At The Table with The Dice Tower - Dude That's Heavy

13:00Hoop and Stick:Yeah. So there's lots of different ongoing education opportunities, which I love, but then also meetups and being able to network and talk to other professionals where it's such a small industry. And sometimes you can feel like an island in your particular area of expertise. This is the place where everybody who has any kind of level of expertise, you get a lot of people in a concentrated area. So you get a lot more information. And they really expanded on that over the past couple of years. And then the hall itself, what I noticed was there was a lot more consolidated of publishers, like bigger publishers, like in Asmodee with umbrellas of smaller companies versus smaller companies getting their own little tiny cubicle.

13:52Hoop and Stick:So that's what I noticed this year, that it seems that companies are consolidating. and we have not the time to talk about all the things that were announced over this past week. Oh, yeah. So check out Dice Tower News on the YouTube channel. I don't know if we're going to get it all covered there. There's just so much to talk about, but lots of things. If you're looking forward to games, they're coming. I'm looking forward to games. Yeah. Well, too bad. Oh, sorry. Yes, Eric. But, Eric, what if you want a game, and then you buy the game, And then you have to ship the game. What a pain in the neck it is because it's expensive.

14:33Hoop and Stick:And it's expensive because games weigh the size of a small grand piano nowadays.

14:38Julie:Yeah, that is our topic for today. We wanted to talk about game weight and not the cognitive weight. How about how you wrote the topic here?

14:46Hoop and Stick:Wrestling with weight. I'm like, thanks, Eric. I do that every day. Oh, he meant games. Never mind.

14:53Julie:Yeah, well, that's a separate discussion. No, no, talking about the physical components and the heaviness of these games, because sometimes you pull a game off the shelf and it is way more massive than you think it is. Or, you know, these upgraded components and stuff that end up making things more massive than maybe you realized when you ordered those upgraded bits. Or you add stuff to the box and now you can't move it. But as we've all three moved in the last few years and having to move a collection from one place to another, it's not just the space, the volume, it's the weight of moving these boxes around.

15:33Julie:So I wanted to get into that and talk about maybe Julie can offer some insight over some of these discussions. Is this part of the discussion when you're talking about upgrading the card stock or something or upgrading the bits? Is there somebody that says, yeah, but how heavy is that going to make the box? And is that going to still contain everything in the cardboard box we put it in?

15:53Hoop and Stick:All the time. All the time. Oh, Eric. I don't know. I don't know what you think we do at publishers. Like if we just sit around and we're like, let's play this. But this is all we talk about. This is our, this is my life. I get to go do the podcast, which is fun and joy and talking about board games. And then I go back to my spreadsheets.

16:18Julie:So, I mean, we were talking about cardstock some time ago. And I think it's actually categorized by weight. And when you're looking at a single card, you don't really think of how much that difference is going to be when you make it a thicker core or a more durable something. But when you put 100 or 300 cards in a box, suddenly that's going to change, right?

16:41Hoop and Stick:Those cards add up, for sure.

16:43Julie:Yeah.

16:44Hoop and Stick:So, I mean, yes, that is a factor. And like you said, space is a factor. Any game that has that many cards, you're going to get the hordes of, but is there space for sleeving?

17:01Julie:Yes.

17:02Hoop and Stick:Campaign coming at you. So the inside, did you? Did you? Did you give enough empty space so that people can then sleeve and still fit all those cards? That's a question that gets. And so that offsets, you know, the size of the size of the boxes. And yes, there's there's tons of factors and tiny things add up. What's interesting, though, because you also have a time factor in there where you have a design of a box and maybe you did it. Maybe you hired somebody because much like making miniatures, having somebody who does a 3D blueprint of what you think the inside the inserts of the box is going to look like is kind of important.

17:51Hoop and Stick:Otherwise, you're going back and forth and back and forth with your manufacturer. although i will say in the past two years manufacturers have wised up and hired engineers to work solely on box inserts as far as i can tell or and things like that problems spatial difficulties packaging i'm sure not just for board games for whatever they do but they realized that there was enough of a need for it that they can now offer those services whereas up until maybe two years ago there was a lot of how about this no that doesn't work how about this no that doesn't work um so you're saving time and time is also a cost factor but for the end game consumer yes there's plenty i get we get lots of i wanted to buy this but the price to ship it was astronomical i can't do that which is totally fair um we don't set the prices that is one thing i'm always mind-boggled on that that people yell at publishers for shipping costs Oh, yeah.

