The 4 Squares Review: Sleeping Gods

[Music] welcome to the dice tower a series of video reviews about board and card games here are your hosts hey everybody i'm tom vassell i'm z garcia hello i'm mike delecio and i'm roy candiday folks today we're taking a look at the biggest game that red raven has ever produced sleeping gods not only i mean sleeping red raven run designed and pretty much everything else by ryan lockett he does everything although in this game he was helped by both his wife and another writer to write the stories in this one this is a storytelling game in which you are taking eight people who live in i think the 1800s or somewhere like that 1929 1929 and they get warped over into this fantasy world and you have to figure out how to get back and that's the whole point of this it's a very long campaign style game um that's that box says is one to 20 hours i'm not sure how you can only take one hour you can die okay sure i play through the whole campaign uh and i think it took me around 12 and a half hours some that's pretty close to where i'm at but before we do anything else there's a whole lot going on here folks let me show you a little bit of it folks there's no way i can go over everything in this game so i'm just going to give you some general ideas of how it works there are eight regular characters plus the captain in this game and you're going to take each of these characters and you're going to split them amongst everybody so if you're playing by yourself you would put all eight in front of you well all nine because you would also use the captain but let's say you're playing two players you would each take four characters and then you would share the captain character each character has a certain number of hit points for their life they all come with a weapon a weapon has a two-hit number which means you add this to a destiny draw that's how much damage the weapon will do and that's how much armor you have they also have different symbols the captain has all five symbols on them each of the other people have various symbols on them and then finally each character has special abilities like for example if i put two command tokens on raphael i can add one to his damage or i could put one on him to swap the position of two enemy cards so there's lots of different things and you'll spread these out this is your crew that you'll be playing the game with this is your game board essentially you have a shipboard which shows your ship on the ship board you're going to be putting 18 event cards that range you'll put those these six pretty deadly ones in the bottom six difficult ones and six easier ones on top be shuffled from a big pile of event cards to put there and you're also gonna you have an action board up here where you'll take a ship action you'll draw an event on your turn and then you'll take two actions the event cards are going to progress the game when you're done with all 18 of them you're going to read a story in a book that will then load you back up with 18 more events and you'll go through it three times for the full game so player will pick a ship action here on the board and each of these ship actions is going to do different things it could heal someone from health they could take an exhaust token off a crew member but and it can draw explore tokens which will let you find interesting things and i'm not going to go over all these things in details but the main thing here is it's also going to give you a certain number of command tokens and this is based on the number of players i'm showing you the one to two player side of the board this would be the three to four player side of the board so you're going to get a certain number of command tokens and command tokens will be used to activate abilities on your crew but they can also be used to activate special cards that you have you're going to get equipment throughout the course of the game so you have some recipes and you have like gloria walker who's with you here so if i have one of these at any point i could put a command counter on her and she lets me draw two ability cards or here when i'm drawing destiny i can put one here to re-flip when i use the gear i can put a token there to re-flip and a recipe i can put one here to turn three different foods to get rid of three fatigue and get rid of a morale token so these also be put on characters but once you put it on something you can't use it again however two of the locations on the ship allow you to remove a certain number of them or the bridge lets you remove all of them your ship can also get damaged over the course of the game and if a whole section gets damaged you won't be able to use that section until you repair it and if your entire ship gets damaged then that's actually one of the negative things that can happen to cause bad things to you over the course of the game after you've done your ship action after you turn over the event and deal with it then you're going to take two actions and this is the heart of the game players have their ship on this huge map here and you have various actions one of your actions will be moving your ship around the board sometimes you move into a spot where you'll have to make a test or you'll take damage to your ship but as you go around the board you can even go up if i went up here for example i would turn to page 16 and now i'm on this spot here and then if i went over here i would go back to page 15 and now i'm on this map players have a written map which shows the entire map you'll be starting here then you can go all over the place now there's a few maps these i think there's four maps on here which are part of the expansion so if you don't have the expansion you just can't go onto those it doesn't really change the game that much so you'll be traveling around and then you're going to go to different numbers on the map you can always go to port and there's all sorts of things you can do in port as the game goes by you'll get experience and you'll use experience to buy experience cards for your crew experience cards can be tucked on your crew to give them more symbols a