 So we are here today to talk about the 41 tabletop games you must play. Now, we're going to be really clear about what this panel is. This is not the best 41 games by any stretch. They're not even our favorite 41 games. I don't even like all the games on this list. They are literally in a random order, meaning I don't actually know what the order is. You went to random.org and shuffled them so that you cannot complain to us about the order. Because I do not want to have a debate over whether Settlers of Khan is better or worse than Batman. You might have seen, we've done this panel before, but we called it the 40 tabletop games you should play. For some reason, I keep submitting all these erudite panels to Pax, and they don't want those. They keep doing all these clipbait panels that RIM submits. So here we are. I need a free badge, so I do it anyway. But here's the deal. While we've done this panel before, there is no overlap between that panel and this panel at all. 40 different games. In fact, it isn't even 41 games. I'm not exactly sure how many games it is, but it'll fit into the hour. It's enough games for 60 minutes and a free badge. But the deal is, when we first did this panel, the idea was, and it's on YouTube, you can go to our website and watch it, it is a list of 40 tabletop games that if you play them, we'll cover all the kinds of things that can be in tabletop and force you to expand your horizons. Like give you a foundation to be a better gamer, be a better game designer, maybe even be a better person. So the problem we're trying to solve now is something very different. This is an arbitrary and capricious list because the fact is there are too many games. You go to Board Game Geek and try to figure out what random board games should I play. Most of them are bad. And you can't trust those BGG ratings, right? Because the BGG community is the one who determines those ratings. And if you're not the kind of person who's a BGG community insider, those ratings are not going to agree with you. And even if you are on the inside, everyone's got different tastes and those ratings are not helpful for you whatsoever. I mean, you have the one friend who keeps saying, hey guys, you want to play this game and you definitely do not want to play that game. But the real point of this kind of panel is that I'm talking mostly to magic players, like it's okay to love magic, but play more than one game, at least once in your life. Because if you expand your horizons and play a lot of different games, you might actually find out that you like really weird, like, train games that guys with beards play late at night. We're train game people now. We got tricked. Let's go choo-choo. So without further ado, we're going to talk about 41-ish games that we think all of you should play for some reason or another. Start right up with an RPG. All right, so this RPG, a lot of people, you go to play an RPG, right? And you're thinking, man, I got to get a GM, I got to prep the session, we all got to make characters, we got to get people to show up at the same time, people can't leave, it's a big pain in the butt. This RPG comes in a tiny box. I could open it up and play it right now with people who've never seen it before. The rules explanation takes one minute, yet it's an RPG. When it works, you draw some cards. The cards tell, well, first you get everyone, a person's a judge, one person's lawyer, right? It recognizes you get like a wig, a robe. You get, when I kick-started it, I got the extra gavel bonus. But yeah, the cards just give you, you know, a court case. Oh yeah, this person's mad about this, but everyone's a ghost or some of the people are ghosts, and then you act out the case, and then the judge decides who wins, the end. And you do this over and over and over and over again. The magic of this game, you know a lot of people like want to play role-playing games, but you feel awkward. Like everyone feels awkward trying to role-play until you get used to it. I've watched people who don't want to role-play, who are strangers, get kind of roped into this game. Five minutes later, they're yelling and crying and screaming. You see some people in the corner and tabletop of Pax playing ghost court, they're all rowdy. You walk up, next thing you know, you're on a jury. And it just happens. So we try to avoid new games because they haven't stood the test of time. There's a lot of games I like until I don't like them. But sometimes you go and you find something new, and it's just so magical that there is no question that this is the hot shit, and this is the hot shit. So one, Japanese tabletop games are starting to really bust, like break out in the United States, and more and more of them are being brought over here, and a lot of them are great. Two, in the first look area at Pax Unplugged, we saw this game, and someone said, oh, that's a Japanese trick-taking game that also uses dice. We already heard hype from it from the enforcers who went to gather it from parts beyond, right? And then I went, I'm like, I gotta find this thing. Everyone was hyping it up on Twitter, and they were not wrong. So you ever play trick-taking games, like your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents play in Michigan, like Uker, Harts, all those kinds of games? A lot of German-type tabletop gamers, they don't think of those as games. They don't play traditional card games. Those games are actually really good. This is a way to see what those games are like. But if you already do play trick-taking games, this is a crazy good trick-taking game. I don't actually recommend this as your first ever trick-taking game. I would just play any other trick-taking game first. Microsoft Harts is totally fine. Microsoft Harts, Wizard, just not Ridge, but Uker, something else first, and then you'll be able to play this one much more easily because it has a slightly advanced trunk mechanic. People who know trick-taking games know what we're talking about. Yep, but the deal is this game, there are two copies of it in first look here, and you can just go try it out. Right, this is a game, they just had two pre-orders for it, and it sold out like within a day. So good luck. All right, people love a game that is like mafia negotiation. There's a lot of games where the theme is you are in some sort of crime syndicate. And a lot of them are all actually the same kind of boring game, but a few of them use that genre and have mechanics that actually cause you to play a game that is like being in the real mafia. This is one of those games. This game actually is pretty serious, very hard to win, but still has a lot of bargaining and social stuff. The things you want, like you want to extort money out of your friend at the table, this game lets you do that, but it's still a real game you can win. It isn't just like werewolf. Yeah, basically it sort of goes like you're a mafia boss, you hire people that work for you, right? And then you've got jobs you want to do. If you succeed at completing the jobs, you get money, you're trying to get the most money, right? But the thing it does that's unique, and this is one of the things like when these games, when we talk about them in a panel like this, there has to be some like nugget, some unique thing about the game that makes it like there's a reason for you to play it. And with this one, you know most games where there's trading negotiation like people don't want to do it. You know if you play settlers with people who are good, no one really trades with anyone. Maybe in last place trades with second to last place. Maybe, yeah, maybe. This game has a clever mechanic where you can make deals and promises. So I want to use your crooked lawyer to pull off a job and you'll be like, well, you can use my crooked lawyer at any point in the future, but in return, you have to let me use your assassin at some point or you have to give me 50 bucks right now. It like gives you a good mechanic to make pretty complex deals with an abstract promise token that you just put on the thing that you have the use of later by putting structure around that negotiation and by making it so that you can't really do much in the game without making deals, everybody's got to make deals. And it sucks when you've made a lot of deals and then all those promises come due in the same turn. All right. Sheriff, not again. Yeah, I think a lot of people know and love this game, right? This is a game all about sneaking stuff past the sheriff into the town so you can sell it, right? Robin Hood TSA. Right. So all you do, you take some goods and you put them in a bag and you close the bag. Everyone puts their goods in a bag and hands them to whoever the sheriff is turned. The sheriff decides which bags to open, if any, and if the sheriff finds contraband, then the sheriff is like, ah, I got you. No pepper allowed in the town. What's that? The king's cheese? You can't bring that