Top 10 Unique Games (with Quinns from Shut up & Sit Down)

[Music] good afternoon everybody i'm tom vassell i'm z garcia hi and i'm quintin smith here from shut up and sit down welcome to the show we are intimidated by their hugeness of size and that's why we only invited one person from shut up and sit down so that me and z could handle it that's right yeah without backup as well i'm i'm very nervous i think invite i was hoping that you'd invite you know two or three of us but i'm i'm alone i'm separated i'm scared uh this is a scouting party yeah i suddenly feel like a pack i feel like a pack hunter all of a sudden this is very strange well don't worry if it makes you feel better i promise to insult you as much as possible over the course of today so business as usual i got it well what i meant was that wasn't gonna just be during his top ten during the phone call afterwards various points over the course of the night tom i've worked here for a while i got it you know how this goes all righty well today is uh so we uh i have a plethora of top 10 topics that i send to different people and so we are blaming today's topic's choice on quinn's for picking it even though he did give me four options um oh that's big of you to admit so unique games this is a interesting one because i'm constantly i'll play a game and i'll go that was really unique and then i immediately forget about it later on when it's time to make a top 10 list i was you know obviously very excited to like not embarrass i was excited to not embarrass myself uh on this top 10. but immediately ran into a difficulty because the to the category is top 10 unique games but i still haven't got an answer from either of you on is this the 10 games that are the most unique or is this the best unique games or both and i'll tell you right now i i'm too much of a coward to commit to either of those so i just went with most unique and that i like the most and if my list is weird that's why yeah how did you order them uh from from the ones i don't know i i think i these are ten games that i like but i think i no no i i ordered them by how much i like them that's the only true answer okay well that's what i did i picked ten very unique games oh you're not allowed to say that are you very very unique yeah that's that's a no-no but apparently i can get away with saying most unique so i don't know what the rules are here but i like the rule where tom is wrong and i'm right yeah but i'm agreeing with you i picked unique games and i also ordered them from how much i like them from top from bottom to top how unique would you say they are though i would say they are almost super unique [Laughter] here's it's in the dictionary now unique does not need to mean one-of-a-kind there could be more than ones of something and it's still unique okay i i'm looking it up i ranked these uh well the first thing i tried to do was not put so many kids games on the list because kids games tend to be a little bit weirder and more outside of the box i largely failed at that there's a bunch of kids games on here and then i also just put near the top of the list how just sort of how far from center they are i guess you know how much i enjoy playing them sure but they've been around for a while and no one's really made anything quite like them again sometimes i don't know they're ranked numerically there what's what's the uh over under on crossovers maybe we might have a couple of crossovers among all of us but i i just don't see a lot of that happening i'm gonna like do one of those sort of trick taking bidding type things now i bet three games from my list will be on either yachty lists i'll go with three okay i want to say two from mine i'm gonna go with that i got two that's already taken well no it's possible is that possible that we could all be right oh no wait yeah hang on maybe maybe i don't have three-way ties right that could be a game that's yeah the three ways someone's what we need we need someone who has any kind of grasp of basic mathematics to help us out alrighty well let's get started i i'm very curious what you all picked here we go [Music] number ten all right my number ten pick here is speaking of trick taking games is a trick taking game and it's a fairly recent one called nokosu dice this is a trick taking game that has both cards and dice in it and at the beginning of each hand you roll out sort of spill out a whole bunch of dice and then you draft them around the table you also deal everyone a hand of cards and these dice you can play into a trick as though they were a card from your hand the dice are colored so when it's my turn to follow and you lead purple i could play my purple five from my hand or i could play a purple three on a die in front of me i can just put that into the table the trick is you have um the the the deal is you have one more die then you will play so you're gonna hold one back okay and the one you hold back at the very end of the entire hand if you score that many tricks i think it is then you get a bonus so it's like one of those bidding trick taking games but you don't have to settle on a number until the hand kind of gets going does that make sense i really like that about it because i hate those bidding games they're so punishing people who are good at it at them will just be good at them and they will just crush the table they can look at their hand and go i'm gonna take three tricks and they do somehow i can never predict that stuff but with this if i have a bunch of different dice values you know it might be three it might be four i just have to make sure i hold that die back and that's the last one uh i think it's neat it plays uh it plays really well it doesn't scale very well you want to play with four pretty much but that's true for a bunch of trick taking games anyway dice is my number 10 pick well start by picking a game nobody's heard of oh i'll continue to do that i wanted to make fun of you there because you know for your first unique game you started a sentence trick taking and it's like well of course there's not many trick-taking games out there but you know by the end i was sold on this game that i also have not heard of my number has anyone ever reviewed this even i reviewed it i don't i don't watch those [Music] my number 10 is a little game another game that you two haven't heard of but uh it's pretty big it's a game called uh root now you two are wondering what's this game called root well let me tell you this is a game that is tell me more well so look listen let me explain my thinking when i talk about root the famously asymmetric war game of woodland creatures uh battling one another so root to me obviously i mean it's like a coin game and you would say it's not unique because it's a coin game it's it's asymmetric sides but first off coin games don't see sides using different uh the breadth of different mechanics on offer in root uh you know is not something you see in coin games more importantly root isn't just a unique sort of game design root is a unique theme as well i mean there's the reason that for root success is not that it's an asymmetric war game we've had those before it's it's the combination of uh a insanely off-putting set of mechanics with a theme that is extremely unusual and stand out um and cute for what it's worth um so and also like i said i designed this list with the idea of games that were unique that i actually also you know really like now i'm not going to say that root is a better game than i'm sorry see what was the name of your game no forget it i'm not really okay it's gone it's gone it's lots of time i feel deep shame when you come at us with root and i'm over here talking about some dinky little dice game all right let me tell you my list only gets less from there yeah okay i actually considered putting rude on my list i and then i was afraid because those i was afraid the groggeners would show up and shake sticks at me and chat about coin games and root wasn't very original and then i would say but what about the animals and then go weep in the corner they're not gonna be watching this that's the truth i will say you know as far as coin games goes there's i mean i've played a couple of coin games i've not seen anything like uh the bird faction the erie i've not seen anything like the um i always call them otters but they are no i call them beavers in the review but they were artists you know there's a there's a whole load of fascinating unique stuff happening in root and i and that's before we even get to the stuff in the latest expansion or whatever expansions to come next that's it my number ten route is a good idea not for the game but for all the expansions that haven't come out yet that will make it even more unique i think that was a fine first choice and we're gonna say lots of good things just in case we need to take it back later you had a good entrance all right my number 10 is a game that again i ordered these from my least favorite to favorite this one i wanted to like more because the story behind it is so good and that's nyctophobia and phobia which is a game that uh was made because the designer had a relative who had trouble seeing and she wanted to make a game that this person could play uh being with some seeing impairment and so that's what this game is you most of the people who are playing the game are blindfolded and you were just feeling your way around and you're running from a serial killer or some evil guy trying to kill you and you're feeling your way through a forest it is not a game you should play right now uh mostly because the one person has to hold the other person's hands consistently throughout the game uh but and it's it has a few fundamental falls in that the person who is the bad guy has to play i think a little bit more like a dungeon master than uh i'm gonna beat everybody at the game because they could just win i think but that does a good job at making you feel like you're lost in the forest to some degree and there's a guy breathing down your neck about to kill you i think i think one of the people's a vampire but one's a serial killer either way which one's worse i don't know i'm gonna go with serial killer you know i was not expecting to get hit with that question tom that's really oh no you know i just it just occurred to me like which one would i think i think i'd rather the empire because maybe he has some weird code but um oh vampire is just a predator vampire has to eat you serial killer is is bad news bad news bears anyhow i