special ability and they just have a certain number of experience that they cost you can also go and buy more equipment cards you can find all sorts of things from armor to more better recipes to something that gives you symbols to better weapons like the blow darts or this hammer and you're also going to go to ports to repair your ship and heal people etc but you're also going to go on adventures and when you go to an adventure you can use one of your actions and say i'm going to go to 23. at that point you will open up this book and find the corresponding number when you landed a number you'll read from the book so here for example it tells you you land in a small wooded area and it will all sometimes give you options sometimes it doesn't give you an option so here i can search for the scholars cabin what does that even mean what requires the keyword heretic as the game goes by you're going to get what are known as quest cards there is a huge box full of these quest cards and as you find a quest card so let's say you find this card here we're not going to look at it but it gives me the keyword sleep so anytime i come across the keyword where i need sleep i can just i can do that so here if i had the keyword heretic i would turn to 155.7 and do that since i don't have that i can simply do the bottom thing here this requires a perception test of 6. if i fail i go to this otherwise i go to this number and then various things will happen many times over the course of the game you're going to have to make these tests and you have different skills we have strength perception cunning savvy and craft and when you make one of these tests you are allowed to exhaust somebody to add their skills so for example here if i want to use captain sophie odessa who is you by the way in this story and i want to use savvy for example i could put an exhaust token on her to get plus one to my savvy once you have an exhaust token you can use another one but it's going to make you less effective in combat so you're not going to use people too many times you have to find a way to get these exhaust tokens off them with food or with going to port you're going to be collecting these cards over the course of the game and you can equip them under your character it will give you a special ability and it can give you another symbol each character can hold two of these and all that does to equip them is cost these symbols here you can also when a test is made discard one of these to get a plus one in that but what you're normally gonna do let's add a strength test of six for example and sophie has this so she has two strength i say i'm going to use her and i'm going to use raphael so i would exhaust both of them i have a base of three i'm then going to flip this card and i want to get i'm going to get a one through six here i got a four four plus three is seven i've passed the test you know so if i had drawn for example a 2 plus 3 that's a 5 and i would not pass a test and the test would fail unless of course i had something to do remember earlier i showed you equipment cards like this gear i could put a command token on it to re-flip this card and there's all different ways to mitigate things but you know you have to have enough command tokens left to do that so you're going to be making a ton of tests in this game and that's basically how they work another thing you might run into in the game is combat well you will run into it when there's ever there's combat you're going to be drawing from this big combat deck it will tell you it will say hey you're fighting against number 34 and number 52. so i'm just going to show you cards one and two here you'll take whatever cards you have it could be up to five cards and you're gonna shuffle them and place them next to each other like this here at that point you're gonna initiate the combat you get to activate four of your crew members to fight them each time you swing at them they'll swing back then if any of them are alive then they fight you and then you keep going back to either your crew's been defeated which doesn't mean the game's over but it's bad or you kill them when you fight somebody you're going to be using either your inbuilt weapon or another weapon that you might have so let's say mack here uses her saber so it has a plus four to hit she's trying to hit this myth and guard well that's pretty easy they just need a five or higher to hit she draws a six that's an automatic hit now if some weapons aren't nearly as good for example gregory's knife is not nearly as good as max saber mac does hit she does two damage unless she puts two command tokens here to get an extra damage she could also put two command to add one to the card so she's pretty good at fighting when you do two damage you kind of slice the creature so i could go one two here or i could go one two like this there's even a way to do splash damage when they're next to each other to hit the creature next to them if you do all if you get take out all the hearts on a creature and sometimes these hearts have two or three in them they're harder to hit but they'll take two or three damage if you take out all the hearts they're gone otherwise they hit you back when it hits you back they're going to hit you back for this much damage so this method will hit back for three plus all the ones showing so this was me i would probably hit those two so that the myth only hits me back for three rather than four this method is going to hit for five unless those two are covered so you have to make choices whether you're going to cover up the hearts or the damage or as the game progresses there might be other symbols on the cards that will do different things to you so you have to be careful they can do poison etc so you're gonna keep fighting back and forth like this they're gonna then hit back and mack has no defense so this one would have hit her back for three damage which she'll take and she only has five hit points when your characters take complete damage they're not out of the game they're just knocked out of the fight and if all your characters are knocked out of the fight well then