18:54Hoop and Stick:And I will say, folks, just because one publisher decides to eat part of the shipping costs to help you, that doesn't mean it's suddenly cheap. They're taking a loss on that. And you cannot expect every board game company to do that. Well, and they're doing it because Amazon doesn't. Right.

19:17Julie:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

19:17Hoop and Stick:So it's a slippery slope, friends. And they understand that. But we do not, at the end of the day, we don't set the costs for shipping. Those are, if I had that kind of power, I would rule the world. Well, and we would listen.

19:36Julie:Tom, you were making a point earlier that I stepped on.

19:39Hoop and Stick:Well, you put on card stock here, upgrade at coins and bits and poker chips, some things way more than other things. But I have noticed in the board games that I have that easily the most – the heaviest games I have by far are games that come with books. Because books, if you've ever helped someone move a collection of books, and I still have a grudge against someone to this day, the books are really, really heavy. And any game – I apologized. that has any any game that has a pile of books in it so this is you know i remember the first time i got tales of arabian nights way back in the day and i thought why is this so heavy because there's a book because that book is filled with compressed paper it's thin and and then if you have multiple books some of these you know dungeon crawls or story driven games and they come with a pile book like why is this so heavy it's the books Yeah, I twisted my shoulder taking Vantage off the shelf a couple weeks ago because I forgot.

20:44Hoop and Stick:I forgot.

20:46Julie:That's a massive game.

20:47Hoop and Stick:That lovely, fun game is all cards and books.

20:51Julie:Yeah. To the point, Artisans of Splendent Vale, which is Renegade Games' adventure game, but it has as its core a set of books for each player. And they had this nice insert that fit all these things into the box. But because of that book chunk being so massive and shipping, it actually cracked the insert, this plastic insert, in shipping in my copy. And so I opened it up. I'm like, oh, there's all these plastic shards all over the place. But these books seem nice.

21:22Hoop and Stick:So Tales of Myth and Legend, we're going through what the case count will be. And the manufacturer was like, there should be four to a case. I was like, there will be two to a case. because the book in that and the cards in that make it so heavy that I don't need the two middle books or boxes being crunched in shipping so that for every case I can only sell several of them because the rest of them have been smooshed. So that's a back and forth that conversation that we've had. I was like, can we just do one to a box and then I can just ship them separately? And they were like, no, you can't do that.

21:58Hoop and Stick:I was like, okay, two. Two then, thank you.

22:02Julie:Yeah, I mean, that has to make an adjustment too because you're talking about packing material to protect those two copies as opposed to jamming four into a box. I think the tendency when you're looking at like a full case of something is that there's no packing material. It's just, you know, chunk of boxes. No, I mean, you'll also see that, well, when shipping to an individual person, you have, you're again, at the mercy of whoever's shipping them. so if you're going through a you know a fulfillment center hopefully you've had that

22:39Hoop and Stick:conversation as a publisher of how they do it and i know plenty of uh ones that do a very good job and show like have a process where they train their staff on the process and all of that but i also know ones that good luck everybody so you don't have any controller of that uh van rider games has its own warehouse so anything coming from our warehouse is shipped with love and care and plenty of extra cushion yeah so that we're not replacing things uh because they're also doing the replacement pieces so they know well julie correct me if i'm wrong isn't there when shipping it's not necessarily that it weighs this much this is how much it ships there are specific lines that when you cross them yeah it gets much more expensive so it might only weigh an ounce more, but you're like, that's too much.

23:32Hoop and Stick:We got to figure out how to cut that ounce.

23:33Julie:Oh, yeah.

23:35Hoop and Stick:That is absolutely true. You go into a next tier. And that's a factor. But also, dim weight is a factor. And dim is short for dimensional. So if you ship a box of bricks, and the same size box, a box of feathers, you actually create a problem for shipping. They don't like that. They would like the size of something to fall within the parameters of the weight they expect it to be.

24:03Julie:Ah, you don't want big empty boxes because that doesn't stack in the truck well.