think this one's extremely unique there's nothing else like it as far as i can tell so have you played this one z nope nope i haven't played it but i i'm aware of it i'm familiar with it and i agree i mean it seems really different i did play it and tom the moment you describe where if you're the uh the murderer or vampire you have to touch everyone's hands to move their hands onto the board um i don't have clammy hands particularly but i don't know what it was as soon as i was assigned that role my hands got so moist and all of my friends made fun of me so much because ah this moist hand murderer putting their hand on the board again so that's my main defining memory of nyx phobia well back in victorian ages this game would have gone over really well you know because they've been like i'm touching her hand it would have been it would have been banned probably it would have been only only sold in the the backs of various stores you'd have to come in and say a code and they'd be like nyctophobia yes this way right that's my number ten number nine my number nine is a children's game that i while not being a child owned for several years this is a game called truffle snuffle and in it it's from hava by the way it's a haba game it comes with a a pig nose on a on a an elastic band you're gonna put that on your face within the snouts is a magnet you spread out tokens on a bowl on the table face down you have a sand timer and once that sand timer begins you are going to touch the snout to these pieces which attach to it magnetically you will then hover your nose your snout over a mirror that comes included see what the token is because you're now you're looking at the other side and and then take it off of the nose into the box of the game you put it in one compartment if it's a one you're looking for you put it in a different compartment if it's one you're not looking for you think you've got the mental image right that's why you look at the picture up online yeah i uh yes you never told me you owned this game i used to own it i i owned it many years ago uh for for a while too and i i used to play with my well he was little then my nephew and it's just i mean immediately you put this thing on your face and you're of course laughing and then you start playing and you start getting frenetic with it and sometimes you're trying to get this thing off of the pig snout and it's not working um it's just a it's really stupid it's completely ridiculous it's also a lot of laughs and it certainly is different i i haven't come across anything quite like it and um so i figured it deserved a spot on the list it's not very high on the list because i again it's a kids game and there will be others that are also kids games this isn't going to have you know it's not going to go the distance it's not going to have legs but uh but it's fun truffle snuffle that is two games in a row i haven't heard of that is very impressive i can't believe now if someone were to say uh hey quincy you're not a truffle game i would say oh do you mean truffle shuffle or truffle snuffle like that's a real sentence i'm sorry for that that's yeah you've made my life worse okay my number nine and this is goodness me did z and i have different ideas of what this list should be my number nine and i could have put any splatter game on this list really because if there's one i mean i think splotter more than any other publisher are defined by publishing things that are absolutely bizarre and unique and and you know i could have named something like the great zimbabwe or roads and boats but i chose food chain magnate um because not because i think it's necessarily the most it is like um the most unique splatter game but it is my favorite and that is something i wanted to incorporate food chain magnate is a very quite heavy game of running competing fast food chains in the 50s which has two i mean fulfilling orders of food is what you're trying to do but that's obfuscated by two very difficult and confusing systems the first of which is you have to market food first because in a kind of dark statement on consumerism nobody actually wants anything you're buying until you force them to want it first but marketing on a sort of this area control map of a city is something that any player can do but once you've infused the desire of burgers or cola into the people that live there um anyone can fulfill that desire based on how close their restaurant is and how cheap your prices are and then the way you uh sort of run your business is by hiring staff and you create an actual management pyramid out of cards which are your employees it starts with you as the top and then you can hire other people who can recruit other people who can train staff and make food and build restaurants and even build buildings and you can get into property development and there's so much about this game that i think makes it unique but the reason it's on my list is because it is so unique and easily in my top 50 games of all time wow i can't disagree with a lot of what you said about the except maybe the top 50. i would argue it's certainly unique in the fact that they managed to make some parts of it look so good and the other parts look so bad a nice you know cross juncture and also this game is unique and i don't believe i've ever lost the game so badly in my life it is i mean it's not a game right what do they joke about that um if you can't lose a spotter game on the first turn then it's not actually a splatter game you must be playing something else that's very reasonable i think i mean i think it's the opposite of reasonable i'm just delivering it in a british accent which makes it sound uh different all right my number nine is well i'm jumping back into weird territory here this is a game that is extremely fragile and if you're playing this you don't want anyone else near the game and that's polarity i don't know if you've played this one z yeah yeah yeah with the magnets uh sort of yes in check yeah polarity is a bunch of magnets that look like uh othello pieces white and black sides and you are in this game you need to balance these around the board so that they are sitting somewhat on a table but hovering in the magnetic fields of the other pieces so you're placing them in such a way that they'll sit there and they're kind of leaning and it's it's kind of cool and it's neat until an oath walks by and jostles the table and every single magnet snaps together yeah which has happened in more i would say it probably happens in more than 50 of all polarity games in existence um or even not just someone walking by the table but you just you move one piece and then it's not like a couple magnets snap together it's just this chain reaction of horror but it is different i i i find it amusing and i would gladly play this probably once every three or four years as a as a lark because i don't think the the uniqueness of it is strong enough to counteract the just being a pain it has to be like perfect sync the world's be rotating the right direction maybe maybe you like it more than easy no i don't think so i i agree that i that it's extremely unique though it is they found they've got that one other magnet game that that uh r r came out with where you would throw them on the table yeah remember that but that was that's what's going to do with hearts right like love no there's a there's another version of it fraction i think it's called attraction right yeah whether magnets are shaped like hearts but i've seen it in its vanilla form as well but i haven't played basically yeah it's just you know that one is very simple you just throw them try to catch them but yeah the one you're talking about is a sort of exercise and finesse that doesn't really work but even the attempt is so distinct that i think is cool can we all agree that a game here finding out that a game will feature magnets is like generally a good feeling yes yes it really is i was thinking about this here that coloma has a magnet spinner in the middle that it just holds the thing there and i think i gave it a whole extra point for it i i i if you put a magnet in food chain magnet and call it i would probably give it an extra point hmm oh okay yeah that's just bad that's i'm just i'm reeling that was good i didn't even mean for that to happen oh i've been i i'll retire right now my number nine polaris finish the list first number eight my number eight is also a kids game the copy of this i have is no longer in print but they reprinted recently with the theme from ice cool this is called in a tree print the terrible pyramid of peng queen that's true i hate so much talking about magnets that's right exactly uh the one i have is called curse of the mummy which is uh orange in german anyway but if that's what that's what i mean cursed with mummy i i really like this game yeah it's got a a board that you said between the one player playing the mummy and the other players it is magnetic you are attaching magnets on on your side you'll have the mummy piece on the other side are all the explorers trying to get in this pyramid steal whatever get out and then you'll move your piece trying to capture them you have a matching piece on the other side so that the players is the coolest part the players who are trying to get in rob the stuff and get out will see your ghostly figure moving around seemingly on its own on the on the board and so they can kind of you know see you moving towards them and then here comes the bend and are they going to keep coming towards me or take that left turn oof okay they turned i really find this game fascinating yes it's a super light game it's silly but it's extremely replayable too this is not like polarity this is not like truffle uh truffle snuffle this is something i can definitely bring out right now and play whoa whoa you're saying this is better than truffle snuffle i'm saying it's at least one better see i've played this and i haven't played truffle snuffle but i feel like truffle snuffle is a game i would remember the rest of my life i have memories i can't quite wash away that involved truffle snuffle and i've tried i've tried to wash them away but they uh they stain me like uh this was also in the back of that store that was selling games got it anyway no i like i like uh curse of the mummy quite a bit i think it's a really just fun engaging game haven't seen anything like it and they keep reprinting this thing which is a a good sign i think so yeah that's my number eight this has been actually uh something