Episode 237 - Time is of the Essence

Intro: 0:00

Recent Games: 0:42

Setup Time: 15:40

Outro: 29:25

Bloopers: 30:21

Games discussed this episode:

The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship: 0:42

Pandemic: 0:59

Pandemic: Fall of Rome: 3:09

ONDA: 9:18

Bunny Kingdom: 23:52

Dice Forge: 25:28

Millennium Blades: 26:28

Runebound: 26:40

Paris Connection: 27:09

Battlestar Galactica: 28:37

Support us directly on Ko-Fi or shop on our merch store or our Amazon Storefront!

Listen to us: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and/or YouTube.

Follow us: BlueSky, X, Instagram, and Facebook

Chat with us: BGG Guild and Discord

This episode was sponsored by Grey Fox Games. Use the code "BLITZ10" to get 10% off your entire cart.

[0:06] Crystal: Hello and welcome to episode 237 of Board Game Blitz, a podcast about all things board games that you can listen to in less time than it takes to punch and organize that new game that you really want to play right now. Board Game Blitz is sponsored by Grey Fox Games. This week, we’re talking about how long it takes to get ready to play a board game! First, we discuss a couple games we’ve played recently, lotr fate of the fellowship and Onda. Then, we talk about setup time can affect your game night in unexpected ways if you don’t plan ahead. And now, here are your hosts…

Ambie: Ambie

Crystal: and Crystal

[0:42] Ambie: Recently, I got to play "The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship," which I don't have a box for because I think it's not out yet, but "The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship" is the new "Lord of the Rings" Pandemic game. It's published in 2025 by Z-Man Games, designed by Matt Leacock. The designer of Pandemic.

Crystal: How many Pandemics are there at this point? I feel like there's a lot.

Ambie: I don't know. But this one's not officially a Pandemic. It doesn't have Pandemic in the name.

Crystal: Ooh, okay.

Ambie: Oh, it's in the game Pandemic family, okay. Oh, there's only 31 on BGG apparently with this tag.

Crystal: Okay, I'm sorry. Did you just say only 31?

Ambie: Okay, but some of them are promos.

Crystal: Oh, okay. Well, then that does make it not as bad. I was about to say, are there actually 31 different Pandemics at this point? Because honestly, if you told me that, I would maybe believe it. And also that's gotta be the most, right? At least with "Ticket to Ride," they're like usually entirely different maps. So it's, even if it's the same game, it's a different map. But a lot of the Pandemics are on the world map. Not all of them, but a lot of them. All right, well, let's talk about "The Lord of the Rings" version of this.

Ambie: So that's not on a world map. But anyways, my friend works at Z-Man Games. And so she brought it over to game night. They were actually playing it at KublaCon. She was demoing it at KublaCon. And so she had the demo copy for that. And then she brought it to game night after KublaCon. So we got to play. But yeah, Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship. It's one to five players, 60 to 150 minutes. So it's a lot longer than Pandemic.

Crystal: That's a very specific and wide play time range.

Ambie: It took us a little over two hours to play. So we played like the intro scenario. It actually has multiple objective cards, different variable set up for objectives for winning the game. But we played like the recommended first game. But the game is a cooperative game. If you haven't played "Pandemic" before, the Pandemic system, it's a cooperative game. Everyone gets these cards in their hand that do different things. Like they have icons on them that you collect to do things. I'm doing like a general thing because the theme of "Lord of the Rings" is very different than Pandemic. And then there's bad things on the board. There's a board with a map and you can move around and do actions like move and other actions that are different than Pandemic. And then there's like a outbreak deck, but in "Lord of the Rings" it's a, I forget what it's called, but a deck that like at the end of each turn you flip over two cards or three cards or four cards depending on the threat level, which gets worse later in the game. And those will tell you bad things that happen. So "The Lord of the Rings" one, "Fate of the Fellowship" is based kind of on Pandemic. I think it's the fall of Rome. It's one where there, it's not diseases that you're curing, but like armies that are moving around. Have you played that one?

Crystal: I have not.

