Expeditions and Apiary Deep Strategy Tips

Jamey is joined by game enthusiast and strategist James of the SpiderForge YouTube channel to discuss deep strategy advice for Expeditions and Apiary, the two 2023 releases from Stonemaier Games.

00:00 - Introduction
03:50 - Expeditions
16:05 - Apiary

[ThePercOfGaming]

The end of the video made me laugh so hard. “I’ll keep trying to do that” 😂

[ryanf]

expeditions looks like my next game! Nice video guys love your work

[gaijinco]

I love SpiderForge! Excellent videos! Really recommended. Those videos have helped me have more fun in the games that I play.

[HexStarDragon]

Great video, thanks so much to both for sharing! I'll sheepishly admit I hadn't come across SpiderForge before, but I can say from my vantage point that James really picks up a lot of the strategy and ideas that Connie designed into Apiary! I'm not as deeply familiar with Expeditions, so I'll have to keep those tips in mind the next time I play.

[JulioR]

Anybody watch Khan Academy when learning calculus?? James sounds very similar to that gentleman! His voice, tempo, and knowledge keep you hooked! Great video!

[WendyGa]

Great topic for a video. That might help me win against my wife once in a while. :)
And thanks for introducing us to James and his channel.

[unclesamb]

Great strategy advice here, but by far the most useful thing I discovered watching this video is that I've been playing Apiary wrong this whole time. I thought the ONLY end game trigger was someone hibernating their seventh worker (I didn't realize it also ended when someone filled the last space in the hibernation comb), and my biggest complaint about the game was that it took forever to end! This will make my future games much more enjoyable.

Also now my wife won't be able to run up a score like 207-112 on me, which is what happened in our last game 😬

[sAKecOkE]

This is great, and I hope people like James are involved when designing expansion content for these games.
It must be incredibly difficult striking a good balance when designing a game (and especially expansions for it) between approachability for new and casual players and the hardcore competitive crowd that want everything to be deep, replayable and perfectly balanced at the same time.
Always makes me sad to see discussions about Scythe and some people inevitably criticizing it for various things like faction balance or lack of combat, when with enough playing experience and a drafting step at the start Scythe becomes incredibly tense and mech combat is so absolutely important for scoring, controlling the board and winning.
The only thing I'd say could help these videos further is including some visuals when going into the different strategy tips to give it more structure and make it easier to grasp & engage with right away.

[StevenStJohn-kjeb]

I've been watching your content for a long time. My wife sometimes passes by my computer and this time she points at Jamey and says "This guy gets younger every time I see him."

[DTeazee]

always wondered how much DEEP strategy was part of the design process of games

[ravstyle]

You can see Jamie’s expansion cogs start spinning after hearing about these strats

[octavus]

my problem with expeditions is that it was hard to feel exploring. You almost feel like janitor especially once majority of tiles got discovered. Because of blocking you are just playing checkers on the map with very utilitarian goals. I want mystery, danger not just cleaning orange and teal "corruption" tokens