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S2 Ep59: Tabletop Games
79 Plays6 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they take a quick break from video games to talk about their favorite tabletop games!
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Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
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Transcript
Introduction and Hosts' Banter
00:00:35
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Duke. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Duke. How's it going, I, Duke? It's going pretty good. I'd say a full three-esque pretty good. Three-esque? Per-per-turn. Oh, jeez. Yeah. I mean, I'm also going to take my taxes, obviously, because I'm the Duke, so.
00:00:54
Speaker
I'm also the duke. We are dukes. Yeah, duke sees duke duke respects duke. Right?
John Wayne Filmography Humor
00:01:01
Speaker
I too am a man of god It's it's not until literally every other player at the table Also claims to be a duke that you know, it's it's a little bit suspicious Speaking of dukes Tonight we're gonna be talking about a John Wayne filmography. Yep, so
00:01:24
Speaker
Literally, the only thing that popped to my mind was Blazing Saddles. Not a John Wayne movie. That is not actually at all. John Wayne's made movies, right? I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:01:40
Speaker
Bonanza No, that's a possibly I'm just a TV show boys Yeah, Cowboys using a classic one. He was a Cowboys player Yeah He ran down the field with the football, you know dodge in the Steers steers. Yeah, that's something whether you're trying to get to another state with a with a horde of 13 year old boys and
00:02:06
Speaker
I don't remember him being part of one of those controversies. Those are other people. But, uh, tonight's episode is, um, not sponsored by anybody, but, uh, inspired or brought to you by community request from friend of the show, Thorn, who, thank you for writing in. Yeah, no,
Introducing Board Games: Coup
00:02:25
Speaker
we really appreciate it. Uh, wanted to talk about, uh, board games, one of the topics he suggested. And so we wrote down some thoughts about, uh, about board games.
00:02:36
Speaker
And the first one's technically, I guess, not even a board game. I would say it is a tabletop card game. In fact, we're gonna just point you a lot tonight. You've taken the bait, now here's the switch.
00:02:53
Speaker
You let them keep the bait you actually just switched them The pigs eating the carrots like it's fine i'll have welts later, but I have the fucking carrot got the carrot Uh, so yeah first one, uh, if you didn't catch on was coup coup, which is uh, very popular spelled c-o-u-p I never would have Been able to connect the two you see me what dave? Uh, sorry
00:03:19
Speaker
So yeah, Q is mostly a card game, right? So it's got tokens as well. Yeah. So tokens are just something you can collect to then cash in on, basically to Q. Everyone starts out with two coins. They said the thing. Seven coins. Yeah.
00:03:35
Speaker
We got them.
How to Play Coup
00:03:37
Speaker
If you have seven coins, you can spend your turn action just killing a player's influence. And an influence is a single card. Each player starts out with two, and they're dealt anonymously, and you can have any combination of one of, I believe, five characters. Yep. Looks like five. So there's the Duke, obviously. There's the Assassin, the Captain, the Ambassador, and the Contessa.
00:04:05
Speaker
Right. Which I think is the only one that explicitly sounds like a female title. Ah, Duke also. Contesso. Contesso. I guess Duke would also be explicitly male. Yeah. Cause it'd be Duchess. I'm a little, I digress a little bit. Um, but they each have their own roles, right? So being able to have one of those cards grants you legitimate access to certain special features.
00:04:32
Speaker
Yeah. So basically, for anybody who's not familiar with the game, which I assume most people are, because I feel like it gets brought to every single party. Right. But there's some people who don't go to parties. Like myself.
00:04:44
Speaker
All right, Jake, then I will explain to you the rules of cool. Thank you. So the dealer myself in this instance would deal out two cards to each of us. You have a chance to look at your cards whenever, as long as you don't reveal them. And then you get a card which kind of explains each of the characters actions. Yeah. Your instruction card. Yeah. Basically your first sheet.
00:05:07
Speaker
So to go into some brief detail Assassin can pay three coins and make somebody remove an influence Which is lose one of your cards? The duke can get more money per turn from collecting from the bank. Yeah
Strategies in Coup: Lying and Bluffing
00:05:21
Speaker
The captain can steal money from people. Mm-hmm. The duke can exchange cards with the court deck, which is just the main deck So you get to look at the top two?
00:05:33
Speaker
Take however many you started with and put the other two back So kind of gives you some insight on what other people might be playing as right and then the Contessa To just say like fuck you. You're not gonna assassinate me. Yeah, and I think ambassador can swap out roles, right?
00:05:48
Speaker
Yeah, ambassador can look at the deck and swap those cards. Right. So you can be like, hey, I'm an ambassador. Let's make that swap. There's a catch though. And that is you don't have to be honest in this game. It's true. I can't see Jake's cards and he can't see mine. So if he says I'm the ambassador and does the ambassador specific action, I'm like,
00:06:11
Speaker
Hmm. Very suspicious. Do I call him out? So if I do call Jake out, I say Jake you're a dirty fucking liar I've known you for years. This is not your line of work. Right. Embasseting. Yeah, that is... I am very badass? No. If that's how I declare it too, I was like as an expert in Embasseting you might have like some some hints that it's not legitimate, right?
00:06:36
Speaker
But basically, everybody else at the table has the opportunity to call the person whose turn it is action as bullshit if it's a character specific action. So if I call bullshit on Jake, he then either has to say, you know what, I accept your statement as calling me out, I will reveal a card. Actually,
Coup: Deception and Social Interaction
00:06:58
Speaker
that's your only option. Yeah, I commit to bullshit. Yeah, if you commit to it, then it has to be revealed whether it was a lie or not.
00:07:05
Speaker
So Jake has to reveal a card. If he has the...
00:07:11
Speaker
I already lost the guy. If he has the ambassador at that point, he can choose to reveal it. Yeah. If so, I'm legit. I called his bluff. He proved that he was an honest and noble man. Just so I actually lose an influence. Not learning that ambassador digging, but still things you can do. You can mispronounce something or like refer to your character. She does. I'm the duck. What can the duck do? Oh, the duck can take three coins. I'm the duck. Three bills.
00:07:39
Speaker
Three loves of bread yeah, so this game when I when I first played it I Really struggled with the deception part of it because I'm not used to being able to like kind of bluff some of this stuff
00:07:54
Speaker
So I'm like, I'm the Duke. And then people would be like, no. That just stood down. Some people start off with like really bad tells where you can see the nervous sweat and they haven't even done an action yet. So you tend to call those people out early. But a lot of those people will also use that as a strength later, like this is my consistent trait. If I do it every single time, it will kind of blend in. People won't know whether I'm telling the truth or a lie.
