Top 7 Boardgame Hidden Gems of 2022

[Music] today is a special day i i can't find the script for the video we are reviewing seven games in one video seriously where is this script all of them hidden gems that without this video might have slipped you by any one of these would make a satisfying drunken impulse purchase home from the pub don't mind if i do oh don't worry i found the script it's all good why did you rename it from seven games with themes what made you think you'd be good at this job i just thought it'd be really easy number one okay up first we are looking at imperial steam southern railways of austria 1839-1857 this is from publishers capstone games which is interesting because capstone don't usually make mistakes that is way too mean i can't do this what it's too boring i need to work up to it let's let's do something else we just set it up number one now space station phoenix is a game i haven't played so tom needs to do this one really yeah oh my god now quinn's you might think that this game looks dull you might think that it's a game about taking little pieces and slotting them into little sockets to get a tiny bonus you might think that it's a game of rolling a dice pool that is so large that any whiff of unpredictability is entirely gone i mean is it yes but it's well not so much more but it's like it's a little bit more yeah like like a medium amount more okay the core conceit of space station phoenix is that your alien fleet has arrived to monitor earth by building a big metal pancake in the sky however a total lack of planning means that you need to get the materials to build this space station with by deconstructing all of the ships that you arrived here on and this is a cool thematic rapper sure but it actually interacts with the game in a really interesting way you see these ships are your worker placement spots and it's these very spaces that you have to deconstruct to get your space station up and running gradually narrowing your options on every turn until your station is finished at which point the game slams shut once you've deconstructed a ship and got its value in metal you can then use that metal to build new floors of your space station floors that you can then fill with aliens aliens that you put in these little slots to get little bonuses giving you the feeling of gradually filling up a hotel as the guests are arriving this is quite cool yeah it's quite nice and these little bonuses will offer you a unique tilt to how you're going to approach the puzzle from now on and wait there's more you see these little aliens that are all over here there's a limited supply of them which means the fact that you're going to score majorities for each kind of type of alien at the end of the game is a juicy little wrinkle that you've always got your eyes on this central little conflict am i selling it well yeah yeah there's more i could get into here a very mean diplomacy board that offers you bonuses when people take certain actions the ability to use other people's spots in a way that starts off jovial and then becomes tense and ruthless and a pace that collapses the distance between thought and actualization and not only is the puzzle of space station phoenix joyous to solve every time every single time it's gonna be just a little bit unique none of this is overwhelming or unbalanced it's got just the right amount of grit and asymmetry to keep you popping it out again and again i can see why you oh grandpa wins there's something to say that's off script what were you actually trying to say it just looks good number two tom back in 2020 i reviewed a lovely little two-player card game called air land and sea i know a game that somehow managed to compress all of world war ii into just 18 cards cards that yourself and your opponent would take turns slamming down like two people dueling with sledgehammers specifically two rather nervous people because the stroke of genius in airland and sea is that at any point a player can go no stop i give up you win this round and let's just shuffle and deal again and the earlier you do that the less points your opponent gets which means if you have a good hand in emergency you want to try and act like you don't cowardice has never been so much fun until today because the sequel's here oh quinn this is just all getting way too exciting my heart is well not racing but it is certainly beating and my blood pressure is a good two miles an hour above the speed limit don't worry tom i'll slow that heart rate for you because air land and sea is now joined by spies lies and supplies a box that loses faith in its title by the third word and arrives on the scene less like the youthful child of the original and more like a weirdly gray and anemic elderly relative quick let's get them in out the rain and feed them a sandwich and maybe they'll change color but like it's good it is good if you're a fan of air land and sea it offers three new sets of six cards diplomacy economics and intelligence and that means you can play it as its own unique game with 18 unique cards or if you want both sets you can mix and match i regret doing that just you with my hands but it means you can play like c diplomacy air or economics land intelligence so every game of air and sea is a bit different or there are actually rules in the manual to combine five sets into a giant game of airland and sea so you're now playing c diplomacy economics land intelligence which is actually altogether too big but it is a fun novelty the question is though if you don't own either game which one should you buy if you're in the market for a whipsmart two-player head-to-head game and if i'm being totally honest there is a purity to the original air land and sea that i really like look at the cards look you got three sets running one to six that show small boy medium boy big boy air boy large air boy wet boy oh no long wet boy what are you doing look i'm serious look at the new cards you get in spy's lies and supplies look if we cover up the text box on these cards not only do i think you'd struggle to put these cards in numerical order of their strength i don't think you could tell me which cards are from which sets and that bothers you yeah i don't have a lot going on yeah i think it's a good point though [Laughter] number three next up in our list of good games that are just too boring to talk about on their own this isn't boring though is it it's just an abstract game it's just a good little abstract quint have