Ambie: Okay, so like there is a version of Pandemic where there's armies moving around on the map. And so like there's no diseases in Africa or something, but like they'll move along a route. And I'm not sure if there's battles in the Pandemic one, but in "Lord of the Rings", so the bad things are orc armies and they're moving around on the map. And so the event deck, like the bad thing deck that flips over actually has a top and a bottom thing that can happen. And the back of the card can have different backs of the card. So you're looking at the back of the next card in the deck and it tells you whether you're doing the top or bottom bad thing. So it's either like the top is usually, I think like placing, I'm not sure cause Lupe was doing, Lupe's my friend. She was doing all the upkeep stuff. So I think the top you put orcs in places and then the bottom is sometimes they move along a track and then there's a token called the Eye of Sauron. If it's on Frodo, then something really bad happens. Otherwise sometimes like it'll move to Frodo with the card. So yeah, they'll move. And then if they go into a space with your good armies, which you also have good armies on the board, then they'll fight. I'm not sure if there are any versions of Pandemic that have dice, but this has dice in it. And so like there's battles and there's this dice tower that looks like the Eye of Sauron like the Barad-dur Tower. It's like a 3D dice tower cardboard that's like all put together. So you put the dice in there to roll them, the roll to see like which armies die. As your actions, you actually control two characters instead of one. Each player will have two characters. And on your turn, you do four actions with one character and one action with the other character. And you get to pick which one is which and which one goes first, but you'll always do like the four together and the one separate. All the characters have different abilities. I had Mary and Pippin are one character, so I had them and Eowyn. I'm gonna be saying stuff like, if you're not familiar with Lord of the Rings, these are characters from Lord of the Rings.

Crystal: I think at this point, like, yeah, if you don't know Pandemic or Lord of the Rings, you know, follow along, have some fun.

Ambie: Yeah, but basically like the basic actions, you can move along the board, which has different routes, like different cities you can go to and you're moving along the routes. Some of the places it's hard to move, you have to discard a certain, like a stealth card or certain cards that have different icons on it to move. And then you can trade with people if you're in a city that, or like in a region, there's regions, and then you can start a battle if you have like little armies and the bad guy armies together on a space. But like your character isn't really part of the battle, it's just little troops. And you can muster a troop, so if you're on like a special space that has those types of troops, there's like elf troops or Rohan troops or like dwarves, I think. You can muster troops. Usually you'll have to pay a card to muster troops, but Eowyn could muster for free in Rohan. And that was like one of her special abilities. So I would do that. Her other special ability was that when she does an attack, if the die value shows a Nazgul, cause there's Nazguls too, usually the die with the Nazgul means the Nazgul just kill two of your good troops. But if Eowyn's there, then the Nazgul dies instead. So I was like, oh, I want to go attack and kill the Nazgul. I think I managed to kill two of them.

Crystal: Nice.

Ambie: Maybe three, I'm not sure. Attacks also draw the Eye of Sauron, so that's how you move that away from Frodo. Cause you want to keep like moving it away from Frodo. So the way you win the game, the way you lose is you don't win or like the deck runs out or like the orc supply runs out. There's too many bad guys. Or like your hope level goes down to zero cause that goes down when bad things happen. But the objectives for the base game were like, get the people in Rivendell and discard some cards. That was one objective. And then another objective was you have to get a lot of armies in Minas Tirith. And the other objective was going to Isengard and like attacking it. So that like is thematic.

Crystal; We're taking the hobbits to Isengard, We're taking the hobbits to Isengard.

Ambie: So like when you do objectives, that's good. They sometimes can turn the cities into like good cities. I forget what they're called. It's kind of like in Pandemic, getting like a research facility or something. I actually kept forgetting that it was based on Pandemic because like the double-sided event, like the top and down of the event deck thing made it hard to remember like, oh, this has come out a lot because it keeps changing. So it didn't feel like the outbreaks in Pandemic that way.

Crystal: You're like, oh my gosh, this again.