you lose it's not game ending but you will have to you know it's not good either but if you take care of them then you've succeeded in the fight i have just scratched the surface of all the different things in this game there are tokens that you can give to other people in a fight if you hit certain spots to give them bonuses there are like the different events that you will draw that will do various things there are totems special items that you're looking for and you'll check them off here as you get them in the game that i played with my kids we played for about 14 hours and we found seven of the 75 totems here there are 13 different endings i've seen one of them as you collect totems and collect endings you will unlock more parts of the game for future things to go through there's a ton of stuff in here but everything is it's just it's an immense game to play through and that's not including the expansion and all that stuff just the base game there's a lot [Music] okay so i didn't mention the components there folks but i liked almost everything about it component-wise i also have i got the upgraded version i had metal coins and things like that but it's not there's not a tremendous amount there's also some kickstarter content and expansion content and maybe in a few weeks i'll talk about that in a separate video but in the base game every card that does anything like the enemies and all the different items and things you can find they have unique artwork he has eight fully fleshed out different unique characters or nine i'm sorry the captain characters um and there's a lot of pieces in this game the book the map looks really cool i'm pretty happy with the components for this it's a bit of a chore to put it away and take it out and the only thing i don't like about the components is all these there's a bunch of cardboard boxes in the game that hold everything and i chucked all of them i only kept the nice magnetic class box okay the other ones were getting in my way and also i had to figure out how to tetrism in the box each time and i was like well what's the point of all these boxes i i kept there's one a used quest tuck box but other than that you know the rest i didn't care about what did you think about the components i i like them i think everything is very functional well made everything makes sense from a component point of view i did not dislike the boxes i'm glad they're in there how about that if you want to get rid of them that's fine it also does not feel unless you throw away the magnetic class box it doesn't feel like you're throwing away money if you get rid of these boxes like they don't seem so fancy that you would feel bad right going your own way with the storage you know what i mean just being like i don't i don't want to do it this way i'm going to get rid of it because i was fitting all the expansion stuff in it all fits in but i had to take out those boxes right right so i like everything there um the only thing i would say there's a couple of small nitpicks and that one of them is as far as this is like a design choice i suppose but it has to do with the components and that is if you do not have the expansion to this the tides of ruin or whatever that's called then you do have on the back of the sheet pad that you use for a campaign it does show you across the bottom four maps something like that that you don't own spaces where you could sail and you that doesn't exist for you right so there is that it's one of those games where if you don't have some of the components it will remind you you don't have them unfortunately you see what i'm saying yeah that's really it everything else i do like i uh first first of all the art uh is gorgeous if you like ryan lockett's art you're gonna have a feast in this game because there's more of his unique art like tom said in this game than any of his others maybe combined um so i think the art is fantastic i think the quality of the components is good the only little nitpicks i would say and again they are nitpicks is i feel like um in the rulebook there were a couple of things that i found a little odd like they they don't mention artifacts except in the list of components and so you'll be talked there'll be maybe a card that tells you to to get an artifact and i'm like well what's an artifact you're looking through the book it's not in the index it's not anywhere else it's just in the list of components like here's some coins here's some artifacts oh that's what they are there were a couple of little typos in the storybook but to me i can kind of give that a pass because there's a lot of stories in that storybook so those are the only nitpicky things that i found otherwise i thought the component quality was really good i thought that the art you know is beautiful i love ryan lockett's art and there was a lot of it there yeah for me i love the art and the way um above and below looked i love near and far and this is just such a more grandiose game with more and more of that feel in it so as far as components go i really felt like the components helped transport you to this like world that he's trying to build with the whole story and the maps and things like that and i thought the i mostly played with the upgraded components but i really enjoyed playing with metal coins and all the different pieces and moving a little ship around the board i thought the components were great overall so tying it to that with the story so this is kind of we we saw his first game with some storytelling it was near and far and then he followed on that with a slightly love and below sorry above and below and then he followed up on that with near and far with some more cohesive storytelling this game takes that up by a factor of 10. and the reason i can tell you that folks is i played through an entire campaign and this is not a spoiler you're looking for these things called totems you know this because there's a sheet there the sheet shows 75 totems when we played with my kids we went out of our way to get them we really worked hard and we got seven out of 75. we did better than me too yes i know he did better