you seen the cover queens have you seen the back of the box it's mostly table and your eyes go straight to this seagull the same seagull that's on the front of the box but let me tell you viewers that whilst this game may look dull and unvarnished on the exterior it is really like a clam where if you open it up it releases a beautiful shining lustrous no not really a pearl just a really good abstract game in acropolis players take turns to claim tiles that they can use to grow their own personal ancient greek city working hungrily to create a high score which you will do through the body and obscene power of multiplication different colors of districts will earn you points in different ways for example each red military district scores if it ends the game on the edge of your city but then at the end of the game you're gonna multiply your score from each color by the number of stars on like coloured plazas two red districts and two stars will equal four points but wait there is more acropolis also has a thrilling vertical element if we place a completed city next to a standard reference pair we can see well it's actually only just off the ground but this is way more exciting than you would expect like trying to eat a pair backwards try it yourself [Music] by building over the uncolored quarries in your city you're gonna generate some stone the currency by which you can snaffle up these tiles just a little bit earlier and a further rub is that tiles on your second layer count for double when you're scoring tiles on your third layer count for triple not unlike puzzly classic number nine the sheer solidity of this design takes you completely unaware there are no big bombastic surprises but it is replete with pleasant little discoveries like learning that your uncle used to be a gym teacher or that the corner shop now sells three different kinds of samosas you know it's easy for a game like this to be entirely unremarkable but the visibility of the draft in the center and how you can spot exactly what your opponent is building to snuffle away things that they might need is really quite electric and on top of that the game is all powered by the deliriously satisfying power of socketing i love socketing and you know there's extra variants in the box as well if you want to make the game a little bit more complicated but honestly i'm quite happy playing the base game acropolis over and over again building ever so slightly more focused cities and the speed at which this game could be set up and teared down is kind of impressive oh impressive like the next two games we've got coming up that is a bad segue fantastic bros pathetic high five pathetic snag number four tom have you been bored so far yes well what if i told you you could be part of a guild of merchant explorers or you could go through wow queens i'm getting dangerously aroused interested no what did you say just move on i'm getting too excited we're at risk of undermining this video's core conceit don't worry because rather than exploring you're more like building civic infrastructure and like rather than going through wormholes you're actually building them as civic infrastructure for real though both of these games arriving in the last six months has a kind of pleasing symmetry they're both from publisher aeg they're both pretty in a boring kind of way yeah and they're both ever so slightly peculiar games of judiciously placing components in hexagons so you can reach further hexagons wow that's a little provocative i know yeah in guild of merchant explorers everyone gets their own map but then uses random cards to try and hurriedly fill areas of land to place towns which they can then explore from each time the board gets wiped letting them reach outwards to the juicy point-filled locations at the edge of the map it's tactile and satisfying and has a sweet sprinkling of random chance and then wormholes is a thought-provoking game where players act as something like interstellar uber drivers and want to earn points by delivering passengers to planets but with two twists one you all drive laughably slowly because space is real big and then the second twist is that everyone can plop wormholes around their ship as a free action which basically work like the warp pipes from super mario and each time someone else looses through one of your personal pipes you get one personal point i'm actually gonna be keeping both of these games in my collection but that's because i think i'm boring boring yeah yeah i mean honestly if you're being mean to either of these games you could call them pedestrian perhaps but i wouldn't i'd call them good looking easy to teach well-made pleasant to touch and if you want to learn more about them you can check out the official shut up and sit down podcast we had a lengthy chat about guild of merchant explorers in podcast 181 and we talked about wormholes in podcast 186. nice plural [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and now an exciting train game double feature how are people still making train games don't be cynical quinns this game combines the theme of trains with the mechanics of an entirely different game what different game game about building civic infrastructure you heard it here first folks they've combined the quite interesting puzzle of sprawlopolis with the marginally less exciting theme of local rail of course i'm being mean here if you're gonna make a game about local rail at least make it as sumptuous and gorgeous as village rails in its squat royal blue box in this game you're making a tiny rectangle of a train route placing cards from a central shop into your tableau to maximize points certain symbols on the track will add points to your score more signals more points little farms and barns multiplying the different kinds of terrain that your track might pass over but more interesting is this second market of trip cards objectives that will deposit a smattering of points onto your score dial but only if you can achieve them and they cost a pretty penny to pick up finishing a route will net you points but there's also a separate economy of these little ticket cards that you can also whack on the end of a finished route to get yourself a bit of money that you can then use to buy cards in in the in the market the puzzle here is delicate with little jabs of interaction where you bank on someone not taking that bit of rail that you really really need or being forced to take the cheapest card and not knowing where to fit