At The Table with The Dice Tower - When It All Goes Wrong

31:04Right. So it's not a, you can say, halt United States Post Office, UPS. I need all those back to fix it. Then you're going to wait for customer service questions. The one time I remember that small window working out, working out in quotes, but Roll for the Galaxy, when it was released, they released a small batch to BoardGameGeekCon and sent just one box or a couple crates worth and sold pre-release to these BGGers, and they realized there was an issue immediately because people opened up the game to play it, and the games had been packed wrong. Like, the wrong distribution of tiles was in the box.

31:47Some were missing tiles. Some just had duplicates. It was obviously a major issue, at least in this crate, and they were able to immediately say, all right, all those need to come back, and we're going to deal with it and we're going to not ship the game because we need to fix it. Yeah. But that's pretty rare that like an advanced canary in a coal mine situation gets to happen and you get to realize that there's a problem right away. And there's – well, that's a different – so when – okay. When you're manufacturing, you get a early proof which – so you get a digital one usually where you say yes, no, yes, no.

32:26That's good. this needs to be fixed i'm resending you a file all of that then you get a physical proof which is shipped which is almost as like a handmade almost handmade not really like it's still on the but they are doing a one-off or two-off so they're they haven't set it up like a full down a conveyor belt fixing like with multiple people on it so it's still far more closer to what Robert would do with his printers and Cricket and stuff like that, where they've put it all together and you approve. Then they send you a manufactured proof, which should be one that before they've shipped, they've pulled it off the line and said, here.

33:12So you get three different points, typically, of a game to look at it. And that manufactured proof is the one that this is where it gets a little tricky. Did the manufacturer do it at the very beginning of the process? When in the middle of it, when, you know, it's been running for a while and people may have stopped paying attention this carefully or, you know, they're using that's and you you can ask and specify and say, I'd like I don't want the first one off. Yeah. Yeah. but even you know so that can happen uh folklore there was uh the giant tree that had two different types of heads and two different right arms two different left arms and a whole bunch of people got just right two right arms oh and two left arms uh nobody was paying attention that there were different ones so they put dumped all of them in bins and we're just i'm assuming um and so for example that where some people we had to replace a whole bunch of them but some people did meetups where they just traded arms at like conventions which was delightful uh so what we i think what we did was we made we we made a promo card and said if you show up and drop off you know do a trade-off at a meet, we'll also give you this promo card and saved ourselves a lot on individual shipping and stuff like that that way.

34:42So thanks for that. I like that creative solution. But, you know, that's something that you're going to get that manufactured proof. And we didn't have that problem in ours because not every single one of them did. So it's a lot of creative thinking For something that is not on the creative side, there's a lot of creative thinking going into fixing problems. Because you do. You want, to the best of your abilities, to fix any problem. Yeah. Yeah. It's like what you said a couple weeks ago. What do I need to do to make this right? It's not necessarily a new copy. Right. What can I do to fix it? How can I get you the right part?

35:21That sort of thing. Right. Sometimes. And sometimes it's, you're just going to have to live with it. We're very sorry. We're going to do better next time, but it's not cost effective to fix this. Correct. So, you know, and then there are the companies where especially the bigger Kickstarter and it's a brand new company. You know, when you talk about thinking through whether you back a Kickstarter or not, I think it's good to support new businesses, but also some of the things you don't know. these are the things you learn from hard lessons in life. To be ready for these sorts of issues. To be ready for those sorts of things.

36:06And so that's, you know, a lot of times when I see the emails going out to ask backers for more money and stuff like that, I am sad, but I am also, like, things like this, that's when it happens. And you cannot predict every outcome. I could not predict when folklore fall of the spire that uh we were going to have a pandemic and everybody every manufacturer was going to shut down and do a shelter in place for several weeks a month and a half six weeks eight weeks i can't remember what it was but enough time where our completed games sat in non-temperature controlled damp situations and then they shipped all of them after immediately so people still managed to get their kickstarter backed game before the deadline i had three days three days of being like oh my gosh there was a pandemic life is just hard but this one thing i got this one thing right we we planned it so well that we had so much lead time that people still got it early before they started opening them and saying, there's something growing in the box.

