Hello and welcome to the very latest episode of... The Shut Up and Sit Down Podcast, the podcast all about board games, board games, and the people who love board games. My name is Matt Lees and I'm joined by Tom Brewster.
Hi, my name is Tom Brewster and I'm joined by Matt Lees and we're going to talk about so many board games on this freaking podcast. Yeah, Renegy there was like a truck driving into my house. I felt like I could hear air horns in the background when you were speaking. Wow. Like a flight of angels.
following you you know like a holy host yeah of air horns yes when you get into heaven imagine if instead of a beautiful like heraldic sort of trumpet arrival it's just like that loads of angels looking bored holding air horns and they're like look we played trumpets for the first like few thousand years but like god it gets tired yeah these things are great you just press the button
And it does it. It does it automatically. We've put in a request to get some Vuvu sailors. Imagine if you got to heaven and it's like, it was kind of a perfect, amazing place, but the people who run it have been doing it for so long that they're just bored and tired. And it's like, it's like... Disneyland employees after like a 72 hour shift and it's just like it brings the whole vibe down
And the only people who can enjoy it are the sorts of people who are rude to people at restaurants in a way that they just don't see the misery around them. Let's talk about board games. Let's talk about board games. On this episode of the podcast, I'm going to just be telling Matt about a bunch of the games that I've played recently that Matt has...
sort of some connection to in fun ways. Some of them. Some of them I've seen. Some of them I've touched. Wow. Some of them you've thought about. We're going to talk about Flamme Rouge Grand Tour. The latest expansion to Flamme Rouge that lets you play an entire Tour de France in your living room.
We're then going to talk about Moving Wilds, the latest hate drafting game from Oink Games. And we're going to cap it off with a little recap, a little re-chat, a little rehash of Seti, a game that we talked about on an earlier podcast that I've played a bunch more. and ended up making a review of. We're going to talk about that again. Why not? Why not? So first up, Flamme Rouge, Le Grandateur, which of course is French for... The Big Bicycle Ride. It is, it is. You've been reading up.
i have i've been learning language what does flam rouge mean again because i was trying to think about this earlier and it's like the flam rouge is like the bit where their leg really hurt near the end of the race or something like that it doesn't i mean that's not a literal translation my brain wants to go
red flame but yeah that could be i don't know i mean that's what my brain says but my brain is not good at french so i wouldn't listen to it but maybe that's like um what's it called when you get a stitch Oh, oh, the flam rouge. Oh, the flam rouge on my leg. Yeah, just going to say that's what it means. It definitely isn't. And we're going to move on.
Flamme rouge does indeed mean red flame, and here refers to a flag that is waved in the final kilometre of the race. Similar rouge-related terms include the lantern rouge, which is the competitor in last... place, which in turn references the red lantern that is hung on the rear vehicle of a passenger railway.
like seven years ago oh my goodness it was such a long time ago i i i'm kind of amazed that it's a actually come out and um that b i'm fascinated to hear about it because i loved it even in that early version the idea of basically just playing a game of flam rouge and then you know what we're gonna play another one and another one
i was in i was in already he just wanted to play more than once yeah but i also like the risk reward that they had baked in which i'm assuming is still there of do you want to knacker out your cyclists now
because you've got to do another race and is it worth it like is it worth pushing for first or is it worth hanging back saving your beans and then winning the next race and i thought that was a really interesting decision and then there was other stuff as well that made it spicier made it feel more
flavoursome for each player and having that ownership of your cycling team. But I'm fascinated, Tom, to hear what you think of it in a post-Heat world. Heat, obviously, is the game from the same designer that basically, like... added cars and engines. It was cars. And everyone loved it. Everyone did love it. But there's something about the simplicity of little men on bicycles. There is. But Matt, I've got bad news for you.
You're going to have to spend like £50 on the Flamme Rouge Grand Tour expansion because it's really good. Airhorn, airhorn, airhorn, airhorn. You don't need to add airhorn sound effects. They're behind you, ethereal, following you like a flight of birds. This expansion is phenomenal.