than me too yeah well we'll come circle around that point don't i'm not holding that up as an example but what i'm saying is we saw a very small fraction of the game yeah and the small fraction that i saw not only was it really well written all the stories have really well written stuff but it's a living cohesive universe there are different races that are in different areas but they can kind of meander into other areas and i was really intrigued you know when i got to the point where they would say you meet a character from this race and i'd be like oh yeah i know about them that's interesting yeah and i thought the storytelling was top notch fantastic i agree with that tom i think at its core at its heart like you said he's moved closer and closer to making a game that is more story and more reading from that book than anything and this is absolutely fantastic and engrossing i mean this is the kind of game that once you are done playing a campaign and you can keep playing these campaigns by the way like we said but you are going to walk away with some fantastic stories there was humor in there there was mystery and suspense and tension it is unbelievably captivating it was and time this game makes time melt away it does in a in a way that i've i'm not sure i've seen in something else it it's just it gets its hooks in in you i it certainly did for me yeah and and to follow up with that story thing i'm afraid that this is going to be an overused analogy so i'm just going to put it out there this does to me feel like the closest thing i've come to to like a zelda game in a board game it has that open world feel i love the idea that you really don't have a lot at the beginning of the game you basically know hey you're trying to find these totems so that reminds oh you're trying to go find guardians it's just this vague notion of what you need to do but beyond that there you go here's this world have at it i like it was the furthest thing from on rails as i've ever seen maybe in a storytelling board game like this i mean but but there are other games that have tried to do that that have created frustration i did not have that sense of frustration here i didn't feel like well here i i have no idea what i'm supposed to do this has a really great trick of you feel like you can do anything you want but you also don't feel like you're lost you never really felt lost you know what i mean so that's a really great quest you can do yes yeah and the other thing that i think is so good is that unlike other storytelling type games that i've played before the the actual rules of the game the turn structure is simple enough that it doesn't get in the way of you going out to explore you know what i'm saying you're not you're you're your mental energy is not being spent on remembering the round structure and all these little minutia rules your mental energy is focused on okay here's the quest that i'm particularly focused on right now here's what i need to do now how do i get there it doesn't get in its own way so that's one of the things i really like about it yeah yeah it seems like all the heavy lifting that you're thinking about from turn to turn has to do with in-world things like man i need to heal i gotta go shop you know i gotta go shopping i need to find this thing like none of those things are rules related it's it's great that way it gets out of your it gets out of its own way right i really enjoyed how immersive it can be all together as you go into the story and do all the stuff i just put some like ambient music on some like nice like fantasy style music and just played through the game and just kind of got lost in the world it was very enjoyable and i love that little map that you have that you can write down notes and be like you try to get clues from all these different pieces of the story and be like oh well maybe i shouldn't go over there or maybe oh that's going to lead to a quest over here and you could look at things on the board and be like what's it trying to tell me um and it's very interesting as the game goes along i feel like it's awesome to be able to get immersed and lost in this like fantastical world and it's strong enough that i'm ready to go back in it i went through had a great time i'm gonna go back in and we're sailing in the complete opposite direction this time just right because but also i remember some things from the last campaign and if i run across something i'll go i know where the thing is i need to get this and i'm feeling pretty happy with the 12 and a half hours it's going to be another 12 and a half hours when we play the next one through sure that's a lot of content oh for sure now when i say there's a lot of content though there's also a lot of stuff you control all nine characters whether you're playing one person or whether you're playing more than one person you just split them up and as the game progresses you have not only all these characters which each have two special abilities and each have a variety of icons and will get more special abilities you also start with four pieces of equipment and you could have you know 20 i think we had like 20 some pieces of equipment at the end of the game plus handfuls of cards there is a decent amount of management or at least you need to remember things because many times i would say oh that's right we can re-flip the card with this thing oh i could use this over here i felt like there was a lot going on and i think some people especially maybe playing solo would be overwhelmed i played it with my kids um well i played it with you guys but i also played with my kids where two people but i handled all the bookkeeping so we were essentially playing three players okay and it worked well but there's there's it's not a small thing it takes up the whole table for sure sure i played uh a two-person campaign took me about 14 hours and uh you've been at two i thought that was not really much of a problem anymore anymore tom um because i was managing four people five with the captain if you count the captain they were yeah 20 some cards by the end on the table but i'm not saying it's a