Games of GAMA Expo, what we played at GAMA Expo 2024. Tabletop Bellhop Gaming Podcast Ep. 235

(bell dings) Hello and welcome to the Tabletop Bellhop Gaming Podcast, episode 235, "Games of GAMA Expo." What got played at GAMA Expo 2024? - So tonight is a special con Recap episode, the first of two shows, where we'll be talking all about GAMA Expo 2024, which happened last week down in Louisville, Kentucky. Tonight, we're gonna focus on the games we played and saw, and next week, we'll be back with an overall show recap. - I'm Sean, your host, and here with me, we have Deanna. - Hey folks.

- And the Tabletop Bellhop himself, Moe. - I am Moe Tousignant, the Tabletop Bellhop your cardboard concierge, helping you make your game nights better. Now this episode brought to you by our sponsor, Grand Gamers Guild. - Watch us record this podcast live Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. Eastern at twitch.tv/TabletopBellhop. Find links to the games we mentioned tonight in our show notes, which you can find at tabletopbellhop.com/episode235 That's 235. Links there may also be affiliate links. Also Moe

and De did bring home review copies of some of the games we will be talking about tonight. We're here to answer your gaming and game night questions. - So tonight, that question is one we got asked a lot last week, today, this week, and since we got back, which is, what did you get to play at GAMA Expo? And before we get any further, I need to make sure everyone is aware that Deanna and I attended GAMA Expo 2024 as both GAMA Media and Events voting members, as well as hosted media. - Before we

start talking games, can you guys give us a quick idea of what GAMA Expo is? I don't think we need details, but an overview for people who don't know the show, as it's really not your usual gaming convention. - Okay, first off, GAMA is the Game Manufacturers Association, and then GAMA Expo is the trade show for folks that are in the tabletop gaming industry that GAMA puts on, and you have to be a member of GAMA to attend the trade show. That make sense? And then it's just the difference of being

at a trade show as opposed to being at a con like Origins, right? Everything's very retailer focused. - Yeah, the whole thing is very much publishers advertising to retailers. It's very retailer focused. You're gonna get lots of announcements and re-releases, new releases, upcoming games. GAMA is kind of the start to con season to give everyone a heads up on what to expect. And for retailers, it's a chance to get your early orders in to kind of plan out your entire years worth of what you're go

nna carry in your store. So it's very different than say Gen Con or Origins or Spiel where it's more about playing games. This is more about learning about games. - And like this was our first time going to GAMA Expo. So it was a different experience, but I got the feeling that it was a lot of, we're gonna tell you about a thing. And then we're really gonna tell people about that thing at Gen Con. - Yes. Yeah, I got a lot of that myself. - So it's now we do have your Game Manufacturers Associati

on. What's the first A for? - I know. I don't know how they got an acronym there. It doesn't quite drive. Yeah, the GA is from game. And the MA is from manufacturers. And then there's no extra A, I guess. I don't know. No one seemed to actually know that. It's been around for a long time. A little bit of background is the GAMA Expo was actually created to be a trade organization for Origins because Origins actually came first. But anyway, that's more detail than we need for this. So then the mai

n thing to know is that this is a professional trade show. This is not open to the public. It's GAMA members. And what has changed over the years is it's no longer just retailers and publishers. Like we were there as events and media. And there's a designer aspect of GAMA now. And there's a warehousing aspect of GAMA. And all the branches of GAMA, this is the con for all of them to get together and network and learn things and help each other out. - Which was really cool. People were learning lo

ts of stuff, which we're gonna talk about next week. - Yes. - But right now we're gonna talk about games and we're gonna go into it in roughly chronological order and just the order we happen to see them in more or less, which is somewhat random. So. - Yes. Yeah, pretty much. Just Pennywise reminds us. In the chat room there was also distribution was present. There's a creator arm of GAMA. GAMA has spread. It's an octopus of the gaming industry. - Well, while I couldn't attend, I'm certainly loo

king forward to hearing all about these games. - So the first night we got in, this is technically two days before GAMA, the day before designer day, which was like a special thing they did this year. We were chilling in our hotel lobby and there were two gamers sitting playing a game. And it ends up it was the two men behind barrel aged games. They were playing a game called Plantopia, life of a potato. And I've gotta say this looked really cute. This is super cute graphics where you are planti

ng various vegetables, not just potatoes. And then there was a neat weather system where people would play like rock, paper, scissors, almost like from their hand. And then the other player would play front and one from their hand. And then it would flip one over the deck to figure out what the weather is. And some of the plants worth the most points would need three suns up to grow. And another plant would need a bit of water and so on. And it was really neat, really quick playing game that the

main thing was the cute graphics. So if you get a chance, look up Plantopia. And now they kind of give us some... - If I remember correctly, they were localizing it. They had brought it over from Japan. - Okay, that sounds correct. So we saw that it looked a little light for our style of games, but look like it could be engaging. And at the same time, they weren't... I don't know how to order this. They showed us Plantopia, but then oddly went upstairs to the room, came down and gave us a copy

of their most famous game, which is stool pigeon, which sadly we haven't had a chance to break out yet. So stool pigeon was technically the first review copy we received at GAMA Expo 2024. And it was two days before the con started in the lobby of the hotel we were staying at. - So, Plantopia life of a potato. Does it involve vodka and or chips? - Not that I noticed, no. - That's not the full life of a potato if you ask me. I think they need to have expansions. They need to have expansions to ge

t the full life of a potato in there. So what we were telling me is we need to hook them up with David Beck of Distilled Fame and get the two to work together to make a legacy game. - There we go. - So next up was the actual first day of the con, which wasn't the first day of the con. It was a pre-con day called designer day, which is an awesome thing that we're gonna talk about more tomorrow and why every designer developer should try to take part in this. But again, that's not tonight's show,

but what we will talk about was, in addition to some awesome panels, was a room full of excited game designers showing off their prototypes. And that was fantastic. It was so busy in that room, so many people that they actually opened up a second room, which was one of the huge ballrooms where you could just try out people's prototypes in games. And I'm saying prototypes, some were very close to finished products, others were barely a game yet. It was such a range. - So most saying we're gonna t

alk about tomorrow, he means next week, next episode. Not tomorrow. - Not tomorrow. Talk about next week, my bad. So just some stuff that stuck out from that in particular is we met an awesome, awesome individual, Jay Dragon, who I interact with quite a bit online. And Jay showed us their game, "Yzeba's Bed and Breakfast." Now this is an indie RPG published through Possum Creek Games that is one of the most beautiful books, well, actually box set, it was a full box set, book and box set that I'v

e ever looked through. You check my social media feeds, I've shared a video of Deanna flipping through this book. This is an indie RPG that has a set of pre-generated characters that you are going to choose one to play. And then the book is filled with short two hour scenarios that are all day in the life of these characters. And I mean like indie day in the life. You're going to take your character on your adventure and go through the day in the life and have lived through whatever event it is.

And one of course is the Tea Party. And then at the end, it's like a legacy board game because then you're going to add stickers and you're going to write in your rule book and you're going to change your character based on what happened during that one slice of life. And literally the next time you play, you just pick a different section of the book and play through it. - It is so cool looking. And you have to know, we went into GAMA Expo and I told Moe, I just want to focus on board games, no

RPGs. So he called me over and I went, no RPGs. He said, but look at it. And I went, oh my gosh, this is amazing. And I feel bad with the video that we did. Didn't show any of the sticker book pages because they were just so cool. They had little outlines and there's these sticker sheets and you got to earn badges and stickers and put them in. And it appealed to my OP Chichi grade school thing. Anyways, it was gorgeous. The art's gorgeous. Game looks amazing. - Yeah, it looks fantastic. Jay was

just showing off their first physical copy. So we would have loved to have taken that one home. Probably would have bought a copy if it was available, but look for "Yzeba's Bed and Breakfast." Again, it's from Possum Creek Games. Just amazing looking game. Wishin' Jeff Sous was in the chat to hear about this one. Now, while I was checking that out, you were over talking to Tam. So Tam is an indie game designer that it ends up, I feel bad that I had not heard of Tam before, but Tam is very well

known in the indie board game scene. - And I'm going to get the name wrong, but they had done a game previously that was on the human DNA sequence. So their previous game was a hard science game. And so the game that they had out was called "Explorations in Space time." And it was very much still a prototype, but it was just lovely. And it had some really unique things going out the board. And I have taken some photos and I'm going to get up on social at some point, but it's a round board with s

ections that rotate. And Tam referred to the game as semi-educational because he pointed out that he co-designed it with the scientists. So all the science was factual based, right? And it's an area control game where you're using wormholes and the rotation of the galaxy in some clever ways. And it just looked really neat. I definitely want to, that gets picked up. I definitely want to check it out. - So Tam Studio is "Games for Humans." That's games number four humans. Now, I looked at a ton of

other games in there, sat down with a guy making his own macha as he showed me his game. I mostly just kind of floated around the room and talked to people, but I know you spent some time deep diving another game as well. - It was just something random I walked by that caught my eye in again, in the designer's demo room. And it was a dueling pianos game. And I'm not sure that was the actual title because it was very much a prototype. Like the fella had these laser cut wooden dominoes sitting ou

t that had musical notes engraved on them. And this was from Dennis Furia of Furia Games who did a card game in the past, the "Deck of Wonders" I think. That the idea is you're at a piano bar and you're engaging in a piano duel where you're trying to match and one up each other until one pianist outplays the other. And really gameplay, it wasn't super unique. It's just double dominoes with a cool theme matching. And that's Dennis's words, not mine. He's like, this is just double dominoes with a

cool theme. But it felt like a really good mash-up of the theme and mechanics. So I thought it was kind of neat. - And that is one of many, many, many music based games we saw at GAMA. It seems GAMA 2024 or 2024 and 2025. A lot of the games we saw, I will not be coming this year. They may be coming as late as next year or even I know at least one I saw was 2026. But music seems to be the new pirates or zombies or farming. There were a ridiculous number of music games. We're gonna mention some of

them tonight, but not even close to all of them. - Just as a note, Tam put out a game I was actually interested in back when it came out just pre-pandemic, Lair, which is the villainous base building game that I remember paying attention to back when that dropped. - So we did other stuff that first day, mainly went to various seminars and stuff like that. And I don't know if we're gonna do a seminar recap in the end, but we'll be talking more about that next week. - As for games though, what ha

ppened at the end the next day was the media first look event. So this was the official day one of GAMA. So again, designer day was something that happened before GAMA and was for people to come in early to take part in it was a fantastic thing. And then the actual official day one, the first thing we took part in is a first look event. And the first game we sat down and tried, we saw lots of games. We started at the 25th century booth, we wandered around, but one that caught our eye where we ac

tually sat down and Deanna played a stranger was "Kiri-ai:The Duel" from Mugen Gaming. This one is going to be localized by Lucky Duck Games. And it immediately gave me flashbacks of that samurai game we reviewed a long time ago, which I'm not even gonna give you a link to because unfortunately it wasn't a very favorable review. Well, this was that, this was two samurai facing off. I'm reminding of Bushido Blades on the PlayStation One, like classic samurai duel, done with cards and really cool.

This one was good enough that we actually bought a copy of it. So no review copy here. We picked up a copy at a local friendly game store in Kentucky on our way home. - Yeah, once you get the iconography for the stances down, it's simple, it's quick, it just flows really well. And it felt thematic. And it also felt like it would scale well, like if I wanted to be very bluffing and strategic and really pay attention, this could be a strategic game or it could be a casual game that you're playing

while you're sitting and having a coffee, right? And I liked that there's a niche there for me of games I can play with half my brain while having a beer that are still a game enough that I'm enjoying them. And then it came in this neat cute fabric wrap that would hold the game, so making it very portable. And that was actually based on a historic wallet from the Edo era in Japan that the designer took out photos and showed us the wallet it was based off of and stuff. So it was just, it was ver

y slick. - And this is actually the designer's re-implementation of their own game from back in 2017. So they re-implemented, which at the time it was called something in Japanese that translated into a Dontan no Kiriai legend. - Yeah, really striking cards, fantastic art, just really stuck out. There was a whole thing with moving, switching from high stance to low stance and basically just trying to guess what your opponent's gonna do. It was extremely well done. Super quick, you take two hits,

you're out. Like not a lot going on, but really well done for a two player dueling game. And the cards are gonna catch people's attention. Up next, we sat down and played a full game of a game called Fluffy Dragons from Lymph. And I don't know, from what I understand that's the first letters of the names of the people who are part of this company, so it's L-A-M-F, Lymph Games. This was really great production quality. Awesome looking little dragon meeples that didn't look like traditional drago

ns because they're fluffy dragons. It is an interesting rock paper scissor style game where there are five elements and you have a hand of cards with those five elements on them. And you play a card face down and then put your dragon on that element. Then everyone's gonna do that. The elements are set up so that every element beats the next two around the wheel and is defeated by the two previous. And you're gonna get these gems that you fight over and if you hit the other players, you steal gem

s from them. Plus there was a whole thing with gray gems that couldn't be stolen and kind of a bluffing game. And the big thing was you could lie. So you could put the card face down and put your dragon on the wrong spot. And people thought you were lying. You could bid your points on them saying, "No, no, you're lying, you're not going there." And then there was a reward. If you were lying and you got away with it, you were the sneaky dragon, you got points. It was neat. It was a interesting ga

me. It was, what is the program called? I can't remember what it was called. It was part of the Horizon? - The Horizons Fellowship. - Yes, it was part of the Horizons Fellowship, which is something we will be talking about a bit more later as well as next week. I really wanna kind of deep dive the Horizons Fellowship to recommend it to people. So this was someone who was brought up through a mentorship program that's part of GAMA that was showing off their game for the first time. - So I mean, l

ying, bluffing, bidding, this game is not for me. But I can see how others would dig it. And the one thing I will say is, it didn't outstay its welcome. It was just nice, quick paced, filler. - Interestingly, while LAMP does have a Facebook page, they don't seem to have a presence on board GameGeek, which is unfortunate. - No, they do not. And I had a conversation with the designer on how important that is to have, but hopefully they'll have one up soon. All right, this one's kind of a side note

because I didn't play the game. But while we were at the media first look, one of the things that was being shown off is the new printing of "For the Queen." If you're a fan of the show, you've heard us mention this many times. I still swear it's one of the best intros to role-playing games for adults, if they've never played one before. And also a good intro to D&D players to show that there's more out there than D&D. Now this new printing comes from Darrington Press and oh my gosh, did they m

ake it beautiful. They updated the look, for one, it's got new artwork by a lot of the original artists, some updates and some new art. One of my favorite things is they put it in a real box. Only people who own the original "For the Queen" are gonna know what I'm talking about, but I can actually pick it up with the cards not falling in. There are new queens introduced, there are new graphics, and they didn't get into the details, but they did do some tweaks on specific cards to make them whate

ver, more engaging, less engaging, whatever. Overall, better quality, better looking. And honestly, if my copy of "For the Queen" wasn't designed or signed by Alex Roberts, the designer of the game, I would have wanted this badly and probably begged them for a copy. But I'm not giving up my signed copy just because the new one looks cooler. - You know you could have both, right? - I don't need two copies of the same game, only for someone else to get. - Yeah, the art is gorgeous, the original ga

me was gorgeous. I'd be curious to see some of the tweaks that they made to the question cards. - Yeah, and like I said, I didn't play a game here, a game here, I basically just fanboyed. - It's pretty much what happened. I also got to meet the fantastic Darcy Ross at the time, so that was cool. - So this will be scheduled for release May 14th of 2024. So keep an eye in the coming months at your FLGS or wherever you buy your games from for this new version from Darrington Press of "For the Queen

