5 Games I Played, and Then Was Sad - with Tom Vasel

[@YegRon]

My wife and I were very excited for Botany when we found out about the campaign. It’s beautiful, the theme appeals to both of us and the price seemed reasonable. However, after diving in a bit and learning about the gameplay it quickly became obvious to both of us that it wasn’t a game we were going to actually enjoy playing.

[@brickisland6353]

Had the same feeling, a great looking game, very nice art and components. But the game it self disappoints.

[@bloodrunsclear]

The sheer amount of games out there is fascinating. It's always nice to have a rapid fire roundup, even if they aren't always sterling examples. Botany 100% deserves a better version: what a great idea!

[@jeannater2393]

Botany’s wonderful charm was absolutely decimated with nonsensical mechanisms and random mishaps that ended feeling like you have to house rule the game to death as part of the grieving process for us. It was really sad

[@BassForever]

I love Unboxed, it's such a unique experience and playing the actual game is almost an irrelevant part. The conversation about how things come together is engaging for me and everyone I've taught the game to.

[@Trig565]

Unboxed just felt like a worse version of Eine Gegen Eine

[@EfrainRiveraJunior]

I'm happy that you played these games, so that I don't have to.

[@drinksandmeeples]

Botany: The event card rule makes perfect sense. Sometimes it's better to draw an event before picking a flower as you might lose it from the event if you trigger that afterwards. Botany never claimed to be anything more than what it is. I think it slightly outstays its welcome and yes, it's really random and swingy, but due to the funny stories I don't really mind it. I don't think it's great by any means, but not bad either. I like it. 7/10 for me.

[@YegRon]

Also, I would say that Botany is an excellent example of an amazing, well run and very polished kickstarter campaign and…a disappointing end product. That’s not to say there aren’t people out there that are going to enjoy it. But at first glance it appeared to me a beautiful medium weight Euro, which it is very much not.

[@MrDJCoulton]

Botany is an example of what happens when an outsider does product design and marketing better than the old industry standards. They do remarkly well at selling a half baked product. Same thing happens in tech too

[@FPchie]

Was tempted with their beautiful product design and marketing as well, but looking at their KS profile, Botany is their very first game to develop. Gameplay rules, plus the lack of video reviews, were not convincing. Knew that I have to pull out, wait and see. Not sure if other 15,000(!) backers put the creator's background and experience in boardgame development into account before spending that money. This is the type of game where I would just play once and leave it in the shelf. Glad save me time to not re-sell this game in the secondary market lol.

[@HunchPunch]

I own and have played Botany. I feel the same, so much potential and developed barely past the first stage of adding mechanics to a game. It feels like they set a goal to have three mechanics: moving, collecting, and estate building and then rounded it off with RNG and dice rolling for variety and luck. I hope that maybe there will be an expansion some day that adds some decision making or complexity to game. Maybe around other resources needed to travel or in order to build your estate. With some thought, an expansion with a few resources or decks of cards and a rulebook could save this title.

[@surayahdevisser4148]

I already had a feeling that Botany would be very light and based on a lot of luck. Not necessarily my cup of tea, but decided to back it anyway. It was exactly how I thought it would be. I have to say that I’ve mostly played it solo, and there you have more control over the things you do. Whereas with other players it really is all based on luck and very unbalanced. So I’ll stick to playing it solo, as I do love the theme and the art. I hope they will think of some ways to make it more intriguing, because they could have done so much more with it! Maybe some fans will come up with some nice improvements on BGG 😄

[@BarronFamily231]

Pirate’s Flag really should have been tweaked slightly and put on mass market shelves as a vastly improved Candy Land.

[@traceyshenanigans]

We play Botany and we love it. It is an awesome game. There is luck, like there is in almost every game in existence, but there is plenty of mitigation through character powers, cards, and just getting good.

[@thecocktailian2091]

You know what all those games have in common? Laziness. Themes that are abundant with mechanisms that are common. It's like they took two grab bags, one with themes and and one with mechanisms. Everybody pull a tile from each bag and make a game!!!! So I guess Unboxing wins the round, ending up being very Meta.

