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Episode 7 - All Sons Would Rather Play Fortnite
80 Plays2 years ago
The Dads discuss several games they have gotten to the table recently, including Marvel Dice Throne, Return to Dark Tower, Battleship Classic, and others.
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Transcript
Introduction to Dice Dads
00:00:22
Speaker
Hello, it's July 30th, 2022, and you're listening to another episode of Dice Dads, the tabletop gaming podcast that focuses on the parent gamer and the challenges that we all face, juggling the hobby we love and the responsibilities of work and family. My name is Josh Fry, and with me, as always, is my co-host Chad Scott. Chad, how are you today? I'm doing all right, how are you? Pretty good. We just spent some time having to get our audio issues all locked down, and now we're all set and ready to go, and I'm excited about that.
00:00:52
Speaker
And I can hear you're clicking in the background. Let me turn it off then. You don't like my clicks? That's all right. It's not that bad. Well, the microphone picks up everything like you said. I'll just sit here like this. So what should we talk about? Let's take a station break. Station break. Yeah. OK, we're back. We'll be back till we will be back at 6 30 in the morning with cartoons.
00:01:21
Speaker
I love cartoons. I still like watching cartoons. I like watching cartoons as well, although you have to be careful. Some of them are not appropriate for kids anymore. Nope. Some of them are appropriate for adults, can't they? So what have we been up to? What have you been doing? What have I been doing? I have been doing a lot of things, but I'm happy to say I have gotten to get a few games to the table.
Marvel Dice Throne First Impressions
00:01:52
Speaker
Well that's good. So a couple of weeks ago I got in my copy of Marvel Dice Masters that I had kickstarted a while back. Hey everybody, Josh in the editing booth here. For some reason here I refer to the game that we're talking about as Marvel Dice Masters. I don't know why I did that. It's Marvel Dice Throne we're talking about. Anyway, back to the insanity. I've been looking forward to getting that open. Is that a remake of like the old one that was out?
00:02:19
Speaker
It is. Well, it's essentially so the game started with several two-player combat packs. You could buy an individual box that had two characters in it and it was kind of a head-to-head. I've heard several people refer to it as a battle Yahtzee game, which is pretty appropriate. You use the Yahtzee mechanics.
00:02:39
Speaker
and your character has different attacks that are set up against the different die rolls that you could possibly make. So you might have an attack that is a particular set of die faces. You might have one that does more damage. There's some attacks that are a short straight and some that are a long straight, and then you have one mega attack that's basically rolling Yahtzee.
00:03:05
Speaker
The mechanics are very reminiscent to the original game of Yahtzee, but it's packaged up in a fun battle game that's easy to learn. And even if you haven't played Yahtzee, it's still the kind of game where you figure it out pretty quickly. And so I had picked up the Season 1 box set, which is like, I think it's six characters in one box, the first six characters that they released.
00:03:28
Speaker
and I had picked that up at a board game flea market a couple of years ago I think is when I went down to board game geek in Dallas Texas and I played that with my son Matthew a few times and that was a lot of fun the characters are
00:03:45
Speaker
kind of generic tropes there's a paladin and there's a monk and a pyromancer and things like that so anyway so the the new marvel edition that they put out is basically this it's the same thing but it's with the marvel characters so marvel license right
00:04:02
Speaker
Right, so the big Kickstarter box, the season box I guess is the right terminology for that, has eight different characters in it and you know they play very reminiscent to any of the other dice thrown experiences you might have had but with the Marvel spin on it they've added some
00:04:25
Speaker
I haven't played all the characters by any means, but in looking at them I can see where they've added some new approaches to the mechanics and have added some additional twists to the rules that weren't there previously just to give people who are looking for something new out of that experience to try something a little bit different.