00:08:23
Speaker
So you lose the first two games in the best of three? There's been a lot of games where i've played with annie who i consider to be a very sweet person if she's listening if not then then But i've seen her be like very cutthroat and sneaky about stuff and she just pulled out things I would I didn't even know she was doing them I usually feel that i'm good at reading people somewhat in those games, but I was taken aback
00:08:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's really interesting and you can you can drop yourself you can put yourself in some positions where one of my favorites is if someone goes to They say I'm the assassin. I'm gonna assassinate one of your roles Then you're putting a tricky spot because if it was the it wasn't the Contessa can defend against assassination you can say I have the Contessa and
00:09:17
Speaker
If you actually have the Contessa then awesome. I mean that's what you would do if you don't Then the assassination goes through you lose one of your roles and because you're called out on lighting You lose your other role and you're instantly out of the game. Yeah, so the games go really quickly Yeah, cuz you to go over the ways you can lose cards If somebody calls bullshit on you and you were lying if you call bullshit on somebody else and they were correct and
00:09:45
Speaker
If you get assassinated or if you get cooed. Yeah But like you were saying if you can like bait an early assassination Because it only takes three isks because you still have to pay to do the action whether or not you're the assassin and it puts somebody who has two cards in that situation of I don't want to be out of the game exactly but at the same time I could just be aggressively baiting because at worst I lose one card exactly and
00:10:10
Speaker
Mm-hmm. It's hard to have those mind games for the back and forth. It's harder as a defender It's also a perfect game where it's like hey, I need to use the restroom. So I would like to Resolve this as quickly as possible boom aggression, you know, just start lying like crazy neither when are you immediately loose?
00:10:28
Speaker
It's pretty good. It's a really good, uh, party game. There's a couple of games on this list that are solid party games because most of the interaction comes down to a social one. Yeah. As a parse, as a parse. A parse. As a parse to, uh, more interaction, um, with the mechanics of the game itself. Yeah. And it's, it's a good small party because it would only support up to, I think it's five.
00:10:57
Speaker
I mean I say I
Monopoly House Rules Discussion
00:10:59
Speaker
have no idea
00:10:59
Speaker
It might actually be six. But basically you want to have, oh it says six, yeah. So everybody would have two cards, you'd still have three in the middle to work with. But basically the key thing is just trying to figure out what people have and when to call bullshit. Because it's pretty common, someone would be like, I'm the Duke early, and nobody wants to call anybody out too early, they don't want to burn cards because they don't have any information yet. Then round two, maybe they're trying to steal as the captain, you're like okay.
00:11:29
Speaker
and they're on three they're trying to assassinate somebody did i miss my window to call bullshit or is this now the window is this yeah yeah if that's that's the uh that's the advanced strat the madness strat is um every turn use an action from a different role
00:11:50
Speaker
Statistically, I feel if you were to check on bullshit A lot of times bullshit stuff seem to be reactionary. Mm-hmm. Where if I go to steal from you, you're like I'm gonna block this. I really don't want to you know lose coins. Yeah, you're you're not the captain, right?
00:12:07
Speaker
I mean, that would come down to game theory. So like, if it's a move that would hurt you more, then obviously if you're at, if you're on your last role and someone's like, I'm going to use the assassin against you. Like, yeah, you're going to claim to be the Contessa because otherwise you lose.
00:12:25
Speaker
Um, so, but yeah, there's, there's a lot of kind of tracking of roles, uh, similar to the other, uh, similar sounding game clue, but you don't get that nifty little, um, notepad to track down all of the suspicions and then confirmations of notes like you could include, which is a game that's not on our list, but easily could put it there.
00:12:47
Speaker
Yeah, we could have gone back to like milton hasbro type. Yeah Sticks and ladders uh game theory. I almost put monopoly on there at the end just kind of as a joke Just because like I could legitimately talk about monopoly But I feel like everyone knows how to play monopoly You would think but brief tangent Apparently like the rules that majority of people play by are variation of their own house rules
00:13:15
Speaker
Okay. Because of how some things work, like free parking and, um, like one or two other things. Yeah. For like how, when you're allowed to buy properties and when things actually are mortgage, et cetera.
Introducing Beneath Nexus
00:13:29
Speaker
Yeah. I know there's like, nobody does that correctly. There's like, including myself accelerated rule, I think.
00:13:34
Speaker
Whereas it's like if you choose not to buy a property, it goes up for auction and like everyone can bid on it. And I know, I think the most popular house rule is probably no cap on hotels. So you're just like boardwalk and park place. I don't care about statistics. I'm just going to feast or famine, win this or immediately lose.
00:13:55
Speaker
Oh, I landed on your 17 hotels on Boardwalk. I guess I'm out. That's the thing. It does kind of become a bit of a numbers game, where like statistically, sure, it's a lot and I was like, if you have a land on your thing, but when that happens, you're going to get paid dividends much more than if somebody hit your stuff going around every time in the light blues. Right. The real advanced strategy, I think, in Monopoly is to close specific streets to divert traffic on the Boardwalk and Park Place.
00:14:25
Speaker
There are one or two draw to like take you right there. Yeah. So if you factor that in as well, they're usually like utilities, aren't they? Like reading railroad, red, reading railroad. You know, what's funny was a tangent on the tangent. I just got to also a quick say I can fly twice as high.
00:14:42
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So coming to Pennsylvania, I was like, Oh, okay. It's pronounced reading. It's not reading. It's just reading, but the association with monopoly is still reading. Even though I literally know it's reading, my brain first goes to reading. So.
00:15:09
Speaker
So anyways, next game, after Monopoly, we have Beneath Nexus, which is a game people are less likely to have played than Coo.
00:15:20
Speaker
I have tried. Dave hates it. So no, it was just a thing that Jake has really enjoyed the game. So he brought it to a lot of social gatherings and I'm like, irrespective of appropriateness of bringing the game.
00:15:35
Speaker
You're dressed and you didn't bring lube? You spit in my face? Actually, that might work. But yeah, you've been really hyping this game for a while. And I did eventually get on board. I gotta say, I really enjoy... I mean, I won't take the
Beneath Nexus: Game Mechanics
00:15:50
Speaker
full discussion away from you because now you're hyped. I'll just go.
00:15:55
Speaker
But it's really cool how it's like a co-op versus I guess it's like pve. Yeah type. Yeah, it's like I want to throw the word asymmetrical in there. It's like an asymmetrical Co-op game sort of but basically you have It's a it's another card game, but it's not a deck builder where you have one antagonist the blight lord and you have a variable number of
00:16:22
Speaker
players or heroes, and you each pick a hero card at the start of the game, and they each have their own deck, that is constant. It doesn't change, you don't lose cards, you don't gain cards. That's just like your set of spells throughout the game. Exactly.
00:16:38
Speaker
So once you've exhausted all of the cards, you have your draw pile, you have your hand, you have your discard. It's kind of traditional rules. Once you've exhausted your draw pile, if you were to need to draw, shuffle your discard, it becomes your draw pile. Very straightforward. That's probably the base rule set for card games.
00:16:57
Speaker
All right, you're done. Get out of here. Yeah. Some of the depth comes in in the form of the actions you can take. So there's green symbols, which are full actions. There are gray symbols, which are passives. And then those are on the hero cards, mostly. OK, I was going to ask. The monster card. For our audio listeners. Exactly. And then there's yellow symbols, which are reactions.
00:17:25
Speaker
And each round, you start with the Blightlord. They go first, they get an action for every hero in play. And then their goal is basically to kill all the heroes before they win the game, essentially. And does the Blightlord have a static deck as well?
00:17:46
Speaker
They have a more expansive pool of cards to draw from, but it's a composite between common Blightlord cards, between all of the Blightlords, and then the specific Blightlord cards from the particular one that the heroes are facing.
