Transcript 001

Kellen: Hi guys and welcome to the first ever episode of the Board Game Barrage podcast. Board Game Barrage started as an Instagram account and quickly morphed into a website where we do reviews and previews on games and games that are coming to Kickstarter and sort of just talk about the industry in general. My name is Kellen. If you've ever seen any content on the site from a Red Tank, that is me. I'm excited to be joined tonight by my co-hosts Mark and Neilan. Why don't you guys introduce yourselves and sort of talk about your gaming tastes?

Neilan: Sure, I'm Neilan, hi everyone. If you see anything from the website with an Orange Tank, that's me. My tastes I think lean towards, more sort of like heavy Euro puzzly games. I feel like multiplayer solitaire is something that's often thrown around as a bad word but I'm sort of into them. But also social deduction games I like a lot. Yeah. Mark?

Mark: If you see anything on the website from the Green Tank that's me. I consider myself sort of an omni-gamer, I'll play anything. Anything from real light easy to explain and play party games to really heavy Euros or economic games or Splotters and stuff like that so I can play, I'm happy to play, sort of anything in the spectrum.

Kellen: Cool. And I am mostly a social gamer I woulld say. I think I see games as sort of a social construct or a way to explore your friends and your relationship with them. That doesn't mean just social deduction games but it means games that are highly interactive sort of the opposite of multiplayer solitaie; If I wanted to do a spreadsheet I'd do it at work. So, why don't we go ahead and get started talking about some games that we've been playing recently. I'll just get us started with a new social deduction game that I've been really enjoying recently called When I Dream. When I Dream is a game where one player has a sleep mask on. So the game actually comes with a sleep mask and you put that on and everyone at the table is trying to get you to guess the word; Let's say the word is "forest". You'll go around the table and everyone will be giving one word clues to try to direct you towards that word, "forest". So you might hear, "trees", "green", "land" or what have you and you get to make one guess and if you're wrong you move on and if you're right you get that right. That may sound really pedestrian but what actually makes the game so great is that half the table is trying to get you to guess the word wrong, half the table is trying to get you to guess the word right and then some portion is actually trying to flip back and forth for you to guess it right and wrong. So you can imaging what that feels like; You have this sleep mask ...

Mark: It feels very, very bad.

Kellen: Confusing?

Neilan: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Neilan: One of my favourite memories of when we played this most recently is. So there's a table of like 6 or 7 of us and I think the word is something like "toast" and we just got into this great segment, the three of us, of like "appliance", "electrical", "power tools" ... It's like, it worked and it was amazing.

Kellen: Yeah, essentially what happens is someone will give the clue "live", the next person will give the clue "dead" and then everyone will start laughing and you also get points at the end of the round if you can recount your dream and all the words that you guess which I think is impossible?

Mark: I am with you there. I could not believe the first time we played it, you started us off and you recounted your dream, you got got all your words back, right? And I was just thinking this is gonna be something ... (Neilan: We can do this.) ... Yeah, and it came to me and every other person either totally gave up on it or or wasn't anywhere close. But yeah.

Kellen: Yeah, it's a neat game. I think it's a bit over produced. I think, I don't know if it's up there with the heavyweights in that genre like A Fake Artist Goes to New York for me or even Spyfall, which I know you don't like ...

Neilan: I'm note a huge fan of that but I would do When I Dream again. I liked it.

Mark: Yeah, I think it offers something different. I think there's something to it that's different than the other games, like you said, in the genre.

Kellen Yeah, so that's When I Dream, I would definitely check that out.

Neilan: Let's talk about Charterstone. We've all been playing this together recently, we're just past the halfway mark through the campaign. So to give some context for this; This is Jamie Stegmaier's new legacy game. It's a worker placement game which is pretty unusual for the legacy genre at least. The idea being that you are, as a group, placing buildings on the board which are going to be the worker placement spots. They're going to evolve over the course of the campaign so by the time you get to around game six or seven you've built a completely different board from, like, any other group that's played that game effectively. I feel like we're, for the most part, pretty positive on the experience so far with maybe some exceptions?

Mark: Yeah, actually, it's funny like I was really excited about it when I was first announced. I was sort of swept up in the whole legacy thing It's a relatively new type of game. So you can imagine all these like, magical places, you think it'll take you. So I was going on with really high hopes and then when it started being released and the early reviews came out, they seemed sort of lukewarm and I got lukewarm about it and wasn't so sure I wanted to play it. And then you brought it out, invited me to play, and I've been really pleasantly surprised. I think the best thing for me about it, or the thing I like the most, is it's a solid game, a solid worker placement game, and there's the legacy component where you can change things but also the quickness of the games.

