We're So Board!
We're So Board!
Episode 26 - Fog of Love
In this episode, Rachel and Jake fall head over heals in Fog of Love. This two-player game attempts to recreate a romantic comedy with players acting out sweet, serious, or dramatic scenes in a relationship as they try to navigate making themselves and their partner happy. The game ends with the romantic couple either meeting or failing their destinies but either way, hopefully it was a fun ride! Listen to find out who has jiggly legs and where Patrick Swayze fits into the equation.
Hello, and welcome. I'm Rachel.
Jake:I'm Jake,
Rachel:and we're so bored. The Podcast where each episode we take a close look at a tabletop game and discuss our personal experiences with said game to answer the question, Will this cure our boredom?
Jake:That's right, we look at the mechanics complexity and replayability in a game to determine if it's the perfect alternative to, I don't know, let's say being the person who collects all the money for the schools, Valentine's Day flowers that students buy for each other, and then delivering them on Valentine's Day during homeroom.
Rachel:That just sounds sad. Because what if you don't get a flower? You're just out delivering flowers for everybody
Jake:that happened in Bob's Burgers. Oh, also, I never got those flowers. So I didn't either. That's all good. Once again, before we get started, I just wanted to let people know that I am streaming on Twitch at Naughty duck 541. You can search for me on there. And my schedule is updated weekly, you can check that on the Schedule tab. When this comes out. I will probably still be streaming regularly. I am a little bit ill. So
Rachel:yeah, apologies if we sound a little bit weird or different than normal. We are recording this while we're sick. But I'll tell you, Jake sounds better than he did a couple of days ago.
Jake:Like a million times better. It's insane. Also, there's one other thing we want to talk about you want to tell them Rachel?
Rachel:Yeah. So our one year anniversary of this podcast is coming up for the next episode. So we started in March of 2021. And by the time our next episode releases, it'll basically be the anniversary, I think we're going to be off by one day. And to celebrate, we are doing a game giveaway. So we're not telling you yet what we're gonna be doing. But definitely tune in to our next episode. And you know, come check out we're going to be doing something very fun and exciting for our one year anniversary.
Jake:Yay. Yes. And we're going to extend the time of the giveaway. I believe I normally we do it for two weeks. I think this time, we're going to let it go for a month. So be sure to listen to that next episode to find out how you can enter to win. So what are we talking about today? Well, since it's Valentine's Day,
Rachel:it is the day after Valentine's the time comes, we are going to talk about fog of love. Basically the only game that we could think of that would fit the Valentine's Day theme.
Jake:Yes. On the box. It describes it as a romantic comedy board game. And I you know, I have thoughts about that. I don't really see the comedy part. But
Rachel:yeah, and we can get it more into that later about, I think why they're selling it that way. Yeah. But that's what it says on the box. And it says several times in the rules. So that's really what they're trying to sell themselves as.
Jake:Yes, it is an only two player game. It's designed by Jacob Jaskov. Or Jaskov, probably Jaskov. Because all the other artists names are Scandinavian as well, except for Cecilie Fossheim, which I can say that one but I don't want to try to pronounce the other three artists names, because I will butcher them. But it was kickstarted by hush hush projects in 2016. It was released in 2017. And then it was picked up by floodgate games and is currently being published by them.
Rachel:Okay, so what is this game? You know, a lot of times we are discussing a game and I tell you what is the goal of the game, the goal is to get the most points. Like that is so meaningful, it kind of is, but it's got such a cooler, better goal that I love. So you are trying to meet your destiny by meeting requirements such as being happy in a relationship and developing your personality.
Jake:Mm hmm. Actually, it's kind of interesting, because that's kind of open to I don't want to say interpretation. But it leaves like your win condition open because there are several different possible win conditions that you may have at the end of the game is unique in that sense.
Rachel:And we will get to that shortly. Yes, so developing
Jake:your happiness in the relationship. That kind of translates to victory points. Because you based on your win condition, sometimes you want your partner to have more sometimes you want to have more and sometimes it doesn't even track on the happiness. So I don't want to say it's victory points. But it kind of is it's almost a score, but not really but it's tracked on your character card. And the character cards are cool because you're a couple in a relationship. Each player has a character card, and the card can be used as a male or female for both. So you could have two men as a couple to women as a couple or a heterosexual couple totally up to you.
Rachel:And I do want to just say that that is a really cool thing that I feel like this game is done, I actually had an option when I bought the game, I think this would have affected what the outside of the box what the cover on the box would have looked like, I had a choice to choose man, woman, two women or two men. Oh, that's
Jake:cool. I didn't even know that.
Rachel:Yeah, so I feel like there's really trying to be inclusive of the LGBT community.
