Our 1 Player Game Review Roundup

[Music] mm hello everybody today we present shut up and sit downs guides to solo tabletop games games that are great for just one player perfect for anyone who finds themselves at the moment without a group to play with obviously that's not a problem for me I have many friends look there's one how you doing another friends just over there I do wish you would go away though ah in this video we're gonna be covering great dedicated solo games like Ariane we've got these games that offer escape rooms and mysteries that you can have all to yourself and I believe on the line we have tom who's going to bring us a little review of the hunt it the new big one player war game from top flight publisher GMT Games are you there Tom Tom are you hearing us are we getting through Queens it's looking like it's gonna be quite a long Oh Tom I think you're cutting out yes Quinn's I can hear you fine and you are getting through it just looks like it's gonna be quite a wait sorry you say I was cutting out no I said that before just carry on with what you're doing now yes Quinn's it's gonna be a long game but I'm sure we'll get through it sooner sorry am i what [Music] unfortunately we'll be hearing more from Tom later on also on the digi link we have Matt who is gonna help us to answer the question why not just play a video game Matt are you there yeah yeah just just give me a minute Quinn's I just need to get I'm just about to a lot for more time James but okay you know what let's just move on let's start this loner fiesta with my favorite purpose-built solitaire game Ariane Ariane is the latest release in a well liked series of 1 player games known as the Oni verse where you might be looking for a dream door stopping a dream forest fire or in Ariane the theme has you helping a dream team to build dream machines before you run out of Dreams Steve what's important is that all six Oni verse games Ariane has received the best reviews and I'm gonna give it another glowing review right now I think this game is awesome when you step up you have got six ships to build and you've got six decks in front of you okay now each ship requires a different combination of crew material and blueprint from these six decks and if you build all six ships before all six decks run out you win however you only have two hangers so you can only be working on two ships at one point and double however what you can take from the decks each turn is limited by what you roll on these six dice on each round you roll all six dice and if you've never rolled your dice and evolved do give it a shot at some point and you can only end the turn by taking a card if you get the corresponding numbers on the deck so if I want a card from this deck I need four of the same this deck requires three pair and so on to get these combinations I can re-roll as many dice as I want as many times as I want but every time I do I have to pick one of these six cards on display to junk so with each reroll you are simultaneously narrowing your options of what you're allowed to get and because the game ends another decks run out you are shortening the game and you are in the middle getting pinched and from this fun foundation of rolling dice and grabbing stuff and building ships this game then erect San entire scaffolding of considerations each deck contains three of the eleven different items in the game so you're constantly fretting about obliterating your reserves of starstuff or eggs or I don't know what any of this stuff is but I'm worried about running out on top of that each deck contains a couple of book cards and you can roll the dice and pick these up you don't build ships with them but you can instead spend a book card to bend the rules of the game to help you out which you desperately need but you can only ever hold one book at a times you're always wondering should I use it now because this is also dice and happen to get what you need to get a book but you already have a book you're gonna feel like a differing dream dingus finally if you like carry on and you win and you probably will like it and you probably will win because it's not that difficult the game then has this raft of six discrete expansions in the box any of which can be mixed and matched from stone clouds that block your path that have to be broken up by you recruiting hammer Birds to this evil Hellkite that roams the sky is causing problems for you it's very clever you see traditionally cooperative board games get their replayability from being as hard as diamond coated nails from Sheffield but getting flattened by a game when you're by yourself is a bit of a bummer so instead Ariane lets you constantly taste victory but then it says okay but what about this what about this mode what about with this expansion what about combining this expansion you like with this one you've always had trouble with it tangles the possibility of expertise in front of you and lets you chase after it on your own time by your own rules Arion is great it is colorful and tactile and inventive and satisfying Andrew and I really really like it it is literally hours of fun which honestly when we started this video I didn't know if I'd be able to say about a dedicated solitaire game I've not played any of the other games in the only verse only verse universe but if you have and you'd recommend any of the others definitely leave a comment on this video on YouTube or shut up and sit down dot-com I'll tell you what else is hours of fun if you're stuck in a room why not pretend to escape an imaginary room that's just common sense everyone shut up and sit down calm I did a review comparing the two best tabletop series that seek to recreate the experience of being in an escape room namely the fabulously inventive exit series and the app assisted unlock games there's also the even smaller deck scape series of escape from games which are a lot like the other two but worse but they do have the advantage that you can't actually fail them so even the biggest idiot plane by themselves will still stumble and Flay all that way to the end covered in sweat and errors there's been a lot of chat online about which tabletop escape room series is best and that's all well and good but the fact is I have had fun playing all the ones that I have played although if you're playing with friends ah you have to share all the puzzles among one another that's how escape the room games are all designed but if you do them yourself you get to keep all those juicy Brussels to yourself shout out to all my only child brothers and sisters who also never learned to share all our add is that if you do set out to play any of these escape room games alone I might completely ignore the 60-minute time limit when you're playing a game by yourself the one advantage you have is that you can meditate on problems for as long as you want you can spool your decision-making across long luxurious minutes you can even walk away from the table come back later come back in a week any game that sets a time limit on your experience is already going about solo gaming backwards so maybe that means escape from games aren't what you should be looking at maybe you one is a mystery we're going to start off with a real treat cosmoses new adventure game series come in these sweet little boxes at a low price point and they're inspired not by escape rooms but by point-and-click video games so in this one monochrome ink you're gonna pick your character from this range of sort of clay homunculus