Top 10 Board Games of 2023

this has been an insanely good year for board games absolutely we somehow got a list of 10 of them and we're going to tell you about them right now what's up everybody my name is Nick I'm Mike we are the brothers murf and yes today we are going to be talking about our top 10 games of the year and who boy this was a tough list debate it was it the Year got on got got after us man there is there are so many great games from this year and as we were kind of reflecting for the past couple weeks I was like I don't know how we're going to get this list down and in fact we didn't we did but we didn't what we did is we're talking about 20 more games over on our patreon because there's just too many games to talk usually we do an extra 10 over on our patreon we're doing extra 20 because uh it's been a really really good year for Bo games so if you want to see those games please consider becoming a patron today it really does truly help us out a lot and you have extra content like supplemental top 10 first looks unboxings all sorts of fun stuff like that do check that out over on patreon be links in the description of this video indeed but Mikey let's go and get our top 10 games of the year let's go let's do it okay before we do that real quick we're talk about a couple caveats yeah uh or rather a couple honorable mentions there were a couple games that kind of were like remakes of other games that we didn't put on the list so uh let's quickly talk about Great Western Trail New Zealand amazing absolutely amazing uh is probably our favorite of the Great Western Trails but since it's still mostly great w Trail we decided to leave it off the list same with the new L granha yes Master set kind of with some extra expansions it's really just a nicer version of the gr how with some modules it probably would have been our top five if we did add on the list it's super super good the last one's going to be unmatched Tales to amaze The Cooperative version of mat Adventures yes yes which is really really fun but again it's still just on Match yes and there are playthroughs of all three of those games on our channel so you can check those out if you find them interesting they again all would make the top 10 but honestly we put them in this category so we could actually talk about 10 other games cuz again there's so many games but let's get to number 10 for real Mikey what's our number 10 it is space bees the board game it is apiary that was the working title was space be yeah 100% it was uh this is apiary this is a game where we are playing as a colony of bees who have have kind of ventured out into space yeah we are I mean I'd argue that they're sentient already they just don't like deep they could take over if they wanted to yeah so they have taken over Earth and now they're looking for other planets to consume uh no you're space fairing bees and you were you have your Colony kind of your big spaceship and stuff and you are going around uh and doing different actions to kind of add tiles to your spaceship which might include like farms and storage things like that you can get uh upgrades that are kind of uh a power that only your uh you know Colony has other players don't you're trying to go for these endgame tiles and stuff but it comes down to these um your worker be yeah these uh hold on one second Hey listen right here come here right here hey we see you up there all right we see you sitting in the che seats the unsubscribed seats just creeping up there in the raap like a f of the Opera watching us you're not nearly scarred enough for that we do have the voice of an Angel though but listen subscribing is free the seats down here are better and they're just as free quit sitting up there like a pervert come on down here where we can see you back and subscribe do it hi everybody so you have these bees right and they are strength one through four and a lot of actions uh have to do with the strength of your bees there and you can actually combine with other players what's cool about this is a worker placement game where no spaces are blocked but you're bumping people out other bees are potentially your own bees uh often and every time a bee gets bumped out they get to essentially level up and become stronger uh and you get to like level four and they're like super strong jacked bees that go and have like a bonus and they go and kind of hibernate and that sort of times out the game so I love that about I just like the idea of like you're not blocked but if I bump your be out I'm giving you a benefit and you're getting that worker back to use again so you don't have to like do a recall action so there is the positive player interaction yeah realistically you will not be doing recall actions very often at all because you're going to be getting especially like a higher player you're going to be getting bumped all the time yeah it's really really cool I like games where your workers level up I always enjoy that in games like T2 with KH where you're as your D they're leveling up strong better interesting like Mikey said most the spots on the board have a if you're a worker Heroes a four you get this extra bonus um which is really really nice and so it's really cool it's got great art it's a weird theme but I'm all here for it why not um yeah I really really liked AP I'm excited to try it more I think this might move up the list as we get it played more we don't have it yet we've only played um a friend's copy and so super excited to get it really really liked apiary and I think I think this I'm going to like it more as time goes on I totally agree yeah I think it's just really good of course it's SN my game so the production value of the game is very high as you'd expect uh this has been like the stone meire game I've been like most excited for having played in a long time so that's been cool to have something where I'm like man I really want to play that again right now yeah um