Malts and Meeples Videos

Firstly, I want to start with the quality of my videos. They are solid, but not always where I want them to be, and that is something that I want to improve upon. Plus sometimes technology acts up and I miss it, see Sleeping Gods Part 5, I believe, for how that went wrong and the audio got messed up. That is somewhat on me. But this is going to be where I ask you to subscribe, give videos thumbs up, and consider the Patreon, which you can find here.

The reason I am making a push for this is that I’d like to do a few things, eventually, to improve my streaming quality. And Patreon plus growing the channel so I can do more previews or reviews of Kickstarter games coming up, means that I’ll be able to do that eventually. I’d like to be able to get a gaming table. That would make it easier for me to keep a campaign game set-up and keep getting it to the table for streaming. I would also like to improve the quality of my game camera, get something that is a bit better on the focus.

New Content

Next up, I want talk about the different types of new content I am considering doing. Because I do have some ideas for upcoming series. And I want to ask if people want me to do board game reviews in video format? I do written reviews, and those won’t go away. But should I do video reviews as well?

But while you ponder that question, let’s look at some series I’m considering doing:

Collection or Cull

This would be a series where I go through my collection and talk about if I am going to cull them – sell them – or keep them in my collection. Plus it’ll be a fun way to talk about the games that are in my collection. I know a number of channels do this sort of thing already, I generally like those videos if they aren’t about – “Look how much I’m getting rid of, I’m so awesome for it.”. But I think it’d be a smart thing to do to take stock of what I have, what might not be getting played, and what might be leaving. This would probably be my biweekly Monday chat.

Video Game Streaming

I want to keep these new ideas a bit more simple. Mainly, without a gaming table, it make it trickier and more work to set-up a board game every single time I want to stream. So I want to try some things like video games as well. And with Elden Ring just coming out, I am really tempted to pick it up and stream that. I also have the digital version of Gloomhaven I could stream. Or Slay the Spire and Inscryption. Though, Inscryption right now is less interesting. And Outer Wilds is another one that really seems intriguing to me. Let me know what you’d want to see streamed.

A little bit about each game:

1. Elden Ring – This is an open world game kind of in the style of a Dark Souls, but way more open world than that. It’s new, looks really cool, but also does still have a few bugs. But if you want to see my hack and slash and die, this could be awesome. Plus the graphics are amazing.
2. Gloomhaven Digital – Gloomhaven the board game but digital. I think it would be fun to go through, I believe you need to control four characters which is a downside. Plus it’s more board game coverage, which isn’t a bad thing.
3. Slay the Spire – This is board game adjacent because there is a board game version coming eventually, maybe, hopefully, to crowdfunding. But it is a rogue-like deck building game. The nice thing is that a run isn’t that long.
4. Outer Wilds – A space game where a sun explodes and the world resets every 22 minutes, I believe. This is going to be a game of exploring mysteries of why it’s happening and maybe figure out how to break out of the loop, I really don’t know.
5. Other – let me know if there is one that you think would be interesting to watch? Maybe something more story and choice driven?

Digital Board Games

So, technically Gloomhaven Digital could fall into this category. But more likely I’d use this to preview upcoming games or more for games that are a one off. So stuff like my Rogue Angels play through on TTS. The idea would be that I want to cover more upcoming games so you know if they are right for you.

Recorded Game Plays

So, unlike most of this other content, this would be recorded. The upside to that is that it means I don’t need to set it up at a specific time. The downside is that they might be more sporadic. But if you liked the Aldarra game play, and that was a massive game, then maybe do some more recorded game plays. I could also do them when I just feel like playing a one off solo game and leave campaigns more for the Wednesday live stream.

Top Tens

Board game top ten lists are always fun. I would consider doing these just by myself as I have before. But I’d also like to start bringing in a few friends on them as well. Or reach out to some content creators to see if they’d want to collaborate. There are a lot of creators that do top tens, but I’m okay adding to that because I like doing them as well. You can see in my Top 100 videos how excited I get making them and talking about games.

Final Thoughts

Firstly, I want to thank everyone for watching. I really appreciate the people who join it live and check it out later. And I do want feedback on what works well, what maybe doesn’t and I could improve upon, things like that. Let me know what you want to see more of or less of. You can use the information in the bottom to let me know on Facebook, Twitter, or email.

And I really want to grow Malts and Meeples this year. But for those who prefer the written content, I will not be getting away from that. Nerdologists.com is going to still be a focus on what I do and something that I want to grow as well. But part of that is growing the brand as a whole and that means if Malts and Meeples does better, hopefully more people will find Nerdologists.com as well.

And help me pick my next board game to stream as well.

Send an Email.
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.
Support us on Patreon here.