Jake:I definitely agree. And that's, I really like that. Okay, so
Rachel:before we get into kind of the setup of the initial game, we're gonna do this a little bit backwards. And I'm going to talk about some of the concepts of the game because I feel like you need to understand them to understand what we're saying for the setup. And there's two major concepts I feel like that you really need to understand going into it. And one of those is personality traits. In the middle of the board, there is these like six different colored sections that have an arrow pointing up and an arrow pointing down. These represent six different trade categories with two different spectrums on each. And so your options are disciplined or not disciplined, which I guess is reckless, Mm hmm. Curious or closed minded, extrovert versus introvert, sensitive versus thick skinned, gentle versus rough, and sincere or deceitful. And so different events that happened during the game will cause you to place like your characters tokens on one side of the spectrum for these various personality traits. So different things will happen that will cause you to go up in sincerity, for example, or whatever. And you can and probably will end up having some mismatched tokens where you've got tokens on both sides of the spectrum for the same personality trait. And what you end up doing is you balance out where you have the most tokens, and it's just whatever the difference is between what's on one side versus the other. So for example, if you have five traits in sincerity and one in deceitful, then you actually have a score of four insincerity. Yes. And so traits are really affected by three trait cards that you'll get when you're building your character. And those are kind of your end of game goals. And those end of game goals will say that they wants you to have a certain number of points in whatever specific spectrum on a specific trait. And those can be individual or shared goals.
Jake:Yes, so you can have shared goals. For example, in one of the games that we played, I had a personality trait called fun loving, what that wanted me to do is at the end of the game, have a balance of five in the extrovert category for a shared goal. So what that would mean is Rachel and I would have to have a total of five in the extrovert with zero in the introvert, or five plus in the extrovert,
Rachel:balancing out so that it comes out to five in the end, but it's between both of our personality tokens, not just yours,
Jake:correct. So that's what those shared goals are. The individual goals are the same, only you're not taking your partner's totals into account.
Rachel:And this is actually really interesting concept. Because during the game, like we were doing really good during our last game that we played, but I actually messed up one of my goals, because Jake, put a couple of personality tokens in the wrong spot, you know, basically causing us to get off balance in terms of I think it was disciplined, and made it so the I didn't meet the goal, because it didn't balance out to the number that we
Jake:needed. And had I not done that we would have won,
Rachel:or had it been an individual goal, it wouldn't have mattered.
Jake:Exactly. But had I not done that we would have won. And I didn't realize that. Yeah. Because you don't know what your partner's personality goals are in the game? Yes. And so what are these events that are causing these changes in personality or changing in traits? These are our scenes, these are the core gameplay mechanic. I think this is what is driving your story forward and forward and forward. It's also how you tell when the game is over. scenes are events that are happening during the game. There are four decks of them. You have a sweet deck, which are sweet events or scenes that happen or like romantic. Yes, you have serious which are not always bad, but they're serious. These are
Rachel:events that often cause changes in the relationship, I guess, or like more significant changes, like I don't know proposing to get married. That is a serious scene.
Jake:And then you have my favorite drama? These are typically not good. Something is happening to cause drama in the relationship. The one that sticks out in my mind is it's titled who was that? And the subtext basically says, I saw you talking to somebody intently who was that, and you have some options on who you're talking to a why, it's pretty cool. Yeah. And then the fourth deck is custom. That's for the expansions that we'll talk a little bit about later.
Rachel:So you're basically going back and forth, each person playing a scene one at a time and 100 resolving it, you know, there are instructions on each individual card, depending on what specifically it is and what it's doing. For the most part, these scenes are kind of like what Jake was describing, you know, it's describing some kind of event or texts or you know, conversation starter. And then there's usually a choice. So this could be your partner chooses, which is the person who's not playing the card or the other person, or it could be a both choose, and you have these little ABCD tokens that you can play face down and make your choice. And then you flip them up at the same time to see who made what choice. And so for, like, the example that Jake gave, you know, who were you talking to? One of them could be like, I was talking to my ex, I was surprised to see them something like that, you know, so that would be something where the partner chooses. And the example
Jake:that I was thinking of for the both twos is one that I got yesterday, when we were playing this is I didn't play it, but a trip to IKEA. We both go to Ikea, and what do you get? And so you can both choose what you're getting,
Rachel:or like what your goal is in mind, when you want to go to Ikea, I guess is kind of what your mentality is.
Jake:Yeah. And so one of them was like, we'll get this and we'll get this and we'll get this, we'll just get some of everything. And another one is like, you know, we already have a lot of things, we'll just see if there's anything that we need. And then there's one that's like, we're not going to get anything. The both choose, you can both choose your choices, play your tokens, facedown in the reveal them at the same time to see whether or not you match,
Rachel:right. And so then there's usually an extra condition about whether or not you match, a lot of these want you to match and you'll gain extra happiness if you match. But there are some cases where matching is bad.
Jake:But these choices that you're making, a lot of times they will have personality traits in the positive or negative listed next to the choices. And those are what are going to take effect on your character. So the IKEA one would make you a go up in extrovert if you just bought everything and then down in discipline. So it would make you more outgoing, but also not as discipline to just spend your money like but what's that mean is kind of real. These choices only affect the person making the choice.
