At The Table with The Dice Tower - Crowd Control

9:11Tom Vasel:In the middle of winter. Yes.

9:13Eric Summerer:Yes.

9:14Tom Vasel:But anyway. Well, it's warm inside.

9:15Eric Summerer:And one, Eric and I did a show there that three people attended. I remember that very specifically. And we were like, instead of doing a show, we're just going to talk roundtable here. You know? Oh, man. Yes. But it was also at Total Con where we did our first game-based. Well, maybe not. It was either Orchards or Total Con. We did a game-based show. And so these are trickier to do. And that's what we wanted to talk about today is these games. So the first two games that we ever did, and I can't remember which one came first. We did. I don't know if you remember. I know you remember the one. One was Wits and Wagers.

9:53Eric Summerer:Wits and Wagers at Origins. North Star Games themselves ran Wits and Wagers. And I went and had such a blast playing in it that I was like, when are you doing it next? When are you doing it next? And they were like, oh, well, you guys can run it if you want. And we were like, done.

10:09Tom Vasel:Yes.

10:09Eric Summerer:And so we ran Wits and Wagers. And I still, man, some of these things I forget so much in life. But I really remember that first show where me and Eric were in the room and he was like, our final question is about Michael Jackson's number one hits. He just died last week. And we were like, oh, should we change the question? Do you remember that? I really remember. That's like stuck in my head. It's like, oh, no.

10:31Tom Vasel:And then somebody knew like every number one hit of Michael Jackson. He was like the resident expert of Michael Jackson hits and nailed the answer exactly right in this big scoring question. Everybody bet on them, I think. Yeah, we normally – But it was epic.

10:48Eric Summerer:You know, when we – well, Wits and Wager specific, I try to do things that I'm hoping nobody knows exactly, and that just happened to be one of those times. The other live show we did at Total Con, I don't know if you remember this one, was Reverse Charades.

11:03Tom Vasel:Yes. parts of that are still stuck in my memory. Yes, again, I very much remember

11:08Eric Summerer:three football player type guys doing how to give birth in reverse charades. And that was just a... So if you never played reverse charades, one person on your team sits down and everyone else acts it out for you. And that made for a really funny live show. And after that show was over, one of the fans of the Dice Tower bought everyone ice cream. again in february in massachusetts but so it was kind of a we felt almost indie is that the right word eric you know like we were like oh we're doing these shows and they're small and everybody come and it was kind of like you know when you watched that uh what's that man

11:48Tom Vasel:in the moon character um uh andy kaufman andy kaufman and he took everyone out for milk and cookies afterwards remember yeah sure yeah yeah yeah so so that there's this idea of you know can

12:00Eric Summerer:Can you run game events at a convention and like a large style, you know, and are they done for the people watching? Are you having fun? It's really kind of an interesting thing. Yeah.

12:18Tom Vasel:And I mean, I think the goal is to make something that is more than just playing the game. You want to sort of make it an experience because this is an event. It's a convention and everyone's gotten together for this special thing. So you want to do something that's out of the ordinary, not just opening up the box and playing the game. But also make it fun for everybody. If it's just fun to watch, it might not be fun for the participants. And if it's just fun for the participants, it might not be all that fun to watch. And since we've done so many of these things over the years, I thought it would be fun to talk about what has worked and what hasn't.

12:53Tom Vasel:What do we try and do when making one of these things larger than life for an event?

12:59Eric Summerer:And I've had a lot of experience recently in the past several years where we've been playing games live on our channel, which has some crossover, right? What's interesting to watch. But with the channel, we also have things we can do that you can't do live, like zooming in cameras. You can do a little bit of that live, but it requires a lot of extra work.

13:19Tom Vasel:And so that's one thing. A lot of equipment and stuff.

13:22Eric Summerer:I do want to mention here, equipment-wise, these things can be a bear because if you're going to show a small game to the audience, you need to have cameras focused on it, likely active people running those cameras or a very specific place to play things. But that doesn't – but there are ways around that like giant games. There was – again, some of these shows bore together for me. But we did a nonsense show one time at Dice Tower Convention. I don't know if you remember this, Eric, where we had people play Jenga for no reason at all.

14:07Tom Vasel:Okay. We just had them do it?

14:09Eric Summerer:It was like in the middle of the show, and some people came up and played Jenga, and the crowd was so into it. And there was this one lady who was pulling it out, and the whole crowd just was like gasping with her. I remember that, again, very strongly. I think we were doing just like, come up and play a dumb game real quick.

14:26Tom Vasel:It was something like that, or they were like interludes between trivia questions or something. And yeah, we were just like a bonus round of a dexterity game in the middle of it.

14:36Eric Summerer:And for us, when you're up there, one of the things about doing live performances is that you're never fooled by how much the audience enjoys a show. I don't think anyway. Sometimes when we put our shows up online, we'll get comments and people go, the crowd wasn't really into it. And I'm like, well, that's just because you can't hear them. We know when the crowd is into it. There are some times where you can feel the room just with you. Some of our Essence shows that we've done in the past, the crowd has just been into it. Some of the game shows, certainly. And we did some game shows at Origins in the past.

15:13Eric Summerer:And there's just been some shows where I've walked out of going, wow, that was just everybody was there. But there are shows that don't work so well. And we've never had people come up to us and go, that was terrible. Most people aren't that rude in person. They'll wait till online.

15:29Tom Vasel:Yeah, much later. Then the vitriol comes out. Usually it's more just of a tepid reaction. You know, if you're used to rollicking, everybody's having just a wonderful time. And then you can sort of tell when it doesn't quite land, when something drags a little bit as you're playing a game.

15:45Eric Summerer:And I'm really hard on myself about this specifically. I don't I remember we used to do live shows that at Gen Con. And you remember we first had that show with the singing and that just showed us one over like gangbusters. And so year two, I was like, let's do it again. And I remember walking afterwards that show going, what a failure. I don't think the show was a failure, but because it did not have the same reaction as the first show, that really bugged me.

