TURN 1 - Player Count
0:00
[Music]
0:18
welcome to Whose Turn is It Anyway your board gaming podcast where we uh sometimes cover big large gaming
0:24
conventions which is exactly what we've just done at the UK Games Expo 2025
0:29
hello guys hello hello and I'm not on my own so we've got Becky hello we've got
0:35
Adrian hello oh and we've got Davey hello how are we all feeling guys full
0:41
of energy and all that kind of good stuff buzzing mate buzzing buzzing yeah yeah mustering the last ounce of energy
0:46
to record this podcast and I'm quite gutted we don't have Spudge with us cuz he'd have made an excellent addition to
0:52
this podcast all right where is Spudge i don't know he's at home spud is at home he's at home yeah oh we'll we'll talk
0:59
about that later as well what the hell's What the hell and who is Spudge
1:04
our mascot my new secret boyfriend your new boyfriend you're shacked up with yeah well spudge spudge cakes as sweet
1:12
as fudge it's fair as you can tell we're alluding we're all knackered delirious
1:17
we're all tired like most people who probably have been to UK Games Expo and
1:23
yeah but we got a lot to talk about and we got a lot to cover so I miss it already i do yeah I do as well but
1:30
before we get into it before we get into the reexitement of reliving the the weekend that we've just had this um just
1:37
like last year we'll we'll be splitting our kind of content coverage of the UK Games Expo uh into this episode which
1:43
will be our kind of debrief covering our thoughts feelings experiences and all that kind of stuff and as we'll talk
1:50
about later we also did a live episode show um at Expo as well on the Fridays
1:56
and of course we'll talk a bit about that later but to actually hear it and you want to hear it and you couldn't
2:01
make it that'll be on a different episode following shortly after this so yes so if you wanted to listen to that
2:08
go check that out and vice versa you want to listen to this it's all good or
2:13
I'm going to have to go listen to it I think yeah well we'll find out why won't we um that sounded really condescending
2:19
and I didn't mean it to we'll find out why won't we Davey like you had any uh like choice in the matter but um it's
2:26
fine so let's get straight into it shall we got a lot to cover let's jump into
2:32
the road to the UK Games Expo
TURN 2 - THURSDAY
2:38
[Music]
2:48
are we talking about cheesy bangers i think we've got to talk about your cheesy bangers playlist so we listened to it and Curley only forwarded fast
2:54
forwarded one track which was the YMCA that was a result yeah I'm pleased with it did he sing that no no i think that's
3:01
quite a valid forward as well escape i forwarded 5 six seven eight by steps
3:06
that was my forward but apart from that it was very good apart from your toxic
3:11
toxic pony mix with the toxic pony mix came in as pony and I was like awesome i
3:16
can't believe she put this in it oh it's got Toxic over the top of it it's brilliant i love that they're both great
3:22
tracks however very good thank you very much i think there's a beer scale for the cheesy bangers for me like how many
3:28
beers do I need before I'll listen to a certain cheesy banger it doesn't necessarily mean good songs i want to
3:34
make that expressively clear that they're not good songs no necessarily but they are all absolute bangers and
3:41
and I like how JP picked my kind of my drive for the the the inspiration and I
3:46
was basically saying if you were sat like next to the dance floor and you heard a track come on you'd be like "No I've got to get up and do it." And
3:52
that's exactly what JP said and I was like "I'm glad you understood my I got the I got the message that was the vibe i got the message they just they just
3:59
all made you smile every time a new song came on I smiled cuz it would trigger memory or make me kind of go I should
4:04
put this on the list or something yeah yeah so So it's still available anybody who wants to listen to it we'll put a
4:09
link in the show notes for the Spotify playlist absolutely and uh it was a lot of fun i mean we we drove up right um
4:16
Dave so me you and Rob we took a car together um we pretended we were each in their own car right yeah yeah I did when
4:23
you started talking about wrestling for 10 hours um should have been in our car mate it was cheesy bangers sing along i
4:28
was singing and dancing i bet you had cheesy bangers higher than volume two yeah we did yeah yeah so that Rob bless
4:35
him uh he likes to have his volume on low he's got to concentrate he's got to concentrate safety first but it's a bit
4:41
hard to to kind of sing along to a song when it's on not about wrestling it's all about wrestling and Vince McMahon
4:48
we did sing along to Mackmore we did yeah fri shop came on we did do it anyway I don't know if that's in cheesy
4:54
banger playlist or not oh really it really was
5:00
very good i'm going to pop some tags so we did all that but you know we got there and all that good stuff um on on
5:06
on Thursday so we uh uh get invited to the uh the kind of preview press event
5:12
which is always good fun uh we won't cover it in detail cuz ultimately what we'll cover is in the show anyway and it
5:18
kind of covers the press event but yeah there's nothing new or different there it's just a collection of people that are deciding to exhibit not exhibit but
5:25
just kind of get together there before yeah so you just kind of get like a little a little taste a little taste it did feel bigger though I thought this
This year's Expo felt very different...in a good way
5:31
year maybe it was just cuz it was over sort of more isisles there were more aisles to it and I don't
5:38
know whether there was less table on each aisle but it just felt bigger this year I thought but apart from that it was kind of similar to what we'd
5:44
experienced before yeah i think they must have fit more in though because usually the bringing bar is in the same
5:50
arena as one of the Yes halls and this time it wasn't was it it was in hall one mhm so they had that whole extra space
5:57
um which I feel like they could have used a little bit more but they must have filled it with other things in the
6:03
actual hall right yeah that was one of the biggest changes this year wasn't it the um the layout was different so
6:10
originally the first hall was booked out somewhere else so they were just going to have halls 2 three and four but then
6:16
hall one became available again so this time it was ticketing and bring a buy
6:21
and I agree with you Dave they could have I don't know why they didn't stretch out the bring a buy maybe not say put more shelves on there if not
6:28
necessary but you could have made it more roomy it's a huge space yeah all
6:33
one is i mean absolutely massive it's mahungous if that is a word because we got our tickets to Thursday which is a
6:39
really top tip for people if you're going down sort of Thursday evening to be ready for Friday morning go into the halls and buy your tickets because then
6:45
you're going to avoid all that queueing but I don't know how bad the queueing got so did they need all that big space
6:51
i don't know i mean afterwards after the press event I went and dropped off my stuff for the bringing and buy so second
6:57
year putting stuff into the bringing them by queued for 2 hours this time was slightly different cuz you queued for
7:04
your um I don't know if it was the same the year before cuz I didn't do the year before but you queued for your tickets to your labels to stick on the boxes and
7:11
then you joined another queue to queue up to put in the bring and buy and the number of people who started queuing up for the bring and buy only to realize
7:17
they needed to go and get tickets printed out and then had to kind of leave that queue that they've been in for 10 minutes and then sort of go and
7:24
get their labels and then come back again was I noticed there's quite a few people doing that but that was for me
7:29
that was my only real gripe there's been lo there's always loads of opinions on the bring and buy and I
7:35
thought it was one the one two years ago that we tried to put stuff in the bring and buy was was rough and this was much
7:42
better much nicer nicer sort of organized and well better done apart from the sticker thing um and collecting
7:49
stuff at the end of the Sunday jumping way ahead was also better nice um so I thought it was a much smoother
7:56
experience for putting stuff in and collecting stuff from the bring and buy at the end so they're getting there
8:02
aren't they it feels like they're sort of perfecting the rules so that it kind of covers everything it needs so I was
8:08
certainly more impressed i know say reading comments online not everyone was necessarily but I was certainly more impressed this year than I was 2 years
8:14
ago and would consider using the bring them by more often now it was like a four fiveq
8:21
year before wasn't it yeah it was mad yeah it was mad but people had like trolley and trolley of board games which
8:27
was obviously causing it all whereas now it was a 20 limit I think per 20 limit per day yeah so it was 60 in total yeah
8:34
so again I was in the queue at sort of one of the longer times of it and it was
8:39
2 hours so that's not too bad I don't think but I think kind of call back to
8:45
what you said Becky like to me this expo is like just felt like the expo of change yes just because the layout made
8:54
it feel so different even though we know what it is and actually it's not really that different but because hall 2 3 3 A
9:02
and four is like a horseshoe U shape really and it's just kind of one continuous flow you could walk between
9:09
all all four halls all three halls to yeah without leaving the the trade halls
9:16
um completely all the way to open gaming and back and forth and um and Because if
9:21
you've been to Expo before years and years in the past you kind of get your bearings on i know where this publisher
9:27
usually is around this area it does sometimes change but they tend to keep them in the the rough uh areas before um
9:34
and this time it's like I have no idea where anyone is it's like going to a complete new convention and having to
9:40
kind of relearn and remap everything out i quite enjoy yeah it's quite easy to get turned around if you're not paying
9:46
attention but if you are paying attention you can easily see which hall you're in cuz there's massive numbers on the walls like
9:54
numbers so you know but because they all connected in a way they perhaps weren't before that is that is you know
10:00
something to be aware of going back to the bring and buy as a bring and buy user rather than depositor of games we
10:08
were only in the queue for about I don't know 25 minutes i think it was like Saturday afternoon it's not bad is it
10:13
was it Friday afternoon it wasn't at the peak time anyway it was Friday about 1:30 cuz I was started queuing at about
10:19
1:00 and as I left the bring and by I watched you guys walk into the bring and buy i'm glad I'm glad it wasn't Saturday
10:25
then so I don't know if your experience was the same so before they've banned you taking any bags in at all this time
10:32
you can take bags in but they banned you from taking any games in there and they were checking people's bags on the way
10:37
out cuz Curley had his bags searched on the way out okay so I guess that's just a way of making sure you're not stealing
10:43
bags but we when we went back in for like a little last look around on the Sunday we just bought a game and then we
10:50
were like "Oh should we go and bring a bite?" Oh crap we've just bought a game so that was a bit annoying we just Okay
10:55
curly went in i went in so because if you'd have take if they'd search your bag and they find a game in it I guess
11:00
they're going to take it away from you because they have to assume it's stolen I suppose have to fight him for it though wouldn't it it was things in
11:07
rings it It wouldn't have been like you know yeah leave it hey it's good
11:13
but yeah that was a silly mistake from our point of view like we knew that rule and then we went and bought a game and then wanted to go to the break so yeah
11:19
fair enough i I also think the traffic felt better like people traffic um in
11:24
the halls yeah the M42 no that wasn't there that was crap no it wasn't but
11:29
walking around the halls it was a you had a lot more space where they it was more of cross-sections rather than they
11:35
kind of used to have one big alley which kind of branched off now they had a lot more intersections in between and it
11:41
meant that you spread out a lot more sometimes it meant you missed entire stalls but then when you went back and
11:47
it was a little bit quieter you were like how did I miss this whole section over here and I was like experiencing
11:52
something new um which was great i also felt Friday was busier than Saturday in
11:58
my head but when I turned up but I felt like the Friday was really busy i think the Saturday was busier for my feeling
12:05
about it saturday was definitely busier but Sunday was quite quiet I thought yeah Sunday was Sunday was lovely i
12:12
think again that's just the the spacing so like the only choke points I really felt was along the like the closest edge
12:18
is the best way I can describe it so the the one that's kind of nearest to the entrance that was always busy and then
12:24
if you kind of went into like the I'd call them like the side alleys almost the where you have like the more niche
12:30
stalls and some of the crafty stalls they quite often got really jammed cuz people stop in the middle of nowhere to
12:37
look at things sort of thing and they don't move over a little bit or whatever so guilty of that as anyone else's but
12:43
those were the two spots where I constantly felt like I got stopped but everything else was so free flowing that
12:49
yeah I think it was much harder to judge the busyiness of it sort of thing because I previous Saturdays you felt
12:56
like to get anywhere you kind of have to really push your way through the crowd
13:01
whereas Friday Saturday and Sunday and never really felt like that beyond a few seconds when you're going along a
13:07
certain bit i also found it easier to get demos or like walk up and get a demo because of
13:13
that as well because it was a bit freer it was I don't know it just seemed easier this year which was nice yeah I
13:20
hadn't experienced that but maybe it was the games I was going for right just the luck of Davey
13:26
well you say that yeah i think that paints a picture of the kind of few changes of Expo this
13:34
year which I personally enjoyed and and and kind of refreshed it a little bit
13:39
for me um and yeah but we'll talk more about that as we go but yeah that's Yeah it was nice wasn't it there is one gripe
13:45
I had which was you can't gripe about the expo it seemed like some the odd
13:51
person I'm not going to say who it was or describe them seemed to be on a bit of a power trip um like they shut the
13:58
pigsty gate um so that you had to filter through and queue and he was it was like
14:04
creating a non-issue is really weird because then we went back like 20 minutes later and there's a different guy on there and they had pulled the
14:10
gates again apart and just let people through and it was free flowing so I was like why why was he doing that it seemed
14:16
really strange and then we also had a guy stop trying to stop you going in
14:21
yeah apparently a press aren't allowed in the open halls on the other bit of paper I saw on the says anyone can
14:29
anybody can up 6:00 so he he was right with the bit of paper he was stood in front of but the other post posters said
14:36
a different thing but which is just a few but he was a nice guy about it wasn't he oh yeah yeah yeah so maybe you
14:42
charmed him he was fine yeah he's my charisma stat so maybe it was just some of the logistics they need to work out
14:47
in that sense of probably communication somewhere right of like oh shut that hole off we're getting too many people
14:53
but they need to communicate that to people as well maybe but other than that the rest of it was really great it was
14:59
bonsa bonsa i'd be interested to hear how the people in four hall four four felt because for me it was the odd
15:06
corner and several times I heard people going do you know where this is or we
15:11
haven't seen that yet sort of thing and all near like 90% of the time I was like that's in hall four and I wonder whether
15:18
or not the people in hall four felt a little bit sort of sort of cal or out of the way or something cuz it did feel
15:24
like an odd little corner and there was some big names in there so it wasn't like it was again like the craft alleys
15:31
or something like that was like all sort of pushed in there they had some fairly big names in there but yeah most most of
15:38
the times I heard when people were like "Have you seen this or have you heard that?" And I had to point a few people in the direction of Hall 4 so I'd be
15:45
interested to hear if that is just sort of my experience of it or if there's any
15:50
facts or feelings from the publishers to back it up sunday was the only day where I went into hall 4 from 3A cuz I' every
15:59
other day I'd always come in from the main entrance coming out and then back in by doing that all the trade bits and
16:05
hall four on the left but usually the reason why is cuz I'm going for open gaming or or whatever so
16:11
I kind of just didn't really see hall four's offering until Sunday interesting that's just me cuz I'm busy but yeah I
16:19
had a good wander around and it was still felt tucked out of the way to me but it'll be interesting to see what
16:25
they do with that in the future it was the quietest section wasn't it cuz it kind of felt out of the way and tucked
16:30
around a corner rather than being full in view and I I didn't really think of it when I was there but now you've said
16:36
it it's like yeah I I completely agree and it's that it's that thing of they had the white walls around it right
16:41
which to sort of to sort of say well this is the end of the halls but it meant it was also felt very out of sight as you walking into hall four yeah if
16:48
you went into hall four you wouldn't necessarily know that there were actually stores in there you go straight in and you see all the tournament and
16:54
then the open gaming stuff and the food carts which is good to keep it separated but
16:59
not good from a selling visible and advertising point of view just as you guys have said I think they
17:06
did a fantastic job of the setup and the layout and how it felt this year with that little caveat there for me it felt
17:13
odd cool well let's get into it so that's kind of a little bit our thoughts
TURN 3 - FRIDAY
17:19
and experiences but let's get into the days so entering into what is Thursday
17:25
evening Friday and Davey's debuckle oh should we start
17:30
with that yeah so Thursday I well we we had the press conference and then afterwards everyone kind of went back
17:36
pretty tired cuz it was the first day of getting used to everything i got to bed
17:42
within half an hour probably asleep woke up in the middle of the night my springs had broken in my bed so I don't
17:49
know whether anyone listened to the Essen podcast but that bed broke on me and now I've had it again so what are
17:56
you doing to the bed the bed breaker right yes layer of beds layer of hotel
18:02
beds um but basically the springs had popped out and I was like really uncomfortable and I did try going back
18:08
to sleep and I was like "No I can't." Um I later found out that apparently the reception is 24-hour but I did check
18:14
everywhere and I couldn't find any information on that so next day I kind of go down reluctantly and complain and
18:21
they obviously give me a new room so I thought "Okay great this is this is this is it." missed the live show because I
18:28
had had no sleep and finally fell asleep probably about 10:00 for two hours they moved my rooms and then the cleaner
18:34
mixed up the bottle of B bleach for the air freshener and proceeded to uh bleach my uh bag and my hoodie so um
18:44
it's not funny i shouldn't laugh but it's something that you'd see in like a like a carry-on film or or something
18:50
like that isn't it yeah we'll put that down but yeah they've refunded the hoodie
18:56
it's all good and they gave us free breakfast for the rest of the And I
19:02
didn't really complain i just kind of Well until they did the hoodie and then I kind of went "Come on this is uh it's
19:09
a bit kick while he's down." Yeah exactly but um yeah so I missed the live
19:14
show on Friday missed half of Friday so that kind of leads on to you guys right yeah that's why you didn't see him if
19:20
you were there at the show and you go "Where's Dave?" He's like "Then you know at the time we didn't know." No so we
19:27
was like "Is he all right?" I was called C i was in a fetal shape on the floor of the hotel room but yeah but JP jumped
19:34
into the breach and and did all of your bits so nice JP did all your bits i'll always do your
19:41
bits but no we we uh kind of unbeknownsted all of this shenanigans was happening we actually had a lovely
19:47
sleep and the beds were great and they didn't break on us and no same with us we were in the same hotel premier in
19:53
definitely stay there again i think we've already booked for next year so so I was I was on the top floor of the
19:59
Hilton which the Hilton was lovely the view was amazing over the lake and the bedroom itself was amazing but the first
20:06
night was really windy like really windy and on the top floor you could just hear
20:11
the wind whistling all the way down the corridor outside that's nice so I had to make a little towel B like draft
20:18
excludder and once I did that and realized I needed to do that it was perfect like I really enjoyed my stay it
20:24
was very close and so I thought I paid for the money like I've got what I wanted from the the money I've paid sort
20:31
of thing you know to be close in a nice hotel and all that lot but yeah the first night of just being like yeah how
20:37
do I what do I do oh yeah let's go make a draft excludder and then sort of roll it up and then Oh that's worked good
20:43
yeah it's that greased up naked guy in Family Guy right just running up and down the hall up i just meant more the
20:49
whistle right oh okay know so we we hit the halls um first thing um and I had a
20:56
kind of press meeting first up which was like right let's get going let's get Expo on the on on the the hip and we met
21:03
with uh Elani from Czech Games Edition had a little chat which was great seeing some of their upcoming stuff and uh to
21:10
the point where Rob just got excited and bought Galaxy Trucker yep so literally straight after that um but yeah after we
Trouble on the Tempus
21:18
had a demo booked at Minor Disaster Games uh Trouble on the Tempest which
21:24
Bob uh one of our listeners um has kind of recommended for us to to try out said "You should try this out when you're
21:30
here." So Bob if you're listening which I'm sure you are hello we've met you finally which was amazing and what a
21:37
nice dude he is yeah it was lovely chatting with him and his friends that were there as well in hall four exactly
21:42
nice chat really had a good chat good catch on we love catching up with the listeners anyway and just uh talking about games and stuff and uh so yeah so
21:50
we we got ourselves on that um demo and we bumped into another listener Nicole
21:56
and son Aaron and that was great and they were kind of trying to get a demo and um and me and Rob were kind of
22:03
already booked and we said look if there's space cuz I think we had more numbers down than we did cuz a certain
22:10
someone wasn't around and uh probably having bed problems that we didn't know about spring never who knows so we just
22:18
said come and jump on this demo with us she was like yeah cool so that's kind of what happened and then another chap
22:24
joined the game is uh set in space so obviously a light space nice um and
22:30
Tempest is the ship right and there's trouble on it hence the name um and you
22:37
are a crew of of this starship um I was the captain that was quite cool so I
22:42
just role played this uh straight away and everyone loved it uh no they didn't um and uh we had technician uh
22:50
Rob onto the side we had an engineer this other guy um and we had a a grunt
22:56
which was Nicole and I think it was a science kind of officer Zaron and uh
23:02
yeah basically the game is um it's it's kind of like you your engines are
23:09
knackered right so you have this kind of variable uh condition that you shuffle in to start the game so that's kind of
23:15
your win condition you need to fix the engines all right piece of piss
23:20
you think it is and uh then the game just kicks you in the balls for round after round after round um so you're
23:27
kind of wandering around you go okay there's there's kind of equipment all on the ship you know space suits and exo
23:33
suits and you know all that kind of stuff you'd expect in sci-fi kind of games um and then suddenly things start
23:39
going on fire and electrical faults start appearing and yeah just basically
23:46
starts to to happen and get real fast and gets real real quick and so you
23:51
kind of uh action wise you you can move two spaces and uh do an action in a room
23:57
or you do the action and move two spaces like you can mix it up and as captain I had the ability of basically ordering
24:03
people around um which I did enjoy um and and yeah it's like right now you you
24:10
pick that uh tool kit up i think that'd be good okay i'll pick the tool kit up but no strategically you you pick who
24:17
the first player is in the round and you go clockwise from them so you kind of want to sequence your actions in a in an
24:23
efficient way that you can kind of get stuff done so you kind of do all your turns and then an event happens so
24:28
you've got a deck of cards which is the event flip it over and it's like bang right room six on fire this happens this
24:35
happens this happens um and generally as
24:40
it gets real like really really bad even just three rounds in the whole thing's on flames your shields are pretty much
24:47
nearly to to minimum and uh the ship is literally about to explode think Nemesis
24:53
but really quick you know happens really quick that's what it reminded me of when she was giving us the sort of talk about
24:59
it at the the um preview event it's like oh this sounds like Nemesis but you've really actually got to play together
25:04
rather than one person run off in a different direction absolutely needed together but you don't know what's coming and obviously this deck's kind of
25:11
um obviously it's randomized and then you get hit and you're like "Oh we've all gone together in the wrong space oh
25:17
we've gone here we've done this oh crap." But the whole rub of the game what kind of makes it a bit unique and
25:24
different is there's a time drive on the ship and if you can get one of your team to the time drive you can basically do a
25:33
a time loop and you reset the game back to the start so what you usually find is even some
25:39
people can die in the game and that happened something exploded one of the characters died it was like "Oh great."