00:18:07
Speaker
So you can pick at the start of the game, Hey, I want to play a pep, the blight Lord, a pep. I want to play the mesh to on a pit, play fiends of Adelphos, things like that. Um, and they all play differently and the heroes do as well. They have their own flavor and, uh, mechanics. Um, so a lot of times the heroes will try to synergize their abilities a little bit, uh, in order to cover more.
Strategies Against Blightlords
00:18:33
Speaker
gaps right so like let's say you're going against you mentioned apep yep what type of blight lord is apep and what would be a good roster versus that from the hero side right so apep's probably the one we've played against the most he uh is mostly direct damage and spell cards
00:18:50
Speaker
He has a couple like discard effects, but he's the one that's going to be casting spell cards to deal damage directly to heroes or putting curses on them that persist through the encounter to define like encounters. There's two encounters and then there's a boss fight. That's like the full game.
00:19:14
Speaker
And he just focuses on trying to burst down the heroes as quickly as possible or set himself up in such a position that he can do that. Which is really good for initial play because you don't have to worry too much about diversifying your strategy. It's just like, how do I get my number of the damage I can output greater than their health?
00:19:36
Speaker
And on the hero side, you would probably want to take someone like, uh, Varen who's, uh, a, the healer, essentially of the group. There's a couple of different heroes that have some healing, uh, but Varen specializes in it. And then he has a lot of reaction spells that are just things like if a player would die or a hero would die, you can't, you can't prevent death in real life.
00:20:01
Speaker
If player dies, stop the game. The Blightlord does not win. That seems fair. But if a hero would die, they're instead reduced to one health. Or ignore a spell that the Blightlord cast. That one's particularly strong. If the Blightlord's trying to play Magic the Gathering and it's like, all right, we're going to prep the combo with this essential first piece. And then I'm going to use the rest of my three actions to execute. You're just like, first piece doesn't happen.
00:20:30
Speaker
Okay, well I guess then. So that's one way you could kind of play around that. You could also take Toa, which is a very popular, or powerful I should say,
00:20:45
Speaker
hero that Has a passive whenever he takes damage once per turn He gains this ether Resource that he can channel to heal himself and it also makes his cards more powerful. That's his mechanic. He kind of plays around And then his cards also can redirect damage onto himself to help fuel his ether and
00:21:09
Speaker
which is really cool. So if you want to like play a second time and you play a different character, your impact and the fights can be completely different. Which I really appreciate from a game like this, where you want some longevity, you want like, you want variance between the matches. It never feels exactly the same.
00:21:30
Speaker
Yeah, like with rng is a mechanic between your decks and the blight lord decks And who you play with each time too. Mm-hmm because I think I've played it once or twice. Mm-hmm But each time we had a different group of people so people chose different cards and they Played a little bit differently. Yeah, but then usually towards the end people like communicating like what can we do to not lose this turn exactly you keep trying to prolong it as you're grouping up against this Deific anime and you're like fuck
00:21:57
Speaker
Yeah, and the nature of the fact that the Blightlord gets one more action for each player means that he doesn't get more turns. It all happens on the same turn, but it makes his turns his or her turns spikier. Like the potential damage output if you have, because it's up to six players, so you could theoretically have five heroes and one Blightlord.
00:22:18
Speaker
And I feel like I would like to start with my six actions because it's one plus or no, it's one for each player So five actions you could just nuke one. You could just kill a person. Yeah your turn It's it's pretty ridiculous the other the other main variants comes in because For the first two rounds they put three cards out one for each encounter. Mm-hmm
00:22:42
Speaker
And the players get to choose, they're upside down, so the players don't know which one represents which. But they agree on which encounter they want to run, flip the card, and that's what they run. Is it just like a variation of the Blightlord itself, or is it some other sub mechanic that players have to achieve?
00:22:59
Speaker
It's, it's what defines the objective for the first, for that round or for that encounter. Um, so an example might be, there's one where, um, usually you would present a monster for each player. Um, and so if you had four players, there'd be four monsters in play and each have their own abilities. The bloke blight Lord can use his or her actions to execute those abilities. And then the players choose who receives the effects of the monster abilities. So it's kind of like magic declaring blockers.
00:23:30
Speaker
There's one encounter where instead of that standard setup you instead Pull out a blight lord And Put them into play as a weak monster at a reduced state just a level level one monster basically as though they were in a boss fight against one player But they will have their ability as like a boss fight monster at level one power
00:23:57
Speaker
And it can be bad. Like, um, the one I think I see Pish pick the most is, uh, Lamesh too, who has a passive in her final boss fight where, um, every, at the beginning of the blight Lord's turn, she pulls a monster into play with one health. Just so if you don't kill her, she just continues to pull monsters, which have three additional facts return. Yep. Mm-hmm.
00:24:24
Speaker
It's pretty absurd. It can get completely out of hand. So that's kind of like a DPS race. You got to get the Blightlord out of play. Got to get the monsters in hand. And once you wrap up the encounter, treasure comes out and there's a mix between cursed and uncursed treasure.
Challenges in Beneath Nexus
00:24:41
Speaker
Curse treasure, best treasure. Some curse treasure is actually really good. But it always has like a flip side. So maybe it's like, oh, you get like a bunch of extra damage on an attack, but you take a bunch of damage. But if there's curse treasure, you have to pick it. You can't ignore it. You can't be like, oh, I would like the non-cursed piece.
00:25:04
Speaker
But you do get to choose which player exactly. Yeah. Like as to, uh, if one of your mechanics is built around, like if I take damage, I got this resource to work with to heal or do more damage. Yeah. You're like, I will take this curse thing. And then you can use that to help synergize with your team. Instead of having your healer who was like, I want to heal other people, not myself, try and deal with it.
00:25:26
Speaker
We literally had, um, we had Nicole playing the, uh, Toa and the last match and we ended up with two cursed relics, um, for them across our two encounters. She took both of them because they both were self-inflicted damage. So, so she's just like generating essence. Uh, it looks like a charm.
00:25:45
Speaker
It's really freaking good. But yeah, those two encounters and then the final boss fight, which is always climactic because the boss has a health crystal for each of their abilities. And so they usually have like a significant amount of health and then just devastatingly powerful abilities to try to, try to wrap it up. And in the times we've played, unless we got absolutely stomped out in the beginning by Lamesh too.
00:26:14
Speaker
It's been really close at the end. Like really close victory for the heroes or really close victory for the Blightlord.
00:26:22
Speaker
And it feels, it's, it's a really fun game that accelerates to the end, like it picks up. And like you were saying, that can, that cooperative nature turns into everybody. Like, because of the blight Lord, there's an advantage to the blight Lord. Um, if he knows what your cards are, people are like, you know, doing the whole, like, like pull their cards over the side, be like, check out this thing I got.
00:26:44
Speaker
Yeah. Check out this thing. And I like that. I like that kind of in-group versus Blightlord sort of co-op. Yeah. Cause you can take people who have never met before, like, Hey, we're meeting a party. Um, like you take two random couples like, Hey, we're all playing this game. Okay. And those people become friends because they're working together against that common enemy. Exactly. And that's, that's one of those warm, the cockles feelings that I do relate to.
