At The Table with The Dice Tower - Mass Appeal

25:57That was the full extent of thinking through that and making an entire game. But there are a lot of companies who are trying to get their existing game into Target. And Target's like, well, we like that, but we want exclusive rights. And as a publisher, you have to then be like, OK, I can't sell this anywhere. And that's going to make retail stores really mad. Or I can do something to make this Target exclusive, which is getting more savvy and making it maybe a pared down version of the game. But also, yes, then there's this extra shiny toy that drives sales of established fans so that Target sees that it is a value and will continue to keep it on the shelves and not sell it at a discount rate.

26:42Which, by the way, a lot of contracts, if you're not careful, means that the publisher who sold them has to pay back the offset of that sale price if it's under the cost that it was sold. Julie ruins everything wow that's not that's not as bad as ruining things I mean that's good information I I think overall I'm very happy with this trend I like it a lot I like people having a simpler version of the game out there I think it's hard to do you know Eric was talking about this being a trend it's sort of a trend but there's not that many companies doing it because you have to make a lot of these games you know a bigger print run than you might normally do um it the the repercussions of failing are are worse i would imagine um because target is not always the kindest company to work with and as julia has shown us they're also evil um in cities they're a corporation you know corporations are going to take care of corporations but they do sell delicious delicious frozen fruit but but uh yeah but so i'm for my opinion i think it's great sometimes i go out and get the stuff because i'm like i don't mind having the the quicker simple one for the library but i usually have the the bigger one but i'm catering to hobbyists i know that but at the same time if someone asks me like ticket to ride for example what is one of my games i often mention to people but if i know that they're looking for something even simpler than tickets right i might I go, yeah, there's like Ticket to Ride London, and that's a very – I mean it's 15 minutes.

28:21And it's a very simple game that I can point them to, and that makes me happy.

28:27Tom Vasel:Yes, and if they like it, then you can say, well, there's this bigger one here. All right. They wouldn't be doing it if it didn't work. That's pretty much the – that's the conclusion there. Yeah. Questions. Questions. Questions. Questions. All right, we have a bunch of questions from David. And don't forget, folks, if you have questions, send them to me at Tom at Dicetower.com. And we might mention them on the show. David asks us the question that everyone – some of his questions are good. His first one is just okay because this gets asked all the time. That's true. This is the classic. When a designer designs a game, do they start with mechanisms and decide what theme would be?

29:05Or do they think of a theme and then design the appropriate mechanisms? Yes. Yes. It's different for every designer, different for everything. I would say more often than not, it doesn't matter because often the designer will bring the game to the publisher and the publisher will say, cool. How would you think if we put this theme on it? Correct. That does happen. Correct. Or if they have a lot of experience designing, you might go to somebody and say, hey, I would like to have a game and I know your game style, like what kinds of games you'd like to design. Could you make one that is based around this theme or this IP?

29:39So that can also happen. Any one of these can happen.

29:42Tom Vasel:Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do like the ones that start with theme and then some aspect of that theme molds the mechanics into some interesting way because of the way real life works. I always like that as a starting kernel. But you can come at it from whatever direction. Sure can. All right. Next question. At game night. At game nights. We usually have the awkward 10 to 15 minutes where we figure out a game to play. Can you recommend a way to avoid that awkwardness? Sometimes we text about it ahead of time and ask people to watch a video, especially if it's a hard to teach game. But there's always like one to two people who don't watch it and then we end up not playing it.

30:24Tom Vasel:I don't like that. I mean, that is awkward. I want to smack those people. Right. Like if you agreed, this is always going to be different depending on how many people come to your group. If you have a bigger group, it doesn't matter because there's games running. So we're going to discuss this in the sense of I'm assuming there's one game being played. A single table group, yeah. I always have a game set up and ready to go. That dissolves the awkwardness. It does. Right. And even if – so if almost everybody did it, then you do an abbreviated teach and those people just have to – Suck it up. Suck it, yeah.