in here. Stealing the king's cheese. But if there's all legitimate goods in there, then the sheriff's in trouble because it's like, oh, sheriff, you opened my legitimate goods? What? Pass it, everybody? All right, no good for you. The cool part, the rules are pretty clear. The game, the physicality of this game is why we're telling you to play. It comes with actual bags with snaps that make a really loud snap when you open and close them. Where you're putting stuff in your bag and the sheriff's just sitting there, once you snap it, you can't unsnap it. Like, it's done. That's it, the end. And then the rules say you have to look at the sheriff, look them in the eye and tell them what's in the bag. There's three apples in this bag. You said there's three apples, well, shit, I opened it up and there's three crossbows. If the sheriff's wrong, it's a trouble. As is the name for crossbows. This game is way fun and is a good game to have that mechanic that people like to have where you're trying to lie to each other, but it isn't just like a really simple dumb card game. There's actually a game around the line. All right. Yeah, yeah. All right, so this is a really simple hide and seek game. One person is Long John Silver. You don't know where the hell they are. Everyone else is trying to hunt Long John down. And the thing is, most of those hide and seek games, not if you played Scotland Yard, also known as like Mr. X. Theory of Dracula. Theory of Dracula. You know, they're all games with boards and maps. Clue to. Right, you're moving along lines and it's a pretty simple search algorithm to just create a dragnet and move in where the person can't escape. This game doesn't have any kind of grade. Well, there is a grade, but it doesn't really matter too much. Long John draws at the start of the game a literal dot on their mini version of the map and that is the exact spot that they are in and they can move too a little bit, right? And you're using actual like compasses, right? It comes with elements, it comes with this. You've got a big compass to draw circles and move with lines and rulers to try to like get your dude on top of that exact spot. So the nautical theme of Pirates matches the nautical mechanics of using, you know, like you're drawing on a seamap even though it's a treasure island, you know, and be like, Long John, are you in this circle, right? And Long John can lie sometimes. He's got tokens for lying, right? And it's all about, yeah, it's co-op. You're trying to find the person but also it's competitive. I need to be the one who finds Long John. I can't let Rim find him, so I gotta make the final grab. So I'm now trying to share a lot of information with the other players. The other cool thing is Long John is a character and eventually Long John doesn't just win the game if no one finds it, that's boring. Long John wins the game by eventually appearing on the map and trying to get to his treasure before any of the players do. So now Long John's on the map, like moving in directions, trying to get to the treasure. Long John behind the little screen also has tiny versions of all the tools the players have to draw and measure and do things on the tiny map. It's way more fun than you think it would be. Well, it's important for Long John to have the tiny map. Otherwise, if Long John was using the big map, you'd see, huh, Long John keeps looking at the left side of the map. I wonder where his treasure is. I think the game just got an expansion or a sequel or something. Like, there's a lot going on. I think there's like a sequel or something coming. Yeah, it's good. All right, Marrakech. This game is pretty simple. A friend of ours got this to play a long time. Either of I should have brought it. You got this thing. This thing's walking around the board and dropping carpets behind it, like leaving all the snail trails of carpets, those physical carpets. But the cool thing about it is the game's actually pretty abstract. The thing moves around like a couple of spaces and you decide whether or not to turn before moving. And the scoring is all around laying carpets down on top of other people's carpets. Right, so everyone's got a different color of carpet. I'm the green carpet, rims the yellow carpet. And at the end of the game, we look at the board straight top down and we count how many squares is green showing, how many squares is yellow showing. So when you cover someone up, you take away a point from them basically. Now the cool thing is most games that either have like, you don't really interact with other players that much, like it's just a worker placement game or games like risk where you're literally just fighting with each other. There's a lot of games that are abstract like this that look like they're not that interactive. You don't feel like I can attack my friend in this game. But if you actually play this game, you can attack your friends. You're gonna have to, because even if you're that person who doesn't want to attack anyone ever, right? You're gonna have to, because the board's gonna fail. Gotta lay that carpet somewhere. Gotta cover up somebody. And they're like cloth carpets. It's weird how much that adds to the game. Yeah, it's really fun because you sit there and before the game, by the end of the game, you're gonna play all your carpets, right? But during the game, you'll use the carpets to play with these things. Kinda like stacking all your meeples. Yeah. All right. Here's one we can get a little more mean on. Seven Wonders, pretty good game. Takes a lot of players, has a lot of problems, but there's another problem in the game industry. A lot of times you and one friend wanna play a game by yourselves. There aren't that many good two-player games until relatively recently. Especially drafting games. Drafting games usually require several people to sit around a table and pass things around. If you only got two people in a drafting game, it's like, okay, take one pass to the other person. All right. And I know, you now know the whole hand. Yup. It's kinda silly. So Seven Wonders Duel actually came up with a really clever mechanism to have a draft that only two people are needed to play. And it also solves another weird problem because Seven Wonders Duel, I think is actually a better game than Real Seven Wonders. Because Real Seven Wonders really relies on what the players to your left and right are doing and what the rest of the group is doing in terms of other things like the science cards. Meaning you don't actually have that much control over how well you do in Seven Wonders unless everyone at the table is similarly skilled. If six people are really good at Seven Wonders and the seventh person sucks at it, whoever sits near them will just win. Like the game is sort of broken in that way. Seven Wonders Duel, you're only playing against one person. It's just who is better. It's a very pure test of the same kinds of skills you're testing playing Real Seven Wonders. Just make sure that both players are somewhat equally skilled. Yeah, otherwise two player games where one person is way better than the other one, not that fun usually. Don't play basketball one-on-one with LeBron. Right, it's not a good idea. All right, talk about a German board game. It even has a German name, Hamza Toytonica. Right, you gotta watch out for this game because the rule book is way bad. Go to board game, you can get the real rules. We were at a convention. Someone taught us this game. We started to play it. It turned out they taught us wrong. Someone walked over and said, guys, you're playing it wrong. Taught us the right rules. We kept playing. Someone else came by. We were still playing it wrong. We were taught this game wrong three and a half times. We only figured it out by reading the rules ourselves. And then when we read the rules ourselves, we realized why everyone was wrong all those times. This game is cool because it has a theme about, well, German stuff and trading a long time ago. But don't worry about that. You don't care about that, it's a bunch of BS. To the point that when I teach people this game, I call things like the helicopter because it has a merchant and a trader and they are very different. And one of them is more powerful than the other one. You can see how that would be confusing. So we call it the disc in the cube. If you learn to rename everything and learn, teach yourself, how to ignore the theme of a game. There was a Mega Man board game that came out a while ago and people were like, oh, Scott, you like Mega Man. You would probably like this Mega Man board game. And I was like, I do like Mega Man, but that game looks like a real bad game. It doesn't matter what skin you put on it. It's real hard for a lot of people to separate the theme of a game from what the game actually is. Right, so this is the opposite problem. The theme on the game is whatever, nothing, right? But the game itself, oh, it's