that i wanted to play for a long time see so i'm glad you're mentioning it and jog my memory because there will be that convention where i play it uh for my number eight i'm sticking with uh just like i had with my number 10 root um games that pack a lot of ideas a lot of uniqueness into one box so this is a social deduction game that i think anyone who's even played social deductible games to death would agree that this is a unique game within the genre i am talking of course not of course but i'm talking about two rooms and a boom on the face tom tom i thought you were gonna mention i thought oh blood on the clock tower ah well i could of course but um he i i and i love bottom of the clock tower i will happily uh well slightly unhappily considering the controversy but it's still my number one game of all time it's built on the clock town but it's not a unique game because blood on the clock tower to me is an evolution of werewolf and that was actually a lot of people's criticism with my review two rooms and a boom is not something that becomes invalidated by evolutions on you know werewolf or evolutions on the resistance of secret hitler two rooms in a boom is is i mean you play it on your feet it's got a marvelous physicality to do with slowly revealing cards using your fingers it's it i mean it i'll use the phrase that z used earlier it's a game that you end up remembering for the rest of your life i mean it i've now played it to death but it made such an impact on me at the time that not just the game itself um being feeling unique and different but tons of mechanics within the game itself you know um some stuff that's been cripped from werewolf but to look through even just the cards that are just in the corset of two rooms of two rooms and a boom there's plenty of ideas that i've not seen there before i mean i remember one of the first times i played it colby dow um founder of plaid hat games receiving a card that said he could not talk for the entire game which is not something i have seen in werewolf and also in that game cards saying that players had to smile all the time which seems silly until you realize that players who are smiling and have to smile then lets you know that that must be the role they have which means the other person who's smiling in the other room can't be a clown they have to be something else they're lying for some reason it's just utterly unique they could still be a clown but i mean they can and they and yeah anyway um two rooms in a boom a game of endless permutations all of which feel very unique that is my number eight i only played this the one time and i it felt a little sort of trite i this whole like i'll show you a card you showed me a card not a whole lot was happening so i wonder if it just if i just happen to have one experience that didn't quite go that well it's possible um it also uh the core game um is if you just played at its simplest which is how a lot of players are introduced and how you might have been introduced is quite simple and quite solvable and i mean solvable depending on how your game goes and often can come down to a coin toss um but it's only once you've been introduced to the game and all the mechanics that they start introducing all sorts of other cards that just jimmy the game are up messing it up more and more and more and more and more so i would say that if you get another chance to play it with something with an experienced group you might have a very different experience yeah it is a game that's that that changes as time goes by i i feel like you have to play it a couple times before you even really know what's going on and what is that if not a unique game hey hey we got your back we're not arguing i agree that among other social deduction games this one is this one stands out the whole i mean moving around like you said going into a different type of space maybe see i talked for ages and it was and i used all these words i could have just said how many board games do you know that require two rooms well there's also twilight imperium but yes yes two tables you're right my apologies my number eight is one of the ones i suspect i'm crossing over with z if only for the fact that we were talking the other day and mike mentioned it and i was trying to tell mike to shut up that is garbage on this go ahead moored m a rosa this so this is a game in which it uses hearing well pretends to use hearing it actually doesn't work um but you stack a bunch of no no don't even pretend z i get it wrong every single time maybe i just got a good hearing but you have all these pyramid of boxes stacked on top of each other and you drop cubes in there and they will likely land either on the table or in one of the floors and then you're just trying to as the game goes by you're guessing which floors have cubes on and it has something to do with a murder mystery someone's been murdered on one of the floors uh trying to shift the blame i think is what it is right you're trying to make sure that when you do lift up one of these places your cubes aren't there and they blame someone else for the murder i think literally everybody at the table has committed a murder if i saw i'm looking at a picture now if i saw this at a con in 2020 i would be like i'm going straight to that table this looks awesome but your television doesn't work a con is the worst place to play it because you drop the cube and no one can hear anything there's nothing and you have to also play it on a table with a tablecloth because sometimes you drop a cube and if you plant a wooden table and you hear this conk on the table you're like well i know that one went all the way to the bottom i think my favorite memory of this game is actually playing this with my mom on a glass table that she used to own and it was we were just laughing so much because you know i i would drop one or she would draw a drop one and it would go like i mean just the glass would reverberate so much and we would just sort of look at each other and just bust out laughing because it was so painfully apparent that that went right through didn't stop anywhere so you know i i think it sort of works tom this is a good one it's a fun game it works it's fun i i it is fun i don't know that i would ever like try to pick some unique strategy to play it i would just but you're right the first time i saw those quinns i wanted it just because of how it looked for no other reason um and it's a decently fun game but it's just it's super silly but there's nothing like it yeah good number seven my number seven is a game called witness that is basically the telephone game meets puzzle solving in which you have four people it has to be four i don't know if you guys have played this tom you played this have you played this i have reviewed this i love this game yeah and so it's that it's they know you have four people at the table everybody has part of a puzzle basically like so and so has this kind of mustache and somebody slapped somebody else and they saw in the darkness that they had no mustache but they had a funny hat and uh this guy over here likes to wear hats that make sense and so you're like whispering to the next guy the little bit that you know from your booklet jeff has a stupid hat and then they go okay great all right so now they say to the next player their own piece and whatever you passed jeff has a stupid hat and only wears one shoe you're like all right cool and so eventually once you've passed it all the way around you answer some questions and see how well you did it's a cooperative game it's so weird it's so weird it's this like it's those little puzzles that you would get in like an activity book cut up into four pieces and then whispered around the table so it's oh see because i love this game this is this is the first game i feel like i've failed because this should be on my list if i'd if i'd remembered it it would be on my list i think it's amazing but i would give the puzzle design a little more credit than it's just cut off into four pieces because my group played that like if you go to the like the very back the hardest part it's all specifically stuff to trick up your memory like yeah if it's like you know he has a stupid hat it's like oh god you know one of you might have written down you know oh well this vintage of wine came in was was bottled in 1942 and then someone else here's this finish of line was drunk in 1945 to mean that when you're playing the telephone game you give the wrong information or you change the grammar and then people are just passing nonsense onto one another because someone messed up the game of telephone early i love this game no i agree i'm not trying to deny the designer any credit i think it's a brilliantly put together game um i just mean that that's sort of how that feels especially when i when you first discovered you go wait what they combined what and what that's that's what's so interesting and bizarre about it i remember i i got a demo of this some convention and i was immediately hooked and they they were moving us along too so they kind of like you know showed you it and then moved you along and i i didn't want to go i was like no let me give me another one i want to do another one they're so weird it's so so interesting so yeah witness my number seven uh i was so enjoying that that i i was stalled okay my number seven is let's see if you two let's see if i feel like my games have come from really left field so far but apparently it's yeah it's a little game called monopoly right shut up it is a game it's a team game for eight players with a screen it's captain sonar it's uh so this i think you know whatever you think about captain sonar you know it's horrible at conventions because you can't hear you know it's you know it's maybe not that much fun it's certainly not much fun if your team is outclassed by the other team but in terms of uniqueness oh baby captain sonar's got you so this is a game of submarine combat in which you've got four roles the captain has a map in which you draw like a game of snake the path of your submarine but it can't cross over itself so but then the captain whenever the ship moves has to announce you know going north going east now on the other team or on both teams there's a sonar operator whose job is to listen to the other captain and then draw the markings that the captain that the other captain announces on a sheet of acetate and then eventually you'll have a long enough snake showing where the other team's moved that you can slide