31:01I mean, if you're setting an expectation and if it's everybody's first time still playing it, then yes, those people probably have an advantage, but not like I've been playing this for the last 10 years and you're new. Like there's there's still that's a discrepancy. And if you are these people, OK, with being that or are you just trying to accommodate everybody and therefore are leading? it's leading to these awkward conversations. At some point, you just have to, somebody has to be a decision maker and move forward. But doesn't it feel like, I always, I meet some people, they do game groups, and we'll talk about game groups in more detail in a future episode, but I met people with game groups and they're like, okay, here's the game.

31:48Everyone needs to watch Rodney Smith's watch it played our video on how to do this. And I'm like, are you assigning homework? I thought gaming was supposed to be fun. That's what they're doing. and it just seems odd to me. Like here, one or two people didn't watch it, they said, and they said they ended up not playing. But what about the one or two people who did watch the video? I'd be pretty annoyed if you told me to watch a How to Play video. I watch it. I get there and you're like, well, Eric didn't watch the video, so we're going to be playing Simply Catan again. Come on, man. I had dominion in my head for that example, but yes, exactly.

32:21Tom Vasel:Yeah, I actually have had this happen from the other direction. My group is a small group. It's just a few people coming, and we discuss beforehand usually what we're going to do. What are the options? What's new? Ooh, I'm interested in that, so I will have that game ready to go. But also, at least one of the folks like knowing what we're playing so that they can look at the how to play video. They can get a look at the rulebook first so that they're not going from zero. We're going to do the teach, but they're not coming in at a complete zero. they appreciate being able to look at it themselves first.

32:57Tom Vasel:So that pre-coordination is pretty important for my current group. I agree, Eric, but there's at least five guys, and they're all guys, I know who I would never, ever tell what the game is because they would go look up strategies and how to destroy people tips, and I'm like, you're not getting that information. This is just a fun game night. You know one of those five guys. Oh, yeah, we do. Okay, yeah. I guess. research is a dangerous thing so no okay so I guess it's know your game group but also I like the idea for this particular game group of setting that hey we're going to play this game if you want to in advance here's how to play it we're going to do a rules teach at the beginning and just set the expectation that no they don't have to come in knowing it but if they want to here we go and then you do the teach as opposed to being like oh we all learned it except for Steve over there well thanks Steve I guess we're not playing this like that's yeah that's not good feels around just don't make it a requirement just let people know this is the game plan we're going to do the teach if you want to make it easier on yourself do this first right I do appreciate some people don't like teaching and feel like if they have Rodney do it then then they didn't miss anything they can just say did you watch the video yes well then all of the rules were explained and it's not my fault if you forget something.

34:22Yeah, but if you... I've heard of groups, Eric, where people play the video.

34:25Tom Vasel:Oh, yeah. Before the game. We're just gonna do this. If it was like a 5 to 10 minute something, I could see that being okay. Alright, speaking of knowing your group, is there a way to politely tell someone that game nights are not meant for job venting or airing of grievances? I play games because it is a way to be social, but avoid lots of awkward small talk. Some is okay, of course. Sometimes it is during a teach or when I am getting ready to teach. Okay. Well, those are two different things. Yeah. During a teach thing, I think we'll all agree you shouldn't be messing up the teach. But going back to the other one, it's time for the airing of grievances.

35:07This is a group dependent thing. If someone wants to complain about their job while we're playing a game, I feel like I'm glad that they have a place they can do that. Yeah. You need an outlet for that sometimes. Yep. Oh. Now, if I'm their boss, that would be awkward. That would be awkward. That would be hilarious. If Z is sitting there going, man, my job sucks.

35:27Tom Vasel:All right. Game night has begun. Time to talk about how much I dislike my workplace.

35:35There's – right. So board games are an in-person thing and a social event. And there is a social contract that everybody is going to be social. So this is the challenge. You got to navigate those things. And maybe board games are a lot easier because you could be with people, but are, you know, not really have challenges being social. Got it. but you still have to you still have to interact with the other humans around you it's okay to ask them if it's interfering with gameplay to maybe pause while this particular event is happening on the board and or it's taking it's a 45 minute game and we bet at it for an hour and a half because we keep going off track could we refocus for a bit like if that's okay but to say i just i just don't want to talk to you about your life i just want to i don't want to know about you right is for some people going to be awesome and for some people it's not going to be awesome so is it okay to tell them not to i think like if it's a certain point of i we've been at this for a while and i'd like to i'd like to wrap it up, sure.