24:09Hoop and Stick:Right. So you actually spend way more than you think you will for that box of feathers because for the size that it is, it is not the weight it needs to be because that is going to create a crunching the box problem with all the other heavy boxes around it. which will then be that that that's where they get their liability and have to pay out and reship and cost factor. So so shipping companies don't want that. So also we're talking about the problem of big, heavy things. You also have a challenge, a challenge to overcome as a board game publisher. when people ask for you to for that big fancy box that holds all their previous versions of something and they just need the box because all the games inside they already have but you did that box for kickstarter and they just want the box can you just ship that what is the problem that's the problem is that it costs me just as much as the big heavy box full of the stuff but yeah so charging you that much seems again why are you charging me this much for shipping that's why because that's what we're being charged it becomes a convention only exclusive if you're going to do that but right weight becomes a problem even post publishers weight some problem consumer wise weight yes games that are heavy weigh on shelves it's not particularly good you know just picking the game up and maneuvering traveling with that game is not so easy to do and the things we think i'm eric has talked in the past people go to essen and as and they are frantically punching every game out you know so that it weighs as little as possible and folks i once did that for several hours and then i took all the stuff we had punched out and weighed it and it was like a half pound and i was so annoyed it really doesn't cut down to the weight

26:08Julie:of the game. It doesn't remove the heaviest pieces.

26:11Hoop and Stick:In past, no. I've gotten more than that. I think it depends on the game. I also think that it's less and less over time as people have become more and more conscious about having extra waste in their games, environmentally the impact. I can remember getting several pounds having punched a couple years ago, but I think less so as time has gone on. People have done more thrifty with their use of space.

26:41Julie:I mean, the cardboard tokens are not necessarily the thing. The punch boards are less of a problem than the cards and the other components, I think.

26:49Hoop and Stick:Yes, that is true. But you also punch a game so that you can game-ception and put a smaller game inside of your game. Put another game inside the game, yeah. That's maybe not necessarily the weight problem.

27:01Julie:We do this to ourselves, too, because after we get a box that may have been perfectly balanced by the publisher, we start shoving expansions in it or put an aftermarket insert that's made of oak into the box.

27:16Hoop and Stick:Okay. Oak. No, but the wooden inserts are definitely heavier. The plastic and wooden inserts. Foam core is the best insert, but there's so few of those out there. But I like them the best because they're sturdy and light. But yes, when you pick up a game that has an insert in it, you're like, wait, what? And you open it up and you go, oh.

27:38Julie:Oh, it's got furniture inside.

27:44Hoop and Stick:Board game furniture.

27:45Julie:How many expansions can you fit, theoretically, in a base box of Dominion?

27:50Hoop and Stick:Okay, well, easily, not particularly too many. I want to say off the top of my head that it's around six. But since I found that you have to be careful with these boxes that are really heavy, because the box corners will split often. So since I bag my Dominion stuff, I put each card in its own bag, so you just pull 10 bags out of the box type thing. And it's about two when you do it that way. Two expansions plus the base game. And that's fine. I just love that Eric poses this question, and I'm thinking a riddle for the ages, and Tom's like six or two, depending on how you pack them. Well, I had all the Dominion expansions in one of those.

28:37Hoop and Stick:I bought an art. This was a big deal for a while. You bought the art box from Hobby Lobby, and then there was an insert for it, and the cards fit in it nicely. But that weighed a ton, and I found that nobody ever pulled it out of the library. And then also, Rio Grande kept lying to me, saying, this is the last Dominion expansion. Oh, this is it. And then another one would come out. In fact, I think there's another one coming out this year. Thanks.

29:00Julie:But I found that some of those boxes, like the art case or the photo cases, or I'm thinking of just a carrier for poker chips or something, sometimes I don't think those are engineered to be absolutely full and then be carted around by the handle. They're just not – Oh, for sure. No one expected you to fill it full with solid material, and then you pick it up and it just falls apart because it's made to carry art supplies or something.

29:26Hoop and Stick:I agree, except on the poker chip case. That's made to carry those poker chips. What are you talking about?

29:30Julie:I have a poker chip case that's separating, and I just filled it with poker chips.

29:35Hoop and Stick:But it had poker chips in when you bought it, right?

29:38Julie:It had some poker chips in it, and then I filled it up with more poker chips.

29:42Hoop and Stick:Who did you buy a half-baked poker chip?

29:45Julie:Maybe it was a cheap Amazon thing. I think I won it in a – anyway. Maybe I just need a new case.

29:50Hoop and Stick:I know where you can get poker chips. We're going to a place.

29:53Julie:Yeah. Yeah, they might have a couple. I can get the really expensive ones that are worth real money.

29:58Hoop and Stick:Well, I'll just say this. There is a positive to game weight before we finish this. When I go for right or wrong, if I'm at a game store and I pick up the game and my hand shoots above my head, I wasn't expecting it to basically be filled with helium. Yep. Or I pick one up and it's heavy. Naturally, I think the heavier one is better because there's more game in it. It's irrational. I know it's irrational. We all know it's irrational. but there's some truth to it.