". - And buy it at your FLGS because if you do, you get a free promo pack to support local game stores, which includes three cleans and new cards. - Oh, that's cool, I didn't know they were doing that. - You can see pictures of those cards on my social media dumps everywhere where I just poured all my GAMA pictures out onto the internet. They're held up by one of those table holder things where you put the number in to know what table you're sitting at. If you see that, those are the promo queen

s. - And you can check out the graphics and the new box on the Board Game Geek, just hit the versions tab and check out the new 2024 English version. - All right, I mentioned music games, here's one. We took a quick look at, didn't get to play it because it wasn't ready, but this is "High Five". The box for this game looks like an old record player, like my pair I grew up with on my parents' metal shelf in the dining room. And when you open it up, it looks like a record sitting on a turntable wi

th the arm and everything, except you'll note the record has holes in it. This is a game where you are actually going to turn the record to show what available actions there are. And you are going to use those to play cards that look like waveforms to make music. It looks fantastic. There was just, this was a early, early prototype. So if you see my pictures, they're early prototype. They're still working on this one, but I got to say it looks really cool. - It's super cute, like just the table

presence alone. And then the theming, they're basically, it's the Beatles with the serial numbers lightly filed off. - Yes. - So. - You play the story of the Meeples, is the band you are playing through. - Yes. - And this one has been in prototype now for a couple of years. There are pictures on board GameGeek from 2022. So it's good to see that this is, coming up on release finally. - So I got to say a props to Smirk and Dagger then for the long development time, because it's a better game in t

he end. - June 2024 apparently is the current, the expected release date. - Okay. Next also Smirk and Dagger is a new Boop. A Boop that actually changes things more significantly than the other one. This is Boop the Halls. A Christmas themed version of Boop from Smirk and Dagger. They made the board pyramid shaped instead of square. So your physics and dynamics are changed up. It's also 3D with multiple tiers, cause what this board is, is a Christmas tree. In this version of Boop, you can win by

getting three cats in a row, just like normal, but also by knocking all of the opponents ornaments off the tree. And I've got to say, talk about nailing it, like out of the park for theming. That is just awesome. From cat jumping on a bed, to cats fighting in a Christmas tree. This was super prototype. It was literally Boop pieces with stickers stuck on them and stuff like that. But it looks fantastic. And the new gameplay element is basically, there's a whole thing where when you push a cat, i

f there's an ornament, the cat then pushes the ornament show boost style. - That would never happen in real life. Cats don't take ornaments off trees. - No, not at all. - I would expect knowing Smirk and Laughter, they're probably aiming for that September, October release date, so they can be in everyone's stockings this holiday season. - Yeah, that would be my guess. Next up, headed over to the Pandasaurus booth, because I saw something that looked like tumbling dice made into a haunted house.

And that's actually what it is. They have started a brand new series of kids games. Note these are targeted at kids called Box Top Pinball. And what it is, is you open up the box and there are more boxes inside and you stack them in a tier. So the highest box, like the main box top, and then the one that's inside, and the one that's inside going down, and you set up targets on it. And some of the boxes have their holes and all this stuff. And you play tumbling dice. And that's an Eagle Griffin

game, where you basically flick a D6 die down this tower and try to tumble it into things. That the theme here is pinball. So you're trying to tumble your die into the scoring zones and hit the bumpers on the way down and everything. And I gotta say, this looks really cool. There was only a prototype version. I tried a couple flicks. It is not easy, but I'm sure you can develop a skill and learn how to do it. The person doing the demos, obviously hadn't practiced much. Got a couple videos of tha

t out there. I just thought this was fast name, but everyone knows how much I like the dexterity games and games that stick out on a table. This looks like, despite being a kid's game, this is a game I wanna have out at our local game nights. - I think you need to see the pictures on this one because it sounds like it's simplistic, but I mean, it's simplistic gameplay. But the level of detail that they put into the targets and the graphics and everything, and it's really pretty cool looking. - A

nd they're actually calling it family friendly. They're not calling it a kid's game. Although I have to say family friendly and Las Vegas don't really work for me. I, the gaming seems a little bit off. The gameplay sounds family friendly. The theme, I don't know. You're playing, you're betting blackjack on, I don't know. - Okay, so the one we saw was a haunted house. - Okay. - It's Scooby Doo's eyes. - Box Stop Pinball, Welcome to Las Vegas is the one that's apparently supposed to release this y

ear. - All right, well, what we saw was very much a haunted house. - Okay. - Look like Scooby Doo with ghosts and pumpkins and-- - Okay, because only one I can find right now is the Welcome to Las Vegas scheduled for release this year. - Okay. - So maybe this is their second one. All right, next one's a big one for Deanna. You wanna talk about table presence. This is called the Arkham Asylum Files, Part One, Panic in Gotham City. This is from a company I've never heard of before. They might've b

een around for a while. I didn't do the research called Infinite Rabbit Holes. Now I'm gonna let Dee take over now because she's the one hyped about this. - I came into their presentation a little bit late so I might get the details on this wrong, but this is their first game, I believe. And they had a background in that the two fellas that started the company came from Disney. They worked at Disney in some fashion and they were like-- - They were imaginary. - Their focus really is on story and

gameplay and the connections that happen between people where they're playing. So it was a neat insight to that. But anyways, going back to this game, it is massive. The box is just seeing it in person and it's just got a lot of neat physical components to interact with. It is an augmented reality game that's Batman themed. And one of my concerns was it's Dark Knight. Is this a family-friendly game? And they said it is the lightest of the Dark Knight. It's never darker in tone than the Batman ca

rtoon. So, you know. And then the overall story is Harley Quinn has gone good and is back to working as a psychologist at Arkham Asylum. And this giant box is stuffed with her case files. So it's just got tons of nifty physical props. And so let me see. So I sat through a demo presentation and the one thing that stuck out to me is that the game is really intended for multiple players. Because sometimes when we're doing these mystery puzzle games, Moe likes to point out how they would be more fun

as a solo experience. But this one, if you can imagine, they showed that you're gonna crack a bank vault and you've got these big cardboard gears that are a physical component that you need to crack the bank vault. And one person is gonna stand in the right spot to interact with the augmented reality. Well, someone else is looking at this guidebook that talks to you about how to crack a bank vault. And someone else is reading the clue, the one of the files to find clues that you would put all t

his information together. And while you technically could do it solo player, it would be awkward and not as fun. You know, so it sounded like it was gonna do a good job of being something that really brought people together to play the game. It's part one of a trilogy about man-games. It's gonna have an ongoing story, but you can hop in at any point. And this is their first time going, they were at GAMA because they're now going to be selling to retailers and it will be showing up in FLGSes. In

the past, you could only buy it off them direct. I am super hyped about this game. I am hoping, I think they are sending me a review copy. I hope they are, it looks so cool. - Part of the game is you actually build up the map of Gotham as you're going and you get a physical map of Gotham. So it sounds like some of their-- - Like 3D, sorry. - No, it's fine. Some of their gameplay aspects sound like a sort of an augmented version reality of the old VR game, Disassemble a Bomb, where you've got one

person in VR disassembling a bomb and someone else outside VR reading through the manual on how to disassemble a bomb. And so it's nice to see some of those VR games that work, but who the heck actually can afford and hand on and deal with VR all the time. So they're moving that into a realm where it's a little more accessible to a lot more people. - Yep. Now they also had another game Deanna's also excited about. And I've got to say that just looked fascinating. It is an Alice in Wonderland th

emed game. - Seven Impossible Things, yeah. They had a lot of prototype, like that one isn't actually available yet. They had a very polished production version of it and you could see a lot of the pieces of it were out available to look at. And again, I believe that there will be photos of that when I get pictures up on social media. - Also, if you're interested in some of their AR technology, you can go to infiniterabbitholes.com see the world like me and get their demo app that you can downlo

ad onto either Apple or Google and experiment with their AR. - So I can talk about that a bit. That's something for the game store retailers to use to be able to show it off in store. And it works with any dollar bill. And they were handing out these special dollar bills that had Joker stickers on them. It really, you just need a US dollar bill and it will work. I don't know if it would work. How do you do this in Canada? - We have no dollar bills. - Oh, we have no dollar bills. I just realized

there was a flaw. - A fresh US dollar bill. - So that could be interesting when this shows up and we find out it doesn't work in Canada. - No, that's strictly just that demo app that was designed to work with any dollar bills. You wouldn't need a special component for it, but they obviously weren't thinking of international markets. - There you go. - All right. - All right, here's one I think Sean's gonna be interested in. This is Lunar Rush from Dead Alive Games. This looks like your kind of ga

me, Sean. First off, they scared us because they said simultaneous play. And we were thinking real time and people were moving things. No, simultaneous as in everyone at once decides. - So this is the thing about mining the moon. You're mining the moon and sending shuttles back and forth between the planet and the moon. And you have to decide if you're going to use a small shuttle that only fits a few resources in it, but gets there quickly, or a large shuttle that can fit tons of stuff but take

s a long time to transport back and forth. And you can't carry as much. You had some resource management going on here. Talk about how you might wanna start off doing a bunch of quick deliveries so that you could upgrade yourself or get stuff at the best price. It's an economic game, so it's a full on market. Think, you know, Clans of Caledonia or whatever the more you sell, the less it's worth and so on. You've got some resource management going on as well as a full tech tree system for upgradi

ng your rockets and picking up more stuff or delivering things faster. This looked really solid for a medium light. Not science fact, but you know, what do you call that? Hard science based? - Board game. - Is this released already? Cause it's showing as a 2023 game. Is it one of those not actually? - It was at the media preview event. That's all I can tell you. So maybe it's a localization, I am not sure. - I think it was a Kickstarter and it's now in retail or heading into retail, I think. - Y

eah, I couldn't answer that, sorry. Next, ARCs. I don't know how many people have been following around on this one, cause it is leader games. The makers of Root, right? They're well known, well established company and this was a huge Kickstarter for them. This looks amazing, like really amazing. It's a 4X game, right? But it's a trick taking game. It is a trick taking card game 4X where you are going to sit there and someone's gonna lead and your suits are your actions. So if someone leads move

ment and they can play a tool of movement, they're going to get to move one of their ships up to two. And then if someone follows suit, they're also going to do movement and they're gonna keep playing it. And then the last person's gonna play a movement card and they're gonna play like a movement five. So it gets to move five different ships on the board, but then they're gonna win the trick. And the, or no, I have it backwards. I think the lower numbers let you do more actions. So if they play

like a one, they're gonna get to move five times. But if they play like a five, which is the highest in a trick, they're only gonna get to move once, but then they're gonna lead the next trick and get to decide what action everyone's gonna take. So it's kind of like "Race for the Galaxy" meets "Trick Taking" meets "Twilight Imperium." And it just looks amazing. - No, I'm just super fascinated with this one. The fact that they managed to take "Trick Taking" and tie it into this 4x game is just mi

nd blown. - Yeah, this is certainly interesting. - All right, next one, we wandered over to the Thunderworks, which they were interesting enough. We checked out three different games at their booth. The first was "Stone Spire Architects." This is the newest game from the designer of cartographers doing something different. This is a dungeon building game, a dungeon building card game, no writing this time, no flipping right. You're gonna just build a dungeon out of cards. We got the most briefes

t of overviews, unfortunately. What this looks like though, is for everyone like me, who went out and bought "Dungeon Keeper" from "Check Games Edition" and wanted the "Dungeon Keeper" board game, sorry, the video game, the silly dungeon building game, but instead got a super heavy Euro. Well, here's the game for you. This is the silly game I wanted "Dungeon Keeper" to be. This is a light, quick playing, do you have enough gelatinous cubes in your dungeon to keep the dungeon clean kind of game?

