Unboxing Week Post Part VI: Brew Crafters

Here we are, day six of my “Self-Imposed Unboxing Week” and we are in the thick of things! Before I move on to the unboxing of the day, please check out my previous five posts and give them a little look-see. You can find them at the links below. 

Unboxing Post I: Star Wars: Imperial Assault

Unboxing Post II: Tokaido

Unboxing Post III: Roll for the Galaxy

Unboxing Post IV: Elder Sign

Unboxing Post V: Dice Brewing

Yesterday I posted on Dice Brewing which is a dice-rolling game where you use the dice and tokens you get to brew different beers. Obviously, the person with the most points at the end wins. I decided to continue on with the brewing theme and move on to a game published by Dice Hate Me Games (now under the Greater Than Games umbrella) called Brew Crafters. This is a game by Ben Rosset and uses classic mechanics like worker-placement and action-selection much like other Euro-styled boardgames like Agricola and Puerto Rico. While this game has some similar mechanics, Rosset did a wonderful job in meshing it with a brewing theme and making it his own. I will just say that my wife and I absolutely love this game and enjoy it even more with each subsequent play. 

Okay, enough of the gushing, on to the unboxing! This game is going to be an interesting and possible long unboxing due to the sheer amount of components that are included in this box. I think I’ll start off with the box. It seems that this will be the easiest starting point! This box is the same size as the “Euro-style” box. It will fit perfectly on your shelf next to any of the Uwe Rosenberg games such as Agricola, Caverna, La Havre or Fields of Arle. It isn’t the square box (i.e. Ticket to Ride) that has become popular in modern boardgaming. I will say that this box is just the right size to fit the incredibly large amount of components! Also, the box cover is just great! 

Next we’ll move on to the rulebook. I just have to say that this is an absolutely amazing rulebook! Ben Rosset did an exceptional job on this book. It is sixteen pages of rulebook perfection. From the front to the back this is how a rule book should be done! It starts with all of the components of the game and then goes on to show you how to set up the game. Along with the wonderfully done text are big, beautiful pictures. The graphic layout of this book is spot on from cover to cover. Rosset (and whoever else may have worked on this) did a great job of the feel and direction of the rules. After giving a setup it goes into the gameplay, which is deceptively simple. At the end he has setup for some advanced play additions for those who have played it enough to feel comfortable with the core game. Then, to top it all off there is an FAQ section and the back cover gives a simple layout of the flow of the game so you don’t need to flip through the book if you forget. This is a rulebook done right! 

After a ridiculous amount of gushing over the rulebook let’s move on to a component of the game. There are 57 total cards that are included in Brew Crafters. There are 24 recipe cards that have the names of the beers and what components that you need to brew them. These are all beautifully done with cool pictures and names depicting the different beers. Then you have 24 different cards that are the skilled worker cards. These are all pictures of people and they are the cards you get special powers when you take them during an action. Then we have the 4 local partnership cards. You can also take these during an action and they allow you to change materials for other materials and give you a greater variety during your turn. Finally there are 5 player aid cards that give the different buildings/equipment and what you receive when you build them. All of these cards are good card stock and have the linen finish that I prefer in cards. 

 

Next up on the component list are all of the wonderful wooden bits. Being a Euro-style game you just know that there have to be meeples and wooden cubes, and wow, are there a bunch! To begin we have 15 meeples. There are 5 pink meeples which stand in for interns that can be hired and then there are 2 meeples of each player color (black, white, magenta, blue, and natural) that are used for player actions on the market board. Along with the meeples there are 150 different wooden cubes! First of all there are 4 each (20 total) of the five player colors that track research on the lab board. Then, there are 130 total cubes that are the materials that the players collect for their beer recipes. There are 50 brown (malt) cubes, 30 green (hops) cubes, 20 yellow (yeast) cubes, 10 orange (spice) cubes, 10 black (coffee) cubes, and 10 red (fruit) cubes. Lastly, there is an overproduced and awesome wooden first player marker that is in the shape of a pint of stout. It is one of the coolest first player tokens I’ve ever seen! 

Finally, we’ll talk about the cardboard components, and this is really where the game shines! We’ll split them up because there are a ton of cardboard pieces in this game. To start with I’ll go over the “miscellaneous” tokens that are included in the game. You have 15 total meeple shaped tokens (3 in each of the five player colors) that stand for shift workers that the players use on the brewery action board. You start with one of these shift workers and then can buy more during the game. Another one of the “random” tokens included are the collaboration tokens. There are 4 of these and they stand for one of four different materials that players can collaborate in but are only used in 3-5 player games. Then you have 3 community farm tokens that show who has put materials into the farms so they can share the wealth later on. Lastly, of the miscellaneous tokens you have 1 market help token (used with a market helper skilled worker card) and the season tracker token. 

