 So let's get right into it. We play I played this game once. I played it two times. Yep rise of tribes came out in 2018 It's a board game. I think it was kick-started. Maybe we played it at PAX. It's a game. It's uh It's alright. Yeah, it's okay So the way I feel about this game is it seems like someone like took or came up with and combined a bunch of Okay to good to sometimes slightly clever game mechanics and mixed them up into a Perfectly average generic board game that is so like run of the mill is nothing exciting about it It seems just like every other, you know, Euro-ish board game. Yep Like there's nothing that stands out. It's like, you know, you think about a board game It's really great and there's something about it. That's like clever or different right like for example Dominion basically invented Deck building right take T&E. It was like, aha your lowest points is Right. There's no In rise of tribes. It's literally just like yep take actions to get the most victory points on your turn I mean the rules were described and I looked at the board and I looked at what I had and I looked at the and I very small number of very direct heuristics immediately became apparent and Everything beyond that was random or political. Yeah So here's basically the way the game works is you put some dudes on to a hex map You're trying to take over spaces. You're trying to do things the game Well, you're trying to get points and there's a bunch of ways to get points But the default way is to build huts. Yeah, and the huts give you every how you a point gives you a point every turns You're trying to it's sort of like settlers a little bit, right? It's imagine it's a little like risk plus settlers you get your guys on the board take over some spaces that we can Get some resources use the resources to put huts on the spaces Yep, defend them the huts spit out a point every turn and eventually the first person to 15 points wins a lot like settlers Right the two interesting mechanics in the game that I noticed that were like, you know Cool is number one is this dice thing going on so on your turn you want to take an action There's four actions to choose from right? There's always gonna be an action that you want to take the most But each action has three dice on it two of them are sort of like locked in and the third one is Sort of like, you know you roll, right? So you sort of roll what you oh, that's right. I remember now It's been a few weeks You roll two dice and you take two actions, right? That's what it is Yep And every when you take an action you put the die you rolled which either has a sun and moon or nothing on it Into the spot of the action you took Displacing one of the dice that's already there right so each action already has like three dice on it So one of the actions might have like Sun Sun blank So you put your dice in there as and kick out the oldest one and it you maybe of the three dice that are there now That you've displaced one. Maybe you've got Sun blank Sun in which case you do the action slightly better It maybe it'll be blank Sun moon. All right. You do it normally. Oh, that'll be moon moon Ah, you do the action slightly worse than normal, right? There's like three levels to each action and it provides this randomness To where you can choose whatever action of the you can use any two of the four actions you want But you have to balance what you need to accomplish with what will you enable another player to do right based on what you do? And what previous players have done what dice have been put in you might be doing actions slightly better or slightly worse So it's variance. It's not huge variance It's not game-swingy variance It's just a little bit of variance to mix things up which is pretty clever But it's also because it's so constrained it's not exciting well because every interaction is hyper generic So while there's a bunch of stuff that has like dudes put more dudes out But there's a lot of fun flavor text nonsense like oh the cougar or whatever the mountain lion appears He moves around the map eating people it it's purely like the most minimal Political remove a guy from whatever players in first place like it doesn't nothing does anything interesting everything Does these very like plus one minus one political actions? I feel like whoever made this was like all right We got to put in randomness and fun to spice things up But we don't want to put in too much because it's too swingy and the game becomes too luck-based like up settlers Let's things be a little more luck-based whereas this Constrained all the luck into this narrow controllable band, which is kind of okay for a competitive game But what ends up happening is everything so constrained and the there's no Skill testing way, you know, there's no difficult to figure out, you know moves So everyone gets about the same number of victory points every turn and progresses at about the same rate Except I played the first time I got a ton more than everyone else because I just build a bunch of huts Well, you were all fucking around tried to build some huts. I've got as many huts as I could yep Each base there's different players to choose from different tribes each tribe needs a different recipe of resources to build a hut Yep, and I went and I was like whoa All of the I was like I'm not picking one that needs three trees if anyone else has one that needs Right, there's a little bit of that going on So there's also a thing you can do where you can basically like unlock more advanced technology that gives you more powers but again Super generic and super constrained Yeah, you have this deck of cards and you can spend one of the actions Let's you flip over the cards to sort of and it's sort of like getting routes in ticket to ride Where you flicking flit you spend an action to get more routes and then if you can fulfill them they activate either giving you victory points or Giving you powers that then Gather one additional resource perhaps when I gather I get extra resources and it cost me two stone in a wood to build it And I guess it's worth a victory point Right the other thing is this is an event deck where if somebody rolls two identical symbols You then start flipping over cards in the event deck and that sort of adds so you know it mixes things up I like events it's like except the events are all just Politics attack the player in charge or attack someone on a particular hacks There were some events that were like okay the next few players get like some extra resources Yeah, but none it's like or like the barbarians come on the board and just do nothing Yeah, the barbarians like fill up one space and clog it up and in the two games I played the barbarians came out clogged up one space and everyone just ignored that space the rest of the game the end Yep, right It's like it's nice to spice things up with an event system of randomness