March 2020 Round Up – 22 games in 63 minutes!

hey everybody today righto rounds up the month of March 2020 which of course has been an absolutely insane month I'm sure for you as well although I'll be honest the way called the social distancing the self-imposed quarantine or in some case government controlled quarantines I suppose honestly really haven't affected me and Jenna or my mom who lives with us very much I mean we pretty much continue to do what we always do stay home stay away from people walk the dogs and play a lot of games and film a few while Jen makes glass and sends it around the world so we we're incredibly lucky here at Chez Hamm Shay righto and yeah really how much but the only thing that is changed in my life for the last four weeks I know if I want to show you this but okay I'll show you for the first time my life I have been humm enjoying exercise because I started using my oculus quest to work out and yeah that is that is not a good look it's better if I heard actually turn the music on but I don't wanna get a copyright strike against this video so I'll just go ahead and take that down hopefully that put a smile on your face and hopefully you will enjoy hearing about 22 new games that you and I played over the last four weeks sorry let's get back to business uh and as always this is gonna be a countdown I will start the list off with my least favorite game of the month and end with my most favorite the new game of the month if you're paying attention you probably already know what it is but I will try to maintain an air of mystery as we count down so let's get going starting with my number twenty-two of the month gloomy graves which is a fairly abstract game where players are grave diggers trying to dig mass graves now that I think about it wow this is maybe not the best well we played it so I will I will talk about anyway okay so this is half this game is car drafting the rest is card laying yose playing cards on top of each other players have their own private grave masquerade they're building in it as a public one and you're trying to lay these cards out such as they cover up previous cards so that you can match the contents of your man grave with the communal mass grave I like I said Wow considering some of the stuff we're seeing on the news but yeah um it's it's it's a very silly it's basically a bunch of fantasy creatures who have been wiped out after you know one of those big Lord of the Rings final epic battles and you're just cleaning up the battlefield but yeah it's it's got kind of a grim dark sense of humor to it it's actually a very very sharp game because a big part of the game is trying to make matching big areas in my tight little grave and on the big communal grave so I can score bigger and bigger points and kind of pushing your luck open I can get one more card down and then score more and more points before you interfere because since we're both playing to the communal area at any given time the big group of cards I've built could get split in half by you and then suddenly my points get cut in half man it works it's a sharp game from designer Tom uh not Tom Lehman Oh oh shoot mr.

OH oh man this is alright I'm gonna have to look it up I am so embarrassed gloomy graves Go Go BoardGameGeek the designer of gloomy graves is not Tom Lehman is Geoffrey Ahlers how did I mix those two guys up I love a lot of Geoffrey's designs and I thought this is a very good design too the reason it comes in so high on the list is really this is a game that is going to be better with more players with only two you miss out on a big part of I think what this experience is because if there are three players two players might both have a vested interest in trying to make a big area of dead unicorns let's say so they can both score and before the third player can get in on it then the two players who temporarily were kind of allied now want to chop it up but then alliances could shift all over the places players work on things that other players are left out of and other players are trying to scramble so I really do think while the core gameplay is very good as a two-player game it was just a little bit too dry and of course I don't know these days the whole subject matter is you know taking on a slightly grimmer view then Geoffrey originally intended so I'm still like I said sharp game with a very dark sense of humor if you enjoy that kind of thing and if you've got plus players and you like tuile Lang both private and communal there's a lot of neat ideas in my number twenty two gloomy graves then we move on to twenty one Franky's rockin Vegas which is a Yahtzee style hey all my turn I roll a bunch of Dyson then I set some aside I reroll and I keep on reroll until I stop and hopefully all the dice I've rolled will score very well for me and you've seen this in law games but you have never seen anything quite like Frankie's Rock in Vegas because this thing as best I can describe it emulates kind of a Vegas craps really complex surprisingly intricate casino style game where there are almost a half a dozen different ways you can score points and you are rolling and re rolling a lot of dice and you know you no matter which whatever you roll right up front you're gonna have to make decisions that are very tricky because this game really leverages several different ways to push your luck in terrifying ways because there's a couple of special dice you're rolling in addition to all the Franky dice the Franky dice are simple you meant you get a matching colored head with a matching colored body and some electricity you've reanimated a Franky corpse and score some points so you you could be rolling and re rolling try to do that but there are these other dice that radically change the rules and when you lock those dice in you have fundamentally different ways of scoring and both of them are big money if you if you push your luck towards those you can score huge points and if you fail you can totally bust and you know it's it's appropriate I think this subject matter because it does feel like what would a casino craps gambling style game be in the fictional world of oh what's that Adam Sandler animated cartoon film the Transylvania Games because this feels like something a bunch of monsters would play it's very like I said surprising complex anything that's maybe the problem with it you want a really light-hearted everybody's yeah laughing and whooping and hooting and hollering while you're rolling if you bust or not but this game requires a fair bit of work to explain all the intricacies once you get those intricacies the decisions are very very interesting and insanely dramatic because you can really shoot the moon and it could totally blow up in your face or you could come out on the other side with major stuff and really about the only thing that I think is missing from this design is to really lean into that Vegas feeling even more and when I've got the dice and I'm rolling and re rolling it feels like the other place should have some tokens they can use to say oh before you roll I'm gonna bet on your outcome it feels like if that one little thing we're added wow this would really come to life even more cuz that is when it's not your turn you're just waiting for your turn to come around and be nice if you had a little bit invested oh I see you're shooting the moon I'm gonna bet against you there's no way you're actually gonna hit your goal for that something like that would have pushed this even to a higher level but it is a sharp game essentially I played it at dice tower west originally with a bunch of people and you know with the right group of people people who are looking for a more complex saying hey I was in Vegas and people had the right mindset to really just go for these huge dramatic swings I got home I played it just with Jenn and they're in a quiet room with two quiet early players it didn't really come alive you need people who are gonna be loud and shout either when they bust or when they break really big and everybody else groans or claps as a result it's a fun game but like I said surprisingly complex which means you've really got to kind of target somebody who wants a rich or more intricate thing but still is looking for a fast meal big kind of party experience it's neat I really enjoyed it when I played down in Vegas but with just Jen at home it wasn't a good fit for us which is why Frankie's rockin Vegas in our number 21 of the month then we got number 20 fly-in Goblin which is a very sharp game where players