Next on the cardboard components list are the different tokens that are used during the game. To begin with you have 75 different money tokens. There are 45 $1 tokens and 30 $5 tokens. You then have 25 resource counters in 2x and 4x which you can use when/if you run out of the cubes. The materials are infinite so these resource counters stand in if there aren’t enough cubes for the game you’re playing. Then we have the 54 reputation tokens. There are 29 1-point tokens and 25 5-point tokens. Next up we have the 21 gold label tokens. There is 1 token for each of the 21 advanced recipes that are included in the base game. Lastly, in the token during the game player, are 15 loan tokens that the players must take if they are unable to pay for upkeep during the winter months. 

The next cardboard component (and the final of the tokens) are the beer recipe tokens. There are 215 total beer batch tokens that are included in this game! These are spread out among the 3 starting recipes and the 21 advanced recipes and are very cool 6-pack shaped tokens with the beer label on the front. On the back of these tokens are the reputation points that you get when you brew them. If you are counting at this point that means that there are 429 tokens that are included in this game and that isn’t even counting the building tokens that I’ll talk about in the next paragraph. With those added in you have over 450 tokens/buildings/equipment that are included in Brew Crafters. I will just say that this was the best game ever to punch out, and I love punching the tokens out of the cardboard sprues! 

Next on the cardboard component’s list we have the player boards. There are 6 different types of player boards that are included with Brew Crafters. First of all (and the coolest) are the 5 personal brewery boards. These have a schematic of a brewery on them and spots that you can add different building/equipment tokens (that we’ll talk about later) which add to the look of the board and give the player different upgrades. Next on the list we have 5 double-sided research lab boards. On one side you have the basic research board and on the other side there are five different research labs for advanced games. Next up we come to the main market action board. This is the main place where the player takes their worker placement actions. 

Along with this there is also a double-sided market action board. This is used for 3-5 player games and is flipped depending on the number of players. Then, there is the brewery action board. This is the action step where the players use their shift workers in order to take actions that can be used by all of the players. These include doing market research, brewing beer, and adding buildings/equipment to the brewery. Lastly we have the season round board. This keeps track of the 12 turns that are taken throughout the game. There are 5 tokens that aren’t included in every game that I’ll mention here. These are advanced actions spots that can be added to the market boards for players who are ready to take on a more advanced game. My wife and I are ready to start using these tokens. They look like they add some great additions to the strategy of the game! 

We have finally come to the buildings/equipment tokens that are included in the game. There are 5 of each of these tokens (and 15 of the hops infusers) and they are used to place on the personal brewery boards. These all add upgrades to the player’s abilities during the game. These buildings/equipment are the oak barrelhouses, the mash tuns, the storehouses, the yeast labs, the double batch brewing systems, the tour & tasting rooms, the farms, the brewpubs, and the hops infusers. These are put on the boards when the player obtains them and make those breweries look even cooler throughout the game. 

Phew, there you have it, Brew Crafters unboxed. If you can’t tell by this post, this is a wonderful game and has a ton of great components that add to the cool factor of the game. I have my components in bags (check out Ben Rosset’s video on BoardGameGeek to see how he suggests organizing it) but if you check out www.gametrayz.com you will find a great insert that I may buy one day. Okay, enough of day six. Just one more and I’m done with Unboxing Week! Come on back tomorrow to see what the final game unboxing will be. Until next time, game on!

Unboxing Week Post Part V: Dice Brewing

Yay for day five!  We are chugging along through Unboxing Week and next up is a fun dice chucker!  Before we move on to the main text and unboxing, please check out the previous four posts if you haven’t had a chance to.  You can find them at the links below.

Unboxing Post I:  StarWars: Imperial Assault 

Unboxing Post II: Tokaido

Unboxing Post III:  Roll for the Galaxy 

Unboxing Post IV: Elder Sign

So the game for today’s unboxing is Dice Brewing.  This is a dice-rolling game by Filip Glowacz and Ireneusz Huszcza and published originally by Board&Dice.  StuntKite Publishing has the rights to publish in the United States and that is where we got our copy.  In this game you have a pool of dice which you roll in order to grow light malt, dark malt, and hops and then you put them together in order to brew different types of beer.  There are also blue dice which enable you to change values on dice, reroll, and bump up scores on dice.  This allows for changing of the dice which somewhat mitigates bad rolls from the players.  End game is the player with the most points (derp) which you get from your brewed beers, money, and left over material dice.