This really gives you an idea of how the combat works in the game. It does have less to do with some of the other things in the game, like skill checks. I talk about the game in more details on my Crowdfunding Preview which you can find here.

But I like that this is more combat focused this time. It shows off for myself, as a player, how the game can do a lot of different things. And Emil and I talked after about playing more and looking at some scenarios in there that aren’t so combat focused to help show off the system.

Rogue Angels After A Break

I do want to talk about a bit of my experience coming back to Rogue Angels after now playing it since October. Mainly about how accessible the game is. For me that’s a question for any campaign style game. When I play it and then the holidays happen, maybe someone is sick, it goes a month or a month and a half without a session, is the game easy to play.

And I thought it was pretty easy to get back into. Now, I did have the designer which certainly helps with getting back into the swing of things. But the basic mechanics are easy to get back into. What you will see is that my memory with how taking damage works is a bit fuzzier. And even at the end as I talk about scars, I was getting it wrong.

Rogue Angels, though, feels easier to get back to the table than something like Gloomhaven would if I played a session and then just let it sit. When playing through Gloomhaven I did have a couple of longer breaks in there, and I was able to pick it up again easily, just for a reference, but that was while we mid campaign. Rogue Angels is definitely going to be easier.

Live Stream

Let me know your thoughts on this live stream. It is definitely something that I’d love to do more. Work with more designers or other content creators, play games over TTS. Or maybe even dive into a Gloomhaven video game campaign as well? Is this content that was fun to watch?

I know it came together at the last second. We were planning on going live on Discord and just sharing a screen that way. But I set-up my sharing quickly, so let me know if it worked. I’m sure that I could navigate TTS a little bit better. But is seeing content like this useful for you? Did it give you an idea of how the game, Rogue Angels, will play, even without having a physical copy to see played?

Send an Email.
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.
Support us on Patreon here.

Fruit Picking

Fruit picking is an Mancala style game where you are taking seeds, moving them around your own player board until you have enough in a storehouse to buy what you want from the market. All of this while you’re racing to collect the right fruits in combination to be able to complete one of four different hands as a winning condition. This can be one of all five different fruits, a full house, three pairs, or four of a kind.

There were a few things that I really enjoyed about this game, first there was the speed of the game. Even on Tabletopia, and digitally they always go slower, the game was really fast. Turns are very simple, you pick your seeds from one location, move them, and if you have enough seeds in the storehouse and there is a fruit card you can buy in the market of the fruit you landed on, you can buy it. But, while turns and the whole game are fast, you can still do some awesome combos, and this is the second thing I really enjoyed. When moving the seeds around, if you place your last seed in the storehouse you immediately go again, so this is a spot that you can really strategize in the game, and honestly, there is probably an ideal strategy from the beginning with only the market messing things up. But if you don’t strategize from the word go and just enjoy the game, you can find yourself in some really great turns of building up your storehouse so that you’re ready for the whole game. That’s basically what happened to me. Finally, I also like that there are multiple win conditions, four of a kind needs the fewest cards but is easier to block by buying up what someone needs, and is the most dependent upon what cards come out. I won by getting a full house, bu we had a player close to four of a kind and a couple other players who were lagging behind a little bit.

Final thoughts on the game, I really enjoyed it, the game play was slick and had a good family weight to it. I could see playing this with my parents who don’t play a ton of games, but I think because it’s fast, I could see playing it as almost a filler in a board game night. The one downside is that the US distribution is limited right now. It is coming to the BGG (Board Game Geek) online store, and right now that’s it. If you are looking for a new family weight game, though, I’d definitely recommend it.

The Librarians Adventure Card Game

Let me preface by saying that I really like The Librarians movies and TV show. They are goofy and campy, but a lot of fun. If you aren’t familiar with them, the Library here is not just a place for books, it’s a place for lost and magical artifacts in the world that could cause catastrophe if you aren’t careful with them.

In the game you are doing basically the same thing, with the base game going to have you playing through season one and an expansion for the first movie coming in the kickstarter as well. This will be kickstarting either in September or October, and sounds like everything is done and playtested so it’ll kickstarter and then go to print right away, which is fun. In the game you are dealing with a scenario, in the case of the first scenario, it starts with the library being broken into, and you are one of three librarians or a guardian tasked to stop it, you have different skills that you can use. You start by putting into play any sidekicks, attachments, or artifacts that you want an can afford. This is done via spending energy. Then you, for each player, flip over a card from the event deck, this might cause you to flip a bad guy or an obstacle that goes onto the board and you have to overcome it. Or it might be a complication which is a one time thing you have to deal with right then. Then, as a group in whatever order you want, you take actions to overcome the obstacles and defeat the bad guys. To deal with these things you are generally using a skill and rolling dice. But you can give yourself successes on the blank sides of dice by discarding cards.