so nice. So the game itself, it's a lot like Puerto Rico in the sense that other than these plates that you eat food off of, like literally, forget the theme, but there's these plates you eat food off of. They're the only random element in the entire game, just like in Puerto Rico, the plantations are the only random element in the game. Meaning if you lose this game, that is because you made a series of bad decisions over the course of the game and it is 100% your fault that you lost. If you win, you can say I'm legitimately in this very narrow space, smarter than all of my friends, in the context of these helicopters and disks. But the core mechanic of this game that's great is that in order to, you're basically claiming these little roads by putting your cubes on them, right? You can't put enough cubes in one turn to just claim the whole road. So it's like maybe there'll be a road with four spaces and I put two cubes on it. Then Rim puts two other cubes, now we're both sort of blocked. Well, to kick the cubes off, you have to sort of spend more cubes to bump and then fill. And if you get attacked, you get to put even more cubes out on the board. Right, when you get bumped, it's like, okay, you bumped me, more cubes for me so that you can come back on somewhere else even stronger. So it's like, even if someone attacks you, it's like, well, that only helps me, great. And if someone doesn't attack you, okay, I'll take it for free. You can't lose no matter where you go. So the game ends up being, and there aren't that many games to do this well, a highly reactive game where you almost have that brain feel, you know, like mouth feel like you eat a food and like food people like, oh, the mouth feel of this thing. I like to talk about games in terms of the brain feel. The brain feel of this is like a super hardcore, like tricky, tight German tabletop game, but it's also highly interactive and highly political. You are attacking players, you're attacking territory. There aren't many games that have all the feelings and all the mechanics that this game has all in one package. So this game can teach you a lot and I think a lot of people would like it, but trust me, just name everything different things and pretend the theme does not exist. Mama mia, densify. So we're at Rosenberg's very important game designer and this is the game that most people do not think about or know about and this is the kind of game, if you look at that cover, I think many of you might just walk past it in the tabletop library. Is this comes in a really tiny box? Tiny, tiny box. Tiny games are usually really good, watch out for tiny games, they're hiding. This game is a memorization game, like the games you might have played as a kid. The basic deal is you got all these ingredients for pizzas and you got them in your hand. You also got recipes for pizzas and you're on the table playing cards into a stack and once all the cards are in the stack, you flip the stack over and you'd better put things in the stack in the right order. So you put in a bunch of ingredients and you put in a recipe. Eventually you flip the stack over, you're like, all right, here's some onions, here's some onions, here's a pepperoni. Ooh, a recipe and then you get to see if the cards that are out from the deck plus the cards you still have in your hand can make that recipe. So it's just a memorization game, but it's a really good, tight memorization game and if you've never played a memorization game since you were a kid, I highly recommend trying one. Modern ones are really good. Stick out. We've got another trick-taking game, just like the Nacosu dice we talked about before, right? But Stick Out is very different from the other trick-taking games because it's all about getting stuck, right? Notice the theme of the game is like a little porcupine guy, he's gonna stick ya, right? So most trick-taking games, usually taking tricks is good. You're bidding how many tricks you're gonna take, right? Yeah. In this game, you're gonna flip over a card, it's gonna tell you what your bad color is and you're gonna avoid that color. Right, that's like your stick-own suit. You don't wanna take any tricks that have those cards in it because then those are gonna stick to you and hurt you. And in fact, all the mechanics of this game are the opposite of what a normal trick-taking game would have. So imagine any game that you like. Imagine trying to design the same game, but all the rules are the exact opposite of the rules you know. Like the evil version of the game. This is the evil version of a trick-taking game. It breaks your brain to play it if you've ever played normal trick-taking games. Like in a normal trick-taking game, there's one suit that's the Trump suit. It's more powerful than everything else. In this game, anything that isn't the suit that was led is the Trump suit. It's nonsense like that. This game will break your brain if you've ever played trick-taking games and if you ever played this game and you haven't played trick-taking games, then all other trick-taking games will feel evil to you. Imagine playing Mario and it's like, no, no, no, walking into a bad guy is good. Jumping down a hall is good. Oh, getting coins is bad. Don't do that. So we used to talk about a game called Jungle Speed. Anyone here play Jungle Speed? Not you, not enough people have played Jungle Speed. It's in the tabletop library. It's a game where you flip cards over and eventually a pattern matches and there's a totem in the middle of the table. And two players, one of them has to have the totem before the other one has it. We know people who have broken their fingers playing that game. So Vault Fostin is basically the super new advanced version of Jungle Speed. You can see that there are six totems on the board and what happens is you're gonna roll some dice and those dice are gonna tell you which totem is gonna reveal a ranking system. The dice will tell you, well, this round, the totem with the animal with the most legs is the strongest. So like we got an octopus, we got a centipede, we got a snake. Right, this round, the shape with the most sides. This round, the shortest stick. The one with the lowest letter in the album. You see there's all these different characteristics on the sticks. So you don't know what ranking system is going to be used each round until you see the result of the dice roll. So you get a dexterity game like Jungle Speed where you're like fighting over things on the table and kinda like hitting each other but because there's a lot of different totems, it's much less likely to actually break your finger. Right, so you roll the dice, you see, aha, it's animal with the most legs. Everyone quickly tries to grab but hopefully the centipede but since it's so fast between the dice and the grab, someone might grab something else. The funniest thing about it is that when you roll the dice, you usually see a bunch of smart adults like we're smart and we think we're gonna play this game, the dice get rolled and for like five seconds everyone's paralyzed, trying to figure out what to grab. Now that make it even better, there's extra dice and those dice, you're gonna give you requirements of things you have to do before you're allowed to grab. It could be something like stand up, turn around and then you can grab, right? There's some that like- Oh, the worst, the inverse grab. You gotta grab it like that. Yeah, it tells you how to grab. You can't grab with your left hand, right? Grab with, who knows what? The reason to play this game? Reaction games, dexterity games, sports? There are tabletop sports. You should try tabletop sports. And two, that name, Wolf-Fauston, as best we can tell it translates to idiot pole. Any German speakers? Speaking of dexterity games, Pinchcar looks like a little kid game. It looks like something you buy like Toys R Us and it kinda is. Dexterious biz. This game, you should Google like and look for images of the custom Pinchcar sets people have built. When people get into Pinchcar, they get big into Pinchcar. They buy several Pinchcars, they make big tracks with jumps and loops and all kinds of nonsense, right? One time someone set one up at Magfest and it was like filling up a whole room and we had a big old race, right? So it's really just race cars by flicking the cars. That's really all there is to it. You flick your car, you try to get to the end of the track before everyone else. Talking about sports again, flicking is a mechanic that comes in like ebbs and flows in tabletop design but Pinchcar is one of the flicking games that's really, really, really good. It's just really tight, it's skill-based. You can get really good at this game. And if you don't have a lot of money to buy a lot of Pinchcar stuff, what you can do is you can basically just once everyone's passed a certain part of the track, take apart the rear part and make the track longer in the front. Ooh, make