Previews: Ruins of Arnak, New York Zoo, Renature, Red Cathedral, Catan: Conquerors, Transcontinental

hello everybody and welcome to the first installment of this installment of the shucks preview videos that's right this is not a shut up and sit down review rather this is part of the or sharks the virtual shucks the away sharks convention in 2020 because in this dang year where publishers can't demo their own games thanks to a global pandemic we have offered to demo them for them so it's very important before we proceed i'm going to be walking you through a whole bunch of crunchy euros that are coming out this year or next year um but i haven't played any of them so all of my opinions are really just impressions based on reading the rules and should not be taken as gospel rather this is just me demoing a game on behalf of a publisher so you can get excited about a hot new release and what a hot little release we've got for you in this video this is the red cathedral published by devere and created by the enigmatically named designers shaya s and israel and first off you can see you got a lot in this box in which players will be racing to construct the red cathedral but also look how small the box is look how compact it is look how nice it is and as we all know small boxes mean small prices so already this game is off to a pretty good start we have set up a three player game here you've got a personal player board for green blue and yellow we've got the central board and also during setup we drew a blueprint card that told us the shape of cathedral that we were going to build this is a pretty straightforward euro game but nonetheless managed to impress me quite a bit and not just because it's gorgeous but because it's got all kinds of unusual elements very simply players are trying to get victory points by building sections of this cathedral which starts the game totally unbuilt and you'll hopefully finish the game with it mostly built um on your turn though you're just gonna do one of three things you are either going to claim a section of the cathedral to build you're saying i'll build that bit option two you can spend your turn when it gets around to you transporting resources from your board to the cathedral in order to actually build the bits of it you said you would option three you can spend your time going to the sort of central market this big central board to get those resources and this is kind of the heart of the game i'm going to teach it last so if you want to choose to spend your turn claiming a cathedral is yours that's easy you're going to get one of these lovely flapping banner tokens of your color and put it initially on a ground floor card of your choice so let's imagine i go i like this bit you're gonna take the little workshop tile on that and you're gonna have to put it in one of the six slots on your board incidentally the game finishes when someone has built six segments of the cathedral you can put it face down at which point it costs you nothing and does nothing or you can spend some rubles to socket it face up and then you're gonna get a little bonus when you use dice of that color but we'll get to that mechanic later um it's as simple as that you claim a bit of the cathedral you take the token done once someone has claimed a bottom floor of the cathedral then let's imagine blue's next and wants to claim a section of the cathedral blue contain many of these bottom spaces but of course now i have put my banner here that represents building the scaffolding which means blue can go above me and claim this card here and that's relevant for a few reasons but i'll get to those later there's some really funky stuff to do with how this game finally scores that i'm looking forward to teaching so we blue and green here have claimed a section let's imagine yellow has claimed a section as well so we've just taken a you know first few turns now let's talk about how to transport materials to the building site materials in the red cathedral don't go to the side of your player board and this is one of my favorite things in the rulebook um you actually have an extremely tight inventory and the inventory is this sort of ruler on your player board which means as you place your first initial flag saying i'll build this and this you're increasing your inventory so you'd think it would be sensible to place all those first it's not a good idea um it's possible for the tsar to get really annoyed with you if you claim a lot of sections of the cathedral but don't actually build them for a while but we'll get to that so i've got my claims section of the cathedral this is later in the game i've got some resources if i choose to spend my time not claiming a section but instead transporting resources to the cathedral couldn't be simpler you're just gonna pick a maximum of three resources which can be delivered to any cards and you're gonna go bam bam bam that's your turn done but let's imagine i did that next turn boom and was able to put the fourth resource that's going to finish this card all the resources are there we're going to flip it immediately all those resources are going to go back to the bank and then i'm going to take this card i'm gonna earn the rubles and the points printed on the card and then i'm gonna flip it face down and look we're slowly building out this nice pretty tableau i'm gonna leave my banner on it though so people know i built that it was me but then a cool thing happens let's imagine here that blue uh built this section