Orléans: Invasion and Trade & Intrigue Unboxing Reaction

Hi! it’s Ryan from Nights Around a Table. Here’s a board game called Orléans: invasion. it’s the expansion – the first expansion – to another game called Orléans, by a different publisher this time. The first one was DLP, and this is TMG. Know your acronyms in the board game world. The reason why i bought this game is because i enjoyed Orléans! What this does is it makes the game into a co-op game, and i don’t particularly like co-op games, i have to admit. But i do like hanging out with my family, and i do like playing Orléans, and those two things are incompatible because the girls – i think we played Orléans once? They didn’t really enjoy it all that much, so i thought maybe… maybe if i get this little beast and put it on the table, we can play co-op, and then maybe… just maybe… my daughters will love me. No! Uhh… they DO love me. They play board games with me fairly regularly now that we have a 10×10. If you haven’t seen my video about our 10×10, check it out, so you’ll know what we’re trying to play this year. Interestingly, though, i might actually take this and swap one of the games out of our 10×10. Replace it with Orléans. We’ve only done four plays so far, at the time of this filming, of our 10×10, so we’ve got ample room to, sort of – you know – give something the old heave-ho, and stick something else in there. Might be this? Unless they really hate it, and then i’m out of luck. Oh! DLP Games is still involved. Maybe it’s… they’re on the box because the license was purchased from them? i don’t know how stuff works! That’s a pretty sad… there’s no rubbing there. That’s a pretty… Box Fart-O Meter: zero. Pretty silent unboxing. What do you say, right off the top? “Get to know Orléans from various new perspectives. Six different scenarios provide new game worlds to explore: solo” (hmm) “together,” (mm-hmm) “and a duet” (ah! “or against each other.” Pretty cool! A bunch of different game modes. This is the big expansion. There’s an expansion after this that’s about half, or a third, of the price. It doesn’t have quite as much stuff in it, but let’s… well, you know what? i should open this thick… This is a thicc booklet! This instruction booklet clocks in at the following number… the number shall be… 24. 24 pages. Lots of stuff going on! Picture examples, but pretty dense text, so it ain’t nothin’. Don’t underestimate it. These boards are thin boards, but they are plasticized…? So they’re not just paper. There’s a bit of a gloss to them. THey ARE pretty thin. i don’t know what they are, or… do. Though i should, because i’ve played the base game. Fine. Fine! More boards. You get these boards, you get these boards, and you get a lot of crazy jazz going on here. i think this is… if i’m guessing, i think this is the invasion board, where people are coming to attack mmmmedievaldom. Where does this take place? France? Yeah – i think Orléans is in France. That makes sense. It sounds very fronch. And so everybody – kind of like Cities & Knights of Catan – everybody must bandy together to repel the titular invaders. We’ve got new these. New buildings. Yes: they’ve got the familiar Roman numerals in brick on the back. You can buy extra ones of these, and i confess i have, for an exorbitant amount of dollars, to expand your bass game just on their own. i think you can get a 3-pack of new buildings for… what’d i pay? 10 bucks? And there’s 20 packs of them? So i only bought one, cuz i’m not a madman (contrary to popular belief). Oh – there’s new, uh, new plagues? Or new – you know – tiles that you turn up at the beginning of every round that do new things. “What new things, Ryan?” you ask. This round: you cannot gain monks. i think that’s already in the base game. This round: you cannot use roads. Mah! Awful. Each player whose merchant is in Orléans loses 4 coins. So Orléans… maybe… i think that’s the very first city? So that means if you haven’t gotten off your butt to explore, that’s it! You’re losing money. It’s fun! Yeah. Reinforcement: at the start of the round, add this to the city walls. i don’t know what that does. C’mah! Bluhh! More things to punch: money, more boards, SO many circles, SO many buildings, SO much things. Someone… they should have just put that on the box. They should have just put Orléans Expansion: So Much Things. Colon… And these little tokens. That is all the cardboard. TONS of new buildings. i can’t imagine what that building stack is gonna look like once you pop all of those out, pile it up sky-high on the table. And last but not least in the box, which has a terrible insert, which is just a well: you get little white pawns. They’re dowels, and There’s one with legs. Let’s see that one. there’s the one with legs. He looks like a… 50s greaser with a pompadour, which i don’t think is very thematic. Aaand some white dowels. Ba-ha. Marshmallows, i might call them. Delicious… that’s probably what they are. Haven’t read the instruction booklet. i’m just gonna go out on a limb and say definitively: those are marshmallows. This is a deck of 50,000 odd cards with no handy rip strip that we have to be very careful to pop open with a craft knife. Looks like a new expansiony stuff: a librarian, a may-or, a fisherman, a scholar a general, merchant… there’s so much STUFF in here! Oh my gosh! You can play solo, you can play head-to-head – there’s a special head-to-head mode, which my friend Michael and i might want to avail ourselves of. You can play cooperatively, together against invaders, bwhoa! Oh my gosh. A lot to sift through there. i’m almost