Episode 1 transcript

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Introductions

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 solitaire; If I wanted to do a spreadsheet I'd do it at work.

What We've Been Playing

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 imagine 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.

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, well 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. (Kellen: I wasn't invited. No, there was not invitation you can check my ...) Yeah, we loved it. The thing that surprised me about it, because you approach these dungeon crawlers from this perspective of, "Hey, we're gonna go in! Beer and pretzels. Throw some dice. Kill some monsters!" But it is so mechanically solid, the decisions are so good. You're like, "I could use this card in this way, but I have to be positioned over here. And how does it affect the next player?" (Mark: The AI is fantastic! (Kellen: The AI is fantastic?) But it really is though! Because you know intuitively, like these games can get bogged down in convoluted mechanics or ...

Kellen: So describe it to me; It's a mission-based dungeon crawler with a card driven system?

Neilan. OK, it wouldn't be fair to say that it's devoid of randomness because there is a cards/deck system for damage but, for the most part, every decision you made is based on a full hand of cards that you have, which is your classes card and you're choosing between two of them and then you can 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 really solid.

Mark: And the cool thing about it being based on a card system, as opposed to say for example a dice system is that the dice have no memory. So you roll and you may roll good and you may roll bad, but with the card system you know what's in the deck. So when you've played a bunch of good cards that maybe less desirable cars are definitely coming up.

Neilan: Right exactly. You have that moment of, "Well, I've missed every time up until now so this is gonna be it!" And when it hits it's great, you know you deserved it.

Kellen: So is this game replacing any other games, like Descent, or any of these other sort of dungeon crawler games? Or, I've heard it compared often to more of a video game experience in a board game format?

Mark: 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 ... like a Dungeons and Dragons sort of thing. You know where you have a group of people, you meet every week and you just play it and it's still fun and there's still things to explore. It's almost exactly the same sort of feeling for me.

Neilan: Right. I think it gets loosely described as 'D&D in a box' which isn't, I don't think, entirely fair because it's certainly not trying to be a role-playing game. But it captures that feeling, like you say, we're gonna meet up and go to this familiar place and have a new adventure.

Mark: Exactly. You don't worry about a dungeon master making a story up and and him having to adjust on the fly about what your adventurers do. You've got a hundred missions, or however many come in the box, you meet up and you play and you have this overarching story and it's just, yeah, I think 'D&D in a box' does sort of capture the essence of it.

Neilan: Absolutley, at least has broad feel, yeah.

Mark: All right, so I guess it's my turn. I'm going to talk about The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31. This is a game that I actually was not expecting to like it all. I have been burnt out on social deduction games. I'd never seen the movie, which I thought was probably to be at least somewhat important to enjoying it. I heard it was a little bit on the longish side and needs a relatively high player count but the first time we played it, I just thought it ratcheted up that tension to a crescendo perfectly. For me its a Dark Moon killer. it does the same thing. (Kellen: Woah!)

Neilan: Yeah, I'm with you. (Kellen: It's not, it's not.)

Mark: You don't think so?

Kellen: No! Well we can talk about it afterwards. Gush about it!

Mark: It forces you, 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 roll bad die and even though you're the most good of the good guys, you just can't contribute and then people start to cast eyes at you and wonder if you're really are on the up-and-up. In that first game, I felt like it built up the tension to the crescendo right at the end of the game where, I think it was maybe Neilan and I think we were 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, we were able to escape and was a really palpable excitement. But I wasn't sure because in games like that it can be very dependent on the session

Neilan: Right, yes. 'Fragile' is the word that everyone uses for this because every game has the potential to break in horrible ways.

Mark: Sure. And then and then we played again Kellen. Was that the first time you played it?

Kellen: Yeah, that's the first and only time I played it. To be clear. But it was good. I was 'The Thing'? I don't know what I was. I was a bad guy and I won and had a great time. (Mark: On the last card flip!) I think, there's a couple things; 1, the board is entirely superfluous. You literally don't don't need it. 2, we had to make a house rule for it before we even started playing it because there's some finicky things about which card did I contribute and trying to pin people down and then there is 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 and you escape but if a hidden traitor, is on that mission than the hidden traitor wins. And they're actually people who legitimately believe that the best strategy is to do nothing the entire game and then you have almost a 50/50 shot of being included in the helicopter.

Neilan: Right. Where I wonder about, whether more games would just bear this out, is that 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 effect of, do I sabotage early and reduce the number of tests we get at the end? Or do I just lie low and then risk getting picked off just on an arbitrary card draw?

Kellen: Yeah, I think we had a fantastic game. It was an eight-player game I think, full complement of people. Played it at 10pm to midnight and had, to be fair, it was a fantastic experience, but for best game of 2017? (Mark: One of the ...) One of the best games. Okay, that's fair.

feature topic

So the next thing we wanted to do is go around and talk about games that disappointed us in 2017. Can't all be roses and ... (Mark: Something else.) ... Lace? No.

Neilan: Yeah! 'Roses and lace', that's the popular saying.

Kellen: Yeah. You can go ahead and start Neilan.

Neilan: Yeah I'm gonna talk about Tiny Epic Quest which was a Kickstarter ...

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