16:13Tom Vasel:It lacked the magic of the first time, can we really pull this together? And then it was like, well, it was a passable show. Yeah, no, that's difficult. Expectations are a thing for sure. If you do something really well, then everybody expects you to do it that well again. And that can be tricky. I kind of wanted to differentiate in talking about these events between the game show style stuff like Wits and Wagers. We've done Family Feud. We did Match Game at Origins once or twice. which are just sort of very presentational already. They're sort of designed to be an audience, you know, panel slash audience experience and differentiate that from playing a game or adapting a board game into something that can be viewed by an audience, if that makes sense.

16:58Eric Summerer:Yeah, and that's tricky because we use Wits and Wagers, which is a board game, but in reality, we have transformed Wits and Wagers into a game show. And it was so successful at that that it's something we still do. We often do it at different conventions at Dice Tower East every year. We still run Wits and Wagers. It's still me and Eric. We don't care if the group is small as long as everyone's having a good time. I remember we did it last year and it was a blast. It just always is. We've had a proposal at one of them. There's all sorts of fun things that have happened. And while some of them are better than others, and I don't know that we'll ever reach the raucous insane level that we had at a couple of the origins sure yeah yeah but these are good and game shows are just fun to do eric and i we really riff off each other pretty well we do two on the cruise every year but these are game shows there's people who this is their job i i know at least two people who go around and do game shows as a living or at least as a side job Yeah, yeah.

18:07Eric Summerer:And there are people you can do that. You can have them come and they'll set up stuff. In fact, when I was at the IAPA conference, the International Amusement Parks Association, they had a guy there who that's what he was selling, stuff to run game shows. Wow. When I went to the – back in the day, it was at the – say at the Nickelodeon Hotel in Orlando, rest in peace. They did a sort of version of the Double Dare. game show. Not quite. It wasn't as exciting as it sounds. They slimed people, but that was about it. But still, I went and watched it because why not? And so these things will bring people in, but game shows are for everyone.

18:49Eric Summerer:But what about gamers?

18:52Tom Vasel:Yes. So I'm thinking something along the lines of, oh, many years ago, the Engelsteins were promoting their game Space Cadets. And somebody along the line said, let's do a live event version of this. And so Space Cadets is the cooperative game with a bunch of little mini games. You're piloting a spaceship. And so the weapons person is shooting like crokinole discs at targets and somebody else is doing puzzles and somebody else is reaching into a bag and finding pieces. And they're all doing their little mini games to perform the tasks of flying this starship. And so they blew everything up. The weapons used pool noodle javelins.

19:31Tom Vasel:We put giant numbers on the floor and people were throwing at the targets all the way across a ballroom. We had giant, like, ten-person groups all trying to do one particular task. And it blew up into a giant thing. Unwieldy, perhaps, but we turned this board game into a hundred-person experience that lasted several hours. yeah and so that's kind of um there's a lot of factors to take into place while doing these so

20:01Eric Summerer:we're going to mention some of the stuff we did and then we'll come back and talk about the factors one of the things we did was magical athlete which has now has a resurgence recently someone said hey do you want to do a live magical athlete and i said well we did magical athlete at dice Tower. This was like 2018 or 2019. The Secret Cabal, who was a very funny podcast, we invited them to be part of this. And I said, this would be hilarious. We'll have people be the things for magical athlete. They will do whatever it says. We'll have people roll the dice. It will be hilarious. You know, I should know by now that if I say something is going to be hilarious, it will not be.

20:40Eric Summerer:For some reason, this is one of the duddiest shows we've ever done. um it is and i want to be really clear i'm not blaming a secret cabal at all they were just kind of like no do we have to be here it's like they're guests and but it just didn't work so in my head it sounded hilarious in my head you know having people be there you roll the dice and the people move it i thought it would be funnier than it was um yes but that did not work um and then And you wrote down here, King of Tokyo, that's been at Origins. That was at Origins for a long time. I remember the Zelensky's used to be like, we're doing King of Tokyo mega.

21:19Tom Vasel:Oh, yeah. Well, the one year my kids came to Origins, they were lined up to do it and couldn't wait to throw the giant dice. And they were like four feet tall standees that were the Tokyo characters. And it was a lot of fun. And it drew a crowd. I mean, it was just sort of a large version of the standard game, but they would run it like an arena event. and it was a great time.

21:42Eric Summerer:What is this Star Trek thing? I missed this one.

21:45Tom Vasel:You weren't there. This was at PAX. Our friend Flip Flory put together and he's done this a couple times now. Made a giant board of the classic VCR game Star Trek The Next Generation where the Enterprise gets hijacked by Kavok or a Klingon guy who yells, Experience Beej! And all of these terrible things. But he did it as a large arena event, and I got to be one of the guest panelists and ran around on a giant game board rolling dice and then having to pause whenever the VCR events would happen. And the crowd got involved by holding the cards, the action cards that the players had, and playing them at particular times and sort of having a teammate in the audience.

22:33Tom Vasel:I ended up escaping in a shuttlecraft and winning the whole game. It was a blast, but it was this large, there were costumes, there were props, there were cardboard shuttlecrafts. It was a great time.

22:47Eric Summerer:Yeah, well, Flip also ran, when I put on the list here, the Catan slash Twister game that I played at Total Con, where somehow he had these rules, and they're terrible rules. Even Flip would agree on this. I think so. You were rolling dice, but also then there would be – Twister was involved. And this was almost 20 years ago, and I could barely play Twister then. I remember this was when I decided I was never playing Twister again, but also the combination. But it was probably funny to watch.

23:22Tom Vasel:It was. I didn't play. I had forgotten that you had, but I did watch, and I had a great time.

23:27Eric Summerer:Yeah, that was before there was too much smartphone stuff in existence. Yes. yes that's true these videos don't exist anywhere um we did on the cruise we did a jenga based rpg that's sort of what's the actual one called um dread uh there's a game dread but that's right so it was inspired by dread we didn't quite do dread we did a very fun variant of it which leads me to something that well anyway what we did was we the the dice tower gang was on the stage doing just various RPG stuff. And every once in a while, they had to do a test. And they had to take a Jenga block out of the tower and put it on top.