Let’s start out with the rulebook.  This game is actually multilingual so it comes with three different rulebooks.  They are in English, Polish, and German.  The rulebook is nicely laid out but it is obvious that the English rules weren’t the first made due to some slightly odd translation issues.  Mostly they’ve done a great job, but there are just a few questions that arise from what I feel are probably just translation issues.  Overall, though, I think you’ll find that most questions are answered in the rulebook and there are nice illustrations to help along with the process.

Next up we have the box.  This is a slightly awkward sized box.  It is rectangular shaped (not the more square-like like most medium sized games) and is quite shallow.  There was no insert included in the box, just the box itself.  That being said I am glad there wasn’t an insert included.  For this game I would have just thrown it out without using it at all so I’m glad they didn’t waste the materials.  While the box is a slightly awkward size compared to my other games, it is small enough that I don’t find it difficult to store it on my shelves.

Now let’s move on to the actual game components.  To begin we’ll take a look at the cards.  There are 30 beer recipe cards (26 of them are advanced and 4 are beginner), 4 workplace cards (which are the player aids), 4 storage cards, 1 marketplace card, and 1 black market card.  These are all of a linen finish (which I love), but they are a very low cardstock.  Now this is two sided coin.  The lower cardstock makes cards easier to ruffle-shuffle but on the other hand it makes them much easier to damage.  In the end I don’t mind the cardstock too much because there isn’t a lot of shuffling needed in this game.  You just shuffle the recipe cards in the beginning and place three or four out depending on how many people are playing.

The next components we’ll look at are the cardboard pieces.  There are some round, cardboard tokens that are included with the game.  These include 15 special ingredient tokens, 18 action (or “take-that”) tokens, 6 seed tokens, 4 blocking tokens, 12 coin tokens, and 1 season/priority token.  These are all decent thickness cardboard and will hold up nicely with multiple plays.  Also, made out of this thick cardboard, are 4 player boards which have the actions that you are able to take during your turn.  The only problem I can find with these is that I think that they could be a little bigger.

The final component in the base game to mention is of course the dice!  This is a dice-chucking game so what would it be without the dice?  Sadly the dice aren’t custom, but they did do a good job of getting high quality, colored dice that have a really nice heft to them.  There are 50 dice that are included in the box of different colors.  There are 14 yellow (light malt) dice, 14 black (dark malt) dice, 12 green (hops) dice, and 10 blue (brewing skills) dice.  Again, these are simply colored dice but they are of a good quality.

The last thing that I will mention is something that isn’t included in the game unless it was pre-ordered.  These are the player mats, a Red Moon Pale Ale recipe, and 6 pre-release bonus cards that give special things you can do during the game.  The best of these extras are the player mats.  They give nice art and a great place to keep all of your dice and component chits.  They are made out of a plastic material that will hold up great!  The only problem with these mats is that they were made just a few millimeters too large to fit in the box!  Thankfully it was nothing that a simple hobby knife couldn’t solve.

And there we have it!  Unboxing Day Five post is all up and complete!  Let me know what you think and if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them here or at BoardGameGeek.  This is a fun dice rolling game that my wife and I didn’t like at first but enjoy a lot after subsequent plays.  Check it out!  Until next time, game on!

Unboxing Week Post Part IV: Elder Sign

Day Four of Unboxing Week is here! My hands are cramped from all of the typing and I’m sure my wife’s are as well as she edits and posts these blogs for me...but, I will fight on! I will push forward and continue these posts for the rest of the week. So fear not fantastic readers, I will survive! Okay, enough of the bad melodrama, let’s move on to the post. Again, if you haven’t seen the past three days check out the links below. 

Unboxing Post I: Star Wars: Imperial Assault

Unboxing Post II: Tokaido
 
Unboxing Post III: Roll for the Galaxy
 
And now, for day four, we will move on to Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson’s great Cthulhu, dice-rolling game, Elder Sign. 