are flinging their little goblin meatballs cute little meeples through the air using catapults trying aiming and trying to land in different rooms inside a castle that we're all laying siege to and if you can land in the treasure rooms you steal treasure if you can land in the event rooms you can trigger things like rotating the castle around so you can aim at stuff you want or you can knock the King off his pedestal and you know steal a lot of points like and one of the things you can steal is money and at the end of every round you can buy bigger and cooler and better special powered goblins that function in radically different ways so on the surface that seems like a really simple game but there's a surprising amount of depth as everybody races to be the first to score a certain number of points and win the game so I liked it a lot if you watch my run-through you can see me and Jen playing it together both having a great time and I made some amazing shots but ultimately this is we are not the target audience for this this would be an amazing game to play with my niece and nephew and we're thinking don't tell them um Ron don't tell them if we're thinking about actually sending it down to them because I think they'll have a hoot with it and yell again I mean this is a great family game very silly very fun very fast and a fair amount of dexterity based skill of aiming these things in you know trying to aim low or go for big arcs and land inside the tower neat fun ideas surprising a hidden amount of depth in my number 20 flying goblin then number 19 the first paid preview of a game that was on Kickstarter this month that I did was lawyer up and I'll be honest when I agreed to cover this game I knew full well it was not going to be a game for me and Jen because one player it's a two player only game one player is the defense one player is the prosecutor and it's a kind of dueling card game where we are engaged in a tug-of-war trying to sway the 12 jurors in a case you know the devil version I had had a murder case I think there's a art forgery case comes with as well and this game is so expanded with more cases but we're just playing cards oh that's a really strong argument card you played I will object to that so your card gets thrown out it's insanely thematic takes a few liberties with the basic structure of how the American trial system works but they do it to make a fun game that it still feels so much like a courtroom drama that you would watch on TV or in the movie theater and in spite of the fact that it is basically an area control tug of war game between two players we could not help but get into the theme yell constantly sounding objection overruled may I approach the bench the defense rest you know all these kinds of tropes we've just really got into it and while I don't think it would be a long-term game for me again because we don't want to sit down for an hour to an hour and a half just trying to think alright if I save this card I know what you're about to do and I can completely cancel this and ruin your plans or all that it's a little bit too conflict II for us but in spite that we love the theme of my number nineteen lawyer up then we have number eighteen sidekick saga which is a very sharp cooperative a superhero game I actually the story is very cool because the superheroes of the city have all disappeared and only their sidekicks are left they're not very tough or up to the challenge of taking on all the crime of the city but they've got to and they've got to level up as fast as possible to fill in the vacuum left by the heroes because super villains are taking the place over and it is a very very sharp game there's a lot I liked here the city's rep said buy a bunch of decks of cards you move your character around wherever you go to you explore that area and draw another card and you know depending on the type of card you get these can be upgrades or clues you can follow up on and over the course of the round much like a pandemic style game more and more bad guys are popping up all over the place creating more and more problems they will attack us they will block our access to certain areas where we need to get things and it's up to us to work together coordinate our plans and you know and try to get as strong as we can and interesting lis work our way up kind of the criminal food chain because off to the side of the main board there is a pyramid that represents how you have to take out the underlings before you can take on the sub buses before you can find the work your way to the boss there's a surprising amount of depth in the decision-making bear of who you try to strike versus where you're trying to go as you keep control over the city and hopefully the whole thing doesn't fall into a panic and I liked a lot about it the reason it doesn't rate higher because honestly this could have been one of the best cooperative superhero board games I've ever played but for a couple of things and I talked about them in my final thoughts and I think even a couple of House Rules could make this game go from a mid-level seven to a mid-level eight on a euro or a three to a four on a one to five scale I think with a little bit of tweaking and again you can check out my run through I don't think I put it up yet I think it'll go up tomorrow yeah cuz I put up my dollar today uh spoiler there's another game coming monde all on this list so I'll talk about there the particulars but the the raw I mean it's such a wonderfully thematic game great sense of humor very DC Comics inspired world and smart interesting decisions just a couple of structural issues I had that I think could be fixed with just a little bit of tweaking which is why it didn't come in hire it's my number 18 sidekick saga then we got number 17 dwarf this is a worker placement game that oddly if you only have one copy of it is for one two or three players but I guess you can buy two copies and then it can go up to five players I think if you have because you have more resources this is a worker placement game where we are dwarves in an under Mountain Kingdom trying to mine raw materials to convert them into treasures while fighting off all kinds of invaders and it's hard it's a very very simple game but what's cool about it is our under mountain Kingdom is a is a area of different stacks of cards and over the course of the game at the beginning of every round we're gonna draw two more cards and put them on top of the stacks and this means our worker placement world is constantly changing and evolving and so you know the the place you could go to to forge the Elda mystic weapon that would score you a lot of points it might not stick around forever so if you can you got to get over there now because it could disappear in a future round but other opportunities will show up and of course as you might imagine there are special abilities you can use to manipulate these stacks of cards and bring cards that were previously buried back up to the top or if you're in a situation where you could afford something really great and I can't well I could manipulate it to bury that card that you were gonna go to so this constantly changing worker placement board is very very cool and I liked the core game quite a bit although again like sidekick saga before it there were a couple of choices about the core design that made it a little bit less ideal for me and Jen I think the game is phenomenal as a solo game because as a very very sharp system for automating an opponent who automatically blocks certain areas and I mentioned this in my final thoughts for dwarf which also now I think about thing I've made that live either sidekick saga and dwarf run-throughs will be coming very very shortly folks um so I'm spoiling this a little bit but I talked about in the final thoughts for there I think this will work great if you took the solo mode rules and applied them to the two-player game it would suddenly really pop because I do think I haven't plays a three-player game or four or five but I suspect this is a game where you really want more because even though it's a small Kingdom as a two-player game the kingdom is still a big enough that there's not as much tension as I would have thought and I just want something that's heightened to board up a little bit more and I think bringing those solo mode rules into the two-player game with some tweaks could work beautifully so I should say I really enjoyed this I played this several times as a solo game before I played it as Jen with the two-player