24:08Eric Summerer:But they couldn't do it. They had to pick someone from the audience to do it. But before the RPG started, I grabbed, I don't know, 10, 15 people from the audience and told them they were aliens. So if they got called, they were going to mess up the Jenga. And they also had to volunteer. If they would say, who wants to do it? They would raise their hand. and the Dice Tower Gang could only pick from people raising their hands. So that worked really well. It was hilarious. And this is where I went back to in my past. I was like, you know what? Sometimes things work well once. And you do it and you move on and it was a great one-time event and you say, not sure I want to go back and do it again because you don't know if you can recapture that magic.

24:51Tom Vasel:Right. It was the not knowing that these were the rules and then being told that and then realizing that a certain percentage of the audience was working against you. And the people raising their hands, maybe they're raising their hands because they're aliens and they really want to mess you up. So that tension every time one of those tests happened was fantastic. In fact, the story, I barely remember the story, but I do remember some of those moments when a critical action was trying to happen. And somebody pulls out a Jenga piece and then just knocks everything over because they were an alien the whole time.

25:23Tom Vasel:That was a good time. But now knowing that people would come to the event hoping to be an alien or, you know, figuring out strategies and the panel on stage would not know what would have would have it approaching differently because they know that there's there's that danger from the very beginning.

25:41Eric Summerer:There's also giant games. so I put pandemic here because pandemic actually I've seen it done two different ways one is giant pandemic it was at Dice Tower East last year huge blocks everyone playing you could go in and you could watch but also there's then the pandemic tournament now that's a tournament so tournaments are kind of weird but the pandemic tournament was one I watched with great intrigue just to see the sweat bead on Z and Eric's faces as they try to beat pandemic Everyone has the same cards and stuff. But that one I don't know would work on a live stage as much. But it could. I've watched iDark Overlord.

26:23Eric Summerer:Oh. This was – actually, I remember this. This was before the music show that we did that one year, that one that was Gangbusters. And I was so nervous about it, I went early to the show beforehand called iDark Overlord, where a bunch of other podcasters were playing iDark Overlord live.

26:41Tom Vasel:Nice.

26:42Eric Summerer:Well, it didn't work as well as it should have. And I think part of that is everyone on stage needs to get into the show. So that's one of the things that you do with these is these things work better. No joke. If they're stupid to some degree.

27:06Tom Vasel:Yes. Yeah. If it's too much of a game, there's not a lot of room for being silly and being entertaining. Yeah, you're right.

27:13Eric Summerer:You've got to commit. You've got to commit. And the fact of the matter is not everyone can do it. Now, some things you're going to bring up people or have stuff, but you need to have at least a few people who keep things going. It's really important, and I cannot stress this enough. The people running the event must be firmly in charge, run that event, be ready to maneuver. Something doesn't work, you cut it. Something's going too long, you shorten it. Something was funny, maybe it's worth doing that again. Someone does something you weren't expecting, build it in. You need that person to run it and you got to go in with some sort of plan because the idea sometimes is, oh, this will be funny.

28:00Eric Summerer:Let's do it. And then the plan doesn't work. And again, I'll go back to magical athlete. I had some of the funny ideas in my head. And when I didn't work, I wasn't really sure. I didn't have any backup plans of how to how to maneuver it.

28:14Tom Vasel:Yeah. OK. Yeah. Yeah. No, you need to to go with the flow. But that's also the magic of these sort of things when something unexpected happens in the middle and it becomes a running gag. It becomes a theme. You embrace it. And now it's the memorable aspect of this thing that you didn't know was going to be part of it. It's all about being agile and reactive. You have to keep a firm control in the general direction of things but be willing to embrace those things that make it such a magical thing.

28:48Eric Summerer:Yeah, sometimes and sometimes things just present themselves. So, for example, Eric and I do the Wits and Wagers game and I don't remember when it was, but one time we were like, we'll throw a top 10 list or something we threw in there as a top 10 thing. And it works so well and became one of the best parts of the show that we kept it in.

29:10Tom Vasel:Yeah, well, I think that was something that North Star actually did as a bonus question. That was always part of it, but I don't think it was necessarily a top 10 list. It wasn't quite structured that way, but they did work bonus questions into the middle to try and infuse some cash into the system and make it a more raucous game.

29:28Eric Summerer:Okay. Well, then let me give them the credit so we don't steal it for ourselves. I also have the – maybe this is weird, but I want to do something that I'm doing, you know, that is us. So, like, Wits and Wagers, we do that. I'm sure other people do Wits and Wagers too, but we have our own system. Sure. We got the permission from Northstar to run with it, and then we just never stopped. And we've been doing Wits and Wagers for almost 20 years now. It's a thing. But if I know someone else does something, I'm hesitant to copy them. So a good example, Eric put on the list, games we like to do, and he put Hotstreak.

30:03Eric Summerer:So I agree, Eric. Hotstreak would be amazing to the point where Camilla and I, for Dice Diaries, we went online. We priced out all the costumes. By the way, a bear costume can be very expensive. Oh, wow. Well, it can be. You can buy cheap costumes and stuff. But we were pricing it out. And then I decided to go look at the pictures from Tantrum Con, and they did it. They did it already. They did a live hot streak. And I was like, all right, well, I'll drag my feet and do it another year then. Because I don't want to look like I'm copying them, even though we weren't. Sure. But, and again, it's kind of a game built for that.

30:39Eric Summerer:You could do camel up. You could, you know, some racing games, some games seem to be built for this.

30:45Tom Vasel:Well, I mean, that's then but then you're also trying to avoid the pitfalls that we were talking about with Magical Athlete. You know, watching a race live can be entertaining, but it can also be sort of dull if you're just standing there. You know, if people are just pawns and they're standing there waiting for their turn to move, that can slow things down a lot. One of the things that made Magical Athlete in board game version so entertaining is that it moves so fast. When you're actually doing the racing turns, you roll the dice and then a whole bunch of things cascade and everyone's laughing and then you roll the dice again.