This was a game that I received from family this past Christmas and it has gotten quite a bit of play at our table. My wife really enjoys this game! She guest-blogged a few posts back and gave her top 5 games list and later admitted that Elder Sign just barely missed the cut. This is another game in the Cthulhu line of games by Fantasy Flight Games. Some people consider this the dice version of Arkham Horror but I don’t think they have many similarities besides the theme. This is a co-operative dice-chucking game where you and your fellow players take an investigator and fight to keep an elder god from waking up and destroying the world. This is a Yahtzee style game and I think it is a great implementation of that basic mechanic. 

To start out we have the rulebook. This is another well done rulebook by Fantasy Flight Games. I know that some people have a problem with their rulebooks but I never have. This particular one answers all of the questions I have about the game without having to look through FAQs or other methods to get those answers. It also looks nice and has good pictures and examples that are easy to follow. 

Next on the list of game components are the clock and the entrance reference sheet. The clock is made of heavy cardboard and is put together so that the hand on the clock is able to swing around. This clock is well made and is the timekeeper for the game. Each turn that is taken during the game takes 15 minutes off the clock and when it hits midnight a mythos card is drawn from the deck. It is a completely unnecessary, but very cool, item that was added for thematic quality. The entrance reference sheet is just a piece of cardstock with the entrance abilities on it. These are places the characters can go to heal, gain sanity, and buy things with their trophies. It is a simple piece of cardstock but it does the job just fine. 

Next up we have the token in the game. There are a bunch of tokens and that means lots of punchboards to punch out! My favorite pastime! Elder Sign comes with almost 150 individual tokens that are for all sorts of reasons. There are investigator markers that are your avatar for the game, stamina and sanity tokens to keep track of health and sanity, clue tokens for re-rolls, monster tokens, doom tokens and elder sign tokens. These are all made of heavy chipboard and won’t bend or be damaged easily. I like the look of all the tokens as they really hold with the theme of the game. 

Next up are the small sized cards which are a favorite of Fantasy Flight Games. Among these cards are the common items, the unique items, the spell cards, and the ally cards. Also in the mini-card size are the mythos cards that are drawn when the clock strikes midnight. These cards are all nicely drawn and have flavor text on them to add to the fun of the game. I like the size of these cards as you collect them during the game. If they were too large then they would just eat up some serious table space! All of these cards are high quality cardstock with linen finish, my personal favorite. Now we move on to the larger sized cards. There are 80 tarot sized cards in the game that are printed on the same heavy cardstock with the linen finish. Included in this size of cards are the adventure cards (which make up the vast majority of the tarot sized cards), the other world cards, the investigator cards, and the ancient one cards. I just want to take this moment to point out that the art on these particular cards is awesome. They use similar art to Arkham Horror, Mansions of Madness, and Eldritch Horror and it just look awesome! I have nothing bad to say about any of their card choices in this game.

This game is a dice-rolling, Yahtzee-style game so we can’t move on without talking about the dice. Elder Sign comes with eight very nice (in classic Fantasy Flight style), engraved dice. There are six green dice, one yellow die and lastly, one red die. These are all well made and good looking dice which each have different icon on them that do different things during the game. I love these die. They feel good to roll and you just gotta love hitting exactly the icons that you need to finish off an adventure card! 

Finally, I'd like to talk about the box and the box insert. The box has great cover art on it and is smaller than most games. It is both shallower and smaller than the normal Ticket to Ride-style box that has become fairly common for most games. Unfortunately this is a Fantasy Flight game which means that the insert is just taken out and thrown away because it is a complete waste of space. That beings said, I like the size of the box and it fits everything from the base game and the first expansion with extra space to spare.

Elder Sign is a fun Lovecraftian-mythos game that provides a fun, co-operative, dice-rolling experience. We have officially made it over the hump day of Unboxing Week! Come on back tomorrow to see what game we move on to next. Thanks a ton for reading! Until next time, game on!

Unboxing Week Post Part III: Roll for the Galaxy

Here we are at day three of Unboxing Week!  If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my previous posts on day one and day two.  Just click on the links that I will provide below and you can see the two games I have already done. 
  
Unboxing Post I: Star Wars: Imperial Assault

Unboxing Post II: Tokaido

If you are just coming in to this series of posts, I’m doing a week of unboxings!  I’ve chosen to do this because I have a severe backlog of games that I have pictures of but haven’t taken the time to sit down and actually write up the unboxing posts.  Thus, I have created this self-imposed Unboxing Week.  I may actually make this a thing where I occasionally do this when I get a backlog of games.  Anyway, on to the game! 

