At The Table with The Dice Tower - Paint Me A Picture

27:39Some people are going to reach out and be like, hey, can I also, and some publishers are going to be like, oh, sure. I'll, I'll take, I'll factor that in.

27:47Tom Vasel:You can, you can input. Input. And if they're not too far along in the process. Okay. uh conversely i've worked with uh some sometimes a you know a design studio when we did uh like uh gordon alford uh pretty much designed the game and the art did all had all the art done and we signed the game and did the dev work but really didn't do a lot of the other pieces of the game when we did lost ones. And there was a piece that I had some, as a publisher, some objections to, and that was a lot of negotiating because it was already a finished piece by the time I saw it. So it can go either way. What do you do with a problem artist, though?

28:39Tom Vasel:And I mean, because people, you know, they start art and let's say they do half the art and then they kind of fade out. It's half done. Right. So as so one, hopefully you have a dedicated art director or somebody who has that job with one of the several hats that they have. So at Evan, Derek being our art director at Van Ryder Games is the person who deals most directly with artists. And isn't it so they're not overwhelmed with 15 people coming at them with I need this and I need that, which is one thing. um but also if you're an art director you need to have a temperament of being very patient and and knowing all the tools to motivate a person um because yes if somebody goes to you you can't just be like blasting them on social media you you actually still need them to do the work hopefully um if that happens you hopefully have a backup um you you know somebody else who can finish the work.

29:46It'll probably cost you more. And, you know, you're probably pushing back your deadlines. But I've never not completed a game because somebody couldn't complete the work. I just know that once the work is completed, whether it's coaxing them to get to the finish line or getting somebody else to step in, that artist, we don't work with that artist again. so it's you know you there's there's lots of things you can do but but that's about a human connection interaction and how good of a motivator you are uh i've worked with all different kinds of artists and and again i i think some of the reason that some of them rise to the top isn't just their skill set.

30:33If you talk to, say,

30:39Jason Engel, who does magic cards, but also did a lot of the art for Folklore of the Affliction, he is incredibly talented, but also he's a very effective communicator. He's pragmatic. He lets you know, for this amount of money, I can do this amount of time. It's going to look like this.

30:58Tom Vasel:Yeah. A lot of that's experience. And can deliver. And you're paying for it, and he does a beautiful job. But also, if something happens, he is very good at communicating and saying, hey, this happened. Magic came calling, and you're not as important as magic. You're not. And he doesn't worry about the – he says that straightforward before he started working on folklore. he was like hey i can fill these in the more lead time you could give me the more likely i can hit your deadline because i will be starting and stopping this project right yeah yeah yeah it's right so if you you know uh vincent du tre same thing you if you want to work with vincent he's he's very busy and he is lovely and wonderful and super talented but very good at being like I can do this much for you.

31:53I can't do all of Detective anymore. I have other things. But I am willing to do this much of it because I enjoy working with you guys. So it just depends on the person. And then on the other hand, you have somebody who's brand new, still working with Sonia Hennar for Tales of Barbaria, who had never worked in the game sphere. There was a little bit of back and forth of her being like, I'm not understanding why you're saying things this way and having a back and forth of that. But her willing to be to to learn, to work with me, to explain her perspective from where she was coming from, the illustrative world and having that conversation without getting upset that it wasn't her expectations and coming with beautiful results.

32:45Tom Vasel:One more question I want to get to. There are some games that use multiple artists for a given release. I'm thinking of Dominion. I know Dixit has used different artists for, I think, different boxes. But is there a benefit to having multiple artists working on a project at once and maybe one can pick up the slack if one's taking longer? That's exactly why you do it, because you get things finished faster. And it happens very frequently in board games because of that. I don't necessarily love the endgame finish product that sometimes the styles don't always mesh. That is true. Dominion does have a pretty wide range of styles.

33:23And sometimes that's the price you pay. But also, sometimes you cannot have three years to complete a product. And that's what it's going to take to have a single artist complete it. So you try to get artists in the same genre. Typically, you try. There are artists that solely specialize in looking like other people's style so they can fit into it in the board game sphere. And they are the unsung heroes, in my opinion. Ghost artists, I guess. Not ghost artists. They still get their credit, but definitely are looking to mesh with the bigger name artist style. Cool. Especially for like item art.