Ambie: The dice also made it not seem like Pandemic because we're like actually attacking and stuff. So there was some theme there. And then like the final objective, after you do the three objectives, you need to get Frodo to Mount Doom and discard a bunch of ring cards. And so like the theme felt kind of thematic for me. I really like Lord of the Rings. So I was the only one probably that was like, oh, this is thematic. Like look, they're all at Minas Tirith and they're distracting Sauron. But then everyone else was like, oh, okay. But I think that also made it kind of harder to play. Like the board itself was kind of hard to tell what was going on. And then also like everyone was piled up on Minas Tirith and the space isn't that big, but we have to put all these like little meeples on there and it wasn't really fitting. So it was hard to see. And then like, we have to see like what our objectives are and count like how many spaces we have to move and if we have time to do it. And so it was hard to tell if we could like move with the actions we had because it was all blocked by the thing. So, and then the game itself, I thought it was just fine. I haven't played regular Pandemic in a long time. So I don't know. I guess like with regular Pandemic, I also thought it was just fine, but this game, I was excited for the theme and I really wanted to like it, but like it lasted two hours and I didn't find-

Crystal: That's too much.

Ambie: Yeah. I didn't find the gameplay that exciting for the two hour game.

Crystal: If you're gonna play a Lord of the Rings board game for two hours, there are better options.

Ambie: Yeah, but like it looks really cool. Like the little meeples were like shaped differently. All of the good guy meeples were the same, but then your character meeples were different and then the orc meeples had like pointy horns and stuff. And they were like mini meeples. And then there's like the Nazgul figures, which are plastic minis and they are on clear stands. So they're flying up overhead. So like, I really liked the production of it. And so when we were setting it up, I was like, oh my gosh, this is so cool. But yeah, the game was just okay. If it were shorter, I think I would like it, but it is a big setup, which we'll get to later in this episode.

Crystal: Alright.

Ambie: Yeah, Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship.

[9:18] Crystal: Well, my game definitely much smaller in scope. It is called ONDA, spelled O-N-D-A. I actually have only played this one digitally. I've played it on board game arena. And the reason that I played it is actually because of something neat that we've been doing in the Blitz Discord. I don't remember if I've mentioned it on the podcast or not.

Ambie: I don't think you have.

Crystal: I don't think I have either. Since the beginning of this year, so now six months, I and the other folks who do weekly game nights in the Blitz Discord, I proposed that we would go through the alphabet on board game arena. And every week when we meet up for game night, thereabouts, we would move to the next letter and then play games that start with that letter. So we recently got to O is where we're at, basically in the alphabet. First off, it's been really fun because we are a bunch of, I would like to say very nice humans. And therefore we end up with that problem that nice people tend to get into where what do you wanna play? I don't know, what do you wanna play? And we just kind of sit there not making decisions. And this narrows down our options, which makes it a little bit easier. And we can also plan in advance because we like, oh, this is C week. What games start with C? What do people wanna play that starts with C? And it's been really quite fun. And ONDA was a game I had never heard of. I didn't even know it was on board game arena. But when I looked at the games that started with O, the art kind of caught my eye. And then I looked at it and it was a card shedding game. And I was like, well, that's a genre I love. So I'd said, hey, I read the rule book. Do you all mind if I do a, you know, a teach of this even though we've never played it? And everybody said, yes, we do this relatively often.

Crystal: So ONDA, as I said, is a card shedding game. It plays two to five players designed by Arthur Lacerda and published by Samba Estudios. Arthur Lacerda also did the art for it. So credit to him for being both the designer and the artist. That's pretty neat. And ONDA is a card shedding game with the theme of rising and falling tides, as in water, the ocean tides. And that's a really important theme in this game because it changes the way that cards are played throughout the course of the game. I would say that this game bears some similarities to some other recent card shedding games like Scout and Bacon for anyone who is familiar with those. But this one, it's a little bit simpler in some ways in that the types of hands that you can play are relatively simplistic. You always must play between two and four cards when you play out, or no, sorry, I think you can play one card as well. Maybe not. My brain's breaking right now, but you can play a maximum of four cards. So you can't do like what you do in Tichu where you play a gigantic run of, you know, like nine cards if you can somehow manage it. So it limits what you can do. And you can only play sets and runs, but there's a bomb mechanic in the game, which for those of you who are familiar with games of this nature that have bombs, bombs are generally a type of hand that will kind of trump or beat anything else that's been played up to that point. But ONDA's bombs change throughout the course of the game. So once a bomb has been played based on the bomb that is currently the bomb, like there's a little deck of cards that shows you what the current bomb is. And the bombs are as simple as a pair of cards. So like somebody can bomb, and then the bomb will switch after that round to the next bomb, and it'll be like a run of two, and then a set of three, and then a run of three. And then once you get to the end of that deck, it flips back to the beginning. And so it kind of makes things a little bit more approachable because if you aren't getting dealt that epic hand, you still have a lot of options.