37:03If it's your personal preference and other people are enjoying the social thing, yep, you're going to have to be more intentional about your game group.

37:13Tom Vasel:You make a small wooden flag that is the airing of grievances flag, and it only goes up while you are packing up and setting up the next game. Oh, you're going to gamify the game experience. It's not grievances time. You don't have the grievance flag, but when the game's over and we're packing it up and I'm putting the baggies in the box. Here you go. Here's the flag. Go ahead. And if you manage to have it the least amount of times, you get a shiny toy. Here's your sticker pack. It's such an ebb and flow because sometimes, you know, you're playing one of those games where there's long turns and people are, you know, thinking.

37:49And while one person is thinking of me and the other people are just chatting about everything, having a great time. Correct. And other games where the game is so enthralling that no one's doing small talk because we're thinking about the game at that point in time. I don't know. It just depends on the game and what's going on. That's true, too. But I love small talk with the one exception of the person who cannot do both. Right.

38:10Tom Vasel:If it's your turn. And we met this person before. They love small talk. I've said I'm sorry. But they just – I'm like, you've had 20 minutes to think about your turn. Yeah, but we were talking about Spider-Man. We were chatting. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. David's last question is, at what point is it okay to tell someone who came late to game night without a text to say they're running behind that we have already done a teach and are starting? Recently, we were about to start after a 20-minute teach, and the person arrived late with a bag of fast food, and we decided nicely to start over.

38:45Me, personally, I would have said, you guys go ahead since it's my fault that I am late. First of all, that text doesn't always satiate it for me. I have someone, the same person I was talking about earlier, who would text me and say, I'm five minutes away. And I know straight up they were lying because they would get there 30 minutes later. And, you know, in their mind it was five minutes. I'm like, it's not five minutes. I just, within a reasonable time, I think you start. And if they come late, we're like, oh, we'll get you in the next game. You'd be real nice about it. You can eat your fast food while you wait, while we wait.

39:22Tom Vasel:And you can chat with the person whose turn it isn't and air your grievances over here. We solved both problems. Right. Right. If they're eating fast food. Wow, we're like Solomon. I know. Yes, they can eat their food and hang out and chat, but only to a certain amount apparently. Yeah. David, I feel like maybe you just need to cultivate your game group a little bit more. I mean, I think this is a conversation that you can have with your group. Like, what is the grace period? I think 15 minutes is usually fine. It also depends on how long you've got. If you only have, like, two hours on a weeknight to play something and you're cutting off 30 because somebody's late, that's a problem.

40:11Tom Vasel:Right. Especially, yeah, I do agree. Like, it's a weeknight. There's a mind game group. depending on and we have a it's not a hard start time but it is a we coordinate and if somebody is running late and we start later we've established okay it's going to be seven o 'clock tonight oh it's going to be 7 30 i'm done by 10 i'm done i'm 100 done and if i'm not done my cat mazzy comes and lets me know that it's time and starts yelling for me. Starts knocking stuff over on the table. No, she just sits on the stairs and yells. She's not subtle. Like it's bedtime. It's the reverse alarm clock. She's like my internal id speaking on my behalf.

40:59By the way, if you start and don't wait for the people who run late, I promise you they'll eventually stop being late. They'll figure it out. Yeah. Right. Right. And you don't have to be mean about it. that's the other thing people think that it's think that being direct is being mean you don't have to be mean about things you can be direct without it being a confrontational or singling out kind of thing it can be very simply a hey we're gonna start hey guys we have a hard start at seven yeah um and if somebody doesn't show up be like that's cool i put a pile of solo games over there or two player games go play in the pile go to the final girl section okay there's nothing wrong with that nothing wrong with it yeah and we'll catch you in the next game like there's there's nothing like wrong with with being intentional but also not without trying to make them feel bad or single them out or anything just be like uh we we started because we said we were starting so we're gonna we're gonna play and we'll have time at this point to do game number two with you um and yeah that might feel a little bad but it also you don't have to make it a mean thing or yeah kind of a thing it should work out people will not they know people who are late know

42:19Tom Vasel:yeah i've been in that situation before i was i was running late i knew it and i of course i texted said, go ahead and start. Don't wait for me. I'm going to join the second game. And then I hung out for a while and read rules to the game we were going to play next so that I was ready to go when it was time to go. We've solved three questions. This is amazing. And then I got the grievance flag. Let's talk games. All right.