31:18Tom Vasel:And when you have to wait for humans to move, then that slows it down. So I'm curious what they were able to do to keep things moving in a live version of Hot Street.

31:28Eric Summerer:Yeah, and we've done games like Ready, Set, Bet, or it's a giant version of that. But that's something Eric wrote down here is audience participation. The D6 generation has always done a good job at this. They've done a lot of audience participation RPGs of various sorts. I believe you've been involved with one in the past maybe.

31:50Tom Vasel:It's possible. Yeah. Anyhow. It may have been lost to the fog of time.

31:53Eric Summerer:But I listen to them, you know, and they're harder to listen to than watch. But there's one thing I notice is that when you're doing a show, if someone's coming to watch that show, they need one of two things. They either need to be participating or have a very good chance of participating or they need to be entertained. And so you can do both. Like when I do my game shows, I do one of the two. It's like a game show. Everyone gets a sheet. Everyone's filling out the answers. Everyone's participating. Or we're trying to be hilarious and funny with our answers and stuff so that everyone's laughing and just enjoying the show.

32:25Eric Summerer:They don't care if they're part of it or not. And so that's tricky sometimes because, again, if you bring up people from the audience to be part of the show, they may not be entertaining.

32:36Tom Vasel:Yes, although having that avatar, even if they're not involving everyone in the audience, bringing up a few participants makes the audience feel like they're involved in some way. I think just having a nice guide for the people running the show and make it a short appearance of the audience participants, whether they're entertaining or not, doesn't matter quite as much as just the novelty of having an audience member involved.

33:03Eric Summerer:Yeah. And again, you need to just keep that concept in mind. The one thing about game shows, when you're doing these shows, you can see people leave the room. Because usually these things are free, so they don't have to be there. And that's one thing I've learned a long time ago is that when you go to a gaming convention, the vast majority of people there are there to game. I could be offering free money and people would probably not show up. but i already mentioned costumes and you know when we we priced out the the outfits for hot streak but there's props and things like that that you might need to make things bigger it's very difficult to make things bigger and not make them look cheap sure yeah but at the same time maybe that doesn't matter i mean i got this we talked about this at the beginning of the episode this new you know curling thing and it's awesome and it doesn't look cheap it looks great but it also wasn't cheap you know this is something i plan to have for a decade at our convention site you know i purchased with that but if you're just doing it for a one-time show and i'm like well we need a to show a card to the audience and it's gonna be on poster board well i don't have time to hire an artist to you know pay him 400 to draw this picture.

34:26Eric Summerer:I'm just going to be like, give Joe a magic marker and he's going to draw it out. And you know what? Sometimes that cheapness and that silliness adds to the fun.

34:35Tom Vasel:Yes, that's the charm. Everybody knows that it's hard to make something giant. Unless you're talking like the price is right budget, you're not going to be able to make giant props on a one-time event salary.

34:48Eric Summerer:Well, on that note, I've always wondered, are the price is right things kind of cheap if you see them up close?

34:52Tom Vasel:I'm sure a lot of things on TV are cheap if you see them up close. Although that's less the case now with HD.

34:59Eric Summerer:Do you want the Price is Right wheel? I want the Price is Right wheel. Oh. I've always – that's one of those things I've always wanted to spin.

35:06Tom Vasel:I know the wheel is very heavy. Yeah.

35:10Eric Summerer:I mean it's the thing that they use in every show, right? Yeah. So at the end of the day, I think these things are great. You have to realize it might be greater in your head than it actually turns out to be because that's just how games work, right? You're taking a game. There's a reason we don't have ESPN Nueve. The old show. Where people are watching board games. People watch us play board games live on our channel, but it still isn't the biggest thing because people want to play board games. Board games by very nature aren't usually fun to watch. There are exceptions, party games, social deduction games.

35:51Eric Summerer:But even that, if there's a crowd watching, I mean, if you go to conventions, you'll see there's a lot of RPGs and stuff. And some people love watching it because they're watching a play almost, a story. But when you go to Gen Con, there's not a lot of come watch people play this game. Even when we broadcast the World Series of Board Gaming stuff, it doesn't get as many views as if we just said, here's four funny people playing Balderdash.

36:16Tom Vasel:Yeah. Yeah. It needs to have a little bit more appeal, a wider appeal than just watching people play the game normally.

36:22Eric Summerer:And it doesn't mean I'm going to stop trying to figure out ways to do it. Because there's always fun things to do. I'm a big fan of getting an audience into something like that and having fun playing games together. So go for it. Just, you know, be prepared. You never know what's going to happen.

36:37Tom Vasel:Questions. Questions.

36:40Eric Summerer:Questions. Questions. All right, folks, today we have a mix of a thing. It was sent in sort of as a tale of horror, but it's sort of also a question. Yes. So this is from Rick. And Rick says, my wife and I have a weekly game night with our friends. He says, probably deeper than a hobby, but his wife also loves playing games. And she's also very good. And more often than not, she whoops him. I think that's pretty much what he said here.

37:07Tom Vasel:That's not the way he phrased it, but yeah, okay, yeah.

37:10Eric Summerer:He said, when I went on a recent trip, he wanted to play a few games with her, and they started using Board Game Arena, a place you can play games online, a very good place to play games online.

37:18Tom Vasel:Yes.

37:19Eric Summerer:He said, it was nice to be able to share that activity when a part. We kept playing nightly when I returned. However, unlike in real life in Board Game Arena, I kept being the one to win the game, and now she's becoming unwilling to play me on Board Game Arena. She still will, of course, but there's a little chip on her shoulder. I don't know that maybe he's reading into this.

37:39Tom Vasel:I will say you have to look at the bias of the letter writer here. Yeah.

37:45Eric Summerer:On a side note, I think it's hilarious. Board Game Arena is fantastic. I very much, if you haven't used it, folks, it just gets better every day. They are consistently adding new games to it. These are all fully licensed games. If you can have a free account or a paid account, but I believe if you have a paid account, you can play a game with people who have a free account. I think that's how it works.