Crystal: But as I mentioned, the tide is important here because at the beginning of each round, players select two cards out of their hands to set aside as wild cards. They can choose any two cards they want, and then as they're playing, they can pick those cards up from the side of, on the table next to them, and use them as wilds to complete sets or runs, or they can take one of their wilds, put it back into their hand, and it turns back into whatever card it was originally to change the tide. And that means instead of cards of a higher value, beating cards of a lower value, if you go from high tide to low tide, now cards of a lower value will beat cards of a higher value. And the tide can only be flipped once per round, so you can't do that, you can't go back and forth. Once somebody has changed the tide for a round, no one else can change it until that round ends. But it's really neat because it again, it kind of removes that problem of, you got dealt a whole bunch of low cards, everybody else has high cards, and you're just kind of sitting there and you can't play anything. In this game, you almost always are going to have options at least at some point during the round. Similar to other games of this nature, it goes until everybody passes, and then whoever was the last player to play wins that trick, quote unquote, I'm saying this with quotes, air quotes, because it's not a trick taking game, but I think everybody knows what I mean by that. So then the bomb would switch, the tide can now be turned again if someone chooses, and you move on. And then you score points based on what cards are left in your hand and points are bad, or you lose points, I guess. You start with 50 points each, and you lose points for whatever you have left in your hand. Whoever has the most points remaining at the end of the game is who wins.

Crystal: The artwork is nice and clean and simple and pretty, and the gameplay is relatively simple to teach and really enjoyable. As we were playing it, this is one of those games where you're like, oh, I should have picked different cards for my wilds, or I shouldn't have broken up that set. You immediately start seeing little strategies as soon as you get into it if you're a person who likes this style of game. So I was very happy that we decided to play it, and I'm probably gonna be looking for a physical copy of the game. I might actually ask Greg if he already owns it, because Greg loves trick taking games and card shedding games, so perhaps he already owns this one. But yeah, I'm very happy that our alphabetical journey led me to ONDA, and I definitely will be playing it more in the future.

Ambie: Yeah, and that's cool that it's thematic. A lot of trick taking games are not thematic.

Crystal: Yes, a trick taking game with a theme? Who would have thunk it?

[15:40] Crystal: When it comes to playing board games, I would say a lot of adults consider the time it takes to play a game before they play it, or even when they're purchasing it. And we have discussed here on the show play times of games and kind of the merits of short games versus long games and things of that nature. But one of the things that I in particular don't always remember to take into consideration is that the play time is not the only time involved in playing a board game.

Ambie: Yes, there's also set up and tear down time, which can be significant depending on the game.

Crystal: It can be really significant. And it's something that my brain just doesn't think about. Like, and when we're going to choose a game, I'm often thinking about how long does this game take to play, not how long does this game take to teach, which we're not even gonna get into that, I don't think in this episode, because that's a whole other kettle of fish. But then, yeah, how long does this game take to set up, to get it out of the box and onto the table to start playing it? Because if a game takes 45 minutes to play, that's all well and good, but if it took you half an hour to get all the pieces out on the board, that really does make a difference.

Ambie: Yeah, because you're thinking about how much time you have left in the night when you're thinking about, like how much time do I have left? What games can I fit in? You'll have to be able to set it up and put it away and play it, not in that order.

Crystal: This is why game night always runs long. It's gotta be, this is like, when you're like, we'll be done by eight, or like somebody's messaging their significant other, or you're just kind of trying to mentally plan in your head for like when things are gonna wrap up, and it's always later than I think it's gonna be, and this is probably why.