But there weren't enough different events and the events weren't consequential enough That you actually had to do anything about that, right? It's it's sort of like, you know, you can have a game with no randomness You have a game with a lot of randomness where then suddenly, you know Your decisions matter less, but at least there's crazy fun things happening This tried to strike a balance between all right, not too much randomness so things get mixed up But it didn't have it there's not enough complex interwoven systems to make decision making difficult So that little bit of randomness ends up being what matters And but you lose out on the fun of randomness because nothing is extreme everything's tiny And it ends up being like, I think it's a good game for kids to sort of introduce them to more complex games I do think this is actually a great game of like intro to You know euro games in general maybe even better than settlers because it has more interlocking mechanisms that are all Basically has like all these basics like there are pieces from ticket to ride. There's dice rolling There's things from settlers. There's things from risk. There's things from, you know Small world. It's like there's really good little pieces to stack like the people's and pieces It's like the generic mechanics, you know the fundamental mechanics of you know, the the main Euro games of the world sort of combined into one And a really flat kind of way it could be exciting for someone who hasn't played tons of euro games and seen all this before Yep But for anyone else, you know looking for a hard game looking for a complex game looking for an exciting game Yeah, because if you're skilled at games at all the game just breaks down to being 100 purely political Whoever's in whatever event happens just use it to hurt whoever's beating you as much as you can Or help yourself and get the most points like there's it's like it's like one of those games We're like, yeah, there's a map and you can go around attacking people if you want to But it doesn't really get you anywhere and it just costs you a lot So everyone just sort of expands to do a bunch of hexes at the start and then locks themselves in the end Yep, as opposed to say tempus and I watch any where you're constantly Anyone who tried to break out or fight just sort of Petered out victory point was no because you lose all your dudes Yep, and I literally won because people didn't attack me enough So I just got no limit a number of dudes in a space You move all your dudes into a space and crowd someone out and try to kill them And then you lose your dudes also And now you have to spend on action the most limited thing in the game your actions getting more dudes Whereas if you had stayed put you could have spent an action flipping over some cards That might have been worth points or getting some resources to build the hut that would have been worth points I guess the the other problem is that it's one of those games where there is nothing to do when it's not your turn Oh, yeah Nothing at all at least people's turns are short because they're two actions But I think it actually would have been better to just do one one one one one one one one one one to make the game go Around faster. Yeah, right? I mean ever since ticket to ride I've noticed and still harp on this that a modern game is a A tenant and a good tenant of modern game design is where players either a play simultaneously On constantly so you're always engaged with the game Or b lots and lots and lots of short actions You're constantly you're going around taking turns those turns better be very very small Right, and if you want to have different kinds of turns have different phases in your game There is a weird c alternative that I've seen particularly in 18xx games a game where There's nothing you can do on your when it's not your turn But There's so much planning to do that every second you have when it's not your turn You're engaged with the game thinking and planning and counting things or bonanza It's not your turn, but you can engage with the player's turn It is yeah, it's not your turn right by the point is games where You're taking one player's turn and everyone else is taking a nap That's not good for any genre of board game Any more in the card present day speaking of which as much as I want to play samurai swords slash shogun slash ikusa It's pretty much scott's taking his turn. Everyone just go eat Well, that's true to some extent because there is before it's your the turn part there's the bidding part which is simultaneous and then well, it's the combat phase the combat phase is I Put on the board the 20 fights. I'm going to start right and then we do all 20 fights But at least at least uh, also that's an old game It is a very old game. Also. I would not if that was a new game. I wouldn't cut it any slack Also, when you're fighting someone at least they're also rolling d12 Even though the other people at the table are sleeping two people are rolling d12s together All right, so it's not a hundred percent sleep mode So yeah this game like if you have kids or you're introducing Like kind of basic not super gameery friends. I say like if you don't have a settler's you don't have a ticket to ride You don't have any of the basic hero games You could like get this one and save yourself the trouble of all the other ones Yeah, but I think actually any one of those other ones might be more fun than this Yeah, I think it really this has to be for people who are younger Like this game like it isn't bad. The problem is it has like nothing exciting. It's just like a straight meh Yeah, like I have there's no flaw in its design. I can say oh the game's broken over there because it's not Right. Yeah, it's like there's no like, you know other than the slow turn taking thing It's like And actually the like once you know how to play the game the turns go real quick too Like it's not even that big a concern. It's easy to learn the rules weren't written. There weren't any, you know I don't uh, maybe there was one or two things in the rule book We might have questioned but Nothing huge and devastating like other games like I can't find any fault in it That's like devastatingly bad. There's just nothing about it. That's really great. That makes me want to play it Yeah, like I never need to play it again And I feel like I've plumbed the fullness of its depths after two plays after one play after one play Yeah, but the two plays was like a confirmation like Yes, this the second play was not different from the first play Yep And the fact that you played without me And you feel the same way confirms my feeling So yeah, if you have kids like are you playing with people who are not game or are you like this This is a good game. Otherwise like it's not for us This has been geek nights with rim and scott special thanks to dj pretzel for the opening