At The Table with The Dice Tower - Parallel Design

11:20Eric Summerer:And there was a lot of small games. What they do is when people come in. So this is an unusual convention because it's a big room full of all these publishers and different people. And they hire these. They bring in these demo people who are going to demo games. And they give everyone this piece of paper. If you play every game on this piece of paper, you get like a button or some special things. blah blah blah. Okay. And so people are like working hard to go play all these games. And if you and then when you're done playing that's it. There's no selling at all in this hall but when you leave the hall you basically exit through the gift shop.

11:56Eric Summerer:You go into this big giant area where they're selling everything you just saw. And one cash register type situation. I like that actually. I think it works really well.

12:08Tom Vasel:With more than one cash register sure.

12:11Eric Summerer:Oh, sure. Although the first day, the internet was down, and so that was kind of a bear.

12:15Tom Vasel:Oh, no. But you're saying one exit point. It's just one big store.

12:19Eric Summerer:Yeah, one exit point. You have to go out through this store. No, you don't have to buy anything, obviously. It's just like a museum gift shop, and your little kids aren't sitting there going, I want a stuffed whatever. But it does -

12:30Tom Vasel:I want a stuffed Cascadia.

12:32Eric Summerer:Oh, there's somebody - Gift shops are like a bane to parents everywhere. And museums know this. Yeah, of course. They're like, it's educational. Buy your children these overpriced items. So it was pretty good. I like that a lot because the people demoing the games just have to demo the games. They don't have to demo and then sell it necessarily. Although it does mean that you might lose out on maybe an impulse purchase or what have you. I'm sure there's ups and downs with the whole situation. There was also an upstairs area where there was Magic the Gathering and a pile of tournaments, Summoner Wars and Unmatched and two-player game tournaments upstairs.

13:17And some other small little booths were upstairs from some just various different things.

13:24Eric Summerer:And then on the third floor way off where they would bother nobody, they put blood in the clock tower as all conventions do.

13:34Eric Summerer:but the convention itself obviously they had tons of people come in the government is very much behind this the mayor of the city showed up and made a speech and made a pretty good speech

13:44Tom Vasel:you could tell that she was a gamer that is really yeah and so that were behind it so lots

13:52Eric Summerer:of people came who never heard of board gaming in general they're just coming to see what's on and so they're playing a lot of these shorter small fast games and those did pretty well all play games were there. I would say there was very few heavy games being demoed at all. The heaviest might have been Gross Guy from C-Mon. But I wouldn't... Bullet Heart maybe from Level 99. But these were not even particularly heavy games necessarily. But just lots of people playing games. Lots of families coming through. It was very, very nice. I mean, I lost my voice talking to people so much. So many people said hi.

14:37Eric Summerer:I had a really, really good time. I got a custom suit. I've always wanted to do that. Wow. And I had a fantastic time talking to everybody, playing games. I was very tired though. Very tired. I'm still very, very tired from the whole experience just because it was just so much and so many people and so many things to see. but I was really glad to go and seeing this burgeoning scene there. Hans, the guy who ran it, ran the CMON convention that I went to in Thailand back in the day. That's how I met him and he does a really, really good job. The demo team and the hosts were excellent and overall it was just a very cool experience.

15:22Tom Vasel:Neat. Any panels that you were a part of?

15:26Eric Summerer:no i ran a game show um once and that went surprisingly well considering i really goofed up um so i made a game show and i was like well how much american culture does everybody here know well they're like lots of american culture okay great but i thought i you know i'd still take out some more u.s centric questions if i could to make this game show made the game show sent it in started the game show up and it was not the game show that i had prepared oh no what uh it was just the different game shows one of the cruise game shows oh no i was like well let's see how this works the first question was like made the top 10 hottest u.s states i was like well what do we do and people are like no keep going we got it and it went well i was like i wonder what the next question will be because I don't know.

16:19Tom Vasel:Good luck everybody. We're all on this ride together.

16:24Eric Summerer:Fortunately it went okay. I was like well if I ever come back I have another game show prepared already.

16:31Tom Vasel:I guess so.

16:32Eric Summerer:And then the other and I also ran Metro Bingo which is a remake of an older game called Streams. I don't know if you've ever played that one Eric or Julie. It's basically do you pull tiles from a bag and they're numbered and then you write them in a line and you're trying to make the line as in consecutive order if you can. But now it looks like subway tracks rather than a stream, I guess, the original theme. This is from Happy Bow Bow. So it's one of their games. So I did that. We also did signings, although I was very pleased. Many people came and asked me to sign things and stuff and they came and saw Rob Davie and Emerson and Colby and Randy Flynn, etc.