34:15Yeah. Item art is, it's not as sexy. It's not. It's just, it's not the box cover. It's so, you know.

34:24Tom Vasel:The red potion. Yeah. Okay. Right. Yeah. So, you know, the people who start there and hopefully graduate up to getting to show their own style in box art are still doing a lot of heavy lifting. And we love them. A lot. So next time you're gazing at that card in your hand and looking at the fine illustration, think of how much work it took to get it there. Please think of the artists. Dun, dun, dun. The more you know. Do, do, do, do. And now, another tale of board gaming horror. Oh my, that's horrific. Gather round, children. I gather with my family every Sunday. I myself love playing board games, and my brothers and dad are also big board gamers.

35:17Tom Vasel:We usually play a game every Sunday following dinner. Usually I will bring something new or a family favorite, since I'm the collector in the family. Just some context of games I have played with my family. About two weeks prior to this past Sunday dinner, I introduced my father to SETI, and we both enjoyed it very much, and that was the first multiplayer teach I had done with that game. I have also introduced great games like Scythe, Spirit Island, Video Game Champion, and Pandemic, along with Marvel United. Last month, I had discovered the joys of Honey Buzz from Elf Creek Games. Two of my favorite elements, worker placement and economics.

36:00Tom Vasel:I had played the game at least three times solo and two times with my brother-in-law. That being said, this was going to be my sixth play within a month when I brought it over to my family last Sunday. It was me and my father and oldest brother. I had set up the game and gave them what I felt was a good teach. covered their starting money and workers, and walked through the six action spaces in the beehive, paused in between, checking to see if anyone had any questions or needed further clarification. I asked, who would like to go first? My brother's response was a suggestion to have me go first, so they could see a turn in action.

36:40Tom Vasel:I proceeded. The game continued going around, placing workers and taking actions. This sounds all fun and games, but the real horror here is despite my teaching efforts and physical examples, about every turn, my brother and dad always had horrific questions of, So what do I do on my turn? How do I get money? How do I fill any order? How do I make honey? Why is that honey different than the other? Does it give special bonuses? I'm not sure what to do on my turn. We finished the game, and about every turn I was forced to play the alpha player against my will. I asked them, as I always do after playing and teaching a new game, So what did you think?

37:27Tom Vasel:The response I got was so horrific I could feel my heart pounding as if the very death was upon me. It was a lot. A lot going on. Kind of confusing. My ability to teach board games was fractured, and I have felt I lost the teaching touch. This leads me into a question. How does one improve teaching when they have an experience like this, where they are now afraid to teach a new game due to fear that it won't be an enjoyable experience?

38:02Tom Vasel:Did Eric die there? I don't know. It was a painful laugh of horror. Yeah. I had to put the pain and the horror in together. It was acting. I would like to read a question here from Matthew. Oh, sure. No, no, no, no. This matters here. Okay. This is related here. Okay. So Matthew says, I don't understand Tom's complete dismissal or hatred for the Board Game Geek game weight statistic. This is just for those of you listening. On Board Game Geek, a big data is based about board games. You can rate games, but you can also rate how quote-unquote heavy the game is from one to five. He's definitely right that due to the demographics of BoardGameGeek, a game's listed weight is going to skew later.

38:47Tom Vasel:However, since this is across the board, it seems to me that it can be taken into account, and thus the stat can give you just as useful, accurate of an idea of a game's weight as it could if the bias wasn't there. For instance, some brands of clothing sizes uniformly differ from the norm one way or the other. if I know that and take it into account I know exactly what size of the brand I should buy likewise if the clock is two hours fast and I know that then I can use that clock to know the accurate time just as well as a correct clock Tom is right that a medium light rated game on BoardGameGeek is medium weight by most standards like Ticket to Ride and that a medium rated game on BGG is heavy by most standards like Castle of Burgundy but since this is true across the board I know that my preference for a game's weight lies between two and three on BoardGameGeek and if a game is a four it is more complex than i usually prefer what's difference does label of light or medium or heavy matter the numbers still give a pretty good idea what a game's weight is okay and my answer to this here first of all that brand of clothing sizes is i've i deal with this all the time when you order online and it's really annoying it's still annoying a large shirt and you meant, oh, that's large for a small person.