and try to build out a colony and each colon is kind of different so like how does this one work what kind of player do power do I have here just seems like a lot of fun stuff to explore so interesting placement as well that is number 10 apiary number nine was actually a pretty big surprise for us and this was the art project easily the biggest surprise which stands for the art Rescue Team this is a co-op game from the op where you are fighting against a an art stealing organization called The White Hand of sarmon um and you are it's a weird crossover uh but you're basically on a different map there's six different maps in the game is one of Japan Egypt like the Polynesian Islands Rio de Janeiro different places and you are trying to get these art pieces back but you have to find them first so every turn every player has to play one of these Mission cards these Mission cards will do a couple different things one they will cost some of your resources you have fuel guns and walkie talkies so they'll cost some those resources and they'll have to put more of these whand agents out onto the board and the they can actually overrun cities which means you'll lose those cities me you can't go there them no art will appear of course but then those cards will also give you resources and then um they have these symbols on them as well and then once you find three of the same symbols so there's like a portrait if you have three of the same three portrait symbols then in the city that has a portrait on it you then get to put an art piece there and then you can go retrieve it um but if there's any white hand there you're going to have to fight off the white hand you get get white gloves on like one very old schol it's really fun CU it's all about crisis management like the white hand are overrunning these cities at the end of the round if there's more than I think five there five or more they over on the city the city becomes lost there's a whole bunch of different ways to lose you can lose by that you can lose by running out of wh hand symbols and then as the game goes on as you collect more and more of these art pieces the white hand gets stronger and stronger and stronger you can then turn in your walkie-talkies to get allies you use your fuel to move around the map and then you use your guns of course to fight yeah this is a a game that's like set in a fun world of like I'd like to see a movie of this like a team that like retrieves art and stuff they're like poing around in like Rome or something like blasting away it's all weird disguises yeah in the name of like Priceless art and stuff so it's just a cool theme like trait art really helps serve it well but this was one that like uh you don't think of like proper Hobby Games necessarily with the op or at least you haven't they've been Shifting the last few years into doing more more of those games and I really like the big swing here with the art project and I'm like I want to see more of like what's coming from the op and like the group that like made the art project and stuff like you have good designers there um and really fun yeah it's really really fun a really great kind of classic Co-op where you're just trying to deal with like what's the biggest threat right now but how do we deal with that and still get to our goal because our goal is to retrieve this art and not just go up and like have braws but you have to protect those cities at the same time so really great in that you have to play these Mission cards so like you're you're always going be not always but you're usually making stuff worse so like how do you do that and then on top of that there's six different maps and all the maps have different rules so we played on the Japan map which is like the base kind of the the base game map we also played on Egypt which is only instead of being different places you can go you're just going up and down the Nile and it felt like completely different game because the way you had to move up and down the Nile was so different than the other map and then there's four other Maps aside from that so it's really really cool there's a lot going on in the game but it's pretty simple looks great I really like the art project it was a huge surprise yeah and it's a really tough Resource Management game like keeping enough resources in your van that are kind of these pulled things to be able to take actions uh and and balance that is very difficult like actually legitimately difficult so it's not like some game that you don't think about and you play it's like no this is a like a hard Co-op one so yeah really good though yeah one we really enjoyed and again a big surprise uh there's that is the art project at number nine number eight was a very uh anticipated game for us this was nucleum yeah it's bord and dice's like big game of the year so anytime bord and dice their big game of the year the s in release we are going to be pretty excited for it and want to find out more and nucleum was definitely no exception there no it sure wasn't this was uh this game it's by Samo chani and David tsy who are two very very good designers coming together for this Des we're like many have Bor and dice who make big heavy Euro games that we really enjoy with an All-Star um uh design cast we're like all right and this is a game where you are in Germany and you are uh essentially trying to build your buildings and then you need to power those buildings with coal but preferably with nuclear power hence nucleum and so you need to build like a railway of uh a network of Railways so that you can bring uh coal and nuclear around so you can get it to your city so you can power them CU they're not worth anything unless they have power yeah um every uh person has a set of technologies that are different so everyone's a little bit different which is cool but it's cool because you have this really interesting way of selecting actions where you have these like these kind of