it after a splurge on an expensive bit of track nothing about village rails is deeply remarkable or revelatory but for a game of its footprint and cost you're getting a lot of puzzle for your buck a puzzle that is continually very satisfying every single game you're gonna get to choo choo choose your strategy how you doing there buddy number seven finally quinn's is going to tell us all about running a failing company oh you sound like my mother don't worry man you got this okay so imperial steam is a truly great euro game which is fortunate because getting this game to the table isn't just a physical challenge it's a mental and emotional one that's because there are a jillion moving parts all of those parts hate you and the theme is a historical construction of southern austrian rail this game has a token representing the severing aqueduct the entire game hinges on whether any of you managed to extend your rail to the port city of trieste perhaps you'll fall short and only reach the town of legible german imperial steam has a theme so dry as to be almost martian which is a shame because in play this game is a thrill you're cool to get a thrill i'm doing it man so listen on the surface this game would seem to hold zero surprises it's an eight-round game at the end of which the player with the most money wins players take turns to do things like hire employees or acquire wood and iron and then use these to extend railways build factories churn out more goods and use trains to deliver goods to cities get paid and then spend the era appropriate goldens you get on more trains more track more factories and perhaps there's then just a little bit of friction if you oh build the track where someone else wanted to or ah they deliver a good where you wanted it so all in all seems like a normal euro game right [Laughter] no in play imperial steam feels like a game where these trains you're running are constantly balanced not on four wheels but on two wheels and if you spare an ounce of grit or wit or determination in running your company that trains are gonna go flying off the tracks into a fireball right for starters those employees you're hiring they get crazy expensive immediately your few employees can go to school but only if you don't use them you can sell goods to make big paydays of cash but there are only about five men in austria who buy them there are however men who'll give you big bags of goldens but only if you sell your company to them 10 at a time so players will often finish a game of imperial steam maybe haven't taken this deal five times and so they immediately lose 50 of their cash which is half their final score you can also make money by flipping your trains over so they become cute passenger cars and generate steady income but how many times will you do this never because you turn up the time you don't have the money and you need those cars to transport goods anyway goods you're not gonna be able to sell and you know what i take it back that this game doesn't have any mechanical innovations because there is one thing in it that's really cool all right the number one way to make good easy money in the game is by agreeing to contracts which say you're gonna ship goods from your factories overseas however you can only ship anything overseas if one player manages to run their railway all the way to trieste and if no player does that by the end of the game all of these contracts are negative points which leads to this really interesting game of chicken where the player who snaffles up or the most high value contracts is also saying they have the most to lose if they don't run their routes all the way down to austria's only seaport on behalf of all of you there are lots more mechanics i could talk about but i'm gonna skip straight to my conclusion imperial steam is not the most innovative euro game we've ever seen it's more like a very respectable aggregate of concepts but the way that it is balanced is absolutely hair-raising this game could have been themed around the verna herzog movie fitzgerald though every golden every employee every stubby length of track is the result of you hustling but imperial steam isn't fun because it's a nightmare it's fun because it's a nightmare shared on any given round someone around the table is going to have their head in their hands because they're short one of the seven or eight resources that this game needs you to manage and you'll just feel this tremendous warmth to them because you were right where they were last round and you'll probably be there again next round when your money runs out again and then after the two or three or four hours it takes to finish this game you will all care about who wins but what i think is even more important is this sense just below this game of completing a tidy domestic achievement imperial steam is like going for a hike together or fixing a leak you're gonna look around the table and say yeah we did that are you seriously suggesting that this game isn't actually as boring as it looks because really it's almost as fun as fixing a leak okay listen you and i are agreed right imperial scene teaches you the difference between a dry theme and a dry game yes because this game is emotional and distressing and alarming so yes on the surface it's like a dry cracker but it's actually a spicy cracker a very a really very spicy cracker give it a try you might just like it so my thoughts on imperial steam basically mirror quinzes it's this huge economic sandbox of crunchy are you alright yeah yeah that's good yeah okay that's good the thing about tasty yeah the thing about it and that's the end of our top seven driest games feature hope you enjoyed it hope you had a nice time tune in next week for our top eight wettest games number one i really don't think this is gonna work dude yeah that'll be fine it looks great i don't think so sorry about your copy and no that's mine if you've watched this far in the video thank you so so much we would love to thank do you mind does it go does it go lower yeah yeah yeah um we're doing a donation drive if you enjoy the work that we do it is almost entirely funded by people like yourselves paying us as much as you think our board game reviews are worth so if we've saved you a little money if we've helped steer you towards a great game or we've just put a smile on your cute face you smiling tom uh we would love for you to give as much or as little as you can shut up and sit down.com thank you thank you it's so wet