it a rally across packs, one end to the other, just right through the hallway. Right, as soon as everyone's passed a certain track piece, just put it at the front and keep going. Okay, got another mafia game, but this one's more like the social deduction action games you guys all like, like cash and guns, where it's one, two, three, and everyone points at each other and everyone screams, someone bangs on the table but it has rules around that that work really well. Right, so you're sitting around a table in a circle, someone's the boss of the mafia, right? Everyone else is just in the mafia, I guess, right? There's a pile of money. And remember those old Bugs Bunny cartoons? One for you, one for me. Two for you, one two for me, right? The boss splits up all the money, right? And he's like, all right, we're gonna give this much money to you and this much to you and this much to you. And then, simultaneously, everyone votes, yes, we're gonna divide the money the way the boss said, no, we're not. Or I'm just gonna rob somebody, I don't care about the votes. Right, or I'm gonna defend and hope someone tries to rob me and I'll rob them instead. Or I'm just gonna skim off the top, I don't care at all. Yeah, I'll use my slay-to-hand and just steal from the boss while he's not looking. So it's a mechanic that you see in games occasionally like I cut you choose, but instead it's I cut, you all vote. So it actually gets pretty tricky. I could be like, Scott, here's a bunch of money, Joe, Joe, Joe, here's a bunch of money, you know what, screw everybody else. Vote for me, rim for president, let's go. Yeah, I would often do a strategy where I divide the money up, give myself always a little bit more, give somebody nothing, right? And give everyone else pretty good because one person's getting nothing so I can divide it pretty well. You make a lot of enemies that way. Right, and then each turn, someone different gets nothing but I get something every turn and the thing is, as long as they don't vote no, you stay the boss. They had to vote no to make a different boss. All right, another Japanese game, wind the film. We're not gonna explain the rules to wind the film because it's actually pretty complex, it's a card game, but it does something that is so rare in games. I think only Bonanza and Hearthstone do it. Yeah, that I've seen. We call it Bonanza Hand because Bonanza is the first game we ever saw that did it. And it sounds stupid and when someone told us this mechanic, the first thing I thought was, this must be a bad game because that seems like a bad mechanic. And I'm gonna mess that up. If I have cards in my hand, that's the order they're in. I always play out of one side of my hand and I get cards into the other side of my hand. I can never change the order of the cards in my hand. All right, so all those magic shufflers who are just like, all the time, they play this game and it's like, well, we gotta start over. Great job, dude. But it turns out that mechanic can be incredibly powerful and make really good games that are very different from each other. Bonanza is like this bean trading game that'll make you hate your friends and scream at them. And Wine the Film is a complex like, it's hard to explain Wine the Film without showing it to you but it's a really good card game. There's nothing else like it. All right, Blockus is a game you can just buy in Toys R Us. All right, so people look at this game and they're like, oh, it's like Tetris, right? And they feel like it appeals to the Tetris crowd. You'll see this sold is like some sort of like good game to put in schools. Like it's academic in some way. That's a bunch of nonsense. It's just a territory control game like Tron, right? Or Go. You know what I mean by Tron? Like with the bicycles, right? Or you can't cross the line behind the other bicycle because then you'll explode and turn into bits. All right, that's what this game is. You put out pieces and whenever you put out a new piece, it has to touch one of your existing pieces but only diagonal. You can't orthogonally, adjacently touch. So Yellow's like made this little line attack in the middle of the map, getting some territory. Well, while Yellow's completely divided the map in half and then down in the corner, right? And you can see how in the bottom right corner of the map, right? Green can play in there a little bit but really that's Yellow's territory, right? So it's all about conquering the most territory and whoever can get most or hopefully all of their pieces on the board, they're gonna win. Make new mistake. This game is a war game in your mind like Roots or some Grognard like chip based game simulating some battle from World War One. This game is a vicious battle and you'll feel that viscerally when you play it even though it looks like a Toys R Us game because it kind of is a Toys R Us game. This game even has openings like chess. No one in this board has used it but there's an opening called the Barassana opening because some guy in board game geek named Barassana posted about it. And it's a way to start your play where you aim for the middle of the board and you create a wall such that no one can cross through your wall without using their one piece and you don't want to use your one piece. I don't know, might as well do a pirates but you don't want to use that because if you play the one piece last in the entire game you get like a bunch of bonus points, so. Now the other reason I really want you to play this game is that not that many people play like chess or go and play it seriously enough to get to the point where they achieve the end game. In a way chess and go are a lot like street fighter. The give and take and ebb and flow and high level strategy and bluffing means nothing against me in street fighter because I suck at street fighter but this game will not take you your entire lifetime to master like chess or go do. So you can experience what it's like to learn a game, to get good at a game, to start to master a game, to start to study openings and then to become like an expert. And it takes a lot less time than it would take to be a chess expert. And you'll get that same sort of feeling. So Paris Connection, this is not a, it is technically a train game. There are trains right there, I see them. But unlike, a lot of them. But it is also much like in some ways the real hardcore train games with the stock certificates and the companies and everything. This game is pretty abstract and really, really simple and really, really quick to play. Right, so there's all these different colored trains. And on your turn, you're gonna start with some random trains hidden behind your shield, right? That no one else knows what trains you have back there. And then there's gonna be some trains on the board. And on your turn, all you do is you pick some of the colors, right? And you can either put trains on the board, make a train route longer. I'll put five more red trains out. Now red is a way more valuable train company. Or you can invest in a train company. I put out some stupid blue one and then I take two red ones from the supply and put them in my stack. Right, so whatever's in your shield is your investments. But you just remove two red from the game, they're not behind your shield, that means they're not on the board. So by investing in something, you make its value potential lower. But you also got investments in it, if it's right. So all you do is you either invest in a train or make a train better on your turn. And you keep going around doing this until the end. This game is a shockingly accurate simulation of simple market structures in global finance. And it's only two rules. So think about it, I see Scott has collected some red trains. Well now I got a tank red, red can't be worth anything at the end of the game. So I know I'm gonna destroy red and everyone else is gonna destroy it. As soon as you see someone like clearly choose a color they're going after, you'll see everyone attack that color, divest themselves of that color. But by doing so, now they're making more of that color available for someone to reinvest. The market will ebb and flow and ebb and flow and suddenly crash. All right, this game is way fun. That is a picture of a stormtrooper that we drew. So there's a lot of drawing games out there. I'm sure people played like a lot of the Jackbox games like your Drawful, right? Or your TKO. Those games are A plus, but we're talking about tabletop here. Right, and you got your Pictionary and tabletop. And there's like a manga drawing game I think. Eat Poop You Cat. Yeah, Eat Poop You Cat, also known as like Facts Machine. Like three people were like, oh yeah, Eat Poop You Cat. Everyone else is like, what did he just say? Eat Poop You Cat. It's a real game. I promise it's not horrible. It's a real game. Right, this game however, right? Rin played and I didn't. Oh, you didn't actually play this