Emerge - Nothing a Little House Rule Can't Fix

Emerge (2023, Pandasaurus Games) for 2-4 players is a dice game where the roll of your dice determines the actions you can take. Player agency is in the distribution of the actions and the players use of dice modifiers and valuable bonus actions.
Enjoying Board Game Dad? Become a Patron!
/ neverbenbetter
Check out my web app for more board game videos and recommendations:
www.theperfectboardgame.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
0:00 - Introduction
0:50 - How to play Emerge
2:16 - Objective
3:36 - Gameplay
11:41 - My House Rule
14:46 - Game ratings
19:26 - Final Thoughts
20:26 - How to support Board Game Dad
/ neverbenbetter
The Perfect Boardgame Ratings:
Theme: 3
Mechanics: 6-8
Components: 4
Strategy: 3
Complexity: 2

[@Swayzee68]

I see what you're saying about your house rule. We kind of liked seeing what each person was doing with their turns, though. Full disclosure, when I read the rule book, I didn't see that we were each supposed to only take one action and then keep going around and around, one action per player until we passed (Terraforming Mars style). The way we had read it was that player one takes all of their actions and player 2 takes all of their actions, etc... it seemed to work out fine. And the rounds went faster than they would have if we had played by the rules.

[@user-mu9xx3sh2z]

Would you be so kind as to write your house rules that you talk about in the video?

[@jameskirk4692]

Thank you for this longer video! It doesn't seem like it's my kind of game, but I love hearing/learning about new games and I like your way of explaining and talking about games. Regarding house rules, yours here seem like a good one, speeding up the game without taking anything away. I personally love house ruling almost any game at home with my family, for many reasons. To make a game less complicated or shorter (especially if I judge it's unnecessarily so) especially for younger family members, make it more fun/interesting for our personal tastes, more strategic and/or tactical and reduce the amount and/or influence of the luck aspect, in order to introduce or improve the educational aspect of game playing for younger players(mix in learning of useful stuff within the fun of playing the game), etc. ... I love often thinking about game rules and I love dabbling in designing rules(unofficially, out of hobby) for my own potential game(s), influenced by mechanics, themes and rules of multiple already existing games I see or play. So I have no problem of anyone introducing any house rule for any game we play, as long as the rule has some sense in context of the game. In fact it's super welcoming in my book, to hear about other people's potential house rules in various games they play, especially to hear it from board gane reviewers such as yourself. I often am confused by how so many people on youtube (reviewers), end up giving up on a game they say they otherwise enjoy, just because of one or few easily changable rules which would solve their current negatives of the game without introducing new disadvantages. It often seems to me like people are afraid to house rule the games they own within their own private gaming group, in order to increase their own fun and interest in continuing playing the game, instead of abandoning it cause rules don't fully fit their own preferences. No one is forbidding anyone to change the game product in any way they see fit for their better experience of that same game product. Watching many game reviews on youtube, I personally see so many games which seems like they would be so interesting and fun for me and/or my family, but have one or few official rules which would be annoying to me or my family or are in any way unacceptable to us or wouldn't be fun enough for us. So with many games' names I put on my wishlist, I also already have a plan how to make tiny modification to that game, to make the game worth it for me, when otherwise I wouldn't wanna get/play the game in a form in which it was originally conceived. I always look forward to personalizing every game to better suit concrete players playing the game, to perfecting each game according to preferences of the players so that everyone can enjoy it more than what original rules allow it for them.

[@theperfectboardgame]

I enjoyed reading your perspective. Since returning from Essen, we are playing games (often more than one) every day in order to prepare for all the reviews I need to publish. I’ll be sure to share my house rules when I make those reviews.

[@michaelbottorffii4913]

I wouldn't have even called that a house rule. It just sounds like playing efficiently. We always play simultaneously and/or with overlapping turns in any game that allows for it. We've never considered that as changing the rules.

[@theperfectboardgame]

I’m glad to hear that. I wouldn’t want to change the game dramatically. But the rulebook is extremely clear. It explicitly says that even if you have enough dice (for example, you have three dice on plants, which is enough to add a 1st AND 2nd plant) you can only perform ONE discovery action on your turn.