39:56Tom Vasel:Yeah. Or, and a clock that's two hours fast. My rage against the Board Game Geek game weight statistic is exactly that. People rate things too low. They'll say this game is light. The fact that games like, you know, the most complicated games on Board Game Geek do not have an average five. They rate it like 4.3. How is that even possible? I mean you go in there and there are people who rate it a 2 or a 1. It's just moronic and I'm getting mad talking about it. But the reason that it annoys me though is because this hurts people teaching games. And we go back here and he's like, why are people not understanding this board game here?

40:40Tom Vasel:Because Honey Buzz isn't that simple. Correct. Most people have played games that are the weight of Uno. They'll play a complicated game like Monopoly, but only that's because that game has been – you just absorb that and you learn it over your lifetime, right? Right. It's not a simple game. But I've been very happy lately with a company called Happy Camper because they've been making very light games like Jungo and Trio and things like that. That's the way most people want to play games. We need to stop this nonsense of like, this is easy. Anyone can play it. Ticket to Ride is the upper limit for many people.

41:18Tom Vasel:I'm not calling them stupid. It's just that that's what people are used to. Honey Buzz is not a very simple game. So, of course, they're going to ask questions on their turn. Yep. My rant is finished. You can now answer his question, how to teach better, where people can learn games. Well, I mean, I think that the fact that the family had played more complicated games before, like Scythe and Spirit Island, you know, these were not easy games. SETI is not an uncomplicated game. And so it was a surprise that Honey Buzz received so much confusion in comparison. But this happens sometimes. Have you ever played a game that someone said is simple and you just weren't getting it?

41:58Tom Vasel:Yeah. Oh, sure. Sure. Or you're just having a bad day. You're not able to absorb information that day. Maybe it was a heavy dinner. What did they have for dinner that night? That's what I want to know. What? How do you mention? People got a buy case about turning everything in about food. But I actually was thinking the same thing because he said, I introduced my father to Seti. And I want to know what the full scope of that was. Did you play it where you both were playing as a team? Was it a one-on-one experience where you could give him all the individual attention? And then further below, it's his father and his brother.

42:36Were the two of them trying to do catch-up while the game, you know, and having a visit time while the game was going on? You know, there was more context I needed for that piece of it. But in general, maybe the theme didn't grab them. And if the theme didn't grab them, they weren't really paying attention. As a teacher, you can't say, well, I did a horrible teach. You also have to, as a teacher, know when you have a captive audience and when they're phoning it in.

43:11Tom Vasel:Yes. Yes. You can't control the players sometimes. We're having fun. We promise. So sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And if they weren't interested in playing the game, no amount of teaching is going to change that. One. Two. Yes, I want more information about the playing SETI and Spirit Island. Like, Spina, Spirit, Island, Scythe. Or maybe they'd reached their saturation point that they're not everyday gamers. So you've given them here's a game and here's a game and here's a game and not stuck to the same games. And now they're like, hmm, I've reached my saturation point with new mechanisms for a game.

43:59Tom Vasel:Yeah, this happened to me just recently. I was teaching a game, which I'll mention in our Hoodle Hoops and Roses and Thorns, where I was teaching someone and they were not getting it. I'm like, how can you not get this? I didn't say that loud because I've learned not to. But how can you not get this? You know these other games. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But knowing one game doesn't mean you're good at others. Someone might be a chess master and not understand Ticket to Ride. Right. People's brains work differently. I feel like I'm pretty good at picking up new games, and I still don't know how to change the oil in my car.

44:36Tom Vasel:Yeah. Sure, sure. We need a game about that. But there are people who scoff at me in that regard, right? How can you not know how to do this? Well, I just haven't put the effort into it. And I don't really want to put the effort into it because I can pay another guy to do it. And so some people don't want to put the effort into board games. They don't want board games to be work. For us, that learning and finding a new experience is fun. Yeah. But it's not fun for everybody. They'd rather pay somebody else to play that game. Right. Right. So I guess that's it. There's more context I need to actually know because maybe that wasn't.

45:12But saying I'm a terrible teacher or I'm afraid to teach again, you can't – not every single teacher you ever do is going to be the most amazing experience. You can only try. As somebody who did teaching for a living and tried really hard every day, that's just – that's life.