game? No, it is. Everyone else was playing this game and I vaguely know how it works. You don't know why we think that is a stormtrooper. So here's the deal. There's one Game Master and one fake artist and everyone else is a real artist. Everyone gets a different color marker and the Game Master chooses a category like Star Wars characters or animals or logic games. Like whatever you think would work for the group. You then write that down, the thing you chose from that. So I write down rabbits and I write it on all these pieces and I give them to all the players except one. So every player except one player know that we're trying to draw a rabbit. The one player has no idea what we're trying to draw and then everyone gets to draw exactly two lines. You can see it's all different colors here. So player one draws a line. As soon as you lift the marker, your turn is over. Then player two draws a line. Player three draws a line and the fake artist is trying to not get called out as being the fake artist. So at the end of the game, all the players one, two, three vote to decide who they think the fake artist is based on who drew like stupid stuff and didn't understand what we were drawing. If they're chosen and everyone's figured them out, they can still win. If they can guess what you were trying to draw, they win. So you have to all draw the thing without letting the fake artist figure out what you're drawing and force the fake artist to reveal themselves by drawing some garbage. You're trying to draw this narrow, narrow path between a draw the thing well enough that people know that I know what the thing is but don't draw it too well that the fake artist can tell what it is because we drew a perfect replica. A friend of ours chose Pokemon and picked like Charizard knowing that one of the people at the table who is an artist would be incapable of drawing a poor Charizard and that that would give up the game for their spy. It was amazing. It's like crappy little line, crappy little line, fully formed Charizard had now everyone knows what it is. Cat Lady. A lot of times a game has like a cool theme. Like if a game is kickstarted or comes out as brand new, it seems like it has a cooler, fun theme. As we said before, that often does not mean that it's a good game. Cat Lady actually is a good game. Cat Lady is actually a really good game that's really quick to play and has some clever drafting mechanics. The idea is you're trying to just collect sets of cats and cat toys in a way that gets you the most points. Pretty similar to Sushi Go, right? If you play Sushi Go, it's like Baby Seven Wonders. Cat Lady, the way it works is the cards are laid in a three by three grid and on your turn, you can take a horizontal or a vertical, right? And then you get the bits of food and the cats and whatever cards and toys were in that row or column and you keep going like that. So it's like there's never, you can't just take whatever cards you want and it's really frustrating, right? Based on the limitations of what you can and can't take and it's like, oh man, I really need to take that row to get that food to feed this cat. I already have to get points, but I really want that cat because I already have food to feed them but I can't get both. But it's also pretty quick to teach and pretty quick to play. We recently did a panel at The Last Packs, Packs Unplugged called Take Your Something Turn. And the moral of that panel was, on average, if two games are equally fun, if the game is faster to play and faster to teach, it is objectively better because we're old, we don't have time to play games. So faster games are generally more fun and there's a whole panel you can watch about it. This game's pretty quick to teach and play so it is a high fun economy, but it still gives you the kinds of mechanics you see in more complicated drafting games. And there is an expansion coming real soon. I don't know if it's going to be any good but I just saw a post about it like last week. Okay, that is the title of that game, Siderial Confluence, Colin, Trading and Negotiation in the Elysian Quadrant. So when we first opened this game, I thought it was one of those 4x space games, conquered the galaxy, build ships, take on hours and hours of time. It looks like a cliff. In fact, it looks like it's more complicated than a cliff. But actually all this game is is cube trader deluxe. That's all it is. There's like five different kinds of cubes. It looks way scary, but literally all you are doing is buying machines that can convert cubes and trading cubes with each other. So you trade a whole bunch and then you crank the machine. And then you trade a bunch and you crank the machine. If you want to play a game where you're negotiating a complex futures contract where I will sell you four brown cubes next turn, if you give me a pink cube now and agree to buy at least one yellow cube from me at some point in the future. Yeah, it's like I got three green cubes. I got a machine that will turn four green cubes. It's like a super cube. Someone trade me a green cube, please. I'll give you like a silver cube or who, I don't know. But this game does something really clever. Getting back to like, there has to be unique thing. This game has heuristics to help you understand the values of the cubes like relative to each other built in. All the cards and things give you a vague idea with numbers of the efficiency of that card. Like this thing will turn effectively three-ish cubes into like two-ish better cubes. It tells you that information upfront so that you don't run into the problem that I'm sure many of you have run into where there's a complicated game. Two people have played it, four people have not. The two people who play it are just better than everyone because they know that the crystal skulls are actually way more valuable than you realize in Silicon. Right, you play this the first time. You don't know which kind of cube is better than which other kind. Brown cube, yellow cube, that's just cubes. It's all bunch of colored cubes, but it says right on the card, oh yeah, this card that upgrades green, it's upgrading, trust me, right? You're getting this much value from this. Oh, okay, I'll buy that. That also saves a lot of time because you also all have that friend in your group who will sit there and try to do math every turn to figure out their alphabet. Don't play this game with that person. Yeah, do not play this game with that person. But if someone is like this, this game gives them enough tools to hopefully do it a lot faster than they've been doing it in your lives up to this point. Right, and also you have to trade in this game or else you're just boned. So if you're tired of pro settlers players like us, not trading is a game where you're gonna trade something. The last fun thing about this game, if you see it set up on a table, it looks fake. It looks like someone just dumped a box on the table and walked away, but I swear, there's a real game going on. Well, the title of the game looks like someone dumped an alphabet on the table. I like this game a lot. It's okay. All right. It's a tabletop game. Yeah, and all it is is the table is a fancy accessory. You see games about that. If we're gonna say the Jungle Speed or Jenga is a tabletop game, how is Air Hockey not a tabletop game? I'm curious, have any of you played Air Hockey but cared, like tried to win? Oh. Oh. Let's have an Air Hockey Tournament at PAX, let's go. Let's call up, who makes the Photon Machines, right? Photon makes the Photon Machines. No, there's a company that makes them, we should call them. We're weirdly obsessed with Air Hockey. Like, what do you want, will you see an Air Hockey table? Like, I don't know, is it Photon, is it Regulation? Yeah. Regulation table? I don't play in a garbage amusement park Air Hockey. But Air Hockey is fun. One, because it is a tabletop game, it's a tabletop sport. You can break your finger playing it just like Jungle Speed. I've heard my finger real bad playing this game. But also it's a game that's deceptively simple. It looks really simple. You look at this, you're like, okay, how complicated can this game be? I've got two paddles, I've got a thing, and I've got a table. But we thought we were good at Air Hockey, like we hold it like this and we kind of do this. We watch some videos of what the actual National Air Hockey Championships look like. People have like these two finger grips and they're like whipping it around. Using like their wrist to get extra power on the thing and they're doing some kind of triangle formation thing. Like, I don't know what's going on there. But I encourage you to play games like this and more importantly, a lot of people raise their hands. Games that are traditionally played by people in bars or in arcades where they don't take it seriously, like the people who aren't at the Mortal Kombat 2 machine when I was a kid in the 90s but are