Exploring Marvel Dice Throne Mechanics
00:04:47
Speaker
So that was pretty interesting. We broke that out last week and played several games with, I think we started with, it's Miles Morales Spider-Man is the Spider-Man that is in the box. And then we started with him and with Captain Marvel and played several games of that. And that was a lot of fun. And then they were two of the easier characters. They all have a
00:05:13
Speaker
complexity ratings so you can kind of get a sense for what you're getting into and then after we played those several times and got comfortable with them we moved up to Loki and Black Widow which were more
00:05:26
Speaker
uh or they were higher on the complexity rating um because they have some twist to the things that they do it's it's less of a direct punch the other guy in the face approach and and more of a uh you're you're building for your subsequent turns you know like um black widow's abilities or that she's trying to get all of her
00:05:48
Speaker
combat abilities juiced up as quickly as possible and then she throws little time bombs at the other person that over the course of two rounds count down and then explode so it's kind of interesting but I had a good time with that one it's a lot of fun and particularly if you're interested with with the Marvel license that does not disappoint so that has been a fun one to get to the table
00:06:12
Speaker
Let's go. Yeah, the Marvel, you know, theme goes a long ways a lot of time. And Marvel's always a pretty good one. Yeah, I'm excited. In my opinion. Yeah, for sure. I'm excited to see what they they do moving forward with that. I would assume that the eight characters that they released with the season box is probably not the last
00:06:33
Speaker
characters we'll see in that. I know they've continued to steadily release other things for the game that were outside the Marvel IP before they did that, so I'm guessing they will continue to do so, but I'd be real surprised if they didn't tack on a few more Marvel characters. And I know just here recently they ran another Kickstarter
00:06:54
Speaker
around about the time that they probably got the last of those campaign boxes out and fulfilled. They opened up a new campaign that's going to fulfill around the holidays and it was Santa versus Krampus in a combat box.
00:07:12
Speaker
Yeah, so you have the opportunity to have Santa beat up on the other Christmas icon. What's Santa do? Spread good cheer? Well, so I was looking a little bit at their campaign and noticed that they had some of the cards out there and they
00:07:33
Speaker
I'm trying to remember what the names of some of them were, but they had used things like Christmas cheer that he was, you know, doling out on the other guy. And there were some sad toys and stuff that they were getting thrown around at each other. They were making liberal use of Christmas iconography. But, uh, obstacle and whatever. It looked, uh, fun. Pretty excellent. Fun, fun, fun. We don't really celebrate the Krampus in our house.
00:08:03
Speaker
Yeah, he's not really anything that we really had growing up. That's kind of a recent thing that we became aware of as he kind of entered popular culture within the last five or six years, right? Been around forever, but not here. Yeah, it's more of a German thing. So yeah, Santa's abilities include things like, trim your tree, and fireside chat, and naughty or nice.
00:08:31
Speaker
And the Krampus's abilities are things like scavenge and bad tidings and spoils. So that's fun. Boils? Yeah, it has some sad looking toys that look like they're tearing open presents. Hmm. I don't know. That one didn't... Santa and Krampus didn't really draw me in. I'd rather have superheroes or something. Right. Well, it's definitely trying to take advantage of
00:08:58
Speaker
the fact that they're going to drop it in December of this year. That's fair. According to their estimated delivery, they're looking to take advantage of the Christmas season. And so they are putting this out as a relatively inexpensive next project. So that'll be interesting to see how that does.
00:09:21
Speaker
There's also a Dice Throne Adventures expansion, I guess you would call it. It's another boxed set game that allows you to play the characters from all the previous games, and the subsequent ones for that matter, in more of a campaign style approach where rather than it just being one head-to-head
00:09:43
Speaker
One versus one combat, you play through several enemies and then have to fight a big boss at the end. That's kind of interesting that they added that just to give you more of an experience that's not just the one-off combat between two players. I haven't had a chance to try that one out yet, but it looks interesting. Cool, cool.
Nemeji Gameplay Overview
00:10:24
Speaker
What else you got? Well, you played the boat game with me. The bug game? Boat. Boat game. Oh, yeah, the boat game. Oh, yeah, that's right. We played the game in Nemeji with Douglas, didn't we? Yep. I pretty much dominated, so I feel like I'm pro. You were very pro at that game. So Nemeji is the successor to the game Takedo, which is the more well known. I'd never heard of Nemeji until we sat down to play it.