and then you and your friends or just you will break into these corporate headquarters to find out what's going on with monochrome inks sinister new rainbow supplement you're still combining items and exploring locations all of which take the form of cards cards cards cards but now there's this additional spatial element where your characters are and how they get their matters as well as who's carrying what and how you exchange items between one another also there's a lot more reading a lot more story and also just a lot more full stop whereas most of the unlock and exit games take you maybe an hour the adventure that you play through here takes perhaps four or five hours I had so much fun playing monochrome ink by myself that in the future I'm looking forward to my other games in this series and playing them with people because I like escape from board games but this link frustrating with someone solves a puzzle and you're like oh well I guess I'm not interacting with that the fact that players in this game if you play multiplayer have different items the fact that you have to come together to combine stuff makes this experience feel pleasantly collaborative or at least it would if if I had friends although if reading and scale and value for money is what you want then you must look into Sherlock Holmes consulting detective the granddaddy of mystery solving games all of the consulting detective boxes that you can buy have ten cases and each case is involved enough to fill an entire evening with fretful pondering at the start of each case you're gonna learn about a crime and then by going to different locations of your choice in all of London and by cross-referencing that with the map and then today's newspaper you might just be able to figure out what happened or if you're like me you'll spend the entire night trying to smash these jigsaw pieces together like a squid with a brain injury you'll make about 40 pages of notes that won't help you and then at the end you'll look up how it was done and Sherlock will tell you huh it was an amend read was an elementary Sherlock you're a bad man but the Francie's consultant detective is frequently frustrating sometimes the puzzle design is downright poor and banjac Singh three hours of your own sleuthing because you didn't notice a single surname in the newspaper is heartbreaking and yet I would still recommend it to just about everybody I still think it is at the absolute top of its class and it is made less frustrating if you just first off read a blog post of tips by a gent called Eric twice and you can find the link to his blog post in the description of this video alternatively if you want something that's a bit like consultant detective but worse and that you can fit in your pocket there's now dectective which I'm mentioning for two reasons first off I like the name and second off I like that it's easy setting up this tiny crime scene as if you were a cross between a criminologist and a wasp look at that so dinky you could play it on folding plain table or in your toilet anyway that's enough for me it's time for a tantalizing report on a big old GMT war game for just one player it's time for us to cover the hunted with Tom are you there Tom how's the game feel on this one good talk to me Tom the hunted is a solitaire tactical level game placing you in command of a German u-boat and picks up the action where the hunters left off and where did the hunters leave us the sea are you reading off the back of the box no I can see it in shop right now Tom just some general pointers on how the game feels to play what kind of mechanics are involved yes this one's called Jurgen the truth is I've spent hours with the hunted and I really wanted to enjoy it I'm not someone that's huge into the historical accuracy of GMT games but I am someone who's fascinated by the labyrinth and systems of games like a distant plane which is a game that I've probably talked about a hell of a lot more than I've actually played GMT games take an absolutely monstrous amount of preparation setup and reading before you can start a game but most importantly they require a hell of a lot of passion from the people playing a passion that I'm not always able to conjure up so surely the hunted would be the perfect experience for me a GMT game where I don't have the burden of teaching the rules to anyone but myself what I've found is that instead of slowly stretching for people's brains at once the hunted slowly crushes one this game is a mire of cross-referencing information clinging to a turn reference so you don't get lost in the currents of this games many many systems this game feels like following a recipe a recipe where at the end you don't get a delicious cake you just get a waft of serotonin that can only come from sinking imaginary u-boats made of statistics even in lockdown I found the gargantuan task of plowing through this monstrous rulebook really quite tiresome maybe even exhausting there are exciting decisions here and cool mechanics but they're buried under regulation upon regulation so much so that learning how to play the hunted feels like you're learning a perfectly useless skill one that I now perhaps unfortunately possess listen there are exciting solo games out there but their forte for me isn't in that simian but instead in Escapist creative fantasies for the trapped brain a game like the quiet year or the artifact is gonna give me so much more joy than this gamified filing cabinet that is the hunted you know I think that the best solo games understand the inner traditional board game the fun of learning the rules doesn't come from the rules themselves but people's interpretations of them and the anticipation of seeing what your friends are gonna do with the mechanics when you're sat here learning these neatly indexed volumes and volumes of sub-clauses and rules the only interpretation is your own and you lose something there I think I mean maybe for some people learning the rules is fun in and of itself but it's not for me the hunted instead makes me feel like a bird in a cage trapped between nihilism and boredom I look to the words for guidance in these trying times and do they reply nay but with tokens lost in a sea of tokens I am save for the 40-page life raft of regulations to trudge on nay to turn back is the more noble goal to stop the burden of time weighing so heavily on my soul and to seek pleasures and you in fields greener I will cast off the shackles of reviewer hood through what some may call it negligence but I will call it the truth right well that was great let's check in with Matt Matt any progress on the question of why wouldn't you just play a video game okay you know what we're done shut down it's over [Music] amateurs if you've enjoyed this if you've enjoyed this video great I'm glad one of us did I wish I could say that this solo saga was coming to an end but sadly I'll be back in another few weeks with more games for just one player but this time ones that are free I'm talking print and play games I'm talking one player RPGs that's a thing and I'm talking all the board games that publishers have made available for free during the epidemic so I want to see you slap that a subscribe button cuz I'll be back in a few weeks

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 284,624

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Solo Special, Solo Games, One Player Board Games

Id: sDbCqZoxROk

Length: 17min 24sec (1044 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2020