25:46
We said "Yeah we need to reset this uh time back to the start." And that's what you did now when you do that you get to
25:53
keep everything on your character sheet so every equipment you have also every
25:58
wound you have stays um but all of the ship resets as new bits of equipment
26:03
that comes out all of the flames go away all of the electrical electrical faults go away and but this time um a paradox
26:11
card goes in the deck from when you did the time jump and then you go again and
26:16
it's the same thing so you got to have a good memory in this which is not my forte so it's like right what happened at the end of uh round one yeah I think
26:24
some fires broke out okay right this time guys half you go that way half of
26:29
us go that way and off we go yeah this is going really well what happened at the end of round two can't remember oh
26:35
bang and then again another death all right okay reset go back again so you're kind
26:42
of doing it and the more you reset um the the worse the game's going to punish
26:48
you for it because these paradox cards come in and and alter uh the rules
26:54
slightly so it could be that you know and normally you can pick your first player on the round might be that from
27:00
this point on it's random or other things that can kind of happen but you get to a point where if you do it too
27:07
many times you'll just blink out of existence because you pissed about with time too much and it's yeah it was just
27:13
a lot of fun like it was just a fun co-op game it kind of reminded me of that pandemicesque of there's a puzzle
27:21
that we've got to figure out um and you'd think by going back in time to basically do things more efficiently
27:27
would would uh kind of make it a bit sy but because it's variable and different
27:33
things kind of happening all the time even when you know and with the paradoxes in it still kind of gives you
27:38
something to to ch you know as a challenge but you know we only played we didn't actually finish the game we played up to round four or five um but
27:46
we all had a laugh cuz we're just role playinging it and I think that's kind of the spirit of the game and and Minor Disaster Games are you know they're a
27:53
kind of indie developer and publisher um and I think the game's on Kickstarter or
27:58
Gamefound right now maybe it's just finished um and uh yeah good on him and
28:04
coming up with something a bit unique something I've not quite seen before in this this aspect um sounds like shades
28:11
of time stories where you kind of re which again is time travel right it's if
28:16
you don't manage to do everything before something happens start from the beginning and you have a obviously with
28:21
time stories you're just retelling the same story every time so this is kind of similar to that right is you're
28:27
retelling that same story but you're now more forewarned um but I'm hope I'm guessing it doesn't
28:33
take like 3 hours every time like Time Stories does so no no it's quick yeah it sounds like a a unique uh
28:41
concept within that design space anyway within that kind of nemesis move around a board deal with certain
28:47
crisis and I think that's probably where the appeal is in the fact that nemesis
28:54
can be quite mean and quite punishing whereas with this if you do get that
28:59
punishing aspect well you you know you can go back in time and rewrite it right yeah it's like yeah Nemesis you're just
29:06
screwed live with it you're dead even if you die in this you you can get reset
29:11
back to life and you carry on which is great for no player elimination kind of thing cuz if one of you dies it's
29:17
probably not a good ending to the game that you're going to finish but you're not going to probably do it cuz you need
29:22
everyone to really be efficient and um but yeah no I think they they've gone for an aesthetic which is like fun like
29:31
the way the game looks doesn't look serious even to the you know the standies that we're using i know they
29:37
have Meeple versions it's all just kind of you know just don't doesn't take itself too seriously so that kind of
29:44
kind of vibe um but yeah Rob really enjoyed it i mean he loves his co-op games and he he was just like I really
29:49
like that yeah I can see that being a game that Rob and I think you know for families that have a slight interest in
29:56
sci-fi would get a real kick out of that this is good fun it's not too expensive
30:02
45 pounds on Kickstarter so there you go and it looks like they've already achieved their um Yeah oh god which is
30:09
really good and uh yeah we like supporting um kind of the smaller publishers doing their thing so yeah
30:14
good start to the Friday i felt nice with me i can't focus on anything until the live episodes out the way because
30:20
that's all that my brain is like "Oh it's going to be in a minute it's going to be in a minute it's going to be in a minute it's going to be in a minute." So
30:26
I was wandering around and looking at stuff but I don't think I was really I wouldn't have been in in the sort of
30:32
right frame of mind for a demo or or anything else really well you had that added pressure though didn't you because
30:38
you took the to lead the lead obviously Adrian as well but
30:44
I just want it done even if anyone else had I would just want it done i just just want it done out the way feel like
30:51
having an interview and you just Yeah as much as Yeah i I enjoyed it i really enjoyed doing it and I I knew it would
30:56
be fun when we did it just the same way as it was last year but until it's done I just wanted it done then Xar yeah it's
31:02
fair sorry Ed you were saying Oh no i was I was kind of in a similar state of I was trying to figure out get bearings
Arena Battles One
31:08
for the new layout and all that lot and kind of thinking a bit about the live episode coming up and then Mark Monk
31:14
from Ninja Geek Gaming totally took advantage of my lost confused state and dragged me onto a table for a demo
31:21
good on you Mark so yes there's literally I'd only walked I literally bought sort of a couple of bits that I'd
31:27
be like I'm heading straight there and then just thought I'll have a wander around and then he he nabbed me so he
31:32
was demoing for um Raybox games I think their name is um and the they do sort of
31:40
quite often like zombie survival games and stuff like that and the one they were showing off was Arena Battle One
31:46
and the idea is that it's multiple of you on a on a well the demo version was
31:53
on like a skirmish table but the the actual version you get in a box is on a grided system um and it's basically
32:02
zombies just keep coming and it's the last one of you to be standing has won and you can shoot other players and
32:08
stuff like that and be a bit knobbyby that way as well but it's ultimately about trying to get away from hordes of
32:13
zombies and I sort of stood there and played and there was a couple of actually Mark's
32:19
friends like local friends as well that were there and we sort of played a game and
32:25
the miniatures were fantastic and the the core gameplay was good but I was like this demo is a bit lacking for
32:32
probably is probably the Yeah it just sort of didn't leave me enthused and then as the demo was finishing and
32:39
this is kind of a theme for the weekend if I'm honest he went "Oh and of course in the main game you'll do this and you'll do that and we've taken this out
32:46
to make it easier and that out to make it easier." And I was like "I wish you'd added some of those bits in." And as it
32:52
happened I pretty much came back past that stand cuz it was along sort of the back edge so it was quite an easy way to
32:58
get through i went by past it about four or five times and sort of by the Saturday afternoon like Saturday sort of
33:04
midday when I think Mark was finishing his last demo there they really had that down and it was looking like a much more
33:11
solid demo of the game so I'm kind of glad I was the first person to have the demo cuz they got to try out a little
33:18
bit on me and sort of I think start and mold what it would look like um and it
33:23
does look like a fun zombie survival game and someone who's a skirmish war gamer I thought actually this is quite a
33:29
nice compact box with some nice minis in it and a nice concept um some of the way
33:35
you have like you don't start with ammo you start with a knife and you got to go and kill zombies or go and discover ammo
33:41
and stuff like that just sort of made that that feeling of that you are in
33:46
survival mode from step one really sort of hit home um and then when you could see oh actually they can't there was
33:52
like a tank abandoned and you couldn't do anything with it but by the time I came back around on the Saturday they had people sat in the tank shooting the
33:59
machine gun out of the tank and oh and this is stuff you can do in the game i was like "Ah this sounds this sounds
34:05
cool now." Like much more than just sort of the basic game that I was shown on the Friday morning so So a little bit
34:10
gutted I didn't get to sort of demo it when it was a little bit more full but at the same time glad that it was me
34:15
that sort of got to to be the guinea pig at the same time for So was it more of a skirmish game or more of a zombieesque
34:23
it had more of a zombide it's the typical sort of grid move so many spaces and all that kind of stuff like Cludo
34:29
for lack of a better sort of terminology for that classic miniatures game well
34:34
because it's on a grided system isn't it with rooms and all that lot so it kind of has that feel for it but at the same time it's then just filled with zombies
34:40
and some of those zombie sculpts are fantastic as well um and they've kind of there's different big bad zombies sort
34:48
of thing one's just wielding a machine gun but holding it by the barrel end to swing it about and stuff like that and
34:53
okay there's there's some really nice sort of characterization of these different sort of alpha level zombies um
35:01
which has worked really well nice nice and always good to see Mark yeah yeah
35:06
yeah yeah yeah cool um then the live episode the live episode yeah dave Dave
Whose Turn Is It Anyway LIVE!!!
35:13
still right yeah sorry he he will join us on this episode just like Friday at some point he turns off um so yeah I
35:21
mean you you'll listen to the live episode I'm sure on the on a different um on the next one but there were people
35:27
there when we got there people there waiting we were waiting which yeah like we were we weren't late no we were there
35:33
about quarter I think quart turn two and we're following the uh Polyhadron Collider chaps and I think they're just
35:39
packed up and and gone by the time we kind of got there about quarter or two because they always leave you kind of a half hour buffer zone between a show
35:46
leaving and the next one starting which is great cuz it's enough time to kind of wrap up and say goodbye stuff and then
35:54
allow the other ones to to kind of get set up so yeah so in we go it was in the same room as last year except they had
36:00
opened the back extended like oh this room's bigger and we was like oh no no way we're going to fill this so yeah
36:07
it's it's kind of one of those uh fun things but oh well see what happens but yeah people are already there waiting to
36:13
crack on and we do that natural thing like "Oh are you guys all right?" And it's like yeah oh we're here for this
36:18
show oh you're here for this show oh cool you're in the right place really think it's going to happen we never was
36:24
up against the same time slot as shut up and sit down which is like this isn't great
36:30
I have to say to the guys that turned up um I just want to say a massive thank
36:36
you honestly every single one of you we appreciate you we love you because when
36:41
you do this thing there's always a fear that it's just going to be us which is
36:46
just end us recording a podcast which which would be fine you know would be okay but it's it's just so lovely the
36:54
voting would have been awkward if it was just us but you're right the format wouldn't have worked yeah that would have been crap i know probably would have just said Becky your it's your run
37:01
currently let's just do your next episode and get it done kind of thing um but no the fact that we we had uh yeah
37:09
I don't know how many kind of people turn up it was over 20 cuz we had some of our voting splits were like 11 11 and
37:15
stuff at it was over 20 plus 20 plus um which is great and uh lots of people um
37:21
that we've seen before um and most people had heard of us cuz always did that little check at the beginning and
37:27
we had some new people just dropped in i was like fantastic so yeah I I I had a
37:33
blast doing it and as as I did last year it was great fun and obviously I was
37:38
kind of wearing my Davey hat as well filling in for Davey which was quite odd because for those that don't know we we
37:44
did a first section of around um as a take on the board game Battleground like a World Cup style world Cup yeah and I
37:51
was championing games against games I really liked so So maybe his heart wasn't fully into the the kind of
37:57
description i can't remember the one but there's one game I was talking about and then I went up against Captain's Chair
38:02
and I was like really what you wanted to say was it forget everything I just said that game's crap that captain's chair i
38:08
can't remember what it was but yeah it it's great what else is there to say that the audience got it right they did
38:15
they did they did we won't say any more than that i would just say that the audience got it right on the day and
38:21
that's the important thing yes so good level of interaction and uh yeah even had time for some QAs questions at the
38:29
end which was nice and probably one of the highlights of my entire expo happened at that time so you were so
38:36
made up i I nearly cried i was like "Okay hold it in come on keep it together now." So um Ryan lovely Ryan if
38:44
you're listening Ryan I'm still still a go that you did this he found and sourced and bought Igloo Pop for me omg
38:53
I couldn't believe it so um Ryan is friends with Ian who used to be on the
38:58
podcast a member of Crocol UK so shouting out Crocol UK yeah they um love you guys they had organized the UK's
39:05
tournament Crocol tournament it's the final one of their kind of I don't know what you call it like season season
39:11
that's that's this is how sporty I am not and uh yeah they were doing their sort of final season of tournaments at
39:18
the UK GE culminating in the UK GE sort of champion mhm um so yeah Ryan and Ian
39:24
both came which was lovely and yeah Ryan bought Igloo Pop i mean can you believe
39:29
it we kind of lost words a bit weren't we i just could I just couldn't believe it i just I could tell you were so made
39:34
up with that it's a little gesture but I know that game is like gold dust yeah it is to get I don't know how much it must
39:41
have cost him it's super rare you can't get it anywhere and that someone saw that and thought "Oh Becky' really like
39:46
that." I mean they were he was absolutely 100% right but it's just so
39:52
touching just so touching yeah it's lovely yeah and we had some real fun characters in there ashley shout out to
39:59
Ashley was sat at the front with her friend we were talking about how much our feet were hurting and Ashley's friends in a wheelchair and he had the
40:05
best sense of humor he was like "Yeah that's not a problem for me." And it was it was just brilliant they were and I'm
40:10
not saying it was like we didn't have a particularly bantery audience other than with the rest of us lot but people were just having it seemed like people were
40:17
having good fun if they weren't having a good fun they were they were pretending they were which was very was very nice they sat well behaved for an hour yeah
40:24
if they weren't having good fun it was yeah it was it was really sweet and um someone snapped a picture of the granny
40:29
trolley um his Instagram account's the spare chair but I know he came to our live episode last year so it was lovely to see him again
40:36
yeah it was just it was just really nice wasn't it I love the granny trolley thing this is like I really want to make
40:41
this a big thing i want it own Instagram account i want it to get really popular for no reason i had to do um some minor
40:48
minor sort of um uh plastic surgery on the granny trolley when I got home oh is
40:54
it perishing no no it's fine i've I resurrected it but the the draw string I think I tried to do it up and there was
41:01
too much stuff in there and it kind of popped out one of the eyelets but it's all right i've I've oversewn it with
41:07
It's fine it's Friday it was another day it was buckling on Friday i'm not going to lie yeah the wheels were like "Oh
41:13
Jesus." But there we go you do have to watch people's feet you got to be careful of it but it's very useful should we all
41:21
dress up as granny's one time and go with the trolley there used to be the two guys that'd ride around on these trolley that would play music underneath
41:28
so we could do that but I mean it's not it's not paisley so I don't know if people haven't seen the picture of the
41:34
granny trolley and they're picturing one of the old tartan ones it's funkier than that
41:40
i mean modern granny adrian's laughing here yeah it's as funky as a granny trolley can be I think um which has got
41:48
a limited amount of funk right but good small f yeah yeah lower lowerase f but
41:55
it's very useful so you know I'm loving it i want to see it every year it it will make a return just even if you
42:01
don't put anything in it I just wanted to just drag it around the expo and people take photos and # expo shopping
42:06
trolley but there we go so that's pretty much the live episode run down and then
42:12
the relax afterwards he's like "Oh can it's done." Yeah can I can chill out now well it's kind of a big deal right for
42:18
for people i don't mind doing that stuff i get nervous but I I too go right that's cool that's done
42:27
now i was just looking forward to being over just like an interview just like you said but during it when you're in it it's also great yeah yeah I loved it and
42:33
you you kind of ride that fear as you go through it um but yeah I think for for
42:39
many people it's not everyone's natural habitat sat in front of people watching you talk about stuff it's kind of It is
42:47
hard isn't it on top of that like I It definitely didn't seem like it but we'd been planning that for what 6 weeks yeah
42:53
in advance we'd started having the conversations of what's that going to be like what we going to do does this
42:58
section work does that section work who's going to do bits and pieces so it's quite again it doesn't show it in
43:04
the moment does it cuz we absolutely wing it once we're in there but the planning of it does sort of it takes up
43:10
a bit of your time ahead of time and then you kind of go is it going to all be worth it in the live episode so well I did my whole thing in the build oh I'm
43:17
not going to do this next year i'm not going to do it i don't like it cuz it feels like homework and I don't like that but it's totally worth doing it i
43:23
really enjoy it and I will do it next year if you want me to we'll we'll figure out what we're going to do yeah but remind me I've said that in fact
43:29
make sure you get the Don't cut this bit out Rob because I'll need somebody to play me back you said you said you enjoyed it you said you wanted to do it
43:35
again definitely doing it there we go and uh then we found out what happened to Dave and we're like "Oh Jesus." So
43:41
we're all kind of caught up there aren't we and uh and then you turned up yeah hello hello hello davey's back on the
Gwent
43:48
podcast yeah so I turned up I met up with my brother so he came up which was nice um
43:54
he was meant to I think two years ago but train strikes and all of that oh yeah I forgot about that it was during
44:00
that time which I ended up having to go home early anyway cuz the year of the bad back yeah yeah exactly oh that was a
44:06
bad year for you yeah it was a bad year so but we got a game in so we turned up
44:11
and we played Gwent which was really cool um if you don't know what Gwent is
44:16
then watch the Witcher no um okay you don't need to convince me to play The
44:22
Witcher play The Witcher yeah it's not in the TV show actually they do mention it in the TV show but so originally in
44:30
Witcher 3 this was a card game that they kind of released and it got so popular
44:35
that they actually made a standalone computer game version of it it's a little bit different to the Witcher 3
44:41
version cuz the Witch of 3 version is like the board game they've basically
44:47
taken the Witcher 3 version and made a board game out of it which some people didn't like they preferred the online
44:54
like LCG version of it um or TCG probably more
45:00
like TCG but yeah so this is you have
45:06
three rows you have a row which is your melee row so it's got a little sword
45:11
you've got your ranged row which has got um like a little bow and you've got your siege row which is um a catapult or
45:19
trebuche or trebuche you play one card and then it passes
45:25
over to the other player at the start you draw 10 cards those 10 cards are the
45:31
rest the only cards that you'll draw for the rest of the game each card's got a value on it at the end
45:37
of the There's going to be three rounds and it's the best of best of three okay so you're going to win two rounds when
45:44
you play a card it's got a little value which is a number and that it doesn't matter what row it is played into but
45:51
that is now your total value um in your play section whoever passes
45:58
basically whoever has the highest value wins sounds really simple and it kind of is but there's a lot of little nuances
46:05
with the game that are really interesting and it's a real dual game
46:10
and you've got to be like right I'm playing this five does nothing at the moment goes to the next player he plays a six now he's
46:17
currently winning I might have a card which is frost which negates the whole
46:22
front row um well it reduces their value to one so I'm not going to play it now
46:28
but if he plays a lot into that front row I just like play a load of crap cards I got in my hand and bait out a
46:34
load more cards of his play that and then suddenly he's reduced them all to one and I've only used my my rubbish
46:40
cards and I've got a higher value than him so he's got to make a decision with his limited resources do I just pass
46:46
this round i give this first round or do I kind of push it out and try and win what how can I do this and it's a real
46:54
head-on head battler for such a simple simple card game it is so tight there's
46:59
cool cards are basically a decoy where you place it and you get to pick another card back up you've got other cards which give you card advantage because
47:06
that's what all this game is is trying to get card advantage play a card you can bring it back from the graveyard
47:12
you've got the monster deck is basically you play a monster go get monsters from your deck and your hand play them all
47:17
out of that same monster type and you've got a little power in the corner which is your commander so it's such a simple
47:25
idea and it worked so well in the in the computer game that I'm really glad they
47:30
made a board game version of it cuz there's new ver there's like little um kind of unique aspects they've added
47:37
which is a twoon two mode you can't do that previously it was only ever one-on-one the two on two you share the discard
47:43
pile which is going to be interesting to play because you've got a lot of interaction with the discard now you're interacting with cards you don't
47:49
normally have in your deck how you know I'm in intrigued to see how that works
47:54
but yeah my brother never played Gwent before um we ended up having two games i
47:59
think they let us have time to to get two games in and the first game you could see it was like "Oh I'm not really
48:06
getting this." And then the second then was like "Oh do you want to play a game?" Cuz towards the end he got it he was like "Yep let's play again." And we
48:12
played again and he absolutely loved it so yeah I'm going to keep my eye on that i think it's going to be released around September time but it's available for
48:18
pre-order anyway but yeah down straight in my basket straight in my granny
48:23
basket straight in Davey's sack yeah lovely no I'm glad you enjoy i do like
48:29
Gwent i've played Gwent on Witcher 3 a fair bit i was always at it i ended up spending more hours playing Gwent
48:35
than I did the actual game i think I used to do that on um Fable there was a game where you were playing um was you
48:41
playing the loot or the guitar you were playing some musical thing and I bloody loved that mini game oh yeah i never
48:48
actually played Fable the actual rest of the game i wandered around a bit but I just wanted to play that game so what
Wispwood
48:54
did anyone else get up to on the Friday while I was playing Gwent i was keen to look at Whispwood so they showed us that