at like some other machine. I encourage you to go try what it's like to play these kinds of games seriously and try to get good at them with a small local community. Like very seriously, like when you play, you are fully focused on the game, you're trying to win, you're not there at the bar with the air hockey table just to get wasted, right? You do that after you're done with the air hockey. Like, you know, most people, when they're at the bar and they play darts, like they just kind of throw darts and the game peters out. No, go play darts for real. Read the actual rules to darts and play actual darts. It's actually a pretty good game. It's also hard. Tempest. Tempest is a pretty funny game because I haven't seen a lot of games like it. It'll scratch that like civilization adjacent itch without taking four hours. Yeah, it'll only take like maybe 90 minutes or even less if you throw, right? It's not a short game, but it's short for what it is. You make a different board every time out of these crazy hex tiles so you don't get bored with the same map over and over again. It's got combat, but the combat's highly abstract. All you're really trying to do in this game is conquer the map with your discs. It's like a risk game. It's really straightforward, but the way the game is fun is that on your turn, you don't just attack and defend or whatever. You choose actions from a list and the possible actions are... This is so great. Move, okay. Walk around. All right, walk around, all right. Have a war. You can have a war, right? You can make babies. Just make some babies. You can have some ideas. Just sit and think. Sit and think and come up with an idea. All right, what were the other ones? Is that it? Those are all the good ones. Yeah, you know what were the other ones. All right, the point is you make babies and you have ideas in Temfus. And those actions do exactly what you think they do. When you make babies, new dudes come out on the map. When you have ideas, you draw idea cards which give you more technologies and help you get ahead in the game. All right, an infamous traffic. This is a pretty serious game. It's a good game. It's a fun game, but it's a serious game. Like John Company is another example of this. There's a problem in tabletop. A lot of games, especially games that came out in the 90s and early 2000s, a lot of them have a colonial theme which is a problematic and messed up era. It doesn't feel nice to simulate colonial like depredations and violence. But people like to make games in these topics kind of like war games. I enjoy war games, but I'm also simulating the horrors of humanity. An infamous traffic is that same kind of thing. It's about the opium trade and the horrors that Britain inflicted upon China. But instead of just being a game, like, yeah, get good at the opium trade, the game does not simulate you getting good at the opium trade. You play the investors that made all of this happen because you were trying to like marry your daughter off and buy a fancier hat and get respected in your local messed up society. The game's more like a simulation of being one of those horrible people back in the day. And the mechanics of the game will teach you a lot about like the mechanics of how these horrible things came to pass and why. Like what were the motivations of the people involved? By giving you that one extra step away from being the person like it's one game where like I'm directly controlling this railroad company. But to put you two or three steps away is like, ah, now we see how someone who from their actions is just investing money in trying to do its best in there. It's causing horrible things to happen far away that they don't even know about. And then this game makes it visible where it wouldn't be visible to the actual horrible people who were doing this. Yep, it's also interesting because this gets into the kinds of feelings you get playing like serious war games and creeps fields, those kinds of things. Because the game is highly abstract, but it's abstract about a very real situation. So a lot of randomness comes in. And instead of a lot of the games we've talked about where you'll sit there and do some math and make a decision and that decision is discreet and has a very measurable effect on the game. Things are a lot softer and muddier in a more real world game. You're making the kinds of decision a human makes in a complex situation and the results are complex and kind of random sometimes and difficult to process and weird things will happen. Like parts of China just erupted in revolution and now you have to deal with that. These games will teach you a lot and they're really interesting to play. And unlike many of the games that explore these topics previously, this doesn't celebrate the topic, it just explores it. And that's a very important nuance. Six nymphs. Oh yeah, so we go- Game for jerks. Super serious game, do a not very serious at all game. This game is the game for jerks though. Yeah, so all you do in this game is you got a big old deck of cards. Numbered what? One to 104. One to 104. You deal out 10 to each player. You can get a lot of players in this game and it plays real fast. Then you throw four cards in the table, you rank them and on your turn everyone plays a card simultaneously. That's great. I love games with simultaneous turns because there is no downtime, no boredom, no waiting for someone else. You don't have to wait for that friend we were talking about to take your turn. All right, you're always playing this game the whole time you're playing it. You take a card from your hand, you put it out, you're gonna play your whole hand eventually. It's just what order you're gonna play it in. Everyone flips over simultaneously. You put the cards into the rows where they fit. If for some reason your card is lower than the lowest card, you're gonna take a row. That's bad. That's bad. It's a golf scoring system, right? But if the game is called six nymphs, right? The sixth person takes it. If you play somehow by accident, the sixth card in a row, you take that row. And that sucks because you take out five cards. But once you play the game it's sort of like almost a goose feel in some, like a real time game mechanics. It's like an old pure card game where you play cards of values and stuff. But you're playing this game, you put cards down. Your decisions matter. You actually have a lot more agency than you think. The game looks and feels really random but then you start to get it and then you will literally like play a card that will set someone else up to get screwed. You start to realize you can attack other players. You start to see through the matrix and the game actually becomes really vicious. Like really vicious. It's also really short to play and there's a copy of it in the tabletop library. This is such a good game to just always hand from your pocket. And you know it like a Pax. You find all your friends in tabletop and they're in the middle of a game and you don't have enough people left over to start a brand new game. This is the kind of game you can bust out and finish before they finish their game. Probably two or three times. Yeah, easily. So I cannot stress this enough. First look is one of the most amazing things about Pax. Like this is not a thing you have access to at most gaming conventions. And they only invented it like maybe a year or two ago. It's like relatively new feature of Pax that the tabletop people came up with. And what they do is the tabletop enforcers, they travel to the BGG con. They go all the way to Germany to the Essen which is like the ultimate board game kind of convention festival, right? And they collect all these games even from Japan or wherever else that are not available here and are coming soon maybe. Maybe not ever coming to the United States. And they bring them and they set them up in this first look area. They lay them out on the table. You don't even gotta check them out at the library. And then they teach enforcers the rules of the game so you don't even need to read the rule book with your friends. An enforcer nearby will tell you how to play and help you out. Yep, they leave them little cards like warning, this game takes a long time. Like know what you're cutting into. I have found so many amazing games. Like Narkosa guys, we found it at Pax Unplug last year in this space. I found a game called Rumble Kingdom which was crazy good. I can't wait for it to come out. You can't really go wrong going down there and playing pretty much any game that's in there, right? Obviously at Pax Unplug, which is the pure tabletop Pax. Crazy crowded. That area is crazy crowded, right? At Pax East, that area was still kind of crowded. But at Pax South, it was like a ghost town all day. There was like maybe a few people playing. I don't know why. Please go fill this area. You're like missing the best area. Yeah, you are uniquely positioned to