42:51Tom Vasel:They say that every rose has its thorn, but not every rose has a hula hoop all right julie what have you been playing recently i told you i've been playing uh nothing but prototypes okay well can is there anything you can talk yes i can so i was i had specifically wanted to talk about pond scape because uh which is from Capstone games. And speaking of games where we scale up and scale down, I got this game without really realizing that it's a very similar system. So you now have, you had Ark Nova and then you had,

43:40oh no, the game just went right away. Sanctuary. Thank you. Sanctuary, which I really very much enjoy. And now we have, pared down from that, we have Pondscape. So game-wise, it has a very similar system where you are, but with cards only, you are tableau building a three by five grid with frogs. And you have their, you're trying to build their ecosystem. So on one side of the ponds is a, is part of the ecosystem and gives you points and conditions. and on the other is the frog which gives you additional things that happen when you place them you also have food in your hands uh and all of this if you've played especially if you've played sanctuary will feel very similar but pared down and i didn't realize that so it's a hula hoop that i very much enjoy but uh didn't didn't realize how familiar it was going to feel while i was playing i i will say i'm not as big of a fan of this one because i feel like the amount of rules and difficulty and scoring doesn't equal how simple the game is at the end of the day i don't know how to explain it like i'm playing a frog i'm like oh i'm trying to think of all these things going on and i'm just scoring frogs in my pond at the end yeah i'd rather play a game like castle combo so i which feels simpler that's that's that's fair i i found it fascinating i didn't get that but that's also because again i went from i i keep i keep going to the more simplified so i wasn't thinking of it those terms but if you started at this end absolutely it's a little bit more than what your time frame um i also found it a little funny that it's saying ages eight and up, which it is language agnostic.

45:28You don't have to read anything, but scoring wise, you're definitely going to need an adult to help an eight-year-old score.

45:35Tom Vasel:This is not an eight-year-old solo experience. Yeah, no. Ooh, speaking of scoring, Eric, I want to talk about Sandcastles. Oh, okay. Sure thing. That is the first game I wanted to talk about. This is from Pandasaurus Games, designed by Alex Cutler. Sandcastles is a tile drafting and tile positioning game. You begin with a starting tile, and you will be building a 5x5 or up to 5x5 grid, which I actually found very confusing because you are not going to build that entire 5x5 over the course of the game. It was described as these are the boundaries you're working within, but you're not going to get that many tiles by the end of the game, and that confused me for a while.

46:17Tom Vasel:Anyway, you count out a certain number of tiles for everybody in the game. I believe it's 15 per person. These are all put in stacks, shuffled up, and the excess are just tossed away into the box. Then, on a drafting round, you count out whoever the start player is will count out a certain number of tiles equal to the number of players. And then they flip up one of them face up. And they decide, do I want to keep this tile or do I not want to keep this tile? If they don't want it, they pass it on to the next player, and they have to decide, do I want this or not? And you're only going to get one tile per round.

46:55Tom Vasel:So if it gets all the way around to the final player in sequence, they have to take it. If everybody else has passed, they have to take this one. And then the drafting will continue. If I got a tile, then the pile gets passed to the next player, and they get first decision, right of first refusal on this tile. Then once you have everyone has gotten their tiles, They get positioned in your grid. You have to follow gravity for most of them. So if it's a standard, if it's a standard, most of them, the tiles are both. There's a standard like the bulk of the sandcastle. It's a giant sand colored wall that has various features on it, windows and seashells and stuff.

47:37Tom Vasel:But then other ones are the top of the castle and they have seagulls and crenellations up at the top of the of the wall. And those don't have to follow gravity, at least not yet. They get to get positioned at the top of your grid and they float there for a while until you're done with all of the tiles. And then they fall down like gravity. It's like they're being suspended for a while because they're magic, I guess. I don't know. Well, if it's a seagull, it's riding the air currents. Well, the seagulls fly naturally. It's the sand that's part of the... Anyway. Anyway. So this continues. After a round, the start player moves, and then they get the first refusal in each stack.