feeling like i haven’t played Orléand enough to justify this. What have i done? What have i done? Have you played this? Do you like this? Is this good? Somebody told me if i don’t like co-op, i can just skip Invasion altogether and go straight to Traders and Builders, so i split the difference and i bought them both at the same time. Let’s open that one! Here it is: the second expansion to Orléans: Traders and Builders! (*Trade & Intrigue) i was about to end the video, but i thought why not put it in the same video? We don’t need no two videos with expansions in ’em. i treat… when i have new board games, i don’t know. i treat it kind of like a wartime board game acquisition, where i act like it’s the last board game i… i’ll ever get, so i better… i better stretch it out and make sure that i can get content out of it. That’s nonsense! i am swimming in unfilmed board games. This is what the back of the box looks like. Very unusual… you don’t really get board games that are just in this – you know – slide-open kind of thing like you’d find printer paper in a box like this. It doesn’t really have a glossy finish. It has… hideous artwork, presumably by Klemens Franz on the front. “Important: the Orléans base game is required.” No problem! i got you, game. Mmm! What is inside Trade & Intrigue? Like i said, Trade & Intrigue is about half the cost of the other expansion, and i don’t believe that you need to have them in a certain order. i think you can buy Trade & Intrigue separately from Invasion and be justified. A huge difference, though between a $25 and a $55 proposition. All you get in the 22 dollar one is just this trifold double-sided instruction booklet, so a whole lot less to talk about a whole lot less going on. Maybe it’s just easier to learn? You get a whole lot more starting tiles, and we already know how those, work so i don’t know if we really need a huge explanation of that. But not much else in the instructions. Some things to punch. Little people! Little tiny… they’re very small. Look how little they are. Little… little people. It’s like the bathroom sign, except there’s three of them. Kind of an interesting… i guess i use public bathrooms, where three people can go. i don’t like it, though. i’m always the guy… never pick the middle urinal. Never… never do… if you’re that guy, i don’t like you. Pick the one… go stall first, and then if you have to go, pick the one at the farthest corner. And… if there’s three, and somebody’s in this one, and somebody’s in this one, and it’s only the middle one left, LEAVE. And hold it. And damage your bladder. Because nobody needs THAT. More buildings. More starting tiles. And this, i think, is the really interesting part of this game: they’ve replaced the favorable deeds board with different deeds that do different things, and give you different rewards. That was the one thing i didn’t super-like about the base game, was the favorable deeds board was a bit like “Nyeah, you put a guy here, and you get a thing,” and it was pretty samey for something that should have been a lot more interesting and competitive, so maybe that’s what this does? It makes the favorable deeds board more interesting and competitive. And last… that’s a kind of goofy way to package that. i guess? Yeah, it makes sense because, the – boop! – the box wasn’t really that stiff. i’m gonna make sure there’s nothing inside. No. It’s just cardboard with a hole. A doughnut! Probably… again, about 50,000 cards, if my estimation skills are up to snuff? We’ll open it with a knife. No handy rip strip. HO boy! We saw one of those just in the last game: a scoring sheet. Oh – THAT’S interesting. Look at this: this looks like something like Ticket to Ride tickets? Maybe these are secret goals, where if you have this stuff, and your… you’ve got a city on that building, on that city, you get things! You get ten points, seven points… i’m guessing these are goal cards. Pretty exciting. Cool! Well! i’m pumped to play. Just before i opened that, i was going to ask you: have you played… wait! One more thing! Wait! We might as well do this one too! Remember i said you could buy new buildings? Well look at this! Oh my gosh! You get a three pack! Of buildings! i got Neue Orst… Ortskarten N°1! If your board game store stocks these, or if you want to order them online, be careful! i know the BoardGameGeek store has them. There are Nueue Ortskarten N°1, and there’s also PROMO Ortskarten N°1. There’s… there’s “Neue” and there’s “Promos,” and they each use their own numbering system, so don’t get confused, and don’t think that if you got number one, you’ve got it all, because there’s two number ones, confusingly. And what they consist of is three new buildings for you to roll in there. One of them… it looked like – that i didn’t purchase – looked like it involves dice rolling? There’s all kinds of crazy nonsense. And i hope that the instructions are in English, because i know… yes, they are. We have English instructions. We’re good to go. Cool! Back to my original question: have you played this game? Do you LIKE this game? Do you like the expansions? Do you want me to talk about them? As of this filming, i haven’t even done How to Play of the base game yet, but it’s high… it’s high on my list, because i’d love to talk about it with you. Tell me if you’ve played it, if you’ve liked it, or if you’re interested in it. Thank you for enduring my nonsense during this unboxing video. i’m excited to uh… i’m excited to play this one. [Music] Did you just watch that whole thing? Oh – hey! 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