38:08Tom Vasel:You can start any game if you have the premium account, but you can join any game if you have the free account.

38:14Eric Summerer:Yeah. So it's really – there's a lot of neat games on there and it plays well. But if I meet someone and I say, hey, do you want to play this game? They're like, oh, my word. I've played that hundreds of times in Board Game Arena. I go, we're playing a different game. Yeah. Because I know that they are just going to run circles around me. We've mentioned this in the past, and I think Jeff Engelstein did a little vignette on it one time about people think they play games more than they do. So if Eric says, I played this game 50 times last year, it might be six. And that's not a joke. People play games a lot less than they think they do.

38:51Eric Summerer:On Board Game Arena, though, you can play games a ton. It's very easy. You start the next game. You can play four games in a night of Ark Nova.

39:01Tom Vasel:You can. Yeah, and it moves faster because all the upkeep is taken care of, and as long as everybody's taking their turns, you can churn through these games a lot faster than you can physically.

39:11Eric Summerer:Do you feel, though, like there's a different set of skills that some people might just naturally be better when they can move the board around and see stuff electronically or pause between turns?

39:24Tom Vasel:So, yeah, I think so for sure, and that's getting down to Rick's question here. I think there is a different perception that you have when you're looking at a game on a screen versus seeing the entire board. It's much easier to pay attention to what is happening on other people's turns if it's physically there. You see them reaching across the table. You see them playing a card. They say something like, I'm playing this, I'm doing this, and you can immediately see all the results of that. When you're playing on Board Game Arena, they make a move and stuff happens real fast and then ding, it's your turn.

39:59Tom Vasel:And now it's like, OK, I now need to take my turn, but I don't necessarily follow what just happened there. And if you're playing turn based, which is how I play many of my games on Board Game Arena, I show up and it's my turn. And now I have to go back through the log and follow what people did. So I have some idea of what they're doing. But it's a lot harder to keep track of what is happening in the entire game state. And so I will miss things like, oh, Tom is about to score one of the objectives. And I didn't realize that that was happening and I could have stopped him. But I wasn't really thinking about that on the other side of the board.

40:34Tom Vasel:Whereas if we were playing in person, I saw him reach over to that side of the board. I saw the look in his eye as he slyly put that piece in position to score the objective. And now I know I need to stop him.

40:47Eric Summerer:But see, this is kind of where I flip with you here. I can see electronically better. I was playing a game last night, and I was like, I guess I'll take this card. I looked over, and someone had three cubes on the card. I was like, wait, what? I thought I was going to win that. Wait, when did that happen? But on the game, it will show me very quickly what I control and don't control. So sometimes it's easier. What actions can I do? You can't even do these actions because they're grayed out. And so it lets you focus a little better. You don't have to learn the game as hard. You can just play the game.

41:22Eric Summerer:So I think it's different styles.

41:24Tom Vasel:Yeah, I agree. And, you know, playing online also helps you learn all the rules or enforce all of the rules. And it's, you know, it's much harder to make mistakes. In fact, you can't if you're following along on Board Game Arena. I found out I was playing Galactic Cruise wrong for the past couple times I had played. I just had one of the costs incorrect as I was paying for food for my cruise. I forgot to pay for the pilot, but when I'm playing on Board Game Arena.

41:50Eric Summerer:Don't work for Eric.

41:52Tom Vasel:Exactly. I didn't have a meal for my pilot. But when I'm playing on BGA, it enforced that rule and I went, oh, okay. So I needed to collect some more food before I could send them on an adventure. These are the things you learn. I don't know if we can really get to the bottom of why Rick's wife is playing differently in person versus BGA, but there's definitely a difference in perception.

42:20Eric Summerer:This is my recommendation. Play one BGA and then play one in real life.

42:26Tom Vasel:Yeah, there you go. Or whoever loses the game gets to choose the format of the next one.

42:30Eric Summerer:Ooh, Eric is wise. Thanks, Solomon.

42:39Tom Vasel:They say that every rose has its thorn. But not every rose has a hula hoop. All right, let's talk some games. All right, I put one of each today, Eric. Oh, I also have one of each.

42:53Eric Summerer:A hula hoop, a rose, and a thorn. I'll start with the thorn. Let's get the bad one out of the way. So this is a game called Age of Galaxy. Age of Galaxy originally came out in 2022 but just last year was re-released by Portal Games the designer is Jeffrey CCH and I have mixed feelings with his stuff I love Terrorscape, which he did and I like Ella and Something Shiny also from him

43:26Tom Vasel:very varied games, those are very different games and I've played others of his and they are all very different yes he's definitely a vladicavato type designer this game didn't do it for me at all though um

43:40Eric Summerer:in this game you are a galaxy and you have to do a bunch of various things you get seven cards over the course of this game well i'm sorry you draw a hand of seven cards at the beginning you will pick one of those cards to be your special power cards can be used in many different ways they can be used as resources they can be used as a special power three of them will become your special powers. That's it for the whole game. And there's a lot of back and forth and there is a lot of rules overhead. And for some reason Ignacy thought that with all these symbols, which by the way are not particularly intuitive, once again, we would love it if we could all share a single reference card.

44:20Eric Summerer:I will always ping that on a game. I still, someone that's going to have publishers that's going to come to me, I challenge you publicly. I call it every publisher in the universe. To tell me why you only put one reference card in a game and how it hurts your company to not have one for each player. Even if you think everything in a game is very simple, you have a reference card for everyone in a game. Sorry. It is 100%. I will never waver on this rule. Sorry. I hate it so much.

44:49Tom Vasel:No, I get it.

44:50Eric Summerer:But again, it's unintuitive. The whole game feels unintuitive. There's sort of attacking in the game. There's sort of collecting resources. There's a decent amount of luck sometimes when you reveal things and attack them. The cards is a tough one because you want to have cards that sync together, but you have this hand of seven. You could draft, which is probably the preferred way to play, but your first game, you're like, I don't know. I wasn't sure when I played my first game of this, and I said, now I got the rules in my head. And then I played again, and I was like, I hate it. I really didn't like this game at all.