This looks fantastic. Next at the same booth was "Citizens of the Spark." I'm only talking about this one because the demo person from Thunderworks that was there was so excited about this game. This is a drafting engine builder, which Sean's gonna hate because that has animal characters, but it's an animal character game where you're gonna draft people and you're going to put them into columns, which reminded me of "Bohnanza." And the more people of the same type you have in a column, the more

powerful their action is when you activate them. So similar to "Bean," where the more beans you have, the more money you get when you sell, this is for action. So you've also got kind of that deus feel going on here. So it's a kind of got to push your luck, timing aspect where you're trying to decide just how many to collect before you activate them. Fantastic looking art, lots of different card abilities, super prototype, all we got was a high level overview, but I think "Citizens of the Spark"

is one to watch for. - And super cute art. - Yeah, the artist has done a bunch of work, Goblin Vaults, Comic Hunters, Cartographer, he's done some work for Cartographers, Solid Art. And then I'll let Dee handle the last one, which I think Shauna dig this one. This was a hacking game called "Metrorunner." Or sorry, just "Metrorunner." - So this one was a Kickstarter, which has already kicked, and I think it has a GenCon release date coming up. And okay, I always feel like hacking is such an inte

gral part of "Cyberpunk Stories" of fiction, but it just falls flat in tabletop games. So I just thought it was really neat that they were doing hacking in this board game, and it was a little mini game in the center of the board, and it was like a tile puzzle mini game in this bigger board that had the Metro line going around the outside, and you're going to ride the Metro to different stops and collect resources while trying to fill contracts for the Mega Corps. But what struck me is interesti

ng, and then you're also doing this hacking component. And what struck me as interesting about the hacking is that as you level up and you get better, it doesn't get easier, it just gets more complex, and you could do more difficult and more interesting things with it. And specifically, you're trying to line up the little green lines in the puzzle tiles to get from point A to point B, but instead now you're trying to get from point A, B, and C to X, Y, and Z, all simultaneously by lining them up

just right. And I just, I don't know, it looked really neat, but I just had no review, I haven't played it, but I was definitely intrigued. - And we expect to see that one in GenCon. So GenCon show off with a September release for Metro Runner. - And that one also featured asymmetric hackers. Each hacker had their own unique way they could manipulate the board that was different from anyone else. Because it was kind of like a slide puzzle, right? You're like swapping tiles, moving tiles are shi

fting them. And I remember the one that they were doing the demo could swap between the corners. And again, it's Waterworks or whatever, you know, the app game where you're trying to make the water flow from A to B, that's the basics, and then it gets more complicated. And hacking was only part of the game. Like it was also this pick up and deliver work for the Mega Corps thing while screwing them over. Really neat looking game. Or one of the most gimmicky games we saw all weekend, Amigo, who do

es a bunch of lighter games, Take Five, Saboteur, they were announcing new anniversary editions of both of those. Saboteur is just everything in one box, whereas Take Five actually includes a new way to play. Which for Take Five fans, you can now play cooperatively, which is probably a big deal for fans of Take Five. Nothing against Take Five, have not played myself. But what I thought was neat, Deanna called me over to show me this, was a set of roll and write games, multiple. I think there wer

e three or four different ones, and I think each box had more than one game. Deanna can confirm that. Where your pencil was your die. So I remember seeing these come out on Kickstarter for RPGs before we could roll your D&D character with your pencil. What was these thick colored pencils that you rolled to be your number that you then put on whatever? Like there were so many different ways to play. - Yeah, there were three boxes. The games were all by Reiner Knizia. I remember my immediate conce

rn when I saw this is the pencil lead breaking, but he assured me that they've tried it over and over again. They stand up to actually being rolled. So I'm like, that's kind of a nifty mechanic. - Yeah, they're actually from Amigo and 999 Games, is the other publisher on that. - Okay. - It's Pick a Pen Tune In. - Well, there's alternate names too, because there's Pick a Pen Gardens. - Yeah, because these are being localized. - Yeah, so there's a series of them and yeah, there are three right now

. I don't have all of their names. Gardens is one of them, but. - Fair enough. - You 100% know that I would be rolling this off the table and fetching it off the floor though, that's the. - What I'm worried about is like, it makes the games, well, I guess you could always go grab a die when you're done. But it'll make them more expendable, like your pencils run out. - That's true, right? - Right, you're eventually gonna sharpen. - It was a game where you're playing through a pad of paper anyways

. So, that's gonna run out too. It's a disposable game. It's. - So, we're sitting there and I can't remember what booth we were at, but I'm chatting with people. I think we might've been looking at Gnome Hollow, which we'll talk about more, because we actually got to play it. And we were talking about light, silly games, and I mentioned Kiss the Goblin and how well it went over with my family. And then all of a sudden someone taps me on the shoulder and says, "Was that you? "Were you just talkin

g about Kiss the Goblin?" And here it ends up, I'm raving about the game, trying to convince a member of the Blue Peg, Pink Peg podcast, Brandon, to go buy this game. And well, right behind me was the publisher Skybounds. And like someone high up at Skybounds, I can't remember who, but it wasn't just, like their demo team, right? And they're like, "Oh, thank you so much "for all the good things you said about your game." And then even cooler, they remembered our review of No Context and how we c

alled out that Genevieve thinks different from everyone else and how it was so obvious in that game. So that was a fantastic interaction. So after that, we had to sit down and try Skybounds' latest game, which is called ContraBanter, the word smuggling game. And it is something else. This is a party game, team-based party game, where you are given three words that you put face up in front of you so the other players can't see what these words are. You then draw, your opponents will then draw a c

ard that just has cues, like some kind of conversational cues. Then you enter into a conversation, talking back and forth, and you're basically improving this right on the spot, having a conversation. And what you're trying to do is slip in those three words. At any point, the other team can be like, "Stop, it's one of your words, whatever, divorce." And you're like, "Nope, oh, that's one X." They get three guesses, they're trying to guess your word. At the end of the conversation, you look, and

if you got words through, you get points. There's points, it's a party game with points. It was surprisingly engaging, but you have to be someone that can think on your feet and improv. You almost need that RPG improv skill. I remember telling an entire story about losing my vehicle in a divorce because I think marriage was the word I needed, and hot rod was another one I needed. Just a really neat game, but man, you had to talk for a long time. I even found that difficult. Most pitch games are

short. I think you had a full three minutes, which doesn't sound like long, but when you're just talking to someone. But it's also meant to be a conversation. The other person can ask you questions, and you're trying to figure out what words they're trying to slip in. It was very interesting. - It was 90 seconds, but to me what-- - 90, that's it? - It was just 90 seconds, but it felt like forever. But what we put it over the top was you had to do it for three rounds. If they guessed one of your

words, it got replaced. Or knocked down, I can't remember, yeah, it got replaced. But then the next time you're talking, you still have to get those other two words back in a second time. It's really easy to slip some bizarre words into conversation once, but to get them in two and three times, that's where it was. I can now see that it's a little more strategic. This game is so not for me. This is anxiety in a box, but it was cool. - And there's some interesting questions there. Questions like

, tell us about one of your favorite local restaurants. Or what is your favorite dinosaur and why? There's good topics there, but even that. I mean, I'm sure Moe could go for a lot longer than 90 seconds on your favorite restaurant, but your favorite dinosaur and why? That's a little tougher. Do you just pick one randomly you remember from Jurassic Park? Or do you actually have a favorite dinosaur and do know a lot about it? - And then your word cues are like diner, sailboat, and ice cream. So y

ou gotta talk about your favorite dinosaur and slip those three words in somehow. It's interesting. It's what you expect from Skybound, to be fair. That's their kind of game, and I think they knock it over the part of what they're trying to do. All right, we wrap up the night meeting up with our sponsor, Marc from Grand Gamers Guild. Had some dinner with him, met up with Andrew from Family Gamers, The Family Gamers. Is that right? I feel terrible if I just got Andrew's podcast and blog name wron

g. Check out Andrew's stuff, fantastic work. Him and his wife, Anitra, do some great stuff. But met up with them for dinner and then went back and Marc wanted to show off one of his games. Now this is one Grand Gamers Guild is localizing. So it is a published game that they're localizing to North America called La Familia Hort. Not La Famiglia, not to be confused with other games. La Familia Hort, which is a creepy looking farming game with a very Edward Gory look. This is like the Addams Family

Goes Farming. You're gonna buy plants from a central market. You're gonna plant them in your field. You have to water them and fertilize them and there's a weather mechanic. And there's some interesting things like you can collect bees that give you bonus points for flowers you have in play. You can buy a watering can that automatically waters things but you can only ever have six things on your board at once. Your plants, once they're fully grown, you sell them. Some of the plants will give yo

u points. Other plants just give you money to be able to buy some. So there's an engine building. There's a lot of interesting things going on here. The game is asymmetric. Each of the different characters have different abilities. My character had a bat with them who produced guano every round. So I could actually at the end of every term produce extra fertilizer. But if I used it, I also had to give some to someone else. We brought home a review copy of this. So you'll be hearing more about La

Familia Hort in the coming weeks. You'll be able to buy a copy in theory in June of 2024 when Grand Gamers Guild, our sponsor, would be releasing that. - Do you have any comments on La Familia Hort De? - Honestly, the jury's out on this one for me. I need to play it again. It felt like it didn't overstay its welcome and it had some interesting decision points and I liked that it was asymmetric. - Okay. The art on it is fantastic. - No, yeah, no, the art. - If anyone wants to check out the BGG p

age for it, the art is beautiful. It's from a Valencia, Spain company and the artist hasn't done a lot, but they should. They need to do a lot more games. I'd love to see more. - So there was a whole thing with moons. I actually forgot about this till you mentioned the arc. So very Zelda style is you have a regular moon most nights, but some nights you can have the red moon and when the red moon comes up, the market fills with creepy things. So there was like a man eating plant and much more Edw

ard Gory looking stuff or Beetlejuice looking stuff. There's kind of that vibe going on as well. So that was it for the first official day of GAMA. I'm just gonna check in with both of you. Do we need a break or are we good to go for day two? Now note the rest of the days are going to be shorter. We played the most and saw the most games at the media preview. Most of the rest of our weekend was spent at various panels as well as trying out on the actual exhibit hall floor. So they're not gonna b

e as long as this one. So don't expect us to be here all night. But I just wanna check in with Sean and DSC if we need a quick break. - I vote coffee break after day two or after this day. - That is where we have it now. So we'll stick to the original schedule. So the next one came from some guys we barely know and I don't know, some kind of trick taking game. It wasn't so good. So I think I'm gonna skip it. No, the next thing we played was matches. This is new hotness from Thing 12 Games who is

someone I interact with all the time. And it is designed by a friend of the show, Danny, from Everyday Board Games, another awesome podcast and Twitch stream you should check out. Now the most fascinating thing about this game is we don't know what it is. We don't know what to call it. I have coined the term a card burning game and Danny seems to think this fits. Now I need to play this with Sean to see his opinion on it. So this is a card game where you have five of each numbered card and 10 o

nes. You're going to put a card in the center of the table, lead like in a trick taking game and say I play a six. Well, the next player can play a six or they can play any number of cards adding up to six. That could be six ones or it could be a five and a one or it could be a two and a two and a two or two twos and two ones and so on. If you play the exact card, the trick burns. It gets hotter. I'm gonna call it a trick because again, my terminology and you put on a scoring token on it. In add

ition to that, there's like a flame card. If you play a flame card, you put another token on it and just that keeps getting hotter, right? The pile in the middle is getting hotter. You're gonna keep playing cards until people pass. First person who's not first person wrote, let me think. So I played so many games. I'm sorry, Danny, I'm messing up some of your rule over for you here. So you're gonna keep playing cards and then eventually whoever wins the trick is gonna get all the points. Everyon

e else though is going to get points for every pair of they played to get up to that number. And then there's a thing where a player burns out there. There's nothing they can play. They get to take a bonus. So the first player to burn out each trick and whatever you wanna call it is going to get a bonus. And the bonuses are neat. Like one of them is just a pile of the cards that weren't in that hand. So you don't know what's in there. So you're hoping there's some good pairs in there. Another on

e is just two automatic points and stuff like that. I think that's a very vague overview of it. But the whole thing is we're like, is it a ladder game? Because on a ladder game, you have to keep playing higher numbers. Well, it's like a ladder game if you're stuck on one rung, you're stuck on six. Everyone has to play exactly six. Another rule I missed is you can play a card upside down as a one. Or is it a hand shedding game? Cause that's a part of it. You can shed your hand quicker. You're gon

na get those bonus cards. So you wanna shed your hand. So maybe you wanna play a bunch of cards face down as ones just to empty your hand to get those bonuses. Is it a trick taker? Well, it is in a way because someone is going to take that trick at the end and the points in the middle. So we're like, I don't know what to call this. And I'm like, it's like you took Hoyle's book of games and lit it on fire. I think it's my best description for matches from Thing 12 games. - Well, the publisher cer

tainly calls it a trick taking game onboard game geek. - Yes. I will have to play it. We did take a, I gotta thank Danny for handing over a review copy. We gotta play it together. Comes in a fantastic matchbook. So it's a giant matchbook, but it looks like a matchbook. - One of the things that I thought was neat was how you could choose what cards to keep in your hand at the end, even after you passed and were out of that particular round, you could be like, well, I'm just gonna teach them all.