This game did a number of things that I enjoyed. First off, each character has their own unique deck of cards, so playing Jacob Stone, I would get different cards than the person playing Eve Baird, and so on. And each of the characters has a skill they are stronger at than the other players and a skill that they are weaker at. I also like that basically everything, minus drawing the events for the scenario, can be done at the same time. I can play my sidekicks and artifacts while you play yours and it doesn’t matter. Now, I will say that the main actions, fighting, dealing with obstacles, etc, should be announced when you are taking them because sometimes order can matter for those things. But it allows you as a group to optimize what you are doing. But the game plays fast because people can do things at the same time. I also liked the scenario, there was a main scheme that the bad guys were trying to do and in the actual scenarios I have to imagine it might be a multistep scheme, and there are then things that you are trying to do as well. It is pulled straight from season one of the TV series and it works well. There are four scenarios in the box that can be played a campaign and unlock new cards for your decks and things like that, but you can also just play a single scenario.

Final thoughts on The Librarians Adventure Card game, this was heavily prototyped though the cards themselves had the right information. So I can’t really comment on the look of the game, but the game play is what matters and I really enjoyed it. If you are a board gamer and a fan of the show, it’s worth checking out the game. If you are a fan of Warehouse 13, probably worth checking out the show and then the game. And I think if you haven’t watched either, it’s still a good game, if you don’t like the show, it won’t be for you. Overall a lot of fun and coming to Kickstarter in September/October.

The Night Cage

Now, I’m going to say that this was a bit of an odd experience. Some of that was because I was quite familiar with the game having watched a Gloryhoundd Playthrough of it. Some of it because the other four people in the game were physically sitting around a table with each other on their laptops. So early on there were some communication issues because they’d be talking muted or showing on their screen to someone what they were thinking by pointing but not using the mouse pointer.

In The Night Cage, you wake up in a labyrinth that is constantly changing and you have only a candle and a little bit of nerve as you crawl your way through tunnels searching for a way out. You are trying to avoid monsters and find not only keys but also a gate so that you can all escape. Every player needs to get a key and be at the gate before you run out of the tunnel tiles and can’t all make it to a gate. And if you get hit by a monster, your candle goes out so you’re moving one space at a time, and if you get hit again, you die. So if anyone can’t make it to the gate, you lose, if anyone can’t get a key, you lose, and if anyone dies, you lose, so there are plenty of ways to lose.

So, I don’t think that my experience was fully representative of how the game works. Like I said, I came in knowing how it worked already and since it was towards the end of the day and Gen Con online, I feel like only some of the people at the other table were paying full attention to the rules, or how to use Tabletop Simulator. With that said, the game was still fun. I like the push and pull of wanting to spread out and find a key as quickly as possible and then having to race back together before time runs out, as spreading out means you’ll see more of the board faster and burn through tiles faster, or you can stay closer together, move around slowly, but the risk of that is that someone is going to get hit by a monster if one pops up. There’s also a good amount of pressure because you can see the number of tiles you have left dwindling, in TTS via a counter, but in real life it’ll be removing them from a stack of tiles that is your candle burning shorter. So you feel the pressure you’re up against and you know that you only have 4 gates and 7 keys, I believe, for a five player game, so you can’t afford to lose too many keys or gates, or you risk not being able to complete.

The Night Cage was a good time to play, like I said, some stuff made it weird. But got to learn more about the other monsters in the Kickstarter and how they’ll work and how they can change up the game and how it works. Overall, it was a fun time, and I think this game in person when you can see the stack of tiles getting shorter and shorter as the candle burns down, it’s going to e great. I’m really glad that I had played it and definitely confirms that I want to back it, as it’s on Kickstarter right now.

So that’s what I played over the weekend. Which one of the games sounds the most interesting to you? Did you do any Gen Con online events?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

Fruit Picking

So, this is a game that I mentioned on my game list yesterday (found here) of things that I’d have wanted to see. It looks like a pretty simple game with a mechanic I really like, Mancala style movement of pieces. The aesthetic is cute and it looks like a good game to play digitally and one that if it’s fun would fit into the collection that I have and would get played. I like that you can play it solo as well. Definitely one that I was curious about and wanted to see, so when it was available to play, I thought it would be easy to checkout.

The Librarians Adventure Card Game

Now, I love this show, so when I saw it as something I could demo, I was really excited. I think that you could have all sorts of crazy and wacky adventures in a game with this theme. I don’t know much about it, but there’s deck construction and it’s an adventure scenario driven game, so I think it could be right up my alley. I like that it is show focused as well, more so than movie focused, because while I like the movies, you get more characters to really play around with as the show, and I want to play as basically all the main characters. I’m hoping that this game has a good balance of fun mechanics and that you really get a lot of the story so the mechanics don’t get in the way. Really excited to try this one though.

