Board game playthroughs, deep dive discussions, and more. A cadre of adventurers in southern California sharing their (mis)adventures with the world. New videos every week!
Just finished my first campaign. (Had to play it by myself mind you BUT) It was awesome. Started off with Steward and Partisan and failed both objectives thus the empire fell and out of it rose the Warden and the Planet Breaker. The Warden starting feudalism throughout the reach, turning clusters into fiefs and players becoming lords and vessels. While the Planet Breaker manned his flagship and scoured the Reach for fragments of an ancient super weapon: the Planet Hammer. The Warden rallied his fleets to stop the Planet Breaker from destroying his planets and defeated him. Thus the Warden continued his reign in the Reach to continue to spread feudalism while the Redeemer rose to power. Ashamed of the violence of the past, he was determined to erase the Reaches history by destroying its relics. Aghast that his history would be lost, the Warden did all in his might to save these relics and prevent the Redeemer from acquiring relics. But alas the Blight infected almost the entire Reach making movement difficult. In a last ditch effort the Warden Raided the Redeemer to save the relics but failed to gain them all thus lost two of the Reaches most precious relics. But in the end, his power was too great and the Warden was the true power in the Reach. Leaving none to challenge him as he revived the empire becoming its First Reagent.
I understand this isn't a modular expansion, but do you think it would be possible to play with most of it except the horrors? I hate having to manage "bots" in games, there's already so much to move around ..
I expect that would make it substantially easier for the humans, since the horrors are what balance out the boons and allies being added to the good team's toolkit. But you could certainly experiment with leaving them out to cut down on admin and putting in a couple extra Night setup cards to make up for it.
Enjoyed this video very much. I always watch playthroughs like this after getting a new board game just to see how others may interpret rules and see if I am playing it the same way. There are some videos out there with a lot of rules being missed but this one was followed pretty much exactly as I have interpreted the rules. One thing I did notice is that at 1:38:16, the green player went down one influence in the Bene Gesserit track to drop back down onto the victory point to gain it again. The rulebook doesn't specifically state that you can't get the victory point again when dropping down, but it does state that you lose it if you drop below it. So, I always took this to mean you can go to the level to get the point and still go higher, but you can't drop back down onto it to get it again as you have already earned it. It isn't until you drop below it, lose the point and then go back up to it that you would get it back. If you think of the track as earning influence gains you a higher standing with the faction, then dropping down shouldn't reward you. It is only when you earn their favor again after losing it do you get it back.
So cool to play along with you Christian and Brandon! Thanks for sharing the playthrough. I shared this video in the Gem Getter Galactic forums on BGG where folks can post a picture of their sheet if they like! I managed to score 130. Got a bit lucky with 2 additional Getterite on the final turn (5 total) and both dice were unused numbers.
Let me blow your mind: you can use an Attack Modifier before or after the defensive roll is made. So you can see if the enemy reduces/halves/ignores damage and then add them. And you can use Evasive before defending to see if you ignore all damage before the Gunslinger's Duel so you don't have to choose the halving damage option if you're already stopped it all with Evasive.
Great to see this game get some love. I think that Kenshin attacks all players from anywhere on the board. So he would have been beating you up from round 1. This is a very difficult boss and a pretty difficult stage. I think you need some luck or very specific fighters to pull off a win with the brutal combo of boss and stage.
28:35 “Raid Dice Limit: You can only collect raid dice if there are defending buildings or if the defender has no Loyal buildings in any systems on the map.” Rulebook page 14.
Thank you for saying so, and for watching! We do try to prioritize speedy play especially since I'm not editing for time anymore. I think it's quite a bit more fun to watch than perfect but slow play.
That was one of the most enjoyable playthroughs of this game I have watched, great idea to split over two episodes too. I do hope you revisit this, maybe with the original crew, and possibly revisit the first game with this crew, perfection guys 👌🏻
I agree on your final point about TTS and that's also true for BGA, it takes a bit of the freshness towards games. And it makes people switch faster from a game to another. There are defintley downsides to these website and sotftware existence, although if did not exist, someone would invent them ahah
So glad you did this, I really enjoyed watching your first video on the base game, and have been hoping you would come back to it with this expansion. A very enjoyable but still informative playthrough of one of the best turn based strategy games out there 👍🏻
You guys have great content! little suggestion though, its ok to think during your turn but if you upload a video, its a good opportunity to edit out those downtime moments. Obviously cant do it during live stream but something to consider. Itll make people more likely to click on another of your videos if they think you'll be able to see more of the gameplay (its hard to commit to a 2 hr video and see only 1 hr of actual gameplay as an extreme example)
I used to heavily edit for time - if you scroll back a couple years on the channel you'll see it used to be filmed on 4 cameras and thoroughly edited. And I agree that makes for better content, but it was unsustainable for a small hobby channel like this one. When I made the decision to go to the lower production value "live produced" style at the start of last year, we started getting 3x the content published, as a result the channel viewership and subscriber growth spiked, and we had more fun doing it. Maybe someday I'll hire an editor or quit my day job, but until then this seems to be the better style for us!