30:27Julie:Yes. So before we wrap up, what is the heaviest game in our collection? Well,

30:35Hoop and Stick:why Julie's thinking, I don't, I thought about this for a while because I'm not going to count collectible card games and card games that I have in case after case after case. But single box wise, it might be role player adventures because it's full of books after book after book. Although I will say gloomhaven's pretty heavy with the insert built in which you you need because the game doesn't it's just so it's hard to sort that game out otherwise but i want to say maybe role player adventures yeah i know the game i'm trying to remember the name of it i didn't actually see that this was a question or i went downstairs and looked it was a storytelling role rpg for kids and it is just chock full of books.

31:20Hoop and Stick:Yeah. It was on Kickstarter forever ago.

31:25Julie:That'll do it.

31:26Hoop and Stick:But I'm not remembering the name. It came out the same time as the apocalypse, so it's been a minute.

31:31Julie:Okay.

31:32Hoop and Stick:What about you, Eric?

31:32Julie:I mentioned Artisans of Splendid Vale with the big chunky books. I think if we're talking about like just a standard base box, because they have all the Dominion cards in a big box, that's probably the winner. But I think it's going to be the Elder Scrolls with all those chips. Oh, that's right. Anything from chip theory. And that box was a masterclass in shipping. I'm sure it was extremely expensive, but it had custom foam that protected the whole thing. It arrived pristine, but that took a lot of effort to ship. Runner-up, Perseverance 1 and 2 came in the same little box.

32:07Hoop and Stick:That's true. It was also all cardboard. That one was my runner-up. That's all right.

32:12Julie:Well, if you need to get a quick workout, you can always just lift some game boxes. Hi. Quick timeout for a message from the Jack Vassel Memorial Fund, an organization dedicated to helping out gamers in their time of need. It's also an organization that would not exist without the tremendous generosity of the gaming community. And a perfect example of this is the annual auction on Board Game Geek, which this year begins on March 12, 2026. You can find some wonderful donations from individuals and publishers that will make your gaming day just a little bit brighter while providing support to an organization that needs it.

32:52Julie:And if you know someone who needs assistance from a catastrophic event, send them to jackvasel.org to fill out our form. That's jackvasel.org. Thanks.

33:08Julie:Questions? Questions? Questions. Questions.

33:13Hoop and Stick:So we have a listener question. When deciding whether I like food, I have a soup scale, which I'm sorry, as an aside, sounds amazing. And I am very excited about this question already. Sure. Keep reading. Soup is the exact middle. For my feelings on soup that are met, if it's worse than soup, I don't like it. Better than soup, I do like it. Oh, it's not a soup scale. It's not a scale of soup.

33:38Julie:Soup is the middle.

33:40Hoop and Stick:I understand and am slightly less excited, but let's proceed.

33:44Julie:More disappointed now.

33:47Hoop and Stick:So what board game would you have as the exact middle between liking a game and disliking one? What is your this person's question version of soup? Because soup for me is much higher in the scale of food.

34:02Julie:Sure.

34:03Hoop and Stick:But that's okay. So what is our middle game?

34:08Julie:So I don't know if this is necessarily the middle. Like this isn't the five because we all tend to not play the stuff in the lower categories. I think they're looking for the crossing line between when you start to dislike something.

34:20Hoop and Stick:Yeah, I'm with Julie though. I'm really struggling on the soup thing. Soup is like in the top 10 % of foods. Thank you. It is. Now, if you had like a soup scale where what soup is in the middle, maybe that would work better. Like, you know, we all have different soups that we love and don't like. So fast. Why this person brought up food in the first place? I'll answer Garrett's question. Okay, a bowl of tomato soup.

34:43Julie:All right. So for me, I think the original Azul is my middle of the road here. I have no problems with Azul. I enjoy the game, but it's not something that excites me. I'll play it when given the opportunity, and I appreciate its mechanisms, and we'll have a lovely time playing it, but it's not something I'm like, yeah, let's run out and play Azul. And then below that, I'll start to find flaws in things and be like, well, you know what? I really don't want to play these things. So I think Azul is my soup.

35:16Hoop and Stick:I feel about Azul the way I feel about soup. So I don't understand any of that. Tom, have you come up with a game? Well, I don't have any specific game because for me, six is this middle feeling where someone says, hey, we'll play. and I'll go, eh, okay. You know, I'll play it, but I'm not particularly excited about playing it. So I'm looking through all my sixes right now to find one. There's just so many games that are sixes. And they're forgettable for me, but I also don't, when I play them, don't go, ugh, ugh. Okay, I'll do a weird one here. I'm going through my sixes. I got the B. I'm tired of looking.