49:01
at the um CG stand what was the name of the lady a lady really lovely um really
49:08
helpful at describing all of the CG games whisp I think is a bit dark as in
49:13
the colors are quite dark i don't mean it's dark and scary it it absolutely isn't dark and scary i think they've realized that the promo sort of the demo
49:21
versions they've printed are quite dark in color so it might be difficult to discern but that looks quite simplistic
49:28
um like almost like a puzzle it reminded me a little bit of what I think Timber's going to play like where you're trying
49:34
to make like a I think the first round you're making a 4x4 grid then a 5x5 then a 6x6 but certain things stay on the
49:41
grid now I know that isn't how Timbertown starts but you're basically trying to um create scoring conditions
49:47
that you have on cards next to you so you know what you're kind of aiming to get certain wisps of the from the forest
49:54
and there's a cute little cat and this cat is like a dual layered piece where you turn it over and it's just like a
50:00
little a bit like a cat looking through a letter box yeah it's like a cute eyes yeah through like a tree stump and you
50:05
turn it over this way and it's the whole cat so I don't there is there is a thing about turning this piece over but like I
50:10
say we didn't get a de manage to get a demo of it but it that looks kind of intriguing but I think probably a bit
50:16
simplistic for what I was looking for maybe yeah and that's me saying that i'm
50:22
not one for complicated games but I think it probably be great for as like a starter game or like a filler game yeah
50:28
definitely a filler but that little cat piece just looked absolutely brilliant but we'll see won't we yeah we maybe get
50:34
our hands on S and have a little little tet yeah definitely want to try good yeah I
50:40
um well at the press event I met up with Andrew Santaro from Chip Theory Games um
Fight Five / Wroth
50:48
and great cuz Andrew remembered us from Essen two years ago pretty much he had a great t-shirt on as well great t-shirt
50:54
neon Genesis Evangelion with Garfield on it really liked it and uh and yeah we
51:00
had a really good chat at the press event and uh so we swung I kept gravitating towards chip theory booth
51:05
for for reasons unknown reasons you got a magnet inside you for the
51:11
I've got hard on for him that's it um his water divider kept pointing towards it
51:17
so where just two chips wasn't it that's what it was whenever I got my bearings I go to chip theory and I work out from
51:23
there that was like my home base uh base camp and then off I went to different areas um but now I we kind of had a
51:31
catch up with with Andrew um kind of organized uh through uh Mark Monk from Ninja Geek Games and so it was myself
51:38
Mark Monk Mark Dainty from Notboard Gaming and then Mike Dennis from Ready Steady Play um all kind of met up and we
51:45
had a little kind of table around the corner from the back of the booth where they do kind of pressy demo stuff and
51:51
and he just kind of showed us a few little games that are kind of coming up um the first one quite quickly is uh a
51:58
game called Fight Five and it's under their um kind of subsidiary studio
52:04
called Neon Knight Studios so for those that don't know Chip Theory acquired um
52:10
a small studio that owns by Manny Tremble the the artist and game designer
52:15
i think he drew Dice uh Throne and uh and he's done some projects with um Chip
52:22
Theory in the past um Tangle Woods and and and Roth which I'll talk about in a
52:27
minute but Fight Five is just a very simple card game um much like War if
52:33
people have played War standard 52 um deck of cards i've never played War so
52:40
it's like it's just like War and I'm like I've never played it so it makes no sense um plays up to five and you kind
52:46
of have this line uh or intersection of line of cards between each player so if
52:53
you've got four I use four as the example so you'll have like a cross section of cards um the two uh that kind
53:01
of bridge each player and then you've got the card in the middle which is kind of everyone can go and attack and really
53:08
these cards are all flipped over they all have values on them from like I don't know one to 13 and you've just got
53:15
your deck it's all shuffled and you draw five and each turn you're assigning
53:20
cards to each of those cards so you'll have five of your cards going to two on your right two in the front and one in
53:26
the the center and it's quite a simple premise if you get a higher number you
53:32
win all of the cards um if you get a a star card it it acts like a it will be
53:38
anything unless there's another star card in play then it cancels each other out and then the next heist would win um
53:45
simple just really simple bit of a silly bit of a laugh game and you play through
53:50
and then top of the points and each kind of 10 11 12 13 card are worth five
53:55
points and each star is worth 10 points that you win and then everything else is
54:00
just based on how many cards that you have in your deck and this your score plays in like 5 minutes it's just a bit
54:06
of silly nonsense and that was quite fun and then he wheeled out Rough um which I
54:11
was kind of keen to play again i haven't played it since the prototype on Gaming Rules a couple of years back I think um
54:19
and Rough is a game designed by Manny Trembley um who I mentioned earlier and
54:25
it's an area control dice drafting game and it's so like vibrant in color like I
54:31
remember you talking about how bright it was if you see the map you think "What the hell is that i'm having an acid trip
54:37
or something." But it doesn't help with the like the little upward grasping hands that are coming off of the like
54:42
are the area control pieces right pieces mixed with all the colors i was like "What is going on with that trippy but I
54:50
kind of like it uh so it's kind of like high fantasy you got your typical
54:55
dwarves and elves and you know these different factions but the way that they're drawn which is Manny's style of
55:00
art it's just they're so vibrant they pop off and they it looks fantastic on
55:05
neoprene it's just like wow it's just so uh it's so kind of in your face and
55:10
really it's the game's pretty simple to play it's it's a cracking convention style game i think plays in about an
55:17
hour to 90 minutes max and we got through a full game which was awesome um and I was playing as the Ugandan faction
55:24
which is like the orcs and they have some cool abilities and they can kind of
55:29
bring units back from the dead and transition other ones into uh orcs as well we have some dwarvy people the
55:37
runin uh on the map we had um uh I think I can't remember the other names but
55:42
some shadowy thievy guys and some horse horsey people the paladins and uh and
55:48
you basically have a set amount of troops which are your basic units and what's lovely Chip Theory blown it out
55:54
of the park with production as always has got unique little troop sculpts for
56:00
um every faction and now they I think standard is metal diecast metal yeah they done them all as metal for the the
56:06
proper release um they didn't need to but they did just for a laugh my Kickstarter bundle kept going "And now
56:12
we've added this and now we've added this." It's like you didn't really need to but I'm happy it didn't lose anything
56:18
not having the metal at all but so when people's wives have to pick other chip theory games up the next day they nearly
56:24
break their backs with the weight of it but we'll come to that that's why they all
56:32
And uh um and it's basically as I say dice drafting so you roll your set of dice um for the pool and you've got an
56:40
allseeing die that everybody has and you roll that as well and that sits on your little mat and uh yeah you take it in
56:46
turns you pick your dieice whoever's in the last VP position gets the last dice so you end up with three dice rather
56:51
than two and they do the typical things on area control games like moving troops deploying troops attack and uh and you
56:59
get this thing uh called kora which is a resource in the game so you can store corora to um recruit your more powerful
57:07
units and this is where the game gets interesting because then you're putting actual dice onto the the mat the dice
57:12
aren't ever rolled they're just typical chip theory they're counters for health each unit for every faction is a bit
57:18
different does different things might help you score in different ways and that's where the the nonsense kind of
57:25
comes in cuz it's like what is going on like I've got this shield and I've got this and it's fast-paced you're never
57:31
bored because I'm doing this thing done you'll go i'm doing this thing done you'll go and it just flies around
57:38
constantly flies around you're getting you set up for taking an area because it's got a high VP value that you want
57:43
to control and then all your troops are dead and then you're like "Oh okay." Um so it's quite knobbyby but then area
57:49
control games typically are quite knobbyby um but I don't really mind it at all i just think it's fun and we had
57:56
a blast and uh and I managed to I managed to get the little win on that as well by the end that was just a sneaky
58:02
little play you should have seen his face there afterwards i was surprised i genuinely was cuz I didn't know which
58:07
way I was going you were beating up a a tired Mark Dainty and a very sweaty Mike
58:12
Dennis from what I saw yeah yeah mike had ran to that meeting which the halls were hot as balls um I think mainly
58:19
Friday and Saturday so if you were doing anything other than or over a brisk walk you are going to be dripping and he was
58:25
I think it took him 45 minutes to stop sweating so that was fun but took advantage we
58:32
just had such a lovely play experience and that's the thing like the game probably could have been anything to be
58:38
fair but the banter was there everyone was kind of in a good mood and we just
58:44
had such a yeah a good fun game and always sweetens the pot when you managed to snipe the victory at the end and um
58:51
but yeah I just want to say thank you to to Andrew cuz he was such a great host and he looked after everyone and um you
58:57
know spent really a long amount of time with us um yet again he did ess and he
59:03
spent half a day with us I think in the end but he's such a good guy and um yeah and uh more on him and other things
59:10
coming up later but that's kind of fight five and Rough ones to definitely watch
59:17
out i'm looking forward to my copy coming yeah Ross's great yeah there we
Tenby
59:22
go what else we got i went via the 10B stand Cozy Cub Games um and I actually took
59:30
along my copy for Benji to sign and bless him he did and he looked really surprised that I wanted He's like "Yeah I absolutely wanted to sign this i'm
59:36
never going to get rid of this game." Yeah it's great and even Curly said not even Curly said but Curley's not a fan
59:42
of that kind of game no but it has this kind of extra little bite to it that makes you want to come back for more um
59:49
and it's a beautiful charming charmingly illustrated game where you're basically designing a street in Tenbby the Welsh
59:56
uh village yeah yeah welsh town um and you're kind of it's the art style
1:00:04
reminds me a little bit I want to say where's Wally but it isn't i think it's just cuz it's so highly detailed not quite macro micro macro level of detail
1:00:12
um and you've got like shops that are red or shops that have got lamp shades in front of them or a bird on the top
1:00:19
and then you get kind of scoring conditions saying the amount of shops next to this one with bird score points
1:00:25
so you're trying to kind of position where you go every now and again you can use certain tokens to kind of move stuff
1:00:31
around um there's a really great catcher mechanic but I would really strongly recommend 10B for light but not
1:00:39
throwaway i think anybody could have fun with it but it it's got more than just your regular place this thing score
1:00:46
those points it's it's really good um and his um partner maybe it was his
1:00:52
partner I think it was his partner I believe so recommended this game called Verdant oh yeah you you were like a picking poo
1:00:58
there weren't you yeah so I mean from that recommendation I just quickly looked on BG and it had a I think a
1:01:04
difficulty of less than three and a half anyway and I was like "Yep that's in sounds great to
1:01:10
me and it's about putting plants in a room and getting the right conditions and it just sounds great so I went and
1:01:16
bought that immediately cuz it looks brilliant i popped it all out yesterday and it does look brilliant nice there's
1:01:21
a picture on the front of a little cat curled upon a chair with loads of plants in the background i'm like "Yes this game is designed for me." I will do
1:01:29
awful at that game because any plant I've ever tried to keep in the house has always died dead well there's there's
1:01:35
green somehow the cardboard would like disintegrate in my fingers as I'm playing the plant well yeah this game
1:01:42
looks really good so um I can't I can't say how what it plays like yet cuz I haven't played it but it they had such a
1:01:48
great a great expo i think the temp guys um they seemed busy every time I walked
1:01:54
by they were really friendly and again in that really nice way that kind of indie designers are just really proud
1:02:01
and pleased with what they've presented and they really want to share it with people and they love it when they get people's kind of when they realize
1:02:07
people really like it and you can see how heartwarming it is and I just in a similar way to Chris Pisscot and um
1:02:14
Unfringed you know that they had such a great store um Fetching Feathers flew
1:02:19
out of stock every it was gone they had cues every morning so that was really
1:02:24
nice for them so I'm really glad that's always one of the nicest bits of the expo for me is seeing the passion and
1:02:33
kind of how much hard work goes into these games and they're gamers themselves they'll play all these games
1:02:39
and it's just it's it's got so much
1:02:45
feeling behind it rather than just being like kind of like a product faceless product yeah it's their heart and soul
1:02:51
that's gone into it and you can you get that feeling as you're walking around and it's just really nice yeah I didn't
Tacta
1:02:58
a game I would have liked to have bought but couldn't was a game called Tacta so I did have a quick demo of that and that
1:03:03
is basically a a card laying down game which has got some dots on the cards
1:03:10
it's kind of done in like a black neon kind of style so each card has got certain amount you you're say pink or
1:03:16
yellow or whatever you you're a color and you lay a card down and there's so many different ways that you can kind of overlap cards so the point of the game
1:03:24
is at the end of play you've got the most dots visible of your color so the
1:03:29
idea is to lay your cards down and overlap someone else's dots but then of course they can you can't you can only
1:03:35
overlap a card once so you can't keep having like a big massive stack over one area but there's certain kind of rules
1:03:41
of placement and that looked really good but it completely sold out so that is in
1:03:46
my basket of games to buy when I was going to say was the theme tact on but
1:03:52
be a really bad so it is quite tactical but yes that is the uh it's good you've
1:03:59
got control of the sound effects you can put a little drum thing in after that one works better but you won't put
1:04:06
that in Becky i will I'm going to keep it in cuz it was the kind of booms yeah that's it oh
1:04:14
which is coming from Did anyone else see Tact no I don't never heard of it no did you see Tact it was in It was in Hall
1:04:19
Four when we were having that chat about about difficulties yeah um I think it Oh
1:04:25
was it the OP the OP game op games yeah in fact it was when we we kind of swung
1:04:30
around to see how the um crocodile was doing so I've skipped today now i thought it was Friday but it's not we
1:04:35
walked around to see how the Crocodile was doing and bumped into Ryan and he was talking about this game and he said "Oh they're giving um demos of it and
1:04:43
they're giving away like a two-player version." And I was "Oh okay cool." And I didn't swing by it quick enough and it all gone and it all gone sad times i
1:04:49
don't know becky's gone into the future now we got wind back i think you I think you will like Verdant though so it's from the same publishers that did um
1:04:55
Calico and Cascadia um and I think Cascadia is great so I think you'll It's
1:05:01
kind of You're right it's that midsize that midweight sort of easily accessible game so I think you'll enjoy that this
Popcorn
1:05:08
is where cuz I was a little bit sort of lost in the halls not lost cuz I've
1:05:13
helped the game base home base right so well
1:05:19
once I'd sort of done the the quick lap that I always do to kind of get my bearings with stuff I then was like well
1:05:24
let's just have a wander around i didn't really have any demos booked or anything that so I just had a bit of a a wander
1:05:30
around interestingly you're mentioning um the OP the OP i don't know how the how you pronounce that i've always
1:05:36
called it the OP um but um Stuart and Josh were looking for
1:05:42
Ang's Destiny and they're like "We've been looking for this for ages." And I was like "It's made by the opera in hall four." And
1:05:48
they're like "Oh we didn't know that." And we hadn't seen it there and then got there and they had like a whole stack of
1:05:53
them and they were like "Oh okay well that makes sense." So hopefully uh hopefully that helped there but I think
1:06:00
the one game that I kept walking past the stand and didn't get a demo of was Popcorn by Yellow yeah I was interested
1:06:06
in that so it's a sort of family weight bag builder and it it sort of was giving me giving me vibes of Quacks a
1:06:13
credenburg almost because it's it's that fun entrylevel theme and just sort of
1:06:19
bag buildings are always a bit of a leveler when it comes to family games and stuff like that and it's probably
1:06:26
what you expect by the name Popcorn you you all run your own little cinema and you put a movie on and you draw out from
1:06:33
your bag and you put them in your little cinema and horror fans want to go and see the horror movies and all that kind
1:06:39
of stuff and then once you get enough points from that that stops showing and you move on to the next film and you draft that but also you can draft the
1:06:47
type of seats you've got in the cinema and I not quite sure how this thematically works but ultimately like
1:06:52
if you put a horror fan in a horror seat then you'll get bonuses um so yeah not
1:06:58
quite sure what a horror seat is apart from maybe sort of archback gothic style sort of but it's that thing of you're
1:07:05
trying to draw stuff out of a bag match it up with the seat match it up with the film get bonuses sort of that that Quax
1:07:12
feel and I really I sort of hovered a few times so they gave us a bit of a demo at the press release and I hovered
1:07:17
a few times kind of watching what people were doing and I thought to myself actually that is it's quite a small box
1:07:22
it's not out yet but it's quite a small box and it's quite a fun theme that you know cinemas movies are represented in
1:07:29
some board games but cinemas generally aren't and I sort of thought oh it's quite a nice unique theme but also one
1:07:35
that families can get into and everyone can sort of get behind and all that lot so I want to give that a go at some
1:07:40
point but I felt really like gallerist right yes yeah art society yeah um it
1:07:46
gave me um sort of vibes of Dinosaur Island oh that kind of pulling people
1:07:52
out of a bag certain colors go in certain places it was just the coloring colors involved it was bright and like
1:07:58
even the movie posters were that kind of some of them were like the horror ones were the like the old style pulp sort of
1:08:04
horror sort of styles and all that kind of Yeah and I I thought it was just it
1:08:09
just had looked like it had a great production value so one I'm that's not really my weight of game for that kind
1:08:16
of that I like sort of quicker party games sort of thing but it interested me
1:08:22
and I feel like I need to give it a go nice yeah good um I had one more I
Kinfire Council
1:08:27
played on the Friday which was uh Kinfire Council okay so Becky you had
1:08:32
spoken about this and so me and my brother wal past and there was no one at the table and I thought oh yeah Becky
1:08:38
spoke about this let's give it a quick little demo we sat down the um the instructor I
1:08:46
don't know the person running the de demo basically sat down and went "Go on then." And we were like "Uh I don't know
1:08:53
how to play this." And she just kind of sat there and just went "Off you go." So I had to kind of probe the rules which
1:09:00
I've never had to do before which was a bit of a weird experience but it did kind of work in the end other than they
1:09:06
kept telling us it was a co-op game only co-op turns out when I looked on BGG it
1:09:12
was a competitive game which made so much more sense and I think there's a good game there what now I know it's a
1:09:18
competitive game because you do have to work together to tackle
1:09:23
um like the cultists which are taking over the town and these cultists have a
1:09:30
score tracker and at the end if the cultist is beating anyone
1:09:36
you lose everyone loses the game at least this is what we were told you lose the game so you do kind of have
1:09:42
to keep distributing points to the lowest player still so that they're beating the cultist but you also want to
1:09:49
be the top player with the most points so that you win which creates a real
1:09:55
nice kind of seessaw mechanic because usually you don't care about the person who's last do you you're just like
1:10:00
running away with the game you don't care now you got to go okay I might vote
1:10:06
so let's explain the rest of the game it's worker placement uh building
1:10:11
resources to deal with threats that happen on the board you've kind of got cultist which block up spaces which you
1:10:16
can fight you've got you've got a um a lighthouse you have to invest building into as a auxiliary action um which has
1:10:25
points on it which is how many the cultist gets if you don't build it and otherwise it's how many points you kind
1:10:30
of get if you do contribute and then there's cards out which certain effects will happen if you don't deal with them
1:10:37
negative effects then there's also the council which is effects that you will
1:10:43
vote on with your influence which you've got a set amount of that will go off and affect the game or affect the people if
1:10:51
you are the uh lead counselor you'll get to choose
1:10:56
kind of which goes off unless there's so many votes that it's definitely this one but that make gives it a unique effect
1:11:03
of the lead council will choose this card they might not do it on themselves they might do it on the person who's last and give them some points to make
1:11:10
sure that the cultist doesn't catch up and take over the game so yeah really interesting game there it's kind of
1:11:16
unique in that sense of you know it's got the whole kind of uh
1:11:23
we we the co-op feel but with the competitive nature of I I want to win so
1:11:28
I just want to do a little bit better than you i don't want to do so well that I'm taking all the points i just want to do a little bit better i want the most
1:11:34
distribution of points to make sure we all win in a weird way but yeah
1:11:40
that's what kind of made me interested in it when I was sort of watching other people's sort of top 10 things that's
1:11:46
going to be at the UKG it it from what I saw of it it kind of reminded me a little bit of the King's Dilemma which
1:11:51
is a game we started playing and only managed to kind of get together twice to play it and then it just kind of fell by
1:11:57
the wayside really but I loved that kind of yeah you are joining together for the
1:12:03
greater good maybe but you've got to remember that certain decisions are going to be in some people's massive
1:12:09
advantage and maybe not your own so you you do want your thing to win but some things maybe that you don't really care
1:12:15
about so much you get to sort of well I all right I'll back you on this one but remember that I need you to back me next
1:12:21
whatever and I quite liked that sort of it is cooperative but it's like a selfish cooperative yeah sort of a thing
1:12:28
semi-op it's like um Legendary Marvel Villains was sort of the same was if the
1:12:34
if you got defeated on the on the overarching story if whatever
1:12:40
that was went against you that's it you've all lost but assuming you passed that then it was whoever had the most
1:12:47
points from saving people or whatever you know whatever you were doing as a villains you weren't saving people I'm
1:12:52