45:28Tom Vasel:Sometimes the kids don't want to listen. Yeah, otherwise you'll quit teaching. Right. You'll be like, that kid failed. I guess I'm a terrible teacher. Right. No, it's going to happen. So maybe – and so just maybe it's not about the teaching. Maybe it's knowing – maybe you go back to – you're going to play Spirit Island a couple more times so that we're playing a game and really getting that down before moving on to a new one. Matthew, just to answer your question again then, yes, I know the scale is skewed at BGG and that's why I despise it so much. And you can say, well, we know it's skewed to take that into account.

46:02Tom Vasel:But so many people are going to go there and not know it's skewed. And that's where I have a problem. I have a problem with this constant, hey, you can – my six-year-old loves Terra Mystica. No, they don't. No, they don't. They love spending time with you. And you're forcing them to play Terra Mystica. Listen, it is a rare day where Tom and I are fully on board and on the same page about things. But I am sitting here shaking my tambourine. Preach. Preach.

46:37Tom Vasel:They say that every rose has its thorn, but not every rose has a hula hoop. All right, everyone wants to talk about my game first. Yes, you get to go. Let me quick do my slight thorn here, which is Sanctuary. Sanctuary is an Ark Nova game. That's what it's called. It is a game which has hexagonal tiles, and it's very similar to Ark Nova. You have these four tiles under your board, and you activate an action, and then move it to the bottom, making it weaker, and the other actions making them stronger. You pick an action and do it. Actions are mostly placing animals into your zoo. Your zoo is made up of projects and animals and buildings, and they're all hexagons, and they score so many different points based on how you place them in the zoo.

47:28it's much shorter than arc nova but i mean that's because what they did is they streamlined arc

47:34Tom Vasel:nova a lot and i think a lot of people will like it for that reason i think a lot of people will enjoy it especially the tile placement although i found scoring to be a bit of a bear at the end i need one of those picture taking things that you can take a picture that scores for you that'll come um yeah but probably will those are becoming more i know you can do cascading now. Just take a picture and it scores it, which is pretty neat. But I had a tough time with it. I think that it's almost there for me. I rate it a 6.5. It's almost a game I like. But it's so streamlined, they took all the really good fun parts about Ark Nova and streamlined them, sanded it down, smoothed it so much that it's too streamlined.

48:17Tom Vasel:And because it's a smaller, or shorter game, the randomness of tile draws is much more evident to me. You know, with Ark Nova, there's a humongous deck. You're like, oh, I want a monkey. I can't find a monkey. Well, I'll just do something else. This one, that seemed more pronounced. But I think a lot of people will enjoy the game. It's a nice, small game. But for me, it missed the mark. Okay. Barely. The other game I played is Vantage. and I don't have enough time on this podcast to give you everything that Vantage is, but it is a massive, gigantic, humongous game from Stonemaier Games in which you and whatever other players at the table are playing have been thrown onto a planet randomly because, of course, your spaceship fell apart.

49:01Tom Vasel:Nothing can ever land normally. Never, ever. And you also don't all land in the same place. You land in different spots on the planet, but fortunately you have earpieces or something and you can talk to each other. Great. There's no limited communication in this game except you each have a little vantage, a view of where you're at. I think there's like 800 of these cards. And you're looking at this spot and you can interact with it. You can pick one of six different actions in each spot. But there's a goal that you all have that you've been randomly given. There's people you'll run into and aliens, this game calls them sentients, that you'll meet.

49:39Tom Vasel:And you will interact with them. And whenever you interact, you roll a dice test, which always succeeds. The test always succeeds. But you might get hurt, lose time, or lose morale doing it, which could end the game if you lose too much of any of those three things. And people can help you, and there's a dice mitigation system. And then after you succeed or fail, well, you always succeed right on these tests. You'll get items which will help you on future tests. and you're just kind of wandering around until you complete your objective or until someone loses too much stuff or until you decide to stop because, honestly, you can just keep playing.

50:12Tom Vasel:Even if the game tells you to stop playing, you can keep playing. Or complete your objective or whatever. And the game is very grandiose and big, and when you play it again, you'll be like, oh, I already know some of this planet. Well, good luck. You're never going to find it again. That's how much stuff is in this game. And if you do find it, there are six things you can do at each location. you may only do one per game. Yeah. So even if you went to the exact same locations and did the exact same, you could pick a different action every turn. And there's traveling and there's maps and there's secrets and there's even some little escape room stuff and more stuff.