After playing it, I sort of wanted to immediately put it out on a limb that it might be one of my favorite expansions to any game, potentially. It's so good. It makes Flamme Rouge into like the sort of... ultimate version of itself uh it's so exciting and with with not that many rules that's what's crazy is it's these very slight little additions that just completely change how you play the game um so to give people at home a little bit of a basic
line for if you haven't ever played flam rouge if you've ever heard of flam rouge it's a cycling game as you may have gathered at this point where you've got these two cyclists that you're trying to race around a track uh getting them to the finish line before anyone else does the way you're going to do this is playing cards from their little decks, you'll play a card from each of your two cyclists' deck, and they'll just move that far forward.
But, after their movement, you'll have this fancy little slipstreaming and bunching mechanic, where if there is exactly one space between cyclists, they'll shtoop, shuffle up, and form a big pack, that they'll then be protected from the sort of exhaustion of the road. when they're in, because anyone at the front of a pack has to take these exhaustion cards that will knacker them, slowly winnowing out their nice spicy fast cards for sad, soggy, single...
tired cards. I was trying to think of a word that had an S in it that was sort of sleepy. Sleepy! Sleepy! I could have said sleepy. So that's basically Flamme Rouge. Whoever gets their cyclist across the line first wins. Grand Tour turns Flamme Rouge into a... campaign game where you'll play multiple races back to back, forming a Grand Tour like the Tour de France or the Giro d'Italia or several other exciting cycling races that are out there. You can go up to...
21 stages you can play 21 games of flam rouge back to back to back should you desire it if you're a sicko yeah right and i might be you might be we've just started our seven stage tour we thought we'd keep it small to begin with just seven games for us um and it's great so
What are you now trying to do in this new version of Flamme Rouge over your campaign? You're trying to get tour points. It's the sort of currency. Whoever has the most tour points at the end of those 21 or 7 or however many stages you're doing, that's going to be the ultimate winner of the game. You get tour points by...
winning stages so if you win the game just like you do in flam rouge you get some points but also you get them by winning jerseys a real thing from real cycling If you go up mountains the fastest, you'll get points towards the polka dot jersey, the king of the mountains jersey.
If you go super fast in some certain straights, then you'll get green points for your green sprinting jersey. And, of course, if you cross the line first, or if you have the best overall time, you get points towards the coveted yellow jersey. which is sort of like the ultimate boondoggle for your cycling team as whoever's wearing the yellow jersey. And so these are awarded as you go through the campaign. You'll get them from every different stage. But this is fascinating already.
Because normally in Flamme Rouge, the base game, you cross the line first, you win the game. But now you care about... whole bunch of other stuff you care about how fast your whole team gets across the line whereas in base game flam rouge if one of your riders fell out the back of the pack and was just lost sort of going through these french sort of a roads on their own
whereas everyone else was piling up in the front. That wasn't a problem. But now... it sucks because that person is just ratcheting up your time for every second they spend outside of the pack and ultimately they're going to cost you in the long run so you want to make sure that you always finish with like a nice competitive time but also you have these sort of
eventual strategic challenges that are present in real cycling races, right? Like, I had a cyclist who was... sort of i decided that they were going to be the one that's going to go for the the mountains jersey and so they took a really suboptimal breakaway super early on to power up this hill and get those points but then they were just absolutely shattered for the rest of the
they just had so few cards in their deck that were useful because they spent all their energy early on just trying to secure those points here and now and then they had to then sort of rejoin the pack to conserve their energy and then later on they tried to break away with my sprinter to get respectable
time at the end there's all of these lovely considerations within a race about how you manage your riders and how you manage your exhaustion because exhaustion now sticks around between games yeah so at the end of every game just like in real life just like in real life when you get a bit tired at the end of a board game imagine that but like maybe a little bit easier really that's what cyclists go through every day i'd actually imagine if we had you know this is a kind of a
a future nonsense bullshit idea but like imagine if you had a world where like you know you'd open up a board game and it would tell that you're a bit tired so it would just remove a few rules you're a bit sleepy so it's sleepy the rule book is just gonna have fewer words in it had yesterday i like the idea that you've got no agency in this you're like no i can't do it i swear i can do it and the game's like no you've had quite enough
of life time to just chill out um you so at the end of every uh race you will get your exhaustion in your deck halved so it's not super punishing you're not going to end up with a rider that's like phenomenally tired and just useless forever but
is a really important consideration like if you fall at the back of the pack and you get really knackered that's that's gonna suck that's gonna suck for the rest of the the whole game um i also i don't know whether i mentioned this but the way that when you cross the line there's this lovely little mechanic that is so simple and so easy to understand, but just sort of creates so much richness in the game, is that when you cross the line, you sort of mark off the...