guessing but capturing people and all that kind of stuff so it's always quite semicol is always quite interesting cuz
1:12:57
I find that the those games can be real make or break cuz sometimes they don't
1:13:02
for me they don't always land right so if you had a good time with it I'm quite interested to see what Yeah what now now
1:13:09
I know it's not fully co-op cuz we were doing we were playing it as if it was fully cup they kept saying it was fully co-op and there's a lot of different
1:13:16
choices I would have made now I know there's the competitive side to it and I can kind of see where the game is now
1:13:22
and that's why it intrigues me more than it did so just as co-op cuz it just felt
1:13:28
bit easy felt too easy just cuz you were just like well there's a points tracker I'm ahead but what what does that mean
1:13:35
there's no benefit right so there's quite a few different games in their series isn't there um Kinfire so it's an
1:13:41
IP that is just in board game it's not like it's a film or something else and there's what's the other one i think Rob
1:13:49
Yeah that's it chronicles is the RPG um and then they've got Delve which is their mini dungeon crawler which I will
1:13:55
talk about cuz we played Saturday but yeah it definitely interested me and you had a good time with it well maybe
1:14:01
you would have had a good time yeah I had a good time yeah you saw that if you approach that demo again you probably
1:14:08
have a better time with it the worker placement and the resource conversion and the way that you have to spend money
1:14:14
to go they've got which seems quite pointless but they had like tiered there
1:14:19
was like plastic bits that s sat under these wooden um under the cardboard main
1:14:25
boards and it was only so that you visually could see this tier was higher than this tier this cost you one gold
1:14:30
this tier is higher than that tier that cost you two gold oh it's an Everel tree yeah it's an Evell tree yeah it's it's
1:14:37
absolutely pointless the Everel tree pointless bits of cardboard but all
1:14:42
games are pointless bits of cardboard japing not that tree all games are pointless sometimes they're chips and
1:14:48
neoprene how dare you hell yeah nice but yeah it the resource
1:14:55
conversion was it did scratch an itch like going to these worker spots and then converting what resources you
1:15:01
needed but yeah and play we played it at two-player right so I do think it might come into its own at a four player as
1:15:07
those semic yeah I think that's the thing about any kind of convention the people that are
1:15:13
doing the demos are not necessarily teachers in fact they're almost guaranteed not to be teachers so maybe
1:15:20
teaching things isn't their forte they're doing this as a voluntary kind of thing usually to get access into the
1:15:26
into the con so the people that you're getting taught by may not know the game
1:15:32
very well they might have been expected to learn tons of games so sometimes you're not going to get the
1:15:37
best teach so it's just worth bearing that in mind that expectation you have yeah and some some people are just
1:15:44
phenomenal at at demos aren't they i've been given a 40page rule book with an hour before yeah i mean and you're like
1:15:50
I'm not learning all of this like it's not unrealistic expectation isn't it so maybe I think that's a shame because if
1:15:59
you had have had a better demo not say better quality demo but a demo with someone who had completely you know knew
1:16:05
the rules knew the game really well you'd have had a completely different experience wouldn't you i'm glad that you you didn't at least let it put you
1:16:11
off but it could have done couldn't it it didn't sit right with me i was like something that that wasn't taught
1:16:18
correctly it's something that just didn't sit right with me i was like I play enough ball games i know the
1:16:23
mechanics and there's something off about that there was and I I asked the question about three times just to make
1:16:29
sure that maybe I'd phrased it wrong or like maybe I wasn't getting it and then
1:16:34
it was like no it's definitely caugh up and I was like okay it's there's something off with this but we
1:16:40
did speak about uh teachers while we were there and I do think it's it's quite it's quite an important thing i'm
1:16:48
wondering why some developers or designers or producers don't put people that do know the game because it's
1:16:54
definitely going to change your experience of how you experience their game but then I think it was you Adrian that said it does depend on the weight
1:17:00
of the game right there's so many factors in teaching it's who's available
1:17:07
cuz you can offer and again it's how much can you offer if you're a little indie publisher you probably can't afford to pay people or put them up for
1:17:13
the night or anything like that so you know we'll talk about one but my last
1:17:19
demo um the guy was running late so two of his mates just filled in who happened
1:17:26
to have play tested it a bit but wasn't there to be a demo it just happened to fill in because their trains were
1:17:31
running late and it's just so you got all of that to worry about as well as the fact that is the person a natural
1:17:36
teacher this might be the first time you've ever heard of them seen them you don't know what their quality is or
1:17:42
anything like there's so many aspects of you know is it a scripted promo is it
1:17:47
not could the have they understood the script have they not kind of there's all those kind of things that that make up a
1:17:54
good demo or sort of make it fall apart a little bit say I've I've I've turned up an hour before a convention well I
1:18:01
turned up a lot lot lot quicker and they went oh and this is the game you're showing and then showed off a 40page
1:18:06
skirmish game rule book to me and I was like well we're going to to cut this down a fair bit like quickly show me
1:18:12
what I'm showing someone and a bit like Mark Monk did with the zombie one very sort of simply went "Right this is what
1:18:18
you're going to do this is how you're going to play the game this isn't all the rules just tell them that and tell them there's more depth to it sort of
1:18:24
thing." And and so my first couple of demos of what I was demoing at the time were not great as I sort of evolved it
1:18:30
and pushed it and all that kind of stuff and so they're all in there and unfortunately yeah a bad a bad demo can
1:18:36
break a game and a good demo can make a game yeah hopefully by the Sunday maybe it was a better better demo so that's
1:18:44
but we don't know but I think there's a good game there good good good so that kind of wraps up the Friday really i
Friday evening, free chicken wings & the quest of getting Elder Scrolls back to the hotel
1:18:50
mean other than Friday evening Five Guys that was Thursday that was Thursday evening we did yeah we had Five Guys
1:18:56
Thursday friday friday we had Japanese JFC japanese
1:19:02
fried chicken it was Japanese fried chicken yeah it was really nice really nice good yeah i had a lovely meal in
1:19:08
there and I stole some um Michael stole Michael's uh chicken wings you sat next
1:19:14
to me met a little friend didn't you yeah I met Met a little friend this is JP all over i can't talk cuz it happens to I'm that person too so I was just
1:19:21
kind of minding my own business eating my my stir fry thing my noodle dish and uh and he goes "You wouldn't fancy some
1:19:28
extra chicken wings would you?" And I was like "Hell yeah I would love some extra chicken wings." You had to hold back the accent then didn't you you had
1:19:34
to i saw it coming out and then he was like "Wait a minute where am I i'm not doing it." Um and uh and you know I was
1:19:41
like "Are you sure?" I said "Yeah yeah." You sure yeah or ordered ordered too much and uh and I had one and I said
1:19:47
"Rob do you want one?" He said "No don't eat chicken off the bone." I went "Good." So I left the second one you didn't really want to share did you no
1:19:53
so I wal those down and jealous on my wings was that's what it was wasn't it you asking strangers to give you some absolutely um so yeah just chatted for
1:20:01
20 minutes half hour and uh it was just one of those nice little interactions that you have at these things and you're just chatting games and generally
1:20:08
interested in oh what do you do like podcast all right cool how's it work and yeah so that was quite a nice little
1:20:15
little experience um so yeah Michael if you happen to be listening thanks you
1:20:20
really Yeah you really enjoyed your chicken wings i loved your chicken and your company it was a nice dinner it's
1:20:26
really interesting when you walk over to the resort world which is where so you walk through the Viking kind of
1:20:31
encampment and it always cracks me up seeing the Vikings come back into the expo to charge their phone i love seeing
1:20:37
that i love seeing that it's like anacronistic just a little bit but there we are so you walk through the Viking
1:20:42
encamperment to go to the resort world which is a mixture of food places food chains food chains shopping stuff and
1:20:50
you I know everyone's wearing their lanyards but even if they weren't you can immediately go "Right that's the
1:20:56
gamer that's the gamer." No regular people regular people looking scared looking confused what's happening and
1:21:02
you can absolutely like you can really see the stark difference and I just think that's so you know even if Michael
1:21:10
hadn't have been chitty chatty sharing his chicken with you you'd have been you you'd have known if he was there for
1:21:15
games or not so you'd have known if if you're going to have a game conversation or if you're going to be just not doing
1:21:21
that yeah we all sat at the bar if you would i wasn't just like sat literally another guy's table we're sat on a bar
1:21:27
in a row so it's one of those seating and arrangements that is it's functional
1:21:33
but it's not super social and talking to left or right it's not really Yeah there was five of us on that bench and it
1:21:40
wasn't really designed for that i think it's good for twos and threes sort of thing and then after that it's a bit tough to kind of get involved yeah
1:21:46
because me and Curly arrived later didn't we you got a table we taken a taxi back to the uh hotel because Well
1:21:55
so Curly had hurt his ankle not his ankle his foot a couple of days before which wasn't giving him particularly too
1:22:02
much trouble but then you add 21,000 steps around that and that is getting a bit of an issue could see he was kind of
1:22:08
not flagging but it was like oh you sit there and I'll go and get the drop the stuff out of the shop and drop box no problem and he's like it's quite a lot
1:22:14
of stuff I was like yeah yeah yeah I like to think I'm a bit of a pack horse and I don't ever make two trips where
1:22:19
one trip same even if you end up like dislocating myself I'm going to I'm only going to walk up the stairs once and
1:22:25
then I'll forget something have to go down again but that's when you come back from the supermarket you've got six bags and I'm taking them all oh yeah 100%
1:22:31
it's stupid I don't know why I do it but there we are so I went to collect my stuff from the Shop and Dropbox first
1:22:37
and I thought "Oh I'll get Curly." Oh actually no I've got a lot of stuff i'll I'll be sensible i'll take a separate trip thank Christ I didn't try and do it
1:22:44
all at once because Curly had gone to Chip Theory Games so JP completely Well actually no it's not you that's at fault
1:22:50
this time it's Rob it's Rob we blame Rob for this curly had decided that he was going to get Elder Scrolls cuz he loved
1:22:57
it it was always happening it Yeah just Elder Scrolls well no just all of it so
1:23:03
it was the all-in pledge yeah yeah pretty much um which consisted of a box
1:23:08
that literally was the took almost the entire of the drop box it's like a stone it's an entire It's an entire callax
1:23:15
cube hanging out the edge concrete block yeah and it's full of neoprene and lead
1:23:22
by by all accounts um and it got the expansiony stuff so I picked this up
1:23:27
jesus tonight what a what a mission um they're all in very handy bags which is
1:23:33
nice but I don't think those bags would have um would have kept the weight if I I had to hold it like a like a baby I
1:23:40
suppose not that I've got much experience holding them but I I held it yes I'm sure they are you couldn't hold
1:23:46
it by the handles of the bags is what I'm trying to say and then I had another bag that had all the expansiony stuff
1:23:52
that he'd also bought and I had to walk from hall three all the way hall through
1:23:57
hall three all the way through 3A to get into four where we were doing the open gaming to to drop it off bloody hell
1:24:04
what a what a trick and we were like there's no way we're going to take all of this which in meters or whatever it's probably not that far but when you add
1:24:10
all the weight and everything you might as well add another people as well so it's slow yeah and then carried it all
1:24:17
the way from four all the way to the moxy as well which I thought was like you've bought it all the way from hall two to hall four to then take it back
1:24:25
past hall two to the moxy and I thought you done that in the wrong order we did all chip in then yeah everyone was
1:24:31
everyone was carrying Curly's pledge basically what was happening um yeah if if we'd have thought about actually no
1:24:37
we need to if I'd have seen it beforehand I'd have said let's meet at the front cuz we're going to be going
1:24:43
that direction we're not taking this to a food chain anywhere the granny trolley was fully rammed still is overflowing
1:24:50
yeah it was yeah we needed a little drop it was an impressive hall if anyone wants to see this there are photos of
1:24:57
the It's one hall to rule them all literally it's I didn't get many big
1:25:02
boxes big All the games that I bought were smallish boxes this time it's still impressive it was a good one yeah yeah
1:25:09
so uh yeah that was but using Uber was seamless so we got an Uber almost
1:25:15
immediately outside of the Moxy we put our stuff in the back of the car and then he waited for us and we did another
1:25:20
Uber from there the same guy and he brought us literally straight back we were only probably about 5 minutes later than you guys were I would have said and
1:25:26
we went all the way back to the hotel and back so worked really well yeah really really well cool so let's move on
TURN 4 - SATURDAY
1:25:34
to Saturday shall we so Saturday morning comes and uh more more fresh faces uh
1:25:40
appear hopefully Davey got got some sleep and uh Why are you talking like this some kind of children's TV show
1:25:46
it's like Teletubbies the sun coming out the baby son baby son i used to hate
1:25:52
that bloody baby son i know it was awful wasn't it i never wanted nightmares i never wanted to punch a baby so much
1:26:01
i probably bit too real now i don't like to do any of that i want to put that on
1:26:06
well they're now like 20 30 years old so they're probably appropriate to punch it was just that little annoying face you
1:26:12
did have quite an annoying face for a baby just don't honestly it's triggering me
1:26:18
it's triggering me but yeah just like Teletubbies we all skipped out of bed
1:26:23
and had our little uh fry ups and my free breakfast yeah and your free breakfast which is fine um and then yeah
1:26:29
Saturday morning we rocked up shenanigans who's going what happened
Power Vacuum
1:26:35
power vacuum power vacuum morning yeah power vacuum and the deluxe bits was
1:26:40
that a shark a power vacuum well it's it's a game it's a trick it's a trick
1:26:46
taking game where you are sometimes trying to lose a trick so that you can decide
1:26:52
where the power moves from one color to another you basically get given a card in your hand which is basically telling you what you want to uh succeed and tank
1:27:00
i mean you can play it either way round um and you if you win the hand you win
1:27:05
the hand but if you lose the hand you get to sort of move this really cool little magnet with like you know like kind of like a tin can with a string on
1:27:11
it that kind of thing as a kid it's got this like a little magnet with a string on it which is the direction that the
1:27:18
power was going to travel okay and the little story behind it was really cool like you're a like a communist power
1:27:26
appliance it does look like communism they've they've done quite a lot of good sort of theming with that um yeah the
1:27:33
the current like I think what do they call it like major major power is dead
1:27:39
and there's a like leaves a power vacuum hence why the game is called power vacuum and you want to plug yourself into the main socket or something it's
1:27:45
it's quite funny so all the all the art style is really interesting yeah toasters and fridges yeah and a phone
1:27:53
yeah it's really cool so that looks that looks really interesting i'm I'm keen to play that every time you win you make a little bit of the statue of yourself as
1:27:59
well don't you yeah you're building a statue to your own honor which is which is really cool so yeah each Yeah each
1:28:04
little kind of layer of this statue is representing I don't know 10 points or whatever but yeah that looked like the
1:28:11
uniqueness of you kind of you're betting on someone to have top power someone to have the least power and that's a hidden
1:28:18
card so cuz it's trick if you win you get more power and then if you lose you
1:28:24
can choose if you've already set that little um power transfer thing you can choose
1:28:31
where that power goes to so you got to try and also like deduce yeah you can if
1:28:37
you reveal really early what your kind of alliance is you get more points but then of course everyone knows what
1:28:43
you're trying to do so they're not going to let you do it but if you don't reveal right till the end what your kind of
1:28:50
alliance is you get crap amount of point it It just looked really interesting and I'm really keen to play that yeah yeah i'll be keen for playing that one as
1:28:56
well that was good i was just looking it up cuz I genuinely thought there's a game called Cogs and Commissaars which
1:29:01
is exactly the same theme so it's Communist Robots and it's a it's like just a card sort of
1:29:08
party game and I I genuinely thought they was the same company cuz the art style and the feel is is is identical
1:29:14
really it's a completely different style of game but yeah it's interesting how many uh how many robot
1:29:22
communist communist games yeah the games there seem to be but anyway it's just exactly the same that red and white with
1:29:29
a bit yellowing sort of art style and the kind of the font they've used is quite kind of is it acrylic yeah it's I
1:29:36
just I've just looked it up cuz I was like it must be the same company it's not yeah Keen Bean Studio makes power vacuum i'm not sure the other one but
1:29:43
yeah that just looked and I had to buy the upgraded box bits because obviously why would you not why would you not why
1:29:48
would you not so that was that was cool and that was my first purchase on the Saturday I think was it oh apart from getting that um folded space insert
Folded Space
1:29:55
served by King Milo himself the designer of the thingies which is always nice and
1:30:01
I think I think he might have recognized us a little bit oh god it's her again oh god she's going to Oh no he was lovely
1:30:06
he was super nice as he always is she's going to ask for a photo again yeah oh cutting in queue as well i didn't cut in
1:30:13
the queue you know what do you know what i didn't even go to Inside Up Games because I couldn't face it just in I
1:30:19
mean my my pledge of uh Earth Abundance is well is on its way but um yeah I
1:30:27
couldn't go near it in case in case so you didn't see the wanted poster of your face behind the thing no but watch out
1:30:33
for this one she jumps cues furious all the British people are furious i just couldn't face it i couldn't face it
1:30:40
yeah now I got um a tabs of teeth and fo insert which I didn't know I needed until I basically got stopped with Becky
1:30:47
and we uh had a look and went n I've got everything i went oh no actually oh I haven't I need that that's full of
1:30:52
baggies and it's doing my head in so yeah bit that up and I bought some socks from oh what are they called witch uh
1:30:59
witch hunt because I forgot to pack socks like some kind of idiot so I then bought some really cool they're not just
1:31:05
D20s they've got all the different kind of style dies on them and I bought three pairs of those nice that was cool they're some cool ties though they have
1:31:13
We bought one for Curly last year actually yeah night the kind of I' I'd call it stealth geek that's my favorite
1:31:19
kind of Yeah yeah it's not obvious unless you're really low and you kind of know there's a really There's a couple
1:31:25
of um really good t-shirt suppliers the one's called Red Oh Lonely Red Planet curly's got most of their Lord of the
1:31:31
Rings ones um and I bought a couple of Harry Potteresque ones and um on the
1:31:37
Sunday again I'm skipping into time we searched for Yeah i'm playing the trouble at the
1:31:44
Tempest i'm just doing like a little Yeah yeah um we went to uh shirts and merch lovely Matt in shirts and merch
1:31:52
and uh Curly's ordered a size t-shirt cuz the quality of their t-shirts I'm not just saying this they are beautiful
1:31:59
mhm so I I bought a one has a board game Obsession and the title the Even though I haven't played Obsession but I really
1:32:05
want to when you posted it I thought I didn't know you'd played Obsession no I haven't but I liked the I liked the But
1:32:10
she's going to and she will get it yes and I love Jane Austin and uh I'm not
1:32:16
saying I have a board game obsession compared to some people but I liked the the premise of the t-shirt and it was in
1:32:22
burgundy and it's one of my favorite colors there you go and it was on the sale they do rather good castles and
1:32:27
runs what burger burger yes yes they do
1:32:32
unique New York there you go so yeah shirts and merch for really good board game sounds good so yeah that was cuz
1:32:40
I'd mostly bought everything I needed on the Friday i didn't do the Saturday was mostly me buying crafty stuff which was
1:32:46
always nice crafty Becky strikes again nice what else did everyone else do Friday i bought a board game table oh we
Natural 20 Board Game Tables
1:32:54
were on Saturday but I bought a board game table burn in your wallet yeah big hole now is that Yeah well yeah but it
1:33:00
was your most of your um uh bring and buy stuff went towards it didn't it it was yeah so what I sold in the bring and
1:33:06
buy basically paid for the deposit of the table so it's almost free then Adrian almost done almost free got to go
1:33:14
to a few more bringing bring buys yeah or sell all of your collection
1:33:21
basically to Forge Table yeah really push that only fans um yeah I'd kind of
1:33:26
spent a bit of Friday wandering around and talking to people so apologies that I didn't buy your table if it wasn't a
1:33:32
natural 20 table and I spoke to you about buying a table from you because they have there is now such a great
1:33:38
selection of different board game manufacturers offering different styles
1:33:44
different levels of board game different options and all that kind of stuff and I nearly bought one to bring back with me
1:33:51
um cuz there was one that you could like take in half and then I could have fitted in the car um decided not to and
1:33:59
just ordered one so we'll see that in a little while but yeah I went with to I went with natural 20 um tables and got
1:34:05
their hybrid table and so yeah what's the difference because ours is a natural 20 so what's the hybrid so there's the
1:34:12
Oh you're going to make me remember the name of them there's the gamer which I think so they've got gamer advent see
1:34:18
the adventure is the one that can split down cuz it can be put in the post oh okay and so they can reach wider markets
1:34:25
um then there's two others and they're kind of either side of the hybrid so the
1:34:31
one's sort of a not cheap like it's cheaper but it's not it's still a nice table um so there's one that's sort of a
1:34:37
a sort of more budget friendly one I guess you'd call it and then there's one which is the all singing all dark singing which I think is the one you guys have got and then there's a hybrid
1:34:44
one that sits in the middle where it's got like solid oak tops and stuff but then the legs are slightly softer wood
1:34:51
oh okay um so that it's lighter and a bit sort of cheaper for them to produce
1:34:57
and that's the one I went for nice we only picked ours because we got an an offer on it because they already started
1:35:02
making it for someone else and that person couldn't then carry on with the purchase so we didn't pick that yeah but
1:35:09
you know it's been great i think Natural 20 have been when you when you join their Facebook page you can see every
1:35:14
few months there seems to be one that's like "Oh this is for sale now to other people sort of thing for reduced price."