00:10:54
Speaker
Same here, Douglas had talked about it a few times with me, but yeah, I'd never really followed up on it till he brought it that night. So in Nomeji, you are, what, Japanese fishing boats, and you move around making decisions as to what you're gonna fish for, collecting different types of fish, and capturing opportunities to improve your equipment,
00:11:22
Speaker
Well, from what I remember, you're going through the timeline, essentially, which I think you can travel around the islands or the archipelago or whatever the correct term is, but you're going down that timeline and you're collecting panoramas is one way to get points by taking pictures of whales and octopus and dolphins. You can visit the magic rocks and get skill ups.
00:11:48
Speaker
And then you had the little paper goat, not goats, boats. I don't remember goats in that game. Especially paper ones. Yeah, you could launch the small paper boats in remembrance. And that was a way to get rid of negative points that you started the game with. So it was kind of an interesting. There were several different ways to get points collected in the game. And ultimately, that's what you were trying to do is be the person with the highest total point value at the end of the game.
00:12:18
Speaker
What's there was crawfish gambling you could grand belong crawfish right which was kind of had a Pressure pressure luck mechanic where you could continue trying to capture them, but you would strike out if you went too far I never managed to capture anything. I always
00:12:38
Speaker
I thought that was an interesting game. It was certainly an interesting theme, not one I necessarily would have picked up on purpose or gotten super excited about, but once we started playing it, I really enjoyed it.
00:12:55
Speaker
And the graphic design to the game is really different. It's, again, much like Takeido, takes a lot of its cues graphically from that game. But it was a very interesting experience, and I would definitely play that one again, I think, if we had the opportunity.
00:13:14
Speaker
Mm hmm. This is a fun game. Well, we'll do another game night and maybe Douglas will bring it again. I think the other games I played in our was just with my with my son. We played Yeti and my spaghetti, which is a plastic.
00:13:29
Speaker
I don't know Yeti in my spaghetti. You're going to have to tell me. Yeti spaghetti. It's I guess a dexterity game is what you call it where you put a bowl and you put a bunch of sticks of spaghetti. You lay them across the bowl and then you put a little plastic Yeti on it and you take turns pulling out spaghetti until the Yeti falls into the bowl.
00:13:53
Speaker
So if you're the one who pulls this the noodle that makes the yeti fall in you lose That sounds vaguely reminiscent of the old kerplunk game. Am I right?
00:14:05
Speaker
Yeah, same type of thing. You got because yeah, kerplunk was sticks with a marble or something, right? Yeah, there was a set of a number of marbles you had on top of the interweaving of sticks that went through the cylinder, if I remember right, is what it was. And then as you pulled the sticks out, the gaps between the sticks got bigger and you were trying to avoid having the marbles run through and fall to the bottom of the cylinder. Mm hmm. Same type thing. Except with more yetis, it sounds like.
00:14:34
Speaker
Yep. And spaghetti. So we did that. Maybe he wanted to play battleships. We played battleship too. Uh-huh. Just classic battleship? Or did you play one of the many different IP-ed battleships that I know of that target in Walmart?
00:14:51
Speaker
Old-school battleship. We didn't even play what there's the newer ones that are they got some new rules and they're sound kind of cool But I never got them. Hmm. I think they're like battleship galaxies or something. There's something in space Oh, yeah, there's a there is a version that I have seen called battleship galaxies I don't really know anything about it in terms of what makes it different but it does have a space theme to it and
00:15:15
Speaker
It's got a space theme and I believe you can when you do hits it like targets part of the ship you know like you hit the the the hull or one of the sides or something and it has certain effects but I don't I'd like to I've never played I don't know any but it has it so I don't know everything about it I'm totally wounded here I could be way off so don't don't roast me bro
00:15:42
Speaker
Looking at BoardGameGeek, it says that Battleship Galaxies was published in 2011, and it is a space combat miniatures game that is a distant cousin to the original battleship game, where two opposing forces, the human intergalactic space navy and the alien retro-dair-ian retro-iridians,
00:16:04
Speaker
are represented by 20 starship miniatures. These are figures for several different ship types and each has an individual reference card that defines the characteristics of its weapons, movement, shields, etc. The game is scenario driven and each scenario defines the goal of the game as well as the initial setup on the hex board. Yeah, it sounded interesting. I just, like I said, I just never had the opportunity to check it out. So it sounds like they took the basic concept of tracking your hits on the ships with pegs
00:16:32
Speaker
and expanded the game itself to be a little more than the stationary map that you start with. This looks like it has more of a hex board to it where you can I guess move
00:16:46
Speaker
ships around from the looks of things the minis certainly aren't bolted down so it would seem that you potentially get to move them around and there's no the board is common knowledge amongst the players there's no separation so there must be some other approach to how you attack the other players ships because it would seem like you know exactly where they are if you can see the board
00:17:11
Speaker
Yeah, if you're playing with my son on Battleship, he knows exactly where your stuff is anyways, because he's peeking around the corner. He likes to make sure that he has perfect knowledge of your map, does he? Absolutely.