of the cathedral now you'll notice in this example that green has not finished this card at the bottom that's embarrassing for green in fact the rule book uses the specific words green will then be chastised by the tsar which i love um but simply put what that means is that as players above you uh finish sections of the cathedral if you haven't finished your sections below you get increasingly penalized and your score tracker moves backwards which is lovely so you want to build section of the cathedral and that's fine just so long as you don't have players claim sections above you and build them first really like that mechanic once sections are flipped though then you have the option of adding ornamentation everyone starts the game on their player board with one door which goes on ground floors two windows which goes on middle floors and one crucifix which can go on the top of the cathedral and by paying resources and gems you can additionally add ornamentation to anyone's card and that's gonna give you some points quite a lot of points actually but also it's gonna really change how the game scores because each column of the cathedral is a little area control game okay so and the taller it is the more cards and ornamentations are in it the more points it's worth but only the player who put the most effort into each column is going to get most of those points so there's a whole area control game going on in addition to this resource management game it's very cool um but we'll push for time though so i'm just finally gonna describe the third thing you can do on your turn which is get those resources that you're gonna be desperately needing and this is feels like the heart of the game if you choose to do this action you're just gonna pick one of these five dice and first move it forward as many spaces as shown on the pips on the dice so let's say i chose to move this blue two i will go one two and it ends up next to this yellow dice in the brick section i'm gonna get two bricks shown by the circle but because there are two pips on the dice i moved i'm gonna get that twice so i'm gonna get four bricks does that sound good it is but here's the problem you can take a maximum of four bricks but you don't have to because remember you have that incredibly tight inventory you don't want to clog it all up with bricks because resources can only be removed from this once you deliver them to the cathedral so it's a game of i'm here now yeah i want as many of these resources as possible but how can i actu can i actually shift them getting resources from this is only one of several things that will happen and you can trigger these things in any order you can also depending on which quadrant of the board you're in representing spring summer autumn or winter use the randomized tradesperson card that is on that section of the board which offers abilities for example this woman here if you have your dice end up in this section she will let you pay rubles to transport some resources to the building site that's pretty cool but also so in addition to getting the resources shown on the dice and getting access to these actions also also also you're gonna get uh the abilities of workshops that you fill so remember when you claim these cards you get those little workshop tiles that you can socket into any of these areas corresponding to different colors of dice that means that when you move that dice you will get that bonus printed on the workshop card so that is pretty neat finally after you've got all of this triggered all of these actions so the workshop plus the dice resource plus the card actions if you want them you're going to grab all the dice in the section of the wheel that you ended up on you're going to give them a little rolly roll and then you're going to put them back changing the board state for the next player around the table that about sums up the gameplay of the red cathedral the game as i said ends when someone has completed all six of the possible cathedral sections they can claim because you only have six banners at which point the game goes into scoring the player who completed their sixth section first gets a few extra victory points and then you're gonna get victory points four like i say the area control game you're playing where every column let's say so this big tall one this is fun every completed card in it is going to be two four six eight and then ten points plus another point for every ornamentation so let's imagine someone threw a crucifix and someone threw on a door and someone threw on a window that's going to be a total of 13 points but only the player who built the most in that column is going to get the full 13 points everyone else the second most is going to get half as much third most is going to get half as much again let's check i'm right about that i was right about that so that's nice isn't it also i should mention that this game like so many games at the minute has a full-on solitaire mode in the manual so it plays just one player as well i think this game looks really neat i'm always a fan of games that pack big experiences into small boxes and i was kind of shocked honestly when i unpacked this dinky little box and then looked at setup and it was like set up for a full-on euro game you know um and yet it's not too difficult to teach uh this for me just hits that sweet spot it's good looking the rules seem interesting the mechanics seem appealing i am quite excited after all sharks to give the red cathedral a little play