1:35:20
So yeah got um got some accessories for free as part of the show um and they
1:35:27
were saying that unfortunately they're going to have to put their prices up soon so they were like such as the
1:35:32
economy get get in now and then you know we don't offer much more off at the moment but if you get in now at least
1:35:38
you kind of miss our price bumps so did did you get to that point where you you did it and you did the transaction and
1:35:44
then you just felt a little bit kind of queasy and ill and now to sit down cuz I did so I kind of as I say I kind of did
1:35:51
all my research on the day and then went back to the hotel and did even more research and then put my deposit down
1:35:59
and immediately went "Is this the right one?" Yeah have I done the what's went straight back online and tried to sort
1:36:06
of reress research everything just in case I'd made a mistake even though I'd put the deposit down at this point like it's it's signed yeah um but no I think
1:36:13
I've I think I've made the right choice i'm quite happy with sort of having seen having gone on their Facebook and seen
1:36:19
other people's hybrid tables um ah you'll love it mate i think so the I
1:36:24
kind of added the underleaf under table leaf storage and I'm not sure I might ask for them to remove that cuz I'm not
1:36:30
sure about it i think I might Is that where you store the planks where under underneath the table yeah yeah and I
1:36:36
don't know whether or not that's the right choice so I'm going to have a think and a mull and I might remove that and put some different accessories in we
1:36:42
tend to keep ours half half erect half not I don't know how you going to say it so we keep the we keep
1:36:51
one half with the table planks on it for eating and the other half is generally
1:36:57
open gaming space gaming space yeah which works for us because then you just need to take one extra plank off if you
1:37:04
got more people or if you're actually having people around for dinner which we never do cuz people are coming around to our house for gaming not not dinner and
1:37:11
then you put the other planks back on so it works fine yeah yeah yeah as I say I'm looking forward to it obviously it's
1:37:17
a bit of a wait till it arrives but looking forward to it good yeah as you say felt a little bit queasy for the
1:37:24
next hour or so while I sort of realized what I'd s like you know when you're like I've been looking at say I'm moving
1:37:31
house hopefully soon as we're recording this I'm like a day or two before exchange hopefully fingers crossed um so
1:37:38
I've been looking at sofas and it's like "Oh a set of sofas is cheaper than that board game table that I've just bought."
1:37:43
You don't need to sit down there Adrian you need to game that's the Yeah and it's pretty much everything else that
1:37:49
I'm buying for the house is cheaper than the table in it and you just kind of go "Oh there's always IKEA pang chairs."
1:37:55
Yeah there's always those if in doubt just get those they're comfy yeah it's it's Yeah but it's done now so that's
1:38:03
future me's problem excitement and the adrenaline I'm going to do it and then you actually pay for things and it's and
1:38:09
then yeah like you just said it's a weird feeling queasy oh oh god yeah and now I've kind of got to live in the
1:38:14
mellow until it arrives and then it'll be all exciting again yeah cuz then he like it's done is in the history gone it
1:38:20
won't be as long as the weight that poor Tambbo had for his table oh my god that
1:38:25
Yeah i nearly back that as well cuz it's it's modular that table so you can kind
1:38:31
of make it into different sizes and all that lot but oh welcome to the went with
1:38:36
table club well when it arrives I will be but yes very much looking forward to it and the guys on the stand were lovely
1:38:42
and uh but as I say I went around all of the stands that sold tables and they were all like lovely and just talked
1:38:49
about kind of what they do and how they do it and how they make it and all that kind of stuff so yeah nice good nice
1:38:56
nice yeah it was that was the exact table I was looking at before when I thought we were going to move
1:39:03
well so yeah yeah nice you're going to enjoy it i'm hoping so you can actually
1:39:09
put some board games in on the as soon as I've moved even when before I got the table I'll get some games in now I've
1:39:15
got like a dedicated games room and it doesn't feel like just everyone squashed into my living room that I just happen to squeeze a dining room table into um
1:39:23
some games up yeah what about you Dave what were you doing on Saturday so I went and checked out a game which is a
Moonstone
1:39:30
little bit 2023 but you know got to be done sometimes so my brother's into more
1:39:36
skirmish games so we ended up having a look around at more skirmish games than I normally would cuz we do I do play
1:39:42
Kill Team and the odd skirmish game but um yeah we ended up checking out from Goblin King Games uh Moonstone
1:39:51
so Moonstone is a skirmish game where you have to go and collect moonstones is
1:39:57
the main objective it's like a little dye that you would put out that has a value on it and when you do the action
1:40:03
trying to pick it up I think it's the only time you roll a dice but you roll a dice and see if you can pick the
1:40:08
moonstone up you've got the objective but the combat is where it is it's very
1:40:15
different so the combat when you're shooting someone it's called arcane you
1:40:20
have a little you have a value a stat which is say three or four and you draw from this deck
1:40:27
the defender will have an evade value and it means they either get plus that many cards but they'll always draw I
1:40:33
think a set value of three or four i can't remember the exact rules we were just having a little demo
1:40:38
in the deck there is two threes three twos and four ones of three different
1:40:44
colors to do my ability say it's a red two i'll look at the cards in my hand oh
1:40:50
no I haven't got a red two in my hand i'm going to bluff and basically you
1:40:55
always will say put it face down say I'm doing this it's up to the other player they might
1:41:02
look at their hand and have both red red twos in their hand they know you're lying they're going to say nope you're
1:41:07
lying so you flip the card if the person who played the card was actually right
1:41:13
in in a different scenario then they get to go again and do their ability again
1:41:18
and go through the whole process so it can be bad but we know this time that he's bluffing right so he flips it if
1:41:25
the other player has a cat catastrophe in their hand they can swap the card with any value card in their hand so
1:41:31
they can suddenly deal damage back which is a real unique space for skirmish games you know that little bluffing
1:41:37
aspect you don't or you don't necessarily have to rely on what you roll and die to be
1:41:43
able to play this you can just be like "Right I'm going to play the social game i'm going to bluff this forward." Or you
1:41:49
don't you can sometimes you'll have those values and still get lucky which means you can just you know be honest so
1:41:55
that was really unique then melee is unique melee is the same it's got a deck
1:42:01
of cards with certain amount of cards of each type but Tom who designed it is uh
1:42:07
was a mixed martial artist um and he's created a deck that feels more kind of
1:42:14
if you're going to block high and the person goes high your swords are going to clash you're going to negate a lot of
1:42:21
the damage if you play a block card that's low but they go high they're going to do a lot of damage to you so on
1:42:28
each of the cards it's got like a high swing mid swing or a thrust sorry low
1:42:34
swing high guard low guard and then each card that you play it says depending on
1:42:40
what they've played how much damage you do or you might not deal nothing as well as having signature moves that if you
1:42:46
play a certain card on your character you'll do a different thing if you want to say it so it creates this real like
1:42:53
eb and flow of combat that's really interesting of what cards you're playing and this is this isn't a bluffing game
1:42:59
this is just trying to determine to think they do more damage if they play that card i've got these cards i can negate a
1:43:08
lot of that damage i'm going to play this and you can kind of slightly map it out um and it becomes down it comes down
1:43:15
to more the player than necessarily how lucky you are rolling dice which yeah
1:43:20
for a skirmish game real unique concept tom was lovely um he we have a chat with
1:43:26
him he said he might come on the show which will be great cuz I don't think we've had a kind of a skirmish designer on the show so yeah um I'm looking
1:43:35
forward to playing it uh me and my brother have now ordered a load of it and uh each character is also like some
1:43:42
whimsical uh fairy tale but done in like a quite a
1:43:48
unique model aspect and apparently the way that they make their resin models is actually quite unique but they wouldn't
1:43:53
tell us how they did it it's like a trade trade secret yeah um but it's got it's a real cool own little theme and
1:43:59
really unique mechanics so yeah one 2023 best rule set is that what the posters
1:44:06
in the kind of entrance to the halls were talking about moonstone cuz I recollect it like like a Davy Jonesy piratey man yeah they had some pirate
1:44:13
cool little pirates and everything and yeah go check out the models if you're into skirmish games I think this will be
1:44:19
you know sounds cool yeah are the pieces little actual moonstones cuz that'd be
1:44:24
cool if they were uh so the moonstones are actually just D4s but you could you could make some like crystal looking
1:44:30
moonstone dice right and put them because when you like roll them out you kind of I think this is how you do it
1:44:36
cuz we didn't actually play that we played Little Jewel but you roll them out onto the board and they go they land in different spots and what value they
1:44:43
have on the dye is actually how hard they are to dig up it's how deep they've fallen into the earth okay yeah makes
1:44:49
sense they should be made of little moonstone so that'd be cool yeah that would be cool but you could bling it up couldn't you if you were that way
1:44:54
inclined you could do it so it's not too hard to do either you just need a set of D4s right cool set of D4s the moonstone
1:45:01
D4s i'm sure they do them somewhere right yeah glowing dark ones yeah cuz
1:45:08
why not um so yeah I think on Saturday morning after our folded space uh Suare
1:45:15
purchases I think me and you headed to Splitstone Games right Becky yeah it was lovely to see Jack again he's his store
Stag
1:45:22
was beautiful really nice really lovely kind of I mean I guess the games he designs lend themselves to a really nice
1:45:29
kind of earthy natural kind of stall so he had just a whole wall of mycelia just
1:45:36
all over there and it was some of them I liked how he mixed it up with the regular box art and the kind of fancy
1:45:42
pants sleeve the dark green and go it was really nice it looked really good so we had a little chat with him about um
1:45:49
the expansion that's coming out which is all about mushrooms that are native to new uh to North America so that was nice
1:45:56
um and it brings a fifth player in it does which looks really cool add some more mechanics apparently as well yeah
1:46:01
that's right so it looks that looked pretty cool and then we demoed his game Stag we did which is about stag beetles
1:46:09
not four-legged stag creatures i thought I thought it'd be a euro about um going
1:46:14
to Magalof on the last holiday lads lads but it wasn't that getting a tattoo
1:46:20
your Beatles are your Beatles are fighting so you know may maybe you could
1:46:25
work it in if you really wanted to i didn't know if I was disappointed or not no I didn't know it was about stag beatles and even though it was an
1:46:33
absolute prototype like oh cardboardy bit like he had made the the actual stag
1:46:38
beat was out of uh wood and the puper out of wood and the little grubs out of wood so it's it's similar i think it's
1:46:45
got a lot of similar aspects to mycelia as in you are kind of evolving a thing so obviously you're evolving a mushroom
1:46:52
in Myelia you're taking it through its kind of life cycle so similar stag is kind of similar in a way so you're
1:46:58
starting off with beetle cards in your hand uh they start off you put you play
1:47:04
them as a grub which you need certain kind of resources for they then to get
1:47:09
them into the next section you are kind of using time as the resource to grow them in their puper state and then you
1:47:16
need some certain kinds of food in order to make them kind of battle ready as an
1:47:21
actual evolved beetle um it's a
1:47:27
h It's a a programming game I would say so as I was playing it it reminded me a
1:47:33
lot of why I'm so terrible at Spirit Island because you've got to think in a
1:47:38
minute this is going to look like this what do I need first to get and I for someone who isn't thick I mean I'm a bit
1:47:45
thick sometimes but someone who isn't thick I should be able to work this out so it makes me a bit cross that I can't
1:47:50
visualize this as well as I think I should be able to but it does it in a really clever way you've got like a
1:47:57
a grid in front of you as your little player board and you've got kind of five tile pieces that have got three or four
1:48:04
three I think i think it's four actions on each on each little kind of stick and
1:48:09
you position that where you want to and you basically run the program through the through the middle line so you
1:48:16
decide what action you're going to do but each each little stick has got maybe
1:48:21
it might might be time as a resource it might be evolve a bug it might be whatever so you can't do all the things
1:48:27
on it so you've got to try and work out right what do I need to do first right well I need some time for that those
1:48:32
only those two sticks have got time oh but that one's got the bug oh I need to do this so it's it's a it's a kind of
1:48:39
Yeah programming decide what you're going to do run your program get your resources and then do the stuff but if
1:48:45
you have made one mess up and you can't do the the next things you've kind of
1:48:52
wasted your turn really so it's really clever in the way that it's all simultaneous play um there is sometimes
1:48:57
when you need to do things and it does rely on like an order um but it's really clever that it there's not any kind of
1:49:03
waiting around which is what can be really annoying in most games kind of waiting for your turn so you it's it's a
1:49:09
simultaneous play it's really clever how he's used that kind of I don't know much
1:49:16
about bugs i'm not is it entomologist enterologist sure one of those a bug
1:49:21
special specialist entomologist because ethmology is words yes enter exactly i'm
1:49:27
much I'm better at words sounds like he knows what he's talking about better yeah better cuz there it really bugs me
1:49:34
people wrong bugs you there we go entomology but I really like
1:49:41
how he's taken that kind of the idea of something that is nature based that we all understand like that kind of life
1:49:48
cycle and growth of something um and has kind of again he's it's only we're
1:49:53
playing like I say a complete prototype so it wasn't real cards it was paper um
1:49:58
but it was totally understandable how this was going to work like you could absolutely like the rules are really
1:50:04
simpleish but how you kind of construct your turn is is different and then you do have
1:50:11
this kind of like stack battle at the end which is quite exciting it only happens if you've got the showdown lads
1:50:18
on tour this is it so There there is kind of like you know there's definitely an element of um yeah other kind of
1:50:23
stags it's like basically group basically it's groups of lads going to BCM nightclub in the middle of Magalof
1:50:28
and then having a rook that's basically what it is you could completely whole
1:50:33
night right you could rethe this completely uh it's not too late Jack it's not too late diversify from your
1:50:40
nature it's definitely a couple of steps up above the difficulty level of my Celia definitely um but not too
1:50:48
difficult to grasp but just difficult for me to get my mind around it yeah I I
1:50:54
do find that with sequencing games so some people really bounce off of the the kind of programming aspect of these
1:51:00
games whereas some people you know really drawn to them so I do find it's the the game type rather than you Becky
1:51:06
yeah it it it was it's not going to be a game type that I'm ever going to excel at I don't think but what was really
1:51:12
funny was at the start of the chat he um he must have remembered Curly from last time when we um played Mycelia and he's
1:51:20
like "Oh is is the other guy here?" Um uh is it what's he called we're like "I don't know spudge or something." We were
1:51:27
like "Who?" That was my favorite bit of the convention the guy with the nickname
1:51:32
i was like "Oh Curly." And he was like "Yes yes." I was like "Well," and his name actually is Curly cuz I'm Mrs curly
1:51:38
he was like "Oh." Uh cuz he thought exactly oh bless him he He did sort of go a bit red in the face he made the
1:51:44
exact mistake that I have made when I first met Curly thinking it was to do with how curly his hair is cuz that's
1:51:50
what I made that's what I thought it was i thought you meant you called him spudge as well that would have been
1:51:55
excellent but yeah so that's what we called curly for a little while after didn't we but yeah I think he was really
1:52:00
because he was asking for kind of feedback wasn't he about um how it was working so uh yeah I think that's why he
1:52:08
would have been found Curly's opinions more useful than mine yeah i think the two things I really enjoyed about that
1:52:14
game one was the programming bit cuz he when he showed me it I was interested i was like I really like sequencing games
1:52:21
the cleverness of deciding well I want that square but it needs to come before that was really I slide this tile up I'm
1:52:26
covering the resource and I want that action and it's that that's the bit it's what you've left uncovered so underneath
1:52:33
there's resources and what you've left uncovered is the resources you get so it's not just about picking the actions
1:52:39
and the order it's in sometimes you have to make a slightly less efficient choice because you want um the top one of this
1:52:46
three that means you've got to slide it all the way down which covers up those resources well if you do it one later
1:52:52
that might not be ideal for you but it means you then get the resources you want because you're going to use the
1:52:57
bottom one of the next hex and that is it was really clever it's really I would say JP made the sort of it's a bit like
1:53:04
smartphone ink in some of the respects of how you lay out these tiles and it's
1:53:09
not quite it's not the same it's not the same really but it's that same feel it's not the same it's not the same
1:53:15
mechanically but it's the same of getting that puzzle and working it out and you're all doing it simultaneously
1:53:20
so it goes a bit quicker than well it feels quicker than I think it is when you're doing it but you sort of work that out and then you're like right
1:53:26
let's go but I kept messing up the fact that I was looking at the resources that I was going to get but I wasn't
1:53:34
have them now you have them at the end and I was using that as a lot of my right well I'm going to I'm going to
1:53:39
bring that beetle from its puper state to whatever and I need this yeah I'll have that because no you won't have that
1:53:45
now you'll have it at the end and that is the bit that I kept uh making errors with but the second
1:53:53
point of the game I really enjoyed was the showdown yeah that was really good he basically explained it when he did
1:53:58
the teach she said "Have you seen Golden Balls?" I went "I know exactly what this is i know exactly what this this this
1:54:04
mechanic is." And it's basically like split or steal at the end of Golden Balls where if you both um kind of steal
1:54:12
you get nothing or you get bad stuff bad crap yeah if you both split you both get something or if one of you steals and
1:54:18
one of you splits then the steely person gets everything and the one who splits nothing and it's got the same sort of
1:54:24
thing but they call it fight or forage and uh we had a in our I say we had a freeway but we did we did have a freeway
1:54:32
with an extra person us two and a lovely extra and an extra and bought them in specially and was like yeah yeah and you
1:54:37
said basically I was the git I stole from from everyone you were knew he was
1:54:44
I knew he was going to do it as well and I was like I'm having it 500 points
1:54:49
thank you very much i don't want to cuz it's not quite as bad as they take everything the stealer doesn't take
1:54:54
everything the person who forages actually gets more resourcy stuff
1:54:59
resourcy and good stuff for the longer term but actually less victory points so there is a bit of a cuz I was like well
1:55:06
it's just whoever's going to make when he sort of first explained it I was worried in my head that it's just going to be whoever judges that bit right will
1:55:12
win will win and while it does give you an advantage if you keep calling it that right and if you keep calling it right I
1:55:19
think you will win but if you call a few of them right you can still lose because someone's So I had an engine which meant
1:55:25
that I basically went from um grub to Beetle in a turn almost every time
1:55:32
because I was doing time mechanics and I was picking things up that just wanted loads of time and less resources so
1:55:37
that's kind of what I'd done and actually despite the fact that I lost several of the battlesh I still managed
1:55:44
to come in with a good number of points because I had built a slightly better engine yeah by foraging more sort of
1:55:50
thing so one to watch yes yeah definitely i think you can tell with Split Stone Games as production what
1:55:56
this is going to kind of be like um so you can kind of see past the prototype for sure so yeah definitely
1:56:02
but it was still a beautiful prototype to be fair it was absolutely lovely um it was one to watch yeah definitely um
1:56:10
appealing sounds like Mush Street yeah um so pretty much straight after that I headed to Earthborne Games and um I've
Hubworld: Aidalon
1:56:18
been on my list was I wanted to try uh their new game Hub World uh Idolon so
1:56:23
Earthborn Games have done Earthborn Rangers and you know that that's been quite a good success for them and
1:56:29
managed to catch up with Andrew Navaro from um well head of Earthborn Games and formerly of Fantasy Flight Games so
1:56:36
quite a well-known dude in the industry and we had a good chat with him um which I enjoyed and Cory Deve uh who's
1:56:43
co-designer on hub world along with Michael Bogs is names that are pretty
1:56:48
much in the netrunner scene have been um and yeah he sat sat us down me and Rob
1:56:54
taught us the game which was lovely um and we played but Hub World for those that don't know or don't know what the
1:57:00
hell I'm talking about is a competitive head-to-head dueling card game um it's
1:57:06
got a lot of uh spiritual successor of Netrunner in the way it works um in the
1:57:13
fact that you're kind of playing as these uh seekers um of various different factions on Hub World so Hub World is
1:57:19
like a a trading planet that has uh established portal technology um and
1:57:25
it's rendered a lot of the old routes of trade pretty much redundant so you know
1:57:30
your your kind of spaceship travel and all that kind of stuff has all been redundant so you got these different factions that are you know ones like uh
1:57:37
the kind of militant go uh government style you got cops and those kind of
1:57:43