45:24Eric Summerer:The thing is, I don't know that I can say it's a bad game. I do think that the symbols not being clear is not good. But I think some people are really going to like this because – but it reminds me a little bit of – what's the game where you have a few cards and you go back and forth and you're both wizards from Sandcastle games.

45:44Tom Vasel:Oh, boy.

45:45Eric Summerer:Anyway, it reminds me of games where you have a few resources and you have to make – put these together to win. But it's too esoteric for me. It's too weird. So this one for me was a thorn.

46:01Tom Vasel:Hmm. That's Age of Galaxy. All right. I'm going to start with, let's start with my hula hoop. This is, I guess, less of a hula hoop and more of a Joey, if we want to bring back a real old Dice Tower term. I played A Message from the Stars twice over the course of the Dice Tower cruise. This is a, I guess you can play different modes, you can play a competitive version, but it's usually played as a cooperative where one player is an alien and they're trying to get across a message to the other side, the scientist observing players. There are three words that are sort of randomized at the beginning of the game that both the alien and the human players are having to communicate across the way.

46:52Tom Vasel:And they have to give clues to try and get these messages across. These are done in single words. So the alien player will hand out a word and give it over to the human players. But the other aspect of this is that certain letters will cause an equation to happen. So there are three letters that are going to add a single point to the total of this word. There is one that's going to multiply. If one of two letters are involved in the word, it's going to multiply that total. And then there's one more letter that's going to cause it to go negative if it exists in the word. So the clue word is evaluated by the alien player, and they sort of do a little math and equation.

47:35Tom Vasel:They say this whole thing totals to a negative eight and then hands it over. And then the human players look at what letters are in that word and try and suss out how that total was achieved. And then they get to give a clue, which then gets evaluated numerically. And you're trying to figure out what letters are in this word based on how it affects the total that each word adds up to. This is a lot, and you're also trying to give clues that help you figure out what the words are. So it's a clue-giving game and a math game and a deduction game all in one. The first time I played this, I got to play with the person who had brought it was so excited because somebody else knew the game.

48:16Tom Vasel:He was so used to teaching it and being the alien player and running things that he was so excited to play as the human. And so he was making logical leaps left and right. He's like, oh, boy, I get to do the math and the thinking. And, oh, well, we can't pick one of those letters because we need, we know because the total is a negative eight that it's going to be one of these three. And then it couldn't possibly be any of these. So you can cross out all those on your board. And I'm trying to follow along with the logic and crossing things out on my board. And we're already thinking, well, now we need to give a clue that's going to use one of these four letters.

48:47Tom Vasel:And I, okay, wait, I'm not done crossing things off on my board. And so we were making so many logical leaps. And he was so excited that I was left in the dust. I had no sense of the logic. I was lost. And so I came away with a pretty negative opinion of this game. But then I got to play again. I said, I know this is probably a thing that I just need to slow it down. And we did. We slowed down. Let me get the logic myself, cross things out on my own, talk through it. And it became much more interesting and entertaining and rewarding to have made the logical leaps. and really, really enjoyed this deductive puzzle of a message from the stars.

49:29So if you do bounce off of it, take your time, try it again.

49:34Tom Vasel:And if you are excited to teach new people, slow it down just one second. Or if you're learning and you're lost, don't be afraid to raise your hand and say, all right, stop, hold on, because I didn't. I didn't say, all right, stop. I need to think through this logic first before we jump through four more hoops. I think sometimes that needs to happen with a message from the stars but I did enjoy it I wasn't sure I was going to on that second run it's a hula hoop for me

50:00Eric Summerer:cool cool cool cool I'm glad you like it I'm looking forward to trying out the new expansion for it Brain Picnic made a game called Storeroom Inc on Borgi B it says Storeroom Inc Trasteros S-A but Trasteros just means well Storeroom oh okay this is this is a game from Brain Picnic, who has made a bunch of little oddities of games. And this one here is about your kind of bidding on a storeroom. So think of this almost as... What's that show I always watch where people are fighting over a storeroom? I'm having a hard time with names. Storage Wars? Storage Wars, right. By the way, the board game I was thinking about earlier was Res Arcana.

50:42Tom Vasel:Oh, yeah, the Tom Lehman game. Yeah.

50:44Eric Summerer:So, anyhow, this is a little bit like Storage Room Wars, you have rows of cards and on the front of them, they will show you what color card that is and the numbers that might be on the back of it. But you're not sure what the numbers on the back of it quite are. And so you have ways, you have tokens you can spend to look at backs of cards secretly, but you're bidding on cards in a row. So you have a two value worker and a one value worker. They're both discs. So the two value worker is just a double thickness disc. So if you want a card from a row, you put a disc down in that row. If you put a double disc, you're going to get two cards from that row.

51:23Eric Summerer:And then Eric might put a disc on top of mine. As soon as there are three discs width in a row, you're done. You can't go to that row anymore. But what's interesting is whoever puts their disc on last picks first. Oh. So if I put my double disc down and Eric puts a single disc on, that row's done. No, nothing else can go to that row. But Eric picks the first card. Then I get two. so that leads to some very interesting you know ideas because what you have is you have these different clients who want very specific things this person might want a four five six of blue of a four a level four or five or six of blue things any items are like a nintendo an old you know super nintendo or whatever you know they're just different items you're getting and they might want a one two three of red and as soon as i have let's say the one and two of red and a five and four of blue i'm like that's four of the six items they want they're going to give me a certain amount of money for that that's good if you get them everything they want it's more but you can only keep so many cards in your hand and this includes the client's cards the ones that you need to fill some of them just want four different colors or whatever it might be and it's pretty fast it's a fast little sort of not auction game but worker placement slash auction sort of it's only four rounds it's pretty quick it's a small box size this was a big surprise to me.

52:38Eric Summerer:I was like, the artwork looks pretty cool, but it doesn't sound like much. And I really enjoyed it. So again, the English name is Storam Inc., but right now it's Trasteros. T-R-A-S-T-E-R-O-S.