37:22Oh, no. And we had to replace. And that's how the movie Alien started. Yep, yep. That's the beginning of the horror. Now, that was something the manufacturer had to pay for because it was their responsibility, and that was awful for them. Yeah, I guess that's a good question is who was paying for this stuff. Right. That was reprinting an entire print run. Oh, boy. Of brand new games. and throwing away all the old ones. Yep. And that was awful for everybody involved. So the whole thing, it had to be shipped again. It had to be like, it was like running an entire whole new campaign, but with nobody paying.

38:01And that was not great. That was a bad, bad, bad time. But it got done. And, you know, if you plan, you do the best you can. And you try to plan for not that situation, but for the what ifs. And that's also, you know, when people talk about, well, it only costs this much to manufacture, but we charge this much. Part of that is factoring in the potential of a bad day and things like that happening and how much is it going to cost. So in theory, if you've planned well, that has already been accounted for in some way, shape, or form from the customer that the publisher is then paying. So I guess the moral of the story is no matter how big this manufacturing error that you've discovered can be, it could have been mold.

38:55It could have been that. It wasn't mold, it was yeast. I don't know. It could be yeast. Tropical yeast. I don't know. Maybe somebody made sourdough out of it. All right.

39:10Let's move on here. We got to keep going. Let's do it. And now, another tale of board gaming horror. Oh, my. That's horrific. Gather round, children. My wife and I have recently decided to accept the fact that board gaming groups, other gaming friends, conventions, and the like are just not for us. We love board games, but aside from the occasional friend or family member who might be up for playing something light once in a while, we're on our own. While this conclusion was less than ideal, one benefit to this is that we get to curate our gaming to exactly what we want to play at all times. No sitting through games we don't enjoy because someone else picked them.

40:00No constant learning of new games to keep up with the BGG hotness. And best of all, revisiting favorites frequently without complaint. One of these games recently has been Merchant's Cove. We've recently enjoyed the multitude of ways you can play depending on the character you choose. After several plays of each of the four base set characters, we decided that it was time to pick up a few expansions to add some variety. So we got the Dragon Rancher. It was a great addition. Next came the innkeeper, a character I was especially excited to play and explore. The Oracle we are not as excited about, but I'm sure eventually we'll pick that one up as well.

40:42We are not fans of keeping expansion boxes at all. We will do whatever we can to get everything into one box so our shelves aren't clogged with unnecessary boxes you don't really need. This has never caused any issues at all for us whatsoever. That is until we ordered the Secret Stash expansion for Merchant's Cove. You may now know where this is going. The expansion came in the mail, and I quickly unboxed everything, fitting it all nicely into the awesome new wooden box inserts we recently purchased for the game. Thinking nothing of it, I tossed the Secret Stash box into the garbage and carried on with my day.

41:24Weeks went by And while we had not gotten a chance to play Merchant's Cove We knew that the next time we sat down with it would be awesome Because of all the great new content in the box to explore Minus one key piece Randomly, one morning before work I was browsing through episodes of a board game podcast I sometimes listened to I selected an episode on Merchant's Cove And that's when I learned the horrifying truth As it turns out, below the insert of Secret Stash, on the box itself, is a secret player board that accompanies a hidden extra character to play with called the Thief. A secret player.

42:07A secret board. A whole new avenue of Merchant's Cove that I just threw away. The sadness. I guess you don't know what you don't know. That's what I tell myself to ease the pain. I also occasionally blame Final Frontier Games for hiding such a dumb secret like that. Especially considering the main box of Merchant's Cove comes with space for this expansion already. Why would you ever think you needed the box? If anything, they're leading you to believe you don't. But I know deep down, the fault is all mine. On the bright side, BGG does have a high-quality image of the board to print, but it won't be the same.

42:48Worse still, I've guaranteed myself a now lifetime of carefully and meticulously examining every single board game box before throwing it out. Dissecting every nook and cranny, anxiously removing every piece of the box to make sure I don't miss some weird secret piece or whatever. Checking and double checking and then checking again, with the constant worrying thought that maybe I should just keep the box, just in case. A worrying thought likely to grow louder with every new purchase. Perhaps even to the point where it becomes so loud that I think the expansion box itself is talking to me. Like a lunatic.