Disney Pirates Battleship Purchase
00:17:24
Speaker
That's excellent. Yep. Well, when I took my family to Walt Disney World several years ago, while we were there, I was
00:17:37
Speaker
trying to decide what I wanted to get myself as a souvenir. The kids of course found 30 different things that they all wanted to take home, but I hadn't found anything for myself until I
00:17:51
Speaker
began to notice that there were several re-themed classic games in some of the shops that were Disney themed and I had run across several that I had seen and different stores seem to have different copy or different
00:18:11
Speaker
titles, but when we were over in the Pirates of the Caribbean area in their gift shop, they had a battleship that was Pirates of the Caribbean themed. And I guess that's not commonly available outside of getting them in the the park gift shop. Yeah, I'd never seen it. Solution there. I think you can order them online, but you have to order it through the through the park the way that you do Disney. And so I went ahead and picked that up. I'm not a
00:18:40
Speaker
I don't have a huge love for Battleship necessarily, but I thought that was kind of an interesting take on it. And it looked like they had also punched up the original concept of Battleship. It looked like there was some extra concepts to the rules beyond just the classic game there. But I haven't had a chance to play it yet. It's sat on my shelf since we brought it home, and I haven't had an opportunity to bust it open yet.
00:19:05
Speaker
Yeah, other than that, I forgot, he really got into Forbidden Island for a little while.
Playing Forbidden Island with Family
00:19:11
Speaker
Oh, Forbidden Island. All right. So we played that one a few times. He was into it and tried to teach it to mom, but he enjoyed that one. Now, that's a great one because you can teach it to somebody very easily since it's a cooperative game. You can just kind of have everybody jump in and as long as some as long as at least one player has played it before and knows what's going on, you can kind of teach it as you go, which is kind of kind of a bonus to that.
00:19:36
Speaker
Right. Now, how successful were you at playing for Benton Island? Because I know my win-loss ratio on that is far more losses than wins. I think we're three, you know. Really? Yeah, we get really close once to getting, I guess, drowned.
00:19:56
Speaker
Um, it was like, if we, if we didn't win this turn, we would have, we wouldn't have made it. And we, we did, we made it just by that last turn. I mean, we, obviously we started on the easy level. We slowly moved it up, but, um, but yeah, we've made it every time so far, but you know, as we move it up, it's going to get harder and harder and it's going to bite us here eventually.
00:20:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's proof that it was a fairly well-designed cooperative game that every time I have played it, I've also had that experience that we just eked it out at the last minute. Unless you're playing it wrong, there's not likely to be an outcome where you just run away with the game. It always seems like you're on the verge of losing and you narrowly grab ahold of the wind at the last minute, which makes it more exciting, I think.
00:20:43
Speaker
I mean, a lot of it depends on how the cars fall. If the islands where the stuff is are the ones that are drowning, you know what I'm saying, where the artifacts or whatever, you know, the lion idol, you know, if those are going down fast, or heaven forbid, the launch pad, because you have to have that at the end of the game, right? If that's the first one to sink, okay, well, the game is over right out of the chute.
00:21:08
Speaker
That's what happened the first time I played it was the helicopter pad was one of the first locations to get sunk. And so it made it super difficult. Yep. Yeah. So some of it is luck in the draw. And we were fortunate enough that those islands would come up, but they were further down in the deck.