Rachel:Yes, this is basically how you play the game. And you can try to meet those end of game goals. So you want to probably make choices that will you know, put your tokens in the places that you need for your end of game goals. But the game does call out and say that you could choose to play a little riskier and like change your personality, quote, unquote, because there is a mechanic in the game that allows you to change those end of game like trade goals during the game. Yes, it's not something that's super reliable. It's not something where like, you can change it specifically from this to specifically that. And it's not something that will necessarily even come up during the game, it's very risky to decide that you know what, I have this trait goal, but I don't want to have anything to do with it, I'm going to try and play the opposite. Or, you know, I'm going to try and go for something else. The point is, is that those goals are not like tying you to that personality. You can choose to play however you want. But I mean, you probably want to try to play towards those goals. So what we've been describing is the like normal type of scene card, but there are actually other types of scenes that can come up. So one of those types of scenes is called a situation. These usually don't have a choice for you to make on them but have a carryover effect to the next scene played. So it'll say something like on your next scene, double the amount of happiness earned or something along those lines.
Jake:Another type of scene card that is not a normal one, our secrets. These are usually played facedown on your side of the board if it's your secret. This does not count towards the chapter length. So the chapters have specific scenario lengths. So during the tutorial, the first chapter is six cards long. So after the six card you move to the Next chapter. But the secrets, they don't count towards this chapter length. It has effects if this secret is revealed during the game. So sometimes your partner can play something to make you reveal a secret, and it will have the effects of that happens. Or if it's kept hidden until the end, it'll have a different effect. And I've noticed that at least the secrets I've seen, typically, they give you happiness, if they are kept secret till the end of the game.
Rachel:Yeah, which is really interesting, because you don't like evaluate the effect that that has on the relationship. So like, I had a secret in the game that we played where it was like, I'm starting a small business, and it's like, I'm not ready to talk to my partner about it yet. I'm not super confident in it yet, but I'm working on it. And if that gets revealed, like during the game, we go and we evaluate, like, what the partner's reaction would be. And so that can cause them to gain sincerity can cause us to lose happiness, because I was keeping that a secret, you know, there's multiple effects. But from what I'm understanding, going through the tutorial and reading the rules, that doesn't happen if it's kept secret throughout the game, like if you wait until the very end, and then it gets revealed.
Jake:Yeah, you don't resolve that? Because it's not resolved during the game anymore.
Rachel:Yeah. So I don't know, kind of story wise, I'm not quite sure where that leaves you or what that means. Does that mean that my business was successful? And now I can come to you and be like, hey, guess what, we've got a great side business. And we're both just happy. Or like, I don't know, in general, I feel like keeping secrets is not great for happiness and relationships.
Jake:Yes, you can still make friends. But okay, one of the secrets I had in the last game was, I'm planning a surprise party for my partner. If it stays secret throughout the whole game, we both get for happiness at the end of the game, if it gets revealed, I lose to happiness. But my partner gets to
Rachel:see like, that makes a little more sense to me. Yes, prize party, but I don't know, I guess what I'm getting at is the it kind of feels like in this game. There's some overarching mechanics that fit really well for some situations and not great for others. And I'm going to talk about that more in my experiences section. Anyway, there are also minor scenes. These are like very small, they don't count towards the chapter length, it's usually not like a decision that is made between the two characters, and they can be discarded anytime on your turn. So what from what I've seen, these sometimes allow you to change your personality traits, goals.
Jake:Yes, there are also the Reveal Secret cards that we talked about very briefly. That's basically what they do. You reveal a partner secret. The next is reactions, the reactions can be played in response to other scenes. And a lot of times that lets you change your choice in a scene after both parties have revealed their selection. So if you make a choice in a both choose, and you find that it actually hurts you both because you both lose happiness, or what have you. If it doesn't make your traits move the way that you want it to. You can play this reaction, which doesn't count towards the chapter length, but it lets you change your choices. A lot of times, I'm sure there are a couple of different reactions, but that's the one we see most often.
Rachel:Yeah. Lastly, we have like special events and linked scenes. So special scenes are ones that are set aside at the beginning of the scenario and something that like specifically gets applied later. So the example we have for this is there's a love story called high school sweethearts that contains a scene called popping the question. So that scene gets mixed in to the deck with the rest of the the scenes, I think it goes in the sweet deck. But once that comes up, and if your partner says yes, and you guys are successfully engaged, you will then take a wedding ceremony scene that was set aside, and you will shuffle that into the serious deck, because now that is something that is eligible to happen. And like makes sense for it to happen because the proposal happened,
Jake:right. And next we kind of talked about this briefly, the win conditions, these are called destinies, you start out with several of them at the beginning of the game, and I believe that they will change based on the love story that you're playing.
Rachel:The love story is the like the whole scenario, the whole game.