43:22What's that, honey? Yes, we're keeping that expansion box. Why? Well, the box told me I should. Oh, and keep that one too. The box said it wanted a friend. Mwahahahaha!

43:41See, this is a tale of horror to me because what's going to happen now is everyone in the world who listens to this is going to be like, I can never throw another box away. Yes, you can. I just played a random – Oh, that was delightfully indulgent. I played a random escape room game where part of the information was somewhere on the packaging. Actually, this has happened multiple, multiple times. Oh, yeah. Unlock has done this a couple of times. Exit does this too. All the time. Yeah, so for every escape room game, you cannot throw anything away. I think you can throw the plastic shrink around the box away.

44:18Maybe. But I'm not even sure on that. But you shouldn't have to worry about this for expansions. I think if it was so secret that they hit it on the box, it probably wasn't even that good of an expansion. Yeah. Fan writer games almost always has something under the insert. Oh. Thank you. Now you know. Oh, yeah. You know, I always look for sure. But yeah, I've been burned. Because there was a time when the exit was new and people would pack several decks into a small container so they didn't have to carry the boxes around. And so, yeah, it made a lot more sense to just stuff the decks in somewhere and then you had them with you.

44:58But if you did that with some of the unlocks, I was talking about unlock. Yeah, unlock decks. If you did that with certain unlocks, important information was on the box and you were in trouble.

45:12yeah you know i wanting to have clean consolidated i i agree that is something that i like to do somebody else in the house doesn't prefer it

45:29but yeah i wait until the unboxing and playing it experience and then i put it away Yeah, just to be sure. For this very reason. So I don't examine it and have the boxes talk to me. I mean, they talk to me for other reasons. This is what? I'm missing what? Don't worry about it. I do appreciate the other side of this. A lot of expansions lately have come in obviously disposable boxes. I know that makes it a little less cool sitting on the shelf. But I know Stonemaier Games has done this where their expansions are in basically corrugated cardboard with the full intent that you're supposed to dismantle this and put all this stuff in your main box.

46:14That's how it's intended to be used. You shouldn't put this on the shelf as it sits. Yes, we have. Well, Alex and I have talked about that and the pros and cons of it. But yes, the idea being it is – please consolidate your games. Make them all streamlined. which is also giving you the the the indication that that's what you need to do yeah the permission to do it the permission to do it i as as much as you know this is yes the the writing on this is lovely it's almost like she intended you to read it eric um i enjoyed it tremendously the melodrama of it the the idea that if you've made a space in your box for an expansion but then you put something directly onto the box to use was there was a there was a meeting yeah an internal meeting that was missed in some way shape or form for that.

47:22So I agree with that statement. You only know what you know after the fact, but that is an interesting design choice from a publisher side that I agree with. If you're going to make space for it in your core box, don't put something on the non-consumable or the part that can get thrown away. All right, let's get some detailed descriptions of games, shall we? Games! Woo-hoo!

48:00They say that every rose has its thorn. But not every rose has a hula hoop. Okay, Wingspan America. This is the latest expansion for Wingspan. New stuff. Wingspan. Yeah. So Wingspan has several expansions. It had the European expansion, the Asia expansion, and the Oceania expansion already. And I was like, when I get around to South America, I want my parrots. Well, the answer is... That day is now. Yeah, that day is now. But here's the thing. This expansion ain't about parrots. This expansion's about hummingbirds. Ah. There's parrots in it. Don't get me wrong. But I guess when I talked to Elizabeth Hargrave, she was like, don't forget Africa.

48:44I was like, oh, yeah. There's bigger parrots in Africa. But there's lots of parrots in this. But this game, this expansion adds a new card to Wingspan, small hummingbird cards or smaller cards. And you will be sticking them at the front of each of the different lines of birds that you are building. And they give you extra actions. It definitely increases the things you can do over the course of a game. You will move up these little tracks as you collect hummingbirds of different types. They will fly to you. They'll fly away. They'll fly to you. They'll fly away. They're not there very long. But there's new ways to score points in this game.