17:18Eric Summerer:But the number one person that people came to see there was an artist. So Maeve Da Silva was there, who is the artist for Harmonies. And also other games. She's done Deus, When I Dream, Stella Dixit.

17:40Tom Vasel:Yeah.

17:41Eric Summerer:Anyway, she was there and people would come by and she would draw in their harmonies. And she would draw like a whole picture with multiple things. No way. And so they did a, you know, they were there for an hour. I came back two hours later and she was still there. They basically had to tell her to stop. But she did a really fantastic job drawing for everybody and very, very popular. So she did a great job on that. And, yeah, so I also met with lots of podcasters and media people from the Philippines. I was featured in Esquire Philippines. What?

18:23Tom Vasel:Was this before or after the custom suit?

18:26Eric Summerer:Bucket list item checked off. No, but I was wearing the traditional Philippine shirt, which made everybody happy. It was good. It was good. good and I'm glad I went. I'm glad to be back where all my effort now goes into Dice Tower East, which is coming up, folks.

18:44Tom Vasel:It was almost

18:45Eric Summerer:too late to buy tickets to Dice Tower East, but you still can, I think. It's going to be great. I mentioned these games, these Filipino games that it's got. They're going to be there at Dice Tower East. Also, some giant stacking games and more that you can see on our channel. It's going to be good. Eric's going to be threatening people with curling.

19:06Tom Vasel:I'm not threatening them. I'm offering to curl wisdom. I'm very excited. Challenging.

19:11Eric Summerer:Yes, challenging. Challenging is the word. I like threatening. It sounds so much cooler.

19:16Tom Vasel:We're going to do a mini tournament of this amazing floor curling set that you can also see on the channel. I can't wait to get my hands on it. It's going to be fun. I can't wait to play games. Yes, games. I hear there's a Philippine animal version of Cascadia to play now. Yes. Very, very cool. Were there language issues at this event? Spiel is sort of, in Germany, has this bubble where you can pretty much converse in English almost everywhere in the fair.

19:50Eric Summerer:In the Philippines, or at least in the metro area I was at, everyone speaks English.

19:54Tom Vasel:Yeah.

19:55Eric Summerer:They speak their own language also, but everyone speaks English. So very, very friendly, very easy to get around. I had no problems at all. I was the tallest person at the convention.

20:08Tom Vasel:Cool. Makes it easy to see.

20:09Eric Summerer:So there was that. Yeah, it was easy to find me. I took my hat off and was like, that's not the disguise I thought it would be. Not there. So that was it. I had a great time. Glad to be back.

20:19Tom Vasel:All right. It's time to head into our topic of discussion, but it has to begin with a tale of horror. And now, another tale of board gaming horror. Oh my, that's horrific. Gather round, children. Back in March, while sitting on the floor folding laundry, I was listening to a podcast about scary movies. The hosts were talking about overused horror tropes and went on a rant about movies where the characters made the ill-thought-out choice of splitting up. A bolt of inspiration hit me like a jump scare. A game based on players splitting up. The core mechanic came to me nearly fully formed. After tossing clean socks and underwear aside, I jumped on my computer and began to create the foundation of a new game.

21:13Tom Vasel:Within 36 hours, I had a working prototype. The game was a twist on the eye split, you choose mechanic. Players would take turns distributing loot between two rooms over the course of six rounds. Meanwhile, there is the increasing threat of a killer that could pop out and put a damper on your treasure hunting. Hastily made handwritten cards gave way to ones I made on my printer. Those were later replaced by, and please don't judge me, I'm new at this, some AI images to give the cards some pizzazz. I playtested with some friends. I made adjustments. I playtested some more. I made adjustments. This past weekend, I took the game to a proto-spiel event to present to other would-be game designers and even a small local game publisher that was in attendance.

22:02Tom Vasel:I received good feedback, and I was ready to make a few more needed changes before hopefully, fingers crossed, getting my game in front of the masses. And then, today, while absentmindedly perusing YouTube, I saw a new thumbnail from the Dice Tower Studios. A review of a game I had never heard of, called Dracula's Fortune. I start to watch, and realized with increasing amounts of horror and dismay that the game being reviewed is... basically, for all intents and purposes, my game. A similar split-and-choose mechanic, the same idea of treasures, set collection, a similar setting, and even the same six-round counter.

22:48Tom Vasel:Alas, this is the deep impact to my Armageddon, the ants to my A Bug's Life. After wallowing and feeling sorry for myself, I now face the unknown future ahead of me. One that may involve a new theme, a heist game perhaps. Back to the drawing board.

