 So we played core worlds exactly once having learned it in its entirety with a big expansion attached to it Well, apparently that expansion was like already planned when the original game was put out Yeah, so now our board games have included DLC right so much So that symbols that only meant something in the expansion were already on the cards But this particular set of core I believe race for the galaxy had the same thing going so maybe but this particular set was one That you can buy someone else it wasn't ours someone else had it That had the expansion and the original game together in one box Now I realized after I played this that I had played core worlds once before at nerd NYC I've never heard of it before But I played the base game and it's it's a dominion like but more people called it an ascension like and having played it twice It is basically just a complicated ascension in my opinion Well, it's a little better than a sense because in ascension you just sentions not even a game Just play your whole hand every turn and then pick the best card on the table and that's it There isn't really anything to do. There's no way to do better at ascension really in this game There were some things that you could work on Disorder you but I think the number one thing going on in is a deck building game Right and usually the thing in deck building games It's hard to call your deck right like in dominion you want to trash so that you can get a really efficient deck in core worlds Almost every turn you get to put cards underneath, you know your Yeah, basically automatic and building and whenever you do a battle you can put your a guy who is in the battle under the city hall So it's so easy to get rid of all these shitty guys under your deck. I actually Didn't I played the game wrong. Remember? Yeah I had two extra basically an extra copper and an extra estate to put in dominion terms You know an extra starfighter and an extra column in my deck to begin with So I had two extra cards to trash and I ended up doing super well And getting all these freaking colonies What's it called capital ships capital ships colony ships and I was super powerful and awesome and scored two core worlds at the end of the game With that because the trashing was so easy and I never forgot to do the trashing So I think they should get rid of that and force you to have the shitty decks that you have to optimize more So my impression of this game. I mean castle of burgundy. I would say if you're a board gamer at all just buy it Yeah, it's fine. It's fun. My impression of core worlds is that I would not recommend you buy it unless you really Really really fucking like ascension, but you want another game that's like ascension because you just want to have every deck building game In the world like you're a deck building nut and you're a little board of Dominion expansions and things like that then you know core worlds, you know It's probably I think it's better than maybe Thunderstone which I played once right. I'm not really a fan of Thunderstone No, so it's probably like you know of the one deck building games. I've played it's probably like you know dominion You know, I guess there aren't really that many other ones dominion. What about the tanto cura? I Guess tanto core is actually better than the other non dominions because it's so similar to dominion So my impression of core worlds is to not get it because and I'm gonna throw out that book We keep talking about the terms from it characteristics of games by Richard Garfield He's really just fucking read it if you listen to Geek Nights because I'm gonna I'm replacing my We get to the point where every reader every list the listener has read it and yeah, you saying that they'll be like Ram I read it already shut up already. Yeah, but I'm gonna keep using these terms this game has no Directional heuristics at all. There's no way to do better than playing your hand in the obvious optimal way You have so few actual decisions to make that if you discount the bad decisions You're basically playing perfectly There were a way to do better is to have memorized the entire deck. There were some decisions to make however They didn't actually end up having to be made because I would be sitting there on most of my turns and the big decision Was there a bunch of cards in the table? Which one do I want to take and you look and it's obvious which one is best for you the deck? You have already started making right and you say that one's the best card for me Someone takes it or they don't it's no one takes it I took it if someone else took it I looked for the second best card for me and took that one and that was pretty much what I did all game So it was like a sentient in the sense that every turn after that first card you get on the first turn You just keep getting cards similar to that card for the rest of the game and that's it now Simultaneously there's no that there's a lot of calculations you have to do while playing Because not only are there two different currencies and every card has both of them, which is fine But almost every card has some crazy different modifier on it like this card up to two cards from your hand Each one of which gives you plus two to ground strength or fleet strength So to calculate what you could or could not do on your turn is Actually really time-consuming even if you are really good at that sort of that was my biggest problem with the game overall Is that in dominion or any other ones right a deck building game? You have like 10 cards to work with or remember what they do maybe up to 20 They're you're all open you can see all the possible cards You know what they all do in this one every turn all these new cards appeared you had to learn and they're all Unique cards so your deck is getting to ends up getting full of all these cards that are all different from each other and in Front of you have all these cards that are all different from each other and you basically need to read Every single card you've got every time you do something that involves all of them to sort of add them all together Because they're most of them are not just straightforward cards that you don't have to read So it's like every time I attacked I had to read every one of my planets to see if they modified the attack and every ship in The attack to see if it modified the attack and every tactics card in my hand to see if it could modify the attack And then your turn you have a second dual currency So you have a currency of fleet and ground you have another currency of actions and energy But they're both basically limiting to the same degree So the game is really unnecessarily complex because that complexity does not be get complex problem-solving abilities or No, it's just complex Computation busy work to do to figure out what your score if you have you can do what you want to do now The expansion makes this worse by adding this whole meadow where some cards have a symbol on them And then you're adding tokens to this other board of symbols And then there's victory points based on whether or not you have the most tokens on one of those But you can spend them four points or to get action It just it gets to the point to where there's almost no positional here is to get all there's no the two Positional heuristics you have how many how many victory points the other guy has showing on his table I think it's simpler and how many tokens he has Has the person taken yeah, and how many tokens they have on that other Alternate board thing the victory points on the planets ended up mattering a lot if I had a chance Based on the turn order to get a planet that was worth six instead I ended up with one that was worth three and that happened once or twice Simply based on turn order. I didn't get a planet I could have had if say the planets had come out differently or the turn order had been different I would have had many more points So the victory points on the planets do matter not just the number of them. So don't buy it It's actually not that good I would have to be pretty You have to be a super deck building fan boy who really love and who maybe even gets off on the sci-fi Space fighting theme now to get this one. It's a plate again. I would have to be pretty thoroughly convinced to do so Yeah, it also took a really long time. It did take a long time compared You know Dominion you can bust off a whole bunch of look It's obvious why it took a long time all the cards are effectively unique and you have to read everyone over and over and over again There's a bunch of side tracks and fiddly rules and the calculation time it takes to figure out even basic heuristics is ludicrous yeah