48:19Tom Vasel:And then you're going to total up points. Windows are important. They come in rows. So the more you get in one particular horizontal row, the better. You're trying to reach certain thresholds to get points. There are some that are just printed points, the seagull or the seashells in the buckets. There are starfish that you're trying to get adjacency. This is like a lot of these styles of games. I'm thinking specifically of Sanibel, that the different types of tile things score in different ways. We've seen this in a lot of ways. The interesting part about this game, I think, is the draft, where you are, you know, do I want this tile or do I think that there's something better in the stack that we're dealing with this round, if I'm the one in control right now?

49:04Tom Vasel:However, if you're playing a two-player version of this game, there aren't any choices, really. Do I want this tile or do I want the second tile? And if I don't want this one, then I just give the other one to the other player, which loses a lot. You only have that one decision each round if it's a two-player game. And I think it loses a lot when it's only two players. I think you need to play this with at least three or four. So because of that, this just lost all interest for me. This became a thorny experience. I think it would be more interesting with more players in trying to get that draft going.

49:42Tom Vasel:But then this feels very samey in lots of other ways. And that whole floating upper tile thing is interesting. You only have slots for five of those roof tiles. And if you end up with more, then you start discarding tiles. And you could be forced to take those tiles based on the way the drafting works. I don't know. I think I need something with a little bit more control. This was a thorn for me, sandcastles. It was a little weird to me in this game that in the scoring, they're like, okay, you can't go more than five by five. like you and in the example they show like almost a completed grid like you can't do that it's not possible there's not enough tiles but the scoring sheet was such a bear to work with when it came to the windows you didn't run into that so you have to count each row of windows yeah and there could be as many windows and i'm like okay that's three points and we're counting on our fingers because there's, I think, like eight rows of windows.

50:49And there's only one spot on the scoring sheet. So I'm like, okay, that one gets you three points. And that one gets you two. Because it's not obvious. It's the least obvious scoring. It's like if you have one or three. And one group of people I gave the game to, and I taught it to them and left, and I came back and they were almost ready to throw the score pad across the room. Ah, cool. I like the game fine. I like it more than Eric does. but that scoring is an issue.

51:16Tom Vasel:Okay. Yeah, yeah. I certainly agree. It's a little weird. Second for me is a game called Miniature Adventures. This is intended to be a series of games. So this is adventure number one which is Goblin Troubles. I'm already in. I have no idea what it's about but I'm in. This comes from a company called Low Tech Games. Designer is John Lohman. So it is designed to look like a 8-bit, 16-bit RPG. It's got that low-tech Final Fantasy sort of look to it. You are cooperatively playing your way through a series of decks. So Goblin Adventure has an A deck, a B deck, C deck, D deck. I think that's the last one.

52:03Tom Vasel:And your job is to, as an adventurer, work your way through that deck. That deck is going to have some baddies in there, you know, a certain spawning of enemies, which they call mobs, although they probably pronounce it mobs because that's how the internet does that. And there's also some rest spots and treasure spots and stuff. Your character, you have I think a choice of six of them or so, gets a class. So there's some combinations in there with special powers and that sort of thing. Your system is run by three dice. So anytime you have to roll for adventure, you have to roll these three dice.

52:38Tom Vasel:and you assign them to your initiative and then a couple of action. There's an action slot and a special slot and you assign the points to those slots. The initiative, of course, is going to determine where you act. So if you encounter some baddies, they're going to have initiative as well. And if you act before them, then you can maybe smack them in the nose before they attack. And you do this by spending your action points. You can do a basic attack for one action, but then you have a bunch of special things on your cards, and you can do that. And as you complete decks, so when you get through the A deck, you get to level up, and your class card comes into play with more abilities and cool things and stat upgrades and stuff like that.

53:25Tom Vasel:And you try and work your way through to the big bads at the end of the D deck, and then you will succeed. I did enjoy this. I'm calling this a hula hoop. I was surprised. It is pretty simple, but it did offer some neat challenges. I was playing this solo with two characters because it sort of helps to help each other out. If one player gets knocked out or if one player is about to get knocked out, the other can heal them. It's good to have more than one character. Going in solo is daunting on this one. um and but if you do uh whenever you run out of uh one of the stats say i spent all my action points on my next turn i need to roll the dice and that is my turn uh and then assign them so luck of the dice can really smack you down um and then it's all about mitigating that uh to try and achieve the goals set for you uh you can get ko'd up to twice without completely being eliminated, but then on the third one that character is gone and they don't get to come back until you get the way through the deck.