play every game in first look if you dedicate yourselves to this. First fish. So you know the game Power Grid? That's the English translation of the game. It has a word that the real name of the game starts with F and I'm not going to say it out loud because I cannot speak German for the life of me. Right, there's a guy, his name is Friedman Fries. He designs a lot of games that are usually in green boxes and he has green hair and almost all the games he makes are FF games. Yep, or SS, slow slots. Right, if you see a game that's like, you know, something like Fool or Foppin, that's this guy also. Games that start with F, high likelihood that Friedman Fries made that game. Fresh Fish is one of those games, maybe as good as Power Grid. It's like one of his best. This is better than Power Grid. It's one of his best games for sure. So the theme of this game is really simple. You're just, there's food carts. You're like, you run a food cart in a market somewhere and there's markets, like there's places where you buy the fresh fish, the food to go in your cart. You want your cart to be as close to that as possible. So you can serve the freshest food and make the most money. It's like a really simple dumb theme. Doesn't really mean much, but the reality of this game, if you actually play it, is that it is a, again, I keep using the word vicious. This is a tight, very competitive, almost violent game because it feels more like a war game because you're trying to like get your thing in the right spot to get the victory points and the further away you or other players are from the thing, the more negative points they take and you can really, really screw people over. The game, if I had to describe it in one word, what it's about, it's about posturing. You don't want to commit your action. As soon as you commit your action in this game, everyone knows where you are and you're screwed. They're coming after you. You want to put things out. You want to be in position. You want to wait for someone else to make the first move. Someone else to make the first mistake. It's like imagine a bunch of people just dancing around with knives, just waiting for someone to take a shot. Everyone's put their ice cream trucks next to the ice cream supply, just waiting and finally someone's like, all right, we're connecting. Let's go. Who's gonna connect to the ice cream truck? Bid, bid now. The game also has this really interesting mechanic where you don't just lay tiles out like you would and you see this kind of game, you think, oh, I'm gonna put these tiles out. No. You put tokens out that claim the right to place a tile in that space. You'll have a lot of tokens out. You keep putting tokens out. Eventually you choose to draw a tile. Now you gotta put that tile in one of the places you've previously claimed. If you've only claimed good places and you draw a bad tile, that sucks. Yeah, that sucks hard. All those picnic tables would have been really close to that ice cream, right? But someone drew the picnic tile tile and they weren't able to play their own check there. There is no other game like this. And I really wanna explain all the ways the mechanics are weird. If you see a copy of this game, just get it. Just play it. Trust me, this game will be an interesting experience for you. So Jenga has a problem. All these stacking games have a problem. Very rarely does one person win. Instead it's one person loses. That sucks. Everybody else wins usually. Or the game has a stupid mechanic that will like, oh, based on all these factors and points, like this person wins, but it tends to end up being arbitrary or random or based on who went first. Like it doesn't really matter. Catch the Moon is the first good stacking game where one person just wins. Right, so what's great about this game is like even if someone bumps stuff or knocks stuff around, it's very forgiving and the game doesn't end immediately. So the idea is that all you and all your friends are trying to build a ladder, right? To the moon. To the moon. Way up in the sky. To your dreams. And you don't wanna make the moon unhappy. All right, the moon has to be happy. If it gets unhappy, it'll cry. And the moon hates more than anything in the world if a ladder touches a cloud. Yep, oh, it's really upset about that. So on your turn, you roll the dice and it tells you how you have to place your ladder. You might have to place your ladder such that it is the highest up ladder. You might have to place your ladder such that it's only touching one other ladder. You might have to place your ladder so it's only touching exactly two other ladders. And so you take your ladder and one hand, you only play the whole game with one hand and you try to get your ladder out there. But here's the magic. You can just fucks with it. You can move stuff around. As long as you don't knock any ladders off or accidentally touch the ground, you can just fucks with it as much as you want and your turn's not over until you let go. All that matters, right, only the ladder that you're holding has to follow the rule. All the ladders that are already there, those, whatever, right, so you just, as long as they don't touch the ground or fall or anything, you are good to go. So you don't have that Jenga problem of, oh, you bumped the tower, oh, you moved the thing. You can move it as much as you want. That's crazy. All right, also all the ladders are completely different and you grab one at random. So there's all sorts of different moves you can make. You can like stick it in the hole and twist it. You can hang by a thread. You can do what's known as the shameful plank where you just sort of lay a ladder flat on top of another one. It totally works. We chant shame, shame when someone does it. We've had shameful stacks for thick. There's also, what do they call it? Like the arrogant, whatever. Oh yeah, arrogance. You go way out on a limb, like five ladders out. The point is if you mess up, let's say I do, I mess up and I break a bunch of stuff. The game doesn't end. I take one of the moon's tears to signify that I made the moon cry and the game continues. And at the end of the game, whoever has the fewest tears is the winner. So you don't have this, oh, Jenga, it's over. You messed it up at the end. You can just keep playing this game. It's great. So gotta talk about at least one other role-playing game. Burning Wheel, we're not saying it's the best role-playing game. We just had to pick one, but Burning Wheel is the mediest one that I would recommend to you. If you wanna try something that isn't just like a big social RPG and also isn't D&D. What, there's RPGs besides D&D? Oh, really? Oh, I didn't know that. What about Pathfinder? Pathfinder's different, right? Nah, nah, no. No, it was the same thing with a different name on the cover. Burning Wheel does so many different things from what you might be used to with D&D that it'll show you like a possibility. In fact, the first panel we ever did at PAX back in 2008, we called it Beyond Dungeons and Dragons. But that was our first ever PAX panel we spent half the time talking about Burning Wheel. Because this guy, Luke Crane, I was at some gaming con, I was walking around and this guy's at the table trying to get me to play his RPG. And I wanted nothing to do with that. As many of you would want nothing to do with that. Oh, it's just like D&D, but I used D30s. That's what I expected. And then I saw this game and it was great. I'll give you two examples of the kinds of things in this game. When you make your character, you write your backstory in D&D, like, oh, Kelvin Blackstaff was my uncle, four paragraphs of how my father was a guy and all that nonsense. In this game, you can do that. It doesn't mean anything. But if you spend points to say Kelvin Blackstaff was my uncle, he is your uncle now. And the Game Master can't do anything about it. Even better, let's say I want Kelvin Blackstaff to be my uncle. It costs 15 points because he's crazy powerful. I can get a discount if he hates me. The discount is one. It costs 14 points for Kelvin Blackstaff to know my name and personally hate me. And then when you're playing the game, you'd be like, you know what? I would really like it. I want to go and find Kelvin Blackstaff. He's in this town, I want to find him. Is he in this town? You roll the dice. Since you got all those bonuses you spent points on, maybe if you roll well enough, I guess you want to have to roll that well if you spend all those points. Guess what, now he is in the town whether the GM likes it or not. Oh, there he is. He hates you. He's coming for you. Shit, he sees you. He looks mad. And the thing is, that's what will happen if you fail. You succeed or fail, something will still happen. It's not just like, oh, you fail. You don't find him. No, it's like, succeed, you find him and he helps you. Fail, you find him, here he comes. Here's another example. You want to be good at