see how good it truly is but there's just no time to waste there's at least four more crunchy euro games that i have to preview let's get our skates on from capstone games and voiland this is new york zoo a charming tetromino laying game about filling your zoo with creatures great and small it plays with one to five takes 20 to 60 minutes and has designer uve rosenberg's fingerprints all over it new york zoo is at its core an efficiency race each player is trying to completely fill their grid with these tetromino pieces and if you fill your grid completely with pieces then you win instantly but at the same time you're also trying to fill up these enclosures with little chunky animals if you feel an enclosure you get to place attractions and attractions will fill your grid even quicker actions in this game are super simple all you do on your turn is pick up this elephant and move it one to four spaces around the edge of the board stopping on either an enclosure space or an animal acquisition space if you stop on an enclosure space then you take an enclosure and pop it onto your grit note here that you have to place an animal onto that tile as soon as you place it either from your houses your storage on the side or from an existing enclosure so here i could place this flamingo or i could place this kangaroo but not in the same enclosure the animals do not get along you've got to keep them in separate spaces or else the second kind of spaces are these animal acquisition spaces if you land on those then you will acquire those animals so in this example i will be taking a arctic fox and a flamingo and i can add them either straight into my zoo in an enclosure or keep them in these little storage houses to be brought into the zoo a little later on when i place a new enclosure and here there's an important rule if you ever fill an enclosure completely with one kind of animal so here we have filled up this enclosure entirely with flamingos you then get to take all of them off that board and put them back in the supply except for one you can keep one if you want and then place an attraction onto your board so for example we can take this little three piece and put it in this slot here so we filled that up and we get a little bit closer to filling the board completely however animal acquisition is not the only way that you can acquire animals in this game as in traditional uve rosenberg fashion if you ever cross one of these sticky out spaces that type of animal will breed so in this example passing this space means that these two meerkats in this enclosure will produce another little meerkat which we pop down you can do that in up to two enclosures of each animal kind and you will only ever produce one extra animal of that kind you can't have multiple animals breeding multiple other animals and just like that i've explained pretty much all of new york zoo it's a straightforward simple little puzzle and the first player to fill their entire grid wins the game as soon as they do it it's wonderfully simple but there's a lovely crunchy puzzle in the middle of how you're going to balance placing new enclosures and putting animals in them to score the maximum area as quickly as possible um i'd also be remiss not to mention that there's a light and breezy 30 minute game if you so desire we played that one on stream and it was a treat and there is also a robust solo mode if you're into that as well so that is new york zoo a lovely little game from capstone and foil land designed by uva rosenberg hello and welcome to this digital edition of orshuk's previews where we are taking a look at renature from wolfgang kramer and michael kiesling published by capstone games we've not got a physical copy of this one to demo with so we're going to be using the tabletopia mod for this demo so what is renature at its core it's a game of placing dominoes each player has a big chunky stack of these and the game only ends when you've played or discarded every last one you're using the dominoes to make little paths of woodland critters from the top of the board to the bottom and dropping off various kinds of shrubberies along the way and then those strawberries are going to give you points when the areas they are planted in are scored it's a light tight little puzzly thing with lots of opportunities to be mean and it's got quite a homely and relaxing presentation but i'm getting ahead of myself so let's get to the most basic of rules first off what do you do on your turn the first step is selecting a domino from your hand and placing it into a legal position on the board what's a legal position well if you've played dominoes then you'll know what you're doing you have to match both sides of the domino to the things around it unless the space is empty and additionally you have to follow these green paths you can't place a domino into the brown field spaces that border them there's also a wild suit at any time shown by this tracker up here currently it's birds and we'll get to how you change it a little later on so you've placed your domino and are feeling pretty pleased with yourself but you may do something else on your turn and that is to place one of these various shrubberies into a field space adjacent to the domino that you've just placed you've got multiple varieties of these on your board and each one has a different size turf is one bush is two pine is three and oak is four and you have fewer of the larger ones now why would i place a shrubbery well placing something onto