00:27:09
Speaker
That's actually really appropriate too. Cause when I first played this game, it was at magfest and it was literally with strangers and we were like, we're coordinating, trying to figure out how to beat the blight Lord, like getting all this stuff together. Um, the manual could be like slightly better. It's not, it's, it's got some vagaries and undefined things. Um, yeah. If you have to loosely interpret a game, I feel like you can clean that up a little bit. Yeah. A little bit. We actually do the dummy text if you need to. Yeah. So people are clear on what's going on.
00:27:38
Speaker
We actually, we found a, a bug or a broken aspect in it, like in one of our first sessions where, um, uh, Dan was playing, uh, he played a monster called a die buck, which has a on death effect.
00:27:54
Speaker
It has like really low health. When a hero hits it, they actually gain health, which is really kind of rare. Um, but when it dies, it's replaced by a monster from the discard pile. So it comes in at full health, right? Very dangerous. Cause there are some strong monsters that could be in the discard pile. Um, but he got two of them in play and the first one died, brought something else in cool, whatever. Second one died and he's like, I'm just going to bring the first in.
00:28:24
Speaker
So now we literally can't win because as soon as we kill the monster, which is necessary to end the encounter, it brings in the second die buck. And it just keeps happening and keeps happening and keeps happening. And we're like, I don't think that it's actually possible to win. There's a no win state. So we went and we talked to the creators of the game and describe the situation. Cause this monster was actually in a booster pack that they were kind of announcing and releasing. And like fully play tested as far as.
00:28:54
Speaker
They apparently didn't think of this because I described it and you just see like the look of horror Like Passover his face as he realizes your flies been undone for a week He's like, yeah We're gonna release in a rat Well glad we could help
00:29:15
Speaker
We just have to say like, except other diebacks done. Yeah, that's, that's the home roll now is we just home rolled. You can't
Karmaka: Karma and Rebirth
00:29:21
Speaker
bring back a die buck with it. Cause we've actually had another game, the most recent one we played with Zach. That's when we had a die buck and a die book in the graveyard. And I was like, this has happened before. This happened before. Can't do this.
00:29:34
Speaker
House rule, this is illegal illegal but yeah, that's uh, that's beneath nexus. I like it because it's easier to get into And uh doesn't take like if someone hasn't really played a lot of like card games things like that Games oftentimes have a lot of setup. There's
00:29:49
Speaker
a game later in the list that has a lot of setup and Beneath an Excess provides that kind of fantasy adventure combat kick and like interactions between card mechanics things like that while keeping it to a level where you can just jump into it as opposed to like read this book now you can play.
00:30:12
Speaker
Yeah. I really like stuff like that. It's kind of like easy, fun to pick up for like a smaller group. And ideally has like cool mechanics and cool art design as well. Yeah. Unfortunately, there's nothing else on this list that just has really good art design. Oh, look, it's Karmaka. Oh my gosh. Box sound effects. I feel slightly lied to as I'm looking at the box and it has pretty good art.
00:30:43
Speaker
I'm saying so this was something that uh, my cousin Kevin turned me on to he was following it on some Patreon or early access thing And thought was a cool idea and back the game as we got to play it over like some holiday. I was like man I Gotta buy me this. Yeah, cuz I really enjoyed it so basically the game is about
00:31:07
Speaker
Ascending yeah to your final state The whole thing is you're going through different lives you start off as a dung beetle and you go through different levels Mm-hmm, but essentially your lifetime is you have six cards that you get I? Believe to start in your hand and four started on your local deck. Yeah, and per turn you get to either play a card as a deed so you put it out in front of you for its point value, which can range between one and three per card and
00:31:35
Speaker
Or you can play the effect that's red on the card. Exactly. So sometimes you want to get out points. Sometimes you want to use the effect to influence maybe the next round or other players. But that's the key part of where it comes in is the other players bit, the karmic balance. Right. So if I play a card that targets you, you're like, oh, that sucks. I'm going to be kind of like side eye and day when to get him back. Right.
00:32:04
Speaker
So what you can do is actually take that card that I played on you and put it into your future life pile. Right. What's your future life? So after you've played through all of your six cards, whether they're out on deeds or just played and got scrapped after their effect was resolved, you essentially die and get reborn next turn. If you have enough points, you ascend to the next level.
00:32:30
Speaker
Um, and you would draw up to six new cards, but if you put anything into your future life pile, that becomes your new starting hand. So you might be having kind of like a shit round. We'd be like, well, maybe I can plan ahead for next round. Yeah. Or maybe you can plan for end game. You're like, Oh, I'm going to drop this combo or do X, Y, and Z. Yeah. So like those interactions are really.
00:32:56
Speaker
really make the game for me and also the cards are broken up into three different styles which are thankfully color coordinated because i'm not a smart man uh red for your more aggressive cards right for things if you want to burn out cards or destroy what other people have that's normal that's a standard impulse red aggression weird red the defensive color
00:33:23
Speaker
Uh, um, green is your vibrance and things for like replenishing your deck or getting a card from the graveyard, bringing it back for vitality sake and blue. Just like in magic, we have this has been consistent throughout RPGs and spaces, um, is for like trickery and manipulation.
00:33:45
Speaker
right mess with stuff color you might mess with your future life like oh i'm gonna store these cards away i might pull from the graveyard put some stuff my future life might steal something from somebody else's future life yeah or i might just steal somebody's cards yeah it's uh it's a very interesting color i think blue cards get passed around a lot they do because you get to do like simple target things and the person's like well i would rather take that card and know that i have that instead of just getting something entirely random that might not be useful
00:34:14
Speaker
Right and You mentioned how you have this dual purpose so like you get the points or you can use it for its effect if you use it for its effect it goes into the into the discard pile this shared discard pile and Some of the green cards I know can pull from that when you I think mentioned a little indirectly with salvage. Yes So you can look through the top cards of the ruins. That's what's called the communal discard pile and pick one of them and
00:34:42
Speaker
And so that's a great reactive move if you know like someone uses a really high impact offensive spell Goes to ruins because the other player didn't want it for their their future life You can be like I kind of want that you wink grab it. You're like mom and dad stop fighting. I'll take this
00:35:04
Speaker
And yeah, there's, there's a lot of back and forth for, um, usually kind of in the early game, people are focusing exclusively on, uh, trying to get their ascensions in.
00:35:16
Speaker
So get like the minimum point, number of points necessary, which is really easy to do when you're a dung beetle. So it starts at dung beetle and then to get to the next level, you need four points. And then to go from snake to wolf, you need five. Wolf to monkey, six. Monkey to angelic being, seven. And then you're ascended. Yeah. And you win the game at that point.
00:35:38
Speaker
But the other thing is, let's say you're having a really, really rough time of it and you're just not being able to ascend. You're still a fucking dog beetle. If you ever get passed over where you die and don't ascend, you get a little token, which is a karmic ring, which kind of counts as a point.
00:35:56
Speaker
So let's say worst case scenario, you can only put down one card. It's worth three points and you have nothing else. You can put that three point card in conjunction with the token to be like, I have four points and I can ascend. Yeah. So if you fail early, you might be able to like hold up, hoard some of them for later. So people cannot stop you from ascending at the late game. Yeah. Well, they have two cards out. I guess in enough tokens. I'm just just fucked. Yeah.
