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PAX Unplugged 2025 | We Got Played: ROAD GAMES
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Today on We Got Played: Road Games, we discuss the games we played in Philadelphia at PAX Unplugged 2025! From tarot to Lord of the Rings, we discuss the good, the bad, and the in between to answer the question: did we get played?
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Transcript
Introduction and PAX Unplugged Experience
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome, this is Isaac Shalev. I'm Jesse Shalev. and this is We Got Played, Games.
00:00:21
Speaker
We just finished our PAX Unplugged experience, so we're going talking a little bit about that. Here we are in Philadelphia, we're in the cab, we're in an Uber. They don't sponsor us, but hook us up if you want us I'll be happy to talk about nice things. We're innna actually a really, really lovely, i think this is an Audi Q7. Gorgeous car.
00:00:40
Speaker
Appreciate our driver. And we are going to chat for a little bit until we get to the airport about
Spotlight: Soothsayers by Play to Z Games
00:00:46
Speaker
the games we played. So, Jesse, tell me, what did we get played? So we played bunch of games. You have the list, but I'll just list as many as I can remember. We played... No, don't spoil it for the audience. Pick out your most memorable one. Let's start there. Okay, okay. I think the most memorable one we played, the one that I think I had the best time with, was game called Soothsayers.
00:01:10
Speaker
Soothsayers. So Soothsayers is from Play to Z Games. It's a card game. Plays in about 30 minutes. Around, I'd say, yeah. I think it's ah two to four, maybe two to five. um And the, you know, I wish I remembered the name of the designer. i remember his last name is a little difficult to say, but maybe we'll look that up real quick while we talk a little bit about it. So Soothsayers is a It's one of these games where you're racing to score six points, the first player to score six or five in a four-player game, whatever it is.
00:01:41
Speaker
um First player to get those points wins, and it's a tarot game. So you're using tarot-inspired deck. You've got four suits. You've got cards going up from one to six, and then you've got these major arcana, which are separate, and they have cool special effects.
00:01:57
Speaker
But basically, it's one of these games where... its You have four actions. They are each tied to one of these suits. You call the action. I'm going to draw. I'm going to um upgrade. I'm going to claim a major arcana. I'm going to collect money. And then everyone else follows.
00:02:12
Speaker
Right? So a play and follow game. and you're trying to collect these tokens basically by having the highest value card in any of the given suits. Whoever has the highest cups card is going to hold that value.
00:02:25
Speaker
that token, that insight token, that's the victory point tokens, whoever has the highest major arcana, and again, in each of the four suits. um And then there are other ways to acquire victory point cards from some of the ah mid-game and late-game cards.
00:02:41
Speaker
So it's it's kind of one of these where you've got to bash the guy ahead of you so that he doesn't get win, and then the next guy bashes the next guy, and the next guy bashes the next guy, and then eventually somebody finds the combo and wins. There's a very push and pull in terms of the points, because you can have the points, but then the points can be stolen from you, and then you have to steal from somebody else to get those tokens. And I think that can...
00:03:01
Speaker
It can not work, especially when you're building your own thing and then suddenly people are just kind of attacking you. But I think the game does a really good job in keeping you engaged with everybody's boards, even when it's not your turn. So it never really feels unfair that people are stealing from you. And it's fun to steal from other people as a result.
00:03:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely that kind of game where there's a lot of interaction. You're always looking around at everybody else's tableaus, but every tableau has no more than eight cards in it. So they're all super readable and, you know, and it's eight cards and four suits. So it's two rows of cards. It's very easy to grok.
00:03:34
Speaker
Um, and, uh, the art is also quite compelling. I enjoyed it. Very like traditional tarot style, uh, art. And it's a game that you can teach your friends in two minutes.
00:03:45
Speaker
Like I, I was playing it and we had a couple of our friends wander over and they were looking over my shoulder and in between, in a three player game, in between my turn and when my turn came around, I explained the whole game.
00:03:55
Speaker
And I did it twice. So we really like this one. Did we get the ah designer on Soothsayers? Yes, his name is Jeff Grissinthwaite. Jeff Grissinthwaite. Now really, a shout out to Jeff, ah who I did meet at RageCon. ah like a a year or two ago, and I didn't even realize that he had a game with Play to Z, which, full disclosure, i am an investor, which means that Jesse is an heir to the Play to Z
Investment Transparency in Game Reviews
00:04:25
Speaker
fortune.