Love your willingness to film the game. A little feedback: There was a lot of “Um…uhh…wait, I didn’t think that through. Let me back this up.” I watch playthroughs so that people who know what they’re doing can demonstrate the game.
Appreciate the feedback! What you're looking for doesn't necessarily align with what we're looking to create, I'm sorry to say, which is more along the lines of videos of authentic and hopefully entertaining friends exploring games together. Plus holding players strictly to their initial moves just leads to much longer quiet thinking time which is not great on camera (or off camera but that's a matter of preference I suppose). Thanks for watching!
Funny how Jordan allowed himself to gain the 5 point bump from second place in tycoon at the end, when he should only have been allowed to do so if he won it outright, and then immediately reminded Brandon that he was not allowed to take the 2 point bonus from warlord.. =p
Hi! Emailing us at optimalplaygames@gmail.com would be the best bet! This used to be in the "about" tab on the channel which it seems like youtube recently got rid of for some reason? Guess I should start putting it in video descriptions. 😬
Yes, theres 4 there, which the game rules say to randomly pick 4 of the 6 to use. Also when i want more difficulty, i lower the used purple tiles to only 2. Makes escaping more interesting
Great to see more Dice Throne! I would probably choose to play regular Dice Throne over Adventures most of the time, but that doesn't mean it isn't fun. About Collateral Damage being Avoidable, I think Evasive does indeed work on that: "Avoidable - Can be reduced, prevented, avoided, or interrupted by cards and/or Status Effects." Evasive is indeed avoiding that damage. Concerning One More Time: "A chosen player may perform an additional Roll Attempt of up to 5 dice during their Offensive Roll Phase." A Roll Attempt is defined as "A dice roll performed by the player to Activate an Offensive or Defensive Ability", so I don't think you could've used it to reroll dice that are rolled as part of the chosen Ability. Other cards that manipulate dice still work there, but not this one. And one last thing about loot cards that aren't upgrades making your deck bigger, don't forget that you can always discard a loot card to draw a card. So they can always replace themselves if they're not helpful in the moment. (page 13 in the first section of loot cards) PS: I recently got into Spirit Island and your videos were great to get a feel for the game and ultimately helped in the decision to get everything. So thank you both!
Thank you for watching and for the clarifications! I had totally missed that loot cards can always be cycled, that definitely makes me feel better about bloating my deck.
Timestamps! 0:00 Intro chatter 1:12 Explaining the general expansion 3-session game structure Setup 2:35 What the board looks like at setup (for 3 players) 3:15 Picking fates 4:00 Fate decks 6:45 Putting initial buildings on the board Gameplay / Differences between base game and expansion 7:35 Intro 7:50 Empire ships (laws of control, movement, harm (battle, tax)) 10:44 Empire ship rules if you're an Outlaw 11:24 Empire ships and catapulting 12:18 Blight 13:00 Free cities (taxing, raiding) - can use 1 key to get a resource from the bank when raiding 14:15 Event cards (added to the action deck) Summits 15:40 Spending favors 17:50 Negotiations 18:30 Becoming an outlaw (if you called the summit), reviving the Empire 19:07 Event dice (triggers crisis phase or edict phase) 19:50 Edict phase - First regent can swap war/peace policy, edicts evaluated in numerical order 21:50 Crisis phase (+ details about blight crisis) 23:20 Types of crisis (blight, court, personal player crisis) 25:00 Summit/crisis/edicts can also be triggered by the 'imperial counsel in session' card being secured Acts 28:59 End of Act 1 - scoring, continuing your A fate or replacing your A fate with a B fate 31:48 Flagship rules 32:55 Flagship - building 36:15 End of act 2 - C fates (some have different instant-win conditions) 45:15 Teardown/Storing the game between acts 47:20 Outro
Nice playthrough. One thing. You can't just replace a die with a robot, you first have to build a robot using a blue room and then that die gets placed in a room as part of the resolution of the dice. Also you can only place one die ahead of the excavator to excavate. You cannot stack as asked. Rule book page 7.