swords or lockpicking or like biting people or ugly truth. Ugly truth is a skill in this game. It does exactly what you think it does. So let's say I want to get better at sword fighting. I got to lose some sword fights to get better at sword fighting. You can't get better unless you attempt things that are impossible and or fail at things. Yeah, it's like, oh, to get your sword skill from three to four, you're going to need like a challenging test and, you know, a difficult test and a couple of routine tests. All right, I challenge the best swordsman in the land to a duel. All right, you got stabbed and are bleeding up profusely. Oh, let's look at the rules for injury. If you get stabbed in this game, you're on a commission for months. Probably, if you even live. Yep. But you got, that was your challenging test for sword fighting, so congratulations. Actions have consequences. Current hit points, getting shanked, sucks in this game. Burning, like check Burning Wheel out. It does so many different things from what you might be used to with other role-playing games. Even if you don't check out Burning Wheel, right? Check out any non-D&D games. I'm pretty sure that Jim White's game set up at Pax out, but I think I saw him tweeting. He sells all the indie RPGs. Go check him out in the Expo hall. Oh, I'll give you one more example. You know, in D&D, you want to have a fight with swords, you roll dice, you have to follow some fight. What if you want to have an argument with the king? The rules in Burning Wheel for having an argument are just as complex as the rules for having a fight. Like I'm scripting for bottles, and points, and counter points, and dismissals, and that's where I'm using that ugly truth skill. Dixit, just in case someone hasn't played Dixit. Well, I feel like Dixit came in and was big, and I feel like it's faded a little bit. I said, we gotta bring it back. But it has sold over 1.5 million copies. As of whenever the screenshot is from. So someone in this room probably played it. Dixit's a pretty abstract game. The idea is there's a bunch of cards that have crazy art on them. Crazy good artwork. Yeah, good art, but it's all over the place and weird. And you're basically trying to get, by giving clues, by telling a story, by saying something about the card, some, but not all, of the people at the table to figure out which card you're referring. It's a lot like the drawing game that I hadn't played, right? Where you're trying to have some people be able to tell what you're drawing, and some people not to, right? See, it can't be too obscure. Like if I say, oh, this card reminds me of Kelvin Blackstaff, and no one knows who that is, you're in trouble. Or if you say, this card reminds me of Kelvin Blackstaff, and literally all of your friends know exactly what card, that also doesn't fly. You've gotta find a balance, you've gotta be nuanced. Nuance is something, a lot of gamers, not gonna lie, not great at. This game will teach you that, and the art is really good and kinda creepy. St. Petersburg, there's all stuff with this game, but the thing that'll teach you, the thing that, like, the reason why I want you to play it is that a lot of games, especially modern ones, have two modes. They have the get money mode, money might be called something else, but it's basically get money, and at some point in the game, you need to shift what you're doing from getting money to getting points. Right, if you try to get victory points early in the game, you're gonna run out of money and won't be able to do anything, right? And because the game is so long. But if you just get money the whole game, well, at the end of the game you'll be wealthy, but you won't win, because victory points is what determines who wins, right? There's a lot of games that follow that same pattern, but they have other stuff going on to sort of obscure it and make it less obvious. In St. Petersburg, all you do on your turn is buy cards from the table with money. That's all you do. It's just buy, buy, buy cards. Whoever bought the best set of cards wins. That's the whole game, but it's all about when do I stop buying those green cards that give me nothing but money and switch over to buying the red and blue cards that give me a lot of points and figuring out that exact timing, right? You know, scoping out what everyone's doing. You can build that basic skill and then bring it with you to games that are more complex. Pax Renaissance has nothing to do with Pax. Pax Renaissance is an incredibly dense and difficult to understand simulation of being a banker in the Renaissance using cards with a lot of words on them. Thankfully, all those tiny words don't mean anything, they're just flavor. All I'm gonna say about this game is that if you wanna see what games that look like this are like, this is the one that will make the most sense to the kinds of people who are in this room. You will either like these games or not. I've played like four Pax games so far that have nothing, these have nothing to do with the convention we're at. They're just called this. And this is the easiest one. It's the easiest one because it's about a time period. I'm not saying that it's easy, it's just the easiest of them. All right, Sumer is kind of like a tabletop game where you're doing worker placement, but it is a video game and the reason I think it's okay to talk about it here is because it's a real-time worker placement game. It's a board game except real-time worker placement. Right, the round starts like three, two, one, go and your workers walk and jump with the platforming controls, go to the store they want to go to and you put your buttons to lock them in. It actually doesn't matter which Ozil, one, two and three are all pretty much equally good and slightly different. Play one of the Ozzles because there's a reason this game is so popular and you see it everywhere. Ozzle Three is in first look at this con right now so you can try it out. I saw some playing it. Detective City of Angels is one of those investigating games, you're investigating stuff and trying to figure out who committed the crime like your gum shoes going around. But the story and the crimes are actually really complex and interesting and the mechanics actually work really well to give you that feeling in a way that those kinds of games tend not to. Bananagrams- Are you just going to do all of them real fast like this? Because we only have three more and we have three more minutes. Okay, sure. So Bananagrams is just a game where you throw a bunch of basically tiles out like Scrabble tiles and you're going to play real-time Scrabble against all your friends. Chwazi is technically a game. It is the same number of game mechanics that Candyland has. This app is free for iOS and Android. You will use this to figure out who goes first when you're playing any other game. You will also use it in restaurants to figure out who has to pay. And the devil's level. You shouldn't play this. So you should play this once. There's games like Munchkin, The Devil's Level. You can figure these games where you play the game, even Flux has this problem and the game's kind of fun for a little bit but it's really only fun because of the theme, the funniness of the cards and oh, screwing people over. But then someone tries to win and as soon as someone tries to win all the other players, the game is designed for them to all attack that player and tear them down. And that causes the game to go on forever. The devil's level is one of those kinds of games but because it's the share zone, the cards are all unique and actually really hilarious. One of the cards, I look at the card and I read what it says to do and I ask Scott, you own this game? Should I do what the card says? And Scott says yes. So I tore the card up and I threw it at him. But this game, as soon as you've had all the humor out of it, you can just stop. And I recommend if you play Munchkin ever again, you do the same thing. I hope this was enjoyable. We're out of time. All right. If for some reason you like what you heard in the past hour, come and get a flyer so you can find us. We are literally everywhere on the internet. You can hear us talking for like the rest of your life. If that's something you really wanna submit your ears to, I don't know, there's YouTubes of other panels. We will post the slides. If you didn't like what you saw in the past hour, come and get the flyer anyway so you report the right person for being bad at the panel. We will post this list of games on our website. It will try to post the YouTube video of this panel on our website. You can go to our website now to see the other version of this panel, the Aerodite 40 games you should play to make yourself a better person. Absolutely not Aerodite. Extremely Aerodite. Yes. All right, we're done. No more panels at this pack sale. See you next year. Go enjoy. I can't drop the mic because it's a headset.