00:04:25
Speaker
So just full disclosure on that. um
Exploring Sanctuary: A Lighter Ark Nova
00:04:29
Speaker
Cool. So... so our feeling on that one is that uh we got to play we didn't get played yes i i was i was a very big fan of that game that i would play again i would play many many more times that was a very very fun game awesome all right uh i'm gonna pick out the the big daddy i want to make sure that we get to this one before we get to the airport uh which is sanctuary yeah that's the other one the big one yeah Yeah, so Sanctuary, you want let you want to kick us off? Sanctuary is a lighter version of Ark Nova. It's marketed as an Ark Nova game, and you can tell it's still about building a zoo, except it cuts out some of the more middleman steps of it. There's no more enclosures for these animals, and what you're essentially doing is drafting tiles from a middle tableau, and then using the powers and the cards that you have to take those tiles from your hand and play them onto your board in a hexagonal.
00:05:24
Speaker
Right, tile-laying hexagon puzzle. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And there are three different kinds of tiles. There's the animals, the buildings, and the projects. All of them go onto your board. They all take up space. And different cards activate different ones of them.
00:05:38
Speaker
Yeah, and I want to maybe start from the perspective of someone who has played Ark Nova before and to say that... There's no money. No money. There's no sponsor cards. Yeah. There's, like you said, you don't have to build the enclosure and then put the animal in um And also, though there is ah this concept of upgrading your action cards, it is less prominent and perhaps less important than in Arcanova. There's no partner zoos. There's no...
00:06:11
Speaker
What do you call them? Universities. There's no science resource at all. Right. ah So, and and by the way, also, and this hurts me, no bears.
00:06:23
Speaker
Are there no bears? I don't think there were bears. There were petting zoo animals. We didn't see any bears, but does that mean that there weren't any? I'm trying to remember because the icon for all of the animals, all the animal types, I think just had the white petting zoo in the middle and all the other ones have colors.
00:06:40
Speaker
don't think there were any bears. So, look, on that metric alone, zero bears, zero love. ah But I do think um that it achieves a lot of great things because it's Ark Nova Lite, not Lite Lite.
00:06:59
Speaker
This is a medium weight game. It's a medium weight race efficiency kind of game. It has several dimensions of puzzle. You're still doing that pretty interesting puzzle, even though you're not doing a shape like tetromino or hexomino or whatever you call that.
00:07:15
Speaker
uh, like Ark Nova, you do still have, um tiles that require other tiles next to them or open area tiles. You do have tiles that score based on what's next to them. Yeah. So it it still is giving you a pretty rich puzzle there as well as a good puzzle in terms of combining different buildings together.
Sanctuary's Endgame and Strategies
00:07:36
Speaker
um And then you have the projects. And the projects are, they're non-rivalrous. So just because i got to do ah two Americas doesn't mean that my opponent can't do two Americas. They can.
00:07:49
Speaker
Right. um It's more of a competition with yourself because you only have one token to play a two of any so conservation project on. So if you do two Americas, you can't do two Australias or two Predators. Right. Yeah, and and also the endgame conditions are important because players trigger when the game ends. When one player gets out all of their project tokens, that will trigger the endgame.
00:08:15
Speaker
Or when one player fills up their board, that'll trigger the endgame. So like in game one, i both got a... a tile that comboed off of birds and let me place open areas whenever I placed a bird. Open area basically means just flip a tile over to the other side and it's an open area and it's worth a point. right But it uses up a space on your board. So every time I played birds, i would put an open area down Plus, most birds, many of the birds that we saw in that game at least, when you put them down, have you put an open area out. Right. So I was putting out one tile and taking up three spaces with each play, so I kind of rushed the endgame by filling out the map.
00:08:57
Speaker
Right. um In the second game, ah you... I triggered the endgame and then I lost. Right. Right, and when you trigger the endgame, you do get a 10-point bonus. Yes. But you triggered the endgame on project tokens. Yes, I did. Rather than on map completion. And I ended up winning not on projects, but because I had a great Predator engine, right? So I managed to get six Predators down and get multipliers so that I was getting five points per predator icon something like that. scored like 80 points on predators alone. was ridiculous. Let's say 80. Let's say a number between 35 and 80. It was not as low as 35. I think we did the math and it was like 36 points off of predators. But look listen, six tiles scoring you 36 points is pretty amazing.