like long action tiles that have two actions on them and you can either put them above your board in which case you'll do the two actions or you can put them out onto the board and then if you match colors cuz all the cities on the board have uh different colors if you match colors you then get to essentially do the actions as well but that's also how you put out rails for your rail network flip face down and become a a rail but there's a little bonus but then they're also gone so there's a big kind of one of the resources is these tiles that do your action so if you get rid of a tile that has these actions on it you then need to do the action that gets you more tiles to hopefully get those actions back yeah but it's like big super crunchy heavy and I really enjoy it yeah there's definitely some like DNA of brass here where you're building up like kind of a shared infrastructure where if I create rails to the city and stuff Nick can get access to those cities along those Railways so you are you are kind of all working together in that regard but you want to be the one that kind of most successfully makes and uses the uh energy available uh with these new kind of power plants these high flu and power plants that are getting built and stuff so yeah tons of decisions But ultimately the turns are fairly like Smooth um the actions themselves are like not hard to understand but like figuring out the way to maximize everything and energize those cities is uh a lot to think about so that's always those kind of games that we really enjoy like kind of smooth buttery type turns but a lot to think about and a lot of um decision space there uh is just delicious and what routes do you go what do you do there's so much stuff there's like of course like contracts you're going for kind of like missions that you can do that you can fulfill so there's tons of that kind of stuff technology all this stuff it's really really good I really like it was very highly anticipated of course and it delivered it is super super good I really really like nucleum a lot absolutely that's why it's on our list y'all it's number uh eight right there go check it out M what's a game that's exactly like nule in every way it's a game where you're like hey I'm wearing a hat and you're like wait that's not a hat that's a dog all right uh this is a game called that's not a hat true this is a pure silly very silly memory game that we have been delighted by all year so much it is so ridiculously stupid and fun uh that you can play with anybody so that's not a hat is a is a memory game where you have a bunch of these kind of like very simple single line sketches of different things a skate a traffic cone a a dog a frog uh all sorts of stuff a Grizzly crime yeah m d uh the McDonald's Arch no uh you are basically going to have a bunch of stuff that's face up to start and you're going to essentially be giving gifts of these different things but when you as the game starts going you're going to take a new card and the old card that you had gets flipped face down that's the last time you're going to see it and know for sure what it is and also where it is because as you get new things you are going to pass your old things either to the left or right based on what direction the arrows are showing on the back of the card and you're going to say hey I got this nice gift for you oh thank you it's a dog's collar oh thank you and then you're going to pass that on and Nick if he thinks that indeed I have handed him a dog's collar he will say well thank you for that but you can get the thing where you're like I'm pretty sure I saw a thimble coming around this way and I think that's what you handed me you are mistaken or trying to lie to me so you can basically Challenge and say like that's not a dog's colar that's a thimble and you flip over that card and if you're right you uh win and the player who was wrong gets the card if you were incorrect you collect the card and if you collect all you know three cards you're out kind of thing yeah it's just so fun because you forget immediately immediately the secondi you like once the game's going you see all these face of things and then the second things get pass down then shift shift shift you're lost and then it never gets better and that's what's great is because you may think you can track some stuff but you're kind of only paying attention to you and there's someone across the room over there and there's so many times where you immediately get a new gift and every time you get a new card or whatever uh from like the deck you get to look at it and stuff and you put it down immediately like I don't know what that was I forgotten already what I have in front of me uh and and it becomes this great thing of like trying to confidently like be be you should have tons of bravado but you don't and and but everyone is just like I have a skateboard for you enjoy this bucket yeah and it's just like no one everyone falls apart but because I'm in the same boat as you I'm not confident with you're notall cuz I'm like I don't know yeah you tell me what these the second flips down it moves even once because especially play like six people it's a lot to track and there's multiple cards in front of people and so you get to like oh gosh is that a skateboard I I don't remember that in front of me and so like it just turns into giggles and fun and it's so simple and so easy that's not a hat is a masterpiece yeah and if you ever play like multiple games back to back you get really lost cuz you can't even remember what's been in this game versus games was the dog in this one or was it it's just silly it's nothing more um and it's exactly what it should be it's a great like night cap for the end of the game night where you can just play something have a laugh everyone's sort of like on equal footing like there's not necessarily being good at the game other than having like a photographic memory I suppose being able