Neilan: Right, I will say, I feel that's gone away a little bit as we've gone further and further. We were all surprised at how quick it was playing early on whereas we get to the point now where we play one game of it and it's like an hour and a half maybe. Which is maybe slightly too long for the early promise of that I would say. But that's not to say how I haven't been enjoying it. I think it's been a really solid game. The thing I like the most about it; its been funny. It creates funny moments just by the way that ... Little design decisions like having you name cards, that keeps recurring and things like that. It's a conversation, sort of fun group, friend game.

Kellen: Let me ask you this guys; Have you ever bought a new game, opened the rule book and thought, "I'd love to have a sticker for every paragraph in the rule book!" Instead of just getting to read it you have to actually assemble the rule book because if so, please check out Charterstone.

Mark: I feel like that's sort of something kind of maybe need to have in a legacy game? Because I feel like part of the fun of legacy games is unlocking different rules or different types of pieces or different mechanisms and if you have them all laid out in the rule book beforehand, you'd read up about them and then it would take away some of that.

Kellen: We are six or seven games in and definitely enjoying it but I think we're still discovering little rules ambiguities that Neilan has said over and over again, that he told us, but half the table is unclear about.

Mark: I am with you there and I think that's part of the whole unlocking the rules thing. I think it's part and parcel of that.

Kellen: He's also never shown us the rulebook.

Neilan: Yeah, just trust me guys. I think I'm somewhere between the two of you where I think there was definitely that first game, up front, "Oh hey, sticker. Oh hey, sticker," where we felt like we were placing stickers more than we were playing the game but that's dissipated a lot as we've gotten further.

Mark: Alright. So my game, I'm going to start off with, surprisingly, my most played game of the new year, which is the Bob Ross: Art of Chill ...

Nielan: I've played it once.

Mark: Yeah, Neilan played it with me once.

Kellen: When did you guys play this without me?

Mark: You were were not invited to that. That was one of our secret game nights. It's a mass-market game, you can buy it at Target. I bought at Target. I think it's only available at Target actually.

Kellen: Please visit target.com.

Mark: Yes, that's right! So it's a simple set collection, hand management ... it's very much like Ticket to Ride in the way that you assemble a hand of cards that you draw from an array and using it to complete ... Whereas in Ticket to Ride you complete routes in Bob Ross you're completing aspects of a painting. It's a really simple game that I've played a lot with family and friends that I've hung out with recently. It's a really simple game to teach, you can tell it's very lovingly produced. I feel like you could have slapped the Bob Ross name and image on a lot of sub-par games and cashed in. And I feel like this game, this is like an actual game, there's not not enough meat maybe to satisfy a "gamer" but there's enough in there that; I've played it a bunch of times, have had fun and I think people have said it evokes nostalgia - which isn't the case for me, actually. I've never seen an episode. It's funny, I just played this again yesterday and I noticed that it was Bob Ross shows on Netflix. So I put it on and it was amazing.

Kellen: When was that even on?

Mark: I don't know.

Neilan: I feel like everyone, here at least, talks about it all the time.

Mark: I think the afro would point to late 70s. I think that's worth thinking about.

Neilan: I will say I'm a little bit weird about this because I don't like Ticket to Ride and it feels like a worse version of Ticket to Ride to me.

Mark: I think that's true.

Neialn: Yeah. So I mean it's a weird for me but yeah it's cute. The production values are really good, the little plastic easel, it's awesome.

Kellen: Alright so we wanted to kind of broadly identify some of our favourite things from 2017, give you guys an example of some of the things that we like and dislike. We all have pretty diverse opinions so I think this could be interesting. I'll go ahead and start things off with a game that we all play together called Battle for Rokugan. It's "Ro-ku-ghan". Took one year of Japanese guys! It was clearly pronounced right. So Battle for Rokugan is a new Fantasy Flight production, that kind of snuck in right before Rising Sun, and then as this area control game set in The Legend of the Five Rings universe, which is a popular card game that Fantasy Flight has also revived this year. It's an area control game that plays in under two hours, sort of loosely based on the Game of Thrones system but simplified and stripped of a lot of the elements. So on each turn, you actually only have these six command tokens that tell you what you can do; like raid an army or bring in a Shinobi or have a sea battle. And what you can do is just choose where the six go on the board and those are all played facedown and then they're all revealed simultaneously and they all happen together. What makes this game so great and so amazing is that there's that tension; I'm setting down a control token and it's pointed at Mark's units, but Mark doesn't know what I'm doing and it literally could be a bluff. And Mark will look at me and say, "Don't you dare or I'll come for you!" and there's a nice interplay there. The game playes quick, the box is really small. I know other reviewers have hit on that but it was kind of surprising when it came. The art is beautiful. So if you like some of these area control games, this one is refreshing in how simple it is. You know, I think the one thing I would say in the negative is there is a little bit more luck than there would be in a game of a similar ilk because you are being told what tokens you have. So you're available move pool is sort of more limited than it is in some other games, but I think ...