Jake:So the one Rachel mentioned was the high school sweethearts, and there's a couple others that are in the game, and there's some expansion ones as well. And that will change your destinies that you have or your win conditions. And as you play throughout the games cards will tell you to discard one, depending on choices that you make. Sometimes it'll say discard a destiny but you cannot discard this specific one if you make this choice, and then some scenes will have the ability to make you swap in pretty previously discarded destinies. So one will say, Now switch in the unconditional love destiny. So that means you have to trade one of the ones you already have for that if it's been discarded.
Rachel:One quick note on destinies I feel like this is not super clear in the rulebook, it's like one very small sentence that's just kind of brushed over, you shouldn't ever have less than two destinies in your hand until you get to the very end of the game when it asks you to pick one. Yes. So you were going to run into situations where it's telling you to discard destinies, but you already only have to, at that point, you shouldn't discard anymore, you need to always have two options in your hand. Yes. Okay. So now that we understand the concepts of the game, like we can talk about the setup a little bit. So you're going to go through a character creation process. And Jake kind of mentioned this a little bit already, but you're going to pick your gender. So like he said, there's two sides to each card. So you can have whatever kind of relationship you want to have, you're supposed to come up with a name for yourself. So this is doesn't really affect the gameplay except the the game just really encourages you to kind of roleplay and create this character, try and be this person. And I feel like it does add a little bit of fun to the game. What was the what was your character's name last night? Yeah. So after you've come up with the name, you're going to draw three occupation cards and keep one. And that's an again, a thing that doesn't super affect it. I think it gives you one personality token, somewhere based on you choose Yes. But otherwise, it doesn't really have any effect on the game, you will draw five features for your partner and pick three for them to keep. And so this is basically like, what are the things that I noticed about you when I first met you? And so you're supposed to pick these for your partner, not for yourself?
Jake:Yes. So like the ones I gave Rachel, yesterday, her character had perfect teeth, a luxurious watch and jiggly legs.
Rachel:What did I give Jake, I know I gave him strong hands and shaky hands. I can't remember what the other one was. But each of those has an effect again, on your personality traits, it gives you a token in one direction or another. And then lastly, you're going to draw those five traits. So that's the secret and of game goals. You're gonna draw five of those and pick three to keep.
Jake:So then you pick a love story. This is the whole scenarios we were talking about. There are several in the base game, like I said, the expansions also provide some, the synopsis describes the start of your story. For example, the tutorial one is a Sunday morning date. So basically you to meet somewhere and now you're going on a date on Sunday. And that's how you start your relationship. And that's how you progress through the high school sweethearts. One is you've known each other since high school, and it starts out with Have you ever broken up? And then the choices are like, yes, we broke up, but it was for like five minutes? No, we've never broken up. Yes, we broke her for five years. And then we got back together. And this is a both choose. So you and your partner both choose, which I thought was interesting. I didn't even think about it. So Rachel pointed it out. What if one person says oh, yeah, we never broke up. And the other one says, Yeah, we broke up for five years.
Rachel:Yeah. And five years one specifies like you've been with other partners and all this stuff. And so it's like, Whoa, you're starting the relation off real weird, if both of you.
Jake:Exactly. So but this will also call out specific destinies that are used during this love story.
Rachel:And then you've got the chapters, which we've already talked about a little bit. So those will usually provide you with an option as well in some kind of scenario to kind of get you started. And then it will list the length of the chapter in terms of a number of scenes. And it tells you what kind of scenes you can draw from so if you remember from the beginning we were talking about there's those different scene decks, the sweet drama, and serious. And so it will tell you, you can only draw from the drama deck right now, or you know, whatever. And that really helps kind of set the tone for what is going on in the relationship right now. Because it's like, we don't have a choice. We've only got drawn like scenes in our hand. Exactly. And then after a couple of chapters, you will hit the finale, which tells you to pick one of your destinies to complete at that point, you should probably only have two options left in your hand and it'll tell you to pick one that like this is what your goal is. And it could be yes, you know that you already meet this criteria or Ooh, I'm missing a little bit of happiness, I hope that I can get what I need in the last couple of steps in the game. And so then you reveal the secrets which will affect certain traits and happiness. And then you calculate your happiness based on your trait goals. And so that's like five points for every goal that you met, and negative two for every goal that you didn't meet. And then you basically determine if you met your destiny at that point, and that determines if you won or lost the game. Yes, the only other thing that's included in the love story, or some of those special scenes, kind of like what we already described with the popping the question and the wedding ceremony for the high school sweethearts, love story.
Jake:So let's go ahead and talk about our experiences with this game. Now we've talked a little bit about it, we're going to go into a little more detail about how we feel about our time playing this game. I love the artwork, it's very well done watercolors, they are very, very well done. My only issue is, it feels like it's slightly lacking. Like, they did such a good job with the amount of art that they did. And I understand that it's supposed to be simplistic and minimalistic, that's great. But on all the cards, there's like no artwork, it's all just text. Mm hmm. They really missed an opportunity for that.