these little fields will not only score you a tasty point there and then which you'll track on this gorgeous score track around the outside of the board but it will also score you an additional point of every other piece of foliage in that location regardless of who owns it which is neat but it's not the neatest or meanest thing that happens in this game so let's quickly hop onto that real speedy clock wipe i've scooted the game on just a little here and you can see that black has got a little one point shrub and a three-point pine in this area and white only has a one point shrub but you'll also notice there's a sandy wooden coloured shrub in here this is a neutral piece that both players have access to when they're choosing to place now white is just about to place their next domino and if they place it here it'll seal off this whole area and whenever an area is completely surrounded it will score based on the player's total shrubbery points in that area whoever has the highest total will win this little token that grants them the top points as well as an end game scoring bonus if you have the second highest then you'll get the second highest points on the tile crucially if you're the only one in an area then you score both sets of points and you get the end game bonus so ideally you'll want that however we've now got the most important rule in all of renature which is that if any two colors of pieces are tied for a position they completely cancel each other out as if neither of them were in that area and that includes the neutral pieces that both players have access to so let's take another look at this example white will place this domino which settles off the area but they've also got the opportunity to place a piece before it's scored they could place one of their own pieces which will give them the higher total and they'd claim the big points or they could use one of these neutral pieces which will bump up neutrals total to the same point as blacks thereby canceling them out so that white can swoop in and take the points which is brutal and that's pretty much all of renatus core but it's wrinkled just a little more by the addition of these cloud tokens essentially you start with a full bank of these and you can collect more by laying dominoes next to certain spaces on the board that house them why would you want those they can be spent at any time during your turn to do some different things you can spend change the wild suit you can even take a whole other turn or maybe most excitingly you can use them to grab one of your pieces back off the board to then place a little later on they're also worth an extra point at the end of the game so they're worth holding on to if you've got them spare and at the end of the game you'll score any leftover unsealed areas though you won't get the hidden points for them just the face value ones and then you total up your scores on this lovely little border score track and that's it that's all of renature uh some extra details are this game seats up to four players with slightly smaller player boards uh it's published by capstone games designed by chrome and kiesling and it's part of their new simply complex series that's three nature it is a lovely little thing we have a very big bouncing baby board for you next this is katan legend of the conquerors put out by uh whoever publishes katan katan studio i knew i knew it or something like that and designed by klaus tuber designer said let's get on and benjamin tuber progeny of daddy tuber now what we have here is if you can believe it a little legacy campaign not for bass guitar but for the guitar played with the cities and knights expansion if you have not heard of katan i'm gonna give you the briefest whistle-stop explanation basically it is an award-winning german classic in which players sort of compete for space and resources on a map of hexagonal tiles at the start of every turn my dice you are going to be rolling two dice this is on the side of your turn and everyone else's turn look at that snake eyes the odds of that what what the odds are there one in 36. uh and then the hexes that match the numbers will produce resources for anyone with settlements on the outside of that hex so in the case of this that too means this uh wheat hex will give a resource to the white player that weak resource will go in white's hands allowing them to build more roads more settlements and scrabble their way towards more points um that's the classic game in a nutshell the cities and knights expansion adds uh cities and knights i mean the most sort of striking piece is this wonderful flippy little sheet you're able to upgrade your science buildings politics buildings and trade buildings unlocking new special resources and new abilities and increasing your odds of being able to draw from three new decks of development cards yellow green and blue cities and lights i might describe it as adding a little bit of what you'd expect from a city building strategy came to katan you get little nights if you run around the board you get all kinds of different fantastical abilities on those cards but the knights are primarily used to keep katan safe let me show you something what we have here is the board in which you will advance this boat periodically throughout the game and when it reaches this uh intimidating looking charging barbarian space you're going to count up the total value of knights on the board versus the value of everyone's towns and if there are more towns than knights