Neilan: I was actually gonna say that as a positive it because one of the things I liked about it, specifically, was that element because I feel like games of this type can get overblown with high-level strategy and like, "Oh, this is my plan for the game and I'm gonna double down on this where possible," but it forces you to adapt to a round by round. Oh, this is what I drew. I sort of have to make this work, but I can pretend, to bluff, that I'm still going along with what I was trying to do last round. You have to like adapt and change.

Kellen: It's on my list man. So I still love it.

Neilan: I know, it's interesting that you list that as a negative.

Mark: So far my opinion is dissenting, I think on this one. In the one game we played I definitely had the least favorable reaction to it. I definitely can see this being a result of me just having played at once. But I I'm a little worried that it rewards a defensive posture. The fact that ... (Kellen: Turtling.) Turtling strategy, exactly. I feel like, in a game like that, turtling is an out-of-date way to design a game. This may not be the case with this with Battle for Rokugan, it may just be the way I played it.

Neilan: To be clear, the turtling strategy won out in the game we played but I don't think any of us was convinced that was going to be the case every time I guess?

Kellen: Are you saying you that holing up in Australia is not a valid strategy?

Mark: Right, right, exactly. For me, I feel like games like this, the way to design them now is to force interaction. I went into this game feeling like I was gonna attack or I was just gonna interact, you know, from the get-go and the fact that I was, I think, the person who did it the most or it was my exclusive strategy, really killed me. (Kellen: Attack everyone.) Exactly. Right, without any regard for my own well-being. I could tell about halfway through that I had no chance. That's not even a problem; I don't mind being in a hopeless situation, trying to play as well as I can but I just had bad taste in my mouth worrying that if nobody else went in with me on an aggressive path that it was just ... (Neilan: That you were doomed to lose.) Yeah, exactly.

Neilan: Yeah, my initial impression was extremely positive. I came out of it wanting to play it again, almost right away.

Kellen: I think I agree with your thought, in general, when a game has defenders winning ties, I would prefer the attacker to win the tie cause you're putting yourself out there. Broadly speaking.

Neilan: So like Scythe, your favorite game?

Kellen: Oh my God.

Neilan: Should we move on to another game?

Kellen: Of course.

RESUME 14:51

Neilan: Let's talk about Gloomhaven which, I don't think is unfair to say, is going to be one of the most popular at least most talked about, most desirable games of last year. Kellen, you're the only person who hasn't played it, well of the three of us at least. I love Gloomhaven. So, I came into it, originally with playing a campaign with Mark and it just wasn't invited the thing. That surprised me about because you used to be good proceed under callers from this perspective of, hey, we're gonna go in beer and pretzels,

Someday, she'll from Monsters but it's so mechanically. Solid, like the decisions are so good. You're like, I wish I could use this card in this way, but I have to be positioned over here. I am. Right. Exactly. And how does it affect the next players, really? Yeah, because you sort of, you know, intuitively like these games can get like, bogged down in convoluted mechanics or like how we are worse is not going. So so so describe it to me. It's a mission-based Dungeon Crawler, right? With a card with a chronic cough driven system K1. Be fair to say, That it's not, it's devoid of Randomness because there was a cards deck system put damage. But for the most part, every decision you made is based on like a full hand of cards that you have, which is your classes Cod, right? And you're choosing between two of them and then you can sort of decide the order of the actions of those cards. So, right off the bat you have this wealth of options available to you depending on the class and each of them is position dependent and has different speeds and different it's just right.