00:36:23
Speaker
I think, I think the other thing here, so, um, you went over some of the colors. There's one more, which I put here as chromatic. I don't know what they're really called. They're special cards, right? Kind of like a rainbow prism. Yeah. Chromatic doesn't accurately convey how cool the cards look. Um, and they're all there. There's two of them. I believe you mentioned earlier, um, mimic, which is, uh, usually when people play cards as deeds, they only count for points.
00:36:49
Speaker
There's a couple ways you can interact with them. Red can ruin people's exposed deeds to just screw over their ability to ascend. But Mimic allows you to copy the effect of that deed. So most of the time, if a card has a very powerful effect, it also has a high point value. So people will try to get that out into play. And you get to activate that potent effect without
00:37:18
Speaker
without yourself owning that card.
00:37:20
Speaker
Yeah. So the beauty of something like mimic is mimic and did one body only cost one minute. One point. Yeah. So you could hold them on to kind of tabulate towards your points in general, but it's a much cheaper card to just burn to like, let's say copy Jake's three point red card to destroy his three point red card. Yeah, exactly. And then like I've taken three points away from him and I didn't really have to do anything.
00:37:50
Speaker
And then I only have a choice of getting the mimic back because he's not activating. I'm not using my own card to target you. I'm kind of using your own. There's some indirect targets. I think blue also has a little bit of messing around with that and like how targets work. But even though they have very low point value, they count as wild.
00:38:13
Speaker
for points so if you need four points to ascend and you have a three value green and a three value red in play and then you Drop either a mimic or an embody for points Now if either of your three value cards get destroyed You still have a path to ascend. Yeah, so as long as you have enough in that same color. Mm-hmm
00:38:40
Speaker
It's
Card Strategies in Karmaka
00:38:41
Speaker
it's really cool. I think the late game for karmaka karmaka on a karmak Late game is when it really starts to ramp up for me because there's a chance that you're just too far really behind It's usually pretty pretty even but maybe you made a couple mistakes in the early game me didn't really know how to play You know stuff like that
00:39:04
Speaker
You get to the end game and say one players out in the front. They're dominating. They're absolutely destroying They've just been racing through their ascensions. You can just be like I realized that I am NOT going to win But there's like this other person who's being like nice friendly not messing around like not messing up anyone else's gameplay Yeah, you can be like I kind of want you to win and just completely screw over the guy in first. It's kind of like Munchkin in a way
00:39:33
Speaker
Whereas you don't want to be like the first person at the end of the finish line, you want to be the second. Yeah. And you can only play one, the other effective or important rule here is you can only usually play one card like per turn, right? Yeah. So you can't be taking, you can't just have all of these actions prepared, be like, all right, and now I obliterate everything and play all my cards and do all of that. It's much more tempo based. Yeah.
00:40:03
Speaker
But to go over some of these, just because the art one is really nice, check it out. But second, I didn't realize what a lot of these cards could do until Successive plays. So there's a card here, Longevity. Has a very soft Gandalf-like picture. It's a two-point green. It says, deal two cards from the well onto any player's deck. So I thought,
00:40:29
Speaker
If I'm trying to die and burn out my cards, why would I want to draw more cards? The reason is, let's say you're about to die. You don't have enough points to ascend. You really want to ascend in this lifetime. You can possibly draw into a solution for that.
00:40:46
Speaker
Let's say Jake's like, I'm really trying to die. I have all these points. I just want to ascend. I'm going to win the game. I could say, Hey, Jake, but what if you stayed around a little longer? And I can now deal those two cards onto him. And that has now delayed his win condition by two fucking turns. Um, I don't think there's really a way to usually draw cards from your own deck faster, but I know there are some great combos as far as taking cards that you have and kind of burning your hand.
00:41:16
Speaker
Yeah. Coming right off of that, I have two here. Both red, as one might expect. Hoping one is vengeance. I don't actually have vengeance here. I've got the first one is Dwindle. It's a one cost red. The player of your choice ruins a card from their hand. So if you want to accelerate to death, you want to empty your hand out as much as possible, you can actually play Dwindle for its effect against yourself.
00:41:44
Speaker
and ruin another card that's in your hand. You've now dropped two cards down. Instead of just one. Instead of just one, so that's an accelerated death. The other one is Roulette, which I had also written in the note here. Two costs, red. Ruin up to two cards in your hand. You may drop to that many cards plus one from the well. So...
00:42:11
Speaker
If you choose not to draw cards off of that, you can just be like, get rid of my hand. I don't care about it. Get out of here. Um, so it kind of accelerates your death in that case. Yeah. Cause the thing is with it only being one card per turn, let's say Jake has just done an action. He sees me with three cards. Thanks. I have time to plan for whatever Dave is doing. Exactly. He's not going to burn three cards. And then I'm like, and I'm done. He's like, what? Yeah.
00:42:38
Speaker
So being able to have those options as far as deck and card manipulation between players and amongst your own cards, I think is really fun. Another one is another day green. Draw a card from the green one. Draw a card from the well. You may then play another card. So you can just be like, oh, I'm not feeling it. Cycle. Cycle.
00:43:03
Speaker
It's got the cool card interactions that can really sustain
00:43:12
Speaker
A match like this. Yeah, and it's really easy to pick up like I've Introduced a lot of people to this people who are not necessarily as board game-minded even my parents I got on board because they don't really game that often and Everybody's been able to pick it up really simply they might not be like mastered at deception and for like planning out things but they understand how the game works
Engagement in Karmaka
00:43:36
Speaker
and
00:43:36
Speaker
Right. I think this would be a good point, a good time to talk about pregame setup.
00:43:42
Speaker
free gaming. Yeah. Like for, for like beneath nexus, you've got to like figure out the monster Lord deck. I like have used a lot of, um, I separate out a lot of cards with bags and I sleeve everything and I try to make it as quick as possible. But a lot of games take a lot of time to set up or like set up plus learn and Karmaka minimizes both of those minimum learning time, minimum set up time. You're just dealing pretty much. Yeah. Um, and that's,
00:44:13
Speaker
It does all of that without sacrificing the depth that kind of beyond Hasbro card games tend to have. So it's a really, really solid game. Karmak has been fun every time I played it.
00:44:28
Speaker
And it's also nice, sometimes you know you're behind in other games and there's no hope, but you have to play it out because you're sitting there and you don't want to just be that guy to step away from the table. But you know that you're out of it. Karmaka allows you to still interact regardless of how behind you are, which is very unique from a board game standpoint.
00:44:52
Speaker
There's one of those things where like, let's say Jake's peeling ahead. He's obviously going to draw aggression from everybody else. So if you just hang in there, you could be like two lifetimes behind and that gap will close pretty quick. Yeah. Cause then the next person will say like, well, I don't want Stevie to win. Let me throw a card on him to burn one of his points where he dies and other things like that.
00:45:14
Speaker
It's like everybody's trying to like clamber up to the top and they're pulling each other down And you're just sitting here on the side like whittling out a ladder. You're
Overview of Betrayal at House on the Hill
00:45:21
Speaker
just like I got this Give me my time And that is uh, that's karmaka
00:45:27
Speaker
I think we can probably fit one more. One more? All right. Probably a game with a little more board set up. What are we going to do? So I want to mention all of them, whether I talk about them or not. We can do shorter sections for each. Sure. Do you have a personal preference between these three?