the player who put the smallest amount of knights into the battle or has the smallest amount of knights on the board gets one of their towns raised however if you're able to repel the knights if you collectively as a group of players have more knights than you do uh cities then the person who had the most nights is gonna get victory points which finally takes us to the legacy expansion so legend of the conquerors is a special three scenario campaign box full of stuff that's going to tell a strikingly ambitious story of barbarians attacking the legendary island of katan now as usual when charlotte sit down reviews legacy games i don't want to spoil all the twists that arrive in the short little campaign uh but i will just reveal two of the big big features so the first is the the it replaces the deck of blue politics development cards to better suit what's happening in the campaign and what is happening in the campaign well this is really pretty exciting so as we've got a new bigger barbarian invasion board here and as it reaches these spaces with a purple flag what you're going to do is actually deploy actual barbarians on the board like so on these uh landing spaces and then once they are on the board they are going to move and the way that happens is that you're gonna be rolling this dice with three swords for each barbarian on the board and you're going to advance them in that direction according to the little uh sort of swordy arrowy pointy thing now there are a few things that are going to be very exciting as these things across the board and the the prominent one is that when they move into a space if there aren't enough knights on the intersections around that space to defeat the token you're going to take that resource numbery thing and flip it and it's gone as in that space will not produce any more resources because it has been conquered and if you're able to later dispatch these barbarians who are charging around tearing resources out the ground you can reconquer that territory again what's also interesting is that the legend of the conquerors scenario one at least let's see because i'm not going to tell you what happens in future scenarios has uh several possible ending conditions you see if this scenario ends as katan usually does with one player reaching a set number of victory points then you're going to in the style of traditional legacy games assign victory points sort of campaign-wide points to the players who came first second third and fourth however if the campaign instead ends in defeat which is either because these marching hexagons conquer too much territory or because the game sees the boat getting all the way to the red dice at the end and no one's reached victory point total yet then the scenario ends in defeat and then the players who get the most campaign points it doesn't matter who got the victory points you're going to get campaign points based on how far you advanced down what's called this hero track so if the scenario ends in defeat you'll get more campaign legend points only if you killed more barbarians than everybody else but as you can probably guess from the thickness of this booklet there's a lot more mechanics and items and components and ideas in this campaign that i am revealing in scenario one i was really quite surprised by this i didn't know katan was uh being quite this experimental i also learned as i was learning the legend of the conquerors sort of legacy expansion the campaign expansion uh they have done this before uh there's another very popular big expansion for guitar called seafarers of katan and just like i've got set up here with katan city tonight and the cities and knights campaign there is in fact if you could another way to do this you could do katan and seafarers of katan and a seafarers of katan expansion again full of new ideas and new ways to play katan i have now said the word katan so many times it doesn't make sense to me anymore let's move on to the next game next up we have quite the beefcake from czech games edition this is lost ruins of arnak designed by min and elwynn which i presume is two people and not one person with a very strange middle name uh what we have here is a big heavy euro game of resource management deck building track advancement beating up monsters all kinds of stuff and uh i will just head off some potential criticism of the past this you would think resembles some of the uh colonial sort of themes in games that the board game industry has been quite rightly sort of questioning more recently lost ruins of arnold is entirely based on a fictional civilization almost a fantasy civilization um as you'll see with some of the close-ups of art in this game it it very clearly is not trying to resemble anything resembling a human culture all the same this is still a game about uh tromping across someone else's historical territory digging up arrowheads and uh publishing research on uh a long forgotten civilization if that's not your cup of tea of course uh we would respect that however we're here to demo this game for you and that's exactly what i'm gonna do so in this game i've set up a two-player game here every player is going to get two chunky wooden archaeologists they're gonna get a private little deck of cards they're gonna get this little camp board one of you the first player is gonna get this charming alarm clock and then uh you're all gonna start panicking i would guess at the size and scale of this board but it's actually relatively simple okay i'm