52:54Tom Vasel:Sounds like a Marvel villain.

52:55Eric Summerer:Yeah, maybe.

52:56Tom Vasel:Alright, a long time ago, I had a game in my collection called Nuns on the Run. We were talking about going to Origins. Sorry. Right, that was an Eric Idle movie, wasn't it? But this has nothing to do with that. I've seen that movie. I forgot about that movie. Just recently had a second edition release from 999 Games with some rules, tweaks, and some distillation and tried it out, saw it on the shelf at the Dice Tower Cruise, wanted to give it a whirl. Nuns on the Run is a hidden movement game. One player is playing the Abyss and the Prioress of this abbey, and the other players are playing the Novices and they would really love to find their secret item, their secret wish, which might be a fashion magazine or their CD player or their phone.

53:48Tom Vasel:And they need to cross the abbey to a specific location where their key is hiding, and then they have to find their item and then make it back to their room without being discovered by the abbess and the prioress. The abbess and the prioress have to move along pre-described routes That player has some routes that say the map has numbers of the different points. And so I might need to go from 27 to 118. And I'm going to follow this route unless I hear something. So I'm moving the character along that route. And everybody knows they're going to follow that route for a while. But the characters, the novices, are running around secretly.

54:27Tom Vasel:And the faster they move, the more noise they will make or the more chance of noise they make. So they will move a certain distance and they're secretly keeping track of where they are. And then they're going to roll a die about how much noise they make. And there's a modifier. If they're running, they're going to make more noise. If they're sneaking, they make less noise. But if they make a noise, they have to put a token out on the board that says, you heard a noise from this direction. And then the Abbas and the Prioress can leave their path and go chasing because they want to find all of these novices running around.

54:57Tom Vasel:And so now you're able to play, you know, cards all over the place and follow along. until there's nothing to grab their attention anymore. And if they get caught, if the novices get caught, they have to go back to their room visually until they're out of sight, and then they can run away again. If they had their special item, they lose it. It's a pretty interesting secret movement game. There have been many other secret movement games since then, but this one is a good time. I like some of the changes they made. They made the line of sight rules a little easier. Now, basically, if you're in a room, You can see everything in that room instead of having to worry about looking around corners and drawing ruler lines and stuff like that.

55:38Tom Vasel:Not necessary here. It was a lot of fun, and it came down to a real close game. And there's always that, you know, I know you're around here somewhere. Where did you go? I just saw you run down the hallway. Where are you hiding? And they might be in the confessional. You never know. Really enjoyed Nuns on the Run. This was a rose. I enjoyed it when I had it. I had let it go because it just wasn't hitting the table. But this new addition is really very fun.

56:01Eric Summerer:I agree. The new edition is very good. For me, let's talk about a game called Suds and Malone. Are they dogs?

56:10Tom Vasel:Are they dogs?

56:11Eric Summerer:No, they're mice.

56:12Tom Vasel:Oh, okay. Close.

56:13Eric Summerer:They are also a detective agency in 1938.

56:17Tom Vasel:Sounds. Yep. I could have told you that. Yep.

56:19Eric Summerer:The designer of this game is Adam West. Wait, what? Not that Adam West. Oh. Adam West has designed some other cool games over the years. For example, he did Galactic Emperor. Do you want to hear a good trivia tip about Galactic Emperor? Sure. Galactic Emperor, which came out, let me find the year of it, came out in 2008. Was the first game to do what, Eric? I'll give you, you can guess.

56:46Tom Vasel:Galactic Emperor was the first.

56:49Eric Summerer:2008. It shares something in common with another game that came out in 2008, Pandemic.

56:56Tom Vasel:Oh. is it the first one to, it can't be the first one to do special roles.

57:02Eric Summerer:Nope, nope. It has nothing to do with the game mechanisms.

57:06Tom Vasel:Oh, okay. It's the first. It has nothing to do with the art.

57:10Eric Summerer:Well, it kind of has something to do with the art. Not really, but it has something to do with the production of it.

57:15Tom Vasel:It's the first one to use plastic.

57:18Eric Summerer:No. That doesn't make sense. It's the first game published by Panda or manufactured by Panda. I had a conversation with Panda the other day And I said, what's your first game? And they were like, Galactic Emperor. And I was like, really? But Pandemic's the one that put them on the map because they manufactured that. And now everyone knows who Panda Manufacturing is. They're the number one board game manufacturer in the world, probably. But Galactic Emperor was the first. He also did Transmissions and Ninjato. And he's also a really nice guy. Wow, neat. But anyway, Suds and Malone from publisher Crosscut Games, which has, well, published all those games I just mentioned.

57:55Eric Summerer:and this is a sort of a deduction style game, but it's more of a dice drafting game than anything else. You roll a bunch of dice, one white, one gray, one black die per player, and then also a color die for that player. So you just roll this pile of dice. And then on your turn, Eric, you pick a die. So Eric takes the white four, but that means for the rest of this round, you can't take another white die. You can still take a gray and a black and you can always take the one that's your color. That one's guaranteed. You can use bullets to modify the values on these dice. And then the number that you pick is the action that you get.

58:31Eric Summerer:And so the actions are – well, one of the actions is paying money to increase how strong your actions are, kind of like Tech Tree. One's moving on a calendar and getting resources. One's moving around a board and finding more resources. one is getting these case cards in which you spend resources which are glasses notebooks and uh another item binoculars i think okay to uh oh and also a fedora is a wild resource this game this is why you like this game yeah but the drafting dicing is very fun because i go well there's two dice left i've already taken a black and white there's the gray one and then there's my color i could take my color now but no one's going to take that die instead of me so i can take but also that's the action i really want to take now and using the bullets to modify the dice is really nice especially since you can modify from a six to a one you know spin the die around and you're just collecting resources and then spending these resources on cards but you're also collecting hints see there's a conspiracy at the bottom where there's four characters in this conspiracy and they are either moles rats or frogs you know the evil animals sure yeah yeah there could be three rats and a mole but it could also be two frogs a mole and a rat you know who so as the game goes by some actions will let you look at them but every time you take a hunt a hunch card you will also get to um so you'll take three hunch cards and you pick one to keep and this one will say two points for every rat in a conspiracy and one point for every mole but this one's four for every frog in there i'm like hmm okay i've seen one frog so the four one means better, but there might be three rats there.