Rachel:Yeah, it would definitely make the game pop a little bit more I feel if there was some artwork, even if it's not on every single card, but a lot of cards like are half empty. Yeah. Like there's room to put something there.
Jake:Absolutely. Especially in specific scenarios, when they call out a specific place or object or anything like that. That could just be a small minimalistic watercolor of that place or object. It'd be really nice. It'd be really nice to see. But they didn't, like I said, I understand is supposed to be minimalistic, and it is it does look clean, but to clean. And that's coming from me who likes everything, like nice and neat and black and white and cleaned up.
Rachel:Yeah, no, I agree with you. It does feel like it's missing something a little bit. Yeah. All right. So I guess the first thing that I want to talk about is some of the spectrum alignments don't make a ton of sense to me. And this is kind of what I was talking about earlier with, like, it seems like they've got these overarching mechanics, or, you know, the way that the game works is that fits a lot of situations, but not all of them. And so I don't know, if it's just like, it was really hard to come up with something that would work for the game, they probably didn't want to go in and define all kinds of special rules for these different situations. But for example, so there's a card here that I'm actually going to read verbatim, because I really feel like it doesn't make sense. So it's called Pride Parade. Hey, do you think we should attend the Pride Parade this year? That's the question. And now I've got a choice of A, B, or C to choose what I want to do. And option C says Pride Parade. Why on earth? Would we go there? I would rather hang out with you at home. Jake, what kind of effect do you think that would have in terms of personality traits? If I chose option C?
Jake:What seems how homophobia is not on here? I wouldn't say it's probably I could see close minded,
Rachel:close minded. I feel like that would be a great one. What it actually gives you is negative points and being disciplined, or reckless,
Jake:reckless for staying home. Yeah,
Rachel:so I can't even begin to make sense of that. And so every once in a while, you get this thing that's like, that option just doesn't make any sense. Like the actual mechanics of the game and what that's giving me versus what the story is being told. And what's being said, like these two things, don't click, and I don't know if it's because it's a bad translation. Is this not an originally English game? Do you know?
Jake:It may or may not be I believe it's Scandinavian in nature, or in origin due to the creator and artist names? I don't know that for certain I didn't do as much research on it as I probably should have.
Rachel:Okay, so yeah, I don't know if it's a bad translation, or what but there are definitely some things that just really don't fit. And it's very off putting when you come across that I feel like you can really get into the theme of the game and into the story. And then something like this comes along, and it just kind of
Jake:knocks you out of it. And so that kind of leads me into my next criticism of the game, is I saw this review for this game on BoardGameGeek. And they brought up something that I totally agree with that I was thinking about how to work this and they did it amazingly. If you play the game, mathematically, you're more inclined to win but you're you're metagaming you're not really playing the game the way that it's intended. it'd be played, it makes it much, much easier to win. If you play the game thematically and the way that it's I believe it's intended to be played, it is very, very difficult to play and very, very difficult to win. Because you're trying to figure out what this other person's wants and needs are, but you're not really allowed to communicate those things effectively within the bounds of the rules.
Rachel:Right, exactly. And so it's like, you're not supposed to tell them what your traits are, right? But in real life in a relationship, I would tell somebody, Hey, I'm a perfectionist. Okay, so that wouldn't be me communicating in terms of like, I require four points in the discipline space, right? Obviously, it's not going to translate to that. But that I feel like that's something that I would communicate to somebody like, Hey, I'm a perfectionist. And it bothers me when you do this, or I really need to do this, because I'm a perfectionist. And we were really struggling to find a place like to find that line where we can have those kind of realistic conversations that a couple would actually have, without metagaming.
Jake:Yes, it's very difficult to do that.
Rachel:I completely agree. And so I think we probably were crossing the line a little bit into metagaming, in our last game that we played, but I mean, the rulebook does tell you like after decisions are made, talk about what you're happy or not happy with. And so we were trying really hard to talk in those kinds of terms. But it was also like, how do I communicate that I need more points in something? Because this is supposed to be a cooperative game? Right? We both want to be able to meet our destinies, if Jake is doing great on his win conditions, how do I communicate that, hey, I need a couple more things. You know, how do I indicate that, like, I need him to play cards for me, that will give me like, certain skills, right? Because if you just play randomly, you're probably going to lose, yes, if you just go without having that kind of conversation, you're probably not going to get what you need. I mean,
Jake:that's, that's like a real relationship, though. If you don't communicate what you need, you're probably not gonna get it
Rachel:exactly. So because this is a relationship that you're trying to have, I feel like some amount of communication needs to happen, it's just really difficult to decide where that line is between, okay, we're just straight up metagaming. And we're actually playing in with the theme and trying to have a relationship.