This is terrible. Or I'm gonna keep these and I'm gonna build up something to eventually be able to do something cool. That made for some interesting decision points. I like that. - Yeah, it was hot. It was a very neat game that I am excited to play again. - I think that when you passed, you just got a point and the thing where you got the handful of cards. - That's when you avoided your hand. - You might be mixing up a different game we tried, but the one that is just a super prototype that Mar

c showed us, but I don't know. - We played a lot of trick taking games. - The last player to pass wins the trick and collects the points on the bleached card, but will not score their pairs they have played. - Oh, that's true too. - The person who wins the trick doesn't matter what cards they use to get it. - If you pass, you collect the points for each of the pairs you've played. - Yes, otherwise you get them. Yeah, you don't get anything for how much you contribute to the blaze. Anyway, solid

game. Speaking of hot games, Star Wars Unlimited. This was, the con happened, was going on when this game released to the public. There had been a pre-release event the weekend before that some local game stores came out, but this is the biggest, most expensive, largest development team ever, most fun to game fantasy flight games has ever put out. And for anyone who knows fantasy flight games, they've been around for a long time and put out a lot of games. This is their new Evergreen game. Their

new forever game. Extremely excited about this. Wish I could share more info, because I was in the keynote and got to learn some interesting things about this game, but sadly we're not allowed to share those. Now what we did do is we got a demo at the Asmo debooth and it seemed solid. We did pick up a copy again, on the way home at one of the local game stores in Kentucky. The day after the con, we went around and hit all the local game stores, which was pretty cool. We picked up a copy. Some i

nteresting stuff here. There's definitely some magic routes. There's some dueling card game routes, but I also saw a lot of the deck building game, which we love the fantasy flight, Star Wars deck building game. It had the same thing where the goal was to destroy the opponent's base, where you're trying to do damage over turn. You had two different types of troops ground in space, and currently they can't interact with each other. You could attack opponent's vehicles or their base. They did the

whole thing that everyone seems to think is new, but it's not where you use your cards as mana, that at the beginning of the game, you pick two cards to be your starting. It wasn't called mana, it was called whatever. And every round you can put more cards in that pile to play your stuff. It is clearly inspired by Commander style magic gathering, and the commanders you get in a starter set are Luke Invader, so you do have leaders that are in play. What is different from other collectible card ga

mes is that during the game, you can bring them into play. So they're not just a card that gives you a special ability. And based on the ones we saw, it's based on how many cards you've already played and how much mana is in your pool. And remember, you can only play one mana at turn. So basically, at some point, Luke Invader will end up on the field, which was pretty neat. I thought it was neat that you didn't have to, we're gonna say tap the mana, because I don't remember what the actual wordi

ng is. You didn't have to, once you had seven mana, Vader will come out. You just have enough in your pool. You don't have to tap it or use it up. So that was neat. The way that they deployed was cool. The fact that you had ground troops and outer space troops, and they didn't intersect with each other unless, you know, cards were rules. - Unless they're something that they do. - Yeah, that was cool. - And the current version of that is Star Wars Unlimited, Spark of Rebellion. - Yes. - Is their

current version. - Like I said, we have a starter set behind us. I know the local game stores have it. If you do wanna try it out, head down to Tabletop Renaissance if you're local. Solon is more than happy to show you the game. All right, next one. This is, we're now out, we're on the exhibit hall floor. We're trying to take everything in that we can. First thing we did was hit Star Wars Unlimited, because I sat in the premiere, and I'm like, I gotta try this game. So next, I wander over to the

WizKids booth, and WizKids, I don't know, blew me away for just, they do a lot more cool stuff than in my head that I thought they did. Like I get their newsletters, and I see their games, like seeing it all in one place. WizKids is doing a lot of stuff. - It's not just clicks. - Yes, they're definitely not just clicks. Including a giant life-size mimic, and a giant life-size Pathfinder goblin that I want for my game room. And some other awesome looking stuff, some D&D maps, they had pre-painte

d monsters from the original Monster Manual for advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Great looking stuff, but what I wanna call out specifically is Star Trek Into the Unknown, their latest Star Trek game. It is a new X-Wing, I'll say it that way. It is a new Starship battle game with a whole campaign based on Into the Unknown, so they can mash up the different things. And I just wanna call it out for the best looking pre-painted miniature I've ever seen, the detail was bonkers. They had the Defiant th

ere, again, I've shared pictures of this. It actually said USS Defiant on the bridge section. I've seen professional painters playing Starfleet battles miniatures, this looked better than that. And this is just what comes in the box. And I gotta say, the game looked great. They weren't even at a point to show demos yet. It was just, look, we've got some of the components, check them out. - It was pretty, it was. I don't usually get excited about spaceships. I'm like, nah, but I'm like, details o

n the pre-painted miniatures, we've come so far, pre-painted miniatures usually look like somebody took something and dipped them in various buckets, so. - If you wanna check out, there are some photos on the board game geek page, including the Gem Hadar ship, which looks gorgeous. It's scheduled for right now for a Q1 release, but we're kind of at the end of Q1 2024. - Yeah, I don't think that's ready. - Things like they may be pushing that back a bit. - Now for hardcore fans, the one thing tha

t they are strong about on this one is everything will be to scale. Because I guess that's the complaint they got for their Star Trek League captains, I think it was called, Star Trek Attack Wing. That's what they, people who, their clicks version of the game and their X-Wing, licensed X-Wing version of the game, people were not happy that the ships were not to scale. What they are doing this time is everything will be to scale. Which I gotta say as a Star Trek fan, that's pretty awesome. - And

they had the bridge and cards slotted in so that people had to be in different positions on the bridge and stuff like that. That was the same game, right? - Yep, yep. - Yeah. So, and-- - Yeah, it looked, it wasn't just a miniature battle game. There was definitely more going on. Next up, we headed to All Play, we checked out a bunch of their stuff. Their hot game is the, was the River City one from here? - Yes. - Yes. River City Glassworks. Sean now knows who these people are, so I will say this

is the latest pinch back and riddle game. It looks really good, unfortunately. It was so popular, we never could get a demo in. I got a very vague overview of an Azul style game where you are drafting gems from a market to put them on your board, trying to collect sets. But when you draft from a section, it then moves down the river with a neat mechanic where you actually picked up the river tile and pushed it down. That's all I can tell you because this game was impossible to get to. It was on

e of the hottest games at the con that we never even got the touch. I am really curious about it, but at this point, it wasn't even out yet. So I'm looking forward to seeing that one, hopefully, at Origins. This one is apparently available on BoardGame Arena. So check out River Valley Glassworks on BoardGame Arena. - That's it, River Valley Glassworks. Now, what we did get to see is the new Kabuto Sumo Sakura Slam. Now, first off, to clear up any confusion, this is a brand new Kabuto Sumo game t

hat is fully compatible with everything in the original game. So it ends up in the original game, and I know the reviews were a little mixed on that one. I was a little excited about this game. I guess in the old game, it was really easy to just turtle and try to keep your beetle in the middle of the board. And part of that was you could push on pieces from any angle. Well, one of the things they fixed is they made it so that the plank that you push on new pieces is only attaches to the edge, an

d it's now a square ring, more like a wrestling ring than a Sumo ring, which they lost a little theming there. But also being a wrestling ring, there are now solid posts in all the corners, which make everything move much more interestingly than one thing being pushed on. Now, what this game basically is, is the redemption arcade game, where you put a coin in and it pushes the coins off, you're trying to push your opponent's beetle off. Now, one of the things they showed us here were all the new

characters. They look fascinating. It's fully compatible. Like one of the characters comes with a sword. And if you can get, and the way you activate your characters is if you enter from all four corners of the rings, you get to activate your asymmetric character ability. And like one had a giant sword that you then push into this ring to try to knock stuff off. It just looks really cool. I'm glad to hear they fixed the complaints I had heard about the original. I will admit, I avoided the orig

inal based on some of the reviews. It looks like they addressed all of those issues and this looks great. - Because the sword would peg onto one of those four rings, the four posts for the corners, right? - Yes. - And then sweep like that. So it was in place. And there was various other ones than the sword that was like a crab claw or something too. - I don't know. I am 99.9% certain that this game is not for me. I am not Dex game, but I'm still curious to try it. - And so this is all the charac

ters, except for two in this version are compatible with the original game. And when you do look over the overhead view, it is sort of a square surround of a round sumo ring. So they're still trying to keep with the theming. I don't know if there are any posts in sumo. - Yeah. - In any of the sumo arenas. I know there aren't any sumo ring, but in sumo arenas, if any of them have posts that may fit in thematically, I don't know, but yeah. So it's very, very good. - Yeah, and that one sword charac

ter is one of the ones that's not compatible with the original board because you had no rings to peg onto to spin the sword. But it's the other way is more what I mean. It's 100% up compatible. So all your characters from Kabuto Sumo will work in Sakura Slam. Next, a tiny game. A very, very tiny game. Gloomhaven, Bugs and Buttons from Cephalofare. Saw the Kickstarter, saw the ad, saw everything about it and nowhere did it ready me for just how tiny this game is. It is super tiny. It is designed

so you can play it on an airplane's tray. That is the design goal of this game. It is a solo Gloomhaven experience where you use your existing characters who have been shrunk down into tiny six millimeter miniatures and you go on an adventure dealing with Bugs and Buttons. Deanna, I wanted to take the mind thief home. - I wanted to take the whole game home, but I'm like little teeny, teeny mind thief, like the size of my pinky fingernail. And the whole game is just, it's designed to be played in

20 to 30 minutes. And I liked both the small footprint and the small timeframe, which made it kind of doable as a solo game for me, which solo games I usually avoid because of I don't have a lot of solo time. - Interestingly, this is a re-implementation of Gloomhaven, which was the user created content that Isaac had approved and sort of been happy to support. So he has now sort of incorporated Gloomhaven into a product of his own. - I would imagine you're gonna see people streaming that one, b

ecause it probably would be pretty cool content. Anyway, sorry, go on. - Next was "Cordisans" from "Pandasaurus," beautiful, tarot-sized cards. When I saw this, I totally thought they were going to explain to me a variation of "Battle Line," and that is not at all what this game is. This reminded me actually of "Biblios." You've got different families. I think there's like seven different families in play where you are trying to take cards for the different families who you're aligning with. You

're like, "I'm gonna align with the pig family, and I'm gonna align with the yellow family." At the same time, you could also play cards above or below this long table where everyone's eating dinner. And while cards above the table show that they're not in favor, those are like disfavorable things that families doing. Cards below are favorable things. And at the end of the game, you're going to get points for all of your ties to the favorable families and lose points for the unfavorable. Looked

fascinating. There's obviously way more to it than that. Absolutely beautiful looking game with a cloth board that just looked great. - It was super pretty. Big table presence. But the thin cards make you be able to lay everything out long and I don't know, it's lovely. - Next, also at "Pandasaurus," we have "Narr," K-N-A-R-R. This again reminds me of the other game we talked about for "Thunderworks," where you are collecting Vikings and each Viking has a different color and they each provide a

resource at the top of the card. Every time you collect a Viking of the same color what you already have, the entire column, like all of the cards of the same color go off and give you stuff. So it's kind of like "Vikings meets Splendor," or it also reminded me a bit of the action system in "Deus." You're gonna draft Vikings, you're gonna get resources based on matching sets, you're gonna use those to go on expeditions and earn points. Unfortunately, that's about all we were able to learn in a h

igh level overview, but the game does look cool and it does have more board elements. It's not just a card game. You had this like weird long ship where you were collecting your tokens and things like that. - And this one is out already. It's localization. The original game was released in Germany in 2023. There was a French-English split version and this is the first Canadian, or sorry, English version that is just been released in 2024. - You have anything to say about NAR? - No, it looks fant

astic. I'm eager to try it out. You pretty much covered it all. - Okay. Next, I just got a fanboy over Eve, "War for New Eden" from Titan Forge Games. We couldn't find anyone to talk to us about this. As far as I can tell, it was just like on display all weekend. But my gosh, did it look good. It let the ships, the amount of ships, the size of the hex board, the tech trees, the dual layer boards, and so on. There was just so much going for this game. This honestly might put "Twilight and Period"

with a shame if the gameplay holds up, but we didn't get to see any of that. - Next, we checked out "Thrive" from Adam's Apple Games. And we're just standing there waiting to speak to someone else actually. And we ended up chatting with the designer and he gave us an overview from just looking at the back of the box. But it sounds like Duke meets Zensu. And the pieces are these little squares. And again, I've only seen the back of the box, but they look like little squares of plastic with a bun

ch of cribbage peg-style holes in them. And each one, you put it out on the board, your pieces, and then it can all move forward one. But every move, you get to add a peg to your piece, and now it'll be able to move in new ways. And as you add more pegs, your movement options keep changing. And it looked really fascinating for an abstract game, something unique. - How odd, because this shows that having released in 2020. - Oh, it's an old game. - Okay, it's an old game. - We were actually talkin

g with them, we were talking with them about how it came out during the pandemic, so kind of got overlooked. And it's a very visual game with kind of wacky pieces. Somebody needs to see this to get how interesting it is. So I suspect it falls under hidden gem. - Yeah, they said they do, Duke, right? You move your piece, it flips. Every time you move a piece, you get to add a new way it moves, which just seemed fascinating. Next, I'm gonna call out Pac-Man Corridor from Hachette Games. It's Corri

dor, you can play Corridor. Or you can play the Pac-Man version, which is one versus many without the five players. Pac-Man wins if he collects the four power pellets, and the ghosts win if they catch him. And it just looks amazing. It's that Hachette, I think it's Giga-Mik, it might be who is the actual, because Hachette's like a distributor, who puts the game out. And it's one of those, you want it on a coffee table, it looks beautiful wooden game, but it's Pac-Man. And it just, it looks like