Ambie: Well, since having kids for us, our game nights have always ended on time or early, because I think like, first of all, we've been playing short games. I used to do games with like a lot of components, lots of setup and stuff, but now we do like short games and party games and stuff that's like setup is just put this on the table, that's it, we're like, deal out cards, very simple. And then when we finish and it's like 9:30, we're like, hmm, okay, that's it, we don't have much time left, so we might be done, or we could just play like a 10 minute game that's actually only 10 minutes.

Crystal: Yeah, and we've discussed this before as well, but I have gotten even more okay with the idea of ending games before they are completed. And if time is a factor for anybody at the table, meaning somebody has somewhere they have to be, or somebody has a cutoff time, anything like that, I will try and be more cognizant of as we're approaching that time, and then I will try and prep the table in advance of potentially ending the game early, because I do recognize that most of us would like to get the game to its completion, but if we can't do that, I kind of want people to know that our fake end is coming. So like, if we're gonna maybe not play the last round of a game or something like that, I try and kind of be aware and like warn people, like, hey, you know, it's 8:15, so and so has to be out of here by nine, we're probably not gonna be able to play the final round of the game, unless, you know, things get real snappy and they tend to slow down toward the end of games. So that's often not the case. The people I play games with are all generally lovely humans. So this is not an issue, but I know if you're like playing at a convention or with strangers or people that you don't know well, that can be a little more difficult, but I do wonder if being able to think more about the setup of a game could potentially help stave off the having to end a game early thing.

Ambie: I don't know, I guess it depends on the situation. Cause we've gone into games, usually when that happens for us, we're like, we have to end early. We know at the beginning, like, okay, we want to try this game, but we know we're not gonna, it's not gonna last the whole time. So then everyone goes into it knowing we're just gonna play a couple of few rounds or something. I think that happened with Weather Machine a couple of years ago, I don't know, but we were like, okay, yeah, we're just gonna play until we, that's it, because we don't have much time.

Crystal: In my game group over the years, we've definitely had some people that suffer from some pretty hardcore analysis paralysis. To be fair, if we're in a friendly group of people and we're not in a rush, I generally kind of let people take their time to some degree, but then we do occasionally, because of that, because we're being nice and it doesn't matter, we run into that problem, we're like, oh shoot, it's 10 p.m. now and we're not done with the game. So that does happen occasionally and it can be a bit of a bummer, but, so how do we fix this? How do we set up more efficiently?

Ambie: One way to mitigate the setup time is to set up beforehand. If you're the one hosting or whoever's hosting, if the person who's hosting has the game, then they can set it up beforehand maybe and it'll be ready when people come.

Crystal: I love to do this if I think to.

Ambie: Yeah, but if someone else is bringing the game, then you can't really do that.

Crystal: I mean, I guess in theory, you could, if game night has a start time, you could theoretically, if you know you're starting, yeah, maybe say like, oh, you know, Bob, if you could come like 15 minutes early, I will help you get the game set up in advance if you know it's got like a really big setup, but I don't tend to think about that usually until people are there and then I'm like, oh, yeah, that probably would have been a good idea.

Ambie: Yeah, and for us, our game night starts like when my kids go to bed, so it's like, you can't really come earlier. You come earlier, that's gonna make bedtime later because the kids will get distracted.

Crystal: Can you please set up the game and then drive it over somehow magically? We need, okay, so that's what we need. We need gravity controlled chambers that you can drive around with with a board game completely assembled that it won't, like the pieces won't get jostled. That's the kind of technology I wanna see in this world.

Ambie: Another thing that we used to do back when we played more complex games more regularly was everyone would help with setup. Like we used to play 18XX games all the time and when everyone was like helping with setup while we're also saying hi to each other, because there's always that time at the beginning of game night where like, oh, hey, how are you? Well, like, what's up? Stuff like that. And so if we're setting up while that's happening and everyone's helping and everyone knows how to set up the game, then it can go pretty quickly. And same with cleanup, everyone helps clean up the game.

Crystal: That to me, assuming the person who owns the game is fine with it, because there are reasons why they might not be, but I believe that that is one of the cardinal rules of board gaming, is everybody helps put it away. Even if you're just shuffling the pieces into a pile of matching colors and then pushing it gently toward the person with the baggies, I don't care, help. Because that's always the worst is when like people start chit chatting and there's one person putting away the game. Like it's the worst.