Jake:My last concern is about the replayability. In this game, I think after a certain number of playthroughs, you're gonna see all the scenarios, the only thing that will really change is your starting and ending conditions, you know, your occupation and your traits and your features. But once you see all the scenarios, I think that this game will kind of lose its uniqueness. Yeah, for lack of a better term.
Rachel:Yeah. And I feel like the game is really banking on having lots of expansions to keep it fresh. So there's a ton of extra room in the box, like a whole big chunk of space, that just nothing goes there. And what I expect is that is designed to be able to fill it up with expansion cards and new scenarios. And that's kind of cool kudos for them for like trying to design a box that will fit expansions. But at the same time, you know that more money that you have to spend each of the expansions with additional cards is average about $15.
Jake:Right, and we'll talk about what the expansions add in just a moment.
Rachel:Yeah, one thing real quick, before we move on, I did want to talk about the tutorial for this game. So if you buy the game new and fresh, it comes set up ready for you to play with the tutorial, meaning that there are like specific tutorial cards that are placed in the various decks in locations where they're supposed to be. So you can play it right out of the box and not have to even look at the rulebook and the tutorial cards will teach you how to do that. I feel like the tutorial does do a good job of that. But
Jake:oh, there is a big button here.
Rachel:If you're wanting to play the tutorial, after somebody has already done the tutorial, or you know started playing the game, normally it is a major pain to reassemble it. There are some instructions on how you can do that. Although I feel that they could be a lot clearer on exactly what they're asking for. But it's based on these little ID numbers that are on each of the cards and you have to basically reassemble them in order.
Jake:And when Rachel says little ID numbers, she means teeny tiny ID
Rachel:Oh my gosh. Yeah. So you know how like, some people really have trouble seeing small text. Like, I don't know, my mom might hand me something and say, I can't read this, like, what does this say, Rachel, and I can usually read it, it's fine. These numbers are so tiny that I can't read them. And so I can't even imagine someone else who has, you know, some more severe eyesight issues trying to reassemble this. It's like not even possible.
Jake:Yeah, it is teeny, teeny, tiny. And it's a pain in the butt to reassemble. And also, my other gripe about the tutorial is while it does do a very, very good job of teaching you how to play the game, it is a wall of text that you could probably cut down into about a third and make it really simplistic. This is what these cards do. This is how you play them. And the other thing is, a lot of times, especially for the like the secret cards, or the situation cards, or the minor scene cards, it gives you this wallet text in the tutorial, but then it tells you in two sentences on the card, the exact same thing. Ah, it's very intuitive. You just look at the card, it'll tell you how to play it. Yeah. So I like that could be really cut down and make it a lot quicker to play the tutorial, because the tutorial we played ended up being almost double the amount of time that it took us to play a different scenario the next time.
Rachel:Yeah, I agree. They've basically taken the entire rulebook and just put it on cards that fit into the decks, and you are reading the rulebook as you play.
Jake:Yeah. And the second scenario we played had almost twice as many scenes as the tutorial, but it took half the amount of time. Yeah, so those are my gripes about the game in general. Now I like to discuss the expansions of the add ons. Because there are some for this game. There are three expansions. Currently, there is the paranormal romance, which I can only imagine is Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore and go. It adds a quote, cinematic love story that leaves a lasting impression, close quote. So this is actually from what it's described on BoardGameGeek, it is added in two parts the first part you play through. And then I don't know if you open the second part in the finale or after you finish the game. But then the second part is added to the game. So future playthroughs will then be affected by playing this scenario and adding this expansion. So you'll have new scenes that are added to the game that weren't there previously. So it also adds 24 new occupation cards, which that's kind of whatever the second expansion is called, it will never last. It's touted as the most difficult story yet, which I don't know how you can make this game any more difficult, because it's very difficult if you play the way it's intended.
Rachel:So the only thing I can think of with that is that there is that fourth custom deck that is talked about in the rules, but nothing in the actual original game boss uses it. So I wonder if you're creating a custom deck out of cards that come with this scenario. And like that's what you're playing from is very specific scenarios that are designed to give you lots of negative happiness unless you're completely on the same page. Like that's the only thing I can think of,
Jake:I can almost guarantee you that's what this next one does, though. Okay, so before we go there, the it will never last also adds 24 new feature cards. So the one that I think definitely adds to that custom deck to add misery to your relationship is, it's called trouble with the inlaws. There's not very much information in the synopsis on BoardGameGeek. It sounds like you're now not just considering you and your partner's feelings and when conditions, but you're also have to considering the in laws, basically, it says that they've come to see you and they have brought their opinions with them. Okay, so I do imagine that that probably is what that is, you're gonna have times where you have to draw from this in law deck, this custom deck. Hmm, that's what I'm seeing.