23:13Eric Summerer:So the phenomenon that is mentioned here is in the film industry is called twin films. These are films with the same or similar plots that are released a year. And usually when stuff like this happens, whether it's in film or board gaming, people accuse someone of stealing from somebody else. But the fact that these things are produced way ahead of time. Yeah. Like these things start way ahead of time. So it's not like I saw Eric's game and I was like, oh, quick, get mine out of the market at the same time. You can't do it that fine. And so in the movie industry, that's how it happens. That's why there was two movies within a couple of years that were about Steve Jobs.

24:00Eric Summerer:I don't know if you remember. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, and there is a ton of these. If you can look it up on Wikipedia, there's just obviously Armageddon and Deep Impact is one of the most famous.

24:11Tom Vasel:I like how the story writer here equated his game to Armageddon and that the – and his game was a bug's life compared to ants. So there's some ego here too.

24:28Eric Summerer:Well, sure. But I mean this is going to happen in the industry period. You're going to come up with an idea and someone else is bound to have a same or similar idea as time has gone by. It's just going to be that way. It's not like there's tons of – especially with theme. I'm always surprised when someone comes up to me like, I have this new theme that I'm working on, Tom, but don't tell me. It's not like you're going to have this secret theme and people are like, I never thought of that. The theme is nothing. I remember very distinctly one time someone came and whispered a theme in my ear and then just disappeared in the night no because they were telling about this theme and I remember thinking and I'm not saying who it is because I don't want to narrow it down to what publisher whatever I just remember thinking okay yay I mean I'm glad you have this cool theme that you thought of but there already is a game app out with this theme and more will come I'm sure it's not as I don't know it's just not it's you're not like this you've not thought of something no one has ever thought of before mechanism wise I get and I get in a specific thing what a bummer it might

25:39Tom Vasel:be to find that this exists type situation yes uh I guess the the question is Julie you seem to indicate when we were talking about this topic that this happens a lot I'm being really quiet Yeah, I know, because, you know, usually in our dynamic, Tom is a little bit more jaded about things when he talks about things. And I'm the Pollyanna. And this is not the case in this particular topic.

26:09Eric Summerer:What? I'm jaded? What? I'm jaded.

26:14Tom Vasel:I can't tell you how many games. I go to so many unpubs and publisher speed datings and people taking meetings with me at shows to look at games to potentially sign. And in the 15 years now that I've been doing it, I can't tell you how many people have come up to me and it's a card game where you're going to battle and there are wizards. And maybe a magic system, perhaps. Yeah, so many, so many, dozens and dozens of them, and each one thinking it is a brand new concept. So I think there's one, there's the arc of that, where if you're a new designer, you design what you know, and you can tell what games people gravitate to, the designer, the new designer gravitates to purely on that.

27:17then you have the designers who you know have been more established who still

27:23Tom Vasel:kind of design in a bubble and then you have designers who play do meetups and everything because any designer meetup that i've gone to somebody plays a game and three other designers are like have you played this have you played this have you played this and they're not doing it to be jerks they're not they're doing it to let you know these are the other games that are like your game and if you haven't played them, make sure you play them to make sure yours is unique enough. It is a very common thing among designers who play together to do that. And they're not doing it to, you know, yuck in your yum.

27:59Tom Vasel:It's not a gotcha sort of situation. The Simpsons did it. Right. It's absolutely to prevent exactly the scenario that this person is talking about um and i've had and i've had the exact like a new designer who thought they had something great and they did um and it was cora quest they are it had already been made um and and listening to them and their excitement for a game they could play with their kids that encouraged sharing and helping each other out and it was easy to use and having to say have you played Korra Quest to them? I don't like being the bad guy, but in that case, I felt like the bad guy because they were new to design as well.

28:43Tom Vasel:Whereas established gamers, when you say, have you played this? Well, just write it down. Or they will say, yep, I played that one so that they know that you know. So design-wise, that theme-wise, yeah, I think there's just things that are in the zeitgeist and mushrooms. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we had a whole cluster of mushroom games at one point sprouting up like in a forest somewhere. Correct. So that is, yes, there's a lot of, as a designer, I can understand when there's a frustration when you think you've made something and it's different than all other things that have ever existed. Right, yeah.

29:22Tom Vasel:On the publisher end, it's really hard to play and not roll your eyes when it's the seventh, it's Scout with a Twist, you've looked at this year. So, I'm trying to be positive. So, what do you do in this situation? You've discovered you've been at a protospiel or something like that. And someone has said, hey, have you played this? Oh, no, no, I haven't played that. When you go across the hall and play a copy and say, oh, golly, this is actually very close to what I'm doing. Now what? Now what? So this, yeah, and that's being asked. Now what? So there are, turns out, as Tom put it, there's a lot of similar games.