50:48Tom Vasel:I don't want to spoil it. There's all kinds of stuff in there. Combat. Combat, yeah. Yeah, and I have not seen all of it, obviously. There's a ton in there, but it is very, very open-ended. I love this game. But I have two caveats with loving it. One is if you're looking for a very focused story, it ain't here. And two, if you're looking for a very immersive story, I don't think it's as immersive as it can be. Jamie talks a lot about sentience, like the little aliens you meet on this planet. But he doesn't really describe them a whole lot. They're like very – they're like – I don't know. They often look like walking crystals or stuff like that.

51:29Tom Vasel:But there's not a lot of character to them. But I don't care. I'm just going around and having fun doing stuff. There are very few games that give you this freedom. You can literally do whatever you want, go anywhere you want, and the game doesn't stop you, which has made it very divisive. Because some people don't like that. They want focus. I want focus, but I have, like, I don't know, a couple hundred games that give me that. There's very few games that let me just go do anything I want. And this game is very chill. We're just going around. I think you should play it with less than four. One, two, or three is pretty good because otherwise you might be waiting a long time before.

52:08I was going to say, up to six players, I would never, ever.

52:12Tom Vasel:Yeah, yeah. Also, look up. It might be in the QR code in the game or something, but there's a thing called Rules Pop. And you should use that because there's all these books and things that you read from. I'm going to do this and this. Someone reads from the Red Book. Rules pop. You just type in the number and the color and it pops up on your phone. Oh, neat. It is so convenient. I will never use those books again. It's really, really handy. It even fades out the text for you until you pass or fail. You know, until you pass the text. You pay the cost. That's cool. Yeah, so I really like it. And there's a lot of rules I'm not mentioning, but there's also not a lot of rules in the game.

52:50Tom Vasel:So I love it. What do you all think? Julie, you want to go first? uh yeah i loved it i but kind of all the same things i we played a four-player game um several of us had played uh a narrative style you know like the storybook game like this before uh one had not i think we all enjoyed it though tremendously but definitely the onboarding of just you know you just wander and do what you want was faster for those of us who played in tales of arabian nights and things like that uh i same thing i just love a good run around and find all the things but again i also played mist obsessively yeah when i was younger uh and that's that's what that is so that that it's it is purely that and i did enjoy the fact that we had a moment where somebody did a made a choice they chose violence at a location and then they moved along and then they were unable to do a quest because they had already chose violence oh no type of thing where literally everybody else at the table is saying you know you can choose to help a person mitigate their dice rolls.

54:14And we're like, we don't agree with the choosing violence. We're not helping you anymore. And then later we were validated. But that's a silly moment that like, those are the kinds of things that are completely kismet. There's no planning that. It just happens. So the fun and the magic is having other people who have that kind of ability to kind of fill in the blanks of weaving the story. And I also agree that the writing could have been more. Could have been more. But I can fill in that myself.

54:51Tom Vasel:I love this game as well. I think it's really fun to just explore and try stuff. Push buttons and see what they do is really a fun thing to try out. Speaking of the focus, though, there are a couple of ways that you can focus on the quest. There's actions on the quest card, your mission, that you can take that will lead you toward the thing you're trying to collect. Like you're trying to get pieces of plants. If you do the actions on the mission card and not on your vantage card, it'll lead you to some plants if you really want to focus on the mission. So that's kind of a good way to, if you want to win the game, I guess, faster, you can focus on that.

55:30Tom Vasel:There's also ways that you can get a better vantage of your area. And the first, I'm not going to spoil any more than that, but it's possible to see things from a wider perspective. And once you do that, you gain some focus into what you're trying to do. And that's a fun discovery. Just learning more about this planet as you go is really, really cool. Big thumbs up from me, too. They've also mitigated the level of difficulty. I believe the lower the number of the area, the easier the experience and the higher. So it's cards one, two, I said 800. I think it's even more than that. But regardless, the higher the number, the more difficult the terrain.

56:11Just throwing that out there, at least as far as we could tell. And from the beginning, they give a dice roll, some recommendations in the very beginning.