that around the map which has islands on to reveal well the only place this a state can go is here therefore they have to be here and then you let the weapons officer know who's been priming torpedoes and may you may or may not be having fun during this process games of captain sonar vary massively but when you've got two full teams that are enjoying themselves uh and are evenly matched it's absolutely superb so that is my number seven captain sonar yes yes yes yes all the shouting all the energy this game has one of the top 10 energies out there you know for a game sort of producing this frenetic vibe among the players oh man that's at the top of that list you know the um the they did a expansion called like the upgrade pack which i don't think is great but there's another expansion which i'm hoping to get to finally next year called like operation dragon which is the campaign expansion but the first mission in that has one of the cutest things i've seen which is both teams start with just their captain and the rest of their crew is told to sit elsewhere in the room of the house because in the story the submarines have found one another by accident so they're not battle ready which means the game starts with the captains having to choose which members of the crew they wake up so by getting the submarine to certain points on the map you're then allowed to wake up one person so you go oh i have the sound operator i'll have the weapons officer and then slowly over the course of 20 minutes you wake up your whole team but in an asymmetric fashion this is actually an a real thing or is it a fan base thing it's a real thing tom that is a real well this thing hang on this is live i'm seeing something haraldo's going into the closet operation dragon yeah cool yeah i received it years ago and it's it's this is kind of my reviewer equivalent of a shelf of shame it's much too cool for me to get rid of it from my cupboard but i've not found the space on shelby sit down to cover it yet but i'm hoping to finally get to it next year that's good i must play that all right cool all right here's the one i'm not 100 sure on so this is a game that most people have not played it was a kickstarter i believe called warband against the darkness um this is right sort of a euro uh you are loading everyone is on the same side you're all fighting against somebody but you have these different soldiers these fantasy soldiers that you are playing out and you're trying to get the most glory i put this one down as unique because i never played a game that had a very it has a super semi co-op theme but it's not semi-co-op but you are constantly trying to upgrade your soldiers and downgrade others this one just felt so different than other games that i still think about it now um there's nothing like it's not there's no pig nose in it and then it's on the wrong list isn't it but it's such a unique interesting game that felt different like a little bit of area control but this whole let's work together to stop the enemy i really like this one it's it's very intriguing don't go by the cover not a great cover and the the game actually also looks super boring but it's it's fun so that's warband against the darkness is therefore like one that's against the light that's always like you're fighting darkness or something okay it's against the spirit of this list that's for sure oh wow number six all right tom you know this is gonna be on my list you know what it is it's from hava it's a big box it's about 150 dollars probably right now and it is the single worst idea for a game you can possibly play in the world we live in today this is trotaphant a game in which you stick a party favor in your mouth and breathe on other people don't play this kids this one has a giant rotating like i mean it's got a it takes a battery it's this giant cardboard rotating tree that you put in the center of the table everybody has a party favor in their mouth which is supposed to be the trunk of your elephant i guess in this scenario you are the elephant and you are going to blow this thing out curl up a piece of the tree into it wow and then uncurl that thing onto a plate in front of you or if you grab the bad one in front of someone else's plate area whatever and you don't know what they are until you grab it and as it spins up into you you see what it is on the other side in fact sometimes it comes back too quickly and you miss it so you have to kind of do a half blow to just kind of look at it and then it comes back half blow i do those all the time it's a well-known gaming term right up there with worker placement so z after one game of this how wet are the components um oh it's certainly disgusting but it is unique i just don't understand how you can like you know this is if they sold us today it would have to be a legacy game nobody's going to reuse that you know but they they i guess they meant for you to sanitize them and then use them again like i said don't don't don't play this folks it's it's covets out there don't invite cover into your houses i don't know that i i don't think covet has anything to do with me not playing this yeah like this is one of those games where the guy brings out and he says don't worry i sanitized this and i'd go no you didn't not enough anyway well there wasn't a mansion uh called operation elephant in which you would play on teams and so you would pass it back and forth between the two of them well i have a copy somewhere let me go let me get it hold on i have a copy you should have like just made it on a piece of paper real quick yeah doodle on a box yeah it's a weird one i i couldn't even spell that when i went to google it you know what let's just move on because the further this game is in my past rather than my present the better um my number my number six continuing my theme of games that i actually quite like but are also unique is from who for a long time and still may be my favorite designer uh the czech vladivertil and this is one of his older games but i mean frankly a lot of vladis uh catalogue could be described as unique but for the game i shot well actually in fact for my first vlad a game on this list i went with galaxy chukka i could have said well i see ah bunny bunny moose mousse was something i genuinely considered for this list because yeah that's the game of listening to a poem while trying to interpret maths while doing things with your fingers um i work with galaxy tracker because i actually still like it as opposed to bunny bunny moose moose but galaxy trucker is a game about building um sort of space trucks with sort of uh square pieces way before i mean i suppose building using tiles to build out on a grid is is less unique now but what is unique in galaxy trucker is then flying in a convoy with your constructs and also an odd sense of cooperation galaxy trucker is the only game i know where while you're all trying to make money the manual says so long as you made one dollar you have considered to be a winner which means actually almost all games of galaxy trucker unless you go into debt which is very possible everyone's a winner but there's some trivia about galaxy trucker another bit of trouble about galaxy trucker supposedly the entire game came to vladimir while he was in the shower and he was at a convention ran out of the shower um with a towel around his waist and said to his uh colleague at czech games phillip he was like i've got it or whatever and just began writing down uh the rough pitch for galaxy chucker and apparently it was like he went from not knowing the game to knowing the whole thing in the course of one shower which if you believe it as i do certainly seals vlada as a great designer this that's why i spend so much time in the shower waiting for that great idea still waiting for that design to come to you right yeah i think i would have not told the story myself but yeah you know you're right there's a lot of these tile building games but very few of them blow up all your hard work yes um you know so i could argue that for all the tire building games out there i'm not sure any of them are as exciting as galaxy trucker a game that came out you know what 2007 2008 or something i'm just thankful that we finally have somebody on the show who likes this amazing game yeah yeah i dislike all the hate you don't know that queens but i quite dislike this game goodness gracious and never a chance of me ever met i put on a lot of top tens so all right but not this one okay uh the next one is one of the newest ones on my list and that is because i like making up currency and that is qe so mine are actually going to get probably slightly less unique as we get higher because i like them more and i tend to like you know the really really weird ones are more of a yeah i played this once a while but qe i love the fact that you can you you're bidding at an auction and you can bid any amount of money any number that you can think of and so if you know beak a bit bit 20 quinn's bids a million and i could say you know what 764 decilion and that's it we're in there now but see you could bid higher because we're just governments printing money so what do we care and the person who bids the most money over the course of the game loses and i thought this game was broken when i first heard about it in fact i tried to break it when i played it and yet it still works i don't know why i find it amusing um i like that one player can drive everyone insane just push the price up that everyone just follows suit you can't help yourself you know i watch a couple games and the high bid was like 467 dollars forget that 467 quadrillion should be a low bid every time you describe this game i um i don't know i i'm less inclined to play because it sounds so annoying to have to deal with these large numbers for no good reason it's like playing if you're playing with it you know what i mean yeah then then you know who else am i going to play with i'm not going to cut you out of that's true you don't have many friends i don't know none of them would want to play qe so but it just sounds annoying again it sounds like that whole fake large numbers on collectible card games like this weird butterfly hits for 4 thousand it hits for four because there's never anything lower than a thousand but in this game is something lower than that yeah but then don't be i can't help myself my goal is to better google in this game at some point it's so annoying it sounds very annoying i mean i took 100 zeros after it if oh wow i mean like i just