to track everything but like I don't have that kind of computer brain so I can't do it it's just it's just so fun and funny it's hit every time we've played it with anybody it's great it's so so good that's number seven that's on a hat let's get number six number six is a game that we kind of came into recently uh we heard about it from thinker themer Amy Maggie who we love very much talking about Forest Shuffle yeah this is a good game a good Tableau Builder game where you are building out kind of like a nice ecosystem which is a very common theme nowadays where you are mostly going to be building out trees for or trees are rather like crown of the groundwork right like they're kind of your structures absolutely which is true and then Within These trees many creatures can live and survive so each tree you put out you can basically Slot Cards on the four sides of that tree and the rest of the the cards are going to be split cards they'll either have a top and a bottom half or a left and a right half and you can slot those around those trees and often times uh the different types of cards are going to be synergistic and combo tastic with other types of cards in terms of how they score yeah it's tons of set collection where um and set collection amongst the same kind of card or different cards like there are butterflies and you will get a certain amount of points for every unique butterfly you have there's like five in the game so if you have all five unique butterflies you will get 20 points but those butterflies have to go on top of trees so you have to make sure you have trees to put them on and then there's like a frog that I'm assuming like eats the butterflies so then the Frog will go on the bottom of a tree and that frog will score uh two points for every butterfly you have so those cards then work together so if you get a second frog now you're scoring four points for every butterfly on top of the points of the Butterflies themselves score yeah cuz everything kind of just like T consideration your entire Tableau works together certain trees you want a whole bunch of the trees certain trees you want a whole bunch of different trees but the cool thing about the game is that I love games where your cards are cards you want to put down and score but they're also your currency cuz to play a card they will have a cost and that cost is going to be getting rid of other cards so this tree might cost three cards to put down so I put down the tree and then I have to discard three cards from my hand to the face up board and then when you're drawing cards on your turn you can either draw from the deck or you can draw from the cards that are faced up on the board so I might be giving Mike exactly what he needs or I might be able to get that card back you know Mike's not going for butterflies I'll get rid of this one and then I'll get it back next turn and so you can kind of work it like that and it's just so much fun to be like okay this time I'm going these rabbits I'm going to get a bunch of these rabbits and see what happens it's just really fun yeah it's just it's just fun to try to like make use of like whatever cards come your way and everything can be worth some amount of points but you can really work it so that they become worth a lot of points and that is very fun to play with each game feels very different to me because you're just going to get different combinations of these cards so how do you make this kind of engine work for yourself uh it really does a lot of great stuff it's one that I've just enjoyed the heck out of playing it's on board game arena works very well expansion coming very s for that yeah I just can't wait uh it's it's just it's got great art to boots very pleasing but um I love just sitting there tripping out on like what can I how can I make you can just there probably will be a part of your Tableau that is just like maximized so you'll get that good feeling of it's like yes this is worth 70 points game yeah and that's uh great someone else is doing the same thing but with whatever combination of stuff they have and so you're trying to like just build it as good and sweet as you can to just blow away your opponents it's awesome it good it good the landing gear is down get that reference put in the comments what's that from you should uh it's from uh aleric Beauty Alis uh so this is Sky Team yeah if if you didn't get the reference um Sky team is a two-player Co-op game where you are trying to land a plane just like a commercial plane y um and uh you can fail a lot of different ways but you basically are two players one the pilot once's the co-pilot and you can do different things so to land the plane you have to essentially meet a bunch of different requirements you have to get to the airport you're trying to get get to the airport you have to get to the airport by the time you land otherwise you landed but you did not land at the airport you just crashed somewhere land in a neighborhood some there's all these planes in the way you got to make sure they land so they're out of your way so that you can safely land you got to make sure your flaps are open you got to make sure your landing gear is engaged all these different things you do this by playing uh by playing dice yeah so you have basically dice behind the screen it's a two-player only game you have their pilot and co-pilot in certain spaces only the pilot can place dice the co-pilot can place in only certain other spaces and there's a couple that anyone can place at uh and you are taking turns we can't talk about the dice you have so once you roll you have to kind of you can plan beforehand you you can talk beforehand about hey we want to work on like getting the plane level here or you know whatever it might be um but you can't talk in the round uh what's really cool is like you have four dice but two of them are destined to go to certain spots you always have to be working on how fast you're