56:21Tom Vasel:All right, Julie, what have you been playing? I mean, besides Vantage, because I did play that as well. uh so my rose is bomb busters yeah so yep and we've discussed it on the i so i'm not going to do a big thing on it but knowing that you you get a whole bunch of little wire tokens only you can see what you have everybody else has theirs up and you're trying to snip the same number wire at the same time ranges from one to 12 and then you have the yellow wires and the red wires are decimal points in between them and you know if you snip a yellow wire at the same time that's great but don't snip a red wire don't do it you'll be sad also you'll lose um so and everyone at the table will yell at you and everybody at the table will yell at you uh i had heard wonderful things about it maybe even from this podcast yeah so i was excited to play and i played with a group of with with the van rider games team over last weekend we played it i don't know how many times but a lot we just kept going again go again again again we lost a lot we won some we had a great time the whole time and in i you know who has deductive regions reasoning who's going on feels who's trying to bend the rules by just warping their language as they talk to you without being real obvious it was a good silly fun but also logical piece of it time that i enjoyed tremendously i also was fascinated by how just listening to everybody else i could figure out what they had but i couldn't do anything about it until my turn yeah yeah um so that kind of tension and frustration of please don't ask me for this please don't ask for this i i know what you have and i can ask you just nobody talk nobody talk to me uh kind of moments all good everything was super fun with that so i can see why it has awards and people giving buzz about it because it's great um my hula hoop because i heard heard nothing about it but enjoyed it tremendously obviously is Menagerie Unlock the Wonders of a Miniature World, which my board game group got this year at Gen Con.

58:55So Moose Games, it was published by Prospero Hall, designed by Fortessa Elise, who did the Cascadia Junior game that also just came out. So you're curators at a museum, like a Victorian feeling, like a field and history museum. So you're collecting insects and you have your little display of insects. So you're trying to curate them based on a tableau building. But on your turn, you can only unlock one of your terrariums. So you have a column of three terrariums and you're building out to up to three, up to five across rows of what the insects are. So on your turn, you unlock only one of your terrariums.

59:45You go to look at the central tableau choice of a three by three grid of cards. You select one, you place it in the terrarium. Super simple. So easy. However, there are five suits of habitats. So the insects are, The art is delightful in the fact that you have all these very beautiful illustrated insects, but then around them in the suit, if it's red, it's all roses. They're all pretty. If it's purple and you look at it carefully, it's all garbage. So depending on the suit, you're going to get more points in that row based on how many you get. So only one red gets you one point. But if you did all five of those cards in that row, you would have 15 points.

1:00:37So you could think that could be the end of your turn, but you're trying to build on that. So you get magnifying glasses and the more magnifying glasses you get, you can pay three to take a second insect. Each of the insects then below has one to three of the five different abilities. So a small insect can be placed in a terrarium, but then it can move through the cracks of that terrarium into another one that is locked. So you might grab something because you want just to do that special power. Some of them will get you more magnifying glasses. You also have a benefactor who's mostly revolved around getting you that economy of more magnifying glasses.

1:01:17And then you have a secret objective that will give you endgame scoring points above and beyond whatever your terrariums have done. So it's light strategy and beautiful and fun puzzly with these trying to maximize your turn. And I wasn't expecting it. And I had a delightful time playing it. And that was Menagerie. Cool. Nate.

1:01:44Tom Vasel:First for me is the latest in the This Game is Killer series from Smirk and Dagger. This is called Frozen Horror. This one's similar to the Alien-themed first edition of the game. You have a very simple map. It's just four rooms of this sort of outpost that you're in. And you're in one of these rooms. You are given a character that is you. And the twist for this is that there is also a hidden role aspect to this game. So you are given at the beginning a card that says you are human or you are the horror. And you are, in the course of a round, going to play two cards. I think you only have a hand of two cards.

1:02:22Tom Vasel:You're going to choose one of them to be played as a movement action and one of them to be played as an action action, an ability sort of thing. And this is done in sort of a snake draft manner. The first player plays one of their two cards in one of those two orientations. So you might say, I'm going to move to this room. And then it's the next player's turn. Or you might say, I'm going to do this action, and then it's the next player's turn. Gets all the way around to the final player. They get to play both of their cards in whatever orientation they want. So if you've played a move for your first card, you have to play the action for the second card or vice versa.