you are at the sort of dot zero zero, right? You're the first to finish. You are the winner of the stage. And then every round from then on, everyone still left in the race takes a minute little marker. And then that shows them just spending more time than you did sort of cycling around the track. And that's what gets added onto their score at the end. And it's just such a simple way of tracking the time that's elapsed after the end of the race that makes it really feel like desperate.
You have to take an extra one because you're just too slow to get over the line in time. And it's lovely because I love Flam Rouge, but I do understand that fundamentally it is a game of trying to find that bite point between...
How rapidly can you hammer your cyclist's legs? That means you get over the line quickly before it becomes a problem that you've hammered your legs. And it is basically, it's kind of a... a slightly for me it's a fuzzy maths problem for other people maybe it's a maths maths problem but there's always that element of luck of the draw and that element of just being like i think i can afford to just be reckless get ahead of the pack and go for it and as you say
Having that dynamic of having two cyclists on your team that you have one of them almost there to support the other, to slipstream. This sounds like that basically makes that mechanic. that idea a necessity more of actually having your cyclists working together to ensure they're looking after each other um throughout the race is something
You can't just gun it off at the end without consequence. Yeah, absolutely. And not even just gun it off at the end, but achieve those other objectives. Like my sprinter really wanted to get that mountain jersey, but it then meant that if I didn't want them like completely messed up, I then had to get...
over the mountain then slow down rapidly so that my other cyclist could catch up and then i could protect that now knackered uh sort of cyclist from you know having to take even more exhaustion so it's this you have to really think about how you're going to
position your riders, not just for those immediate objectives, but how you're going to take care of them for the whole race. Because, you know, you care about them. They matter to you. And I think that this sort of sense of personality is even more sort of amplified by this module that the game adds that you can either use in...
your uh in your grand tours but you can also just put it into the base game of flam rouge which is these uh specialists so like how heat has the garage module where you assemble your car this has uh the specialist module where you assemble your uh legs uh
You can choose from a whole bunch of different kinds of specialists to sort of to swap out your riders for. They'll have a sort of different stat distribution on the cards and they'll have different abilities that make them better at certain things. So my sprinter was a mountaineer, which meant that normally cards get... capped at five when you go up mountains these ones capped at seven which doesn't seem like much but it's a lot when it happens oh felt so good uh
And I also just, there was this lovely, lovely moment when we finished our game of Flamme Rouge Grand Tour where everyone got very excited about the whole thing and wanted to see what the next stages were that were coming up in the tour.
we sort of had this meta conversation of like, well, I want to make sure that my, you know, mountaineer... isn't knackered for stage four because there's a bloody huge mountain so so in stage three i'm gonna make sure that he's gonna you know get protected and he's not gonna do anything strenuous and that's like that's for me is
is the thing about sports i didn't realize for a long time because i'm not into sports at all um and i've always been more into like video games and other games and mostly solitary things i'm a boring stay-at-home darkroom boy and i'm happy with that
Talking to people as an adult who do love sports, I realized it is about these dramas, these metas, these projections. It's like football, for example. Soccer, as they call it in America, because they don't understand words. I'm joking. It's fine. It's fine. I'm stroking your head now if you're angry. I'm stroking the back of your head and saying, it's fine. Don't worry about it.