49:21But also there is – when the hummingbirds come to you, you get different resources or different extra goodies. So there's two things it does. One, it makes the game longer. But two, it fills the game with resources and makes it more fun to run your bird lines. I love this expansion. I would not play it with people for their first game of Wingspan probably. And I wouldn't play it with more than three. In fact, the rules were like, this is longer. You might want to take away an action cube. I don't want to do that. I'd rather just play with two or three players. But I love the new Colorful Birds.

49:57South America has a lot of wonderful color birds and Central America. But I also like the hummingbird mechanism a lot. This is a very, very surprise to me because all three expansions so far, I'm like, they're fine. But I don't love them. But this one I really love. Cool. And the next expansion, Wingspan Parrots, is going to get a 10 out of 10. Well, I don't know. The other game I want to talk about is Sanibel. Sanibel is an island that's here in Fort Myers. It is known across the world for collecting seashells, and it definitely is that. I have yet to find amazing shells there because I don't feel like driving there at 4 in the morning.

50:38but we've gone early with my kids and collected seashells and the beaches are just filled with shells there the people on sanibel are very protective of the island you have to pay six dollars just to cross to get on the bridge they're everywhere parking costs money they have a lot of different rules but the beaches are pristine they have a lot of little habitats for the turtles that lay their eggs there it's it's a neat it's a neat little place also some really cool restaurants if you ever go there go to cheeburger cheeburger good cheeseburger okay so Elizabeth Hargrave went there as a kid or a young adult I'm not sure when and so she oh that's right both my games are from the same designer I yeah anyway she designed Sanibel which is about walking along the beach picking up shells and so in this game it's kind of a game where you can go as far as you want ahead and wherever you stop you can then collect a certain amount of seashells and then you You drop them in your bag, although you carefully place seashells in your bag.

51:37I don't know if you guys have met seashells before, but you have to be – they're somewhat fragile. So you carefully place them in your bag in a Tetris format sort of, and all the different shells score different ways. It's a very light game in many ways, but I really enjoyed it. I think it was a lot of fun. It didn't hurt that I played Sanibel in Sanibel. Nice. I have been to Sanibel. I was there on my 14th birthday. Yeah, it's a neat place. I like it a lot. It's about 40 minutes from my house, but that's okay. Also, if you like Sanibel, remember earlier I talked about Dice Tower Vacation? Yeah, we're close.

52:18Oh. So, anywho, that is Sanibel. So, that's my hula hoop. Wingspan Americas was my hula hoop. That's right, Eric. I did two hula hoops. Anarchy. So, you were surprised by both of these things. I was. In a pleasantly surprised kind of way. You can be extra hoopy if you want, Tom. That's fine. That's amazing. Not going to complain. It's a red letter day in my diary now. It is good. Julie, what do you have for us? I also have a positive day all around. So I continued my theme for our last episode. I was talking about Zuloretto. And I have newer games that are about habitats and animals. that I also played.

53:03I didn't mean to make it a whole theme, but it was also kind of nice because... Sorry, I had some of my cat who was starting to rub on the microphone. So I have these games that are about animals and their habitats that are new releases that I have played. So I am late to the party on Harmonies. It was, what was it, PAX last year that I got the copy. And that was, were you printing, I believe. But I might be late, but I'm a huge fan. Huge fan. So my rose was Harmonies, which is your draft collecting sets of three colored tokens that are representing different types of terrain, like mountains, forest, water from a central board and then putting them on your personal board to build landscapes.

54:02There's two different sides to the player board. The goal is to match patterns on the animal cards to attract the wildlife to those habitats, which earns you points. So on your turn, you must take the three tokens and put them on your board. and then you can take an animal card and have up to four that you're working from personally to score. If you make the pattern, you can then choose to place a cube from that card to your board. Once you emptied the number of, and each time you remove a card, you're getting more points. So you can get points that way. You can also get points for the types of terrain themselves.