00:45:50
Speaker
Uh, the first one, first one. I agree. I also do first one. So, um, before getting to kind of the last one, I want to cover shorter sections for something that was mentioned here was, um, betrayal at house on the hill, which I've only played, um, I believe one time. Uh, but I've heard about a lot and it sounds like it's led to some very interesting experiences.
00:46:15
Speaker
Yeah. Um, it's one of those games that lends itself well to having a unique experience each time. And a lot of that is for just RNG of what people decide. And also I think there's at least 50 different scenarios. Right. And also the game board itself is dynamic. Right. So the way it works is you have a couple of people who have different stats and they all enter this haunted house together.
00:46:40
Speaker
They kind of have to go through and explore the house But also kind of build out the house whether it's the ground floor of the basement or the second floor Maybe find a mystic elevator. Maybe some other spooky shit happens zombies in the basement
00:46:55
Speaker
But essentially there's an event tracker, whereas the curse gets stronger and stronger. If you don't, if you pass the role, things continue as normal. But if you fail the role, the event triggers. Now we pull out a separate booklet.
00:47:11
Speaker
A lot of times there will be somebody who will be transformed into an adversary of some sort Mm-hmm. There is once a time where I was a mummy and people had to play chess against me The most recent time I got to play I got to play as the rat king and basically my character heard rats in the walls and they were talking to me and I was gonna get them a Sacrifice and we're all gonna work together and kill everybody. There's a full covenant around you actually. Yeah I
00:47:39
Speaker
So that was really cool because when that happens, the survivors or the heroes kind of meet and they have their own set of rules like, hey, here's what happens, here's what you know. I also, as the adversary, go off into another room, read my own booklet for this to see what I know about my rats, what I can do on their turns, if they have any special effects. And the reason I want to mention this specific instance is
00:48:08
Speaker
When I came back the heroes had a very determined plan like here's what we can do to take all these rats We have a grenade to have we some of them and some other stuff, but they made some assumptions Mm-hmm. They assumed that I could not have four rats in one tile. They assumed that I could not Merge all those rats to make one giant attack And some other things for like is a plagues tail basically. Yeah
00:48:37
Speaker
So I was essentially the church from that game. Um, and I sent out all the rats and because they made some assumptions, which unfortunately turned out to be wrong, I was able to use like this. I was already in a good state as far as where things were placed. Yeah. Um, overwhelming rats to kind of just swarm everybody. But you played into their assumptions. I've heard this story before for a while, right?
00:49:01
Speaker
Um, yeah, you just try not to let any information slide. Um, but like, let's say that event was triggered later on in the game and they were much more equipped to like destroy rats. Right. Maybe I lose that maybe for how the, um, the haunted house is explored. I'm not in a good position to complete my objective or vice versa. Right.
00:49:27
Speaker
So if you take all of that and the fact that there's already 50, I'm going to keep saying 50 is the generic number, unique events that can happen, unique scenarios. It's just been super fucking fun. Yeah. It's like an hour to an hour and a half. The setup's not complicated. And it's just really cool to see where things go and how you work
Explaining Aeon's End
00:49:49
Speaker
together. Cause I'm not sure if you were in the one we played with AJ. I don't think so.
00:49:55
Speaker
But I don't remember the one I was in was like years ago. Okay in a long time so whatever the mission was AJ was evil and We he had to keep something away from the survivors survivors had to go collect this artifact and put it over there. Mm-hmm He found a loophole because his character got a dog along the way He gave the artifact to the dog and the dog can move up to five spaces at a time, right?
00:50:18
Speaker
through people like, all right, as a GG, because he had like an evil dog. I could outrun everybody. Right. It's again, like it's, it just locked into that. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's pretty absurd. And I think one of the interesting things is you start the game, everyone can be on the same side and then scenario develops. That's no longer the case. I really like co-op to a point. One that I definitely don't have time to go into is, uh,
00:50:52
Speaker
I don't know. You're looking at me like I would know but I don't know if I would know.
00:50:56
Speaker
I get brain farts on specific names when I need it the most. I can think of like some that are co-op competitive, like terraforming Mars. It's the zombies winter one. It's not dead of winter. No, it's dead of winter. Is it dead of winter? It's dead of winter. So you have to work together. But somebody might be working against the colony the whole time. Yeah. Secretly. And I like stuff like that. Yeah. Where it's like. Hidden role. Everybody has a knife. Who's going to stab who, right? Exactly.
00:51:26
Speaker
Um, so yeah, that's, that is a solid entry that I would like at some point to spend a little more time with. Sometimes it's hard to get people to sit down for some of these games, which I understand. Honestly, we're all growing up. It takes more time. I know Justin and Rachel definitely have it. I'm just saying maybe sometime we play that again.
00:51:43
Speaker
Another game that Justin and Rachel actually have that I wanted to mention was Gloomhaven, which has complexity and content, and verse to the amount of time that I'm going to spend talking about it. The next game is Aeon's End.
00:51:59
Speaker
Which is one of my favorites. This is the other one I actually own. And it is a cooperative actual deck builder. And the monster is... It's not run by a player. This one is... Just automated boss deck? Yeah, boss deck. So whenever it's the monster's turn, flip a card, monster does something.
00:52:21
Speaker
And this one's really cool. I actually quite like deck builders. I like card games in particular. I like games where you don't have like
00:52:31
Speaker
a large dedicated board with a lot of things going on. And I think Gloomhaven, I actually got because we went to a hobby shop. We were looking at all these games. I was like, I have no idea. And like, I'm not the person who owns all of the games. I don't just collect them. Shout out to Justin and the
00:52:53
Speaker
So what I did is I went online and I was like, okay, what are the most popular, the highest rated games? Sort by weight, ascending. Yeah, exactly. And so Aeon's End was well up there in the list and I've had a tremendous amount of fun with it.
00:53:11
Speaker
I don't want to get too tied up in the mechanics, but it breaks. Let's not talk about the mechanics at all Yeah, and soon is really fun Yeah, let's just leave it at that it's just really fun. Yeah, no, it's So for me it felt very similar to Beneath Nexus in a way because you do have the group co-op versus again that big PvE Yes, and also last time we played it was a
00:53:37
Speaker
Swear that we cheated because that was insanely close we played it really close, but I don't think we actually cheated Yeah, you choose your character similar deal they have their own advantages super abilities kind of they can charge up You have a shop that one of the cool things is that the shop?
00:53:58
Speaker
You choose what cards will be available in the shop at the start of the game So players can be like I feel like I want this very aggressive spell this high damage spell I want this utility spell. I want this kind of support spell I want some things that will allow me to thin my deck and Getting that choice kind of at the start helps you set the tools that will be available through the rest of the encounter and
00:54:25
Speaker
Yeah, and I wish I had chosen it better Because we won we did but there were things like I had wished for my deck because I went more spell heavy So I got some big cards. Yeah, but I also had a lot of mana resources and that late in the game I didn't need as many so I draw like three damage and like 12 mana and I'm like
00:54:46
Speaker
Okay, and I didn't I wasn't set up for a way to resolve it at that point I just had too fat of a deck, right? Yeah, a really big fat deck But my character had unlocked enough spell slots where I had the potential to do a lot of damage, right? Cuz you had the the energy to open all those Yeah, so that was really cool prep spells in advance and then you resolve them as you're trying to take off monsters monsters and
00:55:10
Speaker
Yeah, you can, like many deck builders, you can build out your economy early. It's usually a pretty good idea by some of the more expensive, powerful spells. And then your deck, so you're getting some of the weaker cards and spells like that less often. One of the unique kind of features here is usually in games like this where you have a library, a hand, and discard.
