Hi! It’s Ryan from Nights Around a Table, and you’re probably wondering “Ryan… where’s the game?” Well the game is so small you can barely see it! It’s right here, and it’s called Ultra Tiny Epic Galaxies. That’s right: ULTRA Tiny Epic Galaxies, not to be confused with Tiny Epic Galaxies, which is merely… oh guh… that’s the expansion. That is the base game, Tiny Epic Galaxies, which is merely tiny, and it’s such a great format. If you watch the channel a lot, you know that i adore this game. i think it’s great, and i love that it packs such a big experience into such a little box, which is the hallmark of the whole Tiny Epic series, but they decided to take a couple of more popular ones from the series, and make them into even smaller, ridiculously small versions. So Ultra Tiny Epic Galaxies is about the size of a standard deck of cards, which is pretty crazy, and i’ve wanted this badly for a long time, but i find it hard to justify spending money on a game that i already own, right? So i own the (now) Gigantic Epic Galaxies, in comparison. So i thought i couldn’t do it, but then recently i made a purchase from my friendly local game store, and they have a shipping limit – you gotta get up to a certain amount in order for them to ship for free, and i was just 15 bucks off, and this little guy is 15 bucks up here in Canadaland, so i thought “Ah – perfect.” It’s the opportunity i’ve been waiting, for to finally get my hands on this. So i wanted to crack it open and compare it with the, uh, now former… you know… the Gigantic Epic Galaxies box that i… i already own. Now, i brought this out mistakenly at the beginning, but i i think it is a little bit of a bummer that i own the base game and the expansion, but the ultra tiny format is only… only contains the components that are in the base game. Interestingly though, i will note that when i bought this version there’s a little seal on it that said it was the deluxe version, and i didn’t know what that meant at the time. If you go back and watch my unboxing you’ll see a look of confusion on my face, which i so often have. But the deal was, the… the base game… there’s a retail version, and then with Kickstarter, they had a little mini expansion. They do this with, i think, a lot of, if not all of their games, so that if you buy it on Kickstarter, there’s a little bit of an incentive to buy it there, then if you buy it retail, they actually split out the little promo or the little expansion, and you can buy that separately from a store like the Board Game Geek Store. So i had the deluxe version, which came with the Satellites and Super Weapons expansion. What’s cool about Ultra Tiny Epic Galaxies is not only is this whole base game in there, but… i feel like… i sound like such a shill! i honestly… these these guys didn’t send this to me. i bought this with my own money, and i honestly quite like this game, uh, genuinely. Naturally. But Satellites and Super Weapons, which you can only get with the deluxe version, or buying this game on Kickstarter, is included in Ultra Tiny Epic Galaxies. How cool is that? Answer: very cool. Kind of sucks, though, that that the expansion isn’t available yet, because i quite like the expansion, but – hey – we’ll take what we can get, and we’ll crack this open and see what is inside! So i zoomed my camera in a little bit. It might be a little bit grainy. i don’t have a craft knife, so i have to have to open this (ftheh ftheh ftheh) with my second favorite board game opening tool, teeth! (indiscriminate space humming) Oh man. So excited about this. Um… i want to see how itty bitty everything is! Okay. So… and i want to know if they have… like, do they have to… do… is… is the solo mode in here? That’s what i’m most curious about, i think. Ss the solo mode in? Here we go. So i’m opening it up, and there’s a bundle of wood right there, in a bag that… it IS resealable. i was going to say… i would be worried if that just kind of, like, rattled around in the box. So you get a little bag, and you get… a deck of cards. Probably… it’s very thin, and i’m bad at estimating, but there’s probably only about… 50 000 cards in there. And so those are going to be all the player mats, and ooh, look: it’s got rogue galaxies on the background, so indeed, the single player mode of this game is… IS on these cards! That’s kind of cool! And then… an instruction booklet that’s almost thicker than that batch of cards itself! But i already know how to play. If you don’t know how to play, uh… here’s me actually being a shill… you can go watch my How to Play Tiny Epic Galaxies video, which i worked so hard on just for you. And this… i’m surprised that the cards in the game… so, the player mat cards aren’t as big, but the planet cards look like they’re in this teensy tiny little deck! Alright: so we got to get stuff out of the main box to compare the sizes of things before we go hog wild and open everything. So here is the main game. Let’s shove all this up here. To compare, this is a standard – what is it? – three by four inch deck of cards? Three and a half? Three and a quarter? i don’t even know. And so that’s the size of it. It’s