36:02Hoop and Stick:The Board Game Geek Game.

36:03Julie:Oh.

36:05Hoop and Stick:This is a game from Richard Brees, and it was about collecting board games. And I really wanted to like it because I thought it was a fun idea of collecting board games. And it was fine. And that's how I feel about it. It's fine. So it would be my middle. I don't have a single game that if it's better than this game, I like it. If it's worse than this game, I don't like it because I don't think there's any single game that's in the middle.

36:28Julie:Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

36:28Hoop and Stick:But I would say there's a group of games which would be the sixes. and there's so many of them here as I'm looking at them.

36:37Julie:I'm still hanging on to that Board Game Geek game because my face is on the side of it. Is it? Yeah, my avatar from Board Game Geek.

36:45Hoop and Stick:I'm going to do a genre. I'm not calling out a specific game. Oh, I like it. So when I'm not a huge fan of social deduction games, but when my niece and nephew who love them want to play, I will say yes. And I know I'll have a good time because they have such enjoyment over it. So for me, social deduction games in general, and I'm not picking one in particular, are my, in this analogy, soup. In this bad analogy, soup is amazing. Again, also soup is directly good proportional to how cold it is outside.

37:26Julie:True, true. Yeah, the colder it is, the better the soup.

37:29Hoop and Stick:I also wonder whether this is something that could work with game weight, seeing as Tom hates BGG's weight scale. How about pick the most mid-weight of mid-weight games and use that as a scale whether the games are light or heavy? That's actually a better thing, although I would not know what that game would be. Again, my problem with the BGG scale is that there is 37 people out there who have given, you know, like advanced squad leader a one on the complexity. Right. That just bothers me every time. I get mad every time I think about it.

38:03Julie:No one can agree on what the middle is, yeah.

38:07Hoop and Stick:Yeah, as the middle complexity, the tricky thing about middle complexity is who am I telling this complexity scale to? Right. Am I telling it to an ordinary human? Because for them, Ticket to Ride is on the upper level of complexity. Agreed. While if I'm talking to a board gamer, even that could be all over the page, right? And also, one game that's heavy to somebody, like I've met people who play really heavy Euro games, and then we'll play some sort of maybe more strategic, like a trick-taking game or an abstract game, and they go, this is so heavy. And I'm thinking, this has like three rules.

38:43Hoop and Stick:So things are just different for person to person. But if I'm talking to gamers, that would be a hard one to put in there. Carcassonne maybe would be the middle for me, maybe. Yeah. Interesting. I was actually thinking Agricola. So, yeah, I was in the same. Oh, wow.

39:05Julie:See, this is the problem. Because Agricola, in my mind, is far more complex. The problem is there's so much above and below it. Like, if you're talking about HiHoChario, is that the bottom? Is Candyland the bottom? Or are you just not even paying attention to those games?

39:22Hoop and Stick:No, and that's the hard part. and this is something as a publisher whenever um i somebody falls sway to what their loudest chirpers are chirping uh i say please go to amazon and look up the reviews of pan am which was in target and it's one of the early uh more gamey games that we think is on the lighter scale and the reviews of it are like this is terrible the pay why would a rule book be 17 pages i don't understand how anything could have that much information like that kind of a thing yep um

39:57Julie:the chirpers i like that name though oh thanks

40:02Hoop and Stick:i did not come up with it that was dennis ahearn my father i'm gonna be using that now though fair enough and and i guess maybe that's a bgg if you have a on your page some I know it sounds silly, but like having a thesis of like this, this site is for hobbyists, something so that you understand this is not mass market consumers, then sure, you know, that scales it up. If it's genuinely for everyone, that's a, that's a big everyone. There's a lot more people who game than just hobbyists who focus on more challenging games.

40:54Julie:I think this is harder than the soup question.

40:56Hoop and Stick:It is harder than the soup question. Man, I like soup. All right.

41:02Julie:We've got to talk about some games.

41:04Hoop and Stick:Sure.

41:09Julie:They say that every rose has its thorn. But not every rose has a hula hoop.

41:17Hoop and Stick:Yes. Let me talk about two games. I want to start off by talking about Layers, which caused a 30-minute conversation in the studio on how to pronounce that word. Does it have one syllable or two syllables? Depends on where you're from.