game so maybe that colored my impression because it's a great fun and we had a good time playing two-player but I think it just needs a little bit of tweaking which is why dwarf comes in at number 17 then we've got number 16 El Dorado the golden temples which again I don't think I've made live I'm sorry folks I'm really behind I guess maybe March did affect me in some unexpected ways but El Dorado golden temples you'll see a run-through for this coming very very are run down very very soon this is the second big box expansion for the quest for El Dorado which is a wonderful racing deck building game from designer Reiner quinita the previous one was heroes and hexes and I got to be honest I think overall I liked the stuff in heroes and hexes that it added to the core formula more than golden temples the interesting about golden temples is finally the race isn't over once we get to El Dorado we then continue the race inside of El Dorado which adds a whole bunch of new cards and some new obstacles we have to deal with and all that stuff's very nice but one of the things it does is once you get inside El Dorado and by the way this is a standalone game you can buy this and without any previous El Dorado stuff and then you spend the entire game if you're not in the jungle you just spend your entire game inside the main temples my problem is originally quest for El Dorado was just a race everybody going from A to B whoever does it first wins now with golden temples it's a pick up and deliver game because everybody's racing to get to three different altars inside of El Dorado pick up some mystic gems and then bring them all back to the central golden temple and that's how you win and so there's a lot of traipsing back and forth back and forth and well I think you'd be okay in a higher player count game the way two-player rules work for Eldorado makes this honestly Jen I found it to be a bit tedious and that was unfortunate which is why I don't think I would I'm raiding Eldorado golden temples here as a standalone game if I were raiding it only as an expansion it would rate much much higher because if you combine golden temples with the original Eldorado so you're half or two-thirds of the gameplay is in the jungles where it's just a race and then only the last little bit is a shorter pickup and delivery sequence I think it gets a lot better but here's the deal I am so in love with his expansion for one main reason it solves ultimately my number one problem with quest for Eldorado a striking lack of cards you can't have a deck builder with giving me more variety about how new cards come in and create a different experience every time I play with golden temples plus the original quest plus exit heroes next is if you want but you don't need it there are now enough cards to wear I don't feel like the game is only half done and it actually has a really cool way of mixing and matching the different card sets from the different expansions I like it a lot so just for that as an expansion it's a must-have um but I I don't know if I'd want it as a standalone prisoner it's a be at peak fun factor it really has to be combined with the original cholesterol Dorado but then if you do that it's great and I would rate it much much higher but anyway as a standalone I rated my number 16 the quest for El Dorado the golden temples now my number 15 excavation earth which is another paid Kickstarter preview that I did I've actually filmed already but the game doesn't go live until next week so again you're getting another little sneak peak maybe I should just put this whole run down or this roundup off for a week or so until I got everything anyway no no times of the essence I'm already a day late so excavation earth is a very very cool setting it's thousands of years in the future humanity has disappeared earth is now an artifact and ruin filled wasteland that other aliens come to to find all the artifacts of our ancient long lost civilization in society and then they try to sell them an artifact market and so this is in a market game where you are trying to collect the resources you need and sell them to the highest bidder before the economy in a particular thing you're collecting crashes and suddenly all the work you did isn't worth much and it is very sharp the presentation is gorgeous I love the sci-fi setting and I love there's a nishan thing about the market that's different than pretty much any other market game I've ever played it's very very standard you save up you get a lot of whatever it is you're trying to sell you sell all the stuff into the market and then that market is depressed and nobody else wants to sell that stuff for a while until they can build back up the value that's pretty par for the course with these store games but in this game when I sell a bunch of ancient Godzilla toys to these aliens who think they are rare and valuable artifacts the market doesn't drop out right away instead there's kind of this holding pattern where other players still have a chance to jump in before the you know the the market bottoms out for those particularly and that is a very interesting twist that I liked quite a bit plus I also like the fact that the core gameplay here is multi-use cards every turn you've got a hand a card you're gonna play two on your turn and those cards could be used for their color or for their icon which means they give you access to different places on ancient earth or you know abandoned earth to collect stuff or interact with certain things or they give you access to the markets where you're trying to sell stuff and if all that weren't enough there's this whole other side game where there's a mothership and that's where you can send your workers when they're not actually engaging in trade in the market they can be giving you access to special powers it's a sharp game there's a lot of stuff going on from designer Dave Turchi and he's uh definitely coming a very hot well known commodity and while ultimately for Jensen my taste as a two-player game there wasn't as much market volatility as we would have liked I suspect at higher player accounts the market would be shifting a lot more and create a lot more excitement Jan I found that our other problem was we could be really cutthroat to each other and you know undercut each other a lot so we tended to stay away from each other and oh you're focusing on those artifacts I'm focusing on these artifacts and then we really felt like as a two-player game where we weren't being yo you know trying to you know I'll do each other there wasn't enough market volatility and I would have loved see some other element come in to mix it up this might be another case where the ultimate Solar rules that are being developed if they could be applied to a two-player game might give us what we needed to be able to rate this a little bit higher or alternatively play with more players market simulations generally benefit from a higher player account because more people buying and selling and changing the value of things in the market creates a more interesting dynamic game experience so there if the game is gorgeous this the design is really really smart I'm I got fingers crossed that that solo game like dwarf before it could maybe give that little bit of extra juice to the two-player experience of my number 15 excavation earth which is going live on Kickstarter next week I believe then we have a number 14 canvas this was another paid Kickstarter preview for a game that was originally supposed to go live last month but they have delayed it which is why you haven't seen the run-through yet and you probably well I don't know if they I think they're now planning on launching later on in the month of April so you'll see it soon but I'll still talk about it now although like with all of these paid previews folks River I was paid to give my opinion so you should take my subjects reviews with a grain of salt or ultimately just watch the preview videos I made so you can decide for yourself with allegra funds that's just always a given with all these paid previews I'm doing but anyway what did we think I liked it a lot we are racing to make three master works is we have these canvases that we are taking we are drafting using a system very very reminiscent of small world which is a system I really love or sensory spice Road as a more recent version where hey if there's a card I don't want I can skip over it by giving up some resources to get one later but then that makes that card more attractive to other players anyway