hate counting generally i've discovered that a lot of my dislike of really well like board games is how much counting is there i don't think i'd like this because of all the zeros you have to count well anyway my number six qe all right number five i kept going back and forth on this one i'm not even sure why it ended up at five and i'm not sure if you can call the game unique this is key forge it's my number five oh interesting that's a good one see it's key forge is a fairly by the numbers deck built i mean not deck building but like collectible card game right that's how that feels but you can't break up your deck you there's no deck building you buy a deck and play it out of the box without messing with it whatsoever and outside of that there's a some sort of mythological machine out there that names and prints and builds these things and spits them out onto unsuspecting suckers who buy them up that's so weird i mean i just but i kept going sort of back and forth because the game experiences isn't that strange you know what i mean the game itself is pretty outside the box and they don't really have anything else like it not so far i you know nobody else i think is able to have the computing sort of know-how to make a unique deck card game in which every single deck has a weird unique name a weird unique combination of cards and they all work yeah you know do you folks i think this is a great uh a great uh thing to have on the list but um do you know about the tournament format where you bring your worst randomized deck that you've found and when you sit down with the whoever you're switched against the tournaments you just trade decks with them so your horrible thing that you bring is what your opponent has to play with all day i love that super cool god heard of that yeah that's amazing i actually think the game does have a unique mechanism though with the fact that you can pick one of three factions and then that's what you can do stuff with and there's not i've not played anything like that everything's free as long as you pick that faction that turn yeah yeah and only the things that you picked activate also though so there's that oh i don't really have a lot of cards to play from this one faction but my table has those cards right i gotta get them to do something yeah i i suppose that's pretty uh different yeah anyway like i said i sort of kept going back and forth with this one but uh i think it deserves a it deserves a mention when we're talking about weird outside of the box games key forge deserves a mention i think i i couldn't agree more i think if we'd finish this and it wasn't on any of our lists i would be like slapping myself my number five is not as good as key forge but it is my second and final vlada game on this list and it has mechanics that are in common with a lot of games and yet when i say no it's i give it now it's not and will never be bunny bunny moose moose because i keep saying the games on this list are ones i actually like oh the game is space alert okay now space alert has programming inc if you're not aware it's a cooperative game where players where either three or four players i think or four or five run a small ship known as a sitting duck class vessel because it's basically star trek through the lens of sort of like incredibly crooked and corrupt ussr is the way to describe this place let universe you have to keep the ship alive for 10 minutes this is a real-time programming game where threats are dispensed by a cd that comes with the game although now there's an app i think um and then it will say you know you'll be a minute into the game and it will say threat detected someone will flip a card the randomized threat could be a nuclear bomb that's been teleported into your ship it could be a slime it could be any number of ships or asteroids or octopuses coming from the outside of the ship and then players have to program their car program their actions using cards and then finally once everyone's programmed all their stuff you then resolve the game as if it was robo rally or something by resolving every step in sequence but unlike robo rally unlike other programming games i've not played a programming game where everyone has to work perfectly in unison and in tandem and you were talking about energy audio z um captain sonar has you know some of the best energy in games i think spacelet has even better energy but it's also absolutely unique even today and that's why it's my number five yeah this is one that just got by me just way back when it was out i remember seeing it at local game stores and i just i you know i never picked it up i never did play this one it's one that i missed i i unfortunately missed i'd be willing to give it a try i love co-op games and you're right this definitely sounds different so i honestly i think not only do i think is it it's aged well i think it's still relevant today i actually think playing space a lot even as someone i mean because it's so unique even as someone who's played a million games like yourself i think if you played space a lot it would actually blow your mind a little bit um and yeah also you'd hate it just to clarify i i like it but z would hate it but i think yeah it's a good choice my number five is our first crossover finally and it's with z which it's not true to bond no it's witness had thought of it it would have been a three-way crossover [Music] so now we're making you feel doubly bad i'm just glad that z said it first so i used all my complimenting on him because [Laughter] all right uh z already said everything i liked about the game this actually made my list a few months ago about games you can't play in 2020 where you let me whisper into your ear here for a bit yes um but yeah i like the puzzle aspect of it it's the kind of game that you think would be easier like i just have to whisper one piece of information and then remember one more piece of information and whisper it how hard could that be the only problem out of the witness is if you have one person at the table who is i'm trying to think of a polite way to say this [Laughter] one person can kind of throw the game off i found somebody who can who likes to reinterpret the truth that's correct they're like that's what i heard but this is what i'm going to tell you yeah but i think what they meant to say was yeah my favorite i i hinted at it before but my absolute favorite thing in witness is when someone has been whispered something and they've clearly got it wrong or botched it and they know they've got it wrong or they can't remember it they lean over and they whisper to you like he was tall or something i'd and and it just gives you this garbage really like okay cool i guess i'll go into the exam section now yes yes i've totally had that happen to me for somebody that says like something about his he was talking about a hat or something and then there were colors on it i don't know anyway my guy wears a belt and i'm like great thanks glad you remembered your bit you know anyway fantastic game i actually i would think about this here today i really want to get it played again so witness number four my number four used to be here above me i moved it over there my number four is a game uh called drop mix drop wow that's true from uh i guess hasbro pretty sure dropbix is this strange apparatus in uh strange apparatus i don't know why that's that's what that sounded like in my head it's this uh battery operated you know uh near field reader thing in which you on to which you play cards the thing reads the card and i'm talking it's basically a cardboard card with a chip in it and plays a piece of music and and you will combine cards and it sort of free form makes music out of it it doesn't always sound great but the fact that this thing works the fact that like i mean it seems like 70 percent of the time you get some interesting jams out of it and you can play head to head you can play in teams head to head you can do a little party mode you can just sort of mess around with the cards that you will invariably end up doing because it's really fun it's so cool this is a bizarre thing and i haven't seen any other i haven't seen any other product that bridges the gap so well between toy and game not this well see that's what i was going to ask is this a game or is it a toy i've not played it it's a toy it's not a game it's a game it's not a toy okay i don't know who to believe though it's not much of a game it the game is not much of a game it's a it's a it's uno right i mean it's like that kind of game it is clearly a game enhanced by a thing you know a modern uh piece of equipment it's like an apocalyptic game if you would that's kind of what it is but you're right it's not a great game but it's really neat it makes for a cool display you know what i mean you bring this thing out to just about anybody i was gonna say the uninitiated but it's that's not true you can bring this out to just about anybody press the button start putting cards on it and give them a deck of cards and they their mind will be somewhat blown the fact that the kids loved it with this game go ahead i said besides the fact i don't like the game is that it's it's out of print now they stopped it's gone and they never came out with enough music that i liked like a lot of the music was very very hip to now and i would have liked more 60s 70s music 80s music there just wasn't as much of that sure no i get that i understand that but um the technology itself is is cool it's impressive uh my number four is a game that is not as good a choice as key forge but i don't have a as good of a mind as see apparently uh but it is still a collectible card game uh and it is still published by fantasy flight it's it's it's netrunner isn't it it's netrunner aka android netrunner aka richard garfield sequel which supposedly solved all the problems to his design magic the gathering now um netrunner specifically is on my list for one mechanic it's not on my list for the cyberpunk theme it's not on my which is pretty unique it's not on my list for the asymmetry where one person plays a corporation one person plays a hacker it's on my list for the simple mechanic of um to win the game the hacker has to acquire agendas the corporation's secret plans they do this by hacking and the hacking is sort of by working their way through um sort of firewalls and stuff deployed by the corporation to hack not just servers the corporation sets up and tries to protect but they can hack the corporation's hand of cards at which