going and you always have to be working on how level you're staying as a plane so if you place like an indifference of dice uh in the leveling thing you'll you'll tilt uh in the direction and you know for one spot to for each kind of indifference you have there if you get too imbalanced and you're going sideways you're going to crash yeah uh and depending on how fast you go will determine how quickly you get to the airport and you can get there early but then you have to make sure you're going slow so you can kind of circle the airport and stuff there's fun things like that but again the whole sequence of like what do we try to prioritize let's get we got a lot of planes coming up here let's get those planes cleared so we have you know open skies ahead of us let's try to go a little bit quicker this round and then as you go you see someone play something you're like well based on that they put a two in their like little speed thing either they want us to go slow or they don't have any higher dice let me try to figure out what that means and and try to you know really you're trying to you know do the Shand of pilots and co-pilots like I don't need you to say any words I know what you're doing I'm g go do my thing uh it's really fun it's really fun to kind of deal with and there's all these different uh airports that give you escalating levels of of challenge uh there's things like Heath thr has extra traffic so more planes you're going to get added onto your kind of little approach board so you're like man you got to do extra work to get those planes cleared there some up in the snow so there's like ice on the track so you have to like deal with that there's like I think there's like 14 or 15 different airports they all work differently so it's like almost like a little campaign in the game but even just the base game is super fun to play it's like really tough and it's just it's really really fun we were super excited when we heard about this Scorpion mask um always do games that are just like outside the box like last year they did turning machine which is one of our favorite games they just do games that are just they're just different they're just built different they're just doing stuff that no one else is really doing I'm always excited when scorby mask comes out with something and this one we the second we heard about it we're like two-player game where you're trying to land on playing together I'm in and it delivered it's super fun it's really really cool it just feels different it's interesting there's a lot of room to like grow with the game and try those harder things cuz you might get to be like oh man this beginning challenge is super easy whatever this game is trash and it's like well okay add ice to the ground and see what happens uh it's probably going to be harder you can do things where there like problems with a plane there like you're leaking kerosene all a your fuel matters like there's a lot of content in a pretty small box which is awesome but Sky team is just um yeah one that we are really excited for and did not um disappoint no did not it did not at all that's Sky team number five let's get number four we knew we were going to like number four there's no there's no question anymore about Garfield gam sure this is Scholars of the South Tigress the second in the South Tigress Trilogy yes uh which is the third Trilogy they've been working on uh this is uh it's very good we there's there's just no publisher that's like hitting it harder than garfi right now real talk though they are just for us anyway for for the style of game that we like they make the EXA kind of and I feel a lot of people agree seeing how many of their games are in like the top 100 of all time uh Scholars tigis is uh a game where you are working uh to uh hire translators and interpret Scrolls coming from uh all around the world and getting them translated into Arabic so that you can kind of like work on the pursuit of knowledge yes exactly because we're in this great period where uh knowledge was just highly touted it's a time I'd like to get back to as as a human race uh and we are doing a lot of uh work to do that so you are taking actions to uh hire translators uh travel to go get these Scrolls bring them back to the houses of wisdom make use of those translators and pay them for their work uh and and then translate these Scrolls into Arabic translate the Scrolls into Arabic and and kind of collect those cards and they all kind of of course it's a mechanical game and they all sort of uh work to uh to get you points and stuff which is the point it is the point and this is a in the South tiger series uh it's all about dice so way First South Tigress last year which is very very good this one they're all about Dice and so this one all of these actions are going to take dice to do sometimes the color of the dice matters sometimes the value of the dice matters but you can manipulate dice in tons of different ways because you have these workers and essentially can add these workers to these dice augment to augment them so if you add say a white di if you add a white worker to it it automatically changes the die to a six so if it's a two it's now a six but you can add a red worker to a white Dy and now that Dy is considered to be red you can add um a blue worker to a white dye and then you have a red dye those combin and now make a purple dye and the secondary colors are even stronger and you can you can like add a red to a red Dy to make it a six and then add this to this D and then combine them you can do in all these crazy different ways that's super crunchy to basically get what you need you're like man I need a 10 green okay how can I do that with the dice I have and the workers that I have it's so inter and so fun where it's pretty darn heavy and then you use those dice at those actions to then do those different things you're going up these all these different tracks CU you know garal