we're collecting these cards that are transparent plastic cards that show elements of a master work and ultimately once I've gotten three of them I can have more than three but once I've got at least three I can combine them all to make a work of art on my canvas and I will score points based on how I mixed and match the different art elements it's very sharp very fun surprisingly thinkI Jedi if there is if there's one problem we have of it it's what kept it from me a little higher is it could be very analysis paralysis prone Jen really spend a lot of time crunching on it but we still had a great time doing that uh and it's it's probably okay because it was a fairly quick game it doesn't take very long to get three canvases made but try and decide okay I've got five different piece of art I'm gonna put three of them together to make this canvas how can i leverage these which ones match the best not to make the most beautiful work of art but to make the highest-scoring piece of art especially considering the fact that every time you play there are different global objectives that everybody's chasing after to try to make certain types of art by combining certain things very sharp game um you know again it was a paid preview but we liked a lot I highly recommend watch for it as it comes out later like I said the only reason I didn't rate higher is very analysis paralysis but for some people that's a very good thing that's my number 14 canvas then we move on to my number 13 succulent succulent for those who might have missed it succulent I don't know why this is a very sweet elegant smooth playing uh tile drafting work replacement tile laying game about and creating a succulent garden creating clippings to complete projects and score a lot of points get special powers along the way I'm from Jay Alex Kevin who is fast becoming one of my biggest designers to watch I've loved his other puzzling designs and this is another beautiful elegant sharp puzzle with surprising amounts of death so why did I shout succulent I don't know what was wrong with me this month folks I had to film my run-through for it four times before I got it right every time I made some big massive rules blunder and um I'm very very happy with the final video maybe I should do all of my run throughs four times to get the best version of it because I I do think the run done shows a very good job of capturing the fun and yes it's so surprising so thinking great components from a great designer and a great publisher I liked everything about it it's only at number thirteen because there were a lot of really great games this month and which I'm going to continue now after number thirteen succulent let's talk about number twelve steampunk rally fusion which was another paid Kickstarter preview for another that was supposed to come out in March but because of the change in the world circumstances got pushed back I believe they are planning on launching Steampunk rally fusion in April now I don't have an exact date yet so you'll be able to see my run-through for it soon um or but if you don't wanna wait go watch my run-through for the original steampunk rally when it was on Kickstarter years ago this new expansion although it functions as a standalone game so you don't need to have the original or I'm sure the Kickstarter will let you pick up both it's another great great game this is a card drafting game like seven wonders or sushi go where the cards were drafting for or pieces of a crazy steampunk jalopy that we are trying to keep running as fast as we can because we're all engaged in a race to never cross the finish line first wins so this expansion adds two new race tracks one through Machu Picchu and one through Mars a whole bunch of new real world inventors which is always one of the coolest things about this and a bunch of new cards you can mix and match with the original game but also work as a standalone and some very very cool new road blocks that appear on the racetrack so this if you look at as an expansion it just improves everything um if you look at as a standalone I might I think maybe I enjoyed some of the elements in the original steampunk rally more than here but there were still very very cool new things in this game if anything I think some of the obstacles you run into kind of up the luck factor a little bit more original steampunk rally you could see coming way off in the future what type of stuff you were gonna run afoul of here there are kind of a like Oh as soon as somebody moves into the space you flip the card and then everybody finds out how they're gonna be affected and whoever happened to flip that first well that could be good or bad for you but you've allowed everybody else to know what's coming and that was fine I just kind of did feel like I would have liked to always know what's coming because that's more like how the original game worked but that's a minor complaint because I love the original steampunk rally I loved all this new stuff and I haven't confirmed this but there are now so many new cards that have been added if you combine both sets I wonder if it would be feasible and it wouldn't break the balance of the game if we were allowed if we could just take out all of the aggressive mess with your opponent you know flat tire type cards so you can focus only on cards that make you stronger and faster because that's only really been my only true complaint about steampunk rally is there were some nasty take that cards that I could do without there are so many cards now I think I could maybe get rid of them finally so anyway that's a paid preview coming soon for my number 12 steampunk rally fusion oh I forgot to mention the fusion dice they are so awesome they are huge game changers and I love them you'll be able to find out more when my video comes out when the Kickstarter goes live next up number 11 another paid preview for a game that is on Kickstarter its Kickstarter has launched last week or no it was earlier this week um it is a cute little micro card game called Squire for hire well this is the first standalone expansion so you can mix and match with the original or just use the new one by itself it's Squire for higher mystic runes and I missed the original Squire for higher when it came out a couple of years ago and I'm kind of bummed about that because I love this game although again folks paid preview please remember these are my subjective opinions about taking with a grain of salt again I love this game and if you don't believe me go check out the preview video I did so I can show you just how much fun it is this this whole game is 18 cards and the cards are all two-sided on one side is a little grid that has adventure equipment for a fantasy adventurer that you're trying to stack all these cards together to show what's in your backpack your adventurers backpack as the more stuff you have the more quest you can accomplish to get more loot the other side of every card is a quest you can complete so on your turn you're going to flip up a card that's on the back side of a card that says hey if you if you have the right type of loot in your bag if you've been able to stack it together with this cool like puzzle e gameplay cards playing mechanism then you can complete this quest and get more loot and um it's a very very fun sharp puzzle little game my only complaint about it is there can be a little bit of luck of the draw just a little bit but honestly we didn't mind because this is a 10 or 15 minute game and again like dwarfed before it if you buy just one copy it's a solo game and it's great solo or two-player but if you have mystic runes plus the original you can combine them together and then it can go up to three or four players which is great but yeah this is a wonderful coming off the heels I talked last month or maybe was a month before about sprawl appleís and circle the wagons two other excellent micro games where you just have a deck of cards and you're trying to stack them together in a puzzly way this does the same thing but with a fantasy setting and it really changes up the gameplay and it's super sharp go check out my run-through because that was my paid preview of my number 11 Squire for higher mystic rooms then we have my number 10 Paris this is another paid preview I think the Kickstarter might be over by now or maybe it's got a still got a couple days left I'm not quite sure does is because it was um earlier in the month but oh my gosh folks just my number 10 of the month as a paid preview AHA this is the latest from