Rachel:Okay, so all of those expansions are just additional scenarios. I wouldn't consider it necessarily an expansion in terms of like really adding new core mechanics to the game or anything like that. I think the paranormal romance one is going for about $20. And then the others are going for $15. Okay. And so it can add up, you know, buying all these expansions. Those are the only ones available so far, but I anticipate that at least the original plan was to have tons and tons of these
Jake:that you can purchase. Yes, I imagine that probably will continue
Rachel:unless the game is not doing great. And speaking of which, let's talk about the Board Game Geek raiding. Yes,
Jake:so the Board Game Geek ratings are a little less than stellar. The big scheme is rated 6.8 out of 6200 reviews. I mean, I have reservations of concerns for this game you've heard, I will be honest, this is not one of my favorite games I've ever played. Okay, the base game is$50 on Amazon, as well as the floodgate games website. Yeah.
Rachel:So I can also kind of understand this rating. I think that the concerns about replayability that you brought up are legitimate and would probably affect this. Also, it just doesn't have a lot of people that have played it. 60 To 100 reviews
Jake:total. Yeah, I don't know. Like I said, it's not my favorite. It's not bad by any means. It's not a bad game, but I have reservations. And I understand this reading. So the paranormal romance expansion is rated 7.0 with 144 Reviews, the it will never last expansion is 7.38 out of 119 reviews. And the trouble with the inlaws is rated 7.4 with 122 Reviews. I honestly feel like this statistic here, because they're in the sevens like this was such low amounts of reviews. These are people who probably really liked the game, and went and bought the expansions. And I don't want to say being overly nice on ratings, but they obviously like the game. Right? That's kind of what I'm imagining. So I feel like maybe slightly over inflated because of the bias of the net.
Rachel:Yeah, I agree completely. It's not enough reviews to really be in unbiased or Yeah, to be a super accurate rating.
Jake:I agree. So if you can find this at a board game cafe or play it somewhere before buying it, I would totally recommend that over going out and purchasing it.
Rachel:Yeah. Okay. So now we're going to get into our ratings. First, we like to talk about easy versus difficult. So this is referring to like, how often do you have to go back to the rules or look up something in order to clarify or like in order to continue playing the game? How often are you having to go back and look something up? This game is a little bit hard for me to rate, I feel like in all of these sections that we have, because I feel like things are over explained. And we kind of talked about this in the tutorial, the amount of detail that goes into some things just feels really unnecessary. And so it makes it feel like it's a harder and more complicated game as you're reading it. And then you get into playing it and you realize it's not that difficult. So I'm going to say that it's easy. But I feel like if you pick up the game and you're looking at the rules, or you're going through this tutorial, you might have an initial different reaction. So this is from the perspective of somebody who has learned the game now and knows how to play it. I feel like it's easy. Yeah, I totally agree. So I think I'm going to give it like a three.
Jake:That's exactly what I was thinking is a three like it's not a difficult game. Everything is over explained, especially in the tutorial, but it's not that difficult. It's very easy to play.
Rachel:Yeah, definitely not hard to play, and not like you have to go back and look anything up. So they give you like a little player aid, one of those little cheat sheets. And I don't know if I've ever needed to look at that for anything.
Jake:That's the other crazy thing in the tutorial. It gives it to you at some point as part of the tutorial, and then tells you to ignore it.
Rachel:Yeah, that's really weird. It's like, here's this, you know, cheat sheet. Don't look at it. Yeah. Okay. Why did you give it to
Jake:me? I don't understand. So there's that. The next thing we like to talk about is simple versus complex. If this is confusing, the example we like to use is chess, it's very easy to learn, because there's only so many pieces, and they all have specific moves they can make. But the amount of strategy that it's involved is immense. So it's a very complex game. How do you use the mechanics in fog of love to win? Are there multiple viable strategies to win? Yes, and no, I feel like this is hard to rate because when played as intended, I feel like it's almost impossible to win. If played mathematically like, yeah, you can do this very simply.
Rachel:So okay, I'm going to address are there a variety of strategies? I say yes, because you've got multiple destinies that you start out with at the beginning of the game, and you get to pick which one you keep. And there is actually some destinies in there that make this a competitive game, rather than a cooperative game, meaning I don't care about my partner's happiness. I don't care about like what the other person is doing. We're not working together to try and achieve a goal. I am just focusing on me. And the fact that you have that option and the fact that you have all these different destinies that you can choose from from the beginning does definitely give you a variety of strategies that you can use to approach the game. Now what you were saying about like mathematically versus thematically? Yeah, it's very difficult to figure out where that line is, like we already talked about. So it's a really interesting situation. I'm going to call it a five right in the middle, just because it's kind of hard to place it, it's hard to pin it down.
Jake:I'm going to give it a four. And the reason I'm going to give it a four is because how to use the mechanics to win is kind of what I'm getting stuck on. When I think of that I think of Euro games, like, how do I best strategize my moves and take my turns? To do the best to optimize everything. And this is very difficult to do, because it's not even entirely up to you. Well, and
Rachel:also the game is discouraging you from doing that. Exactly right. Like typically, in a board game you are trying to metagame you are trying to come up with the best way the most effective way to do something. And that's you playing the game? Well,
Jake:I think that's one of the reasons this isn't my favorite game is because I've said it before. And I'll say it again, when I win a game I want it to be because I won like I did something, I proved that my brain was better. Okay. And in this is so hard to do. Like it's possible to do it this way. So I'll give it a four.