games be bumping Drax and those are different level those are like mathematics physics different sciences that you're then learning in as you're translating these Scrolls and the scrolls are all going to have endgame scoring on them so maybe you're trying to get a lot of like Scrolls from like Sanskrit or um Persia or something like that translated because they're going you're going to extra bonuses for that there's all these different Avenues you could go up but it really comes down to that super crunchy fun dice augmentation that's really really good and it's just this game slaps it's so good yeah there's a lot of games that like give you some ability to mitigate your dice but here it's really about like fundamentally changing your dice and blending colors and things like that it's very very cool it can be incredibly crunchy and brainy to do all that stuff but I really I just think it's really unique and interesting I haven't seen a game do like dice manipulation stuff quite like that that is very cool um I love again the theming uh of this whole series is really cool it's just about like knowledge exploration pursuit of knowledge the next one's inventors of the side I canot wait and I hear it's really good so so excited so very I got a hunch it'll be on the next year's list we'll have to see um yeah and so that's SC of the South Tigers uh garle games doesn't miss they just don't miss um and so that's number four let's get number three so number three when we did this list halfway through the year we did 10 games of the year so far this was number one so it's still really high and this is Darwin's Journey yeah we had I think gotten and recently played Darwin's Journey right but when we did that first list and we played it several times since and stuff and even tried the Fireland expansion now which is kind other side the board and definitely the way to play if you've play if you've done a game or two of Darwin's Journey jump right into it uh it is incredible but this is a fantastic worker placement uh game where you similar I guess like a thing that we enjoy is like all of your workers are going to as you play the game get stronger seal a lot of require you to have one or more of a certain color or a blend of colors of wax seals so the more you can kind of power up your workers the more spaces they can go to the stronger the actions they can take and things like that and you are doing this to uh you know observe species of of animals and stuff you're you're kind of Proto of Darwin uh of Charles Darwin and stuff you're trying to observe species send specimens back to the museums again pursuit of knowledge uh kind of themed game you're exploring with your boat you're exploring these islands Islands you're walking around yeah there's a whole bunch of different stuff you can do but it really comes down to like specializing your workers like this worker got a bunch of red seals on it so this spot can go to the spot that needs a lot of red seals it's really cool and this is one of those games where it's like there's a whole bunch of different Avenues but it's kind of in this line of a lot of games nowadays like these kind of big heavy Euro games that are about comboing actions and this is one where if you go to this spot when you're exploring your person this now allows you to do a boat action then you move your boat and that allows you to put down this tent that now allows you to do this action and there's always going to be once per turn where you take like a f minute turn because you were just combo in game you're going to do something insane you're going to have an insane turn and someone's going to ask you like is it still your turn you're like yeah bro yeah I'm crushing it right now it's awesome it's so good and it's just so interesting so recently so the game we got the deluxe version of the kickstarter it has a bunch of like expansions but there a whole other side of the board called the Fireside Fireside expansion fireand fireand it's full of fire um but basically and then it as now there's like multiple Islands to explore go on it's even better and so we were just like cuz we were like okay Darwin stre probably lower on the list and then we play the fire expansion like n it's still really high this one is so good I really like dar's Journey a lot me too yeah there's just a lot of fun stuff to explore that those combos are so satisfying so even if you don't win you're like I just I did some cool stuff and that is always going to win you're going to see that theme kind of dominate the rest of this list uh to be full disclosure but those kind of those you know mid heavy Euro focusing on like comboing actions is just so immensely satisfying to play I want that so much more than like I took 15 turns to do one thing I'm like no I did one turn I did 15 things yeah real much better that way uh I don't even care if they're particularly like useful things I just want to do all things uh it's really really fun uh just beautiful and everything to boot Darwin's journey I just I want to play more I want to play more now we only just got to the new side of the map oh my gosh yeah it's really really good that's number three Darwin's Journey let's get to number [Music] two number two dripping with theme you know how we love our thematic games this is arani Burger Canal which is maybe the driest game I've ever played in entire life it is not yeah it's not AER it's not going to draw anybody in by its looks it's not going to draw anybody in particularly by its like theme theme or style it's just another U Rosenberg two-player worker placement Masterpiece game if you don't mind them if you don't mind just a mechanical puzzle and here's the thing I don't mind that at all I mind at all I'll s my teeth into that yes and there's going to be a new version called canal coming with better art and stuff if you care about that although I would set your expectations on the art front down here because there's