54:31Tom Vasel:It is a challenging game, and of course the luck of the dice are really going to mess with you. But I did have fun solving that puzzle. My one complaint, thorny complaint, is that the rulebook isn't fantastic and has you searching all over the place for the way that certain things trigger. They could have spent a little bit more time on, like, order of operations and the way certain cards activate with each other, how ties work, how the enemies make decisions as to who they're going to attack. This could have used a little bit more work in the sequence of things. But I like the vibe, and I had fun with Miniature Adventures.

55:08Tom. Cool. All righty. Well, I first played Dino Racer. This is a new little card game from – what's the publisher? Dino Racer from Underdog Games, Marcel and Lehman. This is a dinosaur racing game in which there are five dinosaurs racing. So you put out – the whole thing is cards. You put out a bunch of cards at the top and you have these five dinosaurs here. And each round of the game, you're going to flip over cards equal to the number of players plus one. So let's say you're playing four players. You flip over five cards. Each card shows a dinosaur. That dinosaur moves forward one space. Boom, boom, boom.

55:47at the end after all the dinosaurs have moved forward then each player will draft one of those cards and the card that's not taken that dinosaur moves forward at another space and then when one dinosaur hits the end line that's the end of the race and that dinosaur will score points that are on that dinosaur some dinosaurs have more points than others but they also have fewer cards in the deck and everyone will get points for each card so if the final dinosaur racing wins and he's worth six points and Eric has three of their cards, Eric will get 18 points. Also second place scores and third place scores also.

56:23When all the dinosaurs each reach a card, so when all the dinosaurs, you put these cards at the top of the track, you'll turn over that card. It's called a checkpoint. You turn it over and something random will happen. Usually this dinosaur moves forward a spot or this one moves backwards or maybe these two dinosaurs switch positions, things like that. So that adds a little bit of chaos. It's very fun. It's not as fun as Hot Streak because it's going to be compared to that a lot. But it's also a much smaller package. It's just a bunch of cards. And we found this to be really entertaining. I really like this one.

56:59This was a hula hoop for me. Yes, right? That's the one you don't know it's going to be good? Yeah. I don't remember. That's the one. Yeah. So I enjoyed this a lot. It uses that kind of game – it's like a mechanism from Veggie Stock where the card nobody takes moves a dinosaur forward. So you're thinking about that. And it's silly. It's really entertaining. Two to six players, I found it to be a lot of fun. I think this will be a hit for a while. Neat. That's Dino Racer. And then I played the newest version of The Crew, Journeys to the End of the Earth. Remember when people used to play The Crew?

57:40They still do, but the Lord of the Rings trick-taking game kind of diminished that. But this is the third in this thing. I think it's the third and final, who knows, from Thomas Singh and Cosmos. So if you've never played The Crew before, it's a cooperative trick-taking game. And this one is a little different than the others. Have you guys played either of the other ones? Oh, yes. I'm kidding. Everyone's played it. so in this one they add complexity to how the game and the missions part works and to the point where this is why I'm not giving the game a 10 because I'm like come on but you move your you have like a pawn and a time token and they're moving through the pages of this book like Indiana Jones that's kind of Indiana Jones is kind of the theme and I'm sure there's some sort of story but I always skip the story so I don't remember but what you do in this one is there's two decks of cards and you will flip over one of these decks, top of the deck of the card, and the number on it shows the difficulty of that card.

58:40But that's how far your person will move on the track. So you're trying to get to the end of the track before the time token does. The time token moves one space every time, whether you win or succeed. But then also as you go through these missions, the spaces that you were on will do different things. They might change what one of the cards does. For example, if you're on a skiing spot, there's one card, I think it's the seven blue, that when that card is played, everyone immediately passes their hand to the left. Oh, boy. Chaos! Which is, well, it's chaos, but it's good and bad, right? Because now you suddenly know two hands of cards.

