This is an excellent game and Michael Kiesling is an excellent designer. The game is very challenging but for me is what keeps me coming back to try to solve it. I love this game I give it a 9/10
The theme is that you are gathering ingredients to make the most beer possible. If you end up with too much water and not enough malt at the end, then you must trade it so that your beer has a balanced flavour. It's a little easier to see the theme in the game when you are a bit of a beer and brewing nerd. The theme could definately be more explicit though.
"The theme is that you are gathering ingredients to make the most beer possible. " I think everybody knows it. But what is the meaning of the track? And the dark side why gives money? Etc.
In terms of the theme, I'm not sure why the dark side is the one that gives you money, but there is a little road at the bottom of the board that represents the ingredients going off to the market. The track is your inventory of ingredients that you have put into the brewery from the light side. I imagine that the light side was put on the left because that's where the track is.
@@Alan-pn8nu Might it mean that the shade side where ingredients don't grow as well (IRL) is the side that produces stuff that's not the BEST for making beer? Maybe they only want to use ingredients from the light side because those are better and they want to sell the shade side ingredients for money just to help their whole process...
Tom got it. No one talks about it anymore and it's hard to come by which is a shame. I think in recent day witha bunch of abstract tile placement games this game would be more successful.
One of the best games of 2018. Deep but simple mechanics. Scales well. Love the theme which is there btw. Took way too long for Tom or someone at Dice Tower to review this game. It has been out since last Essen.
Excellent review and commentary - painful as it might be to the designers and publishers! Seems like a patchwork of rules and mechanics were pulled out of a bag and forced into a game - come hell or high-water. Thank you again for your perceptive and honest commentary.
This takes a couple of plays to get beyond the feeling of scarcity. It is one of those games that you could really paint yourself into a corner... but I really enjoy it. Just got the expansion and I am looking forward to playing with it.
I identify as a 17th century Belgian monk, so I’m offended by Tom’s claims that there is no heaven. Also, I can personally confirm that brewing beer is EXACTLY displayed here: move a small cardboard token to your player board and a meeple onto a track...you then have beer.
Tom just getting to Heaven and Ale? wow ,, i wanna like this games but it is just too wonky dorky with some of the accounting and scoring ,, i'm getting to the stage where i just want to think about tactics/strategy but not have to work thru ungainly computations... does that make any sense? guess i want something slightly more straightforward. ty
This game is like taking Monopoly, and turning every action (even scoring) into its own minigame. It's almost as complicated as Android, and I'm starting to regret buying it, because my friends won't play it. Scoring is like minmaxing a character, which feels like a type of minigame too. Then there's the ducat-moving, so to simplify we can just have the resource exchange rate be a ducat-buyback rate. So if you are at the 3:1 rate, you can move a piece backwards to earn 10 ducats and pay 30 ducats to move it forwards. Or change that to a 3:10 for simplicity, where you'll earn 3 ducats for moving backwards. Some of the Monopoly spaces let you get a bonus based on the Settlers of Catan minigame that you're playing, based on landing on other Monopoly spaces. It would be more competitive if these game boards used a combined farmland instead of the separate ones, so you're blocking each other out of completing sheds. Moving around the game board, instead of being driven by an RNG, is instead driven by the player's balance between winning and not losing - not unlike a card drafting game. Indeed, having the round game board might hinder this game, and handing around a stack of tokens might just work better.
Soon as I saw that Tom was gonna do this review, I was pretty sure he'd not like it. But he did...for the most part. The game feels a bit too much on the rails for me, and I love Kiesling games. I'm much more partial to Riverboat even though its art design is probably even more bland.
I watch pretty much all the DT reviews of games and I have no idea ow this got an approve or even printed let alone nominated. This games looks and sounds bad not roll and move bad but still. I feel Tom seems to be going less harsh on games and I am not usually harsh on games and I will play anything. Already over-rated #1.
Tom clearly doesn't like this game but he feels like he should because the Germans tell him it's a good game so he labors to state that it's a good game after stating all sorts of reasons that he really doesn't think that. It's okay to not like Eurogames and I think it does a disservice to new people entering the board game hobby to not make it clear that Euro games are fundamentally all the same - resource management and math with little to no player interaction. I bought Terra Mystika and Agricola because those were some of the "top 10 games" when I got into board games. I basically never play them because games like Clank and Cosmic Encounter are simply more fun and easier to explain to new players. I'm quarter German and I've lived in Germany for the past 5 years and if there's one thing I've learned it's that the Germanic mind and Anglo mind are very different things. I want luck and fighting in my games and German games are quite the opposite of what I have fun with.
@@thedicetower Maybe you should try living in a non-English speaking foreign country so you have some frame of reference. Americans tend to think everyone in the world is just like us. They aren't. To me that's a good thing, the world would be very boring if everyone were the same.
Sam here...ummm...he lived in South Korea for 10 years, dude...and I lived in South Korea for 7 years, in addition to living in Germany for 3.5 years. And if there's one thing that I've learned from my frame of reference, it's that there are often broad differences even within cultures on what people like and dislike.
This is an excellent game and Michael Kiesling is an excellent designer. The game is very challenging but for me is what keeps me coming back to try to solve it. I love this game I give it a 9/10
The theme is that you are gathering ingredients to make the most beer possible. If you end up with too much water and not enough malt at the end, then you must trade it so that your beer has a balanced flavour. It's a little easier to see the theme in the game when you are a bit of a beer and brewing nerd. The theme could definately be more explicit though.
"The theme is that you are gathering ingredients to make the most beer possible. "
I think everybody knows it. But what is the meaning of the track? And the dark side why gives money? Etc.