Pac-Man, it feels like Pac-Man, the pieces are all wood, it's just nice and chunky, just like Corridor. And I already love Corridor, Sean and I live streamed Corridor for Extra Life last year. We played a bunch of games in a row, it's a solid game. But Pac-Man version. - Interesting, by the way, Thrive is available on Board Game Arena as well. So you can check out Thrive on BGA. - So what are we doing when we're done with the shows? I really do wanna try that one. Unfortunately, they had one cop

y there, that they were trying to convince retailers to order, and it wasn't open. And I'm like, oh, I wanted to bring that one home. All right, I'm gonna fanboy again. Ascending Empire Zenith Edition. There is a brand new board game company out there. I'm sure most people listening to our podcast are aware of this, Play To Z Games, which is the founder of Z-Man Games, who has started a new company, has a lot of people we know who are invested in this company, from designers to content creators,

are all backing this. This was just funny because I sat there and learned about the game from a very enthusiastic gentleman that I had a great time with, who then flipped his badge over, and there was a slash singer who had just taught me about his new game and telling me about his new company, and it ends up he knew who we were. So that was my kinda fanboy movement there. This is a reprint. So Ascending Emptires, our friend Charles, liked this game so much, he went and made his own board. The

problem with the original game was, it was a puzzle-fit board with flicking pieces. And I'm sure most people already know what the problem with that could be. So Charles went and got a two-by-four, sorry, a four-by-four piece of wood and sanded it down and oiled it up and everything. Well, now you have a play mat with holes in it to hold the various planets, and you fixed all the flicking problems. This looks fantastic. I had Zev walk me through the game. You're flicking your ships to fly around

the board. If you get a ship that's within range of a planet, you can land on it, and your ship becomes a ground troop. Later, you can land another ship there and you can upgrade your ground troop to be one of two different types of buildings. And once you get three different types of buildings, you can upgrade again. And there's combat. Combat is deterministic. If your ship hits another ship, it blows it up. If your planet, if you have your ships encircle an enemy planet, well, if you have mor

e stuff there, you take it over and wipe it out. So if they've got one ground troop and a capital there and you surround it with three ships, you take it out. It's now your planet. So Forex, flicking, Diana will never, ever play it with me. Sean would probably dig the Forex at aspects. I don't know how well the flicking would go. It just looked fantastic. One of the cool ones that I really like, one of the mechanics is if you build an orbital base, it's a triangle of wood. So not only do you now

have your new thing on the board, but you can actually angle that and it becomes something ships will deflect off of. I just-- fascinating. And if you are listening to this right now, if you're on the podcast, it's too late. But if you're here with us live or within the next few hours, you have 45 hours left to back this on Kickstarter and get your own copy first among friends. Next one's another one, not for Diana. What I'll do to make up, because I got a few in a row here, I'll let her take t

he last one because it was pretty cool, is Niko Jima. I don't know who comes up with themes for board games, but obviously someone heard the message that you need more unique themes. So this has to do with a real life occurrence, I think, in India. Sorry if I'm wrong about that. But it's a dexterity game about cats hanging off of power lines. You can play it cooperatively or competitively. This is going to be hard to describe without seeing it, but you have all these wooden posts with rope power

lines between them in different colors. What you're going to do is roll some dice and they go on this disk board that's divided into four colors. And you'll roll the dice and it'll say purple blue. Well, you have to grab one of those, and then you're going to pull from back to determine what color power line you're going to put out. And then you're going to grab one of the sets of poles and a white power line and somehow place it across and you can stack them and power lines can't touch. But ev

entually you're going to pull a black cube out of the bag. And when you have that, you are going to grab a cardboard cat and hang it off the power lines, barrel full of monkey style. And those cats, I will say, are much heavier than they look for cardboard cats because every time I tried to hang a cat, my power lines all collapsed in on each other. This looks fascinating. It's a dexterity game. It's got table presence out the wazoo. It's more difficult than it looks, but then once you play a cou

ple rounds, you get better about positioning things and knowing the tension on the ropes. A fantastic theme. And one of the best things I liked is there are two ways to play. You could play competitive where the team that knocks it over loses, or you could play cooperative where you are just trying to place X number of power lines. So interesting, this this doesn't have a purely English version available. So somebody must be localizing it for this year. That shed is localizing. And I'm going to

let the Anna take the last one or the end of it was a state one, a two, a two, a 22, a two of KMA Expo. All right, so we were in the game night in the hall where we actually got to sit down and play a full game. And we got to try gnome hollow, which will be coming out from the op. And it was a prototype, but it was like a very finished prototype game. And it's got pretty watercolor style art. And it's about gnomes making mushroom rings. It's a point salad. It was just fun to play. But it was Car

cassonne meets worker placement, meets mushroom market economic game. Most better at describing games than I am. But what I can tell you that I thought was interesting was we played the family version. And there was a reverse side of the individual player boards, which was the uber hard version. And so you could scale it from a lighter family game. But you could also play both sides. You could have kids playing on the family weight side while adults at the table might choose to play on the harde

r side. And it wouldn't break the game. So I thought that was kind of cool. And we played it with the designer whose name escapes me. He was a delightful human being. And he was telling us all kinds of cool things about what he did to solve the game mathematically to make sure that it was balanced and stuff. And it's just-- Moe is telling me his name is Ammon Anderson. So yeah. So that was-- it was just a super fun game. And yeah, maybe I'll let Moe describe it in more detail. OK. Sorry. So you'

re going to draft-- think Carcassonne basically, but with hexes. And you're trying to complete mushroom rings. And there's a lot going on in this. That's the point salad. So what's going to happen is first, you're going to draft a mushroom ring and then a tile, and you're going to put it out. And then you have two actions where it's worker placement where you can place your gnomes on the board. And you have two gnomes. One, you're probably going to place on your newly growing ring so no one else

steals it from you. So there's no-- there's some cutting each other off, but it's less than nasty than farms in Carcassonne. It's hard to do. It's not necessarily worth it. Then your other gnome can also go on the tree stump to go to the market. Or once players start placing signposts around the garden, you can go on those to get something. Once you complete a circle, though, you then level up in a way. You remove a counter from your board based on how big the ring is and place it on an upgrade

. So think the labels and distilled in a way. So you're going to take one of these off and put it on a thing, and you're going to get a reward for that. Now, the basic ring is only three tiles. So a three tile ring doesn't get you anything, but it opens up a scoring at the end of the game. But once you get up to a seven tile ring, you actually unlock some really powerful ability. There's also a thing about collecting flowers, which count as rings on all sides. And once someone's put a flower in

the market, you then are collecting just from potted plants that you're planting in your garden, which are also end game scoring. Point salad, that's a little hard to describe. I'll probably get better at it with more plays, but just it hit all the right notes. And like Deanna said, the scalability, the fact there is an uber hard brain burning version of the game and a family weight version. And they also suggested you could play it even simpler and just remove the mushroom market. So all you're

getting points for is making rings. Like you can play with young kids by just, all you do is make rings. Whoever makes the most, every time you make a ring move your counter. Or you can play the whole thing. Cause every ring you made, you would get mushroom tokens and there was a market, but this wasn't a variable market. What it did was everyone was only allowed to sell each value once. So like once someone sold five blue mushrooms, no one else could ever sell exactly five blue. Someone could

sell six blue, someone could sell five. So there was a rush to get to the market first. - I honestly think this is going to be a contender for the spiel next year. Just had that family weight, but thinky basic gameplay is draft and make circles. - And your player board gave you, you're going to fill in spots to get points. So you might only want to make one little teeny three ring, three size ring, but the, you might, you're not going to make them all, but you have a variability of picking where

you go and where you get your points and your bonus actions and stuff for, and the way at the top, it was scored by pegging things in. Like there's a score line here and you, and you're pegging in pots of flowers at the top and you're pegging in your mushroom rings at the bottom. And it, it scores for both of them. And you just add it up. It's very elegant and simple to calculate it at the end of the game. I don't think it's coming across verbally without you being able to see it, but I liked t

hat. And the market where it was, the spots were taken up. There's just so many market tokens and not all of the spots will get covered. Some will end up uncovered. So you still, you're not completely cut off from selling your stuff to the market at the end to get some points. I don't know. It's just, it's, it's a beautiful game. Like just smooth. - Yeah. So interestingly, this actually kickstarted apparently a while back and, but we'll now be coming to retail in August of 2024 from our friends

at the op. All right. Now that we wrapped up day two of GAMA expo, I think we're going to take a short break and start that with a time, with a word from our sponsor, Grand Gamers Guild. - Words of a Feather is an accessible and beautiful word party game. The active player uses two words on their feather cards and one word they think of to clue the other players into a secret word. All players write down their guests for the secret word and can even bet points if they're confident. When everyone

reveals any player who batches another player scores a point, then the active player gets a point for all of their matches. - So after a successful Kickstarter, an independent Kickstarter, Grand Gamers Guild has swooped in to bring words of a feather to retail. Now there is a retail edition and a Kickstarter edition that will include two additional decks of feather cards. Now Grand Gamers Guild is always working to bring variety to your game night and true to form. This is like nothing else in

their catalog. This is the first party game really to come from Marc and his team. - But you can pick up Words of a Feather at grandgamersguild.com, where you can use our exclusive code, bellhop, B-E-L-L-H-O-P, to get 10% off either edition, as well as all of Grand Gamers Guild's other games. - Now this game really does look fantastic. The wear you draft, the way you set up the board is your word cards look like peacock feathers and you kind of tuck them in into this giant round display that loo

ks like splayed feathers on a peacock. And I am looking forward to having this one, trying it out because I think this is gonna be a great one for public play events to catch people's attention. Plus the gameplay sounds like that, just one style gameplay that everyone seems to love. I am really looking forward to this one. Plus it has a feature I have never yet seen in a board game to this day, which is the box is also a wall display with a hanging mount on the back of it. - The cover is super p

retty. It's like Art Deco Peacock. When Marc handed us a review copy to bring home, I was like, wow, I know nothing about this game other than it. I would pick it up at the store to look at it because it has the prettiest box. - Yes, but you can hang on your wall. - All right, and now we're on to GAMA Expo Day Three. - We're gonna start off with Deanna giving us an overview of the Horizon Fellowship. - Yeah, so we started off doing a media tour of the Horizon Fellowship members. So the Horizon F

ellowship is a program that GAMA has put together where they mentor a group for about eight months and they get help developing their game. And then the end of that mentorship is them getting to be part of this display at GAMA Expo. They weren't part of a display. They were down a row where they each had their own table and very nice polished booths and everything. So they had a media tour where they took us to each one and they quickly explained each game that was part of the Horizon Fellowship

for this year. And yeah, I'll let you take it from there, Mom. - All right, so it was pretty awesome. The first game we saw was called Bubble Net from Dreyer Inc. This is a game based on that whole thing where whales blow mud bubbles to catch fish. There was cooperative game where you're pushing things towards the center of a circle. There was Pirates of the High Teas as in Something You Drink from Pink Hawk Games, which was a worker placement game about tea and plunder. There was Cake Off that

spelled A-U-F from Julie Chen. This was a baking game that featured recipes from around the world. One of Julie's goals with this was to feature foods no one has heard of. And they did a great job of that. Next was Moon Bunny, which is based on Chinese folklore and Steam Up, which that's one I think most people have heard of. That actually won an any. Both of those came from Hot Banana Games. And interestingly, Steam Up came through the Horizon Fellowship last year. So they were showing off the

reward winning game from this fellowship. Next was Fluffy Dragons from Lamp, which we talked about and we played the night before that came through the Horizon Fellowship. Another one that the RPG fans of ours may have heard of, which was Dakuma, which is a deck of cards. The Dakuma deck is how most people talked about this game. That is from Golden Lasso. It is a mix of tabletop role-playing game tool where you can flip a card to help make your character, to come up with NPCs or so on. It also

featured its own improv heavy role-playing game and could also be used as a tarot deck on its own. Finally, there was Toasty Toast from Coco Chan, who had to say, "I just love toast, so I had to make a game about it." This is a party game about putting things on toast. - The Dakuma, I think they won an any last year too. - Yeah, I think they did. I think that's correct. Any of those stick out to you? - The Moon Bunny one was very prototype. It wasn't far along, but it looked fascinating. I've b

een wanting to try Steam up for a long time, so I'm just digging hot banana games in general. Pirates of the High Teas had a very, oh heck, what is that TV show we were watching? - Dragon Prince? - No, with the Pirates. - Oh, that's right, yes. Oh, geez, with Taiko Atiti. - Yes, that one. - Our Flag Means Death. - Yes, there you go. - It had that vibe going on with the art style and stuff. So I was intrigued there, the wheels, the bubble net game. That looked really polished, and I didn't get a

chance to try it out, yeah. - Yeah, of those bubble net is the one I would like for public play events. It looked simple enough, but very appealing looking cool pieces. One of the meetings we had during the day was with Floodgate Games. Most people are gonna know them for Sagrada, but they do have a bunch of other games. They showed off their hot new game, a prototype that sadly we can't talk about much. Now it's called Landmarks. All we are allowed to do is share a picture of the map and the bo

x. This is a very interesting game that reminds me of some social deduction party games kind of combined. And where it is is the players are lost on an island, and one player is trying to lead the other players around using one word clues. And I think that's about all we can say. - Almost code names-esque. I don't know. - This one doesn't even have anything onboard Game Geek, so I can't help you out there. - No, this is super, super new. This is one of, every person we talk to, we say, "Can we s

hare pictures? Can we do this?" They're like, "Fine, fine." Floodgate's like, "Nope." Oh, okay, maybe the board. Not with any components on it. But yeah, we actually played a round of this game, and I've gotta say it's doing some neat stuff. That's about all I can say. Next, I have to call one out. I got the internet to actually hit the thing. It's called Bamboo Bash from AD Games that just filled me with joy, because Mayday has put out a new and improved Click Clack Lumberjack or TikTok, Woodma

n, or Bling Blang Gemstone, whatever other version of this game is. Possibly just in mainly to get the rights back to the game so it's not been ripped off by everyone. It is a taller tower. It features new, better cores and edges. The bark is on different. The core is now, I don't know how to describe it without sharing it. It's not just perfectly round. It stacks a little better, it doesn't move as much, and it's easier to knock the bark off. The tower is almost twice as tall. One of the cute t

hings they added is a little panda miniature, and if the panda falls off, you lose. It's Click Clack Lumberjack improved, which as someone who hosts public play game events, where drinking is involved, this is a good thing. - It brought you joy because you were just happy that you got me to smack things with a little plastic hammer because I normally wouldn't. - Yeah, so apparently-- - Hey, you got a piece off on your first bit. - I did, yeah. - Apparently if you knock the little baby panda off,

he eats all of the bark that you've dislodged and you lose all your points. Okay, there you go. - Aww. - That's kind of cute. I like Click Clack Lumberjack, or one of the various, where the version I own is Click Clack Lumberjack. - Click Clack Jack is apparently what they're officially saying it's re-implementing. - Okay, sure. I said there's lots of different versions of it. I don't know if there were bug stickers on the inside of this one. Next up, I'm gonna call it another dexterity game. I

love, honestly, I think the best dexterity game in the world, which is hamster roll. Well, 25th Century Games is currently running a Kickstarter right now for a new localization, bringing hamster roll back to North America. It's been out of print for a long time. And one of the things they've included is I think it's four new pieces per player, which sounds like such a little thing, but as a hamster roll fanboy, I'm excited about it. And what I am happy to share today is you will be able to buy

