 So seven wonders one of the games we picked we played like I don't know a ton of games that we have to review We've just been slowly like piling them up and then playing them more times to make sure basically seven wonders is the new hot game I heard about it, and I heard that it was the new hot game I played it a couple times at someone's house And then I played it a few more times at like a Zenkaikan and then rim bought a copy and played it even more Yep, it was sold out. I had to pre obviously, you know Yeah, you know already that if we played it so much and we kept going back to it that there is good a warning I am getting slightly tired of it, and I don't think it has staying power. I agree Well, there we go But anyway, it's still a great game I highly recommend you own it because straight up this is a game like Zulareto where it's not the best game if you're smart You'll have solved it pretty quickly and the winner will come down to luck But it's a game that you can whip out and play relatively quickly that you can teach Relatively quickly. It's a great game like at a con like you have a bunch of new people We should play a game You don't really want to spend 45 minutes teaching them Puerto Rico The game pretty much is almost exactly in the same niche as Ticket to Ride It takes about the same length of time to play It's got that same mechanic of on your turn All you do is one very small thing and you take a lot of small turns So the game goes very quickly and in fact this is even one better than Ticket to Ride because everyone takes simultaneous turns So there's absolutely no waiting for anyone to take their turn You just keep going and going and going and going over any arguments of oh so-and-so always doesn't take his turn That's a lie. You take just as long because you can see every round Exactly who's holding everyone up because everyone's taking their turn simultaneously. So always Scott Johnson. That's right So the way Seven Wonders works is you know You have there's a deck of cards and you split it up and you give everyone a hand and on your turn every turn of the entire Game all you do is play a card That's it And you and then you give that the remaining cards to the person to your left or right depending whatever and some of the Cards are resources and you basically tap the resources magic style every round So you build up this kind of increasing accumulation of resources and there's a whole bunch different kinds Yes, so you so early in the game you build up more resources and having more resources allows you to play other cards Which allow you to play other cards which allow you to play more cards that give you more points And then at the end of the game rose the most points wins, right? So it's all about you know getting a good sequence of cards that play into each other You know every if you play a card and you never use that card and never gets you any points You just wasted a turn because you could have used that card to get money instead Which would be worth at least one point now It has a lot of particular mechanics that are either cribbed from other games or just analogously grown like you build buildings Right and you can only build unique buildings So if there's a grainery and you build it you can't build another grainery, but you can build another building similar to a great Now the thing is many buildings have a notation on them that if you already have x building you can build this for free Yeah, it's basically identical to the way it works in Attica Yeah, for example, I learned by you know if you if you actually look at the cards of the game Right, I learned that there's a very the most difficult card to build in the whole game is worth like eight points I forget what it is. It might be the Parthenon or something. It's something ridiculous It's worth a ton of points But if you have a theater you can build that ridiculously expensive building for free So basically I always build the theater so that I can always try to get the expensive building for free And it's worked out in my favor two or three times already Yep, so it's like no wait once you know the cards the game starts to lose a lot of its luster because it's like Just sort of obvious the path to take Well, I wouldn't say the pad there. I don't know about three Maybe four Pads to victory. Yeah, this is the military path. Yeah, there's the green path Well military is a choice that modifies every path. It does true military alone does not win you the game I can get you at most ten plus six plus two points It's mostly the green path and the blue path are the way these ways to go right and green is harder to do But has a potentially higher payout like if one guy goes all blue and one guy goes all green green guys Probably gonna win because the way the math works But here let's talk about like the reason the pads are different You know not to get into the stupid details of the game because you should just buy it You'll read the rules. You see how it really works But the green path is these there's a sets of different science items Yeah, science cards So there's three types and you get points increasingly based on the number of sets of three that you get but also Two to the end points and being the number of one particular one that you have So basically all the green cards if you start piling them up They it makes sort of like a two-dimensional grid of scoring So all the green cards actually score twice in two different ways One of those ways it scores it scores exponentially and the other way it scores It scores linearly, but even the linear scoring is a multiple of seven Yep So you get basically every green card as you get more of them They see the amount of points that each individual green card gives you continues to go up at a very very high rate So if you're playing this game because that you know, it's two-dimensional grid It's actually fairly complicated until you figure it out and then it's obvious If you play this game with friends who have not played it before get all the green cards They will look at the green cards They'll glaze their eyes will glaze over when you explain how the scoring works and they'll ignore them You will win almost every time if you go for the green cards when people around you are not that bright or haven't played much Yeah, it is sort of interesting because there isn't a lot of interplayer You know there is a little bit right you can buy things from the people to your left or right and you military with the people to Your left or right and things like that and But it has a heavy left right mechanic Yes, and you know there's in you hand Pete you think about your hand You're you're we're gonna play a card But any cards you leave in your hand you're giving to the person to your left or your right depending on the age So there is you know significant impact you can have on your immediate neighbors in the game And in a three player game that's really significant because you're influencing all the other players But other than that there isn't a whole lot of interplayer You know mechanics or you can't destroy other people's cards. You can't steal their cards You can't there's really not much you can do to take points away from