00:09:43
Speaker
um So, you know, no complaints over there. But overall... If you've never played Ark Nova and you're looking for a 60 to 90 minute interesting ah race efficiency combo kind of game, um this does a lot.
Sanctuary vs Ark Nova: A Comparison
00:10:00
Speaker
Yeah, this does a lot. And it doesn't feel like a lot of other games I've played. i i feel like the way that you build out your zoo and the choices are compelling. um i guess I think one of the most interesting parts about it that we didn't talk about um that maybe I'll just mention briefly is.
00:10:19
Speaker
You're still doing the the rotation of action strength. So on your turn, you're picking one of your four action cards that are laid out in a row. Right. And they're at different strengths.
00:10:30
Speaker
And three of those cards are essentially animal cards, right? They let you build an animal in a water habitat or an animal that prefers a forest habitat or an animal prefers a rock habitat. Right.
00:10:41
Speaker
The fourth one is the the project card. Yes. There are, not to be confused with terminology, projects and are not the same as conservation activities in this game or whatever, so but the point is there's a kind of card that you can only play with that project card. However...
00:10:58
Speaker
At the beginning of your turn, you always get a tile out of the tile market, and the one that you get is what's within your conservation reach, within the reach of your project tile. So if your project card is at max strength at five, you'll be able to pick five of the six tiles, any one of the tiles from space one through five on that market row,
00:11:24
Speaker
Whereas once you do a project and you drop back down to one, now you have to take the first tile because you can only reach spot one. So that idea of whether you keep your projects up high so that you can select to have a greater um flexibility in what you select is an interesting and immediate strategy that's quite different from Ark Nova where you typically want to take your actions at top strength if possible.
00:11:52
Speaker
So, all in all, if you like Ark Nova but can't get it to the table very often, this is a fine substitute that plays faster and gives you some of the same feel. Yeah.
00:12:03
Speaker
If you've never played Ark Nova, I still think this is a worthy contender. Yeah, it's an excellent engine builder kind of game. And I've played Ark Nova once.
00:12:13
Speaker
I like it. I like the mechanisms of it. I like this maybe even more. It is simpler, and it does... I think it really, really works. Yeah. So, Matthias Viga, same designer as Ark Nova, Capstone Games. It is available, I think it's $50 MSRP.
00:12:33
Speaker
That may have been a special convention price, maybe it's $60. I don't know. You'll go on the internet and they will tell you how much it costs. Right. but But definitely in that big box... Yeah.
00:12:46
Speaker
game in price range, so we're not talking about, you know, Arkanova the card game. No, this is not nothing like that. I imagine that we'll eventually get an Arkanova the card game, and probably an Arkanova the dice game, and maybe an Arkanova the card game of the dice game. I mean, I love the zoo theme so much, I will play every single one of those. But bring back the bears.
00:13:04
Speaker
Yeah, bears would be nice. Yeah, justice for coiler bear exhibit. Okay, ah what else do want to talk about? Ah, whew, um... Great question.
00:13:16
Speaker
I would
New Hobbit Roll-and-Write Game
00:13:17
Speaker
say... want to talk about the new Reiner Knizia game we played, Hobbit game that we played today. What was that called? Okay, we can talk about it. I don't have nice things to say, so you should go first.
00:13:29
Speaker
I have nice things to say. I like Pathfinder games. i like... ah It is a Pathfinder game. It's a game where... you will be it's like a roll and write network yeah route connection kind of exactly you'll be rolling they there are patterns of different roads that and then you would draw them on your board to try to get all of your dwarves are they dwarves they were dwarves we were playing the first chapter so you're trying to get the dwarves to bilbo's house which is like i guess a theme Yeah. And you have to have enough bread for them, because famously that first chapter is all about bread.
00:14:06
Speaker
a lot of bread and in the first chapter of of The Hobbit. But anyway, yeah, you know, so whatever, fine. You're drawing paths between figures. But you liked it, so tell me more. liked it. i liked it. I think it's...