It's basically a soap opera, but for blokes, it's all about like, oh, well, that guy's not going to get on with that one because of this thing that happened. And it's just, it's all about the people and about what will happen when this happens. And in a way, having that like long tail strategy is why I like cricket when I got into that briefly, because I realized actually it was not a game of throwing a ball and trying to hit the wickets. It was a game of psychology.
and doing the opposite of that for a long time and catching people off and having think factors like the weather and how tired players are being a factor that affects strategy that's when it gets interesting
And I think that Flam Rouge is a really fun, simple race game. Yeah. But adding that element of being like, sure, you won the race, but like at what cost? Yeah. It's that thing we talk about a lot with board games. It's the bizarreness of the last turn of a board game, whether it's in a Euro game where it's like, pack up the...
factories sell everything destroy it all turn it all into cash now it's like what happens when the manager comes into the office the next day in this fictional world that we're abandoning it's like well this company's broken now what have you done like it's the same with this it's like well that man's never gonna walk again
but by god he won that cycle race having this extension of it like just adds drama and life yeah yeah and gives it an element that we see usually interesting like war games you know of having that like spectrum of an arc i think that both heat and flam rouge are really good games for people who aren't interested in sports themselves but really like the idea of sports i mean i'm sure they're really enjoyable people who like the sports obviously like at their core but they do
very very good job of getting that passion for what people actually really like about these various sports into the brains of people who don't normally interface with it and i think that flam rouge and heat at their base are just very good at that they make that kind of thing very exciting
But this Grand Tour expansion... it really gets across the sort of excitement of the macro level of sport in a way that like i previously haven't really seen accomplished in a game it's like a game about the sort of like top-down perspective on the whole tour rather than just this one instance
you're playing and i think that it's just it's done so well um this is the kind of thing that i could genuinely imagine doing a full video review for and it's just an expansion which is crazy uh but goodness it's delightful
Oh, fantastic. I'm excited to get my hands on it. One question I have, crucial pressing question, is what's the deal with it in terms of is it set up to be something that you can very easily... uh log and put away and continue later without it being a faff yes absolutely it's it's very much i don't think it's necessarily designed for you to do a whole tour in one go uh it has this incredibly sort of initially quite daunting
that sheet that you fill in after every race you have a sort of personal one that shows how well your team is doing and then you have a sort of big group one that everyone adds into with their times and stuff sort of accumulated across the whole tour but it is like it has this very exciting
exciting bookkeeping at the end where you kind of like take stock of where everyone's at uh in the tour at the moment and then you kind of gear up for the next race uh yeah it's it's very good tom are you telling me this game comes with multiple Spreadsheets? Yeah. Oh, it does. And they are, like, spreadsheet-y spreadsheets. Fill up the car with money. We're going to the shops. We've been talking about a whole bunch of oink games on recent...
podcasts, Matt. What's the deal? I know. I know. We went through a long phase of not chatting about oink games, but suddenly they're everywhere and everyone's playing them and everyone's talking about them. We talked about Deep Sea Adventure Boost on a recent pod, which is like... deep sea adventure but they made it a little bit better and you talked about souvenirs from venice shallow sea shoppers as you put it yeah i played that again the other weekend and uh it's nice
It's like usually somebody gets left behind when you play it with three or four people. Usually somebody doesn't make it back to the airport. So it has that element of like, you know, oh. Somebody drowned, except presumably they don't drown in the canals of Venice, but maybe they do. No one knows. But it's different to like, well, now everybody's dead. It's just like now one person's dead because they were greedy. You know, it's softer, but I like it.
More palatable to the average gamer. I've been playing, Matt, another oink game. I've been playing Moving Wild, which is a drafting game. I didn't know what to expect from this. Oh, you've got it? I've got it. I haven't played it yet, but I've touched it. With your hands? Yep.
Wow. Although it has one of those advanced new manual types that detect if you're tired or not. So when I opened up the manual to try and play it, it just played me reruns of a TV show that I've seen lots. Wow. It's so generous. That's the bottom level.
that's like when it's like nah nah mate if that's a level below it just being blank you know uh that's that's a whole extra tier um so this is a card drafting game uh moving wild where you're trying to make a national park full of nice environments nice animals and improvements And if you do it well, you get points, Matt. You get so many points. Three.