00:55:36
Speaker
When you would go to draw as we as we're full circle basically when you would go to draw you shuffle your discard becomes your new library And this one you don't shuffle your discard and at the end of your turn all of your Resource cards all of your crystal crystal cards anything that you use to get currently the crystal
00:55:54
Speaker
cards. Yeah, Curvy's in his crystal cards. You used to buy new cards. You choose the order they go into your discard. So you can actually stack your next library. That is per round, right? Yeah, per turn. Yeah. So like if you're discarding three cards, you choose where those three go. Yes. Yeah. But you can put them anywhere, right? Exactly. Yeah. Within those three, like you can choose the ordering for those three, put them on your discard. Now it's solid.
00:56:21
Speaker
Oh, so I can choose the order of the ones I'm discarding to add to the pile with exactly is that it on top? Exactly. Okay, and then you flip it over and it's here your new deck so you can kind of like Balance it in such a way that you know, you have some diversity in cards
00:56:36
Speaker
I never put that much effort into it. There was probably way more strategy I could apply. There's definitely some. Because I didn't want to ever get mana flooded, where I'm like, I don't need mana anymore, or spell flooded, where I'm like, I don't have enough spots to allocate these spells to. Yeah. So it was always like a weird balance. But it's a cool angle to also think about. Right. Because it'd be easy to say like, oh, well, I'll get what I'll get, and we'll go from there. In most games, they like that. In most games, heavy shuffle this good.
00:57:05
Speaker
But yeah, your goal is to defend the town, which has its own health tracker. It's called Gravehold. Doesn't really matter. Try not to have all the players die. Every time a player dies, they're exhausted. And unlike a lot of other games, you actually stay in the game. But you do permanently lose the ability to cast spells through one of your breaches. Which is like an allocated spell slot.
00:57:28
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah. So there's downsides there. And then if that person would take damage, instead it's applied to grave hold and it's doubled. So it accelerates losing very quickly. Yeah. And we had what in our game, like two, three health left on grave hold at the end. It was absurdly low.
00:57:48
Speaker
The thing is, you can let, you can choose targets, so you can like, oh, I'm the media sky right now, I'll take that damage, it's fine. Yeah. You can heal it off later. But there are also times you can just let the damage go to the town, and you're like, well, the town health's technically a resource. And so there's like one civilian left who's like, thank you for saving.
00:58:09
Speaker
There's just like a meteor falling like right at you and you're just like, ah Do I dive in front of the meteor and let it let it hit the civilian
00:58:20
Speaker
And yeah, we, uh, we were making decisions on the town health up until like probably 70, 80% of the way through the game. And then we're like, it's not super low, but we're concerned because some of these cards just immediately hit the town. We were fighting rage born, which is much like the blight Lords. There's a bunch of different monsters not getting into them, but they all play differently.
00:58:40
Speaker
And this one, I have like a lot of, I mean, I hate you in the face. So we started arguing like the probability of what cards could be drawn for like, well, theoretically in the situation, if they get this and rage counter, they're definitely going to attack twice. I feel like that's going to be worse for what they could draw into. Yeah. And then also the turn order is decided randomly each time. It's its own deck. Yeah.
00:59:04
Speaker
So there are times you're like, well, if we all get our trends before the boss goes, it's not that bad. But if the boss goes first, Dave could easily die. Yeah, exactly. So we had to make those decisions like around in advance, like, all right, guys, let's talk about some of this. What's going on?
00:59:21
Speaker
We got to the end of it and I was playing kind of supporty and I was funneling charges into one of the heroes who has an ability that allowed him to disregard special boss cards for like a turn. And we're like, we absolutely need this ability up. And then the question was, do we use it on this turn?
00:59:40
Speaker
Or do we use it on the next turn? And we were like you were saying, figuring out the probabilities and trying to figure out the best way to survive. We had just enough whatever resource or mana that was to cast it once across those two turns. Yeah. So we basically, we were funneling energy into these people with, I think it was, I think it was you and one other person that had high impact abilities that we were using.
01:00:04
Speaker
Mine was like, if I spent enough mana, I could double cast one of my cards. That's what it was. Yeah. And we had, uh, there's different strategies for winning. The two win conditions for the players are defeat the monster. Uh, the, the big boss, the nemesis is the terminology for this one. Um, or sustain the entire onslaught.
01:00:23
Speaker
so that the boss goes through his entire deck and it's each section is shuffled tier one two and three um but it always proceeds from tier one to tier two to two three so progressively increase hard facing monsters and if you get through the entire thing then it retreats and you've defended and you win uh that's how we won by the way that is how we won um
01:00:48
Speaker
We actually didn't do that much damage to the monster at all the entire time. It was all the summons. There was so much meat buffer. We were like, I'm gonna hit the monster. Oh, but he summoned two dudes. I gotta deal with that quick. And there was always something in the way. Always.
01:01:02
Speaker
There's only one time I think that we straight up had killed the monster and it's because we had somebody with a double cast ability. It's me from earlier. You're right, but we actually killed the monster. Dustin was playing him at the time and we all just funneled energy into him constantly. It was literally every other player was just playing support for an alpha strike from him. Cue the footage of the spirit bomb. Take my energy. Take my energy.
01:01:29
Speaker
You see like a bird just in the tree just dies Pretty accurate. Yeah, it's a really fun game and I would say probably better balanced than beneath Nexus as far as making sure that it's really close there at the end But I always enjoy playing it so those are the two that I actually take out and I impose upon other people and their social situations where it's not appropriate to be playing board games and
01:01:59
Speaker
Am I supposed to make the joke for me? So outside of these games What are games that you are just like going to name without like huge description? Yeah, well you really look forward it's like I can't wait to play this again with people like once we find the time in the group Yeah, I don't really play anybody anybody else's games Just these yeah Not even a dead of winter that we were mentioning before
01:02:24
Speaker
No, I mean that that's a good one. Um, it's kind of tough because it's, it's, there's a lot of games that take effort to get into, but once you've expended the effort, right. Once the efforts expended, then a lot of those come into, into play, like a lot of the containers games. I really enjoy.
01:02:45
Speaker
Oh yeah, Cthulhu. I think Arkham Horror was that one. Contagion is also really good. Don't you own Contagion? Nope. No. Pandemic? Is that what I'm thinking of? Still don't own it. You don't own Pandemic? I thought I could have played it at your house. Maybe Mike.
01:03:02
Speaker
Um, but yeah, that's just larger scale. It's honestly closer to risk, I think. Um, but yeah, that one's good. I'm a fan of, I'm a fan of co-op games because, um, like I'll play competitive games. That's fine. But it feels better to work with people against the objective if the game is balanced well.