things you got the old world people the old money the people that were making money um rich families and all that kind
1:57:50
of stuff you've got criminal underbelly and different bits and bobs so all the colors are kind of referencing different
1:57:56
factions which obviously leading to different mechanics um and the goal of
1:58:01
the game is quite simply you need to find uh three of your opponent's agents before they find three of yours um much
1:58:08
like agendas in Netrunner it's a similar vibe now this is kind of um completely
1:58:13
symmetrical um rather than your netrunners kind of asymmetrical in the way that you've got runners and corpse
1:58:20
um so it means that you're kind of setting yourself up in in very um aggressive and defensive kind of plays
1:58:27
so you all have a grid in front of you of uh kind of 3x3 um sections which each
1:58:33
kind of column is defending a particular uh district um of of your kind of play
1:58:40
area so the right one is your commons which is represented by your deck of cards your middle one is your council
1:58:46
which is your hand and the left one is your archives which is your discard pile um face down discard pile cuz you
1:58:53
actually have another one that's face up and in that grid you can pretty much
1:58:58
forge um or sorry stage any uh certain cars are obstacles or or locations that
1:59:04
you can kind of put on there some of these are going to give you e economy uh some of these are going to be if they're
1:59:10
obstacles putting barriers down to slow the the opponent from delving into your
1:59:15
uh districts uh to find these agents and much like Netrunner's ice and servers uh
1:59:21
system it's cleaner i would say it's more simpler um than than that cuz
1:59:26
netrunner can get very technical and it can get very deep which I do enjoy um
1:59:32
this was just a a very kind of cleaner adaptation of that and uh yeah really
1:59:38
it's just like I do a thing you do a thing i do a thing you do a thing and that's the biggest kind of change the fluidity in this game it just zips
1:59:45
around it it's you know um whereas netrunner is like I do three actions or
1:59:50
four actions depending if you're a corporate runner so I'm going to do a thing then something else and I'm going to sort this out and then I'm going to run and I've got to resolve that and
1:59:56
then we got to do this and then that's my turn done your go which can take sometimes it's quick sometimes it goes
2:00:01
on this is literally I do an action it's your turn you do an action it's my turn
2:00:07
um and actually as a play style do you want to rush to try and do
2:00:12
something are you then reacting to what they've just done i you know there's a lot more kind of um mind games in that
2:00:18
um as you play and I really enjoyed it it was just a really good fun game the
2:00:24
the artwork on it was cool um much I think it's the same artist they did with Earthborne Rangers so it's kind of like
2:00:30
a dystopian kind of futuristic sci-fi style cartoony style on there and um
2:00:38
yeah I think me and Rob just had a little bit of a blast and it took 20 30 minutes probably not even that long once
2:00:45
we got the flow i was going to say I sat and watched 10 minutes while we were waiting for other stuff and while you
2:00:51
could see I could you know I couldn't quite see your hands so you could tell there was some level of complexity i
2:00:56
actually picked up the rules without a teach and just asking a couple of questions yeah in that time so I think that tells you how simple the design is
2:01:04
but the actual decision space is clearly a lot deeper and you I got that through in just watching you guys play for 10
2:01:10
minutes yeah exactly so it's quite cool in when you're delving on your opponent
2:01:16
um which is basically I'm trying to access your deck handle discard pile to find agents you can kind of pay these
2:01:22
shards which is the currency of the game to to put heat on your opponent so the more heat that they have as more cards
2:01:27
that you draw out of their deck handle or discard pile so like most of these
2:01:33
games economy is is key to do anything so if you know that opponent's running a bit dry you're like I'm going to run
2:01:39
sorry I can't say run i'm going to delve um on this particular area because usually they're having to spend those
2:01:45
shards to flip their face down cards which is called forging to make them face up to then suddenly having barriers
2:01:51
in in the way so yeah you've got all of that kind of stuff there um and yeah it
2:01:57
was just it was cool i'd like to play it again um and just see a bit more of the card pool see what kind of cool things
2:02:04
you can do what tricks of the trade and actually experience how different those factions are cuz you can build your
2:02:10
decks in mixed factions either go heavy on orange or have a bit of a spread um
2:02:15
and I haven't played it enough to know what what each of them offers and um and
2:02:20
like Netrunner I know if I'm playing a genti corporation I know what I'm getting myself in for or if I'm playing
2:02:26
this particular runner archetype I know what I'm getting myself in for so I haven't quite figured that out yet with Hub World but shows a lot of promise
2:02:33
yeah Rob wanted to go halves yeah it's a common theme with Rob is do you want to go halves on absolutely every game that
2:02:40
comes out pretty much so but yeah I'd say I'd say check it out i think it's just had its um campaign run but there's
2:02:48
late pledges available if it's kind of you you enjoy those things I'd Yeah recommend giving it a whirl it's fun
2:02:55
nice what did anyone else go up to on the Saturday anything i had I had a few more
Diablo
2:03:03
things um so just after I watched them play Hub World
2:03:08
I went and visited Glass Cannon Unplugged so again Mark Monk hooked us up and said "I've got a quick meeting
2:03:13
with them would you like to join?" and um yeah got a bit of a chat with them
2:03:18
about kind of what they've got coming up and can't speak too much about it but what I will say is they were able to
2:03:25
divulge a few details of Diablo um and as a big Diablo fan I'm now even more
2:03:31
interested in seeing it so obviously they've got the board game and roleplay game announced and
2:03:38
as I'm sure you can understand for both of them it's going to be about progression and and sort of going up those levels like Diablo is all about
2:03:45
but I loved that game was one of the only computer games I played age of Empire and Diablo II
2:03:52
bloody loved it good game yeah they are and I think again right this is this is
2:03:57
so early concept with what they're doing what they're getting obviously they got to go it's an IP they got to go through studios and stuff like that but I'm
2:04:04
intrigued really intrigued and I'm hoping that they start and release some of what we heard but also more in the
2:04:11
near future because it kind of reignited my appetite to want to see more of that
2:04:17
board game and the roleplay game and they've clearly got big plans for it and I hope that it will do well and they can continue to build on both sides that
2:04:24
they're clearly investing investing in both the board game and the roleplay game side of it so yeah exciting stuff
2:04:32
um again can't talk too much about it but just that's the way of things right just I am excited go and kill some
2:04:38
demons yeah that's it nice um well I had
Kinfire Delve
2:04:45
Oh should I go into the Delve yeah you mentioned Delve earlier and I thought I'd lean into the Kinfire Delve so
2:04:51
that's a game that my brother picked up and then a couple of people have been playing where it's a very small dungeon
2:04:58
crawler in heavy quotations because to me it felt more like a group co-op euro
2:05:04
but with a kind of dungeon crawler theme tacked on because you have a deck of
2:05:10
cards which is symbolizes your dungeon you have your character and then you
2:05:16
have your hand of cards which changes depending on um how many players you
2:05:22
have so we we did a four player so it was a hand of five cards this symbolizes
2:05:27
how quickly like when you use abilities and stuff you're going to tire out so you don't draw at the end of your turn
2:05:34
the only time that you would draw is if you then draw an exhaustion token uh card the exhaustion cards have usually
2:05:41
have a negative effect which is permanent that come out but these cards also if you draw too many of them
2:05:47
there's usually a loss condition on there as well not going to spoil anything because they are different depending on what box you get three
2:05:54
boxes that you can get um so you kind of have the set amount of
2:05:59
resources in front of you to start with we were all playing with closed hands even though it was a co-op massive
2:06:04
mistake what you meant to do is you have the boss card which is I think different
2:06:11
um I think there were a variety of different cards that we could have had with this first box so we had we had a boss card and then you put a card on
2:06:18
from the actual dungeon deck from on each side facing side so you get four cards out around it and then you'll flip
2:06:25
them each card is a color so you have like blue green red and then it will have a value on it and it also say
2:06:32
whether it's a combat card puzzle card or basically indicate what type of challenge this card is
2:06:39
that value is a value you need to meet with the value of your cards in front of you a lot of the time yours will be
2:06:45
nowhere near anything that you do towards this card though will be progress that'll be put on the card so
2:06:52
you can team up and kind of go against it but for losing you'll lose either
2:06:58
health which is group amount so I think it was nine it was starting with four of us but we all had the same health health
2:07:05
pool or what you might do is you might end up putting cards back into the
2:07:11
dungeon cuz your main aim is to go through all of the cards in the dungeon so by killing these monsters you'll
2:07:17
discard a load of cards face down so you won't see a lot of the dungeon the first time you play it which is great replay
2:07:23
replayability or you'll get some item which is you charge a special card which may be
2:07:29
really strong and you can put it in so you have to match the color of it people
2:07:35
can assist you and boost your card so that have little boost value at the bottom which will do stuff as well as
2:07:40
your cards will usually have abilities on that would be like oh add extra if it's a puzzle or do this other stuff we
2:07:46
were playing with closed hands to start with not the way to do it open your hand and then everyone talks about "Oh we
2:07:52
think we should maybe get this card in you'll boost it there and everyone's chatting." Real great interaction for a
2:07:59
co-op because you're playing your deck and at the end of the day you play it how you want to play it but other people are going "Oh I can help here or I can
2:08:05
do this if I boost this this is going to help." And you deal with these basically challenges that are out in front of you
2:08:11
and try and burn off the cards and then when you get to the bottom you fight the boss which flips over
2:08:17
first box nice and easy and great the other guys played the third box I think and I think it goes difficulty wise and
2:08:24
they they just got absolutely slapped they just ended up burning all their resources and Yeah exactly each
2:08:32
different character feels really different in the way their deck played so my character was all had this little shield icon which no one else has i had
2:08:38
a little ability that if I boost and help someone if I've got a shield in there I negate damage for each shield in
2:08:44
there and it's the same for myself as well so yeah I'm uh Richard my brother
2:08:51
had um where you could move progress around so if there was progress out so you could quickly top someone else off
2:08:57
or leave them on one top someone else off and then deal with that card doing two cards at once top up you could
2:09:05
quickly top up another card with that progress and deal with someone else um
2:09:10
Chris played with us Tambbo's brother um he had basically um one where he he he
2:09:16
put extra progress out and then Tambo had a cool thing where he allowed um us
2:09:21
to reroll the dice haven't mentioned the dice each value also has three dice for
2:09:26
each color that you roll that matches the challenge you're doing it adds progress to you so you've got a little
2:09:33
bit of chance in there as well you might be like "Oh we we're like two away oh let's roll the dice it'll be fine."
2:09:39
Right yeah can you push it and then there's another dice which has like kinfire on or or darkness and there's
2:09:47
certain effects on the cards and monsters that come out that might affect it so cool yeah it was it was
2:09:52
surprisingly really good to start with i didn't know what to think about it and then as soon as we got into it I was
2:09:57
like "Yeah I'll definitely definitely play this game." Yeah yeah it it definitely felt more euro like because
2:10:03
it's about your values and kind of what you can play to add up to this total value
2:10:09
i suppose there's no engine building as such and there's no like deck building with that but it had real crunchiness
2:10:17
and kind of deterministic values that you were putting out with a little bit of RNG with the dice rolls but yeah
2:10:24
really good nice good stuff good stuff i went over and did Yeah some craft stuff
Enchanted Needles
2:10:30
that I like to do after I've made all my game purchases i swung by um Enchanted
2:10:36
Needles store so I think she she's called the Enchanted Needle but if you want to find her stuff on Etsy it's
2:10:42
enchanted Nelethe and she does really great counted crossstitch um this was the one I was talking to you about Davey
2:10:48
saying um cuz Gemma's into crossstitch she is so she does a lot of kind of um
2:10:54
RPG and meeply kind of stuff uh and you get like a little kit that everything's
2:10:59
in there so you've got your enchanted needle and all of your um I call it
2:11:04
floss i don't know what the actual the string bits of embroidery so just thread thread yeah thread um and your ader
2:11:11
which is the little square bits and an embroidery hoop so it's everything you need is in one little envelope so it's
2:11:17
really cool i bought this time uh a cool dragon and a really nice bee it's like a
2:11:22
geometric bee isn't it it's cool yeah yeah yeah so and yeah she was really lovely as always lots and lots of
2:11:29
different kind of styles there and seemed really popular there was lots of people at the store so it was really nice to see that i prefer yeah you can
2:11:34
make some cool cross stitch i've got like Gemma's done me some Magic the Gathering uh different like colors one
2:11:41
yeah and then there was a Cthulhu one that she's done and yeah she probably actually really enjoyed that so I said
2:11:47
maybe you want to come next year but yeah there's I think Stitch is it's like a it's like pixel art isn't it cuz it's
2:11:54
in the squares so yeah it's it's really nice nice one yeah so I um just swung by
Time Troopers & Upcoming Episode
2:12:01
with Rob to Molinarius Games so we had a um kind of another demo of Time Troopers
2:12:08
so Rob Rob's just really keen on this that he's he's completely hooked it was like going back in time it was yeah um
2:12:14
so I'm not actually going to go through the game because well one we did it last year and two spoiler alert we're we're
2:12:22
going to have an upcoming episode with Molinarius Games Lee uh probably talking about it in more detail i'm going to
2:12:28
save it for that sorry guys but if you want some more Time Trooper goodness it'll be coming soon because it's
2:12:34
literally launching on Game Found at the end of June and uh we're we yeah we'll
2:12:39
be putting some uh content out around that similar time so So that was cool um well I wanted to talk about Rob's
2:12:46
enabling of the weekend so Rob what you didn't say about Kinfire Delve is that your brother bought it but why did he
2:12:52
buy it he goes "Rob somehow mentioned it and then Rich didn't shut up about it."
2:12:58
Yeah he's like "Okay you got to get this you got to get this you got to get this." And Rich went "Okay I'll get it." And and off he went and then he went "Oh
2:13:03
no but I don't know if it's any good." Um and luckily it sounds like it is so that's good it's sold out everywhere
2:13:10
right yeah and luckily Water St had it water St actually had the best layout of any shop may I just say and every game I
2:13:16
bought I found out was later cheaper in Water St which is like normally Chaos
2:13:22
Cards is my go-to you signed up and got your 20% off your first purchase but you know you could do that with Why wouldn't
2:13:28
you yeah exactly it's all good um but we sat down with uh Mark and he was doing
2:13:33
the demo of Time Troopers and I was doing a scenario in Feudal Japan where
2:13:39
good fun really good fun um but all the while Rob's talking about Elder Scrolls
2:13:44
as he does and obviously Mark was quite interesting he he owns too many bones or
2:13:50
bits of it and you know Rob's doing his basically best sales pitch yeah so I got
2:13:55
a message from Mark uh pretty much at the end of the show after he'd finished
2:14:00
uh with a picture of Elder Scrolls that he's just now dropped 200 plus pounds on um Elder Scrolls talk to me yeah talk to
2:14:07
me yeah Elder Scrolls gone all in all in um and he said "Yeah thank Rob for this." Uh
2:14:14
so yeah just enabling people buying lots of games um which was fun but yeah no it
2:14:19
was always nice to to catch up with uh Lee and Mark from from the the team and
2:14:25
they've been kind of friends of the show for for a few years now and uh we love you guys and uh I remember the big
2:14:31
plaster cast whale yes yes mel melting with heat as the day progresses in expo
2:14:40
yeah their stand was quite um subdued compared to normal because they'd had massive plaster cast whale and then they
2:14:46
had that big timeate time gate thing and this time it was a bit more subdued got
2:14:51
to up your game for next year guys yeah but also kind of just swinging by we
Old Kings Crown
2:14:57
went to Eerie Idol Games and and met with Pablo um so they they make Old King's Crown and uh yeah just a massive
2:15:04
thank you to to him for basically saying here's a copy of the game go and enjoy and talk about it and uh yeah I'm
2:15:11
looking forward to playing that yeah we haven't busted it out yet no I've popped it oh you've popped it yeah popped it
2:15:17
dave's busted it out but we'll be playing it again soon with the full new look and feel
2:15:24
streamlined rules streamlined rules and seeing how it plays but we always enjoyed it anyway in prom
2:15:31
yeah yeah it was he was so you could see the passion he has for that game yeah it
2:15:37
was really really nice to see yeah and then maybe there'll some be some insider knowledge as well at some point wink oh
2:15:44
what's that oh secrets um secrets i was actually quite intrigued with talking about his next uh like upcoming project
2:15:52
i'm not talking about Oh yeah but you know but the theme of it I'm not going to say anything no no if I can I'll get
2:15:58
shot so yeah but it was good uh good fun to to catch up and Yeah it was catch up with old papa yeah yeah hopefully we'll
2:16:05
be able to get another game with him soon yeah but no thank you again really appreciate that it's awesome so yeah
2:16:12
that was pretty much my Saturday other than playing a prototype I cannot mention and I cannot talk about in any
2:16:18
stretch of the imagination um it's good but it's good more about that later i
2:16:24
don't know what else to say um yeah anyone else saturday yeah so I um I got
Class of '89
2:16:30
a demo with Spudge um so me and Spudge went over to Parrison Games i found this Spudge fellow yeah he's lovely he's
2:16:36
lovely um the alter ego of Curly is he Is he a nice Curly he is a nice curly is
2:16:42
nice i won't have it spudge is nice spudge spudge is more outwardly friendly
2:16:48
he's sweeter than fudge spurge spurge we did buy some fudge
2:16:53
actually talking about that yeah that fudge was good it was good so yeah Curly said "Oh if you see some will you grab
2:16:58
it?" So just as I was buying some he then rang we were then kind of meeting up wherever we were meeting up
2:17:04
unbeknownst to me he'd already bought some fudge so he bought two blocks and I bought two blocks so fudge was double
2:17:12
double fudge so it was really I even went back on the
2:17:18
I went back on the last day as well cuz obviously it's fudge it's going to go out of date oh we'll have a quick cheeky swing by reduced some of the last little
2:17:25
bits of fudge so yes I've had I've got a lot of fudge in the fridge at home
2:17:30
anyway that's not where this started so we did go to Parson games so Luia being a big fan of that played that a few
2:17:36
times in prototype version and found out they had a new prototype there which was very prototype it was mostly in black
2:17:41
and white um with the player colors pretty much being the only colors on the board so it was class of 89 is the name
2:17:50
of the game and the concept is that you are building the or you are in charge of
2:17:56
making the yearbook um and what it really is is it's a worker placement game and you are placing your workers
2:18:04
down to get the photos for kids and teachers in certain classes and then
2:18:11
setting out in your yearbook it has sort of a hint of the welcome
2:18:17
twos about it because really what you're doing is a teacher will go down first in a class and it will say for every nerd
2:18:24
or jock student or nerd and jock student you'll get so many points and then what
2:18:30
you're trying to do is fill out the rest of the yearbook in alphabetical order so the students must be in alphabetical
2:18:36
order yeah makes sense so the like the welcome to where you got the numbers sort of thing that's what you're doing and then if you kind of can't fit it in
2:18:44
or you need to stood sort of you you've kind of run out of room to or of
2:18:49
alphabet rather then you'll probably get a new teacher and put them in and then they'll have oh their class wants all of
2:18:56
the the star students that are all from the glee club kind of thing um and how
2:19:01
how you figure out if a student is that is like a star student or a jock is not actually on their card to start with
2:19:07
necessarily but you'll gain as you as you go to different areas and you sort of progress in different you kind of go
2:19:13
up certain tracks in different class types you'll then gain these tokens which sit on the students and so you
2:19:19
kind of make them the nerd by placing this by placing up to five of these
2:19:25
tokens on each student and then on the right hand side is a bit of a polyomino game so you can also
2:19:32
instead of grabbing students you can grab these sort of polyomino tiles and some of them will give you signatures so
2:19:40
like work placement if you're later there you need to have signatures you need to have a hall pass basically to go
2:19:46
there because you're later to the session to take the photos and therefore you need to have signatures so some of
2:19:51
them will give you signatures or they'll give you some of these tokens or some of them will give you different scoring ones so I picked up one of my teachers
2:19:58
wanted um star students so glee club star students and I had a thing that was
2:20:03
then for everyone that had three star tokens on them I'll get two extra victory points so you're kind of
2:20:09
building that engine and and on that side on that side of things you are also covering up symbols which will give you
2:20:16
more of these tokens on the left hand side which is the the student sort of side if you start filling up rows and
2:20:22
columns you'll also gain bonuses so there's kind of like a bit of an engine builder a bit of a sort of spatial
2:20:28
puzzle in there and like I sort of said before it felt like I thought "Oh this is a bit lighter than I was expecting."