Kramer and Kiessling working together again sadly I missed their Okavango which came out I think last year I really want to play that one too I don't think I played a co a collaboration from them since what was it the wrong game uh hardly matters long story short this is a brilliant game whenever Michael Keesling and Wolf gum crimer Cromer work together they just make some of the most beautiful gorgeously elegant gameplay mechanisms you've ever seen because this game it's basically a worker placement game um but it's a worker placement game kind of like agiza where you're on a river every time you place the worker from that point on if you want to move that worker and place it again you have to move forward you can never go back so the longer you use a given worker the more you're cutting off options that you've left behind for other players but the interesting thing is Iggy's yeah and there's some other games to do that system to gives you one River this game gives you six and you're sending workers on all these well they're not really rivers they are districts in Paris during the explosion of growth it had at the turn of the century and um the Belle époque I believe it was called from reading the rulebook and it's super sharp because players are kind of working semi collaboratively to watch these districts build up and as these district build up those become worker placement spots that we can send our workers which represents us investing in the development of the city and again once you've been in this little cafe but then you move on to the hotel you can never go back to that cafe and you've opened it up for somebody else to grab it it's very sharp and you will see that if you go check out my preview for my number 10 of the month Paris then we move on to number 9 a kingdom builder caravans I've actually had this expansion for Kingdom builder for years and I've wanted to play it but I never have the chance I'm always having to play whatever came in new whatever publishers have sent me I got to get those things played games I bought years ago I never get a chance to play those but Kingdom builder caravans has been sitting as the number one most thum games at request righto calm for a little while so that finally gave me the excuse to get this expansion out the gin I have wanted to play forever and I loved it I was reminded just how much I have fall in love with Kingdom builder all over and I just want to play it play it play it over and over and over again uh it is it's it's not a standalone you can't mix and match it is just an expansion and it adds some new terrain tiles it adds new powers it does all the things you would expect an expansion to do but the most interesting thing about this is Kingdom builder if you don't know it is a game where every turn you've got a card that says you can build a house in this type of terrain and you have to add it somewhere on the map but you're limited by what the card says you're also limited by what you've done the past so it's a game full of really tough decisions and you have to be very very smart go watch my original run-through to leverage and give yourself a sense of freedom within those tight constraints but the interesting thing is the point scoring in Kingdom builder always happens at the end of the game we all try to build this awesome little Armada of houses so that we can hit these in-game scoring opportunities caravan introduces the idea of scoring opportunities that happen throughout the game and this so radically changes the feel of the game uh and a nice thing we found is it makes it much less cutthroat than it used to be because in the original game if I can see you are going for something they'll score you a lot of points at the end of the game I can adjust my building to cut you off and in a two-player game me cutting you off is the same as me scoring those points that you failed to score so Jen I found we enjoy it anyway but it's a little more cutthroat but with these new insta scoring things it becomes a much more live-and-let-live game and we the you've loved it anyway and this new caravans it's not new anymore I think it was like the first expansion ever came out but it makes me so want to play the other expansions that come out or get the big box or something and actually as an aside this is not a paid preview folks but right now there is a new version of Kingdom Builder called winter something-or-other yeah I just do a search for on kicks on kickstarter.

com for winter board game and you'll find it and it's apparently the same core ideas of Kingdom builder but they have changed a lot of the basics made it a much more complex game there's a lot more stuff going on it's all set in winter now and I mean it's just a coincidence that that went on Kickstarter at the same time I was getting to revisit old caravans but that makes me Jones I'm probably before it's over I'm probably gonna go in ahead and back this new winter one but again I was not paid for that that I would have loved to cover it but Queen never contacted me about it but anyway sorry that's a haul as an aside my number 9 of the month was Kingdom builder caravans oh and by the way if you're looking for a run-through of that sorry oh we did record ourselves playing it but only backers of my show on patreon at the what is it the rest and relax level they get to watch when I every month Jen I film a video of a run-through that we called our our in our game and only people who back at the R&R level get to see those so um but hey it was just an expansion you can go watch my original run-through if you all know more about Kingdom builder but that's another 9 Kingdom builder caravans number 8 is oh wait before we move on to number 8 back to uh I should say earlier on I Lowe's it gloomy graves and Frankie Rock in Vegas you will not find run throughs of those either gen I played them but I did not film any run throughs or run downs or anything for them just so you know so this is probably about the extent of the coverage Kingdom builder caravans gloomy gloomy graves and Frankie Rock and Vegas are gonna get on the show a home but now let's finally move on to number 8 Santa Monica oh boy this is a good one this is a card drafting and then you uh you know tableau building game where we are trying to make the best breach Front Boulevard in Santa Monica California and this is sharp it's from the designer of hat lady which was a neat little card drafting game that we kind of liked but it was too light for us not so here this is I want to say his name is Josh I have to look that up but um it's a it's such a sharp design the the art is lovely but I own this kind of clean laid-back chillaxed vibe it gives off but this is so sharp because every card you grab has the huge potential for either scoring points or triggering points opportunity off of adjacent cards you play too so the draft to get these cards is a really tense decision and how you lay these cards out in your own Boulevard is a hugely tense decision and if all that weren't enough you over the first a game get more and more people showing up on your boulevard wanting to walk around and see all the attractions you've done and you will lose points if you don't make those people happy at the end of the game so there's a surprising amount to think about in a very sharp fun little game we were really blown away by this and I think as this reaches wider distribution this is gonna be a pretty big hit for publisher AEG just wood I believe is the designer on it we really like this a lot so why I made my number 8 in a very hot month Santa Monica then continuing on number seven is the crew and this folks I'm just calling it right now although I'm not the only one to do it this is gonna win the spiel des jahres this year it has to this is such a brilliant cooperative trick-taking game where players are astronauts on a deep-space mission to find the mysterious planet 9 but it's a fairly abstract game because really what we're doing is on a given chapter of our mission the game comes with 50 chapters we are basically trying to cooperatively win a series of tricks in a standard trick-taking game you know where whoever leaves the trick plays a card and then everybody else has to follow with the same suit and if they can't think and play whatever they want if they play a trump they beat the lead suit and all that kind of trick-taking stuff this takes all those ideas one makes it cooperative two makes it an imperfect communication cooperative game because you have this very very cool idea