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 225,457

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Tom Brewster, Imperial Steam, Space Station Phoenix, Akropolis, Guild of Merchant Explorers, wormholes, village rails, Air Land & Sea Spies Lies and Supplies, Air Land & Sea

Id: jPjtWdvz5Aw

Length: 21min 6sec (1266 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/phil_s_stein]

1. Space Station Phoenix
2. Air, Land & Sea: Spies, Lies & Supplies
3. Akropolis
4. The Guild of the Merchant Explorers
5. Wormholes
6. Village Rails
7. Imperial Steam

[u/Pudgy_Ninja]

It's ridiculous how generic Guild of Merchant Explorers is, but it plays really well. I really love the way the special powers work in this game. It really gives diversity among the players that you usually don't see in this sort of roll & write-style game. To be clear, it's not a roll & write (it's flip & place a cube), but it has that feel.

[u/Judge___Holden]

The dynamic between Tom and Quinns is amazing. Would love to see a games round-up video like this from them every few months.

[u/escheriv]

This video was perfect. None of these games quite piqued my interest, and yet I loved every minute of it.

[u/qwertytarr]

Really liked this video. Super funny and also a great way to show off a number of different games.

It does have the downside of making me interested in even more games. Wormholes particularly looked neat, but so did Merchant Explorers and Village Rails.

[u/ThinEzzy]

I know all the lighter games will get a little more attention, but for those heavey board gamers reading, Imperial Steam is absolutely fantastic. It's incredibly brutal, there's so much going on, and the set up is long, but it's one of the best games I've played in ages, and despite route building being an element, plays surprisingly well at 2 player.

[u/Quitchy]

This video was a laugh riot, and a great way to cover some games that wouldn't otherwise get the time.

[u/Board-of-it]

I loved the Imperial Steam joke at the start...only wish I loved setting it up as much. It's the one game I refuse to set up alone.

[u/Miseribacy]

Everyone and their mother has said good things about Guild of Merchant Explorers, and I like roll n' write type games so this seems like a no-brainer