Truths about White Castle: 1. You will have one turn where you start off small, oh but now I can do this, oh now I afford that and you feel like the greatest turn ever. 2. Once per game, you'll have a great turn figured out and 3/4ths of the way through realize your one short ($, food, metal, whatever). 3. Once per game, you'll have your awesome turn all figured out, and the player before you will do it. 3. Turn based will be how to play this on BGA. I predicting for me it'll be up there with Ark Nova and Terraforming Mars.

I don't know if it's the greatest game ever, but first time somebody at CABS made us play we were like "Really???" And we were all impressed.

This was very interesting! I'd be interested in seeing you play pirates of maracaibo

Thanks for the once again very insightgul and entertaining content! Pretty nice to see raw game learning material and the thought process that goes into it on your side. I hope we can see more in the future.

We almost played a 4 player game of this last night but someone cancel. Been practicing myself for WSBG.

BGA needs to implement a feature for angrily conceding. Simulate a table being flipped.

Biggest recommendation for this class is not to sleep on taking Medium and level 5. Dominate is very tempting, but the bottom of medium (at the start of each of your turns move 1 shadow up to three hexes) is gamechanging. It enables you so much especially for your melee abilities. Keeps all your shadows moving forward and if you take teleport cards it can solve your limited mobility. Essentially you are doing a stacking move 3 that you trigger when you need it. I guarantee this would make the class feel so much better Phoenix :)

Interesting piece in addition to Richard Garfield's BGG post about balancing in games, you touch similar points

Tier lists are good for views. But a good tier list build talks about situational use. Also why did you cut yourself off just as you were starting to talk about otters?

S tier content, as always

I guess it's just that, tier lists are generally tied to some sort of context, that might be missing from the tier list. If we were to say, what is a tier list of the continents in Ark Nova, I think every player would agree that Asia is far superior continent to be grabbing a random Partner Zoo in, and Australia is definitely the worst. But it depends, if the base conservation projects includes Australia, then Australia is one of the most important continents in that game. If primates is on the test, then Australia and Europe are worse. If you start with Aquatic Zoo, then Australia suddenly becomes a lot better. If you include Marine worlds, then who knows! I remember putting similar criticism on No Wonder's It's a Wonderful World tier list, where he placed a lot of production cards high on the tier list because "you're more likely to play them". Just because you're more likely to play them doesn't mean the card is good, and sometimes you just need to build *something* on round 1 to stay in the game, if the cards you got passed were all bad. In fact, he had to break down a whole other section of his tier list essentially into "good for 2 player, not good in 2player". In MTG, tier lists often are limited to what *format* it's being played in. A card may be good in constructed, but unplayable in draft.

Decisions should be made by situational synergy.

I always bring up similar concepts whenever I hear people complain about balance (especially in the past couple years where the complaints are suddenly more personal). People wonder why designers didn't "balance" things because they think a card is too strong or weak. Of course, the context is, "Strong when? For new players? For players who are comfortable with a certain strategy? Early game? Late game? When paired with another card?". Strength isn't a single-axis data point.

I watched a group of top hearthstone battlegrounds streamers put together a tier list of the 80 odd heroes in that recently and it was fascinating to here them talk it through. It was however a completely irrelevant list to me at the end though because so many of their rankings came with a caveat that I just didn't have the knowledge of and definitely not the memory to remember all the points of why certain heroes were good in certain game setups. As I only play casually I just pick the heroes I like playing. It's a different game at different skill levels similar to your MOBA experience.

Could you make a tier list of the different types of tier lists?

The whole time while watching this I was thinking, so when do we get to the good cards? This seems like the weakest class in all of the havens so far. I agree that this was the time to try out scaling health minions. Did they not playtest this class on difficulty 3 or above?

Really good analysis video. Thanks! 🎉🎉

Im just starting to watch the vid and i am at the start of the game, but i must say now. What a horrible horrible draft....

Hey can you please tell me the final scores of the players?

This list looks pretty close to how I would rate things, nice job overall! I like the axis you used, and would probably define them as the following: Skill = Mostly how easy is it to get from 90% of the skill level of top players, and partially how difficult is it to cover that last 10% Variance = How consistent are results amongst players 1-2 tiers apart from each other? What is the % chance for a 500 BGA rating player to win vs a 300 BGA rating player?

Also, the passive effect on the Lighthouse doesn't discard the lighthouse. While it is in play, you may repeatedly discard the top card of your deck.

Thanks a lot for this playthrough! I enjoyed following your reasoning and your strategic analysis. One major mistake - unfortunately - is that the Export effects may only be used once each. When you reach 10 trade goods, you get that effect (and mark that effect as being used), then you need to work to get to 20. So you do not get these effects each round. This gives you some incredibly powerful cards.

Brittle is much more powerful than intended, I think. Just a couple of rounds(or a handful maybe) for the Rat guy to build a mega-trap. Then THIS guy gives the condition. And the little fragile dude follows with his attack. You can definitely see some damage numbers not even Berserker from the original Haven game could pull off. So much appreciated tool. PS: if played cautiously, Fist's stamina is phenomenally good.

Saw GWT El Paso in your games list at the end. Any thoughts so far on it?

I love this game. Very clever timing mechanism for getting your workers back. One of my top games that came out last year.

53:00 IO mining seems waaay too late and not worth it. He must not have had anything else to play..Even his robinson action that gen is debatable imo.. Btw, i wonder why these early greeneries were left open for so long. People just didnt put their cities there. I was especially surprised by yellow's city bottom right. Why not put it where the greeniers of Levi are and get 2 free points? Surely a lot better than some rebates

I like to think of this class as an AI that possesses the summon's body. When you leave one body, the one you were just in it left behind.