00:21:31
Speaker
which helped us out a lot. There's definitely a lot of variability in terms of how quickly the game ratchets up based on the order that exists in the stack of sections. Yep, and then of course he's got his favorite profession. He always wants to be the helicopter pilot, that way he can get whatever he wants. Right.
00:21:53
Speaker
Yeah, it was nice to be the pilot, because you could jump around from tile to tile. Yep. So a while back, I picked up the thematic sequel to that game, Forbidden Desert, which is similar. You're not drowning, obviously, because you're in the desert. Yeah. But I haven't had a chance to play it yet, and I hear that
00:22:18
Speaker
Each game in that series, there's Forbidden Island and then Forbidden Desert and then Forbidden Sky is the third one.
00:22:27
Speaker
and I've heard several people comment that they get more difficult as you go and so they kind of have a similar approach mechanics wise but each game gets a little tougher to beat so I'm curious to see if that's true. So in Forbidden Desert you are adventurers who
00:22:49
Speaker
are trying to survive the blistering heat and the blustering sand in order to recover a legendary flying machine buried under an ancient desert city.
00:22:59
Speaker
It has cooperative gameplay similar to Forbidden Island, but is a fresh new game based around an innovative set of mechanisms, such as an ever shifting board, individual resource management, and a unique method of locating the flying machine parts. So that would be interesting if the sections moved around. That's not something that happens in Forbidden Island.
00:23:23
Speaker
And the forbidden sky from the looks of the box cover. I haven't seen anything more than that on that one, but it appears to have something to do with the floating city of some kind. So it's kind of an interesting theme. Cool beans.
00:23:52
Speaker
I was thinking about making him play Heroes of the Multiverse next or something like that. See how he does with that one. Sentinels of the Multiverse. Sentinels of the Multiverse, yeah. Sentinels of the Multiverse. Oh, I think he would like that very much.
Sentinels of the Multiverse Experience
00:24:06
Speaker
I have not played that with any of my children yet, but I've gotten that out several times with some of our friends who play board games.
00:24:16
Speaker
it plays really easily. And there's certainly a lot of different approaches with the different characters and the different decks that go along with them. I have several boxes of that and have played it several times and haven't even scratched the surface on the different combinations that you can put together for that. I've just got the basic one, but still, there's plenty in there to play. For sure.
00:24:44
Speaker
But we may have to give that one a try before too long, see if he's into it. Yeah, now that's another one that's nice because it's a cooperative game, so you don't have to feel like you're necessarily trying to... Right. ...outdo each other. You can kind of work together to beat whatever the villain character is. Mm-hmm. I tend to prefer the co-op games. They're more fun. I had to play Pandemic with me once upon a time, you know, when the whole COVID thing hit. We had to play Pandemic just like everybody else, right?
00:25:14
Speaker
Sure. Pandemic was a little hard to find there for a while in stores because of that reason. I think everybody was going out and checking out this game that had to have been created based on recent events, right? Never mind that it was published several years before that. Right. Ten years ago or whatever it was. Did not have anything necessarily to do with COVID, but yeah, it got really popular there for a while. In fact, I remember seeing a
00:25:40
Speaker
at the height of the shutdown when everybody was trying to figure out how long that was going to last I saw a
00:25:47
Speaker
news story where they were interviewing Matt Leacock, the designer of the game. And they were kind of asking him what his design approach was to it. And you could tell that they were looking for him to say, oh, well, with this oncoming COVID thing, I put this game together. And that's really not how that that's not the genesis for that game, right? It's just that it didn't have mass visibility up until all that happened. So it's kind of funny.
00:26:16
Speaker
Yeah, I remember we played. I think we were one and one. We had one where it just went, you know, spirals out of control. And the other one, we were just able to stay on top of it and got everything taken care of. But that was a hard time with the game.
00:26:31
Speaker
Yeah, well, yeah, that's a that's a very challenging game. And it's I was just going to say, that's another one, much like Forbidden Island, where there are the characters that you play in the game have different unique player powers. And there are a few that are a lot more useful than others that you're almost it's almost detrimental to your success if you don't play with some of them. It's the medic and that's the one he like to play. Yeah, right.