adorably small. Those are the planet cards. And then the cubes… the player tokens and cubes… you know what? Maybe i should take, like, one of them out. And i’ll probably have to put this on the old close-up cameroo so you can see. So instead of doing a nice machined meeple for the ship, so that’s an original ship… here, let’s put it up here,,, Woo. Are we working? Are we functional? Yes we are. Last time i did a video with that close-up cam, i had major slowdown. It looks like some major slowdown’s happening there, so my apologies if it’s… if we’ve dropped to two frames a second. Aaand we’re not in focus, either. And back that up… nope. Go in closer… doesn’t matter. It’s still fuzzy. No auto focus… but the whole point is that you can see the size comparison! And the original ship is gigantic compared to the cube with this screened ship on it. But that’s… that’s what we’re looking at. And… these satellites… i wonder if i have…? Yes i do. So this is an original satellite. It’s a wooden dowel, disc-shaped, and they put everything on cubes. So this is an Ultra Tiny Epic Galaxies… and the size… actually, interestingly, the satellite in Ultra Tiny Epic Galaxies is kind of, like, bigger, which is shocking! You know, it’s a cube versus a thin cylinder. i wonder by volume which one has the edge? It doesn’t really matter, and i suppose if you like the circular shape, maybe you can use your original satellites if you’ve got those? Great! Uh… what else should we do here? Let’s… let’s pop open this whole bag of wood and see everything. So i think it’s just all cubes. Yep. So every piece is a cube, whereas in the base game, if we were to compare, your… you’ve got a… (one, two, three, four, five, six) you’ve got a hexagonal, uh, dowel to note your progress, your… your civilization… space civilization’s progress, but in Ultra Tiny Epic Galaxies, it’s going to be a cube, presumably with that symbol silk screened on it. There’s energy, there is… i cannot find you! Hello? Uh… you’re blank? No you’re not. There it is! So, yeah. The shapes of things are silk screened on. Neato! Aaand we’ll open this b… guy up… and compare. Now one of the cool things about the expansion that i actually… usually… i don’t know. It depends on the game. Sometimes i keep my expansions separate in their own box, and if there’s enough room, maybe i’ll… i’ll put the expansion stuff in the base game box. But one of the nicest things about the expansion is it has this card, which is a score tracker, which i keep in the main game box because there’s no reason not to use that when you play this game. It’s much nicer. Love it. Uh, so here… do we have a score tracker? We have player cards for… this is a fi… this is a… it’s a five player game! In this size box! That’s crazy! For those of you who play cards, you’re like “Yeah? So what?” But no – this is something special for board games, i gotta tell you. Back to here: so here are the five player mats, and here’s just a, like a player card reminding you of the dice actions… rogue galaxy… and in the… in the main game, i’m going to compare… Woo! i’m going to get the pieces mixed up! i know it! In the base game, to compare, here are the size comparisons of the player mats. So you don’t have as much – you know – the graphic design isn’t as nice, because in the base game, you’ve got these really nice arcs that you can move your tokens up depending on what’s happening in the game. You’ve got this nice swirl… so that’s going to be a better feeling, for sure. And here, you’re just like TDAK TDAK TDAK TDAK TDAK TDAK it’s all squares. Everything’s cubes, you know, but… but, i mean it’s the size of a deck of cards! It’s the size of a deck of cards! That’s still pretty cool! And on the back, there is… every player card has a robot on the back that you can fight against if you’re playing solo, and it looks like they carried that through to the tiny versions! Really neat! The last thing i’ll get into are these planet cards. Get into them with my… with my primitive canines… (impotent animalistic yelling) take that, plastic! You’re scrumptious. (whispering) It’s not really… delicious at all. Go… great great great great great! Plastic everywhere. Plastic and hair! Okay. i don’t know if you can see those hairs. Oh, interesting. Oh, right. So these are the goal cards. Everyone gets dealt one or two… i don’t know. i’ll have to watch my own video. i dare not put these on the… on the close-up cam, because i think the close-up camera is misbehaving right now. Those are they, and then to compare, the planet cards… i love this tape, by the way. If you haven’t discovered this tape, my… my friend Doc clued me into this tape, which is a great way to… it’s self-adhesive vinyl tape, which is a great way to keep cards bound together, if you don’t have a deck box for them or something. So let’s bust out, like, a planet card out of here, and compare. So perfect: both of these planets have a two-space track on them. There’s the start, there’s the finish. Now it looks like it would be a little small, right? If you had… if you had these cubes, and you had two or more people racing, i guess you kind of have