Ambie: Yeah, you can chit chat while putting pieces into baggies.

Crystal: Yes, you can do both of those things. You're talented, we promise.

Ambie: One thing I wonder with like board game arena and other online implementations, like has that made, I'm saying us as like a collective thing because I don't play online, but has that made people like less patient for setup times because it does all the setup and other stuff for you, but like setup, cleanup, there's no, none of that.

Crystal: I mean, I can only speak for myself obviously, but I would say yes, probably. I had played games online on board game arena prior to the pandemic and all of that, but I, you know, pandemic on have played games online significantly more often than I ever did previously. I have never been a person who enjoyed the act of getting a game out, punching it if need be. We've talked about this before, I hate punching games so much. I know that's divisive. People love punching games and I hate it, but like if I could just like blink my eyes, a la I dream of genie and have the game appear on the table fully like ready to go, I would be so happy. Same thing for putting it away. Cause it's like, I've got ADHD brain and all of those activities are incredibly tedious for my brain. So it's just like misery for me. Now I'm still gonna help do it because I'm a good person, but I don't like it. Which is why my friends who love punching games are the best ever. Cause they'll literally be like, yeah, let me punch your game for you. And I'm like, you're the best. Yeah, like there are some games in particular that when I play them online, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so much easier. It's so much better. Bunny Kingdom is a recent one that I hadn't played online before and I played it online. And I was like, I don't have to do any math. It's amazing. There's so much math in Bunny Kingdom. And also yeah, lots of tiny bunnies and other things and cards and whatnot. And yeah, that just, it's easier to manage. And we live in a digital world where everything has become very easy to get quickly in general. And I think that has made a lot of us a little less patient and really for board gamers, we're there to play games. We're not there to move pieces around for no reason or to like, you know, just like, like the setup and tear down isn't what we're there for. And so I think that can add to the tedium, at least for me. What about for you though?

Ambie: Well, I don't play games online. I don't mind setup, I think. So, cause I like moving the pieces around. I like the tactile nature of it. And then I guess on the other hand of, you know, we live in a digital world where everyone, everything happens instantly. It can be like a nice break to slow down. And so maybe that can be like a nice Zen relaxation setting up a board game.

Crystal: That's actually a good point. Cause like, I'm good at like, I'm pretty decent about putting my phone down and not like picking it back up aside to like take a picture of the game and then put the phone back down.

Ambie: Yeah, take pictures, BG stats.

Crystal: But yeah, I mean, you make a good point that it, the forcing yourself to kind of slow down and not get that instant gratification that you get in other areas of life. There is something kind of nice and satisfying about that as well.

Crystal: So is there a golden ratio of setup time to gameplay time? Cause there are games that like for me, Dice Forge is a really good example of a game that is super fun. I love it. Every time I've played it, I enjoy it, but it sometimes takes just as long to set up as it does to play because, and this brings up another point. Dice Forge has a variable setup. There are some like card sets that are in the rule book that like you can just use this card set or you can pick and choose with the ones you wanna use. But if you're doing it variably, then inevitably it takes longer to set it up. And so I often don't pull it off the shelf because the setup is just kind of annoying. And so I'm like, oh, I'm like, do I really wanna go through all of that? And then inevitably if I do pull it off the shelf, I use one of those pre-made setups and I don't ever dive into what would happen if I kind of picked things at random because I wanna do it more quickly. And so like these, they've built in this cool variability to the game that I'm not even taking advantage of.

Ambie: Yeah, for me, I remember like Millennium Blades had a long setup.

Crystal: Oh yeah.

Ambie: Because like any game where you're picking variable decks or something and then mixing them together or like, and then the cleanup also, you had to separate them all out.

Crystal: Runebound is like this too. Like each scenario has specific cards that go into each of the different decks, like the Market decks and the Event decks and like all of them. And yeah, putting them in and then at the end having to take them back out.