59:17You also control when you play that seven of blue, hopefully. But the cards that are flipped over now, if you remember the original crew and the follow-up, they both did the same sort of thing. You might draw a card that says, Eric has to take the three of green card. Or Julie has to take no pink cards. It would give these specific tasks to players. This one just has a specific task for everyone to do. So it might say something like no yellow or pink card can win a trick. Oh. Oh. That's tricky. Or only odd cards can win tricks. Sometimes there's a player you have to vote. Like each player will – you have to kind of – whoever is the leader will pick a player to accomplish it.

1:00:02Like this player can win no tricks this round. And so everyone will put out a token and reveal it saying, I'm confident I can do this or I'm not confident I can do this. Like I remember we played one where it said somebody has to win a trick in each color, leading a card of each color. That's pretty tricky. So I thought I was confident because I had the nine of three colors, but I had only one six of green. So I showed everyone because you can reveal one card. If you never played the crew, you can reveal one card in your hand. And I showed it was the only green card I have. So they knew when I played another card to slough off their green cards.

1:00:43So some of them are incredibly hard. Remember that one I just mentioned where you can't win a trick with two colors? Yeah. You know how hard that is? That's really hard. Yeah. We came pretty close in the final trick. Someone won with the other color. So are those, the conditions come out as you get on the space, so you can't plan for them advance either? No, I suppose you could pick a number, because it shows you the number on the back of the card. Got it. You could pick a number saying, we'll try to land on this token. I don't know. Again, this is the way I feel about all the crew things. I didn't care about that part at all.

1:01:15I just want to flip over a card and see if we can do it or not. Yeah. And I love that. I mean, we just played and played and played and played. It was so fun. One guy never played the crew before. He's like, I'm kind of new to this board gaming thing. He was such a liar. You know, he'd sit there and go, we can't win this. I'm like, what? He's like, well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, oh, yeah, you're right. Okay. Or he's like, we got this. It was pretty funny. So it was a very, I don't know, what you get. I do like the Fellowship of the Ring and the Two Towers trick-taking games.

1:01:47I like them a lot. But I love the crew. It just, when you get into that mode and you're all trying to accomplish a goal together, It's such a great trick-taking game. So Journey to the End of the Earth is a lot of fun. It's definitely the most convoluted, I think, to teach. But at the end of the day, it also works together really well because you're all accomplishing a task together. So it's the most unifying of them all, too. And, of course, you're going to sit – you have to just come to the grasp of your group as to what level of table talk is allowed. Yeah, yeah. you know, cause you're, you're not supposed to tell anyone what cards you're in hand and stuff, but what else can you say and stuff?

1:02:27I don't know. I always play loosey goosey on that and everyone has a great time. Yeah.

1:02:31Tom Vasel:This one looks fun. Uh, I haven't had a chance to play yet, but I flipped through that adventure book and how some of the locations, cause you're, you're globe hopping, you're going to all these different cities and stuff. And, um, some of them seem to have very different rules. You're laying out tableaus of cards and all sorts of extra stuff that happens in some of these cities. And all that's fine and good. I'm not saying that that's necessarily a bad thing. I think that it is a tough dive as a teach. Like I read that rule book. I'm like, what is going on? How does this work? It wasn't as easy as the other ones were, I think, to understand.

1:03:06But at the end of the day, here's our goal. Let's accomplish it. Are there any extra rules from the spot we're on? Yes, no. Deal with those.

1:03:14Tom Vasel:Deal with it. Just deal with it. Crew Journey, City Under the Earth. I love it. Subtitle, deal with it.

1:03:24Awesome. Well, folks, that's some games. More is coming. We'll never run out of games to talk about. So you'll hear more next time. It's true. But until then, I'm Tom Bassel. I'm Julie Ahern.

1:03:36Tom Vasel:And I'm Eric Sommerer. And At The Table, we'll see you. Yes. 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 our Phantom Mr. Sheeran is provided by Spirit Ed. Until next time, from all of us at the table, have fun gaming.

1:04:13I got some grievances to air. Okay. You don't have the flag. You got to wait for the flag. Oh, okay. Did you watch the video before you came?

1:04:22Tom Vasel:You have to watch the video before you get the flag. Fine. I'm watching it right now on my phone.