Amazing. One of my favorite game, dozens of plays, and this really illuminated how much deeper the strategy is than the level I play at. At this high a level of play there is so much more 'donkey space' thinking going on.

Hi Nick. Raul here. fantastic video. Game with all possible strategies. Blake engineer, dalton builder, wei cowboy. And your workerless, very oportunistic and tactical play. Amazing how many points you got in the end. Game decided in the details and a couple of key decisions along the trail. After watching this, i’ve made my mind into playing it on next wsbg.

Great video! Wei here - just wanted to add some context. I didn't remove the dessert hazard for 2 reasons. 1. I want to force the other players to pay the extra money early on since I don't have any money issue. 2. I don't want Dalton to be able to get to his building in 4 moves. I think the biggest misplays I did are 1. delivered to 1 instead of 8 which cost me an objective (I think at the time, I may have miscalculated my money to be able to both get cowboy and cows in the next loop). 2. I forgot I could have taken the first bandit for a draw 2 discard 2 instead of going for 10 money (this would save me one turn and win the game by 1 point).

I was at this table! :) (I was the table judge. Hopefully we finally got a clean, error-free game recorded here on KZbin, as opposed to my own early efforts) At the end of this game, on some level it was just another regular old GWT session: Builder wins, Cowboy is second, Ho-Hum. But of course it was so much more than that. Really great commentary Nick, watched it all the way through. I will join the chorus and say that, sure, you probly should have just bought the two builders and won the game. And as you point out, with Dalton getting set from the start to bounce to the builder spot from the canyon...and then by midgame, he's got the whole bouncy-bouncy-bouncy set up...well, yeah. Another thing I'll note: I don't like to play Engie, personal preference. But in this setup, with the two engineer tiles back-to-back...that's just almost always going to lead to a sad loop, with an awkward stop somewhere for the train player. Just the pacing of the loop, you want those two tiles spread out a bit, ideal world.

Great Commentary!

Just finished watching - thanks for making the video! GWT commentary videos always give me fond memories of Scott's 2018 GWT video commentary being what got me into the WBC scene. I was surprised by a couple decisions each of the players made - that's the fun part of these, seeing how we all value little things a bit differently. Like you, I was pretty convinced Wei Wei had a strong game going in the early stages, but Blake building near the end rather than in the desert risk spot, incentivizing you to collaborate in slowing Wei Wei down felt like a reasonably significant swing away from him that I didn't entirely expect. Those rock hazards felt like the shields that were guarding against Dalton's plan becoming fully competitive, so you removing one did seem like a nice turn for Dalton.

On his last stop at the tribes action, why doesn't Wei Wei do the double aux draw and discard then when he misses if it's a 50/50 shot instead of taking the 10 dollar bandit for 2vp take the shuffle bandit? The 4 VP swing from ending the game on Dalton outweighs the 10 coins/2vp.

I'm 13 minutes in... 10b is in the game, someone else has bought an engineer, and we decide to buy 2 engineers when we have the choice of anything? So that we can rush to the first station master that scores hazards without 4a in the game? This is either a !! or a ?? 😛

Had to read the title twice 😊

Tried it last year and i didnt like it at first few tries. Maybe its time to try it again. Everybody seems to like it. But hey i just discovered Karvi..

I loooooove your commentaries with all these nice and funny things you say and do :) thank you! i'm watching the video after the ring final (two actually, this year and last year) but still it's good and educational. If somebody wanna play with me in TX or in app you're very welcome.

Great analysis on this one, and 100% agreed on hidden trackable information. It’s less bad when you can take notes but still tedious.

Great commentary, how do you feel Levi always suceeds in flying under the radar? Time and time again people (including yourself!) are choosing to target someone else instead of him with negative effects

Was waiting for this one, thanks for the commentary! Hopefully you'll be doing it for your semi-finals TfM game.

Will be wheeling out Hegemony again next weekend...trying to get a fourth and fifth play in before the plan is to cull it! I'd be happy to play it more but it's too difficult to get the same 4 people together for a whole afternoon just to play Hegemony. Going to try Fromage on BGA very soon too and looking forward it

Congrats on winning the Ring Final in such an interesting, low-scoring match of Arnak! I'm just getting into this game on BGA, wondering what's your favourite player count and why?

And the first puzzle immediately sucks. You have to read the developers minds to understand the difference between the format of line 2 and line 3. If you know, you know. I get what they are trying to do, but poorly executed.

I'd missed this one. Very excellent! Thank you!!

I didn't understand Shaw's strategy at all. Playing a sharing bird in the forest is ok with ravens around, but then why waiting till end of round 3 to play another forest bird? And repetedly laying egg with no birds in grassland ... then playing a bird there too late ... both Henry and David tried to build a counter raven engine, she just didnt have anything. Very strange

Yes to more of this! Your pacing and not getting caught up in discussing things that don't matter was fantastic. :)

Regarding Civolution: play time can be trimmed down to ~30 minutes per player with experience. My fiancée and I play this in about 60 minutes now, 30 plays in.

On a side note, very good video, quick and to the point on each game.

Expeditions - Agree with your thoughts. It was better than expected, happy to play but not blown away. Seti - Interesting to hear your thoughts, I was very excited at first and I am slowing losing that excitement. Hegemony - Outstanding game, played all roles and love it. I might want to slightly improve the scoring as the State is very easy to win. Shackleton Base - Very interested in playing this game as well. Gaia Project is what you're maybe thinking about for differences in corps, but it is very hard to balance such games. Civolution - Playing it this weekend, hoping it was great, but I am slowly losing excitement on the game.