Three or more. Actually, this game has a very funny arc where like the very first hand we played was like, I get four points. I get two points. I got six. And then the next hand was like, I get 37 points. I get 42. It really ramps up as it goes. Or maybe it was just our particular setup.
Who knows? The way this game works is you get dealt a big, chunky hand of cards. I think we got dealt a hand of 10 or something like that on our first round. And all you're going to do is choose one of those cards from that hand, put it in front of you, and then all simultaneously... you flip over that card so everyone knows what has been chosen and then you pass your hand to the next person so that's all it is pick a card show what it is
pass your hand, keep doing that until the round ends, at which point you take all of those cards in front of you and you assemble them into a little tableau. You will make this a national park and then round two starts, you get dealt a big hand, you'll draft that again. And you'll add to that same park until at the end of round three, you've got a big park in front of you that's hopefully going to score you mega points.
everyone can see stuff throughout the whole game once you've chosen it right away you can be like okay someone's going for presumably hippos yep that one's got a penguin I will kill them. It's that kind of game. That one. It's your mother, Tom. Stop calling her that one. To her face. So what are these cards? Matt. I hear you ask. You've got three genres of cards. Areas, which are white cards, that show a little area of terrain that you can put aminals in. For example, a jungle.
It'll have a little sequence of pips at the top that show you how big or how many animals you can fit in that space. So if it has six pips, you can fit six size worth of animals in that enclosure. I like this already.
They also have a particular terrain type at the bottom, so there's a sort of bushy green jungle, there's kind of jaggedy yellow savannah, and there's water. Those are the three different terrain types, and they'll have normally one or two different types of terrain that you can put animals in.
Second kind of card, improvements. They make your areas better. So for example, you might have an improvement that makes that area two spaces bigger, or you might have an improvement that adds a terrain type to one of your areas. So previously it was just sh**. Shaggy Savannah, and now there's running water there, maybe, so you can fit both. Third type of card, you knew it was coming, it's Aminals.
You've got so many different kinds in this deck. They're all going to have a bunch of important information on them. Firstly, size. Big animals take up lots of space. A big giraffe, four space. Four space out of your six space thing. That's crazy.
But it's vertical, which means you can stack hippos vertically next to it. Yeah, exactly. You can tessellate... God, I wish it was a Tetris game where it was like the giraffe was like a long, thin piece and the hippo was like a perfect sort of oval and then penguins were like a little... evil 4 but instead of ammo and eggs you've got to just animals in your bag and also zombies
So these animals also will have a little scoring criteria, so they'll have a little number of points. Some of them, for example, the sloth is good if you have other animals in that same enclosure. Penguins, you get more points if you have a huddle of penguins altogether. Lions become smaller if you have...
more of them they sort of gang up or something like that yeah we've all seen lions mate we've all seen lions i mean you also have a little value at the top that determines if that animal is friendly which means it can coexist with any animals or a predator which means it can only hang out with animals of exactly the same kind. Yeah, the natural kingdom has two types of animal prey.
And bastards. Actually, if I remember correctly, there's something really charming about the dichotomy between the two symbols. I think it's friendly or hungry of the two states an animal could be in, which I think is delightful. Well, I mean, that explains humans.
We're friendly until we're hungry. It's very true. Here's the little spice of this game. Here's the thing that makes it pop. So when you build out your little enclosure, when you build your little area, you'll score points for everything that's in it. Most of them will just...
you know naturally like a elephant is worth five points uh sloth is worth two whatever right you'll score points however you lose points for every animal you couldn't put in an enclosure so every animal that can't go in an area that's minus two points and Every enclosure that is not empty, it just has any free space in it.
also scores you negative two points so if you have that six space enclosure you put your four size giraffe in it you need to fill up the remaining two spaces otherwise minus two points which is incredibly brutal and what kind of bubbles up is one of the sort of like
poppiest and most immediate hate drafting games i've played in a while constantly you're passing horrible hands to your friends hoping they don't take the one thing you need but you know they will you know they'll take the final enclosure
because you've got three animals in front of you that need a place to live, they're going to take it just to annoy you. It causes them negative two, but it's going to cause you negative six or something crazy. And hence our first hand was brutal, but then the game kind of opens up a little bit more when you get more.
more enclosures and more room to play in. But that firsthand, so cutting and so nasty straight away because people immediately realized they could be absolutely horrible when it comes to drafting those animals.