of how you can communicate in the vacuum of space yeah I can take one of the cards from my hand put it on the table and put a token that says this is my highest value in this suit my lowest value in the suit or my only card in this suit and that's all I'm allowed to tell you and from that you have to into it whether you can win this trick that you need to win because you have to be the one that wins the trick with the green for whereas I've got to be the one that wins the trick with the fuchsia seven I know so it's kind of an abstract tricking but there is a theme that I do appreciate there's a story you can play through but all of that aside what I found is this is an amazing way to introduce trick taking ideas to somebody like Jen and I who are not familiar with them at all and it's a great trick taking gateway game but that aside it is just brilliant I I don't know why anybody would not be able to enjoy this game and um because of that I didn't cover it alone go watch my final thoughts I was joined by Shay Parker of RTFM a great YouTube channel and he and I talked back and forth about it so I wanted to have a second opinion because I've mostly played a two player and I wanted to hear about the higher player account cuz trick-taking games are traditionally three player minimum plus Shay is a crackerjack trick-taking player he's a huge trick-taking fan so I knew he'd have that perspective as well so it was a really fun conversation we had go check it out but anyway or just go check out the run-through itself and decide for yourself if the crew looks good for you but it's in pretty at our number seven of the month abduch crew then there is number six this is another paid preview for a game that um was supposed to go on Kickstarter last month but haven't yet I believe it should be next week I think don't quote me but soon you should see a video for me for Planet unknown and Wow folks this is an amazing Tetris II polyomino uh a tile laying game that I love to bits this you know I've only played a prototype of it so it's a little early to say and like I said this was a pee preview just once again remember yeah I was paid to cover it so you could take my subjective meters a grain of salt but this has got to be this might be my number one polyomino tiling game and that's saying something because ever since patchwork came out a few years ago there have been so many very very well-designed polyomino style games they've just been coming out over and over and over again but this one oh it's hard pressed to put into words just how great it is it feels like what would terraforming Mars be if it were a Tetris style tile lang game instead of yo a car because you know and it said hex grids you know terraforming the planet you're putting you're trying to puzzle together all these things you're building your own planet too so you're not having to worry about other people blocking out stuff but every tile you lay increases various engines you've got that unlock more and more special bonuses and that's the this is a game where a single play with a single tile could unlock a chain reaction of stuff that just feels so amazing because I unlocks this which unlocks this other thing that lets me do a thing that lets me unlock this thing and it's just great watch my run-through for it my preview for it you can see just how much fun it is this would probably be my wife's number one game of the month quite frankly it's my number 6 which is saying something and again oh you can't watch my video yeah cuz it hasn't gone live I think like I said it goes live so this is like a sneak peek of something it was supposed to come next month last month it will be coming this month so keep an eye out folks for my upcoming preview of Planet unknown my name or six then number five I know this one is up cuz I just made it live today maan dalla and here's the deal folks this was a I had the opportunity to pick this up last year and cover it and I completely blew it off cuz it looked like a completely abstract card game that I would have 0 interesting because if it doesn't have theme I'm not interested and I mean to be fair this is kind of it the Azul level of thematic integration in this game players are working semi collaboratively although it's competitive game to make beautiful mandala sand sculptures and once a sculpture is completed like a real mandala sand art it is wiped away and it's basically an area control game because depending on how much I contributed to the art versus how much you contributed to the art we have the opportunity to score points out of it and at any given times there's actually two different mandalas we're contributing these sand cards to and it's basically two different fronts of area control battles but the beautiful thing about this game I didn't think we're gonna like it all cuz I played so many two-player battle line inspired oh I play my card to my sideline you play your card and whoever ultimately plays the best wins I've seen enough of that I thought Mon dalla would just be more with it with pretty cards and attacked on theme but here's the deal actually I think the theme integration is nice it's still fairly abstract but it's great theme integration considering and the beautiful thing is after a mandala is scored it's not just whoever played the most wins it's not a simple area majority thing instead everybody gets a piece of the pie that everybody contributed to and I love that and so that's half of what makes this game so special the other half is the way it scores which is kind of hard to get your head around watch my run-through to get a better idea or my run down for it oh my gosh this game is great it's so great that I definitely regret not having played it last year because if I had I am very confident it would have made it into my top 10 games of 2019 which I did back in December now as it happens I'm gonna update my top 10 this month and you might see me talking about Mon dalla again because I want to play it a little bit more I need to play if some other games and I wouldn't be surprised if it punches its way in because it is that good this might be the best two-player only game I've ever played or it's certainly up there it's in the upper echelon and it's phenomenal my number 5 of the month Mon doll and it's not my number 5 this was a really good month for amazing games folks let's move on to my number 4 this is the Captain America and Thor expansion packs for marvel champions and I consider not actually putting this on the list because here's the deal I actually played a an online game uh-huh no a virtual distance telecommuting game of Marvel champions a few days ago was it last week I don't remember now all the days are blending together as they might be for a lot of people but anyway I got on the channel gaming rules which is hosted by Paul Grogan and he and I sat down and played a game of the Green Goblin expansion which I talked about in a previous that I really loved the green Goblin's mansion and it was both of our first time first time I ever played Captain America first time he played for and I loved it every time I talk about marvel champions the the fundamental thing that I keep coming back to is how amazed I am that within the combines of relatively simple gameplay mechanisms compared to other games of its ilk because this is a cooperative fight all the bad guys by playing cards to build up interesting and complex combinations of effects while they're throwing interesting complex combinations of effects at us you know like Lord of the Rings or the car game or Arkham Horror the car game you know those sorts of things lots games out there like this uh-huh but the thing that continually amazes me as a lifelong comic book fan a Marvel comic book fan is how well this game really makes the theme of árbol comics come alive and the number one thing I've all that Marvel champions was my number two game of 2019 the only thing that kept it from being number one is I wanted to see with more content because of course there's a living card game more content is coming out all the time would the developers be able to come up with new and interesting ideas within the confines or would it start feeling see me as more stuff as released I am so happy to say every new thing I played with this including Captain America and Thor just get better and better you come up with completely new and interesting game styles that are thematically so well tied to the source material of Marvel Comics I love it I love it I having played this I have to think