1:00:07Eric Summerer:I'm not sure. Do you know what I mean? It's a little bit like that. There's also cards just called flimflam cards, which is great. It has a very strong little theme to it, but it's all about the dice drafting. And I really like this one. It's a nice, solid Euro style game. It's a little just above mid-weight, I would say. And I think a lot of people are going to enjoy. And the art and the theme, that whole mice are private detectives is pretty fun. And it almost, you know, it's funny because there's revolvers and glasses filled with beer and stuff, but because it's mice, who cares? This is Suds and Malone.

1:00:42Tom Vasel:Nice. Alright. Last for me is a game called Lords of Worlds. Lords? Yeah, I keep wanting to say Lords of Waterdeep, but it's Lords of Worlds.

1:00:53Eric Summerer:Say that five times fast.

1:00:55Tom Vasel:This is a Kiesling and Kramer game from Mojito Studios. The story, the theme here is sort of interesting. These are deities that are shopping around for celestial pieces to make their planets out of. So you're trying to buy mountains and rivers and, you know, chunks of planets. That's the theme. I get nothing from that theme in the game, though. It's just a hex board. And it's, you know, there's tiles that have been played out that represent these various things. And they will have numbers on the tiles, sort of depicting the strength of those tiles. And then you exist on this board and you're going to try and move around and collect these tiles.

1:01:41Tom Vasel:The way you do this and pay for not only your movement but also the tiles themselves is by collecting cards in various currencies. There's like five or six suits here. And when cards are placed out on a tableau, they are laid out so that there are groupings of less than eight in value of these cards. The cards have values as well. And you're going to keep drawing and adding. So if I already had a red card out there and I draw a red card, I'm going to put it with the other red cards so that they get clustered into groupings of that color. But if I reach more than I believe it's eight, then I start a new row of red cards.

1:02:19Tom Vasel:And I do this until there are five total rows and then I stop. So there are going to be some rows that have just a single card and there are others going to have many that add up to eight or fewer. And then on my turn, I can either collect cards. It sort of feels a little like Alhambra, the currency system of that in collecting those currencies. I can take those currencies so I have them in my hand. Or I can take an action moving around the board. And I do this by playing a bunch of cards of one color that I can then use for movement points as well as collecting the token that I land on. There's a weird exploration thing that's part of this where some of the all, in fact, all of them are face down, except some that you flip up at the very beginning.

1:03:06Tom Vasel:And then you can flip up the ones that you're next to when you interact. Ordinarily, you have to pay for the number that you take. But if you claim one and position it on your board in just the right way, you then get to take another tile. And that's regardless of cost. so I can go claim a 1 or a 2 that's next to a 10 and claim the 10. And that just seems weird to me. And we read through the rules multiple times to make sure that that was okay, but it was okay. But if you're saving up for a 10 and thinking, I need to get all the resources to be able to pay for this 9 or 10 tile that I really need, and then somebody just comes along and they grab a 2 that's next to it, and then they grab the 10 as well, because why not?

1:03:51Tom Vasel:It just gets a little frustrating. There are a couple of other minor quibbles as well. There's wild tiles that they say match all six of the terrain types, but they only illustrated three of the types of terrain. So you look at it and you're like, well, this could be a mountain, a river, or a forest, but not a plain or a desert, but it can. It can be those things. It just doesn't, they didn't illustrate that. I just found it, I found it frustrating. A neat puzzle, I guess. And there is an advanced mode where everything gets turned up from the very beginning that might help a little bit. But the being able to grab stuff for not paying for it just felt really weird to me.

1:04:36Tom Vasel:And the theme sounds wonderful. You're in a mall. You're supposed to be in a mall. There's not a mall. What mall do you know is a hex grid that just is amorphous blobs? anyway this is a thorn for me I mean it's a more mild thorn I'm not flipping the table here but I'm I was just not excited about Lords of Worlds

1:05:01Eric Summerer:Oh Laurel of Wards

1:05:02Tom Vasel:A Whirl of Lords They're spinning around a lot

1:05:08Eric Summerer:Alrighty well thanks everybody for listening thanks for just always listening to the show we appreciate it a lot we'll be back in a couple weeks And then a couple weeks after that with our live show from Dicetower West.

1:05:23Tom Vasel:Yeah.

1:05:23Eric Summerer:Don't forget to send us. We need some good questions and or tales of horror. Send them to me at Tom at Dicetower.com. I love to get some new stuff to talk about and answer your questions. Give us some brain benders.

1:05:37Tom Vasel:Yeah. You never know. It could be an entire episode topic if it's a really good question.

1:05:41Eric Summerer:Yeah. Like why? Is Merchants of Venus overrated? Oh, man. I could talk about that for hours.

1:05:46Tom Vasel:Yeah. Yeah, something like that.

1:05:49Eric Summerer:Anyway, folks, thanks for listening. Until next time, I'm Tom Vassell.

1:05:52Tom Vasel:I'm Eric Sommerer.

1:05:53Eric Summerer:And we'll see you next time At The Table.

1:05:55Tom Vasel:Thanks for listening. At The Table is produced by Tom, Julie, and Eric with assistance from the team at Dice Tower Studios. You can find us online on Facebook or on BoardGameGeek in the Dice Tower Guild. Promotional consideration has been provided by publishers in the form of review copies of games. Dave Culling arranged our theme based on themes by Timothy Pinkham and taking up fencing as aerobic exercise brought to you by Duel for Cardio. until next time from all of us at the table have fun gaming

1:06:27Eric Summerer:Eric I have a problem that you do not have yeah my AC stopped working what do I do Eric what do I do in February my AC is out

1:06:36Tom Vasel:you just go outside and bathe in the snow Julie come back