them separately. So that is something I'm gonna have to talk to our local game stores about getting in, is the new pieces for hamster roll. - Your sheer giddiness when you discovered you'd be able to go buy those four pieces. - It's a little thing sometimes. So speaking of dexterity games, I guess I didn't even realize we had like a grouping of dexterity games here. I got Deanna to play around with another one. Do you wanna talk a bit about crossbows and catapults? - Well, okay. It's Restoratio

n Games, Redoing. It's a new version of crossbows and catapults. And they have a new non-elastic system for the catapults. And we were physically playing around with them and launching things off them. And they were just, I don't know how to describe it. It was very tactile and pleasing. And it felt very, like it would just last, like it was solid. That sounds weird to say something solid when you can make it go katink. And it had a tension dial. So, you know, it's little things for me that make

the game slightly strategic that there was a tension dial to adjust to try and get your targeting right on it. So, yeah, it was well done. - Yeah, that was the cool thing. - For a game that's not for me, it was well done. - You've got the catapult, right? You flick it back and like, I'm the old one. I guess you could add extra elastics. Well, there was literally a piece of the plastic toy you could turn to make it tighter or weaker to adjust your aim. There was a crossbow that literally didn't

use any mechanical, like there were no elastics, no springs. You just literally squeezed it and it shot the disc and the miniatures look great and the towers are a little more 3D than the original. And I'm like, I've got a video of Deanna flicking some discs and then adjusting the tension. I just thought that one was cool. - Now they did have that one at Origins last year, but it has come along and it was almost impossible to get your hands on it at Origins last year because everyone wanted to s

ee it, so. - Okay, a totally new thing. So one of the big things a lot of publishers are aiming for, and we heard this multiple times over the weekend, is the Target, Walmart, Barnes and Noble market. Now, I don't know if we're allowed to talk about its specific MSRPs, but it ends up there is a certain price point that you have to be under to get your game sold in these places. And a certain style of games tend to be popular there. So there was a big push from publishers we know and love to prod

uce, to diversify their game offerings to include this. One of those companies is Wise Wizard, who put out a drawing party game. Now anyone who knows Wise Wizard and their roots in, like Rob Doherty is a Magic the Gathering champion who went on to make card games, right? Like Star Realms and, not Ascension, sorry, Star Realms and Hero Realms. And this is a drawing party game from Wise Wizard, which just feels weird to me, but it's them trying to branch into this other market. - To be fair, they

have actually built an imprint around this market. So this is actually by Wacky Wizard Games, an imprint of Wise Wizard Games. - Yes, and you're gonna see that from other companies. That there is a definite drive to get hobby game publishers into those other markets, in some cases to lead them to their bigger games. So the game we played, we actually played a full round of this with the designer, Caution Sign. So think of a yield sign when you're driving down like a Caution Sign, an orange diamo

nd with a graphic on it to warn you, don't play D&D with squirrels, if you know the meme I'm talking about. You get two parts of your sign and then you have to draw it. I got Ghost Farmer. So I had to be like warning Ghost Farmer ahead, and I had to draw that. I don't remember what the other players got because I was busy drawing Ghost Farmers. Deanna was watching, maybe she'll remember, she was taking a video at the time. Once you're done though, the lead player, the active player, then takes a

ll of the different cue cards, shuffles in two random ones for the deck and then tries to deduce what each Caution Sign is. It was fantastic, it was really good. Like this, it was like Monstrosity meets, I don't even know, word guessing game. Like Monstrosity, no tellestrations because you don't pass. I don't know, it was just extremely well done. - Yeah, word guessing game, that's it. It's Monstrosity, word guessing game. - And apparently there are 10,000 combinations of words like stylish rhin

o, gassy monkeys, flexible cow, and melting babies. - And it was well designed, so your drawing board was the triangle and then the words would go at the top and the bottom, like they were diamond shaped, like good production value, prior race boards, like it was good. We would have taken a copy home if it was ready. This one has not been released yet. - There was some interesting deduction there where you have a pool of words that you're working from that you know are gonna match the people tha

t were at the table that were drawing, right? So you're like, well, if I figured out that this one's, well, it's a ghost, but it's a ghost what? Oh, it could be a ghost farmer, okay. But you do end up with, there's some extra thrown in to be a red herring, I believe. I was only half paying attention because I was busy taking photos, but well, I can't do both. - Yep. But yeah, that was it, right? Like a lot of it, like watching, they had someone at the booth come over that didn't play to guess wh

ile they weren't even at the table, they called them over after. And they just sorted out all the words and like, okay, yeah. And what happened was in this one, we had bear and panda. And that's where the deduction guy was stuck. He's like, okay, which one's a bear, which one's a panda? So that was a little rough. He like, he got fast, he got stinky, he got my ghost farmer right away. He's like, yep, farmer, yep, ghost, got a pitchfork, good. That one's done. And then move on to the next one. He

's like, oh yeah, I don't know between the bear and the panda. And it ended up that particular gameplay was the first time all weekend someone got a perfect score. And there was, of course, it's a party game. There was some scoring rules. I don't remember what they were. - And that was scheduled for June 19th release. - Okay, now back to that mass market. There is a new mass market version of Star Realms coming. This is Star Realms Academy. This is a new family white version of Star Realms. Ther

e are no text on the cards whatsoever. It's all icons. The most expensive card in the entire market is a five. Instead of having honor that you track, you just have tokens on a player board in front of you. And as you lose your health, you remove them. And as you gain them, you add them. One of the biggest changes from the original Star Realms is damage now carries over. So when you attack something, you put damage tokens on it. The art is absolutely amazing. I want a re-theme of all of my Star

Realms cards using this art, because it's just cute. My daughter Jen would love it. My complaint is it's not compatible. This is not something you can mash up with regular Star Realms. For one, the card backs are different, but the balance would be way off. This is a totally new version. There's all bases or outposts. So all bases block you from taking the honor away from the other players. And I can't remember that there's no shuttles. I think it's shuttles are the things you can always buy. Th

at doesn't exist. It's a smaller deck. It just it looked amazing. This was pure prototype. Not ready for production yet. Like we were playing with cardboard cutouts. - My first Star Realms. Yeah. - Yeah. - It didn't bother me that you couldn't incorporate it into the original game. I could see that it just totally wouldn't be balanced. It was super durable. And the way they dealt with the math and the tokens and the tracking in a way that would be very simple and not bog the game down for younge

r kids. It just looked really good. - Yeah, this one looks gorgeous. Right now it's showing a Q3 release. So that's still pretty vague, but maybe we'll see something post GenCon. - They're probably trying for Christmas release is my guess. Next one, another full game. Well, almost. They kind of cut the deck down a little bit. So we did a demo full game of Japanime game Sushi Boat, which is a really fantastic looking koiadic game that is all about going to an all you can eat sushi place with a su

shi conveyor. The board has plates of sushi that I don't even know how they did this, but they're like domed and look like they have little pieces of sushi on them. I don't know if there's plastic pieces under there, but like they have a glass dome over there. Just looks fantastic. I think it just started, but the dome makes it look 3D. And then you have this wooden board that is the sushi conveyor. When a new plate comes out, you push it and it all slides down the track. The actual gameplay is

actually a worker placement game where there are multiple seats along the track. Now I doubt in reality, you actually move to different seats. One at a sushi restaurant, but this one you do. So you move to a different seat. You then can spend a coin to activate stuff. So if there are employees near your station where you sat, you can tip them to get some abilities. After you've done that, you can collect sushi, which you take the plate and you put it on your growing stack in front of you. Like a

real sushi experience, you're probably gonna forget what you ate and you're not allowed to peek. You're gonna get points for plates of the same color in a row. You're also gonna get it for trying the most different types of sushi. And wasabi. During the game, you can collect wasabi. Each cube of wasabi is a point. Parts of the game are gonna come up something called the wasabi challenge. Part of the track goes under a tunnel. Well, the wasabi challenge has you guessed the colors of the plates u

nder the tunnel. So it rewards you for paying attention. Everyone's gonna get to hear about this one because we brought a copy of this home because it was fantastic. - This is an interesting one because a lot of people may very well get put off by the level of memory involvement in this game. If you aren't a fan of memory aspects of games, that could put you off this one. - I'm not a fan of straight up memorization and having to keep stuff memorized from round to round. But it's not too bad. You

're just trying to more or less remember what two plates are up at that end that end up under the tunnel. And when you bet, even if you get one of them right, you're gonna get a point for it. And you can just guess. I found it didn't take it away from the game. They didn't even tell us about it beforehand. So you couldn't possibly know the first round. They're like, oh, by the way, now guess what's under there. And I'm like, mm. - But first I was like, there's gotta be a reason that part of the

board is covered. So I kept it in my head. I actually won by having the most wasabi. - But it's, you're keeping track of that. You have to keep track of what you've eaten and what's in your pile. There's that you have to remember. It's a relatively short game. I don't know. I usually don't like games that have you memorizing stuff. This one didn't bother me. It's showing us 30 to 75 minutes. - Well, I wonder if that's it. - Yeah, I was gonna say it's not that short a game. Remember we played wit

h the reduced deck. - That's true. We did play a reduced deck. So after I played the whole game, I'll come back and tell you what I think of it. - Yes. Yeah, we'll be sharing about this one. This will be out at, best at four is the board game geek listing right now. - Yeah, we played with four. I could see that. - Oh, you know what was cool too? We were playing it and they had these little dishes that were holding the wasabi cubes and another component, the money. - Money had a tipping tray. - R

ight, and I assumed, oh, it's their demo. They put out cute little trays, but they actually came with the game. So that I thought was cool. - You literally get a wasabi plate. - And those cards, someone is asking, are those menu cards? - No, on the side of the board, those are the employees that you can tip to do special things. Like one employee would let you eat from the other side of the board. Another employee would let you change the order of two of your plates in your stack. Another employ

ee got you wasabi. - But there are, - Plus there was a whole, whole thing you did. - There are end game scoring cards that are menu cards that you take and then you might fulfill. - Plus we didn't even get into it. There's a whole side dish system where you can buy side dishes and there's an area majority for whoever ate the most side dishes and side dishes can be played to break the rules. I said, "High-lover overview, there is more to the game." I dig it. I thought it was fun. I think Shawn wi

ll like it. Kids will adore it. Probably gonna break that one out pretty soon. Except maybe I'll do an unboxing because components are so cool. Our next one, this is another one from the op that blew us away. This I will be surprised if it's not at least nominated for the spiel this year and that is Aqua. This is a tile placement game where you are building layers of tiles. And I played a couple of layering games like number nine. This is better. This was just neater. So you're starting off by b

uilding reefs in various colors. Now it is abstract. It's an abstract strategy game. So you're just basically trying to make sets of colors together and they're hexagonal tiles. And what you're trying to do is build a hex of all the same color reef. So say you build three yellow reefs, you then pick up a creature that you would put there. And I don't remember what was what, but let's say yellow is a clownfish. Well, then you make another reef next to that one and you make another set and you're

like, oh, I get to place an anemone. And you're gonna keep doing that placing these creature tiles on top of your reef creatures growing and that are being supported by the reef. Now, one of the other goals is to get your reef. So it's a set of at least four of the same color touching. And then you're gonna get bonus points for every creature that reef is touching. Now, once you have groups of creatures, you can then start playing predators on top. So if I've got my clownfish and I've got my ane

mone, I can now play my dolphin, which is a two-hex tile to cover both of those. And then when you're scoring, you just go down the layers. Like dolphins are gonna score so many points and you take all your sea creatures, sorry, your predators off, and then you count all of your sea creatures. Then you take those off and you count your reefs. And then just really neat layered system that really rewarded planning ahead. - And based on the predators that you placed on your board, that also gave yo

u some endgame scoring things. Like if you had dolphins, then I can't even remember. And that changed up every game because those were cards that fit underneath that would swap out each game for what the endgame scoring bonus was going to be for that type of predator fish. - Yes, so each of the different predator fish had an endgame scoring thing. So for example, dolphins would make each of your anemones worth two extra points. So when you remove that top layer, you're gonna get a bunch of point

s for your existing creatures out on it. Now, one of the interesting things is you wanna reward biodiversity. None of the predators would eat the same creature. So it would always have to be sets of different ones that encourage you splitting it up. And I think Roger's got a good point. Cascadia 3D, I did hear it called that during the week. - And what tripped me up was you take the predator fish off the top when you're scoring, but the sea animals that are living in the reef, you live there. So

you're gonna get bonus points for reefs that are four or more, and you're trying to build these longer reefs, but then you cover them up with creatures and then you're like, wait a second. Oh, now it's not big enough to score anymore. That tripped me up when we played us. - Interestingly, this one is actually officially called Aqua Biodiversity in the Oceans, because there is also a game from Tate Woo that is coming out this year called Aqua. - And there's some neat stuff going on here where th

e fellow developed it with his son while they were in lockdown for pandemic. So it was just kind of a neat thing. - Also notably the art is Vincent Dutray. So, yes. - It is. - There was a lot of Dutray. - Okay, Vincent Dutray must not sleep ever and only ever makes art because his stuff is everywhere right now. - His stuff was everywhere. All righty, we hit day four, which is the final day of GAMA Expo. Good thing we're only talking about this tonight. That's what I gotta say. So this next day,

so card game realms. The big things was Star Wars Unlimited and a new game called Altered. Altered was kickstarted. It was kickstarted by French company Equinox. It is the most funded card game ever to be launched on Kickstarter. And it may be the most funded game. They won some awards for breaking Kickstarter records. Now, Sean can go off forever on this and you can listen to our episode about Kickstarter and our thoughts on it. But this game was done before it hit Kickstarter. The only reason

they kickstarted this game was to build momentum, to build hype. Now, this game has some interesting things going on. It is a physical card game that you will be able to buy at your local game stores. Now that the first Kickstarter is done, they will never kickstart anything ever again. It will only be available through local game stores. And I'm sure some online local game stores. The game has fantastic artwork. It is a fantasy world based on traditional fairy tales. But it's a weird version wh