[@cleonanderson1722]

Three games I played that made me sad. 1. Indika 2. Slay the Princess 3. Signalis Not board games and not what OP meant by "sad", but video title reminded me and I happened to play these all back to back (they are very good games) while I happened to be depressed and it was kind of a mistake (I don't recommend doing what I did).

[@guandjs]

Botany was definitely a big disappointment. I agree with everything you said. One other terrible feature is that the ending can be abrupt such that if someone can’t get back in time when it is triggered they don’t get anything on their ship. I won the game I played due to that. So glad I didn’t back it on KS though it looked and sounded so good.

[@andrewimpellezzeri3886]

Botany sounds interesting with some house rules. Drafting the original cards and then having cards ,face up, equal to the number of players +1 to choose when getting new plants. For the events I would shuffle the ones that affect everyone in one pile and flip one when after the each full round of play where everyone has taken a turn(possibly a secondary ending if that event deck runs out of cards). The other events I would have drawn when that player's reputation increases. I also would limit the take that where you could only affect the people sitting next to you and only twice per game (so 4 negatives Max).

[@VaultBoy13]

Yeah, but why waste your time on games that need house rules? There's plenty of good games that don't need them.

[@FPchie]

I dont know man, but you paid that much for a KS + shipping, and then you and other backers here have to add in more than one house rule to fix the gameplay...sounds like you are paying to do their job lol... Maybe you could have propose this to them during the KS project? Was this game even heavily playtested? This reminds me of the recent half-baked video games releases after all the marketing and hype.

[@RoboStuk]

Any game is great with some house rules.

[@FPchie]

@@RoboStuk true, but that’s not the point. An expensive, empty game with no rules can be “great” too if your house rules are better.

[@andrewimpellezzeri3886]

@@FPchie I did not back this and do not own it, but if I had spent money on a game I would try and get as much fun out of it as possible. In that vein I was trying to suggest my ideas that might improve the gameplay for others.

[@IronSalamander8]

Kraken Skulls is very light and very random. I backed it for a fast filler for meetups before or after the 'main event' games. It went over well, despite it being crazy, but it's a fun dice roller fest once in awhile. Not one I'd play all the time though.

[@chrisporter3486]

Appreciate the kind words and your support of Kraken Skulls truly means SO MUCH. Choosing any game to buy and try is a big deal now with so many games out there, so you supporting Kraken Skulls.. so grateful. Much love Iron Salamander!

[@ramostott190]

Your description of Pirate's Flag gave me traumatic flashbacks of Zimby Mojo

[@WestChamber21]

Got Botany for my wife and we enjoy it. My favorite game is Eldritch Horror and Botany is like an extremely light competitive version of EH. It is random but there are ways to mitigate it like in EH and we enjoy the theme very much because it really does feel like you’re a botanist researching plants.

[@eVanDiesel]

I agree, but it ran super long with 3 players. That will prevent it from being played too often.

[@jaybakata5566]

What happened to the judgement hammer? Guess you stopped doing that?

[@_Cervantez]

Unboxed looks like it wanted to be City of Six Moons, but didn't dare to go all the way

[@speedandstyletony]

The Kraken Skull game looks like it might work with older elementary age kids. The Prate's flag game looks like a younger kids game if it weren't for all the text on the cards. Nice looking ship pieces though!

[@chrisporter3486]

Kraken Skulls is a big hit for that age, yea! We’ve had a ton of families excited to play it on game night for that reason as well 🙂

[@speedandstyletony]

@@chrisporter3486 thanks!

[@blueseqperl]

I enjoy Botany, but it is a light game that reminds me of Ticket to Ride with set collection.

[@BoardGamesBricksHobbies]

With a map that looks like Pandemic!

[@travisskane5459]

Sad Vasel doing the hobby a favor by calling out sub-par games. Keep up the hard work of keeping mediocre games off shelves!