41:31Julie:It's absolutely original.

41:32Hoop and Stick:Is it Layers or Layers? It's regional. Well, anyhow. Yeah. Anyway, Layers is a two-player game in which each person is building a dungeon. This is from Kids Table Board Games. Each person's building a dungeon, and then the other person is moving through that dungeon on a piece of paper. So you have like a physical board where you use walls and build a dungeon and put some monsters and traps in it. And then the other person says, I'm going to go north. And you move around this by spending cubes. There's like a little cube action system. And some cubes let you sneak or move faster or what have you.

42:04Hoop and Stick:And then the first person to collect a certain amount of treasures and or fight monsters can then go to the exit. and then you get points for the treasures you collected, the monsters you've killed, and if you've made it out and who made it out first. And it's a very simple game. I like it. I think it's very fun. I will – Couchness was saying I have the deluxe Kickstarter edition because I backed it. And after you play the base game, you then can open boxes and they add more stuff. Now, this will be a separate expansion that can be purchased along with this. I think I would have to have that. Because me and my son are having a blast with the game, but we would have found the base game was very enjoyable, but I think we would have got bored with it after a while.

42:52Hoop and Stick:But now that we've opened boxes, there's multiple monsters and multiple traps. So each game, let's use these monsters, let's use these traps, because you only use three of each. And it just adds a little bit more to the game, and I like that a ton. but I also think the base game though would work really well for most people. I just think we would have worn it out after say five plays.

43:15Julie:I think that's exactly what I said. I hadn't seen the Kickstarter edition though so it's nice to know that's all in there and presented in a neat way but yeah, I'd absolutely recommend getting the expansion right away.

43:25Hoop and Stick:Yeah. Well, again, if you're a gamer, I want to be cautious. I think for a lot of people the base game might be fine.

43:31Julie:Yes. Maybe a more middle soup level.

43:34Hoop and Stick:What I would not recommend would be Chicago Grand Slam. Because this game is trash. All right, it's been a while since I beat up on a game. But Chicago Grand Slam, the people who played it were like, we love trick-taking games. We also like poker. Can you combine them with a roll and write? And the answer is yes. But the other question then would be, should you? And the answer for that is no. So you have two pieces in this game that are moving around a board. The outer piece is your leader. The inner piece is your runner. I don't remember what they're called. No one cares. On each round of the game, you play a hand of poker.

44:14Hoop and Stick:You draw some cards. I forget which kind of poker it is. You have a hand of cards, and you can draw replacements for it. And the number of times you can draw replacements depends on the square your leader is standing on. So you draw replacements, and then you can also reveal your poker hand if you want to, to move a few spaces with one of your two people, which might also land on a space that says go forward, go backwards, or get some coins. Coins let you switch out more cards in your hand. Anyway, eventually you have a poker hand. Hooray. But before we reveal our poker hands and move our pieces, we now will play a trick-taking game with them.

44:51Hoop and Stick:What? Where, yes, you lead a card, Eric, and everyone follows suit. There's no trump. There's nothing. It's just the most basic of trick-taking games, And the only thing that matters is whoever wins the last trick moves five spaces. What? Yeah, okay. But I forgot to tell you the best part of the game. The best part of the game is there's a space and a board that says Chicago Grand Slam. If you're on that space and you win all five tricks and you win the final trick with a two, you win the game. Come on, that's not that hard to understand. Let me split it again. This is a podcast, so you cannot see my face, but it has been frozen in an oh no face this entire time.

45:38Hoop and Stick:Again, there's five tricks. You have to win all five tricks. And then the fifth one, you must win with a two. Oh, also your piece has to be on that space.

45:47Julie:But that sounds like this is like shooting the moon or getting all three can't stop columns in one turn. So this sounds like something you'd go for. Well, sure, if it's possible.

45:58Hoop and Stick:I mean, I guess I could slowly move my piece and manipulate it so my piece lands exactly on that spot. And in the springtime on the equinox. And then just keep drawing cards, hoping that one of these times when I draw cards, I'll be able to win all five tricks, which is tricky enough as it is. Because if I see you on that space, you're not winning all the tricks. I will undercut you. I don't care what the cost is. Oh, well. It was one of those games that looks like you can get it at TJ Maxx. Oh. But I was hoping. I was like, oh. And then I was trick-taking in poker. And I'm like, I like both those things.

46:44Hoop and Stick:Yeah. Okay. Anyhow, that's Chicago Grand Slam. A thorn.

46:49Julie:That's a thorn. That sounds like a thorn. Yeah. Julie.