ere multiple realities are clashing together and you can have multiple versions of say Snow White. And you'll have different versions of Snow White. Now, they're doing a weird NFT-like system. No, it is not NFTs. No, it is not on the blockchain. They very firmly confirmed that. But there is some interesting things about how the card play is gonna work and how you're gonna have digital ownership of your cards. The physical cards don't matter really. And if you ruin one, you'll be able to go onlin

e and order a replacement for a buck. Every card's a buck no matter the rarity. You can always get your cards. Either some really funky stuff going on there. There's some gamification, I'm not sure I love. But what we're here to talk about today was the fact that I explained this all to D&D's like, I don't know. And I'm like, we have to try this. We need to sit down and try this because it sounds good. And oh my gosh, this is one of the best card games I've ever played. At least based on one dem

o. - It was so good. And I didn't wanna touch it with the 10 foot pole because I just, for one thing, I had problems with the addictive nature of buying magic cards and do not wish to touch collectible card games for that reason. So, and it's a collectible card game. And I'm like, yeah, I don't even wanna. And then we sat down to demo it and I got so engaged in it that I almost forgot to go to a preset meeting that we had because the gameplay was that good. It was asymmetric decks, of course, ri

ght. But I mean, it was very interesting. You'd see the way the cards work together. It wasn't confrontational. You're just, you have a companion and a character and you want the two of them to travel across this world and meet in the middle. And if your character and your companion meets first, you win. And it's not directly attacking each other and you're not tracking hit points. So that's just interesting. I wish it was a living card game. If it was living card game, I would be its biggest am

bassador in the universe because it was so much fun. Yeah. - Basically, like they took the dueling card game and removed the dueling and almost made it like an area majority board game race. I like without showing this game off, I don't even know how to describe it. You've got random cards in a row. Like the Anna said, you have a hero and a companion. Your goal is to have the two meet and reunite after a journey. Like that's your theme is these fairy tale characters going on an expedition and re

uniting. The gameplay involves three stats and it's just a matter of beating someone else at one of those three stats to move your counter up. But then there's terrain types where like in this terrain, you're in the forest and only whoever wins in forest gets to move up. You can't actually hit each other. There's no attacking. You can't defeat the opponent's cards. It had a fascinating rule that I'd love to see in more TCGs and LCGs where after your cards are used, you can keep two for the next

round, but then you have to resummon them basically. But then the cards have different costs. Like I was blown away by Equinox. I played a blue token deck. Deanna played a green deck with all these creatures that their ability was to take root. So at the end of the turn, instead of going away, they stayed there an extra turn. It was really fantastic. - So yeah, you have cards that you play and what happens is at the end of the round, they're going to go back down here and you can keep two of the

m and the rest are gonna go into your discard pile. And you can swap up which two you've kept there. It's almost like an extension to your hand that the opponent can see. And the green deck had cards that were anchored. So they'd stick around for an extra round. And there's some neat combos there with being able to anchor your cards and be able to put plus one counters on your cards because they're anchored, the plus one stayed around for an extra round. Like there was just some neat stuff going

on there. The way that the cards that were over here, and I can't remember what this area was called, where they weren't quite discarded yet, where you just played them once, you could bring them back a second time. Your reserve. When you played them from reserve, they would have a different cost. They might have some different powers that tagged off of them coming out of the reserve. It was just, it was fascinating. - So this one's interesting. - Yeah, and honestly, if you wanna stick around t

o the after show, we're getting a bunch of questions in our chat room about Equinox. I will have, or sorry, about altered. I'll happily talk more about altered. It's very unique. They're trying something new, which might revolutionize the TCG market, or it might flop and do nothing. I honestly couldn't tell you. What I wanna say here is that was a fantastic game. Like a really fantastic game. - And exceptionally clear everything on the cards. Every time the fellow that was demoing it really knew

it, it was very engaging. And every time I would think, and I'd ask him a question, he'd answer it. And then I'd realize it was clearly written out on the cards. - Further down. - Yeah, it was so clear. All the wording was so clear. Everything just made sense. And that does not always happen in a card game. - And if you do wanna get a taste for it, you can go to Board Game Arena right now, two player only. So you gotta find another player to play with. You can't do solo, but it is there right n

ow in beta to try and play as we speak. - And interestingly, Board Game Arena will be where you will be able to play with players around the world with your own deck. It is because Asmodee owns Board Game Arena, Asmodee is going to start using Board Game Arena in new ways. - We'll leave it at that. - Yes. If you go to their website, it's like altered.gg. You know what, I'm gonna grab it here. So I can tell people-- - Yes, it's altered.gg. - It is altered.gg. - Altered.gg is their webpage. I don'

t know what GG stands for, but if you wanna find out more, it blew me away. It really did. This was a game doing something new in many ways, both gameplay and what they plan to do for the TCG market and for fans of TCGs. And for those that own local game stores, they are doing a lot to support you. Don't be mad at them that they launched a Kickstarter. That's about all I can say. They were only the largest TCG Kickstarter ever. - Oh, largest TCG? - Yeah, there is a different game, the biggest ga

me ever, and nothing touches Brandon Sanderson for largest Kickstarter period. So-- - Ah, okay. There you go. I just know they won something and we're very proud of it. All right, and off of all the altered for now. I'm actually gonna be watching this one. I'm scared to watch this one, but I'm gonna be watching this one. Next, we headed over to Bezier Games, and I wanna talk a bit about "Blueprints" of Mad King Ludwig. Jay, a very excited ambassador for Bezier, showed off this game to us. And wh

at blew me away is this is a flippin' right. And in general, if I mention a game and say there's a flippin' right version or a rollin' right version, you actually expect a simpler, quicker, probably party version of that game. This is the opposite. This is actually, I forget what he said, he knew the exact number of points, but it was like 1.6 points higher on board GameGeek's weight scale. And I'm making that number off at the top of my head. Jay knew exactly the difference. This is a significa

ntly heavier version of Bezier Games. Now, the reason for this is for anyone who has played "Castles of Mad King Ludwig" is probably aware that you play a tile onto the board and then it activates and you get all the points and it does all the things and you get your score and you move on. This is the change is you get to save it up. You are drawn the room, you check off, you have the room and at any point later in the game, you can choose to activate that room, which makes the decision matrix f

or this game massive. Now, another cool feature of this game is something I've never seen in a flippin' right random right is the drawing boards are two layer and the top layer is actually a tracing board and you can physically put the card with the picture of the room you're drawing underneath like between your player board, between the layers to be able to draw it on. It uses different colored pencils to draw the different rooms. It features a lot of the main rules from the base game, but inst

ead of using tiles, you're drawing everything as you go. And I've gotta say it looked really neat, but the fact it's heavier, that's the thing that I think they need to start pushing is this is for hardcore fans of "Castles of Mad King Ludwig" for a more engaging, more brain burning experience. Just from a functionality standpoint, the fact that it was on that see-through drawing paper, then you could slide your card underneath. I need that in cartographers. We're constantly having to pass it ar

ound to orientate it properly to get it. Okay, so I'm not screwing this up, right? And then the other thing is just that small thing of them giving you the colored pencils that again, we've said we need the different colors from when we're playing various flippin' rights and this comes with the game. They've already thought that part out for you. I liked that. And the decision points, me able to decide when your rooms go off. I super wanna try this game. - Yeah, it looks good. And this one is av

ailable now. It kickstarted last year in March and was apparently released in February. There you go, it just came out. The last big event, technically the cons over at this point. PSI is a game distributor. PSI is Marc's distributor. Our sponsor, Grand Gamers Guild, goes through PSI. Bezia Games goes through PSI. Fireside Games goes through PSI. I could keep going. A ton of people go through PSI to get their games out. Oh, it actually might be manufacturer as well. I think they're manufacturer

and distributor. So at the end of Gen Con, I guess this is a tradition, not Gen Con, sorry, at the end of Game Expo, there's a tradition that PSI holds a game night. While we attended the PSI game night, good games publishing is with PSI. We attended this event. This was a mainly retailer focused event, but we had made enough friends over the weekend. They invited us to join them. So that was pretty cool. There we got to sit down with Kim from Good Games Publishing. Good Games Publishing is from

Australia. And once you meet Kim, you're like, yep, that is a man from Australia, who was very excited about their new surfing game. And you could very much tell that Kim was a surfer because he kept bringing up the thematic tie-ins in this game, including, I guess, evil jellyfish called Blue Bottles. So we played through a full game of Surf's Up. It was an interesting bidding game where there were waves washing up on the shore and they'd be worth different points. And we would have to play a c

ard from our hand. And I think the cards went from one to five and the highest bid would win it. But then there was, do you remember what it was? It was, they were the hang loose was the symbol. It was like your coolness factor or your rep. - Your rep, yeah. - Yeah, your rep broke ties. But the interesting thing in this game was, and then there was a card to pick up all your cards for anyone that knows that kind of game. The interesting thing was though, as soon as you claimed a wave with one of

your cards, that card was removed from the game. And I made the mistake of claiming a three with my five, which pretty much threw the game for me. And then every now and then these Blue Bottles would wash in. And these are these evil jellyfish that I guess sting you on the face. Well, there, whoever bid the lowest would have to take the Blue Bottles. And then they would collect the tokens. And he talked about how they would collect on your body if you got caught up in a Blue Bottle wave. And we

ll, that was representing the game because you would grab these different tokens and some hurt more than others. So they have minus points on the other side. For someone who's into surfing, this seemed rather thematic. It was basically an abstract strategy bidding game where everyone starts with the same hand of cards to bid with. And there's a lot of memory element of trying to remember what cards people played and what they still had left in their hands. And there was a whole market system whe

re you could also spend your reputation to buy additional single use cards. I don't know, it's interesting. Do you have any more to add to that? - I mean, it was a little on the light side for me. It wasn't my new favorite game, but what it did with the, I think it was zero to five that you started with. And then once you won the trick, that was gone. And then you would buy a two and a half or four and a half from the market to add new cards back into your deck. But those ones that you bought, t

hat you purchased to bring back into your deck, when you played them, whether you won the trick or not, they were gone. So you kind of wanted to hold on to those and make sure you put them out at just the right time. I like that you could see the waves that were coming. Like you saw this waves here, and you could see two ahead and know what number it was at and what there's a color matching shell thing going on too. - Yeah, and it was obviously thematically, it was neat if you're into surfing. -

So the Blue Bottle Jellyfish is also known as the Portuguese Man of War, for those who don't know the Australian. And it's actually, it's a respect, not reputation. - Oh, respect, thank you. - There you go, thank you. - I just remembered that the tokens were the hang loose tokens. Next is one that Deanna called, I think the best solitaire game she's ever played. It was something like that, which I wanted to get from recording. Some of the people were hanging out with, I joked that I brought a p

od person home. After the PSI, someone swapped out for Deanna. This is the latest game from Fireside. So one, I think we can say this, please be mad at me if we don't, but Fireside is done with Castle Panic. - Well, they're not done with it. It's just they're done with that being their focus. - Yes. - Their big focus. They wanna start moving on to other games. - So this is their mass market, family market card game to go with something we kind of hinted at earlier. It is called Ultimatch. It is

a cooperative card game where you are have, I'll let Deanna take over because she can describe this better because she enjoyed it more than I did. - I dug it. So most talking about how I'm a pod person because I like solitaire games, but no, he meant I don't usually like cooperative games. - Yeah, sorry. I said solitaire, I'm not cooperative. - Basically, if you've ever played the pyramid solitaire game, you make the little pyramid and you've got that card at the top and the tree gets bigger as

you're going down and they're face down and you're going to flip them up as you open up various, I'm assuming you know what I'm talking about. It's that. And I have nostalgic feelings of playing. There was this really complex two player version. I used to play with my mom as a kid. Is I just, I'm like, oh, nostalgia, it's a pyramid game. Okay, cool. But it's cooperative and you have a hand and you're trying to make matches. And if you can match and it's color and number. So let's say there's a y

ellow seven and it's at the bottom of the pyramid, right? And so you want to play a yellow or seven and that will match that card and remove it. But if you can play an Ultimatch, which would be say a two plus a five in yellow, it matches in two or more ways, then that's an Ultimatch. And then you get to not only remove that card, but also add a new card to your hand and add a new card to the pool that's in front that you are cooperatively using to complete these matches as you try to clear the w

hole pyramid. Did I do not get you up to scribing it? - Yeah, yeah. - I'm not great at describing games. I can tell you why I like them, but describing it's something else. - No, that worked. Like basically you're trying to clear the pyramid. You can do it by playing the appropriate color or number. Or if you could play, the other thing was there were primary colors and secondary colors. So there would be say, I'm drawing a blank, I'm secondary, green. There'd be a green number, like green numbe

r five. Well, if you can play a blue and yellow card that add to five, that was an Ultimatch. And you wanted to hit Ultimatches because one of the unique things in this game is there were some numbers in the center of the table anyone can use. Like most cooperative games there were limited communication rules. Like you're allowed to pass cards, but you're not allowed to talk about their values. So like someone would be sitting there and it looked like they were thinking too long. They're like, t

o try to trade cards. There was some interesting stuff going on. It was, I don't know. It reminded me a bit like, I don't know, Hanabi maybe? I don't know. It was interesting with the, and looking at how people were organizing their cards and how they were doing their hand, seemed to be a meta game part of the game. We did play it with the everyday board games crew who Danny wanted to play it because he lost so badly the night before. So we got vindication for Danny by the end of the night by wi

nning our game of Ultimatch. - And apparently not only is it adding colors or matching colors, but there's addition or subtraction of numbers. - Yes, that's correct. Thank you. - Yep, that's right. - So my thing is we had a really fun time playing it, but we were playing it with a really fun group and there was no quarterbacking issues. And I think the game has some mechanics there that stop quarterbacking. I need to try it a couple more times before I can say, "Hey, yes." - Yeah, it was neat. N