2:20:34
And then they went "Oh and we've not introduced you to any of the advanced rules yet cuz we just wanted for the demo to keep it to the sort of base
2:20:40
rules." And so well tell me about the advanced rules well every student has on
2:20:45
the right hand side like a half picture of of like a football or of like music
2:20:51
club or whatever on the right hand side and then also on the left hand side well if you join those up so they make a
2:20:56
whole a whole picture then you get bonuses for that so you'll get bits and
2:21:02
pieces for that at the same time there's public goals so every se like for if
2:21:08
you've got seven whistles or the most whistles in in a column which is like the jock symbol then you'll also gain
2:21:16
points at the end of the game and if you visit an area you can hand in cuz we had loads of signatures at the end and we
2:21:21
were like "What are we going to do with all these signatures like what this doesn't feel right." And they're like "Oh what we also didn't tell you is when
2:21:27
you go to an area you can hand a signature in and change it for a token of the type of classroom you're in." So
2:21:33
again if you're on the sports field you can get a whistle those and suddenly it's like oh man this is going to really
2:21:38
ramp up the complexity of the game and really turn it into a bit more of a brain burnie game so I'm really I'm
2:21:45
really going to keep an eye on this because as I say I kind of thought well this is good i like this but maybe not
2:21:50
quite rivaling Luia i think actually this could it won't be as heavy as Luia but I think it could rival it in terms
2:21:57
of decision making and stuff like that and I really really imp again it's a prototype is in black and white um they
2:22:03
had some of the artwork which is very 80s style artwork they've said they're trying to kind of
2:22:10
take inspiration from certain people who were around in the 80s who are sort of kids in the 80s to sort of make some of
2:22:16
these pictures feel like more 80s and stuff and so you really got a feel for what the end product is going to be very
2:22:22
vibrant and all the sort of blues and pinks that you associate with the 80s and all that lot so had a lot unique
2:22:28
theme as well right unique theme and I think a unique mix for this sort of I'm
2:22:33
going to say it's going to be mid-heavy weight and I think it's a unique mix of of kind of work placement is fairly
2:22:40
standard in these kind of things but having that sort of polyomino there's a
2:22:45
few out there but there's not many of the polyomino and then the sort of get these things in alphabetical order and
2:22:50
match up the images it's kind of feast for Odin is probably one of the few right yeah well I was thinking of plantubo for instance and stuff like
2:22:58
it's kind of the The polyomino bit is not the center part of it but certainly the having things in alphabetical order
2:23:04
and then having to reset classes like with a new teacher and all that just I think is something different to that
2:23:09
sort of mid-heavy weight genre so going to keep a a close eye on that okay nice
Sakana Stack
2:23:15
um I swung by Huff No stand and bought their um Sakana stack which is a kind of
2:23:22
a a card shedding game what I really liked about it was the artwork and
2:23:27
although I'm not interested in Japanese fish because or or sushi and that kind of thing which is the what the images
2:23:34
are I really liked the stylings of it and it seemed pretty simple a bit like a
2:23:40
a bit like scout level i think that kind of level game and I thought everyone needs a scout level game in their life
2:23:47
so I also bought their um flower cards deck which is illustrated all the illustrations done by Joss um who's one
2:23:54
of the founders and it's a Hannah card set which is most kind of I think
2:24:01
Japanese like traditional card game like we would have 13 cards of hearts clubs
2:24:07
diamonds and spades they have a different sort of system so and I just love the artwork and that's really
2:24:12
beautiful so yeah I I picked that up and uh yeah again in that kind of indie way
2:24:18
you can just tell the love that's been poured into something and they've rocked up and they found it's been really
2:24:23
popular and that's that's really nice really really nice that's the way they were saying on the the press event that
2:24:29
the um you know the way the artwork's done on on the the other game the what
2:24:34
was it called the Saka saka i keep thinking the santana which is a completely different thing
2:24:40
but yeah it was drawn in a traditional Japanese method with the way the brush in the Yeah that's really cool yeah it's
2:24:47
really it's really cool attention to detail then so yeah I hope that sounds fun to play
2:24:52
so yeah what else did we do on Saturday i've had our food didn't we oh my god it was Do
2:25:01
you know what it was it was average yeah it was just very average it's a lot of money for average i think one thing to
2:25:07
note for people if you're going with a large group or even if you're not going with a large group if you're going with a small group if you want to have a meal
2:25:13
in the evening you're going to have to pre-book quite early which is something that we always do and it's actually a
2:25:18
really nice kind of way of rounding off the Saturday I think which is usually it's in the middle of the you're really
2:25:24
knackered and it's just a really nice time to take out couple of hours and just have a bit of a decompress get you
2:25:30
out of those halls because it is very overwhelming with the noise the heat the smell the the the amount of bodies in
2:25:37
one area so I think having that little break is actually really helpful really
A lackluster TGI Fridays
2:25:42
helpful usually I'd say "Yeah but TGO Fridays was not nice and relaxing." Or it it was very noisy wasn't it which I
2:25:48
guess maybe it always is i've been there kylie concert across the road which I think amped the volume up a bit yeah
2:25:55
lots of Kylie fans in uh ready getting ready for that concert so you can imagine the the environment that we're
2:26:01
kind of in but yeah I I was disappointed by it um I I I mean what I had was was
2:26:07
up was okay it's fine i enjoyed it but I think it was just hit and miss and we were late sitting down and I think it
2:26:12
just started to piss people off and yeah we had to wait half an hour for our even though we were there on time we had to wait half an hour for our table which is
2:26:18
this is the thing isn't it it's not the service folks they were really really attentive and really nice but it does
2:26:23
sour your experience it was an hour and 15 from when we were booked to be in to when we actually got food wow it was
2:26:29
that long quite a while to be like cuz it was half hour for that and then it was nearly 45 minutes for the first lot
2:26:36
of food to come out which but we made up for it by trying going to get um a happy birthday song for Rob um which he's not
2:26:44
pleased about that he loved and he was very tired and uh probably crouch at this stage but if anyone's been to TGI
2:26:50
Fridays before if it's anyone's birthday they'll do a lot of clapping and and sing a little singing a little song and
2:26:57
make you a spectacle of the entire restaurant and uh it was pretty much Rob's birthday over that weekend so we
2:27:02
we did threaten and at one point every time a server came across there's "Oh happy birthday Rob happy birthday." You
2:27:09
could see that Rob was kind of like getting a little bit twitchy every time he saw someone in exactly the same way
2:27:14
that Curley would not have like just his worst worst thing just but we got him as he walked out the restaurant to make a
2:27:20
phone call and I think a lot of the the restaurant was singing happy birthday as he walked out and he was just like I
2:27:25
need to get out of here i don't think he was happy with that so sorry about that Rob so kind of uh took took the sting
2:27:30
out of the experience for me anyway but that I can strongly recommend the little
2:27:36
what are they called potato tots it's basically like just little mini hash browns delicious they were good they
2:27:41
were delicious yeah my ribs were nice that was the only thing on the plate was really nice with my ribs but that was
2:27:47
the main thing so I paid 20 quid for KFC basically like I was not Yeah i paid 20
2:27:53
28 quid for a bit of a crap salad oh yeah rob salad was burnt and cold at the
2:28:00
same time chicken on it there was burnt and then cold yeah it would have mine would have been fine if it had been
2:28:06
intentionally cold like if the chicken was intentionally cold then you're like "Yeah I can get on board with that." But it wasn't meant to be like that but yeah
2:28:12
the tater tots little things they they were delicious i would absolutely eat them again so we'll probably avoid it
2:28:18
this year i miss the churros i missed the I missed we usually goas and and those churros just ordering a mountain
2:28:26
of churros for a table is just a great way to end a Saturday but it's really difficult to get in if you don't book it
2:28:32
about seven months in a month super early yeah so yeah guys you've really got to be on that be telling people
2:28:39
no no last guy Fridays is great last doesn't take bookings don't try it yeah
2:28:44
exactly so yeah that's pretty much Saturday play some games and things as we did and then um let's roll into the
TURN 5 - SUNDAY
2:28:51
final day which is always a bit of a weird one sunday Sunday's the quieter day i think you kind of by that point
2:28:57
your body is you've had enough you don't want it to be over yet but your body is like I'm I'm done now i'm just done yeah
2:29:05
you could happily go home probably at any point like in the morning i could go home now but then you're like but I know
2:29:11
it's going to be quiet and I can get around everything it's so much nicer to walk around but yeah that's when I tried to buy Tactica again from lots of other
2:29:17
places and Tactica was not available yeah but the one demo I didn't get on
2:29:22
and I thought I'll try Sunday sunday's going to be my day was Terraria oh yeah yeah um which is like a sidescrolly
2:29:28
Minecrafty dungeon delvy kind of game and not wasn't even remotely interested
2:29:34
in this not played the computer game until the press event and actually um I
2:29:39
saw it i went actually looks quite cool don't know what it really mat kind of it
2:29:45
looked fun yeah i was having a chat with the guy and then I think you came over and then
2:29:50
Yeah because it's based on Terraria the video game produced by Chucklefish um
2:29:55
and I was always intrigued about this it's been stuck in production for quite a long time a little bit over than what
2:30:02
it probably should have but I can see how it would be hard cuz they've got to really The thing with video games you
2:30:08
got to tie in to how the video game feels and if you don't then people aren't going to link to it right it's not going to be a good game
2:30:15
how they do the exploration of digging around and then digging down and building and everything else is quite
2:30:22
intriguing and we had a little run for you didn't he he ran through with us kind of what was going on but we still
2:30:28
haven't seen how the game actually plays got no idea and uh I still don't but I'm
2:30:33
intrigued by it so at some point we'll we'll we'll catch that um but then I
Neon Reign
2:30:39
went I went back to Chip theory oh did you again oh did you manage to base um
2:30:45
and it was quite quiet so Andrew was on the the stand and we're just catching up chatting about this bloody guy again oh
2:30:51
you cannot shake him off he's just literally there and he and he did say "So have you tried uh this game?" And it
2:30:58
was Neon Rain i went "No no I haven't actually had chance." He said "Let's
2:31:03
have a game." So he uh pitched me um uh to play this game and Rob sat down as
2:31:08
well he played one of the demoers and uh yeah he just taughted me and again it's
2:31:13
another game under the Neon Knight Studios subsidiary of Chip Theory and
2:31:19
and I've heard about it but they haven't with that studio they're not pushing their games through crowdfunding or
2:31:25
anything like that they're just releasing them so they're kind of just like "Oh it's here." Which is kind of weird for them cuz it's like "What what
2:31:31
is it?" Normally it's a big splash it's a big thing so these kind of smaller games are are kind of flying under the
2:31:38
radar a little bit so we had a game and Neon Rain is is really like a an 80s
2:31:43
style um arcade fighting game really it's like Street Fighter so you're
2:31:49
picking your character and it's got a special move and ability on there and you got your deck of cards and in the
2:31:55
cards you've got buttons you got joysticks going left right down and uh
2:32:00
you're trying to build up combos in your hand so when you're attacking um so the
2:32:05
cards will say you can use this on attack or defense so when you're attacking you play up to one to three
2:32:11
cards and you kind of play them in a triangle fashion so that if you've got a button combo which is maybe two Y's or
2:32:18
two X's you know other than what the cards tell you that they're doing they will add uh kind of combo bonuses so you
2:32:24
can kind of get a combo on you know if you got three cards down in all directions which will end up you know
2:32:30
popping off and and doing lots of damage um and some of the cards give you stars and then when you charge up your stars
2:32:36
on your character as soon as you get the requirement you'll pop their special ability instantly and it'll do some cool
2:32:41
stuff and and then all the characters have like an innate uh power or ability
2:32:46
as well um so when you're doing your attack the other uh defender can then play up to two cards to either block um
2:32:53
or throw uh your your opponent which might then remove some of the cards or break the combo apart um so again to try
2:33:01
and weaken the attacks and again it's just very fluid it's very kind of straightforward and it was just a nice
2:33:08
like little batty game and uh and yeah we I had a lot of fun with it actually i
2:33:13
didn't think I it would be kind of my thing um but yeah it was there's a
2:33:19
little bit of depth there actually um in in how the characters work how the combos work and how you want to do you
2:33:25
want to go all out on this attack or you know cuz you got seven cards and you have to spend the whole action to redraw
2:33:30
up so the timing of when you redraw is quite important because you're leaving yourself open and uh yeah it was a lot
2:33:38
of fun and uh yeah thanks to Andrew who's uh yeah winged us a a copy so I'm
2:33:43
going to give that a go with Josh cuz I think Josh would my son would dig that and we like our kind of head-to-head
2:33:50
card games like Radlands and and uh other games like that so I think that might quite fit in that wheelhouse um of
2:33:57
that kind of way play that samurai game a few times yeah so we like to play our quick like
2:34:03
little jewelie games that aren't too complex or complicated and and uh yeah I'd recommend just giving it a whirl if
2:34:10
you see it um you know it's compared to a Chip Theory Games big box bonanza at
2:34:15
200 quid plus this thing was like 25 pound and uh yeah and it's still got
2:34:21
that not 25 in weight no no but it still has that CT uh CT uh G uh component
2:34:27
quality again the cards are indestructible you know it's that same kind of PVC stuff they use uh for all
2:34:34
the other games and yeah it's good fun nice so yeah Neon Rain check it out new
2:34:40
York rain yeah one of one of the last things I bought was a game called Smug Owls which it was funny because when I
Smug Owls
2:34:46
was talking to Curly about it afterwards he said I looked at that game and immediately dismissed it as crap and I immediately oh that's good and I bought
2:34:53
it almost straight away which just goes to show our kind of The reason I bought it was because it uses English in an
2:35:00
interesting way and I think it might be a game that I can play with my one of my best friends who is an English teacher
2:35:06
so it's kind of it's a game where you make up a riddle and everyone playing has to think of the answer to that
2:35:12
riddle so the first card is like a is always the same and that's what and then at the
2:35:18
very end you've got a question mark so in the middle you've got like a conjunction like and then or is bigger
2:35:24
than or or whatever and you turn over different things in the other two slots so it might say what
2:35:31
rises and then and then you get the next call which might say breaks
2:35:37
uh whatever and then you've got to everyone around the table's got to think of an answer to that riddle the person who either can't think of one or thinks
2:35:43
of one last becomes the smug owl and decides how good everyone else's answer is and kind of dishes out the points but
2:35:50
I just liked how kind of I've not seen anything use use language like that and okay yes it's
2:35:57
just like a little fun party game kind of a thing but the fact he had owls was nice i liked it and I just liked how he
2:36:04
was smug yeah but I liked how immediately C was like absolute crap couldn't think of anything less
2:36:10
interesting and I was immediately like "Yes that's really cool." Like it just showed the absolute opposites that you
2:36:18
Yeah yeah yeah so yeah Smug Owls thought it looked quite cool and there apparently there's a dirty version which if I'd have seen I 100% would have
2:36:24
called Smart Owls yes there actually smutty yes yes there is um so if I'd
2:36:29
have seen that I would I would completely have I would have bought that too but I didn't see it i think to be
2:36:35
honest though you could probably make quite dirty answers anyway
2:36:41
oh owl drop yeah so there Yeah there is there is a dirty version which I'm sad I
2:36:48
didn't see ow i've just totaled up how many steps I did on the Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday oh go It's 82,842
2:36:57
that's pretty good this is the thing cuz we're there from the first day as well yeah you get an extra day of mental steps in
2:37:04
which averages over like 20,700 yeah mine was about 20,000 a day but
2:37:09
then most of your Sundays sat in the car to be honest so but yeah it it So wear
2:37:14
comfy shoes is what we're trying to say always and then the day after today you ache ache like anything i'm not I'm not
2:37:22
ever too bad cuz I stand up all day at work so I'm used to doing a lot of steps and standing up but I'm not used to I
2:37:28
think it's that walking and stopping walking and stopping that is what gets your legs I think
2:37:34
well I ache we're really fit aren't we um anyway Sunday anyone else do anything cool yeah
Sniper Elite
2:37:41
so I got a little game of Sniper Elite so Adrian's played this before i have
2:37:47
it's a good game you've got it i've got it you've got it um but they're doing an expansion which is hitting Kickstarter
2:37:53
um and me and my brother sat down and when this demo includes the Kickstarter
2:37:58
pieces right because I think they're easy they can fit in easily with the rest of Sniper Elite with the certain
2:38:04
abilities right yeah so the the the Kickstarter is kind of two parts one is like a standalone expansion mhm um and
2:38:13
the other is called escalation which is like a load of stuff that you can like you'll get points and you can buy to put
2:38:20
them in and it'll change either side okay so it kind of makes it even more asymmetric or changes up each play with
2:38:27
the escalation whereas it's the escalation one that does that either way it's two halves basically that they're
2:38:32
doing in one Kickstarter one is very much a case of here's more stuff for both games and the other's just like
2:38:39
here's a standalone expansion basically but yeah so we we sat down and played it
2:38:44
i've never played it before um and I was a sniper and my brother was the um the
2:38:50
the general soldiers the the Nazis and um
2:38:56
the way that they've done this is it it works so well thematically
2:39:01
and I really didn't think it was going to but you you've got two cards which are your
2:39:07
objectives um which the the sniper will randomly pull these objectives will correspond to a color which is a section
2:39:14
of the map as well as a number which is a a point on that map when you start
2:39:19
when you spawn in as the sniper you can't spawn in an area where you've got one of the objective cards um and you'll
2:39:26
have a little board where you kind of draw your movement when you move if you
2:39:31
do a one movement nothing can hear you but if you draw if you move two to three
2:39:36
anything that is next to you on any point of that movement will be able to hear your movement and you have to
2:39:41
basically say like you could you know it's making noise but they don't know
2:39:48
which way you've ended up right as a sniper you have like three actions
2:39:54
you move um you shoot and then you can play a card and the cards got little abilities on like I had one where um I
2:40:02
was able to play it face down and move um without making any noise um but you
2:40:08
don't reveal that one till the end i had another one which was a little mine where if anyone stepped on it you can reveal it and a rock where basically it
2:40:15
makes noise it makes noise um which was great cuz I used the rock at
2:40:21
one point and the obviously pigs were coming from a different area the shooting in it is great the little chips
2:40:27
in a bag you've got a load of chips in a bag you've got one that has a hit marker one that has um a red like miss um sorry
2:40:35
the yellow miss and the red marker which is just bad where if you pull two of them they know exactly where you are
2:40:44
you basically have a distance so say I'm three away from where I'm shooting at i
2:40:49
need three hits to be able to hit that cuz it's three distance away so I need
2:40:54
to be able to pull chips and the minimum I can pull then is three but I can choose however many chips I want to pull
2:41:00
now you can keep going push your luck push your but don't keep go you just choose a value at the start it's how I'm
2:41:06
going to pull six chips oh that's worse isn't it yeah but if you choose to get
2:41:12
two of those red ones you reveal yourself instantly you only get need to get hit twice as a sniper and you're out you're dead so you're going to go "Right
2:41:19
I'm going to shoot." You don't have to nominate where you're shooting because obviously that's going to give the game away but you'll go "I'm going to shoot i'm going to draw four chips." You draw
2:41:25
the four chips i was quite lucky every time cuz I always hit but the more you
2:41:30
kill you'll get a chip hit chip in the bag if you kill one of the normal units if you kill one of the officers which
2:41:37
have little abilities for them you get to put a negate chip in and that negate one negates the red
2:41:44
markers which is something that starts with two in the bag um but then when you do an objective so when you finally get
2:41:50
to this objective you'll play the card it's got the number and the and the
2:41:55
location on so the other player will instantly know you're there whether you move first or not they don't know but
2:42:02
they know you're there and you put another red ship in your bag so it starts getting harder yeah and escalates
2:42:08
and it really ramps up after that first objective um as the person trying to to
2:42:14