point you tunnel all the way through the server and then you pluck a card at random you know which is a mechanic we've seen but you can also hack into the corporation's deck which represents their r d their research you can hack into their discard pile all looking for these agenda cards which um are enormously important for both players it's a bit of bluffing it i mean it's bla it's a it's a shell game it's bluffing but it's also it's not bluffing because when the runner is trying to get into the deck it's it's this magnificent moment where you can look into the person's deck and even if you don't see an agenda if you even get any points you can see the composition of their deck you can see what cards they've got coming next so even when you it's got that just the marvelously simple thing even if you don't find what you're looking for you get information uh i mean it's maybe not the most unique board game certainly as compared to the ones compared to games who are mentioning but among card games among ccgs especially netrunner is unique and it's also one of my absolute favorite games ever made yeah i think you'd hit the nail on the head when you set shell game netrunner yeah i've never heard it described that way but absolutely that's what it is it's a shell game yeah this is definitely the most unique of all the collectible card games uh it's and it's managed to not be copied you know it's been out for ages and no one's made anything like it really it's you know honestly like because it sold well at fantasy flight but not enormously well i mean it and it it sold okay in the 90s when it first came out but not enormously well honestly i think maybe this is unfair of me to say but my gut says that collectible card game players the the venn diagram of what they want and then you know truly innovative and interesting card game mechanics is not it's not quite bad um the opinions of queens tonight reflective opinions of the dice tower i mean i certainly don't want you to get dogs in the comments but you know network has come out twice it's been amazing twice and neither time it took off i think we might have to admit that the market is not gonna like pick it up in the way that it picks up stuff like magic the gathering or key forge well for a moment it was extremely popular uh at that first gen con but yeah i also think it's a hard it's a difficult game to to do well at you have to practice at it you can't just throw cards and hope that yeah well yes it's an esoteric game for sure you have to build two different decks you have to sort of learn two games to play it yeah yeah it's different real fun though real fun that's my number four netrunner nice my number four is a game i don't believe that z likes but i think the innovation of this game adds to the theme of this one quite a bit even if it isn't as precise as zee would prefer it to be and that is treasure island a game in which you are using an actual compass and actual tools to draw on a map to figure out where this conniving long john silver is it's a game it's a deduction game of sorts but the way you use these measurement tools i found to be extremely unique it just felt different and it did a really good job at giving this idea of you searching on a treasure map for buried treasure i liked it a lot uh z you were not a fan because of the fiddliness of it right yeah i guess so but i agree with you that it is definitely distinct from any other social not social deduction just deduction game or you know hide and seek mechanisms right right and it it transcends that feeling of whatever you're supposed to be doing in the game the game actually represents pretty well you know like the one to one of that comes through so i'll give you that i think it belongs on the list i don't like it no i i i just always any game that has a some element of imposition bothers me i like things to be exact i don't like miniatures games i keep telling you this all the time the rules say that if the line is close you're just supposed to say you got it oh you know i hate that i hate everything about that rule i love this game but i'm with z that you know like it uses circles you know you're trying to be precise but you're searching with circles which are by their nature completely imprecise because you'll never get the circle to cover like you want to fill them up with circles it doesn't work so you know there's always a chance all right we'll use a square next time like a big stamp stamp my heart take on this is the i love it being on the list for you know you you're drawing big triangles you're drawing circles you're using rulers the compass or all that's great i don't know how good the game is i would like however to see more games that use those tools more compasses more you know more uh you know i don't know all the all the cool cartography that you see people doing in movies you know there's no reason that shouldn't be in more board games because those those devices are really fun all right i'll take it not my number four treasure island number three my number three is a cross over with tom from earlier yes yes uh i almost put on the list i i sort of went back and forth between this one and the igloo pop igloo pop being the other sort of very clear sound driven one those two are like what comes to mind when i think of a game that uses sound but i had too many i sort of felt like i had too many kids games on the list as it was i was like all right well morning marosa is that is about murder it's not really a kids game so yeah everything you said was right we talked about it quite a bit so i just i'll echo everything you said this is really outside the box and uh yeah if you can find they give it a try i almost picked it also yeah if you two are such fans of games that involve sound have you heard of a game called woodlouse chaos it's part of the ugly animal series that includes cockroach poker it's uh it's got this crazy thing where you take turns when it's your turn you look at a card that might have like three spiders and then you depending on where spiders are in the row of animals that's randomized the fact there's three spiders means you have to clap three times if the spider is like fourth in the row you have to slap the table four times but you're doing this trying to chip up all the other players so you might i'm gonna i can't do this on my mic but you'll do like clap bam bam bam bam bam bam bam back or like whatever and you're trying to fast enough when players aren't expecting it to try and give this information that way they can't remember what you just did it's interesting and if i knew the angle that you two were taking i would have included it on my list but that would last chaos my actual number three is i'm buying this right now would last k it's great i collect all those ugly animals games i think they're all good god why is cheating moth not on my list anyway yeah that's a funny one that's that's that's crazy where you have to just get rid of your cards however you can so yeah you throw them under the table put them up your sleeve or whatever yeah that's the best yeah uh fantastic convention game instead my number three was space cadets by jeff engelstein space cadets is bizarre and definitely unique um it is a game where all the players represent the crew of a star trek style ship you can have a captain you've got you know uh an engineer you've got a communications officer but all of these people are playing different mini games so like the census person is reaching into a bag to try and feel certain shapes and pull them out all of these games are played in real time at the same time by the way the sh the shields officer is trying to make poker hands by flipping tiles then assign them to different directions the driver is playing like a programming game um but what's insane about all of this stuff is that you're all you so pilot the ship well you all have to work in perfect sync but all of your mini games are so hard that you know you're attacking a monster or a space creature so the shield guy tries to put shields on front but then the driver accidentally turns left and then the weapons guy shoots in the wrong direction and you didn't get a sensor lock anyway uh there's even when you get ship takes damage there's a card that forces everyone to change locations that everyone has to stand up around the table and walk to a different minigame which is really fun if you haven't taught that player that mini game and the rules explanation that's i hate that card so much but this is certainly a unique game this is space cadets my number three yeah the reason this one is not on my best of games listen i mean i loved it i learned it i said this is fantastic i love the mini games and about the fourth time i taught it i was done because it was just so much work and then you'd finish and someone would go i got it i know how to do my station and be like time to change spots yeah yeah yeah it's a lot to learn this game is not in my collection anymore which probably means it shouldn't be on my list but hey nah whatever my number three is another pirate game and that is world of yoho yeah now i still have not seen another game like this um the world of yoho i think i have this the right name of it i i just call it yoho all the time so um but anyhow in this game you are using your phone as your ship the it shows you the ship on your screen and you put it on this map and you move it around the map on your turn doing different actions and it shows you what's on the map on your screen and even if you fight somebody else sometimes you'll get to someone else and you'll shoot at their ship if you go to a port you'll pick your phone up and you'll work on the little selling and trading and stuff and it's it's almost more video game than it is board game but you actually are using the board out there moving the ship around yeah the problem with world of yoho there's several one all the phones need to be on the internet and on the same one two they're running full battery power the whole time three that guy who's always trying to text is really annoyed about the whole thing because you're using his phone as part of the game and four when you pick it up and you do the little selling and stuff that slows the game down a little bit yet despite all those problems this game fascinates me and i want to play it more often than not just because it's so different than everything else yeah yeah speaking of games that are cool tech demos like drop mix is this this one world of yoho is definitely