ext, I played a cutting game, which now there's a couple on the market. Clip cut, clip cut, parts, is one I knew of in the past. This one was called Dig Saw. You have a mine filled with gems and you are rolling two dice. One die is gonna have a number, the other is gonna have a color. The color is what line you have to cut. The number is how many lines, how many dots, how far you cut, I guess is a good way to describe it. And interestingly, when you roll it, you'll get to do it both ways. So if

you roll like a red three and a blue two, you could cut red two or three blue. So like you kind of swap the dice for what you were allowed to cut. And what you're trying to do is there were three different types of gems and you wanted only one thing on each cut. So you would cut it. And if it just had like one diamond on it, that's worth five points at the end of the game. And then, but if it had a diamond and something else, that was a, what do you call it? Something got in the mix. It was a ru

ined batch. You weren't allowed because it's a mix. So you're trying to cut this thing strategically and then there were special symbols that would give you extra cuts. I know it was interesting. I don't know how much I like the idea of a game you're destroying as you're playing it, but it was more interesting than I expected it to be. That one is coming from Stronghold Games. And I gotta say again, for games that are doing something different, I thought it was really neat. In the short demo we

did, I actually felt there was strategy. Like I wasn't just cutting randomly. I was very much cutting strategically so that I'm like, okay, next time I get a red one, I'm gonna get to cut this chunk off, which will give me a bonus cut of three and I'm gonna cut three over here, which is gonna cut this chunk off, which will then let me next turn cut and get this symbol off. I was interesting. It was, I'd never played anything like it. So that's probably the one of the most unique parts, one of th

e most unique games I played all weekend. Next, we sat down with Jay from Bezier Games and he taught us one of their new trick-taking games. This year is the year of trick-taking from Bezier with three trick-taking games coming out, two of which we brought home. The one we played that night was called Sandbag, which I don't know, I think it was an end of the con, last event of the con, the doors are closing in half an hour, hurry up and finish your game thing, that it just, I couldn't describe t

he game very well. So it was a trick-taking game where you had a sandbag, which I'm not sure why you had that. That was one, your highest card out of your hand put sideways and then you had two face-up balloons in front of that. When you went to go play, depending on if you had cards in the suit lead, you could do some funky stuff where you swapped for face-up cards for what was in your hand and then added them to the trick. It was golf scoring, you wanted the lowest possible score, you did not

wanna take tricks. You could do some nasty things where you would pile on another player, which is where the term sandbagging came in is. You could throw them lots of tricks they didn't want. It's about the best I can describe this one right now. And they said, I think it's because it was the last night of the con, it was the very end of the night and it was like half an hour before the hall was gonna close. - Yeah, technically this is a trick avoidance game, not a trick taking game. - Yeah, the

re was clearly something I was missing in the description when he explained this game and I'm just gonna blame it on being very tired in the end of the night. I know the sandbag card that you had in front of you, you could play at any time to just kind of throw it off and make sure you lost a trick. - Yeah. - That was something, honestly, it just did not gel in my brain for whatever reason. - So I wanna say that people are commenting already that because of the system of Trump and following Trum

p and how that changes, that it is a tough game to teach. So it doesn't sound like it's just you guys, this is a tough to teach game in the first place. Interestingly, when you guys said sandbag, I think about sandbagging, you know, stocking up things when it's actually a game about balloons and sandbags and balloons letting you go up and down and sandbags being your ballast, which is interesting. - Yeah, the theme was definitely air hot air balloons. So sorry, Bazier and Jay, we can't describe

this one very well. Definitely seemed interesting. It didn't feel like other tricktakers I played. And I do dig. I actually like tricktakers where you don't wanna take tricks. That's one of my favorites. Like when I play spades, I tend to bid low, for example. All right, that should be it. But you know what? We've already played two of the games we brought back from GAMA. So once we got back home, we fear we'll throw this in kind of like the bellhops, because we're not gonna do a bellhops tablet

op segment because we've already talked about games all night. So we're gonna cover the two we brought home. The first off is gelatinous from Steve Jackson games. This is a silly party game. There's pretty much no thinking required. You get a set of seven dice, you roll your seven dice, you keep threes, you pass sixes to your right, one's to your left, eventually try to make a gelatinous cube out of the green dice. So you're literally trying to stack eight dice in a cube. It's cute. I played it

with Sean and Deanna at a local coffee shop. It was good for a distraction game while we were talking. And I played with the kids earlier, and actually my kids really liked it. They thought it was fun. We played five rounds, I think it was, in a row and Genevieve's asked to bring it to school because her Uno loving friends are probably gonna dig it. - It's left, right center with the gelatinous cube. That's... - Yeah, there's no strategy to this game. You roll dice and like, yes, you get the ten

sion. And honestly, if you want some more detailed thoughts on gelatinous, I did write up a first thoughts for our Patreon patrons. So if you are a tabletop bellhop, Patreon patron, I go into a lot more depth as much as there is about gelatinous over there on our Patreon. - Yeah, this one is, you know, it's a bar game for role players. - Yeah, perfectly good for what it is. Next though, we played another of Bezier's new trick-taking games. One, maybe my thoughts will change as we play more, but

one that I instantly liked more than Sambag, and that is Xylotar. This is the game where someone heard people like games with unique themes. There are not enough unique themes in board games. You know what board games need? More unique themes, because this is a game about a polar bear that went to a key to a concert that featured a keytar, and loved the keytar so much, so went out and bought one, but found his polar bear claws couldn't play it, but he can play the xylophone. So he hired a scient

ist to invent the xylotar, which is a mix of keytar and xylophone, and made him the ultimate instrument. Sadly, that scientist then went missing, and the Canadian RCMP is now on the hunt for the polar bear, thinking he might've killed the scientist while that's not true, the polar bear is on the run, and has headed north up where he can see the aurora borealis, the Northern Lights. How's that for a theme for a board game? - What the heck? What is with all this story? It's a trick taker. - And no

ne of that has anything to do with the game, except for the fact that you kind of lay out a xylophone of sorts in front of you. That's it. - Yes. I had to share that, because I don't know. At the booth, they had a physical xylotar. - It was neat. - Jay from Bezier has obviously practiced playing the xylotar. It was amusing, the prop was awesome. Trick taking game, where you don't know what your own cards are, sort of. Your cards are dealt out. It's a game where you have, how do I describe that d

eck? So like the lowest note, there's numbers zero through four. The next one is zero through five, then zero through six, then zero through seven, then zero through eight, zero through nine, all the way up to zero through 10, I think if you're using all the suits. There might be a zero through three. I can't remember what the lowest one is. You deal out all the cards, all the players, then you take those and you put them in numeric order from lowest to highest. You then put this high note key c

ard on the back and pass those cards to the other player. So you have just looked at your opponent's entire hand. I've never seen a trick taker do this. That player then takes the cards out and lays them out in order to form their xylo tire and here's where you get the kind of look like a xylophone. Then it's trick taking. There's a rule for what plays first. I don't remember what it is. Then everyone follows suit by playing a card in their hand. Well, all you know is the order your cards are in

from lowest to highest or highest to lowest. And you know the colors and the colors matter because you have to follow suit. And one of the suits in a three player game, it's yellow is Trump. So it's like this bizarre game where you're like, I don't quite know what I have. So I'm gonna play this one at the end and like, oh, it's a five. That means everything to the right of this is a five. So everything I have is five or less except for this card over here. And then you play a trick taking game.

You get points for how many tricks you took. Now to make things interesting, it's also a bidding game like say spades. Anytime after playing a card, you can say, I'm gonna bid. You pick two of your cards in your xylo tar, look at them and pick one to be your bid face up. Note this also lets you see another card which can give you an idea what your other cards are. That's pretty much it. If you hit your bid, you get five extra points. You play three rounds, highest points wins. - There's some ne

at stuff going on and it's the backs of the cards give you the information you need. Like you're looking, oh, I'm gonna get the number range wrong. But let's say you're looking at the dark blue card and it's laid out in your xylo tar in front of you. And you've got four of them and they're in different spots because they've been put in numerically. But each of those on the back will say zero to six. So you know, if it's all the way down here, the highest that could be is a six, even if it's on t

he high end. And that might imply that the rest of your cards are very low. You know, and you can guess in those ranges. And I'm not a card counter. I don't wanna memorize information. When I heard I'm gonna see my entire hand and then pass it off to the next person and also have to try and remember and guess my own numbers. That sounds like work, but it's actually quite enjoyable. And I liked the decision points of like, am I going to bid early just so I can take a peek at two cards and then yo

u have to bid on one of those. You have to pick one of those two cards. That might be nowhere near what you think you're gonna take for the tricks. But if you take seven tricks, it's one point each, that's seven points. You might end up better off with that than you would with getting the five points for getting your bid correct. So I don't know, I liked it. It's good. - Interestingly, this is a re-implementation of another game by the same designer. They've just sort of- - With less polar bears

? - Weeked their game, no polar bears apparently. It's called Magic Trick from 2023. But it's the same thing where you can't see your cards. So they've taken that and they've sort of massaged it into, there is even a high note. It's called high side in the original game. So they've sort of tweaked it and massaged it into what it is now and then slapped a polar bear on top. Because why wouldn't you? - Because why wouldn't you? More games about polar bears, like yes. And note again, a music game,

yet another music game. - Indeed. And if you know what all the different types of notes are, quarter notes, half notes, eighth notes, dotted eights, that actually is part of the suits of the game. So it's as well as colors, they use the different notes to differentiate suits. - Which is also good for accessibility. - Absolutely. So that is only some of the games that you guys got to check out. - Yeah, there's honestly tons more we could be talking about, but we'd be here all night. I'm just gonn

a say we saw a ton of great games. We brought home quite a few, shared some pictures of that on my Twitter account, if you've seen it. We got quite a few games that we received review copies, we had some gifts and we bought a few. We can't wait to start getting more of these played. So look forward in the coming weeks, to hear more about some of the best games we saw at GAMA. - Yeah, there was no way we could have covered it all. Like we had a quick look at Harvest Hoppers from Snowbrite Studios

. It was just enough to realize it's not the kitty game it looks like. And then we had no review that the folks at CGE gave us on Kuntahora and the market mechanics looked so interesting and we brought home a review copy and we're gonna dive into that one. And like that Sirens game that I was talking about during the coffee break with the Greek art and the fact that you can actually play music on it and stuff and I just like, there was thousands of games there. We couldn't see them all. There wa

s games, so many games. - So many games. All right, well, we have been having an active log. I think we brought up a lot of what's been talked about as we were going. So I don't think we need to necessarily jump in. Although Snailruns does say that the premise for the Xylotar does sound like something a six year old would make up. - To be fair, maybe the designer's kid wrote it. You know, it's got that act cop feel. All right, so I think that's enough about GAMA Expo for today. Remember to join

us next week when we talk about the show in general and why we think every designer should try to hit up designer day and people should really be looking into the Horizon Fellowship. - Well, if you're jealous, you didn't make it to GAMA Expo, but appreciate the info dump. Show your thanks by heading to patreon.com slash tabletopbellhop. - And remember, we're actually here to answer your gaming game night questions. We are the Dear Abby for Gamers. Send your questions to questions at tabletopbell

hop.com or head over to the website and click on Ask the Bellhop. - Well, before we wrap up things for the night, we do have a couple of announcements. Now this one is for the locals. - So our first ever Brews and Board Games event is coming up on Thursday, March 28th at the awesome Walkerville Brewery right here in Windsor, Ontario. And I would love to see as many people as possible out. We need to prove to the brewery that Windsor Gamers are a group worth supporting. - Game night runs from fiv

e till nine and there will be drink specials throughout the event. Bring your own games or play games from the tabletop Bellhop library. Myself and other game teachers will be on hand and this is the perfect chance to try out a new game and meet other local gamers. - Now next is some good news about the Point Salad app we talked about recently. - So Mipmap Digital reached out to give us an update based on our review from last episode. For one, the issue I had should be fixed where I was locked i

n an infinite game that I couldn't end. They changed the winning page from having a button you had to hit to making it so it's tap anywhere to go on. And when I did that, I finally got out of our infinite loop. Next, they are planning to introduce an option to hide scores since we're not the only ones who have requested it and complained about the fact that it's easy to do the math. Then finally, in response to Sean's main complaint about having to hit and turn every turn, they can't remove that

because they don't know if a player will want to flip a plate to a veggie, which is one of the options you have on every turn. So after selecting two veggies, the game can't assume you're done because you might want to actually flip your plates. - I'll be honest, I did forget that was even a thing you could do. I've never actually done it in a game, either digitally or for real. I still think that they could make it an option because other than the last hands of the game, you could just know th

at you have to do it first and you don't take that on yourself to make it an option. But I do understand their reasoning because having that turned on could cause problems for some players. - And I will give you a heads up. Roger Dodger will also be bringing games out to Walkerville. So there should be plenty to play. - Well, that was the double bell. - That means our shift is coming to an end and we're going to have to lock the lobby doors. - Well, before we start locking things down, let's tak

e a moment to thank a selection of our Tabletop Bellhop Patreon patrons. - Evil John, Thank you Evil John. - Carlos, Thanks Tycho. - Valentine Pasche, Thank you. - Dianne Tousignant, thanks Ma. - And Chris Leary, thank you Chris. - Could add Deanna say some of those. We'll have to remember that for next time. - Now, even when we're not here live, you can always find us at tabletopbellhop.com all over the web as TabletopBellhop (one word) and on your Podcatcher of choice as the Tabletop Bellhop

gaming podcast. - If you've enjoyed tonight's show and learned something new, you can show your support by becoming a Tabletop Bellhop Patreon. That gets you access to First Thoughts Reviews, our pre-production show notes, bonus audio, and more. - Well, that's all for us tonight. You can also support us by giving us a thumbs up, a like, leave a comment, or better yet, tell your friends and fellow gamers about our show. For the Tabletop Bellhop gaming podcast, I'm Sean. - And I'm Deanna. - And I'

m Moe. - Thank you. - And, - Game on. (bell dings)