uh playing as the Nazis or the German forces um they've got these little cubes
2:42:21
they've got two per colored area so each of the blue soldiers can do well they
2:42:26
can do two actions of the blue army two actions of the red two actions of the yellow they can choose how they use
2:42:33
those some of their officers might have abilities that use these cubes but they've got they can move um up to two
2:42:40
they can search an area where they'll scan the area they're in and two spaces
2:42:47
adjacent to them um or they can do an intel where they spend both cubes and
2:42:53
you will say "Are you in this area?" But then they can't do any more actions in that area um I think there's one other
2:42:59
or they can I think they can search know they can shoot and that's shooting an
2:43:05
area that's on the space they are there's an officer can shoot around them as well that one we're playing oh Jerger
2:43:12
but yeah it's just really good cat and mouse game little hidden movement game and it works really well it just does
2:43:17
the job of being a really solid hidden movement game and if people like the sniper elite sort of idea then it kind
2:43:23
of fits and and there's like the German soldiers for each group they can have a
2:43:29
specialist card and stuff like that and then as you say you pick your loadouts with weapons and stuff and I think it's
2:43:35
just a really solid game so the fact that it's getting an because I've not even got the Eagle's Nest expansion
2:43:40
which came with the first one so the fact that it's now getting another sort of expansion that has vehicles in it and
2:43:46
stuff like that and and this escalation box I think is great it's just going to give more more options and and David
2:43:53
Thompson the designer said that he wants to come on the podcast and have a chat so that was good yeah yeah i was just
2:44:00
really impressed it's such a snappy game for a hidden movement as well kind of you draw your movement on your board and
2:44:06
you do an arrow and you might put round one this is where I've moved and yeah it's for hidden movement it was really
2:44:11
snappy which I really liked about it it was quick quick turns in between really good two player right i probably
2:44:16
wouldn't ever play it three or four i think it improves oh really yeah so I played it against Mark Monk so I think
2:44:23
all of these games all of Hidden Movement games I think work better with at least three players because the point
2:44:29
is really to feel I feel like when you're the hidden person it's to feel outnumbered and you get to hear a little
2:44:35
bit of their conversation and so I think these games always improve at at least three players um so yeah so like when I
2:44:41
played Mark Monk like he was completely lost at one point and he had no one to bounce ideas off as the German player
2:44:48
and I was the sniper kind of doing my thing and then since then I've played it with three and when they get to talk to each other it's great cuz sometimes they
2:44:54
whisper the wrong thing in each other's ears sort of thing and they kind of mislead each other and sometimes they just like now he's blatantly over there
2:45:02
and you're like oh they've got me here like if they if if they agree right now that's my game done sort of thing and so
2:45:07
I I feel like these things make four player I think can be a bit tough it's the same with like white hall mystery
2:45:13
and stuff like that which again is very quick hidden movement three versus one sort of thing and I think at four player
2:45:20
it can be a bit much sometimes but yeah I certainly think they're better at three or four than they are at two normally personally but I enjoyed my
2:45:27
two-player game with Mark when we played at grid yeah maybe three player will work i just haven't played it right so
2:45:32
that's the only experience I had of it i didn't know how to scale up it's really good fun yeah I'm intrigued by it it's
2:45:38
really good fun um but that Yeah that's done by um Rebellion rebellion rebellion
2:45:44
Studios uh your Rebellion Unplugged yeah so uh they also had their other
2:45:49
game Joy Ride there which um yeah looked like good fun but never played it so I've not played that one but yeah seen a
2:45:56
lot of buzz around it bashy bashy car game it's had a lot of love yeah so yeah nice anything else yes
Last Week of Summer
2:46:05
oh yes Dra has been holding back probably probably my favorite demo of of
2:46:11
the convention if I'm being honest and something one I'm really looking forward to so on Sunday I kind of went in and
2:46:18
had a bit of a mooch and then eventually sort of came round to where there was a game being demoed that I felt like I'd
2:46:23
missed out on but I was already like 15 minutes into the convention at this point and um as I walked past there was
2:46:29
two people just being they were like clearly mid teach i thought I'll hover a bit and I said "Look we've only just started the teach do you want to sit
2:46:35
down and join us?" I thought "Yeah." Then I thought Spud is gonna miss this because Spudge wanted to play this as well right so I felt a bit sad but I
2:46:42
thought I can't make him start again for like the third time you can do it once yeah so So I played with we played a 3K
2:46:51
player game of last week of summer and again it's an 80s game so it seems like
2:46:57
a bit of a theme yeah i thought that when I saw those two I was like "Oh it's really going hard on the old ' 80s sort
2:47:03
of vibe." And the idea is you're going to go off to college it's the last week of summer and you are going to make it
2:47:09
the best week of your life basically is kind of the idea
2:47:15
halfway there don't know why that came to my head i don't know yeah usually that's the one
2:47:21
before the one where it's summer of 69 that's a bit more like it this is feels
2:47:27
more like summer of 89 it's it's um yeah that's basically the
2:47:32
concept and there it's basically a bunch of mini games inside a a very simple
2:47:38
sort of kind of worker placement so what you're going to do is you want to have the best last week of summer but in
2:47:45
order to do that you have to have a bit of money so you've agreed to work at all of these places for one shift and if you
2:47:53
don't if if you go and work there then you'll get a bit of money if at the end of the game you haven't done all your
2:47:59
shifts then you're going to get some minus points because you agreed to work somewhere for the summer for a shift and then you didn't yeah you let yourself
2:48:06
down so you got to you got to go and do one shift at each of these places now
2:48:14
what you're trying to do is is kind of sometimes avoid the other people so like at the skate park so one of the
2:48:21
locations is a skate park it's a little polyomino game you're trying to get three of the trick tiles in a row and
2:48:26
then you've done the trick and you get to completely a little cassette which is a victory point on that if you go on
2:48:32
your own when there's no one else there you can do loads of tricks so you can get a bigger polyomino tile which is
2:48:37
great if you go with someone else you get to do less tricks but what you
2:48:42
really want to do is go there when the cool kid is there so every day the cool kids are in different locations at
2:48:48
different times so you're going to play a morning card and you might go and work at the skate park in the afternoon if
2:48:54
you go to the to play at the skate park when the cool kid is there you go up the track and whoever's furthest up the
2:49:01
track okay that means there's other people there so you get to normally do the lower ability but you get further up the track and whoever's the like spent
2:49:08
the most time with all the cool kids gets more victory points at the end as well nice so they're all different ones
2:49:14
so the arcade is a dice rolling game you spend your money and then you roll dice and if you get three of the same dice
2:49:21
over all the turns you've been there then you get to put your cassette down so if you get two rows of these dice
2:49:27
that's one cassette if you get four rows that's another set and then if you get high score at the end that's another cassette sort of thing so that's one as
2:49:33
I say the skate park is a polyomino game um they've got like a blockbuster so
2:49:39
you're going to see as many movies as possible in the last week so you're going to play like a I think like Five
2:49:44
Tribes of Moncala that they've called it but I've never played those games so basically you're going to start somewhere pick up all the cassettes and
2:49:50
then drop them off and then wherever you end up at the end you're going to take all those cassettes and for every cassette you're going to add one to the
2:49:56
tracker and when you get five of a cassette type then you've watched VHS
2:50:03
not cassette as such but VHS then you've watched your horror movies you watch your sci-fi movies and then you get to
2:50:09
put a cassette to say "Yeah I've watched all the horror movies." Um I'm trying to think there's a burger bar so you're
2:50:15
going to push your luck so there's um shakes burgers tacos and fries and
2:50:21
you're going to keep turning over cards and if you keep getting yums then for
2:50:26
every yum you get yum yum you're gonna move yourself up a track and when you
2:50:31
get to the end of the track you get to put a little set on there for a victory point if you get a yuck you've had a
2:50:36
nasty tacker or a nasty whatever nasty shake and therefore you only get to choose one of the cards and you go up
2:50:42
one so it's a push your luck and they're the ones we played with so in a three-player game you'll play with four locations and I was like great so you
2:50:49
kind of are trying to work out where you want to be morning noon and afternoon and if you're working in the same place
2:50:56
as somebody like as where there's someone else turns up then you get less
2:51:01
money as well so you're kind of wanting to work on your own sort of thing so you get more money and at the same time
2:51:07
you're trying to turn up possibly where the cool kids are if you want to go up the cool kid track or there's all these
2:51:12
things going on and I thought this is great like it it gave off Federation vibes where you've kind of got a central
2:51:17
mechanic and then there's loads of mini games around it but definitely more family weight and I thought but there's quite a lot of luck in this and this is
2:51:24
definitely feeling a bit family weight and you went oh by the way there's these two locations you haven't seen yet you can either randomize them or choose not
2:51:30
to and one is a very mean um you are graffitiing a wall but of course you can
2:51:36
graffiti over each other's artwork so it's about an area control game where you're graffitiing over each other's artwork and I can't remember what the
2:51:42
other one was but it's a basically like a stock market game i think it's like a vinyl records where if you play a you
2:51:48
kind of want to play a song so it gets cool but if you play it too much it becomes uncool it's not like and so
2:51:54
there's a couple of meaner boards on there as well and so you can either randomize it or decide maybe you're not
2:52:01
playing with the arcade because it's just too random because it's rolling dice instead you're going to play the the other game and like one of the other
2:52:08
places instead and so you can kind of decide which type of game you want yeah
2:52:14
so modul yeah the artwork it looks very cool it looks very vibrant the bright
2:52:20
and I love how the VP that you get at the end represents like your mixtape that represents your like last week yeah
2:52:28
your amazing memory i just thought it was really really well thought and because it's cassettes and at the end of it you collect all the cassettes up and
2:52:34
you basically start putting the cassettes out and you're like oh that person's getting ahead and then suddenly they've stopped getting cassettes and
2:52:41
the next person and so because the VP isn't a tracker or something like that at the end it's like oh how did we all
2:52:46
do sort of thing and you sort of slowly watch the number of cassettes come out for things so so yeah so um Sean did a
2:52:52
great job of of selling it so it's um now this is the bit where if you listen to our interview I go allies or enemies
2:53:01
cuz I kept wanting to call it Axis and Allies cuz the name of the company is actually Ally Allies or Enemies but in
2:53:07
my head I kept thinking of Axis and Allies so I kept going Enemies and Allies so apologies cuz I nearly ruined
2:53:13
that in the video but yeah Allies or Enemies Gaming it's hopefully coming to Kickstarter this summer i was I was
2:53:19
already excited before before I started playing but yeah it's kind of towards the end maybe the last week um so you
2:53:26
said obviously Kickstarters are Kickstarters like they might come out at different times but I was already excited when we saw this at the press
2:53:32
event and it' been one I'd walked past a few times and thought there's quite a few people waiting for that or there it's Midame or whatever and when I
2:53:39
finally got a game of it it was definitely my it is that
2:53:45
it's family weight it's solid midweight games but it's so it doesn't take itself
2:53:52
too seriously but there is a good game in there as say just the fact that if you don't work all your shifts so cuz
2:53:58
you can just keep going to the skatepark the skate park's free skate parks are free right so you can kind of skimp a little bit and do a load of the skate
2:54:04
park stuff but then at the end you're going to have minus points cuz you've promised to work shifts at the burger
2:54:09
bar and the arcades and all that kind of stuff and just that kind of push pull on it as well as ohh do I go with the cool
2:54:17
kid are the other people gonna go there does that that makes it worse it makes it better all those kind of things really pulled it into quite a just sort
2:54:24
of elevated it a little bit nice they did a great teach on um YouTube oh did they i I saw that last week or before we
2:54:31
went to the con anyway and thought "Oh that that looks really good." And they were just as they were really like that in real life like really friendly and
2:54:38
chatty and yeah really made it it just seemed really fun i like the modular not enemies yeah yeah yeah i I like the
2:54:45
modular nature of it it kind of gives me that that Shackleton base or seti where
2:54:51
you could I don't want to do that put this in or this out and do that and again it's very expandable isn't it you
2:54:57
can oh I'll have more locations and more cool things and if you play four player you'll play five out of the six boards
2:55:02
but what I did think is it's great for expansions right like if you can figure out the beach location if you figure out
2:55:08
two or three more locations with cool little mini games in there and again this is jumping it because he's got to
2:55:15
get the first one across the line but honestly if people got to play it and demo it I think I think this is going to
2:55:20
be a great success it's had my It's had me sort of tingling for Yeah I think I'm going to back it and you just explained
2:55:25
it to me yeah I'm I'm there as well yeah it was it it did a great job of
2:55:31
capturing and again it's really bright and vibrant so like all the colors pop off each location looks and feels
2:55:38
distinct so they've done a great job brilliant nice sorry I got too excited there no it's No it was good it's good
2:55:44
it's not even sunny yet adrian calm down yeah yeah anything else guys i think we journeyed home pretty early after that
Closing thoughts
2:55:51
we were shattered we did we left pretty early we left midday i was like I think we're done now i
2:55:58
think we're ready had a Five Guys hot dog which I've never had before oh nice we only ever had the burgers the hot
2:56:03
dog's nice small but it's nice you can get the jumbo one was it
2:56:08
jumbo one see i think there is they've changed the menu slightly so maybe that's who knows but I stuck around and
2:56:14
hung around with Marcus for a bit cuz Marcus turned up on the last day so it was nice to see him and catch up with
2:56:19
him um and I entered the,000 giveaway so every day they do a competition to win
2:56:26
£1,000 to be spent at the show and I entered it just I'd always do it on a
2:56:31
Sunday never going to win but it's one of those where I think I worked out there's about 150 people that enter it
2:56:38
every time so it's not massive amounts considering how many are there I'm sure I was working out there about 150 people
2:56:44
or that's not the worst odds there there certainly not like a thousand people crammed looking for the answer but so
2:56:50
like looking to see who won the raffle but so I thought I'll enter that and then once I sort of caught that I did the same and headed off home 72,000 I
2:56:59
think went this year wasn't they 72,000 tickets told tickets sold i think 42,000
2:57:05
unique tickets so 42,000 different people but again biggest ever yeah it was yeah
2:57:13
we did a last spin around the bringer by like I mentioned before we went home and it Yeah it wasn't
2:57:20
you can really tell the difference in in Friday to Sunday yeah but I think you can vag you can definitely tell the
2:57:26
difference now they've stopped people taking unlimited games in i think that really does kind of um filter out a lot
2:57:35
of the chaff chaff well what they've also done is they've stopped people repricing items once you've put your
2:57:40
price in on a Friday i can see why but that is quite nice to just get rid of your stuff at the end isn't it it stops
2:57:47
two things it stops people finding the bargains and then just relisting them for a higher price a couple of days later and it also stops people kind of I
2:57:56
remember the first year we went there's loads of really highriced games in there and then by the Sunday they'd all come
2:58:01
down in price because people kept reputting it in at a lower price which I think it just kind of means that
2:58:06
everyone's going to price it as best as they can on the Friday Saturday Sunday when they first put it in and then it
2:58:11
stops people kind of revisiting it so it meant checking out at the end was very easy as well so that's the show that is
2:58:20
it yeah what do you mean that's it we've been here like seven and a half it's been 82 years since we started the
2:58:27
recording expo but you know what i think I've I had a blast i think this is
2:58:35
definitely better than last year for me just I had fun last year there's nothing
2:58:40
wrong with last year but for me that just the freshen experience was like this is just cool and I I I got a kick
2:58:47
out of it and had a laugh and as I always do and uh cuz I always tell myself maybe I'll have a year off and
2:58:54
then I go and I go maybe I won't yeah this is one again we booked hotels right
2:59:00
this we went cuz you have to kind of book hotels early yeah you got to do it while you're there for on the Thursday
2:59:06
and Friday we were there booking hotels right for the next year so I think for me it feels like one of those I hope it
2:59:12
gets bigger felt bigger
2:59:18
and I hope that every year it continues to grow because I think it's got more always more potential right so I hope it
2:59:25
hope they get more space over the maybe not next year but over the next few years I hope they get more space and a chance to grow things and all that lot
2:59:32
because it just it's just awesome for the hobby isn't it and yeah it's a lot more kind of independent
2:59:38
developers as well as you've got your staples but it it really has like a good
2:59:44
variety of games especially this year last year I think it was it was slightly lacking right i think people had got hit
2:59:50
by some of the trade um uh new laws where a load of less people stock didn't
2:59:56
turn up etc and like yeah this year they felt like everyone was kind of there who
3:00:02
was meant to be there that was two unique releases with Luia and um Fate to the Fellowships which was really nice i
3:00:09
think there was well I think those were the two big ones but there were definitely more like there was there was some we looked at like that sold out for
3:00:15
morning of day one sort of thing so there's loads there yeah it was just really good this year i think a good
3:00:21
variety i just felt like there's there's the big the small the everything in between and yeah good representation of
3:00:28
what you'd want from a convention like that i think everyone would find something and again I don't know whether
3:00:34
it was cuz there was more space between the stands but a lot of the stands felt bigger than they'd ever been before as
3:00:39
well and like some stands have been big for years like Aries that stands always been fairly decent footprint and yet I
3:00:46
don't know whether it was bigger or not but it certainly felt like it had more space and so but there was loads of
3:00:52
stands all Play felt bigger cuz I I can't remember was All Play there last
3:00:58
year yeah they were definitely in Essen cuz you've seen them in Essen but I don't think they've had that amount of
3:01:04
foot space and CG CG all of them felt like they had a bigger footprint with more to show
3:01:10
so I don't think Chip Theory was there either last year were they no they weren't no so JP had No they definitely
3:01:16
was yeah they weren't they were selling their games at Spiral Galaxy but they weren't there so yeah so all of the
3:01:22
loads of the big ones especially felt like they had more footprint so be good to see them continuing growing yeah yeah
3:01:28
i just say a massive thank you to everyone who we saw listeners um who we kind of stumbled across and had
3:01:34
interactions with uh designers you know publishers absolutely everyone like it
3:01:39
it really makes the show for us when we we kind of get those interactions and we
3:01:44
just keep getting more and more which is awesome which we just want more and more um and yeah and just a massive thank you
3:01:51
to the organizers of the show as always yeah yeah i mean it's a feat you can tell blood sweat and tears goes into
3:01:57
feet and you know there's a lot of energy and and and yeah focus to to kind
3:02:03
of be put on to to make a show like that and yeah we love it keep doing it cuz we want to keep coming back so there we go
3:02:11
i'm ready for bed yeah yeah are we done we're done aren't we i think we're done we're done we're done so bye
3:02:19
yeah so no all that's left to say is uh again thanks for listening for this jumbo packed expo uh episode and um if
TURN 6 - The Final Turn
3:02:27
you want more expo goodness in your life then check out our next one where we give you the the live recording of our
3:02:33
show on the Friday as well as some of our interviews with designers and folk which uh should be good fun but yeah uh
3:02:40
if you enjoy the show please like and subscribe as always then please share this podcast with all your friends
3:02:46
family and board game nerds uh around that you think would love the show as well um and if you want to support the
3:02:53
show and keep us going and keep us uh uh attending these conventions and and
3:02:59
getting the equipment to do so we are on coffee and we love it if we get that support it really keeps us going um so
3:03:07
thank you to all those that do but other than that I'm ready that was like the
3:03:13
longest outro ever jp I'm stretching it out cuz it's the longest episode ever but other than that whose turn is it
3:03:20
spudges it's Spud's turn sweeter than Fudge