30:11Is it unique enough?

30:14Tom Vasel:Are you really attached to this game? Are you attached to it because you've worked really hard at it? Are you attached to it because you think it still has legs? And if that's the case, what makes it different than the game you just played? Can you lean into that in the experience? If you're doing it because you worked really hard on it and you want to persevere, I understand that. But also, that's not the reason to make the game. You made the game and you have that. what you're saying now is you want other people to have the game and other people already have it and that's frustrating but also not but if it shouldn't undercut the fact that you did create it and that creativity was meaningful to you um but if you're also looking at it from a i would like to make money standpoint then why are you in board games um no but if you want you know if you want other people to have it and buy it and sell it and it already exists then you have to be more pragmatic than creative and that's a hard thing to do and put to the side um but i think there's like a new theme it might be the thing but is it is it the theme or is it the mechanics because it seems like there's also saying that the gameplay is very similar so my thing is it can be a similar theme if you lean into what made yours different than the other game that already exists and if If you're too attached and it's too close, then yes, back to the drawing board it is.

31:47Tom Vasel:I can play a game and give those evaluations on a one-on-one specific basis, but in a general scheme, and I think that's it. Play it with other designers. Play it with other industry people. If you can get it to a convention and get that kind of feedback, that's the next step if you're really attached to it, is my thought. well like the key is finding what about your design is different from you it's really highlighting those differences because the the comparison is going to come no matter what if you're doing a party game that's very close to apples to apples people are going to make the comparison it's impossible for them not to and so you need to really highlight the things that are different

32:30Eric Summerer:i don't think you need to be as concerned about that you shouldn't copy obviously you shouldn't steal. Okay, this is straight up. Don't steal. And different companies have done that. But if you had your game in development already, and it's different, modify it. Make it different and put it out there. And don't worry about someone saying, hey, this is a copy of this. If yours, if you believe in it. But I mean, obviously as a designer, you're going to let the publisher make the decision if they think it's too similar. A lot of this would be avoided. You know, Julie says all these people come up to her and show her these games that already exist.

33:06Eric Summerer:to do research, to look and see if your game is out there already, or this idea that you think is so unique and interesting is out there. Just because it is doesn't mean it's not going to happen. The number of Cards Against Humanity knockoffs that come out and make money, it works, I suppose. I'm not going to support it, and I'm going to call it out. But I think you shouldn't worry about it as much. you shouldn't worry like oh am I making something that already exists why don't you make something and then let other people worry about it I don't know I don't think I would get too concerned about it.

33:42Tom Vasel:Just plunge ahead basically?

33:44Eric Summerer:Well again with the proper research but let's say he in this specific instance this game oh it's similar to this game out there well then I would go buy that game see where the differences are maybe they're not as similar as you think but let's say they are then say okay well, do I shelf what I'm doing or do I change some things up to make it different so it's unique in its own way? What are things about this game that I don't like? I don't like this. Well, then change it in your game.

34:12Tom Vasel:Yeah. It is a bummer when you think you have the most unique brand new idea in the world and you find out somebody else also had that most unique brand new idea in the world. And for the record, that has happened to me multiple times. I have designed a game and then found a game. So I'm also on the other end of that. I have had that happen. And, you know, yeah, it's not the greatest feels. But they're...

34:37Eric Summerer:Sure, I've also had a situation where I thought of an idea for a game or whatever, blah, blah, blah. And then you see someone else, not only is their idea similar to yours, but it's better. And you go, oh, well, all right then, congrats. You discovered electricity.

34:54Tom Vasel:Congratulations. Congratulations. So, in other words, not all is lost, but you need to take the possibility that you have to cut bait and run and say, yeah, you know what? This was a great exercise, and maybe I learned something for the future. But not all is necessarily lost. All right, let's talk about some games that did get published and might be the coolest, most newest idea ever.

35:21Tom Vasel:They say that every rose has its thorn But not every rose has a hula hoop Tom, you haven't talked about games in a while Let's go to you first

35:34Eric Summerer:It's been three hours since I've last talked about games Okay, so the first game I want to talk about here Is a game called Grow Sky Why'd you say it like that? And I say it like that because if you say it together, it sounds like gross guy. Oh, yeah. Which now that I've told you, you'll never be able to.

35:56Tom Vasel:You know, just on repeat. It's all I can hear.

