 So eminent domain. I literally never heard of it. It's okay for the government to take your property as long as they're using it for good. And you're it's like a slumber something. I never heard of it till a guy showed it to me. So we're at nerd NYC board game night doing what we usually do. Playing some games and we played some Marrakesh, which is always fun. And then I got a baby. Then a guy we were playing. We did a show about carpets. I don't recall. I think so. Anyway, and he was like, Hey, you want to play eminent domain. I brought a copy and I said, that's a game I've never heard of. So yes, I do want to play. We didn't say yes yet. We were like, what kind of game is it? Pretty much anytime someone says the game that I haven't played yet as a suggestion, I'm paisley saying yes, but I'll question them out beforehand. So here is how I would describe this game to someone who knows board games. It is basically your race for the galaxy went and had sex with what's the old game? He said it was. This is something, something, something mechanics. Yeah, but it's basically race for the galaxy had sex with Dominion. Right. It's a typical car deck building game, but it's also like Puerto Rico race for the galaxy with the role taking mechanism. It also steals from this old Rome game where say some imagine if in Puerto Rico, someone picked a role like the builder. Yep. I could either build or dissent. And if I dissent, I get to take a coin instead, but I don't get to build. Yeah. The normal mechanic in Puerto Rico is I take builder. I build and because I took the builder, I build better. Everyone else just builds and they don't, you know, and if they don't build, they don't do anything in this game. If you choose a particular role on your turn, then you do it better. Everyone else can do it or if they don't do it can draw card in dissent. So it's like everyone always gets something no matter what. And you ended the roles unlike some of the other games aren't like exclusive. So if I, you know, everyone could just keep researching over and over again and never do anything else but research. It would be dumb, but you could. Now, it also has a, before we get into kind of the details of it, it has a really interesting mechanic where unlike in race for the galaxy where you build your hand up, but you only really do stuff on your turn or Dominion where you throw your whole hand away every turn. One, you can discard any number of cards at the end of your turn and draw back up to five, but two, you get cards pretty much constantly throughout the game because on anyone else's turn, you can piggyback on their action or dissent. And you piggyback on the action by playing cards that have the same action symbol. So as a result, it has a really good sort of catch up mechanic in that if you're not able to do stuff because everyone else is playing in a different optimal pattern drawing a ton of fucking cards. So on your turn now, you start with like 10 cards in your hand. You do whatever the hell you want. You just have to be down to five at the end of your turn. And you can actually go below five at the end of your turn. You can discard as many as you want, but you don't have to discard all of them. You just discard as many as you want down to five or less. And then you get to draw back up to five. Now, you can, you know, it's really easy to go through your deck and it's, it's a little, it's hard to clog it up, especially since it's really easy to use like what research cards to get rid of cards and get them out of the game. Now, it's not customizable like Dominion. You're not, you know, making your set of cards to be out there. The cards come with the game. You lay them all out and there's a ton of them. And while they're all unique, they pretty much come down to a very small number of types and then each one has a slight twist from there, but they're, it's not nearly the problem set. I thought it would be. No, I mean, at first he pulls the game out. I'm like, what do you mean? There's like a hundred unique cards. This bullshit. I have to learn all these freaking cards. No, they're all like improved research improved colonization. Yeah. And the thing is, most of the cards are not even accessible to you to be like, if your starting planet is a Saturn type planet, then you're pretty much limited to only like three cards that you can get early in the game. And most of the cards in the game, you'll never be able to even try to get it's what the game will be over before that you have a chance for those. So you don't even to worry about them, at least not in your first playthrough. So you can start playing as a noob. You don't need to read all the cards like you do in Dominion where you have 10 cards you have to learn. You can just read like three cards that are the ones that are going to be available to you and worry about the other ones later. Now, the big part of that is that if you if your friends have played Dominion before or any Dominion like and they've played either Race for the Galaxy or Puerto Rico, you almost don't have any rules to teach them. This game is so straightforward. Yep. Another thing I like about this game, right, is it comes with like all these little plastic spaceships and you're right. So it's like, usually in a game like Dominion, right, the way to get stuff into menus with money. So it's like, you got to find a way to make money to get stuff to get victory points. And that's pretty much the chain, right? It's like, no matter what you need, you need money and buys. In this game, you want to you can try it, you need just need victory points. And the two ways to get victory points, the big ones anyway, are to get more planets colonized or to build to produce goods and trade them, right? So what you can do is you can either get a few