What a treat. What a treat. I've just realised I can be absolutely horrible. For fun. You're allowed to in games. That's like my advert for board games sometimes. It's not the only element of board games, but it is definitely... an outlet which i don't think people have realized is there it's like it's not just rolling a dice and then moving and being miserable it's like you can have this system where you're allowed to just be dastardly and laugh about it and it's fine it's like no one gets hurt
It is such a fine line though, isn't it? Between like dastardly and, you know, villainous and scheming in a fun way and being a bit of a dick to the people around the table. It's like I could imagine someone like moving wild. is probably the kind of game where the most bad you can do to someone is that kind of like mustache twirling irritation. But then, oh boy, I've played some games where people can get real personal.
yeah and like that i think is a is a thing i think i think it comes down to i want to say i want to say experience but that's not true of like the more games i've played the more you realize that like once you I feel like you reach a point that once you've seen the fun that can be had from being the mustache twirler, you then enjoy my enjoyment vicariously of someone else getting to do that is bigger than my own irritation. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
it's like when someone's been a complete knob to me i'm like well that's you're having a great time and this is game you've learned you've learned you've evolved i don't know if that's something that you get from just playing more games because i think it is basically a kind of uh i think that it's about embracing play
It's about whether people are playing games to try and win games or playing games to play. I'm camp two every time. I think that Moving Wilds is... kind of up there for me with a lot of the really good spicy oink games it's so quick uh it's it's delightful
it's presented really well and i think that it just does its little core mechanic of like nasty drafting really well that decision of having all the drafting being public you know as soon as you you can see what people are collecting in front of them and you can sort of really like swing for in a way that's going to be nasty, or you can kind of predict what they-
what they might add to that little hand next you know you can give them a set of cards and kind of know what they might go for maybe my only criticism is that the hands are a little big which makes it kind of hard to keep track of some of the exact information in there but i think that broadly you just remember a few of those
pole cards and you're safe as houses. You know you just handed them a bunch of penguins and they're not going to take them. You know you're getting a penguin next turn. I had a moment where I had a hand that had all three types of terrain in it and I passed it knowing.
or hoping that no one was going to take the little water train that I really desperately needed because they didn't know what I drafted yet. And I was right. And there's stuff like that. It's just a super simple, pacey little drafting game. It's a good one. Two thumbs up from me for moving wilds. Smashing. Finally, to cap off this podcast, I wanted to quickly circle back to Seti.
This is a game that me and Matt talked about on an earlier episode of the podcast, and I went away and did a video review of it, Matt. I played it some more. I turned our first impressions into full rich. textured impressions. And I came away from it thinking, yeah, that's a good game, but I'm not keeping it. I thought it might be a little collection staple, but I was wrong. I think that Seti is a good game.
I wouldn't take that away from anyone. But I think that the thing I kind of wanted to mention on the podcast was that I felt like it didn't have a sort of hook in the same way that some of the Euro games we really love.