gonna point out first how you win and then how you play and then a shop and then we'll basically be there uh with your grasping of the game so to win this game um you're going to get points from all kinds of stuff but mostly you're going to get points by sort of learning about this sort of arnakian maybe that's what they call it this arnakian civilization and publishing research that all takes place along this sort of papyrus track along the edge of the board every player has a magnifying glass and a journal which represents you seeing things and then you writing them down um so as you'd imagine you can't write down stuff you haven't seen yet so you're going to be advancing both of your tokens the magnifying glass and the book but the book can never advance further than the magnifying glass now as you advance you have little dividers showing what resources you need to give up to advance so this first step you could drop a ruby to go up this side of the track or you could drop an arrowhead and one of the exploration tokens representing how much you've explored the island to go up this track and then you're gonna get rewarded for all of that hard work because every time you move your magnifying glass you get the resources shown at the top um and every time you advance your journal you get sort of permanent buffs but also points you're gonna get points for both of these things and if you get all the way to the top of the track you unlock some incredibly valuable spaces and you can start discovering the lost city of arnac itself but we're getting distracted basically this is a track in which you will pay a variety of resources taking a variety of paths to get to some fat juicy points but really the exciting thing about anak is this middle bit okay this is the terrain itself you're going to be exploring and while it looks very sort of detailed and overwhelming it's actually hugely simple so all this is a worker placement spaces okay so when it's your turn there's a variety of things you can do but the simplest thing you can do and i suggest one of the things you can do on your turn is pay resources to advance one of your markers up this track like we discussed but how do you get resources i'm so glad you are hypothetical person so one of the other things you can do on your turn is take your little person and put them on any of these spaces along the bottom well actually you'll put them in one of the slots at the bottom and to do that you need to pay the associated travel costs so these five spaces at the beginning let's pick up the hand of cards from your personal deck you're dealt at the start um you're gonna have to discard one of these travel icons in the top left in order to get your archaeologist to one of these beautifully illustrated spaces all of which offer different resources so if i want to i don't know sort of go to where these parrots are hoarding rubies i could discard a card with a boot and then i would move my archaeologist from my personal player board to there and then i would have the ability to get a ruby now there is a hierarchy of travel icons in this game so fear are the bad cards in this game there's a lot of very spooky stuff going on in arnak that will force you to take fear cards and put them into your deck and fear cards are negative victory points but do at least provide a boot icon which is the lowest level of travel icon basically if you're really scared turns out you will walk somewhere um this this is certainly true to my experience in real life um but boots are the worst kind of travel icon and if you want to travel to these better worker placement spaces up near the top of the board you're really they're going to need cars or you're going to need boats which have higher levels of travel icon and there's an even higher level which is planes if you've got a plane you can go anywhere um just like real life sort of so you're going to be discarding travel icons from hands to move your archaeologists onto spaces to gather big chunky resources and you're gonna use those resources to advance up this uh this research track right wrong because there's another thing you're gonna be spending resources for actually there's loads of things um you might spend resources going to the shop instead and the shop has this fabulous moon staff thing that's gonna that is both the round marker of the game so it can show you whether you're on around one two three four or five but it also divides the shop in half because to the right of the staff which is at the beginning of the game most of the slots you're going to put these item cards sort of equipment that your explorers might bring with you and you can on your turn instead of moving an archaeologist or spending resources to advance up the track or discovering your location you can acquire a card and these cards are so cool um i'm not sure you can tell in the b-roll of this video but uh the variety and the sort of just the care and tlc that's gone into all the art in this game is a true delight um it's not sort of like i mean i like the quest for eldorado but that was very generic explorary fiction this as adventure fiction is top-notch it's really really fun so yes you've got all these items you can buy these cards that will give you special abilities but on the left of the moon staff we have artifact cards which are even more expensive and even better and so as we move from round one to round two we're going to have more artifacts and less items and so on and so on so that's nice um so these