to stack the cubes up. Not that this is a ship, but let’s pretend it’s a ship. So you would do that, and if you had all five players sort of vying for control of this planet, it does get a little bit fiddly and ridiculous. Yeah. But… it’s the size of a deck of cards!!! Um… it’s got the power on here. i wonder if they had to actually reduce any of the text on the cards describing the powers, because those are pretty small? Also, i wonder what happens when we get into a planet that has – you know – like, four spaces on a track? Or five spaces? Let’s see if we dig out one of those from this deck. (jolly scatting) One, one, one, one… i wonder if the game’s been modified in order to accommodate that? Let’s see… one two, one two, one two… i don’t see any fivers in here. There’s a three… one two three spaces, one two three, one two three, one two three… oh! Here we go. Here’s some of the bigger ones. One two three four… and one to three four five! (cool Transformers sound effect) That’s how they did it. So, yeah! Feel-wise, it looks a little bit different. It looks, you know, sort of necessarily cubey, to accommodate these cubes, and on the player mats, it’s very cubey… da da da. So you don’t get those nice swoops and arcs, so it might not feel as nice to play… but it fits, i might have mentioned, in the box that is the size of a deck of cards! So this is one of the things that actually got the base game played a whole lot in my… in my sort of… i shouldn’t say IN my household. i should say OUT of my household! Because i was… i was able to take this, um, all over the place. i would take it to holiday parties where everyone would hate my guts for busting out a board game because nobody else likes to play, and i would – you know – take it on outings and things, and people were like, you know, “Ryan, why are you taking that? It’s grandma’s funeral. Can you please pay attention?” Um… but i… i still think that the form factor is, you know, one of the biggest things going for this game, so to have it reduced even further, and i can fit it in my big Canadian winter coat parka pocket, that’s pretty that’s pretty exciting! i’m still pretty excited about this. i’m jazzed. It’s a dice rolling game, so i would be remiss if i didn’t actually find the dice and roll them! i’m shooting this after i just finished shooting this video and i’m cutting it in, because i forgot all about it! Here we go. These are the dice: one two three four five six, and they’re dark, so… if you know this game, it’s kind of like a… like a space Yahtzee, and you roll the dice… and then you get to keep any number, and then reroll the ones you didn’t want to keep, if you’re like… okay those two are good, so i want to keep these ones, and roll this… if you played Yahtzee, or if you played the King of Tokyo, it’s the same kind of rules for rolling the dice. And then you line them all up on the card, and – you know – activate the ones that you’ve activated, and people can actually… one of the coolest things about the game is that people can follow one of your actions if they have any energy (quack: culture) left, and so when it brags about decreasing down time in the game, it’s actually not whistling Dixie, because now you actually have to pay attention to what other people are doing. If you’ve got energy to spend (quack: culture) or there’s something you want to do and it’s not your turn, you can blow that energy (duck seizure: culture) and copy one of the dice that they actually activate. One of the coolest things about the game. Uh… do you own this? Did you decide not to buy it because, like me, you own the base game, and you think maybe it’s a waste of time and money? Or are you just sort of, like, curious about it, like i have been for the longest time, and then you finally bit the bullet? i want to know! Looks fiddly as heck, it really does. And one of the games in the series, Tiny Epic Quest, which i’ve wanted to cover on the channel for a while… i couldn’t quite get around to it, because it’s not my absolute favorite game because of the fiddliness. i… this is the the one that introduced Itemeeples, where you’ve got meeples with little hexagonal holes in… where their hands would be, and you can put… you can equip them with little weapons and things. It was the first one they did that on, and it seems like a cool idea, until you actually get the thing out, and then you’re playing like a teensy game of, like, Operation, trying to fit these little plastic pieces into the meeples, and it’s, uh… you know. It’s fiddly. Fiddly is the best word to describe it. May… this looks like it could be dangerously fiddly, and one strong gust of wind, if you break this out – you know – on the on the lido deck of a cruise ship, and that… there goes your game. i don’t know! You tell me! Like it? Don’t like it? Comment on it! Please leave a comment below, and we’ll catch you next time. Thank you so much for watching this one. Did you just watch that whole thing? Oh – hey! To 100% this video, click the badge to subscribe, and then click the bell to get notifications when i’ve got new stuff! [Music: Board Game Boogie by Ryan Henson Creighton]