46:51Hoop and Stick:How about you? Yes. All right. Well, I have succumbed to the convention game of the now, which is Hot Streak.

47:02Julie:Ha ha.

47:04Hoop and Stick:Which again, at the castle, if there's a convention, there is Hot Streak. I'm convinced and I actually had time this convention. So I played it and yeah, it lives up to the hype. I wasn't sure if it was going to. It did. We had a great time. I laughed. I cried. it was better than cats um super quick you're you're playing playing cards taking your drafting bets on what who you think is going to win of the four mascots you it's a snake uh draft you then uh play put one card into the deck to try to sway your your bets uh cards are placed out and the mascots move based on those cards they can go forwards backwards run into each other hilarity ensues i thought that from the description that you have both given including wearing a costume i might add um that it seemed a little simple and and why would i do that why because it's fun.

48:13Hoop and Stick:Are you a fan of fun? Then play the game. It's a rose. My hula hoop was Wilmot's Warehouse. And it was a hula hoop till the very end, I'm going to tell you. So right after Hot Streak, one of the people playing said, I have this other game and brought it out. And what you are doing is you're supposed to be these warehouse workers. You are filling out a grid. It is not a small grid. It is a seven by seven grid and you have shapes, abstract shapes in piles that you place. So you start with one in the middle and then you work orthogonally adjacent from that space or next to it and up and down, left and right, to place subsequent tiles.

48:58Hoop and Stick:While you are doing it, you are telling a story. So ours was, we took place in a diner. These are abstract images So you to let it be kind of whatever you want it to be and fill in. So some of it may look like a sand timer, but if you turn it, it could be a butterfly. Or if you look, you know, it's whatever the piece is, you can kind of fill in a story. So we had at the diner, there was a radio, like a jukebox, because something had kind of an arc and next to it was bacon. And then under those, we put legs kind of looking things so that they look like table legs. And so you're filling out the story, but you're then placing the tiles face down.

49:43Hoop and Stick:So you're supposed to be using this narrative to help you remember where each tile is. You go through five different stacks. At the end of every stack, you get a new rule that you have to do for that time. So maybe only one or two people can look at the image and then describe it to the other two people before placing it. Maybe you just get to place it. You don't get to talk about it. Maybe you can all look at it, but you can only say one or two words about it before the decision is made to place it. So throughout all of this, I'm at the why are we doing this phase of playing. No understanding of the bigger ramifications.

50:26Hoop and Stick:I've asked this question many times. Why are we doing this? The second part of the game, you then pull out the stack of same size, but instead of them being card board, punch board cards that have the same images. you then put all of the images from all of the games. So they're mixed in the images you've used with any potential one that you could have used in any version of playing the game. You have to find them and place the correct image on the correct face down tile. And the faster you do it, the better you are. And that part I loved. I loved it so much that I was like, ah, I see that is the purpose of this.

51:14Hoop and Stick:So we had a very funny time making a story and it was ridiculous. And we were laughing super hard at some of the decision making, like our diner had a unfortunate bathroom and it was very close to where the cooking happened. And we were very worried about cross-contamination. It was all very silly, but the actual then using that information to remember where things were and accurately place all of the cards at the very end and do it quickly. I understood then I was like, ah, and that part was hilarious. Of course, it's very brief. So for me, this is a hula hoop. I did enjoy it, but there was some delayed gratification in understanding the purpose of doing it in the first place.

51:53Hoop and Stick:So Wilmot's Warehouse is a hula hoop for me.

51:57Julie:Maybe keeping you confused for a while was part of the game.

52:01Hoop and Stick:Or, you know, just everybody else had played it and thought that I would know why we were doing it while we played it.

52:08Julie:I'm revisiting a couple of games that the two of you have talked about. The first is A Place for All My Books, which is billed as a cozy game about organizing the book piles in your domicile and making patterns and scoring points for doing so. And you have to, there's this social battery that you charge up by doing stuff at home and organizing your apartment and then going out into town, which costs some social battery just to do so. And then you go out and you get more books and you get to exchange things and go to the library and get scoring opportunities in town and then head back and do more of the organization.

52:45Julie:All of this is true. I absolutely agree with you. This is a rose for me. I thought I would enjoy this style of game. Really did like making the patterns and organizing the books and playing with the little wooden books. Fun, fun, fun time. The one thing that surprised me as maybe less cozy is that there's a timer to this game. in that every time somebody goes to town, it removes, it moves this little timer track. So if somebody goes to town more often than you, if they manage to get enough social battery or don't get that much social battery and just go to town and do just a little bit and go back to their apartment, suddenly that timer has ticked forward and, you know, it's sort of set up so that everybody gets two trips to town unless somebody's moving faster than you.