cards you're getting are by the way something else you can do on your turn if you have a big fancy card like a cool journal you can on your turn play the journal for its effect and of course that journal once you've played it doesn't go anywhere or rather it doesn't leave the game it goes on the bottom of your deck so you're playing a little deck building game here as you acquire items you'll play them they'll go on your deck you'll draw them again so that's fun and satisfying isn't it um but i should uh really let's refill the shop because i'm a good boy it doesn't force other people to do that for me um let me talk finally about my favorite thing in our neck which is how you unveil additional worker placement spaces behind these basics so let's say i discarded cards with a sufficient number of boats to send my archaeologist over here first off i'd grab the idle that's a nice little uh benefit that i can get and i can slot it into my board later if i want but that's some advanced rules i'm not gonna just get into in a brief overview then you're gonna take the top card of uh the top tile rather of this kind of exploration deck and oh look what i've got here i've got a spooky cave to the um to the arnakian bird gods and that space is going to give you fear but also stone tablets and rubies so a bit of a trade-off space there but certainly way more efficient than the five starter spaces and look so i've gone there and i would get those resources and that's all great but uh it's partially great because i do get a fear card into my deck that's bad but places in arnac are not just sort of passively waiting there to be explored no no no they have guardians let's do this huge deck of guardian tiles so yeah i have unlocked that worker placement space both for me and for everybody but it's guarded by oh in this case a huge horrible stag beetle now uh what that does well first off anytime anyone unlocks any of the worker placement spaces it's always going to come with a monster the monster isn't necessarily going to stop you doing what you're doing they're not murderous but they are horrifying which is why once you've you know let's imagine that in a round i send one of my archaeologists there another one there um at the end of a traditional worker placement game you would take your workers back and that's what happens in our knack but in the case of arnac if you take your worker back from somewhere where there is still a monster you're gonna take that uh person back but he's gonna come running home he or she they whatever they're gonna come running home with a fear card and that's the penalty for you not dispatching that monster and dispatching a monster is the other thing you can do on your turn so just to recap you can send a worker to a space you can explore you can advance up this track you can buy an item you can use an item or you can go and kill a monster now printed on that monster are what you need to discard in order to defeat it so and this is often some quite fun thematic stuff so in the case of this stag beetle you have to discard some gold coins then use an arrow head which i would imagine is like distracted with gold and then while it's looking somewhere else get it in its neck yeah i said that these monsters weren't murderous but you definitely are um so if you uh choose to spend your time discarding the resources to kill a monster first off that are any archaeologists on that space are not going to be spooks at the end of a turn when you take them back um also you get a permanent little bonus that you can discard this month well you can sort of expend uh you can use once per game and also any monster you slay is worth five victory points as well so that is a brief overview of lost ruins of arnac one of the most sort of florid and colorful euro games that i've seen in quite some time and i would be really excited to give this game a play like there is no element of this game that isn't sort of aesthetically pleasing from these chunky unique tokens to the big tiles you get to place to the art on the cards to the map on the board and the board is double-sided as well you've got a slightly different setup if you choose to play with a snake temple instead of the friendly bird temple that we have on this beginner game so that's lost through and zvarnak absolutely beautiful i'm sure you'd agree and potentially lots of fun but as with all of the games in these preview videos i cannot confirm if it's fun or not because we have not played them we are only demoing them on behalf of publishers let's take a look at the next game the last of our crunchy euro previews is going to be the transcontinental a game about building the biggest railway that canada has ever seen it's brought to us by wheelhouse games and designed by glenn dresser takes about one to two hours to complete for one to four players it's quite crunchy so we'll jump straight in to the teach players are each taking the role of a contractor looking to have the most influence in building this fine railway essentially each round of the game involves the train traveling from the east coast to the furthest point it can west and then turning back again to be resupplied and make the journey once more next round before the train moves you get to place down these chunky telegram tokens into this central board and when the train reaches those telegrams the player who has that piece gets to take an action in one of the bordering spaces like producing resources or contributing to developments and