other people It's about the same It's a little more than say agricula in terms of how much you can actually fuck with everybody I say it's a little bit less than Puerto Rico because you could screw with people sort of the same way that you do in Puerto Rico Like aha, I played captain so you couldn't play captain You know, but it's like a little bit less than that because in Puerto Rico if I craftsman out from under you That could hurt you pretty badly, you know So my main problem with the game is that like I said, I think I have solved it mostly and I think when I play It really just comes down to luck. Yeah, and it didn't it took maybe eight plays to solve There's not that much going on in most people though Don't play a game as much as we do right they get a game and if they play it twice It's like oh, they're so happy You know, how many people play get a game and play it eight times I found that games like this in a couple weeks Will be played a lot or zulareto gets played a lot too just because like I said at the beginning They're quick to play that is true. It is quick to play. So if you do bust it out You're probably gonna play it too. I mean just takes a half hour tops if people are slow If people take their turn you'll whip out a whole game including scoring at the end in like 20 minutes The scoring could actually take as long as a whole age Just because you know, you have to add up so many different things and you know Some of them are slightly now the analogy of the game is Not as bad as lahab, which basically doesn't have an actual theme. It's just kind of like yeah boats and food Port it's a port town. Yeah, you make money But seven wonders you're playing a wonder Slash the civilization that built that one. Yeah, it's like if you're playing, you know, the colossus Well, are you playing are you the colossus or are you the people building the colossus? I think you're playing the city-state that has wrought the colossus But you know, everyone plays a wonder so sardia you can either pick them Or pass them out randomly and everyone has a little card And in addition to the cards in their hands that they're buying and passing back and forth You can also buy the improvements that make your wonder bigger like as you complete your wonder It does stuff and every wonder has a different set of powers and an a and a b side Yeah, so basically everyone has a wonder which is basically three unique cards that no one else has effectively, right? It's like everyone's playing with the same deck of cards, but each person has three cards Usually three sometimes four. I think there's one weird one weird wonder that is four But everyone basically has a handful of a few cards that are different from everyone else's cards that makes you unique Which gives you a little bit more replay value. It's like well, I'll play with the mausoleum Well, now I'll play with the hanging garden. So it's a little slightly different game If you have a different wonder and every wonder has two sides Which gives you a little bit more replay value because there's an a side Which is easy and direct and there's a b side Which is a little more complicated but potentially higher payout I would recommend when you play do the random allocation of the wonders but let players pick a or b I would recommend you do it completely randomly. No that gets boring because i'm already bored with the game I mean, I wouldn't play it unless I was teaching it or playing it with new people Or as like a warm-up game at a board game night. I would just definitely it's definitely a good warm-up game I don't know. I wouldn't make the highlight game though. No, but it is it is an excellent new warm-up game You know, and if I was short on warm-up games, I would definitely add it to my game library Even if I was I'm accumulating a lot of warm-up games because I lacked them I realized that I because people refuse to play the serious games people just play warm-up games And then they're done. Well, I particular I only owned some of the big heavy hitter games like al grande And t and e and I own a lot of the weird old out of print games like la chita I didn't own many quick whip them out games That's why I got zulareto and seven wonders and i'm ordering riko Zulareto takes a little bit longer than seven wonders. I think it's more of a mid It's sort of in between warm-up when I say well highlight There's different there's two kinds of warm-up games in my mind There's the warm-up game that's quick to play as in you whip it out You play it with everybody and then you play the main event And then there's the warm-up game like zulareto where you've got a bunch of people over you're gonna play a game You're gonna play games many games, but people are still wanting to socialize. They're not indie. Let's just play a game mode yet Zulareto you can socialize over without impacting the game I mostly think of zulareto as more like a settler's replacement right because like i'm looking down on settlers But zulareto I can still play a lot more easily than I can play guitar Settlers and zulareto are actually pretty equal to me zulareto is a much better gateway. I think too Uh, I don't know It depends on the person someone who is predisposed toward hardcore Settlers is a better like intro game someone who isn't zulareto is a better intro game anyway But yeah seven wonders is my other new hot my other trouble. I'll warn you now when you're teaching this game People who played magic as they were kids. They'll get the resources immediately. No one else will Yeah, I was I was very surprised has fucked up the resources Despite multiple alternative explanations analogies examples nothing works I can't understand why these people don't understand how the resources work It's like you have two rocks that means you look at the cost of something if it costs three rock You can't afford it It's like money that you can only spend it once per turn in every turn everyone gives you all the money back Yes, it's magic resources You tap them every round, but people don't get that and they'll like they'll buy resources by trying to like play cards and just they will cock that up You've got to make sure after you teach the whole game Teach everybody your resources again. I guarantee at least one of your players doesn't actually understand Yeah, and on top of that right even if people uh understand resources, right? There's a lot of the game requires you to notice a lot of small things on the cards For example, you know the you what this card upgrades to that card for free Well, it's a really tiny icon that says that so if you're not really looking closely at every card You might like say not build something even though you could have for free Uh, you know because uh People will also fuck up They will not remember that they can't build the same named building twice So they'll build the barracks and then they'll build the barracks again, and it just cocks up the game Hmm Anyway, other than that the game is great. Uh, I don't know if it was really worth msrp, but I'm glad I own it. Mm-hmm We're doing more show or is that enough? I think that's enough This has been geek nights with rim and scott special. Thanks to dj pretzel for the opening music