Rachel:Okay, that's fair. Lastly, we have wrote versus random. So this is what components of the game are randomized and add replayability to the game. And so I feel like this is also hard to pin down because on one hand, I would describe it as extremely random. The only thing that you're not shuffling when you're selecting is the love story itself, the chapters, everything else is shuffled. You got lots and lots of cards that are shuffled, you've got the randomness of the other player choosing the scenarios, very random, but at the same time, I don't feel like that adds a ton of replayability to it.
Jake:Okay, so in our outline, this is kind of behind the scenes here, we're gonna open the kimono a little bit. And I hate that term. But I'm going to use it here. We're going to park the kimono a little bit and show you wrote versus random. It specifically says what game mechanics make each play a unique experience dice rolling randomize cards, changes to trigger different scenarios. So it's got two of those of the three. But I still don't feel like that this is a super random game. Really? I mean, you have decks of cards that are shuffled. And we have said before, I don't know if we've kept it in the episodes, but you cannot take another player's actions and call them rent, right? Sure. Okay. Yes, we've said that before. Like I said, I don't remember if we kept it in the episodes. But we decided that that's not a randomized element. That's true. So the trigger different scenarios are all based on other people's choices, right?
Rachel:I see what you're getting at. But like, the choices that you have to play for the scenario that is still randomized, right? You don't get to pick and choose which scenes you have in your hand. That's random.
Jake:That is random. But you know, that could be for any other card game or any other game, really, you don't get to pick and choose what you have available to you. This is what you have. So I'm going to give it probably a six.
Rachel:Okay, I'm going to give it an EIGHT. Okay, I feel like this is very highly random. And the replayability issue that I'm having is the fact that there's just a limited number of scenarios love stories that you can play. Yeah, you know, so it ends up being kind of the same structure of a love story. In the end is something you've played previously, even if you have different cards. I don't know. I just feel like it's fun and exciting to play new scenarios and love stories, but not necessarily go back and play ones that you've already done. Yeah, like I said, I'm going to give it a six Okay, going with eight So Jake, would you rather play fog of love or be that person that goes and collects all the money for the schools Valentine's Day flowers that students buy for each other and then go and deliver them during homeroom
Jake:is playing unpacking an option? No. Okay. Wasn't I'd rather play this game than do the whole collecting money and delivering Valentine's.
Rachel:I agree. Like I said, I actually have had quite a lot of fun during this. I get really caught up in the story that is unfolding, and I end up just having a lot of fun with that.
Jake:Well, I'm glad you have fun with it. Not so much for you. It's okay, I'll live
Rachel:Okay, well, that's it for our show. That is fog of love, just in time for Valentine's Day. Thank you all so much for listening. As usual, you can hit us up on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at snowboard podcast. That's spelled s o Bo AR D podcast, we'd love to hear about any fun house rules or experiences that you have playing this game, you'll also be able to look up short stories and find pictures of other games that we've been playing recently, and interact with us all things, tabletop gaming, you can also email us at We are so bored. That's w e a r e, s, O, B oard@gmail.com. And make sure that you subscribe so that you receive notifications when we release new episodes. You know, we're pretty consistent, we release every other Tuesday. But if you do that, subscribe, then it'll just make sure that you get notified. And you also have the ability to leave us a review. That's super helpful for us. It helps other people find our podcasts, we really, really appreciate it. So if you have you know, two seconds, just go and leave us some stars. It would be great. You can do that on Spotify now too. By the way.
Jake:We also want to give a shout out to the people who knew we were reviewing fog of love based on the picture we posted last week. So congrats to Justin bird from Play Games spread joy, Jody Walker, Michael Palmer juman Tullio Jim, dents, golf and Ben Chapman. Awesome job guys. Thank you for participating. We also want to thank Mitchell Mims, the designer of our art. He is currently accepting commissions. So check him out at MIMSCO Sa ra on Instagram or his website, Mitchell Mims. That's M IC h e l m i m s.ca rd.co. Once again, listen to our next episode to find out how you can enter and win a free board game that we have not disclosed yet. I think you're gonna want it though. It's a pretty highly rated game. Also, I am streaming on a semi regular basis on Twitch. I stream all sorts of stuff on there. The last time I was streaming I just started playing C foo which is like a over the shoulder third person martial arts combat game. It is brutal. It's also super rewarding when you win. Devastating when you lose. It's very fun to play. Very fun to watch. You can find me at Twitch at Naughty Doc 541. That's na ug HT. Why do see 541 My schedules change every week, but I keep the Schedule tab up to date. All right,
Rachel:well, that is all thank you guys so much for listening and we will see you next time.
Jake:I