[@beornthebear9023]

Botany has been a huge let down for everyone in my circle who got it. I think the prepledge they ran made a lot of people back who didn’t realize the type of game it was

[@jgregveneklasen2657]

It's pretty?

[@emrawiya4807]

And exactly why pre-pledging is bad for the board game space.

[@beornthebear9023]

@@emrawiya4807 this has been discussed extensively on so many places. The majority of people on every poll, forum etc I have seen don’t like. If you enjoy being marketed to in that way great but most people I know don’t like it. A quick search and you can find numerous videos on this. BoardgameCo, Chris George etc.

[@cassandracastro2759]

UnBOXed sounds like the board game equivalent to Stephen King writting about a novelist (sounds like it was designed for designers).

[@MrTomahawker]

Pirates Flag seems like game for 3-6 year old kids. But it has text on cards! Why would you do this?

[@bones983]

With some careful editing, I think Mike can pull “Merchant’s Cove, a very good game” from the audio here. 😂

[@alexlord4599]

I felt the exact same way before and after playing Botany. Took the words right out of my mouth. 4/10.

[@koklead7904]

Botany. Great, successful campaign. End. Haha

[@ko9]

I really liked the glossy cards of Pirate's Flag, but yeah, the game seems very bad

[@brickisland6353]

The Pirate's flag is a kids game, not a strategic game.

[@nshaw1299]

I didn't understand the expectation from 'Unboxed'. It sounds like the benchmark is Zendo. Does it give you an interesting way to deduce rules? that's it. I wouldn't expect the actual games to be good.

[@jgregveneklasen2657]

It would be nice if at least some of the discovered games were worth playing? That's too much to ask?

[@nshaw1299]

@@jgregveneklasen2657 I would say that if the goal is to deduce rules, forcing those rules to be 'rules of a good game' may compromise the quality of the deduction game. Obviously I don't have enough data to say if the deduction game is good. The one-off doesn't bother me. In the deduction genre there are many 'one-off mystery' games...

[@ramonosuke]

I almost fell asleep at the explanation of The Pirate's Flag game. Holy moly, that game is awful. 2/10 for me, because it has nice artwork

[@alexstrang9823]

Unboxed would be more fun IMO if it was just a boxful of components and you're encouraged to make your own games with it, perhaps with some guidance

[@raptormesh]

Looks like some AI art and public domain art as well in these games. I think they're fine in prototypes but for production i'd rather have poor but consistent art then those.

[@chrisporter3486]

0% AI or anything in Kraken Skulls, I’m the full time illustrator. I think just wanted to put that out there so there’s no confusion as we don’t do that for our games or plan to ever do that in the future.

[@randalladkins7452]

Love the title change! Way less pretentious than “5 Games I Played, So You Don’t Have To.” Especially when some games just didn’t work for you and that to title pushes away people who would actually like those games more than you. 😊

[@lucy3107]

I agree. And it seems especially timely this week because our group loves Botany. We had a great time with it and will be playing again soon.

[@lucy3107]

I will also add - our group plays both board games and RPGs together. That's part of the reason the randomness, dice rolling, and uneven events in Botany were fine for us. If you don't like those things and want strategy only, no luck, then it's not the game for you.

[@randalladkins7452]

@@lucy3107 last week he did Age of Comics, Mecurial, and at least one other game that people really disagreed with him on. And all we’re by small publishers who need more people who might think differently than him on thru games to view them. If they were trash money grab garbage, they might deserve it. But it seemed like most people at least in the comments would have at least given them a 7. (I personally really enjoyed Age of Comics).

[@Drew_D]

Would unBOXed be more fun if you just started with rules? Perhaps, House Rules? 🤔

[@DarthPizza777]

Tom you really need to get over your hatred of random and Luck in games and just have fun with it gezz.

[@thedicetower]

I don't hate luck, some of my favorite games have a lot of luck - I just want a lot of player agency also. But I'm glad people like these games! We all enjoy different things!

[@Drumox]

All of these look like Target fodder

[@thecrabbydice]

At this point, if ur a euro game and u have "random events" ur game sucks ....