Ambie: So a lot of card games do that. But my friend who has Millennium Blades, I don't remember, but he made it so the setup was quicker. But I think also you don't just pick whatever thing, you just have stuff set up kind of pre-setup. I don't remember exactly. Another one that's like a short game that has a long setup for how short it is, is Paris Connection.

Crystal: Oh yeah.

Ambie: So that game itself is like maybe 20 minutes or something, but the setup, you have to have all of the cubes mixed up. So I have the Winsome version, so it's cubes and that's actually easier setup than the version with the little train figures because the train figures are harder to take out and put on the board. But you have to mix them all up and then every person gets a random so many of them behind their shield. And then you have to separate them all out and put them on the board. So you have to have the pile of red and the pile of blue. And so you have to mix them together and then separate them as part of a setup. It takes a long time.

Crystal: Okay, listeners, someone who knows how to build web apps, build a web app that just has all the cubes from Paris Connection in it. And you put in the number of players and then you hit a button and it tells you what cubes everybody gets.

Ambie: No, it can only tell you yours because they're secret. So to have you have to pass it to each person.

Crystal: Oh my gosh, yes. Okay, so it has to be like, yes. You pick the number of players and you say, "Okay, player one, hand them the phone. These are your cubes." But like, honestly, I could, I mean, Paris Connection is not really a cute game. Nobody's really clamoring for Paris Connection, but that would make things a lot easier because now that's so annoying. And that's why I like playing Paris Connection digitally.

Ambie: Yeah, that was one that I actually did play digitally and enjoyed, I think.

Crystal: Yeah, so yeah. I mean, it's one of those things where I think your excitement about playing a game will sometimes factor into how much you're willing to deal with as far as like the setup is concerned. If I really wanna play Battlestar Galactica, yes, I am going to pull it out and figure out which pieces from which of the expansions I wanna use, I can separate all those pieces out and figure out. It's a pain.

Ambie: Expansion's also set up. We didn't even go into that. Oh gosh, that's the thing.

Crystal: No, I have to be in the right mood. I have to have the right mindset. I can't just often grab a game like that on a whim. Like, I just, I have to prepare myself. Well, I would love to hear from our listeners what games you love that have inordinately long setup times or what's the game that has the perfect amount of setup time. So hit us up on social media or in the YouTube comments if you're watching this on YouTube or over in our Discord where we are hosting those weekly game nights. You can come play games online with us too if you wanna come join us.

[29:25] Ambie: And that’s it for this week’s Board Game Blitz. Visit our website, boardgameblitz.com for more content and links.

 This episode was sponsored by Grey Fox Games. If you enjoy worker placement games, the deluxe edition of After the Empire (that includes custom gametrayz) is currently 20% off at GreyFoxGames.com AND that discount WILL stack with our normal promo code, BLITZ10, that gets you 10% off your entire cart at checkout!

Join the blitzketeer community on discord for game nights, discussions and more by following the link in the show notes.

Support the show by leaving us a rating and review on your podcast provider

And if you like us a lot and want to support us monetarily (and get some cool perks), check out our Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/boardgameblitz today!

Our theme song was composed by Andrew Morrow.

Until next time,

If you’re lost, grab the book

Find the set-up rules

Time after Time

Bye everyone!

Crystal: Bye!

[30:21] Ambie: If you enjoy worker placement games, the deluxe edition of After the Empire that includes cus- blehblahla If you enjoy worker placement games, the deluxe edition of After the Empire that includes cus- why can't I say custom?

Crystal: I don't know, that's not usually a difficult word. Custom. Custom.

Ambie: Custom game trays. I don't know. I keep going gustum.

Crystal: Gustum.

Ambie: Cause it's game trays, maybe. I don't know, I'm just like.

Crystal: Oh, gustum game trays.

Ambie: Gustum, gustum came trays. All right.

Crystal: Dan is giving me the funniest look right now.

Ambie: If you enjoy worker placement games, the deluxe edi-

Crystal: Now you must have on deluxe. Yay.

Ambie: I'm gonna drink some water.

Crystal: Water will help. Mm-hmm.

Crystal: Then we talk about setup, h- I think I'm missing the word how.

Ambie: Yeah.

Crystal: Okay.

Share: