Hello and welcome to the very 296th episode of the shut up and sit down podcast, the podcast all about board games, board games and the people who love board games. Hola! That's right, it's Tom Brewster and I am Matt Lees. And we're here to talk about board games. We played two of them just now. We did. You played two of them in the past. I know, right? It's four games. I can't get enough of them. I just, I keep playing them. What happened? I don't know. Is it a problem? Maybe. Well, let's see a doctor. Let's go.

Well, I'm just back from the doctor's home and they say it's absolutely fine and I should stop calling the surgery. I'm going to start by telling you about a game called Yotai. This is a game designed game designed by Hui Fam. And it's published by Mighty Bords. It's good. On the box, you've got a picture of a mountain and some people ride in birds. When you told me about this game, I thought it was like a sort of landscape building, you know, thing. Like, you're sort of putting down, you know, forests and trees and mountains. And you're building out a little landscape. And then you were like, oh, the little crates that have the potatoes in them are crazy. Yep. And it completely changed what I thought this game was in my head. Yeah. It's a game about putting little potatoes into crates sometimes. Okay. That's just one part of the game. Oh. The easiest way to explain this game is, have you ever played the game Splendor? Yes. It's a bit like Splendor. Okay. But you put potatoes into a crate sometimes. Now, for people who are, I'm going to need more detail. I was going to say, don't worry, I'm going to describe people who are not familiar with either Splendor or Potato crates. Okay, dox. The way the game works is you're going to have these cards that you're going to put into your tableau, and there are like different rows of cards that increasingly get better. So early on, you're just going to get some very basic little like, it's a little, it's a little forest, it's a little mountain. It's a little bit of grassland. Simple cards. Those cards are going to add symbols to your tableau, which are then going to be the things that you use, not to spend, but to get better things. So it's always about prerequisites. It's always like four green cards. So I can buy this super mega green card from the market. Exactly. So have you got all the symbols in front of you? If you do, then on your turn, you can place one of your little cardboard standee people onto that card to say, I'm taking this at the end of the round. Give it me, it's mine now. So we all do this. We take it in turns to place out all of our little standy pieces onto these cards. And at the end, we take them all if we can.

We'll come back to that in a minute.

Because in addition to having these different tiers of shops, you also have at the end

the ability to just put one of your pieces on a deck.

And we can on deck, you can just top deck and take that card as the back of the card because each of these cards have something

on the back of them that you can use. Okay, which means, first of all, great news. Because you can

only ever have one person on each of these cards out each of these decks, it means you can

hate draft. You can specifically go, whoa, that card is going to be great for someone else.

I'm going to put my person onto it. And then when I take it, I'm probably just going to flip it and use the back of it. Oh, okay. Because I don't need the front, so I'll just take the bonus. So, wait, do you need the prerequisites on the front of it in order to flip it and take the back of it? No. Oh. No. No, no, no. How cruel. The back of some of them have prerequisites, but they're always the same. So the three different decks are always like the first one is just a Billy basic kind of forest card on the back. Just standard. The second one is a classic potato vending machine, which she just gives you some potatoes for free, two potatoes. The third one, you can spend some

potatoes, I think, to buy the card, and then it gets you a heart. Hearts are points at the end of

the game. So effectively, what you're trying to do is get cards from these little shops to slowly

get better cards. And then at the end of of the game you want to have loads of these

heart symbols on your tableau the game ends when you have like i think there's some stars which are on

the top level cards when somebody has three or four of those the game ends immediately and then you

just see who's got the most points right now what's interesting about this is that the cards that you

are taking often you're going to have to spend resources in addition to having the prerequisites.

And the only resource in this game is potatoes.

I thought it might be potatoes.

You're damn right.

They have little boxes.

Well, the thing is, most of the time, you'll just see a card and you're like, I'm going to take that.

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