1:02:55Tom Vasel:It goes back around in the other direction, and then it resolves whatever happens in the course of the round. The goal of the human players is to basically survive, perhaps kill the horror and remove them from the board, and then they all win or escape in some way. There's lots of ways to win and there's lots of ways to lose because if you're stuck in the same room as the horror, they're going to do nasty things to you and kill you and stuff. It's not good for the humans if you're stuck in the room with the horror. It's sort of revealed where the horror is hiding. And there's ways you can detect who's who and all this.

1:03:30Tom Vasel:It's chaos. And it's even more chaos because at the end of a round, those roll cards are shuffled and then they're handed back out. So you might have started as a human, but now you're the horror and the person who was the horror, oh, they're fine now. Everything's fine. And eventually somebody wins or loses and stuff happens. This one's a thorn for me. And I think it's more of a personal thorn because this, if you want party style chaos, great. You're going to have a blast with this game. There's all sorts of surprises and double crosses and reveals. And in our game, we discovered who the horror was through various card plays.

1:04:08Tom Vasel:We knew who they were. We had locked them in the room. We set the room on fire. And then Jason played a card that shuffled everybody's rolls.

1:04:19Tom Vasel:And so then the horror was no longer in the room that was on fire. The horror was somewhere else. And so the game continued for several more rounds, even though we thought we had won. Yeah. I heard Jason got shot in the head immediately. He did get shot in the head immediately. If you want chaos, this game is killer. Both versions, go for it. And the Frozen Horror has that extra twist of the hit and roll. This one's a thorn for me. I don't need to play this one again. So I haven't played this one. I played the first one, and it was a hula hoop for me. But, yeah. If that's what you want, it is zany, ridiculous fun.

1:04:56Tom Vasel:I think if I was going to pick between the two, I would like the one without the hit and roll, and I can just try and airlock the rest of my team out of the space station that we're on in the original edition. I think I'd prefer that one. Gotcha. Hula Hoop for me is the expansion for Potion Explosion, The Sixth Student. I had purchased this a while ago, primarily to get more potions. That's what Potion Explosion is all about, getting those expansions with new cool abilities and stuff. And so I had been playing with those elements of the expansion for a while, but I had not had the chance to do the big expansion part of it is that you can play with five or six players with this expansion.

1:05:38Tom Vasel:It adds a second marble track, marble holder, a nice plastic one. So if you had a first edition that was cardboard, I think now all of them are plastic. But the sixth student adds a second marble track. And if you're playing with five or six players, you do this weird thing where you discard into one of the tracks when you pay for something. And then you draft from the other one. But then if one is more full than the other, it switches. And it switches at the beginning of a turn. So you might be thinking, ooh, I got a really cool move on this one slide track. Oh, wait, it moved, and now we're playing on the other slide track, and so I have to re-figure out my move.

1:06:22Tom Vasel:Which is okay. It sort of increases the AP aspect of this game, because you might have a great plan, and now you have to rethink your plan. But that's always an aspect of Potion Explosion. You might have had a great plan that somebody else messed up through their potion play. So that's a bit of an even shift. I thought it was going to be confusing trying to keep track of this going back and forth, but it is pretty simple realizing which track is going to be active at any given moment. It also adds a new wild style of marble that works differently than some of the other wild styles and offers some new space to play in as you mix your potions.

1:07:00Tom Vasel:I did enjoy this. I was a little worried about keeping track of the two slide tracks, but it works pretty well. That is the sixth student expansion for Potion Explosion. I'm just glad to see this game is still getting played. Yeah. I just played a game called Marblous ah that's the new Cosmos right yeah just keep playing Potion Explosion Eric alrighty so I don't know if your thorn is Jason or the other game but um they can both be thorns I'm not touching that one thank you everybody for listening and joining us for another episode we're glad to have you here we look forward to seeing you all again or talking to you all again or running into you all again.

1:07:43Tom Vasel:We'll see you at an upcoming event or we'll talk to you in a couple episodes. Until then, I'm Tom Vassell. I'm Julie Ahern. And I'm Eric Sommerer. You've been listening to At The Table. 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 that time we collided with our favorite vase provided by Nocturn.

1:08:16Tom Vasel:Until next time, from all of us at the table, have fun gaming.

1:08:26Tom Vasel:Which one of us is the horror this time? What? What? I don't understand that either. That doesn't make any sense. No. This is French humor? my my whole my whole humor is skewed because i'm still jet lagged oh no it was a reference to the game i was talking about but that's fine