming to life across each of these parts dripping theme it's during my theme spoiler alert this may well be in maggie's top five games of all time i think i'm calling it she i haven't seen her this way about a game for a long time it's definitely my top three of of theme integration like how well integrated this uh yeah the theme okay we're jumping ahead we're jumping ahead okay so let's talk about the game in a game of obsession you represent a family estate um all different families so everyone has a different family in this example i have a cavendish and maggie has the wessex family and you are competing estates in the area of derbyshire where your family has fallen into hard times and you now need to build your reputation from the ground up by hosting social events and activities that will attract the best guests and hopefully those elusive fair childs who everyone wants to have at their estate and everyone wants to marry their offspring too so let's talk about what you need to actually do in this game you start with an estate and you are going to be making country estate improvements by way of adding buildings to your property as well as facilities where you can engage in different types of social events and the way that you do that is you have a builders market on the core board where you're going to be able to buy and add to your country estate improvements that fall under five different categories essentials service estate prestige and sporting and i'm not going to go into each of the nuance of those different categories but they all enable you to do different things when you activate them when it comes to your estate improvements you want to be hosting activities that bring all of the guests to your yard i say that a lot in our game reviews it's very applicable to a lot of things but it's true so what you'll be doing is you'll be taking one of these uh estate improvement tiles and hosting an activity whereby you can see in this example in my main gazebo i'm hosting an afternoon tea how delightful that was not planned by the way um in order to activate the afternoon tea activity you need the right kind of staff to help you out with that activity and uh the servant that is required in this instance is a footman who's going to help with this activity so in order to activate him you place him here now you can only play activities that also match your level of reputation in derbyshire when you start the game that's just at a one so you can only play activities that are at a one and also you can only invite guests that are at the same level of reputation as you so you can see here two gentry means that i can play two different guests out of my hand of cards making sure that they are all of reputation one when i do that i might need further servants to attend to those guests in which case you would place them on the card and then when you host that activity you get a range of benefits that are provided by the activity itself as well as the benefits that are associated with the guests who have attended that activity and then here comes the theme and then when you're done with those they go into a discard pile and the challenge with this game is that you are trying to balance increasing your reputation so that you can do more activities with purchasing activities from the builders market and adding to your hand and managing that hand really well with different levels of guests and different types of guests associated with activities that become harder over time so that you ultimately get the most victory points a further challenge about this game that i really love is that every season which consists of four rounds you have a type of improvement that is going to attract those elusive fairchilds and that is revealed at the start of the season and so everyone starts to compete for those types of buildings in the builders market so not only are you trying to achieve maximum victory points through many other kind of things that you are doing you're also very conscious of that race to at the end of the season gain a fair child card which will then go into your hands for the next season and offers quite lofty benefits those victory points you have a victory point card as well oh yeah victory points as well for winning in that season courtship the court the other courtship that's right um and so that is essentially the core part of the game what i love about this game is that when i started playing it it felt a little solitary like it felt like we were both doing our independent things and there's a lot of brain power that actually goes into understanding how all of the actions come together in fact when i first started this play playing this game my first game of this it it felt fiddly to me because there was a lot of card management managing the buildings moving servants as they've been used through to available thinking through all of the bonuses that you're collecting along the way it led to a very narrowly focused self-focused experience that i didn't particularly enjoy but the more we played this the more i realized how clever and layered the system is here the mechanics here are super integrated with each other and ultimately it comes down to how well can you plan ahead for the number of cards that you're going to need for the buildings that you need to build now and in the future to achieve different objectives to maximize your victory points and to ensure that you're not constantly having to skip a turn because you have to pass to pick up your cards again to be able to do what you need to do and so the more that we learnt about how these things interrelate the more this game really opened up to us in terms of different strategies in terms of the tight competitiveness of it i think that we both got there quite quickly which led to very tight scores at the end of the game i have to say from my part i was sold from game one why because not because i won i did actually it's very rare but like i i but for me it was actually so easy to understand the mechanics because the theme was so well integrated that as soon as i understood what i was trying to achieve theme wise i am a family a family manner and i've got my group of servants i'm going to have to enhance my group of servants and my estate so that i can attract better quality or influence that those better quality guests so i can run these activities which will give me the benefits of more reputation so i can do better things actual money so that i can again enhance my my facilities for me it just it just made such thematic sense that i find myself so quickly going through it even though this time i was really left behind and i i did the teach and i read the rule book and got it yeah because because the the theme doesn't like usually that's not my thing i mean hashtag team thinker am i right um but going through the rulebook it was just so thematic everything has its purpose everything is explained away underneath the theme this is like reading a novel this is gold in here this and the glossary but i have to say that as someone who is quickly trying to understand the mechanics of the game i struggled with that because the story to me wasn't speaking to what i needed to do and i just got a little bit confused and so yeah you had a runaway lead in the in the first game um before i could wrap my head around what i actually needed to do so i think yeah if you're like maggie and you enjoy a well integrated theme i mean the cards the cards so let's talk about the cards the cards are going to be a combination of your family members along with some guests who have varying reputations so some of them the benefit of having them hosting them for some of it's a financial benefit sometimes you might have for example an american heiress who attracts a lot of money but the reputation is not so great so your reputation actually goes down even though it helps you