53:31Julie:Then all of a sudden it's like, wait, am I going to get another trip to town? Maybe I don't. And so I start to stress a little bit about getting to town faster and getting a lot of social battery. And maybe I need to get social battery faster. And that's less cozy than I expected.

53:46Hoop and Stick:That's actually my least favorite part of the game. I think it accurately replicates an introvert's anxiety of being forced to go out into the world.

53:57Julie:It's thematic. OK. I still really enjoyed it, but I was surprised at that that that feeling like, Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I was just, you know, I was happy doing my thing. And I was going to make, you know, maximize my turn, saving up a lot of social batteries so I can have a big trip to town. But then somebody was making those quick trips. And it's like, whoa, panic, as I didn't think I was going to get one more trip into town.

54:21Hoop and Stick:Saying, hey, are you secretly an extrovert hiding in an introvert game?

54:26Julie:Just dancing around town. Anyway, that's a place for all my books. Still enjoyable, but just beware, you do need to go to town with some speed. Second for me is a game Tom talked about, or at least the basic version of a game Tom talked about. That's Regicide. I know both of you have played this.

54:43Hoop and Stick:Also a cozy game.

54:44Julie:Yeah, nice and cozy. This is a cooperative game that is based on a deck of cards. There's actually a themed version of this. There's an app that you can use that tracks all of these. It's a deck of cards where the face cards have been removed, and you're going to try and attack all the jacks, then all the queens, then all the kings. And you do this by playing cards that are your attack value, and the different suits will allow you to draw more cards to the group and heal damage and do stuff that helps you move along. It is a really interesting game. And I thought, you know, I was interested in checking it out.

55:19Julie:Is this really something that's worthwhile? I really, really enjoyed it. So this heads into hula hoop territory for me. But I was more surprised by how much I wanted to get it immediately. And then I went on the website to look for, you know, the cost of this game. And it's like$16 to get the official deck, the standard deck of regicide, which is lovely. I like the art. There are some animal companions. There's a fox illustration that I really like that matches the app, of course. But you could play this with a standard deck of cards. But then the legacy version, I'm like, if I'm going to get a standard deck, Maybe I should get the legacy version.

55:53Julie:That's$95. And I'm torn because I think I would enjoy the legacy version, but I need to play it with my family first before I do that.

56:05Hoop and Stick:I agree. Play your family first and see what they think.

56:08Julie:Yeah. So my plan right now is to try it with a standard deck of cards and the app and see how they like it. And if they do, then, yeah, I think I'm going to go the legacy route. But if they don't, maybe I'll still get a standard deck because I really like the art. That's Regicide.

56:23Hoop and Stick:All right. We did it.

56:25Julie:We did it. We made it.

56:26Hoop and Stick:We made it through this heavy episode. But hey, we're about to fly, all of us, to Dice Tower West. That's around the corner. Actually, while you're listening to this, we're already over there. We're there. Woo-hoo. Hooray. In the desert. So if you're there, come by and say hi to us. Come to our live show. If you're not there, well, we'll see you in a few weeks. It's going to be a good time. Until then, though, I'm Tom Vassell. I'm Julie Ahern.

56:53Julie:And I'm Eric Sommerer. And we'll see you at the table. Thanks for listening. At the Table is produced by Tom, Julie, and Eric with assistance from the team at Dicetower Studios. You can find us online on Facebook or on BoardGameGeek in the Dicetower 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 Being Haunted by Endless Quacking is brought to you by Eternal Ducks. Until next time, from all of us, At the table, have fun gaming.

57:28Julie:Quack. Quack. Quack. All right. I know you wanted to do it. What's the soup ranking?

57:34Hoop and Stick:Yes. Finally.

57:36Julie:High, middle, low.

57:37Hoop and Stick:Okay. Well, it all depends on who makes the soup, but if you get a good lobster bisque, that's the best soup in the world, but that lobster bisque can also go from one to ten based on who's making it. Sure, sure. but I'm going to start a big argument Manhattan clam chowder is better than New England clam chowder

57:53Julie:what?

57:56Hoop and Stick:now where does

57:57Julie:clear chowder, where does Rhode Island chowder fit into that?

58:00Hoop and Stick:Out in the ocean

58:02Julie:agreed correct answer