one of those games where you can just tell players okay go here put your phone on the table and then it uses the accelerometer in your phone when you move from one location to the next spot the map sort of shifts under it so you think that your phone basically becomes a piece of glass and it's just the coolest i mean lots of blown minds as i showed this off to the family it's it's neat yeah and the one thing you didn't mention tom when you go when you shoot at somebody else you have the cannonball leave your phone and enter their screen remember that that's super satisfying i don't know coolest thing i love that i love it yeah yeah so yeah if you could get it i mean basically there's an app you download and then there's that you buy a box with a map in it so world of yoho number two [Music] all right my number two isn't particularly bizarre i feel like many of my other ones are weirder than this but i really like the game and it's a um it's a deduction game called the shipwreck arcana oh really yeah and this one is the thing i really like about it it's a like i said it's a deduction game but i i like that it is not one grand search for the truth like many deduction games it doesn't use the clue sort of model of deduction in which some piece of information is missing you spend the entirety of the game to find that answer this gives you one small search on every player's turn the way it works is you pull out a couple of tokens from a bag you look at the two tokens they are numbered between one and seven i think it is and then you take one of the two and you put it on a card out on the table you keep the other one the the other one uh hidden and the cards have things like oh if you have if both of your tokens are odd put the higher numbered one here so if you went there the players around the table go okay well the other number is also odd it's lower than that one it could be this or it could be that if it had been this number he would have put it over here instead so it's got to be the 5. whatever right it's this little sort of mini deduction rounds in secession around the table and i just find it captivating it's a tiny little package it is so fun the mental gymnastics are so entertaining it's co-op i really like this one a lot so i just haven't seen anything quite like it shipwreck arcana don't think i played this one i think you'd like it for sure my number two is uh unusual and you two are gonna say what the heck and i'm gonna say well i'm gonna say exactly what i'm saying right now my number two is believe it or not tigress and euphrates now come on man right here we go okay see that's what i said but here's here's my pitch so i teach a lot of board games as you two do tigers and euphrates is on the surface the most the least unique thing it's a board covered in a grid it's some tiles it's set in ancient mesopotamia or babylon or whatever um these things are incredibly dry it's about civilization's rising and falling and yet i teach tiger's new friends at this point i've talked to a lot of people who've played hundreds if not thousands of board games and teaching this game is still a nightmare because this game is so unique in how in the rules of it it's not been replicated it's not been duplicated unless i mean technically this this entry is invalidated by yellow and yangtze made by this well the same designer it doesn't count yeah yeah yeah but um tigers and euphrates simply doesn't play like anything else and it's on my list because it is one of my favorite games so if we're talking about top unique games it's in there um but it's also on my list because i think it's it's its uniqueness stands out for how generic the rest of it is you know like it even though it's so generic even though it uses elements we've seen before teaching it is still a huge pain in the bum because it is so unique it simply doesn't think the same way other board games do that's my number two tigress and euphrates hmm very what you thought about this one because i think well it is there's no game like it i mean other than yellow and yanksy no one's tried to make it i i feel like it's it's uncopyable even i mean even if we take it to a simple element like the way that players are all building cities but no one owns them but you can kind of own aspects of them for a bit like it it's not just that no one's trying to do tigers and euphrates there's like three or four things in the game that how it's built that simply have never been used a glob that simply never really entered like the popular consciousness which is so bizarre to me it's almost like it's scared off other designers yeah i think the one thing everybody stole from this game and a couple of other kenichi games was the the scoring everybody took the scoring you know collect four different kinds of cubes you score the lowest of the four but the mechanisms yeah i think you're right that idea of building something together inner conflict outer conflict and then owning ideas in something you're constructing yeah yeah yeah you're right that's that's that's a cool one cool that's my number two all right my number two i actually have well i'm not reaching up it's too high i just got the new version of this game and i'm really excited because it finally doesn't look like a boring piece of trash and that's sidereal confluence okay so scenario confluence that sounded loaded i can't wait to hear this go ahead tom i'm going to sit back look seder confused first of all has a unique theme i think in that you're all trying to achieve oneness of some sort of i i can't actually explain it because i'm not high enough to understand it but this game is an engine building game of which there's a gazillion but the way it mixes engine building and negotiation and does not allow you essentially to use your own stuff to help you uh i just found it to be so different than everything else out there it's unique that you need a lot of players to make it work it takes a lot of time it needs that perfect setting but i just i've not seen anything like it and the pictures that we're showing you here make it look even more boring than that fortunately the new version from wizkids is phenomenal it's a twice as good looking but oh more than twice more than twice for sure oh sorry oh wait i'm not looking at the picture no i'm waiting for the shoe to drop here quinn's do you hate this game oh sorry uh no i do not hate it the reason i went okay and i feel bad doing this because you two have been so kind about some of my choices but oh that's never stopped anyone come on now okay okay cedario is you said it yourself it's an engine building game there are a million of them and by the way i love scenario but it's an incredibly no-frills engine building game and also an incredibly no-frills negotiation game it's just it just the fact that it puts the two of them together and balances it and lord knows it was years of work from the designer i think cedar was amazing but it's like it as compared to all the other games the three of us have mentioned so dario is just two things we've seen before you know welded together so but the welding is unique sure and the welding was a ton of work from the designers to get it all balanced so yeah but you know i i don't know tom maybe i just expected more from you at number two [Laughter] well just like my dad i'll disappoint you too sorry and finally number one [Music] it's exciting number one it's gotta be good i don't know um i don't think there's gonna be any more crossovers at this point i any idea what this might be tom because you know me a little bit better it's nothing mentioned this can't be that stupid bear carrying honey putts no that's not your way no no [Music] it is there's been sort of like a vein of deduction type games this one is sort of like that it's about figuring something out and then it's like exit unlock no but those are all interesting i think interesting choices no this is escape from the audience in outer space oh that might be tom's pick actually now my number one is zendo zando is my name i do you know you thought i hated cedario i do hate cento oh no that's okay [Music] [Laughter] it's a really it's a weird activity slash you know sort of like uh cognitive exercise it's not it's definitely the kind of game that is i will not bring out at most events like i mean it has to be a really specific evening with a really specific sort of vibe and ambiance for me to go yeah i think zendo would work right now because this absolutely is one of those games that can kill the mood dead like nothing else right but when the time is right when the people are interested in doing this kind of activity setting up a little puzzle and having everybody sit around quietly sort of trying to figure out what the answer is why this one combination of little pyramids follows some made-up rule in my mind but yet this one doesn't and then they build something and they go what about this one does that follow the rule and i go yes it does they're like oh i think i think i know what it is or somebody else's does when i go no but this one does and i build another one that does i don't know i love that emerging picture you know what i mean it's so fascinating and and nothing's quite like it i mean this is definitely the the unique aspect of the list is i think certainly served by this and i like the game yeah so so without wanting to stunt on uz and my because goodness knows what i'll appear at the dice tower again when you say there's nothing else that'd like it um we did a series on shut up sit down last year called card games that don't suck which was games you can play with a 52-card deck and one of our interns at the time kylie discovered a card game from i think the 70s or 80s called ellucis e-l-e-u-s-i-s and delusis is competitive zendo played with a deck of cards with a bunch of other wacky stuff going on um but it's it's similar that one person decides on a logic rule um but then other players are scientists who sort of have to play cards and then play cards that they think follow the rule because it's a handshaking game or you're trying to get point i forget but at some point if one if it's at some point a player around the table can decide that they're a prophet and then say actually i know the rule and put their card down and they become a profit off gods and god is the person who came up with the rule anyway um i don't want to get sidetracked but elusive uh is a way to play xender with a 52 card deck that i actually prefer to zendo but it's not something the board