00:26:56
Speaker
So he was the medic and I said, okay, fine. You just go around, you clean up cubes. That's your job. I'll take care of everything else. Yeah. It seemed like if you didn't have the medic at the very least amongst the players that you played with or the characters rather that you played with, it made it a lot harder.
00:27:13
Speaker
Uh-huh. Yeah, the one that I forgot the class, the job class, whatever, where you can send cards around other people real easy, because you know, it's a lot of, you got to get four, you know, yellow ones to, to cure a disease, right? Or whatever it is. Yes. Yeah. You have to get sets of cards to be able to cure a disease. So you're trying to work your way.
00:27:36
Speaker
around a different cities and collect those cards and then at some point it becomes a challenge of hand management where you're trying to get all the ones that everybody has amongst themselves into one city, right? So that someone can process that into a vaccine. And yeah, you're right. There's again a character that does that better than the other characters that's handy to have amongst the people that are playing.
00:28:00
Speaker
I have a copy of the one of the spin-off the mini spin-off games that they did for that that's
00:28:08
Speaker
The Reign of Cthulhu, I believe it's called. It's a pandemic with the HP Lovecraft Cthulhu theme on top of it where you have different gates to the dimension where the old ones live that are opening up and you're trying to move around and stomp them down just like the viruses in the original pandemic game.
00:28:31
Speaker
I have heard that that one is particularly difficult. I'm not sure what it adds to the rules, but given that it's a Cthulhu game, that doesn't surprise me. Most of them don't try to make it easy for you as a mere human to beat the great old ones. No, I was going to say they want our overlord to win and they want to prepare you for that day. That's all it is. It's training. That's right.
00:28:58
Speaker
I'm kind of a sucker when it comes to Cthulhu games. I own several that I have not played simply because I couldn't say no when I saw to come along. So I have to give that a try one of these days.
00:29:09
Speaker
Do you have the Arkham Horrors? I do have I have the second edition of Arkham Horror, and I think I have one of the expansions and that one had a lot of expansions. Have you played them?
Strategy in Arkham Horror
00:29:22
Speaker
I certainly don't claim to have the bulk of that, but I have played the base game and it was it's fun, but it's you have to settle in with the right group of people. It's kind of an all afternoon experience. It's a it's a few hours.
00:29:37
Speaker
And much like a lot of cooperative games, if you're kind of goofing around and not paying attention to what you're doing, it's real easy for the evil to get the better of you and run off with the game.
00:29:49
Speaker
Well then I probably shouldn't play. That was my experience was that about the time we all collectively figured out what we were supposed to be doing, we were about ready to get wiped off the map by the minions of Cthulhu. So it's definitely a little unforgiving. There's also a game that has come out since that is
00:30:10
Speaker
called Eldritch Horror, and it takes the basic premise of Arkham Horror and reduces it down to a slightly more streamlined approach. And I have not had a chance to play that one yet, but I hear good things about it because it kind of gives you the same general feeling of Arkham Horror, but in a much shorter amount of time. And it allows you to put boundaries around the game so that it doesn't get too long.
00:30:40
Speaker
So that one seems interesting. I also, not long ago, just picked up. And this is, you'll notice there's a running theme here. I keep mentioning games that I have picked up. This is where we talk about my acquisition disorder that I have.
00:30:56
Speaker
Yep, Junkie. Board Game Junkie. I need to probably be going to meetings at this point. I picked up not long ago the recently released Cthulhu game Unfathomable, which is a reinvention of the game Battlestar Galactica with a Cthulhu theme.
00:31:15
Speaker
Interesting. Did you ever play Battlestar Galactica? I did. In fact, I still have the base game, which is pretty hard to find nowadays. Yeah, imagine. I never got it. I played it, but I never got the game.
00:31:28
Speaker
the base game itself and the expansions go for quite a bit because there's a following out there that is much bigger than the number of copies that physically exist out there and the publisher had long ago lost the rights to continue publishing for Battlestar Galactica because that was an agreement they had through the sci-fi channel when it was part of sci-fi channel and
00:31:56
Speaker
And so that one has long been out of print, but you know, the game itself has you as characters on on the the Battlestar Galactica and one or more of the characters or one or more of the players, I should say, around the table are actually silons in disguise. And so the crux of the game is trying to figure out who's working against the group as you face, you know, challenges that you mutually apply your effort and your resources to.