36:01Eric Summerer:So this is a game that originally came out in Japan. And I don't know exactly who the designer is here. but I do know that CMON when we talk about CMON people often think of the big giant miniature projects and stuff and they are working on those I talk to them those are going to get delivered but they also have a division in Thailand that makes board games and so this is one of the board games they streamlined this to a 45 minute game that plays very quickly the original game took like 2 hours and what you're doing in this game is you roll some dice and then players take turns drafting dice and the dice are custom dice and you can either take a die to take the action that that die will show it might say it might show four fuel and you'll go i will take four fuel or three of this resource and you'll get three of that resource or you can take it and move around a track on your board you have this track on your board that you are moving the ship around and whatever space it lands on, you will get the benefits of that space.

37:13Eric Summerer:And also when you pass some spaces on the corners, they will give you things, sometimes victory points. And that's how you win the game. You're trying to get victory points. So the game is pretty basic in that regard of, hey, it's all about getting victory points. And there's a few ways to do that. One, some of the actions give you these little Tetris pieces. You put them on your board. You cover up symbols. You complete rows and columns. You get bonuses. Again, sometimes them being victory points. You can get tiles that you'll put on the outside of your board so that your airship that moves around, the spots that they land on, you can make those spots better.

37:48Eric Summerer:Or make some of the spaces that instead of you having to land on, you get stuff. You just fly over it and you get the stuff. And then there's a track that you move up in the board that gives you bonuses. And again, if you move up in certain spots on track, it gives you victory points. That's pretty much the game, but it's one of those fun games where it's just upgrading systems. I'm upgrading these actions on the outside of the board. I'm filling in these rows with this little column. There's a little book resource that you put in the middle of your board, and you are churning them out by turning a tile.

38:18Eric Summerer:I really enjoyed this game. I was not expecting to necessarily. I didn't know anything about it, even though a couple guys at the Dice Tower reviewed it and said it was good. I just never watched a review or cared. No, like I said, it just was not even on my radar. I don't know how I missed it, what have you. But I really thought it was a fun game. So this is the hula hoop.

38:43Tom Vasel:You were surprised by it.

38:45Eric Summerer:Yes, yes. So it was a hula hoop for me. Grow Sky. I enjoyed it. I also played another game that was a surprise to me, and this was the Deep Sea Divers of Jeju. Jeju Island is in Korea. It is Korea's Hawaii. I've never been there. So go figure. This is a remake of an older game called Ratenir by Hisashi Hayashi. Neat. And this is a game that reminded me of a dungeon crawl game from, I believe, Phil Walker Harding. And I don't remember the name of it. But the way this game works is you will simultaneously, each round of the game, decide on where you're going to put these divers on the board. You can put them from level 0 to level 11.

39:32Eric Summerer:and then you will split the goodies at the level that you go to with anyone else who's gone to that level. And there's different goodies that you can get and they all score points. And each game, what things give you will change. And there's also trash in the ocean and you are getting rid of that trash. And if you get rid of a lot of trash, you can score a lot of points that way too. The problem is you need to have a continuous line of divers all the way to the top. If you don't, if there's ever a break in that line of divers, then anything below that break gets nothing. Guess where the good stuff is?

40:07Eric Summerer:On the bottom.

40:12Eric Summerer:So this game can have some wild swings of fate. I mean, my first game of this, I just massacred my opponents. And the second game of this, I did so horribly. Because I kept saying, oh, I'm going to go down deep. Wait, wait, no one supported me? I was expecting you to level 7 so I could go to level 9 and I like that it's a fun back and forth definitely I could see people disliking it going I didn't do very well because you can always go to the top and get stuff for sure but if you push your luck you might not get anything there's a way to get a third diver so you can try to set up your own little line of divers and I just found it to be an amusing little game It's a fun theme.

40:59Eric Summerer:It's beautiful. The divers are all these little translucent pieces you put on the board. It looks pretty. There's lots of wild different scoring in how you collect these things. But I found it to be fun. This is from Happy Bao Bao. And I think Hisashi Ayashi at this point is, I think we could say he's just one of the greatest designers there is.

41:18Tom Vasel:Yeah. Really good at that simplicity.

41:21Eric Summerer:He really is, and his stuff is just phenomenal to the point where if I know he makes a game, I'm like, well, I'll probably like it. Nice. He's probably best known still for Bomb Busters, right, at this point. At this point, yes.

41:37Tom Vasel:Yeah. Yeah.

41:39Eric Summerer:So Happy Bow Bow. I'm looking forward to getting a copy of this one myself. They had a lot of fun little games. But this is also another hula hoop for me. I was just surprised by both of these. Hadn't heard of them. Played them both at the convention last week and enjoyed it a lot. Neat.

41:55Tom Vasel:That's Sea Divers of Jeju. Tom, there's a musical on Broadway that's about going to Jeju Island. Have you heard of Maybe Happy Ending?

42:03Eric Summerer:No.

42:03Tom Vasel:It's about two androids on a road trip to Jeju Island.

42:07Eric Summerer:No, no, no. I have heard about that. I did not know Jeju Island was involved in it. I knew the general principle was androids, but that was it.

42:16Tom Vasel:Yeah, they're in Korea and they're going to Jeju. Yeah. Yeah. All right. All right, Julie, what have you got? Well, I had a lot of games brought back from the Tokyo Game Fair. Oh, like a whole crate of fun. Yeah, that Robert very thoughtfully got because they looked like something I would like. So we played a bunch of them. And my first rose is Flamenco, the card game. And he picked it up mostly because it has a picture of a cat in a flamenco dress on the front, which is a type of Spanish dancing that there's a fan. And usually the dancers, they have these very ruffled, beautiful dresses. And I've seen flamenco dancing.

43:08Tom Vasel:It's quite lovely. And the game is for two to five players. and it's a it's a it's a climbing game where you're card shedding but with a few extra steps get it i do i do i got it okay okay so when you're card shedding you have to skip the next number so for example if somebody plays a single three you can play a single five or higher the numbers go from one to seven there's five suits uh and then there's multiples of the one two threes and then a single four five six seven of each color of each suit uh then if you want to uh up the beat you can play a single card but instead of choosing you can double the card count or increase the card count so if you play a single three you could play double threes or double fives but still no fours.

44:15Tom Vasel:The highest number being the seven, in normal circumstances, can't be beaten, except you can in this if you play a one and a two. But that means if you have double sevens, you'd have to play two ones and two twos. Wow. So the other twist of this is that you can break up even numbers. So if you have a six, you could play two threes on it. If you have a four, you could beat it with two twos or four ones. However, if you do that, they all have to be different suits.

45:00Eric Summerer:Sort of. The color issue in this game is very weird. Color doesn't mean anything for 90 % of the game.

45:10Tom Vasel:Except for that. Except for splitting up the evens for the most part. Right.

45:14Eric Summerer:So, Eric, if you play a six of red, I have to play a three blue and a three black. I can't play a three red. Oh. Yeah. But if you play a six of red and a six of blue, I could play two three reds, a three green and a three yellow, because the two three reds I would assign to the blue one.

45:35Tom Vasel:Oh, my goodness. Yeah. My head hurts, and I'm not even looking at the game. I loved it.

45:39Eric Summerer:Well, it's not a thing. It's that you can always play the – it's a weird thing because the color is almost there to stop you from always doing it. The time I notice it the most is when someone plays a seven and someone else plays a one, two, and you're like, sorry, you can't play that because one of those colors doesn't match the seven. It does match the seven. You can't play it.

45:59Tom Vasel:Okay.

46:00Eric Summerer:I loved it. It's my one little sticking crawl in the game. I love the idea of if Julie plays two fours, I'm like, yes. I've been holding on to four twos just for a moment like this. Or when Robert got annoyed at me and played four ones on a four and then the next round, because, you know, you clear it and you start over.

46:19Tom Vasel:He had no ones and I knew he had no ones so I could play two sevens and finish the game. And so strategically, you're thinking about different things at that point. And so for somebody who plays a lot of ladder games, that piece of it and that extra layer of strategy was super fun for what you're tracking. I thought it was great. It was a rose. So that was Flamenco.

46:46Eric Summerer:Okay. Julie, when you get a chance on YouTube, do a search for a Flamenco card game and you can watch their advertisement, which shows the cat's dancing.

46:56Tom Vasel:Even better.

46:58Eric Summerer:I thought you would like it.

46:59Tom Vasel:I like how, you know, I guess it's a tango where you put the rose in your teeth, but I thought it was appropriate that the dancing game got a rose. Yes. Maybe in the hair. The rose in the hair. It is. It is a rose in the hair. The cat has a rose behind its ear in the picture. By Hula Hoop. So, anybody in the board game sphere, I'm assuming, knows Stratego. I do. Yep, yep. What? I know. So strange. I had never played it. And we didn't have it in my house growing up. But then I didn't play it because it's one of those games that Robert played all the time. There's a certain set of games that Robert, when he played them, has played them hundreds of times.

47:51and I knew there wasn't going to be even a modicum of hope of me not just getting completely crushed.

48:01Tom Vasel:Not just him winning. Me being like, what are my life choices and why am I here? So, by loop is Stratego Quick Battle because he was so pleased. He's like, look, they made a game of Stratego, but instead of the it's 40 versus 40 of your pieces and the pieces have different values. I'm doing this super quick because I know everybody knows how to do this. You have a flag, bombs, a marshal, a general, miners, scouts and spies. And they're all worth different point values. And the idea is to capture the flag. but each of the different other pieces have different things that they can do so you have 10 total one flag two bombs one marshal one general two miners two scouts one spy the board is smaller it's great for travel um and while he did still crush me completely it's in 20 minutes or less and i will attest to the fact that even and i've played like i played chess i've played checkers i played a two-player abstract games this is his wheelhouse it is is where he's gonna beat me but i will say i very much enjoyed it and because it was so much faster i actually had a fighting chance because he didn't have time to set up a lot of the strategies he would do so for me it was a hulu hoop because i very much enjoyed it um and for people in your lives if you are a big fan of the old school stuff and you can't get anybody to the table to play a full game of Stratego.

49:37Tom Vasel:I recommend trying Stratego Quick Battle because despite the fact that I knew at the very end I was still going to have a very happy Robert and a very sad me. I had a great time playing it. So that's my hula hoop. Neat. Is it basically just like standard Stratego, just a smaller scale? You're still setting up the pieces? Correct. So it's a smaller box. It only has the 10 pieces per player. So smaller price point. They had it. they reprinted it so but it still looks like the original you still have the water in the middle where you so there's spaces in the middle you can't go but yes otherwise it's a smaller board and you only use 10 pieces and it takes it's a very quick setup and I'd put away all of that was lovely and so when he wants to play it again I will absolutely play it as opposed to, you know, Puerto Rico.

50:38Tom Vasel:Cool. There's just no chance. Okay. All right. First for me is a game called My Book Nook, which I believe right now is a Barnes & Noble exclusive. I don't know if there's a plan that that's a temporary thing and then it will be available everywhere. This is a word game, a cozy word game that comes in an acute magnetic closure box that looks like a book. Most of the cards in this game are letter cards. They come in many different suits. It actually looks a lot like, say, paperback. You've got sci-fi letters and romance letters, etc. There are also a smaller deck of accessories that will go on your shelf, and also some point-scoring cards, and that's generally it.

51:21Tom Vasel:This all gets laid out on the table. Everybody gets five cards, and you are either drawing cards, and you can draw cards from the letter row. There's six face-up cards there. Or that's accessory row, six face-up cards there. You can also draw from the face-down deck if you want those. You can just draw two cards from either of those sets. You have a hand limit of 10, though, so if you are above that, and that's just letter cards. The accessories go off in a pile in front of you. Letter cards need to get discarded down if you have more than 10, so you can't collect too many. But that's your whole turn, drawing cards.

51:56Tom Vasel:or you can play a word. And the longer the word, the more points it will be worth. You've got little point scoring cards that you take one. When you score the word, it stays out in front of you. And the more letters there are in the word, the more cards you get to draw from the top of the deck as sort of a reset action. So you can churn a little bit better if you make big words. And the game goes until somebody makes their fourth word. And then everybody gets one more turn, and that's the game. So you can push it if you make really small words, three and four letters, but those aren't worth nearly as many points.

52:36Tom Vasel:You're not going to get as much churn of the letters. You're going to need to take more time to get more letters to reset, to be able to play something again. These accessories get attached to the words. So you don't actually attach them to anything until the end of the game. Once everyone is all done, then you figure out which accessories are going to go with each word. You can only plug in one for each word. And the design of the cards, the letter cards look like books. And they're sort of pushed to one side of the card vertically so that you can splay them and line them all up. So it looks like the books are on a shelf when you've made a word.

53:11Tom Vasel:And the accessories are a bookend. They go on the end of that. And then they do some sort of, you get two points for every romance book in this word. You get six points if there are five sci-fi books in your entire library, stuff like that. And you total it all up and see who scores the most points. There is a solo mode that is simply see how high a score you can get, and the more cards you discard, you lose points that I found a little underwhelming. But I did like the choices. You could easily, I think there might be a danger here if there is a younger player, somebody who doesn't want to go for those longer words, just pushing end game with three and four letter words.

53:52Tom Vasel:And if you're trying to build to a nine, like an eight or nine letter word and trying to get those last couple of letters you need, it might be very frustrating that they just undercut the entire game. But there is that push and pull of trying to get those extra scoring cards, getting the letters you need to make those bigger words. There is the reward there if you have time to do it. What I liked and what makes this a hula hoop for me is that design of the cards. It's so cute when you've got all those letters lined up and you've made a shelf and you've put like a little D20 on the end and that's some sort of bonus.

54:27Tom Vasel:It just, it's adorable. And I kind of like the pace and the coziness of my book nook. It made it a hula hoop. Hmm. Second is a game called Cloud City, which I've been playing on board Game Arena, nice interaction or nice implementation of this on Board Game Arena. Cloud City is a three-dimensional building, tower building game, where you're going to be making a three-by-three grid. There's other modes where you can make different sizes of board, but the cards that make up this grid have like footprints of skyscrapers, and these things come in three sizes. There's small blue ones, there's medium green ones, there's tall orange ones.

55:11Tom Vasel:And on your turn, you start out with one already out there, and they have little plastic towers that go with them. And they get placed there. Then you will take another card from your hand and put it next to where you've already built. You're building that three-by-three grid. And then you can, if you have like-colored buildings, connect them with bridges. And those bridges are how you score points. You want to connect the two towers to be able to score points. And each tower can only have two bridges attached to it. So you can't, like, make a network that just spreads out from one tower. You need to build a snaky pattern, I guess.

55:47Tom Vasel:And then you draw one more tile for your hand, and it's the next player's turn. And you do this until everybody's filled their grid. The tricky part is that there are only so many of each of the bridges, and especially the big ones. If you want to make one that goes from all the way on one end of the 3x3 to the other, it's worth eight points. But there are only a couple of those in the stack. And based on turn order, they can disappear real fast. Because somebody could build by their one, two, their second turn, they could be putting out one of those super long bridges. And you can very easily not get to do the thing you are building toward because they go away really fast.

56:31Tom Vasel:Which is the tension of the game. I think if you just could build whatever bridges you want, then it's just a matter of who plans the best. And just, you know, there's no danger there. There has to be some sort of tension. But I don't like that tension. I've been in way too many circumstances where I have been building towards something. And just because of the turn order, somebody gets to put those big orange bridges out first. And I don't get to do that. and I think you almost need to aim for the middle ones, the slightly smaller where there are more of those bridges in the pile. It's a neat concept.

57:10Tom Vasel:It's fun to build these things, and the implementation on Board Game Arena is really cool. You can spin the little 3D grid around it. It is nice implementation of the game. It is light. It certainly doesn't overstay its welcome, but I found the frustration level to be just a little higher than I want for this level of game.

57:28Eric Summerer:So Cloud Cities... This is such a weird one to be talking about playing a board game arena. It's a strange one.

57:34Tom Vasel:It's also...

57:36Eric Summerer:Because it's like a 3D... It's like the whole point of the game is that it's 3D.

57:40Tom Vasel:Yes, but that's how it works. I don't know if playing it in person would change this. I guess you get the joy of building all of this stuff. But I just found the game to be more frustrating than I wanted. And I found a lot of times in the last couple of turns, as those bridges are gone from the pile that I can't do anything. Like, I can no longer... You can't change your direction tremendously because you've already laid down the first three or four cards and you can't suddenly start building a super long blue bridge if you can't build the yellow ones anymore. Anyway, that's Cloud City. I found it a little too frustrating for me.

58:21Tom Vasel:Yeah. Yeah.

58:23Eric Summerer:I think it's a fine game. It's fine. But I would never play it on Board Gamer.

58:28Tom Vasel:I'm going to steer clear of it based on this description.

58:30Eric Summerer:Yeah. Go watch your flamenco. I am going to. Go watch the Dancing Cats first. I'm going to be happy. All righty. Well, folks, that's it for another episode. We'll be back talking about more games in the future because we're never running out of games. Never. So satisfying. So many games to talk about. I need to find some name for the summer apocalypse of gaming. But it doesn't matter. It's upon us. And we're here for it, folks. We will see you, hopefully, at Dicetower East. It's coming up soon. Otherwise, we'll see you on this podcast. When I say see you, I mean we'll be talking. No, we can see you.

59:04Eric Summerer:I'm having a hard time ending this thing here. So, we done. I'm Tom Vassel. Until next time.

59:10Tom Vasel:And I'm Julia Hearn. And I'm Eric Sommerer.

59:12Eric Summerer:And we'll see you. We're not going to see the people. Anyway, At The Table.

59:15Tom Vasel: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 a catastrophic controversy that can cause calamitous clashes is brought to you by Seas of Strife. Until next time, from all of us at the table, have fun gaming.

59:49Tom Vasel:Now I have to go back to the drawing board because I had a game that was about a gross guy. And I, it's exactly the same.

59:58Eric Summerer:100 % I would play that game. Well, that game that we had viral is kind of about a gross game.

1:00:04Tom Vasel:Yeah, that guy was disgusting. Yep. Facts.