00:14:19
Speaker
Neat. That push and pull with the bread is interesting because the bread operates on a ah sort of fixed pattern where it's it repeats. so well Well, you need to get bread. You can get bread by rolling bread and drafting it from the dice because you roll five dice, you draft one of them, it goes around the table, everybody drafts one. If path one of your dwarves over a bread space on the board, then you get the bread. You also get bread.
00:14:43
Speaker
you You need... all the dwarves to come home to end this particular game. And for every dwarf that you give bread to as well, you get even more points. The bread is like a scoring modifier.
00:14:55
Speaker
um and And then there's also swords. And if you get a bunch of swords, you also get points. And then Thorin and Gandalf are also around, and they give you even more points if you get them home, but they like more bread.
00:15:06
Speaker
I got them home just fine. I thought it was, I was pretty proud of that. So, yeah, you're drawing these paths, you know, the the straight line, the the cross, the T, the junctions, whatever.
00:15:18
Speaker
i Again, you liked it. I did like it. I thought I got played. That's too bad, because I liked it. Well, listen, it's only about $30 or $35, so even you could afford it It's true. and No, you know, look, my my issue with it is is twofold. One, I'm not.
00:15:37
Speaker
one I've played a million of these Path and Games before. yeah There are better ones. I don't know why this is better than Railroad Inc. It's just fine. i i would have played Karuba five times over playing this once. um I just... I don't i don't i don't get it. and The Lord of the Rings theme isn't doing anything for me here. There are eight chapters. I imagine there's different mechanisms. I do get a little bit of a My City vibe. Like, I get it.
00:16:01
Speaker
It's... but I don't know. Not for me. um and yeah took It's overstayed its welcome. we We weren't halfway through and we had been playing for like a half hour. I mean, um the time kind of flew by ah we were We were playing that for a while. I found it fun. And to be fair...
00:16:17
Speaker
I don't play a lot of board games, so it could be that this concept was more novel to me than it had any right to be, and that you just didn't like it because you had been kind of oversaturated with it. That's reasonable. That's fair. Well, and this is why I always say new games are for new gamers. Right.
00:16:32
Speaker
You're getting this concept, you're getting this play pattern in a new game by a great, right? This is Rander Knizia, in a well-appointed game, right, with a with an IP, a major IP... Yeah. And yeah, that play pattern is great. So from your perspective, it's this is the first time I've seen this and oh, hey, it works.
Appealing to New Players: Familiar Mechanics, Fresh Experiences
00:16:55
Speaker
Right. Right. This kind of network building, this kind of dice drafting works. Whereas having seen it many times before, I'm like, it's not better than many others. It's not different enough than many others. And so, um you know, and and I didn't I didn't have the time for it. Yeah, but if it's your first experience with the genre, you're probably going to end up cherishing it even when you play worse ones. All right, so ah last one. Last one before we have to get out. This is by a designer you I'm almost certain have never heard of.
Introducing Mandu Thing: Creative Communication Challenges
00:17:24
Speaker
It's their first game. um and oh I know which one you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, I'm reaching into my bag to try and pull it because I don't remember the... It's called Mandu Thing. Mandu Thing from Brahm.
00:17:37
Speaker
brahm Uri Brom. Uri Brom. Man do thing. Person do thing, not man. oh it's person. I can't believe you're... Cisgendered ridiculousness. um Person do thing. And it's one of these games where you need to make a person guess a word. It's like taboo. But instead of you not being allowed to say some set of words, you can only say some set of words. It's the inverse taboo. Right. So I had to make people guess fan, and I you know could only choose from about 10 or 12 words that I was allowed to say. So I had to be like... um
00:18:13
Speaker
person same happy person same happy right right person person person same happy right yeah they kept trying to guess and you can say i was allowed to say yes or no on that card so i was able to encourage them and respond to questions but it was it was great and that you know any of these like caveman talkie style games i think it distilled it down and what was so cool about it was the story that he told where he was like i was in thailand um and i was trying to express myself and order stuff at a restaurant And this is what I sounded like. And I realized there was a game in here.
00:18:42
Speaker
So we're here. Thanks for being with us on this episode of We Got Played Away Games. And we'll see you next time. See you then. Bye-bye.