problem i'm just saying just you should know that going in yeah yeah you should know that going in and i would be hesitant to dive into this solitaire that's a little much to figure out like to manage all eight but you start to i mean you know that this person's got this and they just oh okay i mean again i think the theme and the fact that everything once you look through the mechanisms then boils down to something thematic in the game helps you recall that this one character can get rid of curses curse okay i got it doctors on the job you know what i mean so that helps alleviate that but i agree there are a lot of little moving parts in this turn structure is really easy but it'll you know it'll start to compound as you play more and more hours yeah and i played a few hours of it multiplayer but when i played through the campaign i played that solo and it took me about nine hours but that's because i suck and i kept burning through the event deck which is the timer um when you lose in combat you you have to kind of burn through the deck the thing that i found was that although there was a lot to kind of keep track of the idea is that every character does something that will mitigate something else so i never tried to remember which character was the one that could allow you to get rid of a poison token i just knew that if i got a poison token one of these characters is going to let me remove it right or one of those cards is going to allow me to do it and in many cases those market cards or adventure cards are variations on a theme and so if i had two cards that essentially would maybe remove three fatigue tokens i'd pick the best version of that and have that out and the other one i would just kind of keep to the side yeah you know i'm always going to choose that one so i didn't find that to be too much of an issue even as a solo gamer probably mentioned sorry roy which we should probably mention because i know somebody's going to say it in the comments there is no character that gets rid of poison we know [Laughter] gotcha okay yeah i really enjoyed uh all of the stuff i mean maybe i'm strange um as far as like the playing this solo but i mean there's definitely a lot going on but i enjoyed the aspects of like getting more cards out because a lot of those cards can combo together with other special abilities so it's like i do this to reduce the cost of this and then this goes here and now i can do this and now i can do this food for free and heal all these people up um i i enjoy managing a lot of that stuff and all these different games and i just really enjoyed how that all that came together yes you're controlling all these different characters but most of them are not super complicated overall at least for me i mean they have different attacks and different um a couple different abilities on each one but like like mike said you mostly i just had a little bit around be like oh that's the character that does this thing and for me for the most part i could tell you what most of the characters can do for their stats i'm like oh this guy he gets he fishes and this guy heals you and this guy can spin that on exhaust people you know um there's a bunch of different cool characters but yeah um if you're not into tons and tons of specialties and games i come from playing lots of ccgs i know how that is but if you're not into that as much that might be a little bit more daunting and harder to access for you you know okay now here's the thing i really like this game a lot i love the story but i have some problems so the first one is i personally and this may not be everybody but i personally find the game to be incredible incredibly difficult and brutal especially combats they keep saying in the rulebook like some you know you should avoid hard combats but the combats are every single one i've run across has just decimated my crew i think the combat yes i think the combat's really interesting i find it to be kind of fascinating but it slows the game down to a crawl when you do the combat when it's over you almost have to go to heal somewhere which usually negates any benefits you got could use those to heal up so i found that to be a problem especially the you you can try to avoid combat but sometimes some of the good stuff's combat and the game at least in two instances does not allow you to avoid combat with some incredibly brutal combat we beat every combat we came across but that is only because ryan lockett in an update to the kick to the kickstarter put in an easy mode to play the game which we instantly used and played through this on easy mode and if that's easy mode we would have got decimated not playing easy mode ryan law could also put in a bunch of tips and i have a problem with the fact that all that stuff is not in the rule book when you first play this game it's really easy to get caught up in a loop of go do something exhaust all your characters get damaged go spend all your money heal up on exhaust them and do this constant and then you never get anywhere you have to buy equipment like that should have been in a real book like buy equipment and red letters because if you don't know anything about the game you'll think ah not a big deal it's a huge deal and this really brought the game down a bit for me because some you know when i'm going through a role-playing game occasionally i would like to you know whoop up on some enemies and they just constantly brutalize you i mean not as bad as they beat up on mike but they got me i got wrecked but they beat up on me and so i can get through that but sometimes i was like ah i just want to do the story and then the game does other things that make it like the last six events in each iteration would say things like you have some bad thing happening to you you can use one of your two precious actions to get rid of it i don't got time for that those actions are really important to me and then on top of that you're constantly there's just bad things happening all the time which i can get around and you know you can do that but then there's other things that playing the second time through the first time we