just not a lot of Art to like Infuse into this CU this game right now is not available in North America we had someone pick it up for us at s and they did a game found and you could have gotten it then but it's going to get like a a more wide release uh in in America yeah this is a game where it's a worker placement game where you're going to one of seven spots that are all more less the same one's like you get four wood that's what that spot does they're very very simple spots this game is really really simple in terms of like what you can do it's like laav level where it's like you go here you get a resource and you build these buildings and you're building these buildings and putting them onto your grid but these buildings don't do anything right now they're worth points but they don't do anything but they need to be surrounded by stuff they can be surrounded by different paths roads canals or Railways but what you surround them with will matter for the card because the card might be like for every Canal around this one you get D D D D this bonus these points you can surround it with paths it just won't do anything for that card so you're like okay I want to surround this one with canals but again the card doesn't activate until it's completely surrounded and you can also build Bridges from like card to card that like span your roads your canals or whatever and once a card has two Bridges to it it can also activate so each card will only activate two times in a game and again it doesn't activate when you get the card it activates when it has two Bridge or canals and so you can kind of work not specif canals but Pathways around it not Canal yes anything around it yeah and so you're trying it's all about timing and that is what makes this game so good is it's just trying to maximize that timing yeah how and when do you you know get the resources you need so that some of them just give you like passive stuff especially the cards are divided into kind of three stages and they sort of in the first stage cards kind of give you more stuff second stage cards are kind of give you some stuff and generate some points in the third one the third stage are like mostly now you got some stuff turn it into points yeah uh and figure out the timing of that like oh I'm going to do this card cuz it's going to give me some iron then I have this other card that I can play when it triggers if I have three iron on hand I can turn it in for a boatload of points so how do you like figure out the timing of doing all that the resources are fairly tight in the game so it's like well I might want to build some train tracks I have this other card that I built that you know if you get a bunch of tracks around it well that's going to take iron and wood to build so maybe I use my iron for that like how do you extract as much as you can out of you know ultimately three or four turns in a round uh and make use of building out those Pathways because again the worst thing you could do is like build a card and then never get it surrounded or a bridge can trigger its actions you're like well the card will be worth some points on its own but you're like well that was kind of a lot of resources for what so how do you kind of build out everything so that all the cards are next to where they want to be uh to to be again as sort of efficient as you can so if you don't mind like an efficiency puzzle you can solo this game it is fantastic solo as well we can really just dive into that um like all the video games I play are just efficiency puzzles that like this game is right up my alley yeah maybe they should have made it theme sardy Valley then you could Valley or satisfactory or something like that oh my gosh yeah this game I honestly think it's like a masterpiece it's so good it's two-player only but honestly I would maybe even say I prefer it solo cuz then you can really just sit there and get you play it solo a ton awesome it's like you just sit there get your puzzle but that timing is so so good and again the rules are just nothing there's so few rules and yet and then on top of that there's like these decks of cards where all these cards are and there are are if you have the two expansions six six decks of cards and in a two-player game you will use less than half of one of the decks so you can literally play 12 games and never see the same card twice it's insane how much there is it's this game's so good it's so good yeah I know like it sounds like we're trashing or whatever but we're just fully aware of our own tastes and styles and how this game will not appeal to everybody based on it look and stuff I do hope that the new version is the cover looks very nice so I'm hoping that that's like a indication of what the whole production will look like um because it's just mechanically so robust and so good that it jumps right up to like number two or three U Rosenberg ever if not maybe with enough plays number one and feast Rad's definitely got a better theme and stuff but I'm like this is mechanically that good where it makes you like question you're like it's up there it's up there a Rand B Canal it's not our number one although we gushed about it in a way that f is but I feel still thing at least for right now there's one better let's get into it combos combos wbos combos wbos combo wbos is what we're here fored the White Castle is a game that's specifically built around doing combo wbos in fact it's so built around it it only gives you nine turns in the game yeah you only get nine turns CU you need to do combo laas or else you're going to do poorly your G going be very quick so this game is predicated on getting resources and then going to action spaces to then hopefully trigger additional actions that you can take it's all around uh hedi Castle uh in Arkansas so uh surprisingly yeah in Japan so you are uh dice placing there are there are three colors of dice that are on the board and you're going to draft one