planets and use those planets to produce and trade and produce and trade and produce and trade. What I did, or you can just try to get a ton of fucking planets, or you can try to do both those things in some combination, because those are the pretty much the only ways to get a lot of victory points. Yeah, now that's the big thing. It removes the situation that many of these kinds of games have both. It's funny how Race to the galaxies and Dominion's both have this problem, not really a problem, but a sort of end game, the DPT Dutchy Panic Time. That's right. Where you know the game is wrapping up. So rather than continuing to crank your machine or go for a big score, you basically start buying cards that you don't need just because they're worth like one or two victory points at the end of the game. That's right. All the cards that do stuff in this game are worth Bupkis. Yep. The only thing that's worth anything of those three things. And what it's kind of nice is that, you know, a lot of games I've played have, you know, multiple different strategies to victory, right? It's like, oh, well, you can go for this, you can go for that. And all of those things will give you victory points. But if you look, a lot of games, for example, Kalis, some paths are so much more efficient than others. Castle is the most efficient, right? The there are other ways you can try to do the jeweler. And the jeweler could win. But it's so much harder to make that jeweler happen. It's got a totally different curve. This game has three pretty much equal curves on three different victory paths. So you just pick one of those paths or some mix of them. And you can legitimately get a bunch of victory points. It means a lot of people can get a lot of victory points. So it doesn't come down to who picks which path as much as it comes down to who does their path more efficiently. Now you also can't cock block. There's no direct attack and there's no real indirect attack. Yeah, which is sort of slightly. No, because instead it's an additive game instead of a subtractive game. I mean, I like a Gricola. In fact, I love a Gricola. I kind of like taking people though and I miss the ability to day. I'm also here's the thing. I like direct dicking games, but that's how you swing. The direct dicking games have a sort of fundamental, you know, gang up on the leader problem gang it up. And you can see why at like as you look through the years, direct dicking was replaced by subtractive dicking where looking through the years. Yeah, it's lemon party. Huh. It's not where I'll attack Scott and take his sheep. Instead it's where I will go on the space that I know Scott had to go on. So we go where I had to go that he needed with my sheep, the indirect dicking. This is directly taking my sheep or had to go instead has a sort of it's the opposite of dicking. It's a positive flow where instead of trying to figure out what the other guy wants to do and denying it to him, you figure out what you want to do. You figure out what he wants to do and you try to chart a path where he can't ride on your coattails right on the coast. So I know he's trying to build up his military. So I'm not going to play a military action that lets him ride on. I'm going to use actions to do my military. I'll let him use the roles and I'll ride on his coattails instead. You like to ride? No, I said actions because there's one other major mechanic and this is kind of the coup for this game that put it from this is pretty cool to I bought it on Amazon as soon as I got home. Also it's cheap. Yeah, it's like 20 to $25. Awesome. Yeah. Great price. Now supposedly it was a Kickstarter game and there's expansion. There's bits. Well, I think expansion in the box, but the game does not come with like so. I think the expansion was a Kickstarter bonus. Yeah, there's goods like types of goods on the planets in the game, but in the game we played, those don't mean anything, but I believe they mean something with the expansion. I wasn't 100% clear on that. We have to play it again once it arrives, which might be tomorrow, but you don't just have roles. Every card has a role or an action and on your turn you play an action, which is just you and then you play a role, right? You don't have to do the action like so, you know, and a lot of times like, you know, there's no reason to do the same thing as an action and a role because the role encompasses the action. So, you know, the action is always going to be different than the role. It gets rid of the situation like in Dominion where, you know, the number of action cards is such a highly controlled and highly sort of game deterministic mechanic of the cards that are faced. And the thing is, you know, the game is good because you always are just so frustrated that like, if only I could do the role and then the action, I would be set, but you can't. You have to do the Java situation. You have to do the role and let it go around the table, then do the action. I mean, imagine if T and E, how many times do you think, oh my god, if only I could take three actions in Java? If only I had one more action point, those games, I imagine the way they balance them is they just have a bunch of Germans that around and they play the game with, say, 20 action points, then they play again with 19, 18, 17, 16, and as soon as a fist fight breaks out, they stop putting the number down and that's the game. Yeah, but yeah, it's pretty good. So the other thing I like about the game, right, is that you have to colonize these planets. So you use one of the actions, what was it? There's colonized. No, the was the green one. Oh, so you have to explore. The exploring one gets you planets, but they're faced down in front of you. So you get planets in front of you. Then you want to flip the planets over