Taverns of Tiefenthal - Shut Up & Sit Down Review

after smashing it out of the box with quacks of quirt Limburg and the mind Wolfgang Vash is storming back into town with this cozy pub euro up the taverns of teefin Thal a game that takes some of the DNA from quacks of Quentin Berg and stretches us out into some complex kind of concertina but rather than The Blind Luck of dipping into a bag and then screaming you'll be building your own personal deck of cards you'll draw from in a manner that hopefully won't destroy you for the little town of teefin Thal has been besieged by drunkards hordes of them are staggering towards the warm inviting arms of that amber elixir but don't worry because you are a tavern manager and you're gonna keep a detached eye from above making sure that you're gonna wrangle a profit from your nice tavern you wouldn't want to associate with this riffraff after all this is a family show okay I'm taking these away from you you write and script oh okay you wrote this in this euro game you'll be running a tavern building a deck of guests furniture and staff to draw from each round and hoping that you'll build a powerful engine that churns out beer and money at 100 miles an hour and at the end of the game whoever attracts the most illustrious clients he'll will be crowned the winner okay I didn't read nothing like crack open these tennies titties yeah you know Kenny's cold ones bubble boys foam Holmes canisters of Dreams do you mean beers well is beer [Music] [Music] a turn in taverns of teeth all sees you drawing from your personal deck of cards and putting them out into your tavern whether they're staff or extra tables or punters and once you've filled up all of the tables in your tavern well you stop drawing and it's time to serve serve serve regardless of how ready your tavern may or may not be once you've drawn your cards for the turn every player will roll a fistful of dice on these little coasters and impress them around the table in a miniature dice drafting game at start of the game you'll mostly be looking for high numbers on the dice or low ones to produce the two main currencies of the pub beers and cash money now money you'll mainly spend on temporary staff and improvements adding waitresses dishwashers beer dwarves or beer rogues and you put these on the top of your draw tech which means you're guaranteed to see them at least once in the game unlike when you buy things to put in your bag in cracks of Quentin burg which you put them in your bag and you will never see them ever again crucially this is also how you get more tables which when drawn extend the capacity of your tavern meaning that when you're drawing cards each turn you can keep going for longer until you fill up all of your tables with customers and realize that you are shafted and scream so everything is going wrong but don't worry it's probably your fault because every few rounds you get one of these little traveler tokens that fits on your board there which lets you take all of these cards that were in your tavern and put them in your own personal bin and drawing again in the hopes of getting a better spread which usually means more tables now the problem is you can also spend this traveler token on the obligatory boondoggle and literally all euro games the monk tract and that's really just not a good use of your token at all no no it isn't and so just like when you have a mental breakdown like here it's likely you'll develop a fixation with tables but if you get enough money then you can stop to instead buy some pretty chunky upgrades permanently upgrading your pub is brilliant mainly because you get to flip over each little part of the pub like a jigsaw maverick who doesn't play by the rules but by God he gets the jigsaw done also obviously it makes that bit of the board better now ideally you'll also be able to get a discount on some upgrades by discarding one or more temporary workers say goodbye to three part-time dishwashers and you'll get a full-time employee embedded for free it's like in supermarkets where real human staff mysteriously disappear in a replaced by robots that have real human emotions and beg you to unplug them so they might die well yeah that's enough about traditional Commerce Tom what about the Bears obviously brewing large quantities of beer is gonna attract lots of new people into your business increasingly powerful people you'll kind of recruit enjoying us drink from the sacred beverage drinky drink drinky drinky drinky drinky drinky drink drinky drink drinky drink I thought this was a pub there is something wrong with your tavern yes people come in and serve them lots of drinks but it never really feels like actually serving people beer is the thing that matters all of that much you'll want to cram loads of guests into your deck because that's how you're gonna get plenty of points at the end of the game but customers just feel like a means to an end and much like in actual real life for retail work they're an element of the job that you just quietly resent having more customers means you've got fewer tables to work with and having fewer tables to work with means that you've got a much bigger chance of having too when you're tavern for the night with no staff no beer and a tankard / brimming with horror eventually you'll want the big points the nobles these lovely patrons never take up too much space in your tavern as they're all contempt to sit at the same table [Music] but until you start getting nobles it says a lot that arguably the most ideal customer is this bruiser who lets you permanently remove an inferior customer from your establishment [Music] ma'am here's the rub and it is a grating rub like a fresh cotton shirt on unprotected nipples taverns of teeth and thaw is atmospherically rich oh it's it's warm and toasty and it makes your chest feel all nice but thematically just doesn't work this isn't what running a pub would be like or if it is it's like some sort of terrifying tavern designed by an algorithm that a pub that prioritizes having loads of tables over caring about customers at all or if you're based in the UK Weatherspoon's thematically something has gone wrong when a game about running a pub has you opening the same door every night and praying tonight you'll have slightly more furniture and worse should you get really unlucky with your drawer and have no means to buy another do-over from scratch well if a twist of randomness in a game like this is an unwanted garnish that your phone spoils the flavor then taverns of tea for thought it's just not gonna be for you but as some of you will know Shona sit down has always had a real fondness for games with themes that don't quite fit combined with wild strokes of misfortune because then you can sit with your friends and laugh about your nonsensical taverns and oh it's all going wrong it's still fun but with this after you spend such a long time thinking of planning when you have several terrible turns back-to-back well it gets increasingly hard to just laugh it off the issue with this kind of game isn't randomness really it's more that it requires strategy way more than tactics it can be tremendously disheartening when you think okay about about turn but next turn I'm going to do this isn't this and you're pretty sure the next turn is gonna be amazing and everyone roll the dice when you look at the Dyson you