54:49So it's point salad. There's a spatial puzzle part of it, all things that I enjoy. And moreover, they're the solo game on this, I think is fantastic. So playing it solo is also an option. So it's a one to four player game. And so I've played it with people, but I can tell you that I've played the solo, both my copy of it and on board game arena. I don't know how many times this past week, but it's a lot. So it is absolutely my rose. And if you haven't had a chance to play Harmonies, I strongly recommend everybody try it. Neat. My hula hoop is Nocturnus. Nocturnus is a, you're making habitats for moths.

55:37Okay. So it is a flip and write game. So there is a grid that is different types of leaves. On your turn, you flip over a habitat space card, which is going to be a polyamino shape that you either draw that shape onto your board and you're trying it's I actually should have checked this, but I think it's a 20 by 20 grid of just different leaves, different types of leaves. You draw the polyamino shape onto your board, or you may collect butterflies to take into your hand. Moths, not butterflies, to take into your hand. Once they're in your hand, if you have an empty habitat, and let's say it was a square, so you have a four by four grid, those four leaves in there, if they match the leaves, they don't have to be in a particular order, that are on a moth, you can fill in that grid.

56:34So you have moths that are from two to five different types of leaves that they need, those types of plants, for it to be a good habitat for them. So if you've taken out, let's say, a six square grid, and you only put in a two leaf moth, you can do that. It's an ineffective use of your space, but that's your choice. You're playing until somebody cannot fill out a space anymore. And then you're scoring the points. And of course, on your roll and write little write up that you're doing, you gain more points for each set of every single type of moth or all one of a kind, things like that. So it's a it's a roll.

57:12It's a roll and write. But it was definitely a fun and thematic and absolutely beautiful. Maxine Metzger, who also designed Witchcraft, made this one. You can get it from her website only, I think, right now. She's a small publisher. She used to work for King Raccoon, and this is her second game. So that was my hula hoop because I had picked it up because it's pretty, but I very much enjoyed the puzzly piece of it. Okay. All right. Well, let's see if I am also fully positive this time. I'm going to begin with a game called Layers. Growing up, I had a copy of the Travel Battleship that just went with this.

57:55By Layers, you mean? L-A-I-R-S. There we go. Yes, that's important. Travel Battleship that just traveled in the Summerer family car and went on trips. We didn't play Battleship, though. We made dungeons for each other. We used the little pegs to make mazes, and then we would take turns exploring each other's mazes. That's kind of what Layers is. It is a two-player game where you will spend the first portion of the game building a maze. Let's see. What's the grid? It's something like, I think it's 8x8. and you can put walls in between. You have 20 walls. You have to spend at least 17 of them. You have to put treasures in there, traps in there, monsters in there, and an exit and entrance.

58:39And then you're going to take turns exploring each other's mazes. You use a cube economy mechanism to explore each other's mazes. You have to spend certain cubes to move or to look because it's worse if you stumble into a trap or an enemy than it is if you know they're there and walk into the space. And then you're doing some checks. You have to spend cubes to roll dice to face these dangers. And you're trying to get either three treasures or defeat three monsters or two of each of those things. And then you can escape, sort of like Clank, where you get a certain amount of stuff. And then you can leave.

59:13And then the other player gets one more turn to do the same thing. And you'll score points for what you acquired, what treasures you found, what monsters you defeated, stuff like that. It is a pretty straightforward game, but I really enjoyed the setting up. Ooh, they're going to fall for this little trap here, or I'm going to make it really difficult to get to this spot. There are rules about how hard you can make it to get to certain spots. You can only have one of each type of danger from one place to another. But, you know, fooling them, putting a trap somewhere that leads to a dead end, or, you know, hiding all the stuff in the corner so that there's just a big open space in the middle of the dungeon.

59:50it's fun to sort of set something up and have the other player explore it. This is a rose for me, but it is a budding rose. Because the base box, the retail version of the game, has just one type of enemy in it and one type of trap in it. Which is fine for learning the basic mechanics of the game, but there's a whole bunch of stuff in the rulebook that's like, you're not going to need to worry about this unless you get the expansion. You're not going to score points for this unless you get the expansion. and there's only one type of enemy and trap in there, and I would like to have more of them.