does Marvel champions push its way into my number one of the year you know supplanting mark I bow it might I have to think about it more but in the meantime folks all I'm saying is I had a phenomenal time and if you want to you can go watch it was a live stream in front of an Internet studio audience you can go check out it hit that I up in the top right corner the screen and you can watch me and Paul try to save New York City from the evil masked Nations of Green Goblin or no I didn't put an eye up there just go to Marvel dot righto calm so I made a shortcut for this so you can just get there have a fun time watching us have an amazing time playing marble champions as Captain America and Thor those two expansions combined are my number four of the month then my number 3 of the month Jen and I actually had to are in our sessions because I was a late I missed an are in our session in earlier month so Jenna I did too this month which and for our other one because we did Kingdom ability' Kingdom illa caravans my number 3 game of the month that I played was Agricola the revised edition as I I'm a lifelong a Griffith an Agricola is been in my top 5 games forever I think it's my number four ranked at the moment maybe number five I forget but I love a gorilla so much but I'd only ever played original Agricola and yo revised Shahrukh Allah came out a few years ago and they made some changes and whatnot and um I've wanted to see it forever and I've been waiting for a review copy ever you copy never seem to come and ultimately one of my high-level patreon backers who gets to choose you say I want you to cover this game and he said I want you to cover a gribbler revised edition and some of the expansion con I said okay boss you got it I got online ordered a copy it showed up Jan I played it and I'm in love with a gorilla all over again although I never fell out of love but I'm gonna say if you have to choose between seeking out the original Agricola or the new revised edition I think I like the revised edition more it's not perfect one thing I was really surprised by when Jan I played it we ran out of resources I don't think I've ever had that happen with regular Agricola it does have yo 5 X tokens so you can use those if you run low on but that was really surprising but I love the kind of representation it's definitely doesn't feel quite so old-fashioned and out-of-date as it used to with like you know kind of puzzle piece how you snap the board's together and all that of course the gameplay hasn't changed at all other than I very very very much appreciate these special two-player variants there was always kind of a semi quasi unofficial variant that you could add this extra card to kind of loosen it up a little bit so it wasn't quite so cutthroat they have now made that an official thing there's like this whole extra board that you can use for – and I think for 3 player games as well that gives you a lot like gives you access the stone and other things right from the beginning of the game and now that it's officially part of the rules just that one change makes Agricola revised better than a regular Rick love for us as a two-player game now we actually played it with the third expansion the coriolis the c-deck expansion and i guess i would say if you only want to buy Agricola just one box see no expansions you should probably buy regular color because it comes with more cards but if you buy new Agricola revised and either the a it was at the artifacts the publicus or the corriander us whatever the a B or C deck new Agricola destroys original Agricola for its presentation for this extra two-player consideration that didn't then only semi officially existed before and we loved it another thing by the way I've had for years now the Agricola colored or pre-painted minis they come in five different colors and we got to check those out as well and I love them they are so good now I know they are spendy make no mistake about it and the weird thing is each one of these pack of five you get the green ones or the red ones or whichever ones you get so you can play with pre-painted minis instead of just like little cardboard Oriana cardboard uh wooden meeples although wooden people's that came with the game are perfectly fine they're actually very sweet and charming actually but anyway the miniatures are great and there's two things about them I want to say one these are much these are the best pre painted minis I've seen I've seen them in other games like claustrophobia or star these are almost as good as star wars uh was it I'm thinking they're better than Star Trek attack wing and not quite as good as Star Wars x-wing they're almost that good they are really top of the line much better I mean often when you get pre painted minis you know that you get the colors bleeding from one area to another the eyes are off-center if you look at them closer like oh I almost would have preferred this unpainted but we were very very impressed not you know nowhere near as good as a professionally painted mini of course but still leaps and bounds above the what pre-paint means I've seen in most other games so they're and they really enhance the experience now the other thing is these little color expansions the green the red the purple etc they also come with little mini decks of cards and I know some people were very upset for I don't want to have to pay $20 for a pack of five minis in a bunch of cards I just want the cards I don't want the minis don't worry folks as I understand it all those cards will eventually be available well a lot of them are available now in the C deck they got released last year and this year we're gonna get the D deck released so all those you don't need to buy these miniatures well that makes it kind of weird too because the miniature packs are expensive and strictly speaking you're only paying for the minis now because you'll want to get the cards they were just these came with previews of C and D cards now you're gonna get all those C and D cards when you get the scene expansion so I guess I'm gonna say I really like the miniatures and and again they're very very nice much better than most pre-painted minis and I don't know if they're worth the cost but I think I think I wouldn't mind having two sets so Jenna because we're only played two player so we only need the purple and the green and we're set we're satisfied it'd be tough to buy all of them though but it was very very interesting I was glad I finally got them cuz they been gathering dust because I hadn't played Agricole in forever so my number three of the month that was all very long-winded is Agricola revised edition number two of the month is a another game like Kingdom milder caravans and auricular revised edition and gloomy graves in Frankie Rock in Vegas or Jenn and I played it but I didn't film it so sorry don't go looking for a run-through of gloom Haven forbidden circles and this is the standalone expansion for gloom even that I've had for quite a while and I've really wanted to play it and I finally broke down we just didn't play it though because we had three more missions and gloom Haven we had to get through and if we could finish those three missions we would finish the entire storyline or the main storyline of gloom Haven and that's when this expansion forbidden circles picks up you're not supposed to play forbidden circles until you finished the main storyline you can but you know the events in forbidden circles lead directly on from what happened in basically Haven so you're better off doing them in order and so for the longest time I mean we had Jedi who we had played gloom Haven one of our favorite games for a couple of years and we've wanted to so I finally buckle down said we're gonna finish these three missions turned out it was like six because there was some surprise things we had to do along the way but we finally made it through there so we could get out forbidden circles and start playing with the new character that comes with it and playing through these new missions and so at this point I've only played a couple of them but I think that's enough for me to give my opinions first of all the new playable character is awesome I absolutely love her she is unlike anything the game has ever seen before because all of her abilities are about manipulating the the draw piles we have you know the the piles of cards that players in the bad guys draw to modify their attacks the decks of cards that the bad guys use so that determine what type of back we're gonna take