just literally can't do any of it and more than that it's not uncommon to get to the end of a game of towns of teeth and thought and find that really you never found that momentum the game end can often feel a little damp it's quite easy to just have a last couple of turns where everything just goes a bit wrong and you're tapping just fails never really manages to punch yourself into all bit like a good euro does but then the interesting thing here is it's happens of teeth now comes with 5 micro expansion modules which are incrementally added to make the game more complicated so if the problem is it's a bit too dependent on luck to be this complicated what happens if you make it way more complicated does it get much better Oh much worse when you've got all five of these optional modules in play well it's a different beast you've now got a guest book to fill and your bar has a reputation track and entertainers periodically turn up providing their services in exchange for snaps gazing or as the dancer produces 3-bit be dazzled as the juggler makes sure that one of your cards stays between rounds be shocked when the fire breather literally emulates an elderly man in front of your very eyes [Applause] these entertainers give you a degree of control over your wild unattainable deck letting you mitigate some bad luck by sliding some bad fields straight into the bin but it's the reputation track that's the real game changer this is a lazy susan of occasional bonuses that gently orbits your pub landlord and increases by whatever you produce the least off on any given turn so on this turn I produce six money and one two three four beer and the reputation trekker really does seem to rent up the sensation of spicy but this small bearded boy has truly run in to a tavern tango balancing beer and money to obtain the highest reputation possible he is now wrapped with indecision faced with whether to use his newfound notoriety to fund the schnaps habit of a thirsty dancer or to emulate the old man who mostly on the orders tap water with all five modules this baby sings and you even get to do a thing where at the start of the game you choose the specific bonus that your deck starts with so you truly get to kick-start your strategy from turn one meaning by the end of the game you will be big barely bonuses sitting on a throne native customers I mean it still doesn't feel like you're running up pub if anything it's more like running a pyramid scheme where you want to try and get as many really wealthy people on board as you can and then hope that as soon as they're on board you literally never hear from them ever again I'm not sure I'd really be able to recommend the basic vanilla version of taverns you don't often feel like you get a chance to really explode into building something silly and it requires a lot of thought but there aren't many ways that you can actually mitigate bad luck meaningfully or an interesting ways and yes it is lighter but if you want something light and a bit like this just play quack so Gwendolyn burg because it's one of my favorite games however when you amp it up with all of this stuff it gets to be quite a lovely interesting thing and I'd be remiss not to mention the dice drifting thing going in circles it's actually quite interesting and it does provide some player interactions especially when you're playing with two or three you can see on the other people's boards quite easily what dice they want or what boast you're most likely to be getting so it's not just like they shouldn't have put dice in this game it's too much luck it's a cool mechanic it just it's maybe just a bit too much all at once you know it's a big shame that the theme just doesn't quite man especially with these fantastic modular cardboard boards it doesn't feel like a game where you upgrade it's happen in fact the optimal thing to do and it feels very natural it's just to wait until the very end of the game and then just get as many of the upgrades as you can all at once as cheaply as you can which is a shame because flipping over all these bits is fun and it just doesn't really happen very often then it's a shame that neither they nor the customers coming into your tavern are ever really given a starring role within the game I had a ton of fun with taverns for the first few plays but beyond the kind of warm inviting theme it's not that great you know what I think I explained it pretty well in this diagram here right yeah Tom no that makes perfect sense to me so it's maybe it's not quite interesting enough to really keep you and maybe two three plays but maybe that's enough for you was that not enough for you Tom obviously Tommy well like I mean it's just they're better games that are more complicated I think that's the problem really you know it's fantastic well it's not fantastic but it's so much better with all of the little bits all of the little modular bitten but at that point you play again that's more complex so really maybe you just play something like Concordia I might be like let's crack open lowlands where you could play something way more simple on the other end of the spectrum I'm just going to say this do you know right it's all very well you've played it three four or five times in your life I don't know how much I like it but we've set it all up when it's out there on the table like this do you kind of want to play it now I think that stands for something there's always a point when we're doing these reviews and you set it up I kind of want to play it I kind of want to get more tables and flip over the bits and you know what it's not perfect but I think that stands for a lot tevin's is it's going into my personal collection it isn't perfect I might not even get it out of the cupboard all of that often but there's a warmth to this game that I just can't deny it's like crackling fire and mulled wine in a box but less messy and dangerous it's something I might not want every day but it's comforting cozy it's Ovaltine I don't want a hot milky drink every single day but do I like Ovaltine yes it's like do and in his era of hype and the hotness and disappointments and all of that jazz maybe sometimes it's nice to just celebrate things that are quite nice that you quite like and make you feel good even though you know they're maybe not that great and if I decide I don't like it I can always pay a gesture to immolate it for me well that's all if you've enjoyed this video then you can give us a button presses on the internet and all of that chairs and also if you haven't watched it yet you should which are quacks equivalent bug review know there's a game Oh much lighter but very very exciting and also if you've enjoyed seeing dear Tom who's appearing into my videos at the moment you should check out our video review of pipeline which features him literally being covered head-to-toe in vegetable oil I didn't make him do it on his own I swear your honor I swear have a lovely day look at this flyer look at this lovely yellow fire huh hey it's a lie the yellow is coming from this light that's a yellow any more big crap isn't it big crap

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 236,879

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Matt Lees, Taverns of Tiefenthal, Tom Brewster, Pub, beer board game

Id: vUcfy6U3W3Q

Length: 16min 31sec (991 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2019