die per turn place it out onto uh the board somewhere or onto your player board as well make use of that action which might gain you resources or do different things and then often times depending on the action selection you do it might give you a certain action to take which are going to kind of be the three main areas I'll say on your player board which can be placing out your corders into the castle areas your gardeners into these kind of uh Gardens on the side of the board or your warriors into the fields to train and all three of those actions will land you basically your workers on spots that will generally trigger additional actions of gaining resources or possibly doing another full action like putting a gardener out which then allows you to place a warrior out which then gives you some you know mother of pearl which will help you with the cordier on your next turn so it's all about finding like I need to go here so it gives me I'm going to a so it gives me B and C which I'm going to use to pay for D which is going to give me E and F and you're trying to do that where you only took two turns but you did all those turns worth of stuff it's so fun to try to piece that together to like think of okay how can I how can I get a lot of stuff out of this one Vice placement it feels so bad when you're like I'm going to go here and get get two iron your turn that was a ninth of my game and that some people I have heard for some people is a turn off about I can see that it it's maybe too tight in that way but it's so satisfying when you when you get to put together that combo and like maybe it's okay you have that turn because you're building up for that super turn later so you know it it can be worth it to take that small turn yeah if it's worth it you know if it's building towards something larger but this one uh it one of my favorite things in games are when you play a game and this one's relatively quick at least a two-player it's like 40 minutes so nice but it's so nice when you finish the game and I did this let's do that right now again I want to do that right now again that does not happen very often even with games that we quite like and stuff where it's short enough it's easy enough to set up the the box size the game boards and stuff are small enough thank God uh that you are it's easy enough to table that I'm like I want to do this right now Shuffle Up and Deal let's go uh and it's just such a good feeling it's just for us at least leaves us very satisfied because again similar to like we were talking about Darwin's Journey you probably will have at least one turn where you really like man you're like I did it right there I got everything out of that turn that I possibly could that was so nice yep uh and it just feels good to do that there's uh different like cards you can kind of collect and you get this kind of lantern row and every time you take a lower value die or do anything to trigger your Lantern you get all this stuff there's just a lot of things that you can that give you that satisfying feeling when taking a turns of like accomplishment even again if you don't win you're like man I did some stuff I got to feel clever which for us is a massive thing I want to be able to feel clever I want to be able to feel like I put together a good idea and executed something and this game gives at least for us that in a big bad way yeah yeah so good it's very good it's very good it's just like M said the two games were like after we played it we immediately were like do we have time to play it again was a Randy bger canal and the White Castle there you go because uh this game when we first played we immediately went like cool that was the game of the year and we were like something might overtake it and a ren bur got close but we were just like immediately we're like cool that was the game of the year that was it we've played it this is our favorite game of the year you know that and it held up it held up to standard for the rest of the year which is it's so good that is our list again we have an extra 20 games over on patreon because there were so many games to talk about it was really hard to narrow this down but I I think it was seriously an Absolut outstanding year for board games um it was really really really good um and so that is our top 10 list down in the comments below let us know your top 10 games of the year or just your favorite game of the year make sure to let us know down in the comments below uh you've been seeing our patrons go by we talked about patreon a couple times thank you so much to our patrons you really really help us keep this whole thing going it means a ton y'all listen if we didn't name your game it's not a disc on that game it's just not on this just hate it or we haven't played it or it's possible we don't like it true and that's okay it's okay it's okay if you like it and we don't or on our list go to patreon cuz it's probably over there though probably over there I'll tell you this right now cuz everyone's going to be asking Earth it's over there it's over there on patreon there it's over over there so go look there indeed indeed okay nonetheless that is it for us thank you so much for going uh throughout this whole year for us it was a really good year um awesome we really appreciate youall very much I hope you all had a wonderful year and uh we'll see yall later bye everybody bye

Channel: The Brothers Murph

Views: 72,245

Keywords: Brothers Murph, Brothers, Murph, How To Play, Instructions, Board Games, Card Games, Tabletop, Miniatures, Play Throughs, Play Through, Board Game, Tutorial, Tutorials, Rules, Learn How To Play, Game Rules, Learn To Play, Overview, Game Overview, baord games, find board games, new board games, best board games, popular board games, hot board games, Top 10, kickstarter, tabletop Games, Modern Board Games

Id: rxfo2bEFJGQ

Length: 40min 17sec (2417 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 07 2023