and a good deal of her abilities have to do with messing with those decks and just changing everything and it is such a radically different way to play the game I was playing as her and I loved her plus she's incredibly weak but she can teleport like nobody's business and so she's just blinking all over the place messing with stuff so she is ultimately 100 percent of support character she I guess if she if we heard a level or up you can get her to higher levels and she can start getting some pretty effective but you have to know going in her job is to support she is not a frontline character she's just zipping around teleporting looting and just messing with probabilities in the coolest way possible so she is terrible if you want to be a frontline fighter but if like me you love support I've always played a cleric first and foremost and just stay behind and keep everybody else going and that's what she does in a way I've never seen before and glue Haven and I loved playing her now she like said we played through the first couple of missions and I took some peeks at what's coming up ahead because I want to talk about them too so the coolest thing about the missions in Glu haven forbidden circles is they really introduced lots of very cool new ideas because original gloom haven 90% of all your missions are just go ahead and kill everybody and that's how you win kill everybody and they're just very straightforward there's nothing wrong with that it means all of your strategic planning and puzzle solving has to do with how do we kill everybody in forbidden circles they've changed it up that a lot of the missions gosh I almost want to say like over half of the missions have you in addition to or instead of killing everybody you've got to achieve all these very specific goals destroy certain things take things from one place to another all kinds of much more complex things and what that does is it really makes gloom Haven a much more complex game because it's still just as complex to figure out right how do we play these cards to deal with all the bad guys but now we have all this extra complexity where we have to solve these environmental puzzles now some people hate this and absolutely despise it I gotta say I like it a lot because after all the billions of monsters I've killed in gloom Haven it was so nice to be presented with challenges that make us do something else that puts some of the puzzle taking from just how to kill stuff into doing other things I liked it it was a breath of fresh air but I totally understand why some people say this is not my gloom Haven I just want to go back to just killing everything cuz that's where my sweet spot that's where my Zen mode is this game won't give you that so something to know going in it really changes the DNA of what it feels like to play gloomy Haven and another thing all of the puzzle content in these new missions all revolve around this new character so if you don't like playing a support character um the problem is this expansion make somebody play a support player at the character and that character must stay alive in every single mission to win and so you can't make strategic decisions about them getting Kayode or any of that stuff so it is a much more restrictive game regular gloom Haven gives you the freedom to play however you want this one you are given this is the problem you have to solve this problem and you kind of have to figure out almost kind of solve the puzzle that we put forward to how to best play this some people hated it we really liked it it's my number two of the month gloom Haven forbidden circles and that's kind of my final thoughts on that I do look forward to going back for more though cuz for us it's exactly what we wanted and that leaves only the number one and if you hadn't guessed earlier you probably know by now my number one of the month is another paid preview for a little game a little big game called Frost Haven gloom Haven – is finally here I got to play through an assortment of three missions from the sequel that is on Kickstarter right now it's already a problem by this point is probably made six million dollars I'm not exaggerating I don't like I looked at yesterday was up to four million it was just climbing climbing climbing this is gonna be the biggest monster hit of the year and if you know gloom Haven and you love gloom Haven I do not believe you will be disappointed and if you were disappointed if you were one of those players who got forb in circles you were excited for more and it gave you this very different thing and you're like ah where's the thing I really loved frost Haven gives you that frost Haven is definitely a gloom Haven 2.

0 because the core rules are 95% the same nothing really changed about how monsters work how initiative works how play works a bunch of new features were added like um changing seasons that will modify what type of Road events depending on what time of year it is when you go adventuring I know what time of year it is in the in the game not in the actual world or Frost Aven which is a little snowy outpost far to the north of gloom Haven has yet to be built up so in between missions you are actually directly involved in steering the evolution of this little town because another thing is when you loot stuff you no longer only a gold now you can get components that you can use to craft items and if you're not using those components craft items you're using them to build buildings to give you access to more stuff in between missions so there are a lot of cool new ideas brought in here but the actual DNA of gloom Haven remains which is really sharp tactical gameplay play two cards top action bottom action don't know what everybody else is gonna do find out at the same time and figure out how to best move forward and I mentioned relation to forbidden circles because while I very much appreciate that of the three missions I've seen so far it feels like Frost Haven does a better job and doesn't just always make every single mission just be kill everybody it does comes up with new interesting things it doesn't go as far as forbidden circles did forbidden circles for some people goes too far and takes it away from that core gloom Haven formula I think frost Haven from what I've seen does a much better job of melding the like they said the zen-like killing machine of gloom Haven with some more interesting and dynamic world objectives without going too far one way or the other and I think it really hits that sweet spot and that should come as no surprise because it's not like Isaac Childress has been just um you know sitting on his throne of money for the last five years completely ignoring know he's been paying attention to feedback and I'm sure that is why I ultimately think if you have never tried gloom Haven frost Haven I think from what I've seen is probably the better game because it's got deeper more robust world building than gloom Haven ever did it's got deeper richer more interesting characters to play as and it's kept all of the really great stuff and it's got deeper richer more interesting missions as well that said I haven't got a chance to play yet I would not suggest if you've never played gloom Haven to start with frost Haven because frost havens design feels like it assumes you already have played bloom Haven and you know your way around because like I said the characters you play and frost daven are significantly more robust and advanced and require trickier strategic decision-making to do well with so it hasn't come out yet but if you haven't played gloom Haven I was just waiting until gloom Haven jaws of the lion comes out which is kind of in a gloom Haven introduction game that walks you through I think 1520 missions that by the time you end them you'll be a gloom Haven master and then you could jump to regular gloom Haven or Frost Haven but if you already know and love gloom Haven chances are very very high you will love frost Haven even more and like I said to those who are worried because forbidden circles went so far outside the box frost Haven feels like it just came back into the box but then stuff that box with a lot of new stuff a lot of great stuff and that is my number one game of the month frost Haven and that's it folks I have now been talking nonstop for an hour and three minutes I am very thirsty and so I am going to end it here and say that I will see you again next month for another roundup and I hope everybody you know stay safe out there have a nice day talk to you later so long bye bye.