played through when you get to an end they're like discard all the ability cards in your characters right that would have been super useful to know that was going to happen yeah all our command tokens right putting them on our characters i agree with that when we got to the second round we're like we're not doing that this time follow me once and that maybe that's a spoiler but i just found it it shouldn't be really difficult no no it should not be a spoiler time i think that should have been in the rulebook that hey you're going to want to you know equip your characters with these ability cards for a number of different reasons just be aware that when the deck reshuffles they're gone you keep your level up cards and you keep your you know but you're getting rid of those ability cards so i think that should have been in the rule book now before you guys before i talk to you i i i will say that i said the game is really difficult i found that on the easy mode that ryan lockett posted i found it to be write my speed it still felt hard but it was right my speed all right what do you think about the difficulty i had no problem with the difficulty uh i thought it was fine combat is difficult sure but we only i mean i i fought maybe i don't know 10 times i don't know how many times combat happens in a whole campaign maybe 10 maybe 12 times we we lost once that was it the rest of the time yeah people get hurt and you have to be it's a big puzzle i like combat because i thought it was really puzzly and interesting and you have to figure out who your heavy hitter are heavy hitters are and all of that but at normal difficulty i did not have a problem so i disagree with that personally again but that's you know you have that experience that's valid um i liked the difficulty fine i would not play brutal that sounds terrible you know play normal or play that newly published easy mode the one thing i do agree with which is the only thing i'll say that is bringing the my you know what i think of this game down for me is i i do think the rule book has some problems i know the rule book has some problems some tips and tricks would have been nice but besides that there's a lot of things you need to figure out and there's a few that are really important things like hey did you know that to deal with a test you don't have to exhaust anybody you can just flip fate that's not in the rulebook are you kidding yeah that's why everybody some people play through the campaign and everybody's exhausted all the time yeah because you're always exhausting someone also like a tip and trick should be like hey look sometimes just fail a test who cares take the take a little bit of damage right you don't need to exhaust half your crew to not take one ship damage right sure yeah i agree with that that should have been in there but just basically my main it my main beef is and this is something that again was overcome and a lot of fun was had but i think the rule book should have been stronger it's not very clear some of the actions on the characters like the ones that modify combat only apply to that person's combat you cannot give a plus one to somebody else who's fighting right not clear it's just there's a lot of things that i discovered through doing a deep dive into board game geek posts and things like that that i was not happy about finding these things out after having already played like an hour or two so just the beginning of the campaign but you've already invested some time and then you go in there and find out oh this doesn't work the way you the rule book says um you wrote like a 100-page book but you couldn't figure out these 24 make those really clear that that's that's sad that's not upsetting that saddens me a little bit yeah well tom really quickly on the difficulty i'm i'm more on your boat there than i am on on z's boat these boats taking on water no i i i found it to be i found a difficulty i found the difficulty to be a little bit off um i do feel like easy mode is going to be the way i go the next time i play i play normal mode through my whole campaign and i can tell you i lost significantly more than one combat um i i felt like it was and it's a it's a real double-edged sword because i feel like combat the actual mechanics of combat is one of the coolest parts of the game i agree with z that it's it's its own little finite puzzle i love the idea of the splash damage i love the idea of sometimes you're going to want to be damaging damaging them on things that aren't necessarily going to immediately hurt them but it's going to keep them from being more powerful when they do counter-attacks i thought that was cool but one issue i do have with combat is i felt it was like overly punishing i felt like okay so every time i hit somebody unless i kill them and you're not going to one shot any of these oh for sure pretty much in in every time i hit them they're going to hit me back they're going to counter attack me and then any that survive at the end of the round are all going to attack me from left to right that felt so punishing to me it's it's like you know if i've attacked them you haven't i felt like it should be one or the other either they counter attack when you hit them or they all attack at the end of the round it just felt a little too tough to me personally um easy mode i think would alleviate any of those but um so i don't know next time i play i'm playing easy that's all i'm saying i think tells it's the easiest game he's ever played sure no i i i don't have as long of an experience with this as you guys do um so maybe it gets super hard but one thing i thought was interesting is i think he set the game up so that way you could basically discover things and make mistakes and then when you play through it more you can be like oh well i know i need to go here first and grab this gold and then spin it at the market to equip my characters um and that map that um that you can write things on i think it's extremely important because there's a lot of clues that different characters give you as well like literally don't go to that island don't go there you're gonna have