For day three I decided to do an unboxing of one of my favorite new games to come out this year (or very late last year depending on who you’re talking to) and that is Roll for the Galaxy.  Roll for the Galaxy is a dice game that is a re-implement of the original card game Race for the Galaxy.  It was designed by Thomas Lehmann and Wei-Hwa Huang and produced by Rio Grande Games.  This is a wonderful dice-rolling, engine-building game that plays two to five players and scales well at all player counts.

To begin, Roll for the Galaxy comes in a standard sized, medium, family-style box in the same vein as Ticket to Ride.  The box has a great picture on the cover that has an oversized sci-fi cube that is a representation of the dice that come in the box.  It is a great cover and is eye catching which is quite important to getting your game out to the public.  Sadly, when you open the box they have a pretty sad looking box insert.  However, I will say that I don’t necessarily think that this game would benefit that much from a box insert as some bags and the bag that comes with the game really seem to do a fine job of keeping the components separate.

Next on the list of game components are the cardboard victory point chits.  They are thick cardboard and are exactly the same as the ones that are used in Race for the Galaxy.  I have heard differing opinions as to people’s feelings of these chits, but I like them.  Some people seem to think that they are confusing, and I can kind of see where they are coming from, but again, I like them.  All you have to do is count the hashes on the chits and that is the value of them.  I think they lend to the sci-fi theme of Roll for the Galaxy.

Moving on from the victory point chits we take a look at the player screens, the player mats, and the phase strips.  These components are all made of the same thick cardstock and are of a pretty decent quality.  I will admit that I think that the phase strips and the player mats were cardboard instead of cardstock, but I don’t think that it detracts from the game.  The phase strips is a simple strip of cardstock that gives the phases and is what the players puts behind their player screen as they are choosing their phases with their dice.  It has the iconography clearly on the strip and is easy to read.  The player mat is where the player keeps their used dice, unused tiles, and their meeple showing how much money they have.  Again, the icons on this mat are clear and easy to read with no odd discrepancies.  

Lastly, the player screen is one of my favorite additions into the game.  This screen has everything printed on the back of the screen so you can just look at it and know the different phases, you different actions, and what they all mean!  All a player has to do is look at this and they can find all of the information that is needed during a game of Roll for the Galaxy.

Now we’ll take a look at some of the “random” components in the box.  These would be the dice cups, the wooden meeples, and the black tile bag.  There are five of each of these in the game and they come in the five different players colors, red, blue, green, yellow, and orange.  The dice cups are made of hard plastic and have the different phase icons on the sides of the cup.  They are super-high quality and a great addition into the game!  The wooden meeples are pretty standard fare except for their pose.  They look like they are running which has a pretty cool look as they are keeping track of the money that you have.  Lastly the black bag that you place the game tiles in is large and of a very high quality.  It is easy to stick your hand in there and grab a tile with no problem.

 

Finally, the last two components that are left are the main ones in the game.  These are the tiles and the dice.  Let’s start with the tiles.  The first tiles you get are five phase tiles.  These are double sided with one side showing that the phase is chosen and the other side showing that the phase wasn’t chose.  The game comes with nine faction tiles and nine home world tiles.  These are chosen at the beginning and give the player a place to start.  The faction tiles are twice the size of the normal tiles and have a technology for the player to start with while the home worlds are the same size as the rest of the tiles and give the player extra dice.  These eighteen tiles have gray corners so you can easily separate them from the rest of the tiles.  Lastly there are 55 other tiles that are double sided.  One side has a technology and the other side has a world on it.  The player can choose which side they want to go for when they draw the tile.  All of these tiles are very thick cardboard and would be able to take a lot of beatings before showing any wear.

The final component we’ll look at is the dice.  There are a total of 111 custom dice that come with this game.  There are 25 white (home) dice, 22 red (military) dice, 20 cyan (novelty) dice, 14 brown (rare elements) dice, 12 green (genes) dice, 9 yellow (alien technology) dice, and 9 purple (lavender)dice.  These dice are smallish (which is actually good for this game!) and have different icon placements depending on what type of die they are.  The icons are clear and make sense once you know the game.  The only things I would have liked to see would have been engraved dice.  I am somewhat worried that they will fade in time but to be honest, we’ve played it a lot already and they aren’t showing any wear currently.

Alright, day three in the books!  We are almost halfway through unboxing week and I’ve still got some great games with great components left to post.  Come on back tomorrow and see what game gets to be right in the middle of the week!  Until next time, game on!