1:00:24So it's good that I would like to experience more, but it feels just a little bit incomplete in the base box. And very quickly, I think you're going to want more of Layers if you like that mechanism and system at all. So keep that in mind if you pick up the retail edition of Layers, L-A-I-R-S, but still a rose for me. So positive so far. So positive. All right, how are we going to end this? Uh, second is a new TCG based on a video game series called Cookie Run, which I have no experience with at all. In fact, I went to the booth at PAX and, and was looking at this game and somebody came up to me like, so are you the cookie runner or is someone in your family a cookie runner?

1:01:06And I looked at her like, what, what are you talking about? What, what? And she's like, oh, it's a video game. I'm like, okay. And then she didn't know what to do with me because her entire patter was based around knowing what this video game was. Anyway, this is a new TCG based on the Cookie Run franchise. It's called Cookie Run. I believe it's pronounced Braverse, B-R-A-V-E-R-S-E, but I keep looking at it and it's saying Braverse, which is not probably how you pronounce that word. You have a 60-card deck of various cookie characters and some items and stuff, and you're going to battle these out a la Pokemon or Magic.

1:01:45A couple of cool twists that I like about this. Every card in your deck can be used as the fuel for these cards. You can put down one on a turn. You gradually increase the number of resources you have, like many of these games. But the fact that every card is a fuel, it has some sort of type. You can play it down. Anything works for this. And now you can fuel. So it's very rare that you don't have any resources to spend. You don't get stuck like, say, magic, where you don't have the lands you need to do anything. So that's cool. Also, your hit points are represented by your deck. So you put out a creature that has four hit points, and you take four cards from your deck and put it underneath that creature.

1:02:27Then as they take damage, you flip over the cards. And many of the cards, especially the cheaper cards in the deck, have effects that trigger when you flip over the card, which is kind of neat. It's like, oh, you hit me, but now I get to draw a card or now I get to add a hit point to another character, some other effect. There aren't a ton of those effects, but it's a nice little bonus when you got smacked. The goal is to earn a certain number of points worth of characters in your opponent's trash pile, in their bent, I forget what they call it, knocking out a certain number of characters. You also don't lose when you run through your deck.

1:03:04You just get one character put into that knocked out pile, pushing you closer to defeat, but you still get to reshuffle your deck. So that's a neat little mechanism thing. It is still very straightforward. It leans more toward Pokemon than it does magic as far as complexity level. But I like those little tweaks, and it actually had me saying, oh, maybe it might be worth playing some more of this and building some decks and having some fun with some booster packs. So the Cookie Run Bravers TCG was a hula hoop for me, making it all positive today. What? No, hang on. Can't have this nonsense. This is not a very good TCG.

1:03:43Eric, here's my biggest problem with this trading card game, Eric. Yep. Every color feels the exact same. So I went online and looked at all the cards that exist for this thing. And there's a ton of them. And there's a lot of divergence to some degree in the packs, but it is not in those starter decks. Those starter decks, I'm like, are you red? How is red different than purple? It's not. How is purple different than orange? It's not. Yeah, okay. They're kind of all the same. And I just found it to be very lackluster compared to most collectible card games. What makes this one special? The cookies, the attacking, it's so similar to Pokemon in many ways.

1:04:23I liked the bonuses when you get hit. Yeah, that's kind of cool, but even those bonuses are all the same. There were – I was mildly surprised. It was enough to make it a loop. And sanity has been restored. Yes. I'm back.

1:04:45Well, you did it. Oh, I guess that's that. Hey folks, thanks for listening. We are there. We got more coming your way next time. But for now, we're going to sign off here. Thank you so much for joining us. Until next time, I'm Tom Vassell. I'm Julie Ahern. And I'm Eric Sommerer. And 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.

1:05:16Dave Culling arranged our theme based on themes by Timothy Pinkham. And half a dozen pots of Korean alcohol stashed in a crypt brought to you by Six Soju Urns. Until next time, from all of us at the table, have fun gaming.

1:05:36I love how Tom can't just let a positive show stand. He has to. Couldn't. It's okay. I just mentally went to. I gotta bring truth. A little vinegar thrown into the mix there. I went to the beach and started picking up seashells in my mind. It's fine. Okay. Good.