game community knows about because as far as i can tell if it involves a 52-card deck uh no one's interested um but yeah that's elusive it's fascinating i actually considered zendo z and dismissed it for a similar reason because i played a game from ancient egypt no but um no but i this has been a parlor game for a long time so that's why i i i don't know that's just why i discounted it because yeah yeah we used to play like what's a weeble and then you would list some things and after a while you're like oh a weeble is something that starts with the letter s or whatever it might be okay i got you yeah yeah yeah yeah i don't know i find it uh being contained in a box being sold with rules having a little sort of more concrete you know it's it uh legitimizes the activity a little more for me you know what i mean i agree with 52 cars is trash i agree i agree absolutely garbage say what's trash it's my number one now my number one is i think it's like my number two tigers and euphrates i think i'm going to say this and you two are initially going to go what um but then hopefully i'll bring you around to my way of thinking and again it's going to happen here we go you ready tom it's cause it's cosmic encounter i'm conflicted okay so here's my pitch um we have all played cosmic to death we all know cosmic we know we know cosmic back to front um and if people out there haven't seen cosplay encounter or don't know what it is then goodness i would certainly encourage them to google it for a long time it was um my anton's favorite game of all time but cosmic encounter if you detach yourself from everything you know about it is absolutely unique i think you know never mind the fact that every game is unique based on the array of alien races it's like tigers and euphrates have you ever when was the last time you tried to teach someone cosmic even if they've played a load of board games it's bizarre it's got all of these mechanics that are built into the deck that you have to know are coming like warp tubes or you know the single cup you know cosmetics or cards app and the cosmic zaps plague um it's a bizarre thing to teach it is what is it it's a a walk it's an asymmetric war game hand management game with negotiation and alliances it's also a take that card game but also could be any other genre depending on the aliens that have been shuffled into into the game that's true um and really this me putting this on the decision catharsis because it justifies why i love cosmic so much but i've had such a hard time introducing it to my friends because teaching it is such a nightmare because it's so unique so that's my number one cosmic encounter this is actually one game i feel like i'm really good at teaching i i think it's because i have to do it at every convention you know after that uh man i don't know you're right whether you're whether you're good at teaching it or bad teaching it i think tom you and i can both agree this is a garbage pick well i don't know it depends what we like if we did this list in 1980 this is going to be number one on all of our lists uh sort of it brings to question it brings to the the question to the table of something inspired a bunch of other stuff is that original things still unique you know what i mean but what did cosmic ins like what would you say magic inspired well definitely inspired magic to gather okay i've i'd actually never made that connection before well richard garfield said it so must i mean he could have been lying that would be hilarious he was just lying about that yeah um it's like there's no reason to be no i it's yeah i mean i think it's about your confluence oh my goodness is that why magic has 20 health because cosmic gives you 20 ships well that i don't know [Laughter] well if we had a record scratch we'd play it right now but oh my goodness i really hope that's true goodness me i hope that's true all right tom what is your what is your i was correct i said two crossovers and i have two crossovers but the second one is not with z look at that going to justify my bad list let's go tell me if it is that would be great it is it would be funny if it was casually wait let me guess oh you said it captain sonar captain sonar um and again i'm not ordering these as most unique because i think some of the other ones on my list are more unique than captain sonar but there's no other game i played like it with the possible exception of the sequel to space cadets space alert there was some similarities i thought between those but wait did you just say the secret to the sequel of space cadets with space alone no space guys not space alert space um space sorry oh i forgot about dye steel forgot about dice well no no no no no no no no you're right because if you're wrong i'm wrong and that's problematic um i love the idea of a cooperative simultaneous battleship mixed with deduction mixed with these other stuff and for some reason it works and you know you said you don't like playing conventions but i that's my favorite place to play it yeah i i think it's only because if conventions allowed i mean really it's convey it's fine so long as your group is louder than the convention around you which that's how it works right next to the people playing tigers and euphrates and it's a win-win for everybody nice let me teach you this game it's called tigers and euphrates guys can you keep it down anyway yes i've been in both sides of that situation before i've been at the loud table and at the table next to the loud table have you ever tried to teach any game within 30 feet of happy salmon it's just not happening futility right there we uh we went to a danish convention called festival and um there was a point in the day where the like sort of restaurant area became a nightclub and were we were like an hour into a game of goo gong we only had like 15 minutes left let me ask for the final 15 minutes of googong a medium heavy euro with just pounding music what score did you get 17 and it was worse than any convention but funnier destroyed my voice though all right let's see what the people said so i put up a poll on facebook to see what everyone would say and this is obviously going to be i guess less unique since more people are saying it if that makes sense but uh one two three four five six seven eight nine ten here we go number ten they said galaxy trucker oh that's a point for quinn's all right number nine quacks of quedlingberg no that's a bad guess from your audience i'm just somebody's like your audience too i don't think there's oh no they're wrong they're our guys yeah [Laughter] number eight magic maze yeah okay except magic maze on mars but yeah well it's a good one come on now the magic magician seven the crew yeah i thought about the crew but the crew is definitely good enough to be on my list and that's true feels very strange yeah number five was photosynthesis that's interesting one it's got one really sort of weirdly thematic mechanism right that whole shadow thing when you first learn you're like ah but i don't know if that makes the game unique so we're just jumping all over our audience all right number four the mind yeah well it's kind of like it's like it's a sort of a theater game right you know i don't know if you two ever did this at school but anyway just belittling all the audience guesses it's no good welcome to the dice tower number three dice forge sure i mean yeah until another game uses dice where you change the sides there's a couple but but they're they're they're few and far between number two chronicles of crime i actually considered that but the problem is is that it's using tech to add to you know basically stuff like sure consulting detective and other things so it's not necessarily unique it's just better yeah just modern do you mean you don't consider that to just be unique because it's instituting just something now available i guess i don't know i i feel like this is a very ambiguous list of we could argue over it all day long right we didn't even establish our terms of whether most top unique means best unique games i'm still i'm still thrown by that uh what's that what's number one from the people was captain sonar no 249 votes cronkite's crime only got 178. so there's a big wow a big jump there but almost every game we mentioned well almost every game that me and quinn's mentioned was on this list there's root the ones that z mentioned no one has ever played there's no shuffle the guy who designed the game you know what fine fine i get it you know somebody didn't put uh captain sonar on their list well guess what as we as the ever true rule stands tom it's my number 11. no actually you would say that you're ultimately not putting it on your list the ultimate escape is that it's my number 11. i wonder what i i'm i'm coming away from this mostly realizing that i want to play this weird 10-floor hotel game that i can't remember the name of moored m a rosa yeah this is a restoration game written all over it right that would be a cool pickup from somebody else and restoration uh yeah i could do that hey i feel like capstone are getting some weird stuff these days i think you know capstone did the climbers as well i saw those have a year ago this would work for renegade because they've done those cat stacking ones sure that's true they could they could definitely put a like oh actually the arts on modern moroso looks like um the artist that tim fowers works with ah yeah who's name well anyway that's our top 10 unique games if you're watching this later on let us know in the comments what you think what are some cool unique games and um we'll we'll thank you quinn's for coming on we really appreciate it thank you so much for having me his channel the very well known shuttle sit down you already watched it anyway uh they just posted a review of eclipse second edition it's good i liked it it's a very good board game it's too expensive though there you go you don't have to go watch it now ah tom you're not supposed to spoil it you're supposed to be i'm trying to be unique over here this was so much fun thanks guys thank you man this was good anyway until next time i'm tom vassell i'm z garcia thank you i mean do i say my name because i'm i'm not going to be back next time i'm quinn's have fun being unique i'd be back [Music] oh [Music] you

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 234,182

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

Id: pO3yIipLDco

Length: 93min 40sec (5620 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020