have a hook so like you know ark nova has that little card conveyor belt that you're sort of engaging with the whole game that little yeah sort of you know procession of actions brass has that sort of hand assessment and then sort of restriction of having to play around that you know um even something like daybreak which isn't really in the same category but daybreak having that constant decision of do you put a card on the top of a stack to get a new action or do you
tug it to get its tags and i feel like seti's aliens are kind of that gimmick but they're not adding a crazy amount more sort of like nuance to the game as opposed to having a sort of really poppy and fun like core action mechanic initially when you're teaching setty kind of delightful that you can just say
do you want to do an action just do it from the list but i found myself wanting something that was a little more like interactive and spicy to kind of like tie in the rest of the game around if that makes sense yeah i i i can see that i mean i think the elements of like major interaction i feel would be the solar system and about that turning around and when it turns around how it turns around but at the same time there's a conflict there with how
delightfully multi-layered and spinny it is like a rotating lasagna you know it's almost if it was just a simpler system of turning things then it might be more knowable but as it was the idea of trying to keep track of like what impact that might have on other players yeah was kind of too much too big brain for me to be able to think about
And also, it was quite forgiving in regards to like, okay, well, they can't do that, but they can do something similar. They can do something different. Yeah. In a two-player game, I think that that rotating galaxy stuff is quite readable and interesting. Like, you can definitely like... You know, there's that area control minigame around the edge of the board where you have to stack up these little markers to sort of do a bit of territory control.
you can definitely do some annoying things where you make the board move in a way that's going to annoy someone and just nudge them out of the area that you're currently in to just dissuade them from sort of doing something like that or cost them more than it does you. In a two-player game...
great. I just found it really hard in a four player game to have any kind of plan when it came to that big spinny galaxy, because it could just move so much so quickly. And it never felt like someone was making that move in a way that was like, haha. I'm screwing you over. It was always just like, oh, sorry, I didn't mean to do that. It was just me taking my turn. Yeah. Weird little game, Seti. I'm really glad that I played it. Do you think that it's a game that's just stronger with two? Yes.
I think it is sort of flatly stronger with two players, I reckon. Except, although, I will say that the area control game is more lively in a higher player count game, but it's also like you have much less control over it.
game we definitely had things where it was like some of those spaces are so big they've got so much data in them they've got so many places you can put a little lozenge that it feels like you're not even going to be able to fill one out by the end of like two rounds or something whereas in the four player game stuff gets filled much more readily so there's much more movement in that area of the game yeah yeah and the other question i have is if they were to just add loads of other aliens yeah
Would that fix it? I don't know. I think that my biggest issue with the game is just in the fact that the actions began to feel... far less satisfying far more sort of like repetitive and rote the more times i played the game and the aliens add a little bit of spice but fundamentally you're still scanning sectors you're still moving probes you know uh you're still crunching
your little data into your computer and they sort of lack that kind of like pop and spice the more times you play it you know there's there's a sort of innate lack of interaction in those kind of core actions that you're taking that means that you'd have to have aliens do something really weird to get the game to kind of change its shape in a way that's satisfying. I think it doesn't have that many levers to pull on, right? In terms of-
of where it can go with the aliens. But I'd love to be surprised. I'd love to see an expansion to this game. I'd love to see twice as many aliens, and they're all nasty. Yeah, I was thinking they'd make an app version. Hundreds of aliens destroy the game of the created aliens in your area just This alien just draws d*** all over the board. Oh, no. Why did we invite him? There are no other rules. That's it. It's just ugly now. You've ruined it, Kevin.
But that's a funky little game. If you want to check out our review, that is online on our YouTube channel. Shut up and sit down on YouTube. You know where it is. And it's a funny one. You know, I think it's one that you've dug into and it's not a classic on multiple plays. But I had a really fun time playing it once. Oh, yeah.
And for the sort of thing, if you're the sort of game group where you just have multiple people who all chip in and play stuff once or twice and then maybe move on, sell it, give it away or whatever, then it's a fun time. It is a fun time. It's just not. It's not up there. It's the best of the best of the best. It's not in the Pantheon.
it's a step in the right direction for cge though in terms of big box stuff like i think that like it's far more solid than anything we've seen from them in the big box department For a little while. That's very true. That's 100% true. Yeah, funky little game. Really glad that we got a play of it. Yeah, it's been up on the hotness for so long. I think it deserves to be up there because it is poppy. It is fun. It is fresh. But I don't think it's going to stick around for the long haul.
And maybe I'll be wrong. Who knows? That's the end of this week's episode of the Shut Up and Sit Down podcast. We'll be back next week to talk about some more. board games. Board games. Can you imagine? Even more of these things. No. That's wild. Bye-bye. Bye.