generate some income so the integration in the cards is so good that sometimes amy would play a guest and say oh and this guest gives me you know this reputation moba and i i get to discard or lose two of my guests in my hand i'm like oh why and she would go oh because it's got the because i said so it said so i'm like no no why in the sense of there's there's actually thematically there's a little story for each one of the guests that explains the reason why like who they are a little bit of who they are and it gives you the indication of why they attract the benefits or the downfalls that they do so for example in that that one case it was someone who had an unsavory personality and so some guests just don't want to be a part of yeah there was one guy who like couldn't be around women which was like oh was it was that yeah and there was i think there was another there was another character that um needed more help and assistance so you'd have to have more servants as well to activate that card and yeah yeah the theme is like once i got my head around the mechanics i certainly appreciated the theme and then it did it does help from there and it creates like such an experience i get that little sense of like that that um the gossipy but you know like that kind of high society gossip of like oh that's one of the items as well yeah so it's like oh where do they come from and what's you know what's their story so like you get a sense of that and even like with the when you say you know it can be a little bit fiddly because you are moving your your servants here and there and everywhere with the expansion also there's so many more servants added yeah but that was probably one area that i did struggle at the time that's with the upstairs downstairs expansion it can be hard to to remember all the different abilities that each servant allows uh so so that was it felt a little bit complicated to wrap my head around more than doubled the number of servants or added for four new servants and i i probably could have done with two of four i'm not sure it needed all four but um the upstairs downstairs expansion in my view is completely mandatory like i i don't want to play it without it because they're though the guests that i do enjoy i would i love having them in the game particularly like the useful man of course and the chef he is very useful but also what i love about the expansion is it adds in milestones and milestones are public objectives where it's um basically a race and the first person to get that objective will get higher amount of victory points eight whereas the other player would get four in a two player game and i think that that for me adds more of that competitiveness that is less focused on what you're individually doing and more focused on that race element of course that you know really ticks the boxes for me but it did lead to a bit more interaction and also it led to a less linear strategy because do you go after the milestones or do you build up your estate or do you focus on your hand of cards like and and they added in more um dan added in more objective cards um there are slight tweaks more visitors so i think that all of those things combined mean that means that you know the game really does shine with all of the expansions in this case it's so rich and and it did put me in that um in that world so much i'm going to have to go back and it's the subtitle the tagline is pride intrigue and prejudice i had to go back and watch pride and prejudice because like it's one of those movies that i've watched a million times it's like i just have to like i'm just there i'm there right now so so i i think just like kudos for the theme integration even the sense as you're going through it like you do get that sense that you're you're orchestrating you know all these elements so that you can again like have the best odds for that courtship and invite the most desirable guests then kind of and there's even like with the gossip action where you can hur damage my reputation and i just think it's so i mean the amount of time that would have gone into designing each one of these cards and there are a lot of unique they're all unique cards here um along with the different families and they all it's uh they have a um asymmetric ability that you start with some kind of benefit like maybe you're a little bit richer or maybe you have a little bit better of a reputation or a better estate yeah and that helps you kick-start your strategy and think about um you know and kind of tweaks the way that you approach the game yeah and ultimately you end up with a whole host of building improvements that you know once they once you have the activity you get to flip it and it's worth more victory points and so you know you are focused on building out your estate but then your whole deck of cards as well is are worth victory points too so there are plenty of different ways and different strategies that you can approach this game the the game is just like we love it yeah we love it yeah maggie is you know it's probably not you know top 10 top five material for me personally but i think that you need to have that in context of i'm not really one for theme but also i hate period dramas i hate them any period i hate i will not watch them i will not engage and in this you like you you'll hear me saying i'm going to host an afternoon tea and i'm going to invite this person and this person and hahaha this happens as a result of that and i think that to be able to get someone to enjoy a theme that they normally don't want to have anything to do with is just like amazing and like i can't actually really looking forward to playing this more and exploring all of the different it's delightful it's just a delightful game it's not an aggressively competitive because you know why i never like it's very like any anything that you do is you know it's very passive aggressive yes yes and the best of in the best of the best british way yes yeah yeah so will we keep it uh yeah yeah actually after game one i said that to maggie and she was like yeah and i was like i don't know but you know but now this is going to get a lot of play we actually can't wait to introduce some of our friends to this because we know exactly who will love this type of love the crown love downton abbey love you know jane austen anyone who's into or just you know british history like whatever it is they'll be interested they'll be into this the one thing that i'm really sad about is i didn't opt for the coins because the coins are really cool um you know i probably have to find i'm gonna find some yeah the metal coins in the after game market that's how much we love this game i'm looking for coins um anyway so that's obsession if you enjoyed this review please let us know by hitting that like button it does tell us which videos uh are working you know we're very new to this but we're enjoying ourselves um please subscribe to our channel we have uh more upcoming reviews we've got kickstarter diaries that are happening every week we'd love to hear what you thought of this in your comments um either about the review or about the game itself for maggie we'll definitely engage with you in that conversation but anyway that's our review and we'll see you soon bye for now you

Channel: ThinkerThemer

Views: 5,534

Keywords: board games, board game reviews, board game mechanics, tabletop games, tabletop game reviews, board game themes, thinker themer, thinkerthemer, teamthinker, teamthemer, obsession game, obsession board game, obsession game review, obsession kickstarter, upstairs and downstairs, upstairs downstairs expansion, upstairs downstairs, obsession boardgame, board games 2020, upstairs downstairs obsession, obsession upstairs downstairs, dan hallagan, obsession

Id: ifJwiONYvXQ

Length: 18min 29sec (1109 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020