The Night Cage

I’m backing this one on Kickstarter, and with that I’ll get access to a Tabletop Simulator version, but I still want to learn how to play it and play it in that con setting. I think that this is going to be a blast, I really like the idea of the game and the horror and push your luck element to it. Out of all the games, I’m the most confident that I’m going to like this one. I like board games that provide tension, I like spooky themes. And I like cooperative games. So I think that this one, while a bit abstracted, will still have some of the theme just based off of the tension that is in the game. Really excited to try this one and excited to be taught the rules so that I can teach it easily to people via Tabletop Simulator when I get access to that while waiting on the physical game to come in.

Those are the three that I’m doing, I definitely considered more. Roy Cannaday from the Dice Tower just announced and has games for his new 4X space game which I thought about trying out. There were also demos of Hel, the Viking Saga game that I backed on Kickstarter. So, if you are signed up for GenCon online, what events are you planning to checkout?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

Tabletop Simulator (TTS) is a digital gaming system. It is basically an “engine” that can drive any type of board game from simple card games to something as complex as Gloomhaven. To play a game, you have to first get and install the module, but only the person who is hosting the “server” will have to install the module, the other people playing will be able to connect. Then, if the game is scripted it’ll help set-up the game and get you ready to go, if it isn’t, you have to set-up the game. After that you can hop in and start playing the game.

Now, that sounds pretty cool, but I want to talk about scripted versus not scripted because that is an important topic. Scripted games are pretty enjoyable on TTS. It gets you up and running fast, and while there can be some hiccups with how they work, for the most part it isn’t bad. I’ve played Clank, for the first time ever, on TTS and it was easy to pick-up and work with, even with some hiccups in the scripting. I’ve played multiple games of Dice Throne through their official module on TTS and that worked extremely smoothly. On the other hand, we were playing the Forgotten Circles expansion on TTS for Gloomhaven and that was not scripted and set-up was over an hour, some of it was learning the system but some of it is that without scripting there is a ton more work for the set-up. And scripting is often beyond set-up, Dice Throne has a button for the upkeep phase when you start your turn so you don’t have to remember to draw a card and get a CP (combat point).

Game play, I’d say, is generally a little bit slower. Some of that is just the technology. The commands are a bit slower to do as compared to playing in real life as well. Scripted again is faster, but a scenario of Gloomhaven took us, without set-up, around 2.5 hours to get through the whole thing in two nights versus about 1.5 hours if we’d played it in person, or possibly even less than that. Playing Dice Throne, however, was only marginally slower than it would be in real life. I’d say that it would be pretty similar for Clank as well. But it is slower and if something gets messed up, it can take a little while, even with the rewind functionality to fix it. And some of this depends on network speed as well. The processing for everything is kind of jointly handled, so if someone has a slow connection, it can really make the whole thing lag.

There’s another issue with TTS that I want to address. Some of the modules that you can install are fan made and not official. Things like the Gloomhaven one have become officially licensed, but it wasn’t originally. Dice Throne one is official as well. Now, even the unofficial ones can be great to use and will give you an idea about the game, but understand that the company hasn’t signed off on it and technically it is illegal for that to be there, a direct copy of the game. But when companies do use it for a game it’s great. I was able to teach Dice Throne to someone who has been interested in it for a while, but hasn’t had a chance to play my copy. Even for the official ones, I would strongly recommend, if you enjoy the game on TTS to pick it up or at least someone in the group to, so you can continue to support the actual businesses and game designers directly.

With that said, there is something great about it as well. It gives you a chance to test out a game to see if you’d like it before you buy it. And there are some companies that will put out a module with a first scenario or a bit of the game when they launch a Kickstarter or release the game so that people can test it out. So in that way, it can help drive sales to release a limited version, shorter, smaller, however it might be limited, for people to try out and really get an idea of game play. I might be hard pressed to put $100 into a campaign game (I’m really not), but if I could try out an intro scenario that is just made for teaching the game on TTS, that would be great and give me a better idea if I’d like it or not.

So, as a system is it worth getting? I would say, kind of. I think it works well when you want to play a board game as a distance. There are some good modules and a good number of scripted ones. But, it does lack the same feeling as playing across a table from another person. And for me, the little bit of added time, or a lot of added time in the case of Gloomhaven without it being scripted was disappointing. The best way I can describe it is that because the system was made to handle any game, it can’t handle any game extremely efficiently. It works in a pinch, and if you don’t think you’ll get out gaming for a while and you want to game, it’s worth it.

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.