a combat they're gonna wreck you so like you're supposed to write a little exclamation point beside it and be like i'm just never gonna go to that island that sort of thing and then certain ones you finish off and you can cross off and be like i never need to go to that island again there's a lot of interesting things you can do in the game but i think he wanted it to be hard and for you to fail at the beginning and then as you play through things again or you figure out different routes around the map then you'd be able to do it faster easy mode kind of helps you shortcut to that and lets you just enjoy the story more which i think is great as well you know well i'm really curious here about the ratings for this one so zee what are your final thoughts and and rating here um i think this game is insanely good i think it is an epic game it is captivating as all get out and again the only thing i had a problem with which as you play is a self-correcting problem is the rule book it's the only thing that i thought man that sucks that it's not that everything isn't clear and then that goes away because you figure out the right answers right for me are we doing final ratings already here we are not already we've been talking a while here no no i'm ready to keep talking um for me this is going to get a 9.5 out of 10. okay wow almost perfect all right roy what about you um i was going to rate this game a 9. i really enjoy the game i thought it was great i love the story i can't wait to explore even more of it there's just something about it almost transports you to this world especially when you're just sitting there like exploring all the different stuff reading all the stories i love games with storybooks in them to a fault probably some games that people will be like that's not even a game it's just story i really enjoy that and this brings all that together and with the micromanaging of all the different pieces of like building up the the food and trying to re-heal your people and unexhaust them um it's really exciting and i want to explore it more so it's a nine for me all right mike time to put up wow i thought i i'm really surprised by this because i think the game is excellent it is excellent and i would give it a seal of excellence i'm coming with an 8.5 though and i thought that maybe i'd be on the high end of this and now i feel like people are going to think i think it's hot garbage it's an excellent game it's you know in the running for maybe a best of the year so far i mean it's early in the year but man i'm i'm actually thrilled you guys loved it this much because i thought that i was you know gushing over it even with the issues i do think those issues are there uh for me anyway but it doesn't mean it's not an excellent game and not that i don't highly recommend it so 8.5 i gotta say me and mike have been talking about this game a lot all right it's been on our minds and i know both of he and i struggled with their final ratings because i've been sitting there for a long time thinking do i write this in eight because the fact is i can't rate it at 10 or that high as much as i love it a lot of these problems a lot of the little fiddly things like i that first action doesn't feel that interesting to me you know with the pick to worker because i'm like oh man i need to unexhaust people this turn oh man i need to heal people oh man i need to pull the cubes off it's important to me i like the story the story is where i'm at but this game really feels to me like an awakened realms game it fits a lot of the same criteria it has this huge massive interesting story and then it has little tiny cloggy problems for me but all that's overcome because i when i sat down to do my final rating i finally landed on 8.5 because at the end of the day i played a 14-hour game and i want to do it again right and i really want to do it again and so then i gotta say i like it a ton but i don't think it's perfect i think there's fiddly things in there but man ah there's just so much cool stuff and i want to see what's next i haven't spoiled myself on anything you know we i did the one ending that i had we agreed we were going to try to do a certain ending because of something we came across and we were able to pull it off and it felt good but it wasn't the ending i expected so there's 13 endings uh i'm pretty sure one ending is suffering crushing defeat everyone dies i so i don't have to do that one but i'd like to see the other 11. um just to see what they pull off and i also have a few new rules now when we go into the next game because of the cards that we drew which i think is kind of cool it is and we didn't even mention it there's the expansion maps and dungeons you can go through there's a ton of other stuff you'll never find i gotta get those dungeons man dungeons now tom i agree man again like i said we played 14 hours of this thing and it just eats time oh at no point was i bored i mean you just glanced down at your phone after playing a while it's been three hours and i'm like cool you ready to keep going i mean it's it is just unbelievably captivating for me this is ryan lockett's best game i love it i really enjoy it a lot i don't know where i land on that it's definitely the biggest best story game but near and far i like the gameplay of near and far i'm right on the edge i haven't decided yet although i've already played this as much as i've played near and far right right right it's true we'll find out at the end of the year to see where this lands on the top 10 list if it lands on them at all it will be interesting to see but i bet this will be one that we talk about at the end of the year anyway folks that is sleeping gods i'm tom vassell i'm just garcia i'm mike deletio and i'm roy candiday have fun adventuring [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 85,237

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, GeekUsername: TomVasel, board game review, boardgame, uno, ticket to ride, apples to apples, educational games, educational, top 10

Id: TxnlTMkjdCs

Length: 42min 35sec (2555 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021