when the train gets to the rail head at the end you'll collectively bid on how far you want this thing to move advancing the train into new territory and the player who bids the most gets first pick of the rewards something that's really neat about this game though is that the train itself belongs to all the players so the resources that you'll be gathering to bid on extensions add new cars to the train and create developments along the track all sit on the train itself here this counts as one iron for the blue player as the train travels along the board a player might decide to take the develop action which involves lifting their cubes from the train with the goal of eventually filling all the spots on the development so you can flip it and put one of your houses on that spot thing is there's a lovely rub here a player can pick which resource cube they use from the train but anyone with resources behind that one can also choose to contribute to the project hopefully trying to bag themselves a development and some points it's only the players that bid the most that get to put their little warehouses on these spots thus giving them access to the actions and points later on the thing is though is a player can always use the farthest back resource in a cart meaning that there's no one behind them and therefore they're the only one that gets to bid so you're trundling along this track loading resources into your big shared train and then oh no the track runs out this is the rail head and when the train reaches here players collectively bid resources with one particular resource being worth double to push the train tracks forward when this happens you add up the total resources of all the resources bid and the rail head will move forward that many cumulative spaces and then each player will pick one of these rewards to get for themselves with the first player getting first dibs and there's a bunch of neat little rewards here like being able to go first or extra end game scoring bonuses as well as ally cards and all kinds of other nifty little things then the train heads back the other way and you'll do another session of placing telegrams and gathering bits and bobs before the train returns to be resupplied where new carts get added onto the train sometimes when gathering resources you might have a bit of spillover where resources can't be placed on the train itself and if this happens they go into carriages in the yard and when you get back to the supply the player who fueled the train with the most coal gets to pick which carriage goes onto the train next and they'll earn points for the resources added in this way something important to note here is that the carts you're adding to the train are double-sided and the little hidden resource here shows what can be carried by that cart if it gets flipped and that happens as soon as a resource of that kind needs to fill that space so your best laid plans can get jumbled pretty quickly by a rapid conversion of a cart there are of course way more rules and systems and icons and opportunities in this box like these investment cards that give you rewards for placing your little houses on certain territories at the end of the game or these ally carts which give you powerful one-time bonuses to jettison your train to victory and as the train gets more and more elaborate and long and complicated and the tracks get longer the options will spill outwards but i'm to keep it kind of simple because honestly i was surprised at how easy this game was to teach once you can pass the iconography i looked at this box and thought oh my god and suddenly it all clicked into place but that's not to say there aren't meaty decisions i'm really excited to give this one an actual proper run honestly i'm kind of in love with the colours on this thing it's vibrant as hell in a way that plenty of other quite dry trainee games aren't this board is a meandering painterly journey that is gorgeous and the work in progress box art looks absolutely lovely to boot the iconography is super clear and delightful and these player boards have all the information you need to play the game right in front of you it's not just a pretty face though these bidding and resource gathering aspects are enticing so that is the transcontinental from wheelhouse games designed by glenn dresser available next year i think and that is all for this edition of oreshuk's previews thank you very much for watching if you are around on the 16th to the 18th of october which could be now could be in the future or could be in the past then you should check out our excellent online convention it's jam-packed with excellent guests you can buy games from publishers directly that will support us and them and you can buy merch from the shop is it down store for the first time and play all kinds of games with all kinds of people from all around the world from all kinds of publishers and if that doesn't sound like your cup of tea well don't worry we've got a whole youtube channel of other cool content that you can watch as well and that's it for this episode episode of all sharks previews hope you have a wonderful day bye

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 89,392

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Tom Brewster, AwSHUX, SHUX, Convention, board game convention, digital convention, Catan, Legacy Catan, Transcontinental, New York Zoo, Capstone

Id: k3vSQfdLptc

Length: 42min 0sec (2520 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020