In terms of the theme, I'm not sure why the dark side is the one that gives you money, but there is a little road at the bottom of the board that represents the ingredients going off to the market. The track is your inventory of ingredients that you have put into the brewery from the light side. I imagine that the light side was put on the left because that's where the track is.
@@Alan-pn8nu Might it mean that the shade side where ingredients don't grow as well (IRL) is the side that produces stuff that's not the BEST for making beer? Maybe they only want to use ingredients from the light side because those are better and they want to sell the shade side ingredients for money just to help their whole process...
@@alastairblake Possibly, but I don't know for sure that hops prefer sunshine or shade. That makes enough sense to me though.
This game is really good, highly recommended. There's an expansion coming too.
"There's no heaven." -Tom Vasel
Tom Vasel the nihilist: "There's no heaven, there's no ale, there's nothing."
XD
Tom got it.
No one talks about it anymore and it's hard to come by which is a shame. I think in recent day witha bunch of abstract tile placement games this game would be more successful.
One of the best games of 2018. Deep but simple mechanics. Scales well. Love the theme which is there btw. Took way too long for Tom or someone at Dice Tower to review this game. It has been out since last Essen.
Excellent review and commentary - painful as it might be to the designers and publishers! Seems like a patchwork of rules and mechanics were pulled out of a bag and forced into a game - come hell or high-water. Thank you again for your perceptive and honest commentary.
This takes a couple of plays to get beyond the feeling of scarcity. It is one of those games that you could really paint yourself into a corner... but I really enjoy it. Just got the expansion and I am looking forward to playing with it.
I identify as a 17th century Belgian monk, so I’m offended by Tom’s claims that there is no heaven. Also, I can personally confirm that brewing beer is EXACTLY displayed here: move a small cardboard token to your player board and a meeple onto a track...you then have beer.
Tom just getting to Heaven and Ale? wow ,, i wanna like this games but it is just too wonky dorky with some of the accounting and scoring ,, i'm getting to the stage where i just want to think about tactics/strategy but not have to work thru ungainly computations... does that make any sense? guess i want something slightly more straightforward. ty
This game is like taking Monopoly, and turning every action (even scoring) into its own minigame. It's almost as complicated as Android, and I'm starting to regret buying it, because my friends won't play it.
Scoring is like minmaxing a character, which feels like a type of minigame too. Then there's the ducat-moving, so to simplify we can just have the resource exchange rate be a ducat-buyback rate. So if you are at the 3:1 rate, you can move a piece backwards to earn 10 ducats and pay 30 ducats to move it forwards. Or change that to a 3:10 for simplicity, where you'll earn 3 ducats for moving backwards.
Some of the Monopoly spaces let you get a bonus based on the Settlers of Catan minigame that you're playing, based on landing on other Monopoly spaces. It would be more competitive if these game boards used a combined farmland instead of the separate ones, so you're blocking each other out of completing sheds.
Moving around the game board, instead of being driven by an RNG, is instead driven by the player's balance between winning and not losing - not unlike a card drafting game. Indeed, having the round game board might hinder this game, and handing around a stack of tokens might just work better.
Mechanisms look solid, Having a good theme is a nice bonus, but unnecessary.
Really who the heck cares about the game being dry or not? It is so damn good, fun and engaging, that is what truly matters!
Number 1 on my wish list right now :)
Matthew White it is a very good game. Lots of depth.
Soon as I saw that Tom was gonna do this review, I was pretty sure he'd not like it. But he did...for the most part. The game feels a bit too much on the rails for me, and I love Kiesling games. I'm much more partial to Riverboat even though its art design is probably even more bland.
i hear good things about RB, going to have to check it out
It's weird how people still seem surprised by the dryness of Euro games. Isn't that how most of them are?
“Hopmeister” 🤣🤣☠️☠️🍻🍻
No theme? Dark Side? Light Side? They should re-skin this as a Star Wars game. Lol. Make a death star instead of ale.
Zero theme...but it is an awsome game
Similar to chef Ramsey. It’s too DRY
That board is almost as ugly as Castle of Burgandy’s.
those are fighting words... haha
Totally uncalled for.
7:08
This game has the appeal of a kindergarten-fire . I'll pass.
It's actually pretty nifty. It's just overpiced especially for the component quality.
I watch pretty much all the DT reviews of games and I have no idea ow this got an approve or even printed let alone nominated. This games looks and sounds bad not roll and move bad but still. I feel Tom seems to be going less harsh on games and I am not usually harsh on games and I will play anything. Already over-rated #1.
Tom clearly doesn't like this game but he feels like he should because the Germans tell him it's a good game so he labors to state that it's a good game after stating all sorts of reasons that he really doesn't think that. It's okay to not like Eurogames and I think it does a disservice to new people entering the board game hobby to not make it clear that Euro games are fundamentally all the same - resource management and math with little to no player interaction. I bought Terra Mystika and Agricola because those were some of the "top 10 games" when I got into board games. I basically never play them because games like Clank and Cosmic Encounter are simply more fun and easier to explain to new players. I'm quarter German and I've lived in Germany for the past 5 years and if there's one thing I've learned it's that the Germanic mind and Anglo mind are very different things. I want luck and fighting in my games and German games are quite the opposite of what I have fun with.
Or maybe that's just you, and isn't a culture thing?
@@thedicetower Maybe you should try living in a non-English speaking foreign country so you have some frame of reference. Americans tend to think everyone in the world is just like us. They aren't. To me that's a good thing, the world would be very boring if everyone were the same.
Sam here...ummm...he lived in South Korea for 10 years, dude...and I lived in South Korea for 7 years, in addition to living in Germany for 3.5 years. And if there's one thing that I've learned from my frame of reference, it's that there are often broad differences even within cultures on what people like and dislike.