Top 10 Solo/Cooperative Deckbuilding Games | With Colin

hello everyone and welcome to the one-stop co-op shop this is colin and today i am going to do a top 10 list i'm going to do my top 10 solo or cooperative deck builders and if you're interested in any other ones of our top games we have a huge list here of top games that we have so dungeon crawlers adventure games cooperative games of the decade hidden gems there's just tons of them make sure to check that out here on the channel now what i'm going to do is i'm going to tell you a little bit about the game tell you why i like it and then why maybe you might not like it so give you a little bit of both sides with that let's jump into number 10. number 10 for me is dragon fire a one to six player game published by catalyst games lab now this game what you're doing is you are a hero and you have a deck of cards that you'll start off with as you play you're going to purchase new cars that go directly into your hand you will play them they have symbols on them and you have to defeat enemies using those specific symbols to be able to win the game you usually have two to three different uh levels that you have to defeat in order to do that now the game does come with a campaign however i'm going to highly recommend that you play it mostly as a one-off game because the campaign i don't find to be fully fleshed out now later expansions might have changed that and i just haven't played all of those but for me i can play that base game and that's good enough for me what i like so much about this game is first of all you do buy cards to your hand it gives you so much more tactical choices that card in the market is great i'm not going to buy and throw my discard pile i'm going to put it right into my hand and i can use it the next turn there's tons of things you can see this card right here magic missile tons of cards have assist abilities i can play that on other players turns that's so much fun and i should mention this is a co-op co-op game so you can play it solo or cooperatively of all the games on this list i'd say this one is the most puzzly and that's because all these enemies have different damage types you can see here this one has green black and colorless so you have to do specific damage types to these enemies to be able to defeat them the colorless ones you can use any and so a lot of this game is deciding okay with the cards in my hand which enemy am i going to attack that am either does the most damage or b is the one that's going to kill or hurt on one of our heroes the most and so it's so much fun trying to make those decisions being like oh i could play this card actually as an assist on your turn to do something better or something totally different i absolutely love that about this game now i will say this game is not for you if you're looking for a campaign-styled deck builder i've got some other ones on this list that i'd recommend way over this one this one i find to be much better as one offs i also think that if you don't enjoy the trying to decide when is the most tactical time to play a specific card and you know maybe on one of your turns instead of just doing something you might actually not do anything because you only get to draw two cards a turn and so sometimes it's better to hold on to your cards and not do anything and a lot of players don't like doing that they they would prefer to have a regular deck building experience where you draw all your cards you play all of them and then you discard them and draw up again i will say i personally really like the art in dragon fire and that's one of the biggest reasons that i have this one now over shadowrun crossfire i feel like the art is better here but i will say the game is a little bit longer because i feel like everything has a little bit more health you have more health but so do the enemies so just be wary of that overall though if you are looking for something that gives you tactical feeling uh you know so almost almost like it's you have to decide which enemy to defeat which card you want to play which card you want to buy how best to puzzle out the cards in your hand to defeat the enemies on the board this is one that i would recommend dragon fire number nine is thunderstone quest the barricades mode now the barricades mode can be played one to six player published by aeg and it can be played cooperatively or solo now if you ask mike this is definitely not the best version of this game however i have played now the final version i'll say we don't have a playthrough of the final version on the channel this one is a print and play i printed it out while i was on kickstarter but i really actually enjoyed it now that i've played the final production copy what you do in this game is you will be uh either leveling up your heroes or you can buy new heroes and then you can buy equipment and items and put them on them delve into a dungeon and try and defeat a specific guardian in the cooperative mode what happens is each round you'll roll these guardian dice and then as you go through so each round after uh two or three rounds you're gonna roll more guardian dice and these dice do bad things and help the guardian which is the enemy you want to defeat become more powerful and if you take too long well then you're going to roll more and more guardian dice and what those guardian dice will do is all dependent upon the guardian of itself which is kind of cool so if you look over here you can see if you roll these symbols against this death sentinel layer they're going to do different things like add wounds or add monsters that can attack the village and so you have to then either defeat enemies in the dungeon to try and prevent those enemies from actually hurting the village or you take wounds which means when you take wounds you draw less cards yeah it's a really cool mechanic now the difference when you're playing uh the barricades mode versus competitive is that in the competitive each turn you have to make a decision do i go to the village or do i go to the dungeon in the cooperative or solo mode you actually get to do both mike thinks that that's a negative i actually like it i like that better because the game goes faster and i find it to be more enjoyable especially playing with other people and you can all play simultaneously that is a huge benefit of this game when you play cooperatively i can play with four players we all go to the village together we all go to the dungeon if i play with this with four players competitively i'm sitting there for three rounds before i get to do anything that can be really boring what i find so much fun about this game is how your deck building works so you will have these items or weapons you'll attach them to heroes that are in your hands you have to you have to make sure you have a good combination of heroes and items and weapons that you can equip to your heroes and then when you do that you'll get to draw more cards maybe you'll get to do a specific effect but you can see now these heroes both have these knives and their attacks are added up to being two each which is really cool and because that these uh knives have the effect that while you're in the dungeon if you do that you get to draw additional cards so now i've got more adventures i i just find that to be really fun also i love that you will start with these basic adventures but then you can level them up especially as they defeat enemies so for an example here we have a level one adventure that we're going to spend 2xp and we're going to level it up now from that to something much cooler oh look at lincha and so i think that's so cool that idea of you can level up the heroes that are within your deck you can also purchase them you can see down here there's a cost you can kind of see that uh but so it's a really cool way of having your deck level up in two different ways one you're gonna be buying cards from the marketplace like items weapons and all of that but then two you can level up the heroes in your deck as you go barricades mode also added these new classes so for an example in our playthrough i was i had one of our players be the town guard and they give you different ways that you can gain abilities level up you have different ways that you can interact with one another because in competitive play you have lots of things you can use xp for that maybe it's not as useful in cooperative play it gives you more reasons to use xp because you have to use xp to level up your prestige class or basic class now you can see right here this is the board of the guardian and you can see how many dice you roll at the beginning of each of your turns as that threat tracker goes up you're going to roll more dice after a specific amount of rounds you'll flip this over and all of a sudden the guardian's there and you can actually take them down but you have to be able to go all the way to the back end of the dungeon so that means you need enough light to do that you need enough heroes to be able to defeat them yeah i i feel like this is one of those games where if you delve into it it could be so much fun now though let's talk about the drawbacks so if you're looking for this only for solo or co-op i will say the game was not designed initially as that and you can tell there are certain things that your abilities of cards or something they don't make sense or you could buy a card that gives you uh victory points but doesn't do much and so it's why would i even buy that right so you can definitely tell the game was not designed ground up as a cooperative game and that's that's a bummer and that could be a negative they also don't provide any sort of hey this is the uh marketplace you should use against this guardian for a fun cooperative experience no they just give you the stuff and you can decide if you want to do a random setup of the marketplace which i actually don't recommend because i've done that a few times and you know what happens you get things that don't synergize and it's not fun uh what i do recommend is i've been going through the quests in the basic quest book for the competitive games and i'm just doing that but then playing it as a cooperative game experience and so far it's been working uh one or two times i've switched out one card because it may be mostly uh better for competitive play and just swap it out with another random card or a card that maybe i want to try that's what i would recommend there is at least start there if you're interested in playing this game and finally i will say this is an older style deck builder you're going to buy everything it goes to your discard pile then you're going to shuffle up you randomly get stuff and it's not nearly as tactical as something like dragon fire or other games in our list uh definitely the new thing has been when you buy cards they go to your hand and i really like that and so this one you don't get that experience which is fine but i i do wish that i had that so there you have it that's number nine thunderstone quest with the barricades mode expansion number eight xeno shift dreadmire i feel like this is another one that kind of flew under the radar it's a one to four player game published by cool mini or not do you see any minis i don't either i don't know why cool mini or not chose to do this one but they did so it is a card based a deck builder but it's very unique in how you deck build in the game so instead of you buying cards that give you a gold to be able to then buy more cards you actually just gain what's called xenoxanthin each round you'll then use that to then buy units and to buy items and this game once again you buy to your hand i love that so it's very tactical which ones do i want to buy which ones are useful now you'll then place them out onto this blue board in an order that you choose this one being the front and this area being the back then you're going to fill this up with aliens and the aliens are going to attack and you're going to try and defend the base so it is essentially uh you know a castle defense game although you're defending a base against these aliens that are attacking you now what's really cool about the game is there's three stages each stage you're going to get more difficult enemies but also you'll get more units that are available to you that are stronger and better and unlike most deck builders where oh man now i've got these you know basic cards and how do i get them out of my deck i have to find a way to destroy them no this game has a way that auto upgrades them i can burn my lower level units to actually make the more upgraded units cheaper my xenoxanthin that is only a one uh cost when i get to the level or stage two and i can get the three cost ones all those level ones ones convert together into level three xenoxanthine so the deck automatically upgrades itself really cool and then what's fun is if let's say you actually are able to keep any of your units on the board without them getting killed by the aliens they'll be there for the next round so you have lots of strategy on okay do i want to try and save this unit or do i nod where do i want to put this unit because some aliens will attack from the back some will attack from the front you don't know and that's what's so much fun i also love how cooperative it is because when i am playing i can activate abilities on another player's board so if they have a unit that says hey this unit is able to automatically do two damage to any revealed alien well they can do that to the one in your row so you can see i'm playing a two player game and there's two different rows here we could have someone on this side do an ability to help this row which is really cool i love how cooperative the game is and you each have your own special abilities plus your own deck it's it's very cooperative but it's also just a solid deck builder i just i feel like not enough people talk about this game however there are some definite drawbacks uh the first thing is it's comedy or not there's tons of things that are promos that are hard to find uh that add to the game substantially for example there are legendary heroes so if your hero takes damage but or attacks and doesn't die uh in the kickstarter you could get these legendary heroes that then could be upgraded onto your actual board well you can't get that anymore you'd have to get in on the secondary market same thing with legendary weapons and items uh it's i just feel like all these things should have been included or just had been an expansion that you could buy and a lot of them aren't and so you might feel like you don't have the full experience for that also if you are going to play this as a cooperative game beware it can be long because you're supposed to each individually reveal your aliens so okay i'll go first and i have to reveal all four of mine before you go takes way too long if you're gonna play with three players or even four players you're gonna people falling asleep at the table i recommend that everyone reveals their first alien at the same time and then you deal with it then you go to the second alien you reveal it and you you do it together because that is i just think it'll be faster i have had great experiences with that you can still interact uh but then that means that people aren't just sitting there doing nothing finally i will say there are two versions of the game there's dreadmire and there's onslaught and to tell you which one is better i don't know uh dred meyer they have some new rules that you can uh port into onslaught which actually makes onslaught really good and dreadmeyer adds something that i don't love and that's this weather mechanic so there are weapons and enemies that will get different benefits or detriments depending upon this random weather event deck that you just flip and it goes oh well apparently it's foggy i don't really love that but i do love the different alien types because you've got the dred meyer aliens versus the onslaught aliens and then there's a another type that i can't even remember at this point but yeah i definitely recommend checking this one out if you like the idea of tower defense very unique battle line mechanic and a really unique and very interesting deck building mechanic as well that is xenoshift dreadmire number seven legendary encounters alien this is an awesome thematic deck builder one to four players published by upper deck games it is fully cooperative there is a competitive variant where you can have someone play the queen never going to play that i will say this game although if you don't like the alien universe you can still enjoy this game because i have never seen the movies in full disclosure i'm never going to not interested in it and yet i can still love this game so you'll start off just like most deck builders with a very basic deck you have six grunts and six specialists and then you have one or two special cards for your specific character and you're off to the races what you will do is you will draw up to your hand size which is usually a six you might have things that can affect that you look to see how many recruit symbols versus how many attack you can see here i've got tons of recruit no attack it's the beginning of the game then what you'll do is you'll take one card move it into the uh area here the first one is the ventilation shaft but it comes face down i love this i love the encounters effects on how this works you have to scan you can see here you have to use four fight to be able to flip that card up and it could be an alien it could be an event it could be a hazard you don't know and if you do nothing with it and it goes all the way through this area and the complex then it will come into the combat zone and it could potentially attack you who knows what it's going to do so you have to use your combat either to fight aliens or you have to do them to complete objectives and then you use your recruit symbols to recruit new cards into your deck but also you can use your recruit symbols to complete objectives as well you don't know what type of objectives they are and from what i understand they did a great job of parting the movies into the game itself so things happen you go oh yeah that happened in the movies i wouldn't know i haven't seen it but still think that's really cool how that works what i like so much about this game is just how this complex area works and how thematic and how tense it can feel see how this enemy just showed up didn't know what it was all of a sudden boom this enemy this alien comes out and now characters can't be recruited and you have to do four fight to be able to defeat him but i also have all these enemies still up in the complex that i have to deal with and looks like we have an objective up there i i love how there's all these different things that can happen and you can port them all together in different ways and it provides a very thematic fun experience the deck building isn't challenging you can play this with people that haven't played a ton of games and they'll fully understand how it works within a round or two it's not overly complex it's not like marvel if you've ever played marvel legendary and there's eight jillion keywords there's only a few keywords here and i appreciate that because it's easier to get to the table and play with pretty much anyone i will say it for negatives or reasons you might not like this is this is definitely on the more archaic side of deck building you will be putting cards into your discard pile when you buy them and then you're just going to hope you can draw them there is very minimal destruction in the game for cards and so what that means is you're going to at the end of the game get very frustrated with those specialists and grunts because they're going to show up in your hand all the time and it's going to be hard to get rid of them also i'll say that after you've played through all of the movies you definitely can play through all of them again but you know what they're going to what's going to happen and that does take a little bit away from the game but i'll say i've played all of them i could play all of them again now especially with how many games i have and it won't stop me from enjoying it so uh yeah if you like the theme this is a no-brainer even if you don't like the theme but you like thematic games and you like tense games because yeah when when that uh final boss comes or whatever it is that final objective comes it is almost always tense i've never had it in this game where it's a walk in the park it's always fun and challenging and a lot of times you lose which is i think good i think especially with uh the theme that they're doing here it makes total sense uh but yeah that is legendary encounters alien still one of the best deck builders in my opinion number six we have shadow rift this is a one to six player game it's cooperative or solo published by game nights production this is the second edition there's a first edition and a second edition the second edition added the board and some not really new art yeah i'll say right now there's a negative look at the terrible heart these cards i mean especially comparing them to some of these other games that we see these newer ones so much of the card isn't art and if you look at that mic card look there's no art it's just a little i don't know what even what what is that just a one okay fine uh but in this game what you're trying to do is you're trying to protect a village that village is being attacked by these monsters and they're gonna come down this road and as they come out you can try and defeat them you have a certain amount of rounds before they then come and essentially attack the village when they are attacking the village they're going to push up the power of the monsters and if that gets pushed up too high and you've got too many monsters coming in here they're going to kill your villagers and how you lose the game it's actually a very interesting way that you lose you lose when your entire village here is filled up with corpses because basically you've lost all of the people in the village this once again is a general deck builder you're going to start off with basic cards in your hat in your hand you've got some prowess an explorer you have a strike and that's pretty much all that you have and what you're going to do is you're going to buy cards from the market and then attack those monsters as they come out unlike most deck builders there is no elimination of cards in your deck however whenever you defeat enemies and you start gaining heroism what you'll be able to do is just draw more cards it was a definite i thought it was kind of interesting at first i didn't like it but i ended up really enjoying it because it means that those basic cards aren't as bad because yeah i might draw just a prowess but if i draw a might or if i draw a heroism i'll be able to just draw more cards and then it gives me more of the currency that i need to buy cards and i'll say that's the other fun part about this game you have multiple currencies usually when you think of a deck builder just like the last one we talked about you have recruit to buy cards and you have attacked to attack the monsters here you have attacked to attack the monsters but you've got lots of different currencies you have magic you have coins and you have prowess now you can buy coins with prowess and then coins can be shared among all players which is really cool it allows you to cooperate a little bit if someone needs to buy something and needs a coin you can use your prowess to buy the coin and they can get it oh that is something else that's a huge pro of this game simultaneous play you're all going to play at the same time then the new monsters come out and then you're going to play again i'll also say the best part of this game is down here the villagers these villagers all give you special abilities and they can do really cool things the guards can protect other villagers the stonemason can help you build walls cheaper the farmer will give you more prowess really cool but then those monsters kill them and so when they get killed you know all of a sudden instead of having one of those come out a corpse comes out and you can you really feel like you're losing your village as the game goes because all of a sudden you'll get more and more corpses in your deck and then you can try and recruit uh anybody that's traveling you've got two travelers you can see them up here each round you'll reveal two travelers you can say hey grave digger come and come into our town and help us out so you can try and recruit those villagers as well as trying to level up your deck and you have to balance all of that you also have to balance defeating the enemies versus there's shadow rifts in here how you win the game is two different ways you have to either seal all the shadow rifts and there's shadow rifts equal to the number of players or you have to build all of the walls and that basically builds a wall all the way around the town to protect it i really like that you have these different options however almost all the time you go for stealing the shadow riffs there's a couple occasions where going for the walls is works but the walls are so expensive and some of the enemies can even destroy or break walls that it just a lot of times doesn't feel worth it now i will say this game is not for you if you don't like shuffling cards you're gonna have to shuffle your decks and if you're playing solo with two characters you're gonna have to shuffle two of those you'd have to shuffle the village decks every time the village deck is empty you have to shuffle that there's lots of shuffling in the game also without the arch fiend expansion which is somewhat difficult to find you don't have a boss fight at the end as long as you defeat those or seal those two shadow rifts done and that can be kind of anti-climactic or you build the walls but it's really fun if you add the arch fiend expansion it's just a little bit harder to find because after that happens you then go against a boss it does make the game longer but it is pretty dang cool i don't have a playthrough on the channel of that and finally i think they really miss the mark on giving you the opportunity to actually be a player it doesn't feel like you're a person protecting the village it feels like you're just kind of playing cards and and saying hey traveler help me or hey merchant will you give me a coin i feel like they could have made us as characters giving us an ability uh you know making us tied maybe even to one of these villagers and if the villager gets killed then something negative happens to you there's so many things they could have done there that they didn't and it's just a bummer uh but yeah overall though i still really enjoy it i feel like this is one of the better defense defending of village board games that you'll see that's a deck builder so that is shadow rift number five we have the loop this is a one to four player game it's fully cooperative or solo published by catch up games this is a new one that it's not even fully available yet in the us it will be soon i think actually in august so this month hopefully you guys if you like what you see here you can get a copy this game is so cool it reminds me of an upgraded better pandemic so what you're going to be doing is you are a character you're moving around these different eras so these are all different eras in the time line of the universe and you're trying to stop dr fu from whatever his plan is and you've got these missions you need to complete as a team in my playthrough i actually do a solo playthrough of the game you control three different characters but it actually works out really well i love the solo variant it doesn't feel overwhelming and so what you do is for each of your characters you're gonna have a set of six cards that they start with however unlike most deck builders where you start with six basic cars each single card is unique every character feels very different from every other character and that's initially right off the get-go and i love that i love when immediately when i start the game i'm already differentiated from my other players especially in a cooperative game what you'll do then is you'll draw the top three cards of your deck like this you'll place them out on the table and everyone has their top three cards kind of like your hand right on the table when you get to activate you'll then exhaust these cards to use their abilities and move around the board trying to complete those missions stop dr foo get rid of the duplicates whatever you need to do to be able to survive when you end your turn if you end your turn in an era that has a card in that space you then can take that card and put it on top of your deck basically you will be able to play it the next turn which is cool once again a new twist on deck building that's become kind of a standard you get the cards right away instead of putting in your discard pile love it so the crux of the game is you are moving around these different eras of time trying to complete certain objectives stopping doctor foo he's got duplicates on the board you need to move to certain areas you've got energy on the board that you can use to move around the board you've got all of these rift tokens that if you get too many of them just like pandemic you have a bad event that happens there and if it happens a second time you lose the game how you win the game is just by completing four missions just like many cooperative games there are three different ways that you can lose you can see them right up here if that happens you lose the game basically you're just trying to complete those sabotage tiles to win i just i feel like the game is easy for anyone to learn how to play yet it is challenging enough that gamers can have fun playing it you also have a really fun mechanic called the loop where if you've used all of your cards but you're in a location with an energy you can use that energy to refresh all of your cards that are the same dimension type you can see that there's a symbol up here on the top left hand side of the card if i decided to do a loop i could ready all cards with one specific dimension type now these two are black holes so i can't ready them that usually means these cards are more powerful because they're only a one time a turn effect this one though i could potentially do a loop to ready this one again and then play it again and then i'd exhaust it and do the ability then if i'm in a space that has two energy i can use the two energy to then ready it again and do it a third time so there's a lot of fun of moving around the board trying to manipulate where your energy is so you can utilize the cards that you have there's also tons of cards that let you actually use the cards of your other players and then they'll have to discard it but then they'll redraw up before they get to activate just tons of ways to cooperate it's got three different modes of play actually i think it's four four different modes of play yeah a basic mode and three different modes in uh other types of modes i will say this game is not for you if you're worried about an alpha gamer in your group because everything is open information you could have someone tell everyone what to do or say you know what this is the best option this is what you have to do you can't do anything else and we all know how that is uh so if you have an alpha gamer in your group not not a recommend uh also if you know it's kind of a weird theme it's not something you know if you think of pandemic people know especially now know what a pandemic is uh nobody dr fu you might not know who that is it it might feel a little bit not like a theme you're interested in so that might be a detriment but really otherwise there's hardly anything i can say about the game that i don't like so this one is a huge recommend for me so that is the loop number four we have aeon's end which is a one to four player cooperative game published by indie board and cars or action phase games there are tons of different aeons ends i will say that is probably i'll start off with a negative on this one there's outcast there's war eternal there's the legacy there's a new legacy that's coming out i will say that the amount of content for this game is a little bit overwhelming uh where to start it all depends upon what you want if you're looking and this is where i was going to talk about legacy games if you're looking for a really fun and not very long legacy game that is deck building i highly recommend this aeons and legacy as your first experience of aeon's end if you've already played aeon's end though i don't recommend a legacy because it kind of takes a step back and starts you over as if you'd never played the game and so the first three or four out of these seven missions aren't even that much fun because you don't have the full uh breadth of aeon's end itself so if you're just starting legacy all the way if you have you already played and you're trying to decide which one to buy i'd actually go outcast i think outcast gives a good challenge but also isn't too challenging to find and it gives you a good starting point it's got treasures and all of that stuff as well so that's where i would recommend starting now let's talk about the game itself so aeon zen you are a mage and you're trying to defeat some sort of boss nemesis each time you play you'll have a different boss and you're trying to protect grave hold what you're doing you'll start off with a basic set of cards with maybe one or two that are unique to your specific mage your mage also has a special ability that can only be used if you charge it if you charge it up you have to spend your money so instead of buying cards from your market you're going to spend money on your ability and then once you have enough charges you can activate it you're going to be casting spells and the best part and most unique part about this game is you do not shuffle your deck you will buy into the discard file so you still buy your cards to the discard power pile however when your deck is emptied and you need to draw you just take your discard pile flip it over and it becomes your deck so all of a sudden how you discard cards where you play your cards how you're going to do stuff with your cards actually matters which is very unique i have not seen that in any other deck builder and i really like that so the fun part is trying to decide especially because of the different phases of the game you cast spells first before you start playing cards from your hand so when you cast if you cast four spells in a row well then you're gonna have four spells in your deck in a row and so you need to take that into account when you cast your spells also you start off and you can see up here you start off with not all of your breaches open so you can't cast four spells in a row you have to spend ether to open up those breaches so what's although there's only one currency in this game it's ether and then there's the spells that do damage you have so many different things you can use your ether for do i use it to uh focus or open a breach do i use it to power up my ability or do i use it to power up my deck and you only have a limited amount of time before that nemesis starts getting super powerful and that's the goal is you have to defeat the nemesis the nemesis will throw out some minions to try and distract you as well as events that you'll have to deal with but the overall goal is you need to defeat that nemesis and how you're going to do that is with you can see these spells of course that one does one damage whoop-de-do this game does have a static marketplace unlike let's say legendary encounters alien where you have a rolling five cards and you don't know what's going to come up this one you always know the cards that are available to you the other final unique and sometimes i like and sometimes i don't like is the turn order in the game you will randomly draw who's going to go next you don't know when your turn is going to be you also don't know when the nemesis is going to activate it feels or it felt very uh innovative when it first came out and i loved it the more i play the game especially at higher play accounts the less i like it so i've played it four player where i was the first to go in one round and the last to go in the next round that means i waited i waited ten turns before i got to go the next time and at that time the nemesis had gone four times and so by the time i got to go i had to discard cards i had you know anyways i feel like the turn order was a really cool idea but depending upon player count it doesn't work as well if you're looking for a deck builder that actually feels tactical and strategical on how you play and discard your cards this is a high recommend if you're looking for a lighthearted game where you are slowly building your deck having fun playing as a team uh yeah this isn't for you it's gonna be it's a very tight game the nemesis can be a challenge uh almost all of them are a challenge and hard to defeat and so you have to be ready to lose uh also you have to be ready to wait for your turn uh that can depending upon player count that that can be a negative for this game as well but yeah that is aeon's end number three for me is renegade this is a one to five player game published by victory point games and designed by ricky royal yes ricky uh he is a content creator if you don't know absolutely love his work he's one of the reasons why i started making content so yeah super excited when i got to play this game and i feel like it is one of the best deck builders i have played what you're doing in this game you'll start off with a set of cards and then as you play your deck i believe is 15 cards or no maybe it's 16. 15 or 16. i can't even remember at this point but you start with 15 or 16 basic cards and you're trying to go against a mother mother is trying to control this this area and you're moving across trying to defeat her data nodes and using your different abilities and cards to hack in trying to complete different objectives you'll have three objectives each game one gold one silver one bronze as you complete them you'll set up the network which is essentially a board each of these are different pieces you'll flip them over put them out and you get to decide how to set them up you'll then put out sparks which the mother uses to control them and potentially can hurt you and what you're trying to do is complete those three goals each time you play those goals can be completely different if you complete those goals you win then you count up your points and you can see if you beat your previous player now what makes this game so unique is that instead of you buying cards that go into your deck and you have to find ways to destroy the cards in your deck your deck is always the same size all the time and that's because whenever you buy a card with a card you then lose the card that you use to buy it with and you put the other one directly into your hand so cool so you lose the ability of certain cards but then you gain other ones so your deck is always tight and only 15 or 16 cards and how quickly you go through your deck is how quickly the game ends as you uh you can only go through your deck three times so essentially you use those cards to do the certain things that you want to do on the board and you've got to do them in that amount of time otherwise you lose the game but what's so much fun is that instead of you buying a ton of cards and then having a ton of stuff that you go what am i going to do with this stuff no there's none of that because if i'm gonna buy like this christmas tree i have to have one of each of these types of cards i would lose one of the cards that i played put this directly into my hand and then i have it in my hand and i can use it for this round and all rounds going forward i love this it's almost like a deck replacement game instead of a deck builder because you're replacing cards in your deck to make your deck of 15 or 16 cards that much better you'll then use the cards that are in your hand to do different things you've got the red ones here that can destroy things your yellow ones here they can help you change sparks into data nodes that you can use to be helpful to you and you've got your leadership ones that are wild they can do lots of different things like this one says you can execute delete one spark from your partition and every partition adjacent to yours so you can get yourself into the right spot they've got the blue ones that also let you move across the board and there's lots of different puzzling that you need to do because you can put out data nodes and if you have enough data nodes in a specific spot so you can see i've got a red one here and a purple one if i had three blue ones here i could place a fourth to turn it into a different type of of thing that i can use for the game and it becomes something even more powerful now as you can see i'm already having a challenge trying to remember all the different names and in this game the hardest part is the jargon it's really cool that he that uh ricky has all this different jargon for cyberpunk you've got data nodes sparks you've got guardians all this cool stuff i can't remember the names of each thing just be wary of that if you have a hard time parsing through jargon this might not be for you also you'll see once again this does feel a little bit more old school the art look how tiny the art is compared to the card itself you don't have to like the cyberpunk theme to like the game but it will certainly help you understand the game there's a lot going on here i do recommend if you pick this up watch a play through if you read the rulebook it's good but uh it can be a challenge to get through so i do recommend watching ricky's play or my play uh to help you with that first time that you play the game but yeah this is definitely a recommend for anyone that likes puzzle games that likes the deck replacement idea so there's no card that goes wasted there's no why am i seeing my beginning cards anymore no you're after one round your whole deck is almost going to be upgraded and then you're going to upgrade it again and that's what's so cool that's so cool about this game that is renegade my number three this is my number two heroes of tennifer a one to four player game published by broken mill it is a fully cooperative or solo game you are dungeon delving into this game but what's so much fun and unique you once again like most games start with a basic set of cards actually you start with six zero cards and six level one cards so yeah your deck starts terrible and then one special card for your uh specific character but the best part about this game is every enemy you defeat turns into a card into your deck and i think that's so much fun so you delve into these different dungeons you can decide which dungeon you want to go into depending upon level and you don't have to do a level one right away although i recommend it uh you can choose you can jump around to different levels the top enemy is revealed so you'll know what that top enemy is and you'll know what the top enemy cards benefit is once it's in your deck what it looks like and so you can use that as your advantage of okay do i want that card on my deck i kind of do so maybe i'll go there so i can get it into my deck once you decide that you want to delve into that specific dungeon you go in there you fight enemies how you do that is you'll reveal the top three cards of your deck if you're playing cooperatively you can decide okay do i want to keep that hand or discard it uh if you're playing solo you need to make sure that after you've done all the drawing you have to be able to defeat the enemy otherwise you get kicked out of the dungeon but what's really unique is anytime that you cannot draw any more cards and you haven't defeated an enemy that's when you get kicked out or you can choose on your own after you've defeated an enemy i think i'm just gonna leave that dungeon then you push up the time on the track as you go what your goal is is to level up enough that when your time runs out and you get to the boss you can actually take the boss out also each dungeon will have a reward and so if you can clear out that specific dungeon you then will gain a specific reward so that also can help you decide do i want to go into that room or not in the game you will be looking for many ways to get rid of those level zero and even level one cards in your deck and as you play you're going to level up that deck and it is so much fun you take out this ogre all of a sudden i have a two damage card on my deck and when you flip it you remember oh yeah that's what it was like when i took out that ogre now i will say this game is not for you if you don't love a fair bit of randomness because first of all you will go into a dungeon and then you're revealing three cards from your deck and if you like them you keep them if you don't you discard and draw three more sometimes you just get unlucky with your draws second of all sometimes the cards that you draw or enemies that you defeat don't really match your deck and so you'll be defeating enemies and you're going yes i'm taking them out and then you put them into your deck and you're going i don't want those cards they stink and so sometimes that can happen and you can kind of spiral i will say this game is a spiraling game so if you start doing poorly you're going to continue to do poorly it's hard to dig yourself out but if you're playing and having fun who even cares i i think i've lost every game that i've done on the channel i know that i've lost i lose over 60 70 of the time but i'm okay with that because when i do win first of all it feels awesome and second of all it's all about the journey in this game that slow ramp up of your deck taking out those enemies pointing them into your deck seeing how your deck is growing and and just seeing the different types of of of enemies and cars that you can have in your deck it's definitely not a game for everyone but i will say especially cooperatively you really care about what your other players are doing because depending on how much damage they do you have to figure out how much damage you need to do so when i was playing this with baron if he could only do three damage then i need four more to be able to take that guy out so i need to work i need to make sure that my deck can even do that and so you really have to keep tabs of what's in your deck what's left in your deck and also work together to defeat those enemies definitely like that heroes of tennifer a high recommend super high recommend from me number one and this should come as no surprise for anyone that has been watching the channel recently i am in love with imperium classics or imperium legends they're from the same line there's two different boxes this is a one to four player competitive game but you can play it solo as well i think that's our only competitive uh only game on this debt on this list i am hopeful that mike and i can come up with a variant for co-op more to come on that it is published by osprey osprey games so in this game what you're doing is you choose one of the eight or 16 civilizations depending on if you have one one box the classics or just the legends or both of them and you're trying to score more victory points than the dummy player the dummy player then can be any of the other civilizations in either of the two boxes they'll come with a chart on how to activate their cards they will try and compete for cards gaining victory points gaining the treasure cards or fame cards and you're also going to be doing that at the end of the game you compare points to see who wins why is this game so good well each civilization has a 100 different setup at the get-go so there's no hey you start with the same basic cards first thing that i love second thing that i love each deck has its own nation deck of cards what that means is every time that you empty out your deck and you shuffle in your cards you're gonna shuffle in a nation's card or a development card depending upon where you are within your nation those are all unique to your specific nation so every time you play if you choose a different civilization it's going to be totally different i've just recently did a playthrough of the arthurians and they didn't even want their nation cards because they didn't want to get to their last card their ascension card because then bad things happen that's totally different than when i played the vikings who all they wanted to do was push through their uh nation's cards as quickly as possible each civilization feels so different and i would highly recommend if you are interested in that to get the legends box because that legends box has some really unique and interesting civilizations every single civilization will have different things that they're better at and they're not as good at hey the romans they're very good at building so they've got more prosperity cards to get more resources than other civilizations but you know the egyptians they can entomb their cards and they can get more victory points because of that the arthurians are going on quests they're trying to complete quests and they don't even care about what's in the marketplace as much i will say the other thing i love about this game is unlike most of these deck builders you have to get enough you know resource generation to be able to buy cards from the marketplace totally different this game you have abilities that just say acquire or break through that means that you will gain any of the cards from the marketplace or potentially dig for specific cards no card has an inherent value i really like that i i'm no longer spending time building my deck up to get 1800 recruits so i can buy that one hero that looks awesome no if i get a card that lets me acquire i'm going to acquire this card however there's these unrest cards and if i acquire versus breaking through i have to take those unrest cards which are negative points and also if that deck runs out in a solo game you lose so you have to find ways to get that unrest back out of your deck so cool so many different things there's so many facets to the game and i would say that when you or if you i should really say when because you should get this game when you get this game i do recommend watching a play through before reading or while reading the rules because i i did feel like the rules albeit have everything in there the rules don't explain how you actually play the game they just it just explains the different phases if that makes any sense as you watch a play through it'll make a lot more sense you only have three actions in the game but you have five exhaust abilities and the more challenging the civilization usually the more exhaust abilities you can trigger and all of that so it becomes more complex the uh the more complex of a civilization that you are choosing to play and that is something that i also find is a huge benefit they've raided all of the civilizations so you know hey don't start with the arthurians or the um utopians go ahead and start off with the qin dynasty they're only a level three difficulty i really appreciate that especially from someone who maybe doesn't have as much time to play games as i would like i know where to start and i know where to jump to once i want to get in deep even though i absolutely love this game i do know that there's a certain set of people this game isn't for one people who only have 30 to 45 minutes to play this game isn't for you every game i've played has lasted a minimum of an hour sometimes up to an hour and a half it i do feel like sometimes the game overall overstays its welcome you build this awesome engine you're doing these really cool things and then you just kind of have to wait till the end game triggers uh that's okay for me but some people that might be a deterrent i also know some people might have a hard time with everything's not a hundred percent historically accurate i've gotten that as a comment on a lot of my videos i am totally okay with that but i'm not a historian if you are a historian thinking that everything is going to make total historic sense it's not and then finally i will say the component quality i mean the art is amazing and this is how card art should be going forward do you see this full art i love it that is how these deck builders should be they've got this black text with the white or so sorry black background with the white text so you can read it easily i absolutely love that but the component quality of the tokens it's pretty pretty poor i mean they're not even great cardboard uh and you know that's your progress tokens that's your population and why why would they do this they have population that's worth one but they've got two population on it so people have had a hard time understanding all that the materials has three tok symbols on it yet it's only worth one and so it's hard for people to understand that so if that looks like it could be a deterrent for you then yeah this isn't for you but for me this is a game i will never get rid of i love it love it to pieces solo i'm hoping to find a cooperative variant because i'd love to play this with my wife cooperatively because she loves civilization building so there you have it that's my top 10 deck builders hopefully one of those might sound interesting to you and you can go ahead and pick it up all of those have play throughs on the channel so feel free to check those out and as always thanks so much for watching i'll see you at the next stop

Channel: One Stop Co-op Shop

Views: 27,234

Keywords: board, game, one stop, co-op shop, oscs, top 10, best of, list, review, how to

Id: 8rHA4QWZhNs

Length: 48min 20sec (2900 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021