PAX Unplugged and Everything Else (Nov 2022 newsletter) (Patreon)

Hey folks, bit of a late newsletter because I wanted to go to PAX first and report back while it was still fresh! I played a lot of great games while I was there, including the one shown above: KuZOOkA, and funky spelling aside, I had a great time with it. The idea is that you're all animals trying to escape a zoo, but in order to do so you need to work together, which is difficult because you're animals and can't really speak. The way this plays out is almost like a cooperative version of skull, where people place their player tokens along this track trying to eventually land on a space that's far enough to garner rewards, but not so far that the number of cards of a specific color in each players' hands can't match the location where you end up.

You can also play as an adorable snek, so I approve.

An upcoming game that I got to demo was Endeavor: Deep Sea. This will come to kickstarter early next year, and I gotta say I think it might be excellent. It's a sequel to Endeavor: Age of Sail but instead of embracing the colonizer aspect of that game, this one is all about deep sea diving and conservation. There's a very satisfying engine building system that grows as you play. Everything you can do is determined by the specialists you recruit each round, and if you can bump up certain tracks you'll get to recruit stronger ones and use more of them more often. It's also got tons of satisfying combos and I'm very excited to see how it evolves. It's not 100% perfect as is, I think they still need to do a bit of balancing with the rewards, but the core gameplay is solid.

Another game I quite enjoyed playing for the first time (though it's not a brand new one or anything) was Glen More 2 Chronicles. This is a pretty straightforward tile laying game but I thought the scoring was quite engaging. Besides the different ways to score from the tiles themselves, you'll also gain points at the end of each of the four eras by how much more of the scoring resources you have than whoever has the least. So if you specialize you'll probably get a lot of points for having the most whiskey for example, but then everyone else might score points that you miss out on because you haven't recruited enough people in your castle or whatnot. On top of that there are a bunch of scenarios that change the game each time you play, so if you like tile laying games, I'd certainly recommend this one.

And, embarrassingly, Jeff from The Dragon's Tomb finally taught me the CORRECT way to play Root, which of course is a game about animal mating grounds and trying to help a skunk seduce all these frogs, sharks and pandas. Man, I guess I'm gonna have to redo all my videos. It's horrible timing, since I just finished the Root Marauders and Clockwork 2 expansion tutorials. They're still on early access, but they'll be getting uploaded to youtube over the next two weeks. 

For now, I need to buckle down and get to work on the next video for Europa Universalis. This game is a big one. If any of you enjoy medieval Europe simulators, this is probably going to be a big hit for you, so keep an eye out. I should have it done by the end of the year, which is the fastest I'll have ever completed a project this size, since it's basically TI4-weight. Fingers crossed!

And as always, thank you all for being here! Things have been a bit hectic the past couple months (and will continue to be so for a bit longer), so having you here supporting all of this makes a huge difference!