00:32:25
Speaker
And so as a human, for example, you're trying to legitimately work through those challenges, whereas if you happen to be a Cylon, you are occasionally trying to deep-six the efforts of the group because you're trying to get them to fail so that the Cylons ultimately win. But anyway, Unfathomable is Fantasy Flight's new approach to that same game.
00:32:49
Speaker
and it puts you in the I believe 1920s is the time frame as is most Cthulhu stories and you are on a luxury liner very much like the Titanic that is bound for port but it's out in the middle of the ocean
00:33:08
Speaker
and the deep ones, which are the marine-based Cthulhu entities that are in some of the original Lovecraft stories, are attempting to clamor onto the ship and take it over. And so, when you start the game, some of... you're all passengers aboard this luxury liner, and some people are legitimately passengers, and some people are actually
00:33:34
Speaker
human Deep One hybrids who are actually trying to scuttle the efforts of the group as it tries to keep the ship afloat and bound for port and is trying to bring about the rise of the Deep Ones from the ocean bottom.
00:33:51
Speaker
you know that would of course spell disaster for everybody so I thought it was interesting that they uh took that new thematic approach to a game that obviously has continued to be very popular even though it's been long out of print um if for no other reason then you know that gives people the opportunity to essentially play that game again uh even if the theme is a little bit different uh and at this point you know Battlestar Galactica is probably not the richest of IPs out there since that show hasn't been on for a while but
00:34:19
Speaker
But I'm curious to get a group of people together and try that one out. One more I can think of that we played was over at your house we played Dark Tower
Return to Dark Tower Review
00:34:29
Speaker
2.
00:34:29
Speaker
the Return to Dark Tower. So Return to Dark Tower is the invention of restoration games and it was it was their project to sort of reinvent the original Dark Tower game from the 1980s and give it a fresh new spin and more of a modern day game approach to it. And I had the opportunity to pick that one up and and yeah we had played it a while back. What were your thoughts on that?
00:34:56
Speaker
Well, the original game was not a very good game. It was just cool as a kid because it was a neat toy. But the game was pretty crap, let's be honest. Yeah, as board games in the 1980s goes, it had a big
00:35:12
Speaker
It was flashy. It had a flashy toy effect to it, yes. But the game itself was pretty straightforward and there wasn't a whole lot of player agency to it. You just kind of pushed buttons and waited for it to tell you how many soldiers you lost or warriors, I guess they were. But there wasn't, yeah, there wasn't a whole lot of strategy to the game other than trying to amass enough warriors to be able to continue forward.
00:35:41
Speaker
Yep, yep. But now the new one was obviously way better. The title was still just kind of a flashy piece. I didn't feel like it was, it didn't add a whole lot, but you're mostly just playing the app, you know, because you loaded up on your iPad and you're just playing along the app as you move around the board.
00:35:56
Speaker
Yeah and the app actually maintains the progression of the players through the game so that at the end of every everybody's turn we had to drop a skull in the top of the tower right and that told the system it told the tower which then is bluetooth connected to the to the app that that player was
00:36:16
Speaker
you know, done with their turn. So it allows the game to have a sense of progression from player to player, and it would throw events at you between the player's turns and progressively add more corruption to the kingdoms that surround the tower so that if you didn't stay diligent in keeping all of that cleaned up, it was real easy for it to build to the point where it got the better of you. That was definitely an interesting addition to that game that made it more of a
00:36:45
Speaker
complex game, although it's certainly not a complex game on its own, it added some strategic elements to it that I thought were an interesting addition for sure. Yeah, I enjoyed it. I had fun with it. We had a chance to break that out. My son Matthew and I played that with our
00:37:04
Speaker
friend Chris was over and the three of us played that over here and we also barely squeaked by in beating the bad guy at the end of that one but it was uh that made for a an exciting experience that we just barely squeaked out of the end of the game. I don't recall if the game that you and I played if we won that one or lost it. We won but I think we cheated.