And the cool thing about it being based on a card system as opposed to say, for example, die system is that, you know, the dice have no memory. So right, you know you roll and you may roll good in my robe at, but with the card with a card system, you you know, what's in the deck. So, you know, when you've played a bunch of good cards, you know, that, you know, maybe less desirable cars are definitely coming down right now, exactly. You haven't heard of, like, well, I've missed every time up until now nice about it. Yeah, that's gonna be it. Yeah, and when it hits, it's great, right, you know you deserve, sure. Exactly. Exactly. So is this game replacing any other games, like descent, or any of these other sort of dungeon? Games or are you know credit compared often to like more of a video game experience in a more game format? Sure. I mean I think it's I don't know what the term is. Is it like lifestyle game? I don't know. It's just a game where you can look at Dungeons and Dragons sort of thing. You know what I have? Like a group of people you meet every week and you just play it and it's still fun and there's still like things to explore. It's almost exactly the same the same sort of right. Really. I think it gets Loosely described as like being in a box which isn't I don't think entirely Fair because it's certainly not trying to be a role-playing. Encapsulated. But it captures that feeling like you say, like, we're gonna meet up and go to this familiar place, right? Have a new adventure, right? Aesthetic. You don't worry about a dungeon master, right? Making a story up and and, you know, him having to like, adjust on the Fly. That what your adventures do? You've got something as like, you've got a hundred missions or however, many are coming to box, and you've just got, you know, you meet up and you play and you have this overarching story and it's just, yeah. It's like a think. The Indians box does sort of capture the essence. Definitely leave it, at least has brought feel. Yeah.

All right, so I guess it's my turn. I'm going to talk about the thing. I think this subtitles Outpost or what is it, says, infection at our first 31. It's right. Exactly. This is a game that I actually was not expecting to like it all. I was sort of have been. I feel like burnt out on social deduction games. I've never seen the movie, which I thought was probably to be at least somewhat important to to enjoying it. I heard it was a little bit on the longer side but and you know, need it needs a relatively High player count but

The first time you played it, I just thought it like, ratchet it up that tension to like a crescendo perfectly. Like it was, you know, sort of for me its Darkmoon killer, it does the same thing. Yeah, I'm with you. I think it's like it because we can talk about it forces you to like, even if you're one of the good guys, quote-unquote, there's often times where you can't contribute to a mission, the way you'd want to and you just, you know, same thing with dark moon, where you just roll back da,

And you know, even though you like the most good of the good guys, like you just can't contribute and then people started sort of like cast eyes of you wonder if you're really are on the, on the up-and-up in that first game. We I felt like it built up the tension to like again. The crescendo right at the end of the game where there were co-people. I think it was maybe Nealon and I think we're playing with Dan and we weren't sure, which of the two was the Imposter and then at the very end, we sussed it out, were able to escape and it was like, Like, it was just a really palpable excitement, but I wasn't, I wasn't sure because I'm games like that. It can be very like dependent on this session, right yet. Fragile is aware that everyone uses for this because right every game has the potential to break in horrible. Sure. And then and then we replayed again. Callen. Let's enter. Notice that the first time you played it. Yeah. That's the first and only time I played it. Yeah. And Claire. Right. Right. But it was good. I was thing. I don't know what I was. It wasn't bad guy. Yeah. And I won and how did Harassed for lacan. The last car flipped, I think there's a couple things, one, the board is entirely Superfluous. Yes, I really don't need it. True to we had to make a house rule for it before we even started playing it because there's some finicky things about which car did I contribute and trying to pin people down that's her. And then there is sort of this emergent discussion going on right now about whether or not as a hidden traitor, your best move is to pretend to be good for the entire game. The way that the game ends is actually you get on a helicopter. Copter and you escape. But if a hidden traitor, is on that mission than the hidden traitor wins. And they're actually people who legitimately look believe that the best strategy is to do nothing the entire game and then you have almost a 50/50 shot of including a right after where I wonder about, like whether more games or just bear this out, is that, I mean there is a mechanic that is specifically designed against that in that you get more tests against the infected depending on how well you're progressing. So it's like the balance of the infective. Like, do I sabotage early? And yet reduce the number of tests we get at the end.

No, I just lie low and then get risking picked off just on the card draw and I think we had a fantastic game was an eight-player game. I think you know, full complement of people played it at, like, 10:00 p.m. to midnight or had to be fair. It was a fantastic experience, but for best game of 2017 or best included, think one of the one ready that's games. Okay, that's fair. So the next thing we want to do is go around and talk about games that disappointed Us in 2017. Can't I'll be roses and something else lace. Yeah I think it's like they're saying yeah you can go ahead and start you guys. Yeah I'm gonna talk about tiny Epic Quest which wa