01:03:25
Speaker
then competitively for me because in competitive I know someone's losing it's usually me so it's less fun for me to accelerate toward the end I'll have like a relatively I'll answer your question in reverse a game I didn't enjoy that much that is tremendously highly rated overall is terraforming mice
01:03:45
Speaker
Um, which is a competitive economy, buildup points, and then when based off the points you've accumulated and you play off of other people's turns, you know, you're all collectively accomplishing a goal and whoever just was the most productive wins. Uh, but it's not fun for me. Yeah. Cause I just, I don't know. I mean, it's just so much that leads to most people losing. There's a lot of collective effort and you only get one winner. Yeah.
01:04:15
Speaker
Yeah. I'd rather not leave certain things to RNG. Also, if like people can just have like the same common goal, but just be like a turn ahead of me or whatever other events happen. I'm like, Oh, okay.
01:04:27
Speaker
Yeah, like when I when you're talking about karmaka and the fact you're engaged until the end of that that's a competitive game that I enjoy Yes, because you're always engaged and something like terraforming Mars. You can realize ah That's not a multiplier. I'm gonna get you know, this is something they're too far ahead Their economy is too good and you're still in it for like 20 minutes waiting for it to resolve. Yeah competitive games I feel like a lot of times will enter that space
01:04:53
Speaker
Not all the time, they can be really close. And if everybody's really familiar with the game, then awesome. But it happens more often with that type.
01:05:01
Speaker
Yeah. I really like things that feel fresh, each instance. And I can play with like the same group of people and it'll be wildly unique. I can play with a different group of people or it'll be even more unique. Like once people are over the hurdles of something like dead of winter, where you have to know some of the game mechanics before just jumping in. Right. Once you have that out of the way, you can just like, oh, sit down, like a nice one or two hour play session. We'll grab dinner and we'll hang out. Those I like. Yeah. A lot.
01:05:29
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. That's definitely the progression for me. Like if I'm playing with people who don't really play a lot of games, aren't that familiar? You don't have like that much time. Jake's a cherry popper. But beneath Nexus is what I feel. Same group of people, but a session or two later drop hands and like, I think the balance seems slightly better. It has a little more depth. Um, but it's takes more setup, more setup time. So, um,
01:05:57
Speaker
But yeah, it explains why you enjoyed betrayal so much because the mechanics and betrayal literally changed between scenarios, which is quite cool. Like that's, that's a lot to pack into one game, right?
01:06:13
Speaker
It feels weird having a board game or table of us without mentioning something like a tan. Yeah. I grew up playing a lot of it. Were you in the same boat? I actually haven't played Catan at all. Ever. I'm sure we were really with the game. Uh, vaguely. I know it's, it's a resource based. Yeah. Um, so like you're rolling dice to see which numbers come up. If people were built on those tiles with those numbers, they got those resources, use resources to buy things, expand, et cetera, et cetera. Um.
01:06:39
Speaker
It's a fun game. Uh, usually takes like an hour, hour and a half, maybe at most. Uh, but it's also fairly simple. Right. And like, I knew what I was getting into every single time. Um, so it came down to a little bit of RNG, but also I'd learned how to just manipulate certain aspects of it. And it became too rote and predictable. So when you give me something, it's like, what is this? You're like, well, you know, the loose rules, but it can be fucking anything. Yeah. Like ability draft and Dota. I have no idea what's going to happen.
01:07:09
Speaker
There's a that reminds me that we played Rachel had it the the card game with like things like Apple orchards farms Do you remember the name of that? I know it's like a city building card game. Yeah, that's what it reminds me of life me I can't yeah, but yeah, I do know that game similar to that. So just injecting your guys's minds the actual name of the game There you go. I Enjoy that and that also resolves pretty quickly so
01:07:38
Speaker
If you're behind, you're not behind for long. That's, that's the thing that gets me in competitive games. If it's like, if it's reached the tap out point, like, let me tap. Let me like that magic rule. It's like, you may forfeit the game at any point. Hesitations with games or something like no one wants to fucking play a monopoly. It's like, well, it's going to take 10 hours.
01:07:58
Speaker
Yeah. And like certain ones, it is good to know upfront how long it's going to take. But I feel most things that are around an hour are balanced enough that like everyone is fun and having fun is engaged. And if they do need to leave really, it's not going to fuck over the three other people who are like still really in it. Yeah. Party games are usually better for that. Yeah. Gloomhaven is the worst for that.
01:08:23
Speaker
Yeah, but yeah, like I remember you guys started to talk about that like in front of me Mm-hmm and somebody's like it's okay that we're not inviting this thing where I was like listen look at my face Mm-hmm. I don't
Concluding Thoughts on Board Games
01:08:35
Speaker
care I don't have the patience to sit for nine hours for an entry in a campaign. Yeah, I Don't have nine hours straight for anything. That's crazy. Yeah, I
01:08:46
Speaker
I don't really have time to talk about it. It's a very complicated game if you want D&D in board game format. That's not literally one of the published D&D games. It's cool. That's an option. I'm sure if I were a more hardcore tabletop gamer, I would love to have something that's that in-depth and that detailed because I have that deep appreciation for it.
01:09:10
Speaker
Right now i'm at like Give me something I could still play white girl wasted right or shit talk my way through, you know. Yeah, there's also kind of like uh, if the ideal amount of time that you need to drop on it is like a summer As a team then like I don't really have time for that anymore, right? You know like It's it's a little hard to take a picture of the board before everybody leaves. That's that game's too long
01:09:36
Speaker
Yeah, that one actually it's encouraged you to maintain board state by getting like an accessory to literally move the entire board if you need the table without disrupting it because yeah, that's the opposite of the reason I like.
01:09:53
Speaker
Card games. What I actually do, I have a, you know, my square gaming table. I just kind of like have fixed, like a little short three inch wall around the outside of it. I fill the whole thing with water and then I put it in a giant freezer. So that way when people come back, I can just thought out over the next couple of days and then boom, no board state lost.
01:10:15
Speaker
Yeah. Just freeze the whole thing. Yeah. Broken token is also a company that makes a lot of things like that. But I just cut holes in the box. So it's fine. Works out the same in the end. That a deal. All right. Well, thank you guys for listening to this, this long episode that wasn't about video games at all.
01:10:38
Speaker
Except Gloomhaven is coming out for Steam in 10 days apparently. Really? Yup. I was doing some research for it today and it's gonna come out for Steam. You have fun with that. Yeah, I don't know if I'm gonna pick it up. I'm not gonna pick it up. I'm gonna wait for reviews but if it turns out to be like amazing I might consider it. Easier to play games online than in person.
01:10:56
Speaker
Um, that's just how it works. Uh, but yeah, so there you go. Now we've talked about a video game and we have met the, uh, the quota for actually getting back up on Spotify and our audio distributor.
01:11:14
Speaker
Yeah, finally getting that, uh, sponsor credit for mentioning that video game. Yep. A little maven on steam coming. We get zero money from that. So don't even, don't even bother. Which gets your money. Yeah. Honest. Yeah.
01:11:30
Speaker
Well, thank you guys for listening to this episode of soapstone. As always, you can reach out to us at soapstone podcast at gmail.com. Thank you again to Thorne. And you can also join the discussion on Facebook, Facebook.com slash soapstone podcast. And until next time, we'll see you in the next one.