00:37:30
Speaker
That's right. I think we got down to the very end and then something happened and we would have lost if we had stuck to the letter of the law, but we let that. Right. I think I traded more like I traded more cards than I should or something like. Right. Right. I'm remembering that now. I don't think we, I think we cheated a little without knowing, you know, but yeah, if we hadn't, we probably would have got squished.
00:37:54
Speaker
And now I have the expansion to that one, alliances that add several new elements that we haven't touched yet. I'm curious to crack that out and see what that does to change the game. I know it adds at least one more resource element in addition to the spirit and the warriors that you're collecting. So I'm curious to see how that plays into the overall gameplay. I also saw
00:38:20
Speaker
just as of last week that Restoration Games started a crowdfunding campaign out on the new BackerKit platform. BackerKit has long been a pledge manager solution for other crowdfunding campaigns that have been done on Kickstarter.
00:38:39
Speaker
and have come into their own by creating a crowdfunding platform of their own, which I'm sure is meant to offer developers the opportunity to crowdfund somewhere other than Kickstarter.
00:38:58
Speaker
In some of the information I read about that, the long-standing relationship that Restoration Games has had with BackerKit in using them as their pledge management solution for their previous campaigns, they opted to do this new campaign for
00:39:17
Speaker
return to dark tower on the new backer kit platform and so i was looking at that just the other day and they have released the original game again because it has been very hard to come by since the original kickstarter campaign and so for those folks out there that want to
00:39:37
Speaker
that missed the first Kickstarter campaign and would like the opportunity to get the original game and its expansions and things like the fancy printed game mat and things of that nature that you can't necessarily buy at retail. This gives them the chance to get that again but principally the new campaign is centered around another expansion box that adds four more characters and then presumably
00:40:02
Speaker
a dearth of new villains to fight and monsters and things of that nature just to give you more to cycle into the game to give you some fresh new opportunities if maybe you've
00:40:17
Speaker
I can't imagine anybody has played that game enough times that they've cycled through all the different variability between the monsters and the quests and the bosses and everything else that the original game had in it. But certainly if you're starting to work your way through that and needing a fresh new take on it, it looks like this new expansion out on Backkit may offer that for the game. So that should be interesting to see where that goes.
00:40:47
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So that about wraps up what we have been playing recently. I appreciate your time today, Chad, talking about some games that we've played, and I look forward to getting some new ones to the game table with you soon. Yeah, I'll be doing another gaming night up at the store this month.
00:41:08
Speaker
Excellent. Well, I look forward to that. Hopefully we'll be able to start building up a group of players who are excited to come out regularly and we can add that to our repertoire of opportunities to get some games to the table.
00:41:25
Speaker
Right, because my son would rather play Fortnite. All sons would rather play Fortnite. Yes.
Episode Wrap-Up and Contact Info
00:41:34
Speaker
All right, well that wraps up this episode of Dice Dads. We'd like to thank you for listening to our podcast and we hope you'll come back for more soon. You can connect with us by emailing us at dicedads at salamandergames.com.
00:41:47
Speaker
You can also find us at Twitter and Facebook at Dice Dads. And you can find us on the interwebs at www.dicedads.com. Our board game geek guild is number 3395, and we invite you to come join in deeper discussions about the topics found on the podcast and all sorts of other things. Chad, do you have any final thoughts for everybody out there? Final thoughts? I mean, I'm so unprepared for this. You're just throwing it on me all of a sudden, you know?
00:42:16
Speaker
Um, I mean, right now it's all about, um, stay healthy, stay safe. Watch out for monkey pox and all that good stuff that's floating around right now. So that'd be my advice. Stay healthy, stay safe. Well said. All right. Thanks everybody. Good night. Good night.
00:43:17
Speaker
Did I say dice thrown or did I say dice masters at the beginning of this? I'm hoping I didn't say the wrong one. I think you said dice masters. I think I did too. An idiot. Well that's what I was thinking because that's the old bag one where you bought and you got six dice and a couple cards or something, right? Yeah. I'll re-record the start of that because I'm pretty sure I did say the wrong one. I'm pretty sure you said masters.
00:43:47
Speaker
Dumbass. It's alright. It's almost bedtime. For old people. For young ones like you, you stay up all night. Not anymore, I don't.