to actually activate them so that once they're activated, they can produce goods, they can give you bonuses like making your hand bigger, and they give you victory points when they're flipped over. But there's two different ways to flip them over. You can flip them over with ships and attacking them with military or you can flip them over with colonization, which is basically diplomacy. Now this is the huge thing. They're basically the game has two completely independent currency streams and all the planets cost different amounts for either one. It's like if in Dominion it was like you can buy this for five golds or three potions. It's like oh well I can either do potions or I can do money and I don't have to do both. Doing both actually is kind of dumb. Now my plan and actually was working pretty well is I focused on colonizing, but I took advantage instead of trashing, because that's a trash mechanic, instead of trashing my military cards, whenever I had them, I rode on people's coattails and built up a small reserve of colonies or not of colonies of ships to then hopefully snipe up a quick planet near the end of the game. Yeah it's actually tough right because I'm sitting there thinking like well I don't want to keep picking colonize and military because then I'm helping everybody right. I just want to keep picking one that no one else is picking so it only helps me. So I'm like I'll pick military, I'll go all over the ships, no one else will pick ships and thus when I pick ships for me it won't help anyone else. So I did that, but it's like when other people pick colonize I was dick. So it's like well I kind of want to pick colonize sometimes, but I don't want to pick it a lot because that helps other people. So it's sort of like you want to go, you want to apple and you want to orange and you're not quite sure what the right balance is. So it's like I did like 75 percent military, 25 percent colonizing. Right it's telling. Because the colonizing just sort of came in for free when other people picked it. So I'm like well. It's funny, we were playing kind of mirror strategies, like we were on the opposite side of these kind of opposite side of the coin mechanics and Scott won and I was basically, he beat me by like one point. I beat you by two points. Well because you had that bullshit luck of the card, the exact card you needed. Basically I was guaranteed to win. The card that I bought. Unless Scott had unless Scott had one card that he had bought in the course of the game in his hand by the time it was his turn on the last round. So I forced it and then he had the card so he won. But yeah Scott was first place, I was second place. That's right. It was a good game, I want to play it again. Yeah it was very good. I won Marrakesh though, so fuck you. The random game? Wasn't that random? This game, actually this game has no as randomness of the planet stack. Yup, but that is. And it has randomness, that's it. Of your deck. Oh, the randomness of the draw of your deck. Yes, your deck's draw. That's right. But not your deck's odds. No, not at all. So very little randomness in this game. But if you like Race for the Galaxy, if you like Dominion, if you like Puerto Rico, if you like any deck building or any those sorts of games. This game is surprisingly great, especially considering it's at most $25. It's $32.04 on Amazon. I just bought it on Amazon for $23. Well, I see it on Eminent Domain for $32.04 on Amazon. Interesting, maybe people were buying it, I don't know. Maybe. Seven Wonders is $35.58. That's a good price. That is. One interesting thing, we played it with four. That felt right. It's two to four players. Oh, and everyone agrees. It's best with three players. Interesting, which think about it. All the three player games that have the fundamental breakdown have either indirect dicking or direct dicking that allows the apple apple orange. I can actually see it being best with three, right? Because you've got, you know, you've got the military, you got the colonizing and you got the producing. You've also now got to choose between two different strats. Like every time you take an action, you have two players to look at and most likely any action you do will benefit one or the other. But there's three pretty much paths to victory points. So with four players, two people have to pick the same one. Yep. And I was to share the same one with the experienced player who brought the game, who was sitting to my right. Right. So those two people are pretty much going to be sort of dragged down or maybe they'll be dragged up by appalling with each other. It's tough call. Now, right? Now, no. And then the other two people basically, right? So it's like, well, you know, with I was not dragged up by him. He bought things I needed. Yeah. With three players, everyone can pick, you know, pick their own path and see who does their path most efficiently with two players is going to be a whole bunch of stuff that goes undone. But I feel like this elegantly gets around the three player problem by having it has like the positive there's no. You can't gang up. You can't gang up on people because it has no digging. Yes. So three players is just fine. This has been Geek Nights with Rim and Scott special. Thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music. Cat Lee for Web Design and Brando K for the logos. Be sure to visit our website at front row crew dot com for show notes, discussion, news and more. Remember, Geek Nights is not one but four different shows SciTech Mondays, Gaming Tuesdays, Anime Comic Wednesdays, and Indiscriminate Thursdays. Geek Nights is distributed under a Creative Commons attribution 3.0 license. Geek Nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience. But unlike those other late shows, it's actually recorded